Dorianne Laux’s most recent collections are The Book of Men and Facts about the Moon. She is co-author of a handbook on writing, The Poet’s Companion, all from W.W. Norton. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Oregon Book Award, Laux is also author of Awake, What We Carry, and Smoke from BOA Editions, as well as a fine press edition, Dark Charms, from Red Dragonfly Press. Recent poems appear in The American Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Cerise Press, Margie, The Seattle Review, Tin House and Orion Magazine. Laux teaches poetry in the MFA Program at North Carolina State University and is founding faculty at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program.

Q (Meg Pokrass): What is your feeling about having mentors as a writer?

I think mentorship is vital for many writers. Having someone who thinks well of your work, has optimism about it, believes you are struggling hard to say something of importance and relevance, is essential. The mentor who believes these things about your work is also in the best position to criticize the work, and the mentee can take the harshest criticism when they know, at the heart of it, the mentor is coming from a position of high regard. Among my many mentors has been Philip Levine. He believes in my work, which helps me persevere, but more importantly for me, I believe in his work and try to rise up to the high standards he places on his own poetry. I watch very closely how he approaches his work, his life, and his subjects. I think that’s often the most important aspect of mentorship, emulation. Many of my mentors are not known to me, but I have learned from their words, their lines, their images, their ideas and their perseverance, their work ethic. I wrote this poem about Phil and his mentorship.

*Mine Own Phil Levine

after W.S. Merwin

What he told me, I will tell you
There was a war on
It seemed we had lived through
Too many to name, to number

There was no arrogance about him
No vanity, only the strong backs
Of his words pressed against
The tonnage of a page

His suggestion to me was that hard work
Was the order of each day
When I asked again, he said it again,
pointing it out twice

His Muse, if he had one, was a window
Filled with a brick wall, the left hand corner
Of his mind, a hand lined with grease
And sweat: literal things

Before I knew him, I was unknown
I drank deeply from his knowledge
A cup he gave me again and again
Filled with water, clear river water

He was never old, and never grew older
Though the days passed and the poems
Marched forth and they were his words
Only, no other words were needed

He advised me to wait, to hold true
To my vision, to speak in my own voice
To say the thing straight out
There was the whole day about him

The greatest thing, he said, was presence
To be yourself in your own time, to stand up
That poetry was precision, raw precision
Truth and compassion: genius

I had hardly begun. I asked, How did you begin
He said, I began in a tree, in Lucerne
In a machine shop, in an open field
Start anywhere

He said If you don’t write, it won’t
Get written. No tricks. No magic
About it. He gave me his gold pen
He said What’s mine is yours.

*”Mine Own Phil Levine” is closely patterned after W.S. Merwin’s poem “Berryman” and the title is taken from Philip Levine’s essay titled “Mine Own John Berryman” which in turn is based on the Thomas Wyatt poem, “Mine Own John Poins”.

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

Go to your facebook page and see if you’ve posted a new list of words! I love nothing more than a handful of words, a phrase, a quotation, a time of year, a color, a place, and a full hour to try to put them all together into something that might come alive. It’s like a puzzle and all I have to do is fit the pieces together with the glue of my unconscious. And there is nothing like play to trick the brain into working.

Are there favorite writing exercises you give students that you can share?

Many of the exercises I give are like the one above, random words, images, ideas, thrown out in an attempt to loosen things up, shake something new out of the old pockets. And yes, I’ll ask students to go someplace they love, or someplace that scares them or makes them angry or sad, and just sit and feel that for a while before writing. The trick is to hypnotize yourself back into yourself, back into your body and into the deepest part of you psyche or farthest reaches of your imagination so you can say something that surprises you, a thing you don’t yet know.

The best advice as a writer you ever got — or make something up!

Loosen up and take a risk. I think as we go along, we tend to get attached to the way we work best, what has been accepted as good. I try to wheedle myself out of those known places, the worn path, the rumpled bed, the comfortable chair.

What is your favorite recent film?

My favorite recent film is Winter’s Bone. Tough women and hard core meth in the Ozark mountains.

The Fictionaut Five is our ongoing series of interviews with Fictionaut authors. Every Wednesday — and sometimes, on Saturdays — 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” will be out in February from Press 53. She blogs at http://megpokrass.com.

Ramon Collins is a retired newspaper cartoonist, of some repute, who lives on the NE edge of the Mojave Desert. Due to a medical woe, he started studying — and trying to write — fiction in 1997, concentrating on Micro and Flash fiction
since 2003. Collins has had several stories published and even more online. He is Micro editor of an Irish literary quarterly, The Linnet’s Wings.

Favorite advice you have ever gotten as a writer?

One writer advised me to go into real estate or consider being a movie star — anything but literature! Of course, I didn’t pay heed and went on studying and trying to write believable fiction. For me, the key word in fiction is “believable”.

Do you have a mentor? Have you mentored?

I’ve been in 14 online fiction classes and four writers’ workshops, so I’ve had many patient mentors (plus a few cuckoo birds). My professional background is in newspaper art and I worked with outstanding writers and editors for 30 years. When you work around pro writers and listen to their banter, you learn a lot by osmosis.

I mentored a successful Micro fiction class on a writers’ site three years ago and learned a lot.

How do you stay creative? What are your tricks to get “unstuck”? and/or unblocked?

After years and years, creativity becomes a way of life. Kind of like riding a bike, you just remember how to do it. Especially if there’s a check on Friday.

If I hit the flat part of the wheel, I start reading.

Roberta Allen (FAST FICTION) has routine for “stuck” writers: Take a 5-minute kitchen timer, start writing anything that comes to mind. When the bell dings!, reread the words carefully; something will happen (it works).

Cartoonists get “stuck”, too. As with Allen, Charles Schulz (PEANUTS) said when block occurred he used to start doodling; something always happened. I’ve never been guilty of having a Humble Opinion, but making what could have happened, happen is what fiction writing is all about.

What have you noticed in flash fiction online as it blooms and moves forward?

I honestly believe Micro & Flash stories are online fiction’s future. It’s the way people read. The phenomenon has something to do with the TV-20-second attention span and the decline of reading comprehension.

On-screen words are static and reading requires concentration; young people are attracted to movement and sound. It might be a good idea for writers to start studying short-script screenwriting.

And the online writer is fighting attractive diversions: specialty sites, Facebook, YouTube, computer games, sports trivia, porn, etc.

What was the early literary e-zine world like, Ramon… specifically in flash fiction? What has changed for writers what with new online magazines sprouting up everywhere? What was your experience in the lit. e-zine culture like when there were barely a handful of literary e-zines?

The early e-zine world  was very high school — no, junior high school. Everyone had a first-time chance at being an “editor” or “publisher” and they invited their writing clique to the dance. There was even talk of an E-zine Black List.

In the 70s a prominent history professor told me, “No matter how sophisticated we THINK we are, we’re still very tribal.” The 80s proved his point; there’s nothing more tribal than the online experience. The professor went on; “The tribal mindset tends to exclude and the tribe gets more inbred and weaker.” This was certainly apparent in the early e-zines.

‘Zines today are reaching out for new voices and structure — with new blood, some tribes grow stronger. But they are only ego-fodder; an online fiction writer isn’t going to make a living. However, the Micro stories I read get better and better.

What are you working on now? What is important to you in your writing at present?

As a hobby-writer, I’m engaged in yet another online fiction class (#15). Run-on and backward sentences seem to be (what I call) Online Vogue. The most important thing for me is to learn to transfer my imagination to the reader’s imagination by using correct words. Not an easy task.
I continue to be fascinated with Micro fiction (<500 words) because the craft is first cousin to cartoons. It’s about concise writing. A gag line is usually one sentence and there’s not much room in a cartoon balloon.

Presently, I’m starting on a Last Will and I’m stuck — First Person sounds corny; I may switch to Third Omniscient.

The Fictionaut Five is our ongoing series of interviews with Fictionaut authors. Every Wednesday — and over the holidays, every Saturday — 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” will be out in February from Press 53. She blogs at http://megpokrass.com.

Susan Tepper: There’s a sense of immediacy, a dramatic tension, around “Traces in the Winter Sky“ that pulled me right into the space of this story.  Doug, you created that tension in your very first line: “Tyler steadied himself alongside the enormous Cypress that bordered the open space…”

Why?  I thought, why did he steady himself?  Why was it all so enormous and open?

Did you know in advance or did you let the story unfurl moment-to-moment?

Doug Bond:  Thank you Susan. This is a great first question. It lets me know that I was successful with something I’d had trouble with…the opening. I wrote the first version of this story over a year ago, and put it through most of the substantive changes and revisions at that time. A bit later I had enough distance to see some of the issues that were not working and pared it down, simplified the emotional space. But there was enough of the original that stuck to it that it created some other conflicts, so I just left it alone, frustrated.

Your call for the 2nd Valentine’s Day Massacre got me thinking about the story again and how all along this story had been in its own way a valentine. The months of absence helped. I needed an opening that would establish a number of things, Tyler’s age (old), that he’s just had a bit of a dust up with his wife (specifically), that time and infirmity has shifted his sense of placement (generally). I used natural images as symbols of permanence, anchors in a changing world, a place that is otherwise, wide open and dark.

Susan:  Because I’ve been surrounded by art most of my life (many relatives are painters) I tend to see writing as a strong visual.  Your story has that, and as you tell us, it was an intentional choice you made to give the story its firmament: its placement in the world of stories.  I can see it all so clearly, and feel the chilly wind that you create, hear the wind chimes you give us.  There is a huge amount given here in a fairly short span of story.  As if you are painting a story the equivalent of the wide open west before it became a place of little towns.

Doug: Interesting that you highlight the visual energy in the piece. I had the challenge of telling a story through the point of view of a man who has recently lost his vision, whether or not this is taken literally or figuratively by the reader. The benefit to me of Tyler’s blindness was to offer me a narrative frame, a point of view which I built through a non-visual perspective (excepting his memories) and so I was able to focus on smells, touch and what he hears to build the present time story. These details (hopefully) also anchor the reader’s connection with what Tyler is feeling and experiencing.

Susan:  Yes, the visual energy is enormous.  Then you go on to create small town America when you write their back-story, their beginnings some fifty years earlier, a clandestine smoke and some kissing in a little room tucked behind the orchestra at a Christmas concert.  Perhaps a church hall or town hall.  At any rate I can hear Copland’s Appalachian Spring playing as background music to the movie version of this story.  This classic American story.

And just when you get us feeling all kind of cozy, you bring up the stars.  Well, Jenny does.  Stars and numbers.  You change the painting again, broad strokes.  How’s that?

Doug: Oh, this is wonderful, to have you offer the music the story makes you hear. Amazing, you’ve linked it to Copland, as the initial memory that got this story started was a contemplation of my own, back some years to the innocence and freshness of first love, to a night which not only featured a discussion of stars, but a listening to Appalachian Spring, too. The stars in this piece, the constellation Orion, provide a framing as well, an arc from one part of their lives to another. In Greek mythology, Orion was a hunter, and suffered being blinded as part of one of his “courtships” (he also had a dog!) At a time of doubt and confusion for Tyler, the night sky offers, even if only in his memory, an image of something immutable, unchanged in 50 years or 5 million.

Susan:  Well, I’ll be damned!  How did I ever hear Appalachian Spring??  Doug, nobody will believe this, they’ll think we conspired to juice up the Chat!  We didn’t!!

But getting back to this beautiful story- I’ve been holding off from saying that your title “Traces in the Winter Sky“ is for me a series of charcoal brushstrokes done long and lazy against a lavender-gray sky.  There’s your book cover.  Go for it!

Read “Traces in the Winter Sky“ by Doug Bond

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 and hosts FIZZ, a reading series at KGB Bar.

Jonathan Evison is the author of All About Lulu, West of Here, and The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving (forthcoming from Algonquin). He likes rabbits.

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

My first editor Richard Nash was an amazing mentor, and continues to be one. He’s so wise and forthcoming and generous with his expertise, and I do my damndest to live up to this standard by helping every writer I can, however I can.

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

I usually just write myself through it, or run for the hills with a case of beer and a notebook. If I’m having trouble moving forward, it’s usually because I’ve left myself behind the eight ball somehow. I go back and figure out where things went wrong. I find editing to be a great unblocker of creativity. Also beer and campfires.

Best advice you ever got? Words of wisdom… What helped you as a young writer?

When I was drowning in research for West of Here, I asked my friend David Liss (who writes excellent historical fiction) how I would know when it was time to stop researching, and he said: when the research starts getting in the way of the story you want to tell. That was amazing advice. The best advice I could give any writer is to sit their ass in a chair and write, because we’re all a bunch of procrastinators.

How well do you know your characters before you start writing them?

I don’t generally know them all that well to begin with. They are more or less characterizations, and sets of circumstances. It is the decisions they make once I set them free in the narrative which ultimately defines them. The discovery is my favorite part.

Regarding plot: How firm do your original plot intentions remain in the writing? Do they develop during the process of writing? Is it a tug of war?

Very much a tug-of-war, though I generally side with letting things develop. Again, it’s the discovery which floats my boat. I don’t want to be trapped inside my own conceptions. I want the characters and the story to lead me somewhere new and surprising. In short, I like the story to undermine my own expectations.

West of Here… can you talk a bit the nuts and bolts of birthing this complex novel? Such an enormous time-span, wildly big ideas and themes and still… you gift us with a feeling of intimacy in the character’s daily worlds, they are so real….

This book nearly drove me nuts as a critical exercise. Dozens of limited points-of-view populating two conversant timelines a hundred and twenty years apart is a narrative structure which creates all manner of potential continuity problems. I color-coded the manuscript spine, I wrote on my walls, I made graphs, thought maps, I filled over twenty spiral notebooks with notes (and I’m not talking about the research). My approach to the research was really what helped define the novel as much as anything. I didn’t want to use a wide-angle lens to historicize the material, so I read a lot of personal accounts and narratives of Washington frontier life. This helped me ground all my big ideas and themes in the vividly realized daily lives of my characters.

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

I like to smoke pot and write in my underwear. And I love Pilot #3 red pens.

The Fictionaut Five is our ongoing series of interviews with Fictionaut authors. Every Wednesday — and over the holidays, every Saturday — 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” will be out in February from Press 53. She blogs at http://megpokrass.com.

If you were around a year ago, you’ll remember the first Fictionaut Valentine’s Day challenge: post a love story — and stay out of Al Capone’s way. Stories were tagged “valentine” and can still be found in the archives.

Now, with another Valentine’s Day looming, the first Valentine Day Massacre is available as a beautiful chapbook from Červená Barva Press, edited by Susan Tepper. For $7, you get stories from (deep breath): Doug Bond, Angela Brett, Estelle Bruno, Sheldon Lee Compton, Sara T. Einhorn, David Erlewine, Susan Gibb, Frank Hinton, Matt Kang, Dorothee Lang, Ryan McDermott, John Minichillo, Kevin Paul Myrick, Nora Nadjarian, Ajay Nair, Gabriel Orgrease, Derek Osborne, Meg Pokrass, Sam Rasnake, Beate Sigriddaughter, Marcus Speh, Paul Steven Stone, Miles Tepper, Susan Tepper, and xTx. What’s not to love?

Even better, there’s a new massacre underway now in the Valentine Day group. Join and add your stories, “soft, edgy, sweet, or bitter,” by February 14.

Erika Dreifus lives and writes in New York City. Her story collection, Quiet Americans, was published in January 2011 by Last Light Studio Books. It is inspired largely by the experiences of Erika’s paternal grandparents, German Jews who immigrated to the United States in the late 1930s; Erika is donating a portion of book sales proceeds to The Blue Card, which supports U.S.-based survivors of Nazi persecution. In addition to her full-time staff job at The City University of New York, Erika is a contributing editor for The Writer magazine and Fiction Writers Review and an advisory board member for J Journal: New Writing on Justice. Her writing practice encompasses fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Erika is also the editor/publisher of The Practicing Writer, a free (and popular) e-newsletter featuring advice, opportunities, and resources on the craft and business of writing for fictionists, poets, and writers of creative nonfiction.

Q (Meg Pokrass): Please talk about the role mentors and mentoring has had in your life…

Mentors have played significant and enriching roles in my life: intellectually, culturally, and spiritually. But for fiction-writing, specifically… I’ve had remarkably few benign—let alone constructive—experiences as a “mentee”. One notable, happy exception developed through a series of workshops I took with Sands Hall at the University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival back when I was just starting to write fiction.

Now that I’m working full-time in a staff job instead of teaching, my personal mentoring takes place in the form of trying to advise and assist writers online, more or less en masse, via my website, blogs, and newsletter. I am also proud to say that I am the family go-to source when it comes to encouraging reading and writing proclivities among the little ones.

Do you know what you are going to write about when you sit down to write?

Typically, I have some idea. There’s some situation or circumstance that I want to address (I’m insufficiently character-driven for my own good). But, with very few exceptions, I tend not to know the end of a story before I’ve written it. Endings usually find me.

What good habits are helpful daily for creative energy?

Many of my best ideas strike when I’m walking or jogging.

What is new in your writing world?

So glad that you asked! My book, Quiet Americans, is a short-story collection inspired largely by the experiences of my paternal grandparents, German Jews who immigrated to the United States in the late 1930s, and by my own longstanding preoccupations with that family legacy. I’m donating portions of proceeds from book sales to The Blue Card, an organization established in the 1930s that continues to assist survivors of Nazi persecution today.

The book launched on January 19, and I’ve been really gratified by the response it is receiving. There’s much more information about the book and The Blue Card (and, in line with the mentoring question above, plenty of resources for other writers) at my website, http://erikadreifus.com.

What current challenges do writers face when promoting their own work?

This is an excellent question. The somewhat intimidating news is that challenges do exist: navigating the ever-changing social-media landscape, attracting attention in an increasingly inundated literary marketplace, and overcoming any natural reluctance to self-promote. To name just a few.

What is improving for writers in promoting their own work?

First, it’s relatively easy to find knowledgeable resources online (for just one example, I’ll point you to Dana Lynn Smith [“The Savvy Bookmarketer”]). Second, more books and authors may be vying for attention, but there are also so many new venues where they can do so. And, finally, the world of networks (like Fictionaut) can provide a lot of support and camaraderie for new writers who are just embarking!

The Fictionaut Five is our ongoing series of interviews with Fictionaut authors. Every Wednesday — and over the holidays, every Saturday — 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” will be out in February from Press 53. She blogs at http://megpokrass.com.

Susan: Linda, your story “The Golden Moment” is a little gem. In five short paragraphs, which is the totality of the story, you manage to give a complete life, plus the hole that exists in every life.  Do you agree with my take on this?

Linda: Thank you Susan. I love this particular little story, it’s one I spent a lot of time with. I think your observation is close to my intention. I wouldn’t say hole so much as space. It seems so much of life (my life, at least) is spent rushing from moment to moment. We juggle the work meetings with the packed lunches and bus departures and arrivals, the grocery store and dry cleaner trips, the band concerts and soccer games. But in the end, in our end, what do we remember? I’d like to think (and hope) it’s those spaces in between the moments. I think of music, the golden moment between the last note still trembling in the air, and then the appreciation of the whole, and it’s that space I recall most as a performer, that anticipation mixed with relief and satisfaction of a song well-played, of imparting something of beauty.

At the same time I wrote this, I was reviewing a critique from an author I very much respect. I had sent him the first 20 pages or so of my second novel, all for a good cause (The DZANC Creative Writing Sessions). He gave me wonderful stuff to ponder, but the take home for me was to make more white space between the scenes. Keep what was essential. The essence. And I keep coming back to that suggestion in my writing, and in my life in general. Space is a tough thing to achieve, though.

Susan: I believe I have stumbled upon one of life’s true optimists.  What I have seen as holes, you see as spaces.  I base my observation on having read many of your stories here and on the groups.  Even when you write about the most serious topics, there is a certain level of buoyancy.  As if you are telling the reader: It’s going to be OK.  Yet it doesn’t diminish the impact of your stories at all.

Your first paragraph, last line of “The Golden Moment,” you write:  I lower the bow, and the hall thunders.

Wow!  It doesn’t get more positive than that!  When writing this story were you consciously aware of how that line segued into the sensibility of the next (rather dark) paragraph?

Linda: An optimist? Hmm… that’s interesting – my husband calls me a worrywart. Which I am about all the stuff I can’t control. But those things which I can control, I guess I am pretty optimistic, largely because I have a choice: operate out of fear or love. I try to make choices that align with love but, of course, I’m human and stumble all the time. But when I have some control (or think I do), I tend to operate on a cup-half-full basis.

I love your comment about buoyancy. I could stop writing now and feel I’ve accomplished something, so thank you! Life is so blasted hard and complicated, and the tangles get worse as we age, but there’s so much beauty, too. So much to live for.  I believe when you’ve been at the spot when you think life is not worthwhile, and then you find your way back, you tend to have that experience shimmer throughout your outlook and your writings. To be an optimist is really hard work – it is so much easier to slide into dark spaces. I fight the demons of negativity all the time, and I think it reflects in my writing.

Your observation about the last line of the first paragraph doing a segue into the second paragraph interests me, because I did not consciously think through the placement of those first two paragraphs. I mucked around with the positions of the remaining three, but not those two (and I actually at one time had 7 drafts). So your observation excites me (yay for the subconscious – it works, it really, really works!). What strikes me about the musical golden moment and September 11 is that on that tragic day, the silence in the sky deafened. I live 40 miles from DC and the same from Camp David, and I remember standing alone in my backyard, staring at the perfect brilliant sky, and waiting for a jet to explode that very extended golden moment. There was a grace that day about the sky’s silence, a sort of prayer.

Susan:  A sort of prayer is what hit me also throughout the piece.   There is a hush over each part, despite the intense energy, and a musical quality that ebbs and flows.  In the second part you write:  Planes careen into fields and skyscrapers, a cacophony of metal and fire.

It brought to mind Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves.”  Not in content, but the way the energy of this piece works.  Did you have any sense or physical sensation of water, the ocean, perhaps, when writing “The Golden Moment?”

Linda: Ah, once again the subconscious kicks in. To answer your question – no, I was not conscious of water, the lilt of the sea, when writing this story. But while writing, I did experience the sensation of being submerged, of all these events muffled, the way sensations of hearing and feeling distort and go quiet while under water.

I’ve been told much of my prose has a poetic movement to it. I love the rhythm of words, alone and in combination, and perhaps that is what you perceive here. Which is fine for short pieces, I guess, but deadly for novels (or so I’m told!). In my longer writings, I’m striving for transparency, and sparseness. Purity, I guess.

Susan: Well from my experience with the commercial publishing industry, everything is deadly for novels.  So I wouldn’t even give that a thought.  You have to do what feels right intuitively, I believe, and then use your craft and just let the novel rip out of you the way you, Linda, let the child come into the world in your third paragraph:  The surgeon reaches into my abdomen and your head crowns, waxed with blood.

“Waxed with blood” is an astonishing phrase.  It conjures up a waxed apple, perfect and beautiful.  Definite purity.

Read “The Golden Moment“ by Linda Simoni-Wastila

We’re happy to present Fictionaut Selects, a new series of collected stories and poetry from Fictionaut, edited by Marcelle Heath.

Each issue of Fictionaut Selects features a different theme and guest-editor. For our inaugural issue, “Up to No Good,” Jane Hammons selected and introduces stories and poems by Stephanie Bobo, Gita M. Smith, Neil Serven, Mark Reep, Stephanie Austin, and Cynthia Hawkins.

With the weekly, monthly, and all-time most-recommended lists, Fictionaut itself is a kind of emergent literary magazine, jointly edited by all members. (It bears repeating that the full text of all stories is available as RSS feed and e-reader subscription.)

But from the beginning, we have been looking for other ways to slice the ever-growing number of stories — 7,500 and counting! — and present deserving work that might have slipped through the cracks. Thus, Selects is the logical extension of Fictionaut Faves, Marcelle’s blog series in which members point to personal favorites.

There are many ways to read the first issue of Fictionaut Selects. We have created a group on the site where you can read Jane’s introduction and all the stories. We’re also offering free downloads in Kindle, epub, and pdf formats. Just click below, transfer to the device of your choice, and get up to no good with Fictionaut. A print-on-demand version will be available soon.

A big thank you to everyone involved in Fictionaut Selects #1. We hope you like it.

Read Online at Fictionaut	Download ePub (165 KB)	Download PDF (371 KB)	Download Kindle (242 KB)

Q (Nicolle Elizabeth): Greetings, fellow Nic and Jeffrey S. Callico! You are the admin of our Fictionaut Dark Chaos Group. I hear there is a cross-over with Dark Chaos and Negative Suck (a lovely journal, whom we have hosted here in interview at the weekly check-in previously). Can you talk to us about Dark Chaos and the group as a whole? How’s it going? Anything we can do to make your time more comfortable? Hot washcloth?

A (Nicolette Wong): Yes, there is a slight thematic crossover between Dark Chaos and Negative Suck, but each zine stands on its own. The basic premise/thrust of Dark Chaos is to feature writers and artists who aren’t afraid to cross a few boundary lines and potentially end up as an overall disturbance to those who read and view their work.

Life at Fictionaut is good, though comfort isn’t what we’re after. Let’s get the new members and submissions rolling!

Q: Who are three authors Dark Chaos adores and why? (We mean adores the writing written thereof, thereby, heretoworthwit. We don’t really care about writer’s personal lives. Well, we care, we care about everything, but we are mostly focused on writing itself, not necessarily the oh you get the point)

A: Jules Archer, Eva O’Dell and Misti Rainwater-Lites. All three of these writers push language into a space that most wouldn’t dare to attempt.

Q: What is Dark Chaos’ five year plan? Ten year?

A: There is no plan. We take it writer by writer, artist by artist. Each new post at Dark Chaos pushes it forward that much more.

Q: Please tell us more about you, your projects and own work and anything else you’d like to tell us here. Get loud, we can deal.

A: I’m from Hong Kong and bumble around online a lot–like how I ran into Jeff and got involved with Dark Chaos and Negative Suck. My plan is to solicit more quality work from writers we admire or discover so that the communities would grow. As for myself, I write flash and a bit of poetry these days, and survive on too little sleep.

Nicolle Elizabeth checks in with Fictionaut Groups every Friday.

Robert Boswell is the author of eleven books. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, Best Stories from the South, Esquire, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, Colorado Review.

“The Right Thing” was published in The Antioch Review while I was in my final year of the MFA program at the University of Arizona. The story is about a Vietnam vet trying to make his way in the world without being able to escape the past. When I was a counselor I worked with several Vietnam veterans. The story I tell in “The Right Thing” is not based on any story they told me; rather, it’s an attempt to understand the haunted feeling they described to me. The only part of the story that comes directly from one of them is a line of dialogue: “Does this sound like a whisper?” One of the vets asked me that while we were speaking. For reasons I cannot really explain, that line funneled me directly into the narrative.

Reading the story now, twenty-some years after writing it, I am reasonably happy with it. I see a lot that I’d edit and change, of course, but the basic story seems fairly sound. The idea of the past and present existing simultaneously is an obsession of mine, and until just now, rereading the story after all these years, I had forgotten that it started with “The Right Thing.” Characters attempting to evaluate their lives in terms of right and wrong is another obsession. My command of craft has, perhaps, improved but the obsessions endure unchanged.

Read “The Right Thing” on Fictionaut.

Previously on Line Breaks:

• “Gershwin’s Second Prelude” by Charles Baxter
• “Something Better Than This” by Mary Gaitskill
• “Coping Stones” by Ann Beattie
• “Moving Day” by Robert Olen Butler
• “The Palatski Man” by Stuart Dybek
• “My Date with Satan” by Stacey Richter
• “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” by Amy Hempel
• “Credentials” by John Holman
• “Pink” by Terese Svoboda
• “The Line” by James Robison
• “We” by Mary Grimm
• “Shopgirls” by Frederick Barthelme
• “Fragment from an Untelevised Revolution” by Rick Moody
• “One-Way Ticket” by Antonya Nelson
• “The OD & Hepatitis RR or Bust” by T.C. Boyle

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