Mary Elizabeth Dubois
Interview with Joanna Ruocco
When Joanna and I first began emailing about a potential interview for Washington Square, Joanna joked that she pictured us speaking strenuously about fiction while crossing a bridge in bitter wind. In the end, there was no bridge, and no wind, but I like to think we brought the same intensity to our conversation about a woman from Joanna’s childhood named “Bunny,” the often disputatious and relational considerations around the definition of “experimental fiction,” and Joanna’s long lineage of bakery jobs. More than anything, hearing Joanna’s thoughts about her own relationship to fiction and the place of storytelling within the world at large was intoxicating and galvanizing. Joanna, in both her interview and work, reminds us that fiction can still give us what it did when we were young: joy, and that witchy, witchy feeling.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: When did you begin writing? Is the process pure joy, an intellectual project, or “work”? Has your opinion on this changed over time?
JOANNA RUOCCO: I have a big loud Italian family (you know, as opposed to one of those small quiet Italian families). Lots of jokes. Lots of St. Peter stories. There’s the story of St. Peter and the prosciutto. The story of St. Peter and the very big rock. Also, real life stories, none verifiably true. How Uncle Paul lost his hair in the war. How Mother Cabrini winked at my father in her glass coffin. I had the idea early on that words were exciting. You shouted them and waved your hands around. Writing always felt very different. Storytelling was storying, and then there was this other thing, this learning cursive in elementary school and looping together letters on ruled paper thing. I really liked the look of a cursive uppercase G, so I would fill notebooks with words that started with that letter. I collected things back then, dingy things I put in boxes, wheat pennies, vending machine bouncy balls, soaps shaped like shells and animals, bones. I thought of Green and Goat and Girl and Georgia and Gummy as a collection, and I’d add to it all day to help myself sit still through my classes. I think different thoughts about writing now, but I still have this sense that there’s a distance I can’t close between writing and everything else (thinking, speaking, being), and that part of why I like writing so much is that I don’t really know what to do with it. Make things out of it, put the things in boxes? Fiction is a particular case. To write a story, you mostly bracket the weirdness of writing itself and accept a bunch of fictional givens. That’s fine, that’s work I enjoy. I’m interested in all the conventions (that’s part of why I write romance novels). They’re mesmerizing! I want to be mesmerized and also I want to get shocked awake, to notice the written language on the page, like how you sometimes notice your own arm. If I’ve developed an intellectual project, it has something to do very broadly with that shuttling back and forth.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: What are some books that really stand out to you as influences? Pivotal works that changed the way you think about writing?
JOANNA RUOCCO: When I was kid, my favorite book was Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini. I found a copy of it at the library book sale down the street from my dad’s pizza shop, and every year I’d find another copy (always a falling apart hardback with silent movie stills). I bought all of them. I had a whole thrilling shelf of Scaramouche. That was the first novel I read obsessively. I loved the main character’s ugliness and eloquence and all the romping and swordplay. Later, all sorts of novels took hold. I was amazed by Richard Brautigan as a teenager, felt real marvelment. There’s a metaphor and then suddenly the metaphor is literal, the world has to change around it. Around the same time, a friend passed along Ava by Carole Maso and Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Books of gaps, fragments, and textures, with perception and language as subjects—all totally new to me. In college, I got excited about The House of Hunger by Dambudzo Marechera and everything by Shirley Jackson and also Samuel Delany. Throughout my adult life, I’ve learned from too many books by too many writers to count. Kafka! Beckett! But also Leonora Carrington, Muriel Spark, Isak Dinesen, Thomas Bernhard . . . These days I read a lot of novels and stories in translation.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: What is the origin story of Birkensnake?
JOANNA RUOCCO: Brian Conn and I were both MFA students at Brown getting this great gift of writing time, and we wanted to use some of it to read and celebrate other people’s writing. We came up with Birkensnake while drinking twiggy tea in Brian’s attic apartment. The idea was to put out a call for stories, print the ones that made us feel alive, and bind them in a non-glossy journal assembled out of found materials. We were influenced by zine culture, and we did a pretty good job with the cheapness part (we sold copies Birkensnake for four dollars and eventually moved to a barter system . . . you could get a Birkensnake in exchange for a recording of yourself reading a story you loved) and the community-building part (over the years, Birkensnake relied on the participation of hundreds of writers, artists, and readers, and also volunteer crews of folders and sewers who helped assemble each issue). Less so with the quickness part. Birkensnake seemed to take infinite time. Once Brian Conn and I were collating pages in a garage for so long we entered a new dimension through a violet door, lived and died in six different ghost galaxies then re-entered our bodies through our left eyebrows which achieved singularity and had to be scraped off with bone folders. It was bonkers. We never photocopied and stapled. We always screen-printed (except for one issue that we risographed) and stitched. Our friend Sarah McDermott worked with us, reading the issue and responding to it with a drawing we’d use for the cover, coming up with a book structure based on what- ever materials we’d collected (e.g. boxes, wallpaper, x-ray folders, blueprints). By the end of every summer, I think all of us felt semi-digested by Birkensnake, in the best possible way. We had the opportunity to publish incredible work, many first stories, some semi-stories, other uncategorizable things. We skewed slightly sci-fi, more alien texts, though, than texts about aliens. Now we’re on hiatus, waiting to see if some presently unimaginable Birkensnake starts hatching.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Could you elaborate on how Dan and Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith came to be? They strike me as projects that would have different points of entry.
JOANNA RUOCCO: They did! Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith be- gan with a scrap of language from one of Ophelia’s speeches: “They say the owl was a baker’s daughter.” This has often been glossed as an allusion to a folktale about a baker’s daughter who tried to skimp on the dough when Christ came into the shop for bread. The little ball of dough blew up hugely and the baker’s daughter cried out something like “Huuu! Huuu! Huuu!” so Christ turned her into an owl. As a baker’s daughter raised on St. Peter stories, I couldn’t get away from this line and the image of the stingy, bread-denying girl punished/cursed by the Lord. At some point, I read another interpretation of the line that focused on the association of owls with death and also virginity, and baker’s daughters with prostitution. I wrote a very short story, “The Baker’s Daughter,” that came out as a chapbook from Mud Luscious Press. That was the germ of the book. It grew out of that language of baker’s daughterhood and its associative cluster. Daughter as maid, daughter as bawd. Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith changed as a project as I wrote and things got grosser, but the point of entry was my worrying of Ophelian nonsense.
Dan began as ekphrasis. My friend Dan has an uncle who owns a painting of unsurpassable wrongness known as the Finfer (because it’s signed “Finfer”). It’s recognizably a scene of small-town American life. You can see the cultural idiom. Good citizens. Main Street. But every element in the painting is actually unrecognizable. An anvil-headed figure—a boy in a baseball cap?—holds something—a stick? a liver? Canadian bacon?—for a creature that approaches on odd-numbered legs. The nostalgia menaces. I wanted to write something that matched the Finfer tonally and created a similar kind of place. I’m not a very visual thinker, so my translation of painting into language was more about mood than description. There’s something silly and also scary about the Finfer, and I hope about Dan too. The main character, Melba Zuzzo, works in a bakery, so maybe I just can’t escape autobiography. The point of entry for every book— growing up in a pizzeria?
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Dan and The Mothering Coven differ from the diptych, Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith and your collection of stories The Week in terms of perspectival narration; do you have a preference for first or third person? Your first person narratives seem to me to exist inside this Rachel Cusk, Deb Olin Unferth, free indirect discourse tradition (especially The Week); the third person feels aesthetically outside of this, pulling from a more Kathryn Davis’ Duplex-like, mythical, sometimes gothic vein. Perhaps the diptych is the intersection of these voices.
JOANNA RUOCCO: I enjoy all the persons. I get a little sad and claustrophobic when a project starts to develop and I understand how it works, what’s allowed, what’s not, the limits of the form I’m choosing. On the one hand, it’s great, a relief. It’s amazing to sit down and know something about the world you’re building. On the other hand, it involves mourning. The foreclosed possibilities start to haunt me. I tend to work on at least two projects at once, in part so I can jump out from one world to another. For example, I worked on Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith and Dan at the same time. The former was so unrelievedly bleak and narrowly constructed, all simple sentence forms repeating, closing in tiny, grimy consciousnesses. I needed a space where I could put some antic, ungainly clauses, where unforeseen words could crash land. I’m drawn to those first-person spinning-thought kind of stories as a writer and a reader, but if I write or read too many of them I start to feel too grammatical and grayscale. I want ornament and fancy. So one project necessitates another, and I keep roving from mode to mode.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Could you speak to the gothic elements in your work? Do they have a particular Joanna-brain etymology, from books or films or childhood?
JOANNA RUOCCO: My parents had a friend named Bunny who lived up a dirt road in a big dark house. She threw hippie parties and all the psychedelic back-to-the-land type New Yorkers who’d moved to Sandgate, VT—a Rural Free Delivery town in a dead end valley—showed up with nasturtium arugula salads and couscous (except my dad, he’d bring cow’s tongue). Some of the back-to-the-land types had kids, so we’d be there too, kids roaming all over the house while outside the adults smoked and ate nasturtiums and went naked night swimming in the silty pond. Bunny’s house definitely did something to my brain. Her dead husband, Lothar, had been a sculptor. He’d died in the house and left behind all his carvings. There was a life-sized wooden woman asleep under a wooden blanket. There was another life-sized wooden woman, seated, skinny and pregnant, with staring eyes and a skinny wooden child standing on her knees with his arms stretched straight out. Small wooden acrobats dangled from the ceiling. We kids would creep around daring ourselves to touch a wooden eyeball. That was okay, we were brave enough. But there was something else—someone else—a figure of a different order. He stood at the end of a shadowy hallway, which boomed as you walked as though there was a hollow under the floor (where Lothar’s ghost stuck the real bodies). He was tall and disquietingly textured, a paper maché Charlie Chaplin, black mustache, lumpy white face, white hand lumps crossed on black cane. He could not be touched. He was a goopy nightmare, horrible and soft, indistinct. I started writing a novel when I was around nine and wrote it for years, in pencil, across many notebooks, and the heroes—twin mice—end up in a big dark house where their evil uncle locks them in room filled with shadowy carvings to protect a dreadful secret. I never got to the secret. The novel stalled, plplot-wiseotwise, because I spent hundreds of pages listing words that had to do with the Gruesome Grotesque Ghastliness of the house. Bunny held a funeral for herself before she died, threw a party while she was dying so her friends could come and tell stories about her that she’d get to hear. That was ten years ago, the last time I was in her house. I hadn’t been there since maybe another ten years before that. Now that I’m thinking of Bunny’s house and of the dreadful secret I never revealed in my novel of mice (and no men) I have this idea: the evil uncle, also a twin, he murdered his brother (the father of our heroes), because he’s not a mouse at all but the enchanted mustache of paper maché Charlie Chaplin. I don’t see myself pursuing this idea, but probably I’ll be pursued by it tonight in a goopy nightmare.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Do you have the sense/identify with the idea that your writing is doing something experimental, something outside the typical conversations people are having in the literary community? Do you care about a question like this? Do you think a question like this is useful?
JOANNA RUOCCO: I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, about the dif- ferent lineages and futures, and definitions, of experimental writing, and about literary community. I’ve just come on as chair of the board of directors of FC2, an author-run press devoted, to quote the mission, “to publishing fiction considered by America’s largest publishers too challenging, innovative, or heterodox for the commercial milieu.” What does that mean? It’s an adversarial and re- lational statement. I think it means we have to ask additional questions. What work is shut out by the mainstream publishing industry, and why? How are various particular exclusions redressed (or perpetuated) by independent publishers? Since the 1970s, FC2 has been trying to carve out a space for books by writers who experiment in radically different ways (FC2 authors include, for example, Fanny Howe, Samuel Delany, Gerald Vizenor, Clarence Major, Rosalyn Drexler, and Diane Williams, and more recently Amelia Gray, Marc Anthony Richardson, Vi Khi Nao, Evelyn Hampton, and Marream Krollos). Many FC2 books are formally disruptive but (co-founder Ronald Sukenick here) “subject can be ground-breaking too.” I’m interested in the process of questioning how experimentalism becomes recognizable and to whom and in keeping conversations going, within the FC2 community and beyond, about the de-centering of assumed points of view—perspectival and thematic disruptions in addition to formal ones—and about the relationship between literary aesthetics, culture, history.
Of course changing the publishing landscape takes more than conversations! We need to dismantle institutions, create radical alternatives with the awareness that they’re still becoming and will transform and transform again. FC2 has been operating in a unique way, as a collective, for almost fifty years, and now is a good moment to look hard at our operations in addition to our mission. What needs to change structurally as we try to find our future tense? I’m thinking along these lines as the new FC2 chair, but the thinking also applies to me as an individual writer making choices and trying to reflect on them.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Do you feel like your general project is more aesthetic than ideological?
JOANNA RUOCCO: I think they’re connected. I wouldn’t want to write an ideological novel, if that means setting out to illustrate a political belief, because I’m interested, as a writer, in the irresolvable, in getting myself into ambiguous mental spaces. But my imagination, my sense of self and my writing process, my mental spaces, aren’t located outside of ideology. I don’t want, either, to turn a blind eye to social forces and write as though I have access to some beyond that isn’t contoured by power, by the historical fact of my whiteness, by gender and so on. That’s also reductive and predictable. So the goal instead has to do with the tension, the attendant discomforts, charting my pathway into the sentence (from where?) and noting my orientation (or disorientation) once I’m in it, seeing what leaps or contortions or bizarre turns get me into the next.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: What is your relationship to teaching? What do you teach exactly?
JOANNA RUOCCO: I teach intro and advanced fiction workshops in the Creative Writing Program at Wake Forest University. There’s a room in the English department students call the Harry Potter room—it’s very wizardly, with a long banquet table, throne-sized chairs, oil paintings and mirrors on the walls—and when I get to teach in that room in particular I become a person that can say things like “I love being in the classroom!” and “I’m inspired by my students!” I like teaching in other rooms too, but that one is magic. Wake Forest skews toward social sciences, so the students looking for creative community are very, very excited when they find it, energized, open. We have a reading series, so we’re able to bring writers to campus to read and visit classes. I remember being an undergraduate and that my mind was blown by readings, by seeing and hearing living writers perform and getting to talk to them, and it’s neat to find myself on the other side, helping give students that experience. In the past few years, we’ve brought, among others, Renee Gladman, Joanna Howard, Chris Abani, George Saunders, Bhanu Kapil, Alejandro Zambra, Carmen Giménez Smith, Anne Waldman . . . jaw-droppingly awesome writers and performers. This summer, I’m doing something new, co-teaching a critical/creative summer class in London with my friend and colleague Sarah Hogan. It’s called Literature of the Witch and will involve archives, grimoires, and nightwalks, and a visit to the caverns under Hampstead Heath where Leonora Carrington says a certain coven of witches holds secret ceremonies.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: What are some other jobs you’ve had? How have they changed the way you think?
JOANNA RUOCCO: Obviously, I’ve worked in bakeries! And restaurants, lots of restaurants. I did very much bartending and waitressing for years and years. Once, at one of the bars, a guy showed me a Ziploc bag of ancient coins he’d taped to his stomach and invited me to join his criminal empire. I didn’t—I was too confused—but I sometimes think of the career I almost had as ancient coin smuggler. I catered. I worked for a child policy organization. I worked for the coast guard, counting boats. They loaned me a clipboard and binoculars. It was highly ridiculous. I worked in the legal services department of a settlement house helping people get access to food stamps. Through those jobs, I discovered that time passes differently in offices than it does in kitchens. Coldness or warmness predominates. You freeze or you sweat. You’re bored or you’re panicked. Various jobs changed how I experienced a day as a unit of measure, and how I experienced space and female embodiment and social hierarchy and the wage relation. I’ve found pretty much every job I’ve held fascinating in some way or another and formed important relationships while scrubbing a flat-top grill alongside a co-worker with a mop. But I also think that all the jobs we’re forced to work under capitalism fundamentally crush souls and bodies, so I don’t want to romanticize. Toil, expropriation, compulsion—none of it’s good. My writing is sometimes about work, a workplace or work dynamic, but other times it connects with work via rhythm or an uncanny feeling (alienation, thin- gification, the weird animation of objects) or a comic intensity. Amplification and exaggeration become techniques, a way of pushing the boss or the father, whatever authority figure, into absurdity. Even though (because?) the stakes feel high and grimness abounds, humor and joy matter and help make struggle possible.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Are you a witch?
JOANNA RUOCCO: Yes.