Christopher Alan McDaniel of Swamp Ape Review on Hybrid Work, Local Mythos, and “Weirdness” in Literary Publishing
by Editor in Chief Cari Moll
At this year’s AWP conference in Kansas City, I was lucky enough to stop by the booth of Swamp Ape Review. This literary publication, founded and produced by the MFA program at Florida Atlantic University, publishes within the traditional genres poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and visual arts. They also feature an additional category called “Swamp.”
Swamp features hybrid work of all kinds, inspired by the mythology and weirdness of their namesake Floridian legend, the Swamp Ape itself.
As Barnstorm opens its own call for “experimental” submissions, I wanted to speak with a literary journal known for the spotlight it shines on hybrid works regarding their own experiences with publishing pieces that break the mold of traditional expectations.
Christopher Alan McDaniel, member of Swamp Ape Review’s masthead, was kind enough to take the time to speak about his experience as Swamp editor, as well as his own experimental work.
Barnstorm Journal: I have a couple of questions that we can run through, but I thought it would be interesting to sit down and talk about experimental work in general. Since we are doing a bonus issue dedicated to experimental work, I thought this could be a really great feature, since that’s something [Swamp Ape] features.
Do you want to introduce yourself to our readers and start off with a little bit about what you do at Swamp Ape and how you got involved?
Swamp Ape Review: Formally, my name is Christopher Alan McDaniel. This is my second year in the MFA program at FAU. My specialization is in creative nonfiction, but since coming into the program I've really been exploring hybrid work. Since Swamp Ape Review is open for all MFA students to participate in, I got involved my very first semester.
I currently work in ekphrastic work with visual arts, translation of visual arts; I'm in that realm at the moment. That and lyric essay. I'm having fun with it.
All the stuff that we publish under the “Swamp” category is what we call our hybrid genre. If you can imagine a swamp--just like a mixture of sand, water. That’s very local to us down here in South Florida as well, because our local cryptid, our “Bigfoot,” is called the Swamp Ape. So it's really been a pleasure for me to be able to, this year, assume the role as Swamp Editor.
BSJ: I love that name for it! And I love that you work with ekphrasis. I'm such a fan of it. I love ekphrastic work, and it often gets such a bad rap.
But that's also cool that you got your start in nonfiction, and then moved into hybrid because I feel like I see experimental prose lumped in with poetry most often. We’ve seen a lot of poets begin branching out, so it’s interesting to see that with nonfiction work.
It does seem tough to measure how experimental a piece is before it’s no longer a “traditional” poem or “traditional” prose piece. I guess my question regarding that would be, when you're looking at submissions, how “non-traditional” might a piece be before it evolves into this new kind of hybrid work?
SAR: That's an interesting question and one that we explored more at the beginning of this academic year: what we really consider to be a hybrid work. It is very difficult to pin down, because I am someone who really appreciates when someone plays with and manipulates form, and that can appear as traditional or non-traditional. We have to say to ourselves, this doesn’t feel like just a poem. This doesn't feel like just an essay, or something else of that vein. I do think it is easier to describe something as hybrid when they break form in an aggressive way.
This year, we have an inaugural memorial prize called the Justin Waldron Memorial Prize for Innovative Prose, and we gave it to a submission from the Swamp genre. It's basically a hybrid play mix with dinner cards and recipes. There is so much happening in this innovative space. You couldn't just classify it as maybe fiction or just poetry, as there's something else happening here that pushes it over to the edge into this grey area. It is hard to pin down, sometimes, but other times, you can just read it.
BSJ: I feel like reading through our own recent submissions, too, that has been the biggest thing. It’s like…this is experimental, but how experimental is experimental.
I love that you talk about breaking form because I was looking through some of your past Swamp publications, and form is something that really stuck out to me. I remember this one—Animal Control by Becca Ray Ross—and it breaks form in a way that is so fascinating.
I wanted to ask, in your opinion, what creates those really memorable Swamp pieces? Does it relate to form most of the time? Are there other aspects of the piece that stick with you, things you remember, even after publication?
SAR: From my time in judging some of the hybrid work here, the pieces that have stuck out to me are the ones that did things with the narrative structure. A lot of the times our hybrid work does appear in a more poetic form with line breaks, or it has more intentional spacing, where the line progresses vertically down the page.
But I want to use the Justin Waldron Prize for this current issue as an example because it is literally a narrative being told through, different productions of collateral…and it goes all the way down and breaks form and changes and blends form so many times that I don't think I'm ever going to be able to forget it.
This form of hybridity feels more intentional and in line with what they're trying to tell their audience. This person produced an original form that I've never seen before, and that's always something that breaks the ground. It's always something that nags at me--that I feel like I'm reading a poem, and it's doing something that's a little bit unorthodox and it might be telling a personal story that feels not fabricated or not embellished.
This is a narrative, an essay, that's happening in the dialogue of a poem, just because of how it may end up being formatted. They're able to submit to other genres, and if they think that their work is hybrid, then we get it all in one bucket.
Most of the time, I think there is some form of ekphrasis going, where the piece is really trying to have a conversation between two different things on the page at the same time.
BSJ: I've never thought of ekphrasis being a hybrid type of work, just due to the nature of it. There was a panel at AWP where the moderators talked about how ekphrastic work is inherently gendered, so it's really interesting to just look at forms and styles and just ask ourselves: are these forms hybrid by nature?
What do you believe is the importance of upholding a space dedicated directly to those hybrid forms and non-traditional pieces?
SAR: Well, I think we come from an art form that, throughout the history of the discourse, has determined terms for things like fiction and poetry. Now, more recently, creative nonfiction, is considered to have stronger literary value. I think the academic, the prestigiousness, of what we do sometimes makes it so we have to deviate into these buckets: this is nonfiction, this is fiction, and then this is poetry. We exclude so much good literature that doesn't fit neatly into one of those boxes.
It can be that something is so deviated, something is its own thing, all by itself. But then, it can be something like a lyric essay, in which it's telling me a very personal story based on images or something like that. In terms of form, it seems like lyric essay is almost considered, or respected, as traditional literary journalism in the nonfiction community. I hope that answers your question.
BSJ: Absolutely. I think it is really important to have those spaces where people feel like they have the creative liberty to submit pieces as they are instead of having to make all these edits to make it, say, a poem. They shouldn’t have to trim themselves down to fit into a category when their writing is good and presentable and publishable as-is, the way they intended it to be; publishable feels like the emphasis there.
At AWP this year…well, this was my first AWP. I don't know if it was for you as well?
SAR: This was my second time; I went to Seattle last year.
BSJ: Oh, cool. So, this was my first one, but it did feel like publications there were beginning to open up these discussions around submission categories, or at least around hybrid work, that I personally hadn't seen before. Even outside the literary world—you know, we have a whole Beyonce country album—it feels like a shift in the arts industry as a whole. Have you guys at Swamp Ape felt a shift in the traditional genre mindset recently? Or have you kind of always been having these conversations, and it's just now reaching the rest of us?
SAR: That's a pretty good question, and one that I can’t speak on prior to my time being there, but what I can say is that the faculty adviser for the Swamp Ape Review, Dr. Rebecca McKay, has an MFA in translation, so one of her big passions is translation work. By nature, the person brought this journal to life was interested in the dialogue between one language and another, or one art form and another, and what that means for the space in between, and that's a good place for hybrid work to exist.
I don't know if I can confidently tell you that it's been a [focus] since the very first volume, but we're only on volume seven, and I can confidently say we've had Swamp in the past five, six and seven. It’s pretty good that half of our tenure has been dedicated to publishing at least one or two works dedicated to hybridity.
BSJ: Absolutely. It does feel like something everyone else is maybe just catching up to, where you guys have been featuring for a while, so it is really cool, to be a bit of a trailblazer in that.
SAR: I also saw the same thing when I was at AWP. I was like, “Oh, I'm finding a lot more places that I would be able to submit, or just feel comfortable submitting, my own work to.”
We see this even more so with the literary criticism side of MFA-land. People are more willing to publish book reviews, poetry collection reviews. At least, I see that more now than previously in the past.
BSJ: Definitely. There seems to be more flexibility now than before.
For Swamp Ape, how do you think the category name of “Swamp” itself allows you to channel the “mythology and weirdness,” as it says in your bio of the namesake Floridian legend: the Swamp Ape?
SAR: It feels special to us because we are named after the cryptid, but it's not like we're the Bigfoot Review. You could say Bigfoot is an entire U.S. kind of cryptid, but the Swamp Ape is very, very special to us in our little corner of the country. So, I do feel like we lean into some weird stuff.
We even have a part of our journal where we feature a South Florida artist. It goes beyond the weirdness and the hybridity. We pay a lot of respect to the community of South Florida and everything that it's done and all the great literature it has produced.
This area we live in is very vibrant. It's tropical. So many people come to visit here, mostly for the Miami area. There is so much diversity here. It feels so apropos to have a space in the magazine for people to be as weird as they want, and for them not to be judged for it, and for someone maybe as weird as me to look at their submissions and be like, “No, I see what they're trying to do here.” We do have a lot of fun being able to publish some weird shit.
Even if I do lean more towards a “no,” I'm at least going to bring that piece to the group in order to get other opinions, because maybe my weirdness isn't someone else's weirdness.
BSJ: I'm glad we get to talk about the fun side of it, because it's not all just “fighting against traditional publishing.” It’s avante-guard, fun, weird shit.
Is there anything else further you want to say here about Swamp Ape for readers interested in submitting?
SAR: We are in our open submission period right now. Our general submissions are open from March 1st until August 1st. We accept work in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and the Swamp genre. One of my summer tasks is to go through and start looking at some of them and, for our first meeting, have maybe one or two to talk about as a group. We also publish visual art. There is a space in-between sections and groupings dedicated to visual art.
If any of your readers were born in the South Florida area or consider themselves a South Florida native, we do have a South Florida feature section, so please denote that so you can be considered for a special category on top of your genre.
BSJ: I love that dedication to the local space.
SAR: And then there is the Justin Waldron Prize for Innovative Prose; that is a memorial prize we have. There will be another opportunity for us to select one in the coming year. I look forward to reading anyone's writing!