Last week, we posted Part 1 of Flyway’s interview with Anthony Doerr. Below, Flyway’s nonfiction editor, Lindsay Tigue, asks one of her favorite writers about research, authenticity, short-story length, and more.

LT: In an interview with Christopher Mohar for Fiction Writers Review, you said about research, “I very much use writing as an excuse to research, and research as an excuse to procrastinate. The world is so fundamentally interesting and it makes me fall in love with it a dozen times a day.” How much research goes into a typical story, or novel, and what types of “sources” do you seek out?

AD: Right. Lindsay, do you do research for your work?

LT: I love research.

AD: Yeah, I love it, too. Often, my students kind of groan when I say, “Let’s talk about research.” They say, “We got into creative writing so we can make shit up!” But yes, for me, it really is an excuse to learn more about the world, to find some subject, whether it’s poisonous snails or sturgeon or the early construction of radios. In “The Hunter’s Wife,” I just got interested in hibernation, how animals’ heart rate slows way down. Do you call that dreaming? Do you even call that life? There’s this huge gray area between life and death. So often, I start by reading a lot about a subject with no real idea of how to build narrative up out of it except that I’m very interested in it. I think that’s the key for young writers—of whatever age, but young in their career—is to find those things that you’re vitally interested in, even if you don’t want to, or are unable to articulate why you’re interested in those things. Whether it’s violin-making or horse racing, or how dry cleaners work—the more you learn about it the more you realize, first, how ignorant you are and second, how interesting it is. Like that incinerator you showed me yesterday; I’ve never even really thought about an incinerator, what a job in an incinerator would be like. And how maybe in there, there’s some engineer who is probably really passionate about making garbage burning more efficient. And maybe there isn’t necessarily a story in that and you’ve spent a day learning about something you won’t be able to build characters out of.

LT: But you’ve still learned something.

AD: Totally. In terms of a vehicle, the Internet is an incredible tool for procrastination, but it’s still an amazing tool for research—particularly for images. And you’re right, by the way, there’s a lot more research in a novel. Certainly, the longer the work, the more research there is, but being able to look at images, especially historical images in twelve seconds, it’s unparalleled. We have access to information like no humans have had before us.

LT: And videos, too.

AD: And videos, no question. For me, it helps looking at something like a Sears, Roebuck catalog from 1940. You can look at that stuff almost immediately. Maps, even Google Earth is sort of an incredible tool for writers.

LT: Sure, like do you turn left or right at this street?

AD: I do try to alienate the fewest number of readers possible, so I do try and get the streets right, the intersections right, even bus routes. I remember in my novel, I went back to Anchorage just to make sure that this character Winkler was riding the right buses at the right time. Some of that can qualify as procrastination, but you never know what you’re going to learn when you do that.

LT: You just want to make the true true.

AD: Exactly.

LT: In that same interview, you said your “work comes from hundreds or thousands of hours of working through things, from pouring lots and lots of observation and thought into every paragraph, every dead-end, every false start.” I was just wondering, how long do you typically spend on a short story, for instance? A lot of your stories are quite long.

AD: Yeah, the stories themselves are long. I don’t necessarily think of myself as a particularly slow writer, but I work a lot more than some of my friends do (laughs). I’m jealous of poets who are like, “My work day’s done; it’s 9:45a.m.!” I mean that in a funny way, not to dismiss the work they do.

The story, “Memory Wall”—which maybe is a novella—that took me around seven months of straight work. I had had knee surgery at the time and some of those days were ten-hour days where I wasn’t doing much else. So yes, lots of hours.

LT: Do they vary—do some stories come together more quickly than others?

AD: Very occasionally. If I’m being really playful and I don’t feel like it’s going into a book, I can write a story in maybe two or three weeks. But those are typically two or three-thousand word pieces. Very, very rarely does it go that quickly. Even essays. Even book reviews. Book reviews end up taking me a whole week usually. A little essay for the New York Times that’s around eight hundred words—I’ll agree to do it because I’ll think, “Oh I can write that this weekend,” but it ends up taking me probably six days of work to do it.

I revise all the time. I’m just always reading through what I have and trying to make it better, and more musical, and cleaner. More true.

LT: Are you typically working on several projects at the same time or do you like to focus on one?

AD: Usually multiple projects. It depends what sort of deadlines I’m under. This novel is probably now seven years in the making and I’ve written two whole books in between and lots and lots of different essays and magazine pieces. I think, eventually, to be a professional writer, you have to be able to juggle small and large-scale projects all at once. I like that today, maybe I’ll spend two hours on this and tomorrow, I’m in Iowa so who knows what I’ll get to? How about you?

LT: I’m mostly just working on short stories and poems right now.

AD: But one at a time?

LT: Yes, but I know I need to shift away from that.

AD: No, not necessarily. So you’ll have a story and you’ll finish it before you’ll start even a poem?

LT: No, not with poetry, but I usually focus on one story that I’m really in because I have trouble breaking away from that cast of characters to work on another.

AD: Yeah, that’s good. If you’re feeling the energy for any project you’re in, I think you just need to pursue that. That will change a little bit as you get toward your thesis and you start thinking about a book-length project. For me, it’s like once you start understanding what might fit between the covers of this book, you start trying to tailor everything so that it will all kind of mesh.

LT: So, for Memory Wall, did you know you wanted this thread of memory and time to appear throughout?

AD: I did, but it didn’t come until later. I had finished “Village 113” and I had finished “Procreate, Generate” and, I started to think—I was about halfway through “Memory Wall”—“If I start building a whole book out of this, how can I engineer all of these things to work in harmony?” In some ways a writer can be lucky because your fascinations align themselves subconsciously, so that it might still fit inside a book. But then, I started to try to overtly and consciously manipulate these stories so that they all revolved around similar questions. It began to feel as though memory was like a courtyard, and the stories all were windows, different kind of windows, into the same courtyard.

LT: And with The Shell Collector, was it the same process, or was that different?

AD: Similar. I started some of those stories in graduate school and, after leaving, I tried to recognize which stories were weaker and pull those out and write stronger ones. You do start to ask yourself, as you generate new stories: How will this complement the other, already-completed pieces in the collection? That’s something I think about a lot. I think e-readers might eventually demolish the collection the way iTunes has demolished the album, but right now I do love the idea of Dubliners or Winesburg, Ohio, any book that is a collection, where it’s an experience to read each story in succession.

LT: They accumulate in a way.

AD: Yeah, yeah. That’s a great verb for it.

 

LT: This is the typical interview question, but I was wondering what writers have influenced you? What contemporary writers are you excited about right now?

AD: No, that’s a good question. What contemporary writers are you excited about?

LT: Well, I really like Jim Shepard.

AD: I love Jim. There’s a researcher.

LT: In Ben Percy’s class, we also just read Lauren Groff’s collection Delicate, Edible, Birds and I really liked that a lot. I’ve been reading a lot of debut collections, I suppose. I really liked Laura van den Berg’s What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us.

AD: Oh yeah, that’s great. She’s reaching readers. That’s exciting.

Let me see, living writers? I’m still kind of in love with Ondaatje. He has a new book that came out last year, The Cat’s Table. It’s beautiful; it just kind of fills you with hope that you can still be generating excellent work into your seventies.

I’m reading a book right now called Solo by Rana DasGupta. It’s gorgeous. Man, it’s really gorgeous. Really, it’s the whole twentieth century distilled inside one 100-year-old man’s life. He’s gone blind now and a huge proportion of it is threaded through memories, which I suppose makes sense for me, that I would like it. But it’s also got tons of chemistry in it and the second half is more of him thinking about these children he never had moving out into the world and imagining their lives. And you think that would be really nebulous, but it’s really beautiful writing.

Sebald—he’s dead, so it may not fit your question, but still a contemporary writer. Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz, which is such a beautiful book. In terms of the musicality of his language and blending this kind of curiosity and memory and imagination, those are things that have taught me so much just by reading him.

Andrea Barrett. She’s another writer who uses research really well and who really taught me how to use science, that you can be interested in science and write stories about it, that the science building and the English building don’t have to be four miles apart on campus. You can lead a life in which you’re interested in both things. She has been a real model to me.

LT: I think you’ve said before that you were really influenced by Alice Munro, too.

AD: Yes. Especially when I was younger. In my early twenties, I started reading her and it was a weird thing to be a young man in his twenties and reading the kind of fiction that my mom would read, because it was often about the lives of women, older women in Canada. She has this reputation of being the classic living short story writer, but for me she was really experimental in the way she used time, really disruptive of the Ray Carver, Tobias Wolff stories that we had been reading and those the New Yorker was publishing. They were stories I loved also, but that often just took place in the course of one drive, one conversation, or one afternoon. I loved that Alice would try to encompass whole lives. Often she’d show this really important and powerful understanding of time, in terms of geologic time. That’s something I’m always trying to work with, you know, suggest that the lives of your characters are quite small in terms of the life of the place that they’re in without being preachy or making your work too sciencey so that readers fall out of it.

Moby Dick, too. Moby Dick has been so important to me because there are all these chapters that are like: Here are how harpoons are made. My students usually say, “This is so boring!” but I like the idea that you can write this ripping, playful yarn and still teach your reader practical things about the world.

LT: This is related to my next questions. You write about science books for the Boston Globe. Have you always been interested in science? Have any of the topics you’ve written about served as inspiration for stories?

AD: Yes. My mom was a science teacher and my oldest brother is a very accomplished optics scientist. So we were just surrounded by science. Growing up, our shelves were full of Aldo Leopold. The most literary books were Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard and even Rick Bass as I got older. I’ve just always been interested in the natural world and being outside and trying to understand it as a naturalist might.

And yeah, the column has fed my fiction in lots of different ways. The story, “Memory Wall,” the central conceit of it—which I didn’t arrive at until about halfway through—that memories could be harvested and stored, came out of a book I reviewed for the Globe. A neuroscientist was suggesting that that may be possible in the near future. Even then, I was like, “Really, should I try this? It seems so science fiction.” I read a lot of books about fossils, too. I read first about the gorgon in a book for the Boston Globe, this fossil that the characters are looking for in “Memory Wall.”

LT: That’s great that your research is kind of built into your career.

AD: It is. It’s great. Even if nine of the ten books I read don’t necessarily filter into my fiction. The other nice thing about the column is that I get twenty books every month all about the latest issues in science in the mail. So it’s almost just the perfect job to keep your fiction growing. You always have more than you could possibly read anyway.

LT: So, at Flyway we’re concerned with environment and place in writing, and we kind of talked about the different settings for your stories, but I’m wondering, where does place come in your process, do you start with that first or do you start with a character?

AD: Surprisingly not always first. It’s not always like, “Okay, I’m going to set a story in Tanzania and I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen.” Often, you have a character’s desire for something, or just some curiosity like we mentioned for a venomous snail, and then you start threading and spiraling different conflicts out of it and occasionally the whole thing will pivot to a different place maybe two months into the process. But you do need to obviously settle on your place before you’re, say, a fifth of the way through a story (laughs).

LT: The MFA program here at Iowa State has a focus on environment, which allows students to explore interdisciplinary subjects relating to environmental subjects. We also read “environmental” writers in some classes and I was wondering how you would define an environmental writer, what that term really means to you?

AD: I don’t know how I would describe an environmental writer. I think it’s so important to understand where the comforts in your life come from and the costs that they have and how remote those things can be—you know, that your bowl of cereal did not just materialize and that the heat coming out of your furnace registers is fuel that is burning somewhere. That it’s our responsibility, not to feel guilty necessarily, but to try to comprehend our lives in context both with what the world’s going to look like in fifty years and what it looked like fifty years ago. I think storytelling can help do that.

I think there is room for morality in fiction writing and that’s something I grapple with all the time. I get frustrated when people say American writers are apolitical and American writers aren’t taking on moral issues the way writers of other nationalities might because I feel like that’s something I’m very concerned with, trying to display characters’ lives in the context of their times and maybe not judge them, but to just ask the reader questions about things like the Three Gorges Dam for example, in the story “Village 113.”  What does that thing mean to those villagers? Not to condemn it, but to show that it’s erasing centuries and centuries of history and question if progress is something that we should be worshipping all the time?

LT: My last question: What is your favorite animal?

AD: My favorite animal. What I want to say is dog because I just love dogs, but that’s a little easy. Lately, I’ve been really interested in watching herons. You always think they’re very regal and grand, but when you start looking at them really closely they’re always kind of tattered and often they’ve got mud and snails on their feathers and they’re always probing around in mucky places. I think of them as deposed kings. Like tattered old royals who have gotten dirty somehow. I love their patience. They’re such a good lesson in patience. They can just stand there waiting, waiting, waiting for a riffle, looking for some little minnow to come past. There’s something amazing about that. I so rarely even eat without reading or doing something else that to think that eating is all you do. All day, this one thing, this one great project: feeding yourself. It’s a good reminder that we don’t always have to be rushing around.

 

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In late February, Anthony Doerr came to Iowa State’s 8th Annual Symposium on Wildness, Wilderness, and the Creative Imagination. Doerr read from his newest collection Memory Wall. He is also the author of three other books: the story collection The Shell Collector, the novel About Grace, and the nonfiction account Four Seasons in Rome.

Anthony Doerr devotes his writing to the physical world and the miracles it provides. His nuanced observation deals in fascination—his characters’ obsessions become real in the worlds he constructs. Doerr’s writing spans times, examines memory, and takes on vastly different personae, but always, it inhabits an intense curiosity.

Doerr has received numerous prizes and accolades for his writing. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes. He won the 2010 Story Prize and the Rome Prize, and received the Barnes & Noble Discover Award and the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award.

Flyway blogger and Assistant Nonfiction Editor, Lindsay Tigue, spoke with Anthony Doerr about topics ranging from his writing process, to importance of place, and the possibilities of research.

Lindsay Tigue: Your stories are set all over the globe from the Lamu Archipelago in “The Shell Collector,” Lithuania in “The River Nemunas,” to Tanzania in “Mkondo.” What draws you to writing about such diverse places, and would you say you are more interested in writing about the unfamiliar place as opposed to someplace closer to home? Or is it an equal fascination?

Anthony Doerr: That’s a good way to feed me the answer (laughs). I think I am more interested in the unfamiliar. All of my work has to do with disrupting habitual patterns, whether it’s at the sentence level in terms of disrupting cliché, or in the shapes of stories in terms of resisting easy structures, or in terms of place. I suppose I could read a great story about a bald guy who shops at the supermarket in Idaho, but that’s not the sort of story I want to write.  I’m drawn to reading because I want to learn about lives that are different than mine. Then you can also, of course, trace all sorts of commonalities between those lives and my own.

You know, when you read, more so than any other art form, you occupy the mind of somebody else and that’s what got me addicted to reading and writing. I’m drawn to different settings because I like to leave the familiar, no question. I think it’s easy to say, “Oh, they’re exotic,” and that kind of belittles the effort.

For me, I’m interested in transporting, too, in the way you disappear into books as a child. That’s what I want my stories to be—a place a reader can disappear into. And that hopefully they’re made carefully enough and plausibly enough that a reader will believe he or she is in this other world. Even if it’s not exactly an accurate, realistic version of Tanzania or Lithuania.  It’s as much a product of the imagination and research as time spent there.

LT: So have you been to all of the places that you write about?

AD: I have been to just about all of them. In my very first book, The Shell Collector, there’s a story called, “The Caretaker,” and the first twelve pages are in Liberia and I had never been there. In this most recent collection, Memory Wall, there’s a story called “Village 113” and I had been to Hong Kong, but I had never been to mainland China and the whole story is set along the Yangtze. So that’s probably the two examples of places I hadn’t been.

Already when you’re writing about a place you’ve only spent a month in or something, you’re a little bit nervous. I get pretty anxious when I’m setting something entirely in a place I haven’t been. In some ways, you’re liberated because the real world is so real and it fills you with detail that can often be extraneous. If you want to go write about New York City and you go stand in Union Square for a day, you’ll get so much detail that really doesn’t necessarily belong in a piece of writing where you’re trying to convey a certain mood or atmosphere or motivation.

LT: But it fascinates you so much that it’s hard to let go of, even if it doesn’t belong?

AD: Totally. Exactly. I keep a journal and anytime I’m anywhere—right now, for example, I’m only in Iowa for forty hours—I’ll make as many entries as I can.  I never know what I might see here that maybe five years from now I can thread back into a story. I’m always looking at the journal as raw material for something that I might need someday.

LT: It seems many of your characters have a particular skill or a very focused fascination like the blind conchologist’s ability to identify cone shells, or the hunter’s wife’s ability to see the whole life of a person or animal through touch. So, I was wondering what draws you to characters with rare, or even supernatural gifts?

AD: In some ways that’s two separate questions. A lot of my characters do have specific real-world passions. In the novel I’ve been working on for a while, this boy is in love with radios and loves to build and tinker around with radios. But you’re right, other elements of my stories are supernatural and I get that question all the time and I never have a good answer for it. I don’t think of myself as a mystical person. I wrote a whole novel (About Grace) about a guy whose dreams occasionally predict the future, but I don’t necessarily believe such a thing is actually possible. And the letters I get from readers—

LT: Oh gosh, I bet.

AD: (laughs) They’re like, “That happens to me!” I don’t necessarily believe in any of that stuff. In fact, I’m very skeptical of it. But I do love how supernatural events challenge people’s ability to believe. I mean, lots and lots of people right around us in this hotel lobby believe that two thousand years ago a dude was nailed to a cross and then put in a hole or a cave and got up three days later and walked around healing people. That is something that they build into part of every single day they’re on Earth.

LT: Without even thinking about it.

AD: Sometimes without recognizing the absurdity of it. But also, it’s kind of sweet and wonderful.

To a much sillier degree, I’m basically lying to my kids right now because they’re losing their teeth. They put a little piece of skeleton under their pillow and they honestly think that some little winged creature wants to give them money for that stuff (laughs).

LT: And it’s so lovely that they think that.

AD: Right. There’s something wonderful about it. I certainly don’t want to be the one to set them straight on the tooth fairy. Let the rest of the world destroy their innocence.

So you know, I am just interested in this type of belief. I’m trying not to make any judgments about it. I’m interested in putting characters in situations where everything they think is real falls into question in some way and they’re challenged. In “The River Nemunas,” which is not necessarily a supernatural story, I ask the reader and my character to consider: What if there was one last sturgeon in this river? What if they’re not all gone? Some people say that story is about faith and God and maybe that’s true; it was unintentional, or if it was, it was very subconscious. I just wanted to challenge the grandfather who thought he knew what his life was, what this river was, and to show him something that maybe upset his understanding of it. Or opened it up.

LT: In an interview with Christopher Mohar for Fiction Writers Review, you said about research, “I very much use writing as an excuse to research, and research as an excuse to procrastinate. The world is so fundamentally interesting and it makes me fall in love with it a dozen times a day.” How much research goes into a typical story, or novel, and what types of “sources” do you seek out?

AD: Right. Lindsay, do you do research for your work?

LT: I love research.

AD: Yeah, I love it, too. Often, my students kind of groan when I say, “Let’s talk about research.” They say, “We got into creative writing so we can make shit up!” But yes, for me, it really is an excuse to learn more about the world, to find some subject, whether it’s poisonous snails or sturgeon or the early construction of radios. In “The Hunter’s Wife,” I just got interested in hibernation, how animals’ heart rate slows way down. Do you call that dreaming? Do you even call that life? There’s this huge gray area between life and death. So often, I start by reading a lot about a subject with no real idea of how to build narrative up out of it except that I’m very interested in it. I think that’s the key for young writers—of whatever age, but young in their career—is to find those things that you’re vitally interested in, even if you don’t want to, or are unable to articulate why you’re interested in those things. Whether it’s violin-making or horse racing, or how dry cleaners work—the more you learn about it the more you realize, first, how ignorant you are and second, how interesting it is. Like that incinerator you showed me yesterday; I’ve never even really thought about an incinerator, what a job in an incinerator would be like. And how maybe in there, there’s some engineer who is probably really passionate about making garbage burning more efficient. And maybe there isn’t necessarily a story in that and you’ve spent a day learning about something you won’t be able to build characters out of.

LT: But you’ve still learned something.

AD: Totally. In terms of a vehicle, the Internet is an incredible tool for procrastination, but it’s still an amazing tool for research—particularly for images. And you’re right, by the way, there’s a lot more research in a novel. Certainly, the longer the work, the more research there is, but being able to look at images, especially historical images in twelve seconds, it’s unparalleled. We have access to information like no humans have had before us.

LT: And videos, too.

AD: And videos, no question. For me, it helps looking at something like a Sears, Roebuck catalog from 1940. You can look at that stuff almost immediately. Maps, even Google Earth is sort of an incredible tool for writers.

LT: Sure, like do you turn left or right at this street?

AD: I do try to alienate the fewest number of readers possible, so I do try and get the streets right, the intersections right, even bus routes. I remember in my novel, I went back to Anchorage just to make sure that this character Winkler was riding the right buses at the right time. Some of that can qualify as procrastination, but you never know what you’re going to learn when you do that.

LT: You just want to make the true true.

AD: Exactly.

LT: In that same interview, you said your “work comes from hundreds or thousands of hours of working through things, from pouring lots and lots of observation and thought into every paragraph, every dead-end, every false start.” I was just wondering, how long do you typically spend on a short story, for instance? A lot of your stories are quite long.

AD: Yeah, the stories themselves are long. I don’t necessarily think of myself as a particularly slow writer, but I work a lot more than some of my friends do (laughs). I’m jealous of poets who are like, “My work day’s done; it’s 9:45a.m.!” I mean that in a funny way, not to dismiss the work they do.

The story, “Memory Wall”—which maybe is a novella—that took me around seven months of straight work. I had had knee surgery at the time and some of those days were ten-hour days where I wasn’t doing much else. So yes, lots of hours.

LT: Do they vary—do some stories come together more quickly than others?

AD: Very occasionally. If I’m being really playful and I don’t feel like it’s going into a book, I can write a story in maybe two or three weeks. But those are typically two or three-thousand word pieces. Very, very rarely does it go that quickly. Even essays. Even book reviews. Book reviews end up taking me a whole week usually. A little essay for the New York Times that’s around eight hundred words—I’ll agree to do it because I’ll think, “Oh I can write that this weekend,” but it ends up taking me probably six days of work to do it.

I revise all the time. I’m just always reading through what I have and trying to make it better, and more musical, and cleaner. More true.

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Check back soon for Part II!

This past February, we Amesians were fortunate to have Aimee Nezhukumatathil read at our MFA program’s  8th Annual Symposium on Wildness, Wilderness, and the Creative Imagination.  Flyway blogger and Assistant Poetry Editor Extraordinaire sat down to talk with Aimee:

Aimee Nezhukumatathil writes my favorite kind of poetry. Her recent  collection Lucky Fish (2011) borrows language from the natural world   to explore the very intimate as well the very strange. Her poems are both  personal and universal, moving through space and time to celebrate and to wonder.

Before Lucky Fish, Aimee published At the Drive-In Volcano (2007), winner of the Balcones Prize, and Miracle Fruit (2003), winner of the Tupelo Press Prize, the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award in poetry, and the Global Filipino Award. She teaches at the State University of New York-Fredonia, and lives with her husband and two sons.

Recently Aimee visited Iowa State as a guest at the 8^th Annual Symposium on Wildness, Wilderness, and the Creative Imagination. Amidst all the excitement I got a chance to sit down with Aimee and discuss poetic process, growing up and gaining a sense of place in the world, and of course, deep sea creatures.

Andrew Payton: We did a round table discussion in workshop of your recent collection Lucky Fish and we all really enjoyed it.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil: Thank you.

AP: So some of your poems are very intimate, while others, “Two Egg, Florida” for instance, are way outside of daily experience. What’s the most common spark for a poem? How does a poem form for you?

AN: That’s a good question. I don’t know if there’s one set easy answer, but I can tell you probably the most common thing is that for me poems always start with an image. I’m always in envy of people that say, Oh, I’ve got a great title for a poem—for me it always starts with an image or a word that just sounds really beautiful in your mouth, you know? I just can’t get over it. Like the flower plumeria, I’ll be turning that around, but I don’t want to write about plumeria yet. So it’ll just be triggered by an image, but helped along by words I’m always tumbling along in my head. If that makes sense?

AP: It does. Do you keep bank of words or a sort of reserve for when you’re having trouble getting something out?

AN: I keep an image journal. It’s a whole mish-mash of things—recipes I want to try, things I want to jot down that I don’t know will ever be a poem but like the sound of. It’s almost like one of those old fashioned commonplace books where I write down quotes that I like or maybe a couple lines that I’ve been playing around while I’m loading the dishwasher or something. And then later, when I get time to write, I flip through and something usually will pop up from there. And I find if I don’t write it down, it will be just lost in the mind and out all of a sudden.

AP: You also experiment a lot with form. Do you impose forms on poems, or do the poems create form for you?

AN: You know, I think probably a little of both. My first love is obviously free verse and that will never stop. But I’ve found lately that when I’m reading about things like teenage suicide… One of the teenage suicides from gay harassment happened less than half an hour away from where I live in Western New York. It was a fourteen-year-old boy who hung himself in his parents’ yard just because he was being bullied. I find when the subject matter is too painful, or you can’t even make sense of it in some ways, I’ve found that by using form it helps to make sense of it. In a way, I couldn’t find words for it in free verse. It’s been an interesting, kind of pleasant surprise in some ways because I always shied away from form. So with becoming pregnant, when things are just so out of control and you can’t really plan the next day how you’re going to feel and how the poem’s going to get to you or whatever, and being a mom—it sounds all cheesy, like now that I’m a mom I’m writing formal poems, that’s not it at all—but I’m just trying to find some sort of structure in a world that’s increasingly becoming unstructured.

AP: As we were looking at your book in class, we kept running into certain images—the penny, the fish. When you’re writing–

(pause and laugh, while University of Minnesota-Mankato gymnastics team cheers and screams in the hotel lobby)

–do you go through a collection with the idea to place these images into the poems? Or are they more like obsessions that you can’t get rid of?

AN: I think it’s more of the latter. That’s really perceptive. I’m always in awe of people who say, Oh, I’m writing this collection of whatever-themed poems. I’m just writing poems. Eventually I’ll check to see if anything’s gelling. If not, keep going, keep going. It really just came out organically, these images of the fish, these images of luck or love embodied in the magic and surprise of finding a penny or something unsuspected. Those things always came up because they are a kind of reoccurring obsession. When I was forming and molding this into a collection, it was hard for me to avoid—another fish appears or another shiny object—it almost came about organically. By no means was I thinking themes or repeated motifs. Eventually I’d like to take on more of a project book with an overall thematic subject, maybe something historical in nature, but just not right now. It’s on the backburner. I love reading them; I just find them really hard to write.

AP: A lot of poems about the same thing.

AN: Yeah. Part of the reason I love poetry is that when I sit at the desk I never know what I’m going to write. For me that surprise and delight would be sort of taken away. I suppose you could have that still with an overall subject, but I even like that the subject is a surprise nine times out of ten. I never sit down and say, I’m going to write a funny poem or I’m going to write a birth poem. The subject comes out much later.

AP: Back to the obsession with images—are you obsessed with anything right now?

AN: Yes. They permeated a little bit of Lucky Fish, but much more so now: deep sea creatures. I’m talking the really deep sea creatures, not just like dolphins, but the really deep stuff. I don’t know if you’ve been following this, but there have been recent photographs and recent expeditions to animals that have never been photographed before on the very bottom of the ocean—this is just in the last three months. Things like hairy crabs or crabs that seem like they have hair—they’re more like filaments, it’s not technically hair, otherwise they’d be a mammal and not a crab. They’re white and they’re furry and they’re called yeti crabs. This was just discovered four or five months ago, so I’m just obsessed. And that’s just what’s out there that we’ve gotten on film. It never ceases to amaze me. How much else is out there? What I’m working on right now is finding a way to capture that magic for children—it’s very difficult—but I’m working on poems that children can understand that give scientific and biological information about these animals to give a sense of what’s on the bottom of the ocean.

That’s what I’ve been obsessed with. The shapes and the textures. There’s no vocabulary for this. This stuff that is really uncharted and no one’s been writing about—at least not yet. It’s not like you can use the tried and true similes of a dolphin arcing in the water. There are movements and shapes that nobody even has similes and metaphors for yet. In a way, it’s kind of exciting, but it’s also kind of intimidating that you’re one of the few people that’s trying to tackle these subjects and trying to present them to the world in a literary form when there isn’t really a model for it. Do you even know what I’m talking about?

AP: Well, I don’t know the crab specifically, but I’ve seen the Planet Earth episode.

AN: Yeah, yeah, but even deeper than that. I could just sit and watch. Actually, that’s what my four-year-old was watching this morning when I checked on him. Some of them are a little—as he calls it—scawy, vewy scawy. You know, animals eating each other. But there’s a deep sea one that’s relatively benign and mystical with jellyfish just kind of floating around. So it’s an exciting challenge, but a challenge nonetheless, trying to fit these life forms into words and trying to translate them to the page when there aren’t a lot of models out there.

AP: That’s interesting. I often read about something that I want to write about, but it’s so far away from me that I don’t even have the language. Even things that do have language—something in another place…

AN: Exactly.

AP: So you use many images from the natural world, and you’re working on a book of nature essays. These images occur often in your poems. So how does nature shape you and your writing?

AN: You know, I always say that with Nature with a capital ‘N’ is the greatest writer. I’m just trying to take notes as I observe it, trying to track it down before it disappears again. I think in some ways when dealing with these bitter subjects like deaths or break-ups or something like that, it’s almost the opposite problem—even with birth or love—I find that dipping into the language of nature and using metaphors from the natural world give a new spark or new energy. Rather than just, Oh I love you, or, Oh, I’m sad you broke up with me—those themes are definitely important and I don’t want to avoid them in my work—but finding ways to make them new I guess.

For me, incorporating metaphors with a natural bent always freshens it up. So even if I’m writing about first love, it still feels new to me if I’m using the medusa jellyfish as a metaphor for first love—for me, that’s exciting and new. I think it’s almost intertwined; it’s almost hard for me to divorce that because I watch so many of these documentaries and read so much. The majority of what I read is actually field guides or nonfiction nature books—it’s kind of my dirty secret—I read much more of that than I do actual poetry. So when it comes down [to it], when I’m actually composing, that vocabulary’s already embedded in me. So it’s hard for me to say I’m not going to write about nature, because that’s the thing that’s already been stirring around in my head. I feel like the natural world is full of metaphors that are very much applicable in 2012, just as much as they were in 1912.

AP: Our MFA program has a theme of tackling place in writing. As someone who has two parents from two different places, and not living where you grew up, how do you maintain a sense of place? And how does that inform your writing?

AN: These are the best questions I’ve had, easily, in the last six months or so. Usually it’s like, Where’s your favorite place to write? What music do you listen to?

AP: Those are important, too.

AN: Those are great, those are great, but these are really meaty. Since this is Flyway—my Iowa connection is that I lived one year in a tiny town called Independence, Iowa, near Cedar Rapids where we’d go for shopping or something. My mother was a psychiatrist at one of the Iowa mental health state hospitals. I moved around and had kind of an unusual childhood, but wherever I lived the one constant was libraries and my father taking me around outside.

That’s something that I kind of lament a little bit. I can kind of see with some of my friends kids, this is a totally different world and totally different culture where the kids are inside looking at a screen. And I don’t want to sound like a curmudgeon, because I love my iPad and the technological advances, but if we wanted to have fun we would be outside. There was just no other way to it. TV was not really used as a babysitter for us, so we always had to be outside. Even if it was a place that we didn’t know exactly, that was part of the fun: to go tromping through backwater creeks in Independence, Iowa, or exploring the literal edges of desert in Phoenix, Arizona. Going back to that one constant of libraries, I could pick up a rock or pick up some plant and I was blessed with a dad who really knew his stuff. So he wouldn’t say, Oh that’s just a flower, he would say, Oh that’s a yellow bell. He would give me names at a very early age. So I was the annoying kid who could point out constellations, and not just say, Oh look at the stars, but, Oh Orion is close to Venus right now. Given that vocabulary at such an early age was absolutely crucial to finding a sense of place. If I was in Independence, Iowa, or Phoenix, Arizona, you could still see Orion—that was a constant. So even though the actual landscape we were in changed, there was a constant of the stars and there was a constant in going to the library to see what we actually saw outside today. It was an adventure.

When I was a kid, it was always presented with such excitement. Oh look at this new landscape. We’re going to be in the middle of Kansas! How exciting! And if we found it boring, our parents very much put the onus on us. If you are bored, you are a boring person. How can you with your facilities and your imagination be bored? In some ways they shamed us into having an imagination. I kind of liked that. And hopefully I try to instill that in my kids as well. I know sometimes I’ll have to give in and have the latest video game, but for as long I can fight it, it’s going to be up to them to make their own way in a landscape and be outside and find excitement from tromping around in the creek. There’s so much more imaginative play you can do there rather than staring at a screen and having the story brought out for you.

It was never presented as weird or unusual to me—I think I would have rebelled against that—it was just what my family did, and that’s all there was to it.

AP: You just brought up your kids. A common struggle for us grad students is finding the time to write with all other duties. So with teaching and having two kids, what’s your secret to chiseling away a bit of time to write?

AN: If I had the one easy answer I’d be so rich right now. It would always drive me bonkers when I’d have visiting writers that would say, Oh I wake up every morning at four and just do it. I kind of laugh now in hindsight, thinking I had all the time in the world as a grad student, but I very much know the reality is when I was a grad student I was swamped. There were always deadlines; it’s just a different kind of being swamped. The only thing I can offer up is that wherever you are on this planet, if you find yourself attached to a partner or not attached to a partner, writing has got to be priority. If it is, you’ll find ways. It doesn’t have to be perfect. I think it’s that striving for perfection or routine, that’s where people falter. I like looking at it as, I feel better when I work out or I feel better when I have my favorite dessert. I’m not going to stop doing either of those things. I know I feel like a complete person when I am writing, but I also know I feel like a complete person when I’m hanging out playing Candy Land with my kids. I think it’s this weird external pressure—honestly it was drilled into me—wake up every day and write, or be a night owl and just always come to the desk. That’s all fun and great and definitely works for some people, but the big part of it is accepting it within yourself. I know that sounds weird and Zen, but if you do make that priority—you’ll have weeks you have to work on teaching or papers, but maybe the next week then. It’s when people don’t put it as priority, that’s when things go awry.

I didn’t really start getting publication success until I started having that sort of leeway with myself. There were definitely times when I did get up every morning and write—from eight to twelve, I had the luxury of a schedule in grad school, and write, and though not all of it was writing I was at the desk and it felt like a job to me. But so my normal natural self rebelled against it, so I wasn’t putting in the exact concentration. Everybody is going to be so different—that’s another thing I wish I heard in grad school—no one said, What works for me may not work for you. It was instead very much, I have the key and you’re going to follow this pattern. Somebody needs that discipline, but I think everybody can agree that you need to find a way where writing is going to fit in in your life and everything else will fall into place. There were times that I had have a three day break in between, now it’s almost a week, two week break in between because I travel, I teach, heaven forbid I want to be a good mom, a good friend, but I don’t beat myself up over it. Here’s the thing though: when I get to the desk, it’s on. No Facebook, no retail therapy. It’s concentration time. So I might have just two hours as opposed to my luxurious four hour block before, but that’s two hours when I am drafting and writing. That’s helped, too. There’s an urgency there that maybe wasn’t there before. Ultimately I’d say that whatever you can do to keep that urgency alive, so that when you’re sitting down at the desk, it’s happening. Go for it.

 

 

Rhett Trull is the editor and founder of Cave Wall, a biannual print journal out of Greensboro, North Carolina. Flyway blogger Andrew Payton got the chance to ask Ms. Trull a few questions about her work.

Andrew Payton: What is the story behind Cave Wall? How did it start? What was the driving force?

Rhett Trull: My husband Jeff and I started Cave Wall five years ago in order to celebrate poems we love. I’ve been a collector of favorite poems my whole life and for years have kept notebooks and files of them, returning to them often. Also, I love literary journals. I’ve subscribed to many over the years and always wanted to start my own. When I met Jeff, someone else who appreciates journals and poetry, the timing was right and Cave Wall was born. Maybe it sounds kind of cheesy, but the driving force is love. When a poem excites me I want to shout it out to the whole world; I want everyone to experience it. Cave Wall is a way to try to share those poems with, if not the whole world, at least an enthusiastic, appreciative group of readers.

AP: Would you say that you have a particular aesthetic as an editor? What do you look for in a poem or poet?

RT: Whatever my editorial aesthetic is remains somewhat of a mystery to me, and I like it that way. My tastes in poetry are ever-changing. I try to be open to all styles, as do Jeff and our other main Cave Wall reader, Michael Boccardo. We like poems that are long, short, lyric, narrative, funny, sad, and everything in between, as long as they move us. I guess that’s what I’m looking for when I read through a stack of submissions: I want a poem to leave me somewhere different than it finds me. I want to be changed by a poem. Also, I’m looking for a voice, one that engages my attention in a way that makes me forget everything else but this poem in this moment.

One interesting thing I’ve noticed as I put together these issues is how each one ends up developing its own aesthetic; certain themes emerge and are echoed. Sometimes, at the end of a reading period, when we’re trying to figure out which poem out of twenty worthy poems gets the last slot in an issue, one of the deciding factors becomes which poem fits best with the others we’ve gathered.

AP: Your first collection of poetry, The Real Warnings, was published in 2009 by Anhinga Press. How does being a poet yourself inspire your work as an editor? Where do these two roles intersect?

RT: I think the main intersection between editing and writing, at least for me, has to do with an exchange of energy. Getting to spend the majority of my time bouncing between two types of work about which I’m passionate is a luxury I try not to take for granted. If the work on one gets frustrating, I turn to the other and am refreshed, renewed. Certainly, working on Cave Wall has improved my writing, as does any time spent reading and studying good poetry. Plus, spending time with poetry I love makes me a happier person, fills me with gratitude, and that good energy gets carried over into all other parts of my life. As for how being a poet might inspire my work as an editor, well, it helps me appreciate how much work goes into each line, each word, of each poem. I hope this appreciation comes out in my responses to submissions. We receive many strong poems and have room to publish just a few, but I try whenever possible to respond personally to those we don’t accept, pointing out something I liked about the poems, letting the poet know that I value the time I spent with their work.

AP: As I’ve said, I found the most recent issue of Cave Wall superb. As the magazine is not affiliated with a university, like many seem to be these days, how do you promote Cave Wall? Who are most of your readers? And do you hope to expand that base of readers?

RT: Thank you. Your enthusiasm about issue 10 makes me happy. And this interview will, I hope, bring a few more readers our way. Word of mouth and advertisements here and there are our main method of promoting Cave Wall, as well as venues like Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Luna Park Review, and New Pages. The editors of those sites are invaluable when it comes to letting readers know what’s going on in the world of small presses. It helps to win some awards recognition, too, and we’re thrilled that two poems from issue 7 were chosen by Kevin Young for the Best American Poetry that came out this fall. Our subscription numbers continue to climb each year, and yes, we want to keep that number growing. We try to expand our advertising a little every year. We go to AWP. Meanwhile, we try to keep the subscription cost low, knowing how many good journals are out there and how precious each dollar is these days.

AP: Cave Wall publishes exclusively in print and exclusively poetry. Is there any impetus to move some material online or to work in other genres?

RT: I love all genres, but Cave Wall is strictly a poetry and art journal. We like the size of it: just 72 pages each issue. And although we put a few poems from each issue online and may add some other digital supplemental features, Cave Wall will remain a print journal always. The simple reason is that I love books and don’t enjoy reading on a screen for long periods of time. We’re happy with Cave Wall just the way it is. Technology is exciting and fun to explore, but isn’t there something about print publications that ought to be celebrated and continued, too? I think so. I’m going to keep celebrating. I’m in love with books.

Flyway’s Lydia Melby talks with Kate Bernheimer, independent editor of The Fairy Tale Review, about colored issues, communication, comics and “fabulism.” So what actually makes a fairy tale? We’re here to find out!

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LM: What is the story behind Fairy Tale Review? When and how did it come to be?

KB: I established Fairy Tale Review in 2005 after scheming it up over Bloody Marys at The Space Room in Portland, OR a few years prior to that. It had been on my mind for a very long time when I finally rented a post office box for the journal—the first thing I did officially for it.

The idea grew organically from the work I had been doing nearly my entire life, but especially since my twenties when I started my first novel based on fairy tales.  I had long noticed the profound influence of fairy tales on a great deal of contemporary books, yet as an avid reader of journals, it was impossible to ignore that overt fairy-tale work was marginalized into “special issues” dedicated to fabulism or magical realism. I knew of writers who had stories turned down because the work was deemed ‘not-literary’ or because editors had “already published a magical story this year [or in a special issue five years ago],” I had decided pretty consciously to advocate for fairy tales every way that I could, and give them a home. I did not realize at the time how many people would arrive at the scene.

In sum I established the journal as an act of resistance to the idea of dominant forms.

LM: Tell me a little bit about your new program, “Fairy Tale Book Repository”. Where did you get the idea? Can you give me a summary of the “long range plan” your website mentions, or is it a secret?

KB: I got the idea to establish a Fairy-Tale Book Repository over many years of finding discarded fairy-tale books at garage sales, thrift shops, or (along with other sad characters) in cartons on the sidewalk intended for garbage. I was frequently receiving new and used fairy-tale books in the mail from acquaintances, friends, and complete strangers who just thought I might like them. My shelves had become a sort of informal safe haven for fairy-tale books—an unofficial Island of Misfit Fairy-Tale Books.  So I decided to make it official and posted an announcement on the Fairy Tale Review website. So far The Fairy-Tale Book Repository exists in my study, my closets, my attic, and some boxes in the garage. I would love to give the books a more public home someday too, and I share these whenever I can. Anyone who knows me knows it is hard to leave my house or office without an armload of recommended fairy-tale reading.

Part of Fairy Tale Review’s mission is to “preserve” fairy tales of all kinds (more like preserving a delicious jam than some fragile artifact).  This is one of the ways.  I’m working on cataloguing the books and writing up descriptions of their contents and how they made their way to the Repository. Plans are not “secret” at all.  The Fairy-Tale Book Repository has been slow to venture from its current domestic space, but one day it will.

LM: Your website states you do not accept unsolicited submissions, but you put out a call for submissions for the Grey Issue– was this a one time event, or do you often accept unsolicited submissions, or plan to in the future?

KB: Fairy Tale Review Press, the book imprint of Fairy Tale Review, is not open to unsolicited submissions at this time.  Yet the annual journal, Fairy Tale Review, has always had, and has always relied heavily on, open reading periods.  Our next reading period is opening up at the time of the next AWP conference—the end of February 2012—and will be announced on our website, with submission guidelines available there.

In fact—and I really don’t know how common this is for other journals, perhaps many—100 percent of every single issue of Fairy Tale Review that I personally put together from 2006 to 2010 consisted of work I found exclusively through unsolicited submissions. Since then the journal has been guest edited and I don’t know the ratio of unsolicited to solicited work, but I do know the guest editors avidly and carefully read the unsolicited submissions (thousands of them) and responded personally in many cases to these.

To the open calls, of course, sometimes work has been submitted by writers whose work I know already, and this work, along with the rest, is screened anonymously by a dedicated volunteer team and then passed on to me for a final decision (I have in the past read just about every submission, though I’m now on a necessary editorial hiatus to meet other deadlines, and assigning Guest Editors to the new issues). Fairy Tale Review relies on the chance element of fairy-tale luck for what comes down our hatch.  We get many more manuscripts for each issue than we can possibly publish so decisions are hard—especially because the work we receive to consider is often lovingly, carefully sent in our direction by ardent fairy-tale fans. It’s not willy-nilly and so the whole endeavor feels very personal.

There was one exception to the open submission process: when I began Fairy Tale Review in 2005, I solicited work for the first issue, The Blue Issue (available as a free download here).  The debut issue was by and large gathered via word of mouth—I sent around an email to some writers asking them if they had anything for my new fairy-tale journal.  I didn’t know there would be such broad interest, and I started this way not to be exclusive but because I considered it a modest endeavor.  I did not establish any administrative apparatus (website, proper email account) before launching the journal. I guess I was following bread crumbs one by one as I tossed them down on the path. For all I knew, the plan would, you know, go to the birds before I put it together.  I intended the first issue to be a sort of personal revivalist announcement, a trumpet call for fairy tales, quietly putting forward the “fairy-tale feel” of the journal, its affect. I sent it around myself to readers once it was in print, and then sold out the few hundred remaining copies at AWP that year.

The Yellow Issue, the next issue we’ll be reading for (which will be the ninth annual issue, to come out in 2013) will be guest edited by Lily Hoang (Assistant Professor at New Mexico State University and author of Changing, a novel Fairy Tale Review Press published in 2008 which then won a PEN/Beyond Margins Award). She’s written a marvelous call for submissions that will go up on our website.

LM: Do you charge a reading fee for submissions? As an independent journal (not one connected to a university) where does most of your funding come from?

KB: I think it is very polite to ask about funding because people might be curious, when they send work to a journal or read it, “how” these things come to be and it’s good when things are transparent. Sometimes such information helps a reader understand a journal’s artistic vision or mission. Also it seems to me like a lot of people want to start journals, and actually need to know the range of answers to this very question.  So I’m happy to tell you about how funding works for Fairy Tale Review. In a nutshell, we have none! Before I founded the journal, for all I knew literary journals were funded by these marvelous patrons who also supplied their dedicated, bookworm editors with offices in Victorian houses with wood-burning fireplaces and bottomless pots of hot tea in flowered china. Au contraire. I had no funding when I started.  I asked for and received a gift from someone I knew to print up the first couple of issues, get my post office box, and have a website designed and hosted.

In my experience, people who edit and publish literary journals are pretty much doing it out of great love of reading and out of respect for readers and writers, paired with an inclination toward editing is an art form—not for pay.  No one I personally know who edits a journal is making any monetary profit from it—or a salary, even.  They earn income from elsewhere or editing a journal is a part of their other job—often journal editors have many jobs.  Universities that fund literary journals are actively supporting this work, and along with it, advocating for literacy—nurturing readers.  It’s great when that happens. Yet funding situations vary for many reasons and my journal does not have any funding. It’s just out of pocket and whatever comes in from sales goes toward replenishing the ever-shrinking funds available to me for it.  The journal would not exist were it not for the in-kind funding that comes via interns and volunteers (i.e. their valuable and generous time).

All human hours for Fairy Tale Review are donated.  The brilliant Tara Reesor of the Publication Unit of Indiana State University works with her talented students to design the journal and our books and get the files printer-ready.   I recently received a small grant from the Spanish Embassy to cover production costs for the recently published novel Irlanda by Espido Freire, translated by Toshiya Kamei.  Other invoices have been paid out of my own tattered pocket—these include things like the not-insignificant cost of mailing things to the distributor and reviewers and contributors; website hosting and updates;  tables at the Book Fair of AWP, etc. It takes sacrifice. But what a pleasure it is to give things up for fairy tales, and such small things, for me.

Fairy tales save people in all sorts of ways: it’s no accident Anne Frank wrote fairy tales. Historically a lot of authors say they first fell in love with reading through fairy-tale books.  The journal was established, quite simply, to give an open home to fairy tales and to preserve them for future generations of readers. It has never been about “silver coins,” though it takes some money to do this.  With a little fairy-tale luck the work will continue.

As for fees, no, Fairy Tale Review does not and never will charge a reading fee for general submissions. We will charge a fee if we establish a contest (and we’d offer something in return to those who enter).  We have had so many requests to conduct a contest over the years, so we think about it, even though contests are a little antithetical to the nonhierarchical art of fairy tales.  Still, there is a clamoring for one, so we are listening. I often toy with the idea of making the journal entirely free and online, but it’s actually less expensive to print it because getting all the back issue material up on a website would, you know, cost money itself (time, talent, technology).

LM: I’ve seen a lot of my favorite authors published in your journal, some that one wouldn’t necessarily think of when imagining a traditional fairy tale. How does your reading staff interpret the term “fairy tale” when go soliciting (or reading unsolicited) submissions?

KB: Thank you for the kind words about Fairy Tale Review’s diverse and growing list of generous writers who send work to us, from high school students to Pulitzer Prize nominees! It’s been pretty remarkable over the years to see how fairy tales provide so many readers an invisible key to the secret garden of story.  The journal has received submissions from indie darlings; bestselling authors with books prominently displayed in airports; writers who have stapled together their manifestoes; preschool teachers on behalf of their classes; and from MFA students, biology professors, nurses, janitors, chefs, psychiatrists, performance artists, sculptors, romance novelists, playwrights and, as many journals do, lonely prisoners too.

There is no singular, representative style to the work that we publish.  We have published work that falls all over the spectrum from mainstream to experimental.  From commercial to avant garde.  It’s the fairy-tale effect we look for—it’s a sensation, felt through a process of reading.  You get that special ‘once upon a time’ feeling, which can be a chill or a shudder, a glow or a pulse.   Certainly the team of readers I rely on have a certain dexterity with the aesthetics of fairy tales—an area I delight in teaching—but every new work is different and we could never say what we’re looking for except new fairy tales.  Fairy tales are possibility spaces—their borders cannot be closed. Fairy tales always are changing—that is their history, their present, their future.

Fairy tales are minoritarian: they elude definition by status quo terms. As such they survive via becoming—not by being defined. This does not mean that one cannot categorize their techniques (or style) in a given moment in history. To describe is not to identify, if those techniques themselves are seen as always evolving.

LM: Your blog on Jan. 31st states that you accept comic and illustration submissions–how often do you receive submissions of themed illustrations/art and sequential art? Do you often solicit visual art submissions?

KB: Timothy Schaffert, who guest edited The Brown Issue (now in print and available here), solicited work from an artist he admires named Peter Kuper, whose work is terrific.  For The Blue Issue, and for the journal’s cover, I solicited images from Kiki Smith; I had been invited to speak for the Museum of Modern Art about her work, and had fallen in love with it.

Recently, we were absolutely delighted to publish, as a downloadable PDF on our website, in conjunction with The Red Issue, a mini-comic by the artist Jennifer Parks, “They Met in a Dream.” Here’s an example where fairy-tale luck came into play.  A dear friend of mine, the amazing novelist and musician Willy Vlautin, had picked up a postcard in Portland, OR—I might be remembering wrong, but I think he’d picked it up from a pile of them in a coffee shop or bar, near where newspapers and ephemera like these things sometimes sit. It was a postcard advertising a gallery show for Parks’ work, and he gave it to me saying something like, “I think you’d dig this.” I promptly lost the postcard in one of the volcanic piles of paperwork on my desk and a couple of years later, after a move, the postcard showed up again. (I never lose anything—my papers are just nomads.)  I looked at Parks’ blog, where she had recently posted a few images from a Little Red Riding Hood graphic novelette and I loved them.   I asked if we could feature her work on our website and Justin Runge, whom I had taught in a graduate program, designed the PDF for the website (and for a special web edition of The Red Issue).  We also solicited a beautiful cover image from Parks for “Songs for Fairy Tales,” the CD of songs that Fairy Tale Review issued in 2010.

There is a deep connection between visual art and fairy tales. In many fairy-tale books language and image may not even be considered separate entities.  So we honor that tradition.

The journal receives many submissions of artwork but we cannot include much art with each issue, in large part because it is very expensive to reproduce artwork in color.  But I often write lectures and essays about fairy-tale art and keep images on file for those.

The National Book Foundation’s frustrating (and frankly, puzzling) exclusion of “collections and/or retellings of folk-tales, myths, and fairy-tales” is a prime example of how the “literary” field so often dismisses works involving fairy tales, myths and well-known folklore. How do you feel Fairy Tale Review is affected by this bias, and how has FTR already helped change it in it’s short life?

Harvard fairy-tale scholar and advocate Maria Tatar and I co-authored a letter to the National Book Foundation two years ago, respectfully asking that they kindly remove this little-known and, truly, not particularly actively followed, exclusion of folktales, myths, and fairy tales from their prestigious National Book Awards. When the response was very polite but not affirmative we posted our letter online on our respective websites and created a Facebook page, seeking “petition” support. Hundreds of people have signed on to the petition there, including several National Book Awards finalists, winners, and judges.  We would like to continue the conversation with the National Book Foundation; and I am trying to research the history of this exclusion, which must be a fascinating history indeed: who is the person who put this exclusion on the agenda list of a meeting? I would love to know how this person dressed and what cocktail he or she preferred.  The fear of fairy tales—fascinating, really, historically speaking. All kinds of prejudice bond up in the act.  Sadly, this literary prejudice is fairly widespread.

On a basic level, fairy tales are not considered ‘major’ art works.  Fine, by this fairy-tale author—as soon as something is by definition “major,” its ethics can reasonably be called into question.

But it is sad that fairy tales—and other underdog heroes—suffer from prejudice in many circles, among them certain literary circles, as you point out.  This trouble with fairy tales, it is a very American problem in its own way—I’m told by authors and editors in other areas of the world that the same prejudices don’t really hold—and this should be an area of research interest to someone, I think: a comparison of how fairy tales fare in contemporary “literary circles” internationally.  The prejudices, by the way, aren’t always visible to readers; a lot of people are astonished to learn fairy tales might be excluded from any prize. Fairy tales are also very popular, of course. And that too leads to an underestimation, etc.  It has to do with the fact that in order to have capital-L Literature, we must leave something out: how can you have something if it includes everything? To have a defined entity, how can the borders be open?  Fairy tales elude definition.

I cannot offer any objective assessment about whether Fairy Tale Review has helped improve the situation, but I think it may have.   I have long dedicated myself to the fairy-tale revival—to helping reverse the clichés and damages done to fairy tales (and thus to readers who need these stories so often about the weak triumphing over the strong) many years ago, and have never turned back.  I have received many letters of gratitude from readers and hear increasingly often from teachers using fairy tales in the classroom, and I see graduate students studying fairy tales and more and more writers working with a sense of awareness from them. I’m invited to talk about fairy tales at museums, universities, libraries each week—I have to turn requests down!  So from 1995, the year that marked my conscious dedication to fairy tales as an author and editor, when saying “I write fairy tales” could pretty much end a conversation with a lot of people I knew, things have changed one hundred percent.

It would be lovely to think my work at Fairy Tale Review has helped; and my own work couldn’t exist without the prior efforts of authors like Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, and current fairy-tale heroes Maria Tatar, Donald Haase, and Jack Zipes.

If you do plan to accept unsolicited submissions in the future, what advice would you give emerging writers who are interested in submitting to Fairy Tale Review?

It’s a very relevant question.  Read fairy tales—then read some more fairy tales, to paraphrase Einstein.
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Kate Bernheimer is the author of a trilogy of novels and the story collection Horse, Flower, Bird (Coffee House Press), and editor of three anthologies including the World Fantasy Award winning My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales (Penguin). Founder and Editor of Fairy Tale Review, she is an Associate Professor at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette. Her next book, a children’s book, comes out in April: The Lonely Book with illustrations by Chris Sheban (Schwartz & Wade/Random House).