J.W. Wang was born in Taipei, Taiwan. He currently lives in Tallahassee, Florida, where he attends Florida State University as a Ph.D. student in creative writing. His work has appeared in Backwards City Review, Poet Lore, Hobart, Pindeldyboz, Wandering Amy, and more, though most of it is unpublished and awaits revision, and some of it he’d rather forget ever existed. He is the founding editor of Juked and a recovering corporate suit.

Juked. A noun meaning: a football; a roadside joint offering liquor, gambling, and often, prostitution; a deception. A verb meaning: to dance or play music; to deceive or outmaneuver. Which definition does your journal take? What was the impetus for starting Juked?

I know this sounds like a cop-out, but it’s more or less whatever the reader decides it means. Unlike “desk” or “apple” it’s a word that’s more fluid and it imparts very different ideas and images to different people. To me it’s more about the sound, its inherent sense of movement, and the suggestion of all those other things you mentioned. Because I’m one of those people who always sympathize with the underdog, and because at the time when I came up with the idea I felt like I was taking a few shots from life, it ended up being the adjectival past tense, suggesting more of a state than an action, being done to rather than doing it.

The impetus—it came out of the dot com boom back in 1998. You had all these great content sites backed with investor capital popping up all over (my favorite was Word), and there was a tangible thrill about the whole phenomenon that dragged people along. Reading these got me writing again. Then I submitted something to Word, which of course they turned down. I sent the same piece to another place, who took it but then shut down before they ever got around to publishing it. That was frustrating (and indicative of the online publishing landscape), so I decided to start a journal myself.

I love the headings you provide for each story published in Juked. They’re perceptive, and often make me think about the story in a way I might not have. How did you come up with this idea? What else about Juked helps it stand out from other online magazines?

Oh great, I’m glad you like them! When we first began we published a wide variety of stuff, and it was necessary to have something up there to differentiate, say, a list from a review, or a story from a poem. The headings would literally say “story” or “poem” or “list,” and so on. Which was boring and not so fun, and over the years it’s evolved out of my wanting it to be something more interesting, something that plays off of the work itself. I’m not always happy with them, and often spend an inordinate amount of time clutching my head in front of the keyboard thinking up a good one that deserves the story or poem. I’ll also go back and change one if a better word pops in my head later. Though I don’t consciously mimic them, I’m sure the headings Harper’s provides for their “Readings” section are a big influence. The formatting is identical, but I swear that was purely coincidental. Our web designer at the time came up with it.

Making Juked stand out—I don’t know that I look to make it different from others so much as I try to make it fit my idea of what a good literary site should be. It’s a lot of time spent gazing at our own navel, left knee cap, right third toe, etc. I like to think we focus on being clean and simple, and that we make use of photography, but I guess most other sites could say the same. So, I don’t know. We’re just us.

You’ve been publishing Juked for almost nine years. What has been key in keeping the journal running? Where do you hope to take it next?

Stubbornness and guilt. I say guilt because I hate to let people down, including myself, when I know there are expectations for what we do. Romantics may call it love, and yes, I do love it, but it’s a twisted kind of love, very stubborn and guilt-ridden and filled with angst and insecurity, the same feelings I have with writing in general.

I don’t have specific goals in my mind for next steps. Juked has always kind of evolved on its own—I often feel more like a caretaker than an editor. When we were publishing mostly first-person essays and columns way back when, I didn’t try to push it toward fiction and poetry. It just migrated that way. (And it was a long migration.) I don’t know if my becoming a more serious writer made it a more serious publication, or the other way around. I work on making little improvements one at a time, and trust that the long term stuff will sort itself out. Honestly, if we just publish crazy good stories and poems consistently, I’ll be happy. It’s all about the writing.

You turned to writing after working many years in the corporate world. That’s quite the switch. How’d you get from A to B?

Well, I grew up with books and my parents were always reading. I first tried writing stories in Chinese during the second grade, then when we moved to the U.S., I wrote a couple in broken English. Our family was dirt poor, however, and I never entertained the idea that I could be a writer. Writing was just a hobby while I pursued a corporate career. And I did well enough with that, except, the more I got away from where I’d started, the unhappier I became. I didn’t like my coworkers. I didn’t like sitting in a cubicle all day weekdays, then drinking apple martinis on the weekends. My daily concerns were superfluous: where to go for lunch, how to beat rush hour, how best to sock away money so that it’d grow on its own. My writing became really bitter, and I was changing too, into someone I didn’t like. (Not to say that is what inevitably happens to anyone who enters the corporate environment, just that that’s what was happening to me.) The idea it came down to was this: I can always find work in an office, but I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t throw myself into the writing thing. The decision was easy. Being poor again is tough, but in a way it’s easier now for me to be happy with what I’ve got, having seen the other side and knowing that I don’t fit in there. It’s like I went from A to B and back to old familiar A.

After getting your master’s at Southern Mississippi, where you studied with the Barthelme brothers, you went on to Florida State University to obtain your Ph.D. in creative writing. Currently, you’re studying with Elizabeth Stuckey-French. How important has it been for you and your work to have this student-mentor relationship? What have you learned from these teachers that you still carry with you?

Before I applied to grad school I’d had this notion that creative writing programs are cookie cutter factories churning out generic writer after generic writer. I was going to do the Jack Kerouac thing and just live, and live, and write, and write. But I didn’t know what I was doing, and I didn’t have a community of writers around me, and living was hard. For a while I worked as a bartender, and I would come home sore all over and go straight to bed. During my first workshop at Southern Mississippi, Frederick Barthelme told me my story wasn’t interesting, that he didn’t care about the characters, how much of it was basically useless. I nearly popped a blood vessel listening to him. The next morning I woke up with a huge crick in my neck that would last the whole semester. I was ready to quit the program; I thought they were only going to make me write like how they wrote, that I’d be better off bartending again. Luckily my stubbornness took over and I stuck it out. Eventually I learned that Rick was only being honest (the story really was shitty, I realized later), that honesty is something you can’t get from showing off your stories to your friends, that he was only trying to get me to write a good story. Since then I’ve come to embrace the student-mentor relationship, and I still carry with me pretty much everything I’ve learned from them.

Steve Barthelme, by the way, is virtually unknown, but he’s as good a writing teacher as you can find. He doesn’t publish much because he spends all his time working with his students. And Elizabeth Stuckey-French is wonderful. Every week I walk away with something new to work into my writing. I often hear other people talk about their grad school experience and how so-and-so may be a good writer but a lousy teacher. I guess I’ve just been lucky with the writers I’ve been able to work with. In my mind they’re all parental figures for my writing career, an odd family dinner portrait with Frederick Barthelme sitting at the head of the table. Oh, and I still feel twinges of that crick in the neck every now and then. A writer’s wound, a friend of mine called it.

Much of your published work is flash. Recently, however, you’ve been focusing on writing longer pieces and submitting them to bigger places. Is this part of a master plan? Will you ever try your hand at writing a novel?

I’ve always wanted to be a novelist. Then when I tried to write a novel I realized I was no good at it, and had to start smaller with short stories. Then I went even smaller with so-called flash fiction. I’m sure I’ll always write short pieces here and there, but yes, the goal is to write great hefty books, the kind you can really beat someone over the head with.

You also write poetry, and have poems out in Backwards City Review and Poet Lore. Is this a new endeavor? Do you find your poetry differs in voice from your fiction, or does it still sound quintessentially J.W. Wang?

Poetry used to terrify me. Much of it probably had to do with my learning English as a second language. I just didn’t get it. Studying Chaucer and Shakespeare in junior high and high school didn’t help any. I sort of figured out what “What, ho!” meant, but I didn’t know why all the students were laughing. I could’ve gone on skirting around the poetry thing forever, but at Southern Mississippi I figured I’d try to tackle it, and took a class with Julia Johnson (a poet and another great teacher). Then I took another class with her, and another, and amazingly she got me reading, writing, and sending out poetry. So yes, it’s very much a new endeavor, and no, I don’t think it sounds different, or any more different than how one story of mine differs from another. I’m more worried about giving people something different to read than I am about establishing a consistent voice.

In 2008, you are attending the AWP conference in New York City and sharing a table with Aaron Burch from Hobart. Have you met before? For those who have never attended AWP, what does it mean to “share a table”?

Nope, we’ve never met in real life. Sharing a table means at the book fair you’ll see the both of us sitting at a table with two signs instead of one, and you can talk to Aaron about Hobart or you can talk to me about Juked. We split the costs for the table, shake hands, swap tales of editing exploits and derring-do, and maybe have a Scrabble throw down while waiting for people to stop by.

Does the university you attend publish a literary journal? Are you in any way associated with it?

Yes, and yes. The creative writing program at Florida State publishes the The Southeast Review. I am an online production editor, meaning I handle the updates for the web site, and I’m also working on putting together a new look for it. Anywhere I go, I end up the web guy. No idea why that happens. Oh, and I also read submissions for it.

Name the best of the best from the decade you were born in.

Gosh, I don’t know. Leather elbow patches? Disco? David Bowie? I don’t know if it was from that decade, but one of my favorite things from early childhood was taro ice cream cones from the local taro ice cream cart.