[Guest Interview] Jackson Nieuwland and Parker Tettleton on Brevity.
Parker Tettleton’s work is featured in &/or forthcoming from Gargoyle, PANK, The Catalonian Review, Word Riot, & Mud Luscious, among others. His chapbook SAME OPPOSITE is available from Thunderclap! Press. The first poem I ever had published was twelve words long. Since then I have written things of all different lengths. Lately I’ve been working on longer things but being exposed to Parker’s work in a plethora of different journals (the only thing about him that isn’t concise is his list of publications) has rekindled my interest in brevity. I interviewed him about it. –Jackson Nieuwland
JN: Why is your writing short?
PT: I’ve written in many styles but the form I’ve been most taken by over the last several years is the prose poem. Although I refer to my works as pieces, because I feel like I’m working on/towards my own formula, it’s easy to make the comparison. To answer your question: perhaps because I don’t think of my writing as short, though I do appreciate words like concise & brevity. I find a home in a style & stay in that home as long as I feel there are more floorboards to pry up, more angles of glass & light & dark to attempt to navigate some sort of understanding through. Lately, I’ve been mostly taken with the work of Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Richard Purdy, & Jonathan Baumbach, to name a few, but I rarely find myself writing for any length of time in the style in which I’m reading. With this style, I’m simply expressing my interest in mapping out the most electric sentences I can conjure, in a way that, for me, evokes certain elements within the crafts of Hannah, Berryman, & Carver.
Jackson Nieuwland likes unicorns.
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