Fictionaut Five: Gina Frangello

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.