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.