I grew up in the Washington, DC suburbs of Northern Virginia, and after spending more than a decade living elsewhere, moved back here in early 1996. One of the selling points of the house my wife and I bought back in 2001 was the barn in the back. When my brother saw it, his response was, Man you've got to believe there's a God. Empty, it seemed huge.

Keep reading...]]> Stephen Stark (stephenstark.com) kicks off Writing Spaces, a new series dedicated to the desks, cafes, libraries and retreats where Fictionaut writers work, providing a window to the physical places where some of the stories on the site originated.

I grew up in the Washington, DC suburbs of Northern Virginia, and after spending more than a decade living elsewhere, moved back here in early 1996. One of the selling points of the house my wife and I bought back in 2001 was the barn in the back. When my brother saw it, his response was, Man you’ve got to believe there’s a God. Empty, it seemed huge.

I divided it, and a third of it is my office, which I’m not going to show you because it’s such a mess, and the other two thirds, roughly, is my shop, which I’m also not going to show you for the same reason. In the shop, I mostly just collect nice pieces of wood and turn them into sawdust. But occasionally I manage to get something out of it, and behind me, as I write this, on a folding table that also has a box full of my father’s letters home from India during World War II, is the electric violin that I’ve been trying to build for my daughter for the last three or four years.

It’s often said that you can write pretty much anywhere, and I have, but I’ve sort of hollowed out a little space here that in reality likely has lousy feng shui, but when I’m here, I’m not really here, so I don’t really notice. The truth is, though, if we actually had enough room inside the house where I could set up an office, I’d vastly prefer that. More than once, my “disappearance” into the barn has caused some domestic friction.

At least in my mind, as important as place is set up. I wrote my first novel in Iowa on an IBM Selectric III, rewrote and revised it in New York on a Macintosh, circa 1985. Behind me, in addition to the letters and the violin and assorted bits of electronics that will go in it, there’s a Selectric III that I bought at a yard sale for 50 bucks, a couple of other Macintoshes that have been retired, but still refuse to break. Currently, I use a MacBook Pro with an external monitor attached. On the Mac’s monitor I have Apple’s Pages program open, with the novel I’m currently working on, THE BOB DELUSION, open. On the external monitor, I’m running Windows XP virtually on VM Ware Fusion, and dictating this using Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I love this program, not least because it will translate dictation from a digital voice recorder with remarkable accuracy. I spend a tremendous amount of time in traffic, and so, in addition to writing TBD in the barn, I’ve probably drafted seven or eight chapters of this novel driving on the Capital Beltway.

Keep reading...]]> Alfred A. Knopf published J.S. Marcus’ collection of stories, The Art of Cartography in 1991, with a blurb by Amy Hempel: “Dozens of perfectly observed vignettes - the stories within stories - are amplified when Marcus pieces them together.” It can be had now for $1.99 via Alibris.

These are mostly very truncated stories dealing with Americans who suddenly find themselves forced to identify themselves as Americans, natives of Los Angeles, lawyers, or actors. These definitions are at odds with how they think about themselves. In “The Most Important Thing,” the narrator says, “I am Jewish, with a Jewish name, and because there are so few Jews in this city, I often feel Jewish — at work, for example — by contrast. Sometimes I think of myself a bureaucrat.” They work in Europe or New York alongside Europeans for various global concerns. The identifier “American,” is a tag or identifier that serves to encapsulate them. Encapsulation itself serves as a working structure throughout the entire book. The characters live encapsulated lives, placing themselves in various boxes of identity, as an American banker, for instance.

Marcus is the master of containment. Each paragraph encapsulates a narrative. Like organic cells, they are completely self-sufficient, and yet they specialize and perform specific functions as they build passages and stories. The word encapsulate comes from the French appropriation of the Latin word for box and means a “a membranous sac.” Boxes or cells, each paragraph encapsulates a story.

Gertrude Stein, in her enjoyably impenetrable instruction manual How to Write, discusses the difference between the paragraph and the sentence. She writes that a paragraph, rather than a sentence, has emotion. “This is so light it is an emotion,” she wrote, “and so a paragraph. Yes so a paragraph.” In composition classes, the sentence is described as a complete thought. Yet, what to do with sentence fragments. Students learn to scrub the fragments from their paragraph in order to remove incomplete and dangling thoughts.

If a paragraph has emotion, if a paragraph is itself a unit of expression, it can contain more than complete thoughts organized around thesis and elaboration. It contains half-thoughts, even dangling thoughts.

Here is a paragraph from the story “Words” (without fragments, but still):

My parents had always liked David: his occasional letters, his phone etiquette, his ability to be entertaining but occupied whenever they came over for a visit. But our stay at their house — David first — was a conceded failure. David used my parents as easy targets, and they silently thought him a monster.

This paragraph occurs in a string of similar paragraphs. Each paragraph can be removed from the whole and still function in only 52 words, or 125 words, or 250 words. Hempel’s “stories within in a story” are reflected in each of Marcus’ paragraphs. The sentences in the paragraph from “Words” while grammatical, don’t necessary make for stories. Here the sentences are propositions, enumerated examples, complications, and results. Furthermore, paragraph conveys emotion, as they do in that the narrator’s parents like this character David. But, David is a poor guest, and so the overall emotion is negative, but also empty. The possibility of David being a chummy son-in-law has combusted.

Marcus’ ability to create a situation and then to negate it fills (or rather un-fills) the book. An American, unlike a European, is likely to describe themselves first, even before they say they are an American, a Jew, from Los Angeles, that they are what they do for money. In Marcus’s book they are bankers, music critics, and secretaries. If you ask an European who she is, she is likely, reluctantly to be offended and then tell you where she is from, that is where she was born and went to school. Unlike where someone is from, a job title is another form of encapsulation. A person can be a banker, music critic, or secretary in San Francisco, New York, or Prague. Where they are from is like a resume, Americans alter it to suit their present needs. What they do can be carried with them like a suitcase. Answering that they are a music critic when someone asks them who they are is as useful as holding up their suitcase when someone asks them what they are bringing on the trip.

As containers within containers, Marcus’s stories carefully empty themselves out until we are left with 129 off-white pages printed with W.A. Dwiggins’s Caledonia typeface. Each story, each page, each paragraph, each sentence carefully nested like empty suitcases.

Rediscovered Reading is a regular series in which Matt Briggs reviews overlooked collections of short fiction. Matt is the author of Shoot the Buffalo and other books. He blogs at mattbriggs.wordpress.com.

By confabulating movies they hadn’t actually viewed, the writers in Lowblueflame concocted parallel pictures, plots, and narratives. In many of the stories, subtext is teased and stretched until it possesses the official narrative, filling and swallowing it like the amorphous creature in The Blob.

Read more...]]> Masha Tupitsyn is the author of Beauty Talk & Monsters, a collection of film-based stories, and co-editor of the anthology Life As We Show It: Writing on Film, a cross-genre collection that uses short stories, essays, and poetry to explore the cinematic experience. She also writes daily film criticism on Twitter using only 140 characters. The following is an excerpt from Masha’s introduction to Life As We Show It.

When I met Brian Pera, my co-editor, in December of 2005, it was through email, the equivalent of coffee or drinks in the cyber world. Brian wrote me a missive in response to a formal inquiry I’d made about submitting to his online journal Lowblueflame. The last issue he edited, which was still up on his website at the time, featured some of the writers in Life As We Show It and was dedicated to the movies. The untitled issue of Lowblueflame, which I refer to as the “déjà vu issue,” was an exercise in cinematic hearsay. Tracing his own celluloid obsession, a curiosity informed in equal measure by movies seen and unseen, Brian asked each writer to describe a film based on what they’d read and heard about it. If I’d been able to participate, I would have recounted my own movie déjà vu (a word that literally means “already seen”), Don’t Look Now, which I’d seen on TV but didn’t remember seeing until years later, when I overheard someone describing what I thought was a private terror: a red-cloaked monster-dwarf haunting Donald Sutherland in the catacombs of Venice. At the time, my cinematic references were much more limited: I knew who Donald Sutherland was, but not Julie Christie (I had not yet moved to London or discovered the British New Wave). The name Nicholas Roeg didn’t ring a bell. But based on the villain sketch, and the red hoody on the little girl next to me, I immediately recalled the iconic movie I’d seen a clip of as a six year old, rather than the private “memory” fragment I had catalogued it as all those years.

By confabulating movies they hadn’t actually viewed, the writers in Lowblueflame concocted parallel pictures, plots, and narratives. In many of the stories, subtext is teased and stretched until it possesses the official narrative, filling and swallowing it like the amorphous creature in The Blob. Life-long Jaws fanatic, and one of the maker’s of the yet-to-be released 2006 documentary The Shark is Still Working: The Impact and Legacy of Jaws, narrated by Roy Scheider, Erik Hollander writes about the many different ways movies can be viewed:

It was a full three years later when I finally got to see Jaws on the big screen during its re-release in 1978. In the years between, I had obsessed about what I had come to imagine the film to be like. I based my ‘vision’ of the scenes on three years of playground chatter from those lucky classmates that were allowed to see it - which was everyone else! Despite having conjured up a pretty impressive picture in my mind about the movie, finally watching the real deal with my dad on that fateful afternoon in July replaced my misinterpretations with imagery that exceeded my wildest expectations. That day has never left me. When Jaws finally aired for the first time on network television, my dad set up a cassette recorder and taped the audio for me, and for the next Lord knows how many years, I listened to that cassette every single day until the magnetic signal wore away. Every line, every sound effect, every music cue has been seared into my memory ever since. So, for me, Jaws has always been more of a personal life experience than merely a favorite film.

In his book What Do Pictures Want? W.J.T. Mitchell treats images as living things with personalities, demands, and desires of their own, stating, “To get the whole picture of pictures, we cannot remain content with the narrow conception of them.” Part of the incentive for Life As We Show It was to use film, and the culture that comes with it, as an ingredient for narrative impetus-for writing, for imagining, and for thinking. Movies are starting points, like any subject or theme, in order to enter into the culture that’s inside of them as well as the culture that inside of us. For me, film writing, as opposed to straight film criticism, is a way for an author to merge with not just the thing they write, but the film they’re looking at, so that writing becomes both cultural analysis and personal revelation. Since on-screen and off-screen constantly overlap and get mixed up, writing about images becomes most interesting when it attempts to reflect this blurring through form and content. When it allows the writing to be transformed and shaped by what it writes about.

On August 15, Dzanc Books is launching a new online journal called The Collagist. The magazine will be edited by Matt Bell and Matthew Olzmann and is reading submissions now. American Short Fiction interviewed Dzanc executive director Dan Wickett about it.

J.A. Tyler's Mudluscious Press is giving away free copies of Charles Lennox's "fantastically explosive text" A Field of Colors for the month of June. Mud Luscious also has Molly Gaudry's first novella We Take Me Apart available for preorder.

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You Must Be This Tall to Ride is a new anthology of coming-of-age stories edited by B. J. Hollars with twenty stories by Antonya Nelson, Chad Simpson, Steve Almond, Aimee Bender, Stuart Dybek, Michael Martone, and others. Each writer also contributed an essay and a writing exercise. The book’s website doubles as magazine that will continue to publish new stories every few weeks, beginning with  Matt Bell’s “A Certain Number of Bedrooms, A Certain Number of Baths.”

On August 15, Dzanc Books is launching a new online journal called The Collagist. The magazine will be edited by  Matt Bell and Matthew Olzmann and is reading submissions now. American Short Fiction interviewed Dzanc executive director Dan Wickett about it.

J.A. Tyler’s Mudluscious Press is giving away free copies of Charles Lennox’s “fantastically explosive text” A Field of Colors for the month of June. Mud Luscious also has Molly Gaudry’s first novella We Take Me Apart available for preorder.

• Nick Antosca’s story “Playground in the Fire,” which is available on Fictionaut, was published in The L Magazine.
• Chris Killen’s story “Stretch Out and Wait” appears in the anthology Paint a Vulgar Picture: Fiction inspired by The Smiths.
• The inaugural issue of San Pedro River Review features two poems by Morgan Harlow.
• Cliff Garstang’s story “Hunger” appears in the Spring 2009 issue of Cream City Review.
• Stephan Clark’s novella The Castrato of St. Petersburg can be found in Salt Hill #23.  At Barrelhouse, he has a story about Zeno’s Paradox, Friday night football, and Jesus called “An Open Letter to Fans of Southplains Football.”
• Excerpts from Daniel Nester’s Cousin Mike: A Memoir appear in the new issue of Indiana Review.
• The June/July issue of elimae features work by Michael Kimball, J.A. Tyler, and Mel Bosworth. J. A. also has stories in the debut issue of lōbrow and Artvoice.
• Freight Stories No. 5 promises “the best new fiction on the web. Or anywhere else, for that matter.” Contributors include Alicia Gifford and Michael Martone. Alicia’s story “Afterlife” was featured as the story of the week in Narrative.
• Australian Reader published “The Bruces” and “Deep in the Woods” by Brentley Frazer.
• Ravi Mangla’s short “Laces” appeared in Word Riot.
• In Avatar Review, stories by Kevin Wilson, Charles Lennox, and J.A. Tyler.
• Sotto Voce published Mary Akers‘ story “Thunderstones.”
• The first issue of Grey Sparrow Journal contains work by Randall Brown, David Erlewine, and  Sara Crowley.
• To celebrate Bloomsday, William Walsh had texts derived from James Joyce in Monkeybicycle, Keyhole, Flatmancrooked, and mudluscious.
• The June issue of Keyhole Digest features stories by Matt Bell, Ravi Mangla, and J.A. Tyler. Matt’s story “How I Started Going to Meetings” appears in Necessary Fiction.
• Tim Jones-Yelvington’s flash “Painted Faces” has been published on a wall in Boise, Idaho. You can hear and read his story “Fugitives” at Pank.

Digital Fiction Show interviewed Jim Hanas about the serialization of his Cannes Festival story “The Arab Bank” and online publishing:

I began to feel that the stories, once they were published, were entombed inside those journals. … The whole, long dance of print publishing seemed a little absurd. … It made more sense to make the work immediately available. By now, I’m sure more people have read the stories online than when they were originally published.

Maud Newton promises a “Jean Rhystravaganza:”  at The Second Pass, she reviews Lilian Pizzichini’s new biography The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys, and next week, Granta online will publish a correspondence between Maud and Alexander Chee “about Rhys’ affair with Ford Madox Ford, and the novels they wrote afterward.”

Matt Bell moderates a conversation between Michael Czyzniejewski and Kyle Minor, and Emerging Writer’s Network has the video.

At Book Expo America, Sarah Weinman conducted a memorable interview with James Ellroy and Colin Harrison. For a limited time only, you can watch it Sarah’s site, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.

We try to keep up with all Fictionauts. If we missed your news, please drop us a line!

So says Josh Emmons, author of Prescription for a Superior Existence, about Marc Schuster's debut, now out from PS Books.

Read more...]]> “The Singular Exploits of Wonder Mom & Party Girl succeeds wonderfully—triumphantly—as both a comic skewering of the suburban dream-cum-chimera and a poignant drama about one woman’s descent into self-estrangement (where mirrors used properly can fix everything). It’s hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure, a work that understands why the agents of hope and despair are the same, and why, therefore, we are a troubled, hopeful animal. It is, in short, a brilliant novel.” So says Josh Emmons, author of Prescription for a Superior Existence, about Marc Schuster’s debut, now out from PS Books.

Marc reviews books from small and independent presses on Small Press Reviews. He has posted an excerpt from The Singular Exploits of Wonder Mom & Party Girl on Fictionaut.

If you weren’t a writer, how would you spend your time?

Napping.

Which book do you wish you’d written?

Underworld by Don DeLillo.

What are the websites you couldn’t live without?

Wikipedia, which is odd, because I always tell my students to try to avoid relying too heavily on Wikipedia. But it’s just so endlessly fascinating!

What are you working on now?

A 21st-century retelling of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. More or less.

Do you listen to music while you write? What?

Actually, I prefer silence while I’m writing, but I also like to listen to specific types of music whenever I take a break from writing. I like jazz, especially Miles Davis. I’m also a fan of electronic music, bands like Depeche Mode and New Order. Elvis Costello is another favorite of mine, and I like Joy Division, too. Anything angry and disaffected.

[Mark] Sarvas, writer of the highly praised literary blog, The Elegant Variation, has written a brilliantly funny and heart-wrenching first novel about one man's struggle to face the truth. ... Harry Rent is of the same ilk as Walter Mitty and Rabbit Angstrom: deeply flawed, likable, and hilariously, touchingly memorable.

Keep reading...]]> Library Journal says it all:

[Mark] Sarvas, writer of the highly praised literary blog, The Elegant Variation, has written a brilliantly funny and heart-wrenching first novel about one man’s struggle to face the truth. … Harry Rent is of the same ilk as Walter Mitty and Rabbit Angstrom: deeply flawed, likable, and hilariously, touchingly memorable.

The paperback edition of Harry, Revised is now available. Here are Mark’s answers to the set of questions we call the Fictionaut Five:

If you weren’t a writer, how would you spend your time?

I’d love to be a chessplayer. Or a professional cyclist. Or a busboy at the French Laundry.

Which book do you wish you’d written?

A better version of my own. Otherwise, The Great Gatsby, Netherland or Athena.

What are the websites you couldn’t live without?

Maud Newton, The Millions, The Literary Saloon, Andrew Sullivan, TPM.

What are you working on now?

I’m hard at work on my second novel. All I want to say right now is that it has to do with looted World War II art, and fathers, sons and grandfathers.

Do you listen to music while you write? What?

Always. I can’t write in silence, it’s sort of weird. For writing, it’s almost exclusively jazz or classical. Things like Bach’s cello suites, or Keith Jarrett’s solo piano. Music with lyrics disrupts the flow.

May was short story month, and there's a wealth of reviews, recommendations, and interviews in the archives at Emerging Writers Network, Condalmo, Hobart, and Matt Bell's blog.

Calls for submissions: new journal Kill Author and Epiphany are both inviting you to submit. Epiphany is also looking for an assistant fiction editor. Rusty Barnes' Fried Chicken and Coffee offers a helpful list of writers he admires.

Keep reading...]]> “Since How the Broken Lead the Blind is sold out and won’t be reprinted, I’ve now posted the entire book online so that anyone who couldn’t get a copy can still read it exactly as it was in print.” You can download Matt Bell’s How the Broken Lead the Blind as pdf file or read it online at issuu. The title story is on Fictionaut.

May was short story month, and there’s a wealth of  reviews, recommendations, and interviews in the archives at Emerging Writers Network, Condalmo, Hobart, and Matt Bell’s blog.

Calls for submissions: new journal Kill Author and Epiphany are both inviting you to submit. Epiphany is also looking for an assistant fiction editor. Rusty Barnes’ Fried Chicken and Coffee offers a helpful list of writers he admires.

Home of the Brave: Stories in Uniform features stories by Mary Akers, Tim O’Brien, Kurt Vonnegut, and Tobias Wolff. At her blog, Mary interviews editor Jeffery Hess.

More publications:

• Mississippi Review Online is currently wandering the archive and excavating stories by Terese Svoboda, John Minichillo, Rick Bass, Rita Dove, and Stacey Richter.
• Jennifer Pieroni has three short-short stories in Guernica.
• Carol Novack is one of the contributors to The Lineup: Poems on Crime 2, edited by Gerald So with Patrick Shawn Bagley, R. Narvaez, and Anthony Rainone.
• The spring issue of Seneca Review features two poems by Morgan Harlow.
• “After Prom, It’s All Downhill” by Erin Fitzgerald is online at Monkeybicycle. Issue #6 features work by Kim Chinquee, Matt Bell, and Curtis Smith.
• Kevin Wilson has a story in the new issue of Dislocate.
• The June web issue of Hobart features work by Ravi Mangla and B. J. Hollars, as well as an interview with Jedediah Berry.
• “Another Story About Me and Some Guy” by Kathy Fish at Night Train.
• The spring issue of Keyhole is out, with work by Crispin Best, Scott Garson, Tim Jones-Yelvington, and Matthew Simmons. Chad Simpson has a story in Keyhole Digest, which is the free monthly printout.
• Barry Graham, Tim Jones-Yelvington, Rosanne Griffeth, and Michelle Reale are in the May issue of The Legendary.
• Meg Pokrass and David Miller are in the May issue of Rumble Magazine.
• Pear Noir! #2 is out, with work by Barry Graham, Brandon Scott Gorrell, J. A. Tyler, Lauren Becker,  Ravi Mangla, and Charles Lennox. Charles also has a story in Avatar Review.
• You can read an excerpt from J. A. Tyler’s Inconceivable Wilson in apt, and more of his zoo pieces at Necessary Fiction.
• The Big Toe Review published poetry by Molly Gaudry and flash fiction by Kim Chinquee.

At How Publishing Really Works, Sara Crowley writes about recommending Tania Hershman’s The White Road and Other Stories. Tania just posted a new issue of The Short Review.

William Walsh present a playlist for Questionstruck at Largehearted Boy.

At Tayari Jones‘ blog, Marie Mockett discusses “The Perfect Age to Get Published.”

Maud Newton reviews Bethany Moreton’s To Serve God and Wal-Mart and Eileen Luhr’s Witnessing Suburbia for Bookforum. At Maud’s blog,  Carrie Spell writes about Mary Robison’s new novel, One D.O.A., One on the Way: “Robison creates a paradox in which people sound careless, when, in fact, they are being as precise as possible.”

At Luna Park, Marcelle Heath interviews Erin Fitzgerald about Northville Review.

Lauren Cerand, Ben Greenman, Richard Nash, and Amanda Stern are among the participants of the 2009 Center for Fiction Writers’ Conference.

Two reviews by Mary Akers: Patricia O’Donnell’s short story “God for Sale” at Five Star Literary Stories and, at Gently Read Literature, Ron Rash’s Serena: “a finely crafted, beautifully rendered, and classically tragic tale of human ambition run amok.”

Jim Ruland reviews Mary Miller’s Big World for The Believer: “a full anatomy lesson of the kind of heart that’s kick-started by booze, cigarettes, and jukebox songs of regret.”

Finally, we’re happy to recommend Ravi Mangla’s new blog Recommended Reading, in which writers answer questions about what they like to read, including more than a few Fictionauts.

Got news? Let us know!

You can read "The Paprika Ewer," an excerpt from Valeria's Last Stand, on Fictionaut.

Keep reading...]]> The Los Angeles Times compared Marc Fitten’s “penchant for sweeping allegory” to Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe before mentioning Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and M. Glenn Taylor. Fitten’s debut novel Valeria’s Last Stand, set in an imaginary Hungarian village, is, the Times continued, “at first glance a tale of love and lust but from a distance is clearly a symbolic rendering of the benefits and drawbacks of switching from a socialist to a market economy.”

Marc is a PhD student at Georgia State University and received the Paul Bowles Fellowship for Fiction. He is currently the editor of The Chattahoochee Review, Atlanta’s oldest journal. He blogs at Pass the Hooch and is on an extended book tour dedicated to chronicling his visits to 100 independent book stores at Marc Fitten’s Indie 100.

You can read “The Paprika Ewer,” an excerpt from Valeria’s Last Stand, on Fictionaut.

If you weren’t a writer, how would you spend your time?

If I weren’t a writer, I’d spend my time trying to become one. If writing weren’t an option at all, I’d be trying to become an artist or creative person in a different medium entirely. I’ve always been interested in sculpture and painting. I’d go to art school and study that. The point is that I only want to live using my imagination, creativity, and enthusiasm. Otherwise, it wouldn’t really matter.

Which book do you wish you’d written?

I’ve never thought of it that way. What’s done is done. I’m more interested in writing the best novels I can write as opposed to writing masterpieces. However, these are my mountain tops: The Brothers Karamazov, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Baron in the Trees, and One Hundred Years of Solitude. These books are how I measure literature and myself. These books are the pinnacle of the form, as I see it. These books are what I want to aspire to.

What are the websites you couldn’t live without?

Wordpress, Facebook, and Twitter! I use them to talk about the bookstores and update my blog at http://indie100mfitten.wordpress.com/

What are you working on now?

I’m selling my book –Valeria’s Last Stand — right now, so these days I’m not writing much of anything except my indie 100 blog. I’m visiting 100 indie bookstores around america –mostly on my own dime!!– to see for myself what the state of literature is in this country. It’s been a very promising adventure, and I’ve become very optimistic. There are a lot of readers out there.

Do you listen to music while you write? What?

I don’t listen to music while I write. I need absolute silence to write. Silence and a cell are best. I was surprised when a friend told me she listened to music when she wrote. I’m distracted too easily. I do listen to music to get into a creative mood. But other things get me into the mood as well. Just sitting down and typing gets me into the mood. I go to museums a lot. An exceptionally good meal or conversation also works. Perfume works. The point is to become reflective. I’ve been listening to Bach’s 4th Cello Suite a lot recently. And i’m always whistling something from the Velvet Underground. I feel like that’s an easy answer, but it’s true.

Farrar Straus and Giroux published Rick Rofihe’s great collection of stories Father Must in 1991. Nine of the stories in the collection had appeared in the New Yorker during the waning days of minimalism in the late eighties. Rofihe’s collection, it seems, has never been issued in paper but acceptable hardback copies can be found for about two bucks plus shipping and handling.

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Rediscovered Reading is a new regular series in which Matt Briggs reviews overlooked collections of short fiction. Matt is the author of Shoot the Buffalo and other books. He blogs at mattbriggs.wordpress.com.

Farrar Straus and Giroux published Rick Rofihe’s great collection of stories Father Must in 1991. Nine of the stories in the collection had appeared in the New Yorker during the waning days of minimalism in the late eighties. Rofihe’s collection, it seems, has never been issued in paper but acceptable hardback copies can be found for about two bucks plus shipping and handling.

A profile in the Downtown Express in 2005 mentioned that Rofihe was born in Bridgewater Nova Scotia in 1950, a small town without a bookstore or library. Rofihe has never taken a writing class, and yet his writing resembles the academic house style of the eighties, minimalism on first glance. But, after reading one story and then another, it becomes clear that the only structural similarity is that the Rofihe is very interested in sentences. His stories are mostly about the sentences people say to one another. Generally, they are private things with obscure meanings. In “Helen Says,” the word is “masking.” Helen defines the word: “Think of a glove. One that dulls your sense of touch, but as if it were worn underneath the surface of your hand.”

While Rofihe’s style concentrates just as much on the surface quality of the writing, his style omits the gaps, jumps, repetition, and the control over incidental imagery in a book such as the Raymond Carver written and Gordon Lish edited, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Die-hard minimalists seemed to prefer the pronoun to the proper noun and avoided adverbs or colorful verbs. No one came lolloping up the hill in a minimalist story. In contrast, Rofihe’s language is specific and evokes the words used by his characters. From the first page of Father Must:

Enid is in her room putting on makeup. Why do anything to those delicate features? “Because it takes up time,” she would say if asked.

Rofihe’s portrays the private language we use in living our lives. Joan Didion has her aphorism, “We tell our stories in order to live.” In a sense then Rofihe is showing us the sentences we tell ourselves in order to live. His method is a direct way of handling it. The words are the images telling the story. In “Boys Who do the Bop:”

Learning to type? Not easy, right?
It is work which gives flavor to life.
It is work which gives flavor to life.
It is work which gives flavor to life.

And the story proceeds to move between the words that the characters tell themselves about their lives and how these words that they are telling them affect their lives. Another story, “Six Quarters” turns on a joke made by the narrator’s grandfather about the difference between American quarts and imperial quarts. A quart is a quarter of a gallon, but an imperial quart is larger than an American quart so that a there about five imperial quarts to a gallon. Five quarters the grandfather says, and then later the narrator raises him a quarter to six quarters.

One of my favorite stories in the collection is a vignette called “Snowsuit.” In this piece, a woman observes an eight-year-old boy laying in the snow in his front yard. The boy sits in the snow. He doesn’t move. Finally, the woman crosses the street to find out if he is okay and then when he is okay, she wants to find out what he is doing in the snow. He is just sitting there with his thoughts. She is bothered by this. He has thoughts, and these thoughts are not represented in the story and they are inaccessible to the woman. If the boy was doing something, she could understand him. Character is action and all of that. Can’t a person just sit and think? A person isn’t just action. A character is also a boy sitting in a snowfield in a warm snowsuit starting at a monochrome sky.

Read more.]]> We are thrilled to announce that Richard Eoin Nash has joined Frederick Barthelme, Lauren Cerand, Marcy Dermansky, Alex Glass, Lizzie Skurnick, and John Minichillo on the Fictionaut Board of Advisors.

Richard ran Soft Skull Press, now an imprint of Counterpoint, from 2001 to 2007 and ran the imprint on behalf of Counterpoint until early 2009. Here’s why he left. He’s now consulting for authors and publishers on how to reach readers.

Earlier this week, Richard bestowed the PEN/Nora Magid Award on the “Princess Leia of American short fiction” and One Story editor-in-chief Hannah Tinti. He can next be seen at two BEA events: The Concierge and the Bouncer and the panel 7×20x21. You might want to follow Richard’s blog and Twitter feed. (Previously.)