Aji editor, Erin O’Neill Armendarez, interviewed expert bridge engineer, Jerome O’Connor so our readers could learn all about bridges in this issue. Jerome shows an eye for beauty with his photography, proving that engineers can be creative in both how they approach technical problems, as well as how they see the world with an artful eye. Included with this interview are some simply stunning images of bridges he’s visited, some strong and sturdy, others shortly after collapse. All images in this story are courtesy of Jerome. We hope you’ll enjoy his unique and seasoned perspective on bridges as much as we do.

Erin O’Neill Armendarez (EOA): Please share with us a bit of background information.
Jerome O’Connor (JO): My career consisted of two primary blocks of time: 

1) 20 years with New York State Department of Transportation, where as a Bridge Management Engineer I was responsible for the safety of all existing bridges in our region (the Southern Tier of NYS). 

2) 15 years with the University at Buffalo, where I was Senior Program Manager for Transportation Research, which was a federally funded program to improve the performance of bridges during earthquakes. This role evolved into leadership of the Institute of Bridge Engineering, which had a broader goal. We fostered collaboration among university professors who conduct cutting edge research, practicing engineers who applied the knowledge in real life, and the next generation of bridge engineers,  students who ask fresh, insightful questions which also help to advance the state of the practice. 

EOA: How and when did you first discover your interest in bridges? 
JO: To be honest, I fell into it. I was in Brazil as part of a Rotary Group Study Exchange when I saw on TV news that a major interstate bridge had collapsed back home in the US. People there were shocked that this could happen in New York, the “Empire State”.  That event changed things. To reduce the risk of future tragedies like the Schoharie Bridge collapse, legislators created jobs dedicated to bridge safety. My job of Bridge Management Engineer was one of them. 

EOA: In your opinion, what are the essential features of a well-designed bridge? 
JO: Although bridge users don’t think about them much, there are really too many features of a well-designed bridge to try to name. People may notice the beauty of a signature bridge, but I doubt they consider that a large part of the bridge (and cost) is underground. The foundation not only supports the weight of cars and trucks, but also its own weight,  which consists of huge amounts of steel and concrete. Besides those “live” loads and “dead” loads, bridges need to be designed to resist rigorous shaking from wind or earthquakes that can occur. The last thing someone wants is a disaster. Not only can people die, a bridge failure severs a lifeline that is essential to the public for economic and social reasons. There is also a whole science dedicated to protecting bridge foundations from floods that can undermine these foundations.  

Aside from the above, a bridge design team needs to be conscious of the communities being connected. They strive for a “context-sensitive design” that enhances the area while minimizing negative environmental impacts. For instance, it wasn’t long ago that some bridges were designed exclusively for motorized vehicles. Now, it is almost expected that a bridge needs to be wide enough to accommodate pedestrians and bicyclists. Unique features like observation decks are now incorporated into new bridges. Since bridges are built to last 75-100 years; bridge engineers need to anticipate future needs as well.  

EOA: You’ve taken photos of many bridges over the years, including bridges damaged by Hurricane Katrina.  Was that kind of damage predictable?  
JO: Katrina’s worst damage came from tidal surges, the likes of which had only been seen in other parts of the world during a tsunami. Climate change is likely the reason for seawater coming ashore sixteen feet higher than had been recorded before. Bridge designers can’t predict what will happen in the future. Fifty years ago, when those bridges were being built, no one would have anticipated that the water would get that high. 

EOA: Given a probable increase in future flooding in New Orleans and in other cities, both coastal and inland, can bridges be built or modified to sustain the inevitable 500 year deluges we’ve been experiencing? 
JO: The trouble with building a bridge to handle inundation can be visualized by looking at photos of New Orleans after the floodwalls broke. Neighborhoods were flooded even though bridges in the area were “high and dry”.  Eventually a bridge has to touch down on the ground where people live and work. If those areas are under water, it does not serve any purpose to have a bridge. 

A bridge cannot function as a bridge if both ends of the bridge are underwater.   It seems superfluous to say but the definition of a bridge is to connect two areas of refuge (i.e. dry land).  One can say, just build a longer bridge, but in order for it to be useful, it eventually needs to come down to earth. Functionality and economics both come into play when trying to defy mother nature.

EOA: How do you partner with engineers in other parts of the world to assist in solving structural weaknesses or failure in bridges?
JO: Like any profession, bridge engineers and those in specialties within the field share ideas by writing professional journal articles, convening at conferences, collaborating on projects, learning from failures, etc.  At the University of Buffalo, we hosted international meetings and workshops with counterparts from various states and countries. In 2016, I went to Ecuador after bridges were tested by a strong earthquake, the kind that we don’t typically get in the US.  Observing how our designs perform is an opportunity to validate the results of laboratory experiments. We can always learn more.  

EOA: Please give us an example of how the failure of a particular bridge impacted a community and the surrounding environment. 
JO: First, the catastrophic collapse of any bridge leaves us feeling vulnerable; we grieve the dead but also think “it could have been us”. A perfect example is the 2007 failure of the I-34W truss bridge in Minneapolis. It physically came down, but it also put a dent in our nation’s psyche; it made us doubt the safety of our infrastructure. All at once, traffic on this major transportation link stopped. That meant an immediate change to people’s commuting habits, long-haul trucking, and local commerce. No one could tell how long it would last. It was cleaned up and rebuilt in a year but that kind of speed is not typical. Normally, a major project like that would take 13 years to go through the environmental review and design process. This was completed in a year under the declaration of emergency. I can’t help but wonder if funds flowed and procedural steps were slashed to erase the memory asap and patch up our psyche.

EOA: What do you find noteworthy about the River Trail Pedestrian Bridge in Redding, California?
JO: The “stress ribbon” design has a certain beauty in its simplicity. It’s ingenious in that it it’s draped between the concrete piers like a rope, instead of being stiff and flat like a beam. It’s an efficient use of materials and works well on trails like this.

EOA: And the Gothic Bridge in Central Park?
JO: This bridge obviously has a timeless beauty, but is also interesting because of what we do not see. It is made of cast iron, a material which is not used anymore because modern steels are seen as much more superior. I think of this bridge as art and its art defies its technical obsolescence. 

EOA: And the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge in Charleston, South Carolina? 
JO: Cable-stayed bridges like this have become the bread and butter of medium-to-long span bridges. They are incredibly good at what they do and look graceful in the process.

EOA: What innovations are in the works for bridges in terms of materials and/or structural design? 
JO: The emergence of advanced materials and computer analysis tools is making new things possible in the field of bridge design. Not only in terms of strength but also in terms of durability, or the ability to last a long time while being resilient to the effects of extreme forces and environmental conditions. Although Ultra-High Performance concrete (UHPC) and new types of stainless steel are exciting, the one that I see great promise in is carbon or glass fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) composite materials. They are used for their strength and light weight in the newest jets and watercraft, but they are especially useful for bridges because the material does not rust, the curse of both steel and concrete. FRP can replace steel rebars in concrete to make it last longer. Sheets of FRP can even be applied to the outside of concrete to add strength and increase the safety factor.  In New York and Puerto Rico, an entire bridge superstructure was built with FRP. These will serve for a long time, just like that composite in your tennis racquet (wink wink).  

EOA: When it comes to bridges, what keeps you up at night? 
JO: I sleep well at night. Bridge inspectors are working year-round to keep us all safe and are trained to close a bridge before it becomes unsafe. That said, unforeseen disasters can happen so Congress needs to put more money into maintaining our infrastructure so we can rest assured that our families are safe. Many in-service bridges were never intended to last over 50 years but are still in use. Eventually, things rust or wear out and need to be replaced.  China seems to realize that good infrastructure is needed to be considered a first world economy; why don’t we?

EOA: How do engineers create bridge designs that enhance the landscapes they occupy?
JO: Two ways:  They can try to get a bridge to blend in so it gets lost in the natural surroundings or they can highlight its magnificence as a work of art as a technological wonder. 

EOA: In your opinion, what makes a bridge an object of beauty, a work of art?
JO: It is art if it enhances the surroundings and is a pleasure to look at. If it causes you to gaze in wonder, we’ve done a good job.

EOA: Of all the bridges in the world, which is your favorite?  Why? 
JO: It’s hard to argue with iconic bridges like the Golden Gate or Brooklyn Bridge. I’d pick the Brooklyn Bridge because it was built by Roebling men and women* of great vision and fortitude in a time when the nation was demonstrating its uninhibited ambition and confidence to the world.

I’d also comment that my favorites are the many being built by Bridging the Gap Africa to help people who live in a walking world to give them the ability to get food, go to school and get healthcare.

*John Roebling designed the Brooklyn Bridge.  His eldest son Washington and wife Emily oversaw completion of the bridge after Roebling’s death. 

​Looking across the Amstel River into the Herengracht in Amsterdam. Pitt Artist Pens in 5” x 8” Moleskine sketchbook.​

Looking along the Reguliersgracht in Amsterdam. Pitt Artist Pens in 5” x 8” Moleskine sketchbook.

Looking along the Mittelburggraben in Friedrichstadt, Germany. Rotring ArtPen and carbon pencil in 5” x 8” Moleskine sketchbook.​

The harbor in Kuden, Germany. Ink, black carbon and white pastel pencil in 5.75” x 8” Clairfontaine sketchbook with tan paper.

The drawbridge in Heiligenstedten, Germany. Pentel Tradio fountain pen, Tombow brush pens, and white gel pen in 5.75” x 8” Clairfontaine sketchbook with tan paper.

by Erin O'Neill Armendarez

​​After the summer of covid-19 and social upheaval, you might be wondering: Can we all just get along? The obvious answer seems to be no, and the poetry books of Mitchell Grabois and Serafina Bersonsage point to some of the reasons why.  It’s clear that neither is interested in relentless niceness, the ubiquitous standard of good taste that often smothers honest conversation.  Instead, Grabois and Bersonsage offer gloves-off honesty as they scrape the veneer from a status quo that punishes those who live outside implied conventions.  According to the experts, if you scrape correctly, veneer should come off in one nice piece.  If that doesn’t work—and apparently it sometimes doesn’t--it’s okay to use a heat gun, a hammer, just go with your gut.  Get it gone.  Veneer is always covering something.  If you really want to get it out of the way to discover what’s underneath, you might have to dispense with plan A and go with whatever works.   And when Plan A falls apart, the frustration, ineptitude and downright savagery that can emerge can be, what else can I say, funny in a deeply disturbing way, and these two are not apologizing.  Not sorry.  If you’re a bit uncomfortable with their narrators’ predicaments, it’s all on you.

​Virtually all of the poems in Mitchell Grabois’ The Arrest of Mr. Kissy Face were previously published in small magazines.  Robin Ouzman Hislop, editor of Poetry Life & Times, characterized Grabois’ poems as “lucidly readable. . . delivered in a paced, snappy, even raunchy style, a mix of compassion with often hilarious black humor.”  To fully appreciate Grabois, one must tear off a layer or two of political correctness.  The author’s main quibble appears to be with the way we cling to our assumptions on how things should be all the while ignoring the obvious facts of how things are.  Grabois playfully and sometimes despairingly forces readers to contemplate the things we’d rather not think about: Are wind farms an energy solution, or just another serious threat to avian survival?  Are any of us actually sane, or “good”? Most of Grabois’ narrators could use some therapy.  One has an infatuation with female dentists, while another, a farmer, brings pesticides in his suitcase for his stay in the “nuthouse.” Still another describes Latilda, a cult member obsessed with wafting the smoke of her father’s cremated remains toward awaiting archangels.  If you cannot take a joke, The Arrest of Mr. Kissy Face is not for you.  But if you’d rather laugh than cry, you’ll definitely come away from this book with less neurosis and more empathy for the anything-but-ordinary people searching for God, love, whatever, in this book. The harder they try, the more ridiculous they seem.  Is this us?  Read the book.  Watch the news.  You decide. 

Interview of Mitchell Grabois

Erin O'Neill Amrnedarez (EOA): Please share some background information with our readers.
Mitchell Grabois (MG): The term “background” is limitless. Increasingly, I think of myself in terms of the 14-billion-year history of the Universe. When I walk around the lake and witness the sunrise filtering through the trees, when I work in my garden, when I help raise my young granddaughters and see them unfold, almost as if in time-lapse photography, I am often filled with appreciation and awe for the unimaginable timeline and the processes of physical development that led to the world existing exactly as it is, with the mountains and seas and all the plants and animals, and that humans evolved to be capable of appreciating every bit of it. Maybe there’s nothing more exalted in my experience than watching leaves being illuminated by the sun, or following the rotation of the blooms in my garden, daffodils to irises to day lilies and spirea, and on. But I also feel exhilarated when I look at the imperfect line of Quikrete Grey Concrete Crack Filler I laid down this week to keep water from percolating down through the walkway directly in front of my house and unsettling the foundation. All that means more to me than literature, written by someone else or by myself. It is unmediated experience, requiring consciousness but not requiring mind or language.

To use a baseball term, I know that this an elaborate wind-up for the discussion of poetry and being a poet, but in a literary world filled with clamoring narcissists, perhaps we could use a little more of this sort of reflection.
Moving much closer to the present, my people were Jews, which means that my history includes a couple thousand years of persecution. My paternal grandmother was born in Barr, Russia, the site of the first pogrom (anti-Jewish riot). My grandfather was born in Kishenev, Moldova, the site of the largest pogrom in Europe up to that time (1903). His father, my great-grandfather Saul, was a farmer whose land had been taken by Russian decree in 1891. He moved to Kishenev and became a wagon maker. Luckily, his partner was a Christian, who hid Saul and his family in his cellar during the pogrom. The brutality of that event made news around the world, and there was much condemnation of it in many countries, including the U.S.

In response to that condemnation, the African-American community protested that African-Americans had been, and were still being, subjected to worse injustices. It was eighteen years later that the infamous Greenwood Massacre, a violent anti-Black riot that destroyed the “Black Wall Street,” took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma, an event that has received increased attention in the wake of the public execution of George Floyd. As I observed in one of my flash fictions, “Doberman Empire” (written some years ago): The ghosts of the brutal past animate the present as the ghosts of our brutal present animate what-comes-next. 

Fortunately, the eddies of European persecution caused my grandparents to flee to the U.S. in advance of the Holocaust. Of my grandfather’s siblings, only one of eight survived. Even for those who did not directly experience it, the Holocaust continues to influence modern Jews (as slavery and ongoing racism influence modern African-Americans), in ways both subterranean and closer to the surface. It is an influence on my poetry, even when it is nowhere in sight.

EOA: How and when did you discover your interest in poetry?

MG: I started working on my elementary school magazine when I was in the fourth grade. By the time I was thirteen, I considered myself a serious poet. I’m now 67, so I’ve been involved in this enterprise for over half a century. As I recall, even despite Wallace Stevens being an insurance executive and William Carlos Williams being a physician, the prevailing models for poets (and writers in general) in my youth were quite different than what they are today—the poet was a sort of Thoreauvian character—a loner finding his own way. That was consistent with my personality— brooding and introverted. 

EOA: Which poets, contemporary or classic, do you most appreciate and why? 

MG: I’ve actually read far more fiction than I have poetry, and I’ve written nine novels. The first was in my mid-twenties. I acquired agency representation but the agent failed to get me a contract with a publishing company. The comments of the editors to whom she submitted all ran along the same lines: too literary, too strange, too feminist. In my fifties, I wrote six novels, and also got an agent (for five of them) but, though he was able to get contracts for some of his clients, he failed to get one for me. He held the bizarre belief that his inability to get me a publisher was proof of how good my work was.
I’m still trying to get an agent for my last novel. I’ve recently reorganized, retitled and repackaged it, so I remain hopeful. However, my relationship to publishing my novels is probably unlike that of most writers. I feel like an old Brooklyn shopkeeper with shelves full of dusty inventory that he’d like to unload.

But to answer the question: some poets I’ve appreciated have included John Berryman, Wallace Stevens, James Wright, William Carlos Williams, Diane di Prima, Gary Snyder and other beats, Charles Bukowski (whose poetry I find more exemplary than his prose), Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver, Tony Hoagland and Zen Master Ryokan, “the great fool.”  

EOA: How has your life experience shaped your writing?  Is there a strong correlation, or do you prefer to write from observation or imagination?

MG: Many people have had far more difficult lives than mine. However, without going into detail, my childhood was psychologically challenging. In fact, at age 17, approaching high school graduation, I felt dead. I wasn’t suicidal—I felt that I was already, literally dead. It was… disconcerting. It took me many years to surmount that. I believe that the impetus for many poets to write is to try to make sense of emotional realities that they experience that cannot easily be understood and explained. That was certainly true for me. Over the years, as we all do, I developed my own blend of life. Sensitivity, cheerfulness, suffering, compassion and black humor are elements of that blend, and it comes out in my writing in ways that can’t be programmed or predicted.


EOA: How has your craft evolved over time?  Have peers or mentors assisted in honing your process?  

MG: To my benefit or my detriment, or both, I’ve been largely isolated and self-contained as a writer, and “self-taught.” I have no English or Creative Writing degree. In college I took a couple of writing courses. One of the instructors harped on “writing organically,” which made sense. The other instructor was Jim Dodge, the novelist and poet and friend of Gary Snyder. After reading many of my poems, he told me, “Despite Gary Snyder, English is not an idiographic language.”

I don’t know if I can speak to how my craft has evolved over time. I’ve never been good at identifying what writers have influenced my work and that sort of thing. I guess that’s because I’m neither a literary person, an intellectual or an academician. I don’t believe that you have to be those things to be a good writer. Certainly, you don’t have to be those things to enjoy your writing process and what you’ve written. After writing a lot of long fiction, during the last ten years I’ve focused on poetry and flash fiction, and lately I’ve gone back and started compiling a lot of it into book form. I’ve cringed at some of the work before deleting it. However, on rereading, most of the work feels fresh and: Hey, this is good shit. I believe that, ultimately, that’s the prize that you get from being a writer—the understanding that you’ve engaged in a creative process, which is valuable, perhaps even sacred, in its own right and, rereading your work, you have a feeling of satisfaction and enjoyment.   

EOA: How did you decide upon a publisher for The Arrest of Mr. Kissy Face?

MG: Lacking connections, and acting according to my long-held principle that I would never pay submission or contest fees, I simply found a list of poetry publishers and sent out the manuscript. Subsequently, Pski’s Porch Publishing, a small press in upstate NY, accepted and published it.

EOA: Are you satisfied with your publishing experiences thus far?  

MG: Despite my natural aversion to marketing, I marketed THE ARREST OF MR. KISSY FACE to the best of my ability, and there were some sales. The publisher did little marketing. Poets should know that there is a very small market for poetry (though I understand that there’s a stronger one in Britain). If you can manipulate social media in innovative ways, you have a better chance of some success. But any writer nowadays, poet or otherwise, who nurtures the old dream of becoming “rich and famous” through his or her writing is some kind of moron. The market for literary work in general has significantly shrunken. I read an interview with John Irving not long ago in which he stated that if he were starting out now, he would never get published.

EOA: What advice would you give to other poets contemplating publication of a first collection?  

MG: I was excited to have a bona fide publisher publish my poetry, but really, what does that matter? It means that one other person (or maybe a committee) liked my work well enough to put it on paper. Is that important? I think that in the future I will simply self-publish my work, as I did with one of my novels, TWO-HEADED DOG. (By the way, both that book and THE ARREST OF MR. KISSY FACE are available for purchase through my website, wordsbymitch.com, in which you can also find many of my poems and flash fictions which you can enjoy free-of-charge.) Self-publishing short-circuits the waste of time and the hassles of trying to find a publisher and then dealing with the publisher. Considering only my poetry and short fiction, I probably have ten books worth of work. It tickles me to imagine a great-grandchild or great-great grandchild or a descendent even further in the future, reading some of my work and thinking: My ancestor, Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois, was an interesting dude.  

Making this decision puts more responsibility on me—if the only decisions about which poems will appear in my books are my own, and if I’m committed to quality, then my decisions better be well-considered and sharp. Also, let’s not forget the other meaning of “submission.” Why bow your head and accept your fate as a subordinate when you can embrace freedom and take your place as a fully self-determining being?

At this moment, I’m on, maybe, my sixteenth revision (typical for me) of these responses to the Aji editor’s interview questions. I revise until I am fully satisfied with a piece. I revise even after a piece is published. And that’s certainly something that any writer should know—as many, many writers have said previously: Writing is Revision.
 
EOA: What do you hope readers will gain from reading your book?  

MG: I’ve never really thought about my writing in that way. I’ve never written with a reader in mind. I guess I hope that some of it might give readers pause, might give them a deeper sense of humanity, might amuse them.
 
EOA: What advice do you have for other poets when it comes to pursuing a desire to write and publish poetry, to find community and an audience for their work?  

MG: Just do it?

If they’re young, they might consider acquiring academic degrees, like the MFA. There’s been a lot of criticism of the MFA, but human beings operate in clubs, through networking, so acquiring degrees, with all the consequent contacts, could be helpful. Getting published requires a combination of talent, hard work, and luck, and luck usually comes through association with other people.

​Two Poems from The Arrest of Mr. Kissy Face

The Arrest of Mr. Kissy Face

I kissed the woman who slices lunch meat
at King Sooper’s
She shoved smoked turkey at me
leaned away 
and cried: Next!
 
I kissed my doctor
I’d been wanting to do it
since she first told me to stick out my tongue
and complemented me on its smoothness
and the elegance of my taste buds
I kissed her and she asked
On a scale of one to ten, how have you been feeling this week?
I kissed her again
Have you been seeing or hearing things that aren’t really there?
I kissed her a third time
Have you been feeling suicidal or homicidal?
I kissed her more deeply
really sent my tongue to a remote locale
Do you have access to weapons?
 
I said:
How can you ask me that
after everything we’ve been through?
Anyway, this is America
 
She called Security
Security knew me
from the days when I was a high school football star
and an amateur boxer and cage fighter
who went by the moniker Destructo
They were afraid of me
called the cops
warned them: Be sure to bring your stun guns
your billy clubs
and chemical weapons
 
The first cop who entered the room--
I kissed her
She yelled FREEZE! 
Hands where I can see them!
Get down on your knees!
 
I happily complied


Jet Fuel
 
Sometimes I wish I were still out 
on the back porch, drinking jet fuel 
with the boys
 --Tony Hoagland
 
Gasoline smells like gin
sweet and clear
I’ve loved that smell
since junior high
when me and Pollo Murillo and Hector Delgadillo
huffed it from the jerry can
in Pollo’s dim garage
 
Isn’t “jerry can” an incandescent phrase
transcending its simple language?
 
Delgadillo said I was Mexican
I said, I’m a Jew
 
Delgadillo said: You may be a Jew 
in your shaved-off prick
but you are Mexican in the soul
unpredictable, combustible
 
Then he passed me the jerry can
no worries about bogarting that
there was plenty for all
 
Murillo ran off a mountain road
Delgadillo went to prison
and got shanked by the Aryan Brotherhood
Fuck them
 
I’m Mexican
and will wait for my chance for revenge

Serafina Bersonsage’s A Witch’s Education delights in smashing inane, restrictive social norms, particularly those that punish women for following their natural inclinations, one of which is to use their brains.  Her ironies, often understated, are downright wicked.  Imagine a high school girl troubled by dreams of a hot night with “Dubya,” the most disturbing part of which turns out to be her “certain affection” for him.  Many of these poems, which move from childhood home to graduate school and finally into the “woods,” portray the unfair, oppressive rules applied toward female sexuality.  Previous societies have often labeled women who question or ignore these rules as witches, shunning or even executing them.  Bersonsage’s point?  A contemporary American woman’s going to need a few spells to thrive in this world, and when she is found out, the punishments are still apt to be quite harsh.  Like Grabois, Bersonsage has no fear of offending the obtuse keepers of the status quo.  True to the assignation “witch,” her narrators conjure images of Republicans who shouldn’t be eaten (“they can hardly be organic”) and psych wards where desperate patients wonder how to get a room (“a full psychotic break,” the narrator induces).  Depending upon your worldview, these poems will either horrify you, or they will bring you a distinct, guilty pleasure.  As for me, I stand with the witches.  If you are world weary, as an alternative to banging your head against the wall, I prescribe just a few of Bersonsage’s pages.  Trust me—you’ll feel better.  

​EOA: Please share a bit of background information about yourself. 

Serafina Bersonsage (SB): I’m a Michigan-based writer with a penchant for poetry, fantasy, and more or less unpublishable ephemera: fictional lexicons, made-up annals, detailed descriptions of places that don’t technically exist.  At six, I caused a small panic in my first grade class by convincing half of the students that I was a vampire.  My mother introduced me to T.S. Eliot, socialism, and Bloody Marys; the precise order is hazy.
 
Random facts: I lived in Philadelphia for a year; I read tarot on a regular basis; I married a man who is at least as much a bibliophile as I am; I enjoy studying languages and once asked for a Latin textbook for Christmas, but was utterly trounced by Old Irish grammar.  I learned to shoot tequila in my fourth year of grad school, and I once stayed awake for so long during finals that one of my professors thought that I was possessed because of all the burst blood vessels in my eyes.  I can’t do math, play a musical instrument, or play sports without risking serious injury to myself and others.  In high school, I refused to date anyone without a half-decent plan for world domination.

EOA: When did you start to write poetry?  What was your inspiration? 

SB: I started to write poetry in high school, a couple of years after I began writing fiction, mostly because I found it easier to work on poems than novels while pretending to pay attention in class.  I can’t really speak to the inspiration behind my earliest poetry, because I tend to avoid rereading it at all costs.  I seem to recall that some of it was vaguely Arthurian; I was obsessed with Merlin and Viviane.  This was a time when I listened to a lot of Loreena McKennitt.  I aspired to be an elf.

EOA: How did you hone your craft?  Did you take classes or attend workshops?  Did you have mentors? 

SB: My formal training is in criticism—I did a PhD in English at the University of Rochester, where I wrote my dissertation on microcosms in seventeenth-century British literature.  This involved reading a huge amount of rather sycophantic country house poems and trying to make sense of the stage directions for masques—Ben Jonson could be very catty about special effects!—and at one point I developed a small crush on Margaret Cavendish and crashed a stationary bike.  And I think that all of this was very beneficial for my writing, because it allowed me to live in another world for several years, and also helped me to get over any lingering preoccupation with the notion of voice.  For the first two years, I didn’t write any poetry or fiction at all, and, after that, I worked on my dissertation, and wrote poetry and fiction to please myself. 
 
Eventually, I began to share my work, and the feedback that I’ve received from others has absolutely had an impact on how I approach certain things.  I can tell that a piece of advice has really struck a chord when I find myself applying it to other projects—not even necessarily in the same genre.  My doctoral advisor never saw my fiction, but some of her comments on my academic writing still come back to me when I’m revising a novel.  Remarks on a novel manuscript by my agent (the brilliant Connor Goldsmith) have led me to poems, and various editors’ comments on poems have sometimes informed my fiction.  My husband reads everything that I write.  He’s an insightful and ruthless reader—a far better critic than I ever was, when I aspired to such things.
 
I tend to get a lot out of other people’s comments; nonetheless, I remain mildly allergic to workshops.  (I can see how many writers find them helpful; I just tend to avoid formal groups on principle.)  I did take one undergraduate writing class, at the University of Michigan-Flint—but, as I was also taking the GRE that semester, I’m afraid that I wasn’t terribly engaged.  The most useful advice that I can recall was to aim for three hundred words a day—a strategy that has its limitations, of course, but one that served me well when I was just getting back into fiction, a few years after that.

EOA: A Witch’s Education seems to be, at least in part, a response to cultural assumptions about gender and women who refuse to conform to them.  What do you hope readers will take away from this “wicked” little book? 

SB: It depends entirely on who those readers are.  If they’ve been marginalized in some way, if they’ve been slut-shamed or judged for failing to meet cultural expectations or otherwise pushed into the woods, then I would hope that this book gives them a sense of being somewhat less alone in that, assuming that it resonates with any part of their experience.  If they’ve been privileged enough to avoid such things, then I would hope that it broadens their perspective a bit.  And, if they’re Trump supporters, then I would hope that it gives them a paper cut.  (But I very much doubt that anyone from the third category will read my book.)

EOA: Along with irony and some delightfully sharp edges, your poems also imply some understated humor.  Does that humor seem helpful in dealing with some of the especially difficult topics treated in the book? 

SB: I think that the tendency to turn to humor when confronting difficult topics is a habit that I picked up from my father, who has been known to improvise some truly top-quality comedic monologues in hospital rooms.  I also suspect that a certain kind of dark humor tends to be more prevalent in Michigan, or at least in the parts of Michigan where my parents and I grew up (Detroit, in their case; the suburbs of Flint, in mine).  When things go badly enough for long enough, you start to turn to the mordant, the wry, the sardonic.  There’s a protective quality to it, certainly, but it’s also a way of reaching outward—connecting with others by finding a way to make light of something that’s objectively not great.  (I recently learned the etymology of the word “sardonic,” by the way.  It involves poison and laughter and quite possibly senicide, and is definitely something that I would encourage your readers to look up.)

EOA: The copyright page in A Witch’s Education pokes fun at the standard copyright credits. What was your process for selecting EMP as the publisher for your book?  

SB: I believe that the copyright page in question, or a version of it, is one that EMP uses in all of their books.  I was pleased to include it in A Witch’s Education, because I think that it’s admirably honest.  Very, very few people are making (significant) money in this business.  Obviously, I do think that artists should receive credit for their work, and I support the enforcement of copyright laws insofar as those laws allow artists to make a living.  But I also think that it’s good to push back against the proprietary urge when feasible.
 
I submitted the manuscript of A Witch’s Education to relatively few publishers.  I understand why so many small presses have made contests such a central part of their selection process, but it’s deeply frustrating, because a $28 contest fee isn’t a trivial expense for many people, and multiple contest fees can be prohibitively expensive for those of us who prefer to live by Erasmus’s words.  (“When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.”)  So it was a short list, and EMP was on it because I felt that the press’s unapologetically anti-establishment ethos would be a good fit for my project.  Happily, my publisher agreed.

EOA: What are you writing now? 

SB: I’m writing poetry on a fairly regular basis, and I’m also working on a draft of a fantasy novel, which is about four-fifths complete.  The latter project tends to involve the generation of large amounts of worldbuilding material—some of it, very sketchy and utilitarian; other parts, less so.  I feel tremendously fortunate to be able to spend so much time in another world, especially given the state of this one.
 
I’m writing this in July, when the pandemic seems to be on the wane (at least for the moment) in Michigan, but spiraling out of control in many other parts of the country.  Writing during the pandemic has been an interesting experience.  When my husband and I rented our current apartment, we had never expected that we would both end up working from home—  He spends a good part of the day on the phone, so noise-canceling headphones were a necessary investment!  Tuning out the news proved to be rather more challenging, and I’ve had to become considerably more disciplined about when, and how often, I check the latest numbers.  It’s been stressful, but I feel grateful to be able to keep writing during these times.

EOA: Who are you reading these days? 

SB: I’m currently reading Anne Carson, whose “Essay on What I Think About Most” I particularly like.  I’ve also managed to find my way back to Donne, as I do at least a few times a year.  As far as fiction goes, I’m reading Anita Desai’s The Artist of Disappearance, and I’ve just started The Lord of the Rings in Spanish.  (My Spanish comprehension is better than it was, but I’m still in the process of building up my confidence by reading books that I’ve already read in English.)  Assorted nonfiction from the stalagmites that appear on most unused surfaces in my apartment: Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia; John Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent; George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By; and Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, by Robert M. Sapolsky, whose lectures on YouTube are absolutely fascinating.  (I don’t think that I’ve enjoyed science class so much since baking soda volcanoes passed as cutting-edge research.)

EOA: What advice do you have for aspiring poets?  

SB: Take a break if you need it!  I think that it’s difficult to overstate the importance of fallow time, perhaps especially where poetry is concerned.  Sometimes it’s best to let things sit—a poem or a project, certainly, and, at times, it can be beneficial to take a break from writing (poetry, fiction, anything at all), in order to find your way back to it.  But that advice runs counter to the narrative of perpetual optimization that seems to dominate more and more of our waking hours.  It feels nice to have goals, and sometimes it can be beneficial to aim for a poem a day (50K words in a month, etc.), particularly if you’re struggling to cultivate a consistent writing practice.  But it can also be a fine way to produce an impressive amount of mediocre poems.
 
On a related note, I think that many poets, especially newer poets, tend to underestimate the amount of time that they should allow a batch of poems to rest before they try submitting them to literary magazines (or posting them on social media, if that’s their inclination).  Clearly, for some writers, it’s the opposite problem, and they’ll accumulate years, or decades, of backlog before they submit anything at all.  But I think that premature submission is much more damaging, because it can be tempting to allow external feedback (whether positive or negative) to drown out your own critical voice, and it’s harder to be objective about something that you wrote just last month.  I’m fairly certain that at least 80% of the hurt feelings generated by rejection could be avoided by delaying submission for an extra few months (longer, if necessary).
 
I also think that it’s quite important for poets (and all writers) to study languages other than their own, and to try to learn something about the history of their preferred language(s).  Obviously, it’s exciting to read works in the original, but the point is also to get a better sense of the limitations of your own language.  Where does English lack nuance where Spanish conveys it, and how might a poet writing in English try to get around that?  Studying the history of a language might also shed some light on that, and can be especially useful in awakening your sensitivity to dead metaphors—a necessary sensitivity, whether you prefer to engage in necromancy or avoid corpses altogether.

Two Poems from  A Witch’s Education
 
FINISHING SCHOOL
 
We fashioned ourselves
into slightly damaged trophy wives --
not the blonde tanned televised
variety, but the sort you see
in dim cafés, sporting crow’s feet
and small Latin and less Greek, the sort
a wealthy Democrat might seek
to adorn his house in Brooklyn
to play at being bohemian.
We made ourselves such lovely dolls.
Her degree is terminal
like her prospects.
Her dissertation is bound in a little black dress.
It sits on the shelf and oversees
dinner parties and gathers dust
becoming an amusing anecdote, like mine
like me.
We guard our theses, share identities
all taking up yoga, vegan cooking
all losing the same fifteen pounds.
We wear the same black tights to interviews,
becoming
each other’s shadows on the pavement.
We wear the same dress to our weddings.
Five hundred years ago, just possibly
before the Dissolution of the Monasteries
we married the same man, had no mirrors.49
We were each other’s reflections then--
and, when
on the street, by accident, I look
at a woman looking critically
and just too closely, as if she knows
as if she means
to read my history, I see
shards of me in her eyes
 
 
THE MISANTHROPE
 
Actually, I hate children.
Yes, even if they prefer the real fairy tales.
Yes, even if they are yours.
I cannot stand their voices
so loud and ugly, and no --
it isn’t particularly funny
what they said.
A friend’s fat baby I may like
on Facebook, where children are seen and not heard
silent, frozen — and, speaking of freezing
I will nod politely
at the mention of freezing my eggs
for I am one of those childless women
who claims to love children
but I am lying — and, speaking of lying
yes, you did look fat in that dress
and, yes, I fucked them
(both of them
in twenty-four hours
and did not shower
before I came to bed).
And have I mentioned that I hate dogs?
They fenced off the woods in my favorite park
the woods where a monster like me should live
not far from the little town,
bound in hate
to the people who let
their dogs run free and bark and shit
just like their waddling toddlers64
and. passing, I will smile and wave
and say good morning,
and I will hope
that the tall pines crack and crush them,
that their children choke on breadcrumbs
that the apples are poison that fall from the trees.

 Katie Redfield (KR): Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, where you are from and where you are
working now?
Gordan Skalleberg (GS): I was born in Norway in 1960. My dad is Norwegian and my mom is German. At that time, Norway was not that welcoming for Germans, so we soon moved to the Stockholm area in Sweden. My dad is an entrepreneur and I soon started working for him during school breaks. After finishing school, I started working full time in the family business. I spent two years in Atlanta, Georgia, in the early ‘80s as a trainee and while there I met my future wife Andrea. We had three kids. I worked long days in the business, traveling a lot, trying to fulfill expectations and responsibilities. I gradually became more and more weary and almost subconsciously I was dreaming about doing something more artistic. A lot more can be said about this process, but in 2004 I resigned as president of the company and set out to become an artist.

KR: How did you get started in the arts?
GS: In my late teens my dad encouraged me to use his nice camera to develop my seeing and communication skills. I started taking more artistic photos and learned darkroom work. I really enjoyed it and found that I had a fairly good eye. While growing up we did not go to museums or galleries much, but my mom painted some and her grandfather had been a fairly well-known painter in Germany (who once painted a portrait of the Kaiser), so I guess there was some artistic influence anyway. When I decided to quit working in the family business, I wanted to do more art and I had to find my way.

KR: It looks like you spend time between the US and Sweden. Can you share if or how that travel has been impacted by current events?
GS: My wife, Andrea, came from the USA to Sweden and after the kids grew up and moved out, we needed a change and started looking for a place to spend some time here in the USA. We eventually found Santa Fe and immediately felt at home. I am a permanent resident, currently applying for naturalization, and we spend most of our time in the USA. We normally travel to Sweden in the early spring to be partof a large studio tour and then we always spend the summers in Sweden. In the current pandemic, we have had to change these plans. We are staying in Santa Fe and hopefully we will be able to go back to Sweden in the not-too-distant future to see our children and my parents. Everything is so uncertain now.

KR: Your paintings often feature very classically posed people that give them an almost historical feel. Do you typically work from old or new photographs, from life, memory or a hybrid?
GS: I normally work from photos, more or less. I like to alter the photo images to add something that will create questions, inspire people to make up their own stories. I like to say that I am a storyteller without telling the story. I always look for old photos of people I do not know and when I find a photo that inspires my imagination I can go to work. I also use my own photos. I do not like to use photos of ”famous” people or photos where the ownership rights can be an issue. When I paint landscapes I mostly make them up; maybe I will use a photo to just get a color or a cloud or some other detail right.

KR: How do you choose a subject for a piece?
GS: As I said above, the subject has to speak to me. It is hard to define what gets me inspired. Maybe I have had an idea for a long time and then I construct a piece with the help of one or several photos.

KR: It seems most of your work is on plywood. Can you tell us when/why you started working on wood and what has kept you coming back to it?
GS: When I began trying to find my way into the art world, I started almost from scratch and I had to teach myself a lot of things. I remember studying paintings - how the background was painted, colors chosen, materials used. Once I visited an exhibition and saw large works by Swedish painter Rolf Hansson, who had painted on some kind of board. I went home and found a large plywood sheet in my shed and that is how it started. I soon found that I could paint on untreated plywood and let the grain be a random part of my work and from then on I was hooked. I gave a really nice, large roll of canvas to an artist friend.

KR: Many of your pieces seem to juxtapose landscape and portrait. Do you typically start with one or the other?
GS: From a painterly process point of view, I start with the landscape, the background. But before I start painting I have sketched the piece and have a good plan. I will do a lot of the sketching with Photoshop and InDesign. Then I will print it and maybe paint on it or draw in ideas and work from there.

KR: Your laser cut steel sculptures and the shadows they cast are sort of two pieces of art in one. What sparked the idea to start creating these? I read that you have some background in photography. Did that experience with light and shadow play into your design?
GS: When I worked in the family business I learned to do graphic design, photographed our machines for marketing purposes and learned to work with Photoshop. These tools have been fantastic in my work. The steel pieces came about in a process where one thing leads to another. I like to describe it as hiking - you come around a bend and you see a hill and get curious about how it looks beyond that hill. So you move on. At that hill you see something else and you keep moving on - and you will never know what it will lead to. I worked on a photo in Photoshop and applied some cutout filters; then, I took that image into InDesign and played with it and soon came up with the idea of doing a large steel cutout. I made the first test with a full 8’x 4’ plywood sheet; I created a mock-up with a jigsaw. I placed it outside my studio and was blown away by how the landscape and the light interacted with the piece. Next I wanted
to make the real steel piece, starting with some smaller pieces. I came home from the laser cutting factory with my new pieces, had a cup of coffee and played with ideas about how to use them. I drilled two holes at the top of one piece, applied some steel wire, hung it from the ceiling, adjusted a spotlight…BOOM! The shadow on the wall was a surprise that I had not planned. But if I had not constantly been on the move to experiment, I would never have found it. So was it just luck or a result of my process?

KR: How do you push yourself forward to find new creativity?
GS: I think I have partly answered this above. Even if I am not actively painting in the studio, I am almost always thinking about ideas and looking for new projects. I do not normally take huge leaps; I try to move ahead in small steps that are based on my core artistic activity. So, when I am working, I like to surprise myself with the thought, ”I have never done it quite like this before.” As I am not trained and educated as an artist, I very often have to start from what seems to be scratch. How do I paint skin color? I do not have a patented method, so I experiment…over and over.

KR: Experimenting with as many different formats and techniques as you do, I am guessing maybe you
have encountered some failed attempts along the way. Can you tell us about an idea you had that did
not work out the way you expected?
GS: Fear of failure is always there, but I think it is especially important to take that risk. Often when I start on a painting I feel like ”this time it is going to suck.” One nice thing about painting in oil is you can add layers and work on mistakes. This normally creates depth and character and sometimes I have to remind myself to move on and add a layer and keep pushing beyond the ”mistakes.” I am currently working on a relatively large painting that I was looking forward to working on, but I lost the ”fun” and had to take a break. I will soon start on another layer and deep down I am sure it will eventually work out. I have tried to sketch landscapes to be used for steel laser cut pieces, but until now it has not worked out. Is that a failure or am I just not done yet?

KR: What would you consider to be one of your best successes as an artist and why?
GS: I think my first large laser cut piece is one of the best I have done. But in terms of success I am maybe most excited when children are intrigued by my art. I even had a blind man visiting me in the studio once during a studio tour. The place was packed with people, but I had him grab my elbow and then I ”showed” him my art. I let him touch my work and he could ”see” with his sensitive fingers and it was an amazing experience for both of us.

KR: How many hours a week do you devote to your art? What are some of your work habits that you
think are an asset?
GS: A few years ago I started taking riding lessons from a very experienced and ambitious reining trainer. I soon wanted to have my own horse. I now own an awesome reining horse and I ride 4-6 times a week. Every time I learn something new. So I normally go to the barn to ride and then I come home to work. It is a perfect balance and I am convinced it helps me in my artistic work. I will paint maybe 4-5 hours and then do other studio work. I like to keep my studio in order; I need order around me to be able to create. I do not work all the time, night and day. I need to be fairly rested to paint as it takes so much concentration. When it comes to assets in my work, I think my over 20 years in the business world taught me a lot about work discipline, presenting your ”product,” meeting with customers/clients and very much more. My years in the cable industry is my ”diploma,” so to speak.
​
KR: What motivates you to keep creating? What do you hope viewers experience when they engage
with your work?
GS: If I would have to choose between riding and painting, I would sacrifice my beloved horse without hesitation. Even if I get weary at times, creating art is my passion. When I get tired or weary, I try to inspire myself, maybe by leafing through a book about one of the masters, or I go to a museum or gallery and that will most likely restore my desire to create. Sometimes I ask myself about the meaning of it all, why make art when there are so many dire needs in the world? Then I again think of children and young people, how important it is to connect the two brain halves, inspire imagination and creativity. Older people need that stimulation as well. You do not have to be an artist to have imagination and creativity – it is equally important for a designer, a technician, an architect, a doctor, a scientist, etc. I want people to be inspired by my work, even to the point where they might start painting or creating on their own.

KR: What do you find to be the most challenging aspect of being a painter?
GS: I guess the greatest challenge for any artist is to be able to make a living while doing what you are passionate about, having the freedom to work on your own ideas. In that process I think it is important to find out what success is to YOU. I believe I have to start with ME, to do what I love and make sure I am pleased and happy with my work. Only then I can give something of value to others. If you lose that focus, maybe because you are hungry, it is probably easy to lose your ”core business.” When I started out trying to become an artist, people would say ”well, you can afford it.” But it was an immense struggle, not least to break free from what I thought (imagined) other people thought about what I was doing – my family, my parents, my former colleagues and customers. It took years before I actually felt I was WORKING when I was painting. But over the years I have had countless people tell me I made the right choice and that is a great reward…and probably success.

KR: Who are some of your art influences and mentors?
GS: I do not think I have ever had a mentor. In the early stages of finding a way to paint, I was inspired by Andy Warhol’s handling of colors and I was inspired by how Edvard Munch painted. I have gotten so much inspiration from seeing work by known and unknown artists, and also to read about their lives and their work. I take bits and pieces from here and there and let that influence and inspire me.

KR: What advice would you give to aspiring artists?
GS: That is maybe the hardest question of all. It is not a good idea to try to become an artist because you do not want to have a ”normal” 9 to 5 job or because you want to call yourself an ARTIST and hang out with artists. To be an artist you have to have patience and perseverance and you have to be able to spend a lot of time alone. I read a lot about artists; I like to visit their studios. I do question whether I am in a position to hand out advice. For me, maybe I was trying not to burn out, I was desperate in a way…I had to do it.