Renowned microfiction author Joseph Young put out his new flash fiction collection The Thing I Was Trying to Tell You in June, and the collaborative children’s book Rocks: What Are They Doing also came out in June by artists Christine Sajecki and Michael Mäke. They got together for an amusing and enlightening conversation about their books, their process, and what art means to them.

Young: Your book, Rocks: What Are They Doing?, tells us “The language of the inanimate is different than ours so try to get into the mind state of a thing that doesn’t move.” When did you start listening to rocks?

Sajecki: Well, I’ve always been an observer of rocks, mostly through sight, smell, touch, and taste, but actually stopping to listen to them is a much more recent phenomenon. Probably it was just before we started writing this book, though it may have been just after. What would you say, Mike? 

Mäke: Sajecki told me once that she used to lick rocks, ever and always the curious scientist.  

Sajecki: It’s true, it really wakes up all the colors and contrast when you lick a rock! And though I’ve never died or gotten incurably ill from doing so, I feel that I should maybe not recommend this practice until going through full psychogeologist certification and inoculation. Maybe one could carry a spritz bottle. But if you want a rock to sing like a bird, get it wet. (In fact there’s a story about this very phenomenon in Joe’s book! The Artist (A Fiction))

Young: Why did you want to give rocks a say so? 

Sajecki: Really, it seems only fair at this point. 

Young: Could you, and would you, write a book about the minds of bottle caps? Dandelion milk?

Sajecki: Bottle caps! They’d get us thrown right out of the place; those guys can’t keep it family friendly for shit. But dandelion milk sounds like it could be interesting to paint with. We’ll get back to you. I will tell you, however, that I originally fell for Mike when I read his book about the minds and lives of lemons. 

Sajecki: In a funny coincidence, you guys are both fond of applying phrases, words, and stories to unconventional objects and placing them in the world in unexpected contexts: one-off publishing on hand towels, ceilings, cereal boxes, expired land use signs, fences of public tennis courts, to name a few and combine your experiences. Does it feel more or less subversive or interesting to have your writing in such an ordinary object as a book of paper?

Young: For a while there, there was little less interesting to me than putting words between the covers of a book. It’s hard for me to remember what that felt like but the feeling was persistent. If words weren’t glued to a chunk of two-by-four or transferred onto a hammered-together thing and abandoned beneath a railroad bridge, I wasn’t about it. It wasn’t a subversive thing (I don’t think), it just seemed…immaterial—literally. Disembodied. Wherever that persistence went, words on a page feel pretty interesting now. When I look at my bookshelf now I sometimes think, well there’s a thousand years of consciousness.

Mäke: I love the imagined crates with words clinging! I remember the magic of your old apartment and phrases transferred to every imaginable surface. There IS something special about dropping your work out in public. It makes me empathise with taggers. It’s important to come back later and see that you exist.  

Mäke: Joe! How do your poems get written? It’s such a pleasure reading through the moments of your new collection. 

Young: First off, and I don’t mean this facetiously at all, I really like it when someone calls what I call my stories poems. Or even when someone calls them “bro, how can you call those things stories?” Many people don’t, but I like the naming conventions of genre, even as they get defiantly mixed up.

My stuff usually gets written when I stop thinking for a moment and an image, or setting, person, sentence comes in. Then I follow that like caulking a bathtub, pushing the bead out in front just enough to know I’m heading toward something. Still, it’s a rare story where I don’t say to myself, How’s this ever possibly going to work out? Fortunately, brains are keen for making patterns.

Mäke: I love that image and the trust it takes to know it’s going somewhere. I think that’s so lovely. I put up these little word phrases around town and once someone told me they love my poems and it made me feel like the skunk telling Bambi “you can call me flower if you want to.” It was sweet. 

Sajecki: Aw. that’s darling. Blushing baby skunks. Joe, I have witnessed usually calm, kind people get really steamed about your writing, poems vs. stories, like MAD about it, ha, of all things. (I’ve definitely been one of those people but folks really get lit up about it and start shit with me!) It’s funny and perfect that you’re cool either way. 

Sajecki: It’s funny that I do not think of your stories as poems, but I do think of you as a poet. Like, you’re a poet but a witch cast a spell on you that you have to write stories instead. But the trick is on her because you love to write stories. How do you like that? 

Young: I’m familiar with that. Get it?

But sure, I like it. Since if I had to be a poet, I don’t know if I would have ever written too much. I can’t/don’t really want to write poetry. But if I’m a poem person, but hiding out like, turned into a caudate, then I can go happily on my way.

Young: Hey, Mike, can you tell us about Seattle and how your words/art fits into it? I was there the once and it was so shining and hot and the other time it snowed. What are a couple of your projects? Public and otherwise. 

Sajecki: Oh, yes, please, Mike.

Mäke: I started putting up posters maybe 7 years ago. Little stories and threads. A little bit before the pandemic I started taking over graffitied land use signs. That’s when a really nice period began where I would meet people while I was painting and ask them if they wanted to work on a sign with me. That’s my favorite. Taking turns. Being surprised. Responding and adding. There are maybe 6 active signs right now but only 3 turn regularly. I wish they could turn every day. Like the city is breathing. It would take a lot of people though. I live in West Seattle which is a quiet peninsula neighborhood. Blue collar but changing rapidly. Like a lot of other places it has everything you need to really cook but it’s hard to scale to the level it wants.

Young: Lemons, rocks, the object on the cover of my book, there’s some shape sensitivity going on there.

Mäke: Please tell me about lemons for you. It’s a shape and idea I always return to but i’m not really sure why.

Young: Oh, lemons. There’s certainly the compact potency there—not just the sour but the deep rind, the rosy carpels, fitting into the hand. The slimiest seeds I can think of.

Sajecki: It all comes back to boobs, imho. 

Mäke: Lemons are certainly about boobs for me. Nurture and sex and comfort and the whole host of our language for what beautiful things can be made out of the difficulty of being conscious. 

Mäke: Sajecki! Even though you spend your days making images in wax, you have always loved words. I’m curious about the ebb and flow of that relationship. 

Sajecki: Yes! I grew up pretty shy and would freeze up often when spoken words were expected. Visual art became my outlet for expression but I always loved to read, and appreciated books and poetry for how they crack it all open, transcend, transport. I was tempted for a bit in art school to abandon painting and go study writing instead. I am still tempted by that sometimes. But at the same time, I’ve always tried to find places where words and images meet, by collaborating with the likes of you two, the poet Shane McCrae and a few others, and now children’s books! Childrens’ books, picture books, are glorious places where words and images live together in total freak out harmonious joy. 

Sajecki: I’m noticing a more than usual amount of sea lions (Joe). 

Young: Oh, you’re right! You caught my brain doing something I didn’t realize. Living in San Francisco, sea lions were part of the landscape: Golden Gate Park, sea lions, blankets spread out on the sidewalk to sell yellowed copies of The Merchant of Venice. I have noticed how many people watching people work on laptops occupy these stories. 

Young: When you read Rocks to kids, or kids read Rocks to themselves, what happens to them? What are their reactions? Kids are so literal. Kids are psychedelic. Kids are language factories. Which page from Rocks do they like in an extra way? 

Sajecki: The main kid I’ve seen firsthand experience the book is my own. The page that says “this rock enjoys snuggling” and then upside down it says the same thing…. A grown-up experienced reader looks at the page and knows what all the words say, nearly instantly. But my son, a brand-new reader, read the top words carefully one by one, and then flipped the book over and again read each word, and only at the very end did he chuckle. That was really great to see. And then he counted the skips for the rock that skipped 11 times, and told me there were only 4 skips on the page. Dang it! SO literal.  

Sajecki: Mike and Joe! What is one kids book you read as a kid that sticks with you. OR, more generally, what’s your favorite kids book? 

Young: As a kid, The Old Man and the Tiger. Even though I thought the fox was such a traitor. Why’d he have to do the tiger like that? As an adult, Bruno Munari’s Zoo. The page, “The birds are infinite,” wrecks me.

Sajecki: Ok, we talked about The Old Man and The Tiger and you shared your terrific essay on it (link to Joe’s essay). Munari! Munari changed my life. Mike, how about you?

Mäke: Favorite kids’ book? Hmm. The Hat by Tomi Ungerer comes to mind when reading to my son. I am the third of four kids and I have such nice memories of being cuddled up on the couch and all being read to. I loved the boxcar children series. 

Young: Your book began its life as a saddle stitch item printed in monochrome on what looked like brown paper bags (or craft paper). In fact, when Adam first said he was publishing Rocks I envisioned exactly the same (and was very happy with the thought). When and how did it become the book it is now (about which I’m also v happy)?

Sajecki: Well, first, we WERE just going to do kind of the same, just not by our broke selves at FedEx all day. But Adam said that there wasn’t really a difference in cost between full color and black and white in the real publishing world, so I said I’d give painting the rocks a shot, but that if it came out badly or wasn’t fun, we’d go back to the b/w version (using photos we took of rocks and wintergreen transferring them in black and white onto bristol board and scanning them). Turns out it was great fun to paint the rocks, but it was still going to be a humble floppy paper thing. Then what happened, Mike, did we all just get carried away? Ha. We just got carried away, I think. Every next thing was so pretty and so easily possible. 

Young: Hey, Christine, can you think of a joke about wintergreen oil?

Sajecki: Ummm…ok, I got one. Why do bus drivers roll their eyes when wintergreen oil gets on? Because it always asks to transfer. 

Young: Thoroughly exceeds my expectations: 10/10.

Sajecki: Haha. Ten whats. 

Mäke: Ha! I pictured the driver and it made me laugh out loud. 

Mäke: Joe! If you were to pick a poem/short story that seems to want to be a kids book, which would it be?

Joe: If we’re talking someone else’s thing, then A TRUE ACCOUNT OF TALKING TO THE SUN AT FIRE ISLAND by Frank O’Hara comes  to mind. It has pretty much all the things a kids’ book usually wants to have: a boisterous/wise character (the sun), funniness, an exhortation to imagination (and being your own self), vivacity. And it also has the thing I appreciate in a good kids’ book: a bit of darkness behind the bright. “Darkly he rose,” Frank tells us. Also, “They’re calling you too.” That’s a haunted, shivery feeling for me.

Mäke: Sajecki! Could you pick a painting that wants to wander into a story to be read on a lap?

Sajecki: Oh definitely the garbage nun. She started out as a kids book idea, but then made it into my encaustic lexicon, and I’m still working on getting her back to the shape of a kids book character. A big dream/theme in my work over the past few years has been garbage and wrecks, disasters, and who cleans it all up. That’s a good story at any age.

Mäke: Joe! Why do you think your mother was in love with batman? Sajecki! Do you remember your mom being in love with anyone? I can only remember my mom thinking Tom Selleck was very handsome.

Joe: Well, I’m not sure this story is about MY mom, even as much as the title (and my name being in the story) might suggest. I don’t think my mom thought too much about Batman one way or the other, though I could be wrong.

Sajecki: My mom had a thing for Paul Newman, which it turns out is genetic. I inherited her unrealizable crush and her inflatable Paul Newman black and white throw pillow. 

Young: I work at a bunch of public schools and there are motivational/inspirational sayings postered everywhere. Not just the classrooms and hallways where the kids can read them, but teachers’ offices, the breakroom, everywhere. Mike and Sajecki, if you wanted to be motivated, which song would you play for your grandmother? Why?

Sajecki: Motivated for what? Why is my grandmother here. The Italian one or the Polish one. Does she need to get motivated too, or am I getting myself pumped up for something byyyy my grandmother’s dancing? Are magic spells involved? There are way more questions than answers. The answer is “The Beer Barrel Polka.” 

Mäke: Hmmm. My grandma Helen loved “Blueberry Hill.” That would get her on the dance floor. I picture my grandma Glenna being introduced and a sporting event and coming out in her walker to emenem’s “lose yourself” pumped!

Young: Do you (Christine or Mike) have a favorite story/artwork that you like because of the burn to it? Like, it does something you don’t want it to do and that’s good?

Sajecki: I mean, everything Flannery O’Connor ever wrote, for one. I’d be reading like “nooo, Flannery, don’t!!! Oh, she did it. Oh, noooo.” But then I read Carson McCullers and I’m like “noooo, Carson, don’t!! Wait, what? They got home fine?? Hm.”

Sajecki: Hey speaking of, it was a fun surprise to run into her in the middle of your book. “Mystery and Manners,” you packed an outstanding amount of Flannery nerd-whistles into one story! Can you speak of any dialogue you were having in your head with Ms O’Connor while you were writing that one? 

Joe: I’m pretty much always having a dialogue with her in my head. A thousand things while I’m walking around will remind me of something she’s written. So, at some point it must have seemed advisable to put a bunch into a story. Specifically though I probably asked her about plastic legs.  

 

 

Image: Eugenio Mazzone/Unsplash

Follow Vol. 1 Brooklyn on Twitter, Facebook, and sign up for our mailing list.