American Short Fiction blog

There are few words we writers like to hear more than “Your submission has won!”  Though “Free” is a quick second, followed quickly by “A clean well-lighted space.” Put them all together and one hella time could be earned at the following residencies—but don’t wait to apply. September will be here before you can say I shoulda—

Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts

Your $25 application fee could net you two to eight weeks of free housing, studio space, and a $100 weekly stipend.

Application Deadline: September 1, 2010 [for]  two to eight weeks between from January 1 to June 15, 2011

The DL: Residencies of two to eight weeks go from January 1 to June 15 to poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers. Residents are provided with housing, studio space, and a $100 weekly stipend. Submit up to ten poems totaling no more than 30 pages, two stories or novel chapters totaling no more than 7,500 words, or two essays or chapters of a work of creative nonfiction totaling no more than 7,500 words, a writer’s statement, a project proposal, and a resumé with a $25 application fee.

**Emerging Artists News Flash**

The Kimmel Harding Nelson program gives special support to emerging artists by reserving a number of “transitional” residencies for recent masters degree graduates. The application process is the same for all applicants; however, applications from artists in transition following graduation from an accredited degree program are reviewed as a separate peer group.

More: Call ((402) 874-9600), email (pfriedli@khncenterforthearts.org), or check www.khncenterforthearts.org for an application and complete guidelines.

Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, 801 Third Corso, Nebraska City, NE 68410. (402) 874-9600. Pat Friedli, Assistant Director.

MacDowell Colony

Your $30 application fee could net you room and board for two to eight months.

Application Deadline: September 15, 2010 [for] two months from February to May 2011 (Financial Aid Deadline: September 15, 2010)

Location: Peterborough, New Hampshire

The DL: Residencies of up to two months from February through May go to poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers year-round on a 450-acre estate near Mt. Monadnock in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Writers are provided with room and board. For residencies in 2011, submit 6 to 10 poems or up to 25 pages of fiction or creative nonfiction and a description of a proposed project with a $30 application fee by September 15. Applications are accepted only via the online submission system. Travel aid and personal expense grants are available based on need.

More: Call ((603) 924-3886), e-mail (admissions@macdowellcolony.org), or visit www.macdowellcolony.org for an application and complete guidelines.

MacDowell Colony, 100 High Street, Peterborough, NH 03458.

New York Mills Regional Cultural Center

No application fee.

Stipend awarded: no cash, but living and studio space for two to four weeks from January to June

Application Deadline: October 1, 2010 [from] January – June, 2011

Location: New York Mills, Minnesota

The DL: Residencies of two to four weeks from January through June go to poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers in New York Mills, Minnesota. Writers are provided with living and studio space. For residencies in 2011, submit five copies of up to 12 pages of poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction, a resumé, a project description, a brief biography, and two letters of recommendation by October 1. There is no application fee. E-mail or visit the Web site for an application and complete guidelines.

More: Call ((218) 385-3339), email (nymills@kulcher.org), see www.kulcher.org for more info.

Find the Center on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/New-York-Mills-MN/New-York-Mills-Regional-Cultural-Center/95411244316?ref=ts

New York Mills Regional Cultural Center, 24 North Main Avenue, P.O. Box 246, New York Mills, MN 56567. Heather Cassidy, Retreat Coordinator.

I’m flying to Seattle tomorrow for a friend’s wedding. I’ve got my dress picked out and my quart-sized Ziploc stocked. Selecting reading material for a long flight, though, always poses something more of a challenge. Bring something too difficult and you find yourself watching some bad in-flight movie starring Nicolas Cage; too short, and you spend the last leg of your journey perusing Sky Mall.

A couple of days ago, while searching for a book to bring with me on my trip, I picked up Emma Straub’s charming (and appropriately titled) Fly-Over State—and ended up reading the entire thing.

The title story introduces us to Sophie, a New Yorker recently transplanted to suburban Wisconsin where her husband has accepted a teaching job. Sophie is a quiet, slightly off-kilter narrator who observes with curiosity and humor the predictable kinetics of her new neighbors’ daily routines. Surrounded by strangers and boxes, Sophie contemplates who she will be in this new life and how (literally) she’ll fill its empty spaces. Straub is spare and spacious in her telling of a story that, to me, is about the sense of possibility that transience—being in transit—engenders, however temporarily.

An excerpt from “Fly-Over State”:

We could have gone anywhere, that’s what we’d decided. Tucson. Miami. Detroit. Each time James presented me with a city, I’d walk to the bookstore on Seventh Avenue and sit down in the travel section. I’d find us a neighborhood, a coffee shop to frequent. I knew where we’d go for fun, to people-watch. There were the restaurants our parents would take us to when they came to visit; first mine, then his. There was the park I could take walks in, and the places we could meet for lunch during the day. The suits would take us there. I never imagined we’d actually leave New York.

“Fly-Over State” has me thinking about the places planes take us—new cities, new jobs, new lives. And about the places they don’t. The fly-over places, appearing first as pinpricks of light as we approach them from above, and growing into the discernible landmarks of any number of hypothetical lives: traffic patterns, cul-de-sacs, swimming pools, before receding again, far, far below.

At just 77 pages, this slim, two-story volume won’t weigh down a carry-on. But it’s also just too easy to devour in one gulp, so be careful or you might finish it before you even board the plane.

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This post is part of a series exploring the relationship between place and fiction. Got a favorite story about being on the move? Let us know.

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.)

Photo by Michael Coté. Some rights reserved under Creative Commons.

Despite predictions of rain, we enjoyed some pretty nice weather here in Austin this recent holiday weekend. On Monday, after all the fireworks had been launched and all the sparklers sparkled, I headed down to Barton Springs Pool to spend some quality time with my current summer reading project: David Foster Wallace’s Girl With Curious Hair.

I wasn’t the only one toting a book inside my beach bag. From classics by Steinbeck and Fitzgerald to current bestsellers like Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, and from decidedly beach-y reads to more challenging works like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, the spectrum of poolside picks was impressive.

Here’s a sampling of what folks were reading last weekend:

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald  (Lauren, 15, was dipping into this classic for the first time.)

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Barbara Kingsolver  (Kingsolver seems to be a popular choice this summer; I spotted multiple people reading this memoir of the author’s year-long experiment in eating locally, as well as her most well-know work, listed below.)

The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver

Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders, Vincent Bugliosi

The Winner Stands Alone: A Novel, Paul Coelho  (“Not as good as his other work,” according to reader Kat, 24.)

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen, Christopher McDougall

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, Elizabeth Gilbert  (A movie based on this 2006 bestselling memoir will be released this summer.)

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro  (Also being made into a film, to be released in the fall.)

(more…)

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.

ASF joins the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) in an innovative program: Lit Mag Adoption Program for Creative Writing Courses. This program offers half-price literary magazine subscriptions to writing classes adopting them for course use (with free desk-copy subscriptions to the professors).

Classes that adopt ASF—in addition to receiving affordable subscriptions—will also receive a meeting with editorial staff.  (This is where we’ll spill all the good stuff.) The goal of the program is to expose students to the variety of magazines and promote an active, engaged reading culture among a new generation of writers.

We’re thrilled to be a part of this.

For more info about the program, visit the CLMP Lit Mag Adoption website.

Those clever people in Tin Houses.

According to GalleyCat, between August 1 and November 30, 2010, Tin House Books will accept unsolicited manuscripts if the submission includes a receipt that proves the author has purchased a book at a bookstore.

The same rule applies for unsolicited work submitted to its magazine between September 1 and December 30, 2010.

Remember: Tin House Books does not permit electronic submissions. Tin House magazine does. Read the rules.

A fun final note, as reported by GalleyCat: “Writers who cannot afford to buy a book or cannot get to an actual bookstore are encouraged to explain why in haiku or one sentence (100 words or fewer).”

Responses to this new submission policy here and here.

What are you doing this July 23-25?

Washing your hair with beer and avocado? Cleaning out your car?

For something far more extraordinary, head to the Open City Summer Writing Workshop, where you can dive more deeply into your love and craft of fiction, nonfiction or poetry. Here are some details:

Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House at New York University
58 West 10th Street, New York City (that’s Greenwich Village)
Friday, July 23 through Sunday, July 25, 2010
(Hours: Friday 6pm–8pm, Saturday 10am–8pm, Sunday 10am–8pm)

Faculty includes Thomas Beller, Jason Brown, Martha McPhee, and Saïd Sayrafiezadeh. Visiting Writers include David Berman, Mary Gaitskill, Rivka Galchen, David Goodwillie, James Lasdun, Sam Lipsyte, Phillip Lopate, Lara Vapnyar, and Edmund White.

The weekend is chock-full workshops, individual manuscript consultations, seminars, panels, and readings. Whew!

True love’s not exactly free: tuition is $750. Get your application. Ask your questions: editors@opencity.org or 212.625.9048.

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Know of other excellent retreats or workshops happening this summer? Let us know below.