Sam Ruddick has a riveting new article up at Luna Park on the new (or fairly new) issue of Versal, an English-language lit mag from Amsterdam. More than simply writing a magazine review, Ruddick uses pieces from the issue to explore how words function in literature and what it is that draws us to melancholy narratives:

Nonetheless, it seems clear that these pieces share an interest in identity and loss. They paint a grim picture of the world. Think of it: if the common experience, the one shared across cultural and geographical borders, is loss, if the “insight… that can be applied everywhere” is only that the one certain and immovable fact of life is loss, it’s a sad, sad world. I would almost call it hopeless. But for some reason I still keep coming back to an image in the closing paragraph of “Suit.” Our narrator tells us that the dealership is having some kind of promotion on Saturday, and imagines herself standing next to a machine that makes bubbles and blows them into the air. They “float out…carried by the currents of passing cars.” Most of them will burst, she says, if not against the silly sign she holds, then against the silly suit she has to wear. But, she says, “some will make it across the street.”

And to those, we attach our hope.

Remember ‘zines? (Okay, so maybe you never forgot, but I’ve been losing touch ever since I moved away from Portland and Powell’s Books.) Michael Berger writes on The Rumpus about a ZineWiki he stumbled upon—and, from it, how he came back around to one of my own favorite magazines from the past: Hermenaut.

Coinciding with the Copenhagen Climate talks, Poetry magazine’s newest issue focuses on the environment. Or so their email said, but the issue seems a bit more diverse, and some poems don’t seem very environmentally-minded at all (such as Nate Klug’s memorable “True Love“). Who knows though—so far I’ve only made it through the editors’ always great podcast for the issue and John Kinsella’s very environment-focused essay, “Vermin: A Notebook“:

I watched how obvious edge-effects like roads and even fencelines with firebreaks work as imposition or are adapted into larger pictures of flight and crossover involving rocky ledges, gullies, and vegetation. In watching, I understand how better to write a poetry of resistance that will declare the necessity of preserving this region. Can it operate without me shouting out my poems against the shooters, the shires? Whatever the answer is, I do know that every act of resistance adds together, and remaining non-aggressive but resolute in response is what slows the assault against the environment. The assault is remorseless.

What is being published out of Brooklyn, anyway? Is it really the work of generations of gentrification novlelists? So argues Elizabeth Gumport in N1BR issue 5—the book review supplement of N+1—ending with the superb final conceit that “All Brooklyn fiction is historical fiction.” Beautiful, no matter if it’s true or not.

/Ubu Editions: publishing the unpublishable.

The Atlantic Monthly decides not only to be the first magazine to sell single short stories for the Kindle, but they will also charge 4 times as much as One Story does for a single story. And One Story will actually print the story out and mail it to your house.

In the online edition of Time, Claire Suddath uses McSweeney’s recent San Francisco Panorama newspaper issue to make the argument that what readers really want are more magazines, not more newspapers. (Which, of course, would bode well for Time. Magazine. See how that works.)

Finally, fiction writer and The Collagist editor Matt Bell adds to American Short Fiction‘s fantastic ongoing discussion on its blog about about online publishing:

At the beginning of the decade, almost ten years ago, I found the online world of literary publishing, and what I found there was revelatory: all these magazines publishing short fiction and poetry and essays.

I once read with some of the Baltimore literary crew on a tour with Dogzplot at the Jersey Shore. It was a ton of fun and meant a lot. Interviewing Justin Sirois for this week’s column got me feeling sappy, which is hard to do.

Q: (Nicolle Elizabeth for Fictionaut): Hey Justin I see you are an admin at the Baltimore Juggernaut Fictionaut group. waazaaaaaaaaaaa? (elaborate on that)

Yeah, there’s so much amazing literary work going on in Baltimore, I figured I’d start a group on Fictionaut, but we really haven’t used it quite yet. Soon, though.

As for the scene in Baltimore, Michael Kimball and Jen Michalski run the 5:10 Series which is vital to the fiction community, and a new fiction series started up at Atomic Books. Tao Lin packed the place. Gregg Wilhelm masterminds City Lit, and there’s a bunch of great poetry series, but we’re here to talk about fiction, I think. What’s the difference these days? Good poetry sorta reads like good innovative fiction, anyway.

Baltimore also has Los Solos run by Jackie Milad and Bonnie Jones which showcases experimental performances/music with a text based slant (typically) – it’s a brilliantly curated series. Ric Royer runs the Lof/t and brings in innovative writers/performers from all over.

Then there’s our press Narrow House and the behemoth known as Publishing Genius. It’s all very huge in a small way. So yeah, there’s a Baltimore Juggernaut… smashin’… shit…. up.

You are both a short writer and novelist, have you found other Fictionaut writers want to talk mostly about shorter works or are people talking about longer works as well?

Well, the only collection of short fiction I have published is named MLKNG SCKLS (Publishing Genius) which is “deleted scenes” from a larger project, a novel named Falcons on the Floor. So naturally, when readers are interested in those short works, they ask about the novel. Both genres feed one another in a healthy way. But that’s what I intended. SCKLS functions as a trailer of sorts for the novel.

Hopefully SCKLS will get a publisher interested in putting out Falcons. We’ll see. People won’t stop reviewing SCKLS, and that’s ridiculously amazing – you can read more here: New Pages , Book Slut, Big Other, John Dermot Woods, and Matt Bell.

I need to mention that these are stories about Iraqis fleeing Fallujah during one of the worst sieges in the history of modern warfare. I wrote them with the help of Iraqi refugee Haneen Alshujairy; she currently lives in Cairo.

You are also a designer. Have you found that other Fictionaut contributors want to talk mostly about writing or has cover design and web design such as the design of how literary journals on the web are laid out come up for discussion at all? If not, it would be neat to talk about how this can affect writing positively here.

People do ask me about design all the time, but not as much as my writing. I like it that way. Book and cover design is something I love and hope to keep doing, but writing comes first – always has. Both forms of media do compliment one another, though. Creating appealing design work for the writing community is helpful in a number of ways, and it’s gotten my name out there as a person willing to help make writers’ great work look even better. That’s a bonus.

Hire me to do a cover. I’m inexpensive. Really. Do it. Hire me.

You can see a portfolio of that work here.

Have you ever been to Falkenhan’s hardware in Baltimore? I worked there in the basement. Ask me about drywall. Have you ever been to the Paper Moon diner? I worked there too. Tip your waitress.

I was helping an ex-girlfriend move a bed once and we needed twine or rope. Falkenhan’s might have been the closest store for that because we went there, moped about the dank shelves, and felt nerdy for being nerds in a hardware store. Supporting small places like that is essential, especially in a small city like Baltimore. I’ll go back. Wish you still worked there so we could play touch football with rolls of duct tape.

Tell me anything else you want here. What do you really do at the F’naut group, get serious, showcase yer stuff!

We’re tarring Baltimore up in a real way and more writers should move here. Seriously, it’s manic. And it’s cheap enough so that we can run small presses and own houses. I’m going to go publish someone’s great novella right now through Narrow House with Jamie Gaughran-Perez and Lauren Bender… there… we did it. Told you so.

Nicolle Elizabeth checks in with Fictionaut Groups every Friday.

This story gets the prize for Hardest Working Story I Ever Wrote.  First, it got me into grad school at the University of Arizona.  Next it was the first submission in my first-ever grad workshop.  One of the other students in the class circled every single instance of “to be” verbs that I used on the first page of the manuscript, a mistake I never made again, and my first clear lesson on how valuable graduate school was going to be to me.  This story then went on to win a student contest, which led to my first public reading (with Leslie Marmon Silko, a totally intimidating experience).  My mother later sent me the notification of the Mademoiselle contest, so I sent the story there.  Which led to my first publication, plus a thousand bucks. (Until I cashed the check, I was pretty sure they were going to change their minds.)

And also? I ended up marrying that student who’d taken an interest in my work, rough and young as it was.  We just celebrated twenty-five years together.  Thank you, One-Way Ticket.

Antonya Nelson is the author of three novels and six short story collections, most recently Nothing Right (2009). Line Breaks is a regular feature in which accomplished authors introduce and share their first published stories with the Fictionaut community. You can read “One-Way Ticket,” originally published in Mademoiselle in September 1984, on Fictionaut.

Jim Hanas is the author of Cassingle: Five Stories (2009) and Single: Two Stories (2006), two e-book collections of short stories that previously appeared in McSweeney’s, Fence, One Story, The Land-Grant College Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn and online at jimhanas.com.

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

Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts is, to me, the perfect piece of fiction. It is dark, grotesque, hilarious, and it delivers an unsettling feeling all its own. It is also spellbindingly clever. From the vernacular letters to Miss Lonelyhearts at the beginning, to the absurdity of sticking the protagonist with his pen name throughout–well, I just love it. I read it again and again, and I get excited when I see an old edition of it with a cover I haven’t seen before (paired, as always, with the also fine The Day of the Locust). That said, there are a few other things I turn to for inspiration that aren’t fiction. I think Paddy Chayefsky’s movie Network is a great example of how to lead an audience gently away from reality and into absurdity. Gay Talese’s classic magazine article “Mr. Bad News“–a profile of Times obit writer Alden Whitman–is a model of restraint. And Errol Morris’s documentary Fast, Cheap & Out of Control–with its slow accretion of meaning and awe–is a good place to start if you want to show and not tell. All of these are touchstones I return to when I think about what I’m trying to do.

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

After years of trying and failing, resolving and lapsing, having time and not having time, here’s what works for me: One half hour, before work, every business day. I’m never going to be an eight-, six-, or even four-hour-a-day writer. I simply can’t take it. I’ve had unlimited time available to me before and I used it poorly. I once played golf in the punishing Memphis heat every day for an entire summer just to avoid writing. (I hadn’t played before and I haven’t played since.) For me at least, consistency is more important than quantity. You’ve got to buy into the stories you’re writing, and to do that, you’ve got to check-in with them every day. Do I do this? Sometimes. I’ve also come to accept that trying and failing is part of the deal.

What are your favorite websites?

Answering this makes me realize what a faithless web-surfer I’ve become. While I used to read a lot of sites and blogs regularly, I now rely on Twitter and Facebook to churn up the good stuff. Does this work? How would I know if it didn’t? But I did make a concerted effort a few years ago to pull back my attention–to let go of keeping up with the news cycles and the RSS feeds. Don’t get me wrong, I’m zealously pro-technology–between work and play I’m probably online 90 percent of my waking hours–but I can’t keep up with everything, so I’ve stopped trying. This second, I’m a big fan of Feedbooks–one of several e-book publishing sites out there. I’ve tried them all, I think, and I like Feedbooks’ Twitter-like simplicity.

What are you working on now?

I just released a second e-book collection of five stories, Cassingle–which includes work that previously appeared in McSweeney’s, Fence, and elsewhere–and now I’m considering projects for the spring. I first released an e-book, 2006’s Single, as sort of an experiment. Then, earlier this year, I serialized a new story online, “The Arab Bank,” and played around with using Google Maps and Street View to enhance the story. My intention, moving forward, is to do two projects like this a year, whether it’s an e-book or some other form of online storytelling.

I know fiction writers like to curse the Internet as a distraction that keeps them from their work, but I like to tinker as much as I like to write (did I mention I once played golf for a whole summer to avoid writing?) and I now see the tinkering as part of the work. In fact, the immediacy of digital publishing–the knowledge that there’s an audience (however small) ready to read what I write–has lent new urgency to my writing process. Traditional publishing via literary journals makes the writer/reader relationship seem abstract and remote–especially in time. Maybe I’m just impatient, but it seems to me that digital publishing has the potential to bring that relationship back to life.

If you had a prop that you carried with you every day, what would it be?

I have such a prop–my new iPhone. I finally realized that not having one while championing e-books constituted professional malpractice.

What advice would give to aspiring writers?

To avoid golf.

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.

‘Tis the season to support small presses. Once again HTMLGIANT is hosting its Annual Indie Lit Secret Santa. Lots of indie publishers like The Lifted Brow and Keyhole have already begun offering up special offers for Secret Santa participants. Here are some details:

From now till December 15, sign up to play Secret Santa at HTMLGiant. It’s easy! On the sign-deadline, you will find out your recipient and her or his address, and by Christmas (it’s December 25, this year, I think), send them a book from an indie press or a subscription to an indie mag. And you get one too! Sounds like it was a great success last year, and it’s sure to be this year, too.

Today’s the day The San Francisco Panorama from McSweeney’s hits the streets. The idea is to put out an exciting newspaper edition to show the power of the medium in a world of declining newspaper publishing incentives. (Click image at right for more details.) Flavorwire put up some last minute news on the event along with a brief interview with publisher Oscar Villalon.

Though not a literary magazine, exactly, this is not to be missed: The New Yorker has published an excerpt of David Foster Wallace’s forthcoming posthumous novel Pale King. (Via Flavorwire.) Here’s how it starts:

Once when I was a little boy I received as a gift a toy cement mixer. It was made of wood except for its wheels—axles—which, as I remember, were thin metal rods. I’m ninety per cent sure it was a Christmas gift. I liked it the same way a boy that age likes toy dump trucks, ambulances, tractor-trailers, and whatnot. There are little boys who like trains and little boys who like vehicles—I liked the latter.

The translation of Maupassant’s story “A Parisian Affair” in the new Five Dials 8b starts with the intriguing line: “Is there any keener sense known to man than woman’s curiosity?”

PANK magazine interviews Linebreak magazine editor Johnathon Williams:

No, I don’t think all online magazines have print aspirations. In fact, I’d argue that most of the best online magazines, by which I mean the magazines best adapted to the web, have no print aspirations, and that the lack of print aspirations (by which I mean the desire to produce a regular print edition of the magazine, rather than an annual anthology or some another less regular print product) is one of the common denominators of success on the web.

Another literary magazine iPhone app has hit the stores: Opium Magazine‘s Quick Fix.

The new story “The Restoration of the Villa Where Tibor Kálmán Once Lived” from the November 2009 issue of One Story sounds highly interesting—as are story author Tamas Dobozy’s thoughts regarding historical accuracy in fiction:

I’m not someone who feels an ethical need to be absolutely true to history. If I can invent a better way of dealing with the events than the way they actually happened, then I’ll do that. And “better” here means aesthetically, so the story can be more satisfying on that level. I guess I’ve always felt that literature is more entertainment than information, or that the kind of information it presents is not redeemable along some index of real-world verification.

An absolutely fantastic new online resource from the University of Utah: Eclipse. This is a free digital facsimile archive of some radical small press magazines from the past 25 years, which means some amazing publishing events, such as this James Schuyler poem “Bleeding Gums” from the first issue of L Magazine.

American Short Fiction asks: “Rick Moody, what does online publishing mean to you?”

“The return of Ice Floe.”

Finally, The Literary Review‘s summer 2009 Manifest Destiny issue is available in its entirety online. Here is a nice moment to take with you on those holiday shopping events, from Clea Roberts’s poem “I Have a List of Things”:

Shopping at Wal-Mart is that easy.
I glide between the things that people need and want
separate the lovable from the unlovable—
our souls jangling like quarters,
as full and as empty as plastic bags
rolling in the wind.

I like that Rob Walker — he thinks like a creative superstar. His recent project Significant Objects featured my old teacher Myla Goldberg and many other writing deities who probably agreed to sign on to the project because it is so awesome. Take a recycled every day object and write a story from it. Not bad, gentlemen, not bad at all.

Q (Nicolle Elizabeth for Fictionaut): Hey Rob, I see you have a group which also is a writing project called Significant Objects going on here at Fictionaut. Tell us all about it. What are you doing, m’aan?

A (Rob Walker): SignificantObjects.com is a project initiated by Joshua Glenn and me, this past July. Here is the elevator-pitch explanation: “A talented, creative writer invents a story about an object. Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should – according to our hypothesis – acquire not merely subjective but objective value. How to test our theory? Via eBay!”

For the first phase of the project, we had 100 writers (William Gibson, Luc Sante, Bruce Sterling, Myla Goldberg, Meg Cabot, many others) create fictions based upon bric-a-brac objects purchased for a couple of bucks at thrift stores and garage sales. We published the stories on our site — and as product descriptions on eBay. Result: We sold $128.74 worth of insignificant doodads for $3,612.51. That’s a 2,700% Significance markup! The median price paid was $26; highest price was $192.50 (the median object price when we bought them was about a dollar).

In other words, we proved our point. Along the way, our site became rather popular, attracting tens of thousands of readers. So we’ve decided to launch Volume 2. This time, all the money will go to a cause. We will probably auction 50 objects, one every weekday, and when it’s over we’ll give all the dough to 826 National, a nonprofit that tutors students age 6-18 in creative and expository writing.
With the Fictionaut group, we’re basically offering the writers in the Fictionaut community a chance to play along, and maybe contribute to our project.

How has the move over to Fictionaut been inspiring, fun, helpful, if at all. If not we can try to find you a thrift store depiction of a pony or something. I am considering asking for an intern, and I’ll say, “Intern, find Significant Objects a depiction of a pony or something. Where are my sunglasses?”

Ha! Well, no, we don’t need any help getting objects, not at the moment anyway.

One of the things that surprised us when we did the first round of S.O. was how many writers got in touch basically volunteering to participate. We did our best to accommodate that development — we even did contests with Slate, and with SmithMag.net — but I guess there’s something appealing about writing a story that gives significance to an object.

At the same time, we’ve been really interested in the various experiments out there to use technology in clever ways that result in more great creative writing. I mean, I think we’re sort of part of that. So when I learned about Fictionaut I just thought well, let’s see if there’s some way for us to get involved. And maybe get a story or two we wouldn’t have been able to get any other way. That’d be cool, right?

What is Significant Objects going to do in the future? Is the moon part of the plan?

We do intend to produce a moon-specific edition, yes. I can’t say anything more about that, though.

What would Significant Objects like to see from Fictionaut? Breathmint? More pillows? An intern?

Not sure what you’re trying to tell me with that breathmint offer.

Anyway, I think right now we’re just trying to learn how the Fictionaut world works, and what the best way is for us to be involved. Originally we were thinking more in straight-up contest terms — like highest rated story about Object X wins. But then it seemed like maybe it would be better to be more open-ended about it and just see what develops. What do you think?

Anything else you’d like to tell me here. Be bold, go big or go home.

Yes, well, I think you and all the readers and writers you know should definitely spend some time checking out the stories we’ve published at S.O., because they’re awesome and you’ll love them. We went pretty big and bold with Volume 1. So let’s get some Fictionauts involved in making Volume 2 even bigger and bolder, yes?

For most people who read fiction and spend much time online, this won’t be news: Electric Literature recently twittered the entirety of Rick Moody’s story “Some Contemporary Characters” over three days with the assistance of several co-publishers, of which Luna Park was one. The event was interesting to say the least, and response ranged from excitement to annoyance. Was the publishing event a success? It really depends on your perspective. Here’s a list of some of the more interesting responses that came out as the tweets were still rolling in: Carolyn Kellogg on Jacket Copy, Ryan Call on HTMLGIANT, Dennis Johnson on MobyLives, Patrick Brown for Vroman’s Bookstore. and Moody himself in discussion with The Brooklyn Ink.

Luna Park is looking for submissions from editors and writers for our upcoming series on issues of Race, Class, Gender & Sexuality in independent publishing—an idea that arrived largely in response to a piece we published earlier this year by Roxane Gay “On Race and Publishing“). Below is more from assistant editor Marcelle Heath:

We’d like to invite editors and writers to participate in our new series on issues and representations of race, class, gender, and sexuality in independent publishing. How do these issues affect you as an literary magazine editor interested in publishing underrepresented communities, or a writer who wants to challenge dominant notions of identity? What are your thoughts, concerns, ideas about how literary communities reinforce, respond to, and confront racism, classicism, and sexism? Email Marcelle Heath at lunaparkonline@gmail.com.

After last week’s post about excerpts from David Shields’s upcoming book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto in literary magazines such as A Public Space and PEN America, the editors of Knee-Jerk alerted me to the fact that they are publishing seven parts of the book, and have already published five along with an interview with Shields. (I also stumbled upon a great write up of the book and where to find excerpts of it on The Millions.)

New England Review has published in their newest issue an absolutely fantastic group of writing about and by editor and writer Ted Solotaroff, who passed away in 2008. Solotaroff was founding editor of New American Review, one of the most successful and influential literary magazines of the late sixties and early seventies, publishing such now famous works as A. Alvarez on Sylvia Plath and an early draft of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. The NER issue includes a portion of Solotaroff’s unpublished final memoir covering his early days in the publishing world and remembrances by Robert Stone, Allegra Goodman, Robert Chohen, and many others.

Words Without Borders has come out with an international science fiction issue. I doubt much else needs to be said. Okay, perhaps: Stanislaw Lem and Machado de Assis.

The New York Times’s ArtsBeat blog gives some ink to The Lumberyard, probably the most contemporary sounding poetry magazine in the business.

McSweeney’s San Francisco Panorama newspaper-style issue 33 will finally arrive next week on December 8, to be released by the San Francisco Chronicle. It seems apropos here to also mention Kevin Smokler’s interview at The Rumpus with new McSweeney’s publisher—and former Chronicle book review editor—Oscar Villalon.

Carolyn Kellogg writes for Jacket Copy about “Why a Literary Journal Returned to the 2008 Mumbai Attacks“—or, more specifically, why writer Jason Motlagh wrote four pieces about the attacks and their aftermath for The Virginia Quarterly Review. VQR Editor Ted Genoways sees Motlagh’s work for the magazine as “something that would be closer to literary nonfiction than traditional journalism—or even ‘new journalism.’ ” Kellogg writes:

If the report is of the kind we might expect to see from a handful of larger-circulation magazines such as the New Yorker, other venues have been retreating from this kind of extensively researched international writing. That a magazine like VQR—esteemed, yet with a modest and distinctly literary circulation—has undertaken such an effort demonstrates an enthusiasm for significant nonfiction storytelling.

Another new issue of >kill author (this time it is J. G. Ballard).

And even more from Kellogg at Jacket Copy: The Nervous Breakdown has gone from writer community to literary magazine (at least on the face of things).

Hong Hao’s cover for the new Hayden’s Ferry Review made me pause for at least 30 seconds after I removed the issue from its mailing envelope this afternoon. (Picture of Hao’s cover at left.) Then I read pieces by Emily Carr, Matt Bell, Bernardo Atxaga, and Kelly Spitzer for the next 30 minutes.

Finally, I recently received some more news about CLMP‘s forthcoming Literary Magazine Engagement Program—an exciting opportunity for students, professors, publishers, and writers:

CLMP, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, is launching a new ”Literary Magazine Engagement Program for Creative Writing Students.” Funded by the NEA, and coordinated in partnership with AWP, the new program offers half-price subscriptions for selected literary magazines to writing classes adopting them for course use. (Desk-copy subscriptions are available for professors.)

Additionally, once during the semester, senior editors from adopted magazines will take part in a virtual (or in person, if possible) meeting with participating classes.  During this meeting, editors may discuss the history of their magazine, the current literary landscape, their curatorial process, etc., allowing students to better understand the publishing community in which they¹re most likely to be published.  The ultimate goal of this program is to expose students to the variety of magazines out there and promote an active, engaged reading culture among young writers.

Participants will be able to choose from the following magazines for adoption during this pilot program:

Kenyon Review
Ploughshares
American Poetry Review
The Oxford American
A Public Space
New England Review

Classes will be able to order magazines for course adoption directly through the CLMP web site. Please contact Jamie Schwartz for more information about joining the program, jschwartz@clmp.org.

In a reversal of roles, today’s installment of the Fictionaut Five features regular interviewer Meg Pokrass in a Q&A with Matt Baker, associate publisher of The Oxford American.  Meg is a flash fiction writer and poet who edits for Smokelong Quarterly and serves as a mentor for the Dzanc Creative Writing Sessions. Her chapbook Lost & Found was released last week by Bannock Street Press.  Meg has published over 100 stories and poems, and she offers writing prompts on her popular blog.

Q (Matt Baker): You write very short fiction. Is this the format you feel most comfortable in and why? Have you tried writing longer works? Or do you reach a certain word count (say, 500 words) and start to get nervous and panic?

I like to write in little pictures and images of an imaginary life. To get to those images, I use both associative and flawed logic. For me, writing is about imagining living truthfully under imaginary circumstances. I put myself in the mind of the character, as I did as an actress years ago. I like to create moments that allow the reader access to the character, even if these moments are invisible to the character as they happen. In life, I feel that so much is unnoticed by people as they live it, and only much later do these realities become conscious. Many moments feel strange to me in general, I am a pretty edgy person perhaps – so there is a lot of material to draw from! I have (lately) been stringing the little moments together and making longer pieces.

What story or book do you feel closest to?

The story/book I feel closest to is Mona Simpson’s Anywhere But Here. It is a story about father loss. I lost a father. And I identify with every word in the novel. I also would love to write a novel that comes near to tackling that topic, the way the brilliant Ms. Simpson did.

What are you working on now?

Well, I just released my first chapbook, Lost & Found. I am working on making little videos of myself reading (and in some cases acting) my stories! I have work coming out soon in Pank, Gigantic, Gargoyle and others. And hey, I have the honor of currently stewarding the Fictionaut Five Series. I’ve loved interviewing authors about their work. I’m never bored!

If you could have dinner with one writer, musician, or filmmaker (living or dead) who would decorate your dining table? And why?

I would have dinner with Jack Lemmon (the late actor). To me his genius for both comedy and drama and his obvious love for process intrigues me to no end. I could watch him act forever.

What was your/is your favorite car?

My big sister’s beat up barely running Austin Healy Sprite – my first car. It was nicknamed the “death trap”.

Name a recent movie that you hated.

Ironically, it was the Woody Allen/Larry David movie titled Whatever Works.

What city disappointed you?

Vancouver, but it was because the people looked like Southern Californians. They were all tan and blond and well dressed and sinewy. I grew up in Southern California, and wanted to see something different.

The biggest prize you’ve ever won?

The only prize I ever won (and so, the biggest) was “The Screaming “O” Octopus Toy” in an adult microfiction contest. The contest was to “describe the best orgasm you ever had in 10 words”. Here was my answer: “There is a God!” she screamed – alive as a jellyfish”. Anyway, I never received the toy. I even wrote to the publisher and told him I never received it. I still haven’t gotten it. What’s up with that?

Who was your first kiss?

Cary Grant! Of course!

The Fictionaut Five is our ongoing series of interviews with Fictionaut authors.

T.C. Boyle (The Human Fly, Talk Talk, The Women) kicks off Line Breaks, a new regular feature in which accomplished authors introduce and share their first published stories with the Fictionaut community. You can read “The OD & Hepatitis RR or Bust,” originally published in North American Review in 1972, on Fictionaut.

My first published story, which was accepted the year before I went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and which came out during my first semester there, dealt, in an imagistic and fragmented way, with a scene I knew from experience.  Some of this material–or, that is, material suggested by that scene–seeped into Drop City (2003) and then, when I wrote the stories that would comprise Tooth and Claw (2004), into the last story of that book, “Up Against the Wall.”

In Indie Fiction, Monkeybicycle is sort of like the cool older popular boy to me but if the cool older boy were cool because he was full of integrity, heart, hard work, taste, solidarity, un-bad-way charm and just being good.

Q (Nicolle Elizabeth for Fictionaut): Hello Steven of Monkeybicycle. I come in peace. You have a Monkeybicycle Fictionaut group going. How’s it been?

A (Steven Seighman, Monkeybicyle): It’s going well. Membership increased pretty quickly, which is nice. I wish I had more time to post things in the forum, but everyone has been very responsive to the tings I have in there so far, so there is some great dialog happening, which is what I had hoped for. And people are posting a lot of stories as well.

Q: Please talk about Monkeybicycle with us, tell us everything. Sit on my knee, I will brush your hair.

A: Hmm, I’m not sure what to say here other than Monkeybicycle is a literary journal that exists both online and in print. We’ve evolved quite a bit since starting back in 2002, and it’s been a lot of fun. As of two years ago, we’re an imprint of Dzanc Books, which has certainly been helpful in broadening our readership and makes it possible for us to put out our print issues with some consistency. That was a struggle early on.

One other thing that happened recently that makes us a much better, much more read journal is the addition of Jessa Marsh as web editor. I think the selections she’s making for the site are just fantastic and are really attracting a new set of readers that we didn’t have before. In some ways, that’s the most important job at Monkeybicycle; since the site is updated twice per week (Mondays and Fridays) there is a lot more pressure on her to consistently find good work and she’s been doing it every single week.

When I started Monkeybicycle in Seattle, one of the things that was a staple of the enterprise was a monthly reading series that I ran with my co-editor at the time, Shya Scanlon. Since I moved to New York, the reading series stopped, and Jessa is helping to bring it back to life in Chicago. She put together an event recently with some fantastic readers and it had a great turnout. We’re looking to do more of that–in both Chicago and NYC–to make it an important part of what Monkeybicycle is all about again. Ultimately, Monkeybicycle is just out to publish great work and do as much for the literary community as we can. We’re so happy to be a part of it and want to help both publishers and authors to thrive.

Q: How has Fictionaut been working toward Monkeybicycle’s goal of being awesome? New voices uncovered? New editors hired? etc?

A: I wish I had more time to spend on Fictionaut. I find it far more productive than sites like Facebook or whatever else is out there. It seems like this site has a specific focus and makes it easier to find like-minded people (because that’s all there is here!) and really helps the literary community as a whole. We’ve seen a lot of submissions come from the folks on here and I’ve certainly gained a lot of information from conversations I’ve had with various folks in these pages. Fictionaut is doing quite a service for all of us.

Q: Why is it called Monkeybicycle?

A: The name Monkeybicycle is just two random words thrown together. I think I muttered it in reply to some crazy character who confronted me on the street in Seattle after I watched Steven Soderbergh’s Schizopolis. Some people love the name, and others hate it. Whatever the case, I think it’s at least pretty memorable.

Q: What are some things to read which Monkeybicycle can suggest to us?

A: I actually just wrote a post on Monkeybicycle’s blog about some new titles from our past contributors that I thought would make great holiday gifts. One of them was Stefanie Freele’s new collection, Feeding Strays. That book is wonderful. Also, Laura van den Berg’s new book, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, is just outstanding. Definitely the best book I’ve read this year. I might be biased because I was the book’s designer, but I really don’t think so. This is a collection that everyone in the Fictionaut community will love. Right now I am reading Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, which I’m finding to be incredible. I’ve always liked his writing style and the subject matter in this book–his first nonfiction title–is something that I’ve always had an interest in. If you’ve ever wondered where the food you eat comes from, I recommend this book. Though, you might not be ready for the answers you’ll get. And, of course, there are tons of fantastic journals out there as well. Places like Pank and Conjunctions have new issues out that I’m really excited about, and there are endless online destinations with a lot of fantastic work to read.

Q: What would Monkeybicycle like to see out of Fictionaut in the future?

A: I love the idea of Fictionaut and the groups and forums are a great service to the community. And the fact that people post their stories on here and get feedback is something that every writer can benefit from. I don’t know what I would add to make it better, but it’s been fun to see its evolution and I think whatever happens from here will be great. It’s like a cooler, more accessible, version of Zoetrope.

Q: Aren’t you excited for when all of these lovely writers start winning Pulitzers? It’ll happen.

A: That’s something I’ve never thought about, but I’m always very excited to see new work by people we’ve published. I especially love seeing things from those we published early on, because it means they stuck with writing and have grown. That’s such a great feeling to me. I know I have nothing to do with their abilities, but I can’t help but be proud of these folks. I don’t think Monkeybicycle has ever really published anything we didn’t believe in 100%, so seeing these people continue to get their work out there really makes me feel like what we saw in these writers was accurate, and now a lot of other people get to see it as well.

Q: Anything else you would like to tell me here. Secrets to how to ask out the popular girl included.

A: I don’t have any specific questions, no. But I will take a second to encourage everyone to continue supporting the small press community. It’s full of a lot of hard-working people who love what they do, and it takes a lot of involvement for everybody to thrive. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a community full of such dedicated and passionate people, and I’m happy to be even a tiny part of it.