Tuesday, April 25, 2017

New Essay on "Widow Confidential"

I’m very pleased to have a personal essay posted on a new site, Widow Confidential, designed to help widows navigate the journey of grieving after losing their spouse. My piece is about figuring out where to bury my husband after he died young and unexpectedly. (Which reminds me: do your loved ones know your after-life wishes…and are they written down?)

Here’s the opening:

My first husband died of a heart attack when he was 37. With an unexpected death, often no plans are in place: no will, no list of songs for the funeral, no cemetery plots pre-purchased. Making arrangements is not scrambling for paperwork tucked in the back of the drawer with the bank statements. There are loose ends and hard decisions to resolve during this time of emotional crisis.          All I had to go on was remembered casual conversation about after-death options we’d had during ten years of marriage….




(People sometimes ask me if I left things out of THIS ANGEL ON MY CHEST. I didn't necessarily leave this out--but I decided I couldn't write about this incident fictionally, so I guess that's a different form of "leaving out.")

Monday, April 24, 2017

Learning His Way In: Jim Minick on his new novel, FIRE IS YOUR WATER


Interview by John Newlin


Fire is Your Water, Jim Minick’s first novel, is a compelling story of love, faith, forgiveness, and compassion, related from several points of view.  Set in the farmland of central Pennsylvania near the end of the Korean War, the author explores, among many things, family, man and nature, the Biblical gift of healing, and what it means to love unconditionally.

Jim Minick is the author of five books, including The Blueberry Years, winner of the best Nonfiction Book of the Year from the Southern Independent Booksellers Association.  He teaches at Augusta University and in the low-residency MFA program at Converse College.

Questions:

JN: Jim, this novel reflects many aspects of your childhood.  Was it always going to be a novel, or did you originally envision it as a memoir of your childhood?

JM: It started out as nonfiction. In 1983, I was burned in an explosion similar to the one that happens later in Fire Is Your Water. I wrote a creative nonfiction piece about that, published in Now and Then Magazine (Summer 2002) titled “Flash Burn.” Though I tried, I couldn’t figure out how to make a larger book about that time and place, when I worked pumping gas on the PA Turnpike. And I also had these other family stories about this place and another fire, stories from before I was born, and so it took me at least four or five years of wandering in the wilderness of words to figure out that, hey, fiction would allow me to combine these stories IF I could figure out how.

Part of that “how” was connecting these stories by collapsing four generations of people into two generations, and thirty years of stories condensed to three months. The larger part of the “how,” though, was figuring out the connecting thread, which eventually I found to be what happens to a faith healer when she loses her faith and her ability to heal. That became the driving question.

JN: Have you ever met or known a person who possessed the gift of healing?

JM: Ada Franklin, the main character in Fire Is Your Water, is based on my great-grandmother, Ida Franklin Minick, who was a powwow doctor in the Pennsylvania Dutch tradition. She could remove warts, stop blood, and take out fire, like Ada in the novel. And she did enter a burning barn with her daughter-in-law, who was severely burned in the process. And after, Ida was not the one who healed my grandmother’s hands—another relative did. So that got me thinking about why and what happens if faith is lost. I’m pretty sure that did not happen with Ida, but it opened a door for me.

Some other family stories about Ida—like of healing a bleeding cow by saying the chant through the phone—I was able to use in the novel as well. Ida died when I was four. My first memory is of sitting on her lap. So, to answer your question, I wish I had known her better, and in a way, this novel helped me imagine a little of her life.

JN: You spent fifteen years working on this novel.  Did you at any time “give up” on the project?  If so, what do you see as having impelled you to finish it?

JM: “Set aside” is a better phrase than “give up.” Attention got pulled to other projects, so in that fifteen years, I wrote my other four books, plus taught full-time. At some deeper level, I think I knew I wasn’t ready yet to write this book, so I had to learn my way in, through other genres first, and then through extensive reading and studying of novels I admired, like Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, Tea Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife, and Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men.

JN: I love the way you weave the character of Cicero, the raven, into this love story.  It adds a wonderful dimension to the novel.  When you first conceived the idea for the book, was this perspective something you had in mind, or did that idea come along later on?  Oh, and can ravens be taught to talk???

JM: Cicero and the idea of a talking bird came much later, maybe two-thirds of the way into writing this. I was taking a fiction writing workshop with Darnell Arnoult (an excellent teacher and writer), and I knew the other main character, Will, loved birds, so I kept playing with that idea, trying to figure out how to develop that passion of his. Then I remembered reading an essay, also in Now and Then, about a person growing up with a talking crow as a pet, and that, along with Darnell’s encouragement to just experiment, let me walk through that door of magic realism to find Cicero there waiting to chew my ear off, literally.

And yes, many birds, especially “smarter” species like ravens and crows, can learn words. I collected several funny stories from fellow birders about such. One ornithology professor told of a raven a friend of his tamed in grad school. The bird loved to say, “Nevermore,” AND he loved to drink. When he got too tipsy, he’d just repeat, “Never, never, never….”

When Cicero heard this, he wanted to file an animal abuse report until he realized that this happened decades ago.

JN: One of the themes that struck me about the novel was the hint of loneliness, that of Ada and Will, two characters whose lives appear for much of the novel to be heading away from lifetime relationships.  It’s a topic that you addressed at length in The Blueberry Years.  As writer, farmer, and homesteader, your life clearly involved working in isolation for great periods.  How do you deal with that aspect of your life? 

JM: The older I get, the more curmudgeonly I get. And in this society of hyper-social-media-over-connectedness, it’s not easy to find real, meaningful friendships. But it’s necessary to remember the difference between loneliness and solitude.

Writing itself is a solitary endeavor, and so, it’s important to enjoy and embrace that solitude, and to understand how it differs from loneliness. Almost always, I’m lonelier in crowds or cities than in the woods. Thankfully, I’m married to my best friend and I’ve found some great community through writing and teaching. And doubly thankfully we have access to the great antidotes to loneliness in just getting out in the company of trees and birds. I cannot imagine a world without trees and birds (and bass and beavers and bats and beetles). That might be the ultimate and saddest form of loneliness.

JN: Having written your first novel, do you see yourself as gravitating to writing more fiction?

JM: My current project is nonfiction. After that, yes, I have at least two ideas I want to pursue/have started, both fiction.

JN: I know you’ve been researching how a community was ravaged by a tornado in the 1950s.  Have you ever considered using that research as the basis of another novel instead of a nonfiction account of that devastating event?  Or maybe both?

JM: Yes, early on, I considered making this current project about a devastating tornado into a novel—it’d be a whole lot easier, that’s for sure. But I’ve collected many hours of conversations/interviews with survivors of this tornado, and the more I listened and worked with their stories, the more I realize that the best way to honor them and their stories is through nonfiction. That genre, for me, at least, somehow best captures their story.

JN: Any final lessons or surprises from writing Fire Is Your Water?

JM: Faith comes in many shapes. Doubt too. Respect—even embrace—that. And listen to the birds.

Or as Eubie Blake said: “Be grateful for luck. Pay the thunder no mind - listen to the birds. And don't hate nobody.”

*****

More information about Jim Minick: http://www.jim-minick.com/wpdev/

Listen to Jim read a chapter of Fire Is Your Water: http://www.jim-minick.com/wpdev/writing/fire-is-your-water/


Buy the book through IndieBound: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780804011846

*****

ABOUT JOHN NEWLIN

John Newlin’s work has been published in Short Story America, Independent School Magazine, South85 Journal, and Night Owl Journal.  He is the Review Editor for South85.




Wednesday, April 5, 2017

Richard Peabody on the Writing Life; or, Where's the Money?

On the Writing Life
By Richard Peabody

(Note: I read this on Richard’s Facebook page the other day and just had to share it with a larger audience.)

Saw all of these threads today about “I gotta get paid” for my writing, when I get published. Naïve egotistic daydreams about the writer’s life. Like that old commercial 15 years ago where an unseen narrator for an insurance company asked—what can you depend on? And a woman writer says, “My royalties.” 

There are no royalties for 80% of the people writing books. (Journalism is a different animal.) But the writing world has been just as impacted by the Net as the music world.  Nobody wants to do this forever for free.

That is when I usually speak up and say things like—they’re still paying writers the same amount of money they did when F. Scott was writing in the 1920s. Most people I know who do sell books to the corporate NY bigs get somewhere between 2 to 10 thou for an advance. The newbies don’t seem to realize that an advance is actually an advance on sales. You don’t have to pay them back if you don’t make the $ back. But the bigs do tend to lose interest in you as a possible meal ticket. 

So how do you make money in the arts? What is success in the arts? Two questions I’ve seen a lot in the Trump era. 

First of all there’s no $ in the arts. And there’s no $ in poetry fer sure. That’s why most poets and writers teach for a living. 

Could you make more $ self-publishing? Maybe. A lot of writers I know have started selling individual stories online at a couple bucks a crack. And they make a bit of $ that way. There are the what—1% of stories where somebody breaks huge like the Twilight and 50 Shades of Gray authors, whose fanfiction was free on the internet in the early days. 

So, should AWP have panels on how to actually handle $ as a writer? How to develop a business sense? Yeah. 

There are some big lit mags that pay for work. There are some indie publishers who do. This is when I mention that I’ve been publishing people for 40 years and lose about $5 thou per project. I can’t pay people.  I can’t even produce the magazine without other starving artists willing to do web work, desktop work, or editing work, for “Art Rates.” Because we are a tribe and take care of each other in ways that we can so the project materializes. 

When people tell me they’re starting a lit mag I always tell them not to. If they’re word addicts (like most of us) then they can’t not do it. But when they say, I have to make money on it. That’s when I turn off. Cuz nobody does. Cuz that’s such a rare thing I can count the number of litmags or indie presses who make money (sans grants or university support) on two hands. Which is why most mags or presses have the lifespan of Mayflies.

Even friends ask why I bother if all I do is lose money? 

Because keeping this going for 40 years has been something I know how to do. Because it’s satisfying to throw a lifeline to struggling writers, forgotten writers, to shoot the bird to the powers that be even in the lit world or the academic world.

You want to make it? Well, drop into B&N (who are also near death) and see what’s on the fiction shelves. Nothing by people I consider the masters of 21st Century Fiction. No Kathy Acker, No Lance Olsen, No Harry Mathews, No Jeanette Winterson, either. 

So, you could write NF, or YA and make $. Maybe. But I think the genre writers in mystery and SciFi and Romance have the right idea—whip out a book a year. Don’t screw around trying to write the Great American Novel. You have to have product in the pipeline. It’s like Lucy and Ethel with the conveyor belt. That’s how it works. If one of them hits, they reprint the past. If you last long enough, you’re back in print. The corporations just need product to make into movies.

Beyond that? Why continue? A question I ask myself every day as both writer and publisher.

Because it’s all I know how to do. Because it’s not about publication, or $, or reviews. It’s about making/doing. And if you don’t see that. If you’re like the rare bad eggs I’ve encountered in some of my classes during 25 years of teaching fiction, who just want to be Stephen King by tomorrow, then bag it now before you break your heart.

It’s like being a tuba player. Every year the graduate music programs graduate what--another 100 tuba players? And they enter a job market where fewer and fewer orchestras can make it. A limited niche. Do orchestras even have more than one tuba player?

“Show me the money.” Yeah. Good luck with that. 

I heard recently that the boyfriend of somebody I published said I’d ripped off her story and was keeping all of the money. How naïve can you be?Might have been her first or second ever publication and she was in great company. The book sold okay. 

Did I break even? Not even close.

Well, then you must be nonprofit?

Nope. Well, yes of course, but not officially. We’re supposedly for profit.

But then you can’t get grants?

Correct.

Well, at least you get to write losses off on your taxes.

Err, for the first 3 years and then after that the IRS considers your press a hobby. Nothing to be taken seriously.

Well, you could go public?

Sure, and get kicked off your governing board, which also happens all of the time in the art, movie, music, and literary world. 

Which brings me to Allen Ginsberg who didn’t make any $ until the end of his life. That’s how it happens. Same for Paul Bowles. You last long enough and they notice. Slip you some change. Kind of like being the George Blanda of literature. And then off into the sunset.

So what is literary success? Some think it’s about Tenure, editorial positions, the blockbuster movie deal, hanging with who knows? 

I think it’s about heart and soul. I think it’s tribal. I think it’s keeping poets and writers afloat. Giving them hope. Something rare these days. I believe that good writing has horizontal success and lasts through the years. People who make $ tend to achieve vertical success. I mean does anybody bother reading Jaws any longer? 

Maybe people should ask different questions? Like why do some lit mags take 2 years to make a decision on your work? 

Or maybe Rimbaud was right. Maybe we should all just run guns.

______
ABOUT RICHARD PEABODY


Richard Peabody is the founder and co-editor of Gargoyle Magazine and editor (or co-editor) of 23 anthologies including A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat Generation. Peabody taught at Johns Hopkins University for 15 years. His new book is The Richard Peabody Reader (Alan Squire Publishers, 2015).

Tuesday, April 4, 2017

Flash Fiction!

I’m going to be the guest editor at SmokeLong Quarterly next week (4/10 ~ 4/16), which means that I’ll be reviewing all the flash fiction that’s submitted during the week and selecting my favorite for publication and an author interview.

The online journal SmokeLong Quarterly (http://www.smokelong.com/) is one of the premiere publications for flash, which they define as up to 1000 words. Because I’ll be reading blind, even if you know me, you’re free to submit your work. (Or you can submit your work any old time, of course…it doesn’t have to be for ME! Plus, the editors review all the work, so it’s possible your story may not catch my eye, but that it’s exactly what someone else is intrigued by.) 

And, I always like to promote a journal that allows FEE-FREE submissions.

Here are some thoughts the editors offer in the submission guidelines, which really end up being a pretty good primer on what makes good flash fiction:

The SLQ aesthetic remains an ever-changing, ever-elusive set of principles, but it most likely has to do with these kinds of things:
  • language that surprises
  • narratives that strive toward something other than a final punch line or twist
  • pieces that add up to something, oftentimes (but not necessarily always) meaning or emotional resonance
  • honest work that feels as if it has far more purpose than a writer wanting to write a story
We have a special place in our hearts, more often than not, for narratives we haven’t seen before. For the more familiar stories—such as relationship break-ups, bar scenarios, terminal illnesses—we tend to need something original and urgent in the writer’s presentation.

Here’s where to go:
~For more information: http://www.smokelong.com/


~To read some of my personal favorites from Smokelong:

 “Txaj: A Prayer” by Jeanne Jones ~ http://www.smokelong.com/txaj-a-prayer/
“Straight Lines” by Ryan Werner ~ http://www.smokelong.com/straight-lines/
“Gram Pouts with Duck Lips” by Allison Pinkerton ~ http://www.smokelong.com/grams-pouts-with-duck-lips/








Work-in-Progress

DC-area author Leslie Pietrzyk explores the creative process and all things literary.