Interview: Marie Kazalia
Marie Kazalia is an artist, creative writer, author and artist agent. She is a contributing writer for Technorati News, Yahoo!, and the VASA project blog, writing and publishing numerous articles on artists. Marie's first book of creative writing was published in 1999 and is now out of print, with collectors copies still making the rounds. She has had several other titles published by a variety of small press publishing houses.
TCJWW: When did you begin writing, Marie?
Kazalia: I read a lot as a child, and on my own, felt the desire to write and then wrote my first piece of creative fiction at around age 9 or 10. As an adult, I only allowed myself to begin to write seriously once I made plans to leave the U.S. to live as an expatriate in Asia. The writing came once I allowed it to. In Japan, I found myself writing long journal entries that seemed to be of substance beyond daily entries. My writing expanded further into short stories and poetry during the year I spent in India. Then, on to Hong Kong where I lived for two years and wrote a novel about the city and another about my experiences in India based on my journal writings and the poetry and short stories I’d written during my year there.
As a child, I spent a lot of time in libraries and at home with books. ( I also spent every Saturday, from age 7/8 up into my teenage years, inside the Toledo Museum of Art looking at art and in kid's art classes in basement classrooms there.) I don’t know at what age I read Grimm’s Fairy Tales and the short stories of Edgar Allen Poe, but many of those stories were important to me. I submerged myself in books to escape my family life. I’d finish one book in 2 or 3 days and immediately start another. I have a clear and very positive recollection of sitting on my bed, at around age 9 or 10, feeling the urge to write my own stories, my own sentences and descriptions like in the books I read, only about my life. I did try. I sat on my bed and with pen and paper wrote a fictionalized account of my child-self walking to school kicking through autumn leaves on a sidewalk, describing my pleated wool skirt, shoes, the temperature of the air—the whole thing, I thought it quite beautiful. But then I felt that big dilemma—what do I reveal? Do I tell my inner thoughts? What would happen if I did? No one in my life did, not really, as I recall. Everyone led such secretive internal lives. I let a girl my own age read my first written piece. She said it was good. That brought another difficult question. Who was I writing for? When older, as a teenager in high school, I routinely achieved perfect scores on my papers.
One year, the prim 20-something English teacher gave our class the assignment to write a paper on someone we admired and to quote that person. I found some Janis Joplin magazine interviews and chose to write about her life, quoting her—expletives not deleted. (Apparently Janis used the word “fuck” quite a lot). I sincerely thought that I had to be honest about Janis. Her profanity was necessary for her story to make sense. I thought about that and came to the only possible decision—I couldn’t edit the profanity out of her quotes. My presumed lack of culpability in using the f-word in my paper, my lack of acknowledgement of social etiquette for a girl my age by matter-of-factly using that word, caused a dilemma for the English teacher. But it was a perfect paper so she had to grade accordingly. She never said a word to me about it—perhaps I frightened her—as I watched her whisper to another teacher and their shocked expressions. (Later, I realized that I’d found a loophole—a way to use the word fuck at school.) I assumed I’d outgrow those issues, but they remained with me and my writing. Those were just the first instances I’d had to deal with them. The same sort of things continued into adulthood. The use of certain words to describe the hard lives I observed in the San Francisco Tenderloin, and then reading those words at bookstores and other venues brought those same sort of reactions.
TCJWW: What were your first published stories about?
Kazalia: My first published story was about a car trip in tropical South India. It was an old car, no air conditioning, owned by an Indian man everyone called The Director. Four men sat up-front—the Director, two Indian bank executives, and the Director’s chauffeur. All the women sat in back—me, the only American in the car (wearing black silk pants and a black silk blouse) packed side-by-side with some of the Director’s many secretaries (who wore saris and wedding rings on their toes), one had her young son with her. It was unbearably hot and I suffered in the tropical heat more than the others. We stopped to buy coconuts to drink. The Director had the bankers along to look at properties he was considering buying with a bank loan. We traveled slowly over gravel roads for a long time to get to a famous beach temple on the Bay of Bengal. At the beach, Indian men wearing only dotis swarmed me trying to sell me carved stone figures of gods. One offered me a cast bronze sculpture of the Shiva Nataraja (aka The Dancing Shiva) which has much symbolism associated with it. I think the story was about 50 pages long. It placed 3rd in a writing competition and won a cash prize and published. After that, I submitted a lot of my writing to many small press publications. Much of what I sent out appeared in limited edition 'zines and literary journals.
Another short story I sent out had the title Stunned Coyote Raygun Romance, and came from my experiences working a temp job in an office of scientists who had government weapons contracts. An editor of one publication that I submitted the story to rejected it, but lifted my title and used it on one of his own short stories published in an e-zine. My title had nothing to do with the subject matter of his story. Apparently he thought that was artsy to have a title that didn’t match the story in any way. But that’s how I found out that titles cannot be copyrighted. He took my title legally, but ethically, no. Some other publication did accept and publish my story Stunned Coyote Raygun Romance. I also have stories in what might be considered dark or horror genre publications. But I prefer the literary. I have a closet full of small press publications containing my writing. I’m kind of hoping someone will come along and put it all into a book one day, before I accidentally burn the house down and it’s all gone.
TCJWW: Who are some of your favorite authors?
Kazalia: Probably no one would guess that for years I preferred to read Victorian era novels. Charles Dickens started with me early because I had an elementary school teacher who read a chapter or two of Dickens to our class every day. I guess I really got stuck in that era—George Eliot, Henry James, Kate Chopin, Thomas Hardy, Thackeray, Trollope, Dostoyevsky, and the published letters of Vincent Van Gogh. Earlier writings: the Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber, early Melville, Stendhal, Defoe. Later writers: Colette, Proust, D. H Lawrence, Anais Nin, Bataille, Jean Genet, Henry Miller. From the 1960s Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, and from the 1970’s the novel Almost Transparent Blue by Japanese novelist Ryu Murakami—there are so many— I probably left out someone important. Of course Bukowski brought a huge freedom to written words and I read all of his books published while he had his hand in them, but I stopped reading the posthumous collections.
TCJWW: Do you consider your writing to be transgressive?
Kazalia: I do recognize that I am transgressive in my writing. Even my short story about the car trip in South India is transgressive in that a white woman travels alone in a car full of Indians and exhibits even more unconventional behaviors along the way. The transgressive does interest me, as well as the authentic. I have faith that the authentic exists out there somewhere. That it’s possible to find in a human world where nothing is what it seems.
The Transgressive, as a genre of writing, and in film, and in the visual arts, has been identified within the past couple of decades. And in identifying my own writing as Transgressive there is also the implication that my intention is to shock. There is something to that. There is an aspect of that within me, my underlying motivation, and in my use of shock as a device to reveal.
More than ten years ago, my writing was called Confessional. But that designation is incorrect. Confessional implies a dark underlying motivation, when in fact, as a writer, I am transparent. Perhaps that sort of transparency is difficult to understand or accept. When I write I bring things to light. And yes, I have revealed things that others prefer remain hidden.
In some of my writing I’ve contrasted cultures—an unconventional American woman in India, an unconventional American woman in China, conventional life roles verses unconventional behavior, the lives of the rich verses the lives of the poor, encountering drug addicts and the mentally ill, dealing with the double-standards of male freedoms verses restrictions on females. But, also, I am not a documentarian. I fictionalize in my writing and I use metaphor. Most do not recognize my metaphor. For instance, I personally see the title of my book of poetry Erratic Sleep In A Cold Hotel as a metaphor for the life I live each day. While no reviewer, or any other writer I’ve known, has ever recognized it as such.
TCJWW: What makes you wish to write?
Kazalia: My writing and motivation to write comes from within. Lines and sentences form in my head and haunt me until I get them down. If I ignore a line it will persistently return until I give in and write it down. One line forms in my head, then another. More come. I write to get things out of my head. I work on my writing in my sleep. With my eyes closed I see words and sentences form in my dreams. I wake in the morning with lines at the front of my thoughts and immediately need to write them out.
TCJWW: How do you keep the reader interested in what you are writing?
Kazalia: I ignore my feelings. Distance myself and write the words that need to be written to tell the story.
Since the1990’s I’ve published online quite a bit, as well as in small press print publications. Right now, I’m working on getting some of my unpublished short stories online so they can be read on iPhones and iPad, etc. I’m active on social media and share links to my writing regularly in Tweets, on Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIN, Tumblr. I write articles for a couple of online art magazines. I’ve also recently began editing my very lengthy India novel. I plan to make my India e-novel available for sale online. I already have cover art for it, but it’s going to take months to finish. So I may find ways to e-publish portions of the story as I go.
TCJWW: What kind of reaction do you receive about your writing from the press and readers?
Kazalia: Well, I only ever hear from those who like my writing. The Transgressive genre, in all media, seems to be growing. My perception is that it all went deeper underground after 9/11 and now it’s re-emerging stronger than ever. The negative stuff has only come from people of past generations, who weren’t judging my writing, but me, based on values I’ve never known. And that’s how I took it.
In 2011, editors Janie Hextall and Barbara McNaught of Lautus Press, UK, tracked me down for permission to include one of my poems in their (now sold out) anthology, Washing Lines. And recently, again, for permission to include my poem in their 2015 expanded, reprint version of the anthology, with a planned print run of between 1,000 and 2,000 copies. Amazing that the first edition sold out, at the price of ninety-three GB Pounds per copy on Amazon.
TCJWW: Can you give us a look into your next book?
Kazalia: Working on putting together two short stories into e-book form—since my short stories tend to be 25-50 pages in length, two together will make a book. Though very different, the two relate in that they both occur while traveling on remote roads. The first is titled "Hitchhiker." It starts with a dream that is finally experienced, detail by detail, in an unexpected place. The 2nd story, "The Nameless," is set in Mexico, where the protagonist experiences some intense mystical/spiritual experiences walking along a remote, newly grated road through a mountain forest and arriving at a newly excavated ancient pyramid.
I’m also working on my 500 page novel manuscript, as yet untitled, about India. Plus, I have hundreds of pages of related materials—notes, journals, etc. I’ve read portions of my rough draft India MS at public readings and have received some positive responses—here is a short scene lifted from part of it:
(Excerpt: flooded street rain in Madras)
End of the day—I stood on the roof-covered elevated walkway looking down on the dirt road at the crazy Indian traffic. Street vendors under the Sleeping Tree—their framed images of gods and goddesses hanging on the tree trunk. I’d watch the movement each evening amid the noise and dust. The slowly closing finger leaves of the Sleeping Tree folding, pulling up arm-like branches in a self-hug. Then I heard drums and chanting, loud, coming closer— the funeral procession appeared below—passing on the way to the cremation grounds. Orange cloth that covered the body strewn with flowers—eyes closed face exposed—on a stretcher held high above the heads of the singers, shouting, dancers all around drumming though the dusty streets.
Then suddenly, rain. Amazing. The first I’d seen in tropical South India—pouring rain—I held my hand out--so fabulous and cooling. Yet the crazy Indian traffic continued, slowing a little. More and more umbrellas opened—the dusty black ones ladies in saris carried to protect themselves from the sun-- now washed with rain. The quick pace of walkers underneath the umbrellas barely changed, though now they waded through ankle deep water. The dusty street quickly filling with muddy water—the wheeled traffic slowed—it had to—now the water must have been two feet deep. The wheels of bicycles and pedal rickshaw—half seen—showed the depth. But still they pedaled, streaming trails behind them. Shirt backs, once wet with perspiration, now soaked with pure clean rain.
The Director’s servant opened one side the antique wood door so the Director could step out of his office. He emerged smiling. “Come. We will go. I must buy a fish,” he told me.
His chauffeur drove slowly through the flooded streets, rain pouring down the car windows, making seeing out and driving difficult. On a market street near the beach he pulled up close to a fish vendor’s stall. Some Tamil chatter as the vendor handed the Director a fish through the rolled down car window. The Director examining the fish held in his hands-- turning it over and over—obviously pleased and enjoying the experience. He turned to me excited—“life is an adventure,” he said, “if you want to buy a fish, you buy a fish! Rain, sun, or whatever!” I laughed. I understood what he meant and felt—jubilance in the air on this now cool evening drive in the rain through the streets of Madras.
Photo credits:
Author photo courtesy of about.me
