Interview Without the Vampire:

Jeff Friedman and Meg Pokrass: Our collaborative writing feeds our individual writing, and our individual writing feeds our collaboration. There’s a vital interchange between what we do individually and what we do as a collaborative team. Our collaboration began with hilarious discussions on zoom with the two of us coming up with fabulous ideas for stories, amazing stories, none of which we wrote. We talked our stories; we just didn’t write our stories into being at that point. We were too busy laughing and having a great time and then one day we did a story or two. Meg did her version of my story “Bear Fight,” in which the main character is in love with someone who is in love with a bear. Then Jeff did his version of her version of his piece, and Meg did a version of Jeff’s version of Meg’s version of Jeff’s piece. From there, we began writing together, line by line, or two lines by two lines. We’d pass stories back and forth throughout the day. I think one day we actually wrote 7 stories that way. Of course, we didn’t keep them all, but it was a fertile period.

Other ways we worked: Meg offered Jeff an opening and Jeff wrote the ending, and sometimes Jeff offered Meg the opening, and she wrote the ending.  The key to our success has been humor and trust. We have a great time talking and writing. We never correct each other. If one of us writes a line, no matter how wacky it seems, the other person just runs with it. Our collaboration has taken us both into new territories. Jeff is more of a fabulist/surrealist, often writing about political situations or creating surreal micro stories. Meg writes disjunctively about conflicted love, aging and loss with unique utterly original details and images. Writing together, we often enter each other’s worlds, and our work begins to intersect. The House of Grana Padano is unique. It couldn’t have been written by either of us, only by both. It’s such a charming book but it’s not Jeff’s or Meg’s even though one can recognize our two individual styles/voices at times. It’a whole other thing.

VF: Are you Lennon and/or McCartney? Are you Lerner and/or Loewe? Who are you?

JF and MP: In the beginning, we were two improv comedians riffing story scenarios, skits, jokes,  poems, whatever came out. We talked out enough micros/flashes to fill dozens of collections. All of them were so good there was no need to write down any of it; We only needed a sentence or two to burst into laughter. In the beginning, we were Mike Nichols and Elaine May with our rapid-fire responses. Of course, we had not written a word. But then things became more serious and our serious musical ambition took over. We knew we weren’t Bernstein and Sondheim. That was obvious. Not sure why it was obvious, but it was. (Both of us could do a nice job singing “Tonight” from West Side Story.)  We weren’t Lerner and Loew either, though both us wanted to be Lancelot breathing life back into the dead knight in Camelot. Who wouldn’t want to perform a miracle and have Vanessa Redgrave fall in love with you to boot. We considered being Rogers and Hammerstein since we both knew all the words to “My Favorite Things,” but they weren’t right for us, a different generation. After a while, we agreed to be the team of Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, but then they had never written anything together, and that was somewhat problematic for our writing team. Also, Joni didn’t appear to even like Bob. Then it became apparent that we were Lennon and McCartney because often times our conversations would be all lines from Beatles songs. Jeff claimed that he was Lennon at the same time Meg did. Jeff countered by saying that she was the cutest member of our group and he was the most political member so it made sense that she would be Paul and Jeff would be John. Jeff pointed out that Paul had written “Yesterday,” “Let It Be,” and “Eleanor Rigby.” And Meg pointed out that John wrote “I’m Only Sleeping,” A Day in the Life,” and “Help.” Either one of us could be John or Paul, and it just depended on the context. So we decided that we were both Lennon and McCartney, one identity, not two separate selves. And if someone wanted to speak to John, we both answered, and the same was true for Paul. But as time passed, and our guitars began to gently weep, and we found ourselves  constantly repeating, “Here comes the sun, Little Darling, Here Comes the sun,” we had transformed into George. Meg was George with long hair and no mustache, and Jeff was George with long hair and a mustache. He was us, and we were him. George Harrison is really the writing team of Friedman-Pokrass, but that’s a secret, so keep it to yourself.

VF: In your poems in Cafe Irreal, finding, making, breaking connections become themes that are explored through subtle use of shifting perspectives. Does connection/connectedness tend to emerge from the collaborative process, and can you discuss? What other images or themes tend to come to the surface?

JF and MP: We don’t have a formula for writing; we just begin with a first sentence that takes us out of our comfort zone, usually a statement or image that might be mysterious or even nonsensical. Then we run with it. Each of our stories and poems creates a world in which the characters discuss philosophical viewpoints, argue over everything imaginable, lie about their motives, dig into each other until some truth emerges, toss blame at each other, ridicule each other, reach out and pull back, but ultimately it all emerges from love or a broken love. For example, in the story, “Quaking,” a couple experiences their house shaking and shimmying as if they are in the middle of an earthquake. While the house is collapsing around them, the husband shouts, “We’re dying,” and the speaker responds, “That would be a relief,” an unexpected response. In the end, they hug each other, but the wife has one more thing to say: “Next month, pay the bills on time.”  So inside every story the two of us are always riffing with each other, reacting to what the other person says with something equally spontaneous. Our themes are connection/disconnection, love in all its carnations, the magic of storytelling, innocence and disillusionment, our many selves and our lost lives

VF: Could you tell us more about the writing of On Grand Padano? I love the musicality in the section “Motown and More,” which consists of shorter pieces that register for me more like poems than stories. There’s so much freedom, like that move in “Along Comes Mary” with the title running into the story’s start.

JF and MP: We were writing stories together, and stories emerged from those stories and then themes emerged, which sent us back to writing more of those kinds of stories. For example, we so enjoyed writing stories off the Motown theme that we just kept writing them. And then soon they became an end in themselves and we created a section of Motown pieces. At one point, we considered writing a whole book of them.

Our collaboration is very different in that we are always improvising in response to each other. We also edit everything together. Instead of the loneliness of the writer and the solitude of the writer, we had the joy of the writing team.

Meg Pokrass is the author of The First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories (Dzanc Books, 2024) and eight previous collections of flash fiction and two novellas in flash. Her work has been published in three Norton anthologies, including Flash Fiction America, New Micro, and Flash Fiction International; The Best Small Fictions, Wigleaf Top 50, and hundreds of literary magazines including Electric Literature, New England Review, and McSweeney’s. Meg is the original Founding Editor of New Flash Fiction Review, and currently serves as Founding/Managing Editor of Best Microfiction.

Jeff Friedman’s tenth book of poetry and prose, Ashes in Paradise, was published by Madhat Press in November 2023. Friedman’s work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Poetry International, Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom New England Review, Best Microfiction 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024, and The New Republic. He has received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship and numerous other awards. His new book, Broken Signals, has just been published by Bamboo Dart Press. 

Together the two published The House of Grana Padano (Pelekinesis). Check out stories by Pokrass and Friedman in The Cafe Irreal and The Fabulist.