Susan Tepper: What made you choose Montauk on Long Island as the beach setting for your story “from Memorial Day”? You could have picked from many places, why Montauk?

Danny Goodman: The Hughes family, who live on Long Island, feel as much a part of Montauk as the reverse. They vacation there, every year, and have done so for well over a decade. I couldn’t imagine them anywhere else on Memorial Day weekend.

Though this novella and the Hughes family are works of fiction, I feel as if I’ve been trying to write about Montauk for most of my adult life. I spent many summers over the years in the small resort town. So much of my childhood, my adolescence, seems scattered along those Atlantic shores. They call Montauk “The End,” for its position at the eastern tip of Long Island; if nothing else, the Hughes family has taken on that sobriquet, too.

Susan:   I adore Montauk, too, the whole east end of Long Island, both forks.  Now if I were to categorize this story, say for the purposes of submitting to an agent or editor, I would call it a family saga. Do you see your story as a family saga?

Danny: Oh, definitely. The full novella (running about 18,000 words) is very much a family saga, one that continues in my novel-in-progress, with Roddy remaining at the narrative helm, the gulf between family members having grown and swelled. In the end, the entire story, novella and novel, are about family.

Susan: How did you land on this family’s ethnicity?  Is it part of your own ethnic background?

You write:  “The kite hovered like a gull, just high enough that I thought, for a moment, it might break from its string and glide over the Atlantic.  My father pointed out into the expanse and said, ‘See kids, there’s Ireland.’ ”

Danny: The Hughes, like my own family, are diverse. However, their ethnicity made sense to me, given where they live and who they are. It’s not a point of heavy focus in the narrative, but I think it’s important to know a great deal about your characters’ background.

Susan: Very important point.  Danny, do you think there are families out there who manage to escape the “big griefs” and just sort of breeze through life?  I’m thinking, for instance, of a different Irish-American family, the Kennedys.  They had it all, and yet had an inordinate amount of tragedy as well.

Danny:  I’m not sure I would know what that looks like, a family who breezes. The Hughes have their triumphs, not unlike my own, but also fall victim to themselves, to tragedy, to the weight of the everyday. After reading Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night (which was a huge influence on the novella and novel-in-process), I came to an understanding about The Hughes and perhaps families in general: when you love and care for someone, intensely and without prejudice as happens between husbands and wives, parents and children, siblings, lovers, for a familial lifetime, you eventually grow, in the most passionate of ways, to hate one another.

Susan:  That is sobering but I have to agree— it’s that old adage about familiarity breeding contempt.  Yet it feels sorrowful, to acknowledge such a thing about love among family members.

You speak also about the influence of O’Neill and Long Day’s Journey…  I was also hugely influenced by his plays when I was a young actress.  I sense O’Neill hovering, spilling some of his sad karmic magic over your Hughes family.  Do you feel he might be a muse for you in this novella?  Do you believe in the magic of the muse?

Danny: O’Neill’s play has definitely been a type of muse, an inspiration, in what it means to honestly and organically craft the Hughes family. LDJ doesn’t slow down, doesn’t allow the reader to make sense of the family’s decline until just the precise moment, doesn’t apologize for bringing the reader to the brink along with its characters.

In that way, I’d say yes, I do believe in the “magic.” Is that what you mean? In addition, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, my favorite novel, has been a sort-of structural muse, a novelistic exploration of everything I could hope to accomplish from my debut. The Sun… like O’Neill’s drama, explores the breaking down of a group of characters, both individually and a collective whole. Hemingway’s novel, split into three sections, has served as a map for me, providing suggested routes and different methods, depending on the necessity, of narrative travel.

Susan:  I love hearing about specific influences that affect a writer while doing a project, and especially how the great authors of yesteryear often determine our choices.  I feel that many of these writers have been forgotten, or worse, diminished, as time marches forward and new paths are being cut in literature.

Tell us more about the relationship between the narrator, Roddy, and his brother Liam. It sounds as if there’s a bit of rivalry going on.

Danny: Very much so! They’re brothers, separated by only a few years (in the novella, Roddy is almost fifteen, while his older brother is finishing his first year of college), but they’ve lived different familial lives. They’re not unlike O’Neill’s Edmund and Jamie, at once rivals and companions, the closest and most furious of each.

I am the oldest in my family, and my brother and I (seven years apart) have had a wild, but ultimately unbreakably strong, relationship. In Roddy, I get the chance to take on the role of younger brother, to see the world from that vantage. Liam loves his little brother, deeply, but there’s also that sense of brotherhood, competition, of wanting to be the favorite, so to speak. Throughout the novella, I hope it becomes crystalized, that love and bond, because the brothers are a huge part of each other’s makeup. Later, in the novel, this relationship becomes even more complicated, both by distance and tragedy.

Read “from Memorial Day” by Danny Goodman

Monday Chat is a bi-weekly series in which Susan Tepper has a conversation with a Fictionaut writer about one of his or her stories. Susan’s new book From the Umberplatzen is a collection of linked-flash published by Wilderness House Press. 

Molly Peacock, a poet and a creative nonfiction writer, is the author of The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 (McClelland and Stewart, October 2010, in Canada; Scribe Publications, October 2010, in Australia; Bloomsbury USA, April 2011, in the US; Bloomsbury, July 2011, in the UK) and six books of poetry, including The Second Blush (W.W. Norton and Company, June 2008, in the US and McClelland and Stewart, March 2009, in Canada) and Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems (W.W. Norton and Company in the US and UK and Penguin Canada, 2002). Among her other works are a memoir called Paradise, Piece By Piece and How To Read A Poem and Start A Poetry Circle (1998, 1999; both published by Riverhead Penguin in the US and McClelland and Stewart in Canada). She is the editor of a collection of creative non-fiction, The Private I: Privacy in a Public World (Graywolf Press) and the co-editor of Poetry in Motion: One Hundred Poems from the Subways and Buses (W.W. Norton, 1996). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, and The Best of the Best American Poetry.

Former Poet-in-Residence at the American Poets’ Corner (Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, New York) and former President of the Poetry Society of America, Peacock is one of the creators of Poetry in Motion on subways and buses throughout North America.

Molly, since you were my first writing mentor, I’m delighted to ask this first question: What is your feeling about having mentors as a writer? Talk about the mentor relationship if you will, its importance to a writer…

I wouldn’t be alive without my mentors!  Meg, I remember you so distinctly from your early days in New York. To me it felt that you were in a state both lost and determined—like most of us when we get serious about writing! You came to study with me privately.  The idea of private study, which was so ordinary, say, in music, where composers tracked the generations of composers with whom they studied, wasn’t so common in poetry.  But with the example of my friend Nita Buchanan, a learning disabilities specialist in private practice, I began to take private students in my tiny apartment on East 71^st Street, forging relationships that decades later became codified in Brief Residency MFA programs.  My task with you was to find some way to give you both literary companionship, a literary model, and to see your work from the inside out.  That meant to see it not as a finished literary product, the way an agent or an editor might see it, but as a somewhat older, more developed literary artist might see it, from inside the vision.  I felt I had to make myself light as a parakeet (but with a big brain!) who perched on your shoulder and saw your work almost from your eyes.

It was an act of poetic acrobatics.  I loved it, and I hope I helped you.  That idea of seeing the work through the poet’s eyes, not solely through my own, came partly from what is now a 37-year relationship with my therapist. It also came from sheer teacherly enthusiasm, the legacy of my third grade teacher Mrs. Knowlton and my seventh grade teacher Mrs. Baeumler.  Lastly, it came from my mentor at The Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars.  It was Richard Howard’s assumption that if a student is talented, you should do something for that student in the literary world, pointing the student toward a literary magazine, or writing a blurb.

You mean you really felt your grade school teachers were mentors?  Tell us more about Mrs. Knowlton, Mrs. Baeumler and, of course, Richard Howard.

Mrs. Knowlton. I loved that the word “know” was inside her name.  She was young and adventurous.  In 1955 she and her husband bought a used hearse and outfitted it as a camper, then drove from snowy Buffalo, New York all the way to Mexico.  How poetic is that?  No one I knew in all my eight years had been more than an hour and a half from Buffalo, except to go to war.

And my seventh grade teacher, Mrs. Baeumler, with whom I still have a yearly lunch, created my first experience of an art colony. In her English class we wrote every day, and there I wrote my first serious poems.  With those poems in hand, she badgered the school system to create a literary magazine for children.  They did, fired by her zeal.

My mother admired them, and her admiration of women whose enthusiasms carried them beyond the bounds of fifties’ normalcy was a portal for me. Of course they were mentors, role models, sudden flashes in the sky that revealed a way.

Leaping forward decades to my literary mentor, Richard Howard:  Richard taught me as well as poets Phillis Levin, Rachel Hadas, and Tom Sleigh in his first graduate course at Hopkins.  This erudite man’s vulnerability as he attempted his first graduate teaching bonded us in special ways.  Imagine – the premier man of letters of his generation walking along St. Paul Street in Baltimore with his students, turning to me and actually asking how he was doing! He didn’t seem to conceive of himself as a teacher; instead, he thought of himself as a model and a mentor. Casually he said to me one day, “So what are you going to do when all this emotion runs out of your free verse poems?”  I couldn’t imagine my emotion ever running out (and it hasn’t, frankly) but I recognized what he meant when he next said, “You need some structure to underpin all this.”  (He made a characteristically flamboyant grimace when he said, “all this!” meaning, I think, all my twenty-eight-year-old existential angst.  But with that statement he launched me into what later became known as formalism.

What do you do when you feel stuck or uninspired and does it work to trick the brain into working? When you just sit there and look at the page and think, oh crap. Then what?

When I was in my twenties, I realized that if I stopped writing for a period of time, I would have trouble starting again.  This process seemed like pumping water from a well that hadn’t been used for a season.  (There was no running water at my grandparents’ house, which my mother kept after they passed away.  If I arrived in the spring after the pump hadn’t been worked all winter, I’d have to pump and pump and pump to get anything going from the well.  It was a misery!)  One day, after all this priming, I got rusty, unusable water from the well.  But at least it was water, and I knew that if I kept going, eventually it would run clear and drinkable.  This is exactly the way it is with not writing for a while.  You don’t do it.  Then it’s so hard to get going.  Then you write rusty crud.  Then finally it’s clean and running.  I thought, I don’t want to do this with my writing all the time.  The hiatus is not worth the energy and fear that the pump won’t work.  All you have to do to insure a pump will lift water from a reasonably deep well is to use it.  And so I decided not to stop writing.  Ever.  Even if the work is terrible, full of sludge, you keep it flowing.  If you have flow, eventually you’ll have something lucid and fresh and essential to living—and by that I mean good writing.  So I don’t stop.  If I’m stuck, it’s temporary.  Even a few words keep it going.

How can we as writers help each other the most?

By abandoning the piece-of-the-pie mentality, where you think that if someone else gets a reward then you get less, because they’ve gotten a bigger piece of the pie.  The pie metaphor is so limited!  Think of the rewards for writing as air, as rich and limitless as what we breathe—or as oceans.  Jean Rhys reputedly said that she was one more drop in the ocean of literature. Because someone’s up, it doesn’t mean you are down.  Writers can help each other by being ready with a compliment.

Please talk about (discuss here) your one-woman shows.

The Shimmering Verge, the one-woman show in poems I developed for three years and performed for three-more, taught me was a huge respect for performance. Before Cornucopia, my New and Selected Poems came out, I asked the fabulous Canadian director Louise Fagan (whom I knew from doing a benefit performance of the Vagina Monologues) to help me develop a standard reading to give, something almost wash-and-wear, so that I didn’t have to start from scratch each time.  I wrote down all the comments I might say in between the poems, and when I read it all to her, she said, “This is the beginning of a one-woman show.”

We slowly began to work together, doing short performances, until we had a lighting designer, a costume, an entire package, which was then performed at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine.  Later it had an Off-Broadway showcase.

But the underlying reason for the show was that, in my early fifties, I was feeling so invisible.  Doing the show was a way for me to reclaim myself from the curtain an aging woman disappears behind.  I’m sixty-five now, and, Meg, the show worked. I made a transition as a woman and a writer to a place of…hmmm, I guess I’d call it “wise attraction.”

Will you tell us about the birth of The Paper Garden: An Artist Begins Her Life’s Work at 72. Anything about how this book came about… anything about the process of writing The Paper Garden that you would like to share!

“Wise attraction” is the lure of the life of Mary Delany, one of the inventors of collage.

On a September afternoon in 1986 I stepped into the Morgan Library and saw 100 of Mrs. Delany’s amazing cut paper flower collages glowing on the gallery walls.  I was as much hooked on their beauty as on the fact that someone so elderly had embarked on making them.  They were sophisticated and intoxicating, and I had to have the book that went along with them, but found the British hardcover in the gift shop too expensive for my teacher’s budget.  In 2003, after I had given a poetry reading and my husband had given a lecture at Oxford University, we stopped in London to visit the British Museum, and there in the gift shop was the same book I hadn’t been able to buy in 1986.  I bought it immediately.  It was a sign that I had to do something.

What challenges did you face while doing your research and writing the book? 

I came to the book as a poet, not as an art historian or a botanist or a social historian or even someone steeped in 18^th century literature.  I had to learn to become a biographer, and I had some great teachers both because of the privilege of a fellowship at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center and because of observing my scholar husband as he works.  I began to realize that I could use my poet’s skills –noticing things intensely and comparing them imaginatively –and my life skills, too.  I had the persistence, but could I use Mrs. Delany’s flexibility to write her life?  I was overwhelmed, but being overwhelmed, I discovered, repeats the confusion of youth.  And I began this big project in response to a woman who also began a big project in mature years.

What parallels can you draw between your poems and Mrs. Delany’s flowers? 

A single blossom on her Passion Flower has more than two hundred tiny slivers of paper in it.  Making a poem, for me, requires just that sort of layering of fragments to build up a whole. Mrs. Delany’s flower portraits make her flowers into figures, women with flower heads and leafy gowns, all built from botanical accuracy.  I hope some of my own poems are like that.   Sometimes I think of her paper collages as sonnets, the world compressed into the flower of fourteen lines.

What are you working on currently?  What is next?

I’ve just finished an alphabet book for grownups of all ages called AlphabeTique:  the Lives of the Letters, I’m working on, gulp, three books simultaneously.  First, I’m working on a new book of poems, tentatively called The Plum; second, I’m collecting all I’ve written about poetry for the University of Michigan Press; and last I’m writing a new nonfiction book about 19^th century women botanical illustrators, called The Secret Gardeners.

The Fictionaut Five is our ongoing series of interviews with Fictionaut authors. Every Wednesday, Meg Pokrass asks a writer five (or more) questions. Meg is the editor-at-large for BLIP Magazine, and her stories and poems have been published widely. Her first full collection of flash fiction, “Damn Sure Right” is now out from Press 53. She blogs at http://megpokrass.com.

Greetings Fictionauters. Ann Bogle has 12 stories and five book reviews at Ragazine, Thrice Fiction, Altered Scale, Asymptote, Intellectual Refuge, THIS Literary Magazine, American Book Review, Rain Taxi; she has interviews with Jeff Davis at Asheville FM and Bill Yarrow here; and six stories and one poem are forthcoming in 2012. Michael Dickes has work published or forthcoming in Bedford Stuyvesant, Lish, Yard Sailing, Evalyn, Oteu, Butter Beans, Awul Long Time, Culled Fruit, Pure Slush, Southpaw, Kerouac’s Dog, Tree Killer Ink, Apocrypha and Abstractions, Thunderclap Press, Blue Fifth Review, and Negative Suck. Susan Tepper interviews Indian Filmmaker Ramesh Avadhani at The Nervous Breakdown. Marcus Speh’s “Five Nightmares” is at The Rusty Nail; “Spring Things to Do” is published in Yareah Magazine; and an excerpt from “Secret Brush Strokes” is at 7 X 20. Jane Hammons’ “Headstone (for Aaron 1954-1984)” is in Metazen, and she has another “Headstone” forthcoming. Bill Yarrow’s Pointed Sentences is reviewed by David Ackley at THIS; and he has an interview with Derek Alger in Pif Magazine. Bill’s poems are featured in Pure Slush, Thunderclap Press, and rIgor mor.US. David Ackley will have three poems, which originally appeared here, in The Camroc Press Review on May 23^rd. James Claffey’s “Sepsis” is at Molotov Cocktail; his audio story “Easter Sunday” is at Gone Lawn 7; “Odd-sized Legs,” “Tree-killer, and “Eaten Alive” are published at The Bicycle Review and he is a part of Meg Tuite’s Exquisite Quartet story “Supernatural Tyranny of Artistic Subterfuge” at Used Furniture Review; and his poem “Brooklyn, NY” is at Thunderclap Press. Robert Vaughan’s anthology Flash Fiction Fridays is available at Amazon; he read “The Upswing of Falling” (published at Metazen) and Kristine Ong Muslim’s “Revenge of the Goldfish” at WUVM Lake Effect for its Disorientation theme; “Going to Reseda on the 405” is at Elimae; “Moonstruck” is at Bong is Bard; “You’re All” is at Thunderclap!; and Robert’s poetry chapbook, Microstones, is forthcoming from Cervena Varva Press.  JP Reese’s “The Cost” won the Patricia McFarland Memorial prize at Flash Fiction Chronicles. Matthew A. Hamilton has a forthcoming chapbook. My story, “The Last Swim,” is published at Wigleaf. And, finally, I’m thrilled to announce that Jürgen Fauth’s novel Kino has been released. You can check out reviews, interviews, excerpts, and a trailer here.

Marcelle Heath is a contributing editor for Fictionaut and assistant editor for Luna Park Review. She blogs here. Send your news for the next installment of Front Page to marcelleheath@ymail.com.

It’s nice when a face is happy then it changes.  I saw the face of JFK’s mistress, Mary Pinchot Meyer, murdered execution-style later, by the CIA, a new book says, on AOL.  Her face seems happy in that way.  Hers is the kind of happiness that in the next frame may evaporate.  It evaporates when another mood takes precedence, and why wouldn’t it, her long-time married lover the President?  I misunderstand the glamorous icons of our own era whose happiness never evaporates.  I apprehend happiness that turns long in the face with political awareness—belles of a northern temperament not quick to disseminate.

The face of Carol Novack was not long—as she said mine is—but it registered her sense of the political.  Its expressions were labile.

Cancer assassinated her, intimate as a tattler.

It left in her wake—to friends gathered near her bedside—a heritable vision—how it believed itself to be and like her gave its distance to be.  She was Jewish and an atheist so not a believer except in social and legal and creative forms and how to forge them.  Her online journal, Mad Hatters’ Review, continues.

Born in 1948, Carol might have been a swinger.  She was a brunette, not a highlighter.  She wore copper infusions in her hair.  I would swear to her good sense.  With her elegant, New York therapist, our therapist, Naomi Sarna—to whom Carol dedicated a section of her story, “Whirling Birds, Hands Like Knives,” called “Playpoem based upon Jean Arp’s collage: Mountain, Table, Anchors, Navel”—she arrived at a definition of her trouble as “hostility.”  Gin at night, her glasses clinked and kept her awake.  She couldn’t play silently then as she did while writing.  We talked cross-country.  Her nonsense careened with my nonsense.  She liked my drinking—my sudden retching audible over the land line—wiretapping busybodies clicking in—and the love I swore to emphatically then and not when I was sober.

Carol’s full-length collection, Giraffes in Hiding (Spuyten Duyvil, New York City, 2010, 250 pages, $42), contains 42 stories and the art work of 14 artists.  The writing in Giraffes is sometimes called fiction, sometimes called poetry, depending on the reader.  Bookstores shelve it as fiction.  Imaginary persons gather tribally there, in a land Carol invented where church and state are separate.

Carol’s writers were Beckett, DeLillo, Dorothy Parker, Donald Barthelme, and de Maupassant.  She thrilled to Rilke.  She wrote as a woman who felt deeply free, with an imagination of someone half her age, not crushed by good will or copied intentions.

She taught me, “The gerund takes the possessive.”  She said, “My mother always told me, ‘Watch your grammar.’” And I wondered whether her girls’ school in Brooklyn, attended by classmate Katha Pollitt, taught grammar systematically?  Did it teach it linguistically?  Did her brick and mortar syntax endear her to rules of language more ideal than rules of government?  Let her sing?  Syntax, I told her, is the order of the story.

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.

Jürgen Fauth is a writer, film critic, translator, and co-founder of Fictionaut. He was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, and received his doctorate from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. He lives with his wife, writer Marcy Dermansky, and their daughter Nina. His debut novel Kino was just released by Atticus Books. Follow him on Twitter at @muckster. 

What is your feeling about having mentors as a writer? Talk about the mentor relationship if you will, its importance to a writer…

The closest I’ve had to a mentor is Frederick Barthelme. He was my teacher for five years of grad school, and we’ve stayed in contact ever since. It’s not the kind of Luke Skywalker/Obi-Wan Kenobi relationship you might picture when you hear the word, but I’ve learned more from him about writing, and about being a writer, than from anyone else.

What do you do when you feel stuck or uninspired and does it work to trick the brain into working?

I’m a big fan of Transcendental Meditation. Actually, not exactly TM^®, but a low-rent, guru-free alternative that’s being offered by former TM teachers. It’s called NSR and costs $25 to learn. I found it after reading David Lynch’s book Catching the Big Fish. I’ve been doing it twice a day since 2006, and it helps me focus and get distractions out of the way.

Lynch quotes the Maharishi, who said, “See the work. Do the work. Stay out of the misery.” Deceptively simple advice that I’ve been coming back to again and again. First, you need to figure out what it is you should be doing. A lot of times, procrastination or “writer’s block” comes from not wanting to face the truth that, say, you have to go back and rewrite a scene. In that case, “I’m blocked” means “I can’t stand to fix what’s wrong with it.” But once you’re honest with yourself about what you need to do, if you see the work, then the next step is to just do it. There’s no other in-between thing that needs to be done. Just get to work. Anything else just leads to misery, guilt, self-doubt, all that ugly useless stuff. Like I said, simple advice, but I’ve found it very useful when I sit down to write.

Are there favorite writing exercises or prompts which you use regularly & will share?

I used to write shorter pieces based on prompts and so forth, but I found that the high from finishing a flash piece doesn’t last long enough, so I started writing a novel. There, I found it useful to set out with a few basic ideas — three seems to be a good number because a triangle is inherently dramatic — and then keep working those ideas. When I’m stuck, I find something random, unrelated — something from a movie, a song, a piece of art — and I see if I can transpose what’s interesting about it into whatever I’m working on. Everything is ultimately connected to everything else, so if you can make that kind of creative leap, it usually moves you forward. Which is probably just a pretentious way of saying that it’s good to do something unrelated — go to a museum, take pictures, go swimming, see a show — and when you get shaken out of your usual surroundings like that, ideally with a non-verbal experience, then you can get back to work refreshed, and something interesting is going to happen.

Suggestions for making characters live?  Do you know who they are before you write or do you find out who they are in the writing? Do you already know these people? What does a novelist hope to achieve before setting out… where does this urgency come from?

I find out who they are while I write. We always talk about setting, plot, character, voice, and so forth, but sometimes it’s worth reminding yourself that in the end, they’re all the same thing. It’s all just those words on the page. Voice is character is plot is setting. An example: in the beginning of my novel Kino, Mina, a newlywed twenty-something, receives one of her grandfather’s long-lost movies. Her husband’s in the hospital with a tropical disease, but she leaves him there to go to Berlin and solve the mystery of the movie. Obviously, that’s plot — it has to happen because otherwise there’s no story — but it’s also character, because we now know that she’s the kind of woman who will leave a sick husband behind for an adventure. It all unfolds simultaneously, and as you write the book, you learn these things about your characters and carry them forward as you figure out what they’re going to do next.

What are some good habits for an entrepreneur, husband, father and writer with many jobs?

I’m still figuring that out. We’re a two-writer family with a toddler to raise, a writing community to run, a blog or three to edit, and very irregular schedules to reconcile. We’re just launching a new site for our fiction editing business, mjedit.com, which I’m plugging whenever I get the chance, like right now. I’m currently putting off a pressing translation job, while there are also other parts of the jobs that can use resources like the 1099 NEC form that is needed for some jobs. When it all gets too much, I go to the thermal spa or crank up the music and dance.

What’s the best writer’s advice you ever got?

Write every day. I can’t remember who told me this, but writing really is a kind of muscle, and if you want to get any good at it, you have to work out a lot. Don’t expect to use every word — musicians run scales, artists doodle, so not every sentence you write has to be gold. In fact, let yourself write bad stuff. To me, the real work is in the editing — I spend disproportionally more time tightening, polishing, and reworking than I spend on first drafts — but you have to put down the words in the first place. It gets easier if you do it every single day.

How did your new novel, Kino, find you, and you it?

A few years ago, Marcy and I spent New Year’s in Berlin. It was cold and dark and moody, and we went to the film museum, which is full of unbelievable stories and very much focuses on the heydays of the twenties, which I’d always been fascinated by. New Year’s Eve turned out kind of deranged and a little bit dangerous, and I made a resolution (see the previous question) to write every day for a year. So on January 1, I sat down at the kitchen table of the apartment we were subletting and started to write Kino. The first draft took almost two years to get down.

Talk about  Fictionaut – any aspect of it here, if you would like…

It’s been amazing to me to see Fictionaut take off and become the community of writers it is. When you start with an abstract idea and some sketches in a notebook, you have no idea if it’s going to work, if anyone will actually come and use it. So it’s immensely gratifying to me to see what the site has become over the last few years, and how many people have gotten use out of it – so many stories posted, projects launched, books published, friends made. I recently met a couple at one of my readings who had actually met on Fictionaut and just moved in together. It’s a lesson in faith and community, and what I like best about it is how many people — like you and the other blog contributors — have come forward to help and get involved. Like a novel, it’s something that appeared out of nowhere. There was nothing here before, but now it’s something, built together by lots of people, and that makes it incredibly satisfying.

What is next for you?

I’m keeping a tumblr with images, text, and video from the world of Kino called Tulpendiebe – things I found researching the book, things that inspired me. One of the themes of the book is how art inspires more art, and how it wants to be shared in order to be able do that – the idea of the creative commons. So it seemed like an obvious thing to turn Kino and my research over to anybody who’d like to participate.

I just started a group on Fictionaut called Tulpendiebe where anyone is welcome to post writing related to the world of Kino. This could be anything inspired by Weimar-era film, art, or writing, any of the events or characters of the time, or a reworking or remixing of scenes of the book. It’s such a fertile period, and Kino just barely scratches the surface.

For example, I asked Ivan Guerrero, a very talent video artist, to imagine a trailer for the movie-within-the-book, a 1927 silent called The Tulip Thief. I would love to collect more artwork, video, sound, and writing and see if we can extend this world collaboratively. My publisher, Atticus Books, has signaled that they might be interested in producing an enhanced ebook version of the novel with all the related work included.

The Fictionaut Five is our ongoing series of interviews with Fictionaut authors. Every Wednesday, Meg Pokrass asks a writer five (or more) questions. Meg is the editor-at-large for BLIP Magazine, and her stories and poems have been published widely. Her first full collection of flash fiction, “Damn Sure Right” is now out from Press 53. She blogs at http://megpokrass.com.

Susan Tepper:  Because it is April (the cruelest month if we are to believe T.S. Eliot) I felt compelled to chat up a poem that involves the earth (soil).  So, Gloria, when you posted this poem that I heard you read at AWP, I knew it was the perfect chat poem for NaPoMo and how I am feeling, too, about the springtime.

We poets do have this intense fascination with death.  Your poem “Every Death Is A Murder“ takes death to a whole other level or dimension:  murder.

Gloria Mindock:  Yes, I love true crime and believe I have read every true crime book ever written so far.  I love all the details of the murders I read about and the graphic details of the rotting bodies that are described.  I actually wanted to go into forensic sciences but became a social worker instead.  By reading such books, I gather so much material for my poetry.  One of my favorite books is called “Stiff.”  It discusses the rate of decay and so many other interesting details about corpses.  There is a place in TN where they lay out bodies and study the rate of decay.  That is where some of my ideas for this poem came about.

Susan:  Tennessee does that?  eeek… Well, Gloria, I’ve known you a long time and you never cease to amaze me!  You write:

Dear maggots:

I hope you enjoy the chewing of flesh.  Is 54 years difficult to swallow?

This is morbidly humorous, but it also grabs me in my deeper zones and makes me feel very sad.  Does that mean I’m far too emotional?

Gloria: No, you are not too emotional.  I would hope people laugh at the poem. It is meant to be funny and cynical, too.   I love to be morbid and dark in my writing.  It just comes out that way.   All the time, people ask me, “Gloria, why are you so morbid? You’re such a fun person and yet you write such stuff.”  This never fails.  The harsh reality is, depending on a person’s belief and how they are buried, most of us have maggots waiting for us.  Me, I just have a sense of humor about it.  Yes, it should make you feel sad too.  Death is not an easy thing for any of us to think about and face— our own mortality.

So if the maggots are going to enjoy chewing my flesh, as the poem says, I hope they have a damn good time of it.  And what if all my years on earth are difficult to swallow?  Tough.  It appeals to my sense of humor if the maggots take on my characteristics in the poem.  Your reaction is normal.  You can laugh but it touches a nerve, it seems.  Let it.  I did my job.

Susan:  You give the maggots these little personalities, as if they are little pert things like dancing crumbs in a commercial for paper towels.  Can you see them as you write about them?  If so, do you envision them realistically or in this surreal way they come out in the poem’s language?

Gloria:  Yes, I can see them realistically.  With the maggots, I poke fun at them.  Why not?  I always hated the idea of the food chain.  Everything is food for something.  We are lucky that nothing usually eats us to death while we are alive.  But when we die, it is another story.  I’m not crazy about maggots or bugs in general.  I hate them so I have to poke fun at the whole thing.  When I first started writing, my work was more surreal.  I like being able to mix realistic with the surreal.   It’s interesting to me as a writer to see where it leads.

Susan:  Why the letter format for this poem?

Gloria:  This makes it easier to address them in a surreal way.  I need to see some sort of vision in order to talk to them.  It helps me let loose and have fun by envisioning a conversation, even if it is one-sided.

Susan:  This is dark satirical poetry at its best.  You write:

Maggots, how many words will you have of mine?
Will I be strong in the Maggot world or
dissolve into weather?  My bones, stuck to the
ground shivering, were crushed by the garbage truck.
Maggots, enjoy your little steak.

Gloria:  Imagining the idea of a maggot becoming a vegetarian and not eating my flesh cracks me up.  My bones being stuck to the ground, crushed by the garbage truck—  these images would not have happened if I didn’t see the maggots realistically.  Also what helped is that I remember a disgusting image from years ago when I was hiking in the woods.  There was some sort of dead animal decaying in a bunch of leaves.  I remember seeing all the maggots feasting.  It was gross but sad.  How could I forget this?  Once I see a photo or something really intense, I don’t forget it.  I am very sensitive.  It gets stored in my brain.  Sooner or later it comes out in my poetry.  An example of this is the poems I wrote about the atrocities inEl Salvador,Bosnia, Rwanda etc… I write about what the people have gone through by interviewing them, doing extensive research, or by working with the survivors in some capacity. It’s intense.  Their stories of survival are horrific, extremely graphic, there has been so much violence.  I try to be a voice for them since they cannot.

Susan:  This letter to the Maggots is the last poem in your stunning book Nothing Divine Here. A most apt poem to end a collection carrying this title.

Read “Every Death Is A Murder“ by Gloria Mindock

Monday Chat is a bi-weekly series in which Susan Tepper has a conversation with a Fictionaut writer about one of his or her stories. Susan’s new book From the Umberplatzen is a collection of linked-flash published by Wilderness House Press. 

Vanessa Gebbie is a Welsh writer, living in a small village in the south of England. She is a novelist, a prizewinning short story writer, an editor, a creative writing teacher and a fledgling poet. She is rubbish at most other stuff. Her books ‘out there’ are: her debut novel The Coward’s Tale, the short story collections Words from a Glass Bubble and Storm Warning, and Short Circuit – Guide to the Art of the Short Story, for which she is contributing and commissioning editor. She teaches widely. In 2010 she was writer-in-residence at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her website is www.vanessagebbie.com she blogs at www.morenewsfromvg.blogspot.com and she tweets a #StoryGym writing prompt every day on Twitter, where you can follow @vanessagebbie.

I have had a great time, logging in to Fictionaut every evening, always assured of a good read. What talent is here! It has been very hard to select pieces from such a strong field – but in the end I decided I would see which pieces stayed with me, which pieces I would still be thinking about days later. And those would be the pieces of work I’d share with you.

It’s all I want, as a writer – readers who give my words a little time, a little care – and hopefully, the words will respond by becoming bigger than their word count, stronger than the paper on which they may be printed, more resonant than the usual echo in the reader’s ear and mind.

So, these are the pieces that worked a little magic, for whatever reason. Maybe they made me think, or ponder, laugh, feel sad, amused, intrigued. Whatever – they made me feel something.

Thank you to all the writers. In no particular order –

1. “Genealogy” by Sarah McKinstry-Brown Sometimes, you read a piece of work you know will stick for a long time. This is a beautiful poem, thought-provoking and strong. I used to run weekly writing sessions in a rehab for those with serious addiction issues – and was so impressed with what they wrote, I started up an ezine which ran for six years or so. Tom’s Voice is still up there – www.tomsvoicemagazine.com. McKinstry-Browm’s poem is one I would have begged to have on the site for the great good it might do. Where my guys at the rehab were so often judged as wanting, without compassion and understanding, ‘Genealogy’ offers both. Hey – maybe I will still ask her. This is the sort of thing to leave up there for ever.

2. “Great Gatsby Roulette” by Con Chapman is clever, funny – sharp as a razorblade. And it is also wise. In among the fun is a snipe at the ridiculousness of churning out literary criticism, as a group of stoned students write an essay on Gatsby, sentence by posed sentence, for a friend who has to hand it in tomorrow morning. Most of them haven’t read it – but as the piece wisely points out:

“Why don’t you take a turn?” Bates asked, as he passed the joint to Tom.

“Me? But . . . I only read the first chapter!”

“That’s enough man—go ahead,” Bates said. “Give it a shot!”

3. “Why I Don’t Write Sex Scenes Any More” by Gita M Smith is another of those pieces that both raises a smile and then makes you think. It is so true!  I think this piece should be made compulsory reading for all new writers – it would save them and the world at large a lot of dreadful words.

4. “77 words about nothing” by Anthony Van Hart. Having read this poem, which is deceptively simple – it will not leave me alone. I’m caught by the lucidity of image after image, told in simple language, unforced – the effect is much greater than the wordcount would suggest. I love the opening lines – how could a reader not be drawn in by these?

I’m cracked.

Slowed by the dayswimmers

and gravediggers.

Nightcrawlers and court justices.

5. “Daddy Walked The Pits” by Steven Gowin I just loved this for the characters – the father who becomes absolutely obsessed by tar – and his son, following in his foosteps, not far behind. I enjoyed the energy of the writing, the descriptions, and the originality of it. I read it early on – and it has stayed with me. (I also love the smell of tar… maybe that has something to do with it!)

Also much enjoyed:

• “Herstory” by Gessy Alvarez
• “Cupid’s Marksmanship” by James Valvis
• “The Accidental Arsonist” by Linda Simoni Wastila

Editor’s Eye is a blog series that aims to highlight noteworthy work that might have slipped through the cracks of Fictionaut’s automated list of recommendations. Every two weeks, a distinguished visiting editor scours the site for lost treasures and picks outstanding stories.

Frances Lefkowitz (www.FrancesLefkowitz.net) is the author of  To Have Not, named one of five “Best Memoirs of 2010” by SheKnows.com. It’s a true story of growing up poor in San Francisco in the 1970s, getting a scholarship to an Ivy League college, and discovering what it really means to have and have not. Her fiction, essays, and articles have appeared in Tin House, Blip, Superstition Review, GlimmerTrain Stories, Fiction, The Sun, Utne Reader, Whole Living, Health, and more. She has earned special mentions twice for the Pushcart Prize and once for Best American Essays, among other honors. The book reviewer for Good Housekeeping, Frances lives and surfs in Northern California.

What is your feeling about having mentors as a writer? Talk about the mentor relationship if you will, its importance to a writer…

Mentors: what a great idea. Where do I get one? What about a patron; can I have one of those, too?

What do you do when you feel stuck or uninspired and does it work to trick the brain into working?

I get up and walk around, turn the radio on or off, click onto Facebook, sniff my bottle of lemon essential oil, pull weeds…anything to break up my train of thought and introduce a new perspective, a new impulse. My challenge to myself right now is to write the unexpected, at every level, from plot and characters down to sentences and words. So I like to interrupt myself briefly, (3 to 10 minutes) to see where I veer to when I come back to the story.

Are there favorite writing exercises or prompts which you use regularly & will share?

Word prompts work really well for my particular brain. Give me a list of random words and I will turn it into a story. (In fact you do give me lists of random words, and I now have over 200 stories I’ve turned them into!) The process of creating story while working in every word is a bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle and a bit like taking an acid trip. I now use word lists in many of the workshops I teach, including memoir and fiction. Students often balk but the words push them past their usual phrases and their usual way of thinking about things. “Perfume” was one of the words in a recent memoir-writing workshop, and it forced the students to find the perfume (or lack of it) in their childhoods. One remembered the perfume of whiskey on her stepfather’s breath. Another described her mother as “not the kind of mother who wore perfume.”  The key to making a good word list is to mix it up, using a variety of sounds, meanings, and lengths.

Suggestions for making characters live? Do you know who they are before you write or do you find out who they are in the writing?

Precise details, from clothing and scent to psychological motivation and emotional wounds, are what make characters believable. In creating them, I find there’s a back and forth between logic and intuition (or magic or Duende or whatever you want to call it). They reveal themselves as I write, but later, after I know them and see where they are going, I have more of a hand in shaping them and their actions.

What’s the best writer’s advice you ever got?

When submitting stories to publications, always keep several pieces in circulation, so when one comes back rejected, you still have the others keeping hope alive. Also, for the same reason, send that rejected one out immediately to another journal. This advice came from the wonderful Pamela Painter, who taught me fiction at Harvard’s night school. I continue to pass it in.

Please talk a bit about your recent memoir “To Have Not” – whatever you would like to say about the process of writing this, in any way you like.

The way I write, there’s not much difference between fiction and memoir, except that in fiction you have to make up the facts and in memoir they’re already there, but you have to recall them. Otherwise, you deal with the same issues: creating palpable characters with back stories that make them act the way they do; using sensory details to evoke setting and scenes; balancing narration and scene, showing and telling; carrying themes and threads forward in a way that is powerful but not obvious. Writing my memoir was like writing a novel—and I think and hope it reads like one, too.

What question would you most like to be asked about your writing life? (ask and answer it here!)

Any oddball habits, stuff that you usually don’t talk about in your writing life… that you will talk about?

When I’ve written something good, I read it to myself over and over. Sometimes I’m just so astonished at this thing that came out of me, and reading it not only gives me pleasure but also helps to convince me that I may be able to do it again. I guess it’s the mixture of pride and astonishment that parents must feel for their children.

What is next for you?

I am so happy to get back to fiction after so many years writing about myself. Since last June, I’ve been writing a story almost every day, and now that I have more than 200 of them, I’m starting to see if and how they might add up into, dare I say it, a novel.

The Fictionaut Five is our ongoing series of interviews with Fictionaut authors. Every Wednesday, Meg Pokrass asks a writer five (or more) questions. Meg is the editor-at-large for BLIP Magazine, and her stories and poems have been published widely. Her first full collection of flash fiction, “Damn Sure Right” is now out from Press 53. She blogs at http://megpokrass.com.

Susan Tepper:  Because I’m a big fan of your stories, it was difficult to choose one to chat about here.  I decided on “Bottom of the Field“ for reasons that will become clear as we talk.  You write:

The Old Man hates foreign holidays and remarks about the purity and beauty of Ireland’s coastline. “Sure, what business would we have to travel to Brighton or Blackpool? They’re third-rate towns with bad food and rude people. You get a better class of person in the Irish countryside.”

This is a strong set-up in just one line of narrative and three short lines of dialogue.   We are given a lot of information.  Do you do (do you do) this consciously, through revision, or did it just pop out that way from the first draft?

James Claffey:  For the most part the narrative comes out the way it comes out without revision. I read somewhere recently how essential it is for flash pieces to have a strong opening sentence, but for me they just start the way they start without prodding or poking. Sometimes my wife reads some of my short fiction and tells me to cut the first paragraph out and get into the meat of the matter, but it’s rare I do that. Admittedly, I do take a second look after writing them, usually after they’re up here at Fictionaut, and I’ll go through the story for repetitive language and things that go “clunk.”  Maybe the first flush is the most honest writing, and I worry that too much tinkering with the piece will kill the honesty in it. And then I start worrying about the old workshop advice, “show don’t tell,” and the collar of my shirt constricts!

Susan:  So you are what is called an “intuitive writer.”  I kind of figured as much, because all your stories that I’ve read are stamped with a clear “James Claffey” imprint.  Some people are born to this and you seem to fall into that group of storytellers.  You obviously have very good writing instincts.

I find it ironic that your wife would tell you to get to the meat of it, when it seems that you always do, your stories start so strong (not to get in-between a husband and wife here!).  You’re an Irish born writer.  My personal favorites in writing have always been the Irish writers, I cut my teeth on William Trevor and Edna O’Brien.  And of course the many poets and playwrights of Ireland— just amazing.

What is it about Ireland that inspires the storyteller?  Is the landscape?  The rain?

James: Thanks, in fact it’s because of her they start strong! I used to begin each story with a thesis sentence that didn’t do much for the narrative and her advice has worked, as evidenced by the stories I write now. She’s a wonderfully fluid and intuitive writer, and it’s partly her influence rubbing off on me. But, yes, these short fiction pieces are very much intuitive, springing from the wellspring of home and growing up in a climate, inside and outside the home, of storytelling and books. Our house was filled with my mother’s Readers’ Union editions, and those books have imprinted on my memory: Too Late the Phalarope, The Tiger in the Smoke, A Kid for Two Farthings, John Bull’s Other Island, and on and on. In terms of the imprint you generously apply, I really found my voice in the late summer when I re-read my late advisor, Jeanne Leiby’s notes on my manuscript. She noted that the “best” writing was the writing from a childhood perspective, and during my MFA I wasn’t convinced of its strengths. Today I write these stories and have no sense of “oh, this is crap,” the way I did about much of my grad school writing. And in terms of home,Ireland is likeNew Mexico, a place I love dearly, in that the land is “magical” charged with a sacredness that doesn’t exist in many places.

The rain made me a reader, and the reading makes me a writer. I’d tell my students in workshop to show me a great writer who wasn’t a great reader. Not possible. The books we read shape our writing, whether we like it or not. Oh, Trevor, and O’Brien! There are so many contemporary writers out ofIreland, wonderful voices like Claire Keegan, Kevin Barry, Belinda McKeon, Ethel Rohan… we’re called the land of saints and scholars, but truthfully, we’re a land of frustrated, and not so frustrated writers, poets, artists. It took a long time for me to be able to find my voice, and I feel incredibly blessed to have maybe finally figured out what it is I want to say in my writing.

Susan:  In “Bottom of the Field“ you write:

The morning sun shatters on the brilliant blue waves of the Atlantic Oceanas I make my way through the fields behind the cottage we’re renting for a fortnight in the West of Ireland. Two rabbits bounce across the field, white tails darting in and out of the long grass.

In this passage the air quality becomes immediately apparent, it’s a felt thing, as are the brilliant blue waves, the fields with the long grass.  It makes me want to go there so much and experience it all.  I find that is key to a really good story, that the writer can bring the reader into the physical and emotional space so fluidly.

James: Time and space are keys to placing us “there” in the story, and the space I write about is a space I know, the visceral taste of the water, the stinging nettles on the backs of my legs, the leather strap of the binoculars, all become real to me in the collapse of time and memory. To paraphrase Peter Ho Davies by way of Glimmer Train’s contest call today: “The instinct to lay fiction over the top of history… is simply the instinct to understand why certain things happen.” This is what I attempt to do in my writing, layering fiction over history, creating a narrative that is authentic, and a character who is true to life, and captures the reader’s imagination and sympathy.

Read “Bottom of the Field“ by James Claffey

Monday Chat is a bi-weekly series in which Susan Tepper has a conversation with a Fictionaut writer about one of his or her stories. Susan’s new book From the Umberplatzen is a collection of linked-flash published by Wilderness House Press. 

Susan Henderson is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets award. Her debut novel, Up From the Blue, was published by HarperCollins in 2010 and has been selected as a Great Group Reads pick (by the Women’s National Book Association), an outstanding softcover release (by NPR), a Best Bets Pick (by BookReporter), Editor’s Pick (by BookMovement), Editor’s Choice (by BookBrowse), a Prime Reads pick (by HarperCollins New Zealand), a Top 10 of 2010 (by Robert Gray of Shelf Awareness), and a favorite reads feature on the Rosie O’Donnell show. Susan blogs at LitPark.com and The Nervous Breakdown and volunteers for the We Are Family Foundation. Her husband is a costume designer, filmmaker, and Chair of a university drama department. They live in NY with their two boys.

There’s a lot of talent in this place! Thank you for inviting me here and thank you to all of the writers who shared their work.

Judging is a subjective process, so let me talk a little bit about the kind of writing that excites me. I’m someone who likes to be engaged by the first two sentences. Openings like these got my attention: “As kids,/we blew up a fish./ We shoved a bottle rocket into its respiring mouth and lit it.” (Blowing Up While Fading Out by Anthony Van Hart); “Please, come in. Take a chair, son.” (Consider the Son by Eli Hopkins); “Milton’s/up there/on his roof/again,/hammering tin/flashing into swans” (How to Not Suck @ Poetry Section 1 by Dennis Mahagin); “Say the world is a smudged charcoal drawing. Slit from its frame, smuggled out of the Vatican”  (Point of Grace by Mark Reep). In each of these examples, I liked the voice and the energy and the visual of these openings. I was immediately pulled inside the story and curious about where it would go.

There are a number of ways a story will keep me engaged. Is there a beginning, middle, and end? Does the story surprise me? Am I captured by the voice or the language? Has the story taken me somewhere emotionally or intellectually? Has it changed my mind, made me question my beliefs, made me see something differently than I had seen it before? Some standouts: “She likes the safety of bars.… I try to touch her through the bars. I can no longer count the back bones, the ribs. She is a slice of moonlight” (Return by Gary Moshimer); “Women here discuss dog food ingredients and how many calories it takes to eat a carrot versus how many calories are in the carrot itself” (Maybe by Meg Pokrass); “I work at night so that is not me you hear her fucking” (Alice by Kate Axelrod); “a war is yet to be fought, a life to be lived” (Father by JP Reese);  “We take turns with the flashlight, hand it over without turning it off, and the beam bounces off the ceiling, walls, before catching on skin, bright beneath the light “ (The Game by Tawnysha Greene); “Lettie doesn’t know why the TV doesn’t come in anymore or why the postman doesn’t always pick up the out going mail or why the garbage men never put the lid back on or why the store clerk doesn’t know her name….” (An Awful Long Time by Michael Dickes); “At night he would sit in his recliner and imagine the blank television screen a few feet away as a portal window on a submarine, and himself as its trustworthy pilot (The Mariner by Jeffrey S. Callico); and “When he gets up, his back aching as if he’d laid in a coffin for years, his legs do a quick, unconscious dance step” (The Serious Writer and His Mother by Marcus Speh).

In the end, these were the stories that held me with their language, their details, and where they carried my mind and heart. Listed alphabetically:

1. Kissing the Lampshade by James Claffey. This story took me on such a vivid journey and reminded me a bit of William Maxwell in terms of the care taken with word choice and rhythm and a subtle poignancy in the ways the characters both connect and remain at a distance from each other. I would strongly recommend cutting the opening sentence and maybe working the idea of the kidney problem into the title or maybe via the nurse after we hear her walk down that hallway. But other than that, it’s quite powerful writing.
2. Sweet Pea, Sweet William by Henry E. Powderly II. This is one of the first pieces I read and I kept coming back to it. Now I confess I may have misunderstood it, but I took Sweet William to be both the flower and a child. If it’s not also about a child, don’t tell me because I love the power of it. And with my read of it, there’s a conflict I like between the sweet and the dark. The poem captures the beauty of what’s before you in the present and yet there’s that menacing knot of grief, the loss that can no longer be separated from an otherwise peaceful scene. I also love the simple and lingering quality of the words, never writerly and yet each one has been chosen so carefully. Beautiful work.
3. Homesteading by Linda Simoni-Wastila. This was one of those stories where I forgot where I was because I had fully entered the fictional world. I was exploring this beat-up house, felt the weight of the baby, and experienced a mixture of fear and curiosity about going further into the mystery of the attic. I got the feeling that there might be a novel here, and that this writer could really walk that line between literary and commercial fiction—an editor’s dream come true.

Thank you again for sharing your work and all best in seeing your stories find homes.

Sue

Editor’s Eye is a blog series that aims to highlight noteworthy work that might have slipped through the cracks of Fictionaut’s automated list of recommendations. Every two weeks, a distinguished visiting editor scours the site for lost treasures and picks outstanding stories.