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Kate Bullard Adams leads a very pedestrian life in Charleston, South Carolina, and depends on her writing to liven things up. Right now, her fictional cast of pre-Great Recession investment bankers on Wall Street is giving her all the excitement she can handle. Her short stories have appeared in Chautauqua, Harpur Palate, turnrow, The Portland Review, and elsewhere, and both her short and long fiction have reached the final rounds for various awards, including Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers, the A.E. Coppard Prize (Coffee House Press), and the Faulkner/Wisdom Prizes.  Just last week, she learned that her only unpublished story is a finalist for december’s Curt Johnson Prose Award in Fiction. Wish her luck.

Kate, chapter four of Bailout revisits an earlier period in Alex’s life, during the early days of her investment banking career, as a floor trader well before she became a candidate to become Wall Street’s first woman CEO. How does the chapter fit into the greater context of the novel in explaining her character? Does the loss of her stillborn child ultimately enable her professional success, either in practical terms or as form of motivation?

This chapter ties in with the theme of risk, which is central to the novel and to Alex’s character. For a trader, like Alex, risk is a necessary evil. Any trade entails a certain amount of risk, and the greater the risk, the greater the potential rewards as well as the potential losses. When a market is booming and rewarding increased risk, as was the case with real estate and related securities leading up to the recent crisis, it’s easy for a trader to forget the possible downside. For Alex, however, the inexplicable loss of the child that she had carried to term, and expected to deliver successfully, taught her the devastating lesson that “there was no way of ever knowing the worst that could happen until it was too late.” To escape the pain of that loss and the attendant demise of her marriage, Alex threw herself into her career at Grady Cole. There, her single-minded focus along with her intimate knowledge of unforeseen risks and their incalculable dangers propelled her career and positioned her to become the first female CEO on Wall Street.

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Justin Nicholes is the author of the novels River Dragon Sky (2012) and Ash Dogs (2008). His stories have appeared in The Saint Ann’s Review, Slice, Prick of the Spindle, Cleaver Magazine, Outside In Literary & Travel Magazine, The Summerset Review, Stickman Review, The Medulla Review, and elsewhere. He is the chief editor of The Pavilion literary magazine for expat writing and lives in Xinzheng City, China.

Justin, “The Writer,” a prologue to your story collection, is an interesting work of metafiction. Here, the writer conjures the character of Turtle, a 400-pound man who, because of a car accident, is mentally deficient and carries a titanium plate in his head. He represents life as art. The writer herself, originally from Ohio has come to China to teach English, and takes the reader through the process of her work, and the joys and hardships she’s had in terms of getting published. As an Ohioan writer now teaching in China, yourself, how closely does the writer as portrayed in the story resemble your own thoughts on writing in general, as well as your particular interests in creating fiction based on the lives of Chinese men?

The writer in the story mostly resembles an attitude (or a mood or phase) rather than my overall thoughts on writing. She’s a dedicated writer who’s gone through an MFA and published a little, but she’s starting to become cynical. A lot of writers go through this, I think. At first, when we start nailing down the basics, it seems like we’re close to reaching the point where we can finally get published, where an editor we’ve never met looks at our writing and affirms it with acceptance. But we can’t always be at this point yet. Our fiction isn’t ready. We’re not ready. To quote my former writing teacher Richard Spilman, “Beginners often write as if they were landscape painters trying to get the leaves right”. What Richard means is that, with time, writing day after day makes a writer able to cultivate serious thought or surprise in writing, when what the details were trying to murmur finally gets through to us, and we feel our way through the writing process by placing ourselves in the work.

At the beginning, the writer in this story resembles this landscape painter, not writing as if her life is also at stake, not writing as if getting the story right means at some level life or death. By the end of this short piece, though, she comes to an understanding. The writer’s understanding, yes, does resemble mine when creating fiction. The writing process for me always starts with trying to get the details, then letting those details tell me what the meaning and purpose of the work may be, after I read through it a hundred times and revise.

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In a misguided attempt to summon the Muse, Robyn Parnell once saw the profile of the love child of Barbara Kingsolver and Chuck Norris formed by the dust bunnies underneath her computer monitor. She chugged a caffeinated beverage until the image faded. Parnell is an Author’s Guild and SCBWI member; her fiction, poetry and essays have been published in over ninety books, magazines and journals (several of which have not filed for Chapter 11 protection). In 2012 she got to practice her It’s-an-honor-just-to-be-nominated speech when one of her short stories was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Notable publishing credits include her juvenile novel The Mighty Quinn, her picture book My Closet Threw a Party and her short fiction collection This Here and Now; less notable credits are not noted in this notation. When not working on innumerable fiction projects Parnell rehearses her NEA grant refusal speech and considers obtaining whatever professional help is necessary to enable her to compose a more pretentious Author’s Bio blurb. For more information,  see: www.RobynParnell.net and  www.theblogimnotwriting.com

Robyn, in “The Assassin,” excerpted from your novel Looking Up, JD and Ciela are recovering in the aftermath of life, post-“incident.” JD is trying to attain a new “normal,” hence his fateful visit to Rivercrest. At what point do these scenes arise in the novel?

What JD and Ciela come to call The Incident occurs in the book’s third chapter. Before Cheryl’s death and Ciela’s peculiar injury (“The Incident”), JD regularly walked/hiked in Rivercrest Park. JD’s desire to return to a normal routine after Cheryl’s funeral (Chapter 14) is what prompts that fateful visit to Rivercrest (Chapter 15).

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Kevin Eze, a Nigerian writer, is the author of the forthcoming novel The Peacekeeper’s Wife (Amalion Publishing, Fall 2014). His works have been anthologized in Writers, Writing on Conflict and War in Africa and Long Journeys: African Migrants on the Road. His stories have recently appeared in The Four Quarters Magazine and Outside In. He was one of the winners in the Africa Book Club Short Reads Competition in 2013. He writes in English and French Languages from Dakar, Senegal.

Kevin, Mali, the story, does an admirable job of relating the conflict and turmoil in Mali, the country, through its narration, its characters, but, most of all, in its setting—a hospital where “(a)ll but two wings are closed due to fleeing personnel”…“rebuilt after a suicide bomber levelled the old maternity ward,” and where a “nurse would be driven crazy working in a hospital without towels or paper.” How did you decide to set the story in such a place?

A hospital in distress better captures the drama of the human condition in Mali at the height of the conflict. A hospital is a waiting place, a corridor of life. The Malian people were trapped in this tenuous corridor, like in a hospital, waiting, to either return home “restored” or be carried home for burial. The UN-backed French intervention was the doctor. But the hospital was also the irony of the Malian conflict: Malians sought refuge or treatment at the same hospital, irrespective of the color line.

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Jean Copeland is a high school English teacher who received her M.S. in English-Creative Writing from Southern Connecticut State University. Her fiction and personal essays have appeared in T/OUR Magazine, Sharkreef.org, Connecticut Review, Texas Told ‘Em, P.S. What I Didn’t Say, Off the Rocks, Best Lesbian Love Stories, Harrington Lesbian Literary Quarterly, The First Line, and Prickofthespindle.com. She also wrote an essay that will appear in the essay collection, A Family by Any Other Name, in early 2014.

Jean, this opening chapter of The Revelation of Beatrice Darby finds Beatrice awakening to her own sexuality and attraction to women through her impulsive interest in a dimestore novel about a lesbian romance. Beatrice is a churchgoing girl and this is 1957, in a quaint pharmacy and soda fountain, during a time when “good” girls dated “nice” boys, soon got married, and primarily worked in the kitchen and took care of the kids. Without a doubt, her budding revelation will have consequences on many levels. What inspired you to set the story in this period rather than a more contemporary one?

I’ve had an affinity for that period since discovering my first Doris Day and Rock Hudson film on cable as a teen. But as I researched the social history of the LGBT movement for a class I was going to teach, I was fascinated and humbled by the paradox of that era regarding homosexuals: Life was wholesome and wonderful for “normal” Americans but oppressive and dangerous for anyone brave enough to be out and proud. I could explore that precarious life from the safety of my protagonist, Beatrice Darby.

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Jacob M. Appel’s first novel, The Man Who Wouldn’t Stand Up, won the 2012 Dundee International Book Award and was published by Cargo; his second novel, The Biology of Luck, was recently released by Elephant Rock. Jacob’s short story collection, Scouting for the Reaper, won the Hudson Prize and is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. His short fiction has appeared in more than two hundred leading literary journals including Agni, Alaska Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, Gettysburg Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Raritan, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, StoryQuarterly, Threepenny Review, Virginia Quarterly Review and West Branch. His prose has won the Boston Review Short Fiction Competition, the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Award for the Short Story, the Dana Award, the Arts & Letters Prize for Fiction, the North American Review’s Kurt Vonnegut Prize, the Missouri Review’s Editor’s Prize, the Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize, the Briar Cliff Review’s Short Fiction Prize, the Salem College Center for Women Writers’ Reynolds Price Short Fiction Award, the H. E. Francis Prize, the New Millennium Writings Fiction Award on four separate occasions, an Elizabeth George Fellowship and a Sherwood Anderson Foundation Writers Grant. His stories have been short-listed for the O. Henry Award (2001), Best American Short Stories (2007, 2008), Best American Nonrequired Reading (2007, 2008), and the Pushcart Prize anthology (2005, 2006, 2011). Jacob holds a B.A. and an M.A. from Brown, an M.S. in bioethics from the Alden March Bioethics Institute of Albany Medical College, an M.A. and an M.Phil. from Columbia, an M.D. from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, an M.F.A. from N.Y.U. and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Jacob, The Man Who Trounced God at Chess starts a year into Balint’s serial killing spree, but this chapter recounts the circumstances with his wife and Sugarman that initiated his metamorphosis from “conscientious physician to calculating assassin.” What specific timeline does the novel eventually cover? Does it take place over the aforementioned year, or does it continue beyond the time period of the opening narration?

Figuring out how much time the storyline covered was one of the challenges of putting this novel together.  I knew that I wanted some narrative distance, but I wasn’t initially certain how much. Eventually, I realized I needed to start in the middle–beginning after Balint has become an assassin, but before his assassination efforts reached a climax.

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