We are pleased to welcome published author Roy Kesey to Writers on Craft today. His latest book is a short story collection called Any Deadly Thing, published in February 2013 by Dzanc Books. His other books include the novel  Pacazo (winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award), All Over, a collection of short stories (one of The L Magazine’s Best Books of the Decade), a novella called Nothing in the World (winner of the Bullfight Media Little Book Award), and two historical guidebooks. His short stories, essays, translations and poems have appeared in more than a hundred magazines and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories and The Robert Olen Butler Prize Anthology. He currently lives in Maryland with his wife and children.

What do you read when you despair at the state of either your work or modern literature–any “go to” texts?

I can’t imagine despairing at something as varied and vivid and unshakably present as modern literature—can’t imagine how that despair would come to be, or what form it would take, or what would be the point. But, sure, lots of go-to texts, regardless of how my own work is going. Some of the fiction: Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Carson’s Nox, Barthelme’s Sixty Stories, Cortázar’s Rayuela, Morrison’s Beloved, Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, Duras’ L’Amant, Williams’ Vicky Swanky is a Beauty, Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, Robinson’s Housekeeping…

If you could give just one piece of advice to emerging authors about editing that has served you well, what would it be?

 1a. It’s never, ever, ever good enough. Work on a draft until you reach a point of preposterously diminished returns. Then let it sit a month, and start a new draft.

1b. Never take advice from other writers. They only know what worked (or didn’t) for them the last time they tried.

Has your way of finding a path into new work changed over time?

Not really—not at the levels that matter. I guess maybe I do a bit more arc-thinking than I used to, both across a given text and amongst related texts, but down in the mud of actual writing, it’s the same as ever: get a new bit of diction incoming, and hang on tight.

What do you feel is the purpose of literature?

We make ourselves manifest in the world, and confirm ourselves manifest t/here, in tons of ways. Literature is the smartest and coolest and funnest of the ways. Also, the best kisser. Of course, I say that as a person who does not know how to paint or design buildings or compose music or sculpt or manufacture or plumb or garden or bowl.

As a human being, what is the best advice you have to offer?

Stop, drop, and roll.

You write poetry, essays, historical guidebooks, stories, novels, and more. What usually sparks your decision to follow a given impulse on any given writing day?

Deadlines and contracts help. There’s great impetus to be found in knowing that someone else, generally someone I like and respect, can’t start doing their job until I finish doing mine. And the closer something gets to being finished, the more important it is to me to see it through—to make sure that all those hours/months/years of time and energy and desire pay off in the form of some new and hopefully worthy thing coming into the world.

Beyond that, it’s just a matter of finding something (in the world, on a bookshelf, in the fat file of “Stuff Underway” or the fatter one called “Good Ideas?”) that radiates urgency of some kind—aesthetic, intellectual, emotional, whatever. So that’s Project A. I usually only work on a single thing on any given day, and I’ll work on Project A every day until a given draft is done. Then I’ll set it aside and head to the world/bookshelf/files to find Project B. I’m always eager to get back to Project A, though, and will make excuses to work on it again as soon as I feel like the old draft is anywhere near ripe enough.

What’s recently released or in the pipeline for your readers? Give us a sneak peek.

In the pipeline: a novella, a novel, a translation, all at different stages of projectness. As for recently released, here’s a little chunk from the start of “Nipparpoq,” a story first published a few years back in a fantastic magazine called Ninth Letter, and now appearing in Any Deadly Thing, my new collection from Dzanc.

“It is nearly dark. Stand very still. There is nothing that can be done about the cold. It has been nearly dark for the past twelve hours, and soon it will be completely dark. Stand very still and do not think about the cold.”

Writers on Craft is hosted by Heather Fowler, who cares about writing.  She does a lot of it.  Visit her profile on Fictionaut or see here for more: www.heatherfowlerwrites.com.

Sally Houtman has work appearing or forthcoming in Prime Number Magazine, Sheepshead Review, Red Fez, Mused: The Bella Online Literary Review, Flash Frontier, Oh, Sandy! An Anthology of Humor for a Serious Purpose, 94 Creations, Sakura Review, and Natural Bridge. Her story “The sky on that day” was nominated for a 2012 Pushcart Prize. She is interviewed at Flash Frontier.

Sheldon Lee Compton is the recipient of The Appalachian Days Fiction Award, hosted by The Cut-Thru Review.

Joani Reese read for National Poetry Month with Jen Knox and Meg Tuite at the Eastfield College Spring Literary Festival and Collin College. Three flash fiction pieces were recently published at JMWW and three poems by Unshod Quills.

Robert Vaughan read a poem a day from all different poets at One Writer’s Life for National Poetry Month; “Gauze, A Dressing, A Scrim” won 2nd place in the Flash Fiction Chronicles’ String-of-Ten Five contest and he is interviewed here; Robert co-hosted the Middle Coast Poets Reading Series in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; he is also interviewed about his new chapbook, Microtones, on WUWM’s Lake Effect.

Marcus Speh’s Thank You For Your Sperm, published by MadHat Press, is now available at Amazon with blurbs by Fictionaut members James Robison, Kathy Fish, Bill Yarrow, John Minichillo, and Jürgen Fauth; his flash “Mooning” is published in Dog-Ear; and his essay “The Vonnegut Challenge” is published in Yareah.

Kate Hill Cantrill’s short story collection Walk Back From Monkey School is reviewed by The Short Review and featured in Shelf Unbound; Kate is a finalist in the Gertrude Stein Award selected by Rick Moody and has an essay published in the TJ Eckleburg Review (as a part of that contest); she has two poems published in Metazen.

Gloria Garfunkel’s “Writer Conversation with husband” is published by Red Fez; “Spaghetti Woman” is forthcoming in a chapbook fom LucidPlay; “Birds of Prayer 8: The Miracle of Flight” is published by Olentangy Review; and “No Sanctuary” is forthcoming in Jewish Fiction.net.

Marcelle Heath is a contributing editor for Fictionaut and Editor-at-Large for Luna Park Review. Her stories have appeared in PANK, Wigleaf, Snake Nation Review, Matchbook, Necessary Fiction, and other journals. She works as a freelance editor in Portland, Oregon. She blogs here.

There are times when we think we must change life’s rules to make sense of death, to restore order and to replace what we’ve lost. Claire King’s The Night Rainbow (Bloomsbury), narrated by the almost-six-year-old Pea, is like a little girl’s tea party where the guests are all guardian angels.

And she needs them. Her Maman (mother)—nine months pregnant—languishes in her bed, leaving Pea to prepare her own meals, to make her own friends and most of all to cope with her own loneliness. When the mother occasionally emerges from her bedroom, she’s overwhelmed, morose and listless. Her troubles, though, explain her way of dealing with her pain well enough. She has just lost her partner in a tractor accident and a baby in childbirth; and to make matters worse, she might lose her home as well.

As a narrative device, the potential of the new baby to replace, in Pea’s words, the one that wasn’t good enough, pulls the story forward, toward what the reader hopes will be a happy end. We hope the mother will do what’s right for her family. We hope these characters will all get through their grief. We hope they’ll begin to talk to one another in a civil manner—following the example of Margot, Pea’s new friend.

Pea and Margot have a challenge. They will go through all the things that might make Maman happy again until they find the perfect one. It’s Margot’s idea. Of the two, Margot is the rational one. Though a year younger than Pea, she is a precocious and stabilizing presence in the narrator’s life. She’s the age Pea might have been when the rules started changing, when Pea’s baby sister didn’t come home with her mother from the hospital and when the hugs stopped coming from the father figure in her life. Margot fills these voids with intelligence, endearing politeness and childlike logic. She accompanies Pea on their trips to the Windy Hill and the Low Meadow, where they meet Claude, a physically and aromatically ugly man who brings them treats and creates the girls’ nest for them. In the words of one character, this situation seems unnatural—and it does seem a precarious one.   

And I think we are encouraged in The Night Rainbow to wonder what is natural and what isn’t. Pea and Margot’s natural surroundings—the flowers, the trees, the birds, and the insects—stand in stark contrast to the untimely, unnatural deaths that hang over Maman and their new friend Claude. Pea describes her world to us in a manner that suggests a former, happy—natural?—life with her parents, where they went on long walks and learned the names of things. Pea’s life now is a waiting game she doesn’t really know how to play, and her mother’s not helping her to learn the rules.

While I’m tempted to see this story as one primarily meant for mothers and daughters, I cried—and to be clear, I am a man—at the moment one character breaks the rules and does what he knows to be right despite how it might look. And, yes, I’m being purposefully vague. There are quite a few surprises in this story. I find myself tiptoeing around spoilers, as if they are mossy stepping stones across a brook, as if I might slip and ruin everything—so I’ll stop here to let you join Pea and her tea party yourself.

The Night Rainbow (Claire King, Bloomsbury) is available in bookshops and on the web.

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Christopher Allen is the managing editor at Metazen and the author of the absurdist satire Conversations with S. Teri O’Type, the story of a man struggling with expectations.   

Writers on Craft is a new monthly interview series that concerns itself with querying a diverse population of published authors to speak to their perceptions about the nature of craft—and their view on the significance of literature, particularly those who’ve been in the practice of writing for quite some time and actively engaged in the community of American arts and letters.  To show the variance in response between authors in different genres and fields of creative writing, six questions will be standard, with one “black box” question that differs for each interview.  Writers on Craft is hosted by Heather Fowler.

We are pleased to welcome bestselling author Carolyn Turgeon to the Fictionaut blog today for our first installment and thank her for joining us.

Carolyn Turgeon has published four novels, three for adults – Rain Village (2006), Godmother: The Secret Cinderella Story(2009), Mermaid (2011) — and one for middle-schoolers, The Next Full Moon (2012). Her next novel, The Fairest of Them All, will be out in August 2013 from Touchstone/Simon & Schuster. She is also a faculty member at the University of Alaska at Anchorage’s Low-Residency MFA Program and teaches private writing workshops in State College, PA, in addition to hosting her profound and illuminating I Am A Mermaid blog.

What do you read when you despair at the state of either your work or modern literature–any “go to” texts?

I don’t really despair about literature. I feel that there’s beautiful stuff being produced all the time, an overabundance of it in fact. But the state of modern publishing is another matter. There is so much anxiety already surrounding publishing books and worrying about their reception and what the sales will be, and then there is always some new bit of dire news about copyright laws or ebooks or your own publisher in a battle with the largest bookstore in the country (my next book comes out in August from Simon & Schuster, currently in a dispute with Barnes & Noble)… I can definitely get caught up in that anxiety and have to remind myself why I do all this in the first place, why I write these books and work so hard to get them where I want them to be and put all that effort into trying to promote them. I have to remind myself that I love books and stories, an image or a captured emotion or a turn of phrase that makes me lose my breath. I love them.

My favorite, favorite writings, the ones I can count on to ground me and remind me of why I love literature so much, are these, most of them writings I fell in love with as a teenager: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the story “The Distance of the Moon” by Italo Calvino, The Stories of Eva Luna by Isabel Allende, “La Lupa” by Giovanni Verga, Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales, all poetry by Lorca, Boccaccio’s The Decameron, T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” and then the stuff I studied in graduate school, medieval Italian poetry and Victorian poetry, all that swoony Tennyson and Robert Browning and Dante Rossetti. And I love love love myths and fairy tales. Of course.

If you could give just one piece of advice to emerging authors about editing that has served you well, what would it be?

If it’s about editing specifically, I would say this: to really revise, you’ll have to take that complete, shimmering first draft that you spent so much time assembling and you’ll have to rip it apart, and it will hurt. You have to detach and be merciless—cut lines or scenes or whole chapters that don’t work, even if you love them, even if you spent countless hours putting them together, and let the book just fall apart and be horrible. And then you put it back together again, cleaner and sleeker and doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.

What’s hard is that you have to be raw and open and soft to write, and then just blade-sharp and murderous to edit.

How has your perception of what you “do” with your work changed as you have continued to write?

I’m not sure. I just want to keep writing books that are, to me, beautiful, that transport readers to another time and place and sensibility. I’ve had to work hard at plot and structure, though, in telling a story with plenty of twists and turns that maintains suspense throughout and ends up somewhere satisfying. When I started, I could focus on one page to the next, but I got dizzy and completely disoriented when trying to see the big picture. As I write more and more books, I feel more confident about my ability to plot a book and see it from beginning to end, and so I feel like I can experiment more, try new things. I would love to write a screenplay, a play, a graphic novel…. everything!

What do you feel is the purpose of literature?

I think we’re trapped in our bodies, our lives, our own narratives and particular sets of circumstances and that we’re always longing to transcend them and connect with something larger. Story is the best way I know to become completely immersed in another person’s consciousness, to escape the self and expand into the world at large. And to experience, just for a moment, what it is to be completely alien from what we are. When it comes down to it, I think most of our impulses can be traced back to this longing for transcendence.

As a human being, what is the best advice you have to offer?

I think some of the best general this-is-how-you-should-live advice I’ve heard is from the Malcolm Middleton song “Loneliness Shines”:

I think I’ve cracked it, we are what we do
We’re made up of actions, there are no rules
Don’t stand on heads to get higher
Listen to your angels, spread through life like a fire

But if I have to give my own answer, it’s this: to remember that you will die, that you might die today, that everything is fleeting, that you will love people and lose them, that you can’t take anything for granted—not anything at all—and then live accordingly, with all the passion and compassion and bravery and forgiveness and love and humility and appreciation that such a dire set of circumstances demands!

Also: get enough sleep and drink a lot of water. And don’t be an asshole.

As a teacher of creative writing, do you think the enthusiasm of students toward the craft and your direct interaction with their work informs your sense of the marvelous overabundance of wonderful work available now, or soon to be?  And do you write while you are teaching or keep those windows separate?

I teach in the University of Alaska at Anchorage’s Low-Residency MFA program, so I’m not a full-time teacher, really. I spend two weeks every July in Anchorage participating in the annual residency, and there I give a couple of talks, give a reading, lead a few workshops and meet with students, who are learning about each faculty member and deciding whom they’d like to work with during the upcoming year—and I spend the rest of that time listening to all the other talks and readings. Which is great. I sit there taking notes and being inspired and I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do it, and I’m forever grateful to novelist Jo-Ann Mapson for bringing me into the program. Those two weeks always put me in touch again with the fact that I really love writing and story and make me feel lucky that I get to do this, whereas generally there is so much anxiety and drudgery wrapped up in it that I can forget that. And of course a large part of that is the students, with all their excitement and passion, their endless ideas, and the faculty, too, which is so diverse. I mean there’s Jo-Ann, who writes her wise, rich, slipping-into-a-hot-bath novels, there’s the poet Anne Caston, who is so sweet and funny and then rips your heart out with her devastating, beautiful poetry, there’s Craig Childs who’s always traipsing around the world thinking about ancient civilizations and earthly mysteries. And plenty more. It’s just inspiring to be around all of that energy, all at once.

The rest of the year, I correspond with a few students who have me as their mentor, and they send stories or novel excerpts according to an agreed-upon schedule and I give them feedback. That’s easy, I’ve been doing the same thing for years with my writer friends, I’m used to always having a little stack of writing to read and give  feedback on, and I think that’s important, those ways we help and nurture each other. Plus it forces me to think critically about writing in ways I might not do just on my own. So that, to me, is just part of the writing life, only with these students—who are out there struggling to put their visions down on paper, just like the rest of us—I happen to get paid for it.

What’s recently released or in the pipeline for your readers? Give us a sneak peek.

Well my fifth novel, The Fairest of Them All, comes out on August 6 from Touchstone/Simon & Schuster. It’s about Rapunzel growing up to be Snow White’s stepmother, complete with magic mirrors and heart-eating. I’ve written other fairy tales but this is the first time I’ve combined two of them. It makes perfect sense, though: Rapunzel’s raised by a witch in the woods so of course is a witch herself, and she’s young and blindingly gorgeous, that’s why the prince loves her, and, really, what is going to happen to her once she has her happy ending and rides off with him? She’s going to get older. Bad things happen when women get older, in fairy tales. For a sneak peek you can read the one-page prologue here: http://carolynturgeon.com/books/the-fairest-of-them-all/excerpt/.

I also just turned in the proposal for my next book, which is the “real” story of Dante’s Beatrice (the historical woman from The Divine Comedy and other poetry, a woman we know next to nothing about). I’ve been wanting to write this book for years, and I feel like I had to write all the other books to write this one now.

Writers on Craft is hosted by Heather Fowler, who cares about writing.  She does a lot of it.  Visit her profile on Fictionaut or see here for more:  www.heatherfowlerwrites.com.

Heather Fowler’s second collection of magical realism, People With Holes, is a finalist in the Foreword Reviews Book of the Year Award 2012 for short fiction; Heather’s third collection, This Time, While We’re Awake, feminist dystopias, is published by Aqueous Books; her fourth collection, Elegantly Naked in My Sexy Mental Illness, a collaborative vehicle with custom artwork by artist Pablo Vision, is forthcoming by Queen’s Ferry Press.

Gloria Garfunkel’s “Tales of Resistance” appears in Pure Slush’s April issue on Ego.

Lillian Ann Slugocki and Deborah Oster Pannell discuss Exquisite Foolishness at VIDA’s Her Kind for “The Conversation.”

Lynn Beighley’s charity anthology to raise money for those affected by Hurricane Sandy is available.

Gessy Alvarez has stories forthcoming and published at Thrice Fiction (“The Happy Couple”), Camroc Press Review (“Childless”), and Bartleby Snopes (“Little Helper“). Nathaniel Tower reads Gessy’s story at Cold Reads.

Andrew Stancek was Featured Author for March at Pure Slush. His three stories dealing with fashion, starring Slava and Dorota are here. Andrew’s story “Wings” appears in the new Boston Literary Magazine.

Sally Houtman has work appearing or forthcoming in Red Fez, Mused: The Bella Online Literary Review, Flash Frontier, Oh, Sandy!, 94 Creations, Sakura Review, and Natural Bridge. Sally’s story “The sky on that day” was nominated for a 2012 Pushcart Prize. She is interviewed at Flash Frontier

Roberto C. Garcia’s chapbook, amores gitano, is available at Cervena Barva Press.

Marcus Speh’s “Linguistic cross-dressing“ is published by Yareah Magazine.

Christopher Allen’s winning entry in the AWP Heat Flash Contest is forthcoming in Prime Number Magazine.

James Claffey’s “a nod is as good as a wink” is published by Literary Orphans, “bed-making” by Linnet’s Wings, “roadkill” by Prick of the Spindle, “seven times in circular motion“ by Everdayotherthings, “spoon-fed saliva“ by Drunk Monkeys, “a rusted hinge“ appears in The Nervous Breakdown, “the log-bright night“ is at Matter Press, and Blood a Cold Blue is forthcoming by Press 53.

Marcelle Heath is a contributing editor for Fictionaut and Editor-at-Large for Luna Park Review. Her stories have appeared in PANK, Wigleaf, Snake Nation Review, Matchbook, Necessary Fiction, and other journals. She works as a freelance editor in Portland, Oregon. She blogs here.

If you’ve ever heard Robert Vaughan read, you’ll know that sound plays a critical role in creating the texture and substance of his work. Vaughan’s first chapbook, Microtones—another is scheduled for publication this summer—is a collection of twenty-four moments of sound, of speakers caught up in the dissonance and consonance of memory. Together these tones form a story and a familial history—one might even say, to steal a line from Vaughan’s ‘Elements of K,’ “an entire family, harmonizing like the Van Trapps.”

And they are intimate treatments of these families’ microhistories, many of which are devoted to fathers and mothers. It would be an oversimplification to say these pieces are elegiac; but it is not stretching to say mothers hold a more comfortable place in the speakers’ memories than fathers do, the latter often characterized as stolid (‘When the Time Comes’), cold and pragmatic (‘Part of Life: Two Ways’), missing (‘My Bicycle’) or drunk (‘Wrestling with Genetics’). It is important, at least in my opinion, to see that ‘Wrestling with Genetics,’ the last piece in the chapbook, finally puts father and son in the same text as adults—and finally the son wrestles not only genetics but also memory to the ground . . . and takes the keys. I like this.

Reading Microtones as one story in which the characters, while inhabiting different worlds, represent archetypal opposites of Mother/Father, Lover/Abuser, but also Consciousness and all forms of Death (disappearance, absence, escape, separation, etc.) is like listening to a ballad with a rich harmonic structure—of course all of this in miniature. When I think of the collection in this way, I keep coming back to Vaughan’s image of the entire family harmonizing in the car. This is a rare, major chord in a story that strikes mostly darker tones.

In ‘Legacy’ we are briefly shown a photograph of a girl, a family member, and told that her death is her own fault, damaging to the family, contagious and stupid. In ‘When the Time Comes’ a father tells a similar story about a boy in the news. “The children should have known better” resonates here and elsewhere, sounding more like a comment on the adult than the child. Similarly, in ‘My Bicycle’ responsibility is shifted to the child since the father is missing. This prose poem is possibly about sexual abuse, possibly about a positive sexual encounter with a stranger. Regardless of which, the missing father is the acciaccatura for the sexual encounter—as if its mere and brief mention at the beginning sets up, and somehow explains, the story of the camper.

In terms of physical arrangement, many of these pieces are positioned so that they exist across the page in dialogue with a piece that treats a similar or at least complementary theme. A good example of this: ‘The Upswing of Falling’ and ‘Levitation,’ both about romantic relationships, the former ending, the latter in the throes of passion. I find this opposition, this balance pleasing.

Microtones (36 pages) is available from ČERVENÁ BARVAPRESS.

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Christopher Allen is the author of the absurdist satire Conversations with S. Teri O’Type. Allen, originally from Tennessee but now living in Germany, is the managing editor of Metazen, a daily ezine that publishes potential literature.

Jane Hammons published two short stories, “Gone to China” in The View from Here, and “Sounding” in Atticus Review. She also received news that a short story manuscript submitted to Salt Publishing has been shortlisted for The Scott Prize.

Robert Vaughan’s new chapbook, Microtones, will be published by Cervena Barva Press. Flash Fiction Fridays is reviewed in Cervena Barva’s Newsletter. Microtones updates are available at his Facebook author page: Robert Vaughan. “Adversity” and “In Sandy Hook” appear in Red Fez. Bud Smith interviews Robert on The Unknown Show.

Nate Tower reads his flash fiction “Three Episodes” on Cold Reads #6.

Gloria Garfunkel’s “Life’s Meaning” appears in Pure Slush, and “Steam” in Blue Fifth Review.

Andrew Roe’s debut novel, Believers, will be published by Algonquin Books. An excerpt from Believers also appears in the newly released anthology 24 Bar Blues: Two Dozen Tales of Bars, Booze, and the Blues (Press 53).

Roberto Carlos Garcia’s chapbook Amores Gitano (Gypsy Loves) is published by Cervena Barva Press.

Marcus Speh’s story, “One Week On The Happy Isles”, a grocery list of philosophical encounters with happiness, is published at A-Minor Magazine.

James Claffey’s “My Mother’s Hands” appears in The Molotov Cocktail and his post-apocalyptic short “The Ridges of Ancient Battles” is published by Bartleby Snopes.

Darryl Price’s “Rising,” “3 Sentences AddinUp to One Spectacular disease,” and “This is Not Your Poetry” is forthcoming in Sacred/Profame.

Neil Serven’s “Our Place” appears in Durable Goods # 80, and “Where the Sun Don’t Shine” is at Atticus Review.

Matt Dennison has work forthcoming in Redivider, Bohemia Art and Literary Magazine, Print Oriented Bastards, The Medulla Review, Juked, Veil, The Columbia College Literary Review, North Chicago Review and Zymbol.

Marcelle Heath is a contributing editor for Fictionaut and Editor-at-Large for Luna Park Review. Her stories have appeared in PANK, Wigleaf, Snake Nation Review, Matchbook, Necessary Fiction, and other journals. She works as a freelance editor in Portland, Oregon. She blogs here.

Alex M. Pruteanu emigrated to the United States from Romania in 1980. He has worked as a journalist, a television news director, freelance writer, and editor. He is the author of novella Short Lean Cuts and Gears: A Collection (Independent Talent Group, Inc.). His writing has appeared in NY Arts Magazine, Guernica, PANK, Connotation Press, FRIGG, and many others. Alex lives with his family near Raleigh, North Carolina.

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

I’ve never been interested in having a “mentor” as we understand that word to be. I’m more interested in a human relationship with someone who is a profound, yet funny human being. If that person happens to be a writer, so be it. I never came up through the “academic route” (MFA) in writing, nor was I ever interested in pursuing that avenue. Some of the best writers working right now are blue-collar types with shitty jobs and very dim futures. They are machinists, hotel maids, food servers, slaughterhouse workers, crane operators, truck drivers. They are writers whose brilliant work will probably never be seen by anyone. Except maybe, if I’m lucky, by me…in a small, nondescript bar, over a few cocktails and good conversation.

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

I’ve never felt stuck or un-inspired. I’ve actually written a nonfiction piece on this subject for NY Arts Magazine; a piece which was published in December, 2012. I don’t believe in writer’s block or The Muse or any of that nonsense. Just because I’m not physically writing, doesn’t mean I’m not writing. I take my ideas with me into the shower, into my office, to the grocery store, to bed, into the toilet. Once I finish a project, I move on to the next one, whether it’s actual physical writing or beginning to coagulate ideas into a mass of sort. I am constantly inspired by art—painting, sculpture, film. I am constantly inspired by music—modal jazz, specifically. I am never stuck, but I am always robbed of proper chunks of writing time by a full-time job, a family, a busy life.

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

For me there’s no magic to this, just simply work. My “prompts” are other forms of art, as I’ve mentioned above. Also, paying attention to my life—what’s happening in it, and paying attention to what people say, what they talk about. Most things people talk about are useless, but even within the banality of a conversation about the latest episode of Breaking Bad or Honey Boo-Boo, there is a weird or savage story waiting to be dug up. People are generally bland, but within that layer of boring triviality lies the clay that I can work with or mold into something good, something fictitious.

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

I think writing advice is silly, no matter who offers it and how famous he or she is. The process, the work is different for everyone, and attempting to pin down any sort of rules ends up being a cliché. My process is likely very different than most people who call themselves writers, in that there isn’t one. I write wherever, whenever, on whatever, and under any circumstances. I also don’t write. Not writing is part of my writing process. There are times when I simply can’t because I’m at work, or I’m out with my kid at a park, and I’ve forgotten my notebook. What I can say about the process is something my father—a writer himself, published in Romania only—once said. It wasn’t advice, it was just…a sort of cogitation, I suppose. He said: “when you’re writing a novel, you take that animal with you wherever you go.” He didn’t mean that you think about the project always, he meant it becomes you; it’s a living, breathing thing within you. It’s organic. When you shit, part of it is excreted; when you cook and you accidentally slice your finger, it bleeds out of you; when you sweat, it oozes along with your salty perspiration. I suppose that concept is closely tied with work, in general. You have to work. You have to work hard. But personally, I think writing advice is silly. That said, I hope famous writers make a lot of money off those advice books they sell; they should. I’m always happy for writers making a living writing. The only thing I go by is: work. Work always and work hard.

Please tell us all about your new book, and where we can buy it, and everything about it.

My newest book is called Gears, published by Independent Talent Group, Inc. Gears was just released on January 28th; it is a massive collection of short writing—70 stories/400 pages of fiction. I’m extremely proud of this book; it includes 59 pieces published in various literary journals and 11 brand new stories. This collection is the culmination of nearly 8 years of writing, and 2 years of publishing in various magazines. People can buy Gears from Amazon right now, and shortly it will be available at Powell’s, as well. Independent Talent Group gave me complete artistic control over this project; they trusted that I would deliver to them a first-rate work, and I honestly think I achieved that. Gears will be at the book fair at AWP this year in Boston; people can find it on the Manarchy Magazine table, sharing space with a couple of other titles by fellow writers. I’ll also be spinning around AWP and its various off-site events, bars, gatherings, and I’ll have a couple of copies on me, if anyone’s interested in buying it.

What are you working on now?

I am about halfway through writing a novel called The Sun Eaters. It’s the story of two brothers, ages 12 and 9, subsisting in a village in an Eastern European country. It’s the story of their struggles, their attempt at surviving hunger, winter, and political ideology just post-WWII.

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.

Pure Slush’s Glass Animals is live.

James Claffey’s “Mercury Retrograde” and “Childbirth” are published at Thumbnail Press; “The Ridges of Ancient Battles” is forthcoming at Bartleby Snopes; “All this Life Long Later” is at Pithead Chapel; “Splintered” is at Litro Magazine; James has new stories at Thrice Fiction Magazine, Tuck Magazine , Red Fez, The View from Here, and Negative Suck ; and James will be collaborating on his novel with Thrice Fiction Magazine.

Brian Barbeito has stories and poems forthcoming in Notes from the Underground, Gambling The Aisle, and The Fowl Feathered Review.

Jane Hammons’ story, “Gone to China,” was published in The View From Here, and her article, “The Complex Characters of History and Place“ about writer Joseph Kanon, was published in Bloom, along with an author interview.

Marcus Speh’s “Tinpot Love“ is published in the new/old Olentangy Review, and includes a drawing by his daughter Taffimai Metallumai; “The Great Purging,” a fantasy of decay, appeared in Microscenes and was reviewed by Beach Sloth.

Mary Miller’s debut novel will be published with Liveright, Norton.

Rachel Yoder won Missouri Review’s 22nd Annual Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize for her story ”The blood was the mountain and the mountain was the bear.”

Gloria Garfunkel’s “Orwellian Industries Annual Retreat” is forthcoming in Pure Slush; “Sapperstein” was published in New Fifth Review.

Martha Clarkson‘s “Her Voices, Her Room” won Anderbo’s 2012 RRofihe Trophy.

Sheldon Lee Compton has been named Editor in Chief of Foxhead Books; Sheldon’s essay is forthcoming in “Writing into the Forbidden” an anthology which will include essays from Maurice Manning, Chris Offutt, Charles Dodd White, Dorothy Allison, Pinckney Benedict, Crystal Wilkinson, Gurney Norman and Silas House.

Matt Dennison has new work appearing in 94 Creations, indefinite space, Lumn, the delinquent (UK), Arcadia Magazine, and frogpond (Haiku Society of America).

 JP Reese’s “Pink Quartet” was published by Orion headless; “Disturbance” is published by Pithead Chapel, her language poem, “Eve,” was published by Clutching at Straws; and fifteen themed poems are forthcoming in Versus, an anthology published by Pure Slush.

Marcelle Heath is a contributing editor for Fictionaut and Editor-at-Large for Luna Park Review. Her stories have appeared in PANK, Wigleaf, Snake Nation Review, Matchbook, Necessary Fiction, and other journals. She works as a freelance editor in Portland, Oregon. She blogs here.

Kathy Fish’s Together We Can Bury It has accompanied me around the world. I’ve read the book on six planes and even in one of those wooden long boats in Thailand while my friends went snorkeling. No, the book is not Infinite-Jest long, but it’s also not a book you can read quickly then retire to a shelf. It accompanies you.

And it challenges. It challenges me to rethink short fiction and to redefine the concept of “flash,” which started as a gimmick-laden, decidedly non-literary form but which has grown up into something very different. Into “sudden” fiction? A form that often feels as if it were written, and should be read, in one breath. A form that is too short for empty words. A form that relies on imagery as much as poetry does. Or even as much as the visual, sensual arts themselves?

Fish is a keen observer but also a remarkable interpreter of her scene, which is always fitted with unexpected details that create such compelling, true-ringing reality. Here is the beginning of “Empty,” a story full of detail:

It rains all over them. Their hair and their clothes droop. Their bare feet slap the pavement. Droplets cling to their noses. They don’t duck and run. These kids. Even their underwear is soaked. The place reeks of manure and corn dogs and Tom Thumb donuts, wet belly buttons and Tiger Boy and diesel fuel and cows and beer. The one boy’s hunched over, trying to light a cigarette, and the other says, Man, that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. And the exchange student says, Ya! The other boy lugs a large stuffed Homer Simpson whose yellow bleeds into his shoulder. Look at us, the girl says, we’re so unkempt and sorry. We need mothering.

I am in love with the image of the water-logged Homer Simpson rubbing off on the kid’s shoulder. And the smell of wet belly buttons. And the girl noticing how a mother might be needed here. Relationships are certainly at the heart of these character-driven stories. All the usual suspects make an appearance: the siblings, the neighbors, the mothers and daughters, the lovers. We’ve seen all of these characters before, but Fish defamiliarizes and translates them anew for us using fresh, evocative yet simple language.

In its elegant simplicity Together We Can Bury It is like a filet mignon cooked to perfection: it looks so easy, but it’s much harder to get the technique right than one would ever think.

If I were teaching a course in the form of very short fiction (not all of these stories are very short), I would certainly put Kathy Fish’s collection on my syllabus. In fact, I might just teach a course because I’ve read her collection. In sudden fiction, the writer/reader has no space for meandering or groping through the narrative for a story. Each move must stick, and in Fish’s stories every move does. Each beginning draws the reader in, and every ending satisfies. The middle is bursting with realism that does not seem constructed to be realism; it feels real and, yes, meaty.

But what makes Fish’s prose so, for lack of a better word, real? I’ve asked myself this question so many times–on planes, on boats and in this very uncomfortable chair right now–and have come to the conclusion that the profound beauty of Fish’s prose starts and ends with the lovingly observed character. And when I try to think of an example of what I mean by “lovingly observed,” I always come back to “Maidenhead to Oxford” about a woman observing a man on a train platform:

The tall man stands with his long arms hanging straight down as if they’re paralyzed. He is soaked through now, his brown and gray hair flat to his skull, his face like his sweater, drooping. I want to go to him, pull him under the shelter like one would do to a small child.

I decide to call him Ralph.

I realize I’ve chosen to cite two stories in which the characters are soaked to the bone. It’s not always raining in these stories, but there is always the observer and the observed, which we can add to that list of relationships in Kathy Fish’s fiction.

Together We Can Bury It spans almost ten years of storytelling. It was released as a limited print edition for AWP 2012 and is being re-released in time for AWP 2013. The collection continues to attract well-deserved attention and praise. Read other reviews.

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Christopher Allen is the author of Conversations with S. Teri O’Type (a Satire). In addition to writing book reviews for Books at Fictionaut, Allen is an editor at Metazen and an English teacher in Germany.His fiction and creative non-fiction have appeared widely both online and in print. Allen blogs about his slight travel tic at I Must Be Off!