Fictionaut Blog

On Ben Chadwick’s “True Love and the Giraffe”
by Tara Laskowski

“In the known history of Tallahassee, nobody had ever been killed by a rhinoceros, and that was going to change.”

I’ll admit I’m an impatient reader these days. I’m looking for stories to delight me with their language, even more so than the story itself. I want each sentence to be like eating popcorn–every kernel a delight to ingest, so you want to keep going to the end. This is why I like Ben Chadwick’s “True Love and the Giraffe” so much. It’s surprising, it’s fun, it has good humor and is really smart. Though I didn’t know what was going on at every moment, I liked that because I felt like the narrator was driving with confidence, and I was willing to go along with the ride.

I know that the story is a little longer than most pieces posted on Fictionaut, and therefore probably gets less readers because of it. However, it’s worth taking the time for. The situation itself is crazy, and it just keeps getting more and more insane with each twist of the plot. Ben is not afraid to take risks with his plot, and we as readers benefit from it. Good stuff!

On Ajay Nair’s “Bicycle Boys”
by H-M Brown

“Bicycle Boys” is a Horror/Science Fiction Short-Story that follows the mysterious sightings of a group of boys riding bicycles in Bombay, India, that people are unsure of are actually there. The sightings of the titular characters, creates tension with the residents of Bombay during an intense heatwave in the summer. The suspense paces very well, building up moments of mystery and intrigue, with a climax that is both shocking and well executed.

On Jeanne Holtzmann’s “Better Than Chocolate“
by David Erlewine

The first story I faved on this site was “Better Than Chocolate” by the wonderful Jeanne Holtzmann. This story was posted on Fictionaut earlier this year, when Jeannie learned that Night Train was going to be publishing it. I faved it for about 40 reasons, and I’ll get into a couple. The narrator works at a grocery store and is asked (and goes) to visit a co-worker while he’s working his second job as a night watchman. The guy is described thusly: “His dad owns a junkyard. My friends think he’s mean and scary, but they’re a bunch of wusses, and besides, they don’t see him the way I do.” Look how she sets the stage during the narrator’s drive out to see the guy: “Dead leaves blow across the narrow, crumbling pavement like animals running for their lives.” And when the guy sees the narrator, look how Jeannie describes it: “‘You came,’ he says. He smells of weed and beer. He peers out between the diamonds with those eyes, sad and cynical, the color of chocolate and shit.”

I won’t get into any more laudatory phrases or give away the ending, which to me is the kind of heartbreaking I can’t get enough of, the kind that doesn’t try too hard, the kind that smacks you around each time you read it. I love this story and would fave it again if I could.

Fictionaut Faves, a series in which Fictionaut members recommend stories on the site, is edited by Marcelle Heath, a fiction writer, freelance editor, and assistant editor for Luna Park. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

I like Josh, he is my kind of dude and reminds me what it was like to live in a diy house with 10 roommates.

Q (Nicolle Elizabeth for Fictionaut): The first rule about Deckfight is that you do not talk about Deckfight. Break the rule, Tyler Durden. Who is Deckfight?

(Josh Spilker) Sleeper cell of real estate industry spies who watch the comings and goings of the baby boomer set to predict when and where they will move and inhabit next. Buy North Carolina and sell Florida with a close eye on the Del Webb communities of Middle Tennessee. All of this or none of this is true.

We’ve also been known to write and comment about music and literature with a southeast bent. Not everything we cover is in those bounds, but those bounds are what we are most interested in.

How long has Deckfight been going?

“Deck” and “Fight” have been in my mind a long time never finding a connection together until I created a horrible Wordpress site to showcase random music videos. That sucked. I never knew I would like blogging until about 10 months ago, when I just decided, “Forget it, let’s start posting stuff on a regular basis and see what’ll happen.” Blogging (to me) is about a rhythm & flow, and I feel like I finally got that down. And I like music and literature, pretty equally.

I’m not sure what has happened. I wouldn’t say Deckfight is a success or failure, but I generally like it and some nice authors and music-types have been nice enough to respond to my emails. And a few people here and there have decided to help me with it. I get a lot of random press releases, some good, some not—that has happened.

How if at all does Deckfight bring in its indie rock interests to the Deckfight Fictionaut group?

To the Fictionaut group? I’m not sure yet. That’s something I need to look into. In general, I will say that I love literature about rock & roll. Love Joe Meno. Before I started Deckfight, Ben Tanzer and I had some random emails concerning the punk rock mag, Wonkavision,when we were both contributing to it. The new Tao Lin is underrated in its punk rock-i-ness. I like Jason at Orange Alert and David w/ Largehearted b/c we combine the lit & rock.

Also, I think fiction can learn a lot from the DIY indie-punk aesthetic. I’m a big fan of thinking of short stories as mp3s. Chapbooks as EPs. Books as albums. There was a conversation on the Pank blog and HTML Giant about how in music DIY and essentially “self-publishing” is ok, but in literature it’s not. And the argument is that self-published/vanity press is all rubbish with no filter. Well, there’s a lot of trash in self-released music as well. The difference is that the bands throw it out there, find a community for it and then move forward, move on or try something different.

That’s where I think something like Fictionaut can help out. It’s a huge community to post a few stories (play a few songs) and see how the crowd responds. If people support it, but a big publisher (label) doesn’t, it still might be worth putting it out there, then eventually getting some bigger attention. The lit world seems quick to condemn the very idea of self-publishing, when it may be the way to go for some authors at a certain moment in time. I guess the small/indie publishers do foster a similar spirit, but I think there’s room for the self-released, the indie press & the big press–just like in music.

Also, I’ve just started posting short story links on Wednesdays…so hook me up.

How’s the group going? Do you guys watch MTV UK together?

That’d be awesome, but I don’t have cable, only Netflix streaming. So I can rock the A-Team television series, but that’s about it. BTW–do they show Jersey Shore in the UK? What’s the response? Once I was in Belize and I went into this little village shack of a general store that somehow had a cable hook-up and they were watching “The Hills,” some episode with a yacht. The juxtaposition almost made me puke.

I’m still trying to figure out how Fictionaut works, with its bells and whistles, we should all send more stories to groups I think, instead of just posting in the great gust of stories on the main page. We’d probably receive some better feedback that way. This prompt has prompted me to change things for the better. If not me then who? If not now, then when?

Tell me anything else here. Write like a book and I’ll break it up to look cool.

Think we’re going to expand our brand into local aquariums and fish hatcheries with an anthology of Deckfight’s first year. “A Best Of” or “Greatest Hits” if you will, and I know you will. Think we’re going to rock it PDF and ePub style with maybe a couple physicality copies for our moms to wad up and throw into bonfires.

Maybe I’ll self-publish a chapbook, maybe I won’t. But for sure, I’ve got a story coming out soon through the Twitter fiction project of the CCLaP center that everyone should check out.

What will all the fishies think about this? We will have to ask them.

And I’m always interested to know what authors have been reading lately for our Friday Five piece and whatever else, so send some stuff my way: deckfight@gmail.com.

Nicolle Elizabeth checks in with Fictionaut Groups every Friday.

Gina Frangello is the author of the novel My Sister’s Continent (Chiasmus 2006) and the collection Slut Lullabies (forthcoming from Emergency Press in 2010.) The longtime Editor of Other Voices magazine, she co-founded its book imprint, Other Voices Books, now an imprint of Dzanc Books, in 2005 and is currently the Executive Editor of the press’ Chicago office. She is also the Fiction Editor of The Nervous Breakdown and the faculty supervisor for TriQuarterly Online.

Q (Meg Pokrass): What story or book do you feel closest to?

This is an incredibly hard question, and has been sparking a face-off in my head between some of my favorite books. But what I’ve realized really acutely here is that sometimes “favorite” isn’t the same thing as experiencing closeness. Three of my favorite novels are Absolom, Absolom!, The God of Small Things, and Beloved, but I don’t think I feel exactly “intimate” with any of them. It’s like the difference between thinking George Clooney is hot from afar, vs. feeling attraction for an actual lover who is less handsome, but where the intimacy factor makes the real-life-lover seem even sexier. So the book I am probably the most intimate with is Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow. That novel changed the way I read and write on a very core level, and I teach it almost obsessively. Runners-up would be The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which changed the whole way I lived back when I first read it at nineteen. And Mary Gaitskill’s Two Girls Fat and Thin, which is not even my favorite of her books but is the one that, when I was a young writer, made me aware that I was writing in a tradition I hadn’t even quite realized existed, exploring terrain that is out there on a kind of archetypal level, and that many writers try, simultaneously, to tap into. That felt very intimate, and made me feel less alone.

Do you have a mentor?

I’ve had various mentors at different times in my life, and those relationships have tended to evolve over time into friendships that are more equal in nature. My earliest mentor was a writing professor when I was in high school and college, but by the time I became a publishing writer he had left that world to become a political organizer, so while he remained a valuable reader for my work, he himself had chosen, to a large extent, not to navigate the difficult terrain of publishing and to focus his energies elsewhere, leaving his writing more a private thing. In graduate school, Cris Mazza, who is now the head of the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois-Chicago, was a very strong mentor for me, even nudging me to submit my first novel to Chiasmus Press, which published it. But Cris and I met in 1994, when I was in my mid-20s, and more than 15 years later our relationship is more a close friendship; we’ve also collaborated on a number of projects as colleagues, like her guest-editing magazines or books Other Voices has published.

My literary agent is also a mentor–she’s been in the business for a very, very long time, and she’s seen a lot of trends come and go, and a lot of threats of Armageddon, like the publishing community seems to be facing now, and is really unflappable, which is valuable to me.

How do you stay creative? What are your tricks to get “unstuck?”

My work is extremely creative, and also crazily time-consuming, so for me the issue is less staying in a creative realm and more finding the time to focus on my own writing, rather than only reading, editing and teaching. I edit a book press (Other Voices Books), an online magazine (the Fiction Section of The Nervous Breakdown), and I’m also the faculty supervisor of the new incarnation of TriQuarterly Online, which is launching in July. I’m extremely privileged in all of these roles to be constantly close to the creative process–but the reading load can border on insane. I have three kids under the age of ten, and don’t have any actual childcare because . . . well, mainly because we all know jobs like the ones I have barely pay . . . so I’m doing those three jobs, one of which also involves teaching a course at Northwestern, plus usually teaching at Columbia College, all in the 30 hours per week that my kids are out of the house for school. I drop them off and pick them up every day, and am an almost absurdly stereotypical Italian Mom who, when they’re home, spends my life in the kitchen cooking–which I really enjoy–for our family, friends, and my parents who live downstairs. We have so many kids in the house all the time that our environment is often a chaotic mess; the laundry alone is like a minor house renovation project every few days. So the issue is finding time to write at all. I think when you’re pressed for time like that, things like “writer’s block” feel a little mysterious. I suspect it’s something suffered by writers who aim to write daily, on a schedule, which I’m sure can be brutal and there are times when you just don’t feel like it and the words won’t come. But for me, it’s more like I’m scribbling things on the backs of receipts and napkins, playing scenes out in my head while I’m driving a car full of kids to soccer practice, writing notes for my own novel in the margins of a book I’m reading, and just kind of palpitating to find some time to get it down into some coherent format. Luckily, I’ve always been more of a binge writer than a methodical or scheduled writer. I have no routine other than that I always write in the summer, when I don’t teach and am not taking submissions for the various venues I edit. I also require a fairly long time block. I can’t write fiction in half an hour bursts–I need a good four hour chunk to enter that space. Eight or ten hours is better.

What are your favorite websites?

I came to edit the Fiction Section at www.thenervousbreakdown.com because I’d been blogging for the site for about two years, and I think it’s one of the most fun, vibrant, supportive and interactive communities on the web. I think Fictionaut offers a very similar creative community, actually, really strong on comments and encouragement. I still think it’s hard to top Bookslut for in-depth interviews and book reviews and links to all things literary . . . but in that same vein, with variations on flavor, the choices are so plentiful now that it’s almost impossible to keep up on all the things you want to read. I love The Rumpus. I want to be more involved with She Writes. I feel like a person could have a full time job just surfing the literary sites on the web. Well, I guess actually a lot of people DO have that as a full-time job now. I always feel behind, and every time I start perusing links my friends put on Facebook or Twitter, it’s like that sensation of there always being more amazing books to read than you can ever fit into your lifetime. Now it’s not just books but all the other literary dialogue out there too. It’s a constant feast, but it can be a little overwhelming.

What is happening right now in your writing world?

My second book, a collection called Slut Lullabies, comes out in June from Emergency Press. And in Other Voices Books’ world, we’re about to debut The Morgan Street International Novel Series, showcasing fiction set outside the United States. Our first title, Currency by Zoe Zolbrod, is a literary thriller set in Thailand. We’re also reading right now for an anthology called Men in Bed focusing on stories by women writers that depict sex from the male point of view. Any women writers reading this who have work that fit that bill should submit–see www.ovbooks.com for details!

The Fictionaut Five is our ongoing series of interviews with Fictionaut authors. Every Wednesday, Meg Pokrass asks a writer five (or more) questions. Meg is an editor at Smokelong Quarterly, and her stories and poems have been published widely. She blogs at http://megpokrass.com.

This week on Luna Park, Michael Copperman writes what seems to me an original and thoughtful essay considering some aesthetic and political assumptions made about race in contemporary publishing. Possibly one of the most inspiring pieces we have published on LP, Copperman’s essay moves quickly from describing publishing obstacles onto the important reasons we read and write stories: “recognizing human suffering and responsibility, and so examining what is true in us and about us.” Here’s from the beginning of the piece:

The email from the editor of the literary journal started out promisingly enough, noting that they liked my story very much. I knew that couldn’t be all, for the story I’d submitted was a dialect piece, and I knew from long experience that no editor would accept a story deploying a form of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) without some confirmation of authenticity: they would try to verify my racial background and personal history, especially in the absence of publications I didn’t possess because no editor would accept a story written in AAVE without…guarantees. And there it was:

Our editors have concerns about how you colonize this young girl’s voice.

I took a deep breath, wishing polemic came easier to me, and started to type…

In non lit mag news: Copperman also has a similarly-themed brief essay in the latest GOOD magazine on education against the odds in an area of rural Mississippi just half-a-day’s drive from where Luna Park was once based. The sensitivity with which Copperman describes the schoolchildren will no doubt speak to the heart of any teacher or parent.

Copperman’s essay in LP is a part of our ongoing series on race, class, gender, and sexuality—a series in which Claire Messud’s recent all-woman fiction section on Guernica would have fit right in. Messud guest-edited this section for the magazine “in response to why “women authors [are] so frequently left off the best-of lists, and left out of prestigious book prizes.” The result is a host of female fiction from around the globe:

These seven remarkable women form no cohesive group. They write from different perspectives and record vastly different worlds: Chimamanda Adichie’s posh Nigerian matriarch wouldn’t converse with Sefi Atta’s hard-up middle class Lagos narrator, even though their sharp observations of their shared society would shock and intrigue one another. The kids from Holly Goddard Jones’s middle school in small-town Roma, Kentucky, would never cross paths with Elliott Holt’s well-heeled Beltway-raised Helen, unless they all became writing students in rural Pennyslvania, in a class taught by Porochista Khakpour’s volatile and eccentric exiled New Yorker, Azita. Lorraine Adams’s Arash, deeply rooted in his family house in Lahore, would be baffled by Hasanthika Sirisena’s American-raised Sunil, a good ole boy suddenly at sea in Sri Lanka.

From elsewhere around the globe, poet Bei Ling has a moving essay up on UPI Asia about his exile nine years ago from China for the crime of “publishing illegally” the literary journal Tendency.

Also, though never not great, are Words Without Borders issues getting even better? A not-to-be-missed new issue of international graphic novels.

The Paris Review’s new Art of the Memoir addition to their writer interviews series begins with Mary Karr. (And would former Harper’s editor Roger Hodge actually be considered for editorship of the esteemed lit mag?)

Finally, issue 65 of Willow Springs is out, with new writing from, among others, Laura Kasischke, Robert Wrigley, Matt Bell, and an interview with Charles Baxter.

Every Tuesday, Travis Kurowski presents Luna Digest, a selection of news from the world of literary magazines. Travis is the editor of Luna Park, a magazine founded on the idea that journals are as deserving of critical attention as other artistic works.

OK, so, if you have not read James Robison’s story on Fictionaut, “Mars,” drop everything, OK?

Be sure to read the comments of his fellow writers and editors, because basically, we all went a little nuts, thrilled that a) Jim was here on our newbie site; and b) that Jim had posted this amazing story, with its crackling dialogue, mounting tension, and sweet marital confusion.

Later, I asked him to write 2 or 3 things he knows about Fictionaut, and he responded with this love letter. So, I’m saying, we love him here.

I first read Jim’s stories in The New Yorker, and then read his story collection, Rumor. Knocked me out. Then I read his novel, The Illustrator, and was introduced to Q.

OK, I’m not going to say more about Q, except that she is one of the most remarkable young female characters ever written, sexy & dangerous and I will stop there. Go get the book.

So I asked Jim if we could feature one of his early New Yorker stories in Line Breaks and he said sure, and suggested “The Line.” So I said fine, can you provide an introductory word? He responded with characteristic minimalism:

I wanted to create a narrative that could be best diagrammed by a straight line. No ascending nor descending action, no gathering complexity, almost no dialogue.

So then I asked if he could perhaps say a little more, and he said:

Why did I want to impose challenging rules on myself? When writing a story is hard enough? When selling a story actually meant rent money, electric and phone bill money? I don’t know. Or I do. Because I had an editor in mind, Frances Kiernan, and I wanted to show off a little for her. She was a mediator, for me, between the bewildering demands of commerce and those of (in quotes and with apologies) art. I thought she might like a story that behaved in an odd way. The story still seems odd to me, three hundred years later, with its I narrator and some other elements I avoided back then.

Please go out and read everything that Jim Robison has ever written.

Line Breaks is a regular feature in which accomplished authors introduce and share their first published stories with the Fictionaut community. Line Breaks is edited by Gary Percesepe. You can read “The Line” on Fictionaut.

“Unnerve thyself: the violent and enthralling short stories in Trailer Girl detonate on contact,” wrote Vanity Fair about Terese Svoboda’s third book of fiction, out in paper last fall. A “fabulous fabulist” according to PW, Vogue lauded her first novel, Cannibal, as a female Heart of Darkness. 2010 and 2011 will see her fifth and sixth novels. Also the author of five books of poetry, she’s teaching fiction at Columbia University’s School of the Arts this spring.

Q (Meg Pokrass): What story or book do you feel closest to?

I would sleep with Calvino anytime.

Do you have a mentor?

I’ve always responded to No. An instructor at Columbia told me to stop writing poetry because my biography was too much like a woman he’d picked for a prize. A fiction editor of the Paris Review told me poets couldn’t write fiction. Even after I’d published six books, my father said I should really try real estate. Just say No and I’ll say Yes.

How do you stay creative? What are your tricks to get “unstuck?”

It’s embarrassing to say that I don’t get stuck. There’s so much pleasure in writing, why would I not want to? It’s so hard to fight for time, I practically beat up the computer when I get to it. If someone says No to me over and over in one genre, I try another.Okay, so if I can’t figure out plot-that evil necessity in fiction-I freewrite around it for ten minutes. Something always occurs.

What are your favorite websites?

The Rumpus. Afghan Women’s Writing Project. Fictionaut. Diagram.

What is happening right now that you would like to share in your writing world?

I’m all excited about teaching fiction at Columbia where I received my MFA so long ago. A dream (see above) come true.

Can you tell us a bit about your novels? How did they come to you what inspired them…

It took fifteen years to write my first novel Cannibal. I was (am) a poet, I didn’t know how to construct sentences, let alone stories. I wrote over a hundred short stories until I wrote a publishable one (see above writing group for patience). But once I had the power–beware! My favorite novel is Tin God because it’s funny. At least I think it’s funny. The last ten pages are all black with white type so maybe it’s not that funny. Pirate Talk or Mermalade, which is coming out this September, is a fluke, written all in dialogue. It was an exercise that overcame me. Bohemian Girl comes out in 2010 to tweak Willa Cather. Being from Nebraska, I’ve always resented her as a usurping Virginian.

I bet you have an exciting tidbit to end this with? Any new pubs?

One Story has just published me. Hooray!.

The Fictionaut Five is our ongoing series of interviews with Fictionaut authors. Every Wednesday, Meg Pokrass asks a writer five (or more) questions. Meg is an editor at Smokelong Quarterly, and her stories and poems have been published widely. She blogs at http://megpokrass.com.

This week Luna Park continues our series on race, class, gender and sexuality in indie publishing with an article on publishing and the body by Sherisse Alvarez, which begins:

As a writer, I have thought a lot about “community” and what it means.  I am often hyper-aware of my identities as I write: female, gay, Cuban-American, daughter of exiles.

One of the most anticipated books of 2010 was Joshua Ferris’s new novel The Unnamed, out from Reagan Arthur Books earlier this month. In case you aren’t ready to go buy a 320-page novel about a compulsive walker, Granta has published a long excerpt of the book in their just-released Work issue: “The internists made referrals. The specialists ordered scans. The clinics assembled teams.”

Graphic designer and writer Steven Heller says that magazines once had balls.

The upcoming issue of Witness is “Captured: Writing About Film and Photography.‘” Sounds intriguing enough. Perhaps one day writing about film will seem less magical than it still does; I hope not soon. New work by B. R. Smith, Steven Wingate, Matthew Salesses, A. V. Christie, and others.

Though a new issue of Ninth Letter is always something to look forward to, since their recent design update brought them outside the box of anything being done in lit mag design this side of McSweeney’s, their new issue will no doubt be something to get a hold of. 9L Editor Philip Graham blogs about the contents of the new issue—work from Ander Monson, Benjamin Percy, Viet Dinh, John Warner, Cathy Day—and is interviewed about what goes on behind-the-scenes at the Urbana-Champaign magazine.

There is a literary magazine throw-down going on in China between literary superstars Guo Jingming and Han Han.

I think it is finally time I ordered a copy of The Lifted Brow. What put me over the edge was self-proclaimed “giant” interview by Justin Taylor with Lifted Brow editor Ronnie Scott. Here’s a bit:

Also, I don’t know how exotic you think Australia is, but maybe people just like being invited to write a story for an Australian magazine. Especially somebody like Tom Bissell, who would seem really famous to people who read this website but who doesn’t have a publisher out here. The other thing is that Tom Bissell gave us a 10,000 word chapter from his Rome book, which he’d said was basically unexcerptable. But I can publish whatever I want and just have narrow margins if I need to. So I said “Whatever Tom Bissell, just send us a really long thing, I’m sick of all your fears”. And the best part is, we still pay $1 a word, so Tom Bissell gets $10,000. Not really. I don’t think we’ve even paid Tom Bissell yet, because we’ve only just recalled that issue from the distributors and they haven’t told us the sales figures.

Every Tuesday, Travis Kurowski presents Luna Digest, a selection of news from the world of literary magazines. Travis is the editor of Luna Park, a magazine founded on the idea that journals are as deserving of critical attention as other artistic works.

Out of several entries in the Significant Objects group, Nicholas Rombes‘ story was chosen as the official tale of “the music box disguised as a gift that everybody knew was a music box.” The story is now up on the Significant Objects site, and you can bid on the box on eBay. Proceeds from the auction are donated to 826 National.

For the second round, an egg whisk begs for signification. For more on Significant Objects, read Nicolle’s check-in with the S.O. group.

On Colin White’s “The Statue of a Writer”
by Lou Godbold

Who doesn’t know writer’s block? I loved this poem and how it spun a story out of that misery.

“I don’t know much about poetry,” some people say when faced with critical appraisal of words which trickle down a page instead of marching across it. Simple — does it speak to you or not? “The Statue of a Writer” passed that test. First, I understood it (important to those of us who are not comfortable lost in the forests of someone else’s imagination with no way back); second, it made me laugh; and third, I could relate, so yes, it spoke to me.

Perhaps equally as important for a poem, the words slipped easily through my brain in a joyous rhythmic dance, trailing images like folk dancers’ ribbons. One or two of them are still snagged on the bushes of my imagination.

Lovely stuff!

On Bob Eckstein’s “Using Mini-Golf as a Metaphor for the Shortcomings in My Love Life”
by D.P.

I’ve always found Bob Eckstein to be the kind of fine, funny writer you can almost always count on to pick you up and twirl you around. He doesn’t let you fall down by getting much too serious way too quickly (i.e. D.P. the poet) but like any good comic artist he delivers the one-two punch with just a tinge of human sadness at the almost but not quite boring folly of the everyday life of a playful mind paying full (fool?) attention to its own inner movie. He’s a friendly writer with a sharpened tooth full of wit and wonder. That’s why the very first story I ever “faved” was Bob’s “Using Mini-Golf as a Metaphor for the Shortcomings in My Love Life.” It made me smile. Simple as that. Lines like, “If she wasn’t sleeping she was dressing or undressing” or a “new proficiency in lying and an increase in salt intake” got me right away. To the gut, so to speak. But there’s some truth-telling to be had as well: “Men are seldom even sure when a serious relationship begins,” or the very funny, “I don’t recall her name, but she was special.” I laugh every time I read that one and I’ve read it a dozen times. That’s what I mean. No let down. Here’s to Bob!

On Angi Becker Stevens‘ “If Everything is Inevitable“
by Ethel Rohan

Like all Angi Becker Stevens’ stories, this one made me ache just right. I love the imagination and inventiveness here, the tenderness and yearning. “If” is such a tiny word and a huge idea. Angi Becker Stevens’ use of the tiny and tremendous here is ambitious and layered, and wonderfully successful.

“If Everything is Inevitable” is told with deft, restraint and confidence. So much so that even in a work about time travel (what John Gardner called) “the continuous dream” is never interrupted or called into question.

“I want to ask her all the questions she’s forbidden to answer. I want to ask her which animals will go extinct and if the sky will always be the same color and if she knows how and when we’re going to die. I want to know if everything is inevitable.”

This work is a gift to read and a standard to write by. Brava, Angi.

Fictionaut Faves, a series in which Fictionaut members discuss one story they have faved, is edited by Marcelle Heath, a fiction writer, freelance editor, and assistant editor for Luna Park. She lives in Portland, Oregon.