Q (Nicolle Elizabeth): Hey Tim. We usually interview group admins but now and then we do a check in with people active in other ways. You run the award winning Dire Reading Series in Cambridge (Boston) and are the co-founder of the Somerville Literary Festival and I think have written eight books. Nick Flynn once said to me that he likened the reading out part of being a writer to being a traveling minstrel, going from township to township, spreading the song, as it were. Why do you feel authors reading their work to an audience is important? How does the experience change our relationship to the work?

A (Timothy Gager): Nick Flynn is a traveling minstrel. He does so many appearances and when you run into him he has a giant cup of coffee and the deepest darkest circles you’d ever want to see—and it’s all from working. He’s a terrific guy to talk to—just awesome. I think readings are important but only if you can connect with the audience. You sell more books at signings and meet and greets but that is because you are connecting with folks. If you’re a really bad live reader you’re less likely to form that bond with the audience as well. It’s funny, some really great writers, if they read poorly do themselves a real disservice. On the flipside I’ve been to great readings, bought the book and ended up feeling tricked.

When I’m reading, all the little things you hate about your work seem even more magnified in your head. Or you might suddenly realize, geez, I used the word “fuck” a lot in that story.

Have you ever seen Mark E. Smith perform in person? How do you feel that the cross-over between punk performances and literature meets if at all? RIP Jim Carroll ye are missed.

That was so early eighties. Ginsberg singing with The Clash. I don’t think Jim Carroll would have made an album without that crossover, without punk emerging on the scene at that time. Catholic Boy was considered a punk record when it came out. Now if you listen, it’s like, ok, really? I liked his work with Rancid. Sometimes I’ll just shout out, “Out come the wolves” in the middle of a supermarket.

Punk is all about attitude and non-acceptance. Bukowski was a punk. I think literature and performance can cross over if the attitude is there. Non-acceptance doesn’t work that well. Very rarely will you get read or have an audience if you alienate them, unless you are iconic because of it.

Start a group for the Dire Reading Series puhlease? Q2 pt2: What is your favorite book this year and why?

I have the mailing list and I have the Facebook invite list. A group for Dire would be another thing I’d have to go to to bother the same people about the event update. It might be cool if I could post a story a month from each of the features. That would be cool. Sorry, I don’t think I’m supposed to be using these questions for brainstorming.

Hmmmm, favorite book of this year? I’ve re-read a lot of novels that I’ve enjoyed in the past and also pieces of fiction or poetry within anthologies. I’ve been busy writing and working on The Somerville News Writers Festival that reading a novel front to back ends up making me feel guilty or something. Oh, I did like the Patti Smith book.

Do you think that people can learn to read well or is it a natural gift thing? (I had a year of bad readings once it was from sudden insecurity, but it melted sort of) What advice can you offer people who would like to work on their readings?

I think people can learn to read better. It’s similar to improving your writing. Get feedback, record yourself at home and listen back. Read slowly and learn to pause at important or humorous moments.

Please tell us more about you your projects and anything else you’d like us to know.

I’m a hoarder of projects. They fill up my brain until I can no longer walk through it. I’ve actually had to scale back at doing all the things I usually do, or volunteering to read other people or guest editing. I feel bad, but I’m in the middle of writing a novel and I don’t want distractions or feel that I’m subliminally avoiding the work I need to do.

Nicolle Elizabeth checks in with Fictionaut Groups every Friday.

James Robison has published many stories in The New Yorker, won a Whiting Grant for his short fiction and a Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his first novel, The Illustrator, brought out by Bloomsbury in the U.K. His work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and Grand Street. The Mississippi Review devoted an entire issue to seven of his short stories. He co-wrote the 2008 film, New Orleans Mon Amour, and has poetry and prose forthcoming or appearing now in The Manchester Review, Story Quarterly, and Smokelong Quarterly, elimae,The Blue Fifth Review, Wigleaf, Commonline, Blast Furnace,The Houston Literary Review, Scythe, Metazen, The Raleigh Review, Corium Magazine and elsewhere. He taught for eight years at the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program, was Visiting Writer at Loyola College of Maryland, was Fiction Editor of The North Dakota Quarterly.

How does your physical, geographical environment affect your writing, if it does?

The qualities associated with place are tools available for a story. I choose a voice because of other variables, then think where to locate the story in the world. “This sounds like a Pennsylvania story, winter, industrial.” Great advantage of having lived all over hell.

Do you listen to music when you write? What allows you to settle in and write optimally?

Music is out! If it’s The Crystals or Surf guitar, my characters start acting up, driving too fast, lipping off, being vain and dressing in aggressive clothes. If it’s Mozart or Bach, I’m intimidated by the design and organization of the music and stop composing myself. Opera sweeps me up so I forget to write. Greek Orthodox Byzantine chants are the closest to okay.
Anyway.

Early Morning, dead quiet, in the first rush of strong coffee is best.

How does teaching effect your own work (if it does)?

Teaching answers needs to communicate complex ideas, get laughs, hold court, right wrongs, control 90 minutes of narrative and therefore, after a happy teaching day, it’s impossible to write. One is sated.

What is your favorite books/or collections of recent times?

Stuff from former students. Bill Lychack, from a class at Connecticut College, has a new one, The Architect of Flowers, and I got a glimpse of part of that book and it’s great. Bruce Marchart, from a Houston class, has a new novel, The Wake of Forgiveness, causing large buzzings and hot feedback in New York. I recommend Marti Leimbach’s The Man from Saigon. Lots more.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

I haven’t grown up enough to say. Nothing’s been ruled out.

What do you think of practicing multiple disciplines as a writer/ not limiting oneself to writing as a form of expression?

I draw and used to draw for a living but I could not be a fine artist, visual variety, and a good writer. I think the degree of concentration required for one discipline, (in my case at least), is so mind-eating that there isn’t enough self left to give to another discipline.

How do you come up with ideas for stories?

A story must have three ingredients, like, oral surgery, Puccini’s Turandot, and divorce.

Or.

Hurricane science, a niece, and physics.

If I have three large thoughts, intuitions or detections about three varied things, I’ll launch a story.

How is book culture changing? What do you notice in this regard?

I know only that people are reading, reading as much as ever, writing and reading and engaged by the processes. That’s what matters. As to the means of conveyance-I don’t know or care much.

How does the truth make us odd? The Flannery O’Conner quote is: “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.”

O’Connor said she pitied anyone trying to write about Simone Weil, and in the same sense, I know it’s a mistake to try to decode O’Connor. But, her statement means to me. Before you can be a writer you must make it new and the only way to do that is to run a harrowing, fearless, ruthless self audit. A psychological, emotional, moral inventory. You must know who you are, without delusions or self-deception, and what you find is apt to scare the spit out of you. But that is the truth you must accept and the truth from which you will construct every sentence. To that degree, writers are odd, I suppose. I don’t think we are set free by our truths, but then no one is. We are set free to make an alternative word world — an odd but imperative impulse, don’t you think?

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. She blogs at http://megpokrass.com.

If you have a Kindle, Nook, Kobo Reader or other eReader, you can now subscribe to the latest Fictionaut stories and have them delivered directly to your device in full length. Here’s how:

1. Install Calibre. Calibre is free eBook management software that can convert popular formats and also allows you to subscribe to any site that offers an RSS feed. Calibre is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
2. Download the custom Fictionaut Calibre recipe to your computer.
3. When you first start Calibre, it will guide you through a setup dialog to connect to your eReader. Then, select “Add a Custom News Source” from the “Fetch News” menu.
4. In the “Add Custom News Source” dialog, select “Load recipe from file” and open the Fictionaut recipe you downloaded.
5. If you like, you can open “Fetch News” > “Schedule News Download” and select “Fictonaut” under the “Custom” listing to schedule the download — say, once a day.
6. That’s it. If you scheduled the download (and leave Calibre running), new Fictionaut stories will be automatically transferred to your eReader according to the schedule you set. Alternatively, you can open Caliber and select “Fetch News” to manually start a transfer.

We previously mentioned Instapaper as a great way to move selected stories to your eReader.  We’d love to hear how the Fictionaut Calibre recipe works for you — please let us know if you have questions, comments, or improvements.

Update: the recipe now also includes the latest posts from the Fictionaut blog.

Monday Chat is a new bi-weekly series in which Susan Tepper has a conversation with a Fictionaut writer about one of his or her stories. For this first installment, Susan talked to Kathy Fish about her story “Snow.” Susan is Assistant Editor of Istanbul Literary Review and hosts FIZZ, a reading series at KGB Bar.

Susan Tepper: Kathy, when I read your story “Snow“ posted here on Fictionaut I was spellbound (snowbound)?  It’s a little miracle of a story, and a perfect example of the narrative being driven by “place.”  The snow in this story ebbs and flows with such ferocity.  How did you come to begin this way?

Kathy Fish: I live in Colorado and we tend to get freak snowstorms as you probably know. In March of 2003 we got one of those “Blizzard of the Century” kind of deals. The area I live in got seven feet of snow. Anyway, my husband was out of the country and my oldest daughter was in NYC for a school trip so I was home and housebound with my other children for several days. Many of the images from this story come directly from that storm.  It really had this surreal, apocalyptic feel to it. The story arose out of my desire to answer the question, “What if it never stops?” And I went from there.

ST: I know that feeling.  Winter can be so foreboding as well as beautiful.  You really worked that dark metaphor in “Snow.”  Your first line “The snow started late Friday afternoon and everyone struggled driving home.”  The use of “struggle” makes a strong set up line for your opening, and then you give us: cars moved funereally, garage doors opening like mouths, ten inches, still coming down, up against the north sides of houses. To quote just a few.  The story bombards us.  That fear of being swallowed up by the storm that will be unending.  A life-changing storm.  Because it did change things for these people in this place, right?

KF: Yes, I wanted to set that tone of foreboding from the outset, that life as they knew it was never going to be the same again. And I did want the story to bombard the reader the way a storm does. The story appears in New South as one extremely long paragraph (I broke it up for F’nauter’s eyes). I remember when I workshopped it I kept getting the same feedback, i.e. “You have heard of paragraphs, right?” But I stubbornly stuck to the structure I had. I was ridiculously confident that that was how the story needed to be told. Happily, the editor of New South agreed.

ST: I can see the one paragraph format being really effective for this story in that it bolsters that relentlessness of the snow and the after-snow.  It gives no breathing space, kind of sucks us into its white drifts.  The relentlessness that never gives an inch.  But before Armageddon strikes, you make a big transition!  You create a sort of Winter Wonderland with phrasings such as: “Finally on Sunday just before dusk, the snow stopped; they waved to each other; called isn’t this something; people marvelled at the pristine beauty; white snow against a china blue plate sky. You lulled us into this scene off a Hallmark card.  It’s going to be OK after all.  In fact you give us better than OK.  They all go shopping for delicacies and wines and goodies.

KF: Ha, right! I wanted to toy with these people a little bit. Lay out a little hope. And that’s the sort of psychological cycle that sets in. First people are rather bolstered, loving the challenge of the weather, all Man vs. Nature and everything. We can do this! It is almost a feeling of euphoria. And then, yeah, it keeps coming and coming and there’s this transition to a gallows humor and then no humor at all and then…complete insanity, ha.

ST: Kathy, I find it so interesting that you, as the author, are aware you were “toying” with these characters.  And that you are willing to share that with us!  What fun!  Because the story, in its shifting darks to lights, then back to darks, is fun!  Take this line:  “All the snowmen now had large, erect penises and rictus smiles on their faces.”  Care to share again?

KF: You know, once in Estes Park, I saw these tiny, aroused snowmen all in a row on a fence rail. That’s the kind of stuff we as writers use, right? To me that image in the story was an indicator that things on this little suburban cul-de-sac were going downhill fast.

ST: It’s a fabulous image.  How lucky you were to have seen that and remembered!  Again the snow drives your narrative.  Well I won’t give away the rest of your story except to say that it transitions once more and turns very dark, indeed.  It’s a fascinating, beautiful story.

Read “Snow“ by Kathy Fish.

Q (Nicolle Elizabeth): SAM hihihihihi You are Admin at the Blue Five Notebook Group here on Fictionaut. Please tell us all about the group and Blue Fifth Review. History, five year plan, I have a policy about not asking questions I wouldn’t answer myself and so if there was a divorce involved you can leave that part out.

A (Sam Rasnake): I decided to start the group in anticipation of the new series – Blue Five Notebook – from Blue Fifth Review, an online journal of poetry and art. The original series of issues from Blue Fifth, beginning in January of 2001, appeared twice yearly, with supplement themed issues included every other year. This month the final regular issue – Fall 2010 – will appear. There’s also a broadside series – four poems published quarterly. Broadside #20 – also appearing this month – a poem by Kathleen Kirk, will be the final produced work from that series. Because the archives will remain active, readers will be able to access in the future all issues and broadsides.

As of January 2011, Blue Five Notebook will expand the focus of BFR’s publication of poetry and art to include flash as well. I’m excited about this addition. Each month five works of poetry and flash will appear. Since each issue will contain only five works, the series should be a strong reading experience. The new home will be http://bluefifthreview.wordpress.com/ – on WordPress.

I want Blue Fifth Review to have a presence at Fictionaut, and this group will be a means to inform FN readers of matters relative to the Blue Five Notebook series as well as be a means for writers to post their works that have been published in BFN and other venues as well.

What are three literary journals (among the many) that Blue Fifth admires, adores, is proud to be a contemporary of, is a faithful subscriber of, etc?

Poets / Artists, edited by Didi Menéndez
BOXCAR Poetry Review, edited by Neil Aitken
Wigleaf, edited by Scott Garson

How’s the Group going so far? Positive vibes? No arguing. I will so turn this car around if people are arguing. (Unless it’s good spirited arguing then you’re on your own.)

Too early to tell – but I’m pleased so far. I’ve received a number of submissions from FN writers for next year’s issues. I’m looking forward to works posted here that have appeared in the series.

One poet, one flash writer, one painter, go.

I’m terrible with lists – the limitations – though I do them all the time.
Poet: Elizabeth Bishop or Matsuo Bashō
Flash Writer: Joseph Young or Kathy Fish or Meg Pokrass
Painter/ artist: Edward Hopper or Francesca Woodman (photographer)

Please tell us more about yourself and anything else you would like to talk about here. According to Chinese Astrology, this was the year of the Tiger, I am truly looking forward to it turning to a new one, actually.

My work has appeared in numerous journals, print and online. In December 2010, Finishing Line Press will publish my fourth poetry collection, a chapbook, Inside a Broken Clock. This work is part two of Tales of Brave Ulysses, a poetry series of six collections – each one chapbook length – with a focus on the arts. In addition to my roles of editor for Blue Fifth Review and associate editor for Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, I teach creative writing and literature at Virginia Intermont College.

Nicolle Elizabeth checks in with Fictionaut Groups every Friday.

Bill Yarrow is the author of Wrench (erbacce-press, 2009) and Wound Jewelry (new aesthetic, 2010). His poems have appeared in Poetry International, PANK, DIAGRAM, blossombones, Arsenic Lobster, Pif Magazine, The Centrifugal Eye, Rio Grande Review, BLIP, Ramshackle Review, and other literary magazines. He twice won 1st place in The Academy of American Poets Prize competition at Swarthmore College, his poem “After the Shark” was cited as an “outstanding poem” in Pushcart Prize VIII: Best of the Small Presses, and his poem “Andalusia” was nominated by Up the Staircase for a 2010 Best of the Net award. He teaches film, writing, and literature at Joliet Junior College.

What poetry or book of poetry/or prose do you feel closest to?

Poetry: Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” that agent provocateur of poetry, for the profundity of its conceit, for its aphoristic brilliance, for its brave mixing of genres, for its messianic earnestness, for its rhetorical lunacy, for its invincible mission.

Prose: Henry Miller’s The Rosy Crucifixion, wait, I mean Beckett’s Watt, no change that–Hamsun’s Mysteries, that is to say, Machado de Assis’s Epitaph of a Small Winner, not forgetting Byron’s “Detached Thoughts”, not ignoring Babel’s Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories nor Kawabata’s House of Sleeping Beauties, all the while remaining a huge fan of Barthelme’s City Life, how could I forget Robbe-Grillet’s Project for a Revolution in New York? I’m beginning to suspect that I don’t have one answer to this part of the question, Meg. Maybe you noticed.

Do you have a mentor/do you mentor?

Well, I’m a teacher. Teaching is or at least seems inseparable from mentoring. At least one definition of a mentor is a teacher. Perhaps a better way to say this is that a teacher becomes the mentor to those students who stay students after the course is over. I maintain and treasure my relationships with many of my former students.

I don’t have and never had a formal mentor (thought I studied with a number of famous poets), just friends whose opinions I value and to whom I send my work. I guess I’m a mentor for those who send me their work and value my opinion. Fictionaut itself, if we look at in a certain way, is one gigantic mentor network. Maybe your question is really about who pushed me, who prodded me, who turned me into a writer. I guess my answer to your first question is also my answer to your second question.

How do you stay creative? What are your tricks for getting unstuck?

Creativity is a habit. You have to make it habitual. I don’t mean writing everyday; I mean being creative every day. I rarely get stuck. I like the idea of creativity expounded in Henry Miller’s “The Angel is My Watermark” in Black Spring and in these lines from “Jabberwhorl Cronstadt” in the same volume: “The poem is the present which you can’t define. You live it. Anything is a poem if it has time in it. You don’t have to take a ferry-boat or go to China to write a poem. The finest poem I ever lived was a kitchen sink.” I mean creativity in that expanded sense.

In terms of how to get unstuck, well, I think you have the right idea with your writing prompts being a string of unrelated words. Create a puzzle like that or of any kind and the drive to find a solution starts the engine which takes the car of imagining pretty far down the road of production. I am also a proponent of Rimbaud’s derangement of the senses though for me it’s not the cliché of drugs or alcohol; it’s exhaustion. When I literally can’t think straight, often it’s then I’m best able to write. The key is getting to an altered state and there are a million ways to get to one. Balzac used coffee (so much it killed him.) Schiller used the smell of moldy apples in his desk to get himself going. Hemingway always stopped before he was ready to stop and thus insured his ability to pick up where he left off. I don’t advocate the use of drugs or alcohol, particularly not to stimulate creativity — anyway I don’t find the “creativity” produced by alcohol or drugs very interesting. Another way to get unstuck — read Rimbaud!

What are your favorite literary websites?

Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, UbuWeb — I know that’s not exactly what you meant, but I derive a lot of literary pleasure from my visits there. I visit many literary websites (I don’t want to name some and through oversight slight others) and they’re all interesting, but the volume of admirable work, when taken as a whole, is overwhelming and unceasing. I can’t keep up. I visit promiscuously whenever I can.

How has being part of Fictionaut affected you as a reader/writer?

Being at Fictionaut, I’ve come to love flash, feel plugged in to what is happening NOW in writing, have discovered new wonderful writing, writers, and PEOPLE (I think Fictionaut is more about people than it is about writing), have sharpened my taste, have enlarged my capacity for appreciation, and have been humbled by the honest infectious generosity of the Fictionaut community. As a writer, I mostly post, as Sam Rasnake does, only what I’ve had published, so I don’t feel the venue has affected the kinds of things I write. I do, however, look forward to sharing my work on Fictionaut and seeing which pieces swim and which sink and trying to understand why.

Discuss briefly the good and/or bad aspects of being a writer in the internet era.

It’s all good. Easy access to publishing information, a proliferation of magazine and journal websites, no more printing, no more envelopes, no more stamps, email submissions, submission managers, Submishmash, notification records, publisher promotion on the web of writers, broad or coterie dissemination of one’s work, rubbing shoulders with everyone. Big tent by the big river. It’s all good.

What are you working on now?

I write about 3 poems per week. At any one time I have between 60-80 poems out at magazines, often with long return times, six months to a year. I’m not in a hurry. When I hear, I hear. If I get rejected, I take the rejection as an opportunity for revision. When a piece comes back to me, I look at it with ruthless (and I mean ruthless!) objectivity. Nothing in it is sacrosanct. Anything can change and change radically. Tear down and build back up. “First dirty, then clean,” said Beckett. I’m constantly tinkering-even with my published pieces. I’m shopping (but then who of us isn’t?) for a publisher for a volume of my poems. Current title: Florid Psychosis.

I wrote a work about ten years ago called The Distillation. It was a collection of 986 original aphorisms. I’ve been raiding it for my Twitter project-distilling The Distillation (as it were) into Twitter-sized saying and posting one a day. I’m coming up on two years now.

I also do a lot with film and create my own film stills from public domain films. I have two film blogs (“Bill Yarrow Film Blog: All Things Cinema” and “Close Encounters of the Noir Kind“) so some of my creative energy is expended there.

I also do scholarly work. But that’s another story!

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. She blogs at http://megpokrass.com.

Rae Bryant. Taking over.

Q (Nicolle Elizabeth): What it do, Rae. What it do? You have a Moon Milk Review group going on here at Fictionaut. Please tell us all about MMR.

RB: MMR is the canvas between the lines. A salon collective of literature, art, comedy, performance, essays…. We like what we like and tend to bristle at the idea of being labeled as this or that. If the story or the poem works, it works. If the visual grabs, it grabs. Surprise us, make us squirm, enlighten, dig, make the reader continue reading with gripping moments, crisp beautiful prose and lines. We are an eclectic group, and I would be lost without Will Grofic, Poetry Editor, and Gabriela Romeri, Associate Editor. They are amazing and talented and dedicated editors/writers. We’ve also been blessed to have fantastic mentors–Richard Peabody, Gargoyle Magazine, and the Barrelhouse Boys–Dave Housley, Dan Brady, Aaron Pease, Mike Ingram, Joe Killiany.

What sort of work does MMR look for in its authors?

We tend to enjoy the quirk. Realism with twists, magic realism, surrealism. We’re not a genre market. We’re all about the story. Anchor us into characters we want to know, we need to know. Characters we will not forget.

Did you know that it is predicted that Neil Armstrong’s footprint on the moon may last up to another 10 million years?

I was going to say 9.5, but if you say so… I’m so glad you brought this up. We had sent Armstrong a contract and a big check to do a promotional video for us, from the moon, wearing a thong over his spacesuit. MMR written on his Johnson. We’ve not heard back yet. Neil, if you’re reading, the offer is still good. Whenever you can get up there, again, buddy. No rush.

Please tell us more about you, your projects, your boogie, Rae. What runs your boogie?

I’ll tell you a secret. Sometimes I run my boogie when no one’s looking. I’ll put on some Lightnin’ Hopkins (“Coffee House Blues” is my fav) or Stevie Ray Vaughan, and sway through the house like a dance hall girl. Good for the soul. Honestly, my family makes my boogie run. My husband, Patrick, and two children, Tyler and Maddie, are the foundation and bones and blood of my every day. My boogie also likes to wine and dine and read a good story about unlikely quirks in very real and optimistically tragic settings. I’m lavishly re-crushing on Nabokov right now. Lolita is one of my favorite novels, optimistically tragic. This is what generally fuels my own writing, the optimistically tragic. Currently, I have several short stories out at such places as Blip Magazine, kill author, decomP, Foundling Review, Annalemma, The Medulla Review, Bartleby Snopes, and Caper Literary Journal, among others. More to come at PANK and Gargoyle Magazine and other venues. I’m really very surprised and honored that a few stories have been nominated for Dzanc’s Best of the Web 2011 and Sundress’ Best of the Net 2010. Just finished a review of Gary Percesepe and Susan’s Tepper’s novel, What May Have Been, for Puerto del Sol. In my spare time, I’m writing a novel about an accidental Manson family who owns a knock off Wal-Mart store (because that’s just good wholesome fodder there), finalizing the print issue for MMR, guest editing at Smokelong Quarterly, revving up for thesis at JHU in the Spring. I’ll be out and about reading at KGB bar in NYC on November 24th and a few readings at AWP in February including A Capella Zoo and Literary Death Match. Other than that, I plan to sleep and cook elaborate meals for my family, because we all like to eat when we’re hungry.

Nicolle Elizabeth checks in with Fictionaut Groups every Friday.

Charles Baxter has been schooling us for a number of years now. I was talking to a friend the other day about his story “Snow,” and she finished my sentence–we both LOVE that story. And who can forget “Fenstad’s Mother,” which is lodged somewhere in my untidy brain under the label “essential.” I taught his novel Feast of Love once (don’t bother with the movie, go read the book). And so it goes. Baxter writes with a lyrical beauty  linked to a strong set of enduring social values. His scenes move seamlessly from the personal to the political. He is one of those writers I sometimes breathe a silent prayer for, as in–please, please, stay with us, keep writing, please let me hear from you.

We’ve heard from him. We’re proud to feature his work here at Fictionaut.

Charles Baxter’s Introduction:

I wrote “Gershwin’s Second Prelude” in my mid-30s, at a time when I was contemplating the idea of quitting the writing life altogether. I had finished three novels that no one wanted to publish, and to say that I was down in the dumps would understate the matter. A friend had asked us to store his spinet piano in our house for a year (he was off in Europe), and so for weeks I tried to learn Gershwin’s second prelude. Couldn’t do that either: the opening chords were too wide for my left hand. I wrote the story to buck myself up: it’s about being brave in the face of multiple failures.

Read “Gershwin’s Second Prelude” on Fictionaut.

Previously on Line Breaks:

• “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.

Sara Lippmann is a freelance writer and editor. Her fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from places like BLIP (formerly Mississippi Review), Potomac Review, Our Stories,Word Riot, Slice, Storyglossia, NANO Fiction, Big Muddy and elsewhere. It has also been included in Sex Scene: An Anthology, Mamas & Papas (City Works Press), and two other anthologies from Wising Up Press. She is a graduate of the New School’s MFA program and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Q (Meg Pokrass): Do you have a mentor?

I wouldn’t say mentor, but a number of people, including some inspiring writers, have helped to whip me into shape. My 11th grade English teacher once counted the number of times I said “like” during a class presentation; in college, Meredith Steinbach took one look at me hedging around my fiction thesis and told me to sit up straight. Dani Shapiro, my advisor in grad school, instilled me with the courage to write and stick by “what is uniquely yours.” And I loved it when Jhumpa Lahiri, on the topic of submissions, told our workshop she used to drop her envelopes in the mail (when nothing was done online) and go meet a friend at some swank Boston hotel for a cocktail. She taught me to celebrate the simple fact that I’ve put myself out there, and then, to forget about the outcome. I’m taking a class with Meg Wolitzer now and she continues to press the imperative. She has these wonderful sayings, like, what’s the temperature of your story? I could listen to her all day.

More than anyone, though, it’s the members of my writing group – my keen first readers – whose feedback I trust and whose support I find invaluable.

What books do you feel closest to? What writers? A reading list would be cool.

I attended a Jewish slumber camp as a child. Every Saturday stories were read aloud to us: I.B. Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool”, Malamud’s “The Jewbird.” Subjected to the same traditional tales summer after summer, I’d pick at fallen pine needles and only half-listen but there was no denying their hold on me. This is the magic of craft: Voice, setting, dialog, character. Humor! Then I read Goodbye, Columbus – and learned, hey, characters, they don’t have to be all that likeable. Black Tickets fed me the writing bug, but what got me hooked were the modernists – Stein, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, etc. For a while I was so hopped up on their language and style, the way they pushed and tugged at form, I read little else. They are still important to me.

A list follows one’s personal trajectory and is incomplete in nature. That said, there are many works that continue to touch a nerve. They stay.

Short Stories

“Hills Like White Elephants” – Ernest Hemingway

“Fat” -Raymond Carver

“Perfect Day for Bananafish” – J.D. Salinger

“Quiet, Please” – Aimee Bender

“The Best of Everything” – Richard Yates

“The Hunger Artist” – Franz Kafka

“Innocence” – Harold Brodkey

“Something Nice” – Mary Gaitskill

“The Things They Carried” -Tim O’Brien

Collections: Julie Orringer’s How to Breathe Underwater, Joyce’s Dubliners

Novellas/Novels

Goodbye, Columbus – Philip Roth

As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner

Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

Ulysses – James Joyce

The Waves – Virginia Woolf

Revolutionary Road – Richard Yates

The Wife – Meg Wolitzer

As for flash and micro fiction, forms I’ve come to really only through Fictionaut, Kathy Fish does the short better than anyone, including Jayne Anne Phillips circa Black Tickets – and Meg, you’ve cornered the flash.

What are your favorite literary websites?

The Rumpus, The Millions, The Nervous Breakdown, BLIP, Fictionaut (of course)

What are you working on now? You can talk about BLIP….

I put together an issue of BLIP with Gary Percesepe. The theme was accommodations. Some work we solicited, but most of it came over the transom, and we were thrilled to feature stories from a number of talented Fictionauters. I’m also helping out Erik Smetana at Stymie, heading up nonfiction. We’re doing a baseball issue for Spring.

Stories, hopefully a longer fiction. Making school lunches.

What suggestions do you have for when you feel creatively stuck? Do you have any unblocking secrets?

Dani Shapiro once told me that when Grace Paley was her teacher at Sarah Lawrence, Paley said she wrote in the bath. Of course, Paley didn’t mean she was soaking in the tub with dripping wet pages. What she was referring to – and what Dani passed along to me – is the space around the work. The time that you’re not physically writing, that’s all part of it, and as writers, we need to grant and honor that, too, as part of the process.

Right now, it’s enough of a trick to secure time to write, let alone carve out space around it, but I have this time each day when I walk to pick up my kids from school. Roughly twenty minutes there, and – depending on whether or not my daughter conks out in the stroller – another twenty minutes to get my son. I’ve “written” a whole bunch of stuff during these quiet, uninterrupted spells through my neighborhood.

Dreams also unlock doors. It’s musical beds in my house these days, so I’m not sleeping great but have in the past woken up with stories – or at least whole chunks – delivered on my pillow.

I also find that different media yield different results. As much as I love my laptop, I like to scribble it out, fast, on the subway or while waiting for a train. I’m often surprised by the fluidity that comes from pen and paper. Same thing when I tinker with twitter fiction. How does that 140-character box drive narrative? It’s interesting.

So, switch it up. If you’ve been staring at the screen for a while, kick it longhand. Or print out a copy of what you’re working on and see how your words play on the physical page. Try reading out loud. It’s astonishing the stuff you pick up on, the perspective you glean.

But, maybe, all you really need is a bath. A walk. That nap.

What is the most exciting thing (to you) about the online/internet literary scene/community?

Community, for one. All a writer needs is a reader, and FN delivers a widely diverse, talented and supportive readership. Here we are, reading and responding, interacting with and feeding each other’s work in a thoughtful and intimate way. If this were around ten years ago I don’t know I would have pursued that MFA. At the same time we are a large bunch, which can get overwhelming, so it’s been helpful for me to ground the virtual exchange in a real live one. I imagine many people here have done, or do, this. Julie Innis is practically my neighbor but I might never have met her it weren’t for Fictionaut. For connections like these I am so grateful.

Clearly, the proliferation online is changing how we read and what we read and the ways we relate to text. I know people say no one reads anymore but who knows what’s true. People who might not pick up a print journal are discovering fiction online. That’s for sure, and that alone is exciting.

Twitter, done right, can be so instructive. When I was in-house at a magazine – in the 90s – the PR assistant had to provide “the dailies,” a thankless and grueling task, which required her to pore through all the papers snipping and Xeroxing bits and articles and gossips of interest to the staff. These digests would be stapled and delivered on our desks by lunchtime, warm from the copier. Twitter is like that. All these smart, informed people are linking to industry articles or reviews or poems or stories I’m either too lazy or clueless to find – and with a click, it’s all right there – I’m schooled.

What can we, as writers, do to help each other the most?

It’s tough business being inside our heads all day, and I don’t know what it looks like inside yours but mine can be isolating and drafty and brutally cold, which is ironic, right, because at the end of it, what we’re really trying to do is connect. Read and be read. That is what makes us. I think we do have a responsibility as a community to care, to stay invested, to lift each other up, because, god, if we don’t do it for each other, then who?

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. She blogs at http://megpokrass.com.

While we normally save actual personal check-ins for ye olde Fictionaut bloggeshop, I figured, we have a new member, who should start a Group here for her literary journal Gigantic Sequins. Then I thought, she is such a cool lady perhaps Fictionaut would like to know more about Gigantic Sequins. At like 27 this woman is a poet, professor, publisher, was the best addition The Strand ever had and she let me stay on her couch when I was between apartments. She’s a powerhouse yet with this ethereal hippie feel and will always be cooler than me.

Q (Nicolle Elizabeth): Kimberly Ann Josephine Southwick, you are a poet and editor, a bookstore maven and professor. Please suggest to us three books we should read this fall and why.

I think that certain books should be read in certain seasons. Read On Beauty by Zadie Smith — if you have yet to read this book, you must. It concerns a family and a college. Fall has that big-breath-of-fresh-cold-air back-to-school feel to it. So does this novel. Read Just Kids by Patti Smith because it is the memoir of the year, and 2010 is winding down. This memoir is poignant and precise and moving. It made me miss New York. And finally, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. Though this book is classified as a children’s book, it’s worth every page for any reader, despite their age. I have a distinct memory of finishing this book hiding in the literary non-fiction section of the Strand where I shelved books, crying a little bit and trying not to– but it was just so good, I couldn’t help it. It’s spooky, and just in time for Halloween.

Please tell us about Gigantic Sequins. Get glittery with it.

Gigantic Sequins is a print-only literary arts magazine. I always wanted to start a litmag since I’ve always been involved in them at school, so I did. We have had a rotating staff of usually around four people. It started with just me and my friend Shereen– had it not been for her, Gigantic Sequins may have never gotten out of my head and into ink and paper. Now, it’s me; a poetry editor, Sophie Klahr, who lives in TX; a fiction editor, Zach Yontz, who dwells in Chicago; and our designer, currently, is Jordan M. Tavenner, a Bostonian. It’s fun to have a print-only mag with an internet-entwined staff. When I was living in NYC, my staff all also lived in NYC. It’s a challenge, but we get it done. Our 2.1 issue is going to print at the end of October, and we’ll be reopening for submissions in November. Oh, and our mascot/logo for Gigantic Sequins is two semi-colons, one backwards. The semi-colon is my favorite mark of punctuation.

Do you predict E-readers having an effect on the indie literary journal or not at all? If yep, how?

In the letter to the editor of Gigantic Sequins 2.1, hot off the press early November, I talk about how important internet journals and people who read them are nowadays to literature. But the internet is a different market than the print journal. It’s two different things– to see your work in print online is thrilling, but there’s something kinesthetically thrilling about holding a ‘zine that houses you or your friends’ work. E-zines are fantastic and I am a frequent reader of some (elimae and Sawbuck, to name my two favorites), but I am strictly for keeping my literary arts journal to print and print only. There’s just something about ink and paper… I may have just quoted myself. The two may affect each other, but I don’t think it’s a fight. I think the internet is good for journals, either way.

What was the recipe for that tofu soup you made for people when I was staying at your house?

Ah, Miso Soup, yes, wonderful stuff. Miso soup is probably the easiest soup to make, ever. You have to buy some fancy stuff for it, though. You need to buy miso paste, any brand works. There are different “kinds”. I like the white kind. It lasts forever. Seriously. Also, you have to buy dried kombu, which is kelp and also lasts forever. Recipe: Soak 3 pieces of kombu in room temperature water for 15/20 minutes. Then, remove kombu and cut into bite-sized pieces. Chop up a few stalks of scallions and a handful or so of mushrooms (shitake works best?) and cook them in the kombu-broth with sea salt for 20 minutes or so. Chop up half a block of tofu into cubes and add it to the soup and cook it for five minutes. Then, put the soup in bowls and stir in one tablespoon of miso for each bowl, more or less depending on taste. And voila. It’s important that you don’t COOK the miso. Don’t ask why. I forget. Just don’t cook it. Add it to hot stuff, instead.

Please tell Fictionaut more about you, your work, your projects, anything you’d like us to know or not know here.

Currently, I teach at Rowan University and The University of Phoenix. At Rowan, I teach a grammar class where we sentence diagram in order to prove that we understand each part of a sentence. Teaching this class has made me the best copyeditor I know, which is both good and bad. I teach various classes at Phoenix, including an Intro to Composition class and currently I am teaching a Multicultural Literature class. I have poems enough for another small chapbook to come out, but I am busy with teaching and haven’t sent it out as much as I should. I really love to bake pies and cook soup and write letters. And I love teaching. I hope to have a full-time job someday teaching Reading and Writing Poetry classes. I’m on my way…

Nicolle Elizabeth checks in with Fictionaut Groups every Friday.