Future Prairie Radio Season Four Episode One: The Cannon Will Be Made with Matt Schumacher

My name's Matt Schumacher, my pronouns are he, him. I'm a resident of the Kent neighborhood here in Portland and managing editor of Phantom Drift, a Portland-based literary journal whose mission is to celebrate and support the strange and fantastic writing in the Northwest and worldwide. I had been working on the magazine since its inception 10 years ago. I'm also a poet who made six collections of poetry, most recently the collection of Missing Suspiria de Profundis published by Grand Gus Press last summer. This fantastic story collection is about a time-traveling poet, an anti-hero, who eventually collides with the opioid crisis in the drug war.

Having been raised in Iowa, I often think I was drawn to the fantastic due to long-term exposure to cornfields and prairies, wide-open spaces, and imagining what might be performing. As a poet, too, I've been most influenced by the surrealists. In the 1970s, poets believed in the Fantastic's revolutionary power and in its ability to create alternate worlds and hypothetical situations that multiplied possibility. In what Todoroff, or was the V. Todoroff called the 'duration of uncertainty' and Victor Schwabskis notion of defamiliarization, i.e., presenting everyday things to your readers in strange ways to rethink reality.

At Phantom Drift, our mission is to nurture and advance fantastic writing, writing of the word, surrealism in the Northwest and throughout the country and then in the world. We do get international submissions as well as—well, a lot of submissions from the area. We're currently in the process of publishing our 10th-anniversary issue, which I'm really excited about, almost done selecting work, and we're nearing the proofing stage. The last few stories are being decided upon as we speak. We have four poetry editors, four fiction editors, and a webmaster, a graphic designer. The Regional Arts and Culture Council grant allowed me to pay early, which I felt really great to do.

We're hoping that this year we'll be able to print our most special issue. It's even more work than usual, including semesters, in particular by our editors. I know that we should be featuring an essay about the premium poets and the next Mexican fiction writer, Ampara Davila. I do think about the future. I have quite a few goals for the journal. First of all, let's say just stability and being solidly as constant in the literary field. I see us as a sort of precarious rare bird, and I really don't think there's another journal like us in the United States at this time.

The tangible goals for us would include an expanded readership, more submissions. I'd like to see, particularly in poetry and poets out there, bombard us, saturate us, please. as long as we're able, I see us as continuing to offer area writers and artists publishing opportunities and an unusual lively showcase for featuring their work. We'd like our journal to help inspire and kindle the dust of writing, and we welcome submissions from Portland authors and artists. Ideally, we'd like to partner with other local organizations and hold literature events. I have this pipe dream of owning a carnival of the weird fundraising event, with poetry readings, booths, music from local bands.

Stubbornness first, I guess, is some advice I would give on longevity, perseverance, the careful management of what you have before you, and surrounding yourself with people that will help in any necessary capacity. I feel like it's easier than it used to be when I did all the poetry. I usually write the intros to the journal too, I would say, you know, you get kind of accustomed to what you're doing, and you figure out what works best. So, in the decade of making a journal, there are benefits to longevity. It's kind of like teaching, you keep what works, and you jettison the rest.

It's obviously a challenging time to be making art. It's an appropriate time for workers to protest and advocate for the victims of police brutality and social injustice. I'd say it's heartening to remember that great art can and will be made, even in the most challenging moments. I would say the great art of this era needs to be and will be created, and it will face some of the racism and injustice our country has failed to acknowledge, and that's an exciting prospect and a necessary one.

I was giving a friend of mine this advice the other day—a friend of mine, he's been talking about not writing poetry anymore. I advised him to remember the life force of all creative work is play. There's a Dutch theorist, Johan Huizinga, and it's become a lens that works as a beautiful reminder of this concept.

In the more highly organized forms of society, religion, science, law, or politics gradually lose touch with play. Prominent in the earlier phases, the poet's function still remains fixed in the place sphere where it was born. CoExist, in fact, is a play on role that proceeds within the playground of the mind, in a world of its own, which the mind creates for it. Some things are different physiognomy from the one, they were an ordinary life, and they're bound by ties other than logic and causality. It'll be defined as one that may be made in terms of waking life.

Poetry will never rise to the level of seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness on that more primitive and original level, where the child, the animal, the savage, and the seer belong in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter. To understand poetry, we must be capable of dawning the child's soul like a magic cloak and forsaking man's wisdom for the child.

Try to move a bit more play into your process. Think about enlivening the process with whatever tools you have to make it more ludic, I guess, more celebratory, more fun. I would say that most of the literature that I encountered that I really loved for Phantom Drift has that as a centerpiece. It's playful at the level of language, or it's attentive to the sound of the language, just active in that realm and the realm of ideas. I don't think you can lie if your practice includes fun and play in it.

I would go straight to the source, read Huizinga's book, chapter seven. If you're a poet, dabble a bit throughout it, it's an informative piece, I think. Of course, as a writing teacher, I can tell you that collaboration, seeking, which of course, social distancing at the present time most certainly. If you have friends that can present you with prompts or possibilities for creating art, that's an added benefit. You can form a group where you give each other prompts, sometimes that's freeing, that frees you out of any sort of block you're having. If you're writing to a different goal or purpose than you'd written to before.

Something that I try to do as a poet: cross out what you've done before. I don't want to write the same term over and over again, so each time that I start a new project, I say, 'Hey, I've done this in the past, I can't do this again,' sort of disallowing that, and that creates a new space to work, and that's invigorating, it takes you different places. Constraint, oddly enough, can be liberating.