The OxMag Interview

By BRENNA YORK
The roster for OxMag’s final reading of the school year (and I’m probably not supposed to say this) features writers and poets I am most excited about right now. Bios not provided. You will be able to snag whiffs of their unsettling grandeur on April 16th at 7pm in Miami University’s Shriver Bookstore.
Do you dream?
ANTHONY RAMSTETTER
I don’t really dream. I used to, very often. But now I fade to blackness every time. I have a good bed, so I don’t often dream.
ELIZABETH MIKESCH
This week’s dreams:
-ex-lover hugging me overly hard so I could feel in my body, asleep, how compact his body was, in a time crunch while he is annoyed at how long I take to order soup or salad and a cheddar roll
-ex-lover’s new lover breaking into the house begging to sleep with the both of use say no, she becomes very deeply tan and her tan is her embarrassment from a whole-room glow of purple tanning bed light
-everyone tells me my mother is dead and I’m and orphan… “an ORPHAN”, and I ask them to please not say it with such emphasis, as it has just happened.
ZAN DE PARRY
Parties were only bad in like the fifties because either your neighbor was trying to get your wife or sell you something or buca-buca religious. Now they always suck! I didn’t dream last night because I had a lot of bell pepper cocktail from a keg party. I’m excited for us friends at a best party on a big scale.
BRET NYE
Most likely, but I don’t remember them.
How come you didn’t become an inventor?
ANTHONY RAMSTETTER
I’ve invented poems. I create words. Poetry is the best way to invent. Much better than fiction. No one likes fiction writers, anyway.
ELIZABETH MIKESCH
I didn’t become an inventor because I think you have to be electrically smart to pull this sort of shit off. It takes delusion and belief. I’m not smart at all. I have good instincts. I don’t think instincts are inventive. They’re like leftovers.
ZAN DE PARRY
Like a baby, like a baby doesn’t know his arms are his until they are, his brain invents the relationship between itself and the arms, not the arms themselves but the relationship, the realizing. I invent hatred every day. And stress. We invent it for ourselves, not to say it’s immaterial. It’s in the too much that all of us should be eating should we be cut wide open.
BRET NYE
I’d rather help fix the shit that people invented badly.
Would you ever marry one of your fans?
ANTHONY RAMSTETTER
One of my fans? I don’t know. Probably [Alex] Friedman. I sent him a postcard and he hasn’t sent anything back. He has to work for it.
ELIZABETH MIKESCH
If I married one of my fans, I would feel very put out by the attention they were giving me. Compliments make me feel really fat.
ZAN DE PARRY
I hope I’m on that path. But not a fan of mine. A fan of my hunka.
BRET NYE
Yes; in fact, I plan to.
What are you reading right now?
ANTHONY RAMSTETTER
I’ve been reading the Norton Anthology of Postmodern Poetry… Dana Ward, Bruno Latour. Plus lots of disability studies.
ELIZABETH MIKESCH
I am reading May-Lan Tan. She my one and only. I don’t want to tell you what she’s like because I want you to read her by yourself, and I want you to know what I mean. I don’t ever want to talk about it with you. I want to know you read it. Fuck everyone who ever wrote anything before she did.
ZAN DE PARRY
I got M Sarki’s Shorter Prose in the mail and it’s signed! Graham Foust’s Anacreon in Heaven and Other Poems, always Loren Goodman’s Famous Americans, always always always Patchen, and Joe Wenderoth is buck.
BRET NYE
A Fan’s Notes by Frederick Exley, The King in Yellow by Robert Chambers, and tons of literary criticism about haunted houses and ghosts.
Who would be your literary dream date?
ANTHONY RAMSTETTER
I would say Gertrude Stein. In Paris.
ELIZABETH MIKESCH
It would be so hard to come up with what to say to a literary date. Writers are so critical and sharp. They’re thinking about what you said and picking it apart.
I think I’d just have to stare at them from across the table and practice blinking. I faint for Diane Williams, Danielle Dutton, and Noy Holland. I love May-Lan Tan. I think I’d want to be the waitress graciously bringing them the wine they need to be geniuses, and that role would better suit. Keep me in the apron around these babes.
ZAN DE PARRY
I would like to talk to Patchen about putting himself on the line for money to his friends. His letters ask.
BRET NYE
Probably Flannery O’Connor: I’ve always wondered what it would be like to go on a date with God. Or maybe F. Scott Fitzgerald, since I’d sell my soul to write like him. I’d settle for a few pointers over dessert.