Say Yes: An Interview with Lindsay Hunter

Don’t Kiss Me, Lindsay Hunter’s stunning second story collection, is a negative imperative: at once a warning and a challenge. With its title and vaguely menacing cover (a tube of red lipstick nestled between glimmering, dagger-sharp letters), the book lures readers in and then dares them to resist.

Similarly, the twenty-six stories inside Don’t Kiss Me attract and repel. Hunter’s characters are women who kiss their much older teachers and lust inappropriately after nine-year-olds. They take terrible advice, they stay with abusive men, they overeat, and they accumulate far, far too many cats. Hunter presents her readers with humiliating, demoralizing, hopeless-seeming situations, and challenges us, in the midst of it all, to laugh at the jokes, connect with her characters, and appreciate every little glimmer of hope.

As with her stories, there is, refreshingly, no pretense with Lindsay Hunter. Her twitter feed is a dizzying, hilarious string of self-deprecating jokes and confessions. Her blog is a mix of meaningful ruminations on writing and gender roles, pictures of her beautiful baby, and fart videos. She is every bit as eccentric, entertaining, and irresistible as her writing. I was delighted to have the opportunity to chat with Lindsay over email, and to hear her thoughts on reading aloud in public, keeping friends at the dog park, and being grateful for the writing life, even when it keeps her up at night with a pounding heart.

*

Liz Wyckoff: First, Don’t Kiss Me is a killer book title. And the cover design is such a nice complement: there’s a toughness, a sharpness to the book, but also something kind of inviting. Was it hard to choose the title, or did this one speak to you right from the get-go?

Lindsay Hunter: It was very hard! I went around and around. Initially it was going to be called Trash/Treasure. As in, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” But my husband was like, “That’s real easy fodder for the critics.” Ha! Then I wanted to call it All Them Skies because the sky is in basically every story, and I’ve gotten shit for using the sky so much, and I kind of wanted to be in your face about it. But that didn’t seem to fit either. I always really loved the threat and challenge of Don’t Kiss Me, which was the title of the final story in the book, and I realized it was the perfect title for the book as a whole, which to me is like you said—tough and sharp but desperately, desperately inviting.

Liz Wyckoff: In what ways does this collection feel different to you, as compared to your first collection, Daddy’s?

Lindsay Hunter: It feels more sure of itself. Maybe because it’s my second book, and not my first, and so I’m projecting those feelings onto it? But there was a special kind of self-torture in putting my first book out; I remember being convinced that everyone would hate it, and then I had to ask myself why I’d put something I was convinced would be hated out there. I had to come to terms with it being mine, and trust that even if it was hated, I loved it, and that was enough. So I had all of those battle scars in me when Don’t Kiss Me became a thing, and I had become more sure of the stories I wanted to tell, of the “mineness” of them. And it was like a maturing for me, much in the way that the stories in Don’t Kiss Me feel more set in adulthood, while those in Daddy’s feel set in adolescence.

Liz Wyckoff: Many of the stories in Don’t Kiss Me are written in the first person, narrated by women who are really struggling—to overcome fears and loneliness, to make sense of awful things they have done or awful things that have happened to them, to pull themselves up out of some pretty mucky situations. These women are unquestionably unique, but they occasionally share a similar outlook or sense of the world. How do you go about inhabiting these characters?

Lindsay Hunter: I usually hear a sentence they’re saying, and I’ll write that down, and their voice kind of reveals itself to me as I go. Like it’s already there and I’m just kind of brushing away the debris hiding it. I just learned that Elmore Leonard said something like “if it sounds like writing, I rewrite” and YES to that. I want it to feel like life. Ha! As if that’s some kind of revelatory statement for a writer to make. But it’s nonetheless true.

Liz Wyckoff: I’m interested in the rules that govern your stories—what I’ve heard Kevin Brockmeier describe as “ground rules.” For example, “Three Things You Should Know About Peggy Paula” is arranged into three long paragraphs describing the three things we should know. And the narrator of “Like” inserts the word like into almost every one of her sentences. Do you consciously set constraints like this when writing?

Lindsay Hunter: I do, sometimes! Not always before I sit down to write. But as I’m going these constraints I’m suddenly following become clear. With “Like,” I wanted to show how the way these girls were talking simultaneously removed them from reality while also revealing it to observers. Like, like, like. Instead of “is” or what have you. With “Three Things You Should Know About Peggy Paula,” I think I originally set out to just write a series of random facts about Peggy Paula, and it became three essential things.

I will say that, as the former co-host of a reading series where everything had to be under four minutes, I’m very used to writing stories that fit within that time constraint, so that might be one I set unconsciously for myself.

Liz Wyckoff: I just read a really rollicking conversation between you and Alissa Nutting on the FSG Originals website in which you two talk about “gross stuff.” You (and Alissa, too) seem to be really comfortable with the grossness in your work—the barf, snot, turds, and farts that make an appearance in almost all of your stories. Was there ever a time when you were less comfortable with it, or anxious about what readers might think?

Lindsay Hunter: I think, actually, I kind of blindly assumed people wouldn’t be so shocked by it. I remember writing “The Fence” in an afternoon and reading it to my class the next day, very excitedly, and looking up to see people looking kind of choked by their collars. I’ve always been the type of person to want to just get past politeness or artifice, and the way I do that in my personal life is to immediately start talking about all that “gross stuff,” which, to me, is an essential part of life. But yes. Now I’m anxious about people’s reactions, now that I fully understand how shocking some of this stuff is to people. Like when my dog park friends wanted to read Don’t Kiss Me, I felt sad, like, “Well, there go our evenings at the dog park.” (But happily I was wrong!)

Liz Wyckoff: Has your relationship to readers, or that vague idea of “audience,” changed over time?

Lindsay Hunter: Definitely. Well, maybe it’s more that I go back and forth between kind of nervously hoping what I’m writing will land well and writing toward an audience that’s cheering me on. It depends how strong I’m feeling on that particular day.

Liz Wyckoff: Speaking of writing for an audience, as you mentioned earlier, you’re a co-founder of Quickies!—a bi-monthly reading series in Chicago. What does reading (specifically your own work, aloud, in public) mean to you as a writer?

Lindsay Hunter: It means everything! I encourage all writers to read their finished stories aloud to themselves, a partner, an audience at a reading, whatever you can get. It reveals so much. Forming the words in your mouth is a different thing than typing them onto a page. For me, it helped me take ownership of both my physical voice and my writing voice. I needed reading practice badly, and Quickies! gave me that, and it gave me a slightly buzzed audience who were all mostly listening.

Liz Wyckoff: Interacting with other writers seems to be a pretty big part of your life. Do you find that there are good and bad things about surrounding yourself with writer friends?

Lindsay Hunter: A professor once told us we should say “Yes” to everything, because it would open up so many other opportunities for us. I took that to heart and began saying “Yes” to reading at my friends’ reading series, writing stories for their journals, going on tour, doing interviews, etc. Before I knew it I was part of something. That professor was so right! Being a part of a writing community keeps me involved, challenged, aware, all of which, if you want to forge any kind of writing career, is so important, and so easily lost.

The bad part about being part of this community is all the envy and self-doubt and constant comparing. It’s a very dangerous place to find yourself, but I think every writer goes through it. “Shit, this guy wrote two novels in a year AND publishes a story like every week. I watched Breaking Bad all weekend and wrote a single tweet. Therefore I am worthless!” You have to live the life you want to live, and celebrate that. Part of that life is being surrounded by incredibly talented people, so let yourself celebrate them, too.

Liz Wyckoff: I was really moved by one of your recent blog posts called Real Talk. In it, you discuss your decision to become a writer, the importance of showing gratitude, and the recurring theme of trying. You describe the decade between your initial decision to start writing and the publication of your first book as a decade “full of love and travel and fear and doubt and tries and tries and tries.” It sounds so simple, but I think trying can be really terrifying! Do you feel terrified, too, sometimes?

Lindsay Hunter: Always! Just last night I laid in bed, wide awake, even though I have a cold and I’m exhausted and there’s no telling when my son will wake up, so I should have been sleeping, but I couldn’t. I was filled with terror about my novel, and what comes after, which I in no way can see clearly. But if someone had said to me in January 2000, when I decided to focus on writing, “Hey, guess what, it’s going to be an entire decade before you get a book published,” I would have been paralyzed. So you just keep pushing through. You keep living your life, loving the people in it, being grateful for all of it, all of it, instead of worrying about what you don’t have or what you don’t know. Sometimes it’s easier said than done and you find yourself listening to your husband and child and dog snore the night away while your heart pounds itself to a pulp. But you try.

Liz Wyckoff: You’re writing a novel! Other than keeping you awake with a pounding heart, how’s it going?

Lindsay Hunter: It’s going! But there is that issue of having time, which I don’t have enough of these days. So I fear my novel will suffer because of it. Like a neglected child. Still a child, but something is off. I just keep telling myself, Well, it HAS TO BE FINISHED AT SOME POINT. And on that day I shall drink the largest goblet of Sauvignon Blanc the world has ever seen.

An Interview with Joseph Michael Owens

Recently, I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to read Joseph Michael Owens’s short story collection Shenanigans! and I must say that I’m really into his style! For those of you who don’t know, Joe is also the Web Content Manager here at the Lit Pub, and once I had read his work, I was really happy to know that I was working with some highly talented writers here. Joe was very gracious in his allowing me to interview him, and his intelligence and generosity definitely shine through in his writing and in his discussion with me.

I hope you all enjoy learning about Joe as much as I did!

Sam Song: It was a pleasure to read Shenanigans! What were your major inspirations for writing this piece?

Joseph Michael Owens: Shenanigans! was a collection that began its life as my MFA thesis and turned into something more. The inspirations are probably too many to count, but the most prominent books that influenced it were Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End. These books all have the ability to sort of charm their readers with closely examining what’s happening in their characters’ lives. I think Shenanigans! provides a little slice of slice-of-life writing. It’s almost like an appetizer sampler platter. You sort of get a taste of the various things that take place in a couple characters’ day-to-day lives that may seem uninteresting at first but becomes interesting (I hope) by humanizing them in a relatable way; but at the same time, you also never spend too much time on one thing in order to prevent it (again, I hope) from getting boring.

SS: What were some of the influences for Ben’s and Anna’s characters? Do you know people like them in real life?

JMO: Half of the answer is likely predictable; the other half might not be. Originally, the characters were actually based on Jennifer, the woman who I’d eventually marry, and I. However, I saw a lot of potential in other couples whose relationships I admired, as well as stories I’d read with characters who were genuinely likable. I feel like there is so much fiction being written right now where characters are either unlikable or unrelatable (by design) that I thought it might be fun to give a glimpse into people’s lives where the worst things that were happening were trivial, mundane things. Eventually, the characters became less and less Jenni and I and more themselves, which I loved. I’m leaving it up to the readers to figure out which parts are based on real events and which are completely made up.

SS: Why did you have what happened to Ben happen? For instance, why did you make Ben bike up a freezing cold mountain or have him spill scalding coffee all over himself?

JMO: One of those events may or may not have happened to either me or someone I know. I think with Ben’s bike ride up the mountain, it was sort of a way to show how people can do these amazing things when they don’t know they aren’t supposed to be able to. Ben basically sets off riding a distance he’s probably covered many times but isn’t really thinking about the fact that it’s nearly all uphill, which, having ridden a bike my fair share of miles, I can tell you, there is a big difference. He dresses for the weather at the base of the mountain, not considering how cold it’s going to be at the top. He just knows he wants to ride up the damn thing and so he does it. It’s only later he realizes that it isn’t the easiest thing in the world to “just do.”

The coffee story is, in some ways, an homage to shows like The Office and movies like Office Space. A fun fact is that the story is actually the first chapter of a novel I’ve been working on set in the same office with the same characters. Now that it was published in Shenanigans!, it might get cut from the final draft, but there’s certainly going to be more of Ben and Anna because why not, right? I really think the coffee scene is mostly indicative of the chaos and insanity that sort of defines most professional office settings. I work/have worked in them since I was eighteen, and this just seems like something that could (basically) happen. People are rushing around; the break-rooms and kitchens are often small but see heavy traffic; it’s the minutia of the day that really tends to get under people’s skin. I just set out with the hopes of recreating a sense of that.

SS: Is the idea of “just doing” an aspect present in other chapters in Shenanigans! as well?

JMO: If not for the characters, then it definitely is for the writing part. For example, “We Always Trust Each Other…” and “Ninjas! . . . (In the Suburbs?)” were both stories I started sketching out with no real idea of what they’d be or even if they’d be anything at all. One thing I really like to do is include free associations in my writing. I think the finished product stays a step or two short of becoming fully absurdist — e.g. in the vein of Mark Leyner or Jon Konrath — but it allows me to sort of take things to their strangest- and most extreme conclusions (i.e. ones that could feasibly happen).

SS: It seems pretty clear that Ben indeed cherishes his dogs. Why did you decide to let dogs be a huge part of his life? Are you a dog person yourself?

JMO: One thing I can say is that the dogs in the book were based on real life. I’ve always had dogs. Right now, Jenni and I have four total, but we’ve had as many as five. I thought it might be kind of fun to have a couple who don’t have kids but instead, a rowdy pack of dogs that keep them more than busy. We’re animal lovers, in general. I think it’d be hard to write a book without having some furry companions in it.

SS: Continuing the topic on Ben’s and Anna’s dogs, I notice that you even give them distinct “voices” and personalities. Mish and Brock are notable examples, in that they “speak” directly to Ben. Can you elaborate as to what this reveals about Ben’s relationship with them?

JMO: Dogs are so hilarious. I’ve always sort of had different voices for dogs in my head based on their mannerisms and expressions. It’s easy to forget that they aren’t actually human and responding in that way. I think this is something a number of people probably also do, but it adds an element that is new or weird to readers who perhaps aren’t “animal people.” That being said, non-animal people would probably get annoyed with the number of times dogs or horses or wildlife appear in my stories.

SS: Boxcars and Bomb Pops is different from the other chapters in that it isn’t so much about Ben’s present experience as it is about his flow of thought. In this chapter, Ben arrives at this epiphany that in society, “there is something wrong with or different about them if they find themselves not wanting, if they find things and stuff somehow unappealing”. What moved you to acknowledge this idea? Are these your own thoughts, someone else’s, or ones you fabricated for Ben’s introspective character?

JMO: There is this sort of unsaid and overarching idea in the book that people are (of course) incredibly multi-faceted and even go as far as to have different voices, depending on the situation they find themselves in. Ben is kind of a goof, but he’s also hyper-analytical at work as well as kind of introspective in ways that many of those that know him perhaps don’t recognize when he’s by himself. Ultimately, I think, when people are all alone and spending time with their thoughts, everyone is introspective. I liken it to wizened older people who don’t talk a lot but say almost profound things when they do talk; people who might not have a formal education, but are more in touch with the way things work than “book smart” people who’ve never really experienced much of the world outside of a classroom. These are two extreme examples of course, but the idea is that people are smart, in general, especially when they are allowed to sit down and just think about things outside of the hubbub of society.

SS: Do you yourself perceive this idea to be true?

JMO: I think it was something I first noticed in myself, certainly. It seems like when it comes to wanting something, the process of wanting is the driving factor, not actually acquiring the thing was that was wanted. This is really evident in hobbies that involve a lot of tinkering. When the project is finished that someone spent “X” amount of time tinkering with or upgrading or modifying, the person usually moves on to a new project. There are even commercials now about upgrading cell phones before the typical two years a person waits between new phones because there is always something newer and shinier on the market or just around the corner. All of this isn’t really what’s surprising. What’s surprising is that we really don’t like our bleeding edge device (e.g.) being rolled out with planned obsolescence in mind. (But that’s just my two cents.)

SS: The final and arguably most complex short story of Shenanigans! is The Year that Was…And Was Not. So much happens in this chapter, and instead of merely a glimpse at a moment in Ben’s life, we are presented with a dire prospect of his future. Why did you decide to make this chapter such an emotional roller-coaster for Ben and his family and Anna? Why the interplay of the good and the bad?

JMO: A lot of the motivation behind the last chapter was selfishness on my part. It was kind of my way of not wanting to let go of the characters, so rather than have everything tidied up in a nice complete package, I wanted to show that the young couple still had most of their lives together ahead of them. Life is a bit of an emotional roller coaster, regardless of how exciting a person’s life is – or is perceived to be, and nothing is either 100 percent terrible or 100 percent awesome. What is a huge crisis to some of us may seem like no big deal to others. Ultimately, we’re all just here on the planet trying to do the best we can within the situation(s) we find ourselves.

SS: I’ll end my questions about the plot of Shenanigans! here; I don’t want to spoil it for all the lovely people at The Lit Pub! Why don’t you share with us some of your upcoming projects?

JMO: I’m currently working on two very different novels. One is a sort of spin-off of Ben’s character in Shenanigans! called Human Services where it focuses on the people who work at The Agency and all of the insanity that occurs in a professional office setting. I would say it’s pretty much solidly in the literary fiction camp.

The other thing I’m working on is a project I’ve been kicking around in my mind for a few years now, which is a sort of literary epic sci-fi/fantasy novel tentatively called “Of Gods and Men.” I grew up reading lots of sci-fi and fantasy — especially the latter — and always kind of wanted to do something in the genre that inspired me to be a writer. It wasn’t until recently, with the popularity of the A Song and Ice and Fire series (aka Game of Thrones) that I sort of realized that this was a viable option for me. That is to say, I’d really been wanting to use the skills I’d picked up writing literary fiction the past seven or eight years and apply it to something more genre related. Perhaps the work most responsible for this epiphany, even more so than Game of Thrones, is M. John Harrison’s unbelievably impressive Viriconium omnibus. The prose is awe-inspiring and the way he includes elements of surrealism and bits of magical realism is something I can’t begin to do justice here. You’d simply have to read it yourself.

SS: Is there a particular writing process you go through?

JMO: My process is pretty un-process like. I’ve got severe ADD, so it’s almost impossible for me to get into anything that resembles a regular writing schedule. I basically write when I can and/or when I’ve got an idea that’s begging to be put down on paper. Though when I do, I typically draft longhand first; it’s always been that way for me. I find it easier to compose with a pen than I do with a keyboard. Then I’ll type out a first draft, print that draft, and proceed to edit the printed copy with a pen. I know there are a lot of steps, but this has always been the best method for me, personally. There seems to be a number of established writers who do this too, so I don’t feel quite so weird about it. I feel like I could probably write more if I decided to skip the longhand and type everything — editing it solely within the word processing app — but my current method feels to me like what I do write is better; quality over quantity!

SS: People have often told me that if I want to write, I must first ask myself why I want to write. So, Joe, why do you write?

JMO: I think a lot of people describe their reasons in terms of zen sayings or for their sanity or they profoundly muse on their destiny or life’s calling as writers, but for me it’s really so much simpler than that: I just really like to do it! Admittedly, I feel bad — or maybe guilty is the right word —  sometimes when I don’t write, but there can be significant gaps in my output during a given year. I think I feel worse because I know it’s easier to stay in a kind of writing flow than try to repeatedly build your momentum back up, but it also comes down to your own personal capacity: write as much as you can within the amount of time you feel like you want to spend doing it.

SS: What advice do you have for aspiring writers?

JMO: Part of this can probably apply here, but the most important thing people who are aspiring writers can do is read as much as they can. Stephen King said you have to read a lot to write well, and I think that still holds true. I think it’s especially important to read books you like, which may seem obvious, but often students will get bogged down reading stuff they are assigned to read or reading stuff they’ve been told they should like. I’m sorry to say, but not everyone is going to love reading Faulkner (e.g.), especially if their style is more similar to, say, Barry Hannah, to compare two Southern writers. Maybe you’d be better off reading George Saunders than John Updike, or Zadie Smith instead of Margaret Fuller. I’m just throwing names out there, but the point is, find something you love and read as much of it as possible.

SS: What are some of your own aspirations as a writer?

JMO: I think my biggest aspirations as a writer start simple: #1, to finish projects! People with ADD tend to start a million projects and finish a few, if any, of them. So for now, my priority is to finish both Human Services and Of Gods and Men. Beyond that, I just want to write books that at least a few people really like. It’s an incredibly humbling thing when someone tells you that your work really resonated with them. It makes you want to write a special book just for that person because they took the time to read your work that they could’ve spent doing any number of other things. Time is a hot commodity in 2013, and people never seem to have enough of it. My biggest aspiration is that I’d really love to write for a living. I don’t even mean becoming rich and famous because of my work — though I’d certainly not turn it away. I just mean I’d give almost anything to spend each of my days with my imagination and churning out ideas on the page, and through that work (because make no mistake, writing is work!), be able to support/contribute to supporting my family. I think that’s a pretty kickass definition of “happiness!”

They Lived Unofficially in Vacant Dormitory Rooms

In the title story of The Cucumber King of Kėdainiai (pronounced keh-die-nay), a Lithuanian mafia boss who seeks to conquer the world through black market cucumbers takes two Americans on a strange tour of his castle, a former Soviet storage house. In a similar way, author Wendell Mayo takes readers on a strange tour to the other side of the Iron Curtain, to a post-Soviet Lithuania that is simultaneously real and surreal, playfully comic and deeply tragic. Each story in this collection is quite different from the next, but they are tied together by the exploration of the new realities of Eastern Europe, and also by precise prose and characters who continue to haunt you long after you turn the page. Wendell Mayo was nice enough to chat with me about his process of writing The Cucumber King of Kėdainiai, his own experience of traveling to Lithuania, and where he’s headed next.

* * *

SU: Your first collection, Centaur of the North, was published in 1996, and you’ve released other two books between that and this one.  Was there anything different about the process of writing The Cucumber King of Kėdainiai? What has changed about the way you approach storytelling since your writing career began?

WM: The stories I collected in Centaur of the North were actually written after most stories in my third published book, B. Horror and Other Stories. I think that’s because, when I first started writing, I gave little thought to “collecting” fiction. It was only after I had a scattering of stories in literary magazines that I began to wonder about collecting them. It was a little like those Rorschach inkblot tests. I would stare at what seemed dozens of random stories. After a long time, some of my little ink spots looked like “Centaur.” Then, after another long time, I’d cock my head at another area of ink and see “B. Horror.” That’s how I used to work. But my process did change when I wrote stories in In Lithuanian Wood, my third collection, and now in The Cucumber King of Kėdainiai. I found I could not just write stories as they mysteriously presented themselves to me. I had to make a concerted effort, year after year, to commit my experiences in Lithuania to journals, scrapbooks, anything I could get my hands on to inspire fictions.

I first traveled and worked in Lithuania in 1993; the very first appearance of stories inspired by my work there wasn’t until two years later. My journaling resulted in a concentrated effort to write. I wrote story after story set in the Baltics. How could I not? Experiences I collected are so rich, with a special blend of Baltic humor and pragmatism. I remember coming back from Klaipėda to Vilnius via an old Soviet bus with a group of American teachers. It was a long haul on a hot summer day, no a/c of course. About half way along, the entire front windshield fell out of the bus and shattered on the pavement. The driver immediately turned onto dirt roads, wending his way through the countryside. When someone asked him where we were going, he turned to his busload of Americans and said, “Window shopping, of course!”

So, unlike my earlier days, when writing stories in The Cucumber King of Kėdainiai, I found that one story suggested another, and so on. It was a little like coming to a creek dotted with stepping stones. You get a sense that there may be enough stones in the creek (or possible stories in a collection) to get you across, but you’re not sure which stone will be the next one until you actually step onto the first stone and see where it gets you. This is how Cucumber came about—“Gōda” somehow suggesting “Cucumber” suggesting “Brezhnev’s Eyebrows,” and on. I suppose, in terms of process, it makes me seem a little more like a novelist, but I’m not, really. I live to write stories.

SU: When I told people I was going to Lithuania for the Summer Literary Seminars last July, I got a lot of blank stares and responses like, “Where is that?” All the Baltic countries have fascinating cultures and rich histories, but to many they are invisible histories.  The stories in The Cucumber King of Kėdainiai are contemporary, but they are intricately tied to Baltic history. What can American readers gain from experiencing stories of post-Soviet Eastern Europe?

WM: You can’t have a Cold War without at least two sides. I grew up in the 1950s and 60s, and knew quite well the American side the Cold War. My father was a NASA scientist working at the Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. His job, so much as he could tell us without getting into trouble with the government, was to design small nuclear power plants for deep space exploration. He was in the space race in those days; we were all in the race. I saw every liftoff at Cape Canaveral (now Kennedy Space Center) from Mercury through Apollo, no matter what hour, day or night. I remember duck-and-cover drills in grade school and junior high, in case of a Soviet nuclear attack. I was “volunteered” by my father to join the (Boy Scouts’) Space Explorers unit. Communists were always on the “other side” of the Iron Curtain—and when they weren’t, look out! It was an incredibly fearful, stupid game that no could win—or dared to try.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, how could I not venture into the Baltics? How could I not be interested in a writerly way, but also personal way, in the truth—in the bigger picture after fifty years of Soviet occupation and American fear-mongering? I think American readers of stories in The Cucumber King of Kėdainiai can gain a deeper, richer picture of the Cold War, a kind of correction to the monolithic way Americans may have seen what is actually an historically rich and diverse region of former-Soviet annexed countries. It’s that curiosity I count on in myself as a writer, and in readers. I want curious readers. But I don’t pretend to know what most readers want these days. I guess if I did I’d feel pretty uneasy about it. I remember Jane Smiley saying that if you go to the beach and chase waves breaking on the sand, you’ll never precisely match them coming in and out, step for step—so, like reading trends, why try? As a writer, you stand your ground and, eventually, a wave or two will come in and meet you on your terms. Given so much aggression in other parts of the world these days, and the US’s involvement, I think that the history and folly of occupation, assimilation, and displacement of people in countries like Lithuania must be of interest.

Sometimes the whole matter of globalization and assimilation hits home, even in free Lithuania. I’m proud to say that my novel-in-stories, In Lithuanian Wood, has been translated into Lithuanian language and published by Mintis Press in Vilnius, under the title Vilko Valanda (English: Hour of the Wolf). But before that, when I was seeking a translator and publisher for the book, I contacted the American Center in Vilnius, part if the US Embassy. It was an information resource center that I understood had funded publication of some poetry collections by Americans translated into Lithuanian language. I met with folks at the American Center. I was halfway through discussing how to apply for funding when I was told I was required to write an essay justifying how the translation and publication of In Lithuanian Wood in Lithuania would contribute to “a more civil society” in Lithuania. I did not write that essay.

SU: There are many memorable characters in The Cucumber King, but one of my favorites is Vyt from “Spider Story.” Could you talk about the creation of this character?

WM: It’s probably a bit cliché these days, but Vyt really is a composite of several real characters I got to know in Lithuania. The first is a young man, a student in my ESL class I taught in Birštonas; outwardly, he’s pretty much the Vyt I write, in-scene, in “Spider Story.” He had ambitions to be “top cop” in Lithuania and figured he needed English to make it happen. I liked him a lot. But for the story, he needed a duplicitous side, so I drew on a fellow, bald as a cue ball, who would trail me many days across Rotušės (Town Hall) Square in Old Town Vilnius, begging for money. He spoke in broken English, something like, “Mister American. You rich. May I have dollar?” A couple times I helped him out, until one afternoon, sitting on the steps of Town Hall, I overheard him speaking with a group of young Lithuanian men in perfect English! They were laughing and joking at how effective their feigning broken English was in extracting money from foolish Americans. Next time I saw this fellow I let him know what I had heard! The third part of Vyt’s character is his being an orphan, someone not accounted for by society, his being “off the grid.” I drew this aspect of Vyt’s character from orphans I met teaching in Alanta, Lithuania. They were in their teens. Summer months, they lived “unofficially” in vacant dormitory rooms. So moved by these young people, I also wrote an essay, “First Things First: The Orphans of Alanta.” It was published in Advocating for Children and Families in an Emerging Democracy: The Post-Soviet Experience in Lithuania.

Anyway, the result is a Vyt who fascinates me—he’s alone in the world, has a keen sense of humor, survives by his wits, is extremely smart—and suspicious of American presence in Lithuania.

SU: You teach in the BFA and MFA programs at Bowling Green State University. What is the literary landscape of BGSU like?

WM: Having both the BFA and MFA all wrapped up in one place is pretty cool. MFAs in our small, intensive program get teaching experience and, in fact, teach most of the sophomore-level creative writing classes. BFAs have the advantage of learning from talented, inspiring, up-and-coming writers as well as faculty. Thursday nights we get together for readings, a concoction of presentations by BFAs, MFAs, visiting writers—you name it. We get around 100 attending these each week; it’s become a kind of happening, I think, because we include everyone in the program. I know the notion of “community” gets thrown around a lot these days, but I think it’s true for us. Like most MFA programs, we have a community of writers at all stages of their careers learning from one another and for one another. We tend to root for one another.

SU: What’s happening right now in the literary world that you’re excited about? Authors, presses, journals?

WM: I mentioned earlier that I try not be a wave-chaser. Seriously, it’s probably a flaw in my personality. I have started reading stories by Haruki Murakami (and in that regard, I wonder if I’m already behind the times?). Still, I’m interested in his fusion of the fantastic and real, for instance, in story like “The Second Bakery Attack.” I’ve only just started reading him but imagine myself following him a long way.

SU: What are you working on now?

WM: What’s the point of exploring lingering contemporary effects of the Cold War years on people in the east without doing the same for people in the west? So I’m working on a series of stories that explore the effects of those good old duck-and-cover days on people today in the US—the nuclear legacy. I’ve a good deal to draw on from my own experiences, but I’m also having a great time looking into history. This past summer I visited the Nevada Nuclear Test Site, a place where thousands of nuclear weapons were tested in the 1950s and 60s, long before the real aftereffects were known, resulting in nuclear test ban treaties. It was megatons more fun than the casinos in Las Vegas. Hundreds of bomb craters dotted our route through the test site. We were only permitted to exit our vehicle at certain safe, low-radiation areas and had to be sure to wear long-sleeves and long pants. At one point, I stood on the lip of a bomb crater affectionately known as the “The Sedan,” the result of an underground nuclear blast in 1962. This single crater was 330 feet deep and 1,280 feet (about a quarter of a mile) across—big enough, I’m thinking, to fill with new stories.

Labor of Love: On Ramona Ausubel's A Guide to Being Born

The strange cover — a beautiful, precise, mishmash of subjects – is perfect for the stories it protects. They, too, are a mixed bag surrounding the subject of familial relationships of one kind or another, whether between mothers and children-to-be; fathers and their desire to carry something around, womblike, in a set of drawers; or lovers and their possible futures as seen embodied around them in the elderly couples inhabiting their neighborhood.

From the very start, this book informs the reader that these stories contain elements of the abnormal; consider the opening of “Safe Passage,” the first story in the collection:

The grandmothers — dozens of them — find themselves at sea. They do not know how they got there. It seems to be afternoon, the glare from the sun keeps them squinting. They wander carefully, canes and orthotics… Are we dead? They ask one another. Are we dying?

Call it what you will: the fantastical, the imagined, magical-realism. The truth is, I’m not sure you can categorize it as any of these. The unreal elements, often dreamlike but never cast under the shadow of doubt or suspicious, are part and parcel of the real world, of life, birth and death in these stories. If you have trouble believing something, my advice is to sit back with your favorite soothing beverage; let go, let the story take over, let yourself sink into the deceptively simple language Ausubel uses to tell her stories:

A tiny white spine began to knit itself inside Hazel. Now it was just a matter of growing. [. . .] She dreamed that night, and for all the nights of summer, of a ball of light in her belly. A glowing knot of illuminated strands, heat breaking away from it, warming her from the inside out. Then it grew fur, but still shone. Pretty soon she saw its claws and its teeth, long and yellow. It had no eyes, just blindly scratched around sniffing her warm cave. She did not know if this creature was here to be her friend or to punish her.

Each story is crafted independently, but they fit together in this volume under the headings that Ausubel has given to the four sections, an optimistic backwards version of coming to life: Birth, Gestation, Conception, Love. The writing isn’t pretentious. The metaphors are beautifully simple, sprinkled sparingly enough not to make the careful reader cringe at the literariness:

Laura and I sat on a picnic blanket in the middle of our suburban front yard. Poppy sat there too, only she was in her stroller bed as always. The grass was craning out of the dirt and the birds were going for all our scraps. We lay on our backs like Poppy does, flat down, and looked at the graying blue of the sky. It came at us. Storming us with its color, with its light.

This is a first-rate book of short stories, and in a time when such books are difficult to publish, I have no doubt as to why this one succeeded in the task. It is a labor of love, and I’m glad it has come to light, a quiet baby of a book, crying when it is hungry but not screaming, sleeping through the night so early that you may wake up seeping milk, wondering if something is wrong with it. It will stay with you after you finish the stories, and you will worry about it a little bit, wondering if you understood it as you should have, cared as much as you could. Like an anxious parent, you may never know, but you can always go back and care some more.

A Certain Balanced Unbalance

Books, in the mega-multitudes, have been penned about life, the great sorrows, what is redemptive, and what will never be achieved. Other books cast their nets across magic, those unexplained, underlying properties and prophecies that can light up the imagination. Thank You For Your Sperm, a story collection of quirky and unusual title, examines both life and magic. Together. For what is life if not imbued with a certain balanced unbalance the author seems to suggest as he begins with his prologue:

WHO I AM

I am among the many, most definite and most certain: me. Definite: because I know where I begin though not where I will end. Certain: because of the many that have told me that I am, some more, some less, kindly. . .

This debut collection mixes the sacred and profane, beauty and beast, the strange and the wondrous. Not necessarily in that order. Or any type of defined order other than The Serious Writer segment (and even that gives way to whimsy by including two non-serious writer stories) (though I’m sure Speh had his reasons). Rather, the stories in this book seem quarantined like hungry orphans: Read me, they appear to shout from their temporary cots, take me home and love me; or better yet make love to me. Speh’s voices are consistently on pitch, his plots and settings well defined. There is a clatter in the book similar to the way Chekhov made his stories come alive.

An excerpt from “At A Welsh Wedding”:

. . .Because of the Captain’s former legendary sexual prowess there were rumors that moved the relationship between the two families into the unchaste neighborhood of a murky, primitive mélange. . . The groom was the Captain’s spitting image: tall as a larch, large head spiked with black hair, deeply set yellow eyes the size of small oysters… The bride was petite, blonde and busty, with a broad mouth full of happy teeth, given to chatter. . . Then he saw Captain Cat sit in a corner, his eyes closed, his head trembling slightly, clutching his wedding gift, a small laced-up dusty linen bag filled with fifty pebble-sized diamonds. The Captain was now considered a human liability. Doctors from London to Lima had pronounced their diagnoses. . . manic, depressive, schizophrenic, bipolar, paranoid, cyclothymic, borderline, or a genius. . . .

As for Speh’s own particular genius, it might be found lurking behind a potted palm, in the shadow of a half open door, or perhaps slouched low at the wheel of a low slung car: wherever is less noticeable than what is going on in his stories. This book is teeming with heart. It’s funny, too. Highly recommended for all who love literature at its most vibrant.

A Better Kind of Flood: A Review of Stefanie Freele's Surrounded By Water

I’m a firm believer in karma, which means keeping up with the daily transactions of goodwill that proper karma maintenance dictates. So when I received a free copy of Stefanie Freele’s short fiction collection Surrounded by Water in the mail from publisher Press 53, my prize from a contest I’d won, I knew I was supposed to do something with it. You know, new item marked “pending” on the karma ledger. I just didn’t know what that thing would be. Place it in a time capsule, to be found in a near-future devoid of physical books? Or pass it on to someone, perhaps a teenage girl who needed to know that there are other Stefanie’s writing besides Meyer?

I wasn’t a total stranger to Freele’s writing — I’d read the title story in Glimmer Train, and I knew she was Fiction Editor at The Los Angeles Review, so my expectations were already tending toward the high side. But I procrastinated. It may have been last Thanksgiving break when I finally sat down and read this gift of a book and decided that I’d write a review. And since I don’t know her personally, I couldn’t think of a better way to thank Stefanie Freele for several hours of literary enjoyment. Further, if a review could help a few more readers find this book, then so much the better. Pending ledger item closed out.

So, the review. Facts first: forty-one stories of assorted lengths, from micro to full-length short story. Many are prior-published, whether in respected print journals like Glimmer Train (twice!) or Mid-American Review, or online in such fine venues as Pank, Mudluscious, elimae and Night Train. She switches up point-of-view. She can bring the humor (“Feisty Rojo”) and the pathos (“Scantily Clad Submissive Women”) equally well. She wanders from domestic realism (“Kicky Feet”) to absurdism (“Cessation”) to straight-up literary goodness (“Us Hungarians” and “While Surrounded by Water”). She’s a master at that great magician’s trick of storytelling: hooking our interest with a wild notion we think the story will follow, then proceeding to slowly reveal the story beneath the story (“The Father of Modern Chemistry”).Topically, she’s all over the map, but there is a nucleus of flash fiction pieces that together explore the darker underbelly of motherhood, the honest feelings of the sleep-deprived, the lonely-coping, the last-frayed-nerve kind of confessions that a straining woman might only tell her closest friend. Best of all, though, is how Freele wields her words, at the sentence level. “In the Basement”, for instance, delivers a gritty and discomforting portrayal of a young bulimic woman:

You lock the door and assume the hated position. Left hand holds the stomach and right hand is for purging. Your pointer finger is cut up from rubbing on your teeth, it stands aside, healing. Middle finger for this one. At the sight of the toilet, you begin to cry and retch. How did I end up here again? It started ages ago on a quest for gorgeousness, for thinness. Tears blur the pieces of donut and caramel corn. The peanut butter squares catch as expected, too bad, they taste so good, so forbidden. As you choke on a hunk of peanut butter, the tears drain and you press against your stomach to help the vomit flow. Gagging, then a big chunk comes up, of course smaller than it felt in your throat. The roughness of it scratches the esophagus. Whisper and beg to stop. Please let it all come out, I’ll never do it again.

A mere ten pages later, Freele’s lyrical prose is simply mesmerizing in “Blown”:

In that smile, the look takes her beyond the driveway, bringing Jelly into the storm and across the hills to the red-orange paths of fall, toward the rain-slick madrones and the dry streams beginning to fill and spill. That’s occasionally how I see you. She’s listening to the crunch of a hesitating deer, to the dipdip of the quickening rain, to the first mushrooms erupting through the soil like moles coming up for fresh air.

While I enjoyed most everything she accomplished in this book, I was initially troubled by Freele’s tendency toward unresolved endings. Weeks ago I started to write a mixed review, maybe 70/30 favorable, but after stewing on her collection while simultaneously struggling to write an ending for one of my own stories, I stopped. I realized that the breakdown in interpretation was mine. My own predilection towards definitive endings (often my downfall, it seems) was clouding my judgment and tainting my reading of Freele’s prose. I was shortchanging this flood of hers; oblivious to the less-visible positives. After all, didn’t the ancient Egyptians used to welcome floods, because they replenished much-needed nutrients in the soil of the Nile Valley?

So I started over from the beginning, by deleting what I’d written and re-reading her book cover to cover, and that is when I finally felt I might understand her intent. Stefanie Freele, I’ve decided, above all else, is a writer that respects her readers — respects us too much to do all the cooking for us. She’d rather buy the ingredients and leave them in the fridge for us to find, and wonder what we’ll do with them. I believe many of her stories are open-ended because there’s more out there, just off the page-edges of her stories, and it’s our job to seek that out. That level of restraint — it’s something I need to learn from her.

For those who care about such things, there doesn’t seem to be an organizing framework to this collection, but I’ve decided I don’t care about that either. In the end, it makes sense. This mix of forms and lengths, voices and points of view, realism and surrealism, closed ends and open. It’s a surrounding by words, some placid, some roiling.  The mistake I’d made at first was to think I could comprehend an inundation like this from high ground, with dry boots. It has to be experienced up close, face to face with the bloated carcasses of the ill-fated, with luckier others clinging to scrap wood and life, and everywhere the silt-rich currents promising rejuvenation. A benevolent kind of flood — and like the Egyptians of old, we should welcome it.

Christopher Barzak's Before & Afterlives

I first discovered Christopher Barzak a few months before I moved to Korea. A friend of mine mentioned his book The Love We Share Without Knowing which is, among other things, about expatriation in Japan. While Japan is certainly not Korea, I thought it might be nice to get a glimpse at what I was stepping into. And it was beautiful yet painful. Stories of love and loss, tenderness and beauty, all touch by bits of magic, the unreal, the more than real. What struck me most was how perfectly they described what it was like to be a stranger in a country, even when it is your own.

I had previously lived in Ireland, which is much more similar to America than America is to Japan or Korea, but I had felt all these things. The enormous joy, the intense strength of friendships so new, the distance between you and so many others, what it meant to be American, to be American abroad, to be human: Barzak had captured it all in the interweaving stories that make up The Love We Share Without Knowing, and so I could not wait to read his short story collection Before & Afterlives.

It does not disappoint. These are stories published between 1999 and 2011, covering his career, and they are all fall under the umbrella of speculative fiction, but as you read this collection you are reminded how silly genre distinctions are, because why can’t a love story be between a person and a haunted house? Who is to say that the unreal and the real cannot inhabit the same pages? Barzak’s skill here is making a foundation in reality so solid and believable that when the world’s glimmering shifts fantastic you are so swept up in it that it had to be that way. His fiction does not contain magic and monsters to illustrate magic and monsters but to show how beautiful and unknown and haunting our world is.

Reading these seventeen stories that stretch over twelve years we are given an overview of his career, of his concerns as a man. Identity, culture, sexuality, Ohio, rural and suburban youth, family, and always love. I believe love and the transition to adulthood stick out most clearly in his fiction and these are perhaps best captured in “The Language of Moths” and “Maps of Seventeen,” which are two of the longest stories in the collection, and, to me, the most perfect. Burgeoning sexuality, the disconnect of generations, the competitions and barriers that form within families, between siblings, the desire to get away from small town life, the comfort of home, and all the while, just beneath this so real reality, there is a bubbling, a slow rise of magic that shifts everything from a simple story about being a teenager and creates this sublime image of a girl and moths, of a man painting his lover.

While many of these stories traverse similar ground, they are surprisingly varied. There are ghost stories, steampunk adventures, distant future prostitution, surviving an apocalypse, cloning, saving a mermaid, and on and on. There are playful touches, surreal imaginings, harrowing hauntings, and beautiful masterpieces.

To put it short: this is a fantastic collection of fantastic fiction by a man soon to be a household name. His first novel, One for Sorrow, is being made into a film titled Jamie Marks is Dead, and you will know his name, so say it now, write it down, and look for his books. And if you are looking for an overview of Barzak’s writing, start here, with Before & Afterlives.

You will fall in love and it might hurt but it will be glorious.