Andrew Porter is the author of the short story collection The Theory of Light and Matter, which won the 2007 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, was published in Fall 2008 by the University of Georgia Press, and will be republished in paperback Vintage/Knopf in 2010. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Andrew is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a James Michener-Paul Engle Fellowship from the James Michener/Copernicus Foundation, an Iowa Teaching/Writing Fellowship from the University of Iowa, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee’ Writers’ Conference, a Residency Fellowship from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, a Pushcart Prize, and many more. His fiction has appeared in One Story, Epoch, The Ontario Review, Prairie Schooner, The Antioch Review, StoryQuarterly, The Threepenny Review, Others Voices, Story and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, among others. He has also had his work broadcast NPR’s Selected Shorts and selected as one of the 100 Distinguished Stories of 2007 by Best American Short Stories. Currently, he lives in San Antonio, where he is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Trinity University. Visit his website for more information.

There are several lines in your story “The Theory of Light and Matter” that jumped out at me as being discussion worthy. The first one I’d like to talk about is: “As soon as you think you understand something, you eliminate any opportunity for discovery.” I love the notion that “expertise” is, in a sense, stifling. How does this theory apply to writing, and in particular, characters and motivation?

This is actually something I talk to my students about on the first day of class, this idea of thinking about writing as an act of discovery, a concept that Flannery O’Connor writes about a lot in Mystery and Manners. In other words, in terms of writing, I think it’s dangerous to try to figure out everything ahead of time, to decide what is going to happen in the story, or what you want the story to be about, before you’ve even written it. On the one hand, this takes all the fun out of writing it, but perhaps more importantly, it also limits the potential complexity of the story as well as the possibility for genuine surprise. I mean, if you’re not discovering anything in the process of writing the story, how can you expect that the reader will? So yes, even though Robert is talking about physics when he says this, I think it can definitely be applied to writing or any other form of art for that matter.

In the Nov/Dec 2008 issue of Poets and Writers, you revealed to Nicole Pezold in a profile about your prizewinning stories, that you write “pages upon pages of raw content about the characters before going back and devising plot and structure.” Is this where you “learn,” or “discover,” what the story is about? Is it always a character, or characters, that first infects you? Never plot?

For me, the plot of a story always grows out of the character, or characters, so yes, I usually start by trying to figure out who these characters are and what they want, what’s troubling them, and so on. After I’ve written enough pages, I begin to see certain potential conflicts or certain situations that might make for an interesting story, and then I begin writing scenes and back story that relate to these situations or conflicts. As I said to Nicole, it’s not the fastest way to write a story, but that’s my method. As for whether or not I ever begin a story by thinking about plot, I’d have to say no, but that’s only because when I find myself thinking too much about plot, or what I want to happen in a particular story, I begin to feel boxed in. I no longer feel like I can allow the characters to act freely.

Well, your method works! Your stories are captivating and thoughtful, not to mention successful. They also tend to fall on the longer side. Do you think your writing process makes them naturally this way?

Yes, I think, it probably does. After all, some of my first drafts are as long as sixty or seventy pages, which makes condensing them to, say, ten or fifteen almost impossible. In recent years, I think I’ve become more and more drawn to longer stories, stories that aren’t quite novellas, but are still longer than the typical story you might encounter in a literary magazine. In fact, I think one of the reasons I liked Lorrie Moore’s edition of the Best American Short Stories so much was because she chose so many longer stories, stories that fall into that strange middle ground between short story and novella.

Back to that second line I’d like to discuss… It also stems out of something your character Robert said. He said that art is something one has to *work* for. Do you believe this is true? Has it been true for you?

Well, it’s certainly been true for me in terms of my own work, as I’m sure it is for most writers, but in the context of that scene Robert is also talking about how art is something that the person on the other end—the reader, viewer, listener—has to work to understand or appreciate. Personally, I don’t try to write difficult stories. That is to say, I don’t purposely try to make my stories difficult to understand. On the contrary, I work hard to make the reading experience as easy, and hopefully pleasurable, as possible. But at the same time, many of my favorite books are books that were difficult, or challenging, for me to read. Ulysees, for example, is a wonderful book, but when I read it in college, I found it hard to read more than a few pages at a time without having to take a break. In the end, finishing that book was one of the most rewarding reading experience of my life, but it was by no means an easy read, especially at that age.

You and your book have received a fair amount of press, including a shout in San Antonio Express-News’ “Five Best Books of 2008″ list, an interview with NPR, several appearances in Poets and Writers, and even a reading where actors read from The Theory of Light and Matter. How hard did you have to work to get yourself and your work out there?

I definitely did some work last summer to prepare for the release of my book in October. I created a website, for example, and set up some readings. I also relied a lot on the advice of my dear friend Holiday Reinhorn, who went through this process with her collection Big Cats a few years before. Holiday told me that the most important periods of time were the six weeks before the book came out and the six weeks after, so I tried to set up as many things as possible that fell within that time frame. Once I began to set up some readings, and once people began to hear about the book, a lot of other things fell into place. I was amazed by how many people from my past just contacted out me of the blue and offered to help out, whether it was setting up a reading, selecting my book for their book club, or whatever.

How important are connections in this business?

I think connections can be helpful, but only up to a point. I mean, if you’re not producing publishable work, then it’s not going to matter who you know or how many connections you have. At the same time, if you don’t have any connections at all, it might take you a little longer to get your foot in the door. For example, some of my friends have found agents because they were recommended to a particular agent by another friend. It’s more than likely that these people would have still found agents through other avenues, but the connection just made the process a little easier. So yes, connections can sometimes speed things up, but only if the work is good in the first place. And I honestly believe that good work will always gets noticed sooner or later, whether a writer has connections or not.

Training vs. natural talent. Which, in your experience, produces stronger stories?

To be honest, I don’t put a lot of stock in natural talent. I think almost all writers have some talent, but talent without discipline and hard work isn’t going to get you very far. I mean, I went to graduate school with a lot of very talented writers, but these writers were also among the most driven and hardest working people I’d ever met. They were all extremely well read and devoted to studying and learning the craft of writing. And the same can be said of the students I’ve taught over the years. I’ve encountered some incredibly talented writers in my classes, but the ones who have gone on to have success are the ones who worked the hardest at it, the ones who seemed to understand that it wasn’t going to come easily, that they were going to have to put in the hours if they really wanted to make a career of it.

Let’s get back to The Theory of Light and Matter. What does the brick at the end of “River Dog” symbolize?

That’s an interesting question, and I’m not sure that I have an answer. To me, that final scene of “River Dog” has always symbolized the narrator’s relationship with his brother, the way he has constantly had to clean up after him (both literally and figuratively) and also the way he has always been the one who ultimately internalizes the guilt and responsibility for his brother’s actions. As for the brick, it’s simply one more thing he has to clean up as well as concrete evidence of his brother’s criminal behavior. Even the owner of the car, their neighbor, doesn’t feel that he should have to remove it. It’s only the narrator, in the end, who assumes this responsibility, and thus, in a sense, this gesture defines him.

Your story “Skin” is a short-short, and the only short piece in the collection. Since most of your stories run long, a point we discussed above, I’m curious how this story came about.

Unlike most of my longer stories, “Skin” came pretty easily. In fact, if memory serves me, I wrote it in a single sitting. I have a habit of sitting down and writing little sketches or scenes, some of which turn into longer stories and some of which don’t. In the case of “Skin,” by the time I’d finished writing, I realized that what had at first seemed like a sketch was in fact a complete story, or at least it felt complete to me.

What’s next for Andrew Porter?

Well, my collection will be coming out in paperback with Knopf/Vintage next winter or spring, so I’ll be working with them in the coming months to prepare for the release. Knopf will also be publishing my novel in progress at some point in the future, so a good part of this next summer will be spent working on that. As for other things, I’ll probably keep working on new stories for my next collection as well as possibly some essay projects. I always have a number of things in the works; it’s just a matter of finding time to work on all of them.

Karen Rigby is the author of the poetry chapbooks Festival Bone and Savage Machinery. Other work has appeared or is forthcoming in Quarterly West, Field, Mid-American Review, Black Warrior Review, New England Review, Swink, Phoebe, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, Crab Creek Review, and other journals. She is a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship recipient, and the poetry editor for Emprise Review. For more information, visit Karen’s website.

Your new chapbook, Savage Machinery, was published this year by Finishing Line Press. Congrats! How hard is it to publish a book of poetry these days?

In some ways, finding a publisher for a chapbook is easier than for a full-length book. (A full-length book in poetry is usually 48 or more pages.)

I would imagine chapbook publishers are more open to discovering new voices.

That isn’t to say there’s no work or competition involved, though–if you’re opting to have someone else publish the work rather than heading the self-publishing route, you’d still need to research which publishers might be a good “fit” with what you write, and would still need to put your best foot forward.

Chapbooks are usually limited editions with smaller print runs than a book. They come in many varieties–from the hand-sewn letterpress chapbooks that are quite artistic with heavy cardstock covers to the ones that are laser printed with simple black and white covers. Some have spines, more are stapled along the side. Some are published online as .pdf files. There’s a range in terms of what the finished product looks like.

Few chapbooks will make it to the bookshelf at the mainstream brick and mortar store unless you find a local store that is willing to take it on consignment, or some of the specialty or more literary stores. (One small part of the reason being that chapbooks can be quite slim, and when they lack a spine, virtually disappear on the shelf–not very useful from a marketing perspective.)

Whether the publisher you’re interested in has some means of online distribution–be it through their own site, Amazon, SPD Books, etc.–may be a factor to consider too.

So it is a labor of love–I don’t really think anyone would honestly expect to become an Author with a capital A (whatever that may mean)–that isn’t the point.

Once we start talking about full-length book manuscripts, it’s a little different.

The more competitive book publishers (for example, Alfred A. Knopf, W.W. Norton, Ecco, etc.) often have a backlist of authors they regularly work with and very few open slots for new writers each year, let alone first-time writers. Some will not consider unsolicited submissions at all.

There are independent presses, university presses, and the indie, more DIY publishers, and so on–some with open reading periods, some that sponsor “first book” contests, many that require a reading fee–it takes persistence to keep sending the work out, to research which publishers you want to try.

This is very crucial.

It would be expensive and unwise to simply try sending a manuscript everywhere blindly by choosing the names of presses out of a directory–you have to really consider whether or not you’d want to be published by that press, whether you like their work, whether your work seems to fit the aesthetics of the press, and most importantly–and perhaps harder for some writers to admit–whether the manuscript you’re sending around is actually ready to be seen by others, ready to be competitive.

A book requires a high level of cohesion–the poems need to belong together as a book. The order of the poems help create the “story” or experience the reader will ultimately have, themes in the first chapter may echo again in the last, or they may not–there is a definite culling process and many different approaches for how to structure that order.

It isn’t only an assemblage of all the poems one has written to date that happen to “feel” ready–(something like that could in fact be 2 or 3 books). To stand out from the submissions pile, a book has to be–as unhelpful and redundant as it might sound to say this–an actual book.

Chapbooks, too, need cohesion, but working on that smaller scale is sometimes easier in terms of being able to identify the linkages from poem to poem. A miniature book, if you will.

(At the moment I am still in the process of sending out the first full-length book).

Whether it is harder or easier now would likely depend on who you ask. I’m sure some might cite the proliferation of writing programs as one potential source for any increase in the sheer volume of submissions making there way out there, but you could say I’m a practical optimist.

I think the process should be “demystified” (there’s no magic about succeeding or delusion about being suddenly discovered–one has to put in the effort and be willing to persist–as basic as it is, one can’t be in the running for anything without applying)—but I also think time plays a role too. Maybe it won’t happen right away, but I do think good work rises to the surface.

I never realized poetry books have cohesion, structure, a “story.” How would you describe the “story” in your full-length poetry book, “Red Thorn”?

Some poetry books–particularly collected or selected poems–may feature a greater range and many “stories,” since those usually represent the writing over the course of someone’s career.

But there are poetry books that do focus on very particular themes–for example, Nick Flynn’s Blind Huber is based on a beekeeper, and Natasha Tretheway’s Bellocq’s Ophelia is a series of poems inspired by photos by Bellocq. Rita Dove’s Pultizer-winning Thomas and Beulah imagines what the life of her grandparents must have been like.

It’s perhaps a simplification to suggest there aren’t other themes in these books as well, but those are examples of writers that have taken the lens to a subject that intrigued them.

Other books may be more eclectic, but could be “cohesive” in terms of the voice, the imagery, the style of the writing, repetition of a motif, etc.

The book manuscript I’m currently circulating doesn’t have one overriding theme that is immediately identifiable or reductive (i.e. This is a book of poems on love, or…).

Instead, the connections are made through repetitions–for example, the second and third chapters each have a relatively longer poem based on women in films, the first and third chapter each mention Pittsburgh, the first and second chapters each have a poem on Da Vinci, etc.

One might think of the effect as being like a tapestry–something woven in the beginning may carry all the way through, or come up again in the weave later.

Writers often consider which poem will “open” the book and “close” the book–everyone seems to have their own preference–some may choose to open the book with a flashy, idiosyncratic, free-wheeling poem to immediately grab the reader by the collar and tell them, look, this is the ride you’re in for–others may opt for a “quieter” poem to ease the reader into the book more slowly, to kind of get them used to the voice first before bringing out the headier, more involved or even “heavier” poems.

Sometimes a book may deliberately end on an up-tick, a hopeful note, if that happens to be the trajectory of that particular poet’s work–maybe the book was about some struggle, and at the end, you know it turned out all right. It really depends.

If I had to try and characterize what kind of “story” this first book manuscript tells, it might be about discovering the visual world.

How are your chapbooks assembled, in terms of cohesion?

Festival Bone included poems I’d written as an undergraduate and as a graduate student–for that reason I often view that chapbook as containing “early work” (especially since the oldest poem in it, “Sunflower”, was written when I was 21, and now I’m just a few months short of turning 30!).

That chapbook had a looser structure–it came before I had read as much or considered the many ways a manuscript might be assembled. What binds the poems together, apart from whatever serendipities happened simply by virtue of being written around the same period, are the images. The chapbook included three flower poems, one on a garden, and one on a tree (of all things, in retrospect–it must have been my “botanical” phase).

Part of the arrangement was suggested by the publisher. It’s often nicer when a two-page poem appears on facing pages, so that a reader won’t have to turn the page to continue–this explains the placement of “Corset” and the final poem.

At first glance, Savage Machinery is connected by themes–art and food poems.

I’ll quote a reviewer (Carrie Meadows, on the Corduroy Books site), who wrote that the poems are “…inhabited by shape shifters, illusive characters ready to challenge our understanding of who and what they are.”

That’s always the fascinating part about reviews–so often someone else will see something in the work that hadn’t ever occurred to me at the time of writing it. I’m thinking part of the “cohesion” that comes with putting a manuscript together happens on a subconscious level, too, that when you’re writing, you keep mining a certain terrain or turning the same stone over and over, looking at things from different angles, and somehow recognize that all these poems “belong” to that terrain.

Is poetry your sole focus, or do you write in other creative forms?

Poetry is my main focus. I find that it is less linear–I don’t write narrative poems–most of the connections I make are through metaphors or associative imagery. So the very few times I’ve tried to sit down and write a short story, for instance, I find myself at a loss. I know some stories are wonderfully experimental but even those stories have a certain identifiable path–I can think of scenery or descriptions but literally getting a character from A to B –I can’t seem to do that.

Lynn Emanuel has a prose poem in her collection The Dig and Hotel Fiesta (University of Illinois Press). It’s called “The Politics of Narrative–Why I Am a Poet”.

I feel exactly like that sometimes.

And yet, if you were to ask what I enjoy reading, I’d respond with “novels”– even before poetry. This probably comes from childhood, since I read fiction first. I admire that ability others have to create a world–the macrocosm of the novel instead if the microcosm of the poem.

On rare occasions I dabble in creative nonfiction / memoir, though I haven’t sent any of that out. Sometimes this can be closer to poetry for me in terms of using more fragmentation or in terms of the style being more reflective–there’s urgency in the writing, but not necessarily that tension of making the “plot” move along.

What’s your all-time favorite novel?

I’ve had many favorites, and they seem to change. Books have a way of “speaking” to you at particular times in your life. When I was younger I used to answer this with Harriet the Spy. I wanted to be a writer, too, but was a far more cautious child than Harriet, who seemed reckless in a way I knew I’d never be. Then Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, but I think I might find it ponderous to re-read if I were to go back now. I went through a period of liking Carson McCullers. I don’t know that I could claim it is an all-time favorite, but in more recent years I’ve enjoyed H.E. Bates’ The Pop Larkin Chronicles. It’s idyllic, British, a little campy, maybe sentimental, but ultimately fun in mildly scandalous ways.(The TV series was fun, too.) And that seems to be the primary reason I turn to novels these days: pure escapism.

Is there a style of poetry you enjoy writing more than the others?

I used to write a lot of conceits–everything metaphorical, tightly structured, and brief. Lately I’ve found myself gravitating more towards poems in numbered sections or towards a more fragmented line. But generally free verse, and lyric, if I had to choose a style.

You’re the poetry editor for Emprise Review. How long have you held this position? What challenges do you encounter as an editor?

Emprise Review is a relatively new journal–the first issue was published just last August, so it’s only been a few months. Since we’re currently a volunteer staff, we are, as you might imagine, each fulfilling multiple roles, from reading and acknowledging submissions to generating editorial content to the more behind-the-scenes details of proofreading or preparing the issues to go “live” on the site.

The editors-in-chief are currently working through the legalities of turning the journal into a non-profit, so there’s the more practical, business-like side, too, to make sure the journal will be sustainable.

The challenge lies in making sure there is quality content–not compromising on that even if it means publishing fewer pieces at a time than many other journals– while simultaneously growing the journal at a manageable pace and getting the word out. We have a current call for contributors/staff on our page:http://muttsbane.com/info.aspx

You were born in the Republic of Panama, and lived there until 1997. Why did you come to the United States? How was the transition?

I moved when I graduated from high school to attend Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The transition wasn’t as unusual as one might expect. Since my parents worked for the Panama Canal (at the time those were U.S. government jobs), I went to the same Department of Defense schools as the military kids did– essentially, I attended English-speaking schools all my life.

I also had family in the U.S. and had visited several times. Pittsburgh was a newer city to me, but the U.S. itself wasn’t. I’m also 1/4 American (the rest is 1/4 Panamanian, 1/2 Chinese)–the culture wasn’t a surprise. I’d grown up reading many of the same authors (Judy Blume, Beverly Cleary, Lois Lowry, etc.) and seeing many of the same TV shows.

The biggest change was likely the normal one any college freshman experiences–that of suddenly having a new, less structured schedule, and more difficult coursework.

Do you write about Panama?

I’ve tried to write about Panama once in a while, especially when I took a memoir course in graduate school and needed a subject, but in reality I find it difficult to pin down –it’s such a huge topic, how would one approach it? I think most people that aren’t from there immediately picture the Panama Canal, or think about Noriega, but that’s about it, as though these are the two symbols. And yet, there’s more to the place. I haven’t been back since I left, so the landscape has changed a great deal in terms of development.

In poetry I never write about Panama. Probably because I seldom write autobiographically. It does seem to be a topic best suited for non-fiction–one day I’d like to write more about it, but it might be one of those things you need a few decades to grow into, to have enough distance to then be able to look back and examine one’s life.

Granted you don’t write autobiographically, but how has your writing changed over the last decade? Have you noticed new themes emerging? A different voice? In a previous answer, you mentioned your first chapbook contained botanical images, and your second chapbook is based around art and food. How else has your work changed, and where do you see it going from here?

After those two chapbooks, I wrote a few poems based on female characters in movies–but that quickly wore itself out. I’m still figuring out where I’ll head next.

A decade ago I would have been a college freshman. If I pulled those poems out, they would show some of the problems common to newer writers: being too obscure or cryptic, not always having the best ending or opening for a poem, too safe in the structure (almost everything was written in orderly stanzas back then)–but these are all things that tend to iron themselves out through revision, practice, time and more importantly, reading and living–the subjects of those very early poems were, as you might imagine, often imitative, or based on classroom writing exercises or they weren’t, in retrospect, that interesting. Still, I quickly acquired a sense for line breaks and the music of a line, the way things sounded to that “inner ear,” and those were some of the basics that probably helped.

I hope my writing in the future matures into something memorable (I think all writers probably desire that!) but also more complex. Right now, I find it hard to use time in a poem, for instance–take a poet like Li-Young Lee in his first book, Rose, and you can see how sometimes a poem begins in the present moment, detours into a memory of the past, returns–it seems to happen so effortlessly and seamlessly–I can’t yet do something like that. Larry Levis does that, too.

To be able to combine narrative techniques (whether it be the flashback or foreshadowing or chronology) with all the lyrical beauty of a poem–that’s quite something. I don’t know that I will become a writer of that kind of poem, but then, ten years ago, I couldn’t have foreseen the way I write now, either.

Contact Karen: viamrguto51 AT yahoo DOT com

Read:

“The Lover”
published in Line Break

“Flyover Country”
published by la fovea

Purchase Anthologies that contain Karen’s work

Rachel B. Glaser’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, NOÖ Journal, Barrelhouse, Invisible Ear, elimae, 3:AM Magazine, 3rd Bed, Columbia Journal, [sic] journal, CapGun, New York Tyrant, and Unsaid. She’s a student of writing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Visit Rachel’s website.

The first story I read of yours was “The Kid” in elimae. The rhythm and voice instantly hooked me, and you handled the darker elements of the story with honesty and grace. The ending could have been much more graphic, for example, but I’m grateful you didn’t take it in that direction. How important is it for stories such as “The Kid” to find a balance between the dark and the light?

I hadn’t considered making the ending real graphic–maybe I like dogs too much?–but now that you mention it, it would have been a good challenge to try. I find more stories stay on the light or balanced side. Even when something really dark and gritty happens, so often words are softening or ambiguous and the dark, gritty thing is smoothed out. Like some stories in my classes use the phrase “her sex” meaning “her vagina” and “sex” in this case is a smoothing word, all encompassing, farther away from the thing they are describing. But in some cases, perhaps with “The Kid,” I think it’s stronger to leave out the graphic sentences and have the reader imagine them in their own head. I’m interested in that, what work the story will do, and what work it makes the reader do.

I love this line from “The Kid”: “Old Nintendo games littered the floor like headstones.”

Thanks Kelly. Besides the visual comparison, I think nowadays that line works in another way, like Nintendo itself has died.

Do you consider a lot of your writing experimental? Take your work in This Recording, for example.

I do consider my writing experimental, though I usually say “non-traditional,” partly because I used to think there were annoying connotations to “experimental,” sort of like the Sprockets skit on SNL awhile back. Recently, I’ve found it fun to experiment with the essay or article form and play with the reader’s expectations. A story is allowed to go its surprising path, but an essay is supposed to clearly prove a point, so it’s satisfying to de-rail an essay, or in a ThisRecording movie review, avoid talking about the movie. Also, I’m finding an experimental work to be more powerful when playing against a really traditional seeming story.

Who are some non-traditional writers you admire?

Donald Barthelme is the big one for me. I started reading him when my friend found a book of his on the street. Julio Cortazar is great as well. I’m reading Cronopios and Famas and it’s reading like Barthelme. Also John Barth (probably the craziest one on here), Gordon Lish, Judy Budnitz, Djuna Barnes, Elizabeth Hardwick, Thomas Bernhard.

You’re currently a writing student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Are there any writing techniques you’ve learned about that are particularly appealing to you?

The poet Seth Landman (eyeswole.blogspot.com) does a lot of ‘word bank’ poems. He seems to do it a lot with misheard lyrics and non-fiction books, but basically you take any form of writing and use it as a word bank to write new lines. This is a fun trick for writing a poem and usually gets you in the mood to write more.

Do you have any examples you can share with us?

I’m substitute teaching a Creative Writing class right now, and I asked the students to write a poem using Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems as a word bank, and many poems had a similar wistful city feel, but check out this one, by Mark Gozzo. It really twists the O’Hara to an opposite:

My blood is Judas Priest in a glass
I am like a whip made of steel
I come from the mountain of skulls
My soul grows on evil things,
I hate your children
And I think about eating them
I am the hell rocker
Don’t fuck with me

(Printed with permission of Mark Gozzo.)

Tell us about the collection you’re working on for your thesis.

I’m working on my first collection, “Pee On Water and Other Stories.” Stories I’ve been writing since 2005, and writing right now, and this winter and next spring. They’re looking pretty good together, and I hope to get the whole thing published sometime in the next couple of years.

You’re also working on a “crazy historically unsound Civil War drama.” Tell us more!

I just finished my first completed draft of that story. It’s really narrative but also experimental. Most of it seems to take place during the Civil War, but there are mentions of Jazz, which wasn’t around then, so these discrepancies rewrite the time period or else stick out glaringly, or better blur the historic setting, make it a similar parallel one. I just read Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, and I love its ambiguous time and place. Writing and film seem two of the only chances to create new time periods, and I find it inviting to do so, to sink the reader in a time that didn’t happen.

You’re a relatively young (in age) writer. With all the talk about reading on the decline, and all of the technological gadgets your generation grew up with, I’m wondering how, in general, people your age regard literature and the arts. Did your high school have courses for people interested in pursuing fiction writing?

My high school did have creative writing classes, and that’s where I started to take writing seriously. I know reading is on the decline, but I hear that MFA programs are becoming more popular. Maybe the shift from television to Internet will, in time, be a positive switch for writing. Online magazines are certainly starting up everyday, and more and more books are available to read online. But maybe new literature is becoming more and more underground? It’s hard to tell because I’m stuck underground along with it. Around here (Western Mass) there are poetry readings everyday, in bookstores and houses, at colleges, all anyone talks about is writing.

How has the internet affected what you, personally, write and read?

I actually only had a few years of writing before the internet got so in our face. I think it encourages research, but maybe a hasty, goofy kind of research, which is usually the only kind I need. Without the internet I don’t think I’d read as much current/recent and unpublished work. That’s what’s been so exciting about the internet, how it equalizes publishing. Little kids have blogs just as accessible as the backlog of New Yorker short fiction. I’ve also found inspiration in Craigslist and Online Dating entries; certain selections have found their way into my stories. The Internet itself is inspiring and similar to fiction, it keeps abstracting itself and our world and our culture, and then straightening itself out and explaining and proving and communicating, then getting really self-absorbed and embarrassing, but then brave and helpful, and so on. It’s a constant montage, which is beautiful and freeing, but at the same time, sick and addicting and like a monster.

Contact Rachel: bassethoundfound AT gmail DOT com

Read:

“The Kid”
published by elimae

Two Poems
in 3:AM Magazine

“It Happened in New York”
published by This Recording

“Hidden Imagery at the Letter Level”
published by This Recording

“The Week in Film”
published by This Recording

*Painting by Rebecca Volinsky*

Laird Hunt is the author of four novels—Ray of the Star (forthcoming, 2009), The Impossibly, Indiana, Indiana, and The Exquisite. He is also the author of The Paris Stories, a book of short stories, mock parables, and histories. His short fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s, Fence, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among other places. He is a graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodies Poetics, and a faculty member of Denver University.

You’ve published three novels, as well as a collection of short stories, and you have another novel forthcoming in 2009. What have you learned about book publishing and being a novelist throughout this time and process?

I just read an article called “The End,” in New York Magazine, which is the latest installment in the semi-regular declarations about the end of publishing as we know it. I’ve read several of these over the years, but this one paints a particularly dire picture about the fate of literary endeavor in this country. I was sorry, in reading it, that there wasn’t a bit more attention paid to the vibrant and ever more indispensable small, independent publishing houses we have. Instead the focus was placed on a small shop operating with some independence within one of the enormous conglomerates and what they were doing seemed dreary as ever (get celebrities on the list, then get more!!). So, thank God for outfits like Coffee House Press, where I’ve done most of my publishing. Not only do I get to be in excellent, unpredictable company, I have the undeniable luxury of knowing where I’m going to send my next manuscript and that it will get a very careful reading. I’m currently agent-less, and that works just fine with the sort of established relationship I’ve developed. So things don’t feel quite so dire from where I’m sitting. But of course it all can change in a heartbeat. I should definitely find some wood to knock on.

How would you describe the type of readers your work attracts?

This is a strangely tantalizing question because the number of readers a typical book of mine attracts could fit very nicely in a not even moderately robust high-school gymnasium and I find myself picturing a convocation in which all several of them have been teleported in for me to get a good look at them. The truth is this is a very difficult question to respond to without having recourse to the hypothetical. People who don’t mind a certain measure of text-based trickery? People who like Harry Matthews? People who don’t cry when they peel onions? Whoever they are, bless them.

Your first novel, The Impossibly, is often categorized as noir. Does this style carry on into your later novels?

My aesthetic preoccupations have tended to be project specific – so that if The Impossibly investigated certain aspects of genre that might fall in some general sense under the rubric of spy fiction, and The Exquisite under some cross between noir and pulp fiction, Ray of the Star takes advantage of elements of ghost stories. On the other hand, Indiana, Indiana wouldn’t easily fit into any genre category. So I’m pretty far from being preoccupied with noir – though I almost always love to read it.

Can you give us a teaser for your new novel, Ray of the Star?

Each chapter of this slender novel — which is about some demons, ghosts and a man who tries to woo a living statue — is composed of a single sentence.

You’ve almost completed another novel, which you describe as “a longish history-based novel set in New York and Colorado,” as well. What more can you tell us about that project?

Apart from the fact that, for all the usual reasons, it is frustrating the hell out of me, the novel involves early aviation, a graveyard for crashed flying machines, the marvels of osteopathy, numerous quotations from the modernists, a Pinkerton detective, fist fights, Cole Porter songs, the Great Sand Dunes National Monument, Mesa Verde, petroglyphs, palm and knucklebone readers and hoax. Just today I realized I needed to pretty much gut an entire section. This was depressing. I hope I was right.

When did you write The Paris Stories? Have you thought about putting together another collection of short fiction?

I wrote The Paris Stories, their first solid draft at any rate, in 1994-5, when I was living in Paris, smoking piles of Chesterfields and trying to be a student of sorts in Lettres Modernes at the Sorbonne. I am, much less emphatically and without the benefits of nicotine, slowly piling up a number of short pieces that might one day be fleshy enough to make up a book. I love very short things, both reading and trying to write them, but they are so omnipresent (and so often so similar in tone and intent) these days that I have grown afraid it would be too easy to get excited, knock off a couple of dozen over Christmas break or something and then fire them off at my editor.

Tell us about studying at Lettres Modernes at the Sorbonne, and living in Paris, France.

I went marching over to France a couple credits and a thesis short of an MFA from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and proceeded to treat the available rigors of the Sorbonne and the possible glories of Paris as a bag full of bright goodies to pluck up and try to mash into words. I had classes on Montaigne (huge discovery for me), Zola, Gerard Genette, Roland Barthes, Jean Giono, old French, old Provençal and Latin. I took a class with the great Proust scholar Jean-Yves Tadié, who was wonderful, even though the course was not on Proust. I smoked endless cigarettes in the courtyard of The Sorbonne and drank endless cups of espresso out of plastic cups, then sauntered out into Paris to be a flaneur and notice things and stand at café counters and order beers. In short, I was not the student I had once been, but something important was happening in my head. Important to me at least.

Did you study the writing of Jack Kerouac at Naropa? How do you feel about the man and his work?

I never took a course on Kerouac at Naropa but had read a good deal of his writing before I went there and consider him a marvelous prose stylist and major 20th century literary figure. There is a good deal of confusion, I think, generated by the title of the creative writing program at Naropa: The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. In fact, the lineage at Naropa has a good deal more to do with the poets of the Beat generation (Ginsberg was a co-founder with Anne Waldman of the program), Black Mountain College, the San Francisco Renaissance and the New York School than with Kerouac. I learned a tremendous amount, as a fiction writer, from the poetry heavy curriculum at Naropa.

Where else have you lived? What have you done there?

I was born in Singapore and am told spoke as much of the local dialect of Chinese as I did English for my first three years. I moved to London and watched many episodes of Blue Peter and learned to read and tried to call my American mother Mummy (she said no). I moved to the Netherlands and proved to be a speedy runner until I met up with the joy of over-snacking, especially on pommes frites (with mayonnaise). I moved to Greenwich, CT and attended North Street Elementary School and set a record for the standing broad jump that lasted a decade. I moved back to London and had my first girlfriend and listened to a first generation Walkman and looked out my window at the rooftops of South Kensington and decided I believed in ghosts. I moved to a farm to live with my Grandmother in rural Indiana and that went on for a long time.

Since then I’ve lived in Strasbourg, France (studying), taught English in Japan, moved to Boulder, CO, spent the aforementioned couple of years in Paris, lived in New York where I worked at the UN for five years, now live again in Boulder.

I love your story “How 9) Strange,” which appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Issue 19. Do you write much flash fiction? What are your thoughts on the form?

Barthes, perhaps channeling Bergson, remarks in Writing Degree Zero, that form is the residue of duration. I kind of love that flash fiction is sometimes, when it’s really hitting, able to conjure form almost without duration. It’s like a magic trick, but neither the magician nor the audience are there to say ooh and ahh and to then go off and have syrupy cocktails. Maybe what I mean is that it can be like a spell. Something strange and real has occurred, and your eyes (those poor overworked orbs) have been asked to do very little.

You were a member of the non-realistic fiction panel at AWP’s 2006 conference. (Read more about it in the links below.) Did you enjoy the experience? What is the most important thing you hope people took away from your talk?

I did enjoy the experience and will be speaking on a follow-up panel of sorts at AWP this year in Chicago. My hope is that a few people left with the idea that reading, like writing, is a highly active endeavor, and that active engagement with challenging work pays significant rewards.

If you could sit down to coffee with any writer in the world, who would it be? Would your answer change if you were meeting this someone for drinks?

The first three writers that popped into my mind when I read that question are dead. Still, I think I’ll list them and let the list stand as my answer and say that while the people on the list would not change if the beverage was different, the order might: W.G. Sebald, Roberto Bolaño, Julio Cortazar.

Contact Laird: lairdhunt AT earthlink DOT net

Read:

Laird Hunt on Nonrealist Fiction
at the Mumpsimus

“A Man Has a Job”
published by Tarpaulin Sky

“New Marvell Goose”
published by onedit

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

Rusty Barnes is the author of Breaking it Down, a collection of flash fiction published in 2007 by Sunnyoutside Press, and the co-founder and publisher of the online literary journal Night Train. His fiction and poetry has been published in many journals, including Post Road, Salt Flats Annual, Staccato, Opium, Thieves Jargon, Temenos, Barn Owl Review, elimae, Smokelong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Rusty lives in Massachusetts. For more information visit his website.

Talk to me about the photo you chose to accompany this interview.

I’m going to give you a long-winded and probably boring answer. It was taken in Burlington, PA, in the kitchen of my Uncle Bill’s house. No doubt we’d just been fishing. There was a lot of that in those years. As the story goes—I don’t actually recall it—it was around this time that the families were fishing on a local lake, and nothing was biting, dead still water all around. I remember lots of gnats on those trips. My Aunt Ruby finally landed a nice bass toward the end of the day, and the fish flopped and bucked in the bottom of the boat, which apparently touched my tender little heart. I picked it up and threw it back in before anyone could stop me. I must have been terribly upset, because I hate wet slimy things to this day.

It’s a family story everyone loves to hear over and over again, and I don’t mind. Though, if I think about it, that, um, might have been the event that might have begun the process of separating me from the remainder of my very large family.

If you took the men of my family, for example, and asked them what they did for a living, you’d find farmers, mechanics, construction workers, truck drivers, typewriter repairmen. Men with practical skills, who can do whatever needs to be done. It was common for all of them to get together to replace the engine in someone’s car, or rebuild a transmission on a weekend, work until four, scrub the grease off, and grab some tin cans and shoot at them in the gullies out back before dinner. Around the time of this picture, too, my father and eleven-year-old brother put an engine in a car. My brother tightened the bolts while my father held the engine in place by himself. I watched my father pick up carpentry when he needed to, I watched him, when the period of unemployment came, work in gas stations, pick apples a bushel at a time with my mother, and even do the odd jobs for neighbors that my brother and I once did for pocket cash.

It’s a bit unnerving to sit down among men like this even now at 38, when my only practical skills, really, are teaching and reading and writing. That’s something, yes, but how I still wish I was like my uncles and cousins and nephews who can gut deer, butcher cattle, run a spreader, bale hay, wire a house for electricity, put up drywall, hand load ammunition, pick up a CDL license just in case you might need it. I never had much in common with them other than blood, and to make it worse, I’ve doubly abandoned them in my adulthood: I live 300 miles away (the rest of my family, with a couple notable exceptions, have all lived within a three-county radius for 200 years); and I’m a city boy now. God help me, a flatlander. For the first 21 years of my life I sneered at people like me. I know now from experience that Thomas Wolfe was painfully, awfully, right. You can’t go home again. You can never go home again, no matter how hard you try.

Yeah. Back to the point. I threw the fish back, and you don’t toss fish back, in other words. Or you didn’t then. So goes my life.

And that’s what I think of when I see this photo.

You’re the only literary mind in your family? How did it ever occur to you to write, read, and teach, when you grew up with a bunch of “tough” guys?

I don’t necessarily think of them as tough guys, just. . .guys. Men who could do whatever needed to be done. I didn’t know any other kind, except for some of my teachers, until college. I certainly had no models for the type of man I became, though, you’re right. However, nearly everyone in my immediate family read, often a lot. My father read some poetry—even wrote it occasionally—as well as philosophy, theology, ecology. My brother and sister read a great deal, and like any writer, books were, and remain, my best friends. I intended to become first a minister (my uncle was a Methodist minister), then figured I would become a teacher of history. I didn’t know what else to do. Teachers made good money and didn’t have to work hard. That’s what I knew, so that’s what I figured I’d do.

Honestly, I might have been happier as one of those polymath-via-night-reading day laborers you hear about (and I can hear my family laughing in my mind, audibly—for them, I’ve never been cut out for hard physical labor). It’s not as if I’ve ever had to work as hard as my father did, but I’m not unfamiliar with hard physical work. There’s a certain rhythm and satisfaction to physical tasks done as well as can be done, of seeing progress in ways that are generally impossible for an artist to see. My father could say he’d loaded so many tons of gravel during the day, my Uncle John how much blacktop he’d poured, my Uncle Mort how many miles he’d driven. Hell, I don’t even know for sure how good I am as a writer, and I sent my first story out for publication in 1987.

My truest happy work memories are of building the most symmetrical and packed club sandwich I could at the Dixie BBQ, and pushing out a couple hundred fish fries on a Friday night. I felt good about that in a way I can never feel good about my writing.

Anyway, as you can see, I sometimes have difficulty coming to the point. I read, write, and teach because although I’m good at many things, I’m only excellent at writing, and those things exist in a symbiotic relationship. I write because I can, I read because it feeds the writing, I teach, because I had a few teachers who meant a great deal to me, and teaching is a way to pay them back. And I know my particular experience can teach. It’s incredibly gratifying to have students from fifteen years ago or last week send me notes about where they’re publishing, and to see them enter the same worlds I operate in, and to deal with them as peers while knowing I had some little part in making them who they are. In this way, I feel as if bits of my aesthetic and ways of seeing a work are out there making a difference, even if it’s only in convincing people that em dashes ought to be used in pairs.

How did your collection, Breaking it Down, come about?

I met David McNamara from Sunnyoutside Press while listening to a poetry reading at Club Passim. We corresponded a bit, I saw him at another litmag/publisher event in Boston, we talked some more, and when I began to consider the possibility of self-publishing a chapbook, I went to him for advice. I know a lot about perfect-bound printing, but not so much about chapbook and letterpress printing, so we met for a drink, and I brought him samples of what I wanted the thing to look like, and we talked some more. He pulled out magnifying glasses and started identifying and talking font and design right at the bar, a Smithwick’s in front of him, and his eyes lit up like a kid’s, and I thought, damn. He offered later in the evening to do the chapbook through his press, which would be only their second venture into fiction (it’s mostly a poetry press). Later, as our enthusiasm grew, he decided to do the book as a tiny pocket-sized perfect-bound book. He did great, great work. I had input at every step of the way, but he didn’t really need it from me. He knows his shit.

I was impressed with the pocket-sized book, as well. What makes it perfect-bound instead of chapbook or letterpress? What is the difference, and where would one go to get schooled in printing?

Three entirely different things. Perfect binding is a method that’s used to attach the book’s pages to the cover with a really strong glue. Most paperback books are bound this way. Chapbooks are a style of book often associated with the small press, and in particular poetry, with the halved 8.5 by 11 paper and a cardstock cover. These publications traditionally are stapled or sewn, but that’s a vast generalization, depending on the press and their professionalism and interest. Some publishers and writers simply want the work out there in consumable form, and others take their time and learn the business and design their books. And finally, letterpress refers to a book printed using movable type. It’s old-fashioned printing, but printing with great aesthetic value. Most printers and their websites have explanations of the various types of binding and printing on their websites, and Wikipedia explains things relatively well, too.

How would you describe the style of stories in Breaking it Down?

Largely rural, largely depressing stories about men who don’t communicate well. If I had had my way, the book would have been such a downer no one would have bought it. With David’s choice of material (I sent him maybe 50 published and unpublished stories), the collection shows more range than I imagined I had. I can indeed do something outside the area in which I grew up, and sometimes those are even—gasp—somewhat funny.

Did you, or will you, give any readings for Breaking it Down? Do you find readings a successful way to sell books?

I’ve given a ton of readings. You can search under my name on YouTube if you’re so inclined. I had plans for more readings, actually, but my wife’s recent pregnancy and illness made me feel a bit uneasy about it, so I cancelled quite a few so I could be around to help out, as I should be. I did a reading at Sherrie Flick’s Gist Street Series recently which drew well over a hundred people, and I sold or traded eight books while there, and it was a top of the line great experience.

I’ve found that I sell books best at readings. You’ve got a captive audience predisposed to like you, as opposed to cold-accosting people via social networking sites, though to be honest, I’ve done a great deal of that as well, somewhat less successfully. People like to connect a voice with a story or poem, too. Holding the book up and pimping it face-to-face works.

Do you get nervous, standing up there in front of an audience, reading your own heart and soul?

I do beforehand, yes, but generally not while I’m in the moment. I don’t want to fuck up and look dumb. I’ve learned to practice, even my in-between patter, such as it is, long beforehand, and to go in with twice as much material as my time allows. I judge the crowd, if I’m not reading first, and change my ’set,’ as it were, to reflect the vibe. If I see kids in the audience—you never know who’ll show up—that limits some of my material. But then other times I see a 12 or 13-year-old in the audience and figure they’ve heard worse in school, and go ahead and read my raw material anyway. I’m a nervous person, always red-faced and finger-trembling at the slightest hint of social interaction, so unless my voice shakes, it’s difficult to tell I’m nervous. I also separate myself, more or less. I put on my editor/professional/teacher hat, and that helps. The person who screams at the baseball game on the tube and sings to himself and rattles his foul language off the porcelain ears of the young disappears, and my Rico Suave persona comes out.

I want to read the novel you’re working on. Now! Can you share the synopsis you showed me? How far along in the novel are you?

Sure. I’m happy to share it. Right now the novel’s called “Youth and Young Manhood,” ripped from the title of the wonderful Kings of Leon CD. I will find its real title sometime soon, I hope. I’ve got roughly 280 pages finished right now, and probably another 40-50 pages that have been axed from various places, and I have the last two pages. I need to connect them all now, and it’s proved daunting lately to even get writing time, with various life complications taking nearly all my energy. But I’ll get there. I keep telling myself people are waiting for me to finish.

I’m at that point in the novel where the main action has played out, and I have a very difficult dénouement that I need to muster psychic energy to write. Then I have three-four subplots to resolve and/or iron the kinks from, and I’ll be “done.” This first draft came pretty quickly, I have to say, having never completed a novel before, taking about three months to get to 75000 words. It seems odd to be at the end, though.

Thirteen-year-old Richard Sizemore and his friends Katie and Dex stumble onto a passed-out naked woman in the woods near their homes, and in the process of helping her, begin to untangle a web of deceit that begins within each of their own families and expands to include an entire community. With a mysterious locked door, and a menacing farm owner who, the kids eventually find, is trafficking in pornography, the quiet county they live in becomes something else again: a setting where families are tested and broken, and ultimately, made stronger at the broken places. Richard is forced to make a choice between what’s right and what needs to be done, and his life changes forever.

Set in rural Northern Appalachian Bradford County, PA, meth capital of Pennsylvania, against a somberly beautiful countryside, a backdrop of few jobs and little opportunity, this book explores what it means to grow up with limited options, and how something as simple as following your conscience can often lead through disaster to an awakening that for all its hard-won knowledge, may come at too high a price.

You’re also a poet, and are currently working on two poetry manuscripts. Tell us about those.

I have one chapbook manuscript making competition rounds right now, called “Dear So-and-So.” It’s a collection of near-sonnets and off-sonnets, influenced by Ted Berrigan and Galway Kinnell and Kim Addonizio and John Wieners, if you can imagine such a fucked-up beast. I quite like the collection, though contests and journals have not been terribly kind to them yet.

The other manuscript’s provisional title is “The Girlfriend Narrates a Three-Way Before the Ball Drops on New Year’s Eve.” It’s mostly, um, let’s call it an exploration of rural kink and sexual mores. It’s dark and ugly and nearly violent in some poems, and gently lyrical in others, and sort of well-manneredly dumb in others. None of the poems are high on anyone’s priority list for publication, but they’re important to me. I sense if I publish a chapbook from these two, it’ll probably be a suite of the Dear So-and-So’s sandwiched within the other poems, and whatever else I write. As soon as this novel’s edited and at an agent, I’m going back to my old habits of writing a poem or a flash story daily. I need a half-year or so to generate new material and find whatever’s going to come next while I continue research for the next novel.

Let’s switch to Rusty the editor for a minute and talk about editing for Zoetrope and the journal now known as Redivider. Which gig came first? How did you get these opportunities?

I edited for the Beacon Street Review in grad school. A few years after I left they changed the name to Redivider, which is really just a much hipper name, let’s face it. That came first, and I got the gig as I’ve gotten so many other things, by stepping up and being willing to do it when no one else wanted to take responsibility. The Zoetrope All-Story Extra gig in the late 90s came by volunteering. Once in, Mare Freed and Jim Nichols, together with Tom Edgar, had a good system for making the journal work, and I simply worked within it. Like many people, I edited journals in college and continued to do so more or less professionally—I was a poor specimen of medical copy-editor and copy-writer along the way too— when I realized that whatever literary career I had would depend not only on how hard I was willing to work, but also on the vagaries of a marketplace that had little or nothing to do with quality. I spent many years working in chain bookstores and independents while teaching a full load of composition at three different schools, so I knew how difficult it could be to make a good book fly and how much depended on co-op dollars and secret corporate machination, even in the independent stores, with sweetheart discounts and deliberately refused shipments and idiotic strict-on-sale dates. Sigh. I say that now, but I loved bookselling and would do it again. I didn’t fit well in the chain’s corporate structure, being generally too vulgar and knowledgeable for the average store—shock, I liked to talk about books I’d read other than Who Moved My Fucking Cheese— and yet when I worked for the independents, I was too corporate in my mind-set. I couldn’t win. Anyway. That’s not what you asked. Forgive me, O Kelly for my drifting off-topic. Mea maxima culpa.

I still have, shall we say, very close ties to bookselling, and I cherish the days when I visit the Brattle Bookshop in downtown Boston and some poor shriveled soul has given up and sold their entire stock of signed first edition hardcovers ranging from the late 70s to the mid-90s, and I can pick up signed hardcovers of authors like Jayne Ann Phillips and Robert Boswell and Andre Dubus. That, my friends, is a great day, and it doesn’t matter a bit to me that I already have worn paperbacks of everything they’ve ever written. Now I have—hardcovers.

And then you went on to create Night Train. How long has Night Train been in publication? How has the journal changed and redefined itself over the years?

Rod Siino and I co-founded Night Train in February 2002, we published our first issue in September 2002, and though we’ve hiccupped along the way, the journal’s been in constant publication now with new stories every week. We’ve moved from primarily print to a primarily online format, but nothing else has changed, I don’t think. We’ve certainly turned over staff in that time, as reading manuscripts in the volume we do tends to burn someone out quickly. Yeah. I don’t know that we’ve changed all that much. I feel as if we’re less constrained by our (old) stated aesthetic these days, maybe, but then Alicia (Gifford, Fiction Editor) and I have been working together for a long time, and have a good sense of what will appeal to the other. I respect Alicia’s editorial eye a great deal, and the way she helps keep me from making mistakes is nothing short of miraculous sometimes. I’ll be all, is this good, or am I insane? Or, more likely, have I missed something here? And Alicia will come in and make one quick and incisive comment, and I’ll be like, oh, yeah. That’s right.

What can a writer learn about writing from editing?

Unless you’re a complete dolt, you’re going to get a much better sense of yourself as a writer, like it or not. You’ll learn where your strengths and weaknesses are by seeing the constant and repetitive rookie mistakes in other stories, and you’ll learn to see how your own work stacks up against what comes into the journal for consideration. You can learn a great deal about revising your own work, too, by constantly paying attention to how word choice and rhythm, for example, affect the flow of the stories you consider, and how beginnings and endings ought to work together. I think the one disadvantage of editing is this: your own aesthetic development gets retarded. Since you’re editing—if you’re doing it correctly—according to what you perceive the writer is trying to do, you’re constantly trying on different hats and making choices that you might not make regarding your own work. It can become confusing if you have a finely developed sense of what you want to write. I have a straight-on, fairly conventional story-sense most days influenced by the Southern, Appalachian, dirty-realist/minimalist bordering on transgressive fiction writers I love to read, and the fiction I write. Yet, probably because I’m constantly trying on different aesthetics in my editing, my best stories are probably metafictional. I have a relatively large body of published work that speaks to that conventional story-sense, including a book, and certainly my novel falls into that range aesthetically, but I have nearly as much experimental work, most of which remains unpublished. It doesn’t feel right to me, with very few exceptions. I don’t even send it out.

My poetry aesthetic, though, is the polar opposite of my fiction. I read experimental poetry, almost exclusively. I’m not particularly interested in reading narrative in poetry. I like explosive language and transgressive subject matter, great swaths of words that may or may not make linear sense. I like off-kilter, bug-eyed, loopy poems. I haven’t been a quote unquote serious poet until the last few years though, if you don’t count the sheaves of high-school and college verse. I entered grad school as a poet, and upon meeting a real poet, Bill Knott, quickly discovered poetry was not to be my primary métier. I’ll always write poems, though, and send them out. I get probably more joy out of a published poem than I do a story, honestly, and the sad thing is, all that experimental reading has not affected my poetry a bit. What comes out of me is pretty tame language-wise. I’m probably not much of a poet, honestly. My poetry is quasi-fictional, which is to say, um, I’m not sure what.

Does Rusty the editor ever stifle Rusty the writer?

I can’t really be stifled. There’s a great line Jack Nicholson hams up in the film The Departed, supposedly quoting John Lennon: “I’m an artist; give me a tuba (pronounced TOO-burr, according to Jack) and I’ll get you something.” All I need is a block of time and an instrument. I write on the laptop on the couch in the middle of three kids playing and arguing and doing schoolwork, a wife, a mother-in-law, TV blaring. If that doesn’t stop me, nothing will.

You belong to a couple of writing communities—Zoetrope and Scrawl. What are the benefits of such groups? The cons?

The primary benefit is the community of like-minded individuals, who’ve been invaluable to me in times I had no other writing community. I kept writing, I kept learning and reading and meeting other writers, I learned about markets, I started my journal. The cons are pretty small. I feel as if I’m always irking my friends if I don’t publish them, and I’ve lost some of them as a result, which makes me feel like crud for a while, but whatever. The world will flay them much more thoroughly than my rejection of their story or poem ever could. And then there are trolls and psychos and weirdoes, which I’m glad to know are vastly outnumbered by really cool people, many of whom I’m privileged to call friends.

You just started a new blogazine called Fried Chicken and Coffee. It comes with a Content Warning, and as payment to contributors, you offer up a book from your personal collection. It seems that everything about this e-journal is ballsy. Tell us more about it.

Not much to tell yet. It’s a few days old, and I did it because it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while, and thought I didn’t have the time for. The busier I am the more I can do, it seems.

Anyway. I met some resistance to the way I looked and acted in graduate school, having little in common with the people around me because of 22 years spent in the bosom of the backwoods. Or maybe I didn’t meet resistance, and I just thought I did. Either way the psychic effects didn’t change: I felt I stuck out, for reasons having to do mostly with class and expectations about how one ought to operate ‘out-of-class.’ I found some scholarly work dealing with class as I worked in trade bookstores and later in college bookstores, and my reading habits became more expansive. I managed the textbook department at UMASS Boston for a few years, and I began self-educating by buying leftover textbooks, older edition sociology and American studies and media studies texts that had been marked for disposal, and woodshedding the way I had when I began to write fiction. Big influences include White Trash: Race and Class In America, by Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz, Gender, Race and Class in Media: a Text-Reader edited by Gail Dines, Screened Out by Carla Brooks Johnston, Appalachia: a History, and most of all the Redneck Manifesto, by Jim Goad. Many others too. Once I had hold of the theoretical handle, it was all go. I got an idea to do a blog and possibly a journal, associated with Night Train but not at all similar, that included the kind of rural fiction and poetry I love as well as some analysis of the material (as best I can do so), and some leavening with personal experience.

The content warning is a tease, sort of. But I will be discussing at some length the way Hollywood commodifies and reuses the rural bumpkin/white trash/redneck stereotype, which will include discussion of Hollywood and porn and where they intersect for maximum profitability. It could get ugly, and the content warning just says I’ve done my job. If people get offended they can’t blame me.

I’ll do reviews, have guest bloggers, whatever comes to mind. I may even have music.

As for the payment, blogazines are so common. I can’t afford to give someone real incentive to publish with me on a blog, so I thought I’d try to do something else interesting. I have lots of good books. I wish I’d thought of this a few months ago, though. I recently donated 23 cases of books to charity. Everything I have left is great stuff, and it’ll be terrible to divest myself of them, but fun, too.

Contact Rusty: rb AT rustybarnes DOT com

Read:

“Harry, Giselle, and Joyce”
a short story
published in In Posse Review

“If the Tree Falls”
a short story
published by Small Spiral Notebook

“No Pretty Boy”
flash fiction
published by Temenos

“At the Esso”
flash fiction
published by Ward 6 Review

“The Ex-Boyfriend Checks In on Saturday Night by Cell Phone”
poetry
published by Lit Up Magazine

Two Poems
in Thieves Jargon

Rusty Barnes readings
on YouTube

Susan Woodring is the author of The Traveling Disease and Springtime on Mars: Stories. Her short fiction can be found in Isotope, Passages North, Turnrow, The William and Mary Review, Surreal South, Ballyhoo Stories, Quick Fiction and more. She’s also the recipient of the 2006 Elizabeth Simpson Smith Short Fiction Award, the 2006 Isotope Editor’s Prize, and her story “Inertia” received a notable mention in Best American Non-Required Reading, 2007. Susan lives in North Carolina with her family. For more information, visit her website.

On your website, you talk about how Springtime on Mars grew out of imagining your grandmother’s life. You say:

Growing up, I only knew my grandmother as an old lady living alone in a small, pink-roofed house in Crescent City, Illinois. She played cards and wore clip-on earrings and kept rolls of winter-green Velemints in her purse.

After investing so much time exploring another person’s—a character’s— life, how do you feel? What do you come away with?

Truly, writing is an escape for me, and searching out the depths of a character absorbs me. I love it. Working through a character’s psyche makes me more curious about the people I encounter in real life. Then, it turns into a cycle: real people fascinate me, so I make up characters who heighten my interest in real-life human beings, so I investigate, which prompts me to write. Interestingly, though all of this is about me contemplating the lives of others, I find the process ultimately makes me a bit more introspective in many ways.

You also say this (which is profound and beautiful) about what you learned from musing over your grandmother’s life:

“…inside every character, even the most ordinary—boring, even—there exists the exquisite, the invaluable, the suffocation of normalcy, the brilliant and the ugly—the something that longs to be expressed.

Yes, I do believe that, that there’s a glint of the bizarre inside the most mundane. I think the greatest blessing of being a writer is possessing the drive to seek out the extraordinary in the most ordinary character, to unearth it. So many of my favorite writers–Bret Lott, Charles Baxter, Raymond Carver–have a knack for showing this.

Many of the stories in Springtime on Mars take place during prominent historical events—the space shuttle Challenger explosion and the Cold War, for example. Do you find fiction set during memorable moments in history more compelling? Do you think readers do?

I think it’s true what they say about history repeating itself, at least to some degree, and I think that when people read about characters living through a specific historic event, they see similarities to today’s issues. They identify with these situations in the same way they identify with characters who possess traits we’re all familiar with, or traits we find in ourselves. I was born in 1974, which means I grew up during the last stretch of the Cold War in the eighties. I’ve always been intrigued with the events of post-World War II America, the events that shaped the world–and its fears. Something about hearing President Reagan refer to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” compelled me to sign up for a year of teaching in Russia during the mid-nineties, after the Soviet Union had fallen. I just had to see this place and get to know these people we had formerly been so afraid of. Also, I think characters are complex mixtures of distant and unnameable fears and desires and that national and global upheavals reverberate in interesting ways through these characters’ everyday lives. A character who worries equally over invisible Russian aircraft hovering over her backyard and running out of home-canned green beans in the basement fascinates me and speaks to the essential rhythm of real life.

What was it like teaching in Russia? What was their attitude toward you—an American?

It was an amazing experience–I’m so glad I went. Russians are extremely generous people with a heart for hospitality. I remember marathon tea parties where we would have these philosophical discussions and get up every now and then to dance or to pose for a picture. Often, we would discuss the differences between Americans and Russians. We–another American girl my age and I–taught mostly college-aged students, just a few years younger than us, who had grown up on the other side of the Cold War. They were curious about Americans and were very pleased to have us there. To Russians, home is so very important, and they were always looking out for us, so far away from our own homes. We traveled quite a bit while we were there and I remember having tea with strangers on the train–they were all so interested in talking with us, even those who spoke very little English (our Russian was very poor). Of course, it’s been more than ten years now, and I’m sure a lot has changed. I’d love to return for a visit.

I’m going to steal a question from the Springtime on Mars Book Club Discussion Questions, which appear in the back of the book. Question number 14 asks: “All of the characters are unique. Is there one in particular you most empathize with? Why or how?”

I often write of uncertain adolescent girls and overwhelmed young mothers because these are the two people I’ve been most of my life–even when I was no longer an adolescent and not yet a mother, I was uncertain and usually overwhelmed. There are also a number of women in my fiction who are quite a bit older than I am, and I identify with them simply because they’ve already been the places I’m going. They are, in many ways, projections of my own fears and hopes of that stage of my life. However, I’d have to say that the character I most empathize with is Marianne from “Zenith, 1954.” Pregnancy is so often portrayed as a time of hopeful anticipation, and certainly, it is just that. But I think it can often be, as it is for Marianne, a rather scary passage into a new, unknown life. I remember the days just following the birth of my first child. I lay on my bed, exhausted, physically stretched out and swollen everywhere, emotionally topsy-turvy. I thought: eighteen years. For a moment, I was absolutely terrified of the task I’d committed myself to. Of course, it’s wonderful, too–I certainly love my children. But it’s just huge. I find myself both embracing and resisting certain aspects of motherhood, just as Marianne does.

I want to share with everyone the first sentences from “Morning Again” and “Birds of Illinois,” both of which are fascinating and attention grabbing. From “Morning Again”: “Harold,” I say. “You’d better take me to a rocket launch. I’m sixty-eight years old.” And from “Birds of Illinois”: Maud began having sex dreams about the retarded bag boy at the start of April. Which is your favorite first sentence from your collection? Why?

Actually, I think my favorites are the two you picked out, especially the one about Maud. They just speak so much about the desires of the characters and show a glimpse of how the characters feel about these desires–tension from the get-go. I also like the first line in “Inertia” mainly because I sympathize with the young narrator–crushes are hard: “Duncan Jones had thick black lashes and clear blue eyes.” I must have fallen in love with a million boys like Duncan Jones growing up. Sigh.

You published Springtime on Mars through Press 53, which is run by the energetic Sheryl Monks and Kevin Watson. You’ve known Sheryl for a while, haven’t you? What was it like working on this book together?

Yes, I met Sheryl several years ago when we were enrolled in the MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte. She is a wildly talented writer and a superb editor. She is both a perfectionist and a tireless encourager–she seems to hold more faith in my work than I do. She and Kevin make a terrific team–energetic is a good word to describe the both of them. I’m thrilled to be working with them.

You and fellow Press 53 author Curtis Smith (The Species Crown) interviewed each other recently. (View interview here.) How fun was that? Have you two met in person?

Yes, it was great fun. I love that Press 53 is so involved in facilitating a community among their writers. I actually did get a chance to meet Curt a few years ago when Press 53 hosted a cook-out on Sheryl’s deck. Curt is an incredible writer–exacting and elegant and bold. His work is thoroughly imagined, which I appreciate quite a bit. He’s incredibly prolific, too–I’ll stay busy, keeping up with him.

What is your first novel, The Traveling Disease, about? Where does the title come from?

At first glance, it’s about a reckless but not altogether horrible mother who drops her daughter off on the virtual doorstep of her own parents with whom she has been estranged for years. What follows is the girl–named Pamela–spending a summer searching out this tiny southern town for clues of what made her mother leave in the first place. She reads up on the life of Christopher Columbus whom she likens to her mother; they both had “the traveling disease,” or the compulsion to keep moving. I think, though, that what it’s really about is what the absence and presence of loved ones means to a person, what ties us down and what makes us flee, and about a family who is lost to each other, though not completely.

Tell us about your new novel, which is about the death of a factory town.

It’s still very rough, so I don’t have much to say quite yet. The events are centered on the closing of a furniture factory in a small town, something we here in western North Carolina know a lot about these days. Though there is a central character, it is told (at the moment) from the omniscient point of view, which has been a fun challenge for me. Also, I’m having a great time allowing bits of magic realism and surrealism to pop up here and there. I might have to edit some of that out later, but for now, I’m having a ball writing up communal dream sequences and amazing feats of weather. I love weather. Liz Strout, who teaches at the MFA program I attended, says the first draft is for the writer, the second for the reader. I’m sort of wallowing in the first draft at the moment, savoring it.

Do you prefer writing short stories or writing novels? Do you like to read one format over the other?

I think I’m more of a novelist, though I see the short story as the higher art form–fiction at its purest. I do love how a short story can crystallize a particular moment; it has an ability to freeze time that you just can’t do, or at least not in the same way, in a novel. I also like the space I’m allowed working on a novel. Really, though, I go back and forth, both in my writing habits and my reading preferences. I enjoy reading short story collections quite a bit–I see them as having the best of both worlds. There, you have that crystallized moment happen again and again, yet you also get to know and enjoy a single writer’s voice for an entire book. Also, I think there’s such an art to sequencing stories in a collection.

How did determine the sequence of the stories in your collection?

I began with “Inertia” because, in some ways, I feel like it’s the strongest story in the collection. Also, it ends with the sort of image that (I hope!) sticks with the reader as they move into the other stories. I chose “The Neighbors” for the last story because it feels the most substantial to me; it is the longest story with the most main characters and it’s the only story with a bit of distance between the narrative voice and the characters. Also, I wanted to end the collection on a hopeful note–I like the reconciliation that happens at the end of “The Neighbors.” The order of the stories in between was mostly selected through instinct and a little help from my editor Sheryl Monks. I think the best short story collections tunnel into greater meaning as the reader moves through the stories. I’d hoped to arrange the book so that one story built on some of the themes or ideas of the previous story without echoing them–or the characters–too closely.

You write very eloquently about writing. Are you a natural public speaker, as well?

Thank you! I’m actually a pretty terrible public speaker. My hands shake like crazy. I do love to teach–I guess I’m more comfortable talking about writing in general or about other writers than my own work. When I’m doing a reading, I find that it’s much easier to read to strangers than to people I know. With strangers, I can pretend I really am who I am pretending to be–a writer. With my family and friends, I feel like an imposter. I did a reading a few weeks ago in my parents’ hometown in Illinois and I kept thinking about how almost everyone in the audience had known me since I was in diapers. It’s hard to pull off “writer” when your audience is busy picturing you during your poodle-perm and braces stage. Yikes. In either case, I do a lot better once I get past the opening banter, when I can just read. I try to really enjoy that part because I’ve worked so blasted hard on these stories and here’s my chance to share them. I try my best to give my stories the voice–intonations and pauses and even accents and such–I imagined them having when I wrote them. Every now and again I have a reading where I can really feel people listening to me.

You home-school your children. On a daily basis, how do you balance their schooling with your writing?

It’s madness, really. I rise very early–4ish–and write until my husband goes to work. That’s my main writing time. Mine are little, 6 and 2, so I don’t even try to write during the day when I’m home with them. My mother-in-law and her husband keep them for a few hours twice a week and sometimes I can get an entire Saturday morning. Once a year, I go off to the beach by myself and write to exhaustion. I meet my writing group there for a retreat. That’s the second week in October…less than two months away now. Can’t wait!!

What does your writing space look like?

I share an office with my six-year-old. The walls are a bizarre shade of pink–if you’ve ever seen what pink Play-dough looks like, that’s the color. On my side, there are bookcases and a secretary where my laptop sits most of the time. It’s mildly messy, with two boxes of half-scribbled legal pads in easy reach. On my daughter’s side, there’s an old desktop where she checks in with her webkinz pets and a long table covered in half-finished art projects.

Contact Susan: ydot50 AT hotmail DOT com

Read:

“Radio Vision”
published by Turnrow

“Springtime on Mars”
published by Mental Contagion

“Inertia”
published by Isotope

Jessica Lipnack is a writer whose non-fiction work has led to a career as a management consultant. As CEO and co-founder of NetAge, she provides advice, education, and ideas on virtual teams, collaboration, and networking. She is the co-author, with Jeff Stamps, of six non-fiction books on these subjects, including Virtual Teams, Networking, and The Age of the Network. She has written articles and op-ed pieces for The Boston Globe, The New York Times, Seattle-Post Intelligencer, Harvard Business Review, The Industry Standard, and more. As a fiction writer and essayist, Jessica’s work has appeared in Ars Medica, the Global City Review, Mothering, The Futurist, and New Age Journal, where she served as contributing editor for many years. Jessica lives in Massachusetts with her husband. For more information, visit her website and blog.

You started out writing articles and other non-fiction pieces for newspapers and magazines. When and how did you become interested in writing fiction?

I was hired as a reporter for my hometown newspaper when I was sixteen. That summer or the next, I started a novel that was supposed to be a comedy about life in my small town. I’d write after coming home from the paper (worked 3-11 for three summers; 4:30-1:30 for the last). It was a comedy — but I don’t think I got past about thirty pages. Wrote some short stories in high school — and poetry — and maybe even a play or at least I thought hard about one — and was an editor on our school paper.

My father died suddenly during my junior year of high school, as did Kennedy, our school librarian, my close friend’s mother, and our favorite teacher’s wife. Ten years later I wrote the first draft of “The Club,” a story about that year, which I’ve revised, renamed, recharactered, rechronologized, and still haven’t published. Many stories have popped out of that one. After giving birth to our first daughter, I wrote “One Birth, Many Births,” creative nonfiction in today’s jargon, which a fine agent represented to fourteen publishers. No go, but out of that came Networking. Wrote several children’s books while kids were little, more short stories, and published five more nonfiction books. Recently finished a novel, “The Persuasion.”

So fiction has always been in the picture, and in a prominent way. You’re more heavily published in non-fiction, but would you say fiction is your passion?

Writing is the passion. I get very lost in it, even writing this email. Word by word, to paraphrase Ms. Lamott. So I could be ecstatic having finished a blog post about, well, lavender in my garden or a clever thing a colleague said or a cool thing that happened in a meeting…or move on to nirvana, as you’re guessing, when writing up a whole world (fiction). The first character I watched rise from the page (screen) startled me and hooked me on releasing more of them. But…in the end, a good nonfiction piece does that too. You see the characters, hear how they speak, understand what complications they’re resolving, and, in the best, come away in a different place from when you began reading. Example: Geraldine Brooks’s New Yorker piece, “The Book of Exodus,” about the Sarajevo Haggadah, which was spectacular. She also wrote a novel about it: The People of the Book. Or Sylvia Nasar’s A Beautiful Mind. Her portrait of Nobel Laureate John Nash was so rich that Russell Crowe got an Oscar for playing Nash. [Disclosure: Sylvia was my college roommate.]

How you got your start in writing professionally is an interesting story. Tell us more about getting hired on with your local newspaper at age 16. Before this moment, did you know writing was your calling?

I knew when I was six. I was born in a small Pennsylvania factory town to parents who’d moved there from Brooklyn in their late thirties. We lived on the same street as Shandy Hill, the publisher of The Pottstown Mercury. A small daily like the one he ran was hungry for material. Thus, there was a column devoted to breaking news like first-grade birthday parties, which was how I got my first byline. I still feel guilty because I didn’t write the article by myself. It was a class project and I got the credit because Mr. Hill liked me.

So fast forward ten years, and I’m turning sixteen. I write to Mr. Hill, saying that I’m looking for a job on the newspaper. He writes back immediately: “You’re too young, little girl.” And the next day, I get another letter: “Oh, gee, we need you after all.”

Turned out that the woman who wrote up the weddings and funerals needed “a female operation.” He asked me to fill in for six weeks. Once I was there, Mr. Hill gave me other assignments. Mostly he yelled at me and told me all the mistakes I was making but I loved it, wrote six, seven, sometimes eight stories a day. Gripping topics: Lower Perkiomen Township Supervisors Meeting; Band concert in the park; Interviewing Miss Pennsylvania and Miss Pottstown Sesquicentennial — together (photo attached). One night (I think it was July 4th) only one other reporter came in — usually there were about half a dozen, all much older than I, all men — and we had to write all the stories ourselves. I learned to write different kinds of pieces. When I traveled, I wrote columns; one summer, I wrote the “Dear Beatrice” advice column. And I had a very tough editor in Bob Boyle, whose way of teaching was to tease me about my poor spelling (which remains bad), poor grammar, bad fact-checking. I wrote all of this into “Sting and I,” a story that I haven’t published.

After working at your local paper, you went on to write features, columns, profiles, and more, for publications like the New Age Journal, Mother Earth News, and the Boston Globe. When did that transition take place? Were you freelance or on staff?

I worked at the paper during summers of high school and before my third year of college. After graduating from Antioch College in 1970, I freelanced for Boston After Dark and for various “underground” papers of the time. I was never on staff for any publication but continued to publish pieces in these and other places. I wrote whatever I could, including writing for Addison-Wesley, the publisher, where I contributed to an American history textbook (wrote feature stories to make the book more contemporary). Around 1974, I started writing for New Age Journal, which I did monthly for a very long time. Wrote everything imaginable — from cover stories to movie reviews to essays to interviews to book reviews … whatever came to mind that the editor liked. At some point, I wrote a natural foods breakfast cookbook for Mother Earth News, among other odd writing adventures.

A natural foods breakfast cookbook. That sounds cool. Did you invent and write your own recipes? Is it still available for purchase?

I probably have a copy somewhere but it disappeared into the great maw of one of Mother Earth News’s gambits. For a while, they ran courses around the country and somehow (it involved auditioning in a sketchy Holiday Inn near the Boston airport) I applied and got the job to write the cookbook, along with a curriculum for training teachers who would deliver the course, along with the cookbook. Writers will do anything, apparently. At least this writer. I did indeed invent the recipes — and later taught my own course on natural foods cooking for the community education program in Newton, Massachusetts, where I live.

When did you start writing about Virtual Teams and the “Net Age”?

After the gazillionth rejection of “One Birth, Many Births,” which Ron Bernstein, my agent at the time, couldn’t understand because he loved the book, I went to New York to meet with him. He went to his shelf and pulled off a book. “You should write something like this,” he said. The book was Passages by Gail Sheehy, a very popular nonfiction book at the time about women’s development, very little written about until that point. I laughed because this is akin to saying to someone today, “You should write something like The Tipping Point.” As if you could just make that happen. His next idea was a bit more practical. He suggested I write a book about women’s networks. When I told my husband about Ron’s idea, Jeff said, “Why don’t we write a book together about networks?” And so I wrote a four-page proposal, no sample chapter, no chapter outline, just four pages, and Ron was able to interest six publishers; within a month, we agreed to a contract with the British publisher, Methuen, which was launching its first US list. Methuen’s American publisher was a very famous guy in publishing who mentioned the book in an interview in The New York Times Book Review as one of his promising titles. So we had high hopes! Then suddenly Methuen cancelled its whole US list! Ron being Ron quickly resold the book to Doubleday and it was published as Networking in 1982. (In 1984, that book was published in Japan by the Japanese Economic Planning Council, where it sold very well.) In 1986, Routledge and Kegan Paul, the British publisher, contacted us and asked for a revision of the 1982 book, which came out in ‘86 as The Networking Book, which was republished in the US by Viking Penguin. In 1993, we published The TeamNet Factor with another talented figure in publishing, Jim Childs, who was then running a small press in Vermont. We did two more books with Jim, The Age of the Network in 1994 and the first edition of Virtual Teams in 1997, during which time Jim had moved to head up Professional and Trade books at Wiley, where we published a complete revision of Virtual Teams in 2000.

What kind of networks, exactly? Business? Personal? Were you educated, or otherwise experienced, in this field?

The first book, Networking, was about nonprofit, grassroots people networks — why they form, how they function, how they are led, what their values and principles are. We did the research by writing to one person whom we knew to be a prodigious networker, Bob Smith, a federal historian at NASA, asking him for suggestions of people interested in networks and networking. He sent us nine names; we wrote to those people; six wrote back, sending us more names, and within eighteen months, we received the names of 50,000 people around the world participating in networks. We wrote to 4000 of them and an astonishing 40% (1600) wrote back. (Incredible in retrospect, but just a huge amount of work at the time. I gave birth to our second daughter two weeks after signing the book contract.)

You ask if I (or by implication, Jeff) was educated or experienced in this field. Yes, but not in traditional ways. I was twenty years old in 1968, the height of The Sixties. All of us learned how to form new organizations then, learned how to network. With me, it really stuck, e.g. my blog’s name is Endless Knots. And Jeff had just finished his PhD in human systems theory when we started the book so he was already thinking about systems and structures. But neither of us had written a book for commercial publication before — or gathered that much disparate information and tried to make sense of it in such a short time. In that way, it was on-the-job training.

Even though Networking was about groups on the fringes of society, the response came primarily from the mainstream — big companies, big governments, big denominations. We were astonished when Prudential Insurance, Digital Equipment Corporation, the Japanese government, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and The United Nations called for advice. And that was how we became management consultants. Engagements with these kinds of institutions provided experience and stories that resulted in five more books.

One side-note: We did receive many letters, calls, and visits from grassroots people all around the world who read Networking. One touching letter came from a nun in the US who said she kept the book on her night table for inspiration. Robert Muller, who was an Assistant Secretary at the UN, wrote us a poem called “Decide to Network,” and the great design scientist Bucky Fuller (of the geodesic dome and for whom the buckminsterfullerene family of molecules is named) wrote a foreword.

These books were written in collaboration with your husband. You two must work well together!

Perfectly. Without the slightest wrinkle. Seamlessly. Never a harsh word.

I was just wondering when you’d ask. We’ve grown up together — he was twenty-three and I was twenty when we met, which means, in short, that the first couple of books were very difficult. We had screaming arguments over whether we should use the word “node” or “people” to describe one aspect of networks. (Wait. We just had that argument again last week . I think he won.) At a certain point, maybe two or three books into it, we grew up enough to realize that the precise words weren’t that important, that unless an idea had been perverted by the other, it wasn’t worth the battle. Now we don’t even really discuss changes. We just pass the manuscripts back and forth, make changes — and then if necessary talk about it.

I read that you’ve been online since 1979. I didn’t even know the internet was around in 1979! It was the 90’s, and I was in college, when I first logged on.

It’s true. Jeff and I were among the couple of hundred people on EIES, one of the first online discussion systems, joining in 1979, when going online was a deft trick, requiring perfect timing (i.e. you had the slam the phone receiver into an acoustic coupler fast enough to make the connection) and a large pocketbook as in it cost $25 AN HOUR to connect. I’ve been online ever since, duck to water and all that.

In 1995, I got a call from Newsweek saying they were trying to find the oldest woman online and they heard I might be one of them. I was 47 and suggested that they call Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, who had a few years, if not decades, on me. She was responsible for developing a key software breakthrough. Ce n’est pas moi. I am not a computer scientist or even a lowly geek. Just a lover of communication, the faster the better.

A lot of kids are now growing up online. They play games online, do research online, talk online. In many ways, it seems like their entire lives are online. (Disclosure: To a large extent, so is mine.) What do you think the consequences are of growing up in this sort of non-reality?

I don’t know. And I don’t know if this is non-reality. It certainly feels real, sitting here at my computer, writing to you, who will read this perhaps a few minutes from now, perhaps tomorrow. It’s still reality even if it isn’t real-time. But…I worry about kids because the problems they will one day contend with are not just manufactured by games or the fact that their machines keep crashing while they’re in Second Life. Most of the world is not online; most children certainly aren’t; and the huge issues that remain unsolved for the world to survive and evolve are not going to be addressed by Twitter alone. All this technology will help, is essential, in fact, but the truly difficult negotiations required to disarm rogue nations or non-state actors, to massively distribute life-saving medications/immunizations, to build the infrastructure required to maintain life, feed, clothe, and educate nearly seven billion people are not going to happen on MySpace or Facebook alone. I stress the alone part because I do believe all of these technologies are positive contributors to a more healthy world, just highly misused by people with little self-control (myself included, as my family and friends will attest).

Let’s switch gears and talk about your short fiction. What’s your style?

As my older daughter said when she was two, “It all capends.” The material dictates the style. I write satire, which is wry and, as one reader said, “mugging for the camera;” sober, which another reader said reads like Hemingway, with simple sentences, few modifiers; lyrical, which fits the literary mold, more poetic, where the melody of the words carries the piece; and, in the case of the children’s books, rhyme, which I love. The consistent criticism I’ve received that I’ve worked hard to remedy is that I can hold too close to facts. Must be my reporter training. So I’ve been trying hard to shake off any connection to reality…speaking of which…

You have mentioned several short stories based on your life experiences that you’ve yet to publish. Have you found it easier to publish fiction further removed from fact?

Actually, not. The fiction I’ve published is closer to “faction.” Maybe I should try submitting more of the “further removed” stuff.

Can you tell us about your novel “The Persuasion,” and the trilogy it’s a part of?

Gladly. “The Persuasion” is the first book in the “Woman in the 21st Century” trilogy. I’ve been fascinated by the nineteenth-century writer, Margaret Fuller, since I was young (have written articles about her and wrote a treatment for a film script shortly after discovering her). Fuller was breaking ceilings when they were still solid granite. Without formal education (ahem, not available to women living in “Young America,” as the writers of that period were known), she became, in my view, the most prolific writer of the 1840s, while supporting her family. When she was thirty-three, she wrote an essay about woman’s potential for the literary magazine that she edited, The Dial, the same journal that brought fame to her friends, Emerson and Thoreau. In 1845, her treatise was published separately as a book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Shortly thereafter, she added more firsts to her bio (already the first woman in America to have a Page-One byline), she became the first American woman to file reports as a foreign correspondent when she traveled to Europe and ended up covering the Roman Revolution of 1848. Tragically, she was killed in a shipwreck off the coast of Fire Island, New York, as she was returning to America with her husband and little son. She was barely forty years old.

So…the premise of the first volume, “The Persuasion,” is this: More than a century after her premature death, the ghost of Margaret Fuller, the nineteenth-century phenome, interrupts the life of aspiring journalist Mariana Muller. Margaret’s motive? She wants Mariana to rewrite her classic treatise, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, for modern times. Beginning in 1968, the novel follows Mariana as she ducks the ghost’s entreaties, falls for and starts a new life with Tonin, the heir to a Czech fortune, and pursues becoming a writer. Together, Mariana and Tonin settle in Massachusetts where, in 1973, they co-found an institute for the future with a group of friends, several of whom are followers of Bucky Fuller’s work (yes, Bucky is the grand-nephew of Margaret). It takes giving birth to twins, organizing and producing a conference for a thousand guests, and a mystical moment in a starry meadow with Bucky and “Margaret” to persuade Mariana to write “Woman in the 21st Century.”

In the second volume (working title, “Man and Woman”), which I’m wrestling with now, Margaret as apparition and Mariana as real woman actually write the book, even as Mariana and her husband raise five children and confront a series of difficult circumstances, including Mariana’s continuing disbelief that it’s possible to communicate across the divide of life and death. The third volume, untitled, is about the effect of the book’s publication on world events. Big themes and all that.

Wow. There are a lot of “networks” within this novel, as well! Perhaps this is the “secret,” or “meaning,” to life—creating and maintaining connections.

Guilty as charged. Writerly response first: Some years ago, I realized that some of my “ideas” might be better communicated in fiction. “Night Shift,” a short story that was published in Mothering, was about mothers of babies establishing a middle-of-the-night global network — because they were all wide awake at 3 AM. The novel is optimistic, which in difficult times, is perhaps more palatable in fiction than in nonfiction (never mind harder to prove in a genre that demands at least a few facts). But until you put it this way, I hadn’t explicitly recognized that there are a lot of “networks” embedded in the novel. Now the humanity response: when I give presentations with slides, I usually close with one titled “Only Connect,” inspired by Mr. Forster. There’s a lot of science to prove that connections make for healthier lives — and a recent study strongly suggests that cancer patients who blog do better. I have no data to prove it but I am a lot happier, more productive, and probably more loving to those around me when I’m connecting, which is why I write.

You’re an experienced and prolific writer, Jessica. Do you have any advice for writers who are looking to wade deep into the field, such as you have?

First, the basic advice. Write, write, and write some more. Never stop. Every time you touch a keyboard or pick up a pen, you have the opportunity to perfect your writing — even if it’s a note to your kid’s teacher. I remember one note that my mother wrote, excusing me from school. She said I was “suffering from dysmenorrhea.” (Made me go to the dictionary — and question whether it was a good idea for her to be so frank . My mother was not a writer but she was an English teacher so she was always throwing words in my way. (Note to parents: if your kid wants to write, major assist recommended. My mother bought me a manual typewriter when I was ten.)

Second, don’t be precious. There’s nothing wrong with writing for your local neighborhood newsletter or town newspaper or, now, your own blog. These are great practice fields. The blog aside, writing for venues where there are editors makes you comfortable with the editing process — and with waiting, the great virtue of fine writers. You can’t be impatient as a writer or you’ll go mad. Everything takes longer than forever. Submit to an agent and you’re lucky if you get a response in a month… I could spell this out but most people reading this know how excruciatingly long the publishing process actually is.

Third, forget about being published. This is the most difficult one. Since I’ve been published a lot, you might be thinking that it’s easy for me to say. But I too have work that I absolutely love, that I deeply want others to read, that hasn’t been published.

Fourth, in the spirit of contradiction, never stop trying to be published. About a year ago, I received an email from Roland Merullo (who suffered through eight or nine years before Leaving Losapas, his first novel was published) after what felt like a crushing rejection from an agent: “I have a picture of Rocky Marciano on my wall,” he wrote, “the only undefeated heavyweight champ–not Ali, not Foreman, not Tyson, the only–and what did he have going for him? Not size, not talent, but a simple refusal to give up. I think there are times when it’s smart to give up, but not for you, not now, not with this book.” I agree in principle with what Roland is saying. Oooops, I better send some more queries.

Last thought: Kelly, this has been a real pleasure. Thanks for inviting me to be part of your series and for giving me the impetus to reflect on why I write.

Contact Jessica: jessica.lipnack AT netage DOT com

Read:

“Feeling Numb”
published in Ars Medica

“Endless Knots”
published in Global City Review

Letter to the Editor
in the New Yorker

“When Face Time Is a Matter of Life and Death”
published in The Industry Standard

“A Geek Doctor Takes a 2.0 Approach to Healthcare Technology”
published in The Industry Standard

“The Social General”
published in The Industry Standard

CAROL NOVACK is the publisher of the cutting edge multi-media e-journal Mad Hatters’ Review, the author of a poetry chapbook and several collaborative multi-media works, including a CD and two films. She received a writer’s grant from the government of Australia, where she resided during tender years. Carol practiced criminal and constitutional law in her native NYC for nearly two decades and returned to writing in 2004. Works may or will be found in more than 75 journals, including Action Yes, American Letters & Commentary, Diagram, Exquisite Corpse, Fiction International, First Intensity, 5_trope, Gargoyle, Journal of Experimental Fiction, La Petite Zine, LIT, Notre Dame Review, Otoliths, Tears in the Fence, and Word Riot, and in anthologies, including “The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets,” “Arcane Distortions: A DVD Anthology,” and “Online Writings: The Best of the First Ten Years.” A full collection is likely by the end of 2009. For additional details, including links to online writings, reviews and interviews, see the blog.

You describe your journal, Mad Hatters’ Review, as “Edgy and Enlightened Literature, Art and Music in the Age of Dementia.” What do you mean by “the age of dementia”? In general, how does your journal operate?

The first may be answered in my journal’s About Us page: “Mad Hatters’ Review, a bi-annual online multimedia magazine staffed solely by mad hatters, welcomes writings that address psychosocial issues, the pollution of minds, hearts, bodies and nature. We also welcome purely aesthetic pieces, packed with surprising images and whimsical wordplays. The name of our bi-annual reflects our view of the world as essentially demented and nonsensical, too frequently a nightmare or “non-dream” that needs to be exposed to the light for what it is, as well as what it is not. However, we, as artists, can also see another side of this world by voyaging into our own unique terrifying and joyful wonderlands and sharing our visions with others.”

The second, I gather, concerns primarily how we choose the writings we publish. Apart from a few solicited writings, we editors all pitch in to cast our votes, with comments, on the unsolicited submissions we receive. I try to get a consensus, but of course, I have veto power, which I try hard not to exercise the way Bush Jr. does. As for music, I dole out “assignments” to our musical staff. We have cartoon editors as well as an Art Director and art editors, and we include a few of the artists who contact us, wishing to contribute. I work closely with our excellent web designer/maestress to create our new issues.

Poetry, fiction, non-fiction, whatnots, wit and whimsy, audio features, audio text collages, featured films, book reviews, foreign features, columns, comics/tunes/parodies, contests, and galleries. These are all of the categories an artist can be published under at your journal. Whew! Could there possibly be anything else? What would you love to see more of in Mad Hatters’ Review?

I’d like to offer scratch and sniff, “massage a poem/fiction/whatnot/artworks/musical composition,” 3-D artworks, and many more “new media” creations and collaborative delights. I’d also love to see more tax deductible donations.

Is that how your journal is funded—through donations? How can a person donate? What expenses do donations cover?

My journal is largely funded by me, with some help from our editors and people who love what we’re doing. We have a fiscal sponsor, so our fans can make tax-deductible donations (see our main/index page). Donations go towards web designing and maintaining and fees I pay to CLMP, Fractured Atlas, and for miscellaneous other services. Considering the disastrous state of the economy, which will only worsen, I may not be able to keep the journal going. Also — living in NYC has become increasingly over the top expensive.

Are there other journals publishing multimedia work? How does your journal differ?

Sure, there are others, but as one publisher of a multi-media focused, offbeat press put it: “I’ve been a reader of Mad Hatters’ for some time now – I must say it’s the best on the web of its kind.” Actually, there were few when our first issue emerged in March, 2005. Now, there are more, as wannabe editors realize that they’d like to test the potentials of internet publishing. My favorite (in existence before we were, I believe) is Dreaming Methods, but it’s not “open” the way MHR is.

What do you mean by “open”?

From what I can tell, the new media projects are mostly if not solely created by the publisher.

When and how did you become interested in joining different forms of art?

I just was interested, naturally. My father was a musicologist and I played an instrument when I was young. Then I enjoyed creating visual art. I was art editor of my high school magazine. Then I was editor-in-chief of my university’s magazine, and included exciting visuals in the issue I produced –- in fact, I overspent the budget, so I only got to edit one very offbeat issue. When I conceived of MHR, I wanted to present something fun and different, not simply a print journal planted on the Internet, with maybe a visual here and there. What’s the point? I love challenge and originality, expansion, vision. Plus, the kinds of works I publish aren’t those that receive warm receptions at most journal, unless they’ve been authored by well-known writers.

Tell us about your current multi-genre project, “Gated Communities.”

Oh I don’t want to kill it in its youth by talking about it more than I have already. I’d rather talk about it once it’s finished. Suffice it to say, I have grandiose conceptions.

You also write plays. How many have you written? What is the market like for playwrights?

I’ve only written one, a one-act play; would love to write more. I suspect it’s the same lousy market for playwrights as it is for fiction writers, at least those who don’t write “realism.”

You have a collaborative spoken word CD out called Inventions II: Fictions, Fusions, and Poems. Is there a volume I? How did this project come about? With whom did you collaborate? Whose work is recited?

This CD is available for sale at CD Baby, with a description. Also available for MP3 downloads at Amazon and iTunes. The collaborative project came about from interactions with two very gifted MHR composers, Don C. Meyer and Benjamin Rush Miller. I thought it would be fun to produce a CD of a selection of my writings accompanied, mostly, by custom-made music. I knew Ben non-virtually; he’s performed at several MHR events. I met Don when I was visiting Chicago – took a trip to do some recordings at Lake Forest College, where he chairs the music department. CD Inventions I was the first produced (in 2007). The 2008 version includes more tracks with musical/sound accompaniment.

What type of events does Mad Hatters’ Review have? When, where, and how can readers get in on the fun?

Take a look at our events page! I curate local multi-media events and KGB Bar readings (the bar is a popular venue in the East Village) here. Curated a couple of MHR readings at the AndNow festival in Orange County this past April.

While living in Australia, you published a chapbook of poetry titled Living Alone without a Dictionary. What took you to Australia? What type of poems are in this book? How does the title fit in?

I married an Australian and was happy to move there. The chapbook is the product of a woman in her mid 20’s grappling with mother control issues, romantic quagmires, and metaphysical/ontological questions. The title expresses my belief that I must ultimately create my own ontological definitions –- somewhat existential a la Sartre. The first poem was published in 2006 in the defunct journal Mindfire, and last year in Starfish Poetry. The book is full of surreal/irreal images, as is my current work.

You currently live in New York City. Is New York truly the place to be if you want to make it as a writer? Tell us about the NY lit scene.

What does it mean “to make it as a writer?” If a writer has something/s to say and can express her/himself in a manner that reaches effectively the audience s/he wishes to reach, locale means nothing, except that for me NYC is very noisy and frenetic and I’m always dying to get away from the commotion. The “NY lit scene”? You mean sceneS. There are many cliques, many groupettes of (mainly) poets, many reading series that attract the same writers most of the time, others that are expansive and eclectic. NYC is diverse. There are all sorts of writers here, though it seems that a majority of them want to “make” the best seller list, get a big time agent, get a big name publisher. That’s not my definition of success.

I like that. “If a writer has something/s to say and can express her/himself in a manner that reaches effectively the audience s/he wishes to reach, locale means nothing…” Do you think, however, that where a person writes, where he/she lives, inevitably affects what he/she writes about? Or is the human experience somewhat universal?

Well, yes, you’re right, Kelly. We don’t live in a vacuum, of course. At least unconsciously, our subjective experience of the “outside” world/s, including “locale” (world-country-city/town-neighborhood-house), stirs our emotional-mental, psychological-ontological “inner” tides. I’m simply not much of a geographical “place” writer. My writings aren’t consciously driven by my particular locale (NYC), though most of them are at least subliminally “political,” focused on archetypal ways of thinking in the USA and elsewhere, affected by the very sorry state of the inhuman condition in this country and abroad. I do tend to think that our experience of life, on a profound level, is universal, though that word has limitations. We all need emotional and actual nourishment, love, acceptance, recognition, raison-d’etre, self approval. How we deal with deprivation of our basic needs separates us.

For many years, you worked in criminal defense and constitutional law. In 2002, you returned to school and received your masters in social work. Have these professions influenced what and/or how you write? On a personal level, how has working in these areas affected you?

My years as a lawyer have given me fodder for content. EG, my latest satirical column (first episode in issue 8, the next in the current issue) at MHR: “Better than Court TV: True Cases from the NYC Courts.” Then of course, years of thinking like a lawyer must somehow affect my perspective, though most of my quirky works are drawn from a subliminal stream of thoughts and feelings, driven by the rhythms and sounds of language. Dream works, imagistic, psychological archetypes. But much of what I write is considered “political.” I wasn’t a corporate, tax, or business lawyer; I zealously fought for my clients’ constitutional rights.

As for on a personal level, I only worked as an attorney. My “field” experiences in social work were internships. I burned out (to a crisp) as an attorney. The constant uphill battles exhausted me. I could go on and on here. I’d only become exhausted and depressed.

While browsing your blog, I noticed a post you wrote about Democratic Presidential hopeful Barack Obama. It was a warning, in fact. Would you mind discussing your views on Obama, the Democratic party, and your political slant, here?

(See my blog posts from June 28th on.) I’m what would probably be called a “progressive,” which means that I want to see the world progress into the future with as much wisdom and compassion and also forward-thinking pragmatism, as possible. I see Obama as a Pied Piper, leading children (a large proportion of his bandwagon is comprised of young “idealists”) into death. Well, that’s melodramatically put, but I can’t see that any leader who’s not going to stem the tides with compassionate, thoughtful vision, including respect for our Constitution (eg, privacy issues [FISA], separation of church and state), and an unwavering stance against war, is going to do anything but lead us and the rest of the planet into sure extinction, tied to old ways of thinking, politics as usual, and cowardice. Obama is a coward without principles. Political business as usual. He obviously has very strong corporate ties and he’s fooled a lot of people. Some of the liberals and progressives who cheered for him now realize that he isn’t what he purported to be. Others continue to rationalize his reversals. In any case, we are bereft of any choice but to vote against “Bomb Bomb” McCain, hoping that Obama will come to his senses if he’s elected (not assuming that the election won’t be fixed again by the Republicans). Those on BO’s bandwagon should feel totally betrayed. We skeptics, who were called “cynics” and worse, are not surprised — merely inevitably sickened. Some, like me, are despairing; others think there’s a way out. The primaries were a pathetic dance, exhibiting the lurid misogyny and sad naivety of Americans, as well as the obscene, reckless cynicism and deception practiced assiduously by members of the Press…

If you could go back in time and live during any era, which era would you choose, and why?

I’d like to go forward or backward to another planet with a dominant species far more advanced than this one. There’s no era that I romanticize.