A Delectably Linguistic Read, for Poetry and Prose Readers Alike

In his famous essay “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” Gary Lutz writes that the books he fell in love with were the ones “in which virtually every sentence had the force and feel of a climax, in which almost every sentence was a vivid extremity of language, an abruption, a definitive inquietude.”

Robert Vaughan’s newest book, Diptychs + Triptychs + Lipsticks + Dipshits, which manages to pack thirty pieces in fifty-five pages, is a beautiful example of the kind of attention to detail that Gary Lutz admires.  Some stories are stronger than others, certainly, but the language jumps out on almost every page. Take, for example, the following sentences from “Lawyers, Guns & Money”:

He bust a button on his blazer. The testimony reeled in his head, churned, too many cracks.

Say that out loud. They’re sentences you can taste, clicking through your lips and teeth and tongue. Throughout the book the language rarely feels heavy-handed, but rather miraculously obvious, as if these words were always meant to go together, pairs and triplets of words working to create a phrase that feels just right, as in “influx of dwellers” and “sucker lists.”

Although he calls them stories, Vaughan’s work reads more like poetry. Perhaps the pieces are somewhere between, a kind of prose poetry that has found room to stretch out and get comfortable without the need for straight narratives. Most of all, Vaughan succeeds in conveying a mood in each vignette, aided by the titles and categorizing system he uses to arrange most of them. For example, the story “Hexagon of Life” is divided into six single paragraphs that are each headed by a number from one to six. “The Three Stooges” is divided into the sub-titles “Shoebox (Larry),” “Steps (Moe),” and Sidebar (Curly).”

The tone as a whole is deeply personal, and whether you imagine yourself, the author or an anonymous narrator within the stories, you are sure to be moved. The characters tend to be unnamed, lending them an everyman feeling, so that the described occurrences feel painfully familiar, as in “Modern Day Symphony”:

The lingering questions came in the form of water, piss, trees, green, trade. Everyone said live for the moment, but have you ever tried to do that? Forget about the past, no such thing. Holidays? None. No religion either, except in some climactic nightmares.

Some stories are definitely weaker or less satisfying, but it is unsurprising that within a collection of so many short pieces some would stand out more than others. On the whole, however, Vaughan’s book is a delectably linguistic read, for poetry and prose readers alike.

An Interview with Sheldon Lee Compton

Robert Vaughan: Hey buddy! I was up in Boston over the weekend for Tim Gager’s DIRE literary Series and I fell into a time warp. Good news is I was able to start reading your book, The Same Terrible Storm. Man, can you write! I’ve always been an admirer of your craft. We’ve crossed paths in many different places online, and off. But I was drawn into your stories immediately, and can’t wait to dive into the interview. Such an honor to get to chat with you about this heavily awaited book. So, let’s start at the beginning. How long have you been working on this? How many drafts? Tell me about the progression of this “final” birth of your book.

Sheldon Lee Compton: The Same Terrible Storm is a collection of stories completed over the period of about three years, many of them published in some generous literary journals and others just now seeing the light of day. Of the stories in the book, I’d say I put each through three or four drafts for the longer stories and a couple for the short-shorts. This was a decision that came fairly late after talks with Stephen Marlowe at Foxhead Books, the press that published the collection, the idea to include both long stories and shorter stories in this collection.

I can’t say how happy I was to have a collection on hand for Stephen when he and I first talked about my sending something to the gang at Foxhead. I sent two collections – one that became The Same Terrible Storm and a second titled Where Alligators Sleep, which is exclusively short-shorts. I had a lot of input on the book itself, from the final content to the cover, which was handled by the talented Logan Rogers and his crew. My plan for the next collection is to add several short-shorts before publication, maybe even double the number of stories currently in the submitted draft.

RV: Sounds like such a dream come true. Also, this organic process you describe (varying lengths of stories turned into a collection or anthology) seems to be more common currently. It’s great that you had such a supportive team at Foxhead, makes me thrilled to hear this score for indie presses. I wanted to discuss your opening story of TSTS, I was so immediately captivated. You build such a fierce, tender relationship between the narrator and Mary, and son, Dennie. From page 5:

‘I don’t even like insects to bite her. That’s how personal I take it.’

Also: ‘But Dennie was to be raised Christian and that made learn- ing hand-to-hand combat maneuvers tricky. Self-defense didn’t fit into Mary’s plans all that well. But she knew the world was mean, cruel and hard, so she left it alone. Only thing, she didn’t want to see Dennie coming at me with sweep kicks and throat strikes, so we stayed at the east end of the field, away from the house. I felt like I was in a familiar place out there in the field, just like in the war. It was those times out there with Dennie when I would go hours without a drop of anything, and not even miss the smell. If we could’ve stayed in that field forever, hand-to-hand, learning how to keep the world from swallowing us up, I might have had a better chance at being a good Christian.’

RV: So, you establish this grave sense of danger, and this insular need to protect self, family, and to defend against that ‘evil’ at large. Willing to address this? Is this a recurring theme in your work?

SLC: I for sure inject that sense of danger you’re talking about with most of my work, but I suppose it’s not always an evil-at-large type of situation. Often the danger is very focused. But, as anyone who reads the book will see, the stories are set in Eastern Kentucky and this region often functions as a character in its own right, and usually in opposition to the hopes and dreams of the people who populate my fiction. I’m not trying to make the place I come from worse than it is, but at the same time I’m not interested in sugar-coating anything, either. When I write about the people I’ve grown up with and live with now, most folks are of one of two mindsets — there are those who will argue that the mountains that surround are protection from the rest of the world, or those who feel the mountains are hardly more than prison bars, stopping any notion of improving our lot in life. This is a black and white sort of thing, and something I like to do is find the gray in those instances. It’s what I hope I’ve achieved in this book, nothing is completely honorable and nothing is without a certain amount of darkness. But if there is a consistent danger or opposition throughout my work it would be the character’s region. Whether you love the mountains or hate them, this region plays a huge role in the lives of most Appalachians.

RV: I love that you addressed the region, which functions as a character (in its own right) because I feel you have such eloquence in how you write nature and environment, how it shades a story. For example, from page 12: ‘Then the drizzle lifted off, back into the clouds, which moved away in a slow bulk across the ridge and dissipated like a swarm of colorless wasps.’ It is breathtaking, the imagery so poetic. I also admire your use of character names: Burl, Spider, Torch, Mackey, Murphy…how do you decide names? Do they decide you? Also, the “double” tag names with real and call names like Michael/ Spider and Caudrill/ Torch. Are names important? If so, how?

SLC: I’m thankful for your attention to my attempt at a certain lyrical style, Robert, I truly am. Two of my influences as a writer are Breece Pancake and Michael Ondaatje, whose styles could not be more different. Pancake’s is muscular and tight, while Ondaatje writes in that highly poetic way that always reveals the poet inside him. So my influence from Pancake was in how to write honestly about my region, while I tend to lean to Ondaatje as inspiration for the individual sentence, its texture, sound, feel and possibilities. I work hard at blending these two literary devices in my work, and so I do so appreciate when anyone notices. Nature is a given with regional writing, and so it’s more often the place where I can allow myself to use a more poetic voice, even if the story is about slaughtering a hog or working at a junkyard.

I do give a fair amount of thought to character names. There are so many colorful names where I’m from that I often find myself meeting people and then writing their names down as a reminder to later use them in whatever I may be working on at the time. Each one you’ve pointed to here were either names of people I met or worked with or heard of through some local source. Spider and Torch are actual call names of two truck drivers from Eastern Kentucky. Somehow I knew I’d use them in my fiction at some point. I simply couldn’t resist. One of my favorite character names was German — a character from an early draft of the story “Snapshot ’87.” I hated to edit that character out when revising only because I liked the name so much. It was taken from a guy I worked with in the coal mines when I was a teenager. It was his birth name. I still find that terribly cool.

RV: Names in general are cool! For instance, I love that you call me “hoss.” Even though you might call everyone this, I’ve often wondered if I ought to respond by calling you “little Joe.” With all brotherly respect, of course. Tell me a little about your writing life- do you write in the morning? Only certain days? Computer or long hand? How do you tap into a muse, or is that just horseshit?

SLC: Nothing but brotherly for you there, hoss, and feel free to lay some “little Joe” on me! The writing life for me is a full-time job and I’m thrilled about that. In October and I took the leap and left the workforce until very recently. While writing full-time I worked about eight to ten hours a day, waking at five-thirty in the morning and working through the day, allowing myself a couple breaks here and there and an hour for lunch. I found the old saying that it takes a great deal of discipline to pull that off is so very true. The upshot is that even though I’m back in the workforce, I can still manage about six hours a day of writing, doing most of the work in the early morning before I ever leave for my grunt work. Other than needing that instant gratification of the computer for the actual process, I don’t have many tangible needs to write. I once wrote in longhand, but since college my penmanship is simply too poor. I can write a note and if I don’t refresh myself before bed by going over it I’ll not be able to read it the next morning.

Like all folks in this craft, I gain my inspiration, if you can call it that, by reading. I can read a passage from Barry Hannah and get really pumped about trying to write that clean and naturally, or pick up books like How They Were Found by Matt Bell or Mel Bosworth’s Grease Stains, Kismet, and Maternal Wisdom and Mostly Redneck by Rusty Barnes, just to name a few, and be reminded that I actually know writers who are doing it right so it can’t be too far out of reach for me. Sometimes just turning other people’s books over in my hands and reading the blurbs is enough to remind me that this work can be done and done well. The trick for me as a writer of fairly heavy themes is to not take myself too seriously while doing it, though. I usually write about Eastern Kentucky, as I’ve said, and the people here. Most of what has been published until the last five to ten years about Appalachia has been a little too soapbox for my tastes. It’s difficult to write about a culture and keep social commentary out of the picture, but I hope I’m coming close by concentrating on the characters and simply telling their story in an entertaining and compelling fashion.

RV: In your last response, you touched on the subject of themes in your work, referring to yourself as “a writer of fairly heavy themes.” In this collection alone, you broach religion, divorce, drinking, single parenting, blue collar jobs (and unemployment), lies. Can you tell me what draws you to what you write? Does it come organically, or are you turning life into fiction (to draw from Robin Hemley’s great book about craft)? Do themes come to you as you craft a story, or are you aware in advance of what you will be delving into for a certain story? Also, where do you find the motivation for your stories? You mentioned the Appalachians and breath-taking region in which you live, is there more? Maybe give us a tale not yet written . . . what’s something you’ve not yet explored and why? 

SLC: I do draw on my life experiences in my work. Not as much as some might think, but a fair amount. I’m sure we all must to an extent. But, admittedly, I’ve happened to have had an interesting life so far, though most of it has been a darker, more difficult, span of time than some others. I was never really very aware my themes tended to be “heavier” than others until readers began making mention of it here and there. I was aware there were good writers and great writers out there who were not writing about the unemployed, single-parenting, divorce, drinking, the confines of religion, and so on. Just as much as I was aware there were writers, like myself, mucking around in those waters and mudholes. I don’t feel so much drawn to write about the subjects I take time to consider long enough for such a thing. I just believe strongly that each person, no matter if they’ve lived next door to one another for fifty years, have their own vital and unique way of seeing each and every thing and person around them.

I’m fascinated by that fact, and even more fascinated and eager to discover what my experiences look, feel, taste, sound like in only the way I can experience them. In order to truly do this, you have to share it with others in whatever you can. It’s funny you should mention if there are any tales I’ve not touched on yet, because there most certainly is, a glaring one, in fact. My maternal grandfather, Bob. He died when I was about four, so never really knew him. I knew he grew up as an orphan and lived by plowing fields for supper and other chores for a bed to sleep in. My family has always said the community raised him. It created in him a strange sense of looking out for himself, much to the hardship of others, especially his wife and children. He exists only in story form to me, and the stories are countless, an absolute well of stories. In all the years I’ve been writing, I only recently started a story based on him. It’s called “The Favor” and should appear in Where Alligators Sleep, if all goes well.

RV: I look forward to reading that story about your grandfather, Sheldon! Let me ask if you ever judge your work, while crafting, or even after a piece has been published? I recently sent off 24 poems to Gloria Mindock at Cervena Barva Press for my upcoming poetry chapbook, Microtones. And right after I clicked the “send” button, I experienced these deep pangs, like she is going to hate them! (good news, apparently she didn’t!) Do you go through this? If so, how?

SLC: I love that you’ve got a chap coming out, hoss.  Hats off on that note, and that’s a fine title, too. As for judging my own work, well, you better believe it. Oh, yeah, man. I judge harshly. Old West hard. I can, in all honesty, say I’ve only written five or six stories I knew were good stories at the time I finished them. And like any of us who’ve been working it that long, you’re talking hundreds upon hundreds of stories. Twenty-four years and that’s it. Five or six stories, maybe. Of the two novels I’ve worked out of me like rotted teeth, I threw the first in a creek behind my house, the only copy written on my first typewriter when I was nineteen, and the second, which is good but needs a few major surgeries, remains trunked. It’ll see the light of day, though.  As long as I know it’s good, I’ll keep working to see if it can be better. The others, the stories, became tolerable after several drafts, enough drafts that I eventually never wanted to read them again. That’s how it goes, sometimes. Work it until you drop. Somebody will notice. They’ll see how you’ve sweated and heaved and pulled and pushed and never let up. That work will show in your words. And it’ll show if all you did was sit back on your thumb, too.

RV: I thought you were going to say, sit back on your keyster! Hahaha. Okay, I’m going to mix things up now. Time to get off YOUR DUFF, little Joe. Here is a line from a recent Tin House New Voice novel, Glaciers, by Alexis M. Smith: ‘She decided against washing her hands.’ Write a 50 word (or less) piece using any or all of that line. Go! 

SLC : Ha!  Off my duff I come!  Here goes nothing:

“The carpenter held her fingers, the last load of old shingles already hauled off.  He stayed on awhile after, picked the yard for torn pieces of the old roof and nails.  She sat on the porch while her carpenter softly parted blades of grass. She decided against washing her hands.”

RV: Nice use of white space, very provocative, too. Okay, you’re on an island in the Pacific looking for Amelia Earhart’s remains. Name five different parts of her body and a favorite song you are listening to at the time you discover said part.

SLC:  Okay, let’s see here – Crossing a small creek while listening to “Take It On the Chin” by William Elliott Whitmore, I find her jawbone, strong and determined, even in that tiny vein of water.  Later, along a ridge north of where we came ashore, I trip across her leg, the boot laces still pulled tightly into an impressive knot.  I’m listening to Townes Van Zandt’s “Flying Shoes” while admiring the sturdy boot and the leg that had flown so high for so long.   I grow tired after several hours and find a shanty of some sort made of slim branches and great leaves spreading out for a roof.

As I enter, listening to Tom Waits’ “The House Where Nobody Lives,” I find a large stone.  Along the side of the stone is a single fingernail seemingly embedded into the rock, seemingly still clutching for purchase.  I’m about to heave when I leave the leafy shanty and lose my footing, sliding several yards into a clearing.  At my feet I see what at first appears to be a dead animal, its fur matted and clumped.  The closer I come to the thing I see its hair, a half inch of her scalp stretching across its underside.  The Pixies “Hey” finally rolls through my ears.  I can still hear that distinct cry of the guitar as I make it back to the shore line.  I’m the first there, so there’s no news to share.  I walk the line, listening for the others when a foamy wave moves in over my ankles and then out again.  And now she’s looking at me.  Those eyes, blinding if stared at for too long, pushed back from the sea and onto the shore of her private and expansive cemetery.  And as I look at her eyes, and only her eyes, Hank Williams is there singing “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”  And I do.

RV: Dang, Little Joe, you’re good. I say, expand and submit that one! Now, I will give you a “word bank,” five from Matt Bell’s new novel, Cataclysm Baby: empty, scars, soot, taste, & swallowing. You can use any or all of them in a 50 words or less piece.

SLC: I’ll tell you something, hoss, those are some fun words to throw together.  Here you go: The room is empty as scars without stories when Ben wakes.  It is a knocked about box made of soot, and, as he feared, most of the food burned along with all the hope left.  Though he cannot taste what is not there, he continues swallowing as if in prayer.

RV: Great imagery there. You’re a natural born poet, my friend. I want to ask you about your online journals. I know you’ve started a few. You took my triptych, “A,B,C” at A-Minor when you were at the helm there. We also cross paths at Fictionaut, a member-only online writer’s community. Tell me how your writing has shifted since the advent and rise of online writing. Any positive or negative influences?

SLC: It was a pleasure to publish “A,B,C”, no doubt.  Wonderful work.  And, yeah, just realized I tossed in a rhyme without realizing it with the “there” and “prayer”.  Well, well. Thanks for suggesting I have a little poetic notion.  I think poets are on the front line in the literary world.  To write and consider each word, each comma, each line space with such deliberation is something to be admired.  To speak directly to your question, man, I cannot overstate how important the online communities of writers and what many consider the indie writing scene have been for me.  With each small journal, print or online I either founded or co-founded, I received such satisfaction going through submissions and finding just the right story, the one I just couldn’t wait to read aloud to someone.

With Cellar Door, the first journal I co-founded, we didn’t go online.  We paid for a run of two-hundred and fifty copies and sold them from the back seat of our car.  We actually stacked the envelopes full of stories in the middle of the living room floor and parted them out into two basically even piles and started reading.  That’s where I was first introduced to writers like the late Carol Novack, Matt Bell, and an already well-established Joey Goebel, and many others I never heard from again, but remember their stories as clear today as the second I read the first sentence of their submission.  With online journals, I co-founded Wrong Tree Review and then, within the first issue, became interested in starting an online journal that offered readers something new each week.  So, A-Minor Magazine came about, which I edited for about a year and stepped aside.  I loved the experience, but am not currently involved with any journals.  Of late, I’ve been a little selfish.  I want to focus on my own work and simply enjoy the work of others.  In the past week I’ve added seventy-four books to my wish list at Amazon, not to mention my drop-ins at Fictionaut, the writer’s community you mentioned.  There’s always something great to read there.  All in all, I would say the positives in the rise of online publishing greatly outweigh any negatives.  I think print and online can exist, if not complement the other.  People are always eager and pleased to find new options to communicate with each other, share stories.

RV: I like how you’ve worn so many hats leading to this new one: published author (of your new book: The Same Terrible Storm!!!) Explain how this latest transition has changed you, if it has at all. And who are the authors you’ve read lately? Any that stand out? 

SLC: Shortly after I learned Foxhead accepted the collection, I made the decision to leave the traditional workforce and write full-time.  That has been a major change, and a positive one so far.  I’ve been working full-time at this craft since October with the support of my loved ones, and I couldn’t be more fortunate.  The true blessing for any writer is to have people on your side who understand that it can be work, not just a hobby.  It takes a certain type of person to realize this is a craft, a true pursuit of labor, without actually being a writer themselves.  I don’t know if I’d be able to make that leap or not, but I’m thankful to be surrounded by those who can.

The daily grind of writing full-time is a fair amount more challenging than I’d expected, but it’s good work.  It helps me to have a few projects going at the same time.  Currently, I’m writing the novel and also working on a book of photographs with accompanying flash fiction pieces, each of thousand words, for a future book to be called A Thousand Words.  My wonderful lady Heather McCoy is the photographer for the project so we’re getting the chance to work together.  The hardest part at this point has been picking my favorites from her portfolio.  At one point I had I roughly three hundred pictures sorted out and then realized that would be a pretty huge book at one thousand words each.  We’re aiming now for one hundred photographs and stories.

I’ve also been buffering my work day with reading, so I’m glad you asked about what’s off my shelf and beside my laptop these days, Robert.  Since I’m in novel mode, I’m reading more along those lines.  On tap for now is Ron Rash’s Saints at the River, Tom Franklin’s Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter and a couple story collections with Kyle Minor’s In the Devil’s Territory and Chris Offutt’s Out of the Woods nearby, as well.

An Interview with Meg Tuite

Robert Vaughan: I heard the “Linus & Lucy” instrumental song from Charlie Brown during the holidays. I realized how much I related to Charlie Brown and those characters as a kid. I played piano endlessly like Schroeder. Sucked a finger and carried a dingy yellow blanket everywhere like Linus. Do you have any fictional heroes from childhood? If so, how did they impact you?

Meg Tuite: My mom gave me the book Little Women when I was a kid and said “there’s a Meg in here.” I was mesmerized by Meg March, because she was such a tough ass and said it like it was. She was a writer and extremely flamboyant. I loved her. I read that book over and over. I was blown away when I realized that Louisa May Alcott had brought this fictional character to life. Meg March was alive, for me, and everything I wasn’t. I didn’t want to believe she existed only through the imagination of some woman writer. I was very shy, except at home when I bugged the hell out of my siblings with my endless dialogue to no one. Yes, I was in awe (still am) of the magnanimous Meg of Little Women.

RV: Families, functional or not (and what family is? I want to poke out the eyes of those who say their family was “purrfect!”) seem important to you as a writer. In your remarkable first novel, Domestic Apparition (love that title), the chapters are all little gems, vignettes, each barreling the story forward through complex family incidents. How did you arrive at the main character? This family? What prompted you to tell a story about this particular one?

MT: Oh, Robert, didn’t I tell you? Family Health and Overzealous Mental Balance, Inc. is just now pouring the bronze for the monolithic sculpture of our nuclear nucleus in homage to our raging consummate genetics. (Did that even make sense?)

Domestic Apparition is a novel-in-stories. Most were published individually and then I decided to put a collection together, altering content so it was the same narrator throughout, and the same family. My protagonist, Michelle, was based on many different personages rolled into one. But, most of the chapters / stories are based on a memory, a feeling or a character from my past. I had to put a piece of myself in there to bring this family alive.

My family did go to a Catholic grade school and there’s a hell of a lot of material to work with there. And my siblings are all wonderfully eccentric so I played with some of their idiosyncrasies like the character, Nathan, who had some of the same habits as my older brother, Kevin, when he was a kid. But no matter which chapter / story I wrote, it always ended up fictional, every piece took on a life of its own.

RV: Every piece certainly does have its own breath, and even more so when one collaborates. We have had the great fortune of our paths crossing not only through social networks, but also through the monthly Exquisite Quartet column you write at Used Furniture Review, and your stories appearing on Flash Fiction Friday, which I co-host monthly on WUWM’s Lake Effect. We also had the great fortune of reading our work together, thanks to fellow writer, Susan Tepper, at the KGB Bar in NYC in October, 2011. Then, there are the multiple places our work appears together such as Stripped, A Collection of Anonymous Flash. Can you address collaboration, what you like (or don’t) about it and the impact on your writing?

MT: I am thankful for all of the collaborations with you, Robert! You’re amazing and I love Flash Fiction Friday on WUWM. I was honored that you read one of my stories on air. That was a special occasion. And our reading in NYC was exceptional. I always love reading with other writers and NYC was remarkable because I got to read with some of my favorites. I’ve just worked on two collaborations with photographers and really enjoyed it. Jennifer Tomaloff’s anthology is Bending Light Into Verse. She’s sublime. The other is Lost in Thought Magazine; Kyle Schruder is the editor and the photographer is Valerie Chiang. I was totally inspired when working with someone else’s images. They evoked these whole new worlds for me.

Exquisite Quartet is an extraordinary experience. I collaborate with three other writers on a story each month. I start a narrative and then pass it on. All four of us pull together the strings of a tale and then I do some final editing each month to make sure it works cohesively. It’s exciting to see where each writer will take the story. Some writers really flow with it. The Exquisite Quartet Anthology of 2011 is now available. All thirteen stories were published by the stellar Dave Cotrone, editor at Used Furniture Review. It’s been a surprisingly gratifying year working with all 38 outstanding writers.

RV: I’ve ordered two copies of Exquisite Quartet already — can’t wait to read it. I’m also collaborating on Jennifer and Kyle’s projects, so I relate to that same sense of awe that comes from combining two artistic mediums: photography and writing. The act of writing can be so insular, and that our paths lead us to so many other talented artists is certainly a highlight. Can you tell me about the ways you like to craft? Music or silence, public or office? What is the ideal set-up for your pen to fly (or is it the keypad?)

MT: I am always curious about the diverse scenarios that are necessary for someone to write. Some writers need a TV on in the background in order to concentrate! Wow! While I was writing during NaNoWriMo last November, I met a group at a coffee shop, but all the conversations drove me crazy. I followed them instead of what I was writing. I’m a writer who needs solitude to really focus, go deeply into the story. I prefer to write with a pen first and then the computer to type, editing as I go.

RV: I’m the same way, pen first, then computer. And I know what you mean about too much noise, it can be so distracting. We both have the luxury of quiet space. I have woods surrounding my house, and I don’t take that for granted. I’m wondering if you have any literary mentors, or writers past or present, who you feel may have shaped your writing?

MT: I can’t say that any of these writers have influenced my writing, but I do return to them again and again for inspiration. I love Flannery O’Connor for her inimitable metaphors and her dark sense of humor. I used to study her collection of stories and actually counted how many metaphors and similes she had used. I was obsessed. Bruno Schulz, a Polish writer, only wrote two small collections before he was killed by the SS during WWII, but those two books hold entire worlds inside them. His work is sublime. Djuna Barnes is one of my favorite writers. Her dialogue is genius. Flann O’Brien, an Irish writer, wrote at least four novels and I go back to those repeatedly. A brilliant writer and so incredibly funny. And I’ve always loved to read and memorize poetry: Dickinson, Rilke, Sexton, Dylan Thomas. I could go on and on with this list of writers I adore. And of course there are many current writers out there that I admire: Lidia Yuknavitch, Kristine Ong-Muslim, Michelle Reale, Mary Stone Dockery, Robert Vaughan, Len Kuntz, Jim Valvis, Howie Good, Sara Lippmann, Susan Tepper, Julie Innis. . . . Like I said, it really is endless! I’ll stop now.

RV: I think it’s healthy to have mentors, or writers you like to read at the very least. We share many similar tastes. I know from our conversations in NYC last October that you expressed a desire to write more poetry. Funny how from there, you leapt right into that NaNoWriMo novel writing month! But looking ahead, what writing turf might lie unexplored? You’ve published Domestic Apparition, your excellent first novel, have a chapbook collection coming, collaborate on the Exquisite Quartet monthly column. You are quite the busy gal! Not to mention being nominated for not one, but FOUR Pushcart Prizes in 2011. So, what is the scariest thought of writing you might take on? Is it a play? Non-fiction or memoir? Everyone seems to be dabbling in that currently.

MT: I’d like to finish that novel I started for NaNo. The first draft is almost complete and then, of course, the deeper work begins after that. I have a collection of short stories that I’ve assembled. I’ve never written a play, but was asked to write a screenplay for someone. I didn’t get very far, but will continue to attempt it. I keep dabbling with the idea of memoir, but it hasn’t taken off like I was hoping. I do always come back to the short story. I love writing them and I have a list of magazines I’d like to get published in. I am writing some book reviews also, so there’s a bit of NF writing, but haven’t written an essay in years. I think the scariest notion for me would be if someone asked me to write a sci-fi story or a western. Ha! So maybe I should just go for it and do it! Face my fears!

RV: Yes, the poet Howard Nemerov, brother of fantastic photographer Diane Nemerov Arbus, once wisely said, “The only way out is the way through.” Sage advice. But before we get all scholarly and shit here, how about some quickfire questions . . . our buddy, Anna March has started up her excellent music column at The Rumpus, so in her honor, what are five of your fave songs from 2011-12?

MT: Oh, this is a great question!! Thanks to Anna March for her amazing columns! I’ve picked five, Robert, but now I can’t stop listening to music. And it was a tough choice!!

Amy Winehouse singing “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow.” Kills me every time I hear it. I love her and miss her desperately!!!!

Patti Smith singing “Dancing Barefoot.” One of my all-time favorites.

Radiohead performs “Creep.” I love all their work!

KD Lang performs Neil Young’s song, “Helpless.” I get chills every time I hear it!!

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings perform “Red Clay Halo.” I wanted to be Gillian when I first heard her. They never cease to blow me away!

RV: All excellent choices, complete with video links! How about five “secret” celebrity crushes?

MT: Hehe!! Okay!

Any kind of sex with Denzel Washington!

Oral sex with Oral Roberts!

Make out session with Dame Judy Dench (wait, she was already spoken for, wasn’t she? Damn)!

Heavy petting with Dr. Phil!

Missionary position with any Mother Superior!

RV: Oh what fun this would all be! How about . . . I know you are originally from the Chicago area. So five things you miss about the Midwest, or Chicago in general? (And you can’t say Liz Phair because she’s mine!)

MT: Damn, you get Judy Dench and Liz? Hmmm.

I’d have to say I miss the Cubs games. We’d sit in the bleachers, soak up the sun and drink beer. It was the general meeting place before internet dating sites.

Going downtown with my mom when I was kid to see the tree, shop and have lunch at Marshall Fields.

Summers we’d spend in Michigan swimming and causing trouble wherever we could.

I liked that we could walk to school and to our friends house or take the el to get somewhere in the city. We didn’t rely on cars as I do now living in NM.

I miss the great Blues bars downtown. We heard amazing music. Most of the good bands don’t have NM on their itinerary when touring, but always Chicago.

RV: Ahhh . . . the blues, so we are back to music. Which reminds me, there was a recent trend on Facebook: track down the #1 song of the week that you were born. Mine was “Itsy, Bitsy, Teenie, Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini!!!” How perfect for a writer (those commas!) and a poet to boot! What is yours? And how might it relate to you (or not? You can Google it via Billboard or Wikipedia)?

MT: My song was “The Letter” by the Box Tops. Ha!

I love their outfits!!! I have to say it’s all about the letter from his baby to bring him back home. I had no baby. I’ve been traveling forever but never got a letter to come back home. I think I was writing a letter that I wasn’t coming back home!

RV: “My baby, she wrote me a letter!” How cool! Okay, now I am going to give you a first sentence as a prompt. You can incorporate it, and continue . . . or you can take off wherever it sends you:

“A woman fell in love with a man who had been dead a number of years.”(From “Love” by Lydia Davis.)

MT: A woman fell in love with a man who had been dead a number of years.

He was a disappearing act in the cafe they both went to and out on the streets of the city. Once a lady sat right on top of him, drank her coffee, made phone calls on her cell, read the newspaper and then left, without excusing herself or acknowledging him in any way.

The woman loved him for this. He abided many things. He got to the cafe at 9AM prompt for years and she sat at a table nearby. He drank his coffee with two packets of sugar that he stirred in slow methodical swirls while he stared off into space.

The woman thought of approaching him. He wore impeccable suits and his shoes were always scuffed from the long walks he took and all the people who stepped on them. He never spoke to anyone. Death hovered around him like a vaporous camouflage. It was a hazard. He was pummeled on the streets by crowds that ignored him. He never became annoyed.

The woman loved him so much that she would walk in front of him and part people like the red sea to keep them from damaging him anymore than he already was. After all, he was dead. She would sometimes walk backwards in front of him, stare at him intently, but he didn’t notice. He might have been a philosopher or someone who had suffered much loss.

After years of obsession, watching decay fester his eye sockets further into his skull and his rugged skin turn to gray stone she picked up her coffee and muffin and went to sit next to him at his table. His bones swam inside his suits. She was afraid there would be no trace of him soon. She had rehearsed many things that she might say to the man, but now was at a loss for words.

At some point he looked over at her. He smiled. She didn’t mind that his lips were a memory and his teeth were brown as his beverage.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said.

Her heart was entombed in some kind of mausoleum, expanding with each breath she took. She didn’t know that he saw her too.

“We have a lot to catch up on,” he said.

She merely nodded, buoyant with the potency of the moment.

A loud group of boys came up to their table. One sat on top of the man and another sat on top of the woman and the other two boys pulled up chairs. The one lodged in the woman’s lap was quite globular, but the woman didn’t mind.

The man looked over at the woman and smiled. “You see, nothing is ever as uncomfortable as you imagine.”

RV: You are a master crafter, Meg! I say submit it! One more little glimpse of your talent with another way to open up a flash piece? We’ll play word bank! Here are five words and you use any of them in a piece, 50 words or less (thanks, Joseph Quintela, of Short, Fast and Deadly!) And the words are: loose, coarse, unnecessary, chunk, rope (all taken from From the Umberplatzen: A Love Story by Susan Tepper).

MT: She kept falling. The coarse chunk of a rope was too damn loose. Why didn’t they have some manual on how to hang yourself? This was just embarrassing and an unnecessary waste of time.

RV: Those darn loose ropes, I’ve had a few! Haha . . . now some quickies: Do you sleep naked or in pjs? Boxers or briefs?

MT: I love the pjs in winter and ass to the wind in summer. Would definitely go with the boxers!

RV: No pjs here, naked year round. If you had to live one other place than the good ‘ol USA, where would it be?

MT: You’re HOT, RV!!!! I’d choose one of the Greek islands. Paolo and I like to fantasize about what our life would be like there. We’re still waiting for some unknown rich-as-hell relative to drop a load of cash on us and then will be on our way. Any day now, I’m sure.

RV: Lucky you, Miss Mykonos! Hurry up and move, you two, so we can come visit! Now, tomorrow morning, you wake up and discover you have turned into an insect (a la Kafka’s Metamorphosis!) What insect are you and what is your destructible character trait that might be your untimely end?

MT: No question, I’d like to be a preying mantis. And I must be a male, because once the female mates with me she bites off my head.

RV: Yes, those female preying mantises!!! What supreme power they have. Now we are in sixth grade . . . and all the girls are, well, gaga over you-know-who. But you have a secret crush. Mine was Alex: brainiac, so quiet, nerdy. Blushed during lunch when I stared. Yours?

MT: Gene. He’d come over to my house and sit on the steps. My mom asked me what the hell we saw in each other. I blathered on about god knows what and the poor guy just sat there listening. He never said a word and then after about an hour he’d say “alright then, see you later,” and that was our love thing. He ended up becoming a cop in L.A. You think I pushed him into it?

RV: Maybe he was that cop in L.A. who used to come over and . . . oh, never mind! Say you’re a man, maybe even became one through a sex change. And you’re about to meet your first date from an internet site at a local pub. What happens next?

MT: Oh yeah, I saw that porn flick about the cop in LA, hehe!!

Okay, if she giggles or has stuffed animals in her house, I’m out of there so quick! If we get past that and she has no girly bullshit we order beers and since I’ve had a sex change I’m wondering if she notices my last-of–the-mohican chest that I’ve been working to get rid of with hormone injections. We have a few beers, then decide to go to her place. She’s ready for the action, but discovers I’ve got different apparatus. “Oh no, oh dear,” she cries and then realizes she hasn’t had much happening on e-Harmony and says what the hell. We go at it and the rest is either history or historical.

RV: Or both! So, lets wind this puppy down, even though I don’t want it to ever end. Which brings about this: how do you feel about endings? Both in writing, and in life?

MT: It’s always a great time hanging with you, Robert!

I love to write endings in stories. Sometimes they arrive easily. I’ve also sat with a story for months before an ending erupted out of the fog. I find it satisfying when endings show up as a complete surprise to me.

In life, I’ve dealt with a lot of endings. I work in hospice and so I know that with each person I am spending time with, an end is inevitable. Sometimes I have years with them, but usually it’s less than six months. I’ve met the most extraordinary people over the last ten years and what a gift to hang with them during that time of their lives. They are open and introspective and I get to hear their amazing life stories. I love the work and some of the endings are difficult, there’s always mourning that accompanies it, but there’s so much truth that shines through these wise folk before they go.

Thank you so much, Robert, for a sublime interview! Your questions were exceptional and once again, I never knew what was coming next from you! You are the bomb!!!

RV: Right back at you, Meg. This was a blast.