Authors Talk: Anthony Mohr

Today we are pleased to welcome author Anthony Mohr as our Authors Talk series contributor. In this brief interview, Anthony speaks candidly about what inspired his essay, “Risk.”

Of all the memories that conglomerate in the essay, he says that the game itself is what primarily inspired this essay. Anthony then tells us that “98.5%” of everything in the essay is true, from the names of the characters to the dialogue from the military. In light of this, we discuss his friends’ reactions to the essay and their role in preserving the truth of the essay.

You can read and listen to “Risk” in Superstition Review, Issue 19.

Authors Talk: Timothy Reilly

Today we are pleased to welcome Timothy Reilly as our Authors Talk series contributor. Timothy talks about what inspired his story “Nosferatu” and what genre it might fit into.

The story takes its title from Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. That said, the story is not fantasy, nor “so-called magical realism.” Rather, Timothy evokes the vampire myth to put the reader in a particular and strange mindset. Timothy closes by briefly discussing the origins and benefits of this mindset.

You can read and listen to “Nosferatu” in Superstition Review, Issue 19.

John Chakravarty: Small Failures

The submission process must be the most impersonal part of a writer’s career. The author has just spent days, weeks, or even years writing, editing, and workshopping the best piece of fiction they can muster. But without an audience, it’s just a piece of journal writing. Professors and other writing professionals will encourage the author to “get your work out there” and “you need a few rejection letters under the belt.” So this piece of written human soul gets crammed into an email and whisked away to a faceless submission editor.

Finding places to submit work to is the first part of this impersonal interaction. The best way to find a literary journal that will like your work is to read journals that have similar work to yours. The problem is, that the pieces that they are publishing may either A. be much stronger and more practiced or B. not anything like what you write, in terms of style. SmokeLong Quarterly is my favorite online journal, but my written work has not measured up to their level so far. I find this uneven balance when I am submitting work where I’ve either spent a lot of time reading a journal and realized that there’s no way my work stacks up. Or I’ve never heard of the journal, and think they must just be publishing anyone, why would I bother. Scanning through lists and call for submissions can feel like job hunting with incredibly vague parameters.

However, the worst part of this process is the rejection email. There’s never a right time or place to receive the email and it’s never quite worded the right way. A rejection email that sticks out in my mind said, “while we loved the absurdist normalcy of the piece, we regret to inform you…” I appreciated the time it took for them to write something personal about my work, but it left me questioning what that meant. I spent the next few days workshopping the email, trying to get a positive deconstruction of the narrative and what the character was trying to say to me. Needless to say, I didn’t get anywhere.

Being on the other side of this as a submission editor had a similar disconnect. We had almost three hundred fiction submissions. Three hundred is a relatively low number for some journals, but it set a record for Superstition Review. I found myself stuck looking at a neverending list of titles from strangers. They show up like an excel database, or some customer list. It’s very different than sitting across from someone in a workshop.

Writing the rejection email I ran into a similar conflict. Based on the rejections I’ve gotten the email should do the following; thank the writer for submitting, tell them no, and ask them to read the journal anyway. Which always feels inauthentic when on the receiving end.

The value in submitting can’t come from personal connection. Instead, it has to come from a place of personal growth. Only by submitting (and being on the other end) can an author learn to make mistakes and to take risks. Keeping a piece of writing private keeps it safe and for some people that’s enough. Exposing a piece of writing forces the author to grow their craft and skill by releasing that inhibition. Social media has exposed the extremes of our society. Most often, we only see something that is of extreme success or extreme failure. Small failures have to happen for any professional to grow. For writers that comes in the form of rejection letters. These are only small failures, and they must be overcome in order to grow. I hope that Superstition Review gets six hundred fiction submissions next semester and that many more small failures get to occur.

Authors Talk: Jack Garrett

Today we are pleased to feature author Jack Garrett as our Authors Talk series contributor. Jack attempts to understand his story “What Are You Doing?” by self-interview.

From the punctuation in the story’s title to the length of the lines to Jack’s singing voice, no part of the story is left unquestioned. What inspired Jack to create the story’s characters? Does Jack enjoy living alone? How do we know when we know something or someone? Such breadth makes this Authors Talk an interesting change of pace and a unique look into Jack’s work.

You can read and listen to Jack Garrett’s story, “What Are You Doing?” in Superstition Review, Issue 19.

Authors Talk: Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

Today we are pleased to feature poet Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach as our Authors Talk series contributor. Julia has gathered questions from several poets so that this talk feels like a conversation that just happens to shed light on her poem, “Epithalamium After 50 Years.”

Over the course of the creative self-interview Julia talks about the challenge of describing a marriage that evades words and time. She also thinks about different uses of dialogue in prose and poetry- how in her poem dialogue confuses rather than clarifies. Finally, she talks about the “intranslatability” of moments, relationships, languages, and feelings and what it means to capture or be captured by them.

You can read and listen to “Epithalamium After 50 Years” in Superstition Review, Issue 19.

Authors Talk: Charlotte Holmes

Today we are pleased to feature author Charlotte Holmes as our Authors Talk series contributor. In her talk, quick and simple at first glance, she explores how we negotiate space as humans and as writers.

Charlotte begins by talking about the space that is the subject of her essay, “Open House:” a large home that once hosted a monastery. She imagines all the ways someone might use so much space. There would be room to take up modern dance, have multiple writing rooms, or to host all of your relatives. If one doesn’t want it at the moment though, “just close the doors.” She relates this to the negotiation of space on the page and tells us how “Open House” uses white space.

You can read and listen to “Open House” in Superstition Review, Issue 19.

Authors Talk: Jonathan Cardew

Today we are pleased to feature author Jonathan Cardew as our Authors Talk series contributor. Jonathan discusses the work experiences that let “The Story of the Elephant” and its characters come to him.

Jonathan speaks intriguingly about what draws him to flash fiction. He notes his love for ellipses and the fact that anything can happen even after the end of such a short story, that the story “could be about anything or nothing.”

If you’d like to develop your own theory, you can read and listen to Jonathan’s story in Superstition Review Issue 19.

Guest Post: Alissa McElreath, Flying Lessons

Silhouette of small plane against the clouds
Photo by Alissa McElreath

Three weeks ago I stood in a grassy field in Bunn, NC, and wondered – not for the first time since September – how it could be that I was so impossibly far away from my sixteen-year old son. Oh, I could see him: a dark cross moving slowly across a backdrop of fluffy white, but he was some 3,000 feet above me, gliding soundlessly, on his first solo flight.

Solo. Alone. Just a boy and an airplane, the way he must have dreamed it a thousand times over from the day he could first hold a toy plane in his hands and zoom it through the air. He’s worked so hard since he started soaring lessons this past fall. I’ve had ten months to get used to the sight of him in the sky. The first time he flew with an instructor I felt my stomach drop away in a sliding lurch as they took off in tandem with the prop plane. At 3,000 feet the tether was released, and there they were: gliding in graceful loops above me and there was simply nothing I could do.

Standing in that field on that important, incredible, milestone afternoon, I could have burst open with a mixture of pride, terror, and, once he was safely on the ground again (textbook-perfect landing!), an outpouring of relief, but I didn’t. Most amazing of all to me at that moment was not that he had survived this incredible achievement because of course he had done so remarkably well, but that I had. This whole journey, from that first flight to the day I watched my son fly solo, has been one long and obvious metaphor for the process of letting go. It shouldn’t have been much of a revelation to me that day in the field, but it was.

Parents, of course, are very familiar with the bittersweet piling up of milestone after milestone after milestone – familiar with the lump-in-throat choking back of emotions that follows the first steps, the first lost tooth, the first day at school, the first broken heart, the first job, the first driver’s license, the first metaphorical, or literal, spreading of the wings. Writers are also very familiar with the process of letting go – we have to be, or we won’t survive very long. As a teacher, I have to help my creative writing students understand that if they want to succeed, whatever success as a writer inside or outside of the classroom looks like to them, a big part of the journey is about letting go. They may have to steel their hearts and cut loose a beloved character, or passage, or shiny sentence (my students always love it when I pull out the “kill your darlings” quote). They might have to delete pages and chapters, and save certain ideas for some uncertain future time. When they are more confident writers they may send their work out into the big, wide, world but then they will have to let it go, for obsessing about it will drive them mad.

I tell them that sometimes moving forward as a writer can mean letting go of the dream you have for one story, or book, or poem in order to allow another to take root and grow. But I wrestle with this advice even as I give it, because letting go of a dream – even if to allow for room for another – seems fundamentally wrong. If we let go, don’t we risk losing what we need and want the most for our hard work? Yet, it makes sense that we have to let go in order to move forward – if we spend too much time mired stubbornly in any one particular version of our dream, anchored to one spot on the ground, turning around and around in circles, we risk going nowhere.

There was a time this fall when I was ready to chuck it all in – this writing business, that is. I am only now beginning to emerge from a sort of delayed onset mourning over the shelving of my latest book. After acquiring an agent, after two rounds on submission, an almost-offer, a handful of near-misses, I had to let it go, as so many other writers have had to do with their own work. I thought I had handled it all quite well– deluded self-preservation, maybe? The loss suddenly became raw this past year, in ways it hadn’t been initially. Up until very recently I was wallowing in that self-pitying phase of the process that I suspect many writers know well – the one where we hunker down miserably, and declare that we are done with pouring our hearts into stories that no one will read. The one where we want throw away the bits and pieces of writing begun and abandoned, and select and delete the files on our computers (I may or may not know anything about this, mind you) that make up the digital roadmap of a journey to nowhere. I didn’t want to set aside that book. Shelving it felt like beginning again, except several steps back from the place where it had all begun. Somehow, I had become too focused on the outcome and not on what I had learned along the way. I thought about this after asking my son what the best part of flying solo had been for him. He shrugged. Being able to do it, he told me. Using all the stuff I know. Being capable, qualified, and confident, and putting the work and courage and persistence into doing what he loved to do the best. For me, being able to write means I must move past the what could have beens and should have beens and focus on using the stuff I know in order to do what I love the best.

As it turns out, you can let go of things – and people, too – and have them return to you again. You can let go of one dream to make room for a bigger one. You can let go of years of hard work on a favorite book, but know that its spirit is housed in another one just emerging. You can even send your heart some 3,000 feet up into the air and watch it glide effortlessly into view, closer and closer – first a small, impossible shape, until there it is, come back to you again.

 

Authors Talk: Natalie Young

Natalie Young

Today we are pleased to feature author Natalie Young as our Authors Talk series contributor. Natalie begins by reading “Notes on Earth Life” before explaining how the poem is part of a larger series about a human woman, an alien, and a monster. She shares that her “goal is to combine actual history and reality with speculative fiction to explore identity and human absurdities, as well as culture and environment.”

Natalie also explains how her manuscript attempts to “show a different perspective of things our culture does that we tend to accept as normal, but when seen from fresh eyes can be peculiar.” She reveals that using the voice of an alien helped her achieve this because putting on a mask adds distance. Natalie also delves into her inspiration and the process of choosing what topics to include in her poem.

You can access her poem, “Notes on Earth Life,” in Issue 18 of Superstition Review.

Authors Talk: Sarah Carey

Sarah Carey

Today we are pleased to feature author Sarah Carey as our Authors Talk series contributor. In her podcast, Sarah reveals the background of her piece, “Exotic Taste,” and explains how it acted as a way for her to vent while remodeling her house.

Sarah also discusses her reference to Andrew Marvell’s “On a Drop of Dew,” the double meaning of her title, and the process of writing the poem. She even reveals that “Exotic Taste” was written, revised, submitted, accepted for publication, and published in less than two and a half months! Finally, Sarah concludes by discussing her newfound fascination with “the juxtaposition of old and new, with new materials and new lives really being built on top of these layers of the past,” which is the inspiration for some of her current projects.

You can access Sarah’s piece in Issue 18 of Superstition Review.