Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Large Animals
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Los Angeles
STATE: CA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.powells.com/post/qa/powells-qa-jess-arndt-author-of-large-animals * https://www.thecut.com/2017/05/interview-jess-arndt-author-of-large-animals.html * https://awomensthing.org/blog/book-review-jess-arndt-large-animals-pushing-limits/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born c. 1979; has a partner; children.
EDUCATION:Bard College, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and publisher. New Herring Press, cofounder.
AWARDS:Fiction Fellow, New York Foundation of the Arts, 2010; Graywolf Summer Literary Series (SLS) Fellow, 2013.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals and websites, including Fence, Bomb, Aufgabe, Parkett, and Night Papers.
SIDELIGHTS
Jess Arndt is a writer and cofounder of New Herring Press, which focuses on publishing prose and polemics. In an interview on the Powell’s Books Website, Arndt commented on when she knew she was a writer, explaining: “It really became clear to me when I started using writing as a place to explore my most embarrassing junk, rather than as a place to dodge or amend it. Suddenly stories had this weird quality where they could teach me something—albeit often something kind of ugly or hard—I didn’t know about myself.”
Arndt’s debut collection of short stories, Large Animals, “investigates narratives of the queer body,”according to a Kirkus Reviews contributor. For the most part, the twelve stories in Large Animals feature unnamed narrators who often are astute observers of others but less so of themselves. “The narrators in Arndt’s new story collection, Large Animals—whether an uneasy bartender serving Lily Tomlin or a gardener fighting irascible weeds—are surly, out-of-bounds, staunchly individual,” wrote Cut website contributor Maggie Lange.
Many of the characters presented by Arndt are searching for stronger connections and understanding. Most importantly, they want to find true love. “There’s a kinetic restlessness afoot here as these characters wrestle with their own lovability while going to dare-deviling lengths to get love or sex or hopefully some of both,” wrote Rumpus website contributor Melissa Wiley, who went on to note: Arndt “distills the awkwardness of simply being human into a primordial world where nature dissolves and intermixes seamlessly with urban artifacts and ruin.”
In the story titled “Jeff,” the narrator is a nervous bartender named Jess who happens to be serving the comedian and actor Lily Tomlin. When Tomlin mistakenly thinks the narrator’s name is Jeff instead of Jess, an identity crisis ensues in which the narrator not only accepts blame for the mistake because of her bad enunciation but also begins “an imaginary battle between Jess and Jeff, the alternative identity she both loathes and longs for,” as noted by a Kirkus Reviews contributor. “Together” finds a couple battling a strange, sexually transmitted disease that is incrementally destroying their relationship. Meanwhile, their urban garden is being overrun by an especially virulent weed called the Japanese knotweed. A Publishers Weekly contributor called “Together” the collection’s “longest and most plot-driven story.”
The story titled “Beside Myself” features a narrator who is driving and trying to determine the danger of a hitchhiking situation. The collection’s title story finds a man living in the desert who is often perceived as a lesbian by others. Meanwhile, he is having visitations at night by walruses in his dreams or imagination, leading him to declare that he needs privacy so he can sleep alone. “The characters in the diminutive volume float through various forms of limbo—emotional and physical to be sure, but also geographical,” wrote an East Bay Review website contributor, adding: “It doesn’t matter if Arndt’s … narrators are roaming the streets of New York or festering in a shack in some hellish desert landscape, they drift from situation to situation, attempting to espouse meaning where none may exist.”
The story titled “Third Arm” revolves around a female English professor who likes to masturbate while driving. Meanwhile, the professor is seeking healing from the Authentic Process Healing Institute, as the narrator feels at odds with her own body. Other stories include “Can You Live with It,” which features a meandering crawl to various pubs while contemplating the Fyodor Dostoevsky novel Crime and Punishment, and “Moon Colonies,” which features a trio at a gambling city looking for fun.
“Arndt is like a queer Kafka who perambulates the surreal container of the body by dealing almost wholly in non sequiturs,” wrote KQED website contributor Ingrid Rojas Contreras, who went on to note: “Many a great story in Large Animals … has a strong resemblance to Kafka’s shorter fiction—which, unlike his longer work that deals with bureaucracy, are rather works of gorgeously, painfully strange portraiture in which one is irredeemably ill-made for the world.” Annie Bostrom, writing in Booklist, commented: “Arndt’s keen, wild stories are truly original, and readers will hope for more.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 1, 2017, Annie Bostrom, review of Large Animals, p. 57.
Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2017, review of Large Animals.
Publishers Weekly, March 6, 2017, review of Large Animals, p. 36.
ONLINE
Cut, https://www.thecut.com/ (May 11, 2017), Maggie Lange, “Large Animals: A Maggie Nelson–Approved Book for Wild Creatures.”
East Bay Review, http://theeastbayreview.com/ (May 28, 2017), Noah Sanders, review of Large Animals.
KQED Website, https://ww2.kqed.org/ (June 4, 2017), Ingrid Rojas Contreras, review of Large Animals.
Powell’s Books Website, http://www.powells.com/ (May 4, 2017), “Powell’s Q&A: Jess Arndt, Author of Large Animals.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (July 14, 2017), Melissa Wiley, “Ambiguity as a Daily Experience: Talking with Jess Arndt.”
Powell's Q&A: Jess Arndt, Author of 'Large Animals'
by Jess Arndt, May 4, 2017 3:27 PM
Photo credit: Johanna Breiding
Describe your latest book.
Large Animals addresses what it’s like to have a body at its most mutinous/motley; it's a journey of strange forms. The collection is comedic and raw and its protagonists are mostly joined together by a lack of self-awareness that teeters on the dangerously in-the-dark. The 12 (often very short) stories unravel like self-surgeries from intoxicated or otherwise compromised hands. But sometimes, briefly, this unknowing quality pans outwards, implicating our own world directly: a world where sex and gender imperatives are so inadequate they have to be undone.
When did you know you were a writer?
Honestly, it was pretty recently, though I’ve been “acting like one” since I could write.
I think it really became clear to me when I started using writing as a place to explore my most embarrassing junk, rather than as a place to dodge or amend it. Suddenly stories had this weird quality where they could teach me something — albeit often something kind of ugly or hard — I didn’t know about myself.
What does your writing work space look like?
It’s a tiny plywood-lined shack falling off the back of our Echo Park rental. I love it.
What do you care about more than other people?
Inanimate objects. Yesterday my girlfriend called a bouquet in our house “ugly” and even though I of course secretly agreed, I rushed to cover its ears.
Share an interesting experience you've had with a reader.
One time I was reading at The Poetry Project in NYC and every time I mentioned sex (which I did a lot then because I was still trying to dodge other things), an audience member made an extremely loud protuberant grunting sound. Finally I think he had to leave.
Tell us something you’re embarrassed to admit.
This Q&A is activating my oldest fears, which are, of course: being boring, not cool.
Introduce one other author you think people should read, and suggest a good book with which to start.
Dorthe Nors. Karate Chop. Incisive, pared down. Unexpected. Revealing. Plus it has an amazing cover.
Besides your personal library, do you have any beloved collections?
As someone who feels more easily through “things” than other people or my own emotions, I’ve had SO MANY collections because it’s painful (literally) to throw anything away. This might have made me a hoarder, but then I moved to a railroad apartment in Brooklyn with zero closets. Plus, my north node is Virgo, so I can’t hoard; it’s bad for my astrological evolution. Instead I close my eyes, whisper “sorry,” and throw things away. My clunky collection of paint-by-numbers sailboat paintings, for instance. Recently my neighbor from Brooklyn moved around the corner, i.e., has become my neighbor in LA, and he brought one of the paintings I’d done this with. Seeing it was unsettling. I can’t tell if that painting down the block is a positive or negative thing.
Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
When I was 19, a friend and I pilgrimmed to Lesbos. We said we were going for Sappho, but really we were going for lesbians. We were shocked to find everyday Greeks there — “Technically, they’re all Lesvians!" I kept saying. On the Sappho side, there were only a few Germans who were opening a hotel. They gave me a haircut (a fade) on the beach, in view of Sappho’s profile. I rented a motor-scooter and immediately crashed it.
Share a sentence of your own that you're particularly proud of.
I like the last sentence of my book, Large Animals. “‘Can I please have a taco,’ I said.”
What scares you the most as a writer?
I was going to say “writing,” but that seems too easy. Although it’s kind of true. I’m scared of composing fresh work. I guess this is because “it will be bad,” which it inevitably probably will be. Not just bad — but in my pre-writing imagination, ruined. Like think of all that possibility that existed when all those strange idea cousins were clinking around in your head. And: zap. The writing makes them pedestrian, evacuated of potency, unrescuably mundane. On the flip side, I love editing.
If someone were to write your biography, what would be the title and subtitle?
I’m obsessed with a title that already exists, Memoirs of a Polar Bear. So I would ask Yoko Tawada if I could borrow hers. Or could I subtly change it? Memoirs of a Pilar Bear. Memoirs of a Po-lair Bear. It’s actually such a good title there can’t even be a subtitle, because so much feeling just kind of hangs around it, implied.
But then I’m also obsessed with the title The Last Wolf by Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai.
So maybe my formula is: “fierce animal” plus something that seems to be significant and eulogy-ific?
Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer.
A favorite quote: “The ache of something that is not publicity, a place that moves constantly, so that it can always be not so much alone but alive, is I think the determined goal of the true pervert today. Whether that pervert is a woman, or an intellectual or a poet, or just a brat does not ever have to get resolved. Ultimately that pervert must die and so will go her idea. But for now she’s making some room around that shivering thought.” – Eileen Myles.
I don’t know what it’s from, except a virtual “sticky” on my laptop.
What's your biggest grammatical pet peeve?
I’m not sure if this is a grammatical pet peeve, but I can’t stand repeating words. I have an unproductive aversion to it and always try to scrub my stories of lazy vocab. But then — I read something I love and it says “large” or “animals” (just as an example) five times in a paragraph and I don’t even notice it.
Do you have any phobias?
I hate separating pairs. (Is there a term for that?) Almost more than anything.
Name a guilty pleasure you partake in regularly.
Just one? So many. Online shopping. Cans (they have to be) of too-strong IPA. Recently, the show Scandal. Expensive drop-crotch shorts. The purple pixelated body emoji.
What's the best advice you’ve ever received?
I’m infamously bad at remembering quotes, especially when asked. I do know Lynne Tillman probed me once about a novel I was suffering through. She asked me if I “believed in it enough to fight for it.” The answer was (sadly) “no.” But I’m probably remembering it wrong. What did you actually say, Lynne?
How much sleep have you gotten in the last three weeks?
I think 100 percent none. My girlfriend and I have a newborn.
Share a top five book list of your choice.
Lists of “bests” really make me sweat, but here are five books I love right now about bodies that activate the “mutinous” or “motley” or “multiple”:
1. Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
2. Counternarratives by John Keene
3. Zipper Mouth by Laurie Weeks
4. My Struggle, Book 4 by Karl Ove Knausgaard
5. A Body, Undone by Christina Crosby
÷ ÷ ÷
Jess Arndt received her MFA at Bard and was a 2013 Graywolf SLS Fellow and 2010 Fiction Fellow at the New York Foundation of the Arts. She has written for Fence, BOMB, Aufgabe, and the art journal Parkett, among others. She is a co-founder of New Herring Press, and lives in Los Angeles.
JESS ARNDT received her MFA at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, and was a 2013 Graywolf SLS Fellow and 2010 Fiction Fellow at the New York Foundation of the Arts. Her writing has appeared in Fence, Bomb, Aufgabe, Parkett, and Night Papers, and in her manifesto for the Knife’s Shaking the Habitual world tour. She is a co-founder of New Herring Press, dedicated to publishing prose and polemics. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
Ambiguity as a Daily Experience: Talking with Jess Arndt
By Melissa Wiley
June 14th, 2017
Life within a body is hard. In Large Animals, Jess Arndt takes a truth so obvious that we tend to ignore it and renders that truth absurd, hilarious, and a little bit redemptive. As someone who defines the body as essentially “a swarmy, queasy place,” Arndt revels in the body’s inconvenient needs, its instability as an identity marker, and the gender ambiguity that trails her narrators from Atlantic City to the Mojave Desert to Los Angeles. She also has a fair amount of fun allowing them to morph into the odd walrus or share an inner emotional world with a chair, to dip their toes in transcendence. You could call this collection transgressive, but ultimately Arndt is after something deeper, revealing the raw emotions that surface in every kind of human container, the feelings always scratching at the skin, waiting to make contact.
There’s a kinetic restlessness afoot here as these characters wrestle with their own lovability while going to dare-deviling lengths to get love or sex or hopefully some of both. Their longing inevitably outsizes the bodies that contain it, but that’s no reason for them to stop trying to make it hurt less. Throughout all these stories, Arndt is as skilled at blurring the boundaries between external reality and that of the body as she is between male and female, natural and unnatural. She distills the awkwardness of simply being human into a primordial world where nature dissolves and intermixes seamlessly with urban artifacts and ruin. For all its lush weirdness, I found this world deeply familiar.
***
The Rumpus: In “Beside Myself,” the narrator’s girlfriend says at one point, “You always put yourself through stuff like this… trying to write.” I’m wondering what you’ve put yourself through to write this book as well as what your general practice is like. What have been the unavoidable costs to you of becoming a writer?
Jess Arndt: I love that you pulled that quote out. These are my favorite parts of writing—arriving at a weird little promontory or cliff of a mini-realization. The things you can’t plan for. Of course, I didn’t set out to say this or that in the story about “my” life, but when something emerges like this, that does feel true, it’s always nice. Maybe this is a way into saying that I usually hate composing and am terrified of writing fresh work. I’ll do mostly anything to avoid it, and sometimes it gets so bad that I really start to loathe myself, and even all the extra yoga and other kinds of hard-to-manage-health fixes won’t solve it. Then I know the only way out of the pit I’ve dug is: try to write.
This book has been so long in coming. I started it while living in New York—teaching in the day, often bartending at night, breaking up with somebody. And it wasn’t until I fell in love again and moved out to the Mojave Desert, as a way station to LA, that I had the mental and physical space to finish it. I do feel very porous to the world around me, and I do think I begin to feel very obligated to whatever life I set up, the people in it, the relationships, the plants, the animals, the things. So moving to the desert, where it was nothing but dry and the landscape basically said—“You can try to hunch here if you want, but I CERTAINLY don’t need you and also, good luck buddy”—was, at least temporarily, an immense relief. This feeling, of the tension between the life you kind of intuitively create as a support system and the room you might need to create your work is something I think artists are so often struggling with. It was helpful then, as you noted by pulling the above quote out, to try to deal with some of that uncomfortable vertiginous “come close, get away from me” feeling, by actually letting it pop up in the writing explicitly.
It’s painful to try to take the space to write, at least for me. It’s also funny looking back at that quote now. In one way, it still feels very true. But really I think how it works is: I put myself through stuff living, and then somehow rescue it/myself by employing it in my stories.
Rumpus: You have an enviable way with verbs: “… a line of sweat slurred along my chest binder,” “… it took strong desert sun to unshrivel me” etc. And your stories, in general, contain a lot of movement. What do you think this says about your narrators? Did you consciously try to inject a sense of restlessness into them as characters?
Arndt: Throughout my life, people have said to me (and probably say to most writers): “You’re a writer, so you’re obviously good with words.” I couldn’t feel farther from that (of course awesome, enviable) truth. To me, talking is hard. Committing to meaning via marking words down is almost impossible. Each time I enter language I’m embarrassed; I fumble around. Bodies, at least mine, feel like these big inarticulate lumps. But there is so much to feel—so much raw feeling. I think in these stories I’ve reached for a kind of maximalism of undigested feeling, but tried to arrive there through a highly controlled approach. Maybe somewhere deep down inside, I think the less words on the page the better, i.e. the less risk. So it is true—I’d rather have a verb than an adjective. If that verb can imbue the sentence with an electrical current close to what the body that is intertwined with that sentence might be feeling, even better. Best, to me, is when language isn’t allowed to describe. I like it as part of the human meat grinder: mixed up with the body it’s come out of. Also, I find with verbs, I often hit a moment of panic. It goes like: (yelled very loud in my head) “CMON HOW CAN YOU SAY THIS BETTER? MORE ECONOMICALLY? WITH MORE PUNCH?”
In terms of restlessness: yes. The narrators are not exactly restless like wanderers (although they do wander), as much as restless like: where can I rest in a world where I don’t easily find myself represented? What are the strategies—often, at least in this book, self-destructive strategies—if I cannot rest, to keep myself moving? Huge caveat here: I think this can apply to almost anyone who has a body.
Rumpus: I love how the narrator’s gender inserts itself into these stories almost seemingly at random, as when Tamara in the final story, for instance, assumes the narrator is a lesbian because his Adam’s apple isn’t big enough. You seem to be having fun with ambiguity throughout the book. How much was that at the forefront of your mind when constructing the plot of each story? Or did some of that insert itself later?
Arndt: Ambiguity is a daily experience for me. Yesterday, for instance, the parking attendant guy at the chiropractor I go to called me “sir” what seemed like fifteen times in a five-word interaction. Maybe that doesn’t seem ambiguous! But, in my everyday, I never know how someone will read me, or what they are reading “of” me. This has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember—a gender negotiation that often seems hyperbolic or arbitrary. Add to that a kind of “imposter syndrome”—i.e. what if they find out? Find out exactly “what” is never clear. I like that you bring up story construction because I do really believe that, for me, stories can’t come out apart from this or on the side of this. They’re kind of built through it. If a compressed effervescence, or gallows humor, sometimes emerges too, that’s great. I do think it’s funny (the whole system), when looking at things from the outside, if the outside is where I already am. I also think it’s crushing. Both—pretty equally true.
Rumpus: Simply being nonbinary or fluidly gendered now seems to make a political statement. In these dark days of Trump, do you feel pressured to represent a certain community through your writing? Is this—potential political readings of your work—something you’re comfortable with as an artist? Something you want to encourage?
Arndt: I think what you mean is that just “being” means something political, in our current climate. I agree. But terms like “nonbinary” and “gender fluidity” also seem like places of language arbitration. They all have their particular historical hue. I am happy to be an LGBTQ artist, a gender nonconforming artist—someone who writes up close to these things. But also, something I think you’ve quite astutely pulled from the book, is that I’m even more comfortable the blurrier it gets. The body is such a swarmy place. At least it is for me. And I have to believe that much of what I’m feeling is possible to be felt by much of this planet’s population. Don’t get me wrong—I believe in the specificity of experience, especially with regard to minority subject positions. But also, when I think: “Ugh you said ___, and it made me feel seen and also it made me embarrassed and (to approximate a line from my book because I can’t seem to make up a new one) ‘I felt like red construction paper was stapled to my throat’”—I might be feeling that way because of gender, but haven’t you also felt that way at some point? You who have bodies?
Rumpus: To me, all of your stories feel like tightly constructed collages. You’re a wizard at creating friction and movement through juxtaposition of dialogue, for instance, with kinetic descriptions of cityscapes. This has to take some intensive editing work. So I’m wondering how the revision process works for you. How much material do you have to cut to get to the final product, and how painful is this?
Arndt: “Collages” is a great word. It might just be how my particular brain works best—“put this next to this, hope some of this rubs off on this, crumple it up and pray the outside observer can feel it.” In terms of editing, though—the more I cut, usually the happier I am. The problem is, ideally (at least, I have this idea in my mind) the best way to work is to create a lot of material and then shave it down from there. I’m the opposite. I’m so afraid of composing that I’ve already edited it to bits before it gets on the page. That said, there were some painful moments when working with my real-life editor, Julie Buntin (who I owe so much to for her vision and perseverance and humor), where she felt I was being excessive, or a little overdone. I think there’s a danger in being too familiar with, or comfortable in, your work. In my case, I’d read these stories so many times. Annie Dillard talks about it in her book The Writing Life. Basically, I’d naturalized the cadences in my head so completely that it became hard to pull anything out. That’s where trust comes in I guess. Often, Julie would say “out,” and I’d say “fine.” Once in a while, though, I’d say “no way!” I’m not entirely sure if this was because I was thinking with my best writing brain, or because I was just overly smitten with a line, or because I was scared. In any case, some stayed. Give me five years, though, and I’ll probably agree with everything she suggested. Somebody said to me: fight for what you believe in because you are really the one who has to live with it. I also followed that.
Rumpus: Your narrators seem self-deprecating to the point of hilarity, though there’s a sadness also underlying this. In “Jeff,” she blames herself for Lily Tomlin misunderstanding her name, admitting she speaks with marbles in her mouth. In “Moon Colonies,” we see her leaving the woman she wants to have sex with alone in the hotel room only to lose almost all the money she’s just won at the casino. I felt most of these narrators had trouble accepting love from the people they wanted it from the most. Is this—a consistent thread of disappointment in love—something you consciously were going for? How much of this has to do with gender ambiguity, and how much with simply being human?
Arndt: I’m glad you get the hilarity. I agree there’s a kind of manic, sad quality to it.
I think it’s almost impossible to accept love from others when you don’t know how to love/accept/be with yourself. Maybe it sounds canned but, at least in my life, it’s felt true. So here are a bunch of narrators, who are really very close to the same narrator, projecting outward in order not to have to deal with themselves. Maybe this gets back to your restlessness question. The itchy, agitated state keeps them from having to fully encounter truths they might not like or know how to deal with. But it also forestalls any ability to make real connections with the surrounding world.
Being checked or challenged at one of the most basic points of entry into society, i.e. gender, makes cohesive subject formation really hard. How to be a self? In this way, “Am I recognizable? Am I lovable?” is a gender question. But again, I do think most people with bodies have felt some shade of this at some point in their lives. It is hard to have a body. To accept the container. To feel, when moving around in the world, that a cohesive, readable statement is being maintained.
(And wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t have to?)
Rumpus: For the most part, this book is a particularly urban creature. There’s a forceful beauty to your descriptions: “the gum trees chatter their dry long tongues” in “Shadow of an Ape,” for instance; the roots of Japanese knotweed “flanged out at the base like butt-plugs” in “Together.” This seems to embody the tensions between the natural and unnatural while also dissolving them through the vividness of your prose. Blurring the unnatural and natural likewise seems like it may comment on the body, giving us the freedom to reshape it in the same way we do our landscapes. Am I onto something here?
Arndt: I think you’re onto something, in the sense that the narrators of these stories share a permeability with the world(s) around them. And are—maybe as a survival mechanism, maybe as the special lesson they’ve entered the book to try to impart—in an unending series of blurriness-es. The disquiet (I think) comes from a lived feeling that there is no “natural”—or if there is, they don’t have entrance to it. This sounds dramatic but when I think about it, I visualize what I’m trying to describe here in 3D—as a kind of primal yell. It jostles everything. Then, from that electric Jell-O moment, it’s not such a big move to have your sexuality grow from walrus parts or to share an inner emotional world with a chair.
Rumpus: In “Beside Myself,” the narrator says, “Some bodies needed more space,” but there’s an inescapable sense of all of these narrators feeling imprisoned inside a body whose needs subject it to constant suffering. Yet at the same time I feel like this is also the source of most of your writing’s humor. How consciously, then, did you invoke humor to both offset and highlight this pain?
Arndt: Maybe you’ve located the pivot point. I often find being in a body excruciating. It is also true that I want to keep living, and to do so, I need my body. Here I am right here on the couch in the dark while my newborn kid sleeps, using my body to answer these questions. (And hoping, as he grows up, that he feels more spacious in his body than I have yet learned how to be in mine.)
About the humor? Everything is so emotionally close to everything else. Like how real happiness contains a little corner where you are also bawling. Or how everything can kind of be summed up by: I’m crying/I’m laughing/I’m shitting my pants. Humor puts us in our bodies, usually. We have an uncontrolled physical reaction that, I hope, lurches us into new space. But this makes it sound so planned. Mostly, the humor is a way for me to let off steam in a scene. And give a little lateral distance. First of all, for myself, and secondly I guess, for the reader.
Also I just have to say, there are some genius comedians who deal so deep down in the queasy body. Louis C.K. and Dynasty Handbag, for starters. And George Saunders. In my experience, the funniest writers are dealing with the hardest stuff.
Large Animals: A Maggie Nelson–Approved Book for Wild Creatures
By
Maggie Lange
May 11, 2017
3:49 pm
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Jess Arndt. Photo: Johanna Breiding
It’s easy to get sentimental about animals. There’s a fantasy, explains writer Jess Arndt, that they will “somehow redeem us, or return us to our sinless selves. I don’t think I buy it. I listened to my cat torment a giant bug all night.”
The narrators in Arndt’s new story collection, Large Animals — whether an uneasy bartender serving Lily Tomlin or a gardener fighting irascible weeds — are surly, out-of-bounds, staunchly individual. The collection explores lives that tend toward violence and transgression. Maggie Nelson called the book “outlaw literature.” Arndt told me that she hopes “that the book’s line of inquiry holds open a little space for a different kind of multiplicity. A multiplicity that stretches or pokes at everything, including species.” (“Yikes,” she added. “That’s a big claim.”) As a whole, the book sometimes seems to capture one of the most satisfying elements of a nature documentary: dramatic shifts in scale. There’s a micro-assessment of a small beast just trying to find shelter, and then a zoom-out to reveal ideas about a whole species.
Below, Arndt talks about writing in alternative forms, wanting to be an arctic creature, and the animal books of her childhood.
There’s a lot in Large Animals about growth, nerves, membranes, plants, animals. Do you have a particular interest in biology?
I’m definitely not a scientist but I think part of what you’re picking up is a general sense of feeling at a strange distance from my own body. There becomes an observational quality. Can I be in it? Am I in it? Am I looking at it from outside? What if my body wasn’t my body but actually attached to another body, like plant or animal, would it be easier? Where are my borders? Where is the natural world’s borders?
Someone says in the last story, “Animals are only animals because they are observed.” It reminded me of the mind-blowing college-y idea that the idea of “nature” was a construction that came after urban density. For every new concept there’s going to be an “other.”
Who is part of the group and who’s not part of the group? I think that that’s a feeling I’ve had in my own body as early as I can remember. Not knowing anything about sex or gender, except that I didn’t want to be labeled as I was, as the world was labeling me. That flattening effect, where it’s not totally comfortable to be in the human body or the human gendered body, I think pushed me outward into an exploration of other surfaces or a hope of finding connection in other surfaces.
Is there something about observing animals or nature that particularly causes you to question human form or human nature?
There’s a fantasy about animals that they’re not so caught up in the human conundrum that’s so judgmental and cannibalizing of self. In some ways, animals are more a ball of impulses. I don’t think that’s totally ethically where I stand when I think about the animal kingdom. My narrators reach towards that — I feel animal and because I feel animal, I’m worried about what I might do. For instance, in “Third Arm,” the narrator is having visions and dreams about having a bear form, and that that bear form is a representation of violence of otherness. Even though it’s moving towards human connection, it can’t actually realize that human connection.
Do you anthropomorphize animals?
Oh, totally, but I also anthropomorphize objects, if that’s the right term. I’m trying to make sense of this 3-D world that we’re in. Everything I think — to me and to many of the narrators in the stories — has a loaded, latent sensory feeling to it, that is something pleasurable and also something possibly dangerous. Everything seems like it can hurt and be hurt and that makes a challenging landscape, I think, for the narrators to know themselves in and also to move through.
Some of these stories follow characters scared of their own power — tell me about writing that tension, that self-awareness about being a little out of control.
I’m sure my therapist would say that that worry comes from the opposite, feeling little access to power. I do think that there is something that is hopefully changing now that was embedded very early in me about being different and being different in a way that didn’t have a very articulate form. My earliest memories were of getting a sense of how the world worked and also getting the simultaneous sense that I didn’t work that way.
I’m 38 now, so that means I was coming into the those feelings in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. That was really scary. I had a sense if I shared any of those feelings that something bad would happen to me but also, somehow conversely, that people would be worried that I would do something bad to them. That by association somehow, they would be hurt, they would be tainted. I think that that is somewhere in the threads you see in the narrators — the capacity for a nameless wormy grotesqueness that they might inflict on others.
Do you see a connection between writing about nonconformity and the style of your stories? They tend to be unconcerned with genre or traditional structure — is that something you find helpful in exploring the theme of queerness, or is a coincidence of aesthetics?
Yeah — I was talking to Maggie Nelson the other day and she called the stories disobedient and indifferent to form. I totally agree and this probably is their form! [Both] having a queer content, but more deeply arising out of trying to explore and give language to something that is difficult to talk about. I don’t think that that is only experienced by queer subjects, but more basely around having a body, being in a body, being in the world being uncomfortable with being in the world, realizing that you have an impact on the world and also knowing that it impacts you.
Language has always been hard for me. Coming into language as a subject, who has a lot of contradictory feelings that our culture doesn’t necessarily support, is difficult. This is my first book to come out as a collection, but I wrote a novel before that and I really struggled with gender in that novel. Not because I wanted gender to be the main subject of the novel, but because it was hard for me to give the narrator a place to stand, pronoun-wise. I rewrote it like four times — he, she, they, I, you. It was everything, third person, first person, somewhere in between. What I realized what I was doing in that work was using a story to cover myself up. Somewhere along the way I hit this form with the short story where I could really start to dissect myself and my inarticulateness. So the stories are really as much as gender and selfhood as they are like coming to language. That means that the weird form that they’re in, is just as much a part of the story as anything.
Did you grow up reading all the animal literature — you know, Watership Down and The Call of the Wild?
The Velveteen Rabbit killed me as a child and I still can’t even look at it or pick it up. I was raised on those books and the adventure novels, like Jack London. Julie of the Wolves was a really big book for me, where she becomes part-wolf or they become part-her. I think many of the characters have fantasies, whether negative or positive, about somehow merging with an animal source.
I’m jealous of a book I haven’t read, a book called Memoirs of a Polar Bear. Without me even picking it up, that book is singing to me. I’m like, I’m a polar bear. Not in all of the cool ways of being a polar bear, but in all of the “lost in the wastes” and “in danger of becoming extinct.” We find that blur in the animal world. It’s a place of wildness or aloneness or possible safety because you’re not like being judged by human beings, but then it’s ultimately fragile and in peril because of where we are in our world right now.
Arndt, Jess: LARGE ANIMALS
(Mar. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Arndt, Jess LARGE ANIMALS Catapult (Adult Fiction) $15.95 5, 9 ISBN: 978-1-936787-48-7
Teetering between the everyday and the surreal, Arndt's debut collection investigates narratives of the queer body.Many of the unnamed narrators in Arndt's stories defy categorization. Even in their own thoughts, they skitter up to the boundaries of language and glance away, unwilling--or unable--to put a name to their identities. "I'm like a...you know," attempts the narrator of "Been a Storm" during her brief roadside encounter buying fishing bait from two backwoods misfits. In the sardonic "Jeff," a chance meeting with Lily Tomlin, who calls Jess by the wrong name, sets off an imaginary battle between Jess and Jeff, the alternative identity she both loathes and longs for. In "Third Arm," the narrator obsesses over the feeling of "carrying around something that wasn't mine," while in "Together," a couple deals with an intestinal parasite taking up room--literal and figurative--in the dregs of their relationship. Nothing in Arndt's worlds is straight. Through the haze of alcohol or drugs or self-loathing hallucinations, characters elbow for space with frightening visions that exist just outside what is real. They morph into animals or become literal representations of figurative language; they flee the instability of inner turmoil only for their existential fears to manifest as larger-than-life visions. Reading Arndt is like walking toward a shimmering desert mirage and being met with a cloud of acid instead of an oasis of cool water. You're not sure what just happened or whether you're the same now that it's over. Maybe you were never there to begin with. A deeply transgressive, riveting shot out of the gate. Arndt is one to watch.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Arndt, Jess: LARGE ANIMALS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485105213&it=r&asid=2e6e09dbcda8401b19851482bfba36f7. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A485105213
Large Animals
264.10 (Mar. 6, 2017): p36.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Large Animals
Jess Arndt. Catapult (PGW, dist.), $15.95 trade paper (144p) ISBN 978-1-936787-48-7
Arndt's short stories are delicious flights of fancy, or obsession, or fertile curiosity--or, more accurately, some beguiling combination of all three. All 12 pieces in her debut collection are written in the first person. It could arguably be the same narrator in each, perhaps the author herself--or not. Often the stories seem to end abruptly, albeit usually meaningfully. "La Gueule de Bois" riffs on a trip to Paris, "the city whose sole monument is a comically upturned syringe." "Jeff' features a brief encounter with Lily Tomlin. "Can You Live with It" juxtaposes musings on Raskolnikov and Crime and Punishment with a kind of pub crawl through various colorful bars. "Moon Colonies" explores tacky, yet strangely beautiful Atlantic City: "In the morning the waves glowed like uranium, a deep sweat coming up off the seafloor." In "Third Arm," which is full of puckish phrases--"the gag of cars," "a pudgy dark had descended"--the narrator feels herself at odds with her rebellious body. And in "Together," the longest and most plot-driven story, a couple contracts a mysterious malady that slowly breaks them apart. This is a playful and provocative collection, full of sly, deft turns of phrase and striking imagery. (May)
Caption: Jess Arndt's first story collection, Large Animals, is playful and provocative (reviewed on this page).
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Large Animals." Publishers Weekly, 6 Mar. 2017, p. 36. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA484973616&it=r&asid=33810d197b5597c99b60a486ec463197. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A484973616
Large Animals
Annie Bostrom
113.17 (May 1, 2017): p57.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Large Animals. By Jess Arndt. May 2017.144p. Catapult, paper, $15.95 (9781936787487).
Fellowship-winner and small-press cofounder Arndt tells stories that resemble handfuls of ribbons--vibrant, overlapping, tangled, seemingly more middles than beginnings and endings. Arndts first-person narrators go unnamed (except bartender Jess in "Jess," mistakenly and significantly called "Jeff' by a famous patron), and their genders are often discussed but generally undefined, making readers comfortable with knowing a little less and understanding that which doesn't conform a little more. In "Together," the narrator and a companion struggle with a parasite: where'd it come from, and will it be gotten rid oft In "Beside Myself," a driver attempts to gauge a hitchhiking situations danger, noting, "There was a female component in every equation that either made things safer or less safe." In the final, title story, dreamtime visits from walruses convince the narrator to insist on overnight privacy. Arndts keen, wild stories are truly original, and readers will hope for more.--Annie Bostrom
Bostrom, Annie
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "Large Animals." Booklist, 1 May 2017, p. 57. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA495035065&it=r&asid=6333f263197e9d2adf77ee2e6b4c7ed8. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495035065
Review: Large Animals by Jess Arndt
May 28, 2017
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Large Animals
by Jess Arndt
Published 2017 by Catapult
$15.95 paperback ISBN 978-1936787487
By Noah Sanders
There is an abundant feeling of being lost in Jess Arndt’s debut short story collection, Large Animals. The characters in the diminutive volume float through various forms of limbo—emotional and physical to be sure, but also geographical. It doesn’t matter if Arndt’s mostly nameless narrators are roaming the streets of New York or festering in a shack in some hellish desert landscape, they drift from situation to situation, attempting to espouse meaning where none may exist. The stories collected in Large Animals are about characters in the midst of transition, in the long endless moment between Point A and Point B where the boundaries of our lives have broken down and possibilities seem—for better or worse—infinite. These are worlds where the normative rules of existence haven’t been broken, just temporarily sidestepped on the way to whatever might be next. The past has occurred, and the future is inevitably barreling toward these characters, but Arndt’s aim is the often times harsh grey space that lives between them. In Large Animals, Arndt explores what it means and what it looks like to be what we as conscience beings always are, in the process of change.
In “Beside Myself” Arndt writes, “Recently I’d been gripped with a phobia about places. It seemed to me that places were inevitably marked by their future potential.” The fear of what comes next or what happens when someone actually arrives wherever they’re supposed to be, weighs heavily on Large Animals. The collection is replete with characters who aimlessly wander and find solace in skidding to a halt just on the edge of actual arrival. The final destination in Large Animals isn’t an achievement, it’s a burden, a far heavier one than the continued pursuit of a hazily defined existence. More than this, Arndt seems to be saying that there is no actual demarcation of moving from one phase to the next, but rather we exist in a state of perpetual transition. Our arbitrary wants and needs propel us forward, but we do so as a chaotic jumble of thoughts and emotions hog-tied together into a constantly shifting bundle we loosely refer to as our identity.
And there is an urge to categorize the stories in Large Animals as primarily about gender transition, but a reader would be amiss to limit their scope. These are stories about characters who may identify as transgender, but Arndt allows them to be vessels for questions about the general act of navigating the multiple identities contained within. Many of the stories in this slender debut feature characters grappling with another entity—subconscious or otherwise—living beneath their skin. In “Together”, her narrator grapples with both a Mexican-born parasite and her own relationship and identity ennui; in “Jeff,” the narrator fantasizes about abusing a thick-necked, sexually aggressive bro she fears she might be. “Jeff” is the crown jewel in this outstanding debut, an unsettlingly funny tale in which Lily Tomlin mistakenly refers to the narrator as Jeff, hurling them into an identity crisis. The brief story captures both the anxieties of transition—physical, yes, but life’s as well—and how they bleed into our relationships, our friendships, the very core of who we are.
There are times in Large Animals where the writing veers towards the experimental, the overly surreal, and the sense of being lost overwhelms. Arndt’s writing is the compass that guides though, the angular prose darkly humorous and disquieting but still steeped in a warm bath of humanity. We stumble along with these characters, grasping for their coattails, their sense of being lost mirroring our own. Arndt is a cartographer of the steadily changing landscapes of existence. Her stories don’t map with the intention of revealing a destination, but rather at illuminating the nebulous territory that precedes it.
The Cosmic Predicament of the Body: ‘Large Animals’ by Jess Arndt
By Ingrid Rojas Contreras
June 4, 2017
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For the first time in my life I paid extra to have legroom in an airplane. I was getting over a cold, but also I wanted to stretch out and fully enjoy Large Animals by Jess Arndt. You see, Jess Arndt is like a queer Kafka who perambulates the surreal container of the body by dealing almost wholly in non-sequiturs.
Many a great story in Large Animals, Arndt’s debut collection, has a strong resemblance to Kafka’s shorter fiction — which, unlike his longer work that deals with bureaucracy, are rather works of gorgeously, painfully strange portraiture in which one is irredeemably ill-made for the world. Arndt is fond of creating a constellation of small desires for her characters that are hilariously specific, and as with Kafka’s shorter work, her stories turn on the heel of making one seemingly insignificant obsession lie in wait and then ambush the biggest questions of selfhood.
However.
There is no question Jess Arndt would have made Kafka blush.
To wit: in Third Arm, an English Professor drives around touching herself while avoiding her love life and pretending to be largely endowed. “I only liked jerking off while driving — otherwise the sincerity of the act completely killed me,” she quips. This unnamed character sees healers at the Authentic Process Healing Institute, and also, she carries a bit of unspecified gore in alcohol in a jar.
‘Perhaps the best resource is to meet everything passively, to make yourself an inert mass, and if you feel that you are being carried away, not to let yourself be lured into taking a single unnecessary step, to stare at others with the eyes of an animal…’ – Franz Kafka, in ‘Resolutions,’ The Shorter Stories.
Arndt’s stories are built like this—in as many compelling directions as possible. But invariably, one direction rises above the others. The bit of gore — described as apricot-sized, mostly made of fat, and with darker globs — finally turns allegorical. As you are busy ticking off options for what the jar could possibly contain (an amygdala? definitely an organ?), Arndt continues breathlessly: “It made me think of a bar I’d been to near Joshua Tree.” It is here where you get an answer of a different kind as the unnamed character recounts what she told the bartender: “Scientists have proven that matter doesn’t exist. You see a foot but when you get past all that skin bone squishy stuff et cetera, nothing’s really there,” which is a subterfuge lobbed at the mysterious jar, but also to the feeling of being mismatched with your body which artfully haunts this entire collection.
Arndt’s imagination is amusing and far-flung. Her characters are amorphous and refusing of a gender binary, and the construct of each story is a delight. In Together, two lovers share an STD, in Jeff a misheard name introduction (Jess to Jeff) drives a low-key identity crisis. In the title story, Large Animals, a man who is perceived to be a lesbian whiles away his time in the desert where Walruses seemingly materialize by his bed at night. (Only one story in this collection was a miss for me, Shadow of an Ape, which details the rather confusing ordeal of a man in 1860’s San Francisco gold rush.)
There are some eerily stunning sentences in this collection, nonetheless, foremost of all in Moon Colonies, the opening story where a threesome haunt the Vegas strip chasing after myriad temporary playthings:
In the morning the waves glowed like uranium, a deep sweat coming up off the seafloor. It was beautiful but it was nerve-racking too, being that close to the future.
The great unresolved discomfort of perception and body punctuates the landscape in all the stories in Large Animals, and each character finds themselves at the mercy of a conniving version of the self that is overpowering, stacks the deck, and ruins the possibility of what is precisely most desired. In this sense, Large Animals is a collection of humanity reaching toward what might be graspable but remains painfully out of reach. At one point, Arndt writes:
Then it’s spring break. I go on a wine tour. We stare into the big sweaty vats of red. “Wine fermentation,” the expert says, “happens when all of the individual grapes explode against the walls of their bodies.” How nice, I think, for them.
This is a delightful read, perfect for the burgeoning summer, where the fact of the body is always at odds with the life of the mind.