Michael Davis on "The Man in Africa"

Michael Davis' The Man in Africa is the latest addition to STORYGLOSSIA Issue 18. In this mini-interview Michael and I discuss "The Man in Africa."

Steven McDermott: Why "The Man in Africa?" Where’d this story come from?

Michael Davis: I don't know.  I was reading about 5 newspapers a day at the time I finished the first draft.  I try to write regularly.  I guess the things I think about when I'm not writing come out when I am. I don’t know where stories come from. Consequently, whenever I finish a story, I feel a sense of dread because I’m not sure I’m ever going to finish another. Most writers say they feel this way at least some of the time. So I try not to let it bother me.

SM: Surveillance, voyeurism, prescriptive grammar, uranium, and Olympia beer—or Oly as the natives used to call it—what brought this combination together?

MD: Surveillance is a system of control. So is pornography, when you think about it. So is grammar. I’ve been thinking a lot about what control means—controlling one’s destiny, controlling oneself. Culture itself is a system of control and contains other controls. While I was writing this, I was also reading Paul Virilio’s book War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception and Chalmers Johnson’s The Sorrows of Empire. Both of these present images of military and non-military systems of control—development of modern optics/a sub-culture of permanent military bases throughout the world. I guess I was deeply disturbed by what I was reading in these books, feeling a little ill-informed and manipulated and under-educated. I don’t completely trust what I read in the news. Yet I’m addicted to news. What does this mean? I’ve been trying to work it out. After 9/11, I think we all have to work it out our political and cultural ideologies for ourselves, or at least try to. If overlapping layers of societal control are already in place, what happens to free will? What happens to us when the things we cherish and desperately believe turn out to be pre-set channels meant to direct our perceptions whether we like it or not? As for the Olympia and uranium, I don’t know. The worst beers have the best names.

SM: By story's end the paranoia thread appears to give way to the Strangelovian as Will/Tom seems to suggest that we really should quit worrying and just learn to love the surveillance. He got the implant, but why not a webcam, too?

MD: He might have gotten a webcam. I’m not sure that Will is brave enough for that by the end of the story. If I were developing it into a longer piece, I think he might have gone to an electronics store and had a nervous moment. I wanted him to be an observer who gets converted, numbed, almost against his will. I guess I gave him an obvious name. I loved Dr. Strangelove. The comparison is flattering.

SM: Every time I read this story I find a new juicy detail. So how much fun was this story to write?

MD: Thanks. It was fun. It was also hard. I try to have fun with whatever I’m writing. If others like it, that’s part of the fun, too.

SM: What’s your revision process generally? And what surprises surfaced as you revised this story?

MD: I revise as I write. The hardest part might have been maintaining the tone. I find it hard to be consistent with the texture and tone of a piece if it takes me longer than a month to finish. This took about 6 months and at least that many revisions. It was a relief to honestly decide that the story was finished. When I was in my MFA program, it was easy. If someone said my story was a bunch of crap, that meant “ready to be published.” If someone said it was wonderful, I had cause for suspicion. I miss the crap-response. When I tell myself something is crap, it never feels as good.

SM: What other writing projects do you have in work?

MD: I have a manuscript of stories (including this one) that I’m shopping around to publishers. At the moment, I’m writing 2 stories and working on a longer project that I might start calling a novel as soon as I can admit that it’s a novel.

The Man in Africa

Issue 18

Michael Davis has a MFA in fiction writing from the University of Montana, and his stories have appeared in descant, The San Joaquin Review, The Jabberwock Review, The Black Mountain Review, Eclipse, Cottonwood, The Mid-American Review, Full Circle, Hayden’s Ferry Review and, most recently, The Georgia Review. He is a William Saroyan Fellow and former fiction editor of the journal CutBank.

Caroline Lockwood Nelson on "Anna in the Graveyard"

Here's the latest addition to STORYGLOSSIA Issue 18: Anna in the Graveyard" by Caroline Lockwood Nelson. And now, Caroline on her story.

Steven McDermott: Why "Anna in the Graveyard?" Where'd this story come from?

Caroline Lockwood Nelson: I first envisioned "Anna in the Graveyard" as one in a series of linked short stories, each focused on a different member of the Stone family. I began writing "Anna" in the summer of 2003 as part of a presentation for the Locher Fellowship, an art grant I received from Reed College. As I wrote, I discovered that Anna, the character, dominated the entire project. I was unable to do more than begin the stories focused on the other family members before Anna asserted herself as the primary figure, the center around which the other characters merely rotated. Perhaps because her voice is in some ways similar to my own, I found myself focused on her and her story, and so the series of stories became one story, "Anna in the Graveyard."

SM: I was impressed with the risks you took with structure in this story—the rambling start that builds the characterization before homing in on Anna's journey to her mother—and wonder how this story developed and whether structure was something with which you were concerned?

CN: I wanted the structure of the story to mirror Anna herself. The story rambles and twists in the beginning because Anna is unable to pick a path, to chose which direction her own life should take. She's trapped by her memories, caught by her past, a girl stuck with a series of fragmented moments that masquerade as a life, and I felt that the only way to really connect the reader to Anna was to place him or her in the same situation. I wanted the reader to float from moment to moment, to feel the fractured nature of Anna's existence. Anna's sort of wandering through her own life, and I wanted the reader to wander with her, to follow her as she stumbles from place to place, as she drifts back and forth in time so that when she does finally find some sort of momentum, when she decides to journey with her brother to their mother, the reader actually cares.

SM: Mood—I love the way you captured the lassitude—in some ways rules this story, was that one of your goals?

CN: This is a story about mood, about the way mood rules Anna's life. She's been playing the little girl lost for so long that she's no longer able to break free from that role. I wanted to write a story about a girl who feels herself incapable of making movement in her own life. Anna's old enough to be a woman, to stand and live on her own, and yet she refuses to disentangle herself from her own childhood, from her own adolescence. She's stuck and she's weary of how stuck she is, but she no longer has any idea how to put herself back together, how to make the pieces of her life add up to something. So in a way, the story is really a portrait, a depiction of Anna's mind and memory.

SM: What's your revision process generally? And what surprises surfaced as you revised this story?

CN: For me, the revision process usually consists of distance. I put this story away for almost a year and a half before coming back to it. Then I read it aloud several times over, reading for character, for clarity, and for rhythm. I then passed it along to my mother, who is also a writer, and my primary editor. She suggested that there were too many characters. In the first version, Anna had two brothers and we heard from two of her former husbands. The stepmother character Eleanor also had a daughter of her own in the first draft. I merged the two brothers into one and cut out one of the husbands, and removed Eleanor's daughter. When I first wrote this story, I was far too attached to every word, to every character to even consider erasing or re-writing any of it. So I put it down, wrote a bunch of other stories, and returned to it without the same emotional involvement. As I re-read, I found myself willing to cut and paste, to really examine the story as a story, to view Anna and her family as separate entities from myself, which allowed me to tighten the story, to make it complete.

SM: What other writing projects do you have in work?

CN: I just finished a draft of my first novel, a murder mystery set in a costal Maine town similar to the one Anna's mother lives in. It's titled "The Royal Nobodies," and it's about a boy, Jay, who returns home from boarding school after a school shooting he may or may not have been involved in orchestrating. I'm also working on a series of speculative short stories about a pair of brothers earching for a lost lover; the first story in the series, "The Captain is the Last to Leave," will appear in Strange Horizons Magazine in July 2007.

Anna in the Graveyard

Issue 18

Caroline Lockwood Nelson grew up in Pasadena, California, went to Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and spends her summers in Maine. She has a story appearing in Strange Horizons Magazine this July and has just completed her first novel. She is twenty-four.

Adam Cushman on "They Hail from East Lansing"

Another hot one has just been added to the STORYGLOSSIA Issue 18 lineup: Adam Cushman's "They Hail from East Lansing." I love to see writers taking the kind of risks Cushman does in this story. In this mini-interview he provides some insight into the makings of "They Hail from East Lansing."

Steven McDermott: Why "They Hail from East Lansing?" Where’d this story come from?

Adam Cushman: I was at the Miami airport reading Barry Hannah when I saw them. There were four, three girls and a dude with this face, you know, to follow the air travel motif, who had that look people have when they're walking down the aisle with their ticket in their hand, trying to find their seat, gazing at the seat and aisle numbers like it's a homicide investigation. That look on the guy's face began it. Then I saw the khakis, disposable cameras, matching t-shirts, etc that all scream tourists from Ohio, Jersey or in this case, Michigan. It began there, then evolved. I'm embarassed to say it began as an attack on bonafide tourists. Hopefully it evolved into something more human. I've got nothing against tourists, really. Although, those that choose Miami as their destination seem to be an archetype of some sort. Walk into the Clevelander on South Beach any Friday night and you will find some version of Roger, Deb, et al. I mentioned an attack, but that's disingenuous. The truth is I find these people fascinating. I find the archetype even more so.

SM: One thing that struck me about this story was the honesty, the way you allowed the characters their opinions of the others regardless how that came off. Is there an aesthetic at work here?

AC: Maybe. If there is, I've never consciously thought of it as such. I mean there was no planned aesthetic, and having written the piece, I'm too attached to it to give an intelligent crtitique. From one POV this is Roger's story. From another, all four of these people are one big character. I guess the thing that's important to me in everything I write is how the characters relate to each other. Not all of it is nice in this story, but that's just how it went down. The crucial thing to me in revealing characters in fiction is what other people say about them, what they don't do, and how they treat those closest to them. I'm not claming to write realism of any kind, but I believe in a profound sense that our realities, and identities, to a great extent revolve around the opinions of others, especially when we care about said people.

SM: None of these characters is presented in the best light, yet these are—despite the non-realistic style—the most human of portraits. This is who we are, isn't it?

AC: This is who they are, or as far as I could take them. Again, the multiple POV thing notwithstanding, this is really Roger's story. I hope it is a human one. There's a misanthropic element, which is unintentional, but it is there, although I hope people walk away with the human aspect. When I say "human," I mean the choices that some of these characters make in the pursuit of happiness. That's all any of them want, to be happy and feel loved, except Deb, who probably does the things she does because she's been loved too much, and in the wrong way. Roger is a guy with an insane amount of love in him, and nowehere to put it. With Grissy he takes the first opportunity he is offered. Naturally, this causes more problems than it solves.

SM: Jesus with the J pronounced and Boyz with a Z (from your story "Felonies for which I was Never Apprehended: Chapter Eighty-Four"), I sense a dig. So, what's up with that?

AC: It's me masturbating.

I'm from Miami originally. You either understand that world or you don't. A lot of my friends were the first of that generation who grew up on the back of golf courses, with college paid for when they were five, yet fell into gangster chic, started wearing football jerseys with other guys' names on them, and taking dad's Glock to parties, installing flo masters, that kind of thing. Most of them are lawyers or loan servicing supervisors now.

SM: What’s your revision process generally? And what surprises surfaced as you revised this story?

AC: Just keep combing it until there's no sentences that make me ashamed. If I can't honsetly say that after five or six passes, I trash it. The surprise is when I don't.

SM: What other writing projects do you have in work?

AC: "Felnones for which I was Never Apprehended." It's a book of interrelated stories. The title explains itself. I was sitting in a St. Petersburg coffee shop with a friend of mine, the Croatian writer Josip Novakovich, telling him about the old days. He suggested the book, and thankfully, I listened. I haven't had this much fun writing in a while. I knew I was on to something when 84 got picked up by the first journal I sent it to.

They Hail from East Lansing

Issue 18

Adam Cushman's stories have been published or are forthcoming in the Mississippi Review, The Portland Review, Konundrum, Carve and Pindeldyboz. He holds an MFA from Columbia University, is at work on his seocnd novel, and divides his time between Los Angeles and St. Petersburg, Russia.

Gina Ventre on "Prom"

Once again, STORYGLOSSIA has the privilege of bringing to you an excellent writer's first published story. Just added to the lineup of Issue 18 is Gina Ventre's "Prom" Her voice is strong and assured and I expect we'll be seeing a lot more of her work. In this mini-interview Gina provides some insight into the makings of "Prom" and into her writing process in general.

Steven McDermott: Why "Prom?" Where'd this story come from?

Gina Ventre: "Prom" came out of an assignment, given to each member of my writing group, to write a piece out of our comfort zone. One element I had been working on in my writing was brevity. In workshop classes, I tended to turn in stories between 25 and 30 pages. I wanted to be able to convey story and flashback and explanation in under 10 pages. I wanted to use words with more activity to them. I wanted to use more significant detail because I find that the small elements often make a story. The first person narrator in "Prom" is my first, first person narrator. I wanted to be brought closer to the feelings of my character and the rising action in the story. This resulted in a more authoritative narrative voice and one that I have returned to in subsequent stories.

Technical experimentation aside, "Prom" is also an example of the strange amalgamation of details that one can pick up by listening, paying attention to the fine details, and imagining how people would react in a given situation. I think it's important for a writer to have an ultimate awareness of their surroundings because you never know what might come from the person behind you in the grocery line or the one sided phone conversation next to you on the sidewalk.

SM: One of things that impressed me about "Prom" was that even though it focuses on familiar experiences--being an outsider and the prom date—it felt freshly rendered. How did you approach taking on such an iconic experience?

GV:What initially helped was the fact that I never took part in the prom experience so the feeling of being the outsider was easily accessible to me. I wasn't a proud outsider either! I continued, for a long while afterwards, to be fascinated with the idea of dressing up and riding in a limo and dancing with reluctantly tuxedoed boys. I did informal polls where I would ask friends if the experience was as satisfying as advertised. Responses tended towards the negative, especially so with the inevitable sex-on-prom-night question.

Secondly, it's interesting to read stories where the narrator is an outsider commenting on the workings in front of them. I like the tension set up as those characters struggle with the idea of joining, risking rejection, or risking (it is a risk!) acceptance.

Significant detail in a story can be the difference between same old and fresh take. I had heard a lot about detail in workshop classes and how they shape a narrative, how they make work readable and personal. I gather interesting details as they occur and say to myself, "Remember that when you go to write that story." And the makeshift bra festooned with shoelaces? A white cotton original that I may have designed.

SM: What's your revision process generally? And what surprises surfaced as you revised this story?

GV: My first drafts tend to be messy and long with characters meandering in and out of the landscape, sometimes changing names as the plot develops. I write everything out that had ever occurred to me about the particular story I'm working on. On my second pass, before other human eyes see my draft, I weed out over-explaining and extraneous details. My draft is then presentable to my writing group or workshop.

One of the wonderful things about sharing work with others is that you get to see your writing through fresh eyes. Readers pick up on details and themes that can be developed and, of course, those that can be discarded. I also enjoy the freedom to take suggestions and leave others, to introduce new elements or continue to develop certain aspects of the story as originally planned to see where it goes. These changes don't have to be major undertakings. In one of my first workshop experiences, it was suggested to me that I take the middle of a story and put it at the beginning. I moved a few paragraphs and had an entirely new story.

Surprises surfaced during a public reading of this story. My second reading ever. I got behind the podium and slipped entirely into the main character. When I regained capacity for thought, maybe on page 3, I thought to myself, "Yes. Your revisions are working well. The ending is going to work. That last sentence should really have been two sentences."

SM: What other writing projects do you have in work?

GV: I recently began writing a story having to do, variously, with the weather, opera costumes, and a sexual bet. Story was a short short, then became a short, and is now reaching novella length. I'm interested to see where that takes me.

I have a finished novel manuscript cooling in a drawer of my writing desk. I think about those pages a lot. I want to shorten it. Change the voice. Change one of the characters. Maybe take it from novel to novella. Maybe turn it into a series of short stories. I like the freedom of thinking about it once the words are down on the page.

Oh. Yes. And I have those MFA applications that are going out one by one. Personal statements can be writing projects in their own right.

"Prom."

Issue 18

Gina Ventre works in an office during the day, which means that she usually starts writing after dinners of microwaveable Kung Pao chicken and lemonade. In her search for a writing community in Cleveland, she became a member of the Cleveland Heights Writing Group and now finds that she loves her fellow members beyond reason. She is thrilled to be publishing for the first time in STORYGLOSSIA. Gina's blog, "madame x," can be found at ginaventre.blogspot.com.

Mary Miller on Her Flash Fictions

Mary Miller's flash fiction has been appearing in a bunch of online journals and I'm excited to bring you two new examples of her edgy work in Issue 18 of STORYGLOSSIA: A Detached Observer" and "My Old Lady." In this mini-interview Mary and I discuss the stories and her approach to flash fiction.

Steven McDermott: Why "A Detached Observer?" Where’d this flash fiction come from?

Mary Miller: This flash is very loosely based on a boy I waited tables with one summer. He thought I was pretty, but not much else, I suppose. He was a drummer in a band and he wasn't any good, but I was into drummers for a while and I liked to find myself in situations that felt precarious. He insulted me when we first met, and back then I liked to be insulted. Not so much anymore.

SM: How about "My Old Lady?"

MM: This one doesn't have any autobiographical elements other than I met this guy who called his woman "my old lady" and I thought it was peculiar because he was educated and middle class and I associated this kind of language with working class people. I grew up middle class, attending private schools, but I never felt like I fit. More and more, though, I'm realizing that the vast majority of us felt like we didn't fit.

SM: One criteria I use for selecting flash fiction is that I look for pieces that I can't imagine in another form—as poems or as part of a longer story—and I think both these pieces share that quality. How do you approach writing flash fiction? Is there an aesthetic you filter your work through?

MM: My flash really tends to be more inspired. I think of a past incident I want to explore, or an image, or maybe I just overhear a snippet of conversation that interests me and I take off. Of course, many of my flashes suck. But then, sometimes everything comes together. I wrote poetry for a while, but it was all narrative and I realized that I was basically a prose writer.

SM: What’s your revision process for flash fiction? Do you build these up to the bursting point from a kernel? Or do you start with something more and compress?

MM: I edit as I go. I don't cut much. I've heard it's best to get it all down and then come back later and cut/revise, but I have difficulty leaving a sentence alone until I feel like it's perfect.

SM: What surprises surfaced as you revised these flash fictions?

MM: I don't really revise that much. Sometimes I add a contraction, or rearrange a sentence. Lots of times, though, I'm surprised by the outcome. So many things start out as autobiographical and veer quickly into fiction, but they expose truths that hadn't occurred to me before.

SM: What other writing projects do you have in work?

MM: I've just finished a manuscript of short fiction and I'm working on a novel. I'm about halfway through and I'm happy with the direction it's going, but I don't know what it's about yet. People ask me and I say, "I don't know," because I don't, or I say, "It's about a girl," which is totally unimpressive.

A Detached Observer

My Old Lady

Issue 18

Mary Miller lives in Meridian, Mississippi with her husband and her dog. Her work can be found online at elimae, Vestal Review, Frigg, SmokeLong Quarterly, BarrelHouse, and Pindeldyboz. She has a short story forthcoming in Swink.

Carol Quinn on "Globs of Possibilities"

Issue 17 of STORYGLOSSIA features the first published story by Carol M. Quinn, whose work I'm sure you'll be seeing more of in other venues. "Globs of Possibility" was also an entry in the Fiction Prize contest and nearly a finalist. In this mini-interview Carol and I discuss "Globs of Possibility."

Steven McDermott: Why "Globs of Possibility?" Where'd this story come from?

Carol Quinn: My first year at Iowa, I'd gotten myself into a really big rut. It felt like I kept writing the same characters over and over again, and they were all living in the same neighborhoods in Queens and Manhattan, and I was boring myself to death. Around that time, I read a blurb in a magazine about "the new retirement," how more and more couples are viewing retirement as a chance to do whatever it was they wished they'd been doing in the first place. It made me wonder—what if you're finally living your dream, and it's a huge disappointment? And there was Jim. The first draft was mostly about him, but Marianne kept butting in. Once I admitted that her situation—what if you're living the dream you didn't even know you had?—was more interesting to me, things fell into place. As for Jim's former profession, I've always been fascinated by OB/GYNs—what a bizarre and amazing job to have! And it let me use a lot of imagery and ideas (the embryo's hand-buds, for example, and loss being programmed into our bodies) that I'd had kicking around for awhile, and that felt more fresh coming from Marianne's not exactly warm and fuzzy point of view.

SM: You make great use of the triangle relationships in the story: father-daughter-mother and Marianne-Jim-Agent, with Jim and Marianne taking turns being the middle. Although it comes about naturally from the characters and the plot, I'm just wondering if that triangulation was something you focused on?

CM: It wasn't, which is a little embarrassing to admit—but then, it's great when I'm surprised by my own stories. Mostly, I wanted to examine all the different directions Marianne was being pulled in—marriage, motherhood, career, personal fulfillment—and make her struggle genuine. As for Jim and their daughter, I did intend for them (and especially for their certainty about their lives and roles) to be a counterpoint to Marianne.

SM: What’s your revision process generally? What surprises surfaced as you revised this story?

CM: I like to let a first draft sit for a while before I go back and revise it—and usually I revise my stories many, many times over! The revision process for "Globs of Possibility" was a little different, since I did write it for a workshop at Iowa. When I workshopped this story, I received a lot of negative feedback about how unsympathetic Marianne was as a character, which surprised me. I found her very sympathetic—biting, yes, but also very honest about the costs of the decisions she's made throughout her life. Her voice remained basically the same from draft to draft. The biggest surprise for me was Jim—in earlier drafts he was very, very angry with Marianne, but by the final draft he's resigned, even forgiving. They went from, I think, a stereotypical bickering older couple to people who'd been very much in love at one point and still cared about each other deeply. I think his reaction at the end just drives home for Marianne the loss she's bringing upon herself.

Oh, and in the first draft Marianne and the agent were having an affair, which was a very bad, distracting idea on my part. I'm very glad I decided against it in the later drafts!

SM: I didn't find Marianne unsympathetic, quite liked her strength, in fact. Why is it that workshops frequently try to weaken the strongest characters? And, did you ignore the workshop feedback and stick with your characterization of Marianne as written?

CM: I don't know if I would say that workshops try to weaken the strongest characters, since the word "try" makes it sound like an intentional attempt to water things down, which I don't think it is. Really, I think that generally in workshops, people are actively looking for things that make them react strongly. In this case, people in my workshop reacted strongly to what I think of as Marianne's clearheadedness, her lack of sentimentality. The fact that those strong feelings often get translated as negative reactions is just an inevitable flaw in the workshop format—if a reader reacts strongly to or has some negative feelings toward a character, that frequently comes across as negative feedback about the characterization, which are two entirely separate things. In a workshop, the members are looking to give criticism, and anything that sticks out in the story for any reason is something to potentially criticize, even though it may be a strength. I hope that makes sense—I've had a long day teaching the kids, and not all that much sleep! And in this case, yes, I did ignore the workshop feedback. Marianne was Marianne, and changing her character around, making her "nicer," would have been dishonest. And besides, during my time in the Workshop, I came around to the view that anything that provoked a strong reaction—positive or negative—was something worth keeping.

SM: What other writing projects do you have in work?

CM: At the moment, I'm writing mostly lesson plans—I just started a teaching job, which is keeping me very busy. I'd say I'm gathering material, and I'm looking very forward to the summer break, when I can go back to writing stories.

Globs of Possibility

STORYGLOSSIA Issue 17

Carol M. Quinn lives and works and writes in Philadelphia. She is from Queens, but she has never been to Los Angeles. She received her MFA from The University of Iowa, where she won the 2006 Jack Leggett Prize for fiction.