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E.G. Silverman was a finalist for the 2012 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction for his short story collection Hardly Any Mess At All. Silverman’s short stories and novel excerpts have appeared in Beloit Fiction Journal, South Dakota Review, Harpur Palate, 2 Bridges Review, Fugue, Berkeley Fiction Review, Reunion: The Dallas Review, and many other literary magazines. A complete list is at EGSilverman.com. He’s studied with Brian Morton, Sheila Kohler, Carol DeChellis Hill, and Jonathan Baumbach.

E. G., in this chapter of Be My Own Father young Harry recreates his present to help understand the past. He has emulated his father’s life to a tee until it puts him behind the wheel of his Camaro in what may become his final ride. He relates the anguish of growing up without having ever known his father, and the torment he undergoes as he seeks to learn the possibly frightening truth. Does the reader already know the full back-story of Harry’s family that he can’t seem to pry from his mother?

This is near the end of the book. While the reader has been given clues as to the full back-story, this is the first time where it’s laid out in detail. Still, one must wonder how reliable Harry is. After all, he is a teenager boiling over with anger and resentment. Can one accept his interpretation of what he believes are the facts? The reader gets the answer in the final scene, an epilogue after this chapter, but by then it is too late for Harry.

In a sense though, does it really matter what the truth is? Isn’t how characters respond to what they perceive as the truth more important? As their perceptions change, the truth changes, and so do their responses to it. At its essence, that’s what the novel is about, as is much of my work. In life, we all struggle to discover the truth, we rarely do, and yet out entire lives are based on our perceptions of it.

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Rita Ciresi is the author of four novels (Bring Back My Body to Me, Pink Slip, Blue Italian, and Remind Me Again Why I Married You) and two award-winning story collections (Sometimes I Dream in Italian and Mother Rocket). She is professor of English and director of the creative writing program at the University of South Florida. She has received support from the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Virginia Commission on the Arts, the Florida Department of State, and the National Writer’s Voice. Her residencies include visiting writer at the American Academy in Rome, a fellowship to the Hawthornden International Writers’ Retreat, and stints at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Santa Fe Art Institute. She has written the first and final drafts of most of her work at the Ragdale Foundation, an artists’ colony located in Lake Forest, Illinois. Visit her website at www.ritaciresi.com.

Rita, in “The Art of the Hand,” chapter one from The Doctor’s Wife, Lydia and Mark make an unlikely pairing. Yet, before a large, curious, and admiring audience of med students, the seeds are planted of what (as the novel’s title indicates) will become a long and lasting relationship. What span of these characters’ lives are explored over the course of the novel?

The Doctor’s Wife explores the impulsive nature of love. Mark and Lydia meet in August and the novel ends as they drive home from a Christmas party. I chose to tell the story in present tense so I can give the reader a better feel of being caught up in a whirlwind romance. But as I approach the finish line, I’m finding myself reluctant to let these characters go–so a sequel may be in the works.

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Jen Knox grew up in Columbus, Ohio. She works as a creative writing professor and associate editor in San Antonio, Texas. Jen’s writing was chosen for Wigleaf’s Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions in 2012, and she was a recipient of the Global Short Story Award for a different portion of We Arrive Uninvited. Some of her current, short work can be found in A cappella Zoo, ARDOR, Bound Off, Bluestem, Burrow Press Review, Gargoyle, Istanbul Review, JMWW, Narrative, [PANK], Prick of the Spindle, Short Story America, and The Bombay Literary Magazine. She has published two books, including the Next Generation Indie Book Award winner in Short Fiction, To Begin Again (All Things That Matter Press, 2011). Her new collection, Don’t Tease the Elephants, is forthcoming from Monkey Puzzle Press.

Website: http://www.jenknox.com
Blog: http://jenknox.blogspot.com/
Twitter: @JenKnox2

Jen, this section from We Arrive Uninvited is very compelling and leaves the reader wondering what happens next. While everyone in town considers Amelia “a blessing,” Kay considers her a curse, a reminder of her own bad choices and the cruel fate that befell her. Amelia senses her mother’s contempt for her, but never understands why. Does she seek the answer as the novel unwinds?

Amelia is driven to understand Kay and gain her acceptance, but this desire will prove problematic. Kay seems to transfer all her anger and regret to the part of herself she sees reflected in her child. Throughout much of the novel, Kay is depicted as a sort of villain. But life is never that clear cut, and neither is this story. Perspective shifts with awareness. When Amelia comes to understand her mother—learning everything the reader knows to this point and more—her desire to gain acceptance fades, and the way she views reality somersaults.

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LaShonda Katrice Barnett’s stories appeared this summer (2013) in the New Orlean’s Review (“Hen’s Teeth”), Gemini Magazine (“533”), and the Chamber Four Literary Magazine (“Ezekiel Saw The Wheel”). Additionally, her short fiction appears in numerous anthologies and journals such as Callaloo and the African American Review. Barnett edited the interview collections I Got Thunder: Black Women Songwriters On Their Craft (2007) and Off the Record: Conversations with African American and Brazilian Women Musicians (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). She is the author of a story collection (1999). Her debut novel, Jam!, is forthcoming with Grove/Atlantic. She lives and writes full time at home in Manhattan.

Web: www.lashondabarnett.com Twitter: @LaShondaKatrice

LaShonda, “Road to Wingo” finds Edrow Bodine in the middle of a mid-life crisis of sorts, but one in which he’s pretty much accustomed—a perpetual crisis of a mundane existence. He’s “never felt in power or control like the king of his own castle—more like a serf bound to small town life.” In the timeframe of the story he’s “preoccupied,” oblivious to his wife Mina’s gall bladder problems while daydreaming about Katie, his unattainable object of desire and temporary diversion from his dreary days. Mina, to the contrary, is relatively content with their lot in life, and forges ahead despite the pain of everything. Will Edrow appreciate what he has a little more now that he’s reawakened to reality by story’s end?

I like this question a lot and wish I could be in a room with you posing it to readers because the answer(s), I think is really telling about the respondent. Also, to answer this means to think about Mina: what kind of love does she possess and give to her husband? Mina is not very demanding because she doesn’t need to be, as you pointed out, she’s content—especially with her tomatoes. So she can love freely and easily, which includes a lot of acceptance and tolerance. I think I identify much more with Edrow who certainly appreciates Mina to the extent that he’s taken her for granted (the ultimate show of appreciation), but he wants more. I think that Edrow will continue to want more, my hope is that his definition of more will include Mina because something very beautiful could be borne out of that reciprocity.

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Randolph Splitter has published two books, the novella/story collection Body and Soul (Creative Arts) and a critical study of Marcel Proust from Routledge & Kegan Paul. His recent and forthcoming publications include stories in Chicago Quarterly Review, amphibius, Ducts, The Milo Review, and JewishFiction.net. He’s also written prize-winning screenplays (Gotham Screen, Amsterdam Film Festival, Oaxaca Film Festival) and made short films. The Gotham Screen award-winner is a version of Bonobo Boy. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Hamilton College; earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley; taught literature and writing at Caltech and De Anza College; and edited the national literary magazine Red Wheelbarrow.

Randolph, this is quite a chapter. The courtroom scenes are like an amalgamation of the recent Steubenville rape trial and the Scopes Monkey Trial of nearly a century ago. What inspired your work on Bonobo Boy?  Should the reader consider the court case and arguments having broader implications than simply relating to Ben individually?

I became interested in the subject of violence (and how to prevent it). I was even teaching classes with that topic. In the process I read a lot about nonhuman primates, and I discovered that bonobos are quite different from chimpanzees—but both are closely related to us.

Yes, there are broader implications. I’d like the reader to think about human gender roles, with bonobos as an alternative role model.

Although I’m firmly committed to realism—depicting what things are really like—I have a fondness for slightly outrageous ideas that stretch the bounds of plausibility but give us deeper insight into reality.

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Domnica Radulescu is the Edwin A. Morris Professor of French and Italian literature at Washington and Lee University, and is a consultant with the Romanian Studies Association of America. She is the author of two best-selling novels: Black Sea Twilight (Doubleday 2010 & 2011) and Train to Trieste (Knopf 2008 & 2009). Train to Trieste has been published in twelve languages and is the winner of the 2009 Library of Virginia Fiction Award. Her play The Town with Very Nice People: A Strident Operetta has been chosen as a runner up for the 2013 Jane Chambers Playwriting award given by the Association for Theater in Higher Education. Her play Naturalized Woman was produced at the Thespis Theater Festival in New York City in 2012. She has authored, edited and co-edited several scholarly books on theater, exile and representations of women and received the 2011 Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia. She is also a Fulbright scholar and is presently working on her fourth novel titled My Father’s Orchards and on a new play titled Exile is My Home.

Domnica, as evinced by this chapter (“We’ll Always Have Hollywood”), Country of Red Azeleas packs a powerful punch through beautiful prose, bringing together soul mates Lara and Marija in an LA reunion after many years, ones which included horrific episodes in Marija’s case during the Bosnian War. When in the novel does this chapter appear?

The chapter “We’ll always Have Hollywood” comes towards the end of the novel and is of crucial importance in the development of the story as it reunites the two heroines after a long period of separation. Up to this point in the novel we have traced the destinies of the two protagonists starting from their childhood growing up in the former Yugoslavia, partly in Sarajevo, partly in Belgrade and then separately throughout their different and tumultuous journeys. At the start of the Bosnian war in 1992, Marija and Lara part and go their separate ways: Lara immigrates to the United States by marrying an American literature professor and Marija returns from Belgrade to her native Sarajevo where she works as a wartime journalist until the summer of 1995 when she and her family become the victims of atrocious war crimes by Serbian soldiers. Following the summer of 1995 all communications between Lara and Marija are interrupted, yet the reader follows for some time their separate stories: Marija’s story as she tries to recover from the terrific traumas suffered at the end of the war and her own immigration to the United States and Lara’s story as she becomes a professor of political science in the nation’s capital, as she has her daughter Natalia and as her marriage dissolves into a rollercoaster of adultery, a turbulent divorce and custody litigation.

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