Matthew Salesses is making us proud these days. A reader for Fringe during his MFA studies, Salesses has gone on to publish work in Glimmer Train, Witness, American Short Fiction, The Literary Review, Mid-American Review, and plenty of others. He has released two chapbooks, is the Fiction Editor at The Good Men Project Magazine (where he recently published a story by James Franco), and his novella is forthcoming from Flatmancrooked. (And that’s not the only thing forthcoming in Salesses’s life.)

He and I chatted shortly after the release of Our Island of Epidemics, published in 2010 by PANK.

Q. Maybe you can start by telling us a bit about your island. Where did it come from? When/how did you decide to build a story collection around it? And do you have any sense of its place geographically, or is it just kind of free floating?

A. I would say the island came about out of the story’s needs–I wanted to write about epidemics, and in collective first, and I wanted the epidemics to be constrained to a particular population. It would have been too unwieldy to have the epidemics spread too far, become pandemics. It also became clear fairly quickly that the stories were exploring an idea of community.

Geographically, the island is not anywhere specific. I suppose it could be read allegorically as anyplace, though the intent was not originally allegorical. It’s more a fairy-tale kind of place, an imaginative place.

Q. So the epidemics came before the island? There are fourteen stories here, but the characters mention many more than fourteen epidemics. Which was the first epidemic you wrote about? Were there any that you wrote about and then scrapped? Some quick math indicates that the island has been beset by at least two hundred of them–so did you create a list of 200+ epidemics and then pull your story ideas from that?

A. I actually wrote these stories in the order that they appear in the chapbook. I built upon each story, and the epidemics mentioned in each, with the next, and later I liked the way they grew in that order. I hope that they add up in a pleasing way to a larger arc, a larger sense of longing and frustration of longing.

I actually discarded one story in the revisions, about an island of men trees, that is, men who turned into trees. Their friends and families built tree houses in their branches. But eventually, they began to cut the trees down, to forget which trees (of the ones that didn’t have tree houses) were lonely men, and which were trees.

I tried to layer mention of the epidemics to create a sort of history. Also because I wanted to create a hypertext linking the stories by the epidemics online, which I’m still working on, with the help of the editors who published the stories.

I think there are partial lists in some of the stories of certain epidemics that came and went.

Q. What made you want to write in the first-person plural?

A. I like to set myself challenges. For some reason, (self-imposed) limitations seem to work really well for me. I think I get motivated by the puzzle: how to fit my story into the box I’ve made for it. This may seem counterintuitive, but my imagination actually works harder under restraints. Maybe it’s just about rebellion? I need to be contained. If the world is too open, where do you start?

In the case of first-person plural, I’d never tried it before, and I wanted to see if I could, if I could make it engaging, and also whether I could personalize the voice, if I could make a character out of a third-person plural narrator. It turned out there was this push-and-pull between the island and the individual that seemed to me built into the POV.

Q. Tell us a bit about the Good Men Project, and your involvement with it.

A. I got involved in the Good Men Project after answering a call for nonfiction submissions last year. I pitched a story about being a sensitive sports fan and gave my then blog and the resulting Publishing Genius chapbook as clips. They ended up reprinting the chapbook in the magazine launch, and I continue to write about my wife and me as a biweekly column, “Love, Recorded.” I also taught a workshop recently for teenage boys for a new anthology about what it takes to be a “good boy.” GMP is a great organization that gives back to the community and tries to get men to read. The weekend fiction section we just launched, which I’m editing, is another attempt at this. We started out with a story from James Franco and one from the incredible emerging writer Sean Ennis, and we’re following those stories up with work by Alexander Chee, Ben Greenman, Kim Chinquee, Ryan Call, Viet Thanh Nguyen, George Singleton, and others, a story every weekend.

Q. What other projects are you working on? I know you have another forthcoming collection. Tell us about that one.

A. I’m working on the edits of a novella, “The Last Repatriate,” that will be published by Flatmancrooked. It’s about a Korean War POW. At the end of the Korean War, there were actually 23 POWs who said they didn’t want to return to America. One of them came back shortly thereafter and was welcomed as a hero. He got all his backpay, got married, had a honeymoon, and then the Army court-martialed him and he spent a long time in jail. True story. Though the novella is fiction.

Q. And I hear you have a little Salesses on the way. Congratulations. How do you think that will affect your writing and other duties?

A. Babies! Having a baby is a very scary thing. My worries are mostly those of health right now, so I’m not thinking too much about how the baby will affect my writing life. I’m sure it will. But then I will also have a baby, so it won’t be a bad thing at all.

Q. So I guess coming back to Fringe as a reader is out of the question?

A. Sadly, yes.