Ethel Rohan, Cut Through the Bone, has experienced a busy few weeks with interviews and conversations popping up across the online literary community. Good news, good news. Take a look at these interviews and get to know Ethel, where she’s been and what she’s working on, a little bit better.

Here is her interview in Used Furniture Review:

UFR: First, do you consider yourself a writer? For you, what does that term mean, exactly?

Ethel Rohan: Strange how tricky that little term is: writer. Yes, I do consider myself a writer. Really, it’s a label to facilitate convenience of classification, much like woman, mother, Irish, and so on. The terms help identify and tell some of a person’s story. The bigger story, and truth, behind the term is different for all of us. The written word is my center. Yeah, I’m a writer.

UFR: Your new book, Hard to Say, was recently released from PANK. Can you talk about this book a little? How would you describe it?

Rohan: Hard to Say is a collection of fifteen linked short-short stories that draw heavily on my Irish childhood and some of my worst memories. As I wrote these stories, though, I worked hard at distancing myself from the book’s narrator and her surrounding cast of characters. This felt critical to the fiction and the worth of these stories. Often what actually happened kills a good story.

UFR: What’s so distinct about your stories, I think, is that they’re so honest. When you’re writing a story, how do you find that honesty, that true to life quality? As a writer, how would you describe your voice?

Rohan: I’ll jump first on the last part of this question, if I may. I recently received the following story rejection that I admit amused me: “The story is interesting and strong in the end, but there are several sentences that are awkward or don’t make sense.” Any editor who has ever worked with me knows I’m open to criticism, revision and taking hard, long looks at my work for where I’ve erred and where I can improve. That said, this rejected story is one that fellow writers and editors in my lit group reviewed and supported. I believe in this rejected story and think it very much captures my voice and my writing rhythm. I always write to my own rhythm, lyricism that’s especially evident anytime anyone hears me read my work. I’m also aware that my voice and style can appear awkward and confusing to others. This is the constant struggle for artists, I think: How to stay both true to our unique voice and open to reality checks about the quality and value of the work, particularly in the face of complaint, confusion, and rejection.

I like that you find my stories honest, thank you. That’s not something I consciously do when I write though. Another aside, if I may. A few years back a friend gifted me with a weekend writing retreat in Napa County. While there, I wrote and read from a story where a character mercy-suffocated her dying, demented mother. The following morning at breakfast, another writer confided that after I’d gone to bed the others debated until deep into the night whether the story was fiction or memoir. I didn’t know whether to feel flattered or horrified and spat some of my scrambled eggs. I always write out of a place deep inside my characters, and ultimately out of a place deep inside me. I think readers respond to the honesty of that depth of emotion, and of showing ourselves, in my stories.

UFR: Returning to Hard to Say, the stories revolve around a girl and her family. Did you as an author ever find yourself identifying with the character, or characters? That’s to say, as a fiction writer, how close do you allow yourself to get to your subject matter?

Rohan: It’s quite funny that Hard to Say is such a little book because the personal toll of putting these fifteen short-short stories out into the world has proved enormous. I don’t think I’ll ever write out of myself in the same way or from the same place again. Many of the stories contain actual events and traumas that I’ve never spoken about to anyone. As I mentioned above, I worked hard at gaining distance in the telling of these stories and I very much wanted the work to be fiction versus autobiography—because of my terrible memory, because of a desire to protect others, because of the often limits and dullness of ‘actual events.’

As I wrote these stories I tried to remain outside of the characters and above the scenes, recording everything as it unfolded. To protect myself from reliving past traumas, yes, but also to serve the stories better. I’ve seen many stories ruined by an author who insists on sticking with what ‘really happened.’

As a fiction writer, I allow myself to get very close to and deep down inside my subject matter. I’ve learned, though, that it better serves the work (and the author!) to risk this intimacy with more fully fictionalized subject matter.

UFR: Your first book of stories, Cut Through the Bone has garnered a lot of attention, and was even on the Long List for the 2010 Story Prize. Did you write the book with any sort of expectations in mind?

Rohan: I first wrote the stories individually, without thought of a collection. When I write, my expectation is to deliver the best story I can. It was only when I’d published over eighty stories and recognized the persistence of several preoccupations and obsessions in my work that I realized I had enough material to gather into a cohesive collection, a best of my best at that time, if you will.

UFR: There’s clearly a long, amazing history of Irish literature, and Irish-American literature too. Do you consider yourself to be part of that tradition? If so, why? If not, why not?

Rohan: Honestly, as an emigrant, I often feel caught between cultures. The Irish no longer consider me theirs and Americans don’t consider me red white and blue. It’s whom I consider myself to be that matters, though, and I believe myself to be this very fortunate hybrid of both cultures. When I write, I tap into something very deep inside myself and at that core I’m Irish. Maybe it’s that I write from my beginnings, my anam. I’m fierce in my celebration of Irish and Irish-American literature, both its legacy and its contemporary largesse, but I can’t think about that staggering treasure trove when I write—it would be paralyzing.

UFR: As a writer, what are you trying to explore? What are asking? What are you looking to find?

Rohan: I am trying to explore us. I never plot or outline when I write. Never. I simply start and I am always grateful for—and astounded by—where the words take me. I always look to find the best story I can tell.

………………………………………………………………………………

Here, David Hoenigman from Word Riot interviews Ethel:

How has your environment/upbringing colored your writing?

My upbringing sometimes felt like riding a naked wild horse, with only its harsh mane to hold onto. I’d get so afraid on those gallops I’d let go of the horse and hit the ground hard. I can still sometimes hear the clop of my childhood and feel the build of hooves till they’re pounding.

When and why did you begin writing?

Sometimes a bruise is so lovely you don’t want it to go. Often, the worse the injury the more spectacular the bruise. It can feel good to press and squeeze a bruise, even though it hurts. No two bruises are the same and their range of shapes and colors seem limitless. Sometimes bruises disappear but they remain. Our bodies and minds are a brutal beautiful collage of the memory of bruises. Bruises, like stones, are never silent. As a child, I wrote to put bruises on the page. I still do.

Is there a message in your work that you want readers to grasp?

I’d rather drive tacks through my palms than intend to have a message in my work that I want readers to grasp.

What is the most misunderstood aspect of your work?

That my stories are too familiar. Bananas are familiar too, but each is unique and fascinating. Banana skins are green, yellow, spotted, brown, and black. Banana flesh is yellow-white and spined with brown-black. In bunches, bananas are a sun, bouquet, bowl, band of creatures–each with a single black eye. Alone, a banana is a brooch, hairband, mustache, slice of jaundiced moon. Bananas are hard and soft, smooth and ridged. Part-peeled, a banana is a flower. Fully-peeled, a banana is an albino slug. We haven’t yet invented the language to describe the taste of a banana. Bananas, like everyday stories, are sometimes mistaken as ordinary.

What projects are you currently working on?

I’m in this cave so long now with a short story collection titled Goodnight Nobody and a novel titled Kisses With Teeth, I’m crusted with bat droppings. Won’t some terrific publisher somewhere please turn these manuscripts into real, hold-to-my-chest books and let me out of the foul dark.

We ask him some questions.

Michael Kimball, Adam Robinson, Double Dagger, Dan Deacon, Joseph Young, Mary Pulcinella, Chris Toll, Joan Sullivan, Shaun Preston, Jamie Gaughran Perez, Margaret Gebauer, Rupert Wondoloski, and Peter with the Moustache all make cameos.

Enjoy!

Alan Rossi’s story, “Blackberries,” appears in Issue 15. Here he discusses the story, the fruit, and tells us not to take field trips.

“Black or white, it didn’t matter, they were all pale.” Do you think this relates to an innocence, a lack of experience?

I think that’s a really cool way of seeing it. I can’t say exactly what I meant by this line because I don’t remember writing it. I remember seeing it many times when I was again looking over and working the thing, but I don’t remember writing it. I see it as, yes: that these little beings haven’t been out in the world. Maybe better: they are in the world but don’t know it. They are in the world but asleep to it.

Why do you think the experience leaves everyone “aching to be fed again” ?

This is how all beings are, human or no. And I don’t really know what human means, but you know, people we typically call human who are walking around and eating blackberries and stuff. We are not only wanting and desiring all the time, but many of us are aching with want, painfully wanting. The thing with the blackberries, it may be a small thing, but it’s also an extreme (in that it’s different, new) experience and many extreme experiences, if experienced in some way as good, are one that leaves tracks in the brain that lead to more more more. Wanting it again and again and again.

The hand of the child at the end is “sticky, warm.” Does this relate to the children walking away changed by the blackberry bush?

Yes, change, but also cycle, also circle. It is the step into needing needlessly. The residue of the need, always there now. It is another thing to want, a thing to have hunger over. If they are changed in any way, it is that they want more now. The blackberry bush I think is the object of wanting which intensifies the wanting when the thing wanted is gone, which is a difficulty because blackberries aren’t easy to find the wild dreamy world.

Does the teacher ache to feed again?

He believes he’s aware that one taste is enough, he’s aware of this. And yet he isn’t able to do anything with this awareness. An awareness of the want is not enough to kill the wanting. You can see that to me all over this piece is wanting, wanting. I don’t know why. I wasn’t thinking wanting when I wrote it. The teacher has a kind of sickness, a kind of need for control though he doesn’t know why, control of the kids and their impulses, yet he can do nothing with his own.

What do you think was the teacher’s accidental lesson?

Don’t take field trips. I don’t know. I think it’s more how he now knows that whatever he expected to do here, that didn’t happen. In fact, maybe the opposite happened. And what he expected and the opposite are both uncertain in my mind and unknown in some way for the teacher.

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.

Let’s talk about talking seeds. Why do they call out to Ezekiel?

I wish I knew why seeds called anywhere at all. I can say that Ezekiel is obsessed with gardens, whose colors and accelerated cycles overwhelm him. They also remind him of his own origins. It is possible, too, that the seeds don’t call out at all, but instead fill the space that her calling out has left. They call IN once his name is gone.

How do these two poems fit in with Ezekiel as a whole?

Throughout Ezekiel, Ezekiel is fighting against himself to be worthy of Monica, who is herself imperfect. Also central to the collection is THE FACE, both looming and providential. Ezekiel is best to Monica when he doesn’t sense the presence of THE FACE, though it is present almost always to his senses.

What is Ezekiel’s sadness? What does he struggle with?

Part of Ezekiel’s sadness results from the slow realization that his sadness is not as unique as he thinks. His later sadness results from a similar realization that he contributes to the sadness of others. Ezekiel struggles to see beyond VISION to the OTHER independent of his sight.

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.

Just now, instead of the story above, I almost wrote about my innocence being compromised in the locker room of a YMCA by one of the staff. This event had been fully forgotten until about six or seven years ago. All of a sudden, that little pocket of my memory was jarred somehow and revealed it to me in great detail. I can still see the guy’s dick in my face. I decided not to call this my worst memory because it doesn’t seem like a bad memory to me. I mean I don’t want it to sound like I was traumatized and repressed it. I think I just forgot about it happening. He was this big bear guy, and that’s the type of guy I’m now into, so if he had anything to do with the development of my sexuality, I am much more grateful for it than vindictive. Even though the congress of a fifty-year-old man and a pre-teen is wrong in so many ways, I look back on it and like, get a semi. I guess most people would consider this a “worst memory,” it’s just that I don’t look at it like that. God, hilarious how damaged that makes me sound.

Scott McClanahan is the shit. I haven’t seen him read live, but I’ve watched videos. The man is touched. I imagine him taking his storytelling-delivery-performance-thing to a ridiculous level, like to a mega-church where he’s preaching to the masses but all he’s doing is reciting his stories and all the people are just like, Praise Jesus. Here’s a $50.

Tyrant Books is publishing him soon, yes? What’s the news on that? Also, you say you wish you had more of the Appalachian spirit in you, and that Scott has it, and now you guys are working together. Is that a full-circle type of deal that you were aware of going in, or did you realize it after the fact and then say, Praise Jesus, I’m coming home?

Yes, Tyrant Books is publishing Hill William from Scott next year, hopefully by early fall. We’ve been working on it for a while now. I’ll take some things off the text and make an embarrassing mess, then send it back for him to repair. Scott is very open to suggestions, but not a pushover, which is good. I just thought of this, but from my answer to the last question, one might draw the conclusion that I am maybe using Scott’s West Virginuosity to weasel my own shit in as editor and publisher of his work. I honestly hadn’t thought about that until now, but damn, it doesn’t sound too far off. That, and the fact that I greatly admire the guy, admire his work. He was just in the city. He was just here, we hung out, and after we were done saying goodbye on the sidewalk in front of where he was staying, I yelled up to him that I loved him as he went up the hotel steps. I think he said he loved me back. But, you know, that’s just where we are. Earlier, we’d sat on a couch in the bar next to a fireplace with a fire going in it. I drank screwdrivers and Scott didn’t drink because he had a cold. Wait, is this interview about fucking McClanahan or is it about me?

Recently you said that too often you feel censored on Twitter. That’s interesting because, obviously, engaging online with a removed audience should be a liberating experience, one where anything can be said, or suggested. Is your censorship applied personally, or do you feel like, as a publisher, you need to keep up appearances? Then again, I wouldn’t necessarily call your Twitter feed censored: “Sometimes you need to say, ‘Wash your ass,’ to someone in a hurry. By dropping the ‘your’ you can save time without losing any effect.” In an uncensored world, what would that Tweet really say?

I guess the tweet about me censoring myself was half-true. Obviously, as you noted in the question above and the sample tweet you gave, I pretty much let it fly on there. But there are a lot of tweets that I just won’t tweet, or that I delete shortly after they’ve been tweeted, because I think they are too offensive or weird or possibly alarming. I mean, the things I say are highly unprofessional. There is usually a little humor tucked into each one, but I’m not a comedian. I’m sure a lot of people read my tweets and think, “God, what a fuck up.” Of course, it feels cool to be all, “Fuck you and unfollow me if you can’t take a joke,” but I figure there are some people who might be interested in what I am doing publishing-wise, and who also really don’t care about the sex I am having or my drunken thoughts on God and New York. (I created @tyrantbooks so people have an option.) I do like the personalization of the Tyrant on Twitter though. I think, at its worst, it’s like a little muscle-flexing and me saying, “I am the boss of this shit.” Pretty childish, right? No, it’s totally childish, but I have no idea how long this whole “running my own press” thing will last, so I’m making sure I get the most out of my present position. I’ll be shoveling someone else’s shit one day and may find myself no longer in possession of this endless twitter freedom. I must take full advantage of my endless twitter freedom. Plus, everyone seems so uptight when they’re talking about anything literary and business-related, and I am always wishing everyone would lighten up. Adding a warts-and-all presence to the business side of life feels liberating, I think.

Since we’re talking about Twitter, I should probably mention that I went through a sort of Twitter meltdown recently. One morning the tweets of all of the comedians and jokesters I follow began to make me full-on nauseous. I was following some pretty funny people, but the jokes were just coming in too fast or something and instead of making me laugh, they just made me feel sick. I had to unfollow like ⅔’s of my list. It’s much better now. I don’t know. I thought that was weird. I think about Twitter a lot. The effect that a certain kind of tweet can have, and how Twitter acts as an outlet. Sometimes I feel more proud of a particular tweet than I do of an article or story I’ve written. I often wonder what long-term effects Twitter will have on non-twitter writing. Blasting out a couple of good tweets a day can be pretty satisfying. I wonder if this satisfaction will increase the amount of non-twitter writing (because a writer is encouraged by Twitter), or if it might diminish the amount of non-twitter writing (if a writer is satisfied with just doing tweets). The immediacy of the “audience” and the speedy response time that Twitter brings is unprecedented. I think being alive in the age of it (not to mention Spotify) feels like a miracle.

I live near a bar. The other night some drunken bald dude in a Toyota pickup hit my car. He took off and I am pissed about him hitting my car but then also I am like, shit, if I were wasted I probably would have left too. Talk to me about a fucked up thing you’ve done after drinking your weight in booze?

I had joint custody of an English Bulldog named Tiberius that I’d given my ex-girlfriend for her birthday when we were living in Rome together. An unexpected event caused a problem with me keeping him for two months out of the year, the amount of time we agreed on. She lived in New Orleans and I was already living in New York. One late Friday night after a lot of drinking, Vladimir (this Dominican kid who lives on my block) and I got a taxi to the airport to fly to New Orleans and bring back my dog. When we got down south, I called my ex and told her I had popped up in New Orleans and wanted to drive Tiberius back to New York for my visiting time. She immediately freaked, “You can’t just come here whenever you want and take my dog away.” There was no swaying her. She stopped answering her phone. She wouldn’t answer her doorbell. Vladimir and I drank all weekend with friends, and then Monday morning when I knew she would be at work, we drove to her house. I climbed the property’s wall, “pushed” one of her doors open, and Tiberius jumped into my arms. I passed him over the wall to Vladimir and we started out for New York in a rental car. I guess when she got home from work she called the police and supposedly they were “looking for me” or whatever. After my time with Tiberius was up, I returned him as promised. She refused to allow me to see him until the week before he died. Four years had passed at that point. I guess I told this story because I feel like my mind really had snapped under the weight of booze. This behavior is almost entirely out of character for me.

You mentioned earlier the development of your sexuality. In the answer above, you reference an ex-girlfriend, but these days you’re into guys. I’ve known a couple people who have gone through similar changes and it was kind of absurd to watch. Not in terms of their adjusted sexual preferences, because who cares. But in terms of how these preferences changed their entire outlook, especially the arts. Can you comment on that?

I feel like I was born without a thing in my way. American, male, white, heterosexual, not disfigured, not poor, not dumb. Then I decided to come to terms with all things inside of me I found untrue. Doing this, however, meant relinquishing that sweet-ass pole position in the human race that I’d been born with. As a late-blooming homo (unaware until my twenties), I became a minority practically overnight. It added many new facets to reality. For instance, I was newly eligible to fall victim to hate-crime.

To put myself even further away from the warm gooey center of societal acceptance, it turns out the men I like (often older, often bearded, always big boys) are deemed undesirable in the eyes of most, especially other gay men. Most gay men do not like body hair or fat. It’s like cancer or something. Though I think that trend, the waxed Chelsea boy, is on its way out. I hope I don’t sound like I’m complaining here. I love that I love who I love. That my idea of beauty is so contrary to most others’ idea of beauty feels cool, like it’s a rebellion that began in my genetic make-up, before I was even alive or some shit. I think of my balls as like, avant-garde. It’s completely impossible to say how things would’ve been if I’d lived my life straight, but I feel like if I hadn’t been blessed by the gay hand of the Lord, I’d be unimaginably miserable. I’d make a terrible husband and father of three, and I just think gay people are better than straight people anyway.

But your question is getting at this, I think. There is something about living honestly with your sexuality that gives you courage. It’s safe to be straight, and to “come out” is to subject your self to a lot of hate and ridicule that just wasn’t there before. It was there, but now some of it’s directed right at you. You now have to put up with tons of bullshit, but the payoff is that with your new vulnerability comes a bravery to help you deal. It’s like a gift that you’re given for being yourself, and it feels almost like a superpower. I think when you’re put in a less than safe position, your mind goes wild and extends in different ways in order to survive. That seems like a good thing for anyone, artist or not. Seems like once I opened up to myself about one thing, I just kept opening and opening and could kind of see myself and the world around me in a new light. If channeled correctly, that which comes along with homosexuality can be a constant source of fuel for the heart and imagination. I don’t know. Is that what you meant at all? Talking about sex can be lame, but sometimes it feels like the only thing worth talking about.

Yeah, that’s it exactly. And I guess your answer kind of segues into my final question. The mission statement on the Tyrant site states: “We believe in the power of narrative and its ability to make life more astonishingly alive.” I like that. How does a writer’s narrative make a reader’s life more astonishingly alive?

Ha! Man, that’s old. I think one of my old editors came up with it. I guess I take it to mean that life is underwhelming, and we need stories to make it sufferable. A lot of us live less than remarkable lives. We all have our routines, and they all get monotonous. With reading or narrative or books, we can forget how meaningless our lives are and get away from whatever blahness that has us cornered at the moment. I will go outside and look around, and everything looks dead and everyone looks like they’re dead inside. Then I can read something, even a tweet, and be reminded that there are people out there still freaking out on similar levels as myself. And this is reassuring. Some writers aren’t capable of taking me away at all, whereas some are like rockets. The better the writer is in creating his narrative, the further gone I get to get from my own.

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.

The part that is so striking is at the end when you see a real thought of Ronald Reagan’s whereas throughout, he’s just calculating how he represents himself. I assume that’s why you cut the excerpt there?

Yeah, certainly. I try to mess with Ronald Reagan’s thinking. When he does escape, he’s followed and becomes kind of like a pseudo-celebrity and so he has to continue this sort of performance and it weighs on him and eventually he breaks and can’t keep it up. The ability to maintain that and whether or not that affects his being and sense of self.

I also assume that his character name is also a play on representation and persona? What did you have in mind?

Well, it’s a satire. I wanted to say that his parents were wealthy without having to go into it too much. Also I’m fascinated by Ronald Reagan and how he’s loved by so many people. I’m just fascinated by how people view Ronald Reagan in general. I thought that would be a fun name for him to have.

If you had to give the novel a message, what is it? What are you making a commentary on?

I guess the voyeuristic nature of America and contemporary society. I should be able to do this more succinctly….

That was very succinct! The content of the excerpt is drug abuse. Why is it that he ends up there? What’s the commentary?

I mean, there are so many reality television shows full of drug addicts, you know? Intervention, Celebrity Rehab… even something like Hoarders is people on display with mental illness…. Profiting off of their problems, posing as “we’re trying to help these people and if we make millions of dollars, it’s a happy side effect” [laughs] The subject of addiction is a complicated one. If you were to tell someone that your teenage daughter is drug addicted… half the people you talk to would say to do whatever you can to help her and the other half would say to just kick her out and let her figure it out herself. It’s complicated I think. I’ve had people close to me deal with that.

You said you wanted to imply that Ronald Reagan comes from wealth. Are you saying something about wealth and particular behavior?

I guess I’m poking fun at the idea that being privileged leads to this. That ‘I have it so bad because I’m rich’ kind of thing. I don’t know, I think it’s harder to be poor. [laughs]

Where are you now with the novel?

I have 400 pages and the first 125 were for my thesis. Right now I’m in the last read through of line editing… which has been very tedious. Then I’ll get it sent out to an agent. Hopefully it turns from a really great homework assignment to a real book. That’d be wonderful. It’s incredibly close to finished and I can’t wait to be done with it and start something else.

How many years in the making?

About five at this point. It really took a new shape and direction when I got into grad school. Sherrie Flick, Derek Green and Mark Nieson really helped me a lot, they showed great interest and have been very supportive and helpful and are still working with me even though I’ve graduated even though they have very little time.

You’re writing satire that’s timely and topical. What are some themes that you’d like to deal with in the future?

[laughs] Yeah I’d like to finish it while it’s still topical. I want to do something a little more straight forward and literary. I mean, I hope that my work is considered literary when it’s finished… I have an idea for a story that’s set in Johnstown. I have a guy that works at one of the turnpike restaurant and it involves some kind of pyramid scheme. I know that’s a bit vague…

[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!]

***

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.

Does this anticipatory sadness influence your writing?

I think it does, but how it does, I’m not sure. I mean, if I had to examine an origin point for this anticipatory sadness, I’d say it was winter of my 5th grade year right before my school’s Christmas program. My father had recently returned from an exercise in Florida flying A-10s with the Maryland Air National Guard. His best friend, an F-16 pilot who he’d flown with in Utah, was killed in a mid-air collision. My sister, my mother, and I were decorating the tree that night when my father answered the phone and received the news. I did not understand, exactly, what had happened, but I knew that I should be sad for my father. I remember that we sat on the floor in our living room and everyone was very sad. I was sad too, but I think the important thing was that I was sad for my father.

I feel like much of my life since then has been directed towards one day understanding completely the nature of my father’s sadness at having lost someone he loved. I think that must certainly also influence my writing. How could it not? And this isn’t to say that I don’t appreciate happiness and so on, because I really do and I usually consider myself to be happy, but that only recently I’ve learned that I cannot shun sadness or try to avoid it, because the quality of my sadness directly influences the quality of my happiness.

In reading “The Architect’s Apprentice,” I was struck by how close that world was to collapse. I’ve been reading quite a bit of fiction lately that muscles up and functions through a sense of imminent disaster, but what struck me about your story was that the worst part of the disaster has yet to occur, or is happening now. Most of the fiction in this vein that I’ve read takes place post-cataclysm, so, despite the conclusion to your story, I find it more hopeful in that there are characters striving to repair that to which they cling. Is there a particular reason you position this story pre- or mid-disaster? What does that allow you to do that wouldn’t be possible in the aftermath?

I didn’t have any particular reason for setting the story pre-disaster. The story, as many of my stories do, I guess, came out of a length of words, in this case a first sentence, which I wrote and let sit until another sentence could attach itself to it. I suppose the imagery grew out of my trips to the Menil here in Houston, in which hangs a painting by Yves Tanguy called The Hunted Sky. This has been one of my favorite paintings to go and stare at, and I think much of that first paragraph is a response to that painting.

From there, I guess, it was a matter of adding more sentences to figure out how and what these piles were on the plain. They became pieces of the sky, and that, I think, led to the mounting disaster of the story.

In any case, I think the positioning of the story allows me to play with the different skies the apprentice encounters. Had the disaster already occurred, I don’t think the narrator could have dipped in and out of the different skies. Instead, he would exist in a skyless world, which actually sounds kind of neat too but isn’t a part of that story’s possibility now, I guess.

Another thing about “The Architect’s Apprentice” that intrigued me was the motion from universal concerns to the particular and individual. Initially, the apprentice talks about how the sky falling affects the city as a whole. There’s a sense of tragedy about these happenings as the events consume the lives of everyone, but as the story progresses that sense of tragedy narrows to individual pain, most dramatically after the loss of the Architect when the apprentice begins to consider what he’s lost himself, how he’s affected, till finally the world itself is neglected and forgotten as he takes solace in what might be construed as selfish concerns, especially when so much is at stake for the city-at-large. Do you think there’s a difference between those types of concerns, the tragedy of larger disaster versus the more private concerns of personal pain? Can one be ranked more important than the other? If so, why?

I feel uncomfortable trying to rank anything like the pain of public tragedy versus private disasters. I mean that I don’t feel one is more important than another, necessarily, though I know that there has been a greater loss of life in a public tragedy, such as an overwhelmed city, than the single life gone when a teenager loses his parents, so the amount of instances of pain is greater in the former. But I don’t feel that makes the pain of the grieving son any less important than the pain of a grieving city.

Is this a relativistic position that you’re taking?

I’m not sure. Perhaps it is. It’s still something that troubles me, to be honest, and I usually feel confused by my thoughts and feelings on the issue. I usually feel desperate when I think about this. I cannot be truly sure how my emotions, my pain and my happiness, parallel what others feel, but what I can do is examine my own feelings in light of public tragedy or others’ private disasters. I recognize that I’m supposed to feel sympathy for those affected, and I do, and I’m sad when I do, but it’s not until I somehow turn the prospect of that tragedy on my own life, try to anticipate it, replacing the others with myself and my life and loved ones, that I can begin to understand a little bit of what those directly affected are experiencing. Is this a selfish consideration? I suppose it is, yes, because it takes over the experience to a degree and makes it mine, however superficially. But it’s also the best way I have of trying to sympathize with others.

Do you think a text should try and sympathize with a reader? I’m thinking of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake here or perhaps the work of Christopher Higgs and Blake Butler wherein internal structures often support the work as opposed to typical emotional or cognitive bridges that a reader can easily cross. Does a story or a novel or a poem have any responsibility in presenting its content to a reader in an easily digestible manner? And if a work makes these concessions, what might that say about the reader?

I’m usually bad at answering questions like this because I’m scared of saying a text should or should not do something. But, my instinct here is to say, no, a text should not try and sympathize with a reader, nor does a story or a novel or a poem have responsibility to present content in an easily digestible manner. A text should be a text. A writer should be a writer. A reader should be a reader. I don’t know. I’m rarely thinking of these things when I write or read.

When I read, I usually try to trust that the author has the best of intentions. When I write, I hope that the reader trusts me. Really, I like what Gass says about his ideal reader in the preface to In the Heart of the Heart of the Country:

I am fashioning a reader for these fictions… of what kind, you ask? Well, skilled and generous with attention, for one thing, patient with longeurs, forgiving of every error and the author’s self-indulgence, avid for details…ah, and a lover of lists, a twiddler of lines.

His version seems to place great responsibility on the reader, asking him or her to accept the pleasure of the text. I find myself agreeing with this idea the longer I write and read, patiently losing myself in the texts that I enjoy, forgiving those I do not and moving on, and writing for a reader who wants my words to lead the way.

I should also quote Joseph Reed, who, in this interview, talks about what sorts of writing Caketrain is interested in publishing. I strongly admire this idea that from the language comes all else of a story, so it makes sense to focus on the language:

For us, the innovation in writing comes at the ground floor of words. We don’t ever want the language to simply convey a meaning or message. News stories, street signs and instruction manuals do that. That’s not what we’re looking for.

A news article makes concessions to expectations of genre. A street sign is easily digestible: STOP. Instruction manuals have responsibilities to help a consumer.

A story is free of the requirement to sympathize with a reader, in my opinion. A story should be, if anything should be something, language in vivid action and onward.

I like what you’re saying about the responsibility of story. It reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Storyteller,” where he basically talks about a story’s goal as being (my phrasing) to spur the production of meaning, not to actually mean anything itself. In fact, the more open-ended a story, the more power it has and its ability to persist is amplified.

Right, I like that. And yes, the story as a piece of art in the world, rather than as meaning in the world. “What is magic about the object is that it at once invites and resists interpretation.” Because a story has the freedom to simply be an object, a productive thing, if we consider resistance a kind of production, it can accomplish many different things, can spur the production of meaning. Regarding the internal structures versus emotional and cognitive bridges aspect of your question, I feel, honestly, that such a dichotomy is perhaps too simple when applied to Blake’s stories (unfortunately, I cannot speak about the writing of Christopher Higgs yet, nor have I read Finnegan’s Wake). I think what you see in Blake’s Scorch Atlas is a structure, certainly, but that structure really helps support both interesting language and emotional activity, thus spurring a reader to produce a meaning. The greatest example of this combination, in my opinion, is “Seabed,” which structurally follows a traditional and emotional quest narrative and creates that narrative through Blake’s peculiar language vehicles. I think it is the most strictly structured of all the pieces in the book, though it may not formally appear to be, in contrast to “Damage Claim Questionaire.” To me, “Seabed” grounds Scorch Atlas. All structures in Scorch Atlas revolve around “Seabed” and its emotional landscape. A father who has lost a child must leave his diseased town in the company of a young girl, only to find a home in the bottom of the sea? To me, that is a fairly traditional emotional drawstring to tug when building a story, and because of that it helps the reader to orient themselves within the greater, more complicated lost and found of Scorch Atlas. I originally told Blake that I thought “Seabed” should close the book, but now I understand why it appears exactly in the middle.

What’s it like being an editor and contributor of HTMLGIANT?

Now I tend to work behind the scenes at HTMLGIANT. Early in the site’s existence, I tried to post as often as I could, silly stuff and nonsense stuff and serious stuff, but we’ve since gathered a fresh and excellent group of writers to contribute to the site that I don’t think I’m needed up front. Instead, I try to pursue ads, get some reviews going, handle the emails, help Blake and Gene with whatever they need me to do. I’m usually behind on everything, but I do my best.

Working on HTMLGIANT has helped me become closer with some people whom I had originally admired from afar but now consider my friends, both contributors and readers/other members of the internet literature scene. I feel like if I needed help or if someone else needed help, there would be a large group of people who would provide that help unselfishly. I do think that working on HTMLGIANT has helped me also to understand how excited many people are about reading and writing, and I like knowing that I can access that excitement quickly when I’m feeling down.

Of course, there are also the usual internet spats and anxiety-inducing things that go with the scene, and these often affect me too, though I’m much better now at brushing them off. I have to constantly remind myself that I should understand how and why certain unhealthy internet things happen.

Do you understand that? Can you help me understand it?

When I interact online with others, by directly communicating with them or simply reading a thread in which they’ve been posted, I don’t have nearly the amount of context clues that I would had I been talking or sitting with them at a bar or something. Because of this, I have tried to learn other ways of figuring out what’s going on online. If it’s a person whom I haven’t read online before, then I usually treat them sincerely and try to understand the argument they’re making, even if I initially perceive it as a horribly mean thing to say. I think because online is tougher to understand what people are saying and how people are saying it, it’s more important for me to reserve judgment until I can get more information or until the other person clarifies his or her position. I try to go through this process as emotionless as I can, but I’m not always successful.

After some time reading and so on, I can get better sense from what different purposes commenters or posters write online. Being behind the scenes at HTMLGIANT is helpful, because I can also see anonymous commenters’ IP addresses, so I can always compare those and get a history of an anonymous reader’s comments as well. Once I know that, then I can interact with commenters or ignore/minimize their comments or even delete their comments.

What helps me in this process is that I try to be as patient as possible when reading the internet.

I usually tend to think that the majority of problems on the internet that we initially think are unhealthy are just a result of people not understanding or taking the time to understand each other. Why the mean stuff happens? I don’t know for sure, but if I can quickly figure out whether or not a commenter is trying to be disruptive (versus sincere and salty), then I can dismiss the comment from my mind.

Tell us something about HTMLGIANT that a typical reader might not realize.

I don’t want to make wrong assumptions about the typical HTMLGIANT reader, but I think one thing people might not understand about the site is that much of what is posted is not run through an extensive editorial process. Blake has invited writers to contribute because he trusts them and finds them interesting, but that’s usually the extent of the editing (besides any administrative or copy editing we do at the last minute). In other words, a contributor can post his or her opinion on the site, and often other contributors will disagree with the argument in the post. So, I would encourage readers to get to know the contributors as individuals rather than dismiss them as simply yet another HTMLGIANT writer. Our contributors are a diverse group, and they hold a variety of different opinions regarding art, literature, life, and so on.

You’re someone who comes to HTMLGIANT as an internet browser/visitor (essentially, someone tracked in our statcounter); what is your reaction to the site?

It took me a while to learn how to read HTMLGIANT. At first, I was reading in the hopes that I might connect with the group, become popular and internet-famous, and these were the wrong reasons to participate, I now understand. There wasn’t really anyone there that I aligned with in a literary way so those connection attempts didn’t work out very well. I ended up getting my feelings hurt and almost quit reading during Mean Week once, but then a couple of new contributors came online and HTMLGIANT’s voice took on new resonance, at least for me. I find Kyle Minor’s posts very informative and often eye-opening. I’ve also started reading Christopher Higgs’s posts with a different sort of attention and found there was a lot there to learn, even if I disagreed with much of his basic literary premise. Both of those guys have helped me grow as a writer. I’m also (slowly) growing in confidence and that has probably been the greatest contributing factor to me being able to cull what I need from the GIANT’s information stream without tripping on the bumpy bits. I suppose I’m developing into a selfish reader in that I only pay attention to the things that will benefit me and in doing that, I find HTMLGIANT highly rewarding.

Yes, growing self-confidence is important. So is being selfish. There’s so much to sift and sort through, that you have to be selfish, otherwise it’s easy to get lost or caught up in all that is unnecessary. Not that getting lost or caught up in the unnecessary is wrong, because sometimes you do, but you should try to do it under your own power.

What are you working on now?

I’m slowly writing on several projects: the first is a bunch of short stories, which includes the stories that have been published in Mid-American Review and New York Tyrant; then there’s the field guide to North American weather, on which my sister Christy is working with me; we also want to try to do some more stories like “Pocket Finger;” and then I’m picking at something that feels like it could be a novel.

Are you far enough along to tell us anything about the novel?

I don’t think I could tell you enough to really satisfy anyone. I mean, I’m still trying to figure it out. So far, it seems to have a lost aviator, flying machines, wrecked children, and gremlins. A four thousand word portion of it is forthcoming in Conjunctions this spring. But it’s been slow going recently. Very slow going.

Have you ever read a book that changed how you viewed the world or lived your life? If so, which one? Why?

I have a hard time thinking of books that have changed my life in a huge way. I haven’t yet read a book that has changed the way I live my life, nor do I think such books exist for me in the absolute sense of the phrase or how I think it’s traditionally understood. I’m unable to change my habits, much to my wife’s annoyance; she’d prefer that I stopped biting my nails. I do think, though, that most of the books I’ve read have changed me in some way, however minutely. Some of those books include White Noise, Infinite Jest, Grendel, and Notes from Underground.

I think, though, that one book did affect me in a way that altered how I think of my life and what I think of my life, and that was Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. I read that book in the summer of 2007, right when I was beginning to have what my wife and I referred to as ‘freakouts,’ which were essentially minor panic attacks. The stage didn’t last long at all — I went through maybe two or three significant ones that fall — and, anyhow, I think reading that book helped me understand a little bit about what was happening to me and why, maybe, it was happening.

I’m not familiar with that book. Care to elaborate a bit on what understanding you achieved?

Towards the middle of the book, Becker reviews the work of Otto Rank on artists and neurotics. Becker writes:

Rank asked why the artist so often avoids clinical neurosis when he is so much a candidate for it because of his vivid imagination, his openness to the finest and broadest aspects of experience, his isolation from the cultural worldview that satisfies everyone else. The answer is that he takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it, he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art.

I think I read that at a point in my life when I was struggling with — well, I wasn’t believing the lie I had created to cover up the reality of my death, that it will someday occur, etc. I mean, that’s how Becker phrases it, essentially, right? He says that the neurotic is someone whose personal lie about the reality of his or her death no longer seems believable.

So when I read that book, I think it helped me re-purpose my writing. I felt that I was no longer writing to mimic other writers, but instead writing my own version of the world as produced through my personality and experience. It felt more important that I should try to write this way.

Do you workshop your writing much? I ask because you do seem to write from an individual vision and I think that transition from mimic to individualism is something that all writers struggle with as they improve and grow. Was this re-purposing totally on your own, or did feedback from other people help?

I don’t workshop my stories anymore. Obviously, I did quite a lot of that during graduate school, but since then I’ve actually tried to keep the sharing to a minimum. I found workshopping helpful at that time, yes, but now I know that I benefit from hearing the careful responses of a few trusted readers. I don’t think of it as workshopping to show a draft to one or two people, which is what I usually do now. I trust Blake Butler’s responses. I trust Matt Bell’s responses. I trust Mike Scalise’s responses too, and one other friend’s as well. These few have really helped me figure out a lot of stories recently, and I’ll continue to seek out their thoughts on writing, as long as they’ll let me.

The re-purposing came slowly. It wasn’t all on my own. It happened within the context of a graduate program, in which I found myself internally pushing back against some of the reading lists and discussions, especially by the end of my time there. I wanted to read other things that were exciting to me, which is how I learned about all the activity online.

That doesn’t mean, though, that I didn’t benefit from graduate school, from the readings and writings I encountered there. For example, I think The Denial of Death was recommended to me in a graduate course. But instead, I think that the graduate school experience helped me learn how to turn and look elsewhere, to examine my own immediate experiences with a critical eye.

The re-purposing also came about with the help of others. My friend once recommended The Stupefaction by Diane Williams, which I finally read the summer of 2007, and that contrasted so harshly against much of what I was reading that it frightened me into seeking out more of her stories. In my search, I came across an old interview, in which she says, in speaking about how she began to write:

Then I thought, now I know how to do it, now I know. It was anything in my life that I wanted to say no to—that didn’t happen, I didn’t see that, that couldn’t be. It was the revelation that I could write about what was painful and terrifying.

I still think a lot about that quotation, and I also think a lot about the experience of reading that quotation, and though it may not have happened explicitly at the time, I now think reading that helped me shift my writing, helped me begin to write about trying to say no to the lie I had created (and still create) regarding death.

At one point there was post on HTMLGIANT by Blake Butler wherein he offered short descriptions of the people associated with the site. Yours said something like “thinks he’s too good to publish on the Internet.” When I look at the work you’ve published, most of it has been in well-respected print journals. Do you think there’s a substantive quality difference between print vs. internet publishers? Also, how much importance do you give to “reputation” in the literary realm? Does this ever factor into where you might send your work?

I don’t think there’s a difference in quality between the two, though I also don’t know enough, really, about every print magazine and every online magazine to make a good judgment on that. I only really know the few magazines I read or actively pursue, and they’re a mix of the two. I tend to feel pretty ambivalent about the online vs. print debate; I’m not trying to be difficult. It’s just a conversation that, like the MFA conversation or the death of [genre of literature] conversation, is generally uninteresting to me. I have my favorite magazines that are printed and I have my favorites that are published online, and I read those. I don’t often think, seriously, about the distinctions between how I read them. I just read them.

So, how to explain my having published in more print magazines than online, especially given that I’m someone active in the internet lit scene? How does reputation figure into it? I guess I would have to say that many of my publications have come about because I see, read, or know of a collaboration going on between editors and writers I admire, and I want to join that collaboration. I look at reputation, I guess, based on my own values: what I enjoy reading, authors whose writing I like to read. This hasn’t always been how I’ve sent out my stories — for example, I occasionally send a longshot submission — but I’ve found that when I’m careful and think carefully about how my stories might work with other stories and editors whose vision I feel like I understand, then I have more of a chance. I haven’t always done it this way; it’s something I’ve had to learn.

_______________________________________

Ryan Call is the author of The Weather Stations (Caketrain). His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Conjunctions, New York Tyrant, The Cupboard, Quarterly West, and other places. He and his wife live in Houston.

Today we talk with Adam Clay whose work was featured in Issue 12. Adam talks about his favorite poets, writing a poem a day, and balancing family and career.

When did you figure out that you liked writing? How young were you when you first started?

Like a lot of writers, I started in high school. The poems were, of course, terrible, but I still felt driven to write them. Once I ended up in college, I found out you could actually major in creative writing. At the time I had no idea this was even a possibility. I took a fiction course and a poetry course — it became clear (as mentioned below) that poetry just made more sense for me. I was fortunate enough to study with Angela Ball and D.C. Berry at the University of Southern Mississippi. They are both remarkable poets in their own right and very different from one another. I still think a lot about how their influences are in my work today.

Do you find yourself sticking to one style of writing or do you like to experiment?

I try to mix things up. My first book had a lot of poems that were more lyrical than narrative. This was largely due to some of the poets I was reading at the time (Lucie Brock-Broido, C.D. Wright, John Clare, Frank Stanford, and Theodore Roethke). With my second book that’ll be out next year, I consciously wrote more narrative, personal poems with longer, more expansive lines. Since then, I’ve completed a few other projects, including a book-length poem in couplets. Like most poets, I change my work up mainly to keep myself interested in what I’m doing. When that interest wanes, I usually realize it’s time to put a book together and then move onto another style or approach.

Who are some of your favorite writers and poets?

I mentioned a few above and in a few of the responses below. I really like reading works like the journals of Audubon or William Bartram’s nature writing. Right now I’m reading Kate Greenstreet’s chapbook Called, which Delete Press just published. It’s stunning. I’ve been knee-deep in Ashbery this summer, too. He’s a poet I’ve always loved, but I finally had the time over the past few months to sit down with his work and really spend some time with the poems.

What lures you to writing poetry as opposed to prose?

I tried writing fiction as an undergraduate, but it just didn’t feel right to me. With every story, I felt like I wasn’t able to communicate what I wanted on the page. When I wrote a poem and felt like the draft was somewhat finished, I had a feeling that the work had been successful in some way. I also appreciate the formal considerations of poetry. Writing a sonnet or in blank verse is like trying to fit something complex and chaotic into a straight jacket.

Your poem, “Occupied Mind,” has a lot of nature imagery in it. Is it harder for you to write in a city than a more rural environment?

Not necessarily. In Michigan we lived in a fairly urban setting a mile or so from downtown — in that setting, I found a sense of fascination with nature and the way it exists despite the many ways we try to destroy it (either on purpose or not). There was a large movement of poets who wrote about the oil spill last year—and the poems managed to say things in a way that other forms of communication just couldn’t. Poetry seems like the perfect place to express disgust, outrage, and sadness — but it doesn’t end at the expression of those feelings. Maybe I’m talking about “political” poetry, but that seems too tidy of a way to describe poems that are accomplishing really important things that can’t be (or won’t be) said in any other way.

Do you have any little rituals or quirks when you write, for example, only writing standing up like Hemingway?

I don’t suppose I have any Hemingway-esque quirks. With a two year old daughter, I’ve had to learn to write whenever and wherever I can. Sometimes that means writing with her climbing all over me. Sometimes that means waking up at five in the morning so as to get some work in. For the past two years I’ve written a poem a day starting in April and continuing through August last year and June this year. Obviously not all of the poems make the cut, but producing so much work in such a short amount of time really trains the mind to think about writing all the time. By May, I usually wake up thinking about what I’ll write about that day. It’s a good place to be, but it’s also exhausting, which is why I take some time off to revise.

What advice would you give an aspiring poet? Was there any advice a mentor gave you that you think might be helpful for others?

I was always told to write every day when I was an undergraduate — I just never listened. I also think that writing with a book of poems open next to you makes a lot of sense. I used to think of poems as these self-contained voices, but they really should be in dialogue with other poets, other ideas. Alice Notley talks a lot about how when we write, we imitate poets we admire. In failing to imitate, we find our own way of engagement through writing. For so long I made the same mistake that a lot of writers do in that I refused to see the connection between writing and reading. Most poems I write these days are failed imitations. Today I’m reading Jean Follain. Tomorrow we’ll see.

Alia Volz’s story, “Vacajun” appeared in Dark Sky’s Issue 11. Here Alia talks about stereotypes, insomnia, and her earliest memories of magical desserts.

Seth Amos: Your website says that you started writing during a long trek across the Iberian Peninsula, what was it about the journey that inspired you?

Alia Volz: The Camino de Santiago is a Catholic pilgrimage — which is odd because I’m not religious, and wasn’t raised Catholic. I stumbled onto it, so to speak. There’s a great deal of old power on that trail. It transforms everyone who sticks with it, though not necessarily in the ways you might imagine. That was a confusing process, and since I walked most of the 500-ish miles alone, I had to keep a journal, which I’d never done before. Writing made everything feel more vivid, which I loved. The smallest became significant. Plus, I’d always been a voracious reader, and if you consume enough words, they eventually start dribbling back out. So when I returned to the states a year later, I went straight into a Creative Writing program. I’ve been wrestling this beast ever since.

SA: Who are your biggest literary influences?

AV: I’m pretty disloyal. Maybe I will always be a Faulkner girl. Cormac McCarthy makes we want to smash my fingers with a sledgehammer, he’s so goddamn good. People like Carver and Goodis taught me dialogue, and Flannery taught me to be vicious. Then there’s Woolf, Bolaño, Díaz, Dickey, Ellison, Thompson (Hunter and Jim), Oakley Hall, yadda, yadda, yadda…

Honestly, my biggest influence is the book I have my nose in today. I’m a very receptive reader. So if I’m working with a particular genre, style or subject, I’ll look to a (local, independent) bookstore to ramp up my chops. Some writers worry about taint their output, but I’m thrilled to find shades of what I’m reading in my own work. It still comes out sounding like me. It’s hilarious: you can’t escape your own voice.

SA: What/who are your biggest non-literary influences?

AV: International travel, definitely. It’s a big, gorgeous world out there. Also my parents, who are both painters, and showed me artistic diligence. And storytellers of all stripes. Everybody has a good yarn or two. It pays to shut up and listen.

SA: Tell me about your short story, “Vacajun.”

AV: This story follows an urban couple on a weekend trip to a small bayou town in Louisiana. They fancy themselves adventurers, hungry for an authentic Cajun experience. But the town does not exist to please tourists. They can’t consume the culture, as they’d planned, and their bumbling attracts negative attention. Ultimately, they are forced into a more authentic experience of themselves, which is also beautiful.

The underlying interest is in stereotypes. This couple can’t have a genuine experience, because they are prisoners of their own expectations. The people they meet are also stereotyping, so everyone is sizing everyone else up ineffectively. Stereotyping is an unconscious function of the mind, to help process and categorize unexpected information. It limits us deeply, yet no one is free from it. Of course, I was just writing a story, but that’s how I look at it after the fact.

SA: The present-tense voice in “Vacajun” is very fitting for the story and the reader can’t help but think that these events are true, or based on personal experience. How close to personal experience are they?

AV: The events are almost entirely true. The conversations are as I remember them. The voice, however, is fictional. That is not me telling the story. It’s a trick I use, because I find it extremely distracting to depict myself as a character. Either I’m glorifying my virtues or mocking my flaws. It feels dishonest. Fictionalizing the narrator frees me up to tell a true story. It’s just a trick I play on my own brain.

SA: Was there a lot of revision for this story? It’s fluidity of tone hints that it was written all at once.

AV: You’re right, this was a 3:00AM story. I’m a terrible insomniac. I was lying in bed and hating my sleepless brain, when this rhythmic, insistent voice started talking about the bayou. I got up, pounded out the whole thing, and finally got to sleep. I catch my best flows when I’m too tired or stressed to think clearly. This came out clean, so I didn’t mess with it much.

SA: Do you have a set writing routing or do you sit down to write only when inspired?

AV: I don’t have a fixed schedule, but I work with an intense, high-output writing group. We all submit work every other week, so that keeps me on track. Threat of public embarrassment is great motivation.

SA: Do you write on a computer or in longhand?

AV: Usually on a computer, though I do carry a notebook. As a Spanish Interpreter, I spend a lot of time in waiting rooms, so I use that time to draft scenes or develop characters.

SA: Your non-fiction work, “Sticky Fingers Brownies,” tells the story of your parents and their “magic” brownie company. What made you want to tell this story?

AV: My mom is a stellar storyteller, as are many of her stoner friends. I grew up listening to these outrageous tales, and thought they were worth recording. The 1970s in SF was a time of totally unfettered exploration, which all came crashing down with the Jonestown Massacre, the assassinations of Milk and Moscone, and the horrors of AIDS. Fearless times are rare and precious, and deserve respect. Talking with the survivors of this era brought them alive in a really exciting way. I wanted to record that thrill.

SA: What is your earliest memory of them selling these tasty wonders?

AV: Oh boy, that was my whole infancy. The brownie kitchen was in our house, so my earliest memories are rich with the aroma of pot cooking, the sensation of dried marijuana itching under my clothes, the warm gooey batter. I remember being out in the stroller, while my mom did her sales in the Castro, and how the giddy gay guys would fawn over me. Of course, there were many dark aspects, but my associations are oddly comforting.

SA: What is next for Alia Volz?

AV: There’s so much on tap!

I’m deep into the writing of my first novel, Little Jon. It’s a modern cowboy noir, about a group of wranglers hanging onto a ramshackle horse rental stable on a cliff near San Francisco. My protagonist is a roughhewn teenage cowboy, sorely misplaced in gangland, USA. It’s funny and mean, violent and sexy — and I’m having a blast with the writing.

I’m also busy producing Literary Death Match, a well-loved international reading series that places fine readings in the context of a hilarious game show — a raucous mating of Deaf Poetry Jam, American Idol and Double Dare. This week, I’m hosting shows in Portland and Vancouver.

Then October is all about Litquake, San Francisco’s mastodon literary festival. I’m hosting or performing in three great Litquake events this year, so I’m up to my eyeballs. It’s a busy time for little old me.

______________________________________

Alia Volz is the West Coast producer of Literary Death Match. Her fiction, fact, and translations appear in ZYZZYVA, Instant City, Nerve, and elsewhere. The spawn of dope-crazed San Francisco hippies, she’s crossed Spain on foot, heard Papa Fidel speak in the rain, made love under the Moai — and keeps rolling home to good old SF.