Jason Makansi is the President of Pearl Street Inc., a consulting firm which serves the electricity industry. He has many non-fiction and professional publication credits, including three books, the latest, available for pre-order through amazon.com, is titled “Lights Out: The Electricity Crisis, the Global Economy, and What it Means to You.” His fiction has appeared in Marginalia, Rainbow Curve, Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley, Mizna: Prose, Poetry, and Art Exploring Arab America, and Amazon Shorts.


Your new book, “Lights Out: The Electricity Crisis, the Global Economy, and What it Means to You,” will be out in May. It sounds like an important subject, one we should all be informed about.
Why do you think people should read this book, and what do you hope they take away from it?

People either don’t think about electricity–it’s magic in the wall–or think erroneously about it. What was once a parochial business, the “local utility,” is actually affected by an intricate web of geo-energy politics, global finance, and international emissions treaties (e.g. global warming). Meanwhile, your service is probably declining, your utility rates are skyrocketing, or both. My daughter has nightmares about global warming, yet hasn’t made the connection to the lights she leaves on in her bedroom. I want people to get as passionate about the impacts of energy consumption as they are about, say, books. In my last chapter, my prescription to fix what ails us, I advocate people joining clubs that discuss managing their energy use the same way they join book clubs. Electricity “runs” modern society, and this microprocessor age we live in demands not only more electricity but much higher quality electricity than was needed just ten years ago. Having it produced and delivered through what amounts to a “third-world grid” is not only embarrassing, but could prove disastrous.

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You’ve been interviewed for NPR, and have even appeared on the History Channel’s show Modern Marvels. Tell us about both experiences.

Alas, neither was for my fiction, but about my day job with power plants and electricity. Radio is easy. No bright lights to make you nervous. One surprise about Modern Marvels: Power Plants: I had no idea how long and how often it would run. It was filmed almost seven years ago. A few years ago, a colleague in the industry called me and said, “so there I was, getting home late from work, popping a beer from the fridge, situating myself in front of the TV, and who do I see staring at me from the screen? You, damnit!” I thought the show would run once. It’s still running.

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Considering your background in chemical engineering, do you find making the leap from that left brain, analytical mindset, to a creative place, difficult? What interests you about writing fiction?

With apologies to my mother who swears by this stuff, the left brain, right brain crap is like democrats and republicans. It’s simplistic, unfair, and even dangerous to make a distinction. I will say this, however. I find it more difficult to turn down the volume on my analytical side and write more interesting fiction than it is to turn up the volume on my creative side and enhance my engineering assessments, technology deployment plans, management evaluations, etc.

As far as what interests me about writing fiction, I am in love with the written word and fiction is a fun way to toy with the human condition. Or it could be that my older brother won the creative writing award in our high school and I’ve been jealous ever since. I wrote the humor column for the school newspaper.

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Along with Kristy Blank, you started Blank Slate Press, “a radical new concept in publishing,” as you call it. What is Blank Slate Press? How does it work, and what was the inspiration behind starting it?

Yeah, about that. Well, the idea has several components, and none will probably get a good explanation in this short space. The fundamental concept is to publish stories for readers, not academics and MFAs who need outlets to “publish or perish.” First, deliver stories individually on a subscription basis, a la wine of the month, recipe of the week, etc. Why do readers have to buy collections or subscribe to journals, when they can buy one story at a time, for example? Second, support writers using the venture capital finance model. VCs put private capital behind companies that they think can grow faster than the market at large and earn them a significant return on their investment. Potentially rewarding authors could be supported in a similar way. I have observed that VCs who pour money into technology companies have about the same probability of backing a success as writers who are not only acclaimed for their literary talent but are also popular enough to make their publishers a return on their investment. Third, sell individual stories at coffee shops, bars, etc, where people seem willing to take ten or fifteen minutes to read something. Fourth, integrate other art forms into the process–I like the idea of going to an art gallery, hearing a reading, watching a dancer/performance artist in the corner. (Then again, I was big on cafeteria eating as a kid).

Just talking about Blank Slate Press is demoralizing. I couldn’t even get the members of my off-line writers group here in St. Louis to put some effort into it. A local bookstore (where we thought we could share revenue from selling subscriptions) manager listened politely, then rattled off the “hard reality of the numbers” in literature and story publishing (she never really got the notion that this was to break the paradigm, not serve it) and sales. I even have an office about this concept at Zoetrope Virtual Studio. The bottom line: We have a website where a few stories I begged out of our writers group reside, but not much more to show for five years of talking about it.

On a more positive note, an outfit in New York, onestory.com, is pursuing the single serving story idea (quite independently of us, I should add) and I wish them every success. The Amazon Shorts program also allows the purchase of one story at a time. I’ve seen articles about applying VC to the arts, and I look forward to the day I enter Starbucks and see stories for sale alongside CDs. In other words, others will probably get this down just fine without us. In truth, our concept required an army of willing participants, oodles of time we don’t have, and 5 to 10 years, not a few, to properly execute a business plan. By the way, I’m not unhappy about any of this. Kristy (who is, suspense now brimming, my wife and de-facto business partner) and I have ideas like this all the time. It’s enough to know that the ideas are validated, whether or not we are associated with them. As my multiple business partners have discovered, I’m more interested in being right than rich.

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Recently, you had a story accepted at Amazon Shorts. For those of us (me!) who are behind the times, tell us how the Amazon Shorts program works, and give us a promo for the story you have published there, so we can all go out and buy it.

The hitch is that you have to already have something for sale (like a book) at Amazon to be considered. The promo? It’s 49 cents. That’s right. You can’t go wrong. If one of you wrote a review, you’d be my new best friend. Well, except for Kelly. The only other thing I’ll say about the story, “Trophy Wife,” is that it isn’t like most of my stories where I try to cram everything but the kitchen sink into it. It’s straight up, racy, sexy, over the top, and I selected it specifically because I figured Amazon would attract mass-market buyers, not literary types. When it was reviewed at Zoetrope Virtual Studio, one person labeled it male chauvinism and male fantasy, funny since the women in the story are completely and unambiguously “in control.”

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Several years ago, you wrote this amazing story, titled “Moon Dust,” about an engineering writer who visits power plants around the world while on assignment for a magazine. Whether intentional or not, this piece, for me, carried a tremendous political, and ethical, message. And it’s the only story I’ve read that mentions 9-11 in a compelling and intellectual way. What does this story mean to you?

Kelly, your reaction to the story compelled me to get it back into circulation for publication. Seriously, “Moon Dust” almost borders on memoir (but it isn’t). I believe the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and 9/11 will come to “book end” a unique period in world history, a combination of approaching-end-of-the-millennium optimism and western capitalism that ultimately became the conflagration we now know variously as the global war on terror, anti-globalization, radical Islam vs. “The West,” pick your poison.

What does the story mean to me? Almost everything, in the sense that I “lived” this era on almost every conceivable level. I was an agent of globalization, even though as a journalist I questioned it, argued it, and even opposed it in some ways. But I was a participant. I tried to capture as much of the ambiguity, contradictions, mythology, and consequences of this era in what I thought was a simple, straightforward piece of fiction. Most readers of the story think otherwise, but I could care less. It’s my story and I’m sticking to it. “Moon Dust” will eventually find a good home!

Another facet of the story I’ll disclose is that I worked on the 95th floor of World Trade Tower One 1979-1981. My computer screen is a photo of the “Towers of Light,” the beams of light that went up at Ground Zero in the Spring of 2002,what I considered until very recently the last hopeful sign of a reasoned response to this tragedy. Last fall, my wife and I printed up hundreds of “trading cards” with a photo of the Towers of Light that went up on the 9/11/06 anniversary and used them as our contribution to throw the election away from the Republicans in November. I’m staunchly independent so I can’t even bring myself to say elect a democrat; I will utter “Anyone but Bush.”

I also recently published a story, “Hallucination in D Minor,” in Marginalia. This does not mention 9/11 by name but is an account of what it might have been like to have been attending a business meeting while those planes hit, something I could freely imagine scooting back in time two and a half decades.

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Your work has appeared in Mizna: Prose, Poetry, and Art Exploring Arab America. New Pages said this about it: Two brothers travel with their father to his homeland in Syria in “American Muezzin” by Jason Makansi. His vaulted image is doubted by his eldest son, while the youngest observes this disparity between tradition and the American in he and his brother, who are “trying to understand the greatest human conundrum of them all, our father.” Have you personally experienced the gap that often occurs between immigrant parents and their first generation American children?

That would almost be an understatement. Yes. It wasn’t a language barrier, though. And my mother, though Greek, was born and raised in Montana. But today I wonder how much of a cultural gap it is, and how much is just an unavoidable “distance” between fathers and sons. Funny, I wrote this story after I listened to a tape a fellow writer gave me of some noted contemporary author who advised, “Write about a unique place.” Well, I figured, how many American short stories are set in Syria, much less Aleppo, which is where my father was born and raised? Now there’s at least one. The story is almost a travelogue of the obligatory “trip to the homeland” I made with my father and brother in 1986, except that I fictionalized it by making my younger brother the narrator.

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In your opinion, what is the writer’s role in society? In the greater global community?

I don’t have a good answer for this. At the risk of sounding really dopey, I’d say that all art strives asymptotically for truth through the dynamic interplay of illusion versus reality. Fiction writers expose certain truths that are perhaps easier confronted through stuff that isn’t really true, or at the very least altered. It’s funny to listen to myself here, as I am the kind of guy that uses honesty as a blunt instrument of conversation. I’m happy to expose and confront truth in whatever manner possible.

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What are you currently reading?

I recently finished Vollman’s Europe Central and two others in my writers group also read it at my request (well, and a bribe to buy dinner for anyone willing to read it and discuss it). I just closed The Devil in the White City, which I probably read because I had a strong hunch that my oldest daughter would end up selecting the University of Chicago for college (and she did over the weekend!). And, I read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road on several flights week before last. Next up will be Toni Morrison’s Beloved and I bought Don Quixote for our family trip to Greece at the end of June.

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Contact Jason

Visit Jason’s personal website

Visit Jason’s company website, Pearl Street Inc.

Purchase “Trophy Wife” (.49 cents) from Amazon.com

Pre-Purchase “Lights Out: The Electricity Crisis, the Global Economy, and What it Means to You”



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