Virtual Blog Tour: Elegantly Naked In My Sexy Mental Illness, by Heather Fowler

Posted on May 20, 2014 by Sheila Squillante

Heather is here as a stop on her Virtual Blog Tour to answer interview questions regarding how she generates her wildly different stories and the role of multiple influences in her newest work. Also here in this post is an audio reading of a story set during the French revolution.

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As an author, you create work that is both highly modern in its sensibilities and also work that has historical influences. Can you tell us what factors impact a desire to write in both realms?

Every piece of work has historical influences. For me, it simply matters whether the history is personal or a history with reading. In the latest collection, for example, there are pieces set in the French Revolution and during the time of the Italian bubonic plague. There is another story set in what I would imagine to be the1920s. These stories were driven by reading of texts that came from their time frame, literary readings. The plague piece, for example, “Mother’s Angels,” began as an inquiry into the first historical use of the marking of Jews with the fabric badges—the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany, and my readings done as research into how this “marking” phenomenon began. To discover that the same sort of persecution happened in the 1300s was fascinating, and I began to read all I could find on the Catholic/Jew relations during those times and circumstances, including how both the plague itself and the instances of floods, referenced in the piece, came to be blamed on Jews by anti-Semites, partially out of the sort of paranoia mass deaths caused but also out of an ugly desire for vengeance or the acquisition of wealth. Even the politician in the piece was lifted directly from historical documents. The relationship between the mother and daughter, however, was purely my imagination. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] The Whiskey Baron by Jon Sealy

Posted on April 29, 2014 by Sheila Squillante

Hub City Press

264 pages, $26.00

Review by Denton Loving

Jon Sealy’s debut novel, The Whiskey Baron, begins with the not-very-mysterious deaths of two young men outside a known whiskey mill in Prohibition-era South Carolina. These men have both been shot down in the middle of the night, their bodies left in the street. What follows is not a mystery of who committed the crime as much as a beautiful and brilliant exploration of a Carolina mill town—intricately bound in violence and vice—unravelling at its core.

Center stage in this story is a man named Mary Jane Hopewell, accused of the murders but known better as a drunk. Mary Jane is injured himself, barely escaping the first gun fight and then disappearing from Sealy’s fictional Castle County. Two men are looking for Mary Jane, each desperate to find him first. One is Furman Chambers, Castle County’s aging sheriff. The other is Larthan Tull, the man whose liquor supplies a powerful bootleg distributor for the entire Southern region. The different paths of these two men are emphasized by their similarities, and much of the essence of the novel is revealed in their conversations with each other:

“You never know what kind of violence the human beast is capable of, Furman, once he sees through the illusion of free will.”

“Free will.”

“We’re all locked on a stage here. You’ve got a job to do. I’ve got a job to do. Mary Jane’s job was to get drunk. As long as we play our parts, everything runs along smoothly. The show goes on. It’s only when the curtain is pulled back and we see the scaffolding and the strings that we realize something is amiss. And then, who knows?” Continue reading →

Making Good Things: PANK @AWP14

Posted on March 3, 2014 by Sheila Squillante

~by Colin Winnette

I was at the airport earlier, flying back from AWP, and thinking about what it means to make a good thing. Or what a good thing even is. I came to no solid conclusions, and think to call something “good” or “bad” does more harm than good. But I still spend a lot of time wondering if what I’m doing is worthwhile, whether I should try to sell more books and if I would sell more books if I could figure out what a “better” book might be like, because then I could try as hard as I could to make it, this “better” thing. I have these thoughts, knowing full well that they’re worse than unproductive—they’re entertaining a notion based on something that does not exist, and therefore can never be satisfied because I can perpetually shift the nature of its demands. Which means all I’m doing is sitting around undoing possibilities. Continue reading →

A Networker’s Guide to AWP

Posted on February 24, 2014 by Sheila Squillante

~by Morris Collins

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For many young writers AWP is a source of anxiety and dread. The world does nothing if not produce young writers and young writers do nothing if not worry about the same things: How do I get published? How do I get the girl/guy with the awesome ink to like me—even though I am not published? These are reasonable concerns—I mean, AWP only happens once a year and you don’t want to blow it, because let’s face it, you can’t even afford to be here this year—but unfortunately in the lead-up to the conference you’re going to read a lot of very bad advice: AWP is about forging bonds of art and community, AWP is a time to show your gratitude to the other pilgrims on your lonesome path, AWP is a chance to revel in the aesthetic endeavors of those, like you, who make things.

A source of anxiety and dread.

Really? Who needs a lanyard to revel? AWP is about networking, taking names, and getting known. Here’s how:

1. REGISTER UNDER AN AWESOME PSEUDONYM: Faulkner, Hemingway, Pynchon, Zadie, Lahiri—awesome writers have awesome names. Do you have an awesome name? Probably not. So this year choose a really kickass writer name and register under it. What makes a good writer name? Something striking, and timeless, and austere. ‘Percy’ is hot this year. ‘Amis’ has worked for ages. ‘Wright’ has great puntential—it launched brothers Charles and James into poetry superstardom, just after they invented the airplane. (But what about all my publications under my real name, you may ask? Come on. If you don’t know this trick, you don’t have any publications). Think about it: your writing is supposed to expose the best of what’s inside, the scope and grandeur of your soul. So shouldn’t your name reflect this? Cormac McCarthy was born Eugene Needleman. Need I say more? Yes. You think anyone this side of 1920 still names their kid ‘Morris’?

Trying on our new name.

Continue reading →

Marvelous Medicine: The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip

Posted on February 14, 2014 by Sheila Squillante

Books for Precocious Kids and Big-hearted Grownups

by Dan Pinkerton

The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip
by George Saunders

There’s nothing even remotely formulaic about George Saunders. The style and tone of his stories are so distinct they become instantly identifiable, fundamentally Saundersy. Even the author’s lone children’s book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, shares some DNA with his adult stuff. The book has been tamed to achieve a PG rating—no clubbed raccoons dumped into pits, just some squabbling, some light roughhousing, a little sand in the underwear—but the other elements are there: the amusing dialogue; the slangy, pared-down diction; a world similar but not quite like ours; a protagonist who manages to see beyond the limiting factors of her existence. At 84 pages, including some full-page illustrations by Lane Smith (The Stinky Cheese Man, The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, James and the Giant Peach), Gappers even resembles Saunders’ other works in length. One might consider it a starter course in Saunders.

The story is set in Frip, which can scarcely be called a town, lacking anything by way of stores, schools, or other amenities. It’s more like a three family collective wedged between sea and swamp where the families subsist by raising goats. All would be well and good were it not for the gappers: small, round, spiky creatures who crawl from the ocean, attaching themselves in large numbers to every goat they can find. Why? Because Gappers love goats. Encountering one elicits from them high-pitched shrieks of pleasure. For goats, the feeling is not mutual, and the animals stop producing milk, a major concern in a one-industry town. Saunders sets all this up neatly, economically, in the opening pages. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Damnation, by Janice Lee

Posted on February 13, 2014 by Sheila Squillante

Penny Ante Editions
168 pp, $14.95

Review by Amanda Montei

Janice Lee’s Damnation is composed of a series of responses to the films of Béla Tarr. Some ekphrastic, others seemingly commenting on the process of writing at hand, the short pieces that make up the text illustrate a world that is full of longing, sleeplessness, and the unsteady and uneven passage of time: “perhaps, spring is coming. Perhaps, spring is already here.” Lee’s work is one in a necessarily inconsistent line of texts that are trying to rethink how confessional and critical/theoretical modes might converge. I’m reminded of Kevin Killian’s Dargento Series, which similarly documents a kind of compulsive attempt to find emotional resonance in the films of Dario Argento. Like Killian, Lee is obviously searching out a linguistic counterpart for self, for writing, and for that affective gnawing that sometimes clutches us and drives us so deeply into cultural matter.

Without much awareness of Tarr’s films, what comes to the fore for me is instead “this kind of grim and dark and desperate kind of love” attributed throughout the text to the villagers, the lovers, the cows, the Lord himself. The book is also quit explicitly framed by the story of Lee’s obsession with Tarr’s work, which becomes inseparable from the micro-meditations that make up Lee’s text. As Jon Wagner writes in his incisive introduction, Lee’s collection of linked pieces develops “a conception of time washing over and awash in our efforts to represent and inhabit it.” So the book becomes neither autonomous from the films nor simply a commentary or translation of them, but rather an account of the temporality of obsession. This is what makes Lee’s book so revelatory—one cannot help but read her prose as always gestural, and yet if one is unfamiliar with the films, as I am, the gesture is one that points to the absence contained by the fullness of obsession, rather than to any filmic materiality. Lee isn’t reading Tarr’s work, but rather is inhabiting it, inhabiting a recursive experience with it, inhabiting lost time. Continue reading →

Eat Drink Book: Jami Attenberg, The Middlesteins

Posted on February 7, 2014 by Sheila Squillante

By Sherrie Flick

Every book I pick up these days seems to be filled with food. Is it I? Is it because I write this column? Is it fiction lending itself to letting people eat and eat and eat? I don’t know. That’s part of what I’m exploring here each month—how do food and writing connect … and why.

Some connections are obvious, of course. Novels are populated with humans and as humans we do a lot of eating. Ritual, celebration. Food binds us to each other.

When I read a scene that has a character eating, I can sneak under that person’s skin; I can be that person. Even though I’m a vegetarian, there I am eating a steak. Continue reading →

Beautiful Ashes: Brandi Dawn Henderson

Posted on February 5, 2014 by Sheila Squillante

Presented by Jen Michalski, for PANK. For a description of this guest series, click here.

“Easy”

Paul combed straggly bits of long, blonde hair over his pointy, bald dome and believed he was pregnant with Chinese twins. Most days, while other clients were concentrating on counting coins into their palms in preparation for a supervised trip to the nearby Starbucks, Paul sat quietly in a rocking chair, pushing off with his long legs while carefully crocheting the latest beautiful blanket in preparation for the birth of his little girls.

Though I had a degree in psychology, I’d never worked with the developmentally disabled before. I was new on the job by a couple weeks and did my best to be adaptable and kind while managing the needs of a varied clientele. Some clients were completely harmless, like two women in their forties with Down Syndrome who helped me warm up each morning by requesting Cyndi Lauper dance parties. “Girrrllls, they wanna have fu-un, YEAHH GIRLLLS, they wanna have fuuuuun,” we’d all yell from within the windowed walls of the music room, other clients pressing their faces inward from the main floor as we hopped from foot to foot and shook our elbows around. Other clients, though, made me nervous.

Greg was hunched and his caretaker was clearly overworked or underconcerned, as she regularly sent Greg to “work,” as the clients called their daytime activities with us, unshowered, with thick, yellow sheets covering his teeth. He took an immediate liking to me and clung to my left sleeve whenever he could find me. Though taller than I was, Greg hunched himself so that his forehead pressed into the back of my shoulder; he rubbed his face back and forth on my soft sweaters and pressed his eye sockets, one by one, onto the ball of my shoulder. I tried to balance the grace of human connection with the limits of my own comfort, so, at times, male co-workers would peel his grip from me and sit him in a chair where he would curl deeply into himself and ask for me until I returned. Continue reading →

Found Twitter Haiku (Part 4)

Posted on January 22, 2014 by Aubrey Hirsch

Happy Wednesday, everyone! I hope you’re ready for more accidental Twitter haiku. If you’d like to catch up, or reminisce, check out parts 1-3:

And here are this week’s inspiring found haiku:

Aubrey Hirsch is the author of Why We Never Talk About Sugar, a collection of short stories. Her work has appeared widely in journals like PANK, American Short Fiction, Hobart, Third Coast, The Pinch Journal, and elsewhere. You can learn more about her at www.aubreyhirsch.com and she tweets as @aubreyhirsch.

[REVIEW] The Whack-Job Girls & Other Stories, by Bonnie ZoBell

Posted on January 16, 2014 by Sheila Squillante

Monkey Puzzle Press
58 pgs. / $10.00

Review by Matt Pincus

The Whack-Job Girls & Other Stories is a chapbook compiled from flash fiction pieces, the nouveau riche vignettes of current literature. ZoBell, in an interview with Rumjhum Biswas says, “Every single story came from prompts in the Flash Factory at Zoetrope Virtual Studio.” She goes on to say that prompts are ways for her to write about characters, scenarios, or themes she would normally not conceive or imagine.

Although this is true for most authors, ZoBell is able to capture a poetic lyric in short narratives of socially and economically outcast women in her text: the maid working at an upscale hotel called upon to attend to a room at three AM, or the Midwesterner from Spokane who rides a train to Harlem when “the only black people [she] ever saw were Crips and Bloods in movies of the week.” These stories develop their characters’ personal situations (a mother having phone sex for extra income or a woman who sells her Mustang to pay the credit card bill) but there is also a layer of gothic séance, which produces a feeling one gets from a Denis Johnson or Shirley Jackson novel. Continue reading →