Stories by Bruce Holland Rogers have appeared in three of the W.W. Norton anthologies of brief fiction (Flash Fiction, Sudden Fiction Continued, Flash Fiction Forward) and have won a Pushcart Prize and the World Fantasy Award. Some of his stories have been translated into 23 languages, and his most recent collection, The Keyhole Opera, won the 2006 World Fantasy Award and was recently published in a Portuguese edition. Rogers has lectured on the short-short story at universities in Vienna and Lisbon and teaches fiction writing in the Whidbey Writers Workshop low-residency MFA program at the Northwest Institute for the Literary Arts. He has lived in Toronto and London, but currently makes his home in Eugene, Oregon.

Stefanie: In an interview with SmokeLong Quarterly, you are called “an Ambassador of flash.” How do you feel about that title? Is it a tough role? Do you get to wear a nice uniform?

Bruce: The Ambassador of Flash is, of course, the guy who addresses the General Assembly of the United Nations wearing a trench coat. At the conclusion of his remarks, he opens the coat to show that he is wearing nothing underneath. As much as I could use the publicity, no, I am not that guy.

Actually, I am pleased with the idea that I can be considered the *anything* of flash fiction, or the *anything* of *anything*. After all, to receive a moniker, someone has to be reading your work. But I’m not sure that flash fiction needs an ambassador. Very short narratives are everywhere. They can speak for themselves.

There is one sense in which I’d like to earn the role of Ambassador. I’d like to be an Ambassador between literary traditions and communities of writers. I have always published both commercial and literary fiction, and I have always been dismayed to hear writers of one tradition dismissing the writers of other traditions or different ambitions. I know novelists who don’t consider writers with poor sales to be “real” writers, and I know novelists who think that anything published as category fiction can’t be worth reading. Some of these attitudes are the result of tribalism or the desire to shield one’s ego from the painful radiation that shines from varieties of success that are different from one’s own. And some of these attitudes, I’m happy to say, have been breaking down for a generation. But I’d like to see more discussion between different kinds of writers. I think we have a lot to learn from one another.

I arranged for a collaboration between science fiction and literary writers when six of us wrote a collaborative symmetrina that was published in Indiana Review. That was fun, but what really pleased me was knowing that the contributor’s notes for that issue would reveal diverse publishing histories. Writers who publish in Realms of Fantasy or Asimov’s don’t usually contribute to university-backed literary magazines.

Stefanie: You are completing a novel (working title: Steam) – how do you balance working on the novel and continuing to produce at least three pieces of flash a month as you do in your shortshortshort email subscription service?

Bruce: I’ve been writing Steam in much the same way that I write the short-shorts. I write three stories a month, and I also write three novel chapters a month. In fact, just as I have paying subscribers for the stories, I have paying subscribers for the novel.

In some ways, keeping up with both at the same time has been an enervating experience. I have to shift mental gears to go from shorts to a novel chapter and then back again. And in the last month, the process has broken down some. With a too-busy schedule of an international house move from London, intensive teaching, family visits, and some house remodeling, something had to give. I’m about five chapters behind schedule on the novel now.

There are times when I wish that I could simply immerse myself in writing the novel without the interruptions of short fiction or Life. But it’s also true that I get the writing done when I have lots of incremental deadlines. Without deadlines, I drift. Even if I set aside six hours for writing in a given day, I may spend those six hours writing *about* a chapter, rather than actually drafting it. Deadlines make me produce.

But they have to be real deadlines. In the cases of shortshortshort.com and my novel by subscription, the deadlines are real because I have paying customers who are waiting for my work. It does me no good at all to create deadlines by promising my friends when I’m going to finish something. Deep down, I know they will still be my friends if I miss my deadline. But people who have written me a check are customers. I have a contract with them.

Stefanie: How can people contact you and sign up for the shortshortshort or novel subscription?

Bruce: Details for shortshortshort.com subscriptions are on the site. In brief, subscribers can send $10 by PayPal to bruce@sff.net. Anyone interested in the novel should email me first.

Stefanie: Can you tell us anything about Steam?

Bruce: Steam is a novel that sets out to demonstrate that steam locomotives, manic depression, and the futures market are all the same thing. The Clark family lives in eastern Oregon where they own a railroad museum and operate a tourist train. The family patriarch commits suicide, and the night after the funeral, his ghosts (there are two of them) appear and spirit away his twelve-year-old granddaughter, Marita. The family figures out how to follow, entering a realm where the grandfather’s mood swings are made physically manifest, and they attempt to rescue Marita and bring her home.

Of course, I’m leaving out a lot of characters and am not showing here how the futures market relates to all of this. I find it frustrating to boil a novel down to a few sentences, which means that I’m at odds with the way that novels are sold these days! So I’ll make the novel sound even less marketable by noting that it is modeled on Moby Dick. Like Melville’s novel, mine has 135 chapters plus an epilogue. And whenever I’m not sure about what happens in a particular chapter, I search the corresponding chapter in Moby Dick for clues.

Stefanie: During the Magical Realism Panel at the last Whidbey Writers Workshop residency, you brought about the term “Resistance Realism.” Can you talk a little bit more about this concept?

The panel was a discussion between members of the Whidbey fiction faculty: Wayne Ude, Kathleen Alcala, and myself. I have always been irritated by the way that the term “magical realism” has devolved into a synonym for fantasy. In the panel, the three of us made an effort to distinguish magical realism from other kinds of irrealism: surrealism, expressionism, and fantasy.

In a nutshell, surrealism is dreamlike. Anything at all can happen in art that tries to express the workings of the unconscious mind. If you can imagine it, it can happen in surrealism. There are no rules for the surreal. Expressionism, at least as I use the term, means the expression of emotional realities as concrete metaphors. To express the feeling of estrangement after a divorce, the ex in a story is no longer a person but a machine. Fantasy makes the impossible plausible by implying a set of rules for any impossible story elements.

I distinguish magical realism from the other three in this way: Magical realism attempts to convey a real worldview to the reader. The things that happen in a magical realist story are things that someone believes can really happen. Part of the project of magical realism is to convey to the reader what it is like to live within that belief system. Ghosts are real. Picking up coins with the wrong side up really does bring misfortune. A jilted woman can cause her lover to be trampled by horses if she is angry enough and dances hard enough. All of this can look a lot like fantasy, but fantasy doesn’t have to reflect the real belief system of any community. Magical realism does.

Kathleen Alcala has a different take on this. She emphasizes that magical realism expresses the worldview of a community that is under pressure. It is the literature of cultural underdogs. Part of the function of the magic is to show that these oppressed people are powerful within their own belief system. I don’t know if this applies to all work that I might call magical realism, but I haven’t yet been able to think of an exception. I proposed “resistance realism” as another name that we might give to such fiction.

Stefanie: You just returned to Oregon after living in London. How has living in two countries affected your writing?

Bruce: Moving somewhere new always helps me to see with new eyes, and that’s a good thing for an artist. Even moving to a new place in your own country is good, or spending a couple weeks in a different culture.

London has made its way into my fiction in small details, and ideas for my fiction often arise from little things. Regular walks in Queen’s Park, Guy Falkes Day, and “Today in Parliament” are going to give me ideas that are quite different from walks along the Willamette River, the Fourth of July, and C-SPAN. But a writer can get a lot of the same benefit by spending the day in a neighboring town. You don’t have to move across eight time zones.

Stefanie: When initially approached to be interviewed, you said you’d discuss anything except desiccated possums. Is it fair to the public to withhold this information? Might you have any comment now that a little time has passed and those dark days might be in the distant future?

Bruce: I had thought that I had said all that needed saying about desiccated possums in prior interviews. Apparently, though, interviewers just can’t leave this topic alone.

My good friend Alan M. Clark is a painter and illustrator. Alan specializes in dark and disturbing images, and his studio if full of all sorts of dead things that serve as artist’s models. One day, my wife and I were out for a walk, and we came to the site of a home demolition. We spotted the mummified remains of a possum that must have crawled under the house to die, and the conditions had apparently been ideal for preserving the remains.

I knew that Alan could use something like that. In fact, people have been sending mummified animal remains to Alan for years. He once showed me a set of baby mice, and he had been particularly pleased with the gift of a dried bat, which he received in the mail.

Holly and I took the possum to Alan’s house. No one was home, so we hung the possum in a bag from his front doorknob with a gift card. Alan called us as soon as he got home to tell us how delighted he was with the gift. “It has already frightened several people!” he said.

The possum eventually became the central figure in a mobile sculpture of dried animals that hangs from the ceiling in his studio. While I am proud to have made such a contribution to art, I would like to now lay the topic to rest.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER:

Stefanie Freele is the 2008 Kathy Fish Fellowship Writer-In-Residence for SmokeLong Quarterly. She has a MFA from the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts: Whidbey Writers Workshop. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Glimmer Train, American Literary Review, Talking River, Literary Mama, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, FRiGG, Wigleaf, Cafe Irreal, Permafrost, Hobart, Cezanne’s Carrot, and Contrary. For more information, check out www.stefaniefreele.com.

Geoffrey Forsyth’s In The Land Of The Free won the second annual Rose Metal Press chapbook contest judged by Robert Shapard. Stories from his chapbook appeared in, among other places, Other Voices, New Orleans Review, and Rhino. Many of the stories were also nominated for the Pushcart Prize, The Best American Mystery Stories series, and individual press awards. His story “Mud” appeared in the 2007 Norton Anthology New Sudden Fiction: From America and Beyond. Geoffrey is a graduate of The University of Iowa, The University of Vermont, and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He currently lives in La Grange Park, Illinois with his wife and children.

The first story in your chapbook, “In My Mother’s Kitchen,” sets the tone of the collection with this absurd yet serious tale about a boy born onto a cutting board in his mother’s kitchen. From there, many of your stories continue to toe-the-line between real and make-believe, between symbolism and truth. Do you find it easy (or conversely, difficult) to write in this fashion? How would you define the type of stories you write?

I find writing all types of stories to be very hard. It isn’t something that comes easy for me. That said, I find it necessary as an artist to push myself to write as many different kinds of stories as I possibly can. Real/make-believe, symbolism/truth, I try not to think about it too much. Like many of us out there, I grew up watching Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. I liked his sweaters, and when he fed his fish. But I also liked when it was time for the trolley to roll up and take us to the Land of Make-Believe, or whatever he called it. There was something there for me in both worlds. Mainly I want to entertain the reader, keep them interested in what I have to say. The baby on the cutting board I suppose is a nod to my love of fairy tales. I loved hearing stories before bed. They freaked me out. But in a good way.

In “The Wall,” a man purchases a wall from a salesman he meets in a bar. An actual wall, complete with graffiti and crumbling boards. What prompted this idea? How do you make the bar angle work for you in this piece?

I had always admired Frost’s “Mending Wall” poem. You can’t grow up in New England in the 70’s and 80’s and not get a significant dose of Frost. Also, I’ve always appreciated that story Sartre did. And, well, who my age (37) didn’t listen to Floyd at some point in their miserable lives? So, those were the prompts. Then I guess I went looking for a container to put this stuff in and well…I guess I see the bar and the salesman and the buyer of the wall as characters in a joke (i.e. a guy walks into a bar and…or, what did the salesman say to the man from Dubuque?), only there is no punch line, which for me is much more interesting and strange. Some people think I’m taking a poke at Frost in this story, but honestly I don’t see it that way. He was fantastic. Still is.

Talk about the title of the chapbook and the phrase that appears on the back cover: “you’ve got to hide your happiness.”

One day I was home alone. My wife was at work. My kids were at school. It had been a long time since I had been home alone. I stood at my window and watched all these people walking to the train–it was like watching animals migrating. A friend of mine caught me standing at the window and motioned for me to open it. Then he shouted, “What are you doing?” I said I was taking the day off to do, well, nothing. “I’m spending the day at home,” I said. “Well,” he said. “Ducky for you!” He said it real mean-like.

So, later that day, I popped some popcorn and did some channel surfing, where I ended up on VH1 or whatever that channel is called, where they show all those rock documentaries? And, well, they were showing this one on John Lennon. Now, I’m no Beatles fan or anything. Don’t know much about them. Never got too into their music. But this documentary wasn’t too much about the music. I came in at the part when John Lennon has quit the band and has decided to stay home full time and raise his children and have fun with Yoko and whatnot. And you could see on one hand he was enjoying these things immensely, but then the reporters started coming and interrupting everything he did. It got so he couldn’t even have lunch with his family on the back lawn, and the reporters kept pressing him: “What are you doing?” “What are your days like?” “When will you go back to the Beatles.” He would just look at them all and say the same thing: “I know it’s hard for you to believe, man, but I’m enjoying myself right now, taking it easy, learning about who I am.” You could see that everyone he was talking to couldn’t believe that someone would want to do that, and well, that just got me thinking about the morning and the window, the neighbor and his ducky comment, and I wondered: does even a regular person who isn’t a Beatle have a chance at feeling free around here? It seemed to me, and still does, that if I were to go about getting to that sense of freedom I’d either need a thick skin (hence, the rhino in the story) or I’d need to be more covert about my happiness, which I think is demented and sad, but maybe a little true.

Anyway, that feeling of freedom, whatever it’s called, I wish that for my characters. And I wish it for you, Kelly Spitzer.

Why thank you Geoffrey Forsyth! I often think that being a writer allows a person an ultimate amount of freedom. He/she can be an astronaut one day and drug dealer the next. In the mind, anyway… And then I remember that writers don’t often get paid, and when they do, it’s not very much. But still, we can sit around in sweats all day drinking coffee or wine or both and imagine whatever the hell we want.

Astronauts and drug dealers are really hard folks to pin down. There’s so much technical stuff you have to know about with being an astronaut, you almost have to work for NASA to be able to pull it off, and the same is true with drug dealers. So much has to get weighed, and the terminology is always changing, and also the potency of the product has to be considered…and I mean are we talking about a dime bag in the early 80’s vs. one sold a year ago? I don’t know about you, but I don’t see a lot of freedom in writing stories or poems or novels. I think maybe there’s some freedom that happens afterwards, when you’ve done your darnndest to pull off whatever you’ve set your sights on. There’s the freedom to go on to the next thing. And, well, in writing, you’re the boss, for the most part, which may explain that dress code of sweats and t-shirt with barf stains all over it. The quest for freedom isn’t easy on anybody, including writers. Achieving happiness is no walk in the park either, I suspect. I think probably when you’re talking about the pursuit of freedom or happiness you’re really talking about the same thing: that state of being fine with who you are, and having others maybe being okay with that, too. When you think about it, it’s almost impossible to achieve, but we all die trying, which is kind of beautiful, say the poets.

Of all the stories that appear in this chapbook, do you have a particular favorite?

They’re all a little too weird to be lovable. I guess I would say I enjoyed writing “Coins” the most. I liked working with two characters on equal footing. Nobody dies, or even gets injured. It’s hard to write a story like that–one whose motor is fueled not by anger or sadness, but by something else entirely. In this case maybe it’s the recognition that not all failed relationships are destructive. Some just end, but are worth remembering. I stand behind that sort of thing. Don’t get me wrong, I like a good rant, too. But, again, I was trying to push myself into new territory, and I guess, in the end, I’m glad to be the author of a story that is maybe more hopeful in tone than most stories you come across, including mine, especially mine.

There are a number of striking (and perhaps a bit disturbing) images and metaphors in your stories. This one, from “Hunchbacks,” for example, caught my eye:

“He didn’t want to think of the twins with wings growing out of their backs. It reminded him of the time a bird accidentally flew into his house and bashed itself against the wall of his bedroom. He had been sleeping, so when it flew in and struck the wall the first time, he pulled covers over his head. He lay there listening while it thumped itself to death, and when the bird dropped on his chest, even through the blanket he felt the small warm weight of it over the place where his heart was, and for a moment he thought that the dead bird was actually his heart lying there, loosened somehow and flown free of his chest.”

It’s beautiful, but at the same time, it leaves me, as it left the narrator, unsettled. How much time do you spend crafting images and metaphors? Do you think they can make or break a literary story?

Images and metaphors are the meat and potatoes of very short stories mainly due to the fact that so much has to get communicated in a short amount of time. An image or metaphor, when it’s brought off correctly, can convey the very essence of a character, or a place, or even a conflict. Much time and space can be saved with a well-oiled metaphor. Also, let’s face it, these are moments when you can feel the writer working on your behalf, shaping her ideas, thinking always and trying to sharpen what it is– exactly–she’s trying to say. It takes years of writing to get any good at writing them, and even good writers struggle with this aspect of writing. Yes, I spend a lot of time crafting them. Mostly I fail. But sometimes I don’t. I would say from a reader’s perspective that they are extremely important. Good images and metaphors are what I remember about a story. They are what bring me back to a particular story again and again, because they are what make a story particular.

It took you a long time to start submitting your work. What held you back? What advice would you give to others who are afraid to send their stories into the world?

I still have a hard time submitting work. I don’t know what holds me back. Low self-esteem? I don’t know. Fear of rejection? All that shit. But, ultimately, you have to send it out. Because it does no good sitting there in a desk, or saved onto that part of the computer that doesn’t have a Send Now button. In the end the process of writing a story is about making contact. It’s about connection. And while it often doesn’t seem this way, it’s about participating in a life you love enough to criticize. In the end, despite your fucked-upness, you have to get it done, because, it turns out, you care enough about us all not to, and because you’re worth it, Meatball. You really are.

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

Last August, I talked to Joe Young about his blogs, his striking metaphors, his venture into collaborations with visual artists, and more. The full interview is here. What has Joe been up to since then? Here’s the scoop, in his very own words.

Joe says:

Wow, it’s been a year since I talked to you! And what a great year! I see how last year I spoke about my blog, very small dogs (www.verysmalldogs.blogspot.com), which is still up and running. My latest project on that blog are my Art Dogs, in which I take works from various Baltimore visual artists and write microfictions inspired by them.

I also mentioned a project I had in development with artist Christine Sajecki (www.csajecki.com). That became a multimedia art show entitled Deep Falls, which included Christine’s paintings, my microfictions, and an animated video that featured her work, mine, and music by local musicians Caleb Stine (www.calebstine.com) and Nick Sjostrom. We had an opening reception at Antreasian Gallery (www.antreasiangallery.com) here in Baltimore that was really great. Excerpts from the show were published recently in Jen Michalski’s magazine, JMWW (jmww.150m.com).

This November, I’ll be collaborating with the band Red Sammy (www.redsammy.com). There will be alternating readings of my work and playing of their songs at Baltimore’s Theatre Project.

Another fantastic local venture that’s been getting some great national exposure is Adam Robinson’s Publishing Genius (www.publishinggenius.com). In addition to a broadside that featured work by me and art by Kathy Fahey ,Adam’s been doing all sorts of incredible things, publishing such great writers as Blake Butler and Michael Kimball.

I’ve also had the opportunity to write for the local art blog BmoreArt (http://bmoreart.blogspot.com) and the cultural e-zine Splice Today (www.splicetoday.com).

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