Muumuu House has a group on Fictionaut and I decided to ask Audrey about it. It was good.

Q (Nicolle Elizabeth): Who are you (the caterpillar asked Alice)?

A: My name is Audrey Allendale, I’m an employee of Muumuu House. I was expelled from NYU last year. Currently I work part-time for Muumuu House and part-time in a cafe by Tompkins Square Park.

Q: How is Muumuu House using its Fictionaut group if at all? Is it going okay? Anything we can do for you?

A: Currently Muumuu House has secured its Fictionaut group but hasn’t really done anything with it yet. We’re meeting next week in our beautiful Hamptons Muumuu House location (donated to us from my grandfather, in his will) to discuss future Fictionaut group plans, among other things.

Q: How is the Muumuu House group being used if at all? Are there discussions workshopping etc?

A: Muumuu House plans to foster discussions of stories published on Muumuu House, as well as discussions about the authors of those stories, including people that are no longer alive, and whose works republished on Muumuu House are out-of-print, like James Purdy and his story “Color of Darkness” (a story from his out-of-print first story collection).

Q: Does Muumuu House find the Fictionaut site easy or hard to navigate and why?
A: I find the site easy to navigate. I like the clean design.

Q: Does Muumuu House use gchat while on the Fictionaut group site?

A: I do not, literally speaking, use Gmail Chat while on the Fictionaut group site, just because it is on a different screen.

Q: I like that Brandon Scott Gorrell (I think I spelled that wrong.) Tell us who Muumuu House puts out, how and why?

A: Muumuu House has published three books as follows: a poetry collection, Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs by Ellen Kennedy, a poetry collection, During My Nervous Breakdown I Want to Have a Biographer Present by Brandon Scott Gorrell, and a limited-edition non-fiction book, The Brandon Book Crisis by Brandon Scott Gorrell and Tao Lin. The authors of these books and Tao Lin discussed each book and decided that there was mutual interest in Muumuu House publishing said book, after which Tao Lin used his money and printed, respectively, 1000 copies of Ellen’s book, 2500 copies of Brandon’s book, and 150 copies of The Brandon Book Crisis through Thomson-Shore, a printer based in Michigan.

Q: What is Mummuu House’s favorite article of clothing?

A: I enjoy wearing colorful t-shirts and plaid flannel, I’m not sure exactly what the favorite articles of clothing of the other people involved in Muumuu House are, but probably they include clothes from American Apparel.

Q: What’s Muumuu House doing in the future?

A: Muumuu House plans to continue to publish books in high-quality offset editions featuring minimalist designs and a Helvetica interior. Future books include a possible Bear Parade anthology, a possible annual anthology of fiction and poetry, and possible books by single authors already published on Muumuu House’s website.

Q: Anything you want to plug here?

A: My Twitter account is here.

Nicolle Elizabeth checks in with Fictionaut Groups every Friday.

At Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors, Eric Banks interviews Fictionaut co-founder Jürgen Fauth.

Joseph Young lives in Baltimore, Maryland. His book of microfictions, Easter Rabbit, is currently available for preorder from Publishing Genius, with wide release in December 2009.

Amelia Gray, author of AM/PM, says “Joe Young’s lovely little fictions present objects and parts, voices guiding voices, striking images in solid prose. A city of familiar scenes rises around the reader, who may be surprised to find how quickly they attach and draw her near. These are puzzles best devoured slowly.”

What story or book do you feel closest to?

I have this really old anthology with the cover falling off and the pages all yellow — I bought it from a thrift store a long time ago — called 50 Great Short Stories, first published in 1952. It has stories that I not only go back to read over and over again but that I’m always bringing up in conversation. Last night, in fact, I was telling someone about the story “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn” by Thomas Wolfe, which is in the anthology. It also has such gems as “A Haunted House” by Virginia Woolf and “The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse” by William Saroyan. Somehow these stories and that book hold all the mystery and wonder of fiction within them, and it’s exciting just to see it on my shelf. It’s exciting to talk about it now.

Do you have a mentor?

I’ve never had a mentor, per se. Many times, especially earlier on, I wished I had, someone to answer all those questions about whether I was going in the right direction, someone to sooth all those gnawing doubts. I wanted to be able to sit down with some kindly and accomplished writer who would tell me he or she believed in me, unequivocally, that I was going somewhere, kid. Never worked out that way and I doubt it does for many — writing is too much work, and other writers, kindly or not, can help some but they can’t be your author-parent, or so it seems to me. Anyway, what’s been of a lot more help to me has been my peers, or maybe more accurately, those people a bit ahead of me on the curve of accomplishment, people whose writing is better than mine, who make me a jealous and spur me along to catch up with them, people who model how one goes about making successes out of what they are doing.

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

I’m not sure I get stuck much anymore, not in the past few years. Key to this I think is having a lot of places to go with the desire to be creative. If writing isn’t coming or doesn’t seem that interesting to me for awhile, I’ve developed interests in making collages, or playing around with painting, and things like that. I’ve also got into curating and organizing things surrounding visual art, so although that isn’t strictly creative in the sense that I’m making something myself, it’s a good place to put my energy if the writing isn’t there. In general, being busy (with things I like doing) seems to be a good trick for me. I don’t have a lot of time to worry over the value of my writing, say — I either have to do it or not-and that’s actually really freeing.

What are your favorite websites?

I like Zoetrope, and I check in fairly frequently to see what people are up to. It’s stuffed full of people doing great things, writing and editing, pushing lit forward, and a friendly place mostly. HTML Giant has a ton of lively discussions about writing (and other things) and is a pretty exciting place to get to know writers out on the edges of what’s new. I was happy to find out that Riley Dog is back up and running — art and writing daily, and the guy who runs it has a great eye. And I check out BmoreArt to see what’s happening around Baltimore, art-wise.

What are you working on now?

The huge bulk of my energy has been going into Easter Rabbit, getting the cover designed, lining up blurbs, doing PR work, doing some interviews and such, planning the book release party, which will have art and performance and music. It’s great fun, I enjoy it a lot, though I also miss time for just writing or making collages and such. I know there have been writing ideas I’ve thought of in the past month or so that I’ve thought, wow, that would be fun, and then I forget them in the shuffle. It’s a good problem to have though.

You are considered a master of microfiction! Can you talk about how this fascination for the tiny story began?

Hmm, I’m not sure I remember. I think it was probably that I wrote one and got excited about writing more, the wonder of trying to concentrate all my energy into this pinpoint effort. For a while, I know it had something to do with wanting to get as closely to time zero as possible, to write a story, with character and narrative and action, that took up the least amount of story-time possible, close to no time. I wanted to achieve near-stasis, but without actually getting there. I wanted a story that looked like a painting, but was still a story. I probably still want these things, but they’ve been internalized; I don’t think of them consciously anymore.

Tell us your favorite things about creating Easter Rabbit?

Well, certainly the writing, coming up with all the stories over the past several years, the wonder that those things came out of my head, by some magic of luck, tenacity and a bit of skill. But as far as the book itself, it’s been working with the team, Adam Robinson, the genius of Publishing Genius, Christine Sajecki, the enormously gifted artist who painted the cover image, Justin Sirois, who designed the cover and who is a great writer himself, and several other people chipping in too. The collaboration has been great fun and has made the process so much more meaningful than if it were just my book. It’s our book, a group effort, and one I’m really proud to have worked on with these people.

What does your book’s title tell us about what we’ll find inside the book?

I guess first of all that there is a story inside called “Easter Rabbit.” That there are a lot of stories in there that have animals in them. That the stories aren’t necessarily grounded absolutely in realism. That I have a conflicted interest in Christianity, in its imagery and ideas and feelings, although I’m pretty devotedly unreligious. That what’s inside might not always make perfect rational sense — the titles and the words and the strings of dialogue — but that the stories are always vying for, yearning for, some grasp of understanding.

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.

After seeing Where the Wild Things Are this weekend (along with an audience of other Gen-Xers), I spent some time browsing around Eggers & Co. publications online and stumbled across this wonderful piece by Justin Taylor from The Believer archives, “The Codex Seraphinianus.” You kind of just have to read the article, but I will say it is a mixture of adoration for linguistic systems, ancient texts, and idiosyncratic professors. Taylor guest-edited a popular issue of McSweeney’s back in the day on Donald Barthelme, has his first book of fiction coming out from Harper Perennial in 2010, and was one of the kind people to come to our launch party many moons ago.

I also noticed McSweeney’s has leaked a sneak-preview of their upcoming newspaper issue of the magazine—Eggers reaction to the recent print journalism slump—to be published as McSweeney’s 33, aka The San Francisco Panorama, pictured below and followed by a brief summary from the editors.

Issue 33 of McSweeney’s Quarterly will be a one-time-only, Sunday-edition sized newspaper—the San Francisco Panorama. It’ll have news (actual news, tied to the day it comes out) and sports and arts coverage, and comics (sixteen pages of glorious, full-color comics, from Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and Art Spiegelman and many others besides) and a magazine and a weekend guide, and will basically be an attempt to demonstrate all the great things print journalism can (still) do, with as much first-rate writing and reportage and design (and posters and games and on-location Antarctic travelogues) as we can get in there. Expect journalism from Andrew Sean Greer, fiction from George Saunders and Roddy Doyle, dispatches from Afghanistan, and much, much more.

Utne Reader comments on “Digital Storytelling” and takes time to discuss cellphone based magazine CellStories, writing, “I’ve been reading CellStories on borrowed iPhones and have found the daily dispatches to be just the right length for the current limitations of the computer screen.”

New lit mag on the way in 2010 from Ryan W. Bradley and Paula Bomer: Sententia.

The Collagist’s third issue is up, with new fiction from Matthew Derby, Roxane Gay, Sarah Norek, and Catherine Zeidler, and more. Editor Matt Bell offers a nostalgic look at expired lit mags in his editor’s note:

At first, I thought that I’d give away most of the magazines. Some of them were ten years old or older. Others were magazines I’d only bought single issues of, never to read the magazine again. Some were magazines that are now defunct, or that published kinds of work that I no longer read very often. I grabbed a box and began clearing what I could off the shelves. But then a funny thing happened: I started reading the magazines again, thumbing through and finding stories I’d forgotten over the years. Some were by writers I’d never heard of and never saw again. Other contributors were strangers then, but have somehow become people I’m lucky to have as friends…

A message from the anonymous editors of > kill author: “The third issue of > kill author is now online. We hope you enjoy it.” The Dorothy Parker issue.

Finally, an interesting column I’m going to keep an eye on: T.K. writes weekly for This Recording on poems currently out in lit mags. This week he writes about The Paris Review, Frederick Seidel, and noir poems in Black Clock.

When I moved in with my wife, we went through the typical early matrimonial angst that goes with trying to cram two independent lives into a two-bedroom condo. The fact that both of us are artists (Nuvia is a painter) complicated matters. Foot by foot the condo was parceled out. The guest room was turned into a bedroom for my daughter’s visits/painter’s studio/overflow library. The bathroom doubled as a cleaning station for art supplies and meth lab (kidding, kidding).

My wife watched with dismay as her cozy home was systematically converted into a book depository. Nuvia is a native Californian with a healthy respect for earthquakes. To her, a bookshelf is a wave of paper waiting to break. Her fear of being buried in an avalanche of books was exacerbated by the sinking feeling that she’d married a pack-rat. (For my part, I was slow to understand that non-writers tend to view extensive files of previous, current and potential research as symptomatic of an inveterate hoarder.)

When all was said and done, the only space left for me to write was the coat closet in the living room: 10 feet wide, 2 feet deep and accessed by a pair of hideous sliding mirrored doors. Nuvia had rigged a crappy wire shelving unit and that’s where she kept her laptop. Whenever she needed to send an email she’d slide open the closet door and pull up a chair. This arrangement pretty much sucked, but I figured if James Joyce could write sections of Ulysses in a crowded one-room apartment he shared with his partner and two small children using his suitcase as a desk, I could learn to work in a closet. And I did. For two years. When it was “finished,” my bitching became bolder.

If I didn’t like the space, Nuvia countered, I was free to fix it. The only thing holding me back was me. In the interest of matrimonial harmony, I rolled up my sleeves and got all Bob Villa on the closet. I took off the doors, ripped out the shelves, and spackled the walls. I went to Home Depot and picked out some paint. Then I bought a book shelf and desk unit that just barely fit into the space and installed it in the closet and tricked it out with some boxes and shelves.

Of course, when I say “I,” I mean “we.” Nuvia was with me every step of the way to offer her direction inspiration and approval assistance. In any case, the results are pretty amazing. It doesn’t even look like a closet anymore.

Jim Ruland is the author of the short story collection Big Lonesome and the host of Vermin on the Mount, an irreverent reading series in the heart of L.A.’s Chinatown. Writing Spaces is a series dedicated to the desks, cafes, libraries and retreats where Fictionaut writers work, providing a window to the physical places where some of the stories on the site originated.

Gigantic is a newer journal and one of our newest groups, and I thought I’d ask James Yeh and all four editors to chime in about who they are and what they’re up to this time. It’s a small world, so small that it turned out Andrew Bulger and I were headed to the same bar to play video games four days after Gigantic sent back the answers to these interview questions. Andrew Bulger is Gigantic’s in-house artist and he is a very good one, I cannot remember which video game machine he went toward but he has a very good handshake. He doesn’t have a Fictionaut profile but his work can be seen in Gigantic or at http://andrewbulger.com.

Q (Nicolle Elizabeth): Hey Gigantic I see you have a Fictionaut group going here on Fictionaut. How’s that going? People talking? Workshopping? Anything-ing?

A (Gigantic): Hi Nicolle. Our Fictionaut group is going well, thank you for asking.

Q: Who are you people again?

A: Gigantic is a magazine of short prose, interviews and art, propelled by the efforts, talents, and failings of eight legs, four hearts, a hundred twelve feet of intestine, six gallons of blood, some boobs, some dicks and an enormous collective brain.

Q: How many of you are there — I heard there’s like ten of you or something?

A: There are four editors (Ann Dewitt, James Yeh, Lincoln Michel and Rozalia Jovanovic) who run the magazine, plus some very nice and talented people who help out, including but not limited to: our layout editor Erin Grey West, our website designer Joanna Neborsky, our Seizure State editor Joe Wenderoth, our in-house illustrator Andrew Bulger, our editorial assistant Skyler Balbus and our interns Calina Madden and Mariela Quintana, submissions handlers, the list goes on. Is that ten? I just counted, it’s eleven.

Q: Do you prefer my hair up or down?

A: Up. To wear one’s hair up is a sign of both self-assurance and co-dependence, that, to me, is quite appealing.

Q: Who came up with the design, btw, its lovely.

A: Thanks! I’m glad you like it. Our layout editor Erin Grey West and editor Rozalia Jovanovic came up with the print layout primarily, but we all had a hand and input in it. What we wanted to do was something that was both affordable, attractive and interestingly laid out. We hope we were able to meet those goals. As far as online goes, the wonderful blame for that goes to Joanna Neborsky and editor Lincoln Michel, although like the print issue we also all gave input. We should also mention Andrew Bulger, our in-house illustrator, who worked on the interview drawings.

Q: Does Gigantic watch football?

A: Yes
A: No
A: Rarely
A: No

Q: Does Gigantic like in print or the Internet better and why? (Some people have a preference)

A: Choosing between print and web is like asking a mother to pick her favorite child or a coach to pick his favorite player. Producing the physical magazine is exciting in that we aim to create an artifact that will endure, and that people will hopefully want to keep and collect. There’s a thrill to holding an object and a kind of care in producing it that translates and alters the way a work is received by the reader. Though this takes more time and requires more funding, ultimately, it’s rewarding both for us and for the reader. Creating an online magazine has certain limitations but also certain advantages over print. We’re excited to have recently launched our website. We’re trying to take advantage of the form and work with artists to explore the possibilities of animation, video, hypertext and even gaming.

Q: Whats forthcoming for Gigantic?

A: Issue two is coming out this winter. The issue is being loosely organized under the theme “Americanist,” which is to say something along the lines of blue jeans, booze and bombshells (both kinds). Just a few of the awesome people whose work we will be featuring include Robert Coover, Deb Olin Unferth, Clancy Martin, Leni Zumas, Thomas Doyle and Ken Sparling. Also we’re interviewing Adrian Tomine, Sam Lipsyte and Lydia Millet. Online, we’re currently working on a video art series that will feature new work by up-and-coming video artists, and on a web-issue devoted to artful gaming.

Nicolle Elizabeth checks in with Fictionaut Groups every Friday.

With today’s installment, Meg Pokrass takes over the Fictionaut Five series of interviews. Every Wednesday, Meg will ask a writer five (or more) questions.

Victoria Lancelotta is the author of the short story collection Here in the World and the novels Far (Counterpoint) and Coeurs Blesses (Phébus). Booklist called her “a razor’s-edge writer with an existential streak and a fascination with the dichotomies of being.”

Victoria’s story “The Anniversary Trip,” originally published in The Gettysburg Review, appears in The Best American Short Stories 2009, edited by Alice Sebold.

You can read her stories “Everything is Fine” and “Better” on Fictionaut.

What story or book do you feel closest to?

That’s a brutal question! Okay, the weaselly–but true–answer is whatever I’m working on at a given time. I’m a very slow writer, and I’m miserable at multitasking, and that combination means that I wind up in a somewhat claustrophobic congress with the piece at hand. But otherwise, honestly, it’s impossible to choose–if you asked me on ten different days I’d have ten different answers. There’s too much great stuff out there, you know?

Do you have a mentor?

What I have are lots of little voices in my head that can be traced directly back to incredibly wise and astute writers I’ve known. I spent more than a few years in workshops, as I guess lots of writers of my generation have, and I was lucky to have some really sharp guidance at a time when I was ready–and needed–to hear it. So although my work habits now are incredibly–some might say neurotically–solitary, I still feel a very real connection to these folks. But–little voices notwithstanding–I think of them now as friends.

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

See the next question…

What are your favorite websites?

I’m a fiend for food sites-recipes, restaurant reviews, cooking magazines, menus, you name it. When I find myself stuck or struggling with a scene or a character, or just in a spot where I need to work something out in my head before I can actually get words onto the page, I get out of my chair and into the kitchen and get my hands in something I can actually accomplish–I find that focusing on something physical and tactile can often loosen whatever psychic knots are blocking the wires. So there’s an inverse relationship in my house between how well the work is going and the quality of dinner–if I’m having a hard time with a story, there’ll be stuffed game birds and coconut-caramel cake, but if things are going well, it’s cornflakes all the way.

What are you working on now?

A new collection of stories. My last two books were novels, and it’s good to get back to a short form–the pieces I’m working on now are pretty spare and stripped, and that feels right, at this point in my life.

What academic rules about writing do you tend to challenge?

I try to keep things pretty simple, for my own sanity: Write a good sentence. Repeat. Repeat again, keep repeating. Be honest, be fair, be generous–with yourself, your characters, your readers. Don’t take the easy way out, don’t be lazy, don’t be boring or trite or smug–and so forth. I don’t know if these constitute official academic rules, but I think they’re a good place to start.

It has been awhile, but Amsterdam’s beautifully designed English-language lit mag Versal is finally back with issue 7, including new work from Emily Carr, Peter Shippy, Mary Miller, and others. They have also added some talented new editors to the mix:

Jennifer K. Dick, the author of Fluorescence (Univ. of Georgia Press, 2004) and Enclosures (Blazevox, 2007), joins the poetry team, along with Matthew Sadler, whose first chapbook is to be published with Flying Guillotine Press in Brooklyn. BJ Hollars is the newest member of the fiction team. He edited the recently released anthology You Must Be This Tall To Ride: Contemporary Writers Take You Inside The Story from Writer’s Digest Books. Finally, Shayna Schapp is Versal’s new assistant art editor. She teaches at the Interactive / Media / Design department at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague.

“Everyone likes a shipwreck story. I’m certainly not the first writer to be drawn to the La Pérouse expedition, an ill-fated voyage of exploration that left France in 1785 with two frigates under the command of Jean-François de Galaup de La Pérouse, and disappeared three years later in the South Pacific. Part of the early mystique of the La Pérouse story, of course, was that for almost forty years no one knew what had become of the expedition. It’s always a boon to fictionalizers when people disappear into thin air.”

Guernica publishes on “The Wise Latina“—an interview with Lila Downs (pictured at right): “I think that that album is mainly about crying, about something very painful, about not having what you want; I guess we all come across something like that in our life.”

“There is, in Stephanie Johnson’s stories, a profound, unflashy magic of seeing. She puts you right up to the beating hearts of her people—from which vantage, you see how they miss one another, and you understand as odd, perfect miracles their moments of connection and knowledge.” That’s Wigleaf editor Scott Garson on Stephanie Johnson‘s debut collection One of These Things Is Not Like the Others, now out from Keyhole Press. For more on the book and audio of Stephanie reading her work, see the official site.

If you weren’t a writer, how would you spend your time?

I’d probably drive more people even crazier. I don’t sleep a lot, so if I weren’t working, I’d probably make other people stay up all night talking and listening to music with me. Or, I’d have to get a third shift job where I could read while I performed my job functions. Writing is a healthy outlet for energy that otherwise becomes a bit overwhelming.

Which book do you wish you’d written?

This could spiral to an extremely long list—I wish I could take credit for a lot of books. Forced to choose one, I’d go with Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson. It’s concise, clear-eyed, and honest. Brutal and beautiful simultaneously.

What are the websites you couldn’t live without?

I spend a lot more time on the web than I probably should. I probably couldn’t live without Google Reader because it delivers all the things I love in one convenient location. I have a short attention span and I’m lazy—in Reader, I can scan everything quickly, read things other people have shared, and keep track of more sites than I’d ever remember to visit.

What are you working on now?

I’m starting a second fiction collection under the working title C’mon, Get Happy.

Do you listen to music while you write? What?

I mentally absorb whatever is playing, so I usually listen to music that I’m not terribly familiar with or music I know so well that I don’t think about it. I’m susceptible to mood and lyrics, so if it’s music that’s somewhere between the two–music that I’m developing a listening-crush on–I’m more likely to inadvertently incorporate it in whatever I’m working on. But I always need a lot of white noise when I’m working—music, TV, city traffic. Silence makes me feel too self-conscious.

I had the chance to attend a part of the New York reading from the Featherproof Books/Hobart Journal “Dollar Store” reading tour this summer. Fictionauter Amelia Grey brought the house up, Hobart editor Aaron Burch took his shirt off for poetry and my always writerly favorite crush Blake Butler was beautiful. (These were just some of our Fictionauters around, and yes, everyone seemed to be checking their various internetting via telephone… the great Shya Scanlon and I threw back way too much beer and more laughter).

I asked Zach, co-editor and head excellent at Featherproof to answer some questions for us about Featherproof’s Fictionaut Group and Featherproof in general over email recently and it was lovely to hear from him, he’s what one might call “good people.”

Q (Nicolle Elizabeth): Tell people who you people are again? What is Featherproof? (Benefactors love us, talk sweetly. I said “you people” ha, I slay me.)

A: Well,  I just rewrote the ‘about’ paragraph on our website for the first time in our 4.7 years, so maybe it’s best to let it serve:

Featherproof Books is an indie publisher dedicated to doing whatever we want. This might take the form of publishing an idiosyncratic novel, design book, or something in between. We love paper, but we’re not afraid of computers. Our free downloadable mini-books are an invitation to all ten fingers to take part in the book-making process. We also have an experiment in attention span: the TripleQuick Fiction iPhone app. No matter the medium, we see our authors as creative partners involved in every step of publication. We make our own fun.

Q: What can we expect from Featherproof this year upcoming?

A: Lots of stuff. A remix ebook of Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas. The Awful Possibilities by Christian TeBordo is goodbananas. Really really excited to show the world Daddy’s by Lindsay Hunter. It’s like a brain grope. A couple other books that I have to keep secret for now. Though it ain’t easy. The iPhone app. More parties. Less stress, bigger living.

Q: How has the Fictionaut Featherproof group been beneficial to Featherproof if at all?

A: Sure. It’s made us feel really great. We are joiners. Everybody should join. We were really excited to join the Featherproof group, for example. It made a party in our browser window.

Q: Has it been fun, we hope?

A: If ain’t fun, we don’t do it.

Q: How has Featherproof been using the Fictionaut group in general? Workshopping? Networking? High fiving? Cosmic support in general?

A: We’ve been using it to gather a secret army. (Group members: await further instruction.) We have another group, for the iPhone, called TripleQuick. Our hawk-eye editor Mary Hamilton is scouring that one, so if you’re early and awesome, she might take notice of you there. You have to be less than 333 words, though.

Q: Is the Fictionaut group indicative of Featherproof as a whole is so how if not how come?

A: I had a really hard time with statistics class, so I’m afraid I’d fail this question. But if I had to guess I’d say mostly +/- 7%

Q: Anything else here. Recipes, phone numbers, marriage proposals.

A: How about Elizabeth Crane’s haiku for Featherproof:

Jonathan and Zach
Print mini-books, maxi-books,
and me. Dig them now

Nicolle Elizabeth checks in with Fictionaut Groups every Friday.