Months back, I read and thoroughly enjoyed Lori Ostlund’s short story “Upon Completion of Baldness” in Hobart 10. I mentioned Lori’s excellent story on my blog and, to my great surprise and delight, she contacted me. We’ve exchanged several emails since and I remain touched by her generous support and encouragement. Last month, I had the great honor of reading alongside Lori at Why There Are Words. While we waited for our turn at the podium, we shared a tiny couch together. Our shoulders touched. I can only continue to hope, pray, that some of her magic, her brilliance, might have rubbed off on me. — Ethel Rohan

Writing-wise, where are you now?  Where are you going?

My first book, a short story collection that I worked on for probably ten years, came out in October of 2009.  As I was working on that, I also started work on a novel, tentatively entitled After the Parade, which I am now trying to finish.  I put it away for a couple of years because I couldn’t figure out the arc, but I think that I’ve finally figured out some things about arc, structure, tension, as they relate to novels. Because I love writing stories (and love the feeling of completing something), I am also working on a second story collection and making notes here and there for a second novel, entitled The Proprietresses, which is based on the eight years that my partner and I owned an Asian furniture store in New Mexico.

What informs your creative process? How do you keep inspired?

Perhaps because I grew up in a very small, isolated town in Minnesota, travel has always been very important to me as a person and a writer.  I don’t generally like to talk about the writing process with others, but I do like when people — students, friends, strangers in seedy bars — tell me stories, and I especially like when they don’t tell me too much; if I know the whole story, I find myself hewing to the details too closely, and I sometimes forget how to break free and make the story my own.

I keep a little book that I try to write things down in, and I go to this book when I’m stuck or need inspiration. For example, several years ago, my brother and his wife came to visit me and my partner. We all four are teachers, so we talked about teaching the whole time. Along the way, my brother, who teaches middle-school math, told me the following story about a colleague: when the boys pummel each other and rough house during class instead of paying attention, this colleague makes them sit for the entire class period holding hands. I was shocked and intrigued by this, and included it in my notebook along with a few other anecdotes supplied by my brother and my partner.  I had also jotted down something one of my Korean students told me, that in Korea ‘ear wax’ is called ‘ear rice.’  This ‘ear rice’ became a starting point for the narrator of “Dr. Deneau’s Punishment,” a story about a cranky math teacher who punishes his students by making them hold hands.

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It's Always Sunny in Seattle

On a regular basis, we here in the Northwest are subjected to great injustices. The rain, for instance. Or, more to the point, the fact that the sky prefers to wear a soggy woolen sweater instead of a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses and Bahama jams. While the rest of the country is talking about the beach and eating mafugin hot dogs, we’re simmering soup and trying to keep our pale complexion from turning translucent. What the feck. At any rate, we’ll do our best to compensate, coloring our days with something, anything, resembling the sun. Here’s today’s batch of shiny morsels: Geoffrey Hill is the new professor of poetry at Oxford. Shine on, right? At least for him. But what about all the editors out there, what have they got to bask in? Visit the Review of Higher Education for a deserved slice of sunshine pie. Anis Shivani calls the Best American Poetry series a big load of stormy weather, video games catch their rays in Salon, and Eugenides’s novel illuminates some memorable questions in Fiar. Elsewhere, a writer/photographer highlights his dad with a pretty new book, and Gizmodo gives us a glimpse at some enviable bookshelves. Here comes the sun. — Kevin Murphy

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