Shifting states. The novel-in-flash Glass/Fire (Querencia Press, 2024) exhibits the unfolding travails of girlhood, a reality adorned in rich contradiction and symbolism. Mandira Pattnaik’s sumptuous language carries forth a deep and sensuous meditation on life’s volatility. The wildness of nature’s forces at their most capricious lend an elemental intensity to fate. A dynamic and revealing exploration of growth, I talked to the author about the book.Rebecca Gransden: In the mood we were in, fire could be liquid, could be sand, or molten like lava, or flames, licking the last of us.You open the book with the above line. How important are opening lines to you and what does this particular line suggest about the book in its entirety?Mandira Pattnaik: Thank you, Rebecca. I do not particularly stress over opening lines, though I greatly acknowledge their importance, especially in flash fiction. It’s helpful to think of the opening as the answer to the question: What does it all boil down to? So, it is essentially the essence of what I want to convey. I want readers to feel surprised, or jolted, or pleased, or offended—I want them to respond in whatever way. With fiction, I shepherd some of the things that I know as truths ignoring from which field of study they originate and insert them into my make-believe world. I’ve now grown to enjoy this kind of braiding. This line, while it braids certain facts about the nature of fire, also tells something about ‘us’. Do ‘we’, as much as we are ‘in the mood’, as yielding as glass yields to fire? I asked myself this question that hadn’t been answered or addressed in my mind and wished to take the narrative forward from there. That’s the way I approach writing—a kind of collaboration between knowing and unknowing. It becomes interesting how a fractured pattern forms that I must uncover in the process while exploring what remains unsaid. Since I had the scope of a novella, and it was the first time I was attempting something of this length, I had the liberty to take or not take the chance to provide answers, and hoping the reader will decide for themselves.RG: How did you decide upon the title—Glass/Fire—for the book?MP: Glass and fire are unrelated in ordinary usage, and it is easy to forget that something as common as glass is formed by subjecting moldable liquid to fire. But then, glass is fragile. Again, some of the toughest glass-made objects are very useful. Fire is energy, enormously potent, but it is shapeless. It has many forms just like glass. Firepower, however, again like glass, has been tamed to suit human needs. So, all these facts seemed very related, though not in a general comprehensible sense. When I set upon the idea of the novella, the opening story was already out in the world, titled as “Glass/Fire”. After that first piece was published, I was sure it was a title that was full of possibilities and that could be open to interpretation (which I kind of love about titles!), and I had to name the novella that I was writing with the same title.RG: A recurring theme is that of impermanence, the fluid nature of states, whether that be of the physical, tangible and chemical type, or the psychological or spiritual. What is your approach to transience?MP: In Indian Hindu religion and mythology, from a very young age, we’re rather familiar with thought-schools such as the cyclical nature of births and rebirths, the virtue of detachment (to possessions as well as relationships) as opposed to being attached, and how change and impermanence is in-built in the universe (as opposed to absoluteness). I understand the doctrine of impermanence is very important to us as a people. Neither are rulers forever, nor is the mortal body to last eternally. Similarly for wealth or happiness, as is bad times and sadness. In Buddhism too, which originated in India, ‘anicca’ is the same doctrine of impermanence, evanescence, transience. Just as life changes in empirically observable states of childhood, youth and death, so do mental events as they come into being and get dissolved. Friends and foes appear and fuse into the mind’s horizon when their job is done. I find this deeply profound. I realize that the recognition of impermanence alleviates the stress of modern living. I seem to course around the theme of transience quite often in my prose and poetry and somehow that has touched a chord with my readers. Simultaneously, I am a great believer of fluidity and interchangeability. These preferences, I understand, gain ground in my writing in a natural manner.RG: Your language is rich, sensual, often concentrated in its descriptions. You make extensive and poetic use of simile and layered meaning. How much of the style you’ve chosen for Glass/Fire is a conscious decision?MP: Thank you so much for saying so. I’m grateful for all the praise that my use of language gathers, given that I am not a native English speaker. Also, I am not a trained writer in any sense—no degrees or writing workshops, and nothing to do with writing in my family, so it amuses me when Granta, denying me a bursary that I had applied for, compares my sample piece’s style to that of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It also propels me to search for what is my true calling, but then I realize that, having had no training is a blessing as I have all the liberty in the world to use my natural style the way I wish to. I have often been appreciated as a lyrical and sensual writer, which of course, is gratefully received. As often happens, one is not prepared to hear anything about one’s writing—I feel so inadequate as an outsider, untrained, writer from the global south. And then one does get more comfortable. It kind of grows on you, and one starts believing in one’s writing—which I guess happened to me. It was never conscious. I am happy I am allowed my lyrical style, without the imposed regulations that academia might have suggested, or which formal training might have eroded.RG: Let’s imagine pure mechanics. Not fire. Instead of glass, let’s talk attraction and repulsion. What is to be stirred with two scoops of isinglass so courses of molecules change, or solidify like glue, or say, become viscous?It’s tempting to see a tension between the scientific and materialist language used in the book and the lyrical and artful, but the impulse to adhere to distinct categorizations on those terms is made moot early on. While you talk of the chemistry that makes us, the stuff of life, the novella interweaves aspects more broadly to present a holistic view. How do you view the scientific when it comes to Glass/Fire? Do you have a personal interest in the sciences?MP: It's really difficult to place science and art in two watertight compartments, isn’t it? There’s a constant osmosis taking place, and even one feeding on the other to enrich and enhance each other. I like this interplay. I tend to incorporate this tension between science and art amply in my writing. When it comes to Glass/Fire, the very basis of the work, starting at its title, is heavily drawn from various branches of science. I like to think of myself as a scientific and rational individual who also recognizes the limitations of science, both theoretically and practically. I have a background in science, yes, but I also graduated in economics and worked in accounts and audit—so these are all related and interwoven into my writing now. I’m also a big advocate of science explained and used in everyday life, as should the arts be. Instead of classrooms and seminars, science and arts should be part of life for the masses, not just the elite few.RG:But being suspicious in a relationship cemented with trust, is really cruel, it eats away the insides like termites.The novella addresses heavy themes such as adultery, marital breakdown and family strife. Your characters face the undermining of their foundations. How did you go about incorporating these aspects within Glass/Fire?MP: In opting for exploring certain issues, or the choices of themes we make as writers, I am not much interested in topics that essentially affect an individual or family, such as the themes above. I’d rather explore issues that affect society more broadly, such as hunger, civil unrest or apartheid. Having said that, themes of a domestic nature are no lesser in my mind, just a matter of what I am keener on examining as a writer. To me, issues of adultery or marital breakdown are simply manifestations of other problems in families and societies, and as you very importantly point out, in surviving these, the characters in Glass/Fire face the undermining of the very foundations on which their existence depends. These are ways in which the characters are forced to reevaluate the very basis of their being—and they undoubtedly fight back. I wanted to address how fragile existence sometimes becomes, when the truths and relationships you hold dear to yourself are shaken. I believe this kind of tangential approach to characterization requires more involvement and engagement. Instead of examining the said intensely domestic themes directly, or thinking about these issues as specific to one group or category, I asked myself if I could get to the core of their sadness or unfulfillment, and if there were several minor issues that were responsible for the situations the characters found themselves in.RG:There was a man dwelt by a churchyard. His wife was the enormous yew tree that shielded him from all. His children came by as autumn leaves, or as some say, they were the cattle that died grazing upon the yew. Sometimes the man coughed so hard, he’d want to be taken out to sea. But they’d trick him—his wife and his cattle-children—saying, the season’s changed and Christmas is here, when nothing ever changed at all.When it comes to narrative, the novella constantly highlights the meaning to be found in the everyday, that symbolic significance not only exists in a wider cultural manner but is amplified and changed by the personal stories we tell ourselves and are reinforced by family rituals. What was your approach to narrative for Glass/Fire?MP: I find the symbolism in ordinariness haunting me everywhere. It is like there are things on display, in nature and in people, waiting to be observed and newness discovered, until one realizes that it is only the form that has changed, and nothing ever changes permanently. I think I am going back to the theme of impermanence I discussed earlier. There is a lot of anguish, sense of betrayal, and a sense of forced mental captivity in Glass/Fire, and the only way out of it, at least momentarily, was to search for symbolic outlets for that feeling. I think the undercurrent of anguish is somewhat redeemed through the pursuit of, what I term as, ‘extraordinary ordinariness’. I’m attracted to natural, accessible objects' magnetic qualities, things and sights easily missed by the unobservant, which are significant in the way they enhance the beauty of the everyday and what is considered the regular or mundane. In that reference, my approach in Glass/Fire was to find that ray of hope in ordinariness as a signifier of extraordinariness.RG: How does the concept of freedom impact the book?MP: Ah, now that’s somewhat muddy territory for me—I mean, this concept of freedom. What is even freedom—how free are we? What is the freedom of mind? Is being free in the body enough? There are so many questions, and I can hardly begin to comprehend even if I knew the answers. But yes, I am very much an independent thinking individual and the concept of being free, or at least, feeling free is very important to me as a writer. I routinely turn down offers to write according to a certain theme or plan I’m not enthusiastic about. I respect others’ freedom, and in that context, I think it is very essential that we can be tolerant towards the ‘other’, whatever that may encompass. In this book, the narrator, Lily, their mother, Jo, and Heena—they are all seeking some degree of freedom. Some manage to achieve that ‘limited’ freedom they had been dreaming of, others don’t. So that again becomes slippery territory and I’ll leave readers to decide for themselves.RG:Gaze at the archipelago around, like it were the pores of a humungous indigo skin. Pass the tiny island where the market still spills with cheap wares people buy. Not you fancying something anymore, though—glass bangles and silk scarves and colored beads mean nothing today. Ceased to have any merit long ago.At a point in the novella you address the psychological consequences and emotionally disruptive impact of a devastating event. What struck me as particularly perceptive was the observation that in the aftermath of such an event meaning is drained from the world, rearranged or lost. Do you have a philosophical approach to meaning that is expressed in Glass/Fire?MP: I am not sure I am consciously incorporating the ‘meaninglessness’ of certain things in the aftermath of a particularly traumatic or psychologically draining event, but I think it follows as a universal truth of the human condition. When a relationship is thriving, there are several associated memories, and the lovers hold on to those as proxies of the ‘feeling of being in love’. But when there’s a disruption, the equations change, and the same things have no significance.The stories I’m interested in and truly invested in, and want to produce, are about finding the truer meaning underneath our superficial lives and delving into the raw, untouched material underneath. That is where the root is—the origin and consequence. After Where We Set Our Easel, my debut novella, I found myself thinking, What is the consequence? In my debut, I was particularly favorable to seeking a hopeful resolution. But in this one, because of its length which allowed me more space, I wanted to approach the questions of origin and consequence with more elaboration, and not necessarily a peaceful resolution.RG: Looking back, but with an eye on the future, how do you feel about Glass/Fire now? What is next for you?MP: I feel content with how Glass/Fire has been received by readers. I can perceive that it has generated critical interest and is being seen as a book that stands out from the crowd. This is extremely encouraging because I write about characters and settings that are not very common—especially because they belong to South Asia and the novella almost entirely happens in a coastal region of India. I am also happy that this means I can continue to be as original and faithful to my style as I want to. Following this, I have a collection of short stories that I hope will find publication soon. I am also excited about my debut novel that I am currently working on.
1at the airport in lagos, we find out my bags are overweight. it doesn’t surprise me. how was I supposed to fit years of my life into two 23kg suitcases? I buy an overpriced ghana-must-go bag to replace the heavier suitcase so I have more room for my things but my bags are still overweight. my mother is frantic as we pack and unpack, and I decide what else to let go of. “are you sure you don’t need this? the dress is nice on you,” she asks as I hand her another item of clothing to take back home. I nod my head yes, despite the uncertainty that washes over me. I think to myself, maybe I do need this. I still need you. I don’t know what I can do without. my bags are exactly 23kg by the time we’re done. I finally check in and as I hug my mother goodbye, our words become tears. we stay in that embrace, in silence, weeping and weeping until an immigration officer asks me to stop crying because I’ll see my mother again soon. but I don’t know when soon is.2.ten days after I move to houston, I start feeling unwell. I tell myself it’s nothing serious and decide it’s fatigue from adjusting to the peak august heat, but I get progressively worse. my head won’t stop hurting. my throat is sore. my eyes are heavy. I’m burning up. I manage to buy flu and fever meds at a nearby h-e-b. for four days, I am confined to my apartment, weak and exhausted. I don’t have family or friends here yet. I haven’t figured out my health insurance plan. I don’t know if the meds are working. I have no appetite. I wake up each day feeling better and then worse. I cry because I’m so afraid. I set multiple alarms because I worry I will sleep and not wake up. my body feels like foreign matter the city is reacting to. 3.the sickness passes on its own, but for weeks I dread going to bed. I struggle to fall asleep and when I eventually do, I struggle to stay asleep. my dreams feel like malaria dreams: vivid and nonsensical. I dream of childhoods I didn’t have. I often dream of a lagos that I am familiar with but that also doesn’t exist. the events in the dreams blur the line between real and unreal. I wake up confused and worn out. I have to remind myself where I am. I still wake up at the times my alarms in lagos used to go off. my full-size bed feels like it’s consuming me so I start sleeping on my couch because there’s less room for me to wander, for my body to lose itself. in lagos, I had no trouble falling and staying asleep. 4.it’s midnight in lagos and london. everyone I love is asleep. but it’s 6pm in houston and I don’t know who to call or text about my day. I spend my evenings in silence in my apartment. it’s the quietest I’ve been in months. 5.on a saturday in september, I make puff puff from scratch for the first time. I combine flour, sugar, milk, yeast and warm water to form a stretchy dough. I worry that the consistency isn’t right but I cover the mixture with a towel, put it in one of the kitchen cabinets, and hope that it rises. I think about lagos and the small joy that was going on a drive to buy puff puff. and how it’d become a longer drive because I’d remember something else I needed to buy and stop at a supermarket, or two. I think about my regular routes that I could navigate without google maps and ubers and buses that are never on time. the dough rises as it should and I deep fry the mixture in scoops, watching mostly perfect golden brown balls form. I take a picture when I’m done frying the puff puff and send to my mother. I eat puff puff for lunch and dinner that day and then breakfast the next day.6.my screen time is at an all-time high. I don’t want to lose touch. I keep streaks on tiktok and snapchat. I send multiple long voice notes to update my friends. it’s always video calls with my parents and sisters, never audio calls. but I feel like I’m constantly playing catch-up. like I’m missing out on experiencing life happening to the people I love. it will never be the same again. I wake up on a monday morning in october and call my sister. she stays on the phone with me as my voice breaks and the tears fall. I just feel so alone, I just feel so alone. when my professor asks later that day if I’m settling into houston okay, I say that I am.7.I’m aware of my possibilities as a writer in houston, in a way that I wasn’t in lagos. it feels like for the first time in a long time, my writing finally has the space to thrive. I knew I needed to leave lagos. but being here is hard. my god, it’s so hard. 8.if plants aren’t repotted when they need it, they can outgrow their existing pots and become pot bound, causing them to suffer and struggle to survive. however, healthy plants may appear sick after repotting due to transplant shock, a temporary stress response caused by the disturbance of the plant’s root system. in most cases, transplant shock is temporary and while some plants will recover within a few weeks with proper care, others may take several months to fully recover. 9.it’s december. I’m still struggling to sleep through the night.
My girlfriend has started a new regiment this week. She told me after coming home yesterday from work. Supposedly, this is supposed to help her achieve her “ideal form.” Every night now she is supposed to take these fluorescent green pills with her dinner. I don’t mind it too much. She becomes so sleepy afterwards, so I tuck her in our bed before sitting out on the couch for a couple of hours. Our flat is now quieter than usual.It seems the side effects are starting to take place in her body. This morning, she woke up before me squealing in front of the bedroom mirror. Her reflection seemed sickly in color that contrasted her cheerful visage. Grabbing my hands, she drew up my fingers to her cheeks. The skin there felt taut, reflecting the light from the ceiling fan. After we got ready for work, she texted me to go get some food and blankets for the upcoming weeks. Coconut, muskmelon, and vinegar for fruit flies. Her skin has begun to constrict, pulling back to reveal new valleys and canals. I asked her if she should be more concerned about her health, but she says this is natural. It’s harder to watch her stumble around more often around the apartment. I wrap cute bandages around her fingers from all the glasses she drops in the sink. Bruises color her thighs and hips. Her eyes have begun to cloud, a soft chocolate becoming milky blue. I have started to memorize where to run my thumb in circles at the front of her scalp, feeling small bumps under her skin. She asked me to help her this weekend hemming her jeans. When I run my hand along her vertebrae, she shivers while I test the new skin of hers.She quit her job. She told me that she won’t need it anymore. When my arms rest around her waist, foreheads touching, her new antennae curl in an arc and brush my ears. I asked her how much more fruit do we need to go through, and she giggled. She pressed her sharpened fingertips to my chest. Murmuring, she tells me how refreshing it feels now to breathe, to feel in her own skin. Next Tuesday, we’re supposed to get a humidifier in the mail to help her skin break smoother. The pills are starting to run out, so I have to go pick up her refill tomorrow and grab more trash bags.The night her new limbs emerged was the worst. I had just refilled the humidifier the second time while she begged to be held, covered in a cold sweat. Gently, I would roll her over on her side while I switched out the wet towels to toss into a bedside hamper. I would lay down on my side, rubbing her naked back in circles while the skin sloughed off to reveal a set of newly emerged elytra. I lean over to see her tear-streaked face, pressing my lips to her eyelids and her mouth, gently kissing where labrums fought to break out under her top lip. We both smiled. Once she fell asleep, I gathered her shed skin into a pile and shoved it down into trash bags. I got her the lavender scented ones this time.I like to watch her eat now, watching the juice run down her neck as she practices using her new, miniature mandibles. They click while she talks and when she annunciates her S’s. She told me that soon it might be harder for her to speak without proper vocal cords, so I signed up for a subscription to an American sign language course. She sits beside me while I review the alphabet, stroking my back with one of her new, dark legs that jut out from her waist. When we lay together in bed, I like to lay by her back and rub her newly fitted wings between my forefinger and thumb. She becomes more iridescent by the day. The flat has become lively again, with happy chitters reverberating throughout the place. I had to get her a pair of crutches today. Her legs were the next to go, as I watched the marrow into chitin. The thighs I would grip were now small enough to be held in my palm. As her bones start to hollow, it has become easier for me to carry her around the apartment. She covers her face whenever I decide to carry her like a princess from the bed to the kitchen for her meals. Slowly, she asks me what I will do once her transformation is done. I tell her that I will still love and take care of her regardless of her body. Her antennae wiggle in response. That night, I carried her to bed and held her tight to my chest. It felt like I was holding a bird.When I woke up this morning, the other side of the bed had a beetle sitting on her pillow. I put my hand out, watching her crawl up my arm to my nose. I walked her out to the kitchen and sat her by the sink. She spun while I cracked open a jelly from the fridge for her to squish into her mouth. Later, we went to the pet store to pick out a new enclosure. I brought her in her old water glass. She would point out which substrate she liked, what hide aways she wanted. Everyone else there was also carrying their girlfriend in cups. I set up her new enclosure in our bedroom after. She sat on my hands chewing my cuticles. She seems to really like her new spot on our nightstand by the window.My girlfriend died today. One morning when I woke up, the bed felt devoid of her presence. I shot up, running my hands and flipping up blankets and pillows, trying to find her. When I ran over to check her fish tank, I could see her on her back, arms curled up into her chest, bright green peeking out underneath. I scooped her up with my hands, flipping her over while I sat on her side of the bed. She was beautiful. I didn’t even know how to mourn. While I sobbed, cupping my girlfriend to my chest, the humidifier screamed waiting for its tank to be filled again. I decided to put her by the edge of my nightstand afterwards. When I turn in my sleep, I can twist and look into her honeycomb eyes before hiding under another blanket. I like to imagine that she is still there beside me with her cold exoskeleton pressed against my stomach.
It’s late afternoon, day five million of this insatiable year, and I’m melting into an overstuffed chair, doing whatever I’m doing on my computer—checking email, collecting fun facts about my father’s mortality, finding new things to be ashamed of—when suddenly I hear a sound like a leaking balloon and I glance up and there he is, the dog I’ve married into owning, lying belly up on the couch, looking like he was dropped from a helicopter and landed comfortably on his back. Paws to the sky, tongue lolling from his mouth. He’s taking me in with upside-down eyes, waiting to see if I’m going to move in the direction of the door that leads to squirrels or the door that leads to the box full of the matzoh he’s recently developed a taste for. I’m not. I’m not even his real dog dad. I’m just a sad guy in a big chair, looking at a dog over the top of the computer I’m too often looking into, thus the neck pain, the ache behind my eyes, between my lungs. I shut the computer, though, and as I do, the dog cocks his head, angling for a better view of my feet. He’s got one front paw folded, the other extended, like young Travolta. He’s half asleep but looking to dance. He’s ready if I am.
We stood on top of our worlds as we knew them. The fall could kill us. Or worse. All part of the thrill. Henny, Walsh, and I were on the last level of scaffolding wrapped around the Bronson Windmill in Fairfield. We were heading into our senior year at Greenfield College Preparatory School. If you think we had on boat shoes judging from the last sentence, you’re wrong. Only Henny and I had on boat shoes. Walsh wore oversized flipflops with bottle openers on the soles. We sat down, dangling our feet over the edge of the scaffolding, swinging them back and forth above the hundred foot drop. Our cargo shorts were still damp from earlier when we jumped off the cliffs at Devil’s Glen into the river below, oblivious the devil was ever there or ever anywhere.Henny and Walsh were two of my best friends. I looked over at them. Walsh with his pellet gun slung over his shoulder and his Marine haircut to be like his older brother over in Afghanistan. Henny had our communal bong, Sir Bubbles Puffington II, in the padded bong case, slung over his shoulder like it was a bazooka. His babyface was angelic and devilish at the same time. Henny was short for Hennessy. He always told everyone he was from the Hennessy Cognac family. He wasn’t. His dad worked on Wall Street.I sat beside Henny and Walsh with a plastic bag full of three Coors Light forties from the bodega in Bridgeport that never ID’d us. I handed them their forties and we twisted the caps off.“Boat shoes are the cowboy boots of Connecticut.” Henny clicked the toes of his shoes together.“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” Walsh laughed.I looked out at the view. The windmill was on the tallest hill in town. We had a panoramic view. The kinda view suckers in our town paid millions of dollars to wake up to every morning. Ours was better though because it was free. Free for a limited time only though. The windmill used to power a dairy farm in the 1800s for some dude named Bronson. Then it was a nonfunctioning windmill for awhile, preserved to remind everyone of what came before us. Then a cell phone company bought it and decided to repurpose it into a cell tower which was why the scaffolding was up that summer. It was still gonna be a windmill on the outside, but it was gonna be a windmill wired to the gills with cell phone stuff too. Change can be crazy like that, turning a historic windmill into a cell tower, restoring it so it didn’t fall in on itself, didn’t just crumble to pieces. As for us three, we were falling in on ourselves a little up there at the top of our worlds as we knew them.I looked up at the sky. A high-flying jet from JFK or Laguardia was a fly buzzing over the clear blue edge of God’s dead face. God was dead to me then. Every plane, even high-flying ones, still looked like another news cycle. Walsh took his pellet gun off his shoulder and aimed it at the far off plane. I looked out instead of up, at Long Island Sound, what we call The Sound in Connecticut. To the east was The Sound, then Long Island itself, then the Atlantic. To the south, The City. The horizon aligned with the last level of scaffolding so perfectly at some angles it looked like a gangplank leading directly to the Manhattan skyline where things happened. We didn’t climb up for the view though. The view was a byproduct like resin caked in our bong. We climbed up to shout fuck you down at our town below, the words echoing back at us, too young to know what being on top of our worlds meant.It was the summer of 2004. The summer we climbed that damn windmill every chance we got. But that night was our last. After we smoked the bong and threw our empty forty bottles up in the air, after Walsh shot at them and missed, after the bottles shattered on a stonewall below, and after we shouted our fuck yous and climbed back down, we got in a bit of a pickle. We were smoking the bong again in Henny’s Jeep on the road beneath the windmill. Henny and Walsh were in the front seats. I was always paranoid, so I turned around and looked out the back window. A cop car had materialized outta nowhere a few hundred feet behind us. A cop got out, drew his handgun, aimed it down at the asphalt and tiptoed towards our car. I turned around and hunched into the front seats.“Cop, for real.” I placed the smoking bong between my legs in the backseat, covering the mouthpiece with my palm.Henny sprayed the Ozium and put all the windows down. We trained for this regularly. We were prepared. I looked out the back window again. The cop continued his slow march, one step at a time. When he got to the back bumper, I faced forward and stared straight ahead. I shoved my bag of weed under the driver seat. In my peripheral, the cop was almost at the driver-side window. That was when Walsh got out of the passenger seat. Walsh had his hands up. I didn’t know if it was because the cop told him to put his hands up, or he did it to show the cop he wasn’t holding anything. It was a blur. “Just meeting up to go out for the night.” Walsh walked towards his brother’s Wrangler he was allowed to drive while his brother was off at war. “I’m getting in my car. We’re leaving now. Sorry for any trouble, Officer.”The cop seemed confused. The cop holstered his gun and continued walking up to the driver-side window. He bent down to look at Henny. He looked like a rookie, only a few years older than us maybe. I cupped my palm over the bong even harder.“What’s on your lap?” the cop asked Henny.Henny was a smart dude. He was no idiot. He’d tell the cop it was oregano, spices for our youth group’s pizza night. He’d say anything except a bag of weed, Officer.“A bag of weed, Officer,” Henny said.A bag of weed, Officer. The honesty angle. The cop will understand. He was a teenager not too long ago.“Outta the car!” Rookie Cop screamed. “Put your hands above your heads where I can see them.”I took my hand off the bong. There wasn’t any smoke left anyway. Things got hazy for a few minutes. More cops arrived. Next thing I remember was us sitting on a curb with our hands cuffed behind our backs, unable to swat away mosquitoes eating us alive. So many cop cars it looked like a murder scene. Our wallets, cell phones, bags of weed, the bong, and the pellet gun were on the hood of Henny’s car.Rookie Cop told another cop “Three Stooges here were shooting that pellet gun on private property and smoking that big bong.” Rookie Cop had his hand on his holstered gun. “I responded to a shots fired call, guns blazing. Lady reported three men on top of the windmill shooting a gun. You believe it?”The other cop swatted a mosquito on his forearm, smushing it into blood and said “Don’t look like these three’ll be curing cancer anytime soon.”So the three of us sat on the curb with our hands cuffed behind our backs like a real meeting of the minds. I stared at our warped reflections on a cop car door. Walsh was crying. He struggled to wipe his tears with his shoulder because of his glasses. He kept muttering our lives were over, that colleges wouldn’t take us with criminal records. I looked over at Henny who had this smirk on his face like getting arrested was something to cross off his bucket list. I looked at myself. My hair was cut high and tight because Mom never let me grow it out and it was so blonde I got called Village of the Damned kid at school sometimes. I’d be lying if I said part of me didn’t think getting arrested was badass. I’d also be lying if I told you part of me wasn’t scared shitless.“I need the three bags in the back of the Jeep,” I told the cops. “My parents are divorced. I’m going to my dad’s tonight.”I was always explaining my parent’s divorce to people and not because I wanted to. And I was always having to lug around my duffel bag, backpack, and PS2 in its travel case whenever I went from one house to the other.“Relax, sweetheart.” One of the cops said. “You’ll get your bags.”The cops finished searching Henny and Walsh’s cars. Read us our rights. Crammed us into the back of one cop car. Our hands still cuffed and smushed behind our backs. We weren’t buckled in with seatbelts. Rookie Cop got in the car, turned it on, and hit the gas. But the cop car was still in park. The engine revved so loud all the other cops stopped what they were doing to laugh and bust Rookie Cop’s balls. I was surprised cops made mistakes too. I thought about asking him if they taught him that in the academy. Make the other cops laugh, bust his balls back after he busted ours, you know, live a little. Cops and robbers shit. But I remained silent.Once Rookie Cop figured out how to put the car in drive, we drove off. “Born in the U.S.A.” by Bruce Springsteen was playing on the radio. Reality hit me when we passed Mom and Pat’s house. Pat was my stepdad. It was the house I’d gotten picked up from less than an hour before, after I finished an SAT practice test and Mom searched my bags and my cargo short pockets for drugs, but she didn’t check the waistband of my boxers where I stashed the half ounce. I saw our white house with green shutters. Our golden retriever, Max, ran along the Invisible Fence line at the edge of his existence. I saw the giant sun-faded American flag that Pat had fastened to a clothesline he nailed between two trees almost three years ago, the week after The Towers fell and everyone put those little plastic flags in their car windows. The flag was three thousand ghosts flailing in the August breeze. The flag was a lot of things I didn’t understand.Rookie Cop drummed the steering wheel with his thumbs, softly singing the chorus to “Born in the U.S.A.” and mumble singing the verses. Every turn felt like the game Jell-O, our weight shifting into each other with the curving hills of backcountry Fairfield as we passed big houses with nuclear green lawns. Downtown, the houses got smaller, but the lawns were still nuclear green. Bush and Kerry yard signs everywhere. Sidewalks appeared. Everyone was staring at our meeting of the minds going on in the back of that cramped cop car. Joggers. Dog-walkers. Labs and golden retrievers. Lance-Armstrong-looking wannabes on expensive bikes. Young commuter couples walking into restaurants. Moms or nannies pushing babies in strollers with ridiculously oversized wheels. Old men with War Veteran snapbacks watering their driveways with gardenhoses. A gang of kids with glow stick necklaces around their necks about to bike through the haunted graveyard. OxyContin-addicted Phishheads from our youth group who robbed us for a half pound of pot smoking cigs outside the pizza shop they work at. Even a laminated memorial picture stapled to a tree, the picture of this kid who killed himself driving drunk a year ago. All of them had eyes that followed us. I was facing the kinds of consequences Mom and Pat had tried to prevent for years. They were always saying they didn’t want to see me end up like my stepbrother Ralphie. He’d faced all kinds of consequences from drugs.We passed Fairfield train station. Commuters walked up the stairs from a northbound local. If we hadn’t gotten arrested, we’d have driven in circles smoking the bong until we ended up at McDonald’s and ordered McDoubles with Big Mac sauce off the Dollar Menu. Henny would’ve dropped me off at the train station for the last train out of Fairfield, the 11:48 local to Stamford. I’d’ve taken the forty minute train ride, transferring once in Stamford onto the local to Grand Central which stopped in Cos Cob, a neighborhood of Greenwich without mansions, where Dad lived. Every Monday night and every other weekend, I went to Dad’s where I had no curfew, unlike Mom’s where I had to be home at 10PM sharp.Rookie Cop pulled into the back of the police station as Bruce screamed at the end of the song. We were unloaded from the car in an area resembling a grocery store loading dock. Henny and I smirked when we looked at each other. Walsh didn’t smirk whatsoever. We were led single-file into the station like a sad little parade. Henny and I were being charged with possession of marijuana (our separate bags were combined, a little cop trick, but still weighed a gram and a half short of a felony) and possession of drug paraphernalia. Walsh was being charged with the same, plus something about the pellet gun. Rookie Cop led me over to the fingerprint station. As he pressed and rolled each fingertip into the ink pad, then onto their little squares on the sheet of paper, I stared at a McGruff the Crime Dog poster. I’d met McGruff once when he came to my school in third grade for a D.A.R.E. rally while a uniformed cop helped him waddle around the gym. On the walk back to our classroom, we’d all seen it. A bald man with an upper and lower body much-like Scruff’s, but human hands smoking a cigarette and eating a sandwich. Scruff’s hollow head and front paw gloves were lying on the grass beneath the man’s paws. It was like learning Santa Claus wasn’t real. Scruff couldn’t take a bite out of a sandwich, let alone crime.When the fingerprinting was over, the ink stained my fingertips, smudges I’d carry into the future. Another cop took my mugshot. It was nice not having someone telling me to smile a real smile for once which was what Mom always said. I called Dad instead of Mom for my phone call. I’d’ve rather stayed in jail than gone back to Mom’s that night and faced Pat who sometimes cared so much about me I wondered if he cared about me at all or if maybe it was some long gone version of himself he was trying to save.“Dad, I got arrested. I’m at the Fairfield Police Station,” I said.“Jesus Christ, Sean. You were arrested a month ago.”That was true. I’d been arrested the month before in the parking lot of this Connecticut fast food chain called Duchess for yelling the chorus to “Tubthumping” by Chumbawamba at the top of my lungs and also for underage drinking. It was only a summons. No handcuffs. No cell. Just twenty hours community service and some fines.“What happened?” Dad asked.“We were smoking pot.”“I’m leaving now.” Dad sighed. I heard my stepmom, Paula, in the background, saying “What is it? What happened?” Then dial tone.I was led to a cell by a desk job cop. The cement block walls in the small row of cells made everything echo. A drunk guy in a wrinkled suit with no tie was in one of the other cells. He had his hands on the bars. He reminded me of the pirate trying to coax the keys to the cell from the dog while the jail burned in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney World. “When am I getting outta here?” the drunk guy asked. Desk Job remained silent and pointed at the empty cell for me. I walked in. The bars slammed shut behind me. I was alone. I thought about how being arrested would effect the future Mom had planned for me. College, all that stuff. The future I had planned for myself didn’t exist.Walsh was led to my cell shortly after. I wanted to say something to him like it was gonna be alright, but I wasn’t sure if things would be alright. Henny was dumped in shortly after Walsh. We were quiet for a while. The air-conditioning was blasting. It was freezing.“Our lives are over,” Walsh said. “I’m eighteen. I’m gonna be charged as an adult.”“It was some pot and a pellet gun,” Henny said. “We’ll be fine. Fuck the cops.”Henny gave the finger to the camera mounted to the ceiling. I shook my head and slouched up against the cement wall. My teeth clattered from the cold. Walsh cried again. In the moment, I felt strong not crying. I felt like a man, like an adult, like I was ready for the real world, though it would still be three months until I could legally buy cigarettes and blunt wraps or fight a war for oil or vote for one moron or another. My mind back then told me when you get arrested for smoking pot and shooting a pellet gun and you don’t cry, you become a man. Walsh was the manliest of us three. That was the weird thing. I pulled my arms and my head into my t-shirt so it was a little tent. There was a buzzing sound. I peered out through one of my sleeves. Desk Job came into the hallway, opened the cell door with a set of keys, and told Walsh his parents were there. Walsh got up and told the cop his life was over. Desk Job remained silent as he led Walsh away.I thought about Ralphie again. About how he’d been arrested a couple times. About how he ended up. About how Mom and Pat were gonna say I was on the same road as him, a predestined path to destruction because they’d been saying that since they caught me with a pack of EZ-Widers and a few weed stems and seeds freshman year and acted like I was shooting dope into my jugular. I already knew drugs were bad. I also knew they were good. And cool. I already knew drugs were bad though because of how Ralphie ended up, but I wasn’t doing the kind of drug he ended up doing. I swore to God on my mother on my father on my life I never ever would.“I got the munchies.” Henny laughed as he laid back on the bunk with his hands behind his head. “Do you think we’ll get any Burger King? My cousin got Burger King when he got arrested. Or bologna sandwiches like the TV shows?”I told him I didn’t think so. I told him I didn’t think we’d get any Burger King like his cousin or bologna sandwiches like the TV shows. I needed to tell myself something too. I needed to be like, self, listen up, when you’re in a holding cell, there’s always something you need to tell yourself. You need to tell yourself don’t be the god of poor decisions. You need to tell yourself don’t be the god of anything as a matter of fact. You need to tell yourself you're powerless over most of the things you wanna control and everything you think you know about life when you’re seventeen is bologna. You need to tell yourself you’re an idiot kid dousing his life in gasoline. But you don’t tell yourself anything like that because you haven’t lived enough to know the difference between what you can and cannot change. You need to ruin your life before you can tell yourself not to ruin your life. So instead, you sit and you wait for your parents to bail you out. You sit and you wait next to a drunk man in a suit with his hands on the bars like the cell is on fire and the keys are gone. You sit and you wait for the cell to burn down around you or for the cell to burn you up with it. You sit and you wait and from the top of your world you scream fuck you down at anyone trying to save you. You sit and you wait and you scream and all you hear are your own echoes.
I was introduced to Jeffery Renard Allen’s brilliant short story collection, Fat Time(Greywolf Press, 2023), by Chaya Bhuvaneswar (prize winning author of Dancing Elephants). At the time I was a participant in her short story class. She made a habit of urging me to get out of my reading rut and explore the work of writers from divergent cultural backgrounds. Chaya had plenty of good things to say about Allen’s Fat Time, so I bought a copy.I should explain that I come from the opposite end of the cultural universe from Mr. Allen and the characters he portrays. I’m a seventy-plus-year-old retired programmer who grew up in Houston, middle class and Jewish. My reading has been a steady diet of southern gothic writers and the British and American classics. By contrast, Mr. Allen grew up in South Chicago and worked his way to a successful academic and literary career. His characters in Fat Time are people of color. Some from desperate circumstances. Some with world-class talent. Some brutalized. Some celebrated. Their stories are different as different can be from my own lived experience. And yet, I was enthralled. His stories were lyrical, literary and challenging in the best way. They took me to places I will never know.Mr. Allen responded quickly to my request for an interview, proving to be very approachable and an altogether authentic and decent fellow. He kindly agreed to answer a slate of questions. Some are about the Fat Time collection. Some are about craft. Some are about a writer’s life. Sometimes we’re lucky to connect in real time with a writer who affected us.KM: Mr. Allen, thank you for agreeing to an interview.JRA: Call me Jeff.KM: Cool. Let’s dig in. I found the writing in Fat Time beautifully lyrical. It’s also a complex and demanding read. When you compose, how much weight do you give to the reader experience?JRA: My first concern is to myself. In a nutshell, I write primarily because it’s what I do, writing is who I am. I work hard to create the best manuscript I can, something that I feel is an honest reflection of how I see the world. For whatever reason, I have a hard time telling a story straight. Also, language excites me. Language is my entry point to creation, meaning that part of my individuality as a writer gets expressed in my singular approach to words and syntax and rhythm.Some of my favorite writers—Proust, Faulkner, Nabokov, Henry James, John Edgar Wideman, Toni Morrison in Beloved—are demanding. They don’t/didn’t cut corners. (Well, James did try his hand at playwriting because he was desperate for money.) They were smarter than I am.Even if you consciously try to shape a manuscript to be more “commercial,” there is no guarantee that it will find a popular audience. As writers, we have little control over the market. Obviously, publishers spend a lot of time and money promoting a small number of books. But for me, writing is one thing, the publishing industry is another. Writing is an act of faith. All I can do is try to write the best manuscript I can.KM: How would you describe your ideal reader?JRA: They would be a person who enjoys and appreciates the pleasures and rewards of literary fiction, literary narrative. I am a political person, a progressive, a social democrat and internationalist committed to justice, for all people. Social and political concerns certainly inform my work, but they are secondary. I don’t believe that literature is an effective way to change political discourse or change the world. Not to badmouth anyone, but it seems to me that almost everyone in America now has political pretensions. It has become expected of us. I’m not interested in trends.I do my work. That said, I still hope to gain a larger readership over time. I am a huge fan of Michael Ondaatje. Somehow, he has been able to strike a balance between serious literary fiction and a popular readership. May I do the same.KM: The stories in Fat Time are vivid; the descriptions specific, often metaphorical and highly decorated. For example, the scene in “Heads” at the shawarma shop. “...the rim of the sky catching fire”, “trees bent like fingers,” “building ballooning,” and “tangled stalks of words.” All in the length of a random page. It’s lavish. When you compose, do these images tend to flow out in your initial visualization? Or are they primarily the result of considered and scrupulous revision?JRA: I’m gifted with a knack for metaphor. Simile, metaphor, and image—those come naturally to me. I think visually. (On one level I’m a failed visual artist. When I was a kid, I studied at the Art Institute of Chicago for several years.)I’m also a poet. Although I rarely write poetry these days, I still read a lot of poetry for inspiration. Perhaps I remain a poet at heart. As memory serves me, Jean Cocteau—poet, filmmaker, novelist, visual artist—said that he was a poet at heart and a poet in everything he created. The same could be said for Pier Paolo Pasolini, another multi- faceted artist.When it comes to metaphor, I would not separate that device from everything else that happens on the page. Namely, sound, music is important. I find tremendous inspiration in music, especially jazz, artists like John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Charlie Parker, among others. (On another level I’m a failed musician.) I strive for a type of syncopation in my prose. And I also strive for a type of layering, multiple directions and voicings.KM: Are you ever concerned that a metaphor might be strained or that it bogs down the flow of the narrative?JRA: In the revision process, I edit to make sure that I’m not overwriting, to avoid things like hyperbole, mixed metaphor, and sentimentality. But, as you know, writing is always paradoxical. So much goes into the initial drafts. I keep informal notebooks for every manuscript where I write down metaphors, images, sentences, and ideas. Revising is largely about concreteness and precision. As a writer I strive to be a stylist. Lyricism is not the same as purple prose.That said, I admire and appreciate all kinds of writing, including minimalists and writers who strive for a transparency of style. The important thing is to write well. And writing well is always hard. I maintain tremendous respect for anyone who gives their life to this largely thankless profession.KM: How do you begin writing a story? Do you typically start with a scene? A character? An oddity? As you’re building up a story, how do you tend to grow the narrative? Chronologically? Thematically? A Character reaction to circumstance? Some other method?JRA: I’m not sure if I have one formula for starting a story. First, let me speak to the pre- writing process. I’m in the early stages of planning a new collection of twelve stories, and perhaps the only commonality is that I want to write about some real people who interest me: Kunle Adeyanju, Virgil Abloh, Paul Robeson, Ota Benga, the Fiske Jubilee Singers, my former brother-in-law who has spent most of his life incarcerated, etc. I’m usually inspired by characters and situations. (What was life like for Paul Robeson when he lived in the Soviet Union? He never spoke about his time there. That gap in knowledge affords a space for my imagination.)When I begin writing, my general strategy is to start at a place in the story that I think I know best. That might be an image or a scene. It might be the beginning or the ending. Then I try to sketch out the overall shape of the story in a very rough and fragmented draft. At some point I begin to fill out the story scene by scene, section by section, although that filling in may not happen in strict chronological order.KM: The Fat Time stories are divided into Parts 1 and 2. What considerations went into that split and the ordering of the stories of the book?JRA: I don’t think of Fat Time as a collection of interrelated stories. I’m sure there are correspondences, but I did not plan those relationships. I had thirty ideas for stories and didn’t know if they would be one book or two or three. But I whittled those ideas down to the twelve stories in the published book.In some ways the stories are a mixed bag. Some stories are about Africa. Other stories are about the U.S.A. Some stories are set in the past. Others are set in the present or the future. Some stories are riffs on real people or inspired by real people. Others are about completely imagined people. In organizing the stories, I placed them in an order that made sense to me. I do think there is a sense of narrative momentum as you move from one piece to another. And the collection seemed to naturally fall into two parts.KM: Did the editors participate in the ordering?JRA: My editor at Graywolf Press, Ethan Nosowsky, did not make any suggestions about the ordering of the stories, although he gave many other important suggestions. However, he did with my first collection, Holding Pattern. He even suggested that I retitle the collection. (It was initially called Bread and the Land after one of the stories in the collection.)In the new collection of twelve stories I’m working on, six stories are set in the past while the other six are set in the present. Pretty simple.KM: The stories in Fat Time include historical characters. They might be considered historical fictions. I once heard Hillary Mantel give a talk. She said that in her books about Thomas Cromwell, she was deeply concerned that the narrative be historically accurate. The fiction was used to animate her characters. During the talk, she proposed a moral high ground for historical novelists. She argued that “...We shouldn’t recirculate the errors of the past generation or their prejudices. We should join in an honest project to help the public understand that history is not just a body of knowledge but an interpretive skill.” Do you feel constrained to avoid ‘alternative facts’? Is it important that a reader of Fat Time finish the story with an accurate understanding of Jack Johnston, or of the atrocities in South Africa, or the degenerate life of Francis Bacon?JRA: I don’t think of myself as a writer of historical fiction. I have no interest in writing fictional narratives that dramatize events and people of the past. Instead, I write riffs on real people, places, and situations, what some people might call alternative histories. I view this as a form of speculative fiction, more so given the supernatural elements in my fiction. I would characterize myself as a modernist in terms of technique and my concerns. But I’m also a fabulist.When I do research, I’m not driven solely by a concern for historical accuracy. I’m also looking for gaps in the historical record that will allow me to invent narrative. And I’m also looking for interesting facts that I can riff on. For example, I read that Francis Bacon lived in South Africa for a time during his early adulthood. Given my interest in Africa, that was a fact I knew I needed to use. Then I thought about something my doctor had told me years earlier. She had a photograph of herself petting a lion taken on a safari in Kenya. She explained to me that in that moment she was so terrified of the lion that she urinated on herself. In “Heads,” Bacon urinates on himself when he pets a lion in South Africa. This is often how things come together for me when I compose a story.As for Jack Johnson, I don’t think I’ve ever read anything about how he spent his time in Australia when he went there in 1908 to fight Tommy Burns for the heavyweight championship. That was the starting point for the story “Fat Time.”For the Miles Davis story, “Pinocchio,” my original plan was to write a fragmented narrative that dramatized various anecdotes I heard about Miles from various people who knew him, incidents that I had never seen in any of the biographies about him. But then other things began to make it into the story. For example, the nephew in the story is based on my friend Anthony Chisom who died tragically the way the nephew dies in the story. In addition, my Miles Davis is still alive and well. His evil deeds extend his longevity, lengthen his life, my take on the Pinocchio story. And, of course, Miles recorded a song called “Pinocchio,” which was, among other things, inspired by the Disney cartoon.KM: I found your use of time very inventive. For example, the story “Fall” begins in the middle and folds back in time as if told in a recollection. That’s preceded by “Testimonial” which reads like a prologue to “Fall.” It’s a puzzle at first. There aren’t many clues. These relative placements were disorienting, but make perfect sense on second reading. How do you arrive at the sequence of the story telling? Do you have a design in mind? Perhaps there’s an effort to replicate a dinner-table conversation where the teller leaves out important details that must be filled in with digressions. Or is the order governed by the sequence of composition? Or some other method that you could describe?JRA: Every story comes about differently. (Miles Davis advised, “Play what the day recommends.”) “Testimonial” is the earliest story in the collection since I wrote it in October 2001, a few weeks after 9/11. It was my response to 9/11 and came to me in the form of a dream.“Fall” was more planned. I saw the Nat Turner film, The Birth of a Nation, back in 2016 when it first came out, and I was so disappointed with the film that I began making plans to write my own story based on Nat Turner. Then I began to think about Nat Turner in terms of certain conflicts in the political world today. I spent a lot of time in Tanzania and learned about the horrible phenomenon where people with albinism there are hunted for their body parts. So I decided to do a kind of retelling of Nat Turner’s revolt focused on people with albinism in a fictional African country with Turner’s “confession” still serving as a model (structural) for the piece.Overall, I see every element of a story in terms of the progressive development of conflict. So, for example, I don’t think of flashbacks or past action as “exposition.” Timewise a story can move in any direction and push the conflict. Also, asides and dreams can amplify the conflict. I’m drawn to the sea of African time where past, present, and future exist all at once. And I think of reality as a layered continuum encompassing the unconscious, dreams, fantasies, altered states, and the everyday. So rarely do I think of a narrative in terms of beginning, middle, and ending. Much else can happen. For me, narrative is always mythical, archetypal. I’m not a realist. And linear narratives feel artificial to me. I’m more drawn to broken and circular narratives, what I call “shadow narration.”KM: Could I get you to think back to your days as an emerging writer? No doubt you received comments from other writers, instructors, and editors. Some helpful; some not. There seems to be two verdicts... our own and our readers. When revising, do you make pragmatic compromises on the advice of a trusted reader? How did you, or do you, go about reconciling the two?JRA: I don’t have any first readers, although I do from time to time share a recently finished manuscript with a friend. Usually, I have a strong sense that a manuscript is or isn’t working because I’m a slow writer and spend a lot of time trying to get everything right. But I’m also aware that a good editor can see things that a writer can’t. I speak from experience since I’ve had the good fortune of working with people like Ethan Nosowsky, my editor at Graywolf Press.In composing a manuscript, I think it’s important for a writer to have a strong sense of what s/he hopes to achieve and say in a manuscript before seeking out the feedback of others. I don’t think it’s the job of a first reader (or workshop cohort) to “correct” your manuscript. Part of the process of developing as a writer is coming into your own with regard to voice, vision, and value. How do you see the world? How can you articulate what you see in language that is uniquely your own? Finding answers to these questions will involve discovering what you value in literature (and in other art forms). Which writers speak to you? Why? As a developing writer, ninety percent of what you learn comes from reading and from learning how to read properly. I like craft books that focus on reading. I’ll mention two here. I really like Francine Prose’s How to Read Like a Writer. The title says it all. I’m also a big fan of Madison Smartt Bell’s Narrative Design, which focuses on structure as opposed to the workshop format.Some writers don’t believe in the workshop process because workshops can take a boilerplate approach that allows no room for individual expression or innovation. As well, some developing writers will take every opinion in a workshop as the truth and try to respond accordingly. I would advise the writer to listen to the people in the workshop who seem to understand what he is attempting to do in a manuscript.However, every writer is different. Some people rely on readers. Others don’t. As I said earlier, I don’t. To each his own.It’s worth bearing in mind that the workshop is an American invention, and that most writers in other parts of the world develop outside of the workshop system. However, an MFA writing program can have its benefits like affording one time to focus on writing and reading in a supportive community of like-minded writers.KM: You write frankly and vividly about sex between the characters in “Big Ugly Baby.” Do you have any advice for writing sex scenes? Any words of caution? Any red lines that shouldn’t be crossed?JRA: It goes without saying that it’s hard to write about sex in literary fiction or any literary narrative, for that matter. Usually, sex in literary fiction is psychological. But that can easily become a cliché. So how can you write about sex and make it fresh and interesting, without it becoming either trite or pornographic? A year or two ago I read Lady Chatterley’s Lover for the first time and was surprised that so many people at one time found the novel scandalous. I found the novel moving and powerful. Lawrence often gets a bad rap, but I think his best work—the short stories and novels like Women in Love—are as good as anything. Lawrence was doing his best to figure out love, both heterosexual and homosexual, and he tried to write about it honestly, even if he got some things wrong. His work never feels pornographic to me.But pornography can be a good thing if you’re writing satire. Satire is best when it offends. (Think of the brilliant South Park. Or think about Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, which is in large part about a dude who gets an erection whenever the Nazi’s fire a V rocket at London.) So if you’re writing satire, you may want to cross all the red lines when it comes to sex.KM: Do you consider yourself to be a polemical writer? I was wondering because “Orbits” struck me as a polemical piece. It’s a fantasy about the life of the black princess Laila. The daughter of the world’s leader, a descendant of Malcom X, who, with the aid of Moon People, have ascended to the leadership of the world government. It’s a troubled time. A porcine curse has turned black people into pigs. White devils have tails amputated and they turn green if they die. Survival of the race depends on good relations with the Moon. Is it reading too much into the story to find racial overtones in this cast of characters?J.R.A.: I’m not a polemical writer. As I said earlier, I’m a fabulist. Before anything else, “Orbits” is a work of speculative fiction. This story has a specific origin. Some years ago, I met Elijah Muhammad’s youngest daughter. She explained that when she was a girl growing up in Chicago, she and her father lived across the street from Muhammad Ali. Ali gave her her sixteenth birthday party at his home. That was the origin of the story. Something else happened. Once, I was on a bus in Brooklyn and overheard an older member of the Nation of Islam telling a teenage boy that there are people living on the moon. These people live inside the moon and have a lifespan of a hundred years. The third source of the story was an incident that I witnessed when I was in high school in the late seventies. I developed this coming-of-age story from three different sources. Other things in the story riff on the actual beliefs of the Nation of Islam.KM: Cultural norms change. For example, Flannery O'Connor wrote her satires when racism was normalized in the culture. Her stories use lashing humor and demeaning stereotypes to make moral statements. They often rile people up. It seems to me that a story like “Everything that Rises Must Converge” is still relevant to our time. Do you think someone like Flannery O'Connor is worth reading in the current cultural context? Should she still be read? Or is the preservation of her work like a statute of Bedford Forest, something to be shunned?JRA: I don’t believe in censorship. That includes “canceling” artists for their aberrant beliefs or abhorrent behavior. Just as some readers might be offended by some of the racist statements Flannery O’Connor made in interviews, other readers might object to the heavily Catholic nature of her fiction. Flannery O’Connor is one of my favorite writers. I find her stories brilliant on many levels—funny, wicked, violent, and highly symbolic and resonant.If I read a story or look at a painting or see or movie or listen to a piece of music, I take the art for what it is. I don’t know anything about the person who created it. If I’m impressed or blown away by the art, I will probably do some research and find out more about the artist. But I’m not doing so as a way of discovering some troubling facts about the artist for the purpose of dismissing the artist and his/her work. I think we need to rebel against that Stalinist approach to art and artists.KM: I’m retired now, but when I was working, I did a poor job of keeping the working hours in check. I was captive to my obligations. As you were coming up as a writer, did you ever struggle choosing between life and the project of writing? Is there any warning you might offer to young writers making their way? Any hints about the best way to balance the creative and commercial portions of the job?JRA: In an interview once, Miles Davis said something like “Music is ninety percent of my life. My wife and friends are the other ten percent.” I think here he speaks to the obsessive nature of art. My experience has been that making art is an obsession. You do it because you have to. You don’t have a choice. It’s a calling. It’s who you are.On a typical day, I wake up early, before 5:00. I walk for 90 minutes. Then I start writing. I work for four hours. I try to find time later in the day to read for at least two hours. And I also jot down notes and ideas. That’s a full day. But time has to be made for your partner, your family, and whatever else. And even when you’re not writing, you’re thinking about it, mulling over some idea or problem. In an interview, Miles Davis says, “I think about music all the time. I’m even thinking about it now.” That’s how it is, making, creating.I don’t believe there is an easy solution to the work-life balance. The reality is, if you are genuinely an artist, writing needs to be something more than a hobby. You have no choice but to maintain a schedule. The disciple of a schedule is crucial to creating work. The best you can do is work out some compromise with your partner and family. And you have to also earn a living.When I taught full-time, I asked for classes in the afternoon and evening so that I could write in the mornings. But I know some writers who can’t write for an entire semester when they teach. They completely focus on teaching.When I go away to an artist residency, I put in more than four hours a day, usually at least eight hours. I have even worked around the clock.Writing is a torturous process. The process is hard, both mentally and physically demanding. However, if I take a day off from working/writing I feel guilty. Being a writer is both a blessing and a curse.KM: Writing is often described as a lonely pursuit. However, it’s my understanding that to have a literary career today, it’s necessary to take a leading role in the marketing and promotion of your own work. Is that your experience? Do you see yourself reading on stage as you write? Does a successful writing career demand a person develop performance skills? Would you advise an emerging writer to cultivate some showmanship? Is getting a book published a little like the dog who catches a bus?J.R.A.: In today’s market, reclusive writers like J.D. Salinger, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Octavia Butler would not get published. One reality of the publishing industry today is that publishers expect you to promote your work through public appearances and on the Internet. So it is.That said, writers are not actors. And not every writer is a performer or showman. (Harlan Ellison would go to a bookstore and sit in the window writing a new story. That evening he would read the story to the public.) I would encourage a writer to simply feel comfortable and confident in public. And read your work in your natural voice, with your inflections and rhythms.It's also important to find a suitable passage to read before an audience. Not every passage is suitable to a reading. Select a passage that reads well. And remember to look at the audience from time to time. Make eye contact.KM: Before closing, I’ve got to ask, what book did Lamont pull off the shelf in “Big Ugly Baby” or Laila in “Orbits.” I’m sometimes asked by friends for short story suggestions. With emerging authors in mind, are there three short stories by contemporary authors you would consider essential reading? Are there three short story collections by contemporary authors you consider essential? What’s important about those works?J.R.A.: I recently read a terrific collection by a Bolivian writer, Liliana Colanzi’s Our Dead World. The stories were surprising and never predictable. Most serious readers by now should know Edward P. Jones’s two short story collections, Lost in the City and Aunt Hagar’s Children. Jones is like nobody else. The stories are smooth and simple on the surface, with the energy and momentum of spoken tales. He brings his characters alive on the page. I’m also a huge fan of John Keene’s Counternarratives. Keene explores a wide range of locales, forms, modes, and voices in this masterful collection.But let me not stop there. John Edgar Wideman is a master of the short story. Wideman totally reimagines the form through a narrative voice that both is and isn’t him, that both is and isn’t autobiographical. Start with his first collection, Damballah, and read all of them. The Nigerian writer Igoni Barrett is also a terrific short story writer. His stories are traditional in form, but they sparkle and are alive. The late Mavis Gallant is not a contemporary, but she is one of my favorite writers. I would recommend her collection Paris Stories, which was curated by Michael Ondaatje. She has a Chekhovian range where each story has the depth of a novel. She was a remarkable stylist and always found innovative ways to approach the short story form.KM: Thanks Jeff. You’ve been very generous. This has been a wonderful experience.J.R.A.: No sweat. Happy to do it.
I always thought I was a science project. Maybe all girls are. Today I listen too hard and become a sound reflector, sound detective. I click my converse and my head splits like Zeus. Through my skull my alloy daughter emerges. She is like me but picks up gossip frequencies. Particular metal. Flagellum and scape. Dipoles and cables. A sci-fi fascinator for prom. Now more radio than girl. I lean, press, pick up the waves of other girls. Someone said the trees were moving, but it was the world. Silence does not exist here on the moon, in this girls bathroom. Talk, talk, talk. Some of it alien. Who is wearing a bra that doesn’t need one? I search for my name in the washroom static: somebody fell down the stairs at a party, somebody had sex, somebody is too messed up to go back to class, someone is climbing out the window, someone’s period, someone studied and failed, someone talked too much shit. My name isn’t on the air today. I will be patient and ritualistic. I will take tests instead of falling out of the nest. One day soon I will be on the girl radio and they’ll send my name up like a rescue flare asking me how I got out.
Since I went to VoidCon 2023, I’ve pretty much been catching up on the books I acquired there. And the problem only got worse after VoidCon 2024. Organized by Evan Dean Shelton and Edwin Callihan, VoidCon is a curated convention for weird fiction and weird horror, including literature, art and music. Art’s that, like, “wouldn’t it be nice if it found commercial success” but nobody’s expecting it to. The void aesthetic is irreverent and fun while dark and existentially horrid, and militantly encourages the participation of diverse voices on their own terms. So as an artificial way of imposing order on this “Recommends” list, I’m choosing to focus on Void-related works. Otherwise, there’s just too much out there to love. Joe Koch, The Shipwreck of Cerberus(self-published limited edition, 2023)Joe Koch is known around the void as the “King of Horror,” and The Shipwreck of Cerberus is the perfect example of why. It’s adorably small, like a Filthy Loot book, and a Joe Koch limited edition. He was kind enough to set aside my numbered copy so I could pick it up at VoidCon 2023. The action revolves around Rex, who has some interesting sexual encounters with a green woman and an actor-father figure whose decapitated head Rex has an established relationship with. The magic of the book is how you can open it to any page and read a beautiful sentence that evokes an immanent and other-worldly image. Joe Koch gives zero fucks about making it easy for the reader, because he is more concerned with being superb.Brian Allen Carr, Edie & the Low-Hung Hands (Small Doggies Press, 2013)I got this from Brian at VoidCon 2024 because it’s the one nobody else has and holy fuck, Brian Allen Carr is good. This is a short novel about a guy with very long arms just killing the fuck out of everybody, but the emotional sincerity of this character, his trials and tribulations, and his love for Edie ring so true. There’s a category of art that’s just the plain and simple statement of something soul crushing, and Brian Allen Carr is in there, along with Fred Eaglesmith, Neil Young, and Cormac McCarthy. I also feel a bit like Carr has tricked me into empathizing so hard with this long-armed murderer. But I am with him, for him, and I don’t care what he has done. I believe it was inevitable, understandable, and he should be lauded as a genuine hero in an unkind world—a tragic hero. OF Cieri, Lockdown Laureate(Castaigne Publishing, 2023)I picked up this collection from Castaigne Publishing after reading OF’s Backmask, which I gather got a whole lot more attention than these stories. There’s one blurb on the back from Evan Dean Shelton, who is the publisher. But damn, people, read this book. It’s beautifully illustrated by Rachel Lilim. The paper is good quality, and the cover can take a harder beating than anything I’ve had printed on demand. And then there are the stories. It’s the kind of grimy literature that makes you feel the best and worst parts of being alive simultaneously. It’s isolation and social performance and an interiority you’d be privileged to access and oh wait you can if you just read the book. I read the whole thing on one plane trip. OF has style plus content plus a gracefulness of expression that propels you forward in the text. I loved every minute of it.Michael Tichy, Wound of the West(Castaigne Publishing, 2023)I traded Tichy for this collection of “Four Harrowing Tales from the Draw” at VoidCon 2023, and goddamn, Tichy can write. The West is the old timey American west, and the wound is a scalping that the character in the first story survives. Tichy writes like someone who’s been scalped and left for dead and then come to accept it. There’s a gravity to it and a peace. Just read this: “Will is eating the same hare, drinking the same muddy water, sweeping the creeping sand out of a doorway that you stare at each day and hope, pray that some shadow comes to break the light apart. That someone will darken that doorway and kill you or save you, because you can’t do either yourself, and at this point both come to the same.” It’s devastating how at home with despair he is. Highly fucking recommended.Justin Lutz, Give Unto Us(Ghoulish Books, 2024)I picked up Justin Lutz’s novella at VoidCon 2024, after I previously wrote a blurb for his short story collection Gone to Seed, at the request of Ira from Filthy Loot. Give Unto Us is a hole story—a family (mom, dad, and toddler) move into a lakeside house that turns out to have a sandpit in the backyard, and the sandpit exchanges items they drop in for items it acquired from the previous owner before his unexpected death. Of all the void books, Justin Lutz seems pretty normal, in the sense I could see this selling copies. I would definitely watch this movie, and I would gleefully watch the part where Trevor just fucking boots his toddler (away from the sandpit), because Lutz understands that it’s funny when children get hurt. What jumped out at me about this book and from talking to Justin is how much he loves his wife. There’s a capacity to write characters and plots that I think he gets from the fact that he just loves his wife to death, and it’s obvious from the first page all the way to the acknowledgments. I don’t know; it’s just so fucking nice to read a woman who was written by a man who actually fucking loves his wife, and I think that makes Lutz a better writer—and a better person—than a lot of other horror figures.Rios de la Luz, An Altar of Stories to Liminal Saints(Broken River Books, 2023)I will always associate the Broken River Collective with the void, because they were well-represented in its inaugural year, even though I didn’t meet Rios until a few months later at AWP. Her book of short stories feels like the rose+eyeball+anatomical heart being pierced by the fiery dagger that graces the back cover. Her prose is piercing, impossible, and bloody. The back of the book says that the stories within were inspired by motherhood, and she does not hold back. It’s the lyrics of music inspired by the heavens and the answer to the question of what if emotions had viscera. David Simmons, Eradicator (Apocalypse Party, 2025)Simmons is a grotesque master of ceremonies with a heart of gold. He had the crowd mesmerized when he read a story called “Whole Time” at VoidCon 2023. (You can listen to it on the Agitator Patreon site for free.) After that, I read the Ghosts of East Baltimore and Ghosts of West Baltimore set, which tell the tale of Worm, a recent felon whose release catalyzes a series of absurd and gory events. So obviously when I had the opportunity to read the manuscript for Eradicator, I jumped at it. Simmons is hitting at the extremes with this one. It’s hilarious, disgusting, relatable… if you laughed at the end of The Substance, check out Eradicator, forthcoming 2025. Alexandrine Ogundimu, The Longest Summer(CLASH Books, 2023)I feel like Alexandrine Ogundimu should be on every list. For me, she’s the third in a triangle of horror writing grounded in filth and despair, alongside Elle Nash and BR Yeager. This novel is hard to summarize, because its effect has nothing to do with the plot and everything to do with the fact that Ogundimu’s sentences feel like they were only made possible after a hard run through a deep pool of pain and self-reflection. It’s biting and revelatory in a way that, “This is a book about someone accused of stealing from a store that seems very similar to but legally distinct from Hot Topic” doesn’t capture. Alexandrine participated in the void prompts leading up to VoidCon 2023 (This was a series of writing prompts using a word-of-the-day distributed by group chat on Twitter.) Maybe next year she’ll show up for real.Stanley Stepanic, A Vamp There Was(Encyclopocalypse Publications, 2024)This book has three parts – the first part epistolary fiction about a man named Middy who falls in with a vamp who happens to be a vampire, and this fiction is supplemented by historically accurate facts about Fredericksburg, Virginia in the 1920’s. This is followed up by a scholarly essay on how the “vamp” character of the time is conceptually distinct from a vampire but certainly meant to recall the bloodsucker’s image. Rising feminism finally made women threatening enough to take on the role. The title is a nod to the 1915 film A Fool There Was, starring Theda Bara as the seductress who ruins the life of an unsuspecting family man. The rest of the book gives short biographies of notable vamps of the time, which reminded me of Debra Nails’ The People of Plato. This book shines in how it provides the explicit historical context for its own story, and I’ll always remember this aha moment from when Stepanic is putting the pieces together for me about how, according to the historical record, woman becomes monstrous simultaneously as she becomes capable of exerting her own agency—that for a whole movement in popular culture, becoming master of one’s own fate and becoming a monster are the same thing.Honourable mentions to Evan Dean Shelton and Edwin Callihan, whose books I blurbed. (You can go read about them on the publishers’ websites.)
The factory closed the week before Christmas. The owner had moved his operations to Bangladesh. Emanuel had spent eleven years on the assembly line. It was the only job he knew. Marta, his wife, could no longer cut hair. Her condition made her hands tremble to the point that her clients had begun to complain about nicks on their necks and ears. They were three months behind on rent, the electricity was shut off. Their kids were eating crackers and trekking through the snow with holes in their shoes.Emanuel had once had luck betting on football matches. That ended, as all good things do. He owed Ahmad, his bookie, three thousand francs. The man had already taken his scooter. Now the threats began.“Your wife is very lovely,” he said. “It would be a shame to put her to work, if you know what I mean.” “You know my situation,” Emmanuel said.“Meet me tonight,” Ahmad said, “and your problem will be solved.”Emmanuel tucked the children into bed, kissed his wife, and put on his threadbare coat.A wet snow was falling. Sloshy puddles had appeared on the street. The air was cold enough to make Emmanuel’s teeth chatter. He slipped into a dive bar he had often passed but never entered. Some men were yelling at the barmaid. Emmanuel ordered a glass of whiskey and downed it in a gulp. He ordered two more and found himself quickly drunk. Ahmed was waiting on the street in the posh neighborhood he’d directed Emmanuel to. “What do you want?” Emmanuel said.Ahmad lit a cigarette. “Not far from here lives a banker. You’re going to rob him.”They walked a few blocks and stopped in the shadows of the hedgerows surrounding a grand house.“See that window?” Ahmad said. “Climb in. Go up the stairs. The bedroom is on the right. In the banker’s closet, you’ll find a large, gilded box filled with his dead wife’s jewelry. All you have to do is get the box and bring it here.”“How do you know this?”“In another life, I was a woodworker. I built his cabinets.”Emmanuel clambered through the window. The house was dark but for a sliver of moonlight through the window. In the living room, a portrait of the banker and his wife hung above the mantle. Emmanuel crept up the stairs and snuck into the bedroom. The banker was snoring loudly. There was something ridiculous about the old man’s head on its enormous pillow. Emmanuel knew that if he didn’t take the box this very moment, he never would. Do this for your family, he thought. The box sat glimmering on a shelf. He snatched it quickly, too quickly, and slammed his knee into the closet door.“Who’s there?” the banker said. Emmanuel’s foot snagged on the rug. No sooner had he fallen than the banker punched his back. Somehow in the dark, Emmanuel found the box and smashed the banker’s face. The old man staggered back and crumpled to the floor.“I’m so sorry!” Emmanuel cried. “I’m so sorry!”The banker’s eyes fluttered, his lips bubbling with spittle and blood. “Help me, please!”Emmanuel wanted nothing more than to get away, but the banker gripped his coat. The old man was surprisingly strong. Emmanuel had to wrench himself loose, finger by finger. He ran down the stairs and out the door. Ahmad stood across the street, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Emmanuel thrust the box into his hands. Ahmad opened it and smiled.“Your debt is settled,” he said. Emmanuel stumbled home and collapsed to the bathroom floor. He lay there for a long time, praying that God would not punish a man in this position. After a time, he felt better. He undressed and crawled into bed beside his wife.“Are you okay?” she said.“Go back to sleep,” he said.
In town there were a series of murders. Each attack occurred beneath the almond tree spiking through the pavement in the center of Second Ave. No one seemed to care. Everyone walked the sidewalks as if nothing strange had happened. They chatted about the weather and watched the mailman wander the knotted maze of the streets. They met up for brunch and dinner and played games with their children and dogs in the park. My wife and I were terrified. We drove to the supermarket using an alternate route each day. We avoided our friends on the weekends in fear of their possible secret lives of violence. We breathed the flakes of obsidian in the air and vomited blood into the downstairs toilet each night. It was a strange year. In December, the wagonwheel of reeking bodies disappeared underneath a jagged tarp of glistening snow. The engines of our cars screamed upon starting. Our neon lips shimmered within the milky glow of the chilled sunlight.
