American Short Fiction blog

October was Chapbook Month. Which means November is Greying Ghost Is Clearing Out Inventory: Get Your Chapbooks Cheap! Month. (You’ll likely get lucky into December.)

For your chapbook spending spree this holiday season, check out all the chapbook publishers we could round up in one site.

American Short Fiction is as much about inspiring writers as celebrating them.

We’re part of a larger nonprofit here in Central Texas called Badgerdog, and Badgerdog’s mission is to launch and sustain writers. We do this through a writers-in-the-schools program, creative writing summer camps, internships, and more.

Badgerdog operates as part of the Writers in the Schools Alliance (WITSA). Its purpose: put writers where the learning can happen early and often—in grade schools and high schools across the United States.

Recently, InsideOut Detroit, another member of WITSA, has gained some notice. Dr. Terry Blackhawk, Founder and Executive Director of InsideOut Detroit, received the Coming Up Taller Award from Michelle Obama at the White House. One of her remarks:

It was inspiring to be in the presence of so many fine youth arts organizations from around the county who, like InsideOut [Detroit], are working against incredible odds to use the power of the arts to change young people’s lives.

When poetry gets a standing ovation in someone’s living room, let alone at the Kennedy Center, the celebration’s on! So here’s to InsideOut Detroit’s Lena Cintron (center) for receiving a standing ovation at Kennedy for her poems, for Dr. Blackhawk (left) for leading her team to stunning victory, for First Lady Michelle Obama for remarking: “One of the writers who works with young people through the InsideOut Literary Arts Project in Detroit, Michigan put it best when he said something very simple: ‘If you ask a kid to dream, he’ll dream.’”

And, finally, here’s to all the members of WITSA for doing what they do every day to keep the dream alive.

Badgerdog’s President/CEO Melanie Moore adds, “Be sure to check out the WITSA panels and events at AWP in Denver this year. The famous Terry Blackhawk will be there! Along with the famous Badgerdog staff, and others.”

An artist’s residency. Here are some to choose from:

Artist-in-Residence at Rocky Mountain National Park
The Artist-In-Residence program at Rocky Mountain National Park offers professional writers, composers, and visual and performing artists the opportunity to pursue their artistic discipline while being surrounded by the park’s inspiring landscape. Selected artists stay in a historic, rustic cabin for two-week periods from June through September. No stipend is provided. Info and app here. Deadline: December 1, 2009.

Residency at Pilchuck Glass School in Seattle

The twelve-day Hauberg residency, established to encourage collaboration among a group of outstanding artists, offers an opportunity to create new work that utilizes Pilchuck facilities and/or is inspired by the Pilchuck environment. Visual artists in all media as well as writers, poets, art critics, and curators are encouraged to submit proposals with a collaborative concept or theme that makes creative use of Pilchuck’s resources and environment. Twelve-day spring residencies include a single room in a cottage with shared bath, meals, studio space and limited supplies. Reimbursement for travel costs and honorarium are not provided. Info: write to Ruth King, Artistic Director: rking@pilchuck.com or visit www.pilchuck.com. Deadline: January 16, 2010.

Petrified Forest National Park Residencies in Arizona
The Artist-In-Residence Program at Petrified Forest National Park offers professional visual, performing, and literary artists the opportunity to pursue their artistic discipline while being surrounded by the park’s inspiring landscape. Selected artists stay in park housing for two-week periods from April through October. No stipend is provided. Info here. Deadline: March 15, 2010.

Work in a different medium?  Try these. . .

The Puffin Foundation Grant

The Puffin Foundation is accepting grant proposals from emerging artists in the fields of art, music, photography, theater, and video. To receive an application packet please send a SASE (#10 self-addressed stamped envelope) to:

Puffin Foundation Ltd.
20 Puffin Way (formerly East Oakdene Ave.)
Teaneck, NJ 07666-4111

Grants will be awarded to permanent residents and citizens of the United States. Attention given to those works, which due to their genre and/or social philosophy, might have difficulty being aired. Average grants are: $1,000 to $2,500. Info here. Deadline: December 15, 2009.

The Lange-Taylor Prize

The Lange-Taylor Prize is offered to a writer and a photographer in the early stages of a documentary project. By encouraging such collaborative efforts, the Center for Documentary Studies supports the documentary process in which writers and photographers work together to record the human story. Info here. Deadline: January, 31, 2010.

Thanks to Santa’s Helper Mira Bartok for the update.

We are getting excited about our reading coming up. Please save the date: Friday, December 4, we’ll be gathering to celebrate our new issue at Space 12, a great new community space on the East Side (E 12th and Airport, to be exact).

Frank Smith will kick things off at 7 pm with a solo set, and then we’ll have readings by Ashley Butler, Maggie Wilhite, and Michael Noll. Things to expect from the evening: some sweet pedal steel guitar, a philosophy of magic, essays that pack a punch, and the joy of being read to.

Oh, and some delicious food, too–compliments of Xen Kitchen. And beer. So come early and stay late.

It’s been a while. We’re hoping to eventually get these Short Notices posts up on the blog weekly, but it’s been a crazy fall ‘round here.

We’ve been working on final stuff for the Winter issue, which we should have in our hands at the beginning of December. We really, sincerely, intensely, over-the-top love these stories and have put a ton of work into making sure you do, too. Together they form something so great and so strong.

Here are some contributor names: Michael Noll, Laura Owen, Suzanne Rivecca, Leigh Gallagher, Eugene Cross.

The lovely Karen Ingram provided the cover art. Check out more of her work here. (And try to get your hands on one of those postcards. . .)

We’re also looking forward to our December reading, our launch party for the issue. Michael Noll will be coming in from his current residence, the Katherine Anne Porter House, to read from his blockbuster “Bullheads.” Actress Maggie Wilhite will be reading from Laura Owen’s “The Execution Trick,” and Ashley Butler will be reading from Dear Sound of Footstep, her essay collection out from Sarabande Books.

The reading will be Friday, December 4, , at 7pm, at Space 12.  Space 12, a growing community center on Austin’s East Side, is a new space for us and we think it’s going to be a laughing-crying-stomping good time. Live Oak is donating a keg and we’ll be rocking out to some pre-reading music from local band Frank Smith.  Come out, meet us, and join the fun. Seriously. We’ll amaze you.

In other news, we’ve added a new option on the submission manager for short shorts. We publish a new Web Exclusive every month and we’ve found that women totally dominate the less-than-2000 words category. Why? Get it together, guys, and send us something short and gripping or short and stunning or short and subtly spectacular. We’re still selecting for the February issue as well.

Also, also, also: We’re looking for interns for the Spring. We’ve been scheming and have come up with some new projects that involve integrating the fabulous Austin music scene into our fabulous Austin-based literary magazine, so we need a music intern who’s well acquainted with bands and venues and such in this crazy town. More on that to come. We’re also looking for editorial interns, so if you’re in Austin and like fiction, send your résumé and cover letter to me, Callie Collins, at callie.collins [at] americanshortfiction.org. In your cover letter, please let us know about your experience with contemporary fiction (who do you read?) and tell us about a favorite short story and why you like it so darn much.

A brief list of things of things we think will make you a happier person:

• Pumpkin bread
• The new Mountain Goats album, The Life of the World to Come
• One of the new Nabokovs, with their beautiful covers.
• Michael Schaub’s tweets (@michaelschaub)

And because I can’t resist, I’ll leave you with an excerpt from the first story in the issue, Laura Owen’s “The Execution Trick”.

“I’ve come up with a list of five ways to stay sane away from home,” the Magician says. His eyes have softened; he’s relaxed. There’s no way this is the first time or last time for this speech.

“Please share.”

“One: Lift weights every day.” He holds up his right hand, indicating the number one with his index finger. When he moves his arms you really notice that the neck and head don’t move at all. I also notice, for the first time, what seems to be small, black stitches in the side of his neck. “Two: Talk to someone from Minnesota everyday. Three: Introduce myself to someone new. And if I don’t meet someone new, I have to introduce two tourists who haven’t met yet.”

“So is that three or four steps now?” I check the camera again. I think I’ve set up the lighting a little too brightly, but there’s no pressing need to fix that now.

“That’s four. Three and four are kind of one step, I guess.”

“And step five?”

Now he really smiles. I thought the smile before seemed too wide, too cheerful, to be real. But this one is even wider, squishing his eyes up into his wide, shiny forehead.

“Do some magic,” he says.

We writers like to hoard things, don’t we? Sometimes these things are heavy–like that hundred-pound marble-topped coffee table in the shape of a Space Invader I once took off my buddy Michelangelo (no joke, that’s his name. His brother’s name. . . ready? Bob).

Sometimes, though, these things we hoard are light, airy. These one, two sheets of paper may not seem like much, but they can show us new life.

Take my most recent find: a Writer’s Digest article, “4 Tips for Choosing the Right Word.”

Tips are culled from William Brohaugh, long-time editor and reference book writer (English Through the Ages). Read in tandem with another something I’ll be hanging onto–Skip Horack’s new Bakeless Prize-winning debut collection, The Southern Cross—these four tips from old-timer editor Brohaugh shine like bright copper pennies:

1. Keep word and phrase choice appropriate to the context. For example, streetwise characters in a novel wouldn’t likely use technical jargon or acronyms. Nor would the writer of a novel about streetwise characters. One lesson here is to let word choice in the narrative conform at a certain level to the word choice of the people populating the narrative. For instance, formal narration lacking contractions wouldn’t serve a story about rural folk, nor would colloquial narration serve a story about high society — even if the characters themselves spoke completely in context.

2. Listen for what sounds right. I’m thinking of the TV mini-series Merlin, in which a medieval character states, “My mind is made up.” I don’t have reference to when the idiom “make up your mind” was first used, but I suspect it wasn’t in use in Arthurian times, and even if it was, it sounds modern. Better the character have said something that sounded a bit archaic, like “My mind is firm.”

3. The precise word isn’t necessarily the right word. Susurration might be more precise than murmur in a given passage, but if the word is confusing or (see above) at odds with the context or the atmosphere of the story, a less-precise word might actually be the better choice.

4. The most powerful words tend to be the shortest and, not coincidentally, the ones most basic to the English language. Said Sir Winston Churchill, “Broadly speaking, the short words are best, and the old words best of all.” Words like kin, thanks, and small, for instance, are deeply rooted in Old English before A.D. 1000, while words like relatives (from the 1600s), gratitude (in use by 1450) and tiny (from the 1500s) are from succeeding generations. But again, it’s best to choose the word that communicates your point while evoking or echoing the tone of your manuscript, and if it’s the longer word, so be it.

Here’s a paragraph from one of Horack’s sixteen stories, a 1-and-1/2-page marvel called “Chores”:

Easy finished with the front and began cutting behind the trailer. A thick patch of ragweed grew along the back fence. Here, he busted a pair of quail that exploded across the hay field. They separated then disappeared into the pinewoods, and Easy tracked them, wincing as he imagined a clutch of eggs passing through the blade of his mower.

Horack’s prose holds up impeccably in the light of Brohaugh’s tips.  The word choice is spot-on and the construction flawless. I would love to come up with another word for “clutch” in his paragraph. I can’t. It’s perfect.  No other word could do as much work. Not “clench.” Certainly not “pile.”  And it would be a sin to remove the word entirely and simply say “the eggs.”

By the way, The Southern Cross is a brilliant, heartbreaking collection you should really pick up soon.

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Bonnie Jo Campbell’s second collection of short stories, American Salvage, is a contender for the National Book Award in fiction, whose winner will be announced tonight. Vying alongside Campbell for the award are Colum McCann (Let the Great World Spin), Daniyal Mueenuddin (In Other Rooms, Other Wonders), Jayne Anne Phillips (Lark and Termite), and Marcel Theroux (Far North).

Campbell’s collection is exceptional not only in substance, but also because it escapes a trio of NBA general rules of thumb:

1. Be a novel
2. If you’re not a novel, be a collection of linked stories or a novel in stories.
3. Be published by a big New York house.

Regarding 1 and 2: Campbell’s collection contains fourteen stories linked by theme and setting, but no novel in stories here. Regarding 3: It was published by a small press, Wayne State University Press, in Michigan, where both Campbell and the people and places of American Salvage reside.

Interested in how American Salvage came to be, I followed Campbell’s exceptional path—to WSU Press (where I got my start in editing as an undergrad, oh, a while ago) where I spoke with editor Annie Martin. She handles the press’s Made in Michigan Writers Series and she therefore handled American Salvage, from its first exciting discovery about two years ago to the NBA announcement three weeks ago. Martin talks about, among other things, the big news, the book’s title and content changes, and some specific moments in Campbell’s stories that haunt her.

ASF’s Stacy Muszynski: You mentioned you’re “blown away by the entire [American Book Award nomination and finalist] thing.” Congrats again. How did you come to learn of it? What was your reaction?

WSU Press’s Annie Martin: It was actually my birthday and I was out to lunch with a colleague. I forgot my cell phone at the office, so Kathy Wildfong, editor-in-chief, walked into the bakery. I remember asking if the Press was on fire or something. So she got to tell me the amazing news and then I proceed to hug everyone in the office. [...] Everyone in our office was dumbfounded and happy and . . . as a collective unit (eighteen of us) we were just really proud. We all knew it was a fantastic book, but lots of fantastic books don’t get picked for such an honor. I called Bonnie to congratulate her and champagne was had in the conference room. One of the best birthdays ever.

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Oxford American editors have a nifty thing going at their website: quick reviews on new books, movies, and music. The photos are terrific, too—smart, fresh, and to the point.

Like this:

I Am Not Sidney Poitier
by Percival Everett
(Graywolf, 2009)

“I was, in life, to be a gambler, a risk taker, a swashbuckler, a knight. I accepted, then and there, my place in this world. I was a fighter of windmills. I was a chaser of whales. I was Not Sidney Poitier.” So begins the quest of Not Sidney Poitier—and what else but absurdity could ensue for the oddly named young orphan, a spitting image of the famous actor, with scads of inherited money and a rented room in Ted Turner’s mansion?

Percival Everett’s latest novel—or experiment, as his work tends to be—finds its hero ambling through the American South and navigating molestation-by-attractive-schoolteacher and almost-continual bigotry (and seduction), and surviving attempted murder.

All the while, Not Sidney struggles with and shatters expectations for race, class, and wealth (not to mention his enigma of a name). The novel unravels into madness at times, but somehow, while probing the darker depths of these issues with poison-tipped satire and chilling dreamscapes, it remains hilarious. It’s weird.

Lines we liked: “An extremely tall, extremely thin, extremely washed-out, and extremely white man walked out of the darkness beside the building and into the white glow of my headlights. He bent at the waist and peered through the driver’s-side window and said the scariest thing I could imagine.
He said, ‘Boy you must be lost.’
‘I must be,’ I said. ‘Can you fix my car?’
‘Can but won’t.’
‘May I use your garage to try to fix it myself?’
‘You may not.’
‘Are you Rabbit Toe?’
‘That’s what they call me.’”

And like this:

Going Away Shoes: Stories
by Jill McCorkle
(Algonquin, September 2009)

This morning, I was late to work because I could not make myself stop reading OA contributor Jill McCorkle’s Going Away Shoes. This is not to say that these stories are the most upbeat or optimistic start to the day—a lonely school nurse finds solace in the “happy accidents” of PBS painter Bob Ross; a wife reluctantly confronts her husband’s alcoholism decades after he saved her from her own demons; a divorcée pens an angry letter to her couples’ therapist. Still, with her knack for blending humor and pain with remarkably believable results, McCorkle delivers eleven crystal-clear snapshots of middle age, middle class, and marriage gone wrong.

Lines we liked: “A life without any surprise is safe in its own way. You know if you stay within the lines and don’t glom too much paint on your brush, your paint-by-number picture of a seagull squatting on a rugged post will turn out okay. Do you want to look at it for the rest of your life? Does it make you happy? Now those are different questions altogether.”

Thanks, OA editors JTM and SCA for the quick bits.

See more. And leave us your own quick review in the comments.

So I yank open my mailbox and pull out the rained-on mail. (How does that happen when the mailman just pulls up in his shiny government vehicle and shovels it in? There’s only about three inches of weather to pass through.)

Anyway, inside a damp padded paper envelope is Dylan Landis’s debut collection, Normal People Don’t Live Like This, a finalist for the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction.

I can’t say yet what I make of it. But Elizabeth Strout, author of Olive Kitteridge, winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, says this debut is “wonderful, intriguing and original.” Many of the stories have appeared in Bomb, Colorado Review, Night Train, Quarterly West, Swink, Tin House, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among others.

Dylan Landis herself says she has a specific style and process when it comes to researching for fiction because of her background as a journalist and nonfiction writer. (She covered medicine for New Orleans Times-Picayune and interior design for Chicago Tribune and has put out ten books on decorating and other subjects).

She clarifies:

I’m always reporting. I scour each scene, as I dream it up, for clues to my characters’ emotional states. I take notes on the precise ways in which each character cleans her room or thinks about Walt Whitman or talks about her grandmother or puts on her makeup, because no two people do anything the same way. I also report for facts, because facts make fiction ring true. For Normal People, I carefully researched frog dissections. And I sat on a friend’s New York roof at midnight, alone, and took notes on the weird ticking sounds.

I don’t draw on people I’ve met as a journalist since I start with intimate knowledge of a character. A reporter rarely gets to ask her subject: Describe your first sexual experience . . . What is your most shameful memory? Tell me a time someone was extremely proud of you . . . Did you ever cheat on your spouse? Do you ever stifle feelings of tenderness? Do you chew with your mouth open? But you must know such things about your fictional character, or you won’t be able to paint a believable, sympathetic, flawed human being.

We’ll see how all this enters her collection. (Read excerpts at her website.)

If you’re already read the collection, let us know in the comments section. . .

ASF: Has anything surprised you about people’s reaction (and your own) to the anthology?

BJH: I guess I’m surprised that people are actually using it in their classrooms. I mean, that was certainly the goal all along, but I was afraid that people would see “coming-of-age” and think it’s a niche. But it’s not. These stories and essays and exercises are for any creative writing classroom. I think this type of story is a great jumping-off point for all writers, simply because all writers (above the age of ten or so) are already familiar with the tropes of growing older, so the common ground makes writing all the more easy to talk about.

ASF: Is editing an anthology something you can wholeheartedly recommend to another compulsive student/writer/editor?

BJH: Well, compulsive is the right word for it. I don’t know. I think it really depends on the person’s individual goals. The downside of editing an anthology is that takes time away form your own writing. And if I wasn’t wholeheartedly dedicated to the theme, I don’t think I would have been so gung ho. However, if it’s a subject you care deeply about, then sure, take a chance with it. If anything, the anthology has only furthered my interest in these types of stories. And I think (and hope), it’s made me a stronger writer, too.

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