WIPs

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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