2009 Stranger Literary Genius Stacey Levine

It is not an easy thing to interview
Stacey Levine. Like her fiction, Levine requires your full
concentration and effort to uncover the great worth hidden within. Her
personal stories have a halting gait—this is a writer who titled
a novel after a character whose name, Dra—, is cut short by a
pause—as though she’s afraid to reveal too much.

But Levine is a gracious hostess. The bookshelves in her apartment
have a snaggletoothed charm, with books going every which way, and the
subtle lines in the carpet reveal that she’s recently vacuumed. She’s
made tea and chicken-salad sandwiches, cutting the food into tiny
little triangles. “I’ve noticed when you’re making soup and you’re
chopping vegetables,” she says, carving the sandwiches into sharp
points, “and you make things really small, when you chop them into tiny
little pieces, it makes them taste better.” She wants to make sure I’m
comfortable, but she clearly isn’t. When I turn on the audio recorder,
she moans.

Jokingly, I ask her the most hackneyed question I can think of:
Where do you get your ideas? “It’s personal,” she says, and we sit in
uncomfortable silence for a minute. I can’t tell if she’s joking. Throughout the afternoon, Levine makes tiny attacks against the
tape recorder. She tosses a paper plate toward me, and it smacks into
the device. She turns on the radio. She wanders around her apartment,
trying to pull her voice away from the vacuum created by the tiny holes
of the microphone. The recorder’s red “on” light stops her midsentence.
“I forgot I was being recorded!” she says and clams up, unable to
finish her thought. She does this twice.

Silence and interruptions are themes in her career. Over the past 15
years, she has built a small but thoughtful body of work including two
novels, two collections of short stories, a play, a radio script, a
puppet opera, and a split 7-inch she recorded with Peter Toliver for
Kill Rock Stars as the second volume of their Wordcore series
(batting cleanup for Kathleen Hannah). But over half of Levine’s
published fiction has disappeared from bookstore shelves.

One of Levine’s novels, Frances Johnson, was published by
the ill-fated Clear Cut Press, which collapsed under its own weight
soon after being born three years ago. Dra— was
published by the dearly departed Sun & Moon Press, along with
My Horse and Other Stories, Levine’s debut collection that won
the PEN West fiction prize in 1994. Her most recent collection of short
stories, The Girl with Brown Fur, dangled for nine months in a
strange, half-published limbo as she waited in vain for its publisher,
MacAdam/Cage, to dig itself out of a dark financial pit. Last week, she
severed ties with MacAdam/Cage, and “another, more conventional indie
press on the East Coast” has expressed interest in republishing it (in
a way, republishing it for the first time) sometime next year. In the
interim, a bootleg edition of The Girl with Brown Fur is
available from Matthew Stadler’s Publication Studio in independent
bookstores. Green Integer press will republish Dra— in
the next few months, making it the only officially published Stacey
Levine book available for the next year or so.

Levine’s writing is elusive in more ways than one. It doesn’t lend
itself to casual reading and is incompatible with
multitasking—snacking, for instance—or the distraction of a
nearby television or radio. Her sentences are careful and beautiful,
and the narratives answer only to their own internal logic.

In her story “Small,” a tiny man puts enormous objects, like logs
and furniture, inside himself. “He put so much inside: oh how he kept
pushing it in.” A “little mother” cares for the small man. He makes
piles of things to go inside him, and she inspects them to make sure
they are safe. The small man becomes sick and sore with “trouble” after
putting too much inside himself. Soon after the “little mother” helps
him feel better, he “ruins” her with a brick and becomes a judge. The
story ends with a sentence dangling above a chasm of white space: “I
met him about that time.”

Much of her work sounds like something that has been translated into
English from another language, with odd words and phrases. On one page,
chosen at random from Brown Fur, the narrator references a
girl’s “pencilly bones, her underweight, her underbuilt nose” and how
“she was eating at an apple, leaving weird, cubic dental imprints in
its core.” The strange rhythms of the sentence—the “underweight”
without any noun to moor it, making the modifier its own subject, the
unnecessary but transformative “at” after “eating”—sound like
something new, the alien cadences of someone who doesn’t accept the
received wisdom of how language is supposed to sound.

Levine’s sense of colloquial, everyday language has a squirming dark
side. “I get creeped out by men who have women’s first names as last
names,” she says. “It’s just really disgusting to me. I used to go
ballistic” when confronted by those names. She based a recent story,
“The Danas,” on this revulsion. It’s about Mike and Tina Dana, a
married couple who make their eldest children mate to provide them with
grandchildren. Levine says some of her students at Seattle Central
Community College were displeased with the incest, which puzzled her.
“It’s not incest, exactly. It’s an exaggeration. It’s a humorous way to
show how people do power on each other.”

Levine is also fascinated by medical narratives and physical
frailty. Illnesses and ailments plague her fiction like a particularly
mean book of the Bible. She has a cat named Mars with an inner-ear
infection that causes him to stagger about her apartment like a drunken
sailor. When I compliment a fish in her aquarium, Levine says: “See his
stomach? He has a huge tumor.” All the other fish have died, she adds.
For about a month in the early ’90s, Levine wore a bike helmet
everywhere she went. People assumed she was afraid of brain injury. “I
was a weird girl,” she says, shaking her head. Levine worked at an
emergency room as an admissions clerk for a few years. “There’s a lot
of drama going on in an ER. People are always crying. They often get
better really soon, but it’s a big scene.”

When I point out the paternal dynamic between doctors and patients,
that medical relationships are generally people “doing power on each
other,” Levine lights up: “I really want you to understand. I don’t
know if I can make you understand. I feel like I may have made you
understand a little more. It’s hard to communicate an inner world.”

Why does she couch her stories in code? “Because it wouldn’t mean
anything to say outright: ‘He was feeling really anxious because he had
always been criticized by his father,'” she says. “But it does mean
something for me to tell how that would feel, to try to share that
experience in a new way.”

Levine’s stories hum with the power of weird old fairy tales that
haven’t been dulled by years of retelling, with their endlessly long
hospital tunnels and subbasements populated by people who have been
crushed into sad submission, where a young man named Milk Boy (because
“he was just like milk: thin, rushing everywhere, tinged with blue”)
wants to be strong and brave but realizes it would be easier to
disappear, and a man named Pat Smash murders a family of unwanted house
guests who just wouldn’t leave.

She handles language with a poet’s inventiveness and precision. In
an age when authors are praised for turning complex ideas into
something simple and glossy, Levine hides the real beauty of her
stories beneath gnarled folds of gorgeous, sometimes willfully obtuse
language. Half the pleasure is earned from investing time and energy in
the reading, and the other half is in discovering the humanity that was
waiting there all along, dying to be discovered.