Revisiting Amie Whittemore’s story from the Spring 2020 inspired in me a nostalgic pang–for a time when sequestering oneself was a choice–and a renewed appreciation for the piece itself. Amie packs a lot into 307 words. I think you’ll enjoy “Love Hermits” and my brief interview with Amie. [VV]

How did this story come to be?

This story originated with a challenge from my friend, the fiction writer Alexander Lumans. He was working on a 300-word flash story for an Electric Literature contest a couple years ago and I was in a writing rut, so I decided I would also try to write a 300-word story for the contest—which meant writing several 300-word stories! “Love Hermits” came out of that process (and, fun side note, the story I submitted to the contest, “The Five Love Languages Guide to Breaking Up,” was a finalist and eventually found publication elsewhere!). The moral of this story is: find a writer friend who will challenge you when you need a push.

Is there an aspect of fiction writing you find particularly challenging, i.e. getting started, story beginnings, middles, endings?

I find every aspect of fiction challenging. I think the hardest element for me is plot: I love plots, yet I find myself struggling to write them, which results in stories languishing on the backburner for years at a time. And yet I also am incapable of writing deeply lyrical stories driven by atmosphere, character, interiority. I do, in the end want things—often quiet, domestic things as in “Love Hermits”—to happen. Thus, I spend a lot of time being haunted by my characters and their unfinished stories. Often I require an outside impetus—a contest deadline, or a friend who is willing to read a finished piece—to overcome my fiction writing anxieties.

What are you working on now?

Right now, I am extremely grateful to be at Oak Spring Garden Foundation (OSGF) for a writing residency and working on a poetry manuscript. I am still in the early stages of looking at the poems I’ve written over the last few years and seeing how they work together, but I feel fairly confident that this collection will center around some familiar obsessions for me: dreams, love, plants, animals, and climate grief.

Do you have any current or recent projects or publications you’d like to promote?

As part of my poet laureateship for the city of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, I’ve launched two projects I’d love to promote! The first is Dream Geographies, which is an arts collaborative that fosters collaborations between dreamers, poets, and visual artists (though it may evolve to include other genres). We ask for descriptions of dreams to share with poets and visual artists, who create poems/artwork inspired by the dreams for our online gallery. Our second round of poets and artists are at work creating our ‘second dream’ gallery, which will debut in December!

The second is Write with Pride, a series of workshops and open mics offered to LGBT+ youth in middle Tennessee. This project came to life thanks to the Academy of American Poets, which awarded me a 2020 Laureate Fellowship this year. Through this fellowship support, I am able to partner with local literary nonprofits and organizations, The Porch, Southern Word, and Poetry in the Boro, to foster spaces for LGBT+ youth to write about their experiences and connect with each other.

What is the last thing you read that impressed the heck out of you? 

I adored Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible and read it in approximately 36 hours just last week. It’s beautiful, incisive, and strange, like all her work, in its exploration of spirituality/religion, climate grief, and how we connect to each other and the world.

***

Amie Whittemore is the author of the poetry collection Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press). Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her poems and prose have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Nashville Review, Smartish Pace, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is the reviews editor for Southern Indiana Review and teaches English at Middle Tennessee State University. Her website is http://www.amiewhittemore.com.

Michele Lombardo’s story from the Spring 2020 issue resonated with me–and not just because I’m a former online dater myself. I invite you to read “The Love Trigger” and my brief interview with Michele. [VV]

Toulouse Reading

How did this story come to be?

I was actually at a kid’s party when the idea sparked. Another mom was telling me about the trials and travails of a 20-something in her office who was navigating the online dating world. At one point she remarked that dating apps should allow people to give each other ratings, just like Amazon, and I found myself really intrigued by the idea. I immediately began wondering what would happen to humanity if such a thing existed and what the person who brought it into existence would be like.

How does “The Love Trigger” fit with the rest of your work?

It nestles in there nicely. I have a thing for strong, heavily flawed female protagonists. I tend to write a lot about the various ways in which women collide with societal expectations. Carol, as you can probably imagine, is a polarizing character. I can’t tell you how many times the word “unlikeable” came up when I was workshopping this story. Because, of course, female characters are supposed to be likeable even though the same expectations don’t exist for male characters. But I think the fact that she doesn’t conform to that allows her to tap into the zeitgeist of now a little, too. She is an unapologetically “nasty” woman with a vulnerability to her that she’ll do just about anything to conceal. And she does things we all dream of doing, like stabbing an ex in the leg with a pen. We all do dream that, right? Not just me?

Carol’s voice is so strong. Did you consider third-person POV?

I didn’t, actually. I think her voice developed very strongly early on, so I just went with it. Third person limited POV probably would’ve worked, too. But I’m glad she narrates the story. I’m glad that readers get a heavy dose of her unmediated voice. I probably wouldn’t change that aspect of the story if I were to rewrite it.

This story made me snort with laughter. Does humor come naturally to you? Do you think you’re a funny person?

God, no. I do have a dark sense of humor that seeps into a lot of my pieces. But I’m no comedian. I don’t tell jokes and I don’t see myself as an especially funny person. I’m more like the kind of person who thinks of the witty retort five minutes after the conversation ends. So I might think the funny things, yes, but it’s usually not at a conversational pace. Good for writing with humor, not great for speaking with humor.

What makes you laugh?

Cats. Occasionally people, but mostly cats.

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Recently, I talked with Afsheen Farhadi, whose hilariously dark “Green” can be found in our Fall 2014 issue (an excerpt can be found here as well). Here, he reveals his own writing process, some of his favorite recent books, and even teases who he might cast if “Green” were to be made into a movie. Afsheen has also recently completed a new novel, “Voices of Oblivion.”

Read the entire Q & A.

[SM]

“Green screen”
Sam Greenhalgh, used under CC BY-SA 2.0

Recently, assistant editor David Rawson posed a number of questions to Benjamin Reed about his story, “Surprise Me With Something Familiar” (Spring 2007).  Benjamin responded with generosity, insight, and hilarity – way more than we could have hoped for.

How does this story fit into the rest of your work?

I remember it was one of the first couple times I thought I’d written a “polished” piece. But back then I didn’t read a lot of literary journals and I had a really naive perspective of contemporary fiction. I think I judged all my manuscripts in terms of whether or not they might get accepted by Glimmer Train.

How did this story come to be?

I was a bartender for a long time, in a small, dark lounge on Red River, what used to be the very edge of downtown Austin. It was so dark, all the light was from a few dozen red venetian candles and the glowing ends of people’s cigarettes. We poured beers practically by feel, and mixed drinks by sound and texture. We hated making white Russians. Cream–really it’s half-and-half–froths when you shake it. It expands. It gets everywhere, all over your hands, the bar, the bar mats, your shirt, the upside-down glass you use to cap your shaker tin–everywhere. And after you make a white Russian you have to rinse everything extra, which clouds the blue water of the sanitatizing sink. And usually the people ordering them were amateurs, posers, or young men who over-identified with The Big Lebowski.

As such, the manager was constantly “forgetting” to buy half-and-half. So we were always being prompted to suggest a replacement. Usually this would be Bailey’s. One night, we started joking about making white Russians with breast milk. One of our bartenders had just come back to work after having a baby, and was always talking about lactating and pumping. I asked her if she would be up for a donation. Just a few ounces. She said she’d think about it. When I asked again later she replied with a decisive “No.” I assume she’d mentioned it to her husband, and he clearly did not think it was as amusing an idea as I did.

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Of this story, appearing in the Fall 2011 issue, writer Anthony Varallo recalls:

I wrote “Think of Me and I’ll Know” during a time when I was writing a lot of short-short fiction, for reasons that still aren’t clear to me now, but likely have something to do with avoiding the novel I was working on at the time.  The working title for the story was “All Quiet on the Western Front” (great title, but already taken, alas) and the story ran about five pages or so, a story about a guy who gets into an argument with his wife, goes to the library, recalls reading All Quiet on the Western Front in high school, goes home, and finds his son’s lost cat.  The end.

I thought it was an okay story, but, at five pages, it both seemed too long and too short.

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Jamey Bradbury responds to a few question about her story, which appears in the Fall 2011 issue.

How did this story come to be? When is its birthday?

This story’s honorary birthday is Thanksgiving because the idea for the story was born out of a real-life trip I took to Trout Lake (on the Resurrection Pass Trail in Alaska) over Thanksgiving Day weekend: Four days, a weekend-high temperature of -5 degrees, and an incident during which my co-campers nearly burned down our public-use cabin.

If this story was a bird, what kind would it be?

The state bird of Alaska: the ptarmigan. (A male ptarmigan’s mating call sounds like he’s laughing at a bad joke.)

What was the last thing you read that took the top of your head off?

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett. I did not expect to be swept away by this book, but it completely transported me.

What’s the best piece of advice you would give to your younger writing self?

There’s never going to be enough time, so steal every minute you can.

Read an excerpt.

It’s hard to disagree with that.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that this comment was yanked from the middle of  a detailed answer to a question regarding the writer’s compulsions that appeared in the fall 2011 feature, “Ten Questions for Kellie Wells.”

While we’re unsure how Kellie feels about Lego (a topic for another interview perhaps), she does have quite a bit to say about dogs, motifs, omniscience, and sentences.

Read the entire Q & A.

[VV]

“Innovative Design”
Peter Trimming, used under CC BY-SA 2.0