Category: Fiction

A Conversation with Rachel Miranda, Author of Broken Chocolate

Denton LovingLeave a comment

I met Rachel Miranda back in 2012 when we both entered the Writing Seminars at Bennington College. We were placed in the same workshop during our first residency, where we were gifted to learn under the remarkable talents of Brian Morton and Lynne Sharon Schwartz. Despite coming from vastly different backgrounds, Rachel and I found a lot of common ground, especially in workshop, and we’ve managed to keep in touch in the years since we graduated from Bennington.

Rachel is a freelance editor and writing coach based in the metro New York area. Before attending Bennington, she earned a BA in European Cultural Studies from Brandeis University. She is the managing editor of Plamen Press, a small publisher of translated Eastern and Central European literature, and the co-recipient of a Literature Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other grants. She agreed to answer a few questions about writing and publishing her debut novel, Broken Chocolate, published by Vine Leaves Press on March 31, 2026.

DL: I remember reading chapters from Broken Chocolate back when you and I were in workshops together at Bennington, which was more than a decade ago. How long did it take you to write the novel, and how did it change through different drafts? (Feel free to talk about the winding path to publication here, too, if you want.)

RM: I remember those workshops like they were yesterday. But it was fifteen years ago that I started writing this book. I thought it was finished several times before it really was. In the beginning, I wrote in secret, mostly because I was stunned to realize, in my mid-forties, that I wanted to write fiction. I was an insatiable reader throughout my life, and I’d been a student of nineteenth and early twentieth century European literature as an undergrad. But until it hit me like a lightning strike one day—when a friend of mine announced the publication of her first book—it just never occurred to me that I could add my own words to that body of work that had shaped me. Once I had the thought, I could never unthink it.

So I started at a neighborhood coffee shop, stealing an hour between dropping my four kids off at school and heading to work in my then-husband’s medical practice. It took me two years to write the first draft, and when it was done, I finally came out of my self-imposed closet and got myself to a week-long writer’s workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center, led by Alice Mattison, who also taught at the Bennington Writing Seminars. She was such a gifted and rigorous teacher, I immediately longed for more of that kind of feedback. She encouraged me to apply to Bennington and was a sort of mentor to me there. I revised chunks of Broken Chocolate through workshops and one-on-one critiques, not so much the plot as the flow of the narrative and slowing down for the small details—and I learned tricks for resisting my tendency towards wordiness and over-explaining. I got such positive feedback on the story from our wonderful teachers there that I found the courage to start querying agents during and after our MFA studies. I came close a couple of times, but no dice. After well over 100 rejections, I let Broken Chocolate—and my bruised ego—rest for a while as I worked on a different novel and then a memoir.

I went through several rounds of resting and submitting over the next few years, and then I fell seriously ill with interstitial lung disease and my future became suddenly uncertain. In the reckoning that followed, I realized that getting this story out into the world was one of a few things on my “deathbed list.” How could I make that happen? I decided that it was time for me to give up on the agent search and turn my attention to small presses. A few months—and dozens of bespoke query letters—later, I got what’s called a “revise and resubmit” request from Vine Leaves Press with some very specific suggestions for changes. They are a small but steady and high quality publishing house, and I thought the editor’s ideas were sound, so I dove back into the story, clarifying timelines and gritting my teeth while I eliminated sub-plots I was very attached to in order to tighten the narrative further. “Kill your darlings,” right? I sent it back and was immediately offered a contract. And since then, the story has gone through more small but significant revisions in our pre-publishing process. When I sent in my final copy for layout, I cried all day—from relief and happiness for the leap it took to finally let it go.

DL: I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by revealing that Broken Chocolate begins with one character suffering from a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). You write about TBIs so clearly, as well as the recovery process and what it’s like for the family of a TBI patient. You must have researched these areas significantly. Do you have tips for other writers about how to integrate research into fiction, as well as how not to let the research take over the story?

RM: My situation was a bit unusual where research was concerned, because during those early writing years, I was also managing my husband’s medical practice for patients with TBIs and other neurological illnesses and injuries. So I had a veritable front-row seat, not only to clinical information but to the perspectives of staff, patients, and caregivers. I was inspired daily by the resilience and determination and hopefulness of these patients and their families, whose lives had been irrevocably altered. I started to think about how we redefine a meaningful life when the one we envisioned (for ourselves and our children) becomes impossible, and that became the guiding question or theme of Broken Chocolate. When I wrote it, I never could have imagined that this question would take on existential meaning for me during my own illness.

In terms of craft, it was still a challenge to take all the knowledge I had gathered—or absorbed through osmosis—and avoid info-dumping or just losing the reader by being overly detailed. I spent a lot of time thinking about this and found that one of the most natural ways to convey research in my story was through dialogue. I wrote numerous scenes where characters asked questions and information was revealed or explained through the answers they got from more knowledgeable people they were speaking to. Even when Sam Sandor was seeing patients, I gave him a Fellow, a post-grad in training for a specialty, so he could explain procedures or symptoms—or better yet, get her to explain them. I worked hard to make the language of these exchanges realistic, and I was lucky to have lots of examples in my work life to look toward—and a live-in expert to check my work for errors. Mostly, I tried to keep in mind who would be receiving that information and how they would understand it.

DL: You state in your end notes for the novel that the Sandor family is not meant to be a fictionalized version of your own family despite very similar family dynamics. Can you talk about some of the differences and similarities between your family and the Sandors? How did borrowing from a similar family composition help guide you in writing Broken Chocolate?

RM: I think this is one of the great pleasures of writing fiction: to be able to take what you know deeply or have experienced and bend it any which way to work for your story, which then, inevitably, takes on a life of its own. When I started writing Broken Chocolate, my kids were all teenagers, so I had a lot of day-to-day insight into how they operate that I applied to Zev and Zoey, the fifteen-then-sixteen-year-old Sandor twins at the center of the story. The music and art that I’ve woven into the Sandors’ family life likewise is similar to our family life back then. We really did have Friday night jams with our kids when they were growing up. Sometimes we still do, when we can all be together. We really did let our budding-artist daughter paint murals across the whole of her bedroom. More generally, a big family has a certain dynamic that shifts and changes as the children grow and become more independent, and I was trying to capture some of that, from the perspectives of both the kids and the parents. I also should say that in my mind, the story was meant to bring into the light—and by doing so, to expunge—the ever-present fear my then-husband carried around with him, that one of our children would sustain a TBI. But I think the expunging worked better for me than for him. It’s hard not to carry that fear with you when you are on the frontlines of TBI treatment, as he was then and still is, every day.

Occasionally, I borrowed something from my own childhood as well—like when Liv is remembering Zoey preparing for her bat mitzvah, and Zoey says to Liv, “But if you’re not perfect, how can you teach me to be perfect?” That was one of my mother’s favorite stories to tell about young me, and it just seemed to fit with the back history of Zoey that I built into the story. I guess when I said the Sandors are not a proxy for my family, I meant that the specific details of the Sandor kids’ personalities, interests, relationships, physical appearance, particular challenges, and triumphs were not lifted from those of my own kids. I didn’t borrow things they said or did; there are no events in the book that are taken directly from their lives, except for Birthday Breakfast. So, I would say that from a gestalt perspective, there’s a good amount of correlation, but from a minute, detailed perspective, it’s all from my imagination, if that makes sense.

DL: One of the things I remember most vividly about you from when we were both students at Bennington was that you would often share your menus for your family dinners, and they sounded like some of the most elaborate, mouth-watering feasts that I could ever imagine. So I was really excited to see you bring your love for cooking and baking into Broken Chocolate, and it reminded me that you’ve also published a cookbook, The World at Our Table. Was it fun for you to write about something you’re so passionate about?

RM: That part of the writing was pure fun! Giving the character of the mother, Liv, this connection to cooking and baking really allowed me to pour into the story my own passion for making and sharing beautiful food. Some of the dishes I describe in Broken Chocolate are in my cookbook, like the butternut squash lasagna, and the chocolate bread pudding the Sandors always have for Birthday Breakfast. Most of all, I wanted to celebrate the aesthetic and sensual pleasures of cooking and baking, which obviously come with a lot of labor and a certain amount of privilege, but still—we all have to eat every day, right? When circumstances and skills allow that to become a creative endeavor, it brings something else to the table beyond nourishment—a certain light, I think.

Those feasts I used to describe during our grad school days were specifically for Shabbat and Jewish holidays in the years when I was raising my kids as part of a Modern Orthodox Jewish community where everyone stopped their weekday work for 25 hours a week (from sundown Friday to nightfall Saturday) and became something else entirely. My way of being part of that intentional community was that I cooked like crazy every Thursday and invited lots of friends and family to partake. Posting those menus on our grad school Facebook page was my way of expressing how connected I felt to the Bennington community and inviting you all to my table.

If I were to have any advice to give about trying to integrate something you’re passionate about into your stories, it’s to tap into both the minute details of the creative work and the feelings you have when doing that work—delight, satisfaction, a sense of promise or striving or ambition, whatever it is for you—and try to infuse any writing about the process itself with those authentic emotions and sensory details. I’ve found it a strange truth of creative writing that the more particular and detailed you are, the more universally appealing the story is to readers.

DL: You’ve recently created a Substack titled Air Hunger, where you’re writing about many topics but especially about your recovery from receiving a lung transplant. Do you find that writing about your recovery is part of the healing process? And has your fiction changed or evolved in any ways through this time?

RM: There’s no doubt that writing about this crazy, almost-science-fictional surgery that saved my life on May 4, 2025, is essential for me during this time. It’s hard to wrap my head around the radical thing that was done to my body; it changes things on the cellular level—in every sense of the word. Before the transplant, I was wheeling around giant oxygen tanks behind me everywhere I went; I had to place a chair between my bedroom and living room so I could rest in between; just getting into the car for a medical appointment was inconceivably exhausting. This post-transplant year is no picnic, but I’m alive and breathing freely again. Writing about it on Substack is very challenging emotionally, but it helps me to make sense of what happened—is still happening—and it often reveals new insights to me in the process that would not have come otherwise. I am aware, too, that lung disease is the little-known cousin of cancer and heart disease and Alzheimer’s and even such rare diseases as Lou Gherig’s, all of which have appeared in books and movies and television so that there is some broad cultural understanding of what those illnesses mean for the patient. I feel hopeful that my Substack writing will give readers a glimpse into life with lung disease and life after transplant—and of course, that it will also reach pulmonary patients who are out there, isolated and looking for someone who gets what it’s like to go through this. And there is a certain parallel here to Broken Chocolate, since traumatic brain injuries are not often talked about or depicted, either—and I like the idea that people might come away from reading the book with some insights into TBI that they didn’t have before.

As I mentioned, reviving and revising Broken Chocolate in the middle of my own health crisis was a revelation to me. How did I know, all those years ago, that I needed to tell this story about redefining meaningful life after a catastrophic medical event? It’s a mystery, one that the Substack series is meant to explore, too. And it’s very affirming—serendipitous, I guess you could say—that my book is finally being published at a time when I understand it so much more deeply than when I first wrote it. I think my writing has changed from the very fact of what’s happened, of having to reimagine my life in the aftermath, as the Sandor family does in my book.

~

Many thanks to Rachel for answering these questions. Find out more about Rachel Miranda here, and be sure to order Broken Chocolate.

In case you missed it… I have new poems published in recent issues of Five Poems and Porchlight: A Journal of Southern Literature, and I recently interviewed Stephen Barefoot for Salvation South. I will be offering a virtual workshop about place-based poetry through EastOver Press, and I’d love for you to come write with me.

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Guest Post: A Conversation with Lynne Sharon Schwartz and Ruth Mukwana

Denton Loving2 Comments

Last month, EastOver Press published the novel A Stranger Comes to Town by Lynne Sharon Schwartz. This project was very dear to me not only because I think the novel is superb in every way but also because Lynne Sharon Schwartz has been an incredible mentor and friend to me since I studied with her at the Bennington Writing Seminars. It was an honor and joy to help usher this book into publication. In today’s guest post, my friend and fellow Bennington graduate Ruth Mukwana speaks to Lynne about her new novel.

Ruth Mukwana: I met Lynne when I was an MFA student at Bennington College. She was my mentor and advisor in my last year at Bennington. Before working with her, I had read her book, Disturbances in the Field, an ambitious book about family which I’ve gone back to several times when searching for craft ideas. Lynne and I have remained in touch, and she has always been very kind and generous to me. Her words of encouragement and belief in me have spurred me on in moments of doubt. So, I was thrilled and honored to talk with her about her new book, A Stranger Comes to Town.

Set in the Upper West Side, a neighborhood that Lynne knows very well, A Stranger Comes to Town is a masterful novel of self-discovery, revealing the multitude of histories and lives we each inhabit, as well as the many ways we seek to reinvent ourselves and reshape our pasts. The novel’s protagonist, Joe, searches to discover his true identity, exposing how even the most ordinary aspects of our lives are often extraordinarily felt.

~

RM: You’ve written a lot. How were you able to write thirty books?

LSS: It was over a long period of time, and many of them are essay collections by other writers and translations. For W.G. Sebald’s anthology – The Emergency of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald – I researched and curated interviews with W.G. Sebald. I worked hard at writing and treated it like a regular job. I taught at Bennington, and I used to get these manuscripts every month and wrote letters to my students, but it didn’t take the whole month. On the days I didn’t teach, I’d get up, do what I had to do and then sit down and write. But I was also free. One day if I wanted to have lunch with a friend, I could do that. I didn’t have a set schedule.

RM: Where did you get inspiration for all your work?

LSS: They’re all different. Some were based on events that happened, but I altered them a lot. Two-Part Inventions is based on a pianist, Joyce Hatto, whom I read about in the newspaper. She was a good pianist, not great. Her husband, a recording engineer, wanted her recordings to be better known and put her name on recordings by more distinguished and famous pianists. All of this was written about in the newspapers, and there was a court case. The central question in the novel is whether the character was aware of the deception. In Balancing Acts, which was my second novel, I wanted to write about older people. Disturbances in the Field was a big undertaking; it was about family. And then this one, A Stranger Comes to Town, I started writing at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. I had just finished something, and I didn’t know what I was going to do next, and I wanted to do something that’d get me through the pandemic. And it did.

RM: It’s a short book and easy to read. What was the process of writing it like for you?

LSS: Indeed, it’s not a long book, about two hundred pages, but it wasn’t quick to write. It took me more than three years for a short book. The pandemic was going on, and I was teaching. So, there were other things happening. But it was very hard to write, and there were times when I didn’t know where to go with it. What would happen to the main character, Joe? I let it go where it wanted to go, but I’ve always been interested in amnesia, in forgetting, in what makes the self, and I set it in a neighborhood that I know very well. I researched amnesia and found several books, but they’re mostly mistaken about amnesia. Your memory often comes back, and in A Stranger Comes to Town, Joe’s memory starts to come back.

RM: At some point the narrator says amnesia isn’t a disease, and it isn’t, but given how debilitating it is, I’ve always thought of it as a disease. Trying to remember or reconstruct your life when everyone else around you knows it.

LSS: He’s searching for who he is. He no longer knows whom he is or what kind of person he is. And every time he discovers a lot of negative things about himself (that’s what happens when you start looking) or finds another negative thing or something that he did to somebody close to him, he has to go back and reflect about it. And it’s a very hard process for him. When you reflect about your life, when you remember it, often you wonder, why did I do that? How did I do that? What was it in me that made me do that kind of thing?

RM: And one of those negative incidents is that he let his sister take the blame for an accident. He wrestles with himself as he can’t comprehend how he could have done something like that to his sister.

LSS: When we meet Joe, he’s blank and you think, what a nice guy who seems nice to everybody. But then you learn these terrible things he has done. He’s wondering how he could have done such horrible things that he has forgotten and that he now has to integrate into his conception of whom he is. I wish there are more good things that he has done, but he has done more bad things than good, and he doesn’t remember all the good. He does have a good marriage. His wife got pregnant, and he didn’t quite know what to do, and they got married. Their marriage has turned out good, and their children are great. But all these terrible things he’s being told he has done, not only can’t he remember doing them, he also can’t fathom how they’d have happened because he’s not the sort of person who’d have done such things! And he’ll never know unless the people he wronged decide to tell him everything or if his memory comes back.

RM: And it’s incomprehensible to him that the things he has forgotten are things that are unforgivable like the death of his baby brother.

LSS: There are memories from his childhood that barely registered with him. But on the other hand, his mother didn’t want to make her children dwell on that tragedy, the death of their brother. It slipped to the back of his mind, and he forgot, but it’s lodged somewhere in his brain, and it’s hard that it happened. I think there are things that happen when we’re very young that we forget. But if his mother hadn’t tried so hard to keep it from the children, he might have had an easier time remembering it. She was pained by her son’s death, and she didn’t want her children to also suffer.  He’s carrying a lot that we don’t know and he doesn’t know. Does he have more? Is he carrying around more sad stuff? He asks himself, What else might I have done? What else have I forgotten? This is a book that makes you think about your own life.

RM: The other reason the book was easy for me to read is because it also has a great plot. I was expecting to discover that the family that took him in wasn’t his real family, something Joe wonders about!

LSS: He’s thinking any woman could have come to the hospital, somebody looking for a husband, and claimed to be his wife. And when he meets the children, the awkwardness of meeting them is overwhelming for him. They know him, of course, and he doesn’t know them, and they don’t know that he has lost his memory!

RM: Amnesia is a horrible thing to happen to anyone. But for Joe, it has given him an opportunity to examine his life and confront who he really is. Every time he finds out he did a hurtful thing, it’s an opportunity for him to repent and repair which wouldn’t have happened otherwise. He’s rebuilding his relationship with his sister and has the opportunity to acknowledge how he has wronged her and apologize, which he wouldn’t have otherwise done.

LSS: That’s a nice point. I hadn’t thought of that. If he hadn’t had an accident and lost his memory, he’d have just gone on doing what he was doing. He’d remember all these things, but he probably would never think about them. You know he did those things, some of them when he was about eighteen years old and moved on, but this time he’s a grown man, and as a grown man, he must confront that. If you look back on your life, you might find there are things that you wonder how you did them. How did I do that? Did I really do that? Not all our lives are so dramatic, but his life is, and there are many things that he must reconsider and go over and integrate into his conception of who he is and who he is going to be from now on.

~

Lynne Sharon Schwartz is the author of thirty books of fiction, essays, and poetry, including her novels Leaving Brooklyn, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and Rough Strife, a finalist for the National Book Award. She has also published two memoirs, Ruined by Reading and Not Now, Voyager, and has translated from the Italian. Schwartz has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts in Fiction and, separately, for Translation, and the New York State Foundation for the Arts. She has taught widely, most recently at the Bennington College Writing Seminars and the Columbia University School of Arts.

Ruth Mukwana is an Adjunct Lecturer at Columbia School of International and Public Affairs. She has formerly worked with the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process (UNSCO), and the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS). Ruth is also a fiction writer and a 2020 Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil NYC Emerging Fellow. Her work has appeared in several magazines including Bomb, Solstice, Consequence and the Black Warriors Review.  She is the Creator and Host of the Stories and Humanitarian Action Podcast and a Fiction Co-Editor for Solstice magazine. Ruth is a Ugandan national with a Law degree from Makerere University, a Masters in International and Comparative Law from the Free University of Brussels, and a Masters in Fine Arts from Bennington College. She is currently working on a novel and a collection of short stories.

Thanks to Lynne Sharon Schwartz and Ruth Mukwana for sharing their conversation. I hope you’ll read and enjoy A Stranger Comes to Town, available wherever books are sold.

In case you missed it… I have three new poems published online at Porchlight: A Journal of Southern Literature, and I recently read some poems from Feller with Kendra Winchester on episode 50 of Read Appalachia, and I had a fun time hanging out with Ben Tanzer on episode 371 of This Podcast Will Save Your Life.

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Where the Story Demands to Go: A Conversation with Melanie K. Hutsell

Denton Loving2 Comments

I’ve lost track of how long I’ve known Melanie K. Hutsell, but it’s been a few years. She’s a native of East Tennessee, and we share a mentor and many writer friends from this region. In the time we’ve known each other, she has published two novels, The Dead Shall Rise: A Tale of the Mountains, and The Book of Susan, which received the Award of Merit in the fiction category of the 2023 Christianity Today Book Awards. About a year ago, I ran into Melanie at a writers conference, and she told me about her new collection of short stories, The Art of Lost Souls, which she was in the process of sending out to publishers.

The Art of Lost Souls and Other Stories quickly found a home with Main Street Rag (MSR), and is currently available for pre-order. MSR and Editor Scott Douglass have a long history of publishing beautiful books. MSR is the press that published my first poetry collection, Crimes Against Birds. I’m forever grateful to MSR and Scott for taking a chance with my book, and I’m always excited to see MSR continue to publish good work like Melanie’s collection of short fiction.

In The Art of Lost Souls Melanie has created a cast of characters that are both achingly strange and sad. They are misunderstood dreamers, people on the verge of big transitions, wonderers asking what life would look like if all the pieces fit together. But as Hutsell’s characters face loss and uncertain futures, they reveal themselves to be creative souls with imaginations that help them survive. Melanie agreed to answer a few questions about writing, publishing, and not giving up on old projects.

DL: The title of this collection sets up how so many of your characters are some kind of artists, and usually, it’s their creativity that provides a sense of salvation to their stories. You’ve written in the past about having bipolar disorder. How does your background and your own experience of being a creative inform the characters you want to write about?

MH: This is interesting for me to consider. I’ve been aware that I do tend to write characters who are creatives—but until you asked this, I’d never really considered how seldom I write about writers. Because I do tend to think of my background as being fairly focused on words and pages, from an early age. And my fictional creatives tend toward other pursuits, like music or cooking or visual art. Maybe I tend to think, fictionally, of creativity as a way of expressing a character’s superpower, and of course, not everybody writes. I guess I tend to subscribe to the notion that all humans are here to create. I’m drawn towards the philosophy/theology in books like Divine Beauty by John O’Donohue or Art + Faith by Makoto Fujimura, which suggest humans are here to do and experience beauty and that creativity can be expressed in doing anything with love, and by love I mean with intention and giving, in the direction of God and humans.

DL: Some of the stories in The Art of Lost Souls are set in towns and locations that are real places, meaning you didn’t create them out of thin air. The first story is even titled Still Life in Townsend, referencing the town of Townsend, Tennessee. When you’re writing a story, how much do you draw on what you know about the place where it’s set?

MH: For someone who grew up reading a lot of fantasy, my adult work is pretty grounded in the Appalachia of East Tennessee. And I grew up in upper East Tennessee, and that is where most of my work is set, and Appalachian identity almost always is an important facet of my characters. Most of my settings are fictional, with strong underpinnings of reality to them. My two novels, The Dead Shall Rise and The Book of Susan, share some fictional towns with the short stories. Creating a fictional geography allows me to create needed settings or maybe to transport real-life places and set them down in new locations. But, yes, I do sometimes use real settings. In The Art of Lost Souls and Other Stories, both “Celestial Images” and “Still Life in Townsend” are set in real places, and the settings there really define the kind of stories they are. “Celestial Images” is about a homesick Appalachian living in Bloomington, Indiana, and “Still Life in Townsend” is about a motel family who specifically runs a business in the quiet—as opposed to the more tourist-deluged—side of the Smokies, and that’s pretty central to the story. The title story in the collection is set in Knoxville, though it’s a rather magical Knoxville. I was going there for a sense of urban history in that setting, something about time and distance. And sometimes I will invoke real places to make my fictional ones seem more real.

DL: One of the things I admire with the stories in The Art of Lost Souls is that you’re not afraid to go into some pretty dark spaces. But you usually bring some relief to the reader, too. Do good stories require pushing into that darkness?

MH: I do think the best writing is that which costs the author something to make and also requires great honesty. Often when something’s false in what I’m working on, it’s because I haven’t pushed myself enough in that spot, really faced what’s trying to be said there. I haven’t gone to where the story is demanding to go. And I think all of this is true whether one is writing realistic fiction or not, literary fiction or not. Because art is about being human. And there is a lot of darkness there. I consider myself to be generally wired up as someone who believes, but it’s dishonest not to acknowledge the dark.

DL: The Art of Lost Souls is your third book publication. But you’ve also been working for a long time on a magical realism novel. How do you balance multiple projects at the same time? And what keeps you returning to this unfinished novel?

MH: Well, the short answer is, I really don’t balance multiple projects at once. I actually become very absorbed in my writing projects, which is one reason—among many—that the unfinished novel remains unfinished. It’s a work that I’ve been wrestling with in many different variations since college. It began life as a fantasy novel and is a magic realism novel now. The Dead Shall Rise actually started, when I was in graduate school twenty-five or so years ago, as a manuscript written around a misbehaving character carved from the other work. After many years plagued by mental illness (though I didn’t know at the time that was what ailed me) and then devoted to recovery, the unfinished novel came back to me. But I set it aside to focus on writing and publishing short fiction to hone my craft and get a publication history. And then I opted to revise The Dead Shall Rise and seek publication with it, being a more complete manuscript, than to finish the messy, half-done one. And then The Book of Susan got written because of an agent’s interest engendered by reading one of my published short stories. (The agent ultimately passed on Susan.)  And I’ve long wanted to have a collection of my short work appear all in one place, and Main Street Rag publishing The Art of Lost Souls is a realization of that dream. Meanwhile, in between these projects, I’m writing along on the poor, longsuffering, untitled novel, because I can only do one thing at once. I suppose I find the protagonist compelling. Possibly he is my alter ego, more so than any other character I’ve written.

DL: I think you know that I have so much respect for small and independent publishers. Now that you’ve published three books with different small presses, do you have advice for writers about how to get published?

MH: You don’t need an MFA, and you don’t need an agent. Not that those are not good, helpful, and desirable things. But I have neither. I say: write and be a student of writing. I was fortunate to have a mentor when I was in high school, poet Jane Hicks, who was my guidance counselor and who taught me to approach writing professionally. Back then, it was the Writer’s Market and SASEs. Now it’s Submittable and Substack and unknown frontiers. Stay abreast of the ever-evolving business. Always read the guidelines. Don’t be afraid to submit. Don’t let rejection define you – learn from it. And definitely consider small presses as options for submitting your work. I’ve loved working with each press I’ve worked with. Each has devoted such care to seeing my manuscript through the process, helped me better realize the vision I’ve had for that particular work. I’ll pass along advice once given to me—you’re looking for the press that loves your manuscript as much as you do. There’s a lot to be said for sending your work to an indie press.

Many thanks to Melanie K. Hutsell for answering these questions. Find out more about Melanie here, and be sure to pre-order The Art of Lost Souls from Main Street Rag Publishers.

In case you missed it… I recently read with Georgann Eubanks for the Spoken & Heard series. And I’m so grateful that Feller has had some great reviews from Jake Lawson in MicroLit: a Tiny Journal of Prose & Poetry, Noah Soltau in Red Branch Review, and from Meredith Sue Willis in Books for Readers. I hope you’ll take a look.

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Honesty is Bravery Enough: Conversation with David Wesley Williams

Denton Loving4 Comments

Last October, as I was preparing to drive to Nashville for the Southern Festival of Books, my friend Patti Meredith told me to keep an eye out for David Wesley Williams. I found him quickly enough, signing books after his panel with George Singleton. We only had a brief time to chat, but I picked up his new novel, Everybody Knows, and asked him to sign it, not guessing that I would not have time to read it until the new year rolled around. But what a way to say goodbye to 2023 and hello to 2024.

Everybody Knows is a post-apocalyptic satire, but it’s also incredibly beautiful and smart, and a real pleasure to read. As far as apocalypses go, floating across Tennessee on a river boat is not a bad way to go. And it’s always a joy to read the work of an author who clearly enjoys language and is a master at putting words through their paces.

In addition to Everybody Knows, David Wesley Williams is the author of the novel Long Gone Daddies. His short fiction has been featured in Oxford American, Akashic Books’ Memphis Noir, Harper Perennial’s Forty Stories, and journals such as The Pinch and The Common. He spent thirty-five years as a reporter and editor, most of them in Memphis, where he still lives. David agreed to answer a few questions about his writing, his love of music, and the great state of Tennessee.

DL: As a fellow Tennessean, I have to tell you that I thoroughly enjoyed watching you destroy our state. Was that destruction as fun for you to write? And will you talk about how this narrative started for you? Would you say the tone of this book, especially the satirical nature, is similar or different from your first novel and your other writings?

DWW: I didn’t wish destruction upon Tennessee—really!—but I did relish the idea of Memphis, City on the Bluff, being the last hope and refuge for the state. Because as a long-time Memphian I know the ill will—in some cases, the outright hatred—a lot of Tennesseans hold toward Memphis. I suspect some Tennesseans would rather take their chances with a flood than come here.

The novel was written over several years and revised many times, but it always began with the couple on their porch, watching the rain and the coming flood, and one saying, “It’s not the end of the world,” and the other saying, “I think the end of the world’s been called on account of rain.” Later, it actually became a book about the end of the world.

I’d never written satire—or intended to. My first novel, Long Gone Daddies (2013), was about three generations of musicians and the family guitar they handed down. But with Everybody Knows, I was writing at a time when it was impossible to ignore what was going on with the country, the world, the planet: climate change, issues of race, religion, public health, gun violence, crime and punishment, the political divide. Everything was (and still is) so fraught. I felt like I had to write about those things, but in a way that made sense for me. In a way that helped me cope. Writing angry doesn’t work for me. Humor does. So I wrote a self-described “Southern Gothic, mock-apocalyptic, shrunken-epic satire.”

DL: Music is a driving engine in Everybody Knows. Even the title comes from an O.V. Wright song, which I’m so very glad to know now because of your book. It’s clear that you have a passion for all kinds of music, as well as an academic and historical understanding of music. How did you come to see music and particularly the state of country music and Music City as a way to talk about culture and politics?

DWW: I love music, particularly Southern music, which shows up in pretty much everything I write. Music gives Memphis so much of its cultural identity, and also some of its finest moments as a city—white and Black Memphians, working together, to create sublime art.

Also, I think Memphis musicians have always sought success, but on their terms. You can’t easily bend them to the will of the commercial gods. It’s about the song, not a gold record. Sure, we had a band that called itself Big Star, but it didn’t actually sell many records.

Nashville is a whole other place. It’s about business there. How can I say this? I hate modern country music. And when I say modern, I think they’ve been ruining country music in Nashville—turning it to pop—since at least Patsy Cline.

All that said, there’s a lot of Nashville music I love, past and present. One of the characters in Everybody Knows names his boat after Emmylou Harris. Gillian Welch and David Rawlings are on a short list of my favorite performers, alongside the likes of Bob Dylan, Neil Young and—another Nashville favorite—John Prine. Classic country is matchless music. And the Ryman is a national treasure. So there. I don’t hate Nashville. I don’t.

DL: In addition to using humor, irony, and exaggeration to make your readers laugh, you touch on some important topics, especially about race. I took note of how Emmett Till and George Floyd’s deaths were both touchstones within your narrative. Do you have advice for other writers about how to address big cultural moments in fiction?

DWW: I think it really comes down to one thing: Be honest. Say what you believe, say what you feel, say what needs to be said, by you, in the moment. Don’t pander, don’t hedge, don’t calculate. I guess I could add “be brave,” but honesty is bravery enough.

Now, all this may be easy for me to say, because not many people are reading what I write. Everybody Knows was published by a small press and not widely reviewed—but trust me, dear reader, there’s some wild stuff in there, hiding in plain sight!

DL: I’m always interested in the way we identify ourselves with location. You live in Western Tennessee, but you’re originally from Kentucky, as are several important characters in your novel. How does place inform your identity, and impact your writing?

DWW: I think place is everything in fiction. I tend to think of place as a character. Certainly Memphis is a character in most of my stories and novels. And what a character it is—“the old Delta synonym for pleasure, trouble, and shame,” as Eudora Welty called it in one of her books.

Kentucky keeps showing up in my books, in small ways. I think I’m working up to a full Kentucky novel, inspired by my hometown, Maysville—another character worthy of fiction. Daniel Boone lived there. Casey Stengel played ball there. It was Rosemary Clooney’s hometown.

DL: I often ask writers about the process of submitting their manuscripts for publication. Can you describe the time between writing and publishing Everybody Knows? How did you connect with Jackleg Press?

DWW: I queried some 60 agents with the first version of the book, in 2019. The majority didn’t respond. It was already a book about the country unraveling, so it felt natural to revise in 2020 amid the pandemic and the George Floyd murder and the country on fire. I started submitting again, this time with a query letter that began, “What would Kurt Vonnegut write about these times and those ahead for America, if he were alive today — and if he were Southern?”

I sent to a combination of agents and publishers—another 60 or so. The response was the same. They didn’t reject it as much as ignore it. They weren’t even reading it. Which was fine—I just needed one person to give it a chance. Then in early August 2021, I came across a small publisher called JackLeg Press. They asked to read the full manuscript, loved it, and within a couple of weeks I had a signed contract. They’ve been great partners, and we’re looking forward to another novel together. More news on that soon, hopefully.

I’m so grateful to David Wesley Williams for answering these questions. If you haven’t already read Everybody Knows, be sure to order your copy, available at bookshop.org or wherever books are sold.

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In case you missed it… check out my conversation with Georgann Eubanks, where we discussed her travels across North Carolina celebrating some of the state’s most unique foodways in The Month of Their Ripening.

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Ekphrastic Writing at the Knoxville Writers Guild

Denton Loving1 Comment

If you’re in the greater Knoxville area on Thursday, September 7th, I hope you’ll join me at the monthly meeting of the Knoxville Writers Guild at Addison’s Bookstore, located at 126 S. Gay St., in Knoxville. The meeting begins at 7:00 p.m.

I’ll be talking about ekphrastic writing or ekphrasis. The word “ekphrasis” comes to us from the Greek where it means “description.” If you still aren’t sure what ekphrastic writing is, then I’ll briefly define it as writing that vividly describes a pre-existing work of art. I’ll share some of my favorite examples of ekphrasis, and we’ll even generate new work using some of the fantastic art on display at Addison’s.

Here are some of the images I’ll be talking about in this session.

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If you live too far away to be in Knoxville on Thursday, I hope you’ll use one of these images or an image of your own in your writing practice this week. If you come up with something you especially like, please send it to me. If you need more guidance, check out my conversation with Julia Wendell about her ekphrastic poem “Horse in the Landscape.”

Conversation with Patricia Hudson

Denton Loving3 Comments

I live in the shadows of the Cumberland Gap. The idea of westward expansion and the mythology of Daniel Boone are very present in my mind and in my daily life. This weekend, I found myself engrossed in the lives of the Boone women as I read Patricia Hudson’s novel, Traces, written from the perspectives of Daniel’s wife Rebecca and their two daughters Susannah and Jemima. Hudson has combined years of meticulous research along with the tools of fiction to give voice to women who were often forgotten or purposely omitted from the historic record. Before publishing Traces, Hudson worked as a journalist, writing for publications such as Americana, Country Living, and Southern Living. She also co-edited Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia, and coauthored The Carolinas and the Appalachian States, a volume in the Smithsonian Guide to Historic America series. Patricia agreed to answer some questions about Traces, the Boone women, and her writing process.

DL: In your acknowledgments in Traces, you mention that it took you nearly 25 years to write this book. As a freelance journalist, you were working during those 25 years, and you were also focusing on various other projects. But you must have been continually living with the Boone women in the back of your mind. Can you talk about what motivated you to never give up on this project?

PH: I suspect my husband would say it’s because of my innate stubbornness. It’s hard for me to abandon something I feel strongly about, and for whatever reason, these three women never let me forget about them, even though pieces of this manuscript spent decades in my desk drawer. Like so many other women, Rebecca, Susannah and Jemima had been neglected within the historical record, and I didn’t want to be guilty of yet another “forgetting.” However, at one point, when folks asked me how the novel was progressing, my response was: “Rebecca has climbed out of my desk drawer, given me a disgusted look, and told me she was walking back to Kentucky because I was no count.” Thankfully, she eventually came back.

DL: Of all genres of writing, historical fiction feels perhaps the most daunting to me. I know you employed countless years of research, and you also learned from visiting living history sites. What advice do you have for others interested in in this genre?

PH: Historical fiction authors are sometimes accused of having “research rapture” — that is, researching endlessly rather than actually writing. My first piece of advice for anyone who wants to write historical fiction is that from the beginning you should accept that you’ll never know everything about a historical period. Author L.P. Huntley said, “The past is a foreign country — they do things differently there.” As hard as you try, you won’t get every detail right.

You’ll also be faced with situations where — for reasons of clarity, or to corral a sprawling manuscript — you have to depart from a strict reconstruction of the historical record. For example, I didn’t want to depict more than one of the Boone family’s journeys through Cumberland Gap, so I combined several actual events from several years into a single trip. The rule of thumb is that a writer of historical fiction is allowed to bend history, but not break it.

DL: You have a wonderful map on www.patricia-hudson.com that illustrates the journeys made by the Boones throughout their lives. You also continue to post a “Boone Blog.” Does this mean that you aren’t finished with the Boones? Will you continue to write about them? Are the voices of these women still speaking to you?

PH: I think I’m “done” with the Boones in the fictional sense, but the Boone Blog will likely continue for a while. I’ve always loved getting to see “behind the scenes” of creative endeavors. During college I worked on the stage crew of various theatre productions because I loved watching a play come together, observing all the ways a director would tweak various elements of the show between performances. The Boone Blog pulls back the curtain on how Traces was created. I wanted to highlight the many folks I encountered during the research and acknowledge them — historians, living history reenactors, librarians, and so forth. It’s one small way of saying “thank you” to them for their help.

DL: Reclaiming the stories of historic women in itself makes Traces a political novel in some ways. Another way is in how you address the complications of race, both with whites and Blacks and even more so with whites and indigenous people such as the Cherokee and Shawnee. Can you talk about how you balanced narrative and historical accurateness with cultural sensitivities and modern perspectives?

PH: One of the main reasons I wanted to depict the lives of three of the Boone women, rather than just Rebecca, was because each of the women had unique experiences that allowed me to show a variety of responses to the cultural norms of the time.

As a young wife and mother, Rebecca had tragic interactions with the tribes who called Kentucky home, which I felt sure colored her view of the Indians and their culture. Yet somehow, towards the end of her life, she welcomed Daniel’s Shawnee friends as guests in her home. As a novelist, it was my job to imagine how that change of heart might have come about.

The historical record tells us that Jemima Boone harbored friendly feelings towards Native-Americans, even though she’d had the harrowing experience of being kidnapped by them. She reportedly said that the Indians “treated her as kindly as they could” under the circumstances. Her attitude, which was much like her father’s, allowed me to offer readers a more nuanced portrayal of the Indians than would have been possible otherwise.

My third protagonist, Susannah, accompanied her father and several dozen axmen into the wilderness as they cut the initial trace through Cumberland Gap, and then on to the site along the Kentucky River that would become Boonesborough. The only other woman in that party was an enslaved woman, whose name may have been Dolly. One reviewer doubted my depiction of these two women — one black, one white — developing a friendship. Under normal circumstances, they probably wouldn’t have, but when you consider that Susannah was not quite fifteen years old, that she’d had very little experience with slavery up to that point, and that Richard Callaway’s slave was the only other woman in a party of several dozen men, I believe the two women would have supported one another during that very arduous journey. Their relationship allowed me to portray an enslaved person as a fully formed human being.

DL: Through reading Robert Morgan’s Boone: A Biography, I learned that Richard Callaway, not the most admirable characters, was my 7x-great uncle. (Another of my grandmothers was a Bryan, related to Rebecca Bryan Boone.) I later shared this with Mr. Morgan, and he replied, “One reward of writing the Boone biography has been hearing from many people who are connected with Boone or others in his story. It’s like Boone’s life unites us in a unique way.” Have you found a similar response in regard to the lives of the Boone women?

PH: Definitely. At nearly every place I’ve spoken, someone has come up to me and said they were related to the Boones, or had ancestors in the Yadkin Valley, or at Boonesborough, or some other place mentioned in the book. During my research, I discovered that I had ancestors that went through the Gap not long after the Boones did. They tried to establish a homestead near present-day Danville, Kentucky, but when the Indians burned  them out, the family retreated back through the Gap and settled in Powell Valley. My father’s side of the family sank deep roots along the Powell River until TVA flooded their land. If things had worked out differently, I might have been a Kentuckian instead of a Tennessean.

As for Richard Callaway — I depicted him as seen through the eyes of the Boone family. Of course, the Calloway family’s version of the story would have been told very differently. Callaway sought to have Boone court martialed, so there was no love lost there. However, everyone, including the Boones, recognized that Calloway was a brave man who worked hard to protect the inhabitants of Boonesborough during the settlement’s early years. Richard Callaway was fiery, while Boone was more low-key, so from the very beginning, it was a clash of personalities. Maybe you need to write your great uncle’s side of the story? In historical fiction, as in life, truth is multi-faceted. There’s always more than one way to tell a story.

I’m so grateful to Patricia Hudson for answering these questions. If you haven’t already read Traces, be sure to order your copy, available at https://bookshop.org/p/books/traces-patricia-l-hudson/18102062 or wherever books are sold.

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In case you missed it… check out my conversation with Davin Malasarn, where we discussed my poetry collection Tamp on The Artist’s Statement.

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Martin Amis’s “Oktober”

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You may have seen that the writer Martin Amis died last week. I’ve never read any of Amis’s novels, but on hearing the news, I immediately recalled Amis’s short story ”Oktober,” a story that has lingered in my memory because of how much I have admired it ever since the first time I read it 7 or 8 years ago.

I’ve seen this story criticized as “non-fiction-ish” and “lightly fictionalized.” It doesn’t matter to me how much Amis heavily drew from his own experience and observations, as if there’s only a certain amount that’s okay. Rather, this story should be held up as an example of how we can fictionalize our own experiences to find deeper, emotional meaning on the page. Perhaps one reason this story speaks to me is because it’s archetypal in that it portrays a character on a journey, and, as Amis said:

“Even the dullest journey resembles a short story: beginning, middle, end, with the traveler displaced and, we hope, alerted.”

I admire this story for many reasons, most notably because it’s such a well-executed political story. It addresses world events on both the largest and smallest scales. In this case, the story centers on an Englishman in Munich during Oktoberfest, and more importantly, during an influx of Middle Eastern refugee movement. What the narrator witnesses is framed both by literature (Vladimir Nabokov & Thomas Wolfe) and history (Russian refugees in 1917 & German refugees following World War II).

The story’s refugee thread holds continued relevance in light of the migrations being politicized in the United States, centered around the expiration of Title 42.

One of the characters in “Oktober,” Bernhardt, is Iranian-German. He says about the migrants: “You know, they won’t stop coming. They pay large sums of money to risk their lives crossing the sea and then they walk across Europe. They walk across Europe. A few policemen and a stretch of barbed wire can’t keep them out. And there are millions more where they came from. This is going to go on for years. And they won’t stop coming.”

There are also mothers of various types appearing on virtually every page of “Oktober.” And in regard to the mothers that Amis portrays here, I would mention that one thing I admire about this story is how tightly he weaves all the threads of the story. It may not always seem so because the language is conversational, but everything seems to serve a purpose. Everything is connected. Meanwhile, the story is not so economical that it feels austere or lacking. It feels rather sprawling instead.

Amis received criticism during the last several years for some sloppy comments he made about terrorism and extremism. Some of these comments are not so far from those of Geoffrey, a British businessman in “Oktober” who has a less than welcoming attitude towards migrants. Geoffrey is also the character who brings the most shock value to the story. So while he is not a likeable character, he’s incredibly dramatic to follow.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to reading any of Amis’s better known works, but it was a pleasure to revisit this story and to remember all of the reasons I admired it in the first place. You can read Martin Amis’s short story, “Oktober,” online at The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/07/oktober. And I hope you will.

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In case you missed it… check out this month’s list of Submission Calls for Writers, and my conversation with Erika Nichols-Frazer, where we discussed my poetry collection Tamp and her memoir Feed Me, hosted by Birch Bark Editing.

Submission Calls for Writers 5/11/2023

Denton Loving1 Comment

I’ve had a lot of fun this last month as my new collection, Tamp, has found its way into readers’ hands. Thanks to all of you who have ordered the book, and extra thanks to those of you who’ve reached out to let me know what you think about the poems. Just as the days are growing warmer and longer, I’m very aware of how much I hope to accomplish this summer. I have several writing projects that I want to move forward in at least some way. And there also has to be time set aside to submitting our work. To that purpose, I offer this list of one dozen submission opportunities. It’s tempting to pretend most journals are taking the summer off, and maybe we should take it off, too. But neither is exactly true. A lot of great journals, like these 12, are open right now, and would love to read whatever you’ve been writing. Good luck!

Exacting Clam Exacting Clam is an online and in print quarterly journal from Sagging Meniscus Press, publishing short fiction, poetry, book, art and music reviews, essays, interviews, and visual art/illustrations. https://www.exactingclam.com/submit/

Florida Review & Aquifer: The Florida Review Online We are looking for innovative, luxuriant, insightful human stories—and for things that might surprise us. Please submit no more than one piece of fiction, nonfiction, graphic narrative, review, or digital story at a time. Poets and visual artists may submit up to (but no more than) five poems or artworks as a single submission. We charge a $2 or $3 submission fee depending on category. https://floridareview.submittable.com/submit

Pithead Chapel Pithead Chapel electronically publishes art, literary fiction, nonfiction, and prose poetry monthly. At present, we only accept submissions under 4,000 words. https://pitheadchapel.com/submission-guidelines/

Tipton Poetry Journal The Tipton Poetry Journal is published quarterly both in print and an online archive. The Tipton Poetry Journal publishes about 35 poems each. Poems with the best chance for acceptance are quality free verse which evokes a shared sense of common humanity. The Tipton Poetry Journal is published in Indiana, so themes with a regional focus are encouraged. Submissions are read year-round. http://tiptonpoetryjournal.com/submission.html

Waxwing We read submissions of poetry, short fiction, and literary essays Sept 1 to May 1; translations of poetry and literary prose are read year-round. Each issue features approximately thirteen poets, six prose writers, and six authors in translation. Poets should send one to five poems, and prose writers one story, essay, novella, or novel chapter (or up to three short-short stories or micro-essays). https://waxwing.submittable.com/submit

Qu Qu is a literary journal, published by the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte. The Qu editorial staff is comprised of current students. We publish fiction, poetry, essays and script excerpts of outstanding quality. Payment upon publication is $100 per prose piece and $50 per poem. Next reading period opens May 15th, 2023. http://www.qulitmag.com/submit/

The Stinging Fly We publish new, previously unpublished work by Irish and international writers. Each issue of The Stinging Fly includes a mix of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, alongside our Featured Poets and Comhchealg sections, occasional author interviews and novel extracts. We have a particular interest in promoting new writers, and in promoting the short story form. We plan on being open again for submissions from May 16 until May 31 2023, for Issue 49 Volume Two (November 2023). http://www.stingingfly.org/about-us/submission-guidelines 

Baltimore Review Summer The Baltimore Review is a quarterly, online literary journal. Submit one short story or creative nonfiction piece, no more than 5,000 words. Submit three poems. Our current submission period runs through May 31, 2023. www.baltimorereview.org

2023 New American Fiction Prize The New American Fiction Prize is awarded each year to a full-length fiction manuscript, such as a story collection, novel, novella(s), or something that blends forms, like a novel in verse. The winner receives $1,500 and a book contract, as well as 25 author’s copies and promotional support. Deadline is June 15, 2023. There is a $25 submission fee. https://newamericanpress.submittable.com/submit

The Fairy Tale Review Founding Editor Kate Bernheimer will edit the twentieth annual issue of Fairy Tale Review. Vol. 20 will not have a theme. We are looking for your best new work. Writers may submit a single prose piece up to 6,000 words or up to three prose pieces under 1,000 words each. We welcome short fiction, essays, lyric nonfiction, and creative scholarship. Submit up to four poems totaling no more than ten pages. Submissions will be accepted through July 15, 2023. http://fairytalereview.com/submit/

Poetry South Poetry South is a national journal that considers all kinds of poetry. Though we pay particular attention to writers from the South — born, raised, or living here — all poetry within our covers has a claim to the South because it is published here. The magazine has a tradition of including poets from other regions in the US and other countries. We are looking for a great mix of styles and voices that will appeal to our audience and breathe new life into the poetry of the South. Send 1-4 unpublished poems in Word or RTF format. Our annual submission deadline is July 15. https://www.muw.edu/poetrysouth/submit

Masque & Spectacle Masque & Spectacle is a bi-annual arts and literary journal. We publish short fiction of all genres, up to 7,500 words. We are looking for unpublished nonfiction essays, literary analysis pieces, and personal essay/memoirs of up to 7,500 words. We are looking for all forms of poetry, including formal and experimental work. Submit work to be included in our next issue between May 1 and July 31, 2023. http://masqueandspectacle.com/submission-guidelines/

Thanks for reading. Please feel free to share these opportunities with other writers.  If you’re not already receiving these posts directly to your inbox, please subscribe.

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In case you missed it… I had a wonderful conversation with J.D. Isip about his newest collection of poems, Kissing the Wound. And I shared a writing exercise based on J.D.’s poem “Leaving Krypton.”

Coming up… Join me Tuesday, May 16, at 7:00 p.m., as I speak with Erica Nichols-Frazer about her book, Feed Me, in Birch Bark Editing’s InConversation series. The event is free but registration is required. I hope to see you there.

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Writing Exercise 22.7

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In my previous post, I had a wonderful conversation with Erica Plouffe Lazure about her new linked-story collection Proof of Me. Today, Erica is sharing a very short story from her collection. Originally published in Swink, Erica’s story, “Re: Division Unification,” is a mere six paragraph structured in the form of an inter-office memo. I appreciate interesting narrative structures such as in this one. Another story in Proof of Me, “Azimuth and Altitude,” is told through a series of phone messages. These kinds of structure lend towards a monological confession. In other words, it’s a great way to let a character loose to better reveal their voice and their particular narrative. Read Erica’s story below, and afterwards, I’ll share Erica’s advice about how to use interesting structures in your own work regardless of genre.

RE: Division Unification

Golden Poultry Processing Plant
MEMO
To: All Golden Poultry Division Employees
From: Kitty Ingram Lanford
RE: Division Unification

As you know, Boss Karpinski likes to say that we here at Golden Poultry should all aim for division unification. Better workers, he says, produce better teams; better teams make for better projects; better projects create a better office atmosphere, which brings better leadership, all of which contributes to a better, more unified division, which, in turn, makes our company succeed. The company is considered successful when it makes more money. And it is the division’s office’s leader’s team’s project’s members—each of us—who are charged with making that happen.

To motivate us into further unifying our division, Karpinski tells us to get our “ducks in a row,” to “think outside the box,” and to always leave “room on our plate.” Achieving these three goals, he says, will no doubt put “a feather in our cap.”

More than once, he has noted that members of our division’s team must “wear many hats” in order to succeed. This in particular caught my attention because I have yet to see anyone in our division, save for myself, wear a single hat, let alone several. I did a good stretch of knitting a few years back, after my father died and before my daughter joined the Marching Tigers, and those of you who work on my team in our division’s office know that I actually own and wear an extensive collection of woolen hats—although not at the same time. I’d like to know why Boss Karpinski suggests that we all wear hats, then, when in fact I am the division’s sole multiple hat wearer. I can imagine he’ll read this memo and say, “there’s no ‘I’ in ‘team,’ Kitty Ingram.” But there’s no ‘we” in team, either. Only “me,” mixed up. And wearing all the hats. And while I see boxes of chocolates and boxed pens doled to my colleagues as quarterly rewards, I—the lone multi-hat wearer of our division—have yet to see a reward, let alone a single feather, for my cap—or caps, as it were—come my way.

Perhaps the source of these elusive feathers is the ducks which Mr. Karpinski is so fond of aligning. Every time he urges us to get our “ducks in a row,” I can’t help but think we are getting bad advice. My father was a prize duck hunter out at Mattamuskeet each year, Mallard Class, and I know that, unless they are stuffed and mounted on your mantle, ducks do not readily get in rows, nor do they like to. As everyone knows, ducks in flight make v-shaped formations, which is not a row but rather an elegant, egalitarian arc. And anyone who’s ever watched ducks in a marsh could tell you they aren’t about to line up for you when they’re sitting in the water. That’s why they make buckshot. Yet Mr. Karpinski seems to believe that there is some relationship between row-friendly ducks and our mission of division unification. But to put them in rows is contrary not only to the natural tendencies of ducks, but also to the true aim of the statement, by which I assume he means: get organized.

But in order to get organized, he wants us to think outside the very object that would help us, logistically, to achieve it. It has been nearly three decades since I have been able to maneuver my body to fit inside a box, let alone think inside of one. And, unless you are compelled to place a box over your head as inspiration to get the neurons firing, thinking outside of a box is a natural, if not logical, thing to do. It begs the question why a box would even need to be present in order for thought to occur. My experience suggests that thinking happens—and should happen—when no box is present. So it makes one wonder: why the emphasis on the box? If, perhaps, the word “box” is meant to suggest my rather boxlike “cubicle,” then I heartily agree. And, since boxes tend to stay where you put them—except if that box happens to be in the supply room closet filled with staples and designer pushpins and the four-dollars-a-pop fountain pens and deluxe desk calendar—it seems a far simpler and more logical task to put your boxes in a row, and to let the ducks outside where they belong.

By solving the dilemmas of box placement and duck-alignment, it frees us, then, to consider Mr. Karpinski’s third piece of advice to achieve division unification. When I first heard him say, “don’t tell me your plate is full; always leave a little room,” I thought he was talking about the holiday all-you-can-eat chicken buffet the division pays for down in the break room. It’s advice I get from my dietician, too. And my therapist. But I always want to know, and no one ever tells me: what are we leaving room on our plates for? Ducks? In boxes? But then I realized that leaving room on a plate simply means that there is more to life than ducks and boxes and Golden Poultry, for that matter, and that you need to be ready for it. Leaving room on your plate is, in essence, making room for change, something that would mix up and rehash stale leftovers, be it food or phrase. Maybe it’s something that might inspire you to leave the division’s office for a while, even for just an hour, to take a walk in the woods to experience box-free thinking. And maybe you’d find in the woods a lake, where, if you are lucky enough, you may come across a family of ducks and observe them. You would know how unwilling they’d be to get in rows for you, how easily they spook if you rush at them, scare them a little into taking flight. I used to do this when I was a girl, on those Saturday mornings duck hunting with my dad. I’d rush at the ducks and when they flew away, a feather sometimes would fall from their fold, and land, miraculously, at my feet.

~~~

Erica Plouffe Lazure: When I wrote RE: Division Unification, I was working in an office at a university, and often had to edit the somewhat formalized and (at times abstruse) language of professional communication. And my brain is always looking for something to be entertained by—I’m a terrible punster—and so I thought it would be fun to see what would happen if one of my characters were to co-opt some of the hackneyed phrases we always hear in corporate settings, and use them to address a topic that is personal in nature while maintaining a somewhat formal tone.

I think stories that steal from other formats (with essays they’re called “hermit crabs”) can work, due to the sense of urgency (that “confessional” feel) and the familiarity of the format itself. Something that I always think about when I compose stories (no matter what format they take) is what circumstance would motivate, or even force, my character to ACT? What would push them into divulging something that they might not otherwise? Something I would caution against is using unusual forms gratuitously—there’s a fine line between coopting an unusual format to bring the writer (and character) closer to the truth of a situation, and using it as a gimmick.

As far as Kitty Ingram Lanford, we are introduced to her in the story “Marchers,” but we don’t know precisely what motivates her until she has a chance to speak on her own behalf via the memo in “RE: Division Unification.” Here we see a woman who is probably unseen and ignored at work, who dedicates a lot of time to causes she cares for, who is likely still grieving the death of her father, and who is sick of having people steal office supplies from the closet. To refer back to our earlier conversation about how I shaped my story collection, “RE: Division Unification” is a good example of how I’d reworked the names and some of the minor points of the original story (published in the now-defunct Swink journal) and found a space and voice for her in Proof of Me as Kitty Ingram Lanford.

Prompt: Start by making a list of unique structures along the lines of an office memo/email, or a voicemail. Pick one that allows a character to tell their story. Be sure to allow your character to confess something to their audience. Include a memory from the character’s past.

If you are writing nonfiction, try to recall a job you once held, and write about a time when you wanted to express something to a co-worker or boss, but didn’t. Use a memo, email, or voicemail format to recall that moment to your former colleague, and why it still stays with you.

If you are writing poetry, make a list of the objects of a workspace that is familiar to you. Then make a list of words you associate with that profession (feel free to look them up). Mix and match the words to see what story or throughline surfaces. Or, find a format within the workspace (an admission ticket or order form, for example) that you might borrow to “contain” the poem.

If this prompt helps you, I’d love to see the final product. In the meantime, please check out Erica Plouffe Lazure’s website, and don’t forget to buy her collection, Proof of Me, available from online retailers and your local bookstore.

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Conversation with Erica Plouffe Lazure

Denton Loving1 Comment

Erica Plouffe Lazure is quick to explain that she is not a Southerner nor a Southern writer. But what exactly is a Southerner or a Southern writer today? Are such distinctions based on the accident of birth? On the range of time and experience? How do perspective, talent and empathy work into the equations? I’ve heard every side of these arguments over the years. All I know for certain is that regardless of the way she self-identifies, the stories in Erica Plouffe Lazure’s linked-story collection Proof of Me authentically center on a small square of land called Mewborn, North Carolina, a place born out of Erica’s lived experience as much as from her imagination. Erica was kind enough to answer some of my questions about putting these stories together, about her submission process, and about winning the prestigious New American Press Fiction Prize.

DL: How long did it take you to write the stories in Proof of Me? Can you talk about how some of these stories link together and how those links impacted the shaping of the collection?

EPL: The stories in Proof of Me go back from when I first started pursuing creative writing—as early as 2005. Some were completed and published right away; others sat as drafts that I’d revisit and revise from time to time. I always keep a folder of stories that are “workable” but as of yet incomplete, and as I set out to help round out the stories and voices in this collection, they were integral.

I enjoy the editing process, and believe that, especially when you’re feeling stuck with a particular story, setting it aside for a while and returning to it can help shake loose its arc, and get it into publishable shape. Combing through each story one by one can help you to see how they might all fit together. Initially, I had not set out to link the stories (geographically or otherwise) in earlier configurations of the collection, but in the early days of the pandemic, I decided to dust off the collection, print it out, and see how I might more consciously connect each story to the other. I’d already written several pieces about some of the characters (like the Weaver sisters, or Cassidy Penelope), and so those stories became natural anchors for the larger collection. From there, I reworked some of the other pieces to connect more organically to other characters in the collection, or found ways to tie back stories that were set outside of Mewborn to the town itself. If I hadn’t allowed myself the flexibility to change certain aspects of the stories as I’d initially envisioned them, I’m not sure the collection would have been as strong.

DL: These stories are set in a range of locations such as Nashville and Boston and as far away as India, but each story is centered emotionally around Mewborn, North Carolina. Was it helpful in your writing process to create your own Yoknapatawpha County?

EPL: Mewborn the town is very much an imagined community, a bit of a hybrid of the small city of Greenville, in Pitt County (where I’d lived for about eight years), certain parts of Eastern Carolina, and my own hometown in Massachusetts. The name Mewborn is taken from a small crossing close to Kinston, but I chose it because I liked the sound of the name, and did not want (like Faulkner, I would guess) to have to adhere to the actual historical particulars of Pitt County while crafting a fictional work. And yet, a strong sense of place—about a small town, about how families and neighbors live and function alongside each other, about how even those who leave their hometown are still tethered to it—is what I hope surfaces in this collection. And as I mentioned earlier, I hadn’t intended the stories to be linked when I first set out to write them, but the revision process enabled me to see how I was, in fact, writing of, or about, the same place all along. And I should note that, for the record, I am not from the South, nor do I claim to be a Southerner, but I am very much a student of its literature, and I had never written a word of fiction until I moved to North Carolina.

DL: Can you describe the time between writing and publishing these stories? How did you connect with New American Press? Were there many rejections along the way?

EPL: Since about 2009, I had submitted various versions of Proof of Me to book prize contests offered by smaller presses. I like to joke how I almost renamed the collection The Bridesmaid, because it had been a finalist or runner-up in at least a half-dozen or so competitions (including New American Press, which eventually took it). But I think my effort to substantially rework the collection to make it more directly linked, geographically and thematically, worked in my favor. Rejection is part and parcel of the publishing game, and at some point, you understand that it’s not because the work isn’t any good; it’s more of what fits with the vision of the press, and the aesthetic tastes of the contest judge (or editor). I haven’t really gone the agent route—the agents I’ve had conversations with were always asking about my novel (! Don’t ask !) and were not interested in story collections. I’ve found there is certainly an interest and demand for short stories, but I guess we story writers have more work to do in making a convincing case to big publishers.

DL: Do you have advice for writers who hope to publish story collections?

EPL: This is rather technical advice, but something that helped me to envision my collection AS a collection was printing it all out (1.5 spacing, double-sided) and then read it aloud and edit with a pen in hand. I would make notes of key objects, characters or themes in a notebook, and then look for spots where those objects (sewing machines, dice, cars) might show up in another story. In some cases, I realized that, with a name change and a shift in a few key details, a story that might not have been part of the collection could be transformed into another piece of the Mewborn puzzle.

As far as submitting your work, I suggest that you research the publisher first to make sure it will be a good fit. Some publishers will want you to chip in for paying for a publicist (and there goes your advance), others might not do much in terms of promotion, or expect you to do much of that work yourself. I suggest researching a few past winners of story collections prizes of publishers that you’re interested in, and see how their books fared (via reviews, or press interest, or readings). Smaller presses tend not to have big budgets for book launches, so be aware of that.

DL: What are you working on now?

EPL: I’ve been working on a collection of flash stories under the thematic title Desire Path. It’s a term often used by city planners and landscapers to describe a “footpath made through foliage or grass by repeated traffic, rather than laid out by design.” I plan to take this literal definition in a metaphorical direction, where each of my characters will aspire for something guided by their desires, instincts and travels, and endeavor to carve a path of their own making to attain it. It is slow-going, but I’m enjoying discovering how each story might bend toward (or even challenge!) the established theme.

Huge thanks to Erica Plouffe Lazure for speaking to me about her new book. Don’t forget to order Proof of Me now. Stay tuned for my next post where I’ll share a writing exercise from Erica based on one of her short stories. Make sure you never miss a post by subscribing here: