krys malcolm belc

introduction

Maybe she knows this, or maybe I should just come out and say it outright: without Jen Howard, I would know nothing about editing short nonfiction. I wouldn’t know that I like to do it, and I wouldn’t know how to do it. When I got to the MFA program at Northern Michigan University, I signed up to read short-shorts (what Passages North calls flash/very short fiction and nonfiction) for two reasons:

1. I had a sense I liked to write short things and

2. I had three children, including an eight-month-old, and figured I’d be more able to keep up my end of the bargain if it involved reading micro and essays.

Over the three years I was in the program, Passages North became a calming center for me, a place where we could hang out and read and discuss submissions with the most generous eye. Jen was our leader in every genre, but because she’s such an accomplished writer of shorts herself, I felt her presence most in those meetings. In a lot of ways in my editing life I think I’m still chasing the high of reading a short piece aloud to a group of Passages short-short editors and hearing, “Wow,” at the end. It’s a high you can only get reading someone else’s work that you want to share with the world.

And that’s how I feel about everything Jen writes, too. Her shorts have it all, all that wow. On a recent day two copies of her new chapbook, Flat Stanley Reports Back to His Third Grader, arrived on my doorstep. My partner didn’t think she could handle sharing a copy with me. I had read and heard a few of the Flat Stanley shorts as they made their way into the world, and yet I was not prepared for the emotional effect these 26 wide-ranging pieces would have on me in their compiled form.

In the first few pieces, Flat Stanley learns about the world, mostly about murder; in “Flat Stanley Investigates Velma’s Murder,” she writes:

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Flat Stanley googles why do men murder women. The internet says men murder women they love and women who are strangers because they cooked badly and said the wrong name during sex and let the dog chew up something important and the baby cried or she looked over his shoulder why they were kissing at maybe some other man who was there or not there or they got lost on a dirt road or she looked like his babysitter or they said no.
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Here Stanley is a stand-in for a speaker both curious about and horrified by our world. As the collection progresses, the boundary between the speaker and Stanley becomes more porous:

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Or somebody in the wrong bar could see them kissing and yell at them or beat them for being dykes or she could read an article about dogs drowning in post-hurricane flood and cry. Flat Stanley—who is clearly not a little paper boy here, but the narrator, the author, even, maybe—
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In this way, the collection becomes a highly inventive memoir, a magnifying glass turned inward after many pages looking outward. I wanted to talk to Jen Howard about her book the way friends talk about books, but also needed a structured way to annoy her about her craft. This is her third chapbook of short prose, and though clearly as a mentee and devoted fan, I’m biased, but I consider her a master of the form.

the interview

 

What is it about chapbooks?

I don’t think I set out to write chapbooks. I just set out to write very short pieces, and the creative process is easier for me when I am writing about a similar thing, or with a similar system, or with Flat Stanley in mind every time. Because that’s just a fake way to write about everything else, right? When you add up a bunch of tiny tiny pieces, I don’t want a thousand tiny pieces to be a big book, I want the tiny pieces to be a little book!

Did you cheat on Stanley? Or did you stick with this project for a while?

I’ve cheated on other projects, but I stuck with Stanley. I think he fit anything that I was worried about. Because I’ll say that this is about true crime, but there’s a bunch of other things in there. Flat Stanley could handle anything.

 

Do you now have experiences and wish that you were still in this project?

Yeah! Because the little stuff I’m writing now feels formless. I have this “mystery with an answer” shape, but it’s not the same. It doesn’t give me eyes to see the world through.

 

Does it usually take you a while to figure out what the thing is going to be?

It does. But I really liked how Flat Stanley was this actual physical presence between me and what I was writing about. A lot of the earlier pieces use the second person with Flat Stanley. Sometimes that’s Flat Stanley, sometimes it’s another person. I am kind of messy with it. Only later is there any sort of “I” in the book. Starting the new project without all those barriers between me and what I’m looking at is turning out to be hard.

When I read a chapbook of flash or a poetry collection I usually read a few of them and then stop, but I read this in two sessions—on the way to work, and on the way home from work—and I wonder, how did you decide when to have the “I” in there, like in the reader experience?

It came later for me in the writing, and I felt like that made sense in the reading, too. When putting them together, I started with pieces that more neatly used the conceit of Flat Stanley, and then I let it kind of fall apart. The “I” only gets in there when it’s allowed to because it’s fallen apart. There’s no real place for the “I” in these stories, I don’t think. I didn’t imagine there would be. It feels like the form got broken.

 

Yes, but then at the end….it reminded me of if you throw down a deck of cards but then you pick it back up, because…you used the word “messy.” It gets messy, but then it gets un-messy. You very much end with a tidy one.

That’s true, and that was an earlier one, too. You’re right. That makes sense. I like that image of the deck of cards.

 

I liked the structure of the project a lot. The end two [shorts] aren’t, but the one before is…very straightforwardly a memoir-y one.

Yeah. It is. [Laughs]

In a good way! I think you’re a memoirist, and this is a memoir.

I do too. You know about me, I don’t like to create characters and imagine motivations for them and put them in silly situations. None of that is appealing to me at all. But I also don’t quite have the gumption—I don’t mean to frame it as an insult to myself, I don’t feel about it that way—but I don’t have any desire to directly write about my life in narrative ways, either.

You’re also not trying to draw simple conclusions from things that have happened to you in a way that feels neat. It’s a way to show a little but not have to keep going with it all the time.

I have these bursts of intensely personal moments. And later I’ll be like, “Oh, fuck, why is that out there, on paper?” But they feel decontextualized enough not to stress me out too much.

I was in Team Shorts meeting [at Passages North] and we were reading a Jonathan Cardew story that we published recently, which I really liked. One of the team members said that it feels “like a drunk voicemail to an ex.” And it really hit me, like, wow, that might be my favorite genre of writing, really. I do think sometimes at my best that is that I’m going for. It’s not a letter to your ex that you’ve thought and thought and thought about how they’re going to read it. It’s that ridiculous moment when you’re saying it all wrong.

Like hot mess direct address. What would not be great about that?

That’s what I want. At my best, I can have those moments.

Does anyone anymore ask you if you’re a fiction or nonfiction writer? Or is that something you’re far beyond contemplating at this point?

Nobody asks me that, no. We don’t talk like that at Northern [Michigan University], or at Passages. Maybe I don’t get assigned to teach nonfiction as much as other people.

 

But you’re a memoirist! It’s interesting to me, just because I had the false belief that you were a fiction writer when I came to the program because you teach fiction. But that’s not real, right? That’s not it.

It’s true! Part of it is because we have such strong nonfiction writers teaching already. I’m not not allowed to teach nonfiction. They just have it covered. But also, I don’t feel out of place teaching fiction and I don’t feel out of place teaching nonfiction. They’re similar projects for me.

 

How were you thinking about gender and queerness when writing about Flat Stanley?  

This is the part where I get confused about whether we’re talking about the doll or the book.

 

I guess I mean the quasi-character. He’s the kind-of-you-but-not-you of the book.

What matters to me matters to Flat Stanley.

When you were working on this project, how much were you thinking about whether you wanted there to be a pop culture thread (the murdery stuff) or whether you wanted there to be scatter?

Part of that is just learning to accept that I can write about what I’m actually interested in, and a lot of that is really lowbrow television shit. I and still feel profound feelings watching Forensic Files. A lot of it was just an acceptance, a desire not to reject what I actually think is interesting. Other people write about smarty-pants stuff.

 

Highbrow shit.

Yeah! Maybe I’ll write a Survivor book next.