Stories by Bruce Holland Rogers have appeared in three of the W.W. Norton anthologies of brief fiction (Flash Fiction, Sudden Fiction Continued, Flash Fiction Forward) and have won a Pushcart Prize and the World Fantasy Award. Some of his stories have been translated into 23 languages, and his most recent collection, The Keyhole Opera, won the 2006 World Fantasy Award and was recently published in a Portuguese edition. Rogers has lectured on the short-short story at universities in Vienna and Lisbon and teaches fiction writing in the Whidbey Writers Workshop low-residency MFA program at the Northwest Institute for the Literary Arts. He has lived in Toronto and London, but currently makes his home in Eugene, Oregon.

Stefanie: In an interview with SmokeLong Quarterly, you are called “an Ambassador of flash.” How do you feel about that title? Is it a tough role? Do you get to wear a nice uniform?

Bruce: The Ambassador of Flash is, of course, the guy who addresses the General Assembly of the United Nations wearing a trench coat. At the conclusion of his remarks, he opens the coat to show that he is wearing nothing underneath. As much as I could use the publicity, no, I am not that guy.

Actually, I am pleased with the idea that I can be considered the *anything* of flash fiction, or the *anything* of *anything*. After all, to receive a moniker, someone has to be reading your work. But I’m not sure that flash fiction needs an ambassador. Very short narratives are everywhere. They can speak for themselves.

There is one sense in which I’d like to earn the role of Ambassador. I’d like to be an Ambassador between literary traditions and communities of writers. I have always published both commercial and literary fiction, and I have always been dismayed to hear writers of one tradition dismissing the writers of other traditions or different ambitions. I know novelists who don’t consider writers with poor sales to be “real” writers, and I know novelists who think that anything published as category fiction can’t be worth reading. Some of these attitudes are the result of tribalism or the desire to shield one’s ego from the painful radiation that shines from varieties of success that are different from one’s own. And some of these attitudes, I’m happy to say, have been breaking down for a generation. But I’d like to see more discussion between different kinds of writers. I think we have a lot to learn from one another.

I arranged for a collaboration between science fiction and literary writers when six of us wrote a collaborative symmetrina that was published in Indiana Review. That was fun, but what really pleased me was knowing that the contributor’s notes for that issue would reveal diverse publishing histories. Writers who publish in Realms of Fantasy or Asimov’s don’t usually contribute to university-backed literary magazines.

Stefanie: You are completing a novel (working title: Steam) – how do you balance working on the novel and continuing to produce at least three pieces of flash a month as you do in your shortshortshort email subscription service?

Bruce: I’ve been writing Steam in much the same way that I write the short-shorts. I write three stories a month, and I also write three novel chapters a month. In fact, just as I have paying subscribers for the stories, I have paying subscribers for the novel.

In some ways, keeping up with both at the same time has been an enervating experience. I have to shift mental gears to go from shorts to a novel chapter and then back again. And in the last month, the process has broken down some. With a too-busy schedule of an international house move from London, intensive teaching, family visits, and some house remodeling, something had to give. I’m about five chapters behind schedule on the novel now.

There are times when I wish that I could simply immerse myself in writing the novel without the interruptions of short fiction or Life. But it’s also true that I get the writing done when I have lots of incremental deadlines. Without deadlines, I drift. Even if I set aside six hours for writing in a given day, I may spend those six hours writing *about* a chapter, rather than actually drafting it. Deadlines make me produce.

But they have to be real deadlines. In the cases of shortshortshort.com and my novel by subscription, the deadlines are real because I have paying customers who are waiting for my work. It does me no good at all to create deadlines by promising my friends when I’m going to finish something. Deep down, I know they will still be my friends if I miss my deadline. But people who have written me a check are customers. I have a contract with them.

Stefanie: How can people contact you and sign up for the shortshortshort or novel subscription?

Bruce: Details for shortshortshort.com subscriptions are on the site. In brief, subscribers can send $10 by PayPal to bruce@sff.net. Anyone interested in the novel should email me first.

Stefanie: Can you tell us anything about Steam?

Bruce: Steam is a novel that sets out to demonstrate that steam locomotives, manic depression, and the futures market are all the same thing. The Clark family lives in eastern Oregon where they own a railroad museum and operate a tourist train. The family patriarch commits suicide, and the night after the funeral, his ghosts (there are two of them) appear and spirit away his twelve-year-old granddaughter, Marita. The family figures out how to follow, entering a realm where the grandfather’s mood swings are made physically manifest, and they attempt to rescue Marita and bring her home.

Of course, I’m leaving out a lot of characters and am not showing here how the futures market relates to all of this. I find it frustrating to boil a novel down to a few sentences, which means that I’m at odds with the way that novels are sold these days! So I’ll make the novel sound even less marketable by noting that it is modeled on Moby Dick. Like Melville’s novel, mine has 135 chapters plus an epilogue. And whenever I’m not sure about what happens in a particular chapter, I search the corresponding chapter in Moby Dick for clues.

Stefanie: During the Magical Realism Panel at the last Whidbey Writers Workshop residency, you brought about the term “Resistance Realism.” Can you talk a little bit more about this concept?

The panel was a discussion between members of the Whidbey fiction faculty: Wayne Ude, Kathleen Alcala, and myself. I have always been irritated by the way that the term “magical realism” has devolved into a synonym for fantasy. In the panel, the three of us made an effort to distinguish magical realism from other kinds of irrealism: surrealism, expressionism, and fantasy.

In a nutshell, surrealism is dreamlike. Anything at all can happen in art that tries to express the workings of the unconscious mind. If you can imagine it, it can happen in surrealism. There are no rules for the surreal. Expressionism, at least as I use the term, means the expression of emotional realities as concrete metaphors. To express the feeling of estrangement after a divorce, the ex in a story is no longer a person but a machine. Fantasy makes the impossible plausible by implying a set of rules for any impossible story elements.

I distinguish magical realism from the other three in this way: Magical realism attempts to convey a real worldview to the reader. The things that happen in a magical realist story are things that someone believes can really happen. Part of the project of magical realism is to convey to the reader what it is like to live within that belief system. Ghosts are real. Picking up coins with the wrong side up really does bring misfortune. A jilted woman can cause her lover to be trampled by horses if she is angry enough and dances hard enough. All of this can look a lot like fantasy, but fantasy doesn’t have to reflect the real belief system of any community. Magical realism does.

Kathleen Alcala has a different take on this. She emphasizes that magical realism expresses the worldview of a community that is under pressure. It is the literature of cultural underdogs. Part of the function of the magic is to show that these oppressed people are powerful within their own belief system. I don’t know if this applies to all work that I might call magical realism, but I haven’t yet been able to think of an exception. I proposed “resistance realism” as another name that we might give to such fiction.

Stefanie: You just returned to Oregon after living in London. How has living in two countries affected your writing?

Bruce: Moving somewhere new always helps me to see with new eyes, and that’s a good thing for an artist. Even moving to a new place in your own country is good, or spending a couple weeks in a different culture.

London has made its way into my fiction in small details, and ideas for my fiction often arise from little things. Regular walks in Queen’s Park, Guy Falkes Day, and “Today in Parliament” are going to give me ideas that are quite different from walks along the Willamette River, the Fourth of July, and C-SPAN. But a writer can get a lot of the same benefit by spending the day in a neighboring town. You don’t have to move across eight time zones.

Stefanie: When initially approached to be interviewed, you said you’d discuss anything except desiccated possums. Is it fair to the public to withhold this information? Might you have any comment now that a little time has passed and those dark days might be in the distant future?

Bruce: I had thought that I had said all that needed saying about desiccated possums in prior interviews. Apparently, though, interviewers just can’t leave this topic alone.

My good friend Alan M. Clark is a painter and illustrator. Alan specializes in dark and disturbing images, and his studio if full of all sorts of dead things that serve as artist’s models. One day, my wife and I were out for a walk, and we came to the site of a home demolition. We spotted the mummified remains of a possum that must have crawled under the house to die, and the conditions had apparently been ideal for preserving the remains.

I knew that Alan could use something like that. In fact, people have been sending mummified animal remains to Alan for years. He once showed me a set of baby mice, and he had been particularly pleased with the gift of a dried bat, which he received in the mail.

Holly and I took the possum to Alan’s house. No one was home, so we hung the possum in a bag from his front doorknob with a gift card. Alan called us as soon as he got home to tell us how delighted he was with the gift. “It has already frightened several people!” he said.

The possum eventually became the central figure in a mobile sculpture of dried animals that hangs from the ceiling in his studio. While I am proud to have made such a contribution to art, I would like to now lay the topic to rest.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER:

Stefanie Freele is the 2008 Kathy Fish Fellowship Writer-In-Residence for SmokeLong Quarterly. She has a MFA from the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts: Whidbey Writers Workshop. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Glimmer Train, American Literary Review, Talking River, Literary Mama, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, FRiGG, Wigleaf, Cafe Irreal, Permafrost, Hobart, Cezanne’s Carrot, and Contrary. For more information, check out www.stefaniefreele.com.

Geoffrey Forsyth’s In The Land Of The Free won the second annual Rose Metal Press chapbook contest judged by Robert Shapard. Stories from his chapbook appeared in, among other places, Other Voices, New Orleans Review, and Rhino. Many of the stories were also nominated for the Pushcart Prize, The Best American Mystery Stories series, and individual press awards. His story “Mud” appeared in the 2007 Norton Anthology New Sudden Fiction: From America and Beyond. Geoffrey is a graduate of The University of Iowa, The University of Vermont, and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He currently lives in La Grange Park, Illinois with his wife and children.

The first story in your chapbook, “In My Mother’s Kitchen,” sets the tone of the collection with this absurd yet serious tale about a boy born onto a cutting board in his mother’s kitchen. From there, many of your stories continue to toe-the-line between real and make-believe, between symbolism and truth. Do you find it easy (or conversely, difficult) to write in this fashion? How would you define the type of stories you write?

I find writing all types of stories to be very hard. It isn’t something that comes easy for me. That said, I find it necessary as an artist to push myself to write as many different kinds of stories as I possibly can. Real/make-believe, symbolism/truth, I try not to think about it too much. Like many of us out there, I grew up watching Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. I liked his sweaters, and when he fed his fish. But I also liked when it was time for the trolley to roll up and take us to the Land of Make-Believe, or whatever he called it. There was something there for me in both worlds. Mainly I want to entertain the reader, keep them interested in what I have to say. The baby on the cutting board I suppose is a nod to my love of fairy tales. I loved hearing stories before bed. They freaked me out. But in a good way.

In “The Wall,” a man purchases a wall from a salesman he meets in a bar. An actual wall, complete with graffiti and crumbling boards. What prompted this idea? How do you make the bar angle work for you in this piece?

I had always admired Frost’s “Mending Wall” poem. You can’t grow up in New England in the 70’s and 80’s and not get a significant dose of Frost. Also, I’ve always appreciated that story Sartre did. And, well, who my age (37) didn’t listen to Floyd at some point in their miserable lives? So, those were the prompts. Then I guess I went looking for a container to put this stuff in and well…I guess I see the bar and the salesman and the buyer of the wall as characters in a joke (i.e. a guy walks into a bar and…or, what did the salesman say to the man from Dubuque?), only there is no punch line, which for me is much more interesting and strange. Some people think I’m taking a poke at Frost in this story, but honestly I don’t see it that way. He was fantastic. Still is.

Talk about the title of the chapbook and the phrase that appears on the back cover: “you’ve got to hide your happiness.”

One day I was home alone. My wife was at work. My kids were at school. It had been a long time since I had been home alone. I stood at my window and watched all these people walking to the train–it was like watching animals migrating. A friend of mine caught me standing at the window and motioned for me to open it. Then he shouted, “What are you doing?” I said I was taking the day off to do, well, nothing. “I’m spending the day at home,” I said. “Well,” he said. “Ducky for you!” He said it real mean-like.

So, later that day, I popped some popcorn and did some channel surfing, where I ended up on VH1 or whatever that channel is called, where they show all those rock documentaries? And, well, they were showing this one on John Lennon. Now, I’m no Beatles fan or anything. Don’t know much about them. Never got too into their music. But this documentary wasn’t too much about the music. I came in at the part when John Lennon has quit the band and has decided to stay home full time and raise his children and have fun with Yoko and whatnot. And you could see on one hand he was enjoying these things immensely, but then the reporters started coming and interrupting everything he did. It got so he couldn’t even have lunch with his family on the back lawn, and the reporters kept pressing him: “What are you doing?” “What are your days like?” “When will you go back to the Beatles.” He would just look at them all and say the same thing: “I know it’s hard for you to believe, man, but I’m enjoying myself right now, taking it easy, learning about who I am.” You could see that everyone he was talking to couldn’t believe that someone would want to do that, and well, that just got me thinking about the morning and the window, the neighbor and his ducky comment, and I wondered: does even a regular person who isn’t a Beatle have a chance at feeling free around here? It seemed to me, and still does, that if I were to go about getting to that sense of freedom I’d either need a thick skin (hence, the rhino in the story) or I’d need to be more covert about my happiness, which I think is demented and sad, but maybe a little true.

Anyway, that feeling of freedom, whatever it’s called, I wish that for my characters. And I wish it for you, Kelly Spitzer.

Why thank you Geoffrey Forsyth! I often think that being a writer allows a person an ultimate amount of freedom. He/she can be an astronaut one day and drug dealer the next. In the mind, anyway… And then I remember that writers don’t often get paid, and when they do, it’s not very much. But still, we can sit around in sweats all day drinking coffee or wine or both and imagine whatever the hell we want.

Astronauts and drug dealers are really hard folks to pin down. There’s so much technical stuff you have to know about with being an astronaut, you almost have to work for NASA to be able to pull it off, and the same is true with drug dealers. So much has to get weighed, and the terminology is always changing, and also the potency of the product has to be considered…and I mean are we talking about a dime bag in the early 80’s vs. one sold a year ago? I don’t know about you, but I don’t see a lot of freedom in writing stories or poems or novels. I think maybe there’s some freedom that happens afterwards, when you’ve done your darnndest to pull off whatever you’ve set your sights on. There’s the freedom to go on to the next thing. And, well, in writing, you’re the boss, for the most part, which may explain that dress code of sweats and t-shirt with barf stains all over it. The quest for freedom isn’t easy on anybody, including writers. Achieving happiness is no walk in the park either, I suspect. I think probably when you’re talking about the pursuit of freedom or happiness you’re really talking about the same thing: that state of being fine with who you are, and having others maybe being okay with that, too. When you think about it, it’s almost impossible to achieve, but we all die trying, which is kind of beautiful, say the poets.

Of all the stories that appear in this chapbook, do you have a particular favorite?

They’re all a little too weird to be lovable. I guess I would say I enjoyed writing “Coins” the most. I liked working with two characters on equal footing. Nobody dies, or even gets injured. It’s hard to write a story like that–one whose motor is fueled not by anger or sadness, but by something else entirely. In this case maybe it’s the recognition that not all failed relationships are destructive. Some just end, but are worth remembering. I stand behind that sort of thing. Don’t get me wrong, I like a good rant, too. But, again, I was trying to push myself into new territory, and I guess, in the end, I’m glad to be the author of a story that is maybe more hopeful in tone than most stories you come across, including mine, especially mine.

There are a number of striking (and perhaps a bit disturbing) images and metaphors in your stories. This one, from “Hunchbacks,” for example, caught my eye:

“He didn’t want to think of the twins with wings growing out of their backs. It reminded him of the time a bird accidentally flew into his house and bashed itself against the wall of his bedroom. He had been sleeping, so when it flew in and struck the wall the first time, he pulled covers over his head. He lay there listening while it thumped itself to death, and when the bird dropped on his chest, even through the blanket he felt the small warm weight of it over the place where his heart was, and for a moment he thought that the dead bird was actually his heart lying there, loosened somehow and flown free of his chest.”

It’s beautiful, but at the same time, it leaves me, as it left the narrator, unsettled. How much time do you spend crafting images and metaphors? Do you think they can make or break a literary story?

Images and metaphors are the meat and potatoes of very short stories mainly due to the fact that so much has to get communicated in a short amount of time. An image or metaphor, when it’s brought off correctly, can convey the very essence of a character, or a place, or even a conflict. Much time and space can be saved with a well-oiled metaphor. Also, let’s face it, these are moments when you can feel the writer working on your behalf, shaping her ideas, thinking always and trying to sharpen what it is– exactly–she’s trying to say. It takes years of writing to get any good at writing them, and even good writers struggle with this aspect of writing. Yes, I spend a lot of time crafting them. Mostly I fail. But sometimes I don’t. I would say from a reader’s perspective that they are extremely important. Good images and metaphors are what I remember about a story. They are what bring me back to a particular story again and again, because they are what make a story particular.

It took you a long time to start submitting your work. What held you back? What advice would you give to others who are afraid to send their stories into the world?

I still have a hard time submitting work. I don’t know what holds me back. Low self-esteem? I don’t know. Fear of rejection? All that shit. But, ultimately, you have to send it out. Because it does no good sitting there in a desk, or saved onto that part of the computer that doesn’t have a Send Now button. In the end the process of writing a story is about making contact. It’s about connection. And while it often doesn’t seem this way, it’s about participating in a life you love enough to criticize. In the end, despite your fucked-upness, you have to get it done, because, it turns out, you care enough about us all not to, and because you’re worth it, Meatball. You really are.

Jacob Appel has over 80 short stories published or forthcoming in journals such as Agni, Alaska Quarterly Review, Arts and Letters, Boston Review, Confrontation, Florida Review, Fugue, Gulfstream, Harpur Palate, Iowa Review, Inkwell, Michigan Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, Nebraska Review, New Millennium Writings, New York Stories, Passages North, Prairie Schooner, River Styx, Seattle Review, Shenandoah, StoryQuarterly, Subtropics, Third Coast, Threepenny Review, Washington Square, and West Branch. In 2001, his story “Counting” was shortlisted for the O. Henry Prize, and in 2006, his story “Fallout” received a special mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology. Jacob has won numerous contests and awards, including a Dana Award and a Sherwood Anderson Writers Grant. As a non-fiction writer, his essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, and many regional newspapers. He also publishes in the field of medical ethics, and is the author of eight full-length plays that have been performed in theatres around the country. For more information, visit Jacob’s website.

You’ve amassed quite a list of publication credits, in very reputable journals, I might add. How long have you been writing? Do you have any tips, or secrets, on how to get published?

I started writing in high school. Unfortunately, when I told me career counselor that I wished to become a writer someday, she leaned over her desk with concern and suggested that I choose a “more realistic” profession. I didn’t write for more than a decade after that encounter. In my second incarnation as a writer, I’ve been writing for about twelve years…. I think that is about how long it takes to acquire the fundamentals of any art form. Mastering the form, of course, takes the remainder of one’s life.

I am increasingly confident that the secret to publication is relentlessness. Keep writing, keep sending out your work, respond to rejection by sending out even more work. If a journal sends you a note stating that your style just isn’t what they’re looking for, which has happened to me on multiple occasions, wait until that editor retires and try again. I have acquired more than 11,000 rejection letters and I’ve published fewer than one hundred stories. From a statistical point of view, I have failed abysmally. But I think few writers “fail” because they don’t have raw talent or potential; most aspiring writers don’t publish because they give up too soon.

Are you aware that the blog Literary Rejections on Display calls you the Golden Appel because you’ve won numerous contests? How do you respond to this post, and the comments it prompted?

I was both flattered and highly surprised when I was first contacted by Literary Rejections on Display. The truth is that there are a number of other writers who have won as many, if not far more, contests than I have. I suppose the anonymous curator of Literary Rejections on Display is particularly attuned to spotting my by-line….sort of how, if you learn an obscure foreign language, you suddenly discover that many other people also speak it. (I studied Dutch for many years and it shocked me that “everybody” seemed to speak Dutch, while the reality was that I was hyper-sensitive to noticing those few who did.) I do think that Literary Rejections on Display is a delightful, entertaining and witty website. I am looking forward to the day when Writer, Rejected sheds his or her anonymity so that I can invite this genius to lunch. However, I confess I haven’t spent much time reading the comments on the site. I’ve come to understand that some are less flattering than others….but I try not to take that to heart. I recognize that there are people out there who don’t care for my writing. I assure them that I’m still learning and improving–and I do hope that someday I’ll write something that suits their standards and tastes. I am also hopeful that there will someday be a parallel blog named Literary Acceptances on Display, and that I’ll be mentioned there as well.

You’re also a seriously educated guy. You have a B.A and M.A from Brown, and M.A and M.Phil from Columbia, a M.F.A in creative writing from New York University, and, as if those weren’t enough, you have a J.D. from Harvard Law. Why so many degrees? How has your schooling benefited you? Your writing?

I love learning new things. I’m often asked whether a writer should write what he knows or what he doesn’t know–and I think the answer is to focus on the reader’s knowledge, to write what the reader doesn’t know because most people read to acquire knowledge or insight into worlds that are not familiar to them. Alas, many of my degrees are professional in nature and designed to further my career as a bioethicist. I wish very much that my work in fiction and my work in bioethics would overlap, but it does so only rarely. Someday, I’d love to merge my interests and to put together an anthology of short stories on bioethics-related themes from abortion to euthanasia. (By way of full disclosure, I should add that I’m expecting to receive my medical degree from Columbia University this coming spring). The one area where my interests do complement each other well is in teaching, which is both how I earn a living and what I love doing most. Drawing upon examples from many different fields helps one to connect with students of all backgrounds and with highly diverse interests.

I should add that my degrees generally make it more difficult to fill out standardized forms and to apply for grants. Usually, the forms ask for a list of all of one’s degrees and then provide room for only three. Clearly, an example of how the overeducated face ongoing discrimination.

You also teach fiction workshops, correct?

I’ve been teaching at the Gotham Writers Workshop in New York City for approximately eight years now. I like Gotham’s distinctive method and I am always impressed with the high quality of the students. Quite a number of my former students have now gone on to MFAs and to publishing in the literary journals. Two of them in particular, Chanan Tigay and Christie Hauser, are destined to become literary stars. That brings me a great deal of satisfaction. I was fortunate enough to have many brilliant writing teachers over the years–among them the essayist Andre Aciman at NYU, the playwright Tina Howe at Hunter College, and Julie Leerburger of Scarsdale High School–and I think it’s very important to pass along both wisdom and enthusiasm to the next generation of writers. Teaching writing is probably the most rewarding job in the world. Occasionally, I’ll hear an established but not yet financially successful author complaining of his or her teaching duties…and it saddens me profoundly. I feel bad for that writer’s students, but I also feel bad for anyone who views sharing their literary knowledge as a burden.

How do you find the time to write as much as you do?

I can’t speak for all writers, but I approach writing as my top professional priority in life. My job is to write every day, no matter how tired I am after a long day lecturing on bioethics or working at the hospital, even if I manage to produce only a couple of sentences. Writing is a full-time job….twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week…because I’m always looking for story ideas or combing the world for precious details or moments. Most people take Christmas and Thanksgiving off from work–but to a writer, a family’s holiday dinner is prime observation time. That being said, it’s easy to write every day when you love writing. The challenge I often have is finding time “not to write”–in other words, sacrificing my writing time to attend to other quotidian tasks such as changing the light bulbs. Sometimes, I find myself typing in the dark for several days before I’m willing to make such a concession.

Tell us about the short story collection you’re putting together.

The story collection I’m working on is tentatively called “Creve Coeur” after the fictional city in Rhode Island where the stories take place. I started writing the stories in this particular collection at a moment when several people very close to me, including my grandfather, were dying. As a result, a deep sense of loss seems to permeate the writing. I am very hopeful that I will publish a collection someday–and even that the market for fiction collections will improve. However, my great regret in life–I’m not even forty, and already I can sense this to be the case–is that my grandfather never had an opportunity to witness me publish a book. He was quite a remarkable man, a Belgian by birth, a jeweler by trade, a refugee who never lost his good humor or his love of his fellow human beings, and he taught me the great pride a craftsman can have in his work. I suspect that is why the stories in “Creve Coeur” are focused on the travails and triumphs of similar skilled workers–locksmiths and barbers and diamond cutters. The one luxury of having published over eighty stories, and written at least another fifty, is that if I can ever manage to sell one short story collection, I’ll have another ten waiting right behind it. A colleague recently pointed out to me that I may be the most widely-published and honored short story writer in the country without a published book. She meant this as a compliment–but I am not so sure this is an achievement to be proud of.

You’re working on a novel, as well. Any hints as to what it’s about?

As soon as I figure out what it’s about, you’ll be the first to know. All I’m confident of for certain is that it’s a love story because, the more I write, the more I become convinced that those are the stories most worth telling. Right now, it also involves an amateur historian who discovers that the American Civil War never took place, that the entire conflict is a colossal hoax perpetrated by a cast of hundreds…but that may change in the final version. Every time I sit down to work on it, I find myself thinking that maybe I should be writing a Broadway musical instead…trying to put music and lyrics together. Now that takes real talent! What I have learned in the process is that writing a novel is as distinct an art form from writing a short story as it is from writing a series of show tunes…or even designing a house. If only the task were as simple as stringing together ten short stories or three novellas and calling the finished product a novel…but, for better or worse, novel writing appears to be an entirely different skill. I believe that it was Somerset Maugham who said that there are three rules to writing a novel–but nobody knows what they are. As for me, I’m not even sure that there are three rules….My deepest fear is that we’ll do a follow-up interview in ten years, shortly after you win a well-deserved Pulitzer, and I still won’t be sure what my novel is about.

Let’s talk about your playwriting. You’ve written eight full-length plays that have been performed around the country. How did you become interested in this art form? How involved are you in production?

As a child, my parents–who in every other way are wonderful, generous human beings–never once took me to the theater. Okay, maybe once….I have vague recollections of my father receiving free tickets to The Sound of Music. So I can’t begin to express the sheer wonder I experienced when I moved back to New York City after college and started accompanying friends to off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway performances. At first, it never crossed my mind that I too could write plays of my own….but as my friends who write for theater started going to rehearsals and openings, surrounded by like-minded souls, while I searched (often futilely) for literary journals containing my stories in the obscure recesses of out-of-the-way bookshops, it struck me that playwrights might have the better half of the literary bargain. In my opinion, the only experience more magical than seeing a play on stage is seeing ones own play on stage. That being said, I find it far more challenging to write a play than to write a story. You have fewer tools–and far more opportunities to make a fool of yourself in front of large audiences. Maybe that’s why I am so grateful when total strangers agree to bring my plays to life. I try to go to at least one performance of every staging of one my plays, which for a person who dreads flying in airplanes is quite a challenge, but I’ve recently driven from New York City to Detroit and to Indianapolis and to Columbus to pay tribute to the theater companies that have been willing to put their faith in what I’ve written. So far, I’ve never taken much of a role in the production process. There’s a certain thrill to being surprised–and I’m rarely, if ever, disappointed. Each version of any particular play can manifest itself in thousands of different ways–that’s a good portion of the fun. And then there’s the dream that you’ll walk into the theater and suddenly discover that you’ve created something bordering on perfection, like Sarah Ruhl’s “Eurydice” or Rich Espey’s “Hope’s Arbor”….Someday! In any case, I have a new play, The Replacement, opening at the Intentional Theatre in Waterford, Connecticut, in early October, so I’m feeling very hopeful.

Is there a particular subject your plays explore?

I think one of the defining features of my plays is that they are constructed around strong female characters. There is an ongoing debate, which I largely try to stay away from, about the degree to which structural sexism prevents female playwrights from having access to major New York and regional theaters. What I personally find puzzling, and somewhat disturbing, is that the vast majority of modern plays written by both men and women feature men–usually middle-aged white men–in the leading roles. This is particularly strange when women compose both a majority of aspiring actors in New York City and the majority of theater-goers. Beyond issues of gender, I think many of my plays focus on issues of aging or dying, and several take place in hospitals and nursing homes. This is probably the bioethicist in me fighting for attention. However, I’ve also just completed a reworking of the Helen of Troy myth, presented from Helen’s point of view, and a play about an African-American ornithologist’s quest to be the woman who “rediscovers” the long-believed-extinct ivory-billed woodpecker, so I can’t say that I’ve really carved out a distinctive niche for myself yet.

You’re a licensed sightseeing guide in New York City. What is your favorite “unknown” place to show people?

That’s an easy question. There’s an obscure monument on Riverside Drive, just north of Grant’s Tomb, that was erected in the late eighteenth century to commemorate the death of an “amiable” child, St. Clair Pollack, a four-year-old kid who likely fell into the Hudson River near that location and drowned. Private citizens make pilgrimages to the monument and leave small mementos–St. Christopher medals and old coins and roses and ribbons and unlit votive candles. I’ve always thought it quite remarkable that so many ordinary New Yorkers take the time to pay their respects to a child who died more than two centuries ago–back when this neighborhood was farmland and strawberry patches. (Everybody has a particular field of expertise in the world–ranging from nuclear physics to American literature. I can safely say that I know more about the “amiable child” monument than any other living human being–and I challenge anyone to prove otherwise). I’ve actually written a short essay about the site, describing the time I spent there after the attacks of 9-11, but it has yet to find a home.

What would you like to take on next, in writing and/or in life?

I would like to be appointed poet laureate of the Galapagos Islands. (If anybody with pull in the Ecuadorian capital happens to read this, I’d greatly appreciate their exerting their efforts on my behalf.) However, until that happens, I think I’ll stick to writing short stories…. another eighty or so, and I might just get the hang of it.

Contact Jacob: jacobmappel AT gmail DOT com

Read:
“Hazardous Cargoes”
published in New Millennium Writings

“The Ataturk of the Outer Boroughs”
published in Storyglossia

“Natural Selection”
published by SFWP

“The Empress of Charcoal”
published by Harpur Palate