Happy Spring Fictionauters! Jerry Ratch’s fiction e-chapbook How the 60s Ended is published by Wordrunner eChapbooks. JP Reese is the recipient of the Patricia McFarland Memorial Prize from Flash Fiction Chronicles for “The Cost.” Reese has two poems published at Kitchen; a short story published by Apocrypha & Abstractions; and will be reading, as will Jen Knox, at DCCCD Spring Literary Festival in Dallas. Thrice Fiction’s recent issue includes a number of Fictionaut contributors. Jason Lee Norman’s book Americas, which includes a story for every country in the Americas, is forthcoming. Bill Yarrow’s book Pointed Sentences is published by BlazeVOX. Yarrow has poems in The Del Sol Review and OF ZOOS, and his poems are forthcoming in Pure Slush, Wilderness House Literary Review, Istanbul Literary Review, Mad Hatters’ Review, and Many Mountains Moving. Matt Dennison has poems in Tulane Review, Alba, San Pedro River Review, and Tree Killer Ink, and has work forthcoming in Reed Magazine, Yemassee, Sein und Werden, and The Mas Tequila Review. Marcus Speh’s “Book Breath” is in Blue Fifth Review, and “Thank You For Your Sperm” appears in The View From Here. David Ackley’s “Light Shot Water” is forthcoming in Lost in Thought. MaryAnne Kolton’s “The Chess Teacher” appears in The Vehicle.

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.

Bill Yarrow:  Ann, you write in many different styles, but I think of you as an avant-garde writer and “Letters, notes, conversations, partings” is one my favorite avant-garde pieces by you. Can you tell us a little about it—its inception, your process in writing it, the form it took, whether this came out whole or was revised, etc.

Ann Bogle:   I was so assured back in October when I posted “Letters, notes, conversations, partings” at Fictionaut that you and a few other readers — Sam Rasnake, Joani Reese, David Ackley, Christopher Allen, Kathy Fish, and Robert Vaughan — could decipher the piece.  I was also excited when THIS Literary Magazine asked to publish it.  I wrote it in 2000, where I had been living for years at my mother’s house in Minnetonka, Minnesota.  I had gone through a “recovery” period (from social drinking) and was not writing much creatively, except for letters sent as email.  One day I wrote this “list” (that contains lists) and it came out exactly as you see it here.  It reminds me of early morning writings I had written in pencil, but I think I typed it.  It includes my rendition of the hexagrams of the I-Ching.  I never fully understood my fascination with the hexagrams or why I wanted to communicate through them.  My partner in my 20s, Bruce Johnson, had designed a font for the hexagrams while visiting me once in Houston, and I had incorporated them as illustrations in my mixed-genre work.

Bill: I am interested in your comment that certain readers would be able to “decipher the piece.” Could you talk about that idea of deciphering, please?  Do you feel writing in general (or perhaps 21st century writing) is a cipher? Do you feel your writing specifically (or this particular piece) is a cipher? In what way? What characteristics are required of readers for “decoding” avant-garde writing or writing in general? Does the word “decipher” suggest that there is something specific hidden in the piece or that its virtues are perhaps not immediately accessible or not accessible to all readers?

Ann: This piece is not coded.  I wrote it out of a kind of cleanliness or exhaustion, a wish to be as simple, minimal, and tuned as possible, tuned to an ear in space perhaps, as I discovered its pitch.  The entire question reminds me of John Ashbery’s writing — what people apparently have said about it — that it is difficult and frequently inaccessible.  In an interview with Time, Ashbery notes that he writes, aware that his work mystifies many others though it makes sense to him.  And to me.  My partner now, as I near 50, the poet Tony Sanders, describes deciphering and decoding in terms of the following exercise: to read, to “translate” literature from a language unknown to one.  Russian was his example, but it could be any language in which one may not know even the alphabet.  The process that begins to take place is, as he describes it, the discovery of melody, and melody both makes and subverts sense.

Bill:  I love that answer, particularly your characterizing this writing as “tuned to an ear in space perhaps,” as you “discovered its pitch.” I think that’s a very good way to think about “Letters, notes, conversations, partings,” a piece in which discovery is central and ongoing, a piece in which the writer, in writing, discovers the pitch of the creation, while the reader, in reading, hears and comes to understand the melody that “both makes and subverts sense.”

You mention Ashbery in terms of difficulty. I don’t find your piece difficult, but I do find it mysterious and entrancing. It reminds me of Christopher Smart’s Jubilat Agno, particularly in a line like “Florence is a master technician of sacred Latin horticultures.” The letter and the number sections are very melodious and remind me of the alternating “Let” and “For” sections in Smart’s poem, but your examples are so playful, as when you write, “E.  is for renaissance” and “N.  is for Harvest.”

Why does the alphabet section begin with N, V, and Z before the alphabet proper commences? I love that it does that but wondered whether those letters had any particular meaning for you.

Ann:  N is for Harvest.  N is the 14th letter in the alphabet.  The 14th hexagram is Harvest or Possession in Great Measure.  Another way of thinking about the hexagram is to place, pictorially, fire or flame over heaven.  Or numerically, 7 over 1 (14th).  V is woman?  Eve?  V is Vater.  V is to F as Vater is to Father.  E is Elizabeth.  Z is sleep.

Bill:  I was also struck by the three repetitions of the word ana. “A. is for ana”; “Ann is ana”; and “Ana is a recycling choice.” Did you mean ana in the sense of “a collection of things connected with a famous person, place, or period, especially spoken or written information, anecdotes, or sayings,” as in the Menagiana or Johnsoniana or did you have something different in mind?

Ann:  Ana as a collection of bon mots or anecdotes, exactly.  Ana Verse is my blog.

Bill:  Your idea that “Ana is a recycling choice” is brilliantly phrased and a great way to talk about the nature of fiction. I connect that “recycling” idea with the idea of remembering, using memory in fiction. I know that the intersection between fiction and memoir is one that interests you greatly. Could you comment on the use of memory in “Letters, notes, conversations, partings”? Some lines (particularly the name references in the “Everywhere words” section) seem autobiographical.

Ann:  When I wrote “Letters, notes, conversations, partings,” I thought I was at a crossroads.  I wanted to be at a crossroads.  I predetermined I was there, as a way of calling time.  I thought four years was long enough for writing letters from my mother’s house.  The lists in the story — if I can call it that — are written from the point of view of time starting anew.  The assessment of the past is cursory, critical, as if I were packing only for a brief trip, taking only those things with me that were necessary for survival.  Yet it isn’t survival in the dire sense.  Survival in the sense of continuance.

Bill:  You write, “Memoir is mer-memory.” “Mer” as in “sea”? Do you consider this piece memoir? If so, in what sense is it memoir? Or do you think of this as part of your “mixed genre work,” memoir being one of the parts?

Ann:  I consider the piece personal and rhythmic.  If it were merely personal, then perhaps readers would not be able to access it as writing.  I guess it is accessible and the matter in it becomes transformed through rhythm to become work intended for an audience.  Mer is sea, yes!  And yes it is mixed genre — perhaps a poem, perhaps a list story, perhaps memoir.  And the numbers are there, too, of the alphabet and hexagrams.

Bill:  Thank you, Ann, for sharing your insights about this many-layered,  fascinating work.

Read “Letters, notes, conversations, partings” by Ann Bogle

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. This week, Bill Yarrow is the guest host.

David Rocklin grew up in Chicago. He graduated from Indiana University with a BA in Literature. After attending law school, he pursued a career as an in-house attorney and continues to serve as a mediator. He lives in California with his wife and children. The Luminist is his first novel.

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

I met my mentor, novelist Susan Taylor Chehak, via the UCLA Advanced Novel workshop. I can say without hesitation that my writing and its possibilities – for a career, as well as for my own understanding of writing and its place in the world – emanate from that relationship. She knew when to guide me and when to step back and let me stumble along. She gave me insight into the business of writing, and served as wordless inspiration to make writing a part of each day. She took joy in contrary opinions about all writing, even her own. She never worried about how to sell, only about how to tell. She unabashedly loved every writer who came into her view, even the ones who drove her nuts. She didn’t simply stay in touch after the workshop ended; she made me a reader of her in-progress work. She made me feel real when I picked up a blank page.

I think it’s not merely helpful, but critical that a new writer find someone who will serve as a mentor, a voice of reason when the task of writing proves overwhelming (as it does for all of us, usually once a week), a voice of encouragement when isolating ourselves to find the right words suddenly seems an odd and maybe nutjob thing to do (see above, once/week), a beta reader and pointed critic of the work, not the writer. Above all, a mentor who pushes a writer to find their own voice (as opposed to refining the mentor’s) – it’s just so central to how we form ourselves.

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

I’ve been doing this long enough now to be able to differentiate between the sort of stuck that requires in inward nudge (go for a walk, go to the gym, go somewhere where’s there’s people and motion and sound, and just sit for a while), or an outward nudge (talk to someone who gets it without a lot of effort from me to explain). One of those two approaches always seems to work for me.

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

I don’t really use any, as I’ve grown used to compression – with a full time job and a toddler at home, I point all my energy to that moment in the day when I know I’ll be able to write; by the time I reach that moment I’m like a horse at the starting gate. That said, in the formative stage of a new piece, I like to write down questions and answer them. A variation on the ‘what if’ exercise that helps me get a flow of thinking/imagining going.

A favorite exercise is one I’ve talked about in workshops, on setting and how to make it more evocative. Take two people and place them in a room. Give them the task of briefly, physically describing the room; however, tell one of them that they’ve been in the room before, and something wonderful or horrible happened at that time. Then, read their writings aloud and see the difference that infusing the room with a back story makes in the writing. The physical description in the second piece will be much more evocative and alive.

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?

I would say that the written creation of a character in a novel really shouldn’t differ from the way a friendship is formed. When you meet someone for the first time, they don’t normally spill out all their backstory and how it’s relevant to the moment you both find yourselves in, not unless they’re on the way to the electric chair. Friendships – and that’s what our relationships to these characters are, as writers and readers – form over time. They deepen. We learn things gradually and offhandedly. We make our own connections between the small intimate moments like a picture on the wall, a habitual gesture or phrase, a seemingly inconsequential personality trait, and the histories that gave rise to them.

For me, the characters come to life slowly, over the course of many drafts. I may have a vague idea of who they are in the very beginning, but if they remain the person I thought they were after several drafts, then I’m not really letting them reveal themselves to me. I’m simply forcing them to remain the person I want or need them to be. Much like friendships that thrive v. the ones that die.

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

The feeling of being inadequate to the task of telling a story will never leave you, so stop worrying about it and just get on with the work.

How did your novel, The Luminist find you, and you it?

I visited the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. They were exhibiting photographs from the earliest days of the art, including a number from Julia Margaret Cameron. I’d never heard of Ms. Cameron, or her work, but the photographs I saw that day really moved me. Those faces were at once immediate and gone, long before I’d ever encountered them.. The first image I encountered, of a woman half-shrouded in shadow, was stunning. Her face emerged from the dark into a muted light. She was unreadable. The model, as it turned out, was Julia Jackson, the mother of Virginia Woolf (I wrote a blog about that image, and the serendipity that caused it to become the cover of the novel.

After the Getty, I did a bit of research on Ms. Cameron. She was unique for her time, a Victorian woman who obsessively pursued this then-unknown art and science despite all societal expectations or barriers. She saw something like prayer in her work, and saw possibilities to rival painting.I found a quote of hers: “I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me…” I read that she lost a child shortly after birth. Her quote took on a newly relentless, tragic meaning. An image of her started to form, but from a vantage point outside of her, as if she were observed from under the cloak of an old camera.

That’s where the story started. What transpired is completely fictionalized, but my jumping-off point began the day I met her at the Getty.

What is next for you?

I’m at work on a new novel, tentatively called The Daylight Language. It came out of research I did for The Luminist. It tells the story of a boy taken from his home at a time of war, and brought to nineteenth century London and Queen Victoria’s Court. I’ve also been batting around a contemporary story idea, a love story at that. Finally, I’m working with a group of LA-based writers to create a new reading series that extends a concept currently being done in San Francisco. I’ve got high hopes for that, as I’ve been missing a sense of writerly community. I hope this fills it for many writers!

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.

Sheldon Lee Compton, “Perishable”

Loved the blending of taste and smells, the images of bugs trapped in ice, and the eventual, subtle, sad journey the writer takes us on.

Jane Flett, “Please, tell me the smell of the moon” 

Wildly poetic, inventive images, and an undercurrent of deep emotions.

Christopher Bowen, “May the Road Rise Up to Meet You, The Wind Ever at Your Back” 

Refreshing sentence structure and phrasing, strong imagery, and a highly perceptive exploration of male/female roles, with lines like: “I . . . shoveled love onto banks of ice and shrapnel and wars and woe.”

Stephen Hastings-King, for both “Dunes”  and “Book of Days” 

I enjoyed watching this writer’s mind work its magic in prose.

Bill Yarrow, “Joan of Dark”

Masterful.

Katie Moore, “People Called Our Windows Art” 

And this flash story has many artistic moments—Moore takes a theme that’s been done before and gives it new life, using strong characterization and poetic perception.

Jane Hammons, “1053” 

In this simple flash story, Hammons captures her character’s mental confusion with just a few sparse lines, draws us into the picture, and then finishes with a killer line. Great paired with the photo.

Matt Dennison, for “Failure” 

I liked this writer’s careful precision and originality, even with subjects that have been explored many times before.

Kat Moore, “Migraine on a Sunday Afternoon”

I have never had a migraine, but I think I know how one feels now … thanks to Moore’s skillful dissection.

Michael Dickes, for “Like Dancing Alone” 

This writer is on the road to finding a special, unique voice.

John Olson, for “Nocturnal Bypass” 

Olson does plenty of “gnawing on deep philosophical subjects,” with rhythm, satire, and surprising twists and turns. Loved the ghost who snuck in…

Matt Mullins has had a few fistfights, but he has no real experience with the martial arts. He is not the other Matt Mullins, the FIVE TIME MARTIAL ARTS WORLD CHAMPION MATT MULLINS, who could definitely kick this Matt Mullins’s ass (unless maybe this Matt Mullins had the advantage of total surprise and a baseball bat). This Matt Mullins has spent nearly his whole life in the Midwest fighting with more intangible things. Mid American Review, Pleiades, Hunger Mountain, Harpur Palate, Hobart, Descant, and a number of other print and online journals have all been there for him with the spit bucket and towel. This Matt Mullins has made a living as a tree surgeon, a house painter, an automotive plant security guard, and a teacher, among other things. Search the web all you like, but you will not find this Matt Mullins on youtube throwing spinning back kicks to a heavy metal soundtrack before tearing off his shirt. His debut collection of short stories, Three Ways of the Saw, is available from Atticus Books and Amazon. You can find his experiments in digital/interactive literature at lit-digital.com.

Have you had mentors? Do you mentor? Talk about the mentor relationship if you will, its importance for a writer…

I’ve had writing teachers and friends who also write whose ideas and suggestions have influenced me, but I’ve never had a mentor in the true sense of the word. The people who came closest to being mentors for me were the ones who opened the doorways to new writers and new ideas, which I then began to explore on my own terms. In that sense, I had friends and teachers who pointed me toward the mentors living inside the books I’ve read.

But I think some kind of mentor/mentee relationship is key for an artist of any type. The genius of others is at the core of good art, and you’re striving in a vacuum if you haven’t in some way considered the aspects of that genius through a relationship with those who’ve come before. The advice and guidance of experienced practitioners of your chosen medium is always useful. For some people this guidance comes from an actual relationship with a specific person. In my case, I learned by going directly to the writing of others. So although I do think mentors in the typical sense are important, personal experience has taught me that another type of mentoring occurs when you study the writing of writers whose work impacts you.

What do you do when you feel stuck or uninspired… suggestions for unblocking creativity?

For me, step one is to put my ass in the chair. Ignore the dishes. Don’t pick up around the house or rake the leaves or clean the gutters or go out drinking (excuses I’ve used). Once I’m there at the desk confronting the lack of things, it becomes a matter of will. I’ll try to avoid dwelling on the fact that nothing seems to be emerging from my imagination at the moment. I’ll kick around in the attic of my head and see what knocks loose. I might look to the outer world, history, current events, nonfiction, where there is always something interesting happening that can be a trigger. Sometimes I’ll pull out something unfinished I set aside a long time ago and try to see it with fresh eyes that let me take it in new directions. Now and then, I might read someone who inspires me then try to riff off what they did in another genre. I’ll read a poem then try to incorporate my take on its notions into a piece of fiction, for example. But, really, once I stop worrying about being “stuck” and start doing, the writing usually begins happening.

Are there favorite writing practices/exercises that you can share? No worries if not.

I’ve mentioned this in other interviews, but it’s a technique I really like to use, so I’ll go into it again here. I like to withhold scenes in such a way that they still emerge in the reader’s imagination. Leave one scene and begin the next at the right moments and in the right ways and you imply the events that happened in between. These events then emerge in the reader’s imagination. Because the reader’s imagination is your most powerful tool as a writer, withholding those scenes allows you to essentially “write” something by using your reader’s mind. What’s better than having the reader do the writing for you? They’re automatically going to love what they come up with. But you need to give them the pieces that enable them to do so. The key is to learn how to plant what comes before and trigger what comes after in a way that allows the withheld scene to fully emerge in the reader’s mind. So there’s definitely some risk involved, because if the withheld scene doesn’t fully emerge, you’ve done the opposite of your intent: You’ve created a hole instead of causing the reader to imagine the scene for themselves. You can apply the same principal to subtext as well, that lurker whispering the heart of your intentions—you give just enough to make it hum in the background while leaving room for the reader to connect the dots on their own.

The best advice you ever got? Words of wisdom… What helped you as a young writer?

My dad once said, “If the flame burns, the writer will out,” and I believe it was George Clinton of P-Funk who said “If it don’t fit, don’t force it.” I think that somewhere between my dad’s Irish romanticism and the bottomless groove of George’s cosmo-funk there lies a kind of universal creative truth: you can’t make it happen unless you’re driven to try, but trying too hard usually isn’t the best way to make it happen.

Talk about your new book and anything here about the process of putting it together, publishing, etc. Anything you want to talk about here…

Before it was accepted for publication, the compilation of the manuscript itself caused me to look at my own work in a different way. My focus was on getting individual stories published, so I wasn’t really seeing the larger picture. Even though half of the stories in the collection had already been published by journals, I’d never taken a step back and considered how all the stories I’d written would fit together as a collection. Once I did that, I started seeing patterns and themes emerge. Everything seemed to fall into place naturally from there, and I realized that I had a solid manuscript I wanted to start submitting to publishers.

After it was accepted for publication, watching the book come together was a really positive experience for me, because it was an objective indication that it was time to let all these stories go.

I am a constant reviser, and I read and write relatively slowly. I felt bad about that until I went to see Junot Diaz read a few years ago and someone gave him shit for not putting out a book in the ten years since Drown. His response was, “Hey, I’m a slow-ass writer.” I wanted to stand up and cheer. I felt like cheering again a few years later when I learned Junot’s slow-ass process resulted in a novel that won him a Pulitzer.

For me, getting the book published was the final phase of my own slow-ass process. I took it as my last chance to touch these stories—everything from their overall shape down to each word in every sentence. That’s the kind of writer I am. The story needs to be compelling overall for its structure and content and ideas, certainly, but every single sentence also needs to sing. Lots of writers feel this way. We’re the ones who’ll spend an hour working over both the content and the rhythm of a sentence. In the end, the publication process gave a constant reviser like me a deadline, which is something I needed. It was a chance to take the stories that I’d been living with for a while, put the final spit-shine on them, and send them on their way.

What is new, what is next in your writing world? Anything here about what you may be publishing in the future.

I have two screenplays in progress that I’m hoping to nail down this summer. One’s an adaptation; the other’s an original. I have a novel knocking around in the back of my head. And I have a short manuscript of flash fictions/prose poems I’m finishing up called The Roaring Engine of Here.

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.

About a dozen of the poems in Larissa Shmailo’s In Paran (BlazeVOX, 2009) also appear at Fictionaut.  Before that they appeared in such diverse publications as Fulcrum, About, Rattapallax, and Barrow Street.

About the title poem I write, “I so highly recommend this poetry book.  Buy it if you dare!  It’s strong yet nurturing, nurturing yet cutting-edge sophisticated.  The title poem seems centered on origins–what so often creates a spark that leads to a fire.”  Shmailo notes, “My name, Shmailo, may be derived from Ishmael, father of the other twelve tribes.”

Death is a man in Shmailo’s writing, but he is a lover and dancer, dark yet honorable, honoring her, posing as you, in making her his statistic.  He is a suave in Shmailo, accessible only through ornery and dangerous rituals.  He is not a traitor or thief as in Judy Grahn.

In “How to Meet and Dance With Your Death (Como encuentrar y bailar con su muerte): A Cure for Suicide,” the speaker vouches for a recipe she learned from an old Curandera who cautions her, “that it could be done once, and only once.”

The recipe begins with “2 gallons of pulque (fermented Mayan beverage), or, if unavailable, gin” followed by “1 case tequila/Several cases beer/1 bottle Mescal/2 ounces good marijuana/carton cigarettes/three large peyotes/coffee as needed.”

The procedure includes dancing.  “When the dancing is over, go somewhere and drink the bottle of Mescal; leave the worm in the bottle for Death.”

“Do this correctly the first time [the recipe says], because it can not be done more than once.  To do this once is sagrado, sacred; to do this more than once is common, so no lo jode.  If you do this more than once, you will do it often, and then you will become an old borracha who sleeps with common men.  Punto.”

Besides being a poet, who performs her work, Shmailo is also a translator.  In her poems, “New Life 2/Variation on a theme by Joseph Brodsky et al.” and “New Life 5 (Magpie Translation of Joseph Brodsky), Shmailo imagines and rhymes the end of the war: “Imagine that the war is over, that peace has reigned,/That you can look at your face in the mirror again./That magpies, not bombs, whistle down upon your head/That outside the city, homes are not destroyed–instead/A baroque burst of laurels, palms, magnolia, pine[.]”

Her poem, “Six Months with You” appears at Fictionaut in the group titled, “Three Love Poems.”  The speaker pledges to “Quit my lover/Leave the city/Sell my books” and “Live in Kansas, Join a carpool/Shave my legs.”  The man she addresses is more than any man she has already met and not the man of death seen dancing in “Cure for Suicide” or felt rumbling in “Williamsburg Poem.”   For him, she would “Break the true law/Break my poor heart/Break my vow.”

Shmailo’s transcultural poetry lights our side of the sea.

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.

Sally Houtman’s work has appeared in over 30 literary journals, including  Literary Mama, Tattoo Highway, Girls with Insurance, flashquake, Flash Frontier, and Mobius: The Journal of Social Change. In 2012, Sally’s story “Immiscibility” was selected as an outstanding story by writer/editor Robin Black for Fictionaut’s “Editor’s Eye” showcase. Sally is the winner of three New Zealand literary competitions, has placed second in two others, and was recently short-listed for the prestigious Fish Short Story Prize, an international literary award.

When did you realize that you wanted to write?

 The answer to this question, when I wrote it out, wasn’t interesting even to myself…

You have said to me that creativity is the “easy” part for you with writing, but getting the words onto the computer and beyond is in your own words an entirely different story, so to speak.

 With that in mind:  Please talk about how challenging it is to be to be a blind writer in today’s highly technological world.  What kind of adaptive technology do you use and does it either helps and/or hinder your ability to create and produce work?

Simply put, without adaptive technology I would not be writing even this. That said, the reality is that for every technological advance there seems to be a whole new set of challenges.

Basically, there are two things I use to get my words to print and beyond – a desktop camera which magnifies printed material, handwritten notes, etc., and a computer screen magnification program which also has speech output.

The good news is that these technologies give me the ability to access material that would be otherwise beyond my reach. The difficulty is in the inherent limitations of using such technologies in that there is a time and frustration factor, making even simple tasks quite arduous. For example, unlike a sighted person, I do not have the ability to skim or scan text, neither can I easily play with formatting or spacing or see how a piece lays on a page. Proofreading is also challenging as I can’t pick up things like extra spaces or punctuation errors because the speech program does not read these. And if I lose my place in a text, forget it. I’ll lose twenty minutes trying to find it again. The best way to imagine this is to think of holding a powerful magnifying glass over a page – you can read the print, but only a small chunk at a time. And yes, my computer ‘speaks’ to me, but I’ve got to know where to find the text to tell it what to read. For this reason, web pages, particularly those with many graphics, columns or scattered blocks of text give me headaches. Something as basic as researching publication markets for my work can prove exhausting because no two websites have the same design or layout. I spend a lot of time searching for links and buttons that end up being right in front of me the whole time.

Like myself I know you have had no formal writer’s training. What is the hardest part of that for you if it is? How has Fictionaut helped if it has? What other writer’s sites or programs have been helpful to you?

If I’m honest I think the difficulties of having no formal training in the craft of writing are largely in my own head. It’s that inner critic constantly shouting, “You don’t know what you’re doing,” that creates more doubt and insecurity than any outside influence. True, I don’t have the terminology to define what I do with my words, but I’d like to think that instinct and intuition count for something here. People, particularly the Fictionaut folks, have been nothing but supportive and encouraging of my work. It’s more the feeling of being an ‘imposter’ that dogs my confidence and makes the feedback hard to take in.

Support wise, I’ve got two close friends who are published authors and I’ve met with them regularly to workshop material for the past few years. With their help I’ve learned some of the basics of the craft that I wouldn’t otherwise have known.

Aside from my friends, Fictionaut has been my only other source of creative support.  I love the feeling of being part of a community and having made a place for myself there through the merit of my words. In any new situation I’ve been reluctant to disclose that I’m blind – I’ve never wanted this to be my defining characteristic. nor do I ever want to feel that I’ve earned anything through ‘sympathy points.’ Writing for me has been a means whereby I can truly participate/compete on a level field. When I send a piece off to a competition or to a publication, I’m on equal footing with everyone else. No one knows I’m blind and quite frankly, no one cares. It’s nice to be able to now openly share this with the Fictionaut community as I’m not looking for anything there but support, oh, and the occasional helping hand if you find me knocking about in the corridors lost and confused.

Do you find yourself in your own writing (as in life) depending strongly on sensory information? Please discuss how smell, sound, taste, touch are guides for you in  your stories? I feel that your attention to this kind of detail is one of the qualities which draw us quickly and seamlessly into your stories.

What a lovely compliment. I know it’s such a cliché to say that a blind person is more in tune with their other senses, but from what you’ve said about my writing I guess I have to admit that there’s a certain truth to the cliché. Senses aside, I naturally think that a good story is not so much about the landscape as it is about the character’s perception of the landscape. It’s not what the character is seeing, but what he or she is feeling or experiencing in response that I think lifts the story above the ordinary, making it perhaps richer and more meaningful. Ultimately, when I write it’s my world and my unique perception that creates the scene. It’s my canvas and my landscape and I can paint it however I like.

On this subject, I recently wrote a personal essay (“Windows” which is in my story queue at Fictionaut). In it, I say:

I feel that I’ve been granted inner vision in exchange – an ability to draw on the blank canvas of a page the world as only my damaged eyes can see it, no lines, no edge, no form. With words I can shape silhouettes from shadows, march skinny bands of letters into the curve of a hip or the thick knotted trunk of a tree. With my fingers and a keyboard I am more than something damaged, I am something precious, something rare.

That pretty much says it all.

What are you working on now?

Continuing to write. I’ve got bits of a novel scattered about my computer that may or may not ever be completed. The enormity and length of the text is a bit too overwhelming, I think. My dream is to have a short story collection published someday.

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.

Cooper Renner‘s Disbelief, a novella in prose and verse about Samuel Taylor Coleridge, has just been published by Ravenna Press, and a selection of his illustrations The Amores [and] The Sorrows of Young Hemdlos will be included later this year in a Ravenna Triple, along with poetry by Alek Lindus and fiction by Brandon Hobson. He edits poetry, interviews and reviews for elimae.com.

Susan Tepper:  Jules, in your story “An Ordinary Broken Heart“ we meet a memorable male character in your narrator.  When the story opens he is sitting in a hospital ER.

You write:

 So I sit on a hard plastic chair, under fluorescent lights. I smell the familiar antiseptic and watch the scenery.  It’s a busy night at the hospital. Token injuries like a broken leg or third degree burns pass me by on stretchers. Things get interesting when a man’s wheeled in, frowning girlfriend at his side.

“Things get interesting…”

Do you think your narrator is aware of how whacked out that is?  That he is about to hit on a woman with a potential corpse on her hands.   Or is he one of those guys who is clueless about their own behavior and motivations?

Jules Archer:  I don’t think my guy is totally clueless about his behavior or motivations.  I don’t think he is aware of his whacky-ness either (is that a word?). I think, in a creepy way of looking at it, that he is just doing what needs to be done. He looks at it (wooing the hospital women on this one day) as matter-of-fact, with a bit of cockiness tossed in the mix. “Yeah, I can do this,” I think is his odd shtick.

Susan:  That was my take on him, too.  He is the quintessential unreliable narrator.  They are so much fun because they can go anywhere and do anything and don’t answer to anyone.  They can also be dangerous.  You have set this story in a hospital ER, a place fraught with danger and uncertainty.  Any idea what made you choose this particular setting?

Jules:  Well, originally this Valentine’s Day story idea came from doing a duo blog post with Harley May. The goal was to write the antithesis of a Valentine’s Day flash. No lovey-dovey crap allowed. We each had to come up with two key words and instantly I knew one of mine had to be ‘hospital’. It’s not your typical romantic setting, plus I already had the picture brewing in my mind of all the Valentine’s Day related accidents that I thought would occur. I mean, who hasn’t choked on a candy heart? And then came a guy who freakishly cashed in on love and the story was a goner.

Susan:  “… a guy who freakishly cashed in on love…”

A great way of putting it.  Also, if I might add: It’s very “Jules”…  You definitely have your own slant on life and it pushes into your stories and poems in the best possible way.  Voice is crucial for carrying any narrative.  But you’ve also made him “seeable.”  In other words, I could see this guy crystal clear.  Was he immediately clear for you in the physical sense?

Jules: Thanks, Susan. That makes me all giggly inside that you say it’s very “Jules”. But I am glad to hear that…that my voice is carried through in my pieces.

I could see him right off the bat. Not sure how or why but the character just came to me. In my eyes, he was a young, cute kid, who likes to get into trouble. Shaggy hair maybe. Cocky charm. Doesn’t fear the world. Has a way with the ladies. Especially on Valentine’s Day. Oh, is it wrong that I kind of want to date him now?

 Susan:  Ha!  That’s perfect!  Of course you want to date him.  I want to date him.  We gotta love our characters— even the really naughty ones.   And this baby-boy is all yours and he has the lines.

You write:

 There’s a brunette sitting in the corner, knees pressed together, head in her hands. She came in, holding the hand of a guy with third degree burns.  The tears in her eyes tell me not a chance.

His casual disregard of what’s real in that ER comes across as funny because it’s part of his personal truth.  The worst behavior can be really funny if we don’t moralize.  Do you think he’s a narcissist?

 Jules:  Hmm… I don’t think he is a narcissist in the sense that he’s absorbed with himself and elitist. I think he is someone who is just honest with himself— and others— to the point of being almost cruel— but he doesn’t see that. He just does what he wants and get what he wants. He definitely lacks empathy and definitely looks out for himself, but not to the point of narcissism.

Susan:   First I thought he was one of those people doing the hospital “drive-by”— hitting up different hospitals for the same prescription drug.  But it didn’t go that way.  He also tries to twirl the nurses around his finger.

You write:

The nurse calls my name and I look up. I approach the desk. “Busy night.”

She bristles. “Yes, it is.” I lean against the counter. Gives me the stink eye over the rims of her spectacles. “I remember you from last year.

Jules:  Yes. Here he’s just making conversation, being his usual charming self, albeit maybe a bit tongue-in-cheek. But this nurse doesn’t buy it. He’s familiar to her and she knows he’s up to no good.

Susan:  Despite all his obvious cruising, I feel a deeper underlying motive here with him.  Did something from his childhood wound him perhaps?  Valentine Day can be heavy with chocolate and roses, but also grenades.  It can be a lonely day if you watch the flower trucks making the deliveries and you are getting none.  His “love-seeking” behavior in a non-traditional environment leads me to believe it’s something from his child-psyche.  An unfulfilled need, perhaps in his mother on that day of love?

Jules: Good question, Susan. No…there was nothing in his childhood, no Oedipal complex or anything like that because I don’t see this character as having that underlying trait. When I wrote him, I had the notion that one childhood he got screwed over on Valentine’s Day. Maybe when he was 9 he didn’t get any Valentine’s in his classroom trade. Maybe when he was 19 his girlfriend dumped him on that certain day. So now, once every year, he takes a little payback on the ladies. Sure, he loves love, but he loves mischief more.

Read  “An Ordinary Broken Heart“ by Jules Archer

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.

Front Page’s March editon includes Linda Simoni-Wastila, Darryl Price, Neil Serven, JP Reese, Marcus Speh, and Sylvia Petter. Linda’s story, “Accidental Arsonist,” is in the debut issue of A Baker’s Dozen, co-edited by Michelle Elvy and John Chapin-Carpenter; her essay on curbing prescription drug abuse appeared in the New York Times’s Room for Debate; “Greetings From Motel 6” is forthcoming in 2013 Poet’s Market; and “Breathe” was the featured debut of Metro-Fiction, part of Metro-Moms network. Darryl’s “The Pocahontas Forgiveness Goes Viral” appears in River Poets Journal; “That Kind of Body” appears in the Wilderness House Literary Review; “The Pretty Business” is in Letras Caseras; “What I Find” is published in Eos:The Creative Context; “The Most Beautiful Truth,” “If The World’s Still Turning,” and “Fun And All,” are published in character i; “Young Woman At The Well” is published by Lost in Thought; “I’m Afraid You May Have” appears in Language>Place>blog Carnival; and “The Cake for God” and his e-book Safety First is published by The Camel Saloon. Neil Serven’s story, “Return Policy,” appears in Washington Square 29 (Winter/Spring 2012). Joani’s first chapbook, Final Notes, is published by Naked Mannekin ; she has work forthcoming in kitchen and Reprint Poetry; and Joani will read at The Writer’s Garret in Dallas this April. Marcus’s “Happy Feet” appears in Letras Caseras; “Winter Garden” is published in A Baker’s Dozen; “Selected Works Of A Hermit Crab Written On Shells, Stones, And Scales” appears in ILK Journal, and “Candy” is published in fwriction review. Sylvia’s collection The Past Present will be available free as a Kindle download from Friday, 2 until Tuesday, 6 March.

Finally, if you sent me news for Front Page and it is not included this month, I apologize. My email account was recently hacked. Please resend your news to marcelleheath@ymail.com for next month’s post. Thanks!

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.