First things first: we’d like to wish all of you a happy, healthy, and creative 2012. We’re excited to announce 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 recommended stories.

Here’s how it works: every two weeks, a distinguished visiting editor will scour the site for lost treasures and pick a handful of outstanding stories posted on their watch. The identity of the editor will only be announced at the end of the two-week period, along with their selections. Our first guest editor is digging through the site as we speak, so watch this space for her favorite overlooked stories!

(Photo by partymonstrrr)

Davin Malasarn works as a Senior Writer at UCLA and recently published his first collection of shorts and flash fiction called The Wild Grass and Other Stories. He was a 2008 Emerging Voices Fellow with PEN Center USA. His works have been published in the Los Angeles Review, Opium Magazine, Rosebud, SmokeLong Quarterly, and other places. He is currently searching shelters for a small mutt that he can take home and call “Fred.”

Q (Meg Pokrass): Have you had a mentor? Have you yourself  been a mentor?

Mentoring has taken on a deeper meaning to me because I recently spent two months trying to really define it for an article I was working on in my day job. It’s a special thing, isn’t it? A combination of teaching and love. I’ve had some important mentors in my science life, but I haven’t been as lucky in writing. I think mostly I’m afraid to call on other writers to serve as mentors because everyone seems so busy. (I imagine a situation where some wise person leads me up a mountain and forces me to live there for 10 years, growing my own rice and writing stories without words. That opportunity has yet to present itself.) Having said that, though, I’ve learned a great deal about writing and the writing life from people like Mary Yukari Waters and Kathy Fish, both of whom are beautiful writers and generous people. I tend to include references to fish in most of my stories in honor of K. F.

What makes us care about fictional people?

I used to try and break down the traits that make us care about someone. I thought I could put together a list of things like: charitable, intelligent, kind, etc. But then I started to pay attention to the traits possessed by literary characters I love the most, and I’d come up with things like “hangs a screwdriver around his neck” or “always looks sick.” I realized that developing a character that people care about has to be much more intuitive. Why do we fall in love with people? We love people because they smell like bread or because they need a step stool to reach the top shelf. We love people because they don’t care if their fingernails get chipped or because they always tear their pants. (Okay, I’m not sure I ever fell in love with someone because they always tear their pants.) I think people want to be convinced that the character is or represents real people or someone who could be real. When we stumble upon someone like that in a book we judge them, and if we like them, then we hope they reach their goals.

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

For me it’s not so much that choose what I listen to inside myself as it is hearing anything inside myself at all. I feel so bombarded by the outside world that listening to my inside world is often a huge challenge. But that’s the most important thing about writing. At least it has been for me. That’s the thing that has helped me to improve the most. I try to access the source, the part of me that forms before the rest of the world colors it. My first novel was about a nudist, a bird flu, and a magic swimming pool. That was over ten years ago and before I ever took a writing class or thought about publication. I think my journey as a writer is to get back to that place again and write the same story using a better skill set.

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

I don’t fight it too much when I get stuck. These days, if I don’t feel like writing, I give myself permission to do other things. If I didn’t my home would be even messier than it is now. Usually I’m drawn to things like music, painting, and cooking, and that almost always inspires me to write again anyway. Mary Miller also told me that whenever I get stuck I should just read. That’s excellent advice.

What writing prompts work for you if they do?

I tend to avoid writing prompts because I usually need something more personal to cling to in the begin of my writing process. My own lack of imagination is maybe to blame, but my stories often feel too technical when I work from a prompt.

Do you listen to music when you write?

I often try to manipulate my own emotions when I write, so, yes, music often comes into play. Radiohead always makes me feel more creative. Shostakovich helps me access my dark side. Sometimes if I need a pick up, I listen to the Black Eyed Peas, which either gets me to write or gets me to dance around in my living room–both of which seem productive.

Talk about putting together your award winning collection The Wild Grass and Other Stories – anything about this process…

The biggest obstacle to me publishing Wild Grass was finding the courage to self-publish. So many people told me it was a bad idea, but deep down I knew it was what I wanted to do. I’ve wanted it for several years. Once I made the decision to really do it, I looked through my body of work from the last ten years or so, and I picked out the stories I had an emotional attachment to and the stories that I thought were strong. I wanted to take readers around the world. I wanted to include published stories and those stories that were so personal to me that I never even submitted them. I still feel a sense of fear associated with some of the work I put out because some of it is so autobiographical. But I think that’s a good thing. I think that’s what should be put out.

What are you working on now and next?

Now I’m working on a novel about these six people who take part in an experiment to live forever. The deeper I get into it, the more I realize that all six people are some part of me, and really the book is about my own views of life and death and success and failure. I guess it’s a science-fiction book, but I’ve never really liked reading science-fiction myself, so it probably doesn’t fit into the genre too well. But I’m enjoying working on it.

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.

Cooper Renner‘s fiction has appeared in several magazines, most recently including The Brooklyner, JMWW, Dark Sky and Blip, as well as in other venues mentioned below and in the ghost story anthology Shadows and Silence (2000) and the illustrated chapbook Dr Polidori’s Sketchbook (2010). His poetry, published under the name Cooper Esteban, is collected in Mosefolket (2007) and has been published in Unsaid, Keyhole and, perhaps most notably, in The Quarterly with Gordon Lish. His drawings and photographs have been used by Bannock Street Books, Thunderclap Press and Gold Wake Press, and have appeared in such magazines as Lamination Colony, Smokelong and Sleek. He is currently “snow birding” on Galveston Island and working hesitantly on a new Maltese novel, perhaps to be called The Gothic Congress.

Q (Meg Pokrass): Do you have mentors, do you mentor?

Because I didn’t go through the MFA (or any comparable) system, most of my learning about writing has come through reading (mostly older) writers and from contacts with editors (generally writers themselves) who published my poems, notably Gordon Lish and Deron Bauman. I also had long and encouraging correspondences with Donald Hall and Guy Davenport, though we didn’t necessarily discuss my work all that much. We wrote about books, writers, all sorts of things.

I would hesitate to say that I am myself a mentor, though I do often suggest edits to work that runs in elimae. I’m not really in a position to do much mentoring as almost all of my writer contacts have occurred via the Internet rather than in any kind of face-to-face contact, working together over a manuscript.

What are your favorite ways to jumpstart creativity?

I’m not sure that this is something I am at all good at, especially when it comes to poetry. A long time ago, more than 20 years, I wrote a lot of poems (or drafts might be a better word). Ideas seemed to come to me, often sparked by something I was reading or even by a stray image or phrase, something that opened up a voice to me. In the last decade or two, ideas for poems have come to me very rarely. I am also not terribly productive of short fiction, though I have found it greatly inspiring to have the prompt words you’ve been providing all year at Facebook. At root, I have almost nothing whatever to say, no content, as it were–at least not anything of interest to anyone but me–and so my writing has to come from outside, in the case of my poems usually from a pre-existing character, from mythology, religion or history. My poems are mostly monologues, very short expositions from other characters. Most of my fiction, written from time to time over almost 40 years, has been in novel form, a form which in some ways short-circuits the need for inspiration since one theme can run for two hundred pages or more. Almost all of the fiction I have written since my retirement from the public schools five years ago has dealt in some way with Malta, which I first visited several months after retirement. My twisted little literato mind keyed off the fact that Coleridge lived and worked in Malta for several months not long after the British took over 2 centuries ago, and that has wormed its way into a number of works.

What is it like living sparely and simply, something you have mentioned to me, having a simple life as a creative person in all the ways that you do…

I wish I could live even more simply. I guess it all started twenty years ago when I started getting geographically restless. Moving lots of things around gets really boring (not to mention heavy and time-consuming), so I started divesting. About five years later I bought and moved into a travel trailer for the first time and started living in RV parks. One simply can’t pile up a lot of stuff if one has only 200 square feet to live in. And then several years after that I switched to a trailer with less than 100 square feet, so… Having a Nook helps in the book area, and using an iPod helps musically. I’ve long since gotten to the point that things feel like a terrible burden to me, something to care for and worry about. If a university somewhere would give me an office to work out of, then I would almost certainly let books start piling up again, even against my own will, in that office, and still keep my living space light. I tend toward the thought, though I haven’t quite attained the reality of it, that I don’t want to own anything that anybody would want to steal from me.

You are one of internet writing’s most beloved editors. PLEASE TALK ABOUT YOUR EDITING PROCESS.

You are very kind to say that, though surely you exaggerate. Even so, I thank you. I do hope that I am useful in some way or another. It is important, I think, to remind writers that their work is theirs, and they are the ones who must be “happy” with what is published in their names. The edits I suggest may not please a writer, and usually in that case I will simply tell him/her to keep it as he/she wishes and send it out to another magazine. When a writer has agreed to an edit, but leaves me with the feeling of some hesitation or regret, I like to remind him/her that the work in its original form can always be restored when the book comes out. What appears in elimae is not necessarily the final form of a work.

As for my process (if what I do deserves the word), I think I learned it (or they might say mislearned?) from Lish and Bauman. I go for the sentences and phrases which feel most alive and vital and “new”, and ask the writer to remove the rest, even if it changes the “meaning” of the work. Meaning doesn’t matter a great deal to me as an editor: a feel for language and imagery is what attracts me. The strongest writing is what I want, not a pre-ordained message which the writer is attempting to embody. I think writers generally need to divorce their writings from their personae.

This is not, by the way, something I achieve myself in regard to my own fiction, except for the micro fictions, which probably loosely correspond in intent to my editing style or the way I approach my poems. My long fiction is not elimae-ish. It is in fact content-driven, not avant-garde at all but narrative. I hope that it’s both entertaining and written with some degree of literary skill, but I suppose readers will decide that. My longer fiction is, perhaps it’s fair to say, nearer in intent to Arthur Conan Doyle’s than Raymond Carver’s.

What intrigues you in your world right now the most… creatively and otherwise. and congratulations on your move…

Over the past couple of years I’ve been reading a lot of work in translation from the first part of the 20th century and the very late 19th: Hans Fallada, Robert Musil, Thomas Mann, Joseph Roth, Irene Nemirovsky, Veza Canetti, Wolfgang Koeppen, Hermann Hesse (in Hesse’s case, often reading for the second or third time), as well as, in a few cases, newer works (sometimes mysteries) set in that world. The Austro-Hungarian Empire has seemed especially intriguing. Right at the moment I’m reading War & War by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, a book which is not exactly my cup of tea, though I’m enjoying it more than I feared when I first started. Krasznahorkai is, I think, a bit younger than I am. Another contemporary, though somewhat older, writer whom I enjoy is the Israeli Yoel Hoffmann. The writer and translator Tsipi Keller has recommended a number of writers I might not otherwise have stumbled across, because she has a more European (and more classically Modernist) tilt to her reading. Koeppen is a writer I came to because of Tsipi, and he is amazing. His post-war “trilogy” (Pigeons on the Grass, The Hothouse, Death in Rome) ought to be at every writer’s fingertips. Those books are astonishingly marvelous, a kind of mid-century Modernism in much the same way that Alan Garner’s novels (Strandloper, Thursbitch, Red Shift) and Davenport’s stories are late-century Modernism.

Of course I love to draw, and a few of your readers may have seen a few of my works here or there. My work is, I would say, at best “naive” or “primitive”, but perhaps that doesn’t prevent at least the occasional work from being at least a bit interesting. For the past year almost everything I have drawn has been digital, working with various programs on an iPad.

As for my move–I am back in a travel trailer for the first time since 2006 and for the first time without having my location dictated by a job. At the moment, I am on Galveston Island, hoping its winter will be mild enough to keep me from feeling quite as despondent as winter usually makes me.

What is new? What is next for you? What are you working on?

Kathryn Rantala at Ravenna Press is planning to publish two “Ravenna Triples” next year, books of about 96 pages which will include 3 authors each: a collection of three chapbooks, as it were. If all goes as planned, a collection of my drawings which incorporate texts will be published in a Triple along with the fiction of Brandon Hobson and the poetry of Alek Lindus of Greece. I’m excited about it. Ravenna is also going to do a print edition of my novella Disbelief, which is written partly in verse and partly in prose and claims to contain the substantially complete fragments of a lost narrative poem by Coleridge, along with memoiristic material and “scholarly” commentary. New York Tyrant andThe Anemone Sidecar have published excerpts from it, but this will be the complete work, along with a handful of illustrations. I’ve also had a story called “Coyotes” accepted for an upcoming anthology of Texas writing to be called, I think, New Border or New Border Anthology. And I’ve published 3 ebook novels this year: Dr Jesus and Mr Dead, A Death by the Sea, and A Spurious Death in a Foreign Country.

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:  David, I have read many stories about human need, but none, to my recollection, were written in such a forcefully economic way.   I see “Tortillas“ as a story about human deprivation on a deep level.  As its author, does it strike you this way?

David Ackley: The story’s like a little bucket of particularized human behaviour that you dip up from some elemental source: I don’t know how far or exactly where this pool extends, but I’d agree that it’s probably deep. When you say deprivation, I assume you’re talking about some prior condition of the observed family.

Susan:  Yes, I am talking about something lacking here in this family. This piling on of food items listed so deliciously, and consumed almost as if they were a family of vacuum cleaners.  It all gets sucked in so effortlessly.

David:  Maybe they’re a kind of figure for consuming, which we’re all encouraged to do, past need, even past want, as long as it keeps coming we keep putting it away. Presumably they’ve come from somewhere else where even needs weren’t very well met and now have adapted to a fault to the opposite view where you’re not doing your part until you’ve grazed up everything in sight. I’m not just referring to food here, as I guess you weren’t either. The waiter in that sense is a kind of enabler.

Susan: The waiter is definitely an enabler!  And we actually have two needy families running parallel here.  The boy (Alan) who is visiting his dad in El Paso, they are one family, and the second family (the big eaters) who are the observed family.  I have to say that I immediately related to this story on a personal level.  When I was twelve, my brother and I visited our dad in El Paso, before we went on to Roswell where he was working that summer.  My memory of El Paso is also hugely about food, only in my case it was a pancake house that served maybe 100 varieties.  I had chocolate pancakes with whipped cream and chocolate drizzle.  Flat like your tortillas.  Food is symbolic and food is real.

David: You’re exactly right about the two parallel families, Alan and his father, who come from the cold northeast, and the observed Hispanic family, obviously from a warmer climate. Which brings in an emotional contrast as well. You can assume something wistful in Alan’s observation of a family whose needs, however basic, are being met against what’s missing between his father and him. The story is an excerpt of a larger work that’s struggling in the no man’s land between novella and novel at present, and the emotional hunger that Alan feels is played out more in that work of course.

Yeah, food and hunger seem to underpin much of the way we think and react to other things; all consumption seems like eating sometimes….

Susan:  Right- and what is missing between Alan and his father is what drives the narrative here.  And that you, as the author, decided to start by using a list- a food list, of all things, really gives the story its strong punch.  It’s fascinating because it is a quiet story with a big impact.  It’s almost ritualistic in the listing of the foods.  I felt pulled in and right there with them all.  I saw the foods, and in particular the warm tortillas which have an almost aphrodisiac effect- the way food can in certain circumstances.  We are lulled, almost trance-like, into this story of warmth and food and deprivation.

Do you think there is a mother back home for Alan?  Do you think he feels loved by his dad?  I’d like to know some backstory if you’d care to tell.

David: In the novella (let’s call it) Alan’s mother died when he was 14 and when his father took a 2nd wife, within months, Alan moved out to live with his older sister. He and his father have been distanced (if not quite estranged, they’re on speaking terms, but not very often) since then.

The question of what each of them, Alan and his father, feels for the other is a complicated one that the novella plays out.  And, whether whatever feeling is there changes, or is better understood, at least, is its central preoccupation.

Susan:  Overall it sounds quite character driven, and it has been set up really well in this short segment that you have titled “Tortillas“. I love your ending line which finishes the piece quite poetically:

“…  and it seemed to Alan that they were all prepared to indefinitely continue this way of giving pleasure to each other, they with their consumption of tortillas and the waiter with his bringing more, until the night came to an end.”

Read “Tortillas“ by David Ackley

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.

Andrew Roe‘s fiction has appeared widely in both print (One Story, Tin House, The Sun, Glimmer Train, The Cincinnati Review) and online (Hobart, Freight Stories, wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly) journals. In addition, his reviews and non-fiction have appeared in The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Salon.com and elsewhere. He lives in Oceanside, California, and keeps a sporadic blog at andrewroe.blogspot.com.

Have you had a writing mentor/do you mentor?

I guess I’m non-traditional on this one-the answer to both questions is no. I didn’t go through an MFA program, so I never had the mentor-type relationship that can come (or so I hear) from being in such a program. Not that a writing mentor has to come from an MFA program, of course; but for whatever reason, I’ve never experienced one of those someone-takes-you-under-their-wing deals. And I don’t teach, which means there aren’t many opportunities for mentoring.

When I think of mentors, I think of the writers who have meant the most to me over the years: Joyce, Camus, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Carver, and also, more recently, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, George Saunders, Colson Whitehead, Charles D’Ambrosio. I also think of that Seinfeld episode where everyone wanted a mentor.

Tricks to unblocking creativity? Tips?

These days my writing time is pretty limited.  So any time I do have, I typically charge ahead without much blockage. It’s rare that I do get stuck. But what’s always worked best for me is stopping a day’s work on a good note, knowing exactly where I’m going to start and what I’m going to do the next time. (This could be a Hemingway tip.) That really helps with the focus and sense of momentum (especially important when working on a longish piece of fiction) and reduces (somewhat) the hair-pulling and teeth-gnashing.

And if one story or project isn’t working, jump over to something else. Oh, and one more thing: listen to music. That always inspires me and gets me out of a writing funk. Lately it’s been Wilco and Megafaun that does the trick. But the Ramones can also work (for me, at least).

What makes characters real? What makes us care? Your stories are so real, and the reader develops nearly immediate empathy…

Thanks so much, Meg. That’s really nice and encouraging to hear. I’ve been told that my short stories are “quiet.” This means, I think, that my stories tend to be more character-driven. This is what I naturally gravitate toward as a writer; it’s not a conscious choice on my part (and I know that plot is my kryptonite).

What makes characters real? Wow. That’s a great question. It’s something of a mystery to me, but here goes: It probably has a lot to do with the writer spending time with a character. And I don’t just mean what ends up on the page. I’m also talking about spending time with a character in your head, of not being able to shake a character, to be haunted, to have him or her inhabit you for a prolonged period in some deep, fundamental way. The downside of this, though, is that I sometimes walk around in a fiction fog (something my wife can attest to).

What makes us care? The most obvious thing is also probably the truest: recognition of ourselves, our emotions, our thoughts, our feelings. My characters are typically flawed, struggling for meaning and connection, trying to do better but not always succeeding. And that’s something most people can relate to.

Please talk about editing. I once read on your blog that you had a piece rejected 40 times before an amazing acceptance (The Good Men Project). Can you talk about what that was like, if you made changes to the piece, kept editing  – or was it just a matter of finding the right home for it?

I usually don’t torture myself by totaling up the number of rejections a story gets. But in this case, I was curious because I’d been submitting “Where You Live” (the story you mentioned that was finally published by The Good Men Project) for years. I knew the number would be high, but 40 rejections did surprise me.

As for editing, I tend to edit and revise as I go (I’m a turtle), so when I get a first draft “done,” it’s more like a sixth or seventh draft. Then I’ll go back and take another pass (or two or three). I’m a constant tinkerer, and it’s difficult for me to consider a story ever being finished, even if I’m lucky enough to get it published. With “Where You Live,” I’d send out the story and then, after a few rejections had rolled in, I’d look at it again, adding a comma, removing it, taking stuff out, adding stuff in, etc.

At one point, after I really started to doubt the story, I added a new, extended ending. My thought was that the main character, Michael, needed to be more sympathetic and achieve a stronger kind of redemption in the end. But you know what? Matt Salesses, the fiction editor at The Good Men Project, thought the last section wasn’t necessary and that the story would be more powerful by ending it earlier (i.e., using the original ending). And he was right. So my initial instinct had been correct, but I had let all the rejections affect my judgment, leading to a change in the story that wasn’t for the better. It was a great lesson, and I’m very thankful for Matt’s wise edits and advice.

What are you up to now? What is next for you?

I earlier mentioned “a longish piece of fiction.” And I’m currently working on a novel called Believers (an excerpt was published in The Sun in July). It’s fairly long, has multiple points of view and characters, and revolves around a series of supposedly miraculous events in Los Angeles. I like to call it a historical novel because it takes place in 1999.

I’m hoping to finish this latest draft early next year. After that, I’m going to take some time off from writing. That will probably last less than a week. Then I’ll start pecking away again. I have a few longer, in-progress short stories that I’d like to finish. Then I’ll be on to the next novel.

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

I’m always intrigued when a new group for a literary journal is formed at Fictionaut. I contacted RW Spryszak about his new group, Thrice Fiction, and  how it ties in to his magazine, Thrice Fiction.  Thrice Fiction, in their own words:

The main thing Thrice Fiction means to feature is the forms fiction can take. So along with the more standard, straight-up, rote, causative stories that go from A to B to C, there will always be the form benders. Is it poem or is it short story? Is it recognizable at all? Does it tip a hat toward the phenomenon of flash fiction? The answers are; who cares? Does it have to be? And why not? Respectively

We don’t always know where we’re going. All history, besides usually written by the victors, is also retrospect. And sometimes a survivor gets a word in edgewise.

It’s the edgewise we’re after.

So we’ll mix forms we may not yet understand with the more acceptable, accessible ones. We do this in the hope that it can all be seen as part of the same effort. We set the proximity between the two streams so they can at least offer validity to each other from a new viewpoint. Not that anyone is seeking approval, but simply making the statement that they belong together for a reason. People who love words read it all.

Q (Lynn Beighley: ): I sent an email to RW Spryszak, and received a response, and then got your obliging acceptance of the interview. I’m not sure if RW Spyszak is your real name and I have no first name. What should I call you?

Greetings Fictionaut Community. This month’s reading includes two stamp stories by Kathy Fish, one in Wigleaf and the other in the MLP Stamp Stories Anthology. Kathy’s chapbook is also reviewed at Outsider Writers Collective. Susan Tepper has a story in Schuylkill Valley Journal. Matt Potter’s Pure Slush has a new print anthology, Slut, featuring many Fictionaut members. Marcus Speh’s “The Serious Writer Occupies Wall Street” is at Occupy Writers. Atticus books’ panel discussion on the occupy movement and the arts included Marcus and Katrina Gray. Marcus’ “Tripping” is in Referential Magazine, and his “Three Questions” has been nominated for a Pushcart by Wilderness House Literary Review. Victoria Lancelotta has received an NEA Fellowship. Kari Nguyen has received a Pushcart nomination from Blink-Ink. Robert Vaughan’s “Bacon & Eggs, 1977” is at elimae, and “Spin-the-bottle” and “Stone Wall” at Kitchen. Robert is also Fiction Editor for Thunderclap 7: The Music Issue. Christopher Allen’s “The Shoes, the Girl and the Waves that Washed Them Away” has been nominated for a Pushcart by Blue Fifth Review/Blue Five Notebook Series. Christopher’s “Pru in the Dimple of a Broad-smiling Boy” is also at Gone Lawn. David Ackley’s “See?” is forthcoming in Wilderness House Literary Review, and “under the skin” has been nominated for The Best of the Net Anthology by THIS.

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.

Shya Scanlon is the author of the poetry collection In This Alone Impulse and the novel Forecast. His work has appeared in Mississippi Review, Literary Review, New York Quarterly, Guernica Magazine, Opium Magazine, Hobart, and others. He is co-editor of the journal Monkeybicycle, and Reviews Editor for The Nervous  Breakdown. He received his MFA from Brown University, where he was a recipient of the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction.

Q (Meg Pokrass): At different points as a writer, have you had mentors? Do you mentor?

This is probably non sequitur, but I find it strange that the word we use for a “trusted counselor or teacher” derives, at least in part, from a story about deception: Athena taking on the guise of Mentor to advise Odysseus’ son to figure out what happened to his father. Is there something inherently misleading about mentorship, a lie at the heart of advice? I hope so. Sounds interesting.

I’ve not really had mentors. In grad school of course I received some good feedback and encouragement from the faculty, but the program at Brown is pretty hands-off, so even there I’m not sure I’d call it mentorship. But perhaps I’m putting too much emphasis on the lead-by-example element of the role. If you simply mean anyone who’s offered insight and guidance to me along the way, the list would be long. I think I’ve been pretty fortunate to have been involved in some pretty supportive communities.

How do you stay creative? What are your tricks to get “unstuck?”

Fear keeps me creative. I’m only partially kidding. Honestly, who knows the schedule by which the Muse makes her rounds? I’m always worried what I’m writing will be the last thing I’ll have inspiration for. And then I have another idea. As probably any writer worth her salt will say: to read is to be inspired. So I read. And when I find texts that make me happy, which is often enough, the deceptively complicated act of reading itself becomes a creative act. Beyond that? I hit the gym. I make at least 25% of my breakthroughs while exercising.

Favorite writing prompts or exercises you are able to share?

Speaking of exercise… Carole Maso gave us a writing exercise that, though I grumbled about it at the time, actually led rather directly to a shift in the very tonality of my writing. It was simply to choose one spot and sit for two hours and write what you see. At least, I thought it was to write what you see–other students interpreted the assignment differently–and what I chose was to sit in the Brown gymnasium and write about the other people there. The result was a kind of loose, free-associative prose that returned, by nature of it having a firm physical location, to certain themes. I didn’t publish it or anything, but it led to other writing I did publish, and generally a new direction to what I now look back on as a turgid, overly self-involved prose style I’d been pursuing for years.

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

A hard-learned suggestion I have is to remember that a full character would not only bring with him or her whatever is necessary to complete a scene. People have baggage, and though it may be beside “the point” of whatever action is taking place, it’s this very excess stuff of identity that makes characters feel fleshy and three dimensional. I often find myself spontaneously riffing on a character’s peccadillos to find something new they can bring to a scene, and in the process discovering something truly ripe or consequential in terms of the work’s larger themes.

Plot: how it evolves for you… anything on this subject.

Ah yes, plot. This is a kind of contentious issue, isn’t it. Plots are for burials, etc. It’s funny that one of the words we use for prose writing in general is also used for one of its constituent elements: story. It kind of rigs the game, you know? Imagine if we called books characters, and then people started challenging the idea that they had to involve active agents. Anyway, I’m both not very good with plot, and drawn to it for precisely that reason. My books have managed to include plots in a much stricter sense than I would have expected from myself. Yet it keeps happening. Though a book may not start with a strong plot, meaning, I suppose, a particular narrative direction set off by tension or struggle, one ends up emerging during the course of writing–sometimes rather quickly–and I wind up wanting to see where it takes me. It’s pretty common these days among writers I consider peers to disparage plot, I think, and to focus on language, for instance, but even in the workshops at Brown–where experimental fiction is king–we frequently heard someone or other insisting that a piece needed to have something more “at stake.” Which is really a matter of plot.

Tell us everything! Tell us what is new with you, everything that is new? You are returning to the F-5 – what has changed? Give us the details!

I just read over that first interview. Wow! I was cocky. But okay, sure, it looked like things were going really well, perhaps on the verge of getting even better. Well, since that interview, my novel was completely unsupported by a publisher who promptly went out of business months after the release, just as the book was finding its audience. Since then I’ve been toiling away in obscurity on the same book I cheekily refer to as “non-fiction.”

But I’m not bitter! Things ain’t all bad. Forecast will be reissued by Civil Coping Mechanisms early next year. It’s third life, really, since its first was as online serialization. Whether this third be “a charm” or “company” remains to be seen. I’m definitely thrilled that someone still believes in the project. I hope to leverage this interest into a broader readership, and I think we’ve got some great ideas about how to achieve that.

As for the book I’ve been working on for the last couple years, it’s taken me in some pretty unexpected and wonderful directions (cf. my answer to the question of plot), and I’m happy to report–actually, I’m happy to *believe*–that it’s the best thing I’ve written. It begins strange, grows stranger, then gets weird. An excerpt of it went
up at Spork recently.

Let me just take a moment, too, to thank you, Meg, for all the great work you do at Fictionaut, and for including me in the goodness!

Susan Tepper:  Women and their hair.  I’ve started believing it must be in our DNA to have this hair obsession.  Kari, your story “You Take All” begins with hair, but of a different sort.  What made the story begin as it does?

Kari Nguyen:  Not too long ago, my aunt walked into my house, wearing my mother’s old wig. She was proud to show me. My mother followed behind, smiling. It was one of those moments I’ll never forget. I felt overwhelmingly connected to that wig right then. It had returned, years later, to stand in my kitchen. I hadn’t expected it. After that, I knew I wanted to write about a wig and its place in a family. The wig had to be central, its own character. And it had to demand attention. I wanted to convey some of this in the story’s opening scene.

Susan:  I love when a story springs out of a simple kernel of something real then sprouts into something deeply magical.  You write:

Your mother’s wig is a honey-red, a melting heat. You imagine your mother to be wearing her heart on her head. When the wig first appears, you run through the house, screaming, ‘It’s ALIVE!’

A wig, an inanimate object, with great possibilities for transforming a person, becomes an alive, hot heart thing.

Kari: So true. The wig, to this child, is full of possibility. She’s unaware of its meaning or why her mother wears it. I wanted to capture that child-like wonder.

Susan:  The mother-daughter bond is very strong in this piece.  I especially love when they are sitting looking through old photos, and the wig is there, too, on a photo of her Grandmother.  But as you write:  the odd, grainy photos….

And your narrator is thinking:  The past, apparently, was a time without color.

This line stopped me cold.  It’s a sobering thought.  Is the past a time without color?  Kari, is that true for you in the writing of this story or does the past blaze?

Kari:  I remember, as a kid, looking back at old photographs and having trouble believing that these people, in their black and white worlds, had actually existed. I imagined the narrator feeling this way. I think it’s probably hard, sometimes, for young kids to accept the fact that things – people, lives, etc – have come before them. In actuality, the past, in this story, does blaze, as you put it. The grandmother, the first to wear the wig, chose to stand out, when she could have simply blended in.

Susan:  Yes!  There is a lot of strength in the story, in these characters, the choices these women make.  And I sense in the narrator the importance of keeping close in a spiritual way to the ties and bonds of her mother and the women relations around her.  Is it a blood bond or almost a fear that keeps the status quo alive for this narrator?  Because, you are, in the story, talking life and death.  Even though we’re going out of our way not to divulge too much plot.

Kari: I tried not to let fear play too big of a role. It’s more about their bonds, their rituals, all that they share.

Susan: Fear didn’t play a role, in fact quite the opposite: The story is fearless.  But me, with my inquiring mind, I like to scratch around and dig things up.  So what I’m trying to find out is whether your narrator did fear for her future?  Regardless of how she carried herself with attitude and dignity and a certain aplomb.  But, when push comes to shove, was she afraid?

Kari: I don’t think she’d like to admit it, but of course the fear was there. I think, though, from early on, there was a sort of acceptance, followed by resolve, so that there was less room to acknowledge it.

Susan:  About the narrator you write:  “Your reflection is unfamiliar, your skin is awash… You’ll wear your heart on the outside too.  You are the rituals of your women gone before.”

Read “You Take All“ by Kari Nguyen

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.

Marty Castleberg is a recovering academic and organizational consultant who now spends his days surrounded by his stringed companions while he untangles words at his writing desk. He just finished a travel-memoir – Daveland – which is about the choices we make when we can no longer hide a life-long secret.

What are some of the challenges to writing as an adult with neurological differences?

Yes, yes, yes, what to call me? Even the politically correct phrase “learning different” has its problems. At any rate, I’ve come to learn that there are as many advantages to being neurologically different as downsides and I couldn’t imagine giving up those advantages just to be considered “normal.” How boring.

LD people display different symptoms but generally speaking we tend to see the world in more of its splendor and complexity than most people, yet we stumble over the simple things. Because I have little short term visual memory I had to learn to write with my ears (not literally of course, I know they’re big but . . .) which can lead to some interesting grammar and creative spelling, even though everything would be phonetically perfect. (I believe that the invention of spell-check, with all it’s imperfections, saved my life. Literally.) I’ve developed these other senses to fill in the visual gaps, much like a blind person compensates, using sound, touch, and the ability to verbalize stories. In this sense, I view myself as more story-teller than writer.

Hard to explain, summarize, or label… imagine.

It is. I recently saw a piece of research that suggested that over 50% of adults in the US thought that learning disabilities are a form of mental retardation. This makes me vulnerable in a way that most people don’t experience. In our society we judge intelligence by things like spelling bees and test scores, even though those things represent a limited number of gifts and are no more special than the athlete who has to make millions of mental calculations to control their bodies. We know enough about intelligence now that these prejudices are comparable to believing that the earth is flat.

Some have labeled us “puzzle people,” which seems to fit. When I was a kid we got warehoused somewhere; today I would just as likely be put in a gifted program, but many are still swept aside to keep the narrowly focused education machine rolling. That’s why so many of us are in prison. What a waste. We need to get past the bigotry that almost feels sanctioned in our society. Ironically, some of the most politically correct people are the worst offenders. We are appalled when people make fun of the physically challenged yet if someone makes a spelling or grammatical gaff in a public way it will go viral. And for the poor kid who can’t tell the difference between his left and right and switches b with d, or p with q, the world can be crushing.

So it’s with added anxiety I hand over drafts to other writers/readers, even editors, because you don’t want the person who’s helping you shape the story thinking he/she’s working with a complete idiot. And writers can be very unforgiving when it comes to anything grammar or spelling related. Those things represent the backbone of the trade after all. If it ever becomes an issue I can use it as an opportunity to teach, then again, some people believe in a flat world.

What are your tricks to get “unstuck?” when not feeling creative? What gets your engine going?

I can’t say that I’ve ever been blocked. However, I do feel that the act of writing, or the discipline of writing can be a heavy weight to carry at times so I have no problem with putting it down to rest occasionally. I’m in that phase now, having just wrapped up years of work on Daveland. The key for me is that I understand why I’m putting it down, that it’s to refresh myself and take a peak at the sun, not merely some unconscious avoidance strategy. I usually ramp back up by writing smaller pieces until I’ve generated enough juice to jump into a major project.

When I’m in writing mode I like to start with research and strategic reading. I remember Caroline Alexander saying in an article I read some years ago that (I hope I get this right) her work was 40% writing and 60% research. She also said that if she felt blocked it meant she needed to hit the library. Good advice. I also should note that I view writing very broadly. In full writing mode I make sure that I spend as much time reading other works as I spend on my own drafts. Even exploring a place or setting is as important to the process as putting words on the page. And, when appropriate, I will photograph settings and scenes that may be relevant. I studied my photography documenting my time in Argentina to create many of the visual images in Daveland. (My short term memory stinks; my long term memory is stellar.) When I have all the information and tools in front of me I can get a bit obsessive for weeks at a time. It’s rather workman-like: every morning and evening, sandwiched by reading and life. Once I’m in the process I don’t have time to get blocked.

In general, do you know what you are going to write about before you write or does the work lead you?

My writing is about putting a truth on paper that I can’t articulate any other way. Philip Roth talks about his writing being driven by a question that he wants to answer, to learn something he didn’t see before. So, I start with the question and hang on, knowing the question may be irrelevant by the end of the process.

Have you been mentored? Do you mentor? What are your feelings about having mentors or heroes in the areas we love and want to grow?

My case is different than most people, I started my education in remedial reading rooms/special ed. Given my visual problems with language I couldn’t aspire to be a writer, even though the thing that saved me was the book-of-the-month club and not the stuff from the school library.

Most recently I’ve had writing coaches that were basically guns for hire who had nothing invested in me. And I have a long list of favorite writers I’ve read over the years who I re-read to inspire me during different writing phases. I’m especially inspired by writers who had similar quirks to my own: Gustave Flaubert and John Irving to name two. There were also the great examples of how to talk about things that are intensely personal. I didn’t want to be a poster child for anything but I so admired how writers like William Styron, Kay Jamison, and Joan Didion were able to get inside their experience without wallowing. Genius.

Otherwise, there are scores of people who have touched my writing along the way by giving me their eyes and encouragement while being good humored about my quirks.

My life would be very different if it weren’t for the people who saw my little neurological quirks as potentially beneficial rather than problematic. The first was my former partner Jude, the special ed. teacher I wrote about in Daveland, who led me through a diagnosis and helped me build a life that embraced my quirks. She never let me forget the benefit of seeing the world through different eyes. Then, I was a minister’s intern for awhile and I started writing one-minute PSA radio spots for him. He was the first person who told me I was smart who I actually believed. (I came from a family of story-tellers, so knowing how the story should sound came easily to me.) The minister playfully laughed at my grammar and spelling mistakes as he turned my paper draft different directions to read it. Then, during my doctoral work, I had a journalist sit on my committee so that I could try to pull the grammatical mush together that had passed me by in grade school. Then my research work, experimenting with narrative as an intervention tool, forced daily production that I couldn’t just pull out of my hoo. I got a lot of encouragement to expand my writing to a larger audience. They were grateful to read something that didn’t look like it came from an accounting firm. All of these people were the real inspiration.

How did Daveland come about?

When I first started drafting it I thought it would be a humorous travelogue about my struggles learning spanish in South America. One of the challenges was the lack of dialogue, a result of not knowing the language, so I invented the wisecracking Dave. When my initial readers came back with feedback they said two things: 1. the real story was about me coming to grips with my neurological issues-it needed to be a memoir. And 2. MORE DAVE! I cringed, but I knew they were right. What I didn’t know at the time was that the concept of “Dave” went to the heart of what I was trying to express. It was more than just a filler for dialogue, Dave was the story, and I couldn’t see it until the second draft. Unfortunately, by the time I was done with Daveland, the publishing industry was in a tailspin from the economy and a digital reality that it wasn’t prepared for, so I knew that selling the dreaded memoir would be nearly impossible. I did have one insider suggest that autism would be a better issue for me: “it’s hot right now.” Plus, I had no platform, which made me a risky bet, so I figured it was a sign to move on.

Then two things happened. I used my musical and sound background to produce a cd for a local poet I’d accompanied while performing around San Francisco. Then I realized that Daveland would be most beneficial to those who would probably prefer audio in the first place. So, I thought, I will do it for people like me, I will make an audio-book. Another thought occurred to me. If I do it right I will have a platform when I’m done so I can sell the paper rights after the fact.

So, not only did I start working on my narrative skills by reading everything aloud, I started mixing music and getting permissions for different scores from around the world. (Best find: the military orchestras.) I learned more about GATT laws than I ever wanted to. I also gathered sounds from around the city, including staging my own custom sounds in the garbage room of my building. After about 150 music mixes, developing a new narrative voice, and thousands of sounds later, I had an audio-book that was scored and sound-scaped-9.5 hours of radio theater.

What responses to Daveland have you loved the most? Which have you been the most surprised by?

If there was a surprise it’s that so many people close to me struggled with the larger theme of Daveland: hiding and coming to grips with the less than perfect parts of ourselves. They have their own Dave stories apparently.

Otherwise, what I’d hoped would happen has happen. I’ve unearthed a number of people who share some of my quirks. One is a professor at an R-1 University who said he graduated from high school illiterate. I would like to learn more about my reader’s stories. How did they learn to read? Who helped them? What was life like for them back then? Now? Do they feel the need to hide it? I had thought that their Dave stories would make a good follow-up book. Stay tuned.

What have you had to unlearn?

Academic speak. I never really fit into academia and was grateful I found a doctoral program that valued making knowledge accessible to the greater community. My luck continued as I developed some notoriety for integrating narrative into formal written feedback. In fact, while researching at Harley-Davidson for ten years they referred to me as their Reflective Analyst/Learning Historian. If I’d given them a steady diet of dense academic sterility I wouldn’t have lasted a year with these guys. It made me realize the value of a well crafted narrative to force someone to stop, reconsider, reflect.

Best writing advice?

Learn to listen to your own voice.