Tom Franklin is the author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, Hell at the Breech, and Smonk. Winner of a 2001Guggenheim Fellowship, he teaches in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program and lives in Oxford,Mississippi with his wife, the poet Beth Ann Fennelly, and their children.

Q (Meg Pokrass): Do you mentor? If you would discuss the importance of mentoring?

I think mentors are essential for writers, but since writing’s such a lonely biz such mentors are often on-the-page mentors, that is, writers you learn from by reading their work or by reading interviews, etc. I’ve had several of these, Barry Hannah chiefly, whose sentences were so packed with electricity and kick-ass language that he opened my eyes to what one could do with nouns and verbs and their juxtaposition without ever telling me this face to face.

Other kinds of mentors are important, too, of course. Teachers are who I’m thinking of now. Nearly every writer has a writing teacher he or she remembers. This works well alongside the non-present mentors because while you can certainly learn a lot on your own, a hands-on mentor can identify things you’re not doing as well or things you’re doing and shouldn’t. It’s more direct. The two together work well. That second kind, though, is the type mentor one has to seek out. Mentors don’t often come a-looking.

What tricks to you use when you are feeling stuck and uninspired when writing something?

When stuck, which seems to be much of the time with me, I usually watch tv. If nothing else, I begin feeling guilty about not writing, so that’ll maybe get me back to it. A better thing to do is read. And for me, reading something that pertains to what I’m struggling with is best. Now I’m writing a character who was in WWI. I’m all over the internet these days, finding cool WWI stuff. This’ll be a small part of the novel I’m doing — one character’s backstory — but it’s interesting and if I get interested I’ll want to dig deeper.

Looking at pictures is good, too. Esp. for anything historical. Try to describe what led to the taking of a photograph. What’s going on in those folks’ heads? How did that photo come to be taken? Remember that every person in the picture had a life before and after that picture, that’s one moment in a person’s life. Clearly, carefully, fully imaging your characters will make them breathe on the page. They’re the sum total of their experience until the moment you take them up, and they’re the sum total of all the hopes for whatever future the end of the page holds.

Being stuck can also be a sign that you need to take some time off. Don’t fret about leaving a ms for a few days or weeks or even months. I have 3/4s of story that I started in 2000 that I take out and peck at every few weeks. At some point I’ll finish it, knock wood. But only lately have I realized what the ending should be. This is, what, 2011, and by my math that’s like 11 years. So don’t worry if you set something aside. Work on something else for a while.

Any exercises you give your students that you will share here?

What I do in my workshops (undergrad and grad) is begin each class by having students tell us one detail they observed since the last class. Detail is god in fiction, I tell them, and I want them to start viewing the world like a writer, constantly looking for things to use in their fiction. For instance, the worn path lines in grass, the places that cut across lawns where people are supposed to use sidewalks, these paths are called “desire lines.” It’s an architectural term but a great detail. It’s easy to see how that might fit in a story as a detail but also how it might grow metaphorically to represent more than itself, and that’s what good detail does: mean more than itself.

Can you describe your process toward making characters real?

I usually begin with an image or even a line of dialogue. I’m writing a character now who’s an old man. The only thing I know about him is that he has a waddle, that roostery loose skin that hangs under the neck. Apart from that, he’s a mystery to me now. But as I write, beginning with his waddle, he’ll start to true up, he’ll say a thing or two that’ll surprise me and then he’ll be off and running, that waddle shaking, doing things on his own. So the answer is that I get a foothold and then wait for the character to begin to act. Do they always? No. Often nothing happens but a stagnant waddle. It just hangs there. But if I go in and prod that waddle often enough, it’ll start to shake on its own at some point….

Will you tell us what draws you as a writer toward writing about people inhabiting unhealthy physical environments, dying towns or communities?

A dying thing, a literal one, a carcass, is itself full of new life. Disgusting maggoty life, yes, but flies rise from this out into the world, and then the carcass ultimately dissolves into the dirt and bones’re eaten by other animals, it’s all life. With a place it’s the same thing. Especially a small place. Where everybody knows yr name.

Something happens, something goes out of a place, the store closes, a certain family leaves, somebody dies, and suddenly a place, a town, hamlet, village, is on the downslide. People who can leave do. This leaves those who can’t leave or those who choose, for whatever reason, to stay. They cling to the past, or they just ignore everything and go about without living. The buildings become deserted, houses empty, trains stop stopping, grass grows in the graveyard. At some point such a place might become quaint, or of historical interest, or just fashionable for some reason. But it’s got a history now, and it’s not all good. It died, once. And mostly, these places, they’re dead still, haunted by fascinating people. Rick Bass’s lovely “The History of Rodney” is about Rodney, Mississippi, population: “about a dozen of us.” It’s a perfect example of a story like this. A tree grows through the middle of the narrator’s house, if I remember correctly. It’s man’s history dissolving back into nature, and parts of the death of it, the houses, fences, old bridges, are so lovely, sunset lovely, the last dying colors of something. Where better to focus your gaze?

I noticed that in his novels William Gay often had young men and old men, seldom were there any in-betweens, any 20s to 60s. I asked him about this and he said he thought we as humans are most interesting as young people and old people, that the beginnings and ends are better ground for fiction. Maybe it’s the gothic instilled in me by the very air but I can’t help loving an old building. Broken windows. Wood the color James Agee described as that of a hornet’s nest. Throw on some kudzu, I’m sold.

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:  James, it has been said that we bring the sum total of who we are and what we know to every story we read. Today we discuss your story “Sand.”  I know sand intimately.  So I was immediately drawn by the title into this story of two brothers.  Is this memoir or straight fiction or a combination?  Is there a Cain and Abel sub-text going on, perhaps unconsciously?  Not an entirely off the wall question (!) since you did use an epigraph from Leviticus 17:11: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood…”

James:  No, a Cain and Abel question is not off the wall.  The short answer is “No.”  In answering that question, I’ll answer both.  The story is fiction, but based on my relationship with my brother, Charles.  We grew up in a house right on the beach, on the southern-most shore of the Chesapeake Bay in Ocean View, which is in Norfolk, VA.  It was a paradise for us.

My brother was much as the brother described in “Sand,” a kind of savant, with an incredible artistic gift.  He won a scholarship to study architecture after winning a competition for design of a commercial building.  He got in trouble and lost it, but continued with his art, filling notebooks with breathtaking sketches.  He was also homeless for much of his life, a fact he hid from the family for many years.  Even when they knew it, he continued the charade with stories of jobs as a cartographer for oil companies in Louisiana and California.

When he was killed in LA, I was director of a homeless shelter in Texas and had been trying for some time to get him into a program I personally believed would help him.  I loved my brother, so the Cain and Abel thing doesn’t really apply … having said that, I was probably jealous, because Charles was greatly loved by the family, while I was estranged from them for many years.  In some ways, we shared the same dilemma, similar perspectives and passions, but Charles was lovable, friendly.  The detectives who spoke to my parents said that he was well known on the streets.  Everybody liked Charlie.

I could adapt, though.  He could not.

Susan:  This account of your brother, family, and your upbringing is fascinating.  The true story would make an intensely dramatic tale.  It also brought to mind Steinbeck’s East of Eden.  Thanks for being so candid.  It’s always interesting to discover any  “truth” hovering within a story.  Some writers give all their truths to the page while others give none.  For the most part, I hide.  Your opening line is a stunner:  “As children, we lived in a house on the beach, surrounded by sand, our skin touched by sand, moments of our lives filtered through sensations of sand.”

I adore that line.  Do you believe the sand also found its way into the souls (hearts, if you prefer) of these two brothers?

James:  The place where we lived, at that time, was less congested than today, almost like the Outer Banks of North Carolina, in that … the beach, the sea was flat, the sky enormous.  Yes, the sand was everywhere.  The beach was our front yard.  The back of the house faced inland, but even there, not far away across the few streets, were forested creeks and backwaters, a salt marsh where, the history books told us, pirates lived and hid their ships in the deeper inlets.  A magical place.

We had a view of the Chesapeake to the north, the Atlantic Ocean on the eastern horizon, and the shipping channel moved east to west, parallel to our beach, a deep channel where freighters moved slowly in and slowly out from the Tidewater to distant places we could only dream of, places with magical names you could read in the shipping news of the Norfolk paper.

The sky, though, was enormous, so big it could swallow your ego, teach you a kind of humility you never forget.  Yes, it’s still there, the sand.

Susan:  Yes, it’s still there, the sand.  (Beautiful).

The narrator tells us that he is darkness and his brother is the light.  The brother builds magnificent sand cathedrals that startle the tourists, while the narrator digs holes in the sand that the tourists fall into.  What of this?

James:  In terms of the story, one becomes the artist and the other an ironworker.  One becomes open to beauty, one seeks solace in the firm realities of steel.  One is drawn to cathedrals, one builds skyscrapers out of iron beams.  One is open, the other quite closed.

In the end, it is the realist who survives, but at what cost?

Susan:  The light and the darkness.  Intermingled.  These complexities in “Sand” tugged me in different directions.  I love that things important to the narrator remain blurred for him.  I believe this part turned the story:  “Yet, I loved him, my brother, for all our differences.  I understood him as no one else.”

A shocker!  Here I was visualizing a seaside painting by William Merritt Chase, and you threw me a Picasso.  These two lines sort of fractured the story down its middle, laying the ground work for what comes next.

Read “Sand” by James Lloyd Davis

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.

Midwest represent!

Q (Nicolle Elizabeth): Hi Robert James Russell. You have started a group here at Fictionaut for Midwestern Gothic. How is it going and what is the group all about? Tell us everything.

A (Robert James Russell): It’s going well so far. Midwestern Gothic is a new quarterly literary journal I’m starting whose aim is to feature Midwestern writers, and/or pieces featuring the Midwest. It may be a lofty goal, but my partners and I are really trying to make this THE compendium of Midwestern fiction. We’re also going to be accepting (year-round) photos that best represent the essence and flavor of the Midwest.

Q: So like, if Southern Gothic is O’Connor, who again, in greater depth, would be like some examples of Midwestern Gothic or something for example?

A: It’s funny, because that’s exactly my train of thought. During my Master’s work I studied Regionalism, especially Southern Gothic, and, being from the Midwest, I realized there never was a movement like that.

Q: Do we have to wear black if we join the group?

A. Ha, no. As I mentioned previously, “Gothic” to us means “real” — we want real life, good, bad, or ugly — so, again, we can catalog this often-overlooked region chalked full of unique mythologies and stories.

Q: Please tell us more about you, your projects and anything else you would like to share. I hear lake snow effect is intense woah I typed lake as kale at first.

A. Ha. Well, where I’m from in Michigan originally (the west side), lake effect is nasty, nasty stuff. It doesn’t affect me too much these days, though, luckily.

About what I’m up to: I have a collection of short stories coming out in April via eight cuts gallery press called The Mating Habits of College Girls, and this past September I put together an anthology called Sex Scene: An Anthology which was an exercise in getting different writers with different styles to all write a sex scene. It’s available as a free download.

I also ask that anyone from the Midwest or interested in what we’re doing join our group here, or check out our full site here: www.MidwestGothic.com (we’ll start accepting submissions soon!) Our official Twitter feed is @MWGothic, and I tweet at @robhollywood.

Nicolle Elizabeth checks in with Fictionaut Groups every Friday.

Roz Chast is a long-time staff cartoonist for The New Yorker. Her cartoons have also been published in many other magazines  including Scientific American, the Harvard Business Review, Redbook, and Mother Jones. Her books include a comprehensive compilation of her favorite cartoons called Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, and Health-Inspected Cartoons of Roz Chast, 1978-2006, a popular childrens book created with Steve Martin called, The Alphabet from A to Y with Bonus Letter Z, and her latest book “Too Busy Marco”. Roz lives in Connecticut with her human family and two birds, Eli and Marco.

Q (Meg Pokrass): I heard you (a few years ago) speaking at San Francisco at City Arts & Lectures about your interest in old fashioned, forgotten, and outdated objects. Can you tell us why this is something you notice?

I think my interest in outdated things probably has a lot to do with my parents. They were both born in 1912, which made them a lot older than my friends’ parents when I was growing up. They were both children of immigrants and grew up with very little money. Both of them graduated from college into the Depression. They were very anti-buying new stuff, for ethical, emotional, and economic reasons. So growing up, I was surrounded by outdated, worn-out furniture, household appliances, lamps, clothing, etc. For instance, they had a rotary phone, one of those really heavy ones, until 2003 when I moved them up to an old-age home up here.

Also, if you would talk a bit about  your interest in outdated words?

Language-wise, I’d have to give my parents credit or blame for this as well. My father was a teacher, and my mother was an assistant principal. They used old-fashioned words, and if they used an expression, it was from another era. “I think we’d better call a halt,” or “I’m going to blow my top!” Things like that, that you don’t hear so much anymore.

In your work, normal things become odd in the noticing… This is one of the quirks that draws me immediately. Do you rely on your memory?

That, and I take notes. I don’t carry a tape recorder.

Your well-loved painted eggs (which are magnificent)… how did they come to be?

I got obsessed with Pysanky several years ago. I had someone teach me the traditional technique and bought some supplies on the Internet. I made several dozen eggs, sold quite a few, then the fever passed. Then the fever returned about a year or two ago. I made a few dozen more, sold a lot. Then the fever went away again. It’s a mystery.

Where can they be viewed now?

Different places at different times. I’ve shown them at the Julie Saul Gallery in NYC a couple of times, and also at the Westport Arts Center in Westport CT.

Can you offer me an example of human behavior which strikes you as odd to you? Something I may not have thought about? I’m thinking about your hysterical essay in The New Yorker about public banana consumption…

I think in general I can’t believe how unselfconscious people are in public, from chomping away on a banana or smelly sandwich on the train to talking really loudly into their cell phones about their cousin’s infection or whatever.

Why does it bother you?

It’s just gross.

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.

Words without Borders is seeking to raise $7,000 to publish their first issue dedicated to Afghanistan. According to their Kickstarter page, they’ve already secured a story from Mohammad Hosain Mohammad’s collection Anjirha-ye Sorkh-e Mazar, which was awarded the prestigious Golshiri prize, as well as a story by Mohammad Asif Soltanzadah, and another by Pashto writer Sher Zaman Taizi.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a great essay by William Germano that answers the question: “What Are Good Books For?” He writes:

In 1959, C.P. Snow threw down the challenge of “two cultures,” the scientific and the humanistic, pursuing their separate, unconnected lives within developed societies. In the new-media ecology of the 21st century, we may not have closed that gap, but the two cultures of the contemporary world are the culture of data and the culture of narrative. Narrative is rarely collective. It isn’t infinitely expandable. Narrative has a shape and a temporality, and it ends, just as our lives do.

For those attending AWP: Flatmancrooked, HOBART, Dzanc, Featherproof Books, and Barrelhouse are hosting the first Literati Gong Show on Thursday, February 3rd at 6:30pm at Madam’s Organ Blues Bar. Judges are Benjamin Percy, Pam Houston, and Forrest Gander.

McSweeneys has a NEW website. It looks great—but if you’re like me and immediately looked for where to submit, you’ll find it at their old website here. While you’re submitting your latest smarty-pants manifesto, check out 826 National where Neko Case is auctioning off her classic 1967 Mercury Cougar (featured on the cover of her album Middle Cyclone) to benefit 826.

Marcelle Heath is subbing in this week for Luna Digest, a selection of news from the world of literary magazines, presented every Tuesday by Luna Park, a magazine founded on the idea that journals are as deserving of critical attention as other artistic works.

Jessica Anya Blau‘s second novel, Drinking Closer to Home, is coming out January 18th. Her first novel, The Summer of Naked Swim Parties, was chosen as a Best Summer Book by the Today Show, the New York Post, and New York Magazine. The San Francisco Chronicle, the Rocky Mountain News and Barnes and Noble chose it as one of the Best Books of the Year. Currently Jessica is living in Baltimore and teaching at Goucher College.

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

I’m sure it’s different for everyone, but for me having mentors, specifically my teachers in graduate school, was hugely important to me. I had no confidence, no idea that I could actually “be” a writer, and here were these people–Madison Smartt Bell, Stephen Dixon and John Barth, specifically–who seemed to have faith in me and to like what I was doing. It changed everything for me. If they were going to take me seriously then I had to write seriously, that is I had to do it no matter what the outcome, and do it the best I could.

What was your path to being a writer all about? Let’s hear about that road!

I was in the buyer training program for a high end department store in San Francisco when I wrote my first story. It was written on my day off. When I gave it to a friend who was a newspaper journalist he said, “It made me want to throw my typewriter out the window,” meaning he was jealous. An exaggeration, for sure, but enough of an encouraging response to think that maybe I was on to something. Then, when I moved to Canada with my then-husband the conditions of my visa didn’t allow me to work or go to school. I got a dog. I had a baby. And I wrote and wrote and wrote. As long as I wrote a couple hours a day, I felt like a productive person. Productivity is important to my happiness.

What is a key element to successfully writing about sex in fiction?

Hmm. Well I’ve noticed that bad sex is far more interesting than good sex because it conveys character. Good sex usually just conveys sex and therefore feels like pornography which people see in great sites like spankbang online. But good sex that conveys character can work, too. Writing sex scenes is like writing dialogue. You don’t want it to be expository. It should never explain what’s happening. Instead it should reveal the inner-workings and emotional territory of the characters.

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?

I sense them internally. If I’m writing about them, I feel them the way an actor “feels” his/her character. I’m sort of possessed by them at the time of the writing. I think people should only write about characters that they feel that way. So if you’re basing your character on someone you know, you have to take him/her over and create a character that’s like the person but isn’t really THE person. If it’s THE person you can’t really know everything and you’ll end up with a flat, unbelievable character. If you recreate him or her into your own version of who they are, then they belong to you and you can write them out in an organic and natural way.

Tips in general for fledgling novelists?

Oh goodness, I have no idea. I’m not an expert on anything. Except maybe sunblock. I do loads of research on face creams and sunblock! I guess every writer should try to make it interesting. Don’t be boring. Don’t be dull. Don’t show off and try to broadcast information about yourself that you think will impress people. Just make it interesting.

What are some sustaining practices/ habits for a writer to develop?

Doing it in spite of the failures and rejections. Doing it no matter what criticism you may receive. Doing it over and over and over and over again. Accepting that the first few drafts will be pretty shitty and that you simply have to keep revising. I think a lot of good writing comes down to perseverance. We all start out the same: hopeful, willing, with an idea. The ones who finish are the ones who just keep going.

What is the best writing advice you ever got?

Try again, fail again, fail better. Originally Beckett, but then repeated to me by Lynn Freed.

How autobiographical are your novels?

The first one, The Summer of Naked Swim Parties, has a lot of autobiographical material. Drinking Closer to Home is almost all autobiography. And the novel I’m working now has very little autobiographical material.

What is next for you?

Well I’m starting another revision of a novel I finished. I sent it to my agent, she read it through and then we had a two and a half hour conversation where she laid out everything that was wrong with it. And she was right about all of it. Or almost all of it. She’s an excellent reader. This will be the fifth full revision, although the first half of the book has probably been revised about ten times already. Writing is revision. Once you accept that fact, you can write.

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.

Q (Nicolle Elizabeth): Hey Danny, welcome! You have a group going here at the Fictionaut camp for fwriction : review. What’s the deal with the Group and the journal? Info on both, give us the goods.

A (Danny Goodman): Hi Nicolle. First, let me say that I think you and Fictionaut are lovely. It’s true.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk. fwriction : review is the sister site, if you will, of my literary blog, fwriction. With the blog, I created something that I was searching for: a one-stop shop for people like me, who love writing and reading and generally rocking waffles. I am better at promoting other people’s work than I am my own, and that led me to the journal. I love discovering new writing, sharing it with the world. fwriction : review gives me that opportunity.

Q: If fwriction : review were a short story, what would that one short story be? What is the ANTHEM story to fwriction : review? That one story that makes fwriction : review go,”and that is why I write/read/breathe.”

A: That’s really hard to pin down. Over at fwriction, I showcase a “story of the day” in an effort to bring what I think is quality writing to readers at large. However, if I were to an anthem story for fwriction : review, it would have to start with any Raymond Carver story (most notably “So Much Water So Close To Home”), continue with Charles Baxter’s “The Next Building I Plan to Bomb” and James Salter’s “Last Night,” and end with Meredith Martinez’s “When I Say Love.” If fwriction : review were a novella, it would be either Emma Straub’s Fly-Over State or Edan Lepucki’s If You’re Not Yet Like Me. I believe I’ve failed in answering the question succinctly, and for that I am truly sorry.

Q: Please tell us more about you, your projects, and anything else you’d like to mention here. This one is a quickie, but goody. I hope. You haven’t sent the answers yet so who knows but I have faith.

A: I’m a writer, editor, teacher, lover of coffee, books, and all things Superman. I still sometimes dream of flying over New York City, providing something unique to the universe. For now, though, I bring stories to the world, and I’m okay with that.

Oh, and, submit to fwriction : review, please. Thank you. You’ve made my day.

Nicolle Elizabeth checks in with Fictionaut Groups every Friday.

Called “a gripping dystopian thriller” in a starred review in Publishers Weekly, Kit Reed‘s new novel Enclave is about dysfunctional kids trapped in a mountaintop boarding school. The Baby Merchant, is about the man who will do anything for a couple that wants a baby– for a price. With Thinner Than Thou a winner of the A.L.A. Alex Award, and her collection, Dogs of Truth, it is now available in trade paperback. The New York Times Book Review has this to say about her work: “Most of these stories shine with the incisive edginess of brilliant cartoons… they are less fantastic than visionary.” Other novels include @​expectations, Captain Grownup, Fort Privilege, Catholic Girls, J. Eden and Little Sisters of the Apocalypse. As Kit Craig she is the author of Gone, Twice Burned and other psychological thrillers published here and in the UK. A Guggenheim fellow, she is the first American recipient of an international literary grant from the Abraham Woursell Foundation. She’s had stories in, among others, The Yale Review, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Omni and The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Literature.

A member of the board of the Authors League Fund, she serves as Resident Writer at Wesleyan University.

Q (Meg Pokrass): Daniel Handler refers to you as one if his most important early mentors. Can you talk about that, how that happens, what that kind of creative nurturing is about? What it feels like to have helped Daniel and others?

You work with people whose work you like, and it doesn’t take long to recognize the keepers. They’re the ones that are fun to work with, and you like working together. You make great friends and next thing you know they’re also terrific colleagues. Nobody can teach another person how to write. That’s something writers learn on the job, and the big issue is finding out who has the guts and persistence to go the distance.

You’ve spoken about how discovering in your brain a cadence or something external, if I have it right… you have to “hear” your people speaking to find them/create them. Do character’s voices come from inside your mind or from something you notice/overhear that leads you?

Actually, everything I hear, I hear inside my head. It’s an organic process. Paul Horgan once said “style is metabolic,” and I think he’s right. It’s why nobody’s sentences on a page look quite like John O’Hara’s or Scott Fitzgerald’s– or Mark K. Danielewski’s, for that matter, or the loopy cadences of David Foster Wallace. It’s something you HEAR, not something you overheard. I hear my characters coming before I know their names, and certainly before I see them. I think the way they think– I have to know what it sounds like inside their heads.

Where in the process of a new writing endeavor do we define our genre and our audience?

Salespeople do it, critics do it, writers just have to do what they do as best they can, and when it’s done and they come up for air, figure out what it is. Writing to the market is certain death because what you THINK people want is not necessarily what they want. You have to start by satisfying yourself– making something that pleases you.

What do mediocre writing teachers teach students that really messes with their heads?

Anything that sets out a dogmatic HOW-TO! Every writer is different. Everybody works differently. What’s important for a teacher is figuring out what the student is trying to do and helping them figure out how to do it BETTER. Not in any way telling them how to do it.

Do you have tricks to move things through when not feeling as inspired?

Sitting down every day at a regular time and doing what you have to do.

Can you share some of the good habits you have learned over the years which are helpful as a writer…?

Sitting down every day at a regular time and doing what I have to do. That and coffee with caramel latte biscotti.

What is exciting about this time as a writer w/ the internet and what it offers?

We’re all in touch with a lot more people– and a lot faster, which makes a job that is, essentially, a solo performance, a lot less boring. We can sit in front of the magic box doing what we have to do and PRETEND there’s a lot going on in our lives.

What is (conversely) not so good about it?

For entertainment, we don’t even have to run over to the window.

Any suggestions on regular day-to-day craft of writing?

Starting from the beginning of the file every day with a story, or a chapter… making it better until for the time being, you are satisfied that it’s gone as far as you can take it.

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

I read a lot of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene back in the day and that was only the beginning. Since I don’t believe in inspiration, I just read because I can’t NOT read; everything sinks in and sits there, layer on layer of stuff, some good, some bad, but as a reader, I don’t look back and as a writer casting around for the next thing, that’s not where I go fishing.

What is happening now in your writing world?

I’m sitting on page proofs of What Wolves Know, a new short story collection P.S. Publishing is doing in the UK and the US, with copies due in March. They’re doing a limited collectors’ edition, which will be expensive and gorgeous, but for the rest, they’re doing a hardcover trade edition– with a great cover design. I have stories in the Spring ’10 issue of The Kenyon Review, as well as stories in invited anthologies by Ellen Datlow Haunted Legends (edited with Nick Mamatas) and the forthcoming The Naked City, and one past, one coming in Asimov’s SF and one in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I have one more to write before I look around to see what, exactly, the next novel will be.

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.

Nick Ripatrazone—perhaps this country’s biggest promoter of lit mags in the classroom—asked readers “What is the best single issue of any literary magazine?” The responsewas astounding, with some fantastic suggestions: Conjunctions #29, McSweeney’s #32, Tin House #40, New York Tyrant #3, The Lumberyard #4, New American Review #1, TriQuarterly #56, Evergreen Review #1, Vertex #1, Swink #1, BLAST #1—I guess lots of first issues. My own pick was Location #2, an obscure, Donald Barthelme edited, and short-lived publication. Ripatrazone’s best? Granta 8: Dirty Realism. Hard to argue with.

A couple of lit mag panels to enjoy at AWP in Washington DC this coming February: “Beyond Times New Roman: The Literary Journal as Object,” with Versal, 1913, Ninth Letter, Lumberyard, 6×6, and Luna Park—and “Building the Literary Robot: The Lit Journal as New Media,” with Prairie Schooner, Electric Literature, Fictionaut (!), featherproof books, Octopus Magazine & Books, and (again) Luna Park.

And you can follow up these panels with “Journal Porn” at Black Squirrel (the home turf of fantastic readings from local DC lit mag, Barrelhouse). Hang out with “lit mags you’d like to sleep with”: 6×6, 1913, The Lumberyard, Trickhouse, and Versal.

Lewis Hyde—yes, that Lewis Hyde—on lit mags and the CIA:

As for “the organizations,” the most famous was the Congress of Cultural Freedom, which covertly sponsored a highbrow intellectual journal, Encounter; paid the expenses of American and European intellectuals to attend international conferences; and supported the foreign distribution of American literary and cultural journals such as Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, Hudson Review, and Sewanee Review.

“Happiness in Magazines”—both a fantastic notion and a new column on periodicals from The Raconteur.

The Center for Fiction is looking for an intern to work with fiction author and editor Dawn Raffel on a new online literary magazine. Sounds interesting.

Zoetrope: All-Story has a gorgeous—in a new wave way—new issue designed by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, “a short issue themed largely around violence and crime.”

Electric Literature #5 is here. (NSFW?)

Nice new design at The Review Review, great site about lit mags for readers, writers, writer-readers.

And Jaime Karnes strongly recommends the latest issue of BOMB:

BOMB magazine has been publishing conversations between artists, writers, actors, directors, and musicians since 1981. It is where art and culture collide to provide the most intimate, raw, and scarily real portraits of this and the last century’s most influential people. Issue 114 / Winter 2010 most exemplifies this magazine’s mission. From beginning to end, it is quite impossible to set this issue aside.

Every Tuesday, Travis Kurowski presents Luna Digest, a selection of news from the world of literary magazines. Travis is the editor of Luna Park, a magazine founded on the idea that journals are as deserving of critical attention as other artistic works.

Susan Tepper: Phoebe, from your very first sentence of “In The Woods” I was sucked in.  And such a straightforward, unembellished sentence it is:  Everett Finn liked white bread sandwiches.  It felt like an arrow shot through my head.  This Phoebe Wilcox is the next Anne Tyler, I was thinking.  As the author of this story (book) are you aware of similarities in tone, texture, style?  (I ask this from a place of highest praise for both authors).  Also, it’s the kind of thing agents ask writers all the time: Who do you write like?

Phoebe Wilcox: Well, until you asked that question, I’d never made any such analysis because I’d never read Anne Tyler, though Judith Lawrence of Lilly Press had said the same thing about Tyler’s writing and mine.  I actually just now went on Amazon and finally read the first chapter and a half of The Accidental Tourist.  The similarity I noticed was an ability to describe human emotions in an insightful way.  What is not the same is that my writing seems much more poetic, but then I haven’t read much of her at all.  Someone recently asked me if I’d started out as a poet and that is completely accurate; that person had me pegged.

ST: Yep, your poetry flows through this as the river does.  You’re a River Poet, is that correct?  Tell us a little about the River Poets.  I first met you as a poet, in fact I reviewed your chapbook before I even knew about Angels Carry The Sun.  Do you think being a poet has influenced any of the plot choices you made in this fiction?

PW: I never think of myself as being included in anything- it’s like I’m a permanent outsider; however, I guess since I’ve been to a few meetings of the River Poets, I could be considered a River Poet.  They almost had a brawl at their Christmas party over a sexual innuendo, so it’s a little risky going to those meetings!  As far as being a poet and this influencing plot choices?  I don’t think so.  Poetry just flows like blood and plots are like working on a car.  Two separate animals.  And the only way to do it is to climb underneath a junker and tinker, tinker, tinker.  You may get greasy and knick your knuckles.  It’s going to hurt and be sort of boring, or boring several times over, until you find that wire (that twist) that you know will get your junker on the road and on it’s way to being a rip roarin’ nasty-ass machine.  Wanna go ninety with me, Suz?

ST: Most definitely will go ninety with you Phoebe!   The novel is practically brand new and I know you’ve been working your butt off to promote and read and do all the right things.

PW: Yes, and just want to add that my plot choices mostly hinged on my wanting this to be a story of hope.  I wanted there to be a certain innocence to these characters in often-horrendous situations.

ST: Many poets refer to themselves as “outsiders.”  I think it’s almost a kind of poet cachet.  Whatever works, whatever keeps the flow.  I love that you decided to give your novel a specific emotional edge, and that being one of hope.  It is important to many people in these unsettled times to feel there is hope in the books they read and the films they see.  We writers are competing with the visual image all the time.

Phoebe, certain word choices you made, name choices, settings-  led us into a more placid zone than the world of today.  I mean, no one is bombing the twin towers in your book and the airports were easy then.  What was your personal emotional climate during this writing?  Since you decided to go for “hope” did you push away certain darker elements?

PW: I made a lot of choices in that book that would be soothing for people, actually.  Because I personally get fed up with so much cheap glorification of violence, and I truly feel that good writing can be done about any old topic.  A good writer should be able to make a laundromat an exciting place, you know?  My own personal emotional climate when I started that book at nineteen was a place of desperate unrequited love!  I definitely did push away darker emotional elements to lighten the book.  I’d gone, many years after the book was underway, to a writing/art center in Cape Cod, the Fine Arts Work Center, and there met A.J. Verdelle, an author who was instructing the workshop I was taking.  She said that “the first order of revision was tendency.”

So for example if you tend to be depressive and write books that are total downers for everyone, what you need to do is go through the thing and perk it up a bit, so we don’t all read it and go kill ourselves.  Basically, that’s what I did.  I decided to make Flora more upbeat than she was when she first started.  I gave her more of a sense of humor than she had.  In the end I was really happy with the result.  She was stronger, less passive, funny, etc.  I liked her more and felt like readers would find a book that they’d enjoy living inside for a little bit.

ST: I adored Flora.  She has so much life to her and resiliency.  She is a character that can “take us on a journey.”  When I studied writing, that’s what was stressed:  write characters that you and the reader can journey with.   You’ve done that here.

Read “In TheWoods” by Phoebe Wilcox.

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.