American Literary Review Awards: Results!

Many thanks to all of you who entered our 2013 American Literary Review Awards. We are thrilled to announce this year's winners:

Short fiction, judged by Matt Bell:

Winner: Tori Malcangio for "Ever Seen Sedona?"

Runner-up: Nikki Moustaki for "Big Blue"

Creative Nonfiction, judged by Poe Ballantine:

Winner: Xujun Eberlein for "Clouds and Rain over Three Gorges"

Poetry, judged by Alan Michael Parker:

Winner: Susannah Nevison for "Preparing the Animal"

Runner-up: Tobias Wray for "Sci-Fi Aubade"

Congratulations to our winners, and stay tuned for their work on our new website!

Glad You Enjoyed Your Biscuits: Clint Peters' Interview with Poe Ballantine

Clint Peters (CP): Visiting writer Poe Ballantine stopped by Denton in early November this year, where he read at the University of North Texas and we rustled up breakfast at the Old West Cafe. I had the Cowboy and a plateful of homemade biscuits and gravy, and Poe had the Train Robber with cheese. While our bloated stomachs squeezed blood back into our brains, I quizzed Ballantine on the finer points of self-expression, parenthood, Amazon one-star reviews, Jack Kerouac, marriage and fame. We talked mostly in context of his new memoir, Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere. The book is centered around the unsolved murder of math professor Steven Haataja in Chadron, Nebraska where Ballantine lives, and is also, seamlessly, about Ballantine’s bilingual marriage, his autistic son and wondering where the true heart of America is buried. During Love and Terror’s writing, Poe took part in a documentary about the murder case. The film shares the same names as Poe’s memoir, and a link to filmmaker Dave Jannetta’s kick-starter page is listed below. The book itself is ridiculously funny as it is strangely tragic and page-turning. Somehow, Ballantine has made the Nebraskan panhandle feel both terrible and exotic. I should say too that Poe was kind enough to wait on me at the Old West while I finished my biscuits. 

CP: Your book condenses some material down from about five years to a space of about a year, and you modified a couple of other things for narrative flow. Why do you think some readers get routinely miffed, underwear bunched in a knot by a writer who shapes material openly? Do they think artists don't write nonfiction anymore? 

 

Poe Ballantine (PB). It often depends on the type of underwear, you know, tight underwear bunches more readily, but there’s definitely confusion between creative nonfiction and journalism, and I don’t think there should be. Journalism reports an event from the field objectively and factually as it happened. Its intent is to inform. Creative nonfiction unzips the skin of journalism and reaches down into the penetralia for emotions, meaning, beauty, ideas, and if you’re lucky, art. When you set my account side by side with the so-called factual account of Steven Haataja, the newspaper articles, police reports, autopsy report, etc. there’s really no comparison between which illuminates the record best, but I’ll let you be the judge of that.

CP: Tell me about the decision to broach a murder investigation. How did you get the, um, excuse the expression, balls? 

 

PB: I only entered the whale’s mouth on this because Steven lived right around the corner from me and I had spent some time with him and knew many of his colleagues, neighbors, and friends. His death felt personal. I knew that his story could’ve well been mine. I had never written true crime, so it took me a while to get my feet. For a year this was strictly a timeline, a list of suspects, a few press releases, some interviews, a handful of theories and scenarios, and several hundred unanswered questions. Gradually, I enfolded other elements. Early on I realized that Steven’s tragedy needed humanizing, which gave me an opportunity to depict my town and its residents. There might be a debate about whether or not I should’ve undertaken the investigation, but when that whale’s mouth opened, I don’t really think I had any other choice but to walk in. 

 

CP: How would you be as a writer today if you'd graduated from an Ivy League college at 22, entered an MFA program (or MA program like UNT's) and been newly minted at 25?

 

PB: I’m guessing before I fizzled out completely I would’ve written four literary novels, “literary” in this sense meaning plotless, convoluted, ambiguous, and at least three hundred pages too long. My first novel would’ve been about an eccentric and talented but deeply troubled Civil War family, the second a dense and irritating study of political power during the Hoover Administration, the third an examination of race with keen insight and sympathy written in the comfort of my all-white neighborhood. The last novel, right before my suicide, would’ve been about a man strongly resembling myself who struggles with alcoholism and depression from writing literary novels. 

 

CP: Which books would you burn and which would you surreptitiously stick on a shelf at a bro party house if you could? 

 

PB: I’d burn all four of those literary novels I just mentioned. I don’t know what a bro party house is, but in its bookshelf I’d stick this book I just heard of about a 1950’s atomic scientist, who after a bad experiment comes home one evening from the lab disfigured and double in size, eats his wife, children, and two poodles, then has a sex change operation. I can’t remember the name of it.

CP: Does that book exist? That's the kind of thing I remember being tossed around my MFA program. It's certainly no weirder than Pynchon. 

PB: That book is a product of my imagination, Clint, as far as I know. 

CP: Why this writing thing? Is it, like, a calling? Is it therapeutic? You can tell me. 

 

PB: Among my limited talents, writing is what I do best. And though I don’t write for therapy, I often start out with a question I don’t know the answer to. I suspect most readers are refreshed by authors who don’t pretend to know, even after they’ve examined a subject exhaustively. The important thing is to invite the reader along for the ride, and that should include beer and sandwiches as the sun sets over the river. 

 

CP: What's next for you, Arctic exploration? What if, indeed, the killer is caught (officially)? A sequel? 

 

PB: If the killer is caught, a revised edition, perhaps a sequel, would be required, especially in light of the fact that Phoebe Krakatoa has now disappeared and many suspect that she did not meet a good fate. I’d hate to get trapped writing about crime in my own small town, though, so maybe I’ll get the chance to escape to a foreign country.

CP: How do you write and have a family? 

 

PB: The two were incompatible for a long time. I couldn’t have a dog either. I was traveling by bus, staying in small rooms, etc. When I hit my mid forties and had begun to publish regularly and had enough material to last a lifetime, I married and settled down. It’s possible to compose under any kind of circumstances, but I have to assert a daily claim to three or four hours of uninterrupted time. My wife and son understand this. It’s just work, after all.

CP: When you make sentences, do you edit each one or do your pour them out as if gasoline onto a fire that your soul is making? 

 

PB: I pour them out on fire and then go back later and forge them.

CP: Ok, one weird thing I have to ask, did you help decide to put your picture on the cover of your new memoir and did that add another level to the already inherent exhibitionism of writing?

 

PB: I vowed from the beginning that I would never have a photo on a book jacket. Author faces by and large are not meant to be seen, or at least they’re a deterrent to book sales, and I’m no exception. But my publisher wanted a jacket photo for all my books and I went along in the moronic delirium that comes from someone wanting to publish your work. When she saw some of the stills from the documentary about me and my book she decided to plaster my butt ugly mug across the cover. Can’t say I’m crazy about it, but sales and design and all that stuff are her department. 

 

CP: How much does that one no-name, one-star review for your memoir on Amazon rub you?

 

PB: That review, which doesn’t bother me because it barely makes sense, was written by Maria “Susie” Zimmerman who runs a portable burrito wagon in our small town. Maria is married to the criminology professor who took over the investigation of the missing math professor after the local police had fallen into a doze. At first she LOVED my book, then she got to the part where I told about her husband’s campaign to steal my wife. Then she HATED my book and promptly got on Amazon to tell the world. I have heard that she rails to many of her customers about her dislike for my book and how she plans to burn it. She is so obsessed with my book that she often forgets the sour cream or puts on too much sour cream or too many jalapenos or she pours green salsa instead of red. Maria insists I should’ve titled my book The Revenge of Poe. She believes I wrote Love and Terror not to paint my small town or discuss my bi-cultural marriage or my son red-flagged for autism, or to address in detail the mystery of the murdered professor, but to get revenge on her husband for trying to jump my wife’s bones. I kind of like that title, The Revenge of Poe. It brings to mind a gothic tale of a 1950’s atomic scientist, who after a bad experiment comes home one evening from the lab disfigured and double in size, eats his wife, poodles, has a sex change operation and opens a burrito stand. I think I’d LOVE that book and put it on the shelves of bro party houses across the land. Maria’s burritos, by the way, I’ll give four stars.

CP: Does your growing popularity freak you out or does it feel deserved or something else? 

 

PB: I think Pfizer is about to unveil a drug that increases the size of your popularity, but until then, I don’t sense any popularity, growing or otherwise. If it happens I’ll let you know. 

 

CP: Wait, you've had two essays in the Best American series and one in Best American Short Stories, Sy Sanfransky recently put your butter-smeared pin-up in The Sun and Cheryl Strayed drools over your pages. I'd say you've got some momentum. 

 

PB: As far as popularity is concerned, I'm still regularly described as "obscure." Most people in the small town where I've lived for almost twelve years were not aware I was a writer until Love and Terror. A kid at the reading there made a point to say that he'd never heard of me. This is pretty typical, and I like it fine that way, I'd just like to sell a few more books.

CP: Why do people compare you to Kerouac when you read nothing like him? 

 

PB: I don’t get to pick the writers I’m compared to. Kerouac, for a beat writer, is pretty clunky, and the idea of composing without revision off a roll of butcher paper or whatever is absurd to me. But people are attracted to gimmicks and icons and pre-digested stories: oh this is the guy who killed himself because no one would publish him, or this is the woman who put her head in an oven because her boyfriend’s dick looked like a turkey neck, or this is the guy who tried to shoot an apple off his wife’s head and killed her instead, or this is the guy who traveled aimlessly and antiheroically and used a psychopath for his central character. So I need a handle, I suppose, a place where readers can grab on and jump aboard. And since I traveled aimlessly and antiheroically, like Kerouac, I’m kind of stuck with this roll of butcher paper fed into my typewriter.

CP: How did you manage to survive without health insurance, and how did you manage to not slip into television bunkerdom? How did you manage to write as a short order cook? Damn it, how do you have that enviable tenacity? 

 

PB: It was all or nothing for me. I was going to be a writer or wrapped up in the roots of an apple tree, so I wasn’t thinking about insurance or retirement or dental care. My tenacity as you call it, which came from leaving myself no alternatives, often felt more like drowning. I was never asked by anyone to do television, besides there’s too much money in that.

CP: No, I mean, how did you stay away from the perpetual defecation that spews from TV? The average American spends four hours a day gorging on pixel juice.

PB: I’ve logged several thousand hours in front of the telly, but there were years at a time when I didn't have a television or if I did, it was part of the rental — only two or three networks with nothing on. Most of the time there's still nothing on. TV, I notice, especially the news "shows," make me more cynical and inclined to melancholia, and I don't think that's an accidental correlation.

CP: Is there a certain amount of time that has to pass after an event for you to write about it, and if you wait too long will you lose it all? Where, for Goldilocks, is the middle way? 

 

PB: I fill notebooks with detailed notes. If something happens that I recognize as a potential story, I’ll put it down whole as I can as soon as I can. I have written pieces as they happened or as they were happening, but this is unusual. To find the idea or the problem underneath, to explore the penetralia, takes time. The notebooks full of details and sketches that you save will not only jog your memory but help, when the piece is ripe, to bring it to life.

CP: Given your keen sense of place and landscape, have you ever thought that in another dimension you would be a nature writer? Or, are you a nature writer? 

 

PB: Nature writers generally have a well-trained eye, sometimes even two eyes. They’re more visual than aural, is my point, and though I wouldn’t gainsay their powers of imagination, they’re more confined than I like to be to the environments they observe. I paint mostly urban pictures because I’m more interested in people than poppy fields. I’m also more aural than visual, and I spend more time in my mind than outdoors.

CP: Thanks Poe!

PB: Glad you enjoyed your biscuits. 

Links:
-Love and Terror - The Documentary
-Poe Ballantine Making Pizza
-Poe Ballantine Reading at UNT with Introduction by Ryan Flanagan 
-Hawthorne Books


Poe Ballantine has held 75 jobs in thirty states including janitorial work, truck driving, ship riveting, pizza delivery and pest control. He is the author of nine books including the novels God Clobbers Us All and Decline of the Lawrence Welk Empire, and the essay collections Things I Like about America and 501 Minutes to Christ. Earlier this year he published his first memoir, Love & Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere, which takes place in Chadron, Nebraska, where he currently lives with his wife and son. He has had work appear in Best American Short Stories and twice in Best American Essays, including the 2013 collection edited by Cheryl Strayed. He regularly appears in The Sun.

 

Clinton Crockett Peters: A PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of North Texas, Clint has an MFA in Nonfiction from the University of Iowa where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow. He has been published in Upstreet, The Next One, Antimuse, The Grassroots Journal and other literaryish venues. Prior to writing, he was an English language teacher in Kosuge Village, Japan (population 900) and a backpacking, canoeing, and caving wilderness guide in Western America. He lives with his wife in Denton, and they want a dog. 

 

ALR Literary Awards Contest Judges Announced!

It's that season again, ALR readers: the ALR Literary Awards are open for submissions and we are reading away! 

We are proud to announce that the following writers will be working with American Literary Review: 

Poetry: Alan Michael Parker
Fiction: Matt Bell
CNF: Poe Ballantine

Alan Michael Parker has written three novels, Cry Uncle, Whale Man, and The Committee on Town Happiness.He is also the author of seven collections of poems: Days Like Prose, The Vandals, Love Song with Motor Vehicles, A Peal of Sonnets, Elephants & Butterflies, Ten Days, and Long Division. His poetry has appeared in magazines such as The American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Pleiades,and The Yale Review. In 2011, his poems were anthologized in The Best American Poetry as well as The Pushcart Prize. Among other numerous awards and fellowships, he has received three Pushcart Prizes, the Fineline Prize from the Mid-American Review, the 2013 Randall Jarrell Award, the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the 2012 North Carolina Book Award for Long Division. He teaches at Davidson College, where he is the Douglas C. Houchens Professor in English. 

Matt Bell is the author of How They Were Found (2010), a short story collection; Cataclysm Baby (2012), a novella; and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods (2013), his debut novel. He studied at Bowling Green State University and is an assistant professor at Northern Michigan University. Bell is the senior editor at Dzanc Books and founding editor of the literary magazine, The Collagist. His stories have been anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories, Best American Fantasy, and 30 Under 30: an Anthology of Innovative Fiction by Younger Writers.

Poe Ballantine is an American writer of both non-fiction and fiction. His work has appeared in The Sun,The Atlantic Monthly, and Kenyon Review, among others. He is the author of two essay collections,Things I Like about America and 501 Minutes to Christ, and his memoir, Love & Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere, has been noted by The Los Angeles Review, The Rumpus, and Cheryl Strayed. His essay, 501 Minutes to Christ, was reprinted for Best American Essays. His novels include God Clobbers Us All and Decline of the Lawrence Welk Empire, and his short story The Blue Devils of Blue River Avenue was reprinted for Best American Short Stories.

Remember that our contest deadline is October 1st.  Happy submitting!

An Interview with Tara DaPra

AprilJo Murphy (AJM): Welcome, Tara, to our humble little webspace at American Literary Review. I was so impressed – dazed even – with your essay “Writing Memoir and Writing for Therapy” in Creative Nonfiction that I quite literally threw the magazine across the room several times during the process of reading it. Your ability to have such a poignant perspective about grief and creation – to not let it overtake your authorial voice and become too painful for a reader – shows a mastery of subject and distance that floors me. Or, literally, astounded me enough to end up on the floor.

Could you tell me a little bit about your writing process? How do let your material breathe? Do you have a routine, or are there authors whose work you read to inspire you?

Tara DaPra (TD): “Writing Memoir and Writing for Therapy” begin as my “thesis essay,” a literary essay I wrote in 2008 to complement my MFA thesis. But I was rushed for time (I was also trying to complete a manuscript!) and knew it wasn’t right or finished. It then sat untouched until the summer of 2011 when I showed it to a few colleagues at UW Green Bay. One described the voice as “Malcolm Gladwell-esque.” That alone may have propelled me into finishing it. So I worked on it that summer, and then put it away again, and I worked on it again the following summer. The essay was originally almost twice as long. I love the braided essay form but it can be really difficult to tie all the pieces together, so I decided to save some of my ideas, a lot which were about Catholicism, for another essay.

I’ve been working as an adjunct since 2009, and there’s a lot of insecurity in that line of work. I spent the first couple of years post-grad school scrapping together a living, so I had zero time or psychic space for writing. There’s a lot of valid criticism these days about tenure, but I’ll tell you, living with zero job security is a real creativity killer. I’ve gained a measure of stability in the last year or so, and I also had a baby in 2011, and those two forces have freed up a lot of time I used to spend worrying. They’ve also brought a routine to my life, so I’ve worked to again make reading and writing part of that routine. I’m not disciplined by nature, but there’s a freedom in structure. For a while I worried I had “forgotten” how to write, but—to borrow the cliché—it’s like riding a bike. During my time away from writing, I was mostly teaching English composition, and a fair bit was online, so I was doing a lot of writing but in a whole other capacity: Writing to instruct, writing to clarify, writing in a much more direct way, and that actually helped my “real” writing when I finally came back to it.

But to get back to your question about whether or not I have a routine—I don’t know that I really do. Even though I preach “Writing is a Process” all day long to students, I still struggle to make a regular, steady process part of my reality. I’m not that writer who wakes up a 5:30 every morning to write for two hours. I wish I were, but I’m not. But I live in perpetual hope. I’m planning to take an online class this winter "Daily work, daily inspiration: Restarting or developing your writing practice" taught by my friend Éireann Lorsung through the Loft Literary Center. She is an absolutely amazing poet who runs a beautiful micro-press called MIEL. If anyone can teach me, she can.

 AJM: You've written a lot of pieces connected to grief and mourning. Your personal essay  the color the brain and the heart – has spoken to me about memory and loss, and ultimately living through it all. I'm curious, what role do you think the writer has when dealing with grief? In what ways can personal loss inform our professional work? Can mourning and creating memory or meaning coincide?

TD: At present, our culture relies heavily on science to understand and explain the world. But before there were scientists, there were philosophers; before there were therapists, there were novelists. Good writers follow the same steps as a scientist; in fact, they did so intuitively long before "scientific method" was so dubbed. 

Writing was my best friend during the grieving process, and some of it was just for me, just venting, and some of it has taken on its own life and become suitable for the world. But it was my driving force. Death and grief force us to re-examine our worldview, to re-assemble our understanding of the world, and that is a very compelling reason to write. 

AJM: We’ve spoken a bit about Irish memoir and notions of memory. Could you please tell me a little bit about what attracts you to this particular section of nonfiction? (I know that Tara is an Irish named meaning “Earth,” so I’m a little curious about your particular pedigree and literary heritage).

TD: In graduate school, I won a Judd Fellowship, which was a great program at the University of Minnesota that allowed me to create my own project, so long as it brought me overseas. So I developed an idea to go to Ireland to visit the Hillof Tara, which was the seat of the High Kings, to write a kind of backwards genealogy essay about my first name. Americans love to trace their roots, and I thought this was a fun way to play with that idea. What does it mean to share your name with an ancient, sacred place, a place that’s so much bigger and more important than one life? It’s another way of looking for belonging, just like tracing the family lineage. And that’s at the heart of everything I write—I’m always looking for a way to belong because I’ve always felt that I don’t fit anywhere.
 
My second night in Dublin, I went to The Palace Bar, which I’d heard was a pub where journalists from The Irish Times hang out. I brought some writing and sat in the corner, and drank a pint of Smithwick’s, and I did meet a journalist, and I married him a year and a half later. I moved to Ireland the year following graduate school, but the world economy had just crashed and with so much uncertainly in Ireland, we did what so many had done before: We settled in America. In the meantime, I’ve learned that even though we both speak English, it’s not the same language. What I call “lies” he calls another version of the truth. I don't mean to say that my husband is a dishonest or immoral person. He’s not. He’s a very kind, generous man, and I married him—in large part—because he makes me feel safe. But we do have this fundamental difference in our perception of truth. So I’m exploring why there are so few Irish memoirs and how I think it has to do with the Irish tradition of story weaving and their flexibility in truth telling.

The last few Irish memoirs I've read - Edna O'Brien's Country Girl, Colm Toibin's A Guest at the Feast, John McGahern’s All Will Be Well. John McGahern died about a year after his book came and and on his death, The Irish Independent interviewed his ex-wife. She claimed the five pages where she appears in the book are pure fantasy. Now fabrications and embellishment in memoir are of course not the domain of any one culture, but I do think there’s something about the colonial legacy that makes memoir, at least in the way that Americans understand it, foreign to the Irish.

AJM: This is an interesting thought, that there is a sense of flexibility in the Irish memory. I’m thinking a little about Irish funeral customs here – how keening and waking are both expressions of mourning but also a very physical expression of love and loss.

Do you feel that Irish memoirs, and by extension perhaps, Irish-American hybridity seeks to take the personal and elevate it to a mythic or a tendency to think of memory as a bit tricky or supernatural in itself?

TD: When I was traveling alone in Ireland, I almost felt like I was taking part in a play. Irish people are friendly to outsiders, almost to a fault. It’s like they want to play these roles that have been—to use your word—mythologized by the culture. Tourism remains one of Ireland’s biggest revenue sources, and the Irish are keenly aware of its importance. I think the writing can fall into that as well. But this may also have something to do with the fact that Irish society has a cohesion, a harmony, that just doesn’t exist in America, which is a patchwork place in comparison.

AJM: When you are running a workshop, what barriers do you set up to keep it from being a “group therapy” session? You've touched upon this in "Writing Memoir and Writing for Therapy." Could you please tell me more? 

TD: One really basic way to address this—which many others have said before me—is to avoid second person pronouns. My husband actually uses these all the time when talking about something “America” or “Americans” are doing (“What are you guys thinking?” [fill in latest American political fiasco]), which drives me crazy. So in workshop, we talk about “the character” or “the narrator” on the page. I also request that when a writer’s work is being discussed by his or her workshop mates, the writer remains quiet. To channel nervous energy in the meantime, I encourage the writer to take notes. This prevents 1.) defensiveness about the actions of the character, and 2.) it really allows the writer to listen to what her peers have to say. Questions can be addressed after all the comments have been made. I also like the idea of hearing a question and the writer not responding immediately, giving it a little time to simmer.

Another great piece of advice came to me via Patricia Fransisco Weaver. She tells her students that if they’re writing about something that’s still very raw, that it’s a really, really good idea to concurrently take part in therapy. I love this advice, because it doesn’t tell the writer that she can’t write about something until it’s fully processed—which I think is the message that’s often given. I mean, the fact that it isn’t processed can create a powerful sense of urgency to write, so why waste that momentum?

AJM: When you are running a workshop, do you have favorite exercises? What are some of your teaching tricks, that you wouldn’t mind sharing? 

TD: Since I’m a nonfiction writer I like to use prompts that involve memory, which is useful for all genres. So I might ask students to write about a favorite photograph, or a recurring dream, or even to write around “things I can’t tell you” or something they don’t fully remember but wish they did. I'm also looking for new writing prompts and recently came across a treasure trove from Poets & Writers. 

I think all writing begins with description, which can be a kind of meditation. Describing a person, a moment, an object allows a story to emerge and creates a flow and an authenticity in writing that can be hard to find if we spend too much time looking for it.

AJM: This has been a lovely conversation - and very informative. Thank you very much for coming to speak with us at American Literary Review. I hope our readers enjoy your perspective as much as I do. 

Tara DaPra has an MFA from the University of Minnesota. Her writing has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, The Rake, and Sheepshead Review. She teaches writing at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay and the University of Wisconsin–Marinette and in her "free time" (ha ha!) reads and edits submissions for the online lit + art journal Paper Darts.

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.