Fringe, the Noun that Verbs Your World

Marvin “Popcorn” Sutton died on March 16, 2009. Of Popcorn’s influence on The Last Moonshiner, author Lydia Ship had this to say:

“He built his own coffin and kept it in his spare room. Deep in the mountains with his still, he once ran out of food and ate ketchup and grubs for dinner – damn good, he said. He made moonshine, drank it, and drove off-road delivering it (or off-road, into-tree). Popcorn also fought a bully. The fight interested me. That’s why I wrote about him.”

Let’s get WORKING! The first piece in Fringe’s themed issue – Working – is Someone Else’s Ivy, an essay close to my heart. This is not so simply because I published it, but because I have lived the life she writes about: food service. You needn’t have swirled whipped cream on someone’s mocha before to appreciate the description of the job, though. In fact, you don’t even need to have customer service experience. All you need is to want to be able to do your job the way you know the job should be done. That is, not necessarily how your boss wants it done. Amy Clark’s tale of a worker’s revolt is the stuff dreams are made of.

Fringe Working Issue artist Martin Askem graces us with his inspiring artist statement:

The Saviour of Modern Art

I am a self taught, self developed, self managed and motivated artist who has been practicing for just over one year.

I am without doubt the most exciting artist of the modern generation with my work being rated as powerful as Salvador Dali’s work by many respected art critics and organisations.

I have a vision that I pursue with more vigour and aggression than the late Picasso had in his early days in France. My vision is to be recognised as the greatest living artist in the work and indeed the saviour of modern art.

I have a creative depth of mind that cannot be surpassed and I have future works planned that will not only exceed the currently considered masters but indeed all masters from all time.

My work speaks for itself and will continue to do so.

When this and future generations talk about art, one name will stand above all and that name will be mine

Martin Askem

- – - – - – - -

He also sheds some light on two of the pieces featured in Fringe:

Ten Decima Street

A dedication to my grandparents Decima & Charlie, A lady... more »

All writers have their quirky routines, favorite pens, preferred work spaces, writers block remedies. They also, whether they know it or not, have their own set of rules and regulations they try to follow each time they sit down to their blank notebook or empty computer screen. Writing is an exercise in solitude–most writers write for themselves, following their own voices and instincts. However, it’s not a territory free from expectations and rules–writing is not, as many may believe, a free-for-all.  If there’s one thing writers like to do, it’s talking about, reading about, and writing about writing. It is in hearing others’ rules and habits and mantras that writers find a sense of community and the feeling that we are not all alone in this crazy endeavor.

Which is why The Guardian’s recent two-part story, “Ten Rules for Writing Fiction,” is so compelling. Inspired by Elmore Leonard, the paper asked 29 writers (including Leonard) to list their own rules for writing. While it’s fascinating to get a voyeur’s look into the minds and habits of some of the most prominent and talented writers of our time, it’s also amazing that so many of the rules diverge and contradict and then... more »

Editor, poet, and graphic designer Bryan Roth talked with Fringe’s Rachel Dacus via email about his own work. Roth writes, mainly in free verse, about relationships, pivotal moments in time when everything can change, and regret about the choices we make in those pivotal moments. He’s well-known in Colorado for reading his own and others’ poems from memory.

The first part of this interview covers the purpose of poetry and how to edit a collection.

Let’s look at your poem “What the Gambler Knows.” What gave you the idea for this poem?

What the Gambler Knows
I'm a driver, I'm a winner.
Things are gonna change—I can feel it.
—Beck, "Loser"

One day you'll wake up,
realize what your life has been reduced to—
what, in the end, each day becomes—
is simply one more chance
to roll the dice,
one more quick recalculation
of what you're up against,
what you still have left to lose.

***

It’s been said that poets write about their obsessions. I think, to a large extent, that’s true of most poets, and certainly true of myself. One of my greatest “obsessions” is time, and particularly with how everything hangs in the balance at any given moment—really, how every moment of every day—you have... more »

 We lost one of the American literary greats this past week. Fringe celebrates J.D. Salinger’s ineffable legacy with posts from writers who have been affected by his work. 

Bostonist co-editor Kerry Skemp writes:

I found out about J.D. Salinger’s death in that least Salingerian of forms: the Facebook status update. Discovering the death of a beloved but notably reclusive author of classic books through an always-changing, often-inane website was jarring, but not necessarily surprising: just the day before, another friend’s status update had alerted me of Howard Zinn’s passing. I was saddened by these deaths, but reassured, in a way, to know that others cared about these men too, that I was in a community of concerned individuals who wanted to carry on the legacy of these men. This saved me the responsibility of mourning alone, of living up to their legacy. I wasn’t alone. But was Salinger?

My first impulse after reading that status update was to run home and hug my copies of Salinger’s books—to make sure that they were okay, that they wouldn’t disappear in the wake of their author’s death. I continued, though, to feel strange about the disconnect between the painstakingly crafted, long-lasting works of a notoriously solitary author, and the ephemeral nature... more »

Editor, poet, and graphic designer Bryan Roth lives in northern Colorado, where he teaches poetry workshops and classes, helms his own design company, and is in the process of launching a new poetry press. Fringe’s Rachel Dacus emailed to interview Bryan to pick his brain about the purposes and occasions for poetry and about poetry editing. He writes, mainly in free verse, about relationships, pivotal moments in time when everything can change, and regret about the choices we make in those pivotal moments. He’s well-known in Colorado for reading his own and others’ poems from memory.

In the second installment in this interview, which will go live next Wednesday, Roth and Dacus will talk about some of his poems.

How did you become interested in writing poetry?

In high school, my freshman English teacher in gave everyone an assignment to write a poem. I had no idea what to write about. The girl next to me in English class was constantly complaining about math class, so I wrote a poem complaining about how hard algebra is, which was ironic because math was my best subject, and English—not so much, up to that point. Long story short, the teacher liked the poem so much,... more »

We lost one of the American literary greats this past week. Fringe celebrates J.D. Salinger’s ineffable legacy with posts from writers who have been affected by his work.

Fringe Editor-in-Chief Lizzie Stark writes:

For me, Catcher in the Rye represents two major touchstones of my literary life. The first was the spring break of my sophomore year in high school, when it became the first required reading book I had ever liked. As a student at a private all-girls school, I felt that I understood Holden’s beef with the phonies, and as a teen girl, like all teen girls, who felt inept at fitting in, I related to his outsider status. I  picked up Franny and Zooey and found myself unsuccessfully trying to utter the proverbial “OM”, as if it had the power to shock me out of teenage malaise. The small format of the books, their plain white,  slightly bumpy covers made me feel like I was reading something important, ancient, adult.

Years later, during the summer after my sophomore year of college, I read Catcher again on a trip to West Africa to visit my cousin in the Peace Corps. I’d made a tactical error in bringing a book about privileged white boys to one of... more »

I’ve always found that, other than dumping off all my old clothes in the Goodwill cart, helping people can be a lot harder than I expect it to be. Sometimes the obstacles people face just make me want to sit down on the floor and cry. Sometimes I simply can’t make a difference. Sometimes people don’t want to be helped. Meaghan Winter writes of these internal struggles in her essay Grown. Winter follows the life of one woman in the women’s crisis center where she volunteers. Through their interactions she sheds light on the feelings of anger, joy, frustration, and impotence that come with the simple desire to help somebody.

  We lost one of the American literary greats this past week. Fringe celebrates J.D. Salinger’s ineffable legacy with posts from writers who have been affected by his work. 

Claire Blechman writes: 

When I lived in New York, I was friends with a girl who worked at Harold Ober Associates, J.D. Salinger’s literary agency. We asked her one night (over Arepas at a tiny restaurant in the Village) what it was like on the inside. She told us the agency received bags and bags of fanmail for Salinger, which languished unopened in the office.  

 There was in fact a specific list of instructions on how to deal with Salinger-related issues. Most were variations on a theme: don’t ask, don’t tell. His address was a state secret: only two people in the whole agency knew it. The only mail he ever received from them was residual checks.

 “J.D. Salinger hates you,” she said. Me, and you, and everyone you know.

 I decided to read Catcher in the Rye my senior year of college. I was lifeguarding with a particularly vacant muscle-head from the lacrosse team who went by his last name: Pearl. I asked Pearl what the last book he read was. “Catcher in the Rye,” he said. It was his... more »

An interview with T.L. Crum, author of Bloodsuckers.

Fringe: What was the inspiration for this piece?

I’m writing a short story collection about people living ordinary lives in the face of extraordinary physical conditions – everything from face-blindness and cystic fibrosis to the more common (but no less extraordinary) alcoholism or depression – so that’s initially why I latched onto the idea of writing about leech therapy. Oh man, that’s a terrible pun.

Fringe: How often do you write? Do you do it on a schedule?

Because my husband wins the Most Supportive Husband/Best Daddy award, I’m able to write about six out of seven days per week. Since I started my novel, my goal is to write 2,000 words per day, minimum 1,000. Some days, that’s a lot to ask of my carpal tunnel, though.

Fringe: How did you get into writing? How long have you been writing?

I started off writing screenplays in college (incidentally, I majored in business). I wrote six mediocre features before I decided that I wanted to try my hand at a short story. As soon as I set my very first scene – a mother on a boat holding a dissolvable urn – I was addicted. Finally, I could... more »

We lost one of the American literary greats this past week. Fringe celebrates J.D. Salinger’s ineffable legacy with posts from writers who have been affected by his work.

Ashley Peterson eulogizes J.D. in her own words:

The first Salinger enthusiast I knew, which is to say, the first person I knew who read beyond Catcher in the Rye, was Sarah Worden.  We met in eighth grade drama class, shared a love of Dum Dum lollipops, and by twelfth grade were best friends.

By college I too had read past Catcher, and one summer decided to read even beyond what Salinger had allowed Little, Brown to provide.  Blissfully and thankfully unaware of the possibilities of interlibrary loan, a friend and I traveled to a handful of Virginia college libraries chasing copies of stories from McCalls, The Saturday Evening Post, The New Yorker.  We came close to catching them all, I believe.

Last Thursday, I went home and read the first half of “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.”    Is there a more comforting literary presence than Muriel Fedder’s father’s uncle, the tiny man in the silk top hat?  With his cigar, his broad smile, and his outsized farewell gestures buoying the rumpled Buddy Glass he called... more »

We lost one of the American literary greats this past week. Fringe celebrates J.D. Salinger’s ineffable legacy with posts from writers who have been affected by his work.

Today, Laura van den Berg, author of What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us,  remembers what it was like to read Salinger as a teenager and as an adult:

Growing up, I was a decidedly non-literary child—the kind who had to be routinely prodded to complete assigned readings for school—but that began to change when I encountered J.D. Salinger, the first writer I fell in love with on my own volition. Like many others, I felt an immediate kinship with Catcher in the Rye. At the time, I felt as though the book, with its brilliant exploration of coming-of-age angst and loneliness, had been written for me; I longed to be like Holden, a see-er of the truth in a world populated by phonies—which is, I suppose, as good a reason as any to become a writer.

When I revisited Catcher in the Rye in later years, my view of Holden grew more nuanced. I could see that he was unreliable, at once see-er of the truth and also in the grips of a kind of blindness. And... more »

We lost one of the American literary greats this past week. Fringe celebrates J.D. Salinger’s ineffable legacy with posts from writers who have been affected by his work.

Today, Vernacular editor Alexis Hauk reminisces about the recluse:

I admit, I hadn’t cracked a Salinger novel since early college when, on a trip to Italy the summer after freshman year of college, I poured all that over-privileged “existential longing” of mine into Franny and Zooey. Those two months from Milan to Palermo in a bus were some of the sweatiest, most alcohol-drenched of my life. And I often wonder if, had we all had not been in such a perpetually hungover, dunder-headed, 19-year-old haze for so much of the trip: would we have admired and appreciated the Pantheon a little more?  Or Pirandello’s grave?  Or the head of St. Catherine?

Just as I wonder about that trip, I sometimes question if—by reading his first and seminal work, Catcher in the Rye, as an adolescent—Salinger’s skill as a writer was completely lost on me, unfairly relegated to a “juvenile” classification early on.  Eudora Welty, no slouch herself, called Salinger’s writing “original, first-rate, serious and beautiful.”  But all I really remember is how I could, like, totally relate. With sober... more »

This week in Vintage Fringe: “rest : stop” and two more poems by Arlene Ang, of Issue 6 fame. Fringe poetry editor Anna Lena Phillips interviewed Ang by email to find out what she’s been up to of late. Her responses to our lightning round indicate that cake is the winner.

It’s been over three years since your work appeared in Fringe. Looking back on the poems, what do you notice?

Reading them again, the Czech patient and Czech scientist jumped out to me. I didn’t even notice they were there separately in two different poems. It’s like the Cold War all over again. Makes me want to check on their whereabouts now in my other poems. There could be a story there.

“That time my upper lip swelled up” made me smile. It was one of those desperate moments where I had to write something quick at the ITWS [Inside the Writer's Studio] forum. There’s a challenge there where you have to produce a poem every day for thirty days . . . and that morning I woke up with a very itchy, swollen lip. The undercurrent of urgency here just brings me back to that day. I never realized it would... more »

 We lost one of the American literary greats this past week. Fringe celebrates J.D. Salinger’s ineffable legacy with posts from writers who have been affected by his work. 

 Fringe contributor Justine Tal Goldberg writes: 

  J.D. Salinger was my first love. He came to me in high school, between assigned readings of Shakespeare, Hemingway and Camus, and long before those other literary giants of college—Joyce, Faulkner and Yeats. These authors stole my heart, passing my affections between them like the college boys I dated, but Salinger stayed by my side. He was a good friend among acquaintances, a relationship among flings, and the voice of reason when my own characters threatened to lie.

              As a teenager, I appreciated Salinger’s honesty, his self-deluded characters who through seamless narrative are revealed for the phonies they are. (Can you blame me? It was high school after all.) As a young woman, I was deeply moved by his faith in childhood, his authorial finger trained on the grown-ups, those poor folks utterly devoid of magic. Now, I’m sorry to say that I hadn’t thought about Salinger much until yesterday, of course, when I learned of his death and sat down to reflect upon his life.

              Is it trite to say that I feel like I’ve lost a loved one, an ex with whom I’ve fallen out of touch but still care for in... more »

Check out Alexandra Sheckler’s interview with founder and editor of Bookslut, Jessa Crispin. Jessa dishes about the blog, review-worthy books, and the best reads of 2009. Now it’s your turn to dish – which book has the Bookslut reviewed that tickles your fancy?

A recent article in the Guardian’s Book Blog (I’m addicted) debated whether it’s necessary to date a reader if you yourself are a reader. The writer, clearly also the reader in this scenario, says that reading is not only an intensely personal ritual, but also an incredibly social one. Think about the success of book clubs–most people find they can relate better to what they’ve read if they discuss it with others. This is something I have definitely found true, though my own book club is still in its fledgling days. I love talking about books and writers, getting recommendations and different perspectives from fellow readers. I am incredibly lucky in that I work in a field (publishing) chock full of voracious readers, and many of my friends are also readers (comes with the territory when you attend a graduate program in writing and publishing).

Okay, so if you love to read, you can chat about books around the water cooler, or around a few bottles of wine at a book club. Isn’t that outlet enough? Do we really need our romantic partners to love reading as well?

According to the Guardian, no. The writer says that his wife of eight years has read... more »

Fringe had the opportunity to chat (virtually, at least) with Laura van den Berg about her debut story collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, published by Dzanc Books in October 2009.  The stories, a collection that blends the intricacies of human relationships with the magic of myth, have been generating a good amount of praise, and Laura was featured as part of the Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers” program.

Here are a few of Laura’s answers to our burning questions:

This is your first collection. How was the publication process compared to your expectations? How did having your stories published in journals like One Story, American Short Fiction, and Boston Review prepare you for the experience?

Since it was my first book, I didn’t really know what to expect, but I’ve been really happy with the notice the collection has received. And I feel very lucky too—there are a lot of books out there, so finding an audience or recognition of any kind can be challenging.

In terms of story publications, publishing a book was a very different experience than publishing individual stories for me; the stakes, in a number of ways, felt much higher. But one thing... more »

The NY Tyrant Guide to Not Being a Horrible Writer in the Year 2010 is Vice’s uncharitably snarky take on slush pile cliches, and it proves that I, too have tortured readers of slush piles the world over. Here are a few of my favorites from the list:

“When you think you are about to write something really good, go to the grocery.” This is true of my own fiction writing. If I think a sentence is great, that’s generally because it’s full of purple-prose or writerly diction that calls attention to itself and takes the reader out of the story. A  good rule of thumb is to cut it in the second draft.

“Oh sweet, you went to that museum alone one day and had a tuna sandwich in the cafe? You’re killing me, please.” I’ve written this story. Twice. And it even got submitted out. <dies of shame>.

“Write less dialogue, unless you are really good at it, which I guarantee you aren’t.” Yeah, I suck at dialogue. Now I mostly try not to write it. Reported dialogue and narrative summary are my friends.

“Please, God, no characters who are musicians. There is nothing worse than trying to describe music, or how someone... more »