Vince Vasudevan: What were the stories that inspired you to write (personal contacts, authors/poets/directors, works)?
Paul Cunningham: I always feel like I have to return to high school when I’m asked this question. Books that were formative at an early age included S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Paul Zindel’s The Pigman, and Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War (which references “Prufrock” — so I began reading T.S. Eliot shortly after). After learning Cormier’s book had been banned, I went on to read more banned books including Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and Elie Wiesel’s Night. As a teenager, if I learned a book had been banned, I instantly wanted to read it. (I don’t know if there’s a better advertisement for a book in America than a ban.) I transferred to a charter school during my junior year where I could concentrate in Creative Writing. There, my curriculum included Howl (which required a signed permission slip), Neuromancer, Maus, Autobiography of Red, and others. My poetry instructor ended up gifting me a copy of Johannes Göransson’s translation of Aase Berg’s With Deer. Berg’s poetry had an immediate and significant impact on my writing, and remains a continuous influence. Some filmmakers who are important to me include Lynne Ramsay, Yorgos Lanthimos, Ruben Östlund, Kenneth Anger, John Waters, Guy Maddin, Pier Paolo Pasolini, John Cassavetes, David Lynch, Andrei Tarkovsky, Agnes Varda, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Michaelangelo Antonioni, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Federico Fellini, Stanley Kubrick — I could keep going. But neither of us have that kind of time.
VV: You graduated from the Notre Dame MFA program in 2015, winning the Sparks Prize Fellowship (named for author Nicholas Sparks ‘88, providing a generous stipend for one recent graduate to focus on completing a book). Briefly, can you take us through your time as a graduate student?
PC: They are two years I will always look back on fondly. A time of experimentation and a time for discovering many new-to-me authors and artists. It also resulted in some lifelong friendships. Eventually, my MFA thesis, The House of the Tree of Sores, became my first book in 2020. Thanks to the encouragement from my then-advisor Johannes Göransson, I also stopped thinking about translation as a mere hobby and began taking it more seriously than I ever had previously. Since that time, I’ve published translations of both Helena Österlund and Sara Tuss Efrik. My translation of Efrik’s play Danse Macabre Piggies recently appeared in Experimental Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024). I also spent a lot of time during those two years under the counsel of Joyelle McSweeney. She gave me the gifts of Matthew Barney, Guy Maddin, Claire Denis, and more.
VV: Over the past decade, how has your pedagogy evolved, and what do you prioritize in the classroom?
PC: My pedagogy has mostly remained the same. Whether I’m teaching poetry or prose, I’ve always tried to expose my students to as many different forms, authors, artists, and art movements as I possibly can. What resonates with one student, might not be a good fit for another. This is expected. My hope is that they try on a variety of different hats until they find a suitable fit. Most importantly, students know my classroom is a place for experimentation, risk, hybridity, and the testing of new ideas. I don’t impose rigid formal expectations, but I’m also not necessarily anti-form. I think it’s important for a writer who claims to resist traditional forms to be able to articulate how/why, which means I also expect my students to be able to identify/defend their own personal aesthetic frameworks.
VV: As an MFA student at Notre Dame, you were on the poetry track. As a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Georgia, you were on the prose track. What do you find interesting in the spaces where poetry and prose intersect?
PC: Poetry has always fueled my prose. I wouldn’t be able to write prose the way I do now if I hadn’t approached things as a poet first. My creative dissertation was a project of genre. I wrote an SF novel called Report of Land. The least helpful thing to me during that time was actually other SF novels. I found myself not wanting to be influenced (or distracted?) by other SF novels or short stories. I found myself needing to ignore familiar tropes of SF in order to write something that felt new and exciting to me. I mostly read Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and George Eliot during the years I spent working on Report of Land. A genre-defying film called Kiss Me Deadly (1955) was also an inspiring experience around this time. And LeAnne Howe, my dissertation director, was an invaluable mentor during my time at the University of Georgia. I couldn’t have written Report of Land without her. After she recommended Homero Aridjis’ Persephone — something just clicked.
VV: As an avid film watcher, how does visual storytelling impact your written works?
PC: I always begin with an image. I keep image journals. And dream journals. I encourage my students to do the same. I learned about the importance of approaching narrative by thinking in images from Aase Berg. I was always very inspired by something Aase once said: “I started writing prose poems because I was thinking in images. I wasn’t interested in the chronology or development of prose, if nothing else as something one has to be aware of. This chronology – time passes and things have to happen and there has to be a narrative – is an element that reminds me of male sexuality. It’s a patriarchal invention I want to avoid. Even as I experiment, I want to avoid setting up a relationship with the male norm.”
VV: How has Action Books evolved since you joined as a Managing Editor in 2020, and what is your favorite part of being involved with this press?
PC: Action Books continues to surprise and publish what many other American presses might deem unpublishable or impossible. One of my favorite parts of the job is seeing what our new editorial fellows bring to the table each year. Recently, Helen Quah has begun her own critical poetry series at the Action Blog called “Rear Window” and she and Daryna Gladun have also breathed new life into our social media with Pink Wednesdays, “Poem of the Month” features, and more. I'm also very much looking forward to our 2025 season which will feature Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez's translation of Antonio Gamoneda's Burning the Losses; M.L Martin's W&E: A Refracted Tarnslation of Wulf and Eadwacer; Ted Dodson and Kit Schluter's translation of Jaime Sáenz's Death at the Very Touch / The Cold; and Leia Penina Wilson's Call the Necromancer.
VV: For readers just getting started on Paul Cunningham’s works, where should they start?
PC: Fall Garment (Schism Press, 2022) is my most recent full-length book. Divided into three parts, it begins with “Factory Appetite,” which focuses on a plagued glass factory from my childhood; “Sic Ark,” an erasure of Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel Jurassic Park; and the titular “Fall Garment,” a meditation on fashion designer Thom Browne (tailoring for the living) and seventeenth century English polymath Sir Thomas Browne (arrangements for the dead). New Michigan Press will publish my next chapbook of poetry in spring 2025: Sociocide at the 24/7. The chapbook begins with the poem that concludes Fall Garment (“was it ashes or was it glitter / at the end of nations?”). Sociocide at the 24/7 is very much influenced by the critical writings of Jonathan Crary — especially Scorched Earth — and is set in an imaginary gas station convenience store located somewhere on the outskirts of Hollywood. It was also partially inspired by the controversial Disney mascot named Figment. Crary has designated the “sociocidal” as an “engine of addiction, loneliness, false hopes, cruelty, psychosis, indebtedness, squandered life, the corrosion of memory, and social disintegration.”
VV: In your opinion, what distinguishes the Notre Dame MFA Program from the rest?
PC: Our programming, faculty, and relentless support for our MFA students.
Originally published by at english.nd.edu on November 04, 2024.