My one and only experience in Romania was five years after the fall of the iron curtain, the remnants of which were still weighty. Guns and gray were everywhere, and then there were stories of Ceaușescu and how he’d been the only person allowed to hunt bear. That night in the hills overlooking Brașov we ate bear from an enormous wooden board with raw garlic—because Ceaușescu was dead.

The Romanian government allowed Alex Pruteanu and his father to emigrate to the United States when Alex was ten years old (his mother had already defected), so it’s little wonder that Pruteanu’s narrative memory reaches back to salt mines and simple rural folk in his short fiction and verse collection Gears. While it’s impossible to fit all these stories and poems into a neat, ordered category, there is—as Pruteanu says himself—a theme of movement. I see this as usually young men travelling toward, for lack of a better expression, something better; yet I’m reluctant to say this assumes success. In fact, some of the US-set stories are about young men ruined by greed, drugs and perversion.

The 71 pieces that make up this pleasingly heavy collection are intricately crafted character studies, but they are also studies on culture and influence. This is not a collection you can read straight through in one sitting. The themes—oppression, existential angst, addiction and just staying alive in the modern world—are not light fare; which is not to say the stories make for difficult reading. The author’s prose style is remarkably readable.

Pruteanu’s stories about transient young men and The Old Country—a poor sobriquet, but maybe it’s fitting?—are more character/dialogue-oriented than the stories set in the United States, some of which (e.g. ‘Urban Legend’ and ‘The Informer’) read like a Tarantino screenplay transformed into a stream of consciousness narrative. Add poetry and an experimental piece one has to read upside down and backwards, and you’re holding in your hands an incredibly versatile collection.

These are stories of coming and going, leaving and arriving—of moving on? In fact, Gears is so global in scope that pinning it down is pointless. The opening to ‘Saints’, though, comes close to representing the collection’s narrative tone. Here you are:

First thing I ever did when I arrived in New Orleans was buy a bottle of cheap bourbon from the ABC to go with the cheap room in the cheap transients’ house on Josephine Street just at the edge of the Garden District. I set the bottle on the filthy table by the window and poured the golden juice into a small, dirty tumbler which I had packed in the duffel bag, and listened to Mahler’s 5th on my small radio.

I’ve chosen this passage because it demonstrates so many aspects of Pruteanu’s male characters, who are often highly educated Renaissance men who find themselves in transit, intoxicated and/or in rehab; but this passage also shows us the solid rhythm of the author’s prose.

The dialogue between mother and son in ‘The Osseous Tissue of Fish, Two Poems and One Song, How to Safeguard A House Key, They Drank Water Out of Jars, Where the Microphone is Hidden’—the title is almost as long as the story—effortlessly conveys the sound of these characters’ speech patterns. In fact, this is one of Pruteanu’s authorial assets: his natural ear for voices.

Great work. Important themes. Deadly, memorably serious.

___________________________________________

Christopher Allen is the author of Conversations with S. Teri O’Type (a Satire), an episodic adult cartoon about a man struggling with expectations. Available from Amazon.

We are pleased to welcome acclaimed and widely published poet Amy King to Writers on Craft today. Amy King is the author of five collections of poetry: Slaves to Do These Things, I’m the Man Who Loves You, and Antidotes for an Alibi (a Lambda Book Award finalist), all from Blazevox Books. Of her most recent book from Litmus Press, I Want to Make You Safe, John Ashbery described Amy King’s poems as bringing “abstractions to brilliant, jagged life, emerging into rather than out of the busyness of living.” Safe was one of the Boston Globe’s Best Poetry Books of 2011. The Missing Museum is forthcoming in 2014 from Kore Press. King teaches English & Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College, is a board member with VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, helps organize “The Count,” and moderates the Poetics List (SUNY-Buffalo/University of Pennsylvania), the Women’s Poetry Listserv (WOMPO) and the Goodreads Poetry! Group. She also co-edits Poets for Living Waters, an international poetry action in response to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and other ecological disasters. In 2012, King was honored by The Feminist Press as one of the “40 Under 40: The Future of Feminism” awardees.

What do you read when you despair at the state of either your work or modern literature–any “go to” texts?

I don’t despair.  I go to Diane Arbus, John Ashbery, James Baldwin, Roger Ballen, Charles Baudelaire, Leonora Carrington, Anne Carson, Claude Cahun, Hélène Cixous, Hannah Hoch, Leonor Fini, David Lynch, Frida Kahlo, Alice Notley, Tomaz Salamun, Gertrude Stein, Cesar Vallejo, Remedios Varo, Carrie Mae Weems and Francesca Woodman to escape ego-ruts. Some here are visual artists; some also write.  I read the visual, I read the lives, I read the text.  I’ve left musicians and everyone else out.

If you could give just one piece of advice to emerging authors about editing that has served you well, what would it be?

Advice feels prescriptive in possibly unhealthy ways lately.  If you’re in my proximity, say, in the form of a student or a writer pushing buttons, I offer challenges.  Teaching has helped me evolve some cursory challenges like: reverse the order of each line, make the last the first, etc.  Omit every other line. Turn each adjective and adverb into a fortune cookie fortune.  Delete every third word.  Sculpt another poem with deleted words.  Change your addressee from the president to your mother.  Editing is writing backwards.  Editing is writing.

How has your perception of what you “do” with your work changed as you have continued to write?

If perceptions don’t change, then death assumes responsibility. “Doing” is meeting the unstoppable force with the immovable object while writing a photo at the moment of handshake.  How you get there is to continue. “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”  Some call this curiousity. There are many ways to sidestep the takeover.  Enable the energy in paintings, music, objects, everything, along: words can unseat atoms.  I sometimes think in ekphrastic performances. Others, I choke back sense.  I carry on.  I continue.  I go on.     

What do you feel is the purpose of poetry/literature?

There are as many purposes as there are hearts with anterooms. There are as many anterooms as there are Russian dolls inhabiting them. Each doll’s heart has its own heart.  Each anteroom opens its heart. We are purposed with heart by opening anterooms. We are the dolls inside every heart.  How many is that?

As a human being, what is the best advice you have to offer?

Feel like this at least once when you write, if possible:

You may not believe in magic but something very strange is happening at this very moment. Your head has dissolved into thin air and I can see the rhododendrons through your stomach. It’s not that you are dead or anything dramatic like that, it is simply that you are fading away and I can’t even remember your name.

–Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

Also, consider the feasiblity of the golden rule.

I love how you embrace the visual arts under the umbrella of your influences—as well as the function of organized chaos in your editing advice. Lately, I’ve been reflecting on the careers of artists who continue to grow and morph, asserting their own right to move their artistic vehicles in whatever direction they’d like. Caryl Churchill, acclaimed playwright who prefers not to explain her work, is well-known for both sending along whatever she completes and having the liberation to avoid whatever aspects of a playwright’s life that she feels are intrusive to her creative will; it is almost as if she is using the enabled energy of a private creative space to protect that productive continuous self-reinvention as an artist that she prefers, turning out innovative work well into her golden years.  I think everyone with a strong will has strategies for keeping their art alive and vibrant. Do you also find that you protect your new projects or art strategies and shield them while they germinate such that their energy will not be diffused? How does your generative flow work? 

Just as water finds many paths, the generative flows in countless directions, depending on the day and the mountain or mind.  Sometimes talking shop with friends grounds perspective, builds momentum and vision; other times discussion roadblocks the work so that a glass of wine at a cafe table alone is a go-to.  Interaction through social media can act as a springboard; whereas workshopping with students might rupture the site where idea meets practice and the detritus shape-shifts, free-flowing for having begun with no agenda.  No one policy accesses a jackpot each time; I’m always on the lookout.

Flexibility has been my biggest asset, and likely renders my work less “marketable” for lack of an identifiable constant.  As in Wittgenstein’s definition of “games,” the work of “Amy King” varies, held together only by family resemblance.  Poetry is a permission with no agreed-upon purpose.  It is the physics between us, speculative and full of wonder, wrought through the medium of language.  Call it “negative capability,” “dérègelement de tous les sens,” “ostranenie” or “duende,” it is the excess that matter does not contain, but gets at, if handled just so at precisely so.  Poetry spans many mediums; hence my pursuit also through the visual and aural and my continued attraction to its mercurial essence.

What’s recently released or in the pipeline for your readers? Give us a sneak peek.

The Missing Museum will appear in 2014 from Kore Press.  Here are three poems:

 I CAN’T GO ON, I’LL GO ON

                  —Samuel Beckett

I’m walking through a field.

I see the swell of craggy trees, pot-bellied leaves, an open book, goose shit.

Inside me is a landscape replica, a compass mapped.

A lantern swings in the distance, despite the porous wind.

This baby takes over my steps, steps into my shoes,

and I walk “childlike” among the grasses,

echoing the earthworms, braying like donkey ears

on actor’s cue.  A bicycle passes by these accidental burial grounds.

Pineapples and tea roots never enter my mind;

they remain adult remains, unable to vine into my baby head & heart.

A child in the distance hands over a rotten token,

invites me to the Loop-de-Loop.

He wants to pass unnoticed, wants me to distract the barker

with an adult-head face.  Initial imitation, I am learning a coastal folk dance

with him while the child rides circles in the air between us.

What once was glass could become a bread or the quivering crystal rabbit

sitting on the table before us now.  The stew bubbles midnight’s snack.

My body becomes pregnant and physically alive.

The child harbors inside:  we are all fields, elk songs replete.

I feed peanuts to goatface interlopers.  We go for the hunt,

me and the boy with antlers tied to our ears.

The silent river nearby learns the ropes of favorite dance steps.

Elderberries ripen their favorite positions, our last minute call for shots

of forest whiskey and deficient sap to nourish

these limbs; the disintegrating lamb crawls out of the pot.

Full from light and the river’s abundant edges, we relax

in the day’s next morning to play pigeon with the birds & rock for a pause.

THAT I WILL LISTEN TO UNTIL

I’m doing it again, conceiving my own grammar, avoiding

the hardboiled heads of law-masters. Every time my own

turns to thought, I make mono-matter for the masses

I imagine will break the Shakespeare of just another day.

This isn’t to say I’ve got anything more than what’s going

for me.  But let’s not praise too soon the mighty men

women aspire to – I take on my hunchback pack

the menial jobs in a recession where others fear to kneel.

Not to say those who hold back with macaroni and cheap nuts

aren’t inventing the new star splatter in the gaps

of how this economy will go local post belly up soon though.

We may even go a-bartering again. Some do something ancient then.

Remember the time you told me color comes alive

at Carlsbad Flower Fields in a sea of stinking crisp flower blankets

when the coastal hill becomes a handcrafted quilt?  I had never

been to California before.  I didn’t believe you

until I read Larry Levis threw the editorial page in the street,

watched him pull up Pierre Reverdy to see his knees and pissed

on the bed of green hay stitched around the hill’s swollen ankles.

This kind of working farm subsists because someone has refused

to give up the practice of peyote and painting in New Mexico

when New York City was supposed to be her only meal ticket, at least,

according to Steiglitz.  She left there forever and found loneliness

in the ancient wisdom called hope.  Both remain pivotal arts to date.

But back to how words go together.  We met over

the new tsunamis when people became

much like the Black Plague numbers.  Except there were more

expendables to date, so no need to call up the old country poor

to burn and lime the body count.  We began discussing how

to rid the hillsides of ash and bone fragments

as they were soon weighing the colors down and counting out

Hollywood’s insignia.  Even the presidents’ faces fell off.

The Americans stood alone then on the global market,

fishing for ways to get back the hatchets they once used at root.

They, as in we, were considered contagions until

the worldwide web was torn asunder and barriers against

nanobots improved.  Our children’s children echoed a nostalgia

for concepts waning:  half-drunk wine, smoky meats

and the symbolic gesture of touch.  A place where men wear

lime-green pants, brimmed hats, and candy-striped pullovers.

They protested, But God does exist as much as angels

and plans patterned by the local neighborhood board

to live the two-kids-house-dog-college dream or

any other golden fragment enlisted

as the future Who We Will Be Then.

We will be then, but before it happens, we keep happening now

in the limoncellos we sip, the late-night gut aches,

the false handshakes over business economies, the difference

between pianos played, apples eaten and profits on paper.

But we go better for the yellow fields rife with daisies that still exist,

jeans that hint at splendor, the swell of an unplanned smile

across a train platform, how the herbs and grains still feel as ancient

and right as when we, on afternoons, go down to meet the sun

at just the right angle, that space where we lose track

of grammar and the cost of what it is to have

not as much as the next town over, to bend closer and take in

the way your bent arm smells in the long hot sun,

opened by how the tiny soul fills out your skeleton

with the warming sounds of blanket words that I will listen to until.

WE WILL NEVER FULLY RECOVER

 Because the light resembles marmalade,

the zeitgeist dips gelatinous between our ribs

and makes us speak.  My sister is not gay.

My daughter is not gay.  I enjoy the war

of this party.  My husband’s not gay.

My self is not gay.  I will never be as important

to you as your family.  Please, more chips & aperitif.

This gathering will be finger foods only,

nothing more substantial to speak the appetite

or test one’s endurance with manners.

I don’t have a dog in this fight; my sister

is post–gay only.  I’m merely a gnat sans trench coat

in a small bony space crossing letters out.

The anti-Vanna White.  Even if you don’t remember,

you sleep through memory nightly.  You sleep

through me and feel your Pinot Noir all the way

back to Napa Valley.  Because the total square root

of heat is light that turns a grape

into strains of bottled affection, I hold you

close, stroke your estimations, even before

the growls of this party deliver its host

from the assumption of body, pull us

into her white-hot affection, and whether we

believe or only gesture the Eucharist, our sex

goes gay for all objects in contact.

My husband goes gay, his nipples get bothered,

my brother is gay, he’s a leg length in bathtubs,

my grandmother’s grave echoes with gay—

her silky epitaph and flowers.  Gay is the next

pro-creation, save where the bombs and guns

illuminate people harnessed by fatigues

and futures without pay, futures without gay,

death in an imminent trigger. The unemployed also

party less gay when fairies are unable to boot-camp.

Writers on Craft is hosted by Heather Fowler, who cares about writing.  She does a lot of it.  Visit her profile on Fictionaut or see here for more: www.heatherfowlerwrites.com.

Michelle Elvy, Linda Simoni-Wastila, and Christopher Allen are hosting FLASH MOB 2013 in celebration of International Flash Fiction Day. Deadline for submissions is June 10.

Alice Boatwright’s Collateral Damage won the Bronze Medal for Literary Fiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards.

Gloria Garfunkel’s story “Great Expectations” is forthcoming in Camroc Press Review.

Tantra Bensko has stories forthcoming in Birkensnake, Women Writing the Weird, Imperial Youth Review, Camroc Review, Mad Hatters Review Annual, Literary Orphans, the anthologies Not Somewhere Else But Here (Sundress), and Looking Back, and an e-book from Sein und Werden, Guest Edited by Rhys Hughes. Her story was recently published in Red Fez. She also has a novel forthcoming from Dog Horn, named Unside: a book of closed time-like curves, and a collection from Make-Do, called Yard Man.

LucidPlay Press, run by Tantra, has released a chapbook anthology called Word Swell, and includes work by John Olson, Bill Yarrow, Gloria Garfunkle, Epiphany Ferrell, Rhys Hughes, Owen Kaelin, Sara Fitzpatrick Comito, and Michael Seidel. It is available for free here, and contains art by Joanna Husbands, Amir Catic, and Doming.

Brian Michael has work forthcoming in NFTU (Notes From The Underground) and Misjudge Your Limits.

Bill Yarrow has recent poems in Treehouse, Contrary,After Hours, The Jewish Journal, Reprint Magazine, and OF ZOOS. Two chapbooks (Twenty from MadHat Press and Incompetent Translations and Inept Haiku from Červená Barva Press) are forthcoming in 2013.

Derek Osborne reviews Marcus Speh’s Thank You For Your Sperm at Gertrude’s Flat.

Marcelle Heath is a contributing editor for Fictionaut and Editor-at-Large for Luna Park Review. Her stories have appeared in PANK, Wigleaf, Snake Nation Review, Matchbook, Necessary Fiction, and other journals. She works as a freelance editor in Portland, Oregon. She blogs here. This will be Marcelle’s last column for the Fictionaut blog.

Though Thelma Ryan later married Richard Nixon and went through a life of nick names both with and before she met him—they were married more than 50 years—dubbing herself Patricia while yet in college—“Buddy,” “Miss Vagabond,” “Irish Gypsy,” “St. Patrick’s Babe in the Morn,” “Babe,” “Pat,” “Miss Pat,” “Patricia,” “Dearest Heart,” “The White Sister,” and “Starlight”—it seems inevitable that the not-novel, not-biography, not-memoir written by Ann Beattie and bearing the former first lady’s name would be called Mrs. Nixon, befitting both the era she occupied and her formal distance yet iconic status in the public’s mind.

As soon as I understood that Ann Beattie had written a book called Mrs. Nixon, I did not believe, as some readers may have, that she had written a novel about Pat Nixon.  I knew it was about Pat Nixon, wife of Richard Nixon, but I thought it was more likely a biography, and I asked, instantly, why has the famous minimalist short story writer turned to writing biography?  Then I recalled that I had read that Lydia Davis, too, has shown an interest in it, and Virginia Woolf had famously praised the art of biography in her criticism.  I could not quite have imagined that the book Beattie turned out is not a biography or novel or memoir or how-to write manual, but a pastiche of all these, set forth in what might be an unprecedented blend of prose genres and elements.  It was written, and not only written but produced, against certain odds and with a certain bravery.  It defies not only the expectations of Beattie’s own readers, readers’ readers who follow her through all her guises and stylistic innovations, from story to story, hooked on the next manifestation of her thinking in fiction; it was also written in defiance of expectations of fiction itself, of biography itself, and of how-to write manuals.  It could be a blue print for how to write a how-to write manual, one that demonstrates the discipline of sticking with facts and filling in their gaps with plausible, from a realist angle, conjectures about life lived between known lines.  The duty to stay with reality is stronger in writing about a public figure, one who will forever be in the pantheon of history, than it is in writing about a private citizen or even famous actor, artist, or musician, whose inclusion in history seems predicated on taste over time.  Beattie sidesteps the danger of replacing fact with fiction.

Reviews of Ann Beattie’s book seem divided—Beattie has this time both wittily perplexed and offended reviewers at The New York Times.  By contrast, throughout the blogosphere, Beattie’s conceit, writing about Pat Nixon “as a paper doll,” as Michiko Kakutani describes it unsympathetically, garners significant appreciation as fictional experiment.  It comes as a surprise to most of her readers that Beattie departs so completely from her usual style in writing fiction, but as I reflect, it does not surprise me.  Years ago, at least ten, researching on the Internet for a possible anthology of essays by writers of experimental fiction, I came across Ann Beattie’s name more than twice and more than that of any other fiction writer of similar standing.  It seems her interest in the experimental came before her implementation of it in Mrs. Nixon.

In her preface to her essay, “A Thought is the Bride to What Thinking,” Lynn Hejinian writes, “Prose is not a genre but a multitude of genres. […]Intrinsic to the existence of boundless multitudes is the impossibility of comprehensiveness and therefore of comprehension.”  I feel that Beattie combines prose genres in Mrs. Nixon in ways that give forth to the infinite possibilities of prose itself.  Juxtaposition is one way; listing another; speculative nonfiction and fiction two others (speculative may refer here to guessing about a real life, facts that cannot be known but that can be surmised with the educated eye of a novelist).  Beattie also accesses literature: exegeses of Raymond Carver, Anton Chekhov, Tennessee Williams, Guy de Maupassant, and others lend to her pursuit of the quiet and unassuming, hardworking farm girl who grew up to become first lady.

What is perhaps most surprising about the book is that the joke of its title—a joke not told at Pat Nixon’s expense but about her rise to prim dominance in American culture—is sustained as a book-length carapace rather than as a one-liner or humorous title never written.  It is an experiment laid out for study and recreation.

Ann Bogle has been a member at Fictionaut since July 2009.  She is fiction reader at Drunken Boat, creative nonfiction and book reviews editor at Mad Hatters’ Review, and served formerly as fiction editor at Women Writers: a Zine. She earned her M.F.A. in fiction at the University of Houston in 1994.  Her stories have appeared in journals including Blip, Wigleaf, Metazen, Istanbul Literary Review, The Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Fiction International, Big Bridge, Thrice Fiction, fwriction : review, THIS Literary Magazine, and others.  Her short collections of stories, Solzhenitsyn Jukebox and Country Without a Name, were published by Argotist Ebooks in 2010 and 2011. Books at Fictionaut features reviews of books published by Fictionaut contributors.  A shorter version of this review appeared in the Fiction Reviews section of the print-only version of Rain Taxi, Vol. 17, No. 1, Spring 2012.

We are pleased to welcome published author Roy Kesey to Writers on Craft today. His latest book is a short story collection called Any Deadly Thing, published in February 2013 by Dzanc Books. His other books include the novel  Pacazo (winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award), All Over, a collection of short stories (one of The L Magazine’s Best Books of the Decade), a novella called Nothing in the World (winner of the Bullfight Media Little Book Award), and two historical guidebooks. His short stories, essays, translations and poems have appeared in more than a hundred magazines and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories and The Robert Olen Butler Prize Anthology. He currently lives in Maryland with his wife and children.

What do you read when you despair at the state of either your work or modern literature–any “go to” texts?

I can’t imagine despairing at something as varied and vivid and unshakably present as modern literature—can’t imagine how that despair would come to be, or what form it would take, or what would be the point. But, sure, lots of go-to texts, regardless of how my own work is going. Some of the fiction: Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Carson’s Nox, Barthelme’s Sixty Stories, Cortázar’s Rayuela, Morrison’s Beloved, Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, Duras’ L’Amant, Williams’ Vicky Swanky is a Beauty, Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, Robinson’s Housekeeping…

If you could give just one piece of advice to emerging authors about editing that has served you well, what would it be?

 1a. It’s never, ever, ever good enough. Work on a draft until you reach a point of preposterously diminished returns. Then let it sit a month, and start a new draft.

1b. Never take advice from other writers. They only know what worked (or didn’t) for them the last time they tried.

Has your way of finding a path into new work changed over time?

Not really—not at the levels that matter. I guess maybe I do a bit more arc-thinking than I used to, both across a given text and amongst related texts, but down in the mud of actual writing, it’s the same as ever: get a new bit of diction incoming, and hang on tight.

What do you feel is the purpose of literature?

We make ourselves manifest in the world, and confirm ourselves manifest t/here, in tons of ways. Literature is the smartest and coolest and funnest of the ways. Also, the best kisser. Of course, I say that as a person who does not know how to paint or design buildings or compose music or sculpt or manufacture or plumb or garden or bowl.

As a human being, what is the best advice you have to offer?

Stop, drop, and roll.

You write poetry, essays, historical guidebooks, stories, novels, and more. What usually sparks your decision to follow a given impulse on any given writing day?

Deadlines and contracts help. There’s great impetus to be found in knowing that someone else, generally someone I like and respect, can’t start doing their job until I finish doing mine. And the closer something gets to being finished, the more important it is to me to see it through—to make sure that all those hours/months/years of time and energy and desire pay off in the form of some new and hopefully worthy thing coming into the world.

Beyond that, it’s just a matter of finding something (in the world, on a bookshelf, in the fat file of “Stuff Underway” or the fatter one called “Good Ideas?”) that radiates urgency of some kind—aesthetic, intellectual, emotional, whatever. So that’s Project A. I usually only work on a single thing on any given day, and I’ll work on Project A every day until a given draft is done. Then I’ll set it aside and head to the world/bookshelf/files to find Project B. I’m always eager to get back to Project A, though, and will make excuses to work on it again as soon as I feel like the old draft is anywhere near ripe enough.

What’s recently released or in the pipeline for your readers? Give us a sneak peek.

In the pipeline: a novella, a novel, a translation, all at different stages of projectness. As for recently released, here’s a little chunk from the start of “Nipparpoq,” a story first published a few years back in a fantastic magazine called Ninth Letter, and now appearing in Any Deadly Thing, my new collection from Dzanc.

“It is nearly dark. Stand very still. There is nothing that can be done about the cold. It has been nearly dark for the past twelve hours, and soon it will be completely dark. Stand very still and do not think about the cold.”

Writers on Craft is hosted by Heather Fowler, who cares about writing.  She does a lot of it.  Visit her profile on Fictionaut or see here for more: www.heatherfowlerwrites.com.

Sally Houtman has work appearing or forthcoming in Prime Number Magazine, Sheepshead Review, Red Fez, Mused: The Bella Online Literary Review, Flash Frontier, Oh, Sandy! An Anthology of Humor for a Serious Purpose, 94 Creations, Sakura Review, and Natural Bridge. Her story “The sky on that day” was nominated for a 2012 Pushcart Prize. She is interviewed at Flash Frontier.

Sheldon Lee Compton is the recipient of The Appalachian Days Fiction Award, hosted by The Cut-Thru Review.

Joani Reese read for National Poetry Month with Jen Knox and Meg Tuite at the Eastfield College Spring Literary Festival and Collin College. Three flash fiction pieces were recently published at JMWW and three poems by Unshod Quills.

Robert Vaughan read a poem a day from all different poets at One Writer’s Life for National Poetry Month; “Gauze, A Dressing, A Scrim” won 2nd place in the Flash Fiction Chronicles’ String-of-Ten Five contest and he is interviewed here; Robert co-hosted the Middle Coast Poets Reading Series in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; he is also interviewed about his new chapbook, Microtones, on WUWM’s Lake Effect.

Marcus Speh’s Thank You For Your Sperm, published by MadHat Press, is now available at Amazon with blurbs by Fictionaut members James Robison, Kathy Fish, Bill Yarrow, John Minichillo, and Jürgen Fauth; his flash “Mooning” is published in Dog-Ear; and his essay “The Vonnegut Challenge” is published in Yareah.

Kate Hill Cantrill’s short story collection Walk Back From Monkey School is reviewed by The Short Review and featured in Shelf Unbound; Kate is a finalist in the Gertrude Stein Award selected by Rick Moody and has an essay published in the TJ Eckleburg Review (as a part of that contest); she has two poems published in Metazen.

Gloria Garfunkel’s “Writer Conversation with husband” is published by Red Fez; “Spaghetti Woman” is forthcoming in a chapbook fom LucidPlay; “Birds of Prayer 8: The Miracle of Flight” is published by Olentangy Review; and “No Sanctuary” is forthcoming in Jewish Fiction.net.

Marcelle Heath is a contributing editor for Fictionaut and Editor-at-Large for Luna Park Review. Her stories have appeared in PANK, Wigleaf, Snake Nation Review, Matchbook, Necessary Fiction, and other journals. She works as a freelance editor in Portland, Oregon. She blogs here.

There are times when we think we must change life’s rules to make sense of death, to restore order and to replace what we’ve lost. Claire King’s The Night Rainbow (Bloomsbury), narrated by the almost-six-year-old Pea, is like a little girl’s tea party where the guests are all guardian angels.

And she needs them. Her Maman (mother)—nine months pregnant—languishes in her bed, leaving Pea to prepare her own meals, to make her own friends and most of all to cope with her own loneliness. When the mother occasionally emerges from her bedroom, she’s overwhelmed, morose and listless. Her troubles, though, explain her way of dealing with her pain well enough. She has just lost her partner in a tractor accident and a baby in childbirth; and to make matters worse, she might lose her home as well.

As a narrative device, the potential of the new baby to replace, in Pea’s words, the one that wasn’t good enough, pulls the story forward, toward what the reader hopes will be a happy end. We hope the mother will do what’s right for her family. We hope these characters will all get through their grief. We hope they’ll begin to talk to one another in a civil manner—following the example of Margot, Pea’s new friend.

Pea and Margot have a challenge. They will go through all the things that might make Maman happy again until they find the perfect one. It’s Margot’s idea. Of the two, Margot is the rational one. Though a year younger than Pea, she is a precocious and stabilizing presence in the narrator’s life. She’s the age Pea might have been when the rules started changing, when Pea’s baby sister didn’t come home with her mother from the hospital and when the hugs stopped coming from the father figure in her life. Margot fills these voids with intelligence, endearing politeness and childlike logic. She accompanies Pea on their trips to the Windy Hill and the Low Meadow, where they meet Claude, a physically and aromatically ugly man who brings them treats and creates the girls’ nest for them. In the words of one character, this situation seems unnatural—and it does seem a precarious one.   

And I think we are encouraged in The Night Rainbow to wonder what is natural and what isn’t. Pea and Margot’s natural surroundings—the flowers, the trees, the birds, and the insects—stand in stark contrast to the untimely, unnatural deaths that hang over Maman and their new friend Claude. Pea describes her world to us in a manner that suggests a former, happy—natural?—life with her parents, where they went on long walks and learned the names of things. Pea’s life now is a waiting game she doesn’t really know how to play, and her mother’s not helping her to learn the rules.

While I’m tempted to see this story as one primarily meant for mothers and daughters, I cried—and to be clear, I am a man—at the moment one character breaks the rules and does what he knows to be right despite how it might look. And, yes, I’m being purposefully vague. There are quite a few surprises in this story. I find myself tiptoeing around spoilers, as if they are mossy stepping stones across a brook, as if I might slip and ruin everything—so I’ll stop here to let you join Pea and her tea party yourself.

The Night Rainbow (Claire King, Bloomsbury) is available in bookshops and on the web.

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Christopher Allen is the managing editor at Metazen and the author of the absurdist satire Conversations with S. Teri O’Type, the story of a man struggling with expectations.   

Writers on Craft is a new monthly interview series that concerns itself with querying a diverse population of published authors to speak to their perceptions about the nature of craft—and their view on the significance of literature, particularly those who’ve been in the practice of writing for quite some time and actively engaged in the community of American arts and letters.  To show the variance in response between authors in different genres and fields of creative writing, six questions will be standard, with one “black box” question that differs for each interview.  Writers on Craft is hosted by Heather Fowler.

We are pleased to welcome bestselling author Carolyn Turgeon to the Fictionaut blog today for our first installment and thank her for joining us.

Carolyn Turgeon has published four novels, three for adults – Rain Village (2006), Godmother: The Secret Cinderella Story(2009), Mermaid (2011) — and one for middle-schoolers, The Next Full Moon (2012). Her next novel, The Fairest of Them All, will be out in August 2013 from Touchstone/Simon & Schuster. She is also a faculty member at the University of Alaska at Anchorage’s Low-Residency MFA Program and teaches private writing workshops in State College, PA, in addition to hosting her profound and illuminating I Am A Mermaid blog.

What do you read when you despair at the state of either your work or modern literature–any “go to” texts?

I don’t really despair about literature. I feel that there’s beautiful stuff being produced all the time, an overabundance of it in fact. But the state of modern publishing is another matter. There is so much anxiety already surrounding publishing books and worrying about their reception and what the sales will be, and then there is always some new bit of dire news about copyright laws or ebooks or your own publisher in a battle with the largest bookstore in the country (my next book comes out in August from Simon & Schuster, currently in a dispute with Barnes & Noble)… I can definitely get caught up in that anxiety and have to remind myself why I do all this in the first place, why I write these books and work so hard to get them where I want them to be and put all that effort into trying to promote them. I have to remind myself that I love books and stories, an image or a captured emotion or a turn of phrase that makes me lose my breath. I love them.

My favorite, favorite writings, the ones I can count on to ground me and remind me of why I love literature so much, are these, most of them writings I fell in love with as a teenager: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the story “The Distance of the Moon” by Italo Calvino, The Stories of Eva Luna by Isabel Allende, “La Lupa” by Giovanni Verga, Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales, all poetry by Lorca, Boccaccio’s The Decameron, T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” and then the stuff I studied in graduate school, medieval Italian poetry and Victorian poetry, all that swoony Tennyson and Robert Browning and Dante Rossetti. And I love love love myths and fairy tales. Of course.

If you could give just one piece of advice to emerging authors about editing that has served you well, what would it be?

If it’s about editing specifically, I would say this: to really revise, you’ll have to take that complete, shimmering first draft that you spent so much time assembling and you’ll have to rip it apart, and it will hurt. You have to detach and be merciless—cut lines or scenes or whole chapters that don’t work, even if you love them, even if you spent countless hours putting them together, and let the book just fall apart and be horrible. And then you put it back together again, cleaner and sleeker and doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.

What’s hard is that you have to be raw and open and soft to write, and then just blade-sharp and murderous to edit.

How has your perception of what you “do” with your work changed as you have continued to write?

I’m not sure. I just want to keep writing books that are, to me, beautiful, that transport readers to another time and place and sensibility. I’ve had to work hard at plot and structure, though, in telling a story with plenty of twists and turns that maintains suspense throughout and ends up somewhere satisfying. When I started, I could focus on one page to the next, but I got dizzy and completely disoriented when trying to see the big picture. As I write more and more books, I feel more confident about my ability to plot a book and see it from beginning to end, and so I feel like I can experiment more, try new things. I would love to write a screenplay, a play, a graphic novel…. everything!

What do you feel is the purpose of literature?

I think we’re trapped in our bodies, our lives, our own narratives and particular sets of circumstances and that we’re always longing to transcend them and connect with something larger. Story is the best way I know to become completely immersed in another person’s consciousness, to escape the self and expand into the world at large. And to experience, just for a moment, what it is to be completely alien from what we are. When it comes down to it, I think most of our impulses can be traced back to this longing for transcendence.

As a human being, what is the best advice you have to offer?

I think some of the best general this-is-how-you-should-live advice I’ve heard is from the Malcolm Middleton song “Loneliness Shines”:

I think I’ve cracked it, we are what we do
We’re made up of actions, there are no rules
Don’t stand on heads to get higher
Listen to your angels, spread through life like a fire

But if I have to give my own answer, it’s this: to remember that you will die, that you might die today, that everything is fleeting, that you will love people and lose them, that you can’t take anything for granted—not anything at all—and then live accordingly, with all the passion and compassion and bravery and forgiveness and love and humility and appreciation that such a dire set of circumstances demands!

Also: get enough sleep and drink a lot of water. And don’t be an asshole.

As a teacher of creative writing, do you think the enthusiasm of students toward the craft and your direct interaction with their work informs your sense of the marvelous overabundance of wonderful work available now, or soon to be?  And do you write while you are teaching or keep those windows separate?

I teach in the University of Alaska at Anchorage’s Low-Residency MFA program, so I’m not a full-time teacher, really. I spend two weeks every July in Anchorage participating in the annual residency, and there I give a couple of talks, give a reading, lead a few workshops and meet with students, who are learning about each faculty member and deciding whom they’d like to work with during the upcoming year—and I spend the rest of that time listening to all the other talks and readings. Which is great. I sit there taking notes and being inspired and I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do it, and I’m forever grateful to novelist Jo-Ann Mapson for bringing me into the program. Those two weeks always put me in touch again with the fact that I really love writing and story and make me feel lucky that I get to do this, whereas generally there is so much anxiety and drudgery wrapped up in it that I can forget that. And of course a large part of that is the students, with all their excitement and passion, their endless ideas, and the faculty, too, which is so diverse. I mean there’s Jo-Ann, who writes her wise, rich, slipping-into-a-hot-bath novels, there’s the poet Anne Caston, who is so sweet and funny and then rips your heart out with her devastating, beautiful poetry, there’s Craig Childs who’s always traipsing around the world thinking about ancient civilizations and earthly mysteries. And plenty more. It’s just inspiring to be around all of that energy, all at once.

The rest of the year, I correspond with a few students who have me as their mentor, and they send stories or novel excerpts according to an agreed-upon schedule and I give them feedback. That’s easy, I’ve been doing the same thing for years with my writer friends, I’m used to always having a little stack of writing to read and give  feedback on, and I think that’s important, those ways we help and nurture each other. Plus it forces me to think critically about writing in ways I might not do just on my own. So that, to me, is just part of the writing life, only with these students—who are out there struggling to put their visions down on paper, just like the rest of us—I happen to get paid for it.

What’s recently released or in the pipeline for your readers? Give us a sneak peek.

Well my fifth novel, The Fairest of Them All, comes out on August 6 from Touchstone/Simon & Schuster. It’s about Rapunzel growing up to be Snow White’s stepmother, complete with magic mirrors and heart-eating. I’ve written other fairy tales but this is the first time I’ve combined two of them. It makes perfect sense, though: Rapunzel’s raised by a witch in the woods so of course is a witch herself, and she’s young and blindingly gorgeous, that’s why the prince loves her, and, really, what is going to happen to her once she has her happy ending and rides off with him? She’s going to get older. Bad things happen when women get older, in fairy tales. For a sneak peek you can read the one-page prologue here: http://carolynturgeon.com/books/the-fairest-of-them-all/excerpt/.

I also just turned in the proposal for my next book, which is the “real” story of Dante’s Beatrice (the historical woman from The Divine Comedy and other poetry, a woman we know next to nothing about). I’ve been wanting to write this book for years, and I feel like I had to write all the other books to write this one now.

Writers on Craft is hosted by Heather Fowler, who cares about writing.  She does a lot of it.  Visit her profile on Fictionaut or see here for more:  www.heatherfowlerwrites.com.

Heather Fowler’s second collection of magical realism, People With Holes, is a finalist in the Foreword Reviews Book of the Year Award 2012 for short fiction; Heather’s third collection, This Time, While We’re Awake, feminist dystopias, is published by Aqueous Books; her fourth collection, Elegantly Naked in My Sexy Mental Illness, a collaborative vehicle with custom artwork by artist Pablo Vision, is forthcoming by Queen’s Ferry Press.

Gloria Garfunkel’s “Tales of Resistance” appears in Pure Slush’s April issue on Ego.

Lillian Ann Slugocki and Deborah Oster Pannell discuss Exquisite Foolishness at VIDA’s Her Kind for “The Conversation.”

Lynn Beighley’s charity anthology to raise money for those affected by Hurricane Sandy is available.

Gessy Alvarez has stories forthcoming and published at Thrice Fiction (“The Happy Couple”), Camroc Press Review (“Childless”), and Bartleby Snopes (“Little Helper“). Nathaniel Tower reads Gessy’s story at Cold Reads.

Andrew Stancek was Featured Author for March at Pure Slush. His three stories dealing with fashion, starring Slava and Dorota are here. Andrew’s story “Wings” appears in the new Boston Literary Magazine.

Sally Houtman has work appearing or forthcoming in Red Fez, Mused: The Bella Online Literary Review, Flash Frontier, Oh, Sandy!, 94 Creations, Sakura Review, and Natural Bridge. Sally’s story “The sky on that day” was nominated for a 2012 Pushcart Prize. She is interviewed at Flash Frontier

Roberto C. Garcia’s chapbook, amores gitano, is available at Cervena Barva Press.

Marcus Speh’s “Linguistic cross-dressing“ is published by Yareah Magazine.

Christopher Allen’s winning entry in the AWP Heat Flash Contest is forthcoming in Prime Number Magazine.

James Claffey’s “a nod is as good as a wink” is published by Literary Orphans, “bed-making” by Linnet’s Wings, “roadkill” by Prick of the Spindle, “seven times in circular motion“ by Everdayotherthings, “spoon-fed saliva“ by Drunk Monkeys, “a rusted hinge“ appears in The Nervous Breakdown, “the log-bright night“ is at Matter Press, and Blood a Cold Blue is forthcoming by Press 53.

Marcelle Heath is a contributing editor for Fictionaut and Editor-at-Large for Luna Park Review. Her stories have appeared in PANK, Wigleaf, Snake Nation Review, Matchbook, Necessary Fiction, and other journals. She works as a freelance editor in Portland, Oregon. She blogs here.

If you’ve ever heard Robert Vaughan read, you’ll know that sound plays a critical role in creating the texture and substance of his work. Vaughan’s first chapbook, Microtones—another is scheduled for publication this summer—is a collection of twenty-four moments of sound, of speakers caught up in the dissonance and consonance of memory. Together these tones form a story and a familial history—one might even say, to steal a line from Vaughan’s ‘Elements of K,’ “an entire family, harmonizing like the Van Trapps.”

And they are intimate treatments of these families’ microhistories, many of which are devoted to fathers and mothers. It would be an oversimplification to say these pieces are elegiac; but it is not stretching to say mothers hold a more comfortable place in the speakers’ memories than fathers do, the latter often characterized as stolid (‘When the Time Comes’), cold and pragmatic (‘Part of Life: Two Ways’), missing (‘My Bicycle’) or drunk (‘Wrestling with Genetics’). It is important, at least in my opinion, to see that ‘Wrestling with Genetics,’ the last piece in the chapbook, finally puts father and son in the same text as adults—and finally the son wrestles not only genetics but also memory to the ground . . . and takes the keys. I like this.

Reading Microtones as one story in which the characters, while inhabiting different worlds, represent archetypal opposites of Mother/Father, Lover/Abuser, but also Consciousness and all forms of Death (disappearance, absence, escape, separation, etc.) is like listening to a ballad with a rich harmonic structure—of course all of this in miniature. When I think of the collection in this way, I keep coming back to Vaughan’s image of the entire family harmonizing in the car. This is a rare, major chord in a story that strikes mostly darker tones.

In ‘Legacy’ we are briefly shown a photograph of a girl, a family member, and told that her death is her own fault, damaging to the family, contagious and stupid. In ‘When the Time Comes’ a father tells a similar story about a boy in the news. “The children should have known better” resonates here and elsewhere, sounding more like a comment on the adult than the child. Similarly, in ‘My Bicycle’ responsibility is shifted to the child since the father is missing. This prose poem is possibly about sexual abuse, possibly about a positive sexual encounter with a stranger. Regardless of which, the missing father is the acciaccatura for the sexual encounter—as if its mere and brief mention at the beginning sets up, and somehow explains, the story of the camper.

In terms of physical arrangement, many of these pieces are positioned so that they exist across the page in dialogue with a piece that treats a similar or at least complementary theme. A good example of this: ‘The Upswing of Falling’ and ‘Levitation,’ both about romantic relationships, the former ending, the latter in the throes of passion. I find this opposition, this balance pleasing.

Microtones (36 pages) is available from ČERVENÁ BARVAPRESS.

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Christopher Allen is the author of the absurdist satire Conversations with S. Teri O’Type. Allen, originally from Tennessee but now living in Germany, is the managing editor of Metazen, a daily ezine that publishes potential literature.