I don’t have a dedicated writing space. We have four kids (current ages ten to sixteen months), and they dominate all spaces in the house.

So I write everywhere. Wherever I can.

Like Dante, Poe, and Stephen King, I write in the basement. When I go down there, I mean to write dark, dark things. But our basement is sunny and filled with toys, so I write stuff like this: He dominated conversations the same way his nose dominated his face.

To honor Tillie Olsen and Grace Paley and my mother, I write in the kitchen. Mostly recipes, dinner menus for the week ahead.

Like Ford Madox Ford and William Carlos Williams, I write in the dining room. These men—they weighed a combined 587 lbs.—liked to eat and write. Fork and pen men, they were.

In the bedroom, like Andre Dubus and Edith Wharton, I write. My mistress—I do not have one— and my wife would attest.

Following David Markson, I write in the library where my recall is perfect and my thoughts organized. The library is the best quiet place to work through third drafts.

Like Charles Bukowski, Dylan Thomas, and Dorothy Parker, I’ve written in bars. But generally in the afternoon and drinking only coffee.

I’ve written in the woods, like Thoreau and Annie Dillard. You can get lost in the woods if you don’t know what you’re doing. Better to write on a screened porch, almost outdoors, like Lydia Davis.

Like Elizabeth Ellen, I write in my car—she recently posted a picture on Facebook of herself writing in her car, which reminded me how often I write in my car. Like Flannery O’Connor, I like to write on buses and trains. And like Thomas Pynchon, I’ve written on airplanes.

As T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens were known to do, I write a lot at work, maintaining my correspondences, my many multiple submissions, and revising my third person bio.

William Walsh is the author of Questionstruck: A Collection of Question-based Texts Derived from the Books of Calvin Trillin (Keyhole Press, 2009) and Without Wax: A Documentary Novel (Casperian Books, 2008). In addition to work forthcoming in Annalemma, Pank, and Artifice, his stories have appeared in Kill Author, Lit, Caketrain, New York Tyrant, Juked, Rosebud, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and other journals. A story collection called Ampersand, Mass. is forthcoming from Keyhole Press. 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.

More than you knew before about German literary mags. Bookfox blogs about the Goethe Institut’s coverage of the literary journal/short story scene in Germany: “Like moles, literary magazines burrow through the subsoil and often bring literary treasures to light. They live on self-exploitation, are sometimes short-lived and bizarre, and publish against the mainstream.” The title of this article? “Moles in the Subsoil of the Book Market: German Literary Magazines,” of course.

Bookfox was turned onto the above article from Absinthe: New European Writing magazine (pictured above), whose blog is quite cosmopolitan, such as a recent post about Aleksandar Hemon, who says in a conversation with Junot Diaz, “Everyone can declare the English language as a home and no one can be banned from it.” Amen.

On HTMLGIANT, Christopher Higgs comments on comments made about genre fiction on the Tin House blog: Tin House & Genre Fiction.

Here are perhaps the best places to find literary magazines in the DC area.

Flatmancrooked has launched a rather colorful new website.

And so has the Australian lit mag Meanjin.

Last week the first issue of Dzanc’s The Collagist came out. An awesome selection of work: Chris Bachelder, Kim Chinquee, Charles Jensen, etc. On the website is also an essay by Ander Monson about his piece “Assembloir: The Which is True of Others Is True of Me” from the issue.

Three big literary magazines—BOMB, Opium, and Gigantic—throw a tripartite fundraiser party in New York together at the Bowery Electric on August 26.

Time Magazine writes approvingly about the Asia Literary Review–reminiscent of a 1958 piece in Time about another English language literary magazine overseas (at least overseas at the time).

This time, in Canada and from The New Quarterly: You Can Help Save Small Mags.

A new Scottish Granta? The Glasgow-based design agency Freight launches poetry and fiction magazine Gutter.

Following the serialization of Shya Scanlon’s novel Forecast online? Chapter 10 is now up at Keyhole.

A project update from Significant Objects—the literary site that sells objects on Ebay alongside writers’ stories—releases their project update thus far. Aggregate cost of objects sold so far: $46.50. Aggregate sales: $937.15. New object writings up for bidding by Kevin Brockheimer and Nathaniel Rich.

Hunger Mountain republishes George Saunders’s (that’s a picture of him at left) first published story “A Lack of Order in the Floating Object Room,” with an introductory note by Tobias Wolff, who writes, “So what did I see in this story? I saw the future, nothing less.”

And, well, though LP normally sticks to literary magazines, the latest story in The New Yorker is too exciting not to mention: “Max at Sea,” a revision of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are by McSweeney’s editor (there’s a lit mag) Dave Eggers.

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.

We thought it’d be fun to see all of our members’ books in one place, so we created a virtual store on Amazon. We hope you like it. If you haven’t added your publications to your profile yet, you can do so here. Happy browsing!

We’re pleased to announce that Gary Percesepe is joining the Fictionaut Board of Advisors. An associate editor at the Mississippi Review, Gary’s stories, poems, essays, and articles in philosophy and religion have been published in Mississippi Review, Salon, Antioch Review, and elsewhere. Gary is the author of four books on philosophy, and has a novel in progress called Leaving Telluride — parts of which have appeared on Fictionaut.

Last year, Gary edited a special issue of the Missisippi Review about the lit mag at 100 (pdf link), and he was recently interviewed by PANK Magazine. Welcome aboard the Board, Gary!

I write notes and ideas for poems and stories into notebooks first, then write on the computer. A lot of my time at this desk is spent reading, the rest in some kind of writing activity. Four large windows face south and southwest, and here you can see the light from the late afternoon sun. Books and literary journals fill shelves and spill out onto the floor, and to one side there is a large bureau filled with notebooks and papers.

Morgan Harlow‘s work most recently appeared in Seneca Review and Hit and Run. 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.

Some of what I learned about short fiction comes from a 1986 anthology called Sudden Fiction. The book reps everybody from Mark Strand to Grace Paley to Joyce Carol Oates to Carver to Lish, and the tone the work triumphs, as in the title, is a sense of urgency which came into fashion for the short and has since tapered off in our current landscape.

Nowadays, the general status-quo focuses more on a flexing of an economy of language. How directly can you say something…how close to a twitter post can you define a moment? Beautifully conceptualized but problematic for a writer/reader such as myself who is often charged with what one might call arguably, a nervous urgency to write. When we dig down deep to commit a piece to the page, maybe it’s a build up after we’ve walked around with that one sentence for a month, that one image for a year in the back of a coffee-stained filthy notebook we call home, we have to consider our audience. That is to say, when someone is taking the time to read your work, are you hoping your piece will add to and change their collective internal narrative, or are you just riffing about a grapefruit/messy break-up? A respect to the short form, I think, involves remembering the rules. Just because a piece is 300 words, 500 words (Rick Moody, by the way, is famously quoted as saying any story under 1,000 words is not writing, it’s throat clearing), is there an arc? A narrative? A sucker punch, a non-ending? Follow the rules, people need them, break the rules within the rules. Sam Lipsyte says the short story should be a valentine, James Yeh says the short story should be a valentine and an indictment. I say: the short story should be a painfully good time. Lighten up then deepen up.

If we go back to the short a la the aforementioned collection from the mid-1980’s, we’ll also find Pam Painter’s widely anthologized “The Bridge.” I have a soft spot for this one because it takes place in Boston where I’m from and because it’s a good story. A woman’s standing over a bridge with a package. Is it bread? Is it a baby? Tension is the key here. Why is Hitchcock considered a master? The work doesn’t show it all, it leaves it up to you to decide. “The Bridge” is Hitchcockian, read it if you’re looking for some tension. Amy Hempel, Tumble Home, a master at the craft. Her stories simultaneously feel like she’s in danger with herself and yet somehow getting the last word. She’s vulnerable, and in charge of the puppets and that’s writing.

My favorite short in the 1986 collection isn’t actually one of the published pieces at all, but rather, is what Tobias Wolff sent in for the practicum in the back. I’ll quote the entire work here because they’re paying me by the word:

I was on a bus to Washington, D.C. Two days I’d been traveling and I was tired, tired, tired. The woman sitting next to me, a German with a ticket good for anywhere, never stopped yakking. I understood little of what she said but what I did understand led me to believe that she was utterly deranged.

She finally took a breather when we hit Richmond. It was late at night. The bus threaded its way through dismal streets toward the bus station. We rounded a corner and there beneath a streetlight stood a white man and a black woman. The woman wore a yellow dress and held a baby. Her head was thrown back in laughter. The man was red-haired, rough looking, and naked to the waist. His skin seemed luminous. He was grinning at the woman, who watched him closely even as she laughed. Broken glass glittered at their feet.

There is something between them, something in the instant itself, that makes me sit up and stare. What is it, what’s going on here? Why can’t I ever forget them? Tell me, for God’s sake, but make it snappy – I’m tired, and the bus is picking up speed and the lunatic beside me is getting ready to say something.

I’m not arguing that all shorts must be first person confessional, but I am arguing that it’s a good story. This piece, however, is about reading translated literature, so I’m moving on. Once a month I’m going to recommend a translated work to you. You should trust me because you liked the first half of this essay. If you didn’t then I’m bored with you.

Last year approximately 180,000 books were published in the States. 300 of those were translated works. (This is a work written in another language and then brought into English so that English speaking readers can read it too.) When we’re on our blogs, in our monthly papers, reviewing books, suggesting works on GoodReads or whathaveyou, how many of them are coming from another country? A new translation of Don Quixote came out this year, did you notice it? I have a thing for South of the Equator mysticism because I like to pretend there are humming vibes within the universe and that the moon, perhaps combined with whatever religion you like to shun or believe in, matters. In a talk about what it was like to write Marquez’s biography over the last twenty years recently, Gerald Martin revealed to us that Marquez and his wife, Mercedes read their horoscopes every single day, and that they believe intensely in astrology. Maybe I’m looking for comfort in answers, I’m probably insane.

The official recommendation for this month is Archipelago Books‘ The Twin, translated from the Dutch by David Colmer and written by Gerbrand Bakker. A work about a twin who loses his brother in a car wreck and has to leave his life at university to return to his family farm. It’s heart wrenching and funny, and just because it was originally written in Dutch doesn’t mean you have to be afraid of it. Order it online, get your local bookstore to get it in, join us. Next month we’re going to talk about it, or rather, in keeping in tone with this column, I will unpleasantly yell at you about it. Here is an excerpt to whet your palate:

Fog. All I can see are the bare branches of the ash. Empty branches. Beyond that, nothing. It’s always a bit damp in Father’s bedroom. I can’t remember it being clammy when I slept here. It’s still March, but to me it feels like it could just as well be May or even June. Father agrees entirely.
“I’ve had enough.”
“You just said that.”
“It’s taking too long.”
“It’s not spring yet.”
“I know. That’s why.”

Nicolle Elizabeth writes for Words Without Borders, The Brooklyn Rail, New York Press and others. Her chapbook Threadbare Von Barren is forthcoming on Paper Hero Press.

Everything I know about what is called the short short or flash fiction or whatever you want to call it, I learned first from reading a small red hardback with a yellow dust jacket I found at a used bookstore in Seattle in the early 1990s called You Know What is Right by Jim Heynen. It had been published years before, in 1985, by a small press named North Point Press that, in turn, was bought by Farrar Straus and Giroux in the nineties where the name continues to exist as an imprint.

Heynen writes mostly about farms and rural life in the midwest. I guess these are regional stories if you want to get right down to it. They are written in a kind of plain and laconic style that reminds of the kind of talk used by my relatives from Iowa. Compared to the nattering rush of my Kentucky relatives, my great aunts and uncles from Iowa are reticent, even mute. When they make an observation it cuts to the quick. They say what they mean. They don’t mess around with problems of context or irony. They have faith in language’s ability to describe what they see.

For some reason, regionalism has a bad name in the United States. In Ben Marcus’ introduction to David Ohle’s Motorman, he tries to put the term, experimental, into context. “Without [experimental] there is regionalism, or more simply crap.” For many critics and readers, poetry and stories concerned with the specific and made out of local materials represent the effluvia of small town bigotry, delusional screeds of the greatness of Topeka, Spokane, or San Pedro. I never bought this simple polarizing argument. I don’t see what the local and specific that is the regional, has to do with the crap or the lack of crap in literature.

Ohle’s work, or any experimental work for that matter, doesn’t appear fully-formed and without precedent or context. It just is, unless it is testing some convention. Ohle leans on our knowledge of detective stories, procedural manuals, and the old epic and picaresque narrative of the hero’s quest. His book is populated with stock characters modified to fit the story’s broken allegory. In this sense, it is deliberately denatured from the local and specific, but I would not say this is the defining characteristic of the work. I would argue, in fact, that most remixed detective stories are simply crap. Crappiness is hardly specific to regional literature. As great as Motorman is, it is great not merely because it is experimental.

Heynen leans on our knowledge of farms, small town life, and stingy old men. His stories are executed in the cadence of local speech. It is, by this measure, regional and conservative, rather than experimental. And yet this conservative approach has radical effects. Unlike a work like Motorman, which is largely unhinged from observable reality, You Know What is Right operates at the intersection of local speech, the physical world of barnyards, and the capacity of country boys to observer and articulate their experience. The book opens with a story about a boy who puts his eye up next to the eye of a pig while the pig is asleep. When the pig wakes it is surprised, but not startled. It is “more like the look of somebody up in the back seat of a car who doesn’t realize how far he’s (missing word) since he fell asleep. The look that says, ‘Oh, I didn’t know we’d gone this far, but okay.’”

Rarely do Heynen’s similes and stories stray from images and situations that are unfamiliar. It is the juxtaposition of the familiar, at least for someone who has ever lived in proximity to a farm that reveal a hidden world. Some boys fish in a pond left by a flood and catch a yellow dress. “It was yellow, with small red flowers.” They turn the dress into a girl, scratching a body in the dirt. “This is our yellow girl,” Heynen writes. The pronoun shifts to include not just the boys but the boys and anyone reading the story. And the dress, too gains a pronoun, moving from it (being a dress) to a she (being the yellow girl).

Each story executes a transformation. They occur in less than two pages or 500 words, and yet they are complete stories with beginnings and middle and ends. Unlike so many very short stories, Heynen’s stories are not crushed into sharp fragments. They seem almost leisurely, belying the great skill and literary cunning necessary to create such fully-formed narrative in such a brief space.

Heynen has continued to write and publish collections of these minute stories. In 1994, Vintage issued a collection, The One-Room Schoolhouse, which is still in print. But it is the actual rhythm of stories, and even the few duds in You Know What Is Right, the little red book with a yellow dust jacket, that makes for a peculiar perfection.

Rediscovered Reading is a regular series in which Matt Briggs reviews overlooked collections of short fiction. Matt is the author of Shoot the Buffalo and other books. He blogs at mattbriggs.wordpress.com.

[Luna Digest will be on hiatus the following two weeks as we move operations to Pennsylvania. We will return to regular operations on 8/17/09. Thx, Luna Park.]

We missed mentioning this last week (even after we were so nicely asked to do so): Hannah Tinti, one of the founding editors of One Story, recently won the PEN/Nora Magid Award for her work on the magazine. Here’s Tinti on their latest issue, Joe Meno’s “Children are the Only Ones who Blush“:

“When I first read this story on the subway (where I seem to do all my reading these days), I found myself smiling at Dr. Dank giving therapy to the twins in those matching dentist chairs, then laughing out loud when Jill Thirby arrived, dressed all in yellow. At the same time, underneath this humor, the story was always working on a deeper level, so that when Jack makes his false confession at the end, it reveals a greater darkness.”

There is no more prestigious award for literary magazine editing (not that there are many such awards out there). So it would seem reasonable that, if you are a writer looking not simply for a place that will publish you, but also for an editor that will take the necessary time and effort, this list of some past winners of the Magid Award would be something to take note of. (Robert S. Fogarty over at The Antioch Review, who won in 2007, I notice is not on this condensed list.)

In other literary magazine news:

The American Short Fiction blog has posted some of the best literary magazines that accept submissions over the summer.

Also on the ASF blog: Copper Nickel editor Jake Adam York talks with Stacy Muszynski about the new Facebook cause “Support Literary Journals.” (And, yes, I signed on.)

Dzanc has finally come out with their Best of the Web 2009 annual (edited this year by Lee K. Abbott), which has “invaded the internet” at Perpetual Folly, The Short Review, Largehearted Boy, and elsewhere.

Across the Atlantic: Though Guardian blogger Jean Edelstein didn’t at first think she would care for Literary Death Match, she finally found out why she enjoyed LDM’s first London show: “The joie de vivre of the Death Match seems driven in large part by the very American optimism of the young literary scene on the left side of the Atlantic.” If you still aren’t convinced, LMD has put some video of the London event online. The show will be making the rounds in the U.S. again at the end of the month, first in New York, and then in Chicago for the annual Printer’s Ball.

A stunning short story (really) by Mary M. Davies online at Monkeybicycle: “At the Starlight Club with Felipe, 1990.” This was brought to our attention by PANK, one of the handful of literary magazines on Twitter.

Two poems from Craig Arnold–the poet who disappeared while touring a volcanic island in Japan–appear in the Summer 2009 issue of The Paris Review. Really touching, elegiac selections by the PR editors. Here’s a quote from “The Heart Under Your Heart”:

it is a beach at night
where the waves lap & the wind hisses
over a bank of thin
translucent orange & yellow jingle shells

Junot Diaz is everywhere these days: here and here and here. (Okay, that last one is from way back in January–but it’s with Samuel R. Delany of all people.)

Flarf poetry? The July/August issue of Poetry magazine devotes a section of the magazine to examining Flarf poems and Flarf writers, with a much appreciated introductory essay by Kenneth Goldsmith.

New, possibly badass, editorial ideas from Kakofonie: “This is all wrong. It’s all wrong. We don’t care about the language. French, English, Czech, Swedish. We don’t translate here, we publish.” (Emphasis mine.) Read the full editorial intro in issue one online.

Finally: Eyeshot magazine is no more. (Picture at right is from their final post.) Nathan Tyree spoke for many of us when commenting about the news over at HTMLGIANT, “Now I have to be rejected by less interesting people.”

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.

Ru Freeman‘s debut novel A Disobedient Girl chronicles the trials and travails of two Sri Lankan women and their pursuit of freedom.  Ursula Hegi (Stones from the River) calls it “Evocative and moving. Ru Freeman is a marvelous storyteller who sees deeply into the complex layers of compassion and love, of sorrow and betrayal. An amazing first novel.” Ru’s creative and political writing has appeared internationally, and A Disobedient Girl will be published in translation in Italy, Israel, Taiwan, Brazil and the Netherlands. Ru blogs on her official site, rufreeman.com.

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

When I’m not writing fiction or literary non-fiction, I’m usually writing about political events, which is not the same as being A Writer in my opinion. It is difficult for me to disengage from the world, so I’d be involved in politics one way or another, full time rather than as I do now, part time. I’d be writing about it, campaigning for a political outcome I favor, or advocating for people or causes I feel strongly about. I thrive in public settings and among strangers, so any kind of political work would be interesting to me. And more dancing, too, which I can only do on the side right now.

Which book do you wish you’d written?

I think this question has to take into consideration what I could write, in terms of an understanding of certain kinds of events or places or predicaments, so I’d say A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry. I have admired him for a long time, and he accomplished a great deal in that book in terms of portraying a place and a system of injustice but in ways that made the reader to transcend both of those things to reach the humanity of his characters. Very different to books like Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss and the Hollywoodization of places, like in Slumdog Millionaire. If there is a book I still aspire to write and perhaps feel is possible, down the line, it would be Cracking India by Bapsi Sidhwa, except with regard to Sri Lanka. It would take many years, a tremendous amount of research and serious commitment, but that’s an aspiration.

What are the websites you couldn’t live without?

Oh. God. To be completely honest, I’d be very unhappy – sedentary as I am so much of the time in front of a computer! – if Facebook were to end. But there are so many I visit on a regular basis both the political ones and the literary ones that I feel I need. In terms of the latter, it is not only the review-based ones but the blogs of my writer friends; Alex Chee, Laila Lalami, writers who combine politics with their creative work for instance, I would be deeply disturbed if they stopped posting.

What are you working on now?

I’m thick in the middle of book promotion stuff. In between I’m trying to revise a non-fiction essay on being an immigrant for a terrific literary journal, and getting back to my second book which is supposed to be done in a few months. That is also set in Sri Lanka, and working toward that Sidwa book I mentioned earlier, but nowhere near that scale.

Do you listen to music while you write? What?

I listened to a lot of music from Israel and Palestine as well as the music of Andalusia and the music of the Roma when I was writing my first, unpublished, novel. It really helped me with the writing mostly because it evoked those places for me and music was very much a part of the book. Of course, that also meant that the music wrote itself into the book in ways that were perhaps overdone. It needs a lot of – silent – revision! I don’t listen to music when I write now. I use it for dance like I said in that Poets & Writers online series, Writers Recommend where I talked about how I use music to get unstuck. Because dance is so much a part of my life, music gets under my skin and interferes rather than helps so I have found I can’t really listen to it and write at the same time. For me that is like trying to hold my breath and breathe underwater.

This is my new office.  I have used this room before, but the setup was very different, and the walls were ice white.  I’ve moved my desk four times in the eight years we’ve lived in this house.  The last space was very open, and after we did some insulating this past winter, I decided it was time to get a room with discrete walls again.  This room has pocket doors, which I remain reluctant to close – I don’t really want to shut out life, especially family life, and commit myself to the page.  Plus, as bright as this place is, the idea of closing the doors gives me a catacomby feel.  I haven’t shut them yet; the kids were in school and now we will be traveling, but the ability to enclose myself makes me feel almost grown-up.

I read on the bed.  Books, journals, edits.  I write in notebooks on this bed, cheap spirals and composition books.  I have a certain kind of cheap pen that flows thick and quick on the page.  I think Papermate makes it, and I like blue the most.  Sometimes I write stories right on the computer, but I have a very hard time keeping myself away from the Internet and email.  When we come home in August, I am going to get out a typewriter – there is one in this house somewhere – and make myself type on that until I can force myself out of my twitchy anti-writing habits.

Another place I write is out loud.  I tell stories on command.  Not very often, because it is so threatening, but I do it sometimes, when my husband asks.  The other night he asked when we were in bed and my first reaction was a big fat NO!  And then I told him a story I kept forgetting to write down, about firewood and neighbors who intimidate.

Occasionally I write on stage with my husband.  He is a dancer, and we improvise off each other, based on words the audience gives us.  I came up with this exercise when I read about P.T. Barnum asking Mark Twain to write on stage.  Twain refused, so I took up the offer, figuring I will never write the great American novel, but I can try my hand at something that Twain would not do.  Writing aloud is a good (i.e. nauseating) challenge, and the stories I make onstage are seeds for more writing at home.

Amy Halloran lives and writes in upstate New York. 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.