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Stephanie Dickinson, raised on an Iowa farm, now lives in New York City. Her novel Half Girl (winner of the Hackney Award given by Birmingham-Southern) is published by Spuyten Duyvil.  Corn Goddess (poems),  Road of Five Churches (stories) and Straight Up and No Sky There (stories) are available from Rain Mountain Press. Her story “A Lynching in Stereoscope” was reprinted in Best American Nonrequired Reading and “Dalloway and Lucky Seven” and “Love City” in New Stories from the South, Best of 2008 and 2009. She is the winner of New Delta Review’s 2011 Matt Clark Fiction prize judged by Susan Straight. Her Port Authority Orchids was a 2012 finalist for the Starcherone Book Prize for Innovative Fiction.

Thanks for sharing this chapter with WIPs, Stephanie. It’s powerful and haunting. How did this novel evolve?

On July 26, 2006, Jennifer Moore, age 18, was abducted after a night of underage drinking and taken by small-time pimp, Draymond Coleman, to a seedy Weehawken hotel room that he shared with his prostitute/girlfriend, 20-year-old Krystal Riordan. During the early morning hours, Jennifer was raped and strangled by Coleman, while Riordan looked on.  The entire evening had been one of poor judgment that began when Jennifer’s friend drove them in her mother’s car to Manhattan from New Jersey, to go clubbing. The girls parked in a No Standing Zone and when they returned, discovered the car had been towed. The Impound would not release the car to the intoxicated girls. Jennifer’s friend passed out and EMS spirited her off in an ambulance to St. Vincent’s Hospital. Jennifer, in her white mini and black halter, walked off into the night and ended up on West Side Highway with Coleman stalking her.

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Brian Mihok’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Necessary Fiction, Hobart, 1913 and elsewhere. His novel The Quantum Manual of Style will be released in February 2013 by Aqueous Books. He co-edits matchbook, a journal of indeterminate prose.

Brian, The Quantum Manual of Style is quite a unique novel, with its manual-like style guide and hypothetical teaching examples woven into the broader narrative. What inspired such a construction? Do you have a background in science? In quantum mechanics?

It started with two unrelated ideas. I had just moved to Buffalo and because I didn’t know anyone other than my girlfriend, who was in grad school at the time, I was afforded a lot of time to read and write. She would come home late and do homework until she went to bed so it was like being in love with someone who is actually out of town. Still, she brought home all these style guides, APA, MLA, whatever-A. Big fat guidebooks to teach a student the relatively unimportant yet technical details of adhering to expected academic usage. The books would sit there during the day and stare at me long enough until I opened them up and flipped through. At some point it occurred to me that it might be interesting to see a book of fiction that looked like one of them. Something kind of ridiculous and over-the-top. Something that purported to give simple rules to simple problems, but was really ideologically a mess of ideas and reasons and examples. That was one idea.

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