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Cleaver Magazine

Fresh-Cut Lit & Art

 
 

Category Archives: Interviews with Fiction Writers

A conversation with Nancy Ludmerer, author of Collateral Damage: 48 Stories by Kathryn Kulpa

Cleaver Magazine Posted on February 14, 2023 by thwackFebruary 14, 2023

FLASH-WRITERS: TRUST YOUR READER: a conversation with Nancy Ludmerer, author of Collateral Damage: 48 Stories (Snake Nation Press, 2022)
by Kathryn Kulpa

I had the pleasure of interviewing Nancy Ludmerer, a student in one of my Cleaver flash fiction workshops, about her full-length flash collection Collateral Damage: 48 Stories, published by Snake Nation Press. Nancy’s work, both fiction and nonfiction, has been widely published in journals, and she moves effortlessly from brief, lyrical microfiction to longer, more complex stories that push the boundaries of flash fiction. A master of compression, she can unfold a lifetime in a paragraph, as she does in this piece from the collection, originally published in Night Train:

Bar Mitzvah

When Benjy started to choke on a piece of celery stuffed with scallion cream cheese, I turned from the buffet table and asked, are you okay, and when he shook his head, I said raise your arms but he kept choking, so I slapped him on the back of his fancy new suit, and then two words clicked in my head Heimlich maneuver so I punched my fist into his stomach even though this was the wrong way to do it, but I couldn’t think, couldn’t think of the right way, his gray eyes huge and terrified, I had never seen him that scared, so I cried we need help over here Benjamin is choking and then she was there, Dinah, the wicked stepmother in her fuchsia gown, the airline stewardess (flight attendant, Benjy had corrected me once, don’t be sexist, ma) and she clasped her arms around him from behind and jerked back hard and the celery flew across the room on angel’s wings and I said thank you God while this woman who had wrecked our lives ten years earlier hugged my son and I knew then, on his Bar Mitzvah day, that for everything there is a purpose under heaven.


Five Questions for Nancy Ludmerer:

Kathryn: I love your cover image! Was it something you chose, or did the publishers provide it? Can you tell me a little bit about the photographer and the subject?

Nancy: After accepting the book for publication, Jean Arambula of Snake Nation Press almost immediately asked my thoughts for the cover. The book is in two sections: Part I “Collateral Damage” and Part II “In the Repair Shop.” The stories in Part I turn on a loss and end in uncertainty. Those in Part II tend to offer hope or redemption at the end. It may be fleeting but it’s there. Before responding to Jean, I looked at the websites of three or four artists who are friends and whose work I admire. Chrystie Sherman is a brilliant photographer; the cover photograph, featured on her website, immediately spoke to me because, as I perceived it, it depicted an artist repairing a massive sculpture. There were so many details I loved, from the relative size of the artist and the work to the small mannequin of a graceful woman off to one side. Given Snake Nation’s limited budget, I paid to use the photograph and was thrilled with how it came out. Something else rather extraordinary: Chrystie took the photo several years ago in Ukraine, one of many journeys she took—to India, Morocco, Tunisia, Syria, Cuba, and Eastern Europe—to photograph the remnants of Jewish communities there. You can see more of her wonderful work at chrystiesherman.com

Kathryn: Thanks, Nancy! I love the sense of scale in that cover photograph, from the larger-than-life sculpture to the human artist to the tiny wooden figure. Everything is relative, and the details are perfect, down to the smallest object. That’s also true of the stories in this collection. “Bar Mitzvah” was one of my favorite pieces, especially the airline stewardess/flight attendant correction and “Don’t be sexist, Ma!” The story’s form, the mad rush of that one breathless paragraph, fits the subject perfectly, and it’s a wonderful exploration of some of the recurring themes, like the mysterious role of fate in people’s lives, also seen in “Dream Job” and “There I Will Take Your Hand” and “Tale of a Fish.” 

I think this is leading me to question two. Do you see fate—the working of chance, or perhaps God—as one of the themes of the book? There are stories where characters agonize over what is the right action to take, sometimes to comic effect, as in “Hal’s Sleep Showroom” and “Reasons Why You Should or Shouldn’t Sleep With Your Son’s Piano Teacher,” and other stories (“Dream Job,” “There I Will Take Your Hand”) where a random happening or thoughtless choice have life-shattering consequences. How much control do any of us really have over our lives? 

Nancy Ludmerer

Nancy: Your question reminds me of Hamlet’s response to Horatio in Act V, Scene II: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.” The book recognizes the things we cannot control, yet that doesn’t stop the characters from trying to “shape [their] ends.” None of us can escape loss, but how we respond to it can shape the future. In some stories, the protagonist cedes control—an example would be “St Malo” where the protagonist stays with a man who diminishes her. In others, the narrator has made a decision she wishes she could undo. One of these, addressed to a cat, is aptly called “The Decision.”

For me, one of the most heartbreaking stories is “Clementine” where a young girl, forced to take her dog Clementine to the ASPCA because her family can’t afford to keep her, dreams of a bright future for Clementine (in spite of her friend’s dire prediction) because the dog’s bark is always saying “yes!” As readers (and as the writer), we worry terribly for Clementine’s future—and the narrator’s—but for all of us, saying “yes” is critical to continuing after devastating loss. In “There I Will Take Your Hand” the grandfather finally tells his adult granddaughter a long-held secret about his childhood in Vienna, revealing that he had a sister who perished in the Holocaust when she was unable to go on Kindertransport and he went in her place. What happened certainly was not in his control (he was six at the time) but telling his granddaughter about his sister, after not speaking about her for decades, most definitely is.

I often say I know I’ve found the perfect ending to a story when I read it aloud and can’t help crying as I approach the end. I usually get over it with repeated readings but “Clementine” and “There I Will Take Your Hand” are among the stories where I still have a difficult time reading aloud the final sentences.

Kathryn: Those two stories and “The Decision” definitely got to me as a reader. Another question I have is about the structure. As someone who has worked on putting together flash chapbooks, but not yet a full-length flash collection, I’m fascinated by how writers structure a long(ish) collection of very short pieces. In your acknowledgments, you thank your son for suggesting you put together a collection a decade ago, and I wonder if you see this as a kind of career retrospective—your best work over a number of years? Or did you pick stories that fit together best, or that expressed the ideas of ‘collateral damage’ and ‘repair’? Did the title come first, and then the stories, or did you choose the title after looking at how the group of stories you’d chosen worked together as a whole?

Nancy: Collateral Damage: 48 Stories is definitely a career retrospective.  The “oldest” story in the collection was published in 1996; the two most recent in March 2022.  That said, there are many stories that didn’t make it in. The four stories in Collateral Damage that are not flash fiction still are no more than around 2000 to 2700 words; I have other 5000- to 7000-word stories that I never considered including. There are also many flash stories I’m proud of—“How Are You?” (published in Vestal Review) and “Learning the Trade in Tenancingo” (published in KYSO Flash), among them—that are not included in Collateral Damage because they are ‘making the rounds’ in other collections with a different focus. Regarding those two stories, I have under submission to various presses a story collection (both full-length and flash) in which all the stories concern the law in some way (tentative title In the Shadow of the Law).

When I first thought about what stories might belong in Collateral Damage, I was aware that many of my stories concern children, who are often the collateral damage of their elders’ mistakes and bad behavior.  But soon that expanded to include stories where a marriage or relationship itself is the collateral damage, or even a narrator’s self-image is damaged, as in “Do You Remember Me?” As for the title Collateral Damage, it came first. Indeed, before it was the title of the collection, it was the title of a microfiction, the first story in the book. With most stories, I remember the moment or experience or prompt that eventually led (perhaps years later) to the story, but with this micro “Collateral Damage”—where a common housefly, a witness to domestic violence, is the “collateral damage”—its origins remain a mystery.

Kathryn: Another structure question, but focused more on individual stories. There are many kinds of stories here, from tiny micros to flash fiction to traditional-length short stories, but flash definitely dominates the mix. Can you talk a little about how you came to writing flash fiction? I know you mentioned Pamela Painter’s class in your acknowledgements. Are there other workshops, anthologies, or writers who inspired you? Does flash feel like your natural voice now, or do you find yourself alternating between flash and long-form prose depending on what kind of story you want to tell? I noticed some of these pieces, like “13 Tips for Photographing Your Nephew’s Bar Mitzvah When You Still Can’t Forgive Your Brother-in-Law,” make excellent use of a hermit crab structure. Do you find that writing to a specific form, such as a list, or setting a strict word limit can be a way to make creativity bloom?

Nancy: I began writing flash fiction over 30 years ago in a workshop taught by the wonderful Pamela Painter at the University of Vermont summer program. The next summer I followed her to the Kenyon summer program, where I returned many times, frequently studying with Nancy Zafris, another extraordinary teacher and writer. (Collateral Damage: 48 Stories is dedicated to the memory of my parents and Nancy, who became a dear friend.)  Having to produce one or two stories a day in Pamela’s and Nancy’s workshops was exhausting but also confidence-building, as were some acceptances that followed.

Back at home, where I was a full-time lawyer and single mom, I could manage to revise and polish a flash fiction; this was harder with a 15- or 20-page story. The form is one I particularly love. Indeed, some of my favorite writers are masters of flash (as well as longer works), including Chekhov, Kafka, Paley, and Tillie Olsen. In terms of creative inspiration, I don’t consider myself a master of the hermit-crab form (“13 Tips” is one of my rare hermit-crab successes), but do find prompts and word limits helpful. For years, Beth Ann Bauman’s weekly Filling the Well workshops (previously at the West Side Y in New York City, now on Zoom) have kept me writing even when life intervenes. As to whether flash is my natural voice, I’m not sure. I’m thrilled to say that my novella-in-flash chapbook, set in 17th-century Venice, is soon to be published by WTAW Press. When it comes to my longer work, Karen Bender’s advice and guidance have been invaluable.

Kathryn: Finally, so many of these stories are about failed relationships and family structures. Romances that fizzle out (“Waiting,” which reminded me of that wonderful Stuart Dybek story “We Didn’t”), children disappointed by their parents (“Foley Square, July 2019,” “Fathers,” “Family Day”), single parents struggling to cope after death or divorce (“Adventureland,” “Security Device”) and partners conflicted about the overwhelming responsibility of parenthood (“Hal’s Sleep Showroom”). Yet other stories, like “There I Will Take Your Hand” and “Cara Cara,” present a more tender picture of family bonds. This makes me think again of the titles of the two sections, “Collateral Damage” and “In the Repair Shop.” Did you think consciously about including more ‘hopeful’ stories to balance out the darker pieces?  More broadly, is it necessary for art to provide us with hope or redemption, or is it enough for it to reflect something true about life, even if it’s a tough truth?

Nancy: I definitely chose to include stories that end on a more hopeful note in Part II of the book. The original manuscript I submitted to Snake Nation Press had the same number of stories as the published version, but was not divided into “damage” and “repair.” Given the two years that elapsed between submission and acceptance (mainly due to COVID), SNP let me revise the manuscript to include around ten new stories and make other changes and deletions. In that process I realized it made sense to divide the book into two sections, giving readers some breathing room. As it is, readers occasionally tell me they need to stop after reading a story and continue later because each story creates its own universe. Another way I see this is that, in flash, the reader must fill in the blanks, what’s left unsaid. As a writer of flash, you must trust your reader to do some work and engage readers enough so they are willing to do it. (And yes, Stuart Dybek’s brilliant story “We Didn’t” remains an inspiration; I was beyond thrilled that he wrote a blurb for Collateral Damage).

There are several stories that could have worked in either section, ‘damage’ or ‘repair.’  In the final revision stage, my goal was to make the sections roughly equal. In response to the final part of your question, I don’t think a story has to provide hope or redemption. If it changes or engages the reader in some way, that is enough.


Collateral Damage:48 Stories (134 pages, $20, ISBN 978-1-7346810-7-9) is available from Snake Nation Press and signed copies are available on Amazon. Additional purchasing information is available at nancyludmerer.com.

Kathryn Kulpa is the author of Girls on Film, a flash chapbook (Paper Nautilus); Who’s the Skirt?, a micro-chapbook (Origami Poems Press); Pleasant Drugs, a short story collection (Mid-List Press); and Cooking Tips for the Demon-Haunted, forthcoming from New Rivers Press. Her work can be found in Flash Frog, Five South, Ghost Parachute, Milk Candy Review, Unbroken, and Wigleaf, and her stories have been chosen for Best Microfiction and the Wigleaf longlist and nominated for Best Small Fictions and the Pushcart Prize. Kathryn is a senior flash editor at Cleaver and leads writing workshops.

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Published on February 14, 2023 in Interviews, Interviews with Fiction Writers. (Click for permalink.)

A conversation with Christopher M. Hood, author of The Revivalists by Hannah Felt Garner

Cleaver Magazine Posted on January 30, 2023 by thwackJanuary 30, 2023

I Tell My Students All The Time, “Your Job Is to Make Art. Your Job Is Not to Explain Shit,” a conversation with Christopher M. Hood, author of The Revivalists (Harper 2022)
by Hannah Felt Garner

I met Christopher M. Hood in the English teacher’s lounge at the Dalton School in New York City, where he’s been a teacher since 2008 and where I periodically substitute. Starting out as a high school English teacher, Christopher went on to found Dalton’s Creative Writing Program, which he now runs full-time. My first impulse for this interview was envy-tinged curiosity: how does he approach creative writing to college-bound high-achievers? And how did building a curriculum for teenagers impact his vision of the craft? Which brings me to the interview’s other major impulse: to discuss Christopher’s debut novel, The Revivalists. The premise: Bill (our narrator) and his wife Penelope are surviving in Westchester in the aftermath of a devastating shark-flu pandemic in the near future. When they hear disturbing news from their daughter Hannah, stranded in California, the couple set out on a cross-country road trip beset with obstacles both comedic and horrifying. Christopher and I sat down to chat during school lunch hour, where Christopher reflected on the making of his pandemic-inflicted family drama, and the impact of its release last fall.

Hannah Garner: While I was reading your book, I found myself thinking a lot about genre. Maybe the obvious generic traditions that we could put it in are the pandemic novel, the dystopian novel, disaster, road trip…But then I noticed the structure of the narrative, which is rather episodic. I was starting to see how different episodes seem to veer into different genres. For example, there’s a little Wild West moment, there’s a man-versus-nature moment with the lions, Utopian moments where we encountered the black feminist collective,  maybe even the gothic, the comedic? So I was wondering if we could start there, by asking: how were you thinking about genre as you were writing this book?

Christopher M. Hood: First of all, part of that episodic nature is that every chapter is directly inspired by a book of the Odyssey. And so that gave me some of the creative impulse moving along. I think of it as literary fiction but my definition of literary fiction is pretty expansive. I loved Zone One, Colson Whitehead’s zombie novel. I think some of the tropes that you find in genre—so many of my favorite books use those in literary fiction! I think to me, what keeps it from being a dystopia novel is that it’s about a marriage. And it’s interesting because the feedback to the book—when I do get negative feedback—can be people saying like, “This isn’t what I wanted it to be. This was a dystopian thriller, but I didn’t get the conclusion that I wanted to get.” Because to me, the conclusion is: we’ve arrived at the family, you know? Like if it’s the Odyssey, and he’s trying to get back home, that’s where he has arrived at the end.

Hannah: Still keeping in that genre line, I was thinking that there’s an arc in which you go through all these disaster genres—or genres of violence you could say—and what wins out, what the book ends up being is domestic fiction. I wanted to read a passage where your book was telling me this. It’s towards the end of the novel, when Bill has finally been reunited with his daughter Hannah.

“We just want you to be hap—” My voice trailed off as I saw her mouthing the words along with me.

“To be happy. Yeah, I know,” she said. This is so fucking classic.”

“How is this classic?” I waved my arms at the Armageddon-haze of the cult encampment around us, but I knew precisely what she meant. Like a tsunami casually obliterating a seaside resort, our domestic drama was sweeping over the firelit scene and drowning it. A man with a rifle could have dropped into the ditch, barking orders and firing warning shots into the dirt at our feet, and we would have spun toward him in unison and said, “God, do you mind, we’re talking!” until he backed away, apologizing, palms up.

Christopher: That was so much fun to write by the way. I was like, this is exactly it, right? This is the thesis of the book: sure, the world ended, sure, the majority of the population died, sure, it’s dystopian yada yada yada—we’re still going to be fighting about the same shit. If there’s a thing that made me write the book, it’s that. This sense of like: all these things are going to survive the end of the world—gender, or like the family dynamics. Bill’s still going to say this wrong thing and Penelope’s still going to be like, why did you say that?

Hannah: It seemed to me that one of the things the book is most interested in figuring out is what survives after devastation. What it is that withstands in humanity. Thinking more specifically about what survives in America—since this book takes place in America and we don’t really have a sense of what’s happening elsewhere in the world—what ideas about America informed the writing of the book and then maybe did new ideas about America come to the fore for you?

Christopher Hood

Christopher: I think the way I survived the writing of the book is really by focusing on the couple. For me as a writer I’m more trying to stay narrowly focused and then hoping that this all says something about the broader picture. I’m not going in saying “I shall now share my thoughts about America.” But I think it’s inevitable that they would come in. I think the easy answer is that I’m writing about race and class and gender and the ways that those survive the apocalypse and the ways that those split apart and unite and stratify America. A friend of mine was talking about why novelists aren’t being asked to explain our moment. I guess I find myself shying away from that idea—that that’s a novelist job. I don’t think I can really explain for anybody. On some level I’m just trying to talk about this couple and trying to get it right. I tell my students all the time: your job is to make art. Your job is not to explain shit. Your job is not even to necessarily know what you have written. Maybe you just feel like it’s done. It’s the reader’s job to figure out what it means.

Hannah: I want to start making a connection to your teaching. The central couple in your book leaves their very verdant, fertile home in Dobbs Ferry, where they have certain resources to get through the pandemic world they live in. And then those get stripped down over the course of the narrative. There’s a pivotal moment in the desert in the West where they no longer have any means of transportation and—it’s kind of a funny moment—all they’re left with is a gold bar and a San Cristobal necklace, which are just vestiges of things that used to be useful in their former lives. That felt like a very symbolic moment of this stripping down process that happens in disasters. Colloquially, we talk about the COVID pandemic this way, that it brought us down to bare bones. That was one thing that I really connected to in your book, that felt very true. And it got me thinking, by an association with the metaphor of “bare bones,” of what you might do in the classroom when you’re teaching writing. This seems like a weird connection but I’m curious, what your “bare bones” of writing are, and then maybe has this kind of stripping down effect we’ve been experiencing over the last couple years affected what your take on that is?

Christopher: My teaching—the core belief—is that I take my students seriously as writers, even before they take themselves seriously as writers. So, some of my baseline things. One is: your goal as a writer, the baseline, the very rock bottom goal, is to keep the reader turning pages. So that’s partially why I wrote something that is sort of a page turner. Because that’s the goal! Then the other piece as it relates to fiction. You were talking about the gold bar and the necklace with San Cristobal. Both of those things end up serving these super important purposes at the end of the book. And a reader could think, “Oh how smart, he knew he was going to need these things.” And if you’re writing a paper about the book, you might write about the symbolic importance of St. Christopher who protects travelers and why that necklace, dadadada…Why did I put those in the book? Because with the necklace I had some lines of dialogue and I was like, “Oh, I need a thing because I’ve had too many lines of dialogue.” So I put in a thing. I tell my students all the time: this is how it works! You don’t plan it all out, you don’t have to know. That’s not your job. I put stuff in the book, like I populate it with things, because then those things give me material, they build the world of the book.

A huge part of what I do is I have all these students who are very earnest and hardworking. And they’re high school students, which means they have an incredibly difficult job. They’re being asked to juggle seven subjects, to get an A in all these subjects, and it’s all so much stuff that the only way to survive is to be organized, efficient—all of which are death to writing. So much of what I do is I’m like, “Just play, stop trying to make sense.” My theory of writing that I’m trying to teach them is you build the world and you populate it with characters and with things—and then you see. Because otherwise you’re just trying to be super smart. And it may be that there are people who are just super smart and that’s the way they write, in which case: great. But I think for the most part when writers are writing a poem or a story or a novel, they know some of what they’re doing, but they’re also trying to create something where things will happen.

Hannah: I want to ask you about your article, “The Gold Standard” that you wrote for Writers and Teachers. In it you write that one of the problems you see with schooling’s emphasis on grades is that students start to lose the connection between the works of literature they study for class and the writing they produce for class. You write:

“Many students today don’t really understand that writing can be judged on its own merits, that it can be good and bad, more and less interesting. They only know that it can be graded.”

You argue that teaching creative writing in high school, as you do, helps them make that connection by teaching “contextual thinking.” Quoting you again,

“I’m not trying to teach Joey to write Heart of Darkness or The Great Gatsby. But I am trying to teach him that they are written documents; that they are the product of human decisions made on the basis of criteria that he can understand. They have lessons to teach. Not moral ones (although they may have those as well) but stylistic ones. Lessons about writing.” 

I was curious if that’s still how you’re thinking about teaching and also if you have any anecdotes of instances where you see that working in the classroom.

Christopher: I think that even more than I used to. One of the things that I say to my students—and let’s be very clear that I am really aware of my privilege that I teach creative writing and run a creative writing program in a high school. I tell my students, “I will read whatever it is that you write. Do you know why? Because they pay me! It’s my job! But your goal is to produce writing that I would read even if I wasn’t being paid. In other words, your goal as writers is to transcend this dynamic.” Because that’s how writing works. You go into the bookstore and you’re not like, “Gosh look at all these books, the writers must have worked so hard, I better buy all of them.” No! You are selfish, you read what you want to read, you read what you like. What I’m saying is: if you’re teaching writing, the goal has to be to produce writing that matters. I have multiple students—lots of students!—that have written poems or stories that rattle around in my head along with ones by Emily Dickinson and John Berryman and James Baldwin and all these writers that I love. Because they’re great! They’re really good poems. Or, wow, that was a really good story. And the kid wrote it eight years ago, and I still remember it. Because when I was reading that story, I wasn’t a teacher evaluating a piece of writing within a rubric. I was a reader wanting to know what happened next.

Hannah: You shared with me some documents that go into your teaching. One of them is articulating the ethos of your classroom which is informed by this workbook Dismantling Racism. One of the tenets of white supremacy culture as outlined in the workbook is “urgency.” And I thought that one was particularly interesting for aspiring writers, for writers, for young people who might be even more susceptible to the sense that they need to achieve a certain thing in a certain amount of time. I was curious how you integrate resisting this culture of urgency in your classroom.

Christopher: So, I just finished writing a new essay about running and commitment and talent. And one of the things I write about in it is that I thought for a long time that as a runner at Haverford College, I’d been a failure. Because I was never an All-American, which I had somehow arbitrarily decided would be the thing that was my apotheosis. And then I could finally, as Emily Dickinson says, “put myself away as a completed man.” And of course, it’s just a piece of paper, right? And at some point I realized, “Oh, I’m just beating myself up for no reason.” And I would never in a million years say to one of my teammates who wasn’t an All-American, “Oh, so you were a failure.” Oh my God! Like, I don’t think that: that’s horrible! And yet I totally said it to myself.

Publishing a book is a complicated thing, partially because you have all these ideas of what it’s going to be like. And then it isn’t! And you know, there’s disappointments in that. Then you’re like, “Oh, I didn’t make this list and I didn’t make that list and I didn’t this and that and the other thing.” And like, I don’t know, there lies madness. I mean, I’m human. I feel that stuff. There are things I wish had happened for the book that haven’t—at least yet. But also, there’s all these people who have read it and loved it and had a real experience reading it. And wouldn’t it be just a terrible shame if I let attachment to whatever and that sense of urgency deprive me of feeling proud of this book that exists in the world and that is meaningful to people? There are people who are like, “I love that book,” and that means that to them, that book belongs to them. And that’s amazing.

One of the great blessings of this fall has been that it has been a great fall of teaching. My classes are absolutely wonderful. I love the work I’m doing with them. It’s super meaningful. I’ve got great students. And I don’t want it to stop. So do I want the book to explode in the zeitgeist and start selling like crazy? And would I love to see it on the New York Times best-seller list? Of course. That would be amazing. But I also don’t want to lose the thing that I have. And why this interview is really fun. Because I’m a teacher. I was a teacher before I was a writer. I love teaching high school. And I think you can hear it. Probably if we listened to this interview, we would hear that when my voice is most excited is when I’m talking about my students and my teaching. And I’m lucky that the teaching and the writing are—I’m clasping my hands together—because they’re one and the same, you know?


Hannah Felt Garner is a writer and teacher of prose living between Brooklyn and Paris. Her short stories and criticism can be found in Cleaver, Paris Lit Up, and Revue Profane. Besides teaching literature and composition, Hannah also contributes editing to Mother Tongue and Cleaver’s own interviews section. You can follow her writing on Instagram @hannahfeltgarner.

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Published on January 30, 2023 in Interviews, Interviews with Fiction Writers. (Click for permalink.)

I LIKE TO THINK THAT ALL OF MY CHARACTERS HAVE A GOOD SENSE OF HUMOR: A Conversation with Chaitali Sen, author of A NEW RACE OF MEN FROM HEAVEN by by Gemini Wahhaj

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 16, 2022 by thwackDecember 16, 2022

I LIKE TO THINK THAT ALL OF MY CHARACTERS HAVE A GOOD SENSE OF HUMOR: A Conversation with Chaitali Sen, author of A NEW RACE OF MEN FROM HEAVEN
Sarabande Books, January 2023

by Gemini Wahhaj

Chaitali Sen’s short-story collection A New Race of Men from Heaven (Sarabande Books, January 2023) won the 2021 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Her novel A Pathless Sky was published by Europa Editions in 2015 and her short stories have appeared in Ecotone, Shenandoah, American Short Fiction Online, New Ohio Review, and Colorado Review. The daughter of Indian parents, Sen grew up in the US and now lives in Austin, Texas, where she is an important part of the literary community. In the fall of 2022, we participated on a panel about Bengali women writers at the Conference on South Asia and I was lucky enough to read an advance copy of her manuscript.

In “Uma,” a young woman emigrates from her native Calcutta to the US, where she is ultimately reduced to a guest in her brother’s atomized suburban home on Long Island. In the opening pages in Calcutta, though, Uma is surrounded by an abundance of human relationships and hilarity: she is deeply connected to the city, the streets, and the local politics. A romantic portrayal of her husband opens onto a rumination on the leftist heritage of West Bengal:

After eight years of marriage, his smile still excited her. He held a booklet they both knew well—Make the 1970s the Decade of Liberation. She always liked the simplicity of the first line, “The year 1969 has ended,” while the next two sentences were poetic, extolling the great victories of the revolutionary masses, culminating in the exclamation “What a year it was!” She wondered if those words had tethered their revolution to a kind of nostalgia in lieu of progress. They sounded distant to her now, from another time and place that could not be revisited.

Rereading A New Race of Men from Heaven, I became aware of the bones of Sen’s stories, as well as the laborious work of laying down their skeletal structure. I had to go back and ask, as a jealous writer, how she did this. I found, underneath a perfect skeleton, a long set-up.

Gemini Wahhaj: In so many of the pieces in the collection, you think you are following one story, but then at the end, it opens up, cracks open, and becomes a much bigger story. This happens for me in the title story, in “The Immigrant,” and also in “The Matchstick, by Charles Tilly.” You’re following a rather enjoyable, contained narrative about a woman trying to get a date, or a little boy lost, or identity theft, and then suddenly there is the gut punch, and you are forced to see a whole universe. Can you talk about how you make this happen, as much are you are willing to share? Is that how your stories operate, by entertaining us, by offering the plot we enjoy and expect, to lead us to a deeper question at the end. And for writers, are there ways we can set up our stories in this way?

Chaitali Sen: Thank you, that’s such a wonderful observation and I’m glad that the stories open up a kind of universe at the end.  For me, short stories are like puzzles or codes that have to be cracked, unlike novels, which are less mysterious to me. It is somewhat a subconscious process, but I think the universe, or maybe what could be understood as the theme, is what I’m interested in, even if I don’t know exactly what that is when I’m starting or where the story will end up. I start with the characters in a situation, confronting a certain problem. Without that, I can’t really get anywhere. But once I have that, I look for the unexpected places the story could go and unexpected ways the problem could be solved or not solved. There is also a fair bit of trial and error. I have many, many stories that never get to that next level, or never even get off the ground. One thing I tell students is to think about what the story is about after a first draft after you’ve done some exploring. Then, once you have a handle on what the story is about, let that be your guiding star to help you make decisions during the revision process about what stays and what goes. Which choices best support what the piece is about? Even if the readers have their own interpretations of the story, if you have a sense of what you are trying to say, you’re more likely to have a well-structured and satisfying story.

Gemini: The title of the book A New Race of Men from Heaven is the title of one of the stories in the collection, but how do you think it defines the whole collection? After I read the last story, I looked back through all the stories again through new eyes, and they all seemed to come together for me. In one way or another, they lay bare the pretenses of our lives, the injustices of society, or colonial violence. As if the stories expose the fragility or imperfections of our humanity. Also, each story brings us to such deep, heart-breaking empathy in the end. It’s such a tense experience. On the one hand, you lay bare the pretense or violence or flaws of the characters we are following, and on the other hand, we are left with such a feeling of empathy for someone else at the end.

Chaitali Sen

Chaitali: First, the title comes from what I believe is a mistranslation of a Latin inscription of a painting at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, England, depicting the arrival of the royal House of Hanover. The official translation is something like, “A New Generation of Men from Heaven.” But when I was doing research, the first blog I read translated it as “A New Race of Men from Heaven” and this was one of those uncanny, serendipitous, ‘divine’ interventions—I say that as an atheist—that gave me the title of that story and the collection. I think it points to the whole absurd way human society has been organized around hierarchies and divisions by race, religion, gender, sexuality, class, caste, and other arbitrary distinctions, and how much that affects our lives whether we are aware of it or not. So in every story, there is some straining against or grappling with these divisions and hierarchies as a constraint or chain on our aspirations. Maybe the empathy comes from the fact that we all live like this, under these constraints, and no one can escape having their lives shaped by them. We may experience them differently, depending on our circumstances or social status at any given time, but we are all shaped by them.

Gemini: You have mentioned that you do not speak from one identity, and you are not trying to represent an identity. And this is true. Many of the stories are not necessarily about Bengalis or Indians. In many instances I was surprised at first, reading from a wealthy, older male writer’s perspective. And yet, would you say that there is a philosophical consistency? That you’re rooting for the underdog? The children, the secretary, the young man in prison?

Chaitali: I’m definitely interested in the underdog, and I think it’s fair to say that I’m rooting for them. But in general, I’m also interested in power and powerlessness, and the ways that can shift from one moment to the next even though there are definite entrenched power relations in society that are set by the system we live in: class structure, patriarchy, colonialism, white supremacy, ethnic hegemony, etc. I’m interested in vulnerability because no one is invincible and no one is immune from the chance that their world might be turned upside down. I’m interested in those small moments of instability, and how people get back their equilibrium, often going back to the status quo or some semblance of normality. And in the background, perhaps unstated within the story itself, I’m interested in the lingering question of what going back to normal means for all the people we don’t see and we don’t hear from. In “The Matchstick, by Charles Tilly,” only one person ultimately benefits from that situation, while the other disappears.

Gemini: There is a lot of wicked fun in some of the stories. You seem to be poking fun at characters that could be most like you/me/readers of short fiction: a writer, a liberal woman living in Texas, a yogi, an academic. And yet, there are very sincere, painful stories told from the perspectives of people who are very removed from these positions of narrative power. For example, the story “Uma” is told in a very serious tone. What do you have to say about that?

Chaitali: Honestly, I wish I could write more stories that are outright having “wicked fun.” The tone of the story, like the structure, sort of asserts itself as I write. I like to think that all of my characters have a good sense of humor, even if the story is serious, and then sometimes there is a narrative voice that is poking gentle fun at the characters, because people like me—writers, liberals, middle-class people, Americans, immigrants—we are full of contradictions and often delusional about ourselves and how we live. For example, in “The Catholics,” every single character is lying to themselves about their convictions. So yes, I think sometimes if we are able to poke fun at ourselves, if we are able to recognize our own tendencies in a character that is lying or acting irrational, we can also come to ask more questions and think more deeply about our lives and our world.


Gemini Wahhaj is the author of the novel Mad Man (7.13 Books, fall 2023) and the short-story collection Katy Family (Jackleg Press, spring 2025). Her fiction is in or forthcoming in Granta, Chicago Quarterly Review, Press 53, Allium, Zone 3, Northwest Review, Cimarron Review, the Carolina Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, Chattahoochee Review, Apogee, Silk Road, Night Train, Cleaver, Concho River Review, Scoundrel Time, Arkansas Review, Valley Voices, and other magazines. She has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Houston, where she received the James A. Michener award for fiction (judged by Claudia Rankine) and the Cambor/Inprint fellowship. She is an Associate Professor of English at Lone Star College in Houston.

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Published on December 16, 2022 in Interviews, Interviews with Fiction Writers. (Click for permalink.)

IN WHICH LIFE?: A Conversation with Chauna Craig, author WINGS AND OTHER THINGS, speaking with Emily Huso

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 26, 2022 by thwackSeptember 26, 2022

IN WHICH LIFE?: A Conversation with Chauna Craig
author WINGS AND OTHER THINGS, Press 53
speaking with Emily Huso

Chauna Craig’s second story collection, Wings and Other Things, speculates about the possibilities that exist beyond fear, self-doubt, and patriarchal control. Most of the collection’s sixteen stories are set against Midwestern expanses and center female protagonists who dare to imagine the roads not taken and to re-imagine themselves.

In these narratives, Craig explores moments of silent but irreversible rupture: an unwelcome revelation about a significant other, words that can’t be unspoken, a dream dashed. Like the exposed anatomical heart depicted on the book’s cover, Craig’s prose demonstrates vulnerability, a rawness of syntax and image. Through sharp sentences and halting fragments, we are shown not just the breaching whales and the prairie’s sky of infinite stars but the wiped snot, feet scraped raw in a field of corn, mouths that taste of mint, smoke, and betrayal.

Like the illustrated heart, the collection has a distinct rhythm and pace. If the book’s flash fictions are like skipped heartbeats and its longer stories sustained throbs, then the female characters are the collection’s steady pulse. In their quiet assertions of self, their desire for “other things,” the women in Wings demonstrate profound resistance to silencing and disenfranchisement.

Corresponding via email, Craig and I discussed fiction as an exploration of unlived lives, movement and suspension in story, and the power of small, quiet actions.

—Emily Huso, September 2022


Emily Huso: In “Impossible Blue,” the opening story, you write, “There was no her. Or maybe there were millions of her and she just hadn’t discovered the right one” (10). I love how this line invites the reader to think about the multiplicity of selves, the lives not lived and unrealized versions of the self. Why did you decide to lead with this particular story?

Chauna Craig: Most of the stories in the collection are quite limited in timespan—the length of a phone conversation, a night, maybe a couple weeks—but this one spans years, hinging on the moments when something changes and exploring how, even if you’re content with your present life, you can simultaneously spin back to the past to reconsider choices and spool forward into the imagined futures where you might feel spontaneous grief for losses that never felt like losses before. I wanted to open the book with a character who becomes conscious of the multiple lives compressing and expanding in her every moment because that’s my experience as a writer with a head full of characters, and I hope readers feel the same, that some characters linger and live on in the mind. Maybe this story is my ars poetica for this collection? The idea that writing and reading fiction is about the chance to live multiple lives and explore opportunities we couldn’t or shouldn’t in the “real” world? I just came up with that, but it feels true. The protagonist of “Impossible Blue,” told by a shrink to explore something in her life, asks, “In which life?” As a reader and writer, I take her question very seriously.

EH: It’s such a provocative question, and I appreciate that these stories never land on an easy answer. That resistance to resolution along with the thoughtful story sequencing left me with a feeling of suspension. The flash fictions in the book feel like quick updrafts, the longer stories like gliding. What are your concerns when thinking about the overall arc of a collection?

CC: My original ordering of these stories was consciously built around the elements of water, air, earth, and fire, and I’m fortunate that my editor recognized that I was forcing stories into that structure, which prevented me from seeing the more organic connections. When I returned to the table of contents, I realized I had to cut at least one full-length story that simply didn’t fit in. I went through finished stories that hadn’t been included originally and found flash-length stories that amplified in bursts some emotions that were drawn out in longer stories. So it delights me that you mention the reading experience as updrafts and gliding! Even though a lot of people don’t read story collections in their published order, I wanted that reading experience of sustained narrative interrupted with little, concentrated bursts.

EH: So many of these stories begin and end in places of uncertainty or possibility, depending on your perspective—mid-flight somewhere between a reckless recently divorced girlfriend, a protective husband, and two daughters; balanced on railroad tracks stretching “in either direction, infinitely”; frozen at a knock on the door, steeled for whatever is on the other side. How do you think about beginnings and endings? In a story, what do beginnings and endings need to accomplish?

Chauna Craig

CC: The standard position on story beginnings is that they need to pull the reader into the fictional world and make them want to keep reading or, as one of my old teachers said, “begin with trouble then make it double.” And I’m still all about that because I will pick up a book in a store and read the first page to see if it entices me to turn the page. The older I get, the more I’m aware that I don’t have time to read everything I want to, so something better hook me right away.

Endings are less clear cut for me. Some readers require resolution to the story’s external events, but as you point out, a lot of my stories end in suspension, a pivotal pause that could go many ways. I think what’s important is that something has been resolved, though. With the knock-on-the-door ending you referred to, the character recognizes she can’t stop or hide from whatever’s coming, but that she can and must reframe her own desires around what she previously accepted as fate. That’s a significant realization. Even when character epiphany is out of fashion, as it sometimes is, the reader needs a sense of movement, change, significance. You have to leave a reader feeling that the time spent reading a story was an investment, that they’ve been left with more than they started with, and that might mean something different to every reader.

EH: Speaking of movement and suspension, the women in this collection frequently seem trapped not just by their circumstances but by their social conditioning. This feeling of limitation makes me think about the trapped chimney swift in the title story. Even if the bird could escape its fate, it seems highly unlikely that it will abandon its nest. Maternal instinct seems to dictate the choice the swift makes, perhaps even eliminates choice entirely. What does agency look like for characters who feel trapped by their circumstances or whose social conditioning limits their ability to make their own choices? How would you respond to the common workshop critique that characters must have agency to be round, complex, and/or interesting?

CC: I have certainly been the object of that particular workshop critique! I do think it’s important that characters make choices and act on them—that’s part of what makes well-rounded characters, and we read fiction to consider the range of choices humans make, the possibilities for all of us. No one wants to read about the human doormat who remains a human doormat. That said, as a culture we pay a lot more attention to the loud people who live large. We expect heroes who grab guns and right wrongs, women who run with the wolves. I love those characters too, but as an avowed introvert, I know how much we underestimate the power of small, quiet choices and actions. I think of women in controlling relationships, like Elise in “The Sweet and the Heat,” and I’m keenly aware of her constant calculations about when and how to resist her partner’s control. While she lives largely in reaction to Levi, she demonstrates genuine agency in forging a friendship with her neighbor and in searching for her runaway stepdaughter. She is not one-dimensional or merely passive, and I think the challenge with characters like her is to find ways to explore why and how someone surrenders agency or doesn’t.

EH: You mentioned “The Sweet and the Heat.” That story along with “The Ferryman’s Smile” and “Smoke, Iowa” stands out to me from the rest of the stories in the collection for how it centers women’s relationships with other women. The specter of male violence and control moves to the periphery, making space for questions about “the culture,” as Camille puts it in “The Ferryman’s Smile”—about the ways that social norms dictate what women’s relationships with other women look like, perpetuate the harmful ways we talk about and treat women, and teach girls to perceive themselves. What issues were you turning over in these particular stories? How do you see them in contrast or synchronicity with the other stories in the collection?

CC: I think a couple of other stories try to explore women’s central connections to other women, i.e. the sisters in “Big Sky Blue,” the narrator/her mother and mother/best friend in “The Empty Set,” but in those ones, the looming threat of marriage and the father’s release from jail seem to pre-emptively close that space you mention. I dedicated this book “to the women who give me wings and keep me aloft, and to those who help me land safely” because, with a few exceptions, women have been the people who show up for me in my times of need, who celebrate with me, who make me believe there is always more me to become. And as much as I wish these themes about control and cultural norms were dated or irrelevant because we live in a post-patriarchy, we don’t. Control of women is literally being codified right now by state legislatures deciding vital questions of personal autonomy. Women are presumed incapable of knowing their own minds and making their own decisions, and the further outside of the patriarchal lines those desired lives are, the tighter the cultural control. Jenn Shapland in her fabulous memoir, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, talks about McCullers’ first biographer describing her “ambivalences” and how that seems to be code for her love for other women, also implying confusion or “a woman who doesn’t know her own mind, her own wants.” Hear that enough, and it’s easy to start to believe that about yourself.

At the beginning of “The Sweet and the Heat,” the runaway stepdaughter leaves a note that Elise fixates on: I want other things for myself. The character doesn’t have context for understanding what that might mean because she has so deeply internalized the message of not wanting, of equating expressing a self with “selfishness.” To even be able to hear the voice of the self, we have to unlearn the powerful messages that women only know themselves by their service, even submission, to others, whether men, the family, or their workplace. And men have to unlearn those messages about women too. These issues are so persistent and pervasive and often personal that I can’t help but explore them in the lives of my characters.

EH: That thematic thread definitely feels urgent in these stories, whether it is explicitly explored through characters or implied through metaphor. Speaking of metaphor, I have to ask how you go about creating the startlingly vivid images in your stories that carry so much symbolic weight. For example, in “Scrap Moon,” the narrator’s ailing mother describes the moon as “a withered hangnail. Throwaway,” and the reader can’t help but think about things that, like a hangnail, hold on—the residents at the assisted living community who hold onto life, onto fractured memories—and about what we discard: a hangnail, a severed part of ourselves; the people society dismisses, like the narrator’s unmarried son or the elderly, including our own parents. Can you talk about your process of discovering and developing loaded metaphors?

CC: Definitely a “loaded” question, but I appreciate how you describe “discovering and developing” metaphors because that really is the process as I experience it. If I’m writing regularly and paying attention to the concrete world of the story, I trust the unconscious to show up and do its job. As I steadily build scenes with attention to sensory detail, my mind tosses up images and descriptions that create or reinforce patterns. That’s how our minds work: we seek order, patterns, balance. More, I have to let go and let readers make the smart, intuitive connections you made about images in “Scrap Moon.” In revision, I do often look for how images and ideas echo each other, but I confess I never thought about the hangnail moon image tying into the themes you note, and now I think “that’s so smart, I wish I’d thought (consciously) of it!”

Writing is first and foremost discovery for the writer, but I don’t pretend I can control what readers discover for themselves, and that’s part of what keeps stories alive.

EH: Do you have a favorite craft technique to use? If so, which one, and why?

CC: I don’t know that I have a single favorite technique, but I have always loved collage and montage where the reader has to work to make leaps, white space where everything is hinted at, happening off scene. I tend to experiment like that in creative nonfiction, and the stories in this collection are more traditional narratives, but there is an irresistible energy in stitching bits together into a living Frankenstory.

EL: As a writer, what artistic transitions are you in the midst of? In what ways are your aesthetic imperatives shifting?

CC: I love this question. I also find it terrifying because at this point in my life, I don’t have an answer, not a good one. My impulses seem to push toward weirder, more fragmented writing while fear of “wasting my time” drives me to be more “marketable.” I know those aren’t mutually exclusive directions and that there is no single market either. I’m not good at patience, but I am trying, as Rilke famously noted, to “learn to love the questions themselves.” Still, like so many of my characters, I’m waiting for the lightning strike to tell me what’s next, so I really hope I haven’t failed to recognize the subtler nudges all around me.


Emily Huso’s stories and essays appear or are forthcoming in The Roadrunner Review, Reflex Fiction, and Watershed Review. A graduate of the MFA program at the University of Washington, she has received support from AWP’s Writer to Writer Mentorship Program and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Find her on Twitter @emilyhuso.

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Published on September 26, 2022 in Interviews, Interviews with Fiction Writers. (Click for permalink.)

MAKING EACH STORY ITS OWN: A Craft Conversation with Tony Taddei, author of THE SONS OF THE SANTORELLI, speaking with fiction editor Andrea Caswell

Cleaver Magazine Posted on May 16, 2022 by thwackMay 16, 2022

MAKING EACH STORY ITS OWN
a Craft Conversation with Tony Taddei
author of  THE SONS OF THE SANTORELLI
speaking with fiction editor Andrea Caswell

Tony Taddei’s debut story collection, The Sons of the Santorelli, is a fast read: the prose is smart and snappy, the characters are funny and flawed, and we can’t look away from the situations Taddei has put them in, situations he believes “best evoke their mortality and individual points of view.” I recently had the opportunity to speak with the author about his book and the craft of short fiction. The discussion included reflections on writing family sagas, the do’s and don’ts of assembling a linked story collection, finding just the right words, and how Taddei’s training as an actor has helped him as a fiction writer. Our conversation has been edited for clarity. —AC, May 2022

Andrea Caswell: Tell us about the title and the title story.

Tony Taddei: The title came to me after I’d finished a couple of stories about the “sons of the sons” – the second-generation boys of the Santorelli family. Those were the first stories I wrote, and I’d already decided on the surname “Santorelli,” which in Italian means “little saints.” I remember rolling around the words “the sons of the sons,” and at a certain point I scribbled down the “The Sons of the Santorelli” in a notebook. Reading it out loud, I liked the alliteration of it, and I also liked the way the words themselves captured the entire saga of multiple generations. Even use of the article the before Santorelli seemed to be a way to signify a whole clan rather than just a single man. Everything about it felt right to me.

It was quite some time after I came up with the title that I wrote the book’s title story, which I’d planned on being the collection’s origin story. By then, using the title “The Sons of the Santorelli” for both that story and the collection had become an easy choice.

You have to find a way to become receptive and very loose in your mind and body when you write. You need to open the pathways to let in those words and phrases that, when you look at them again, make you feel as if they came from somewhere outside yourself.

AC: The collection covers a span of 60 years or so, across the lives of three generations of the Santorelli family. How did you decide where their family saga would begin, and where it would end?

TT: I didn’t know the timespan the stories would cover when I started to work on them. I always knew there’d be a story for each of the first- and second-generation sons (eight in all). I also knew that I wanted an origin story and at least one story about the patriarch of the family, but I wasn’t sure if that would be a single one or multiple stories, and I wasn’t sure in what time period I’d set them. It was only after I’d written each of the above stories that I started to get the sense that the book would span at least 50-60 years – from the early 1930s to the late 1980s. After that, I started to play around with other stories that I thought needed to be added to round out the collection. For instance, I wrote “Commedia dell’Arte” because I sensed that the collection needed at least one story from Aida’s (the matriarch’s) point of view. I also finished drafts of four other stories that took the grandsons into their adulthood, as men in their 40s and 50s. Those stories would’ve taken the collection well up to the 2000s, but once I started to assemble the book, I felt the sensibilities of those stories were part of a different collection. I took those out of the running, and it remains to be seen if I’ll use them as the start of another collection someday.

The circumstances and driving aspects of a story can be a metaphor for the story’s protagonist as well.

AC: There’s a tremendous intimacy to these stories, in that we get to know each character well and see them at some of their most desperate moments. We meet the sons as children, and by the end, they’re adults with their own problems. Yet each story can stand on its own, without needing to rehash previous plot points. Can you share some of the challenges of creating a linked collection like this? Another way of putting it: how did you do that?!?

TT: Once I came up with the family tree, so to speak, and I knew whose point of view I wanted to tell a story from, I just wrote the most honest and surprising, stand-alone stories that I could, trusting that the stories would eventually link in ways I may not have even planned. Of course, as you write a linked collection, you do know each of your characters, and once you’ve written the first few stories, you can use small details from the previous stories in the story you’re currently working on to link them together. But it’s not something I would recommend a writer think too much about when they’re creating a linked collection. A lot of the work of linking stories takes care of itself automatically in the writing, as well as in the reader’s mind. Once the collection is finished, you can always go back and embroider more links to make the connections stronger. What’s most important is to make each story its own, knowing that if you understand how the characters are related, the links will come naturally.

AC: A successful short story creates a sense of immediacy, a sense that something momentous is happening to a character, and I loved that quality throughout the book. Each story is exceptionally focused: an evening walk home from work, one hour of a bachelor party gone wrong, the first time someone uses a snowblower. How did you decide on these singular moments to communicate larger truths about each character?

TT: Again, each of the characters in these stories has their own strengths and failings. Keeping these characters and their personalities in mind, I wanted to draw out the most acute aspects of who they were, and I waited until I found a circumstance to put them in that would best evoke their mortality and individual point of view. I also wanted the book’s stories to have a dark sense of humor as well as a bit of a slapstick quality—humor and slapstick being about surprises, and surprises being what I most wanted these stories to deliver.

I believe that the circumstances and driving aspects of a story can be a metaphor for the story’s protagonist as well. In writing these stories, I waited to find just the right match between character and circumstance. When I found it, a lot of the rest of the writing took care of itself.

AC: Building on the previous question, is the short story your favorite form? At any point in time, did you think you might try to write a novel about this family?

TT: Yes, I like writing short stories most of all. The time frame for writing a short story can give you a more immediate payoff (if by ‘immediate’ you think in terms of the couple of months it can take to write and polish a story, as opposed to the couple of years it can take to write a novel). I’m impatient and tend to lose focus if I work on one single thing for longer than a few months. Short stories allow me to make something good out of that failing of mine. Though I might have tried to write a novel about the Santorellis, writing about them in the short story form not only felt like the right way to do it, but I also think it best suited my talents.

I wanted to help the reader to feel what it might be like to be inside the heads of these characters as they experience the world in their own peculiar ways. 

Contradicting the above just a bit, I should add that despite my love of short stories. I have managed to write one pretty good novel, as well as a novella that I’m fond of (if anyone out there would like to read them, feel free to get in touch with me). I’ve also recently finished the first three chapters of a longer work (I don’t want to jinx it yet by calling it a novel). That said, short stories are my go-to form, and I have another full collection I’ve just finished. They give me a more immediate feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment that none of the longer forms offer.

AC: I learned from your bio that you’re also a trained actor. Has a foundation in acting been helpful to you as a fiction writer? If so, how?

TT: Absolutely. In fact, my writing career started with me writing plays and sketches for performances in small venues around New York City. It was only when I got tired of having to find people to perform my work (not to mention places to have it performed) that I turned to fiction. Once I did, I found that it was the form I had been meant to write all along.

When it comes to writing fiction, my acting training has been undeniably helpful in a couple of critical ways. First, being an actor, you learn to break down a script and understand a character’s and a play’s objectives, beats and actions. In short, you learn to parse dramatic structure, which is table-stakes for writing any good piece of fiction. Second, many good fiction writers fall short when it comes to writing dialogue. Because I was an actor and was taught to find a way to think and speak like whatever character I was playing, I can more easily put myself into the role of the characters I’m writing. Hence, the dialogue I put into their mouths will more often ring true because I find myself – quite literally – speaking it first in their voice before I write it down.

AC: You’re very skilled at conveying background information with a single sentence or short paragraph. There are many examples throughout the book, but I loved this sentence in “The Great Dream,” in which you wrote of the character Vittorio, “The donkey his father used to make a living ate better than he and his brothers did.” Can you share insights on finding just the right words to convey an entire way of life like that?

Keeping these characters and their personalities in mind, I wanted to draw out the most acute aspects of who they were, and I waited until I found a circumstance to put them in that would best evoke their mortality and individual point of view.

TT: I’m not sure there are any insights I can share here. All I can say is that you have to find a way to become receptive and very loose in your mind and body when you write. You need to open the pathways to let in those words and phrases that, when you look at them again, make you feel as if they came from somewhere outside yourself. There’s a physiological feeling I get when the right words, conveying just what I want to say, come to me. It’s a sort of frisson that ripples through my mind and when it does, I know I nailed it. Even though I may not know where it came from or if I’ll ever be able to do it that well again.

AC: These stories are gritty and realistic; we recognize the messiness of humanity in them right away. Yet two of the stories, “Little Man” and “The Son of the Sheik,” contain fabulist or supernatural elements, and you seem comfortable in that realm as well. Can you talk about those two stories in particular, as far as their departure from strict realism?

TT: Those two stories are the most obvious instances of me deploying a little magical realism in the work. But if you look at the rest of the stories, I think you’ll find that a lot of them are also a bit “fabulist,” as you put it. In one story, “We Now Conclude our Broadcast Day,” you have a guy talking through his TV set to 1960’s television celebrities, who sometimes answer him back. In another, “Deus Ex Machina,” you have the protagonist carrying on a dialogue with God, who answers him in some very eerie ways. In writing these stories, I’d have to say that I tried to thematically keep all of them just a little off-center. I thought this might make them more compelling to read, but I also wanted to help the reader to feel what it might be like to be inside the heads of these characters as they experience the world in their own peculiar ways.

AC: David Gates has praised the collection for its “unsentimental departure from the conventional immigrant family saga,” and for your intimate knowledge of these characters’ dreams and disappointments. As a child or younger person, did you interact with family members who, like Vittorio and Aida, came to the U.S. from Italy?

TT: I am a first-generation Italian American. My parents were born in Italy and came to this country with their parents when they were small children, nearly 100 years ago. I was also lucky enough to have grown up with all four of my immigrant grandparents, so yes, I did interact with family members who had some similar sensibilities and attitudes to Vittorio, Aida, etc. David is right when he says I have intimate knowledge of these characters’ dreams, and I do have a strong first-hand understanding of the types of people who live (and die) in The Sons of the Santorelli.

That said, I wouldn’t want a reader to think that the characters in this collection are members of my family, thinly disguised. I purposely gave the people in these stories broad characteristics beyond those of the family I grew up with. I also pushed them into circumstances that did not happen. What’s on the page here is fiction, and the most you might say about how I tapped into my family and their dreams to write these stories is that the stories bear an emotional imprint of who they were. Never a literal one.

AC: You’ve included film, television, music, and literature references throughout the collection. Some of your characters seek solace and escape in these art forms, which deepens our understanding of their emotional lives. Were any of these arts formative for you, as far as your ultimate path to becoming a writer? I’m thinking of “To Build a Fire” by Jack London, for instance.

TT: Early on I came to depend on the comfort and inspiration that the arts brought to my life. Reading, listening to music, and watching TV and movies allowed me to escape the small life I was living, to dream of worlds and ways of being that were just not available to me in the dreary Northeast town where I grew up. Like just about everyone else (then and now), my parents and extended family consumed their share of television, movies, and popular music (though none of them ever read anything more than a newspaper). What I realized when I was young was that books, movies, television, and other popular art forms had a far different effect on me than they had on others in my family.

I didn’t purposely set out to weave references to music, television, etc. into the work when I began writing the Santorelli stories. As I got into writing them, however, I found that using pop music, literature, and cultural artifacts from TV and movies as reference points for the characters made the work more accessible and, for me, more truthful. It was also a great deal of fun to have Jack London, or Sly and the Family Stone, or Dean Martin or G.I. Joe come along for the ride as their own minor characters and/or period anchor points in the work. It allowed me to reconnect with what art and pop culture meant to me as a boy. It also sunk me (and I hope the reader) into the stories in a way that would not have been possible without it.

AC: The cover design for The Sons of the Santorelli recently won gold in the prestigious Hermes Creative Awards. Congratulations to you and to all involved in the publication of this beautiful book.

TT: Thank you so much.

The Sons of the Santorelli, Bordighera Press, 160 pages, is available for purchase here.


Tony Taddei was born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut. His humor and fiction have appeared in publications including Story Magazine, Folio, New Millennium Writings, The Funny Times, Pif Magazine, Animal and The Florida Review. Tony holds an MFA from the prestigious Bennington Writing Seminars and is a recipient of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship for fiction. A trained actor, for many years Tony created characters on stage before turning his attention to inventing life on the page. Tony currently resides in New Jersey where he raised three daughters and lives with his wife Karen and their 2-year-old Cockapoo Brodie.

Andrea Caswell is a fiction editor at Cleaver Magazine, where she runs the Short Story Clinic to provide feedback on short fiction (submit here). Her work appears or is forthcoming in Tampa Review, River Teeth, The Normal School, Fifth Wednesday, Columbia Journal, and others. In 2019 her fiction was selected for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. A native of Los Angeles, she now lives in Newburyport, Massachusetts. For an opportunity to write with Andrea, you can register for her upcoming class, The Write Time, here.

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Published on May 16, 2022 in Interviews, Interviews with Fiction Writers. (Click for permalink.)

A CONVERSATION WITH NAMRATA PODDAR, AUTHOR OF BORDER LESS

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 22, 2022 by thwackMarch 22, 2022

A CONVERSATION WITH NAMRATA PODDAR, AUTHOR OF BORDER LESS
7.13 Books, 157 pages
Interview by Grace Singh Smith

Full disclosure: I met Namrata Poddar—writer, editor, UCLA professor of writing and literature—in a room filled with Vermont sunlight, at Bennington Writing Seminars. But what I should actually say here is that I met Joohi Mittal, a widow whose fortunes have fallen (“Poor Joohi, Mount Sinai duplex to Malava cubicle!” Mount Sinai. Need we know more?). Joohi appeared in Namrata’s story, “Silk Stole”, which we were “workshopping.” I don’t remember any of our comments, helpful or not; what I remember is a day in Joohi’s life unlike no other in her recent memory, where, thanks to an unexpected return from an investment, this mother of three—who works “three plus jobs”—allows herself a window into her lost life. She buys a designer silk stole, a drink at an Americanized café (Coffee Keen!), and—if only for the length of a facial massage, a Prada purse-wielding snooty fellow customer notwithstanding—Joohi feels “the lines on her forehead dissolve.” Ahhhhh. But then the story’s last two words disturb Joohi’s, and our, brief equilibrium. She “. . . sank deep.”

Several years after I wanted to clobber that Prada purse-wielding woman who checks out Joohi’s chipped toenail polish, “Silk Stole” appeared—has just appeared—as part of Namrata Poddar’s debut novel Border Less. Joohi appears, of course, but she is part of a large cast of border-crossing characters who are searching for a better life. Border Less traces the migratory journey of Dia Mittal, an airline call center agent in Mumbai, and as Dia journeys to the United States, the stories of other border crossers—travel agents, immigrant maids, fashion designers, hospitality industry workers, Bollywood artists (junior and senior), hustling single mothers (like Joohi), academics, tourists in the Third World, refugees, and more—appear, not so much vignettes as threads in a vast web. And true to the complexities and struggles of immigrant life, the lines on these characters’ foreheads, if they do dissolve (figuratively speaking), only do so at a price.

Namrata and I talked over email about what inspired this many-voiced novel, her publication experience, how she navigates writing male characters (and tackles racism and classism), why she chose to end Border Less with a story written in the voice of the goddess Shakti, her advice for aspiring debut authors, and so much more. This interview has been lightly edited. You can read more about Namrata on her website.

—Grace Singh Smith, March 2022

GSS: Congratulations on this gorgeous symphony of a novel that challenges so many preconceived notions of form. When I first heard the title—Border Less—I was very intrigued. Why not, you know, Borderless? Then the novel’s epigraph, by Édouard Glissant, a stunning confirmation of the novel’s power and potential, answered my question, or at least I think so. Can you tell us a little more about the novel’s title (and the epigraph)—how it informs, inspires, and is also driven by the voices within it?

NP: On the title, it’s definitely the verb over the adjective. Meaning, it’s less “borderless” because we live in a world with a rising wave of nationalism in so many countries including the U.S. and India, increasingly under Trump erstwhile and Modi’s current leadership. To suggest that we literally inhabit a  “global village” with no borders—even if it’s true somewhere within a digital universe composed of Facebook, Twitter, and the like—would be to suggest a political utopia, a reason I didn’t care to name the novel “borderless.” That said, most characters centered in the book have experienced geographical dislocation in one way or another, and are borderless to the degree that they do not claim allegiance to just one nation-state. Also, a spiritual interrogation and a yogic worldview punctuate Border Less along with its political exploration around the word “border.” Among several ideas, I see the novel offering a meditation on what it takes for women to let go of all the expectations and “ borders” placed on their being by society, families, parents, children, lovers, husbands, arty gatekeepers and more, and to tune into themselves and truly feel borderless.

The title as a verb—Border Less—also has multiple interpretations in the book. But if I’d to boil it down to a dominant one, Border Less alludes firstly to the novel’s closing chapter, an epilogue of sorts where the Hindu goddess of creation Shakti is calling out the Euro-American literary establishment and asking it to borderless forms of literary storytelling, especially the novel.

Lastly, the epigraph by the Nobel-nominated Afro-Caribbean writer and intellectual, Edouard Glissant, that opens the novel reinforces this circularity in the novel’s structure; it alludes to communities who have endured oppression and historic marginalization and how they have produced other forms of storytelling that subvert the assumptions of mainstream Western storytelling. Much of Glissant’s oeuvre explores forms of postcolonial storytelling and was a big influence on Border Less.

GSS: This novel defies the traditional form of the mainstream Western novel, with many voices and narratives. There is Dia Mittal, the airline call center agent in Mumbai, India, whom we meet in the first story Help me Help you and who eventually journeys to greater Los Angeles. Then there are all the stories that intersects with Dia’s—all border-crossing characters like Dia. Related to the first question, too—did you always know you would write a novel in this form? How did Dia appear to you as the fount of Border Less?

NP: I did not ever imagine I’d write a novel (even if I wanted to), let alone a polyphonic novel like Border Less. Maybe that’s because, for the longest time, I saw the novel, at least for my own writing aspirations that progressed over my U.S. years, via the American literary establishment and its market forces. Here, the novel follows the psychological drama of a few protagonists, is character-driven, and the plot often involves tracing a character arc on the page, a story movement from conflict to some sort of resolution in a way that won’t interrupt what John Gardner famously called the ”vivid and continuous dream” of an implied bourgeois reader’s experience. What I’m paraphrasing here are the assumptions of the modern realist novel and a decisive rise of the Anthropocene in storytelling, both of which, to me, have their origins in the West. Across much of the world and throughout history, storytelling hasn’t worked in this specific way.

As a brown woman with desert roots who grew up in a coastal, postcolonial India, who then migrated to the U.S., and who continues to live in a global patriarchy, my individual and communal history is marked by gaps, fissures, and ellipses. So it made more sense to me that my novel’s form reflects my own history over the history of my colonizer.

As a literary critic, I spent many years focusing on the realist novel as it manifests in 21st-century literature by writers of color; it’s a body of writing I still love. As a fiction writer though, this template of the novel did not inspire me at all—I don’t viscerally connect with its assumptions of continuity and wholeness, zooming into one or more main characters. To me, these arty assumptions come from white male history, assumptions that have been laid bare in works by several writers of color including Amitav Ghosh, Matthew Salesses, Gish Jen, and Edouard Glissant. As a brown woman with desert roots who grew up in a coastal, postcolonial India, who then migrated to the U.S., and who continues to live in a global patriarchy, my individual and communal history is marked by gaps, fissures, and ellipses. So it made more sense to me that my novel’s form reflects my own history over the history of my colonizer. All this critical reasoning, though, happened in the later stages of writing the book when I was thinking about form in serious ways.

As for Dia, she kept reappearing in my drafts over many years—an insistent voice of a lower-middle-class Mumbai girl, one who doesn’t come from the Bombay of writers like Salman Rushdie or Suketu Mehta, all Bombays I deeply love; one who crosses multiple borders between languages and cultures, like so many Mumbaikars have; one who insisted I put her story down on the page. That said, her voice rarely came to me as the dominant voice amid the multiple voices and stories I drafted toward the book; it came interspersed with other voices that spoke in my head. It’s this juxtaposition of voices that I’ve tried in many ways to capture within the book.

GSS: As someone who’s been slogging over a first novel for years, I find your journey and the novel’s publication inspiring. How long did it take you to write Border Less, how many drafts did you write, and how did the work evolve through the various iterations? For example, did you have a sense from the beginning that you’d split the novel up into the two sections on which these interconnected narratives hang, Roots and Routes?

NP: From its earliest drafts that I wrote while on a sabbatical from grad school to the time it was done with its final stage of line-edits in 2021,  Border Less took seventeen years to write. I rework compulsively most things I write. Even a story or an essay of 5,000 words takes me, at the least, around twenty-five to thirty drafts. So you can imagine the various versions that must’ve happened over seventeen years with a manuscript of about 50,000 words.

Honestly, I didn’t feel inclined to keep a precise count as I feared the results would create a limiting belief in my head that would interfere with the process. That said, Border Less did evolve over many, many drafts, especially since I was revising not just its content and doing the developmental as well as line-edits at different moments, but also, thinking seriously through questions of form at each step.

Border Less first started as standalone scenes and vignettes, many of which evolved into stories that often connected organically to become a collection of interconnected stories. This collection then morphed into a novel, yet a novel that draws inspiration from a BIPOC legacy of novels and storytelling at large over a white legacy of the novel.

GSS: I love how you use slang, of the sort you’d heard on the streets of Mumbai and also Hindi terms/words—“bhunkuss,” “jaan,” plus the names of Bollywood songs—without explaining, or even giving hints, as to their meaning in English. What kind of considerations go into that—do you worry about uninitiated readers stumbling over it?

…when white writers write in a Caucasian English that’s specific to say, working-class London or middle-class California or New York suburbs, they don’t pause on the page to translate for a brown Anglophone reader like me the communal idioms or slang they import into their use of English. When using hybrid English in my novel—one inspired from both South Asia (especially Mumbai), and a South Asian diaspora in the West—I allowed myself the same freedom most writers I love wield within their writing.

NP: One of my biggest motivations in writing Border Less was to see more Anglophone fiction in both my homes—India and the U.S.—reflect the English my people and I speak. After all, every Anglophone writer reflects the world they come from in the way they use language—whether it be Toni Morrison or Salman Rushdie, Sandra Cisneros or Raymond Carver.

And yet, when white writers write in a Caucasian English that’s specific to say, working-class London or middle-class California or New York suburbs, they don’t pause on the page to translate for a brown Anglophone reader like me the communal idioms or slang they import into their use of English. When using hybrid English in my novel—one inspired from both South Asia (especially Mumbai), and a South Asian diaspora in the West—I allowed myself the same freedom most writers I love wield within their writing. In fact, this non-explanation of one’s world and an opacity with language is the only way I’ve ever encountered and consumed “literary” writing. I felt no desire to play a literary pioneer here and pursue the goal of full linguistic transparency as if that were possible.

GSS: In Firang, the narrator’s husband’s friends, a slightly cringe-inducing group (IMHO), call her Firang, foreigner because she spent her childhood in Mauritius before moving to India, France, and Northern California for school, then finally to Orange County where she settles down with her husband, Vish. Firang is a very loaded term. The narrator’s journey across borders aligns with yours—or at least the places where you’ve lived. How much of your own immigrant experience informed Border Less?

NP: Firang is certainly a loaded term, although like with any word or concept, it gains and shifts meaning with context, something I hope cultural insiders will recognize within Border Less, too.

I believe Noor, the narrator in Firang, and I have overlapping life journeys to the extent that we have both lived in India and France, but I haven’t lived in Northern California and Noor hasn’t lived in the East Coast cities of India and North America as I have. Where our life journeys overlap is in the fact that we have both crossed borders and lived in more than one place. Although that’s the case with most characters in Border Less.

Migration or the constant navigation between countries, continents, languages and cultures,  impacts my life in crucial ways. If it seeps into all of my work—fiction, nonfiction, translation, teaching, and editorial work—that is because it’s a huge part of who I am. It’s a topic that can never not interest me, on the page or otherwise. 

GSS: Brothers at Happy Hour has unlikable men complaining about the women in their lives (it doesn’t exactly end on a complimentary note for these bros). There’s this character, TJ, who’s finally settled down at the age of thirty-four with a distant cousin, after a month of “rumored dating,” causing everyone to be “surprised yet relieved he wasn’t gay.” (That yet, though.). TJ is the first brother—“brothers”, since they aren’t related, after all—we hear from in this story. He launches into a bitter complaint about his “super Type-A wife.” I found myself feeling mildly sorry for TJ, in spite of myself. How hard—or how easy—it is for you to write sympathetic—and, conversely, unsympathetic male characters?

Of course, the feminist in me may rationally believe that it’s hard to create sympathetic male characters, but as fiction writers, we don’t write with a political label attached to our pen. We write by learning to listen and letting our characters guide us moment by moment into the next step of a story.

NP: I agree. With all the moments you share from the novel above, TJ comes across as a fairly unlikeable character. That said, there are other moments within the novel where TJ is also relatable to readers, or I hope, especially when it comes to his loyalty for his friends, or the inside jokes they share as Indian American “brothers.”

Like other male or female characters in the book, I see TJ as an ambivalent character—he embodies the good and the bad, and I hope this makes him more than a one-dimensional character.  Of course, the feminist in me may rationally believe that it’s hard to create sympathetic male characters, but as fiction writers, we don’t write with a political label attached to our pen. We write by learning to listen and letting our characters guide us moment by moment into the next step of a story. TJ to me was as hard or as easy as writing other male or female characters within the book, whether it is Dia the protagonist, or perhaps the most likable of all male characters in Border Less, Jeetendra, a motel owner in Southern California, the narrator of the chapter, “Victorious”.

GSS: Another question from Firang. “Every cliché on India I’d heard from white folks in the west, my new brown family in the West was recycling, joke after joke on the motherland’s lack of civilization, the poverty, the population, the heat. . .” I found it easy—too easy—to identify with the narrator’s irritation, and it is evocative of the layered racism often invisible from the outside (that is, most people are aware—or such is my hope—of colonial and post-colonial attitudes of Westerners towards Indians but then there’s the racism, discrimination, and classism within the nation itself, part of my experience growing up in rural northeast India.). I note, too, where the call center supervisor in Help me Help you makes a jab at the way “interns from Ahmedabad” pronounce certain English words. Did you intentionally create these moments, these nods to the often invisible reality of inter-Indian racism and classism, or did the story produce these moments “organically”?

NP: I didn’t intentionally create these moments. They showed up organically because like you, I’m quite aware of racism, classism, and casteism within our South Asian communities—in the subcontinent or its diaspora worldwide. In the later stages of writing the book, though, when I did wear a critic’s hat, these moments stood out to me as a key highlight. After that, I did my best to hone these moments, as a storyteller, for the reader.

GSS: Kundalini, the closing story, is a brilliant, fierce takedown of patriarchy in all its avatars, from religious to literary, and it is written in the second person! By the goddess Shakti, no less, she who “[owns] that ancient game of Form and Illusion”. I think it is important for readers of Border Less to know why you chose to end Border Less with her voice. Please tell us more.

NP: Glad you enjoyed the ending. Although to be honest, I didn’t always choose to end my novel with Shakti’s voice. When I think of storytelling in rational or conventional terms, ending the novel of Dia’s journey and her eventually finding “home” made sense to me. And yet the last chapter came to me almost as is, that is, Shakti, speaking directly to some of the big figures of South Asian history and mythology, not to mention the Western literary establishment and other characters in Border Less. When I was transcribing the voice I heard, I loved what I had on the page, except that I didn’t know what to do with the epistolary short fiction I’d downloaded, as if from ether. I put it away in my digital folder for “extras” yet Shakti’s voice kept insisting that I put her back into my novel and also that I give her the last word.

This led me to think of the manuscript I had in deeper ways, to think through the questions of form, and a postcolonial legacy of storytelling including hybrid novels that I was already familiar with, thanks to my life in and involvement with teaching and literary criticism. And surely, in the structural revisions of the manuscript, ending the narrative with a secondary character who repeatedly comes up in the book as a leitmotif made sense, especially since Border Less is less about character-driven fiction, and way more about community-driven fiction. “Kundalini,” especially in its performance of the great cosmic dance of destruction and creation, the Tandava,  heralds a new world order; it echoes the epigraph by Glissant that opens the novel by reaffirming an alternative world with other forms of storytelling that come from communities who have endured historic oppression and marginalization. It thus also reinforces a circularity over linearity of “plot”; it echoes the circular movements of the Rajasthani dance ghoomar that punctuate the novel; it creates a frame that encases Dia’s story as well as her community’s, and frames are crucial to Rajasthani art forms from my ancestral home in India, from our performing arts to haveli architecture with its specific forms of windows or the jharokha.

In short, ending with “Kundalini” made so much more sense than with Dia’s journey that appears in the novel as its penultimate chapter.

GSS: You are an author, an editor, a professor of literature and creative writing at UCLA, and last, but not the least, a mother.  Who have been your greatest influences, people who have anchored you?

NP: My biggest influences as life anchors or as a working mother are my mother and my sister, who’ve always had to work very hard to earn a living and yet have been very present for their families, especially their children. Other big inspirations on the road are a whole community of mother-writers who also raise children, produce books, hold day jobs and are active literary citizens. Watching multitasking working women who’re no suckers to patriarchy or systemic oppression at multiple levels lead their day-to-day lives and simply be themselves in all their light anchors me on the road. This list of peers and role models in my life is very long, although my mentors, Dr. Francoise Lionnet and Dr. Shu-mei Shih at UCLA, and Jill McCorkle and Angie Cruz from my time at Bennington Writing Seminars first come to mind, as do peers like Camille Dungy, Tiphanie Yanique, Bich Minh Nguyen, Sonora Jha, Pooja Makhijani, Anajli Enjeti, Chaya Bhuvaneswar, Kaitlyn Greenidge, among others. Another huge life anchor of mine is a close circle of friends, working mothers of color, who keep life very real for me, and who uplift me when I trip, and it’s my hope that I do the same for them—shout out in particular here to SoCal writer-sisters Shilpa Agrawal and Aline Ohanesian, and academic sister from Mumbai, Dr. Urmila Patil. 

My two cents, then, for aspiring debut authors trying to finish and shop their manuscript in the American market: Learn as much as you can about the publishing landscape. Put out your work as much as you can to discover who is truly your reader. Know also what you seek first—a paycheck from your book sales or a book that deeply reflects you. For minority writers, these two goals in the current literary landscape can often be incompatible.

GSS: And lastly, what has been the publication journey like, for Border Less? What were some obstacles that you had to reckon with? Do share any advice you might have for others who, like you, are laboring over work that challenges the literary status quo.

NP: As with most BIWOC—more so, those not born and raised in the U.S. and those who don’t strictly center the U.S. in their work—I had a hard time shopping for my manuscript within an American literary industry known to be eighty-five percent white at all levels of executive decision making. And while I talk openly, teach, and write about these structural inequities in American publishing in most of my recent nonfiction and editorial work, I reckoned early enough with the fact that my manuscript was unlikely to get a pass by the Big Five. Firstly, because I didn’t have an agent until I already signed the contract for my novel, and secondly, because of all the “rules” Border Less resists when it comes to “literary storytelling,” and because the novel’s last chapter in calling out the literary establishment is fairly incendiary.

After a point, I shopped my manuscript mainly with small and indie presses known to take an interest in BIPOC voices. Here, too, while the manuscript was a contender for three literary awards for first books from Feminist Press, Black Lawrence Press, and C&R Press, it didn’t garner enough interest toward an actual publication. I’m someone who doesn’t believe in giving rejection too much energy so at some point, I just stopped tracking the numbers—but I did submit and receive rejections continuously, until one day, Leland Cheuk, an Asian American author, the founder and publisher of 7.13 Books, reached out to me with an offer for publication.

My two cents, then, for aspiring debut authors trying to finish and shop their manuscript in the American market: Learn as much as you can about the publishing landscape. Put out your work as much as you can to discover who is truly your reader. Know also what you seek first—a paycheck from your book sales or a book that deeply reflects you. For minority writers, these two goals in the current literary landscape can often be incompatible.

Beyond the completion and circulation of a book, get clear on what you want from your writing path. Then start looking for ways to make that happen. Walking the road as a “minority” writer who takes her work seriously is already a pretty demanding path, no matter what choices you make, unless you come from generational wealth or financial privilege. Every choice on the road to publication is a tradeoff, but once you know what you truly want, paying the cost toward your choices will come easier, I think, as will contentment and hopefully, joy.


Namrata Poddar writes fiction and nonfiction, serves as Interviews Editor for Kweli, and teaches literature and writing at UCLA. Her work has appeared in several publications including Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Longreads, The Kenyon Review, and The Best Asian Short Stories. Her debut novel, Border Less, was released in March 2022 from 7.13 Books, and was a finalist for Feminist Press’s Louise Meriwether Prize. She holds a PhD in French literature from the University of Pennsylvania, an MFA in Fiction from Bennington College, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Transnational Cultures from UCLA. Find her on Twitter,  @poddar_namrata, and on Instagram, @writerpoddar. Author Photo Credit: Elena Bessi

Grace Singh Smith’s stories and essays have appeared in Shenandoah, AGNI, Arrowsmith Press, Santa Monica Review, Cleaver, Aster(ix), The Texas Review, Home (Heady Mix), and elsewhere. Her story “Oshini” was selected for the 2018 Best of the Net anthology, and her story “The Promotion” was cited as notable in The Best American Short Stories 2016. She is Santa Monica College’s spokesperson and is the blog editor at AGNI.

 

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Published on March 22, 2022 in Interviews, Interviews with Fiction Writers. (Click for permalink.)

Five and a Half Questions for Michelle Ross on her new collection SHAPESHIFTING—Interview by Kathryn Kulpa

Cleaver Magazine Posted on November 17, 2021 by thwackNovember 18, 2021

Five and a Half Questions for Michelle Ross on SHAPESHIFTING
from Stillhouse Press
Interview by Kathryn Kulpa

Michelle Ross has published short fiction in Cleaver (“Lessons,” Issue 13; “My Husband is Always Losing Things,” Issue 23; “Night Vision,” with Kim Magowan, Issue 34). She spoke to us recently about her new short story collection Shapeshifting.


Kathryn Kulpa: This is such a strong collection! One thing I really like about Shapeshifting is the diversity of points of view, style, and even genre. There are short, flash-like pieces, longer stories, realistic and often funny pieces like “After Pangaea,” with the parents sleeping in cars to keep their place in line to sign their kids up for kindergarten, and darker, more disturbing stories like “Keeper Four” and “A Mouth is a House for Teeth.” Did you worry that the stories might be too divergent, or that publishers might want a more uniform voice?

Michelle Ross: Thank you so much, Kathryn, and thanks for talking with me about the book!

I can’t say I worried about the range of the stories in that regard. Many years ago, I accepted (and have since embraced) that I’m a writer who needs to work in a variety of forms and styles.

Sometimes I’m in the mood to write realistic fiction, and sometimes I’m in the mood to write more speculative fiction. Sometimes I’m in the mood to write short and sometimes long. Sometimes funny, sometimes more serious. Sometimes to borrow forms, sometimes to follow more traditional story structures. I don’t try to restrain myself in that regard. I’m not even sure I could. Rules and restrictions bring out my rebellious nature. Also, I think writing is at its best, not to mention more fun, when it’s playful. So I follow whatever interests me at the moment. What I think unites these stories are their concerns, the questions they ask. If there’s anything in terms of range that I was a little uncertain about early on, it’s the inclusion of the couple of stories that are written from the point of view of daughters—“The Sand and the Sea” and “Life Cycle of an Ungrateful Daughter.” In a book of stories that take the point of view of mothers, these stories diverge a bit. However, in “The Sand and the Sea,” the protagonist is a mother herself and a central question she considers is how her relationship with her mother might have been different if her mother had received the mothering she’d needed. In “Life Cycle of an Ungrateful Daughter,” the daughter imagines her mother’s perspective. Another outlier is “The Pregnancy Game.” The girls in that story are not quite teenagers yet; none of them are mothers, either. Yet all these stories grapple with questions about motherhood in one way or another. Ultimately, I felt these stories not only belonged, but that they made the book stronger.

KK: I agree! The theme of motherhood, viewed in different ways, is an anchor for the collection. Sometimes the stories are written from the point of view of daughters with difficult mothers (“The Sand and the Sea”), young girls enacting motherhood (“The Pregnancy Game”), or women who have taken on a caregiver role in some other way (“Keeper Four”), but often the point of view character is a mother. Are there stories you think you would not have written if not for your own experience of being a mother?

MR: I probably wouldn’t have written most of these stories if I hadn’t first become a mother myself. I don’t think I would have been drawn to write about motherhood if I weren’t grappling with motherhood, if it weren’t something that occupied my mental energy. The only story in the book that I drafted before becoming a mother is “Life Cycle of an Ungrateful Daughter,” and that one is from the point of view of a daughter imagining her mother’s point of view.

KK: “Keeper Four” and “A Mouth is a House for Teeth” are stories that really resonated with me, and both have dystopian elements that seem especially timely right now, although I’m guessing they were probably written before the pandemic. Can you talk about the origin of those stories?

MR: “A Mouth is a House for Teeth” is easy to recall. That story came to me more fully than most stories do. That is, I knew before I started writing that I wanted to capture the intense feeling of isolation that I felt in early motherhood. I was no longer going to the office each day. I was no longer going anywhere, really. On the one hand, I was very much taken with my son, and, sure, I had him as a constant companion. On the other hand, he couldn’t speak, and the relationship between mother and baby goes one direction—it’s all about the baby’s needs, never about the mother’s needs. My partner worked long hours some days. He worked out of town some weeks. When he wasn’t working, he often seemed to be disappearing to go run errands that took longer than they should. I recall feeling kind of out of my mind sometimes because I was so damn exhausted and so alone. To really capture that feeling, I felt like I needed to exaggerate. I needed to put the mother in this story alone in a house with her child for years. I needed her to not be allowed to leave that house ever.

“Keeper Four” emerged from a few different scraps. One of those scraps were scenes I had cut from a failing story—scenes of a woman trying different tactics to get a bear to eat. Another scrap was a book that someone had gifted my son: Unlikely Friendships: 47 Remarkable Stories From the Animal Kingdom. The book’s photos and stories are endearing, yet at the same time, something about it nagged me. Some of the unlikely “friendships” in the book were, in fact, mother-child relationships—a dog mothering a monkey, for example. From this nagging was born the idea of humans experimenting to develop a drug to try to induce this mothering behavior in women. Also, I wanted at least one story in the book to be from the point of view of a woman who rejects motherhood, so “Keeper Four” naturally became that story. Why is the story so apocalyptic? I think that nearly every time I set a story in a corporate office, the story tends to get a little apocalyptic. Corporate offices and apocalypses go together like peanut butter and jelly.

KK: I’m always interested in the decisions that go into putting a story collection together. I know that, in addition to writing solo stories, you also collaborate with Kim Magowan. Were there any collaborative pieces you wished you could include in this collection? Or other work that was originally part of this book, but ended up being cut for thematic or other reasons? At what point along the way do you look at stories you’ve published and say, “Hey, I think I’ve got a collection here”?

MR: I see the collaborative writing Kim and I do as separate from my solo stories. We have a manuscript of collaborative stories we’re peddling right now to presses, in fact. Also, I just generally tend to work on multiple projects at once even within my own work. As I was writing the stories for Shapeshifting, I was also writing stories for my forthcoming collection, They Kept Running, as well as stories for a few other projects that are still in progress. Selecting the stories for Shapeshifting was mostly straightforward because I knew early on, when I hadn’t written even half these stories yet, that I was working on a collection of stories that interrogate motherhood. Thus, I was writing stories with this book in mind. But along the way, I also kept a list of all the stories I’d written that were motherhood related and I went with my gut about which stories felt like they should be in this collection and which stories felt like they belonged in They Kept Running. The story I was most uncertain about was a flash titled “Manhandle.” Stillhouse Press ended up making that decision for me. The editors felt it didn’t belong in Shapeshifting, so now it’s in They Kept Running.

KK: You publish a lot in journals, both flash and longer work, and I’m amazed by how prolific you are—especially considering you’re also a working parent. Do you follow a writing schedule, or write at random moments when an idea strikes you? Do you have a writing group, or do you ever take workshops for inspiration?

MR: I get up at about 4:30 each morning and write for a minimum of two hours. Same goes for weekends. I don’t have a writing group per se, but Kim Magowan is the first reader for everything I write. Yasmina Din Madden, who I’ve known since we both got our MFAs many years ago at Indiana University, has been one of my regular readers lately, too. Once in a blue moon, the three of us do a mini flashathon together, sometimes with other writers, such as Brittany Terwilliger. I don’t take a lot of workshops, but I have occasionally turned to workshops or other courses when I’ve felt like I needed a little change, some inspiration. “The Sand and the Sea” came out of the Kathy Fish workshop I took some time ago.

KK: Finally, I just wanted to say how perfect the cover design is! Did you have any say in it?

MR: Thanks! I think so, too. Stillhouse asked me to send them images of a few book covers I love and to write notes detailing what I like about those covers. The designer then created two very different cover options based on that information as well as, I assume, their feeling about the book. This was the cover that immediately snagged me. There was no question for me that this was it.

KK: Thanks so much, Michelle! Shapeshifting is available from Stillhouse Press.


Michelle Ross is the author of the story collections There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You (Moon City Press 2017), winner of the 2016 Moon City Press Short Fiction Award and Finalist for the 2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Short Stories, and Shapeshifting, which was selected by judge Danielle Evans as the winner of the Stillhouse Press Short Story Award and is forthcoming in 2021. Her fiction has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, The Common, Epiphany, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, TriQuarterly, and other venues. Her fiction has been selected for Best Microfictions 2020 and the Wigleaf Top 50 2019, as well as won prizes from Gulf Coast and other journals. She is fiction editor of Atticus Review and was a consulting editor for the 2018 Best Small Fictions anthology. A native of Texas, she received her B.A. from Emory University and her M.F.A and M.A. from Indiana University. She currently lives in Tucson, Arizona, with her husband and son. She works as a science writer.

Kathryn Kulpa was a winner of the Vella Chapbook Contest for her flash chapbook Girls on Film (Paper Nautilus) and has had work selected for inclusion in Best Microfiction 2020 and 2021 (Pelekinesis Press).  Her flash fiction is published or forthcoming in Flash Frog, 100 Word Story, Monkeybicycle, Smokelong Quarterly, and Wigleaf, and she serves as chief flash editor for Cleaver Magazine. Kathryn has been a visiting writer at Wheaton College and has led writing workshops at the University of Rhode Island, Stonecoast Writers Conference at the University of Southern Maine, Writefest in Houston, Texas, and at public libraries throughout Rhode Island.


A conversation with Nancy Ludmerer, author of Collateral Damage: 48 Stories by Kathryn Kulpa

A conversation with Nancy Ludmerer, author of Collateral Damage: 48 Stories by Kathryn Kulpa
February 14, 2023
FLASH-WRITERS: TRUST YOUR READER: a conversation with Nancy Ludmerer, author of Collateral Damage: 48 Stories (Snake Nation Press, 2022) by Kathryn Kulpa I had the pleasure of interviewing Nancy Ludmerer, a student in one of my Cleaver flash fiction workshops, about her full-length flash collection Collateral Damage: 48 Stories, published by Snake Nation Press. Nancy’s work, both fiction and nonfiction, has been widely published in journals, and she moves effortlessly from brief, lyrical microfiction to longer, more complex stories that push the boundaries of flash fiction. A master of compression, she can unfold a lifetime in a paragraph, as she does in this piece from the collection, originally published in Night Train: Bar Mitzvah When Benjy started to choke on a piece of celery stuffed with scallion cream cheese, I turned from the buffet table and asked, are you okay, and when he shook his head, I said raise your arms but he kept choking, so I slapped him on the back of his fancy new suit, and then two words clicked in my head Heimlich maneuver so I punched my fist into his stomach even though this was the wrong way to do it, but I couldn’t think, couldn’t ...
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MICRO MENTORING: Flash Fiction Masterclass, taught by Kathryn Kulpa, October 1 – October 30, 2022

MICRO MENTORING: Flash Fiction Masterclass, taught by Kathryn Kulpa, October 1 – October 30, 2022
September 9, 2022
MICRO MENTORING Flash Fiction Masterclass Taught by Cleaver Senior Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa 4 weeks Saturday, October 1 - Sunday, October 30; asynchronous with 4 group Zoom sessions, plus an optional one-on-one Zoom consult with each student. $300 Class limit: 6 This class is intended for writers with experience in flash fiction. Questions: [email protected] This class is intended for writers with experience in flash fiction. You are invited to begin the class with work you would like to complete and revise, but we will also offer group exercises to generate new work, accountability, and feedback. Previous students are welcome! Kathryn Kulpa was a winner of the Vella Chapbook Contest for her flash chapbook Girls on Film (Paper Nautilus) and has had work selected for inclusion in Best Microfiction 2020 and 2021 (Pelekinesis Press).  Her flash fiction is published or forthcoming in Flash Frog, 100 Word Story, Monkeybicycle, Smokelong Quarterly, and Wigleaf, and she serves as chief flash editor for Cleaver Magazine. Kathryn has been a visiting writer at Wheaton College and has led writing workshops at the University of Rhode Island, Stonecoast Writers Conference at the University of Southern Maine, Writefest in Houston, Texas, and at public libraries throughout ...
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MICRO MENTORING: Flash Fiction Masterclass, taught by Kathryn Kulpa, July 8 — August 6, 2022

MICRO MENTORING: Flash Fiction Masterclass, taught by Kathryn Kulpa, July 8 — August 6, 2022
June 22, 2022
MICRO MENTORING Flash Fiction Masterclass Taught by Cleaver Senior Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa 4 weeks Friday, July 8—Saturday, August 6; ZOOM meetings on Sunday, July 10; Sunday, July 17; Sunday, July 24; and Sunday, July 31. $300 Class limit: 6 This class is intended for writers with experience in flash fiction. Questions: [email protected] SOLD OUT This class is intended for writers with experience in flash fiction. You are invited to begin the class with work you would like to complete and revise, but we will also offer group exercises to generate new work, accountability, and feedback. Previous students are welcome! Kathryn Kulpa was a winner of the Vella Chapbook Contest for her flash chapbook Girls on Film (Paper Nautilus) and has had work selected for inclusion in Best Microfiction 2020 and 2021 (Pelekinesis Press).  Her flash fiction is published or forthcoming in Flash Frog, 100 Word Story, Monkeybicycle, Smokelong Quarterly, and Wigleaf, and she serves as chief flash editor for Cleaver Magazine. Kathryn has been a visiting writer at Wheaton College and has led writing workshops at the University of Rhode Island, Stonecoast Writers Conference at the University of Southern Maine, Writefest in Houston, Texas, and at public libraries throughout ...
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MICRO MENTORING: Flash Fiction Masterclass, taught by Kathryn Kulpa, Sunday, May 1—Saturday, May 28

MICRO MENTORING: Flash Fiction Masterclass, taught by Kathryn Kulpa, Sunday, May 1—Saturday, May 28
March 25, 2022
MICRO MENTORING Flash Fiction Masterclass Taught by Cleaver Senior Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa 4 weeks Sunday, May 1—Saturday, May 28 Asynchronous, with weekly (optional) Zoom meetings on Thursday evenings or Sunday afternoons. $300 Class limit: 6 This class is intended for writers with experience in flash fiction. Questions: [email protected] SOLD OUT! This workshop, for experienced flash fiction writers, is limited to six students and will feature a combination of generative writing prompts and in-depth discussion of works in progress. In addition to the optional twice-weekly Zoom meetings, students may also, if desired, schedule a one-on-one Zoom consultation with the instructor. Kathryn Kulpa was a winner of the Vella Chapbook Contest for her flash chapbook Girls on Film (Paper Nautilus) and has had work selected for inclusion in Best Microfiction 2020 and 2021 (Pelekinesis Press).  Her flash fiction is published or forthcoming in Flash Frog, 100 Word Story, Monkeybicycle, Smokelong Quarterly, and Wigleaf, and she serves as chief flash editor for Cleaver Magazine. Kathryn has been a visiting writer at Wheaton College and has led writing workshops at the University of Rhode Island, Stonecoast Writers Conference at the University of Southern Maine, Writefest in Houston, Texas, and at public libraries throughout ...
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WRITE, REVISE, PUBLISH! Flash & Microfiction Practice taught by Kathryn Kulpa, Feb 20—March 27 2022

WRITE, REVISE, PUBLISH! Flash & Microfiction Practice taught by Kathryn Kulpa, Feb 20—March 27 2022
December 6, 2021
WRITE, REVISE, PUBLISH! Flash & Microfiction Practice Taught by Cleaver Senior Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa 5 weeks February 20—March 27 Asynchronous, with weekly (optional) Zoom meetings on Sunday evenings $200 Class limit: 12 Questions: [email protected] SOLD OUT Do you tend to procrastinate? Do you often do your best work under pressure? Do you sometimes start stories but never get around to finishing or revising them? Do you find the whole process of submitting work for publication stressful or depressing? This five-week workshop is designed for busy writers who want to put writing time and accountability into their schedule with a combination of online prompts, real-time writing sessions, constructive revision suggestions, submission tips, and a group of writing buddies willing to take the submission plunge with you. We will focus on short flash (up to 500 words) and microfiction (up to 400 words). The first two weeks, we will work on generating new stories; in the third week, we’ll focus on revision; and by the fourth week, everyone will commit to submitting three stories for publication (as your classmates cheer you on). Kathryn Kulpa, THE ART OF FLASH; AFTERBURN; FLASH BOOTCAMP; WRITE, REVISE, PUBLISH!, (flash fiction and nonfiction) was a winner of ...
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Five and a Half Questions for Michelle Ross on her new collection SHAPESHIFTING—Interview by Kathryn Kulpa

Five and a Half Questions for Michelle Ross on her new collection SHAPESHIFTING—Interview by Kathryn Kulpa
November 17, 2021
Five and a Half Questions for Michelle Ross on SHAPESHIFTING from Stillhouse Press Interview by Kathryn Kulpa Michelle Ross has published short fiction in Cleaver (“Lessons,” Issue 13; “My Husband is Always Losing Things,” Issue 23; “Night Vision,” with Kim Magowan, Issue 34). She spoke to us recently about her new short story collection Shapeshifting. Kathryn Kulpa: This is such a strong collection! One thing I really like about Shapeshifting is the diversity of points of view, style, and even genre. There are short, flash-like pieces, longer stories, realistic and often funny pieces like “After Pangaea,” with the parents sleeping in cars to keep their place in line to sign their kids up for kindergarten, and darker, more disturbing stories like “Keeper Four” and “A Mouth is a House for Teeth.” Did you worry that the stories might be too divergent, or that publishers might want a more uniform voice? Michelle Ross: Thank you so much, Kathryn, and thanks for talking with me about the book! I can’t say I worried about the range of the stories in that regard. Many years ago, I accepted (and have since embraced) that I’m a writer who needs to work in a variety ...
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WRITE, REVISE, PUBLISH! Flash & Microfiction Practice, Taught by Cleaver Senior Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa, October 24 to November 21. [SOLD OUT]

WRITE, REVISE, PUBLISH! Flash & Microfiction Practice,  Taught by Cleaver Senior Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa, October 24 to November 21. [SOLD OUT]
August 14, 2021
WRITE, REVISE, PUBLISH! Flash & Microfiction Practice Taught by Cleaver Senior Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa 4 weeks: Sunday, Oct. 24 to Sunday, Nov. 21 Mostly asynchronous with one weekly Zoom meeting: Sunday, October 24 - Intro; 11 am Thursday, November 4, 6:30 pm Sunday, Nov. 7, 11 am Thursday, Nov. 18, 6:30 pm $200 Class limit: 12 Questions: [email protected] SOLD OUT Do you tend to procrastinate? Do you often do your best work under pressure? Do you sometimes start stories but never get around to finishing or revising them? Do you find the whole process of submitting work for publication stressful or depressing? This four-week workshop is designed for busy writers who want to put writing time and accountability into their schedule with a combination of online prompts, real-time writing sessions, constructive revision suggestions, submission tips, and a group of writing buddies willing to take the submission plunge with you. We will focus on short flash (up to 500 words) and microfiction (up to 400 words). The first two weeks, we will work on generating new stories; in the third week, we’ll focus on revision; and by the fourth week, everyone will commit to submitting three stories for publication (as your ...
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FLASH BOOTCAMP, taught by Kathryn Kulpa, Four Weekend Sessions in June-July, 2021

FLASH BOOTCAMP, taught by Kathryn Kulpa, Four Weekend Sessions in June-July, 2021
May 3, 2021
FLASH BOOTCAMP 4 Summer Weekend Bootcamps Taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa June 4 - 6 June 18 - 20 July 9 - 11 July 23 - 25 Saturday and Sunday Zoom sessions 2-4 pm ET $150 for one session; $275 for two sessions; $375 for three Sessions; $425 for all four sessions. *Get focused!* *Get motivated!* *Get writing!* This generative mini-workshop is designed for busy writers who need to carve out some writing time to generate new work, and who crave deadlines and accountability to stay motivated. This class combines writing prompt "homework" you do on your own with group writing and discussion sessions. In just three days (Friday through Sunday), you will have six new micro-stories ready to revise! Format: Combines asynchronous (writing prompts you do on your own time Friday and Saturday) with two, 2-hour Zoom sessions on Saturday and Sunday. Focus:  Flash pieces 500 words and under. The exercises and feedback were excellent. I also appreciated the Zoom classes which helped me connect with other writers and discuss work. The workshop was incredibly helpful. Kathryn's critiques, prompts, and synchronous sessions were marvelous. The community of writers that formed was strong and committed. Plus, three ...
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AFTERBURN: Flash Revision, taught by Kathryn Kulpa | April 4-April 25 2021 [SOLD OUT]

AFTERBURN: Flash Revision, taught by Kathryn Kulpa | April 4-April 25 2021 [SOLD OUT]
January 29, 2021
AFTERBURN A Workshop in the Art of Flash Revision Taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa 3 weeks April 4-April 25 $175 Class limit: 12 Questions: [email protected] Flash fiction may be born in a lightning flash of inspiration, but crafting works of perfect brevity requires time and patience: sometimes cutting, sometimes adding, and sometimes starting all over again. In very short stories, every word must work, and revision is as much a part of writing flash as it is of writing longer prose. In this hands-on workshop, we'll practice the art of revision. Flash fiction writer and editor Kathryn Kulpa will share first drafts, revisions, and published versions of her own work and that of other flash and short fiction writers. Students will learn different revision strategies and how to apply them to their own work. We will create new flash together and work on taking it through several revisions, and students will also have the chance to bring existing stories to the workshop to revise with a goal of publication. I loved having the ability to work on the material at my own pace, at my own time. I met several writers who I will continue to stay in ...
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THE ART OF FLASH, taught by Kathryn Kulpa | Feb. 25-March 28, 2021 [SOLD OUT]

THE ART OF FLASH, taught by Kathryn Kulpa | Feb. 25-March 28, 2021 [SOLD OUT]
January 29, 2021
THE ART OF FLASH A Workshop in Fiction and Nonfiction Taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa Feb. 25-March 28 5 weeks $200 Class limit: 12 Questions: [email protected]  Flash is a genre defined by brevity: vivid emotions and images compressed into a compact form. We most often see flash fiction, but flash can also encompass prose poetry, micro memoir, lyric essays, and hybrid works. In this class, we will take a close look at different styles and forms of flash fiction, as well as flash nonfiction, hybrid, and experimental works. Each week, we will read and discuss one or more example-works and generate new work from prompts. Students will share their work for peer and instructor feedback, then will choose one story to revise for the final class. This workshop has weekly deadlines and assignments to help motivate you to write, but the work can be done at your own pace and on your own time—there are no required meetings (although we may have an optional Zoom pop-up or two and bonus prompts for those who are interested). We welcome both new and experienced writers looking for motivation, structure, and constructive criticism. Kathryn Kulpa was a winner of the Vella ...
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THE ART OF FLASH, Workshop in Fiction and Nonfiction, taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa | January 3 to February 7, 2021 SOLD OUT

Neon Lightning Bolt
September 17, 2020
THE ART OF FLASH A Workshop in Fiction and Nonfiction Taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa 5 weeks SOLD OUT Class limit: 12 Questions: [email protected]  Flash is a genre defined by brevity: vivid emotions and images compressed into a compact form. We most often see flash fiction, but flash can also encompass prose poetry, micro memoir, lyric essays, and hybrid works. In this class, we will take a close look at different styles and forms of flash fiction, as well as flash nonfiction, hybrid, and experimental works. Each week, we will read and discuss one or more example-works and generate new work from prompts. Students will share their work for peer and instructor feedback, then will choose one story to revise for the final class. This workshop has weekly deadlines and assignments to help motivate you to write, but the work can be done at your own pace and on your own time—there are no required meetings (although we may have an optional Zoom pop-up or two and bonus prompts for those who are interested). We welcome both new and experienced writers looking for motivation, structure, and constructive criticism. Kathryn Kulpa was a winner of the Vella Chapbook ...
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AFTERBURN A Workshop on the Art of Flash Revision Taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa | November 15 to December 12, 2020

AFTERBURN A Workshop on the Art of Flash Revision Taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa | November 15 to December 12, 2020
September 17, 2020
AFTERBURN A Workshop on the Art of Flash Revision Taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa 3 weeks November 15 to December 12, 2020 $175 Class limit: 12 Questions: [email protected] Flash fiction may be born in a lightning flash of inspiration, but crafting works of perfect brevity requires time and patience: sometimes cutting, sometimes adding, and sometimes starting all over again. In very short stories, every word must work, and revision is as much a part of writing flash as it is of writing longer prose. In this hands-on workshop, we'll practice the art of revision. Flash fiction writer and editor Kathryn Kulpa will share first drafts, revisions, and published versions of her own work and that of other flash and short fiction writers. Students will learn different revision strategies and how to apply them to their own work. We will create new flash together and work on taking it through several revisions, and students will also have the chance to bring existing stories to the workshop to revise with a goal of publication. Kathryn Kulpa was a winner of the Vella Chapbook Contest for her flash chapbook Girls on Film (Paper Nautilus) and has had work selected for inclusion ...
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THE ART OF FLASH, Workshop in Fiction and Nonfiction, taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa | October 3-November 7, 2020 [SOLD OUT]

Neon Lightning Bolt
July 23, 2020
THE ART OF FLASH A Workshop in Fiction and Nonfiction Taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa 5 weeks October 3–November 7 $175 Early Bird before September 3, 2020 $200 Regular Class limit: 12 Questions: [email protected]  [Sold Out] Flash is a genre defined by brevity: vivid emotions and images compressed into a compact form. We most often see flash fiction, but flash can also encompass prose poetry, micro memoir, lyric essays, and hybrid works. In this class, we will take a close look at different styles and forms of flash fiction, as well as flash nonfiction, hybrid, and experimental works. Each week, we will read and discuss one or more example-works and generate new work from prompts. Students will share their work for peer and instructor feedback, then will choose one story to revise for the final class. This workshop has weekly deadlines and assignments to help motivate you to write, but the work can be done at your own pace and on your own time—there are no required meetings (although we may have an optional Zoom pop-up or two and bonus prompts for those who are interested). We welcome both new and experienced writers looking for motivation, structure, and ...
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AFTERBURN A Workshop the Art of Flash Revision Taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa | August 3 to August 22, 2020 [SOLD OUT]

AFTERBURN A Workshop the Art of Flash Revision Taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa | August 3 to August 22, 2020 [SOLD OUT]
May 29, 2020
AFTERBURN A Workshop in the Art of Flash Revision Taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa 3 weeks August 3 to August 22 $125 early bird / $150 regular Class limit: 12 Questions: [email protected] SOLD OUT Flash fiction may be born in a lightning flash of inspiration, but crafting works of perfect brevity requires time and patience: sometimes cutting, sometimes adding, and sometimes starting all over again. In very short stories, every word must work, and revision is as much a part of writing flash as it is of writing longer prose. In this hands-on workshop, we'll practice the art of revision. Flash fiction writer and editor Kathryn Kulpa will share first drafts, revisions, and published versions of her own work and that of other flash and short fiction writers. Students will learn different revision strategies and how to apply them to their own work. We will create new flash together and work on taking it through several revisions, and students will also have the chance to bring existing stories to the workshop to revise with a goal of publication. Kathryn Kulpa was a winner of the Vella Chapbook Contest for her flash chapbook Girls on Film (Paper Nautilus) and has ...
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THE ART OF FLASH, Workshop in Fiction and Nonfiction, taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa | May 9 — June 6, 2020 and June 20 — July 25, 2020 [both sections sold out]

Neon Lightning Bolt
May 6, 2020
THE ART OF FLASH A Workshop in Fiction and Nonfiction Taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa Both sessions of Kathryn Kulpa's The Art of Flash are sold out—new classes by Kathryn will be announced shortly! Session 2: 5 weeks June 20 — July 25, 2020 $125 early bird / $150 regular Class limit: 12 Questions: [email protected] [sold out] Session 1: 5 weeks May 9 — June 6, 2020 $125 early bird / $150 regular Class limit: 12 Questions: [email protected] [sold out] Flash is a genre defined by brevity: vivid emotions and images compressed into a compact form. We most often see flash fiction, but flash can also encompass prose poetry, micro memoir, lyric essays, and hybrid works. In this class, we will take a close look at different styles and forms of flash fiction, as well as flash nonfiction, hybrid, and experimental works. Each week, we will read and discuss one or more example works and generate new work from prompts. Students will share their work for peer and instructor feedback, then will choose one story to revise for the final class. This workshop has weekly deadlines and assignments to help motivate you to write, but the work can ...
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A Conversation with Melissa Sarno, author of JUST UNDER THE CLOUDS

A Conversation with Melissa Sarno, author of JUST UNDER THE CLOUDS
August 27, 2018
A Conversation with Melissa Sarno author of JUST UNDER THE CLOUDS published by Knopf Books for Young Readers Interview by Kathryn Kulpa Melissa Sarno reviews children’s and young adult books for Cleaver and has just published her debut middle-grade novel, Just Under the Clouds (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2018). It tells the story of Cora, a middle-school girl trying to find a place to belong. Cora’s father always made her feel safe, but now that he has died, she and her mom and her sister Adare have been moving from place to place, trying to find a stable and secure home they can afford. Cora is also dealing with bullying at school and is sometimes challenged by looking after her sister, who has learning differences. But her life holds some good things, too, like a free-spirited new friend and her father’s tree journal, where he kept notes about the plants he took care of. Cora has kept his book and uses it as a way to record her own observations and feelings as she looks for her own true home in the world. While many children experience homelessness, it’s a subject that is seldom explored in contemporary children’s fiction, ...
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NINETY-NINE STORIES OF GOD by Joy Williams reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa

NINETY-NINE STORIES OF GOD by Joy Williams reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa
September 22, 2016
NINETY-NINE STORIES OF GOD by Joy Williams Tin House Books, 151 pages reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa Joy Williams is an author whose work I sought out because once, in a review, someone compared me to her, and since I hadn’t heard of her before, it seemed like a good idea to read her. It was a happy discovery. Still, she was not an author I associated with flash fiction. Her dense, full short stories seemed more like novels writ small. Things change. In Ninety-Nine Stories of God, Williams has pared away all but the essentials. These very short prose pieces are novels written in miniature, pocket epics and cryptic parables etched on the head of a pin. Most are not more than two pages, some are a single paragraph, and a few are just one or two sentences: simple, even stark, yet weighted. The sixty-first story, “Museum,” for example, is one rueful sentence: “We were not interested the way we thought we would be interested.” Williams’s small stories, like the best flash, keep most of the iceberg under the water, leaving us with as many questions as answers. Each story ends, rather than begins, with a title, which often serves ...
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A CONVERSATION WITH KATHRYN KULPA, author of Girls on Film

girls-on-film-cover
September 15, 2016
A CONVERSATION WITH KATHRYN KULPA author of Girls on Film Paper Nautilus Press, 2015 Vella Chapbook Winner interviewed by Michelle Fost I had the chance to catch up with fellow Cleaver editor Kathryn Kulpa about her chapbook, Girls on Film. It is just out from Paper Nautilus and was a winner of the press’s Vella Chapbook Contest. An intriguing part of the prize is that the writer receives a hundred copies of the beautifully designed chapbook to distribute as she likes. Kathryn will be selling signed copies through her Etsy shop, BookishGirlGoods, and she’ll also have them available at readings, writing workshops, and other events. Paper Nautilus will also have the book on sale. For more about the Vella Chapbook contest and Paper Nautilus Press, have a look at the press’s website.—M.F. MF: Congratulations on winning Paper Nautilus’s Vella Chapbook Contest, and the publication of Girls on Film. I wondered if you might talk a little about the process of writing the chapbook. KK: All the pieces in the chapbook were already written, and most of them had been published by the time I put it together, so it was more a process of selecting and matching complementary stories to create a cohesive ...
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A HOUSE MADE OF STARS by Tawnysha Greene reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa

A HOUSE MADE OF STARS by Tawnysha Greene reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa
August 12, 2015
A HOUSE MADE OF STARS by Tawnysha Greene Burlesque Press, 189 pages, 2015. reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa In the very first scene of A House Made of Stars, Tawnysha Greene’s debut novel, the ten-year-old narrator and her sister are awakened by their mother, who spirits them to a darkened bathroom where all three sit in the bathtub, towels piled over them, while the house shakes with thuds so loud even the narrator’s deaf sister can feel their vibrations. Their mother tells them it’s a game. She tells them they’re practicing for earthquakes. But even at ten, the narrator knows it’s not nature’s rage they need to fear. It’s their father’s. Greene’s voice in this novel is pitch perfect, an eerie and convincing combination of innocence and prescience. The hard-of-hearing narrator is homeschooled and isolated; her mother believes public schools will not teach “Godly things.” Yet her understanding of their family dynamic and her father’s mental illness are intuitive and profound. Without adult labels or filters, we see his depression, his paranoia, his moments of happy, expansive mania that can change in an instant to brutal  outbursts, and the scars he carries from his own violent childhood. We see her mother’s ...
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THE BOOK OF LANEY by Myfanwy Collins reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa

THE BOOK OF LANEY by Myfanwy Collins reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa
June 23, 2015
THE BOOK OF LANEY by Myfanwy Collins Lacewing Books, 200 pages reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa When terrible acts of violence occur—as they do all too often in America—our thoughts naturally turn to the victims and their families. But what about the families of those who commit violent crimes? What if someone you grew up with was a school shooter, a terrorist, a mass murderer? That’s the reality fifteen-year-old Laney is living. Her brother West and his friend Mark, two high school outcasts, boarded a school bus armed with machetes, knives, guns, and homemade bombs. Six people died; twelve were wounded. Mark blew himself up, but West made his way home to kill his mother, and he would have killed Laney, too, if police hadn’t stopped him. Left with the wreckage her brother left behind, Laney feels completely alone, unwanted, even hated. Her father died when she was young, and her mother’s boyfriend is only interested in leaving the state as soon as possible. Strangers phone the house with death threats. This is her only identity now: the killer’s sister. The Book of Laney is a young adult novel about facing the worst things the world can hand out and learning ...
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YVONNE IN THE EYE OF DOG by Kathryn Kulpa

YVONNE IN THE EYE OF DOG by Kathryn Kulpa
December 13, 2013
YVONNE IN THE EYE OF DOG by Kathryn Kulpa If God looked for Yvonne would he find her? If God looked down, past stars and satellites, through storm clouds thick and grey as dryer lint, would he see Yvonne in a stolen van, Yvonne in a darkened shopping plaza with Ma’s Diner and A-1 Hardware, Crafts Basket and Pets Plus? Yvonne is down on options, down on her luck. Listening to the sighs and snores of her dog asleep in the back seat, the beat of rain on the roof. Her world the smell of wet dog. Her face in the mirror, hair wild, curling in the damp. Everything about her seems high-contrast, vampirish. Face white, except for that bruise her cover-up won’t cover. Tired eyes. White eyeliner is the trick for that, Teena had taught her. No white eyeliner in Yvonne’s make-up bag. No black, either. Almost out of tricks. She pats more cover-up on her eyelids, feels the oils in the makeup separate. Always something red and raw to show through. Yvonne likes to think that in this whole world not one person knows where she is right now. A parking lot, a strip mall, two hours ...
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LOCAVORE by Kathryn Kulpa

LOCAVORE by Kathryn Kulpa
March 4, 2013
LOCAVORE by Kathryn Kulpa The streets smell like fried dough and there’s the carnival sound of an outdoor mic, a tinny crackle that makes him think of Little League games and awards day at summer camp. It sounds like the end of summer. The locals are celebrating something, the patron saint of clam cakes. They’re selling raffle tickets, but he’s not buying chances. The sky is dark blue, but he’s not watching the sky. The café door is open, inviting him to a darker world of scratched wooden floors and mismatched tables and hard metal chairs: the world of Latte Girl, whose sweet smile is only for the locals, whose cups she graces with sailboats and dragonflies and long-eared dogs, while his foam never holds more than an indifferent swirl. There’s a line—there’s always a line—but he doesn’t mind. He likes to watch her tamp and pull; he likes that everything is done by hand on one old espresso machine; he likes that they are her hands, small and plump, still childish, with chipped black polish on her short fingernails. As often as he tries to touch those hands, she pulls back. Leaves the change on the counter, slides ...
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Published on November 17, 2021 in Interviews, Interviews with Fiction Writers. (Click for permalink.)

A Conversation with Amy Koppelman, author of A MOUTHFUL OF AIR by Michael McCarthy

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 14, 2021 by thwackSeptember 14, 2021

A Conversation with Amy Koppelman
Author of A MOUTHFUL OF AIR
Two Dollar Radio
Interview by Michael McCarthy

I spoke with Amy Koppelman as she was finishing making her first book, A Mouthful of Air, into a feature film. Though she wrote the novel eighteen years ago, it still seemed fresh in Koppelman’s mind. As I spoke with her over Zoom, she searched for the right words to describe her first novel. In this work, Koppelman engaged the experience of postpartum depression when conversation about the topic was rare. The book was first published in 2003 by MacAdam/Cage (a small press that has closed) and is now being reissued by Two Dollar Radio.

In this interview, which Koppelman and I have edited for clarity, Koppelman discusses how she began writing, the encouragement she received from Joan Didion, and whether writing is a world in which she feels safe. —MM

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Michael McCarthy: There are a lot of words that could describe this book: masterfully written, engaging, suspenseful. But one word that also describes it is important. In it, you talk about an issue that has still not received much attention: postpartum depression. When was the moment when you knew you simply had to write this book?

Amy Koppelman: I didn’t know that I was writing this book. I don’t think that anybody sets out to write this book. When I wrote the second-to-last scene in the book, my fingers jumped off the keyboard because I just couldn’t believe that was what I wrote. I knew I wanted to write about shame, how we perceive shame within ourselves, and what we allow for ourselves within the confines of that shame, but I had no idea what the story was.

I started writing the day Kurt Cobain died. My husband called me about the news while I was lying in bed in a dark room. He didn’t know about my depression because I was really good at acting. I remember thinking, “I don’t want to be like Kurt Cobain. I don’t want to die, even though I really want to die.” So I had to figure out how to get better. I called a therapist that day—a name I’d been carrying around on a card in my wallet—and I also started writing around then. So I think originally, to answer your question, I was putting my emotions on paper. It’s not an autobiographical book, but the feelings of shame and self-loathing and all those feelings that one feels when they’re depressed—those were all mine.

MM: The main character Julie Davis is a character who, in modern lingo, really “goes through it.” She endures a depression that could register on the Richter scale. As a writer, you chose to go deep into her thought processes on a day-to-day level. Was it ever emotionally difficult or personally strenuous to spend so much time with a character who was going through that kind of depression?

Amy Koppelman

AK: I had two little kids, who I loved spending time with, so I would drop them off at school, then go home and work. Being able to put all that sorrow and ugliness into the computer gave me the ability to be the most present, happy mom. There was always this huge disconnect between the shit I was writing about and how I was feeling with them, which was very happy. And very grateful.

There was nothing—is nothing—I like more than being a mom. I wasn’t writing about that pain at the same time I was feeling it. I was remembering it, so the emotional whiplash wasn’t as bad.

MM: What kept you going through the writing of this book? What was your routine?

AK: I have no writing routine. My kids and my husband always came first. If somebody was sick or needed me, a couple weeks could go by before I got back to it. But if no one needed me I would just do my “housewife” stuff—my chores—and sit down and work for a couple hours until I picked up the kids from school.

MM: The protagonist of the book leads a rather privileged life. She lives in a nice apartment in Manhattan. She has a supportive family and a nanny. She has access to mental healthcare as well as more conventional healthcare. As an author, was there a conscious decision to choose a character who led a life with such privileges as a way of talking about depression?

AK: Yes, that was an intention. Eighteen years ago people were just beginning to talk about depression as an illness. It was important to me that people understand that depression was no different than asthma or diabetes. You need to go to the doctor. I didn’t want the reader to find an “excuse” for Julie’s behavior so I removed every obstacle.

Julie had the time, support, and means to get any help she needed and she still couldn’t figure it out. She was trapped in a loop of self-hatred. “You’re not a good mother. You’re going to fail. You can’t help but fail.” So imagine a single mom, raising kids, working two jobs. How is she going to find the time and/or seek out the resources—especially when the very nature of depression makes everything feel futile?

MM: Were you ever frustrated that she couldn’t get better, or perhaps made decisions that made getting better unnecessarily difficult?

AK: She’s extraordinarily selfish, right? There’s nothing more selfish than killing yourself. Julie leaves her husband, her son and her baby girl. Even if they get better and are able to move on, the collateral damage of suicide is so vast and awesome. It’s nearly impossible to recover. It has a ripple effect on every subsequent generation. Of course, I was frustrated with her. But in a way that was the point. I wanted Julie’s story to serve as a cautionary tale. Don’t be like Julie. Make different choices.

Live.

MM: If my research serves me well, this book had a difficult publication history. It was difficult to find someone who would be willing to publish a story that was so dark and relentless in its depiction of depression. I believe there was even an interaction with Joan Didion. Could you take me to that moment?

AK: Sure. No one wanted to publish this book. I didn’t even take it personally. I was frustrated, though, because I knew there were so many women who were pushing strollers down the street and were in so much pain behind their smiles. At the end of the day, all you can really do is write the truth as you see it, as you hear it.

That said, after several hundred rejections you start to wonder: what if the reason I’m being rejected is because I’m not a good writer. Maybe the book just sucks. I had seen some article that said where Joan Didion lived, so as a gift to myself, I dropped off the manuscript for A Mouthful of Air and a note. I told her how much she meant to me, and then I asked her, “Am I a real writer?” Because if I’m not a real writer, I should start doing something else.

Everyone I knew was like “Joan Didion’s not gonna write you back.” But she wrote me back! She said that she had read the manuscript and, “Yes Amy, you are a real writer.” When you’re a writer you face a lot of rejection, that’s okay. Don’t pay attention to the rejections. Just collect the positive things people say—hold onto those words. (Amy waits a beat, smiles.) Most of the time they’re not from Joan Didion. That was super special.

MM: And after that bit of encouragement, how was the publication process?

AK: After getting rejected by virtually every agent in New York City, I finally found an agent in San Francisco. Randi Glass took my query out of the slush pile and gave it to Amy Rennert. Both women believed in me, they weren’t scared of the story. And they even found a mainstream publisher. This was my first novel. I was offered something like $10,000 from Doubleday (I think it was Doubleday)—a really nice advance—all I had to do was change the ending. But Julie has a psychotic break. She couldn’t pick up the phone and call 911. It just wasn’t true.

And that’s always been my “north star” as it were. To tell my characters’ truth. To depict the inner pain of someone with a mood disorder. No matter how ugly it is. So, I didn’t change the ending.

At that moment, I basically chose the trajectory of my career. Indie presses didn’t (and still don’t) get the same shelf-space or table-space in bookstores, which was everything back then. But Amy didn’t pressure me. She continued to hunt for a publisher and ultimately Pat Walsh, the editor at MacAdam/Cage said yes and published the novel in its purest form. And now Eric and Eliza Obenauff, the publishers of Two Dollar Radio are giving the novel a new life. I feel so proud to be part of the Two Dollar Radio family and part of the indie community. Independent presses are vital and I think very underappreciated.

MM: Depression seems like a near-impossible illness to write about because at its core, it makes day-to-day life seem nearly undoable. It seems that it would be almost impossible to get a book out of a character for whom daily life is so trying. What obstacles did you face in dramatizing depression, and how did you overcome them?

AK: The stories I tell are very small. They’re like a photograph—an image of a woman in a specific place in time. Writing something with any kind of through-line is always the hardest obstacle for me. I write freehand for many years—with little idea where I’m going. I know the feelings I want to convey, the mental illness I want to portray but I have no idea how I’m going to accomplish it—translate those ideas into a novel. Eventually, I write a scene that reveals the answer: “Oh, that’s what this novel is about.” Then I go back and piece together the story. Your subconscious is smarter than you. If you keep writing, you will find the answer. 

MM: What challenges did you face moving A Mouthful of Air from the page to the screen?

AK: As I was adapting the novel I’d ask myself the following questions:

  1. What’s the action of this scene, the physical action? —for example, Julie crosses the room.
  2. What is happening in the scene emotionally? What are you conveying about her mental state? — Julie starts the scene self-assured and happy but ends the scene insecure and anxious.
  3. Is this emotional beat necessary to convey? —Yes, because now we know that when she’s in a group of people, Julie gets anxious.
  4. Why does the emotional beat matter? —Because we see that Julie is disproportionally fearful. Depending on where the scene is placed in the novel, this bit of information tells us something important about her character. About her POV. And about what’s at stake.
  5. After the first draft I went back and asked myself how many times was I making the same point? — There might be four scenes that show Julie anxious. Do they build? Are they all the same? If so, how many should I keep?

Amanda (Seyfried) said she wanted Julie to have a career, so I made her a children’s book author and illustrator. When my daughter Anna was little she had crossed eyes and wore an eye patch. Kids would make fun of her relentlessly, so at night before she went to bed I’d tell her about this little girl named Pinky Tinker ink who was born with an ugly, wrangled finger. And just like Anna, kids made fun of Pinky. It turns out, though, that Pinky’s finger is actually a key that helped her unlock doors no one else could see—this helped Pinky solve mysteries—find the answers. The idea was that the very thing that Pinky was ashamed of is what made her special.

I thought Pinky was a good—alter ego? Is that the right word?—for Julie. In the film Julie is well known for her books about a little girl named Pinky Tinkerbink. Through Pinky, Julie helps kids unlock their fears but can’t figure out how to unlock her own. And I think somewhere in there is the tragedy of Julie’s story.

MM: It’s interesting to see this book being made into a film nearly twenty years after its publication. Do you notice any change in the conversation surrounding postpartum depression?

AK: When I wrote this book, I had no idea that this category of depression existed. I remember when the book was published I was invited to attend a conference on postpartum depression in Jersey City, and there were like twenty people there. Today there are hundreds. So, yes. There have been huge strides. People are aware of it, “postpartum depression” is a term that people are familiar with.

In 1998 when I was a new mom, people rarely talked about postpartum depression and it remained largely undiagnosed. Today we know that one out of every five women suffers from postpartum depression. In a bunch of states now, there are laws that require gynecologists to screen new mothers to see how they’re doing. But there is still no national protocol—no system in place to check on a new mom’s mental health. That’s very upsetting.

People take antidepressants much more regularly now but I still think most people are undermedicated—no matter what the hip magazines say. Most moms—most people struggling from depression are still profoundly ashamed to ask for help. My biggest hope for the movie is that someone will see themselves—or someone they love—in Julie’s character. And they will get help. Postpartum depression is very treatable.

MM: I have one more question that involves a quote from the book. Julie goes to see her brother perform his music. You write, “Gently, forcefully, he manipulates his world. This, the only world in which he feels safe.” The question I want to ask you is this: is writing a world in which you feel safe?

AK: No one can hurt you when you’re in a room by yourself with your computer. The characters in your head certainly can’t hurt you. The keyboard can’t hurt you. Not being able to string two sentences together is frustrating—you may want to bang your head against the wall, but even that can’t hurt you. And if your thoughts and feelings get to be too much you can simply shut your computer. There is no judgment.

Writing for me started as a safe place to put all of my sadness and I think in many ways that’s still what it is for me—a safe space to process grief and trauma. I learn through my characters’ choices. The good choices and the bad ones. So yes, to answer your question writing is a safe place for me—for everyone actually.

Because everyone is a writer—all you have to do is allow yourself to write. If you can tell a story to your friend at the coffee shop, you are a writer. You don’t need permission. Writing is a safe place to put your thoughts. But that doesn’t mean your writing needs to be safe.


Michael McCarthy headshotMichael McCarthy is an aspiring writer of prose, poetry, and nonfiction from Braintree, Massachusetts who attends Haverford College, where he intends to major in English. His work has been published in Prairie Schooner.

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Published on September 14, 2021 in Interviews, Interviews with Fiction Writers. (Click for permalink.)

Michelle Ross Interviews Dan Crawley, Author of STRAIGHT DOWN THE ROAD, a novella in flash

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 16, 2021 by thwackMarch 16, 2021

Michelle Ross Interviews Dan Crawley, Author of STRAIGHT DOWN THE ROAD, a novella in flash

Dan Crawley’s novella-in-flash, Straight Down the Road, was highly commended by judge Michael Loveday in the 2019 Bath Novella in Flash Award and published by Ad Hoc Fiction. His debut short story collection, The Wind, It Swirls, is forthcoming from Cowboy Jamboree Press this year.

Michelle Ross: Straight Down the Road is set during a family road trip. There’s a kind of out-of-time feeling to the trip. Are they on the road for a couple of months? Is it years? For the reader, it feels like the road is home for this family. Is the road home for them or do you know this family in other times and places that don’t appear on the page?

Dan Crawley: I love this question, Michelle. Yes, the “out-of-time” feeling is very intentional.

When I first started writing these stories, I was constantly debating whether to give a timeframe and if I might place these characters in a static setting, like a home. I decided the dad would briefly mention a rental home in a micro but came down on the side of not wanting to specify the length of time they’re on the road. These characters are wanderers, traveling to no real destination.

So the station wagon, the Plymouth, and the road became their only homes. That feels right for the “world” of this novella, which delves into the feelings that emerge from the lack of a safety net. And the changing settings, I think, add to this anxiety the characters feel, especially the mom. I wanted the change of sceneries to be recognizable to any reader, too, maybe reminding them of their own past road trips.

MR: I love how you call the parents “the mom” and “the dad” (as opposed to “the mother” and “the father”). It feels just right. Was this a quick, instinctive choice?

DC: Since this novella is set in the 1970s, I went back to my own childhood. I’ve never called my parents mother or father. Mom/Dad is so much less formal, and I am anything but formal with my own parents! It was an instinctive choice, more endearing, I think.

MR: Let’s talk about titles. In particular, I’m struck by “Ran Out of Money.” The title does so much work for that story, work that might have been otherwise tricky to accomplish in the piece itself. Do you recall whether that title came to you early on or later in revising? In general, do you tend to title stories early in the drafting or later?

DC: Generally, I tend to grab a phrase or a few words from the story for its title. Or even a word that gives a reader the gist of what the story may be about. This happens after a draft or two.

I’m glad you bring up this particular story. My initial thought was to write a flash about this family running out of money. I wanted to place them in a dire situation, with no money for even a motel room or a proper dinner. What would they do? How would they get through a night? So, even though I didn’t realize it at first, this title was there before I even wrote a sentence. I loved shaping a story around this conflict, using such a stylized tone. Here I had a dark moment in this family’s plight but wrote the flash as a romp.

MR: Recently, when you talked about Straight Down the Road for the Desert Flash series hosted by Sudha Balagopal and Rudri Patel, you said you found beginning with the last piece of the book, which had been published first,  helpful. You said, “I need to know where I’m going.” Is that often true for you in your writing?

Dan Crawley: Knowing the ending line for a given story in advance is beneficial when it happens, but most of the time I struggle with endings. I am a big proponent, though, of letting the characters guide the narrative with their dialogue or actions. More times than not, they propel me toward a satisfying conclusion.

For this novella, it was a huge advantage to be writing toward an already known conclusion. It helped me create some of the foreshadowing in the earlier stories, like the dad telling his story of driving a truck when he was young.

MR: Did you write the rest of the stories in random order or in the order in which they appear in the novella?

DC: Including a strong conflict in the second story (“Jumping Off A Cliff”) helped a lot in writing the stories that followed. That thread of the dad’s rash decision was always there in my thinking as I worked on the other flashes although a few of the stories were written outside the chronological order of the novella, like “Five Sugar Cookies and Two Pieces of Beef Jerky,” “Lamb Chops,” “A Classmate,” and “Protective Services.”

MR: I’m curious if there are any pieces that could have been arranged differently and the novella still work as a whole?

DC: I am so happy you asked this specific question. I did spend some time thinking about where to place “Lamb Chops.” I decided it should come after the diner story because the tension is heightened in the stories that follow.

In ordering the stories, I also thought about the mom and dad each having their say. This approach guided the set-up of many of the stories, which made the whole process more feasible to me.

MR: What immediately comes to mind is this series of three flashes toward the middle of the novella: “The Story About the Inebriated Bread Truck Driver,” “Anyplace Can Be Home,” and “Unmoored.” The tension between the mom and the dad escalates in moving back and forth from his point of view to hers.

DC: I’m so glad you brought up these specific stories. The bread truck story is the first moment the mom shows her anger with her husband, snapping back at him. The micro fiction that follows, “Anyplace Can Be Home,” returns to the dad’s POV. I wanted the dad to reveal his view as the provider in their family. He will find a stable home where they all can live together, “which is the way it should always be.” It’s a plea to his wife, really, even though he’s speaking to everyone.

“Unmoored,” which is from the mom’s POV, reveals her anxiety as the family is forced to down-size from the LTD station wagon to the Plymouth Duster, kind of like moving from a large, comfortable house to an apartment. The piece culminates with a story she tells her son about how his dad broke her heart. A desperate appeal for sympathy, really. She does this again in “A Classmate,” divulging her early relationship with her husband. More digs at him to show the rising tension.

I placed “Leaving Zion,” “Let’s Play Ball, Cecil,” and “Powers” together because they represent the moments when the vacation is still at full steam, and the children are not yet aware of their parents’ conflict.

MR: How did you know when the novella was done? That you didn’t need to write any more stories for it?

DC: Okay, I’m one of those weird writers (maybe I’m not so alone in this thinking?) that a piece of writing is never complete. Even with published work, I’m revising stories all the time, a line here or there, typically with work that appeared in journals a long time ago. Regarding the novella, I have had fleeting ruminations about a few other flashes that could’ve fit. One takes place in a drive-in movie theatre. And I’ve got ideas for a few other places this family can travel in their wanderings.

To be honest, though, I am happy with the length and how this novella turned out. At the last moment, when I submitted the novella to the Bath Flash Fiction Award, I had written seventeen stories, and I think they all do the job nicely.

MR: Flash novellas are not a form I’m versed in, but your gorgeous book has convinced me I should read more of these things. Do you remember what the first flash novella you ever read was? Also, do you have a favorite flash novella?

DC: Thank you so much for your kind words, Michelle. I’m glad my novella has encouraged you to seek out more novellas-in-flash to read.

I read Sophie Van Llewyn’s Bottled Goods when it came out in 2018. I was struck by her use of stand-alone flash fiction stories for chapters. And even though its length puts it closer to a novel, I found the brevity of chapters and the interlinked stories dealing with the same characters fascinating. Then I heard the term “novella-in-flash” in the lit community and started looking for these shorter books. Since then, I’ve read a lot of novellas. I love the form. For me, a few standouts are The Loss Detector by Meg Pokrass, The Way of the Wind by Francine Witte, Three Sisters of Stone by Stephanie Carty (Hutton), Three Men on the Edge by Michael Loveday, The Neverlands by Damhnait Monaghan, and The Chemist’s House by Jude Higgins. I’ve read a lot of novellas from Ad Hoc Fiction, too. I just finished two of their recently published novellas: The House on the Corner by Alison Woodhouse and When It’s Not Called Making Love by Karen Jones. Brilliant writing by these two writers. And there are so many other novellas-in-flash out there that I’m excited to read. I really hope this form continues to grow in popularity in the future.

MR: Your book of short stories The Wind, It Swirls is being published this year by Cowboy Jamboree Press. Tell me about that.

DC: I am proud of the work I’ve produced in this collection. It was very kind of Adam over at Cowboy Jamboree Press to see something in these stories, and I’m grateful for such a perfect home for my first full-length collection of stories.

The collection consists of thirty stories, some in long-form and some flash fiction. I think it is a good mix of my realism, image-driven aesthetic. I would say most of the characters in the stories are trying to hang on against the rough winds of relationship or financial woes. Really, this book encompasses the last few decades of my writing. The oldest story goes back to 2002, a long piece I published in The North American Review, with other pieces appearing recently in literary journals. Many of the stories first appeared in now-defunct journals (both print and online), so for many readers, it’ll be like checking out new work from me. I’m beyond excited and look forward to everyone reading it.

MR: What are you working on now?

DC: I’m trying to write a lot of micros and some flash fictions right now. I want to complete a full-length collection of these small stories, and I have about three dozen written so far. I don’t know how long it will take me to finish; I’m such a slow writer. Also, I’m envisioning these stories as belonging to two different categories: “When I was a child,…I thought like a child” and “But when I grew up, I put away childish things” (1 Corinthians 13:11). So my storytelling is going back and forth between these two character perspectives, wants, conflicts.


Michelle Ross is the author of the story collections There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You, winner of the 2016 Moon City Short Fiction Award, and Shapeshifting, winner of the 2020 Stillhouse Press Short Fiction Award (and forthcoming in November 2021). Her fiction has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, Electric Literature, The Pinch, and other venues. Her work has been selected for Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, the Wigleaf Top 50, and other anthologies. She is fiction editor of Atticus Review. www.michellenross.com

Dan Crawley is the author of the novella Straight Down the Road (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2019) and the short story collection The Wind, It Swirls (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2021). His writing appears or is forthcoming in a number of journals and anthologies, including JMWW, Lost Balloon, Tiny Molecules, and Atticus Review. His work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize.

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Published on March 16, 2021 in Interviews, Interviews with Fiction Writers. (Click for permalink.)

An Interview with Mike Avery, author of THE COOPERATING WITNESS, by Andrea Caswell

Cleaver Magazine Posted on July 2, 2020 by thwackJuly 2, 2020

An Interview with Mike Avery
Author of THE COOPERATING WITNESS
Literary Wanderlust Press
by Andrea Caswell

In Mike Avery’s debut novel, an ambitious law student is determined to find the truth to save an innocent man accused of murder. But the truth is never black-and-white, and the secrets she discovers hit close to home. The Cooperating Witness is a compelling legal thriller in which the moral ambiguities of justice are on trial. Mike Avery mines his fifty-year career as an attorney and law professor to craft a suspenseful story of murder, the mob, and a young woman’s determined idealism. In the following interview, conducted via phone and email, the author discusses his novel, the freedom of writing fiction, and the complex intersection of our legal system and morality.


The Cooperating Witness book jacketAndrea Caswell: You have extensive experience in the legal profession. What insights did this give you in writing The Cooperating Witness?

Mike Avery: My legal background was very helpful. I’ve known a lot of people like my characters: burned-out lawyers like Bobby Coughlin and idealistic students like Susan Sorella. I felt I knew how they might think, and how they’d react to situations that presented themselves in scenes. I’m also very familiar with FBI frame-ups, having litigated a well-known case over a period of several years. My goal was to create a story that was true to life, in the sense that it could actually happen in a courtroom, but was also dramatic.

AC: Susan struggles with feeling alienated in the male-dominated world of criminal law, and sexism adds to her challenges. She needs a strong mentor, but finds that mentors are “still few and far between for a young woman interested in criminal defense.” Why do you think that is, and are there solutions on the horizon?

MA: The opportunities for women as criminal trial lawyers have been gradually improving. During most of the time I was active in court, there were very few successful women criminal attorneys on the defense side. There were more women prosecutors, because Government agencies were required to have equal employment opportunities. Women are saddled with the macho notion that the public has, the stereotype that a criminal defense lawyer has to be aggressive and combative. No doubt that influences the choices that clients make when it comes time to retain a lawyer. There is, however, more than one way to be effective in the courtroom.

AC: Your novel explores the complex relationship between the law and justice. Susan discovers that the law isn’t always about right and wrong, and many of us might be surprised by that fact. Is that an inherent contradiction in our justice system?

MA: I think Susan discovers, particularly in terms of the relationships she and her father have with mob boss Frank Romano, that right and wrong as defined by the law do not always take into account moral imperatives. Or to put it another way, as she tries to seek justice, she finds she is confronted by conflicting obligations. In TV shows and police procedural novels, it is a cliché that private detectives or the police have to cut corners to nail the bad guy. I think that concept is overused and probably encourages police lawlessness. In this book we see what happens to the FBI agents who believe that the end justifies the means.

AC: The novel is set in Boston, from its gritty wharves to the elegant Parker House Hotel. One scene takes place in the Rosebud Diner, which was a local dive when I was in college and is still there today. What makes Boston the perfect setting for your novel?

MA: I lived in Boston for almost forty years and practiced criminal law there for nearly thirty of them. I know the culture. There is a rich diversity of characters in the community to draw upon when writing fiction.

AC: We experience the action from multiple characters’ perspectives, including Susan’s boss Bobby, FBI agents, prosecutors, the accused, and even the charismatic mob boss Frank Romano. How did you decide to inhabit those different minds, and what were some of the challenges these POVs presented?

MA: When I started writing fiction, I knew nothing, niente as my murder victim Tony Francini would say, about writing from a given character’s point of view. My first drafts were all over the place as I flitted from one character’s perspective to another in the same scene. So, point of view became an object of study for me, with the assistance of my teacher Stuart Nadler from the Bennington Writing Seminars. One of the things I read, and I’m sorry I can’t recall who wrote this, was that you can’t answer the question, “What does a barn look like?” You can only imagine what the barn looks like to a specific person. In each chapter I tried to imagine what the action looked and felt like to the character whose point of view I was using, and then to describe it in the language that he or she would use.

AC: How difficult was it to write a female protagonist, to give voice to her inner thoughts and feelings?

MA: That was very difficult. Whether I did a good job or not is something readers will decide. I got a lot of help from strong women in my life, including Jill, the woman I live with. In particular I have to thank my daughters Katie and Samantha, who are young, very independent, smart, and feminists. From time to time I’d ask them to read a section of the book to tell me whether I was off-base. To the extent I got things right, I have to give them credit. But to the extent that I made mistakes, I’m afraid I have to take the blame.

AC: The novelist Susan Scarf Merrell has said that “responding to art with art is what artists do.” You reference other art forms, such as Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, the movie Casablanca, and a painting by the German expressionist Max Pechstein. How did those works find their way into your novel?

MA: What characters respond to, whether in literature or film or the visual arts, can deepen a reader’s understanding of them. When Susan first goes to the co-defendant’s lawyer’s office, she notices a painting on the wall, a Pechstein that I was fortunate to see at the Brücke Museum in Berlin. As Susan reflects on the exploitation of one of Pechstein’s models, it  mirrors her own feeling of being sexualized as a woman in a professional role. The painting captured that sense of vulnerability very well.

AC: Food figures prominently in the book. Susan works at her family’s restaurant in the North End, where we enjoy strolls past Italian grocery stores and cafés. Characters dine on traditional antipasto platters, and homemade pasta with puttanesca sauce. Is it fair to say you’re a foodie?

MA: I love to cook and love Italian food, so I spiced up the story with it. One of my favorite scenes in the book is when Bobby Coughlin is attempting to get himself together to try the murder case and prepares chicken marsala as a metaphor for what he has to do to get ready to walk into the courtroom.

AC: The late film scholar Robert Warshow posits in his classic essay, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero” (1948), that gangsters are portrayed as mythological figures who we know we should condemn, yet we can’t help but admire them too. Susan experiences this conflict with Frank Romano, the local mob boss. He’s charismatic, “an elegant criminal,” but ultimately his success will be his downfall; he’s recognizable as a tragic or anti-hero. How did you conceive of Frank Romano?

MA: Romano is a man whose life took an irrevocable turn early. Maybe he could have been someone else, or done something else, but he is a mob boss. At the same time, he is generous, intelligent, highly literate, and capable of tender feelings. No person is all good or bad and Romano shows us that.

AC: You’ve published legal treatises, and more general nonfiction books about law and politics. How different was the experience of writing fiction?

MA: Writing fiction is very different. I love that I can just make things up. When writing about law I have to footnote everything. In law one has to attempt to be logical and have everything make sense. When there are contradictions, one has to explain or resolve them. Usually one is attempting to be persuasive, or to craft an argument. In fiction, things can happen, as they do in life, that are unpredictable and make no sense. One of the things I have to work on as a fiction writer is to let that happen and ignore my legal personality that wants to put everything in order.

AC: Have you started your next project?

MA: I’m writing the sequel now. Susan is practicing law and working with a strong female mentor to defend a new client charged with murder.

AC: You’ve devoted much of your career to civil rights law and social justice reform. Which organizations do you see doing great work in these areas right now, and how best can we support them?

MA: There are many organizations doing excellent work at the moment. I work with the National Police Accountability Project (NPAP), a project of the National Lawyers Guild. We assist lawyers who bring lawsuits against officers and police departments for misconduct by the police. We are expanding our work to assist community organizers who are struggling to hold the police accountable for civil rights violations and to bring about needed changes in how police departments operate. NPAP can be found at https://www.nlg-npap.org/.

To learn more about the author or The Cooperating Witness, visit his website.


Mike Avery author photoStarting as an ACLU staff lawyer during the Black Panther murder trial in New Haven in 1970, Mike Avery enjoyed an exciting career as a civil rights lawyer. He represented victims of police abuse and racial and sexual discrimination and defended people charged with everything from peaceful protesting to murder. In 2007 he obtained the largest judgment ever awarded against the FBI, $101.7 million, for the wrongful conviction of four innocent men for murder. The crime was actually committed by an FBI informant. He has served as the President of the National Lawyers Guild and was one of the founders of the National Police Accountability Project. Avery spent 16 years as a law professor at Suffolk Law School in Boston. He has published several non-fiction books, is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, and spent a year as an exchange student in the former Soviet Union at the University of Moscow. After retiring as a professor of law, he obtained a Master of Fine Arts from Bennington College.

Andrea Caswell holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and is a fiction editor at Cleaver Magazine. Her work has been published by River Teeth, The Normal School, Fifth Wednesday, Columbia Journal, and others. In 2019 she was selected as a fiction participant for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. A native of Los Angeles, Andrea now teaches writing in Newburyport, Massachusetts.

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Published on July 2, 2020 in Interviews, Interviews with Fiction Writers. (Click for permalink.)

An Interview with Sharon Harrigan, author of the novel HALF, by Virginia Pye

Cleaver Magazine Posted on June 15, 2020 by thwackJune 15, 2020

An Interview with Sharon Harrigan
Author of the novel HALF
University of Wisconsin Press
by Virginia Pye

Book Jacket Cover Art for HALFWriters have a way of finding each other in Virginia, thanks to several strong literary non-profits. Sharon Harrigan teaches at WriterHouse in Charlottesville and I used to help run James River Writers in Richmond. We met years ago at the annual JRW Writers Conference. When my first novel came out, Sharon generously reached out and offered to interview me for Fiction Writers Review. I moved to Cambridge several years later, but we continued to keep track of each other’s careers, cheering on each new publication. I’m delighted to interview her now about her debut novel, HALF. In sparse, lyrical prose, it tells the story of identical twins who speak in one voice, until they can’t any longer.

Virginia Pye: It’s a daring idea to write a novel from the perspective of identical twins. I gather that you’re not a twin yourself, which makes me curious why you chose to tell the story this way?

Sharon Harrigan: I didn’t set out to write about twins. What I wanted to do was write about empathy and intimacy, the kind of platonic closeness I had with my older brother growing up. So originally, the characters were singleton siblings, different genders. But then when I took this concept of sibling bonding further—because exaggerating our real-life can distill the experiences and make them clearer—these characters became so close they were indistinguishable. That’s when I realized they had to be twins or my readers (and I!) would get confused.

I’m also using sibling love to say something about all non-romantic love. That when we empathize with someone, we feel their pain—and their joy. It’s as if what happens to them happens to us. That’s something we especially need to be reminded of during these increasingly divisive times.

VP: When the two sisters are children their story is told in vignettes that have an immediacy to them. The scenes and other characters are described in poetic detail, using the senses and focusing on how a child might process the world. How do you think that showing the story through the twins’ eyes in this intimate way helps your reader relate to them?

Sharon Harrigan author photo

Sharon Harrigan

SH: Children don’t yet know a lot about the bigger world, so they experience things more close up, more focused on what they can immediately perceive with their senses. There’s something magical that we lose once our world enlarges, and as a child, I promised never to forget what it felt like to be small. I’m trying to remember on the page that helpless quality, that sense of awe for people who are bigger, and the credulity, as well as the fluidity between the real and the magical. That’s a lot of what the novel is about: the blurred lines between the actual and the imaginary, the spillover between mythology and mental illness, the lies we tell each other and ourselves so much we believe them, the truth that stares us down but we don’t see it because we’re in denial and the crushing disillusionment that sometimes arrives at the end. Isn’t that an apt description of what it means to grow up?

VP: The twins share the same perceptions and perspectives in their early lives, but as they grow and start to know other people, they begin to become distinct from one another.  This transition comes about slowly and leads to a surprising rupture. Can you talk about the way that difference is introduced as a crucial element in your story?

SH: We know at the beginning that the girls can’t speak in one voice forever, and it’s that instability that drives a lot of the dramatic tension. I tried to make their gradual separation feel natural. That’s the way it often is when we drift apart from people—whether it’s our twin, our best friend, or our spouse. Sometimes we don’t see it coming, and it’s a shock when we can no longer deny it. One of my readers described the separation like this: “The narrator dissolves before our eyes.” The whole book is held together by the dual narration, so when that is gone, it’s like the floor falls out from under our feet. At least that how I wanted it to feel.

When my daughter read the novel, on the other hand, she said the twins’ separation felt like a relief. “The twins were never exactly the same,” she said. “Nobody is. But their closeness is so important to them that they hide all their differences, not just from each other, but from themselves. When they finally break apart, they don’t have to cover up anymore.”

People suppress their differences in order to be part of a group all the time. Think about high schoolers and their desire to fit in. They end up dressing the same, talking the same. We also do this when we join a church or a profession or a political party. I had my students do an exercise using the “we” voice and one of them said something I found fascinating. He is in a men’s group, and the facilitator tells people not to use the “we” voice when they are sharing because it is often used to hide from personal feelings or assert unity where there is diversity. The “we” voice allows people to hide. And yes, that is true for my twins.

VP: One crucial way the twins are bonded to one another is through their understanding of their abusive father. And yet his death is what finally separates them. In this way, he has a divisive effect on them in both life and death. Was it difficult to write such a destructive character?

SH: He became more intense in later drafts because I let myself give him mythic proportions. He is, in a way, Zeus. At least some people think he is. And just like a Greek god he can destroy things on a whim. He can also be so powerful and charismatic that he’s irresistible. He’s a hero-monster, like some of the men we see in the news every day. He is also a real man, the kind of real man I’ve read about in memoirs. I read a lot of them, because that’s what I teach. One of my early readers said the father exemplifies a Midwestern type: the tough but truly loving father who is determined to make his children strong by bullying them. And yes, this is how I remember my own father. He truly thought he was doing the right thing.

VP: Without giving away too much, I’d love to hear you say more about the end of your novel when the twins reveal their very different views of the past. The distance between them becomes vast. Can you share more about how memory plays a role in defining who they are and who they aren’t to one another?

SH: That’s a great question. One of the reasons I used the structure I did—one chapter for every year from ages five to twenty-two—is to give readers the sense that they are seeing a life being lived in real time, the way it is for the characters themselves. Then by the end, when the twins are adults and remember that life in two different ways, we can recognize how memory works, how it is not an objective truth but something filtered through an individual’s biases.

VP: Finally, I love to hear about the journey debut novelists have traveled on their way to publication. Can you share yours?

SH: I remember when your first novel was published, and I was so inspired by your success. It made me feel hopeful. Thank you for that!

I’m a late bloomer. I’m 52 and this is my first novel. My first book, a memoir, was published three years ago. It’s funny because I started writing seriously when I was 14 and thought I was getting an early start! I took poetry classes at the Detroit Institute of Arts. My brother and I got special permission to be able to attend because these were adult writing workshops. I gave a reading at the DIA when I was 18. I’m pretty sure I was the youngest person ever to do so. In my early twenties, a small press was going to publish my poetry collection. It was typeset and everything, and then they went bankrupt. (That collection has still not been published, but I now have a press that’s interested, all these years later!) I became a mother too young and then a single mother, working as an editor full time and also freelancing, hustling to make rent in New York City. My writing became something it didn’t feel like I could afford to do. Only many years later, after I remarried, did I get an MFA and start writing prose and restart my stalled writing career.

I love to hear stories about other writers publishing late. Margaret Renkl, who wrote the amazing memoir-in-lyric-essays Late Migrations, one of my favorite books of the past year, published her first book at age 57. And that book has brought her acclaim, including an invitation to become a New York Times columnist. People like her inspire me to think: It’s never too late!


Sharon Harrigan teaches at WriterHouse, a nonprofit literary center in Charlottesville, Virginia. She is the author of Playing with Dynamite: A Memoir. Her work has appeared in the New York Times (Modern Love), Narrative, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.

Virginia Pye author photoVirginia Pye‘s collection, Shelf Life of Happiness, was awarded the 2019 IPPY Gold Medal for Short Fiction. Her debut novel, River of Dust, was an Indie Next Pick and a 2013 Finalist for the Virginia Literary Award. Her second novel, Dreams of the Red Phoenis was chosen as a Best Book of 2015 by the Richmond Times Dispatch. Her stories and essays have appeared in Literary Hub, The New York Times, The North American Review, The Baltimore Review, and elsewhere. She’s taught writing at New York University and the University of Pennsylvania, in high schools, and most recently in Boston at GrubStreet. She can be found on FB, Twitter, Instagram, and at www.virginiapye.com

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Published on June 15, 2020 in Interviews, Interviews with Fiction Writers. (Click for permalink.)

An Interview with Claire Oleson, author of THINGS FROM THE CREEK BED WE COULD HAVE BEEN, by Andrea Caswell

Cleaver Magazine Posted on April 28, 2020 by thwackApril 28, 2020

An Interview with Claire Oleson
Author of THINGS FROM THE CREEK BED WE COULD HAVE BEEN
Newfound Press, 64 pages
by Andrea Caswell

Things From the Creek Bed jacket copyClaire Oleson’s chapbook, Things From the Creek Bed We Could Have Been, is the winner of the Newfound 2019 Prose Prize, awarded annually to a chapbook-length work of exceptional fiction or nonfiction that explores how place shapes identity, imagination, and understanding.

In the following interview, she discusses the work, and how making art can reshape our understanding of what we see in the world.

Andrea Caswell: The stories in this collection are language-driven, intensely intimate, and saturated with beautiful images. Did any of these stories begin as poems or prose poems?

Claire Oleson: I enjoy navigating in the spaces between prose and poetry; in Creek Bed, I hope a poetic dedication to the individual word is visible alongside the breathing space that prose gives to its subjects. I wanted the size, the “living room” of a story, with the minutia and pace that poetry can offer. Also, somewhat in retrospect, I’ve found my writing across genres is often propelled by sight more than distinct action. I wanted image to offer propulsion, like plot can, but I wanted everything I included to belong to sensation, to be incapable of happening anywhere outside of a body.

AC: The artist Corita Kent said, “Art does not come from thinking, but from responding.” To what are you responding with Things From the Creek Bed We Could Have Been? 

CO: Alongside this desire for the writing to feel embodied, I also want the readers who come to it to feel like they belong inside its feeling. Here, I don’t mean that they “belong” in the sense that there’s a neat space carved out for an audience-surrogate, but far more that the story isn’t complete until someone is in it, feeling it. Following the quote you provided, I think it’s fair to say that if I wanted to be easy, to be point-blank, and solely focused on convincing, I would have written an extended essay on image, gender, bodies, and ownership. This would have been neater than what I’ve chosen to do: a slew of surreal-adjacent and often absurd stories that take longer to tell you what a thesis could blurt. But I come to you with no footnotes and more mess because I agree with Corita Kent here; this isn’t art until it’s being responded to, occupied, waded in. In that same vein, certainly everything I’ve written can be taken as a form of response. I’d love to say I’ve involved some thought too, but absolutely, the best feelings and needs and evenings I’ve communicated in Creek Bed come from having carried feelings and needs and evenings.

I want these stories to be spaces people come to live in, if only briefly, and to encounter as potential lives or ways of living. —Claire Oleson

AC: Tell us about the title.

Claire Oleson

CO: I thought about pulling a title from one of the interior stories, but this felt like a missed opportunity to sneak more writing in, and I didn’t feel it would envelope everything included with a flexible but precise name. Things From the Creek Bed We Could Have Been is a stupid title because it’s long, it takes time to write out, type out, google, or tell someone. I sort of love it for being a little bit stupid, but in all earnestness, I made it and picked it because I feel it presents a sense of possibility, calmness, fear, and absurdity in one (labored) breath. I want these stories to be spaces people come to live in, if only briefly, and to encounter as potential lives or ways of living. There’s a lot of water in these pieces and the first piece opens inside a creek, so I feel invoking an immediate sense of setting from the cover that flows right into the first story offers an organic and (forgive me) fluid entrance. Oh also, god, I will confess that I was thinking of the poet C.D. Wright who has a book legitimately titled The Poet, The Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, A Wedding in St. Roch, The Big Box Store, The Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All. To me, this is superb. It gushes and it leaves things behind with you. A title like this feels like someone is standing in front of you, continuing to hand you delicate things you can’t possibly carry but also can’t afford to drop. You just have to be overwhelmed. I thought of doing something more stupid and longer than Things From the Creek Bed We Could Have Been, but in the end, I thought C.D. Wright has already done this so well, I might as well be humane to my publisher and cover artist.

AC: Visual arts, such as photography and painting, are integral to many of these stories. How would you describe the role of other art forms in your creative life?

CO: There is a lot of visual art and I put it in to continue to ask people to see as they’re reading. I love knowing that every piece hung/illuminated/shoved/presented in these stories is going to be completely different, reader to reader, despite their semi-static existence in the inked word. Everyone leaves with their own different gallery and there’s no one right, Platonic canvas or neon light. The seeing done by reading makes them, again and again, and it recruits the reader in their making. Because many of my characters are teetering on deciding whether or not what they’re making is “good” or “beautiful” or “ignorant, insufficient, unworthy,” some of that decision gets to come from how the reader decides to hang, frame, and know them. In my life outside of writing, I like to keep up drawing and a pinprick of painting when supplies are handy. I think I know just enough of each to know that I’m a hobbyist (but, with adoration). Having worked at both has taught me the delightful truth that, all day, we are seeing wrong. It’s not until you sit to commit something in front of you to paper or canvas or cardboard that you process what you think a face looks like is entirely wrong, in a series of minute but critical ways. It’s really wonderful to be so incorrect about what we take to be the basics. Seeing, a lot like reading, is often taken as a passive task, something that just inhales. Making art and looking at art is quick and elated to show you that seeing is something you do and can learn to do better but not perfectly. Reading, too, is a work. Reading is deciding to believe in small and nonexistent rooms and move things around in them for a while. Please, if you’re reading this, come into the Creek Bed and mess up the furniture.

AC: Each story in the collection is narrated in the first person. What were some of the narrative decisions you made as you wrote these?

CO: I wanted everyone written to feel like they were speaking for themselves. I wanted every protagonist to have both the freedom and constraint of being steeped in their own thoughts alone. With some free indirect discourse, the reader gets gleams of other characters’ priorities, but the bulk of narration is dedicated to one person at a time. This is, I think, the hardest number of people to be at a time. Amidst the teetering moments of emergency or non-emergency that my stories center on, the feeling of being in one brain can manage to be both the most comforting and most alarming thing. First-person is an allowance to be candid alongside the pressure to be impressive, coherent, and interesting, for both the characters and writer; so I hope my teetering, one-at-a-time people are just that. And if they’re average and incoherent, hopefully they’re at least devastatingly fascinating to make up for it.

AC: Tell us about Newfound. What inspired you to enter their chapbook competition? What have you enjoyed most about working with them?

CO: I’d seen Newfound’s chapbooks prior to submitting and I think the physical books they produce are made with such detail, care, and clear desire to thoughtfully make a fitting physical body for a work of writing. Coming to the end of my undergraduate career, I had begun to amass pieces from workshops that I still liked even after bringing them through everyone’s teeth. I wanted to do something with them that would let them belong to and with one another. I think these contests offer a wonderful gateway into publishing for authors who are looking into the world of books after having appeared in journals. Chapbooks are also so digestible and offer a lot for the short prose or poetry writer while still providing the distinct and individual object that’s dedicated to one author. Working with Newfound has been lovely; they’re responsive, kind, invested, and showed enthusiasm for my work from the time of my initial submission to the binding and distributing of the books.

AC: What are you working on now?

CO: Ooh, surviving. Some writing is happening. I’m mostly invested in finding productive and lucrative-enough work in the current climate. But I’ve made some poems I’m not unfond of, some lavender simple syrup I’m very fond of, and I’m preparing to prepare to cultivate the desire to make a full-length manuscript.

To purchase a copy of Things From the Creek Bed We Could Have Been, click here.

◊◊

Claire Oleson is a queer writer hailing from Grand Rapids, Michigan. She has a B.A. in English and Creative Writing from Kenyon College, where she won the Propper Prize for poetry and the Denham Sutcliffe Memorial Award. Her writing has been published by Limestone, Newfound, Bridge Eight Magazine, Sugar House Review, and the Kenyon Review online. She is the senior poetry editor for Cleaver.

Andrea Caswell holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is a fiction editor at Cleaver Magazine. Her work has been published by River Teeth, The Normal School, Fifth Wednesday, Columbia Journal, and others. In 2019 she was selected as a fiction participant for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. A native of Los Angeles, Andrea now teaches writing in Newburyport, Massachusetts.

 

 

 

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Published on April 28, 2020 in Interviews, Interviews with Fiction Writers, Interviews>Interviews with Cleaver Editors. (Click for permalink.)

CLAIRE RUDY FOSTER MADE YOU A MIX TAPE, an interview by KC Mead-Brewer

Cleaver Magazine Posted on November 2, 2019 by thwackNovember 3, 2019

Author Claire Rudy Foster on a park bench

CLAIRE RUDY FOSTER MADE YOU A MIX TAPE
author of the story collection Shine of the Ever
Interlude Press, 194 pages
interviewed by KC Mead-Brewer

I got to know Foster’s fiction through their first story collection I’VE NEVER DONE THIS BEFORE, and I’ve been hooked ever since. Foster doesn’t disappoint with their new collection, SHINE OF THE EVER, thirteen stories full of humor, beauty, sincerity, and refreshingly nuanced queer and trans characters. Foster’s dedication to challenging mainstream preconceived notions about queerness is well reflected in all their works, from their essays to their flash to their upcoming novel. In SHINE OF THE EVER, they focus their vibrant, energetic style to a deceptively simple task: no sad endings. To learn more, go here.

—KC M-B

KMB: I’m so excited about this collection! After your last collection, I’ve Never Done This Before, I’ve been eagerly looking forward to seeing your next big project. How long have you been working on these stories? Did they come together organically, long after you’d written some of them, or did you start out writing these with a book in mind?

CRF: Thank you—I’m excited to share it! The stories in Shine of the Ever run the gamut from very recent to some of the earliest I’ve written. The title piece, a novella, started out as my undergraduate thesis. I finished it in 2006. Since then, it’s changed about as much as I have. Living with, and in, a story is an intense experience. That novella inspired the rest of the collection, which includes a flash fiction piece that is contemporaneous with “Shine” and more recent pieces from last year.

Shine of the Ever is very close to my heart. As I started to come out as both queer and transgender, I struggled to find representations of myself in literary fiction. The stories I wrote reflected a yearning to see my experience and the experiences of the people I loved on paper. My identity came into focus through and with my creation of this book. The process was intimidating at first, but as I looked back, I saw that many of my stories included queer and trans characters. It seems that I’d been working on Shine of the Ever and its themes and people for a lot longer than I thought.

KMB: I love that Shine of the Ever includes both a flash story exploring a bisexual romance and a novella deepening this exploration (albeit in a very different way). How did you decide on the order of the book’s stories? Would you prefer your readers go at the collection from start to finish, or do you mind if they take a hodgepodge approach?

CRF: I associate bisexuality with feeling partly invisible. Bi erasure is common: there’s a sense, for me, of hiding in plain sight. I chose to include two stories about bisexual characters who deal with the ‘seen’ and ‘unseen’ in their relationships. They worry about seeming queer enough, or disappearing into heteronormative-looking partnerships. In both stories, there are many layers of intimacy. Platonic attraction can become sexual, or the reverse, or flow into another kind of relationship altogether. The collection can be read in any order; the stories are not linear, just as people are not. Sexuality and gender are complex—my hope is that the reader will appreciate the collection’s diversity of queer identities, loves, and people.

KMB: You let nothing go to waste in these stories; every detail has an echo somewhere, creating a powerful resonance throughout. I was especially taken with the story “Domestic Shorthair,” where the tension between burying “evidence” and unearthing “evidence,” at hiding identities and revealing identities, is wound tighter and tighter in every paragraph. Are these resonant details brought forward during your revision process, or do they rise up naturally during drafting?

CRF: My goal with Shine of the Ever was to collect stories that oppose, mirror, or challenge one another. I also explored tension within each piece, playing with what each character knows, doesn’t know, and isn’t willing to see. Amit came into my imagination complete, a very smart person with a blind spot that’s at odds with their incredible attention to detail. Amit is not ‘out’ in the conventional sense, but to the outside world, it’s obvious who they are. As “Shorthair” unfolds, the things Amit doesn’t see, about themself and their roommate, force them to come to terms with the consequences of staying closeted. As you said, the circle tightens around Amit, and the evidence they can no longer ignore provides a moment of insight that changes their perception of themselves.

The revision on Shine of the Ever was, I’m glad to say, not a brutal one. I think of my writing as music, a mix tape. The tones have to be right. When the collection was put together, it was easier to hear which sections were falling flat.

KMB: What books/stories/authors were you reading as you wrote these stories? How did they affect your writing process?

CRF: The way the stories feel was really important to me with Shine of the Ever. It wasn’t enough just to write about LGBTQ characters. I wanted the stories to feel queer, too. While I was working on this collection, I gravitated toward books and authors who were dreamy, unusual, and smart. Mostly domestic. I read Maile Meloy, Tessa Hadley, and Alexander Chee. I read Brandon Taylor’s tweets, of course, because he never fails to delight and provoke. I watched Personal Shopper over and over, and Certain Women.

In each of these, I was looking for a private moment of self-identification. A moment like this: a trans girl, alone in her kitchen, looks up from making a sandwich and thinks to herself, Damn, I’m super gay right now. And then she goes back to her sandwich. There’s no reveal; no ‘coming out,’ which we put so much emphasis on. The character is just hanging out with herself. Straight characters do this in fiction all the time. I sought to do the same with characters and voices that were like mine instead.

KMB: This collection reads as a celebration of the complexity and humanity of queer and trans women, characters who are simply and exquisitely themselves. I admire how artfully you build on your characters’ flaws instead of magically “curing” them in the end. How do you go about constructing your characters?

CRF: Queer characters are so frequently shown as two dimensional, or as supports for the straight main character. In art as in life, queer people aren’t allowed the same complexity as straight characters—at least, not without paying a terrible price in exchange. Some of the most nuanced images we have of LGBTQ characters are in film, yet they inflict terrible suffering on queer bodies and hearts: Moonlight, Boys Don’t Cry, and Brokeback Mountain. Although there’s been some positive change in representation, I think there’s still a real lack of queer characters who are not good or pure in a way that is a rhetorical device to invite sympathy and who also do not face painful consequences for being ‘imperfect.’

My characters come from my observation of life, other people. I look in the mirror. I listen to how people talk about themselves and others. What’s omitted. I’m especially interested in flaws, the things we struggle with and why. Redemption bores me.

KMB: In many of these stories, but perhaps especially in the titular piece, the question of authenticity is considered from a variety of angles. The energy and empathy with which you tackle this tricky issue is very refreshing. It reminds me a little of what you’ve spoken about in previous interviews regarding your personal struggle with addiction: “When I was in active addiction … I felt powerful, mysterious, complex. Like a real writer, whatever that is. Even as my drug use destroyed my brain and my body, I held onto the idea that I was part of something meaningful.” How has your wrestling with the idea of being a “real” or “authentic” writer informed your characters’ related struggles with authenticity?

CRF: I sometimes struggle with rejection and self-doubt. Who doesn’t? As a nonbinary trans person, in particular, it’s hard to feel invalidated at every turn. I’m not ‘trans enough.’ The language I have to describe myself is imperfect. I’ve lost important relationships because the people I cared about couldn’t ‘see’ me as I wished to seen, or know me as I desired to be known. However, I’ve never not felt like a real writer. The issue, in my creative work and in my gender expression, is finding people who see what I see—who see me the way I see myself. It’s the same for my characters. They don’t seek acceptance, necessarily. They want to be seen. Identity is a powerful thing. It can also be painful, to wear an identity that other people don’t notice or understand how to see.

Funny, I never feel shame in isolation. I am very accepting of myself. I only start to feel insecure or uncomfortable when I’m around people who don’t accept me. Whether it’s my recovery, my identity, my sexuality, or the way I choose to live—I’m good with myself. I struggle when I have to wait for the rest of the world to catch up.

KMB: As a writer, what things do you particularly love to see in a story when you read? What things aggravate you?

CRF: I read a lot, so my tolerance for trends is pretty low. I think there’s so much emphasis on writing something clicky. Clickbait is dull and formulaic. Every week, I see articles about how people don’t read long stories anymore, or how to optimize your reading with flash fiction. Many writing guides have tips about crafting a “hook,” or using other marketing techniques to grab the reader. That drives me crazy. I don’t even engage with those posts or the insipid debates they incite. Let literature be literature. I hate to see aspiring writers breaking their necks trying to stand out of the slush pile with cheap, attention-grabbing hooks or front-loaded stories.

I love to read stories that are compelling, and flirt a little. I like it when a story can be patient with itself, and when the reader is led into its world slowly, one sentence at a time. This is one of the things I loved about Aimee Bender’s fiction when I was younger; I see it less frequently now, as a style in fiction.

KMB: I know you’ve also been working on a novel recently. How does your writing process change as you move from a story collection to a novel?

CRF: Well, the submission process is more grueling. With stories or essays, I can write one in a day, send it to the journals, and get a response in about a month. With novels, there’s no such thing as spontaneity. The idea may come quickly, but the execution takes time. A novel is not a one-night stand. The novel I’m working on is in the rewrite phase, and my time frame is open-ended. I keep digging in, and it keeps giving me new material, so who knows.

I usually know right away if a story is boring or no good, and I can move on to the next thing. Novels are different—a different frame of mind. A project of that scope requires patience. You work, and you wait, and maybe the story comes along.

KMB: Some of Shine of the Ever’s strongest, most practical-minded characters are also those who engage in practices like tarot and crystal healing. Do you see any conflict or contradiction between these things? Do you practice tarot yourself? If so, are there other ways that it’s inspired or affected your writing?

CRF: I don’t see a conflict between those things. Tarot and other magic are invaluable tools for getting new insight, or seeing a problem in a different way. Who doesn’t want to see the future? We dedicate so much energy to scientific methods, mathematical predictions, and other theories that are supposed to tell us how things will be. I think tarot and other practices are incredibly practical. In my stories, it’s also a marker of time and place: witchiness is enjoying a resurgence in popular culture right now. From Lisa Marie Basile to Joanna C. Valente to the Becoming Dangerous anthology, I’m seeing a smart reinterpretation of what these ancient crafts mean to us in a digital world.

I think superstition, faith, and magic are important to a lot of people in the queer community. Feeling protected, integrated, and healed, connecting to a world that we don’t necessarily see, believing that there’s a higher purpose, even when life is difficult—people need hope, always.

KMB: Your stories here are so full of hope—something I haven’t often encountered in stories about queer and trans people. What does it mean to you to be writing stories of hope right now?

CRF: Representation is so important for growth: when you see it, you can be it. In Shine of the Ever, the rule is ‘no sad endings.’ That’s it. I didn’t want to sensationalize my characters or replicate the stories I see that focus on the extremes of queer life. It’s not all coming out, and gay bashing, and oppression. I object to packaging and marketing of queer suffering. That’s one of the things I appreciate about Interlude Press: they don’t publish books that fetishize queer pain. Making LGBTQ people into exotic or doomed creatures is just another way of other-ing us. We’re people. At the same time, Shine of the Ever is not inspiration porn. I didn’t want to create characters who were just so brave. I’m so tired of that. The constant overcoming. I wanted to write about everyday life, as I see people like me experiencing it.

I hate that being queer is a liability in our culture. I want that to change. There is so much joy for us, too. It’s my responsibility to show that. We deserve to be happy. We deserve to see ourselves happy. We deserve more.


Claire Rudy Foster is a queer, nonbinary single parent in recovery. Their short story collection, I’ve Never Done This Before, was published to warm acclaim in 2016. With four Pushcart Prize nominations, Foster’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, and many other journals. Their nonfiction work has reached millions of readers in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Narratively, among others. Foster lives and writes in Portland, Oregon. (Author photo by Elizabeth Ehrenpreis)

K.C. Mead-Brewer lives in Ithaca, NY. Her fiction appears in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Carve Magazine, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of Tin House’s 2018 Winter Workshop for Short Fiction and of the 2018 Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. For more information, visit kcmeadbrewer.com and follow her @meadwriter.

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Published on November 2, 2019 in Interviews, Interviews with Fiction Writers. (Click for permalink.)

A Conversation with Stephan Salisbury, author of BRITT & JIMMY STRIKE OUT. Interview by Sue Laizik

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 24, 2019 by thwackMarch 24, 2019

A Conversation with Stephan Salisbury
author of BRITT & JIMMY STRIKE OUT
Alternative Book Press, 341 Pages
Interview by Sue Laizik

Stephan Salisbury has been a cultural writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer for more than three decades. Britt & Jimmy Strike Out, his first novel, is a dystopian, satirical quest story about branding, live streaming, social media, and commercialization of lived experience. Britt and her friend Jimmy set out into a blighted urban landscape to find answers when Britt’s online brand starts to fail, friends start disappearing, and mysterious men show up at her home to intimidate and threaten her for not getting in line with the President’s brand. Ken Kalfus describes it as the “first great novel of the Trump Era.” Stephan Salisbury is also the author of a non-fiction book Mohamed’s Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland about the anti-Arab hysteria after 9/11 and its devastating effect on people’s lives.

Stephan and I had many great conversations about books in the 1980s, when I worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer as a clerk for the book review. Years later, we reconnected through (of course) social media. This conversation took place via Google Docs over several days. Following our conversation are two excerpts from Britt & Jimmy Strike Out.—SL

Sue: I know you as a very good investigative and cultural journalist (for over thirty years!), so my first question when I learned you had written a novel was, Why fiction?

Stephan: Yes, I’m still a journalist. All writers who take fiction seriously are journalists of a sort. But instead of reporting on woman found dead in concert hall, they report on what they think about woman found dead in concert hall. Some writers, of course, make their reporting explicit. Dreiser comes to mind. Whereas Proust was shining a light into his own head and reporting what was rattling around inside. Journalism, at least as it’s practiced in newspapers today, is formulaically rigid, and that’s where fiction and the novel, remain alluring. It’s the freedom of the form, rather than the freedom of the subject that’s attractive: in fiction, a writer can do the police in different voices (to quote Dickens); the journalist, not so much. Britt & Jimmy is completely driven by voice, largely Britt’s voice (she is the narrator, after all), but also the cacophony of voices that’s swirling everywhere and swooping in on us, like pesky birds. Journalism remains the foundation for everything I do, though. It keeps the digital self-indulgence from floating away, like an overly gassy blimp.

Sue: I want you to talk about Britt—the novel’s protagonist and narrator—and her voice. (She turns into a bit of an investigative reporter herself.) But, first, some context might be helpful: Explain a little bit about the world of the novel, as well as what you call the “cacophony of voices,” including the voice of the President in the prologue.

Stephan:  The novel takes place at an indeterminate time, presumably the future, over the course of one night when Britt and her friend Jimmy are forced to flee from her digs through the streets of the collapsing city. Clearly there has been some catastrophic event in the far past, but its effects—crumbling buildings, gaping sinkholes, ash sifting down everywhere, the obliteration of economic and social life—are far more important than the causes. The physical is giving way to the virtual, the material to the immaterial. This is a world in which everything touchable has been debased and every habitable oasis has been depopulated, scattered, re-worked, and remarketed.

Stephan Salisbury

The President and the corps, his network of private partners, preside over this territory, leaving ordinary people to scrabble for a few pennies gained via branding and selling themselves and their wares online, where life is robust and good and, not surprisingly, dominated by the President. Who is he? He is the creation of every imagination in his great country. He is the President, the P, the guy with the biggest, most powerful brand of all. Ride with the President and you move with Presidential speed, the fastest of all speeds. The President, who is the focus of the novel’s opening section, is not unlike an oddly thoughtful frog, watching, tongue at the ready to snap out and snare whatever he seeks to snare. He sits in his bed and reviews the overnights, recounts what may or may not be prophetic dreams, watches various livestreams of himself, conducts millions of simultaneous chats, engages in endless self-promotion, and above all, worries that the overnight numbers might suggest a flagging presidential brand. In such times of stress, the President, as all presidents before him, going back and back into the foggy and unknowable past, launches an outside threat. Nothing welds a populace to its leader better than a decent, old-fashioned threat.

Britt and Jimmy flee Britt’s place because they are visited by two mysterious presidential agents who tell them they and their friends are not pulling along with everyone else in this difficult moment. The President has noticed and identified the disappearance of Britt’s good friend Deb as the reason for disruptions in the smoothly flowing system. Deb had become known as the President’s Girl, the hottest of the hot brands. But she took a wrong turn, her brand disintegrated, and now she has vanished. The agents tell Britt and Jimmy to find her. Britt and Jimmy are fleeing the P and his world in search of Pluto, the ruler of the pits, the city dump where everything goes to die.

Sue: Your answer makes me think of several follow-ups. They all have to do with different elements of the novel, so I’ll just put them out there and let you have a go. 

  1. “The physical is giving way to the virtual, the material to the immaterial”: that’s a wonderful description. Yet, the physical world—mise-en-scène—is so vividly realized on the page (which is one of several ways irony is employed in the novel). In what ways was Philadelphia an inspiration for the setting?
  2. Britt is a great narrator and character. She reminds me of a younger, more innocent Oedipa Maas (from Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49). Talk about her character and her voice.
  3. And speaking of characters, the President in Britt & Jimmy Strike Out seems eerily familiar in a way that makes the skin crawl, yet you wrote the book before the 2016 elections. How is that possible?


Stephan:
The novel was written before Trump announced his candidacy, but what does Trump represent if not the political culture and the wider forces shaping our world? It’s been almost forty years since Reagan, so his genial corruption and corporate spokesmanship have evolved and ripened, if that’s the right way to put it. Add a huge dollop of the internet with its self-branding, its intense commercialization of everything, its drive to entropy, its nastiness, and—voila!—Trump.

I think that I’m more acutely aware of these kinds of cultural shifts because of the severity of the problems facing newspapers. Newspapers back in the day—a few years ago, lol—were really flags of community. You’re walking down the street, see a paper in a box or on a newsstand and you know exactly where you are. Read it, and you’re reading things that your neighbors are reading. So papers are binders, they tie people together in a shared experience. But digitization works differently. No flag of community. No sign of place on the street. No shared experience with neighbors. Life becomes increasingly fragmented and disembodied. All of the things that have become commonplace in the Trump era were latent before—the ubiquitous branding, the lies and deceptions, the self-aggrandizement, the surveillance, the kleptocratic corporate fascism. All of it. That’s what I picked up on.

Listening to the new online producers at the Inquirer gave me Britt’s voice, by the way. I was struck not so much by the naiveté as the disinterest a lot of these people had in the world and people around them. So I paid attention. Britt is someone who evolves from a kind of pure version of self-marketing to a self-awareness geared toward actual understanding. She moves, I guess you could say, from Fake News to real life. I mean, here she is, living her life, livestreaming everything, and her brand falls apart, her friends disappear, she’s visited by weird emissaries of the President who tell her fantastical stories of people going OFF THE TRACKS! Aunt Rita smothered by tsunamis of waste as she livestreams from the pits! Britt is, to put it mildly, unnerved. She wants to find out more. I guess what distinguishes her is that she doesn’t want to double down on the stuff that got her to such a bad place to begin with.

All that said, I’m still sometimes amazed myself, how much in our daily world now was prefigured in Britt & Jimmy—everything from the use of social media to influence behavior in the election to really specific policies like family separations at the border. Eerily Trumpesque. Philadelphia is absolutely in the book, but the city is all jumbled up, kind of falling over itself. The signs and ghost signs, the fires, the dilapidation—all scream Philadelphia. And there are specific places and people described. The Gurney Boy, the leader and singer for the Nighttime Echoes, really used to be at the corner of 15th and Chestnut Streets, late at night, about forty years ago. The city was empty as an old paper bag back then, but I’d run into him most every night about two in the morning. It’s a city, you know.

Sue: I know you have thought a lot about the cultural shifts and the (d)evolving political climate, as is apparent in much of your writing, not just this novel. It’s there in much of your journalism, in your previous (non-fiction) book, Mohamed’s Ghosts, and, hilariously, in your satirical blog CSI: American Carnage, a daily narrative commentary on the current administration and politics. There have been a couple times when your blog has narrated events before they happened, which is impressive given how unpredictable the goings-on in Washington have been. Talk about the blog.

Stephan: Ah yes, CSI: American Carnage, my daily take on the world descending. You know, it started out purely as a jokey riff on Trump and his reality-teevee world filtered through the news shows and their reality-teevee world. That was back in January of 2016. Since then it’s been a scramble—how do you keep one step ahead when there’s always a porpoise close behind who’s treading on your tail? I do the voices, again. When in doubt you ask yourself, how would the President say it? That immediately takes you down the rabbit hole of language. We have broken a number of stories, many eventually picked up by the Fake News©. If you live in the shit, you stink too—that’s how we continue to live in the future even when it’s become the past, because, you know, the past is always prologue. Our team of crack reporters, for instance, has been way out front on the coming Venezuela unpleasantness, and we were completely on top of the President’s takedown of Spike Lee at the Oscars. We had his diss of Spike before the President even picked up his cell and logged onto his Twitter feed. We are also following closely the babies that have been ripped from their mothers’ bosoms on the southern border. We’ve tracked them every step of the way through the backchannels and the tunnels that crisscross beneath the country. A harrowing story. We’re on top of it. As Les Moonves, one-time head of CBS, said a couple of years ago about 24/7 coverage of Trump’s ridiculous campaign: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” That was before poor Les got called out for serial sexual misconduct and was forced out. Then, of course, he lied and destroyed evidence. No word if he is getting advice from the White House.

Sue: I notice the CSI: American Carnage “editors” took over your response to that last question midway. Did that shift happen consciously? Between the blog, your journalism, your fiction, and other writings, you have many voices. Talk about yourself as a writer and difficulties you’ve encountered in writing (especially the novel). 

Stephan:  As I mentioned, voice drives a story. If you have voices, they can overcome even a lackluster story. I learned that as a kid. Look at something like Catcher in the Rye. It really is a weak book—except for Holden’s voice. It keeps younger readers enthralled. Voice is what draws readers to Dickens over and over again. I’m surely not in that league, but the lesson is a good one. Inhabit the voice and you can get into all the fancy restaurants. Actually, writing Britt & Jimmy, the trickiest part was melding the virtual and the actual. Or is it the other way around? There are many scenes in which what is happening online takes on a very real presence. For instance, when B&J stumble upon Briggs’ outpost store on the far edge of the city. The encounter seems to include some kind of missile attack which leaves Britt and Jimmy sprawling in the street. Does it really? Or when they are resting by the side of the road and a parade of gimpy soldiers staggers by, followed by a wave of rodents, which morphs into an actual parade reminiscent of one held in Philadelphia, followed, at last, by a VICTORY parade celebrating the End of the Burning Season! All is narrated on camera by Britt and Jimmy who are, in fact, watching from the side of the road. If I’m successful for readers, it all blends together, seamlessly. Such mashups lead to some of the funniest parts of the book; and we need that kind of laughter.


The parade scene Stephan mentioned in his final comments is a good illustration of the melding of the virtual and the actual along with other aspects of the novel that came up during our conversation. Jimmy and Britt, far along in their journey, are on a deserted, dilapidated street when an incongruous line of wounded soldiers followed by a frightening mass of rats pass by. Britt has used the camera on her pad to stream the procession live with voiceover. Logging on to Britt’s site with their pads, Britt and Jimmy see that Britt’s video is looping (and getting many “hits”). After a disruption, the video starts over yet again on her site. The beginning is the same, but the parade that follows has been transformed into something else entirely. The actual is subsumed by the virtual in this excerpt:

I still have the pad in my hand. My stream opens up again. There is the street we’re on.

Jimmy, the stream is back up on my site.

A rhythmic metallic sound begins faintly and grows louder. There’s the cloud of dust rolling toward us, must be the gimpy soldiers. Do I want to watch this? Do I want to see all that again, the great rodent ocean?

We are beyond the Ville, I hear myself say, just as I said before, that’s my VO! The cam is still focused down the street, in the direction of the sound.

The streets have been empty, I say. But this is happening now. You are seeing this as we do.

Far down the street on the screen I see small figures, sheathed in white, marching along, the gimpy, blood soaked guys with the white headbands? No, no gimpy guys. No band of brothers. They come closer and I see they are little ghosts from a children’s tale, the diminutive white-sheeted dead. The front rows bear enormous banners uplifted on poles:

Triumph Over Occupation!

Then behind it:

Little Caesars Sporting Club

A third:

End of the Burning Season

And the last:

Victory!

I hear myself saying, Here comes the Victory Parade right now.

That is my voice!

We are reporting directly from the WHBS Studios, or I should say, the street, where these events are being beamed to you live. The Caesars have just come into view, right on schedule. Aren’t they darling, James?

Indeed, says Jimmy’s voice. This is one of my favorite moments in the celebration, he says. The Caesars have been presenting their colors for, what? As long as anyone can remember, that’s for sure. And they are always a treat, Brittany. Here they are with their balloons, folks! Let’s watch.

The ghastly little buggers glide by us like oil slicks, their white coverings completely concealing whatever might be inside, if anything. They could be little rat automatons for all we know. Their banners have precise lettering, as though stenciled in laser labs. The Caesars fill the street, a moving rectangle, a wavy white flag of twisted anonymity. The dead.


This passage illustrates the zeitgeist of the novel world. An authority figure uses a cautionary tale to teach about the potentially fatal dangers of going off-message and losing focus on one’s brand. In the end, video images are buried and mourned instead of an actual person.

Finally, one day, I’ll never forget, she’s streaming from down in the pits—actually in the pits!—and one of the Nutri-Waste chutes opens up and masses of plugs come hurtling all around, a load showers down like brackish hail. It overwhelmed her, knocked her silly, and her vidstream gets jumpy and frazzly and then blotchy and then nothing. Dark.

They never found her, he says. Not WRMS, not Sentry, no one. And for what? For what did she do it?

I don’t know, I say. For her site? For her fans? Revs?

Sheesh, Morrie says. Her site? Her revs? Here’s what: she lost her focus, she lost her fans, she even lost her feed, her micros, and she lost her whole self. And we lost Aunt Rita. All we had left was her jerky final stream, which we buried in our own plot, with services and all. Buried images of Auntie Rita buried in a looping shower of digested plugs—that’s all that was left for us. There was upset in the family. Upset for all who followed her. It was a long time before all that subsided, before the perplexities washed away, and there are still questions that come into Central about it. Poor Aunt Rita. And it was all so unnecessary.


Sue Laizik is a reader living on Long Island, NY. In addition to her stint at the Philadelphia Inquirer, she has worked in publishing, IT, and academic administration. She also attended graduate school in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and taught English at Columbia and Barnard Colleges. She currently tutors high school students studying for the college-entrance exams.

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Published on March 24, 2019 in Interviews, Interviews with Fiction Writers. (Click for permalink.)

A Conversation with Nathaniel Popkin author of EVERYTHING IS BORROWED and Grant Clauser 

Cleaver Magazine Posted on August 31, 2018 by thwackFebruary 7, 2019

A Conversation with Nathaniel Popkin
author of EVERYTHING IS BORROWED
published by New Doors Books

Interview by Grant Clauser 

Nathaniel Popkin, Cleaver Magazine’s fiction reviews editor, published a new novel this year, Everything Is Borrowed (New Door Books). It draws deeply from his love of Philadelphia history and his passion for research, but is also a compelling story about one person’s obsessions and regrets. In addition to the new novel, he’s the editor of a new anthology, Who Will Speak for America, author of the novel Lion and Leopard, and three books of non-fiction, Philadelphia: Finding the Hidden City, Song of the City, and The Possible City. We recently asked Popkin to talk to us about Everything is Borrowed.—Grant Clauser


Grant Clauser: In your new book, Everything is Borrowed, the city of Philadelphia is as much a character in the book as the people. How is infusing a city with personality different from developing a human character?

Nathaniel Popkin: Novelists struggle to compose characters who are complex but also readable. That is, a character should not be so contradictory that she doesn’t make sense. A city, on the other hand, is intrinsically contradictory and almost impossible to figure. Its personality is some kind of amalgamation of built form, size, scale, and of course the people who animate and imprint themselves on it. The imprinting to me is the way to figure the city as a character. To what extent can a character imprint herself on the city, and how so? What form does it take? Or is it impossible? How does a city reveal these (even minute) imprints, how does it store and reveal memories? Or maybe it doesn’t at all. In my first (non-fiction) book, Song of the City, I worked up an urban concept, that a city, or its parts, exists on a scale between the infinite and the parochial (the infinite city is cold and unimpressionable but also wide open, the parochial city smothering and malleable but also nurturing). I invented the concept after reading the novel The War of the Saints by Jorge Amado, in which Salvador de Bahía through its intensely parochial Carnival grants the main character infinite freedom to be and to express. So one way to figure the city’s personality is using the scale between infinite and parochial.

The city in Everything is Borrowed is figured in the accumulation of layers—in physical form and in mind and memory (the layers forming in the tension between the infinite and the parochial). This accumulation is its most tangible characteristic and it mirrors the mind of the main character.

GC: There are several different storylines running throughout the book, some even on different timelines, yet you weave them in and out through each other. Did they evolve at the same time as you were crafting the story, and how did you decide on their intersection points?

NP: This is the formal experiment of the novel—to present the historical past, the recent past, and the present all in the present tense. This written form is the analog to the city’s mounting layers, which collect and store all of it. The intersections came quite naturally as I wrote the book in one gesture. For this reason, I’ve found it hard to choose passages to read at book events—the main character Nicholas Moscowitz passes through fields of time sometimes all in one paragraph or page. I’ve always worried this would be confusing for a reader confronted with only a small section of text. Yet because the time fields shift naturally (at least I hope) they come to form a dreamscape to mirror the cityscape and Nicholas’s inner life.

GC: Again, thinking about timelines–it seems to me that the mind naturally exists outside of linear time. Our thoughts constantly wonder from the past to present to future. What are the challenges of working that kind of flux in a novel?

NP: The most obvious challenge is that it could be frustrating for the reader: hard to follow, annoying, distracting. Sometimes a writer wants to announce a form—the form becomes the subject of the book; it’s meant to be visible (and sometimes those novels break ground and sometimes they’re insufferable). In some sense this is what’s happening in Everything is Borrowed for all of the reasons described above. But Nicholas is an architect, the kind who believes that the best design is invisible. In a meta sense and as the architect of the novel, I agree. The natural movement among these mental time fields should feel intrinsic to the character’s experience.

There’s danger in a novelist trying to replicate human life too carefully—the result is flat, airless. The best dialog, for example, doesn’t reveal how people really speak. The same for the wandering thoughts.

Another thing: there’s danger in a novelist trying to replicate human life too carefully—the result is flat, airless. The best dialog, for example, doesn’t reveal how people really speak. The same for the wandering thoughts. To replicate that manifestation of a person’s inner life would destroy the text’s capacity to move the reader.

GC: As the novel progresses, Nicholas gets drawn increasingly deeper into the rabbit hole of history, as well as the rabbit hole of his own life. Did you feel their same draw as you were researching for the tale? Is there any danger for a novel (or novelist) that draws so strongly on history that one might get lost in it?

NP: I did much of the research that Nicholas does, but I did so with a different and more distant sense of curiosity. I did it as a novelist searching for serendipitous moments, for ways to move the plot, for ways to deliver the atmosphere the novel needed. I did it to build Nicholas’s world.

On the other hand, a critique I often hear is that the novel goes too deep into history—and maybe that’s because I was blinded by discovery. So in this way, yes, there’s danger—you might lose the storyline. On the other hand, a novel emerges out of some kind of strange obsession.

GC: As Nicholas learns more about the history of that part of Philadelphia, and more about the history of the people, he seems to learn more about himself. The external and internal discoveries parallel each other. Do you think that’s one way the mind works—that focusing on a goal outside ourselves can bring about different ends? Sometimes complementary and sometimes conflicting?

NP: Maybe it’s a novelistic trope to have a character learning about himself by seeking something else. But Nicholas is seeking himself, even if he doesn’t know it. He’s pawing at an itch, pawing and pawing. But to answer your question directly, I think the mind is constantly imbibing the world, digesting and adjusting to it—and you never know how something drunk one day will seep in another. It must be a dynamic process.

GC: On one level this is a story about avoiding truths as much as digging them up (or realizing them). Why does avoiding something in front of your face seem to also trigger another discovery? Is it nature that eventually brings a person around full circle?

NP: Oh yes, repression never really works does it? You can’t really erase or avoid or ignore. Whatever’s lurking there will find a way to make itself known—because you need it to. Nicholas needs to deal with his own personal memory, his own sense of shame. But I don’t believe in the full circle. Who knows where it will take him? Maybe not full circle. The novel ends before the end; Eva is returning, that’s all we know. And Nadia? Nicholas comes full circle in terms of some plot developments but emotionally we aren’t sure where all this will lead. I’m not sure there are ever clean resolutions.

GC: Anarchy plays a significant role in this book. How did you come upon the story of the anarchist Moskowitz (I’m assuming he’s real) and why did you choose to build a story around him and that movement?  

NP: I came upon the story of the anarchist Moskowitz in the same place Nicholas does—the history book by Harry Boonin. I read the story of Moskowitz carrying out his Yom Kippur protest in a physical place quite well known to me and his subsequent transformation to be president of the Holy Burial Society and I was fascinated (reading the passage was one of the seeds of this book). I put it away until I had the right character, whose own issues found resonance with the anarchist Moskowitz’s.

Moskowitz was an immigrant anarchist at the end of the 19th century and so I had to do quite a lot of research into that time—and the world and ideas of anarchists. This led to a significant thematic exploration of the book, between anarchists who in popular imagination tear down and architects who in popular imagination build up. In the world of this book if not in real life, though, anarchists espouse a philosophy of building organic community without state interference—almost in exact opposition to conventional wisdom—and architects, who all too often are the ones, out of ego or desires of the marketplace, to tear down.

GC: What are the greatest pleasures you get out of writing a novel?

NP: The chance to compose music, to rupture language toward the ineffable, to pose questions.

[Philadelphia] is a remarkable city for an artist because the eyes remained fixed on the ground, with the people, and not in the stars (only Calvino could make real art out of the stars). It is a remarkable city for the triumphs and scars that it bears, for its humanity and humility. And, of course, it’s cheap, relatively speaking, always good for an artist.

GC: What do you like best about Philadelphia? Is it a good city for an artist?

NP: It is a remarkable city for an artist because the eyes remained fixed on the ground, with the people, and not in the stars (only Calvino could make real art out of the stars). It is a remarkable city for the triumphs and scars that it bears, for its humanity and humility. And, of course, it’s cheap, relatively speaking, always good for an artist.

Another thing: it is a dynamic place, more dynamic than I think I would have said previously, and that creates the currents for art and literature.

GC: One of your many roles is as an editor of the website Hidden City Philadelphia. How does that work overlap or influence your literary work?

NP: My experience of the city feeds everything, even in my work for Cleaver as a book review editor. The city is a text to read, and actually to be read in various languages. As a writer, I enjoy playing with subjects and themes. So one subject I wrote about as a journalist and then incorporated into the essay-photo book Philadelphia: Finding the Hidden City also appears in a fictional form in Everything is Borrowed. Maybe better to say, for me, everything is related.

GC: In addition to your new novel, You’ve also recently co-edited an anthology called Who Will Speak for America? Can you tell us a little about that?

NP: The multi-genre anthology Who Will Speak for America? confronts the rising nativism and corruption of the Trump era with voices of reason, despair, and hope. With co-editor Stephanie Feldman, we sought to gather a wide range of contemporary America literary voices to answer a question originally posed by Congresswoman Barbara Jordan in her 1976 address to the Democratic National Convention. In the speech, she stated, in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam:

Many may fear the future. Many are distrustful of their leaders, and believe that their voices ar never heard. Many seek only to satisfy their private work—wants; to satisfy their private interests. But this is the great danger America faces—that we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups: city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual; each seeking to satisfy private wants. If that happens, who then will speak for America? Who then will speak for the common good?

The Congresswoman used the question to inspire people to stand up for America’s cherished ideals of liberty and justice for all. A few of our contributors took the question this same way, while others addressed the corruption of those ideals. But to most, Jordan’s question was a call to be heard, as Trump and his allies seek to limit who can call themselves American–targeting refugees, asylees, immigrants, and even naturalized citizens. For many, claiming American identity is an act of bravery. This, after all, is the tradition of American writing: to widen the meaning of “American” by writing our freedoms, challenging their limitations, and defining for ourselves the future.


Cleaver reviews editor Nathaniel Popkin is the author of five books, including the 2018 novel Everything is Borrowed, and co-editor (with Stephanie Feldman) of the anthology Who Will Speak for America? His essays and works of criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Kenyon Review, LitHub, Tablet Magazine, and Public Books. If you are an author or publicist seeking reviews or a writer hoping to write reviews for Cleaver, query Nathaniel.

Grant-ClauserPoetry craft essays editor Grant Clauser is the author of four poetry books, Necessary Myths (Broadkill River Press 2013) and The Trouble with Rivers (Foothills Publishing 2012), The Magician’s Handbook (PS Books, 2018) and Reckless Constellations (Cider Press Review Books, 2018).  In 2010 he was named the Montgomery County Poet Laureate by Robert Bly. In 2014 he was a guest poet at the Sharjah International Book Fair in the United Arab Emirates. Poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Cortland Review, Gargoyle, The Literary Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry and others. He also writes about electronics, teaches poetry at random places and chases trout with a stick. His blog is www.uniambic.com. Email craft essay queries to [email protected].

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Published on August 31, 2018 in Interviews, Interviews with Fiction Writers. (Click for permalink.)

A Conversation with Melissa Sarno, author of JUST UNDER THE CLOUDS

Cleaver Magazine Posted on August 27, 2018 by thwackAugust 27, 2018

A Conversation with Melissa Sarno
author of JUST UNDER THE CLOUDS
published by Knopf Books for Young Readers
Interview by Kathryn Kulpa

Melissa Sarno reviews children’s and young adult books for Cleaver and has just published her debut middle-grade novel, Just Under the Clouds (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2018). It tells the story of Cora, a middle-school girl trying to find a place to belong. Cora’s father always made her feel safe, but now that he has died, she and her mom and her sister Adare have been moving from place to place, trying to find a stable and secure home they can afford. Cora is also dealing with bullying at school and is sometimes challenged by looking after her sister, who has learning differences. But her life holds some good things, too, like a free-spirited new friend and her father’s tree journal, where he kept notes about the plants he took care of. Cora has kept his book and uses it as a way to record her own observations and feelings as she looks for her own true home in the world.

While many children experience homelessness, it’s a subject that is seldom explored in contemporary children’s fiction, and Melissa Sarno has given these children a voice that speaks from the heart. The Horn Book Magazine called Just Under the Clouds a “thought-provoking debut about the meaning of home and the importance of family,” and Kirkus Reviews praised it as “troubling, affecting, and ultimately uplifting.”

I had the chance to speak with Melissa recently about Just Under the Clouds and her journey as a first-time novelist.—Kathryn Kulpa


Kathryn Kulpa:  First, I’d like to congratulate you on the publication of your first novel! I’m sure it’s been a journey of many steps. Can you talk about some of the exciting moments along the way? Did you find an agent first? When did you get the news that Just Under the Clouds was going to be published, and how did you feel? 

Melissa Sarno: Thanks so much, Kathryn! It’s been a long journey and I’m thrilled that my debut novel is finally out in the world.

I wrote three novels over the course of eight years before writing Just Under the Clouds; two that never found an agent and one that was submitted to publishers but never sold. Shortly after that experience, my first agent left the business. So, it was a huge and happy moment when I found a new agent who was enthusiastic about this book. She has been the perfect advocate for my work.

I learned that Just Under the Clouds had sold when my agent called to share the offers from the book’s auction. I heard the news while my then two-year-old son was tantrumming in the middle of the parking lot at the playground (imagine one hand holding the phone, the other trying to hold him up while he screamed and went body-limp on the pavement, refusing to leave.) When I finally got home to sit with the news, he napped and I cried (happy tears) all by myself because I had just moved to a new town and I literally knew no one. There was barely even any furniture in my home! Soon after my agent sent me a photo of a little blooming tree. My editor had sent it to her for me because Just Under the Clouds features a tree. I knew it was the beginning of something really lovely in my life. I’ll never forget that moment of knowing things were about to bloom.

KK: On your website, you talk about writing ‘secret stories’ for years, starting as a kid. I can relate! Did any of those stories make it into this novel? Do you have others that you have, or may want to publish?

I wonder how many of us wrote “secret” stories as kids. I wrote a lot as a child and I still have many of those stories in notebooks and binders.

MS: I wonder how many of us wrote “secret” stories as kids. I wrote a lot as a child and I still have many of those stories in notebooks and binders. None of those ideas made it into Just Under the Clouds. But my next book, A Swirl of Ocean, which will be out next summer, actually features a strange neighbor I had as a kid. We called her Turtle Lady, because she kept pet turtles in her backyard. I had a lot of weird interactions with her throughout my life. Truth is always stranger than fiction and I can’t tell you how many times I have written pieces of her story over the years (my first attempt was when I was 14.) I’m happy she has finally found a place in this book.

KK: One of the things that really struck me about Just Under the Clouds was that there isn’t just one way to be homeless. I think many of us tend to think of “the homeless” as a permanent group of people who may be older, mentally ill, and/or substance abusers. But Cora and her family challenge those stereotypes. They’re not actually living on the streets. Maybe you’d characterize them more as “housing insecure.” They have places to stay, but not the safety and stability we usually associate with “home.” Can you talk about how you came to write about Cora? Any research, personal experience, or people you met that inspired these characters? 

MS: When I first starting writing Cora’s story, I had intended to write about a city girl who loved to climb trees. As I tried to understand why she gravitated toward trees, I came to understand that I was writing about a girl who was looking for stability and permanence, which led me to write about a child seeking home.

Cora’s story is not based on personal experience or anyone’s experience I know. But I did talk to some friends who experienced homelessness as children and I read Invisible Child by Andrea Elliott in the NYTimes. That powerful and heartbreaking piece about a homeless girl in New York City really opened my eyes to that experience and I learned that I had a lot of misconceptions about homelessness that fit the stereotypes you mention here. Unfortunately, many more families live the way Cora’s family does, moving from place to place struggling to find that safety and security.

KK: I love how Cora keeps her father’s tree notebook and how this keeps her connected to his memory and gives her a way to map her own life. Was the notebook always a part of the story? 

MS: Yes, the notebook was always part of the story. I wanted Cora to have a way to connect to her father through his field journal. It becomes a place for Cora to make sense of the world around her, through art and through tracking and surveying trees and plants around Brooklyn.

KK: And speaking of trees, the use of the “tree of heaven” and the urban setting made me think of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Was it a deliberate homage? Was that a book that influenced you as a young writer? 

MS: It’s funny, I always felt that Just Under the Clouds was connected to my love of The Secret Garden and the ways we can help one another grow. I was even going to have Cora love that book but I felt it was a little too on the nose.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn must have been rattling around in my subconscious for a long time because I read Betty Smith’s beautiful book when I was a teenager. It wasn’t until my editor said, “isn’t the “tree of heaven” the same tree from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn?” that I even made the connection. I remember running to my bookshelf and frantically re-reading the first few chapters for the first time in two decades. I thought, well, I’ve created an homage whether I meant to or not! Talk about on the nose!

KK: As an adult reader, it was hard not to feel, at times, that Cora’s mother’s determination not to accept help from her friend, Willa (with the subway pass, for example, or Adare’s learning differences) was hurting Cora and Adare or putting them at risk. I sensed she had her own complicated backstory—one Cora wouldn’t know. Would you like to talk a little more about this aspect of the story? 

MS: Cora learns a little bit about her mother throughout the story but I do imagine that her mother has a more complex backstory. She has lost her husband and, with that loss, an entire support system. She alludes to the fact that there is no one to lean on where she grew up. And her oldest friend, Willa, doesn’t approve of her life choices (her career as an artist or the man she married) so it’s hard for her to let Willa in. That pride felt important for me to uphold, even if it might lead her to making choices others might not agree with. I hope that readers recognize her fierce love for her children and empathize with her plight.

KK: If a child Cora’s age who is experiencing homelessness reads this book, what would you hope they would take away from it? 

MS: I hope it allows all readers to question or redefine their concept of home and see that they are deeply connected to the world around them in different ways. And I hope it helps those who need the mirror of this experience feel less alone.

KK: Who are some children’s or YA authors that have been important to you? Were there some books that really resonated with you as a child or teen?

MS: As I mentioned, I always loved classics like The Secret Garden and Anne of Green Gables. As a kid, my favorite author was Cynthia Voigt, who has written many books for children, including the Tillerman cycle. That series was the first realistic fiction about contemporary life I remember reading. I also love children’s authors Ali Benjamin, Jaqueline Woodson, Kate DiCamillo, Gary D. Schmidt, Rita Williams Garcia, and Rebecca Stead because they show me what’s possible when writing for young readers

KK: I see that you have a new book coming out next year. Is it about the same characters? Can you tell us something about it? 

MS: A Swirl of Ocean will be out next summer and it’s a separate standalone novel for young readers. It’s about an adopted girl who swallows the ocean to understand something about who she is and where she came from. It’s all about dreams, and secrets, and the surprising ways we are all connected.


Melissa Sarno is a freelance writer and editor with an MFA in screenwriting. She lives in the Lower Hudson Valley of New York with her family. Just Under the Clouds, her debut novel for middle grade readers, is out now. Read more about her at melissasarno.com.

Author Photo: Katie Burnett

Kathryn Kulpa was a winner of the Vella Chapbook Contest for her flash chapbook Girls on Film (Paper Nautilus) and received the First Series Award in Short Fiction for her story collection Pleasant Drugs(Mid-List Press).  Her work has appeared in Jellyfish Review, Monkeybicycle, Smokelong Quarterly, and Evansville Review, and she serves as flash fiction editor for Cleaver magazine. Kathryn leads writing workshops in public libraries throughout Rhode Island and has been a visiting writer at Wheaton College. She was born in a small state, and she writes short stories.

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Published on August 27, 2018 in Interviews, Interviews with Fiction Writers, Interviews with YA Writers. (Click for permalink.)

A Conversation with Janet Benton, author of LILLI DE JONG, interviewed by Colleen Davis

Cleaver Magazine Posted on May 9, 2018 by thwackAugust 27, 2018

A Conversation with Janet Benton
author of LILLI DE JONG
published by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday
Interview by Colleen Davis

Janet Benton’s debut novel, Lilli de Jong, has received praise from critics and readers alike. Kirkus Reviews called the book a “monumental accomplishment.” Both National Public Radio (NPR) and Library Journal recognized it as a Best Book of 2017. Lilli de Jong was also a 2017 Goodreads semifinalist for Best Historical Fiction, sharing space on the list with works by Pulitzer Prize winners Michael Chabon and Jennifer Egan. Read Joanne Green’s Cleaver review here.

While this is Benton’s first published novel, she has maintained a presence in metropolitan Philadelphia through years of work as a writer and editor. Her pieces have been published in magazines and newspapers (including the New York Times “Modern Love” column), and she’s taught writing at four universities. She also serves as a mentor and teacher at The Word Studio, a creative center that’s been a talent incubator for local writers. While the triumph of her first novel may look like an overnight success, her achievements are the product of decades of diligent effort. Benton’s mastery of craft elevates the tale of Lilli de Jong to a tour-de-force that harkens back to the great Victorian novels, which continue to transform college students into aspiring writers.—Colleen Davis 




Colleen Davis: Thank you for meeting with me today. I’d like to start by saying congratulations. Critics and readers have applauded your wonderful book, Lilli de Jong. I’ve looked at a lot of the reviews, and I’m wondering whether or not you were surprised by any reactions you got back from readers.

Janet Benton: Yes, there has been one surprising reaction. It never occurred to me that the presence of breastfeeding in a book about newborns and wet nursing would seem out of place to some people. I actually find it amusing. If you’ve ever nursed a newborn, you know nursing happens quite often—not to mention that, at times, Lilli was nursing two newborns! I barely mentioned breastfeeding compared to the number of times it would have had to happen. But then other people said the descriptions of breastfeeding were one of the strengths of the book. There aren’t many books that really describe breastfeeding. A lot of mothers have told me how grateful they are for how I highlighted that relationship.

…people said the descriptions of breastfeeding were one of the strengths of the book. There aren’t many books that really describe breastfeeding. A lot of mothers have told me how grateful they are for how I highlighted that relationship.

CD: Did the book find any new audiences that you hadn’t thought about when you were writing it?  I’m asking partly because, as a person who has never breastfed a child, I could still really relate to Lilli’s struggle over having to make a decision about caring for her child or entrusting it to someone else. I think many caregivers in our society find themselves faced with similar questions.

JB: Readers who have adopted children told me they felt really moved to consider the situations of mothers who give up a child. And some people who have never had children have written to say that they were grateful to be plunged so viscerally into the experiences of pregnancy and early motherhood. Men have said the same thing, that they were glad to be put in close contact with those physical and emotional experiences. And as you point out, so many of us are giving ongoing care to people we love, in so many circumstances. This work is crucial and irreplaceable, yet it’s the most undervalued work in our society.

CD: The book examines a woman’s experience in great detail. What has been the response from male readers? Do you have a large male audience reading the book as well?

JB: It’s a disturbing, well-known fact that, in general, men read few books written by women, whereas women—particularly while growing up, in English classes—rarely read books not written by male writers. If you look at the books that win prizes, too, there is some sad data showing that books written by men with male protagonists win the majority of prizes every year. I’m a woman, and I wrote a book with a female protagonist. Most of my readers have been women. Yet the men who have read it have been quite affected by it…. and others buy it for women in their lives.

CD: On the heels of your achievement, you were asked to interview the celebrated author Isabel Allende. How did that come about?

JB: I was invited to be a part of the Author Series at the Free Library [of Philadelphia]. After that interview, I was in correspondence with Andy Kahan, who runs the series. I told him that I love interviewing people, and if there was ever an author he needed an interviewer for, I’d be available. He wrote back immediately, asking, “How about Isabel Allende?” I was thrilled.

CD: Wow, impressive! Did any of her observations have special resonance for you?

Janet Benton

JB: Yes.  She described her writing process in ways I thought were useful and interesting. Once she has an initial, rough idea, she does a lot of research. Then, she said, “I try to tell the story from the belly, not from the brain. Let it be. Let it come. And then the editing, the correcting time comes, and that’s very cerebral . . . .I think that my mind works in circles and spirals, never in a straight line.  I just go around and around, and sometimes the circle starts getting smaller and smaller, until finally I sort of get the story.” I love knowing that, after thirty-five years of writing and twenty-three published books, she understands the phases of her process as both linear—research, writing, revising—and nonlinear—a gradual tightening of a circle of ideas.

When I did bring it to the market and tried to find an agent and a publisher, it all happened very quickly, because I had worked extraordinarily hard. I estimate it took about eight thousand hours to research and write the novel.

CD: Could you talk a little bit about your “overnight success” with Lilli de Jong and how long that process took?

JB: I’ve been writing ever since I was able to write. I went to graduate school for fiction writing, and I’ve been writing and editing for others for my entire career. I’d started several novels and never finished one. I was never obsessed enough to spend that many hours, in addition to working and having a family. But this story just meant so much to me that I was willing to give up a lot of other things over the course of many years in order to finish it. When I did bring it to the market and tried to find an agent and a publisher, it all happened very quickly, because I had worked extraordinarily hard. I estimate it took about eight thousand hours to research and write the novel.

CD: Roughly how many years passed between inception and publication of the book?

JB: The very first glimmer of the idea came to me in the summer of 2003. The book was sold in July 2015, and it was published in hardcover twenty-two months later, in May 2017. It’s also out in audio, e-book, and large-print editions.

CD: During that twelve-year period, you went through different phases of story development, including research, drafting, and editing. Can you talk about those phases and which of those was the hardest for you?

JB: The hardest thing for me was getting the whole story out from start to finish. After having the initial idea and writing a pile of paragraphs, I began to research.  I started reading about unwed mothers and wet nurses in general. I’m very grateful to the historians who’ve gathered that information and shared their understandings. I read contemporary books about women who had given away children, too. I re-read some of my Victorian favorites, like Tess of the d’Urbervilles and The Scarlet Letter. I read Samuel Richardson’s novels Pamela and Clarissa.

I also read as many historical documents as I could. I tried to read diaries from the time, but often people’s handwriting was difficult to decipher. I went to a historical society to read some diaries, but I could hardly read the handwriting. Luckily many printed books from the late nineteenth century have been scanned and are available as PDFs, so I was able to download an array of books . . . housekeeping advice, the laws and regulations for the city of Philadelphia, memoirs, lists of charitable institutions, guides for working with the poor, and much more.

CD: What was difficult about drafting the first chapters? Was it creating the plot itself?

JB: No, it was making sure everything was historically accurate: What babies wore, where the characters might be living, how servants might behave, how they would dress, how a charity for unwed mothers might be run and by whom, and on and on. You can’t take anything for granted. Take something as simple as the word backyard: Did they even have backyards? Did that term mean then what it does now? I subscribed to the online Oxford English Dictionary and used it a great deal. For example, if I said that something gave Lilli a jolt, I’d need to check—was that word used prior to the invention of electricity? You have to interrogate every single word, every metaphor. Not to mention every physical object in the book. What foods did they cook? I found recipes and menus. I found a book from the 1880s on hackney carriage fares. All of those things are, as far as I could tell, accurate to the time. I created entirely made-up characters, but I put them in a container that was as accurate as I could make it.

 CD: Lilli is a great character. She’s smart and plucky and very persistent. Even when she’s afraid, she plunges forward. Would she have been the same kind of person if she had been born Episcopalian or Catholic? Did her Quaker upbringing make a difference?

JB: Yes, I meant it to. She had been educated equally to boys. She grew up with a strong mother who had high expectations for her. She was given a foundation for finding her own truth, which is the Quaker method of silent waiting. She had faith in herself. The Quakers suffered greatly at the beginning because they were considered highly radical to believe that a human could have direct contact with God. My feeling was that someone raised like that could have great faith in her inner wisdom. She would know she could still be making the right choice even if others felt she was making the wrong choice.

CD: How did you manage being a parent at the same time you were writing a book and working?

JB: I would love it if women’s magazines would stop pretending that there is a way to have a so-called balanced life. I think you’re always failing at one thing or another, if you’re working and trying to raise a family—and add in writing a novel! I tried to ensure that my daughter would not suffer as a result of my writing the book—so I lost a lot of income. I wanted to write the book so badly, and I wanted to finish it. I made many sacrifices.

…when my daughter was about seven or eight years old, I started to go away for a weekend here and there, and I would write for sixteen hours each day. I would write and get up to eat and write more and sleep, do that for one more day, then go home.

CD: Did you set up a rigorous writing schedule every day?

JB: There were times when I could set aside a certain number of hours to write. I’d block them out on my calendar. And when my daughter was about seven or eight years old, I started to go away for a weekend here and there, and I would write for sixteen hours each day. I would write and get up to eat and write more and sleep, do that for one more day, then go home. I would motivate myself with deadlines, and I was in a writing group for a few years, so I had to produce something every month. For one year, I was lucky to have a woman who was a student and a friend with whom I traded five pages a week. I was only able to do that because my great Aunt Ruth died and left me a small inheritance, and my mother also helped us that year. That was the only way I was able to finish a full draft while running my business and raising a family. But even after that year, I still had years of work to do, and I had to make up for the loss of income. Talk about pressure. By several years later, I really wanted to finish it, so I went back into the very low-income phase for about six months. And then it sold.

Once the novel had been sold, I felt like the mirrors in the changing room had become two-way. I got even more self-conscious about every little sentence. Every time I got a set of page proofs, I revised more. Ultimately I felt that my book needed protection from me. It was a relief when it reached the phase when I could do nothing more to it. 

CD: All the detail work definitely paid off. Although I’m rarely able to read a book fast, I read yours very quickly because I really wanted to know what would happen to the main character.

JB: That’s gratifying to hear! People often tell me they read it in a white heat.

CD: You’re running a household and you’re working. You’re a mom, a wife, a daughter. What do you do when you get a tremendous blast of inspiration and you suddenly have to solve a really mundane problem?

JB: I have all these piles of scraps, and they go back many years, and they weigh on me heavily. I have all these bursts of things I want to write, and I am horribly behind. I got even more behind by taking so long to write this book. At least I’ve finished a few things over the past years, but I have so much more to do. It’s quite painful. I wish I could write full time. 

CD: The book would make a wonderful film. Has anyone expressed interest in film rights?

JB: I would love for there to be a film. Yes, there has been interest in the film rights, but no one has bought them yet.

CD: What are the most special things to emerge from the publishing experience so far?

JB: It’s been very special to see that the book is important to a lot of mothers. It affirms the value of their experience, their work and struggles. A lot of people buy the book for themselves and then buy more copies for women they love. The paperback is coming out this summer, on July 10. I hope lots of book clubs will continue reading it. It’s a good book for discussion. People tell me they talk about women’s opportunities and lives in the nineteenth century and now, the challenges of caring for infants, the choices Lilli had to make and what they might have done in such circumstances. They have very lively evenings. One group dressed in period costumes and invented a special drink they called mother’s milk.

CD: Do you have advice for other writers?

A lot of people will say, “I’ve had this book idea for twenty years. And I’m just waiting until the right time in my life.” And I’m thinking, No, no, no! You just have to start.

JB: My advice for any writer who hasn’t yet given the priority to their work is just to start. Start now. You’ll never have enough time; you’ll never have the right circumstances. Be satisfied with any little scrap you can create in a day or a week. One or two sentences a day or a week adds up to something over time. Once you have something, it’s a lot easier to create more. A lot of people will say, “I’ve had this book idea for twenty years. And I’m just waiting until the right time in my life.” And I’m thinking, No, no, no! You just have to start. My mother, who’s an artist, used to tell me that you have to do what you love “in spite of.”

CD: Your mother is an artist, and you are a writer. Does your daughter show signs of the restless creative impulse?

JB: Yes. She used to like to do tons of writing and reading, but now that she has a phone, she’s showing interest in photography, too. My mom definitely gave me the understanding of what it meant to be a creative person. What I see from her and what I know from my own life is that having a creative pursuit is a way of continually healing yourself. Whatever comes into your life, you can heal yourself if you have a vehicle for letting it out and exploring it in a creative way. Having a creative outlet is good for your emotional health. So I’m very glad my daughter is learning this, too.


Colleen-Davis

Colleen Davis is a Pennsylvania writer and author of the website Between the Pond and the Woods, which provides information and a Facebook forum for dementia caregivers. Her writing has been featured in Making Sense of Alzheimer’s, Elephant Journal, and on episodes of the television documentary  Philadelphia: The Great Experiment

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Published on May 9, 2018 in Interviews, Interviews with Fiction Writers. (Click for permalink.)

A Conversation with Ayelet Waldman, author of A REALLY GOOD DAY. Interview by Chaya Bhuvaneswar

Cleaver Magazine Posted on April 26, 2018 by thwackApril 26, 2018

A Conversation with Ayelet Waldman
author of A REALLY GOOD DAY
Interview by Chaya Bhuvaneswar

Over the past five years, rigorously-designed clinical research trials of the drug psilocybin, published in top tier journals such as Neuropsychopharmacology and elsewhere, have steadily pointed the way to the therapeutic potential of hallucinogens in psychiatry—along with National Institute for Mental Health-funded ketamine trials leading to standard outpatient clinics now offering “ketamine infusion” for patients whose depression has not responded to multiple other drugs, and in many cases, not responded to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) or even deep brain stimulation (DBS) where electrodes are placed into brain regions in an awake subject resulting in relief from crippling, often suicidal depression.

What could compel someone to be desperate enough to try such treatments? The alternative: the urge to commit suicide. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention estimates that nearly 45,000 Americans die from suicide each year; suicide is ranked as the tenth most common cause of death in the U.S. Yet relatively few popular and critically acclaimed novelists have been generous and brave enough to write about their personal struggles with suicidal ideation and ongoing contemplation of the act. Ayelet Waldman, a prolific and visible author whose novel Love and Other Impossible Pursuits was made into a searing film directed by Don Roos and starring Natalie Portman, and whose memoir Bad Mother was a New York Times bestseller, is one of these few. Notably, more male novelists (e.g., William Styron, Augusten Burroughs) have ventured into the territory, though Alice Sebold’s stark narrative of her psychological symptoms following her rape also made a significant step forward for disclosure and destigmatization. The particular courage of Waldman’s admission of intense suicidality, however, reflects the profound stigma attached to women with children disclosing any form of mental health issues. In support of the courage of her disclosure, I interviewed her one evening in January over the phone, with follow-ups by email. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation.—CB

 


Chaya Bhuvaneswar: In many essays, as well as the recent memoir, A Really Good Day, in which you describe the symptoms that led to your exploration of micro-doses of LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), you are so frank and raw in your discussion of your bipolar II diagnosis. I’m interested in the connection between bipolarity and confidence in one’s own judgment—can you speak about having that confidence, any processes involved in building it? What can you say to people with mental health diagnoses who are seeking to build that confidence in themselves that is durable through episodes of being told their “judgment is off,” that they shouldn’t trust themselves?

Ayelet Waldman: That’s really, really—this applies to so many things. If you suffer from a mental illness, there are times when your judgment can be wrong, times when you are acting from a place of emotion mind rather than a place of wise mind, and you’re so emotionally dysregulating, that you’re not making choices that even you yourself would make under different circumstances. But it’s also true that nobody knows the inside of your head as well as you do. So, there are other times you are the best judge of what works for you. It’s all of life being dialectic. Balancing back and forth on that’s bipolarity. Somewhere in the middle between trusting your own intuition and the feeling that you are acting in wise mind and balancing emotional truth vs. hyperrational truth.

If you suffer from a mental illness, there are times when your judgment can be wrong, times when you are acting from a place of emotion mind rather than a place of wise mind, and you’re so emotionally dysregulating, that you’re not making choices that even you yourself would make under different circumstances. But it’s also true that nobody knows the inside of your head as well as you do. So, there are other times you are the best judge of what works for you. It’s all of life being dialectic. 

CB: What was it like incorporating a kind of ‘mood diary’ into the book, where you had to in large part be judging whether the micro-dosing was helping you stay stable or not?

AW: What every single patient does—you have to have self-respect— everybody’s medication changes all the time. So it’s good to have a tool that you could use to evaluate the utility of the medication beyond the kind of retrospective necessity that doesn’t take into account all the things you forgot over the course of the month, i.e. there was an earthquake and I woke up, and I had a really shitty night, and understand and evaluate your reactions in a way you can’t if you’re not tracking. One of the ways I assessed whether [the micro-dosing] was working was how many words did I write—how productive was I. How many words I wrote every day. And that was a really effective tool for me. My feeling of mastery of my work life, productivity, sense of usefulness in the word. Was it 96 or 96,000? Flow—if I hadn’t been paying attention to one of the tools I wouldn’t have appreciated that I was in a place of flow so often, astonishing and wonderful place in there. The place of flow is the positive part of bipolarity.

Flow—if I hadn’t been paying attention to one of the tools I wouldn’t have appreciated that I was in a place of flow so often, astonishing and wonderful place in there. The place of flow is the positive part of bipolarity.

CB: Can you also speak to how Love and Other Impossible Pursuits addressed the stigma of postpartum depression, like the character of Emilia, a character I really loved, was suffering from?

AW: I really wrote it to give myself a search for a kind of community. [It illustrated how writing can be put to work] to find your friend, confessor, therapist, to work through issues.

CB: I also thought the character of William, Emilia’s foster son, is an equally important, incredible character. William’s precociousness and vulnerability really come through. When you were writing the book, how did you feel about William? Can you talk about how the character evolved?

AW: I kind of—I saw the book as a love story. Always. Always seemed to me to be a love story. A love story about maternal love. Think Katherine Hepburn—Spencer Tracy. They hate each other and love each other in the end. And I really saw the book in that way. About these two people, stepmother, and stepson and ultimately made for each other, beshert. I always knew that was happening.

CB: You synthesize scientific information so beautifully. Had you read and done that for postpartum depression scientific literature before writing the book? Did you do research for Emilia’s character?

AW: I think it was mostly from just myself and in my dead baby group, a support group for people who had terminated a pregnancy for genetic reasons like I did. It was terrific.

CB: The character of Carolyn is a revelation.

AW: It’s always you and not you. She was way more than an imaginary me. That was how I would react if my husband left me, but then I’m not like a caricature. I based her on a real person. That scene in the classroom where she tore up the picture? That really happened to a friend of mine with the mother of her stepson. But that isn’t the complete story. She is ultimately is a human being. She is also a physician has skills and the sense of a vocation.

CB: Did you worry about Emilia being likable vs. unlikable?

AW:  They always say that. People say that she’s an unlikeable character. There was a narrative that she was an unlikable character but that was sort of the point. But I was sort of disappointed by it, it wasn’t that I was surprised by that reaction to her. Women’s characters are expected to be likable.

CB: Can you speak more about the concept of “destined”—beshert as this certainty.

AW: The only thing that matters is the work you do. It’s nice to have a narrative of beshert. It’s useful to have as a model in a long marriage. That kind of can float you through difficult times. Times when you could give in. It is irrelevant to the strengths of your marriage. The only thing that matters is how much you’re willing to prioritize your partner. That is what marriage—all the wonderful ties. Even when you don’t feel like it. The only thing that matters is the work.

The only thing that matters is the work you do. It’s nice to have a narrative of beshert. It’s useful to have as a model in a long marriage. That kind of can float you through difficult times.

CB: What are you working on next??

AW: I have another novel that I’m struggling with. And other television and film projects that haven’t been announced yet.

 


Ayelet Waldman is the author of A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life, the novels Love and Treasure, Red Hook Road, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, and Daughter’s Keeper, as well as of the essay collection Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace and the Mommy-Track Mystery series. She is the editor of Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons and of the forthcoming Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation. She was a Federal public defender and an adjunct professor at the UC Berkeley law school where she developed and taught a course on the legal implications of the War on Drugs. She lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband, Michael Chabon, and their four children.


Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s work is forthcoming or has appeared in Narrative Magazine, The Awl, Narrative Northeast, aaduna, Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Asian American Literary Review, Compose, Redux, The Write Launch, Del Sol Review, Bangalore Review, Blue Lake Review, Nimrod, jellyfish review, and Santa Fe Writers Project. Her fiction has been anthologized in Her Mother’s Ashes 2: Stories by South Asian Women in the US and Canada, and she is a blog contributor to aaduna, as well as Michigan Quarterly Review. Follow her on Twitter @chayab77.

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Published on April 26, 2018 in Interviews, Interviews with Fiction Writers, Interviews with Nonfiction Writers. (Click for permalink.)

A Conversation with Kim Magowan, author of UNDOING from Moon City Press, Interview by Yasmina Din Madden

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 30, 2018 by thwackApril 2, 2018

A Conversation with Kim Magowan
author of UNDOING from Moon City Press
Winner of the Moon City Short Fiction Award
Interview by Yasmina Din Madden

If you’re a fan of short fiction, it’s likely you’ve come across Kim Magowan’s witty and layered stories in one of the many venues her work has appeared in. I met Kim a few years ago, and since then she’s become a go-to writer for feedback on my own work. Additionally, Kim’s innovative flash stories, particularly those that experiment with form and structure, have been an invaluable resource in the flash workshops that I teach. Last month, Kim’s collection, Undoing, winner of the Moon City Short Fiction Award, was published by Moon City Press, and next spring her novel, The Light Source, will be published by 7.13 Books. Magowan’s female characters, who often engage in what many might consider taboo behavior, are complex, intelligent, difficult, and compelling women. Recently we bonded over our mutual admiration of writer Ottessa Moshfegh, whose work often centers on the lives of unconventional female protagonists. At the AWP conference a few weeks ago, between panels and a drink or two, we had the chance to discuss flash fiction, novel writing, and our love of strange, smart, rule-breaking women in literature. —YDM

Yasmina Din Madden: You have a collection of stories and a novel coming out within a year of each other. Could you talk a bit about how your writing approach or writing practice changes depending on the form?

Kim Magowan: It took me forever to realize The Light Source was a novel—for the longest time I thought of it as a set of linked stories, like Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge. I wrote first drafts of the second and third chapters when I was in graduate school. The germ was a story a friend told me about a bride canceling her wedding because she had caught her groom in bed with her maid of honor. That intrigued me: why on earth would someone have sex with their best friend’s fiancé? The explanation I arrived at was the seed for the whole book. So, I wrote what I saw at the time as two “stories” back in the 1990s (when the novel is first set). When I seriously returned to writing, back in 2010, I dusted those stories off, revised them substantially, and wrote two more linked stories. Then in 2012, an agent who had read my story “Version” in the Gettysburg Review got in touch and asked if I was working on a novel. He was not interested in a story collection, which is a common procedure with agents. That was the incentive I needed to realize (duh), my increasingly entangled “stories” were a novel. My family was in New Orleans for five weeks while my partner was researching a project, and I spent that time in a writing fever. Bryan dropped the kids off at camp while I sat in the kitchen, typing madly. By the end of those weeks I had finished a complete draft. That agent ended up passing on it, but I will always be grateful to him for making me realize that this unwieldy monster was a novel, and I had simply been too terrified to see it as such (because who has time to write a novel!?). I continued adding to The Light Source, particularly the Julie chapter, over the next couple of years, and sent a bunch of queries to agents. A few were interested, but they all wanted me to turn it into a more conventional book than the one I had in mind.

During the same time, I was writing short stories. I wrote drafts of several of the stories in my collection when I was in my twenties and thirties. But the vast majority of them are from 2010 on, when I seriously buckled down to writing and turned it into a passion, instead of a sidelined hobby. Especially after I had my novel in satisfactory shape, by 2015, my attention was on short stories, both reading them—I have read well over 100 story collections in the last five years—and writing them. I also became increasingly interested in flash fiction, paring stories down to the bone. Novels permit a lot more leeway than short fiction. You can be digressive, you can plummet into rabbit holes of flashbacks. Short fiction has to be disciplined and crystalline.

YDM: What drew you to the flash fiction form? You’ve written and published a lot of flash in the last few years and I’m wondering what you think the form allows for or allows you to explore in your writing that a conventional short story doesn’t.

KM:  There is a practical response to that question and an aesthetic response, and I’ll give you both. The practical response is that I have a full-time job and two kids, and flash fiction is the only writing I can reliably get done when the semester is in progress. I can write a draft of a flash story in a sitting, and revise when I have time. I have to be very efficient as a writer. I reserve my summer and Christmas breaks for writing longer stories (though of course it isn’t always clear to me at inception whether a story will end up being long). When the semester is on, I write flash, or collaborate with Michelle Ross, or revise and edit. So that’s my nuts-and-bolts pragmatic answer.

But I also truly believe that writing flash has made me a better writer. It’s so disciplined. I think of novels as soup and flash fiction as a bouillon cube. There is no waste. Of course, this is generally true of short stories: you have to be compact and precise. You have to work out, if your character is a collector, for instance, exactly what she collects—what item will reveal that essential quality you need to expose about her. But flash is that efficiency, times ten. I could never write poetry—my poems always sounded like bad Eric Clapton lyrics—but flash is as close as prose comes to poetry. The skills that writing it has made me hone are portable. I carry them into my longer work.

I also truly believe that writing flash has made me a better writer. It’s so disciplined. I think of novels as soup and flash fiction as a bouillon cube. There is no waste.

YDM: Your story “Squirrel Beach” was published in this magazine and is part of your collection. The narrator’s detached critical tone, as she contemplates her sister-in-law and her brother, is both funny and brutal. In fact, a lot of your fiction is brutally funny—I’m thinking of “Be Good” for instance, a story written in list- and second-command form that chronicles a husband’s cheating. How do you see humor informing your work?

KM: Thank you! I like “Squirrel Beach” a lot too—that was one of what I think of as my “angry drinking stories” I wrote in 2016. “Brutally funny” is a lovely compliment. I gravitate to funny writers. Amy Hempel and Lorrie Moore were revelations for me, that you could be a “serious” writer who was also funny, and that jokes did not have to be one-note. One of my all-time favorite novelists is Jane Austen, who is cruelly hilarious. A recent story collection that makes me laugh out loud is Katherine Heiny’s Single, Carefree, Mellow—it’s full of these perfectly turned zingers. The writers I love best are adept at shuttling between funny and sad, even combining the two emotions, like Kazuo Ishiguro does in The Remains of the Day. So I admire humor, and I often wish my stories were funnier: it’s one of my 2018 ambitions, to lighten my writing up. Some of my stories I like best are ones where the humor works (I hope, anyway) to illuminate characters. For instance, the protagonist in “Family Games” connects with people, both her estranged husband Phil and her new friend Angie, through jokes. She and her husband hand each other set-up lines. Their mutual, twisted humor is one of the reasons Phil is hard for Mel to leave, despite all his flaws.

YDM: Is there a story in the collection that came particularly quickly or easily? And what about its evil twin? Was there a story that seemed impossible from beginning to end?

KM: I’m not going to count the flash, because I always write flash quickly, but the story in the collection that was most an unanticipated gift from the sky was “Family Games.” I had to write that story under the gun. I had submitted a story to Sixfold for their contest that got accepted elsewhere, and I had three days to come up with something new—all of my other stories were published or forthcoming. I stayed up all night cranking out “Family Games,” sent it in the morning to my first reader Michelle Ross, revised it the next day, and submitted it. It’s one of my favorites in the collection, and I have never written a story that long so painlessly. Its evil twin, strangely enough, is a story that it shares many affinities with, “Version,” another story about a writer couple who play word games. “Version” was a headache and a half to write!

YDM: Could you talk a bit about the title of your collection? There’s clearly the tension, in many of these stories, of relationships or families unraveling, but undoing is different. I’m curious about how you came to this title, which I love by the way.

KM: Right—undoing is not the same as unraveling. It can be—certainly “undoing” has negative connotations that I wanted to draw from (“he was my undoing”)—but I like the ambiguity of the word. It also can connote undoing a problem, undoing a knot. When we play Four Square with our daughters, they’re always calling “Re-do-sies!” I intend that facet of undoing: the longed-for second chance. So, “Undoing” was the original title for the opening story in the collection, “When in Rome,” and comes from two uses of the word that occur at the end of that story: undoing a memory through a fantasy, and undoing someone’s buttons. I had a hell of a time coming up with a title for the collection. I’m terrible at titles, and I also didn’t want to spotlight any single story by titling the collection after it. Michelle Ross, title queen, suggested I use Undoing, and it immediately clicked. It encapsulated, for me, the self-sabotage thread, but also the nostalgia. So many of the stories feature characters who long to move backward, to recapture some since lost moment of connection and peace: sitting on a stoop licking ice cream cones, the future unmarred.

YDM: You’ve co-authored several stories with writer Michelle Ross. Could you talk about how this process works and what you see as the advantages of co-writing stories?

KM: Michelle and I have been collaborating on stories since July; it’s a blast. One of us will start a story—say, write the opening paragraph—and then lob it at the other person, who writes some more, tosses it back. We decide when it’s done and revise together. There are so many things I love about the process. It’s very freeing for me, to have to incorporate some left turn, some unforeseen element. I used to act, and collaboration reminds me of improvisation. All of a sudden your Improv partner has hands that are melting, or is blind, or has grown antlers, or thinks you are a sandwich, and you just need to adapt and go with it. I can get very finicky and prissy with writing. Collaboration pushes me to be speedy, raw, messy. Plus, Michelle is so damn good, partnering with her is like rallying with an excellent tennis player. She ups my game.

Michelle Ross, Kim Magowan, and Yasmina Din Madden at AWP 2018

YDM: Talk to me about “Version,” a story in the collection that includes elements of metafiction, plays with structure, and centers on writers who are often talking about writing. It’s one of my favorites in the book.

KM: Ha, that is my evil twin story! So, the backstory of that story is that originally it stopped at the end of the first section, once Kate has her reading at the bookstore and David confronts her. I was in a writing workshop with three other writers, including my very talented sister Margot, and Margot asked, “So, what happens next?” And my initial thought was, But Kate’s story is over, and then I realized that the story was over from her POV, but not if I picked up another perspective, David’s. But as soon as I started working on David’s, I realized, well, his story is contingent on what decision he makes, whether he contacts Kate or wimps out, and then that following trajectory depends on whether Kate responds or ignores him, and… and…. Well, suffice to say, that story got very “Choose your own adventure” on me.

“Version” tends to elicit extreme responses. Several people have told me it’s their favorite story in the collection (indeed, one of the collection titles I was kicking around before settling on Undoing was a line from that story, This Version Doesn’t Belong to You). Others don’t like it. It’s very metafictional, as you say, plus many people are ideologically opposed to writing about writing. One of my most well-read friends said, “Make the characters something besides writers. Make them construction workers.” Which, of course, logically made no sense! But I get the bias against writing about writing. I received the same flak from Sixfold readers about “Family Games.” Personally, I think “Version” is one of my best. It’s a little chilly and cerebral, but I like all the games Kate and David play. My favorite bit is the box of staples David slips in Kate’s grocery bag of “staples.” Both of them get a kick out of wordplay.

YDM: I’ve just mentioned one of my favorite stories in the collection, so now it’s your turn. Is there a story or two in your collection that you feel a particular affinity for and why?

KM: Aside from the stories we’ve already mentioned, I like “Chin Chin Chin” a lot. I find it, for all its sharp edges, sweet and romantic—well, romantic for me; that’s as romantic as my writing gets! I also like the linked stories about Laurel (“Eleanor of Aquitaine,” “Warmer, Colder,” “On Air,” and “Pop Goes the Weasel”) and the linked ones about Ben and Miriam (“Brining,” “This Much”). Both of those sets of stories could easily have turned into novels—I know so much more about those characters than made it onto the page. They dug their hooks into my imagination. Except who, as I said before, has time to write a novel?

YDM: Who are the writers who have influenced or inspired you most and is there anyone new you’ve discovered recently whose work you find exciting?

KM: So many! I am a ranker, so you’re asking me a question that I could go on and on about. I’m going to be disciplined and just mention a few recent books that have blown me away. I love Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, how she plays with perspective and time. No current writer is as funny, original, and humane as George Saunders: Tenth of December is an all-time favorite collection, and Lincoln in the Bardo exploded my brain. Jenny Offill’s Dept of Speculation is the novel I wish I’d written. Reading it was an epiphany: there is an audience for smart books. I love how that novel toggles between the micro (a floundering marriage, molecules, floating passages of text) and the macro (outer space). Edward P. Jones’s The Known World may be the most important American novel of the twenty-first century—every writer needs to read that book. It’s astonishing. Finally, I’m obsessed with a writer you turned me onto: Ottessa Moshfegh. Her story collection Homesick for Another World is even better, I think, than her celebrated novel Eileen. It’s all thorns and prickles; it’s like holding a barbed fruit.

YDM: What are you working on these days?

KM: Two things: a second story collection, which so far is mostly very short fiction—I have about 16,000 words of that; and a collaborative collection I’m working on with Michelle Ross, that is twelve stories and growing. Also, there’s a novel I would love to write about my great-grandmother, who was an amazing character—a total scandal. Her father was a prominent rabbi in Vienna, a member of Parliament. Liza ran off with a Gentile musician when she was seventeen, had two children, returned to Vienna when she was twenty. Her humiliated father married her off to a much older rabbi (my great-grandfather) and packed them out of Austria. She wrote these wonderful, wild, feminist fairytales that were published in The Atlantic and Harper’s. She had two children with the rabbi, a longstanding lesbian relationship, and an affair with another Christian who likely fathered her youngest son. She used to make her husband the rabbi pork stew and tell her kids, “Watch him eat it.” She deserves a novel, if I can figure out a plot worthy of her.


Kim Magowan’s short story collection Undoing won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her novel The Light Source is forthcoming in 2019 from 7.13 Books. Her fiction has been published in Atticus Review, Bird’s Thumb, Cleaver, The Gettysburg Review, Hobart, New World Writing, Sixfold, and many other journals.  She lives in San Francisco and teaches in the Department of Literatures and Languages at Mills College. www.kimmagowan.com

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Yasmina Din Madden lives in Iowa. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in PANK, The Idaho Review, The Masters Review: New Voices, Word Riot, Hobart, CARVE, and other journals. She teaches creative writing and literature at Drake University.

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Published on March 30, 2018 in Interviews, Interviews with Fiction Writers. (Click for permalink.)

Brian Burmeister Interviews David J. Peterson, author of THE ART OF LANGUAGE INVENTION

Cleaver Magazine Posted on February 23, 2018 by thwackFebruary 23, 2018

A Conversation with David J. Peterson
author of THE ART OF LANGUAGE INVENTION
Penguin Random House

Interview by Brian Burmeister

If you love fantasy and science fiction films and television programs, chances are you’re familiar with the work of David J. Peterson, the masterful conlanger, inventor of languages. While best known for inventing the Dothraki and  Valyrian languages for HBO’s popular series Game of Thrones, the University of California San Diego graduate has created more than forty languages in his film and television career. You can find Peterson’s original languages in such Marvel Studios films as Thor: The Dark World and Doctor Strange, as well as over half-a-dozen television shows, including the critically acclaimed Penny Dreadful.

Peterson is one of the co-founders of the Language Creation Society, and he is the author of two books, Living Language Dothraki and The Art of Language Invention.

In this interview, Brian Burmeister asks David J. Peterson about what led him to language creation, what his process looks like, and what advice he has for novice language creators.—Nathaniel Popkin, ed.


BB: Your degrees are centered in linguistics, but what led you from the study of language to choosing to create new ones?

David J. Peterson

DP: Ultimately, it was the study of languages in general. Learning as many languages as I could—just for fun. I was doing that at the university. I had taken Arabic and Russian, and it was advertised in my dorm for a student-taught class on Esperanto. So I took that, and that was the first time I had ever heard of a person inventing a language. The semester after that I took my first linguistics course, and it was in that class I really put everything together, and I thought it would be really interesting if there was a language that combined certain morphological systems and marking systems. That was when I thought I could make a language—and I did. But rather than having it be for international communication because I thought Esperanto had pretty much won the day for that, I thought, what if I just created it for myself? Just for fun. So as soon as I had that idea, I was off. I thought I was the first person ever to do so. When I met other language creators online, finally, I discovered there were many others who had done so. Not only that, but they had been doing it for longer. And they were better. At that point there was a lot of learning. And I kept at it, just because I loved it.

BB: That first language you created, was that something you would speak with your friends?

DP: I think, in the beginning, I had the idea that my girlfriend and I would speak it. I think that was more of an excuse, something to justify the exercise. I did show it to her eventually, but she wasn’t interested in speaking it. But I kept with it just because I enjoyed doing it.

BB: In terms of language creation in general, what are some of the most difficult issues that you face?

DP: Definitely creating a verbal system. Especially if you’re creating a naturalistic language. It’s very, very challenging. The naturalistic languages I create, they evolve over time—the evolution is simulated. With nominal systems, it’s fairly easy. They’re fairly static. Honestly, verbal systems change with every single generation. People thirty years apart don’t use verbs exactly the same way. Consequently, on a macro level, the systems change radically every hundred or so years—which is nuts compared to nouns that are kind of like trees compared to rivers. To create something like a verbal system when you know it’s not going to stick around for a long time, everything you’re creating is going to be the product of something new, so it’s hard to get it just right, and create the entire full system, to have all these changes embedded with them, and not to get lost—that’s the hardest thing for a language creator. It’s like, all right, you created a system and this is your time X, and now you have time X minus 100, X minus 200 and so on. With the verbs, it’s like, wait a minute, are they still doing that? Or has this progressive suddenly become the regular present? Has this future become a subjunctive? That’s the hardest part.

BB: Of the dozens of languages you’ve created for TV, movies, and video games, do you have a personal favorite?

DP: Definitely the Irathient language I created for Defiance. I love everything about it. I love the grammar I set up for it, even though it’s a bear to use. I love the writing system. I love the sound of it—I absolutely love the sound of it. And I also like how words are created. It’s one of my favorite methods of word creation, the use of really large noun classes. It just hit so many notes that I really respond well to. It’s my absolute favorite.

BB: What does the process of creating your languages look like? Are your time and efforts consumed by a particular language for several weeks? Or is it a longer process than that? 

DP: It’s kind of like thirty-five percent of the work happens in a very short amount of time. After that, the rest of the work takes place over the course of your entire life. The most intensive part is setting up the grammar. Making sure that it works. Making sure that it sounds good, and that everything tests right. And that takes a lot of work in the beginning. After that, it’s just vocabulary creation. That’s the type of thing that’s very occasional, either whenever you need it or whenever you want to. And literally, it’s going to take the rest of your entire life because you’ll never create as many words in a created language as there are in the natural languages of our world. 

BB: You have fans who are very passionate about the languages that you create. What are some of the most creative or memorable uses of those languages that you’ve seen or heard about? 

DP: I love when fans get tattoos. I’m a big fan of tattoos, but I would never get one myself, so it means a lot to me when they get a tattoo of something I created—you know, permanently etched on their body. I find it to be absolutely extraordinary. Just extraordinary. And there have been some really good ones. 

BB: For those looking to learn more about language creation, can you give us a preview of what awaits your future readers in your book The Art of Language Invention?

DP: In The Art of Language Invention, I initially set out to teach everything you would need to know about language creation. Then my editor told me how long they wanted the book to be—or how short, in my opinion. (Laughs.) It’s not that. But at the very least, it will give you the basics. Assuming a spoken, naturalistic language. Although it does have some information if you’re doing something for aliens or if you’re doing a sign language, for example. It’s a very good place to start out, to figure out what the rules are, to get something that has a naturalistic result, that looks like the languages we have here on Earth. Also, in the beginning, it gives you a short history of the modern conlanging community, which was important to me, because that’s where I came out of. The conlanging community that was born, really, on the Internet in the 90s. Especially at that time, there was nobody who was famous, there were no books on this subject. And it was just an email listserv where anybody could send email messages, so everybody was pretty much equal on there. It was a wonderful way to learn, and I made a lot of friends along the way. That’s where I learned to do everything that I’m doing now, and why I am the language creator that I am today. Joining that community changed my life entirely.

BB: What would you recommend to the person who might not have very much experience, but has the enthusiasm to give language creation a try themselves?

DP: First of all, that listserv is still there, and I’m still on it. It’s been there since 1991—so 2021, coming up, it’s going to be 30 years, it’s crazy. I was a newcomer when I joined. So you can always do that. That was the first conlang community, but there’s tons of conlang communities now. There’s tons everywhere. On every different platform. A nice place to go is the Language Creation Society’s website, conglang.org, because that’s going to point you in a bunch of different directions. You can collect all information about anything you need to know about conlanging, so if you start there you can get to a bunch of different places. 


Brian Burmeister teaches communication at Iowa State University. His writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He can be followed on Twitter: @bdburmeister.

 

 

 

David J. Peterson’s author photo by Jake Reinig

 

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Published on February 23, 2018 in Interviews, Interviews with Fiction Writers. (Click for permalink.)

Michelle Fost Interviews Marc Labriola

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 20, 2017 by thwackDecember 20, 2017

A Conversation with Marc Labriola, Author of DYING BEHAVIOUR OF CATS, from Quattro Books (Winner of the 2017 Ken Klonsky Award), 124 Pages

Interview by Michelle Fost

Congratulations to Marc Labriola on winning the 2017 Ken Klonsky Award for Dying Behaviour of Cats, along with publication of the novella by Quattro Books. You can read Marc’s first two published short stories, “Cutman” and “Self-Portrait with Broken Nose,” in Issues 7 and 9 of Cleaver Magazine. In Marc’s latest work, we follow Theo, a man shut inside the home of his father after a hurricane. There is a leopard perched above him, on the roof. Theo watches the news reporting his story on television, where they split the screen: on one side, Theo, and on the other, the leopard; as the crowd across the street looks on, Theo views himself as half man, half beast.


Michelle Fost: The leopard on the roof! In Dying Behaviour of Cats, Theo’s rich inner life seems to have become externalized. I wondered if there are writers who were models for you for what you set out to do here. Writers you admire? Can you talk a little about influences?

Marc Labriola: Yes, let’s begin with influences. A lot of my writing begins under it. Writing Dying Behaviour of Cats, it wasn’t “writers” who were influential so much as “books.” I’ll tell you what I mean by that. Theo’s a shut-in, so he becomes an expert on killing time. In one chapter he re-imagines the objects in his house for the purposes of entertainment. He figures out that if he blows into a baritone mouthpiece it sounds like starting a car. Or if he opens the latch of his sax case, he hears a gun cocking. Killing time, he realizes that everything doubles for something else. The most important thing he has though, are books, in particular, abandoned books; books left by his wife Catalina when she ran out on him. The Poetic Edda. Solomon and Saturn. Oedipus Rex. Odi et Amo, and others.

When I was writing the novella, I started reading the books that Theo would be reading, so they end up bleeding into the narrative. I read a lot of Catullus, this ancient Roman poet, who is Catalina’s favorite. Catullus is crazy. He goes from erotic love poem to obscene rant. That’s kind of a good way to describe Dying Behaviour of Cats. This happened to me with music too. I wrote most of this book under the influence of John Coltrane’s Interstellar Space album.

But if you’re looking to place this book in terms of writing style, it’s kind of like Gabriel Garcia Marquez trying to out drink Charles Bukowski.

MF: Cleaver published two of your stories, “Cutman” and “Self-Portrait with Broken Nose.” I wondered how you would compare writing the novella with writing short stories.

ML: Writing a novella is different from writing short stories because it ruins your life for longer. It’s as if everything in your real life has to answer to the fictional world you’ve created. Sometimes I’m chasing a word or an idea and I’m waiting for the city to somehow leave it in a place for me to trip over. On a street corner or subway car or back alley. It’s like I’m waiting for things to remind me of myself. And then when the city answers back, it’s like finding a man on the street that looks like you. You recognize yourself in strange things. Even simple things you encounter— a cat climbing the fire escape to the roof, a wedding ring beside the tub, a house key lying on the street, an open bathroom mirror, makes you aware that you are touching these amulets of everyday life. When I’m writing, everything has this symbolic weight.

Writing a novella is different from writing short stories because it ruins your life for longer. It’s as if everything in your real life has to answer to the fictional world you’ve created.

MF: Anything that stands out for you about the process of writing or revising the novella?

ML: I didn’t really start the book until I thought I was done. That’s when the real writing happened. The first time I read the manuscript from start to finish was in the middle of the night. And intersections between characters and ideas, that I’d never originally intended, started to emerge. And I cultivated those moments. So you will see strange symbols that unite the book—the colour red, eggs, the crab constellation, Saturn, the saxophone, and of course, cats. The test for truth is the collision of ideas, as if every moment in a story is just a return to what’s true. If that doesn’t happen, you can keep pounding on its chest, but the story won’t come to life.

MF: Are there things you accomplished in the novella that you’re especially pleased with? Any surprises during the writing?

ML: I made a discovery when I decided to eliminate dialogue. Don’t get me wrong, many characters speak throughout the book. But when they speak, their lines are embedded inside the words of the narrator. But then I took it a step further. When the story takes you towards the innermost thoughts of Theo, for example, the narrator too, becomes bewitched by the character and takes on the language of that character. Then when we are exposed to the thoughts of Catalina, the narrator adopts the “language” of Catalina. When you read the book, it forces you to read in this way, constantly moving in and out of the lexis of each character. The best way I can describe my narrative voice in Dying Behaviour of Cats is “demonic possession.”

MF: Reading and thinking about your stories and now Dying Behaviour of Cats, I was struck by a continued fascination with a cluster of themes—violence, masculinity, awareness of the body—and with a surprising lyricism that can develop out of a gritty, often crude surface. Theo from the novella and Andrea and Ben from the stories in Cleaver might be neighbors. Is their world one we can expect you to continue to write about in your next work? What’s next?

ML: It’s very interesting that you say that Andrea, Ben, and Theo, these three ruined men, could be neighbours, because my original conception was for a short story collection where all the characters lived in the same run-down apartment building. But, like a lot of conception, there are happy accidents. Dying Behaviour of Cats is one of those. This small story of a leopard on a man’s roof ended up uncoiling into a novella.

But, let’s talk about violence. You’re right about this cluster of themes. You know the first day I met my editor, he asked me to meet him in a café on the bottom floor of the building where the publishing house is. I knew what he looked like from the photos of him on the backs of his books, but he didn’t know me from Adam. So, I walk in to our first meeting, shoes polished, wearing this light grey Italian suit. And I see him right away. I go up to him and say, “Hi, Luciano?” He turns to me and says, “Holy shit, Marc? Are you Marc Labriola?” From reading my work, he thought I would show up with a split lip. Maybe a black eye. Or with a bottle of bourbon in a brown paper bag. Anyway, I’m telling you this because, yes, the novel focuses on the body, but it doesn’t end with the body.

The first day I met my editor… he turns to me and says, “Holy shit, Marc? Are you Marc Labriola?” From reading my work, he thought I would show up with a split lip. Maybe a black eye. Or with a bottle of bourbon in a brown paper bag. Anyway, I’m telling you this because, yes, the novel focuses on the body, but it doesn’t end with the body.

At one point, Theo tries to see how long he can go without eating, without sleeping, then without speaking. He is trying to break through the boundaries of his own body. The parts of the book that are most focused on the body are all about attempts to transcend it. At one point, after Theo has tried to hurt himself, he realizes that through trying to die, he feels as though he is slowly becoming immortal. That he has been building up a tolerance to death. And I think that’s very true of suffering. The same is true with your comment about masculinity. When you think it is most about the “masculine,” you find Theo searching for the mother who abandoned him, the wife who ran off. Hunting femininity and divinity.

In terms of what’s next, I’m currently writing a novel. It begins when an internationally renowned author dies at 90 years old, and surprises his family by requesting in his will that his body be buried in the little town in Mexico that was the setting for his most famous book. When his body is sent, and the world realizes the true location of his famous novel, journalists descend on the town, intent on discovering if the now cult characters actually exist in real life.

MF: Thanks so much for taking the time to answer these questions, and congratulations on the Ken Klonsky Prize and the publication. Best way to order a copy of Dying Behaviour of Cats?

ML: In Canada the book is available at Indigo, Chapters, Book City, and online retailers. In the US, the book is available online through Barnes and Noble and Amazon.


Michelle Fost is a writer living in Toronto. Her writing has appeared in Geist Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and elsewhere. She is a book review and fiction editor at Cleaver.

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Published on December 20, 2017 in Interviews, Interviews with Fiction Writers. (Click for permalink.)

Benjamin Percy Author of THE DARK NET, interviewed by Brian Burmeister

Cleaver Magazine Posted on October 13, 2017 by thwackOctober 13, 2017

A Conversation with Benjamin Percy
Author of THE DARK NET
from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 272 pages

Interview by Brian Burmeister

Benjamin Percy has a fascinating and wide-ranging career as a writer. His short story “Refresh, Refresh” was selected as one of the Best American Short Stories 2006 and was further anthologized as one of only 40 stories included in 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories. He has written four novels, a book of craft essays on writing, and has contributed works to such publications as Esquire, GQ, and Men’s Journal. In addition, Percy currently writes for DC Comics’ Green Arrow and Teen Titans, and for Dynamite Entertainment’s James Bond. He newest novel, The Dark Net, released in August 2017, explores many of the dangers of our current digital age.

In this exclusive interview, Cleaver interviewer, Brian Burmeister, asks Benjamin Percy about the things that scare him, the books that shaped him, and the advice he has for fellow writers.


BB: The great post-modern writer Donald Barthelme famously encouraged writers to “Write about what you’re afraid of.” With The Dark Net, you paint a very harrowing picture of the vulnerabilities of the Internet’s infrastructure and our personal information. Are those possible dangers something that you’re deeply concerned with as we move through the next few years?

BP: Right now—with every swipe of a screen, every click of a mouse—you’re feeding information into an algorithm. Right now—when you post a photo or tag a location on social media—you’re willingly giving up vulnerable data.

Right now, you’re reaching for your phone, your fingers always twitching distractedly for it, because it’s digital cocaine, a prosthetic cerebrum.

Right now, private cameras—on phones, on laptops—are being auctioned off by pirates online, so that someone might be watching you right now without your knowledge. Right now, Siri or Alexa is listening to everything you say. Right now, malware can be stored in human DNA.

Yeah, I’m concerned.

Benjamin Percy

BB: In one of my favorite passages of The Dark Net you wrote, “Books are like batteries…you grow a little stronger by reading them, surrounding yourself with them.” Whether in your preparation for writing The Dark Net, or in your general development as a writer over many years, which books do you feel have made the most profound impact on you?

BP: Too many to list. But for The Dark Net, William Gibson’s Neuromancer was essential. He’s the godfather of cyber-punk, and an excerpt from his groundbreaking novel is included as the epigraph. I also owe a debt to William Blatty’s The Exorcist and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman for their respective treatment of the demonic and occultism.

BB: As an author, you have come to find yourself in a fairly unique position as someone who has very much come out of the literary tradition to now blur the lines between literary and genre writing. What lessons do you think exist for literary writers to take away from genre works? And vice versa?

BP: The differences between so-called genre and literary fiction are mostly irrelevant, so long as the writing is strong, the characterization believable. Margaret Atwood and Cormac McCarthy could be stocked in horror, western, crime, science fiction and fantasy or Literature (with a capital L). Bookstores should be broken down into two sections: books that suck and books that don’t suck.

What sucks about the worst of literary fiction? Nothing happens. What sucks about the worst of genre fiction? The prose is pedestrian and the characters are types. One extreme errs on the side of artsy-fartsyness while failing to address that most essential question, “What happens next?” The other extreme errs on the side of full-bore momentum with little acknowledgement of language’s power and the emotional well you need to fill up.

BB: One of the standout traits of your writing in The Dark Net is the vividness with which you describe each location, each character, each action. Over the past several years, you have written many comic books for DC Comics and now Dynamite Entertainment as well. Do you feel as though your work for comics has changed the way you visualize the worlds within your prose?

BP: I’ve always been a visual writer, as influenced by novels and poems as I am by movies, TV, and comics. But I have been writing for DC Comics the past three years, and that’s definitely carried over to my novel writing. Especially with structure and plotting. You have 20 pages and five to seven scenes. The end of every scene should be a tantalizing question mark that carries the reader forward. That’s how every chapter works in a novel. Also consider this: every issue of Green Arrow has an A, B, C, and D plot. The B plot becomes the A plot of the next issue. The C plot becomes the B plot. And so on. Something very similar is going on in a novel, when it comes to the rotation and progression of mysteries. I could nerd on about this for some time. That’s the short version.

BB: You were a long-time creative writing professor and last year published Thrill Me, a book of essays on the craft of writing. As many of Cleaver Magazine’s readers are also writers, what is one piece of advice you would offer to any fledgling or struggling writers out there?

BP: Read your brains out and write your brains out. Don’t listen to the word, “No,” (or at least don’t let it bother you, because you’re going to hear it a lot). And re-read. There’s a lot to be learned from re-reading and re-reading and re-reading a story you admire and then breaking it down into its component parts and trying to figure out the techniques and design that made it so powerful.


Brian Burmeister teaches communication at Iowa State University. His writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He can be followed on Twitter: @bdburmeister.

 

 

You may also enjoy:

A Conversation with Andrea Jarrell, author of I’M THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY, by Elizabeth Mosier

MY SHADOW BOOK, a novel by MAAWAAM, edited by Jordan A. Rothacker, reviewed by William Morris

BEAUTIFUL IN ITS SLOWNESS: An Interview with Rachel Slotnick by Millicent Borges Accardi

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Published on October 13, 2017 in Interviews, Interviews with Fiction Writers. (Click for permalink.)

A Conversation with Andrea Jarrell, author of I’M THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY, by Elizabeth Mosier

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 6, 2017 by thwackSeptember 6, 2017

A Conversation with Andrea Jarrell
Author of I’M THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY
from She Writes Press, 176 Pages

Interview by Elizabeth Mosier

Haunted by her father’s absence and riveted by her single mother’s cautionary tales, Cleaver contributor Andrea Jarrell longed for the “stuff of ordinary families,” even as she was drawn to the drama of her parents’ larger-than-life relationship. In her new memoir, I’M THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY (She Writes Press), Jarrell revisits family stories starring wolves in cowboy clothing and lambs led astray by charming savior-saboteurs, to recount how she escaped a narrative she’d learned by heart.

Jarrell’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Narrative Magazine, and Lit Hub, among others. A Los Angeles native, she currently lives in suburban Washington, D.C., and works as a communications strategist for educational institutions. Read Andrea Jarrell’s craft essay “Becoming an Outlaw: How My Short Fiction Became a Memoir,” published last year on Cleaver.

Cleaver interviewer Elizabeth Mosier asked her about the long road to writing her own story. 

EM: You’re the one who got away. What does “getting away” mean for you?

AJ: The book’s title speaks to the getaway at the heart of the book—my mother leaving my [violent alcoholic] father when she was pregnant with me—but it also speaks to my feeling that I have escaped my family’s dynamics. I went to college, I got out of a bad relationship, I married a good man and created a family. For so long, I didn’t realize that my mother’s life choices were driving so many of mine. When I could see the bright lines of my story, that’s when I was no longer writing her view of the world.

EM: Your mother’s “Nick” is your “Wes.” He’s the son of one of your early writing teachers, “Isabel,” who praised your talent but then sabotaged your work by fixing you up with her brilliant but binge-drinking son.
 

Andrea Jarrell

AJ: Leaving “Wes” was such a pivot in my own life, and I think it’s a natural pivot in the story. People who read the book are so mad at “Isabel,” and I was, too! As somebody who has a lot of relatives with addictions, I understand her impulse to look for a good thing and hope it would change things for her son. It felt like I was the chosen one, and then it felt like it was all just a big trick. You’re very vulnerable in any writing program, as an artist and as a person, because you’re putting out this work that you care so much about. I’ve had some hard knocks with that, and also some good luck with very helpful mentors. But as the artist, you have to do the heavy lifting. Even though I wanted to be published in my twenties, I don’t know that I could have stood it. I needed all this recovery to gain confidence and authority, to be able to stand on my own two feet and not get knocked over.

EM: You first started to explore this material as fiction, while pursuing an MFA at Bennington in your late thirties.

AJ: It was so helpful to start as a fiction writer. What I learned at Bennington is that it’s easier to write lovely sentences than it is to tell a good story. I grew up hearing stories—my great-grandmother, my grandmother, and my mother all had a talent for choosing the telling detail. But it took me so long to construct something, to figure out what details fit into something bigger, or what details could make the story grow. A line of remembered dialogue might be a jumping-off place, or an aperture that I can open up. Even if it’s my starting place, it might not end up being where the story ultimately starts. It might be a window in. The more I revise, the more I learn to trust that there’s more there to find.

EM: What were the biggest challenges you faced when you began working with this material in nonfiction form?

AJ: I loathe the idea of being overly explanatory or melodramatic. I didn’t want to turn my story into an Al-Anon meeting. Yet editors would say, “It’s okay to dwell here.” There were certain points where I needed to be more direct—more telling, not just showing. The marketing writing I do for work has taught me how to hook people’s attention, but there are hazards to that kind of writing, too. In art, the writing can’t be too neatly packaged.

The hardest part [in developing this memoir] was figuring out a structure that worked to develop the central themes of desire, an unusual mother-daughter bond and its impact on sexuality, and recovery.

I resisted arranging the chapters chronologically, because that’s not as interesting to me. In the end, though, the story is told mostly in chronological order. Still, I couldn’t bear to start in childhood. For one thing, I thought it would be easier to engage the reader in an adult’s life than in a child’s. Also, in the chapters where I am a child, there’s an imbalance of power. It’s more my mother’s story than mine.

Finally, I realized that the trigger for the book was the murder of a woman, my neighbor when I was living in Maine with my husband and children. It happened during my time in the MFA program at Bennington, and I immediately wanted to write about it, though I didn’t understand why it was such a powerful experience. Once I decided to begin with this story, a lot of narrative problems were solved. I could start as an adult and make natural connections between my life and my mother’s.

EM: As you write, that story was “A path that paved the way, inevitably, back to my mother.” You return to childhood to answer the question that opening chapter asks: How did you avoid becoming that woman you feared, whose sexuality seemed to put her in peril? You found your way to a happy life, which, for you, means a lasting marriage, motherhood, and a creative career. And yet, between the lines of your memoir there lurks a fear that you don’t really deserve what you have, that you’re “getting away” with something.

AJ: I haven’t experienced true tragedy, but I’ve had bad things happen that felt tragic to me. Having escaped that, part of me waits for the other shoe to drop. But the message in my memoir is to keep choosing life. I never want to just give up—to say that this is all I get, that this is my fate. I want to keep believing that I can evolve, that I can have new experiences, and that I can grow.

EM: Perhaps one of the things you learned from your mother is to have confidence in your ability to navigate the unknown. You make clear in the memoir that your mother has healed, is healing, and is making plans for her future, too. And yet you felt nervous about the way you depicted her, and sought her blessing to tell this story.

AJ: In order to tell my own story, I had to tell some of my mother’s. I feel a sense of responsibility about that. I don’t actually know what I would have done if my mom objected to the book—if she weren’t who she is. My father is the villain in the story, though I do try to show his better nature. I’m always surprised when people say, “There’s so much love in the book.” Even when it comes to my dad.

EM: Your memoir’s publication coincides with National Recovery Month. Is this a recovery book?
 
AJ: Certainly not in ways one might expect. It’s not about recovery from any specific addiction. I think that, as humans, we’ve all got a void within us that we’re trying to fill. Figuring out how to do that in a positive rather than self-destructive way is part of what the book is about. I think about what Vivian Gornick has said of memoir, “What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.”

I’m the One Who Got Away isn’t trying to tell anyone how to recover. But I do think it wants to make sense of the healing we are all trying to do.


Elizabeth-MosierElizabeth Mosier is a novelist and essayist. Her reviews have appeared most recently in The Philadelphia Inquirer and Cleaver. Her essay “Believers” was named a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2015, Read more at www.ElizabethMosier.com.

 

 

 

You may also enjoy:

BECOMING AN OUTLAW Or: How My Short Fiction Became a Memoir, a craft essay by Andrea Jarrell

ON THE MIRACLE MILE by Andrea Jarrell

LOST by Andrea Jarrell

 

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Published on September 6, 2017 in Interviews, Interviews with Fiction Writers. (Click for permalink.)

A CONVERSATION WITH CLAIRE RUDY FOSTER author of I’ve Never Done This Before

Cleaver Magazine Posted on October 5, 2016 by thwackFebruary 25, 2018

ive-never-done-this-beforeA CONVERSATION WITH CLAIRE RUDY FOSTER 
author of I’ve Never Done This Before
The KLEN+SOBR Interventions, 78 pages
interviewed by KC Mead-Brewer

Claire Rudy Foster’s short story collection I’VE NEVER DONE THIS BEFORE made its official debut just this week from KLĒN+SŌBR Interventions. It’s a tight collection with six stories’ worth of addiction, struggle, pain, and grit. Foster’s critically acclaimed short fiction has been nominated for an AWP award, a Pushcart Prize, and a Best of the Web award. Foster will be giving her first public reading from the collection at The Alano Club of Portland this upcoming October 22nd.
—KC M-B

KMB: I love the title of your collection, all the different ways it applies (and perhaps sometimes doesn’t, perhaps only as a lie or a trick or a wish) to your various characters. How did you go about deciding on the “I Never” premise of these stories—was it like playing a much grittier, more intense version of that old childhood game “I Never,” or did the connection between these stories arise of its own accord? Something else altogether?

CRF: The title is a line from [a story in the collection] “Runaway.” In many ways, the main character of that story walks a narrow line. Is she guilty? Innocent? To what degree is she participating in her own exploitation? When she says, “I’ve never done this before,” it’s a transparently untrue statement, and one that she’s used throughout the story to disguise herself as a victim. Elsewhere in the collection, my characters experience their own firsts, or revisit choices that they lived to regret.

For people with alcoholism or addiction, it’s said that there are a lot of “yets.” I haven’t done that—yet. In active addiction, bad decisions and trouble are always around the corner. Someone may say, I’m not a thief, I don’t tell lies, I would never sell myself. But in reality, it’s really just a matter of time. My characters inhabit that space, the “yet,” and I think the title of the collection speaks to the condition of being in limbo, waiting for the next big wave to hit.

KMB: In “Fidelity,” your protagonist has these tremendous lists of things she is and isn’t interested in—being a widow, acting out her grief, getting a cat, etc. Do you create these kinds of lists and details for all of your protagonists, regardless of whether or not we readers ever get to know them?

CRF: As a writer, my practice is to be so intimate with my characters that I feel like I could zip myself into their skins. I don’t believe in writing “relatable” or “likeable” characters—there’s  a lot of pressure to do that, but the results are bland, as though the character was a Frankenstein created by some kind of focus group. Instead, I look closely at my character and try to imagine what he or she would do or say. In “Fidelity,” the protagonist is profoundly lonely. Her husband’s overdose has stranded her on the island of their marriage, all alone. She struggles to relate to new people, and when she finally meets someone who speaks her language, it becomes apparent how isolated she’s been.

I don’t create lists and details, but it’s easy for me to see my characters in my mind’s eye. I want to know everything about them—from what kinds of shoes they’re wearing, to why their parents gave them such a silly middle name. Just as with acting, even if these details occur offstage, they’re still critical to the development of the character.

KMB: You write very bravely in your introduction (as well as in your stories) about your struggles with drug and alcohol addiction, in particular how it made you feel as though you were “part of a long, sodden [literary] tradition.” In my own writing, I often find myself meeting characters who struggle with severe depression, yet I am constantly concerned about romanticizing this disease, knowing all the ways it has insinuated itself into various artistic traditions over the years. How do you approach this conflict in your own work?

CRF: Sickness is in the eye of the beholder. When I was in active addiction, drinking and getting loaded, of course I romanticized that. It kept me from loathing myself: I felt powerful, mysterious, complex. Like a real writer, whatever that is. Even as my drug use destroyed my brain and my body, I held onto the idea that I was part of something meaningful. I put my pain on a pedestal and worshipped it.

When I got sober in 2007, my perception towards addiction started to change. I saw that what I’d done was harmful to me, and had damaged the people around me, too. For me, there is no conflict in that. A reader or writer who has faced issues like addiction, depression, loss—she knows the reality of it. I try to represent my characters’ truths, and leave the reader to decide how honest they’re being with themselves.

KMB: Your story “Runaway” has a truly fascinating protagonist, a woman known to others as “Zombie Girl,” a woman with a “small black thing…crouched, waiting” inside of her, a woman who—even in her prettiest fantasy of being a girl who’s loved by her father, whose father would pamper her by letting her fly first-class—would compare herself to “a princess in a coffin that flies [to her love] over a blackened sea.” How did you approach a character like Zombie Girl? What was it like tackling a character like her, someone others would call “brain dead,” from first person point-of-view?

CRF: Here’s a joke. What do you get when you sober up a horse thief? A sober horse thief.

In the addiction and recovery genre, the trope of transformation—how working the 12 Steps or getting into treatment changes a filthy, wicked addict into a good, moral, sober person—is very popular. I’m sure it’s a reality for some people, but for me, and many other people, it is not. When I got sober, I became more myself, and I learned to make friends with that person. In “Runaway,” I’ve got a protagonist who is a criminal, through and through. I loved writing from Zombie Girl’s perspective because she is impenitent. She acts without regret, without second-guessing herself. If anything, being sober makes her more dangerous, because she’s able to think clearly again. Her mind is gorgeous and twisted. I will be revisiting this character in my next novel, Two Graves.

KMB: In your introduction, you talk about growing up immersed in a wide array of voices, from Alice Munro to Stephen King. What writers have been of particular influence on your work? Your process? Is there any particular author or book that you turn to whenever you find yourself stuck?

CRF: I’m a habitual re-reader of books: a familiar book is a good friend. I have a personal canon of about 20 books that I have read dozens of times. Every new year, my resolution is to read books I’ve never read before, and every year I’m moderately successful. Currently, I’m reading Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad, as well as a poetry collection by P.E. Garcia.

KMB: I was particularly struck by the story “Bereaved”—all those different ways to drown. I found myself wondering if the refrain of Danny’s constant phone calls was working as a sort of beacon or lifeboat for Angela, or as just another current dragging her under. Do you go into a story knowing what refrain you’re going to use (if any), or do you find that refrains are something that usually arise naturally, in their own time and space?

CRF: For Angela, Danny is a lifeline that tethers her to the shore. His presence in her life normalizes her: look, I have a boyfriend, we’re getting married, everything is fine. However, anyone could be in that role for her, and “The Bereaved” explores the relationships we have with people who are both interchangeable and irreplaceable.

My writing has been called lyrical. Protean. I’ve always been a language-driven writer, and played around with different sound patterns and sentence structures. Wordplay is really attractive to me, but I’ve also learned that it needs to be tempered with solid content. A plot, for example. The prose should be ornamental, not an obstacle to the reader’s pleasure. If I fall in love with a particular line, I listen to its music. I’ll let it hang in the air for a few paragraphs until its echo fades. Refrains work well in “The Bereaved” because my protagonist is going in circles, repeating the same choices. She’s the only one who doesn’t hear herself saying the same thing over and over again.

KMB: You wrote a (wonderfully honest and useful) article for The Review Review reflecting back on your choice to attain an MFA degree. Even with your ambivalence about the degree itself, did you find that there were some specific trick(s) or piece(s) of advice that you looked back to when working on this collection?

CRF: Benjamin Percy, who I met at this program, always told me “Keep hammering.” That’s really the best advice I got, or could give. Read a lot, write a lot, and keep hammering. As much as I regret going for a graduate degree in Creative Writing, the choice to make time for my writing was a big one. I wanted to get serious about my writing, and I did: I learned that a writer is someone who shows up to write, no matter what.

KMB: In your interview with SmokeLong Quarterly, you said that for you, “‘church’ is any place, emotional or physical, that we visit consistently because it feeds the sacred part of us.” Is writing a form of church for you?

CRF: Absolutely. A friend of mine says, “The end of your rope is a holy place, because that’s where you let go.” I feel that way about writing. To be immersed in words, whether I’m writing or reading, is total bliss for me. It connects me to my humanity by helping me forget myself. Everyone has a story—telling mine, or hearing yours, brings me closer to that holy place.

KMB: Superstition Review often asks their authors this question and I love it, so here, I’ve decided to steal it: What does your writing space look like? Do you find yourself generating new material in a different space than you edit in?

CRF: I’ve written in all kinds of places, with varying degrees of privacy. On some level, it doesn’t really matter to me—once I’m into the story, I’m gone. At this moment, my writing space looks like the bed my partner makes in the morning, with its flowered cover and dejected-looking pillows. It looks like a stack of books with a half-full water glass on top of it, a chocolate bar, and a window that looks out on my apartment’s parking lot. This is not a glamorous space, or a quiet one, but it’s mine. When you read “I’ve Never Done This Before,” my hope is that you feel enfolded, as though in bed, with each character whispering their secrets to you across the pillow that you share.


Claire-Rudy-FosterClaire Rudy Foster lives in Portland, Oregon. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing. Her critically recognized short fiction has appeared in various respected journals and she has been honored by several small presses, including a nomination for the Pushcart Prize. Her short story collection I’ve Never Done This Before was published in 2016 by The KLEN+SOBR Interventions. She is currently at work on a novel.
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K.C.-Mead-Brewer

K.C. Mead-Brewer lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Carve Magazine, Strange Horizons, Hobart, and elsewhere. As a reader, she loves everything weird—surrealism, sci-fi, horror, all the good stuff that shows change is not only possible, but inevitable. For more information, visit kcmeadbrewer.com and follow her @meadwriter.

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Published on October 5, 2016 in Interviews, Interviews with Fiction Writers. (Click for permalink.)

A CONVERSATION WITH KATHRYN KULPA, author of Girls on Film

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 15, 2016 by thwackSeptember 15, 2016

girls-on-film-coverA CONVERSATION WITH KATHRYN KULPA
author of Girls on Film
Paper Nautilus Press, 2015 Vella Chapbook Winner

interviewed by Michelle Fost

I had the chance to catch up with fellow Cleaver editor Kathryn Kulpa about her chapbook, Girls on Film. It is just out from Paper Nautilus and was a winner of the press’s Vella Chapbook Contest. An intriguing part of the prize is that the writer receives a hundred copies of the beautifully designed chapbook to distribute as she likes. Kathryn will be selling signed copies through her Etsy shop, BookishGirlGoods, and she’ll also have them available at readings, writing workshops, and other events. Paper Nautilus will also have the book on sale. For more about the Vella Chapbook contest and Paper Nautilus Press, have a look at the press’s website.—M.F.

MF: Congratulations on winning Paper Nautilus’s Vella Chapbook Contest, and the publication of Girls on Film. I wondered if you might talk a little about the process of writing the chapbook.

KK: All the pieces in the chapbook were already written, and most of them had been published by the time I put it together, so it was more a process of selecting and matching complementary stories to create a cohesive chapbook. Some of the stories, like the “Child Star” series (“Wendy in Rehab,” “Child Star,” and “Wendy and Brian on the Last Night of the World”) were written about the same characters. I wrote “Wendy in Rehab” first, and the characters stayed with me, so I kept returning to them. Since I knew those three went together, it was a good starting place, and then I looked at other stories that fit thematically. The contest had a limit of twenty-five pages, so I had to cut some stories I really liked, but that didn’t work with the others. It’s a good way to evaluate your work and see the recurring themes that thread through different stories.

MF: I was interested in the way children’s literature had a place in this work. Can you talk a little about that? You seemed to create a little Narnia in a swimming pool.

KK: Yes, exactly! I’ve always been a ridiculously passionate reader—the kind of person who’ll read cereal boxes if there’s no other reading material handy—and so many of my own childhood memories are tied in with books I was reading and the fantasy play that grew up around them. I’m often inspired by fairy tales and their more modern equivalents—comic books, movies, children’s and young adult literature—and the enduring myths they create. I actually have a newer piece that didn’t make it into the book, but that touches on the same theme, where I ask: “Who’d choose the man-village over the jungle? Who’d give up being kings and queens in Narnia to be solicitors and vicars’ wives in Wolverhampton? Who’d choose Kansas over Oz?” Not me—I’d choose Oz, or Narnia, or Hogwarts, in a heartbeat.

MF: You write of “hours of glorious neglect.” Wendy and Brian may have an exaggerated experience of a certain kind of parenting, but it feels true to the culture of the time, pre-helicopter parenting. I feel like you manage to show us nostalgia as a positive force, and I wondered if you would talk a little about the theme of nostalgia in your work.  

KK: It’s become kind of a cliche now—oh, kids of the 70s and 80s got to ride their bikes without helmets and stay outside all day without parents—and we did, but there was a dark side to that, for some kids more than others. So I have a true nostalgia for the freedom of that era, the unstructured, unscheduled time that, for some of us, opened the imagination. At the same time, I want to avoid romanticizing it, because there were a lot of Wendys and Brians, kids whose parents were just too self-involved or messed up to be there for them, and you don’t come out of that without some kind of damage.

MF: From black Maybelline eyeliner to yellow sunglasses, your use of color creates a visual progression through the pieces. Is visual art important to your writing? What are some of the themes and artistic elements that you find yourself returning to in newer work?

KK: Visual imagery is very important to me, and I’ve been told my work is cinematic—appropriate for this collection, of course. I have taken part in some ekphrastic poetry and art exhibits in Rhode Island, where writers were matched with visual artists and we created works inspired by their art, or they created art inspired by our writing. It was such a rich interplay. When I teach writing workshops, I often use old photos, postcards, or even found objects as writing prompts, and many of my own stories have grown out of those exercises. The yellow sunglasses image came from a teen writing workshop exercise where I asked students to freewrite images based on the color of a crayon they picked from a box of crayons. (I always do my own writing exercises with my students—it feels like cheating not to.) As far as recurring themes, I often find myself returning to the idea of coming of age, passages, doorways, bodies of water, things that are lost, the separateness of the self, connections and disconnections, orphans, and secret worlds that coexist with our own—which could be literal places or states of consciousness.

MF: Are there writers out there who are particularly important to what you’re up to?

KK: This is the kind of question I agonize about for weeks on end, so I’ll try to avoid listing every author who’s ever influenced me, which would be impossible, and just focus on a few books I’ve found a strong connection to lately. Short story collections I wish I’d written: A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin and 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl by Mona Awad. I just read a wonderful flash fiction collection by Joy Williams, Ninety-Nine Stories of God—she is not a writer I associate with flash fiction, so it was a joy (no pun) to discover this—all the pieces feel so fresh and effortless. Also, the novels Find Me by Laura van den Berg and Green Girl by Kate Zambreno: those are stories that let me fall into them like a wardrobe; I remember staying up all night to finish Green Girl and then wanting to stay up and write. Finally, what I’m reading right now: Kiss/Hierarchy, by Alexandra Van De Kamp—it’s a collection of poetry and prose poetry, some pieces that hover right on the edge of poetry and flash, and there’s a strong cinematic influence in many of them: poems about film noir or about the actress Jean Seberg. Alex has Rhode Island connections, and we met up there recently and noticed all these parallels in our work.

MF: I’d love to hear a little about the press, Paper Nautilus. How did you learn about them? And I’d love to hear a little about the look and feel of the chapbook.

KK: I saw the contest announcement online in a few writers’ forums, and I liked the name of the press—that caught my eye—and their aesthetic, and I just decided to try them. I was a finalist in 2014, and then I entered again in 2015 with two different chapbooks, and one was a finalist and Girls on Film was a winner. The editor, Lisa Mangini, is very respectful of writers, and she gave me a lot of freedom as to the design of the book. I had an idea of the look and feel I wanted for the cover, and I asked a friend, Gigi Thibodeau, who is a writer and photographer, to take some photos that would capture the kind of dreamy, vintage mood I wanted, and she did an incredible job. The mirror, the picture of the 1940s film star, the vintage perfume bottles and jewelry—I didn’t tell her to use those elements specifically, but when I saw those images, I knew they were right for the collection. I also had in mind a kind of DIY look, like 80s mix tapes and early zines, and Lisa found a label maker font that fit that aesthetic perfectly. 

MF: Any thoughts about the importance of places like Cleaver and Paper Nautilus for writers?   

KK: They’re huge. Small presses, lit mags, online journals—they are everything. When I was a kid and first started trying to be “a writer,” I would send my stories to The New Yorker and The Atlantic and even Ladies Home Journal, because those were the only magazines I knew of—the ones I saw in the magazine racks at CVS. Now there’s such a diversity of lit journals, and it’s so easy to find them online—not only online journals, but even print journals usually have some kind of online presence, so you can read examples of what they publish and learn about their style. It’s much easier for new writers to find a home for their work.

At the same time, the book publishing world has shrunk. There are fewer major publishers, and it feels like the ones that are left have become more conservative, more “brand” oriented, less willing to nurture new talent. But I think small presses are really coming into their own. There are more of them, and they’re publishing strong, exciting voices. Some of my writing friends have published work recently with Engine Books, Rain Mountain Press, and Jolly Fish Press, and I also have work in anthologies from Spider Road Press and Hyacinth Girl Press. That world is opening out, and I think it can only contribute to the diversity and vitality of contemporary literature.


kathryn-kulpaKathryn Kulpa is the author of Pleasant Drugs, a short story collection, and Who’s the Skirt?, a microfiction chapbook. She is the flash fiction editor at Cleaver and has published work recently in Smokelong Quarterly, The Flexible Persona, Carbon Culture Review, and Litro.

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Michelle-Fost-Author-PhotoMichelle Fost is a writer living in Toronto. Her fiction has appeared in The Painted Bride Quarterly and her book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Boston Phoenix Literary Section. She is a book review and fiction editor at Cleaver.

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Published on September 15, 2016 in Interviews, Interviews with Fiction Writers. (Click for permalink.)

Nathaniel Popkin: in Conversation with Translator LEE KLEIN

Cleaver Magazine Posted on July 27, 2016 by thwackFebruary 7, 2019

REvulsionNathaniel Popkin: in Conversation with Translator Lee Klein

REVULSION: THOMAS BERNHARD IN SAN SALVADOR
by Horacio Castellanos Moya
translated by Lee Klein
New Directions, 88 pages

NP: You’ve traveled to El Salvador, the subject of Revulsion. Did you know about the author Castellanos Moya?

LK: In 1995 I traveled by land from Austin, Texas (where I lived at the time) to Costa Rica and spent about a week in El Salvador en route south. I visited the beach at La Libertad described in the book and experienced San Salvador but I don’t remember seeing any book other than the one I was somewhat inappropriately reading at the time (Cheever’s big red collection of short stories). I hadn’t read Bernhard at that point. I hadn’t even heard of him. But six years later I became exposed to the Bernhard virus and started reading him like mad, hunting down copies (Vintage hadn’t re-issued new editions yet and the University of Chicago editions weren’t so easy to find, not even in NYC; in Iowa City, circa 2002 or ‘03, I found a first-edition hard cover of Gathering Evidence but not a single other Bernhard book in any of the town’s many bookstores, which, at the time, may have excessively disheartened me about humanity, as though I needed Bernhard to raise my spirits during the first G.W. Bush administration).

The first Moya I read was Senselessness in 2009 or 2010, attracted by Bernhard comparisons in reviews, but I didn’t really become aware of and, more so, driven to acquire a copy of El asco:  Thomas Bernhard en San Salvador until 2011 when I read Roberto Bolaño’s mini-review in Between Parentheses, the great/amazing/unpredictable Bolaño miscellany that came out that year. [Of El asco, Bolaño wrote, in Natasha Wimmer’s translation: “Its acid humor, like a Buster Keaton movie or a time bomb, threatens the hormonal stability of the idiots who, upon reading it, feel and irresistible urge to string the author up in the town square. Truly, I know of no great honor for a real writer.”]

It was definitely the Bernhard bit in the title that drew me to it. Bolaño also called Revulsion possibly Moya’s darkest and best. I wanted to read the fucker. I was surprised that no English version existed. So I ordered the original Spanish edition. But once I started reading, probably after a few pages, I wound up translating as I read, really enjoying the process of simultaneous reading and writing. When I mentioned this to friends, they expressed interest in reading whatever I produced in English, so I committed to translating the complete book—and once they read it they encouraged me to find a publisher. At first, it hadn’t really occurred to me to try to publish it. At first, I really only translated it for fun and for friends who are Moya and Bernhard fans.

NP: The success of this book was an accident, it seems. For Moya, creating a novel in Bernhard’s voice was a kind of fun diversion (but also a way to speak some truth about the condition of El Salvador). It’s an accident of fate that this book, for which he never expected to get any attention, is, in El Salvador, at least, exactly why he is famous, or infamous. This is confounding, I assume frustrating for him (he calls it a “stigma”). People have asked him to write versions for their own countries and cities, as if all that matters is the form. But I wonder to what degree that’s not the case, to what degree it’s a genuine condemnation of El Salvador, of an essential poverty of culture?

LK: I can’t really speak for the author. It’s probably half-joking/half-genuine condemnation and an attempt at writing like Bernhard, which everyone does after reading him for a while. The repetitive phrases infect your thought patterns. Phrases composed in emails while reading Bernhard start to seem distinctly Bernhardian. It’s one of the most virulent/infectious prose styles. Otherwise, anyone who has ever released a stream of bile over beers with friends knows it can be fun, therapeutic, truthful. Exaggeration is also an essential part of it. Bernhard, in the guise of his narrator in his masterpiece Extinction, proclaims himself to be “a great artist of exaggeration.” Everything is the worst thing ever. Everything obliterates the narrator’s sense of wellbeing, etc. Extreme statements are funny and often truthful in a way magnanimity can’t quite muster. In 2007, I wrote a screed called “Thomas Bernhard and the Necessity of Complaint,” about my first year in Philadelphia (2006), comparing the city to NYC, ranting about cheesesteaks and the general not-so-cultured vibe picked up on by my seriously anhedonic sensibility at the time. There’s definitely something “fun” about writing in this mode. It’s a liberating constraint. I think Joyce called it “jocoserious”—seriously joking—or at least it’s a term associated with Joyce. And lord knows the United States merits a serious “Revulsion” right now—an an epic rant about gun control in the style of Thomas Bernhard, taking aim in part at Trump and the larger situation (economic, political, psychological, spiritual) that makes him appealing to some people.

NP: In some regard it’s easy to write in this form, to attack obvious cultural tics—bad food and beer, the hordes majoring in business administration (in Nicaragua I met these people, from El Salvador)—is simplistic. The attack is base and distinctively under-nuanced; as in Bernhard, it aims at middle class mediocrity. This kind of writing isn’t supposed to be good, according to rules of fiction that eschew the broad brush. Yet it’s delicious, funny, and a bit addictive. So what is it about Bernhard, or Moya here, that works? Is it the self-parody? Why are you drawn to it?

LK: I’m not sure I agree that it’s simplistic, base, under-nuanced, or eschews brushes of a certain width. The word “nuance” derives from clouds. But a good rant is a laser that disperses (or, to use a better Bernhardian word, annihilates) whatsoever shades the sun. It’s easy to write a few pages in this mode but difficult to write 100+ pages of paragraphlessness that someone would be willing to read. A lot of the nuance/subtlety involves seeing around the narrator, that is, getting an idea of the sort of guy the narrator might be, why he’s ranting, why he’s so disturbed by cheap greasy food devoured like celestial manna (as Philly residents, we can probably relate to the obsessively devoted consumption of grease more than most). The repetition and ranting also supply lots of opportunities for humor—again, I’d say the narrator’s bile is a bit self-consciously overboard. Also, there’s nuance in that the narrator in this and in the best of Bernhard is not against everything: he’s in favor of the bartender, he’s in favor of the whiskey he drinks, he’s in favor of the classical music the bartender lets him play at the bar, and also, importantly, he suggests that he’s very much in favor of the absolute inverse of everything he rips. He’s ultimately a super-sensitive idealist, not a blowhard negatron, and this is essential to an appreciation of Revulsion or Bernhard. Similarly, once I started realizing that all the complaining people in Philly who seem to always say awcummawn all the time were tender flowers I started to come around on the city some more. Contempt and compassion are two sides of the same coin.

NP: I have to say this is an awfully smooth read (aside from the jarring “pleasure of the diatribe”). Moya’s prose, never mind in the voice of Bernhard, can race along, mounting in clauses and intensity. That may not be so easy to render in English. But you have done it—and I would say with more finesse than previous Moya translations—and this is your first book length translation. I suspect you found specific ways to do this with punctuation and word choice. Care to elaborate?

LK: Thanks, man, although I’m totally revolted by your sense of jarringnesshood: “with the pleasure of diatribe and mimicry” is a damn fine phrase! “Finesse” means intricate and refined delicacy, subtlety. I very much enjoyed reading Katherine Silver’s translations and admired them although I didn’t specifically compare her versions with the original Spanish texts to see what she was doing. They definitely seem to preserve the general sense of Moya’s quick and conversational yet sometimes thorny Spanish prose. I’m not well versed in translation theory in general but as a reader and a writer I tried to maintain dual loyalty to the original Spanish text in front of me and to unseen readers of the English version. At first the loyalty was more to the original but in the end, once everything was rendered in English, I switched into full-on English editorial mode, concerned with aerodynamic language, etc., creating an English version that read as smoothly as the original one did. The final edits with Declan Spring (the fantastically kind, clear, and expert New Directions editor) and Moya were interesting in that Declan pointed out spots where I may have been too loyal to the original, where the phrasing still seemed to have a foot in the Spanish, and Horacio pointed out where I may have been too loyal to the translated English, where I had veered somewhat from the original sense.

NP: This is a book of semblances, I suppose. There is the narrator, Vega, who, the reader is warned, is based on a real person of that name, and who, like the character Vega has moved to Canada and changed his name. There is the semblance of Bernhard all together, San Salvador for Salzburg, the character Moya’s hope to create a semblance of a European, or even Mexican, literary life in El Salvador. So I wonder if when translating you had at hand not only Moya’s Spanish text but also the work of Bernhard, the voice of Bernhard (as translated into English I gather unless you read German) to draw on. How did Bernhard factor into your process?

LK: “Semblances” is a 2666 word. In the Ansky section (Part V) of that novel, the word is repeated over the course of a paragraph almost in Bernhardian rant style: “when the fearful soothed their fears with semblances.” I love it. Such a cool word. Like a monarch butterfly camouflaging itself to look less like prey than a predator, in Revulsion’s case, someone who’s very much too sensitive for existence in El Salvador or maybe really anywhere other than abstract realms of art, music, literature, and whiskey, takes on the semblance of Thomas Bernhard, to the humorously exaggerated point of changing his name, to become more like a predator. It’s like dressing tough as self-defense but this narrator’s self-defense against spiritual degradation is to appropriate a ranting prose style—as a concept, that’s pretty funny. Vega, the narrator in Revulsion, might also be soothing his fear with semblances. Appropriating Bernhard’s style when feeling down and gone to seed or assaulted by spiritually degrading bullshit might not be the best thing for you but it helps, sort of the way a downtrodden populace might support extremists who seem to convey to them a sense of power. I’ve read nearly all of Bernhard and have celebrated his books by positioning them on the central shelf of my primary bookcase, literally and figuratively. Bernhard’s prose style is central to my literary intuition. “Semblances” is also central to translation, which at best is maybe like a monarch butterfly trying to disguise itself as another monarch butterfly. They’re not the same entities but ideally the second one seems a lot like the first.


Cleaver reviews editor Nathaniel Popkin is the author of five books, including the 2018 novel Everything is Borrowed, and co-editor (with Stephanie Feldman) of the anthology Who Will Speak for America? His essays and works of criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Kenyon Review, LitHub, Tablet Magazine, and Public Books. If you are an author or publicist seeking reviews or a writer hoping to write reviews for Cleaver, query Nathaniel.

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Published on July 27, 2016 in Interviews, Interviews with Fiction Writers. (Click for permalink.)

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