ALR reviewed on NewPages.com

Hey everybody, have you caught our glowing review over at NewPages yet?

Here's a teaser:

On Kaitlyn Palacios’s essay “The Waiver”...

"Palacios’s essay is an unfurling testament to memory, love, youth and nationhood, and it is an irony such as the husband’s statement that makes you suffer on her behalf. Her memories become the reader’s, as the cadence of her language echoes her conversion. The narrative is so well-crafted, ebbing and rushing in an almost oceanic pull, I am late for everything today for reading it, unable to rescue my index finger from holding the page."

On Kyle Mellen’s short story “Just Like A Man"...

"Mellen uses the voice as a clever ruse; what you perceive as an exercise in the voice of the typical American man takes a story wildly out of the formula’s context—when you might expect a certain outcome, you are arrested by escalating violence and grotesque murder in a nihilistic framework that will freeze your blood. The risk in the plot development is well-managed; I found the pacing to be virtuosic. I think the effort would be terrific even in translation."

On our poetry selection...

"From a layman’s perspective, many of the poems tend to inform each other and complement the prose while invoking tradition."

Thank you, Mary Florio, for your wonderful review! 

An Interview with Catherine Lucille Sharpe

April Murphy: I discovered your writing when "One Thousand Kittens" was a finalist for Cutbank's Montana Nonfiction Prize in 2011, and then went on the hunt for more essays from your unpublished collection Ambition Towards Love. What I found surprised me. 

Some essays of yours, like "Proxy" and "Somewhat Organic" are what I think about as being kind of traditional memoirs, but then there are essays like "Shades of Gray" and "Another Lesbian Space Fantasy" that seem to break out of old ways of thinking about the CNF genre - blending the imagination and a sense of magic without the same authentic and honest (and charming!) voice that characterizes your longer work. Can you talk a little bit about these different forms your writing takes? 

Catherine Lucille Sharpe: I am certain that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is important, for reader and writer alike.  It must be important; people get quite upset when they discover that the writer has cheated--stepping outside the bounds of "literal truth" to copulate with fiction.  But why don't people get upset when nonfiction parades around as fiction? I am guilty of this.

The Ambition Towards Love collection deliberately flows back and forth between fiction and nonfiction.  Whatever the genre, I continue to circle the same ole boring human stuff--love, loss, more love, more loss, lies, less love, gain, a little more loss, joy, heroism, duplicity, frailty, failure, growth, shrinkage, doubt, love again, loss again, truth, etc..  The usual.  

As a writer and self-avowed nutpouch, I've clearly been trying to sort one or two things out on the page--the mere two dimensions of the page seem so much more manageable than the infinite dimensions of my head and heart. 

I know that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is important to me because I take the trouble to know the difference line by line, paragraph by paragraph.  In my nonfiction, I might forsake a perfectly good "real" detail, simply because it does not add to the meaning of the story, or what I want to emphasize in the story.  And guess what!  I might include that same detail in a short fiction because it creates ambiguity--one of the best ways to make fiction seem just as true and confusing and unknowable as real life.  

The decision to approach an idea through fiction or nonfiction profoundly affects my writing process, even when there are thematic congruities.  I've noticed how the struggle to craft readable fiction has improved my nonfiction writing, in both predictable and surprising ways.

Predictably, being forced to dredge up a believable character is good practice for bringing your Great Aunt Susan to life for the nonfiction reader.  She's the one who always sucks the knuckle of her pinky finger so that she can twirl her wedding ring.  It doesn't fit on her ring finger anymore, and anyway Uncle Frank's dead, so it doesn't much matter where she wears it.  There's something pathetic and familial about all that saliva, and now the reader gets Aunt Susan, too.

Unpredictably for me, engaging in fiction demands that I suffer a vulnerability I don't necessarily feel in the process of nonfiction.  In fiction, my judgment must fade way, way back, allowing the story to emerge from its mysterious place, a place I hardly control.  It can be frankly terrifying to tap in to my subconscious--my id whines, my ego hits, and my superego makes me write the same sentence a hundred times on the chalkboard.  The reader, even as she nods her head vigorously, agreeing that she's reading fiction, is still coming to some conclusions about the writer.  She can't help it!  If the writer goes on and on about cup size, the reader is not going to mistake the writer for a leg man.  Or a leg woman.  (Boy, I can't make that sound right.)

When you read my fiction, don't you dare tell me I'm lonely, or wimpy, or flailing, or crazy-in-love with my offspring (thus doomed to suffer), or bitterly angry, or actually quite sad at times. 

When I am writing the truth, or at least my nonfiction version of the truth, it is so much easier to control what the reader thinks about me.  The persona is deliberate, calculated, securely insecure, always ready with a deflective quip.  The reader will certainly mistake my persona for me, and thus I am safe from scrutiny.  I believe that I am in charge.  Which is, of course, a different kind of fiction, but luckily, the kind I reserve for therapy sessions.

To my dismay, all of this precision about fiction and "truth" does not ultimately prove useful to me in the real world.  Some people tell the truth only to discover later that they lied.  Others lie only to discover the truth.  Some don't even bother to lie, they just keep their mouths shut, suddenly go on diets, go to work early, come home late, and wait to be caught.

Your resumé is one big piece of creative non-fiction.

My Amibition Towards Love collection approximates the experience of a whole story--one where the reader swims through truth, both designated and actual, as well as the lies we call fiction.  Nonetheless, like me, the reader still has to figure out what really happened.

But by the time the words hit the page, it’s all true.

AJM: Do you think that queer writers are obligated to write queer nonfiction? I suppose since nonfiction is about personal experience, the subject matter is inevitable is one is queer. The writer, then, gets to figure out how their queer identity is expressed what (if any) resonance it will give to their more 'universal' life story. 

One of the things that's refreshing about your writing is that the central struggle isn't your queerness - the narratives don't get their tension from a 'coming out' plot, nor do they have a political abrasiveness despite the fact that they are about gay marriage/divorce/reproduction - instead your work exists in a world where all of this is secondary to the love you have to give your daughter and yourself. 

CS: As far as I'm concerned, nobody is obligated to write anything. Well, unless contracts are involved. I do, however, this it's Super Nice when people write about stuff they really care about. The form - fiction or nonfiction - is less important than the question at stake for the writer. When I'm reading, I'm engaged in the investigation that the writer is making into the subject matter, so it better be a real question the writer has, with some juice.

I'm totally way flattered that you find my work refreshing in its absence of Queer Identity Conflict, which I'll just call QIC for our purposes. I haven't written much specifically about QUIC because it is not a painful enough question for me - plus I already know the answer. I'm special. 

When I say I'm special, what I really mean is that I'm like everyone else. That makes me special, because not so many people realize that. And I've decided to worry less about being original and worry more about being average. And writing about that instead.

I'm really, really, really, really, really interested in what it is like to be human. More precisely, what it is like for me to be human. My current line of inquiry is how I am like so many others, not how I feel apart from these other creatures.

AJM: It seems like you really have a focus when you're creating your persona. So, how do you navigate your real lesbian identity with your lesbian narrators? 

CS: Poorly. They are all mixed up inside. Therefore, I try not to think about it too much. The idea of a continuum of truth - from lies (fiction) to truth (nonfiction) - is inept at best. Truth is a blob, a DNA strand, a froth of delicate, short-lived moments. I've had perfectly good fiction turn into nonfiction on me more than once. On the page and in real life. Freaky.

AJM: As someone who didn't enter academia after completing your MFA, can you tell us a little bit about what your writing life is like now? 

CS: Oy.  I’m scattered and slow. I’m undisciplined about my creative work. I prefer black pens and write longhand in a college-ruled spiral notebook.  Usually early in the morning. Sometimes my daughter has to borrow my notebook for drawing or math or to teach me something by diagramming.  For now, I let her because she can’t really read cursive (this is de-emphasized in school now, did you know?). Also, I like what she inserts into my ridiculous musings.

For my paid work, I write all day (or at least sit in front of a computer all day as if I’m writing) for a corporate healthcare services entity. Sexy.  Adjectives are discouraged, as are complicated sentences that involve semi-colons; apparently these are too difficult to follow. It is a constant struggle to avoid being sucked into the undertow.  I have to remind myself that writing has saved my life—connecting and re-connecting to that source is an end in itself even when progress on new creative work is slowed down to a drag-drag-crawl-sob-crawl.

Sharpe wrote mostly for live performance in San Francisco before turning her attention to gay marriage, in vitro fertilization, gay divorce, parenting, dating, fiction, and nonfiction.  Her first collection of interlocking essays and fictions Ambition Towards Love hasn't been published, but you can read some excerpts in Opium Magazine, A cappella Zoo, Word Riot and CutBank, among others. A couple of pieces have even been included in anthologies and she almost won several prizes--one from Montana and one from North Carolina. If you would like to know if she actually ever wins a prize or publishes her collection, join her email blast list by sending a note to catherinelucillesharpe@gmail.com. Put "join email blast" in the subject line.

Review of Michael Martone's Four for a Quarter

Four for a Quarter. By Michael Martone. Tuscaloosa, AL: FC2, 2011. 300 pp. $16.50 paperback.

            Four is not normally a holy number, not miraculous or charmed, not usually held in the collective consciousness as worthy of praise or blame. It’s after three, on our way to seven, not the number of fingers per hand or even a prime. Except that in Michael Martone’s art, four becomes sacrosanct, a number of the body and of the mind and of the spirit, a number to be enamored of and troubled by, a number beyond duality or dialectic. Nothing like Four for a Quarter is being written right now, and while Martone lives in the same world as Kevin McIlvoy, Amy Hempel, and Donald Barthelme, I’m not sure he’s from the same world. I’m also not certain anyone else can so astonishingly balance repetition and variation, obsession, meditation, and revelation—a juggling not of four balls, but of a spinning top, a sparkler, a phial of tears, and a pair of worn, sexy underwear.

Each story in this three-hundred-page collection is told in four linked parts. The first, the title tale, recounts four stories of four booths, and begins the book-long investigation of watching, seeing the self, and seeing others. From the first booth—a photo booth—the speaker delightedly watches four clothed, swimming Amish people; the speaker enters the second booth, a see-through, educational photo booth at the Children’s Museum, and says, “I imagine that they have replaced the camera too with one that takes X-rays, and my souvenir will record a transparent me. My heart will be an opaque dollop in the airy cage of my ribs”; the third booth is a confessional, with a priest hearing cardinal and venial sins, which will be “hauled into the air by fluttering cardinals […] leaving me white and clean as new paper”; and the narrator emerges from the fourth photo booth, one at Woolworth’s, thinking, “I am the same person now as when I went into the booth. I am the same in each of the four black-and-white pictures of me,” while escaped parakeets and canaries perch and flit throughout the store. This blend of internal investigation surrounded by and enmeshed with images of fancy and fantasy occurs throughout the book, creating a texture not surreal but playful, not insincere, but not quite so serious. The stories feel weighted, like they have mass and matter, but they are also full of space. This mix of the marvelous, the mundane, and the momentous allows for an investigation of a wider range of ideas than most story collections hold. Other things that come in fours in this book include, but are not limited to:

                        Four lost pregnancies.

                        Four fifth Beatles, described through haibun written by Yoko Ono.

            Four descriptions of a teenaged farmer whose hands are cut off, titled “4H”: subtitled “Hands,” “Head,” “Heart,” “Health.”

Four tales of days and seconds lost in the historical changes between calendars, in the shift of daylight savings, and in the delay of leap days—lost time two lovers want to preserve.

                        Four seasons.

            Four postcards from four towns in Indiana: Story, Santa Claus, French Lick, and Muncie.

                        Four states that start with the letter I.

                        Four monologues describing the sex lives of the Fantastic Four.

                        Four ways to tie a tie: Windsor, Bow, Half Windsor, Four-in-Hand.

                        “The First Four Deaths in My High School Class.”

                        Four foursquare houses.

                        Four Corners.

                        Four speeds of vinyl records.

            Four sexy stories of four Susans: Lazy, Black-eyed, Sue Bee, and Susie Q, involving sex in the parents’ house, sex wearing glasses while naked to better see the sex, sex with honey as a prop, and sex on a passenger train, respectively—three told from the points of view of the men, the last told from the last Susan’s perspective.

                        Four faces of Mount Rushmore.

                        Four Fourth of Julys.

                        Four Calling Birds.

            But this book does not list—it coils around its subjects, and it magnifies, making the micro macro. This book explores the purpose and possibilities of narrative, and these fragments of people’s lives often compactly capture a moment that feels more resonant than what is contained in an entire novel. Cleverness abounds, but these stories are not slight or sly—or, if they are sly, they are always devastating, as well.

            I’ve had the privilege of listening to Michael Martone talk about the art of fiction, at lectures at Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers, and in bars at AWP. This book enacts his philosophy of writing, though he’d probably consider “philosophy” too strong a word. In my paraphrases, Michael Martone says and asks things like this:

                        Fiction is an ingredient in a form.

            Where do we culturally put things when we don’t want or need them anymore? In the university. But institutions need not only be storehouses for knowledge, places we call when we need to know something—they can also be generative, places that create new things.

Apollo can play the lyre. But Hermes is the patron demi-god of innovative writers, because he made the lyre out of a tortoise shell, cat gut, and horns, after he stole Apollo’s cattle and made them walk backwards, so Apollo would follow them the wrong way.

                        Learning the rules then breaking them is bullshit.

                        Conventional fiction can be taught. Innovative fiction cannot.

            There are four kinds of stories: narrative realism; nonnarrative realism; narrative irrealism; nonnarrative irrealism.

            I’ve never studied with Michael Martone, but he’s taught me, and others, through his stories: form can be invented, and it is still possible to feel you’re in the presence of something that exists nowhere else. In a time when more people are studying the art of writing fiction than ever before, many people fear that short stories will be codified, normalized, made tame. With Michael Martone teaching and writing, there’s at least one force of resistance. His stories make the question “Can anyone really write anything new anymore?” feel like a stupid question, one with four answers: “Of course”; “Who cares?”; “Why not?”; and “Watch this.”

Erin Stalcup's fiction is forthcoming in The Tusculum Review, H_NGM_N, and a Swiss fashion magazine called Novembre, and her stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Kenyon Review Online, The Sun, [PANK], and elsewhere. She serves as an Assistant Fiction Editor of the American Literary Review.

What I'm Looking For: CNF Assistant Editor April Murphy

Hello ALR readers and submitters!

As we're in the thick of our reading season, and as we're working our way through submissions, I'm starting to see some trends in what's making the cut to the second round and what's not. In the spirit of transparency, I thought I'd offer some insight on the selection process (you really don't need to be chewing your nails).

I feel I should also offer a caveat - these insights are by no means the ONLY things we're looking for, nor do they reflect the tastes of Bonnie Friedman, the CNF Editor, nor Ann McCutchan, ALR's steward. You can take them or leave them.

1. Reading submissions takes a LONG time. 

 If you've already submitted to ALR, chances are your submittable status shows you are "in progress." What does this mean? If my story is really "progressing" then why is it taking several weeks, if not longer, for it to complete this process? 

The short answer is that we have several rounds of readers and your story must make it through several different levels to ultimately be accepted. Readers will often be assigned up to 5 essays (even more if it's fiction or poetry) at a time. If they take 2 weeks to read that before passing it along to an assistant editor who may take an additional week or two to read it and they pass it along to a busy professor/editor who may take a few weeks to read it.... you get the idea. It's a hot minute. 

This is long process, while tedious and a bit nerve wracking I'm sure, but it is awesome for you as a writer.  Every set of eyes that lands on your piece sees something different and can call attention to these merits. It allows you to build momentum inside of our office. So even if it feels like your submission is stagnant, I assure you that it's got a life of its own. 

Often, a reader will become invested in something and root for it. "Hey! Have you read that essay about the comic book store? AMAZING. I just sent it along." "Check out the scene on page 5 - delicious." etc. We're all involved with ALR because we love great writing. You guys send a lot of it. Keep sending it!

      2.  Cover letters are important. 

I should just state that this is a bit of a personal preference. I always read the cover letter an author sends along before I read their essay. Why? It shows me how seriously you take yourself as an author. Are you professional and friendly? Are you a goofball who writes a haiku? Do you have any previous publications and where were they? 

Cover letters also show me whether or not you are familiar with ALR and our policies. If you've noted that your essay is a simultaneous submission, I will move it up in my reading list because I don't want to  miss out. If I don't know that you've submitted it elsewhere - I can't do that. 

If you send along an essay without a cover letter - of course I'll still read it and if it's awesome, I'll be blown away by it. But! If you can help yourself with a cover letter, why not just take the extra 3 minutes to write one? 

      3.  Essays should have action AND reflection. 

Creative nonfiction writers may be familiar with Vivian Gornick's ideas about the "situation" and "story." She describes nonfiction as being broken up into the plot/action (situation) - learning how to ride a bike, how you found out that you don't like cheese, shopping for a pen - and the reflection on that experience (story) which explains to readers why shopping for a pen was important in the first place. 

Many of the CNF submissions to ALR are filled with well written situations, essays that read almost like short stories. Compelling characters, good description, etc. But by the end of reading these pieces, I often wonder why the author wanted to write about it. I feel as if they are a puzzle that I don't know how to solve. I've been given all the pieces but there's no picture on the box to follow. What's the story? 

I, of course, don't want to suggest that you should dog your essays down with too much reflection and not enough in-scene development. There is a balance that each essay requires and a little reflection goes a long way in covering/framing action. Both of these things are necessary for CNF to work: action so your readers can share your experiences; reflection so that they can identify with and understand why those experiences  resonate with you. 

Some essays that you may want to check out that do this really well: "The Way We Are" by Thomas Lynch, "Street Haunting" by Virginia Woolf, and "Notes of a Native Son" by James Baldwin. 

Thank you, ALR submitters, for the opportunity to read your work. I hope this blog post was helpful. Keep sending your words! We cannot wait to read them!

Best,

April Murphy

Creative Nonfiction

Assistant Editor


April Murphy is a Doctoral Candidate in UNT's Creative Writing Phd Program. April is the Assistant Nonfiction Editor at American Literary Review. She is currently working on her first book Shrouded: Women Who Work With the Dead. 

American Literary Review ABD Graduate Student Reading

Please join us Friday, November 16th at 7:30pm for the American Literary Review's ABD Graduate Student Reading, featuring fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction from Hillary Stringer, Jessica Hindman, and Elishia Heiden. The reading will take place at the home of April Murphy and Nate Logan. All faculty and students are welcome to attend. Please feel free to bring spouses, significant others, and buddies as well.

Elishia Heiden, a Missouri native whose Gammy dated Rush Limbaugh's grandpa, writes non-fiction and fiction (she is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in fiction)--but usually mingles the two brilliantly. For instance, she might've tried out for American Idol--or maybe she didn't? She might've taken her high school basketball team to state--or not. Or maybe she plans to move to Austria in April after her pending book deal is finalized. Or maybe not. What is true is that she likes to meddle with the "what ifs" and "or maybes" against professional advice, and this obsession leads her to write things.

Jessica Hindman's work has appeared in O., The Oprah Magazine and Invisible Citizens: Youth Politics after 9/11. She is a winner of the Hands Across the Middle East essay contest and Joyous Publishing’s Fiction Contest.  She has worked as a freelance researcher for The New York Times Magazine and MTV, where she was the first person to compile research on the show that would later become the nationwide hit Teen Mom.  She also worked as a reporter for her local paper, The Shenandoah Valley Herald, where she wrote stories with headlines like this: "Local Woman's Lap a Pitstop for Flying Rodent."  Her dissertation is a memoir about her past life as a professional fake violinist.  

Hillary Stringer is a doctoral candidate in English Literature at the University of North Texas, where she is working on a novel. In addition to being a Teaching Fellow, she is the Production Editor of the American Literary Review and a coordinating editor for Pakistaniaat, a Journal of Pakistan Studies.  Her fiction has appeared in Synergies, The Tidal Basin Review, and Microchondria, an anthology of short-shorts complied by the Harvard Book Store. She was nominated for a 2011 AWP Intro Journal Award. She received her Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Cincinnati in the spring of 2009.

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