DeWitt Henry is the author of the novel The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts (winner of the inaugural Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel), and a mid-life memoir-in-essays, Safe Suicide: Narratives, Essays, and Meditations.  Both are sequels to his latest memoir, Sweet Dreams, about growing up on Philadelphia’s Main Line.  The founding editor of Ploughshares literary magazine, he is a Professor at Emerson College in Boston.

Talk about the mentor relationship if you will, its importance for a writer…

 I owe poet and translator Rolfe Humphries, editor Maggie Cousins, novelists Richard Yates and George Garrett,  and critics William Pritchard, Reuben Brower and James Randall.   They took my promise seriously, they read and commented on my work; their faith helped me keep my faith over years of finishing and revising my first novel.    I also owe literary friends, especially James Alan McPherson;  Don Lee, my one-time student;  and my colleagues over the years at Emerson, including Margot Livesey, Richard Hoffman and John Skoyles.   In turn, I try to pass on their spiritual kinship.  Actually the ideas both of mentoring and of conversation are woven into the guest editor policy of Ploughshares.   Frequently writers that we published early in their careers have returned as guest editors to help other emerging writers.  I can’t imagine a talented writer coming of age without the blessing of a mentor, any more than I can an athlete without examples, competition, and a coach.  Of course, the relationship on both sides is about nurturing the young writer’s independence and individual vision.  Another topic would be the necessary letting go of the relationship; of outgrowing and being outgrown.

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

Get physical.   For me that means running, which offers  a discipline and measure of accomplishment without asking for imagination.   Your body simply rises to the workout.  Swimming, likewise.  Dancing.   I also remember a poet, I forget who, who said that she didn’t have a lover right now, but she knew that she would have a lover, that loving was a function of her nature; and that her writing was as well.  You can’t will yourself to love or to write.  But you have to trust your nature that you will.  It helps, too,  to set aside a project that stalls you, and try working on something different—even a different kind of writing, poetry, letters, reviews—thereby letting your no-mind keep working on the original problem, while your conscious self is not.  Yet another strategy for me has been turn to reading until I can’t stand reading anymore; then I come back to writing for relief.

Are there favorite writing practices/exercises you use or give to others that you will share?

My favorite is “Gulls, Butts, and Spoilers,” which is about insider snobbery and prejudice about outsiders.  Who annoys you?  Who should manage or control her or himself better?  Who should know better?  Why do you call someone a jerk?  Try to imagine a character you initially want the reader to understand as negative (not evil, just incompatibly different, insufferable, or inappropriate).  As you write about such a character, the nature of fiction will lead you to explore the character’s humanity.  Often we initially despise in others what we most fear and despise in ourselves.

For example, think of Absolon in Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale,”  Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night,  Miss Bates in Jane Austen’s Emma, Robert Cohen in Hemingway’s Sun Also Rises,  or Hot Lips in the movie Mash.   In each case,  an in-group of like-minded friends join in mocking  or punishing an outsider—outside by lacking wit, outside by social status, outside by culture—and as result are challenged to reevaluate their supposed superiority.  The result can be comic or tragic or both.

What is the most useful advice you were ever given as a writer?

Leave things out without losing them.

Don’t over-privilege literal adventure in your life, such as drugs, war, and the wild side.  Remember Eudora Welty’s:  “A sheltered life can be a daring life as well.  For all serious daring starts from within.”

Trust your nuttiness.

Put life above art, but art above self-gratification, pride, material gain or fame.  You write because you have to.

 Which books have you recently read for pleasure?

Sven Birkert’s memoir-in-essays, The Other Walk (sequel to Sky Blue Trades);  Jerald Walker’s first memoir, Street Shadows; Bruce Bennett’s sonnet sequence  A Girl Like You; Beth Kephart’s  Into the Tangle of Friendship (and You Are My Only); James Brown’s This River: A Memoir; Howard Junker’s An Old Junker; Steve Yarbrough’s The End of California;  Jill Bialosky’s History of Suicide; Gail Mazur’s Figures in a Landscape; Andre Dubus’s Townie; Deb Olin Unferth’s Revolution; Bill Knott’s Swat Poet; Jessica Treadway’s Please Come Back to Me; Jennifer Haigh’s Faith; Elizabeth Mosier’s My Life as a Girl; Steve Himmer’s Bee-Loud Glade; William Lychack’s The Architect of Flowers .

Are there new writers who come to mind that you feel are not getting sufficient attention? Who do you think we should be reading that we may not (yet) know of?

 Duff Brenna’s Murdering the Mom: A Memoir is just coming out, and is powerful; Doug Crandell’s fourth novel, likewise, They’re Calling You Home; Gerald Duff’s Dirty Rice; and Don Lee’s The Collective. In the fall 2011 Ploughshares  that I guest edited, see new writers Nikolas Butler and Susan Falco, and in Winter 2011, Thomas Lee, winner of the Emerging Writers contest that I was privileged to judge.  The best collected/selected of short fiction I know that is yet unpublished is Ellen Wilbur’s.

Please tell us about Sweet Dreams: A Family History and anything you would like to related to writing it.

 After completing early drafts of my first novel, The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts, I began working on a memoir, which I thought of as a “documentary novel.”  Frank Conroy’s Stop Time was my primary inspiration, along with Gorki’s classic, Childhood.  After living with this project for two decades, writing, rewriting, and living, the outcome is now Sweet Dreams: A Family History.  This depicts the background of a candy-manufacturing family in Philadelphia after World War II, while the novel imagines the lives of workers in the family’s factory in the late 1950s.  As I have written elsewhere, the conflicts of my imagined working class couple actually mythologized my own parents’ struggle, and my realization of that marked my need to turn from fiction to fact.  Of course, that said, I insist that Sweet Dreams is not about me.  My life and the lives around me are transformed to metaphor, and in that sense Sweet Dreams becomes a book about the reader.

What is new, what is next in your writing world?

After the childhood and coming of age years covered in Sweet Dreams, my mid-life years, where I began my own family, are recounted in linked essays in Safe Suicide.   Now I have finished another collection of linked-essays about our outcomes and my senior years, called Family Matters.  Some these essays have appeared recently in Nerve, SOlstice, Wilderness House, and Ducts.  They go back over the same material in new ways, as well as extending the saga.  I am particularly proud of four novella-length, fugue-like essays on my father, my brothers, and my son and daughter.  Not only in chronology, but in vision and form, the collection culminates Sweet Dreams and Safe Suicide.

Tell us about the ethics of writing about your children.

This is discussed nicely in a New York Times symposium, “The Memoir and Children’s Privacy.”   I love this comment by Michael Greenberg:  “To tell a writer she has to lay off her children…seems unduly restrictive.  To write a memoir about one’s child without his endorsement, or even consent, is a risk many authors wouldn’t take.  But some writers do take the risk, and it seems prudish to condemn them for it.  Ultimately a memoir should be judged the way all literature is judged.”  Put another way, strangers don’t care about the life of the model, they care about the art and what it says and how it helps them to understand their own lives.

You turned from writing fiction after your first novel to writing and publishing memoir.   Is that a permanent progress, as David Shields argues in Reality Hunger?”

I don’t know.  I hope not.   I now feel that I have said what I needed to say in terms of memoir, and I want to move on from family as a subject to community as a subject.  I hope to return to writing a novel about figures in the municipal government of the Boston suburb where I live.

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:  Roberto, in your striking poem “Oh, dinner“ I was immediately swept up by the opening.  You write:

Could have been the Geisha I drew
with a blue crayon, the children and I
shared a green and a blue one

A man and his children drawing with crayons.  A simple enough act.  Yet right away, this seemed much larger, as if it were about to take on more worldly proportions.  The father did draw a Geisha.  That is provocative.  Do you know ahead of time the progression your poems will take?  Or do they generally surprise you?

Roberto Garcia:  I am almost always surprised.  I just wait and watch them unfold.  There’s a wonderful novel (it’s been made into a film now) by Brian Morton called “Starting Out in the Evening.”  The main character, Leonard Schiller, is a novelist whose technique is to follow his characters around until they do something interesting.  I tend to do the same thing with my poems only I follow them around in my head.  “Oh, dinner“ came about that way.  I was drawn to the couple and everything they did was so interesting.  The Geisha just bled out of the crayon. That was a bonus given to me by the muse.

Susan:  “The Geisha just bled out of the crayon.”  Now there’s a gorgeous line, Roberto.  Is your muse a female or male?  I think mine tends to vary from piece to piece.

Roberto:  Mine too.  It all depends on what I’m writing.  However, I have to admit she’s usually female.  Growing up I was surrounded by the beautiful voices of powerful women; my mother, grandmother, two aunts, etc.  So I hear in “womanese”, if that’s even possible.

Susan:  Oh, that’s lovely for a poet.  Now I hate to be a nudge (actually I love being a nudge), but the Geisha comes up again in your second stanza:  You write:  “The couple next to us tried discreetly / to study my blue geisha, …”

A blue Geisha, no less.  Very Picasso, or perhaps Matisse.  Did you know they were rivals?  At any rate, this 2nd appearance of the Geisha indicates to me, at least, that the Geisha holds something over this poem.  That the Geisha is a force in the poem.

Roberto:  I did know that actually!  I love art and as a result I write a lot of ekphrastic poetry.  Something artistic finds its way into many of my poems.

I suppose that what I found interesting or off about the couple and what had my poetic attention at the time was a kind of mysterious sadness.  There was loudness to it like a bright color. Maybe the blue Geisha is a bridge between the speaker’s world of family and the couple’s realm of sadness and mystery.  I was conscious of the couple the moment I picked up the crayon and I “followed” them and the speaker around to see what would happen.

Susan:  That was how I saw the blue Geisha, too— as a life force when compared to the “observing” other couple (at the other table) who seemed death-like.  You write:

The couple next to us…
…passed along
their awkwardness, the woman, sad,
stared into each face at our table

I feel the poem is touching on things that are far beyond this simple meal, this simple act of crayoning with children.

Roberto: Definitely.  I’m a firm believer that within the simple moments there are all kinds of wonderful complexities happening.  There are critical moments of intuitiveness we pick up on as human beings (the woman looking at each of the people at the table, their awkwardness, etc.) and as artists one of our challenges is expressing that or the hint of that in our work.  But not just in body language, emotively.  Perhaps that’s too abstract an answer but I feel the poem works for that reason.  That even though it’s plainly written it emotes what’s happening between the couple and the family.   And the pulsing blue Geisha is this “invitation” or I don’t know “something” (I know I said bridge before) pulling it all together.

Susan:  That’s how I see the Geisha’s role in your poem, too.  As a bridge to a much larger concept or world or invention.   As is the artist’s role, too, regardless of whether the medium being worked is words, paint, clay, whatever.   It can’t be just a facile representation, and still be called art.  And I don’t say this to sound lofty or obnoxious.  But the differences are just huge.  Monumental, really.

In this compelling poem you write:

And I thought I saw her memories, tragedies,
their emptiness on the legs of the wine…

“The legs of the wine…”  There’s a phrase to carry you places.

Roberto:  Agreed, not lofty, obnoxious or any of that.  It’s more a conviction, an artist’s conviction.

As for “The legs of the wine…”, I love the way wine legs drip back down into a glass and so I took that expression a step further and turned it into a metaphor.  There are lots of wonderful expressions for the phenomenon of alcohol evaporating and separating from the water in wine like tears of wine, church windows, and curtains.  I feel as though it alludes to the shadows surrounding the woman in the poem quite well.  Also, that image of a mysterious woman with a wine glass is timeless.

Read  “Oh, dinner“ by Roberto Carlos Garcia

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.

Groups on Fictionaut are typically used to collect themed works. But Ben Matvey has created a group as a place to keep each chapter of X, A Novel, which he is serially posting.

It’s been getting great reviews, and I find myself looking forward to each new installment. While Fictionauters often seem to prefer flash and micro fiction, I can attest to Ben’s novel as being worthy of the reading time investment involved in a larger work.

Not only does it have very palatable chapter lengths, Ben’s writing is entertaining, approachable, and most importantly, compelling. Trust me, you should be reading X. My favorite chapter so far is Chapter 3: Morowitz. Or if you want a very short taste of X, you can start with a vignette, Vignette 1: Joy Finkelstein.

Here’s Ben’s synopsis of X, A Novel:

Over much of the next half year I am going to be releasing my novel X as a weekly serial on Fictionaut. X is a period piece set in the late 1990s Ecstasy scene revolving around the very different journeys of three over-thinking twenty-somethings who stumble into each other’s lives. One character’s story is a comedy, another a tragedy, and another a tale of recovery and the start of redemption.

Q (Lynn Beighley: ): Philadelphia seems to feature very prominently. Why did you choose this setting?

Bobbie Ann Mason‘s short stories, first published in The New Yorker, were included in her first collection of fiction, Shiloh & Other Stories which won the PEN/​Hemingway Award. Two of her books, Feather Crowns and Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. Her memoir, Clear Springs: A Family Story, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and an Arts and Letters Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Her first novel, In Country was made into a film starring Bruce Willis and Emily Lloyd. Her most recent novel, The Girl in the Blue Beret is in its sixth printing and was voted one of the best books of 2011 by the Chicago Tribune.

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

I have little experience here. My college writing teacher, Robert Hazel, was a deep influence because he cultivated a romantic image of what a writer was.  But I didn’t get much encouragement.  It was nearly twenty years before I began writing stories in earnest and sending them to the New Yorker.

Who do you read for pleasure?

Most reading I do is pleasure. I read fiction randomly, but my ambition is to read War and Peace, and some Shakespeare.  For non-fiction, when I get interested in a subject, I tend to pursue it.  For instance, I did a lot of reading about the French Resistance when I was writing The Girl in the Blue Beret. More recently, I’ve gone farther back in French history.  David McCullough’s The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris got me interested in some of the artists he portrays, especially Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the illustrious sculptor who did the fabulous statue of Sherman marching into Central Park (actually, I guess he was marching into Georgia, but the statue is at the entrance to Central Park). Saint-Gaudens interested me not only as a sculptor but as a lively personality, and I want to read more about him. Now I’m reading The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes, whose biography of Coleridge I am passionate about.

Have you come across any new writers who are not getting sufficient attention?

I know they’re out there.  A friend of mine has written what I think is a brilliant and poignant but also wickedly funny send-up of community-college politics–it’s called Batman U–but the agents haven’t swooped it up. It seems harder to get an agent than to get into Harvard.  If something this good can’t find a home, publishing just isn’t equipped to deal with all the fine writers out there.

Suggestions for making characters live? Do you know your characters beforehand, or do you find out who they are in the process? In Country is one of my favorite novels of all time – I’d love it if you could talk about that process, finding those people… how they came to you.

Normally, I discover them in the process.  In Country was slightly different.  Those characters and their relationship to each other came about suddenly at the beginning. There they were–Sam, Emmett, Lonnie, Irene.  But I didn’t know what their story was! They interested me so much that I stayed with them.  I tried a short story but it didn’t work.  I tried a novella, and Emmett died of cancer.  Too depressing! Then when I realized that Sam’s father must have died in Vietnam,  I knew what the story was.  And that it was a novel, with a significant theme. It may have taken me two years to get there.

What must we watch out for?

Animals on the road, especially when you’re driving at night.

What’s the best writing advice you ever got?

My editor at The New Yorker, Roger Angell, who patiently read and rejected nineteen of my stories before accepting the twentieth one, told me early on, “We don’t know who these people are. We don’t know how we are supposed to feel about them. We don’t want to be condescending toward them.” That was a complicated thing for me to figure out.  But I realized that I had to work out my own attitude toward the characters.  I had been too superior and judgmental.  I had to try to stand at enough distance not to interfere, but close enough to be able to see them from their own point of view.

And/or the best living advice?

My grandfather said, “Always be saving.” I hear that voice from time to time when it comes to American wastefulness and greed, and I’m wondering what to do with this or that plastic bag.  He also said, “Don’t be different,” but of course I paid no attention to that.

Please talk about how you find the music and rhythm when working with language, pace, timing…  in your writing.  How do you access this? Is it instinctual? What helps a writer (you specifically) in finding your rhythm?

The source is intuitive, but it is always what I am working toward. I write and rewrite until it sounds right. The sound is in my head. I don’t have to read it aloud.  I become more aware of it when an editor suggests a word change and my response might be, “But that’s only two syllables. It needs three.” The sound involves tone, speech (the way people talk), the re-shaping of spoken word in a literary way so that it isn’t draggy and trivial. The sound has to be right for everything in the work–characters, images, etc.

I don’t write poetry, but I think the same impulse to make music is there.  On page one of The Girl in the Blue Beret, there is a sentence I’m fond of because of the way the sounds of the words go together.  “They walked through the furrowed field toward the tree, Lucien’s sturdy brown boots mushing the mud, Marshall following in borrowed Wellingtons.”   It’s the last clause that I love to say. I’m not sure what to say about accessing one’s rhythm. You can’t just enter a password. Maybe it is a matter of knowing and trusting your own style, your way of seeing. That means having confidence. But that’s a long road, isn’t it?

What are you doing/working on now?

I have hardly done any writing since finishing The Girl in the Blue Beret. It takes a long time to get reoriented after a novel.  I’m studying French and trying to clean up my room.

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 athttp://megpokrass.com.

Robin Black‘s collection If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (Random House, 2010) was a finalist in the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize. She is at work on her first novel and will be the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bryn Mawr College in 2012.

There was more good work than I could believe. I could easily have tripled, quadrupled the number of pieces I chose but my instructions were just a few. Thanks to everyone for all those wonderful words.

1. “Immiscibility” by Sally Houtman

I love and also admire so much about this piece. The way she uses the scientific information as both metaphor and structuring device is pitch perfect. And I think this story could be used to teach people how to make a story with very little plot – almost none here – actually feel like a satisfying, fully realized story. And it’s beautiful. Just beautiful. Favorite line: “With his back to the door he paused, thumbs hooked in his belt loops, to observe the simple politics of rock-paper-scissors, of making a fist and counting to three.” And it’s all that good, really. Bravo to Sally Houtman.

2. “Mario World Haiku” by Brian Warfield

Well, first of all, I love the idea. I think haiku is the perfect form for writing about a video game. It’s not just the spareness, it’s the way the form echoes the whole world of games, the way a universe exists within very particular rules. So I think it’s a perfect marriage of form and subject.And there’s a great whimsy here – though the piece doesn’t miss the potential metaphoric depth of Mario’s journey. I would love this all by itself: “Leap over the abyss/If you are big you can break boxes/Sometimes there is something in them”

3. “History Channel” by Stephen Hastings-King

This is such a moving piece- moving in the way that it conveys with great economy the whole tragedy of . . . it all. The fleeting nature of life, the futility of trying to defy that, the horror of war. Time, time, time. There is an eloquence here and an elegance, but no pulling of punches. Somehow, for all its bloodlessness and odd abstraction, the story that leads to these lines is as evocative a description of war as many I have read: “None of us ever listened to this. That would be pouring the war back in through your ears.” Gorgeous and so intelligent.

4. “My Grandmother Becomes a Young Widow” by John Riley

There are so many lines here that I could pull as exquisite. Like: “The dead never live up to expectations.” And: “A dull widow, weary of the mourners,/
newly aware, but unconcerned, that it’s possible/to die without consequence.” But it’s the whole poem that really captures the wistful, longing of the living for the dead, the wish that they set some kind of immortal example, the realization that perhaps they were just us, after all.

5. “I Married This” by Meg Pokrass

There is so much here. It’s like a novel in a few hundred words – with no sense of being a fragment though, it is whole. I love especially the exact capture of a certain kind of parental desperation, when everything has gone in whatever the opposite of “according to plan” is, the wisdom behind the line: “’People have to do something,’ I said, ‘For you, this was the right thing.’” The bigheartedness of this piece, containing as it does, disappointment, compassion, love, resentment all jumbled together, all reliant on one another, all endlessly human.

Editor’s Eye is a new 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.

Clifford Garstang, a former international lawyer, earned his MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. His award-winning linked story collection, In an Uncharted Country, was published in 2009. A novel in stories, What the Zhang Boys Know, is forthcoming in 2012 from Press 53. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, Bellevue Literary Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, Tampa Review, and elsewhere. He is the Editor of Prime Number Magazine.

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

I haven’t had a true mentor, as such, although I’ve had several teachers who have been helpful in various ways. And because I don’t teach in any sort of traditional academic setting (I occasionally teach creative writing online), where I think these relationships must usually develop, I also haven’t become anyone’s mentor, except informally among some younger writers I know. I do think a mentor can be very helpful because there are so many unwritten rules in this business, not to mention the fact that introductions can be important. One teacher I worked with at a conference in a short period of time introduced me to agents, worked with me on several stories, and later recommended me to an editor. Here was this famous writer who liked my work enough to do these things-that was enormously validating at the very least.

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

I don’t really suffer from block, so much. I’m always working on a few different things, so if one piece isn’t drawing me forward, I can switch to something that attracts me more. But there are a couple of things I’ve done just to get the juices flowing. One is to look out the window and describe what I see. That helps to jump start my creativity. Another, especially if I’m working on something that might already have an influential source, is to just type something-copy the work of another writer. Merely as an exercise you understand. It won’t go into the finished product, of course. For example, I was hoping to capture some flavor of a novel I read a couple of years ago. And it was a short novel, so I had in mind retyping the whole thing. I would do a little every morning just to warm up. Eventually, though, my own project took on momentum of its own and I no longer needed the warm up.

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

Other than the exercises I mentioned above that are really just warm up exercises, I don’t generally do that sort of thing. There is an exercise I’ve assigned, though, that generally yields extraordinary results, and that’s to tell a story using sentences that follow an ABCD pattern. That is, the first word begins with A, the second with B, and so on. It’s so restrictive that it’s liberating, and word choice becomes paramount-as it should be. In terms of practice, I like to stick to a schedule. I begin around 8 am and I write for as long as I can, subject to the unfortunate distractions of the Internet.

As an editor, what does a story need to do to jump out from the others in the slush pile? How important are first sentences, etc.

I look for freshness. Either tell me a story I’ve never heard, or tell me an old story in a new, compelling way. First sentences are very important, especially the choice of verb. It’s a very bad sign if the main verb of the opening sentence of a story is “to be.” When I teach the short story I always refer students to Sven Birkerts essay from Agni called “Finding Traction” in which he deconstructs the first sentence of a hypothetical submission and rejects the story without going further because the sentence doesn’t do enough work. It’s a frightening essay, and I can’t say that I apply (or even can apply) his tests, but I think about when I’m reading submissions. (That essay is available online, by the way, and it’s easy to find.)

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

Don’t quit. Fred Leebron, the director of the MFA Program at Queens University of Charlotte, where I studied, repeated what I’ve now seen repeated often elsewhere: published writers are the ones who didn’t give up. I’ve got friends-terrific writers-who couldn’t deal with rejection, and so stopped submitting work and eventually stopped writing. And I’ve been frustrated myself by the lack of major successes, but there have been enough little successes, I guess, that I’ve been able to keep going. As for what helped me as a young writer-I’ve never been a young writer. Although I wanted to write after college and even got an MA in English with that in mind (at that time, in the late 70s, I don’t think I had even heard of an MFA in creative writing), I got sidetracked in a major way by a career in international law that I wouldn’t trade for anything. Twenty years went by and I realized that I still wanted to write, and I finally had the courage to do it. If I could advise my younger self, I would say to write anyway. Even though the career is challenging, even though you’re travelling all the time, find the extra minutes in the day to write. I didn’t do that, and I kind of regret it now. Having said that, now that I’ve given myself time to write, I have lots to draw on from my career and international experience.

Talk about your collection In an Uncharted Country. Anything here about the collection itself and the process of putting it together. And about the stories themselves, what they have in common with each other…

When I was getting my MFA I worked on a novel set in Southeast Asia, where I lived for many years. I finished that and couldn’t bear the thought of starting another novel. (I didn’t realize that I wasn’t done with the first novel, but that’s a different issue.) At that point I had moved out to the country in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and as a stranger in a strange land I found everything I saw and everyone I met to be new and different and inspirational. So I started writing stories. I didn’t intended them to be a collection at first, and certainly didn’t plan on a linked collection of stories, but every time I finished one I realized that there was more about the people in the story that I wanted to explore, or there was a minor character I wanted to get to know more. Eventually I had a pile of stories that were connected by the location but also by all the overlapping characters. (People tell me it’s fun to be reading along and to recognize characters that have appeared in earlier stories.) I hesitate to talk about themes, because that’s really for the reader to discover, but I also found that there were strong thematic elements that held the collection, all related to the fact that I was in these new surroundings, trying to find my way.

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

I’ve got a new book coming out this fall. It’s a novel in stories called What the Zhang Boys Know and it’s set in a Washington DC condominium building. Unlike the first collection, I set out to write a series of connected stories all focused more or less on a single family. The stories are all independent-almost all have been published in literary journals at this point-but the arc of the whole is that a widower is looking for a new wife to help raise his two young sons. I’m excited about it because people have reacted very favorably to the stories and I think they’ll like the book as a whole, too. While I was looking for a publisher for that book, I was writing a novel set partly in Korea (where I lived for a couple of years) and partly in Virginia. I have an agent for that book now and we’ll be going out to publishers with that in a few months, I hope. And then I’m writing a play and a new novel and . . . still editing Prime Number Magazine.

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 athttp://megpokrass.com.

Susan Tepper: You break up your stunning prose poem “Last Night On Oil Street“ into 3 distinctly separate yet linked stanzas: The Commune, The Ghosts, The Trees.

In The Commune you write:

Spray paint ecru to heat searing through my fingers I’m leaving this block of farce we’ve inhabited and lost: the rights to sleep facedown on canvas,..

Nicolette, there is a fixed resolution here that springboards this piece: “…I’m leaving this block of farce…”

And resolve can be a potent device when used in prose and poetry.  I can feel the energy crashing off the narrator, the page, off Oil Street.  Tell us something about Oil Street that is real.

Nicolette Wong:  Oil Street is a well-known street in Hong Kong and it has a long history. My piece is set in this warehouse building that was a part of the Hong Kong Yacht Club in early 20th century – right by the sea – and both buildings were later deserted.

The legend: the warehouse was used for storing dead bodies during WWII, then, in later times, as transit for coffins before they were shipped to the crematorium via the nearby pier. In more recent times, the warehouse became an art commune until the artists got kicked out. To this day there are lots of ghost stories surrounding Oil Street. The irony: the warehouse will be demolished for a property developer to build a five-star hotel in its place, and the former Hong Kong Yacht Club will be revamped into the government’s Arts Promotion Office.

It’s funny what you say about resolve. The narrator’s resolve comes from being expelled, the one thing he has no control over. And you picked up on the detail – “I’m leaving this block of farce” – that encompasses and drives the whole story. Very shrewd, Susan!

Susan:  Fascinating history of Oil Street!  I’m deeply fond of Hong Kong and its people though I haven’t been back in over a decade, I’m sorry to say.  The piece opens masterfully, and there is your word choice: farce.  Such a terrific word.  It has brought down love affairs, friendships, governments, all manner of things.  It’s meant to be funny yet in certain contexts it’s an insulting, degrading word.  Here it’s used to explain the degradation of something that was once good.

“Farce” creates a chasm in the piece.  You present this triad of Commune, Ghosts, Trees.  Does this form you chose hearken back to the mysticism that is old Hong Kong?

Nicolette:  Not consciously, though I think you’re spot on about that. Last summer a bunch of us (writers and artists) visited Oil Street for a community art project. The site was only revealed to us through sparse historical facts, ghost stories and silly references in our pop culture (e.g. bad MTVs), and it was going to get torn down, wiped out from our sight.

I must have chosen the word “farce” because that’s how I see Hong Kong: a place where all manners of things are destroyed, by absurd and random connections between the government, businesses and people. A lot of our old architecture/cityscape, all the landmarks that embody our ways of lives 50, even 30 years ago are disappearing real quick; even a restaurant we went to last month may be no more today, because some

luxury brand wants to open its new shop there and the rent has tripled. Soon enough, no one will remember what this city used to be. Like our cultural and socio-political identity that’s being constantly invaded, blurred, remolded into a void that we can’t grasp.

But, I digress…About the form of my piece: according to Chinese superstitions, ghosts are attached to places. So when the artists leave the building and it gets demolished, the ghosts have nothing to hold onto, they’re gone. The trees in the front yard will be gone, too.

Susan: Heartbreaking.  Truly.  Watching as your environment and your culture erode around you.  Nicolette, I don’t feel that what you’re telling us here is a digression, but more an extension of your densely evocative “Last Night On Oil Street“.

You start with that feeling of primary colors shooting sparks out of the story, like Chinese firecrackers, or walking the streets of Kowloon in the dead of night, always full of color from the goods that hang off shops in the little streets, throngs of people everywhere.  I have never felt as alive before or since!  Hong Kong has its powerful hold, be it from ghosts or the dreams of ghosts.

In The Ghosts you write:

We’re the last departure before the sea rips for sand to kill surf and stretch the land our neighbors have feared.

Nicolette: The disappearing coastline. I’m curious where all the lost souls go?

And I’m big on visuals in my writing because I’m a voyeur. How do the artists spend their days, in frustration  –  sleep facedown on canvases, in a way that most of us never would? Who would have thought that ghosts could crack, scars seeping through their skin? What goes on in the dark alley past the street market? When I write, I see an image opening up – the sea rips, a red brick shoots out of the window – then I zoom in, envisage the details, move from one hidden thing to the next. The space unfolds like that. I never plan my stories or poems. All this makes me a terribly slow writer.

Susan:   All this makes you a fascinating writer.

Nicolette:  With “Last Night On Oil Street“ , I knew it was going to be the artists, the ghosts and the trees, but I had no ideas what they were doing there. I found a color – ecru – for the artist and it was on his hand. Then the rest.

Susan:  It’s strange that you found “ecru” which is a mild shade of beige, a soft but innocuous shade, that you use to express so much physical and historical and actual and mystical power and ambiguity that drives this piece of writing.

The blank canvas- upon which the artists lie face down- well that is also beige before it receives the gift of paint.  I find that an extremely interesting choice you have made.  But there is nothing simplistic here, and that your choices seem contradictory pull this story into stronger conflicting modes.  It’s a reflective piece that means more each time I read it.

In The Trees you write:

We grow bleeding oxidized bands to break free, leafy rhythm on the swing. The dead strum us; we lift each other.

Nicolette: The artists fade out, don’t they? On their last night in the commune, they can splash paint and carve their tales on the walls. Then it’s all gone. Nothing can be seen anymore.

The trees are rusted long before the end. They just keep thriving, playing with the ghosts in the dark. They’ve been there from the start and they’ve seen it all through the decades. Now they watch the final destruction until they become a part of it.

What happens when you’ve belonged to a place for so long that you just can’t leave, as your home is being taken away?  Here comes the blade.

Read  “Last Night On Oil Street“ by Nicolette Wong

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.

Origin Stories, O. Henry Winners, Readings, and Book Releases are just a few Fictionaut highlights this month. “True Conditions” by Michael Copperman is forthcoming at Camera Obscura, and “Reading the Water” will appear in April’s The Sun. Heather Fowler’s book Suspended Heart received a glowing review from The Short Review, and her collection People With Holes will be published by Narcissus Press. Fowler plans to donate 100% of her proceeds to V-Day, Eve Ensler’s global movement against violence against women and girls. Fowler’s other news includes a story in Necessary Fiction’s Origin Series; a story in Feminist Studies; and a discussion of Corey Mesler’s Notes Toward the Story & Other Story at The Lit Pub. Sam Ruddick’s story is forthcoming in the 2012 O. Henry Prize Winners. J.P. Reese’s “The Human Condition” and “The Rest Home” is forthcoming at The Glass Coin; “Almonds” and “Lex Talinois” is at Eunoia Review; “Empire Falls” at Blue Fifth Review; and “A Letter From Your Editor” is at Pure Slush.

Steve Himmer’s The Second Most Dangerous Job in America is the first ebook short in a new series from Atticus Books. David Ackley’s “Hellgate” (which first appeared at Fictionaut) is forthcoming in Thrice Fiction. Bill Yarrow’s book of poems, Pointed Sentences is available at BlazeVOX and Amazon. Marcus Speh’s “The Families/Die Familien” is a bilingual weekly highlight at the Frankfurt Bookfair 2012 blog fest; “Lefthand View” is at Trainwrite; “From Rus­sia With Love” is at decomP; “Eter­ni­tude” is at A-Minor; “A Classy Whore” at Reprint Poetry; “For Carol Novack” is at Mad Hatters Review; “The Sodom­ized Dic­ta­tor” at PANK; “Sniper” is at Dogzplot.

Robert Vaughan has published Flash Fiction Fridays, 34 stories from WUVM’s Lake Effect; has work in Heavy Feather Review, Untoward Magazine, Connotation Press, fwriction: review – Year One, Exquisite Quartet Anthology, and Stripped. Michelle Reale interviews Vaughan at Flash Fiction Chronicles. Susan Tepper and Mark Reep’s Story and Image Collaboration “Real Eyes” is in NYC Big City Lit. Jules Archer’s “Glory Days” and “Baking Cakes for the Enemy” are at A-Minor. My story “Eldorado” is in the latest Snake Nation Review. The Sunday Best Reading Series is presenting “Delicious New Fiction: Jonathan Baumbach, Janice Eidus and Douglas Light” at Hudson View Gardens’ The Lounge, February 5th at 4pm, 116 Pinehurst Avenue @ 183rd Street. $7. Call Patricia Eakins at 212-923-7800 x1342 for more information.

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@yahoo.com.

To publish: 1) to produce in a format so that a number of people can read it; 2) to produce in the proper venue for achieving authority and prominence.

-Mark Wallace

Flash fiction is finding a home at last through the free waves of the Internet.  Its deployment as a genre-long overlooked and passed over by traditional publishing houses and literary journals and magazines-is surprising its writers as much as its readers.  Supposedly, our attention spans have been weakened by television and by the Internet itself, and many of us find ourselves unable to read long works of fiction-the novels of the past.  According to this theory, a glitch in our collective brains suddenly attracts us to flash fiction’s brevity and wit.  Our interest in it is evolutionary and environmental.  There is ongoing debate-for some people interested in definition, it is more like a meditation-about the differences between flash fiction and prose poetry.  As with poetry, in flash fiction, it becomes less important to know, at the outset, whether a given story is true (“It happened,” as Mary Karr would have it) or the author invented it (“lied”).

Many of the 88 stories that make up Meg Pokrass’s debut collection of stories, Damn Sure Right (Press 53, 2011, 174 pages) appeared in journals on the Internet before their collection as a paperback.  I had read many of them there, as each appeared, one at a time, one surprising turn of phrase at a time, turning each over as I held it like a dime or shiny nickel.  I had considered their place in literary time, their linguistically joyful yet thematically sorrowful insistence on original response.  I had read them vertically, scrolling down a page, slowly, incrementally, my hand on a mouse, as if their power were shared between writer and reader, as if in reading, I had had something to do with their creation, if reception is needed for artistic completion.

I have read in interviews on the Internet that Pokrass trained in acting and practiced in poetry before discovering her unique vision, voice, and form in flash fiction a few years ago.  Perhaps no other writer of flash fiction has found her métier as certainly as Pokrass has.  Each story and its inner units-inflection, dialogue, image, word choice, tone-deliver what her readers by now have come to expect from her: a whipping, sad humor that challenges not only our understanding of what “fiction” is meant to achieve in a compact space, but of how we feel, now, in this year past the millennium, to be living in America, to be writers on the Internet, to be connected to one another as purveyors of writing, small packages of words nowhere created more succinctly and brilliantly than in Pokrass’s neat and quirky parables.

This is how many words I need to write to fill out the review to equal 500 words for publication.  What words would I add at this moment?  Damn Sure Right.

Kathryn Kulpa is the author of the story collection Pleasant Drugs (Mid-List Press) and has published work recently in Monkeybicycle, Northville Review, Metazen, decomP and Stone’s Throw. She is the editor of Newport Review, a literary e-zine. She comes very close to living in Rhode Island.

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

I didn’t have mentors as a kid or teenager, even though I was writing. The writers I knew were dead! I’ve only had one true mentor. That was Jincy Willett. She was an amazing writing teacher, and brave. She would share her own work for us to critique. I love her short story collection, “Jenny and the Jaws of Life”; I’m not sure if her influence shows up in my work, but I think we do share a similarly mordant, fatalistic humor. What I really remember from working with her is the intensity of attention she would give to every story, which is something that has strongly influenced my teaching style. No matter what the quality of the writing, I look hard for what can be salvaged.

Just as important as having a mentor is having a writing friend, partner in crime, someone who gets that you devote hours to this insane, non-remunerative practice. Someone who’ll read your first drafts and share theirs with you. I’ve been fortunate to have them over the years.

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

I have a writing group, and we do writing exercises together. It’s amazing how a time limit and a prompt can break down the blocks.  “15 minutes–GO!” And I just go. Stopping at 15 minutes is the hard part.

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

I like using visuals: old postcards, random family photos found in junk shops, pictures cut out of magazines. My flash story “Winter White” (from Metazen) was inspired by an advertising image. Random word prompts are also great story starters. Magazine cutouts, scrabble tiles, fortune cookie fortunes. I always like to have a bag of words and a bag of pictures handy.

As an editor, what does a story need to do to jump out from the others in the slush pile? How important are first sentences, etc.

A good first sentence matters, but I think some writers think you have to throw out some shocking, world-ending first sentence, and that’s not true. A story can build quietly. I just need to get a sense of assurance by the first few paragraphs–a feeling that yes, this is a voice I can trust, this is a writer who knows the craft, this is someone who will tell me a story worth reading.

What is the best advice you ever got as a writer? Words of wisdom…

I remember being a young writer and agonizing over taking a character in a story past adolescence … he was an architect, and that was important to the story, but I knew nothing about architecture, and I’d never had a job beyond working in bookstores and so on, and I didn’t know this or that about various grown-up things, and someone in my writing class just said “Make it up,” and I thought oh… right. It’s writing, not medicine. You can’t actually kill anybody if you get a detail wrong. Of course, you can always go back later and do the research, but don’t let worrying about facts stop you from creating fiction.

And what is going on with you these days with your writing?

It seems to be getting smaller and smaller. Short, mini, micro. Maybe someday it will just shrink to one sentence, or a word … or maybe it’ll slingshot around the sun and come back longer, and I’ll start writing nothing but novels.

Please talk about what you love the most about editing Newport Review if you will.

Discovering new writers, giving talented people their first chance at publication–that’s got to be the best.

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 athttp://megpokrass.com.