Interviewed by Christine Rice
Is there a term for someone who is more than a ‘renaissance’ person? A person who excels in many, many fields?
If there is such a term, it would be used to describe author/journalist/professor/ activist/actor/model Chris Campanioni. One of Chris’s accomplishments (certainly not the latest…he moves much to quickly to pin down) is the publication of his novel-in-stories Drift from King Shot Press. In DRIFT, Chris weaves magical elements into a frenetic beat. Of his work, Chris says, “…so much of this book reads like a ghost story, or several ghost stories, set to a new wave soundtrack/backdrop.”
Some writers and readers still seem slightly suspicious of the novel-in-stories form. And without knowing its history, it can be easily misunderstood. Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, published in 1919, set the cast for the novel-in-stories form. Anderson’s risk-taking ways influenced writers including Steinbeck and Faulkner, among others. In a 1951 letter, John Steinbeck wrote, “Sherwood Anderson made the modern novel and it has not gone much beyond him.” And after Anderson’s death in 1956, Faulkner called him “the father of my generation of American writers and the tradition of American writing which our successors will carry on.”
Drift carries on this tradition with stories and characters and voices as diverse as America.
I caught up with Chris this fall, via email, when he was in Berlin, to discuss the Talking Heads, Octavio Paz, selfies, and teaching as activism, among fifty or so other topics.
CHRISTINE RICE: Hi, Chris. How’s it going?
CHRIS CAMPANIONI: Hi, Chris! I’m actually at this very moment returning from a morning run around Berlin’s Charlottenburg. I’ve been here for the past ten days conducting interviews and working with refugees at Germany’s largest LGBTI refugee center.
CR: We published one of your short stories in Hypertext Magazine. Earlier this year, when we started discussing your book and this interview, I started researching you and found that you are an editor at PANK, a writer of prose and poetry, a professor, a former journalist, a nonprofit exec, an activist, a model, and actor. What did I miss?
CC: Hmm … that’s a pretty good list. Sometimes Google isn’t so reliable but I think my name—the only one like it, on the Internet at least?—helps. As part of CUNY’s Pipeline Program, I mentor other students of color, many of whom are also first-generation Americans and first-generation college students. The endeavor is meant to help get undergrads of color into graduate school and eventually diversify academia, as well as the professoriate. Some of my work at CUNY’s Graduate Center today involves traveling in the footsteps of people that had made migratory passages similar to my own parents and redrafting narratives of exile, and so I’m really excited about where this work is taking me, because nothing else I had done in my personal or professional life had been able to situate my cultural dislocation within a larger framework of immigration discourse.
CR: DRIFT feels very much like your TedX reading of the poem “Yes, We’re Open” in which you explore the “everyday interruptions of our daily lives.” DRIFT is narrated from different points of view, different characters. At its core, it’s a novel-in-stories (a deconstruction of the traditional novel). Would you agree with that? Or would you argue something else?
CC: Oh, totally. I had been writing the book for many years, from 2006 up until the waning days of 2012—that eschatological Mayan calendar phenomenon which arrested the world so briefly around December of that year. So, I felt fortunate that the story itself engages so much with temporal shifts; the revolving characters, who we meet at different points of their lives had the chance to “grow up” as I grew as a person and a writer. In this way, the arc of the narrative, even though it’s not at all told linearly, feels kind of natural to me.
CR: My novel, Swarm Theory, is a novel in stories too. When I sent it out to agents, one agent, in particular, asked me to put it in chronological order, and rewrite it from one particular character’s POV (which I didn’t do.) What was your experience when sending out DRIFT? Did you get similar requests?
CC: You know, when Michael Kazepis [publisher at King Shot Press] got back to me after he’d read the manuscript, he totally scared the hell out of me. His first response was that the book was just as you put it—a novel-in-stories—and so why not chop it up and publish a set of novellas? Understandably, I was worried for many months, not only because I felt deeply that the stories not only were all interlacing—background characters in one scene or section become protagonists in others; tangential events and minor encounters recur later, with drastically different meanings—but also because the point is the drift. Of course, Michael eventually got over the sheer size of the novel and also intimately understood what the text was trying to do. He even gifted me the name; the book was originally titled something absurdly long: “Fashion of the Seasons.”
CR: And how did you discover King Shot Press?
CC: Oh, this is one of my very first and beloved AWP memories. I was at a really cool bar in LA’s Little Tokyo, giving a performance as part of C&R Press’s spontaneous reading party. It was my first AWP so I had that nervous energy going and I’d probably drank too many Old Fashioneds by the time it was my turn and it was very load and the mic had stopped working or it was never working. I was reading, sort of screaming, from Death of Art, from which the poem you mentioned earlier— “Yes, We’re Open”—comes. Michael and I had been corresponding intermittently, but we’d never met in person. He rolled in to the Far Bar and it was like—in that great literary community way, through routinely exchanging our most vulnerable pieces of our self and our work yet mainly interacting online—we were old friends. We began talking about literary influences and the kind of writing King Shot champions and I told him about that monster manuscript I had in the proverbial attic from my early twenties. Voilà.
CR: What was the hair trigger idea for DRIFT?
CC: Oh god, I have no idea what was the elevator pitch I’d been using, or trying to use, in query letters. The violence of memory? I know I was interested in exploring appearance and image, sure, but moreover, I wanted to write a series of disappearances. I think so much of this book reads like a ghost story, or several ghost stories, set to a new wave soundtrack/backdrop. There’s that moment—in the middle of an underwear fitting no less—where one of the characters, as he’s literally being stripped away, wonders if all the other people in his past evaporated the moment he forgot about them, as if he’d changed the channel. But I think that technological aspect—the translations and mistranslations of technology, and the inherent abrasions within any translation—was also something I was consciously writing toward, populating a novel with characters that have been literally silenced, rendered into objects or in some cases, nothing. The #metoo movement was unfortunately not at all in our cultural worldview ten years ago, but re-reading much of this work today allows me to understand a “new” social exigency in how often the text critiques the rabid commodification of bodies, especially marginalized bodies.
CR: The epilogue quotes Octavio Paz and the Talking Heads.
I believe that we are entering another
time, a time that has not yet revealed
its form and about which we can say
nothing except that it will be neither
linear time nor cyclical time.
OCTAVIO PAZhere’s that rhythm again
Here’s my shoulder blade
here’s the sound I made
here’s the picture I saved
here I am
TALKING HEADS
Why did you choose those passages?
CC: Oh, these are such good questions! I had been reading Paz in school, and I was already almost done writing this book when I came across this passage and I knew it’d be ideal for a novel that tries to “re-think concepts of motion” which was originally the book’s last line. I am really hyper-conscious of injecting my work with pop culture, not only because it informs our private lives in revealing, often unconscious ways, but also because I understand pop to be a potentially subversive utility to the system (capital) that produces it. Also: I write so often to music—one of the reasons why I so often wear headphones in public—so I’m indebted to the lyric form, and I make that explicit in the text, too, of course; there’s always lyrics bleeding into dialogue or narrative, cutting in like an advertisement or interference. But these lyrics, especially, this Talking Heads song, “Stay Hungry”—it reminded me of how I read my own work, and especially this book, as a series of time-travels. Which I think is true, you know, for every writer, right? We are always self-archiving, and finding our earlier selves, or translations of our self, across time. For a book about collective and individual memory, but also that uncanny gauze-like déjà vu unrecognition between appearance/disappearance, I felt it was an explicit invitation to find your own rhythm in the drift, to find yourself—or lose yourself—among the images. Which—thinking again to your question of a “trigger idea”—was certainly one of them; this idea that all of us fashion each other in each other’s gazes.
CR: Poetry and music are almost characters in and of themselves in DRIFT. Can you talk about how you play with music, poetry, language in your work?
CC: I think every writer understands on some level that no matter what it is you are writing—a play, a short story, a poem, a film treatment—employing the services of each mode or model is extremely useful in transmitting the stuff. I’ve never considered myself just a poet or a novelist; today I mostly write “nonfiction” which means nothing really except for that publishers are selling my prose-poetry-essay amalgamations as nonfiction. I suppose I also was attracted to that Talking Heads song because of its title—Stay Hungry, right? —and I am a voracious writer who deals in excess. I’m a glutton. So, implementing music, poetry, those weird film “exhibits,” letters, screenplay, and moving from Spanish to English without distinction is the manifestation, I suppose, of that lust for language.
CR: One recurring character, Chris Selden, is an actor, a model. Through his character, you comment on acting and modeling. There’s a sense of emptiness in the process and it’s portrayed as a sad, vacuous industry. In one section, ‘Chris’ refers to himself as a monkey performing for an audience.
You write:
But she was there all the same, a projection in my mind, there as I stood silent, filmed or not filmed–I never know when the camera is rolling, I only know there is more than one, and if one isn’t on, another one is–there as I wondered what had happened to my life, wondered where all of it went. Except I know, at least, the answer.
What was it that pulled you into acting and modeling and what did you learn from it? How has it (or not) influenced your editorial work, your writing?
CC: You know, life is one big coincidence. Long before I began modeling—in the summer of 2007—I was very interested in “the culture industry” à la Adorno and the manufacturing of image and re-presentation. Then I found myself there, suddenly, working as a journalist at night at the San Francisco Chronicle and later, the Star-Ledger, and working as a model and a soap opera actor during the day. So maybe I was consciously trying to force a proximity to the subjects I was endeavoring toward in my writing, but that’s also one of the reasons why I hardly make any distinctions between fiction and non-fiction, and as you sort of suggest, many of these characters granted me an opportunity to form a composite or overt characterization of the many different experiences I’ve had in both media and fashion. I used to tell people at events and guest visits to colleges that if I’d gone into accounting, I would have written about that. I’m not sure if that’s true. I would have never gone into accounting—I’m very bad at math—but if I had, I’d likely still be writing about fashion and media, perhaps from an outside, more objective perspective, but with the same through line or goal of making people more aware of the kinds of underrepresentation and misrepresentation rife in both industries. And in terms of influence, stimulus … I’ve felt that I’ve always been misrepresented via the industry of images, or by the preconceived notions many of us have of what it means to model, or to be a model, and so on some base level, I feel as though my writing—whatever form or subject it takes—is always my attempt to realign the image and the person.
CR: I’m glad you didn’t go into accounting.
Many of the characters misrepresent themselves or maybe it’s intentional deceitfulness. Now more than ever, most of us curate what we present to the world, right? Or…maybe it’s the way people collect and come to conclusions about others.
“Talking Heads,” is written in a series of electronic communications from different people to the character Chris Selden. They’re all saccharin-sweet, complimentary attempts to ingratiate themselves with Chris. Other authors have experimented with electronic forms, most recently, Jennifer Egan in A Visit From the Good Squad.
It’s interesting to see the evolution of writing and the influence of digital communication. Can you talk about how the immediacy of digital communication influences your work?
CC: Oh, sure—the way people fashion each other in each other’s gaze, right? Not knowing or knowing too well that we are adapting our behaviors, mannerisms, tilts of our face to fit a false model. Exposure turns into familiarity, which develops into comfort and satisfaction. It’s the reason why we’re afraid of difference. It’s why we prefer to invent, imagine, and re-frame our identities to correspond with similarities and semblances. One of the reasons why the selfie is so popular is because it pretends to portray us at our most vulnerable; up close and between the eyes, looking at you the way we’d want to be looked at ourselves. It’s a fashioning of the self, which is inherently always both dynamic and artificial. When I read A Visit From the Goon Squad, I received a boost of confidence because I now knew it was possible—even potentially celebrated!—for a book to take up the forms and the subjects that Drift initially takes up. When I was still writing the book, I thought a whole chapter or story written in Facebook messages—messages without actual communication, since there’s not a single response—was sort of a novel approach, but as you mentioned, several writers are doing more and more with Internet linguistics and hashtag, abbreviated forms. I think poetry, with its rapid-fire line breaks and narrative slips, does a good job of replicating and responding to this heightened immediacy, as well as the discordant, often jarring ruptures and dislocation inherent in text communication.
As an instructor, I’ve designed and taught a class called “Identity, Image, & Intimacy in the Age of the Internet” that has been really helpful as a testing ground to enact a lot of these theories, much of which grew into my next book, the Internet is for real (C&R Press, 2019). I’m really indebted to all of my students, and also of course, to the Internet, which has been really productive and really helpful for me to be able to interrogate and respond to all of the above concerns, but even more so, to use the content itself—the screenshots, the memes, all the inbox spam, all the trash—it’s what made the Internet is for real and in some nascent form, it’s what made Drift too, as you indicate. And none of this kind of appropriation is possible without the technology that allows the original to occur in the first place.
CR: You’ve been a journalist and an editor. You’re currently an editor at PANK. How has editing influenced your writing?
CC: Editing is a great gift and a great privilege. It’s remarkable to get such a comprehensive survey of what it is the world is writing right now, which is to say, what the world is thinking right now and in what forms.
CR: You’re also an activist. How did you become involved in activism? Again, how does activism feed your writing?
CC: I think writing and activism goes hand in hand, and despite the academy’s wishes, or its naivete for assuming otherwise, teaching, too, is essentially an activist role because at the end of the day you are directing and contributing to a social project. The initiatives I’ve been a part of—things like the MAGNET mentorship and the YouNiversity Project—all of these came out of my desire to give back an iota of what it is my parents gave to me. They’d each escaped repressive governments to arrive and meet each other in New York City and neither had the opportunity to attend college or even travel very much as adults. That code of accountability—I always talk about this with other first-gen Americans—it has followed me my whole life, and I’m thankful, too, to have it. My work, too, is increasingly building on this idea of accountability and accounting, and the “book” I’m currently writing is actually a collection of notebooks. Within this kind of poetics—docupoetics, or a poetics of witness—the context of temporality and the exigency of a now-ness, which is to say activism, is everything.
Chris Campanioni is a first-generation American, the son of immigrants from Cuba and Poland, and the author of the Internet is for real (C&R Press) and Drift (King Shot Press). His “Billboards” poem was awarded an Academy of American Poets College Prize in 2013, his novel Going Down was selected as Best First Book at the 2014 International Latino Book Awards, and his hybrid piece This body’s long (& I’m still loading) was adapted as an official selection of the Canadian International Film Festival in 2017. He is a Provost Fellow and MAGNET Mentor at The Graduate Center/CUNY, where he is conducting his doctoral studies in English and redrafting narratives of exile. He edits PANK, At Large Magazine, and Tupelo Quarterly, and teaches Latino literature and creative writing at Pace University and Baruch College.
Pick up a copy of DRIFT.
