Jane Ciabattari is the author of the critically acclaimed short-story collection Stealing the Fire. Her short stories have been published in KBG Bar Lit, LOST magazine, Chautauqua magazine, Literary Mama, VerbSap, Ms. Magazine (nominated for O.Henry and Pushcart awards), The North American Review, Denver Quarterly, Hampton Shorts (which honored her with an Editors’ Choice STUBBY Award), The East Hampton Star, Blueline, Caprice and Redbook, which nominated her for a National Magazine Award. Her story “Payback Time” was a Pushcart Prize “special mention.” Her story “How I Left Onandaga County,” appears in the anthology The Best Underground Fiction (November 2006, Stolen Time Press) and also was a Pushcart Prize special mention, as was her story “MamaGodot,” which appeared online in Verbsap and in the summer issue of Chautauqua magazine. She has been awarded grants for fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, among others. She has taught at Knox College, Columbia, New York University, and in summer writing workshops at Taos, Squaw Valley, Chautauqua, among others. She serves as president of the National Book Critics Circle and is a regular reviewer for NPR.org, The Daily Beast and dozens of other publications.

You can read her story “Wintering at Montauk” on Fictionaut.

How have you used your background as a journalist in writing fiction?

As a journalist, I’ve interviewed a hundreds of people, including Sherman Alexie, Isabel Allende, Halle Berry, Jimmy Carter, John Cusack, Aretha Franklin, B.B. King, Sly Stallone, Archibishop Desmond Tutu, Renee Zellweger… Just being around so many public people has broadened my sense of the mannerisms and behaviors I could give my characters in fiction. I also traveled widely as a journalist, and have used Shanghai, Mexico, El Salvador, Montreal, and other places as settings for fiction. I hope to pull together a story set in Havana. And the skills you develop–researching, digging into material, asking questions–are as useful in fiction as in journalism.

Sometimes I’ve developed stories based on experiences I’ve had as a journalist.

I was in Los Angeles to cover the Golden Globes awards when the Northridge Earthquake hit around 4 am. It was a 6.7 quake with the greatest ground acceleration of any quake in North America and lots of aftershocks. LA went black. Freeways and buildings and bridges collapsed. Fire broke out. Thousands were injured. The hotel evacuated us into the parking lot of the Viper Room next door. Later I wrote a short story about a boy, a girl, and a dog who meet during an earthquake in LA. It’s called “Aftershocks.” It’s one of the stories in my second collection-in-progress (published at KGB Bar Lit.)  Another story in the collection I’m working on draws upon research I did on meth addiction. “Arabella Leaves” was published in Ms. and nominated for O. Henry and “best of” anthologies.

Which came first, journalism or fiction?

Fiction. I was a creative writing major at Stanford, but I assumed I could never make a living writing fiction. I worked as a Sunday magazine magazine editor in San Francisco and at night I went to graduate school in creative writing at San Francisco State. After my husband and son and I moved to New York I worked first as an editor and then as a weekly columnist, covering international affairs, Washington politics and the movies.

Have you learned anything as a book critic that has helped in writing fiction?

More than I can say. I once heard Colm Tóibín say that “writers are part magpie, part vulture.” That’s it. As writers we gather what we need while we work from what is around us. That means all the books I’ve read to review have had the potential to teach me.

• Some of the lessons I’ve learned reviewing books:
• Great writers can write bad books.
• First-time authors can fail in a variety of ways, and succeed in as many ways.
• Rare indeed are the writers who bring something fresh to literature.

And I have learned specific craft lessons–about point of view, about structure– through analyzing the work of our best writers. I tell my students with craft questions to look at their favorite authors for examples of how to do it right.

Do you shift back and forth, or focus on one thing at a time?

I’m a creature of deadlines. I’m usually working on a batch of things at once. Right now I’m revising a novel, finishing a second collection of short stories, meeting deadlines for NPR.org, The Daily Beast, Oprah, the Los Angeles Times, the list goes on and on. I like what I do and I work six days a week at least and mostly find it great fun.

What are your favorite websites?

I love Electric Literature, their cool videos, the range of work they publish. Fictionaut is a gem. I read Stephen Elliott of The Daily Rumpus daily. The Collagist is doing interesting things. Granta of course. Guernica. PEN. Narrative Magazine. Larry Dark’s blog connected with the Story Prize. The Nervous Breakdown. I miss Maud (her blog has been quiet of late.) I think NPR and The Daily Beast are doing good book coverage online, and not just because I write for them. The Guardian, my hometown paper the NY Times, the Los Angeles Times (Carolyn Kellogg is particularly sharp), The Millions, The Quarterly Conversation, Open Letters, the list goes on and on. I bookmark things like the live web cam at Maverick’s to remind me there is an ocean out there, and mountains, and a natural world….

What inspires you as a fiction writer when you are feeling less than creative?

Music. Usually music I connect with a character I’m writing about. Or fragrance. Seriously. Lemon grass. Coppertone. Roasting chicken. Espresso. Anything with a strong fragrance can get me into a place I’m writing about. Or travel. I get a lot of story ideas on the road. I started “How I Left Onandaga County,” my short story about a lap dancer turned facialist, while driving through Onandaga County on the way back from teaching at Chautauqua. (This story is on Fictionaut, FYI) It’s a monologue really…Ms. published it, and it was reprinted in an anthology called The Best Underground Fiction and was a Pushcart special mention.

Do you have any unblocking tricks?

Find an object–a key, a pair of scissors, a sprig of basil, a purple and green dragon, a log of goat cheese, a cellphone, a rubber band–and write several paragraphs about it. This is an exercise I use when I teach. I do the exercise along with the class, and slide the passage right into the work I’m doing myself.

What is your favorite thing about social media (FB, Twitter, etc.)

It’s fast. With Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, I can get the word out and keep up with hundreds of writers, publications, organizations. I can read stories and novel excerpts online everyday. My social media focus is on reading, literature, writing, and the work of the organizations I’m involved with, like the National Book Critics Circle and the Overseas Press Club. The consolidation makes it possible to make a few keystrokes count. Viral, as they say.

What worries you about it?

It’s a rabbit hole. Down you go, and it can be hours before you come out. I interviewed Yiyun Li about her new collection, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl for The Daily Beast. She mentioned that she had gone on an Internet cutback over the past year, trying to spend less than an hour a day online, which gave her more time to read, to write, to think, reflect…

I think Yi has a good idea. I’m trying to be judicious about my time online. It’s not easy. My cable modem was fried a few weeks back, and I didn’t get it fixed for several days. I went to internet cafes for an hour or so each day to check email, and spent the rest of the time walking in the sun, and sitting in rooftop cafes taking notes on the novel I’m finishing and reading galleys for books I was reviewing. It felt great. Lesson?

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.

Nicholas Ripatrazone asks, “Is There a Lit Mag in This Class?” Here’s a bit from the middle:

Writers did different things in literary magazines than they did in books. Books were stodgy, hard, spine-formed collections. There seemed little room to breathe within such pages. But literary magazines were athletic, a place for play—serious play, no doubt, but certainly capable of more range. Writers could stretch. Most importantly, as a young writer I felt much more confident with an issue of Boulevard in my hand than one’s collected poems. I certainly needed to be familiar with both, but the possibility that my own work could one day appear in the thinner volume was exactly the confidence I needed to go write, to submit stories for workshop, and to pursue the study of writing.

Though I think Ripatrazone’s essay is necessary and intelligent, I recently discovered that the general argument for lit mags in the classroom isn’t all that new. Curt Johnson—editor of December: A Magazine of the Arts and Opinion from 1962 until his death in 2008—wrote on this same topic for the 1966 issue of College Composition and Communication, arguing astutely:

…if [students] are ever to be persuaded, they must first be shown that writers did not stop writing the day before yesterday and that the English sentence, paragraph, and theme are infinitely malleable. They will not be persuaded of this by the contemporary prose in Playboy, admirable as it is when written by Herbert Gold, nor will they be by that in The Atlantic or Saturday Evening Post, even though this dullard and that desperado both lack the four-color gatefold distraction of Playboy. But if a student’s study of the canon of lit and the hallowed rules of comp can be leavened with writing that was writ yesterday and printed today—good and bad (for it is easier to show structure when the structure shows, is it not, than when it has been artfully concealed by a master? And it is easier to demonstrate the utility of rules when it can be demonstrated that often their neglect results in chaos, is it not?)—if, in short, a little magazine is made a part of the course materials (be the course lit or comp), a student can see that English 102 has relevance beyond his pursuit of a degree.

Getting back to Boulevard—if you’ve been keeping up with the recent MFA discussion over at the London Review of Books and The Rumpus, the latest issue of Boulevard adds another log to the fire, Anis Shivani’s polemically titled “The MFA/Creative Writing System Is a Closed, Undemocratic, Medieval Guild System that Represses Good Writing.” So there.

In that same issue of Boulevard—which I recommend picking up—is a poem by Billy Collins titled, of all things, “Literary Magazines.” It begins:

I don’t know about you
but I go right for the poems

flipping past the stories and essays

not interested in discovering how much time
someone wasted on
the lost cinema of the Netherlands…

The latest issue of Istanbul Literary Review has a host of Fictionauters: Ajay Nair, Jack Swenson, Sam Rasnake, Marcus Speh, Dorothy Lang, Darryl Price, along with our own Marcelle Heath.

Amanda Deo of Thunderclap! Magazine has released a Femme Fatale issue, with very snazy cover by Ryan W. Bradley and writing by Maria Scala, Kat Dixon, Rebecca Schumejda and others. (Deo was recently interviewed by Nicolle Elizabeth on the Fictionaut Blog.) Pay $7 for print, or download the issue for free.

Underwood has made an awesome poster.

Defunct #2 is live.

The Rumpus has published their first magazine review: Nancy Smith takes a look at the latest issue of Ploughshares, guest-edited by Jim Shepard.

And a fantastic new story by Roxane Gay (in a very strong issue of Guernica), “There Is No “E” in Zombi Which Means There Can Be No You Or We,” beginning:

[A Primer]

[Things Americans do not know about zombis:]

They are not dead. They are near death. There’s a difference.
They are not imaginary.
They do not eat human flesh.
They cannot eat salt.
They do not walk around with their arms and legs locked stiffly.
They can be saved.

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.

By all accounts, the first-ever Fictionaut reading in San Francisco last weekend was a smashing success. Now the East Coast is joining the excitement: we’re delighted to announce Fictionaut’s inaugural New York City reading, at KGB Bar on October 17 at 7pm.

Terese Svoboda (Pirate Talk or Mermelade), Ben Greenman (Celebrity Chekov), and Matthew Salesses (Our Island of Epidemics) will read. We hope you can join us.

Please let us know if you’re interested in organizing a Fictionaut reading in your city. (I’m looking at you, Nashville.)

Thunderclap is great. They have a Group going at Fictionaut. We are happy.

Q (Nicolle Elizabeth): Amanda! How goes it, sis? You have a Thunderclap Group going here at Fictionaut. How is the group working out and what is Thunderclap and how are the two related? Tell us everything. Be a thunderstorm.

A (Amanda Deo): BOOM! Okay. Thunderstorm coming. It’s going very well, thank you! I was invited to Fictionaut by a poet I published, Parker Tettleton, who suggested that Fictionaut is a fantastic way to rope in writers to the press. I signed up, took a look at the site, bowed down (“we’re not worthy!”) to it’s functionality and design, and knew that it would help draw readers and writers into Thunderclap. One of my favorite things about Fictionaut is the easy and appealing way it organizes the work of writers on its site. It also allows some of the folks that have become Thunderclap fans to point their friends or other writers they know to my group.

You’ve also recently started a press. How is this different from publishing a journal. Any words of advice?

I wanted to start a press so that I could branch out with chapbooks and my bi-monthly magazine. Putting together a zine is awesome, but I’m so interested in single collections of work I wanted to make sure I branded those amazing collections somehow. I want Thunderclap, the word, to be an identifier for writing that I think should be read by others. Both a press and a journal take a lot of work, esp. on a low to non-existent budget. It can be hard to attract writers when there is no payment involved. But I find that there are still so many writers out there that are dying to be published in any way they can. As far as advice goes, I suppose my biggest piece of it would be that the time a press can take up in your life, from the editing, the design, the production, etc. can be more than any editor thinks. I have a full time job so it does get tough to find time to work on it but I really try hard because I know I’m accomplishing something for people that is greater that I can probably understand.

Internet or in-print publishing, give us your pros and cons on each.

Ah! I really love both. I started working on a zine in 2003 and a lot has changed in a mere 7 years. There are tons of better software programs out there now to accommodate the needs of the technology/design challenged like myself. The pro of the internet is your audience is infinite. The con of the internet is that because your audience is infinite, it is often too large and your work can get lost out there in space. The pro of in-print is that your readers have something they can stain with their greasy fingers. They can spill coffee on it and years later remind themselves of that coffee stain. It is the traditional, the authentic. The con of in-print is that the expenses of putting a decent production together can be more than small houses, such as myself, can really manage. You really have to scrap your pennies unless you are the CEO of Random House.

Where do you see Thunderclap and Thunderclap press in ten years?

No one has asked me that question yet. I was scared to be asked this question. I’m not much of a planner. I’m willing to keep on with Thunderclap for as long as I can keep up with it and people are interested in hearing from us Generation Y’ers.

Please tell us about you, your projects, your work, anything you’d like us to know. Strut it.

I’m just a lumberjack lovin’, plaid shirt wearing, beer drinking Canadian who moved to the US for love. When I got married in 2007, I felt a huge void from my prior writing scene in Ottawa, Ontario. So Thunderclap is as much helping me and it is actually helping my marriage. I just released a special edition of Thunderclap! Magazine which is entitled Femme Fatale. I wanted to showcase approx. 40 female writers, including myself, in one collection just so that I made it clear that female writers rock. /end strut

Nicolle Elizabeth checks in with Fictionaut Groups every Friday.

My daughter has been telling me for some time how I should start a literary magazine for kids, or, at other times, that I should make a children’s section for Luna Park. I have told her many times that there are already magazines like Cricket and Stone Soup, and that, as far as Luna Park is concerned, I don’t think there’s much of an audience for children there. Then I again explain the adjectival definition of “niche.”

And now I discover there is a new online lit mag directed just at teenagers, Liminal. So it seems that—with Passager publishing work by writers over 50— everyone is finally covered.

In Narrative Magazine, Joyce Carol Oates ponders the late Ontario Review, Donald Barthelme, John Gardner, death, and influence in her essay, “In the Absence of Mentors/Monsters: Notes on Writerly Influence.”

“The Dungeon Master has detention.” New RPG fiction from Sam Lipsyte in the latest New Yorker. Yep: New Yorker fiction with Dungeons & Dragons as the subject. (Reminds me of a fairly complex RPG story I heard Joshua Furst read at Greenlight Bookstore last summer—if anyone sees the story published somewhere, please let me know; editors, I’d ask him about it. It was pretty damn good, if I recall.) Here’s a bit from the new Lipsyte piece:

The Dungeon Master comes around the desk and I think he’s about to make a speech, but he lowers his head and spears me in the gut. We crash together to the floor. He squeezes my throat. I palm his chin and push. Marco screams, and I’m almost out of air when Brendan climbs the Dungeon Master’s back and bites his head. They both tumble away. The door bangs open and Dr. Varelli leans in.

“Play nice, you goddam puppies!” he bellows, then shuts the door.

We lie there, heaving. My wrist throbs. I smell raspberry soda in the carpet.

Boston Review redesigns.

On that note, Luna Park received a book of short stories in the mail the other week—yes, not a magazine. The book Vida by Patricia Engel, an author I first fell in love with years ago in Boston Review, reading in their pages her first published story, “Lucho.” I continued seeing and admiring her work, again at Boston Review, then later in Harpur Palate and Guernica. Though I’ve already read half the stories in the collection, I look forward to reading more work from Engel, whose fiction—as fiction editor Junot Diaz says he wants for Boston Review—is often so sharp it cuts the eye.

Finally, Lapham’s Quarterly’s releases The City issue. In his introduction, “City Light,” editor Lewis Lapham asks:

The Census Bureau counts 232,581,397 Americans, 82.6 percent of the population, living in the nation’s cities, but if our moralists and intelligence services are to be believed, they do so at no small risk to the safety of their persons and the security of their souls. This issue of Lapham’s Quarterly addresses the obvious contradiction. If the city is a sewer of vice and a slough of despond, why do so many people choose to live there?

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.

Brad Watson was born in Meridian, Mississippi. He studied at Mississippi State University and The University of Alabama, has taught at Alabama, Harvard, The University of West Florida, Ole Miss, The University of California at Irvine, and now in the MFA Program at The University of Wyoming. He’s published three books: Last Days of the Dog-Men (winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters), The Heaven of Mercury, and (in 2010) Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives. His stories have have appeared in places like Narrative, The Oxford American, Greensboro Review, Idaho Review, The New Yorker.

You can read Brad’s story “The Misses Moses,” from Aliens in the Prime of their Lives, on Fictionaut.

What stories/books do you feel closest to?

So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell
Blanco, Allen Wier
Ron Carlson stories
The Death of a Beekeeper, Lars Gustafsson
and his story, “Greatness Strikes Where It Pleases”
My Antonia, Cather
Stoner, John Williams
Airships, and Ray, Barry Hannah,
Selected Stories, Welty
and “No Place for You, My Love”
A Good Man Is Hard to Find, O’Connor
As I Lay Dying, Faulkner
Taking Care, and Escapes, Joy Williams
especially “The Farm”
“Gooseberries,” Chekhov
“The Awakening,” Babel
The Ice at The Bottom of The World, and Charity, Mark Richard
especially “Strays,” “The Birds for Christmas,” and “Memorial Day”
The Moviegoer, Percy
Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut
Trout Fishing in America, The Hawkline Monster, Willard And His Bowling Trophies, Brautigan
“Bruns,” Norman Rush
The Shell Collector and Memory Wall, Anthony Doerr
Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell
Edisto, and Typical, Padgett Powell
Collected Stories, Lydia Davis
Night Work, Christine Schutt
“Me and Miss Mandible,” and “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning,” D Barthelme
With, Donald Harrington
The Lover, M Duras
The Restraint of Beast, Magnus Mills
and many, many more, many by friends it would be dangerous to begin naming because I would forget some no doubt.

Does teaching writing effect your own work?

I love my students because of, as I’ve said recently, their beautiful young minds. I teach for the money, of course, like everyone else, but what makes it worthwhile is knowing the younger writers.

I don’t think teaching affects my writing one way or the other. Sometimes, reading so many works-in-progress drains the well, and you have to have time off and then read the best books you can find in order to clear the critical voice from your head.

How do you like living in Wyoming and does it play a role in your writing?

Wyoming is beautiful and I hope it’s giving me more to write about (eventually), more than my own so-far ridiculous experience as a ridiculous child and so-called adult.

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

The best thing is to keep finding great, beautiful stories and novels, for me. Reading a great book I hadn’t read before always revives me. As for getting unstuck, anything that can distract me from the narrow rutted path of mundane thought: anything from a plain old shower or bath to a long, long drive, a long hike or bike ride in the mountains, or just giving it up for a while in the knowledge that I’ve become my own worst enemy and I cannot defeat me and so I let me pass.

Give us an exercise – your favorite writing exercise…

I love the Meg Pokrass exercise of Google translating a fucked-up story into another language and then Google translating it back into English to see how that particular insanity may re-fuck-up the story in a good way. That’s the best one I’ve heard lately. But I don’t do exercises, myself. I sometimes ask my students to do an exact structural imitation of a story in order to surprise themselves with the ingeniousness of the way that story (word by word) is put together.

What are you working on now?

Aliens In the Prime of Their Lives is a collection of stories is just recently out. Now, I’m working on a novel, when I’m not working on two other novels I have in the drawer, plus two or three new short stories. But, unlike some other writers such as the ingenious and prolific Richard Bausch, I often don’t write very well or much when I’m in the thick of teaching. Call it ADD or BWISANIDIOT.

You have dogs now, and have often owned dogs. I read somewhere that the stories in your first collection was inspired by the dog/dog owner connection. Can you talk about how animals and people are connected, or the importance of having dogs for you, in your life?

We have two dogs now but actually they’re the first dogs I could call my own. My brother had a couple of dogs while we were growing up, but they were HIS dogs. I had a cat along with my second marriage, the greatest fat cat in the world, who was much like a dog and who liked to box the ears of small dogs just for fun and out of meanness. He came when you whistled.

The first book came from overhearing an anecdote about a woman who’d put her husband’s dog to sleep as revenge for his cheating. I wrote a story, then a disjointed novel, from that, with a lot of anecdotal, observational, and newspaper research, and then when the novel failed I broke out 9 stories from it. They became the first book. I think the main idea in the book is expressed best by the words I quoted as epigraph for it, from the book Myths of the Dog-Man by David Gordon White: “Ultimately, the dog, … its constant presence in human experience coupled with its nearness to the feral world, is the alter ego of man himself.”

What do animals offer humans that humans usually do not offer humans?

Unconditional forgiveness, as if they’re dog God.

Can you share any experience you’ve had with social media that has been helpful for you? Favorite websites? What can we as writers ultimately hope to do in terms of self-promotion and how do we do it in a way that seems genuine? Any thoughts about this, actually…

I’m still wondering how to do this, how to use these things. I’m a former newspaper reporter from the days just after they’d first started using computers. I’m a dinosaur. I’m trying to figure it out. I am on Facebook but I don’t use it very well. I have a website and although I’ve posted a lot of links to reviews, interviews, and so on, plus two pictures, and a reading schedule, I haven’t written a single blog entry. Pretty lame. I’m going to try to start using the blog, though, once I figure out just what I’d like to write on it.

How long does it take you to write a short story?

Anywhere from one day to 30 years.

Why do you write longer first drafts when you write longhand — longer than first drafts on the laptop, say, which one would think more probably leads to garrulousness?

Because I can’t tell how long it’s becoming as I write it — my handwriting is poor, and I can’t mentally convert handwritten page to typed page — and because I think I care less how long it’s becoming, and maybe that’s because I’m having more fun writing it when I’m writing longhand. I should do it more often, even if I do have to cut more. It may mean I get in more interesting things more often, who knows.

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.

We’re happy to announce Fictionaut’s very first reading and get-together, this Saturday, October 2, at Viracocha SF in San Francisco. Scheduled readers include Meg Pokrass, Thaisa Frank, Jane Hammons, Joan Stepp Smith, and Ethel Rohan. For more information, check out the event page on Facebook. Hope to see you there!

We’re also planning Fictionaut events in other cities. Please let us know if you’d like to help organize a Fictionaut reading in your town.

Tracy Lopez has founded the group Raíces y Alas. You bet your chacha I jumped on asking her questions about that. Did you know that the Cha-Cha was written to a song by Cuban composer and violinist Enrique Jorrín in 1953? This rhythm was developed from the danzón by a syncopation of the fourth beat. I wonder what it would be like to try to Cha-Cha while say, reading Fictionaut on a cellphone? Example: Hey Tracy great opening sentence, *cha-cha-cha. Have you seen how many reads Meg Pokrass’s latest story posted has already? Wow, cool! *Cha-cha-cha. Glad to see Erlewine’s posting work (TRABAJO) again, *cha-cha-cha and DIP.

Q (Nicolle Elizabeth): Hey Tracy! You have a group going which I love (okay I love most of our groups, fine) which is for writers who are Latina/o or just feel like they are via surrogate and may write in as what you called, “Spanglish.” Cultural pride with an inclusion to all is great. Please tell us more about this group.

A: (Tracy Lopez) Raíces y Alas (Roots and Wings) is a group for Latino/Latina fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. As you said, this group is all inclusive because there is a lot of love for Latin American culture out there and some of us weren’t necessarily born into it. Some have married into it or grew up around it, but those experiences are no less valid or beautiful. Thankfully the Latino community is very accepting of what they call “Latinos de corazón” – which is to say, you may not be Latina/o by blood, but if you feel it in your heart, that is all that matters.

Did you know that last year out of the 180,000 books published in English, only 330 of them were translated works from other countries brought over into English? This includes all languages and all kinds of books, cookbooks even. This is bad, Tracy, it’s bad. Any thoughts on translated literature, here?

Wow, I didn’t know that. It’s really disappointing when you think about all the amazing stories being told around the world that we’ll never have a chance to discover. It really unfairly limits readers to a smaller reality than the one that exists. Some of my very favorite books are English translations from various other languages… And while we’re on the topic, I just want to give a shout-out to those who make their living translating books. These people don’t often get the same recognition as the actual author but I admire them so much.

Who are some little-known latina/o writers we should know about and why?

It’s funny to call someone who is actually published a “little-known author” because then I’m wondering what in the world that makes me, but nevertheless, here are some names that aren’t quite as big as Gabriel García Márquez or Sandra Cisneros, for example. Elva Treviño Hart is the author of the autobiographical Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child – I highly recommend that book. If you want to discover more than a dozen new amazing Latino/a authors in one, check out Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America. There were so many great stories in there but one of my favorites was by an author named Daniel Chacón.

What is one place we should all visit even if only once in our lifetimes in your opinion? What book should we read when we get there?

El Salvador. I haven’t traveled around the entire world or anything but I’ve been to a few different countries and no where else were people as friendly as in El Salvador. I would walk down the street with my husband (a native of the country), and complete strangers would say, “Buenas!” (the local greeting, short for “buenos días”, “buenas tardes”, or “buenas noches” – depending on the time of day.) I’d say to my husband, “Who was that?” and he’d shrug, “I don’t know that person.” As for the book to read when you’re there, Bitter Grounds by Sandra Benítez.

Please tell us more about you, your projects, your work, your favorite title of any short fiction collection ever written?

I live outside the DC Metro area with my husband and two sons (as well as my mother-in-law most of the time.) I had a small non-fiction piece published in SerPadres magazine earlier this year (the Spanish language version of Parents magazine), and I’m working on two other small non-fiction pieces for Café Magazine in Chicago. I’m very excited about that but I love to write fiction, too and that’s been harder to break into. I have a few manuscripts in different stages of completion. This past year I’ve been querying agents in search of representation for a 68,000 word YA novel about a Tijuana teen who runs away from home and crosses the border illegally into the United States. So far I’ve had plenty of rejection, a few nibbles, but no bites. We’ll see what happens. Until then, thanks so much for interviewing me. Suerte (luck) to all of you.

Mary Gaitskill is an original. We are so proud to feature her first published story here at Fictionaut.  “Something Better Than This” was published in an obscure feminist magazine in Canada (now defunct) called Branching Out back in the late 1970s.

Author’s note:

I was 22 when I wrote this.  I can’t remember where it came from except that I did actually sell rhodium jewelry on Yonge St. in Toronto in the mid-70s and it was one of those occupations that could make an already crabby person insanely misanthropic.  Looking at it now, the story seems so misanthropic (albeit skittishly so) that I almost want to apologize to the universe on Susan’s behalf.  But at the time, I imagine I just thought keeping my sense of humor up.  And I probably was.

Previously on Line Breaks:

• “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.

Lauren Cerand, an independent publicist, is a member of the Fictionaut Board of Advisors. She lives in New York. For her latest projects and more, visit www.LaurenCerand.com.

What story or book do you feel closest to?

I once referred to Ava Gardner: Love is Nothing as “a blueprint for living,” and never was that more true than when I took it to a salon last month and pointed to a photo of her and asked for her exact boyish crop. There is also one description of an outfit that includes a cloak and sandals in A Spy in the House of Love that is really great. And I want a whole summer just like A Sport and a Pastime.

What are your favorite websites?

With my a.m. coffee, I cover my coasts with Maud (www.maudnewton.com) and Mark (www.elegvar.com). Lola is Beauty (www.lolaisbeauty.blogspot.com) and Style Bubble (www.stylebubble.co.uk) are longtime style stops, both out of London. I like what The Nervous Breakdown (www.thenervousbreakdown.com) is doing for community, and what 20×200 (www.20×200.com) does for art. Figment.com is another good new one, specializing in young adult-oriented mobile storytelling. CellStories.net is crushing it, too. I consciously seek ways to make big ideas more portable, whether it’s learning from how someone puts together an outfit to make a striking visual statement or discovering what can be made possible by technology.

What excites you right now?

The classic, super-awesomely-American tradition of publishing your thoughts as a means of sharing them with others and changing the world, in small and large ways, and its influence on nearly limitless methods of distribution and an existing infrastructure for conveying information to mass audiences in a competitive marketplace is what I think about most of the time. That and how to fail better. I also wish I could make it to LA to see the Dennis Hopper show and to DC to see the Yves Klein show before they close. A good maverick on a grand stage gets my motor running.

As an out-of-the-box thinker, a visionary for how we can do good and also promote our work…what can you tell writers getting their sea-legs in this intimidating world of social media?

How does trust/familiarity happen in this world of virtual connections? Publicity, the way that I learned how to do it, was based on EXPOSURE. Like, get on NPR or in the New York Times and everyone who matters will have seen it. While those outlets are still hugely influential star-making machines, there are also a lot more stars. And infinite galaxies. And maybe the stars are looking elsewhere? I could keep going with that one, although eventually the universe would collapse. Maybe it already has. Publicity, the way that I do it now, is based on MOMENTUM. Get the right vibe going, and keep at it.

What can writers/editors do to continue to build community while doing what we love? How can we help Girls Write Now?

Be good to your friends. Give us twenty bucks.

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 an editor at Smokelong Quarterly, and her stories and poems have been published widely. She blogs at http://megpokrass.com.