Steven McDermott is the founder and editor of STORYGLOSSIA, the journal recently named best online publication by Million Writers Award. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University, and a BA in English and Philosophy from Western Washington University. His work has been published in such journals as Aethlon: The Journal of Sports Literature, Carve, Passages North, Red Wheelbarrow, The Rockford Review, Timbercreek Review, Westview, The Angler, Scarecrow, Thieves Jargon, SmokeLong Quarterly, Word Riot, and elimae. Steven is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and the bibliographer for the International Raymond Carver Society. Visit the Storyglossia litblog .

It’s often said that literary endeavors are labors of love. Whether it’s writing and publishing short fiction, or editing for a journal, there is little or no compensation beyond the personal satisfaction of it. For you, what in particular inspired you to start STORYGLOSSIA, and what has kept that fire burning strong enough to raise your journal to the level it’s at?

Initially I was bored with what I had been reading in the literary journals I subscribed to and thought my aesthetic applied to editing might produce something more exciting, something more like what I wanted to read. As for what keeps me going? This whole wave of digital media is changing the world and I’m excited to be involved in it in some small way. I think future literary historians will look back at this era and recognize that in the early part of the 21st century much of the best work was being published in online journals rather than in print journals. Too many people have too much invested in print right now so the disruptive media gets slagged. That will change.

What is your aesthetic?

Lately it’s turned to mush. With the past several issues of Storyglossia I’ve pushed for more variety and have been pleased to include more non-traditional work. I love to see writers taking chances. When I started the journal, I was hoping for raw, edgy, stories with strong emotional content. A bit of life splattered on the page, imperfections and all. An example of what excited me back then is Nicky Hoult’s story “The Contract” from Issue 4.

Despite the fact that there is little or no money in writing and publishing short stories, journals, including yours, do sponsor paying contests and release print versions. How are these ventures funded?

Most journals rely on subscriptions, advertising, grants, and in the cases of university based journals, English department budgets. Storyglossia relies on none of those sources of funding. With the exception of a generous donation from Steven Gillis of Dzanc Books, Storyglossia is funded out of my check book. This year’s contest was nearly self-supporting. That is, the entry fees covered the prize money awarded, and some of the other costs of the contest, but it was not a revenue generator.

I recently read your short story collection, A Winter of Different Directions, and was struck by the amount of detail in your writing. Take the golf scenes in “Go,” for example, or the plant life in “Single Malts of the Olympia Peninsula.” You write with profound authority. Do you research your topics?

Some of it’s write what you know. For example, I used to play scratch golf and have a degree in landscape design, which required two years of botany classes. So I know golf and my fair share of plant names. But, yes, I do a lot of research. For “Single Malts” I went out to the Olympic Peninsula to the locations in the story and cataloged the plants I found there and then worked them into the story. The carpentry stuff was research. And the scotch. What a great excuse to taste a bunch of single malts! But I also found a book on scotch in a used book store and relied on that to guide my taste testing. The cleanroom stuff in “Cleanliness is Next to Emptiness” is also from research. I do try to visit the settings in my story if at all possible. I want someone who knows the place to recognize it from my descriptions. Same with the work my characters do.

Much of your writing in this collection is rooted in the Pacific Northwest. Its cities, wildlife, and businesses all make appearances. La Push. Microsoft. Boeing. Salmon. Other than the fact that you live in the Pacific Northwest, what makes you want to write about this place?

If I’d grown up and primarily lived somewhere else I’d probably write about that place, so there’s no grand aesthetic of place at work in the collection. Although, I do think the Pacific Northwest is under represented in our literature. There’s plenty of New York and LA fiction, plenty of “southern” fiction, so maybe we need a bit more PNW fiction. I could rhapsodize about the natural beauty, but I’ve traveled enough to know that it’s everywhere. I’ve chosen to settle up here in the NW of the NW, so unless a story is set in another location for a reason, the default setting is the NW.

Do you see the Pacific Northwest as having a distinctive quality that could foster the type of development we’ve seen in Southern, or other regional, fiction?

I’m inclined to say no. We don’t even have accents up here, we speak in homogenized newscaster tonalities. And making fun of Seattle’s coffee culture and Idaho’s Aryan Nation has already been overdone. As one of the last parts of the country to be settled, the NW has a mix of stuff from everywhere and I think that makes attempts to capture a regional flavor difficult: just about anything you think of that seems distinctive you can also find somewhere else. And the Cascades split both Washington and Oregon into completely different cultures; the westside and eastside of the mountains are themselves different regions. At one time there was a strange mix of populism and entrepreneurialism and that might make for some fascinating historical fiction set in Seattle or Portland: the Wobblies and Klondike for example. As with anywhere, you can find eccentric pockets, so maybe a project that focused on describing all of those eccentricities would reveal a region more unique than I suppose. We’re currently being overrun by tribal casinos, but that is also happening elsewhere.

Talk about putting this collection together—how long it took, how you selected the stories, what advice you would like to give to those currently in the process, etc.

Well, first I did the contest thing. Put a few different collections together from my stories that were getting published in literary journals and sent it off to the usual suspects: the Flannery O’Connor contest, Drue Hienz, AWP, etc. Those collections were titled “Proper Emotions,” from a flash fiction piece that didn’t make it into Winter. I kept experimenting with different configurations. One version was eclectic, comprised of the stories with the widest range of styles. Another version was more thematic; just the loser stories. When it came time to finalize Winter I went with a mix of stories that reflected both those goals: a wide range of narrative techniques and stories about characters bouncing along the bottom end of their lives. I didn’t want it to just be a selection from previously published stories, so among the twenty there’s a half-dozen newer stories that are not available anywhere else.

Most of the stories were written post 2000, but there are a few that have been kicking around since the late 80’s. “Oxygen” and “Nothingness” are early stories. Both “Tough Act” and “The Bridge Back To Home” are older stories that have gone through numerous versions substantially different from the ones in the collection. “Crane Man” and “Swept Aside” are the most recent stories; written and appearing in journals in 2006.

As for advice, I don’t know. I was consistently told that the variety, the range of styles and techniques in my stories, was a detriment. A hindrance to marketability. Linked stories–a pseudo novel–that’s supposed to be a winning strategy, but I’m skeptical as not very many of them seem to be published either. The only advice I’d stand by is passion. Every story in my collection is a story I was desperate to write at some point; I think you have to bring that to the work.

Talk about the styles and techniques used in your collection.

The spectrum goes from “Oxygen,” which is a quite traditional elegiac story, to “Risk Factors,” which is non-traditional: an email with an embedded faux-SEC filing (legal language), which itself has embedded commentary that is part-rant, part-confession, and also includes a thread of a story in the realist mode.

“Blue Jeans and Black Leather” is a slice-of-life piece with a hint of Carver in the way it withholds interiority and uses uninflected language. While “Nothingness,” which is driven by interiority, uses heavily inflected language and is ripe with figures of speech, explicit attempts to make metaphor. Both are first-person narratives, but completely opposite in style.

“Fresh Sludge” is primarily scene-based and the style is more like a screenplay with minimal scene-setting and an emphasis on dialog. The structure of the scenes also follows the screenwriting technique of entering the scene at the latest possible moment and exiting the scene at the earliest possible moment. “Delisted” uses those same techniques for about half the story’s sections, but for the rest goes to the other extreme: deep novelistic interiority. The goal was to reveal character via action, without commentary, and then use the interior sections to work against that characterization by revealing contradictory facets of Martin’s character.

With “Single Malts of the Olympic Peninsula” I was trying to master free-indirect discourse (something also used for a good chunks of “Cleanliness is Next to Emptiness”), which is an incredibly demanding technique, and I re-worked that story more than anything else I’ve written.

As a general strategy, I like to work with somewhat unsympathetic characters, try to get inside their existential world, reveal their all too human struggles.

Endings. I definitely experiment with closure, or resisting it. Life is open and I try to leave my stories similarly open-ended, try to signal closure in other ways.

The unsympathetic characters and the open-endings are the stylistic features for which I catch the most heat, but I enjoy the challenge of trying to make those transgressions work.

During the spring 2008 Whidbey Island Writer’s Conference, you will be conducting consultations. What will you be giving advice on? Is this your first time attending and/or presenting at this conference?

Yes, this is my first time at the Whidbey conference. Now that I’m living one island north it seemed a conference to get involved in. I’m doing one Q&A session on “Getting Out of Literary Journals’ Slush Piles” and the editorial consultations are by appointment with the topic up to the writer requesting the consultation.

You are the bibliographer of the International Raymond Carver Society, and will be presenting a couple of papers at the Society’s conferences this December and in September of 2008. Talk about your interest in Raymond Carver and how you were appointed to this role.

I was contacted by the Director of the IRCS, Sandra Lee Kleppe of the University of Tromsoe (Norway), and asked to take on the role. The were impressed with the Carver bibliography I had developed for my website, which has been considerably expanded since taking on the role for the society.

My interest in Carver evolved out of trying to understand how he achieved such powerful emotional affects in his stories. And the more closely I read his work, the more respect I gained for his craft. His willingness to write about down-n-out characters is certainly one of my influences, along with Stanley Elkin, who thought the history of literature was too full of the winners, that we needed more literature from the perspective of the losers. Carver did that, and achieved surprising success in doing so. In some measure his success made it OK to write about marginal characters.

Name one book everyone should read in each of the following categories: A. for its ability to make you laugh B. for its ability to make you cry C. for its ability to surprise you.

To laugh: T. C. Boyle’s novel Budding Prospects. To cry: Yukio Mishima’s story collection Death in Midsummer, particularly the story “Patriotism.” For surprise: Emer Martin’s novel Breakfast in Babylon.

You look like a rugged outdoorsman; are you?

I don’t know that I would necessarily tag myself that way, but I did spend one summer backpacking through Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks and the Bridger Wilderness and went weeks at a time without seeing another person. That experience is still one of the highlights of my life. So I do have a strong affinity for the natural world. If I’m feeling down a hike in the woods usually sets me right.