Hazel Foster’s Summer Sunday at the Fair is a real treat in the June issue.  She talks with us about circuses, how she watches television and the believability of that vampire guy as a male lead.

1. Why rebut Water for Elephants? And is this a rebuttal for the film or book?

I work in a library. I am often encouraged to read fiction that is not to my taste, and I very often check out suggested materials, bring them home, let them sit in a pile for a few weeks, and ultimately return them un-cracked. Water for Elephants, the book, got past this cycle. I read it. It was easy to read. Fluff in the worst way. It read like the outline of a novel, never pausing to explore scene or character. I finished it and felt disgusted afterwards, disgusted that anyone, ahem, Sara Gruen, could write such garbage, be read by so many people, and make so much money. I know, it’s a tired complaint, but I’ve never had it strike me as powerfully as it did then.

The rebuttal wasn’t intentional. I sat down to write, and it came out. I wasn’t sure what it was, but it was satisfying. When the movie was released, maybe a month after I wrote this piece, I did have a sick impulse to see it, but I resisted. From what I’ve heard, I made the correct decision.

2. What kind of circus would you create and operate?

The kind where snow cones don’t drip down the front of your shirt, and Shriners don’t dress up like clowns, and horses don’t spit foam and roll their eyes like they’re the newest breed of the undead. Not a sunshine and rainbows circus. Not a Lady Gaga corpses on stage circus. Maybe a petting zoo with controlled amounts of alcohol and sushi circus. Horrible combination, but it could be fun.

3. Why did you choose to write your rebuttal as a tour?

The choice was not a choice. It happened. It worked. I left it. I like the idea of guiding a reader’s eye in an intentional way. Fiction can often be underhanded, “look here, but don’t look there. Something’s important here, but don’t notice it.”

4. How do you watch your television?

I’m not sure I qualify as having a television, but when I do watch one, I like to watch it with another person. I like to have the blinds open, glare permitting. I like to have a blanket over my legs and stomach, even if it means sweating. I like to have my phone cradled somewhere on my body. I like to get up during the commercials—I love commercials—and get food and pee. I like to watch television, but I don’t as much as I used to.

As a child, I ate every meal in front of it. I ate over a towel. I ate carefully so as to preserve the carpet. As an adolescent, I watched analog television on a thirteen inch that liked to turn-on, on its own, at full volume, and not turn off until I ripped the cord from the wall. It was possessed. I was terrified of it, but I still glued myself to it. At that age, I snuck shows I wasn’t allowed to watch: Angel, Sex and the City¸ Family Guy. I watched them through lines of static after my parents had gone to sleep. As a young adult, I used TV to escape, much like the girl’s parents in my story. I watched nearly every episode of Golden Girls, Gilmore Girls, and The Office. Now, I watch TV to relax in between work and writing, for the most part. Sometimes, it can be like it used to be, watching hours at a time, but only for the good stuff: True Blood, Big Love, How I Met Your Mother, Firefly.

5. Can you believe Robert Patterson as a romantic, manly lead?

Unfortunately, his name is Robert Pattinson. And, no. He is a teen idol. Nothing more. Maybe a step above Beiber and Zac Efron but just barely, and only because he was in Harry Potter. Besides that, did you see New Moon? There is nothing Hollywood-manly about that chest.

6. Who would you cast for the film adaptation of your rebuttal?

Are you saying someone is interested?

James Tadd Adcox makes another appearance in the June issue. He talks with us about breaking boners, bed talk, and the failures of monogamy.

1. Did you also know a girl that kept breaking boners?

Apparently whales actually have a bone in their penises. Or I think so. Henry Miller talks about it at the beginning of Tropic of Cancer, traces the etymology of “getting a bone on” to the existence of the bone in the erect whale phallus, which is probably wrong, as far as
etymology goes. If you look up “Whale Penis” on Wikipedia, it sends you to a page titled “Penis (redirected from Whale Penis).” It does not, however, take you to a section of the page devoted to whale penises. If you want to specifically know about whale penises, and whether they actually contain bones, you have to search around a little bit. The only thing I can find about whale penises, now that I look, is the statement “Accurate measurements of the blue whale are difficult to take because the whale’s erect length can only be observed during mating.”

2. Why do we always fall for people into hurting themselves?

When I asked Google that same question a couple of nights ago, it sent me to a lot of pages about like how to deal with people that are into self-injury. So I think that what Google is trying to tell us, here, is that asking why we are in a given situation, ie the situation of
loving someone who hurts themselves (or, for that matter, the situation of hurting oneself), is less important than figuring out what we are going to do about it, how we are going to live now that we are in that situation.

3. Have you ever broken a bone?

Not that I know of. Maybe in like my foot.

4. What would you call me in bed?

I am assuming that probably we are sleeping in different beds, J Bradley.

5. How sober were you in the writing of this story?

Stone.

6. Is monogamy designed to fail?

The primary arguments for the existence of monogamy are the ontological, the cosmological, and the argument from design. According
to this last argument, if monogamy is designed to fail, there must, by definition, be a designer. Who then, this argument asks, is that
designer? The designer must be greater than the design. Therefore, concludes the argument from design, the designer of monogamy must be Death itself, towards which all monogamy leads.

The ontological and the cosmological arguments basically say the same thing in different words.

It’s been fun talking, J Bradley.

Mandy Haggith’s poetry is featured in the London Calling issue. She talks with us about how she butters her biscuits, the color yellow, and rapefield cultivation.

1. Has Coldplay ruined the colour of yellow?

Not at all.

2. How do you cultivate a rapefield?

Bees are essential.

3. What is a gorse?

Gorse is a spiny evergreen shrub, which bears coconut-scented yellow flowers in all months of the year, but in particular profusion in May. Bees love them.

4. Why the obsession with yellow in this poem?

Because gorse is so very yellow, and because yellow flowers signify home.

5. Whose is your favorite bawling teenaged drum kit?

Brian Downey’s.

6. What do you put on your biscuits?

Honey

Alice Slater’s witty fiction appears in our London Calling Special issue. She talks with us about her roller derby name (awesome), reliable narrators, and lots more.

1. How much do you trust the internet with food reviews?

I rely on websites like the fictional HappyVegetarian.com when travelling, so I usually put a little faith into the integrity of anonymous internet reviewers. That said, the worth of an individual review depends entirely on the reviewer’s use of caps lock and exclamation marks.

2. What would be your roller derby name?

Charlie Bukkaki. She thinks! She drinks! She comes all over your – well, you get the idea.

3. How reliable are the multiple narrators of “HappyVegetarian.Com”?

They’re all either cheerily crackers or about to kick off, so they’re as reliable as a sack of greased weasels.

4. What is your favorite vegetarian junk food?

Morrissey.

5. What is your least favorite simulated sex act?

Anything that involves an oversized pepper grinder in a low-brow Italian restaurant.

6. What food do you wish was made of people?

Miscellaneous kebab meat, because then at least we would know for sure what was in it. From my rudimentary understanding of the post-clubbing kebab scene in the UK, most kebab meat ends up on the pavement anyway, so the consumer’s experience would be completely unaffected, and I’d feel a bit less haunted by the thought of what goes into the humble doner.

Virginia Lee Borges makes her literary debut in the June issue with a story that remains one of my personal favorites. She talks with us about what she leaves around the house, what she wants to pile, and her creation process.

1. What do you leave around the house?

I don’t leave many traces anymore, nothing visible or out in the open.  My mother was a strategic clutterer: if there was a book she wanted me to read, she knew not to ask me.  She’d put it near my chair instead.  If she told me, I wouldn’t touch it, but if she left it out, it was sure to be read within days.  I was a stubborn child, and my mother is a wise and patient woman.

Now all my clutter is kept safely out of sight; I stash candy wrappers underneath couch cushions and mattresses, for example.  I like to read and slowly eat something sweet, like Francie Nolan reading on the fire escape with her bowl of penny candy.  I’m too absorbed or lazy to get up from whatever I’m reading to throw away the wrapper, so I hide it instead.   It’s one of those tenacious childhood habits.  Like nail-biting.  I rarely eat candy anymore, but it still surprises me when I clean under the mattress.  There’s always something there.

What I leave around the house nowadays, less gross, are things tucked into the wrong drawers.  I think I have a specific portion of my brain devoted solely to indexing our drawers’ shifting contents.  Though you’d never know it as a visitor; everything looks perfectly clean on the surface.   That’s from my father, who in his youth spent long swaths of time on a ship.  Nothing could be left on a flat surface, or it’d hurtle into the walls in a storm.  And so growing up we had this phrase in needlepoint on the wall: a place for everything and everything in its place.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wished to be the type of person for whom that is true.  I had a dream once where every item in my desk not only had its own place, but its own private slipcover: a stapler slipcover, a tape dispenser slipcover, individual slipcovers for each pencil and pen.

It feels like that would be a tidier and better life.  But I always seem to be carrying things as I’m walking room to room.  And so the ice cream scoop ends up in my desk, and pencils live in the kitchen drawer along with the toothpicks and spoons.   But nothing stays where it can be seen.  It all gets put away somewhere.  And the drawers all end up equally wrong.  Or equally right.

But at least our things would be safe in a storm.

2. What do you learn quickly?

I’m suspicious of things quickly learned.  Quickly learned, quickly lost, has been my experience.  I learned quickly in grade school, back when demonstrating learning meant spitting out facts.  Now, in my second year of MFA study, I’ve had to re-learn to learn slowly, read slowly, talk slowly.  I’ve always been a fast talker.  Part of that is, I believe, that whatever I have to say, I often don’t actually want people to hear it.  Which is why I find writing such a relief: I can slow down, take my time, get it right.  I tend to bond with writers who are also perfectionists.  Perfectionism lends itself more easily to lightness than to quickness, I think, as in the lecture by Italo Calvino: “lightness for me goes with precision and determination, not with vagueness and the haphazard.”

3. How did you create “Skin”?  How much of your life is in it?

I usually start, first, with an image; and, second, with whatever strong associated emotion the image conjures.  Then I have to figure out who is feeling that emotion and why.  In Skin, that image was the piles and it stayed in the first paragraph – though it doesn’t always.  To capture and sustain my attention, the image must be emotionally weighty, that is, it has to be capable of carrying emotional weight.  It has to have a certain density to it, a gravity sufficient to hold all the other images of the story in its orbit.

As for my life… I’ve never been pregnant, and nowadays my skin seems to stay on my body.  But I’ve always been fascinated by the ways in which our bodies fail or betray us, as well as how we choose who or what to hold onto, shed, shove away, keep, or cherish.

4. Who have you outgrown?

Honestly?  No one.  If I like someone a minute, I like them a lifetime.  (The caveat: short as my own life has been thus far.)  I love getting pulled back through the wormhole of time.  I love re-becoming this person who liked that person.  I love the remembering why.

Any growth beyond my ability to access that, I’d see as a bad sign – though as a reflection of faulty past judgment or misdirected present development, I’m not sure.  It’s a dilemma I hope to never confront.  But I still have several childhood t-shirts that I like and wear regularly.  Just because something fits differently, I’d argue, doesn’t mean I’ve outgrown it.  (Others may call this denial.)

5. Congrats on your first publication.  How did you celebrate?

Well, thank you!  I’m delighted to have Skin in PANK.  This whole publishing business scares me.  Something about the permanence of it, the idea of declaring a piece of writing finished, ready for consumption and judgment. But I’ve taken it very slowly.  Just this one piece to this one place.  And obviously I’m thrilled with how it’s turned out.

How did I celebrate?  First I jumped up and down screaming so my husband ran from the next room.  Then I e-mailed my mother and father and brother and cousin.  Then I e-mailed my mentor, writer Ron MacLean, and told my writing group.  All this may or may not have involved a surfeit of exclamation points.

Then slowly, very slowly, I told a few other classmates and friends.  I’m happy to have this interview as an excuse to tell more.   I’m not naturally good at celebrating myself (even in high school, my birthday celebrations were always surprises), but I’m lucky to blessed with family and friends who are unafraid to celebrate forcefully on my behalf.

6. What do you want to pile?

This is selfish, but – what I want to pile is people.  Ideally I’d like to pile all the people I love in a closet.  I’ve lived so many places and been blessed to know so many incredible people that I always find myself missing multiple someones.  Not an uncomfortable heap of a pile, but in very comfortable pods of some sort.  Something like those Japansese capsule hotels.  But with clear casings, so that when I open the closet door I can see everyone at once, eyes closed, happy and ready and waiting.    But of course, my people pile probably wouldn’t be very pleasant for the people themselves.  They deserve better.  I’d need to put in some board games.  A deck of cards.  Add a skylight.  A porch with a swing.  Then, I’d serve lemonade.  And move in myself.

Cara McGuigan is featured in our London Calling issue. She talks with us about the box beneath her floorboard, the dissolution of her heart, and altering EPCOT.

1. What would I find in your watch box beneath the floorboard?

Running away money and a purse with my baby teeth in it.

2. In Russia, do butterflies find you?

I’m not sure. It would be nice. I picked a butterfly up once, you know. They have little furry feet.

3. How does your heart dissolve?

It’s like a chemical reaction: when sadness and ache and love and desire to protect someone combine and makes the blood in your heart all hot and salty, and then it spills over and coats your heart and dissolves all the walls when it runs down the other side. Then the warmth seeps into all the other parts of your body, and you heat from the inside out. (In all honesty, a bit like those blue self-heating bags with the crystals and liquid that you release, that we used to use if someone sprained something badly at gymnastics).

4. What country would you escape to if you had to escape?

Wow. What a question! You know, I had to have a really good think about this. If you were escaping to one place and you didn’t want to go back, and you didn’t want to be found, it’s have to be somewhere populous and outwith the extradition laws. For me personally, to keep me sane, it would also have to be somewhere with good food, and an interesting history and architecture – preferably also somewhere hot with a sea you could swim in. So, I came up with… Yemen! Obviously there are problems (not Muslim, can’t speak Arabic, don’t know anyone, would stick out like sore thumb). But I’d have lots of time to get to grips with it all.

5. How was “Bábochka (Butterfly)” built?

I wanted to do a story with a strong female character, and I like doing stories that twist slightly sexually. My parents were given some pictures for their wedding by a Glasgow Jewish artist called Hannah Frank, and it really started with finding out more about her, and the Glasgow she would grew up in, visiting the Glasgow Jewish Archives, and wandering about the Saltmarket. Gradually, though, I discovered other crazy things about the time frame, the Hunger Marches, and the fact that the population was double then what it is now – where did all those people come from? So I had all these lush, quirky elements just sitting waiting for something to thread them up with. Then I found a picture of a Russian girl, a street photographer in Moscow, and wondered, “If she could do that there, why could she not do it here?” And somehow, it all came tumbling together.

6. How would you change the Soviet Union section of EPCOT?

I don’t know. I would need someone to fund me a research trip to Disney World before I could possibly comment.

David Holub brings his unique humor to the May issue and he talks with us about unfriending, punctuation, and his fake laugh.

1. What is the Truth?

The Truth is that thing that you cannot look at directly or you die. Like a Burning Bush, something that exposes your errors and deficiencies. To cope with your brokenness, you begin to shape your outlook and the world at large around your distorted views and beliefs, allowing you to live in peace, thinking you don’t suck at existing as much as you do. Fox News comes to mind.

2. “Un-friending a Facebook friend is always hard but un-friending your dead grandfather is plain heart-breaking.” – How much truth is in this sentence?

My grandfathers died seven and twenty-two years before the existence of facebook. I would love for them to have been around long enough so that I would’ve had a chance to un-friend them once they’d gone on to be with the Lord.

3. Would you care to share some of the monologue from “Ye Olde Falsies”?

I was hoping you’d ask! Let me dig out my dusty volume…Oh my…it turns out to be way too racist to be repeated here. Like a lot of work written during a certain time and then read in modern context, “Ye Olde Falsies” is racially shameful, despite being written by a slave.

4. How do you make punctuation apparent in your speech?

I enunciate so hard that I’ve given myself face and neck spasms and caused a number of children and geriatrics to seek medical attention for fright.

5. What are the challenges in writing literary fiction that is also funny?

One challenge is to avoid making jokes for the sake of it. To me, the funniest humor comes out of character and story. Much of the work I receive for Kugelmass (as well as my own stuff, some of which was deleted) suffers from this. A line or thought plopped in because of its perceived funniness at the expense of the story. That is, the joke might have been funny but it didn’t serve the piece as a whole. Other things are pacing, playing with timing, toying with the momentum, getting serious without being sappy, etc. Sometimes it feels like I’m driving a semi-truck, with all these gears and pulleys and whistles and switches (I’ve obviously never been inside a semi-truck). Point is, there are a lot of things to control at once that aren’t always there with straight literary fiction.

6. What does your fake laugh sound like?

If you’ve ever heard “Spanish Flea,” by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, it sounds like that.

Andrew Pullan’s poetry is featured in our London Calling issue. He talks with us about fighting metal, adolescent itches and winks as a seductive technique.

1. What job opportunities are there up north?

Very limited – the only oppportunity seems to be to work.

2. How many winks does it take you to get someone in the sack?

Speaking from experience just one – although having conjunctivitis can cause major problems.

3. Which actor is the poem miming?

Christopher Walken.

4. What metal have you fought?

Brass – two monkeys had a go at me once in a bar.

5. How do you cure the itchiness of adolescence?

Sex only after marriage.

6. How much of your life is in your poems?

My fictional life. That is to say the life I wished I live and the life I feel safest in. If you want to be a writer then day dream a lot. The best writers I know are amongst the best liars I have ever known.

We have three stories by Joshua Helms in the June issue. He talks with us about fire starting, fragility, and paternity.

1. What have you set on fire?

When I was 13, I lit a tissue on fire with a match and told my mother the burnmark on the living room floor was from me accidentally knocking the hot iron off of the ironing board.

My friend Kevin Weidner had a series of bonfires early last year. Among the victims: an instant Polaroid photograph of a younger, leaner, tanner me taken by an exboyfriend, a Valentine’s card in which I wrote a longwinded and shamelessly romantic note for aforementioned exboyfriend, several empty PBR cans, the already-frayed ends of my jeans.

2. How do you know you’ve left enough details out of flash to make it interesting?

I write a really short story and cut every other sentence, disconnect dots, make it dreamlike, leave questions unanswered and/or unasked.

3. Is the baby mine?

Natalie says your face looks familiar. She says it’s possible but she’ll have to ask Michael. When Michael gets home Natalie’s not sure if it’s him or his brother or you.

4. How fragile are you?

I am made entirely of glass. Everyday activities require much caution. Especially brushing my teeth and having sex.

5. What would your funeral look like?

A violinist in the corner. Dandelions perched before the mouths of friends and family. My ashes in a small black urn on a wooden table, hoping to catch a few seeds.

6. What is the sound of Phillip Glass exploding?

Metamorphosis in reverse.

Caroline Crew has four poems in the June issue. She talks to us about where the weather touches her, seasoned hips, and assailing to the trees among other things.

1. Why is “Saussure, Sorry” screaming at me? I am hungover enough as is.

I was also. I took my first pure theory class last fall, and needless to say didn’t fall in love with the discipline. I hated being so far away from  the texts. So instead on Tuesdays and Thursdays I would quietly nurse my hangover with a very large iced coffee and write snarky things about theorists. Cowardly really because Saussure can’t snark back.

2. How do you season a hip?

I think that is something your mother should’ve told you.

3. Why assail to the trees?

There are a lot of trees hanging around poems at the moment. It’s like a renaissance or something. So assail to the tress because there are lot of great poems in them. In practical terms, you should assail to the trees in order to gain an unexpected vantage point on your enemy. Although all of my military strategy knowledge comes from watching Deadliest Warrior, it is still good advice. Not just for wars, either. Try to keep going up so you can see more things.

4. Why must communication occur on Tuesdays?

To build dramatic tension. And because every person that is better adjusted than I am has told me communication is important.

But seriously, I think writers assume they are excellent at sharing their feelings and what have you because they type them up and pump them into magazines and books. Really writing is the ultimate act of passive-aggression. It is especially passive-aggressive to apologize for this behaviour in yet another poem.

5. Where did these poems come from?

Oh, you! What a question. Do you want me to be honest? ‘Saussure, Sorry’ came from a literary theory class. ‘Guerrilla’ came from a word game I played, also during this class, where I had the phrase ‘elaborate me, please’ that eventually become ‘assail’ and ‘trees’.

The other poems actually happened to me out in the real world. This winter was terrible, and the UK was covered in something alien called ‘snow’. No one knew what to do, and this meant my flights home were almost cancelled. ‘This Is Also The Apology’ is an apology. It is largely an apology for all the other poems I have written about the subject. Notably the ones that are appearing in PANK 6.

6. Show me where the weather touched you, Ms. Crew.

As long as this stays just between us. It was between my toes, and I think I enjoyed it.