Five Questions with Matthew Mahaney

Kirby Johnson: First I must mention how strikingly beautiful Your Attraction to Sharp Machines is. The book feels like a diary with its padded hardback cover and the inserts inside. What was it like to work with BatCat Press to determine the form this novella would ultimately take, and did you have an idea of how you wanted to present this story before hand?

Matthew Mahaney: Thanks. I remember asking Deanna, the BatCat editor, how much input I’d have, soon after she told me they’d chosen Sharp Machines from their open reading period. She said no author had ever asked to be involved before, which shocked me, but that she was willing to let me submit a short list of things I hated & loved before they began designing. She also kept me up to date with regular emails and pictures, which I appreciated. I’m thrilled with the final product. I always pictured this book being like a drawer crammed with papers that the reader happened to pull open at an estate sale or something. I wanted readers to have a feeling of eavesdropping, of sifting through a pile of documents in their lap, which obviously could never have happened with a standard paperback.

KJ: We at NANO Fiction love stories that are under 300 words and the sections of Sharp Machines, whether they be in line or prose form, move quickly — yet there is a certain delicateness about the language, especially in the first two sections. What advice do you have for people writing narrative in a more lyric form, or in different voices throughout their work? Are there any rules that you follow?

MM: I was labeled a short-poem writer by my friends and classmates soon after I started my MFA at Alabama. I’m an unreasonably impatient reader, and as a result I tend to end poems at what might be most other writers’ midpoint. I guess my only advice would be not to worry too much about being influenced by what you’re reading. I struggled with this for a while, but gradually realized that the longer I stay with a project the further and further my writing gets from the writing that inspired them. I never would have written the letters to Elizabeth if I hadn’t been reading The To Sound by Eric Baus, and ditto Claire Hero’s Sing, Mongrel for the diary entries. The only rule I have is to try not to be boring.

KJ: Your new book is broken into three sections with each section taking on a new speaker. What was it like to structure the book? Did you have a clear idea of how each section needed to be written or did the sections come from more separate beginnings?

MM: I wrote each section separately, in different workshops at Alabama. It started with the Elizabeth letters, before I knew I was writing a book at all. At one point the book was going to consist of various things written by Jonah Bell. I had written about twenty or so letters to Elizabeth, and I was beginning to have the feeling that I both couldn’t & didn’t want to write an entire book of them. A teacher suggested I think about what Jonah might do and write when he’s not writing these letters, but I ended up being more interested in Elizabeth. Knowing how Jonah viewed and connected with her made me think about the very different ways other people who interacted with Elizabeth might see her. The diary entries came next, and then I found an old article on multiple personalities that led to the second section, which rounded out the book and made it feel more complete. As for organization, I originally had all of the poems mixed together, with no section breaks. I was trying to mimic that drawer idea I mentioned earlier, but it felt sloppy and incomplete. Once I decided to try putting the poems into sections, an obvious strategy I’d been resisting for that very reason, the book finally felt finished.

KJ: How long do you typically work on a piece of flash fiction (or a poem), and when do you know your work is ready for public consumption?

MM: I write in small bursts, generally while multi-tasking with the internet, tv, music, and/or video games. I also revise as I write, often tweaking the first sentence for half an hour or more before I move on to the second. This is also another reason everything I write tends to be short. Ninety-nine percent of my writing is also part of a project. There are very few solo poems saved on my computer. As for publishing, I usually wait until I have at least five or so related poems from an ongoing project, poems that can work on their own in a journal, but that are also clearly part of something larger.

KJ: What’s next for Matthew Mahaney? What are you working on now?

MM: I recently started sending out my second book, which is also a novella, this one in linked prose poems, though it’s different from Machines in several ways. I’m also about sixty pages into a nonfiction book about my blood phobia, though I’m on a bit of an extended break right now. Most recently, I’ve been writing some new poems that feel like they may be answering the “What else would Jonah Bell write?” question I decided not to answer the first time it came up, so we’ll see where that leads.