Consciousness and the other: Fragmentation, unselfing, and a contemporary role for the modernist collage interview

ABSTRACT

This article utilizes the form of a creative writer’s craft interview – a popular example is The Paris Review’s “Art of Fiction” series – to explore the interview as a tool in creative writing practice. The mock interview – the author is both interviewee and interlocutor – allows the author to interrogate how interviewing functions as a means of exploring identity and so reorients them to another subject’s pain and experience. In addition, the author examines Muriel Rukeyser’s use of collaged fragments of interviews in her The Book of the Dead and includes a discussion of the poet Philip Metres’s writings on documentary poetics as a means of thinking through new ways for them – and any creative writer – to incorporate the interview as a tool. The article ends with the importance of the collage-interview, in the age of ChatGPT, for preserving language complexity and of representing experiences beyond the author’s imagination and experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Political poetry
• Muriel Rukeyser
• The Book of the Dead
• unselfing
• literary interview
• documentary modernism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hasanthika Sirisena

Hasanthika Sirisena in associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Susquehanna University and a faculty member in the MFA Writing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Their creative and academic work focuses on immigration, queerness, disability, and the ways that writers, particularly marginalized writers, innovate artistic forms for aesthetic, and political, purposes. Their most recent book Dark Tourist: Essays (Mad Creek Books/The Ohio University Press, 2021) was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and they were recently awarded a Civitella Ranieri Writing Fellowship for their next project.