Lee Ann Roripaugh (she/they) is a biracial Nisei and the author of five volumes of poetry, most recently tsunami vs. the fukushima 50 (Milkweed Editions, 2019), which was named a “Best Book of 2019” by the New York Public Library, selected as a poetry Finalist in the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards, cited as a Society of Midland Authors 2020 Honoree in Poetry, and was named one of the “50 Must-Read Poetry Collections in 2019” by Book Riot. Her collection of fiction, Reveal Codes, was selected as winner of the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award and published by Moon City Press in late 2023, and their chapbook, #stringofbeads, a winner in the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition, was released from Diode Press in 2023. She was named winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry/Prose for 2004, and a 1998 winner of the National Poetry Series. The South Dakota State Poet Laureate from 2015-2019, Roripaugh is a Professor of English at the University of South Dakota, where they serve as Editor-in-Chief of South Dakota Review.
Curtis Smith: Congratulations on Reveal Codes and on winning the Moon City Short Fiction Award. I really enjoyed the stories. I’ve read a number of your poetry collections—but this is the first time I’ve read your fiction. Was fiction always part of your writing world—or did it follow poetry? And if so, how did you start writing fiction? How different is the process for you?
Lee Ann Roripaugh: I’ve always been an avid reader of fiction and have also always been interested in writing fiction. However, I instinctively gravitated more toward poetry early on. Because my first publications and professional successes were in poetry, I was initially tracked into poetry. I took some courses in fiction writing in grad school, though, and continued to write fiction, although at a slower pace. That said, I’ve always felt genres are completely arbitrary and Eurocentric—a reflection of both capitalism and empire’s need to categorize and commodify. I also write creative nonfiction, and I’m very interested in the fluid shape-shifting of hybrid/mixed-genre work as well, so for me, the question is less about a difference in genre processes, but more about finding the right, or most interesting, structural frame within which to set content. Or to discover what a certain frame might potentially illuminate or discover with respect to content. In many respects, the creative process is quite similar for me across genres. I find myself attracted to shiny things. Something glimmers for me: an image, an idea, a detail, a snippet of dialogue, a memory, a line or a phrase. I’ll take note of it, and over time these small notes with begin to magnetically call to one another associationally and so I will place them in proximity to one another until a piece begins to take on shape and substance. Then, eventually, as a specific project or manuscript begins to materialize, I begin to brainstorm and write down more project-specific notes and ideas, and when the small notes arrive, I can oftentimes easily see how they can be channeled into one manuscript or another. For me, it’s about seeing associations, and patterns. It’s a process that’s simultaneously random, organic, improvisational, and aleatoric, as well as meticulous and precise.
CS: We know each other through your work at South Dakota Review. SDR has long been one of my favorite journals. How has the literary journal world changed over the course of your career? How do you view the role of journals like SDR in the current literary landscape?
LAR: Thank you for the kind words about South Dakota Review! I think the literary journal world has changed significantly over the course of my career, largely due to the richly exciting influx of online literary journals, and the connected rise of publishing possibilities for visual, graphic, interactive, and multi-modal works. Earlier on, print journals like South Dakota Review were privileged as being somewhat more desirable publications, but with the advent of social media, online journals have the potential to reach more viewers/readers, and pieces/issues can be easily shared. So I think the reading habits for literary journals have increasingly shifted more and more to an online readership, and subscriptions/readers for print journals such as South Dakota Review have substantially declined. At the same time, online journals can easily be discontinued or disappear, so there’s a tangibility, or permanence, to print journals that is still valued, or desirable. My feeling is that if one is going to put out a print journal, the journal should ideally merit its physical manifestation by being visually striking, with quality paper, and conscious, intentional curation that represents, as fully as possible, in all of its aesthetic richness and polyvocalities, the state, or states, of the current literary landscape.
CS: The book’s back cover readies us for the themes of communication and how we interact with each other. I start each semester by inviting my students to explore the currents that speak to us and then work with them (or at least be aware of them). Are these the themes that you gravitate to the most? If so, what do you find interesting about them? I noticed a lot of the misfiring communication was between people in love affairs—is this one of the richer dynamics you work with?
LAR: Because I was raised in a house with a first-generation immigrant Japanese mother, whose first language wasn’t English, I think that I’ve always been fascinated by the arbitrariness of language, by the slipperiness of signifiers in general. For me, communication in my house of origin never had the illusion of being seamless, or transparent, or de facto. This early rockiness in communication, combined with the fact that I grew up in an abusive household, made issues of communication both fascinating and fraught to me. My fourth book, Dandarians, a hybrid volume of prose poems and lyric flash essays, explicitly thinks through these issues of language and communication, as rooted in my household of origin. And while I don’t think it’s a theme that I gravitate to in all my books, it’s definitely a thread that’s captivated my attention in both Dandarians and Reveal Codes. With Reveal Codes, in particular, the misfiring communication happening between people in love affairs was interesting to me, I think, because communication is so crucial in these types of relationships but can be so difficult if/when people feel vulnerable. So the stakes can feel really high, even as difficulties in communication are making a relationship rapidly implode. I think, too, that healthy communication is something that wasn’t actively nurtured or taught in certain generations, or in abusive households, and so I’m intrigued by people who don’t know how to express themselves in this way finding themselves bewildered in their interpersonal relationships, and misfiring in their communications—sometimes through using maladaptive coping strategies picked up from toxic dynamics in their families or in prior toxic relationships. The results, I think, can be funny, disturbing, sad, and very human.
CS: We see both flash and longer pieces here. When you start a story, do you have an idea of the shape/form it will take? What aspects of a particular story make flash (or a longer piece) a more suitable form?
LAR: I think for me this tends to have something to do with the point of origin. A story that ends up manifesting more as flash, tends to emerge more from lyric impulses: an image, or a series of images, an emotion, or a metaphor, or a powerful association. Whereas a longer story tends to emerge more from narrative impulses: an anecdote, or circumstance, a remembered exchange, or a particular character dynamic.
CS: Many story collections span a wide range of years. Was that the case here? From the first story you wrote in this book to the last, did you change as a writer? If so, how? If you did change, did that impact your editing of your earlier work?
LAR: I’m a slow writer, with an unfortunate history of being hideously committed at work, plus I’m frequently working on multiple projects, so yes! I began writing this collection in 2012 and finished drafting the manuscript in 2021. Previously, I’d cut my teeth on a collection of short stories in the early 2000’s and had published a handful of these stories in literary magazines, but even though I learned a lot from writing this first story manuscript I wasn’t ultimately happy with the collection as a whole. When I began writing Reveal Codes in 2012, I knew that I wanted to write shorter, crisper stories—stories that were hopefully funnier, that dipped freely into the absurd, and that weren’t necessarily beholden to traditional narrative structures but could take on lyric shapes and forms as needed. While it wasn’t difficult for me to keep the aesthetic/formal choices relatively consistent across the stories as time progressed, I did find it increasingly difficult to keep the tone from becoming increasingly dark because current events were changing rapidly, and I was experiencing profound personal changes: Trump was elected in 2016; in 2017 I was diagnosed with cancer and eight weeks after my cancer surgery my estranged elderly parents got in touch with me asking for my help after my father broke his hip; in 2018 I moved my parents into assisted living over spring break and became their legal guardian; in 2019 my father passed away and I had spine surgery; and then in 2020 COVID hit. While a lot of these events were channeled into my poems and essays, it’s true that the stories I was writing couldn’t help but become darker and sadder, so the challenge for me ultimately became one of architecture and arrangement when ordering the collection.
CS: We talked earlier about the themes of miscommunication—another strand I noticed in these stories was a kind of internal miscommunication—characters who sometimes didn’t seem to understand their own motivations. For me, this helped add to the book’s vibe—this sense of many of these characters not knowing where they stood—both within their worlds and within themselves. I know these pieces were written separately and perhaps many years apart—but did you have an overarching vibe/mood that you were going for?
LAR: Internal miscommunication, or the ways in which one communicates and/or miscommunicates with the self, was definitely one of the ways in which I wanted to think about the themes of communication, personal revelations, vulnerability, and miscommunication. And this intersects, too, with another one of my thematic obsessions, which is flux, metamorphosis, transformation. I’m particularly interested in those moments when a character is on the cusp, or precipice, of something shifting or changing with or for them. And this change can occur within them as a shift in perception or self-awareness, or it can occur externally without their awareness thereby creating a kind of friction, or it can sometimes occur both externally and internally. For me, this intersection creates a really interesting moment of transitional, fluid, liminal space—a moment of flux—where all connections and receivers seem to be open for a single, chaotic moment.
CS: Point of view is one of the early decisions one has to make—and we have third person here, and an equal number of second-person stories, but no first person. First, what is it about second person that worked for you in these pieces? And second, is first person something that doesn’t work for you in fiction? I know you use it in some of your poems.
LAR: I think that I initially avoided using first person in my fiction as a way of articulating a point of view that would feel markedly different from my poems and essays, which were typically written in first person. First person is interesting because it can either be intensely confessional, or it can be a way of inhabiting a voice/character/persona that is most definitively not the writer. In either instance, though, first person is still always a mask of sorts, isn’t it? It requires creating the illusion of authenticity. Because I’d written a lot of autobiographical poems, or essays, as well as dramatic monologues, I was initially very curious to explore what one might do within the space of narrative distance created by using third person. But then, at some point, I became enamored with writing my personal essays in second person and found that I really loved using second person in short stories as well. I think what captivates me about second person is the way in which it encompasses both a sense of intimacy as well as a carving out of narrative space, or distance. I’m intrigued by how it functions as a slightly-distanced first-person point of view that also opens up a small bubble in which the reader becomes complicit and participatory. While second person creates the illusion of intimacy found in first-person, it simultaneously challenges this authenticity, and acknowledges its artifice, through the narrative distance/aperture created by using “you” instead of “I.” Second person point of view, to my mind, creates a narrative space that simultaneously encompasses both internal and external points of view and I find the possibilities of this fascinating.
CS: A last craft question—another thing I talk to my students about are access points and how we find our way into our stories. Do you have a go-to access point when you’re writing fiction?
LAR: As I mentioned earlier, access points, for me, are always something that sparkles, or glimmers, and captures my imaginative interest. But yes, there are certain elements that create an access point for me that is fiction-specific. For fiction, I look for something that is associationally rich in terms of what it might reveal, metaphorically, about the human condition, and I also like details that have a glaze of absurdity, quirkiness, or funniness. So, for example, the moment my cognitively-declining Japanese mother, who was zealously hoarding her Ensure from my also-cognitively-declining father, started referring to her Ensure as “fat juice.” Or the time a newlywed friend confessed that she’d discovered she’d been wiping down her bathroom counters and faucets with her husband’s butt wipes. Or the overheard gossip about a woman who purchased a new couch and, instead of removing the old couch, simply placed the new couch directly in front of the old couch. These all became access points for me in stories from Reveal Codes.
CS: What’s next?
LAR: I have a sixth collection of poems, Kaze no Denwa / The Wind Phone, currently under review, and am circulating a manuscript of lyric essays. In the meantime, I’m conceptualizing new and different essays, and have also started work on a novel-in-verse that has speculative elements and is drawing upon tropes drawn from CliFi, or climate fiction.
Curtis Smith’s latest novel, The Lost and the Blind, is a Foreword Review’s 2023 INDIES Book of the Year Award Finalist. His last novel, The Magpie’s Return, was named an Indie pick of 2020 by Kirkus Reviews. His next novel, Deaf Heaven, will be released in May 2025.
JMWW 