Ander Monson is the author of  the novel”Other Electricities” and the poetry collection “Vacationland.”  Monson also edits the online literary journal, Diagram and teaches at the University of Arizona.

Ripple: You’ve said previously that creating a story through multiple mediums (as you’ve done with schematics in OE) makes the book a thoroughly designed experience rather than a simple text.  Do you feel that this creates a more tangible world to readers?  Does this help them immerse themselves more completely in the story you’ve created?  Are there other senses you’d incorporate into your work?

Monson: I don’t know how it works from the reader experience, but I do think that if we’re interested in writing books, we should be writing thinking about the books, not just writing prose that can be dropped into books or ebooks or whatever else. It’s hard for me not to think about the artifact of the book as I work on a book, even if the pieces were originally published as solo things. By putting them together my obligation to the material changes.

I’m not sure what you mean by the “other senses,” but I’ve been working on further elements of interactivity in my texts (thus the web presences of the books–my new book has sections that proceed out of the text and end online, tangling up the idea of reading). The idea is that the reader doesn’t have to go online if she doesn’t want to, but there’s moments in the essays that are denoted with glyphs or are otherwise rendered different via type that indicate I’m not done with this question/idea/image. This also allows me to keep thinking about things after the book’s been published, since the online stuff is revisable, and also totally under my control (no editors involved). This is one thing that more experimental things do for reading: you have to read experimental texts more actively; when done well I think experimental texts have some quality of games, like you have to play them as much as read them.

Ripple: Even your website itself is intricately designed with photos, interactive card indexes and the like.  Is the controlled chaos of otherelectricities.com faithfully representative of the inner workings of Ander Monson?  Is the labyrinthine quality of the site a single stroke of inspiration or hours upon hours of careful consideration?

Monson: The different forks on the website were conceived at different times (each book has its own thing going, and there’s some interactive web essays on there like the “Box” one), so I think of the website as a way to organize a bunch of different collections of things while retaining some bigger sense of Ander Monson as author, so when you’re on there, you’re in my head, or a simulated version of my head, which is also what essays are meant to do. The labyrinthine quality, as you nicely put it, is emblematic both of my interests in prose/poetry (digression is big for me) and a function of the ways I’ve been composing and working on the website, clipping off some things, adding others, and so on.

Ripple: Imagine the “Welcome” sign greetings first-time visitors to the, Houghton, Michigan depicted in OE.  Underneath the “welcome,” there is the population.  Beneath that, is a simple, single-sentence summation of this small Upper Peninsula hamlet.  What does it say?

Monson: It says “You are Now Entering Memory” and underneath it, “Home of the 1982 High School Cross Country State Champions.” I actually spent a lot of time trying to figure out where the “State” should go in that sentence. I think that’s the best place for it.

Ripple: Weather seems to play a large role in your works.  Is that purposefully done or just organic?

Monson: I don’t think it’s an either/or proposition. If you grow up in a place where weather is a constant consideration it is everywhere, in every character, in every interaction. But plenty of people from where I grew up don’t write about it all the time either, so it works both ways. It’s one of those big ideas that I am going to continue pushing on.

Ripple: Amputation shows up really often.  Does that symbolize anything for you?

Monson: Amputation doesn’t symbolize anything, no. That’s not to say it doesn’t mean anything.

Ripple: How would your dream obit begin?

Monson: Ander Monson…

Ripple: If you could bottle yourself as a scent, what would Eau de Monson smell like?

Monson: Ice rink shavings just post-zamboni in the second intermission. Collected, electrified, and smoking hot.

Ripple: You’ve said that music helps you create.  Is what you write affected by the type of music?  Do Disney soundtracks produce love sonnets while death metal delivers elegies?  What are your feelings on country?  Gangsta rap?

Monson: Did I say music helps me create? I don’t think I usually get much inspiration from music. I do intentionally listen to certain sorts of music as I’m writing on a project, though, because certain artists/songs keep me in a particular emotional or intellectual space that I like (the Low with OE for instance). That’s part of the deal with working on longer projects, that you have to get back into the headspace of the piece even when you may be decades away from where you were, where those characters still are. Music can be a shortcut to that space.

Ripple: When writing poetry (or fiction, or anything really) do you set out to try to write experimentally and play with form, or does it come more organically?

Monson: It varies.

Ripple: Quite a bit of the humor on your website is self-deprecating.

Monson: Though this is not a question, I do agree that there’s something interesting about this.

Ripple: You’ve said that you created Diagram in order to have a space for more experimental works.  What is it that draws you to the fringes of “traditional” literature?

Monson: Did I say that? I dislike the term experimental. After all, the history of literature is the history of experimental literature. But when most people say experimental they mean it as a subtle put-down (you don’t, and I don’t, but most people do; experimental usually equates to obscure and difficult and annoying; means don’t expect to enjoy this intellectual pap). The idea of experiment simply means that you are trying something and you don’t know what’ll happen, right? Isn’t that how most people write? You don’t know where the piece is going to go, but you work at it until you do. And then the difference between a good experiment and a bad one is whether or not we like/enjoy/appreciate what results from the experiment. A good experiment proves something to be possible, or to be true, or to be cool. Maybe we mean that experimental literature shows its experimental beginnings, where as unexperimental (or “normal”) literature just disguises its beginnings in experiment better? After all, “realistic” writing is an experiment. It is an effect. It is a literary trend. But it reads to us–because most of what we’re offered is “realistic” writing that aspires to prose transparency, to a seeming lack of style, as if that’s not a stylistic effect–it reads to us as the default, because it’s the dominant style. If we were in a different era or a different country/culture we might read things differently.

So almost no writer I know wants to do what others have done before. If that’s what you want to do, why write at all? Why not just read those who’ve done it brilliantly before? Which is a way of saying that I didn’t see a lot of places publishing what I was interested in reading, the kinds of writers who were trying new things, and so I decided to just make one myself. We just put up our 50th issue on Wednesday.

Ripple: Do you think it’s harder to edit an online journal or print journal?  Do you think that having an experimental journal online makes it more accessible to readers?

Monson: The obligation of the online journal is a more frequent production schedule (because it’s online, readers expect new content continually, so annual journals online don’t make a lot of sense). And that is a lot of work (we do 6 issues a year, which takes a lot of work and a constant attention to reading submissions, doing production, identifying and scanning and reproducing diagrams and so on).

Doing a print journal is a different ball game. Production is more difficult in print journals. Print journals require a more solid funding base. Then you have to sell them. You have to distribute them to bookstores and handle subscriptions or whatever other model you have in place to get your work to readers. It just happens that my editorial interests and skill set work better with online (though we do print anthologies because we like books and book artifacts too). I think doing a print journal is kind of ridiculous at this point, given the economics and the logistics. Of course a lot of online journals are ridiculous and not-thought-out either. A lot of online journals are startups and won’t last. Like print journals. Most journals die out or fade out or go broke or people have kids or get tired out for other reasons, or die. It’s a noble effort, a way of resisting time. And of fomenting a kind of literary community.

Ripple: The schematics section of Diagram is intriguing, to say the least.  What did that section evolve from?  Does it have any relation to the idea of the schematics in Other Electricities?

Monson: I don’t know. The two things (the schematics in OE and the journal DIAGRAM) come out of my thinking around the same time, so obviously there are connections. But OE is using those schematics to mean in a different way than DIAGRAM does. They both come out of me finding images that are old and beautiful, and wanting to find a way to honor that. The schematics, after all, are the raison d’etre for the journal. They provide its design ideas, its modus operandi, and a significant portion of its content.

Ripple: If you could be any dinosaur, what would it be and why?

Monson: You know it’s the Tyrannosaurus, possibly carrying a crystal gavel, as purchased from Amazon.com. Looks bad ass but has those feeble arms. It’s like they’re not arms at all, but amputations of arms. They strain the definition of limbs. But then you get all those sweet-ass teeth. And in those tiny arms you’re carrying an instrument of great power that represent justice and can refract light in all kinds of awesome directions. And that’s going to be a major evolutionary advantage.

(*) Oh wow, the staff is all ladies? Rock on, girls/grrls/ladies/women/womyn/peeps.

Ander