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If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make?
Colm Toibin. I’m part Irish and have an affinity to that land as well as admiration for the broadly varied subjects and both male and female characters Toibin has taken on so sensitively. “The Master” and “Brooklyn” I suppose I’d dish up a cassoulet, the French version of Irish stew. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? The blank page. Putting pen to paper. What books are on your nightstand? I just finished Colson Whitehead’s “Harlem Shuffle,” a serious period romp. Waiting for me to pick up is a fairly eclectic selection of already should-have-read modern and contemporary classics: Llosa’s “Feast of the Goat,” TC Boyle’s “Budding Prospects,” Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth.” But I may take a vacation break with Daniel Silva’s thriller, “The Cellist,” in which the Mossad takes on the Russian financial Mafia. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? The period. It means I’ve made progress and can move on to a new sentence. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? “Pride & Prejudice.” As a teenager, I was convinced it would bore me. I was too immature to understand its subtle critique of social mores that is still relevant to this day. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? My favorite pens that run out of ink with no warning. They provide me a reminder of how hard I’ve worked. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? “Write with Intention and Attention.” I also like what Louis L’Amour said, appropriate for a larger bathroom mirror: “Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” Does writing energize or exhaust you? The act of writing energizes me greatly, though when I stop, I’m fairly exhausted, and find it difficult for an hour or so to reintegrate into “real life”. What are common traps for aspiring writers? Perfectionism and thinking you need an “important idea” to begin. What is your writing Kryptonite? An idea, phrase, news item, piece of gossip that grabs me by the balls. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? The closest I’ve come is fearing that I might have writer’s block rather than understanding that I may require a reasonable amount of time to collect myself and begin again. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? Yes, but perhaps a technical writer for plumbing fixtures. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? My writing group has supported me through numerous drafts and gaffs. They have always been both constructively critical and extraordinarily supportive. Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book? I primarily write short stories, many of which are independent of others, though my collection “Motel Stories” contains twenty linked stories that all take place at a seedy motel on Hollywood Boulevard. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? “Love Never Always” was my first publication, a collection of poetry that gave me the confidence to let my writing flow with fewer doubts. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? A really good, large desk that has room for all my notes on scraps I make to write. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? Maybe Somerset Maugham. “Of Human Bondage” is ridiculously dramatic, and possesses an overly complicated plot and a disappointing ending, but I learned a lot about leaning toward concision and simplicity after wading through a couple of his novels. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? When I called a bully for what he was on the playground. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? I’m not sure what constitutes an under-appreciated novel, but there are so many fine ones that don’t get the attention they deserve. As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? Probably the coyote, the Native American trickster. What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? The truth from my point of view as to how they have revealed themselves to me. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? Two unfinished novels and perhaps 60 unpublished short stories. What does literary success look like to you? Getting published more often and receiving an occasional personal message of praise from an editor. What’s the best way to market your books? A good email list personalizes your approach with built-in support. Getting reviewed and accepted into strategic bookstores along with readings gets the word out. What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex? Eliminating the blind spots and POV of a male, albeit a “sensitive” one. What did you edit out of this book?” A very long story featuring four complex female characters. I’ll save it for a future publication I have in mind. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? I’ve been a visual art curator for many years, a profession that I love intensely. If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make? I don’t know if he eats meat or not, but I’d love to have a steak with Cormac McCarthy. I’m not sure what route I’d go with it. Sometimes I do my secret marinade. On other occasions, I’ll do a red wine and mushroom demi-glace. I could also just do a pan sear with garlic, butter, and rosemary. So many options, but I’d definitely do asparagus and mashed potatoes as a side. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? Well, I wouldn’t call this a crush any longer because I’m now an adult male, but I definitely had a crush on Wednesday Addams as a kid. I was in the sixth grade when the 1991 film came out, and I fell in love with Christina Ricci’s portrayal. Jenna Ortega does an incredible job in the new series. Does writing energize or exhaust you? Both, actually. When I’m in the flow, like when I’m really feeling the poem almost as if I’m channeling it from a source outside of myself, I feel incredibly energized. Time stops. This sounds weird to say, but I feel this sense of unity and oneness, a true euphoria. When I exit that space, I feel depleted. I have to decompress a little. I can’t talk to anyone because socializing feels so strange, like another language. I need a drink and several minutes just to feel like I can be a person in the world again. What is your writing Kryptonite? Oddly enough, teaching poetry. I love when I get to teach poetry along with the usual English comp courses, but I find that giving feedback on poems taps into the same energy that I use for my own work. Whenever I teach poetry, like I did in spring 2022, I end up not writing as much. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? Interesting concept. I wasn’t aware this actually existed until the interview. Anytime my English 101 students turn in essays. Unfortunately, I don’t have a choice but to read them and give them feedback. They’re trying. They’re mostly good people, but some of their essays…yikes. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? I feel like it puts more pressure on the process. I’ve been submitting my work to literary journals since I finished graduate school (2010), and while I had several published, it wasn’t really until the first book came out that I started thinking every poem had to be “publishable.” I got in my head for a while. I overthought everything. Is this good? Will someone publish this? In the past, I wrote poems that I knew were throwaways, but I enjoyed writing them. It took me a while to be able to get back to writing for fun and not thinking each poem needed to be great. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? Poets as a whole haha. I was really into sports growing up, and I had this very typical, Midwestern belief that poetry was “girl stuff.” I loved reading, but I was strictly into fiction and nonfiction. I hated poetry units in school and didn’t take them seriously. It wasn’t until high school that I started reading and writing poetry. I saw one of my friends writing in the high school library. I asked him what it was, and he told me, “Poetry.” I was surprised. I was like, “What the fuck are you writing poetry for? That’s lame.” He said, “No, it’s actually really therapeutic. I can process my thoughts and experiences and feel better about my life.” So, I started writing poetry to deal with my teenage angst, but I didn’t really know what I was doing. In college, I took a Brit Lit class and encountered the Romantic poets again. I fell in love with John Keats. I learned more about form and technique. I started devouring all the poets I could. So that’s the long answer. I guess the short answer is John Keats. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? In high school, I was kind of an asshole to my parents. I just thought I was smarter than them. They were conservative, very practical Christian/Catholics who both came from agricultural backgrounds, and I was weirdly this liberal, creative atheist who just viewed them as backwoods Kansans. I don’t think that anymore. I would do a lot of things just to piss them off, like becoming a Kansas Jayhawks fan instead of cheering for K-State, or deciding to become a vegetarian for a while not for any ethical or environmental reason but just because it was a stab at my dad, who had been a cattle rancher. One Saturday night, I was supposed to hang out with my friends. We were at my sister’s basketball tournament in Kansas City, and my dad decided he wanted to stay to watch the next teams play because some of my sister’s friends were on those teams. I was upset, so on the way home, I made a cutting remark about him not having any friends when he was young. He’s ordinarily a pretty calm guy, and this is very uncharacteristic for him, but he pulled the car over and came at me like he was going to beat the shit out of me. My mom intervened, and we didn’t come to blows. That was when I realized that language has power. I think I always knew it, but that was the moment where I saw language’s power coming at me in the form of a fist. As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? Definitely a raven or a crow. Or a plague doctor. They’re all kind of similar. I remember my first email handle was oldcrowsmiles. I chose that in high school. My parents thought I was sneaking around drinking alcohol because of Old Crow bourbon. I just liked crows. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? I have 4-5 manuscripts that are actually ready to go. I need to revisit them. Many of them were written while I was in graduate school or shortly thereafter. I was quite prolific then, but when I look back on material from 10-15 years ago, I feel like I’m such a different writer now. While I may eventually try to publish those old manuscripts, I’d like to put together a new one of the stuff I’ve written the last couple years. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? I don’t currently write for work as teaching pays the bills. Well, I do work as the lead writer for Bandbox vinyl record club, so I guess I can’t say that I don’t write for work. But to answer the question, I’d be a chef. I love cooking. I would love to be like Anthony Bourdain, cooking and writing. What books are on your nightstand? Lately I’ve been reading a lot of epics—both historic and fantasy. Things with enormous stakes and multiple POVs. In the last year I’ve read everything from Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy to Bernard Cornwell, NK Jemisin, and Ken Liu, and am about to start Steven Erikson’s Malazan books. I’m taking inspiration from this for a future project, sure, but I also think some of my reading habits have changed post-COVID. I find myself gravitating towards these long, dense pieces. There’s probably some reading-as-coping-mechanism there, but I don’t think it’s primarily escapism. I find myself in deep admiration of those writers who are daring to write unironically about grand, concrete, life-and-death themes, especially now when we seem to have brushed against the limits of what we as a civilization are capable of enduring. Reading or writing about anything other than those limits feels incomplete to me, at least right now. What are common traps for aspiring writers? At least for me a trap was trying to appear clever or talented. Most of us are writing because somewhere along the way told us we were good at it, but I think the “look at me!” impulse has only ever gotten in my way. My best work seems to consistently come when I allow myself to sink beneath the text in as ego-less a way as possible, focusing only on trying to grasp something that is solid and true. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? I don’t know that it changed the process of writing (the two books were worked on at about the same time), but other things changed around it. I’d wanted to have my name on a published book since I was a kid, and imagined that once that happened, I’d finally feel like a “real” writer. Of course, that wasn’t the way it worked. I didn’t feel any different at all, and so realized I’d actually been a “real” writer (whatever that means) the entire time. It was that, I guess, that helped me give myself permission to do things like talk about my writing, set up a website, and the like, all things I wish I’d started long ago. Before I’d imagined that Twitter or the fraud police or whoever would show up and tell me I wasn’t legitimate enough yet. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? One of my first writing mentors and champions was my high school English teacher, Christine Kindon (she actually sent me a beautiful card after my first book had been published). As my writing grew beyond academic assignments, I wrote an early (awful) story that had a house fire scene. She saw promise in it, and helped me to edit, rewrite, and grow this story, and I remember her helping me to pay careful attention to the fire imagery in that one scene. It was only later she told me she’d survived a house fire that took the life of her daughter, and that reading and working on the scene with me had been, in some strange way, a little cathartic. I was blown away by her confidence, and the fact that something I had created over here in my world, had engendered an emotional response over there, in hers. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? I finally read the entirety of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun last year, and—forget SFF or Dying Earth or whatever—it’s just a staggering piece of literature, period. It’s a shame he isn’t more widely read and appreciated outside and inside the SFF genre. Beyond that, I’d say really any of those books that people tend to deem “commercial,” or “guilty pleasure” books, as if somehow their readability is a literary demerit, or the fact that some of these authors are able to turn a book around in a relatively short time frame automatically means its quality suffers. Sometimes, yeah, maybe that’s true, but I’ve found more often than not many of these books we in the literary community tend to look down upon do many many things brilliantly, and we should be learning from and appreciating them much more than we are. What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? In this case, quite a lot. I have a good friend who is a multiple, and a large part of this project was getting to know them and seeing just how damaging most of our portrayals of DID are. So many stories position DID as the murdery antagonist, and I hated that. So I embarked on this project with my friend in mind (and their blessing), and they were kind enough to read several drafts and offer feedback along the way. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? When Fire Splits the Sky is my third attempt at a novel. I also have an almost-finished collection and two works in progress that are still relatively early in the screenplay (mapping) phase of the draft, which I think of as blocking a play. The one is particularly massive though. My first run through of it was something like 730 pages. I think that one will occupy me for quite a while. Like WFSS did at the beginning, it feels like I’m on the edge of myself with that one, working on something I’m not quite sure I’m capable of pulling off. For me, that’s the place I always want to be with a project. What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex? It’s not something I’m conscious of as I’m writing, because I think the issue is subsumed in the larger question of, “How do I inhabit the psyche of this person who is not me?” which is a profoundly difficult thing to do. As far as writing a character who is differently gendered than me (one of the main characters in When Fire Splits the Sky is a male alter-personality in a female body), it’s actually something I do quite a lot, and I honestly have no idea why that is. I’m married to a woman, and I have daughters, so I suppose I’m always trying to understand the way they exist in the world today, but I don’t think that’s the underlying impulse. All I know is that most of my projects begin with a reach, a gap between my existing ability and the demands of the project, and gradually trying to bridge that. The larger question for me, at least for this book, was the question of whose story is it to tell? In writing half of the story from the perspective of a female trauma survivor with multiple personalities, I didn’t want to tell a story that wasn’t mine. I started with only Ben, her husband, but that version felt incomplete, so I gradually layered in the female perspective as well, laboring to create as truthful and complete a portrayal as I could. What did you edit out of this book? The first draft of When Fire Splits the Sky was actually about twice as long, and had several additional viewpoints. The novel alternates between Ben and Maranda, but the first draft also included chapters by a number of her alters. There were some textual experiments in those that I really loved, but ultimately this isn’t an experimental novel, and they didn’t push it far enough to justify those leaps (for example, one alter’s sections were multi-page outlines), and as many early readers tripped over those sections as did not. Even more importantly though, it really came down to the fact that they were overly expository, and every time you got to these experimental chapters the pacing slowed to a crawl. I ended up weaving the alters’ voices into Maranda’s chapters and scrapping the rest, and that solved a lot of issues. To Drown a Man by Tyler James Russell
$16.00
At once delicate and visceral, the poems in To Drown a Man chronicle the long gauntlet from a life of secrets to a life of intimacy. “The only difference between imprisonment and hiding,” Russell writes, “is who shuts the door.” Exploring the meaning of redemption and shame as related to the personal, the marital, and the spiritual, these are the poems of a soul at war with itself. They read like chunks of ore being burned of their dross. Book Details Genre: poetry ISBN: 978-1-950730-47-6 Publication Date: August 4, 2020 WHEN FIRE SPLITS THE SKY by Tyler James Russell
$17.00
Following Ben’s weekend hunting trip outside Juneau, his wife Maranda—a trauma survivor with multiple personalities—makes a discovery that looks like it will finally put their limping, less-than-a-year marriage out of its misery. But in the morning, when a cataclysmic blast throws the world into chaos, Ben and Maranda find themselves stuck in a car, heading north to Anchorage, on a seemingly hopeless quest to reunite with a missing family member before it’s too late.
Driving for days through the fiery devastation, Ben and Maranda’s marital and personal trauma plays out against what might be a global—or even cosmic—catastrophe. All the while, they are pursued by two men with dark ties to Maranda’s past. To reach Anchorage, Ben and Maranda will be forced to confront their blackest secrets as they decide what any relationship might be worth at the end of the world. Told in alternating chapters from Ben and Maranda’s perspectives, When Fire Splits the Sky is an apocalyptic, psychological, road-trip thriller about the limits of our capacity to endure, change, and survive. BOOK DETAILS Genre: Fiction ISBN:978-1-956692-41-9 Publication Date: November 22, 2022 If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make? This year, I started a substack newsletter about food called Anne’s American Kitchen, and it’s all about home cooking and the power of food to overcome differences. I am really taken by this question! I tend to cook French food when I am home, so I think I would invite French medieval feminist Christine de Pisan over, and I would feed her potage crème de laitue (Lettuce cream soup), saumon braisé à la sancerroise (braised salmon in a rich white wine sauce) , and gâteau aux épices caramélisées (a caramelized spice cake). Needless to say, I would serve champagne, a wine that had not yet been invented yet, and I would watch her reaction to the bubbles. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? I fight the fear of what conclusions the reader might make about me personally based on what I have written. For instance, in The Bunker Book, I have some poems spoken in the voice of Nazis. For the record, I am not a Nazi, nor am I an apologist for fascism of any kind. However, this discussion of freedom’s battle against authoritarianism needed to include such voices in order to be intelligible. Nothing in my book is autobiographical in any strict sense. The reader won’t know my life’s details, but she or he will know which ideas excite me or worry me. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? In The Bunker Book, I actually write about losing my virginity to Rhett Butler, and at the same time, in this same poem, I am Rhett Butler. Clearly, I have issues, but please don’t kink-shame me. What books are on your nightstand? Right now — I have Our Lady of Bewilderment by Alison Pelegrín, Electric Arches by Eve L. Ewing, Millionaire Households and Their Domestic Economy, With Hints Upon Fine Living by Mary Elizabeth Carter (my first title with Unsolicited Press, Polite Occasions, is obsessed with and deconstructs etiquette, so this is an odd pet topic of mine), Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist by Anne Boyd Rioux, De Nugis Curialium by Sir Walter Map, a book that contains the shorter book that the Wife of Bath threw in the fire in The Canterbury Tales, and The Bible. I read voraciously. Next month, I anticipating switching out the book by Walter Map for the farces of Georges Feydeaux and a new book by Margaret Atwood. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? I love the finality of a period but distrust its ability to end things. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? Moby Dick was required reading, but despite what all the lovers of that book say about it, I thought it was unpleasant and low-key misogynist. I refused to write the required paper and instead turned in a paper on how most of the female characters in Tennessee Williams’ plays resembled his descriptions of his mother in his memoir. The teacher gave me an A. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? I would like to thank the aluminum cup near my head right now filled with ice cubes and Diet Coke. I would like to thank the wedge pillow behind my back. I would like to thank every illuminated manuscript archived in The British Library and all the wine on the wine list of Galatoire’s Restaurant in the Vieux Carré in New Orleans, a veritable pirate’s trove of good drinking. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? I was fretting over the fact that I recently discovered that someone who was almost a mentor to me 20 years ago was indicted as a bag man for Russian Oligarchs funneling funds to the Trump 2016 campaign, wondering how to understand the shocking deterioration of character in this person I knew years ago. My friend, an Emmy-winning writer, Jane Murphy Shimamoto, wrote me, saying, “Make art. Spare no one.” To write at a time like this — “Make art. Spare no one” is a great motto. We need to tell the truth and do it without flinching. What are common traps for aspiring writers? There are so many! The deadliest one is an overfondness for one’s own words. Write the first draft freely, but then be BRUTAL in your editing. Nobody was ever any good in his or her first draft. Stop stinking up the page. Engage in ruthless editing and re-editing. What is your writing Kryptonite? I am vaporizing my Kryptonite right now. I am working on a memoir about my very dysfunctional and adventurous life. It’s absolutely terrifying, but I am doing it. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? There are books so tediously conventional, I can’t finish them. The antidote to reader’s block is reading something else. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? The object of the writer is to make the reader feel or think. I can’t imagine a dispassionate poet, but theoretically, he or she must exist. After all, Wallace Stevens worked as an insurance executive, and they are not as a group prone to wild fits of passion. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? Because I am part of the editorial team for Peauxdunque Review and am president of The Women’s National Book Association of New Orleans, I hang out with writers frequently. I count among my friends and acquaintances authors and poets like Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Melinda Palacio, Julie Kane, Elizabeth Tran, Peter and Nicole Cooley, Constance Adler, Cornelius Eady, Anne Boyd Rioux, Marilyn Hacker (my mentor), Gerry LaFemina, whom I have known forever, Karisma Price, whom I only met last year, and so very many others — thank God! In New Orleans, I think we are experiencing a time like the Harlem Renaissance, the Algonquin Roundtable, or the Beat scene at City Lights Books — the town is jumping with the very best writers in America today. We are creating a new way of talking about the South, what matters in Southern History and the future in the South. The magnificent New Orleans writers also know how to mix a cocktail and laugh at a joke, making our gatherings lots of fun. These writers I know make me a better writer the way that jamming with Louis Armstrong might make one a better drummer or clarinetist. We are all getting better together by sharing work with each other and talking to each other about grand ideas of who we might become as a nation. I dreamt as a high school student of finding my way to a group of writers that was teeming with ideas and new modes of expression. Here I am, hallelujah! Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book? I really do mean for people to read the books in a stand-alone fashion, but I have recurrent themes:
What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? I bought a plane ticket to Berlin to watch the Wall fall and to dance in its rubble. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? I struggled to read Genesis as a bored five year-old in a King James Bible placed by the Gideons in a hotel room in London as my parents slept off their jet lag. I didn’t understand all of it, but I understood that God created the universe with words and that when Abel gets murdered, his blood speaks to God from the ground. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? Lady Susan by Jane Austen is marvelous because a woman behaves very badly in Regency England and gets away with it. As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? Isn’t every author’s avatar that old-school Microsoft paperclip icon? What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? Shhh! I told them I made up everything without inspiration from them! How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? I have two — a memoir I am writing about my adventurous but completely messed up life, and a half-finished novel about the divided state of America entitled Emma Jo’s Prayer Blog. What does literary success look like to you? This. Plus, I would like to win the Pulitzer, please. What’s the best way to market your books? I go to bookstores and leave them on consignment. I hold readings. I write for other kinds of publications. What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex? I seem to have to pay them thirty percent more than the female characters. Is that a hard and fast rule? What did you edit out of this book? I’ll never tell. Anne Babson is the author of THE BUNKER BOOK and POLITE OCCASIONS.
 If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make? Tolstoy. Borscht.
What books are on your nightstand? Always - Montaigne’s Essays. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? Question mark."Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers" - Voltaire What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? My chair. Does writing energize or exhaust you? It can energize me, but only until it exhausts me. What is your writing Kryptonite? An untroubled mind and a quiet morning. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? Yes, yes, and yes. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? Of non-fiction. Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book? I’ll tell you when I finish my second novel. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? Professional editors. What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? Well, there are only two characters in the book that have a direct resemblance to a real person. The rest are either composites or wholly created. The main character resembles me, and I owe myself honesty. The other character is Lauren who is a direct take on a young woman I knew back then. She read the novel and really loved it. Unfortunately, she passed away in late 2020. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? One, and many more false starts. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears?
For me, the actual writing is magical and it is a space I love to be in. What scares me the most is my own internal editor. It takes me a long time to bring poems to this side of me because she has the power to completely take the magic out of poem. Just as I can get lost in writing the poem, in a good way, she can get lost in the editing process. She listens, too much sometimes, to what others say it should be, and she’s not always good with boundaries. She likes to tell me all the ways that something could be misunderstood, so I can’t always give in to her. I’ve found the best way is to give her limits and clear directions. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? Virginia Woolf. I actually had not read any of her work until my senior year in college, when I took a senior seminar on her work. What struck me is how the poetry of her words carried me along and how she infused existential questions into quotidian experiences. I love how she pulls me in and I am right there in her world, delving into the existential observations, the beauty of it all, and the connectivity. She integrated so much in her work, art, philosophy, psychology, life, and she’s not afraid to confront complexity. What books are on your nightstand? How Humans Learn by Joshua Eyler, Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri, Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison, The Way of Tanka by Naomi Beth Wakan, Leaving Church by Barbara Brown Taylor, Partakers of the Divine: Contemplation and the Practice of Philosophy by Jacob Holsinger Sherman Favorite punctuation mark? Why? The em-dash. My first draft of any prose that I write contains these extensively long convoluted sentences, because that makes sense to me. Existence doesn’t come in neatly packaged individual steps, its all connected and cyclical, and the em-dash approximates that; it gives us space to build connections, to continue on. Does writing energize or exhaust you? Oh it energizes me. The part that is difficult is coming out of writing mode, back into the world. I’ve never been one to transition my attention well. I get hyperfocused very easily. What is your writing Kryptonite? Spreadsheets. In addition to being an adjunct instructor, I also do some contract work with managing data and administration of a tutoring program. Once I start managing the pivot tables, writing formulas, or analyzing data, the poetic network in my brain closes up shop for the day and that doesn’t reopen unless I’m able to do some effective meditation and give it plenty of nature time. The great conundrum though is that I really do enjoy using my analytical problem-solving skills for this, and I would miss it if I wasn’t doing it. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? Before I had kids, I used to hang out at bookstores and libraries all the time. Sometimes, the sheer volume of words and ideas would get so overwhelming, and I would just have to put all the books back and just start writing myself. I think it is easy to forget how powerful the act of reading can be, and it is important to allow ourselves time to process and pause as we experience that—to glean the value out of it and manage that power. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? That’s a hard question, because I only have being me as a point of reference. I have no idea how much other people feel anything. It’s possible that not feeling emotions as strongly enables you to put words out into the world more easily. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? When my grandmother passed on, she left a small amount to each of her grandchildren. When I got that check, I was mom to three kids under 5, living far away from extended family, so carving out writing time was very challenging. I took this money, hired a babysitter and took a writing class. I reconnected with my writing self in that space and it made all the difference. It gave me a space to be something other than an exhausted mom on the playground for awhile. It reminded me that it made the experience of my family so much more lovely and amazing. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? In my MFA program, I took an international poetry class and I saw on the reading list was this book of ancient Japanese love poems, The Ink Dark Moon. This is a collection of poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani. I got the book and I remember being completely annoyed because I wasn’t in this for sappy love poems. When we got to this book though and I began reading the translation of ancient Japanese tanka, I was completely blown away. The integration of artistry, philosophy, nature, and the feminine was life-changing for me. I felt a kinship with these women through the translation of their words. Here I was, separated from them by over a thousand years, by language, and half-way around the world. This is what makes poetry amazing. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? When I was in second or third grade, I was upset by something that was happening with my classmates at school. I felt very misunderstood and as if the more I tried to say, the more my words were turned around. I was in tears and could not explain the depth of my angst to my mom, so she sat with me and we wrote a story together. I learned in this moment that the act of writing impacts our internal lives. It gives us tools to manage and develop who we are, and the act of sharing that writing makes a difference in our connections to others. What does literary success look like to you? As I was preparing to enter a local poetry contest, I was trying to decide what poems to submit. I read the top contenders to my family to get their input. After I read “Fibonacci Wake,” the one that ended up winning second place, my oldest daughter said “That one, Mom. It sounds like you.” I think for me, it is those small moments that acknowledge the poem makes an authentic connection, that it’s more than words on a page, it's an interaction. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? The marketing; I’m not much for social media. (I’ll do it, she says, swallowing the lump in her throat.)
Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? The intrepid Anne Shirley What books are on your nightstand? The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin, Astoria by Peter Stark, Tacky’s Revolt by Vincent Brown, The Candy House by Jennifer Egan, and Rosaura a las diez by Marco Denevi Favorite punctuation mark? Why? Although I think it’s variety that makes it fun, I’d have to favor the good ol’ period. Just end it already. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? A mug of chai latte If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? One bite at a time. And chew well before swallowing. Does writing energize or exhaust you? Energizing when it’s going well, exhausting when it’s not. What is your writing Kryptonite? When my writing group takes a break I’m predictably less disciplined about actually getting anything done. Turns out I need deadlines! Have you ever gotten reader’s block? That enigma called busyness. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? Sure. A person could be an acute observer or a wit with a flair for wordsmithing even if they’re not an emotional roller-coaster. Though a bit of mania could bring extra spark, wink. Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book? I don’t have a rule about this. So far each book is a stand-alone project. I suppose what they have in common is how different they are from each other, particularly in place and time. (But I wouldn’t rule out sequels or spin-offs!) How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? Once I secured a publishing contract with Unsolicited Press, I took working on the next project more seriously. I devoted more time and brain space to it. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? One day, on my walk home from school with a neighbor girl, somehow in our conversation I used a swear word. The girl rushed to my house, to tattle. My dad was outside, and she declared, “Mari said the F word!” I was (at age 6 and an acute rule-follower), of course, horrified. Dad said, “You mean family? Fun? Friends?” He knew what was up and wouldn’t let her have that power over the situation. What a hero! What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? Iceland’s Bell by Halldór Laxness As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? Oh, the tortoise, of course. Calm and steady. (And I wish I had a thicker shell!) How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? Since writing The Runestone’s Promise, I have completed a novel set in and around Portland, Oregon, called Cleah’s Bequest (yet to be published) and am working on my third, The Stolen Watch, which takes place in Ecuador.  If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make?
I vacillate between Denis Johnson, Raymond Carver, and Breece D’J Pancake. These men struggled. The latter, to his death. When pressed, Breece. Though, no meal. Think we’d just drink whiskey and ponder one's brokenness as a foundation for creativity. And though brokenness lives in everyone, the severity of particular individuals’ suffering can create diamonds from coal. Breece was a diamond. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? Everything. I am a nurse who writes. Without formal training, workshops, or mentoring. I’d embrace those options if presented. I occupy two worlds, the writing and nursing world. It’s a complicated mental space. Though creativity is a hallmark of nursing. I’m fortunate to have a career, but the responsibilities of a career make balance difficult. Necessity can override passion. I’ve gained a new appreciation for writers, because we obsess over our work before a word ever lands on the paper and long after we hit send. Words can haunt. Lack of words can propagate madness. I teeter on the precipice of madness. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? I’d swap crush for kindred spirit. Moth Smoke tells the story of Daru Shezad and follows his sharp decline. I believe we are one misstep, one firing, one infidelity, away from the circumstances that befell Daru. I have been Daru. My crush lay in the steamy darkness of the character and the sex, drugs, and societal shuffling that ensues. What books are on your nightstand? The Best American Short Stories 2020, The Order of Time (Rovelli), and A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories (Berlin). Each unfinished. It pains me not to read every day. Several of my children are avid readers, which I embrace as a parent. The written word is a powerful learning tool. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? Yikes. I am a grammatical disaster. But I love the comma. Wonderful for describing, listing and linking, but left unchecked can overtake a sentence. Though I lack confidence with the comma. When and where do I apply? It’s a struggle. Punctuation marks are akin to foreplay. Done well, they can be amazing. Too little, too much, and well… What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? Every book assigned. I was a terrible student. I read for pleasure. My mother’s books and whatever was lying around the house. As a teen, I read the North and The South, by John Jakes, for fun. Who was I? But never remember reading an assigned book. Pure rebellion, because I love to read. Though if I did, I skimmed it. I have a faint memory of reading The White Mountains (The Tripod Trilogy) and The Boxcar Children. But human memory is untrustworthy and fallible, and I am old. So everything I said may be inaccurate. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? My mirror. Shows me what I am. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? Embrace the struggle. It's critical to the mastery of your existence. Does writing energize or exhaust you? Without question, both. No one reads anymore (exaggeration), and making a living as a writer is difficult. There are other ways to survive. Unless you're a writer, then a well-crafted sentence is akin to adrenaline. It’s essential to your survival, and its absence will bleed your soul. What are common traps for aspiring writers? Not developing your own voice. It’s something no one else has. Don’t mimic your favorite writer. Honor them with your interpretation of the world. Being too rigid. If you can’t set aside time to write, don’t worry. Write when you can. If you try to force your writing, you may struggle. The human mind is fickle and moody. Your job is to recognize your personal window. It’s not every day between noon and when your kids get home from school or whenever a blog on the rules of writers says it should be. It’s on your time. Cultivated from your emotions and experiences. What is your writing Kryptonite? Consciousness. A speck of dirt on the floor can distract, which sends me into a cleaning frenzy. And I’m not a cleaning fanatic, but opportunities not to write are abundant, taunting and self-protective. If you don’t write, you can’t submit. No submissions mean no rejections. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? If I allow myself or find the opportunity to read, never. Finding the time is like catching a high-speed train. Life never slows. I need to do better. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? Hard to say. Empathy is essential to translate an individual's thoughts and feelings. Putting yourself in the characters’ place helps your writing resonate. Less empathy, less resonance. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? No literary friends. Please, don’t judge. I’m bearable. I have my professional relationships in the medical world, but not elsewhere. The writing community is amazing, vibrant and supportive. But online, there’s a shared misery. Proclamations put forth into the social sphere. Hardships, bemusing. The following and unfollows. The announced breaks from the platform. How many words did I write today? What editor screwed me? Do we cancel the unpopular, provocative or triggering? I just can’t. Do assholes write and publish? Yes. Assholes exist everywhere. Our literary shelves will be bare. Write or say something controversial and divisive. That’s okay. I can decide for myself something's value. Have you read the bible? After I read good writing, I want to become a better writer. It’s obvious I need a mentor. Having someone who has walked in your shoes. The tricky part is allowing that mentor into your life. The pairing needs to be organic and through the growth of my writing. Searching is counterproductive. Someone will enter my life. My doors open. Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book? Being a short story writer, I want each story to stand on its own. At baseline I’m erratic and just write. In my first collection, faint whiffs of a progression exist, though subtle. Even if I tried, I don’t think I could write with the underlying premise of forming connections. It makes me wonder, will others see a connection? Or gobbledygook. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? I felt vulnerable. Someone may read my work. It made it more difficult. I’m a hack on borrowed time with tremendous self-imposed pressure. Half of my life has passed. Being published made me realize I have more to do. Yikes. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? Thinkpad X1 Carbon. Best laptop keyboard, tactile response and key carry for a writer. [Mic drop] What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? Herman Melville. Moby-Dick refuses to die. But who am I to judge? The book can be soul killing and a great American novel. I’ll try again to digest the endless whale facts. Though, I’m still contemplating. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? My father is smart and difficult. Once I scribbled words on scrap paper. He picked it up, read it. He said, “It’s good.” His words carried me for decades. Still carries me today. It’s the only praise I remember. That's power. A unique power from language. Dysfunctional. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? For me, The Stand from Mr. King. Though others will balk. As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? A fox. As an emergency room nurse, quick thinking and adaptability are key. Two attributes that serve my writing. And I work nights, Foxes are nocturnal. What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? Forgiveness. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? A half dozen unfinished stories on paper. In my head, endless. What does literary success look like to you? Is there such a thing? If it compromises my drive, I’ll pass. I have enough problems. What’s the best way to market your books? Write well. What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex? I’ve done it once. Roach. A short on domestic violence with a twist. It’s my favorite story to date. I believe I captured something, though I’ll never capture the full emotional breadth and strength of a woman. Dare I try. I never thought about writing from the opposite sex until you mentioned it. Now I’m ruined. What did you edit out of this book? This book (Short-Story) collection was my unofficial writing course. Much needed to be edited out, I’m sure. I did my best to condense dialogue, flowery prose. On a podcast, I read a story from the collection after I submitted the final draft. In the future, I may record everything. When read out loud, as an author, you gain a different perspective. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? Funny you should ask. The short answer. I have a day (night) job. Long answer. I tried the maladaptive ways to exist. They did not serve me well. To those in my inner circle, I was a storyteller. And several of those individuals told me I should write my experiences on paper. I am lucky; I have a career as a nurse, but writing was my genuine passion. An anchor for normalcy. When I can’t write, I become unhinged and self-destructive. I spent a lifetime as an emergency room nurse. During my struggles, I was trying to understand who I wanted to be. I am both a nurse and an author. Not writing isn’t an option.  Photo by Dan Williamson If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make? I would cook fish tacos with homemade guacamole for Kurt Vonnegut Jr. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? Writing doesn’t scare me. Not writing does. Short hiatuses, weeks or months, are okay. When I go longer periods without writing as a regular practice, that usually indicates something is out of balance. Sometimes, I fear I’ve lost the ability to focus on writing or get “in the zone” because I’m overworked or feeling mom guilt. I may be feeling that as I write this. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? Since I’m already taking Kurt out to dinner, I’ll use this opportunity to discuss my love of Frankenstein’s creature. Could there be a more eloquent, tragic, and culturally misappropriated character in literature? What books are on your nightstand? Right now, there is a can of flat seltzer and a hair scrunchie on my nightstand. Across my room, on the dresser, I have (Unsolicited pressmate) Jackson Bliss’s Counterfactual Love Stories (Noemi Press), Maegan Poland’s What Makes You Think You’re Awake, James Tate Hill’s Blind Man’s Bluff, and Annie Proulx’s Barkskins. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? Em dashes accomplish so much, but I enjoy the full-stop of a period. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? Catcher in the Rye. I got ten pages in and thought, “This writing is so terrible, and this narrator was so whiny.” I think I read a few R.L. Stine books instead. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? Coffee. As a sober person who spent many years using alcohol to get into a headspace to write, I appreciate the psychoactive support this beverage has provided me during many 4am writing sessions. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? Read, read, read...but keep your eyes on your own paper. You can’t write if you spend too much time assessing others’ careers, which have no relation to yours. Does writing energize or exhaust you? Energize. What are common traps for aspiring writers? Fakery. Going for effect. Forcing form without concern for content. Writing without considering the role of form. What is your writing Kryptonite? Exhaustion. And saying, “Yes.” As a full-time film production professor, filmmaker, mom, and friend, it is easy to overwork and let writing practices slip. I have to be selfish with my time and personal resources. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? I am going through it right now! This is my first semester teaching all new preps, all while producing a short film, parenting, promoting the book I released in July, and preparing for a new year of projects. I love the books on my dresser, but they have taken me a long time to get through because I am so exhausted. COVID hasn’t helped. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? I don’t know. Are there people who don’t feel emotions strongly? Maybe they can. I used to think that alcohol helped me feel my emotions and facilitate writing, but it actually numbed me to my real feelings. I still wrote a few decent things. Maybe someone can write without feeling emotions strongly, but how good can it be? What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? I’m an extroverted introvert, so my idea of “friends” might be someone else’s idea of borderline friend/acquaintance. Throwing definitions to the wind here: I consider Barrett Warner, my editor for Blood Histories, a friend. Beyond his generous intelligence and discernment with my book, he and I have had a wonderful epistolary friendship that has kept me sane over the course of the pandemic. He has helped me balance restraint and wildness at the level of language. Katie Farris and Erin Rodini are supportive poet friends I adore and look to for inspiration and courage. Kate Bernheimer, Hannah Grieco, Tommy Dean, and Jo Varnish are editors I’ve worked with but would call friends. Christina Rosso-Schneider, a Philly-based writer who also owns A Novel Idea on Passynuk, has been a really wonderful writer to connect with in-person during the pandemic. She is incredibly supportive of local writers, and I was honored to read at her book launch recently. I’m grateful to the writing community I have on Twitter. They create a space for sharing work, opportunities, and promotion. Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book? That’s a good question. Blood Histories ended up being a concept album, and I do not see much connection to The Year of the Monster. That said, I would love for my body of work to have cohesion but also evolution. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? What’s interesting is that Unsolicited offered my first contract, but with the 33-month editorial schedule, I ended up publishing Blood Histories through Galileo Press in the interim. Working with Galileo helped me see how I wanted to trim the language in TYOTM. It also allowed me to see how gratifying the collaborative aspects of the publishing process can be. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? If you mean what was the best way I spent my hard-earned writing money, I would say the Yeti nano microphone I bought with some of the funds I earned from a paid reading with San Diego State University’s MFA program. The second-best would be other writers’ books. I love to support writers, to buy more books than I will ever have time to read. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? I’m going to get flack for this, but it took me a while to enjoy Poe. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? When I was nine years old, I wrote to the film magazine, Premiere. I sent them my photo and a short letter telling them that I was starring in the school play. I told them it was my dream to be on the cover of the magazine. They ended up publishing my letter in the Letters to the Editor section, alongside a photo mock-up with my picture and “PREMIERE” splashed across the top–a cover just for me. I realized that a letter, full of hope and passion, could find an audience. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? Breakfast of Champions. As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? Staryu, from Pokemon. What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? That’s hard to say. I think I use parts of a lot of people to fill in the mannerisms and desires and fears of my characters, but very few are intact fictionalizations. My Hollywood abusers are mostly intact, with very little alterations. I owe them nothing, but I wonder whether I will someday owe the industry their real names. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? I have one unpublished chapbook titled They More than Burned that was a top 20 finalist in Black Lawrence Press’s Chapbook Contest this fall and received an honorable mention in The Cupboard Pamphlet’s 2021 Chapbook Contest. I also have a novel, The Law of Inversion, about a failed end-of-times prophecy, a runaway Nobel scientist, and a math teacher harboring many secrets. What does literary success look like to you? Reading my book from start to finish and feeling like I did what I wanted to do. And maybe getting a blurb from Jason Isbell. What’s the best way to market your books? Twitter has been a really handy platform, at least for my first book. We went into the second printing before release day, and most of that was due to Twitter promotion. Local venues are also really important. I plan to have my launch for this book at Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg, which is not only a beautiful space, but also a huge literary venue that has hosted a lot of great readings and book releases. What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex? Remembering that many men are more indirect in their speech and talk a lot less than I imagine they do. What did you edit out of this book? I pulled a reimagined fairy tale titled “Blood Histories”...which ended up becoming the title work of my chapbook from Galileo. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? When I’m not writing, I am teaching film production at a small private university. If I could choose what I would do? Honestly, I’m doing it. But my next choice would be forensic pathology. I really love forensic science and enjoy reading about it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tara Stillions Whitehead is a filmmaker and multi-genre writer living in Central Pennsylvania. Graduate of University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television Production and San Diego State University’s Creative Writing MFA Program, her writing and films work to subvert the toxic cultural narratives endorsed by popular media and the institutions that profit from stigmatizing and disadvantaging marginalized and historically oppressed groups. Her writing was included in the 2021 Wigleaf Top 50 and has been nominated for various awards, including Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, AWP Intro Journal Awards, and the Pushcart Prize. A former DGA assistant director for television, she is currently Assistant Professor of Film, Video, and Digital Media Production at Messiah University, where she serves as production faculty for narrative filmmaking. Her hybrid chapbook/concept album, Blood Histories, was published by Galileo Press in 2021.  The Year of the Monster explores American culture as commodity and comorbidity. From black holes and animal extinctions to death row trauma porn and the redacted scripts of Hollywood abuses: these sixteen stories subvert traditional notions of justice, challenge vulnerable characters to survive in transgressive spaces. Mixing traditional prose with screenplay and script-hybrid, and certainly not without hope, The Year of the Monster encourages close examination of how American media and our complicity in its marriage of violence and culture perpetuate the human and environmental crises.
 Elisabeth Blair is a Montréal-based poet and editor with an extensive background in music and visual art. She has been artist-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Wildacres, and ACRE. Her publications include two chapbooks--We He She/It (Dancing Girl Press, 2016) and without saying (Ethel Press, 2020)—and poems in a variety of journals, including Harpur Palate, Feminist Studies, and Juked. Unsolicited Press has the privilege of publishing her first full-length collection, because God loves the wasp. Before you preorder a copy of her book, take a minute to get to know about her process and thoughts on writing. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? The em dash, for sure—it’s gorgeous, breathless, adaptive, helpful, noncommittal, suggestive… What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? The super comfy soft chairs at the University of Vermont library, which was near where I lived when I was working on much of this book. They are boxy and plush and you can curl up in them while swinging the attached little arm-desk around in front of you for a laptop or notebook. I wish I had one at home! Does writing energize or exhaust you? Each type of writing has different effects on me. I get super energized writing about poetry – like when I’m drafting my poetry craft newsletter, or offering a poet feedback on their poem or manuscript. Freewriting of any sort is deeply calming. Writing about trauma carries with it a special kind of deep focus, catharsis, and relief (though it brings with it a whole host of other emotions too). When writing fiction (whether in prose or verse form) I find it’s so challenging on so many levels that I get exhausted after only a few hours. It was only this year that I finally learned how to take cat naps, which help keep me going when I’m working on fiction-based projects. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? Yes! In the past I went through very long, 2-year-ish cycles, where I was either reading a lot or reading very little. I always thought about it as a consuming mindset vs. a producing mindset. Ideally you want to have both, but in practice, if I was in a production phase, I could only read a few pages of a book before I’d start wiggling in my seat like an impatient child and then leap away to write—I just had too many ideas. Whereas in the consumption phase, I was open, calmer, and had more room for new words, new ideas. Over the last 5 years I’ve been able to balance this cycle out through teaching. To prepare for giving a workshop, I need to read all sorts of wonderful stuff, so I’m always regularly reading—especially poetry. And I’m so glad — it’s such a great side effect of teaching. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? I think anyone who wants to be a writer can be a writer. There’s room for every one of us weirdos. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? At around age 10, I discovered quite by accident the absolutely ghastly murder-suicide poem “In the Round Tower at Jhansi” by Christina Rossetti. Until then I’d only read childrens’ poetry (simpering or humorous stuff) and never really took to it—but this poem gave me shivers to my bones! I’d often re-read it in secret, scaring myself silly. Then at age 13, I had to make a poetry anthology for class. To find poems, I wandered through the public library opening books at random, and happened upon “A Lovely Love” by Gwendolyn Brooks. At that time in my life I was experiencing the intensity of first love, and I was astonished at how this strange, musical writing deftly portrayed wild, passionate, secret (!) love. Both these experiences profoundly affected me. No movie I had ever seen—despite all the money and resources in Hollywood—had affected me like these tiny poems had. It was clear to me that poems wielded enormous power. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? I’m working on three main manuscripts right now—a giant erasure poem, a novel in verse, and a sci-fi novel. Then there are 3-4 other bits and bobs that might assemble themselves into a manuscript in the future, but which are currently just poking around on the sidelines. What does literary success look like to you? Literary success takes two forms. The first is supporting myself financially with my writing and writing-related activities. This is pretty easy to measure (if near-impossible to achieve). The other is more difficult to measure: I would like to earn the respect of those whom I respect—to become a valued peer in the eyes of my literary idols. What did you edit out of this book? The early drafts had a lot of teenager-y sarcasm, bite, and bitterness to them. I had to first let my 16-year-old self have her say—exactly the way she wanted to say it—before I could gently guide those snipes and rages into more sophisticated poetic expressions of these same emotions. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? If I wasn’t creative, I think I’d love to be an entomologist. Bugs are the best!  A memoir in verse, Elisabeth Blair’s because God loves the wasp documents two and a half years she spent living in two abusive facilities for “troubled teens” during the late 1990s. The wilderness camp and emotional growth boarding school were modeled on the teachings and tenets of Synanon, a mid-20th-century cult.
ORDER TODAY.  Jackson Bliss is the winner of the 2020 Noemi Press Award in Prose and the mixed-race/hapa author of Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments (Noemi Press, 2021), Amnesia of June Bugs (7.13 Books, 2022), and the speculative fiction hypertext, Dukkha, My Love (2017). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Ploughshares, Guernica, Antioch Review, ZYZZYVA, Longreads, TriQuarterly, Columbia Journal, Kenyon Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Witness, Fiction, Santa Monica Review, Boston Review, Juked, Quarterly West, Arts & Letters, Joyland, Huffington Post UK, The Daily Dot, and Multiethnic Literature in the US, among others. He is the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bowling Green State University and lives in LA with his wife and their two fashionably dressed dogs. Follow him on Twitter and IG: @jacksonbliss.
 Andy Smart earned his MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Solstice Creative Writing Program at Lasell University, where he was a Michael Steinberg Fellow. Andy’s essays have appeared in Salamander, Sleet Magazine, and Moon City Review as well the anthologies Show Me All Your Scars (In Fact Books) and Come Shining: Essays and Poems on Writing in a Dark Time (Kelson Books). His poetry has appeared in Lily Poetry Review, The American Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere. Andy was a 2019 Pushcart Prize nominee. His first chapbook of hybrid poetry, Blue Horse Suite, is available from Kattywompus Press. This is his first book. Andy lives in Missouri and online at www.AndySmartWrites.com.
Toby LeBlanc is a mental health therapist in Austin, TX. Writing is a way his own tales can have life alongside the countless stories of courage and strength of his clients. While he and his family sleep under the Texas stars, he will always say he's from Louisiana. He enjoys wearing period-specific pirate costumes and fishing. His dream is to one day do both at the same time.
We love our authors. That sounds silly, but it's true. We love them so much we like to annoy them by asking questions about their writing lives. Today we bring you an updated interview with Francis Daulerio, one of the most "breath of fresh air" poets you'll ever read. We invite you to read the interview, and if you have a buck or two, support Francis by purchasing his upcoming poetry collection, JOY.  If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make?
Oh jeez, I’ve been a massive fan of Anthony Bourdain’s work for a good long time. I always admired how easily he was able to navigate the really complicated elements of culture and religion and politics and distill it all down to a palatable examination that didn’t feel like it was being swayed by anything other than reality. I’m absolute shit in the kitchen, but it’d be a real honor to share a bowl of home-grown garlic scape pesto my wife and I make each spring. It’s no culinary masterpiece, but I think he’d like it fine. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? I worry a lot about the headspace I’m creating for my readers. My first book was so sad (too sad, if I’m honest), that I’ve subsequently tried to layer in large helpings of hope wherever possible. It’s important to recognize how difficult life can be, but there’s no sense in wallowing, and I certainly don’t want my writing to take anybody to an unhealthy or even dangerous place. When I write now, I try to remind myself that there is hope to be found, and I try to aim for it whenever I can. What books are on your nightstand? We have books all over the house, so we eventually started turning different rooms into different sections. Philosophy and art in the living room, fiction and poetry in the study. You get it the idea. The nightstand serves as our nonfiction section. Stuff like Matt Haig’s Reasons To Stay Alive, Ross Gay’s Book of Delights, Maggie Smith’s Keep Moving. Good books to grab if you wake up with the scaries. The Buddhism section also lives there along with a few random books on gardening. It’s very zen. All the vibes. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? The em dash. I’m a poet ffs. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? Many of them, actually. I was a pretty lousy student in high school. I probably could’ve used some meds, but early aughts catholic school wasn’t the place to talk about mental health or medication (imagine that!). What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? I’m actually a little mad at myself for not thanking Lexapro in the acknowledgements page of the new book. What a life-saver! I wrote 3/4 of Joy from my typical, unmedicated state of constant anxiety and then finished and edited it feeling like a totally new person. I know medication isn’t for everyone, but it drastically improved my daily life. Does writing energize or exhaust you? The first stages of writing a new poem are totally energizing, and the editing process can be, too, if it’s enlightening or transformative. Generally though I do get exhausted by the tedious nature of editing. Once that spark of creativity is gone and I’m left with a heap of words to move around, things get a bit less exciting. What are common traps for aspiring writers? I think social media makes it easy for an aspiring writer to feel excruciatingly inadequate. You see all these people dropping links to new publications and it can quickly start to feel like you’re the only one striking out, when in reality we’re all getting bombarded with rejections all the time. It can be difficult to learn how to interact in the writing community before you’ve really gotten your feet wet, which is why I think that space has turned into such a shitstorm. The good news is, once you get some publications under your belt, you get to take imposter syndrome for a spin. So there’s that… What is your writing Kryptonite? Any and every other thing. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? I don’t think I’ve gotten traditional reader’s block, but there are definitely long stretches where I simply can’t find time to sit down and read at length. I try to take advantage of gaps between projects and time off work, but life with young children doesn’t make for loads of free time. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? This feels similar to the “do artists need to experience pain to create” question, and while I think the answer is probably no, I can’t help but think that the difficulties I’ve lived through have made me better equipped to write the way I do. Maybe that’s just me trying to make myself feel better. I’ve had panic attacks, and afterwords tried to tell myself that living like this isn’t all bad because it somehow helps me create. I don’t think that’s true, but in the moments I want to feel like I’m earning my spot by suffering. I’m sure there are folks who can do this without feeling intense emotions, but I’m not sure how. I definitely couldn’t. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? I couldn’t write anything without my friend Rich Appel. He’s an incredible poet and editor, and he’s the first person I email when I’ve written something new. Honestly there’s not a poem in any of my books that he didn’t help with. I also get a lot of inspiration from my MFA friends Nick Gregorio and Daniel DiFranco, and I’ve learned a lot about how to exist in this community from Maggie Smith. I feel quite lucky to be surrounded by such incredibly creative people. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? Books! What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? I have a very vivid memory of playing cards with my older cousin in the trunk of my aunt’s Chevy Blazer. Our parents were all in the house, and while he beat me in each game, he taught me how to curse, which words meant what, and how to drop them in at the appropriate times. Looking back, it was a pretty transformative experience (I’m only half kidding). How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? Zero. I’ve got some ideas for a few different books, but nothing started yet. I’m thinking about trying out comedic nonfiction essays, but we’ll see where that leads. There also some poem ideas rattling around up there. Who knows. What does literary success look like to you? Mega yachts and piles and piles of cocaine. If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make?
I am a huge fan of Miriam Toews. I would love to have dinner with her and, like a leech, I’d pick her brain about her writing process and ask for advice; however, my cooking is not nearly as awesome as her writing, so I’d ask her what she wanted to eat, and then I’d practice making said meal until it was go time, and, realistically, I’d probably mess the meal up and end up ordering out. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? I think I have a huge case of imposter syndrome. I wish I could say that I combat that by putting my head down and continuing to write despite my insecurities, but sometimes it gets the better of me. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? I love the character Jenny Fields from John Irving’s The World According to Garp. She is a badass who can do it all. What books are on your nightstand? There are two books on my nightstand right now. The first is This Bright River by Patrick Sommerville. I love his work on Station 11 and other shows, so I grabbed his novel to read. The other book on my nightstand is Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. I haven’t read it, and I probably never will. My sister passed away at the age of 36, and it was her favorite book, so by not ever reading it, I feel like there’s something that I can still learn about her, even 10 years later. I find it strangely comforting. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? I love the ellipsis. I think it invites engagement from the reader. It kind of forces them to fill in the blanks… What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? The assignment was to independently read a Shakespeare play and do a report on it. I was a lazy high-school student who avoided work whenever possible, so my choice was Shakespeare’s King John. I picked that one because I figured it was one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays, and there was a pretty good chance that my teacher had not read it. I was right! If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? "You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it." - Octavia E. Butler Does writing energize or exhaust you? It energizes me. I get in the zone, and I lose track of time when I’m writing. What are common traps for aspiring writers? I think aspiring writers don’t realize how much time and energy it takes to write. Writing is a craft with limitless room for improvement. If you want to write, you’d better be prepared to never be satisfied. What is your writing Kryptonite? I have to be careful of what I read while I am writing fiction because it frequently seeps into my writing, and the writing ends up feeling forced and lifeless. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? I usually do not have reader’s block. I do, sometimes, have difficulty figuring which book to read from my list of to-read books. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? I believe that it’s possible, but not the norm. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? Ben Tanzer comes to mind. Through Ben, I have met a lot of other awesome writers from Chicago: Mark Brand, Joseph G. Peterson, Peter Anderson, Giano Cromley, and Jerry Brennan to name a few. For me it’s nice to know that there are like-minded people out there. Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book? I want each of my books to stand on its own. Honestly, I cringe when I read my past work. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? Buying a computer solely for my writing was the best money I’ve ever spent as a writer. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? This is a surprisingly difficult question for me to answer. There are so many more authors who I liked at first, but I’ve grown to dislike over the years than there are authors who I have grown to like. I think Stephan King might be the best answer to go with here. For me, he is so hit or miss that it took a while for me to find something in his repertoire that I liked. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? I came home from school one day to find that my younger sister had ratted me out for swearing at school. I got in a lot of trouble for that. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? Dave Newman’s Raymond Carver Will Not Raise Our Children is an underappreciated favorite of mine. As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? A seagull. They are capable of beauty, but they also spend most of their time fighting for scraps and picking through the trash. What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? Not all characters in The Craigslist Incident were based on real people (I need some plausible deniability, here), but for those characters who are loosely based on real people, I will defer to Anne Lamont: “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” What does literary success look like to you? Every time I achieve a literary goal, I set another one. I just keep plugging away. I don’t think I will ever feel successful. What’s the best way to market your books? I believe that after all has been said and done, the best way to market a book is through word of mouth; therefore, I believe it is important for me to get my book out to as many readers as possible. What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex? I am petrified that I will get something wrong, and that mistake that will take the reader out of that fragile, magic, fiction bubble that I worked so hard to create. What did you edit out of this book? I think a better question for me would be: What have you edited into your novel? For years, my focus was poetry, so I focused on condensing a narrative into as few words as possible, and, unfortunately, that habit followed me into my prose writing. When I worked with the Unsolicited editing team, I found that I was adding scenes to the plot rather than cutting scenes. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? I think I would be working somewhere in the field of psychology. I also love teaching, so I would for sure be teaching.  If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make?
Well, I’m not a very good cook. I’d eat breakfast with Craig Lancaster as long as he made it. I’d eat leftovers from Mary Karr’s fridge and whatever Alexandra Fuller wanted me to eat! Basically I’d do whatever those women wanted me to! What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? It’s terrifying to just start. It’s terrifying when I’ve gone weeks with no new ideas, and it’s terrifying when I get ALL the ideas at once because I worry that they’ll go away! I think the best thing I do is scribble ideas in a notebook, whether it becomes pages and pages or it’s just a doodle or some sort of outline. I have come to terms with the idea that sometimes my notes just aren’t meant to see the light of day. I have also worked hard to just take a breath and send my work out there. Rejection hurts, but it’s not the end of the world. There’s a great anecdote from Stephen King from his early years in which he uses a railroad spike to tack all the rejection letters to his wall. It happens to, quite literally, the most prolific of them all. We indie authors aren’t alone! Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? Janet Fitch is one of my most favorite authors, and her first novel White Oleander really changed the way I viewed characters. They don’t have to have linear or neat, clean growth. They can have an ugliness, a rawness that almost hurts to read. I felt that about her characters in Paint It Black, but I have an absolute obsession with Marina Makarova in The Revolution of Marina M and Chimes of a Lost Cathedral. I can’t find the right adjectives to do her justice. What books are on your nightstand? My dad listens to “books on tape.” (He does use a streaming service but hasn’t broken into modern lingo yet.) He talks a lot about this Louisiana ex-cop called Dave Robicheaux, and he’s so animated and uses this terrible accent when talking about it. He gets so excited about these books, so I’ve been checking out James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux series from the public library. I could lie and say it’s War and Peace on my nightstand, but it’s a stack of good ol’ boy mysteries. A bad guy gets eaten by his own pigs, people! That’s bedtime entertainment! Favorite punctuation mark? Why? I’m an Oxford comma girl. I love a good semicolon; I don’t, however, use it a lot in fiction. But I can’t stop using exclamation points! I just have a ton of excitement! What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? I used CliffsNotes (does that date me?!) to get through The Scarlet Letter, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Great Expectations…I read so much that the librarians waived the 3-book maximum, but I couldn’t read anything I was assigned. I didn’t read The Great Gatsby or To Kill a Mockingbird or Catcher in the Rye until I was in college. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? Oh, definitely my lifelong companion Brown Bear. I used to call him Winnie the Pooh, even though he’s not the yellow honey fiend. I dropped him in the street when I was about two, and my mom put an ad in the paper: “Lost. Little brown bear.” My earliest memory is of going to a woman’s house to retrieve him. He’s been everywhere with me. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? “If you don’t write it, who will? Just do the damn thing!” Seriously, though. Just write it. If it’s in you, get it out. Does writing energize or exhaust you? Oh, it’s energizing. Sometimes manic. I never feel like I’m “done,” but I’m not exhausted by it. What are common traps for aspiring writers? I think we all have a level of hubris, but it’s important to recognize that. Not everyone’s first book is picked up by, say, Random House. And that’s more than okay. Better than okay! Also, guard your work. Blogs and other easy-to-publish sources don’t protect your work the way it deserves to be protected. Don’t give up. Yes, you may have to work a “real” job. You may not write for three years. You may choose to attend nine thousand writer’s retreats and never come out with a single idea. All of it is okay. Do you write? You’re a writer. Is your grandma your only reader? She’s proud of you. What is your writing Kryptonite? Does this question mean I’m Super Man? I’m so easily distracted by whatever I find on the internet. I’ll take a break, fall into the proverbial rabbit hole, and emerge 2 hours later. Were those cat videos worth it? Have you ever gotten reader’s block? Ooh, good one. Nope. I will read books multiple times until they become part of my soul. I am never not reading something. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? Sure. Tell that story!! I guarantee that someone else has a similar experience as that author. Writing should come from every single experience. There’s no “one size fits all” for emotion. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? I’m internet friends with several Montana writers, and just seeing them working (and succeeding, and failing sometimes, and living, and feeling) gives me an understanding that we’re all in this together. Not one of us is this hermit who lives on an island of self-importance, rolling around in stacks of cash. It’s a small community of folks who support each other through (often inappropriate) humor and the much-needed encouragement to just keep writing. Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book? I write short stories, and sometimes one story is connected to another but told through different narrators. The one connection I think I will always have is Montana, but I’m in the stand-alone camp. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? It encouraged me! The thought that other people will see my words in print gives me the motivation to do more. It’s such a dang process though, but I haven’t changed it. I do what works for me, which is long-hand notes and notebook scribbles. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? Any money spent at a book store, a book sale, library overdue fines…reading makes a writer, and it’s the one thing that consistently encourages me. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? I always had a hard time with the ones I was “supposed” to read. I eventually came around to Faulkner. I’ve never been into reading just to say I’ve read a certain book or author. I still don’t like Dickens. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? When I was young, my best friend and I said this: “sticks and stones can break my bones but words can really hurt!” I remember being made fun of at the time and realizing that the things that come out of people’s mouths can cut deeply. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? Plain Bad Heroines by emily danforth. She had huge success with her first novel The Miseducation of Cameron Post, but her second is just this intense noir/mystery/queer/magical/mystical piece of genius that involves a real Montana woman (Mary MacLane) who was so controversial and outspoken and outrageous in a time when women were decidedly not. The moon, because the writing process certainly follows an ebb and flow. Sometimes it’s full and rich and bright and super, and other times it’s dark and absent (but still spinning around there somewhere). What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters?! I owe them the assurance that I am not intentionally basing characters on them, even though they think otherwise. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? A million? What does literary success look like to you? Honestly, I’ve written for so long. I’ve never tried to make it a “career.” Success, for me, is handing a real, bound, published book to my parents and saying “I did it.” Having an actual book. Maybe two. But something that other people read, something that stands alone. That’s success. It’s not the finish line. What’s the best way to market your books? Who likes to toot their own horn? I like the simple “post online” method and hope it spreads like wildfire! Not the most effective. What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex? Bodies. I don’t know how a man settles into his body. I can only guess and observe and put a little of what I know about those around me into male characters. It’s really hard to avoid stereotypes. What did you edit out of this book? A lot of swear words! If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? I am currently a librarian and 8th grade teacher. I love working at our middle school. We own a cattle ranch. It’s an amazing privilege to work outside. I’d love to create art full time. Honestly? I’d be pretty good at being a professional nap-taker. If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make? Spicy enchiladas for Daphne Du Maurier – the greatest suspense writer of all time. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? I’m scared that I won’t have the time in my life to write all of the projects that I want to, and/or that I will start a piece and then never finish it. The best way to combat that, I think, is to work according to your own schedule, but make sure you put in work every day, even if that work is only conceptualizing the project(s). Also, respect the editing process: once the first draft is finished, that’s when the bulk of the work begins and the piece really starts to take shape. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? I mentioned Daphne du Maurier above, but in terms of literary characters I’m obsessed with, I’ll say Villanelle from Jeannette Winterson’s The Passion, one of my favorite novels. What books are on your nightstand? Currently, Class, Politics, and Ideology in the Iranian Revolution by Mansoor Moaddel (partially as research for an upcoming book) and Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. (I always try to maintain an eclectic reading list.) Favorite punctuation mark? Why? The ellipsis. So much mystery and angst is contained within those three dots. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? I couldn’t get through The Scarlet Letter the first time around. I’ve since tried to reread it with slightly more success. (As far as Hawthorne goes, “Young Goodman Brown” is my favorite.) What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? My record player, which accompanies nearly all my writing sessions. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? “Conquering self-doubt is the first step to being the writer you want to be.” Does writing energize or exhaust you? Writing energizes me but editing exhausts me. What are common traps for aspiring writers? I think writing what you expect other people want to read (or what you think publishers or marketers want to sell) is the worst trap. That inevitably leads to uninspired or generic writing. Any artist can only create the work that speaks to them – that they themselves would want to read or watch or listen to. What is your writing Kryptonite? Stress. Exhaustion from my day job or social obligations makes me too distracted to focus on the work the way I should. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? Not really. I have a plan in my head for what book is next on the docket. (Although I do worry that I won’t have enough time to read all the great books out there. It’s a good problem to have, in my opinion.) Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? No. Thinking critically about the world is also a must, but it’s not enough to only be conceptual - there must be passion to your ideas. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? I’m friends with several fiction writers based (or formerly based) in the Twin Cities, either published or unpublished; and with numerous international film critics and theorists. There’s not enough time to list all the ways they help me become a better writer! It is indispensable for artists to have a community and a discourse to share ideas, support each other, constructively criticize them, commiserate through the rough periods, and get excited about the work they admire. In particular, I used to be part of a group of horror and sci-fi writers in Minneapolis that would share their ideas and early drafts of work on Google Docs. This was important because we would also frequently talk about how speculative genres are underrecognized for their artistic and subversive potential. Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book? Both. That might be a cop-out answer, but it’s true. Every work should stand on its own, but an artist should have a collective body of work with at least thematic connections between them. I do also admire sequels, prequels, spinoffs, and other works that expand the universe of a work of art, not simply to capitalize on a familiar name. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? It increased my confidence. From starting to write the book to publication was about nine years. If you put in the work and have faith throughout the process, then the end goal really is achievable. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? This may sound like paid promotion (it’s not!) but about six years ago I spent almost $1,000 to work with Mark Malatesta, a professional literary coach (and former agent). He helped me write my query letter and synopsis and compile a list of agents to reach out to, along with providing insight into what I could expect from the querying process. He landed me my first agent, and even though a publishing deal didn’t come directly from that, it was indispensable experience. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? J.G. Ballard is the first author that comes to mind. I don’t love his early book The Drowned World (which was the first thing I read by him), but have really admired almost everything else. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? Weirdly enough, I remember the O.J. Simpson trial being televised when I was about ten years old, and it’s one of the first major public discourses I can remember. Even at the time, I noticed that the way people talked about it (especially as it related to their racial identity) was especially charged. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins is one of the best British novels of the 19th century. As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? The bur oak tree. It’s a majestic tree native to the American Midwest that grows slowly but lives a very long time – an apt metaphor for the writing process. It also is not outwardly beautiful (it doesn’t have dazzling fall colors) but the leaves often have a faint golden hue in the autumn, which is a kind of understated glamor I admire. What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? An attempt to make those characters as complex, genuine, and rooted in sympathetic motivations as possible. That should describe every character, but especially those based on real people. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? About five (and even more unfinished screenplays). I used to feel very anxious about these unfinished or unpublished works, but now I think it’s constant motivation – a reminder of how many other stories I want to tell. What does literary success look like to you? To have my work read by strangers (no matter the number, but the more the better) who connect with it in some way is the ultimate goal. To write a novel (and edit it numerous times until it’s “final”) is incredibly gratifying, but the book doesn’t really come alive until it’s read by people who simply want to read it because they love literature. The true epitome of success would be to make enough money from writing and editing that it could be my full-time job and I could focus on my art as much as I think it deserves, without relying on a day job. But no matter how financially lucrative it is, I’ll continue writing regardless. What’s the best way to market your books? I’ve always thought that word of mouth is the best strategy no matter the art form. So getting the book out there to critics, readers, and writers who also respect genres like horror and believe that great work can be made within that format is my ideal approach. If the work is good enough, word of mouth will be spread (through social media, conversation, interviews, etc.) and the book will gain a following, even if it takes some time. What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex? I think writing any character is extremely challenging, no matter their sex, racial identity, sexual orientation, etc., but it’s the most exhilarating challenge in writing fiction. You have to fully inhabit each character, whether their identity is relatively similar or totally different from your own, and try to understand them inside and out; develop a backstory for them, envision their hopes and fears, even if you don’t necessarily write about that in the novel. So the most difficult thing is to try to know them and empathize with them completely but convey that succinctly. That’s a challenge even with people we know in real life: human beings are always mysteries, and that’s what makes them so compelling. (I do think that writers need to basically be empaths, though. I can’t imagine writing a compelling character if you’re not radically empathetic to them.) What did you edit out of this book?” SO MUCH. Hollow went through at least six rounds of edits, including an early round with a New York editor named John Paine who really helped improve the novel and allowed me to recognize its early weaknesses. I cut out a scene in which the protagonist investigates the central mystery by visiting a hospital in Grange, the town in which the novel is set. I also cut out some horrific scenes involving the witch in the novel, since they were somewhat repetitive. More beneficial, though, were the scenes I added, including more backstory about the Ben and Amy characters, and the scene in which Ben goes to visit his estranged wife and then leaves in shame at the last moment, which is now one of my favorite scenes in the novel. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? I currently do have a day job in the marketing department of an educational theater company. I’ve also worked at restaurants, movie theaters, art museums, coffeeshops, you name it. Writing is my passion and the thing I want to dedicate my life to, so I’ll keep working day jobs as long as I have to to support that passion. But ideally that work would involve the creative arts somehow; film is my other great passion, so I’ve also really enjoyed working at theaters and film festivals.
 Join us on Wednesday to celebrate the poetry of Maureen Sherbondy and Megan Mary Moore. Same time: 5:30PM Pac Time. Same place: Zoom Same people: Managing editor hosting You can log onto the event here. Megan Mary Moore is passionate about horror and poetry. She holds an MFA in poetry from Miami University. Her work has appeared in Rattle, Rogue Agent, Haunted are These Houses by Unnerving Press. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio where she teaches dance and talks to ghosts. Maureen Sherbondy has been published in Calyx, European Judaism, The Oakland Review, Prelude, and other journals. Her poetry books include Eulogy for an Imperfect Man, Beyond Fairy Tales, The Art of Departure, and six chapbooks. LINES IN OPPOSITION by Maureen Sherbondy
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Poet Maureen Sherbondy has had enough. Her eleventh collection, Lines in Opposition, explores our need to set limits in times of conflict and confusion. These poems of defiance range from the artistic to the political to the familial, from Basho to Godot, Gretel to Ashbery, the Rockettes to Bubble Yum. At times wry and whimsical, at other times acutely serious, Sherbondy's poems testify to the importance of knowing when and how to draw the line. Book Details Genre: Poetry ISBN:978-1-956692-10-5 Publication Date:4/12/2022 If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make? T. S. Eliot. I would make a roast chicken with gravy, mashed potatoes, and asparagus. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? That I will run out of interesting things to write about. I combat my fears by reading work by other writers. I also spend a lot of time listening to the world around me and paying attention. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? F. Scott Fitzgerald What books are on your nightstand? Greasy Lake (T.C. Boyle), The Immortalists (Chloe Benjamin), By the Wayside (Anne Leigh Parrish). I carry around books by Robert Bly and John Ashbery for poetry inspiration. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? : I like lists. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? I was an obedient student. I read every single assigned book. And I loved to read. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? My coffee pot. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? Don’t give up. Only writers who give up never get published. Does writing energize or exhaust you? Writing energizes me and keeps me balanced. What are common traps for aspiring writers? Trying to chase trends. Trying to write like the masters. What is your writing Kryptonite? A negative political climate. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? No. I have a very active imagination. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? Yes, but their work might be terrible and distant. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? Sharon Kurtzman, Jacob Appel, Therese Fowler, Elaine Orr, Crystal Simone Smith, Diane Chamberlain, Barry Peters. Yes, they nourish me as a writer. Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book? Some of my books work together. Some stand alone. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? Not at all, but I took myself more seriously as a writer. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? Buying more books and attending writers’ conferences What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? I like all authors. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? My first words to my mother: “Let me do it myself” What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? This Side of Paradise. Gatsby gets all the attention. As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? A horse or a frog. What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? I make my characters up. What does literary success look like to you? I write one new poem or story a week that I am pleased with. What’s the best way to market your books? I give readings, appear on NPR, and teach workshops. What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex? I do better writing characters from the opposite sex because I have been surrounded by brothers and sons my whole life. I have much male energy. What did you edit out of this book?” I deleted a few poems that felt weaker. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? I teach full-time. I sold workers’ compensation before. I think I would study rocks.  Maureen Sherbondy is the author of LINES IN OPPOSITION, a poetry collection.
In Lines in Opposition, Sherbondy explores our need to set limits in times of conflict and confusion. These poems of defiance range from the artistic to the political to the familial, from Basho to Godot, Gretel to Ashbery, the Rockettes to Bubble Yum. At times wry and whimsical, at other times acutely serious, Sherbondy's poems testify to the importance of knowing when and how to draw the line.  If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make? John Irving. The Hotel New Hampshire made me want to be a writer. He lives in Toronto which is only a couple hours from Buffalo, so he could hop on QEW and be here in no time. I’d cook a big Greek meal for him: salad, dolmades, spanokopita, pastichio, roast lamb, lemon potatoes, and galaktoboureko for dessert. Then we’d clear the dishes, move the table and chairs, and wrestle best two out of three. Ouzo for the winner. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? Honestly, nothing scares me about the writing process. It’s the outcome of the process that scares me. What if this book isn’t as good as the last one? What if it gets bad reviews? What if it doesn’t sell? Those are the things that scare me. How do I combat those fears? I try to write the best book I can. Then the book goes out in the world and out of my control and I hope for the best. Ouzo also helps. What books are on your nightstand? The Eighth Detective by Alex Pavesi and The Fountain by David Scott Hay. I highly recommend both. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? I don’t have a favorite or least favorite punctuation mark. I do have an unnatural attraction to italics, however. I love to italicize everything. I’m sure it drives my copy editors nuts. The funny thing is, I know the rules for italicizing, but I go ahead and italicize for no apparent reason. It’s a sickness, I tell ya. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? Don’t tell Mrs. Prince from Kenmore West Senior High School, but I never read The Taming of The Shrew in 11th Grade. I don’t think I even started it. I took one look at the cover and decided that the play was untameable. Now I feel guilty and will have to read it. Hell, I bet I still owe Mrs. P a paper, too. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? The MacBook Pro. Sure, the old Remingtons and Royals are cool looking and romantic, but no spell check? No cut and paste? Wite-Out, for God’s sake?? Plus, I do a lot of writing in bed. There’s no way I could balance a typewriter on my chest. The Mac definitely deserves a shout out. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? Well, first off, sneaking into other people’s steamy bathrooms is a little weird. But if I did, and I didn’t get caught, shot, or arrested, I’d simply write, ‘Don’t quit’. That’s it. Just a simple reminder that nothing will be published, read, or reviewed if you decide you’re not good enough or that writing is too hard. So, don’t quit. Does writing energize or exhaust you? It energizes me for a while, but then when that high wears off I need a nap. I’m an excellent napper. That’s not bragging. If napping was an Olympic sport, I’m definitely up on that medal stand. What are common traps for aspiring writers? Self-doubt is a big one. It can paralyze a writer to such a degree that they can’t write a single word. Then the frustration sets in and they throw up their arms and decide it’s easier to binge something on Netflix than it is to be brave and write something–anything– and risk failure. The opposite is also true. Aspiring writers sometimes think publication will come more quickly than it does. They don’t understand that you got to play the long game when it comes to writing. You have to live and learn and go through all the shit–heartbreak, sickness, divorce, deaths. And you have to go through the good stuff, too–the births, the weddings, the successes, the friendships, the love affairs. Then once you know a little bit about life, you have to practice your craft, improve your skills, learn how to write. All that doesn’t come quickly for most of us. Sometimes inspiring writers are too impatient to wait for all that and they end up pressing that Netflix button on the remote, too. What is your writing Kryptonite? Late nights. I write from five to seven in the morning. If I’m out late, the chances of me answering that 4:45 bell is pretty slim and then I’m in a crappy mood all day. Luckily, I’m getting older and the late nights aren’t that much of a problem anymore. But every once in a while… Have you ever gotten reader’s block? I used to travel for my day job. I was a real road warrior, hopping on a plane almost every Monday morning. I did most of my reading in airports, on planes, and in hotel rooms. When I switched jobs about six years ago, travel wasn’t required as much in my new role and for the first time in my life I had to make time to read. This did not stop me from buying books and the To Be Read pile grew higher and higher… Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? Technical writers can get away with it, I guess, but not fiction writers. A fiction writer needs to create characters that readers care about. If readers don’t care, they’ll stop reading and pick up another book written by a different author. If an author doesn’t feel emotions strongly, they can’t convey them. How can they expect their readers to feel anything if they can’t? It can’t be done. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? This is an easy one. Carla Damron, Dartinia Hull, Beth Uznis Johnson, and Ashley Warlick. We’ve had a group text thread going for ten years. I’d say 90% of those texts have absolutely nothing to do with writing, but we do critique each other's work, share information about agents, publicists, and editors, gossip about other writers, and complain passionately about our publishers. It’s a hell of a lot of fun. And I couldn’t even begin to quantify how they’ve made me a better writer or a better person. They’re family. Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book? Each book has to stand on its own and make its own way in the world. But I’ve staked out my turf. Buffalo, New York is my hometown, and this is the place I want to write about, the place I want to explore. I’m fascinated by the stories and architecture here. This town feeds my imagination and inspires me to write. So, while each book will stand alone, they’ll be connected by a sense of place, a mythical Buffalo that’s known economic booms and financial busts and is rich with stories about bootleggers, bank robbers, and even the birth of The Lone Ranger, not to mention my own family history. It’s going to be a lot of fun to continue writing about this city and its characters. Oh, and Go Bills! How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? I don’t think publishing changed my process, but age certainly has. For years, the alarm would sound, and I’d go up to my attic office and start writing by 5am. Then one day about four years ago, I couldn’t get out of bed. I was awake, but I couldn’t kick the covers off and go to work. It was a mental thing. I remember it was early November, the house was cold, and I just couldn’t physically get out of bed at 4:45. I missed three or four writing days in a row, and was really beating myself up about it, calling myself weak and lazy and just generally hating myself. Then I realized something: laptops are portable. If I couldn’t go to my laptop that early, my laptop would come to me. Since that realization, I’ve put my fully-charged laptop next to my bed at night and when I wake at 4:45, I just grab it and start writing propped on pillows. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? Tuition for Queens University of Charlotte’s MFA program. Going there was a game changer. Before that, I had been writing for over twenty years with just a handful of published short stories to show for my efforts. I approached Queens as my last shot of ever having any sort of successful writing life. Something clicked while I was there. The concept of ‘story’ became more clear. My writing became cleaner. I graduated ten years ago and have written four books since then. An MFA might not be for everybody, but for me it changed everything. I owe Fred LeBron and his faculty a great deal. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? You know, it’s probably odd to think that a Pulitzer Prize winner is under-appreciated, but I think William Kennedy falls into that category. Do people in their twenties, thirties or forties even know Kennedy? Do they read Ironweed? Those Albany novels–Ironweed, Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game–made a huge impact on me. I want to do for Buffalo what he did for Albany. Actually, I think I need to go back and re-read those books, to re-learn from the master of historical fiction with a strong sense of place. Hell, I think everyone should. As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? I have a one-eyed Shi Tzu named Coco. She’s actually my daughter’s dog, but I’m home all the time so she spends a lot of the day with me. Coco has a bed in my office and has claimed the foot of my bed as her own. She’s been at my side or feet for the writing of all my books. If she’s not my spirit animal, she may very well be my muse. What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? Man, I owe them everything: for the inspiration to write about them, for the curiosity to learn more about them and the times they lived in, for giving me a story to flesh out and make my own. I’ve spent so much time with the characters from Rook–Al, Lolly, and Bobby–as that book evolved from a novella, to a trilogy of novellas, to my first novel that when I was done, I actually missed them, even psychotic Bobby. I liked spending all that time with them. I liked getting to know them. In a way, I was sorry that it ended. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? I think I have three early, really sucky novels that were unpublishable. I took one, Slip Kid, and distilled that into a short story that appears in my collection, Muscle Cars. The other two are unsalvageable, I think, but I haven’t looked at those in a long time. Maybe there’s something in them that I can steal. I also have a manuscript that I just finished. I’m calling it my pandemic novel because I started it when we were locked down. I need to revise that one. So, we’ll call it four altogether. What does literary success look like to you? Well, that’s an interesting question. I think my answer to that has evolved over the years. First, success was just to get published, and I accomplished that with the publication of my story collection, Muscle Cars. Then success became getting a novel published. Rook is my debut novel, so that definition of success has become moot. So, at least for now, literary success has become the desire to create a body of published work that when read in its entirety people will say to a friend, “That kid had a hell of a career.” What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex? Developing fully developed characters is the same regardless of the character’s gender, so in that respect it’s not any harder or easier for me to write a female character. And the same rules also apply: be original, don’t be cliched, don’t be lazy in the descriptions, etc. Having said that, I’m blessed that the writers personally closest to me are all women and will call me out if I get something wrong about a female character. Carla Damron, Dartinia Hull, Beth Uznis Johnson, and Ashley Warlick are my secret weapons when writing female characters, What did you edit out of this book? Rook evolved from a trilogy of novellas to a novel. The second novella in the trilogy concentrated on Al’s time in federal prison. I had obtained Al’s prison record under The Freedom of Information Act, so I had an understanding of his time behind bars. In addition, he was writing then so I knew what he was writing and where he was being published. He even wrote an account of when Johnny Cash came and gave a concert for the inmates. Plus, I knew about his correspondence and relationship with his writing mentor Dan Marlowe thanks to Charles Kelly’s fine book Gunshots In Another Room: The Forgotten Life of Dan. J. Marlowe. So, I had a lot to draw from from that period of Al’s life. But as the novel came into focus, those prison years no longer fit in Lolly’s and Al’s story. Those ninety pages were cut. It was actually a pretty easy decision once I figured out what the book was about. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? I can’t imagine not writing.  Stephen G. Eoannou is the author of ROOK, a novel based on the true story of Al Nussbaum. To his unsuspecting wife, Lolly, Al is a loving, chess playing, family man. To J. Edgar Hoover, he is the most cunning fugitive alive. Al is the mastermind behind a string of east coast robberies that has stumped law enforcement.
Order Here.  If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make?
I don’t cook! I would take Paul Celan to a drive-thru fast food and then sit in the car and eat fries with him. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? That I will fail. Tell myself that I will fail. Walk through the fire. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? Oh! Ingeborg Bachmann or Anne Carson. Hard to decide! What books are on your nightstand? I can’t read in bed. I have books piled all around my work area and work space. But right next to me now are ALCOOLS (Apollinaire), A POET IN THE WORLD (Levertov), and New Urge Reader 4:Erotic Fiction by New Women Writers (New Urge Editions) Favorite punctuation mark? Why? Holy God the colon: it is a masterpiece of announcement. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? My laptop If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? Don’t fuck up! Does writing energize or exhaust you? I am unstoppable when doing vispo and asemics. What are common traps for aspiring writers? Do not follow others, or dress like others! You don’t have to wear a scarf or glasses! What is your writing Kryptonite? People shuffling and rooting in the kitchen while I am working Have you ever gotten reader’s block? I am not good at reading. I have to do it my own way, on my own time. I don’t get how people can just sit down and read an entire book. It is super work for me. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? Yes. The work can take that over, or not. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? For visual work, lots of folks on Facebook. They push me and encourage me and love me. Sylvia Van Nooten, Amanda Earl, Dona Mayoora, Terri Witek, goes on and on. Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book? It is what it will be. I believe that they are all connected. By spirit at least! But my work is definitely a building. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? It encouraged me to stay the same! Do what is best for you, always. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? Used bookstores. You should spend $100s even if you don’t have it. Find a way. Give Plasma. There is a great one in Jacksonville, Fl. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? There are so many. I have reactionary moments that dislodge any presence of mind or thoughtfulness, so I have to go back to lots of things. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? Oh! Writing letters to my parents asking for things like kittens! As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? Rasputin What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? No one is real. I owe everyone my best and respect. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? I have lots of projects in the works. It is a cycle. What does literary success look like to you? Well, I think there is an iconic notion to success these days. A cult of personality. For me, it is making a lot of projects with a lot of people. What’s the best way to market your books? I dislike the word “network”, but make friends. Always. Be giving; give your work to people for free in a vital way. They will give back to you by buying your work, books, posting and sharing your work, writing reviews and interviews. Don’t be cheap. Love everyone. What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex? I don’t know. I don’t like the opposite sex! What did you edit out of this book? LOTS of glitches. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? Art, art, art, performance, art, art. Sex work. If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make?
For sure, the late Eve Babitz (preferably pre-sobriety Eve Babitz/Eve Babitz during her sowing-wild-oats prime). I guess I’d blend up some cauliflower soup as a first course before stir frying noodles and veggies in sesame oil and oyster sauce because I’m a lazy cook and these are two of my quickest and easiest hot and homemade crowd-pleasers, healthy enough for a lifelong Southern Californian, yet starchy enough for a lifelong-maverick Southern Californian. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? Revisiting incredibly unpleasant memories. I combat this fear by taking my sweet time when it comes to putting a longform piece of personal writing together. Procrastinating and distracting myself with as much as possible for weeks or months on end. Which helps to explain why it took me 11 or so years to write a book that’s not even 200 pages. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? Anne Shirley, although I confess that I saw/fell for the 1980s PBS adaptation of Anne of Green Gables before reading any of the books in the series (and that I didn’t take to the books as much). What books are on your nightstand? Nadia Owusu’s Aftershocks, Eric Nguyen’s Things We Lost to the Water, and Gabrielle Union’s We’re Going to Need More Wine. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? The slash (it even sounds so take-no-prisoners). You’ll notice I’ve already used it more than once within these responses. As an indecisive Libra, I’m often torn between which of two words to go with and ultimately can’t/won’t commit to just one. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? I vaguely remember skimming a lot of the tail end (and maybe parts of the middle section too?) of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina - which I (for some reason) chose to read for some kind of an independent study-esque assignment. It didn’t grab me and was too long. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? I have two: (1) pens/pencils; and (2) paper. For much of my adulthood, I’ve gone out of my way to keep both within reach at almost all times. So much of my personal writing pops into my head, and then gets written down before I forget, when I’m far away from my computer or at home but the computer isn’t on. I also use the Notes app on my phone to jot things down, but I can handwrite sentences/paragraphs much quicker than I can peck out the letters (while fighting off autocorrection attempts) on my keypad. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? “You’re living a writer’s life.” A local acquaintance once said this to me as we ate our Wendy’s takeout in the Staten Island Ferry Terminal on my lunch hour from a low-paying temp job, during one of my “woe is me/why is my life like this at my age” eras. I’ll always remember him saying “You’re living a writer’s life” in a very matter-of-fact/why don’t you get this? tone that instantly made me feel better and still does. Does writing energize or exhaust you? Both (75 percent energize, 25 percent exhaust), the same way everything and everyone I deeply care about does. What is your writing Kryptonite? Overuse of alliteration. Not everyone is as charmed with it as I am. Same problem with the slash. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? Yes, during periods of extreme exhaustion. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? Sure, but this someone isn’t as likely to move the masses the way writers deeply in touch with their emotions (and aren’t afraid to show it) will. There’s a noticeable difference between the creatively sensitive wordsmiths and those who aren’t much more than competent grammarians who play by all the technical rules. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? So far, nobody. I have very strong first impressions. When I don’t click with someone’s vibe or voice from the jump, it rarely has gotten much better for me from there. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? Although I don’t remember the actual incident itself, my late mom was always tickled to tell me about a time when she and I (in my toddler days) walked past a huge puddle, after a rainstorm. I apparently pointed at the puddle and yelled “RIVER!” to the delight of at least one onlooker. Just later hearing that story and absorbing how much joy the comparison brought to my mom and this random person passing by (before I ever truly thought of myself as a writer) taught me about how effective the deployment of metaphors and analogies can be, in both creative writing and daily conversation. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? Terry Reed’s The Full Cleveland As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? As I say at one point in my book, all animals are my spirit animals! What does literary success look like to you? This, right here - getting invited to answer these kinds of questions and finally reaching the ranks of book author! What did you edit out of this book? As a longtime proponent of Less Is More, I generally tried cutting content that didn’t seem to add anything new or particularly useful to the storytelling. I cut and reworded many sentences to better protect people’s (including my own, at times) privacy. I also replaced many instances of gratuitous snarkiness, judgment, and/or anger with more compassion because, on and off the page, empathy is the attribute I would most like to be remembered for. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? I would be an editor – which is what I already do. It’s been my day-job career for almost 20 years. What books are on your nightstand? Perfect Fools by John Saward, Black Bottom Saints by Alice Randall, Up North in Michigan by Jerry Dennis, and A Fine Canopy by Alison Swan. Does writing energize or exhaust you? Energizes! What are common traps for aspiring writers? Clinging to unnecessary words and lines. As Stephen King says, “Kill your darlings.” What is your writing Kryptonite? Laundry, cooking, cleaning, and driving my kid to and from basketball practice. I can’t wait until he gets his driver’s license. And then maybe I can figure out how to swing a maid. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? During the first months of the pandemic I couldn’t concentrate enough to read. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? Sure, but I doubt their work would be interesting and worth reading. Readers want to feel something when they read a book. A lack of emotional energy will be conveyed in the narrative, the characters, and the writing will be flat. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? I belong to a group of women poets and writers whose work I greatly admire. Taking in their comments, questions, and insights over the years has not only kept me humble, it’s sharpened my skills and helped me think even more critically about my writing. There is something powerful in being part of a community of writers where you are not only receiving, but giving feedback, and helping to shape, in some small way, other’s work as well. Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book? I want each book—just like I want each poem or essay in one of my books—to stand on its own. However, that doesn’t keep readers from seeing connections between them. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? I don’t think it so much changed my writing process as much as it has made me recognize the collaborative aspect of the writing business. Working with publishers and editors is most definitely a partnership and with each of my published books, I’ve appreciated that back-and-forth experience. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? A few years back, I spent (my husband says, “wasted”) twenty-five dollars on a mannequin I named Gladys. She moved from a neighbor’s garage to our living room. As I started decoupaging her, she became quite the muse. Gladys, along with some of the poems she inspired, recently took a trip to the Lowell Art Gallery to be part of their WordView exhibit. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? This will probably sound cold, but I don’t like it when people or books waste my time. If I don’t engage with a book early on, I set it down and move on. While there might have been one or two authors in the bunch who could have grown on me, none have because I’ve abandoned them before our potential relationship could even bloom. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? When I was about seven, I painted some rocks and then walked down Creston Street to Mrs. McHugh’s house. She was always giving us kids in the Westnedge Hill neighborhood candy and I wanted to give her something. “Rocks for sale,” I told her when she appeared. I mistakenly thought that “for sale” meant “free.” She gave me a quarter and after that I knocked on a lot of doors. I made a slew of money that day, maybe three or four dollars, and realized that words matter. When I returned home, I also learned that it is bad business to take money for rocks. My mother was quite upset and sent me back outside to return all the money. At that moment, Missy Martin came flying around the corner on her bike. As I couldn’t remember who gave me what, I just gave it all to Missy Martin. She took it, no questions asked. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker. As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? You not only have to have a thick shell, but you have to be steadfast and persevere to be a writer. So I would choose a turtle. I have always loved them. In fact, one of the first things I remember writing about involved turtles. What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? “This family is a gold mine of stories,” my mother has told me throughout the years. I’m glad I finally listened to her and wrote Kissing the World Goodbye. So to my family members whom I unapologetically mined for this book, I owe them a copy of Kissing the World Goodbye. Al Haley is the nonfiction editor of Concho River Review. When he accepted the essay which also is the title of the book, he said of my sister, “She may be one of the best things that could happen to a writer and you get to be sisters to boot!” He’s right, and my sister probably deserves two copies. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? I have one unpublished 25,000-word manuscript that is geared to middle school readers who enjoy edgy fiction. While I have no half-finished books, I’m working on a poetry book about saints that is almost finished. I’ve also been chiseling away at another book but haven’t reached the half-way point with that one. What does literary success look like to you? Being able to write. Period. Krishna said something like, “You have a right to your labor, but not to the fruits of your labor.” Okay, now that’s weird. Krishna ended up surprising me and slipping into my book (the “Butter Love” essay) and now he’s making an appearance in this interview! What is going on? What’s the best way to market your books? I’ll let you know once this book becomes a best-seller. What did you edit out of this book? Some swear words. My sister has quite a mouth on her. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? I’d be a hairstylist, funeral director, or a brick pointer. Books by Jennifer ClarkIf you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make?
It seems most writers, or at least the twentieth century sort I’m familiar with, have a tendency to put off dinner in favor of a prolonged cocktail hour. So maybe not so much cooking, but mixing and pouring… That said, I’d love to chat with Paul Theroux. He’s been everywhere and written so much and so eloquently. As for all the dead ones, nah. They’d likely resent being dragged back to this overheated realm just to hang out with me. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? I’m not sure anything about the writing process scares me, per se, but failing to do justice to a great character or idea is certainly a worry: bobbling what should’ve been a slam-dunk, I mean. To combat this, I remind myself that writing is revision, and that time isn’t always the enemy. What doesn’t quite work today may well find its natural footing tomorrow. What books are on your nightstand? The Rock Cycle: Essays by Kevin Honold American Copper by Shann Ray Delights & Shadows by Ted Kooser Having and Being Had by Eula Biss Favorite punctuation mark? Why? As a writer of nonfiction who seeks to gain new understanding of the world as observer and participant, I’d have to go with the question mark, as it succinctly embodies the form. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? Unfortunately, there are too many neglected books to name. As a kid, I was obsessed with basketball and being an athlete. It wasn’t until all of that ended that I became a dedicated reader. On the plus side, the discipline that you learn playing sports is good training for being a writer. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? The coffee-maker, first off. But also the beer fridge. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? Abandon all hope, ye who enter here…? No, just kidding. But if aspiring writers have the correct mindset, they won’t put much stock in easy inspiration. Does writing energize or exhaust you? Both. The energized feeling is wonderful, that buzz of flowing words, the escape into the self. But the exhausting part is trickier. It never lets up, even as you improve. The reason? Because to continue improving as a writer, you have to push your boundaries and constantly work at the edge of your talent. So even though you have gotten demonstrably better, the act of writing never gets much easier. What are common traps for aspiring writers? Booze, most notoriously. That and material ambitions. And not reading enough, or trying to duck the classics, the difficult and time-consuming stuff. What is your writing Kryptonite? Like most writers, my writing Kryptonite is all the non-writing work that’s necessary to support my writing habit. Then again, that stuff is also grist for the mill. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? No. I’m skeptical of the diagnosis. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? Probably not, or at least not a writer of quality fiction or memoir. That’s not to say a writer couldn’t be very reserved, very private, but genuinely cold? I doubt it. Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book? Interesting question, as it seems that one author writing multiple books, unless those books were vastly different in subject and scope, almost couldn’t help but leave some overlap, some connections. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? Growing up, my parents operated and published a small-town newspaper in the rural Midwest, and it seemed our neighbors were always either chuckling over my mother’s lighthearted column about our home life, or cursing about my father’s hardheaded political editorials. So I’ve always known that words have power, though I view it somewhat differently now, more personally. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? I don’t know if we can rightly call Russell Banks under-appreciated, considering his name is known and he publishes widely, but his novel Continental Drift should be read by more people. It’s extraordinary. As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? A black cat, as these animals seem to keep finding their way into my life. What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? Anonymity, for sure. And quite possibly a beer and a private talk, depending. But not much else. Fiction is fiction; end of story. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? Three currently, sadly, crushingly. What does literary success look like to you? That’s somewhat difficult to answer amid a wider culture that seems to view writing books as an esoteric hobby at best, not to mention a publishing industry with ever-narrower tastes and ever-tightening purse strings. If pressed, I’d point to the internal. If you’re consistently writing and publishing, and if you’re proud of your work line-by-line and as a whole, that’s success. What did you edit out of this book? A number of accounts of visits to very good breweries, where unfortunately no one did or said anything particularly weird, shocking, or funny, and also a ton of fascinating stuff from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy that I couldn’t figure out how to shoehorn in. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? Well, I write and I work, so I suppose I’d continue to be a teacher and a bartender, though probably a less interesting, less dynamic version of both. Without writing, the real question would be: how in the hell to spend my mornings? If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make?
The ghost of Clarice Lispector. Although, whatever I make, she rejects. So, we call out for delivery and she orders something -- apple turnovers -- that aren’t on the menu, and lots of them! The restaurant is terrified, but they comply. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? That the thing will suck, after I’ve written it, and after I’ve revised it. I often combat my fears by drinking a stout or two. In all seriousness, there is no combatting this particular fear -- except to keep on writing. The more chances you give yourself -- to not suck -- the greater your chances are of not sucking. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? I can’t answer this question honestly. The safe answer would be the character Anna Karenina. Is that crazy or what? Maybe Faye Greener from The Day of the Locust. The fiction writer Lucia Berlin, maybe. There is a living writer, (at least I think she’s still alive), who nearly jumped off my old rooftop, but I can’t say what her name is, fml. What books are on your nightstand? Margaret Walker’s novel Jubilee. Sandra Simonds’ poetry collection Warsaw Bikini. A good friend sent me some Japanese novels. Carl Sandburg’s folk music collection The American Songbag. Well, that’s not quite true. It’s a PDF, that’s on my computer, which is on my nightstand. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? The parentheses because they’re very suggestive. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? There were quite a few. MacBeth was one. I read it later. It’s a blast. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? I couldn’t think of anything and then for some reason my mind said “Potato masher.” Why not? Love the “puree.” If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? That’s a lot of mirrors. I’d probably keep it short, to save time: “You Are Closer Than You Actually Appear.” Does writing energize or exhaust you? Writing is exhausting, but revision is energizing. What are common traps for aspiring writers? Defensiveness. Especially the one that goes “This really happened.” Just because it may have transpired doesn’t necessarily make it a good piece of writing. What is your writing Kryptonite? My colossal weakness for mischief-making. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? No. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? Yes and no. Yes, because they could feel those emotions for, say, a “colder” thing like language, which would actually make language warm, ha ha. But if they felt no emotions at all, that would be pretty tough. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? I used to know only, like, poets and fiction writers. But in the past couple years, I’ve become friends with people who’ve written scholarship books, and this form of writing turns out to be incredibly difficult and admirable. But to answer the question, let’s take my friend Rod Smith, the nutty experimental poet. The key thing about Rod, though, is that every so often, he gets serious and it’s surprising, and effective. He says “doot doo” and he sneaks up on you, and gets you good. Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book? Each book has to stand on its own. Occasionally, you need to pick it up and fend off some kind of avant garde attack. It’s good to have a sturdy book, in hand. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? A first book is a real treasure, because it’s amazing to have something in your hands, to show friends and family. At the same time, you put yourself out there, and if it’s not perfect, which it isn’t, you’re sort of baring your soul, publicly. So, what happens is, the next books become a quest to master the form of the book, if that’s even possible. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? My mind said things like Coltrane records and fresh ginger. Wtf? You’d have to say Coltrane records, but ginger is very good, mmmmm. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? Virtually all of them. The thing is, you have to be skeptical, because if you do the opposite, if you just love everything, then you might as well strip off your clothes and run amok in the middle of the big city. Perhaps it was the language poets, though, most of all. I thought that was bullshit at first, but then some of the writing really struck me as being -- precisely the kind of thing -- that enables language to evolve. And that really is the work of poetry. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? Well, it’s mostly about rejection. I mean, the language of rejection is powerful. Debilitating, really, but it’s also powerful to agitate against rejection. Lots of electricity in that dynamic. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? That’s a tough one. Maybe Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan? As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? The fox. I actually have a fox friend. During the pandemic, this happened. She used to wait for me every evening when I’d go out for a run or a walk. She’d just be waiting near the woods, with that big tail curled behind her. Just brilliant stuff. And then we’d jog along together for a little while until she drifted off. Once, I got within a few feet of her and she nibbled my hand, briefly. Magic. What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? Absolutely nothing, hahahaha. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? Too many to count. Most writers are like this. You’ve just got to be practical and keep pressing forward, take chunks of this and bits of that, and fashion it all together in the best combinations. “Be ruthless in your practicality.” What does literary success look like to you? Too many people associate success with money and in the end that is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. The vast majority of big money books really blow, but I guess the authors are comfortable. The answer is -- a risk-taking book that’s really tight. Very hard to come by. What’s the best way to market your books? Readings. Be a performer! What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex? You start to desire them, romantically. It gets kind of frustrating. What did you edit out of this book? Mostly, what you guys didn’t like. Hahaha. No, I think we dropped some loose language and vague kind of stuff. I really appreciated the feedback! If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? Something that involves robes and lotions. No, in all seriousness, I’d probably be a professional potato masher. |
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