The Snow Whale is John Minichillo‘s first novel. He lives in Nashville with the writer, Katrina Gray, and their very young son. Find him at thesnowwhale.com.

You can read an excerpt from The Snow Whale on Fictionaut.

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

My wife is a writer, and I try to feel close to her as often as I can (can I do a winky-face emoticon, do people do that in interviews?) We are each others’ first readers / best readers. We really get each other and have probably influenced each other in untold ways. We’ve taught workshops together, which I’d recommend to any couple, whether you write or not. She wrote a very important scene for The Snow Whale, and it turned out great, and it was one of the kindest things anyone has ever done for me. And she got me on Twitter, which is disposable writing and very good for you as a writer – for us anyway, it amounts to sending off jokes into the ether.

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

I’ve had some semi-famous writing teachers but “mentor” is this overbearing word. I sent them all The Snow Whale when it came out, a couple of them blurbed for it. This is the kind of thing you dream about as an MFA student, and for me at least, it took a really long time. So I was out of touch for many years. I suppose a lot of us go off and do other things, and some of us stayed in touch, but I was toiling in obscurity. I mostly wanted them to be proud and so you don’t see these people anymore, so they are kind of like dead parents. You send give them flowers, they may not notice. I learned from all of them and I am grateful for the time they gave me.

My university workshop, the writers are juniors and seniors in college, and some of them are sophomores. So the mentoring I can do is limited. I secretly love it when a bunch of them are talented and having fun and I had nothing to do with it. They do all the work while I play M.C. One way to mentor is to be this living example. Share your drafts with the class. Make them go to readings. Suggest very strongly that they should be submitting to magazines.I’m fostering a sense of competitiveness with those young writers and if they like it, it will stick with them.  In all the discussion about writing programs I don’t see anyone talking about how it made us want to be seen as better writers than the other writers in the room. I want to be a better writer than you. And I WANT you to be a better writer than me. That’s why so many of us writers are bitchy. That’s why we have egos. I recently listened to Michael Jordan’s NBA Hall of Fame acceptance speech and it was a joy. He talked about all the people who gave him drive and competitive spirit, and he said it was because he wanted to be better than them. I think a lot of writers have this, which is why people put down Jonathan Franzen, who is a fucking splendid writer, because we want to be better.  My wife and I live near Tony Earley in East Nashville. He doesn’t know who I am. I see him sometimes when I drive home from work. I want to be better than he is. So he’s a mentor. He has no idea about this, but he is.

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

Anyone with writers block needs to just go out and procreate. As a graduate student you have so much time you don’t even realize it. You have the luxury of working the equivalent hours of a full-time job on reading and writing (this is reason enough for anyone to go). As you get older time is much harder to come by.  I just started writing on an iPad. The word processors are all primitive but the touch screen is nice – I can just reach out and drop a cursor. The point is that I’m hoping to be more mobile with it. I’ve always worked at a desk, and worked well that way, but now I want to take it anywhere I get a spare hour. It’s been good so far.

Favorite writing exercises you would like to share?

I like to give the writing workshop a list of settings, settings that are unusual, settings both realistic and nonrealistic, settings that allow for good interaction, etc. When I was younger I always rocked my setting long before I had any notion of the story or the characters. Setting grounds the characters and creates mood. Not making the most of it is a missed opportunity.

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?

Character is the hardest thing, the slow-growing thing. In The Snow Whale, which is a loose retelling of Moby-Dick, I had some automatic stock characters to start me off: an Ahab, an Ishmael, a Queequeg, a white whale. But like any other story they would evolve over drafts. Dialogue draws them out and gets them to stand on their own.

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

I believe plot should be simple. Whether it’s tragic or funny it should always be easy to grasp. The Fictionauts would groan and roll their eyes if I told you what I was working on now. It’s an old worn-out plot, and I’m having fun with it.

Q (Katrina Gray): Hello, Thomas Pluck and Fiona Johnson. You’ve started a group with some guts: The Lost Children Challenge. How did the idea come about?

Thomas: The idea was all Fiona’s. I’m a moderator for Flash Fiction Friday, and we have a rotating guest spot. I chose Fiona because she writes dark tales that have a strong emotional foundation and a moral core. She did not disappoint. In the interest of full disclosure, she’s also a friend who encouraged me to submit my work for publication, and I still owe her for that one.

Fiona: Tommy invited me to be the guest writer on Flash Fiction Friday where I am a fairly regular contributor. My challenge was to come up with a story prompt that would inspire and get a range of people to take up the challenge. I spent a lot of time thinking about the sort of prompt that I would cause a response in me. As I am a visual person, I suddenly thought of Danielle Tunstall and the amazing images she creates. I clicked through her albums on Facebook until this picture of a child with a man’s hand covering her mouth appeared. The child’s eyes are full of stories and I knew that this was my prompt. The words came quickly after that. I’m a teacher and over the years I’ve looked into too many damaged children’s eyes so I’m well aware of the harm that sadly is still being done to our children.

There are so many children’s charities around the world, which indicates how many problems need to be solved, and how many children need help. How did you choose the charities that will benefit from the project?

Thomas: I chose PROTECT.org because my major writing influence is Andrew Vachss, who helped found the organization. For a long time he’d been saying that children’s advocates needed a PAC like the NRA. The NRA only cares about the 2nd Amendment; most organizations that fought for stronger children’s protections and funding for existing programs also had a host of other causes they supported, so they would have to decide which was more important at times. PROTECT has no such difficult decision to make. In 2008 they got the PROTECT act passed and the continuing onslaught of child pornography convictions is due to their hard work.

Fiona: I’ve been thinking for a while that I want to do something special to mark my 50th birthday. I don’t need anymore presents so instead I decided that I’d have a 50th birthday give-away where if people would write me stories, I’d donate cash to Children 1st, the Scottish society for the prevention of cruelty to children. The charity just matched the prompt exactly and as I’ve spent most of my life giving children the best opportunity I can with their education, it just made sense.

You two are ponying up some big bucks for this. Were you concerned about getting, say, 10,000 stories, and having to refinance your mortgages? The Fictionaut community is pretty big and prolific, you know. We do powerful things.

Thomas: I’m not a rich man. However I do spend too much on books, burgers and beer. If 10,000 joined in, I’d pay it off month by month without telling my wife. And I write crime stories, so I’d rob a banker or a hedge fund manager with all the criminal knowledge I’ve absorbed. I’d have a hard time putting all the entries in a blog post on www.flashfictionfriday.com though!

Fiona: If there are more stories than I can afford to pay for just now, I’ll just pay them off one week at a time until I’ve cleared my debt! The challenge does have a time limit,  so that should help too!

So many writers have had way-less-than-ideal childhoods. I’m thinking James Joyce, Frank McCourt, Tobias Wolff, Stephen Elliott. Lots of others. Writing can be therapeutic, sure, but I think there’s more going on with the connection. Do you have your own ideas about early hardship shaping an artist in a way that nothing else can?

Thomas: I think most artists have a desire to be heard that stems from an early need. I was the firstborn and had a wild imagination that’s  never left me. I won’t say I had a hard childhood because I know many who’ve had so much worse. There was hardship, and there were heroes. Heroines, to be precise, who pulled my sister and I through. I won’t presume that all writers have had similar experiences, but it certainly helps to know pain if you plan on depicting it or dissecting it.

Fiona: I don’t know if you must have experienced hardship to be a writer but I think you have to have had life experiences, good or bad. I think there comes a greater understanding of the human condition with age, this won’t be true for all writers, but to sing a love song you have to have had your heart broken and to write, you have to have experienced the full range of emotions that people experience over a lifetime.

I’m about to get personal here. Can you pinpoint how something in your own childhood that influences your own writing today? Does it work that way for you?

Thomas: My parents divorced when I was six, and it was a messy one. It taught me a lot about revenge, love and how it can bitter into hate. The feelings from that time are the live wire that powers my still-crazy imagination. I had a lot of fear at the time and fear is the root of all anger. If I were to pinpoint one moment, it would be when I was eleven, and I was hanging out with a kid named Travis, whose mother left him alone all day- he’d eat from people’s gardens- and a kid named Joey, who wore a white shirt and chinos, visiting his old Italian grandparents. Not a snobby kid but his family had money. We were in an old park and for no good reason, Travis threw a cinder block at Joey’s head. Blood sprayed. Joey cried and ran. He was okay, I heard, but I never saw him again. Travis said I snitched on him. He didn’t seem to get in much trouble over it. I still think of the mindless, fatherless rage Travis had to feel to do that, to a stranger, out of pure hatred and envy. It still terrifies me, and the Lost Children challenge is partly about the fact that we make our own monsters, by tolerating their physical and emotional abuse, and their suffering through neglect and need.

Fiona: Childhood has a strong influence on my writing. I can now stand back and consider things that happened and try to get under the skin of what was really going on that I wasn’t aware of as a child. A lot of understanding comes through being a mother, a wife, a wage earner myself.

If another writer wanted to start a challenge like this one, what are the steps to get it going?

Thomas: Choose something you’re passionate about. You can’t fake that kind of emotion, and it becomes infectious. Being part of an active and friendly community like Fictionaut certainly helps, and I’d like to thank everyone who participated or made suggestions. You need to set some sort of ground rules, like length, deadline, perhaps genre if that matters to you. A little structure for the ivy to climb.

Fiona: I would say don’t do it yourself. I’ve had a great time working with Tommy and Danielle on this challenge. We’ve worked as a team and that’s been very satisfying. Use all the social media sites to publicize and don’t be shy, just go out there and directly ask people for their support and you’ll be surprised at how generous others are with their time and talent.

You guys are awesome.

Thomas: Thank you for this interview. I will be keeping the group open long after the Flash Fiction Friday deadline, so if it inspires you to write, please put it in the group. I’d like to thank Fictionaut member Ron Earl Phillips for inviting me be a moderator at FFF, and the rest of the Fictionaut community for their help and support in this project.

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.

Susan Tepper:  Joani, let’s talk about your poem “Put Down Your Camera and Love Me.” Captivating poem.  Now that is a knockout title, if ever there was one.  I can hear a lot of voices yelling Yes !

Can you recall which came first, the title or the poem or part of the poem?

JP Reese: Thank you, Susan.  I’m glad you picked this particular poem, as it’s one I’ve written and revised for over a decade to get it where it is at this moment.  I may not be done with it yet.  The title was originally the final line of the poem. The working title back then was “Vacation.”  Ho-hum.  About a year ago, I reworked the last stanza and realized those lines were the title, not the concluding idea.  Sometimes, these sudden impulses toward a sort of poetic “rightness” just hit me.  Using this line as the title was one of those light bulb moments.

Susan: A light bulb moment that works so well for this poem!  It begins:

“The dead whale’s bones wash to white / on the beachhead in Puerto Peñasco.”

Life and death.  And death.  And death.  The poet’s favorite themes.  You offer us death with the bones washed to white but then you offer us life on the brimming beachhead.

JP: The poem is set in a real place, on the beach outside a house owned by my nephew in Mexico.  A whale washed up there some years before, and by the time I visited, it was simply great ivory rib bones rising from the sand.  My children would play inside them, embraced by the skeletal remains.  I don’t see the poem as particularly weighted toward death, but rather as a reminder to live one’s life clearly and joyously while there’s still time.  The whale bones are my nod to the late medieval and Early Renaissance habit of painters who placed a skull within a living scene as a reminder of the ultimate fate of all humankind, a memento mori.

Susan:  Would you say this is a love poem, then?  Particularly since the word Love is part of its title.

JP:  It is a request to be loved fully and without reservation by another human being.  The speaker realizes time is passing and the everyday, mundane activities suddenly no longer have enough value nor do they offer the life affirming spark of connection most of us seek in our relationships, at least early on, before familiarity sets in to dull the electric current in our bodies down to a manageable thrum.  The bones are her epiphany, if you will, a stark depiction of the finality of life and thus an impetus to act without reservation on her deepest desires before it’s too late.

Susan: The bones as epiphany.  How interesting.  Also what you wrote above about the Early Renaissance painters putting a skull within a living scene brought to mind Georgia O’Keefe, a modern painter who uses skulls and bones in her work.

I think this is a very sexy poem.  You write:

“Your mouth tastes of sea salt, / … / drink you into my mouth.”

JP: Yes, let’s just say one can interpret that allusion to physical activity in any way he or she pleases. I took out one of those mouths for the poem’s publication at Ramshackle Review, and I like the poem either way, but I wanted the physicality that using the word twice brings to the mind’s eye.  Physically, the mouth is a sexual locus.  I am sitting in my library at home surrounded by three O’Keefe reproductions as well as an enlargement of her photograph as an older, beautiful woman taken by her lover Alfred Steiglitz, so I appreciate the idea that my description of the aesthetics I had in mind while writing this poem made you think of her. She’s one of my heroes.

Susan: Oh, Joani, that’s so cool!  I can’t get over that I visualized O’Keefe from the poem and there you are surrounded by her paintings, as well as her photo (taken by her lover who, of course, is an incomparable and famous photographer).  I sensed a lot going on in this poem.

You write:  “The skeletal shadow sinks eastward / ”

What made you choose eastward, as opposed to another direction?

JP:  The literal answer is that at Playa Encanto, the beach on which the whale has draped his milky bones, the sun sets directly over the water, leaving figures and skeletons as elongated shadows flowing east up the dunes and over the patches of grasses that dot them.  On a metaphorical level, the eastward direction reaches out toward the next dawn, another chance. Death, the bones, their shadowy implication, reaches out toward life, a rising sun.  I like the idea that people, no matter their age or circumstance, can always choose to change.  Life is filled with renewal and possibility.  That is why the title uses the imperative. The speaker asks the “tourist,” observing his own life, to stop lurking behind the lens and become the picture, meet the speaker on a different psychological plane and join in the dance like the twinned dolphins streaking silver over the sea.

Read “Put Down Your Camera and Love Me” by JP Reese

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.

As the summer’s end approaches, leaving earthquakes, hurricanes, and other disasters behind, time will tell how literature will record their impact. In the meantime, let us look to the literature of the present. Susan Tepper’s poem “Daisy” appears in the Somerville News and her non-fiction piece “That Summer in Greece” at Pure Slush. Joani Reese’s poems “Abstinence” and “Play” are featured at Camroc Press Review and her piece “May You Live In Interesting Times” at Gloom Cupboard. Jane Hammons’ “What Ever Happened to Old Tom Joad” is forthcoming in Blink Ink’s The Noir Issue. Ann Bogle’s book, Country Without a Name, is available at Lulu. Kathy Fish’s collection, Wild Life, is available through Matter Press and Amazon. Robert Vaughn’s “Nowhere in Sight” and Andrew Stancek’s “Goat Fate” and “Flight” are at Pure Slush. Estelle Bruno’s “Immobile Car Immobile Phone”  and Linda Simoni Wastila’s “Poison Pill” are at Every Day Fiction. Myra King has a story forthcoming in Boston Literary Magazine.  My story “Christina Heppel” is at PANK, read by Marcus Speh.

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.

Anne Leigh Parrish‘s debut collection of short stories, All The Roads That Lead From Home, will be available this October from Press 53.  Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Clackamas Literary Review, The Pinch, American Short Fiction, Eclectica Magazine, Storyglossia, PANK, Bluestem, r.kv.r.y., and many other publications.  Visit her website at www.anneleighparrish.com.

You can read the title story of Anne’s collection, “All The Roads That Lead From Home,” on Fictionaut.

As a reader, which writers do you feel closest to?

William Trevor and Alice Munro.  Also Edna O’Brien.  You’ll notice that none are American authors.  I don’t know what that means, except that I’m drawn to the exotic.

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

Mike Curtis at The Atlantic served informally as my mentor for a good eight years.  I sent him story after story, and while he didn’t accept any, he always cut to the chase in just a few well-chosen sentences.  I learned a great deal from him.  Yes, I mentor.  I’ve mentored probably more than I’ve actually taught.  I meet people on the internet who ask if they can send me something of theirs.  I always says yes.  I think it’s necessary to share what you’ve learned, as if writing were a basket of bread handed around a wide, lively table of voices.

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

I stay creative by accepting the fallow periods.  They’re inevitable.  Inspiration is intermittent, not constant.  To keep going I start another short story, or if I’m working on my novel, drop one of the characters into a strange situation they don’t quite know how to get out of.  The need to find out the result always wakes me up and gets me back on track.

Favorite writing exercises you would like to share?

I’m not much on exercise, per se, but I like to invent odd situations, like a scholar who forges the diary of a Confederate soldier who never existed; a group of children bringing home an old man that wandered away from his nursing home; a young woman who donates her used piano to a priest who befriends her.  Once I have the “core” of a story, the exercise becomes filling in the gaps, and creating the world my people live in.

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 like to show a person’s weakness, the thing that makes him fail.  Then there comes a moment when the weakness is overcome, if only temporarily.  I begin with a general idea of who someone is, but moving that soul through struggles, passion, and pain is where the real learning takes place.  As the character becomes complex and multi-layered for me, she does for the reader, too.  Ideally speaking.

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

For me plot is all about how best to showcase the moment when a story changes direction, either in the mind of the reader, or the protagonist, or both.  My plots are fairly simple, nothing daring or extraordinary.  The action takes place inside my characters more than it does in the outside world.  That said, I do try to throw the reader a few curves to keep her interested, some odd circumstance that sharpens the view, like meeting up with an old rival for lunch, and seeing that she’s caught the hem of her dress in the car door as she drives away.

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

Q (Katrina Gray): Hello, Kait Mauro. Before we get into Like Birds Lit, I have to ask: Do you fill your camera will rocket fuel and Wheaties? Because I’ve been stalking you, and I see you have some powerful photos (I might even call them poems-on-film) up at www.kaitmauro.com. My favorite is the one where the much-taller adult video sign looms over the less-imposing “Jesus is watching you” billboard. That’s gold, finding something like that.

A (Kait Mauro): Haha well wow, thank you. That makes me happy. Photography has been one of my obsessions for a while now. That picture is a littler older, from a couple summers ago. My sister and I were on a road-trip, we started in Austin and worked our way up to Northern California. We were staying in the shadiest motels because we hated to pay more than $30 a night for a room. Then one morning I looked outside and saw that. It had been dark when we’d gotten in the night before so I hadn’t noticed. Just one of those “someone up there clearly has a sense of humor” moments.

Like Birds Lit–the site, not the group–came along in May 2010, and it’s now gone. Can you tell me a bit about its birth, death, and everything in-between? If you’re privy, you might even share what it wants to be when it reincarnates, just so we call all be watching out for it. Also, how is an “online literature collective” different from a journal/mag/zine?

I started Like Birds Lit towards the end of my time in high school. I was quite bored and just really craving a new creative outlet at the time. I had a ball creating the website and soliciting submissions from writers on Fictionaut, it was a really fun project to work on. But then I started at Wash U in the fall and I just didn’t have time to put into it anymore, so it pretty much ended there. I’m still really interested in the whole zine, independent publishing, collective creativity scene. I plan on jumping back into that sooner or later, I’m just not sure what that incarnation will look like.

Oh, and I don’t think it is so literally different from a journal/magazine/zine, for me a “collective” just felt less formal – there weren’t editions or issues or anything, things were just posted as they were submitted. I like the word “collective” better than “zine” or “journal” too, feels more organic maybe, more co-operative, it’s just one of those language things.

So now the Like Birds Lit group functions as kind of a class reunion for some of the stories and poems on the site, right? What made Fictionaut a natural home for a continuation of the site?

Well, it just kind of happened that way. Initially I had the group and the site running simultaneously but when I didn’t have time to maintain the site, the group lingered on because it didn’t really need anything from me. I definitely always saw the site as very connected to my experience of the FN community though, it was just kind of a branch of that that I wanted to take further and to explore.

I see you’re majoring in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University. This is completely awesome. So I can pretty much assume you don’t mean “like women/chicks/broads/skirts” when you say “like birds.” But what *do* you mean? Is the title meant to be a command? (YOU: LIKE BIRDS. NOW.)  Or “birds of a feather, here flocking together”? Or maybe, “here are some things similar to birds”? Did Anne Lamott have a hand in naming the site-slash-group?

Good question. When I named the group, I really just liked the way the words sounded together – which sounds like a loopy thing to say but as someone who writes and reads and just loves language, the way they taste and sound and yada yada, I just enjoyd the way the words worked together. I think Anne Lamott may have had  something to do with it though. I really adore birds and I think it probably does have to do with the fact that Bird by Bird has been my favorite book for like nine years now. A family friend actually recommened I read it when I was eleven or so years old, after warning my mother that it contained the f-word… and I was just in love with it. Anne is still my favorite author, I actually “friended” her son on facebook, that’s how much I adore her books haha. I probably shouldn’t have mentioned that but really, why not? It’s a little bit stalker-like but it’s human and seeing pictures of where they live in California makes me happy, so there’s that. I talked to my university about bringing her here to speak but when I contacted her agent, she told me how much Anne really doesn’t like to travel, how unhappy and anxious it makes her, so I decided I’ll just go to California to hear her sometime.

There’s another line too, from the very end of a Marina Carr play called By the Bog of Cats, that goes something kind of like, “She’s cut her heart out, see it lying there on her chest like some dark, feathered thing.” Which is very dark and sinister but it also feels related to art and to writing and to being creative in any public sort of sense.

Q: You are an activist. Tell me how you’ve seen art shift the direction of a political or social movement, and in what way you’d like to see another shift take place. Does gender play a role in the perceived power of artistic voice? You totally have the podium here….

Haha well, that’s wonderful except those are huge questions and I am intimidated by the podium. I will try to answer in little snippets and to be as genuine as I can. I do consider myself an activist now. It’s not a role I conciously decided to play but it came about organically. What happened was that I finally realized the kind of people I was happiest around: the writers (naturally), the artists, the passionate ones. And it turned out that a lot of these people were also activists, so I started to learn about that way of living and so far it has fit me well and I have never felt more consistently okay. From where I am now, it’s hard for me to see how any thinking, feeling human being who exists in this place could go through life without feeling the deep injustice of it all and becoming an activist in some ways, but I guess that’s what so much of society tries to create – the white noise to make that kind of existence posssible. People see what they want to see until something very real happens to them, for the most part, I think, anyway.

I really don’t feel like I can say anything about how art can create change in a movement or in politics, I’d feel incredibly pretentious, but I do know that art has power and creativity is so important and I think the world would be a better place if there was more art and more creativity involved in all processes and systems. One area of activism that I find really interesting is civil disobedience, which really worries some of the more anxious people around me, and creativity is a huge asset to those kinds of actions. I think the way people think of “art” and its place in society is very limiting.

For the other question, I will just say simply that gender plays a role in everything.

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.

After studying law Melissa Chadburn obtained an MFA from Antioch University.  As a committed reader and intern at dzancbooks she is familiar with the slush pile.  She is a lover and a fighter, a union rep, a social arsonist, a writer, a lesbian, of color, smart, edgy and fun. Her work has appeared or is upcoming in Guernica, PANK Magazine, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Splinter Generation, Northville Review and elsewhere. She is of African, Asian, Hispanic, Filipina, and Irish descent, and was raised by Dutch/Indonesian and British foster parents. Her mixed background has made her aware of racial and cultural differences and similarities which influence her writing. She loves pit bulls and cheese. Reach her at fictiongrrrl(at) gmail.com or follow her on twitter or get ripped open at  http://betteranever.blogspot.com/ xoxo she loves you very very much.

As a reader, which writers do you feel closest to?

Holy moly this is the hardest question of my entire life. I feel compelled to cheat and say whoever I read last.  I guess that’s kind of true.  I’m a hungry voracious reader and I love something gritty and I love being surprised. Someone recently said that whenever you think you know where you’re going in your writing turn left. Joyce Carol Oates sucks my breath away, Benjamin Percy surprised me in a way that was tragic and tough and tender, there were a couple of stories that popped up in the New Yorker recently that pissed me off enough to read a second time and deconstruct because of their fierce beauty, specifically, Lauren Groff’s Above and Below and Justin Torres’ Reverting to a Wild State.  So yeah basically the last thing I read.

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

I’ve had a ton of mentors.  Both formal and informal. I got an MFA and studied with some very generous writers like Leonard Chang, Susan Taylor Chehak, Tananarive Due, Rob Roberge then there were those I had in a workshop like Steve Almond, and those incredibly generous editors of print and online journals that have given me feedback but I’ve learned the most from two types of people.

1) Those that make mistakes.  I intern at dzancbooks and I learn far more from the people that make mistakes and stuff I don’t dig than those that are perfect the whole way through.

2) The next group of people are the people that can’t.  Whether it’s the people of no voice or just the people that have a specific No in their life.   So now I get to tell a story. I love this story.

I had two jobs in Berkley in the late nineties.  In the morning I was an attendant to a quadriplegic and in the afternoons I was a barista at a café.  The quadriplegic was a woman named Toy. I got her ready for her day. I washed her body, I shaved her legs, sometimes the clippers would bump up against her catheter and the small sensation she got caused her legs to spasm.  She told me not to stop them. She liked it.  It was the only movements she had.  I emptied the bag that held her urine.  I cleaned out her rectum.  I parted her hair.  I dressed her.  I picked her up and put her in her wheelchair.  We gossiped.  I served her breakfast.  And then I would leave. Or attempt to leave. But she always thought of something else. One more thing.  She wanted me to stay.  Eventually I left to my next job. I ran.  If anyone asked me why I ran I said, “Because I can.”  So my largest mentors are people that can’t, poor people-(really poor not the working poor), people in the Philippines that are stuck with only a small plot of dirt and their dreams, kids in foster care that are slowly being shuffled down an endless long tunnel of few opportunities and no joy and many beuracratic barriers.  Sorry to be so depressing but those are the people that motivate me; people stuck under ceilings of No.

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

Reading makes me creative if I feel stuck I re-read something great. Also I’m pretty competitive but in a loving Capricorn sort of way.  So I build a lot of checks and balances into my work.  I make myself accountable.  I’ve invented a fake boss. My ego needs to see my name in print at least once a month.  After a little while I start getting itchy and I submit like crazy.  I think my experience as a labor and community organizer helps me with this.  I know how to play numbers games.  Also this is where places like fictionaut come in handy writing is a lonely solitary thing for me but I’m a really social person so places like fictionaut help me get feedback and commune with people. Community is such an important part of living to me.

Favorite writing exercises you would like to share?

I don’t know basically I like any writing exercise where someone else is bossing me. I’ll do whatever you tell me to do. I guess I’m a submissive like that. I’ll do anything to be your darling. I do like playing with different POVs.  If I write something I might try it again in another POV. That was probably the most common feedback I’ve gotten in workshops before as well.

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?

It varies. Some characters bug the crap out of me so I know who they are before I write them.  They inform my writing more than my writing informs them.  Other characters I get to know throughout the process.  The best way to make a character come to life is to meet them on the streets.  If I’m not describing someone accurately it’s because I don’t have a clue.  I’ve found that too often in other people’s work as well, the writer shying away from describing or naming a character, because they too can not see them. I like to go people watching. My favorite place to people watch is Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. Go to a train station or any place of arrivals and departures and you’ll be shocked at the people– their fashion choices their display of emotions their contrived state of being. People are wild. But some people make it so that you HAVE to write about them.

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

Oh this is easy. I don’t know about you but I am always planning for my demise.  I can run for a very long time on worry.  I’ve been wondering exactly how all this worrying serves me and I guess this is the answer.  I always wonder ‘What if?’ and then a plot is born. What if I drove through this red light and got hit by a truck or hit a small child or a cart of berries flew in front of me or there was a blackout at that same instance. What if? What if? What if?  You get it I’m sure.

Please tell us about what you’ve most recently completed…  and what is happening now….

I just finished the first draft of a story about the Chilean miners.  I find it fascinating that it is one year later and they are all a stone’s throw away from homelessness unable to work, never compensated, and there is gonna be a movie coming out about them.  But even more from a story telling perspective there was that whole Alfred Hitchcock ‘bomb under the table’thing happening, where we (the world) all had more information about their fate than the miners and it seemed like life’s cruelest joke. Then even moreso five of them got busted for having affairs while they were stuck underground! But that story ended up being about more than that it also ended up being about a woman that suffered the condition of “m0re” and was never sated no matter what she got.

I am currently working on (dare I say) a novel.  Aaahh!  That was scary. Anywho I thought it was shorts and then linked shorts and it turns out it’s a novel and it is currently entertaining and scaring the crap out of me at the same time.  I call it the book of old wounds because it’s about a character that feels unloveable yet suffers from repetition compulsion and keeps on revisiting old wounds and the novel chronicles these wounds.

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

Susan Tepper:  Darryl, you are known primarily as a poet, so it was with some surprise that I discovered this fascinating little story you wrote called “That Kind of Body“.  It’s a story that begins with a notion then takes the reader on a far flung journey.

Darryl Price: Anything that happens to me in this life happens in a story for someone else. We are constantly surrounded by these incredible stories of life. In this one I was trying to present the huge amount of assumptions we are so quick to pull out when confronted with something out of the ordinary. And just like in the photograph you are only getting part of the whole story, which is still unfolding anyway. So in a way it’s a lie, or a false notion, to begin with. It’s the appreciation you bring to it that can transform the experience of it into something more incredible. Because it’s a tiny mirror of the larger universe. Truths can be found and viewed.

Susan:  Yes, totally, the appreciation you can bring is transformative!  In this story your narrator first brought to mind the character of Holden Caulfield.  The story reached back to a more innocent time in America’s history, when things still felt alive for discovery.

Darryl: I think that’s simply the fact of youth. Your canvas is purer, larger. The possibilities haven’t narrowed so much emotionally that you’ve begun to give up on your dreams. But sooner or later you run smack dab into the physical reality. And that means people- people who might not necessarily think like you or act like you or even want the same things like you. It’s a harsh awakening. I find humor helps. And of course poetry!

Susan:  Poetry helps me hugely with those kinds of issues.

Darryl, you begin your story:  “I was thin young. There’s a kind of freedom to be found when walking around inside that kind of body that allows you to have in this world what’s known as a presence.”

A presence.  Though there is a sense of ego here, I did not find the story to be ego-centered around your narrator.  Quite the opposite.  This was simply factual information he was supplying about his personal take on the world at large.  And from this beginning, the story springboards into something remarkable, also image-driven.

Darryl: This young man by the very fact of his existence is present, even more so than those around him, because he is not yet tethered in the conventional sense. He moves freely through the world of things and the freedom of his own immediate ideas.

Susan:    “…so I went to the state fair with my dinky camera and my money to see what I could see.”

He went to the state fair.  Such a throw-back to early Americana.  Your character’s sweetness and innocence stun me.  Now I’m getting Cal in East of Eden.  And your guy, he saw plenty, right?

Darryl:  Right. The word dinky is important here because it implies not a lot of money but still enough gumption to do the best with what you’ve got. He engages the world — even if it is with a ragged enthusiasm. And he’s open to what he might possibly see. That sets him up for the experience to follow. And the level on which he will experience it as it happens to him. He’s willing to open doors where others are happy just to leave them shut. They experience what they choose. But there are unexplored options to the obvious. Courage is required. And a sense of excitement for the unknown worlds within the ordinary.

Susan:  So you are saying that our experiences are more self-driven than we understand them to be at the time.  I agree.  For instance, your character goes to the state fair and encounters “a freak.”  He has free will.  Yet he chooses to go to that particular freak tent, or whatever, and be with this freak-woman.  If he had gone, instead, to ride the roller coaster, would he grow up to be a different kind of man?

Darryl: Absolutely. Because his courage would never have been tested in this way. It would have remained dormant. He met someone extraordinary because he stepped out of line so to speak. It was in a free wheeling moment that he changed direction and chose the tent. Like you said he had free will. He could’ve walked on. But didn’t. The once in a lifetime moment grabbed him and spit him back out all the better for it. It can never be repeated. It can never be found again. It’s already gone. It can only be lived once. If you are lucky enough, find your courage on the day when opportunity asks: Why not go this way today?

Susan: Yes!!!  And you write:

…when a voice called out to me, “I can see you there boy, don’t run away from me, this is something you’ve just got to see for yourself if only to tell your grandchildren about it one day, only fifty cents, the head of a beautiful woman and the body of a hideous snake, don’t pass up this opportunity of a lifetime, take a chance, only fifty cents!”  What could I do?

Readers, you will have to find out for yourselves.  Such a wonderful story!  So life-affirming.

Read “That Kind of Body“ by Darryl Price

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.

Katrina Gray: Hello, Walter Bjorkman. Before I ask you about your brilliant “Zero Faves” group, I’ll give you the spotlight. What writerly things have you been doing lately?

Walter Bjorkman: I have taken a turn to poetry, mostly, trying to return to what I started out writing as a late teen in the ’60s & young guy in the 70’s. Over the last decade, especially the last 3 years, I have jumped back & forth from prose to poetry, even doing a collection of shorts, Elsie’s World, that was published this last January. So the poetry was put aside for a bit, except for some of my 52|250 – A Year of Flash contributions. I also just signed on with Helen Vitoria, for her new poetry journal, THRUSH Poetry Journal, as associate editor & web guy. It is her vision & journal, and if I can add a little assistance to such a great poet, I will be thrilled.

Katrina: Now: I love the idea of “Zero Faves.” The group description suggests that the intention is to give passed-over stories a second chance. Do you think the story feed on the front page just rolls so fast that some good stories inexplicably drop off the edge like lemmings? Or are you rebelling against the fave system in general, like anti-conformist Beats? In that poem my middle school teacher just loved, Casey *did* swing out at the bat. Should we chuck out all the stars and awards and prizes when it comes to literary output?

Walter: Heh – why would I rebel against the fav system? Oh yeah, I studied under some Beats – been awhile. It was two-fold, exactly as you described. Having been an analyst, I couldn’t help but notice a lot of factors are at play – time of day, day of week, is your crowd on at the same time, so yes, at times stories just shoot through there. The rebelling part was also that if you learned how to play the game (as long as you have a good poem or story), you could guarantee some play. We should not chuck out anything, just decide if we want to go for it, not that there is anything wrong with that – lol. And at times  I go for it, so this “protest” is mere observation, not an indictment. Wouldn’t chain myself to the College president’s front gate over it. (And Casey was probably thrown a spitball on that 3rd swing.)

It also shows how some don’t have a clue as to groups, their functions, or are just getting  exposure for faves by scatter-shooting their stories into any and all groups. I have had some that join the group with as many as 6 faves already on their post. I oust them without comment. I love Fictionaut and have made many a friend here that has led to projects and great reading that has been truly rewarding, such as editing 52|250 with Michelle Elvy & John Wentworth Chapin. One of my earliest & favorite pieces was “a night on the fictionaut” – an homage to what I experienced that night & my first flash.

Katrina: Zero is a number with all kinds of connotations. I would like to have zero debt and zero bunions, but otherwise this word, zero, has negative connotations. I’m gonna get all mathy on you here, but zero isn’t a negative or a positive, and probably most people can’t even imagine it without wanting a donut (except me: never been a fan of Krispy Kremes). Do you think Fictionaut should implement some kind of anti-fave, kind of like a ninja throwing star, that isn’t meant to make you feel good but to inflict some pain? For the sake of giving zero a break at least? So that if your story got zero faves, you could at least feel good about not accumulating anti-faves? Please tell me you’d support this move.

Walter: As a guy who got 800 on his math boards, and was slated to work on the first moon rocks before dropping out & becoming a poet and general rounder, I’d rather get metaphysical here. We should embrace the zero. Be the zero. Exalt the zero. For the sum of all parts, if all parts are zero, is not greater than the whole, it is the same – zero. Nada. Ziltch. Bupkis. The idea that all the parts inside of me is greater than me is very disturbing – I would always be worried about bloating and digestive blockage. So no, no anti-faves for the zeros. If used at all, perhaps for every fave given, an equal and opposite anti-fave was created – isn’t America too overweight as is? (And nuts to both Krispy & Dunkin – a holeless zeppoli, greasy & powdered is just fine.)

Katrina: I notice that your blog, The Poetry of Place, features really nice places. I imagine it takes more than zero dollars to be a traveling poet. I think you’re holding out on me here, Walter: are there really, truly people out there who get paid for writing, with each dollar representing the ultimate fave? Give us some hope here.

Walter: Ah – my blog is actually Qwik-Bake Synthetics. What you see there is I am hosting edition #8 of Dorothee Lang’s great language/place blog carnival. It was a great experience and wonderful journey, right from my desk chair to the furthest poetic places you could imagine, on 24 other people’s blogs. I encourage those not in the know to hop on board at the Qwik-Bake station and stay for the whole ride! I wouldn’t know about money or travel of late, I am trapped in an apple orchard on a mountain with only a sometimes working junker to get around, at the mercy of friend. I have heard that writers that write about real stuff for glossy magazines have some of the green.The rice & beans here aren’t bad though.

Katrina: If the “Zero Faves” group threw a party, what conversations would be in the air? And would the party be BYOB?

Walter: “Hey, what’s a nice poet like you doing in a group like this?” “What’s your pen name?” “How come I am in a club that would have me as a member?” “Uh, I just stopped in for directions. Anyone know how to get to the top?” BYOAnything – I do not judge. Wine, booze, zebras in tutus.

Katrina: Have you ever written something with the intention of getting it, and keeping it, at the “Zero Faves” group?

Walter: No, and see above, as I know how to play the game, I would be insane to ever have a zero fav.

Katrina: What are some of the faves in your life? Things in the stuff-Walter-likes hall of fame.

Walter: A mythical time & place as a little kid – baby-boomer Brooklyn, with Dodgers & stick-ball, kings, bikes pretending to be horses, the same foghorns Walt Whitman heard almost a century earlier. Rainy streets.

Blues. Blues guitar, piano, blues anything. Bob Dylan, a monument to creativity. Anyone trying to write, create anything. Wanting to both dance inside a painting by van Gogh and scream inside a Munch. Coffee, cigarettes. Egg-creams. Tough city women. Gentle country men. Botanical gardens. Tropical waters. Cold mountain streams. Body surfing. My son. A day uptown, a night on the bowery.  What ya got?

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.