56 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY Q&A with Josefine Klougart tr. Alexander Weinstein Q: Is there a quote you like or think is particularly fitting or relevant to very short fiction, whether by a fiction writer or by someone in a field other than literature, be it the arts, sciences, philosophy, religion, or other area? A: “The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past.” I always have this quote by William Faulkner in mind when it comes to saying something relevant about literature or the human mind in general. It really is a good description of how the mind works, or at least how mine does. The human mind, and the poetic mind, in particular, doesn’t care about categories such as time and space; it moves with great agility in patterns that transcend these categories . This experience, of the mind transcending these categories, must always be embedded in writing. Otherwise literature becomes nostalgic, loses its connection to nature and everything that “really is.” As a short-story writer, you don’t want that to happen, and you don’t want it to happen as a human being. Everything is present always, right now: the past, what you sense, your reflections and imagination, and the sense of what is coming. That is what literature is all about, this entanglement. The short story, at its best, is able to condense this experience of entanglement, to collapse time and place and crystalize it through a scene, a thought, a language; language transcends what we think is possible; it gives us a possibility to see the world as it is, as it was, and as it will be. A lightning strike of beauty in the awareness of these elements as one embrace, that is what Faulkner is saying. Q: Do you have a favorite flash story or writer, or favorite book of very short fictions? photo : sofie amalie klougart We See Our Mother Go to Bed Josefine Klougart W e see our mother go to bed soon after dinner; she places her plate in the dishwasher and leaves, dragging a pale trail behind her like one dredges the bottom of the sea, her feet a rake across the ocean’s floor and up the stairs. We remain seated at the table, hear her pull the door shut behind her. My father takes a single heavy breath, sighs, looks around and gathers our glances as if with a long thread; when he finally rolls his eyes we gather together, folding over one another like cloth. We clean up, like usual, but it’s all foreign. The light falls differently. It’s as though the house has rotated a couple degrees on the cadastre, turned in its sleep; the bed of rhododendrons must be completely ruined, the cobblestones must be yawning on the streets, pushing themselves against one another like ice floes in the shallow water by Nappedam, when the thaw changes to hard frost, when cold arrives with the wind, suddenly over East Jutland, high pressure and crisp, blue skies, when the melted slush and floating shards collect all at once into a heavy sheet of ice. The evening is different, the taste of toothpaste foreign, the nightgown colder than before, for three days, a whole season. Josefine Klougart is the best-selling author of the collection Rises and Falls and the novels The Halls and One of Us Is Sleeping. She is regarded by critics as one of Denmark’s preeminent new postmodernists, and her first collection has been nominated for the 2011 Nordic Council Literary Prize. Alexander Weinstein is Director of the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and a professor at Siena Heights University. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Sou’Wester, and Cream City Review. He is presently finishing his first collection, The Apocalypse Tales. SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2012 57 photo : anton martin A: I just returned to Denmark after a three-month writing exile in New York. Here I bought Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter, a translation of Sappho’s songs. These fragments are a perfect example on what short prose is able to do: to condense. My favorite poem or my favorite fragment is this...