Roddy Doyle‘s novels include The Commitments (1987), Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, for which he won the Booker Prize in 1993, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors (1996), A Star Called Henry (1999), and The Dead Republic (2010). His most recent book is Bullfighting (2011), a collection of stories. His adaptation of Gogol’s The Government Inspector will be performed at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in November 2011.  He also writes for children.  He lives and works in Dublin. (Photo by Mark Nixon.)

Q (Meg Pokrass): Have you had mentors? Any thoughts about the role of mentor to a writer at different points.

No, I never had a mentor.  A friend of mine, the playwright, Paul Mercier, was a great, living example.  We’d met in college, then taught in the same school in Dublin through the 1980s.  And while he was teaching, he wrote plays – great plays – and directed them.  I saw them, and I saw him writing them, and working at a ‘normal’ job.  One occupation didn’t get in the way of the other.  In fact, the teaching seemed to feed his writing, somehow.  I remember thinking, ‘If Paul can do it, I can.’

I think a mentor, a more experienced writer, could be a help to a younger, less experienced one.  There’s advice that’s always useful, and practical.  But it can be tricky.  Advice can become interference.  Encouragement can be mistaken for praise.  All writers have to learn to live with their own work, become their own best editors.

Do you have suggestions for working writers when the brain feels tired and sluggish? Where does “inspiration” come from during the tired times?

I work full office hours, five or six days a week.  Even with the best coffee, I can’t be inspired all, or most – or even some – of the time.  Often, inspiration comes while examining, and editing, words that have already been written.  I write through the sluggish times, and judge its quality later.  If quality doesn’t seem to be there, quantity is some compensation.  Writing, say, a thousand words a day is a reasonable way to measure progress.  Later, throwing seven hundred of those thousand words into the bin, is a different, more exciting, way to measure progress.  But you need to have the words first.

What is exciting about this time as a writer with the internet and what it offers. What is (conversely) not so good about it..?

Research is quicker, sometimes.  Distraction is easier, sometimes.  Breaks – a quick gawk at Facebook or the BBC football page, or the Irish Times, or Pitchfork – are nice.  Editing by e-mail is convenient, but a bit dull.  Mobile phones are fiction hell.  Not because they go off as I work – that’s fine; the distraction is often welcome.  It’s the fact of them, that virtually everyone has one, that no one has to go searching for a working pay phone, that meetings don’t have to happen anymore – it’s taking the mobility out of contemporary stories.  It’s a challenge.  I’m glad I don’t write crime fiction – too much technology.

Do you have favorite literary websites? What sites do you find yourself going to read? Or just, your favorite web sites?

I used to have a look at George Murray’s Bookninja every day, but it seems to have gone.  I read, or glide over, the book pages of the Irish Times, the Guardian, the New York Times.  I read some of the papers – opinion pieces.  I like the BBC football – soccer – page.  I look at Pitchfork most mornings – it seems to be automatic, like needing to hold a cup of coffee before I can walk into my office.  Then I start work.  I limit myself to a few sites.  The New Yorker and New York Review of Books come through the letter box.

Any favorite writing exercise would be hugely appreciated.

I don’t have any.  I just write.  I don’t even keep a diary.  I don’t want to write after a day’s writing.  ‘Today I wrote.’

What writers, artists, musicians (dead or alive) do you turn to again and again for inspiration?

I have music on as I work, unless I’m editing.  Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Brian Eno, Hauschka, Brian McBride, Tim Hecker, Arvo Part – I owe all these people a pint – each – because their work has got into my fingers.  At the moment I’m listening to Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ ‘Searching For the Young Soul Rebels.’  It seems to be doing the trick.  Literature: Dickens – I read or re-read him, a book or two a year, to remind myself about why I write, and love writing.  Any good book excites me, makes me want to write.  I’m reading all of Kate Atkinson’s books at the moment.  She’s brilliant – now there’s a writer who knows how to make mobile phones entertaining and useful.  I work with teenagers, and I find watching them work very exhilarating.  I told them last week how much I enjoyed seeing anxiety on their faces.  They got it.

What is happening now for you? What is new, just now in-the-works…

I’m working on a novel, set in Dublin today, a return to some old characters.  I’m also writing a book for children, a longer version of a story called ‘Brilliant’, which I wrote for this year’s Dublin Saint Patrick’s Parade.  I’ve been working on a script for a musical based on my first novel, The Commitments.

Tell us a bit about your writing center, “Fighting Words”, if you will. It sounds wonderful.

Fighting Words is writing centre for children and young people – and not so young – that I co-founded, here in Dublin.  It’s very close to Croke Park, the Gaelic sports stadium, in the north inner-city.  We opened in January 2009, and have provided workshops for about twenty thousand kids, so far.  All our services are free.  We have a small staff – four – but about  four hundred volunteers – writers, aspiring writers, people who love reading, retired teachers, student teachers, artists, and people who just want to be involved, who want to assert their citizenship in what is, at the moment, a miserable country.  I’m very proud of Fighting Words. (www.fightingwords.ie)

We invite people to write.

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 at http://megpokrass.com.

Robin Black’s story collection If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, (Random House, 2010) was a finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Fiction Competition, a summer reading pick for O. Magazine, among Best Books of 2010 in the San Francisco Chronicle and Irish Times, and the winner of the Athenaeum of Philadelphia Literary Award.  Her essays and stories have recently appeared in Conde Nast Traveler UK, O. Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Georgia Review, One Story and others. Robin lives in the Philadelphia area with her family.

Q (Meg Pokrass): Have you had mentors? Do you mentor? Talk about the mentor relationship if you will, its importance for a writer…

I have had a few wonderful mentors. Steven Schwartz was my first supervisor at the Warren Wilson MFA program and through the eight years since has been the person I can turn to for advice ranging from highly practical to neurotic – me, not him. I studied with Allan Gurganus two hundred years ago – well, thirty years ago. Two decades after our work together I wanted to get back to writing I got in touch with him and he wrote me the most exquisitely generous letter full of great advice and encouragement. Dani Shapiro has held my hand through the entire publication process, there to answer every question and to steer me away from a couple of humongous mistakes I might have made.

I try to be a good mentor to my students. I think – I hope – they feel comfortable coming back to me for whatever help I can give. I’m still relatively new to a lot of this myself but I do try to share what I’ve learned. But there’s this other thing that happens with writers which doesn’t exactly fit the term “mentoring” but seems somehow related. So many of my friends are writers who are at similar career stages to mine and we sort of mentor each other. Maybe there’s an element of the blind leading the blind to that but I think it is so, so important to have peers and colleagues while going through what could be a very lonely, isolating profession. And some kind of good faith attempt to help the other folks seems to me like the best way to combat all the inevitable competitive bs that arises in us all.

What do you do when you feel stuck or uninspired… suggestions for unblocking creativity?

When I feel stuck – which happens more often than I like to admit even to myself – I switch forms. Sometimes I’ll write some “poetry” – the quotation marks are there because it’s so bad it barely qualifies. But that’s what I like about it. There is zero pressure on me to do it well, so I can do it without that crazy-making pressure I feel sometimes with prose. I also paint and draw. Sometimes I do cartoons – narrative drawings. Again, I’m not very good, but I find that remaining creative while shaking off whatever project is blocking me for a while is really helpful. So, so often my feeling stopped comes from worry about whether the work is good or not. So the first step is to remove that worry, unlink it from my creative impulse. I used to bake at those times, but then I hit middle age and each calorie became a longterm committed relationship, so I’m safer with watercolors and lousy verse.

Are there favorite writing practices/exercises that you can share?

I have never been much a writing exercise person. Unless I count the gazillion projects I have started and never finished. I envy people who have routines, warm-ups, all of that. To me it is a huge mystery still why on some days I write like a house afire and on others I feel like I can’t possibly ever have done so.

How well do you know your characters before you start writing them? How firm are your ideas on that…?

I know pretty much nothing about my characters when I start. My stories tend to begin with odd little observations, hunches about human interactions. Quirky things. And the people develop while I worry through whatever that situation is. I try to know as little about a story and about the people as I possibly can for as long as I possibly can. The people develop as the story does. The story develops as the people do. I find that when I begin with too fixed an idea about anything I get into trouble.

Regarding plot, my question is about firmness of ideas vs. letting the plot develop in the writing… is it a tug of war?

It’s really hard to describe how unattached I am to the idea of any particular plot in a story as I’m writing it. I’ll often write ten, twenty versions. In this version the couple gets together, in this one they don’t even cross paths, in this one, he has a terminal disease in this one she has three sons, in this one two of those sons are his. It’s all incredibly amorphous. There really isn’t a story until there’s a finished story. I’m pretty much wandering around in the dark with each one. “Okay, how about this? No. Not that. How about this? What could happen here? What might these people be capable of? What might they think of doing? What wholly non-character driven event might intervene here?” The more teaching I’ve done the less attached I’ve become to the idea of knowing a story before it’s done. I see it with students so often, this over-attachment to the original idea for a story – which is totally understandable, and definitely a jam I’ve gotten into. But it stops people, this feeling that certain things MUST happen. Stories have lives of their own. In my experience when you don’t allow for that, those lives can end pretty fast.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This. Please tell us what you loved about the process of birthing this collection.

When I started writing short stories in 2001 after a hiatus of many years it was just about an experience as pleasurable as any I have ever had. I was thirty-nine years old and I felt like I had suddenly discovered the key to my own happiness or maybe just the key to myself. Nothing felt as compelling to me as trying to convey things. That sounds so simplistic. But that was it. I had spent close to forty years being an obsessive noticer of how people interact, a private theorist about human behavior and also a collector of the sorts of metaphors that occur in daily life, the way our lived lives seem to run parallel with a kind of naturally occurring symbolic scheme – something of which I was always, always aware – and suddenly I knew how to convey all of this stored up information. At the same time, I had been through some very difficult times, and I had all this heavy, thorny grief in me. I’m not sure I can explain this well, but I knew somehow that the way to work through my own grief was to work through the griefs of imaginary people. The whole book for me, every story in it really, was an exercise in rehearsing for myself the fact that we do recover from losses, that we do move forward, that humans are unimaginably, profoundly creative when it comes to crafting and recrafting reasons for hope. Not that every story is happy by its end – not at all. But to me all of the characters I invented are just doing what we all do. They are finding ways to go on. It’s our great and lovely gift, that ability – and it’s especially beautiful because it’s often irrational. Wanting to keep going. Writing stories, making stuff up, somehow helped me understand that.

But the other less new age crazy sounding joy I got out of writing those stories has to do with discovering what a complete craft nerd I am. I am terrible at math, at foreign languages, could never learn to read music but suddenly for the first time I found a system that made sense to me. The craft of writing. It’s genuinely nutty how much I like that stuff and that has been a huge, huge pleasure to me. Most of the stories in the book, along with being whatever else they are, are experiments in different forms of narrative, little tasks I set for myself. And I really loved playing with all that stuff.

The best advice you ever got? What helped you as a young writer?

As a young writer, back in the early 1980’s, I worked with Allan Gurganus at Sarah Lawrence and he had us write a story a week for a year. Along with a great deal of other wisdom he imparted, the experience was tremendously helpful because I learned not to be too precious about my own work. If you have to write fourteen or so stories in a semester, some of them are just going to be god awful. So I got used to the idea that some of my work would be god awful, that not every word I produce is meant to be read by others. I find that very, very useful.

What is next for you?

I’m at work on a novel. (The standard short story writer answer, I know.) I just realized that I still think I am somehow going to figure out who I really am as a writer – that one day I’ll understand the best way for me to do this in some way I never have. And of course once I figured out that I think that, I realized how ridiculous it is. So I guess what’s next, along with the novel, is trying to be a little more accepting of the fact that I am never going to feel like I really know how to do this. And even to enjoy that fact if I can.

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 at http://megpokrass.com.

Susan Tepper: Matt, your story “Dinner at the Harmony Restaurant“ opens without harmony but with great ferocity.  Your first line:

I ripped the glasses from his face and throwing them on the floor, stomped them into the polished floorboards.

Yikes!  The energy here is wild and compulsive!  Was this taken from a true life incident?

Matt Potter: Sort of. I was at a dinner and who would pay what as the dinner ended, caused unease, until it was sorted out i.e. some of us said we would only pay for ourselves, and thus would not split the bill as others suggested. But yes, I can be honest and forthright and compulsive and physical. Rudeness and lack of thought always make me angry. There are lots of stories of me taking matters into my own hands and leaving others dumbfounded with my ferocity. Actually, one of them is detailed in my non-fiction piece “A Free Rinse.” Aah, I’ve never suffered fools gladly.

But yes “Dinner at the Harmony…” has a great, fun, ferocious beginning. With flash I think you have to jump right in – BANG! – yet still retain some mystery so it propels the reader through your story … which I guess is true of any story. In “Dinner,” you know what’s happening – it’s outrageous – but you don’t know why yet.

Susan: Oh, it is a relief to know it didn’t quite happen as written!  I also do not suffer fools gladly.  Though I tend to get quite verbal when I feel the fools come marching in…

What I love about this story is that after the initial “violent” opening, we are hit with another bit of violence, but this one is a veritable avalanche of sensory details.  Everything about this story is intense in the sensory aspect. You write:

“… anemone shells and tortoise shells and quail egg shells left over from the Mauritian bouillabaisse and tipped them over his balding head.”

Hmm… his balding head and shells.  I’m getting a connection here.

Matt: The bald head and the egg shells were a happy accident, at least in my mind, when I was writing. I was seeing the scene in my head, in the restaurant where the real dinner took place, though the host of the dinner in real life was a female friend, and she was not suggesting we split the bill. I recall thinking a list here would be good — the prompt was broken shells? — and I like lists in stories. They have a rhythm and not many writers get that rhythm right.

So I had to think of exotic creatures that come in shells… hence the quail eggs: I wanted something else from the sea but couldn’t think of one! And a friend works on and off in Mauritius, and I know it has an Anglo-French history so there is the bouillabaisse reference — just a Provencal or Marseilles bouillabaisse seemed too ordinary. And the real restaurant had some interesting flavoured-desserts and so it all kind of messed together in the image of the exotic shells and debris sliding and slipping down the bald head.

Susan:  Very interesting how the sensory aspect of story works differently for different authors.  Yes, saying Mauritian bouillabaisse is way more exotic, for sure!  Because it pulls the reader into the Mauritius, and even if you don’t know the particulars of that place, there is that exotic element around it that “spices up” the story in a very cool way.

But getting to plot and character.  Your “guy” who is taking all this abuse, well, he’s taking it.  At this point, he still does not react.  Now I’m looking at him and I’m thinking: well he must be carrying an awful lot of guilt.  And not just about this meal.  He just oozes guilt, to my mind.  And I’m getting real interested in him.  I mean, who just sits there and takes this amount of shit?   Is there a hidden sub-text to his character?

Matt: This story is about ego, and not the ego of the man “taking it,” who may or may not be the host: that’s not clear. I think the dumped-on man is probably stunned and embarrassed and completely out of his depth, with both the general turn of events and the ferocity of the reaction: here we were having a nice time and you have completely overreacted and maybe if I just sit here – as I am completely stunned anyway – you will rant and roar and then go away. Whereupon we can survey the damage, clean up the mess and probably never see you again. He has probably put up with the narrator’s anger before … and this is the last time. Of course, if he was the narrator’s boyfriend, it would be even funnier.

Susan:  Of course you are the author of this story, and you have your opinion of what is going down here.  But for the reader, a story often takes on a different “bent” than what the author had in mind.  Which, to me, is what makes fiction so magical.  Both the writer and the reader get to decide what is what.  I once read this comment:  “The reader can only take the sum total of who he/she is to any story.”  The simple truth of that just blew me away.

So what I’m getting at is this: there seems to be an underlying sado-masochistic quality here.  The violence, though funny, is extreme.  And the victim is just taking it.  And you did imply something about him “conceptually” being the narrator’s boyfriend.  Which, to my mind, makes a lot of sense.  Remember this one: “The sadistic man had a masochistic wife.  He beat her every night, they lived a very happy life.”  I think this story is far more dangerous than what appears as the surface danger. I wonder if there is a sequel to all of this perhaps stewing in your brain?

Matt: Hmmm … no. But I am actually a very passionate and at times over-the-top and violent person. I think I have a lot of anger, which stems from — I believe — feeling I was being ignored, or not taken seriously, when I was a child. (This sounds soooo pathetic, but it is a driving force …) Not having my feelings or opinions acknowledged now, in my mid 40’s, brings these same feelings to the fore. I often write about sex — it is a favourite topic — but “Dinner at the Harmony…” was not about sex for me. It was about ego: you are not taking me and my wishes seriously. However, I can see why others would think it is about sex, especially if they have read other stories of mine. The man being dumped on was never the story for me, as this was a case of me being in the story, even if the character actually wasn’t me. Really, he was just a cypher for “me” to rage against. He may never have actually suggested they split the bill anyway: it could well have been someone else at the dinner, but the narrator just chose him to vent against.

The man being dumped on was colourless and hairless and wore round, wire-rimmed glasses and has piggy eyes (in my imagination) and probably wore brown (!) and is an all-round blah looking person, and was probably too quiet too. But you are right about readers bringing themselves and their sum experience to the table. But for me, the story was a joke told against the narrator, but by him.

Maybe the dumped on bloke deserves his own story now.

Read “Dinner at the Harmony Restaurant“ by Matt Potter

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, Lorenzo! There are two ways we could look at your group, Narrative Medicine. It could be a place for therapeutic stories and poems (really, the best medicine, though my insurance plan *still* refuses to reimburse me for books), or it could be for stories about healthcare. What was your intention when you created the group?

Lorenzo Sewanan: My intention in creating the group was to present a space/theme for the writing of stories concerning medicine, whether from patient, doctor, advocate — all perspectives are valid. I believe that medicine cannot afford to have just the clinical perspective, and this is echoed by current emphases on patient-centered care and evidence-based medicine. Complementary to this is the fact that as you say, stories are good medicine, as a favorite blogger of mine, Dr. Dasgupta,  likes to write about. So, really, I want to see and promote stories from all perspectives about experiences in medicine.

What is your connection to medicine? Doctor, nurse, patient, advocate?

So, I’m actually a student working towards becoming a physician and am currently applying to medical school. My stories/poetry often arise from my experiences as a patient, relative, and EMT.

However, I’m quite active with AMSA, the medical student association, where I am a leader in Wellness and Student Life/Medical Education, a participant in the Medical Humanities Group, and the current host of the AMSA National Book Discussion Webinar Series. In fact, I first became interested in Narrative Medicine after attending the AMSA Medical Humanities Institute, Bearing Witness.

What’s your personal choice of narrative medicine? What have you read that would fit perfectly in your group?

Personally, I like poetry for narrative medicine. I like finding the right word, the right place to put it,and establish the right rhythm.

When I read healthcare narratives, it’s the tragic stories that are the most compelling for me, that illicit my empathy. Tell me, as both a reader and a writer, do you think that gripping, captivating fiction can be written about healthcare situations that go *right*?

For me, few things are more emotional, and I find it a powerful medium for conveying the raw emotions of medical interactions and relationships, where intimacy, trust, fear, pain all collide so brutally sometimes.

Are you bold enough to continue this metaphor? “Writing is like surgery.”

Writing is like surgery, but it takes more than the knife to heal.

This is your last chance to tell us more about yourself. Publications? Pets? Summer vacation plans? Favorite ice cream flavor? Spill it, Lorenzo.

So, right now, I’m sitting in the basement of Brutalist concrete building, getting ready to dissect some electrical fish. Not too interesting, but I’m spending the summer doing research in biomechanics and electrical fish biology, learning more about the mystery of mysteries called life.  Later this summer, I’m planning to go on vacation in Suriname (South America) which is where my family is originally from.

And, by far, I am hoping to enjoy some vanilla ice cream!

As for publications, I’, just starting out, but I have published essays in 115 Vernon( a local journal), poetry in Slate Literary Magazine (a local literary magazine) and The New Physician (Med Student magazine). I write regularly for my blog at http://rrrenzo.blogspot.com/.

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.

George Singleton has published four collections of short stories (These People Are Us, The Half-Mammals of Dixie, Why Dogs Chase Cars, Drowning in Gruel); two novels (Novel, Work Shirts for Madmen); and one book of writing advice (Pep Talks, Warnings, and Screeds).  A new collection of stories, Stray Decorum, will appear in 2013.  His fiction has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Oxford American, Playboy, Georgia Review, Zoetrope, Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Epoch, Glimmer Train, and so on.  His work has been anthologized widely, including ten appearances in the annual New Stories from the South. He was a Guggenheim fellow in 2009, and received the 2011 Hillsdale Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers.  Singleton teaches at the S.C. Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, and lives in Dacusville.

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

I had some fine writing professors in undergraduate and graduate school, and I think that what I’ve learned from them and from some other writers I don’t know but admire is this: Get your work done.  Richard Yates, Harry Crews, Barry Hannah, Raymond Carver: All of them had addictions of one form or another, but it didn’t stop them from working hard and fast.

Back when I drank hard hard, I still found a way to get up pre-dawn and type away. I should mention Flannery O’Connor, too — no horrific addictions that I know of, but she couldn’t have felt all that perky most days.

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

I don’t let myself get out of the chair at my desk until I’ve written a decent page of something.  Oh, I’ll want to get up and do everything from changing the oil in my car to looking for snakes in the back yard, but if I go off and start one of those projects it usually ends with a sad reductio ad absurdum of other projects.  Better find some alcohol for the snake bite, for example.

Are there favorite writing exercises you use/can share?

I think this only when starting a new story: Two characters, one of them is uncomfortable about something, see where it goes.  Sometimes I’ll write a 500 word sentence so I don’t get stuck thinking about grammar problems, then go back and find what’s inside there, which is usually a little kernel that goes something like, “I didn’t want my wife telling our neighbors about her fascination with leeches.”

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?

My first-person narrators are basically me.  My female characters are basically me wearing a dress.  Seeing as the level of my well is still pretty high, I continue to write about — for better or worse — scam artists, and people trying to figure out what’s the right thing to do, et cetera.  Around here, in the upstate of SC, somebody will usually say something odd or colorful or mesmerizing, and I’ll steal it pronto.

What are some good habits for a writer to develop?

I know writers who spend a lot of time exercising so they’ll live a long time and be healthy and have time to write.  Unfortunately, they don’t seem to write much now because of the exercise regimen, and then daily commitments to family and work.  I may be wrong, but it seems to me their muscles might not be rusty now, but their writing organs are going to be pretty tarnished at age 65.  I could say eat well, and do everything in moderation, but that doesn’t seem to work for, say, my mentors listed above.  Get up early.  Start writing before you’re fully awake.  Don’t hang out with quick-tempered crackheads.

What’s the best writing advice you ever got?

Comedy is serious.  This goes hand in hand with Samuel Beckett’s notion that there’s nothing funnier than human misery.  And that harkens back to Aristotle’s notion of catharsis.

Do you have an idea for a story before you write it?  Where does inspiration or the concept of “a great idea” play in for you?

Sometimes I have an idea.  Most of the time it’s one sentence, and the rest spills out.  Most editors will say that my stories tend to spill out in the wrong direction, or decide to go upstream in an impossible manner, and so on.  I haven’t ever kept tabs, but I imagine that most of the time when I went “What a great idea for a story!” I got bogged down hopelessly.

What’s next for you?

A collection of stories called Stray Decorum, coming out in 2013–as if there will be a 2013–from Dzanc.

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 at http://megpokrass.com.

Katrina Gray: Hello, Jeffrey S. Callico and Emily Smith-Miller. Jeffrey, this is your third time on Checking In With Groups. First Negative Suck, then Dark Chaos, and now The Carnage Conservatory. Tell me the truth: at this point you’re just creating groups so you can keep chatting with us, right?

Jeff: Hey, whatever it takes. No, I can’t take all that much credit for Carnage. Emily came up with the site name and the very fantastic subtitle, as well as the web design and format. I just hung around and said, Yeah that’s cool, or Nah how about this instead, etc. Anything to get the word out for this is always appreciated.

So, what were you thinking when you conjured up The Carnage Conservatory?

Jeff: I haven’t written much horror, so I wanted to try my hand at it. Emily has a much better mind for it than I do, but I thought that having a unique website for potential submissions in this genre would be cool. So we discussed it and came up with something that I think will stand apart in many ways from those hundreds if not thousands of other horror sites out there.

Emily:  Well we began to extend down a particularly dark and deranged path, mostly involving literary interest in really fucked up violent murders, sex and good old fashioned mutilation. It was fun but there aren’t a great many writing sites, other than your personal blog, that will accept rather bloody and gruesome stories. Why not make one? We couldn’t be the first who got a kick out of writing sadistic horror stories — and we mean stories not just porn or violent images, something with a point that also makes you grin and say yeah he fucking deserved that. Or even just expose your demons to the world of writing; you are not alone — we like horror movies, what about them moves us? Is it the complete abandon of humanity in the killer? The survival of the victim? What turns us on to the really dark stuff? Horror movies get to have their artistic outlet visually raping your skull, but writing feels like it’s tame on most blog sites. That’s where Carnage came in. Jeff already had Dark Chaos for writers who only come out at night, and other publications which you’ve already noted, but he has guidelines on those. This site has guidelines, I’m not going to specify, but they exist. I’m not a total fucking chaotician, but he wanted us to start this site because let’s face it, sometimes he writes fucked up stuff and I am the perfect co-conspirator to run this naughty little operation. First of all I’m pretty unknown, and not at all upset by that. Second, as some would say, ‘I’m a sick bitch’ only when I want to be and only in print. I don’t torture puppies. And so voila, Carnage was born.

I’m imagining what a real-life carnage conservatory might look like. I’m thinking it’s a cross between the Mutter Museum and a meat-packing plant, with cicadas mating on top of a calf liver. Am I close? Getting there?

Emily: Add some wanton victim hanging from a hook, a couple buckets of blood and HH Holmes reading the paper in the corner while Fred and Rosemary West play cribbage and you’ve probably got it.

Jeff: What you said, what Emily said, as well as an image if you will of maggots and parent flies squirming and buzzing around on a rotting corpse that’s been tied upright to a straight chair for months as some sickly sweet bubblegum-lyric pop song plays repeatedly over speakers you can’t locate in the room, making you eventually realize that the killer was one of the most maniacally evil people in the universe.

What the hell is that scratching sound?

Kids in the cellar. Or is it you?

If you could publish any author or any story at The Carnage Conservatory, who/which would your ideal be? This is a roundabout way of asking what you’re looking for, submission-wise.

Emily: Think Chuck Palahniuk with some excerpts of American Psycho.

Jeff: Emily’s work is a great example, but also that of Cheryl Anne Gardner.

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.

Giancarlo DiTrapano is 6ft, 200 lbs, blond-Italian, straight-acting, 7 inches, top, cut. He is also the editor of The New York Tyrant & Tyrant Books.

What is your feeling about the mentor relationship for a writer?

A mentor relationship sounds like an excellent relationship to have. I was never fortunate enough to have one though. I might have tried to have one, but my potential mentors weren’t as wise as I thought they were, or I ended up dating them.  I think if you keep working alone that you’ll eventually mentor yourself. Having a mentor sounds like cheating to me if I think about it hard enough. Ideally, we would follow in the footsteps of the Ancients, trading sexual favors for knowledge. I’m dead serious about that. Generational mentorship is probably a more noble pursuit than a personal one.

You are an editor of New York Tyrant, and you have tough decisions to make. What makes a story grab?

I have no idea. Lots of things. Personal things probably. Like if I see something in a submission that relates to me personally, it grabs me. But that doesn’t always make the story good. Whenever I write something I think to myself, “Would anyone else write this?” If I feel that the answer is yes, then I delete it. Confession and shock grabs or not. Sure, what it does is show the reader how honest you are willing to be. Not confessing shows the reader how uncomfortable with honesty you are. This can be just as endearing.

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

Oh, I always feel uninspired and I have no idea how to create inspiration. I work better being uninspired. If I actually feel inspired, then I would probably want to just sit back and feel the inspiration rather than write.  I feel like I am turning away from life by writing life down, when I feel like I should maybe just stare directly into it and let it fully soak in before trying to be a decoder. I would rather fill up with code.

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’ve written very few fiction pieces. The things I have written that are perceived as fiction, I feel like those are probably the least fictitious. At times I think anything poetic is fiction.

What are some good habits for a writer to develop?

What I often wonder about is writers and their obsession with their good health habits, whether mental or physical. I mean, it seems like they’re missing the point.  I’ve always felt that health was the opposite of writing.

I would suggest “engaging in life” as a good habit. Like, go out and do things and take risks and throw yourself around a bit. Surround yourself with people who genuinely interest you. I would suggest living a life that is interesting and that you won’t have to lie about.

If I could live in the hours from midnight to two inside of a dark bar with good music, I would. People are at their best when they’re celebrating, and I really like people, so I want to be with them when they are at their best.

How did NYTyrant begin. How has it changed? What is next for Tyrant and Tyrant books?

The Tyrant began as some friends who wanted to have fun. Then we started taking it too seriously so it became unfun. Some left, I stayed. It became fun again. Many have come and gone from the beginning. Luke Goebel works with me now and he’s great. We argue a lot and have fights but it’s a kind of inter-familial fighting. If there isn’t a close dynamic between you and whoever you work with, then I would suggest not working with them. If someone is easy to work with then the partnership probably isn’t doing anything. I don’t know if the magazine’s changed at all, besides adding the book arm to it.

What’s next for you?

I don’t know. Sometimes I get really bored with all of it and want to just give up on literary endeavors. But then I read something that excites me and I get stuck doing what I do again. I feel that this will not last forever. The next Tyrant is on its way, I promise.

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 at http://megpokrass.com.

May has been a fruitful month for Fictionauters. Susan Tepper and Gary Percesepe’s novel, What May Have Been: Letters of Jackson Pollock & Dori G has gone into online distribution. Meg Tuite, Fiction Editor at Connotation Press, interviewed them here. Pure Slush’s May theme is Queer, and features work by Nicolette Wong, Christopher Allen, S.H. Gall, Melanie Simone, Robert Vaughan, Marcus Speh, Susan Tepper, and many more. Michelle Elvy celebrates 52/250 Year of Flash’s grand finale. Dallas Woodburn’s “Woman, Running Late, in a Dress,” has won the Ninth Glass Woman Prize, curated by Beate Sigriddaughter. Second prize goes to Marlee Cox for her story “Collapse,” and Kari Nguyen’s “The Problem with Keeping,” wins 3^rd prize. The new issue of fwriction:review features Julie Innis’ “Fly.” Meg Pokrass has started a new project, “To Voice,” which offers book trailers and story readings for authors who need visibility. For more information on how to help this crowd-funded campaign and view samples for Murray Dunlap and Tiff Holland, click here. Thomas Pluck’s story “The Last Sacrament,” is at Shotgun Honey. Digital Writer Spotlight Series features Julie Innis at eBookNewser. And finally, Jürgen Fauth’s novel Kino will be published by Atticus Books next year. You can read the opening chapter here. Congratulations to all for your success!

Send your news for June’s installment of Front Page to marcelleheath@yahoo.com.

Susan Tepper:  Jane, you set up “place” almost immediately (in the second paragraph) of your story “The Uninvited Guest.”  A few choice words and we get a clear view of where we are and who we’re going to spend time with.  This is very strong.  “Place” is definitely one of the driving forces in this story. You write:

The first time I see her, she is slouched in a tire swing, pushing off with one foot and dragging the other in the dirt beneath a dying pecan tree that probably hasn’t made a nut in 20 years. A colorful mess of sweet peas and hollyhocks swarm the trellis that leans up against a falling-down garage. Chickens peck their way through the litter in the yard.

Have you ever been in this particular place, or anywhere similar?  Because it feels so intimate in the way of known places.

Jane Hammons: My first response to this question is yes, yes I could get in my car and drive right to it. But the truth is no, no I have not been to this place except in my imagination. It is a composite of my great-grandmother’s back yard in Roswell, New Mexico. Yards of houses you see if you get off the Interstate and drive the blue highways of the Southwest. Specifically I imagine this yard and house to be in a neighborhood of Albuquerque that is (or was) south of Central Ave., which is the old Route 66. At the turn of the 20th century people who worked for the railroad built Victorian houses there. When I went to school at UNM, these Victorians were mostly rundown and carved up into cheap apartments. Place and setting are — I can’t even think of a word to express what I want to say — essential, critical, organic? — to pretty much  everything I write. Stories generally come to me in two ways: voice or idea — and each usually leads to a different kind of story. But both are always very clearly attached to a place, even when the place isn’t as present on the page as it is in this story.

Susan:  I did pick this story for several reasons.  One being a selfish reason: the fact that you and I have this “Roswell connection,” in that we both know Roswell, NM to some extent, though you much more so than I.  But I saw Roswell in here, too, and it just grabbed me so hard.

Immediately after establishing your setting, you jumped right to character.  Names.  Tayber and Opal.  Perfect for this setting.  You put Tayber (Tay) in lizard skin Lucchese boots.  You give us big heat: July, noon, 100 degrees.  You tell us about a baby scam right away.  All this in the first few paragraphs.  This story is thick.

Jane: With this story I wanted to write something that met some of the requirements of the suspense genre. And that is to hook the reader quickly, hold tight, and set the plot in motion. From writing flash I’ve learned to pare things down to the essentials. The challenge here was to flesh things out with the plot in mind and convey the characters fairly quickly. Thus those boots (I want them!). I didn’t really know how the story would end for a long time. I was very wrapped up in the birthday
party scam!

As for the atmospherics — you know that heat. It is as oppressive as hell. I wanted distinctive names, but not the kind of clichéd names people often use for rough, Southwestern characters. I had once worked as a cocktail waitress for a horrible woman named Opal. So there she is. I don’t really know where Tayber comes from — I  imagine that it is probably spelled Tabor or something like that, but I wanted a phonetic pronunciation, so I gave it that spelling. I’m a really slow writer, but this story came fast for me. I drafted it in a couple of days and then took another month or so to revise it. I sort of picture it as a dust devil or whirlwind!

Susan:  Your first line has ominous undertones.  You write:  “We go where we go because of who Tayber knows.”  As a reader it struck me as: hmm… really.  Why is that? Jane, did you know from the very start how bad these people were?  Or did their badness evolve as the story progressed?

Jane:   I knew that Tayber was an SOB from the outset — he had to be. One of the things I wanted to explore was Rox/Lydia’s submissive nature. I didn’t understand where it came from until I got close to the end and had to figure out why they were even together in the first place- sort of addressing your question about the opening line.

Susan:  That was going to be my next question.  WTF was she doing with him?  Why do certain young women become enslaved?   Tayber was such a treacherous guy yet also charismatic.  He turned Rox/Lydia into his collaborator and then he got hold of Connie.  What do you suppose was his charm?

Jane:  I’m not so sure that it isn’t Connie who has gotten hold of Tay, but I guess we’ll never know . . .

These relationships — like Rox with Tay — interest me. We see near the end that they met at a shelter where he worked and that Rox was a street kid at the time. She’s vulnerable in that way, and she’s considerably younger than he is. So there’s that.

As for Tay, I tried not to make him a stock character predator or charismatic bad guy, but he does have some of those inexplicable qualities. I don’t understand them, but they are clearly powerful.

Susan:  Clearly powerful.  As is this story.  The intensity here in both setting and character is just spectacular.  I could so easily see this as a film.

Read “The Uninvited Guest“ by Jane Hammons

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: No pretenses here, Andrew: I zeroed in on Dirty Theologians because I have a thing for men who wear Franciscan cassocks and shave their heads to resemble tonsures. But I don’t think your group is about that kind of dirty theologian. Can you clear this up for me?

Andrew Bowen: Dirty theologians are folks who create art regarding religious/spiritual matters without holding the punches. In the profane world, religious life is messy. The lessons we glean often come through R-rated circumstances. The work of a dirty theologian isn’t found in the Inspiration Section, but in jars hidden in caves, between mattresses, and in the locked drawers of the clergy.

I see that there’s a discussion in the group about whether creativity and theology are like oil and water. I side with the Baha’is — that an act of creativity is the ultimate prayer.  Where do you weigh in?

The Baha’is and I are good friends. Because they believe in “progressive revelation,” the idea that divine inspiration can arrive on any station jives well with their typical artistic flare. I happen to agree. Many of our spiritual/moral/cultural truths are crafted via the arts. Fiction (and other forms of art) is therefore the language of truth and inspiration.

What’s your favorite piece of theological fiction and/or poetry?

A favorite? Really? Honestly, I get around, but I’ll play along. Yan Martel’s Life of Pi, The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis, the poetry of Rumi… I’m getting turned on just thinking about this.

You know what I heard? You’re doing this cool thing called Project Conversion where you put on a different theological hat every month. What inspired this?

With all the animosity and conflict regarding religion, I came to a crossroads last October where I felt that I needed to pick a side: say “to hell with religion” and join the New Atheism movement, or try and bring some sense to the world of faith. I chose the latter. My strategy is to do something so dramatic that it creates a lull in the fighting on both sides. Through Project Conversion, I hope to inspire folks to explore the spiritual/philosophical traditions of our species instead of focusing on our perceived differences. So far, the results are amazing.

How has Project Conversion affected your creative impulses? Is there still room for writing?

I am a writer first, revolutionary second. Because Project Conversion is so intensive and time-consuming (living a faith literally takes every second of the day), I find myself with little time for fiction projects. Nothing however, lasts forever. I still think about old story ideas, and because I have new inspiration from each religious tradition, new ones spring to life. These are recorded for later use when Project Conversion cools down and I have more time to go old school.

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.