Susan Tepper:  You begin your story “Sounds of Silence” with the following line: “Mirko is humming as they sit in the waiting room.”

Andrew, based on what is to come, the humming is a most unusual physical choice you have made for this character.

Andrew Stancek:  Mirko is a young man filled with contradictions.  He also frequently surprises his creator.  In that opening scene he’s ill at ease.  He’s throbbing with unpredictability.  He hums but it is also in him to be turning cartwheels to amuse his companion, to grab a mop standing in the corner of the waiting room and waltz with it, to jump on top of the desk and shred all the documents lying there.

Susan:  Interesting.  I took the hum to be either his nervousness or that he is kind of clueless.  Because you have made this a doctor’s waiting room and she is to have an abortion.  He doesn’t seem to be especially connected, in a strong emotional way, to Terka.  Or am I wrong?

Andrew: A disconnect with the world is a key aspect of Mirko.  He has either severed or had severed for him connections with his mother, his father, his home.  He attempted a relationship with another young woman which blew up in his face.  With Terka it is a physical relationship, but Mirko is prepared to deal with the consequences.

Susan:  Mirko is a young man growing up in Bratislava during the Communist take-over, is this correct?  What was the time period?

Andrew:  Bratislava, yes.  The communists ruled Czechoslovakia from 1948 until 1989.  The Mirko stories take place in 1966 and 1967, preceding the Prague Spring of 1968, which ended with the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union in August of 1968.

Susan:  Andrew, you were there, and you know from whence you speak.  Your Mirko is a wonderfully alive character.  In your side-bar, you often describe him as a “hoodlum” but I see him as a survivor in the truest sense.

Tell us a little about what it looks like in the town where Mirko is currently living in this particular Mirko story (noted in your sidebar, this is the 18^th Mirko installment).

Andrew:  I talk of Mirko being conflicted and your question brings out the conflicted part of me.  On the one hand I see Bratislava as paradise on earth, the most beautiful city of all time.  On the other I remember vividly how grey, grimy, polluted and run down it was.  Public buildings were covered with graffiti, walls were tumbling down, streetlights had bulbs broken.  For a child or adolescent it was dangerous to walk around since hordes of hoodlums were always ready to deliver a beating. Petty crime was rampant and the police never there when you needed them.  But I took endless walks by the Danube, through the winding streets dating back hundreds of years, tripping over street musicians, vendors and sprawled drunks, breathing in an atmosphere which I continue to miss.  It was home; I was rooted; those roots still thrive.

Susan:  Thanks so much for sharing with us this conflicted vision of Bratislava.  I can see how the conflict of what is wished for, and what is reality, has made its mark on Mirko’s character.   It makes him tough and yet vulnerable.  It draws me, and other readers, toward him, as we anxiously root for him in his various trials and tribulations.

In this story, what is especially disturbing is the place.  The abortion clinic as you describe it.  You write:  “The nurse comes over with a tissue.  Mirko notices a stain on the sleeve of the blue uniform.  She’s chewing gum;”

This feels unsanitary to me: stains, gum, a tissue.  A clean tissue? my brain is asking.  I feel the story turns on this.  It gets dangerous right here.

Andrew: Again, ambiguity.  The nurse tries to be kind and yet she and Mirko physically move the somewhat resisting Terka into the bowels of the building.  Mirko tries to be loving, to do the right thing by sticking by the girl.  But always danger.  Always complicity.

Susan:  A somewhat resisting Terka is putting things mildly!  You tell us: “Terka clutches the door frame before giving in, gives him a last pleading look.”

A woman clutching a door frame for any reason is a very significant physical act of terror.  I felt terrified for Terka in that moment.  But what is even more significant to this story is the way in which you end it.  The ending of this story, to me, exemplifies the whole conundrum of Bratislava under Communism.  And therein lies the story’s brilliance.

Read “Sounds of Silence” by Andrew Stancek

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.

Neal Pollack is the author of a half-dozen books, including, most recently, the self-published novel Jewball but also the bestselling memoirs Alternadad and Stretch, the cult classic The Neal Pollack Anthology Of American Literature, and the rock novel Never Mind The Pollacks. A regular contributor to many magazines and websites, Pollack lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and son. (Photo: Laura Sartoris/Anthology Photography)

Q (Meg Pokrass): Have you ever had a mentor? Do you mentor anyone?

There have been a lot of teachers who have helped bring me to the present moment, but not one mentor.  I’ve had “bosses,” people who’ve taught me a lot about writing, including and especially the editors at the Chicago Reader in the 1990s, but no one has ever explicitly taken me under their wing for a long period of time. In the summer of 1991 I was an intern at The New Republic, pre-Steven Glass, and I shuffled papers for Michael Kinsley and Andrew Sullivan. The people there were varying degrees of nice, but I wouldn’t call them mentors. When I worked with Dave Eggers in the late 90s and early aughts, he taught me quite a bit, but we were more like peers at the time than mentor/mentoree. There was a teacher in college named Joseph Epstein, a very skilled and clever writer who edited The American Scholar for a time. He taught me quite a bit, but I came to find his politics unappetizing and we lost touch. I studied improv with Del Close but never got into the inner circle. Most recently, I’ve been studying yoga with Richard Freeman, who I love and respect, but I wouldn’t consider him my mentor. It’s been quite a list, really, of teachers. I’ve been very fortunate.

As for me being a mentor, I don’t think so, not really. God help anyone who places himself or herself under my intellectual care.

What makes us care about fictional people?

The same thing that makes us care about actual people: Details of a life richly lived.  Books can still be gripping if the characters are cardboard, but that’s the mechanical functioning of plot. If the details are right, though, the actions will seem true and, I hate to use this Hollywood term, relatable. A good reader can tell the difference between a real character and a cartoon.

What is the best advice for a writer you know?

Just keep hacking away, without worry about results. And don’t expect to make much money, because you won’t.

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

It’s not like every day of my life is a magical party of creativity. Some days I sit at my desk and transcribe interviews or fill out invoices, taking time in between to work on my fantasy-football teams or play online poker.  Inspiration is overrated.  When it’s time to work, you’ll work.

What starts work for you? Do you start with words, a phrase, anything like a prompt?

Usually, if I’m working on a long-term project, I’ll do a little bit the day before leading in to what I’m going to work on the next day. So I already have a placeholder. And when I AM on a roll, I have my 1,000-word-a-day goal. That gives me a finish line. If I go past it–and I sometimes do, particularly once I get cruising in a project–that’s great. But if I don’t, at least I’ll have the sense of having accomplished the day’s mission.

Do you listen to music when you write?

I go in phases. Right now, not so much. But there have been times when the music goes all day.

Talk about putting together Jewball – anything about this process…

I wrote the first chapter in 2008 and then got stuck, mostly because my publisher refused to buy it based on that chapter. So I let it sit for a few years, but it was always in the back of my head. Then when I made the decision to publish it myself, I produced the book very quickly. It took me approximately three months to write a 53,000-word novel. That’s actually quite do-able if you know your material. I now have hope that I can do it again, multiple times.

What are you working on now and next?

Brock Clarke is the author of five books, most recently Exley and An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, which was a national bestseller and has appeared in a dozen foreign editions.

His stories and essays have appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, OneStory, The Believer, the Georgia Review, and the Southern Review and have appeared in the annual Pushcart Prize and New Stories from the South anthologies and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. He lives in Portland, Maine, and teaches creative writing at Bowdoin College.

Q (Meg Pokrass): What is your feeling about having mentors as a writer? Talk about the mentor relationship if you will, its importance to a writer?

My feeling about mentors is that I’m all for them. But I’m thinking of two different kinds of mentorships: one is the teacher-student (and I’ve had some great teachers–Joanna Scott in grad school, Liza Wieland and Bob Olmstead in undergrad, Lee K. Abbott in a summer writers conference workshop) and the other is the relationship between yourself and the books you love. A relationship in which you pay slavish attention to how the writers you love (for me: Bellow, Cheever, Muriel Spark, Grace Paley, Donald Barthelme, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Frederick Exley, Kazuo Ishiguro) do what they do. The former is the kind of mentorship you need when you’re younger, when you need someone to tell you directly what you’re doing wrong and how you might do it better; the latter is the kind of mentorship you need when you’re beyond telling and you need showing. I wouldn’t have become a writer if I hadn’t been taught by my afore-mentioned teachers. And I wouldn’t have been able to write the books I’ve written if I hadn’t been taught how by Henderson the Rain King, A Fan’s Notes, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, etc.

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

I’m afraid the answer to this question is the answer to the question I just answered: when I’m stuck, I go back and start reading things that I’ve gotten me unstuck before. A writer’s plumber, or plumber’s snake, is other writers–an analogy, and a sentence, that I really wish I could blame on someone else. But unfortunately, it’s all mine.

Are there favorite writing exercises you give students that you can share? If not, can you make one up for me here?

I don’t use writing exercises, even though my students want them. That’s not why I don’t use them–I just hated them as a student. But I’ve been thinking about reconsidering lately–possibly because my students seem to want them so much. I read recently about an exercise in which students are supposed to write a scene in which a couple goes to a mattress store with the intention of buying a mattress. I like that very much. I mean, it could be any store, of course. But a bookstore doesn’t seem as promising as a mattress store. Another blow against bookstores: not only are they struggling to compete with online booksellers, but as the setting and subject of creative writing exercises, they don’t stand a chance against mattress stores.

What are some of the new realities for the future of the book and for writers that we don’t talk about enough? What do we talk about too much?

I actually think we talk too much about the future of the book. I mean, writers talk about it too much. I don’t think bookstore owners, or book sellers and buyers, or book publishers, talk about it too much, or could talk too much about it: it’s their job, they have to talk about it, just as long as talking about it, obsessively, doesn’t end up as a substitute for thinking about what to do about it, and then doing it. But writers, in my experience, don’t have a fucking clue when they’re talking about the future of the book. They barely have a clue when talking about the future of their own books.

What are you working on currently?

I’m working on a novel called The Happiest People in the World. It’s about Danes being named the happiest people in the world, and it’s about the Danish cartoonist controversy, and also about how one of those cartoonists, or rather not one of the real cartoonists but one who I made up, runs from people trying to kill him and to upstate New York, where he assumes the identity of a high school guidance counselor. A realistic, autobiographical novel, then obviously.

Several Fictionaut members have contributed to The Lost Children Anthology, which is now available at Amazon, Goodreads, Smashwords, and Barnes & Noble. All proceeds will benefit child protection agencies. Pure Slush continues to showcase some of the finest writing around. You can check out the latest here. The newest Istanbul Literary Review is out now. W.F. Lantry’s “Sovereignty” is up at Booth. Marcus Speh has stories in Atticus Review, Blue Print Review book blog, Pure Slush, Wilderness House Literary Review, Metazen, kill author, Best of 52/250, mad hatters review blog, and has been nominated for a Best of the Net by Blue Fifth Review and Pure Slush. Linda Simoni Wastila’s “The Last Trip” has been nominated for a Best of the Net by Camroc Press Review. Robert Vaughan reads Christopher Allen’s “The Pain Taster” at WUWM’s Flash Fiction Friday. Madame Tishka gives advice on Love & Earthquakes at Thunderclap! Press. Happy Reading!

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.

Susan Tepper:  Gill, your first sentence in “The Premature Ending of Annie MacLeod” gives a ton of information and sets up the story really well:

“I was gutting mackerel when they came for me, my fingers dipping in and out of rainbow’d bellies, trailing pink as I cried for dad, and island life carried on.”

Are you a spontaneous writer or did you know in advance what was in store here?

Gill Hoffs:  Thanks so much for being a literary fairy godmother, and granting me a wish from my wish list!  Generally, I’m quite a spontaneous writer.  I have a bundle of written-on receipts and post-it notes in my pockets at any one time, covered in crayoned titles, snippets of description, and first lines that *might* go somewhere when I’m not running about with my 4 year old.  Here ‘Annie’ was in my mind in a series of images: a semi-ruined church hiding in a ring of outbuildings, an unhappy child of secrets, and a sunlit island off the Scottish coast.  For The Lost Children Challenge, where this story first appeared, it was suggested we write descriptive stories with realistic dialogue from our home towns, and there was an extremely beautiful image supplied as a prompt.  With “Annie” I sat and thought of my childhood, wandering with my book and a pocket of biscuits along the shore, I wondered about who would be lost and where, and used names from my husband’s family to tie it together.  I didn’t know what would happen until my fingers typed it.  I really REALLY enjoyed writing this story!

Susan: It’s an intensely lyrical and visual story that made me, as a reader, want to go there and see their croft, the shoreline, everything about the place where they live.  It utterly mesmerized me.  I also love the way you use language.  You write:

“My mother, proper in mourning black, stuffed me under a pile of nets when she heard them riding along the shingle shore to our home.  The sun trickled through in tiny diamonds.”

This, in the first paragraph, sets up immediate tension in the story.  The girl has been stuffed under a pile of nets for protection.

Gill: I get intensely homesick for the beach.  It’s where I feel most at home, even or perhaps especially during a storm, or its aftermath.  When a story like this is in my head and I’m listening to the thoughts that describe it, I get to *be* there, even for a short while, and I actually feel a small sense of bereavement when I reach the end and have to leave.  The book I’m currently working on is set almost entirely at sea, and just a few days ago I went home to *my* beach for research purposes – who am I kidding, I go there whenever I can, but this time it was for something other than just fun and relaxation – and I sniffed the old nets and thought of my girl, Annie MacLeod.  Her protection is also her damnation.  Without education and a separate identity – which she loses in the story through the actions of her mother – she is nothing but a wraith in the wind.  This is unfortunately true of a lot of children both throughout history and now.

Susan: Sadly, yes.  And thanks to the hard work and dedication of Thomas Pluck and Fiona Johnson, and 30 contributing writers, The Lost Children Challenge has grown into an e-book anthology, The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology , on Smashwords and from Amazon starting November 1. (All proceeds donated to 2 child protection agencies.)

Let’s talk a bit more about your use of descriptive language.  You write:

“I heard the door of our croft scrape shut across the summer warmed flagstones… up through the blue hats of harebells and pink tufts of thrift dotting the coarse green of the island’s west face…”

I have cut sentences here, in order to showcase the beauty in your phrasings.  But your strength as a writer lies in the fact that you know how to intersperse tension and dialogue, and straight prose, too, so that the reader isn’t buried under the more descriptive parts.  That isn’t an easy thing to do.

Gill: Thank you!  I read a lot, I have since I was three according to my granny, and since I’ve been writing, I’ve found myself noticing telling details in other writers’ work – the sprinkling of words that light up their story in my mind so I can see/hear/feel and almost smell it.  Sometimes it’s a moment of colour or an unusual name, sometimes it’s the use of a specific product by a character.  I was discussing this with Matt Potter the other day- how if a character or a writer mentions a particular plant or flower by name it lights the scene for me, but if they just say ‘a flower’ or ‘a yellow flower’ there’s not the same vivid quality for me as ‘a daffodil’ or ‘a black-eyed Susan’, say.

Susan: Agreed!  As long as it’s not over-used, which, by the way, I’ve never seen done in any of your stories.  I want to touch on your use of vernacular dialogue.  It also can hugely brighten a story.  The mother in your story says:

“… you heartless toe-rags…  So you can just sod off back to the mainland…”

toe-rags / sod off:  Dialogue that cements her character, and adds vivacity and even a touch of humour (spelled it your way)!

Gill: Ha ha!  Yes – there are some quite deliciously repugnant terms used where I come from.  ‘Toe-rag’ – well, how disgusting is that?  I try to use Scots in my Scottish pieces so as to add flavour and a feel of veracity for the character(s), but sparingly so as not to turn off readers from ‘out of town’.  I grew up hearing people speak very VERY broad Scots, so broad I couldn’t understand a lot of what was said to me (I’d just smile and look a bit ‘glaikit’ as we’d call someone who appears a bit foolish or dimwitted.  But I’m not actually Scottish myself, I have an English mother and Irish father, so what I heard and said at home was very different from elsewhere.  Apparently in the USA they call folk like myself ‘switchers’.  I quite like that, it smacks of intrigue and derring-do!

Susan: Derring-do.  Well that’s a new one on me!

Read “The Premature Ending of Annie MacLeod” by Gill Hoffs

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 Assistant Editor of Istanbul Literary Review, 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.

Ayelet Waldman is the author of Red Hook Road and The New York Times bestseller Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace. Her novel Love and Other Impossible Pursuits was made into a film starring Natalie Portman. Her personal essays have been published in a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, Vogue, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. Her radio commentaries have appeared on “All Things Considered” and “The California Report.” Her books are published throughout the world, in countries as disparate as England and Thailand, the Netherlands and China, Russia and Israel, Korea and Italy. (Photo by Stephanie Rausser.)

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

I have four children and am thus so absurdly busy that I don’t have time for writers block. If I waited for inspiration, I’d never write anything else as long as I live. I have one rule: butt in the chair. I try to sit down to work five days a week, from about 10:30 AM to 3 PM, with a short break for lunch. When I’m feeling crabby, I remind myself that that is about as UN-onerous a schedule as a person could ask for, and I have no business whining about it.

But of course I do still whine. And when I’m whining and out of sorts, I put on Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. Minimalist classical music and that piece in particular has a kind of propulsive energy that makes me buckled down and write. 

What makes us care about fictional characters as readers?

The work “authentic” is loathsomely fashionable nowadays, and I tried so hard to think of a different way to describe what makes a character important to the reader, but alas I fear that is the word that describes it best. As a reader, I don’t demand or even expect likeability. I enjoy reading about complicated, spiky people, people who are interesting because of their flaws. But for me to care about a character, even an “unlikeable” character, I must feel like she is true, that she is real, that the things she does and says make sense. I don’t necessarily need to say to myself, “I know someone just like that!” What I need to feel is that the character is doing exactly what he should be doing, would be doing. As a reader, I lose interest when the character’s actions seem forced by plot rather than to come naturally from who he is.

Mentors/Mentoring: talk about this, if you have had a mentor?/ & if you yourself have been a mentor. Anything about this experience.

My husband is without a doubt my literary mentor. He edits my work, and I edit his. I’ve learned more from reading his manuscripts and books than I ever could have learned in an MFA program. (Although maybe I just say this because I never went to an MFA program, and I feel a certain insecurity because of that.)

Being married to a writer, anything on this subject of you both being writers?

I have the world’s best in house editor. And more importantly, I am allowed to edit one of the best American writers of this century (or any, frankly). How cool is that?

“Voice of Witness,” your women in prison project/ please tell us about this. How can we help, if we can?

Inside this Place, not of It, is a book in the Voice of Witness oral history series. We interviewed people in women’s prisons around the country and edited the transcripts of the interviews into long narratives that illuminate different human rights issues. The book includes narratives by women who underwent terrible sexual abuse in prison, women whose children were kept from them, women who were denied basic medical care, and worse. Every American should read this book, so that you can understand how we treat the least powerful among us. Buy the book, recommend it to your friends. And, look at the section in the appendix on “further action.” Write a letter, make a donation, reach out.

Red Hook Road – how did this novel happen, what compelled you to write it?

Michael and I heard a news story about a bride and groom who were killed by a drunk driver as they drove from the church to the reception. We looked at one another, and then simultaneously shouted, “Dibs!” I won that fight. If the victims of the tragedy had been escape artists or superheroes, I would have lost.

What are you working on now and next?

Too much! Which is great. The busier I am, the more I accomplish. Desperation is great inspiration. I just finished the first draft of a novel called Unclaimed, which is more or less about the Hungarian Gold Train, a train full of the property of the murdered Jews of Hungary that ended up in the hands of the American army in Salzburg in 1946. I’m working on a pilot for HBO with my husband called Hobgoblin that is also set in the 1940s. I’m adapting my murder mystery series for CBS. And, lastly, I’m collaborating with my husband and with a brilliant young composer/lyricist named Peter Lerman on a musical.

Steve Almond has been stirring the pot for some time. He is the author of ten books of fiction, three of which he published himself. His Author’s Note is modest, but don’t let it fool you. This is one impressive writer. You can read his full bio here but an even better idea is to buy his new collection of stories, God Bless America, which Lorrie Moore calls “funny, beguiling, and completely original.”

We agree.

We welcome Steve Almond to Fictionaut and are pleased to feature his first published story at Line Breaks.

Right. So here’s “Alteration.” You will notice that it sucks. I can’t figure out who I’m imitating here, though it’s not George Saunders, because I wouldn’t read him for another five years. Probably I’m trying to channel Ignatious J. Riley. The important thing is what the story itself is trying to impart, which is something like: the process of psychological change is mostly about the setbacks. Either that, or it is trying to say, “You, Steve Almond, should not be sending stories out yet.”

Line Breaks is a regular feature in which accomplished authors introduce and share their first published stories with the Fictionaut community. Line Breaks is edited by Gary Percesepe.

Lynn Beighley: Your description for the Shred the Safehouse group states that you are “Looking for writing with rawness.  Raw energy, raw emotions, raw experience. No holding back.” I’m intrigued by the idea of giving people a place to write things they normally wouldn’t. What stops us, do you think? How do your group and your site give writers this safe zone?

Felicia Lear: I have met a few writers who enjoy writing fiction based off their lives instead of just claiming it. I think what stops people from writing like this is that they want to disassociate themselves perhaps or they don’t want people to know such personal details. Our site gives people the opportunity to “fess up” and write about actual experiences and feelings that are true to them. Almost like a public diary but under the guise of beautiful works built out of words.

Lynn Beighley: Can you tell us about something from your own life and how it manifested in your writing? Did writing about it change the way you felt about or viewed the event?

Felicia Lear: While there are several examples I could use, I will use one of the most recent. First, some background. At age 19 I met and fell in love with a boy who helped me pick up the pieces of myself that I had broken off through a period of self-destruction. After a two year relationship, a breakup, and four years of silence between us, we reconnected as friends in the beginning of 2010. Ten months later, he entered the hospital and never came out again. Most of the more recent pieces I have written have been about his death and how it affected me as if we were still connected on a much deeper level. I write about his untimely death, the hospital, and my mixed emotions of love and guilt that I’ve carried around these last 11 months.

Writing about this instead of specifically talking about it (as I just did, which sounded kind of whiny to me) has helped to lighten my shame for the silence and my resentment that had kept us from having a longer friendship. Constructing words around the events has helped me realize the truth of the matter (that he’s dead and never coming back) and, while I am still not over the death itself, the words I find in the tragedy (cliché I know) help me to heal a little more each time.

Here is one of the poems off of fictionaut: “No title.”

Lynn Beighley: Why do you think other venues shy away from this kind of writing?

Felicia Lear: What I see nowadays is a lot of push towards fiction. I’m all right with fiction, I love several works from several writers, not only from Fictionaut but throughout the internet community. I don’t think that other venues necessarily shy away from this type of writing but I think that sometimes when you are writing about your raw emotions and experiences, it can sound like perhaps whining or ranting. No one wants to read that generally so the push for fiction is there. I also think that there is a school of thought in writing that if you can make up stories and poems about people and things that don’t exist and didn’t happen, that somehow makes you a better writer.

Lynn Beighley: Does writing “outside the safehouse” lead to more of a memoir style? Is there room for pure fiction?

Felicia Lear: While being outside of the safehouse can get the “memoir-y” feel at times, we are open to fiction as well. People often use fiction to put themselves (or their characters) in places that they might see themselves someday or maybe it is an emotion or an experience they worry could occur to them. I don’t know some of our submitters personally so their works could be fiction for all I know but they approach it like it’s real life and it’s raw and oh so real to the reader regardless. ( I don’t make them sign anything saying it’s fact or not, that’s left to the discretion of the writer of course).

Lynn Beighley: You say, “One of the pieces that is a clear demonstration of what we are looking for is Misti Rainwaters-Lites’ “Checking in,'” quoted here:

Checking in. by Misti Rainwater-Lites

“Maude” is on the suspended television.
There are cracks in the leather chairs.
This house is made of bricks.
I’ve got candy bars in my purse,
farewell get well soon gifts from my husband.
He sits beside me reading one of his Mars books.
I keep apologizing.
He has to work in the morning.
“It isn’t right. You’ve done all the work,” I tell him.
He has done most of the work
these six long years.
I have slept painted written writhed
played the role of broken bitch
well beyond the fix of steadfast love.
“Three’s Company.”
A dead audience laughs at Chrissy Snow.
I tell the counselor I keep thinking of the oven.
He looks like my first husband, bland and pretty.
He’s of no use.
There’s a commercial for a new kitchen time saver.
The skinny teenager on the couch mutters his disgust.
“Peeling eggs is the best part of Thanksgiving!”
At some point, probably during “The Ropers,”
I start sobbing.
I want to leave.
I’m sorry for my husband.
Sorry for the hours.
Sorry for everything I am and will continue to be.
I want sex, fresh sex, the easy fix
as substantive as cotton candy
on the tongue.
Only in the throes of orgasm
am I less me more it.
Meat. Plant. Divine.
I cannot even kiss my husband.
I do not miss his snuggle.
He pats my back, tells me I’ll feel better soon.
Then “Sanford and Son” comes on
and I laugh out loud against my wishes.
This used to be our show.

Lynn Beighley: Can you tell us about what works for you in this piece?

Felicia Lear: Well, if anyone has ever read ANY of Misti’s works, she’s something special. The poem that she wrote was not only real but it made you feel without having to point out emotions in words. I enjoy pieces that drag me through the lines so that I’m holding my breath till the end. Her honesty to herself and how she feels shines through each line and, in my opinion, leaves the reader able to connect while still being able to distinguish Misti’s view point from what they feel or think of when they read that particular poem.

Lynn Beighley: It seems to me as though shorter forms are more suited to intense
expressions of human emotion. Has this been your experience?

Felicia Lear: This has definitely been my experience. I think often a skeleton of grounded words works awesome when writing these types of raw pieces (not that we would ever turn away longer pieces). I just think spurts of experience and emotion weigh in on the actual humanity of a piece.

Lynn Beighley: What authors do you admire for their ability to express themselves
with raw emotion?

Felicia Lear: Eli Coppola and Michelle Tea have been two of my favorites since my younger years. The way they confess things that others would never confront has always been an inspiration to me. It’s 2011 nowadays and everyone has a blog and tells everyone everything in the internet world but what I like to see is eloquent words telling of real life issues (hold the whining please – but if you must, you must!).

Lynn Beighley: How would you like to see your website, shredthesafehouse.com, evolve?

Felicia Lear: I want it to evolve slowly. Thus far we haven’t sent any one rejections and we mostly solicit poems and such from people at this time. I want people to use the site more as a tool for confessional type poetry and I want to see confessional poetry become more prominent than it has been so far this century.

Lynn Beighley is a fiction writer stuck in a technical book writer’s body. Her stories often involve deeply flawed characters and the unsatisfying meshing of the virtual and actual world. You can find more of her work at Fictionaut and on Twitter as @lynnbeighley.

Grea Olear is the senior editor of The Nervous Breakdown and the author of the novels Totally Killer and Fathermucker.  He blogs at Huffington Post Parents, and his work has appeared at Babble.com, The Rumpus, and The Millions. He teaches creative writing at Manhattanville College. You can follow him on Twitter (@gregolear), visit his website, check out his parenting site Fathermucker:The Blog, and, if it’s not too much trouble, compose a Miltonic sonnet in his honor.

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

I take a break.  As writers, we are trained to be working constantly.  “Write every day,” that’s what every writing teacher I ever had told me.  And that’s great advice, when you’re 22.  But once you’ve demonstrated the discipline to write novels, you have to approach it differently.  Writing is a job.  As with all jobs, you shouldn’t do it every day.  You need to take breaks.  You need to take walks.  You need to take vacations.

Mentors/Mentoring: talk about this, if you have had a mentor?/ & if you yourself have been a mentor.

I’ve had people who have helped me along the way-professors who have told me that I should read the fiction in The New Yorker, professional writers and editors who have offered praise — but I’ve never had a mentor, as such.  As a sidenote, I object to the word mentee, meaning one who is mentored.  Mentor is a person’s name; it’s not an actual word that you can fiddle with.

What makes us care about fictional people?

Fiction allows us to delve into the depths of who we are without hurting those close to us or being bound by the more inelegant elements of truth.  In that sense, fictional people can be more real than real people — certainly we are able to learn from them, from their mistakes, their successes and failures, just as easily as we can from an actual person.  But how many actual people can be know as intimately as we know, say, Leopold Bloom or Emma Bovary or Jay Gatsby?  Fictional people allow us to get to know people we wouldn’t ordinarily have any contact with.

How important in a novel is the concept of  “tragic urgency” whatever this means to you.

I think urgency is important.  Urgency is another way of saying drive, motion, momentum, plot.  But I don’t know that urgency has to be tragic.  What’s wrong with comic urgency?

How does comedy happen in writing? Does one aim for it, or away from it. I have heard you can’t try. I think I agree, at least not consciously…

For me, comedy comes naturally.  It’s almost a defense mechanism; when talk turns too serious, when it requires me to reveal too much, I deflect self-reflection with a joke.  I’m trying to get away from that in my work, but old habits, like Bruce Willis, die hard.

What writing prompt work for you?

I’ve never done those exercises.  I like to write for a purpose.  Sometimes this might be a hindrance, but that’s how I’ve always viewed it.

Do you listen to music when you write?

Sometimes, if I’m in the mood, but not usually.  Let me rephrase – I have music on.  If the writing’s going well, I don’t actually listen to it.  I don’t hear it at all.

How does reading great stuff or shitty stuff make us write?

Writers are competitive fuckers.  If I read something mind-blowing good, my first reaction is to say, I want to write something this good.  If I read Dan Brown, I become physically ill.  My stomach literally aches.  I feel violated.  It’s sort of the reverse of the Stendhal Effect.

What do you start with on the blank page?

With the novels, I begin with notes.  I have these special notebooks — National Brand Narrow Ruled Eye-Ease Paper One-Subject Notebooks — and I dedicate one for the project.  I have one for Totally Killer.  I have one for Fathermucker.  I have one for my new book.  Once I have a grasp of the character names and the architecture of the story, I begin the actual writing.  I don’t like to write just to write.  I like to have a plan.  I like to use everything.

Fathermucker – how did this book… happen, what compelled you to write it?

I was out of ideas, and my wife said, “You should write about your life.  You should write about what you’re doing now.”  And it was so liberating to do so!  Then I read Jess Walter’s The Financial Lives of the Poets, and I said, “Wow, is this good.  I want to write something like this.”

What are you working on now and next?

I just finished a pilot script for Fathermucker, and I’m preparing notes for Book #3, which I’m really eager to start in earnest.  The book that inspired me this time was The Color of Night, by Madison Smartt Bell, which is just a fantastic book-dark, allusive, and gorgeously written and plotted.  Book #3 has nothing whatsoever to do with Bell’s book, but I love the tone of it, and found it inspiring.