Joseph lives in Baltimore, where he writes and edits. His fiction and poetry have appeared in such magazines as SmokeLong Quarterly, elimae, Mississippi Review, FRiGG, Exquisite Corpse, Alice Blue, and elsewhere. Visit his micro-fiction blog, very small dogs , and Baltimore Interview, the art blog he co-edits.

Okay, before we get started, can I just say OMG! I’m interviewing Joe Young?! This is exciting for me because you were one of the first, if not the first, writer whose work I fell in love with upon joining Zoetrope Virtual Studios. I read everything I could by you and couldn’t get enough. Still can’t. There are many people besides me that feel the same, so I’m asking for all of us: Will we ever see a novel, or a short story collection, or a micro collection, or SOMETHING in book format, by Joe Young?

Thanks, Kelly! So nice of you to say. I remember first reading your flash fiction pieces too, those wonderfully evocative stories about teenagers. Hmm, a book? I don’t know. I’m so terrible when it comes to that kind of thing, sending work out to magazines, presses, etc. The writing is so much fun, the process, the mystery of where the words come from, that once I’m done writing something all I want to do is write something else. The glow fades so fast from what’s already done. Another story is waiting to be written, so who has the time to deal with something from a week ago? I feel terrible about that sometimes. I wish I could have more drive in that department. But then again, that leads into your next question, about my microfiction blog. A blog is such immediate gratification, and while the fire is still hot around a piece of writing, I can blog it. And then maybe a person or two will read it.

You recently started a new project called “very small dogs,” which is a blog focused on micro fiction. What prompted you to start “very small dogs”? How many micros have you written for it?

See above for one reason I started it: aimlessness, ambitionlessness, a terrible disinterest in my stuff a day or two after it’s done. Also, I like control. You decide what and when to post something on a blog. And, it’s sort of like a collection of work, all in one place. It’s self publishing at its easiest, for slackers.

I started the blog in May of this year (2007) and have posted 39 stories to date. I’m not sure it’s entirely accurate to say I wrote them for very small dogs, since a few of them actually predate the blog and since I probably would have written a lot of them anyway, but it does keep the fire on me to stay productive.

You also run the Baltimore Interview blog, in collaboration with photographer Michael Cantor, which is “dedicated to profiling arts people in the Baltimore area.” Have you always had an interest in visual art? Do you partake in the visual arts yourself?

Oh, I love visual art, painting, sculpture, collage, whatever. I’ve always been a bit jealous of visual artists, partly because a piece of art is an actual object, something that takes up space in the world. A piece of writing has no physical weight, dimension. Sure, a book does, but that’s not exactly the writing itself, as a painting or sculpture is itself. So, what with that jealousy and that fondness for art, I decided that one way of being able to “hang out” with art and artists is to talk to them and write about it. Yeah, I’ve done a bit with the visual side myself. I spent a couple months learning to draw a few years ago. Also, I like thinking about ways to give writing physical presence and have played around with printing my stories out and attaching them to objects like chunks of 2 X 4s or computer hard drives, or arranging them on various paper sources, old maps or pages from calendars, and hanging them on the wall.

Mentally, how is the process of writing different than drawing? Do you find you use different senses, perhaps? Does mood impact which art form you’re likely to partake in, if not content?

Well, I don’t know that much about drawing, it’s not something I’ve practiced a lot in my life, but it was quite a bit different for me, process-wise and mood-wise, than writing. Drawing was much more meditative, my eye slowly and calmly working over the subject, whereas writing is a much more intensive thing, concentrating hard to try to come up with the right words to describe both what I see in my mind’s eye and also the feelings attached to that scene. It’s the difference between rendering the world and interpreting it, I think, something I’m sure artists know all about in their own respective medium. Given that, I guess it’s a much fuller sensory experience to write, while drawing for me tends to rely mostly on the eye.

Tell us about the collaborations you’re working on with visual artists.

I have a painter friend, Christine Sajecki, I’m going to collaborate with in some fashion for an art show she’s having at a Baltimore art gallery this October. I’m going to contribute microfictions based around her work and then we’ll display them in some fashion side by side in the gallery. How all this will be done is still in process, but I’m really looking forward to working all that out. Her stuff is great and the idea of working with an artist and being part of her show is really exciting. I also have a photographer friend, Beth Crisman, who has been e-mailing me photos, to which I respond with a micro. At some point we’ll collect the photos/stories together in some fashion. Another great project; she’s really good.

Have you seen collaborations such as this before? Where did the idea come from?

Sure, I’ve seen them before. I really like when art and writing come together and have seen some beautiful collaborations in that regard. The artist Jasper Johns and poet Frank O’hara did some really neat stuff together in the 60s. I guess seeing that kind of thing made me want to find artists I could work with too.

Christine herself was a poetry minor in art school, so she’s really in tune with writing (check out some of the titles of her paintings), and Beth has been really enthusiastic about working together and has been great in giving me photos with lots of room in them for exploring.

How long have you been writing? Have you taken any writing classes? Attended any workshops or conferences? Who or what has influenced your style?

I’ve been writing forever, but I got a lot more serious about it maybe 7 years ago. This was right around the time I “discovered” flash fiction. It completely opened me up, that discovery, legitimized my impulses towards really short writing, and, before, when it took several painful months of banging my head against a traditionally lengthed short story all of a sudden these flash pieces started pouring out of me, several a week. It still took some time to accept myself as primarily a flash/micro writer (everyone is supposed to write a novel, right?), but at some point I just had to concede that it’s what really fires my imagination, and that short, really short, is my natural rhythm. I love that intense lens of concentration you focus on the page, trying to dig out the deep bones of a story. A lot of people have influenced me: Kathy Fish, Mary Miller, Robert Bradley, Gary Lutz, the shortest stories by Grace Paley, poetry, haiku.

I’ve taken a few creative writing classes here and there in San Francisco and Baltimore, but I never went to school as a creative writing major, and neither have I done any workshops like Tin House or gone to any conferences. I was an English major at San Francisco State University, which always felt a bit more comfortable to me than creative writing. Some people really thrive in that atmosphere, and more power to them if they do, but that kind of close scrutiny of my work gives diminishing returns for me I think. I don’t tend to look too deeply into my motivations for writing or the writing choices I make, and I prefer to go by feel when I’m writing rather than by making my tendencies explicit. Not that feedback hasn’t been really useful to me from some really smart and talented writers–it’s been invaluable at times–but I can only absorb so much at one time, and I think an intensive MFA-type environment would have been largely wasted on me.

You have an insane ability to create striking metaphors. Take this one, for example, from “Poems on Small Dogs” published in Alice Blue:

Her bare shoulders are two trucks. She turns and drives them away.

How much time do you spend on such lines? Do you have any tips on how to create vivid and unique metaphors?

Thanks. Like anything in writing I guess, sometimes they come immediately and sometimes they take forever to shape in the right way. All I know about metaphors, and words in general, is just to sit and let them show up, and then, once they do, pursue them relentlessly, no matter how stupid they may seem at first (or may end up being). Going out on a limb for a story, or for a word or a sentence, is my favorite thing, taking a chance at being obtuse or silly or over the top. It’s one of the benefits of writing flash/micro, being able to throw one away if you have to without a terribly great loss of time or energy.

Tell us three things we should know about life. Or love. Or chop suey.

Oh jeez. I guess one thing that’s been on my mind is, people are good. They really are. I love them. They screw up a lot, do really shitty things sometimes, but that’s mostly because they’re so damn fragile. One thing for sure, we shouldn’t drop bombs on them. I haven’t had chop suey since I was a kid though. I like kung pao.

Contact Joseph

Visit Joe’s website

Read:

“Photographers”
published by SmokeLong Quarterly

“Poems on Small Dogs”
published by Alice Blue

“Troubadour”
Third Prize in Literary Potpourri’s 2003 Flash Fiction Contest

“How Things Hold Light”
published by FRiGG

“Bijou and Music”
2 micros, published by Rock Heals

Filed Under: The Writer Profile Project |