Note: Jeanne Leiby, sadly, died in a car accident in Louisiana Tuesday. This interview was conducted over the past couple of weeks, and I scheduled the post Monday, in advance of a very busy Tuesday, in which the news of her death didn’t reach me. The post appeared this morning. I hope it can stand in some small way as a representation of the kind of writer, editor and teacher that she was.

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Jeanne Leiby has been an editorial force at several American literary journals, most recently as the editor of The Southern Review, as well as a writer and teacher. She’s also someone who’s been important to me as a writer, because she published a couple of my stories, which will probably make me grateful to her for life.

Jeanne Leiby in an LSU photo

I noticed her most recently over her post following up on the VIDA breakdown of acceptances/submissions by women in publishing – she took the initiative to analyze TSR’s submission and acceptances and posted the answers online. I wanted to ask her about that and other matters of writing and editing, and she graciously agreed to answer these questions by e-mail.

What’s your idea of a well-edited magazine? Is it simply great individual pieces, or do the pieces need to work together in some fashion?

We accept individual poems, stories, and essays because the work itself challenges, compels, intrigues, and surprises. But we do keep our eyes on the way each issue develops. Because we have the luxury of publishing four volumes a year, and we’re filling two or three issues in advance, we can move things around so the issues as also as strong as they can be. Unless we are actively filling a special topic issue, we don’t look to design thematic links. In fact, sometimes it’s the opposite. For example, if we have two brilliant first person stories both told from a child’s point of view, I might separate them across two issues. But sometimes themes emerge, ones we didn’t see until after the issue has been set. Our autumn 2011 issue was a very wet issue. There was water everywhere—streams, ponds, oceans, bathtubs. We didn’t plan that, and nor is that the reason I picked antique nautical charts of the Gulf Coast for the cover and art insert. That just sort of happened.

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Learning about Christopher Newgent and Vouched Books was my first productive encounter with Twitter. Someone (OK, it was that Willow Springs Twitter thing over there on the right) tweeted a link to a story about Newgent, and I’m glad I followed it, because I found somebody who’s working for literature in a very hands-on, face-to-face way that I like a lot.

Chris Newgent

Newgent started Vouched as a way to promote small-press books around Indianapolis. He sets up tables at arts events around town, and all the titles for sale are books he’s read and liked. Newgent, a poet and fiction writer who has published in several journals, graciously agreed to answer some questions by e-mail.

Could you describe Vouched? What brought it into being, and how does it work?

Vouched started simply as a guerilla bookstore. I set up a table full of small press books at art and literary events around Indianapolis and peddle them to passersby. It’s grown now into the Vouched Presents reading series at Big Car Gallery here in Indy, and also Vouched Online, where I and other contributors do book reviews and recommend our favorite writing in online journals and magazines.

It came about from a conversation I had with Chris Heavener, the editor of Annalemma, about community-building and a need/desire to push these small press books we love beyond the internet community, to people who wouldn’t otherwise know they exist. He did a small press table at the Brooklyn Flea Market earlier in the summer, and I took the idea and ran with it to create Vouched.

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Anybody who ever wrote to a prompt would be fascinated by – or maybe envious of – Ciara Shuttleworth’s story.

Ciara Shuttleworth (Photo by Daniel Berkner)

Shuttleworth, a poet in the University of Idaho’s MFA program, wrote a sestina in a class taught by professor and poet Robert Wrigley last spring. In a matter of months, the poem – titled “Sestina” – was published in The New Yorker.

Shuttleworth’s poem is made of six words, whose order is shuffled to match the highly structured form of the sestina. (You can read the poem here, if you subscribe to The New Yorker.)

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

I’ve read that you wrote “Sestina” within minutes of being introduced to the form in a workshop. Is that right? Could you tell the story of the poem?

I was in Robert Wrigley’s Prosody and Form class last spring. We discussed a selection of poems each week in a particular form, and were required to write a poem in that form as well. The week Bob assigned the sestina, I wrote a subpar sestina (it worked, but it was not nearly as good as sestinas such as Miller Williams’ “The Shrinking Lonely Sestina”).

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Sometimes I struggle to read 10 pages in front of an audience – so I was fascinated when I heard that Kyle Minor was going to read all the stories in the latest Barry Hannah book in one sitting.

Kyle Minor

Minor and Nick Bruno read Long, Last, Happy: New and Collected Stories straight through, over nearly 12 hours in December. It was streamed online at HTMLGiant. I didn’t see it and it wasn’t archived, but I’ve remained curious about it, in part because I love Hannah’s stories and I wondered if their wild originality would make for difficult or easy reading. I e-mailed Minor – who writes fiction, essays and really smart online literary stuff – to ask him about Hannah and his own work.

Minor is the author of In the Devil’s Territory, a collection of short stories, and his work has been widely anthologized and honored.

When did you first read Barry Hannah’s work, how did it affect you, and did your relationship to his work evolve as you read more of it?

The first Barry Hannah book I read was his novel Yonder Stands Your Orphan. A magazine had given me a copy to review, right before it was published. I was on the front end of learning how to read, really read, so I didn’t really know how to read it. There was a meandering quality to it – I hadn’t read enough fiction, and what fiction I had read was primarily event-driven. And there was a denseness to the prose that required a reader like I was to slow down in a way I wasn’t used to slowing down. At first, I was repelled by the voice, and the dark humor, and the unrelenting darkness of Man Mortimer and so on. But I knew there was something there that I couldn’t walk away from when, after I finished reading and “reviewing” it, I put it aside and then kept thinking about it.

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I first became a reader of Roy Kesey’s one story at a time. The stories in his 2007 collection, All Over, had been appearing in journals for a few years, and his name became a kind of brand to me: Read this story – clean, direct prose; imaginative, sometimes insane, scenarios; and the emotional truth to keep them firmly in the realm of the human.

Kesey in Beijing (Photo by Adam Pillsbury)

Kesey has since written a novella, Nothing in the World, set in the disintegrating Yugoslavia, and his new novel, Pacazo, published by Dzanc. The novel is set in Peru and concerns an expatriate American investigating the mystery of his wife’s brutal death, while negotiating the intrusions of memory and history. The novelist John Domini wrote: “It’s a shaggy-dog tale, one that eventually — boldly — invites comparison to its great progenitor, Don Quixote. In cutting a classic wide swath, Pacazo exposes itself to risk, a tricky balance between hilarity and horror. By and large, though, this rangy novel earns its claim to the old knight’s inheritance.”

Kesey, who lives in Peru, graciously agreed to answer these questions by e-mail.

Your new novel, Pacazo, is your longest and most complicated work. Did it change much from the way you initially envisioned it? How did it begin and grow, and how did you manage the complexity of it – the different time frames, the interweaving of present and past?

It changed plenty, actually. Like most of what I do or try, Pacazo started with a weird little bit of phrasing that just kind of showed up in my head. In this case it was a sentence with a sort of stilted, exhausted, estranged, overly formal diction, and violent undertones, about a lizard in a tree. That original sentence still exists, albeit in altered form, in the first chapter of the novel. But first it had to become a character’s voice, and that character had to have his own short story to live in, a story which McSweeney’s was kind enough to publish back in 2002, I think.

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I liked Ben Stroud’s story “The Traitor of Zion” for a variety of reasons – it’s good like that – but a very personal connection was probably the main one. Stroud’s story is about a Mormon-like splinter group in Northern Michigan in the 19^th century, complete with a prophet and questions of loyalty, sex, morality, violence, honesty and loss of faith – subjects that are very near to me in my own fiction and life. In fact, Stroud’s story appeared in Ecotone, a fine journal that once published a story of mine with some similar themes, so I felt a kinship with him, or at least with his story, though we have never met.

Ben Stroud

Stroud has also published stories in Electric Literature (see trailer below), One Story, the Boston Review, and other journals. He answered these questions recently by e-mail.

“The Traitor of Zion” is set in a 19^th-century religious outpost run by a prophet-like figure. How much historical truth is there in the story?

A great deal, actually. The Hebronites are based on a splinter group of Mormons who, after things fell apart at Nauvoo, instead of going west to Utah followed a guy named James Strang to Beaver Island in Lake Michigan. Eventually he had 12,000 followers, and was pretty remarkable: he’s the only person to be crowned a king on American land (this happened a few years into his leadership on the island), he took multiple wives (a point of contention for his followers), and he was eventually assasinated. Most—including most Mormons—believe he was simply faking his revelations to capitalize on the Mormon movement, but there are still a few hundred Strangites out there.

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I first thought about interviewing Reese Okyong Kwon after reading a story of hers in the new American Short Fiction several weeks ago. The story, “The Circling Eagles, the Eager Fish,” was brief, elliptical, dark, funny and moving. My favorite things. Then I checked out “Superhero,” a story of hers that Narrative published a couple years back, and wrote her to ask for an interview.

Reese Okyong Kwon

Kwon is a 2005 graduate of Yale, winner of the Wallace Prize in fiction there. She’s published stories in the Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Gulf Cost, Epoch, and elsewhere, with more to come. She was named one of Narrative’s “30 under 30” writers. You might have seen her at AWP, where she was part of a panel.

Your story in the new issue of American Short Fiction, “The Circling Eagles, the Eager Fish,” moves in an indirect way – there is not a simple linear narrative, though there is definitely a progression. In the absence of a more direct kind of plot, how do you develop the movement of a story? What brings it together?

It has to do with urgency, at least for me. (Let’s assume that any sweeping declarations I make here have a “for me” clause appended to them, like that game people play with fortune cookies: “you will succeed in your next big endeavor”—in bed.) When I start to write something, I know it might be a real story—as opposed to being a whim, or an exercise—as soon as I start to sense a possible answer to the question of why the story’s being told. Why, in other words, a character cares about these particular moments in her life, and by extension why I should care, and by further extension why anyone should care.

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Ander Monson can make you feel spectacularly uncreative. He writes poetry, fiction and wildly inventive nonfiction. He edits a journal, DIAGRAM, and teaches, at the University of Arizona. His web site is an imaginative, inventive endeavor in its own right – and his latest books are actually books-slash-web sites, with the two forms conversing and interacting. Unlike a lot of web writing, Monson is stretching the boundaries of the art form with the technology – using the web as a creative tool, not simply a word bucket. He takes photos. Does video essays. He tweets under the handle Anger Monsoon – which makes me want to reconsider my whole view of Twitter. The New York Times wrote: “No one medium can contain Ander Monson.”

His recent book Vanishing Point – a non-fiction work subtitled “Not a Memoir” though memoir is its subject – is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle awards. He also has a newish book of poetry, The Available World, and his 2005 novel, Other Electricities, has developed a passionate following, to mention just a few of his projects. What made me think of interviewing him, though, was reading his recent short story, “Weep No More Over This Event,” in Tin House at the end of 2009. It’s a creepy, unnerving masterpiece, and it stuck in my head.

Monson, who is obviously a busy guy, agreed to answer a few questions by e-mail.

You seem able to play just about every instrument in the band – fiction, nonfiction, poetry – and in your recent book Vanishing Point you sometimes seem to be playing them all at the same time. I suspect questions of genre are kind of old hat for you now, but I can’t help asking: As a writer, what does genre mean to you? If anything?

My poems, essays, and stories start in very different places, and each feel qualitatively differently to me–they’re powered differently, spurred differently, are interested differently in language, consciousness, voice, self, and world. Once they’re started I don’t really care much where they go from that original intention–and if they start to intrude on the spaces traditionally cordoned off for other genres, I don’t put up a lot of resistance, except to make sure that the moves they make get us somewhere interesting and hopefully beautiful.

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McSweeney’s publishes a lot of great writing, but one of the things I like most about it is its adventurous design. The physical form of the books themselves, in combination with the artwork, consistently expand the idea of what a “quarterly concern” can be.

Matt Furie's nice guy

Still, the current issue was surprising, even by those standards. It came packaged in a box painted to look like the head of a smiling, bald, red-faced, middle-aged American man. Inside his head are pamphlets and booklets with stories, a play, letters, and miscellany – good stuff, including an excerpt from the novel, “The Instructions,” by Adam Levin.

But it’s the head that has invaded my imagination. Sitting on my desk, it has inspired lots of questions from my 3-year-old. My wife wondered whether it was meant to look like anyone in particular. I have pondered it, trying to figure out the emotional story behind the façade, those happy green eyes, those beads of nervous sweat…

Matt Furie, a San Franciso-based artist, created the illustration. After checking out his other work – a wild, often sexual amalgamation of monster, animal and human – I wrote him to ask for an interview, and he graciously agreed.

How did the big square head come about? Was it something you did for McSweeney’s specifically or work that they adapted in some way?

My friend Brian McMullen, the art director for the project at McSweeney’s, asked me to do it as an illustration project. He sketched out the basic idea and said he wanted a nice guy’s head, someone you just met that you could have a conversation with on an airplane. He turned out looking nice but also sweaty and maybe a little nervous.

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Seth Fried

Strange things happen in Seth Fried’s stories. A young man is drafted into a harem full of women. A monkey is loaded into a space capsule and sent into a volcano. Supposedly cool-headed scientists become unhinged over an ancient mystery. But for all their ingenuity of concept, the stories also have these big, throbbing hearts – real emotional power. It’s a great trick, and it’s not hyperbolic to invoke writers like George Saunders and Aimee Bender when talking about Fried. He described one of this stories, “Those of Us In Plaid,” this way in a promotional video for the story: “Thrills! Moral Imperatives! Perturbations of the Human Spirit! And a Monkey!” Sweet. Fried’s new collection, The Great Frustration, is being published in May by Soft Skull Press. He answered these questions by e-mail.

One of the most most-flogged clichés in the world of writing advice is “write what you know.” You’ve written movingly, hilariously and vividly about a harem, a ritualized annual picnic massacre, a self-loathing hitman – just to mention a few. How do you go about inhabiting fantastic – or at least unknown – worlds and making them real?

I think that cliché tends to get misinterpreted. Like: If you’re an ambulance driver, you should write a novel about being an ambulance driver. If you’re a herpetologist, you should write a book of poetry about being a herpetologist. Both those books could end up being perfectly great, but that seems like a very narrow interpretation of what it is a person knows. Even though most of my stories are far removed from everyday experience, all of my ideas grow out of some anxiety or hope that I have about the world or myself. So they’re still dealing with things that are very close to me.

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