INTERVIEW WITH MARCUS SPEH

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Submitted by Lucien Quincy Senna on 5 October 2011 - 6:49am

Marcus, I have formulated a few questions for you to consider and we can work on them simultaneously if you want, I call it call and response but here go the questions: FYI In case you weren't already aware "Call and Response" is the term used to describe the relationship between the Pastor/Reverend and the Congregation in mainly black churches. You can hear it in the background of some of Martin Luther King Jr.'s speeches. Its when the congregation says "Amen to that!" or responds to what has been said. That is why I wanted the readers of this interview to be able to respond to your answers. You can also find it occurring in live jazz performances. 

!. Why did you choose Red Lemonade as a forum for your work? You already have quite a sizeable cult following and numerous awards. Was it to get feedback or look at works in progress a la, what is nouvelle cuisine?

2. Before we delve into your prose/flash fiction, is it about including photographs which you may or may not have taken? Are they essential to the Flash of your fiction, like polygraph tests. Some of the photos allude to the subject but others are suggestions of something else. Explain please.

3. How do you spend your time outside of writing since you mention many incarnations in your bio?

4. Living in Berlin and your German roots, seem vital to your identity as a writer. That must be complicated given most of the world's attitudes towards Germany, its heavy historico-political past and present. What is your attitude towards being German and what does it mean to you as you describe your own work as Germanic?

5. "Flash Fiction" is a series of almost poems -- or short stories with a poetic edge to them. You did make a conscious decision to utilise this format. As a poet, I am interested in how you make it work because the shorter the piece, the more careful you have to be with every word and line, especially in a language which I assume is not your first. Why did you choose this format?

6. The Serious Writer and his Penis and the Serious Writer and her Bush are starkly different but linked as their titles suggest. You say you don't like the humourous part of the Penis section -- one which is funny in a Freudian way--the Bush is more of a serious piece of work and has moments of intense beauty. Which do you prefer, the erotic or the poetic or the semi-comedic?

7. "Fundamentalist Teenagers in front of a Metropolitan Railway Car." -- Are they considering suicide by trying to get run over? You make it unclear and no God Nietzchean. Is that what you intended?

8. We both are tied to Derrida, Lacan, Hegel, Heidegger and their assessment of the human condition. Is your work affected by them?

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Marcus Speh 9 October 2011 - 5:58am
i've only just realized the potential of this format to turn into an interesting public dialogue (before it'll disappear in the blog) & i've said so on my blog & asked readers to engage by commenting & asking questions themselves! it's a pretty convincing argument in favor of red lemonade's annotation engine...
Ry Downey 13 October 2011 - 6:04am
Wasn't it also the origin of the blues in that it occurred in the cotton fields when a slave would sing the first line of a song and then the rest of the group would sing the line again?
Lucien Quincy Senna 13 October 2011 - 4:03pm
You're right but it goes further back like the syncopation in jazz, to Africa.
Marcus Speh 9 October 2011 - 3:54am
In the cold light of this autumn day, “sizable cult following” and “numerous awards”, albeit flattering, translate into a few dozen good writer friends, several hundred readers per story and some net nominations. — Though I’m grateful for the feedback that I’ve received, I’m really looking for publication & support. Perhaps in reverse order when I think about it. Because I believe support based on mutuality and integrity will inevitably lead to publication as long as the writing is good. And support is especially important for me as a German writer who only writes in English and lives (for the most part) among Germans. Before you said it, I wasn’t really aware that a “look at works in progress” might be a motivation, too, but of course it is. This is true even if the work as such is not what I would normally read or purchase, because as a writer I find anything written and published interesting as a way of gauging my own efforts: of style; of content; of presentation, too. Since publishing excerpts of “House of Worship”, I have especially appreciated the opportunity to show something whole. I’ve also enjoyed seeing what other writers do with the feedback they receive. It has helped me realize what a feeble Philistine I am when it comes to working with responses to my own work. This is something I need to explore much more & it doesn’t come easy.
Marcus Speh 8 October 2011 - 5:18pm
Isn’t “delving into flash fiction” rather like taking a header into a shallow pool? Or is it akin to a dive into a pool assumed to be shallow, which then turns out to be a lot deeper…I’m ambivalent myself, and I’m quite interested in and excited about discussing flash in this community, rather than over at fictionaut where the majority of stories is flash and where I've hung out a lot.
Marcus Speh 8 October 2011 - 5:20pm
One of the issue of tying yourself and your words to explicit, photographic images is that I find it hard after a while to see the text as independent and separate. I will create another version of “House of Worship” without photos, and I’m looking forward to the result.
Marcus Speh 8 October 2011 - 5:22pm
...The photos are not essential to the final flashes, but they’re essential to my writing process. I like your comparison with “polygraph tests”. Perhaps the photos are forensic utensils. Flash may depend more on images, especially on instantly gripping mages, than other forms. Really more like poetry in this respect. If you only have 200 words of prose to tell a story, you cannot skirt the story, and a strong polaroid-like image may be the best way to start.
My flash “Before the Bloodbath” comes to mind. It summons a strong image using only the title (which contains the entire story, actually). The rest of the piece could be seen as no more than a swag of this initial image. The whole flash started with a photo as a prompt, “Ireland”, by Claude Le Gall. But it’s rather rare that I begin with a photo. More often, a photo sustains the editing and sharpening of something already (half) written.
Marcus Speh 13 October 2011 - 4:47am
That question comes as a bit of a shock: what is “time outside writing” exactly? I don’t ever not write. Does anyone who really writes? I’m quite serious: one of the great joys of my writing life (or: the portion of my life that is a writing life) is the fact that I’m on excellent terms with my unconscious which works away 24/7 so to speak. Not without asking for rewards of which sleep is the simplest and often the hardest, too. — Apart from that, the conscious side of “many incarnations" translates into different careers, countries, languages, marriages etc. When I’m not outwardly engaged with writing, I spend time with my family; I teach (term has just begun reminding me how much I enjoy teaching though it does take time away from writing—I don’t teach CW or Lit); I network (mostly online, and much less now than when I began to publish online), though actually the networking comes mostly down to writing (non-fiction) again; I take long walks; I enjoy fortnightly meetings with a Berlin writing group consisting of two Brits, two Americans, one Italian and one German (me) — we’re currently working through Le Guins “Steering the Craft", which is great fun and has resulted in some exquisite writing, too. I’m also involved in research and supervision at my school and I have a number of executive coaching clients. In between engagements, and in the car (audible[33] rules!) I tend to read. Currently, I read Stefan Zweig when I go to bed, a little Dostoyevsky when I feel despondent as a writer, and Camus when I feel existential. I tend to re-read the same books all over again (in addition to a gazillion other books which, in the age of the e-book, I don't even read anymore but skip and own only in the most fleeting, pixellated manner of owning). —Luckily, my day has got 48 hours, doesn’t yours?
Marcus Speh 9 October 2011 - 5:24am
I will try to stick to your question (I don’t know why I find this so hard…) — My attitude towards Germany is highly ambivalent: that’s normal for Germans since the Great War and also rooted in the fact that my grandfather was (but didn’t die) in a concentration camp; what’s not so normal is that I lived abroad (in the UK mostly, but also in Italy) for many years & that I’ve been married to two foreigners & that I speak English at home, teach in English & write in English, and that my best friends aren’t German either (or live abroad as well). I really live the life of an expatriate in my homeland. I don’t resent it at all, and it probably feeds my art in mysterious ways. I sometimes wonder what my writing would be like if I lived in the US where most of my (online) readers & writer friends come from. When I wrote while being there in the past, my writing tended to change (both style and subject)—check out “Three Suggestions For Writers Exiled To Texas”, which I wrote during a Texas vacation last year. — The attribute “Germanic” for my story collection was meant to provoke, and I would not like to live with it as the only label—the other two, “absurd” and “existential” are just as, if not more important. In Germany, absurdism and existentialism (we’ll get to Heidegger later) have a long, glorious, tradition, which is both anti-fascist and anti-imperialist. Kurt Schwitters and the dadaists, Max Ernst and the surrealists, experimental writers like Arno Schmidt, and the enthusiasm with which Fluxus was greeted in post-war Germany are only a few examples. So what may be the cliche of “Germanic”, some sort of large-bodied, blond stupefaction leading to the holocaust, is not what I had in mind, but rather the post/modern continuation of a German heritage of thought and a concern and preference for profundity. Often pitch dark and usually, alas, devoid of the lovely humor that characterizes Anglo-Saxon writing. The Germanic literary attitude is reminiscent of late 19th century Russian writing & results for me personally in preferring Dostoyevsky over pretty much any writer past or present. Never mind Nabokov, who thought Dostoyevsky unbearably sentimental and structurally confused ("living in a wasteland of literary platitudes")—while I think Nabokov, a rather shallow superb stylist, could not take the depth of his own people. But I digress. This is perhaps too big a topic for a small interview…but what would really interest me: do readers see anything "Germanic" in my work, and how do they respond to it?
Marcus Speh 13 October 2011 - 5:17am
“Four Fundamentalist Teenagers In Front Of A Metropolitan Railway Car” was created in response to a visual prompt as part of a contest. Your response makes me wonder about the life of a text separated from the image that co-created it. Who’s the author and what’s the story once the text flies about the world on its own like Tucholsky’s lonely knee that was separated from a soldier and went off to see the world…If I beam myself back to November 2009, I remember that the first line, the teenagers yawning before school, came to me while watching my daughter in second grade getting ready for class. There had been a terrible shooting at a German school that year, too. When I then turned the teenagers into little terrorists, I felt the seriousness of the implied accusation needed some smoothing similar to Lessing’s play “Nathan the Wise" from 1779. Germans read this play in school as an example of bridging religious and ideological conflicts. It had always impressed me how Lessing brings powerful representatives of the world’s largest religions on stage making it possible for us (even today) to give all of them a fair hearing…So—I did not intend for the teenagers to consider suicide and though I like Nietzsche’s text “The Antichrist” very much, I did not think of “no God” but rather of “many gods” and I thought of the fact that teenagers everywhere have similar needs independent of the religious roof they live under. — Whatever the intent, I like that piece for its irreverence which may come from the wildness of the characters: anything can happen, right? And their clothes allude to a land beyond our land, a dreamt land: I still kind of remember that state of mind as a teenager, the sea of possibilities, unfiltered by knowledge, beautifully “boisterous” (the attribute that carries my passion in this short piece).
Marcus Speh 9 October 2011 - 1:41pm
English is indeed my second language. It is a great language to write in…I’m not the first to have observed this. Why great? For me, writing in another than my native tongue means that I can bring all the linguistic playfulness to the language without having to worry too much about the burdens of the native. Like Beckett, writing in another language allows me to write "without style.” The burden of the native tongue, at least in my case, is an inner critic who looks like a German general. Please imagine Rommel on speed. He is is a lot stronger, fiercer, and meaner than any internal English-speaking critic could ever be. He’s got no sense of humor. When I propose “Mango” or “Salsa”, he retorts with “Sauerkraut” and “Walzer”. That’s the extent to which I feel inhibited to write prose in German. Letters, essays and so forth are no problem whatsoever. Translating into German is possible and I’ve done it. Translating into German and back into English is actually one of my preferred ways of dealing with really difficult editing issues. When I miss the forest for the trees, I translate a passage into German—the translated version is a different beast altogether—and when I translate it back to the original English, the problem oftentimes has disappeared altogether. I conclude that there’s a magic not just in, but between languages, that Beckett, Nabokov, Conrad, and other bilingual writers must have not just felt but exploited. This is great company to be in.—As for the choice of flash as a format, I’d like to say that the format chose me rather than the other way around. I’m not a natural short story writer at all. I can be meticulous, but I hate myself that way. I once wrote 300 poems in a year and they were all bad. But flash, which for me really isn’t the same as “prose poem”, is a natural medium for the web and I’m a natural on the web. I’ve talked about flash before aplenty & as a writer I feel that I’ve come to the end of my flash though I’ll continue employing flash as a medium, or substrate, for the longer forms that I’m writing now, a method that’s been identified by the novelist and theorist John Gardner as “fictional pointillism” (see the thread by Michael Vagnetti), which both in style and process of creation is perfectly adapted to my work, life and writing habits.
Marcus Speh 13 October 2011 - 5:29am
I’ve moved away from all of them though I still feel somewhat close to Heidegger. Derrida is overladen, and I no longer believe that looking at con/text makes us better people/writers/readers or whatever. Lacan’s gone sour for me after the Sokal/Bricmont controversy (I’m a physicist like Alan Sokal, whom I know well), though I do hold the importance of the unconscious in high esteem—not just on general grounds but as a more than accidental tourist of our writing. I believe with John Gardner that it is the role of the author to create a “vivid and continous dream” for the reader. This is undoubtedly easier for the novelist than for the (prose) poet or flash writer (the unconscious loves stability and needs a certain length of runway for take-off and landing) but it’s impossible to create said “dream” without the collusion of the unconscious. Now, Heidegger I still dig, because his only real interest was “being” (or non-being) and that’s the central concern of my writing, too. I don’t share the criticism of Hegelians concerning Heidegger’s use of language because I don’t think you can write about human existence, death and infinity without going into a blur, without merging with the deity in some profound sense that defies physics because it lies so far beyond (today’s) physics. When I’m in the deepest pain, I want a poem or “language gone riot” (Bertrand Russell about Heidegger), otherwise I’d have a glass of milk and a cookie. That’s also why I really prefer Camus and Sartre, because they don’t succumb to logic in the face of death, or to even cheaper positions of discourse. Your guess that I am informed (either way) by those guys is correct. I’ve talked about this elsewhere at length when talking about a flash I’d written on a torture scene: I do think writing about the human condition is what I’m about. As I said then: “If we don’t throw our weight behind life, decency and humanity, we’re nothing but word clowns.”
Marcus Speh 9 October 2011 - 4:09pm
It’s easy to underestimate “The Serious Writer And His Penis”. We’re not supposed to take genitals seriously, especially male genitals. (True, they’re funny-looking). This story can be read as a cultural commentary with secret traps, pitfalls and characters that are real enough (the story talks more about women than about men). There’s a shift of attention from the hypnotizing quality of the genital (interesting really only to lovers, not readers) to humor as a relationship quality (interesting to everyone). I poke fun of the propensity of men to fixate on size. I think I simply wanted to drag the sorry sausage out into the open and see what I could do with it without having to touch it, as it were. As a flash I find the penis story altogether richer and more serious than the prose poem “The Serious Writer And Her Bush”, which is not about genitals at all (except through the pun in the title) but…well, I don’t really know. It’s locked, too poetic for surgery. I accept this last piece as a word-plant that grew organically in my head. It’s not hard to like. I came up with this character “The Serious Writer” in 2009 and have written dozens of stories for him. I think I could write a whole book of these ditties, but I’m afraid he’s too transparently me and too focused on his writing to be interesting to a wider audience. (As an aside: the online zine Pure Slush publishes my five last installments of the series this month—beginning with the serious writer's mother: what could be more serious?) —Regarding your question, I would have to say that I couldn’t pick one: I’d always try to put all three in the soup with some philosophy as cream on top—sometimes trying too hard. Less can be more.
Lucien Quincy Senna 9 October 2011 - 3:13pm
Marcus, I've asked Richard Nash how we can publish the interview so that it is not embedded in my home page and so that other people can read your answers and comment. No response from Dick so can you think of a way we can do it? I'd like the interview published with the questions and answers and a place for people to comment/annotate. Any ideas? Cheers from Oxford.