MFA

SR Pod/Vod Series: Writer Eric Maroney

Superstition Review

Each Tuesday we feature audio or video of an SR Contributor reading their work. Today we’re proud to feature a podcast by Eric Maroney.

Eric MaroneyEric Maroney is the author of two books of non-fiction, Religious Syncretism (2006) and The Other Zions (2010).  His fiction has appeared in Our Stories, The MacGuffin, ARCH, Segue, The Literary Review, Eclectica, The Montreal Review, Pif, Forge, Per Contra, Stickman Review, Samizdat, and Jewish Fiction. His non-fiction has appeared in the Encyclopedia of Identity and The Montreal Review. His story The Incorrupt Body of Carlo Busso was the runner up for the 2011 Million Writers Award. He has an MA from Boston University, and lives in Ithaca New York with his wife and two children.  He is currently at work on a novel called The Land Before You.

You can listen to the podcast on our iTunes Channel.

You can read along with the work in Superstition Review.

Guest Blog Post, Beth Gilstrap: The Quiet Times

Beth Gilstrap

Beth GilstrapDownstage center, the footlights warmed my bare feet. I had run down the long hall, through the double doors, and kicked my shoes off upon entry –my first ritual. At the end of the school day, I no longer had to navigate the social cavern of being the Principal’s daughter.

A deep bow. My hands raised, With plenty of air behind my words, I said, “My name is Beth. This is my theater.” Since my brother had moved on to middle school, in his absence, the auditorium became mine and mine alone. Jenny, a teacher’s daughter joined me on occasion, but I was often by myself while my mom was hard at work in the office doing terrifying Principal things.

I practiced dance routines until my soles were black from stage dust. I was proud of my feet, though I wasn’t entirely sure why people praised them so much. I had good turnout.

Other times, I just lay on my stomach and did homework in pencil. When I finished, I stared at the ceiling with its crisscrossed lines, ropes, and bags. How it all worked was a mystery, but I taught myself to raise and lower curtains and snapped lights on and off in varied patterns. Just cool blue and green made the world right. I grew fond of the way the velvet felt on my arms as I slipped from behind closed curtains.  And always, as though hovering just below the surface, ready to come up for air, was an audience. If I just pulled a little harder, they’d appear.

By the end of the fourth-grade, I’d written a play with Daryl Hall and John Oates as central protagonists. I’m both proud and mortified by this fact. Unfortunately, there is no surviving copy of what was surely my masterpiece. Mom absconded with it, too disturbed by the multiple sex scenes to let the thing live, but before the manuscript was confiscated, I’d blocked out the play, and bossed Jenny into being Daryl Hall’s lover.

Somewhere in the dip of time and space on that stage, I became a seeker, and what is an artist but just that? Writers, dancers, painters, musicians, what have you, we all seek. We fight silence, each in our own way. We talk to each other through our works. Some rhetoricians and philosophers might call this a form of dialectic, or even the trialectic when we get down to ekphrasis or the attempt to interpret and transform one form of art into another, most often the verbal representation of the visual arts, but I’m not here to dig into a bag of big vocabulary. What I’m concerned with is how to get past what most call writer’s block, but I prefer to think of as writer’s funk.

Sometimes, the faces emerge easily. Just a slight tug and there’s a cast of characters fully formed in all their toxic glory. There are days it’s just one face, one body, that shows up in a seat, maybe in the back left, maybe down front, but it’s there. Other times, there’s no one who’s materialized, but you can feel them in the distance, a murmur. When I write, I do everything I can to pull that tiny sound up and out. For me, this is inspiration and these days, I see it as less ephemeral than I used to. I can still summon that stage when I need to, though I haven’t stepped foot on it in almost thirty years. When I get stuck, it is my touchstone, my birthplace as an artist, where I first learned to seek.  This wasn’t always the case.

A year ago, I finished an extensive revision of my first novel. I’d recently graduated from my MFA program, and I was exhausted. Unsure of my future or myself, I curled up with disenchantment, draped it over me like a blanket. Some writers say to read when you feel yourself drifting, but I was at such an insecure point that I couldn’t even read without thinking I could never do that. I still read, but it was not the answer for me at that moment in time. Two graduate degrees can burn the reasons you love to read, too. It was during a particularly Scarlet O’Hara bout of self-pity that I decided to visit an art museum. And there, in a sculpture built of trash, a voice seeped through.

I’d heard of and done a few writing exercises using ekphrasis before, but this was different. It wasn’t just about describing the sculpture. It was creating a world around it, a cast, and story. I had forgotten how important non-verbal arts could be to an artist working primarily with words. During the days, weeks, or months when I feel unproductive and bad at what I do, it’s usually because I haven’t left the house much. I’m too immersed in words. Though I aim for 3-4 hours of uninterrupted writing time per day, it is difficult to maintain. I get depleted. Faces recede. Distance grows.  Writing becomes the equivalent of walking into the same wall over and over. Writer’s funk takes hold.

In an effort to understand why ekphrasis works for me, I looked for other writers who’ve used the technique. According to Michael Trussler, writers such as Donald Barthelme, Salman Rushdie, and John Edgar Wideman use ekphrasis to “intimate structures of feeling or those aspects of consciousness which exist apart from taxonomies.”  Formally speaking, its aesthetic “preoccupation with flux and transcription serves to check our propensity for thinking in immutable categories.” In other words, this method of representation can be fruitful because it attempts to get at the spaces in between the visual and verbal. And so I say to you, writers, do what you have to do to get on that silent stage, to walk the land of the in between, to pull those strings a little harder. Go to paintings. Go to plays. Go to music. Seek and see what emerges. And in the meantime, we must all learn to be okay with the quiet times for they will always be.

 

Guest Blog Post, Heather Foster: Fifty Ways to Leave Your Mentor

Heather Foster

Heather Foster

Just drop off the key, Lee

And get yourself free

–  Paul Simon

 We begin romantic relationships with the best of hopes. We believe in forever, or at least, we thrive on the thrill of not knowing how or how long a relationship will endure. How happy or miserable can we possibly be? At what point does the façade wear off so that we start leaving our dirty socks in the bathroom floor, stop pretending we don’t eat Twinkies at 1:00am? And how, in a flurry of rage or discovery, or in a moment of can’t-take-the-standstill-anymore, will it end, once and for all? When will we change our Facebook status to “single” or “it’s complicated”? And how will it feel when people tell us, “I’m so sorry you and so-and-so broke up”?

A writing mentorship is a kind of love story, a kind of celebrity crush come true. As an undergrad, I was told that the MFA was an apprenticeship, and that I should choose a program with poets whose work I loved. I did. I picked a poet whose books wormed their way into my soul and left me dying to know how he could help me—me, the underprepared unlikely MFA candidate, who had just switched from pre-med to English 18 months before that moment, who hadn’t read or written nearly enough—learn to write great poems.

The first morning of my first residency, I met him. He walked into the room, tall and grey and good looking, but with an air of assholery that didn’t sit well with me. He was still wearing sunglasses, and his hair seemed to have been styled via a handful of gel and a few quick trips around the block in a convertible. He was in shorts and sandals. And when he opened his mouth, he spoke loudly in a thick New York accent. He seemed to know everything, and to want to be sure we recognized it.

This wasn’t going to work, Heather the farm girl, who drove a pickup truck with no cruise control, who still had red mud on the tires, and the hotshot New York poet. In our first conference, he asked what poetry I’d read. My answer sent him on a tirade about getting serious, about being in over my head, about how far behind my classmates I was. I hated him, and I thought about quitting the program. I went back to my room and packed everything up—everything except his books, which I’d left on my nightstand, hoping to have him sign.

I picked up my favorite in the stack and opened it. All over again, I fell in love with it, and I did what any girl does when she likes a boy who seems out of her league—I resolved to make him like me back.

That semester, I took masochism to new heights, cranking out sestinas and sonnets, reading twice the recommended number of books, doing annotations on all of them, listening to and desperately trying to implement my mentor’s suggestions for my poems. His passion for poetry was wonderfully contagious, and we turned out to love many of the same poets. Sometimes, he’d call what I’d written “bullshit,” but only when it was totally true, and I came to crave that no-nonsense attitude. When the praise came, I knew he meant it, and during the time we worked together, I lived for it.

Three years later, after my thesis defense, I went back to my motel room and cried like a brokenhearted seventh grader. The defense went brilliantly. I passed with flying colors. My committee members were pleased. But my time with my beloved mentor was officially over.

He had become a surrogate poetry father to me. Even though I knew all along the end was coming, when it came, it hurt. Because when a mentorship is at its best, you give yourself over to it; you become a willing horse to the shadow of your teacher’s whip. You let yourself forget where it’s going.

When it ends, it ends on good terms, and you find yourself in foreign territory. You see him again someday, with other students, and you want to punch their noses in. You can’t write a damn thing post thesis, and this is totally normal, but you don’t know that yet. You want to talk to him again, but you’re afraid to be a nuisance. You send heavily edited emails at carefully spaced intervals so as not to appear like a stalker.

You are grieving everything—the end of the routine, the end of the feedback, the end of his constant motivation. Your toes are curled over the rim of a canyon and you are shouting his name across a vast chasm and your whole life is the echo it makes.

Eventually, you realize he misses you, too. Eventually, you reach a frequency of communication you can live with. He hasn’t vanished into the abstract. He is still a source of encouragement.

Keep writing, he tells you, every time you speak. So you do. Finish that book, he tells you. So you do. Keep me posted, he says. So you do. And that urge to please a beloved mentor—that desperate need for his atta girl—it never goes away. You never stop hearing his voice in your head when you revise. You never throw away the drafts with his notes on them.

Yes, there will be times when you will not be able to write, no matter what. There will be times when you’ll think of quitting. There will be times when you will drink a caramel vodka milkshake at 10:00am on a Thursday (yes, it happened).

But here’s the thing—you’ll let the misery have its moment, but then you’ll do what you learned to do years ago, the first time you felt that way. You’ll go to the shelf, and you’ll pull down his books, and they’ll remind you why you never left. And you will take those poems into your body like a cure.

Guest Post, Chelsea Brogi: ASU Professors Read at Changing Hands Bookstore

Chelsea Brogi

On September 16, 2013 two of ASU’s professors showcased their recent publications during a book reading at Tempe’s own Changing Hands Bookstore. Valerie Bandura and Tara Ison read short selections from their newest work, poetry collection Freak Show and novel Rockaway, respectively.

Valerie BanduraIn Freak Show, Bandura exhibits the raw emotion of the horrors the Jewish had to encounter during the cold war, and how they were pushed out of the former Soviet Union. She sets up a theme throughout her poems, giving distinct and sorrowful details of how throughout the years, the newest generations of Jews did not understand why they were being pushed out of these countries, writing that “We had no idea why we were running, why we were the chosen, then chosen to leave. With us it was simple; we were chased so we ran.” Bandura’s poems are thought-provoking, but even during that darkest time, she shows that there is light at the end of the tunnel. Bandura’s final poem was her parents, coming from a trip on Lake Powell. Within this poem, she describes a happy, carefree setting; one very different than the situation her family left in the former Soviet Union.

Tara IsonTara Ison started her reading with a self-interview that she wrote for The Nervous Breakdown. In it she asked herself what she would do if she weren’t writing. Some of my favorite answers were knitting, going to the dentist, vacuuming, and reading student work. After reading her self-interview, Ison shared with the audience the first chapter of her newest novel Rockaway. Her protagonist, Sarah, is desperate to further her artistic career, staying in a cottage off the seashores of Rockaway, New York. Sarah is determined to paint a beautiful new set of paintings, and gains so much more from her summer in Rockaway. Ison does an exquisite job of creating a personal journey for Sarah, throwing her into a bottomless emotional pit of a summer.

Valerie Bandura’s work has appeared in The Minnesota Review, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, and others. Bandura also served as a Joan Beebe Teaching Fellow and was awarded a residency from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference and was awarded the James Merrill Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. She has received degrees from Columbia University and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren College, and currently teaches writing at ASU.

Tara Ison is the author of three novels, Rockaway, The List, and A Child out of Alcatraz, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in Tin House, The Kenyon Review, LA Weekly, and others. Ison was the recipient of the 2008 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship and the 2008 COLA Individual Artist Grant. She has also been the recipient of multiple Yaddo Fellowships, a Rotary Foundation Scholarship for International study, and more.  She received her MFA in Fiction and Literature from Bennington College, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Fiction at ASU.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis Comes to ASU

Superstition Review

Every semester, the creative writing program at Arizona State University hosts distinguished authors to give readings of their work as part of the MFA Reading Series. This semester, Pamela Uschuck, William Pitt Root, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Michael Martone have been invited to share their work on the ASU campus. The upcoming reading on October 23rd will be by esteemed poet, essayist, and scholar Rachel Blau DuPlessis.

DuPlessis is arguably most well-known for Drafts, a long poem that has taken 26 years and 5 books of collected poems to complete. Her newest book, Surge: Drafts 96-114, was published this March and brings the work to a conclusion. The project, which has been compared to T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, is a collection of poem “drafts” that ultimately combine to form one long poem. The poems are organized into groups of 19, with each group covering the same themes in the same order, and utilize a number of genres. In an interview with Hayden’s Ferry, Rachel Blau DuPlessis emphasized that the poems can be read individually or with the work as a whole. She said, “Poems can also be read in any order. But they are joined together by all being ‘drafts’.”

Along with being a poet, Rachel Blau DuPlesiss is a feminist scholar and critic. She has published several works of feminist critique, with the most recent being Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry. This work is the third book in a feminist critical series on poetry. DuPlessis’ background is evident in her poetry, which is rich in feminist themes. In the aforementioned interview she says, “…my poems are work written by me—and that ‘me’ is a lot of social and political things (“identities”) all mixed up together, including gender information, gender feelings (sometimes passionate ones) and observations.” As a part of her identity, feminism in naturally tied into her work as a poet.

Rachel Blau DuPlesiss will be reading her work in the Social Sciences Building, room 109, at noon on Wednesday, October 23. Later that day, DuPlessis will be giving a lecture, “Manifesting Literary Feminisms: A Conversation with Rachel Blau DuPlessis” at 4:30 pm, also in the Social Sciences Building, room 109. For more information on either event, visit the College of Liberal Arts and Science’s website. To prepare for this event, you can attend a master class by Cynthia Hogue on Rachel Blau DuPlessis. This class will be held on October 16. For further details, email Cynthia Hogue at Cynthia.Hogue@asu.edu.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, poet and essayist, coming to ASU

Superstition Review

Rachel Blau DePlessisJOIN DuPLESSIS FOR TWO EVENTS ON WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23 

  • MFA Reading Series Event: 12-1 p.m. in SS-109
  • Afternoon Lecture: “Manifesting Literary Feminisms: A Conversation with Rachel Blau DuPlessis,” at 4:30 p.m. in SS-109. The lecture is co-sponsored by the School of Social Transformation, the Institute for Humanities Research, the Department of English, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and the Office of the Associate Dean of Faculty.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Ph.D., Columbia University, 1970) is known as a poet and essayist, and as a critic and scholar with a special interest in modern and contemporary poetry. From 1986 until 2012, DuPlessis has been engaged in a long poem project, collected in several book-length installments from Wesleyan University Press and Salt Publishing. The newest book, Surge: Drafts 96-114 (Salt 2013), brings this 26-year long poem to a temporary fold.

Another key critical book by DuPlessis is Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934. DuPlessis was a Distinguished Visitor in the English Department at the University of Auckland, has held an appointment to the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, and was awarded a residency for poetry at Bellagio, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation.

ASU
The English Department is an academic unit of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Guest Post, Jason Olsen: Questions I Can Answer

Jason Olsen

A couple of nights ago, I met someone who, upon learning a bit about me, asked me what type of poetry and fiction I wrote. This was a lovely and well-meaning person and I know she wasn’t trying to pin me into a corner with impossible to answer questions, but she kind of did.  These “what do you write” questions are brutal. I suppose if I primarily wrote rhyming poems about ducks (which would, of course, require restraint when thinking of words that rhyme with “duck”) or coming of age in the Old West stories, this question would be easy. But I’m not really writing in a single genre and, while my individual stories and poems feel connected, it’s likely due more to voice than anything thematic, and it’s not going to make much sense to someone expecting a simple answer if I say I’m a “voice-driven” writer. I’m not entirely sure that explains much, anyway?

So, what kind of poem and stories do I write? Am I surreal? Am I funny? Am I the same writer story-to-story or poem-to-poem? How do I answer this without sounding pretentious (and making references to things my well-meaning questioner likely wouldn’t know well) or being a jerk (“I transcend categories!” might make me sound a bit like an ass)? So, when faced with this challenging question, I did the smart thing—I avoided it all together. I never answered her. I changed the subject to something more approachable, a specific story I was working on, and lead the conversation there.

Sure, I felt slightly guilty about this, but the moment passed and the discussion wasn’t bad but it made me think about something key about me as writer. I love talking about my writing but I’m not always entirely sure how to talk about my writing. How do I answer questions about my writing when so much comes from a combination of inspiration (which, aside from the occasional cool story of how a piece came to be, is usually dull) and craft (which is often not interesting to someone not as deeply involved in the life)?

I started thinking of questions I could answer—questions that I could tackle and sound (hopefully) approachable and still interesting as I answered them. Instead of dwelling on the difficult, I have accumulated a handful of questions I could conceivably answer. So, if you run into me at a dinner party, here’s some help. Of course, if you read everything below (which I hope you do), you might be bored by eventual answers.

Why are you a writer?

I had a bad toothache once. I guess more to the point, I had several bad toothaches.

This has nothing to do with the connection of tooth pain to the soul or anything like that. It’s much more literal. I had just graduated with my BA from UNLV and I was working at a pharmacy while I tried to figure out what to do next. I assumed I’d go to grad school and, considering my BA was in English and I was interested in literature, I figured I’d go for my Masters in literary study, probably focusing on British Romanticism.

And then, toothaches. I needed root canals all over the place. The insurance I was getting through my own job wasn’t worth much and I learned that I could remain fully covered on my mom’s insurance if I took six credits a semester. So, even though I was finished with my degree, I decided to reenroll at the college just for the insurance. Even paying for the classes was going to be cheaper than what my dentist needed to do to me, so it would work out.

Those few semesters rocked. I took whatever fit my work schedule and seemed interesting. I wasn’t limited by requirements or anything else. I took a class on the films of Jean Renoir because why the hell not. I took grad level classes. I took creative writing workshops.

More specifically, I took a poetry workshop. It was with a poet visiting the college for the semester—Martin Corless-Smith—and, while I was a bit out of my league compared to the admitted MFA students in the class with me, I held my own and loved every second. My writing grew and evolved and my passion for this stuff grew and evolved. I read contemporary poetry and I hadn’t done much of that. Most of what I had written before this class were imitations of what I was studying in my literature classes. So I was writing bad imitations of Tennyson. This class showed me I could read the stuff that was contemporary and vital. I started writing bad imitations of James Tate. This was more comfortable. I saw more of myself in these poems and I liked it.

But I assumed this was just an interest and my career (or what I was vaguely envisioning as a career) would require an MA in literature. I had a conference with Martin where he gave me a long list of poets and writers he wanted me to read (and that list would prove to be full of eventual first loves) and, when I told him I wanted to study lit, he told me no, I should get my MFA and wrote down a list of grad schools. I was at a point in my life where I needed someone to lead me in the direction I needed to head. And, thanks to my teeth problems, I found someone able to give me that push.

How do you stay focused enough to write everyday?

I don’t. Not usually, anyway. If I’m working on a project that’s got me really excited, I’ll work more often, but most of the time, I’ll work more sporadically, often in bursts. I’ve got a lot of papers to grade, a garden, a two-year old, and on and on. It’s hard to maintain that and write everyday.

Now some writers will shame me for saying this. Maybe they are right. Some writers spend a set amount of time each day to write and use that time no matter what. This is wonderful and I wish I could do it. This isn’t because I’m not focused, necessarily—it’s mostly because I simply can’t.

So I do what works for me. I binge write. I’ll spend time where I can get it and I write then. If I’m excited about something I’m working on, it’s easier to find the time. If I’m not, I don’t press it. Even when I’m not writing, I’m thinking about writing. I’m coming up with ideas and characters and if something clicks, that’s as good as any formal time at my desk. For me, I find the opportunities to write, but I don’t force them into my schedule, at least not usually. But that’s just me—different writers need to do what fits for them and I find the loose moments and cram them with words. As I always advise writers, figure out what works and don’t base everything on what another writer does, just use those other writers for hints on what might work.

Where do you get your ideas?

I get my ideas from everywhere. I think about people I’ve known or seen and write about them. I observe the world around me and write about that. I read news articles and watch TV. I’m sitting in a hotel lobby as I write this and I just watched a guy in pajamas shove four candy bars in his pockets while he complained about a toilet. That’s got potential, right? I write about my wife and hide the specifics just enough to not get myself in trouble (at least, not too much trouble). With fiction, it starts with character. With a poem, it starts with the thread of a thought. It’s all out there in the world waiting—we just have to have our eyes open widely enough to find it.

How do you end things?

Before the reader is completely ready.

An Interview with Jamie Quatro

Superstition Review

Last month I had the honor of attending a reading at Changing Hands Bookstore with Jamie Quatro. Although I had already finished her entire collection, hearing Jamie read her work was beyond captivating. The energy with which she spoke exemplified the dedication and passion she has for words—using them to create a rhythm and molding them into complex stories. Jamie graciously agreed to do this interview regarding her debut collection, I Want to Show You More, via email.

Superstition Review: At the Changing Hands reading you invited author Melissa Pritchard—one of your professors from ASU—to join you. How has your relationship with Melissa contributed to the literary aesthetic that you have today?

Jamie Quatro: I enrolled in Melissa’s MFA workshop with a BA from Pepperdine and an MA from the College of William and Mary, both in English. When I met Melissa, I was a Princeton PhD dropout and mother of four children under the age of eight. I was writing stories at night, after they were all in bed. I didn’t know if the stories were any good. I had no idea how to edit myself, or how to submit to journals. So I was lucky to land in Melissa’s workshop—I can’t imagine a more supportive teacher. Melissa’s emphases on social responsibility and spirituality meshed with my own aesthetic concerns. And she introduced me to the work of two poets I now call favorites: Jack Gilbert and W.S. Merwin.

S[r]: Many of the stories in your new collection deal with acts of infidelity—where your character never actually crosses a physical boundary. What is it about this type of affair that compelled you to explore it so deeply?

JQ: There’s something inherently erotic about the “almost” in fiction – one can let the imagination take over when the person or thing desired is at a physical remove. To me, erotic urgency in fiction (and in life) resides not in the act itself, but in the build-up. And the longer the space between suggestion and consummation (which fulfills, but also kills, to some degree, the original desire), the more charged the prose becomes. So when a fictional affair carries the suggestion of fulfillment but is, in a physical sense, impossible to consummate, it creates a kind of electrical current on the page. When I was drafting, I found this urgency creatively propulsive. At one point, I did draft a story where my characters actually went through with the proposed meeting at Grand Central—they found the empty car, boarded the train, etc. But in the end, I decided it was best to keep them in the place of not-quite.

S[r]: I came across this Book Notes piece you wrote in largehearted boy discussing the music playlist for your collection. Your stories have a distinct lyrical cadence that drives them forward. Can you expand on the role of music in your own writing process?

JQ: My mother is a concert pianist. Growing up, I’d fall asleep listening to her practice some of the most gorgeous and difficult music ever composed: Liszt’s La Campanella, Chopin’s Premiere Ballade. I grew to know those pieces intimately—the phrasing, dynamics, etc. When the piano stopped—if I was still awake—I’d keep the music going in my head by changing the notes into words. I didn’t realize I was doing it; the words seemed to originate in the piano. My stories often come in a similar fashion: they begin with sound or cadence, a pulse or rhythm to which I begin to attach words.

S[r]: “Ladies and Gentleman of the Pavement” took me to a place I have never been. Obviously it is an alternate reality, but on another level it deals with complex ideas including (but not limited to) resistance and redemption. Where did the idea for this intricate story come from?

JQ: I saw an image online, a distance race somewhere in Europe in which the competitors had giant crucifixes strapped to their backs. The image haunted me. Why? What was the point? If I were going to strap something to my back during a race, what would it be? It’s anyone’s guess how I wound up with phallic statues. Thank goodness there are also objects d’art bobbing around in the runners’ moisture-wicking carriers.

S[r]: In an interview with The Center for Fiction you mentioned that you weren’t thinking about a book until most of the stories were finished; yet there is a strong momentum between your stories. Can you describe the process of selecting these stories and arranging them in the order they are in now? Was that a simple or difficult task?

JQ: I agonized over the story order. I had these self-imposed parameters: start with a flash piece, to hook readers quickly and “break them in” to the voice; disrupt the expected narrative order in the linked stories; intersperse flash pieces among the longer ones; don’t put stories with similar family structures side-by-side; mix surreal and traditional stories. I spread the fifteen stories on the floor and shuffled them around like puzzle pieces until I reached a kind of stasis: I couldn’t move one without disrupting five others. Just before the book went to print, I decided to put “Relatives of God” last. I liked the final image: the parents looking at the children, the children glancing back. It felt both recursive and redemptive.

Now after readings, people will come up and say, “I read your last story first” or “I’m skipping around.” Which is, of course, how many of us read story collections. I read the title story in Saunders’ Tenth of December first, even though it’s the final piece in the book, because everyone kept saying “you have to read this story.” Still, the order is important to me, if only for personal aesthetic reasons. And readers who do move straight through might appreciate the time I spent agonizing.

S[r]: Although a similar underlying current propels your stories, this was one of the most stylistically diverse collections I have ever read. The differences in point of view, tense, quotation styles and chronology were refreshing and impressive. Is there anything you can’t do?! What story took you the most out of your comfort zone and how did you overcome that?

JQ: “Demolition.” No question. I wanted to try a Millhauser-esque “we” narration, and it proved a big challenge. And what actually happens in that story—the cave, the undressing, the kudzu—that all took me by surprise. I didn’t want the ex-parishioners to go in that (deeply unsettling) direction. Alas, by the time they started going there, they were running the show entirely.

S[r]: Despite the diversity in your collection, there are several similarities between the stories involving infidelity. Many of these similar details were so beautifully subtle that I had to go back to make sure I wasn’t imagining them. There is a nameless woman in an emotional affair—some stories divulge that she has been married for seventeen years; others involve her four children, a pastor and most frequently a four year-old son. Is this character indeed the same woman? If so, were these stories once part of a larger one, and how did they evolve into the collection as they are now?

JQ: Yes, they’re meant to be linked: same woman, same lover, same families. My editor and I had to go through and make sure all of those details lined up.  And no, they were never part of a longer work. In fact, all of the flash pieces, as well as the three short sections of “What Friends Talk About,” began as poems. I was obsessed with the material and wanted to see how far I could push, how deep into the well I could go.

S[r]: On a similar note, “Georgia the Whole Time” is a prequel to “Here,” and in your collection they appear out of chronological order. Which story did you write first and how did that affect your approach to the other?

JQ: “Georgia” came first, “Here” about a year later. Originally they weren’t linked stories—they had different settings, family make-ups, types of cancer, names/ages/number of kids. When my editor and I began working together, we decided the two stories could, in fact, be about the same family. It took some adjusting: adding a child here, taking one away there, making sure the years added up. It was tricky. I had to do math.

S[r]: You’ve said before that it is important for fiction writers to explore unknown experiences. How do you balance the expectations of fiction with the expectations of family or religion?

JQ: I try not to think about expectations when I draft—moral, familial, aesthetic, or otherwise. To write with anything less than complete moral and aesthetic freedom would be a kind of suffocation. Of course one can make adjustments in the revision stage. But freedom from stricture while drafting is essential to the authentic writing life. I think of what Barry Hannah said about music, its relationship to prose: “it’s ineffable. It is the highest thing you can reach for. It is beyond good and evil; that’s why I don’t like to attach morality or philosophy to the deepest things I feel. They’re just beyond it.”

S[r]: What fabulous advice. Thank you so much for taking the time to answer our questions, we look forward to seeing more from you in the future!

Past Intern Updates: Christina Arregoces

Superstition Review

Christina Arregoces, Issue 7 Art Editor and Issue 8 Interview Coordinator, discusses her pursuit of literary outlets and plans for the future.

HeadshotAfter interning at Superstition Review my freshman and sophomore year, I went on to immerse myself in any (and every) literary outlet I could. From ASU’s State Press Magazine to Lux Undergraduate Creative Review, from the Barrett Chronicle to Every Day Fiction, I applied for, submitted to, reported for, and wrote for just about every publication that I was lucky enough to stumble upon.

And between papers, classes, and incredible mentors during the next year and a half, I then stumbled upon copywriting.

I now happily work as a part time copywriter at a marketing firm in Tempe, and I plan to continue there until I graduate in 2014.

Until then? I’ll be hard at work on my creative writing Honors Thesis, while continuing to write for the Washington D.C. based blog, Spike the Watercooler.

After then? Well, that’s a good question. Though I’m planning on taking the LSAT this June, I’m still considering applying to a handful of MFA programs, with the end goal of getting my PhD and teaching at a collegiate level (hopefully, somewhere in California) in mind.

Let’s just say I’ll be doing quite a bit of breath holding come next fall.

Past Intern Updates: Katie McCoach

Superstition Review

Katie McCoach, Issue 6 Nonfiction Editor, discusses her experience at Superstition Review and other internships and how they gave her the experience to pursue her ideal career.

dsc_0507Until my internships with Superstition Review, Ellechor Publishing, and Folio Literary Management, I had no idea where my Creative Writing and Communications degrees were going to take me. I knew I enjoyed the degrees I had chosen for myself, but what job would I end up with? I felt like the only choices I kept hearing were technical writing, teaching, or apply for MFA programs.

Those options weren’t for me. But then the lingering question; what was?

Well, a few internships later I discovered my dream job, and the path to take to get there. Fast forward a year and here I am now, pursuing my dream. Half of my time goes to an author marketing company where I spend the day executing marketing campaigns for traditional and self-published authors, and the other half of my time is spent freelance editing as Katie McCoach Editorial. I edit and critique manuscripts, query letters, website content, and newsletters. When I look back at how in the world I got here, it comes down to six things interning did for me, so I wanted to share them here for you.

  1. Real Life Experience – I know you hear this all the time. Enough already, right? But it really cannot be expressed enough. The internships I held were all very different from one another and from each of them I discovered this whole world I knew nothing about. I learned how to communicate with authors, how to hone instinct in selling, selecting, and editing, and I saw the different roles each person can play in the publishing industry. Many of the things I learned in my internships I would never have learned by just my degree alone.
  2. Discover What You Want  – A couple years ago, I was the Nonfiction Editor for Issue 6 of Superstition Review. Here I learned the in and outs of a literary magazine: how to communicate with authors and pique interest, how to develop an instinct for selecting the best work for the issue that season, and I had a chance to read amazing work by so many brilliant writers. At one point, I was asked to give comments on one of the pieces, to see if there were any suggestions or feedback we could contribute. This was my favorite part, and it wasn’t even one of my typical duties. That’s when the first hint of what I wanted to do as a career began to hit me.
  3. Conduct the Ultimate Interview – Internships are jobs. Although they are temporary and often times only a few months long, they are still jobs. This is your chance to conduct the ultimate interview – how does this job fit with your personality? How are your skills best utilized? Can you see yourself here in five years? How could you move up in the industry? I worked for a literary magazine, publishing company, and literary agency. I saw very different roles of the publishing industry, and from it I discovered where I fit best.
  4. Path to Your Dream Job – Every person in your industry started somewhere, maybe even interning exactly where you are now. So ask them – how did they get their job? What about their boss’s boss? The path to your dream job becomes readily available to you as an intern and this is your chance to begin it.
  5. Perspective – I chose to intern at companies that were all related to publishing and from this I saw different parts of the industry that I could have never seen if I hadn’t worked in the areas I did. Interning at Superstition Review I saw the literary magazine side of publishing. The publications in literary magazines across the country influence contests and grants. These contests can mean referrals for lit agents, which in turn can mean a sale to an editor, and the next book a publishing company picks up. There is much more to it than that of course, but I now am able to see the industry as a whole, which gives me perspective, especially in relation to the job I chose to pursue.
  6. Connections – This is another one of those things we hear a lot. I currently live in Los Angeles and I am surrounded by the film and TV industry. I see first-hand how connections are the only way to establish your place in that industry. The same goes for publishing, though depending on the path you choose, it might not be quite as cutthroat. When I first moved to LA I attended one of those kind-of-awkward-but-you-push-through-it networking events. I was wary at first, and then I met someone who was starting her own marketing business. She needed an editor for her website content and what do you know, here I was, an editor. On top of gaining business with her, she also had a friend who was a literary agent, and that agent knew other freelance editors, and by then my connections had tripled. This happened just from a two-hour networking event, so imagine what a semester-long internship can do.

Interning was definitely the right choice for me and my career path, and – I have to cliché it up right here – I would not be in the position I am today without it.

If you are a current or past intern, what has interning done for you? If you are debating interning, what things do you hope to gain from the experience?

Katie McCoach graduated from Arizona State University in May of 2011 with her Bachelor’s of Arts in Creative Writing and Communications. She currently resides in Los Angeles, CA as a freelance editor. She has had essays published in TrainWrite and Kalliope. You can visit her at www.katiemccoach.com and on Twitter @katiemccoach