Alan Heathcock’s aptly titled story collection, VOLT, open with a fast, brutal scene: An unbearably painful accident, told in terse, beautiful language, sets the reader off into the powerhouse opening story, “The Staying Freight.” It’s not always easy to read this and what follows – and yet it’s hard not to. The flood of positive responses to VOLT, ranging from the New York Times to NPR to the hallowed halls of Bark, is a testament to the finesse and skill Heathcock brings to bear.

Alan Heathcock

Heathcock, who teaches writing atBoiseState, said he wrote VOLT over 12 years. He answered these questions by e-mail earlier this month.

How long have you been working on the stories in VOLT, and for how long have you had in mind the connections of place and characters of Krafton? Did you start with the notion of writing stories about this place, or did that unity emerge as you wrote the stories?

I started writing about the town of Krafton way back in the late nineties, just because I was drawn to the landscape—I’ve always found something mysterious and curious about rural landscapes, the crops and woods and openness. I quickly discovered the dramatic advantages to working within this setting, the isolation of characters forcing them into a kind of contemplation that allowed me to investigate certain themes. The unity of which you speak is, I think, in part due to the themes investigated within the place. The stories come back, again and again, to look at the invasive nature of violence and the tenuous nature of peace, of how community—both secular and religious–enable or disable these things. Because I kept hitting on questions of justice and faith I found the two main characters, Sheriff Helen Farraley and Pastor Vernon Hamby, kept appearing.

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For a while now, I’ve been tuned into Matt Bell’s occasional tweets about his work on revising a novel – little updates that were meaningful to me as I considered similar work of my own. When he recently noted that he had completed a round of revisions, I thought it might be a good time to ask him some questions about the process and about revision in general.

Matt Bell

Bell is the author of the collection How They Were Found, a forthcoming novella, Cataclysm Baby, and the chapbooks Wolf Parts, The Collectors and How the Broken Lead the Blind. He’s an editor at Dzanc Books, and he edits the literary magazine The Collagist. He teaches writing at theUniversity of Michigan.

He answered these questions by e-mail.

You tweeted recently that you just finished some novel revisions that have occupied almost two years. Could you describe the nature of the revision and however much about the project you’re comfortable with? Have you been reworking plot and character elements, or focused more on language and refining expression? Or some combination?

The first draft of the novel took about ten months: I don’t outline, or plan ahead, and in fact sort of actively work to keep myself from looking further ahead than the scene I’m writing—and ideally no further than the sentence or the paragraph. So the first draft—which actually comprised any number of revisions over each passage, as I write forward, then back up, then revise forward to the edge again—was the best I could do by that method, but I knew it needed a lot of work.

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The Sunday New York Times held a couple of pleasant surprises: Two writers who’ve been interviewed here at Bark were reviewed positively in the Book Review. Check out this review of University of Idaho prof Daniel Orozco’s Orientation, and this take on Caitlin Horrocks’ This is Not Your City.

Here’s a passage from Horrocks’ Bark interview, addressing the differences between writing a novel versus a short story:

“The main difference is that I have no clue what I’m doing on the novel. There was a point that I felt that way with stories, of course, but I’ve had years, practice, lots of good workshops and good readers, to help me figure things out. I haven’t decoded the form, but it’s a forest I’m used to hacking my way through.

“My novel project feels like a jungle without any clear paths at all. I don’t know which plants are poisonous or which animals might eat me. There are weird noises in the distance. I don’t have the right kind of shoes. It’s always raining, and I’d like to cower under some leaves and just research forever, but I know I have to step out, start tromping, and get muddy.

“I heard the writer Peter Ho Davies refer to a story as a rock that you could cup in your hand: hold it up to the light, feel the whole shape of it at once. The novel was a giant boulder you could only walk around, seeing small slices of it at a time. I like this image a lot. I just need to keep reminding myself that I can get around the whole rock that way, with more steps and more patience. And through the jungle? Picture the rock in the jungle. Then it all fits.”

Here’s the entire interview.

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I’ve never met Ben George in person, and yet I feel like I know him. Over the course of his editing a couple of my stories – helping to improve them in deep, significant ways – we had lots of phone conversations about art and parenthood. He has that rare ability to see deeply into a story, and to recognize its possibilities in the context of what’s there – a way of improving a piece by identifying and amplifying what’s best in its nature, rather than by merely identifying weaknesses. I look forward to the day when he’ll get his hands on my work again.

Ben George, editor of Ecotone

Ben is a graduate of the University of Idaho’s MFA program. He was an editor at Tin House before leaving for Ecotone, a journal that’s established a high bar for excellence in its short history. Lookout, its book-publishing partner, recently published Edith Pearlman’s “Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories,” to great acclaim.

Ben graciously agreed to answer these questions by e-mail.

How do you edit a story or piece of writing – how do you go about discovering how it might be improved? How do you manage the trick of suggesting significant changes, while making sure the author retains the sense of creative control?

I’ve heard writers say that much of what they learn while working on a novel does them no good when it comes time to write the next novel, because each novel presents its own unique obstacles, its own demands for how it needs to be written, thereby cruelly rendering useless some of the things that were learned on the last book. To some extent, the same might be said about editing. The “how” question is tough, then, because to be a good editor, meaning to hope to be of any use to the writer, you need to approach each piece of writing fresh. I’m overfond of the verb suss in this context—you suss out the particular intentions and pleasures of a story or essay. (I do this with the poems we publish as well, but I make suggestions less often on poetry.) It’s like very gratifying detective work. You’re trying to get to the heart of the mystery about this story and how it’s been conceived and made by the writer. Until you know that, you can have no real sense of whether and where it might be improved upon. Usually the first time through a story I’m just having a conversation with it, making little notes to myself about what I think it’s doing and why.

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Because I’m between real interviews, and because I’m such a swooning fan of John Banville’s, and because I’ve been unable to locate Banville to see if he’d participate in one of my little Q-and-A’s, I’ve invented one to fill my spot this week.

Banville is an Irish writer who often writes about horrible men in astonishly rich, beautiful prose — the cliched comparison is to Nabokov, and for whatever reason, it’s a combination that I find irresistable. He’s an incredibly vivid writer, and he makes you feel his world distinctly. The language itself is complex and ambitious and lush — verging on the too-pretty, but never quite getting there. Some of his books seem, at times, virtually plotless, while others develop the tension of a great mystery. He also writes thrillers under the pen name Benjamin Black, which I will read the moment I finish the Banville catalog.

Anyway, here is my pretend interview with John Banville.

How are you feeling about death these days, John?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7szK6ArSh0&feature=related

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Andrew Scott has been working for the good of the short story for a while now – as a writer, editor and founder of Andrew’s Book Club. So it’s fitting that his own collection, Naked Summer, has just been published by Press 53.

Andrew Scott

I’ve been a reader of Scott’s, in one way or another, for a few years now. I love the idea and spirit behind the book club, and I once won a free copy of Scott’s excellent story chapbook, Modern Love, by writing an overheated mock reviewer’s blurb for it. His work has appeared in Esquire, Ninth Letter, The Cincinnati Review, Mid-American Review and other publications. He co-edits the online journal Freight Stories, teaches at Ball State University and lives in Indianapolis.

Scott graciously agreed to answer these questions by e-mail.

Your new collection, Naked Summer, was just published by Press 53. Can you describe the book and stories just a bit?

Naked Summer is a collection of nine stories, all of them set in and around Tippecanoe County in Indiana, where my hometown, Lafayette, is the county seat. The shortest story is the opener, which was written on a cocktail napkin for Esquire. The longest is the closer, which is nearly a novella. In between are stories of various sizes. One of the nicest things someone has said about them—the other night, at a reading—was that they’re the kind of stories you want to read twice. That’s something I’ve always tried to do, based on advice from Lee K. Abbott.

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Daniel Orozco’s first book has been a long time coming – he says he once thought it would never actually make it into existence. The dark and funny title story, “Orientation,” was selected for Best American Short Stories in 1995, and the nine stories in the volume were written over nearly two decades.

Daniel Orozco

But Orientation and Other Stories is landing with a big splash. Over the course of the long wait for publication, Orozco has built a following, one beautifully crafted story at a time. Now the book is getting glowing reviews all over the place; Julie Orringer wrote, “This may be Orozco’s first collection, but he’s nothing short of a master.” Here’s the review from New West.

His stories have appeared in Harper’s, Zoetrope, McSweeney’s, Ecotone and StoryQuarterly, and been picked for the Pushcart Prize anthology, Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories and others. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, he teaches at the University of Idaho.

He graciously agreed to answer these questions by e-mail.

You’ve described yourself as a slow writer, and the stories in Orientation were written over many years. How long do you work on stories, and do you work on them in a continuous stretch? Or do you start and stop, pick them up and put them down, etc.?

I started one story and put it down and picked it up seventeen years later and finished it, but that’s the only time that’s happened. I finished another story in about eight weeks, but that’s rare too. And so my rate of story production falls somewhere between those two extremes. Typically, each story is a discrete, singular project, finished more or less in one stretch.  Each project may be interrupted by life–work-related stuff, personal crises, acts of God, etc.–but never by another story. I’m not a very good multi-tasker.

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Kenneth Calhoun has one of those resumes that’s so wide-ranging it’s hard to summarize – graphic designer, professor, writer, interactive storyteller, filmmaker. His short stories are how I came to him, most recently the story “Then” in the new Tin House, which is a spooky, elliptical tale about parenting anxiety and sleeplessness.

Kenneth Calhoun

His story “Nightblooming,” which was originally published in The Paris Review, was selected for the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2011. He has created an interactive online story, “Big Swing,” based on one of his short-shorts. And he’s an assistant professor of graphic design at Lasell College in Newton, Mass.

Calhoun graciously agreed to answer these questions by e-mail.

Your story, “Then,” draws me back, in part, because I’m trying to sort it out, and can’t fully or exactly do that. How do you find a balance between maintaining mystery and telling the story? How do you suggest or signal what lies behind what’s on the page?

The design of the story, which was inspired by the insomnia theme, is meant to suggest that it was a whole, linear thing that has been cut up and re-arranged out of sequence, with parts left out. This is the impression it hopes to give, though it’s an illusion. That is, it never was a whole thing that was cut up and re-arranged. Instead, I just wrote flashes and glimpses—sometimes in chronological order, sometimes not—knowing that the gaps and all the connective tissue would be added by the reader’s mind. The reader’s mind would also try to organize the story and struggle to make sense of it, if the reader cared enough about the situation and the characters.

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C. Max Magee started The Millions as a literary blog back in 2003. Eight years later, the site has taken on the pleasingly reliable aspect of something sturdier than a blog: it publishes work by sharp, well-known writers; it has a dependably high level of quality and polish; the pieces read like edited, carefully considered work; and it combines the best of a print publication with the best of a webby thing.

C. Max Magee, founder of The Millions

This description seems ripe to be called “back-handed” by faithful defenders of the interwebs, but I mean it as a totally fore-handed compliment. The Millions is a great site. If you’re into good writing about good writing, and for some reason you haven’t checked it out, I highly recommend it.

Magee, who co-edited The Late Great American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books and who has written for many publications, graciously agreed to answer some questions by e-mail.

One of the things I appreciate about The Millions is its similarity to certain qualities of a printed publication – the writing is polished and edited, many of the pieces are long and detailed, and it has less of an impulsive, tossed-off quality than a lot of stuff online. How did you initially envision it working, in comparison to something like a book review or magazine, and how has that evolved?

The site started out as a blog in 2003 and wasn’t always as polished, but almost from the beginning I had traditional print publications in mind as models in terms the quality and depth of the writing.  I didn’t really have a fully formed vision for the site at the outset, and I didn’t have any expectation that I would be doing it for this long. So, much of what you see evolved pretty organically as the site got bigger and attained a wider readership and more writers got involved in the project.

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If you read modern short fiction, more than likely you’ve come across the wildly imaginative stories of Caitlin Horrocks in recent years. Horrocks has published stories all over the place, from The Paris Review to The Kenyon Review to The Southern Review, as well as being selected for The Pushcart Prize (2011) and Best American Short Stories 2011.

Caitlin Horrocks

Her first book, the collection This Is Not Your City, is being published this summer by Sarabande Books. Ron Carlson says of the collection: “How can a first book arrive with such advanced understanding of all the beautiful and sometimes shaded echelons of hope in which we live our lives? Caitlin Horrocks is a stunning writer and these stories mark a brilliant debut.”

Horrocks, an assistant professor of writing at Grand Valley State University, graciously agreed to answer these questions by e-mail.

You have a collection coming out this year, This Is Not Your City. Can you tell us a little about it?

The author questionnaire from my publisher asked me to do this in a single sentence, and I came up with “Darkly comic stories about people wrestling with their imperfect lives, in ways both everyday and outlandish.”

The stories are unlinked, and set in different states and countries; the title story is about a Russian mail order bride in Finland; another is set on a cruise ship held hostage by pirates, another is about girls in Michigan haunted by an imaginary ogre. I wrote them over several years, from when I was 24 to 28, and I tried to make them the kinds of stories I like to read—sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes both at once. Sometimes quirky, but always rooted in people that felt real to me, and hopefully to the reader. Read more »