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poisedBen Greenman is an editor at the New Yorker and the author of several acclaimed books of fiction, including Superbad, Please Step Back, and What He’s Poised To Do, out later this month from HaperPerennial. He lives in Brooklyn. You can read the title story from What He’s Poised To Do on Fictionaut.

As a reader, which writers have you recently discovered and felt closest to?

No new discoveries, but several books I have picked up again after a long interval and felt a new surge of excitement: James Salter’s Light Years, Stanley Booth’s The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, and the collected stories of Isaac Babel. The last is the most interesting rediscovery, I think. I had read the Red Cavalry stories a long time ago and was put off by the violence and the untraditional length of the stories. Some are as short as two pages. This time through, I liked that. Not sure why. Plus, the stories are great: they are journalistic and psychologically realistic and also beautifully colored (by which I mean that he uses many colors in his descriptions).

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

I was just talking to my friend Rhett Miller about this. He’s a great songwriter, and he said that when he gets stuck he has go-to books that he uses: poetry collections, or biographies, things that he knows will contain odd turns of phrase or suggestive description that will get his wheels out of the ditch and get him moving again. For me, it’s the exact same thing in reverse: I use songwriters’ lyrics, whether it’s his, or Sly Stone’s, or John Prine’s, or Sam Phillips’s, or Joseph Hill’s–they get me thinking, and that’s all that has to happen.

What are your favorite literary websites and e-zines?

I can’t pick just one. Electric Literature? Opium? HTML Giant? I read them all erratically: this is my fault, not theirs. As far as literary sites, I love the UPenn Online Books page, because I like downloading and/or printing out free literature.

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

I have a book of stories about to come out called What He’s Poised To Do, and in conjunction with it, Harper Perennial and I started a Website called Letters With Character that invites people to write letters to fictional characters. We’ve been up about three weeks, and we have about a hundred letters, and they really run the gamut from people who feel the need to romantically intervene in the plots of classic novels to people who want to thank characters for inspiring them to people who want to air out a grievance. The books that people have written to/into are interesting: everything from Winnie the Pooh to Harry Potter to The Confidence-Man to Don Quixote.

My book has fourteen stories, all united by the notion that people spend most of their lives trying to connect with others and most of their lives failing. Letters are one of the major tools of attempt, and I believe in them in ways I do not always believe in email or Twitter. The stories take place through time and space: 19th century North Africa, Atlanta in 2015, the moon.

Tell us more about Letters With Character.

Letters With Character is something I thought of and my editor at Harper Perennial, Cal Morgan, named. I thought it would be a great way to see how people interact with fiction, and if it is a therapeutic or provocative exercise. So far, it is.

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.


  1. Terese Svoboda

    Isaac Babel–swoon! And what a cover on that new book!

    T

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