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We’ve been very busy this fall, but we’re finally on top of things and we’d like to officially open up applications for our spring 2012 internship slots. Hooray! We’ll be taking applications over the next few weeks; the deadline is November 23, and we’re going to be strict about it.

If you’ve already sent along your cover letter and résumé, no worries—we have it under consideration! If you’re interested in our internships and haven’t sent in an application yet, read on.

Our editorial interns do things like evaluate submissions, correspond with authors, copyedit and proofread stories, help plan our launch events, and research for future issues and various ASF projects. Our internships are unpaid, but we’ll give you as much real-world lit mag experience as you can handle. We recommend that applicants have a strong background in English or American literature, or a related field. Interns usually work 10 or 15 hours a week for a period of three months–for the spring 2012 position, that’ll run from February to early May. The internship is in-office, so you’ll have to be in Austin for those months.

Here’s what you need to do to apply: send a résumé and cover letter to me, callie.collins [at] americanshortfiction.org. Please put “spring internship” in the subject line. Any questions can also be directed my way.

And here’s something important: In your cover letter, let us know why it’s important that we hire you and not somebody else. Demonstrate your undying passion for fiction. Tell us about your experience with contemporary short fiction. And talk about a story, an author, or a journal you can’t get enough of, and why. Our internships are pretty competitive, so make sure you pick an author or a story that has meant something to you and talk about it well.

We’re excited to hear from you.

Y’all. It’s finally here. The Austin Lit Crawl. Everything kicks off tomorrow, Saturday, October 22, at 8 pm.

The Austin Lit Crawl is a new collaboration among literary magazine American Short Fiction, the Texas Book Festival, and the Austin’s East Side. Inspired by the San Francisco literary festival Litquake’s long-running Lit Crawl (and produced with Litquake’s participation), our Lit Crawl will feature some of America’s most groundbreaking and beloved writers (along with equally beloved local literati) onstage and in conversation. The Crawl will host 11 events over the course of the evening.

Catch Susan Orlean screening clips of canine hero Rin Tin Tin. Brace yourself for a heady cocktail at Cheer Up Charlie’s–and take in performances from Erin Morgenstern, Hillary Jordan, and Mat Johnson. Match wits with Lev Grossman and Chad Harbach at Shangri-La. Converge with twenty YA authors in a cemetery.* Watch Ernie Cline bust some stereotypes wide open–probably while geeking out. There’s a lot more–including Chuck Klosterman, Chuck Palahniuk, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, and Meg Wolitzer. Perhaps you’d like to look at our comprehensive schedule** or our very pretty map and start plotting your Crawl strategy?

Put on your Crawling shoes.

—

*You’ll need to BYOF. Bring your own flashlight.

** We’ve had to move Adam Mansbach’s Lit Crawl event from the Scoot Inn to Public School (1021 E. 7th St.). It’ll take place from 9 to 9:45 pm. His event, like other Lit Crawl events, is free. Donald Ray Pollock will still be opening for Chuck Palahniuk the Scoot Inn (1308 E. 4th St.)–but they’re now appearing from 9 to 9:45 pm instead of 8 to 8:45 pm.

Ever play that game Two Truths and a Lie? Well, this month’s web exclusive is a little like that. Blurring the line between fact and fiction, Aubrey Hirsch’s “Albert Arnold Gore” will keep you guessing. Rendered in clear, keen prose, this set of three linked shorts offers portraits that are inventive and intriguing—and ultimately poignant and revealing. Read “Albert Arnold Gore” here, and check out our Q&A with the author, below.

1. This piece is part of a series of what you’ve called “counterfactual biographies,” fictional stories about historical figures. Can you tell us a little bit about where you came up with the idea for these stories and what interests you about blurring the line between fact and fiction?

The series started with a stand-alone piece about Amelia Earhart. I was fascinated by her story and wanted to tell another side of it, ascribing thoughts and motivations to her that we couldn’t actually know. I had so much fun writing it that I decided to try writing a series of these little flashes, each one about a different famous person.

The line between “fact” and “fiction” is something I think a lot about. They’re both fickle terms and there’s a lot of gray area between them. This is especially true when you’re talking about celebrities. At a certain point, their story becomes legend and it’s difficult to extricate the real from the invented. In my own work, I’m more interested in the fiction that lies around and in between the recorded facts: little details, inner thoughts, hidden motivations and so on.

2. OK, so why Al Gore? And how much did you know about Al Gore (or I should say the Als Gore) before you started writing?

When I’m sitting down to write one of these stories, I generally start by casting a wide net. I research lots of different people and ideas and allow myself to click random links or to indulge whatever curiosity arises until something strikes me as especially interesting. I can’t say exactly what led me to Al Gore, but as soon as I started reading about his life and his family, I knew there was a story there. I had also been thinking that it would be fun to try one of these pieces as a set of linked flashes that told one complete story. The three generations of Als, all with the same name, provided a perfect opportunity to do that.

I was still in high school when Al Gore was in office, so going in I only knew the basics: Vice President, failed presidential candidate, beard, An Inconvenient Truth. But now I feel confident in saying that I am an expert on all things Als Gore!

3. What do you find interesting about writing linked or prompt-based stories? I know I enjoy reading them—it feels almost like watching the gears of an author’s imagination turn as they trace an idea or theme through different worlds.

For me, it’s a kind of stretching. Having a “prompt” or “project” forces me to write stories I otherwise wouldn’t have written. It’s also nice to come to the blank page with some direction. I primarily work on these stories when I need a break from my novel, which is pretty intellectually draining. So when it’s time to write something else, it’s great to have a bit of guidance to get my creative energy flowing again.

4. My favorite line in the story comes when you’re describing Al Gore III: “His tongue slides around the gaps in his teeth like a worm on a hook.” This is such a small, but beautifully rendered detail. I’m wondering if you found it challenging, in this piece and the others in the series, to home in these kinds of details when the characters you’re writing about are all these historically significant figures, who are larger than life in a way.

The small details are actually the easiest part for me (and the most interesting). When I’m thinking about a scene, it generally comes to me in microcosm first. The harder part is contending with established facts, juggling the timeline and working with or against preexisting impressions of a famous person. I often find so much interesting material about my subject that I can only allude to a tiny fraction of it in the story. I guess I have to hope these little stories inspire people to do some more digging on their own.

5. What’s up next for you? Where else can we find your writing?

As I mentioned, I’m hard at work on my first novel. I’m also finishing up the counterfactual biographies series and hoping to send it off to chapbook publishers soon. You can find some of my recent work in PANK, The Emprise Review, and Daily Science Fiction, and I have stories coming out this fall in Whiskey Island Magazine, Fiction Southeast, and Confrontation.

Hey, hey! Our editorial assistant Katherine Johnson put together this fantastic video that explores issue 52, which is out now.

It’s got readings from the issue and loads of tips. Tips on: how to read these stories and why. You may want to get your hands on some Nilla Wafers, a bottle of red wine, and some Joni Mitchell. We’re just saying, they could come in handy.

You done? You may find yourself itching to get your hands on a copy of the new issue. You can do that here.

Oh, hey there.

Don’t know if you’ve heard, but we’re having a little party here in Austin tomorrow night. We’re celebrating the new issue of ASF (our twentieth!); we’re celebrating poetry; we’re celebrating memoir; we couldn’t be more inclusive!

Seriously, this one’s going to be a really great time. We’ll be at the Highball this Thursday night, September 15, with Wild Child, poet Roger Reeves, memoirist Andrew Tilin, and fiction writer Mary Helen Specht. 7 to 9 pm, but get there early for Happy Hour and to say hi to us.

More details and RSVP on Facebook.

We’d love to see you there.

In this weekly series, Intern Alyssa, your fearless reader, will review popular short stories and their film adaptations. We’ll explore what works in each medium and what doesn’t, and how exactly the allure of literature can translate to film. Alyssa has no formal training in film, unless subscribing to Netflix and following Roger Ebert on Twitter count as formal training. She would also like to issue one big standing Spoiler Alert now.

Nick Halsey (Will Ferrell) lounges on the lawn in Dan Rush's EVERYTHING MUST GO (2011).

Well, here we are. The end. Before I started this series, ASF editor Jill Meyers and I talked about what adaptations I would want to review. We both agreed that Raymond Carver’s “Why Don’t You Dance?” and Dan Rush’s Everything Must Go fit right in. In fact, Everything Must Go is really the film that got me thinking about adaptations, as I mentioned in the footnote of my first entry, so I feel it’s fitting that it’s the focus of my last entry.

In that first entry, I may have alluded to the fact that I don’t really like Denis Johnson, whom Tobias Wolff compared to Raymond Carver. Well, here are some more controversial confessions: I don’t really like Raymond Carver. And I don’t really like Will Ferrell. (I also don’t like kittens, chocolate, or Paul Rudd. Just kidding! I love all those things, just like everyone else in the world.) But for some reason, I thought that the pairing of Carver and Ferrell might really work for me. And, in the end, it didn’t really work for me—but it sort of did.

"Why Don't You Dance?" from WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE. Raymond Carver. Knopf, 1981.

In one of my English classes as an undergraduate at the University of Texas, my professor assigned us several stories from Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and Cathedral. The assignment included both “The Bath” (from WWTA) and “A Small, Good Thing” (from Cathedral), which is essentially a longer, less heavily edited version of the former. My professor pointed out a major difference in the stories: “The Bath” ends ambiguously; “A Small, Good Thing” ends more optimistically. He attributed this change to Carver’s eventually victorious battle with alcoholism, and applied it to the writer’s career in general. Where once Carver’s stories ended in bleak loneliness, in misunderstanding, they later ended in profound connection, in moments of transcendence. Or, as I called it in that class, “schmaltz.”

I don’t think it’s as easy as this: “He wrote depressing stories when he drank, and then he stopped doing both.” But I do think that on this simplified spectrum, “Why Don’t You Dance?” would fall on the bleak loneliness end, and Everything Must Go on the schmaltzy transcendent one.

Dan Rush said that the idea for Everything Must Go came when he reread Carver as an adult, and he couldn’t rid his mind of the image of a man’s bedroom on the front lawn. It is indeed an intriguing and cinematic image, but it’s also one that comes in the first sentence of a very short story—“Why Don’t You Dance?” clocks in at only 1,620 words. Obviously Rush, who adapted the screenplay himself, had to fill in some gaps, or he’d walk away with a twenty-minute film. (As it is, Everything Must Go has a pretty short running time—hardly over an hour and a half.) So where in “Why Don’t You Dance?” we see a despondent, drunk man with his belongings on the porch and later wonder, as the woman he encounters that evening wonders, why, in Everything Must Go, we know.

Nick Halsey (Will Ferrell) loses his job and his wife on the same day, and due to the same problem: an unspecified (for most of the film) incident that occurred on a business trip during which he relapsed into alcoholism. His estranged wife throws all his stuff on their front lawn and changes the locks, and over the course of the film’s five days, Nick comes to terms with his new life’s circumstances with the help of a neighborhood kid (Christopher Jordan Wallace), Nick’s AA sponsor (Michael Pena), and a new (and pregnant) neighbor (Rebecca Hall).

It’s a pleasant and heartwarming—though not saccharine—journey, with several uncomfortable and touching moments along the way. I enjoyed watching it. But if I didn’t have to write this piece, I probably would have never thought about it again. Why would I need to? It leaves nothing unsaid.

“Why Don’t You Dance?,” on the other hand, leaves most things unsaid. We don’t know why the main character has arranged his bedroom on his front lawn. We don’t know where his wife is, and we don’t know if she’s coming back. We don’t know much about the young couple who stumble upon his house and assume he’s holding a yard sale. We don’t know, though we may assume we do, what the young woman is thinking when she dances with the man in his driveway and says, “You must be desperate or something.” We don’t know much of anything by the end of it, and the last two paragraphs have stuck with me since the first time I read it, about five years ago:

Weeks later, she said: “The guy was about middle-aged. All his things right there in his yard. No lie. We got real pissed and danced. In the driveway. Oh, my God. Don’t laugh. He played us these records. Look at this record-player. The old guy give it to us. and all these crappy records. Will you look at this shit?”
She kept talking. She told everyone. There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out. After a time, she quit trying.

Haven’t we all had an ineffable experience that we’ve tried in vain to explain? Don’t we all know the unquiet desperation of trying and failing to make ourselves understood—not just to others, but to ourselves?

Well, the characters in Everything Must Go haven’t. They wade through their sea of problems and emerge dry-legged, triumphant, and holding hands. It’s a nice movie full of nice people who make mistakes and then correct them. They’re all believable, thanks in no small part to the actors who portray them. Will Ferrell, especially, is great. As an alcoholic who (spoiler alert) may or may not have assaulted a woman, he walks a fine line between honesty and likeability, and somehow he remains both honest and likable. His face is heartbreaking and familiar. And Laura Dern, queen of the adaptations, is just lovely in a very small role as an old high school acquaintance. But as a whole, the movie was (like Dern’s scene in particular), a little too neat. A little too “talked out.”

And, in the end, so am I.

Stray observations:

• Is there a name for those precocious but innocent child characters who enlighten cynical and narrow-minded adult protagonists? Like Manic Pixie Dream Girls, but in child form. What should we call it? Seymour Glass Syndrome? (Why do I like it so much when Salinger does it and so little when anyone else does?)
• Will Ferrell should make more dramas.
• The story about Carver’s change in tone and style is really more interesting and complicated than I made it sound up there. For starters, check out Frank Kovarik’s piece on The Millions about Carver’s posthumously released manuscript Beginners.
• Most importantly, I want to thank everyone for reading these blog posts. I had a great time writing them. Extra special thanks to Jill, for giving me the opportunity to do so. Now, unfortunately, summer’s over. Get back to work!
• But if you need some cinematic distractions after work, check out these other famous films and their literary counterparts: 2001: A Space Odyssey (“The Sentinel,” Arthur C. Clark); The Swimmer (“The Swimmer,” John Cheever); Freaks (“Spurs,” Tod Robbins); Rear Window (“It Had to Be Murder,” Cornell Woolrich); The Killers (“The Killers,” Ernest Hemingway); The Last Time I Saw Paris (“Babylon Revisited,” F. Scott Fitzgerald).

In this weekly series, Intern Alyssa, your fearless reader, will review popular short stories and their film adaptations. We’ll explore what works in each medium and what doesn’t, and how exactly the allure of literature can translate to film. Alyssa has no formal training in film, unless subscribing to Netflix and following Roger Ebert on Twitter count as formal training. She would also like to issue one big standing Spoiler Alert now.

Thomas (David Hemmings) examines a print for evidence of a murder in BLOW-UP.

Hey, Summer Film Clubbers! September is upon us and autumn is nigh, which means, unfortunately, that my series is drawing to a close. Next week’s entry will be my last. We’ll end, appropriately enough, with Everything Must Go, Dan Rush’s 2010 adaptation of Raymond Carver’s classic “Why Don’t You Dance?” This week, we’re discussing Michaelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 classic Blow-Up, based on Julio Cortázar’s “The Devil’s Drool.” So let’s get into it!

I think I may have purchased a bowdlerized translation of “The Devil’s Drool.” I read it and reread it so carefully, yet found nary a consensually questionable orgy or bevy of interchangeable topless women. Does anyone know where I can find the dirty version?

BLOW-UP, dir. Michaelangelo Antonioni. Starring David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave. 1966.

Little joke. Let me explain: there’s a lot of nudity, models, naked models, and implied sex with uncomfortable power dynamics in Blow-Up. But we’ll get to that later. (Please resist the urge to scroll through this post just to get to the dirty parts.)

For now, suffice it to say that Blow-Up joins Secretary in the club of adaptations that take great liberty with their source material (and their female characters’ integrity, but again—later). If we render the events of each piece in the sparest possible terms—man takes photo of couple in park, subject unsuccessfully demands he hand over photo, man later realizes something sinister’s afoot in said photo—then Blow-Up is a faithful adaptation. Let’s approach this a little differently than we usually do and quickly list the straightforward plot differences in each piece.

Setting: “The Devil’s Drool” takes place in Paris; Blow-Up, in swinging Sixties London.

Characters: In “The Devil’s Drool,” the protagonist (Michel) is a professional translator and amateur photographer. In Blow-Up, the protagonist (Thomas) is a professional fashion photographer (hence the models). While Thomas interacts with a variety of models and artists in Blow-Up, Michel doesn’t interact with any other characters in the present (a problematic term, Cortázar would caution) of the story, which takes place in his head/on the page.

Plot: Michel photographs an older woman and a teenage boy struggling in a park. Initially he assumes the older woman was trying to seduce the boy, but later he becomes convinced that the woman was procuring the boy for an older gentleman waiting in a parked car. He finds himself within the photograph watching the scene unfold. Thomas photographs a younger woman and an older man canoodling in a park and later realizes a gunman was hiding in the bushes—a fact of which the woman seemed aware.

Okay. So, I’ve come to believe, over the course of the summer, that what makes an adaptation faithful to its source material is not a strict adherence to its plot points, but a general observance of its themes. And, well, Blow-Up certainly adheres to Cortázar’s many ambiguous themes that allow for about a million different interpretations. The title “The Devil’s Drool” (“Las Babas Del Diablo,” in Spanish) refers idiomatically to a thin spider thread, and the story itself is as intricately woven as a spider’s web (sorry). It concerns the interplay between imagination and paranoia, the life of a photograph, the existence of truth—I even saw one interpretation that invoked the Heisenberg Principle. If a roomful of monkeys on typewriters could produce a Shakespeare play, they could probably also produce a valid interpretation of “The Devil’s Drool.” But the theme that struck me most was the inaccuracy of language. The protagonist, a translator (like Cortázar himself), grapples daily with the question of truthful, accurate language, and, well—it’s kind of a losing battle, as evidenced by the first paragraph:

It’ll never be known how this has to be told, in the first person or in the second, using the third person plural or continually inventing modes that will serve for nothing. If one might say: I will see the moon rose, or: we hurt me at the back of my eyes, and especially: you the blond woman was the clouds that race before my you’re his our yours their faces. What the hell.

BLOW-UP AND OTHER STORIES. Julio Cortázar. Pantheon Books, 1985.

What the hell, indeed, Señor Cortázar. When I tried reading this story after a fitful night of sleep, I was momentarily concerned that a lifetime of insomnia had taken a permanent, brain damage-y toll on me. Not so. Cortázar’s convoluted, nonsensical prose underlines the absurdity of language, and his alternations between persons imply the unreliability of a narrator. Later in the story, he states the narrator’s unreliability in terms that make Nick Carraway look honest and subtle.

And Blow-Up? Well, ambiguity is certainly a theme. The titular blow-ups refer to enlarged prints of the couple’s dalliance in the woods, the graininess of which prints imply a murder (a barely discernible gun, the shadow of a body). Thomas, sans camera, encounters the body in the park at night, but without photographic evidence, does it exist? Or: if a body falls in the park and no one’s around to photograph it, is it really dead? Apparently not. When he returns the next morning, the body’s gone. His hesitant participation in a mimed tennis game at the film’s conclusion beautifully enhances the film’s themes of ambiguity and perception. If you toss an imaginary tennis ball to a couple of mimes, does it make a sound? Apparently, yes.

But.

I don’t think that ambiguity and perception are the most prominent themes in Blow-Up. I think the most prominent themes in Blow-Up are ennui and jadedness, as evidenced by Thomas’s abhorrent treatment of women as well as his desire to photograph the corpse. I have to editorialize here: I didn’t like this movie. I understand that it’s a “good” movie, or a “great” movie, or a “masterpiece,” from a technical standpoint. But what’s to enjoy? It glorifies misogyny and forces the viewer to watch what may be a rape scene (the aforementioned consensually questionable orgy). And, okay, yes, I get that the aforementioned scene contributes to the themes of ambiguity and perception. But I think that’s a pretty weak argument to make in order to excuse the film’s rampant misogyny. Look: Thomas spends so much more time physically and emotionally manipulating women, and asserting his sexual dominance over them, than he does questioning the truth in perception. I think Blow-Up is an accurate (if chilling) depiction of hipsters in mod London, but a successful adaptation of “The Devil’s Drool”? Not so much.

Stray Observations:

• The film’s famous montage of still photographs depicting the murder is, I admit, fantastic, and a neat homage to Cortázar’s “photo comes to life” ending.
• Antonioni pans to the sky in the park a couple of times, recalling Cortázar’s references to clouds passing in the sky.
• Both “The Devil’s Drool” and Blow-Up eschew typical structure—they’re meandering and plotless and compelling nonetheless.
• Cortázar liked the remake.
• This letter from cast member Ronan O’Casey to Roger Ebert really throws a kink into the whole “themes of ambiguity” theory.
• A brief blog post does not have nearly enough room to do justice to these pieces. I left out so much that I’d love to talk about. Commenters, want to correct my most egregious omissions?

Howdy, fellow online fiction readers. Gather round. It’s September, and that means it’s time for the latest installment in our web exclusive series. This month we bring you a fantastic piece of flash fiction, “Litter” by Iris Moulton. At 445 words, “Litter” flies by, but don’t let its don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it length fool you — it’s an elegant, evocative piece that’ll linger in your mind long after you reach the last line. Read “Litter” here and be sure to check out our interview with the author, below.

1. Tell us about the genesis of this story. Where did the idea come from and what kind of evolution did it go through to get to us?

So much of what I read in any genre feels like someone else’s memory. This came from not only asking myself to start remembering, but also giving myself permission to acknowledge a memory as important and formative. And then allowing that memory to be inaccurate, conflated, fictionalized. My memories are not of fleeing a war-torn country or rushing into a burning building—the strongest are of things like the time my little sister dropped a toy out of a moving car. Sure, I would feel comfortable writing about rushing into a burning building, but there is an urgency to small moments I recall and can expand, like in this piece, that is giving them priority right now.

2. One of the things that makes the story successful, I think, is that it’s told from the point of view of a child. The narrator’s voice draws readers in very quickly—which is so important in a piece of this length. Can you talk a little bit about how you imagined your narrator? Did the voice come naturally or did it take some work to channel a young(er) person’s perspective?

The voice felt organic and natural when writing this particular piece because I channeled a lot of the way I viewed the world as a child. The challenge was reconciling the knowledge I have now with whatever knowledge I had then. For example, it wasn’t until I wrote this that I realized it might be fairly unusual that to this day I won’t run over a plastic bag on the road because I assume it is full of kittens. At the same time, I didn’t want to inject too much of my Now into that memory—I didn’t want to make that education feel unnatural. And I remember very well being young and seeing all these singular shoes on the side of the road and being so worried for their owners. The shoes felt like a trail of breadcrumbs that—if I was old enough to drive then—I would have followed and found a family tied up in a cabin that I was meant to free. But now, older, it was a challenge to reconcile that impulse with the practical voice saying that these are not necessarily signs of something sinister—made easier, of course, by the fact that I do still assume these people have all been horribly murdered.

3. Objects have such power in this piece. Everyday items—stuff that’s been lost or forgotten or thrown away on the side of the road—take on an almost talismanic quality that feels really essential to the way the story unfolds. It’s an interesting way to approach a story, and I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on the power of objects in fiction. What about in your own writing process? Do you have any lucky writing charms?

Though the story takes place during such a brief stretch of misremembered or perhaps completely imagined road, the setting is, thankfully, still permanent and universal. The roadside from the memory that spurred this story, wherever it was, is likely unchanged, and I’m sure it looks like any other roadside. So I was able to make a study when I ran errands or took a walk. It was a relief to then be able to remember and include all roadsides I’d seen: the thick-webbed bushes in Kentucky, the boots in Utah, the prisoners in California. These specifics from my memory accented the universal objects found along any roadside. Doing this—getting to the universal by way of the specific—is to me the most amazing thing about fiction.

I have tried to not develop many superstitions or specific needs as a writer—it would be a sort of prison to me if I could only write beginning at 8:58 a.m. facing a southeast window while wearing my red sweater and clutching the mug that says I HATE MONDAYS. To write, and to hopefully work at making a life as a writer, means to write constantly and work really hard, and that might mean at any time of day or night, in any city or room that you happen to be placed. And I love to work while I travel. That said, I seem to do better if I can at least see outside, like through a window. Thankfully, that is pretty readily available.

4. I went on a lot of long road trips when I was growing up, so your story held a particular charm for me and brought back some memories. Did you have a specific stretch of road in mind when you wrote this? Any drives that hold special meaning for you?

Though I had a specific action in mind—the action of losing the toy out of the window—where or when it took place is less certain. I sort of see where I think it happened, and it is along a stretch of routine road, which makes me think it may not have even been a road trip at all.

I am a lover of road trips. Perhaps my favorite, thus far, is when my partner and I were a few months away from moving from Utah, and we drove from Salt Lake City into and around Southern Utah. I saw pockets of red rock canyons I’d never seen before—places where pioneers wrote their names in axle grease, where desert hares hopped through these strange, sandy cemeteries. It was a long and good goodbye to Utah, and pretty damn romantic, actually.

5. What are you working on now? Where else can we find your writing?

I am currently working on two projects that are taking up the bulk of my time, but I am thus far enjoying both of them. The first is a novel and the second is a collection of vignettes. Alright, I guess one quirk I have when it comes to process is that I don’t want to say much more than that.

My work has been most recently published in Fugue, Everyday Genius, and elimae.

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Can’t get enough of ASF’s awesome online fiction? You’ll find lots of other great reads in our web exclusive archive.

In this weekly series, Intern Alyssa, your fearless reader, will review popular short stories and their film adaptations. We’ll explore what works in each medium and what doesn’t, and how exactly the allure of literature can translate to film. Alyssa has no formal training in film, unless subscribing to Netflix and following Roger Ebert on Twitter count as formal training. She would also like to issue one big standing Spoiler Alert now.

Connie (Laura Dern) sits on a porch swing in SMOOTH TALK.

In 1966, twenty-three-year-old Charles Schmid was convicted of killing three girls in the Arizona desert. Schmid, the “Pied Piper of Tucson,” caught the attention of Time, Playboy, Life—and Joyce Carol Oates, who based her 1966 short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” on Schmid’s murders.

Oates’s oft-anthologized story, first published in Epoch Magazine, tells the story of fifteen-year-old Connie’s sexual awakening…sort of. Rebellious and beautiful, Connie spends the summer before her sophomore year of high school sneaking off to a drive-in to flirt with boys. One of those boys, though, turns out to be a creepy older man with the creepy name “Arnold Friend”—and the creepy habit of stalking teenage girls. When he shows up at Connie’s house while the rest of her family is out for the day, he verbally terrorizes her until she “gives in” and leaves her house with him.

WHERE ARE YOU GOING, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? STORIES OF YOUNG AMERICA. Joyce Carol Oates. Fawcett Publications, 1974.

Oates’s story is many things: an allegory, a coming-of-age tale, a psychological horror story. I remember reading this story in college and feeling a vague sense of déjà vu, and I wondered if I had read this story before, or if it just eerily tapped into one of my greatest fears as a teenager. Whatever your interpretation, it’s a very effective story.

One of the ways in which I think Oates succeeded especially is in establishing a sense of Connie’s isolation, thanks in part to the allegorical ambiguity of the setting and characters. Connie inhabits a nightmarish fairy tale, replete with a cruel mother, a plain but perfect sister, a spectral father, and a golden carriage Cadillac. The structure of the story enhances this somnolent sense, with several sleepy paragraphs of prose describing Connie’s daydreamy life before her final encounter with Arnold Friend. Indeed, on the afternoon that Arnold shows up at her house, Connie awakes, disoriented, from a nap:

…when she opened her eyes she hardly knew where she was, the back yard ran off into weeds and a fence-like line of trees and behind it the sky was perfectly blue and still. The asbestos ranch house that was now three years old startled her—it looked small. She shook her head as if to get awake.

You know how sometimes when you’re dreaming, you think you wake up, but you’ve only woken up in the dream? Everything seems almost normal, except you have this nagging thought that your cat isn’t supposed to be talking, and your house doesn’t have eighteen flights of stairs, and James Franco isn’t actually your boyfriend. That’s how the rest of the story feels: like a bad dream from which we’d like Connie to wake. As Arnold threatens and coaxes Connie out of the house, she becomes more and more disoriented: she no longer recognizes her house, and she dissociates until she feels she is watching herself open the door and leave the house.

Whereas lengthy, languid paragraphs occupy the first third of the story, Arnold Friend’s unnerving dialogue makes up the majority. Near the end, Connie tells him, “People don’t talk like that, you’re crazy.” Although Arnold doesn’t physically violate Connie (on the page, at least), his verbal assault is enough to make me cringe and want to look away. It’s incredibly disturbing, and Oates succeeded most in her fearlessness with his character.

Smooth Talk, Joyce Chopra’s 1985 adaptation of Oates’s story, succeeds largely thanks to its cast and its screenplay—though it doesn’t always go as far as I’d like it to. Laura Dern’s portrayal of Connie is subtle and endearing, and Treat Williams lends to Arnold not just a convincing creepiness but also a disturbing charm. (Mary Kay Place is also great as Connie’s ambivalent mother.)

I found the structure of the movie really interesting. At just 92 minutes, it’s on the short side, and a full two-thirds is exposition of sorts: Connie fighting with her mom; Connie and her friends at the beach, at the mall, at the drive-in. Laura Dern is so charming that I enjoyed watching all of these scenes, even if the extras and the score evoked ABC after-school-specials. I suppose it would be difficult to market a movie that’s just an hour of Treat Williams being creepy, and I like Chopra’s choice here.

Tom Cole wrote the screenplay, which takes lines verbatim from the story—notably Connie’s mother complaining about Connie’s “trashy daydreams,” a phrase I was happy he used. My biggest complaint with the script is that I don’t think Cole went as far as he should have with Arnold’s dialogue. Although Cole’s Arnold is certainly threatening, he didn’t inspire in me quite the same sense of fear and imminent danger as Oates’s Arnold did. For example, Cole modifies this pivotal line: “I’ll have my arms tight around you so you won’t need to try to get away and I’ll show you what love is like, what it does.” Um, that line alone makes me want to make sure all my doors and windows are locked (they are), even though I’ve read it a million times. In the movie, it’s the still frightening (but somewhat less so), “I’ll hold you so much and tight you won’t need to think about anything or pretend anything and you won’t even want to get away, even if you’re scared.” Similarly, he doesn’t explicitly threaten her parents.

SMOOTH TALK, dir. Joyce Chopra. Starring Laura Dern, Treat Williams, Mary Kay Place. 1985.

I imagine the slight softening of Arnold is due to Chopra’s decision to modify the ending of Oates’s story. In Smooth Talk, the viewer sees that Connie makes it out alive, so that the movie ends up feeling like a bit of a morality play: this precocious teenager is punished for daring to explore her sexuality. I find that disturbing, especially in light of the final scenes of the movie, where Connie makes amends with her family and dances with her sister to James Taylor’s “Handy Man,” a callback to an earlier scene in the film. “You wouldn’t feel, like, defiled or anything if I touch you?” Connie asks her sister. She’s smirking, but we know she means it. “Do you still like this song?” she asks her sister a minute later as they dance. It’s a telling, honest moment that reveals the way Connie feels changed after her encounter with Arnold, but the lack of commentary with which it’s presented complicates it for me.

Joyce Carol Oates wanted nothing to do with the adaptation, but she praised it once she had seen it and even defended Chopra’s new ending. I thought it was a successful adaptation, too. Like its source material, Smooth Talk is enjoyable, disturbing, complicated, and thought-provoking—even if it does have lots of cheesy synth music.

Stray observations:

• Charles Schmid was a gymnast, and Treat Williams does some neat little balancing beam acts on that gold Caddy of his. Not sure if those facts are intentionally related.
• Joyce Carol Oates dedicated the story to Bob Dylan, whose song “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” inspired the title.
• Do you need a creepy Halloween costume idea? You should go as Arnold Friend. He stuffs his boots to make himself appear taller, so you’d be totally comfortable walking around all night.
• Smooth Talk, which no one I know has ever heard of, won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance the year it was released.

Hey, there. We’re looking to make the journey down to the Austin Convention Center this coming March for the orgy of ideas (and product promotion) that is SXSW Interactive. It’s not too far of a journey, in terms of mileage: 3.9 miles from the ASF offices. But we still need your help to get there!

You see, we’ve put together a panel on fiction (and why it matters), and we’re hoping that folks will like our panel via the SXSW PanelPicker. Basically, the panel idea is: we’ll bring in some fresh, just-caught fiction, and highlight the incredible moves the writers are making. . . and then get into how you can make some pretty killer moves yourself. It’s about stealing the strategies of great fiction writers. Or adapting them, if you prefer.

If we get enough love through the PanelPicker, SXSW staff may be more inclined to include our panel in SXSW programming. Would you please like our panel proposal? Just click the thumbs-up button, please. Thanks. We’ll save you a seat on the karaoke bus.