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... 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 »