Douglas Cole Q & A with Eastern Iowa Review
Chila: How did you come up with the title for this interesting essay? It's pretty cool.
Doug: Well, I’d been exploring Guy Debord’s Situationist writings about dérives[1], and there’s this sort of scientific, almost ironic language he uses, very French-intellectual, which I didn’t really want to import too much into my writing. But I liked the idea of creating these poetic essays with sort of naturalist, log-entry titles.
Chila: It seems you actually went through the process of collecting information about it several years ago. Why have you waited so long to send it out for publication?
Doug: My computer died on me! I had to get a new one, and when I was loading my work up from the old machine to the new one, I forgot to save my collection of dérives. I totally forgot about them. I went on to work on other stuff, and the dérives just sort of faded into the background, until I went looking for something else on an old flash drive and found them again. Oh, hey, I said to myself, let’s take a look at these. And then I thought, this is a nice collection; I should start sending some of these out and see if they spark. So I did.
Chila: You co-"performed" the material in the essay with a Buddhist nun. Can you tell us about that?
Doug: That’s a good question. At the time I wrote that one, I was teaching a research class at Seattle Central College, and the theme of the class was The City. I was using Lewis Mumford and Guy Debord and Bennet Miller’s The Cruise and various poems, paintings and lyrics, all as an exploration of the idea of the City as a living, changing work of art that we could interpret and create. We made guidebooks for Urban Oases, did guerilla art (nothing harmful)—writing that arose mostly out of the more playful Situationist kinds of activities (like switching soup can labels, which we never did). And of course we wrote a lot of dérive documents that came out of being “drawn by the attractions of the terrain.” We’d go out in small groups because, “One can dérive alone, but all indications are that the most fruitful numerical arrangement consists of several small groups of two or three people who have reached the same level of awareness, since cross-checking these different groups’ impressions makes it possible to arrive at more objective conclusions. It is preferable for the composition of these groups to change from one dérive to another. With more than four or five participants, the specifically dérive character rapidly diminishes...” (Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive”). So, the Buddhist nun was one of my students, and on the day I had the class work in groups to do these dérives, she and I did the activity together. Turns out she really got it; the whole dérive thing was very natural for her. So, that’s where the piece came from.
Chila: Does your teaching enhance your opportunities to write or vice versa? Or are they separate entities altogether - writing is one world while teaching is another.
Doug: I know some people think of teaching as a drain of their creative energy and time, that it takes away from the creative well of their writing, but I’ve never experienced it that way. Cormac McCarthy, a writer I love, even wrote that teaching writing was a “hustle.” There’s this vague, sometimes hostile, floating disdain for teachers by people (artists, writers) that I just don’t get. Many beautiful artists and poets and musicians have taught. Some of the writers I love most (Richard Hugo, Theodore Roethke, here in the Northwest), taught and wrote, and the teaching didn’t seem to diminish their work. I’m grateful for teaching; although, it’s tough to make a living on the salary. But I love it. I mean, I was listening to the radio on my way to work the other day and heard an interview with a guy who had worked in a mine for 40 years. When he started the work he went to his doctor because of back injuries, and the doctor told him it was from hitting up on the low ceilings in the mine and that he should get another job. The guy said he just laughed and said, what other job? You know, so, I go into the class and say I’m grateful to be here. And I am, and I try to pass on that spark of love for language and stories and poetry and thinking that I have, that I felt from some of my teachers. Poets, writers, teachers, artists...those are the people who have always been my heroes.
And I teach things I love, so I get to study art I love at close range with others. And there’s a way of seeing when I’m teaching that’s different, discoveries I might not make if I didn’t put the work under the spotlight of collective consciousness. And that's always a good thing for an artist to do, I think: study the art. I don’t think I could exhaust Shakespeare or Keats or Elizabeth Bishop or James Baldwin...in learning more about writing. I mean, I’d do it without a class to teach, but this way I get payed for it! I don’t know...I like it, and I do the things I teach when it comes to my own writing, so it’s good, focused discipline for me, and I think I’ve been getting better at that, (the discipline, I mean), over the years. Oh and hey, some of the dérives came out of the work of teaching.
Chila: Most exciting writing project on the docket for you now, and when will it be ready?
Doug: Actually, I have a story coming out in Iconoclast, and I’m pretty excited about that. I sent a couple of things to Phil Wagner, the editor, and he chose a story called “No Return,” which is an excerpt from a novel of mine. It’s been interesting working with him, though he’s hard to contact. He’s old school, no email, just regular mail, and he has this handwriting that looks like each letter took about a minute to write, and the stamps on his postcards look like they came from a kid’s old stamp collection. I sort of picture him out there in the woods near Lake Mohegan, setting type by hand and smoking a pipe and wading across a floor of cats. But don’t get me wrong; I have a lot of respect for him. I’d seen the journal on newsstands for years and liked it and liked the work he chose. I’m glad to be in that journal. I also have upcoming work in Chiron, Pinyon, Slipstream, Solstice, Edge, and Texas Review. I’m kind of on a roll right now, and I feel very grateful because some of the work I’m doing is being appreciated by writers and editors I respect. So, that’s my docket for the moment.
[1] http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/2.derive.htm.
Chila: How did you come up with the title for this interesting essay? It's pretty cool.
Doug: Well, I’d been exploring Guy Debord’s Situationist writings about dérives[1], and there’s this sort of scientific, almost ironic language he uses, very French-intellectual, which I didn’t really want to import too much into my writing. But I liked the idea of creating these poetic essays with sort of naturalist, log-entry titles.
Chila: It seems you actually went through the process of collecting information about it several years ago. Why have you waited so long to send it out for publication?
Doug: My computer died on me! I had to get a new one, and when I was loading my work up from the old machine to the new one, I forgot to save my collection of dérives. I totally forgot about them. I went on to work on other stuff, and the dérives just sort of faded into the background, until I went looking for something else on an old flash drive and found them again. Oh, hey, I said to myself, let’s take a look at these. And then I thought, this is a nice collection; I should start sending some of these out and see if they spark. So I did.
Chila: You co-"performed" the material in the essay with a Buddhist nun. Can you tell us about that?
Doug: That’s a good question. At the time I wrote that one, I was teaching a research class at Seattle Central College, and the theme of the class was The City. I was using Lewis Mumford and Guy Debord and Bennet Miller’s The Cruise and various poems, paintings and lyrics, all as an exploration of the idea of the City as a living, changing work of art that we could interpret and create. We made guidebooks for Urban Oases, did guerilla art (nothing harmful)—writing that arose mostly out of the more playful Situationist kinds of activities (like switching soup can labels, which we never did). And of course we wrote a lot of dérive documents that came out of being “drawn by the attractions of the terrain.” We’d go out in small groups because, “One can dérive alone, but all indications are that the most fruitful numerical arrangement consists of several small groups of two or three people who have reached the same level of awareness, since cross-checking these different groups’ impressions makes it possible to arrive at more objective conclusions. It is preferable for the composition of these groups to change from one dérive to another. With more than four or five participants, the specifically dérive character rapidly diminishes...” (Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive”). So, the Buddhist nun was one of my students, and on the day I had the class work in groups to do these dérives, she and I did the activity together. Turns out she really got it; the whole dérive thing was very natural for her. So, that’s where the piece came from.
Chila: Does your teaching enhance your opportunities to write or vice versa? Or are they separate entities altogether - writing is one world while teaching is another.
Doug: I know some people think of teaching as a drain of their creative energy and time, that it takes away from the creative well of their writing, but I’ve never experienced it that way. Cormac McCarthy, a writer I love, even wrote that teaching writing was a “hustle.” There’s this vague, sometimes hostile, floating disdain for teachers by people (artists, writers) that I just don’t get. Many beautiful artists and poets and musicians have taught. Some of the writers I love most (Richard Hugo, Theodore Roethke, here in the Northwest), taught and wrote, and the teaching didn’t seem to diminish their work. I’m grateful for teaching; although, it’s tough to make a living on the salary. But I love it. I mean, I was listening to the radio on my way to work the other day and heard an interview with a guy who had worked in a mine for 40 years. When he started the work he went to his doctor because of back injuries, and the doctor told him it was from hitting up on the low ceilings in the mine and that he should get another job. The guy said he just laughed and said, what other job? You know, so, I go into the class and say I’m grateful to be here. And I am, and I try to pass on that spark of love for language and stories and poetry and thinking that I have, that I felt from some of my teachers. Poets, writers, teachers, artists...those are the people who have always been my heroes.
And I teach things I love, so I get to study art I love at close range with others. And there’s a way of seeing when I’m teaching that’s different, discoveries I might not make if I didn’t put the work under the spotlight of collective consciousness. And that's always a good thing for an artist to do, I think: study the art. I don’t think I could exhaust Shakespeare or Keats or Elizabeth Bishop or James Baldwin...in learning more about writing. I mean, I’d do it without a class to teach, but this way I get payed for it! I don’t know...I like it, and I do the things I teach when it comes to my own writing, so it’s good, focused discipline for me, and I think I’ve been getting better at that, (the discipline, I mean), over the years. Oh and hey, some of the dérives came out of the work of teaching.
Chila: Most exciting writing project on the docket for you now, and when will it be ready?
Doug: Actually, I have a story coming out in Iconoclast, and I’m pretty excited about that. I sent a couple of things to Phil Wagner, the editor, and he chose a story called “No Return,” which is an excerpt from a novel of mine. It’s been interesting working with him, though he’s hard to contact. He’s old school, no email, just regular mail, and he has this handwriting that looks like each letter took about a minute to write, and the stamps on his postcards look like they came from a kid’s old stamp collection. I sort of picture him out there in the woods near Lake Mohegan, setting type by hand and smoking a pipe and wading across a floor of cats. But don’t get me wrong; I have a lot of respect for him. I’d seen the journal on newsstands for years and liked it and liked the work he chose. I’m glad to be in that journal. I also have upcoming work in Chiron, Pinyon, Slipstream, Solstice, Edge, and Texas Review. I’m kind of on a roll right now, and I feel very grateful because some of the work I’m doing is being appreciated by writers and editors I respect. So, that’s my docket for the moment.
[1] http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/2.derive.htm.
Many thanks to Doug for a fine inner-city-based lyric essay. Only the very best to him in the days ahead. ~Chila
Douglas Cole has published three poetry collections: Interstate (Night Ballet Press); Western Dream, (Finishing Line Press), and The Dice Throwers, (Liquid Light Press), as well as a novella, Ghost (Blue Cubicle Press). His work is anthologized in Best New Writing (Hopewell Publications), Bully Anthology (Kentucky Stories Press) and Coming Off The Line (Mainstreet Rag Publishing), and he has work in or forthcoming in journals such as The Chicago Quarterly Review, Iconoclast, Slipstream, and Midwest Quarterly. He received the Leslie Hunt Memorial Prize in Poetry and the Best of Poetry Award from Clapboard House. He is currently on the faculty at Seattle Central College. His website is douglastcole.com.
Douglas Cole has published three poetry collections: Interstate (Night Ballet Press); Western Dream, (Finishing Line Press), and The Dice Throwers, (Liquid Light Press), as well as a novella, Ghost (Blue Cubicle Press). His work is anthologized in Best New Writing (Hopewell Publications), Bully Anthology (Kentucky Stories Press) and Coming Off The Line (Mainstreet Rag Publishing), and he has work in or forthcoming in journals such as The Chicago Quarterly Review, Iconoclast, Slipstream, and Midwest Quarterly. He received the Leslie Hunt Memorial Prize in Poetry and the Best of Poetry Award from Clapboard House. He is currently on the faculty at Seattle Central College. His website is douglastcole.com.
