Interview with Amanda Stern

INTERVIEW WITH AMANDA STERN

Introduction by Drew Peifer. Interview by Sonia Farmer.


So, what can you do with a writing degree? Just ask Amanda Stern.

So far, she's been an actress, a playwright, a casting director, a comedian, co-host of "This is Not a Test" celebrity talk show, a novelist, a painter, and a photographer. She can often be found hanging around the Happy Ending Lounge in Manhattan where she hosts the Happy Ending Music and Reading Series, an innovative blend of musicians and authors that's featured celebrities such as Rick Moody, Jonathan Ames, and James Salter.

In Amanda's newest novel, The Long Haul, a troubled relationship plays itself out against a backdrop of addiction and bad decisions as The Alcoholic and his nameless girlfriend travel the country, playing music and ruining each other’s lives. Book reviews and interviews highlighted the distance that Amanda creates between the reader and her characters, as well as between the characters themselves. As the title suggests, The Long Haul teaches us that sometimes it’s the stories that are hard to tell and even harder to listen to (no offense) that leave the deepest impression. Amanda’s deliberately belligerent protagonist almost seems like she doesn’t want to tell us her story, but the pages keep turning and it’s all laid out: the frustration of unrealized hopes, the guilty ritual of addiction, and the futility of making promises that have already been broken.

Fans of Amanda Stern are fans of her curiously inappropriate sense of humor as well as her drug-infested tales of prolonged unpleasantness, and not many authors would have thought to curate a reading series in a converted massage parlor, complete with its original “penis showers” still intact. Take a trip to amandastern.com and you’ll find both published and unpublished writings, as well as visual art, ugly teen photos, and a forum in which visitors can add to Amanda’s modest catalog of rejection letters by submitting their own. Amanda also chronicles a hectic four week journey across America to promote her book that begins with several valiant attempts at passing her driver's license exam, holding a contest to find a volunteer driver to go cross-country on tour with her, then getting into a car crash with the winner of the contest. Along the way, we learn that it is never a good idea to shower in an Amtrak bathroom, and communicating with your publisher is key when you decide to book a tour.


Ladies and gentlemen, Amanda Stern.



You read a compelling excerpt from your new book at Friday Forum. What’s the title, again? Can you describe what it’s about and what led you to work on it?

Ah, the dreaded question is the first question! The title of my novel-in-progress is The Gurthrie Test. I can’t really say what it’s about or what led me there because I’m not done writing. Stories are shape-shifting creatures – what the book is about presently will be an altogether different beast when completed. How’s that for elusive?


Where did you grow up and how do you think that shaped you as a writer?

I grew up on MacDougal Street between Bleecker and Houston in Greenwich Village. I had a fairly unique upbringing. I was the youngest of six kids at my mom’s house on MacDougal Street and the middle of five uptown at my father’s. Life downtown was crazy, chaotic, free-spirited and undisciplined while uptown life was much more uptight. In many ways I had two simultaneously upbringings. We even dressed differently when we went uptown. But while there were two different ways we were being raised, there was one thread that ran through everything: panic. I have suffered severely from panic attacks my entire life starting at a very early age. As a child, I was terrified of separation, it felt like a physical death to part with my mother. I didn’t understand on an intrapsychic level that I would return. Yet every other weekend I had no choice but to leave my mother and so I grew up living in a state of constant dread and grief. The panic shaped who I became as an adult and informed the topics I choose and the themes I gravitate toward. In other words, it wasn’t where I was raised that shaped me as a writer, but what was growing inside me.


You have a pretty impressive resume as far as job titles go. What job did you love the most, and what did you dislike?

I think my favorite job was working for Hal Hartley in my very early 20s. The specific Hal Hartley job I’m thinking of is when I ran the rehearsals for “Amateur.” Hal is just about the loveliest man on earth and his cast was amazing and everyone treated me so well although I had just graduated college. The worst job ironically was also on “Amateur.” A bunch of the production crew was from LA. So pre-production was all Nyers and it was the best experience, but when the LA crew came and we went into production, things went really sour. I did something called “running first team,” which means I was in charge of all the “name” actors. The Assistant Directors on that job treated me really badly, very abusively. They thought I got special treatment because I had a close bond with Hal and the actors, so they were determined to make me suffer. And they did. I just hated the hell out of them. There were two in particular. I remember both their names still. They were just awful to me. The film shoot ended with both of them getting seriously ill from Craft Services.


How do you prefer to write?

I can write whenever. My schedule is set so that now I write during the day, but I’ve written at frequently and throughout the night. I’m not a morning person, but I will say, the few times I got up very early and felt delirious, my writing was pretty cool. Not good, mind you, but cool.


What led to the formation of the Happy Ending Reading Series?

My friend Oliver owns the bar and when my first novel, The Long Haul, was coming out, I asked him if I could read there. I wanted to read in bars that no one was reading in. Instead of answering, he asked me if I wanted to run my own series. I thought about it and realized I did.


Favorite books?

Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson, Light Years by James Salter, Play it as it Lays by Joan Didion.


Share something really funny about your childhood.

Nothing was funny about my childhood. Although I did go through a very strange period where I wanted hearing aids, orthopedic shoes, crutches, an eye patch, and any other badge of the seriously injured.


Any guilty pleasures?

The Hills.


What’s one thing you just can’t get enough of?

Three things: my nieces.


What are your irrational fears?

All my fears are rational.


Who’s your favorite person in the whole world?

You.


Where would you like to travel and why?

There are a kajillion places I’d like to go, but for now I would like to go to Berlin. I have friends there. It seems vibrant and cool. New York is no longer New York.


What are some of your favorite places to visit?

To visit implies I’m a regular, but I have been to several places I think often of returning: Mjlet, an island off the coast of Croatia; Barcelona; Menorca, off the coast of Barcelona; and Portland, Oregon.


What’s the best piece of advice anyone gave you that you could share with us?

If I remembered the best piece of advice anyone gave me I probably would have a steady income.

But if you really want to know, it’s “trust your own experience.”

We're Back!

Hi everyone!

Bet you didn't even know Ubiquitous actually HAD a blog until you stumbled across the address, right? The blog is fairly new, but this year's staff is planning to make it as important as the published magazine. That means we need SUBMISSIONS, so send them in!

This year we're accepting any writing submissions, whether they be poetry, fiction, interviews, creative non-fiction, reviews, critical essays, or anything in between. That goes for art, too. Got an art piece with writing in it? Even better. Don't have time to scan your art pieces to send to us in jpeg format? Don't have time to take a photo of your art pieces? No problem. Just let us know you're interested, and we can take the photo or scan your art pieces in for you.

Send any submissions or questions to ubiquitous.submissions@gmail.com. You can even leave submissions on a disc in our box in Chapel Hall. Our deadline for the magazine is October 18th, but we accept writing AND art submissions year-round for the blog. Want to write something for the blog, but don't know what? Just let us know. We have a ton of ideas that need writers!

Think the blog could use a make-over? Most of us involved in Ubiquitous have little experience with computers (no, seriously--someone actually asked what a blog was during our first meeting) so if you're willing to help us out, drop us an e mail at the address above.

And now, to kick off the year right, here's a brief history of Ubiquitous from our very own academic advisor. We can't update if we have no submisions, so share some of your work with us!

-The editors


**********


Welcome to the new school year, UBIQUITOUS! As long-time faculty advisor, I’m in a good position to give a little background…

“Ubiquitous,” the name of Pratt Institute’s literary and arts magazine, means “it’s everywhere.” When I first started teaching in the English Department (I won’t mention how long ago – I’ll just say it was well before my current classes of freshmen students were born) the name was more than ironic. Student enterprises tending to wax and wane in a more or less cyclical pattern, the magazine had languished, clinging to a shadowy existence as a name-only entry on the roster of Student Activities.

“An art school without a magazine?! What sense does that make?” I kept thinking. I had worked on a number of journals (Megaphone, Birch Leaves, Artemis, Columbia, Parnassus – I’ll bet even you zine junkies have never heard of some of those) and I was determined to get Pratt back into the running. A colleague remembered a publication years previously called Snakeroot, that showcased work by faculty, students and writers in the community. For a few years I was involved with a publication in the English Department called Thought Lines (with a sub-heading by Hannah Arendt: “We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human”). It was an annual anthology of wonderful writing culled mostly from the Freshman English classes. But a bona fide, student-run literary magazine, that also had art, as befits an art school – well, what’s the opposite of “ubiquitous”?

Apathy on campus was rampant; Student Activities was skeptical. But I fastened my eye on an older student in one of my classes named Stanley, who had both publication experience and enthusiasm. With a small grant from the Mellon Fund through the office of the then-Dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences, novelist Richard Perry, and a price break from my friendly local copy shop, a small committee of dedicated students put out a photocopied, Velo-bound 88-page edition that brought Ubiquitous back into the realm of the actual, even if it could not be said to be “everywhere.”

That was in 1992, and so this is the resurrected Ubiquitous’ 15th anniversary! It has been thrilling for me to see the magazine, like a child, grow a little bit each year in stature and sophistication, and to feel pride in my contributions in shepherding it along the way. We’ve had a pocket-sized issue, a hand-bolted rhomboidal issue, an accordion-pleated one, and one that consisted of postcards in a hand-folded box. One issue was 15 inches long by 2 inches high. (The writing and art was necessarily rather attenuated!) We’ve had black-and-white covers, color ones, glossy, matte, and one that was painstakingly brushed with a circle of vegetable oil on each copy so that the second page showed through to complete the design. We’ve had covers featuring photographs, paintings, graphic designs and hand-set antique letterpress type from Pratt’s well-kept secret studio. We even had an issue on a CD.

The editors have been from fine arts, commercial arts, graphic arts, art history, and our relatively new major in Writing for Performance, Publication and Media. It is truly a pan-Institute journal, and it is beginning at last to live up to its name: it now has two issues a year, a chapbook in collaboration with the spring poetry contest sponsored on campus by the Academy of American Poets, and various ancillary readings and events. Even the posters are impressive, as are the behind-the-scenes efforts to get them prominently into the public eye.

Recently, at the first meeting of the new school year, a dozen students crowded into the Writing Center to hear about the editors’ plans for the fall issue. The students were especially wowed by the current budget, incrementally larger each year as it has been painstakingly pitched and won in the annual Student Activities budget process. It’s a big opportunity – and responsibility – to work with a budget now more than ten times that of Stanley’s issue fifteen years ago.

So keep an eye out for it, and more to the point, contribute to it! I can’t tell you what it will look like, or what kinds of genres, both verbal and visual, you will find inside, but I can vouch for the fact that it will be something Pratt students – a pretty special lot – will be proud of, and that it will reflect them in all their astonishing diversity and talent.

Liza McAlister Williams
September 2007

Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)--Emily Thomas

My shopping basket is too heavy to hold onto so I put it down by my feet. Through the big glass window, I watch a couple fight and make up. The girl wears a long black coat. The boy wears faded tan Wallabees and a tie. The boy gives the girl a long kiss on the mouth, steps off the curb, and looks both ways. Someone pokes me in the back. The line has moved. I push my basket forward with my foot. I don’t want gum. I don’t want to read the tabloids. The woman in front of me pays with food stamps.

I make it home and my pregnant mother digs into the shopping bag and grabs the carrots and the mustard. She eats this every day and in a month my sister is born. Her hair grows in curly and blonde. After her first haircut the curls go away. She tries swimming and hates it. She tries ballet. Still no curls. I drive her to second grade and we talk about our dad’s new puppy whose name is Bernie. She gets her first pair of pointe shoes and I teach her how to sew on the ribbons. She dances in the Nutcracker. When she puts up her hair, a couple of curls fall out on the sides. I drive her to sixth grade and we talk about our dad’s new apartment in a different state. We like it. It’s bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside.

For a few months all I wanted to listen to while my mother and I drove in the car was country music. If a song I didn’t like was on Continuous Country, my mother would sigh with relief, but I would switch over to The Nashville Way All Night and Day.

“Why?” my mother would ask. “Please, why?” And I would say, “Because it makes me feel good.”

On the first of February, we drove to her favorite restaurant. There had just been a blizzard, and the wind sent tree branches pirouetting into the road. Since it was her birthday, I let my mother pick the music. The station she picked was playing the song “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” by Bruce Springsteen. “What is this, mom?” I said. “Ugh.”
My mother cracked the window and threw out a piece of gum she had wrapped up earlier in a napkin.

“I wish I was listening to Tim McGraw,” I said.

“Let me tell you a story about this song,” my mother said. She brought a hand to her hair and poufed it into shape. The whole coif shifted to the side when she touched it.
“When I was a teenager, I would listen to the radio through my pillow when I was supposed to be asleep. And once I heard this song, and—“ she put her chin on the steering wheel. The car was filling with cold air.

“And what?”

“I just thought it was the best song I had ever heard.”

“Can you close the window?” I said. “That’s not even a story.”


emilymica@gmail.com

Thetis--Aldrin Valdez

for Mai Maguire

I met you in a city by the sea,
just yesterday
it seems. Your prettiness was harsh
at first, unusual
because most girls then
were blonde and stout--
you were lithe and ocean-eyed,
not in color but in gaze.

I heard you sing once, too,
in a bus to the mountains.
It was winter and your nautical tune
warmed the ride through valley frosts.

And then you became a friend
years later, in the flotsam-jetsam of hurricane times.
I ended up beside you in class sifting too slowly
through millennia of art, pausing to consider
a then-faint metaphor
in the Cycladic shores of Grecian yore.

Since then, you've become too quick.
You move too fast and too much,
I can barely keep a memory still;
it ripples with a mere touch
and then I remember I cannot breathe water.

I would like one day
to grasp you completely, secure you
in the tangle of my arms,
finally tangible and exhausted of all forms
except one:

My friend
my sister.

Aldrin Valdez is a Sophomore Painting Major.
avaldez@pratt.edu

Serial Poems -- Erin Heath

Dearest Mousetrap Inventor,

their coats are still white, buried beneath theories

Look; produce; compare among the scientists
before oceans before bones,
it turned out a glitch produced a gene
for reasons, not mutation.
An experiment, a mixture of circumstance builds
a complex mousetrap.
Such a system falls with evolution’s
modern jawless equivalents
of incremental changes: 9.82 meters per second per second







The tracks of scientists scratch the kin

of a bitten skeleton. The teeth remain closed,
half-blown, scattered glass on glass table.
A direct afarensis stature, the frame sized unlike

a modern two scientists, unclear, a key of
a key of evidence happened before.
uncover
the States’
wobbly foundation







Dear Fahrenheit,

The object, unnamed trumps its discovery, tagged with
only 1.5 pixels. The telescope measures the ground.
Observations of a moon circling, enabling the release

Science operates a new report, shuffling thin white rectangles.
They spin out until they look like stars whose light takes years.
A percent of light, analysis, percent of
planetary shock—

Shooting geysers transform to ice crystals, a sheen
of freshly fallen snow. Nine billion miles
liquid water

shooting geysers minus 400 degrees

an eccentric atmosphere sweating organisms:
astronomer should be regarded as
two distant objects







Outer

Crashing crafts, help scientists.
Water might lurk deep in dark craters. Help future human
early lunar hydrogen
bound for the south pole,
identified identified identified
help astronauts off-land, the first to strike.
A craft will fly, launch Earth before slamming






Dear Mathematics,

Dr.,
the date
ancient keys and locks
Dr.
find any piece
an elegant,
of course
formulate
Dr.
be considerate,
three pieces
what, Dr.?
even if this calculates
it doesn’t show much






Dear Scientist,

A plume of debris rising 30 miles before
hitting the moon. Looking 90 degrees against the darkness,
high high increase of the orbit,
aim the telescope, smash into distant bodies,
A heavy copper comet ejected from a stone






Dear Force,

Earth’s magnetic storms send large flares.
Their intricacies introduce a phenomenon called
atoms,
stripped of ultraviolet force,
these temperatures are high enough to
x-ray the loops
beyond a fuzzy dawn.
The first sign the first high x-ray
the loop the pointed the rounded
then a wave






Crossing

A pocket would be expected to glow
at high velocities, causing ions
to suddenly bash near the
edge of the loop.
The lack of such electric lines
lines
relatively converge.
The strong halt
against a mattress, a motion charged,
a big trap






Burn

In a field, a lightbulb dissipating
over the years, a flux,
such fields, parallel to the sun,
a flat sheet
working over time as a result of
the current giving rise,
the weak x-rays
a series, a sequence,
the mysterious source reaching its peak
within two minutes—such fields




Erin Heath is a Junior writing major
cityscorp@hotmail.com