Today’s digest is devoted to the memory of Kevin Morrissey, the 52-year-old managing editor of Virginia Quarterly Review who took his own life this past Friday. I never met Morrissey, only exchanged a few emails with him and learned from his always generous and informative emails to various publishing listervs. He will no doubt be missed by family, friends, and the literary community in general.

Arriving at VQR in 2003, it was no doubt much thanks to Morrissey’s work that many have since considered the magazine “the best fucking magazine on the planet.” In a Los Angeles Times post about Morrissey’s death, Carolyn Kellogg describes the magazine as “one of the nation’s leading literary journals…at the forefront of discussions about how such journals can stay both relevant and fiscally secure in difficult times.” And in one of my early writings for Luna Park, I wrote that VQR “sets a high bar for literary magazines—and for magazines in general.”

Waldo Jaquith—web editor of VQR—wrote a brief tribute to his friend and boss:

A lifetime of grappling with depression combined with recent stresses proved too much for him. He was the managing editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review at the University of Virginia since 2003. Kevin was dogged at his work, meticulous in his detail, and one of the finest human beings I’ve had the privilege to know.

The comments to Jaquith’s tribute are moving and informative about just how many people were touched by Morrissey’s work and friendship. I wish I had met him.

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.

What happened was Susan Tepper started the Oil group and my vegan anarcho-punk heart was thrilled. I clapped my hands and thought, “Alright team Fictionaut!” One of the many wonderful facets of our fair Fictionaut is our connection beyond geography. Our community houses writers in different time zones, countries, first languages, fifth languages, poetics, thoughts on form, input on aesthetic, we are a varied bunch, but one of the things we all have in common is our love of literature. We are writers, we are readers, we are Fictionaut. (Okay fine I went overboard on that one, fine.) Still, we Fictionauters enjoy certain truths considered liberal elsewhere, such as the freedom to write, and to talk about writing. Fictionaut as a community is partially founded in this premise, that we can share work and talk about others’ work and continue a dialogue of thought, of generous cheering each other on, that people are being seen.

Susan Tepper decided to include another element many of our community member’s journals discuss, which is an attention to global issues beyond the ones written in our own fiction. In the middle of the night, Susan started the Oil group and I thought, “Well now, we are doing something.” I decided to think on a larger scale this week. I rounded up some other opinions. Kyle Minor, incredible all around guy and indie fiction superstar talent just so happened to be in Haiti and agreed to give us a report. I’m from what’s called The Snow Belt of New England. Everything west of Connecticut is the South to me. Manhattan is the South. With this clichéd uneducated approach in mind, I asked Southern born one of my favorite people James Yeh to talk to me about New Orleans post Katrina. He’s from South Carolina which apparently is not where New Orleans is, but he put me in touch with blogger Nate Martin who actually had a bunch to say. I asked a bunch of new York based writers how they felt the city was post 9/11 and whether the disaster still rang true to the writing community and was told by all four that I am annoying for asking. I suppose in some ways this is a good thing, to think that a city can heal, that people can heal. I’m hoping Susan’s Oil group here at Fictionaut talks about the healing part, too. This week’s check in is with writer Susan Tepper founder of our Oil group, writer Nate Martin on New Orleans and writer Kyle Minor on Haiti. Am I too much of a peace loving hippie for hoping we as a world can all just have a break from gloom doom and despair?

Nicolle Elizabeth: What are you hoping will come of the Oil group?

Susan Tepper: I honestly don’t know. Forming this group was probably some type of release valve for my own pent up rage over the oil gushing into our waters. This destruction of a planet that is a paradise of nature beyond anything mankind could possibly dream up– now being destroyed by what mankind has dreamed up. There’s a hideous irony to that. I guess this Oil group is ultimately a place of comfort, despite the topic. A kind of half-way house for writers deeply concerned over the spill and needing to release those feelings into stories and poetry. So many people joined the first 24 hours! That says something to me about this group filling a need. And as I wrote in the Group Description, the work can take any form including humor and satire. Since we are on the subject of tragedy, I’ll stay here just a bit longer. I think once you’ve been involved in any large scale tragedy, it leaves its mark. Mine was the Northwest Airlines plane crash in Detroit, 1987. I was working for Northwest in the NYC marketing division. On an August day, one of our planes, enroute from Detroit to Phoenix, hit the roof of the Avis building during take off. A group of us were sent to Detroit as part of the rescue effort, which essentially turned out to be body identification, and lending support to the families. Everyone had died in the crash except a baby girl. This was before DNA. So the coroner’s team of doctors and dentists had little to go on, trying to ID the victims off dental records, etc, and descriptions given by distraught relatives, or anything we could dig up on old insurance claims. It was all very strange and horribly sad. Yet it was also mystical, and in some ways a state of grace. I only say that because I’ve never experienced a group of people working together so well under the most extreme circumstances. The summer heat and stench of bodies in the make-shift morgue (an old airplane hangar)– well it was like nothing I could have imagined. At the end of a few weeks there, I had to throw away my shoes and leather belts and purse, because they’d retained that odor. I did keep the file on the families I worked with, and all the details of the crash. It’s something I can never part with.

Kyle, how come you went to Haiti?

Kyle Minor: I’ve been visiting Haiti for the last three years. I’m working on a novel about Americans in Haiti and a nonfiction narrative about a child kidnapping-for-ransom in Ouest Province. This time I saw buildings pancaked and knew there were bodies crushed inside. I saw lots of people who looked like they had been through hell. I saw people sleeping in rubble, sleeping under plywood, sleeping under nothing, and it’s been six months since the earthquake. But I also saw good signs — good temporary housing going up thanks to people like the Maxima factory, the Dutch government, Samaritan’s Purse, Helping Hands for Haiti, the Church of God, and most of all Haitian neighbors helping neighbors. And in the Nord Province, where the earthquake didn’t do much damage, I saw people working on roads, cleaning up streets, and working on a government building. These are all hopeful signs. Less hopeful is the tent city situation. No workable solution seems at hand. I’m working with a group that is replacing housing very efficiently in mountain villages such as Callebasse and Barette, and in the remote village of Prospere. Bring me to your city and let’s do a benefit reading and raise some money for houses. From all I can tell, the best work is being done by small organizations on the ground. Consider partnering with one of them. If you must give your money to a famous person’s organization, I’d recommend Sean Penn, whose work is widely admired by people in the area. If you’re a doctor or nurse or medic, volunteer some time.

Nate, what’s the word on New Orleans re: post-Katrina literary world. I heard an influx of hipsters moved down in solidarity to volunteer their help.

Nate Martin: True. Lots of young people have moved to New Orleans since Katrina to participate in the rebuilding of the city. Some are hip, and others are not hip. Some help out “rebuilding” in literal ways, like volunteering to build green homes or starting entrepreneurial ventures or nonprofits, and others just sort of figure that adding themselves to the mix as bright, motivated, intelligent people is good enough. I saw a clever advertisement for the University of New Orleans the other day that showed a picture of a smart-looking girl and it said, “She’s part of the BRAIN GAIN.” There’s even a nonprofit here whose sole function is to keep all the people who have moved here post-Katrina from moving away. Lots of people have been coming through, too, some as a residual result of the storm: Dave Eggers taught a master class last year at NOCCA and did some other stuff with the annual Tennessee Williams Literary Festival; Deb Olin Unferth is coming to teach a master class at NOCCA this upcoming year; Amy Hempel recently completed a residency at Tulane; and an outstanding unknown writer and generally all-around great guy named Nate Martin has really been shaking things up and doing good for the community.

What can writers, readers do to help?

Move here.

Nicolle Elizabeth checks in with Fictionaut Groups every Friday.

Meg Pokrass: Okla-can you tell us about your “unusual” path to becoming a poet and writer? Mine was an early life in theater, and I love to learn how people find their eventual thing. And in your case, things! Clearly, you wear many creative hats…

Okla Elliott: It’s hard to trace these sorts of developments, to decide which facts are pertinent. Should I count the adventure story I wrote, when I was eight years old, about a purple jelly bean, in which I only named the jelly bean as purple at the first introduction and used a purple colored pencil to write “jelly bean” each instance after that? Were the silly and sexually naive limericks I composed to make my friends laugh when I was in middle school the first poems in my “career” as a poet? A sizable part of me thinks these things do count, and so that means I can say I was a poet and writer even before I had any idea what that meant. Actually, my ignorance of how to do things might have been the primary guide on my path to where I am today.

As a member of the first generation of my family to graduate high school and enter college, the possibility of focusing on the arts, philosophy, etc as any sort of lifestyle was unthinkable-or at least for me it was. In high school, I read everything I could: Stephen King, Dostoyevsky, Kurt Vonnegut, fantasy novels, encyclopedia sets, physics books, books on Buddhism, a lawnmower repair manual I remember quite vividly, and so on. For my fifteenth birthday, my sister (who was a math major in college) took me to a bookstore and allowed me to pick out any two books I wanted, and though now I think it is funny, at the time I saw nothing odd in selecting an introduction to thermodynamics and a fantasy novel titled Kaz the Minotaur.

I was considered the math and science guy, and I loved those subjects, just as I loved literature and philosophy. I always assumed I’d go on to be a physicist or engineer even as my friends and I listened to Leonard Cohen and discussed the lyrics like a secret map to the human heart.

In college I studied physics and computer programming at first, taking foreign language classes and philosophy classes on the side. To make a long story short, I slowly realized I could make a life of philosophy, literature, and languages, so I slowly switched over and ended up with a dual degree in philosophy and German, with minors in French and religious studies. I’d read most of Nabokov on my own my freshman and sophomore years as well as a fair amount of Goethe, Robert Penn Warren, and Voltaire. In many ways, these writers are still very much my models. All wrote in every genre; Voltaire was as important a political thinker as creative writer; Nabokov was a scientist who discovered a new species of moth; Goethe was a translator, a scientist, a statesman, and a creative writer in every genre. I think it was also this mix of writers that gave me the idea that the way to become a writer was to travel the world and experience/learn all I could, which led me to studying in Germany for a year and Poland for a semester in undergrad, as well as traveling all over Europe. More recently this notion has sent me on one-month learning “safaris” in Montreal and Guadalajara, Mexico.

I hate the idea of specialization, especially in one sub-field of writing. MFAs, which have their uses, have also given people this false notion that the genres are all distinct and a person is a “poet” or “fiction writer” or whatever. This is a relatively new notion, and one I attribute to MFAs’ institutional organization habits. Hemingway wrote poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and reportage. Chekhov wrote fiction, drama, and nonfiction-and was a doctor, for crying out loud. And the list of great writers who work or worked in multiple (or all) genres goes on and on: Diderot, Hardy, Brecht, Updike, Oates, Vollmann, etc, etc, etc.

In my view, 99% of the DNA for good literature of any sort is about the same-avoid clichés, be intellectually and emotionally honest, use lively language, etc.

Ohio State University, where I got my MFA, is a bit more enlightened on the subject in that it encourages students who specialize in one genre to take classes in others. I took workshops in every genre multiple times while there, and that feature of the program was one of my deciding factors for attending it.

And so, this is the path I have taken. I follow my interests, no matter where they lead me. If I want to think with metered verse one day, that is how I think that day, and if I want to think with Heideggerian philosophy another, then so be it; if I want to think in traditional narrative, I do, experimental narrative, I do; and if I want to do all of it at once and another thing besides, such as the memory of working in a tobacco field in rural Kentucky as a boy, then that is fine as well. We live once and will die before we’ve experienced even a fraction of the amazing shit out there in the world. Why should we cut ourselves off from so much of it, thus handicapping ourselves in an already impossible endeavor of understanding ourselves and the world?

You asked about my “unusual” path to and approach with writing. I would simply say that such a multi-genre and interdisciplinary approach has not always seemed unusual and that it ought not today. In fact, I predict that due to the way jobs in the humanities are going, people who want good jobs will have to wear a few hats. It was the way of writers in the past, and it will be again, at least for a sizable subset of us.

MP: Can you talk about how your work in translation, trauma studies, and Theory affect your creative world?

OE: I touched on this in my perhaps overly long first answer. I think all the various fields I work in deepen the others. My translation work has gotten me into the shapes and feels of other writers’ work, thus allowing me to play the mimic a bit and learn their tools for my own work, and my own work allows me the tools to actually approach theirs in the first place. My work with trauma studies affords me an understanding of the psycholinguistic facts about processing trauma, so when I write creatively on the subject, I can faithfully recreate it. Cultural theory makes me question all my assumptions about life and art, publishing media, and so on. This helps me keep myself from merely following a safe and thoughtless path. Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist, Slavoj Žižek, has neatly extracted one line from Marx’s Das Kapital to describe ideology: “They do not know they are doing it, but they are doing it.” Staying critical (in the neutral philosophical sense of that word) prevents one from falling victim at every turn to ideology and thus to safe thinking as usual, which I find anathema to real artistic production.

There are weird (and I daresay idiotic) turf wars between scholars and writers. Scholars somehow look down on creative writing types as not doing real work (unless they win a Pulitzer, or preferably won one 20 years ago and are now dead), while creative writing types generally treat their scholarly classes as wastes of time and boring and even, I’ve seen at the three institutions I’ve witnessed MFA students over the years, as somehow beneath them. Both sides of this silly turf war baffle me. How can producing literature reduce my ability to understand it? How can carefully reading literature and surrounding texts then seriously thinking about these things hurt my ability to produce a poem? This is a classic example of infighting among a group (i.e., those who like the arts) that should be in solidarity against a larger group (i.e., those who want to cut funding to the arts).

MP: Please talk about New American Press and Mayday magazine, and, if you will your new job as Managing Editor for As It Ought To Be.

OE: David Bowen and I started up New American Press seven years ago, when we were living in Greensboro, NC, where he was doing his MFA, and I was doing my comparative MA in economics and political science. We ended up living together and becoming fast friends. We wanted to write our own work, but we also wanted to contribute to the community of literature while, let’s be honest, imposing our tastes on it a bit. So we founded New American Press and began doing chapbooks. And over the years it has grown to doing full-length books as well as chapbooks, and in 2009, we launched Mayday, which is a hybrid online/print journal. Our publishing model for the journal is an attempt to navigate the contemporary landscape. It is impossible to ignore the utility of online publishing, but most writers and readers still enjoy a print book, so we will be doing anthologies every other year that include “best of” previous issues and longer works we feel would be annoying to read online. We definitely publish the sorts of things you find in any journal, but we also want to focus a bit more on translation, travel writing, and literature/commentary that acknowledges there are other parts of the world outside the US. We live in a global society now, and since the US’s policies affect so much of the world, it strikes me that it is about time we start taking notice of that world.

As for As It Ought To Be, I started that site up with Matt Gonzalez, a lawyer-activist in San Francisco who has held elected office as a Green Party member. This is where I give attention to my more political interests. The site has about a dozen regular contributors and we try to post a piece every day, ranging from articles on food policy to poetry to voting reform to book reviews. Matt and I have shared responsibility for the site, with him being managing editor for the past year. Now I’m up to bat for a year. I predict I will pass the hat on in a year’s time as well. Matt still writes for the site and solicits material, and so on, and I will do the same once I step down. As a side note, we are one year old this month, and we’ve received over 110,000 total hits, with the daily number growing constantly. It is my hope that in another year we’ll have doubled that annual readership and doubled our number of regular contributors.

I guess as a final note on editing, I have to say that while it takes tons of time, and wading through slush piles can be tedious, I love nothing more than publishing a young talented writer alongside a Harvard professor, love nothing more than having published the first English language translation of a play by Abdellatif Laâbi, who spent ten years in a Moroccan prison for what his government called “crimes of opinion.” My own writing matters more to me as a rule, but somehow publishing Laâbi’s play mattered more than having a few poems of mine appear in a journal where maybe twenty to thirty people might read them.

MP: Do you mentor? Have you had a mentor/mentors? What is the importance of this concept to you?

OE: I mentioned having done my MFA at OSU. I still imagine Lee K Abbott and Erin McGraw as editors when I write fiction. The same goes for Lee Martin in regard to nonfiction. I took both fiction and nonfiction with him, but my particular weaknesses as an essayist were perfectly suited to his strengths as a teacher. In fact, every essay I ever workshopped with him has been published. I often joke I need to audit a Lee Martin nonfiction class once every year or two if I hope to have any luck as an essayist. But the faculty member at OSU that most felt like a mentor was Andrew Hudgins, who is easily one of the best poets (and essayists) this country has, as well as being a great teacher. He’s tough as a teacher, so some students weren’t as welcoming of his instruction, but I can say that both in terms of literature as an art and as a profession, and all the gray areas in between, I can’t imagine a better teacher.

As for my own mentoring, I enjoy working with students and helping them go on to graduate school or publish, but I am a bit young to be mentoring anyone. I’ve only had one real teaching job and that for only one year. Right now, I don’t teach at all, since I am on a 3-year research fellowship at U of IL, but I can’t wait to get back to teaching. I absolutely love teaching and mentoring. Some people see it as necessary evil so they can write or whatever, but I love it, even teaching composition. I’m serious. I’ve never taught a class I didn’t love.

MP: What authors are you currently fascinated by? What books sit on your nightstand?

OE: I have my oldies but goodies: William T Vollmann, David Foster Wallace, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Bertolt Brecht, Albert Goldbarth, and Margaret Atwood. I re-read them constantly. But more recently I have read Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Age of Reason, which is just brilliant, a perfect novel in many ways. I have also fallen in love with the work of Jorge Volpi, a Mexican author I recently interviewed and who is among the best writers alive today in any language. I also have been reading Slavoj Žižek books over the past two years like it’s my damn job. Michel Foucault’s work, while sloppy in places, is very readable and truly groundbreaking. I find I read less fiction and poetry as the years go by, to be honest, and more history, cultural theory, psycholinguistics, cognitive science, and so on. This is in part a function of my current research at U of IL, but also a function of feeling a diminishing return on time invested in reading short stories and poetry.

MP: What is new in your creative world?

OE: I am working, with co-author Raul Clement, on Joshua City-a po-mo, sci-fi Brechtian novel replete with lepers, revolutionaries, nearly deified trains, and Siamese triplets that can see the future (if in fact they exist at all and are not the hallucination of a tyrannical Mayor Adams). An excerpt of the novel was included in an anthology, Surreal South 2009 (eds. Pinckney and Laura Benedict), out from Press 53. I am also working on various short stories, poems, translations, and scholarly articles.

MP: Will you give us a short or long booklist?

OE: Sure. Here goes, at random.

For They Know Not What They Do, by Slavoj Žižek

The Man Without Qualities, by Robert Musil

Cosmos, by Witold Gombrowicz

Season of Ash, by Jorge Volpi

American Rendering: New and Selected Poems, by Andrew Hudgins

All Things, All at Once, by Lee K Abbott

Cancer Ward, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Rising Up and Rising Down, by William T Vollmann

Selected Poems, Margaret Atwood

Fox Girl, by Nora Okja Keller

It Is Time, Lord, by Fred Chappell

The Holy Book of the Beard, by Duff Brenna

Did discussion of The Paris Review un-acceptance business get a bit too feverish last week on the internet? Perhaps. Daniel Nester—who brought the story to light—has a run-down of much of the online conversation, as well as a new email from Paris Review editor Lorin Stein (not to Nester) apologizing for the handling of the situation and promising to give the poets, along with a personal apology, “the full fee that we owe them.” Sounds like the perfect solution.

No doubt the best thing to come of the event was Blake Butler’s pitch-perfect parody over at HTMLGIANT:

Latest in the controversy regarding manuscripts recently turned down post-acceptance at the Paris Review, apparently we may get to see the maligned documents see daylight after all. According to insiders at the Peemsmen Monthly, a second-shift janitor at the P.R. headquarters, upon realizing what literary-scandal-wrongdoing-travesty he’d been made to take part in, ran back out into the trashyard where the massive P.R. dumpster is and fished out said to-be-and-no-longer-ParisReviewianed language.

The janitor, who wishes to remain anonymous for now, is currently looking to publish the lot as a “found manuscript.” He is available for contact via representation by Marble-Withersby Agency in New York.

Currently tallied among the rubble:

– A haiku by Jonathan Franzen on the brevity of life and the deliciousness of fat free yogurt

– An erasure by Nam Le of his mother’s travel diaries as a child, concerning her impregnation with him, which Nam Le erased himself from entirely, a retroactive comment on the Gulf War…

And the list goes on.

Though it’s true they still don’t accept electronic submissions, Prairie Schooner recently tapped Timothy Schaffert to be their first web editor. Marcelle Heath interviewed Schaffert about online reading and new directions for the magazine.

MiPOesias is using MagCloud to publish their chapbook series, where you can read such books as Sam Rasnake’s Lessons in Morphology. (And if you have an iPad, you can read it for free.)

Looking for design work? Brooklyn-based lit mag Armchair/Shotgun is looking for a new graphic/book designer for forthcoming issues.

Finally, we have a new series at Luna Park on The Future of the Literary Magazine (and a list of links on the topic). Does it have a future? What (or whom) does it look like? What will its relation to writer/reader be? And so on. We are looking for interviews, articles, excerpts, reprints, and etcetera on the direction of the medium.

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.

On Marit Meredith‘s “Snowdrops”
by J.B. Lacombe

In “Snowdrops,” Marit Meredith captures a huge amount of emotion in a tiny piece of flash. The story’s emotional impact is what first impressed me; the ending took my breath away. Reading the story a second time, I noticed that the imagery is tight, each image fitting like a puzzle piece, from the repetition of “All will be well” to the predominant image of snowdrops. This neatness pleased me. Further, it reinforced the feeling of this story being a memory. The story reads like a memory because only the sharpest details remain — the snowdrops, the snow, the stillness, the calm, and the kicking — and through the years, those details have become even sharper, even more true and vivid, to the narrator. The emotion of the memory also remains and gives the story its power.

On Ramon Collins‘ “Sometimes“
by Martha Williams

This charming story charts the journey of Tommy and Sue Ellen as they walk to the pond to catch frogs. We open to find Tommy persuading his mother that he should be allowed to go barefoot because Sue Ellen is – and she’s a girl. The two friends lead us along their country walk, until Sue Ellen takes all the familiarity from their path by telling Tommy that he loves her. What follows is a conversation that only happens between childhood friends. By the time Tommy returns to ask his mother about loving Sue Ellen, he has taken another step along the road to growing up – and we leave him at that transient stage when catching a frog is still as magical as love. The story closes on a poignant note with his mother realising that she can stop fearing for his feet, and start worrying about his heart. 
With voices so real they could be memories, and natural images so strong you can almost smell them, this short piece evokes the best of childhood before digital communication – and serves as a vital reminder that the friends and the frogs are still there for our children now. Mothers, grab the moments while you can. Writers, admire the craft. Readers, print it for your bedside table – because this is a timeless favourite that you will want to read over, and over, and over…

On Melissa Ann Chadburn‘s “Confession“
by Matthew A. Hamilton

Melissa Ann Chadburn’s didactic short story, “Confession” blew me away the first time I read it. It is not just a story about a girl who shares her sins with a priest, but focuses more on what it really means to forgive.

What I liked most about the story is Melissa’s character development. At first the reader is persuaded to think that the priest will be the compassionate and understanding one. Sadly, he is not. He does not fulfill his role as a priest: he is not show the woman compassion.

At the end of the story, it is the woman who seems to take the true role of the priest: she has pity on the priest when his car won’t start. She shows him compassion and offers him help. After assisting the priest, she hugs him and says, “This is what Jesus must have felt like.”

If this story taught me anything, it was this: even though there are people in this world who might not be willing to forgive you, you should always have the courage to forgive them. Maybe if we did this, it would also be possible for us to erase the hate in this world.

Fictionaut Faves, a series in which Fictionaut members recommend stories on the site, is edited by Marcelle Heath, a fiction writer, freelance editor, and assistant editor for Luna Park. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Mike Young was one of the first people to ever blog positively about a story I wrote. I never forgot that. This week I asked him about Noo Journal and Black Helicopter Press, both outfits he has a big old publishing hand in. He knows what he’s talking about. In internet/hax0r (“hacker”) “1337” (that means “elite/leet speak”), he’s been around forever. He’s like a mini less grumpy less instructional Gordon Lish, or the next Jonathan Galassi or something.

Q (Nicolle Elizabeth): What is Noo Journal? What is Magic Helicopter Press? How are the two intertwined if at all?

A (Mike Young): NOÖ Journal is a free independent literary journal that I co-edit with Ryan Call. We distribute it online and in print thanks to friends all over the country who put them in coffeeshops, bookstores, grocery stores, etc. Magic Helicopter Press is a small press that I run through which I publish chapbooks and books of strange, interesting stuff. They’re intertwined because I eat the same sandwich while I’m checking both email accounts.

You do a lot, talk about your projects you’re involved with and your own work?

I have two books forthcoming: We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough, a collection of stories this September from Publishing Genius Press, and Look! Look! Feathers, a collection of stories from Word Riot Press. The poetry book will appeal to people who like to graffiti road signs with more interesting language and then take pictures of something unrelated, maybe a sad duck, and paste that picture on top of a picture of the altered road sign. The stories will appeal to people who like 57% or more of the stuff on this list: magic cysts, peaches, gameshows, electrolytes, necklaces made of bluebird bones, mosquito fog, murals, drivethrough redwoods, and cardboard banditos.

You read a lot and know a lot, what is forthcoming from Noo, Magic Helicopter Press and elsewhere which will be awesome?

Two amazing books are forthcoming in the soonish sense from Magic Helicopter: Jason Bredle’s Smiles Of the Unstoppable, which is a limber and vivid sad clown routine that is like taking an imagination pill named Jason Bredle. It’s some of the most entertaining poetry I’ve ever read. And also Ofelia Hunt’s Today & Tomorrow, which has a style of prose I’ve never read before, which feels indebted to being honest about the way a mind really works and really falls apart, and also manages to tell a murder saga, a penguin saga, a zamboni saga, and a grandfather saga all at the same time. It’s a feat of a book, for serious.

You have been involved in the online and print indie community forever. Words of wisdom for writers just setting out?

Don’t try to publish every little paragraph you write. You’re not a character in a video game. You don’t have stats. Just read a lot of interesting stuff and work on your stuff until it feels foreordained. Not just some witty thing you thought up while the milk was still cold. Trust me, I’m telling my past self this as much as I’m talking to anyone else. Read lots on the internet but don’t have seven tabs open while you’re trying to read a goddamn story. Show some respect. Ditto for your own work. Respect the fact that stories are how the world happens in the human brain. This is science. We are doing work at the foremost thrust of science. So ask yourself whether you really need to write a kooky relationship story, Mike.

If someone wants to start a journal or a press, what would your advice be? Is it hard to be both a writer and a publisher?

It’s hard to balance the time. Definitely. My advice would be to carve out a system that allows you to allocate time for your journal in a sensible way. Don’t let it take over your life. Reach out to people whose work you like. Don’t try to gain immediate notoriety by publishing who you perceive as “famous.” For fuck’s sake, none of us will get properly famous until we die. Don’t knee gobble. Be honest and have some kind of vision, even if it’s bare bones or hokey. Be an open node. You can make cute little bookmarks if you want, but those things terrify me and I throw them away. Make attractive vessels for what you publish but don’t make it all about your “production values.” Mix art and writing together. Do stuff in the flesh: readings and shit. Respect the fact that writers are insane and we all think we work seven-hundred times harder than we actually do. Remember that on some basic level, it’s not about pleasing or socializing with writers: it’s about finding them readers.

Please tell us anything else you’d like to here. About the best cities to live in to find literature, about writing, about life in general. It’s hot and for god sakes my apartment has been over-run with houseflies.

Sorry about your houseflies! You should adopt some as pets. Northampton, MA is a great city for literature, though the weather is like an abusive boyfriend. Northampton is where I live right now, and it’s very close to NYC and Boston but it has is own thing going on. The hippies here are 34% less insufferable than the ones on the West Coast, which is where I grew up. The Bay Area seems like an awesome city to live, and Portland is of course on a whole other planet of awesome. As my friend recently said: “Goddammit everybody, stop telling us how great Portland is, we get it!”

Nicolle Elizabeth checks in with Fictionaut Groups every Friday.

CL Bledsoe is the author of two poetry collections, _____(Want/Need) and Anthem. A chapbook, Goodbye to Noise, is available online. A minichap, Texas, was recently published by Mud Luscious Press. A short story collection, Naming the Animals, is forthcoming from Mary Celeste Press. His story, “Leaving the Garden,” was selected as a Notable Story of 2008 for Story South’s Million Writer’s Award. He’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize 3 times. He is an editor for Ghoti Magazine. He blogs at Murder Your Darlings. Bledsoe has written reviews for The Hollins Critic, The Arkansas Review, American Book Review, The Pedestal Magazine, and elsewhere. You can read CL’s story “Honesty” on Fictionaut.

Q (Meg Pokrass) : As a reader, which writers do you feel closest to?

I feel closest to writers who can see behind the curtain and get at the real tragedies and triumphs of life. Basically, life happens in the living–life isn’t about the vacation to Maui, it’s about sitting at a cubicle for 8 hours a day or trying to catch a moment of peace when the baby’s napping. A good writer can make changing a diaper seem more meaningful and interesting than winning the lottery. Of course, the interesting and meaningful stuff comes from the characters, not the situations. This is why certain stories can have grand political themes, war, adultery, etc., and yet be essentially boring because they lack human interest. This is the problem with many films coming out of Hollywood.

Though setting is less important than character, I am drawn to certain settings and situations. I don’t care about stories of rich people facing inconveniences and overcoming them to again be rich, or stories about 20-somethings and the unfairness of having to get a job, or stories about “New York.” Generally, readability comes from tension. Poverty has a great deal of inherent tension. The struggle to keep ones home, or find a home, and feed oneself and ones family is a lot more interesting to read about to me than who’s fucking whom. I like stories about the single mom working at Wal-Mart, or the guy managing a gas station. These are actually hard stories to find. As for New York, it’s been done. In a similar vein, I hate Southern Writing (with the capital “S”) pretty much for the same reason as I hate New York stories. The bottom line is that they both tend to be lazy. They rely on cultural stereotypes that may have been somewhat accurate in the 50s, but certainly aren’t anymore.

Raymond Carver, of course, was the master of writing short stories about working class characters facing real problems. Amy Hempel, of course. Donald Harington’s novels are brilliant, though he does idealize. He owns it, though.

Nicholson Baker is a great example of a writer who can do a lot with very little. His novels are essentially about almost nothing, plotwise (i.e. going to lunch, or writing an introduction to an anthology) and yet his focus is on human nature. Terry Pratchett would be a good example of the latter. He has created another world with, at times, non-human characters, but they feel and think and react in the most human, recognizable ways. He manages to make an anthropomorphised Death seem human and fallible (he loves kittens…). There are several flash fiction writers I admire, mostly ones I’ve found through editing Ghoti.

At different points, have you had mentors? Do you mentor?

I haven’t really had a mentor. That’s the one thing I really felt I needed, when I was younger, and probably still do. It’s actually one of the reasons I went to grad. school. I’m not really sure why it never happened. I’ve always been very open to suggestions about my writing. I’m also very generous with beer. I just never really developed that relationship with anyone. Maybe I smell bad. In workshops, I would pretty much try anything that was suggested. Not to sound like an ass, but I was usually further along than my classmates, so they couldn’t really mentor me. I was also very serious about writing. I have always worked my ass off, which was not the case with most of my classmates. I did develop close relationships with a handful of writers who were at a similar place as me. In grad. school, what I really found was that the faculty often seemed to treat the students more as competition. I could have really used some advice about writing. What I got was, “This’ll never fly in New York.” Or “If you’re going to send a story out, send it to The New Yorker, because nobody reads anything else” (that was as an undergrad.). I seem to be developing a New York theme here. It’s unintentional.

I don’t think I’ve mentored, though I’ve given lots of advice. Mentoring, to me, means a sustained relationship. I’ve had lots of moments where I’ve mentored, but not long term. I have a couple writer buddies I’m very close with. We share work, ask/offer advice. But we’re equals. I suppose, in a sense, I mentor by publishing Ghoti.

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

I don’t. I was creative for about 15 minutes in 1987. Unfortunately, I didn’t write anything down, and now it’s gone. Everyone I know is more creative than me. There are squirrels outside my window right now who could write better novels than me, novels about the ghost-scent of acorns in winter, and the smell of squirrel-sex-musk. Hang on, I’m going to write that down.

Whenever I get a decent idea, I write it down. I have probably 20 notebooks full of ideas for stories, novels, songs, screenplays, etc. I’ve been doing that since high school. I go back through them from time to time when I need ideas, though I actually remember most of them. It takes me a long time to really develop an idea for something like a novel. Years. I have to sort of layer it, fold ideas in on other ideas like making a cake batter, until it has enough body to sustain itself. That analogy kind of got away from me…

So, um, stream of consciousness, memory, experience, etc. I stay creative by writing. I write because it’s how I process and how I communicate. If I don’t write, after a certain length of time, I get really depressed and cranky. It’s not something I can control. It’s just something I’ve noticed. Kind of like I’m going through a withdrawal.

Then it’s a question of finding the time to write. I try to set daily goals for myself to force the creativity, but working full-time plus, often, weekends and evenings makes it difficult to produce regularly or at all. Then the question of picking what to write. Refer to need for a mentor above. I just write whatever is on my mind at the time, or whatever seems most doable. Or what I’m asked for. I will take any job offered to me, as a writer. A review that 20 people have passed on? Sure thing. Thanks for the opportunity. An article no one wants? By when do you need it? This really helps me be productive–it gives me deadlines.

As far as actual writing, taking breaks helps. If I’m stuck, I’ll go make some tea or go for a walk. Watching movies doesn’t help, but I do it anyway. I watch a LOT of movies. Going on Facebook or whatever doesn’t help either. During the school year, I wake up around 6 in the morning, write for an hour or so, then go about my day.

I really push myself. I mean, my third book is coming out in a month, and yet I feel like I’m a lazy bum who will never accomplish anything if I don’t write 3000 words today. Even when I do write 3000, I kick myself for it not being 5000.

I read when I can, but see above–it’s difficult to read when you’re reading 3 novels already, that you’re teaching, plus whatever I happen to be reviewing. I review a lot of books. Still, reading helps.

My wife and I try to get out into the world at least once a month. We travel or see a play or do something that isn’t work. All of that feeds the creativity monster.

How has founding/editing the online literary journal Ghoti affected you creatively, if it has?

I founded Ghoti with a group of friends who’ve pretty much all moved on, except Chris Fullerton. We’re the last men standing. Whoop. I wanted to make a journal that published good writing (kind of rare, actually) and that didn’t care about names (also, used to be, kind of rare). Ghoti takes a lot of time and energy. I have very little time, usually. So Ghoti takes time away from my writing. It’s a very thankless job, because even though we might publish 20 people in an issue, we’ve rejected hundreds more. In that sense, it’s a drain. People do sometimes recognize me from Ghoti. It also keeps me reading new work. I’ve discovered a lot of great writing/writers through Ghoti. It helps get me out of my head, so to speak. I don’t know. We’re just kind of back in our corner of the internet, doing our thing. I hope it has helped some people. I hope it continues to do so.

Tell us about your existing collections, and what is new…

I have a short fiction collection coming out in a month or so called Naming the Animals, Mary Celeste Press. I’m excited about it. It has lots of great stories I’ve been working on for a long time. I have a couple poetry collections under my belt, but it will be nice to have some fiction out there.

I have a poetry collection, Riceland, that was sort of picked up, but actually we’re not sure right now, tough economic times, etc. so I’m trying to place it elsewhere. I have a couple other poetry collections I’m trying to place, reworking those. I have a collection of 10-minute plays I’m trying to place. I’m working on a novel tentatively called The Savior about my experiences in a punk band in the 90s in Arkansas. I recently wrapped up a flash fiction series at Troubadour 21. I’m about to start another one. Lots of summer projects. I’d like to write some more short stories. And novels. And poems.

A reading list?

How about what I’ve been reading? This summer, I re-read Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Read it.
Also, Lamb, by Christopher Moore. Meh.
Help! A Bear is Eating Me! by Mykle Hansen. Pretty good.
Ass Goblins of Auschwitz, by Cameron Pierce. Well, the name pretty much says it all.
A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain. Nine Conversations, by Tamler Sommers. This is a collection of interviews with philosophers. Interesting.
Further Along, Donald Harington’s final novel. Haven’t finished this one yet.
I’m also reading several books I’m reviewing. Soon, I’ll have to start reading the books I’m teaching next year…

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.

Though, as NPR reported this morning, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill may be finally capped and the “three oil and gas seeps on the seafloor near BP’s damaged oil well are not cause for serious alarm”—there are still millions and millions of gallons of oil above and (thanks to dispersants) beneath the surface of the ocean and covering some beaches. Gulf Coast lit mag from Houston is running a “Gulf Coast Clean-up” subscription drive. That’s right: two birds, one stone. Give money to Gulf Coast clean up efforts and get some great reading.

Last week’s digest post addressed the situation over at Mississippi Review. Since that post, the situation has been much discussed (and here and here).

Also from past digests: Denise Hill of New Pages offers up her thoughts on “Literary Magazine Submissions—How Much Would You Pay?” in response to the Tin House-gate controversy of the July 6 digest.

Over at Luna Park: New fiction from Sam Ruddick at Threepenny Review, Mary Miller on dreaming of a Pushcart, Nicholas Ripatrazone on sport (or sports) literature, and Kon Desmond interviews Singapore poet and editor Yeow Kai Chai. Here’s Yeow Kai on death and identity in his poetry:

I subscribe to Roland Barthes’ idea of the death of the author, of not relying on biographical details of the writer to distill meaning. Poetry for me is liberating: To be faceless is to be free.

Rock literature magazine Shaking Like a Mountain (co-founded by Vito Grippi) kicks out a new fiction contest.

Finally, Daniel Nester reports on “The Great Paris Review Poetry Purge” over at We Who Are About to Die. The gray lady of lit mags is rejecting already accepted poetry?

Picture this: you have your poems accepted by The Paris Review.  Such an acceptance can mark the start of a great career, lead to a book deal or to be anthologized, or perhaps solidify a reputation in the small world this correspondent and others call Poetryland…

…Then you get an email from Lorin Stein, the new editor of The Paris Review.  With perhaps the memory that there had been an announcement, written about in New York Observer, about a change at the Poetry Editor desk.

Dear XXXX,

Recently I replaced Philip Gourevitch as editor of The Paris Review and appointed a new poetry editor, Robyn Creswell. Over the last month, Robyn and I have been carefully reading the backlog of poetry that we inherited from the previous editors. This amounts to a year’s worth of poems. In order to give Robyn the scope to define his own section, I regret to say, we will not be able to publish everything accepted by Philip, Meghan, and Dan. We have not found a place for your three poems, though we see much to admire in them and gave them the most serious consideration. I am sorry to give you this bad news, and I’m grateful for your patience during the Review’s transition.

Best regards,
Lorin Stein

Read part two of Nester’s report.

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.

Rose Metal Press is a female founded and run empire which in four short years has become one of the fore-runners in the indie fiction community. As a welder and Emerson undergrad alum, I like them additionally. Though, mostly because they really do put out excellent work, (11 quite legit indie books to date), and have great attitudes, and are awesome.

Q (Nicolle Elizabeth): Rose Metal, welcome to Fictionaut. How is it going?

A (Abby Beckel and Kathleen Rooney): Hi, Nicolle. Thanks for the invite, and for being such a thoughtful hostess. (With the mostess, etc.)

What is Rose Metal Press? (Its history, mission, its everything?)

Rose Metal is a fusible alloy with a low melting point consisting of 50% bismuth, 25-28% lead, and 22-25% tin. Also known as “Rose’s metal” and “Rose’s alloy,” Rose Metal is typically used as a solder.

Our Rose Metal Press is an independent, not-for-profit publisher of work in hybrid genres, specializing in the publication of short short, flash, and micro-fiction; prose poetry, novels-in-verse or book-length linked narrative poems; and other literary works that move beyond the traditional genres of poetry, fiction, and essay to find new forms of expression.

Just as the alloy Rose Metal joins one unlike thing to another so strongly that they cannot be separated, Rose Metal Press publishes three beautifully produced titles per year by authors who fuse unlike elements together in their writing in ways that are both surprising and seamless.

Shortly after our 2005 graduations from the MA and MFA programs at Emerson College, we co-founded the press in Boston in January of 2006. In observing the literary community and deciding what kind of focus we wanted our press to take, we noticed that many writers were doing exciting, culturally important work in these hybrid genres, but that they had limited opportunities to publish that work since few commercial publishers accept such submissions due to concerns over profitability and marketing.

How many books, anthologies, journals etc has Rose Metal birthed into literature over the years?

ISBNs are sold in batches of ten. And we just had to buy another batch! Because our next full-length book, COLOR PLATES by Adam Golaski, will be our eleventh book, and releases in September. But our tenth book, our next chapbook, will come out in a few weeks, in late July. The chapbook, WE KNOW WHAT WE ARE, was written by Mary Hamilton and selected by Dinty W. Moore as the winner of our Fourth Annual Short Short Chapbook Contest.

Talk about the contests. How are the judges chosen? What’s the contest all about?

This year’s judge will be Kim Chinquee, and our first judge was Ron Carlson, our second was Robert Shapard, and our third was Sherrie Flick. The judges are chosen based on their own accomplishments in and support of the short short form. Chapbooks are often considered the province of poetry, but we think that they also make good delivery devices for flash fiction, hence the contest. If you win, we make a limited edition chapbook out of your book and we letterpress its covers by hand on a vintage Vandercook press at the Museum of Printing in North Andover, MA. Details are as follows:

Our Fifth Annual Short Short Chapbook Contest submission period begins October 15 and ends December 1, 2010. Our 2010 judge will be Kim Chinquee. The winner will have his/her chapbook published in summer 2011, with an introduction by the contest judge. During the submission period, please email your 25-40 page double-spaced manuscript of short short stories under 1000 words to us at rosemetalpress[at]gmail[dot]com with a $10 reading fee via Paypal or check.

Rose Metal and Grub Street are affiliates or no? I thought you somehow were connected but can’t remember if not ignore me I have no airconditioning.

We are mutual fans, and fellow-Boston-area-based literary nonprofits, yes. But we’re not formally affiliated. However, Grub Street has been really supportive of us, and allows us to host our launch parties there sometimes, in their amazing space overlooking the Boston Common.

What lit does Rose Metal love?

All the work by our authors, of course, but also many, many of the books being put out by other small and independent presses (and some of the mainstream and university publishers). We love books that take chances, and publishers who do the same and think beyond the big sell or big name, and instead choose books first for their beauty of language, or originality, or amazing perceptiveness, etc. The aesthetic of the press is that we tend to choose stories and poems that are funny/sad – that use the innate irony and absurd humor of daily life to illuminate poignant relationships and situations without sentimentality.

What’s in the future for Rose Metal?

After Mary Hamilton’s chapbook and Adam Golaski’s full-length collection, we’re going to be publishing a multi-author volume of chapbooks consisting of a reprint of Third Annual Short Short Chapbook Contest winner Sean Lovelace’s HOW SOME PEOPLE LIKE THEIR EGGS along with four of the finalists to the Fourth Annual Short Short Chapbook Contest, including Elizabeth Colen, John Jodzio, Tim Jones-Yelvington, and Mary Miller. It will be called THEY COULD NO LONGER CONTAIN THEMSELVES, and will be sort of similar to the multi-author chapbook collection we put out back in 2007 called A PECULIAR FEELING OF RESTLESSNESS, which included a reprint of Claudia Smith’s First Annual Short Short Chapbook Contest winning manuscript, as well as chapbooks by Amy L. Clark, Elizabeth Ellen, and Kathy Fish.

After that, we’ll put out prose poem/short short book THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE by Jim Goar. What we are saying about the latter is this: The prose poems and flash fictions in The Louisiana Purchase carry the reader past Ozzie Smith and Thomas Jefferson into a world where the moon is an outlaw, a weeping elephant flees from the authorities, the Pinkertons upset the sky, effigies of Phil Neikro are burned, and a society made of words collapses. According to Scott Glassman of Rain Taxi, Goar’s “clause-free declarative sentences are a perfect match for the edgy grade-school surrealism that guides us into emotional revelation.”  The Louisiana Purchase is what Alice would have found had she fallen into William Clark’s map instead of a rabbit hole; it is an uncanny territory that both delights and disturbs.

Those two books, plus our contest-winning chapbook, make up our list for 2011. Beyond that, we’ve got other great hybrid projects under consideration for 2012 and beyond.

Thanks for having us!

Nicolle Elizabeth checks in with Fictionaut Groups every Friday.

Charles Jensen is the author of three chapbooks, including Living Things, which won the 2006 Frank O’Hara Chapbook Award, and The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon (New Michigan Press, 2007). His first full-length collection, The First Risk, was published in 2009 by Lethe Press. A past recipient of an Artist’s Project Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, his poetry has appeared in Bloom, Columbia Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, The Journal, New England Review, spork, and West Branch.  He is the founding editor of the online poetry magazine Locuspoint, which explores creative work on a city-by-city basis.

Q (Meg Pokrass) As a reader, which writers do you feel closest to?

The writers who really grab me do the unexpected. I really enjoy experiments with form, like Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves; experiments with voice, like Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End; experiments with lyric, like Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica and Carole Maso’s The American Woman in the Chinese Hat. But I think what I appreciate most of all is a clear, believable, compelling voice, which is the strongest aspect that can run through both poetry and prose. I love David Leavitt’s short stories and Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me for this reason. And I read most of Sue Grafton’s alphabet series because I like the voice of the main character so much.

As a teacher of writing, how has teaching influenced your own work… if it has?

Being a teacher is one of the greatest gifts. It’s almost as good as being a student. Teaching requires you to look more closely at a piece of work, to read it with a different kind of eye; you aren’t reading it just to enjoy it or to appreciate it, you’re reading it to anticipate what people will ask about it or say about it. You’re also looking for the work. Antonya Nelson once said (and this is probably a gross paraphrase) that if you want to be a carpenter, one of the best things to do is turn a chair upside down and see how it was put together, and if you want to be a writer, you do this with stories. You open them up, take out all their parts, and put them  back together again. I can’t say I do this when I read for pleasure because in those times I’m looking more for the kinds of things I mention above. And I think teaching is a great way to afford yourself some sense of surprise as well. Hearing my students’ responses to work we read can pull out things I would have otherwise missed. I take back all my questions, my close readings, my discussions of work from classes and it becomes a part of my approach to writing, I guess you could say. Those new ideas end up shaping my writing as I move forward.

At different points, have you had mentors? Do you mentor?

Absolutely. I can trace my love of writing back to when I was 13. Wisconsin has a Writers in the Schools program and a poet was sent to my school to work with us for a week. That was when I really began
writing in earnest, after that, after I realized that writing was something people valued. In high school, I had an amazing mentor who worked with me for four years, looking at just about every piece of writing I did and giving me great constructive feedback. Most of all, she encouraged me to continue, and I came to believe writing was something worth doing. Although it seems small, and I think most writers already feel that way, I think that little belief is one of the major differences between someone who writes and someone who WANTS
to write. I am only more than happy to work with other people who are looking for the same kind of support, but I think I can be a tough mentor. But there’s nothing greater than seeing someone you’ve worked with catch that spark and just explode with new writing, things they’ve kept in for so long, that they’ve always wanted permission to write.

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

Reading, for me, is the most important creative activity. Anytime I notice I haven’t been writing, it’s a direct result of having stopped reading. I feel fortunate that, for the last several years, I’ve gotten to work in the center of two unique literary communities and that the simple act of going to work has been an act of literary
engagement in some way, but even that can’t take the place of reading. I’ve always felt it was like filling a gas tank. If I pour in enough words, my engine will continue running. One thing I’m working on right now is trying to find a way to construct more reading time in my life because I’ve felt “stuck” now and then.

What are your favorite online lit sites?

For magazines, I love The Collagist, No Tell Motel, and Anti-. They all use their “internetness” in an interesting way and publish work based on their own goals and interests, which I appreciate. I have
also been fairly active in the literary blog community (if you can call it one) for about six or seven years now. Blogging was, then, such a great way to build a personal literary community, and now I’ve found that Facebook has been a great resource as well. It’s a bit lazier since, with blogs, you must seek out content, while Facebook constantly pushes content to you. But I find I get access to new sites and new opportunities through Facebook now. In fact, Facebook was where I first discovered Fictionaut!

What is happening? What are you working on? A general view of what’s up with you…

For about five years, I’ve been working on a collection of prose poems that has finally coalesced under the title Nanopedia: The Smallest American Reference. I have a sense that I’m only about halfway through it. The only consistent connection among all the pieces is that they must fit into a 3.5″ x 3″ “window” on the page. I have another poetry manuscript in progress that I think will end up exploring different kinds of faith, and I have been trying to get back to a novel in progress called Musical Theatre in Hell, about a college production of Jesus Christ Superstar that goes horribly (and laughably) awry. I’ve also been sketching out two other ideas–a book on management that uses pop culture as a teaching tool, and a book of personal essays. I
think I’ll have time to devote to all these projects later this year, so I’m excited to really dig in and get working!

A reading list?

Gladly! You should read these!

Dylan Landis, Normal People Don’t Live Like This
Mary Gaitskill, Don’t Cry
James Mathews, Last Known Position
James L. White, The Salt Ecstasies
Nicole Cooley, Breach
Mathias Svalina, Destruction Myths

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.