I really like it when Fictionaut comes alive in person. Tonight Fictionauters Elizabeth Ellen, Kim Chinquee, Peter Schwartz, Christopher Kennedy, Robert Lopez, Barry Graham, Karen Baddely, Steve Rosenstein, Marie Barrientos, G.D. Peters, Paul Hylan Segar, Ken Sparling, Geoffrey Nutter, Jen Michalski, Mark Mirsky, and Shya Scanlon will read the KGB Bar in New York City for Dogzpot and Sententia Magazines. Fictionauter Timmy Waldron will be reading Saturday night. These people, among others, are the future of publishing and American Literature and I thought I’d ask Fictionauter Jackie Corley to talk about where short fiction in independent literature has been and where it’s going. She is the editor of Word Riot and Word Riot Press as well as many other projects and her own work, The Suburban Swindle.

Nicolle Elizabeth: Hey Ms. Corley. I’d love to talk about Word Riot here at Fictionaut. You are a journal and a press, with a long and present history. Can you give us some insight into Word Riot?

Jackie Corley: My goal with Word Riot has always been to not overextend myself or my editors. I’ve seen too many online mags come in guns blazing and then they’re gone just as quickly. I feel that publishing monthly and putting out 2-4 books a year is something i’ll be able to continue doing for many years to come.

What authors does Word Riot have chaps/books going for currently and forthcoming?

Later this year we have short story collections coming out from Paula Bomer and Mike Young. We recently released an anthology called What’s Your Exit? A Literary Detour Through New Jersey. The breadth and depth of this collection — 49 writers and poets are included — presented a challenge for me as a publisher that I was eager to meet and the book has been incredibly successful for us right out the gate.

I think of you as a staple in the short fiction community. How do you feel about where we’re at currently and can you offer any insight into where we’re going?

I’m pretty excited for where the indie lit community is at right now. I think blogs & sites like HTMLGiant, Big Other, the Millions, the Rumpus & The Nervous Breakdown have united the community in a way that didn’t exist before. Smaller presses continue to thrive and bigger publisher are taking notice of writers coming out of this indie lit scene. I’d like to see more bigger publisher start to pluck from this stable. Thus far it’s only been Harper Perennial that’s been looking to the indie lit scene for the next generation of writers. I’m also pretty eager to see online mags get the attention and respect they deserve. We’re coming on 10 years for some of the older mags and we’re just starting to see the mainstream literary community acknowledge this growth.

Nicolle Elizabeth checks in with Fictionaut Groups every Friday.

Ben Greenman is an editor at the New Yorker and the author of several acclaimed books of fiction, including Superbad, Please Step Back, and What He’s Poised To Do, out later this month from HaperPerennial. He lives in Brooklyn. You can read the title story from What He’s Poised To Do on Fictionaut.

As a reader, which writers have you recently discovered and felt closest to?

No new discoveries, but several books I have picked up again after a long interval and felt a new surge of excitement: James Salter’s Light Years, Stanley Booth’s The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, and the collected stories of Isaac Babel. The last is the most interesting rediscovery, I think. I had read the Red Cavalry stories a long time ago and was put off by the violence and the untraditional length of the stories. Some are as short as two pages. This time through, I liked that. Not sure why. Plus, the stories are great: they are journalistic and psychologically realistic and also beautifully colored (by which I mean that he uses many colors in his descriptions).

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

I was just talking to my friend Rhett Miller about this. He’s a great songwriter, and he said that when he gets stuck he has go-to books that he uses: poetry collections, or biographies, things that he knows will contain odd turns of phrase or suggestive description that will get his wheels out of the ditch and get him moving again. For me, it’s the exact same thing in reverse: I use songwriters’ lyrics, whether it’s his, or Sly Stone’s, or John Prine’s, or Sam Phillips’s, or Joseph Hill’s–they get me thinking, and that’s all that has to happen.

What are your favorite literary websites and e-zines?

I can’t pick just one. Electric Literature? Opium? HTML Giant? I read them all erratically: this is my fault, not theirs. As far as literary sites, I love the UPenn Online Books page, because I like downloading and/or printing out free literature.

What is happening right now that you would like to share in your writing world?

I have a book of stories about to come out called What He’s Poised To Do, and in conjunction with it, Harper Perennial and I started a Website called Letters With Character that invites people to write letters to fictional characters. We’ve been up about three weeks, and we have about a hundred letters, and they really run the gamut from people who feel the need to romantically intervene in the plots of classic novels to people who want to thank characters for inspiring them to people who want to air out a grievance. The books that people have written to/into are interesting: everything from Winnie the Pooh to Harry Potter to The Confidence-Man to Don Quixote.

My book has fourteen stories, all united by the notion that people spend most of their lives trying to connect with others and most of their lives failing. Letters are one of the major tools of attempt, and I believe in them in ways I do not always believe in email or Twitter. The stories take place through time and space: 19th century North Africa, Atlanta in 2015, the moon.

Tell us more about Letters With Character.

Letters With Character is something I thought of and my editor at Harper Perennial, Cal Morgan, named. I thought it would be a great way to see how people interact with fiction, and if it is a therapeutic or provocative exercise. So far, it is.

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.

Fictionaut loves it LOVES IT when our fair Fictionauters fare well. John Reed, our own, and our own fiction provocateur, is soon to release his first non-fiction title, Tales of Woe, and it is foul.  True stories without any redeeming character whatsoever—just bleak, bleak, unremitting, and undeserved.  Printed on black paper, with fifty pages of full color art .

Q (Nicolle Elizabeth for Fictionaut): Hi John Reed, thanks for making time for us over at ye olde Fictionaut. Your newest work Tales of Woe (site), forthcoming from MTV Press in August, is comprised of flash pieces interwoven in their gloom, but mostly, interwoven in their deep understanding of and insight into humanity. Woe has us feeling that sometimes, things can turn for the worse, the awful, that there is something wrong with everybody. You can explain it better than I can. What’s the book about?

A (John Reed): Tales of Woe chronicles stories of pointless suffering.  Undeserved suffering.  Not a thread of silver lining.

Are all of the pieces entirely fiction or are they based in fact? Did a man actually attempt to have sex with a bicycle?

Totally true.

Did you choose the illustrators?

Jacob Hoye, my editor, and Walter Einenkel, the designer, also contributed an enormously to that process.  But, yes, I worked with and chose the illustrators.  We looked at many, many artists for Woe, and after a while we had a sense of the Woe aesthetic, which isn’t stylistic so much as characteristic.  We wanted a wide spread of indy comix type artists—but all of them had to have the quality of fine art, not just graphic art, and all of them had to be “Woe.”

Some of the images got more direction than others.

Why black paper?  Was it difficult to work with?

The black paper felt most appropriate, and with current printing and software capabilities, it’s more possible than it used to be.  But yes, it was really difficult.  It fought us every step of the way.  The manuscript costs a hundred bucks to print on an inkjet.

Why (if you do) do you feel the book will speak to flash fiction, short fiction writers, poets and novelists who don’t normally read fables, Edward Gorey-esque works and etc? (I think it will, by the way.)

Catharsis, until recently, was a process by which you watched someone else suffer, and then felt better for it.  That, I think, is the appeal (if there is one, we’ll see).  That’s the humor as well, gallows/journalist humor.

I thought the project was going to be much easier to work on than it was.  The stories didn’t get easier to write; they got harder to write.  The more I time I invested in these horrendously upsetting tragedies, the more depressing the material became.  I’d expected myself to harden to the stories: not the case.  But I did become a better person for working on Woe; how could I not be more appreciative of my own life and loved ones?  So, of course, it’s easy to criticize Woe as a freakshow/car-wreck attraction, but the stories in Woe, for me at least, offered something else: a broader perspective on living.

What was the process in working on Woe like? Did you ever find yourself feeling depressed in general from the subject matter?

Some of the stories make me feel sick, even as I write this sentence.  They are truly awful.

Were there any extra tales which didn’t make it into the final manuscript?

We cut some material: some text, several images, and one full story.  Self-censorship?  Maybe.  But some of Woe is pretty difficult to live with as is.

Why so much Sarah Palin?

Believe it or not, those centerfolds are not extraneous.  I started thinking about Palin before she was a VP candidate.  In researching Woe, there were three types of stories that I had to quit using, because they were too easy to find.  First: stories about animals.  Second: stories about children.  Third: stories set in Alaska.  We had enough Alaska stories to fill the whole book.

Nicolle Elizabeth checks in with Fictionaut Groups every Friday.

Thaisa Frank’s short stories have received two PEN awards, and her two most recent collections Sleeping in Velvet, 1998, and A Brief History of Camouflage, 1992, have been on the Bestseller List of the San Francisco Chronicle. Frank returns with her first novel titled Heidegger’s Glasses. Set in the final days of World War II, the novel explores an underground compound of scribes hidden deep in the German forest who must answer letters written to those killed in the camps.

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

I feel closest to Kafka, although I have been influenced by Faulkner, Donald Barthleme, I.B. Singer, Flannery O’Connor, Sigrid Undest, Par Lagerqvist, Richard Brautigan,  Ana Hatherly, Borges, Gogol and Flaubert. Without question there are numerous writers that I haven’t mentioned.  Recently I really enjoyed Tom McCarthy’s book, Remainder (published in the Paris underground after it was rejected by everyone in Britain, picked up when it became it had a cult following in Paris, and eventually was published in this country.)  I’ve also liked Jane Mendelsohn (I was Amelia Earhardt) and  Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime.  Perhaps Kafka influenced me the most because he works in a surrealist mode and wrote the first fairy tales of modern life. If you’re curious about the difference between surrealism, magic realism, and fantasy, I wrote a column for The Divining Wand.

At different points, have you had mentors?

My mentors have been the writers I’ve read, which is how I think most writers learn. So all of the writers listed above–and numerous short story writers and flash fiction writers.  At times I’ve had good editors.  I think they were less mentors than voices from the open marketplace that told me what I had to do to get a book published. (It’s amazing how writers will change things for editors.)

Do you mentor?

I guess I do. In fact I’m in the curious position of teaching writing without ever having taken a workshop. I majored in philosophy of science, which–oddly-became useful when thinking about how to teach fiction writing which I think (and I know many people would agree with me) is essentially unteachable.  I tend to look at the balance of a story first, just the way a carpenter would look at a table. I try to look at things that don’t necessarily have meaning in a story–things that fracture unity and pieces of the story that have valence. I’ve devised my own methods of thinking about fiction and voice. (I co-authored Finding Your Writer’s Voice, which is still in print and is part of St. Martin’s Writers Library.)  When a writer is flailing about (as we all do), I encourage them to work with voice–who they are and how they express that artistically.  It’s usually voice that makes readers willing to follow a writer.

Even though I don’t think fiction writing can be taught, I do think that a story–once it’s whole–can be edited.  But that can’t happen until a writers plunges into improvisation and is surprised by their own story. Unless a story is a discovery for the writer (rather than a recording of what they’ve decided to write), it won’t be a discovery for the reader. I try to help writers make that discovery.

How do you stay creative?

In truth, I’ve never known how to do this.  It’s either happening for me or it’s not. And I’m a sprinter, not a marathon runner. That is, I can go for days without writing and then work nearly around the clock.   I tend to work by generating a lot of fragments, half-baked stories, and phrases. So I always have something I can do. But there are times when I spin my wheels and feel totally worthless. I tend to work quickly when I work, as though I’m entering a different time zone–or maybe a place where time disappears. I hope that makes up for the taffy-like sense of time I often experience when I’m not writing.

What are your tricks to get “unstuck?”

I have a bunch of exercises that other people have found helpful, but there’s only one that ever helped me, which is writing grammatical nonsense.  The words can’t link together in any associative way, even though you may make sense of them later. For e.g. Spoons calibrate talkative leaves. This exercise seems to give the inner critic/editor an entirely different job from the usual job, which is making sure that things make sense.  And when you go back to writing sense, the inner critic relaxes, just like a backseat driver you’ve given the wheel.  It’s hard to write nonsense but it’s not a big deal to fail at it.  And you can cheat by taking words from different realms (chemistry, literary criticism, politics, jive, cooking) and mixing them up, It’s very hard at first, but after a while you get good at it.

I don’t have any other tricks that help me get unstuck, but there’s one thing I try to avoid, which is the kind of “journaling” (when did that get to be a verb?) that’s going to tell me what I already know about my day, rather than a writer’s log where I discover what I don’t know. This kind of writing just encourages linear thinking, which isn’t what writing is about. (Again, I know a number of people who will disagree with me.)

What is happening right now that you would like to share in your writing world?

My book has been picked up by a lot of foreign publishers before publication and I met a few of them today at the BEA.  Europe really seems to like this book–and it makes me happy to know it will travel across the ocean.  And of the foreign publishers have been very interested in the part of the book that touches on Heidegger–that is, the intellectual overlay that isn’t necessary to catch in order to b e interested in the plot.  My Italian publisher, Neri Pozza, was in philosophy and they publish Europe’s leading expert about Heidegger.  So they were very excited and I was excited, too, even though the irony of Heidegger’s philosophy–what he’s saying about the nature of reality (and the paradox of his being a member of the Party)–is lost on most readers.

How does your background as a psychotherapist influence your writing if it does?

Actually, it had a negative influence for the following reasons: (1) Psychology is aimed at reducing the mystery of human life and fiction is aimed at elevating it.  There’s a reductionistic flavor to the best of psychology that is a bane to the fiction writer who has to see characters whole and full-blown, like found works of art.. (2) Also, as a therapist, I was sworn to secrecy because of the confidentiality issue.  So I had to put the fiction-writer’s part of my brain on hold. It was like being in a large dysfunctional family where everyone had a secret I wasn’t supposed to tell and I couldn’t use my imagination during sessions.   (3) I also couldn’t ask questions that fiction writers ask out of curiosity. For example, if a client said that he and his girlfriend went out to dinner and had a fight I wanted to know: What was the restaurant? What did you have to eat? In other words, I wanted information that would place it in a scene. But therapists can’t ask those questions.  (Sometimes I cheated and did ask.) (4) Therapists can only talk when appropriate, and can only “share” their lives when appropriate.  Most of the time it’s about silence and active listening.  Writers tend to be active listeners, which is why many people do tell them stories. But in my experience writers like to tell stories, too. So that vow of silence was grueling.  (5) Many therapists think that art is some kind of insane expression of the unconscious.  Or they want to be artists. Or both.  I often felt I was in a strange community.  (I hope this won’t discourage any writer from getting a degree in therapy: )  )

How did you come up with the idea for your soon to be released novel Heidegger’s Glasses?

Years ago, when I’d just written  a couple of books of short fiction, I had an image of a woman in a mine, answering letters to the dead. I wrote about sixteen pages and knew that the situation was too complex for a short story. But I never considered myself a novelist.  So I put it away.  A few years ago I was at a party and someone told me  that Heidegger had a revelation about his own eyeglasses. (He looked at them and forgot what they were for, as though he were from the cave days or a different planet and got sort of stoned on the notion that we try to hold our human world together by fragile sense of meaning.)   I had completely forgotten about the sixteen pages. But when I heard this story, I thought: “Wow. Heidegger’s Glasses would be a great title.”  So I began to write a story about WWII, completely forgetting about the mine.  But when I got the proofs for the book, those first sixteen pages popped out of a drawer, and I realized they were the DNA for the book I actually wrote. The title is what catalyzed the book. But obviously I’d been mulling it over for a long time.

You have told me that you adore flash fiction – both writing and reading it.  Can you talk about why you are specifically drawn to this/fond of this form?

I like flash fiction (short but with characters) and prose poems (also short but with a transforming image instead of characters) because they’re short enough so that the voice of the line can coincide easily with the voice of the story, which is always bigger than the sum of its parts. You can see how the piece is working as a whole without hours of slaving away at a novel or a longer short story. And if you can get a piece of flash fiction to feel “whole,” to have unity, chances are you’ve begun to discover your unique vision of the world. There’s a throw-away quality to this kind of writing, like a found dream.  Some of my prose poems and flash fiction pieces have worked right away and others have taken years to develop. I also like it because it’s the one kind of fiction I’ve found I can teach in a workshop.  So I take back my statement that fiction is unteachable.  I actually think that anyone can learn to write a good piece of flash fiction.

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.

On “Confessions of an I.R.A. Terrorist”
by Savannah Schroll Guz

For its authentic voice and sharp characterization, David Ackley’s story, “Confessions of an I.R.A. Terrorist,” remains one of my Fictionaut Faves. Not only is Ackley’s choice of the first-person vantage point a joy to read (since it so perfectly captures the monologue of a callused but well-meaning London cab driver), the story also astutely scrutinizes the illogical nature of prejudice and the way in which, over a decade, such intolerance and fear have so rapidly changed target.

Through lines like the following one, Ackley reveals the witty resignation of his narrator to the circumstances of his world. Here, the narrator Paddy O’Donovan is referring to a loudspeaker request to move an unattended suitcase from an Underground station: “That’s the Brit all over; polite to the last, please and pardon and thank you very much, even as they’re about to detonate your undies.” Or a line like this: “When we drive off I raise my middle finger over the roof in salute to my chums and from three cab windows in a line come a brown, black and tan middle finger sending it back to me.” This is so vividly real, so in character that I can’t imagine this man doesn’t actually exist somewhere in London, maybe drinking a pint and eating crisps from a bag inside his flat in Battersea. It’s a powerful piece of fiction that reveals a great many uncomfortable truths about human nature, both through the narrator’s actions and through all those surrounding him.

On “Pacific Light”
by P. Jonas Bekker

The protagonist of this story gets drafted in 1961 to serve in the US military. But, as he tells us, ‘the shooting war was canceled’, and he ends up being an asset in that other, non-shooting, war – the Cold War – as he gets assigned to a unit in blistering hot and mind-numbingly boring Oahu. Ackley uses his dry, deadpan humor to lend color to the seemingly pointless enumeration of anecdotes from the stupid and tedious life of a draftee in peacetime that follows. The anecdotes and loose remarks he threads together are so hilarious, in fact, that I didn’t care one bit that the story didn’t seem to be going anywhere. And certainly, had it not, I would have loved it still.

But it does go somewhere. The first time you feel this is when the storytelling slows down into the only real dialogue of the story. Near the end of his tour, the protagonist stands on the shore with his fellow draftees waiting for something that is supposed to happen at ‘nineteen hundred hours’. As it gets dark, they bicker about what exactly is about to happen. There is supposed to be some sort of big explosion. I didn’t know what Ackley was getting at until he had one of the guys say the event is ‘about nine hundred miles away’. In this great story, Ackley lulls you into a snickering half-doze with his stupid soldier jokes and then he – literally – drops the bomb on you.

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.

I love this thing Michelle Elvy‘s doing. A story a week. I think Kim Chinquee‘s crew has been doing this too but I think it’s one a day and what I think it will all lead to are some legendary anthologies in ten years. Cheever says, “Writing is not a competitive sport,” and I say, well hell, maybe it is, but with the self. Join 52/250 it’s great. Michelle Elvy took some time to look up from her ink well and let me grill her about it. Think of this week as an “about us” pamphlet.

Q: Where did the idea for the 52|250 group come from?

It started from an idea I dreamed up one night, to make myself write at least one piece of flash fiction every week for a year (besides my ongoing longer projects – novel, memoir, you know, the usual suspects). That was back in February… it was one of those personal goals you set in order to kick yourself into gear. I was going to make a page on my website, call it 52|250 because I liked the sound and symmetry of fifty-two-two-fifty (yeah, that’s how you gotta say it!). Then, I mentioned it to an old friend from high school, who’s a writing teacher and storyteller himself, and he responded, “I’m in!” A few emails later, we sorted out the details and launched the website. Add a Fictionaut Group and a Facebook page, et voila! a new community is born. My friend John (Wentworth Chapin)’s on board as my co-pilot.

How’s it going? People active? Stories coming? Creativity and good vibes flowing?

Oh, I’m amazed by what’s happened in the first week. We received seventeen stories on the first theme, Breadfruit. The themes are submitted by all sorts of folks – we put out calls for submissions on Facebook, email, wherever. So lots came in. This one – Breadfruit – came out of the blue. I was surprised by it, wondered how we’d write anything at all about it. But then, 17 different approaches to one idea rolled in. And even now, we already have submissions for this next week’s theme, “fancy me”.

Are you putting them in an anthology?

Well, I’ve certainly thought about that. After a year, we’ll look over the whole collection and see what we’ve got. Based on the first week, my expectations are quite high. One step at a time at this point.

Have any been solicited for other journals?

Not yet – we just started! But I encourage anyone who writes for 52|250 to submit their stories elsewhere, too.

Are people offering edits/helpful comments as feedback within the group?

It’s too early to tell – but I hope that will come. I send my stories to other writers and friends for feedback quite often; I know others do as well. So maybe that will develop as the comments evolve. It’s a great idea, though, because not all the writers who submit to the website are from Fictionaut. For those folks, a kind of “workshop” might be appreciated.

Who are you, anyway? Tell us everything, anything.

In 52 words (I like a challenge):

Erstwhile academic, teacher of history; now sailor and teller of tales. Chesapeake born, water girl, live and love in the South Pacific. And yet, still dream of landlocked Berlin. Lover of mangoes, not breadfruit. Optimist-cynic. Mother of two. New to online literary world, blown away by talent/community. Like living large, writing small.

Whats 2011 look like for 52|250?

2011 will be a blockbuster year. James Cameron will be knocking down doors to get to the movie version of 52|250: A Year of Flash, but we’ll probably go with Jane Campion, because I think her quiet, studied approach to art will suit our project better. Of course, by then Meg Pokrass will be a celebrated Xtranormal producer, so we’ll ask her to do a short. I don’t yet know how the story ends, but so far I know it starts with breadfruit and includes little worlds, cartography, lovelies on the beach, the balance of terror, a broken camera, and something about fancy me. Sounds like a blockbuster already, doesn’t it? There are 45 more ideas coming our way, so we’ll write the script as we go….

Anything I left out, go go go

Go check out the website – http://52250flash.wordpress.com/ – it’s bright and beautiful thanks to all the wonderful writing already happening there. I am amazed by the stuff one can create with so few words. Flash fiction is appealing because it represents a burst of energy in a small space. For me, it’s like harnessing something really big and packing it down until you see it clearly. It’s whimsical, fun. It’s also challenging because of the economy of words. For a lot of writers, I suspect it offers an alternative from some of the other work they engage in, and yet it also sparks all sorts of new energy. Several new ideas have been born from flash, for me. The process is wonderful: you start with a vague notion, work it to a small and lovely thing, and end up with an expression of something larger than you. When I read other writers’ flash stories, I’m drawn to the aesthetics of it, how it’s tight and close, never sprawling on the page. And yet the images can blow your mind, or linger with you for a long time.

In short, flash fiction is a unique art. There are 17 works of art up at our website now; 52|250 is a gallery of small frames with big talent.

Nicolle Elizabeth checks in with Fictionaut Groups every Friday.

On Jane Hammons‘ “Dreaming in Mink”
by Kirsty Logan

Most little girls are in love with their mothers – those impossibly elegant images of what we aspire to be. But as we grow older, we realize that our mothers are not just our mothers. They are strangers in familiar clothes. To me, this story suggests that our parents can only be interesting to us when we no longer see them as just parents; when we are no longer just their children.

I was in love with this story right from its first voluptuous, mysterious paragraph. Words like ‘kohl’, ‘mink’, and ‘rippled’ plunged me directly into these character’s dreams. I love to get delightfully lost in the story’s structure, its rhythms and breaks, in the contrast between the sensuality of the women’s world and the clinical violence of reality. Compare the relationship between the women: “A kohl eyed model, aloof in full-length fur that rippled to the ground in luxurious folds” with that of Sally’s husband: “Antiseptic smile. Teeth so perfect they might be false. Hands soft as baby mice fit everywhere.” I can almost feel his fingers slipping into my unwilling mouth.

On Pia Ehrhardt‘s “Baby Hater”
by Jeanne Holtzman

I have read many stories about mother-love that have moved me, but none as much as Pia Ehrhardt’s “Baby Hater“. The rhythm of Pia’s words propelled me through sensory details that capture the essence of motherhood. Overwhelming love is “an ocean inside a balloon.” “A tiny fingernail scratching the tightly covered mattress,” is “less of a sound than one bristle of a brush on a snare drum” but to a mother becomes as loud as a scream in the night. Pia shows how motherhood fills you with love and fear and empties you of everything else – all the important things your brain was stuffed with, even your other worries, even your most ridiculous erotic fantasies, and ultimately even your child. From the mildly eyebrow-raising first line to the powerfully understated last one, this story touches all the tender parts.

On Beate Sigriddaughter‘s “The Lucky Children“
by Myra King

I chose “The Lucky Children” as one of my Faves because I believe that the best literary fiction should make one think, question and be moved. This story of Beate Sigriddaughter’s certainly does all that. Brave and honest, it explores the shadows of rape and the protagonist’s reaction to it at that time and also now, in the moment of her recalling. She holds the guilt of not reporting the rape. By not saying anything, did she expose other women to this man’s attentions? But, as all good stories go, this one is not as black and white as I have just pictured it. This man is studying to be a doctor and with the future at her mind’s fingertips the protagonist knows that he has indeed become a doctor and not just a GP, but a pediatrician. Now the ethical waters of grey swirl the reader up with the facts that this man is saving lives and, most poignant of all, children’s lives. Does good rule out bad? Should she forgive him? If she ruined his career by exposing him, he would have not reached his full potential and therefore children’s lives may have been lost. There is the dilemma.

And if she forgives him his larger transgression can she then forgive herself of her lesser transgression? These are questions the reader must answer for himself/herself.

What I wrote to Beate was this: Wow, Beate. This is powerful and bravely written – the contrast between the guy knowing the woman did not want him but still took her, and the fact that he was going to do good things with his life. Does it atone? Is he sorry? It seemed to me he may have been. I don’t think he’s one of those dangerous types, not if he cares about children so much. To ruin his career and therefore those he may have saved – and children too – an ethical dilemma – but so poignant. Brilliantly written and superb ending too, Beate. Have faved. To forgive is not to condone, it helps us to heal. And the character does not have to forgive herself, she has done nothing wrong.

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.

Jack Swenson has long admired the beauty and power of miniature fiction. Writing flash is a labor of love in his opinion. His scribblings have appeared in many online and print journals including Ghoti, Wigleaf, Metazen, Staccato, and Pindeldyboz. Hello Walls, a book of his best stories, is now in print.

Q (Meg Pokrass): When in your life, Jack, did short story writing become a passion?

Twice. I ran smack dab into the work of some fine writers when I was an undergrad. I loved the short-short pieces of Isaac Babel and the poet William Carlos Williams. Make Light of It is the title of WCW’s book of stories. Great stuff. More recently I came upon Raymond Carver’s work, and, well, that was the second time lightning struck. The passion smoldered for about ten years and then burst into flame.  I’ve written hundreds of stories in the past two or three years.

What short story writers inspire you?

In addition to the above, I would have to make a long list of folks who write flash and micro fiction. Somebody named Pokrass comes to mind. Also Jeff Landon, Kathy Fish, Susan Tepper, and many others.

What are your favorite short stories or story collections of all time?

Make Light of It, The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel, The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, Where I’m Calling From (Carver), Mark Twain’s Short Stories, The Portable Chekhov. And that’s just the short list.

What do you want to do next? What are you working on?

I’m currently acting on a suggestion by Susan Tepper and organizing a number of my stories into four books in which the stories are arranged chronologically. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this myself, but I didn’t. Heretofore in my self-published books, I used alpha order, which more or less isolates each story. That doesn’t bother me, but I suspect it creates difficulties for reader.

Tell us about Hello Walls.

Hello Walls is a self-published book, a big fat collection of what I judged were my best stories at the time. Since I’ve written more, but Hello Walls contains many of my favorites.

How has the internet effected your reach as an author?

Oh, my gosh, Fictionaut has changed my life. I have “met” so many fine writers, not just prose writers but poets as well.  It’s such fun and so useful to get the feedback, not to mention a chance to shoot the breeze with “real” writers, people who know their stuff. Veterans reach out to rookies on the site and take them under their wings. The outreach is an amazing and beautiful thing. Yours truly exchanging messages with Meg Pokrass and Sam Rasnake and Kathy Fish? In-effing-credible!

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.

A few weeks ago I attended a panel of literary magazine publishers on new business models for literary magazines (things such as this recently discussed over at Bookfox). Managing editor of New England Review, Carolyn Kuebler, was one of the panelists. As most know, NER is having to change its business model in a very serious way, since as of December 21, 2011 it will no longer receive institutional support from Middlebury College. The main way Kuebler discussed they would reach this goal was through more fundraising. But she also mentioned that there plan was to make the magazine indispensable. Or show that it was indispensable. I can’t remember which. Either way, it made me think about how literary magazines might be indispensable—an idea which seems to run counter to public opinion of them. What might make a few literary magazines unique, perhaps even necessary? What are a few lit mags that stand out as specific published objects, distinguished from other literary magazines and books?

1. Though—as CLMP’s Jeffrey Lependorf has noted—the New England Review has “achieved grand dame status,” the work they are doing is, I think, too little appreciated. Their last issue included stirring poetry by Matthew Olzmann and Howard Altmann and fascinating stories by J. M. Tyree and Christine Sneed. But lots of lit mags have such creative work (though arguably not of the continual quality as that published in NER). What distinguishes NER is the range and variety of the material in each issue. For instance, alongside those poems and stories in their previous issue were letters by Tocqueville written during his 1831 study of democracy in America and an argument by Robert Alter about the connection between the King James Bible and American literary style. And the current issue has—alongside poetry by Jynne Dilling Martin and stories from Beth Lordan and Castle Freeman Jr.—translations of writing by “France’s greatest poet” Yves Bonnefoy on Samuel Beckett and Adam and Eve, and journals from Ellen Hinsey comparing the Berlin of 1989 to that of 2009. NER is probably more like Scofield Thayer’s The Dial—arguably the seminal American lit mag—than anything else around.

2. The newest issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, their Arts & Letters issue, has received a lot of attention—and rightly so. The issue is devoted to the creation and appreciation of creative content, with Kurt Vonnegut on narrative form, Kandinsky on abstract painting, Harriet Beecher Stowe on the Louvre, Raymond Chander on screenwriting, Lu Ji on composition, the Coen brothers on Hollywood, the U.S. Government on comics, and so on for 221 pages and without ads. Each issue of Lapham’s Quarterly is an international compendium of thousands of years of creative and critical thought on an individual subject.

A typical issue features an introductory Preamble from Editor Lewis H. Lapham; approximately 100 “Voices in Time” — that is, appropriately themed selections drawn from the annals and archives of the past — and newly commissioned commentary and criticism from today’s preeminent scholars and writers. Myriad photographs, paintings, charts, graphs, and maps round out each issue’s 224 pages.

Where else in print does such a thing exist?

3. Though I like the content, the main reason I suppose I subscribe to GOOD Magazine is the fact that 100% of my money goes to a charity from a selected list. H.O.W. Journal—Helping Orphans Worldwide—is a lit mag from NYC doing something similar. Founded in 2006 by Alison Weaver and Natasha Radojcic, the journal is a part of the 501(c)(3) non-profit Helping Orphans Worldwide, using funds raised from subscriptions, submissions fees, donations, and issue launch party fundraisers to help such organizations as the Atetegeb Worku Memorial Orphanage in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the SOS Children’s Village in Zanzibar, Tanzania, and, currently, Safe Space in New York City.

H.O.W. Journal is an art & literary journal that publishes an eclectic mix of today’s prominent writers and artists alongside upcoming talents with an effort to raise money and awareness for the approximately 163 million children throughout the world that have been orphaned. The publication features works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry as well as visual arts.

What’s more, each issue includes work by prominent and emerging literary and visual artists, such as Tao Lin, Roxanna Robinson, William Giraldi, Carolyn Forche, Susan Minot, Justin Taylor, and Paola Peroni. A lit mag with a social—what’s more, a philanthropic—consciousness? And still publishing great writing? Seems an anomaly in an often very self-interested  literary environment. But if there are more such endeavors out there, I’d love to hear about them.

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.

I would go so far as to say I am an actual fan of Dark Sky. You should be too. Fictionauter and Dark Sky “Guy” Kevin Murphy made some time to check in, saltily as was expected.

We got going in 2007 as an online weekly arts magazine. We published fiction and poetry and photography and visual art and some film reviews. It was fun. Now we focus solely on literature, which is also fun, and closer to the heart. We are a blog and a magazine, combined. Recently we started publishing books. We like books.

Three authors Dark Sky admires/takes cues from/is into?

We don’t really take cues from authors. Authors write stories. We write about those stories, publish those stories, and enjoy those stories. There are hundreds of solid authors from whom I’ve gained countless hours of misery/bliss. I’d list them, but I don’t really like lists.

Dark Sky’s favorite brand of soap?

IronyIsDead Body Wash

Tell us about you. Think of me as free publicity shamelessly. It’s my thing.

Ah, well, hmm. I live on an island outside of Seattle. I’m left-handed. I like making homemade pasta. My wife and I are working on a graphic novel about a kid named Grotto. Other than that, just check out the magazine.

Anything else you want to include here like the hundreds of questions I might have missed. Seriously, anything. It’s fine, go.

We’re real excited about the two collections of poetry we’ve published — Ben Mazer’s January 2008 and Seth Berg’s Muted Lines From Someone Else’s Memory. We’ll have two more titles coming out soon. And there’s always new stuff going down on the site, which is the result of the committed hard work our editors and contributors put in every day.

Nicolle Elizabeth checks in with Fictionaut Groups every Friday.