Self-described literary wet nurse Miette Gillette is one of our belletristic crushes. Whiskey Tit publishes books no-one else will, with titles like, Kinderrinder, I, No Other, and The Man Who Can’t Die, which we can’t get enough of. When we decided to do a Five Questions With…, our series on interesting New Englanders, Miette was an immediate, must-involve choice.

Take: When did you know you were a New Englander?
Miette Gillette: Transplant from NYC. I’m still not sure I’m a New Englander, though last summer I was attempting to inseminate our sow, and couldn’t get the cap off of the bag of pig semen. I didn’t have a free hand, and the pig was getting excited, so in a pinch I used my teeth to remove the cap, and got more of a taste than I’d ever like to admit. Is that a New England thing?

T: What one word would you use to describe New Englanders?
MG: Subarued

T: Favorite New England-based artists?
MG: Yannick Murphy and Carolyn Chute are both doing vital, astonishing work in American letters. Stylistically they’re diametric opposites: the literary equivalent of working in NYC interactive agencies, then retiring to inseminate pigs in Vermont. But both women capture very thin slices of New England culture in ways that nobody else in the country is capable of.

T: What’s your favorite bizarre, historical, or quirky piece of New England trivia?
MG: There’s a law against bringing elephants into the state of Vermont. Given the current collection of beasts roaming on my land, this is a law that’s definitely looking out for my interests.

T: What’s the funniest thing you’ve seen while driving in New England?
MG: I’ve seen about all the things one might see on Vermont Driving Bingo: skunks chasing moose, naked families happily hitchhiking, ducks stopping to drop an egg. When we first moved to the area, we were renting the last house on a dead-end road. The road apparently had not always been a dead-end; a bridge had gotten washed out years prior, and the town had decided not to fix it. But GPS systems still had the road intact on their maps, and had that road marked as the fastest route from Sugarbush ski resort to Boston. Every Sunday night in the wintertime, without fail, a car would be barreling down the road and smash directly into the snow bank in front of our house. So the funniest thing many weekend skiers had probably seen in Vermont were two beleaguered city transplants, hopping out of bed at midnight often in boots and coats but nothing underneath, patiently towing them out of the snow bank and turning them around. Notice: Heed the Dead End signs!

Bonus Questions:

T: What’s pissing you off today?
MG: The same thing that’s been pissing me off pervasively since January 20.

T: Dog or cat?
MG: Well, just today the Dog gave my daughter’s favorite stuffy a rhinectomy, and the cat vomited mouse guts all over the proof of a new book I’m debuting in two weeks’ time. So, both?

The post 5 Questions with. . .Miette Gillette appeared first on Take Magazine.

Yarrow Paisley doesn’t want readers to ignore the id. His new collection of narrations—I, No Other—explores the gamut of chaos that can erupt when you suppress the baser impulses lingering beneath the surface of your consciousness. His prose bursts with what can seem like inscrutable absurdities, as bizarre events manipulate timelines, bodies, and any lingering shred of literary convention.

A deep solipsism links his cast of first-person narrators. “They’re basically hardly even aware of an audience, of anyone listening to what they’re saying,” Paisley says. “They’re just kind of speaking to the world in a natural way.” The collection’s title nods to that intentional egoistic element, playing on a Rimbaud quote included as an epigraph: “Car Je est un autre” (“For I is an other”). Paisley’s characters operate on the assertion of the self over anyone else. That’s why he bills the collection as “narrations” specifically rather than short stories. “They don’t have the structure of stories for the most part,” he says. “but they’re definitely about this kind of explosion of self, narrative impulse.”

These “absurdist interludes,” as Vermont publisher Whiskey Tit bills them, provide Paisley a dreamlike space to transgress certain norms—of narrative form and, obliquely, of gender and sexuality. “The more of those taboos you can break, the clearer your vision becomes,” he says. “I know my stories make people uncomfortable. To me that’s a good thing. That’s what I want my literature to do to me.”

An interlude calls to mind a separation, as in between songs on an album or acts in a play. Paisley considers his interludes to be “separating mundane reality, kind of tearing open a hole in the fabric of spacetime and peeking out.” He clarifies: “When I say the fabric of spacetime I’m referring to the social fabric, as opposed to reality itself.”

“Because you know they seem to be admitting this more and more in science, but this is all a social construct,” he continues. “I mean reality itself—we’re taught how to perceive it, but it’s all filtered through your brain, so it could be anything. That’s where cosmic horror comes from—that sense that we know deep down none of this is real. I think an absurdist interlude keys you into that.”

Paisley—who splits his time between raising his son, writing, and delivering mail around Northampton, Massachusetts—deliberately aims to discomfort the reader. In some cases he tries to shock and “force [the reader] to confront the empathy they should feel for these characters.” More broadly he hopes to make readers face the psychological forces they most often refuse to recognize.

“If you never acknowledge [the id] or if you make denials to yourself about it all the time, then you run the danger of being easily controlled by it without even realizing it, without knowing,” Paisley says. He suggests the danger of rejecting the unsavory truth, comparing a figure like Trump to one of his narrators.

“He’s the id that emerges when you try to turn away from it,” he says. “You have to confront those things directly and not turn away from them.” Unfortunately, Paisley notes, people had turned away from a frightening reality. “That’s why they were caught by surprise when [Trump] just came up and grabbed the throne. Because everyone was complacent. People were told that it was absurd. It was an absurdist interlude to them. They thought, ‘Oh, this is gonna be over on election day.’ And it wasn’t.”

That insight makes I, No Other feel all the more necessary. Paisley agrees that the jolt it gives the reader could be more broadly applicable in this kind of moment. Many people “woke up shell-shocked,” he says, because “they wouldn’t look at [the truth]” before the election. “They still won’t. They still can’t believe it. It’s gonna take a while for people to really internalize the way everything’s changed now.”

Yarrow Paisley
Northampton, Massachusetts
Website

Top image by Philip Shelley

The post Man of Letters appeared first on Take Magazine.