CAREFULLY CURATED CATASTROPHES (a hypothetical pitch), by Matthew Burnside

Posted on July 27, 2015 by Sheila Squillante

Dear Publisher,

This pitch, if you even want to call it that, started out as (& being about) many different things.

In the end, I decided it couldn’t be (about) one thing without being (about) everything.

What the hell even is a story if not the simple saga of someone trying?

If I wanted to impress you, here are the things I would tell you about myself: I recently graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently teach creative writing for new media there. I was recipient of a Truman Capote Fellowship. I am author of five chapbooks, one of them interactive, two of them for charity. My stories, poems, and articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Experimental Writing 2015, The Iowa Review, The Los Angeles Review, DIAGRAM, Ninth Letter, Passages North, PANK, Hobart, kill author, Pear Noir!, Gargoyle, NAP, OmniVerse, and more. I am co-founder of an experimental literary magazine called Cloud Rodeo, managing editor of Mixed Fruit, and have been a reader for PANK, The Iowa Review, and NPR’s 3 Minute Fiction. In addition, I write a monthly column for Ploughshares on storytelling and intersections between new media and literature and serve as interviews editor for BOAAT press.

The manuscript that I’m submitting, Bestiary and Other Tales of Monsters, was recently finalist in a few contests, including The Lit Pub’s Prose Contest, the Santa Fe Writers’ Market Literary Awards, and the Willow Springs Editions Spokane Prize in Short Fiction.

If I wanted to be honest with you, here are the things I would tell you about myself: At 32, I’ve applied to 32 academic jobs & received 0 interview requests. (The future’s so bright I’ve gotta wear one of those miner helmets with an industrial flashlight on it.) I only got into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop after 50 other programs cordially disinvited me to attend their programs over a period of 3 years. The manuscript I’m sending you has been rejected over 25 times now. In workshop sometimes at Iowa, my head would hurt because I didn’t understand what the fuck anyone was talking about. I would say something like, “I like the fact that this story has a pony in it. It’s very axiomatic I think,” and hope no one would ask me if I even knew what the word axiomatic meant. Continue reading →

#AWP15: On Firsts

Posted on May 8, 2015 by Sheila Squillante

–by Chelsea Kindred

First AWP.

First plane ride where passengers are reading The Paris Review instead of US Weekly.

First snow rain in April, first city split in two and stretched across the Mississippi. The same river that crawls across the country, curving in and out of the words of writers past, present and future.

First panel, first page of notes, first inky smudge from tip of pinky to bottom of wrist on my left hand. That tell tale sign that I’ve been writing. Continue reading →

#AWP15: Listen Up

Posted on May 1, 2015 by Sheila Squillante

–by Shannon Reed

In the weeks leading up to my first AWP conference, I heard a great deal of advice. Although much of it turned out to be helpful, the words “strategize” and “survive” were so often included, I began to think of my trip to Minneapolis as a minor campaign in a small, bloodless war. Get in. Get free bookmarks. If the battlefield is clear, maybe snag a free tote bag. Avoid the panels. And then, get out. As it turned out, I enjoyed the conference a great deal more than I expected – the free tote bags guy at the London Review of Books was really nice! – but I also came away more concerned about the inclusivity of the world that AWP gathers together.

Much has been written about the representation (or lack thereof) of writers of color and LGBTQ writers at AWP, and, from my limited perspective, the concern seems justified. Here, though, I want to point to another area I worry about, one that I am better equipped to speak to: the way the conference actually unfolds, which leads to a prioritizing of one kind of communication and learning over all others. Continue reading →

#AWP15 or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bookfair

Posted on April 24, 2015 by Sheila Squillante

–by Dan Reiter

A Lawrence Weiner canvas at the Walker Art Center

I am in a dive bar in Minneapolis, waiting out the interlude between poets, watching William Tyler navigate a tractate of reverb. The thought of tomorrow’s panel discussion––”The Writing of Atrocity”––has me locked in a cycle of dread and procrastination. They expect me to speak ten full minutes, yet I have nothing prepared, no idea where to begin.

Behold the young literati: bold-rimmed, russet-bearded, baroque, well-inked. Come here for truth. Tyler’s pick sends out blistering messages; he manipulates his pedal until his guitar is playing three-part harmony. Why hadn’t I worked on my presentation last night? Who wastes a perfectly free evening unscrolling the #AWP15 twitter feed? But God, that tweet of Melville House’s––Saeed Jones (@theferocity) flaunting a gorgeous paperback of Baldwin’s last interview––was a classic: “James Baldwin and @theferocity give better side eye than you.” Continue reading →

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 →