Mary Akers: We were thrilled to have your short story Bigwig in this issue, Brian. I’m sure there’s an interesting story behind the story. Could you share with our readers how Bigwig came about?

Brian: The first draft of “Bigwig” is almost twenty years old. Conception of the story came while I was keeping a dream journal. I can’t remember the dream entirely now, but it had to do with boats on the St. Lawrence River, where the story is set.

The beginning of the story was vastly different from the way it appears today; essentially, it was a narrative within a narrative where one character is telling a story to another character with the consequences of that story weighing on the relationship between the two. I can’t tell you how many times I submitted that story to journals only to have it rejected; two editors wrote back saying they couldn’t understand the significance of the opening and closing scenes to the middle part of the story.

Nevertheless, I refused to change it and eventually gave up, stuffing the story into a desk draw. Then a year ago I worked with the wonderful writer Katherine Vaz, who was writer-in-residence at Wichita State University. I worked on a different story with her and found her editing made the story better. I learned a lot from her – like how to be brutal when editing your own stories. As writers, I think we can sometimes obsess over the details and lose focus on the “big” picture. Afterwards I returned to “Bigwig” and finally cut that opening scene and altered the ending, sent it out again, and bang, it was accepted at r.kv.r.y. I am very happy that “Bigwig” finally found a home here.

MA: Wow. Twenty years from conception to publication. Now that’s commitment to your story. Would you consider yourself a stubborn writer?

Brian: Or persistent? But perhaps I am stubborn, or just slow on the uptake. Of course, I’m familiar with Faulkner’s advice: writers must be willing to kill their darlings. I was just trying to make “Bigwig” more complicated than it needed to be. What remains now is a rather basic story in terms of plot that works.

MA: I think it’s very helpful to be stubborn as a writer. In fact, unless you’re one of the lucky few who manage to hit every literary green light, you’ll never get widely published without being stubborn. Do you have other stories stuffed in desk drawers ready to hit the submission road?

Brian: I have much work stuffed in desk drawers, but I’m better now at consistently sending work out. I’m always working on something. I’m working on my first novel as well as a collection of nature essays, and I have enough material for at least two collections of short stories.

MA: Nice. So what’s the novel about?

Brian: Well, it’s a road novel set between 2007 and 2012, during the financial fiasco and ensuing housing bust. It’s a story about people on the road – some living on the road by choice and others by necessity – but at its heart, it’s a story about family and community and connections.

MA: Have you done any travel in the course of researching this novel?

Brian: You could say that. I’ve chosen a rather nomadic life, at least temporarily. A few years after my divorce, I decided to sell my house and travel the country. I have a small professional writing business that provides some income and allows me mobility. I can say I’ve seen a lot of this country from the big cities to the small towns to remote backcountry locations, and I’ve met many interesting people along the way.

MA: Do you have any plans to settle down and write from one place in particular?

Brian: Eventually I’ll settle in one location again. I miss the sense of community, and I’d like to find a teaching job. I really enjoy teaching.

MA: Thank you for your time, Brian, and for sharing your fine work with us. I guess I’ll close by saying happy travels.

Brian: Same to you.

Alice Lowe: Jim, as I recall, The Twisting Path was one of your earlier efforts when we started reading and reviewing each other’s work last year, and you took it through a number of incarnations before the final version now published in r.kv.r.y. Given the nature of the story, I imagine it was difficult to write, and I wonder how you approached it, what obstacles you encountered in telling your story, and how you overcame them. Because I know that you’ve turned some of your life stories into fiction, did you ever consider writing this as fiction in order to give yourself more latitude with the facts?

Jim Brega: Well, going back to the real origins of this story, I’d have to start with the daily blog I was writing in 2009 and 2010 to document the experience of being diagnosed with and treated for prostate cancer. Friends kept encouraging me to use some of the material from the blog in my creative writing. That idea was very challenging for me because the blog material was extremely emotional and raw, full of anger and complaining, not “literary” at all. (For example, part of the testimony I uploaded was a post-op photo of my abdomen, with PowerPoint arrows indicating surgical incision points.) The experience of receiving my diagnosis was actually the least traumatic one in the whole process, so I decided to start with that. The second half of “The Twisting Path” was my first attempt to deal with the material. If you remember, it originally stood alone and was titled “Spring Fever;” I thought it might be a flash piece. But I wasn’t able to put the part that came before the diagnosis out of my mind, so I ended up writing about the biopsy as a “prequel.”

AL: Interesting—I would have imagined that the diagnosis would be enormously traumatic, even shattering. Hopes dashed. But as I read your piece, I understand that you’re saying that by the time you got the diagnosis, you’d already gone through the stages of grief, as it were. That by agreeing to the biopsy, you would “start down the twisting path … that could lead from this room to others like it.… in an accelerating rush to the final tumble.”

JB: “Hopes dashed—“ I can see how most people might think of the diagnosis that way; that would be logical. But I, like the narrator in the story, have watched the wasting away of “a lover, then one parent, then the other,” which changes my expectations of disease. I tend to face potentially bad outcomes by imagining from the beginning the worst that could happen and devising a contingency plan for that possibility. I guess that could be considered a mental rehearsal of the stages of grief. Once the plan’s in place I allow myself a little hope that things will go a different way. So, in the story, deciding to go ahead with the biopsy was the first step on “the twisting path.” If the biopsy had been negative, I would have been all done: no harm, no foul. But I had already imagined that it would be positive, to steel myself against the diagnosis; when the call came it was just a confirmation that I had to take the next step. It took nine months, but eventually I reached the end of that section of my “path” when I made the decision to have surgery. So far the evidence is that I was cured. Earlier you asked whether I considered writing this piece as fiction. While I was writing it I didn’t feel the need to stick to the strict “facts” of the experience (as I remember them), because what was most important to me was to try to capture the feelings that are inherent in situations like this one: fear, loss of control and individuality, distrust of what I think of as the “medical- industrial complex,” etc. I also wanted to write about those moments in our lives when we know we are making a life-altering decision from which there can be no turning back, and are confused about what to do. I struggled with that part of the story—if you remember, it once had a whole (made up) section about a dream in which I visualized the options metaphorically. The dream sequence really didn’t seem authentic; fortunately, through working on the story in our circle, that part was cut. Interestingly, it wasn’t until I had reached a point where I felt the piece was “finished” that I realized I’d inadvertently incorporated into the story an experience from another minor medical procedure I’d gone through during the same period. So, without getting into the fiction vs. creative non-fiction controversy that’s raging in the literary world right now, I’d have to say that I approached and wrote the story not as a reporter but as someone who had gone through a confusing and emotional experience and wanted to convey to readers what it felt like. At the same time, I didn’t feel the need to expand or embellish the experience to make my point. And in spite of my lack of attention to the issue, I think the essay would pass a fact check.

AL: I was glad when you decided to take out the dream sequence, because your experience, as you wrote it, is so intense that the dream seemed both unnecessary and distracting. But I also recall it being a vivid piece of writing—maybe you’ll find another use for it! That fiction-nonfiction controversy has been like a bag of potato chips—once I dip in I can’t stay out of it. I agree that we’re wise to stay out of it, but I think you’ve very succinctly stated the ideal intent of a personal essay—that of capturing and conveying the emotional experience yet still passing the fact check.

JB: Speaking of conveying an emotional experience, I wanted to ask you about a passage from your essay, My Moving Cage, which was published in the July 2011 issue of r.kv.r.y. In describing your first experience with a panic attack that occurred while driving across the Coronado bridge, you wrote, “It was as if there were hands on the steering wheel covering my own, an evil entity who wanted to take the car over the side. I clenched the wheel in a vise-like grip to keep from making a sharp turn to the right, through the restraining wall and into the dark swishing water below. I was sweaty and clammy. Dizzy, hyperventilating.” Your description is very vivid; it almost feels like a description of being possessed. Although you write about trying to avoid the road structures that trigger this panic, you actually have had to confront them many times. Even though the feeling returns full strength near the end of your essay, did repeating the experience affect your ability to recall what the original incident felt like? Do you think your discovery of similar episodes described in the work of Joan Didion, Susan Cheever, and other writers influences the way you remember or even experience your own?

AL: “Possessed” describes it well—the crux of my phobia was the feeling that I wasn’t in control of not just the car but of myself, my own actions. Feeling possessed, out of control, is of course transpiring in my head, but at the same time I was fully conscious of the physical, tangible things that were happening to my body and in my responses, and that’s what I felt I needed to convey in my essay for readers to absorb, to make them squirm a little. The same way I felt when you described the biopsy in such detail! Unfortunately for me, avoiding the Coronado Bridge doesn’t get me completely off the hook—I’ve had a few relapses, which I’ve learned to accept, and so even now I can attest to the accuracy of my description of the original incident. I think that discovering that my malady had an identity, and reading the descriptions set forth so powerfully by the likes of Joan Didion and Ruth Reichl—I know and fear the Bay Bridge, I’m right there with them in their panic—was validating and reassuring. I hadn’t lost my mind. Not only was I not alone, I was in highly esteemed company.

JB: As you mentioned, you also researched your symptoms and discovered that they characterized a recognized phobia: hodophobia, “fear of travel by road.” When I recently re- read your essay I realized that it hadn’t occurred to me to wonder whether what I went through had ever been classified as a phobia. As I started researching the question, right away I was able to come up with iatrophobia, “fear of doctors,” but that didn’t seem to cover it. Nosophobia is “fear of a specific disease;” but, again, my anxiety was more general. There are two terms for a fear of needles; also too specific. Then I came across tomophobia—“fear of an invasive medical procedure.” Jackpot! A description of a patient with this phobia describes his “…intensely irrational and unavoidable fear of putting himself in the hands of others…. Moreover, the fear of losing control of his body through loss of consciousness or compromise of physical integrity during an operation or surgical intervention was reported….” The importance given the fear of losing control, in all the various meanings of that phrase, really resonates, and may be an element that connects our two experiences.

AL: And we’ve both written personal essays to transmit emotional states to readers!, One of the things I find striking about The Twisting Path is its form and pace. You start off in a narrative, descriptive mode; it’s first person, your observations and internal deliberations. Then, once you’re in the exam room, your story gradually transitions and becomes more dialogue driven, which to me accentuates the immediacy and the awfulness in excruciating detail of what you were going through. And then, bam, you’re on the phone getting the diagnosis. And then you draw back into the slower narrative of your thinking and your acceptance of what you’d anticipated: “It’s to be the twisting path, then.” Marvelous! As one writer to another, was that according to plan or did it evolve that way?

JB: I’d have to say half planned, half evolved. Having written the second half of the story first, I knew that the narrator was going to end up essentially alone in a wide-open natural environment. As a contrast, I wanted the atmosphere in the first half of the to be intimate, claustrophobic even: three characters in a tiny room. There are three sense /images that make the connection between the two parts: the smell of blood (which indicates danger or fear), an image of a twisting path (the uncertain course of medical decision-making), and a line of dominoes falling (fate set in motion by a human hand). But the only element of the three that was originally written into both halves was the reference to the smell of blood. The image of the twisting path was invented while I was struggling with the now-deleted dreams, and the row of dominoes was added to both parts much later. Since you noted the “excruciating detail” of the autopsy, I wanted to mention that I intended the dialogue in the biopsy room to be a bit humorous, though I’m not sure whether I achieved that. I’m a great fan of the ability of writers like Augusten Burroughs to tell horrifying stories in a way that makes the reader laugh. My sense of humor is very dry—some have compared its texture to that of dust—but from a certain point of view I think that what happens to people who are suddenly thrust into medical environments is kind of horrible/funny (or horribly funny). People become stupid, confused, uncertain, unable to carry on a simple conversation or follow a clear instruction. They suffer the worst humiliations without complaint. But the humor in the situation exposes their humanity, their vulnerability. They find “truth;” it’s beautiful, really. The phone conversation in the essay’s second half is hardly a conversation at all; if you notice, the narrator utters only three words aloud: “No, no questions.” Yet he’s obviously still engaged in a vigorous inner monologue. I purposely set this conversation in a spot where he could observe and appreciate the early signs of spring in the landscape around him. He confronts the irony in the lushness of the Earth, an Earth that’s coming alive just as he is forced to confront mortality. The atmosphere becomes more sinister as he imagines the ground opening up beneath his feet as if to swallow him. There’s an implication that he may have spent many hours admiring his view, but is suddenly seeing it in a new way because of the news he’s receiving. At this point the /images of a twisting path and a row of dominoes from the first part of the story are repeated as a coda.

AL: You mentioned admiring Augusten Burrough’s ability to tell horrific stories with humor. What other writers do you admire?

JB: I enjoy reading almost anything, and cultivate the serendipity of having something wonderful come into my hands un-looked-for. Often I allow the two-dollar bookshelf at my local used bookstore to suggest something to me. That’s where I recently scored a copy of Joan Didion’s collection of essays Slouching Toward Bethlehem, which was delightful. I also found a copy of Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy, and of Martin Duberman’s memoir, Waiting to Land. I’m in the middle of an anthology in which I discovered Saul Bellow’s short story, “A Silver Dish,” which blew me away with its perfection. But on any given day you’d be as likely to find me reading Karen Armstrong’s A History of God, though perhaps a bit more slowly than the other things I’ve mentioned. I think the last thing I bought on my Kindle was To The Lighthouse. So, my reading list, to the extent I have one, is very diverse.

AL: What are you working on now?

JB: Right now I’m spending some time re-working a few completed stories that have not been able to find homes in a journal. I’m also twenty thousand words into a story that might or might not become a novel at some point. And I’m reading as research some “boys’ book” fiction series that were published early in the twentieth century, looking for inspiration for a potential Young Adult book. Those who are interested can follow me on my blog at jimbrega.com.

AL: Well, thanks for inviting me to participate in this conversation!

JB: Thank you! I really appreciate it.

Alice Lowe is a freelance writer in San Diego, California. Her creative nonfiction has appeared this year or is forthcoming in Prime Number, Phoebe, Jenny, Tiny Lights, City Works, Writer’s Ink, Skive, Raven Chronicles, and Killing the Angel. Her essay, My Moving Cage, was published in the Summer 2011 issue of r.kv.r.y. In addition, she was the winner of a 2011 essay contest at Writing It Real. She has published essays and reviews on the life and work of Virginia Woolf, including a monograph, “Beyond the Icon: Virginia Woolf in Contemporary Fiction.” Alice blogs at www.aliceloweblogs.wordpress.com.

Lowell Jaeger’s fine poems Ants and Excavation appear in our October 2012 issue.

Hannah Bissell: You’re always working on something. What are you working on now?

Lowell Jaeger: I’d like to see Many Voices Press do a book of brief memoirs from past and present AmeriCorps volunteers. Short vignettes of the best and worst experiences. I’ve worked with AmeriCorps volunteers in Montana Conservation Corps for the past several summers, and I’ve totally fallen in love with these young people, their community service spirit, their giving natures, their willingness to brave weeks of exposure and hard labor in the wilderness. I wonder why they are so willing to give, so willing to sacrifice, so energetic, so engaged, so hard-working. What can I do to help the AmeriCorps cause? I could do this book of AmeriCorps memoirs, a book aimed at prospective AmeriCorps enlistees, a book to give these prospective volunteers a realistic glimpse into the challenges – victories and disappointments – of volunteer service. You’re right; I’m always working on something. I don’t quite know where to begin on this one, but it’s percolating in my head. That’s how these things grow.

Hannah: Sounds like a worthy project, but it’s not poetry. Will you be publishing more poets?

Lowell: Our big anthology, New Poets of the American West, took three years to put together. A real labor of love. A real adventure, too. Seems amazing to me that a small non-profit micro-press like MVP could have ever pulled it off – 250 poets from 11 Western states, including a Pulitzer Prize winner like Philip Levine, a National Poet Laureate like Kay Ryan, prominent Native American poets like Simon Ortiz and Joy Harjo and Leslie Silko, and poems in Spanish and 6 Native American languages – wow, I hold the book in my hands like an Olympic gold medal. I’m proud of that.

And I’m proud of the three books we’ve done by Native American poets Victor Charlo, Lois
Red Elk, and Minerva Allen. All three are risky enterprises; these deserving Native poets, now in their seventies, have gone so long without the attention their talents merit. Charlo’s book includes poems in Salish, Red Elk’s book includes poems in Lakota/Dakota, and Allen’s book includes poems in Nakoda (Assiniboine). These books are cultural artifacts, historical artifacts. These are voices singing at the margins of American culture. That’s what Many Voices Press is all about – a celebration of many voices.

So, yes, I want to publish more poets, especially more Native poets. But publishing is one thing and marketing a whole other thing. Hard these days to sell books in general, even harder to sell poetry. We’ve managed to persist through a lot of tough times. With the kindness of strangers.

Hannah: You’ve written four collections of your own poems. Do you have a new collection in the works?

Lowell: I’ve got a new collection, How Quickly What’s Passing Goes Past, now in search
of a worthy publisher. It’s a collection of poems out of my childhood in the 50s and 60s during the Cold War. I read someone somewhere who said, “Anyone who has been alive on earth for at least seven years has enough material to write about for the rest of his life.” I feel like that’s true. As a kid in the 50s and 60s I must have been walking around like grade school documentarian, listening to the conversations, filming the dramas, jotting notes in my sub-conscience. Now the memories are pouring forth faster than I can possibly shape them all into poems, sometimes four and five poems a week.

Hannah: What is it about the Cold War era that calls to your imagination?

Lowell: I was a kid with my eyes open. I saw neighborhood fathers digging bomb shelters. We hid under our desks at school when Civil Defense sirens commanded we should duck and cover. TV was new in our lives, and the /images were horrific – Hiroshima, Nagasaki. Then came the H-bomb, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy/King/Kennedy assassinations, and napalm.

I recently saw again (on the r.k.v.r.y. Blog) the Nick Ut Vietnam War photo of the kids and soldiers fleeing for their lives down an empty road with the war blazing behind them. There’s that naked little girl – especially now, as a grandfather, I’m moved and pained by that image. But those are the sorts of /images I grew up with. I don’t know why I was so affected by that sort of thing; my brothers who shared that time in the world with me seem to have been living on a different planet. For them, the past is past. For me, the bombs just got bigger and bigger, scarier and scarier. I felt like that young boy in Ut’s photo, the boy wearing the look of horror. Doesn’t his mouth resemble that poor freaked-out little guy in Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”? That’s how I felt. That’s what many of my generation felt. That’s what this book  is all about.

Hannah: Calm down. Okay?

Lowell: Sorry. Sorry to sound so bleak. The new book, believe it or not, is also filled with a
lot of humor. As scary as those times were, they were also ridiculous. The whole idea of hiding under your school desk to save yourself from a nuclear blast is ridiculous, isn’t it. Or  radiation; we were always in dread of atomic radiation. Families owned their own Geiger Counters. Here, I’ll give you a humorous poem from the new collection. A poem called “The Test” which displays our ridiculous fear of atomic radiation:

The Test

Dad confided in Mom he’d heard it
from a guy at work who’d heard it
from another guy whose younger brother
worked a maintenance job at the plant
where they built the bomb.

Reports of super-secret testing, us
against the Commies, killing the atmosphere
with radioactive dust. The air
we breathed could burn us up
from inside and turn us into lepers

with bloody sores and wrinkled skin
hanging like rags. What if that’s just talk,
Mom said. Maybe, said Dad, but what about
all those babies born wrong
with no feet or no fingers or no arms?

Mom couldn’t push that thought back.
She’d incubated four boys and wanted grandkids
someday. I don’t see how that works,
she said. Why is atomic fallout
making babies born wrong? . . . Dad shrugged.

Nobody knows, he said. And would have left it,
except Mom called us boys
into the room and looked us up and down
for worries we hadn’t even dreamt of yet.
We should get ‘em tested, she said.

Well, Dad said, I think they’re safe
if they got balls in the right place.
Which is how four pre-teen boys lined up
and dropped their drawers for Dad’s inspection.
What the hell, we asked. What’s going on?

Dad bent his face close to where we’d hoped
to keep undercover. And squinched his brow.
I don’t see nothin’, Dad said. Mom looked

from a safe distance. She asked, You boys
feel all right? Then threw up her arms before our reply.

How will we know, she said. Lord, how we gonna know?

Hannah Bissell is Assistant Editor of Many Voices Press. She is currently a second year student in the Pacific University MFA Program.

Stefanie Freele: In your excellent SOS flash, Natasha minimizes his dream as mere “elephants and banana leaves” – but there is so much more to his vision. You’ve paired together two authentic characters with opposing goals. Where did this idea stem from?

Andrew Stancek: Thanks, Stefanie for the compliment and let me say it is a thrill being interviewed by you since I am such an admirer of your work.

My writing tends to be character-driven and sometimes I am blessed with a premise visiting me almost wholly-formed. In “Elephants and Banana Leaves,” I wanted a Tamil background and I saw a wise Tamil man, displaced in North America, under whose influence an idealistic young man goes in search of wisdom. But his young wife has no such wish. My first image of Natasha was of her wearing red stilettos. She is also associated with a lacy black bra and a red thong. Such characters produce fireworks, not a common journey.

SF: If you could spend time with an author, studying with him, who would it be?

AS: I had the great fortune of studying with Alistair MacLeod, whose novel No Great Mischief and short stories I return to time and again. But I also think it would be exhilarating and empowering to talk craft with Colum McCann and Ian McEwan.

SF: What have you read lately that you want the world to know about and read also?

AS: Almost all my reading these days is of writers whom I wish to emulate. I have been studying Robert Boswell’s Living To Be A Hundred. I keep rereading Chekhov and Kafka. I am about to reread Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad which just blew me away when I first read it. William Trevor’s novels are always at my bedside. David Bezmozgis’s recent novel, The Free World, is a jewel. Ellen Gilchrist has a spectacular collection of interwoven stories called Nora Jane: A Life in Stories, which serves as a shining example of how to write a novel in stories. And since I talked earlier of my homeland, I must recommend a book about the Czech experience, written by a recently deceased friend, Josef Skvorecky, called The Bass Saxophone.

SF: In your bio, you mention seeing Russian tanks occupying your homeland. Can you tell more about that day? And, how the experience may have influenced your writing?

AS: Let me begin with a little bit of background. In 1968, in Czechoslovakia, a group of enlightened reformers tried to liberalize a rigid government and bring about a system “with a human face.” In August, the armies of five Warsaw Pact countries, led by the Soviet Union, occupied Czechoslovakia and overthrew the government of Alexander Dubcek. Faced with overwhelming power, the government advised its citizens to surrender without a fight.

Bratislava, my hometown, swarmed with hundreds of Russian tanks, driven by young men not much older than I was. Soldiers with machine guns patrolled around key buildings. Street signs disappeared overnight to confuse the invaders and make it more difficult to arrest the opposition. Pro-government, anti-Russian graffiti covered every blank space. Streets teemed with people. Panic, tears, shouting. Outside a downtown university building an overexuberant student was shot and his body was left on the steps for a few hours. The spot was transformed into a memorial with photos and flowers.

I turned thirteen on the first day of the occupation. I was bookish, idealistic, introverted. I
drank it all in. I had been sheltered and even as the events were unfolding, people had a sense that a world was ending. In the next six weeks it is estimated that 104,000 Czechs and Slovaks left the country for good. My family and I were among them. The occupation remains the turning point in my life. It took twenty-six years before I was able to go back for a visit. My writing is profoundly influenced by the events of that year, in obvious ways, such as being set in Bratislava, or less obviously in thematic preoccupations with dreams, flight, surrender, betrayal, retreat and loss of innocence.

SF: What a profound experience; it took 26 years for you to go back. What does recovery mean to you? What are you recovering from? Are you recovered?

AS: For me at least, I think it is impossible to be recovered. My childhood, adolescence, young adulthood were spent surrounded by dysfunction. I spoke already of the invasion of my country and the resultant relocation to another continent, culture, language. Melancholy, and depression are as familiar to me as breathing. But they are of course all fodder for stories. “Every experience you undergo, every pain, every dream is something you must write about,” is the advice a wise mentor gave me.

Stefanie Freele was born and raised in Wisconsin and currently lives in the Northwest US. Her short story collection, Feeding Strays released by Lost Horse Press was a finalist for both the Book of the Year Award and the 2010 Binghamton University John Gardner Fiction Book Award.Surrounded by Water, Stefanie’s second collection of short stories is now available from Press 53.

Yu-Han Chao, author of the story “Don’t Tell Her,” published in the July 2012 issue of r.kv.r.y. is interviewed here by her favorite librarian, Mimi Chong.

Mimi Chong: Since this interview is for r.kv.r.y., what are you recovering from currently?

Yu-Han Chao: Five weeks of false labor. An emergency C-section. The guilt of putting off revising my five-year-old novel manuscript. And this interview, for quite some time.

MC: Hope you’re feeling better. What books are you recovering from?

YC: Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which I enjoyed but felt like I didn’t get, and that really bugged me. Why 42?

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. I will never recover.

E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey. Why why why why why?

MC: I also want to know why. Do you draw from your Taiwanese background a lot?

YC: Yes, I kind of don’t have a choice, since that’s what I know the most, having spent most of my life there. I know it hurts me commercially because Taiwan isn’t as “sexy” or provocative as China (communism, ooooh!) and I don’t write historical fiction or about wars, and for some reason people in the publishing industry don’t seem to think Asians are a market worth selling to. Maybe they imagine we are too busy buying SAT/GRE/GMAT prep books. Or that we only read Chinese/Korean/Japanese/not-English-at-any-rate.

MC: From reading your stories, I get the feeling that Taiwan is a dingy, grim, materialistic kind of place. Is it really?

YC: It’s hard to generalize what an entire island is like, but the answer for the most part is no. Okay, maybe a little dingy, with open sewers and roaches and bloody betel nut stains, but for the most part people are terribly friendly and all sorts of lovely and delicious things are cheap so the materialism isn’t as bad as it could be. It is crowded, however, and the cost of living has been going up recent years.

MC: The story in r.kv.r.y. is about the death of a beloved son. Do you have personal experience with this?

YC: The Taiwanese woman who owned an Asian grocery store down the street from my apartment in Pennsylvania did. This story was really for her. A lot of things were changed, but her son did die falling during a hike, and I was there when she had just found out; it was heartbreaking. Thankfully, a few years later when I visited her, she was back to her cheerful self. R.kv.ry.

MC: What book is on your night stand now?

YC: My nightstand holds a Kleenex box, lotion, and Tiger Balm. There is a row of books leaning against my nightstand on the floor: Elizabeth Talent’s Time with Children, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction, Mark Costello’s The Murphy Stories, a Chinese nonfiction book, Gina Ford’s The Contented Little Baby and Sears & Sears’s The Discipline Book.

MC: What’s your favorite literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?

YC: Martial arts novels by Gu Long (Taiwanese writer). He was my first love; his prose is practically poetry. Even though he died an alcoholic suffering from repercussions of a knife wound sustained from a drunken brawl, I still fantasize(d) about being his girlfriend. Incidentally, towards the inebriated end of his career, his books were rumored to be ghostwritten by his girlfriends, and I would have happily done that.

I also really love Bridget Jones’s Diary and its sequel, in spite of what other people say. I wish Helen Fielding had written a series with Bridget as the main character that took up an entire library shelf, like the trashy teen series we all secretly devoured. I even wrote my own version, Bridget Zou’s Diary. It’s set in the Bay Area and my Bridget is Asian with immigrant parents and a Facebook-employed younger brother.

MC: Good luck with that novel. I’d buy it. There should indeed be more mainstream, non-historical-fiction with Asian main characters in American bookstores. Speaking of bookstores, what was the last truly great book you bought and/or read?

YC: Speaking of guilty pleasures, and also in response to this question, I am rereading Lolita on my Kindle for the umpteenth time. I have owned several editions of it in various stages of my life. My first copy had the black and white photograph of a schoolgirl’s inward turned knees on the cover. Reading the book at an impressionable age ruined me a little bit, but Nabokov’s (or Humbert Humbert’s) voice and word play are irresistible despite the awful content/sentiments.

MC: What was the last book that made you cry?

YC: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. It was actually the sad sex scene (too late, too late!) that made me cry. Ishiguro in general makes me sad in a good way, something about the emotional undercurrent behind his words and the understatement.

MC: The last book that made you laugh?

YC: Breakfast of the Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. I was probably quietly sniggering more than I was laughing. There’s so much in that book, I’m not sure where to begin. The humor in it was so matter-of-fact about terrible things that feelings of guilt followed my feelings of amusement, because it was plain wrong. For instance, “Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes.” And the narrator gave measurements of women and penile girth and width of men when introducing them. I’d love to write a book like that but don’t have the guts. Love the doodles, too.

MC: Which novels contain the best sex?

YC: Not Fifty Shades of Gray. I do not read novels for the sex, and honestly cannot remember anything that could be my answer to this question. In fact, based on my response to the sex scene in Never Let Me Go, it appears I like my literary sex nowhere near “the best,” if any.

MC: If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?

YC: Angela Carter, even though I would probably make her feel “as gross as Glumdalclitch” (from Burning Your Boats) because I’d be one of those “young and cute girls” she saw in Japan, and standing beside her I’d look like a munchkin. Regardless, I’d gladly be her personal assistant or maid for free just to be around her brilliance and delightful vocabulary. She seems like so muchfun.

MC: And among authors you’ve met already, who most impressed you?

YC: Junot Diaz. I didn’t actually meet him, but attended his reading at AWP in March 2010. It was a short and sweet reading of one of his racy, prepubescent boy stories and he answered the usual clichéd questions from the audience with patience and grace. He also seems like a lot of fun.

MC: What’s on your to-read list?

YC: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, two Umberto Eco books, a bunch of half-read Margaret Atwood books, and I’m in the middle of Shame by Salman Rushdie. Also, some Norton anthologies to learn craft and maybe help me prep for the GRE subject test so I can apply for Ph.D. programs.

MC: Do you have a website? What do you think about the future of electronic and online publishing?

YC: www.yuhanchao.com

I love my first generation Kindle, and edit for online literary magazine The Rose and Thorn
Journal. Electronic publishing is the way of the future, and while pretty books are nice, websites can be just as if not more attractive and the interactive and multimedia possibilities are endless. And a lot of the time they are free, which is great.

MC: Like r.kv.r.y.

YC: Exactly.

Mimi Chong is a librarian, researcher and reviewer living in Boston, MA. She enjoys anime, fantasy and literary fiction. She is currently recovering from water retention.

Rebecca Lloyd: Hello Indira. I’ve just been reading ‘My Kitchen, My Space‘ in r.kv.r.y. quarterly, and thinking what a good story it is. The helplessness of Mala’s situation is so exactly described. I wondered how you came to write it, I’m particularly interested in the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ saucepans in the story.

Indira Chandrasekhar: Thank you, Becca. I was interested in domestic aggression and the marking of boundaries in a relatively contemporary household that does not have an established hierarchy such as, for example, the traditional Indian joint family does. Mala is forced to move in with her mother-in-law but there is no reason why the relationship between the two women, who are in a modern context, cannot be civil. And yet, territory is paramount and feelings are brutal and violent. The story is set in the kitchen, because kitchens can so often be the sites of territorial strife in households, don’t you find?

So, indeed yes, the saucepans do end up being symbolic, and the Teflon-coated one is an easy victim, an obvious choice for the bad saucepan. That bit about the polymer debris, it came from the heart. One thing I’ve learned from discussions with many wonderful writers such as yourself is that as a story evolves you do have to let go of narrative strands however enticing they might be. Another aspect I wanted to allude to in this story is how ridiculous we can all become when we take uncompromising stances. I thought about having a feature of the conflict where, regardless of rationale and logic the old lady sticks to her opinion. As does Mala. In the end, this idea got obscured and I decided to let it go and keep the story focused on the saucepans.

RL: And can I ask you about your writerly habits? For example do you write every day, and do you carry a writer’s notebook with you when you are out and about?

IC: I do write daily. When my output is blocked, and a story simply will not emerge, I try at least to be careful about my everyday writing – emails, notes to the editors, things of that sort. When that correspondence gets sloppy I recognize that I am either tired, or, wonder of wonders, have another story coming.

Much of my inspiration comes from Indian cities. Mumbai (or Bombay as it used to be known), where I am most of the time, is intensely dense, one of the world’s most populous urban centers constricted geographically by the sea and the hills. Sights, conversations overheard, conversations had, people’s histories, the daily news – they are rich with many layers and have wonderful potential for stories. I used to carry a notebook but I find it distracting; when I am jotting things down, I cannot observe and absorb.

So I’ve taken to storing things in my head, and do my writing on the computer when I am back at my desk. Scenes – particularly sad, or disturbing or happy ones – tend to stay with me for a long time, and metamorphose, and I find myself putting them into stories that grow away from the original in strange ways. I find this is a blessing, for it helps me deal with writing about the kind of disparity one encounters daily in a city like Mumbai; it is so easy to veer into the obvious seduction of poor/rich, good/bad. The time that I find it useful to make notes, be it in a notebook or on a computer is when listening to family stories about extraordinary characters and events extending to a wide circle and going back many
generations. Good good stories.

RL: That’s interesting. And what about reading – do you get time to read, and do you believe as many writers have said in the past, that a writer when not writing should be reading?

IC: A difficult question. The simple answer to both questions would be ‘yes’ to both parts, but there isn’t a simple answer, is there?

How I read and what I read is very dependent on what I am doing. In the course of editing Pangea, when you and I were reading short stories with intense attention, just as I described that my writing was affected, so also was my reading. Fortunately with Out of Print, where I am constantly reading submissions, I have found a balance. All the same, when I am reading and editing with great engagement, either I have my editor’s lens on and find myself over critical, or my brain is simply too stretched. I am less able to immerse myself in a novel, or to lose myself in a story as I did in the past, when finishing a book would leave me with a sense of loss for the world I was leaving. The result is that I am more discerning, more selective in what I read, finding myself impatient with many of the things I loved before. I tend to seek work that is brilliant in craft. Does that make me sound pompous – what I am trying to say is that the time when I read purely for pleasure, without one part of my brain assessing what I am reading, where I am simply allowing my sense of things to go where the words take me, is precious.

To read when not writing, I think is truly important for a new or aspiring writer. Just in terms of the exposure to the craft and skill and subtlety that can be achieved. But as a universal prescription, I am not sure. I think writers have to find their own balance.

RL: … a difficult question answered very well, I’d say! So, just moving onto Out of Print, tell me a bit about that and what inspired you to set it up?

IC: When I started to feel more confident in my writing and felt that my stories were ready enough to try and place in literary journals (many thanks to your short story group on Writewords and to the input from Zoetrope Virtual Studios (where Mary Akers is also a member) most of the magazines that were interesting were outside India. Our rich heritage of small magazines in English (and many in local languages, although they were of academic interest since I write only in English) seemed to have disappeared.

Looking to journals outside India made me recognize that the worlds I was writing about were not always accessible to people outside the subcontinent. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Without implying that my writing is anywhere on the same level, reading Achebe and Soyinka, Mishima and Murakami, Dickens and Woolf, Twain and Carver, opened new worlds for me. I began to wonder if contemporary subcontinental writing, with its vastly different regional and linguistic influences has a cultural commonality and what that looks like. It seemed worth opening a magazine to find out.

RL: I imagine it must have been a bit like opening a treasure trove; I’ve read some extraordinary stories on Out of Print. Do you feel that your own story writing is moving in a particular direction that you can recognize, or do the stories appear to simply pop up to be claimed by you, and with no obvious links to each other?

IC: Indeed, yes. We come across some wonderful work. Very diverse, written from different perspectives, with strong interesting voices. So, instead of providing a simple answer to the question about common threads to subcontinental writing, Out of Print seems only to have opened up new ones. Which is fine and exciting.

Speaking of wonderful work, may I say thank you, once more, for your terrifying ‘Finger
Buffet.’ That you were able to write about that incident by making the characters into people the reader could see was quite remarkable.

My own writing is shifting and growing, I can feel it. So although the stories do appear, just like that, to be ‘claimed’ by me (what a lovely way of putting it), and although my principal focus remains the complex, nuanced dynamic between people, I find myself occasionally trying to direct stories in specific ways. More often than not, however, what I am thinking about – the injustice, the power games, the greed, the politics, the gamut of things that affect life – ferments and waits to spew over into the stories. The challenge is to control and hone all those seething concerns so the story moves forward.

One way I am able to do this, is through setting the story, placing the characters in a situation where the issue that is pushing to the forefront of my mind, fits fairly naturally. Which makes it sound as if my writing is deliberate and intellectual. In fact, most of the time it is a choppy back and forth between getting the words out and dealing with something that the story is allowing me to address and stepping back to look at how it is all getting crafted. A bit messy, really. It’s in the editing that it usually comes together.

RL: Thank you for your thoughts about Finger Buffet, I was glad to see it print. My next question is what percentage of the stories submitted to Out of Print are good enough for publication, and of those, apart from good writing, what other qualities are you personally looking for, I know you work with two? other editors.

IC: Yes, I work with two other editors – who happen to be my niece and my daughter. Wonderful young women, and really smart readers.

We tend to publish less than ten percent of the stories that are submitted per issue. The thing that I look for in a story is engagement. When I begin a story, do I want to find out more? Do the characters, or the story have appeal? I am not talking about a first sentence that is crafted to grab the reader, I am speaking of something deeper, more essential than that. Perhaps it’s the honesty of the writer as regards the story, perhaps it’s the desire of the writer to explore the subject, perhaps it’s the approach the writer has taken to tell the story. I can’t pinpoint it precisely. But it is tangible. That is the thing, really, the author’s attitude to the story is tangible. And even if the work is derivative, or poorly written, or is telling a story that ultimately we don’t like or is unusable in Out of Print for other reasons, that genuineness comes through.

Well, you have made me think about my writing, Becca. I know there were other things we talked about discussing regarding my own work and writing in general. But, you are right. This seems a good place to stop. Thank you for taking the time to ask me such thoughtful questions. I really appreciate it.

Rebecca Lloyd is a novelist, short story writer and creative writing tutor. Her short stories have been published in Canada , USA , New Zealand, and the UK. She won the Bristol Short Story Prize 2008 for The River. Her novel Under the Exquisite Gaze was shortlisted in the Dundee International Book Prize 2010. She was a semi-finalist for her short story collection Don’t Drink the Water in the Hudson Prize 2010. Her first children’s novel Halfling was published by Walker Books in January 2011. She is co-editor, with Indira Chandrasekhar of Pangea, an Anthology of Stories from Around the Globe, published by Thames River Press in 2012 and developmental editor of The Female Ward by Debalina Haldar, due for publication by Thames River Press this year.

Alisha Karabinus: I loved reading “Savasana.” It has so many of the qualities of the nonfiction you usually write that I had to remind myself that it was fiction. How did you decide to switch to fiction? Where did this come from?

Jami Nakamura Lin: This actually stemmed from a couple of pages I found in an old notebook that I wrote in about 2009. I forgot that I wrote it. I found it again while trying to find material for my nonfiction thesis. The idea still seemed intriguing to me, so I ran with it. These days I only write fiction when I get fed up with memoir-y stuff and want to be able to make up worlds, but when I was a kid I wrote stories all the time– these stuffy, elaborate, but really imaginative pieces about girls who lived in the olden days. I think I was pretty influenced by watching my mother’s BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

JNL: Writing fiction is a process of creating more, while writing nonfiction, to me, is a process of cutting back. Writing fiction is difficult because you start with a blank slate– you don’t know where any storyline or narrative thread is headed. But that is also what I’ve found enjoyable about it. Nonfiction is restrictive in the sense that you can’t blindly make things up. You have a bit of leeway in the sense that you can pick and choose what and what not to include, and how to organize it, but you can’t just pull stuff out of nowhere. But that sometimes makes the writing easier, because you have parameters.

I think I struggle with plot in fiction. When I write nonfiction, I know what the ending is, so to speak, because it happened. That was the hardest part with this piece. Where should it end up?

JNL: When I was little I was an obsessive notebook-keeper. I called myself Harriet, after Harriet the Spy. I started religiously journaling when I was about eight, and now I’m twenty-three, so I have boxes and boxes of journals. I wrote a lot of stories as well. But I never thought I could do it  “for real”. I love kids, and I’m very curious about the mind, so I thought I would be a social worker. However, in my senior year of college, I didn’t get into a psychology class I wanted during the fall semester, and there was a nonfiction class scheduled at the same time, so I thought, “I love writing, I’ll sign up for that instead.” And I did. And through a lucky chain of events, I had to turn in my essay first, and my professor read it and encouraged me to apply for an MFA. Which sounded so much more rewarding than anything else I was planning on doing right after college.

AK: How was the transition to studying English and writing in graduate school after working in a different discipline in your undergrad, especially with the demands of graduate level study?

JNL: It’s hard because I’m not very well read, and I’ve missed out on a lot of the “canon” that everyone else takes for granted that we’ve all read and understood. To say nothing of theory! But it’s not too bad. Psychology and creative writing, for me, are quite related. I do both because I always want to know *why*.

JNL: I practiced yoga a lot in college, when we had free classes, but not so much anymore! At the time, my favorite pose was child’s pose, because it’s where you go to rest.

JNL: That’s something I always struggle with, especially with writing my memoir. I can get really absorbed in reading old journals. What’s helped is working on multiple pieces at once, and making sure some of them are lighter and not so self-obsessed. Right now, I am sketching out ideas for a steampunk-esque story that takes place on the modern-day prairie. Kind of like if the Industrial Revolution never happened, and we were all still living like Laura Ingalls in 2012. I’ll never do anything with the story, but it’s a nice breather.

AK: I just want to say I love the ending of “Savasana.” Thank you for taking the time to talk to me about it, Jami!

Alisha Karabinus is co-founder and Executive Editor of Revolution House magazine and an MFA student in Fiction at Purdue University, where she is the Managing Editor of Sycamore Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such publications as the Raleigh Review, PANK, and Per Contra. She lives in Lafayette, Indiana, with her husband and young son.

Virginia Pye: In your two collections of stories, a specific setting plays an important role in defining the parameters of your characters’ experiences. In In an Uncharted Country, it’s rural Rugglesville, Virginia, and in What the Zhang Boys Know, an apartment building in Washington, D.C.  Do you have a sense why location is so important to you and how you use it to help you delve more deeply into character?

Clifford Garstang: I think setting is a critical element in fiction, one that can work on a couple of levels to affect the experience of reading. On the one hand, by creating a setting that is both fresh and familiar at the same time, a writer can make a reader both comfortable when he or she enters the fictional world and also curious about that world. On the other hand, the setting needs to contribute to the underlying meaning of the work. In the case of In an Uncharted Country, the rural setting was meant to evoke a certain kind of community in which the quirky central characters would feel like outsiders—that is, it’s not terribly diverse, its values are traditional. As for the condo building in What the Zhang Boys Know, in some ways I was going for the opposite—an urban dwelling that throws together a wide range of people who have to deal with living in close proximity with humanity. There’s another point to be made here, too. These are both linked collections of stories, and setting is one way in which the stories are tied together. And you don’t get the setting all at once, which is the beauty of this form for me.

VP: You have chosen to write novels as collections of stories. While this method has been employed by authors for a long time, its use is often still questioned. As a narrative choice, it allows for a kaleidoscopic vision of character: we see them from completely different angles and perspectives when glimpsed in diverse stories. Can you tell us some of the advantages of writing novels in stories? Are there any disadvantages and do you think you’ll keep to that style or try a more traditional novel approach?

CG: One of the great advantages from the writer’s point of view is to be able to inhabit many different characters and perspectives. Even in a tightly woven book like Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, some of the stories focus on characters other than Olive herself. In the classic example of the genre, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, the same is true, and the character around whom the book is organized is sometimes completely absent. In my two books, I’ve enjoyed these shifting voices and personalities. Another advantage is that the writer can explore multiple themes without straying too far from the central story. In my new book, for example, there is an over-arching narrative, but a few of the stories about some of the residents of the condominium building do swing away from that narrative for a while before circling back, although thematically they remain consistent. I don’t know that there are disadvantages for the writer or the reader of novels in stories, although agents and publishers still think these creatures are story collections and therefore are afraid of them. For now, though, I’ve moved on and have written more traditional novel forms.

VP: One of your reviewers has commented that your depiction of the apartment building in D.C. is “the Winesburg, Ohio of the 21st century.” Your setting has people of different races and backgrounds and thoroughly different experiences. Did you intend for it to encapsulate America today? And, if so, what does that say about our country now?

CG: I was terribly flattered by that Winesburg, Ohio comparison. I don’t think I intentionally meant for the diversity of the condo building to be saying anything about America, however; it simply reflects my own past experiences living in urban environments. But the diverseness of the residents of the building certainly was intentional, because I wanted to show that all of these very different people share things, not all of which will be immediately apparent. We are an incredibly diverse country, whether or not some people want to admit it. And we’re all witnesses for one another in ways that we sometimes don’t realize.

VP: You seem to have traveled extensively and have lived in Asia. Your central characters in the most recent collection are Chinese-Americans, some very recently arrived. Why were you drawn to write about immigrants? Have you ever felt like one yourself when in other countries? What does the immigrant experience show us about our country?

CG: Oh, this is complicated! For several years before I began writing this book I was traveling frequently to China. I’d been studying Chinese and reading a lot of Chinese history. And when I was imagining who my central character would be I wanted to find someone unlike me—someone about whom a reader might be curious and without firm expectations. So it doesn’t surprise me that I chose a Chinese immigrant. But this particular immigrant is married—or was married—to a Caucasian, and so their children are mixed-race. That blending of cultures was something I was really interested in. But also, the immigrant experience is one that provides built-in tension. It’s very unsettling to be thrust into an unfamiliar environment. And yes, I certainly felt that way on each of the occasions I’ve lived abroad, even though I knew that I wasn’t making a permanent home there. We’ve already touched on this, but I think it’s important to remind ourselves, just by looking around, that almost everyone is an immigrant.

VP: The Replacement Wife, one of the central stories in What the Zhang Boys Know, is told from the perspective of a young, Chinese-American woman. Although it’s a overused question, I can’t help but ask how the voices and experiences of your characters come to you, especially when they are ostensibly so very different from you as a white, male American.

CG: It’s a question I get a lot, particularly because the stories in my first collection were also from various points of view, of people who are very different from me. How do the voices and experiences come to me? I like to think that I’m an observant person—most writers are, I think—and I’ve traveled a lot and worked with a lot of people in my life. So I’ve seen and observed people like the people I write about. Yet, even though these people are different, we share a lot, too—we have similar emotions, we live in the same place and time. Years ago, a writing teacher recommended to me a book called An Actor Prepares by Constantin Stanislavsky. It’s an acting text, but there’s a lot that’s relevant to writers, too. He writes about “emotion memory,” a technique for calling on your own emotions to portray the emotions of a character. That’s what a writer needs to do, too. But I can’t discount the role imagination plays, too. Sometimes you just have to imagine the characters, provide them with appropriate emotions, and let them loose.

(Read “The Year of the Rooster” by Clifford Garstang)

VP: I’m curious about your decision to become a writer. Many people talk about the books they’d love to write, but they never get around to it, because they’re caught up in making a living in some other way. Weren’t you an established, successful professional in an altogether different field and then, in near-middle age, didn’t you decide to toss it all and take up writing full time? Had you written at an earlier point in your life and always longed to return to the practice? What propelled you to take the chance on becoming a writer, especially when your previous employment was so secure?

CG: Oh, my, but this is a long story! The short version is that I knew going to college that I wanted to write fiction, and I tinkered with it in school. But each choice I made after graduation took me further away from writing—first the Peace Corps, then law school, then international law practice, then international development consulting, then the World Bank. And along the way I did try to write a little, but nothing serious. Finally, as the new millennium approached, coinciding with the 20^th year of my law practice, I decided that the time was ripe to take a leap and pursue my old dream. My friends and colleagues thought I was nuts. They may have been right.

Virginia Pye’s debut novel, River of Dust, is forthcoming from Unbridled Books in Spring, 2013. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and has taught writing at the University of Pennsylvania and New York University. Her award-winning short stories that have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including The North American Review, Tampa Review and The Baltimore Review

Mary Akers: Thanks for agreeing to talk with me today. I loved your short story “Oranges” that appears in our July issue. It’s such a beautiful, wistful story and I really admire how you grapple with decades of time in what is quite a short story. The next-to-last paragraph reads:

“In the morning he’ll stand up in front of his seventh-graders. ‘History is memory,’ he’ll say. ‘It’s knowing that the birds who come coursing over your backyard are traveling paths ten thousand years older than you. It’s knowing that the clouds coming over the desert today will come over this desert a thousand years from now. It’s knowing that the eyes of the ones who have gone before us will someday reappear as the eyes of our children.'”

This idea of history-as-memory is lovely. It’s also what I’d like to focus on today, if you’re game, and since your most recent book is titled MEMORY WALL, I’m going to go ahead and assume that you are. In your writing, you often travel freely through time–forward, backward, into the future, and even into the pre-human past. This gives your stories such a sweeping feel, such a massive, monolithic presence. Does this style come naturally to you, or do you have to give yourself permission to take those leaps? Do you do it confidently? Or only with sweaty palms and trembling?

Anthony Doerr: Thank you, Mary!  Thanks even more so for being a promoter and protector of literary work.

Okay, time-travel in fiction.  Let’s see.  I do everything with sweaty palms and trembling, unfortunately.  But I take heart from the folks who have risked failure before me.

The first Alice Munro short story I ever read was “Walker Brothers Cowboy” and it includes these lines:

“He tells me how the Great Lakes came to be. All where Lake Huron is now, he says, used to be flat land, a wide flat plain. Then came the ice, creeping down from the North, pushing deep into the low places … And then the ice went back, shrank back towards the North Pole where it came from, and left its fingers of ice in the deep places it had gouged, and ice turned to lakes and there they were today. They were new, as time went … The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquility.”

As a kid I loved hunting for fossils, finding crinoids and brachiopods and (on the very best days) trilobites in the stones around our house.  And I loved making timelines out of long scrolls of paper and trying to understand the size of a human life in comparison with larger, geologic scales of time.  I remember one analogy in particular stuck with me, one my mother (a science teacher) taught us in middle school: What if a single calendar year, she asked us, represented the entire four-and-a-half billion year story of the Earth?

The Earth, we established, would form on January 1; single-celled life would show up in late March.  Animals with skeletons wouldn’t evolve until late November. Dinosaurs wouldn’t show up until Christmas and would be gone by the 27th. Recognizable homo sapiens didn’t show up until 11:48 pm on December 31^st!  Columbus fumbled his way to North America 12 seconds before midnight!

That exercise freaked me out and excited me all at once.  Egypt, Greece, ancient China–great civilizations, who fought wars and built temples and created whole literatures, could fit into a few seconds on the calendar year of the planet’s life?  To a child, this represented a radical re-ordering of humanity’s place in the universe.  Mom and Dad hadn’t always been there!  Abraham Lincoln hasn’t always been there.  The idea of “Ohio,” the idea of cultivating vegetables in a garden like my Mom did–those things hadn’t always been there!

Like Munro’s character in “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” I was beginning to understand that I was only going to exist on Earth for an appallingly brief time: that I was hopelessly mortal.  This knowledge is what made me want to communicate some sense of the larger scales of time in my own work.  For years I couldn’t figure out how to do it.  But when I came across Munro, and saw how she used time (and then later Andrea Barrett, and Italo Calvino), that she didn’t believe short stories had to take place in one evening, or in one room, or in one day, I found my permission.

Incidentally, this knowledge, that life is short, is what made me decide, at a ridiculously early age, that I wanted to be a writer: I wanted to do what I loved to do before I ran out of time.

MA: That’s beautiful. I hope you get as much time as you need to say what you want.

A few years ago, I was privileged to attend a great lecture by Kevin McIlvoy in which he talked about the beauty and the value of “somatic writing.” Writing that you feel in your bones, in your soul. In the West, he says, we are moving farther and farther away from feeling. We test our children on facts without remembering that feeling the world is just as important. Neither do we teach them (or remember ourselves) to get worked up about language. He read from Anais Nin and referenced her work as being very emotional, very feeling-based, sensation-based. “I only believe in fire,” Nin wrote.

He told us to think about children, about how engaged they are in their world. “For example,” he asked, “how many of you have reached down to pick up an object off the floor of the Little Theatre…and put it in your mouth or nose?” Children are all about sensation. We can learn from them. He believes that our first gift is physical aliveness, and after that comes intellectual study/awareness.

He proposed using the word “prehension” to describe the act of being without words, feeling that there is something there…as opposed to “comprehension,” a word we all use. He said that writers are often trained and encouraged to intellectualize their work, to separate themselves, but seldom to feel as they write. Your writing style comes to mind when I think of work that I would call “somatic.” What do you think about this concept and is that something you consciously strive to be?

AD: Wow, I love Mc (well, I’m lucky enough to know him a little and call him, “Mc,” but I don’t know how the heck to spell it.  Mac?  Mack?).  He’s very good at those lectures.

No, I don’t think I try consciously to write “somatically,” but I am very interested in how stories and novels can transport, and transport absolutely.  I’m very much a believer in John Gardner’s notion that fiction writers stitch together dreams, and that we don’t want to unconsciously break those dreams and wake our readers up.  So I spend lots and lots of energy trying to make my sentences as sensual and grounded and seamless as they can be.  And the best way to do that–the best way to transport a reader into another place, another life–is through moment-by-moment sensory detail: through the mouth and the nose, as Mc put it.  The path to the universal, I tell my students, is through the individual.  You reach for the stars by playing in the gravel.

MA: Sensory details are important to me, and I admire how well you incorporate them in your stories. They are especially rich in the stories of MEMORY WALL. I’ve been formulating a theory of late, that goes something like this: the sensory details that strike us most deeply are often similes that require us to conjure up a an image or sensation first, before we apply it to the written word. A super-simile, if you will. This is getting convoluted, but let me give you a specific example from your wonderful story “The River Nemunas.” Your young protagonist Allison is in a strange new world, in her grandfather’s home in Lithuania. Here’s an excerpt in which she describes her first night there: “Grandpa Z’s bed is in the kitchen because he’s giving me the bedroom. The walls are bare plaster and the bed groans and the sheets smell like dust on a hot bulb.” That description hits me hard. Not because I’m generally familiar with the smell of dust on a hot bulb, but because I get there. I first have to conjure up what I think that might smell like, and THEN I can apply it to the sheets, and then BAM! Wow, I get it. And my theory is that we readers like to do that work. We like for a description to make sense after we have done the work, but we really like having done the work, on a subconscious level. It makes us feel smart, as if we have really gotten something important. Would you care to comment on this idea of the super simile?

AD: Hmm, I love that you’re thinking about similes, Mary.  The etymology of “metaphor” is super-interesting to me: “Meta” means “across” or “over” and “pherien” means “to carry” or “to bear.”  So a “metaphor” literally carries something across (I think of Saint Christopher ferrying the Christ child, who grows heavier and heavier, across the river.)  A metaphor freights meaning from one place to another, unexpected but apposite place.  That’s what my favorite similes do: they nudge a reader’s mind, for a split second, out of the literal world of the story and into another space (often a place of memory) for a couple of words.  They vibrate the string of the sentence, if that makes sense.

In “Procreate, Generate,” to use one of my own attempts as an example, when I have Imogene (who can’t have a child) put her husband’s 2-year-old nephew on her lap, I write that “his scalp smells like a deep, cold lake in summer.”  I settled on that simile because it takes a reader (and Imogene) to a place outside of the immediate scene for six words, a place that’s still sensual and (hopefully) vivid and surprising, but also a place suggestive of longing, of something she cannot reach, which is the whole point of the scene: she cannot have a child of her own to hold on her lap, and this is a painful thing for her to do.

Metaphor and simile is where complexity comes from: without them, we simply tell stories that are straight lines.  We write sentences that don’t vibrate, strings that only exist on one plane, and move in a single direction.

MA: Yes, a six-word escape. That’s a great line. Very evocative.

I recently watched a wonderful movie, MOON, which its director (Duncan Jones) called “intelligent science fiction.” Have you seen this movie? Basically, it forces us to think about the bigger question of human existence, most notably what it means to be alive, how we know we ARE alive, and what sort of feedback we need from the world in order to confirm/understand our humanness, our aliveness. And one of the core elements of being a human, it turns out, is our memories. (As your epigraph in MEMORY WALL confirms.) But do we own our memories? Or do they own us? (I also recently watched the movie INCEPTION which explores the idea of implanting a memory or an idea..and how far down into the subconscious mind we have to go to do that organically. The answer in the movie is three levels down–the dream within the dream, within the dream, in order to keep the subconscious from recognizing the memory-intrusion and rejecting it.) In a way, this is exactly what is happening in your title story when Luvo and Alma merge at this intense, existential level of memory. What was the inspiration behind this story? It contains so many fascinating levels. How difficult was it to write?

AD: I’ve said before that my grandmother’s journey through dementia was my inspiration for the story, and that’s certainly true, but to suggest a story comes from a single place of inspiration probably oversimplifies things.

That story was very difficult to assemble.  Seven months of work, I think.  I injured my knee and went through surgery (and recovery!) while I was working on it, and I spent a lot of odd hours confined to a bed or a chair working on that piece.  As usual, I tried to take on too much: class, race, Alzheimer’s, a remote geography, geologic time scales vs. human time scales.

MA: It is a lot to take on, but you make it work. And how nice to have something as small as a short story bring in all these larger issues. I enjoy the layers–they inspire me.

Memory can be such a slippery thing. Two people rarely have the same memory of any event. I worked with a fellow on a non-fiction book about his life (he was banished to Siberia as a child during WWII and his grandfather starved to death on purpose so the children would have enough food to survive). After escaping Siberia, he worked for years as a psychotherapist mining other people’s painful memories, and he came up with a theory that goes something like this: “What you choose to remember, and how you choose to interpret it, determines who you are.” That strikes me as pretty brilliant, and I think your stories in this collection bear that theory out. But it also makes me think about Esther, her urgency, and the seizures she courts as an entry into the land of memory…You know, I’ve talked myself into a circle here, and I’m not even sure I have a question, but would you care to comment on any of this?

AD: Well, that’s very compelling– who among us doesn’t whitewash our own memories about ourselves?  Who doesn’t glorify our triumphs, and rewrite our worst moments?  Who doesn’t want to forget, or revise, our smallest failures–the time we ate a second donut, turned back to cigarettes, yelled at the kids?  The only person we absolutely have to live with, after all, is ourself.

MA: Funny you say that. All this week, I’ve been focusing on memory in anticipation of our interview, and guess what happened? An old friend of mine from high school contacted me on Facebook to remind me about this nice thing I had done for her that she has remembered all these years. (Basically, I ran laps with her when she was in trouble for arguing with our track coach. If she hadn’t run the laps, she wouldn’t have been able to attend the end-of-year banquet.) I had zero memory of this. Even after she described it to me, nothing. But for her it was crystal clear. So…I have no memory of doing a kindness, but she has this lifelong comforting memory of a kindness being done. How odd is that? Do you think we are programmed to remember the nice things done for us more than the nice things we do? Is it some biological imperative of a social society? And yet how many of us are haunted by the things we have done that are not nice. The unkind word, or the bullied kid we didn’t stick up for, or the hurt we caused another. Those are rock solid memories for most of us–and also the good stuff of fiction. Do you try to give your characters regrets as a way to bring them to life on the page?

AD: That is beautiful and strange and interesting and mysterious, Mary.  Here I am thinking we try to revise our memories of difficult moments to protect ourselves, and here you are saying you’ve forgotten one of your best moments…

MA: I’m fascinated by the way Luvo becomes Alma near the end of “Memory Wall.” I’ve had dreams that feel so real my brain actually turns them into memories. A dream-memory. What’s that about? It’s like a computer taking a cookie from your Internet browsing history and turning it into an executable file. File: Dream; Save As: Memory. There’s some serious subconscious crossover going on in that case. Fascinating, isn’t it? Have you ever had this experience?

AD:  Super-fascinating. Yes, I willfully and consciously wanted to play with identity in the title novella (and in “Afterworld” as well).  I’m always interested in oppositions (Canada versus Kenya in “The Shell Collector,” Alaska vs. the Caribbean and ice vs. water in About Grace, etc.), and who could be more opposite than Luvo, the poor, erased South African kid, and Alma, the privileged, white, semi-racist widow?  As dementia erases Alma, her memories fill up Luvo.  To conceive of ways to have their identities eclipse each other engaged me from the start, and kept me writing through to the end.

MA: I think every reader has a special short-list of writers that they know they will always enjoy reading. My short fiction list would include Margaret Atwood, Rick Bass, Andrea Barrett, Ann Patchett, Barbara Kingsolver, and Anthony Doerr (not in that order). If you were to put on your intellectual/critical hat for a moment, and leave aside the fact that one of those writers is you, what would you say all the writers on my short list have in common?

AD: Wow, that’s an interesting question–thanks for including my work in that company, sheesh.  Let’s see: All are North American?  All write in English?  Those are mostly trivial commonalities, though.  How about: All pay attention to place, and believe that setting is more than window dressing, more than something a writer injects into a story like a nutrient?  All believe that where a character (any human being) lives fundamentally determines a person?  That we are becoming more and more divorced from place by corporations?  And that sentences should do more than simply deliver action?  That stories should be big, spiky, beautiful, strange, idiosyncratic, rich experiences?

MA: Lovely. I agree. And finally, because we are a recovery-themed journal, what does recovery mean to you? Or even better, what role do you think memory plays in the act–the art–of recovery?

 AD: Hmmm.  Recovery implies a kind of prior injury, doesn’t it?  A wound or illness?  Something from which to recover?  So obviously memory is something that must be managed and controlled–our memories of traumas are always odd and often unreliable, aren’t they?  As we recover, sometimes memories keep us from returning to dangerous places, scary moments, things we ought to face once more—here I think about people getting back on the horse, getting back behind the wheel, getting back into romantic relationships, etc…

And memory must be preserved, too, right?  So that we understand what the former world was like, before the injury, before this new, recovering, overlapping world arrived?  Here I think about deforested mountains, oceans stripped of life: what are we hoping they’ll recover to?  And I think about war: how wars are always remembered by the victors, how the victors determine the memories people are allowed to have.

For me I think all of life is a kind of pendulum: encouragement to discouragement and back; wakefulness to sleep and back; illness to recovery and back…

MA: Brilliant. Thank you so much for participating!

AD: Thank you, Mary!

Mary Akers: Thanks for sharing your wonderful essay “The Shrink Who Killed Gazoo” with us. I love the way you use humor to tell this story. We all take ourselves too seriously, don’t we? Is humor a regular part of your writing routine? Do you laugh when you write it? (I ask, because I’ve written a few humorous pieces and always felt cranky and exhausted afterward. Being funny is hard work!)

Michele Whitney: Thank YOU for seeing the value in my piece. It is truly an honor to be published in r.kv.r.y.

Humor and laughter have always been a part of my life. My laugh is a bit of a national treasure. It’s one of those loud laughs where you either love it because its contagious, or you hate it because, well, you’re just an unhappy person. Humor was something that my mom instilled in me growing up; finding the humor in things when life isn’t so humorous. I also learned how to tell a funny story from my mom. There are so many stories that she has about growing up, or even about her courtship with my dad that still crack me up even after I hear the same stories over and over. I currently live with my mom, so I have exposure to these funny stories everyday. I’m thinking of compiling a book of these stories one day. The only “downside” to humor (I realize that’s kind of an oxymoron) is that too much humor can keep us in denial about our issues. There has to be a balance, or an “integration” of humor and laughter with the sadness and tears as well.

I would say that my traditional writing style is not predominately humorous. Humor is definitely integrated into my writing, it’s just not as obvious. This essay was a bit different from my traditional writing style because there was sharp, sarcastic, witty humor throughout the entire piece, whereas normally I am more heartfelt and gentle. I laughed as I was writing this piece. Only because the way I told it is the way it exactly happened. It was one of the few times that I took a relatively recent experience and wrote the whole thing within days after it happened. Every word and reaction made me laugh when it happened as well as when I was writing it. It was one of the “easiest” pieces I’ve ever written. The only real work was getting the background research done on “Gazoo.”

MA: One part of your essay in particular resonated with me: “I’m just the kind of person who thinks that everything is my fault. Perhaps it’s the conditioning of my conspiracy-theory-filled mother or the paranoia I formed from growing up in an alcoholic home. Or perhaps I’m just crazy. But if there is a conflict, I think it’s my fault. If there is tension, anger, sadness, or fear being expressed…it is my fault. If I experience loss…again, it’s my fault.”

I get that. I grew up in an alcoholic home, too, so what you wrote made a lot of sense to me. But it turns out a lot of people struggle with this idea of thinking everything comes back to them–that they must be at fault. John Rosemond, a parenting guru, calls it GAS. That stands for God Almighty Syndrome. (Why do we think we are in control of everything?? Do we think we are God?) And sometimes I have to remind myself when I feel guilty or anxious or responsible, that I’ve just got GAS. Anyway…my burning question after all of this is…have you killed Gazoo yet?

MW: Oh my goodness! I’ve got to use that…GAS! Now I know there is an acronym for it, so I feel much better. Ha! I think for me the issue was that growing up with an alcoholic father, I had little control over anything. And neither did my mom. Imagine me being maybe 12 years old one Christmas Eve, getting ready for Christmas Eve church service when there is a knock at the door from my dad’s work stating that he had been found face down drunk in the snow. Or imagine my heartbreak when I begged my dad over and over again on my high school graduation day to not drink, but for “some reason” he just had to have one beer. When you have little control over the outcome of things growing up; when there is so much uncertainty over many life events, I think you want desperately to never have that feeling again. So as an adult, you try to control everything. When I first started recovery from codependency, and one of the aspects of being codependent was “control,” I thought…”well I’m definitely not a controlling person!” But as I began to work the program, I realized that I very much wanted to be in control. I wanted to control the outcome of things, so that they would always be favorable. So that they would always turn out good.

As far as killing Gazoo. It’s funny, a friend asked me that same question literally the other day. I wish I could say he was completely dead. Perhaps he is on life support. It’s not easy to do away with something that has most likely been with you from the beginning of time. Remember, Gazoo is not necessarily evil. Sometimes he thinks he’s helping me because he thinks he’s protecting me. He represents the coping skills that may have worked in the past, but no longer serve me well as I become more evolved. The important thing is awareness that he is there, and to know the triggers that make him come out.
MA: I was reading over your blog (happy belated birthday!), and the idea of being “in-between” has stuck with me. Sometimes I wonder if we feel in-between because we spend so much time either dreaming about the future or remembering the past. What happens if we change the language and say I am “present”? That could also mean in-between, but maybe it has a better connotation? Words have power, don’t they? Both power for good, and the power to make us doubt ourselves. Another word I like to use to express the notion of in-between is “fallow.” In farming, you have to give a field a rest every once in a while. While it’s resting, good things are happening. Connections in the soil are being made, nitrogen is building up…good things. There is a lot of potential in a fallow field. So maybe being “fallow” is another way to think of this. Your thoughts?

MW: Thanks so much for stopping by my blog! And thanks for the birthday wishes. Wow, I love the concept of “fallow.” The reason I love that concept is that you definitely know that something good is going on in that “rest” season. But I’m assuming that in farming, “fallow” has already been proven to be a time of “good things.” There is no faith required, it just kind of happens the way its supposed to. This time of my life is filled with so much uncertainty (which I talked about before) and I can’t stand uncertainty! Some would say I have a huge lack of faith during this time, which is most likely true. What I struggle with and really struggled with prior to recovery is that I sometimes believe that nothing good is going on when I’m in this season of “fallow.” That there is no purpose in the in-between period, and that I’m just kind of floating around with no reason for being. My issue is that I’m in-between with so many things right now, including career, school, and love. The challenge for me is being present for everything in the here and now…practicing gratitude and having faith that things may not work out the way I want or expect them to, but they will work out…and they will work out good. Some people call it acceptance…that last stage of the grieving process. I used to think of acceptance as giving up. But now I’m realizing that acceptance is just a way of being present for “what is,” so that we can be open to “what will be.”
MA: Did you read much as a child? Who were (and are) some of your favorite writers?

MW: As a child, I liked to read, I wish I could say that I loved to read then. My “love” for reading really didn’t take off until I was in high school. I had a really cute English teacher, so it was fun going to class just to look at him. 🙂 And then all of a sudden I was reading. One of the assignments we had in the cute teacher’s class was to read  Richard Wright’s Native Son. It was one of the first books I really remember enjoying from start to finish. There was love, sex, murder, all told from an intriguing African American perspective and set on the South side of Chicago (where I’m from). As an adult, I acquired an unbelievable collection of books both real books and on my Kindle! I have diverse interests when it comes to writing, including mystery, romance, and self-development. Some of my favorite writers are Sidney Sheldon, Maya Angelou, Danielle Steele, Melody Beattie, and Stephanie Meyer (yes I’m a ‘Twi-junkie’).

MA: And finally, what does “recovery” mean to you?

MW: Recovery means “connection” to me. It means to restore our connection with the Divine. It means that we realize that we were never really separate from the Divine in the first place (however we choose to define the Divine for ourselves). It means being in constant connection with our “inner child”…the person we were before the “world” and its dysfunction got a hold of us. And finally, it means that we realize that all of the above is an imperfect process and that each day is a new day to begin again.