Adios, Happy Homeland! is Menendez’s fourth book of fiction. Her first collection of stories, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, was a 2001 New York Times Notable book of the year and the title story won a Pushcart Prize. In addition to her other books—Loving Che (2004) and The Last War (2009)—she’s worked as a journalist and prize-winning columnist for the Miami Herald. Now Menendez is establishing a creative writing program at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands. She and I met in cyberworld and chatted about balancing the memories of the past with the demands of the present.

Let’s begin with process, Ana. I read your first collection, In Cuba, I Was a German Shepherd, when I first started writing fiction and I remember being shocked that you could link stories that way.  At what point in the process does the tie that binds them together emerge?  Do you begin with character or idea or story?

With In Cuba I began with one character: Maximo. And almost every story grew out of his relationships. It was a fictional treatment of what I had seen in my own community. My mother was forever running into someone who knew someone who knew someone with whom she went to school in Cuba. It seemed to me as a child that all Cubans knew each other.

Was it a similar process with your latest collection, Adios, Happy Homeland! ?

With Adios it was different. These stories grew out of the prologue, which itself grew out of someone else’s fiction: Borges’ “An Examination of the Works of Herbert Quain.”  With In Cuba I wrote the stories as a spider spins its web. With Adios, the writing was much more linear: one story led to another, led to another in a pretty direct way.

There is a shared thematic link of flight in Adios, Happy Homeland, but I also saw truth as a permeating idea.  The Prologue ends with the declaration “…just because it never happened doesn’t mean it isn’t true” and in “Cojimar” we’re told, “truth is the strangest thing you’ll ever know.”  In “Flying” the word true/truth/truly appears on almost every page.  So, is wrestling with truth the writer’s ultimate goal?

For me, yes, this wrestling with truth is paramount. It’s the obsession—or I should say puzzle—that has driven all my books in one way or another. In Adios this working out of the truth becomes even more important. The prologue, after all, is written by a creolized version of a fictional author who is presented as a real writer, in a short story that reads like a non-fiction obituary/retrospective written by an Argentine author who sounds like an Anglo-Saxon scholar!

And why might fiction be a fruitful place for this?

Fiction—any art really—is the best way to explore the dynamic between what is real and what lives only in imagination. And the mystery of fiction– the open-ended, indirect poetry of it — is the best approximation of what it feels like to be alive.

The characters of In Cuba, I Was a German Shepherd straddle worlds and geographies.  When I interviewed Jennine Capó Crucet, who is also the daughter of Cuban exiles, we talked about the simultaneous push and pull of being from a place people are often trying to escape. It seems no matter how far you get from home, either for writers or for these characters, there exists this distant voice calling to you. In the title story, Juanito declares, “Here in America, I may be a short, insignificant mutt, but in Cuba, I was a German Shepherd.”  What can we learn about identity and place in the present if we’re still living in exile?

Interesting that Jennine wrote her Hialeah book while living elsewhere. That certainly has been true for me as well. I’ve never written about Miami while I was living there. The one book I wrote while in Miami is set in Istanbul – a city I still miss as well. All my characters, in one way or another, are divided and trapped by their loyalties. In Adios, one character says, “we’re always leaving.”

Do you feel that way, too?

For me, leaving is the way we learn about identity and place. Travel far and long enough and you realize there is no such thing as a fixed “identity” – though this is often so difficult a realization that we cling to the outlines of who we thought we were.

You play with language in Adios, Happy Homeland! We get Google translations, dream parables, mythical prologues, and made up glossaries.  You conclude with a fictional bibliography. Even some of the traditional stories have magical qualities.  Was it liberating to write in less traditional forms?

Yes, it was really a joy to write this book. The most joy I had since I was a twenty-seven-year-old living in New York City and working on my first collection. I started Adios after abandoning two novels that were boring me to tears to write. I realized that I hadn’t read a novel I enjoyed in years—yet I was reading every short story that came my way.  Who was I kidding! So I sat down to write fragments, more for my own amusement than with any idea toward a finished work.

Did it stir the creative process even more?

Absolutely! For the first time in years, I found myself sitting at the keyboard for hours, forgetting to eat, returning late at night. That’s when you know you are working honestly: when it stops seeming like a job and takes on the form of the old obsessions. As I started linking up the stories, the ideas started coming so fast that I had to open a new file just to keep track of them.

I’m wondering about structure.  How did you decide to order the risks you took on the page?

I had a lot of help on the ordering. Initially, I just put them down in the order I wrote them. But a few friends who read it thought there were too many non-traditional forms near the end of the collection. With the help of my fantastic editor, Elisabeth Schmitz, I was able to re-order them in a way that seemed more cohesive. She did the same thing with my first collection, by the way, and now I can’t even remember the original order I gave them—hers was so perfect.

Do you consider this collection a tribute?  To whom or what are you paying homage?

Yes, very much a tribute to Cuban writers of both prose and poetry (though in the case of Cuba, I think it’s all poetry, even when labeled prose). Those writers were on my mind with every piece, most strongly in “You Are the Heirs of All My Terrors,” which I wrote as a tribute to the late, brave Reinaldo Arenas.

In your blog post “1989,” published with The Huffington Post, you wrote: “I grew up into a culture where nothing was what it seemed, where liberation meant tyranny, where hope begat doom and optimism was for the mentally deficient.” Are you acknowledging this divide between reality and truth when you deconstruct and reconstruct myths in Adios?

Reality, truth, imagination, desires, delusions—I think these themes have always played a role in my writing. Not so much the hard lines that separate them as the way they bleed into one another, the way our delusions become reality, the way we construct truths out of our desires. The self, our personal histories, are themselves a powerful work of the imagination. Throughout our lives we are sifting, re-ordering, constructing and deconstructing our ideas of who we are.

You balance journalist and fiction writer. Many writers have day jobs – we’re writers, but also teachers, editors, parents. Do you struggle to separate the writing worlds or do they relate?

“Balance” is quite a hopeful term! In truth, it’s a real struggle. I’m fortunate that I left journalism in 2008. I doubt I could have written a collection like this while still working as a journalist. Truth, or rather, accuracy, is such an overriding concern in journalism that it can’t help but influence the fiction one writes. Of course, it seems to have only fostered Garcia Marquez’s imagination. But most former journalists end up writing in a more minimalist vein. It took me many years and an extended hiatus to muster the courage to write in a different way.

At the moment, I’m working at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, setting up a new creative writing program there. The job is incredibly gratifying and I find that thinking about writing and reading feeds my own work. The biggest challenge I have right now is finding time to write fiction while caring for a nine-month-old baby!

That I completely understand! Such a juggle, isn’t it? Babies and books. And speaking of feeding your work, what writers have influenced you most?

James Joyce would be the first. I’ve lost count how many times I’ve read Dubliners. “The Dead” is one of the most perfect short stories ever written. It has an ineffable quality that transcends the form. It’s impossible to summarize it in the way, for example, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is possible to summarize. To understand “The Dead” you must read every line to the devastating end. I love Kafka and Borges for the way they take on dreams and shatter “reality.”

Alice Munro is a master. I just love everything she’s written. Though she writes in a more realist vein, her stories are beautiful and moving and I never finish one without feeling I’ve just spent some time with a genius. And I’m a huge fan of Haruki Murakami. I remember the first time I read one of his stories in The New Yorker and I thought, you can do that? You can thumb your nose at the tidy ending? It was exhilarating.

Are there other short story collections that you recommend that link by theme or character well?

Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics would have to be at the top of the list—it’s a strange and beautiful ride taken in the company of a “cosmic know-it-all” as one critic described. Same with his Invisible Cities—you don’t know whether to call it a short story collection or a novel in parts or even poetry. But it’s all sublime.

Which writers do you return to again and again?

Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock is gorgeous—I learned so much reading and re-reading that collection. I would also include W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants in this list, though maybe it’s more accurate to call that a novella collection or even a “novel” as I think the publisher described it. All of these fit my definition of a good collection: The whole adds up to much more than the sum of its parts.  When you’re done reading them, you are haunted, sometimes for years.

Further Links and Resources

Nadelson is the Hallie Ford Chair in Writing at Willamette University. He also teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program at Pacific Lutheran University. He lives in Salem, Oregon. A former student of Scott’s, I took his short story workshop as an undergraduate at Willamette. This interview took place over e-mail in September and October 2011.

SCOTT NADELSON: I think what happened when I started listening to Dylan was that I heard language—carefully constructed language—in a context I couldn’t easily categorize or contain. I was one of those high school kids who didn’t care much about anything, or didn’t know that you could care about anything; I went to school, did my homework some of the time, watched a lot of TV, and listened to music as loud as I could. Until then, any kind of written language I didn’t understand I’d quickly find frustrating and abandon; if I understood it too easily, then I’d dismiss it as not worth my time. When I listened to music, I hardly paid attention to the lyrics; if anything they were a way of following the melody and singing along to the beat. But Dylan put language forward in a way I couldn’t ignore even if I wanted to. In the best of his songs, his lyrics were mysterious and evocative but also precise, playful, full of emotion, unsentimental. Plus there was an energy in the progression of words, in their rhythm, in the layers of imagery they unfolded that seemed to contain more meaning than the words or images themselves. I was surprised to find so much pleasure and tension in the way language could be approachable one moment and then move just out of reach the next.

I’d listen to, say, “Chimes of Freedom,” and I’d feel like I was getting a pretty good handle on it—the speaker hears in peals of thunder bells tolling freedom for the downtrodden masses—and then out would come these lines that were so gorgeous and baffling that my head would empty of all rational and simplistic thought: “Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail / the sky cracked its poems in naked wonder.” I’m sure it’s because I already was drawn to music that I was open to lines like this, that I was willing to let them seep into me, even if I couldn’t quite grasp them; if I’d read them on the page, I probably would have turned away. But once Dylan’s voice got into my head, along with the possibility that language could make me feel something even if I didn’t know why, I was soon more open to other forms of writing as well.

At that point, of course, I still mostly wanted to be a rock star with really cool hair. But now I also wanted to be one who could write a song that made you forget to breathe.

You’re not the first writer to list Dylan as an early influence. I think it speaks to that community’s ethos as not only poets, but storytellers. I’d argue that many of Dylan’s songs – “Tangled Up In Blue” comes to mind – are condensed stories. Do you agree? (As a side note, speaking of influences, when I looked up “Chimes of Freedom,” realizing I didn’t know much about its origins, I learned that Dylan himself wrote the song after reading Rimbaud.)

Absolutely. In those early years Dylan owed a lot to Rimbaud and the beat poets, but he was also a terrific storyteller. He had a gift for pacing and distilling narrative down to its essence. Some of his best stuff is narrative: “Tangled Up in Blue,” for sure, and pretty much everything else on Blood on the Tracks; “Ballad in Plain D”; most stuff on John Wesley Harding and especially on The Basement Tapes.

I once read an interview with Dylan, or maybe I heard another songwriter talking about it—or, who knows, maybe I made it up—in which he claimed that he hated nothing worse than story-songs. In response, the interviewer, somewhat in shock, listed off a number of those songs with narrative impulses, and Dylan snapped, in near rage, “Those aren’t story-songs! They’re ballads!”

What I love about that anecdote is that it suggests Dylan saw himself working in a particular narrative tradition; the idea wasn’t to stuff a story arc into a five minute song, but to use and update the ballad form to explore contemporary narratives. I think it’s because he understood the form so deeply, had listened to and sung old ballads so many times that he absorbed their narrative rhythms, their pacing, their compression and mystery, that his narrative songs don’t feel dated like those of a lot of his contemporaries.

I’m curious whether your experience as a reluctant reader influenced your teaching methodology? Did that perspective give you any insight into how to reach students who don’t think literature is relevant to their lives?

That’s a great question. It may be an exaggeration, but I’ve often believed that literature saved my life; I was heading down a fairly self-destructive path when I got serious about reading and writing, and discovering something that meant so much to me allowed me to refocus my energy in positive directions. And that has definitely affected the way I approach teaching and the way I think about education generally. The reason I never cared about literature when I was young was that no one made me understand that I should or could care; teachers just told me I had to learn that a simile uses “like” or “as” and that Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter. They didn’t tell me why those things mattered. The problem, I think, was that by the time I started school the study of literature had become divorced from the physical, emotional, and intellectual experience that literature is meant to create. No one talked about how Hamlet had moved them, or how Huckleberry Finn had made them laugh; they just talked about whether Hamlet really went crazy and about the symbolism of the Mississippi River. Above all, no one talked about loving literature, and if you don’t love something, what’s the point of spending hours reading and talking about it?

So in my teaching life, I try to express this love as much as possible. The work I choose to share with my students is work that moves me, that haunts me, that mystifies me, and I try to always return our conversations to the students’ actual experience reading a story or poem: where and how it made them nearly cry, where and how it sped up their pulse, where and how it suggested connections that made their heads spin. I try to remind writing students that they should find joy in the process, and if they can’t, then writing might not be the best pursuit for them. I think people should devote their lives to things that matter so much to them that they can’t imagine doing anything else. And education should be a means to discovering and deepening those passions; it should help people find the things that are going to make them want to get out of bed on difficult mornings. The most successful writing class I can imagine is one in which I help beginning writers find a reason to face a blank page when the words aren’t coming easily.

That sounds like a worthy outcome for more experienced writers as well. It isn’t a coincidence that writing is often described with religious terminology—i.e. Joyce Carol Oates’ The Faith of a Writer. So much of writing is facing that blank page or disconnected jottings, and, to quote Lorrie Moore, “trudg[ing] ahead in the rain, regardless.”

In a recent interview on The Nervous Breakdown you revealed (to yourself) that you’re a “floundering” writer. You said, “Most of the time I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing, no idea where my ideas are leading me, but I’m stubborn about following them through, and eventually, if I’m lucky, the effort leads me somewhere interesting.” Can you share how you keep yourself motivated even when you are “floundering”? I love the image of a struggling Eudora Welty cutting apart her drafts, re-arranging them, and then piecing them back together with straight pins. Do you have any rituals or tricks to share?

I guess the thing that keeps me going, even during the most frustrating periods, is that I love process more than product. Whenever I’m stuck, or confused about where a story is heading, I try to return to those things in writing that bring me the most joy: odd perceptions, tense dialogue, obsessive thought. I try to have fun riffing on a little scene or quiet conflict and not worry about whether anything will come of it. And small, unexpected discoveries spur me on to search for more discoveries. Even if an idea finally crumbles to dust—which happens all too often—I usually have other little scenes or conflicts in mind, and the promise of those small discoveries gets me to sit down and work every chance I get.

I wish I could say I had useful tricks or rituals. I love that image of Welty with her cut-up drafts, too. My process is much less delicate, more bludgeon than straight pin. I often just keep going back to the beginning of a story or essay I’m struggling with, trying to find the right angle in. I write forward until I get stuck, then start again, from a slightly different angle. I often end up with as many as fifty false starts before I find my way to the end of a first draft. I used to resist this process, and I still sometimes find it maddening, but now I think it’s mostly productive: what happens is that in writing these false starts I’m working to find the right storytelling voice, the one that can carry the material, that can access the characters and conflicts in the most effective way for the story. It’s rare that I find this voice on the first few tries, in part because I don’t know the characters well enough yet to understand their most crucial concerns. There’s probably a more efficient way of going about it, but I just keep beating my head against a piece until something opens up or it gives me such a headache that I have to set it aside.

The other thing I do when I’m having trouble finding my way is to look for models, especially in old favorites. If I’ve just had a terrible writing morning, I’ll pull down a Leonard Michaels story, for instance, and within a few minutes I’m in such awe, experiencing such pleasure in his voice, in the movement of his prose, that I’m already wanting to get back to work. It’s not that I then try to write a Leonard Michaels story; but that a Leonard Michaels story is even possible, that such a thing can exist, makes me so grateful and excited that whatever setback I’ve just experienced, even if it’s a significant one, soon feels diminished in comparison.

You have an impressive publication history. This September saw the release of your third story collection, and a book of autobiographical essays is forthcoming in March 2013. Considering that you balance teaching in addition to your writing, to what do you credit your prolificacy?

If I can credit anything it’s mostly stubbornness and obsession. Teaching and writing take a lot of energy, and often the same kind of energy, and doing both at the same time means putting in long hours and feeling stretched thin. I sometimes wish I could give myself a break during the school year, and not try to write while I’m teaching, as some writers I know do, but I’ve come to find I really need the work as part of my daily life. I’m not a terribly religious person, but writing has become something of a spiritual practice for me, like meditation, or maybe more like mental yoga, and without it I feel ungrounded. A few days without it, and I’m pretty quickly at loose ends. A week, and I’m miserable, and my wife starts begging me to get back to work.

Do you have a specific schedule or just grab the time when you can?

Until my daughter was born, I had a pretty regular writing schedule; I’ve managed to keep my mornings free to write for a couple of hours before having to turn to other things. With a now one-year-old, that has changed quite drastically. I almost never have more than an hour of unbroken time, and I’ve had to adjust the way I work. Now I’ll write for half an hour, forty-five minutes at a stretch, but I still try to do it every day if I can. What I’ve found is that I used to waste an enormous amount of time. I’d putter around for half an hour, looking at books on my shelves, staring out the window, before I’d get down to serious work. If I do that for thirty seconds now, I know quickly I’m going to lose whatever time I’ve got. I’m sure that puttering was useful to get me in a certain mindset, but now it seems like a luxury I’ve had to leave behind. Right mindset or not, I’ve got to get typing.

Because I work in short(ish) form, I never write an entire draft of a book at once. In fact, I usually don’t even know I’m working on a book until well into the process. I just work on stories or essays, usually a couple at a time in different draft stages, until I have a number of them that start to speak to each other, and then I start thinking about the whole. So by the time I’m working on something I’m calling a book, much of it is already in late draft stage, and some of it might even be close to finished. Then it becomes a matter of filling in gaps, smoothing rough edges between pieces, thinking about a larger arc.

You’re known for placing your stories in your native New Jersey, even though you’ve lived in Oregon since 1996. Beyond writing what you know, to what do you owe this fascination with your birthplace? What is it about writing in absentia that appeals to you?

When I started writing, I never thought New Jersey would become such a central part of my fiction, but now I write very few stories that aren’t set there. And hardly any of my stories have characters who haven’t come from the place where I grew up. I do think part of this is familiarity, or at least that’s the way it started. But more important is how the setting has evolved in my imagination over the past fifteen years. New Jersey has become less an actual place in my fiction than a state of being, a kind of limbo between the great city and the vast continent, where people are caught between retreat and full engagement with life and all its uncertainty. What the place offers me is a setting ripe with quiet tension and internal conflict, as well as a metaphor for the illusion of safety and security amidst the chaos of human intimacy and connection.

I sometimes send my New Jerseyans off into foreign lands, and a different kind of tension arises when they bring their baggage of fear and repressed desire into places where they can no longer contain the contents. In the new book, for example, I’ve got a kid with his grandparents in Jerusalem, and there all hell can break loose when his family conflict plays out against the backdrop of a much wilder setting than the one he’s left behind. But the conflict is still one that evolves in and out of his New Jersey state of being—I can’t imagine him coming from anywhere else.

Do you ever research places you’re writing about, or do you write from your memory and imagination?

The research I do is almost always a result of necessity. I need to know the name of a certain street, or remember where a lake is located in relation to a mountain, or look at a picture of a church in Zurich, and then I do the most cursory possible Internet searching to find the crucial piece of information or something that’s a close approximation. In other words, I let my imagination lead me and use research only to fill in gaps; but as soon as a gap is filled, I go as quickly as possible back to the imagination. Being a writer has meant never being an expert on anything, but having the barest trivial knowledge and surface understanding of a whole bunch of different things.

How does a story benefit from being set in a specific place as opposed to an anonymous city?

It really depends, I think. There can be something very freeing about using a landscape that’s open, that doesn’t restrict you to a particular set of geographic and cultural markers. Think how much more exciting Kafka’s vision of America is than if he’d actually known what New York City looked like. But using a real place can offer all kinds of opportunities for texture, for tensions that arise out of a character’s relationship to that place and to a reader’s associations with it. I do think it takes a certain kind of imagination to create a place out of nothing and to make it specific and real enough that a story can inhabit it. For me, having an actual place to work off of allows my imagination to focus on the things that concern me more—a character’s internal struggle, for example, or a failed communication between characters. I’d much rather spend my time imagining what a character thinks or does than what street he needs to take to get to the center of town.

That said, I do use some made up New Jersey towns in my stories, in order to give myself leeway to move buildings around, or make a place grittier than it might be in real life, or add some quirky details. But readers are more ready to accept them as real because I’ve put them in a geographic location that has certain set features and associations.

Aftermath’s epigraph features selections from the work of two poets (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Stephen Dunn). The selections are apt and closely mirror the collection’s eponymous theme. Were you reading Longfellow and Dunn while completing the collection, or did the relevance strike you later?

Both the Longfellow and Dunn quotes came after the book was finished, pretty much accidentally. I discovered the Longfellow poem when I was getting ready to send the manuscript out—I wanted to make sure there weren’t any other books called Aftermath, and when I searched the title, up came Longfellow. And I almost fell out of my chair when I read it and saw how beautifully it evoked the feeling I was trying to capture in the stories. The Dunn came soon after and was even more random; an acquaintance posted a link to it on Facebook, and once again I couldn’t believe how perfect it was, how it went straight to the heart of loss and acceptance and a begrudging carrying on—in fact, it did in a few lines so succinctly what I’d tried to do in nearly three hundred pages, that I nearly despaired and considered sticking the manuscript in a drawer. But like all good writers, I decided that if I couldn’t beat them, I’d steal from them, and I went from having no epigraph to having two.

Do have a habit of reading poetry? If so, do you think it affects your prose in any way?

Poetry was my first literary love—after Dylan—and I do read a lot of it, though not in as deliberate a way as I do fiction or nonfiction. Usually I let friends recommend something, or I pick up something at random in a bookstore, and devour a poem or two while I’m pacing my office before class starts. I have a lot of admiration for and envy of what some poets are able to do—the distillation, the direct line to emotion and depth of engagement with the sensual world, the associative leaps and structural experimentation. And I know the more poetry I read, the more closely I pay attention to the rhythm of my sentences, the interplay of sound and syntax and breath.

What advice would you give your younger self?

I think it would be the same advice I give myself now, whenever I feel frustrated or lost, whenever I worry that I’ll never write another decent book or story or sentence: Don’t take yourself too seriously.

I once had a teacher who told me a story about a conversation he had with Grace Paley. He was working with her while at Stanford, complaining to her about how badly the writing was going, how tortured he was by the process. And she turned to him and said, “You don’t have to do it, you know. No one’s sitting around waiting for your next story.”

It may be devastating to realize that no one but you is going to care if you stop writing. But it’s also wonderfully freeing. All pressures and expectations drop away. You don’t have to worry about shaping the future of literature or saving the world. You can just put one word after another for the simple pleasure of making something out of nothing.

Further Links & Resources

Note

[1] “Angle of Vision: A Conversation With Scott Nadelson.” Trachodon Magazine. January 2011.

I’m thankful for many things this Thansksgiving–friends, family, bits of good fortune large and small that have come my way over the past year. But in terms of stories, there’s one I’m eternally grateful for: Julie Orringer’s “Pilgrims.”

I first encountered “Pilgrims” in The Best New American Voices 2001, where it was the lead-off story. It begins simply enough: a family–father, mother, sister, brother–are headed to Thanksgiving dinner. But within paragraphs, you feel less and less at ease. The mother is gravely ill, as are many of the parents at the group dinner. Brother and sister must contend with a pack of motherless, lawless children roaming the huge treehouse in the backyard. The story’s conclusion is so shocking that the first time I read it, I literally had to sit down. Once you read this story, certain images will stay with you forever: paper pilgrim-buckles taped to sock feet. A glass of red water. A tiny tooth clutched in a palm.

In some ways every story I’ve written since has been influenced by “Pilgrims.” It prodded me to delve deeper and darker in my own writing, to follow characters into terrifying places, to allow terrible things to happen–even to characters I loved, even to children–if that’s where the story led. It gave me permission–no, it dared me–to see how far I could take a story. Thank you, Julie Orringer.

• Read the first few pages of “Pilgrims” online, and find the complete story in Julie Oringer’s collection How to Breathe Underwater
• Erika Dreifus reviews Orringer’s novel The Invisible Bridge
• More “stories we love”

Finding these unlikely correlations between worlds, Mehta blurs cultural distinctions in the hyphenated Asian-American identity. In “Ten Thousand Years,” he sees Hindu lore in a Western relationship. The narrator recalls a poem in which Kali straddles the corpse of Lord Shiva, aligning the act with his lover’s infidelity: “Kali was fierce—a string of severed heads around her neck, her blood-stained tongue exposed, machete drawn as she lowered herself upon Shiva’s dead, but erect, penis.” The protagonist likens that image to “[his lover] and Miss Andhra Pradesh taking turns practicing corpse pose in the sand.”

Mehta’s simple yet striking imagery becomes most effective in “The Cure” and “What We Mean.” Situated in the middle of the book, the stories provide brief repose from Mehta’s predominantly character-driven works. Instead, Mehta uses these pieces to showcase his mastery of language. “What We Mean” considers the varied manifestations of meaning: “When… dogs bark, they are trying to communicate something vital. Someone is trapped in a burning house… Someone is holding onto a branch in a fast-flowing river heading for a waterfall, the branch about to break.” Though they lack the driving plot of the surrounding stories, these pieces command reader attention through spare, evocative language.

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.

Further Links and Resources

We don’t usually think of Halloween as a “reading” kind of day, but I can think of at least a couple of Halloween-related stories.

In Lorrie Moore’s classic short story “You’re Ugly, Too,” a history professor escapes her life by visiting her sister over Halloween weekend–to attend what may be the most painfully awkward Halloween party in literature:

Zoe put on her bonehead. [...]

When Earl arrived, he was dressed as a naked woman, steel wool glued stretegically to a body stocking, and large rubber breasts protruding like hams.

“Zoe, this is Earl,” said Evan.

“Good to meet you,” said Earl, circling Evan to shake Zoe’s hand. He stared at the top of Zoe’s head. “Great bone.”

Zoe nodded. “Great tits,” she said.

And Rick Moody’s short story “Demonology” begins with trick-or-treaters:

They came in twos and threes, dressed in the fashionable Disney costumes of the year, Lion King, Pocahontas, Beauty and the Beast, or in the costumes of televised superheroes, Protean, shape–shifting, thus arrayed, in twos and threes, complaining it was too hot with the mask on, Hey, I’m really hot!, lugging those orange plastic buckets, bartering, haggling with one another, Gimme your Smarties, please as their parents tarried behind, grownups following after, grownups bantering about the schools, or about movies, about local sports, about their marriages, about the difficulties of long marriages, kids sprinting up the next driveway, kids decked out as demons or superheroes or dinosaurs or as advertisements for our multinational entertainment providers, beating back the restless souls of the dead, in search of sweets…

and hurtles towards a terrifying familial heartbreak. This is one of a few stories that I literally cannot read without crying.

There must be more that I’m forgetting. What other Halloween-related stories can you think of? Tell us in the comments!

Further reading:

• Want more chilling reads? FWR contributor Forrest Anderson recommends three favorite stories that scare (and be sure to read the comments for a scary real-life story about one of the authors!).

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:

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I don’t mind admitting that I get stuck as a writer—occasionally. Well, pretty often. Okay, I mean constantly. And I’m not talking about jamming up over a flowery paragraph or a pivotal scene. I’m saying that I’ll be four pages into a new story (on what I’ve come to imagine on my worst days as the road to hell, thanks to a willful misinterpretation of Ron Carlson Writes a Story) and I’ll not only forget how to write a sentence, but I’ll lose sight of how a short story should even look. I used to feel ashamed about my lapse in genre memory and the sweaty-palm, shallow-breath panic that followed, but I’ve convinced myself that all writers catch the yips.

I’ve learned to keep a small stack of short fiction in my desk drawer as a remedy—a way to interrupt my bad habits, challenge my stale techniques, and remind me of the moves the best stories are capable of making. The story I keep on top is “Irish Girl” by Tim Johnston. Originally published in the now-defunct DoubleTake Magazine, it was later selected for the 2003 O. Henry Prize Stories and anthologized by David Sedaris in Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules. I first found the story in Johnston’s debut collection, also titled Irish Girl, which won the 2009 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. I’d bought the book because the contest judge was Janet Peery, who wrote another story I keep in my drawer as a curative tonic, “What the Thunder Said.”

“Irish Girl” opens simply enough with the protagonist as an eight-year old boy playing with army men under the kitchen table. His older brother kicks his leg—“not too hard but not too soft, either”—and tells him that his parents want to speak to him in the bedroom. Then, in a move I don’t recollect seeing in any other story, the writer breaks out of scene for the briefest of paragraphs to contextualize the family and the era they inhabit by telling the reader what the protagonist does and doesn’t know: “Charlie didn’t know… about Nixon’s decision to send troops into Cambodia, or how that led to the shootings at Kent State… He did know a little about the thirteen boys from the agricultural college arrested for rioting, because his father had been their lawyer. But he didn’t know that the trial, which had made the news every night for two weeks… had given his father the idea to run for office.” The story drops back into scene—the eve of his father’s departure for the Iowa House of Representatives—and the protagonist learns that his older brother is adopted.

The story does an excellent job portraying not only how the adopted brother grows distant from his parents and younger brother over the space of four years, the “blue light” going from his eyes, but it also subtly reveals a family held prisoner by its inability to adapt to a changing country. That’s a highfalutin way to say that it’s a damn good story, a story that cures the yips that ail me by reminding me what I can get away with in the best short fiction: direct language, echoing imagery, and earned sentiment.

• See the entire “Stories We Love” series (so far!)
• Find a copy of Irish Girl at an indie bookstore near you.

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!

To claim your copy of this collection, 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!