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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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.

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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.

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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.