I reached out to Corey Mesler and asked him to write a little bit about his work in the latest print issue of Dark Sky Magazine. Here is what he said:

I have a series of poems about The Mountain. What does The Mountain mean to me? It means height. It means chutzpa. It means aspiration. It means fearlessness. I come to The Mountain with hat in hand. Some days I come to the mountain with my head in hand.

Sometimes The Mountain talks to me. It tells me things that later become poems. It speaks to me the way the brown cardinal at the birdfeeder does. It speaks to me the way sheet lightning speaks. It tells me the same kinds of secrets known by the seas, the winds, the dunes, the worms, the deep woods.

I am a writer because I have to observe. Because I want to observe, because observation is a calm central point, a calm from the concentration that goes beyond concentration. I want to understand what I see and I fall short always. I fall short in my ability to concentrate, and to ignore concentration. I fall short of my own desires. I fall short of what I expect to be as father, son, lover, friend, writer. I fall short of all my goals.

The Mountain is one goal. The other goals are hidden. They are behind The Mountain. As collaboration I offer this thought from Flann O’Brien: “It were better for a man to die on the mountain from celestial water than to live at home famished in the centre of the plain.”

Corey’s poem, “More Noise About the Mountain” appears in Dark Sky’s latest print issue.

Ben Gwin’s “Inpatient” was pulled from his work-in-progress novel, Clean Time, and published in Issue 12 of Dark Sky Magazine. Here, I talk with Ben about Ronald Reagan, American voyeurism, and finishing a project five years in the making.

So let’s talk about “Inpatient.” I’m especially fascinated with playing around with simulacra/simulation reality TV theme. What was the inspiration for the story?

It’s an excerpt actually from a novel I’m writing called Clean Time. It was also my masters thesis, which won the Best Thesis in Fiction Award at Chatham. I was really happy with that. I worked really hard on it. My main character, Ronald Reagan Middleton, has a drug problem and he winds up in rehab on this reality TV show for a portion of the novel. He meets this girl Althea who he’s laying with in the dirt there. This part was to develop her character specifically and hopefully Ronald Reagan’s as well and, you know, to move the plot ahead, to complicate their relationship because they are about to try to… um, escape from rehab. I wanted to try to have as much conflict in that scene as I could… as far as them trying to communicate. One of the themes of the work is, you know, how we present ourselves… Not just drug addicts, but I guess especially drug addicts… Presenting ourselves one way, you know, putting on a show for people and then you know, really being another way.

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[Ed Note: This interview was posted a couple of months back, but since Ryan is making some news, I figured it was timely to repost it today. Enjoy, and congratulations to Ryan!]

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Ryan Call’s debut collection, The Weather Stations, is forthcoming from Caketrain and if you haven’t pre-ordered it, you’re performing a disservice to yourself. Today, we talk with him about skyless worlds, what it’s like behind the scenes at HTMLGIANT, and what happens when our personal lies about the reality of our deaths begin to unravel.

Tell us a bit about yourself. Where are you from? What fires you up? What makes you sad?

I don’t really think of myself as being from anywhere. I was born on Hill Air Force Base in Utah, lived there for maybe a year or two while my father flew F-16s; my sister was also born there a year later, and then we moved to Maryland when my father left active duty to fly for the airlines. We lived in Chattanooga, Tennessee, beginning the summer before my 6th grade; my parents still live there. Since then, I’ve lived in Memphis, northern Virginia, and now Houston, which seems to be the place that my wife and I have settled. I’m not a typical Air Force brat who can claim to have moved every year as a child, but I think it was enough to keep me from feeling sure of where I’m from. As a result, I’m from, probably, not a place, but a family.

Usually I feel pretty calm, though it still happens that I get intensely emotional about things. More often, I get happy in a calm way. This usually happens when I think about being with my wife, about hopefully living with her for a long time, about reading my favorite books, working on my writing, being with friends, my family.

I also get sad a lot. I get sad when I think about my childhood, not because I had a bad childhood, but because I’ve since left that world and cannot get back there. I’m very susceptible to nostalgic sadness, I suppose. Recently, I’ve been taken with random moments of sadness, which usually come about because I’ve somehow remembered that I will die, and my wife will die, and my family will die, and other people I love will die. I get sad when I think about that, about not being able to be with them. Something I wonder about, though, is how this sadness is a kind of anticipatory sadness; I’m frightened to experience how the emotion will shift once there’s physical cause for its existence in my body.

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The internet has created the two most powerful forces in publishing today. But it comes with merits and faults. Beyond destroying independent publishers, privacy is one of the foremost contentious issues in the cyber universe. This is where Baudelaire enters the discussion. Before Facebook and Twitter, one had to share one’s letters for the big reveal. The Stranger offers another angle on Hemingway’s, while The Washington Post examines Beckett’s status updates of yore. You probably read about escaped wild animals on the internet or did you read The Ridge? And hey, why don’t we all go streaming with Pauline Kael.

We brought in four new editors to help us run the magazine arm of Dark Sky. Additionally, we decided to change our publishing schedule. Below, we try to figure out just what the hell is going on. Gabe Durham, our new magazine editor, gets things started.

Gabe Durham: Besides the sheer quality of the work, how have you and Brian attempted to set the magazine apart?

Kevin Murphy: By being unpredictable. I love being surprised by the way an issue comes together, in terms of the contributors and the work we publish. Lots of decisions come down to personal taste, of course. So I’m sure we’ll be reading different types of stories and such as you bring the magazine into a new chapter, but I’m really confident that as you settle in, your tastes will mesh well with our model of unpredictability, and awesomeness.

Brian Carr: Of course, if it doesn’t we’ll kill you, but we’re nice guys. We’ll let you choose how. So. . . in the event that this doesn’t work out, how would you like to die?

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