Vic Sizemore’s fiction is published or forthcoming in StoryQuarterly, Southern Humanities Review, The Good Men Project, Connecticut Review, storySouth, Sou’wester, Blue Mesa Review, Real South, Superstition Review, A River & Sound Review, [PANK], and elsewhere. Excerpts from his novel The Calling are published in Connecticut Review, Portland Review, Prick of the Spindle, Burrow Press Review, Pithead Chapel, Letters and elsewhere. Sizemore’s fiction has won the New Millennium Writings Award for Fiction, and been nominated for Best American Nonrequired Reading and a Pushcart Prize. You can find Vic at www.vicsizemore.wordpress.com

Vic, in “A Fisher of Men,” an excerpt from your novel Seekers, Caleb, a preacher’s son, knows that “Satan doesn’t miss an opportunity.” He finds himself sexually attracted to his college roommate, bandmate, and friend John, but pushes his feelings away with the help of the Bible and “prays and thanks God for forgiving his iniquity.” He confronts temptation head-on with Bible verses and plans to proselytize the wayward souls of a neighborhood gay bar. Does his faith and family background preclude deeper forms of soul-searching and acceptance of his own homosexuality, or do aspects of self-realization and self-acceptance take place later in the novel?

Caleb’s torment is born of the tug between his earnest resolve to have victory over his sexual orientation, which he honestly believes to be a sin against God and nature, and his longing to explore this facet of his identity because it feels so natural to him. He does engage in deeper soul-searching later, and even questions the tenets of his childhood faith, but he cannot shrug off an entire life of Fundamentalist teaching–at least not in time to avert tragedy. This leads him to swing between extremes, which is not an uncommon way young people raised in this environment struggle to figure out who they are.

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John Guzlowski’s writing appears in Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, The Ontario Review, Atticus Review, War Literature and the Arts and other journals both here and abroad.  His poems about his parents’ experiences as slave laborers in Nazi Germany appear in his book Lightning and Ashes.  His novel Road of Bones about two German lovers separated by WWII is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press. Writing of Mr. Guzlowski’s poetry, Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz said, “He has an astonishing ability for grasping reality.”

John, in “Village of Cold Houses,” an excerpt from your forthcoming novel Road of Bones, the Nazi soldier Hans has come to question everything he’s done and seen—and his role in mankind at its worst. “Killing was easy. Any man could kill any other man.  Any man could do it to any woman. Hans had even seen women who could do it. They had done it and gone back to stirring their laundry or breastfeeding their babies.” Since this chapter occurs towards the end of the novel, how previously did Hans’ understanding of war and the depravity of human nature evolve over the course of the narrative?

The chapter takes place late in the novel and late in the war, January of 1944. Hans has been in the war since Sept 1939 and fighting against the Russians on the Eastern Front since 1941. The novel focuses on a one-week period during which Hans realizes his inhumanity, but the story of what he has been like in the war and the depravity he has participated in comes into focus through several flashbacks.

One of the central memories is of a house he and some of his comrades had entered in the first summer of the invasion of Russia. They found an old grandmother and her daughter and her daughter’s baby. Hans and his fellow soldiers killed the grandmother and the baby and raped and killed the baby’s mother.

This is a memory he tries to escape – and can’t. The novel is about his acceptance of what he has done, the acceptance of this memory and the acceptance of his guilt.

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Marlene Olin’s stories have been published by Upstreet Magazine, Vine Leaves, The Saturday Evening Post, Emry’s Journal, Biostories, and The Jewish Literary Journal. In the coming months, her work will be featured in Edge, Poetica, Arcadia, Ragazine, and The Poydras Review. One of her stories will also be included in Love on the Road, an anthology distributed by Liberties Press.

Born in Brooklyn and raised in Miami, Marlene attended the University of Michigan. She presently lives in Coconut Grove, Florida with her husband but spends part of the year in Jackson Hole, Wyoming as well. She has two children and two grandchildren. She recently completed her first novel.

Marlene, in “The Maid of the Mist” Blossom’s age has caught up with her; she’s begun having mental lapses and is unable to adequately care for herself. Spells or not, she’s still quite clever and keeps her sense of humor, despite a history of mental illness—her mother’s in-and-out periods in a sanitarium—and the “quart of milk left out in the tool shed. A set of keys thrown in with the wash.” Ultimately, her visit to Niagara Falls in the custody of her step-grandson proves likely fatal. How did you come up with Blossom, and did she have some say—even subconsciously—in her final exit?

I majored in English and was greatly influenced by a handful of very gifted teachers. There’s no question that one teacher can change your life. I wanted Blossom to be that sort of person. Placing her in a small town amplifies that influence.

Though I leave the ending uncertain, it’s clear to me that Blossom wants to wrest control of her fate.

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Carole Rosenthal’s fiction and nonfiction appears in many places, and she is the author of the short story collection It Doesn’t Have To Be Me (Hamilton Stone Editions). A chapter of her memoir is in the new anthology, Not Somewhere Else but Here, and parts of this work are published in ACM, Huffington Post, and Persimmon Tree. Her first literary short story was accepted in the final issue of the late, great Transatlantic Review. Since, her stories have been in a wide variety of magazines, including Able Muse, ACM, Sol, the minnesota riview, Confrontation, Other Voices, The Cream City Review, Mother Jones, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Rosenthal’s writing, often anthologized, has been dramatized for radio and television, translated into eleven languages, and printed by presses such as Dell, Virago, Arbor House, and the Modern Language Association. She is a longtime professor at Pratt Institute, and lives part-time in New York City and part-time in the Catskills Mountains.

Carole, in “News from the Past,” your excerpt from The Goldie Files, the reader learns how Bernie Biederman wouldn’t have made a good member of The Monuments Men. In fact, he snatched a treasured, 800-year-old manuscript from among church artifacts in a cave he was chartered to guard while an allied soldier in World War II. He’s caught in an unending dilemma: holding a significant document of human history—with painted illustrations, calligraphic script, and religious codes—but unable to receive recognition or profit from “his book” for how he acquired it. How did the story originate, and how much did Bernie’s burning lifelong secret help shape his character?

In The Goldie Files a mystery is solved, a priceless long-hidden art work is recovered, and Martin Biederman, Bernie’s only son, is forced after his father’s death to shoulder the public and private obligations of his father’s troubling secrets. I began this novel after reading journalistic accounts of the wartime disappearance and subsequent repatriation of an illuminated manuscript that resided for centuries in the same church where Heinrich Himmler conducted his notorious Nazi SS rituals. When I visited that town—Quedlinburg, Germany—to view the manuscript, I discovered that Himmler also considered himself the reincarnation of Germany’s first Emperor, Heinrich the Fowler. Nazi mysticism doesn’t play a large role in The Goldie Files, but it sure does stimulate the imagination.

In 1945, as a dapper, young Jewish GI, Bernie believed he was “rescuing” an ancient manuscript—he would never agree that he had “snatched” it—from the casual desecration of a profit-minded Army buddy. He is dazzled by the manuscript’s bejeweled cover with its graceful ivory Madonna, its stylized miniatures and iconography. Raised in an orphanage, primarily self-taught, secrecy and silence come naturally to him, but Bernie’s cultural universe vastly expanded after his enforced European stint. His possession of “his book” lends an obsessive excitement to his life, and upon returning to the States, he begins consuming world history, learns imperfect Latin, and immerses himself in medieval art.

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Randy Nelson is the Virginia Lasater Irvin Professor of English at Davidson College, where he teaches courses in nineteenth and twentieth century American fiction as well as workshops and seminars in creative writing. His short stories have appeared in many national and international markets; and his instructional essays are to be found in magazines such as The Writer. A multiple-award-winning author, his most recent recognition was the Flannery O’Connor Prize for his collection The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men. At different times in his career, Randy has been a textile mill worker, a soldier, a landscaper, a garbage man, and a baseball coach; but the great love of his life, aside from wife Susan, has always been teaching. His students include Patricia Cornwell, Sheri Reynolds, and other nationally recognized writers. He’s currently at work on a new collection of stories.

Randy, in “Someone from the North,” your excerpt from A Duplicate Daughter, a strange cowboy PI from the other side of the mountains visits “what used to be a village” before a major earthquake, and, years later, is “little more than a dumping ground.” An old license plate is the cause of his visit. Can you explain the premise?

Sure. The private investigator, Gerald Manley, has been hired by a wealthy California family to pursue new clues in an old kidnapping case, that of the wealthy couple’s infant daughter in 1936. Detective Manley succeeds beyond anyone’s expectations, finding twelve year old Mía Muñoz and restoring her to a life of wealth and privilege back in California. This remarkable stroke of luck is more than it appears to be however: in tracking down the license plate, Manley has found the right name, but the wrong girl. The real baby was killed in the earthquake referenced in your question. The quake nearly destroyed the village that the “kidnappers” happened to be driving through.

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Lenore Weiss grew up in New York City, raised a family in the Bay Area, and currently resides in Louisiana. Lenore’s collections include “Tap Dancing on the Silverado Trail” (Finishing Line Press, 2011), “Sh’ma Yis’rael” (Pudding House Publications, 2007), and “Cutting Down the Last Tree on Easter Island” (West End Press, 2012). Her most recent poetry collection is “Two Places” (Kelsay Books, 2014). She currently teaches a memoir class at Ouachita Parish Library in Monroe, Louisiana and serves as the copy editor of Blue Lyra Review. Her blog resides at www.lenoreweiss.com

Lenore, in “Hazardous Turnips” excerpted from Pulp into Paper, the characters at the mill are caught in what has become a common dilemma: rural workers in essentially company towns thankful for their jobs despite growing hardships—including their own health and that of everything around them. How did you decide to concentrate on the subject?

I moved to northeastern Louisiana several years ago and set about familiarizing myself with the area. Two events coincided that led me to write this book. My mate worked for a contractor at the Georgia-Pacific mill in Crossett Arkansas, one of the oldest mills in the Koch Brother’s arsenal. He was assigned to “detention pond” duty with the supposed goal of filtering harmful effluents from the paper making process. I watched him become slowly poisoned by H2S (hydrogen sulfide) and other noxious gases that have been established by the EPA as carcinogens. Every night I heard his terrible cough and stories of company noncompliance with standard industry operating procedures. Around the same time, I met the northeastern Louisiana representative to LEAP (Louisiana Environmental Action Project) who was involved with the Crossett Citizens for Environmental Justice. I began to attend their meetings and researched the history of the mill in Crossett. The book grew out of that experience.

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