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Khanh Ha’s debut novel is FLESH (June 2012, Black Heron Press). He graduated from Ohio University with a bachelor’s degree in Journalism. His new novel has earned a 2013 Leapfrog Fiction Award Honorable Mention. His short stories have appeared in Outside in Literary & Travel Magazine, Red Savina Review (RSR), Cigale Literary Magazine, Mobius, DUCTS, Lunch Ticket, The Mascara Literary Review, Taj Mahal Review, Glint Literary Journal, The Literary Yard, and will be forthcoming in the summer issues of Zymbol, Yellow Medicine Review (2013 September Anthology), The Underground Voices (2013 December Anthology), and The Long Story (2014 March Anthology). www.authorkhanhha.com

 Khanh, “Of Bones and Lust” from your novel Once in a Lullaby provides great depth into the narrator’s background. Can you describe how the chapter sets up the greater narrative and what’s to follow?

Once in a Lullaby is narrated by two voices in time parallel. Giang (pronounced Zhang), the narrator seen in “Of Bones and Lust,” is a Vietnam war veteran, a former North Vietnamese soldier who defected to the South, and later a reform-camp prisoner following the fall of South Vietnam in 1975. After spending 10 years in a remote prison camp, as a drifter he finally settles in the Mekong Delta in the U Minh region, working as a caretaker in a roadside inn. Nicola Rossi, a deceased lieutenant in the U.S. army, is the other voice, the voice of a spirit, the omniscient voice. Through his voice we follow a search by an American woman–his mother–for the remains of her son, who went missing-in-action during the Vietnam War, where we come face to face with broken psyche, with barbarity, and with moral correctness. With his mother is her Vietnamese daughter adopted in 1974 when she was five years old. She’s eighteen now when she meets 39-year-old Giang. He arranges for their stay at the inn and gets Miss Rossi a local man, another war veteran, who takes the American lady into the forest every day to look for bones. Whether she could eventually find her son’s remains will be answered within the greater narrative. But it is always the bones. When you hold it in your hands, a fragment of bone, or a morose-looking skull marred with spiderweb cracks, you wouldn’t know if it was a Vietnamese or an American bone or skull.

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Carole Glasser Langille lives in Nova Scotia and teaches poetry in the creative writing program at Dalhousie University. She is the author of four books of poetry and a collection of short stories, as well as two children’s picture books. Her book Church of the Exquisite Panic: The Ophelia Poems, published in 2012, was recently nominated for The Atlantic Poetry Prize. Carole has also been nominated for The Governor General Award and one of her children’s books was selected for “Our Choice Award” from the Canadian Children’s Book Centre. Several of her poems can be found at Canadian Poetry Online.

Carole, “Red” begins with a gripping opening line, and then reveals Rhiannon as a woman stricken by grief and confusion after the death or her fiancé. Does her apparent obliviousness to his drug problem indicate another character trait? Like Jill finally asked: how could she not have known?

Thanks for your question. In this story Rhiannon does seem to be a woman who is self involved and unaware. Several characters in this collection aren’t clued in to the world around them, hence the title of the collection, “You’re Stunned, Girl.” But I have sympathy for Rhiannon as well. Hard as we try, everyone has times in their lives when they’re stunned.

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John Solensten has published five novels, two short story collections, more than 30 individual short stories and memoirs and more than 90 poems. His plays have been produced by theaters in Minneapolis, St. Paul, Duluth and Oklahoma City.His first play Goodthunder won a national native American drama competition and his fiction has been awarded first place in the national AWP novel competition and the Minnesota Voices short fiction competition. His most recent novel, Buffalo Grass (2013), is based on Lakota legends of the white buffalo and the restoration of buffalo in the South Dakota prairie. He is currently completing a novel based on the life of Richard Harding Davis, the legendary Gibson Boy. He lives in Burnsville, Minnesota.

John, this chapter from The Gibson Boy, an American Hero provides an intriguing glimpse into high society during the fashionable Gay 90s, and to the idea of developing an iconic American ideal: Charles Dana Gibson’s depiction and actual discovery of “the real American Girl.” What led to your interest in portraying the period in novel form?

I had published on Davis’ fiction in various periodicals, but discovered he had not really dealt in any psychological depth with his capture by the Germans. His actual capture was of relatively short duration, but it provided, two years before his death in 1916, an opportunity for me to use my research to make this period a period of “reckoning” as he becomes more introspective during his “death walk.”

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Sarah Normandie is a writer. She’s been making up stories since age 2, when she figured out how to record her stories into her mother’s cassette recorder. To date, Sarah is a law student at Western New England School of Law where she is a merit scholarship recipient, Phi Alpha Delta member, and Cali Award winner. She has a Masters in early childhood development, a Bachelors in child psychology, and several years of teaching and education management experience. Additionally, she has been a student in the UCLA Writer’s program, where she penned her first novel, The Broken Girl.

Sarah is a frequent contributor at 5MinutesForMom.com and a freelance legal writer/researcher. Her early childhood articles have been featured by the National Association for the Education for Young Children and utilized as teacher trainings modules for early childhood professionals across the country. When Sarah’s not hard at work writing her next novel or studying law, she is a mom to two amazing kiddos. She is happily married to her high school prom date.You can find more information about Sarah and her writing at http://redroom.com/member/sarah-normandie or contact her at sarahnormandie@yahoo.com

 Sarah, The Broken Girl’s first chapter is rife with tension, drama, and intrigue. Not just the present situation with Kenny and the car crash finale but also with references to Anna’s past and future—her own abusive upbringing and her unborn daughter. Without giving too much away, can you briefly discuss what’s to follow?

Complications from the accident threaten Anna and her baby. Anna’s struggle to survive, and to save her baby is paralleled with scenes from her own abusive childhood. Anna must face her childhood to truly live.

Abandoned by her Vietnam veteran father, child Anna lives under the ruling thumb of her mentally ill grandmother-a woman on the edge of bipolar and borderline personality disorder. Anna’s mother, incapable of being the mom Anna needs, splits her time between boyfriends, popping pills and under Grandma’s psychotic control. Things take a dramatic turn when Anna’s Aunt Sally is diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and Anna’s grandfather; the “family glue” is so devastated, he has a stroke. After Grandpa’s death, Anna meets Fanny- Grandpa’s long lost 83-year-old spitfire sister who reveals a shocking family secret that changes everything. While young Anna fears for her safety and sanity, adult Anna fights to survive and save her baby. Mixed with present day family drama as Anna’s family fights by her bedside-the past and the present come together as adult Anna discovers her own strength by letting go of her painful past and finds her own happy ending.

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Sharon Leder is currently the program director of the Teichman Art Gallery on Cape Cod.  She has taken workshops in fiction writing with Kathleen Spivack, Elizabeth Rosner, Kaylie Jones, Paul Lisicky, Sally Gunning, and Eileen Pollack. She is Professor Emerita at Nassau Community College, Garden City, New York, and has taught within SUNY the subjects of women’s studies, literature, and Jewish Studies.  She has authored “The Language of Exclusion:  The Poetry of Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti” (with Andrea Abbott), has co-edited with Milton Teichman “Truth and Lamentation:  Stories and Poems on the Holocaust” and co-edited with Ines Shaw and Betty Harris “Women, Tenure and Promotion.”  After thirty-seven years of teaching, she is now writing fiction and poetry.

Sharon, here in the first chapter of We All Fall Down, the father is a key figure in absentia.  Does that fact continue as the novel progresses, even after his death?

We actually meet Sara’s father Josef in person in the very next chapter and also in subsequent chapters that are flashbacks to the 1950s, when Josef has been forced against his will to reveal his fifteen-year heroin habit to his family.  Sara, as an eight year old, is almost immediately enlisted by her grandmother into the family’s struggle to help her father admit his problem and his abusiveness and to find treatments and cures.  Sara’s relationship to her father—and its emotional effects on her–alter as she moves from childhood to adolescence and witnesses his increasing drug dependency and loss of self-esteem.  When Josef dies, Sara is driven to discover from her mother how he got hooked on heroin. Thus, we meet Josef again in scenes that are flashbacks to the late 1930s and 1940s when the once-wholesome teenager is led to addiction by the clubroom culture that sprang up in New York City during the Depression years leading up to World War II.  The novel also concludes with Sara’s father.  Sara imagines having the conversation she never had with her father about his addiction.  Their conversation takes place on the day he died and is Sara’s way of finding out whether or not he committed suicide.

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Joachim Frank is a German-born scientist and writer who moved in 1975 to Albany, New York and more recently (2008) relocated to New York City. He took writing classes with William Kennedy, Steven Millhauser, Eugene Garber, and Jayne Ann Philipps. His short stories, prose poems and poems have appeared in Lost and Found Times, The Agent, Inkblot, Heidelberg Review, Groundswell, Peer Glass, elimae, 3711 Atlantic, Cezanne’s Carrot, Brilliant, Eclectica, Offcourse, The Noneuclidean Cafe, Ghoti Magazine, Duck and Herring Co. Pocket Field Guide, Raving Dove, Hamilton Stone Review, Bartleby Snopes, Red Ochre Lit, StepAway Magazine, Black&White, and Litbomb. He also wrote three novels, including The Observatory featured here, all still unpublished.

Joachim, the “Downpour” of radioactive rain at the May Day celebration along the Rhine sets a sobering tone for what’s to come. What led you to set the prologue in the wake of Chernobyl and do elements of the Chernobyl disaster continue to resonate throughout The Observatory.

The prologue’s purpose in this novel is to set the stage in Germany, particularly Bonn, where all the action of the main story will take place. The May 1, 1986 event on the banks of the Rhine in Bonn very closely follows historical accounts. I chose it in order to have a plausible reason for the downhill spiral in the marital relationship between Arthur and Eva later on, which leads to their separation. In a way, a relationship is poisoned slowly, in the same way as radioactivity leads to deteriorating health and cancer in the long term. Chernobyl itself as a topic does not recur in the main story; however, its prominence in the prologue serves as an introduction to American readers telling them that the stage is set in post-war Europe with its complicated interconnectedness of East and West. Also, a reminder that Europe is in fact a small theater for events — a cloud coming from the Ukraine reaches Bonn in a few days, the same time as a cloud from coast to coast in the United States.

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