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Ben Shaberman’s first book, “The Vegan Monologues,” is a collection of humorous essays published by Loyola University of Maryland. It features essays carried by a variety of media including: The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, VegNews, Vegetarian Times, Clean Sheets Erotica Magazine, and NPR’s Morning Edition.

By day, he is a science writer for the Foundation Fighting Blindness, reporting on research for inherited retinal diseases. He also has a master of arts in writing from Johns Hopkins University, and has won awards from the Stonecoast Writers Conference (University of Southern Maine) and the Des Moines National Poetry Festival.

Ben, “Missy” is an intriguing excerpt from Jerry’s Vegan Women. As it turns out, though, Missy is no longer one of Jerry’s women or a vegan by story’s end. Perhaps the ideal Jerry formed of her was better suited for her mother, Claire. At what juncture do Missy and Claire appear in Jerry’s Vegan Women and how does the story excerpted here play into the broader collection?

The book is comprised of ten different stories with each featuring a different woman or girl, though “Missy” is really a story about two women. The book progresses chronologically with Jerry transforming along the way. Some of the women appear in more than one story, but Missy’s one and only appearance is in this chapter. The resolution with the ex-mother-in-law-to-be Claire is revealed toward the end of the book.

“Missy” provides a major turning point for Jerry in which he has the proverbial rug pulled out from under him. Just as he has gotten his vegan life together — gone vegan and become an activist — “meat happens.”

But given that Missy is officially the fourth female in the book, there are six more adventures with vegan women to come.

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Steven Ostrowski is a fiction writer and poet who teaches at Central Connecticut State University. His work appears in numerous journals, including Raritan, Madison Review, Literary Orphans, Sleet, and Wisconsin Review. He has published chapbooks with Bright Hill Press and Finishing Line Press.

R Dean Johnson’s fiction has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize anthology, and his essays and stories have appeared in Ascent, Natural Bridge, New Orleans Review, Slice, Santa Clara Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He teaches fiction and creative nonfiction workshop in the Bluegrass Writers Studio, the Brief-Residency MFA program at Eastern Kentucky University, and his students all call him Bob. Originally from California, he now lives in Richmond, KY with his wife, the writer Julie Hensley (who calls him Bob), and their two children, Boyd and Maeve (who call him Da).

Bob, “Cards for All Occasions” comes from a work you’re titling Delicate Men, about the frustrations and guilt men often feel for not living up to cultural ideals, or even cultural norms. In the story, Erik demonstrates his own fragility in trying to “protect” his beloved cousin, falling prey to his own insecurities, jealousy, ignorance, and homophobia. He makes a living expressing sentiment directed for and on behalf of strangers for Hallmark—a modern-day Cyrano of sorts—but is entirely out of touch regarding the relationships in his own life. Are other protagonists in the collection marked by such irony?

There is a strong thread of irony running through the collection of stories that make up Delicate Men. I like that you reference Cyrano because as much as irony plays a part in the collection, it is often informed by a search for, or veiling of, identity.

The collection’s title story, “Delicate Men,” is about a middle school boy trying to fit in at a new school. He gains a tenuous acceptance with the most popular crowd but when he witnesses a one-sided fight between one of his new friends and an unpopular kid, he empathizes with the latter. By the time he gets home he’s crying and confused by his emotions. All along he’s been afraid he’d be the one who got beat up at the new school, and as certain as he is that he avoided this fate, the reader knows he has been beat up emotionally. But, I don’t know that the dramatic irony of that story would work as well if it weren’t informed by the protagonist’s struggle with identity at his new school.

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Mithran Somasundrum was born in Colombo, grew up in London, and currently lives in Bangkok, where he works in an electrochemistry lab.  His short stories have been published in The Sun, Natural Bridge, Inkwell, The Minnesota Review, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine among others

Mithran, The Mask Under My Face chronicles how a number of people’s lives and families are turned upside-down by a single event. Can you briefly encapsulate the situation for readers?

The situation is that an off-duty policeman is shot and killed in a nightclub toilet by the son of a rich and very well-connected businessman (Sirichai).  This leads to a country-wide outcry, as it’s not the first time Sirichai’s son (Surapat, nicknamed Gai) has killed, and up to now he has always escaped punishment.  Meanwhile, although Sirichai is well-connected, he has accumulated some very well-connected enemies — Old Money types who resent him as a nouveau riche upstart, and resent the politician he funds.  One of these people controls a newspaper, and she gets it to run a campaign on behalf of the policeman’s widow, Attiya, and her ten-year-old son, Den.  It’s easy to do as Attiya is beautiful and not at all well-off, while Den appears to be everything Surapat is not.  Apart from simply collecting donations, the campaign keeps the fires of outrage stoked (which is its main purpose) and ensures Surapat has to leave the country for an extended period.  Meanwhile, Attiya is forced unwillingly into the role the media creates for her, while knowing the public portrayal of her “heroic” husband is largely false.  He was a serial philanderer who was in the nightclub because he was selling drugs.

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Fred Skolnik was born in New York City and has lived in Israel since 1963, working mostly as an editor and translator. He is best known as the editor in chief of the 22-volume second edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica, winner of the 2007 Dartmouth Medal and hailed as a landmark achievement by the Library Journal. Other award-winning projects with which he has been associated include The New Encyclopedia of Judaism (co-editor, 2002) and the 3-volume Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust (senior editor, 2001). Now writing full time, he has published dozens of stories, essays and poems in the past few years (in TriQuarterly, Gargoyle, The MacGuffin, Minnetonka Review, Los Angeles Review, Prism Review, Words & Images, Literary House Review, Underground Voices, Third Coast, Polluto, etc.). His novel The Other Shore (Aqueous Books, 2011), set in Israel in the 1980s, is an epic work depicting Israeli society at a critical juncture in its recent history.

Fred, Things Unsaid, your novel-in-progress, is an ambitious undertaking. It’s a literary time travel of sorts, bringing Virgil’s Aeneid into the present period. What was the source of your inspiration?

After I completed my first novel, The Other Shore (Aqueous Books, 2011), I went back to two uncompleted, thematically related earlier novels that I had been working on for years, called Basic Forms and Death, and managed to finish them (both are now making the rounds of publishers, with an excerpt of the former appearing in Sententia 3). I now felt the need to write another, broader novel picking up the same themes again, and as Basic Forms and Death both had a mythological underpinning (Oedipus in the first, though more in the Freudian sense, and Theseus in the second), I felt committed to the form and began looking for an appropriate framework, finding myself drawn to the Aeneid, which gave me everything I needed in the way of a narrative and a structure upon which I could impose my own. I was also aware of course that Joyce had used the Odyssey in much the same way as I thought to use the Aeneid, and therefore my novel also plays itself off against Joyce’s Ulysses occasionally. In fact, Virgil himself used the Odyssey as a model and has a number of parallel sections.

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Heather Luby is really nothing more than a girl from the Ozark Mountains that grew up with dreams of writing stories. Her work has appeared in Word Riot, LITnIMAGE, Bartleby Snopes, Halfway Down the Stairs, Travel by the Books,  and Annotation Nation. She is the Managing Editor of The Citron Review and a Creative Writing Instructor with St. Louis Community College. Heather has an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles and her novel Laws of Motion is represented by Bill Contardi of Brandt and Hochman Literary Agents. When not conversing with the characters of her imagination, she can found wrangling two willful and beautiful daughters around the suburbs of St. Louis, MO.

Heather, the beginning chapters of Laws in Motion really set the stage for Tom’s hitherto unknown discoveries later in the novel. While the novel is a literary one, it includes plot elements of a mystery thriller. During your work on the book, did you turn to any novels of genre for guidance? If so, were any influential in affecting your writing style?  

I always turn to other writers and works that I admire for guidance when I ‘m writing. One of my mentors in graduate school, the writer Leonard Chang, gave me a piece of advice that has been the cornerstone of this novel and that was to “always read work that informs your writing.” In my case, there were a handful of highly influential books. Reservation Road and Northwest Corner, both by John Burhnam Swartz. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, I Know This Much is True by Wally Lamb and The Sportswriter by Richard Ford. None of these books have a real mystery or thriller component, but each one contributed in the development of my novel in some specific way. The works by Schwartz are probably the closest in that they deal with violent death and some criminal actions. However, I mostly read to inform myself on grief and the male experience, assuming that if I could get into Tom’s head, and write him authentically, the rest would take care of itself.

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