Fringe, the Noun that Verbs Your World

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 »

A note from Justine Tal Goldberg, author of Swear.

“I conceived of “Swear” during one of the strangest weekends of my adult life. An old friend of mine was killed in a motorcycle accident and I, along with two hundred of his closest friends, returned home for the funeral. There was just something incredibly wild, disarming, and finally traumatizing about the whole experience. Home was not home. Friends were not friends. I felt an overwhelming sense of distance, dislocation. Much like the narrator of “Swear,” I found myself going through the motions, ridiculous and exposed.

At first, this piece was about Brian, my friend who died. Then it was about Mike. (Mike does in fact exist, but he is nothing much like the character that shares his name.) Then it was about me. Then it wasn’t about any of us. “Swear” is about that feeling of being sorry for who you are, of wanting to apologize for the person you’ve become. And maybe that person isn’t so bad, just unrecognizable as the girl she’d been.”

Use the space below to share your thoughts on “Swear” or to ask the author a question!

It’s difficult and almost impossible to write meaningfully about mortality. About faith and grief. About love. Many writers fail when trying, slipping into something trite, something already said. Many writers don’t even try. This is what makes A. Hunter Sunrise’s three pieces of flash nonfiction so remarkable. In delicate, lyrical prose, she dances not around the subjects, but with them. She illuminates her feelings on the subjects for the reader and allows her to flow along with the thoughts, drifting finally to the end, these ephemeral words taking on shape.

Hello. My name is Joe Robb and I live on the south bank of Cincinnati.

I don’t know what you know about Cincinnati.

When I used to live in Boston, I met people from the East Coast or the West Coast who thought my hometown–the mighty metropolis on the coast of the Ohio–coasted through a flat sea of corn, and that it was a town, small and rural, full of twang. They were surprised by my accent, and to learn that my city was big, and ugly sometimes, but beautiful at other times, so seeped in odd history that when you step on the pavement of Cincinnati, stories leak up through the cracks in the asphalt and the smells of malted barley and pigflesh flood your nose.

Was that too much?

Cincinnati is the Queen City, The ‘Nati, The City of Seven Hills, The Beer Capitol of the World, and Porkopolis. Cincinnati is the birthplace of Roy Rogers, Bootsy Collins, Doris Day, Stephen Spielberg, Sarah Jessica Parker, and King Records, but not Jerry Springer, although he served on our city council from 1971 until 1974 when he resigned, admitting he had hired a prostitute with a personal check . . . that bounced. The... more »

This year, as the final days of December tick down, our attention is not only turned to the end of 2009, but the end of a decade–the first of the new millennium. Shocking, isn’t it? Though it doesn’t seem all that long ago that the world was in a tizzy over Y2K, we’ve come a long way. The publishing industry has evolved and changed in ways that are barely quantifiable, and only continues to change every day. We’ll be feeling the effects of the Kindle, online media, flash fiction, and Twitter on literature for years to come. We lost some literary icons (Kurt Vonnegut, David Foster Wallace, John Updike, Eudora Welty, just to name a few) and created some new ones (Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer, Michael Chabon). We’ve seen the rise of wizards and vampires and the decline of newspapers. Yes, it’s been quite the decade.

I love lists. I love reading them, I love making them, and I love crossing things off of them. But when it comes to compiling a “Best of the Decade” list, I find I’m a little too daunted by all that’s out there. When the Globe and Mail asked several prominent writers to... more »

Fringe editor-in-chief Lizzie Stark interviewed Issue 2’s Sonia Gutiérrez, whose (de)Classified piece “Shattered Beer Bottles” was reprinted in Issue 21, about writing, Spanglish, and how femininity is constructed in Latino culture.

It’s been three years since we published “Shattered Beer Bottles.” Looking back at the piece now, do any new ideas about it occur to you? Is there anything you’d change?

Oh yes, definitely. I’d make a few changes. Let’s begin with the title. I can see now that the title may be too cryptic for some readers. I’d change the title to “Chicana in the Midst” or “Spider Woman.” I would definitely add another stanza focusing on breasts (Three years later I’m ready to talk about breasts).

Is this piece typical of your work?

Not exactly. Prior to writing “Shattered Beer Bottles,” I hadn’t used Spanglish in my poetry. The school that I attended, Santa Fe Elementary did not allow that language on school grounds. And regardless of the anti-Spanish sentiment of the early ‘80s, my father enforced that we only speak Spanish at home, which haunted and hurt my writing in my college years. Abiding to the strict separation of languages, I’d write a poem in English and then translate it to... more »

Today on the American Short Fiction blog, the web editor posed the question, “What does online publishing mean to you?” to literary luminary Rick Moody. Moody recently garnered much buzz with his Twitter story, “Some Contemporary Characters,” a series of tweets which appeared over 3 days for Electric Literature.  Though Moody clearly appreciates the possibilities and new directions provided by online publishing, he also still firmly believes in the power of print:

“Online publication, to me, is of interest because it’s cheaper and easier to produce, thus emboldening people who want to bring their vision out into the marketplace of ideas. But that doesn’t mean it’s better. Best of all is written on stone, and if that doesn’t work, whatever is nearly as long lasting as stone.”

What do you think? Do you agree with Rick? What do you see as the ultimate future of publishing as we know it?

An Interview with Kate Russell, author of Hunters.

Fringe: What was the inspiration for this piece?

I’ve recently moved back to Maine after a few years of living out of
state and I find myself struck by things that otherwise would have
gone unnoticed. One Sunday this past fall I saw a Maine Guide dressed
in full camouflage hunting gear, despite hunting being illegal on
Sundays. I started wondering what the story might be behind that and
“Hunters” emerged.

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

I write every day, most often at night, but I have no set schedule.
Even the fact that I write every day isn’t the result of a set
schedule; I just write all the time because it’s my favorite thing to
do. My goal is one thousand words a day, but that doesn’t always
happen.

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

I first started writing fiction about ten years ago when I realized
how much fun it was to write about myself in the third person.
Thankfully my characters have evolved into their own people and not
just thinly-veiled versions of me, but the reason I started writing is
the same reason I continue to write: it’s just so much... more »

The blurb hooks us with a tantalizing premise: aged ex-copywriter Frances sits on her stairs waiting for the bailiffs to give up and leave her in peace.  By way of killing some time she pretends to reflect on the exciting array of world history she has beheld over the past five decades, including such delights as the rise and fall of Communism, Feminism, and Capitalism (which was promptly followed by the Shock, Crunch, Squeeze, Recovery, Fall, Crisis and finally, Bite).

Sadly, this dizzying array of economical, political and social upheaval is merely a backdrop for our narrator’s main gripe – namely, her ex husband, Karl (one of many) and her disparate handful of offspring and offsprung.  She also happens to be the What If sibling that Fay evidently never had and most likely didn’t want anyway (Frances nicks Fay’s would-be hubby, but pays for it later).  There is absolutely no real purpose to this, as Frances appears to be little more than a skinny version of Fay.  I don’t think this is necessarily the case of shoddy characterization (although let’s not rule that out) more than another symptom of the irksome line of wrongness that etches its way through the novel. ... more »

This week in Vintage Fringe, we’re featuring “No Translation” and five more poems by Rachel Dacus that originally appeared in Fringe Issue 4. Poetry editor Anna Lena Phillips caught up with Dacus by email over the Thanksgiving holiday to discuss ecopoetry, the practice of keeping one’s mouth shut, and Dacus’s “square poems.”

It’s been over three years since your work appeared in Fringe. Looking back on the poems, do any new ideas about them occur to you?

I still like the box format of the poems—I use it to compose in and then sometimes break up a poem into lines. More often, I leave the dense square of text as is. I think it encourages focus and enables ambiguity and resonance in the writing. While I don’t like to leave out punctuation in order to do this, I find the square shape—neither a lineated poem nor a paragraph—makes the reading slower, which is nice for poetry.

When I first read these  “square poems,” I loved the way the syntax and imagery, within the defined shape of the poem, and seemed to open up experiences of landscape. For instance, the beginning of “Poem to Save Your Life”:

                                                         Sung by a gnat
          who lands  on  the  under-carriage... more »

The October 2009 issue of Quick Fiction features our very own fiction editor, Shuchi Saraswat! Her piece is called “The Good Bathroom” and the full story can be read in the print version of the magazine.

Quick Fiction 16 also features “precious little fictions of 500 words (or less)” from past Fringe contributors Amy L. Clark,William Walsh, Matthew Purdy, and Michael K. Meyers.

While obtaining his PhD from UW-Milwaukee, Stephen Roger Powers taught an Intro to Creative Writing class, the kind that few want to take and few want to teach. It was my first class as an undergrad, and Powers and I became fast friends—being the only two in the room who clearly wanted to be there.

That friendship carried beyond the classroom, buoyed by margaritas and MFA recommendation letters, and has continued to this day in an e-epistolary manner. In October of this year, Salmon Poetry in Ireland released Powers’ first poetry collection, The Follower’s Tale, centered around his deep and abiding fascination with Dolly Parton and her amusement park, Dollywood.

Recently I was able to catch up with Powers, and we chatted over a cup of coffee—albeit from two different coffeemakers, 500 miles apart, over email, with Powers exhausted after returning from a book tour in Ireland.

First question seems obvious: why Dolly Parton?

I first “discovered” Dolly in 1987. We took a family road trip to Tennessee to see some relatives, and we stopped at Dollywood. My childhood wasn’t terribly exciting because I lived in the Midwest and went to Catholic school. I loved movies like Star Wars and Jaws because they took me to more... more »

I don’t run. A 26.2-mile run through the wilderness is a new kind of hell. But Michelle Menting is braver than me. She takes it on and writes about the experience and the thinking that goes on behind an undertaking like this in On Marathon Thinking. All you runners and even people like me, here’s your chance to discuss Michelle’s piece.

An interview with Sarah Scoles, author of Algorithmic Behavior.

Fringe: What was the inspiration for this piece?

Scoles: I am really interested in human behavior as it relates to patterns and feedback. How do we know how to act in a given social situation? How do we learn to act and react in an acceptable manner? What does it mean to “fit in”? I believe that a lot of our behavior patterns are based on learned, algorithm-like neural pathways. If X happens, then I should do Y. If A upsets you, do B to feel better. Last year, I was taking a History of Mathematics class, and one of the first things we learned about were Sumerian tablets and the way they were always encased in these egg-like “envelopes.” In my head, a character formed–someone who was actively aware, because of her social awkwardness, of the algorithms that determined her actions (as opposed to most people, for whom these “algorithms” are subconscious and natural). I imagined that this character would have a difficult time expressing herself, and using the tablets as both metaphor and literal communication mechanism seemed apt to me.

Fringe: How often do you write? Do you do it on a... more »