Adrian Gibbons Koesters is a novelist, poet, and nonfiction writer whose work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Hotel Amerika, Berkely Review, Prairie Schooner, 1966: A Journal of Creative Nonfiction, and many other journals. She holds an MFA in poetry from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her poetry collections, Many Parishes and Three Days with the Long Moon, were published by Baltimore’s BrickHouse Books in 2013 and 2017, and her short creative work on trauma and prayer, Healing Mysteries was published by Paulist Press in 2005. Her most recent work is the novel, Union Square, published by Apprentice House Press in 2018. She lives in Omaha, Nebraska.
Kristina Marie Darling: You recently published your first novel, Union Square. What would you like readers to know about your book before they delve into the work itself?
Adrian Gibbons Koesters: Thanks for that question, as it plagues me a bit. I guess the first thing, that I’ve mentioned often, is that my aim for the book was to represent truly a part of Baltimore City that does not necessarily fall within its better-known tropes, by which I don’t mean cliché, necessarily, but the kind of comedy you get about White Baltimore in Barry Levinson and John Waters films, both of which I admire very much. It may be incorrect to do so, but I tend to call this Baltimore Gothic, as opposed to much of Levinson’s Homicide: Life on the Street, and The Wire, for easier reference. I’ve lived in very poor parts of the city, and, bizarrely, very wealthy ones, but those stories are the ones that feel to me like, yes, this is what I know or at least what I can understand.
My aim in the book is to tell stories of people who are affected by circumstances of poverty, violence, narrow religious and cultural expectations, and race bigotry and racism. It’s not news to anyone in 2019 that family sexual violence is very common, not to say rampant, but that reality is very much part of what ruins two of the five main characters. I would suggest that in 1952, the setting of this novel, that species of violence was indeed very common; in fact, one of the driving motivations to write the book was in part to go back, not necessarily to the beginning, but to a time that is too often associated with innocence and freedom from these kinds of cares. If they had not existed then, it’s doubtful that they would today.
On the other hand, it’s very important to me as a novelist to not condescend to my characters, and I think Union Square is successful in this. I’ve had that compliment as well as the acknowledgment that the male characters are written very believably, and that I have been able to write about Catholics and Jews and Lutherans as well as White and Black people as themselves, which was very much my aim. My strongest hope is that I have been successful in this.
I would also like readers to know that, while the book treats of very difficult and painful material (as any good book should do), it’s also very funny throughout. I don’t know if that’s gallows humor or my largely Irish background, or the fact that, really, Baltimore is a pretty funny place as well as a deeply wounded one.
KMD: Union Square was launched by Apprentice House, which is an innovative and groundbreaking publishing project. The organization is largely student-run, truly what one might call a “teaching press.” What drew you to this particular publishing house?
AGK: That the press is located in Baltimore and housed at Loyola Maryland was very attractive to me from the outset. I heard of it from the person who was acting as my agent for poetry at the time, the Portland poet John Sibley Williams, who has also published with them. A number of colleagues had published with Apprentice House and spoke very highly of them.
My experience working with the press has been terrific all the way down the line. The director, Kevin Atticks, is wonderful to work with, very supportive, and goes the extra mile for the author. I can say wholeheartedly that the students I have worked with have been every bit as professional as anyone in publication, and were a delight to work with. It’s a great model and I’m so glad you asked about it; I’d recommend AH to anyone.
KMD: Though your work often defies classification, some might call Union Square lyrical fiction. It is truly a book in which the tools of poetry are used in the service of narrative and world building. What can novelists learn from poets about the performative aspects of language? What advice do you have for prose writers who struggle to convey meaning, and create suspense and tension, through the behavior of the language itself?
AGK: Yes, I think that’s quite true. There is a natural association with poetry and creative nonfiction, but I don’t know that this is the case—at least, it should not stand as an inviolable rule. When I was teaching introductory multi-genre classes in creative writing, we always began with poetry (and this is a common strategy, of course). Teachers tend to recognize, I think, that in the poetry workshop students are forced to abandon the “what” and “why” and focus on the “how,” which to my mind is the essential focus for any writer, writing in any genre. I hate to say it, but I think many prose writers focus on structure, time management, and the like when they consider the “how,” and leave language out of it for some reason. Perhaps it doesn’t occur to them, I’m not sure, but it can be seen in their work, especially in dialogue (and even more especially in the dialogue of male characters written by women writers and vice versa). Nothing, in my opinion, kills a great story faster than not being able to hear a character, or when all characters sound the same. This is not a problem limited to “genre fiction” by any stretch.
At any rate, this focus on the elements of prosody is nothing short of a revelation for students, but the benefit of it is that they immediately get out of their heads and the possessiveness of their feelings and memories, and move on to the hard work of figuring out what the language and structure of a poem are achieving. Most students came in not only not having written any poetry but also not having read much. At the outset there’s a great deal of resistance, but I can’t think of a single one that did not comment that the study of prosody—line, sound, meter, and rhyme were the elements we focused on most closely—did not immediately improve their prose, often substantially.
I am a particularly auditory person anyway, and will admit that the elements of prose I tend to struggle with have to do with actually getting down to telling the story and making things happen! So I imagine that the lyric aspect to how I write anything permeates my choices without my having to think about it very much. The challenge there, though, of course, is to ensure that you are not making the same choices and gambits over and over, but that’s true of any writing over time. What you’re doing in the work ought to be recognizable, but it should resist being predictable. And that of course is the tall order that separates very good writers from middling ones.
I have an essay in a past issue of Assay Journal, “Because I Said So,”* on “creating languages” in creative nonfiction, and what I was attempting to get at in that essay is the necessity of matching the language, not necessarily with the content of the piece, although one certainly can focus on sonic elements to achieve a certain appropriate voice, but with a singular, particular perception of the locus of the story. Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead is one of the most pleasing examples of this I can think of. She takes the somewhat shop-worn first person narrator, and gives him the language of a man who has both made his living and his vocation as the spiritual leader of a community, and combines this with an innate shyness and conviction that he hasn’t made much of himself as a person. The epistolary narrative works perfectly in that novel to express both “sides” of him, to the degree that I don’t think you could imagine another strategy she might have used. To my mind, this is what makes that novel a tour de force.
What I would suggest to prose writers who are interested in making their language choices either more interesting or more “lyrical” is to immerse themselves in the writing of writers for whom that also seems to come naturally, but also to look at poets who write a good deal of prose poems or who tend to focus on narrative poems (this is not a certain bet, as some narrative poetry does not always take the bother of figuring out its best language). This is the oldest advice in the book, but read, read, and read some more. You can’t do better than that.
And then I suppose the final tool, if you like, is to listen as much as you can to all kinds of vocal music. One of the benefits of growing up in a city like Baltimore is that you have from the day you are born exposure to so many cadences and rhythms and turns of phrase just in the way everyday people speak that recognizing them comes naturally pretty early on. It is possible to find a close substitute for that kind of gift in song, but again, in all kinds of song.
KMD: You have published across genres, with poetry collections, reviews, and spiritual writing in top-flight journals. In a highly specialized academic job market, what are some of the advantages of having a broad range of skills, interests, and experiences as a writer?
AGK: That broad range has been wonderful for publication, and my love of writing in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction is very much rewarded there. I’m delighted that no one is expected these days to stick to one genre or specialty. But, frankly, in today’s academic job market I think it’s more important to have a variety of academic specialties as well as publications. Most universities are looking for applicants who are skilled in teaching two, or even three, areas of literary and cultural studies, and creative writing as such would only be one area. It’s a tough go, no matter what you are interested in.
KMD: What are some books — books that would never be on the syllabus of a fiction workshop — that you feel contemporary prose writers could learn from? Why?
AGK: Oh, what a lovely question that one is. I don’t know that I would never find them in a fiction workshop, but the books that I return to again and again are Gilead, Edward P. Jones’s Lost in the City, I. B. Singer’s Shosha, Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima, John McGahern’s By the Lake, and Louise Erdrich’s Last Reports on the Miracles at Little No Horse. These books for me are all miracles. What I love about all of them is their occupation of the other-world. The authors if able might disagree with me about that characterization, but I think most books settle strongly with me if they can create a world of belief, even if it’s a belief that one is shattered by. The other thing that I love about all of them, is that I can hear them and carry what I hear with me. Someone is speaking.
KMD: What are you currently working on? What can readers look forward to?
AGK: Right now, the sequel to Union Square, which will be the second novel in what I hope to be a trilogy, titled Miraculous Medal, and a memoir tentatively titled Not from People. I also hope to be writing more reviews in the coming year, but we’ll see!
Thanks so much for the lovely conversation!