Your essay “Listening to the Music of a Vulture’s Egg” from Volume 23 takes the reader on a philosophical journey through time and space, and it begins with this griffon vulture’s egg that you bought as a child. Starting an essay from unlikely objects seems to be a trend in your writing, and then you take a reader through a meandering process of exploration, and to me this feels so vulnerable for a writer to do. Do you ever feel overexposed in presenting such an intimate portrait of your interiority?

You’re right about unlikely objects being a trend in my writing. I’m fascinated by the way they can provide the impetus for an essay. Before I started to explore this genre, I never realized how many things are poised to spring ambushes, luring the essayist into astonishing mazes of meaning, memory, and association. Essays help attune the ear to the music of things. But I’m still startled – and delighted – by the sheer unexpectedness of the connections that proliferate once I start to really listen to the notes that sound in the objects that happen to catch my attention. The vulture’s egg was precisely one such object.

Do I ever feel overexposed in presenting such an intimate portrait of my interiority? I’m often surprised that I don’t feel more inhibited by the risk of this. I’m a private sort of person. The idea of writing as undressing in public doesn’t appeal to me at all; I certainly don’t set out to reveal my innermost thoughts and feelings on the page. But I go where the writing takes me. I guess focusing on objects makes it feel more as if I’m unravelling their secrets than mine. Clearly, though, in choosing objects, I tend to select those that are in some way implicated in my life, so when I delve into them, I also reveal aspects of myself. But the magic of the object is paramount. It lures me into following threads and connections that I might shy away from if I approached them directly.

As for vulnerability, a measure of this is a useful quality in a writer. You need to be open to things, to let them touch you, if you want to chronicle their nature. That can sometimes be painful, but I think it’s preferable to cultivating some kind of armour-plated indifference, or staying always at the superficial level of common-sense and routine description.

The way unlikely objects spark my essays is something I’ve touched on in two of the short pieces I’ve done for the Royal Literary Fund: a talk for their “Writers Aloud” series, entitled “Confessions of an Odd-Object Essayist”, and a film about a Japanese temple bell, recorded for their “The Writer’s Talisman” series.

There’s a line in your essay that always sticks out to me: “The slow wave of time’s tsunami, surging from beginning to end, is of course impossible to picture.” Time feels like such an essential component to this essay. Can you tell us a little bit about your process for writing this piece and how you tracked time in the narrative?

Yes, time is certainly central to this piece. I think part of the reason that objects have such an impact is because they often seem like frozen nodes of time. They reach our present still redolent of the past that birthed them, they bring aspects of their time into ours. The vulture’s egg not only took me back to the moment when my twelve-year-old self bought it, but to the moment when the egg was laid. And thinking about this specific object’s provenance and the journey that it’s made also nudged me far further downstream in the rivulet of time it occupies – thinking about time in terms of the evolution of a species rather than just the brief lifetimes of individuals. The bone flute and The Tibetan Book of the Dead were also suggestive of temporal perspectives that dwarf the lifespan of any single person.

You ask about tracking time in the narrative. It’s more a case of trying to make clear the depths of time that underlie the shallows of our everyday experience, showing that the trackings of memory and history, however gripping they may be, are only a kind of superficial lacework laid over something that can’t be caught in their calibrations.

As for the process of writing this piece, “process” sounds a bit too organized and planned. Like every essay, it starts with a chaotic jumble of ideas, impressions, and images. I slowly refine these through multiple drafts into the finished piece.

What is the “aha moment” for you in an essay, that moment when you know that you’ve spiraled enough to finally glean some connecting point to bring the essay’s meaning to its fruition? How long do you let yourself spiral until you either give up or continue to press forward?

I don’t think I follow any pattern that’s as regular and predictable as a spiral. Things unfold in a more erratic and less tidy way. But the key moment in terms of recognizing that a piece is viable, that it’s worth persisting with and bringing to completion, comes when it ambushes me with insights I hadn’t been expecting.

To explain what I mean by this, let me refer to a comment by the great Lydia Fakundiny. When she died in 2013, the world of the essay lost one of its keenest minds. She was perhaps the closest thing I’ve had to a mentor. I still miss the in-depth correspondence we exchanged. Lydia taught a course on the essay at Cornell and edited a brilliant anthology called The Art of the Essay. I can’t remember how we first came into contact, but it led to a whole series of emails. I valued her comments enormously. She was one of the most perceptive readers my essays have had. She once said: “If an essay doesn’t at some point surprise the writer, it probably isn’t worth writing.” I agree with that. It’s when a piece surprises me that I know I’ve found a thread worth following. So, I guess that’s my “aha moment.” If there are no surprises, I’m probably writing an article rather than an essay, or it may be one of those frustrating dead-ends that I occasionally get into where, despite initial promise, a piece just doesn’t gel. Then the best thing to do is abandon it, hopefully without having lost too much time trying to push forward.

This issue was birthed during this pandemic, and the political and social unrest that’s been spilling over on the streets in cities all over. It feels like day after day we witness more violence and division, and we felt that the title “hunger for tiny things” took on a multi-faceted poignance for this issue. I’m curious—what tiny things do you hunger for these days?

Like millions of ordinary citizens, I find the routine mendaciousness of so many areas of public life dispiriting, and the ready resort to violence concerning. Politics seems often now to be little more than a squalid scramble for sectarian advantage, profit or self-aggrandisement. Humane ideals, a sense of duty, honesty, respect for evidence, valuing education and expertise – all seem in woefully short supply in our 21st century technopoly (to borrow a phrase from Neil Postman). It’s hard to know what to do in the face of this, and easy to become disheartened. When I heard the phrase “hunger for tiny things” it made me think first about all the ordinary routines and experiences that I miss in these days of pandemic lockdown – coffee with friends, a hug, a kiss, going on holiday. But the tiny thing I hunger for most is in fact massive – it would amount to a sea change – but it can only happen through countless, small-scale individual actions. I’m thinking of an embracing (or reembracing?) of basic decency and truthfulness, being kind to and respectful of each other, recognizing that education is a more worthwhile goal than profit, and that caring for the environment is everyone’s responsibility.

Writers tend to write what haunts or obsesses them. What are some themes/topics that are important to your writing, or tend to show up a lot in your work?

When I’m writing an essay, I don’t think in terms of themes or topics. I’m just trying to get whatever’s in the mind – whatever sparked the essay – into as satisfactory a form as I can manage on the page. Each essay starts anew and doesn’t follow any pre-set pattern. It just unfolds according to whatever fits the particularities of its composition, as this addresses the ideas/feelings that brought it into being. The independence and unplanned nature of each piece notwithstanding, I think it’s fair to say that, overall, my essays are variations on the theme of highlighting the extraordinary nature of the (apparently) ordinary. In writing them I’m trying to see beneath the skin of the quotidian, the language of routine naming and assumption – our everyday diction – which tends to settle on things like a veil, stopping us from seeing their incredible real nature. 

The nineteenth century Scottish essayist Alexander Smith said “The world is everywhere whispering essays and one need only be the world’s amanuensis.” I agree with Smith that there are openings into essays all around us. But his use of the word “amanuensis” makes it sound as if essay writing is just a simple process of taking down dictation. First, you’ve got to hear the world’s whispering – and that’s harder than it sounds. There’s always plenty of distraction and of course it’s easier to lapse into conventional labelling and description rather than portraying things with the kind of depth and detail that hints at the incredible cargoes they carry.

In writing essays, a large part of my motivation lies in a desire to try to scrape away the dust of impoverishment from my vision and to see the astonishing richness of our experience. You don’t need to travel to exotic places or look for fantastical objects in order to appreciate this richness. All of the ordinary things around us are imbued with it. It’s just (just!) a matter of being alert to it, of not letting routine dull our perception. An observation of Mary Oliver’s sums up what I think of as my essayist’s credo: “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.” So maybe that – paying attention – is another underlying theme in my work. 

What books, writers, art, or artists inspire you and your work, now or in the past? Is there one book or writer that you would say has been most influential in your work?

I agree with Mary Oliver that “To write well, it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply.” Fortunately, I enjoy reading, so it’s a pleasure rather than a chore to keep on doing it. I must have drawn inspiration from scores of writers over the years, both ancient and contemporary, and across many genres. J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine stands out as a book I keep going back to, but I wouldn’t want to nominate any single book or author as “most influential.” I mean, in a list that would include Thucydides, Montaigne, William Golding, Seamus Heaney, Barry Lopez, Mary Oliver, Pierre Ryckmans, and lots more brilliant writers, how could I possibly choose?

The Best American Essays series, edited by Robert Atwan and with a different guest editor each year, is a treasure trove of good writing. I’ve derived a great deal of pleasure – and instruction – from these anthologies, which have been published every year since 1986. The appearance of a new volume is a highpoint in my reading year.

My fascination with haiku poetry also means that Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) and the other great practitioners of this form provide an important touchstone. I find myself repeatedly drawn back to this minimalist verse form. I first encountered it in my teens via one of those lucky accidents that secondhand bookshops are so good at engineering. The fact that the first volume of R.H. Blyth’s Haiku in Four Volumes, published in Tokyo in 1947, happened to be on the shelves of that particular bookshop on that particular day in 1972 seemed improbable. It was in an area of Belfast more noted for ugly sectarianism than an appreciation of Japanese literature, still less the Zen aesthetic in which this literary form is steeped. I’ve often thought there must have been an interesting story behind this battered volume’s journey. In the several decades since buying it, reading, composing, and occasionally publishing haiku has become part of my writing life. R.H. Blyth’s monumental – and monumentally eccentric – work has become well thumbed. The three other volumes were acquired along the way. I refer to haiku in the introductions to several of my books, using them as points of reference to cast light on what my essays do. My third collection even embedded the name in its title – Irish Haiku – a choice I sometimes now regret given how often the book is mis-shelved under Irish poetry (though there are worse things to be mis-shelved under!). Despite their obvious dissimilarities, haiku and essays share considerable common ground. Their modus operandi is different, but both are sparked by a desire to express as accurately as possible what falls on the fabric of their writers’ consciousness. They’re both concerned with seeing clearly what’s there and putting it into words as precisely as possible. Although they often start from something seen, haiku, like essays, are more about insight and realization – how a moment falls upon the mind, how extraordinary it is – rather than its purely visual components. Both forms foster a sense of wonderment at the familiar. I’ve always liked Graham Good’s assertion that “Anyone who can look attentively, think freely, and write clearly can be an essayist.” I think the same thing holds for haiku writing. Of course, Good’s prescription is easier to state that to put into practice. Looking attentively demands an alertness to the moment as it lays its presence upon us. This kind of looking occupies the same cognitive bandwidth as Mary Oliver’s paying attention. It’s a fundamental prerequisite of essays and haiku.

I’m also intrigued by the great Japanese artist Hokusai’s two series, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji and One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji. The latter is less well-known because it appeared in book form rather than as separate prints, and because it was in black and white not colour – but it’s no less brilliant. In all these scenes Hokusai explores his chosen idée fixe. The way in which Mount Fuji features so variously in so much of his work fascinates me. It underscores a simple but often under-emphasized truth that I think is encountered in essay writing too. Namely that there’s a richness in the familiar scenes around us, the things we think we know. If we keep looking at them attentively, they can appear in unexpected guises, suggest new avenues of meaning to explore. Whether it’s a majestic mountain or a vulture’s egg, there are extraordinary dimensions in the things that meet our gaze. No single account can come close to doing them justice; repeated framings can only hint at their fecundity. In my fourth collection, Irish Elegies, I was pleased to include an essay entitled “Thirty-six Views, None of Mount Fuji”. Inspired by his multiple takes on Mount Fuji, I attempted thirty-six views – in words – of a place in Ireland as close to my heart as Japan’s sacred mountain was to his. My essay in Vol.23 could easily be recast and expanded as “One Hundred Views of a Vulture’s Egg.”

What craft element challenges you the most in your writing? How do you approach it? You have such a prolific writing career; has this challenge changed over your career progression, and if so, how have you approached it differently?

What challenges me most is what I assume challenges all writers – how to put ideas and feelings into words. Flaubert once confessed to feeling “like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.” I’d be suspicious of any writer who couldn’t identify with that. I know all too well how horribly off-key my writing is in early drafts. It offers only the roughest approximation of the music that I want to play. After multiple re-writings I can approximate more closely to the notes I’m struggling to put into words. Then sometimes – those Eureka moments – what’s in mind and what’s on the page sing in harmony; they dovetail so precisely you can almost hear them click together. When that happens, it carries an extraordinary sense of completion and accomplishment. So I guess the “craft element” that challenges me is trying to ensure this dove-tailing happens as often as I manage it – and I don’t think that’s really changed over the course of my writing career – it’s always the same essential business of getting thoughts and feelings into words as precisely as possible.

I often bring to mind the advice given by Basho: “Let not a hair’s breadth separate your mind from what you write.”  In writing essays I’m trying for as close a fit as possible between words on the page and what’s in my mind and heart, trying (and of course failing) to push the hair’s breadth closed.

What projects are you working on right now?

In terms of book-length projects, I’ve got two things nearing completion. One is what I hope will become my 8th essay collection, which I’ll probably call Hidden Cargoes. The other – provisionally entitled Pages from the Vivisection of a Journey – is a kind of essayistic commentary and meditation on a bus journey that I’ve made hundreds of times. I’d like to think that by this time next year I might have secured publishers for both these manuscripts – but of course placing books in the shadow of a global pandemic makes the whole process even more uncertain than usual.

Although less well advanced, I also have plans for a book of haiku. I’m not sure yet what form this will take, possibly an illustrated book of bird haiku. A recent essay in the Scottish journal Northwords Now – “Zen and the Art of Catching Birds in Words”, which is accompanied by Vawdrey Taylor’s wonderful artwork – was a tentative try at some of what I might include in such a book. [Editor’s note: In order to view Taylor’s accompanying artwork, please see this pdf version, with permission from Chris Arthur.]

Books apart, I always have a cluster of smaller-scale things sitting on my desk. As one of their Fellows, I contribute now and then to the “Showcase” section of the Royal Literary Fund’s website. I sometimes take on commissions for single pieces if the subject interests me – recent examples would be an essay for World Literature Today’s climate change issue, and a short think-piece on what we’ve learned from the pandemic for Media Development. And I pretty much always have an essay that I’m working on. At the moment it’s one about the very different ways a photograph of a street in my hometown in Ireland can be read. I rarely write book reviews any more, but I thought a volume edited by Thomas Karshan and Kathryn Murphy might be interesting, so I’m reading On Essays: From Montaigne to the Present (OUP, 2020), and will soon be writing my assessment of it.

Chris Arthur is author of several essay collections, most recently Hummingbirds Between the Pages (2018). He has published in a range of journals such as Hotel Amerika, The Literary Review, Orion Magazine, Southern Humanities Review, and Threepenny Review. Among his awards are the Akegarasu Haya International Essay Prize and The Sewanee Review’s Monroe K. Spears Essay Prize. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays and is often included in that series’ Notable Essays lists. He’s currently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Dundee in Scotland. Listen to Chris read from “Listening to the Music of a Vulture’s Egg” on our YouTube Page. You can learn more about Chris and his work at his website. 

Your flash cnf piece “air in the brain” in Volume 23 feels like this urgent, almost pseudo apology or justification from the speaker who feels compelled to explain their mother’s behavior. Can you tell us how this piece came to be? What’s the inspiration behind it?

Grief actually inspired this, and mourning. One of my friends killed herself & I started to write about how moments can get the best of you and make you act irrational. As I tried to write about my friend though, I found myself writing about my mom. Even though my mom abandoned me multiple times during my childhood, her actions are incomprehensible, seemingly implausible to her. She often even says, “I must have had air in the brain. What was I thinking?” 

I think it’s really difficult to articulate the harm you cause others and it’s easier to “metaphoricalize”—that way your hurt is outside of you, not a part of you—and I also think it’s easier to forgive people when you do this. You can place blame on the abstract, something uncontrollable. I discovered while writing that’s what I was doing, both for my mother & my friend— explaining their irrationality by air in the brain (which I actually have a sister piece of, but I’m still editing).

One thing that I love so much about “air in the brain” is how it can be read as either creative nonfiction or fiction. I love it when genres blend and blur. Do you consider yourself a multi-genre or hybrid writer? Do you often work in one genre over the other? How do you see multiple genres intersecting in your work?

Odalisque by Didier William

I am a hybrid writer. I don’t like limitations or being told what something ought to be or should be. Most of my workshops and school and teachers were proscriptive, and, quite honestly, they took the fun out of writing. Hybridity, at least to me, is about joy and vastness. As a lover of all genres and writing, why wouldn’t I borrow features from all of them? Basically my philosophy is aligned with Hannah Montana:  YOU GET THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS.

You’ve won several flash contests, and clearly have a knack to succinct storytelling! What do you think are necessary components of a story for a flash piece to work?

RISK. RISK. RISK.

This issue was birthed during this pandemic and the political and social unrest that’s been spilling over on the streets in cities nationwide. It feels like day after day we witness more violence and division, and we felt that the title “hunger for tiny things” took on a multi-faceted poignance for this issue. I’m curious—what tiny things do you hunger for these days?

I hunger for my family, traveling, eating inside a restaurant, wasting time window shopping, going to the mall, not being afraid of strangers, so so so much, and at the top of everything— I really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really hunger for carelessness—for late nights out partying, dancing the night away with my friends, all of us dressed up in post-apocalyptic outfits, faces glittered, heads light and heavy, not having a care in the world, just living, carving out bliss. 

Writers tend to write what haunts or obsesses them. What are some themes/topics that are important to your writing, or tend to show up a lot in your work?

Since I’m only really working on a nonfiction project, I’m typically writing about trauma (sexual assault, grief, suicide, etc.). If you check out more of my work, you’ll notice this theme very fast. I used to wonder why I couldn’t write about happier things, but Rahna Reiko Rizzuto contextualized this for me in her essay “How Writing Fiction Helps Me Give Shape to the Chaos of Trauma” saying, “Fiction does not just mirror our truths so they are safe to experience; it also helps us endure the aftermath.”

What books, writers, art, or artists inspire you and your work? Do–or have–you had any mentors in your writing life?

Oh god, so, so, so many artists + writers + books I love. I aspire to create a project as breathtaking as Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Jenny Offil’s Dept. of Speculation, Justin Torres’ We the Animals, Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of, and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, to name a few.

I’m constantly inspired by writers like Saúl Hernandez, María Esquinca, Annie Trinh, Aldo Amparán, Maureen Langloss, Tucker Leighty-Phillips, Tara Zambrano, Sage Ravenwood, Blake Levario, and Cathy Ulrich. There are so, so many others (basically most of the people I follow on Twitter). 

I owe my joy for writing & fascination with storytelling to queer fan-fiction, especially Teen Wolf + Mass Effect, which got me started writing in the first place. 

What craft element challenges you the most in your writing? How do you approach it? What is your quirk as a writer?

Ever since metaphor-gate happened on Twitter, I feel like I’m constantly trying to find metaphors of quality, whatever that means. Language that lives in us changes almost daily, and it’s difficult for your past, present, and future to have peace. I try to make language unfamiliar to myself so I can combat this, which is not always successful. 

Is silence a quirk? If it is, I’d say that. 

What projects are you working on right now?

I’m currently on my flash-hybrid-creature-of-a-novel. It’s all I’m working on and one day I’ll finish. 

JJ Peña is a queer, burrito-blooded writer living and existing in El Paso, Texas. He is the winner of the Blue Earth Review’s 2019 Flash Fiction Contest, CutBank’s 2019 Big Sky, Small Prose Flash Contest, and Mythic Picnic’s 2020 Postcard Prize. His work is included in the Best Microfiction 2020 Anthology and Wigleaf Top 50 (2020). His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Hobart, Cream City Review, Pembroke Magazine, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. He serves as a flash-fiction reader for Split Lip Magazine. You can learn more about JJ at his website.

The artwork featured in this post is “Odalisque” by mixed-media painter Didier William. You can learn more about his work at his website. 

Your poem “Estate Sale” in Volume 23 starts out really funny and lighthearted until about the time when the speaker finds sales tags on used underwear. Then it shifts into some very thought-provoking territory on the longevity of material objects and our inevitable deaths. Can you walk us through how you conceived of the emotional depth in this piece? What was your inspiration or intention with this poem?

I think I just walked through my own thought process as I went through this estate sale in Arizona. First, I was laughing at the absurdity, the bizarre things unearthed at these sales, but then I saw that underwear on the toilet and it struck me how uncomfortably intimate it was, how nonconsensual. I mean, what kind of person volunteers to sell their used underwear with stains on it? How many people really consent to estate sales in the first place? This was a retirement community in Arizona, so it struck me in that moment that most of these are sales after death, not from moving or other reasons. It got me thinking about how brief we are on this earth, how we can take nothing with us. I can’t help but think of that verse 1 Peter 1:24-25: “All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord endures forever.” That verse suddenly took new meaning at that estate sale.

There’s the line “how no one keeps secrets for the dead” in your poem that I keep thinking about; how nothing ever truly stays private even after we no longer remain. What does that line mean to you? What does privacy mean to creative writers?

This is such a great question. When I first started writing, I was shameless! I let everything hang out, to a fault. It was a form of coping, of admitting to things in the dark I’d never talk about in daylight. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more reserved. I can’t control what will remain or be forgotten once I’m gone—I don’t think any of us can, even writers—but I think I’m more conscientious now of doing everything in my power to clarify my message.  

This issue was birthed during this pandemic and the political and social unrest that’s been spilling over on the streets in cities nationwide. It feels like day after day we witness more violence and division, and we felt that the title “hunger for tiny things” took on a multi-faceted poignance for this issue. I’m curious—what tiny things do you hunger for these days?

I think the big (tiny) thing I hunger for these days is fellowship, particularly writing conferences, conventions and workshops. I also greatly miss travel and exploring new places. I miss looking forward to things—these days, the biggest things I look forward to are getting take-out on the weekends and movie nights! I also greatly look forward to a respite from doing dishes. I don’t feel like I’ve ever done this many dishes in my life. Maybe that says something about my bad eating out habits!

Writers tend to write what haunts or obsesses them. What are some themes/topics that are important to your writing, or tend to show up a lot in your work?

So many things! The overlooked people and things. How brief we are, and how quickly we’re forgotten. Coping with change. Coping with limitations (I’m a spoonie on the autism spectrum, but only recently discovered this). I think the things that haunt me most are usually spiritual lessons I still haven’t learned. Writing teaches me, slowly but surely, and I keep growing–but some lessons are ones that linger with us our whole lives.

What projects are you working on right now?

I am between projects and it’s the worst feeling! I just finished edits on a middle grade novel in verse, and want to try to jump into some more middle grade or young adult work, but haven’t quite settled on the next thing. I’ve also been writing down some poems here and there, and am trying to put together a new chapbook manuscript.

Meg Eden’s work is published or forthcoming in magazines including Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Crab Orchard Review, RHINO, and CV2. She teaches creative writing at Anne Arundel Community College. She is the author of five poetry chapbooks, the novel Post-High School Reality Quest (2017), and the poetry collection Drowning in the Floating World (2020). She runs the MAGFest MAGES Library blog, which posts accessible academic articles about video games. Listen to Meg read “Estate Sale” on our YouTube page. You can follow her on Twitter (@ConfusedNarwhal) and learn more about her work at her website.

Your short story “FastDog Security” in Volume 23 is, as Keith Lesmeister wrote in his editorial letter, “quirky and odd, in the best possible way.” Can you tell us how the idea came to you to write about a public transit security officer with terrible anxiety? What was your inspiration?

I first started thinking about what would become this story a very long time ago. I was on a cross-country bus trip and it must have been about 2002. As a country, we were just getting used to thorough searches in airports and the Patriot Act was looming and awful. But these were buses and we just got on and off them, no big deal, until at one station, there was a little checkpoint set up. There hadn’t been anything like that at the other stations. But my travel buddy and I let this fellow poke through our bags and wand us. Then we got on the bus and looked at each other and neither of us was quite sure if the man had any business being there. It scared me that I didn’t know, and I still just let him search me. In my brain then, it was going to be a story about the way so many of us submitted to search, collectively, without question, and how we gave up those aspects of our rights and privacy–how fear made us so easy to manipulate. I thought it was going to be a story about that. But on that bus ride it also turned into a joke that the guard’s wand wasn’t real. Years later, my travel buddy had turned into my husband, and we were still joking about that guy making beeping sounds out of his mouth. I don’t think he actually did, but I forgot what the original person was like, and Hank took his place in my brain. Then it was still a story about fear and anxiety. But it was coming from a very different angle. And I think that’s pretty reflective of the way I write. I often start out wanting to write about an “idea” and that almost never works out for me. The stories I keep with are when a character grabs me or when I get consumed by someone’s voice. But, of course, every character lives in a bigger world, and so the story has to also be about the world. Finding a character gives me an angle on the world and on whatever “idea” I want to take on.

“FastDog Security” reads very tight and controlled, which I think says a lot about Hank, the narrator. How much did point of view factor in your writing decisions when you considered how to exaggerate Hank’s sense of controlling his narrative?

Well, he has to keep that tight control–his world is spinning out on him. I think the patterns of speech of a narrator can serve as a sort of mask for their true, tender self, or as a way of hiding their fears and vulnerabilities. Hank has to hold on tightly and when his control slips, when he can’t control his storytelling, that’s when it gets really interesting. It’s like, whenever someone is wearing a mask, you wonder so much harder what their face looks like. When something is hidden, it makes you want to find it. Because a character pretends to be tough, we know they are vulnerable, and we feel compelled to find that vulnerability, to poke at it. The words are the mask and we watch for when the mask slips.

With Erin Kate Ryan, you co-founded and run the Minneapolis Storytelling Workshop which includes classes and prompts that engage writers with television, comics, movies, and games. It’s a really fun and offbeat resource for many of us! What do these various mediums of art and storytelling mean to your own writing?

You know, we really just started the Minneapolis Storytelling Workshop because we wanted to teach a class about Buffy The Vampire Slayer and other organizations wouldn’t let us. But then it’s grown into something bigger. What we noticed is there are a lot of people who don’t necessarily think of themselves as intellectuals or artists or creatives, yet they’re having amazing conversations about TV shows. Because TV is great! And so are other forms of storytelling, even the ones that snobs roll their eyes at. All storytelling can be really subversive, too, which is something we’re always looking for when we teach classes or send out prompts. We are always looking for ways to fight injustice through engagement with narrative. How do we write stories that challenge societal norms? How do we re-envision the world? And how do we make those stories compelling enough that they lodge in people’s brains and do the work? Most of our prompts and our classes are about those ideas. But I should also admit we’ve been significantly less active since the pandemic started. So it’s a little bit dormant, but still alive!

This issue was birthed during this pandemic and the political and social unrest that’s been spilling over on the streets in cities nationwide. It feels like day after day we witness more violence and division, and we felt that the title “hunger for tiny things” took on a multi-faceted poignance for this issue. I’m curious—what tiny things do you hunger for these days?

 It’s pretty satisfying to do tiny things. It’s a thing I realized kind of recently. It’s easy to use “that’s not enough” as an excuse to do nothing at all. But there are a million ways to do some tiny thing that might help a person or, you know, challenge fascism. I’m talking about mutual aid, I think. What tiny thing do I have that would be more just if someone else had it? Suddenly it’s less tiny.

Francis Bacon

Writers tend to write what haunts or obsesses them. What are some themes/topics that are important to your writing, or tend to show up a lot in your work?

I write about cyborgs, I guess. But not exactly that. I like to think about what is body and what is something else, how other things become us, and also how we can cast off parts of ourselves to say “that is not me.” I like to think about how we can redraw the lines of self. In “FastDog Security,” the tool Hank uses becomes a part of him. It integrates with him in a way that when it doesn’t work, his own body takes over for it. Most of my stories take a look at how body is defined and boundaried by different characters. I often use gore to explore this, or magic, but sometimes it’s through more mundane things. I write about tattoos and cosmetic surgery, and about ghosts and dismemberment.

What books, writers, art, or artists inspire you and your work? Do–or have–you had any mentors in your writing life? 

When other people answer this question, I think, “Oh those are great writers and I should go read them!” When I answer this question, it sounds like “She thinks she’s as good as those writers? I don’t think so.” But! When I first read Kelly Link, it broke open the world for me in terms of writing stories that are weird and cross genre and can do anything they want. She’s not the only one, but she’s incredible and she’s the first I read like that. In the past few years, here are just a few writers who have re-blown my mind: Carmen Maria Machado, Helen Oyeyemi, Kathryn Davis, Kiese Laymon, Yukiko Motoya. I don’t think I write like them. But I definitely learn from them. I also have a craft column for the Loft Literary Center, in which, once a month, I try to learn about just one technique from a book I am reading. I learn so much from all of the books I write about there.

What craft element challenges you the most in your writing? How do you approach it? What is your quirk as a writer? 

I hate to research. I just want to make it all up.

What projects are you working on right now? 

I’ve been working on a novel for way too many years, but it’s finally maybe getting close? And I’m always writing flash–someone in my writing group noticed that lately it’s been “gooey” flash. So maybe that will keep up and I’ll someday have a whole book of ooze.

Allison Wyss’s stories have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, Moon City Review, Yemassee, Lunch Ticket, Jellyfish Review, and elsewhere. Some of her ideas about the craft of fiction can be found in a monthly column she writes called Reading Like a Writer for the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, where she also teaches classes. And she’s hard at work on her first novel, which is about dismemberment, fairy tales, and what makes your body yours. Listen to Allison read from “FastDog Security” on our YouTube page. You can learn more about Allison and her work at her website.

Your poem “Before the First Incision” in Volume 23 includes a speaker contemplating an impending surgical procedure while walking on the beach. Can you tell us a little bit about how this poem came into existence? What inspired it?

The poem is definitely autobiographical. It recounts the days before a surgery, a moment when profound fear and dread gave way to hope and defiance. I had been through a few rough few years, from a medical standpoint, and my mood was pretty bleak when I took a late-evening walk along a beach in the Pacific Northwest. The sky was uniformly overcast, and, in the muted twilight, the sky and sand, the mist along the shore, and the fog blurring the horizon had a silvery, almost otherworldly cast. Between massive pieces of driftwood that looked like human bones and the washed-up remains of a seal that had likely been gutted by a shark, I seemed to be surrounded by intimations of death. At some point, my fingers and feet went numb from the cold, and yet I didn’t want to button my coat or leave the beach. After weeks of feeling depleted, I finally felt alive. The sting of wind on my face felt like a gift. I didn’t stop walking until the tide forced me from the beach, and when it did, I accepted the icy water nipping at my heels as part of a natural cycle I had to honor and, as much as possible, meet on my own terms.

You have an extensive list of publications across genres which includes your novel The Wonder That Was Ours from Dzanc Books. I’m always curious how multi-genre writers come to the page. Can you tell us about your writing process? How do you know when a piece of writing should be in the genre you choose? Does your revision process differ or stay the same depending on the genre?

Others will have different takes, but I’m inclined to write poetry when I’m dealing with bewildering emotions that defy, at least in my mind, entirely rational analysis: grief, trauma, or fear. Essays usually allow me to draw upon my training as a segue-obsessed academic historian with a penchant for over-explaining. It’s impossible to generalize about short stories because there’s a huge difference between flash fiction and novellas, though I’m drawn to writing short stories when I want to explore a dynamic involving only two or three people. Novels allow for sustained attention to the complexity and broader social contexts of difficult moral choices. Whatever the case, no one should feel compelled by the clamor of literary cliques to extol one genre over another. I’ve heard a startling number of writers and editors argue that a certain genre represents the “highest,” or “most demanding” form of expression. (It’s usually the genre they work in.) In my view, every genre has value, and the choice of genre depends on the story. It would be absurd to explore the ideas at the center of Toni Morrison’s Beloved in a flash piece, though I’m sure some would dispute this. Ideally, open-mindedness and flexibility define the artistic process, and I try to start with a process, rather than a product, in mind. 

 My revision process is somewhat constant across genres. In the early stages of drafting, I put everything on the page—whatever images come to mind, fragments of dialogue with potential, and soon-to-be indecipherable notes to myself. Then, in alternating states of paralyzing anxiety and dogged determination, I group ideas, sequence paragraphs/stanzas, and write full sentences/lines. I always struggle to accept the slowness of the process. It’s so easy to give in to cravings for external validation, to rush to call something done and submit it, sometimes prematurely, in the vain hopes of stifling the intolerable insecurity that plagues most artists. I’m working on patience. 

This issue was birthed during this pandemic and the political and social unrest that’s been spilling over on the streets in cities nationwide. It feels like day after day we witness more violence and division, and we felt that the title “hunger for tiny things” took on a multi-faceted poignance for this issue. I’m curious—what tiny things do you hunger for these days?

Standing in the narrow aisle of a bookstore and reaching for the same book, at the same moment, as another person, and instead of growing annoyed, smiling in the spirit of kinship. Sitting inside a café and staring out the window during a rainstorm. Small talk with strangers. Hell, at this point, going to the dentist. 

Writers tend to write what haunts or obsesses them. What are some themes/topics that are important to your writing, or tend to show up a lot in your work?

“Before the Incision” doesn’t reveal this, but much of my writing reflects a preoccupation with father-daughter relationships. Though there are notable exceptions—Shirley Jackson and Sylvia Plath, to name two great examples—few authors focus on father-daughter relationships. Most novels about parent/child relationships focus on overbearing mothers and bristling daughters bickering with each other, or fathers and sons locked in battle over who will reign as the alpha chimp. The occasional stories centered on mothers and sons usually rely on a father having walked out on his family, as if a son can’t have a powerful relationship with his mother if a man is in the house. Father/daughter stories seem to be the rarest, the assumption perhaps being that a woman’s primary parental relationship is always going to be with her mother. Having grown up in a patriarchal household, I’m profoundly aware of how much fathers can shine, or loom, in women’s psyches. I keep returning to the complex dynamics between daughters and fathers, and, specifically, to daughters rejecting the versions of masculinity modeled by their fathers. 

What books, writers, art, or artists inspire you and your work? 

I am most inspired and impressed by poets and prose writers who can write from multiple perspectives and employ a range of narrative voices, artists who have the versatility and empathy needed to inhabit the minds of radically diverse people. James Baldwin was a genius in this regard. He could write beautifully about straight and gay characters, about men and women, and about people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. His ability to render even the most unsympathetic characters in three dimensions is a testament to his sophistication and humanity. I have similar admiration for authors like Kazuo Ishiguro, whose first-person narrators range from an English butler in the 1930s to clone orphans cultivated for organ donations. In the age of selfies, these writers seem possessed of a rare and refreshing curiosity about the lives of people who aren’t mirror reflections of themselves. There’s an assurance of human connection in that. 

What craft element challenges you the most in your writing? How do you approach it? What is your quirk as a writer?

I was an academic historian in a former life, and when I started writing fiction and poetry, I had to break certain academic habits. Mainly, I had to let go of my compulsion to over-explain, provide extensive backstory for every character, and shoehorn ham-handed segues between every paragraph. A few years ago, I detailed my rocky transition from footnotes to fiction in an essay [for Writers Studio newsletter] called “The Metamorphosis of Graham Greene.” Years later, I am still learning to trust my readers, and to embrace a practice familiar to seasoned poets—the practice of evoking rather than explaining. Ongoing experimentation of the sort described in my essay usually limbers me up. Granted, some of my rough drafts still read like legal briefs and VCR manuals, but I’m slowly recovering.

What projects are you working on right now?

I’m currently drafting my second novel. Maintaining focus during the pandemic and a period of political turmoil has been a challenge, and I’m relieved that I’m working on my novel’s messy first draft, blocking scenes and sketching characters and basically throwing lots of soggy spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Fine-tuning would be a challenge at this point. I’ve also been sketching ideas for new poems and stories and looking forward to the end of the pandemic and the return of my wayward brain.

Alice Hatcher is the author of The Wonder That Was Ours, winner of Dzanc Books’ 2017 Fiction Prize and the recipient of recognitions from The Center for Fiction, Friends of American Writers, and the Eric Hoffer Foundation. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in numerous journals, including Cagibi, Alaska Quarterly Review, Fourth Genre, The Beloit Fiction Journal, and The Lascaux Review. Her nonfiction received a special mention in the 2020 Pushcart Anthology. She currently lives in Tucson, Arizona. Listen to Alice read “Before the First Incision” on our YouTube Page. You can learn more about Alice and her work at her website.