We Who Are Now Published Authors: Becca Klaver.

My first book came out in 2009 on a very small press in San Francisco. Since its release, I’ve gone through so many questions in my head. Ultimately, the ones that stuck out were: Why did I even publish a book? Was it worth it? What difference does a single book even make with so many out there? How can a small press author like myself really hope to have any impact outside of this insular small press world?

I think these are questions worth approaching again and again.

I decided to ask some of these questions to some other first-time authors. Today, I’ve invited Becca Klaver, author of Kore Press’ L.A. Liminal, to join the discussion.

Becca Klaver
LA Liminal
Kore Press, March 2010
http://www.powells.com/biblio/17-9781888553376-0

I prompted the discussion with this:

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I like Milan Kundera a lot. I also like how old-fashioned his critical writings are, especially in reference to “the novel” and such.

I pulled a few quotes from some of his essays. Pretend you are answering the same question as Kundera in a really ugly auditorium at a really silly university round-table.

“…the author with his own considerations must disappear so as not to disturb the reader…”
How did you approach this in your book? Did you hide yourself and your considerations? Even if you yourself are in your book, is it possible to disappear and not disturb the reader?

BK: I don’t want to disappear. “I” does not want to disappear. “I” am there with or without a pronoun so “I” may as well be there as a pronoun. “I” is another, sure, but “I” is still the other that says stuff inside my brain.

I noticed that on the back of my copy of Diane di Prima’s Memoirs of a Beatnik, the category to file under (besides “Erotica”) is “Ficto-Biography.” If “Ficto-Biography” were a shelf at Barnes & Noble like I think “Erotica” is, I would want LA Liminal to be on it. I would also want James Frey to be on it because c’mon OprahWorld, do you really think narrative truth is gonna save you or even exists at all?

“A character is not a simulation of a living being. It is an imaginary being. An experimental self.”
This somehow appeals to me. I tend to think that it’s pompous to assume as a writer I could ever fully grasp a character that is not me, and Kundera’s explanation satisfies my suspicions. What do you think?

BK: What I have been trying to figure out is how to get more and more of “my” “selves” on the page. To not filter out the “non-literary” parts of my external and internal lives. Because you think that the self that goes into a poem has to be a sort of poemy self, but it doesn’t. For a poet (vs. a fiction writer), the ways of building an imaginary or experimental self are perhaps more limited, but not really. If I could remember how to do combinations and permutations, and if I could count all of the objects, thoughts, feelings, songs, places, people, words, etc., I have available to me to put into a poem, I might be able to tell you how many possible selves there could be in my poems. (Infinite selves!!! My boyfriend calls me “Whitwomanesque.”) Why not just keep trying them out? The person who’s writing them is, in the parts of her life that aren’t on paper. So yeah, the life/poem experiment is fun and ever-shifting and I try to pay attention.

“The novel is built on those few categories the way a house is built on its pillars. The pillars of The Unbearable Lightness of Being: weight, lightness, soul, body, the Grand March, shit, kitsch, compassion, vertigo, strength, weakness.”
What are the pillars of your book?

BK: Debunked fables, Santa Ana winds, crossfires, underworlds, beer, self-implication, spectacle, quitting smoking, dreams are poems, Manifest Destiny, superimposition, Southern California Gothic, American Beauty, Arrested Development, down-home midwestern elitism, playing with shards/matches, tropicalia-loves-melancholia, why can’t we all just live in one big house together.

“Every book says to the reader: ‘Things are not as simple as you think.’”
What things aren’t as simple as the reader thinks in your book?

BK: There is a story in here about going to a place where dreams come true™, feeling disillusioned, and leaving, but mostly these are poems about Story. Instead of telling it slant I usually tell it meta, fabulous, or hyperreal.

“But if man has lost the need for poetry, will he notice when poetry disappears? The end is not an apocalyptic explosion. There may be nothing so quiet as the end.”
Do you think man has lost the need for poetry? For that matter, do you think the world needs your book?

BK: If man has lost the need for poetry, maybe the other half of the population could use it?

Or, if people have lost the need for poetry, maybe our definition of “poetry” has gotten too narrow? People like, and maybe even need, poetry; they might look for it in song or speech more often than in books of poems, though.

“The world” doesn’t need my book, but there might be micro worlds that need my book. Or, if a world is a person, “Walt Whitman, a kosmos,” then, sure.

“Man hopes to reveal his own image through his act, but that image bears no resemblance to him.”
With the release of your book, what self-image do you hope to reveal?

BK: That being young and thinking too hard and feeling too hard is an OK thing to put into your first book. You don’t have to wait till you get older and wiser; you don’t have to out-smart your feeling self; you don’t have to wait till you gain distance and things start to even out. (Things even out, right?)

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Check out our prior authors in the We Who Are Now Published Authors series here. And stay tuned for upcoming Kundera quizes with authors Zulema Renee Summerfield and M.G. Martin.