[p. 2 of 2]

[Shields continues]... were crucial influences on me about a decade ago. I'd written three books—three works of fiction—two novels and a book of linked stories—and I was working on my fourth book, Remote, and I couldn't get it to become a novel. I wasn't interested in that mechanism. And these works of art mentioned above were crucial catalysts to push me into this mode. For the last ten years or so—ever since Remote—I've been in love with art again, whereas in the late eighties and early nineties, I was trying to love traditional fiction and was bored beyond belief.

Obviously, regarding reality hunger, one wants to put "reality" in quotation marks and understand that I or other writers interested in this mode aren't somehow uniquely accessing the real. Instead, I think, and this is crucial, the emphasis is not on "character" and "plot" but theme and idea. The kind of work I'm interested in is above an investigation of something rather than pure story. In this regard, this quotation from John D'Agata seems to me crucial:

The poem and the essay are more intimately related than any two genres, because they're both ways of pursuing problems, or maybe trying to solve problems. Maybe the works succeed, maybe they fail, but at least what they both do is clarify the problem at hand. They're both journeys. They're both pursuits of knowledge. One could say that fiction, metaphorically, is a pursuit of knowledge, but ultimately it's a form of entertainment. I think, at least, essays and poetry are more directly and more urgently about figuring something out about the world. Fiction may do that, too, but not... the fiction I've read.

LRS: My experience was that while working with this form that's so deeply established, its conventions (scene-making, plotting, sustaining dramatic tension) began to impede discovery, and it's this self-discovery (this admission of truth!) that has become such a dangerous part of my own writing. I have become interested in writing some of the stuff that goes through my head but rarely makes it out of my mouth. I'm trying to write about distractedness, what (and why and how) it's like to be trapped inside yourself, inside thoughts, daydreams, neuroses, memories, fantasies, and so forth, as the world (marriage, family, job) goes by. The writer Susan Neville once said that literature begins where our illusions end.

The prose in your last four books, all nonfiction, feels deliciously dangerous because of a confessional quality, a willingness to enter places that literature has ignored (saying the unsayable) and to reveal self at all costs while also making a connection to the culture that encourages such behavior. An example that comes to mind: in Black Planet, there's that wonderful passage that describes you imagining yourself as Gary Payton while making love to your wife. Male fantasy seems like a territory largely unexplored in literature (except of course erotica or pornography). That moment feels dangerous to me. There are moments similar to that in Enough About You. They remind me of John Cheever's journal entry in which he dreams himself on a postage stamp. Can you talk further about this "dangerous" quality?

Shields: I'm glad you find some of the work in my last few books risky.

Funny that you mention that moment in Black Planet. I can't count the number of times someone has come up to me and said how strange they found that moment or how many times reviewers mentioned it, usually critically. Clearly, it punches people's buttons in a way they find discomfiting, which, surely, surely, must be the point of art.

Oscar Wilde: "The books that the world calls immoral are those books that show the world its own shame."—pretty much my mantra.

And yet, of course, I'm not interested in my own consciousness per se, my own thoughts per se. I'm interested, I hope, in what Yeats calls "mirror turn lamp"—self-investigation that goes so deep that it turns primitive, mythic, "universal," and thus one's own self-investigation becomes investigation of some larger cultural/human tendency, trait, characteristic.

I like, too, what you say about impeding discovery and the way in which journal/diary work can have the effect of freeing one up to enter into more risky, dangerous terrain. Why? Because in such works—Cioran, Cheever, Pessoa, Nietzsche, Leonard Michaels's Shuffle, David Markson, et al.—the momentum of narrative is absent. The heavy-breathing plot line is vacated and in its place there must be something else to replace that momentum and that becomes, perforce, cultural dread, psychic revelation. What could be more exciting?

LRS: It seems that since Remote (published 10 years ago!), you've been turning mirror to lamp, investigating the nature of self, our desires, our cultural influences and inclinations, our need to be known by others. In a way, Remote feels way ahead of its time, like it will (and should) continue to find new readers who are interested in this particular subversion of form in which plot, like an erected scaffolding, is torn down, and what stands in place is the thing itself.

I know we've both been interested in short prose forms (the prose poem, the short-short story). I am especially drawn to two pieces from Remote that stand so beautifully on their own: "Why we live at the movies" (along with the old snapshot of a child, presumably you, dressed in cowboy costume) and the section that follows, titled, "Desire," a short meditation on your desire for women who wear glasses. The former operates through image and metaphor while the latter is driven more by a sort of lyrical self-reflection. For me, short prose forms are so exciting because they seem to suit this search for self while at the same time placing the writer in the position of actually shaping and/or inventing the form itself. (Letters to Wendy's by Joe Wenderoth comes to mind too). Can you talk about your sense of short prose forms and this desire for self-investigation? Why is the prose poem so conducive to self-reflection?

Shields: Peter Johnson, who's a prose-poet and editor, talks well about the way in which the prose-poem form is by its very definition a genre-blurrer. Divided self: divided work. In the search for self, or some semblance of self, it's good to have an open-ended form that can go absolutely anywhere—into reflection, into fancy, into reportage, into stand-up comedy, into any possible form that will deepen the investigation, which is all I care about. Ninety-nine percent of novels, certainly all traditional novels, are not committed to investigation; they're only minimally, marginally about investigation; the investigation comes almost as exception, as icing.

I was thinking about this recently in regards to my daughter's soccer game. The coach's daughter struck me as unusually beautiful, though not in an exactly traditional way. She's only around 12 or 13, but it occurred to me—maybe a little perversely—what an interesting book it would be to be the father of this girl and just constantly meditate on what it would be like to be that beautiful, how the world comes to a person like that, how that beauty affects the world; I would love to write that book. Whereas the more conventional approach would be you'd create a novel in which there's a father, a girl, and all sorts of other characters, and only slightly does the book get at beauty. Maybe such a book would even be called On Beauty, but it would yield way too many of its reins to narrative development—to what D'Agata calls entertainment—and that's simply not serious writing, whereas, say, Letters to Wendy's yields nada to narrative and instead is on every page, in every sentence, exploring the nexus of American appetite, desire, voluptuousness, vanity, etc.—the book might look inchoate, but it couldn't be more focused.

I'm not hugely interested in short forms except as building blocks, I must admit, of larger forms—that I'm hugely interested in. Prose poem per se, short form per se, I definitely love, but I especially love what happens when the mini-pieces are building a Watts Tower.

A final thought regarding shortness—I love how it cuts to the chase, eliminates all dross. The very brevity says, "Get rid of contrivance, character development, scene setting, tedious dialogue,"—give me, as in Robert Hass's Human Wishes, the core concerns, the guts of the thing that thrills and pushes the writer to cut to bone.