Susan Tepper:  Christopher, I’m a sucker for war stories, whether they take place at home or at the battle zone.  Your story “Three-handed Bridge” is an unusual slant on the Vietnam War.  It focuses in a pin-point way on this particular family of three.  What prompted you to write this story?

Christopher Allen:  First, thank you for inviting me to chat with you, Susan. I could chat with you for days, so this should be fun. I’ve played Bridge since I was four. I don’t remember playing three-handed Bridge—a game you play only when someone is absent—when I was as young as my little, smart-aleck protagonist, Anthony. He embodies a lot of my own experience; but in the end when I envision him, he’s not me.

The micro “Three-handed Bridge” is adapted loosely from an unpublished novel of the same title. In the novel, Anthony tells the story in the first person. He’s an elderly professor when he’s telling how he learned to play Bridge. The language of Bridge informs every part of his life—especially the delicate negotiation of relationships. He’s preoccupied with finding the perfect partner. The perfect man. (It’s hard for me to see the micro stripped of the larger story.)

Susan:  I have never played Bridge.  But I do know a bit about dysfunctional families.  How interesting that this story is a flash-back to earlier times in your novel.  You have set this story in a room which you describe:  “… the walls in the army base apartment a fatherless beige.”

Army base apartment / fatherless beige.  That brief description conveys a great deal.  Plus there is a war going on.  Well you got me hooked already in your first sentence.

Christopher: The bare, beige room is the way I see those early years. I’m not sure which came first: war or dysfunction. I guess that’s why both exist. But the effect war has on families has always troubled me. It forces spouses and children to deal with absence.

Susan: Tell us about the mother in your story. You describe her as “.. a cool-eyed grass widow.” What does this term grass widow mean?

Christopher: A grass widow is a woman who’s been left behind by a man who’s, say, gone off to war maybe. The mother in the story needs companionship more than she needs children. When I think of the mother in the story, I see a woman dressed for the bridge club, sitting on the floor with her boys.

Susan: Grass widow is a terrific phrase. The mother in the story clearly needs companionship. You tell us: “The mother was grooming companions.”

There is a deep sadness here with the two small children and the lonely “grass widow.” I’ve been in that room, myself, and can feel it all over again. Do you think war changes all relationships between spouses?

Christopher: Definitely. War changes everything. My parents have a very strong bond, but war challenged it. I think war has a great impact on children, who don’t understand where their father (or mother) is. Last year I wrote an unexpectedly emotional account of watching soldiers come home at the airport in Nashville. I broke down as I saw a father reunited with his three children. I cried like a baby.

Susan: When you say the mother in the story was “grooming companions” did you specifically mean she was on the look-out for men? For dates?

Christopher: I suppose one could read that into it, but I meant a substitute for her husband in terms of conversation, communication, interaction on an adult level. It’s possible that the mother is grooming companions because she’s afraid her husband won’t come back from the war. At any rate, the exercise of learning the adult game is robbing the children of their childhood. That’s what war does.

Susan: War is horrible at every level. And in books and movies, it is seldom dealt with from this perspective of children being hurt. The children suffering and being changed because of a parent gone to war. And, today, in our current war (s), sometimes both parents are sent away. That is morally corrupt.

But in this story, war of a sort is also going on in this small, rather innocuous beige room. The mother’s misery and loneliness takes a toll on the little boys. It’s as if they have become “little surrogate men” to fill the gap in their mother’s life.

Christopher: Yes! They certainly have. I think she’s taking control of them because she’s lost control of her husband. And she knows her husband is losing–but not giving up on–the war in Vietnam. She’s like a drill sergeant looking for a squad. That’s one level. The other level might just be that Bridge is the only game she knows–and she knows nothing about boys’ games.

Susan: I think I will go with your first: That the mother is taking control because she / her husband / the Vietnam War / the world – all that she knows is spinning out of control. Yes, she’s like a drill sergeant looking for a squad. It’s an unbelievably sad and powerful story told in a short span of story space.

Read “Three-handed Bridge“ by Christopher Allen

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.

Mark Wisniewski‘s novel Show Up, Look Good, likened to The Catcher in the Rye by DeWitt Henry and praised by Jonathan Lethem, Molly Giles, Kelly Cherry, T.R. Hummer, and Christine Sneed, will be published soon by Gival Press. His first novel, Confessions of a Polish Used Car Salesman, was praised by the Los Angeles Times and C. Michael Curtis of The Atlantic Monthly and went to a second printing one month after publication. Short fiction of Mark’s has won a Pushcart Prize and appeared in Best American Short Stories and magazines such as Antioch Review, The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Triquarterly, Glimmer Train, and The Sun.

Tell us about any mentors you have had.

Mentors were important because where I grew up there were no writers. There were pieceworkers and cops and construction workers and garbage collectors. There was one lawyer and my parents wanted me to be like him because he was able to afford eight kids, and the whole point of life was (I guess) to raise as many kids as you could create. It was a very idealistic yet recession-oriented upbringing wherein wanting to be a writer was insanity. So I trained myself to not want to write. Then, after I left that part of the country, I met a few writers and realized, Damn, a person can do this.

Can you talk about your own ways to unblock creativity?

For me a good way to get going is to read until I find something I like, then take some structure from it, like maybe the structure of the first sentence, and put my own words into that structure. This can take off pressure and start a flow. Of course even easier is using nicotine, but I quit that because it was killing me.

How do your stories and poems happen–do they find you? Do you plan what to write? How do they arise?

I don’t know how stories and poems happen. To say they find me sounds more woo-woo than I’m comfortable with but for the most part accurate. I’d also say they don’t find you unless you’re looking for them. It’s like bird-watching, I suspect. I mean there’s this guy who walks around the lake here, a birdwatcher, and he has the hat and the binoculars on the leather strap around the neck and the hiking boots and the whole khaki get-up and even the beard, and you just know he sees a lot more birds than I when I walk in jeans and a T-shirt to get the mail. Then again while he’s seeing birds, I might see a poem.

What is your favorite writing environment? Do you prefer quiet?

My office. And there’s a certain level of dishevelment that’s ideal for writing. Too much and I feel like a hoarder of crumpled drafts–too clean and I feel like a beginner. Beside my desk, on one of the file cabinets where things on the floor are supposed to go, is a boom box I purchased in ’97–with proceeds from Confessions, in fact. The radio button is broken, and the CD compartment is held together by packing tape. But beside it are hundreds of CD’s, and I blare those bastards. When I try to sleep, there’s ringing in my ears.

What are you doing now in your writing world?

Promoting Show Up, Look Good. This takes a lot of time, and it ruins concentration and devotion to new material. In other words, I saw zero poems on my walk to get today’s mail. I’ve been seeing too many galleys, emails, and Facebook messages.

Could you talk about Show Up, Look Good–is there anything you would like to tell us relating to the writing of it, and the publishing of it fourteen years after your first novel?

The writing and publishing of Show Up helped me finally face the truth that there’s a wellspring of cruelty in publishing. I’d sensed this since I’d begun writing, and as Confessions was agented and published I encountered plenty of deceit, and even antagonism, but I sort of denied their existence, as most writers do. I mean, seriously: how can a writer, on a daily basis, admit to the publishing industry’s meanness–on top of the lit-world’s never-ending wars regarding gender, genre, east coast v. west, race, MFA v non-MFA, sexuality, religion, class, and so on? If you admitted to how embroiled the literary milieu is, you’d never draft a thing, let alone revise and submit.

Denial can be good, I think you are saying, or we may not wake up!

Well, the fact is, literary malevolence will never die. It’s why Confessions took years to get published even though it had two of the best agents out there, and I think it’s why Show Up took so long to get published. And it’s why Show Up will face the usual sniper fire of backlash most any acclaimed book faces, as did Confessions just after it was published–even though Confessions is now considered a kind of literary darling.

No writer likes to admit to being criticized, because to do so might mean bad publicity. And what’s been a kind of double-whammy for both Confessions and Show Up was that the narratives in them expose and ridicule selfishness, rudeness, and abuse. SHOW UP has a chapter about the cutthroat snobbishness of literati, and the book’s narrator makes it clear she detests such people.

I’m grateful Robert Giron at Gival had the grace and fortitude to publish a novel that’s direct and unafraid. Because, yes, novels like Confessions and Show Up will take a few lumps here and there, but in the long run, any honest narrator will find love.

What will be next ?

Next for me is to get back to a novel that was abandoned in the same manner Show Up was once abandoned. I have another novel that agents asked me to write, agents fought each other for, and house editors rejected. That process has confused me over the years, but I understand it more lately. Anyway this novel I want to get back to is more serious than Show Up, and I want to revise it one more time to make sure the rejection it faced wasn’t my fault. You know: sometimes these agents get so excited about making money they rush an author, and the author’s book suffers and doesn’t get published, and then the agent falls out of love with the author, leaving the author and the book in an odd place. But of course that doesn’t always mean the book wasn’t good. Sometimes it means the book’s good but needs work.

Katrina Gray: I’m wondering about the name of your group. Is horror tapping us, or are we tapping horror?

Brianne Baxtali: I always imagined it like sticking a spigot into what amounted to the very worst tree ever imagined, collecting the sap, and manufacturing it into a viscous substance to pour over tasty pancakes.

But Horrortap is a whole bunch of horrible trees, so maybe the group is a lot more like Canada than previously assumed. If that’s the case, Horrortap should have its own flag instead of a still from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

I see your group calls for work characterized by psychological terror. I’m thinking Poe, Lovecraft, Oates, but I imagine that psychological terror could be an undercurrent in some literary fiction. The definition has the potential to be broad. What is your idea a story that belongs in Horrortap?

Do you know the Four a.m. Feeling?  It’s when faces pop out of the static on the television and the Emergency Broadcast guy suddenly starts talking back. Or when the shadows start creeping longer than the taut string that has abruptly been loosened from your spine so your limbs feel slack. Or the exact moment you discover that your childhood boogeyman is starring in an entire YouTube serial. Or the hyenas that stalked our earliest ancestors are at your door, demanding to tear your DNA to shreds with ghostly warbles that shake the night like a seizure.

The Four a.m. Feeling is that something has shifted, and reality is not the way you had left it minutes ago. And it’s most assuredly four a.m. at Horrortap.

There has recently been discussion about looking for psychological disturbances in students’ stories since a writing professor revealed she’d had concerns about the anger conveyed in the Virginia Tech shooter’s assignments. It seems that in some cases, a writer’s freedom of expression is at odds with an outsider’s instinct that a writer is revealing a serious disturbance. Do you or any of your horror-writing contemporaries worry about exposing something deep and visceral in your work, for fear of how you might be perceived personally?

I don’t know if I can comment on the Virginia Tech shooter. I don’t know enough about him, personally. I don’t know enough about the case. Obviously, he was ill. I’m sure there were a lot of red flags that weren’t related to writing. I’m not sure what else to say; I can’t speculate on somebody I didn’t know.

Instead, I’m going to relate this in an attempt to answer the larger part of the question: This past year, I lived through my own horror movie. I was the victim of a pretty intense stalker. It’s not over yet because I still have to go back to court later this month. I still have a lot of trouble even talking about it.

This guy used to be my friend. I knew him for years. That’s why I felt safe enough to have him as a roommate. It turns out he wanted a relationship, and it didn’t matter how many times I said no – that wasn’t good enough. He got it in his head that if he couldn’t have me all for himself, nobody could, and that’s a dangerous way to think. So, he started harassing my friends and family via Facebook, email, and text. He would follow me whenever I left the house. I felt extremely uncomfortable. But my mother, the Queen of Bad Advice, told me I was just being paranoid. Whatever.

He kept finding out things about me, things I worked so hard to keep secret. I couldn’t figure out how he was doing it. Then, four days before I was set to move out, I got an anonymous letter in the mail: He had apparently put a keylogger on my computer. In addition, he had cameras throughout the apartment and had been filming me. Not only that, but it was strongly implied that I was in serious danger. He may have been making sure that I didn’t move out at all. (I still don’t know who sent me that letter, but you can bet I’m thankful every day that it arrived just in time.)

That happened in May. I still have nightmares probably, oh, five times a week. I’m constantly on high alert. I can’t shake the feeling of being watched. He’s in jail now, but that doesn’t erase the fear that he’ll show up at my apartment or at work to slit my throat or strangle me. Or, you know, just to show up.

In July or so, I was losing it a bit, and I would just stay up for days listening to Joy Division and writing. That was the only control I felt I had. It was taking those demons, pinning them to the floor, and transmogrifying them into words.

But that wasn’t when I started writing horror.

I feel like epilepsy is eating my brain because we can’t get my meds right. When I was a teenager, I had a bunch of things wrong with me, and nobody would listen. After three years, I finally got diagnosed with cancer. By that point it was in my bones and spine, and I was told I probably wouldn’t be around the next year. One night I talked to my best friend on the phone, and the next morning he was dead because his car had hit a tree at ninety miles per hour.

I couldn’t tell you when I first started writing horror, but I do it because I know terror. I know what it’s like to have death standing at the foot of my bed. I’ve felt the cold smiles of monsters in the corner of my room, and I’ve run until I thought my heart would explode. And I keep doing it so I don’t go entirely numb; I keep doing it so I remain human and don’t turn into a monster myself. It’s like an exorcism over and over and over. All I’ve ever wanted to be was a writer, and that’s why I keep going.

Actually, I have kind of a funny story: When I was pretty sure I was going to die thirteen years ago, I made a deal with the universe. I said I would go willingly and without a fuss, but only when all the stories I had to tell were finally done. So, to finally answer your question: I don’t care what people think. Sometimes, these stories are the only things keeping me together. I’ve never had them published because I don’t know how, but I don’t know who would want them, either. But whatever; it’s the process of writing that I love. It anchors me to life, it burns me clean, it makes me exist. Sure, I have some issues beneath the surface, but this is how I deal with them, and this is how I keep them from consuming me.

I only know how to be a storyteller. If somebody can’t handle the details, well, they probably couldn’t handle some of the things I’ve been through, either. They have the choice not to read. I don’t have the option to not function day to day.

Stephen King is probably the best-known and best-selling horror writer. I hear he is working on a sequel to The Shining. Are you looking forward to more redrum?

I heard a brief synopsis of the plot, and I wondered if it was a joke. When I found out that it wasn’t, my next guess was that Stephen King was burnt out.

I’m not really a Stephen King fan. I’ve tried – my dad really likes him – but I just don’t like his writing style. Still, that guy was writing like twelve billion books a week or something and then he got run over by a van. He doesn’t know how to take it easy, but he probably should. Yeah, I see the irony here. I’m stubborn and I won’t stop writing because if I do I’ll disintegrate, and I bet Mr. King has a touch of the same thing going on. I don’t know. The difference is that he’s made it and I haven’t – I’m still starving and struggling and clawing for all my writing goals. He’s more than met his, I’m sure. That guy needs a break.

Regardless, I really like Stephen King: The Person. Did you know he made a cameo in the  “Pet Cemetery” video? It turns out Mr. King is a huge Ramones fan. Yeah, he’ll always be the coolest person at any party because of that.

Halloween ’tis the season for a group like Horrortap. It’s my favorite holiday, and my 3-year-old son is a big fan of scary pumpkins and spooky scary skeletons, so we are looking forward to it around here. Do you have big plans? Are you planning on horror-tapping all the unsuspecting trick-or-treaters who come to your door?

My door is actually kind of hard to get to – there’s an iron gate on the street, then a fence around back, then my door. That’s great for my own sense of security, but not so good for trick-or-treaters.

My boyfriend and I are planning on dressing up as Slenderman and Masky from the Marble Hornets serial, which will go down in history as one of the best couples’ costumes ever. Actually, if you’ve never seen it, I suggest it – hard. It’s probably the scariest thing I’ve ever watched. The whole series was made for like $500, and it goes to show what good writing can do.

Then again, Tom Savini lives in my neighborhood. Yeah, no joke – right down the street in an otherwise unassuming house with a gargoyle on the gate. But this is Pittsburgh. We do three things better than anybody: Football, ketchup, and zombies.

I grew up an hour northwest from the city in a small area known as – I kid you not – Zombieland. I think it got its name because parts of the original Night of the Living Dead were filmed there, but a whole bunch of local legends sprung up, too. As kids, we all took that movie seriously; it was hard to separate fantasy from reality when zombies were literally shambling through your backyard. As teenagers, we would make pilgrimages to Wampum, which was the site of the farmhouse. That’s long gone, but the shed’s still there. And, of course, if we wanted to piss off our parents, we’d drive all the way out to the Monroeville Mall, which is Zombie Mecca. (Protip: Security gets really touchy about taking pictures of the fountain. You know the one.)

Wow. You know, I don’t think I had much of a choice in this horror writer thing.

Katrina Gray checks in with Fictionaut groups every Friday. She lives in Nashville with the writer John Minichillo and their lovechild. She is the editor-in-chief of Atticus Review, and she blogs about mostly non-literary things at www.katrinagray.com.

Fall has arrived, and I’m happy to celebrate by sharing good news. But first, I’d like to acknowledge Mark Reep, founder Ramshackle Review. Mark recently announced he had to close RR, which has published work by a number of Fictionaut members. Thank you, Mark, for publishing this fine magazine. In other news, Jürgen Fauth has an excerpt from his novel Kino at The Good Men Project. Bill Yarrow’s poems are featured at A-Minor and his chapbook Fourteen is available at Naked Mannekin. W.F. Lantry is interviewed at This Magazine, and has poems at Tower Journal and Horizon Review. Susan Tepper’s “Who Made Men Dance” is published at Art Faccia. Susan also interviewed Robert Olen Butler for The Nervous Breakdown. Sheldon Lee Compton’s story collection, The Same Terrible Storm, is forthcoming from Foxhead Books. Stories by Susan Gibb, Con Chapman, and Gill Hoff are at Pure Slush. Meg Tuite’s “Prevailing Winds” is at Fwriction Review. Finally, Andrew Stancek’s “Mirko’s Mountain” is at Apollo’s Lyre.

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.

Q (Meg Pokrass): As a reader, which writers do you feel closest to?

Lately, Ross MacDonald.  He wrote in the mode of detective fiction, but his interest was clearly in the people and how they are getting by.  How the life takes shape according to some weak spot that the character is trying to protect.

I gave myself a little course in Graham Greene over the summer.  The library at my school was having a Greene dump, so I got a bag of Greene books for a dollar.  Our Man in Havana has a good sentence in it.  “It was the evening hour when work was over and the last gold light lay flat across the roofs and touched the honey-colored hair and the whiskey in his glass.”  You have to know that the honey-colored hair belongs to the man’s daughter, and she is his main preoccupation.  He’s worried about her.

Greene’s troubling in lots of ways but I admire that he went out and tried to see the world and get it into his work.  Harder than it sounds, I think.

At different points as a writer, have you had mentors? Do you mentor?

Frederick Barthelme is the writer I imitated most shamelessly from almost the time I started to write (well before I met him), and then later studied with and learned from.  When I was in grad school at Southern Mississippi we had Rick and Steve Barthelme, Angela Ball, Kim Herzinger, and Mary Robison.  I was all attention and tried to absorb everything.  It was a good place to be.

I do teach writing now but am probably not much of a mentor.  Just trying to keep it together at the moment.  If freshness is a virtue, I have that, because I forget what I said.

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

Keep paying attention.  Look at what is in front of you.  Keep looking.  You don’t really have to be creative much, if you can get something down half accurately.  I think paying attention is 80% of it, and beyond that you have to have your idiom at the ready, if you know what I mean.  If you want to write novels, you need to have absorbed the form somewhat so that you can think in terms of the long story.  But then, the trick is to not let the idiom speak for you.  You have to keep your eye on what’s really in front of you in the world.  Like with Ross MacDonald–he’s working in the idiom of the hard-boiled detective novel, but when he renders, for example, a sexually frustrated college professor, you get the sense that he is drawing from life.  He’s listened to them talking.  The way they will wring a sentence to death sometimes.

Favorite writing exercises you would like to share?

My favorite exercise is to get up early, get some coffee and start typing before I am completely awake.  You don’t know what will come out.

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

I guess I start by thinking of real people I have known, and how their faces work and so on.  And then at some point, one hopes, the world of the story is fully imagined enough that you can follow the people through that world, and see what happens there.

In fiction you have the advantage of being able to give your character a very clear choice about something or other, and this helps them seem alive.  For example, there’s a story by Chekhov called “Anyuta” is which a medical students is kicking his mistress out of the apartment.  “Mistress” is not really the right term.  She’s sort of a concubine/housekeeper.  So he tells her to go, and as she’s leaving, she gives him this packet of sugar.  In real life the gesture might be meaningless, or else it might be so complicated that it’s hopelessly ambiguous.  But in the story, because it’s fiction, Chekhov is able to simplify and frame the moment so that we are able to read what she does in a certain way, and it’s illuminating and affecting.

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

I enjoy a knotty plot, so I plan ahead, then improvise, then plan again.  Of course it has to be built out of the choices the characters are making, and these need to make sense.

Plot.  When you are writing a novel in first person, the plot is partly derived from the narrating character’s sense of the justice of his own actions.  He is saying, “Then we did this, and here is why it made sense at the time.”  So there’s some pathos in that, too.  In a certain kind of novel, the tortured plot is really a manifestation of the characters’ self-deception.  The flowering of their self-deception.  Think of P.G. Wodehouse.

How did your new novel Angela Sloan find you and you, it? Anything on this subject about the writing of your new novel!

It started when my daughter and I were watching C-Span.  She fell asleep, and I got interested in a panel discussion on Watergate.  I started reading Watergate memoirs, and what I said above about tortured plots and self-deception applies here totally.  Almost everyone who had a part in Watergate wrote a book about it, and each one is the story of why it made sense at the time.

Then I started reading CIA memoirs.  You know, the CIA had an interesting moment in the seventies, post-Watergate, when they got overwhelmed by this new culture of exposing everything.  If there is nothing to be ashamed of, why keep it secret?

So it was kind of as though the country itself had its private life revealed.  Novels, at least the kind I’m into, are typically more about the secret lives of individual people, not of countries.  But there is something interesting there, putting a person’s secret life against the background of his country’s secret life.

That sounds a little grand, I am afraid.  I also wanted to try writing a Chinese character.  I was living in Tennessee when I started the book, and we used to go to one of those humongous Chinese buffet restaurants.  This was in Johnson City.  All the big eaters went there, and the staff was made up of these very thin Chinese young people, fresh off the plane, who could basically say “More drink?” and “Thank you” and that’s about it.  I wondered, and still do, what life is like for those people and how we look to them.

Tell us about what you are working on now.

A story set in Rochester, New York, which is where I live now.

Susan Tepper:  “Origin” is a complex and layered story, the most difficult type of story to write well.  Marcelle, you pulled it off, and then some.  Your first line: “The woman was looking for the bathroom when she came across the girl.”

Woman / bathroom / girl

That the woman was not looking for, say, the kitchen or living room or front porch – when she comes across this girl- well that simple first line felt very loaded to me.

Marcelle Heath:   Thank you so much, Susan. I knew when I began the story that I would have a woman brushing a girl’s hair and that the girl would be a stranger. There’s an intimacy in brushing someone’s hair. I also knew that the woman would be at a party, and that the house would be unfamiliar. So, in this scene, she’s in this strange place, and the girl guides her. The bathroom is definitely loaded– it’s a private space, a place of sanctuary, and can be its opposite as well, a place of shame, repulsion, and fear.

Susan: The woman (who remains unnamed) seems to be at a crossroads.  You tell us that she “…waved tentatively at a colleague who was promoted ahead of her.”  You also tells us the house in which she is visiting, contains “two narrow staircases that led in opposite directions.”

What is that all about, the two staircases, in terms of this story?

Marcelle: Yes, the woman is at a crossroads. The colleague, and the person she wanted to seduce, left with someone else. The party is a disappointment, a burden, and an obligation. I think of it as a fairytale – the two staircases are paths in her journey.

Susan:  So the staircases are symbolic?

Marcelle: Yes, one will lead her to enlightenment, the other to destruction.

Susan:  Hmm..  And someone she wanted to seduce left with someone else.  Not much fun in that!  You get her into the bathroom and someone outside is trying the doorknob.

You write:  “The woman scrambled into her underwear.  The garment was aubergine and baroquely laced around the edges.”

What shade is aubergine?  It’s a beautiful word, by the way, as is your other description baroquely laced around the edges.  Words that set the tone of the story as it continues.  Do you think if you’d dressed her in plain cotton undies, the story would have taken on a whole different slant?

Marcelle:  Ha! Yes, aubergine is a great word – it’s eggplant. The language becomes more ornate, definitely, as a way to describe the sense of strangeness or other-wordliness by contrasting the realist setting with the beginnings of the uncanny – embellishment. Of course, “baroquely-laced” suggested something both old-fashioned and futile to me. After all, she wore them for the purpose of a failed seduction. If she had worn something else, the effect would be much different. The tone would be starker, perhaps? I’m not sure. If the description had been “plain, white panties,” I almost think the tone would add an element of the grotesque, especially with the word “panties.” I remember one reader suggesting I cut “baroquely-laced” from the story, but I couldn’t part with it.

Susan:  I agree with you about leaving baroquely-laced in the story- totally!   It’s so interesting how word choices can make such a difference in what the characters decide to do and how the story will progress.  You made other lush choices:

“The oval hairbrush was a silver antique.  There was a repoussé design of a woman’s head at top.  Flowers flowed out of her hair and continued down her neck into the handle.”

All of this suggests to me that you were working deep out of your unconscious.  I believe it’s the unconscious flow of words that create the most provocative stories.  Tell us more about the little girl and her significance.

Marcelle:  Thank you! I spent days thinking about the brush, its shape, its heft, its bristles. I could feel it in my hand, how heavy it was. I thought of the woman’s hair like Medusa’s – as if at any moment it could come alive. However, I’m not sure how unconscious the words – I did a lot of research, looked up antique brushes. There was no brush that matched mine, but the term “repoussé ” is completely taken from descriptions. My vocabulary isn’t that extensive! The little girl was strange to me from the beginning. Her heavy flannel nightgown and matted hair, suggesting that she had woken up from something, maybe a nightmare.

And when the narrator begins to question who she is, asking at one point “You’re not Matilde, are you?” I remember thinking, yes! I’ve found a way in. Like the woman, she seems not to belong anywhere, she’s a wanderer in a way.

Susan:  It’s a fascinating story.  I don’t want to go much further because it will give away too many of your delicate and delicious plot details.  But I will say that I was captivated by what you wrote and what you ask of the reader to consider about this story.   And about their own delicate lives.

Read “Origin” by Marcelle Heath

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.

Ben Loory‘s fables and tales have appeared in The New Yorker, Gargoyle Magazine, and The Antioch Review. His book Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day was released July 26, 2011, by Penguin Books, and was chosen as a Fall Selection of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. (Author photo by Heather Conley.)

Q (Meg Pokrass): Which authors do you return to time and again as a reader?

Henry James (short stories, not the novels). Philip K. Dick (the novels, not the stories). Stephen Crane (the poetry, not the prose). And Ezra Pound (ABC of Reading). Plus Beckett, Brautigan, Emerson, Sebald, Patricia Highsmith, Jim Thompson, Shirley Jackson… Ionesco, Nietzsche, Borges, Kafka, Melville, Robert Aickman, Hawthorne…

And lately I’ve been getting into Norman Mailer, who was just wonderfully insane. I like his essays.

Do you listen to music when you write?  What do you listen to?

I’ve always needed complete silence when I write– I tend to get caught up in melodies and words– so I never write anywhere but in my house (and usually in the dead of night). But during the process of writing my book, I discovered this CD called Alina, by Arvo Pärt… He’s a sacred minimalist composer from Estonia and this CD is kind of a miracle. It’s the only music I’ve ever found that instantly quiets and focuses my mind; I wrote my whole book to it on repeat, and now I find I can’t write without it.

At different points have you had mentors? Do you mentor?

I’ve never really had a mentor, no, though I’ve definitely had teachers who helped and inspired me. Dennis Etchison, who taught the short story writing class that made me start writing my book, was by far the most influential of those, but I wouldn’t exactly call him a mentor. More like a wise man who handed me a key and told me where the secret door was located. As for acting as someone else’s mentor, no, I’ve never done that. Not that I wouldn’t; it’s just never come up. And also I guess I’m a little leery of telling people what to do.

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

I’ve never had a problem with getting stuck. My problem is the opposite: turning it off. I live in constant fear of being swept away into the aether by unrelenting story thoughts. So I have to be careful to budget my time and be sure to rest and eat right and see people and do stuff. Otherwise my brain can get very unruly and then sometimes scary things happen.

I think if I got stuck I’d just do something else. Like play music. Or clean out the closet.

Writing Stories for Nighttime and Some For The Day – what surprised you (or didn’t) about the way this collection came together, what was it like, how did it happen, etc.

Virtually everything surprised me about writing this book. Starting with the fact that I was writing at all. I’d wanted to write a book for almost a decade, and had never really had any luck with it. I was always obsessed with what I would do, what I “had to say,” what my book would mean. It was only when I threw away the idea of preconceptions that things actually started happening. Every time I sit down to write a story, I’m surprised (and sometimes terrified) by what comes out. And then all the stories just kept on coming; it was like discovering I had a library in the basement.

The process of publishing was surprising too, mainly just because of the time involved. I thought when I sold the book, well, that was it– it would be out and in stores the next week. I never really thought about the whole publishing end, about the physical process or the editing and marketing. And then there’s the whole thing about people out there reading it, which is nice, but mindboggling to consider.

What things have you had to unlearn as a writer?

I think I had to unlearn virtually everything I learned as an undergrad studying English. I had to learn to write, not from ideas, but from feelings– from confusion, fear, and hope. Also, I had to throw away that “Show, Don’t Tell” crap, which wasn’t hard because I never understood it anyway.

Best writing advice you have ever had?

A story is something you live your way through, not something you conceive of and then execute.

What you are working on next?

I’m always working on a million different things, but I guess the big one is this book about a town. I’ve been working on it for a couple years now; it’s like Winesburg, Ohio, but in The Twilight Zone.

Christopher Bollen is a New York-based writer and currently the editor at large of Interview Magazine. His first novel, Lightning People, was published in September 2011 by Soft Skull Press.

Q (Meg Pokrass): What do you do when you feel stuck or uninspired and does it work to trick the brain into working?

I’m a big proponent of not waiting for inspiration while writing. I think for the initial seedlings of a story, inspiration may need to strike—it usually strikes me when I’m not at my desk, often in another city or in part of the world, very often, for some reason, while I’m physically moving around. But once I’ve said yes to putting  something down on the page, I usually treat the work of words a lot like that of a woodcarver (albeit one who strongly believes in removable parts). I’m very wary of waiting for the perfect writing moment, because I know from experience how horrifically rarely those moments arrive. In fact, usually those perfect writing moments are only acknowledged in retrospect after you look over what you’ve written and say, “okay, no shame in this.” What I do is treat writing as manual labor: you will sit down for the next three hours and you will put at least five paragraphs down. I can usually start finding the current just by sailing out a few sentences. But yes there are fingernails bleeding from frustration and dialogue that sounds as if it’s been translated from Arabic to English by an Internet program. I think it’s important to accept that there will be days of bad writing—that even bad writing keeps you close to the story.

What makes us care about fictional characters as readers?

It’s lunacy. We shouldn’t. There is nothing reasonable about actually caring about a character that we know from the outset is completely made up. Some day aliens will see us crying over Katherine in Wuthering Heights while still not giving any poor beggar the change from our coffee, and that alone will either be a warning not to land here or enough reason to wipe us off the map. But caring about fictional characters IS important if you believe the imagination is important, if you believe that living outside of your immediate periphery is important—and specifically if you were a lonely child and you spend most of your time dreaming of places and people that didn’t match the place you grew up (i.e. fiction as survival mechanism). We would probably be holding on to the change from our coffee whether or not we were good fiction readers, but I believe that fiction does push us in a direction toward empathy. We care, yes, when an author is particularly skillful at applying flesh and yellowing teeth to a character to make them believable. But, I think a lot of the credit goes to the reader: can the reader get there, can the reader inhabit those shoes, can the read shut off the million distractions and invest. Am I the only person who would not go on a second date with someone who says a book has never made them cry or at least want to join a peaceful cult group?

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

I’ve had a number of writers I’ve looked up to, a few I’ve met and still looked up to afterward, and a number of professors and teachers in my undergraduate years that have helped me with my work. But to be honest: after I left college I never showed my writing to a mentor or listened to criticism as I went or even allowed a friend to read a single page before the story was completed. I don’t mean to discourage mentoring or writing seminars. But, for me, I was of the state of mind when I began writing my novel that any harsh criticism early on (or “great ideas for trying something different” which to me equaled criticism) would have stopped me in my tracks. I couldn’t hear no, not right, I’m not feeling it, don’t. It would have destroyed the excitement I was having with telling the story, No, instead I locked the door and shut the windows and wrote all alone for almost three years before I finally showed just a few dozen of the hundreds of pages to a perspective book agent—who kindly liked what he read and became my agent. That was Bill Clegg and he was a great soundboard for me when I was working through ideas. But still I like to think of writing as something you primarily do alone, with just you and the keyboard. I’m being absolutely serious when I say that writing is a lonely profession. A writer needs to be able to deal with deep pools of loneliness. I fear even meaningful interventions can dissipate the voice of a writer—until the editing stage and then it’s a free-for-all.

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? Do you already know these people?

Of course, I try to get in the mind of a character when I invent him or her, and tread carefully to lay down a specific, idiosyncratic backstory. But I think first and foremost, it’s important to reveal not how they are similar to the rest of the characters but precisely what makes them different—what are their hangups, their tics, their bizarre romantic histories (the way a person treats love and sex is, I’m afraid, very telling), how do they dress and how does what they do and wear fail to cover up what they are insecure about. I don’t know the characters before I put them down, but I usually know them either after the first few lines of dialogue or by the first few choices of description. I don’t like my characters looking like fashion models (except, in one case, where one was something of a model). I want them to have food stains, lopsided shoulders, and uncontrollable habits. And by in large I do not use real people I know as templates. They never sound as authentic as the person they are modeled on and, as a writer, you have drawn yourself into a prison of having to think in someone else’s head in order to uncover motivations. I think usually good character come alive pretty quickly. It’s the ones that feel formless after a few pages that you really have to worry about.

What are some good habits for a writer?

I don’t really believe in giving advice because 1. I’ve only written one book so what do I know? And 2. Everyone is so different. But I would suggest the following: stick to a routine and make sure you write every day. Also if you have a day job, say goodbye to nights and weekends because novels are like seven-month old babies. They demand every second of your attention. You need to sit down and deal with them even when you’re exhausted and just want it all to stop. The only method for not losing your way in a story is to stay with it, day by day, not letting weeks come in between.

Tell us about Lightning People – how it evolved, where is sprung from – anything relating to this process.

Lightning People came into being mostly by the determination that I had not started writing a novel in my twenties, so I sat down at the age of thirty and began. I knew I wanted to write a book about New York, but I wanted to describe a New York I wasn’t seeing in the books, films, and televisions of the last decade—a charade of a city seemingly built for constant shopping and dating. That wasn’t the hard, dark, rough, survivalist’s version of the city I knew. I felt there was still so much desperation to the place. I also wanted to write a character-driven story where the men and women who filled this New York in LP weren’t these especially cool, young, celebratory downtown folk. That seemed like another stereotype. I tried to chisel out characters with very real and sometimes very sad and stark operational systems For example, I begin the book with a marriage at city hall. So many books begin with a marriage, but I wanted this marriage to be instantly undercut by the fact that it wasn’t done just for love but for a Greencard. Already there is a canker in the rose in this story, and those cankers grow and grow as the book progresses.

Susan Tepper:  “A Sunday Afternoon in Paris“ is quite romantic without being “overtly romantic.” Jack, you begin the piece with this cinematic beauty:

“The painting and the two of them in the big room.  A tableaux.  The woman with the dark hair and green eyes, the tall American, the painting.”

Was this an image that came to you immediately upon this writing?

Jack Swenson:  Yes, because that’s what happened. I met the young woman in the Louvre. The painting was Seurat’s “Le Grande Jatte.” It was at the Louvre at the time on loan from Chicago. It’s a huge painting. I have revised the tale many times, and I keep changing the color of the woman’s eyes. To protect the innocent. Actually, her eyes were brown.

Susan:  I did see a Seurat in that line.  And I do love that this was “lifted from life” in the truest sense, though you gave her green eyes which is such a stunning choice and seems to meld her more into that painting.  Jack, I’ve read a lot of your work and you have this ability to seamlessly switch from place to place (Paris to farmland to suburbia, etc).  Yet there is always your distinctive imprint on every story.  How do you explain that?

Jack:  I think it is because I am a born again storyteller. I love to tell stories! I love to read them, too. Years and years ago, I wanted to write stories- like Isaac Babel and William Carlos Williams (yes, the poet wrote short prose pieces, too). Then when I found Carver, I was an immediate convert, but this happened many years later.

It seems to me that story telling is a lost art. When I was a kid, I loved to be a mouse in the corner when my parents had friends over. They told stories. It was great fun. Now at a get together, it’s mostly chit-chat and gossip. I’m bored to tears.

Susan:  Me, too.  Bored to tears with banal chit-chat.  You write:

“The woman lived on one side of Paris, and the man lived on the other.  She couldn’t let him sleep in her bed, nor could she sleep in his. After midnight he walked halfway across the city to his shabby hotel.”

Now this sure isn’t boring.  I found this to be an intensely intimate story.  She can’t spend the night with him which tells us a great deal about her as a character, perhaps about her levels of intimacy.

Jack:  Well, the time frame for this story is the early sixties. Attitudes about sex have changed. At the time, I wasn’t happy about it, but what was I going to do? There I was in Paris, in April for God’s sake, and I was sleeping alone. In a tiny hotel where I had to walk up four flights of stairs to get to my room!

Susan:  Ah ha!  Jack, did I ever tell you that I always wanted to be a private eye?  It seems I have uncovered certain other autobiographical details in this story than previously noted by the author…  hmm…

So tell us, dear author, is the whole piece autobiographical or only in part?

Jack:  Mm. Ah. Well. It’s not entirely autobiographical. No.

Susan: OK, well good enough.  Did you draw on Paris as a city of sensual delights: the place itself, the food, the cafes, the women?  Sensory aspects in this story are strong.  And of course there are the whores outside his hotel room window.

Jack: No, I don’t think so. I spent 3 1/2 months in Europe, mostly in major cities. I was in Paris a month, waiting to pick up my VW bug in Wolfsburg, Germany. In Paris I had a lot of time on my hands. Sorry. That’s not very romantic, but that’s the way that it was.

Susan:  I’d like to stick with the whores a moment, if that’s OK.  You did have your character looking at the whores outside his window.  And there is something so innocent about whores in paintings (and you did start with a painting tableau).  When Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas and others painted the whores of Paris, they did so with a kind of detached innocence.  The whores were always colorfully rendered with a sense of depressed gaiety.  I got the sense of depressed gaiety in this piece, too, which perhaps was influenced by his observance of the whores.  Am I way off the track?

Jack: Well, maybe some of the paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec were on my mind. I suppose the picture I paint in the story could be read that way, but depressed? I’d prefer the word detached. I see this story as more comic than anything. I think that’s true of all my stories. I write about the Human Comedy. That’s just the way I see things.

Susan:  Yes, detached.  It is the Human Comedy, Jack Swenson style!

Read “A Sunday Afternoon in Paris“ by Jack Swenson

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.

Q (Katrina Gray): Hello, Harris Tobias. I know you’re new to Fictionaut, so please tell us all-things-Harris-Tobias. Don’t be shy or modest. There’s no room for that here.

Hi Katrina, I always wanted to be a writer but it was a dream deferred while I raised a family and earned a living. Three years ago, I retired, my children are having children of their own and life has settled down to where I can give myself the time to write. I have written a couple of novels and a slew of short stories. I am slowly learning my craft and finding my voice as a writer.

I write in several genres: science fiction, detective fiction, children’s lit, poetry and song lyrics. I enjoy the diversification and have had some success in each field of endeavor. As a story teller, naturally I hope to have my stories and poems read by others, so I submit pieces all over the internet. The internet is filled with venues for writers. My stories have appeared over 100 times in 30 or so different publications.

Q: You started the Lyrics In Search of Tunes group. How did this idea come about? Are you a Bernie Taupin in search of your Elton John?

Yes. I would love to find someone who heard the music in my words and could belt them out like Elton John. I love writing songs. I don’t play an instrument but I can hear the orchestra or choir in my head. Of course the few times I’ve actually heard a song of mine sung, it was nothing like I expected. That’s the great part about collaborating with another artist, it’s never what you expect.

I look for collaborators in a lot of what I do. I’m currently collaborating with a half a dozen illustrators on some of my children’s stories.

Q: You introduce the group with this nugget: “Song lyrics are the stepchild of poetry.” But is this true? Because I’m betting Dan Fogelberg could give Longfellow a run for his money. The Dan Man rhymed “I can’t blame you” with “Pennsylvania.” Now *that’s* something you couldn’t get away with in poetry.

It’s true that lyrics can be poetic and poems can be sung, but , in general, I find that when I label something a poem it is different than when it think of it as a song. A poem is generally weightier, deeper and more serious than what I consider a song. That’s not to say that songs can’t be deep and serious, it’s just not how I think of them.

For me, songs are freer and lighter fare than poems. Songs have a consistent rhythm and rhyme, a chorus and verse structure that poems don’t require. At least that’s how it is in my mind.

Q: We’re all curious now. We have to know your favorite lyricists, lyrics, songs, singers. Who sets the bar for you?

I like Dylan, old blues, folk, gospel and ballads. I have tried writing songs in all of those styles. A couple of years ago, I was writing a detective novel, The Greer Agency, and got the idea of adapting some of it to the stage as a play. I then added songs for the characters and before I knew it, Gumshoe, a musical, was born. I found a talented composer who has been writing the score for it for the last year. We plan to enter it in some play competitions in the near future.

Q: Do you ever hear a melody, or accidentally write to a melody that’s already in your head? Do you play an instrument?

I do not play an instrument. I wish I could. If I could play I’d like to play piano or guitar but then I’d wish I could sing and perform as well. I also wish I could illustrate my children’s stories. You can’t be good at everything. I’m happy I can write fairly well. There are plenty of illustrators and musicians who wish they could write, that’s why I started the song writer group to put us together. It’s early in the process but so far I can’t say the group has attracted much interest.

Q: Yes or no: was Neil Diamond telling the truth when he sang, “Being lost / Is worth the coming home”?

That’s a very good line, I’d have loved to have written it.

Katrina Gray checks in with Fictionaut groups every Friday. She lives in Nashville with the writer John Minichillo and their lovechild. She is the editor-in-chief of Atticus Review, and she blogs about mostly non-literary things at www.katrinagray.com.