Susan Tepper is the author of Deer & Other Stories and the poetry chapbook Blue Edge. Her work has appeared in Salt Hill, American Letters & Commentary, Green Mountains Review, Crannog, Poetry Salzburg, New Millennium Writings, Snake Nation Press and many other journals. Later this year Cervena Barva Press will release a book of her poems.

Q (Meg Pokrass) What story or book do you feel closest to?

World Without End by Francine du Plessix Gray had a profound influence on me. I wasn’t writing at all when I read that book, but I sensed myself in both female characters, though more so in the quieter, less flamboyant woman. It was a “triangle” story involving three long-term close friends, a man and two women. I read it ages and ages ago, but remember it centered around a trip they took on the Trans-Siberian Railroad through Russia. That book was a life changer for me, in that opened some window that wasn’t there before. I think it let in some sort of light.

Do you have a mentor?

For poetry I do, the poet Simon Perchik. His influence on my poetry has been extraordinary. First of all, he’s one of the nicest, smartest, least pretentious people I’ve ever known. His sense of humor is legendary. Simon just turned 86 and he’s still going strong. I consider him to be the greatest lyric poet writing in the English language today. And Simon has another book due out this year! I think it’s his 17th book.

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

I don’t get stuck. I didn’t start writing until rather late, and it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. I’ve had a lot of different careers, and some were very hard jobs. When I sit down to write, it’s total nirvana. I discovered quite recently that writing for me is another form of travel, and I just love to travel.

What are your favorite websites?

Fictionaut is a wonderful site, I can’t get over the amount of terrific writing being presented. I’m not involved with the other networking sites. I should be, I know, but its a time thing and I’d rather spend it writing fiction and poetry. Most of the journal reading I do is hardcopy. I like holding the actual book, looking at the cover. It’s a very sensuous thing, holding a book.

What is new? What is next?

My collection Deer & Other Stories is my newest, it came out in the fall of 2009. Later this year I have a poetry book coming out. I also have three unpublished novels. The most recent one was completed last year. I’m hoping by some strike of luck that I’ll find a publisher for it. I may publish the first two novels small press, but that’s still up in the air. As for what’s next, I’m working on new stories all the time, and poems. And I’ve started a novel of linked stories, a first for me. Fun!

Do you write a lot when traveling? How does traveling influence your writing?

Actually I never write while I’m traveling. I’m insanely happy when I travel, and want to take in every aspect. But travel always has an enormous impact on me, and consequently affects what comes out afterward in the form of writing. I’m a sponge. When I come back from a trip, some details/aspects/place/characters often appear in the writing. And often I’m not aware of that until much later, perhaps it will hit me during revision, or even after the piece has been published. Then I’m like: Wow! So that’s what this piece was all about. I love not knowing what I’m going to encounter on a trip so I never do any travel “research.” I just show up there. It’s the same with my writing. No research, no outlines, no prior thinking. I just show up. I believe it was Woody Allen who coined that funny phrase about success, that just showing up is most of what success is all about. Well something like that– he said it better!

Tell us about your novels.

Oh, boy. My novels. I love my novels. Is it bad to say that? I don’t mean it in a bragging way. I love them like you love your offspring. I don’t have kids but I have 3 novels to love. I think it’s OK meant in this context. My first novel has never been published though it was shortlisted in a contest sponsored by Zoetrope nearly ten years ago. That brought some attention to that novel. It’s written in three points of view: a twelve year old boy, his sixteen year old sister, and their mom. The father split the family. He was a Vietnam vet, and had kind of a crack up and left them. He never appears in the novel, only in their minds and memories like a persistent shadow. The story takes place in a small community at the Jersey shore. I’m very fond of that novel. The second novel is written in close third-person, one pov. It is set in Philadelphia, and the narrator is a young woman who has recently lost her twin brother in a tragic manner. It’s all about that twin thing, which can be very mysterious. Of course things beside that occur in the story, and the ending is quite dramatic. (at least I think so!). My third novel, completed last winter, is a quirky “road novel” and also told third person, single point of view. The narrator is a Gulf War Veteran on the cusp of turning 50. He has been on disability since that war ended. He hooks up with four unlikely characters and the five of them travel by car to Colorado during winter. I had a blast writing this novel, and wrote it very differently than the others, in the sense that I would open “randomly” to sections, and just start reworking that particular part, just playing with it. Nothing was cast in stone and could be reworked any way it felt like going. I did the entire book that way, until spring. I may have kept working it, but the weather got nice and I wanted to be outside more. So it was done. But it was wild and fun to work like that! Totally without “the net.”

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.

Just two things this week.

First: Last week was our exhausting and hopefully exhaustive week-long look at McSweeney’s Tolstoyesque (in length) issue 33, the Panorama newspaper issue. Reading the issue all week was sort of like hanging around in the physics lab of literary publishing, if there were one, and with Richard Feynman rather than Freeman Dyson. Lots of hollering, throwing things against the wall.

This week, assistant editor Marcelle Heath introduces another installment in LP’s ongoing series on race, class, gender, and sexuality in literary publishing. Here’s Heath’s series introduction:

The idea for a series on race, class, gender, and sexuality evolved organically from reading literary magazines, blogs, sites, small and large press catalogs, reviews, best of lists, and the like. Discussions about these issues are robust within the academy, and I wanted to respond to how they surface in literary communities. There were two watershed moments this past year that provided an opportunity to engage in this dialogue. In August 2009, Roxane Gay, assistant editor for PANK, posted “Awkward Stuff: Race, Women, Writers, Editors,” decrying the scarcity of writers of color and women writers in independent publishing. While many voices echoed Gay’s concerns and conveyed their own similar experiences, others bitterly and aggressively dismissed her claims outright. In November, Publishers Weekly published their Best Books of 2009, which did not include any women writers. Again, the responses ran the gamut between outrage at the pervasive sexism within the publishing industry, and hostility towards those who claimed that the omission of women was anything but merit-based. Our intention is to explore how exclusionary practices dominate the publishing landscape and how writers and editors respond to such practices. To begin our series, Roxane Gay addressed the numerous comments to her PANK post in “I Don’t Know How to Write About Race.” In our second installment, below, we talk with Jarrett Haley, editor of BULL: Fiction for Thinking Men about masculinity, violence, gendered divisions of labor, and PW’s list.

The entire interview is up online, but here’s an interesting bit from Jarrett on publishing women in BULL:

Haley: Since then we’ve had about the same slim success in receiving submissions by women, which doesn’t bode well for much success in publishing submissions by women. Out of the few we get something clicks every now and then and I’m happy when it does, because I think BULL is all the better for it as far as perspective. But saying “success” here feels a bit squirmy to me, as if it’s something we’re actively trying to do. All we try to do at BULL is put out the best of what writing we receive, regardless of who or where that writing comes from. To do anything otherwise would be corrupt.

And, second: Virginia Quarterly Review editor Ted Genoways wrote a brief article for Mother Jones arguing that a great amount of pointlessness exists in work currently published in literary magazines—and, what’s more, that it is perhaps time to write such magazines off. What was most interesting was not Genoways’s argument, but rather the great reaction in the comment box at Mother Jones. Editors and writers such as Gina Frangello, Matt Bell, and Timothy Schaffert weighed in. But this wasn’t quite the end: Roxane Gay added her two cents about Genoways’s argument over at HTMLGIANT—and once again the comments exploded (which, I suppose, isn’t so astounding at HTML…). Here’s a nicely-worded bit from an early comment from Justin Taylor:

…which, incidentally, brings me to the spot where I break with Genoways. The call for an issues-based literature smacks of the self-pride (and self-interest) of a guy who just published a North Africa issue of his magazine. Basically, it seems that his magazine already IS the change he wants to see in the world–and hey, bully for him! But I guess you’re not allowed to turn your Mother Jones op-ed into a full-page advertorial for yourself, so he’s counting on the readership to connect the dots on its own. Incidentally, Charles Antin, whose short story “The Iraq Show” was published in VQR Fall ‘08, may be dismayed to find out that no good fiction has yet emerged from the Iraq war.

For all its flaws, I think it’s an interesting piece of writing. Genoways touches on something terribly important, but never quite gets around to saying it, at least not in the way I’d like to see it said– if fiction wishes to speak to anyone other than itself, it needs to be where everyone else is….[T]he ragged-but-right charm of Shtetl life is no substitute for having the key to the city. It seems to me that Genoways, in his managing of the VQR, is attempting to foster a culture(s)-wide arena, he’s creating a space wherein journalism, graphic art, fiction, poetry, and other things are juxtaposed, afforded the opportunities and challenges of proximity, etc. There’s merit in that philosophy, and not just a little bit either.

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 Morgan Harlow and Victoria Lancelotta
by Gary Percesepe

Like Elizabeth Bishop or Joseph Cornell, Morgan Harlow‘s art is not great but small. An Elizabeth Bishop poem or a Joseph Cornell box reveals a world in miniature and invites us directly in. These two artists offer us layers of art, a sedimentary aesthetic that contain boxes within boxes, riddles wrapped in paradoxes, suffused in mystery-there is a certain indeterminacy in their work that multiplies hermeneutical possibilities and closes off no room for investigation. Each detail is minutely observed, and the emotion is carried by things, things sometimes ignored or overlooked. In Harlow’s poem “On the Way to Your First AA Meeting,” the indeterminacy starts with the title, where a sly pronoun expertly placed creates a fictive world that makes the familiar strange: a drive to a meeting becomes an existential excursion–

At a stoplight on some crowded
corner, you wait for the moon to change.

Harlow has become one of Fictionaut’s most reliable and astute readers. If you are lucky enough to earn one of her thoughtful, economical comments on your work, you are blessed indeed. She’s like an epigram in motion. How appropriate then, that this small poem set the Fictionaut community abuzz some months ago, as interpretation after interpretation was offered, minds were changed, hearts were opened, aliens were sighted, closer to home than one might have previously imagined. Harlow is a writer’s writer, and if this is your first introduction to her work you are one lucky sumbitch.

Victoria Lancelotta is something else again. This is the place where I’m obliged to confess that my judgment may be clouded because (pick ‘em) we’re colleagues at the same literary journal, we’re both Italian Americans, both from the east coast (she’s a Baltimore writer, I am hopelessly NY), both rabid baseball fans and hopeless flirts (at least she is), that I’m half in love with her, or at least with the pictures she sends me of herself, cooking, or her latest pair of high heels-and yet-she still surprised me with “Everything is Fine.” Another ironic title, sure, but this story peels like an onion, each layer revealing more emotional truth, a familial tale of infidelity that put me mind of Alice Munro for its novel-within-a-story depths, if you can imagine Munro in stilettos. The ending knocked me sideways; re-reading the comments on the story I see that I am not alone in this. I am especially pleased that this story first ran in the Antioch Review, where I was a fiction editor once upon a time, and where (I tell myself) I would have snatched this story out of the slush blindfolded in a blizzard.

So there you have it–a poem and a story, two lovely & amazing writers, worlds upon worlds, there for you, back in the recesses of the vault here at Fictionaut. New Fictionauts, or old comrades who merely blinked as the front page speeded up, have at it! Ciao.

Fictionaut Faves, a series in which Fictionaut members discuss one story they have faved, is edited by Marcelle Heath, a fiction writer, freelance editor, and assistant editor for Luna Park. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Opium Magazine has started a group on Fictionaut and I like asking Todd questions so I thought I would bother him via Google chat. I also like seeing him person because he is very good-looking and always wears a suit, and has a girlfriend who is not me. Taken, ladies, he is taken.

Opium has been running for nine years and has published everyone from Etgar Keret to Amy Bender to Chuck Close to Art Spiegelman. In addition to the print side, are the online issues. Which have averaged three stories per week, also for nine years. Then there is the Literary Death Match, which is when authors from all walks of journals, publishing houses, collectives and websites are brought together to read in friendly comedic competition. “The pen is mightier than the sword and ink will spill,” as it were.

In addition to ambitious, Todd is also a fiction writer, both long and short form with three novels under his belt and in the works. He is also a fellow Aquarius. Again, I really didn’t care about Fictionaut for this one, I just wanted to flirt with Todd over the computer.

Me (Nicolle Elizabeth for Fictionaut): Mini-wheat to Roman Candle come in and sparkle Roman Candle. Hi Todd. How’s things? Please answer that in a numerical list of three.

Todd: 1. good 2. well 3. I don’t get this question.

What is Opium Magazine?

Yawn. Try again!

What is Literary Death Match?

Opium Magazine is a literary humor publication that boasts delightful design alongside its wide-ranging content. The website has been updated daily since its debut in 2001, and the print magazine, designed by David Barringer, has been published semi-annually since August 2005. Featured artists include Etgar Keret, Aimee Bender, Chuck Close, Jack Handey, Vik Muniz, Neil Labute, Daniel Handler, Art Spiegelman and more. Opium‘s Literary Death Match is a competitive, humor-centric reading series that features four readers (who represent print and online literary concerns) in an edge-of-your-seat read-off, all critiqued by three all-star judges. Regularly produced in New York City and San Francisco (and being pitched as a TV show), each live event marries the literary and performative aspects of Def Poetry Jam, the rapier-witted quips of American Idol‘s judging (without the meanness), and the ridiculousness and hilarity of Double Dare.

Is Opium‘s main focus in publishing humor content, or do serious pieces also run? Not that comedy isn’t serious. It is.

We run it all.

Fictionaut is (as of late) an online focused community though who knows someday I bet these interviews with go in a print anthology 100 years from now. Point: does Opium run different content online than in print?

Absolutely. In fact, I think only one story has crossed over from online to print, and that was a story by Kim Chinquee that’s about 55 words long, as is one of the best things we’ve ever published (that was in Opium3).

How does LDM (Literary Death Match) utilize the Internet to reach readers/LDM go-ers?

It occurred to me today, when I was chatting with one of the judges that will be part of our LDM Baltimore debut on Jan. 30 that the LDM is really about awareness. Meaning, the LDM grows the awareness of Opium. It’s an interesting strategy, and one that’s definitely worked. When we launch a new issue, it releases at LDM events across the country. That means people who are coming because there’s a reader representing Publishing Genius or Quick Fiction or Paris Review becomes aware of Opium

Don’t you love publishing genius? I love them.

Yes, PubGenius dudes are great!

Okay so if LDM is a tool for Opium and Opium online runs different content than Opium (print), is it safe to say the crux here is Opium Mag in print itself? What is the future for Opium Mag? I would personally like to see a President reading it at a Sate of the Union address, myself. That question actually was how many Opiums run in print? You told me once when we did the NY Press interview but I don’t have that notebook with me, sorry i am so bad at this.

We have a 2,000 print run, per issue. We’re aiming to double that this year. And because of that time spent, we want to make it everything it can be, which is always changing. As for DC, we’re working on doing a Literary Death Match at the White House. It’s one of our dreams, now that we have a president that can read.

How many submissions does Opium get — what is your acceptance rate?

We get a ton of submissions. I’d say we accept 4 out of 100 for print (but we love so much to accept things!), and 15 out of 100 for online. That’s a ballpark guess.

How many writers have been published in Opium to date? I bet they ALL ARE ON FICTIONAUT.

Man, a number? It would make sense to know that, wouldn’t it. We average about 30 per print magazine. And we’ve been online for almost nine years, and have published on average about 3 stories a week. So, 52 x 3 x 9= Minus repeat authors, so -50. And that’s how many.

Does LDM only ask Opium authors to participate?

Hardly ever. Our system is to invite literary entities (magazines, indie publishers, other reader series, even) to send reader-reps. So, for Boston’s event, it’s Open Letter v. Night Train v. Four Stories v. Handsome. We love that model. Opium’s just the organizing body.

It’s like giving LDM’s viewers a cool chance to get exposure to different outfits within the lit community. Much like Fictionaut. I get that and I love it. What cities is LDM going to be in this year upcoming?

We do, too. We’ve announced:

January:

13th: Boston (Enormous Room)

14th: Chicago (Fizz)

15th: Dallas (Dallas Museum of Art)

21st: New York City (Bowery Poetry Club)

30th: Baltimore (The Windup Space)

February:

12th: San Francisco (Elbo Room)

18th: New York City (Bowery Poetry Club)

24th: London (The Book Club)

March:

(pending): Dublin (The Sugar Club)

Heart Tennessee Williams! When I was little I used to say, “Maggie the cat is back” for no reason other than i thought it was glamorous. 2. One time you said to me something to the effect of I’d throw myself in front of a bus if it got more people reading. 2a. Does that still apply? 3. How international is LDM now?

It will only apply, now, if my novel sells. It’s been international since last April, when we did Beijing. We’ve done London thrice, Beijing, Paris (I co-hosted in French!), and next up is Dublin.

JE PARLE FRANCAIS J’ADORE FRANCAIS. You should post some of your novel on Fictionaut I bet people would give great feedback. What are you reading right now? Your novel’s done, isnt it?

My novel is done. Though I’m taking back my book about world travel from my agent, to add Beirut, Petra, Amman, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. I just finished The Ask by Sam Lipsyte and re-read Wells Towers’ Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. Both had very positive effects on me. I just wrote my first short story in a year.

Gorgeous on the travel tip cities. Both excellent dudes to read. Do you sleep ever? Also was it weird to go back short fiction after having worked on longer works?

I sleep all the time, but Opium never really cut into my fiction before. But with the advent of the LDM, my fiction has taken a steep hit. It’s difficult, but it’s something I’ll work hard to undo in 2010. I do think it’s harder to write shorter works, now. I’ve written three books (the first was rejected, and now the two are ready), and I always tend to fold my short ideas into my longer work, now. I’m a writer before an editor in my mind, and want that to continue to be true (in my mind).

Nicolle Elizabeth checks in with Fictionaut Groups every Friday.

Jim Ruland is the host of the L.A.-based reading series, Vermin on the Mount, and the author of the short-story collection, Big Lonesome.

(Meg Pokrass) What story or book do you feel closest to?

Ulysses by James Joyce. I grew up in an intensely Irish-Catholic household and my parents had a copy that I remember trying to read at a fairly young age. Its heroic title appealed to me. At the time I was following the advice to underline every word you don’t know, and I must have underlined a dozen words on the first page. It bothered me how little sense I was able to make of it. When I got out of the Navy and went to college I had an excellent teacher, Jolanta Wawrzycka, who took me through the book. My Irish-Catholic upbringing finally started paying dividends. For a while my ambition was to be a Joycean scholar (!) and I presented papers at a few conferences, including the James Joyce International Symposium in Dublin. I ended up pursuing a career in advertising instead, but I keep going back to Ireland and I’ve never stopped reading Ulysses.

Do you have a mentor?

I’ve been fortunate enough to have many. Over the years I’ve worn many hats and in each arena there were people who showed me the ropes: The Navy, college and graduate school, and the advertising agency where I worked for a number of years. The biggest influence would have to be the teachers I had in the honors program at Radford University: Tim Poland, Louis Gallo, and Jolanta, who I mentioned above. They were the people who put books in my hands and said “Read this and we’ll talk.”

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

In advertising, we have a name for writers who get stuck: unemployed. I have a pretty workmanlike view of the creative process. You take what you’ve got, even if isn’t the “big idea” you’re searching for, and develop it and until your crappy little ideas turn into somewhat better ideas, and so on. Eventually you get there, but it’s all about putting in the work. I’m squarely of the school of learning by doing. You don’t learn to shoot free throws by riding your bicycle or eating ice cream or even by doing lay-ups. You have to stand at the line and put the ball in the air again and again and again. That said, I’ve come to appreciate that writing is a process, and there are some aspects that can’t be muscled through or hurried. This has been a difficult and sometimes painful lesson to learn.

What are some of the other ways that working in advertising may have influence you as a writer?

I guess the biggest thing was simply earning a living as a writer. That had a huge impact on my confidence. Working in L.A., I learned early on that everything is written. Movies, television, radio, billboards, magazines, websites, bus graphics, soda cans, matchbook covers, and on and on and on, and they need writers for all of it. Also, L.A. copywriters are less likely to get a big ego about their “work” because everyone is trying to break into Hollywood. The stereotypical copywriter is the hack with a whiskey bottle in his desk drawer. In L.A. it’s a TV pilot for Jim Belushi.

What are your favorite websites?

I’m spending more and more time at Goodreads. I really like how it has all the bells and whistles of a social networking site, but those aspects are ancillary to the books, which is how it should be. People don’t talk about books in social situations anymore; they talk about television. Goodreads is a great place to find cocktail-party length blurbs of books new and old. Goodreads lets you indicate whether you’ve read the book, are reading the book, or would like to read the book. Clicking “to read” is a nice way of capturing the book’s details. Investigation without commitment! Also, changing a book’s status from “to read” to “currently reading” or from “currently reading” to “read” is immensely satisfying. I try to say something about all the books I read, even if it’s just a few lines. I wish more readers would do the same.

What are you favorite games?

If they play it at Vegas, where the photo was taken, I’m interested. I like gambling on pro and college football. I like betting on horses, real or otherwise. I like slot machines. I like the new video blackjack games where you sit at a virtual table and are dealt cards by a virtual dealer. I like all of it. Sometimes I like it too much.

What are the addictions you have that are productive ones.

Coffee, Facebook, and fantasy football. The coffee keeps me stimulated. Facebook puts me in touch with a lot of people I otherwise wouldn’t be in touch with, and I’m in the black with my fantasy earnings this year. I have other addictions that I no longer indulge, and that’s made me a much more productive member of human society.

What are you working on now?

At the moment I’m doing a lot of legwork for my reading series, Vermin on the Mount. The next reading is on January 10 and will feature Vanina Marsot, Goodloe Byron, Porochista Khakpour and Vicki Forman and promises to be a great night. The following event will be held on March 14 and so far I’ve got Jamie Attenberg and Jennine Capo Crucet. And then in April I’m taking Vermin on the road to AWP in Denver. This one is very much in the planning stages so I can’t say too much at the moment other than it will be held at a sex shop called Hysteria and will be sponsored by Keyhole.

Writing wise, I’m working on a number of freelance assignments and completing the third draft of a novel about addiction, advertising, epilepsy, gambling, and ghosts.

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.

This week, Luna Park will be posting a day-by-day reading of McSweeney’s recent newspaper-styled issue 33, The San Francisco Panorama. Our copy just arrived in the mail a week ago, so we are, honestly, getting a bit of a late start here, but hoping to make that up with duration of coverage. The following is from the first post:

Part 1: Opening the Package

The Panorama showed up in the mail last week in a white plastic envelope, inside of which was the newspaper issue itself, tucked again inside a super-sized ziploc bag. It took a minute to get the thing out of the layers of packaging. Maybe it was because it arrived so soon after Christmas, but the opening up of The Panorama’s package felt more like opening a gift than it felt like opening the mail—even Luna Park mai, which is mostly made up of magazines like McSweeney’s. The wrapping itself wasn’t Christmasy—it was fairly bland, actually—but the thing inside was big, colorful, and awkward. (After looking at the unwrapped newspaper, my nine-year old daughter said, “Is that just one paper, or many?” Just one, I said. “That’s a really big paper,” she said, stepping back.)….

And here’s Roxane Gay getting the jump on Luna Park in a nice in-depth piece about her reading experience of The Panorama for HTMLGIANT: “Inside Willie Wonka’s Chocolate Factory: McSweeney’s 33—Panorama.”

CLMP—the organization of indie lit publishing—sent out an email this morning about Poetry Ark, an organization that has

launched a one-year, online competition to select 100 outstanding English-language poems by living authors. After an initial screening by our editors, all other decisions will be based on the votes of you, our site visitors. Poems that make it to the final selection of 100 will be included in an anthology of winners and will automatically qualify for an additional round of voting to determine the recipients of prizes totaling over $2,000.

According to those at CLMP, it all seems to be on the up-and-up over at Poetry Ark, and I must say that the website has a nice look to it. I suppose everyone is going to have to judge for themselves then about this strange commingling of American Idol and literary publishing.

Here’s some humorous literary appropriation from the Significant Objects‘ Twitter feed: “Lessons from Significant Objects for…law firm branding?” Even reading it again now—twice—I have trouble quite getting the logical leap the writer makes from (A) fictional stories attached to random objects for sale on ebay to (B) greater transparency at X law firm means we can continue charging premium prices without feeling bad about it.

According to Collagist editor Matt Bell, “Caketrain 7 is one of the best recent lit mag issues.” High praise—but after looking at the preview of the recent issue up on Caketrain‘s website, I’m very, very intrigued to read the rest. Here’s from Emily Carr’s issue-opening poem “13 ways of happily, draft 7,” which begins alluringly, “scorned as timber, beloved of the sky / you emerge from the photobooth / with yourself in triplicate ferrying corn…”

Some literary magazines that deserve much more of your attention: Australia’s Torpedo (via Lost at E Minor), a new issue of Kyoto Journal, Butler University’s Booth, musical and literary At Length, Lauren Becker‘s new Corium Magazine, and, also new, /One/.

Finally, Push Pin design studios’ Seymour Chwast’s limited distribution magazine The Nose isn’t exactly a literary magazine, but the website for the recent “Prediction” issue is one of the best “current issue” magazine website pages I’ve ever seen. It takes time, but is well worth the wait. The issue is full of unrealized century-old predictions, such as, “There will be no C, X or Q in our everyday alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary.”

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 Derek Osborne‘s “Neon Fire”
by Susan Tepper

What captivated me immediately about this little gem of a story is the straightforward way that Osborne presented the characters, place, details and plot. Yet “Neon Fire” is by no means simplistic. It’s a deeply layered, textured story of two people trying to be in love. Trying. Jennifer has her ways of going about it, while Rick seems to define love from a position of distance. The story takes place in a cold, wet Boston; not in Paris where the couple had spent an idyllic holiday. Rick cannot forget (or forgive?) that it is Boston, now, and things have changed. But have they? Is Jennifer, flighty and seemingly lovely, really so different a woman from the Jennifer in Paris? Or has Rick shut down and made space between them that can’t be bridged? It held me right to the very end. I’m a romantic but a modernist, too. It wasn’t corny but scarily real. I loved “Neon Fire.”

On Lydia Copeland‘s “Small Potatoes“
by Alan Rossi

In a remarkably short space, Lydia Copeland’s “Small Potatoes” takes us down deep into two lives. It’s fitting that we begin beneath the surface of things, under a beach house: a man with a sunburned nose, a woman who wants to kiss it. Cobwebs in their hands, shells at their feet, wind showering down palm leaves. Wind lifting the man’s hair, the woman’s clothes. Lifting us, too. A game they play, imagine-the-future, makes us ache for them both: this man possibly could be without this woman in some short months, and this woman, maybe this woman will be with a new man, the one she’ll marry “just because.” But it’s only a game, right, here under the beach house? A playful guessing, a reaching out into the future, a way of tricking the universe so that they might stay together. Because we want them to.

And yet, there’s a second paragraph, when things break. The man is cruel, the woman distant. No kissing of a sunburned nose here, no touching at all, not even eyes looking to one another. Their game from an earlier time was prophetic. And the garden these two are before now, so different from that dark, safe place under the beach house, that garden is “closed up for the evening.” Everything is, for these two. And I love every word, despite the fact that my heart breaks a little every time I read the story.

On Nora Nadjarian‘s “Mother Tongue”
by Finnegan Flawnt

This poem spoke to me firstly because English is a second language to me, as it is to the author. Although she is not German, she adopts the view of a German perfectly by direct citation and by drawing on deep cultural references like the director Fritz Lang, who used sound as a character in early films like M (1931) and who is, for Germans, associated with the loss of ‘mother tongue’ because he had to emigrate during the Nazi era like many Europeans, thereby losing his ability to create in his own language: a foreshadowing of the often involuntary displacements of globalisation. This poem is at once contemporary but not trivial, and intimate, without drifting off into cliché: it employs the relationship with the mother delicately, thereby alluding to an important quality of mother/tongue to which we are loyally and painfully tied for life.

And the poem reads beautifully, too.

Fictionaut Faves is a new series in which Fictionaut members discuss one story they have faved. Fictionaut Faves is edited by Marcelle Heath, a fiction writer, freelance editor, and assistant editor for Luna Park. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Nicole Elizabeth: Hello Gary. I was thinking we’d do a craft talk specifically on first lines. One of the groups you are Admin of at Fictionaut is the “First Lines We Love” outfit. It seems to be a great forum for writers to get together on the web and discuss other works they’ve loved, been inspired by, and want to share. How did the idea for the first line group come about?

Gary Percesepe: I was noodling around on Fictionaut one day and lighting struck. Also, Jurgen begged me. He said, “Groups Groups, Gary, we need Groups!” I was in Montauk at the time, trying to enjoy the beach. So I dropped my cigar, put down my Myers Original Dark & Diet Coke and said OK, and created about a dozen on the spot. Jurgen is very insistent. He owes me a fortune.

What is so important about the first line in any work of fiction?

Surely you jest.

One of my favorites is the first line to Annie Beattie’s “Dwarf House,” which is: “Are you happy?” McDonald says. “Because if you’re happy I’ll leave you alone.” What are some of the lines the Fictionaut group has agreed are great, but more importantly, why has the group felt they were great.

That’s Ann’s take on Tolstoy, maybe? Her own private Anna Karenina moment. The first line of Anna Karenina has always fascinated me. It’s one of the most widely quoted lines in literature, as you know, and has many English translations, including : ” Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I admired the line, but didn’t fully realize its power until I was having lunch one day in Yellow Springs with my friends Mary Grimm and Nolan Miller, and I sort of mocked that line from Tolstoy and Mary looked at me calmly and said, “That sentence changed my life.” And I was intrigued, and asked her why, and Mary said, “I was in a bad marriage and that line woke me up, and gave me the courage to get out.” Mary is really a terrific writer. She’s part of the Fictionaut community now, and pretty soon I am going to feature in Line Breaks one of her early New Yorker stories, “We.”

Fictionauts have posted some pretty swell first lines. You should put Ann’s up there. My personal fave, among the lines currently up there now, is from Amy Hempel: “Things really turned around after I saw the breathing Jesus.”

How does the first line chime in during your own writing process? Do you start at the start and work toward clarity? Does it come later?

Sometimes it comes later, sure. For me, sometimes the last line comes first. I often hear endings, like a musical phrase bouncing around my head, and then I write toward it. But sometimes the first line does come first, which is always a delight. This happens with poems pretty often, for me. It happened with the novel I recently finished, Leaving Telluride: “This bed is a wreck.”

As a reader at a literary journal, how important is the first line in orienting the editors toward the story? As a writer how important is it? As a lover of literature how important is it?

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of a good first line. Hemingway used to advise, “Write the truest sentence you know. Then another. And another.” Just lay them down. The great editor and writer Gordon Lish, I am told, used to forbid a writer to read more than one sentence if the first sentence did not work for him. End of workshop for that unlucky writer! As a reader at the Antioch Review, many years ago, I started with the best intentions, wanting to read every word, every sentence of every story, and I did that for time. But I soon learned that if the story was not working in the first few pages, if I wasn’t hooked, chances were that the reader would not be hooked either. Plus, we were publishing maybe twelve stories from over five thousand submissions. Very competitive. In time, I was scrutinizing the first page of submissions, looking to fall in love, and finally, toward the end of my time there, if a writer did not grab me in the first few paragraphs it was pretty much over. I would often keep reading, out of a sense of duty, but my heart wasn’t in it.

As a reader of literature, as you put it, I find that I am far more forgiving when reading a novel than a short story. You’ve pretty much signed up for a long read, and it’s part of the readerly contract, I suppose. It’s a different kind of reading experience than reading a short story. Novels are baggy, but stories are taut as a string. Same with poems, for me. With flash, same deal-even the title has to do a lot of work in a flash piece. It had better.

What are some writing exercises you can suggest to our writers who would like to better craft first lines?

Listen to the blues. You get some great first lines that you can write a story from, and the first line is repeated, of course, in the blues. Repetition can be very effective in a short fiction. You can also listen to country music and get great ideas for first lines, once you de-countrify them. Vallie Lynn Watson just published a story at Fictionaut called “A River So Long” that put Ann Bogle and I in mind of the great Joni Mitchell tune; it’s hauntingly beautiful. For me, reading the poet John Ashbery is a treasure trove of ideas for first lines of stories and poems. Same with Mark Strand’s stuff. I keep a journal of possible sentences, something I learned from reading Fitzgerald. And Cheever’s journals, same thing. But hey, there are a lot of people at Fictionaut who have better writing exercise ideas than me. Like Dylan said. It ain’t me, babe.

Anything else you’d like to tell us here I’ve forgotten, I could go on forever, and according to Todd Zuniga of Opium, most people including writers only have 11 minutes per day of free to read blogs time.

In that case, go back through and cut out half of this. Jacques Derrida joked that when you have too much text you can go back and take out all of the little words– and, the, this, for, but, etc. That’s one approach to editing. Never tried it. Neither did he. I miss him, though.

Nicolle Elizabeth checks in with Fictionaut Groups every Friday.

He serves on the Board of Advisors for Fictionaut. He’s the author of a slew of novels and short story collections, and a memoir. He’s taught a generation or two how to write, including a distinguished cast of Fictionauts, down at the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi, any one of whom could do a better job of writing this than me. He is also Executive Editor of the acclaimed Mississippi Review.

He is Frederick Barthelme. But he is also the brother of Don B.

So you’re a writer and you think you’ve got problems? Try being a younger brother of a man whose stories still stand like monuments out there in the land of literature. So, OK, you’ve got this famous brother, and you’re in the same line of work, and what are you going to do? The brother already did it, and did it better, and what’s the odds of two Nolan Ryans showing up in the same family with the 101 mph fastball, you see what I’m saying?

Someone once asked Heidegger about reading Nietzsche, and Heidegger says to the guy, first go read Aristotle for ten to fifteen years.

Which, in a sense, is what Frederick Barthelme did. He knew that no one could ever do what the brother did, and it was pointless to try, so he did the literary equivalent of reading Aristotle for a few decades, out in the woodshed.

When he emerged, a few decades later, he was holding “Shopgirls.”

If you want to write, but you honestly believe you can’t wait ten years or ten minutes — well, first of all, you’re wrong — but if you’re in a hurry, read Barthelme’s own account of how he came to his hard won personal aesthetic.

Or, just read “Shopgirls” ten to fifteen times.

How influential was this short story? Published almost 28 years ago, literary critics still write about it. B.W. Jorgensen has a terrific article on “Shopgirls” published in New Ohio Review, wannabe writers in thrall with the second person ape it, and one famous comedian felt he had to expropriate it for himself. A few years ago Steve Martin jacked Rick’s title, lopped off an ‘s’ and published the book and made a movie version too, casting himself opposite the lovely Claire Danes.

In his remarkable collection of stories, a retrospective look at 29 of the finest stories written by an American writer, The Law of Averages, Barthelme reflects on the many characters he has created over the years, and how it all comes back to that barbecued chicken in the clear plastic in “Shopgirls.” That’s some chicken.

Forgive me, please, for going on like this. It’s just that whatever I’ve learned about writing goes back to the chicken also, and to this story, and what followed from it. As for its author, well — all together class — we love him as hard as we can. — Gary Percesepe

Here is Rick’s introduction to the story:

Like most stories, “Shopgirls,” first published in Esquire in 1982, is less “about” something than it “is” something–a pinball journey with an amusingly  repressed but intensely sexual pre-stalker stalker and a few young women who are all too aware of their intoxicating power. These folks gather, exchange numbers, stories, frames of reference, then bounce away from each other in a way as accidental as their coming together. In the course of these events the principals reveal themselves to each other and the reader, suggesting the ways in which our brittle connections are made and severed, our families are lost, and our personal histories have their claims on us. In sum, it’s sort of like real life.

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 Frederick Barthelme’s “Shopgirls” on Fictionaut.

Mike Young is the author of We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough (Publishing Genius, 2010) and Look! Look! Feathers (Word Riot Press, 2010). He co-edits NOÔ Journal and Magic Helicopter Press. Visit his blog at http://mikeayoung.blogspot.com.

(Q: Meg Pokrass) What story or book do you feel closest to?

There are a lot of books that sleep close to my ideologies and heart places, among these: Jesus Son by Denis Johnson, You and Other Poems & New Addresses, both by Kenneth Koch, How To Be Perfect by Ron Padgett, The Dream Police by Dennis Cooper, The Verificationist by Donald Antrim, Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison, the short stories of Raymond Carver, D’J Pancake, Barry Hannah, James Purdy, Grace Paley, Mary Robison again, Lorrie Moore, and Thom Jones, The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, Money by Martin Amis, Suttree by Cormac McCarthy, Ring of Fire by Lisa Jarnot, This Connection of Everyone With Lungs by Juliana Spahr, The Easter Parade by Richard Yates, The Great Fires by Jack Gilbert, the poetry of Frank Stanford, Frank O’Hara, Eileen Myles, and, let’s see, Actual Air by David Berman. This is a very random list scurried up by trying to remember my most memorable and affecting reading and re-reading experiences. No doubt I’ve forgotten books I love. Two books I’ve saved for last: Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen, my copy of which I rarely lend but which I am always eager to lend, which means I am always looking for people I feel certain, rare ways about. The final book is I and Thou by Martin Buber, which I finally read this year after reading lots of Emmanuel Levinas and trying to track Levinas’s development as a thinker. I and Thou is the closest thing to a Bible that I have, which sounds a little melodramatic, sure, but hey: I am melodramatic. And it’s true.

Do you have a mentor?

While I was a student at Southern Oregon Univeristy in Ashland, Oregon, the poet K. Silem Mohammad was like Doc Emmett to my Marty McFly. I mean, he got shot by terrorists in a van for me to go back in time. When the lightning hit the clock tower, he threw himself off the cord in an extravagant stage dive. Seriously though, Kasey is an amazing friend and poet, not to mention one of the smartest people I know. He’s without tire in his curiosity and encouragement, and he’s taught my friends and me so much about language as a conduit for wonder and the importance of keeping one’s brain burning in all arenas. I’d count with him all my friends at SOU as co-mentors, insofar as they are lovely writers themselves and didn’t laugh at me over-performing Lisa Jarnot poems in my kitchen while my face turned red.

From my time in the UMass MFA program, I’d count Dara Wier and Chris Bachelder as definite mentors and different but mutually enlightening teachers. Chris makes craft a visceral thing, and I’ve learned from him to appreciate that elegance can drive one as pleasantly wild as forced derangement. From Dara, I’ve learned how to think about reading, how to read more broadly and thoughtfully and gleefully, and how to drive with a tea jar on your roof. And my friends in this program, who are terrific writers and wits and cooks and dancers and bodies and singers and apple pickers.

Plus there’s the Internet, duh, which has been wildly formative. If were to start listing everybody off the Internet, we’d basically end up with the Internet, which I’m saying is actually a pretty amazing thing.

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

Take a walk. Ride a bus. Go somewhere new. Visit a place where you feel defensive because you’ll be alert and notice stuff. Get things stuck in your head and try to unravel them. When you’re on a roll but you can’t remember what should go next, write “blurp.” Trust your weirdest instincts. Don’t try to know what you’re doing until you’re dead. If you’re stuck because you’re afraid of something sounding stupid or sentimental, be afraid of not being honest instead. Maybe change one word, one sound, say “boob” instead of “boo.” Make a mess and clean your way into something good; don’t try to get finicky with the glue. Write one good sentence after another, one good line. Steal everything you hear. Steal everything you read. Steal your own thoughts and feelings back from yourself. Sometimes if I’m writing a story, and I get stuck, I just mimic some small physical gesture someone might do, and then I see how the world and the people in the world of the story might react to that. Of course, if you don’t have worlds or people in your stories, well, you’re probably too creative to get stuck, so good for you.

What are your favorite websites?

Chris Higgs’s Bright Stupid Confetti is an awesome and frequently updated showcase of art: visual, video, writing, more. I like the art blogs It’s Nice That and My Love For You Is a Stampede of Horses, and I like the music blogs Songs:Illinois, Swedeseplease, There’s Always Someone Cooler Than You, Nine Bullets, Skatterbrain, Soul Sides, Obscure Sound. I also like to Wikipedia useless shit, like the history of staplers-knowledge which, once learned, I guarantee to have no coherent memory of at all.

What are you working on now?

I’m finishing a collection of short stories called Look! Look! Feathers, which will be — as of this morning — officially released this Fall from Word Riot Press. Majorly excited to be working with Jackie Corley and to be published alongside Paula Bomer, who also has a collection from WRP coming out. Plus I’m editing my poetry collection We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough, coming this summer from Publishing Genius Press, along with Rachel B Glaser’s Pee On Water, which is brilliant. One thing I’m never sure about is when to italicize, but I try to act real confident. On the publishing front, Ryan Call and I are trying to get NOÔ 11 together, and we’re getting ready to put out two full lengths next year: Ofelia Hunt’s novel (rhythms of now-cresting I’ve never seen in fiction before) and Jason Bredle’s third collection of poems: hilarious, hard felt, and so-honest-it-should-have-its-own-capillary. Plus we’re doing Evelyn Hampton’s sparkling chapbook and a “coffee table chapbook” collection of “inspiration” from sweet people featuring Evah Fan’s artwork. And we’re doing a second edition of Mary Miller‘s chapbook Less Shiny in February or so. 2010 is going to be hella busy, but at least if I die young, I’ll have something to show for it.

What makes you want to read a story and how soon does a good story capture you?

Some delight and urgency of language, some momentum of event, maybe. If the story’s into event. Also an immediate establishment of a tone or atmosphere that suggests either something viced — with a drip dripping from that something viced — or something mangy and out-of-control, really hurtling toward the hospital for good reason. I guess when event’s the terrain, I am a fan of the listen here, the really for real, the story that asks if you’re sitting down. Otherwise I am a fan of dreamy precision, as in carving as close to your dreaminess as possible.

A good story arrests, obviously, from the first sentence, or from the first couple sentences. Best is when an opening sentence really licks me; good is when an opening sentence does no harm and drags itself to a really killer third sentence or whatever. Which is fine. Then there’s a sneaky and humble kind of story that doesn’t call attention to itself on a sentence level, like doesn’t flail itself around, but really forces you to agree with it. Those stories are good too. Bobbie Ann Mason is really good at that.

Here’s the opening sentence to Charles Hale’s story “Giddy Up Little Baby,” which will be appearing in NOÖ 11 and which is a terrific, hilarious story: “When my best friend, Fast Eddie, returned to town with the news that he had received a DUI while visiting his cousins in lower Alabama, I knew we were going to have to find alternative forms of entertainment.” I love 1) how nonchalant the story is about the hokeyness of “Fast Eddie,” 2) the easy, confident lope of tone and language 3) the almost ridiculous specificity of “lower Alabama,” which makes me feel comfortable, a confidant of the narrator, like sure, lower Alabama, sure, and 3) the understated joke of “alternative forms of entertainment.” What sells me extra hard is Hale’s second sentence: “He told me about his Alabama adventures while we sat in front of the bookstore in camp chairs with a cooler between us.” Camp chairs in front of the bookstore is such a specific and funny place, and the story seems aware — by telling me about it, and not about the weather or something — of how specific and funny it is. So I know I’m in good hands.

Every good sentence in a story buys you about three or four sentences of reading from me. If you follow the math, we’re talking exponential: one sentence buys four, next sentence buys the four after that, and whoa. A few good sentences in a row can buy you the whole story. Other people, depending on their generosity as readers and the luxury of their time, might have different ratios.

What creates likable, memorable characters?

It’s funny, I’ve been thinking about what a bad rap “mimesis” takes among certain of my writer friends. Or, as Gene Kwak called mimesis on his blog the other day, the idea that writing should “twin” the world. I’m of the opinion that writing should do whatever it sets out to do, so long as it does it. That said, language is the site of the enterprise, sure. But the word “poet” comes from a Sanskrit word that means “to pile up,” which is a fact I think should be taken with all its attendant implications. There’s a part of our brains that can’t tell the difference between “He picked up an orange” and someone actually picking up an orange. This is cognitive fact, and also kind of obvious. Hard to ignore.

One thing that I think is done very well by so called “realistic” writing — writing that attempts, in some way, to sacrifice its identity as constructed material in favor of transparently forming a brain world that resembles the actual world — is subtlety. Especially on a character level. I like language that tracks the emotional electricity between people in a really shrewd and thoughtful way. Such emotional interaction is slippery, vague, complicated, hard to analyze, hard to get right. This is where the mimetic abilities of someone such as, say, Ray Carver, become so amazing. He can talk about how a person has a certain kind of face that doesn’t quite square up. And we can know what he’s talking about. And what he’s trying to do is be mimetic. He’s not being flashy in his language. Can’t be, because then the language would start hugging itself and would lose grip of the weirdness that is reality. This is where realism, I think, gets a bum rap. People think “oh boring realism.” Cancer and car crashes, etc. Certainly one might tire of the boring, overcooked, drably huge bits of reality. But the whole point of capturing reality should be capturing the fleeting, the subtle, the weird. Weird means that which comes. Wind that comes in and turns. That which enters unexpectedly and which hangs out uncomfortably. Mimesis isn’t for the duh stuff. It’s there for the weird stuff. And that’s where I think it becomes a very artistic venture indeed.

What would you do if you could do anything tomorrow?

I’d like to see my girlfriend, Carolyn, who’s away at a Buddhist retreat and can’t talk for a week. Definitely. I’d like to see her and I’d like to take her to Scotland.

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.