A conversation with Artist Fellow Ben Miller

Each year the South Dakota Arts Council selects a group of South Dakota artists to receive the Artist Fellowship grant rewarding individual artistic excellence. The $5,000 fellowships reflect the variety and quality of art being produced in South Dakota. In this issue, Arts Alive spoke with Ben Miller, whose writing has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Experimental Writing, The New England Review, The Southern Review, The Antioch Review, One Story, Fiction International, The Kenyon Review and other venues.

How has the art of writing shaped you as a person?

I came to writing young. I mean, before I was twelve. I came to writing as many young people do: in some desperation. I didn’t experience freedom at a school of buzzers or in a crowded home descended into strange disarray. But I discovered freedom could exist in the realm of art—on the canvas of the blank page—and that made it a beacon in the darkness of the 1970s in Davenport, Iowa. I tell part of the story in my first book River Bend Chronicle: The Junkification of a Boyhood Idyll Amid the Curious Glory of Urban Iowa (Lookout Books)—just part, I say, because this is a very large and always evolving story to me—the power of art to positively transform individuals, to allow them to converse with their humanity, and by extension, place the larger culture in helpful dialogue with its realities, however rough they are.

What did this fellowship year allow you to explore as an artist?

The generous support of the fellowship provided a welcome practical boost to my writing, which I have usually pursued, by design, far outside of the walls of academia. Holding a day job unrelated to writing brings me into regular contact with the routines and aspirations, joys and disappointments, of the workaday world. The intensity of common experience, I’ve found, enriches my exploration of art’s fundamental role in society.

Ben Miller in Paris, photo by Anne Pierson Wiese.

But 2020, of course, threw me off track like it did everyone else. As America has quaked from coast-to-coast due to a compendium of deadly historical events, I’ve found myself—as a part-time worker in a hospital environment—especially dwelling on the issue of form. The fragility of form. The salvation of form. The form your life takes is the form your expressions inevitably assume, if you are a writer. The two are inseparable. And as I’ve literally watched or heard forms vanishing during an epoch of death, I’ve felt an urgent need to know more about what vanishes when a person perishes, and when an institution falters and collapses under pressure. Each human is a product of internal and external forces—the unique result of individuality and intellectual/emotional/spiritual partnerships of many complex sorts. Studying my particular set of essential details has led to a book-length meditation on the vagaries of literary form that I call The Extravagant Art of Seeing: Thoughts While Tearing Up a Novel Late One Night.

How have your experiences in different environments (Iowa, Times Square, the Radcliffe Institute, South Dakota, Paris) influenced your writing?

The first poem I finished that I was proud of I finished at the age of nine. It was entitled New York, New York, I Love You So. It was about a place I had never seen except in magazines. But I could write the stanzas because I did not conceive of America as being made up of regions but as one sprawling entity that connected all to one, one to all.

This notion endured. After attending Cornell College in Iowa, I leaped at the opportunity to attend graduate school at New York University, even though I still had never been east of Chicago. I just went. I just loved it. After I met my partner in 1987—the poet Anne Pierson Wiese, who grew up in Brooklyn, but had family roots in South Dakota and Minnesota—I began visiting the Upper Midwest with its awesome skies and quartzite rock, and I loved that too.

It was all America. It was all something I should know. It was all larded—below the ascendency of the clouds—with the leaden fury of a history that few people had the time and energy to adequately acknowledge, but the history didn’t dematerialize because of neglect: it was always there, buried or locked up, waiting to be found and liberated, waiting to be known.