Tania Hershman was born in London in 1970. In 1994, she moved to Jerusalem, Israel, where she now lives with her partner. Tania is a former science journalist, and her award-winning short stories combine her two loves: fiction and science. Many of Tania’s stories, which have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in print and online, are inspired by articles from popular science magazines. In September 2008, Salt Publishing released Tania’s debut collection, The White Road and Other Stories. For more information, visit The White Road and Other Stories website, Tania’s website, and her blog: Titania Writes. Also check out The Short Review, a unique website dedicated to reviewing short story collections that Tania founded in November 2007.

Intro to Word Association Interview
I contacted Tania a few weeks prior to the day this interview was scheduled to be posted, and asked her what she wanted to talk about. I’d read the previous interviews from her virtual book tour, and she’d already answered a ton of questions about herself and her book. Was there anything that hadn’t been discussed that she wanted to focus on, I wondered? Tania’s answer set the course for this interview. She said: “I have to say that, 6 virtual book tour ’stops’ in, I am really tired of talking about myself!” She then suggested a different approach to the interview based on Angela Meyer’s interview with Nam Le. I was definitely game. I’d never done a “word association” type interview before, and it seemed the perfect format at this stage in Tania’s tour. Tania answered however she wished, with only the prompts you see for inspiration. Each prompt is specific either to one of Tania’s stories in the book, or to the topics she writes about.

Gravitational deficiencies. Feet on the floor.

Stories lift you, they take you places. Great stories forget about the rules of physics, about gravity, and they soar. But they can also root you in this world, show you behind the curtain, reveal reality in a way you may have never seen before. A great piece of fiction can do both, it takes you on a journey and it returns you to yourself, but a slightly changed self, altered, pulled a little, pushed a little, stretched.

“I am Eve in the garden before the snake arrives.”

We can do it, again and again, making mistakes is the way we learn. It’s not one chance, you’ve blown it. I believe life puts situations in front of us and will keep putting them there until we learn, until we figure something out. If Eve could go back to the Garden, would she do it differently? Would she refuse the apple, shun the snake? Writing is my way of testing out possibilities, the What If… I work through scenarios in my stories – how might it feel to have children, for example? How might it be not to like your child? How might it be to lose a loved one? This is only partly a conscious process. It’s all about potential, about possibilities, about imagination.

The Art of Science. The Science of Art.

I don’t like boundaries, definitions, pigeonholes, this is art, this is science, two worlds, two languages, no crossing between, strict passport control. Look at the amazing images in science magazines; that’s art. And the way scientists talk about truth, about beautiful equations. Truth and beauty? Art. Science. It’s all part of a whole, art and science are two telephone lines in our conversation with the world, about the world, questioning and probing. It used to be that artists mixed with mathematicians to discuss, to share. Now there’s some kind of wall. I wasn’t allowed at high school in the UK to study “sciences” and “arts”, had to choose one or the other. What kind of choice is that? More Physics for Poets, and Poetry for Physicists, that’s what this world needs.

Splinters.

This is how stories come to me, like splinters that float through my brain. Some of them stick. Some of them begin to irritate, they worry at me until I give in, until I say, Fine, I’ll write you, until I start to write and I let the story out, let it grow.

Side effects. By-products.

Are often more interesting. Get rid of the main attraction, take a peek to the side, what’s happening in the margins, out of the spotlight. Distract your mind, put your attention somewhere and let your brain whirr away in the background. By-products can be toxic, altering; side-effects can include twitches, upsets, asymmetry, imbalance. Much more interesting than whole, healthy, walking the straight line. Veer off the main drag, take a detour, walk the darker paths, the roads less taken.

“I’m gobsmacked.”

Ha, this made me laugh. So British, does anyone else know what this means? Shows me that you can take the girl out of England, but etc… etc.. I am a British writer, regardless of where I live. And I am seen as an Israeli writer just because I live here. And a Jewish writer, just because I am Jewish, even if none of my characters are. And a woman writer, and a writer in her thirties, and a 21st century writer and and… Labels. All labels. I’m just someone who spends her time making stuff up.

Home.

Wherever I write. Somewhere I want to be most of the time. The person we are with? Something we may all be spending our lives searching for. A refuge. My head. My heart.

What if…?

Everything. This is all of it. What if…? and let go, free fall, no soft landings. It takes you anywhere and everywhere. Trust your imagination.

Tania’s Next Stop:

12/23/08: Kanlaon

Tania’s Previous Stops

12/10/08: Eco-Libris
12/2/08: Eric Forbes’s Book Addict’s Guide to Good Books
11/26/08: Tim Jones: Books in the Trees
11/17/08: Sue Guiney: Me and Others
11/9/08: Vanessa Gebbie’s News
11/5/08: Literary Minded
10/28/08: Keeper of the Snails

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.

Read an interview with Elizabeth Ellen at 3:AM Magazine. Elizabeth is the author of Before You She Was a Pit Bull, a chapbook published by Future Tense Books in December of 2006, and 16 Miles Outside of Phoenix, a chapbook of short-shorts forthcoming from Rose Metal Press in early 2008.