Illustrations by Max Mose

I.

My parents are quite literally gods.
         Abnormally beautiful and self-
absorbed. And like all beautiful,
self-absorbed men and women who make
the mistake of marrying one other, they have
their faults. Plural, possessive.
(I must take my time. Go slow.)
First,
         although they married
each other, they always thought they could
do better. You know. Someone
taller, perhaps, with straighter
teeth and better opportunities.
Next,
         the only opinion that ever really
mattered to them
is how they would fare in a rival’s estimation.
Then,
         the one that explains
this laying bare
of family business is this. The only reason
my mother had children was because
she desired
proof, some life-size tangible
to remind her how
sublime she once was.
Finally,
                   everything I’ve said,
am saying, will say,
is
harsh but true. Harsh.
but so true.

II.

Sometimes, like now, the best place to start
is the beginning, but where is that?
How does one get there?

III.

The woman who gave birth
to me,
         I suppose some might hazard the word
Mother, had a difficult time. The pain must have been
enough to make her delusional, for she swears
I came from her thigh. This is nothing usual
in the way of history
below the Mason-Dixon. The façade
is always more important than what’s underneath.
Consider this. Not one, but two,
parents who’ve made a point
of not remembering
their children’s birthdays. No months, no days.
Zounds,
         they can’t even keep straight
who was born, much less who was born
when and in what order.
Another testament to
the power of the vain to shroud
the scandalous.
                   My father
says he gave birth to my sister
Athena—and that I helped. All this
from the top of his head. No, not that one.
The unimaginative one
on the top of his neck. And not to be outdone,
the woman biologically responsible for my being
insists on believing she bore me to spite
my father, that I was
immaculately conceived. Of course,
she uses the term parthenogenetically.
(I wonder if that’s anything like in vitro.)

IV.

So, blood is spewing forth like lava
and what limps forth but a squat,
hirsute, thick-necked
boy with two clubbed feet.
Needless to say that the woman
who claims to be my mother
isn’t pleased. Immediately
she thinks my father will point
an iron finger at her side
of the gene pool. She forgets the gothic
bent of what it means to be Southern,
(Our family tree has no branches.),
and promptly tosses me over
the balcony, the proverbial
baby with the bath water.
Everyone has a crazy relative or two.
But this nut cleans herself up,
powders her nose, and goes out
for the evening to play bid whist and tell gossipy
anecdotes about cheating husbands and ugly babies with those adders
she calls friends.
                   Round these parts,
people say that if your daddy
don’t claim you can “get in line,”
but if your mama don’t want you,
“You’re messed up for life.” I suspect
that that’s true,
                   because much too much
later I thought about
paying money to consult
a psychoanalyst,
but my parents said that sort of foolishness
was for mortals. All I know is
the greatest falls always happen
just beyond your mother’s sight
and, no matter how sincere
the remorse, the regret
—later, if it comes—
is quite useless,
once the damage is done.

In the morning, Miranda comes into the kitchen where I’m making coffee.

“They’re back,” she says. “What?” I say, even though I know. By the time the hot water starts to drip, she’s gone again. I sip my coffee and wait for my brain to burst, for that skip-and-jump feeling in my heart. If she’s in the shower, we’ll be okay. If she’s in bed, or worse yet, in bed with the curtains drawn, we’re in for another round.

I know I am supposed to be supportive and encouraging and resilient, but no one ever considers what it’s like for the other person. No one ever says, but how are you? I picture some stranger saying this to me as he rolls down the window of his car. Picture him yelling, “I know about Miranda, but how are you?” In traffic, at stoplights, I find myself looking expectantly out the window.

But Miranda doesn’t have cancer. She’s never lost a baby and she’s not dying. She has birds.

At first, the attacks were occasional. In an instant: fast breath, racing heart, dizziness, darting eyes. Then more frequent, with numbing after-effects that left me feeling like I had a sick dog, not a wife. Now, they’re never about one specific thing. She fears nothing and everything at the same time; she fears she’ll never accomplish her dream.

“But what is your dream,” I say. If only she’d tell me, I’d make it happen.

“Exactly,” she says.

She watches sitcoms, wears sweatpants, won’t drink anything caffeinated. She keeps her hand on her heart, trying to time its pacing, trying to untangle the tightness she feels there. I yearn for the sound of her voice. Sometimes she sits in the shower, knees up, eyes unblinking. I know because our shower is made of glass.

People change, I tell myself.

When I tell her I’m leaving her, it comes out easy, like I’m on stage. She looks at me for a long time with more words than have come out of her mouth in days and says nothing. We both know I love her too much to ever leave her, so threatening it was worse than actually doing it.

One day I take her to a therapist’s office I’d looked up online. She doesn’t even complain, which is the scariest part. Ten minutes in the car and I’m second-guessing. We can still turn back, I think. We can change our lives, but I know we can’t. I’m the stable one, and Miranda—my Miranda—is the one who once jumped out of a still-moving car to rescue an upturned flowerbed. The one who wanted to get married in Vegas and who gives $20s to homeless women on the street. The one who once, after witnessing a father hit his daughter across the cheek, came home and made harsh, hurtful love to me because it made her furious, she said, and fury is just another form of passion.

I didn’t understand, and when I told her I didn’t want to make love like that, I think it excited her more. It’s one of the things I think she likes about me the most: that I am the woman in the relationship, and she, impulsive and uncontainable, is the man.

We’re like that tether ball game you play in elementary school, I think. And love might not have anything to do with it at all.

Inside, Dr. Simon looks like Santa Claus. The hairs under his nose twitch when he breathes. He doesn’t ask questions, makes no pleasantries or small talk. He begins right away, and I am thankful.“You need to think of it in a way you can visualize,” he says. “Some patients like to think of animals. Animals with certain features that they think resemble their anxieties.”

Quack, I think.

“Animals?” Miranda says.

The sound of her voice is painful and I want to close my eyes and sleep inside her throat.

“I know it sounds a bit ludicrous,” Dr. Simon says. “But try to answer the question.”

“Birds?” she says, timidly.

I look at her, stunned. Birds? What the fuck?

“Good.” Dr. Simon nods approvingly. “Tell me why.”

“Miranda,” I whisper. She levels me with her eyes. I know she is thinking, you forced me to come.

“That’s what it feels like?” she says. “That’s what I picture? The beaks, the claws, the racing, beady eyes. The flutters and flapping.”

Something like pride flushes my cheeks. How hard it must have been for her to say that. How awful it must be to have a bird for a heart, or birds in your head, beating their wings and squawking and thumping like that. I think of their beady eyes, their pointy beaks, their creepy claw-like feet, the way they shudder and shift.

“Very good Miranda. I have a good sense now of what it feels like for you. And that is excellent news.”

“Yeah?” she says.

“Oh yes.” He leans back slowly. His eyes are everywhere on her. Miranda’s body relaxes. She has pleased him, and this pleases her, and I realize then that it might be him, not me, who will be the one to save her.

That night I stay up watching YouTube videos on how things are made. Jam, bulletin boards, light bulbs.

Whatever.

When I get in bed, I pick up one of her arms and slide under it. She doesn’t wake up, but then again, sometimes I think she’s sleeping only to look over and realize she’s just breathing slowly, eyes open. I put her hand on my chest, but it feels the way I imagine it feels for those soldiers who lose limbs in battle. Like their arm is still there, even when it’s not.

Or is it the reverse?

The next evening when I get home from work, I expect Miranda to be in bed. Instead, she’s gone, and the apartment is full of birds. Birds, everywhere. Parrots. Robins. Cardinals. Loons—couldn’t tell you. Red, blue, shimmery. Black. Brown. Feathers flutter down from places I can’t see. They perch on candlesticks, on the mantle, on the fireplace. Birds bob in front of my feet, all sizes, all kinds. There is squawking and chirping and song. I’ve never seen anything like it. My house is a zoo. It’s the birdcage at the zoo. It’s the sky.
I want to cry. Or scream. A scream like you’ve always wanted to let out but never had the opportunity, because opportunities like that are rare. But they’re also real, and mine was here, and I’d earned it. But all I can think and hear and feel are the feathers, the wings, the colors.

“Miranda?” It’s pathetic, what comes out, how un-loud it is. “Miranda!”

Then the smell hits my nose. I step on something and feel a concentrated, dizzying stir near my foot. A bird squawks and shakes its feathers violently. Then I hear her. At first, I can only see her bare legs until the birds flying in front of her clear out. As soon as I see her, my head empties. Her face is flushed pink, her eyes bright with something I haven’t seen since I used to come home and find her alive. Her face tilts up as she follows the flying patterns of the birds and when her head moves, I let my eyes rove from her face, to her neck, and down. She’s wearing just a T-shirt, naked, from what I can tell, underneath.

“Aren’t they beautiful?” she says. One of them brushes her cheek with its wing and speeds off, frightened.

She laughs. Tilts her head back and lets out striking, tinkling laughter.

I ought to demand to know where they came from, how she paid for them, if she stole them. Ask what the hell we’re supposed to do now.

I mean, they are everywhere.

But all I do is stare at her mouth, wanting to see inside it, wanting to know where that laugh came from, and what else could come from that place.

“Miranda,” I say, and she nods.

I whip off her T-shirt and pull her down on the couch, touching her everywhere like she is new. The birds resting there startle and squawk, disrupting the silence that had fallen over the others. While Miranda and I roll around, the birds fly overhead, ducking over and under one another, their colors and sounds mixing together. At first it’s strange and chaotic, but then, after they settle down again, it really is quite beautiful.

All rights reserved to Lisa Gordon.

I remember thinking that diseases
                were like a marriage

vow: I’ll give you mine if you
                give me yours—in sickness

and in lesser sickness,
                to have and to give

to any future lovers. A preemptive
                revenge against infidelity—

hope your new partner likes
                this strain, this infection.

New meaning brought to the phrase
                Cleanliness Is Godliness.

But diseases are no marriage,
                no promise, no pact.

Just proof that once we shared our
                selves with each other,

and carry those memories with us
                as evidence, scarring and

damning as they are.

All rights reserved to Timothy Otte.

No. 1

Fade in on: a residential street, lined with trees. It is the quiet of an early summer morning. The houses are asleep. In the extreme distance, we see a figure moving toward us. Birds sing. As the figure gets closer, we see a stick thin boy with blond, combed hair and a dirty white T-shirt riding a dated bicycle and moving at great speed. When he is ten yards away, he begins to slow. He comes toward the camera, looking into the lens, until he is in close-up. Title appears across his face in a stylized font: The Eleventh Summer of Theo Loudermilk. There has been a correction made to the title such that a line is drawn through the word “Eleventh” and “11 1/2” has been written above it by a child.

Black.

No. 2

Fade in on: an ancient stone and cement wall capped with thick shrubbery. Theo’s bike is propped up against the wall and, through the gate, we can see that a cemetery lies within. We cannot see Theo himself, but every few moments, we can hear him spit. We move slowly into the bone yard, then dissolve to a close-up of Theo’s mouth. He is eating cherries: putting them in his mouth first, then tugging off the stems. He works the pit free with his tongue and teeth, takes a deep breath, and launches it from his lips. Theo rests his back against a particularly aged stone—moss-covered and worn featureless. When we find one of the pits he has scattered, we hold on this for a moment. The morning sun illuminates the blades of grass with gold.

Black.

No. 3

Fade in on: a close shot of a black umbrella popping open. When it lifts from frame, we see Theo’s face. We then cut to a wide shot revealing that Theo is standing on the lowest row of bleacher seats at an empty little league field. There is no sign of rain. He springs from the bench, the umbrella raised above his head, but lands harder than he’d anticipated. He moves to the next highest row of seats and tries the jump from there—the descent once again not meeting his expectations. He then climbs to the highest row and prepares for lift-off. He crouches and realizes he is a good six feet from the ground. Thinking better of the height, he steps down a row. He assesses the elevation, nods to himself, and jumps. He does, indeed, appear to float for a moment as we cut to: black.

No. 4

Fade in on: Theo standing on a broad lawn, drinking from a green garden hose. There is something abstract and isolated about the hose—no houses or gardens can be seen. When he has had his fill, Theo wipes his mouth with his wrist, drops the hose, and dashes out of frame. We hold on this a moment, then see his sneakers from his POV. They are running on an asphalt path, but take just a few steps before they stop short. Still in Theo’s POV, we move in on the path, where a colony of ants is excavating the sand from beneath the tar. They have created a circular mound and are removing the grains from the hole in the center one-by-one. Theo reaches a finger into frame and causes a tiny avalanche. The ants scramble to correct the damage, then settle back into their routine.

Black.

Repatriated

Shaky hands, costal bang. Blood poured from
a hole, repatriated to heart. Compensation is
an ugly word, creased skin pulled from an orange.
I gather small fish in a cup, my finger lightning
rod, little wobble. The room begins to smell
like juniper, dull coins. Stillness comes
in a thing like you, curled at my waist.
What I’ll do to protect this splendor.
I open like a lock, love the sturdiest verb.

Blood Garden

You are five and wicked with need. A dandelion
seed blown through the house. The grandmother
closet, change deep in the belly, the dress.
You colonize the too-big shoes, easy ingénue.
Thirsty at the top of the stairs, lapping
sugar water, silky tongued and brave until

one shoe catches the other, the smell of olives,
the way down. And so tumble two stairs, crush
glass beneath your body to slice the soft meat
of your fist open, a hush unraveled in red
across the carpet. Your skin a white flap,
a red plane. To you blood is a garden
where your future is sown, the red arc
a bright harbinger of so many wounds.

All rights reserved to Caitlin Bailey. 

It is night. I shut my eyes

& they open again.

They are lost
the way a bead

of water gets lost
on a hot mirror.

They itch from the faint
needle fall of stars.

I aim the flashlight
at the map, & giant moths
crash into highways

& lakes, like monsters
in Japanese
horror flicks.

My little circle
of light looks

to the tiny
unseen inhabitants

of this paper Pennsylvania

like a tornado
of sun: they burn apart

& tell me to go
home. I am

home, I tell them,
which is why I am lost. I need their help

getting down
from this ladder
of night, & they won’t. I need to drive

through the hurt

forest & wind up
at a 24-hour donut shop

where I can sugar myself
and coffee myself

& pretend this country
is not the enemy
of the dawn. Men

live here & ride their snowmobiles
through the soft bodies

of deer. They sharpen their boots
in the mud. They blacken
each other’s eyes

with fistfuls of mid-
night. Someone
or something throws a snowball

of midnight at the back
of my head
& the word ‘fuck’
rolls out the front

which means the map
is broken

& the flashlight

has run out
of ideas. You

are no help. I ask you
to hold the map

& your hands backpedal
into pockets. I ask you
to pour what’s left
of the flashlight

into my cupped hands
& the door
sulks suddenly shut.

Inside, we pass the silence
back & forth

like a joint
& take big
selfish breaths

as the headlights flash
into a field,

spotting the flying saucers
of deer eyes
in the grasses.

They are green & lovely
& they mean us no harm.

But when I turn
the ignition, the deer run off
like a gang of hurdlers,
leaving me alone

with you & my fear. Together

we drive past beasts
& night birds
& crackling barns,

seeking the blind
moon. All the small houses

are on strike. The porch lights
haunted with gnats.

& When I roll my window

down to suck in
the dark air, you roll
your window up, as though
there’s only so much world

you can take.

All rights reserved to Gregory Lawless.

“Hummingbird Study” (first draft)

 By Meredith Taylor

I rode my bike from my Isle Vista apartment to Butterfly Ridge in Montecito. I named the area Butterfly Ridge because it’s directly over Butterfly Beach. It was formerly Channel Drive but the Beanie Baby guy (Note: Google his name) has taken away the Drive and made a pedestrian/biker pathway bordered by a colossus of flowers of all colors, and then the flowers simply meld with the stunning view beyond (of the Channel Islands and the blue Pacific Ocean). There is no more beautiful place on earth. It’s a haven for butterflies and hummingbirds and I, Meredith, a grad student at UC Santa Barbara, am studying hummingbirds and planning a scientific life. My back was turned to the Beanie Baby guy’s Moorish mansion (still not completed after years of construction) (Note: Google to see if it is actually Moorish architecture). I was watching two hummingbirds in some sort of game or dance. I wondered if anyone had ever seen it before, like maybe the DuPont guy who did those photographs (Google that guy).

I almost reached for my backpack but I didn’t want to take my eyes away from whatever was going on, maybe a fight. No time for the digital camera. I would have to just watch and not look away then record it all in my journal when I got home.

They looked like they were trying to kill each other.

I saw two hummingbirds. Colors that I recall were navy blue, possibly dark gray or black, red, purple, green, shimmering feathers like new car colors ever changing with the light, long beaks, tiny birds, beady eyes. They hovered about two feet apart, five feet from the tops of the flowers. Then they flew toward each other aggressively and bumped each other with great force. I could hear the collision. I was standing only six feet from them. Then they went back to the original hovering positions and twice more repeated their fierce flying into each other and the same loudness at contact. After this they were about two feet from each other and they flew in unison, parallel to the other, high into the sky, maybe twenty to twenty-five feet high and when they reached that height, they circled and swooped down and landed among the flowers.

If you’ve never traveled faster
than light, count yourself
lucky. It does mean things
to the body. Your bones

get soupy, you can’t stand up
straight, and you totter
like a baby gazelle, wobbly,
full of fright. But the Captain

with his bald, Shakespearian
grace makes it all look
so easy. The way his big hands
splash across his chest

when he smoothes his uniform
or slaps his combadge
with dictatorial haste. He even
pulls off being pissed

with panache. I, on the other hand,
am only hailed when there’s a spill
on the bridge or an accident
on the holodeck. Too bad,

at this point in history, nobody’s
improved on a bucket
and a mop. Swab the deck,
ye dog, he says to me

with a wink, quoting Stevenson,
I think. At night he watches old
Merchant & Ivory flicks
or BBC tapes, practicing

his delivery. Make it so, he says,
bare-chested, while I disinfect
his sink. He brushes his fingers
against my cheek and booms,

Don’t make me pull rank.
When I slap his hand away,
he laughs. Then he reads a little Pliny
before he falls asleep while I massage

his feet. The second I stop,
of course, he wakes up
coated in sweat. Nightmares
of Romulan attacks or perhaps

it’s something deeper
than that, something he can’t
remember, or won’t. Don’t stop,
he tells me, and I don’t.

All rights reserved to Gregory Lawless.

From the Outlived Series:

Paper Darts: Your sketchbooks are pretty phenomenal. Can you describe your relationship with them?

Pat Perry: When you decide to pursue art as a living, projects, personal or commercial, get drawn out and complicated. If those bigger works are the movies I make, my sketchbook is filled with YouTube videos. Ed Templeton nailed it when he explained how everyone likes to pick up a pencil and draw as a kid, but most people lose that and stop making art for fun. My sketchbook is the way I feel is best to keep that raw, unfiltered practice alive. That book is for me and I can draw whatever I feel like drawing without worrying whether its right or wrong—what freedom! The observational drawings keep me on my game while also keeping a document of the days that go by. The drawings from my head stir the pot and are an escape from the monotony and stress of the real world.

PD: How do your sketchbooks translate into finished, fully illustrated pieces? Do you prefer sketching to the process of finalizing a detailed, finished work?

PP: The sketchbooks aren’t where you’ll find the initial, exact study for a finished piece. Only fragments that spark me down a path and on a tangent that eventually ends with a finished drawing or painting. The sketchbooks are great because I don’t have to execute the pages in a room by myself away from the life I’m desperately trying to translate and interpret. I can be right there under that overpass, next to that lake, in that hospital room, drawing. The fully finished pieces are just as necessary though, and I like forcing myself to work on something for a long time and seeing it to its end. I think an audience can be moved by a piece that took a long time, because that only reinforces how important the idea was.

From The sketchbook:

All Rights Reserved to Pat Perry.

Roxane Gay is the author of Ayiti, a collection of short stories published by Artistically Declined Press in October 2011 and named one of the National Book Critic Circle’s “Small Press Highlights of 2011.” A list of her published stories and essays would go on pretty close to forever. She is co-editor of PANK, fiction editor of Bluestem, essay editor of The Rumpus, and a regular contributor to HTMLGiant. She is also an assistant professor of English at Eastern Illinois University (that’s right, she does all that and still has a day job). She is easily one of the most versatile writers in existence—the questions asked of her in this interview could have been thrown out and replaced with completely different lines of inquiry and she would have had something interesting and thought-provoking to say regardless. Personally, I believe Roxane Gay defines what it means to be a writer today: someone who is deeply engaged in both the world of words and the world itself. 

My first question concerns a subject I suspect (well, I certainly hope) no interviewer has asked about first: Edith Wharton! I know you love her work (as do I), so I wanted to know what you think a fiction writer today can learn from reading her novels in terms of craft. 

What can’t a writer learn from Edith Wharton? Her attention to detail is impeccable. She does description in a way that makes me want to crawl inside her books. The way she writes quiet suffering and social suffocation is exquisite. She offers such an intimate understanding of the world(s) her characters come from, so her books also offer one hell of a primer on creating a sense of authenticity. Edith Wharton is absolutely everything.

The author Tayari Jones recently commented on the way people tend to ask writers of color to comment only on other writers of color, or women writers to comment only on other women writers. I note that your short story collection Ayiti was described as an examination of “what it means to be Haitian,” yet it’s so much more than that. (You also write on the widest range of subjects of anyone I know—everything from Twilight to the demise of the Encyclopedia Britannica.) How does a writer deal with being “pigeonholed” by race or sex or other restrictive categorization?

You accept that other people are going to try to force you into certain restrictive definitions and you fight those restrictions when you need to fight them and surrender when you need to surrender. Figuring out when to do what is tricky, but mostly—your instincts will guide you correctly.

I’ve twice heard you give a reading of “Girls With Eating Disorders,” and there’s a point where the male character says to his bulimic girlfriend, “You’re taking up a lot of room.” At both readings I heard the audience gasp at this. Your stories often depict cruelty even while they are also often very funny (I think the audience laughed as much as they gasped). Have you ever written something that made you wonder if you were crossing a line that shouldn’t be crossed? If so, could you tell me about it? If not, is there a “line” that you would hesitate to cross? Either way, what right now is the next line to cross in your writing—what would you dare yourself to do next?

I try to go there in my writing. I make myself uncomfortable. When I feel nauseous, or disgusted with myself I think, “Now I am getting somewhere.” I don’t know if there’s a line I wouldn’t cross, though I tend to think, “What would my parents think?” and use that as a sort of general guide for not bringing shame and humiliation to those around me. Life is pretty cruel so I like writing about both the petty and more significant cruelties we have to face. Is it uncomfortable? Yes. But so is life. It is important for writing to take chances and push boundaries, not all the time, but when it serves the story best. That’s all I am ever trying to do.

The next line I want to cross in my writing is drawing more from my personal experiences in my nonfiction. There’s a troubling period in my life I want to write about. The thought of doing so terrifies me but I still want to do it. We shall see.

I was originally going to ask what pisses you off about writers, but I considered how much snarky criticism is going around in which one writer rags on others for what they’re doing wrong (that, implicitly, he/she is doing right). Instead I’m going to ask what you see as the most positive trends emerging in writing today.

Writing today is absolutely thrilling. There are great conversations taking place about literature. I am really energized by some of the emerging forces in literary criticism, particularly online.

You’ve been published in Best American Erotica, and I know you’re reading the best-selling 50 Shades trilogy, so let’s talk sex. (Well, sex writing, anyway.) 50 Shades has been described as “mommy porn,” which I guess is meant to describe the way these novels are hugely popular with mainstream readers even while they graphically depict an S&M relationship. The trilogy’s detractors point to lackluster writing, which could suggest that while erotica may finally become “acceptable” reading, it doesn’t go so far as to suggest it will become a “respected” type of writing. I’d like to get your thoughts on where you think literary erotica is going / could go / should go.

I am sure in the next few years, we’ll see a bit of mainstream attention because of all this 50 Shades business. The literary erotica community has been humming along and doing quite well for some time. I’m not even sure that the goal is to become more respected. As a culture, we struggle to respect expressions of sexuality. We see this at every level. Until our culture changes, there’s no place for literary erotica to reach for. Within the literary community, erotica will gain more respect when the writing gets better. I’ve read the 50 Shades trilogy and the story is pretty hilarious and at times hot, but the writing is abominable in every possible way. There’s a reason why people are pointing fingers. There is great erotica out there but most of it focuses on the erotics and less on the writing and that’s fine. While there are different opinions in the erotica community, are we really reading erotica for a complex intellectual experience? I just want to be turned on. I’m not looking for Pulitzer-worthy prose.

You were born and raised in the Midwest, and you’ve lived much of your life in small towns in this general region. How do you think this has shaped your writing? A zillion people have written about cities; what can stories about small-town middle America offer that readers get nowhere else?

Bright lights, big city, nightlife, crowding, blah blah blah. That’s all well and good but I’m more intrigued by the small town and all the complexity that can be found therein, about the lives people manage to create for themselves when they are so far removed from urban experiences, about how they survive, about how they thrive, or don’t. Can you imagine what’s going on with a man who has never left the county where he was born? My goodness. I have grown weary of this idea of the flyover state. People actually live in those states and when I can, I try to write there so that those places can become more than this vast monolith too narrowly encapsulated by a pithy phrase.

There are some creative writing teachers who want nothing to do with so-called “genre” fiction—sci-fi, fantasy, romance, etc. I know you’ve used The Hunger Games in an advanced fiction workshop and clearly don’t have this kind of prohibition, so I’d like to hear about how you incorporate “genre” into your classes. Is there a difference between how you would use The Hunger Games in a workshop versus, say, The Age of Innocence? What do you do about students who only want to read contemporary genre fiction and have no use for anything by old dead guys?

I introduce the idea of genre in my fiction classes at all levels and then I talk about tearing down the walls between genres and focus on craft techniques. I tend to believe stories are stories are stories. Certainly, there’s a lot to be learned from studying genre and the various rules of different genres, how to break those rules, and the like, but there's also a lot to be learned by seeing that there is probably more in common across genres than we tend to believe. The difference between how I use The Hunger Games versus a book like The Age of Innocence is in terms of what craft techniques I want my students to learn. I look at what a text does best (or not) rather than looking at the often arbitrary genre designation. In terms of students who want to read narrowly, I discuss the importance of reading broadly and the importance of understanding history and how the dead white guys built the foundation contemporary fiction stands on. Many contemporary vampire stories, for example, can find their roots in Victorian literature.

Hypothetical teaching scenario: You have a student in a workshop who wants to be a writer. It’s all they want to do in life. They dream of topping the bestseller list. And…their writing sucks. Completely. Now they’re in your office asking for advice. You say to them…?

50 Shades of Grey is a bestseller. So are Dan Brown’s books. Bad writing has never been a deterrent to commercial success. I’d offer the student an honest, constructive critique of their writing. I’d tell them about the realities of publishing and I would wish them luck. I never want to be the person who tells a student they can’t have their dreams. Pragmatism is important, but so is hope. Without hope, students cannot thrive. My job is to encourage ambition.

You are head of the Creative Writing Committee at Eastern Illinois University, and I understand that you would like to build an MFA program there. Why does the world need another MFA program? 

The world doesn’t need another MFA program. That said, this is central Illinois and we can create an affordable MFA option in this part of the Midwest that will give students access to several nearby literary communities and a passionate faculty community. It’s not about the degree. It’s about the experience, and I think we can create a really positive atmosphere for young writers.

AYITI by Roxane Gay from Artistically Declined PressWhat’s a question no one has ever asked you that you want to be asked…and would you pretend I asked it and then smile delightedly and answer it?

Team Gale or Team Peeta?

TEAM PEETA.

All rights reserved to Letitia L. Moffitt.