They'd Have Yelled If They Found Out: On David S. Atkinson's Bones Buried In the Dirt

Bones Buried in Dirt is a collection of short stories that are linked together to form a novel. This is a literary format that can either go brilliantly, or it can go horribly, terribly wrong. David definitely has written a work that falls in the brilliant category.

The stories are all from Peter’s point of view and follow him from around the age of four or five all the way to around twelve. In these stories, Peter goes through everything from neighborhood wars (“The War”) to first crushes and girlfriends, with sexual experimentation along the way (“Training Part 1” and “Training Part 2”).

I became so immersed in the stories that at times, I almost forgot that the author wasn’t a kid, that these weren’t being told straight from a child’s mouth. David captures the way a child thinks, the way he acts, and the rationales he forms to explain things perfectly. In “The Virgin Mary Tree,” Peter’s friend Joy  has run off into a potentially dangerous situation. Peter wants to stop her.

We were really going to get in trouble if something happened and we hadn’t helped. My parents would have yelled at me and asked me why I had just let her go. Her parents, too. They’d have said she was our friend and we were supposed to have helped. Or maybe they wouldn’t have said it. They’d have thought it though. They’d all have thought it when they looked at me. It wasn’t fair. I didn’t even know what was going on.

He isn’t able to stop her.

I thought I could tell them all I tried. I thought maybe that was going to be good enough. I walked back to the hole in the fence. I might have even gotten in trouble for having been in the graveyard. I wasn’t supposed to go there at all. I still went a lot, but my parents didn’t know that.  They’d have yelled if they found out I went in. Or maybe worse.

Peter’s reaction reminded me so much of when kids do face situations that are outside of their normal contexts. They can’t see exceptions to situations.  Peter can’t see that his parents probably would not have gotten angry with him for being in the graveyard in this situation, because he’s never had a prior situation in which they wouldn’t have become upset at his breaking a rule.

In another story, Peter’s dad has to sit him down and talk to him because a neighbor was just arrested for molesting boys. Peter’s dad wants to make sure that this hasn’t happened to Peter, and Peter is more concerned that prior activities he and his friends engaged in will get him in trouble. The timing in this story is so tight. I could feel myself in both his and his father’s skin, David caught both characters in such a perfect way.

“You can tell me, Peter,” my dad pleaded.  “You have to know you can talk to me.  If something like that happens, it isn’t your fault”

“He never did anything! Honest!”

My dad took a deep breath and exhaled loud.  “Good” he finally said.

I tried not to look at him, but he was looking at me.  I just wanted him to stop. I already told him nothing happened. It made me keep thinking of training.  My head wouldn’t stop twitching, like I couldn’t get my neck to sit right.

David does an amazing job with character descriptions. In just a few words, he sums up a character, and almost everything after that the character does or says, fits in with the original picture he gave of the character.

In his last story, “Cards,” we meet a character named Danny, who is only in this one story. Yet, from the very first description of Danny, I knew him and all his further actions made sense and fit with the picture painted at the beginning.

Danny looked up a little. He sat on a swing like a big old slug. Not swinging really, just swaying around a little scuffing the dirt with his shoes.  The dirt got his black sweat pants all dusty. He probably didn’t care. He always had those dingy things on.

I enjoyed how the stories deepened from one into the next. I felt that it perfectly captured the evolution of what is important to us as we age.  In the first story, Peter is upset over a balloon.  In later stories, he’s upset about way more intricate social relationships. And finally, in the last story, you begin to see the beginnings of an adult empathy to Peter.

There was very little I didn’t adore about Bones Buried in the Dirt or David’s writing. However, in a couple of the stories, Wooden Nicklepayback being the one sticking in my head, David ends the whole thing too abruptly. He does this in a lot of the stories, but in most of them it fits with a child narrating or with the story itself. But this type of ending doesn’t work every time. Also, the only one adult to adult character interaction in the entire book, between Peter’s dad and a neighborhood rival, PJ’s dad, feels false. It’s awkward, but not in the “we don’t know each other but your kid’s beating on my kid’s” way, which might be what David was trying to achieve. It fails though and just feels awkward.

This was a fascinating book to read. I loved it, I loved how I remembered things from when I was a kid because of it, things I felt or said or did.  I loved watching Peter grow up. Certain images that David painted in Bones Buried in the Dirt are still lingering with me days later.

One of the bonuses to reading this was David’s providing me with the best 80s hairstyle description ever.

She had long, nasty brown hair that was all wavy and stuff.  Her bangs rolled up in one of those dumb shredded wheat puff things, like she’d been messing with hairspray again.

An Interview with Roxane Gay

For this series I’m asking writers I love to recommend a book. If I haven’t read it, I read it. Then we talk about it.

In this installment, I’m talking with Roxane Gay about Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins.

Roxane Gay’s writing appears or is forthcoming in Best American Short Stories 2012, New Stories From the Midwest 2011 and 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, NOON, Salon, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Brevity, and many others. She is the co-editor of [PANK]. She is also the author of Ayiti. You can find her online at http://www.roxanegay.com

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Colin Winnette: I’m interested in why we read what we read. Why we pick up the particular books that we do, and why we keep at them. What brought you to Battleborn? What led you to read it for the first time, and why did you want to talk with me about it here?

Roxane Gay: This book was sent to me by a publicist at Riverhead. I hadn’t even heard of it, but once I started reading, I couldn’t put the book down. I was excited to discuss the book with you because it has been, by far, my favorite book of the year in a year of great reading.

CW: Most, if not all, of these stories focus on characters who are struggling with the past, and who will likely continue to struggle after the story’s end. In your opinion, what is the function of a book like this? To observe and report? To capture a state, or states, of being? Are there therapeutic efforts here? All/none of the above?

RG: I’m sure writing is therapeutic for many writers but I think there’s a lot more than that going on here. This is a book about how strength is forged and how sometimes, we cannot help but succumb to our weaknesses. The collection’s title really shapes how the stories are read and really helps each story capture this sense of what it means to be battleborn.

CW: Or, more specifically, what did the book offer you?

RG: As I read these stories, I wanted nothing more than to keep these stories near me, always. There is such control and grace in each story. Watkins tackles complex and intense subjects but there’s no melodrama here. Not only did I derive an immense amount of pleasure from reading Battleborn, I learned so much as a writer.

CW: What is a story like “The Diggings” doing in a collection like this? It was one of my favorites, but it’s certainly an outlier.

RG: I don’t really think “The Diggings” is an outlier. On the surface it seems like that because it’s set during the Goldrush and it’s a story about brothers but it’s also a story about desire and desperation and suffering and you can see those themes in most of the stories in this collection. I tend to think of this book as a masterclass. The range of stories is simply amazing and so when I consider Diggings within the context of the rest of the collection, I think, “Of course.” Not only does it fit thematically but it also fits with the diversity of the overall collection.

CW: I recently drove from Texas to California. We passed through Las Vegas on the way and eventually began to see the brothels in the small towns that surround it. It was a peculiar sight: rows of 18-wheelers and compacts alongside a few double-wides marked with a sign that read something like “Shady Ladies Ranch.” Watkins takes on one of these brothels in “The Past Perfect, The Past Continuous.” A lot of us have images of the places written about in the book — Vegas and the surrounding desert are iconic images — but few of us have experienced the intimacy of a life lived there, or even an extended visit. Watkins gives us insight into these intriguing places, or helps us imagine them a little more fully. How did you react to the function of place in this book? In many ways, the book is its setting, and those who populate that setting.

RG: Place is everything in this book, an inescapable gravity for the stories. I felt totally immersed in the stark beauty — both natural and manufactured — of the West and how that starkness shapes the people living within that landscape.

CW: Which story sticks out to you as best exemplifying what this book has to offer? If you could only recommend one story, rather than the collection, which would it be, and why?

RG: My favorite story is “Rondine Al Nido,” but my first instinct was to say that every story is the best in its own way. “Rondine Al Nido,” though is something else. The narrative frame intrigues me because it keeps you sort of off kilter. The story is disturbing but we see these rather unpleasant moments unfolding in really subtle increments. The horror, for lack of a better word, builds so slowly that it becomes almost bearable. The elegance of how this story was told takes my breath away.

Growing Out of this Darkness to Find the Light: On Scott Dominic Carpenter's This Jealous Earth

Let me start out by saying this isn’t your typical review. The book I’m talking about, This Jealous Earth: Stories, by Scott Dominic Carpenter, is one I’m publishing through my own press. So rather than a review, consider this a discussion of said press (MG Press), our mission and how I ended up where I am, and, specifically, why we’ve chosen Scott’s book as our debut publication.

And it all starts with a single fact: I hated Michigan growing up. I hated the seasonal changes (damn you, allergies!), I hated the food, and, most of all, I hated how flat everything was. Oh, how I dreamt of mountains! Of adventures! But like many youths disaffected with their birthplace, sometimes a wider lens is all that is needed, and this hate grew to a begrudging respect once I moved away to Los Angeles, and eventually, upon my return home, that begrudging respect became unadulterated love for the place I had been so quick to abandon. I couldn’t, for the life of me, get over how beautiful everything was, like it was the first time I had ever seen it, and the uniqueness of the region, the very same things I had looked down on before, were now the very same reasons keeping me there. And thus, this fire for the Midwest, specifically, promoting authors and poets from here, was born.

And boy, does it blaze hot today.

I co-founded Midwestern Gothic in late 2010 with one of my best friends, Jeff Pfaller, as a way to harness our collective passion for the region — and, truly, to try to help turn around what we saw as a gross underestimation of the literary talent present here. Sure, there have been nationally renowned authors from the Midwest that have reached super-stardom (Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Chuck Klosterman, to name a few), but what we set out to do was to try to change people’s collective perspective of the region: rather than see a single Midwest author who’s “made it,” crawled out of the despair here (as is so often depicted in media) to success, we wanted to show everyone that this is a true hotbed of talent ripe for the picking. That while there are the big name people you may have heard of, there are loads of other fantastic authors and poets and journals and presses equally as worthy of admiration you may not know. And, perhaps most importantly: that our unique circumstances here have bred into us a literary fierceness unlike anywhere else in the country.

Here’s what I mean, and I’ll be frank: The Midwest is dirty (in parts), dingy, full of hardworking folks — blue-collared, if you will — and I think the history here, the historical devotion to farms and factories, the nitty gritty, our mostly-congenial attitude (with a slight bit of snark), has produced very distinct literature . . . literature that, I believe more than any other region, holds a mirror up to us. Shows us the darker sides of life, of ourselves, the parts we may want to gloss over and not think about. But it’s not just about being dark, it’s about growing out of this darkness to find the light. And you can’t very well do that if you don’t embrace it.

And that was why we were so thrilled when we received Scott Dominic Carpenter’s manuscript for This Jealous Earth, a collection of shorts that take the reader on various journeys, all intimate in their own way, filled with characters that might, at first glance, be labeled as irritating or unwelcome, but eventually grow on you, sneak up in your subconscious until you can’t stop thinking about them. These are people faced with decisions that may not seem tremendously big, but will alter their lives one way or the other. And these are the sorts of things we experience every day, right? What is life if not for a series of decisions, of various tensions affecting us, day in and day out. And it’s through these collective experiences — wrought with humor, I might add, another great facet of the Midwest psyche — that you fully grasp what he’s done: held that mirror up to us. Shown us the good, bad and ugly of ourselves. Shown us what we like to pretend may not be a part of us, but is buried somewhere. And this makes the stories that much more enjoyable, even easier to glob onto, because what’s in these pages is you. And maybe the collection doesn’t ask and answer big questions about life, solve any major dilemmas or, even, get any national dialogs going. But it doesn’t need to. It’s an intimate experience Scott’s created here — no matter where the story is set, no matter who these people are, you are there with them.

This Jealous Earth is the first publication of Midwestern Gothic’s newest endeavor, the micro-press MG Press. Our goal runs parallel to that of the journal — highlight Midwestern authors — but differs only in the focus: in this case, book-length fiction with a singular point of view that really worms and worries around the foundation of all things Midwestern. Sure, it may seem nepotistic for me to recommend a book I’m publishing, that I have a stake in, but truly, it is one of the best short story collections I have ever read, one that made me appreciate my home even further and come to terms with the grimy side of my being in one fell swoop — recognizing in that darkness something a bit familiar.

And then, a surprise: a speck of light. Hope.

It Didn’t Even Matter Whether or Not I Ever Learned Algebra: On Brian Allen Carr's Vampire Conditions

When I got Vampire Conditions in the mail last week, I sat down just to take a quick look and ended up reading the whole damn thing straight though to the end.

When I finished it, I wanted there to be ten more books just like it that I could read right away but there weren’t and never will be, and if I didn’t still have the book to hold and flip through, I might wonder if it ever existed in the first place. That’s what this book does.

The stories in Vampire Conditions feel like great magic tricks in the sense that when they’re over, you sit there, freshly entertained, wondering exactly what just happened. How does Brian Allen Carr do what he does with these stories? You want to know, but you don’t want to know. The endings are so perfect that you’re left with this feeling that can’t be described or accounted for, so you get into the next one, still very impressed with the last, doubtful that he’ll be able to replicate the impact, and then he does it again, and again you sit entertained and impressed, trying to figure out exactly what or how things pile up the way they do.

The main characters in these stories range from an adopted teenage Asian kid whose dad gets George Straight to come hear him play some country songs on the guitar, to a middle-aged firework store owner who finds himself with a bunch of baby opossums to deal with as a direct result of something he did. And despite having very different narrators, these stories flow smoothly together and make themselves very easy to read, even though the writing itself isn’t the least complicated thing on Earth.

I don’t want to say too much because this is the kind of book that’s better when you come into it fresh, like going to see a movie you’ve barely heard anything about, so I’ll leave it at this: Vampire Conditions by Brian Allen Carr is fucking fantastic in a way that nothing else is. Read it, everyone.

A Luminously Magical Collection: Luke Geddes's I Am a Magical Teenage Princess

What draws you in first are the titles: “Bongo the Space Ape,” “Defunct Girl Gangs of North American Drive-Ins,” “And I Would’ve Gotten Away With It If It Wasn’t For You Meddling Kids.”

Then there are those funny first lines:

“Having once been initiated, the party cannot, will not, will never, under any circumstances, end.” . . . “Sex in outer space is not that different.” . . . “Bongo doesn’t need this shit.”

But Luke Geddes, in his first book I Am a Magical Teenage Princess (another excellent title), knows that once he’s drawn you in, the outlandish must meld with gritty substance. Those titles and lines open doors — doors to ’60s/contemporary life mashups, savage cartoon dreamscapes, hellish high school dramas where one’s private embarrassments play out, for the edification of youth, on a public screen.

On entering these stories you might think, on first glance, you’re in familiar territory. There’s hygiene-conscious Helen, the ever chipper coworker, Barney of Bedrock fame. But don’t be fooled. The cartoon characters, the TV sitcom “types” have shadows, and depths — and even tears and blood when the story trips a wire on them and they plunge down some harrowing space.

In “Another Girl, Another Planet,” the characters’ lives, like any teens’, are rife with clichés from pop culture. But the protagonist is so smart, her dead spaceship so inimical to teenage pap that a magazine quiz’s title, “What kind of future planner are YOU?” resounds like an existential joke. And in “Betty and Veronica,” the duo don their characteristic masks in public, while beneath them brew untidy passions — imperiling their squeaky-clean roles.

Ultimately, it’s Geddes’s empathy and clear-eyed, comedic vision that makes Magical Teenage Princess stand apart. Like us, his characters are magical and flawed, strange constructs of ghost eras and selves.

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.

The Way I Sleep Is Sporadically and Often Desperately

If you were to see my bed or even my bedroom, it might be hard to think someone sleeps there. Books, paper — so much paper just somehow everywhere — clothes, letters, those envelopes and boxes people mail books in, Gameboy Advance games — only Pokémon, really—a toothbrush, pens, used up batteries, and all kinds of random cords that belong or once belonged to something I needed. The way I sleep is sporadically and often desperately. Somehow, The Way We Sleep captures all of this and so much more.

I don’t like anthologies and have maybe read one or two before picking up Jessa Bye and C. James Bye’s The Way We Sleep. Knowing I had a deadline to read this, I was not looking forward to it. Dreading it, really. Anthologies or even just normal short story collection can take me months upon months to get through and so I was expecting to have to send some disappointing emails this week, explaining I was still only on page 20. But then just three sittings later, it was all over and I was shocked by how quickly it went, how easy it was, how beautiful and painful those pages were.

I have had a very tumultuous relationship with sleep and my bed. Dreams, though, we’ve always been on the same team. But the bed, it can be a lonely place, often a haunted place, a crippling and emotional place. Now, if I were to try to explain what my bed means to me, I’d probably just hand someone The Way We Sleep. It really covers everything, even the things that haven’t happened to me. It’s beautiful and grotesque and touching and tragic and funny and playful and philosophical and magical.

The writing in here is mostly top notch, with my favorites being by Roxane Gay, J.A. Tyler, Etgar Keret, Matthew Salesses, Tim Jones-Yelvington, Margaret Patton Chapman, and Angi Becker Stevens, whose story was my absolute favorite and the one I still cannot stop thinking about. There are a few stories that fall short, but this book is really full of amazing things, and for every story that misses, there are five that hit in ways you never imagined.

And it’s not just full of short stories, but also quick and funny and weirdly insightful interviews and comics. The comics were one of my favorite parts of the reading experience. Right in the middle of the book, it works as a sort of breather from the prose. Playful and funny and emotional, the comics really rejuvenate you and make it so you need to keep reading. For me, even more than that affect is the fact that I dream weirdly often in cartoon. I mean, to see my dreams reflected in a book is one thing, but to see them drawn out is really something else. Something deeply satisfying and beautiful.

The Way We Sleep just works. Maybe it shouldn’t, but it does. Jessa Bye and C James Bye have done a tremendous job here, because editing a book like this is much more than simply checking grammar. The structure and juxtapositions of this book make for an extremely gratifying reading experience and allows the pacing to never get bogged down by similarity of content or tone or style. This is a collection of stories, comics, and interviews that just speeds by.

Being released just in time for the holidays, I can’t recommend it enough as it would be perfect for friends, lovers, and family. There’s something in here for everyone, whether they’re looking for sex or love or humor or just something to pass these cold wintry nights.

So, yes, The Way We Sleep is something you want to read. But be sure to keep it next to your bed, just in case.