This great little number from Ryan Mohr, “It’s All Pretend,” from the March Issue.

1. Where did “It’s All Pretend” come from?

I knew I wanted to write a sad and dark, yet perhaps optimistic story about love. I think I started working on it shortly after an inadvertent glance at an escort ad in a print or online classified. I was probably looking to buy some used tools or something. I think it began like that . . . or in a motel room immediately after paying or not paying for companionship.

2. How much of your life bleeds into fiction?

Exactly thirteen percent.

3. How do you move back and forth between poetry and fiction?

I’m not sure. I consider myself far more proficient at fiction than poetry. Most of my poems are tangential, postmodern kind of stuff with first-person narrators. “It’s All Pretend” is only one of a handful of stories I’ve written in first-person. Generally, I prefer to write in the third-person.

4. What are your nerd credentials ?

I do own a lot of books, so if that fact alone gives me a “nerd credential,” I’m more than willing to accept it. My girlfriend says it’s because I’m not very social, which is true to some extent. I like to believe that nowadays I just lack the mental and physical energy for conversation. I guess I’m probably more of a “nerd asshole.”

5. What have you pretended lately?

That I do not live in 2012 America.

6. Does everyone want to feel something real?

I suppose it depends on context. Who doesn’t want to feel genuine love or happiness? Or is that not entirely attainable? Who knows? Obviously, people tend to read fiction and plays, watch movies, etc., hoping to be entertained, searching for an escape from the mundane truths of reality.

From the March archives, Two Poems from Kate Fujimoto.

1. What is the weirdest thing you’ve married?

All marriage, ever, is weird.

2. Where did these poems come from?

A black moth whispered them into my ear on a moonless night last October.

3. What does a village grin look like?

Like one of those towns with one bank and one hospital and one grocery store, and those three buildings right next to each other all on one side of the street, and maybe the bank looks like it could be robbed by someone from the hospital and then they could walk over to the grocery store and buy an apple and eat it on the steps of the bank – but smiling.

4. What haunts you? Who would you haunt?

I am haunted by sugarcane, and would haunt Abraham Lincoln, or maybe Bob Dylan.

5. What have you paid attention to lately?

Whether or not people put their napkins on their laps at restaurants and at what point during the meal they decide to do this.

6. Who are your influences?

Old Yeller.

Emily Testa wrote “The Crown Prince of Irkutsk Oblast” and we published it in March.

1. What title would you like to hold in a past dynasty?

Empress Supreme

2. Do you keep up with others when they have something you don’t have or do such things matter to you?

I read a ton of magazines, ranging from the respectable to those that amount to, as my younger sister might say, hot gutter trash. So to some extent I do keep up with and covet the particulars of lives that don’t resemble mine at all. On the other hand, I don’t have internet or television or the almighty Facebook, so it’s pretty easy for me to tune the world (and the Kardashians) out.

3. Why did you choose to section everything off using a numeric system for “The Crown Prince of Irkutsk Oblast”?

When I wrote this story, I had just moved with my philosopher boyfriend. I was then in the habit of snooping through his books and I remember being fascinated by the way some of them were organized. Their headings and indexes were otherworldly, yet governed by this confident and unshakable internal logic. I borrowed the structure of this story from Intention by G.E.M. Anscombe, a rare woman in an intensely male-dominated field.

4. How has screenwriting influenced your narrative voice?

If anything, it’s the other way around. Clipped and episodic writing happens to be a good fit for screenplays and teleplays, but first it was just the way I wrote stories and before that it was just the way I conversed. Ask anyone who’s had the misfortune of speaking to me by phone. When the conversation is over, even if it’s been a pleasant one, there’s no winding down. It’s just “goodbye” and click.

5. What is the worst crime you have committed? Were you ever caught?

When I was 19, a friend and I relieved a park of a roadside sign that said SPEED HUMP. Then we gave it away and — I can hardly believe the bravado — went back for the one they put up in its place. A state trooper named Cheryl arrived at the scene posthaste and made us believe our lives were over. Anyway, it turned out we were friends with the magistrate’s son, and in the end we just had to write an apology letter, pay $70, and do some community service. I faked mine.

6. What would you do to stop someone you love from boarding a plane?

If I thought a loved one was in danger, I’m not sure what I would do. Fear takes over. Maybe you can’t plan ahead. But if I thought (as Ilya thinks in the story) that someone I loved was leaving me, I might tell gate agents an extravagant story of theft and terrorism, or lay in the runway, or attempt to scale the plane before takeoff. Whatever it takes.

These Two Stories from Matt Sailor were a great addition to our March Issue.

1. How would you have ended the E.T. video game?

Really, for all I know, the game could have a remarkable ending. But I’ll never know, because the game play is completely obtuse and impossible to navigate. But I think something resembling the actual ending of the movie could have been pretty trippy and amazing on the Atari–some big polygonal mother ship that you get to after an obligatory flying bike sequence.

2. Why would someone trying to kill Custer tie one of their women to a post to be raped by him? Was this decision influenced by the kind of drugs that Bushnell was on?

Luckily, I don’t think you can blame Nolan Bushnell for any of that, because those pornographic Atari games were unlicensed, an early form of digital piracy, essentially. I think it’s just some sick and twisted revenge fantasy on the part of whoever created it. I can only guess that like your less pornographic Atari games, the simplicity of the technology and graphical capability led programmers to go for something that could be rendered very clearly with very simplistic graphics. Why that translates to Custer raping a woman is just as baffling to me as it is to you. But I do think it’s interesting that games from that period (pornographic or otherwise) have this abstract quality (because of the graphics, the sound effects) that makes them so much more interesting than more recent games, which have a sort of predictable bent towards realism (or a sort of hyper-masculine attempt at realism that actually couldn’t be farther from realism).

3. What Star Trek: The Next Generation crew member best resembles you?

I don’t think it’ll come as any surprise to anyone who watches the show that I want to claim Data, the android who wants to be human. On a show that was so much about familiar archetypes and putting story over character, his search for humanity was one of the conflicts you could really latch onto. To me, he always seemed so much more human by virtue of his being so confused about what it meant to be human. He would ask the other crew members about some aspect of humanity, a joke, or a social convention, and they’d always be so eager to cogently explain to him exactly how that fit into their identity as humans. Which is funny, because for me I think it’s so much more human to not quite understand your motivations for things, and be constantly failing to understand why you do anything.

But that’s really wishful thinking, because I don’t think I’m actually anything like Data, who’s essentially a super hero. So, I’m going to go with a character named Barclay, a crew member who showed up in just a few episodes. He was this very nebbishy, neurotic, very socially inept crew member who was usually played for comedy. Sort of the Enterprise’s own Woody Allen. On a ship full of highly trained military officers, I think that’s the only person I could really hold a candle to. He was always getting infected by some alien life form, or jeopardizing the fate of the crew with his timid ways. My kind of guy. Continue reading →

From the March Issue, Katya Apekina’s “The Deaths of Max Morozov.”

1. What mutant power does Max have that allow him to keep coming back to life?

I don’t know! The story started off with me wanting to write a short about someone’s life: birth to death. But then it became birth to death to death to death etc. The story just kind of stuttered. I think if people need a logical explanation there isn’t really one, but I guess you could go with the fact that he is a scientist who studies immortality, so he might have some secrets.

2. Would you want to be able to resurrect yourself at will?

Yes. Though I would rather just never die. I guess resurrection is the next best thing.

3. How do you want to go out?

I don’t. See above.

4. How did you map out all the ways Max dies in this story?

I didn’t really map them out. But I was reading a lot of obituaries and thinking about death as a way of understanding life. And his deaths were a way to understand the different phases of his life. At each important juncture he dies. People are always reinventing themselves and being reborn metaphorically, in each phase of their life they become a new person, even though they also stay the same. I just made it literal. I am very literal.

5. What would you like to kill?

The shittier aspects of my nature. Litter.

6. What is your favorite airport?

I was just in a tiny airport in Sheridan, WY that I liked. It had models of airplanes in glass cases and was smaller than a high school gym.

We loved this mini-series (of which, it is revealed below, there are more), “Three Must-Haves,” from Steven Casimer Kowalski in the March Issue.

1. Why would anyone spend so much money on objects?

I don’t know if Bruce Robinson wrote it for the movie or if he pulled it from someplace else but there is a quote from his film Withnail and I that goes, “Free for those who can afford it, very expensive for those who can’t.” To me, to most people, $1500 is going to be a bit much for shorts. But to smaller, more privaledged group $1500 isn’t a great deal of money. And this gets even more complicated when the amount is universally recognized as “too much” but the product itself, its status, its quality makes it “worth it.” There may or may not exist in the world things called Veblen Goods which are things we want to buy simply because they are expensive. That’s just a theory floated by a late 19th century economist named Thorstein Veblen and it might seem an odd thing until you realize that people are spending $225 on cotton shirts. But if you have the money and it won’t hurt your budget either way, why not ignore the best things money can buy and just buy the most expensive things money can buy?

2. Where else does dignity not reside on our bodies?

Armpits, groins, anything that drips or auto-dampens. There is a probably a really entertaining project somewhere in the idea that some parts of us are valued as more dignified than others. The eyes, for instance, are always going to be valued and described as elegant while pubic hair is so alien to everyone that we need to use the clinical term “pubic” just to talk about it without becomes sick to ourselves. And those are just the universals. Each of us has a dozen pieces of ourselves we hate. In fact, you’re probably lucky if it’s only a dozen. And we spend lots and lots of money trying to augment them for other people. And not all of it is a bad thing. But it can certainly become a bad thing.

3. Where did “Three Must Haves” come from?

They started as humor pieces inspired by Esquire Magazine’s Big Black Book. The Big Black Book is essentially a style guide for men and before I trash it I’d like to first say there is some really useful stuff in there. It taught me how to iron pants, for instance. But along with useful information there is plenty of hogwash. In an older issue they list some “essential items,” one of which was a pair of sterling silver tweezers that cost something like $100. And I am sure they are very nice tweezers but they cannot be so nice they justify a price twenty times higher than I might pay at a corner drug store. It just seemed ridiculous so I started to look up other high end goods and they did not disappoint. I have dozens of “Must Haves” written now including one about a Chess set that costs $9000…Are you curious why it’s so expensive? Well, it’s because THE FUCKING IVORY FOR THE CHESS PIECES IS FROM AN EXTINCT WOOLY MAMMOTH. I remember reading that for the first time and just saying “holy shit” over and over. Continue reading →

In regards to Adrienne Gunn and this piece she wrote for us, published in March, “Girl in America.”

1. How does one summon the whore within?

In the case of Girl in America, it’s as easy as the addition of some hair and makeup for Pippa to release the whore within. Her whore is attracted to adoration, attention, and is aggressive in her pursuit of it. For “real women” it seems that same look-at-me impulse exists, or I wouldn’t see so many educated women uploading photos of themselves in bikinis onto Facebook. In what world do you want three hundred and fifty of your closest friends examining a picture of your body in a bikini? And commenting on it? Sexualization of women is nothing new, but the willingness of everyday women to publicly project this persona seems to be a new phenomenon.

What I’m really interested in is how and why that whore exists in the first place. And my thesis, if there is one, is that it isn’t an instinctive aspect of womanhood, but instead is a reaction to a certain place and time. A reaction to new technology, the Internet, social networking and YouTube, the rise of reality television and characters who regularly say “blowjob” on Sunday nights on HBO. All of this has made the creation of a whore within remarkably commonplace. And she’s not so secret anymore.

I mean this country literally applauds women for fucking Hugh Hefner. For being nineteen-years-old and having sex (or at least purporting to) with an eighty-six-year-old man in a bathrobe. Now that girl has got to summon the whore within to get there. But once she does, the payoff can be huge. Look at Kendra Wilkinson. She has no other talents other than she was able to get her inner whore to fuck Hugh Hefner. And now she has her own television show and a basketball star husband. Pretty sweet. So Pippa too is a product of this society and hopes for a similar outcome.

2. Do you create backstories for your characters for flash fiction?

I definitely think of my characters as having lives before they step onto the page in one of my stories. I like to think that I do the work necessary with their backstories to create the verisimilitude that they need. I think the emphasis on backstory changes from story to story though. For Pippa, snapshots of her childhood and adolescence were essential to creating meaning in the present time action of the story.

3. Have you ever seen yourself on television? How did you like it?

Now that you mention it, I have, and either consciously or unconsciously that moment surely became part of Girl in America. Picture it – Spring Break, Panama City Beach, Florida, the year 2000. I’m staying with a group of sorority sisters in a really dire hotel. There’s a video camera and we’re constantly filming each other, fascinated by our own fabulosity.

Back in the Midwest, we put the tapes in a VCR and I remember the very unique sensation of being both captivated and horrified by this version of myself. There we were, portraying ourselves as giggling, half-drunk twenty-year-olds, flouncing around in backless shirts and pleather pants (mine were white with fetching off-white zebra stripes), flirting with boys, doing keg stands (!), and saying the most ridiculous things. The guy I was dating at the time had the habit of saying “She’s going to get the hurts; she’s going to get punished,” which I adopted and am on camera saying constantly for no explicable reason or insight into what a jackass it made me look like.

Spring Break itself is essentially a form of irreality. One is encouraged to act in ways that you wouldn’t in “real life”. So compound that with watching yourself on television – it’s own irreality – and now you’ve got a confusing mixture of “who is this person that is me?” While I was horrified by my apparent idiocy, I also thought I appeared funny and fun and – shockingly – sort of beautiful. Obviously, it wasn’t a classy or sophisticated kind of beauty. I had the mouth of a trucker and was frequently wearing a blue Adidas visor (why?), but still there was a moment of detachment where I saw this person and thought, wow, she’s pretty, as if it weren’t me – just an objective judgment on whether someone was hot or, sadly, not. So I was hot. Yay!

That observation of course made me want to press my face closer to the TV and watch the tape over and over again, because a moment of objectivity about yourself is like magic. I wanted to examine whatever the elements were that created this pretty so I could harness them in the future. I wanted to analyze what I saw about myself, what others saw about me, and the space between. (I experience a similar feeling when I stare at my Facebook page today.) Of course I didn’t – I save those kinds of obsessions for Pippa – but I wanted to, and I think that desire to consume representations of yourself when gone unchecked is what is really dangerous. As if a photo of yourself or a moment in time captured on video could encompass something truer about yourself than what is going on in your mind right this second. Continue reading →

Kelli Anne Noftle’s engaging piece, “Moving,” appeared in the March Issue.

1. How has poetry shaped your flash fiction? Do you find the two genres blur together sometimes?

I find that they are blurring and bleeding into one another the more I write. This is especially true for my new work.

2. What do you never have time to learn?

I’m too busy learning what I should have known years ago that I don’t have time to learn the stuff I should be concentrating on right now. It’s endless and exhausting.

3. Where is the strangest place you have told that you loved someone?

The places are never strange, just the people I’ve said it to.

4. How has your music impacted your writing?

Writing has impacted my music more than the other way around. I write melodies so that I can sing poems and get away with belting cheesy lyrics.

5. What is the most embarrassing thing you discovered during a move?

Nothing particularly embarrassing. Everything is mostly sad. Standard under the bed stuff: dead spiders, ticket stubs, empty condom wrappers, dust balls, hair bands, lost shoes.

6. How can a city flood into a room?

I wrote that line about Los Angeles. Sometimes the city and my apartment room feel the same–both are isolating. The city washes over all the objects in the room; I’m constantly reminded of being alone in an urban sprawl dotted with people who are sitting alone in their apartments or hunched over their steering wheels migrating slowly down the freeway.

In March came “The Listening Glass” by Chad Redden.

1. Your use of white space between stanzas is generous. Was this intentional when creating “The Listening Glass”?

Yes, the space between stanzas and within some of the lines is intentional. I felt the poem needed very thick walls of silence between the stanzas to hint at the many things that cannot be heard through the wall. Plus, it is a way to slow the pace of the reader. I am overly concerned about the reading experience of webpages. It is easy to scroll down and move onto the next page, so I forced an extended scroll. In my recent poems, I have attempted to use silence a part of the poem. I like hearing the gaps between words when people speak.

2. How autobiographical are you in your poetry?

Is it autobiographical if you play out the situation in your mind and experience it there? Then maybe 90%. Otherwise, 20%. Many of the situations that appear in my poems have never happened. However, I am big daydreamer and waste a lot of thinking time on how I would better handle a poor conversation, relationship conflict or zombie plague. This is probably because of reading too many Choose Your Own Adventure books as a child and always second guessing myself.

“The Listening Glass” is not super autobiographical even though I did have a listening glass. It came from a conversation with a friend who also eavesdropped and her experience with that. It was nice to put myself into her situation in which I could draw from my own experiences.

3. Who have you eavesdropped on lately? What have you heard?

I’m usually the listener in any relationship. Generally, if I open my mouth, I end up looking foolish. I try to stay quiet. Plus, I love listening to strangers talk. People say the most poetic things without thinking about it. Bus rides are usually the best when someone is on the phone, because I can make up the other side of the conversation – the voice on the phone. This is a fun game to me since usually I talk to myself in my head a lot. It is nice to be someone else.

Most recently I heard my neighbor complaining to his wife about how he left his “milk cup” over at a friend’s house. The milk cup is his favorite plastic tumbler to drink milk from. He was overly concerned that the friend had not returned his phone calls about the milk cup and worried someone might use it for soda or alcohol thus ruining his milk drinking experience. Continue reading →

“Night of the Living Blues” from Joshua Michael Stewart was published in the  March Issue.

1. Is it a requirement to obtain a poetic license to write a poem involving music in some shape or way?

Poetic License? I guess so, but I think of it as more of a variation of a theme. I’ve written blues poems the traditional Langston Hughes way in which the poem reads like the lyrics to an old Bessie Smith song, and I’ve written blues poems mixing that traditional form with the sonnet and pantoum. “Night of the Living Blues” had two things going on: 1. I wanted to write a poem that didn’t use the traditional blues form, but incorporated the language and images that one would find in a blues poem. 2. I wanted to write a poem that would read like a modern day folk tale (think John Henry) where the focus is on one character, and their quirky travels through life.

2. How would George Romero turn “Night of the Living Blues” into a movie?

He would weave in the myth of Robert Johnson into the script. The tow truck driver would be the protagonist, and it would be the most moving and beautiful film about necrophilia you have ever seen.

3. What was the process you used in shaping this poem in couplet form?

I wrote the poem, counted the lines and when I couldn’t divide them by four or three, I divided the lines by two. Genius, I know. Continue reading →