This past winter holiday, I got Cami Park a subscription to The Lumberyard for HTMLGIANT’s second annual indie lit secret santa—and I recently stumbled upon her ecstatic write-up of the first issue she received, issue 5. I couldn’t agree more with Park. For example, I too can’t bring myself to open the fantastic CD packaging.

I wish more magazines would do this: A Public Space invites readers behind the curtain of their upcoming issue in order to expose the editorial process in action: the final poem from APS 11 here, the editing here.

New Aussie lit mag sighting: Kill Your Darlings.

As everyone no doubt knows by this point, FSG’s Lorin Stein has been named the new editor of The Paris Review. In case you somehow missed it all, or just want some more info, here’s a very brief interview of Stein by Edward Champion about the new job. And here’s Stein on the magazine’s famous interview series:

Aren’t the interviews wonderful? Think of the ones with P.G. Wodehouse, Philip Larkin, Henry Green, Hemingway — I wouldn’t wish for video, even if it could be had. And I feel the same way about Nat Rich’s recent interview with James Ellroy. It’s a work of art in itself.

More important news of the past week was of course the very sad death of novelist and story writer Barry Hannah. Last year, Gulf Coast published an excerpt of his at one time forthcoming novel Sick Soldier at Your Door—which was later reconceptualized by Hannah as a book of short stories (or so the rumor goes). Whatever the format, the excerpt is now up at the Gulf Coast website.

One well-read lit mag.

The third issue of Cerise Press is now online. Broken into sections of Poetry & France and Japan & Latin American, the issue has poetry from Jim Daniels, Kimiko Hahn, Robert Wrigley, Osip Mandelshtam, translation from Marilyn Hacker, fiction from Pablo Medina and Mary Helen Stefaniak, and much more.

Finally, the cover of Hobart‘s upcoming Great Outdoors issue.

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 Sharanya Manivannan’s “Streams of Unconsciousness”
by Sara t.

In “Streams of Unconsciousness” by Sharanya Manivannan, the author gives us two characters in a life long relationship, who are endowed with such precise attributes, that we imagine we know them. What struck me is how she manages to do this in such a short piece. “He was a watch collector, a failed auteur, a misogynist. She was the kind of woman who would crack a rib if someone looked at her too sweetly, and cry for six months if he didn’t, a masochist. They fit together, but with some effort, like Tetris blocks” It is this precision that allows her the luxury of a short story. For all its preciseness and short length, the story describes the complexity of a relationship at its core. Love/Hate relationships, relationships carried on over a span of years and oceans, relationships that we carry with us like an appendage we just cant bear to amputate. The characters exist in an alternate reality all their own, doing the dance of “I want you, now go away”. It is this tension that makes the story bristle with life although the outcome seems hopeless for this pair. I think Ms. Manivannan is a master at short story telling, because she knows how much to tell, how much to leave out and when to stop.

On Darryl Price’s “Being for Being Against the Common Sense”
by Bob Eckstein

This collection of poems by Mr. Price plays like a record album of different songs. I’ve been aware of his writing for quite some time, seeing it grow and push boundaries and he is really developed his voice. I personally find his writing vibrant and never stale. Sentimental without getting pretentious. I’m excited to recommend his work to other Fictionaut readers and hope you agree Price is one of the premier poets here.

On Kathy Fish’s “Foreign Film”
by Sam Rasnake

A great piece of writing is one I carry in my head – voice, setting, tone, imagery – long after reading it. It’s a piece I directly connect with in such strong fashion that my everyday life is impacted. On a cold, snowy day on a drive by an empty field, Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man” begins to tug at me. That’s great writing. “Foreign Film” by Kathy Fish is such a work. Using only 337 words in a compressed and Carver-like style, complete with sharp dialogue, Fish creates a multilayered piece that is staggering in its directness.

When I first read Fish’s story, I couldn’t get the scene – this one powerful moment in the lives of no names – out of my head. It’s there still. In the structure of the piece, there’s a real-life couple fictionalized, arguing the night while watching a foreign film on television – a film whose characters are fictionalized but made real in the story. Life resembles art resembles life. The two worlds meet, as it were, and it’s Fish’s writing ability that makes this work. The final paragraph – a story in itself – is haunting. Two physical acts, though separated by time, language, and levels of reality, move as though locked in parallel motion. Great writing indeed. This story is a gift.

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.

Ray Carver called Amy Hempel some pretty good names, including “a precisionist.” Praised by the New York Times as a “miniaturist…whose fiction is marked by an almost miraculous exactitude of observation and execution,” Amy is known far and wide for her luminous, perfectly crafted short stories. Her first story collection, Reasons to Live (1985) was celebrated by Rick Moody as a landmark of its era’s short story renaissance. If you are new to the world of Amy Hempel, beg, borrow, steal, or buy a copy of Amy’s Collected Stories (2007). Here is what Amy had to say about “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried,” now on Fictionaut:

I wrote this story, my first, as a workshop assignment in Gordon Lish’s “Tactics of Fiction” class at Columbia in the late ’70s or early ’80s (I have no sense of time). The assignment, the only one we were ever given, was to write our worst secret, the thing we would never live down, the thing that dismantled our sense of ourselves, as he put it. My worst secret was that I felt I had failed my best friend when she was dying. And this is the story I wrote. I sent it to Triquarterly, and returned home to San Francisco. Which is where the editor, Reg Gibbons, reached me to say they wanted to publish it. I sent a copy to the mother of my friend who had died, and asked her to tell me if the story seemed in any way exploitative. I was prepared to pull it. But she gave me the go-ahead. This story, the first I wrote and the first I published, has been translated into more than 20 languages, and I feel certain I would not have written it had I not been assigned to look in the place I didn’t want to look.

Line Breaks is a regular feature in which accomplished authors introduce and share their first published stories with the Fictionaut community. Line Breaks is edited by Gary Percesepe.

Darlin’ Neal is the author of the story collection, Rattlesnakes and The Moon (Press 53) which came out this month. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Eleven Eleven, Puerto del Sol, The Pinch, Per Contra, Smokelong Quarterly, elimae, and dozens of other magazines. Among her awards are a Literary Arts Fellowship in Fiction from the Mississippi Arts Commission and a Henfield Prize. Her work has been included in Best of The Web 2009 and Online Writing: The Best of The First Ten Years, and has been nominated numerous times for the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Jensen Beach and Orlando, Florida, where she holds an assistant professorship teaching in the MFA and undergraduate Creative Writing Programs at the University of Central Florida.

What book are you closest to?

This question makes me think of the books I first loved as a child. My mother had me reading Dickens and Hawthorne and the Brontes by the time I was nine. I remember very vividly though reading True Grit when I was eight and jumping up in the middle of the night on my bed wanting to run and tell everyone I knew what I wanted to do with my life, that I wanted to write books. I loved those main characters and that story so much. Then it was Tolstoy while I was a teenager, a long obsession. All the lines that would give me chills because of their perfection. All the big questions considered through character. Anna Karenina is very much an influence that remains, and a model. Jesus’ Son. The Time of The Doves. I can’t pick just one. But these are all books I’ll read and read again.

Do you have/have you had a mentor/mentors?

My first mentor would probably be my mother and all that reading and love of the classics. More officially Kevin McIlvoy. I took a class from him and it set my course toward studying fiction, right when I was closing in on finishing my Bachelor’s in Psychology and Journalism. So I started with that treasure of a teacher and my luck in that regard has continued. My second college mentor in writing was Antonya Nelson. I had the great experience of working in an independent study course with her on my first novel while I was still new at it all. She and Kevin McIlvoy are still there with me in various ways when I write, he in ways to open the paths to mystery, she especially when in deepening that sense as I revise. In Tucson, while I was working on my MFA, I studied most with Joy Williams who was so good at conceptualization and just a wonderful presence to be around. In Mississippi, Mary Robison who sort of saved my life as a writer through the connection we made, and Frederick Barthelme from whom I learned more about story form than anyone, I think. All of these, from my mother on, are great presences to have in my life as a writer, and I’m happy that we’re all walking around on this earth at the same time.

What methods to you use to get creatively “unstuck”?

Just getting going. Sitting down with a pen and paper. I handwrite just about everything first. I’m in a group in Zoetrope that helps a lot. Trying to clear the deck of all the things that are piling up too so I can focus without distractions. Sometimes that’s the hardest part, to not let teaching or other deadlines get in the way, worry over loved ones.

What are your favorite web sites?

By far, Zoetrope where I’ve found such a wonderful community of writers these last several years, and where I’ve been able to keep in touch with so many dear friends on an intimate level. I’m enjoying Facebook lately. And I really like to read the Rumpus blogs. My dear friend Sue Henderson’s LitPark.

What are you working on now?

I’ve been working on a memoir about my experiences growing up and traveling so much, about time in Mississippi and New Mexico. It’s very much centered on my relationship with my mother and the mystery of her life before me, the secrets she had and their power over us, the undeserved shame. I’m on my way right now to see her as she’s very ill and dealing with the crazy family dynamics, my troubled father mainly and the way he puts so many barriers between us all, in his need to control and the bizarre ways he deals with insecurity toward education and poverty. I don’t know if I’ll need to write on something else for awhile, but I do have a related novel that I put aside that I may start working on again. It’s a novel that I’d like very much to finish as a gift to my mother. This summer I’ll be working with Dorothy Allison at the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference and I can already feel these two projects fighting for attention for the work I will be most focused on while I’m spending time in the New Mexico of my childhood.
I’m also preparing my finished novel to send to an agent today and working on lining up readings and all for my short story collection, Rattlesnakes & The Moon, that just came out this month.

Can you tell us about one of the stories from your new collection Rattlesnake & The Moon?

I’ve included stories from a range of time in my collection. I wrote “Lafayette” when I was in my 20s. I consider it and “A Man Wrapped In Gold,” which is also in the collection and written about the same time, two of my firs tbreak through stories. Both helped me win a Henfield Transatlantic Review Award in Arizona. A later version of “Lafayette” also won the Joan Johnson award at the University of Southern Mississippi, and was one of a dozen finalist stories for Playboy’s College Fiction Contest. It took a long time but finally found a home at The Gingko Tree Review. I had lost my best friend not too many years before I wrote it when we were both in Louisiana. The story is certainly fiction but that grief is one of the things that drove the writing. The baby girl in it used to be a baby boy. It was originally titled “Dead Armadillos” which Kevin Canty pointed out sounds a lot like it should be the name of a punk rock band from Texas.

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.

by John Minichillo

Marcelle asked me to say something about one of my faves, which made me realize I’ve given a lot of faves, more than eighty, some for friends, but most to writers I didn’t know and was pleasantly surprised by. All of them I stand behind, each of us putting together our own anthologies. And for those who don’t know, “recommended stories” can be sorted for “all-time,” where James Robison’s “Mars,” Kathy Fish’s “Spaceman,” and Pia Earhardt’s “Ambulance” crown the heap. There’s Myfawny Collins, Meg Pokrass, and Scott Garson up there too. All of whom have gotten my faves.

I know I’ve probably missed some great stories along the way, so I’m excited about this new blog feature, to see what else gets recommended. Among my favorites, I’d highlight Meg Pokrass’s “The Big Dipper,” Joe Tripician’s “Remember Me to the Motherland,” Sam Nam’s “I Use Commas Like Ninja Stars,” Jason Lee Norman’s “Animals in the Sky,” Mary Hamilton’s “It Is True that Me and Theodore Swallowed Pop Rocks and Pepsi Cola and Now We Are Dead,” Noria Jablonski’s “Arroyo Vista,” Victoria Lancelotta’s “Everything Is Fine,” Marcy Dermansky’s “Adults at Home,” Ben Loory’s “The Book,” Sean Lovelace’s “Someone Emailed Me Last Night and Asked if I Would Write About Nachos,” Matt Mullins’s “Three Way of the Saw,” Katrina Gray’s “Sectioned,” and Kim Chinquee’s “I Had Time to Kill.” There are a few more I would name, but the authors chose to take them down. And here I’m asked to recommend one.

Gary Percesepe’s “The Way You Live Now,” is the one I wish I’d written, a story about the loss of a child, our relationship to objects, and the nature of time. It’s a mature, subtle, and patient story, from a writer who has been paying very careful attention. In the comments section, James Robison said, “How dare you use second person to portray the entirely singular state of a well ordered mind blunted by shock, sorting through wreckage and stumbling for an ontological foothold, and succeed? And succeed so emphatically?” Erin Fitzgerald said, “I’ve been back a few times to read this again. Thanks for that.” And from David Erlewine, “I think we need to petition Jurgen for a special category of favorites, like ‘game changers,’ or ‘go back to school, son, because you ain’t even close to writing something like this’ stories.” And so now we’ve put it there. If this one doesn’t get to you, nothing will.

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.

We collect the best of last week’s Twitter feed for those of you who “don’t know from Twitter.” If you have member news or interesting links to share, please email or DM us.

On Fictionaut

• Fictionaut April Fool’s Challenge!
• Jim Hanas leads up to his Significant Object on Fictionaut.

Fictionauts at Large

• At Litsnack, John Minichillo’s “Moving In And Reunited With Her Things.”
• “The House as Rita Sees It” by Ben Greenman at 52 Stories.
• Arlene Ang’s “On the Last Known Destination of a Missing Person” at Staccato.
• Michael Kimball writes Kim Chinquee’s life story on a postcard.
• Women Writers: A Zine with fiction by Katrina Gray, Roxane Gay,Julie Innis, Susan Tepper, Vallie Lynn Watson, and Meg Pokrass.
• “Chocolate gives nose bleeds to children, my grandmother said.” Lisa Lim’s “Beards” at http://wigleaf.com
• “Fifty-One” by Ajay Nair at Bull Men’s Fiction.
• “Obelisk” by Ravi Mangla at Necessary Fiction.
• “What’s on TV? We could watch murder shows.” Two flash fictions by Scott Garson at 3:AM Magazine.
• “Stephen King, Stephen King. You’re afraid of everything.” William Walsh at the Kenyon Review blog.
• New SmokeLong Weekly: “Complicit” by Gay Degani, selected by Tara Laskowski.
• Publishers Weekly meets Publishing Genius.
• “The Man Sitting Behind You Is a Serial Rapist,” by Bess Winter — just up Wigleaf.

Submissions & Contests

• Submit to La Petite Zine before they close submissions for preemptive spring cleaning.
• Win Tom Lee’s Greenfly and Joseph Young’s Easter Rabbit at The Short Review.
• Women writers! Submit to A Room of Her Own‘s Orlando contests & eMessage competition. $1000 prizes.
• Rick Moody will pick the winner of HTML Giant’s “So Many Books” contest. No fee, and you have till March 21.
• Round-up of writing contests for poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, flash & more at Newpages.
• Matchbook is now accepting submissions for a series of postcards that will showcase both visual art and poetry.

Etc.

• We guessed the literary mystery spot.
• Viral Lipsyte.
• “The first 12 years are the worst.” Ten rules for writing fiction from Margaret Atwood, Richard Ford, Neil Gaiman &c.
• Edward Hirsch: “Culture can’t absorb that many people trying to make a living in poetry.”
• Spring Indie Preview: Dzanc Books,  Emergency, Featherproof, Softskull, 2$ Radio and more.
• Noted poet C. Dale Young’s first published story in Guernica.
• Weekly translations of “super-short” fiction by Haruki Murakami.

Tomorrow, February 24, Creative Nonfiction releases their long-awaited magazine redesign. You see an image of the new cover at left, which is a bit different from their previous, more somber design. The issue looks like it will also include some interesting things for CN—such as an encounter with Dave Eggers, Philip Lopate on using the imagination, and the history of Creative Nonfiction.

Granta online editor Ollie Brock wrote Marcelle the other day to mention a few new things up on the Granta site, in case we missed them (and we had). First off, Brock says Granta has restarted their New Voices project to exhibit six emerging writers each year. The first is Billy Kahora from Kenya with the story “The Gorilla’s Apprentice.” Kahora is also editor of the literary magazine Kwani. Brock interviews him about his magazine and African literature here.

Brock also mentions some imaginative histories on the site from journalist Jeremy Seabrook. Titled “Work I Never Did,” the essay is to be published in two parts, the first one here, the second here.

Here’s an enchanting pull-quote from Amelia Gray’s “These Are the Fables,” published yesterday in Cell Stories (quote via Matt Bell):

“Here’s the thing,” he said. “Your mama’s dead. And you’re forty years old. And I have a warrant out for my arrest. And I am addicted to getting tattoos. And our air conditioner’s broke. And you are drunk every day. And all I ever want to do is fight and go swimming. And I am addicted to keno. And you are just covered in hair. And I’ve never done a load of laundry in my life. And you are still technically married to my drug dealer. And I refuse to eat beets. And you can’t sleep unless you’re sleeping on the floor. And I am addicted to heroin. And honest to God, you got big tits but you make a real shitty muse. And we are in Beaumont, Texas.”

Speaking of Mr. Bell and excerpts, there’s an intriguing bit of Lily Hoang’s forthcoming novel The Evolutionary Revolution over at the recent issue of The Collagist. It begins unreliably, “We cannot be held responsible if some of these events are not quite in order, if some of the facts are slightly out of place. We did not live through this, and what few facts we do have are difficult to verify…” Hoang’s novel will be available June 2010 from Les Figues Press.

David Shields’s much talked about Reality Hunger: A Manifesto is to be released today—but in case you can’t or won’t get a copy, here’s yet another excerpt of the book, this time a bit on hip-hop on The Outlet, the blog of Electric Literature. “Art is theft”  Shields says, and “Language is a city.” Indeed.

Yet more responses to Ted Genoways’s now infamous criticism of contemporary fiction publishing: First, Jaime Wood wonders if the problem with fiction isn’t postmodernism for Bark. And more recently, David Backer offers up a guide to fiction online over at The Millions (within which, I must add, is the interesting but erroneous idea that Fictionaut is an imprint of Luna Park—maybe sometime in the future, after I purchase Google).

Sentinel Nigeria Magazine, a new literary magazine of Nigerian literature, is live.

Scott Esposito gets into the conversation about “Who Should Edit The Paris Review?”

Finally, The Cupboard never ceases to amaze with it’s micro-issue magic. Their latest volume is Bridge & Tunnel (& Tunnel & Bridge), by Joshua Cohen, a work which appears to be a fictional unpacking of the city, of the bridge, of the tunnel. Cohen—whose much looked forward novel Witz is forthcoming this year from Dalkey Archive Press—seems, much like his friend Justin Taylor, a writer to watch. Here’s a claustrophobic excerpt from Bridge & Tunnel:

When we stopped saying we were going to move out of the city, we had:

nothing to talk about at parties, nothing to talk about on the train, nothing to talk about to my aunt, nothing to talk about to her parents, nothing to talk about over pizza, nothing to talk about over good but insufferable sushi, nothing to talk about on the corner of Canal Street & Centre, nothing to talk about at jury duty, nothing to talk about in the bathroom at the theater before a movie began. When the bun place closed. The midnight movie theater in Midtown. When there was nothing to do in Midtown. No point to go. When the deli that pastramitized its own meats shut down, too. I really liked that bun place. When we stopped saying we were going to move out of the city, we became more bearable (we had to be). But, speaking just for me, more depressed.

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 came to write “Credentials” when I wanted to expand on a secondary character I had created for an earlier story, because I was trying to write a book (Luminous Mysteries).  The character had the name Belly Man.  I had given myself that name one morning when, looking in the mirror, I was surprised to see that my physique had changed.  That led to my feeling some affinity with the big guys.  Belly Man in the earlier story was an ex-con, an entrepreneur without the big resources and status that usually come with that title, and of course heavy.   But he had a mystery about him for his criminal past and his sense of entitlement.   “Credentials” allowed me to go a little deeper into who Belly Man is, explore his power and his vulnerability.  I grew up noticing men who had grand senses of style and confidence.  Their style I understood, but their confidence I didn’t.    When I started playing with the nicknames in the story, “Credentials” let me ask questions about identity, such as who do people think they are?  Why?

Line Breaks is a regular feature in which accomplished authors introduce and share their first published stories with the Fictionaut community. Line Breaks is edited by Gary Percesepe. You can read “Credentials” on Fictionaut.

On Kathy Fish‘s “Petunias“
by Lauren Becker

When Kathy Fish posts on Fictionaut, people read, and rightly so. People mark her stories as favorites, people comment, people love. Fish’s story, “Petunias,” is one of my favorites of hers, and in general. It is quiet in its one word title and cadent sentences; fewer people have read it. “Petunias,” originally published in Sleepingfish, is a list of declarations, but is very much a story. Every line but the last of this exquisite, 165-word, robin’s egg delicate piece, begins with the word “[p]eople” and states absolutes, marked with solid periods at end of each.

The beginning sentences clearly refer not to what “people” do, but to what a particular person does. “People laugh, darkly, saying they’d rather be surfing.” We do not have time to wonder who this person is, as we are thrown almost immediately into a series of sentences heavy with universal truths. The statement that “[p]eople never do get what they want,” is one that gently flicks at us all on dark days, creating a sense memory of certain resignation. She does not let up when she reminds us of how we “long to distinguish ourselves.” A double blow. We are indistinguishable in sharing that truth.

Her tone switches from one of present observation to that of retrospect. The luxury of hindsight and the impermanence of feelings and situations are gone. “People” does not refer to us all in this context. The story refers to one life, one person. “People are here to remind you, that’s somebody’s sister.” Again, Fish does not explain. But in that last image, the person standing next to the flowers is, again, all of us, who will absolutely stand or sit or lie somewhere, at a loss.

On Brent Robison‘s “September Morning” and Noria Jablonski‘s “Arroyo Vista”
by Katrina Gray

I’ve returned a dozen times to Brent Robison‘s “September Morning.” The magic of this story is in what is not revealed in its lilting sentences. Robison trusts the reader to put the pieces together. The time frame of the narrative is crucial-is everything-but Robison believes that you, gentle reader, are astute enough to get it, even if it’s not until the last sentence. And then drops the bomb: the bittersweet irony that the reaffirmation of life can come at the most inopportune moment.

And then there’s Noria Jablonski‘s “Arroyo Vista.” I’m a fan of it, not only because the story expertly pokes fun at artificial subdivisions with idyllic-sounding misnomers, but also because it features a mother who breast-feeds her year-old son-to which I, a childbirth educator, shout a massive “WOO-HOO!” The mother’s erosion of self is the crux of the story, but is stunningly subtle. She is aptly overshadowed by the character of her new neighborhood. A masterpiece.

On Rachel Yoder‘s “Infinite Things All At Once”
by Nora Nadjarian

The story moves me at two levels. At the linguistic level, it is competently written, with the assurance of someone who is not new to the art of writing. Each paragraph does exactly what it sets out to do, not a word more or less. The language is lucid, poetic, the imagery gripping. It is exactly the kind of writing I love, and would love to read more of.

At the emotional level, I find it a heartbreaking story of empty lives, of people doing things to fill up their loneliness, of people who have no language, maybe not even the right tenses to tell a story. The reader feels the cold, the purity, the desperation. The following line is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read:

I was so cool and so lonely I might shard apart into ice flakes so delicate and infinitesimally complex they ruin your heart at the precise moment you are able to comprehend them.

“Infinite Things All At Once” makes you look inside your heart, try to comprehend and sigh. A true gem of a story.

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.

Fictionaut has always relied on your feedback to evolve. To find out what works, what doesn’t, and what we need to improve next, we’ve created a short survey.

We’re grateful for your responses.