 by Ellen Pasquale
As a soon-to-be college graduate, I often find myself panicking over the feasibility of my writing dreams and seemingly too-optimistic goals. There seems to be constant pressure to submit to that journal now, become published now, have something to write in your bio now. I recently had the pleasure of talking to author Laura Scalzo who unknowingly calmed my nerves, assuring me that it is never too late to write and inspiration can be found anywhere. Laura Scalzo is a graduate of Syracuse University, and had her first work of fiction published in 2017 on literary journal Hobart’s website. Her short story “War & Peace in Sans Serif” is soon to be anthologized within the next edition of the "Grace and Gravity" series, Grace in Darkness. Neither she nor I had been interviewed for or had conducted an author interview before, and we began our communication eager to ask questions and give answers. We arranged a phone call around undergraduate studies and work to discuss typography, her love of literature, and finding time to write. In “War & Peace in Sans Serif”, Elise works making signs and selling booze among Washington DC landmarks at a store called Freeman’s. Dan Przybylek reports the news from the TV station across the street, trekking over twice a day to buy vodka in the morning and Tanqueray in the evening. He is lost in the trajectory of his own life and finds temporary solace in Elise, though not without a cost. It is a story about mistakes, empowerment, and a sleeveless dress decorated with hot pink starfish. It is a story about longing, and the power of an apology. The emotions in your story are so raw and real. Is there anything in particular that inspired “War & Peace in Sans Serif”? I actually saw a brother and sister very similar to the siblings in the story--college-aged, athletic, attractive, moneyed. They were speaking to a young woman behind a counter in a condescending way. It was terrible. That’s what inspired this story. I'm sure this won't surprise you, but War & Peace is my favorite book. Elise's name was originally Lise, but her character ended up being nothing like Tolstoy’s Lise, so I changed her name so readers wouldn’t be lost trying to find a parallel.
1 Comment
 by Lauren Korczakowski
Whitney McKnight is an acclaimed award-winning health sciences and mental health policy reporter, producer, and editor. Most recently, she was the Washington Psychiatric Society Journalist of the Year in 2017. She has been the editor of Psychiatric Annals, Pediatric Annals, and has hundreds of bylines in the medical trade and general media publications. She is the founder and producer of docu-mental — “an exploration of how to create herd immunity to depression and anxiety.” https://www.whitneymcknight.com/. McKnight’s short story, “The Son”, is about a boy who accidently wanders away from his drought stricken town. It is beautifully written dystopian story touching on metaphors allegory about the subtle meanings in life. I had the opportunity to talk to McKnight about her career and “The Son”. Why you were inspired to submit this work? I wrote “The Son” about ten years ago and probably would never have thought to offer it to anyone at all had Melissa not asked me. It was never rejected, so much as I wrote it and forgot about it, although it was on my mind about a year ago when I was listening to the BBC (which I tend to do often when I am working from home). There was some woman talking about a dystopian book she'd written about a boy and a wolf, and I thought...wait a minute. Didn't I already do that? LOL. I didn't catch the woman's name, but I would love to find her story one day. Which is my way of getting to your question about what made me want to submit this and what's with the dystopian "flair" as you call it. The former is that I was invited and the latter is that I think most writers have some kind of dystopian ideas they want to exorcise at some point. Throw into the mix someone such as yourself who wants to explore the intricacies of mind, and dystopia is a natural path of exploration. Dystopia to me is about extremes. Mental illnesses are often experienced as an abject, extreme condition. So, for writers who tend toward depression and anxiety (which is most of them), what better avenue for exploration of feeling abject alienation than a world that has gone to an unrelatable extreme? What I wasn't willing to do was leave my little boy and doggies without hope. Not all dystopian fiction writers want to leave the reader with that, but I reject their cynicism. All that being said, what I do recall wanting to do when I wrote the piece was less about clinical evaluation of depression, shame, and demoralization, which is what much of psychiatry focuses on anymore, and instead look at what might be the possible meanings behind people's pain. To do that, I think it's essential to use metaphor, because images that are not literal have the most room for interpretation as the individual sees fit, according to his or her personal experience with the world. As for the crying in the street...it was a healing, communal event where each person's individual pain was recognized, given some sort of meaning, which in turn lead to mattering, which is healing. an interview with the author of "how long before i see you" by Rana Attia
In "How Long Before I See You," Patricia Fuentes Burns’ story for the Grace in Darkness collection, a recently divorced woman takes her children to the beach. While her kids play with another family’s kids she starts talking to their parents. Through the conversation she has with the father, and through future encounters, the protagonist begins to understand that everything in her life, a life that is turning out differently than she hoped, is not so black and white and that in the grey area there is space for hope. Fuentes Burns says much of her writing is about hope, connection, and acceptance. Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Fuentes Burns considers Dillard’s words to be her life motto and as the philosophy behind her writing, which remains rooted in small moments of grace even as her characters face drama and tragedy. The quote highlights that life is not about the big moments, but about the small daily things that make us who we are and make our existence meaningful. It is about finding grace through our darkest periods and living moment to moment rather than focusing on big events to make life richer. This idea of overcoming hardship through small moments of light and grace is seen in the events depicted in "How Long Before I See You." Fuentes Burns has been published in several publications. Her short story, "Venom," was published in the Quarter After Eight, "What Girls Do" was published in Quartery West, and "Rope Flowers" in Georgia State Review. How would you define grace in darkness? The phrase suggests the idea that in your darkest moments and in the most difficult seasons of life is when you experience the most grace. You receive help from places you never expected. You have moments of clarity you couldn’t imagine before. In darkness is when you are most open to experiencing grace because you need it so much. When everything is great, you don’t need that grace and you may not appreciate it when it is right before you. An interview with the author of "Sleeping Beauty hair" by Tova Seltzer
Naomi Zeigler is a writer, journalist, cultural critic, and now a member of a tech startup in her work as an executive associate at Quorum, a platform for public affairs and stakeholder engagement. While her poetry has recently appeared in Tacenda magazine, her piece in Grace in Darkness will be her first prose publication since graduating from American University last May. In “Sleeping Beauty Hair,” Zeigler recounts growing up as a daughter adopted from China into a white family, faced with ignorant attitudes and a sense of cultural disorientation. She seeks connection with the distant side of her heritage through whatever ambassadors and fragments are available—Chinese employees at restaurants and theme parks, an ornamental hand mirror purchased at Epcot. Throughout the story, details of physical othering recur and make themselves naggingly known: when children mimic her narrower eyes, when she worries over the flatness of her nose, when her father comments that he “doesn’t see” her race—a comment that reinforces the idea that belonging is something to be seen, something bodily. Even among Asian students at college, she feels out of place, unable to relate to the traditions and memories that immigrant families share. “The only connection I have to China is my birth,” she writes, “and that is not enough.” Not enough to belong to Chinese culture, and yet still too much to not be seen as other in America. During her time as a literature major specializing in cinema studies and minoring in women’s and gender studies, Zeigler worked as a journalist with the school newspaper The Eagle, publishing cultural analysis and reviews of current film, music, performance and art. From summer 2016 until spring of 2017, she also served as the paper’s Opinions editor. In October of 2016, she offered an op-ed titled “I am angry, and that is alright with me,” a rebuke of then-presidential-candidate Donald Trump and his supporters from within her own perspective as a woman and a survivor of violence. Zeigler described her relation with social conditioning and the pressure to be polite and manageable, and how she had realized during that ugly election cycle that her natural reactions should fuel her activism: “I know what I want and I have the drive, ambition and intelligence to take it. But I am rarely angry. How foolish I was to believe that I was not to be angry.” Her experiences have fostered a dedication to seeing and calling out injustice, and this engagement with the world often starts from the heart, in personal exploration. Thus, it’s not surprising she’s begun to work in the personal essay genre. Apart from her Eagle op-ed and her Tacenda piece, Zeigler’s work was primarily critical and academic until “Sleeping Beauty Hair,” but it was a form she was happy to try. “I have always had a soft spot in my heart for writing that is confessional,” Zeigler said when asked about the shift in genre. “There is a vulnerability in really being able to lay yourself out for consumption. Anyone can make judgments on what you write and when you're writing about yourself, the stakes are even higher. Nonetheless, there's a freeing element to this as well because you no longer have to keep it inside you and let whatever voice whispers into your ear be the only voice you hear.” Like Zeigler’s 2016 op-ed, “Sleeping Beauty Hair” was propelled by the election of Donald Trump, when a friend encouraged her to help combat the dark times with new creativity. Throughout the drafting and editing process of the essay, Zeigler pushed herself to write something more introspective and personal than ever before. An Interview With the Author of “Without A Map” by Isabella Austin
Anyone who has a chance to read Carmelinda Blagg’s short stories will note not only the complex characters, but also the vivid worlds and complicated relationships present that make them impossible to put down. Blagg grew up in Texas, in a large family where several of her brothers became artists, so it is no surprise that she caught the creative bug, too. Since relocating to the DC area in the early nineties, she was grateful to discover its diverse and supportive writing community while earning her MA in writing at Johns Hopkins. Blagg’s pieces have been featured in a number of journals including Barrelhouse, The Lindenwood Review, and Halfway Down the Stairs. Her piece “Geographies” was included in the Best of the Web Anthology from 2009 and she presently serves as an Associate Editor of O-Dark-Thirty. In this issue of the "Grace and Gravity" series, Grace in Darkness, which creates a space for DC women writers to share their stories, Blagg’s piece “Without A Map” stands out as it is not set in the United States. However, it includes undertones throughout that connect the characters to the US in an unexpected way. I had a chance to speak to her about her path to becoming a published writer, her inspirations, and what the DC writing community means to her. Isabella Austin: When did you start writing? Carmelinda Blagg: I was always interested in stories, but writing didn’t come to me right away. Several of my brothers are visual artists (painters, watercolorists) and, like them, I drew. Later it was photography. I think we all got the creative spark from our mother, who had a love of the arts and encouraged us to use our imaginations. When we were toddlers, she used to read to us and I loved that. I think it was the sound of her voice, how it evoked the rhythms and patterns of narrative. That’s something that stayed with me. By the time I got to college, I had settled on studying literature. And the more I read, the more I fell in love with the idea of writing. I loved what language could do. It was very powerful. But I didn’t really settle on writing short fiction until my late thirties. I did a lot of traveling (to Europe) and, like most writers I had to keep a day job. An interview with the author of "the bright codes" by A.R. Castellano Molly McGinnis is a recent graduate of American University whose writing has appeared in Hobart, CQ Researcher, Winter Tangerine, and the Adroit Journal. She currently works as a researcher and lives in Washington, D.C. I first met Molly in 2016, during a fiction workshop which read an earlier version of “The Bright Codes,” and I was admittedly eager to revisit the story prior to its appearance in Grace in Darkness. She told me that when she was a kid, Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories freaked her out, because she thought a genie would come to turn off her “story writing current,” too, but luckily, that doesn’t seem to have happened. In “The Bright Codes,” protagonist Lisa notices one night that, amidst the mundanity of every-day life, she has developed an unusual condition – what McGinnis aptly terms “chronic invisibility,” a periodic fading in-and-out of visibility which begins with something as innocuous as a missing finger joint but quickly escalates. Like much of Rushdie’s fiction, McGinnis’s story occurs in a world that is largely similar to ours, but only incidentally strange: a resolution adjustment on the pixelated screen of unreality. Themes of (in)visibility recur throughout “The Bright Codes.” Even before parts of Lisa begin to disappear, the reader gets a sense of her relative invisibility—where the other characters are introduced and identified relative to their occupations, Lisa is a student, and one either still taking Gen-Eds or an otherwise disparate set of classes, at that. Could you talk a little bit about why you chose to set this story of a chronically invisible girl alongside the 2014 Ebola crisis?
I started thinking about this story in 2014, during the Ebola crisis, so I had a lot of notes about Ebola mixed in with my notes about a chronically invisible person and her world. When I wrote the first draft in 2016, the Ebola notes seemed like a part of the plot itself, so I left them in. Ebola was this huge, invisible threat, where symptoms became visible only when it’s too late, and the other part of the threat was in its invisibility – citizens in Ebola-affected areas couldn’t access information on prevention or didn’t trust what they were told. So, there are many metaphorical implications, but really, the story is set in the fall of 2014 in Washington, D.C., and for me, the fear of Ebola had to be part of that landscape. I was also taking an introductory ethics class at the time, and it was the first time I learned about bioethics and all its exciting backroads – I remember the phrase “invisible illness” caught my attention, and so did the concept of covering (your identity). I knew I wanted to write a character who was not only chronically unseen by others, but lost her ability to recognize herself as well, and understood how disorienting that could be. I’m not Lisa, but I did always wish for invisibility as a superpower when I was a kid, and learning about covering and the double consciousness in my lit and ethics classes was a good reminder that what was once protective can become harmful over time. An Interview with the author of "terraforming" by Leah Rambadt
Second person isn’t a perspective a writer often considers when choosing the narrative voice for a story. Nor is it one a reader expects when reading a literature piece. For most readers, their experience of being addressed as “you” in text is most likely from “how-to” books, such as a cookbook, or even a self-help book. And, since writers tend to write in a manner similar to what they read, the works narrated in second person can wind up resembling a list or an instruction manual. But how can a reader’s experience change when reading a story written from a second person perspective? Immediacy is the biggest change. In first or third person, you, the reader, are either sharing headspace with the protagonist and their view of the world around them, or following the protagonist and getting insight into their mind. In second person, you are the protagonist of the story, while the author guides you through the narrative. “Terraforming,” Andrea Jarrell’s contribution to Grace in Darkness, is a memoir narrated in second person. You, as the protagonist, experience anxiety – parental anxiety, anxiety of the future – and struggle to achieve some kind of assurance that there is hope in the future. As you follow the journey Andrea narrates, you gain a new understanding of some part of yourself, and the world around you. Andrea received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Bennington College, and is the author of I’m the One Who Got Away, a memoir. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post. She is currently the head of a successful consulting firm. Since Andrea frequently travels for work, I had the opportunity to ask her some questions about “Terraforming” and her writing life by email. Why did you choose to narrate "Terraforming" from a second person perspective? Was it to give the reader a sense of immediacy, or was there another reason? As a writer, second person was another way to get into the story — to try and see it objectively and enter it as if entering the story from a character’s point of view rather than my own. It may seem odd to say given that I write memoir and personal essay, but rather than telling my stories I am more interested in how I can craft literature with my raw experience as my source material. I want to write what might feel more like short stories rather than essays. An Interview with the Author of "CAT: A Narrative" by Yohanca Delgado
“The silver stray cat with sporadic black stripes over its back and tail is crouched in Henry’s backyard again, howling for feline reasons no human heart will ever know.” This is the opening line of Venus Thrash’s contribution to the Grace in Darkness anthology. “CAT: A Narrative” is a poignant short story that weaves together mental illness, animal longing, music, and the reverberating power of emotional memory. Thrash’s short story follows Henry, who has retired from years of singing in the musical CATS. To capture the unique musicality of Henry’s inner voice, Thrash constructed sentences that vibrate with rhythm, assonance, and lyric—sentences like, “In the flash of a year, Henry’s burnt sugar tenor bubbles and thickens into a silky baritone, infusing soulful sweetness into a choir just a hair off-pitch.” It is hard to read this story without thinking of poetry, and it is unsurprising that Thrash is an accomplished poet. She is the author of The Fateful Apple, which was a finalist for the 2012 Jean Feldman Poetry Prize, the 2009 Arktoi Books Poetry Prize and nominated for the 2015 PEN Open Book Award. Thrash’s poetry has appeared in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Split This Rock, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Torch, Gargoyle and The Arkansas Review. Her work has been anthologized in Resisting Arrest: Poems to Stretch the Sky, Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC and Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade. She is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and a Summer Literary Seminar in Kenya and Fire and Ink scholar. She is co-editor of Beltway Poetry Quarterly and co-director of the Joaquin Miller Poetry Series. I was fortunate enough to talk to the author Thrash about the ways in which her work meld poetry and prose and the creative process behind “CAT: A Narrative.” Your short story “CAT: A Narrative,” echoes one of the last poems in your poetry collection The Fateful Apple, “Rincon, Georgia III.” Both pieces center on cats and on the comforting ritual of seeking them out and caring for them— though they each take the subject in a different direction. Would you say the two pieces are in conversation with each other? Is there something about cats that interests you thematically? I'm severely allergic to cats but they've found a way to enter my work perhaps because they're banned from my life or because they've always been a mystery to me. As a child, I spent my summers in Rincon, GA living with my grandmother. Now, my grandmother wasn't a cat owner either but I was amazed at how dozens of cats suddenly emerged from those dense Georgia woods, their tails erect in the air, and came running up to the back door whenever she called. My grandmother fed them leftovers twice a day. Because of that she had quite a command over them which is an image and moment I wanted to capture in the poem. The story, CAT, emerged from similar observations in that a family of stray cats hang out in my back yard and I've watched them birth several generations. They're resilient, resourceful, bloodthirsty and merciless when it comes to hunting down mama birds and rats. It's my own personal wild kingdom. An Interview With the Author of "What to Make of Her" by Ambar Pardilla
You expect to find the most trite trinkets when searching through someone else’s desk: paper clips, pencils, scissors, staples, and, if you’re lucky, maybe a leftover piece of chewing gum. It’s a place for reverie, reflection, planning, and perspiration. But sometimes a desk can carry secrets, like bills you can’t pay for or letters from your lover. What happens when a confidant or even a stranger stumbles into those things? This is where Lorine Kritzer Pergament’s “What to Make of Her” starts, when Eva combs through her now-deceased friend’s desk and discovers her diary. Eva comes to see that she has a cosmic misunderstanding of their almost familial friendship. Pergament has contributed her work to Gargoyle and Penn-Union. Her piece “Coming of Age” was published in Bridges and her short story, “Smell the Roses on Your Own Time,” appeared in Amazing Graces: Yet Another Collection of Fiction by Washington Area Women. She’s currently working on a book. Ambar Pardilla: What was the inspiration for the story? Lorine Kritzer Pergament: That story just came out of my head. I was assigned a story by Margaret Myers [at Hopkins], who was my instructor and who became my mentor and friend. She was my thesis advisor. It was “Fiction Techniques” [class] — she went through the different elements of fiction. But then we each had to write a short story. She didn’t give us any topic. No prompt. It just came to my head. None of the people are people I know. The only thing — I had a friend whose parents came from Poland and that was how her mother talked. I can remember from childhood. The character of Eva herself wasn’t my friend at all. But I just sort of got the parents, that ethnic thing in because I thought it was an interesting juxtaposition between her parents and Cece’s parents, who were WASPy. I liked having the difference between them and yet, they became good friends. An Interview with the author of "Navigating" by Brenna E. Raffe
In 2010, Cheryl Strayed let out into the universe what would come to be, in my opinion, the best Dear Sugar column she ever wrote. Writing may be hard, she said, but if you are a writer, it’s harder not to write. Strayed concluded the piece with the now-famous line: “Write like a motherf---er.” Jessica Claire Haney realized in 2005 that writing was a necessity for her. While grappling with Graves’ Disease – autoimmune hyperthyroidism – as well as celiac disease, depression and related complications, she turned to creative writing as a component of healing. Motherhood and writing have thus always been inextricably linked for Haney, whose work draws heavily from her experiences as a mother of two. Haney’s first publications came out of Writer’s Center workshops. After her health had improved enough for her to have her first child, she joined one writing group and formed another, making fruitful and lasting connections. Recently, she has been focusing more on health and wellness advocacy, but is dialing back her commitment to writing about those topics to spend more time on her emerging novel, The Unspeakable Passing of Clouds. Before she began writing, she was an English teacher—she draws from those experiences in her forthcoming story “Navigating,” which is an adapted chapter from the novel. You can follow Jessica on Instagram @MindfulHealthy, Twitter @CrunchyChewy, and Facebook. BER: Your story for Grace in Darkness, “Navigating,” and the story published in the previous edition of the DC Women Writers Anthology, “Out of Scale” are chapters from your forthcoming novel. Tell me a little more about The Unspeakable Passing of Clouds, how these chapters fit in, and your plans for the book’s future? JCH: The Unspeakable Passing of Clouds follows three Northern Virginia women through three years each a decade apart; we see them in 1992, 2002 and 2012. All women face an experience of unplanned pregnancy, and all grapple with shifting notions of identity and community in a world with evolving definitions of connection. Their lives connect in side-swept ways, as do the lives of strangers. We see Kari most in 1992 when, in her early 20s, she surprises her colleagues at Planned Parenthood by continuing an unplanned pregnancy. As an outspokenly feminist white woman now with a mixed-race baby, she finds herself confronted with unexpectedly complicated ideas about belonging and privilege. Elaine, the character in “Navigating,” is a struggling first-year teacher in 2002 when one of her students confides she’s pregnant. Already on shaky footing and unsure how to reach her needy students, Elaine tries to connect with this pregnant student at school while, in her community, the only connections she seems capable of making are to people from whom she buys furniture on Craigslist. |
Archives
May 2020
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed