Interview: Author Jensen Beach
We've set up these arbitrary rungs of value; literature, languages, the humanities, occupy the lowest.
This interview was conducted through email by Brian Allen Carr, for NAILED.
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Back when Dark Sky Books was still alive, I was fortunate to get to work with Jensen Beach on his debut collection For Out of the Heart Proceed. I edited it, so consider me biased, but it’s a gem of a book filled with tender tales of family complications and personal uncertainties. It was the last book we put out. We went out with a bang.
Because beautiful things always come back to life eventually, the good people at Dzanc Books have re-released this splendid text.
I took the opportunity to catch up with Jensen—to talk about things.
NAILED MAGAZINE: What’s the best book you’ve read since the original release, and was it so good that FOOTHP would’ve been different if you’d read it before release number one?
JENSEN BEACH: The best thing I read was a novel I taught last semester. Blackwater by Kerstin Ekman. It’s a crime novel from the early 90s, and it’s amazing–structurally innovative, odd and evocative setting, strange plot. It works in ways that books don’t often work (vague, I know), and it’s dense and difficult. The perspective isn’t really tied to any one character and this isn’t marked by the novel’s arrangement. It’s sentence to sentence. It just jumps from head to head of any of the characters and back out to an authorial point of view. It’s really great and jarring. And it’s nothing like my book, so I don’t know that it would have changed FOOTHP in any way other than the way every great book influences and instructs.
NAILED: Do you listen to music when you write?
BEACH: I don’t. This is probably sacrilege to lots of people, but I’m not a big music guy to start with. Don’t get me wrong. I like plenty of music and listen to it at other times, but I’ve never been able to listen to music when I write; I need quiet. One of my least favorite qualities about myself: sometimes when I’m in the car, even driving long distances, I’ll look at my iTunes library on my phone and think, “I’d kind of rather just listen to NPR.” I’m boring.
NAILED: What’s the weirdest question you’ve ever been asked in a post-MFA job interview?
BEACH: The ones I always think are weird are when a search committee pretends to be students for the purposes of a teaching demonstration, especially if that pretending includes behavior that the member of the committee thinks is representative of “difficult” student behavior–not participating, etc.
NAILED: What’s the biggest problem with the state of literature?
BEACH: The biggest problem, I think, is the lack of value we place on literature. Plenty of people (everyone reading this, I’d guess) value books and journals, poems, stories, essays, all of it; but I think out in the world this value is lower than it should be. I encounter this working in academia too. We’ve set up these arbitrary rungs of value; literature, languages, the humanities, occupy the lowest. Maybe everyone feels like that concerning whatever they’re most invested in.
NAILED: What’s the best thing about the state of literature?
BEACH: The best thing is the people working hard to write, edit, publish promote the great stuff out there. The small presses putting out books that wouldn’t otherwise have a chance, the literary journals publishing new and challenging stories and poems and essays, and the shared excitement of being a part of that. Also, the money.
JENSEN BEACH received his MFA from the Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, as well as degrees from Stockholm University. He is the author of a collection of short stories called For Out of the Heart Proceed (Dark Sky Books, 2012), and his stories and reviews have appeared in American Short Fiction, Best of the Web, Fifty-Two Stories, Kenyon Review Online, The Lifted Brow, Ninth Letter, Sou’wester, and Witness, among other publications. He has received scholarships from the Napa Valley and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences. Currently, he helps edit Hobart, teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he lives with his family. He can be reached at his official website: here.
Brian Allen Carr is a writer and teacher who lives with his wife and daughter near the Texas/Mexico border. His most recent novella, Edie & the Low-Hung Hands, was released on Small Doggies Press in January of 2013.