Megan Cummins Interviews March SoS Emerging Writer Alex Russell

Alex Russell lives in Davis and is at work on both stories and a novel. His work has appeared in the Georgetown Review, where he was a finalist in their annual magazine contest, and in the Atticus Review. In 2012 he was also a finalist for the Tampa Review Danahy Prize. Alex graduated from the MA program in creative writing at UC Davis in 2012, the year following my graduation from the same program. Alex interviewed me for the January installment of Stories on Stage, and we thought it would be fitting to reverse roles for Alex’s Stories on Stage debut.

Alex writes with sharp imagery that never gets in the way of the forward momentum of his stories. We sat down at Peet’s in Davis and talked about his novel-in-progress and his short story “Fire,” along with imagery, nostalgia, family, and future goals. Here are a few of the things Alex had to say.

There’s a careful attention to detail in your writing that leads to stunning images. They lift the writing off the page and make it tangible and devastating. I was wondering if you could talk about your process with your imagery, if you have one, or how images work for you as you write?

Images to me are the primary drivers of a story in a lot of ways. I don’t know if this method is a great thing to do as a storyteller, or if it’s native to storytelling, but I don’t usually start writing with a scene. My stories begin with an image. I believe in John Gardner’s advice about “The Waking Dream,” the idea that the writer should never put anything in that pulls the reader out of the dream state of reading. I’m also very visual anyway, as most people are, but images are the things that anchor me to a story. There is a pressing issue to put an image into words when I write. Recently, I started a relatively new process to approach starting the story “Fire.” I wrote a series of daily scenes, and this story grew out of a scene of a kid trying to light a fire in the fireplace and being unsuccessful at it. I picked this scene and asked questions of it.

Another thing I’m very interested in is the way a metaphor shifts over narrative time, the way it takes on different meanings as a story changes. Sometimes the metaphors work and sometimes they don’t. I try not to assert too much control over images and metaphors, so they can grow naturally. If I stay out of their way, I can assert control and craft over other areas.

I feel a strong sense of nostalgia in your writing, as though for the characters, the present isn’t living up to the past. I was wondering if you had any thoughts on how nostalgia works in your writing?

Very transparently, one of my primary hang-ups just walking around is my nostalgia for the past. That’s my primary occupation. Talk about existential angst, that’s it. I try not to sweat on it too much, but the book I’m working on now is very much about the past and about the way the past holds sway over the present and prevents us from accessing the present, prevents us from accessing a more natural version of who we are as individuals because of the weight of having to carry all this stuff – trauma, hardship. We define ourselves in those ways when sometimes it’s just not true anymore. This manifests differently for everyone. I don’t understand how it works or why it’s that way.

Similarly, families are having trouble relating in your writing. There’s an emphasis on the fact decisions have been made by the characters that can’t be undone, and the effects are far-reaching. This is important to your work in a thematic way. What is the role of family for you in these pieces?

It’s a hobbling thing to write about families. What I’m writing about now has to do with what is noble about our pasts and our presents. Just because you were there for your past doesn’t mean you really know what it was or is. What I’m finding in the process of writing my novel is that heaping on details doesn’t bring us closer to understanding. I don’t think it has anything to do with volume of stuff. I think it’s something else. I know it sounds like I’m pursuing philosophical ideas but I’m really just chasing images. But it’s interesting to think about all this stuff.

A lot of your characters are builders, men who work with their hands. This is an interesting contrast – building physical structures while other parts of their lives seem to crumble. Do you have any thoughts on the juxtaposition?

Well, this could be kind of a shoddy metaphor if I let it get too simple. But I know the construction world. The house in my novel, I did the plumbing. It took me eight weeks. There’s a lot of metaphor in building. I’m interested in the more subtle metaphors too. I’m interested in the way the capitalist structure inflects that metaphor. This is serious money, not just guys getting together to build a house because they want to. At the same time I set my novel right at the cusp of the collapse, when guys were getting laid off. There’s this larger hand coming out of nowhere, there’s nothing that they can do about it. I’m interested in what happens to characters in that situation. It’s why I set it right at 2008.

If you could pick out a few of the most important things you’ve learned about writing in the past few years, what would they be? What are your goals for the future?

I think there’s an important transition that happens when you realize you’re no longer writing just personal writing, that your work should be bigger than personal writing. Because you could sit in a room and write all this stuff and make it almost like therapy. It’s one thing to write and try to achieve an emotional realness to something you’ve experienced personally – not necessarily even for a therapeutic purpose. But there’s a difference between that and writing that will get at something in the world that other people or you don’t understand yet. A perfect example that comes to my mind is George Saunders, who I think gets at the realities of the world that we all know but haven’t seen put in a certain, more visible way, while at the same time engaging us on a deeply emotional level. That’s what I aspire to, to pursue those types of issues that have huge sociological repercussions, repercussions in every way. That’s what I’m working toward – something larger that I don’t understand yet.

Megan Cummins’s fiction has appeared in Freight Stories and Issue 17 of A Public Space. She attended the University of Michigan and the MA program in creative writing at UC Davis. She is a past contributor to Stories on Stage.

Valerie Fioravanti tagged for The Next Big Thing Blog/FB Series

What is the title of the book? 

Garbage Night at the Opera, after the first story in the collection.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

Garbage Night at the Opera slowly came together while I was busy writing two other books. I had been working on a novel and a collection of travel stories in grad school, but was slowly accumulating these stories about life in Brooklyn and Queens, the kind of native New Yorkers who live outside the cultural fantasy image of what life in NYC is about.

What genre does your book fall under? What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

Garbage Night at the Opera is linked short stories, which means the stories are inter-related, with characters reappearing in major and minor roles. It’s roughly 30 years in the life of one extended family as their neighborhood loses the factory jobs that supported them, languishes for a generation, then gentrifies beyond their means.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

Short story collections tend to emerge over time, meaning that you don’t simply group the first ten stories that you write together. There are stories in my second collection that were written years before some of the stories in my first. It’s a matter of fit. Garbage Night at the Opera focuses on one family in Brooklyn, and the consequences of a community being dislocated from its primary means of support. The collection I’m working on now, Bridge & Tunnel, is mostly set in Queens, although work—particularly the Manhattan commute—is once again a central theme.

What inspired you to write this book?

In some ways, it was an homage to my mother and her close-knit family, because Greenpoint was their home and they loved it unconditionally, idealistically. She died while I was in the third year of my MFA program. Some of the characters in the book have that same love for the neighborhood. Others do not.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

I’ve been told it reads like a novel. If you liked Olive Kitteridge, you might enjoy Garbage Night at the Opera.

Who is publishing this book? Are you represented by an agency?

BkMk (pronounced Bookmark) Press of the University of Missouri-Kansas City published the book December 2012. Garbage Night at the Opera won their yearly book prize, the G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, in 2011. I do not have an agent.

Where can I buy your book?

Here are links to Amazon & SPD Books, but your favorite locally-owned bookstore is always an option.

My tagged writers for next Wednesday are:

My fellow Chandra Prize winners Laura Maylene Walter (2010) & Lauren Cobb (2012), Kate Hill Cantrill, Renee Thompson,  Jodi Angel & Adam Russ. Thanks to Rus Bradbird, author of Make it, Take it for tagging me.

Lori White Interviews Master Teacher & April SoS Featured Writer Nancy Zafris

Nancy Zafris is the author of the story collections The Home Jar & The People I Know and the novels The Metal Shredders & Lucky Strike. Nancy is currently the Series Editor for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and was Fiction Editor of The Kenyon Review. She has also taught for the Antioch University low-residency MFA program in LA. Find out more about Nancy at nancyzafris.com.

Nancy will conduct Master Teacher Weekend Workshops in Sacramento April 27-28th & Los Angeles/Westwood May 4-5th. She will be the featured writer at Stories on Stage April 26th. For more information about the workshops, visit http://valeriefioravanti.com/master-teacher-workshops/.

What can participants expect to accomplish over the two days of this workshop?

First, I want to focus on generating original work which we then analyze and use as another catalyst for more work.  Second, I want to talk about putting a collection together — some practical advice.  I feel in a unique position to do this since I’ve not only published two collections but I’m the series editor of the Flannery O’Connor award for short fiction and so I see many, many collections and I can actually tell quite a bit just by their table of contents. So we’ll talk about that.  Third, each participant will also have a previously written story critiqued in class.  We’ll devote a shorter amount of time than usual so that we don’t take up 6 hours of class time.  I’m also scheduling individual conferences before and after the class, and during the 90-minute lunch hour. I’ll skype with those I don’t get to individually during those two days. Basically, I’ll do what’s necessary to give each writer complete feedback on his or her story.

So the participant can expect something a little bit different from the regular workshop.

Yes. Quite a bit different. It’s not static. We don’t “workshop” stories per se. I treat the stories before me as if I’m an editor at a publishing house and I need to get this piece ready for publication. If someone wants their 85-year old grandmother to be a pothead who supplies her grandson’s friends, I’m not interested in hearing from the other writers that their grandmother would never do this and that grandmothers in general would not. The question is not, Why can’t this work? The question is, What needs to be in place to make this work? It’s high energy, rigorous but supportive, and I think it’s fun.

In the workshops I’ve taken with you before, you use prompts. 

Yes, I like prompts. I use prompts at the Kenyon Review summer workshop. Prompts really get the creative juices flowing. But I’m careful about what prompts I use. I like them to have an inherent structure.

Are they for long or short pieces?

Because of time limitations, they are mostly for short shorts. But I’ve recently devised some for longer pieces. Those I try out myself to see if they work.

Do they?

Two of them I tried out resulted in stories that are included in my new collection, THE HOME JAR. I think one story is pretty easy to spot. It’s a numbered story. The other might not be so easy to find.

Why is the story numbered?

The numbers function as space breaks and time jumps. One of the biggest issues in my workshops are stories that span a lengthy period of time. The writer begins to summarize rather than dramatize. So I tried to figure out something that allows for a time span but also ensures that each discrete moment is dramatized. I think you published the one you wrote using this structure.

Yes, in Spittoon (http://issuu.com/spittoonmag/docs/spittoon_1.2)

We were next to each other, I remember. I had done a micro fiction piece that came from another prompt.

That story of mine spanned several years. Why can’t stories span a lengthy amount of time?

They certainly can! They simply can’t be summarized. This is where Aristotle’s unity of dramatic action comes in. He says the dramatic unit should not be longer than 24 hours. Oedipus Rex takes place in a day.

But I’ve read stories of yours that last much longer than that.

Yes, absolutely. I have a story in the collection that goes from the early 1930s to the late 1990s — over 60 years. And I recently went back to check on these stories because I had given advice to someone that his stories had this time and summary problem we’ve been talking about, and I started to feel like a hypocrite because, I was sure, my stories did not have this unity of action. So I went back and checked the stories in this new collection and except for that numbered prompt story, I was surprised that they all took place in a 24-hour period, even the one that spanned 60 years.

So you’re talking about “the fish” now.

Yes. That’s my way of talking about the unity of action. Some teachers use the fish structure to illustrate subplots. I use it to illustrate what I’ve begun calling the top story and the bottom story. The top story is basically the plot or the story you’re feeding the reader (and that one is short), and the bottom story is the real story (and that can be as long as you want).

And you’ll be doing the fish in the workshop.

Oh yes. And I’ll probably assign a couple of stories to read beforehand that illustrate this structure.

I can say that learning this structure really helped me with my stories.

And it’s meant to help, not to dictate, because every writer is different. You in particular, Lori, thrive on structure, it really releases your creativity. And I believe you’ve published several pieces from the workshop. I guess over 50 stories coming out of my workshops have been published.

You’re currently the series editor of The Flannery O’Connor award for short fiction. Before that you were the fiction editor of The Kenyon Review. How has that influenced your teaching?

It’s made me approach stories initially from a technical angle. That is, I’m in the position of judging them and it means for the stories that they will be published or not published.  That’s a big deal.  I try to approach the story without any of my own desires or projections.  I let the story be.  It tells me its own terms. If it violates the very terms that it has proposed up front, then the story stops working, technically, the way it should. So in teaching, it’s somewhat the same. I don’t want to tell people what to write; I simply want to figure out a way to make it work. I’m very against making the story “smaller” in order to make it work. I like ambitious, layered stories, and I think ambitious stories can have more things “wrong” with them and still work. I’m not a big fan of tidiness. Tidiness is its own sort of summary for me.

Lori White’s latest story will be published this spring at The Journal Online.  Other stories have appeared in Kenyon Review Online, The Kenyon Review anthology Readings for Writers, apt, and Necessary Fiction.  She teaches English at Los Angeles Pierce College and lives with her partner and their three dogs at a fire station in the Los Padres National Forest.

Alex Russell Interviews January’s Emerging Writer Megan Cummins

Megan Cummins builds stories about kids and adults that anyone can feel and understand, in prose that is beautifully transparent until an occasional simile drives such clarity into an image that you have to stop and see how it was done. She is currently working on a novel, often while riding the train from her home in Sacramento to her job at a union office in the East Bay where she keeps the books.

Megan completed her MA with the graduate Creative Writing Program at UC Davis in 2011, when I was finishing up my first year there. Her short fiction has appeared in Freight Stories, and is forthcoming in A Public Space. We met for this interview at Old Soul Co. in Sacramento, where the barista there knew everything there was to know about the tea industry, and explained it to me in the time it took him to brew me a cup. Megan agreed he was astounding.

 It seems that many of your characters are girls right on the cusp of adulthood, right at that pivotal moment, but also in environments in which they don’t recognize the danger around them. Could you talk about that?

Until about five years ago I was always writing about characters that were older than I was. Eventually I sort of realized that I didn’t really know the characters I was writing. Not that I can’t write about characters who are older than I am and not be convincing, but now with my novel it’s more interesting to me to write about kids. They’re in conventional places like suburbia, or in families or relationships that might not be stable but aren’t necessarily violent or anything like that, but there is always this underlying danger that I think comes from them not knowing themselves. As far as where that comes from in my life, maybe it’s from being young and not really feeling like I’m adult yet even though I am and have the responsibilities of an adult.

In the novel you’ve been working on, I noticed that the present narrative seems to center on a major event in the past, almost as if that event is still determining their lives even as adults. What drew you to that structure?

When I was at the Tin House Writers Workshop the summer between years at Davis, something all the teachers there seemed to say was to put a short clock on your story, the shortest clock possible. And I’ve never been able to do that. Even my short stories span at least months. I’ve never been able to put short clocks on my stories. It’s not my natural inclination. I always feel like I have to draw from something that happened in the past. But by the end of the story I want the beginning to somehow read differently in light of what’s happened.

When we were in school, we had what now seems like this unlimited amount of time just to focus on writing. What has the transition into the post-grad world been like?

I know at Davis that technically you were hired at 20 hours a week for TAships, and right now I work 20 hours a week for work.

But those are real hours.

You’re right. Those are real hours, so it’s vastly different in that regard. Also, even if I was really busy with grading and Lit classes and other obligations, everything I did in some way went back to Literature. It went back to reading and writing. So all these different things I was doing were somehow informing each other in a way that my work now doesn’t. I really love my job now. The people are really great. I’m the bookkeeper so it’s entirely the opposite. I’m doing numbers. So I don’t have this atmosphere where everything I do is related to reading and writing. That was amazing for those two years. Now, in some ways it’s kind of nice. I write on the train on the way to work and when I get there I don’t think about anything related to my own writing for however many hours I’m there. In some ways that break is kind of nice, but ultimately my work habits feel more scattered now. I try to stick pretty strictly to writing on the train, and then writing at home the days that I don’t work. Even if that’s more consistent it feels kind of fractured, because it’s not part of this bigger writing environment, or haven that I feel like we had. But I guess you have to grow up sometime. I’ve put it off longer than most people. In the end I think it’s a necessary experience but it’s definitely a different one.

 

Alex Russell recently completed his MA in creative writing at UC Davis. His work has appeared in the Atticus Review, and in The Georgetown Review. He lives in Davis with his wife and two dogs.

Naomi J. Williams Interviews January’s Featured Writer Erica Lorraine Scheidt

Naomi J. Williams Interviews Erica Lorraine Scheidt

Erica Lorraine Scheidt was born in Portland, Oregon, but makes the Bay Area her home today. She has a master’s in Creative Writing from UC Davis, which is where we met six years ago as fellow grad students. Right away I was struck—and charmed—by Erica’s personal and artistic openness. Her writing is unflinching, surprising, and so full of love—love of language, love for her characters, love of possibility. I’m thrilled that her debut YA novel, Uses for Boys, has met with acclaim from places like Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly, but even more thrilled that so many readers—especially younger readers—now get to participate in Erica’s generous vision.

Erica and I recently completed an e-mail conversation about Uses for Boys. Here’s how it went:

I have to tell you that I got my copy of Uses for Boys yesterday and read the entire book before dinner. I had to force myself to put it down once and do some of the things on my to-do list before finishing it. What do you think contributes to that un-put-downable quality in a book, and were you conscious during the writing or revision process of trying to create something that has that quality?

Naomi, really? That’s wonderful. I’m thrilled you had that experience. I marvel at writers who have the ability to tell unputdownable stories and wish that I’d done it on purpose. I read this great post recently about suspense by Lee Child (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/a-simple-way-to-create-suspense/) and have been thinking a lot about it. Child talks about asking a question and then making the reader wait for the answer. In Uses for Boys, I think we’re waiting for Anna to turn her experiences into insight. And she always seems to be just on the cusp of it. That’s what propels us through her story.

That’s a great insight from Lee Child, and I think you’re right that the reader is propelled through Anna’s story by that sense of waiting. Let’s talk about structure for a second, because I think that’s part of what makes the experience of “waiting” one’s way through Uses for Boys so pleasurable and so fast. You’ve got lots of short chapters, some of them very short, all of them headed by these great, pithy, revealing titles—“I belong here,” “the next morning,” “a real family,” et cetera. Did the manuscript start out with this structure—the short chapters and their awesome titles, presented in a pretty straightforwardly chronological way—or did that evolve through writing and revision?

No, not at all. I was very influenced by The Lover by Marguerite Duras and was trying to write the book elliptically, the way that The Lover circles around a central memory. Of course it was Duras’s third time writing that story and my first time writing Anna’s. I was so lost. Time was all knotted up and incomprehensible. I was in my second year at UC Davis, studying with Lynn Freed, and she said, you know in that direct way she has, to tell the story chronologically. Oh! Yes. In order. And that made everything better.

I always had the short chapters (and I worry a bit about that, because both manuscripts I’m working on now also have short chapters), but they were numbered until the last or near-to-last draft. Then I went back and named them. That helped the story snap into focus for me, but I’m not sure why.

 I wouldn’t worry about a proclivity for short chapters. One could do much worse than having a style marked by the lyrical economy on display in Uses for Boys. Another thing you demonstrate is a real willingness to put your characters through the wringer. Anna goes through a lot at a very young age. What was the balancing act for you between throwing hardships her way (like her mother’s almost complete absence from her life) and allowing those surprising moments of grace (like the trip to Goodwill where she finds, not only new wingtips, but a new friend)?

I love your questions, Naomi. And I love that you assume a kind of skillfulness on my part that would be better described as a happy accident.

What’s tough in thinking about it as a balance is that what I believed was a moment of grace, like Anna watching the skaters under the Burnside Bridge and hearing some guy she just met say he knows how she feels, would not be for a lot of readers. They would look at that moment and think, “oh no, there she goes again.”

And it’s because I’m empathizing with Anna, but the reader can see through her.

We can, and yet….One of the things I loved was how these two things we tend to think of as occupying opposite poles—grace and trouble—were never that far apart in the story. The most remarkable moment in that regard is the one that culminates in that unlikely, beautiful, and moving line: “How the abortion makes us a family.” That one brought tears to my eyes.

That’s a very generous reading, thank you.

Let’s switch tacks a bit. For years you were engaged in the mostly quiet and solitary business of crafting Anna’s story. Now it’s out in the world, you’re getting lots of great press, and you’re busy doing author appearances. What can you tell us about the experience of having the book out there and going from writer-in-the-garret to writer-at-the-podium or writer-subjected-to-book-reviews?

Yes, it’s strange. Until about two months ago, only a handful of people had ever read the book. And then the publisher sent out hundreds of copies to reviewers and book bloggers and suddenly people were reading the book and talking about it and talking among themselves and having this relationship with the story that had nothing to do with me. It’s so different. And it’s hard not to want to listen in. But at the same time, I’m writing another novel that’s its own beast and I don’t want to write against readers’ complaints about Uses for Boys or into what they love about it.

On the other hand, I care about Anna’s story and I’m gratified by the discussions young women are having around the book—whether they liked it or not—about loneliness and sex and family. So, it’s a hard question to answer, because it’s strange and heady, but also it’s a gift.

So you’ll be the featured reader at Sacramento’s Stories-on-Stage on Friday, January 25. (It’s SoS’s third anniversary, by the way!) It’s your second appearance there, so you know the drill, where a local actor reads your work to a live audience. Can you talk about the experience of listening to someone else read your work and being part of its audience?

I have to say, Stories on Stage impressed the hell out of me last time I participated. I had so much fun. I’m a huge fan of Selected Shorts on PRI, so the first time I was invited I jumped at it. I had no idea it was such a well-attended, well-produced event. Gay Cooper read my story and she read it so differently than I do, I felt like I got to hear what other people do when they read it. I loved it. You know, Valerie has created an amazing community with Stories on Stage. Sacramento is lucky to have her.

It’s true. We’re very lucky to have Valerie.

In a sort-of related vein, Uses for Boys takes place in Portland, OR, and its environs, of course, but you’ve been in the Bay Area for a while: Do you have a sense of yourself as a Bay Area writer, or, to extend eastward our way a bit, as a northern California writer?

I don’t know. I’m hugely influenced by some Bay Area writers, like Daniel Handler. And am very inspired by the community some writers have created, like Dave Eggers with 826 Valencia and Voice of Witness or Stephen Elliott with The Rumpus. I’m fortunate to be working in close proximity with those folks. But I’m not sure that’s much of an answer. I will say this, my new novel is set in San Francisco.

Naomi J. Williams is a fiction writer and English prof based in Davis, California. Her short stories have appeared in places like One Story, Ninth Letter, A Public Space, and Gettysburg Review. She’s been nominated five times for a Pushcart Prize and was lucky enough to win one year. These days, she’s completing a collection of linked stories about the 18th-century La Pérouse expedition; she occasionally blogs at naomijwilliams.wordpress.com.

Sue Staats Interviews Upcoming Master Teacher Peter Orner

Sue Staats interviews Peter Orner and a surprise guest.

Peter Orner—whose upcoming Master Teacher workshop, November 10-11, should be a “can’t miss” for any writer—has been called “one of the most distinctive American voices of his generation” by the prestigious Granta magazine. His most recent novel, Love and Shame and Love, received rave reviews in the New York Times Book Review, Washington Post, Boston Globe, and The Wall Street Journal. Similar praise came from Bay area publications: Anna Pulley of San Francisco Weekly says, in her review, “even though the narrative slaloms back and forth through time and point of view, the shotgun pace keeps you deeply wedded to the characters, their struggles, their almost triumphs…Love and Shame and Love will break your heart, but in the best possible way.”

Orner lives in San Francisco and teaches in the MFA program at San Francisco State: he’s also in demand as a guest lecturer and reader. He was appearing in Chicago when we began our e-conversation—I had sent him a few questions and, despite his busy schedule, he was giving them his full attention—when a squirrel showed up and our interview quickly became something more like performance art which, quite coincidentally, perfectly illustrated the quirky, multi-layered charm of Peter Orner’s writing.

Love and Shame and Love is, essentially, linking vignettes, four generations of a family told in a decidedly non-linear fashion. Yet it all hangs together beautifully, as a person’s collective memory of his or her family might.  How do you manage this?  Do you write the stories of each character, and then mix them together?  Or, do you write as it appears in the book—a mixing of memories and stories, one story called up by another?

You got it, the novel is an attempt to replicate how my mind (and my memory) actually seems to work, which is that I’m generally in two or three or eight places at the same time. I mean, I’m here writing an answer to this question, but I’m also in a hotel room watching a squirrel, literally, no joke, climb up the screen outside my window. (I’m 4 floors up. God only knows what he’s doing on the building. He keeps slipping. He seems not to be the most sure footed squirrel I’ve ever seen.)  See? I’m always one place and another, and add memory to this mix, and we can conjure up different times in our life at any given moment…Holy shit, the squirrel just lost his grip and fell…(Just checked on him. He seems to be okay, he’s hanging off a ledge below my window. I’d like to help him but I’m afraid I’ll scare him and then he’ll fall into Michigan Avenue.) Where was I? Oh, right, how I mix things up. That’s how I do it, I just try and make a book by following my characters wherever they happen to go and often the answer is – a great many places, literally and in their heads.

So, it sounds as if this ability to juggle several stories at the same time has essentially shaped your distinctive writing style.

Yes. I think I’m just trying to track my own brain. Add fictional characters to an already chaotic mind, and you have total mayhem. The trick is to harness the mayhem and makes some order out of it. I’ve been at this for a while now, and I think in the past I used to fight it, and try and write like a more ordinary person, with a degree of discipline and a plan. Now I just go with what I seem to do…which is just trust that at some point things just might make sense to a sympathetic reader.

Your chapters tend to be short, some no more than snippets of a character’s memory or the contents of a letter.  Have you always written with such economy, or has this developed over time?

Compression has always been something I’ve striven for. I think the world talks too much. I figure if I’m going to take your time, I’m going to the best I can to do it in the least amount of words. And for me, less words often means more power.

Okay, the squirrel’s back in the saddle and yet again climbing up my screen.

Emily Dickinson, is there a more powerful writer? I love Whitman, but he sometimes talked too much. Dickinson never. And she can take your head off in under twenty words. I think prose writers should think more about this.

Give us some other good examples of the type of compressed prose you mean. Which writers do you recommend to your students?

It really depends on the student. I’d say Jane Bowles writes wonderful prose that is often compressed. Also Melville, not known for his compression maybe, but he was one of the greats, think of those breathtaking and so brief chapters in Moby Dick. My favorite is one called “Bulkington” about a character by that name who only appears in that tiny chapter. Grace Paley, of course. Andre Dubus, my teacher and old friend, used to take an 80 page story and reduce it to 20, that’s compression. Kafka, the list could go on and on. Faulkner can be very direct when he wants to be. My mother is a fish…Hrabal, a Czech writer who is also a favorite writes very intense compressed hilarious sad books..

I figured out a way to take to a picture using this computer, and I’m attaching my friend the squirrel. I think he is a guy. This squirrel is now looking at me, staring, his little chest is pulsing. What does this all mean?

 (I’m really quite enchanted and distracted by the squirrel but I’m also equally fascinated by how Peter is weaving the answers to my questions together with his minute-to-minute encounter with the squirrel.  But I admit it’s getting harder to stick to the interview! However, I persist.)

As a writer, you’ve clearly developed your own approach to character and plot. As a teacher, do you encourage students to begin with vignettes, bits of the story, then slowly form them into a whole?  How do you deal with a student who is really tied to outline and traditional plot development?

As a teacher, or a reader, or a writer, I’d never recommend my particular method, or unmethod, really. I think storytelling as an art form that is essentially organic and comes always from the individual teller. We’ve got to find our own way to tell. Ideas of character and plot are as myraid as their people and the crazy situations people get themselves into. Of course, there’s Aristotle, who we should listen to, and even read once in a while. Though I humbly disagree with him that plot is always the most important thing. For me, there is so much drama – and story – in character.

When I teach, if I encourage anything, it’s to ask your characters tough questions. What we need are more complicated characters, politicians, and squirrels. Seriously, no writer in their right mind would push their own aesthetic on other writers. I just want a piece of fiction to move me as a reader whether it has a lot of plot or not. And yet, I love a wide range of work, and while compression is important to me personally in terms of my own writing, I tend to be drawn toward what people might consider plot-heavy writers like Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Mann…and of course Dostoevsky. I put these writers alongside my cherished Chekhov, one of the great compressors of course. But note, toward the end of his life, Chekhov kept writing longer and longer…What does this tell us? Not to be complacent, and think you write one way and not another.

Be open. Period. Don’t sum yourself and decide what kind of writer you are, ever. Because tomorrow you will be a different person. This is what I try and impart to myself and to my students.

It’s a frequently-asked question, but one I think might be good to ask you, since you’ve said your fiction draws heavily on your own life. Do you think that, given the very slippery nature of memory, that all memoir is fiction? Or, even the other way around?

This does get to the heart of the matter. Aren’t there times when you think that the life you are living and the life the people you know and love are living is actually fiction? I mean take this squirrel for instance. This is really happening. I’m sitting in this hotel room answering these questions, and again, he is climbing slowly up my screen. It sounds to me like complete fiction. Five stories up? Downtown Chicago? But it’s not. What does this tell us? Not that old dull saw that truth is stranger than fiction, but rather that very often truth actually is fiction.

So yes, I agree with some variant of the notion that all memoir is fiction. Because any time we start selecting the details we use to narrate experience, real or imagined, we are beginning to a made up story. I draw on real life because I’m trying to explain to myself just how strange this life is.

I think the squirrel just killed himself. He seemed literally to think about it and then just leap – poor soul.

Noooooo!

No, wait, he caught the edge of the window and is up again, and again scrabbling across my screen. I’m going to open the window and see what impact this has on my sleek furry companion.

(Several exchanges of e-mails later)

Peter, I have to ask. What happened to the squirrel?

The squirrel is alive and well and living the high life in Chicago. He survived 8 falls from that window

Whew! And thanks very much for taking the time to answer my questions

Peter Orner’s column, “The Lonely Writer,” appears in The Rumpus. It’s all about short stories and writing and if you love short stories, you should read it. Here’s a link: http://therumpus.net/sections/blogs/peter-orner-blogs/. Also, there’s more information about Peter on his website, http://peterorner.net/. You can request more information about Peter’s Master Teacher Weekend Workshop at http://valeriefioravanti.com/master-teacher-workshops/

Sue Staats recently received her MFA in Fiction from Pacific University. She’s currently revising her novella, The Mitchell Boys, and working on a collection of linked short stories. Her short story “No Hero, No Sharks” was runner-up for the 2011 Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction, a finalist for the 2011 Reynolds Price Fiction Award, and was published this spring in The Farallon Review. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have also been published numerous times in Susurrus, the literary journal of Sacramento City College. Her poetry and fiction will be published soon in The Sacramento Poetry Anthology and r.kv.r.y.

Sue Staats Interviews September Emerging Writer Ana Cotham

Stories on Stage attendees will be familiar with Ana Cotham, who has been a volunteer with the reading series since its inception. She’s at the table welcoming you to the reading, and she’s happy to sell you raffle tickets and books, and accept your donation.

Ana is also a fiction writer, and her short story, “A Love of Olives, A Fear of Squirrels,” is being read this month.   But when you dig into her background, you wonder how she has time to write fiction at all—because Ana is also a freelance writer, the technical editor for a local consulting firm, and the volunteer data manager for Happy Tails Pet Sanctuary. I wondered how she managed to keep all these balls in the air, and when she found time to craft her stories.

Ana, you seem to be everywhere—I see your stories in Sacramento Magazine, you’re associated with Solano Magazine and UC Davis Health Magazine, you work part-time for Pacific Municipal Consultants as their technical editor. How do you manage all of these assignments? Are you unusually disciplined? Or, just quick?

I’m neither naturally disciplined nor quick; I just drink a lot of coffee and beg for deadline extensions! I also love my yellow legal pads; I write down everything I need to do that week, everything from work assignments to, say, doing the dishes or buying milk. Putting tasks on paper helps with the discipline—when it’s on paper, you don’t need to juggle it in your head—and crossing them off is just satisfying. Sometimes I’ll write down something I just DID in order to cross it off. Sometimes it’s about immediate gratification!

Tell me a little about your writing and editing life—what’s it like to earn a living as a freelance writer?

The stress of money aside, I generally like the freelance work I do, and not just because I can write in my pajamas. I like my assignments, usually topics like lifestyle, wedding, travel, health care, personality profiles—the best ones are both fun and informational, for me and hopefully for the audience. That said, I am now 50% employed by PMC, and I loooooove having a steady job. Knowing that at least some money is coming my way every other Thursday is a huge relief. Plus, it’s good to get out of the house and talk to real live people. When you are cloistered with deadlines for days on end, you (and by “you” I mean “I”) forget how to, you know, put the words together to make the sentences when actually trying to communicate with someone that isn’t a cat.

So how do you find time for fiction writing?

Finding the time for fiction is probably—no, it IS—my biggest problem right now. I can go for days without touching my own work, even if I’m thinking about it. It’s difficult to write and edit all day and then come home and write and edit some more. The energy just isn’t there. Also, because I prefer having large chunks of time to work on my own stuff, sometimes I don’t feel that the time is there. As a freelancer, if I have the time, I feel guilty about not using it on paying work. This is no different from any writer who juggles more than one hat. It’s a common and ongoing struggle. But I’ve been trying to reframe it as, “Well, this short story may not be paying NOW, but it should turn me into a multimillionaire SOON, so the investment is worth it!”

 Tell me about “A Love of Olives, a Fear of Squirrels,” the story being read at SoS. It’s such a great title – what inspired it?

The inspiration behind it—well, I’m happy to be able to put into print that I was inspired by a book called Spook by Mary Roach, who is a … humor science writer? Is the best description of her work? She is fabulous and I want to be her groupie. There, I said it. Anyway, there was a line in the book that triggered the “what if …” that writers love, and I followed it.

But, of course, the “what if” was just the diving board. The story hinges its “what if” around grief and family and relationships—I hope, anyway. I feel like maybe the story isn’t quite done. My writers group, Wordforge, thinks it needs to be a novel. But they’re all novelists, so they’re biased.

What’s your goal a writer?

Honestly, right now, I think I need attainable, reachable goals. Finish a first draft of this novel. Finish a third draft of that short story. Dedicate time to submitting again. But mostly WRITE. Last week at my Wordforge meeting, we talked about the six things a writer had to do in life: “Read read read, write write write.” We amended it to include “Submit submit submit.” I have the first part down, and as soon as I have a better handle on the next two, well, then I’m sure those multimillion-dollar deals will follow. Isn’t that how this writing stuff works?

Gosh, I hope so—I’m counting on it! Ana, thanks very much, and congratulations on having your story selected for Stories on Stage.

Sue Staats recently received her MFA in Fiction from Pacific University. She’s currently revising her novella, The Mitchell Boys, and working on a collection of linked short stories. Her short story “No Hero, No Sharks” was runner-up for the 2011 Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction, a finalist for the 2011 Reynolds Price Fiction Award, and was published this spring in The Farallon Review. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have also been published numerous times in Susurrus, the literary journal of Sacramento City College.