Today Kyle Hemmings talks with us about differences between traditional and experimental fiction, as well as all the beauty and ugliness of the New York club scene.

Tell us about the first story you remember writing.

Okay, it was a story that grew into novel and then I tore it up from frustration. It was called “Dreaming with Your Eyes Open.” A very small excerpt from it survived and was pubbed in Rose and Thorn around 2006. It concerned these two brothers, very dissimilar, one artistic and sensitive, the other, a beach boy chick magnet. Over time, the artistic, introverted one discovers his older brother might have killed a girl their father was secretly dating. My first published story was one called Fish Bowl in Verbsap in 2005. It was about a quadriplegic living alone in an apartment. He was in love with a new tenant and jealous of her boyfriend.

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It is like water everywhere. You opened my mouth and put in something that tasted bad. Now it is like water everywhere. It is gray and it no longer hurts. I cannot feel my legs or my tongue. I am in nothing but water.

There was the time when all the water was falling and the loud noises were in the sky. I was afraid, as I always am when the loud noises shake the place where I live. There was one noise that was so loud. As I hid in a dark place, the noise and the light that comes with it crackled in my fur. My fur jumped from my body and stood all around me.

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These were plucked especially for you. Tonight, at the table, after the mash taters and stuff leftovers, the hardened rolls and thick gravy, the slimy pineappled ham, pumpkin pie and whatnot, do me a favor and think of the bird. It’s a special bird that doesn’t come around that often. Only sometimes, and to a few it seems. We salivate at that door, you should know, waiting. Someday. We know. Someday the tickle will be unmistakable, and off we’ll go.

– Everyone at the coffee shop knows he is going away in the morning, and they are all nice to him. The Cajun cook comes out from behind the grill to shake his hand. Ella sits down and talks for a while when she brings their coffees. The regulars are proud of him and wish him luck. Daniel and Juliana leave around ten to go for their last drive. — Lindsay Purves in Anderbo

– After losing his brother, Pascual, my father and family moved to Tijuana and then to L.A.. Little did he know that he relocated his kids from one violent place to another. — Álvaro Huerta in La Bloga

– Dying lungs wheeze. Urine stink fills the room. Reaching for my book, I try imagining how he sees me. Still wearing his nose. Still wearing mom’s cheeks. Still wearing those faggy earrings. — Tom McMillan in Backhand Stories

– I dreamed of swimming across an Olympic pool even though, in waking hours, I cannot swim without inhaling water and choking. In the dream, though, I inhaled and exhaled at the right moments — face above, face below the water and not the other way around. Children played in my racing lane, but I swam around them without scolding them. — Amy Minton in elimae

– He had seen no tunnel or loved ones waiting in the light, perhaps he had not gone far enough, the ceiling had blocked him in, but he knew for certain now that Warren had been right, that death was not really death but a kind of second, better life, and he was eager to see his fallen brothers-in-arms. — Nels Hanson in Sixers Review

When I was 15, my Thanksgiving dinner was a Cornish hen that mysteriously appeared next to the shabby set up I was holed up in. I cooked that little bird on a spit over a fire I started with my first bowdrill coal. Out in Idaho, shivering my brass monkeys off with nothing but sagebrush and a few head of cattle in sight. One steer was frozen, tongue iced to the hard dirt. Those lonesome few days took me back to the Louis L’Amour books of my aught years with a capgun six shooter. It was “splendid isolation.”

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Here’s the final trailer for Ethel Rohan’s CUT THROUGH THE BONE, scheduled for release on 12/1/10. If you haven’t ordered your copy yet, today you have the chance to get one for free.

Toward the end of the trailer, Ethel describes why she writes. The first five people to correctly finish the following quote win a copy of Ethel’s debut collection of short fiction.

Here you go:

“I write to make sense of the strange. To know people. To piece things together and . . .”

Email the full quote. If you’re one of the first five, you’ve got yourself a freebie.