One Time All I Wanted is Dark Sky’s first ebook-only title. I sat down with One Time‘s author Nicolle Elizabeth over a series of emails to talk about Interpol, brake stands in front of crowded porches, and holding grudges.

Could you introduce me to One Time All I Wanted?

I wanted to say as much as I could, in as direct and economically simplistic a way for each piece included. I looked at each piece as its own separate short story.

Is there a particular order to the recollections in the book?

Yes and no. When I was writing it, I wonder if one memory or story led to another linearly but then later, as is sometimes the way with sentences in my longer pieces, I’ll be like, in the middle of something else, and look up and think, “Oh wait I forgot to add something,” and then another sentence will come. I often write short stories only after knowing the first sentence. I then will think on that one sentence for like, a really, really long time. A year maybe. It’s like meditating on something in a way. Then I build and write or deconstruct and edit from there. From an ordering standpoint, some of the pieces were moved around a bit from the Dark Sky editors, and I trusted them entirely, and am glad that I did because I feel like they treated me like I was this really fragile thin glass snowglobe in transit, like, they respected and cared and tried to help me harvest drafts which could be as could as they could be.

What made you choose to write this book?

Actually, I didn’t. I was in the middle of this moving process involving selling my house, and I was relocating down south for a semester and starting this new job and completely alone and I kept getting lost while driving and sometimes I would go back to my apartment, and I would write these first person memory perspective posts on my Facebook page. Some were true some were complete exaggerations. I have this really odd way of processing things, I always have, and sometimes I have to re-work them out while writing. Not always, sometimes it’s not essay, it’s straight fiction. But for example like let’s say I was carrying home a tray of water bottles from the grocery store, maybe the way I would express this would come out in my head something like, “Walked for centuries, melting snow in water jugs. Neck carries the weight,” or something. So I was posting these things, I think because of what I was going through, as a way to comfort myself in memory, and honestly as a way to amuse myself. Then like, a hundred people a day would like these mini stories. I got notes from four different publishers asking if I would submit some of them individually or as a series and I was like, “Sheesh guys, I dunno.” really it was comforting in a way to hear that other people were taking comfort in my misery or something. Then Brian Carr from Dark Sky messaged me and he asked, “What are these?” and I answered him, “They’re Facebook posts,” and he said, “These are more than that. Write me one hundred of these.” I then went through the process of archiving them over the three months I had been writing them out, and then began to write them out deeper, and go in and edit some, and what I started to realize was, “Wow if this is actually my life, what a sad girl I am.” I told him yes I would, for him I would, and then when I got to one hundred I sent them to him as a book, and we all began to edit.

Have you done this style of writing before?

Sort of. When I was in 8th grade I wrote a short fiction story, which was around six sentences or so, about each of my friends and then distributed them at the lunch table to each friend. They were “my artistic vision through observation.” Nobody talked to me for a week. I went through this repetition phase of linked flash pieces while working on a chapbook in 2006 and this writer I was working under said to me, “Oh you have got to read Joe Brainard.” She was right, I totally was writing like him and didn’t even know he existed. Then I participated in this. Then I wrote this, and here we are. I mean I wrote other stuff too but these are the similar ones I guess.

“i spent an entire year skateboarding to work across the Williamsburg bridge while listening to Interpol’s “Turn On the Bright Lights” on my head- phones because even though bro dude preppy sports types seem to love that album, it was a really good album.” This really is a good album – favorite song?

Right? It is such a great album. It got all this attention from the strangest pop amalgamation but who cares it was a great album. What this piece is about, really, is that I had moved to New York to go to school for more writing and to be a writer in New York instead of in my random notebooks, and you know what, a lot of it was a really tough experience for me. I wasn’t happy. I was broke, I didn’t really fit in, I was working three jobs and taking two hour long subway rides from the ghetto in Brooklyn to get to campus, which was in basically a different state. Everything in my life was a disaster. I felt like I was losing parts of myself instead of learning them. So, I would skate over the bridge, and listen to sad melodramatic music and feel terrible for myself. I love the entire album and I think I was listening to it in a way I found particularly miserable and humorous because to me when someone says the words “Turn On The Bright Lights” I think of someone waiting for something to happen, asking for change. “She swears, I must pray for the female,” etc.

One entertaining aspect of the book is the mix of fiction and reality and wondering which is which as you read. What made you decide to include both?

Well thanks Seth, that is so nice to hear that you believe all of these. I’m told fiction is best if people are actually buying it.

“one time i learned how to say, “build a bridge and get over yourself,” in ten languages. i then spent time thinking about the architectural integrity of different bridges. there were things to take into account, such as materials used, such as climate, such as landscape, such as tradition. some bridges have water running under them and some don’t.” Is the water under these bridges standing or nonexistent?

Oh no, I’m a grudge holder. I’m working on that though, more water for all. More forgiveness.

What about the two bridges you walked across to tell someone to leave you alone?

I am the queen of making an asshole out of myself to tell someone to stop making an asshole out of me.

There’s an honesty in what I imagine to be some of the fictional “recollections” that makes me wonder if, on some level, everything in the book is true. Is this accurate?

I’m really moved that you’re thinking that.

“one time i thought i’d impress a guy by doing a brake stand on my bike when riding up to the party house because he was out on the front porch but i ended up falling over and his girlfriend came running out to help me. she looked really beautiful in the streetlight. her hair smelled like coconuts.” How was the party?

It was awful I ended up drinking too much and getting carried by my friend back to his apartment where I then puked in his stairwell while his roommate tried to make out with me and then when I went back to the party house in the morning to get my bike from the front fence it was locked up to, someone had stolen only my fender. Who does that?

If the “i” in each of these stories is you, is the “you” in them the same person? Is the “you” even a person?

The “i” for sure is me, and i have been in a lot of these situations, by the way, in one way or another, to clarify your question about truths earlier. The “you” is a lot of different people. I think each you is a different person, maybe.

Tell me about the town square and the fiery torches.

Oh honey one time I was on this treadmill and this scary lady I’ve never met before goes I’ve read your writing I know everything about you then she was levitating above me on the treadmill and making the buttons go faster and I was like I am falling someone please help me and then all these people were like we hope you die.

Brett DeFries’s poems appear in the fall Web issue of Dark Sky Magazine. Here, Brett gives us a brief look at Ezekiel, talking seeds, and why heaven may or may not be polluted water.

Could you introduce me to Ezekiel?

As a collection, Ezekiel is a book length poem series. As the speaker in the collection, Ezekiel is someone nearly unable to cope with every day sense experience. Color is sometimes ecstasy and other times hell. Ezekiel is a victim of hauntings, and dogs are allergic to him. He is friend to Simon, son to his mother, client to Sasha, and burden and lover to Monica. He often confuses one relationship with the other, and sometimes he forgets his roles altogether.

Why is heaven “a dirty bowl of water?”

I’m not sure it is, and neither is Ezekiel, though if we were dogs, we might believe such a thing. From my own observations, though, I can say that as water is revealed to (some of) us, it is not the purity it stands for. If heaven is a revelation of world in time—and why not—then heaven is not remote from terror or soil or drought or spit. Instead heaven is worsened or improved by what populates it.

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Lots of times people on the Internet say they know people but really they don’t because they never meet them. Or maybe this is the future now and from here the only way we know people is on the Internet. Cancel out both forms of knowing and you have the standard interview. In this online interview world one presents questions and one presents answers and some information is shared and people in the comments say “great interview” but really it’s all bull shit.

This interview here, with me and Giancarlo DiTrapano, it may be bull shit or it may be not or it may mean that now we know each other, for better or worse, Internet like or in the real. Either way, Gian is all right in my book. He writes his thoughts strong and publishes the good shit and speaks the truth proper. Today he is offering up words on death, sex, booze, growing up West Virginia and why some writers are like rockets. Take your seats. You may get to know him now if you feel like it.

Let’s get right down to the dirty — childhood. What was yours like? What’s your worst memory from back then?

I grew up on the Kanawha River in Charleston, West Virginia, a part of a pretty functional family. Great parents, the normal luxuries. My dad used to give me vocabulary quizzes every Sunday, so I thank/blame him for my obsession with reading/writing. Mostly all of my youth went smoothly until my nineteen-year-old brother was killed in a car accident on a Miami highway. Then, everyone went kind of nuts. I’d say that was the worst thing about my childhood, the thing that caused the most sadness and fracture. I’m not sure if my brother’s death made any of us stronger, but we recovered from it enough. Though his death was ultimately a tragic and terrible event, his passing sparked in me an obsession over many things: death, dying young, teen idols, all that. At one point, and I hear this is pretty common, I thought I would die before reaching nineteen. That aside, I couldn’t have asked for a better childhood. I’m not sure I could have gone on living in West Virginia past high school though. I fit in fine and all, but I never felt like I really belonged there. This makes me feel like a fraud sometimes, and it’s hard to admit, but it’s just fucking true. I wish I had all of that good Breece D’J Pancake Appalachian spirit in me, but I don’t. Sometimes I think I just don’t have it in me yet, and that it’ll one day come to me, like catching a flu, but I won’t count on it. Anyway, for now, and thank God, we have Scott McClanahan for that. I passed onto Scott my duties of reporting from the holy spirit of Appalachia the first time I heard him read. I knew I’d never be able to do it as well he does.

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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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