1.     Tell us a little bit about the genesis of “Heliotrope.” Where did the idea come from? How did the talking placenta first arrive in the story? What kind of revision did “Heliotrope” go through?

I once nannied for a family of vegans.  They were really strict about diet, so the meaty-looking lump Ziplocked in the freezer had me curious.  I finally found out it was the youngest kid’s placenta. How crazy that something so intimate and raw and meaningful and sort-of-maybe-disgusting would be chilling next to the peas!  I came home and wrote a few sentences in which a teenage babysitter steals a placenta, with the idea that it would talk to her after the theft. I knew the placenta needed to talk; I didn’t know what it wanted to say. Maybe by giving it a voice  I was trying to give it back some of the power I felt it had lost in the freezer.  But I couldn’t do anything with the idea, writing-wise. A talking placenta without a story is just a gimmick. I didn’t find the story until five years later, when I used the word “stereoscope” in conversation with a writer friend, John Evans, who proposed we each write a page, including the word “stereoscope,” and submit it to five journals by the end of the week.  This time–maybe it was the luxury of a deadline, maybe it was the challenge of incorporating the stereoscope–the story came. I read a bunch of blogs about the things people do with placentas–everything from eating them for strength to making placental quilts.  Planting seemed to fit the story, and maybe I was interested in sunflowers and heliotropism at that point because I’d just planted a garden. Anyway, I made relatively few revisions once I wrote a draft.  (By the way, the exercise worked for John, too. His stereoscope poem, “Elegy with Boardwalk,” is coming out soon in the The Missouri Review.)

2.     At 240 words, “Heliotrope” is a miracle of compression. There’s a tension between the vision researcher and the placenta, the narrator and her sister, fatalism and free will. There’s a lot going on here! Nick’s position as a vision researcher seems like a particularly salient detail. Could you talk about the position of science in the story?

Thank you for saying so! I like to pack stuff into stories, though sometimes it’s a struggle not to overdo it. I’ve always thought one of the coolest things about being a writer is that any information or experience you come across is potential material. (And when experience fails, there’s Wikipedia.)

Well, first of all, science got my mind to a place where I could finish it.  Until the Stereoscope Challenge, the talking placenta idea was just a kernel. Science made it pop.

Science is full of poetic truth.  Certain concepts resonate with human intuition, our experience of the world. The mechanisms underlying heliotropism and holograms are complex, but they’re also ideas you can distill and explain to a child. In this story, invoking science allowed me to pack a lot of ideas, and symbolic possibilities for the reader, into a short piece.  I got a similar bargain out of philosophy and linguistics.

3.     “In the end, we compromised. I buried it in the garden with a sunflower seed and later that year, after Nick had left us all, we sat and watched the flower’s face track the sun.” The last paragraph suggests that perhaps the narrator and her sister now stand on equal footing—at the very least, relationships have fundamentally shifted. What kind of shifts were you looking to accomplish in “Heliotrope”?

I wouldn’t say I was looking to accomplish anything more specific than a shift that would provide an honest ending.  Starting a story involves posing myself a riddle. When I typed that Nick left them all behind–the sisters, the placenta, and the baby in all its innocence–my gut breathed a sigh of relief and said, ‘Finally! Took you long enough!’ and I knew I was onto something. But until then, figuring out that key shift was the riddle keeping the story kernel in my head.

4.     What are you working on now?

I’m finishing a novel. It’s the story of a Japanese-American woman who, as a child in Kyoto, murders her bully.  She goes on to start a new life in America–becomes a nurse, marries, has a daughter–but tells no one of her past.  A death in the family brings her back to Japan for the first time since the murder, and, well, she finds out she’s not the only one with a secret.  I’m also working on a second story collection about where I grew up, outside Chicago. (The stories in my first collection, Ms. Yamada’s Toaster, are all set in Japan.)

B. J. Hollars gave us the great short “Missing Mary.” You can read it online here. In this short interview, we ask him about his inspiration, his methods, and his new work.

1. Tell us a little bit about the genesis of “Missing Mary.” Where did the idea come from and what kind of revision did the story go through to get to us?

I think I started this piece as a result of my desire to try to subvert a somewhat clichéd story trope. The opening line points to that—”You’ve heard this one before.”

This isn’t a new story: a girl goes missing, she’s never found, the end. While I was interested in Mary herself, I was far more interested in the lives she touched after she vanished. I was also interested in the mystery of the thing. I sort of viewed this as an erasure story. I started with a much, much longer piece with far more answers and then I just started whittling away until I broke it down into its simplest elements. I’m a bit obsessed with coming-of-age stories, but I want to write them in a unique way. I think this genre of story is often exploited and the end result is rarely original. And so, this was my attempt at an old story in a new packaging—something stripped of its essentials.

2. The narration of this story is one of the things that makes it unique. You address the reader directly, including asides like “but that won’t prove to be a critical detail.” Can you tell us a little about this style of narration?

Sure. I think this goes back to my idea of “new packaging.” I felt like that omniscient voice seeping through was quite ominous. Because the question becomes: “Wait a minute, if there’s an omniscient narrator involved, than why doesn’t he tell us what happened to Mary?”  The narrator himself is implicated in this way. If the narrator knows which clues are important and which aren’t, then surely he knows far more than he’s letting on. And so, the reader is forced to choose: Do I trust this withholding omniscient narrator or not? And I guess if you read the story, you really don’t have much of a choice.

3. Your piece is not the typical “missing child” story. In some ways, it’s about a whittling away—or collecting the lack of evidence, assessing material that does not relate to Mary. And then the ending has a surprise turn. How did this progression, this arrangement of details, come about?

Yes, I really like that interpretation. I think that’s dead on. This story is about whittling away. I want the reader to be the detective, but I want the detective to have bare bones resources. And so, a reader is given facts, but a few of them are red herrings. Some facts seem to push the reader on a particular path, but since we never know what actually happened to Mary, we aren’t sure which suspect (if any) is the guilty party. I wanted to create a world overflowing with suspects: a classmate, a police officer, a fisherman, even Mary’s family. But I think the lack of closure is important. As I was writing this, a friend of mine lost her dog, and I just kept thinking: How much more terrible to never know what became of her. That lack of closure, I think, puts a major hole in the center of the story. I couldn’t imagine any other possible ending.

4. What are you working on now?

Oh, all kinds of things. I’m quite excited about my nonfiction book forthcoming from the University of Alabama Press titled Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence and the Last Lynching in America. I’m also in the early stages of a second anthology. And there are always short stories to be written, and an essay in need of revision, and that bear of a novel that never quite steps into the light.

Reading Lisa Locascio’s “What Is Disneyland?” is like taking part in a fevered, wondrous dream. Be sure to check the story out and then return here to read more about Locascio’s inspiration and editing techniques.

1. Tell us a little bit about the genesis of the story. Where did the idea for “What Is Disneyland?” come from and what kind of evolution did the story go through to get to us?

I have often found that my best work comes from refracting my experiences into my fiction. Certain elements of the story are “true”—I did go to Disneyland, I am engaged to a man from another country. The character “Stella” is a sort of self-proxy I’ve experimented with over the last few years. She has appeared in a few stories, including this one published by Candor Magazine. When I wrote “What Is Disneyland?” I had just moved to Los Angeles, which I immediately loved, and I had just met my fiancé, whom I immediately loved, but both the city and the man were a bit mysterious and unknown to me.

I’m fairly obsessed with the allure of mystery—the moment of not knowing before we discover whether someone or something is dangerous or benign. I wanted to write about all of this in some way, and I started thinking about Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9,  an art film I watched at midnight a few years ago in New York, where he and Björk meet on a whaling ship and get married. So I started out with Stella’s travel narrative, and then the way she can’t escape her thoughts, even in a distant place like Disneyland. The implications of migration and movement in a story about being in love with a foreigner really weren’t planned, and were only pointed out to me after the fact by my advisor, Aimee Bender.

Continued…