Steve Himmer is the author of a novel, The Bee-Loud Glade, and an ebook novella, The Second Most Dangerous Job In America, both published by Atticus Books. He also edits the webjournal Necessary Fiction. His website is http://www.stevehimmer.com.

I’ve enjoyed spending a week in the flow of Fictionaut, spotting trends and tendencies I’ve never quite noticed while popping in and out of the site more sporadically. It’s interesting to see how conversational this space is — more about collaboration than competition. There’s a distinct culture to this community, reflected in the emergence of “local” forms that have emerged over time, of which memory-driven flash fiction interlaced with photographs seems to be the most common. My sense is people are using Fictionaut for different reasons, from support to workshopping to sharing stories gone out of print elsewhere to trying things out as writers, and while reading all those stories last week I thought often of oral history projects and Storycorps and related endeavors: snapshots  of how people in a particular moment are making sense of the world through the stories they tell and the details they just can’t ignore. It almost feels antithetical to highlight specific stories when it’s the whole — the culture of Fictionaut — I found most fascinating, but these three stories captured my attention in particularly powerful ways:

“The Farmer’s Wife” by Mary Hamilton

One quality I really respond to in a story is a sense of being mythic and quotidian at the same time. I’m fascinated by the ways in which we tell ourselves stories, how we make our daily lives into myth, just to get through our days. “The Farmer’s Wife” does that so well: it’s a story aware of itself being told, initially building on the archetype of “the farmer’s wife,” that woman at the core of so many stories (not to mention national myths). Then all at once, this short passing, paragraph breaks in after two longer, denser, more abstract ones:

I feel ridiculous she says to the busdriver, the pharmacist, her co- worker. They all nod sympathetically. They don’t disagree.

The story is specific then, about one woman, one life, and the mythic is brought down to earth. The daily cutting of thumbs is left literal and lofty at once, without explanation because we don’t need any: we know already the violence and tension of suspending our lives between the humdrum of a day and the dream we want it to be, and we all have sore thumbs of our own.

“Boy/Girl” by Brian Warfield

There’s a back-and-forth playing with time in this story I really enjoyed. Whole lives are encapsulated in these sometimes abstract and sometimes specific details, and although author and reader know the whole shape of these lives up to death, the characters don’t. They’re trapped, their stories already written, and at first that fatalism might make us ask, “Why bother telling the story if that’s where it ends up?” But the telling makes it worthwhile, that tension between an avalanche in the future and a sandwich right now:

They would die later, much later, too late. They would die of natural and unnatural causes, respectively. An avalanche would dump a metric ton of rocks upon the head of one of them, and a car would drive through the side of the other one’s car and body, and they would both die, unaware of the other. They were unaware of these fates that waited for them in their futures.

A sandwich waited for Henry in his kitchen to be eaten and a glass of lemonade waited in Mary’s kitchen to be drunk.

“Boy/Girl” is a story built of those juxtapositions, between one life and another, between reader and character, between the aspiration of now and the inevitable ending to come. It makes a complex demand of the reader, and offers a rich reward in return, as we ask ourselves what matters and when and why.

“A House Made of Stars” by Tawnysha Greene

It’s rare for a story of childhood memory refracted through an adult lens to engage me as much as “A House Made of Stars.” I think it works because it isn’t mired in childhood, as such stories so often are, without any sense of why we — both the adult narrator and adult reader — should care. It doesn’t take the significance of memory for granted, but makes it matter. This story is faithful to the immediacy of memory in its vivid details, but creates a more complex perspective though gazing back from a wiser, older position:

My cousin’s bed creaks as we reach her room. The nightlight is on and I see her form lying down, blankets hastily cast over her, and then I see why—the floor vent by the foot of her bed pulled out, lying on its side where her face had been moments before. She had shown me how she did this last time we were here when Daddy’s momma died and we came for the funeral, a butter knife looped underneath the side and pulled up until the vent came free. While our parents sat, cried downstairs, we watched them eat bread, lasagna, sometimes talking, sometimes, saying nothing at all.

That passage weaves past and present perspectives together, giving us the rituals and secrets of both adulthood and childhood at once, and the moment extends in so many directions at once without pushing the reader toward any one or another, letting us instead find our own way through the story rather than pushing us forward with forced sentiment.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I have previously published a story by Tawnysha Greene at Necessary Fiction.)

Editor’s Eye is a blog series that aims to highlight noteworthy work that might have slipped through the cracks of Fictionaut’s automated list of recommendations. Every two weeks, a distinguished visiting editor scours the site for lost treasures and picks outstanding stories.

Susan Tepper:  Misti, I had difficulty choosing from your work because you write so many good pieces.  But I decided to go with “Bad Wiring“ for this chat because it seems to contain a universal theme vis a vis women and men. You write:

She was a defective model. He wanted to send her back but no one would take her.

I don’t think there is a woman dead or alive that hasn’t felt that way at least one time in her life.  Now I’m going way out on a limb here by saying: Despite the Womens’ Movement, it’s still a man’s world.

Misti Rainwater-Lites: Thanks, Susan. It’s absolutely a man’s world. I say this with all the weight of almost four decades of life at the poverty level in America behind me. I’ve spent time in three different mental hospitals, given birth twice, been married and divorced twice, begged men in various topless bars to give me tips so my boyfriend wouldn’t leave me and been betrayed by numerous women (including my own mother) because of men. We don’t need a new wave of feminism in America. We need a tsunami. I’m willing to sacrifice my lipstick and my eyeliner if I have to but I refuse to put down my vibrator and my pen.

Susan:  Damn straight.  And keep that pen and vibrator going.

Your stories and poems are all voice and color.  They burst on the page, they murmur, they scream.  But they do not bore.  In this particular story “Bad Wiring“, we get a whole world in a flash fiction.  You write:

It seemed she was all his until she completely broke down. Then he could scrap her and go shopping. The idea of that shiny day kept him going.

Now where I see the brilliance that is unique to your voice, is your choice of the word “shiny.”  That shiny day… One word and it turns this piece into very black humor.  But, humor.  Not simply a dark passage of writing.

Misti:  Humor is natural for me. I wrote a short ghost story a few months ago and it was published online. When I went back and read it a couple of weeks ago I laughed out loud. This happens a lot. I tend to shy away from genre but the few times that I have written erotica, pornography, science fiction or horror, my weird sense of humor infiltrates the tone. When I was a kid, whenever I was in a bad mood my mom and maternal grandmother would poke fun at me by singing a song that went “nobody loves me everybody hates me I’m going to eat a worm” or by telling me, “You’ve got the same little britches to get glad in.” You can’t come out of a childhood like that without a strong sense of humor intact. My favorite novel of all time is Slaughterhouse-Five. Kurt Vonnegut was the master of black humor. And my favorite comedian is the late Bill Hicks. His rage fueled his hilarious commentary. I love that, the marriage of rage and humor.

Susan:  the marriage of rage and humor is so perfect for describing your work, Misti.  Now in this story we have a group of poet friends (hmm… poets…always a risky venture) haha!   But it all seems to circle around the theme of the imperfect woman, or as you write “the defective wife.”  That is such a big issue for women over the age of 25!  I’m way older than 25 but I don’t feel old. Yet, statistically, today, women are tossed aside for much younger women at a greater rate than ever before in history.  Ours is a money driven culture and it all boils down to economics.  The sugar-daddy syndrome  alive and thriving.  You write:

The husband and the valuable associate entered the kitchen to find the bad wife mopping the linoleum, naked except for a pair of red high heels, screaming along to an Iron Maiden song that was blasting from the stereo. Well, he thought, at least she’s finally taking in interest in housework.

The image is kind of almost classic.  It’s funny, due to the nudity, but the red high heels give it an old-time sitcom feeling, sort of Donna Reed on acid.

Misti: I married late by Texas standards. I was 27 when I married my first husband. We had horrible fights. He had never lived with a woman before. He came from a protective, close-knit, middle class New York Italian family. I come from an extremely dysfunctional working class Texas family. We came together because of a mutual respect and admiration for each other’s writing but that wasn’t enough to keep us together for any length of time. One of our worst fights occurred in a grocery store parking lot the night before Thanksgiving. He wanted me to go inside the store and buy a turkey. I was in no frame of mind for shopping. He tried to force me out of the car and it got real ugly real quick. My second husband was much more tolerant of my idiosyncrasies and weird mood swings. He never expected me to bake a turkey.

Susan:  The way you bring your emotional life into the work feels seamless.  A dysfunctional marriage leading to a story of a dysfunctional marriage.  Quite lovely to be able to accomplish this.  It isn’t easy, many writers shirk from their “truth.”   In method acting we were taught to dig into that stuff and use it in the role.  I think you could easily be an actor, Misti, if you ever tire of the writing life.

Read “Bad Wiring“ by Misti Rainwater-Lites

Monday Chat is a bi-weekly series in which Susan Tepper has a conversation with a Fictionaut writer about one of his or her stories. Susan’s new book From the Umberplatzen is a collection of linked-flash published by Wilderness House Press. 

Darlin’ Neal is author of the story collections Elegant Punk (Press 53, 2012) and Rattlesnakes & The Moon (Press 53, 2010). She is the 2011 winner of DH Lawrence Fellowship from the Taos Summer Writers Conference, their highest honor. Her short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in numerous journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Eleven Eleven, The Mississippi Review, Puerto del Sol, and Best Of The Web. She serves as faculty advisor for The University of Central Florida’s award winning undergraduate literary magazine The Cypress Dome, and for The Writers In The Sun Reading Series. She is Fiction Editor of The Florida Review.

What is your feeling about having mentors as a writer? Talk about the mentor relationship if you will, its importance to a writer…

I think it’s crucial, that having someone to show you the way and to inspire and encourage you.  I’ve had many people I consider my mentors.  The first writing mentor I had as an adult was Kevin McIlvoy at New Mexico State.  His belief in my writing opened the door for me.  His dedication and hard work were models that remain with me.  Then Antonya Nelson came along and took over working with me on my book.  What an amazing eye she has, and Robert Boswell was there early on.  These people were all mentors because of the way they lived and breathed the writer’s life.  I went from New Mexico to study at the University of Arizona and Joy Williams came to mean a lot to me as did Joy Harjo.  Later when I found myself lost as a writer because of so many things that were going on I decided to get my doctorate and Mary Robison sort of saved my life as a writer at the University of Southern Mississippi.  Frederick Barthelme taught me so so much about form.

Now I have the pleasure as a professor in an MFA and undergraduate creative writing program of acting as a mentor in my own right.  I can’t even begin to express the awe and great satisfaction seeing undergrads I work with on Honors Theses and in classes fly off to places like New York University or Emerson and to have them keep in touch with me about their accomplishments, or to work with grad students on wonderful books.  To be sending all these fine writers and editors out into the world and to know I had something to do with coaching them along, that I have had the opportunity to give back so much of what was given to me is immensely rewarding.  We are a tribe and we need each other.  We make the world a more beautiful and understandable place.  We cause important disturbances that resonate.

What do you do when you feel stuck or uninspired and does it work to trick the brain into working?

I focused on getting my book together, this latest collection, while so much was going on: my mother was dying, my dear aunt had a terrible accident, my daughter had a baby and came back home to me.  I haven’t been writing.  I feel like so much has been going outward and I needed the space of the summer that’s coming up to go back inside to my characters.  I am planning to work on revisions to my first novel and also to work on a memoir.  For me it’s all about staring and being still, getting a pen in my hand and some paper, being at the computer and proceeding.  Not over thinking it too much.  I will be teaching first summer session.  I’m buying a house near the ocean!  Second session though it’s going to be all about nesting and traveling if I need to for the book.  I got a university research grant to help me have that time and I’m going to use that time to write and maybe do some healing from loss.

Are there favorite writing exercises or prompts which you use regularly & will share?

Writing flash fiction is rather recent for me and I have a group of friends I work with when I’m writing flash.  We give each other prompt words, just a few words to put us in the space in our minds of language and what it triggers.  I let the words take me where they will.  That’s how the flash in this collection and the two pieces of flash in the last book came about, with the power of those words and the nurturance of this writing group.  I really needed and need them.  For years I was moving so much and so disconnected from the world of art and writing, or at least I would have been without these people I could keep in close contact with through the internet, some of them in Australia, in New York, in Colorado, in South Africa.  I treasure these people.

Suggestions for making characters live?  Do you know who they are before you write or do you find out who they are in the writing?

I don’t know who my characters are really before I write, for me it is a process of discovery I gain by working to inhabit the visceral moment with the pov character.

What’s the best writer’s advice you ever got?

Kevin McIlvoy: “Know that in everything, everything, there is sufficient mystery for story.  Be in readiness for wonder.”  I think I have that right.

Antonya Nelson telling me to stiffen up my gut when I was headed to Tucson.  Now I know I’ll be flooded with memories of advice from people like Robert Boswell, Frederick Barthelme, Mary Robison, Joy Williams tonight when I’m trying to sleep.  How lucky I’ve been.

Please talk a bit about your new collection Elegant Punk…  I’m curious, what percentage of the collection flash fiction? I am a big fan of your flash fiction work as well as your longer pieces.

The collection is mainly flash fiction.  There are four longer stories and many, many flash pieces.

What is next for you? 

That house with the baby and the dog by the ocean, and everyone there.  The space to have company.  We’ll see if it passes inspection tomorrow!  And then the summer of writing, writing, writing on that memoir and finding its shape.  The main thing is going to be finding the shape because I’ve got reams of notebooks filled with my scrawl.  I’ve always wanted a house, growing up as I did moving and living mostly in trailers.  It was a desire I shared with my mother. She passed into the New Mexico sunset on the second day of spring this year. In my home as I play house with my own daughter I hope to feel her presence guiding me through the nonfiction.  I believe this can happen.

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 the editor-at-large for BLIP Magazine, and her stories and poems have been published widely. Her first full collection of flash fiction, “Damn Sure Right” is now out from Press 53. She blogs at http://megpokrass.com.

Throughout his career, Daniel Pyne has moved freely between the world of television, film and books. His writing credits include The Manchurian Candidate, Fracture, Any Given Sunday, and Miami Vice. He is also author of the noir novel, Twentynine Palms (which was also made into a feature film). Pyne holds a B.A. in Economics from Stanford University, and an MFA from UCLA’s film school, where he teaches a graduate seminar in screenwriting every winter. He lives in Los Angeles and Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife and children, two cats, two dogs, two lizards, and a turtle. For more info on Daniel Pyne, visit www.danielpyne.com.

What is your feeling about having mentors as a writer? Talk about the mentor relationship if you will, its importance to a writer…

I was extremely fortunate to have had a series of wonderful mentors at the beginning of my career.  I think it’s incredibly beneficial to be able to learn from artists who have broken ground before you, who can guide you on your creative journey and encourage you to take on challenges that might otherwise seem overwhelming.  Their knowledge is invaluable; their comments and criticism comes from a place of such deep understanding and experience that it never feels undeserved or cranky.  I think a mentor also helps a young writer understand, simply by example, that it’s a slow process, and there are no shortcuts.

What do you do when you feel stuck or uninspired and does it work to trick the brain into working?

Hmm.  I can’t really trick myself.  When I’m stuck, I just try to write through it.  I force myself to do the terrible awful miserable version of whatever I’m writing, and usually the horror that results from knowing that someone else eventually will be reading it makes me find a thread I can pull to make it better, and then better again, until I either rewrite into a good version, or stumble on a whole new angle that works.

Are there favorite writing exercises or prompts which you use regularly & will share?

I’ve learned, from screenwriting, to always ask myself, about every character, no matter how fleeting or seemingly inconsequential: “what’s his movie (or novel)?”  Which is to say, if I were writing the story of this waitress (or fortune teller, or contortionist) with whom my tale has suddenly intersected, what would it be?  I ask myself this because everyone in a story has his or her own novel that they’re the main character in, and we’re just seeing a moment of that novel here, in this one.  But seeing that moment, and knowing that it’s part of a larger story, and letting it collide with the action and intention of this story, enriches the narrative and sometimes even creates opportunities for more tension, conflict, and character.

This also allows me to see my story from different angles, to make sure that everything that happens has a reason and a motivation, and doesn’t happen just to serve the raw mechanics of the plot.

Suggestions for making characters live?  Do you know who they are before you write or do you find out who they are in the writing?

A little of both.  I think that character and action are inseparable: we are defined by what we do, but what we decide to do in any situation depends upon who we are.  I tend to begin with a general idea of a character, or a matrix of character relationships, and then I like to let them play out as I write, to surprise myself, to let the characters go.  The best part is when the characters take over the story completely, and you find yourself struggling to keep up with them as they race forward, surprising you at every turn.

What’s the best writer’s advice you ever got?

Stay in the chair.  When you get up, anything can happen.  Sandwich.  Nap.  Seeing what the dogs are up to.  Finding that thing you lost the other day.  Or where the window was leaking last February during the big rain.

Getting out of the chair usually involves not writing.  Except when you’re thinking.

As long as you don’t think you’re thinking when you get up out of the chair to go and see if there are any Cheez-its left.

How did your novel, “A Hole In The Ground Owned By A Liar” find you, and you it?

A few years ago, my actual real life brother bought an actual real life collapsed gold mine (not on eBay), and opened it up with his backhoe.  It was awesome.  Meanwhile I had a couple of characters wandering around in my head who needed a place to play out their skirmish, and then I read a news story about a man who, on the way to showing some investors the gold mine he’d purportedly discovered in Indonesia, leapt out of a helicopter and plummeted into the jungle.

That was pretty much all I needed.

What question would you most like to be asked about your writing life? (ask and answer it here!)

This question stumped me.  I guess I don’t have one.

What is next for you?

I have a new book (Fifty Mice) I’ve almost finished.  I have a screenplay I’ve written for Studio Canal (a French film company).  I have a television pilot I’ve written for Lifetime (which means I may be a chick-lit writer now).  And then I have this other idea for a novel in case Fifty Mice doesn’t work out.

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 the editor-at-large for BLIP Magazine, and her stories and poems have been published widely. Her first full collection of flash fiction, “Damn Sure Right” is now out from Press 53. She blogs at http://megpokrass.com.

Frances Lefkowitz is the author of  To Have Not, named one of five “Best Memoirs of 2010” by SheKnows.com. It’s a true story of growing up poor in San Francisco in the 1970s, getting a scholarship to an Ivy League college, and discovering what it really means to have and have not. Her essays, and articles and short fiction have appeared in Tin House, Blip, Superstition Review, GlimmerTrain Stories, Fiction, The Sun, Utne Reader, Whole Living, Health, and more. She has earned special mentions twice for the Pushcart Prize and once for Best American Essays, among other honors. The book reviewer for Good Housekeeping, Frances is the former Senior Editor of Body+Soul magazine (now Whole Living). She lives and surfs in Northern California.

Anything but the usual, please. Twists in language or plot or attitude. A thin, sharp line between forms or toes dipping into several at once. Economy and understatement, brush strokes that imply so much more. These are the qualities that get me excited about a piece of writing. Three things that rub me the wrong way: snark; gratuitous sex or swearing; wordiness. I’m no poet, though I care very much about each word. And I don’t feel right recommending friends here, so I’ve had to overlook the fine stories of James Claffey and the incredible twisty work of Meg Pokrass. Now that you know my biases, I offer you my favorite pieces from the past few weeks of Fictionaut posts:

Pinhole by Kathryn Kulpa

A story or a poem or a storypoem told in a succinct but oh, so revealing list of explanations, or are they excuses? If I told you more I’d ruin it, and I’d use more words than the piece itself. Delicate but not at all fragile.

Rinds by Ajay Vishwanathan

In exactly 500 words, we get a glimpse into the intricate and heartbreaking dynamics of a culture, a marriage, a family, a neighborhood, and a mother-daughter relationship, all from the very tactile and convincing point of view of a little girl. This story masters the trick of telling big truths through small, sensory details (a priest’s turquoise ring; a dusty ceiling fan) that catch the narrator’s eye. I can definitely smell that rind, and it makes me sad.

Swing by Seamus Bellamy

One of the baseball greats, or maybe all of them, used to say you had no choice but to “just keep swinging,” especially when you’re in a slump, and sooner or later you’ll start connecting again. As Mr. Bellamy shows in this potent storypoem, the advice applies for all sports, maybe for all of life. And it’s no metaphor even if it is one. Such a solid sense of flesh and impact here.

Falling Man by Gita Smith

OK, I’m a native San Franciscan from a pro-labor family, but those aren’t the only reasons I fell for this compact story about a steelworker who lost his life building the Golden Gate Bridge. The images of people doing the impossible; the descriptions of how they did it; the details (600,000 rivets!) of what went into it: these are the real attractions here. And the emotional heft that underlies them all. This story reads like a series of sepia photographs, lofty and weighty at the same time.

Drive By by Gessy Alvarez

“I see the little girl my son punched in the face” is one of the worst things a mother could ever have to say. But he’s your son, he must have learned it from somewhere. But he’s your son, you can’t abandon him. But he’s your son, he’s hurting and you want to make him feel better. This little story tracks all the nuances, including the older teacher who calms the furious other mother down “by just nodding her gray head.” Oomph & swerve.

Someone Points a Gun at My Brother by Kait Mauro

An act of violence has a public and a private side, though what was yours about your life suddenly becomes open for gawking. This poemstory does a fine job illustrating the lingering rawness, the feelings and the acts of exposure. But what I most admire here are the holes, what isn’t said.

He was the Worst Man of his Name by Sheldon Lee Compton

The title hooked me. The “knuckled money” reeled me in. The looming but unspoken questions—what makes a ‘fair’ fight? what won’t we do for money?—kept me there. Like most stories about fights, this one is also about families, and it feels ancient and mythological despite the hip Che Guevara tattoo “moving like a reflection across the skin” of the younger challenger. After the pow, the moment slows down and opens up enough for a whole history to emerge. Then it’s time to stand up and face the crowd.

Fickle Currency by Misti Rainwater-Lites

Almost too slumming-it romantic for me, with the kissing and blushing and cackling against a backdrop of desert heat and colors. But then there’s this: “until the Jesus salesmen knocked on the front door.” And this: “the snarling face of chaos.” Just enough fresh to make this doomed micro-love-story breathe and thump.

Editor’s Eye is a blog series that aims to highlight noteworthy work that might have slipped through the cracks of Fictionaut’s automated list of recommendations. Every two weeks, a distinguished visiting editor scours the site for lost treasures and picks outstanding stories.

Susan Tepper: What made you choose Montauk on Long Island as the beach setting for your story “from Memorial Day”? You could have picked from many places, why Montauk?

Danny Goodman: The Hughes family, who live on Long Island, feel as much a part of Montauk as the reverse. They vacation there, every year, and have done so for well over a decade. I couldn’t imagine them anywhere else on Memorial Day weekend.

Though this novella and the Hughes family are works of fiction, I feel as if I’ve been trying to write about Montauk for most of my adult life. I spent many summers over the years in the small resort town. So much of my childhood, my adolescence, seems scattered along those Atlantic shores. They call Montauk “The End,” for its position at the eastern tip of Long Island; if nothing else, the Hughes family has taken on that sobriquet, too.

Susan:   I adore Montauk, too, the whole east end of Long Island, both forks.  Now if I were to categorize this story, say for the purposes of submitting to an agent or editor, I would call it a family saga. Do you see your story as a family saga?

Danny: Oh, definitely. The full novella (running about 18,000 words) is very much a family saga, one that continues in my novel-in-progress, with Roddy remaining at the narrative helm, the gulf between family members having grown and swelled. In the end, the entire story, novella and novel, are about family.

Susan: How did you land on this family’s ethnicity?  Is it part of your own ethnic background?

You write:  “The kite hovered like a gull, just high enough that I thought, for a moment, it might break from its string and glide over the Atlantic.  My father pointed out into the expanse and said, ‘See kids, there’s Ireland.’ ”

Danny: The Hughes, like my own family, are diverse. However, their ethnicity made sense to me, given where they live and who they are. It’s not a point of heavy focus in the narrative, but I think it’s important to know a great deal about your characters’ background.

Susan: Very important point.  Danny, do you think there are families out there who manage to escape the “big griefs” and just sort of breeze through life?  I’m thinking, for instance, of a different Irish-American family, the Kennedys.  They had it all, and yet had an inordinate amount of tragedy as well.

Danny:  I’m not sure I would know what that looks like, a family who breezes. The Hughes have their triumphs, not unlike my own, but also fall victim to themselves, to tragedy, to the weight of the everyday. After reading Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night (which was a huge influence on the novella and novel-in-process), I came to an understanding about The Hughes and perhaps families in general: when you love and care for someone, intensely and without prejudice as happens between husbands and wives, parents and children, siblings, lovers, for a familial lifetime, you eventually grow, in the most passionate of ways, to hate one another.

Susan:  That is sobering but I have to agree— it’s that old adage about familiarity breeding contempt.  Yet it feels sorrowful, to acknowledge such a thing about love among family members.

You speak also about the influence of O’Neill and Long Day’s Journey…  I was also hugely influenced by his plays when I was a young actress.  I sense O’Neill hovering, spilling some of his sad karmic magic over your Hughes family.  Do you feel he might be a muse for you in this novella?  Do you believe in the magic of the muse?

Danny: O’Neill’s play has definitely been a type of muse, an inspiration, in what it means to honestly and organically craft the Hughes family. LDJ doesn’t slow down, doesn’t allow the reader to make sense of the family’s decline until just the precise moment, doesn’t apologize for bringing the reader to the brink along with its characters.

In that way, I’d say yes, I do believe in the “magic.” Is that what you mean? In addition, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, my favorite novel, has been a sort-of structural muse, a novelistic exploration of everything I could hope to accomplish from my debut. The Sun… like O’Neill’s drama, explores the breaking down of a group of characters, both individually and a collective whole. Hemingway’s novel, split into three sections, has served as a map for me, providing suggested routes and different methods, depending on the necessity, of narrative travel.

Susan:  I love hearing about specific influences that affect a writer while doing a project, and especially how the great authors of yesteryear often determine our choices.  I feel that many of these writers have been forgotten, or worse, diminished, as time marches forward and new paths are being cut in literature.

Tell us more about the relationship between the narrator, Roddy, and his brother Liam. It sounds as if there’s a bit of rivalry going on.

Danny: Very much so! They’re brothers, separated by only a few years (in the novella, Roddy is almost fifteen, while his older brother is finishing his first year of college), but they’ve lived different familial lives. They’re not unlike O’Neill’s Edmund and Jamie, at once rivals and companions, the closest and most furious of each.

I am the oldest in my family, and my brother and I (seven years apart) have had a wild, but ultimately unbreakably strong, relationship. In Roddy, I get the chance to take on the role of younger brother, to see the world from that vantage. Liam loves his little brother, deeply, but there’s also that sense of brotherhood, competition, of wanting to be the favorite, so to speak. Throughout the novella, I hope it becomes crystalized, that love and bond, because the brothers are a huge part of each other’s makeup. Later, in the novel, this relationship becomes even more complicated, both by distance and tragedy.

Read “from Memorial Day” by Danny Goodman

Monday Chat is a bi-weekly series in which Susan Tepper has a conversation with a Fictionaut writer about one of his or her stories. Susan’s new book From the Umberplatzen is a collection of linked-flash published by Wilderness House Press. 

Molly Peacock, a poet and a creative nonfiction writer, is the author of The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 (McClelland and Stewart, October 2010, in Canada; Scribe Publications, October 2010, in Australia; Bloomsbury USA, April 2011, in the US; Bloomsbury, July 2011, in the UK) and six books of poetry, including The Second Blush (W.W. Norton and Company, June 2008, in the US and McClelland and Stewart, March 2009, in Canada) and Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems (W.W. Norton and Company in the US and UK and Penguin Canada, 2002). Among her other works are a memoir called Paradise, Piece By Piece and How To Read A Poem and Start A Poetry Circle (1998, 1999; both published by Riverhead Penguin in the US and McClelland and Stewart in Canada). She is the editor of a collection of creative non-fiction, The Private I: Privacy in a Public World (Graywolf Press) and the co-editor of Poetry in Motion: One Hundred Poems from the Subways and Buses (W.W. Norton, 1996). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, and The Best of the Best American Poetry.

Former Poet-in-Residence at the American Poets’ Corner (Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, New York) and former President of the Poetry Society of America, Peacock is one of the creators of Poetry in Motion on subways and buses throughout North America.

Molly, since you were my first writing mentor, I’m delighted to ask this first question: What is your feeling about having mentors as a writer? Talk about the mentor relationship if you will, its importance to a writer…

I wouldn’t be alive without my mentors!  Meg, I remember you so distinctly from your early days in New York. To me it felt that you were in a state both lost and determined—like most of us when we get serious about writing! You came to study with me privately.  The idea of private study, which was so ordinary, say, in music, where composers tracked the generations of composers with whom they studied, wasn’t so common in poetry.  But with the example of my friend Nita Buchanan, a learning disabilities specialist in private practice, I began to take private students in my tiny apartment on East 71^st Street, forging relationships that decades later became codified in Brief Residency MFA programs.  My task with you was to find some way to give you both literary companionship, a literary model, and to see your work from the inside out.  That meant to see it not as a finished literary product, the way an agent or an editor might see it, but as a somewhat older, more developed literary artist might see it, from inside the vision.  I felt I had to make myself light as a parakeet (but with a big brain!) who perched on your shoulder and saw your work almost from your eyes.

It was an act of poetic acrobatics.  I loved it, and I hope I helped you.  That idea of seeing the work through the poet’s eyes, not solely through my own, came partly from what is now a 37-year relationship with my therapist. It also came from sheer teacherly enthusiasm, the legacy of my third grade teacher Mrs. Knowlton and my seventh grade teacher Mrs. Baeumler.  Lastly, it came from my mentor at The Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars.  It was Richard Howard’s assumption that if a student is talented, you should do something for that student in the literary world, pointing the student toward a literary magazine, or writing a blurb.

You mean you really felt your grade school teachers were mentors?  Tell us more about Mrs. Knowlton, Mrs. Baeumler and, of course, Richard Howard.

Mrs. Knowlton. I loved that the word “know” was inside her name.  She was young and adventurous.  In 1955 she and her husband bought a used hearse and outfitted it as a camper, then drove from snowy Buffalo, New York all the way to Mexico.  How poetic is that?  No one I knew in all my eight years had been more than an hour and a half from Buffalo, except to go to war.

And my seventh grade teacher, Mrs. Baeumler, with whom I still have a yearly lunch, created my first experience of an art colony. In her English class we wrote every day, and there I wrote my first serious poems.  With those poems in hand, she badgered the school system to create a literary magazine for children.  They did, fired by her zeal.

My mother admired them, and her admiration of women whose enthusiasms carried them beyond the bounds of fifties’ normalcy was a portal for me. Of course they were mentors, role models, sudden flashes in the sky that revealed a way.

Leaping forward decades to my literary mentor, Richard Howard:  Richard taught me as well as poets Phillis Levin, Rachel Hadas, and Tom Sleigh in his first graduate course at Hopkins.  This erudite man’s vulnerability as he attempted his first graduate teaching bonded us in special ways.  Imagine – the premier man of letters of his generation walking along St. Paul Street in Baltimore with his students, turning to me and actually asking how he was doing! He didn’t seem to conceive of himself as a teacher; instead, he thought of himself as a model and a mentor. Casually he said to me one day, “So what are you going to do when all this emotion runs out of your free verse poems?”  I couldn’t imagine my emotion ever running out (and it hasn’t, frankly) but I recognized what he meant when he next said, “You need some structure to underpin all this.”  (He made a characteristically flamboyant grimace when he said, “all this!” meaning, I think, all my twenty-eight-year-old existential angst.  But with that statement he launched me into what later became known as formalism.

What do you do when you feel stuck or uninspired and does it work to trick the brain into working? When you just sit there and look at the page and think, oh crap. Then what?

When I was in my twenties, I realized that if I stopped writing for a period of time, I would have trouble starting again.  This process seemed like pumping water from a well that hadn’t been used for a season.  (There was no running water at my grandparents’ house, which my mother kept after they passed away.  If I arrived in the spring after the pump hadn’t been worked all winter, I’d have to pump and pump and pump to get anything going from the well.  It was a misery!)  One day, after all this priming, I got rusty, unusable water from the well.  But at least it was water, and I knew that if I kept going, eventually it would run clear and drinkable.  This is exactly the way it is with not writing for a while.  You don’t do it.  Then it’s so hard to get going.  Then you write rusty crud.  Then finally it’s clean and running.  I thought, I don’t want to do this with my writing all the time.  The hiatus is not worth the energy and fear that the pump won’t work.  All you have to do to insure a pump will lift water from a reasonably deep well is to use it.  And so I decided not to stop writing.  Ever.  Even if the work is terrible, full of sludge, you keep it flowing.  If you have flow, eventually you’ll have something lucid and fresh and essential to living—and by that I mean good writing.  So I don’t stop.  If I’m stuck, it’s temporary.  Even a few words keep it going.

How can we as writers help each other the most?

By abandoning the piece-of-the-pie mentality, where you think that if someone else gets a reward then you get less, because they’ve gotten a bigger piece of the pie.  The pie metaphor is so limited!  Think of the rewards for writing as air, as rich and limitless as what we breathe—or as oceans.  Jean Rhys reputedly said that she was one more drop in the ocean of literature. Because someone’s up, it doesn’t mean you are down.  Writers can help each other by being ready with a compliment.

Please talk about (discuss here) your one-woman shows.

The Shimmering Verge, the one-woman show in poems I developed for three years and performed for three-more, taught me was a huge respect for performance. Before Cornucopia, my New and Selected Poems came out, I asked the fabulous Canadian director Louise Fagan (whom I knew from doing a benefit performance of the Vagina Monologues) to help me develop a standard reading to give, something almost wash-and-wear, so that I didn’t have to start from scratch each time.  I wrote down all the comments I might say in between the poems, and when I read it all to her, she said, “This is the beginning of a one-woman show.”

We slowly began to work together, doing short performances, until we had a lighting designer, a costume, an entire package, which was then performed at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine.  Later it had an Off-Broadway showcase.

But the underlying reason for the show was that, in my early fifties, I was feeling so invisible.  Doing the show was a way for me to reclaim myself from the curtain an aging woman disappears behind.  I’m sixty-five now, and, Meg, the show worked. I made a transition as a woman and a writer to a place of…hmmm, I guess I’d call it “wise attraction.”

Will you tell us about the birth of The Paper Garden: An Artist Begins Her Life’s Work at 72. Anything about how this book came about… anything about the process of writing The Paper Garden that you would like to share!

“Wise attraction” is the lure of the life of Mary Delany, one of the inventors of collage.

On a September afternoon in 1986 I stepped into the Morgan Library and saw 100 of Mrs. Delany’s amazing cut paper flower collages glowing on the gallery walls.  I was as much hooked on their beauty as on the fact that someone so elderly had embarked on making them.  They were sophisticated and intoxicating, and I had to have the book that went along with them, but found the British hardcover in the gift shop too expensive for my teacher’s budget.  In 2003, after I had given a poetry reading and my husband had given a lecture at Oxford University, we stopped in London to visit the British Museum, and there in the gift shop was the same book I hadn’t been able to buy in 1986.  I bought it immediately.  It was a sign that I had to do something.

What challenges did you face while doing your research and writing the book? 

I came to the book as a poet, not as an art historian or a botanist or a social historian or even someone steeped in 18^th century literature.  I had to learn to become a biographer, and I had some great teachers both because of the privilege of a fellowship at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center and because of observing my scholar husband as he works.  I began to realize that I could use my poet’s skills –noticing things intensely and comparing them imaginatively –and my life skills, too.  I had the persistence, but could I use Mrs. Delany’s flexibility to write her life?  I was overwhelmed, but being overwhelmed, I discovered, repeats the confusion of youth.  And I began this big project in response to a woman who also began a big project in mature years.

What parallels can you draw between your poems and Mrs. Delany’s flowers? 

A single blossom on her Passion Flower has more than two hundred tiny slivers of paper in it.  Making a poem, for me, requires just that sort of layering of fragments to build up a whole. Mrs. Delany’s flower portraits make her flowers into figures, women with flower heads and leafy gowns, all built from botanical accuracy.  I hope some of my own poems are like that.   Sometimes I think of her paper collages as sonnets, the world compressed into the flower of fourteen lines.

What are you working on currently?  What is next?

I’ve just finished an alphabet book for grownups of all ages called AlphabeTique:  the Lives of the Letters, I’m working on, gulp, three books simultaneously.  First, I’m working on a new book of poems, tentatively called The Plum; second, I’m collecting all I’ve written about poetry for the University of Michigan Press; and last I’m writing a new nonfiction book about 19^th century women botanical illustrators, called The Secret Gardeners.

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 the editor-at-large for BLIP Magazine, and her stories and poems have been published widely. Her first full collection of flash fiction, “Damn Sure Right” is now out from Press 53. She blogs at http://megpokrass.com.

Greetings Fictionauters. Ann Bogle has 12 stories and five book reviews at Ragazine, Thrice Fiction, Altered Scale, Asymptote, Intellectual Refuge, THIS Literary Magazine, American Book Review, Rain Taxi; she has interviews with Jeff Davis at Asheville FM and Bill Yarrow here; and six stories and one poem are forthcoming in 2012. Michael Dickes has work published or forthcoming in Bedford Stuyvesant, Lish, Yard Sailing, Evalyn, Oteu, Butter Beans, Awul Long Time, Culled Fruit, Pure Slush, Southpaw, Kerouac’s Dog, Tree Killer Ink, Apocrypha and Abstractions, Thunderclap Press, Blue Fifth Review, and Negative Suck. Susan Tepper interviews Indian Filmmaker Ramesh Avadhani at The Nervous Breakdown. Marcus Speh’s “Five Nightmares” is at The Rusty Nail; “Spring Things to Do” is published in Yareah Magazine; and an excerpt from “Secret Brush Strokes” is at 7 X 20. Jane Hammons’ “Headstone (for Aaron 1954-1984)” is in Metazen, and she has another “Headstone” forthcoming. Bill Yarrow’s Pointed Sentences is reviewed by David Ackley at THIS; and he has an interview with Derek Alger in Pif Magazine. Bill’s poems are featured in Pure Slush, Thunderclap Press, and rIgor mor.US. David Ackley will have three poems, which originally appeared here, in The Camroc Press Review on May 23^rd. James Claffey’s “Sepsis” is at Molotov Cocktail; his audio story “Easter Sunday” is at Gone Lawn 7; “Odd-sized Legs,” “Tree-killer, and “Eaten Alive” are published at The Bicycle Review and he is a part of Meg Tuite’s Exquisite Quartet story “Supernatural Tyranny of Artistic Subterfuge” at Used Furniture Review; and his poem “Brooklyn, NY” is at Thunderclap Press. Robert Vaughan’s anthology Flash Fiction Fridays is available at Amazon; he read “The Upswing of Falling” (published at Metazen) and Kristine Ong Muslim’s “Revenge of the Goldfish” at WUVM Lake Effect for its Disorientation theme; “Going to Reseda on the 405” is at Elimae; “Moonstruck” is at Bong is Bard; “You’re All” is at Thunderclap!; and Robert’s poetry chapbook, Microstones, is forthcoming from Cervena Varva Press.  JP Reese’s “The Cost” won the Patricia McFarland Memorial prize at Flash Fiction Chronicles. Matthew A. Hamilton has a forthcoming chapbook. My story, “The Last Swim,” is published at Wigleaf. And, finally, I’m thrilled to announce that Jürgen Fauth’s novel Kino has been released. You can check out reviews, interviews, excerpts, and a trailer here.

Marcelle Heath is a contributing editor for Fictionaut and assistant editor for Luna Park Review. She blogs here. Send your news for the next installment of Front Page to marcelleheath@ymail.com.

It’s nice when a face is happy then it changes.  I saw the face of JFK’s mistress, Mary Pinchot Meyer, murdered execution-style later, by the CIA, a new book says, on AOL.  Her face seems happy in that way.  Hers is the kind of happiness that in the next frame may evaporate.  It evaporates when another mood takes precedence, and why wouldn’t it, her long-time married lover the President?  I misunderstand the glamorous icons of our own era whose happiness never evaporates.  I apprehend happiness that turns long in the face with political awareness—belles of a northern temperament not quick to disseminate.

The face of Carol Novack was not long—as she said mine is—but it registered her sense of the political.  Its expressions were labile.

Cancer assassinated her, intimate as a tattler.

It left in her wake—to friends gathered near her bedside—a heritable vision—how it believed itself to be and like her gave its distance to be.  She was Jewish and an atheist so not a believer except in social and legal and creative forms and how to forge them.  Her online journal, Mad Hatters’ Review, continues.

Born in 1948, Carol might have been a swinger.  She was a brunette, not a highlighter.  She wore copper infusions in her hair.  I would swear to her good sense.  With her elegant, New York therapist, our therapist, Naomi Sarna—to whom Carol dedicated a section of her story, “Whirling Birds, Hands Like Knives,” called “Playpoem based upon Jean Arp’s collage: Mountain, Table, Anchors, Navel”—she arrived at a definition of her trouble as “hostility.”  Gin at night, her glasses clinked and kept her awake.  She couldn’t play silently then as she did while writing.  We talked cross-country.  Her nonsense careened with my nonsense.  She liked my drinking—my sudden retching audible over the land line—wiretapping busybodies clicking in—and the love I swore to emphatically then and not when I was sober.

Carol’s full-length collection, Giraffes in Hiding (Spuyten Duyvil, New York City, 2010, 250 pages, $42), contains 42 stories and the art work of 14 artists.  The writing in Giraffes is sometimes called fiction, sometimes called poetry, depending on the reader.  Bookstores shelve it as fiction.  Imaginary persons gather tribally there, in a land Carol invented where church and state are separate.

Carol’s writers were Beckett, DeLillo, Dorothy Parker, Donald Barthelme, and de Maupassant.  She thrilled to Rilke.  She wrote as a woman who felt deeply free, with an imagination of someone half her age, not crushed by good will or copied intentions.

She taught me, “The gerund takes the possessive.”  She said, “My mother always told me, ‘Watch your grammar.’” And I wondered whether her girls’ school in Brooklyn, attended by classmate Katha Pollitt, taught grammar systematically?  Did it teach it linguistically?  Did her brick and mortar syntax endear her to rules of language more ideal than rules of government?  Let her sing?  Syntax, I told her, is the order of the story.

Ann Bogle has been a member at Fictionaut since July 2009.  She is fiction reader at Drunken Boat, creative nonfiction and book reviews editor at Mad Hatters’ Review, and served formerly as fiction editor at Women Writers: a Zine. She earned her M.F.A. in fiction at the University of Houston in 1994.  Her stories have appeared in journals including Blip, Wigleaf, Metazen, Istanbul Literary Review, The Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Fiction International, Big Bridge, Thrice Fiction, fwriction : review, THIS Literary Magazine, and others.  Her short collections of stories, Solzhenitsyn Jukebox and Country Without a Name, were published by Argotist Ebooks in 2010 and 2011. Books at Fictionaut features reviews of books published by Fictionaut contributors.

Jürgen Fauth is a writer, film critic, translator, and co-founder of Fictionaut. He was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, and received his doctorate from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. He lives with his wife, writer Marcy Dermansky, and their daughter Nina. His debut novel Kino was just released by Atticus Books. Follow him on Twitter at @muckster. 

What is your feeling about having mentors as a writer? Talk about the mentor relationship if you will, its importance to a writer…

The closest I’ve had to a mentor is Frederick Barthelme. He was my teacher for five years of grad school, and we’ve stayed in contact ever since. It’s not the kind of Luke Skywalker/Obi-Wan Kenobi relationship you might picture when you hear the word, but I’ve learned more from him about writing, and about being a writer, than from anyone else.

What do you do when you feel stuck or uninspired and does it work to trick the brain into working?

I’m a big fan of Transcendental Meditation. Actually, not exactly TM^®, but a low-rent, guru-free alternative that’s being offered by former TM teachers. It’s called NSR and costs $25 to learn. I found it after reading David Lynch’s book Catching the Big Fish. I’ve been doing it twice a day since 2006, and it helps me focus and get distractions out of the way.

Lynch quotes the Maharishi, who said, “See the work. Do the work. Stay out of the misery.” Deceptively simple advice that I’ve been coming back to again and again. First, you need to figure out what it is you should be doing. A lot of times, procrastination or “writer’s block” comes from not wanting to face the truth that, say, you have to go back and rewrite a scene. In that case, “I’m blocked” means “I can’t stand to fix what’s wrong with it.” But once you’re honest with yourself about what you need to do, if you see the work, then the next step is to just do it. There’s no other in-between thing that needs to be done. Just get to work. Anything else just leads to misery, guilt, self-doubt, all that ugly useless stuff. Like I said, simple advice, but I’ve found it very useful when I sit down to write.

Are there favorite writing exercises or prompts which you use regularly & will share?

I used to write shorter pieces based on prompts and so forth, but I found that the high from finishing a flash piece doesn’t last long enough, so I started writing a novel. There, I found it useful to set out with a few basic ideas — three seems to be a good number because a triangle is inherently dramatic — and then keep working those ideas. When I’m stuck, I find something random, unrelated — something from a movie, a song, a piece of art — and I see if I can transpose what’s interesting about it into whatever I’m working on. Everything is ultimately connected to everything else, so if you can make that kind of creative leap, it usually moves you forward. Which is probably just a pretentious way of saying that it’s good to do something unrelated — go to a museum, take pictures, go swimming, see a show — and when you get shaken out of your usual surroundings like that, ideally with a non-verbal experience, then you can get back to work refreshed, and something interesting is going to happen.

Suggestions for making characters live?  Do you know who they are before you write or do you find out who they are in the writing? Do you already know these people? What does a novelist hope to achieve before setting out… where does this urgency come from?

I find out who they are while I write. We always talk about setting, plot, character, voice, and so forth, but sometimes it’s worth reminding yourself that in the end, they’re all the same thing. It’s all just those words on the page. Voice is character is plot is setting. An example: in the beginning of my novel Kino, Mina, a newlywed twenty-something, receives one of her grandfather’s long-lost movies. Her husband’s in the hospital with a tropical disease, but she leaves him there to go to Berlin and solve the mystery of the movie. Obviously, that’s plot — it has to happen because otherwise there’s no story — but it’s also character, because we now know that she’s the kind of woman who will leave a sick husband behind for an adventure. It all unfolds simultaneously, and as you write the book, you learn these things about your characters and carry them forward as you figure out what they’re going to do next.

What are some good habits for an entrepreneur, husband, father and writer with many jobs?

I’m still figuring that out. We’re a two-writer family with a toddler to raise, a writing community to run, a blog or three to edit, and very irregular schedules to reconcile. We’re just launching a new site for our fiction editing business, mjedit.com, which I’m plugging whenever I get the chance, like right now. I’m currently putting off a pressing translation job to answer your questions, and babysitting is over in 15 minutes. When it all gets too much, I go to the thermal spa or crank up the music and dance.

What’s the best writer’s advice you ever got?

Write every day. I can’t remember who told me this, but writing really is a kind of muscle, and if you want to get any good at it, you have to work out a lot. Don’t expect to use every word — musicians run scales, artists doodle, so not every sentence you write has to be gold. In fact, let yourself write bad stuff. To me, the real work is in the editing — I spend disproportionally more time tightening, polishing, and reworking than I spend on first drafts — but you have to put down the words in the first place. It gets easier if you do it every single day.

How did your new novel, Kino, find you, and you it?

A few years ago, Marcy and I spent New Year’s in Berlin. It was cold and dark and moody, and we went to the film museum, which is full of unbelievable stories and very much focuses on the heydays of the twenties, which I’d always been fascinated by. New Year’s Eve turned out kind of deranged and a little bit dangerous, and I made a resolution (see the previous question) to write every day for a year. So on January 1, I sat down at the kitchen table of the apartment we were subletting and started to write Kino. The first draft took almost two years to get down.

Talk about  Fictionaut – any aspect of it here, if you would like…

It’s been amazing to me to see Fictionaut take off and become the community of writers it is. When you start with an abstract idea and some sketches in a notebook, you have no idea if it’s going to work, if anyone will actually come and use it. So it’s immensely gratifying to me to see what the site has become over the last few years, and how many people have gotten use out of it – so many stories posted, projects launched, books published, friends made. I recently met a couple at one of my readings who had actually met on Fictionaut and just moved in together. It’s a lesson in faith and community, and what I like best about it is how many people — like you and the other blog contributors — have come forward to help and get involved. Like a novel, it’s something that appeared out of nowhere. There was nothing here before, but now it’s something, built together by lots of people, and that makes it incredibly satisfying.

What is next for you?

I’m keeping a tumblr with images, text, and video from the world of Kino called Tulpendiebe – things I found researching the book, things that inspired me. One of the themes of the book is how art inspires more art, and how it wants to be shared in order to be able do that – the idea of the creative commons. So it seemed like an obvious thing to turn Kino and my research over to anybody who’d like to participate.

I just started a group on Fictionaut called Tulpendiebe where anyone is welcome to post writing related to the world of Kino. This could be anything inspired by Weimar-era film, art, or writing, any of the events or characters of the time, or a reworking or remixing of scenes of the book. It’s such a fertile period, and Kino just barely scratches the surface.

For example, I asked Ivan Guerrero, a very talent video artist, to imagine a trailer for the movie-within-the-book, a 1927 silent called The Tulip Thief. I would love to collect more artwork, video, sound, and writing and see if we can extend this world collaboratively. My publisher, Atticus Books, has signaled that they might be interested in producing an enhanced ebook version of the novel with all the related work included.

 

 
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 the editor-at-large for BLIP Magazine, and her stories and poems have been published widely. Her first full collection of flash fiction, “Damn Sure Right” is now out from Press 53. She blogs at http://megpokrass.com.