Spotlight On…

Our heartfelt congratulations to Cliff Garstang, the recently announced winner of the IPPY Gold Medal for Mid-Atlantic Best Regional Fiction, 2010, for his much-hailed collection of short stories, IN AN UNCHARTED COUNTRY, from PRESS 53.

“This collection delivers on its title: each story takes us into an area—emotional and geographic—that we may not have been before. There is an impressive variety here, and Garstang’s ability as a storyteller is on display each time. These characters are real, vulnerable, and always, in unique ways, brave.” — Elizabeth Strout, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Amy and Isabelle and Olive Kitteridge

Today, Ethel Rohan shines the brights on Cliff:

Writing-wise, where are you now?

I’m between projects. I just sent a manuscript of a novel to my agent. Time to start something newish (I’ve got a series I’ve been poking at from time to time over the last couple of years).

Writing-wise, where are you going?

The new project is another hybrid. I like short stories, both because of the concise form and because you can actually get the things published individually, and so this project is a combination of short stories and very short stories, with some connective tissue that’s even harder to categorize. So, I’m going forward to some non-traditional work, but I’m also looking backward: I’ve got a failed novel in a drawer that I’m considering pulling out and revising. I think there’s something there worth saving, or at least cannibalizing.

What informs your creative process? How do you keep inspired?

Experience filtered through my imagination informs my process. I’ve been fortunate to travel a great deal and have lived overseas a lot, so my ideas come from everywhere, and writing about exotic locations allows me to revisit, if only mentally. Inspiration, though, is more magical. I have no idea where that comes from.

Tell us something that most people don’t know about you?

I was a Benedictine monk in a past life.

How has the Internet impacted your reading and writing? What is the future of print publication?

You mean besides being addicted to web-surfing? Because that has a serious impact on my writing. Otherwise, I certainly read more unknown writers than I would have, thanks to the Internet. I see work by some of these writers in print magazines, of course, but online magazines open up the world that much wider. As for the future of print publication, I think there will always be books and print magazines (if “always” is defined as the remainder of my lifetime) but certainly electronic media will continue to gain a share of our attention. I don’t yet have an eBook reader other than my iPod Touch, which I use only for very short books, and as much as I love gadgets I don’t anticipate getting one. I’m just too fond of books.

If you didn’t write, what would your life look like?

If I didn’t write it would be because I didn’t quit my last job in order to devote full time to writing, so I suppose I would still be a lawyer at the World Bank, living in Washington DC or an overseas posting, and traveling constantly. It was a job that I mostly liked, so I wouldn’t even be that unhappy about being there. On the other hand, if I were to quit writing now, or even if I didn’t quit but wanted a change, I could see myself working or volunteering for an international non-governmental organization, or returning to my Peace Corps roots.

Do a five minute free-write with the word “fun,” and please share:

He just wants to have fun. He’d spent his whole life meeting the expectations of others: his parents, his older brother, his wife. Now he was free of all of them, and even his children didn’t care where he was or what happened to him. There was no one to see, no one to judge, no one to report. Bangkok was full of possibilities, some legal and some not, and he wasn’t going to hold himself back. For once he was going to have fun. But where to start? There were the massage parlors–the brothels–with the lithe young women who would do whatever he asked. That would be fun. But not fun enough, maybe. In fact, he’d been to Patpong; he’d done all that, even before he was free, and he wasn’t proud of it. Having fun shouldn’t hurt someone else. He could head down to the beach. He knew a guy who could get him mushrooms. That might be fun. But he’d done that, too, once, years ago. That was fun. Frightening, in a way, but fun. Now, though, he wanted something else. Something more. Something he’d never done before. (My, but 5 minutes goes by fast!)

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Clifford Garstang is the author of the short story collection In an Uncharted Country (Press 53, 2009). After receiving a BA in Philosophy from Northwestern University, he served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in South Korea. He then earned an MA in English and a JD, both from Indiana University, and practiced international law in Singapore, Chicago, and Los Angeles with one of the largest law firms in the United States.

Subsequently, he earned an MPA from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and worked for Harvard Law School as a legal reform consultant in Almaty, Kazakhstan. From 1996 to 2001, he was Senior Counsel for East Asia at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., where his work focused on China, Vietnam, and Indonesia.

Garstang received an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte in 2003. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Cream City Review, The Tampa Review, Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere and has received Distinguished Mention in the Best American Series.

He won the 2006 Confluence Fiction Prize and the 2007 GSU Review Fiction Prize and is a Fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. In 2006 he was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He has recently completed a second collection of stories and a novel.

He currently lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. His website is  www.CliffordGarstang.com.