Valerie O’Riordan brought PANK one of our favorite stories in the August issue–a rather disturbing yet beautiful tale of obsession. Today she talks with us about unhappy endings, Cher, and the senses.

1. This story took us by surprise. Was it difficult to write about something so ugly in such a beautiful way?

The idea for the story came from a photograph I found online – a very exuberant, colourful shot of three Malaysian girls dressed as mermaids and laughing, and being photographed through a huge water tank by some tourists. The story then works through notions of observation, objectification and obsession, and, of course, sexual assault. I didn’t want it to be too gritty and dirty; I wanted to portray something of the unreal beauty and tenderness of the original image – and the narrator’s feelings – whilst also showing the possibilities that can lie underneath that. It was quite tricky!

2. What happens to the girl in the glass after the story ends?

I think she probably goes into therapy and develops a terrible fear of restrictive clothing! She would certainly leave her job and be mistrustful of the men she meets. I don’t think it bodes well for her, sadly; the narrator will survive intact, because all he sees in his actions is love, where as Shona’s experience was brutal and traumatic, and therefore quite debilitating.

3. Even though what happens in this story is quite brutal, you write about this man almost tenderly. He does something horrific and yet we feel for him. We think of it as a love story. Do you?

Yes, I think it is a love story, if a rather twisted one! The narrator loves this girl; he sees his attentions as tender and affectionate; her simple act of smiling at him is a huge emotional moment for him. He wants to connect with her, but he doesn’t know where the lines are drawn. So in the end, after the attack, he’s still waiting; his love is unrequited, and because he doesn’t understand the horror of his actions, it’s quite sad.

4. Which mermaid do you like best—Ariel, The Little Mermaid, Madison in Splash, or Cher in Mermaids?

Oh, Cher in Mermaids, without a doubt! I love that movie. I used to hold my breath in the bath like Christina Ricci, and I really wished my parents would spin a globe and move us to some random destination. Never happened. Bah.

5. You play with light and texture and the senses in this story. Why?

I think the narrator is lacking in emotional understanding and depth. He works very much at a surface level, so these physical details – the fabric on the mermaid costume, the water on her skin, the sparkles in the air – these are elevated beyond any usual levels of meaning to comprise his entire world of love and longing. He works on the same level as those who idolise a person from a movie or a photograph, so the physical details are much more important to him than emotional inference, which he can’t comprehend.

6. Why does the antagonist remain unnamed?

I wanted it to be a first person account, so that the reader could inhabit his world and hopefully empathise with him to a certain degree. The evidence suggests that he isn’t a major player in Shona’s life, or in the workplace at large: nobody ever speaks directly to him or interacts with him beyond a perfunctory level. I wanted to emphasise how alone he is; how he’s entirely caught up in a fantasy relationship with a girl he barely knows. If he was named by anybody, I think that would have placed him more firmly within a community and ruined that spell of isolation.

7. What’s Birmingham like?

Birmingham’s good! It’s one of the bigger cities in England, very multi-cultural, multi-racial, and there’s quite a vibrant arts and music scene, once you know where to look. It suffers from a historical reputation for being quite an industrial and grim town, but there’s been huge regeneration efforts in the past decades, and there’s a lot going on here. I’m originally from Dublin, Ireland, and moving from a capital city to a regional town took a certain amount of adjustment, but there’s been such a huge push from the arts community here to put the city on the cultural map, that it’s quite an exciting place to be.

8. What is the writing community like in England?

It’s a very supportive community, in my rather limited experience! I’m lucky to be a member of an excellent UK-based online writing group; some up-and-coming writers like Tania Hershman and Vanessa Gebbie have passed through its ranks over the years, and it’s been really useful for me in developing my craft. There’s some really good literary festivals, and plenty of emerging novelists in England that are well worth keeping an eye on – Chris Killen, Jenn Ashworth, Ross Raisin – and the short story has a pretty high profile at the moment, with Salt Publishing and Comma Press at the forefront of that. I’ve found the level of advice and support out there to be really positive and encouraging – but of course, with the internet, it’s all so international and blurred anyway. And, naturally, we all love PANK!

Erin Fitzgerald edits The Northville Review and has three short short stories in the August issue. Today we talk about what happens next, gaming and VH-1 reality programming. (Note: This interview took place before we learned one of the contestants on Megan Wants a Millionaire was a crazy killer who would flee to Canada and turn his murderous sights upon himself.)

1. In Early Decision, we don’t see what happens next but we’re left with a rather disturbing sense that there isn’t a happy ending for whatever or whomever is behind the door. If there was an epilogue to this story, like in the movies, how would it read?

The narrator’s college application personal statement, using that unique and memorable experience to illustrate why she’d be a terrific asset to an incoming freshman class.

2. My brother plays WoW religiously and one of the things I like to do is watch him jump around and twirl and whatnot. It’s very relaxing, the way the little figures move so fluidly. Anyway. Are you a widow or a gamer?

Hibernating gamer. Once you’re hooked, you don’t ever quit completely. I expect to be playing Aion this fall, and stocking up on Hot Pockets for Star Wars: The Old Republic next year. Have your brother emote /dance on some characters — the Horde male dances are especially good.

3. What we particularly enjoyed about these stories was the subtlety of them, with these quiet endings that were also very loud. What kind of magic potion did you use to make this happen? Be specific about ingredients and where we might obtain them.

Diet Vanilla Pepsi. I was concerned when they changed the can design, but so far it’s been all right.

4. Seriously, though. What inspired each of these stories?

Early Decision came from a prompt — the opening phrase. “We set out at dawn.” I love working with random prompts, they let me sneak up on things. I’ve written about gaming a lot, but a few minutes of a Dr. Phil episode made me try it from the widowed point of view in Riposte. Waiting Room came from the town where I live, almost by osmosis. It’s hard for me to imagine that story without it.

5. Waiting Room has an almost surreal quality to it. The title also seems to have a double meaning that adds to the surreality of the piece. Was that intentional?

I’m not that clever. For me, titles are like playing the claw game at the bowling alley. It’s usually when I get sick of trying that the Beanie Baby finally falls in the chute.

6. Do you mostly write short short fiction or do you also write longer stories?

Short short fiction is a relatively new discovery for me, and mostly what I do these days. I like tinkering with things on such a precise scale. I miss having longer authorial relationships with characters, though, so I’m not done with longer stories, novellas, etc.

7. A writing teacher once told me that you’ve found your groove as a writer when you think you’re writing the same story over and over in different ways. Do you feel that sense of different sameness in your writing?

Sometimes — but there are definitely times when it’s a warning that I need to think about the world a little more, and maybe amuse myself a little less.

8. Are you watching Rock of Love Megan’s new show on VH1? If so, is it worth a look or is it as horrifying as I expect?

I wasn’t going to watch it, but you know how it is. Sunday night….nothing to do…oh look, Celebreality! The millionaires look like the dads of all the guys in Daisy of Love. They each have a giant black credit card. When Megan does an elimination, she cuts the giant card in half and says “Your credit is no longer good with me.” I think the show developers at VH1 read a lot of George Saunders.

1. Who is responsible for all the cleverness on the Writers’ Bloc website? We love it.

I designed the site last September back when we were a tiny Rutgers enterprise, but with all intentions of making this thing big. I knew nothing about literary journals, about publication, about submissions. But I found this magical porthole called Duotrope and was able to spy on other markets, most of whose websites are “avant-garde” and have obviously been designed by a drunken slug. So I plugged in a little humor and kept the Bloc minimal and white. It seems to have worked.

2. How long have you been editing? How are you affiliated with Rutgers University?

Last September one of my brilliantly off-the-wall professors, Dr. Rafey Habib, felt the urge to revive the English Students Organization. It had died of unknown causes in 1996 and left a $13 inheritance. So he and six students (enter Kevin) sat down in comfy chairs and sloshed around some ideas, and the lit journal was one of these. It would be small, a showcase for students’ work. I volunteered to edit. Something to tack onto my resume. So, being an incurable perfectionist, I went home and lost a lot of sleep, and started advertising furiously for submissions through Craigslist and through flyers I tacked up at Rutgers and mailed off to a bunch of other universities. Reading a hundred submissions for the first issue was a small miracle: the journal was a vague concept in mid-September, and a stark success by January. Here I am a year later, still mesmerized, taking submissions from Morocco and England and Jupiter, from people who have heard of us, and trying to find time to refill my teacup. We are majorly indebted to all the great writers who submitted their work, especially early on when we were a nobody.

Our few editors all go to Rutgers–and I think we are all going to disappear from campus after next semester. No matter. My job is not up for inheritance. It’s too much fun. The Rutgers logo is more or less a nominal association anyway. The reason Duotrope includes “Rutgers” as part of our name is because of this new fledgling market, called Writers’ Bloc, post-s apostrophe and missing k and everything. Now there’s also another called “The Writer’s Block.” I like to pretend they’re paying homage to us.

My unexplainable insularity when it comes to New Jersey culture has often made me feel like a foreigner. True, I’ve lived here since I was a zygote, but I never paid much attention to the ghosts in the Pine Barrens or any of that folklore. I think maybe I need to take a trip, alone, at night, into the woods to get in touch with my United State. The only Elizabeth I’ve seen is a thin strip of PATCO track, and that was through a pane of glass, so I never got to experience the olfactory perturbation at the town’s periphery. And don’t laugh, but I just Googled my exit off the Turnpike because I hardly ever use it. It’s 4. Or 5. One of those. If it helps my New Jerseyness any, I’m 34 off 295. And I go down the shore.

It’s just one of those idiosyncrasies that I’ve acquired over the years, probably through an airborne contagion. Luckily, I’ve stilled my inner Grammar Offense to ignore the Oxford comma’s absence in other people’s work, but I will use it ruthlessly in my own. It might be a byproduct of my obsession with organization on the nano level, like a just-in-case partition between two terms in a list, or a way to create a sort of Feng Shui balance, or maybe some other spur-of-the moment bullshit reason.

5. Are you also a writer? If so, does your editorial work inform your writing?

I do write. I write short stories, normally, but was shocked to have a poem accepted in Gloom Cupboard recently. I’m not a poet. I also write impertinent letters to unsuspecting companies when I get bored. There are 450 of them at www.sincerelyinsane.com.

I’m the slowest writer I know. Kurt Vonnegut once defined two types of writers, bashers and swoopers. Bashers sit there and deliberate over every single word before they move on to the next. Swoopers write it all swiftly and edit later. I bash the brains out of anything I write.

But yes, being an editor has definitely broadened my perspectives on what’s possible. A couple days ago I read two submissions from Barry Graham (editor of DOGZPLOT), and I loved what I read, but I sat there thinking, what the hell did I just read? I had to ask him for an explanation–they were collages, a sort of cut-and-paste genre where he took all the last sentences from an author’s work and made them into a trippy narrative of sorts. Very cool stuff. We’re publishing both in our next issue. Other than that, you’ve probably heard it said that a writer’s work is the collective presence of his life and literary experiences. I might only pull six or seven authors from my bookshelf during the course of a Bloc issue, but when I’m editing I’m reading 70 or 80 different voices. It’s got to have a major impact on my writing.

Well, I’m still pretty new to the lit journal scene, and had no idea what was out there only a year ago. I’m always trying to tame the pile of books on my night table, and last semester there was a whole lot of reading for school, but I just bought a Keyhole because I liked the cover and I can’t wait to get it in the mail. I’m also pretty excited about Super Arrow, too, which hasn’t published yet but is bursting at the seams. (I submitted something for the first issue.) And everyone’s been talking about kill author, and its general awesomeness on every level, but I have to jump on the wagon and agree. They only publish phenomenal pieces. My mental image of the anonymous editorial staff is this secret brotherhood, all in hoods so you can’t see their faces, and all swinging censers on their way to the Holy Slush Pile (even if it’s electronic). All they say is “MMMMMMMMM.”

Let’s rule out dentistry: I don’t want intimate knowledge of the various ways a mouth can die. I’d probably be that renegade fifth dentist, anyway, who’s always excluded from gum commercials. As for tattooing, I do have artistic inclinations, but I’ve never before drawn on people where I might not otherwise wish to touch them. Fire chiefs are cliche. Every kid wants to be an astronaut or a firefighter. So I guess that leaves the gospel singer. I’m not a bit religious, but that sure as hell would be a nice release every Sunday, getting up there and belting out Jesus tunes like it’s the Second Coming. Those people have power. AND cool robes. There are only so many jobs in the world that involve those two things.

8. What do you look for in Writers’ Bloc submissions? What kind of writing excites you most?

Ah, the million-dollar question. I wish I had one sentence I could post on the Bloc website saying: THIS is where the money’s at. I find it difficult to define something I have no idea exists–Barry Graham’s collages, for example. We could always say, “Send us something original, that breaks the boundaries of–“ but you’re bored already, and every author is going to think their work is original and boundary-shattering and all that jazz, so there’s no point in saying it. The kind of writing that excites me the most, the kind I say yes yes yes yes yes to, is anything that jolts me with a revelation, and actually moves me from a languid position on my chair. Generally this happens when I encounter characters that are so real I wonder if the author knows them personally, because they’re ten times more important than plot. If you’ve ever read Mark Twain’s “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” the whole thing’s about this senile old storyteller who corners an unsuspecting young person and yaps to infinity about impertinent things. There’s no plot, really, just characters who are dripping with reality. I love it.

Probably one of the top reasons is implausibility. Sure, I have my Willing Suspension of Disbelief Goggles strapped to my face, but too often the kind of dialogue I have to read incites me to patronize my computer screen. (Come ON, nobody would ever say “Yes, and you have learned a valuable life lesson in the process.”) Another reason is Stage 5 Illiteracy, the kind you have to quarantine in an all-white room. There’s also those buckets-o’-fun submissions where the story is basically about how much the author thinks he/she is clever and witty. I actually read one recently where the narrative is broken by the author’s insertion of “no pun intended.” Hie thee hence to the garbage pail.

10. Who else do you work with at Writers’ Bloc and how does your staff work together? How do you divide responsibilities?

Because the Internet is a series of tubes, collaboration is a breeze. We don’t even need to hold meetings. When my tube beeps with a submission, I’ll read it if it’s fiction or zip it off to Crystal Barkley, the poetry editor, in another tube. It’s like she works in that auxiliary drive-up building banks have, which is sort of independent but communicates with the main complex. I’ll get the tube back with a deposit slip or a withdrawal slip, depending on the merit of the submission, and stick the deposit slips in the vault. Dan Morgan’s our drama editor, and he has a tube, too, but sadly it’s collecting cobwebs. We’ve only gotten two drama submissions this whole time. And we also have Rich Leonetti to worry about artwork. He’s the one who doodled most of the doodles scattered in issues 1 and 2. The awesome handwriting above our logo is from his biology notebook.

11. Writers’ Bloc and PANK meet at a bar, have drinks, hit it off. Do they a. go to a sleazy motel and have a one night stand or b. make out in the bar but leave it at that or c. exchange phone numbers, start dating, and live happily ever after? Show your math.

I like to think Writers’ Bloc is a classy publication that would never do option a or b, but it’s been an impulsive little thing right from the start, so it just might slobber all over PANK after a few bourbons, I don’t know. Hopefully decomP or elimae wouldn’t post embarrassing Facebook pictures the next day.

12. Why is your magazine named WritersӉ㢠Bloc?

I can’t say it’s utterly clever or enigmatic like some of them out there. PANK, for example. I have no idea what that means. It sounds like a rejected author getting hit over the head. I guess we could have called ourselves Twelve Chameleons Quarterly or The Desiccated Leftovers Review or Rusted Buskin. But we didn’t. A bloc is an allegiance, a coalition, a community of groups sharing a common purpose. The groups are the prose writers, the poets, the artists, and the editors. The purpose? Ostensibly, it’s to be a glass box in a literary museum for people to come up and breathe on. But I read this wonderful Vonnegut quote yesterday, and it’s a little off topic but it explains so much about the small press industry. In his 1971 address to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, he says:

The American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters don”â„¢t really give a damn for arts and letters, in my opinion. They, too, are chemically-induced efforts to form a superstitious, affectionate clan or village or tribe. (Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, Delacorte Press, 1974, pp. 179″“80)

That whole business about distributing gold stars for writers’ badges–dealing in the currency of publication credits–is a front for genuine human interaction, according to him. And I wholeheartedly agree. Editing is lovely, but none of us really love the printed word. We love the people behind the printed word. So I guess our real purpose is to form a clan, a folk society.

I like to stick to the classics. Goddamn fucking moron, or something along those lines, has the gravity of an ultimatum and sounds so good because it’s been heavily polished by being ejected for centuries. People don’t think I curse much, or at all, even people I know well. (“Kevin cursed?”) But try bugging me with a hidden mic in my car, at work, at home, etc., and see if I’m still the same wholesome person you thought I was.

I was never taken by The Real World or Survivor, but I am furious with Cash Cab. That show seriously sucks. But I can’t stop watching it, and it’s always on when I’m eating a sandwich in the kitchen. Ben Bailey (the host) isn’t too obnoxious, but some of the people he drives around are morons. They never hear me when I give them the answer for free, like four times. There was a contestant once who seemed nonplussed by the fact that he was on a TV game show, and not only was he a stupid moron about the questions but he didn’t use a single lifeline before he got kicked out. And some of those people, I’ll tell you, they sit there and equivocate between one wrong answer and another, wasting their time, then at the end they keep the paltry sum and skip the Double-or-Nothing Video Bonus Question. Always go for the Video Bonus Question. The Video Bonus Question is always something inane, like naming the molten liquid that spews from volcanoes. Ugh.

–where were we?

Why haven’t you been to the dentist?

I had an appointment in June, and I was proud of myself for making it because it was exactly six months after the last one, but I called out sick. I wasn’t sick, just kind of tired, and I don’t think I have anything wrong with my teeth. But you know how fun dentistry can be. There’s a note on my desk that says “move dentist appointment” and I like to conveniently bury it beneath all the other notes. No wonder dentists have a high suicide rate.