What was the point of origin for “I Don’t Like Georgia Anymore”?
I was imagining a fellow on death row in Georgia just hours prior to his execution—a neglected fellow in his youth, like a lot of hardened criminals, thinking about his boyhood and his mother. I suppose that’s what a lot of guys on death row think about before the needle slides in. For a memory-work like this, details matter; as such, the emphases in the work pertain to certain scenes in the present and the past. He’s just a young guy, after all, raised in the 1980s like me. I guess I feel an affinity with him in the sense that thinking about the past can bring about an onslaught of strange and specific memories. Our mothers and fathers are always strange; they belong to other worlds, but still interact with us.
A childlike lens of maternal comfort coincides with a more adult perspective on the ‘mother’ character in your story; how did you approach the construction of this character?
The mother’s made by the clothes she wears and the pills she swallows, and both are designed to distance her from so-called normal life. She’s had dalliances with men and episodes of focus, but her character is considerably more conflicted than the speaker of the work. She tried at dinner, tried at life, sought Jesus a few times, but she simply couldn’t make it work. A little Southern Comfort in the afternoon for her was not enough; she was forced to turn elsewhere to feel good. She flailed on the edges. The speaker just went bad. Your focus on her, therefore, makes sense—she’s the more dynamic figure of the two.
How have your experiences living in Turkey and teaching American culture and literature influenced the stories that you tell?
I should answer this question in terms of language and the creative process. Because I don’t speak Turkish (very well), I live a great deal in the interior, inside my mind, in the English language. The newness I’ve experienced here in Turkey (a continuum that includes all aspects of culture, geography, politics, and social and academic life) is always in the process of being translated (transformed) back into English. To put it more directly, I “live” during the day—be it at the university where I work, socializing, shopping etc.) and “re-live” in the evening when I sit down to write. My distance from the United States probably allows me to see American life and culture differently than someone who actually lives there, as well. What’s the old saying? To understand a place, you have to get away from it. It’s been a blessing for my own work to live here—that dynamic difference in language and culture always spinning through me and around me. If I lived in Kansas City or Cincinnati (without that dynamic difference), I actually have no idea what my creative process would look like.
What upcoming projects or publications are we able to look forward to from you?
My second collection of poems, titled The Recreateds, will be published by The Nasiona Press later this year. The poems therein focus on individual biographies rendered imaginatively.
Interviewed by Munira Tabassum Ahmed
Hyades Magazine 