Schuyler Vanderveen
Schuyler Vanderveen is a writer from Laguna Beach California. He lives in Los Angeles and writes flash fiction, prose poetry, and short stories. In May he will complete his M.A. in English Literature at Loyola Marymount University and hopefully will get to surf some more after that.
Entrevista / Interview
What was your first impulse to write?
Oh man, what a question. Like ever? I think everyone who really gets hooked on reading - who gets bound by the spell of a story - has a little secret desire to make something like that of their own. In third grade, I wrote a little book based on the Dragon Ball Z cartoons, but as I read more I think I began to think more and more "oh writing is something done by these dead, white male geniuses" and I basically stopped admitting that I had my own desire or impulse to write. Somehow, a college professor intuited I had this latent desire and just flat out told me: "I think you want to be a writer." It sort of felt like a weight dropped off of my chest and I knew she had ferreted something out that I wanted but was too afraid to admit to myself. I read some books on writing fiction and I don't know if I still think of it like a career. sort of think of it like tennis now: there was never a pro-career in my future, but I still love playing and it's worthwhile for me to do. It makes it a lot less daunting to think that I can tool around on little projects and just write a speech for an event, a poem for my girlfriend, a short story just to entertain a friend, and that writing doesn't have to be this talisman that will take one to fame or fortune.
What is your chosen style of literature and why have you chosen it?
I'm still a young writer and so I'm aping other people's styles all the time while I find mine. Everything in the portfolio is really different and drawn from different people I like reading. The chicken sexer story is definitely inspired by Joyce's more technical passages and some of the old military thrillers/genre fiction I would read that fetishized military technology. I think industrialized agriculture is fascinating and awful: operating at scale depends on really clean, organized, efficient - I'd even say graceful - technical workers and equipment and spaces. Chick sexing is especially clean (warehousing mature chickens is not) but what' going on is essentially the destruction and processing of living feeling things - and that's a dirty, bloody, nasty business. So, I think the stylistic conceit I'm foregrounding is this high contrast. Other stuff I do is very colloquial, first person.
How do your studies inform what you write?
I don't know if my studies inform what I write as much as what I read for pleasure does. I have a couple popular contemporary authors I like, George Saunders, Sally Rooney, Kristen Roupenian, Ta Nehisi Coates, and others. I try to read or listen to the fiction in The New Yorker every month as well so that I have an idea of how a story "feels." I also listen to a lot of interviews with writers and something I've taken away is that you just can't over intend this stuff - when you do it shows; it's a lot more intuitive than high school English close readings would like you to believe. Like, right after I read Normal People, I started one of the best stories I've written just because I intuitively absorbed Rooney's language and found it useful to fictionalize some romantic troubles I was having in my own life. I will say that my studies in rhetoric sexual literacy help me remember that my stories are acts of public communication and attune me when I'm navigating something sensitive in public discussion. This awareness shapes which narrative events I include and how characters think about them. There's another story in the portfolio about a girl who finds herself being watched by a man at a traffic light. I've been told by my women friends that I did a really good job with that one - that my descriptions of the character's experiences of being gazed at, her interpretation of the gaze, and the conscious effort it takes to ignore it, were accurate. I think that's because it was informed by feminist readings about the male gaze, and conversations I've had with female friends and girlfriends about similar experiences. So, my studies maybe inform how I represent characters and experiences on an ethical level insofar as it helps me imagine when a reader might be thinking, "oh he's on point with this," or "something he's doing seems off - I think he's getting this issue wrong" as I write. I think having some training in rhetoric as well as sexuality and gender studies helps me remain sensitive especially there.
In what way do you relate to the name of the magazine, Interespacios?
I think I relate to this name insofar as I hope the magazine can bring my writing into contact with someone different than myself, culturally or otherwise. I was raised in a pretty white, homogenous beach town in Southern California. Yes, the history of California is multi-cultural. The heteroglossia of place and town names communities point to that multi-cultural history, as do the demographics of the state - but all of that sort of got subsumed by the white, Anglo immediacy of my education and social world. Any intercultural contact I've had I've had to go out of that space and intentionally find for myself by seeking out people who are different than me. I hope contributing to this magazine can be a way of doing that and I'm looking forward to reading what other people submit.
Instructions for Reading this Prose Poem
The first step to reading this poem is to stop being a reader. Instead, pretend you are a highly trained chicken sexer. Allow me to help. First, slip into your clean, white sorting smock. Use your fingers to dilate the elastic band of your hairnet and place it on your head, allowing the band to close around your skull. Let the blue, sanitary rubber gloves snap against your wrists after you’ve pulled them over your fingers. Even now, you are more like one of those critical workers who separates the freshly hatched chicks from the cockerels. The former will eventually become valuable laying hens. The latter are redundant and therefore worthless. Finally, make sure your surgical mask fits snugly over your nose and mouth. We would not want to contaminate the chicks, or worse, for the chicks to contaminate us. Pick one, this one, up – swiftly, yet delicately. Hold it close to your eyes under the light of a bright, fluorescent lamp. Turn it over so that it is upside down. Ignore the small cheeps coming from its open beak and the kicking legs, slender and delicate as twigs. Spread the yellow down on its backside, which is soft even through your gloves, until you see the little donut of flesh the size of a pinprick – the cloaca. Do not try and create a system by which you can tell a chick’s cloaca from a cockerel’s. You are doing, with upwards of ninety-five percent accuracy, what no sorting machine is able to do, and so fast that any observer, in an eyeblink, would miss the moment you made your decision and sorted. This is why you are paid ninety thousand dollars per year to look at the genitalia of newly hatched chickens. If this poem is a chick, quickly, yet delicately, set it back down on the conveyer belt. The chick may yet die in transit to the next incubator, or it may grow into the laying hen we all hope it will be. What matters is that we have determined that this is one of the poems which may be. If, on the other hand, it is a cockerel, if it is redundant and must be destroyed, fling it into the shredder at your right. You can do this as carefully, or carelessly as you like – the poem will be macerated at high speed regardless. But do it quickly, even if the poem manages to get one good, upside down look into your eyes.
Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries
My house is haunted. No I’m not kidding you. One night, right on the edge of sleep, I hear what is unmistakably a kid breathing right in my ear. And you know of course I shot right up, because that’s pretty freaky. Next thing I know my framed Grateful Dead poster is knocked clean off the wall and my tax paperwork flies up off my desk into the air. Then, I heard what sounded like a little boy screaming in the distance, like it was being carried over on the wind, you know? So anyways then that stopped and it went silent, like dead silent. I was spooked. My first thought was how the heck am I gonna sell the house? I only just moved in. But then I thought, what the heck Jer, really? You’re gonna let a kid, and a dead kid at that, boss you around in your own home? So whatever, I figure ignore the little guy. I bought earplugs so he couldn’t whisper in my ear anymore, bolted everything to the floor, and locked all my loose papers, keys, you name it, up in cabinets so he couldn’t get in. Well the earplugs worked, but he figured out the locks somehow – I tell ya, it looked like a bomb went off in my home office. So I tell myself,
“Okay Jerry, get creative. How do you make this work for you?”
So I call up Ghost Hunters, you know, that show where those fellas look for ghosts in abandoned hospitals and houses then record the wind and say they found one? Yeah, well of course when they come to the house the kid is nowhere to be found. So I tell em,
“Wait, just wait, let me see if I can coax him out.”
I run to the store and start putting out toys. You know, stuffed animals, a Ouija board, comic books. He doesn’t go for any of it – so I put down some real money and get a one speed bike. These guys are packing up getting ready to leave when the pedals start to turn – and get this, for the first time, they get footage of a real ghost riding through the house. That goes to air and the world goes absolutely nuts. The scientific community comes out and starts paying me to let them do some work in the house, I’m on talk shows, you name it. So I take the money and go to Mackinac Island for the weekend while these poindexters try and get the kid to come out. Except they can’t always get the kid to come out. They need me there to make sure you know, that they can get the best results possible. But I’m thinking shucks we can’t keep spending the money on bikes and what have you. So I do a little research. Turns out some guy was a real piece work, did a little too much drinkin’. His wife leaves him in The Depression, and he goes to work on the kid she dumped on him. Eventually he ends up strangling the kid before offing himself– one of those deals. I don’t have much of a stomach for that true crime stuff, but I find the guy’s mugshot and a list of everything in the house the police seized from the crime scene. Let me tell you, I’m a real ghost whisperer now. Whenever there’s some new research being done, I just put up Daddy’s photo on the wall, and “Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries” on the record player. When Rudy Vallee sings:
The sweet things in life, to you were just loaned
So how can you lose what you've never owned?
I’m telling you books go flying off the shelves the bike gets kicked around, you name it. You bet ya he chooses to ride the bike more now when the science types come through.
But yeah it’s still annoying sometimes. One night, I have the boys over for Poker, and the kid freaks when I have guys over, ‘cause you know, and starts smashing plates in the kitchen, really ruins the night when I’m ahead. So, that night I mean business. After everyone leaves I put on ol’ Rudy Vallee, drag the bike into the living room, and take a hatchet to it. Just cut it to pieces, and I tell him:
“As long as you’re in my house, you play by my rules.” Haven’t had a problem since.
Song of My Appetite
One afternoon in the summer weather of September I came home from school a hungry child. My mother served me not a peanut butter and jelly, but fresh tomatoes sliced under a drizzle of olive oil, lightly peppered on cheese between two blocks of white bread. I took a bite then another. Soon a few drops of oil on the plate were all that was left of the sandwich. I licked the plate clean ten set it down again and called my mother for more. But she was not in the kitchen and could not here, so, a hungry child, I took a bite of the plate. Ceramic shards slid roughly down my throat. I was unharmed, so I took another bite, then another, each one sending course, crunching plate down my throat – an acquired taste. Having finished the plate, I climbed the countertop, took the rest of them down, and those too like a fragile stack of pancakes with syrup from the fridge. Then, the bowls, the coffee mugs, each one decorated with a little dog, a state name (Montana tasted best), and even one with Picasso’s boy with pipe. The silverware I had to swallow, but it wasn’t long before I moved on to furniture, chewing the L sectional one soft leather cushion at a time, the fabric of the ottoman ripping in my mouth like gamey pig, using my incisors and bicuspids to take chunks out of the credenza as if I were a giant termite. I swallowed the surround sound and gnawed at the big screen, choking down precious metals and fiber optic cables. After licking the den clean, I decided to try a whole room all at once and so ate mine, or rather mine and my brother’s, he still inside, tumbling down to stomach acid and our pricey electronics. The House, tan, modern, and angular with a deck that jutted out like the bow of a ship, groaned and cracked like splitting bones. I never discovered if my mother made it out. How do you devour a whale? In one bite with 3,000 gallons of water to wash it down and a coast guard escort. I drank the oceans dry and crunched continents with their teeming billions in the vice grip of my molars. Returning to plates, I tore into the Eurasian and sucked the molten mantle juices out from underneath like marrow. And I have continued on and on, inhaling galaxies and wolfing down nebulas with their sleeping broods of stars like Fenrir. Out here, beyond even the cold and black, I, the hungry boy Spinoza- like in my vastness and corpuscularity, may have eaten parts of myself. I have lost track, but if I eat myself, I eat myself.