I was asked to read at Fictionaut to select stories or poems that might be worthy of my subjective gaze. I selected stories and poems and I hope you will read them.

I also did something self-serving I wasn’t asked to do. As an added bonus I selected the stories posted during Fictionaut’s first days  (Click on “Most Recent” under “stories,” then click the very last page, currently page 284). Nearly four years ago, Jurgen Fauth put up the genesis post, “Orchard,” a chilling Monsanto sci-fi dystopian flash:

“People didn’t seem to mind, and bought cherries like they did in the old days.“

Fictionaut was wide open and a hella lotta people have posted in the interim. It seems the stories–and I’m going to just call them stories from here on out because I’ll tire of typing stories and poems–but writers seem to be posting for various reasons.

So I didn’t look at every story in the same way, but I probably clicked on them all. There is work that is fresh and the writer has asked for feedback. Then there are stories that were already published. I didn’t select anything from the Fictionaut Recommends window because I was asked to try to outsmart this crowd-sourced aesthetic awards system. And so no offense super-fave stories, but I thought of you as the enemy. That said, many of the stories I selected had already accumulated little blue stars, and I was glad to know there were others who had also read and appreciated the stories below.

I’ll start with this from Brian Warfield’s “Resplendent“:

“Betty’s finger got married to the circular saw on a brilliant Saturday in June.

It wasn’t her ring finger, but whatever.”

J.A. Pak’s “The Gratitude of Bones” is not to be missed.

There is no greater crime ever perpetrated on Earth than that Con Chapman’s “Break Time in the Army Corps of Engineers Mascot Lounge,” only has one fave at the time of writing. My fave! Are you people idiots? Are you addicted to microwave popcorn or something? Do you wake up and shuffle out into the unholy mess day after day? All any of you really needs is this story. I’ve admired Con Chapman thingamajigs from afar for a while, but this one is best I’ve read. The lines hit. Funny and very smart.

Melanie Neale’s “Hurricane Shutters” is heartbreaking and gorgeous. This might just be my favorite out of everything I read.

I selected two Gary Hardaway poems, “Prairie Yields,” and “The Naming.” In the comments someone said, “You are becoming your very own school.”  I don’t know what that might mean, but I like the poems.

Chris Okum’s “Watching Home Movies With My Twin Brother” is wonderful.

Ann Bogle’s “The Cool Report” is enchanting, a backwards chronology of list-serve messages along with poems and personal journal entries. One has to submit to the thing as it rolls along consuming and elegant. Ann’s note asks for our response about the word “Niggas” that an editor suggested be removed. James Robison objected to censoring the writer, while no one else responded. I’ll be honest here, since I was asked, but I’d probably cut the passage for purely aesthetic reasons. If the debate in question was foregrounded I probably missed it, and that passage seemed so unlike the rest I wouldn’t feel anything was lost by cutting. Enjoy the read and feel free to disagree with me.

Marcie Beyatte’s “Double or Nothing”  is a perfectly executed coming of age flash.

Witness the death of one of J. Mykel Collins’s characters in “Life After Death.”

Maybe I fell for Mark Reep’s  ” How to Profit as Copper Becomes the New Gold,” because my hand is also bandaged.

Charles Huschle’s “Glue” might be all you ever need to know about couples therapy.

That first week on Fictionaut, Jurgen Fauth followed up “Orchard” with the near-death experience, “Gas Making You Sick,” and the New Orleans Jazz fantasy, “Dizzy.”

“I’m a regular at his Wednesday night gigs at the Bon Temps. Kermit swings hard.”

That same day Marcy Dermansky’s “Little Meadow Sims” got beat up again in school today.

And on the third day of Fictionaut is my own “Moe Tucker,” a young Clinton-era student of Shakespeare with a snare drum.

Heap many good faves like Mardis Gras beads, and thanks for listening.

John Minichillo’s novel, The Snow Whale was a Hey, Small Press! best of 2011, and they called it, “the funniest novel we reviewed all year.”  He lives in Nashville and you can find him here:  thesnowwhale.com and on Twitter @thesnowhale. 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.

We don’t get many new groups on Fictionaut these days, so it’s always good to find a new one, especially one with quite a few members.  Roberto C. Garcia created the group  Letras Caseras, and describes it as:

This group is an extension of my tumblr www.letrascaseras.tumblr.com.

It is my sincere hope to continue the wonderful work of Marcus Speh over at Kaffe in Kathmandu. I know it won’t be the same but in keeping a tradition alive perhaps we can make it new.

I’d like for this group to be more overtly political than the rest of Fictionaut, however, please share your works of beauty, protest, witness, and overall honesty. And check out and contribute to the tumblr as well.

Q (Lynn Beighley: ): Hi, Roberto. What does the phrase, “Letras Caseras,” mean, and what does it mean to you?

What are you looking for people to submit? How do you decide what will be included?

Pam Houston is the author of two collections of linked short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat, the novel, Sight Hound, and a collection of essays called A Little More About Me, all published by W.W. Norton.  Her stories have been selected for volumes of Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and Best American Short Stories of the Century. She is the winner of the Western States Book Award, the WILLA award for contemporary fiction, and The Evil Companions Literary Award and multiple teaching awards.  She is the Director of Creative Writing at U.C. Davis and teaches in The Pacific University low residency MFA program, and at writer’s conferences around the country and the world.  She lives on a ranch at 9,000 feet in Colorado near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.  Her new book, Contents May Have Shifted, will be published by W.W. Norton on February 6th, 2012. Author photo by Adam Karsten.

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

I didn’t exactly have mentors where I was coming up as a writer.  I had wonderful undergraduate teachers, who taught me everything about how to be a person, and ultimately how to be a teacher, but as far as the real writing went, my mentors were more on the page then in the flesh.  Writers I admired greatly, but in most cases never met, or met much later in my life.  Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, Don Delillo: the usual suspects I guess, along with some very important dead writers: D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Willa Cather.  Now I spend the better part of my life mentoring students.  I direct a graduate CW program at UC Davis, I teach in the Pacific University low-res MFA program, and a low-res program is truly all about mentoring in  ways a hi-res program doesn’t even approach, and I have a private group of students that meet twice a year.

It is probably true that I throw myself into the mentoring process as a kind of a do-over for what I missed having in my own life, and the fact that so many of the students I have mentored have gone on to publish books seems like a testimony to the value of the process.  And yet there was also something really valuable about having to work as hard as I had to work to decipher what those dead and distant authors were doing on the page, because they weren’t there in person to explain it to me.  We have this whole massive industry these days where writers work extremely hard to articulate and share their writing process, we give craft talk after craft talk until we get so sick of our “process” that we never want to write another word, and while there is much to be learned this way, I also wonder what is lost because aspiring writers don’t have to enter that difficult water by themselves.

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

I believed the poets when they said “form will set you free.”  As long as I have some form in mind for a piece I am writing–even if it is a form I am going to violate later on in the writing process-as long as I have boxes of a certain size and shape to fill, it is rare that I get truly stuck.  Stalled, yes.  Bored, disheartened, maybe.  But not truly stuck.

In Sight Hound I had 12 first person narrators, and at first I thought they would all speak once, and then I thought they would all speak twice, and I even had them each speaking three times before I realized they all didn’t have to speak the same number of times, but by that time, see, I had tricked myself into filling all of those little boxes of story.

In Contents May Have Shifted, I decided very early on that there would be 132 very short chapters, all titled with the place name of the place they took place, and 12 chapters that took place no place, in the air, and they would be titled with the flight numbers of the airplanes they included.

Faced with a writing day, you see, it is much easier to say, I am going to write the two pages of concrete physical details that will ultimately be called Santa Cruz, Argentina, or Juneau, Alaska, then it is to say I am going to  WORK ON MY NOVEL.  And 12 12’s-a gross-was interesting to me in and of itself.  I felt I could work on those 144 little pieces forever.

Are there favorite writing exercises you give students that you can share?

Well, unsurprisingly, given what I have just said, I often ask my fiction students to write formal poems.  Pantoums have a particularly wonderful self-generating quality.  Other than that, my favorite exercise, though to call it “favorite” or “exercise” is misleading, because it is simply what I do, day in and day out, is that I ask students to write three separate scenes, three moments where the world caught their attention, where it glimmered at them in some significant way.  I ask that one glimmer must be from the last 24 hours, one must be from more than 10 years ago, and the third one can be from any time they want.  The way those three glimmers will speak to one another, by virtue of the fact that they were called up by the same mind on the same day is often quite interesting, and in combination they will often comprise the bare bones of a story.  In a certain way, this exercise is what Contents May Have Shifted is, taken to the nth degree.

Suggestions for making characters live?  Do you know your characters beforehand, or do you find out who they are in the process? When I read your first collection Cowboys are my Weakness I was struck by the pendulum-like traits of bravery and vulnerability in your characters.

Well, I don’t make any secret of the fact that every book contains a Pam-like character, a woman of a certain age, trying to pay strict attention to the things that glimmer at her and form from that a way to live intentionally.  And since I know a version of that character intimately, she’s comes ready made in three dimensions.  As for the other characters, I have to go back to that same observer…the part of me that pays very strict attention to the world around me, which includes lots of different kinds of characters, right?

There is always a moment, after having met someone, when they do or say some telltale thing that reveals their character, their understory, or at least implies it.  If you pay attention you won’t miss these when they are offered.  Writing great characters seems to me about giving them those tiny gestures, some offhand line of dialogue, something they wear or eat, that gestures pointedly at their understory.  John Updike was a master at this.  If you study his short stories you will see what I mean.

How can getting older enhance our strengths in writing? What changes? What must we watch out for?

Well, lets get what to watch out for out of the way first.  We don’t want to, above all else, I think, become parodies of ourselves.  That is one of the scariest things I can think of.

But on the brighter side, I got to spend a few days recently with my dear friend Terry Tempest Williams.  The two of us have been at this writing game together for a long time.  I have a picture of us signing our first books at a little table in Salt Lake City from 1992-we were such babies…we don’t look old enough to drink, even if you added us together.  But recently we talked about being 50, about how maybe at 50 it was time to step into our voices in a new, more confident way, and take more risks, maybe even say outloud the things we have long suspected…own our intuitive sense of how things work on this planet, dare to speak even the uncomfortable truths.  Terry has written a book called When Women Were Birds (Farrar, April, 2012) that takes this idea of voice as its subject.  It is going to give thousands of women, and lots of men too, I reckon, permission to speak more freely.  That is what age on a woman is all about, I think.  Permission.  Permission to say, “I like this and I don’t like that and here are some things that I think that might be worth hearing.”

On the simplest level, our writing should get better as we get older because we have read more, we have written more, and with luck, we have learned to be less and less defensive.

What’s the best writing advice you ever got? And/or the best living advice?

Henry James said, “a writer should strive to be a person on whom nothing is lost.”

Once, in LAX airport, Carlos Casteneda told me that a lot of changes were going to be coming to my life and I ought to face those changes with love instead of fear.

Not a day goes by when I don’t think about both of those.

Tell us anything and everything you can about your new book. What an exciting time for you!

Contents May Have Shifted is a novel of 144 very short chapters, all narrated by a woman named Pam, each named with the place they take place:  Istanbul Turkey, Juneau Alaska, Marfa Texas, Trenton New Jersey.  Except for twelve of them which take place no place, in other words, 39,000 feet above the earth on an airplane.  In this way the book is a kind of photo album in words.

Pam’s work takes her all around the country and the world, and in each place she’s trying to understand exactly what that place has to teach her.  There is a man at the beginning, and a better man at the end, a child, dogs, horses, and a whole lot of smart, funny women friends.  There are churches and temples and mosques; acupuncturists, watsu practitioners and monks.  There are icebergs, mudslides, glow worms, blow holes, and several near misses in the sky.  Some readers have said it is a book about looking for something to believe in, about finding faith in a faithless age.  One said it was a book about friendship, which I  think you could make a case for, because Pam’s friends have all the best one liners.  Sometimes I think it is a meditation on perpetual motion, on freedom versus settling down.  Terry (Tempest Williams) said it was my own personal Book of Runes.  I will live with it a while out in the world before I know what it is about for certain.  What I can say now is that it is me doing exactly what I am inclined to do on the page.

What is next?

Good question.  I have been writing some essays.  One on writing, one on alcohol, one on Mongolia…but those are just keeping me occupied while I wait for whatever comes next.  I once tried to write a book of letters, and I didn’t know enough at the time to make the form transcend itself…I might give that another try.

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: John, your intriguing story “Along Came Doreen“ starts this way like a poem or song lyrics:

“Twenty two, reading Camus, feeling blue, life is absurd. Why even try? Live for today, stay blown away. Inherent meaning does not exist in this universe.”

Immediately I was pulled in by the funky voice of your narrator.  It’s fun!  I needed to find out what would happen.  Did you know Doreen would be part of this story, or did you discover her somewhere down the line of writing it?

J. Mykell Collinz: Doreen is the story’s central character. That started with Drug War Snitch, which takes place about ten years later. After the fourth episode of that story, I felt a need to go back to the very beginning of our relationship and start writing it over again with more of an emphasis on Doreen. The first paragraph describes my mental condition as I grabbed my guitar, jumped in my car, and headed for the bar, one pivotal evening early in our relationship. The rest, about practicing the guitar, singing in my basement, imagining myself performing in front of Doreen and her adoring friends at the bar, and then actually doing it, is a compressed version of the evening where we became more seriously involved at a gathering in someone’s house after the bar. Doreen is my central character in several other stories, also.

ST: You say “our” rather than “their” relationship, which forms my next question:  How much real truth is here in this story?  You can fudge this answer for the sake of your privacy, but you can also tell as much as you wish.

JMC: Doreen and I were eventually married in June of 1965 and we’ve been married ever since. She died at home of cancer last May. This is part of a series of stories based on the facts of our life together which are still in progress. Many details are compressed or simplified in this story to characterize a number of different experiences.

ST:  Oh, my.  That’s very sad news.  John, I’ve always found you to be a writer with a deep heart.  That you’ve chosen to share this personal information here, well, I’m speechless.  And honored that you feel this is a safe space in which to do so.  Thank you.

One of the many things I loved about this story was the narrator saying:  “I needed a miracle.”

There is purity to that line.  It doesn’t get any truer than that.  Who hasn’t been there?  Who hasn’t needed a miracle?  It helps us relate to him.  And, to my mind that is the single strongest element in story-telling.  Can we relate to the character(s).  And I don’t mean we need to “like” the characters.  Though I happen to like your guy.  And that night he got his miracle, right?

JMC: Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned her death at this time but it’s now a part of the story. Yes, he received his miracle, in the form of love, infusing his universe with meaning. And, yes, the need for a miracle to get him out of his mental and spiritual funk does help the reader relate to the character, which is the single strongest element in story telling, I agree.

ST:  I don’t think there is a right or wrong time to reveal things.  I think we do it according to our own timetable, and as you say: it’s now part of the story.  And stories are what these chats are all about.

I’ll reveal something.  I was a “girl singer” and can so relate to much of this story, the atmosphere you’ve created, the nerves that go along with certain gigs.  You write:

“While practicing at home, I would visualize myself standing on stage in the large, square, dimly lit barroom filled to capacity for open mic night. With ceiling fans circulating smoke filled air, the atmosphere would be torrid.”

Torrid.  Perfect word for the atmosphere of the bars back then.  Your male character lets us in on his vulnerability.  That’s very nice in a story.  A lot of male writers will not allow that to happen.  Does it come easily for you to write a vulnerable male character?

JMC:  I’m not sure if I can say it comes easily to write a vulnerable male character yet it does apply to many of my characters, particularly the characters based upon my own direct experiences because that’s what I’m usually trying to convey, to give insight to the character’s basic fears, desires, and motivations.

ST:  I applaud you for that!  Go for truth, I always say (especially to myself).  By the way, John, speaking of truth, your character talks about strapping on his Martin acoustical six-string guitar.  There’s more truth.  The fake musicians often call it an acoustic guitar.  Ha ha!  Do you still play, and if so, what do you like?

JMC:  That’s very insightful of you to catch that. Yes, I still play every chance I get, usually when I’m alone. I don’t play songs, I explore musical patterns, it’s a mystical experience. I listen to all forms of music. I love music.

Read  “Along Came Doreen“ by  J. Mykell Collinz

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.

Welcome to the inaugural installment of Editor’s Eye, 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 a handful of outstanding stories. Now, our first guest editor’s identity can be revealed: it is none less than our very own Meg Pokrass,  author of Damn Sure Right, host of the Fictionaut Five interview series, and editor for Blip Magazine.

Here are the stories that caught Meg’s Editor’s Eye over the last two weeks.
 
 

“Devoured” by Deborah Jiang Stein

A quiet intensity surrounds the underwater feeling of this piece. Tiny observations which illuminate oceans of meaning… a piece which tackles the story of family duty crashing up against call of life, and with odds being so slim.. There is a mountain of tragic urgency here.

No words on the train, no words between mother and daughter. The girl will spend her life behind the candy stand, just as she’s expected to set garbage out on its sunrise schedule, separating burnable and non-burnable. She imagines stuffing the family candy stand into the bag of burnable refuse.

“Tradition” by Terri Kirby Erickson

Erickson writes this flash fiction New Year’s Day story about loss, and the details make her recipe. With melancholy humor, Terri Kirby Erickson shows us how life rolls on, meal by meal, swishy step by swishy step. A survivor lives here.

I use my mother’s recipe for cornbread because I have no recipes of my own, unless it’s the one called, “Disaster.” We should never have gotten married, but you know that. We have nothing in common other than the grim determination not to fail at anything.

For Carol: Life Bursts Out by Tania Hershman

I won’t say a word here except READ IT. What a wonderful dedication to the late Carol Novak, as Novak was one of the early online publishers of Tania Hershman’s work in her legendary “Mad Hatter’s Review”. This story by Hershman is superb… as all of Tania’s stories I have had the pleasure to encounter are. Read!

Life was small. It was tiny even, so tiny it was hard to see it sometimes. Life curled up to make itself even smaller, to fit into the kinds of holes that insects crawl into to get away from bigger insects. Life was sad. Life didn’t want to be an insect. Life was getting backache from the curling up. It wanted to straighten out, stand up tall, shout out to the world. But it had been so long, Life wasn’t sure how to.

“Gardens” by Carol Reid

In 121 words, Carol Reid gives us pure poetry in the language here, every word hanging ripe before the next, where it needs to be. Not one word too many. From her first sentence, we watch a love which is hiding and glowing all at once. Reading this, we are happy voyeurs watching an opal shine.

He knows the woman contemplating groceries. She has kept her hair the same shade of beachfront gold. She hides her body as always under loose drapes of grey and blue. A flicker slips across his heart– that night when she mentioned the convent in the same breath as a three a.m. invitation…

“Coward” by Roberto Garcia

Roberto Garcia serves up taut animal-like tension in this poem, felt to the reader like a blow. The ending groans and shines, Garcia shows us how fight-or-flight fear intensifies when tables turn:

…..& I cup his face with

my fingertips like its some thing I’ve created
& the spit is gone from my mouth
I am afraid, God help me, I am afraid.

“Silver” by Christian Bell

Christian Bell’s trademark is painful humor, and in this piece, his rare mess of strangely jaded vulnerability won me. In this micro salad of intrigue. Bell’s beautiful, vulnerable ending implies a forever dark, fragile, and messy life.

This is not unlike the razor to your wrist, the car running in the garage port, the one foot hanging off the ten-story ledge. Your ice cold eyes used to entrance me, the lure of northerly volcanic landscapes, but now, they’re dull rocks found in a quarry. There are silver bullets in that gun, I say, lethal to the undead but I’m sure not you.

“Moscow, Wyoming” by Chris Okum

Chris Okum’s one-sentence story creates an ingenious mix of Theater of the Absurd with true horror… reading this, our brains weigh a world of brief sanity against fate — smooth as a bullet writing, shot from Okum’s window, striking our brains right in the center. Something like magic.

Professor Layne Cundy, of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, was in his kitchen, pacing the linoleum, snacking on strawberry trail mix, thinking about his next book, The Opera: Pol Pot’s Peformance of a Lifetime, remembering something his mentor, Dean Van Dunson, once said about Pol Pot, that as a college student, Pol Pot, while studying in France, was a member of an avant-garde experimental theater troupe, and that Pol Pot was often cast as a dog…

“No Place For Unicorns or Teddy Bears” by Michael Gillian Maxwell

Michael Gillian Maxwell’s story offer a straightforward narrative voice, employing smart visual details. Here we are catching a bittersweet glimpse of compensatory, brotherly work relationships, and how sexual fantasy takes over when conditions are this lousy, when the stakes are absurdly high. He shows us a war of dangerous work and the Carpenter Ant-like lives of humans so replaceable.

The noonday air is pungent with the odor of yeast from the brewery and smells of effluent waft from the nearby river. The permanent, full time workers carry metal lunch buckets and steel thermoses. Liver sausage, baloney, and PP&J sandwiches on white bread are packed in amongst pickles, hard-boiled eggs, potato chips, and Oreo cookies.

“Saying It With Flowers” by Barry Basden
(first published in Used Furniture Review)

Basden paints a story of guilt and the human need to feel closer to what we are supposed to feel in this life. A married commuter buys an inadequate bouquet for his dutiful, suburban & clearly traditional wife from a crippled man after a tryst-like “huddling” in the city with another woman. This flower transaction becomes complicated, bad instincts take over, and I won’t ruin it by telling you the rest.

Your wife is cooking dinner out there right now. So you give the crippled man his ten dollars and he hands you a small bouquet. You shuffle toward the bus stop, but standing in line, you think the flowers seem puny, not nearly enough. Still, there’s time and you walk back for more.

Meg Pokrass is the author of Damn Sure Right, a collection of flash fiction from Press 53. She interviews authors here at “The Fictionaut Five”, and serves as associate editor for BLIPMAGAZINE (formerly MIssisspippi Review). Her flash fiction and story animations have recently appeared or will be appearing soon in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Gargoyle, Gigantic, The Rumpus,  Big Muddy, CUTTHROAT, Mid American Review, Yalobusha Review and Superstition Review and lots of other literary journals with strange names. Meg lives near the ocean in San Francisco with seven animals.

Fictionaut is joining Reddit, Wikipedia, Boing Boing, and many other sites in the strike to oppose the Internet censorship bills SOPA and PIPA. Tomorrow, January 18, the site will go dark from 8am to 8pm EST.

Fictionaut is committed to creativity, freedom of expression, and a censorship-free Internet, and we hope that the blackout will help to draw attention to this fundementally flawed legislation.

If you haven’t seen the video below, take a look for a quick introduction to the dangers of SOPA and PIPA. Find out more at americancensorship.org.

Zoe Zolbrod‘s first novel, Currency, received a 2010 Nobbie Award and was a Friends of American Writers prize finalist. Related short stories and nonfiction have appeared in The Chicago Reader, Knee-Jerk Offline, Fish Stories Collectives, and Maxine, a zine she co-founded in the 1990s. She blogs at the literary website The Nervous Breakdown and lives in Evanston, IL, with her husband and two children, where she works as a senior editor for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Q (Meg Pokrass): Mentors/Mentoring: talk about this, if you have had a mentor? Have you yourself been a mentor?

Zoe Zolbrod: I don’t consider myself to have had or been a writing mentor, although I’ve received some needed support for my writing along the way, most especially from my friend and editor Gina Frangello. What I have leaned on for guidance have been books themselves. I first read The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton when I was about 14 years old, and I’ve probably read it dozens of times since. It was my primary model when writing Currency. Other books that I turned to repeatedly for instruction and encouragement included The Color Purple by Alice Walker, The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells all by Allan Gurganus, and A Passage to India by E. M. Forster. And I read and reread and underlined the essay “The Art of Fiction” by Henry James, which had a few lines that absolutely gave me courage when mine faltered. More recently, I’ve found myself studying Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments and returning repeatedly to Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water.

What do you listen to inside yourself, what directs your writing…?

Sometimes I hear a character inside my head, speaking very clearly and distinctly. That was certainly the case with Currency. Then, I had to block out the critical voice, the argumentative voice saying I didn’t have a right to the character. When I write essays, the argumentative voice is what I listen to, that part of me that’s always squinting suspiciously, poking holes, debating with imaginary strawmen as I go about my day. Now, I’m writing a memoir, and I’m listening to, well, myself, a very deep and vulnerable part of myself. I have to block out the voice saying that this is indulgent, that no one cares, that it’s unethical or pathetic or some combination of the two.

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

I sometimes turn from my manuscript and write about the problem or obstacle that’s making me feel stuck in a blank document or in a notebook or even just at the end of the draft-loose, free-writey sort of scribbling that has permission to be bad or even almost nonsensical or that might take the form of a conversation with myself. My other method for getting unstuck is to take long walks. At several crucial points when writing Currency, I solved a problem of plot or character while walking for miles along Lake Michigan.

These days, I have so little dedicated writing time that I’m pretty ready to use it when I have it. Some days the words come slowly, but I feel the gears turning, and I know that if I keep my butt in the chair (and my mouse from sliding toward my browser icon) something will come.

Discuss writing Currency, if you will…

In the late-90s, I sat down to write from the point of view of a Thai man for a workshop assignment. Although I’m usually a slow writer, I churned out over twenty pages in one sitting and was left breathless and exhilarated. I felt like the character-Piv-was there with me, narrating, and I was just taking dictation. I was compelled by his voice and his story in a way I never had been before, and I knew I had the seed for a novel.

The story Piv was telling me hinged on his relation to Westerners, in particular to Western women, and so it was clear to me from the get-go that an American woman would be a character. I didn’t know what trouble the two would get into, though, until I read an article in the New York Times Magazine about animal smuggling that absolutely blew my mind. That’s it! I thought.

With the introduction of the smuggling plot, I found myself writing a literary thriller, which meant that the novel was both character- and plot- driven. Perhaps accordingly, I simultaneously wrote, outlined, and researched. It was a push-pull: what I discovered while writing would sometimes push forward the outline, and the outline would sometimes pull the writing along. Sometimes I’d research to find the answer to a question that the writing had posed, or sometimes I’d write toward a fact I’d found while researching.

I felt a lot of momentum. But that didn’t mean that I was churning out the pages. I’m a recursive writer, always finding reasons to go over existing pages. I was constantly backtracking to make plot adjustments or to finesse the language, especially in Piv’s chapters, which were written in an idiosyncratic Thai-inflected English. Writing between one and two full days a week, with a couple of short residencies thrown in there, I finished a complete draft in about three years, maybe a little less. It was over 400 pages long. With the help of suggestions from my writing group, I spent a year revising before I felt ready to send the novel out to agents.

I went through two agents and two more significant revisions (and had two children) before Currency was finally published by Other Voices Books about twelve years after I started it. It clocked in at 276 pages. Although so much has changed, I still feel like the first chapter is very close in spirit to the pages I transcribed back in the 1990s when Piv first spoke to me.

You write essays, memoirs, novels… which form do you enjoy working in the most?

Writing Currency was one of the great joys of my life. I loved the feeling of being so deeply immersed in that fictional world, the way something concrete arose so clearly from a haze. I miss the experience of writing and revising that particular book like I miss traveling itself, very palpably, very viscerally. I crave the smells and the quality of the air there. Sometimes the longing is so great it really overtakes me.

But in the past couple years, I’ve been drawn to nonfiction, to essays and memoir. I love the satisfaction of having an immediate online audience via The Nervous Breakdown, where I’ve been posting most of the essays, which are often on subjects of the day. That immediacy is a great pleasure after self-publishing a zine that came out once a year and working on a novel for over a decade.

The stories and issues I’m exploring in the memoir have been pushing on my brain for years. I actually tried to approach the material from a fictional place, because it seemed more fun, and freeing, and safe, and I couldn’t stand the word memoir in relation to myself, but the endeavor just felt false. And now I’m immersed.

How does parenting fit into the mix?

I have a three year old and a ten year old, and a full-time job as an editor. To be honest, it’s difficult to have a child my younger one’s age and to be in writing mode. She wants me around all the time, and I’m not. She wants my undivided attention, and my attention is VERY divided-between her, my son, the domestic drudgery and the clouds, where my head is always drifting. When I am immersed in my writing, I am a more irritable and distracted family member. I try to be aware of that, to allow for it sometimes and to step back from the writing at other times. Jillian Lauren recently had a post about this at Greg Olear’s Fathermucker blog, and it made me feel in good company.

It helps me to leave the house to write. I’m grateful for the use of The Writer’s Workspace in Chicago, which gives me a sanctuary. And I think often of a book I read when I was pregnant with my first child, A Question of Balance, in which women writers talk frankly about… well, you know. I try not to blame family life for writing frustrations. There’s always something. When I do get time now, I seldom lack inspiration.

What are you working on?

I’m practicing what to say about this: “I’m working on a memoir exploring the lens through which I’ve viewed my childhood sexual assault.” How does that sound? I think it connotes something a little more dramatic and heavy than is accurate (which is one of the issues I’m interested in, what we bring to the term sexual molestation) but it’s what I’ve got right now.

I’m terrified and motivated by this project. I can carve out six or eight hours for myself come up for air at the end feeling simultaneously wrung out and energized, lightened, like I’ve covered so much ground, only to find that I’ve written maybe three or four new pages.

Because it’s so hard to find time and I worry about the effect on my family life, and because I need to earn a living and have discarded the dream that I can do that through my personal writing, I have tried at times to suppress the urge to write. We can be so cost-benefit oriented in this culture. But that feeling of exhaustion and absorption, the journey from the not-known to the spoken, the molding of words to create a rhythm that becomes part of the sense of them, that reveals some sense in the world. . . I crave it. Right now, it’s benefit enough.

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: Your story “Something about L.A.“ begins this way:

He puts me out of the Benz south of Four Corners.  He’s pissed because they’ve closed the monument for construction.  Not my fault but he has to blame someone.

You have this story “set up” in just the first 3 lines.  A really strong picture.  The Benz (aka Mercedes) is sorta cool-talk, so we probably have a pair who think they’re pretty cool.  He chucks her out of the car, so there’s immediate tension.  Gay, these first 3 lines could be a scene in a film, it’s strikingly visual.

Gay Degani: Thanks for the kind words, Susan, and I will admit I do strive to be visual and to create tension immediately in a story.  I need the anchor and I think it helps readers engage.  When I first started taking writing seriously, I decided I would write screenplays (I do live in California after all).   It was the eighties and there were all these wonderful movies out there like Trading Places and Arthur, Alien and The Terminator, Stripes and Ghostbusters that I felt an emotional connection with. I’ve loved movies all my life watching them on a black and white TV from the time I was very young. Philadelphia Story, It Happened One Night, Casablanca, Rebecca, these were the kinds of things I wanted to write. So I learned how to write from learning how to write scripts.

Susan: One of my early writing teachers told us that film was our biggest competitor as fiction writers, and that we should study film.  Well, Gay, it sure paid off for this story!

You’ve placed it in the desert- telling us there are hot winds, sand, exhaust fumes.  And our gal, flying solo now, is all decked out, trés fashionista, in her Gucci, Louis V, Jimmy Choo sandals.  When you turn the story on its tilt:

“It’s not like I was born to money anyway.  Not me.”

Gay: Ah… the element of surprise!  Another thing I try to do is to throw in a curve-a reasonable curve, but a curve.  This particular story- it’s weird- it just kind of came out of me, and that doesn’t happen that often, but it’s beginning to happen more now that I’ve been writing for a while.  I think it has to do with experience and beginning to feel the turns of a story coming up.  What I mean is that there is the set up (and I think this one came from a prompt.  I can’t remember the exact prompt but I think “Four Corners” was in it.  Since I’d been there, I thought, why not?).

So from the Four Corners setting, I wondered what would be a bad thing to happen there? In a somewhat isolated place and what else could I do to make it difficult for her.  So that’s what I did- think, fish out of water. The question here for me was what attitude should she have in this situation? But as a rich girl, she wasn’t someone I could really understand or feel empathy for- that rich girl personality.

Susan: Right. ‘Cause if she had been born to money, I think it would have been an entirely different story.

Gay: The easiest thing was to make her nouveau-riche, a pretender of sorts, someone I could feel sympathy for. This meant going in the opposite direction of what she seemed, and realizing this at this point in the writing of the story, confirmed that she needed to be someone who wasn’t born to money.

I don’t know if I thought about this in this long logical way, though.  For me, I was typing along and reached a crossroad.  Here’s the set-up and now what needs to happen? To decide what happened next, I had to decide who she was.

Susan: The intuitive writing is the best writing.  Just letting it glug out in its own form and pacing.  It takes some practice and a fair amount of guts to let the work spill onto the page that way.

So there she is, our gal.  Left alone at the side of the road.  Fair game for what your unconscious mind wants to do next.  You’ve upped the ante.  You write:

“The truck shivers to a stop, dust swirling.  The door opens as a small figure slides off the driver’s seat.  A boy, just a boy, dark skin and hair, wearing a faded plaid shirt and jeans.  Barefoot.”

Gay: Now this is exactly where my subconscious surprised me.  Where does this stuff come from??  I don’t know.  All I remember knowing at the time was I knew I didn’t want it to be a man– good, bad, or ugly.  I wanted nothing romantic and I wanted nothing nasty. I had done some research on Four Corners just to ground the whole thing in detail and saw that it was on or near a reservation (I don’t remember exactly right now which) and so having the person in the truck be Native American must have been on my mind. I also wanted it to be unexpected, and I liked the idea that she couldn’t really see who it was. And Ruben just appeared, god bless him.

Susan: Ruben is magical.  He’s twelve!  A combination mensch and Don Quixote character.  Her knight in shining armor, so to speak.  But without the (ahem…) knightly night to contend with.  He’s what gives this story its shine.  The best stories turn on a dime that you can’t find or ever remember having in your pocket.

Gay: Isn’t that the truth?  That’s why I always remind myself when things aren’t going well to have faith in the process.  The process is everything.  All we can do is show up every day and believe in the magic of the experience.  And though I don’t think it ever gets easier, if I have faith that something will happen to make things work out in a story- and life, it almost always does.

Read   “Something about L.A.” by Gay Degani

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 is fiction editor of Wilderness House Literary Review, co-author of new novel What May Have Been, and hosts FIZZ, a reading series at KGB Bar.

Happy New Year! MaryAnne Kolton’s “She Had Sex With Strangers”, “The Love Tap”, and “NEON” is at The Toucan; “War is a Bad Thing” at Eunoia; “We Sustain” in Lost Children Charity Anthology; Invisible Child” at Anatomy; “The Birthday Girl” at Lost in Thought; “Give up?” at Larks Fiction Magazine; “Escape” and “Anya’s Frustrating Friday Morning at the Reeza Cheney Surgery Center” at The Legendary; “A Different Kind of Summer” and “Beth” at Inwood Indiana Press; “We Sustain” at Connotation Press; “a more or less uneventful flight” at Orion headless; “Duplicity” in Pure Slush’s Slut Anthology; “The Chess Teacher” at The Vehicle Magazine; and “Bed rest” at Clever Magazine. Marcus Speh’s “Touching Robert Coover in Providence” is at Airplane Reading; “Thumbling” at DOGZPLOT; “a fable” at Letras Caseras; “Fox” at Necessary Fiction; “Berlin Pastoral” at Fatboy Review; and “The Story, So Far: Marcus Speh,” at Northville Review. Robert Vaughan’s “Wrestling with Genetics” is at Necessary Fiction; “Stubborn, Corn Maze, Distance” at Apocrypha & Abstraction; “Wait, Weight, Wait!” at Used Furniture Review; “Turkey Town” at Blue Fifth Review; “My Top 10 Books of 2011” at JMWW. Vaughan co-hosted Flash Fiction Friday at WUWM. Susan Tepper’s From the Umberplatzen is available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Michelle Elvy is now editor at Blue Fifth Review. Wilderness House Literary Review has published “What’s a Housecoat” by MaryAnne Kolton; David Ackley’s “See?”; and “2008, What I Wanted” by JP Reese.

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.

Brad Listi is the founder of The Nervous Breakdown, an online culture magazine and literary community that now includes TNB Books, an independent press specializing in literary fiction and nonfiction. He is the author of a novel called Attention. Deficit. Disorder., a Los Angeles Times bestseller, the executive producer of The Nervous Breakdown’s podcast series, and the host of Other People with Brad Listi, a twice-weekly podcast featuring in-depth, inappropriate interviews with today’s leading authors. To learn more, please visit www.bradlisti.com.

Tell us about Other People.

Other People is a twice-weekly author interview podcast, available for free at iTunes, or at Stitcher. Each show is about an hour long. I’m a big radio and podcast nerd, and I listen to a lot of this stuff and really like the medium. The idea is to do a show that really focuses on authors as people-who they are, where they’re from, why they do what they do, and to be a bit looser and more irreverent and more personal than the average book-related show.

What’s going on for you now creatively?

Well, there’s the podcast. And then there’s The Nervous Breakdown, my online culture magazine and literary community. That’s a big job, and it takes up a lot of time. And then I’m also working on a new novel, which is coming along slowly but well. And I’ve got a one-year-old daughter. That’s pretty much it. That’s all I have time for.

Your feeling about mentors, having one, being one? how you feel about literary mentors…

I think mentors are probably essential in any field, whether they come in the form of a personal relationship or not. The first way, obviously, is to know someone, to be taken under someone’s wing. But you can also pick your mentors based on whom and how you read. And you’re not limited to your field of interest, either. You can learn how to write from a plumber, I think. Or from an astronaut or a priest. It’s just a matter of who they are, and how they live and work, and what they have to say-and how well you’re listening. And of course some of the best mentors out there are the ones who teach us what not to do.

As for being a mentor myself, it’s something I don’t mind trying to do if somebody asks me for help, but I’m not out there actively looking for mentees. I feel like I have so much to learn in my own right. As a writer I’m just getting started.

What tricks do you use to get “unstuck” when blocked creatively?

I read. I listen to music. I might go see a movie. I exercise. Or else I quit. I sleep on it and start over again the next day.

Any prompts or exercises or ideas that get you going?

Listening to an interview with a favorite author is always helpful. It usually winds up reminding me that all writers-great writers included-go through the same stuff. No one is an exception to the rule. You can never hear that enough.

What do you love about what you do?

Almost every aspect of it. The writing. The working with authors and running The Nervous Breakdown. The podcast. It’s all fun for me. I’m very lucky in that way.

What don’t you love?

I’m not entirely in love with technology. Social media, for example, can be wearying.

Who are your childhood heroes (literary or otherwise).

Shel Silverstein was big when I was really young. Edgar Allan Poe. Kurt Vonnegut in junior high. Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Dostoevsky and Camus started in high school. Hunter Thompson, John Kennedy Toole, and Jack Kerouac in college. Céline was big right after college. DeLillo, Bret Easton Ellis, Joan Didion, James Baldwin, DFW, Lorrie Moore, Gore Vidal, Jon Krakauer, Paul Auster, Rick Moody. Writers like that. It seems pretty standard, I guess.

What’s next for you?

Well, the goal is to keep going. To keep The Nervous Breakdown going, and to grow its publishing imprint and its book club. To keep the podcast going. To finish my novel. That sort of thing.

But ultimately, who really knows how things will go? Publishing is changing so fast, and the world is so crazy, there could be things on the horizon that surprise me. I’m trying to be ready for anything.

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.