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To claim your free subscription, please email us at the following address:

winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com

If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us!

In her recent review of this collection, contributor V. Jo Hsu writes:

In his debut publication, Rahul Mehta confounds reader preconceptions. Mehta’s short story collection, Quarantine, features a cast of homosexual Indian-American men. The book artfully interweaves sexual and racial tensions without resorting to tropes or creating an antagonistic “other.” In the title work, “Quarantine,” both the gay, American-born narrator and his traditionalist grandfather experience the isolation metaphorized by the story’s title. The two generations simultaneously search for belonging, prompting the older man’s plea to stay among the Hare Krishnas. Decrepit for most of the tale, grandfather Bapuji finally comes to life among the devotees, “leading the aarti, chanting ‘Hare Krishna, Hare Ram.’”

Hsu concludes her review, writing:

Ultimately, Quarantine becomes less a meditation on sexuality and race and more an investigation of human connections. While the collection does not shy from sex, it also marvels at the restorative effects of platonic touch. In “Ten Thousand Years,” the narrator’s boyfriend, Thomas, forms a deeper connection with his grandmother than the grandson ever had. In Thomas’s touch, the elderly woman finds a tenderness her grandson could no longer give. She dozes to his “hand on her forehead, gently stroking it until she [falls] asleep.” Similarly, “A Better Life” explores the sympathies between a college graduate and the wife of his host family. Mehta’s gentle, emotional prose culminates in one of the collection’s most tender scenes when, wordlessly, Lala offers Sanj the only comfort she can through her embrace.

• To read the entire review of this collection, please click here.
• “The Cure,” one story from the collection, appeared in Fifty-Two Stories
• Mehta wrote an essay titled “Coming Out” for Random Reads. It contains a touching, insightful passage about the relationship between his parents and his writing.
• You can also win one of three copies of this book, which we’ll be giving away next week to three of our Twitter followers.
• To be eligible for this giveaway (and all future ones), simply click over to Twitter and “follow” us (@fictionwriters).

To all of you who are already fans, thank you!

To claim your free copy, please email us at the following address:

winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com

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In this auspicious moment, Penkov delivers a heck of a book. Its bold subtitle promises us broad cross-sections of Bulgarian society, and he resists commonplace post-Communist sentimentality to show us a broad range of Bulgarian society—older generations who leave themselves behind in the face of change, younger generations that lose their way, people who leave home and come back changed, people who leave home and never come back at all. Penkov gives us specific, intimately drawn glimpses into the various Bulgarian species of this thing we call the human condition, and he does it with a well-honed style that is not merely ornamental.

Since the book’s subtitle invokes a nation and its history, it’s fitting that history plays a key supporting role in Penkov’s dramas, and he finds a variety of ways to invoke that history. The title story, about a man’s failed attempt to reach out to a beloved cousin, unfolds around the Serbian-Croatian conflict at the turn of the millennium. “The Night Horizon” conjures up the ghost of hostility between Bulgaria and Turkey, the nation that occupied it for centuries. “Buying Lenin,” which appeared in The Southern Review and Best American Short Stories 2008, gives us a Bulgarian émigré to America who buys Lenin’s preserved body on eBay for his grandfather back home. “A Picture with Yuki” wades into the problematic relationship between Bulgarians and gypsies.

This variety helps keep East of the West from covering the same ground over and over. Sometimes history remains silent and inscrutable, sometimes it’s an ever-present roadblock that must be danced around, and sometimes it weighs so heavily on people that they significantly limit their life choices. The seventy-one-year-old narrator of “Makedonija,” who has the broadest perspective on Bulgarian history of all the characters in the book, becomes as haunted by old letters from his dying wife’s long-ago first love as he is by his own memories of war.

I’ve seen men with their eyes gouged out. Men close to me, barefooted, with wrists tied together behind their backs. Hanged on the village square for everyone to see. As I lie in bed, eyes shut tightly, I still hear the rope creaking when the bodies sway, and I can hear the sound the bodies make swaying.

Image courtesy Paul Eliasberg

History, invoked in this way, metes out ancestral punishment on those who get caught beneath its steamroller by circumstance. In “The Night Horizon,” an obsessive Turkish-bagpipe maker foists a male name (Kemal) onto his daughter so that she can “properly” carry on his family craft. After all Turks are ordered to take Bulgarian names, he is taken away from his home (whether to imprisonment or death we never know) and his daughter takes up his ethno-historical conflict:

Sometimes Kemal took her bagpipe above the village to play with the echo. Once, she saw cars on the road below her, bumper to bumper, with mattresses, chairs, wooden cribs roped to the tops—blue, green, yellow, red cars, blood flowing away from the mountain…. Down the slope she watched people from the upper hamlets haul their households on their backs like camels…. Pots and pans and spoons and ladles and metal plates jumping wildly and catching the sun like gold coins. So Kemal struck her song with the bagpipe…

The characters in East of the West each have their own historical burdens to bear, and individuals—or families, like the one in the title story that gets torn apart because of a daughter’s love for a man across the river in Serbia—can’t carry them for very long. In “Cross Thieves,” which unfolds in 1997 as “once again the government has fallen,” Bulgarian history becomes a kind of currency in itself:

Gogo and I steal things and sell them, mostly to Gramps. We snuck into the biology classroom and took the skull our teacher used for an ashtray. Later Gramps claimed he resold it as an authentic skull from the 1944 Communist uprising…. We’ve stolen coils of copper wire from the physics lab (a Soviet leftover from the ’68 Prague spring), a map of the Balkan Wars (vintage, first edition!) a globe (with the USSR still whole and strong). In Bulgaria today there is a black market for everything, it seems.

In this collection we also see—no surprise for a formerly Marxist country—history manifesting itself as class conflict. In “The Letter,” a girl steals from an older compatriot woman who has learned English and, after marrying a British businessman, basks in relative luxury in a small village. The people identify Missis, as she is called, as being “British” because she has taken on a new identity. “This is how you learn your English,” she tells the young thief. “This is how you marry Mister and live rich.” Class conflict also shows up in “A Picture with Yuki,” in which the phrase “class enemy” is used the traditional Marxist way, as well as in “Devshirmeh,” where a down-and-out emigre to Texas watches his daughter disappear into a higher social class because his ex-wife marries an expat Bulgarian doctor.

In Penkov’s work we see class and history affecting the lives of almost everyone, and the English language often appears, like it does in “The Letter,” as a dividing line. It is part of the complex negotiation with Bulgarian-ness, foreign-ness, and the ever-present issue of social class. The elderly protagonist of “Makedonija” tells us, “I listen to the English and all the words sound like a single word to me, a word devoid of history and meaning, completely free.” The émigré narrator of “Buying Lenin” “memorized words and grammar rules and practiced tongue twisters, specifically designed for Eastern Europeans…. Remember the money, remember the money, remember the money. Phrases like this, I’d heard, helped to break your tongue.”

Perhaps Penkov’s best and most crystalline expression of Bulgarian-ness comes in “Devshiermeh,” the final story in the collection (and, as is often the case with first books, the longest). Émigré narrator Mihail (Americanized, to his annoyance, as Michael even by his Bulgarian ex-wife) takes his daughter Elli for the weekend and goes fishing with a fellow ne’er-do-well friend named John Martin:

“Yad, John Martin,” I explain, “is what lines the insides of every Bulgarian soul. It’s yad that propels us, like a motor, onward. Yad is like envy, but it’s not simply that. It’s like spite, rage, anger, but more elegant, more complicated. It’s like pity for someone, regret for something you did or did not do, for a chance you missed, for an opportunity you squandered. All those feelings in one word. Yad….”

Though yad might not line every Bulgarian soul, it aptly describes the free-floating tension that filters through the psyches of Penkov’s characters. Yad accounts for their endless wrestling with their national identity, so strong that it survives crossing borders and cutting off ties to the past. A great quality of Penkov’s stories is the sudden—but, in retrospect, inevitable—emergence of his characters’ destinies. At their halfway or two-thirds points the stories turn, and around that corner its people fall inextricably into the nest they have made.

This is expressed most beautifully in “A Picture with Yuki,” in which a Bulgarian/Japanese couple living in Chicago travel to Bulgaria to seek fertility treatments—a return, for the husband, fraught with all the wrestling over foreign-ness and Bulgarian-ness that his yad can handle. During a drive to the country, they may or may not hit a gypsy boy on a bicycle, who later falls into a coma and dies. The boy’s father, not knowing their possible role in this death, asks the couple to take a picture of the dead child for his nekrolog—a death announcement to be posted at the cemetery gates.

The gypsies bring the boy outside and prop him up on pillows to take his picture, then invite the couple to stay for dinner. The couple never mentions the bicycle accident, and afterwards the weight of their uncertain guilt threatens to demolish their relationship and rebuild it around what is unspoken. In moments like this, Penkov’s work supersedes the confines of any national literature and presents us as we are—with our worries, with our yad, with our furtive gropings toward meaning—no matter how much we may wish to be some other way.

Further Links & Resources

• Check out other FWR pieces on Bulgarian literature.
• Here’s an interview with Penkov in The Dallas Observer’s book blog.
• Read an archive of Penkov’s work on Blackbird.
• Penkov offers a list of how to write about Bulgaria in GRANTA.

In the introduction to his recent interview with Machart, Aaron J. Cance describes being literally “thunderstruck” by reading The Wake of Forgiveness. He writes:

Machart’s prose was hard, economic, and had a razor-fine edge. The first six pages, alone, were crushing, and left me feeling run through, utterly bereft. The brutal physicality of the book confidently rivals anything written by Cormac McCarthy but, miraculously, just beneath its unyielding exterior, like a whisper in an empty room, lies a numinous spirituality, the subtle luminescence of the human condition, and it is the balance between these two elements that makes The Wake of Forgiveness such an exquisite book.

Of Machart’s debut collection, Men in the Making, Cance goes on to write:

Although comparing short stories to a novel is something akin to comparing peas to carrots, it was a relief to see some of the same hard prose in the shorter pieces. The stories, like the novel, seem to deal with the navigation of a large indifferent world by a soul in a body. The tension between the physical body, with all its hungers and desires, and the ghost in the machine, the internal voice that has been molded by everything it has seen and done, is still, ever, an integral part of this work…

The stories that make up Men in the Making, of course, have more to offer than an exploration of this one tension. They are, in fact, a much more complex examination of what it is to be a man in the twenty-first century, while, all the while, navigating the space between the two aforementioned poles. Machart crafts a careful meditation on our desire to protect those whom we love: our wives, our parents, our children and, were this his final conclusion, this collection would only be traversing an already well worn path. What makes these stories provocative, what gives them additional depth, is his determination that men are, ultimately, unable to save, or even protect, the people they care most deeply about, and his incisive study of the ways in which the twenty-first century male reconciles himself to this inability, while struggling to retain a sense of his own masculinity.

To read Aaron J. Canc’es complete interview with the author, please click here.

• Read Machart’s brilliant and haunting story “The Last One Left Arkansas,” published by Zoetrope. Two words: debarking drum.
• You can also read his short-short story “Something for the Poker Table,” published in Five Points.
• Check out Machart’s website for more information, including upcoming author events.
• You can also win one of three signed copies of this book, which we’ll be giving away next week to three of our Twitter followers.

To be eligible for this giveaway (and all future ones), simply click over to Twitter and “follow” us (@fictionwriters).

To all of you who are already fans, thank you!

It was almost exactly a year ago that I first read Bruce Machart’s novel, The Wake of Forgiveness. Two colleagues of mine had returned from the Mountains and Plains Independent Bookseller’s Conference in Denver, Colorado, abuzz about a young new author who had appeared on the literary scene, as if out of thin air. His debut, they claimed, was remarkable. Advanced reading copies appeared and were passed around, but I initially kept a safe distance on account of an innate resistance to all books praised lavishly. When I did get around to reading The Wake of Forgiveness, which I felt compelled to do because its author was visiting Salt Lake City, I was thunderstruck (and I use this expression without any possible sense of guilt over the use of hyperbole).  Machart’s prose was hard, economic, and had a razor-fine edge. The first six pages, alone, were crushing, and left me feeling run through, utterly bereft. The brutal physicality of the book confidently rivals anything written by Cormac McCarthy but, miraculously, just beneath its unyielding exterior, like a whisper in an empty room, lies a numinous spirituality, the subtle luminescence of the human condition, and it is the balance between these two elements that makes The Wake of Forgiveness such an exquisite book.

There is a good deal of anticipation for Machart’s forthcoming collection of short stories, Men in the Making, out on October 25^th. Although comparing short stories to a novel is something akin to comparing peas to carrots, it was a relief to see some of the same hard prose in the shorter pieces. The stories, like the novel, seem to deal with the navigation of a large indifferent world by a soul in a body. The tension between the physical body, with all its hungers and desires, and the ghost in the machine, the internal voice that has been molded by everything it has seen and done, is still, ever, an integral part of this work. In the novel, which follows two families in Dalton, Texas, one father, Villaseñor, is hungry for a long lasting family dynasty, while another, Vaclav Skala, is hungry for land, the Skala boys are starving for affection, and Karel, his youngest son, longs for absolution.

In Machart’s short story, “What You’re Walking Around Without,” the character Dean Covin is always hungry for something that he can’t quite articulate. By the end of the tale, he comes to accept “that to be a man, a whole man, is to remain forever in need,” but what the reader finds in this story is a more clearly pronounced distinction between the physical and the spiritual, and the lack that the characters feel seems to stem from a disconnection between the two. Covin, it turns out, transports human organs and tissue, and even the occasional stillborn infant, but he most frequently carries female organs because “their bodies more often betray them.” These bodies have no voice. Covin, in fact, says prayers for them because they cannot speak for themselves. By way of contrast, one of the other drivers who works with Covin, a character known only as Driver eighty-two, is the precise opposite:  a voice without a body. In “Among the Living Amidst the Trees,” the body’s betrayal of the soul is most strongly manifested, particularly through the character of Glenda’s father, Tricky, who is bald from chemotherapy. His body is, quite literally, killing him.

The stories that make up Men in the Making, of course, have more to offer than an exploration of this one tension. They are, in fact, a much more complex examination of what it is to be a man in the twenty-first century, while, all the while, navigating the space between the two aforementioned poles. Machart crafts a careful meditation on our desire to protect those whom we love: our wives, our parents, our children and, were this his final conclusion, this collection would only be traversing an already well worn path. What makes these stories provocative, what gives them additional depth, is his determination that men are, ultimately, unable to save, or even protect, the people they care most deeply about, and his incisive study of the ways in which the twenty-first century male reconciles himself to this inability, while struggling to retain a sense of his own masculinity.

The Wake of Forgiveness introduced readers, last year, to a lean, highly intelligent prose artist of the first order. Men in the Making shows us that Machart is equally adept working with the short story form which, by his own admission, is both his point of departure and first love. I’m always hesitant, though, to oversell a book. Much can go wrong. In this case, I have little fear of readers building unrealistic expectations, particularly where The Wake of Forgiveness is concerned. The short stories, striking as they are, had little chance of equaling Machart’s startling debut novel but are, all the same, worth the reader’s investment. My real fear in lavishing praise is that the author will think that I’d either like to borrow his car or that I’m full of shit. I was able to dispel both suspicions, and to talk candidly with Machart about his work the night of his visit to Salt Lake City and, on and off, afterward.

Interview

Aaron Cance: I think a good point of departure in our discussion of your work would be the keen interest demonstrated in both the novel and in your short stories in exploring our bifurcated existence.  You seem very much drawn to explore the tenuous balance that we all must maintain between our physical existence and the beings that seem to exist within, and yet somehow beyond, our physicality.

Bruce Machart: That seems fair to me. Eudora Welty called place the “lesser angel” of fiction, by which she meant, I must assume, that character is the arc-angel. For me, it seems that you can’t really have one without the other.

And as your characters grow and change, as they evolve, they all seem to find themselves navigating, as they are best capable, the uncharted space between these two aspects of being.

Feelings, reactions to conflicts, thoughts – all of them are intertwined vitally in the two places each of us inhabits at once: where we are now and where we are from.

Which is what gives your character Karel Skala such extraordinary depth. Your choice to stage the narrative in three distinct periods of Karel’s life allows your readers to follow his development with a keener understanding of important past events that have shaped him than might have been possible with a single, continuous fictional timeline.

I hope that’s true. I think the structure of the novel has given some readers fits, but it came to me rather instinctively (unlike so much of what I do), and with very few exceptions, the reader discovers the characters’ dramatic present and history in much the same way I did.

So Karel became more and more fully realized in the three different time periods of the book simultaneously, developing, in each of these periods, uniquely, with fidelity to who he was at that point in his life.

Once I realized how and why I’d structured the book that way I had, I went back [to each piece] to ensure a kind of three-part narrative arc. I hope that it works to instill, in the novel, the kind of time-bound conflict that Karel experiences.

A friend and mentor of yours, Melanie Rae Thon, at the University of Utah, in a description of character development process, once explained to me that she thought of her characters as very real people, that as a work progressed she became better and better acquainted with them. She was able to discover them as she worked. You seem to have created three variations of Karel simultaneously, which sounds inordinately more difficult than simply fleshing out a character, simply creating someone.

Steinbeck once wrote that “a good writer always works toward the impossible.” To me, the evocation of the complex and instrumental and numerous intersections of our exterior and interior landscapes is one of those “impossibilities” that we must try, knowing we will likely fail, to render faithfully.

In a great many places in the novel, you seem to have emphasized a brutal and inescapable physicality in your characters. In some places it manifests itself through circumstances in which they take on the roles of animals, such as the scene where the Skala boys are actually strapped to the plow, as beasts of burden, while their father digs along behind them. In other places, simple parallels are created. Sophie, for example, is described as “a good woman [who] . . . endured the indiscretions the way a good horse will endure shoeing and hard harness work.” Are these narrative devices used as counterweights to the book’s more spiritual underpinnings?

You know, I don’t really know. This seems to me to be more the kind of detail-oriented inquiry that I think is better left to readers to make. Who was it that said that we should trust the art, not the artist? That always seemed like good advice to me.

I have heard that expression, although I couldn’t tell you who coined it. I guess you would lean more, then, toward Roland Barthes’ notion that the author/artist ceases to give meaning to the work when it leaves his or her hands, and lands in the hands of the reader?

I do, but that sounds as if there is some finality to the author’s role. There is, I think, but only after the reader has turned the final page. I have made some mistakes, undoubtedly, negligence of research, and the like.

Well sure, at some point, your involvement in the work, as a piece of art, comes to a complete end.

Right. Once the book becomes a product, and someone pays for that product and takes it home, my opportunity to shape it has passed. And that’s exactly as it should be. If the book works, one would hope that it works on numerous levels, that it “contains multitudes,” but I have to accept the probability that, for some, there may be impediments, entirely of my making, to the suspension of disbelief that may prevent even the first reading.

It really must be a bit disconcerting, as a published writer, to trust that you’ve “stoked the coals” of the book enough that readers will find what you’d like them to.

It worries me to some extent, this notion that I may have failed. I certainly may have on some level. I think that it’s all but unavoidable because of the nature of the form.

But what is important is that some arc of narrative transmission has taken place, some direct transmission has taken place between you and your readers. You have created a strong, energetic piece of art that you can set free in the world.

If you don’t mind, I’d really like unpack the notion of physicality in your work a little further. I think that the places in both your novel and your collection of short stories where your characters are behaving most like animals, these places really hold a mirror up to that part of our nature.

I think that’s right. What I really do believe is that we have too much of a sense of our own superiority in the world of beasts, in the physical world, in a world that is far greater than our ability to understand it.

These characters remind us that, at the end of the day, we are not as refined as we might think we are.

But that is what we are. We are highly evolved animals. But, that being said, I do believe that these [experiential] moments are a function of what I said earlier: a farm boy, a farmer, a rural woman—all of these will likely see the world around them, and the worlds within them, vis-à-vis the landscape in which they live.

The men in the novel seem to rear their children the same way they would train a horse. An untrained horse must be broken, then nurtured.

In regard to this, I really appreciate what one reader has said, that the Skala boys are literally tethered to the earth. This is the kind of metaphorical nuance that comes when I write, largely, from the subconscious . . . which seems to me the well from which I draw most of my better scenes and sentences.

In more than one place in The Wake of Forgiveness, the relationship between fathers and sons pivots on the whip. Karel and his brothers are strapped into the plow harness and are actually lashed to work, and to the land. For Karel, the whip is “the closest he ever gets to his father’s touch.” Shortly after the Skala/Dalton race is over, Patrick Dalton, infuriated at his loss, borrows Skala’s whip to use on his own son. This Father/Son relationship that is realized through the whip, and the sense of sacrifice that lies beneath the surface seems, to me, to have religious underpinnings. You spoke to that when we were out, after your reading.

I was raised a Catholic, and I am still a practicing, if sometimes failed and hesitant, Catholic. Some of that conflicted appreciation for things sacramental and ritualistic have found their way, probably unconsciously, into the work.

So there is an interconnectedness between the subconscious well that you draw from and your own conscious beliefs.

There always has been, for me. My stories, too, find these thematic gasses bubbling to the surface from the submerged bedrock of my faith and my own questions about faith. The whips in the story aren’t conscious symbols of flagellation or the Passion, but I wouldn’t guess that that particular reading is anything other than valid, nonetheless.

Some of the short stories in Men in the Making are also about fathers and sons. In “What You’re Walking around Without,” Dean Covin and John Dalton have a tenuous father/son relationship and “We Don’t Talk That Way in Texas” explores some of the more difficult aspects of the father/son relationship through three generations. In “The Last One Left in Arkansas,” the story revolves around Tom’s relationship with his wife and two boys, and, returning to the notion of animal parallels, the Labradors, Bo and Luke, are shadow images of Tom’s boys in the story, Mattie and Nate, and the two dogs share as close a bond as the boys.

We’re all raised on stories of fathers and sons, and some of the universally resonant stories of the Bible feature the dissolution and/or conflicts made manifest by these filial relationships. We are asked by our fathers, at some point, to suffer. It pains them to ask it of us, to surrender us to it, to resign themselves to witnessing it, but there’s not a reasonably self-aware person on earth who doesn’t recognize, at some point, the necessity of human suffering.

But it’s not always without its own purpose.
Certainly not. Whether it acts as the relief against which we can experience joy, or simply as the means by which we gain the humility that spawns empathy, or as the common experience that renders human experience “knowable.” As Sonny says in [James] Baldwin’s short story, “Sonny’s Blues,” “No, there’s no way not to suffer.”

It’s an unavoidable part of the human condition. Let me ask you this: what influence do you think your own relationship with your father or with your son has had on your writing?

Father/son relationships are fraught with tension. And this does not, to my mind, preclude love or affection or strong bonds. But when I look back at my childhood, I remember how BIG my father seemed. He was physically big and capacious and omniscient and omnipresent . . . and how does a boy ever grow up to equal that? Now that I’m a father, I am struck by the way my son puts his hand palm to palm with my own, taking these measurements, and I know at least part of what he is thinking, what he’s feeling. I’m a better writer for my experiences as a father, but being a son is all you really need. Feeling small, feeling desires without any ability to satisfy them, being dependent, being egocentric in an expansive and indifferent world—this is all you need to experience to know where good stories come from. They come from longing and self-doubt. I sometimes wonder what would happen if we could protect our sons and daughters from their own desires. Would we save them or destroy them?

It’s really interesting, to me, that you’ve couched it that way. The stories in Men in the Making seem to meditate heavily on notions of what it is to be a man in today’s world. The most painful part of this meditation seems to be the realization of your male protagonists that they are unable, ultimately, to protect the ones they love from the “expansive and indifferent world” that you’ve spoken of, and their painful reconciliation with that inability.

Absolutely.

We’ve spent quite a bit of time discussing some of the more metaphysical aspects of your writing, and of writing in general. I think what I’d really like to wrap up our time together with is a few questions about the physical mechanics of the craft. You mentioned to me, at one point, that when you signed on with Houghton Mifflin for your novel, The Wake of Forgiveness, that the deal also included your short story collection, Men in the Making, which will be released October 25. In your formative years, as a writer, did you visualize yourself as a novelist or were you primarily at work on short stories? Were the stories a form that you consider your starting point, or were the seeds of the novel already slowly germinating?

Short stories are my first love. I started fumbling around with stories because I read Eudora Welty’s story “Powerhouse,” and I wanted to know how and why it worked such magic on me. Most of the stories in Men in the Making were written before I went to work on the novel, and I’ve always found myself incapable of working on more than one project at a time. I don’t know which parts, if any, of The Wake of Forgiveness were there all along. I don’t know if I really even believe in latent stories, stories lying in wait for us to become big enough or experienced enough or insightful enough to find them. I suppose that I find self-awareness vital to personal and social development, but it’s crippling for me as a writer. If I know why the hell I’m writing a story while I’m writing it, then I can’t imagine spending the time to get it on the page. There would be no point.

Could you describe your process? Some writers work extremely methodically, and with a great deal of discipline (which no one in his or her right mind would dismiss as unimportant) reserving the same two or three hours (or more) a day for nothing but writing. Some writers are struck by periodic bursts of inspiration, and write in streaks. Most, I think, lie somewhere between these two poles. How would you describe how it works for you?

I’ve recently moved to New England, where they have these wonderful and damp and dark things called basements (no such thing in Houston), and I have a great metaphor for this: I am a sump pump. I wait while my understanding of the lives of the characters fills the unlit basement of my imagination, and then I pump it out in a few loud, violent surges. I suspect that I give my editor and agent fits when they call or email after a month has gone by, asking how a story is coming, and I tell them that I’ve made no progress. But the truth is, I’m still there . . .the pump is still plugged in the electricity is connected.  I’m down there in the dark where I belong. It’s just that there’s not yet enough water to worry about. When I was at work on The Wake of Forgiveness, I often went weeks at a time without writing even a sentence . . . but then wrote the last seventy-five pages in a little over a week’s time.

I’ll close with the question that you’ve probably heard more than any other, particularly out on the road touring for the novel. Who would you say your two or three biggest influences were? What singular gift did you receive from each of them?

Faulkner and Welty for the unapologetic lyricism and the attention to the way place inhabits character just as surely as character inhabits place; Richard Yates and Andre Dubus for their unwavering empathy for their characters . . . and my financée, Marya, who is at work on her first novel. When I come down the stairs at 5:30 am, she’s already there with the story working its way out of her and onto the page. It’s humbling. I know that I’ve done it, and know that I will do it again, but I still come down the stairs thinking, God, I wish I could do that. She teaches me, reminds me, how to want the story, how to lose oneself in it, how to surrender to it.

Are you working on a new book now?

Yes, a new novel called Until Daylight Delivers Me. There’s water in the basement. Not enough yet, but it’s rising steadily.

Further Links and Resources

>> Mary Stewart Atwell interviews Kevin Brockmeier

>> Steven Wingate interviews Andrew Krivak, whose novel has just been nominated for the National Book Award.

>> Carolyn Gan interviews Edwidge Danticat

>> Or, consider Joshua Bodwell’s essay on the problem of autobiography in Andre Dubus, one of Machart’s influences.

Watch an interview with Bruce Machart with Joe Viglione on Visual Radio:

To claim your copy of this collection, please email us at the following address:

winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com

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In the opening of his recent review of Orientation, contributing editor J.T. Bushnell captures the sense of excitement that so many readers have felt anticipating the release of this collection. He writes:

If you’re like me, there are books you like and books you love, and then there are books that make you remember where you read them. This book is one of those. The nine stories in Daniel Orozco’s debut, Orientation, are so remarkable, so funny and dark and innovative, so smart and stirring and sad, that they left me pounding the sand on which my girlfriend and I had laid our blanket, muttering, “So good, so good.” We’d made a day trip to the Oregon coast to celebrate an anniversary, but I’ll remember nothing about the trip better than reading this collection.

I have, after all, been waiting for it since 2004. That was when I first came across Orozco’s short fiction in Harper’s Magazine. I was so stunned and moved and entertained that I hustled across the library to a computer, where I found another story of his in the archives of Zoetrope: All-Story. It was electric, mesmerizing. A couple years later I found another one anthologized in a text I was using to teach a fiction-writing course, then a couple years later a new one in a Best American anthology. Each time I was dazzled, and I searched for his book, eager to read more. But there was no book. Not until now.

Happily, Bushnell concludes, the book has been more than worth the wait: “Orientation is, without question and without hyperbole, one of the best books I’ve ever read. I can’t find words emphatic enough that aren’t already printed on its dust jacket, but I can assure you that all the words there are true.”

In addition to this review, we’ve also recently published an interview with Daniel Orozco. At the end of the summer, Rock Bottom author and contributor Michael Shilling talked by phone with Orozco. The two discussed “craft, teaching, and MFA haters,” among other things. Below is an exchange in answer to Shilling’s initial question about the unique structures of many of the stories in Orientation:

Orozco: Every story that I write feels like a kind of experiment. The challenge in crafting a story is how to engage a reader emotionally, intellectually, experientially. I’m always looking for some kind of challenge, some kind of structural or narrative constraint to try and figure out. For “Officers Weep,” it was, Can I tell a story that is written in the form of a police blotter? And in a way the structure determines how the story’s gonna go. So yes, I begin with form and then fill in with character and engagement. Jerome Stern talks about the “shapes of fiction,” and I think that’s a good analogy, because I need a shape for the story and then I start figuring out what’s going to happen in it.

Shilling: That approach is refreshing. I think a lot of writers are afraid of playing with structure because of self-consciousness, these false distinctions between the “realistic” and the “experimental,” and if they play around with structure it’ll be seen as a gimmick. As if a gimmick is always bad.

Orozco: Right! I mean, the story “Orientation” is a gimmick. You can only do it once for a limited amount of pages, and the same goes for “Officers Weep” because I can’t do a series of stories structured as police blotters. But so what? All that matters is that a story, whatever the structure, must be grounded in the humane.

To read Michael Shilling’s complete interview with the author, please click here.

Author photo courtesy U Idaho website

• Don’t miss J.T. Bushnell’s September review of Orientation.
• For more about Daniel Orozco, visit his faculty page on the University of Idaho’s Website for the Department of English.
• Read Orozco’s “I Run Every Day” in the archives of Zoetrope: All-Story.
• You can also win one of three signed copies of this book, which we’ll be giving away next week to three of our Twitter followers.

To be eligible for this giveaway (and all future ones), simply click over to Twitter and “follow” us (@fictionwriters).

To all of you who are already fans, thank you!

Orientation, his long-anticipated story collection recently out from Faber and Faber, shows off this unique set of nimble narrative chops, so it’s no surprise that pieces from the collection have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Writing, and The Pushcart Prize anthology. In addition, he’s been the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a finalist for a National Magazine Award in fiction. Via phone from his home in Moscow, Idaho, where he is on the fiction faculty at the University of Idaho, Daniel and I talked about craft, teaching, and MFA haters.

Interview

Michael Shilling: Among other writers, you’ve been one of these “best kept secrets” whose collection is deeply anticipated. How does it feel for Orientation to finally be out?

Daniel Orozco: It’s nice. [Laughs.] I never thought I’d get this collection published.

Considering that you’re a short story writer, and how little publishers want to publish short story collections, it’s quite an achievement. Was finding a publisher an arduous process?

For a long time, publishing people told [writers], “Hey, these stories are great, but do you have a novel? Because nobody wants a short story collection.” So yeah, I pretty much gave up on the idea that I’d get the collection published, and that was the reason I started a novel, out of a kind of career necessity. But then I finally found an agent who told me she could sell the collection, but we had to wait until, as she said, the stars lined up. And they did. So it’s just fantastic.

Your stories really run the structural gamut, and those structural choices create different emotional tones and narrative priorities. Taking “Officers Weep” as an example, how do you think those choices affected the way those stories ended up?

Every story that I write feels like a kind of experiment. The challenge in crafting a story is how to engage a reader emotionally, intellectually, experientially. I’m always looking for some kind of challenge, some kind of structural or narrative constraint to try and figure out. For “Officers Weep,” it was, Can I tell a story that is written in the form of a police blotter? And in a way the structure determines how the story’s gonna go. So yes, I begin with form and then fill in with character and engagement. Jerome Stern talks about the “shapes of fiction,” and I think that’s a good analogy, because I need a shape for the story and then I start figuring out what’s going to happen in it.

That approach is refreshing. I think a lot of writers are afraid of playing with structure because of self-consciousness, these false distinctions between the “realistic” and the “experimental,” and if they play around with structure it’ll be seen as a gimmick. As if a gimmick is always bad.

Right! I mean, the story “Orientation” is a gimmick. You can only do it once for a limited amount of pages, and the same goes for “Officers Weep” because I can’t do a series of stories structured as police blotters. But so what? All that matters is that a story, whatever the structure, must be grounded in the humane.

Agreed. Other stories in the collection also have specific structural choices. Like, in “Somoza’s Dream,” we jump around in time somewhat, but it still manages to have a pretty tense momentum. How did that story come together?

The first drafts of “Somoza’s Dream” were much more expansive. There were flashbacks to Somoza’s childhood, for example, so I was going to move back and forth in time more. But it read more as a biographical story, and I decided to abandon that thematic approach because I figured out that I was trying to make this man who wasn’t very interesting more interesting that he was. So once I gave up this autobiographical framing, I started populating the story with people around him. I knew that I wanted to begin with the assassination and then return to it, but that was pretty much the structural demand I made upon the story. Once I had that in place, other elements of the writing started coming together.

So why Somoza? Did you have a particular interest in the Nicaraguan revolution?

The story came from a couple of places. To start, it came out of an exercise at Bread Loaf, in a class taught by Reginald McKnight about telling lies convincingly, which I decided to do through historicality. I did a three-page scene about G. Gordon Liddy.

I have a Liddy story too!

Really? Yeah, he’s a fascinating character to take on. So I had him meeting Somoza, and then over the years the story shifted focus solely to Somoza. Also, my family is from Nicaragua, and I thought it would be interesting to engage with something from my political and cultural past, and really put the screws to this guy, really run him down because he really was a bad guy, and I had a lot of fun just “writing” him.

The agreed history is just one story, right?

Yeah. I mean, E.L. Doctorow says that history is a story, between the historian and his facts. So in writing a story based on historical figure, it’s interesting, the line between when you stick to the facts and render it with a certain verisimilitude and when you veer away.

Writers such as Jim Shepard have gone a long way in getting people to de-snobify about this false difference, or at least acknowledge the much more porous relationship between fiction and history.

Absolutely, and of course, nobody ever nails him for anything because he does his research, and [from a storytelling angle] his work is so imbued with the specificity and personal experience of the characters, who more often than not are on the periphery of historical events–which is a very smart approach.

Let’s talk about “Shakers,” which I thought was a really subtle use of the earthquake described in the story as a metaphor for “shakings,” be they personal or geological.

Yeah! [Laughs.] You know, an earthquake that huge would never happen, so it immediately becomes a metaphorical thing. It was a way of bringing all these individual and solitary lives together. So though you have these separate stories of individuals in solitude, you have them all gathered in one place, reacting to this one event, and touching on what we talked about before, that structural component was what drew me to whether I could write it or not.

Was the story ever longer? I ask because it reads like you had ten characters, and you closed your eyes and pointed at four and worked with them. Like there could have been six other people that you could have equally expanded upon and connected.

That’s great to hear that it reads like it could have gone on and on, because I’m not one of those writers who sits down and writes seventy pages and then gets it down to twenty. Me, I write two pages and get it up to twenty, and that’s how “Shakers” went, though I wrote it in five weeks, which is the fastest I’ve ever written a story.

That’s interesting, because it reads like it took a extraordinary effort of discipline to bring it down to the length it is—it could have been a novella.

I did want it to read that way, fluid in a sense, like it could have gone anywhere. I probably had one or two narrative lines that I cut out, but yes, there was something unusual about the writing of “Shakers,” organic and intuitive, different than any other story I’d written. It felt like a gift.

Which is nice, because they usually feel more like births. [Both laugh.] Another thing about the story I loved was that it felt, through this confluence of the personal and natural, like you were telling a geographic history of California, an accounting of the really different landscapes that make up California. It reminded me of that Pavement song off Crooked Rain, “Unfair,” which takes on this same confluence.

Cool! They must have read John McPhee.

Doubtless. And both the song and your story end up being celebrations of California.

Yeah, I mean one of the reasons I enjoyed writing “Shakers” so much was in rendering these landscapes. I’ve lived in Idaho for eight years and I miss California – its vastness – and so in the story I really wanted to revel in that vastness.

It reads like a love letter.

It is, very much so. And what better way to write a love letter to California than via an earthquake?

You couldn’t get much more integral to California than an earthquake. Even the ending, with the guy in the desert who’s probably going to die, [he] has this surge of love for the natural beauty around him as he wastes away with his broken leg. It’s weirdly funny, a demented commercial for the California tourist board, like, “California, right on!”

Yes! The ending is ironic but it’s also true. You know, I like combining the absurd and the profound, and I like that the story accomplishes that.

“Shakers” isn’t the only story that speaks to matters of place and geography. For example, “Only Connect,” which is so infused with the essence of Seattle, however abstract that sounds. Living here, I can tell you that you captured something on the page that encapsulates this temperate rain forest so well, and so mysteriously.

Yeah, and that story is the love letter to Washington.

Not surprising that it was published in Ecotone, considering the magazine’s focus on “place” in fiction, where setting is more the foundation of the story more than, say, character or humor or plot. “Only Connect” could only happen in Seattle and the surrounding areas it touches on, like Bellingham and Astoria.

It reminds me of what Flannery O’Connor said, which is that you can do whatever you want on the level of theme, but that the world of the story has to be real. You know, I tell my students that a story doesn’t work unless you ground it in a physical world that is concrete, that we can really imagine.

What are your thoughts on teaching?

You know, my goal on both the undergraduate and graduate level is not primarily to select the best writers and nurture them and bring them into the world. My goal is not to baptize the ones with the gift and tell the others, I’m sorry, my son, you must go to vocational school. That’s not the job. Ultimately teaching writing is the flip-side of teaching reading, by which I mean creating readers who are able to critically and thoughtfully respond to texts.  On the undergraduate level especially, I try to dispel that, number one, your opinion about a story matters. No. I don’t care if you like it or not–how does it work? This is about learning craft. Number two, students think, well, I can write whatever I want. No, you can’t. The short story is a very demanding, exacting form – once you understand what went into crafting that story, then you understand where your response comes from, and that makes you a smart reader.

That echoes what Robert Coover said, that his job as a writing teacher is to make better readers.

And if better writers are the result, that’s great too. Of course, that’s particular to the graduate level, where you’re aiming to find people capable of mastering the craft. On the graduate level, it can be very gratifying because the level of discussion and engagement is deeper.

More specifically, what about the arguments for and against MFAs?

I guess my rather benign defense of MFA programs in response to that question stems from my . . . um, irritation with writing programs being singled out as needing defending.  So: Can you really teach writing?  Well, it depends on whom you’re teaching it to.  You can’t teach writing to anybody, but you can—just as in the teaching of medicine or engineering—teach it to somebody who has the drive to learn it and the knack to get better at it.  The difference is that if you don’t show evidence of the drive and the knack, you get drummed out of medicine and engineering.  We in writing aren’t quick to do that, because writing isn’t just a thing you learn, it’s a thing you do.  It takes two or three years to get an MFA, and within that time the drive and the knack may be either fully present or they may be submerged, hidden, yet to surface.  I’m not going to shut somebody down just because they’re not at the top of their game.  (If somebody did that to me years ago, I wouldn’t be a writer, and you wouldn’t be interviewing me.)

I’m not saying that everybody who gets an MFA eventually becomes a writer; most don’t.  But laying the groundwork in craft and technique, mentoring everybody—rather than separating wheat from chaff—can certainly help the ones who stick with it.  To paraphrase the character Joe Gideon in Bob Fosse’s great allegory of writing programs, All That Jazz: I may not make you a good dancer, but I can make you a better dancer.

People like to have a strong opinion on MFAs in one direction or the other. With the haters, I often feel like, Really? People trying to become better humans in this tiny, unrenumerative way? That upsets you?

There are worse things to do than graduate someone with an MFA and send a bad writer out into the world. You know, you send out a bad engineer or a bad doctor and then you’ve got problems.

That’s why you don’t get an MFA in being a doctor. Really, MFA stands for Victimless Crime. [Both laugh.]

If I have a truly gifted undergrad, I will mention the MFA to them as something they might consider. But for other students who want to keep writing, I’m reminded of what a teacher told me, which is “Find your metaphor.” You know, find something else you’re good at to do while you write.

So you’ve got the collection out in the stores—unless you’re superstitious about talking about works in progress, would you mind talking about what you are working on now?

I won’t go into too much detail, but I am working on a novel, and am soon going out to UCross in Sheridan, Wyoming, where I’ll spend four weeks there focusing on it.

Sweet Sheridan. I was in a pretty epic snowstorm there once.

That’s why I’m going in August. [Laughs.] I’ve been working on it for about five years, then had to leave it for six months or so while we were getting the collection out, but now I’m full-bore on it, with due date looming. I started it grudgingly, out of necessity, but I have enjoyed figuring out the structure of the long form.

Jesus, novels are tough to write, huh?

They really are.

It’s like, musicians call it “running on blues power.” It’s just such an act of faith and love and inspiration, but you’re not sure if you’re actually running on, you know, quality [both laugh]. Considering that before this project you’ve always written short stories, has writing a novel made you appreciate them equally? Do you have a preference?

At this point I do prefer short stories to novels, both writing them and reading them. Not to take away from the novel, but like I said, the short story is a very precise, exacting form that’s also very artificial. I think the novel is more organic—it’s longer and baggier—and so for me it’s much harder to write a novel. I have had a hard time being engaged with it for five years, sustaining this interest, but I’m genuinely excited about this novel and eager to get back to work on it.

Further Links & Resources

Daniel Orozco / image from the University of Idaho's website

• Read J.T. Bushnell’s review of Orozco’s debut collection. In it, he writes: “Orientation is, without question and without hyperbole, one of the best books I’ve ever read. I can’t find words emphatic enough that aren’t already printed on its dust jacket, but I can assure you that all the words there are true.”
• You can also check out our most current features on other debut collections right here.
• Or check out some of our favorites from Story Month.
• For more on this author’s work, visit Professor Orozco’s University of Idaho page.
• Read some vintage Orozco: his story “I Run Every Day” published a decade ago in the fall 2001 issue of Zoetrope (Vol 5, No 3).
• I’ll take some Chemical Brothers and a side of zither with that, thanks: Largehearted Boy features Orozco’s sonic selections for his stories in their fabulous Book Notes series.
• And be sure to pick up a copy of Orientation: And Other Stories at your local indie bookstore.