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Rosalind Palermo Stevenson is the author of the novella “Insect Dreams” published by Rain Mountain Press. “Insect Dreams” has also been published in the anthologies:  Poe’s Children (Random House/Doubleday, edited by Peter Straub); and, Trampoline (Small Beer Press, edited by Kelly Link). Her short fiction has been anthologized in Wild Dreams: The Best of Italian Americana (Fordham University Press), and has appeared in literary journals including: Web Conjunctions, Drunken Boat, First Intensity, Spinning Jenny, Skidrow Penthouse, Italian Americana, River City, Quick Fiction, Washington Square, No Roses Review, and others. Dramatic readings of her story “The Guest” have been presented for Share Our Strength and at the Italian American Writers Association (IAWA). The Guest was also the winner of the IAWA annual fiction prize and named story of the year by the cultural journal Italian Americana. Her work has received several Pushcart nominations, and her short story Kafka at Rudolf Steiner’s is forthcoming as a chapbook from Rain Mountain Press. Rosalind lives in New York City where she is currently finishing a novel.

Rosalind, I really enjoyed reading about the land and people you describe in this excerpt from The Absent. Westward expansion and the idea of manifest destiny made for an exciting period in American history, one of discovery and promise, but also challenge and tribulation, depravity and brutality. What sparked your interest and made you choose to write about this period?

For me a work begins more with an impulse than an idea. An originating impetus. It’s more in the body than in the mind. The thing that sparks the work for me is not really and idea or anything intellectualized. For “the Absent” the spark was a voice and a rhythm, and then a particular sentence that had come into my mind–though that sentence did not make it in the final draft. In any case the sentence was: Here is the way it was when I was taken, the murder of my father on the lower Red River. The voice, the rhythm, and that sentence became for me something that Bruno Schulz would call the ‘…ultimate raw material… the atmosphere, indicating a specific kind of content that grows out of it and is layered upon it.’

Of course this raw material of necessity must come from and be comprised of ‘something.’ For me that ‘something’ grew out of a combination of things that had been on my mind at the time, or that had impressed me or moved me in different ways. For example I had recently gone to an exhibit called “Spirit Capture” at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, and a certain creative impulse was sparked by seeing it. I’ve always been drawn to the spiritual path of the Native Americans, particularly the Navajo and their view of life as effort toward achieving an inner state that is in alignment with the greater state of being of the cosmos. Around the time I began the book I had also stumbled on a very brief account of a young boy who had been abducted by Indians, who were shortly afterwards forced by the army to return him to his mother. And I had been excited by Michael Ondaatje’s “The Collected Works of Billy the Kid” and Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian,” and the treatment they had each given to subject matter similar to that which had been bubbling up in me.

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JEN MICHALSKI is author of the novel The Tide King (Black Lawrence Press, winner of the 2012 Big Moose Prize), the short story collections From Here (Aqueous Books 2013) and Close Encounters (So New 2007) and the novella collection Could You Be With Her Now (Dzanc Books 2013). She is the founding editor of the literary quarterly jmww, a co-host of The 510 Readings and the biannual Lit Show, and interviews writers at The Nervous Breakdown. She is also the editor of the anthology City Sages: Baltimore, which Baltimore Magazine called a “Best of Baltimore” in 2010. She lives in Baltimore, MD. https://twitter.com/MichalskiJen

Jen, I really enjoyed this excerpt from The Tide King. It’s a compelling story, and really gives the reader a great sense of what young soldiers endure when called to duty, specifically here related to the Second World War. The war novel, as a form, dates back as far as literature itself. Was it a subject about which you’d written before?  There a many specific facts and fine details lending authenticity to the narrative. What type of research was involved in writing about Stanley’s foray into war?

This was my first foray—and interest—in World War II, or any war. And when I first began the project, I had a completely different scope of interest. I’d read a story in an old issue of National Geographic about a father and son team in a submarine searching for the sunken World War II German battleship The Bismarck. In the epilogue of the article, the reader discovers that son died in a car accident soon after they’d returned home, and I thought this would be a great short story, but I wasn’t sure how to approach it. But one night, I started writing about a soldier going to war (which is the basis of this excerpt). Then, all of the sudden, it became a novel spanning two hundred years, with fire jumpers and country singers and other things. Although both of my grandfathers, who have passed on, served in World War II, they served in noncombat positions, so in addition to hours and hours researching the Internet and watching Ken Burns’ PBS miniseries The War, I read Eugene Sledge’s memoir of the Pacific theater, With the Old Breed, which was featured in The War and also the miniseries The Pacific, and Stephen Ambrose’s Citizen Soldiers. There’s also a great nonfiction book, Soldier From the War Returning, by Thomas Childers, that examines soldiers’ reintegration into society after the War, that I used for sections later in the book.

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Mark Budman was born in the former Soviet Union. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in such magazines as Mississippi Review, Virginia Quarterly, The London Magazine (UK), McSweeney’s, Sonora Review, Another Chicago, Sou’wester, Turnrow, Southeast Review, Mid-American Review, the W.W. Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward, Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure, Short Fiction(UK), and elsewhere. He is the publisher of a flash fiction magazine Vestal Review. His novel My Life at First Try was published by Counterpoint Press to wide critical acclaim. He co-edited flash fiction anthologies from Ooligan Press and Persea Books/Norton.

Mark, this excerpt from “Lenin: Red, White & Blue” is an engaging and provocative read. Funny too. What inspired the idea to transport Lenin through time in Rip Van Winkle-like fashion?

Being born and raised in the old Soviet Union, I grew up in the shadows of Lenin and Stalin. I prominently featured the latter in my previous novel My Life at First Try. Now, it was time for the former. They were friends and rivals back then, so I decided it’s time for them come together to a computer near me and then to books near you. Continue Reading →

Michael Fischer’s fiction has appeared in Beloit Fiction Journal, Green Mountains Review, Bayou, and several other places. His manuscript is titled “Crybaby Lane,” and he is a Visiting Assistant Professor in English at Marshall University.

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Michael, “Aim for the Moon” is part of a story cycle project of yours, the setting of which is “Mid-State Psychiatric.” What inspired the project?

In 1992, at the age of fourteen, I was committed to Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh, North Carolina for a year-and-a-half. Mid-State is the fictional psychiatric hospital loosely based on my experiences at Dix in the early 90s and other state mental hospitals I’ve researched in the South.

Originally, I set the stories at Dix, but it didn’t work. The burden to “get the details right”—down to every street and ward name—suffocated my imagination and became a crutch to avoid brutal honesty. For instance, when the book was set at Dix, I would often say—in the most self-congratulatory way possible—“I must represent these people—my people—who don’t have a voice! I must help fight the battle against mental illness stigma!”

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Harold Jaffe is the author of 20 books of fiction, docufiction, novels and essays, most recently OD, and forthcoming Revolutionary Brain. Numerous of Jaffe’s volumes have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, Japanese, Turkish, and Serbo Croatian; and he has given interviews both in the US and abroad. Jaffe is editor-in-chief of Fiction International.

Hal, thanks for letting WIPs share excerpts from Othello Blues and Revolutionary Brain. Can you give a brief summary of these projects?

I subtitle Revolutionary Brain “essays and quasi-essays” because I do not adhere to genre codes. Several of the texts in the collection resemble fiction or docufiction. The theme of the collection describes a wide arc, but can reasonably be described as a demonstration of esthetics and culture theory that turn toward, not away, from our tormented globe.

RE Othello Blues, Shakespeare’s Othello (along with Iago, Cassio, and Desdemona) has been transposed into the mid-21^st century. Othello, called Otis Crawford, Iago, and Cassio are blues musicians, the US is a shambles, and Otis divides his time between playing Mississippi delta blues and living them as a fighting member of the Steve Biko Identity, a social activist group comprised of poor people of color. The language of Othello Blues is a precisely pitched inner-city vernacular embellished with blues lyrics, most of which are invented by the ever virulent Iago. As in Shakespeare, Iago is the nominal villain, but in my version there is an eloquent passion in Iago’s hating which functions dialectically as a kind of resistance against cultural dictates.

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Sean Ennis is a Philadelphia, PA native now living in Water Valley, MS where he teaches for the University of Mississippi and the Gotham Writers’ Workshop.  His work has appeared in Tin House,  Crazyhorse, The Greensboro Review, LITnIMAGE, The Good Men Project, Talking Writing, Down and Out, and the Best New American Voices anthology.

Sean, I’ve read many of your wonderful short stories, and am happy to be introduced to your work here in your novel. How did it arise?

I wrote about a 100 pages from the point of view of the people who kidnapped the kids.  Maybe it had its moments, and maybe that work will inform what I’m writing now, but it’s a hard perspective to make sympathetic to readers, and at some point it felt necessary to explain why people would do horrible things.  It wasn’t a question I had a good answer to, or really wanted to delve into too much. It seemed to me that you would only murder and kidnap if you were genuinely ill, or an asshole.  Maybe it’s a lack of imagination on my part, but a point of view that might have to justify illness or plain old shitty behavior stopped being appealing to me.

The central drama of the story was initially tied up in my mind with things like events at Columbine High School, Virginia Tech, and unfortunately, there have been more incidents repeating this sort of violence, which made me feel even more that the point of view of the perpetrators was something I’m not interested in exploring. When these sorts of events felt like anomalies, they held some intrigue for me.  But these days, they just don’t. I guess I have pity for people who feel so lost that such drastic acts of violence feel necessary, but I stopped wanting to try to imagine what it was like to be them.

Also, between the original conception of the novel and now, my Claire and I have had a child of our own.  Obviously, that has a tendency to change a writer’s perspective a bit. Switching to the point of view of someone who lost a child in the event, and who found the violence of the event absurd, makes the project a lot more intelligible to me.  On some level, the issue of motive for the kidnapping is off the table.  A parent just wants their kid back.

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