[Massive Novel Alert #2! Here's a Boudinot appreciation, a little bit of online journal history, and a "This Is Your Life," sort of piece by Mr. Aaron Burch, the man behind the unstoppable Hobart journal. The occasion for this appreciation? The publication of Ryan Boudinot's stellar new novel, Blueprints of the Afterlife.]

In 2003, I think it was, I still lived in Seattle. I’d moved away, and then moved back, and had been doing Hobart for a couple of years. I’d just put out #3, a joint issue with Monkeybicycle, because they (Steven Seighman and Shya Scanlon) were also on their third issue, and we were all in Seattle, and none of us really knew what we were doing, but we were figuring it out and everything seemed new and exciting. And readings! Steven and Shya started a Monkeybike reading series and brought together people in and around the northwest (Kevin Sampsell! Matthew Simmons! Ed Page! Sean Carman! Matthew Stadler! Adam Voith!) and we formed something of a lit community, reading with each other, hanging out and drinking, seeing one another at other readings – at Elliott Bay or University Bookstore or various cafes and bars and even a makeshift garage or warehouse or someone’s living room.

I can’t remember how or when I first met Ryan Boudinot, but it was around this time. He lived in Seattle, too; was a writer. He was actually in Hobart #2, a kickass story about a serial killer at his son’s kindergarten, “Father’s Day.” Easily one of my favorite stories in the issue, and it seemed to hit the exact tone that I was looking for, though I didn’t yet know it. Another story, “The Littlest Hitler,” was one of the best things I’d ever read, and had just been anthologized in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003. It was the first thing published by someone I knew (either as author or editor/publisher, and this was both). He had stories cropping up all over the place— eyeshot, The Mississippi Review, Bullfight Review, BlackBook, McSweeney’s. He was in the Monkey half of Hobart/Monkeybicycle #3 and that story went on to be anthologized in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005.

And whenever I saw Ryan, it seemed like he was nudging himself toward starting a lit journal. We’d grab coffee and he’d ask about Hobart’s creation. I’d see him at a reading and he’d ask about the logistics of working with printers. You could see him daydreaming about soliciting his favorite writers, or finding a gem in a slush pile and being the person who got to introduce it to the world. Thing was, I wasn’t really writing anything myself at the time. I was working on Hobart. I was seeing Steven and Shya writing less, when at all, because of working on Monkeybicycle. The spark of editing dreams I could see in Ryan’s eyes led to my own nightmares of not getting to read any more Boudinot stories.

My memory is of trying to talk him out of it, but making no progress. Whether or not that actually happened, I did end up giving him a pitch: guest edit an issue of Hobart and get it out of your system. You an have complete control of the issue—choose the stories, solicit whoever you want, pick whatever you want from what comes in, choose the cover art if you want, etc. And thus was Hobart #4 created. Looking back at the issue, the fact that I hadn’t really yet figured out how to do book layout glaringly jumps out at me, but so does the strength of the issue. He introduced me to Laird Hunt and J Robert Lennon and Ray Vukcevich. The story opens and closes with pieces by Aimee Bender that were inspired by a painting by Marcel Dzama featured on the cover. There’s one of (I think?) Tao Lin’s first stories in print. There’s Stephen Elliott and Robert Lopez and Rick Moody. There’s three amazing short pieces by the very Matthew Simmons that asked me to write this, and a story by Elizabeth Ellen, before she started helping with Hobart, before Short Flight / Long Drive Books, before I left the Seattle where I got to hang out with Ryan (and Steven, and Shya, and Simmons) and moved to Ann Arbor.

After (I think? I’m not great with memory or chronology) Hobart #4, Ryan was a web editor at Pindeldyboz for some time, and then he left the world of editing (or he’s just doing it on the sly?), which is something of a shame considering the strength of Ho4 but is really probably for the best, given the writing he’s given us instead.

Big whoa to Hobart for this amazing addition to their Short Flight/Long Drive series — it’s Karl Taro Greenfeld’s collection of short stories, NowTrends, and it’s officially released today.

The book in total neatness features three different covers, and it’s designed to resemble a travel guide.

I had a chance to travel with Karl this weekend, as he read in Baltimore and DC. Here’s the dirt: He ate pizza with chicken on it. Then, at the Baltimore reading he read a story about a guy who had to come up with a propaganda cartoon for the Japanese during WWII. He prefers whiskey to beer. In the morning he turned away the wrong Eggs Benedict, the ones with crabmeat. Later he didn’t eat pizza but did eat a few wings and stood several rounds while we watched the Bills play the Cowboys. There, he told me about an article he’d recently written about Scott Norwood. Norwood is the guy who shanked the Superbowl-losing fieldgoal for the Bills back in the time that I lived for Andre Reed and Don Beebe. Then at the DC reading he plied me with more beer and read part of a story about a boss who joins a soccer team with his underlings. Both stories that he read in these two nights worked for me. Then he took a train back to NYC.

At the DC reading he said he thinks his publishers are playing a joke on him, making him read in rooms that are constantly getting smaller. That’s because the reading for the Three Tents series in DC is held in a small room. Coincidentally or not, in that room he read with Megan Boyle, whose book also just came out today (as Blake noted).

In conclusion, Karl Taro Greenfeld is a good guy and his book is an impressive addition to the Hobart catalog (and if you buy it directly, you can get the ebook versions free).

(Exciting spoiler! This interview debuts an awful Mary Miller poem.)

1. Diners fascinate. They seem archetypal to me. I think of Hopper’s Nighthawks or Hemingway’s “The Killers” and naturally Hollywood’s many diners. It is your title and setting. Could you knock around this idea of the diner?

I like how diners, particularly in small towns, are places where people know each other.  I don’t know the woman at my local coffee shop or bar or grocery, but I really like the idea of knowing these people, of calling them by name and asking after their families (okay, so maybe one of the guys at Nomad knows me, but he’s the very friendly one).  Once you know these people well enough to ask how their mothers’ foot surgery went and what their kid got for his birthday, it’s like you’ve fully consented to living in a place.  I’ve never fully consented to living anywhere but I’m trying to change that—I want to be connected to a place and the people in it.

I also like diner food, though it’s often bad.  In the diner in this story, the real man based on the fictional man had the worst chicken fried steak of his life.  It was really big and flat and tough.  But even bad diner food appeals to me, kind of like how cafeteria food appeals to me—it brings back memories, familiarity.  Who doesn’t love those rectangular slices of pizza with the tiny nibs of pepperoni?  It’s just so disgusting and processed and good.

2. Months ago you spoke about a novel you were writing about two amnesiacs traveling on a Greyhound bus. How is that going?

Did I?  If I started this project, I don’t remember it.  And that’s not a bad amnesia joke.

3. Do you like glass bottles or do you prefer cans?

Cans, for sure.  I have a tendency to break glass.  I’m currently renting a house in Austin from my cousin and I’ve broken five glasses and the tail off one glass bird in four months.

4. There is some term I’m too lazy too lazy to look up, some psychological/sociological term to explain the rise of reality TV. The idea is that we watch and feel the urge to watch as we see people better looking than ourselves and with better looking, more charming friends, and with nice cars and houses, etc. and we think, “Fuck, I am missing out on life. Why can’t that be me?” OR: We watch some crazy-eyed drunk young lady tumble down stairs into a pool of her own blood/emesis and think, “Well, I might have a little drinking problem but at least I’m not that raging dumpster-diva of a coughed-up drunk.”

Your characters (and here, in “Diner”) watch others and use those others as some form or warped mirror. Discuss.

I love reality TV.  Yesterday, I spent four hours watching The Bad Girls’ Club and the girls kept saying things like “We run Miami!” and this made them very excited.  Of course, they’re really just girls who aren’t ageing well and drink too much, women who can leave their jobs for two months and be hired back no problem (i.e. strippers), but, whatever, it’s reality TV!  They also like to call each other followers, as if they aren’t all followers.  Who isn’t a follower, anyway?  We’re all followers.  Intervention is my favorite.  And there’s a new show on A & E called Heavy that I’m excited about.  It’s just all so pathetic and we’re all pathetic but some of us are on TV about it: trying to find a man who’ll consent to marry them, lose weight, get clean, run Miami, etc.  I don’t think I answered your question, but I guess I don’t see the warped part.  It’s just some of us are on TV and some aren’t.

5. Have you written poetry?

Not anymore.  It was really bad and I tried to turn everything into a metaphor.  What’s so bad is that I thought I was pretty good.  My friend Dan Crocker read some of my poems once and told me not to ever, ever show them to anyone.  So, here’s an example:

Toy Soldiers

I would like to gather up all my former

lovers, place them in a basket, and carry

them with me wherever I go.  Everybody

that hates me can get in, too.  Once full,

I will take the basket to my room where

we will play toy soldiers.  The nearsighted

ones will have to be on the front lines,

also the ones with knee and back

problems.  Out of kinship, I will give

the manic-depressives and the obsessive-

compulsives a running start

in the opposite direction.  I’m sorry to report

that the vast majority will be killed

in action and buried in mass graves.

The rest—maimed and suffering

from post traumatic stress disorder—

will have to ride around in

my basket forever.

6. “The Diner” was delivered to me as a gift, with a flask and a FREE WHISKEY AT AWP card. It came as one story, folded like an origami accordion. What do you think about the genre of one story?

I’ve been meaning to subscribe to One Story, but then I’m always meaning to subscribe to more lit mags.  I don’t think I like it all that much, though.  There’s only one shot.  I tend to like magazines that have a little bit of everything—poetry, nonfiction, artwork, fiction.  They’re good for people who have short attention spans and like variety.

7. Could I ask you some technical questions? How do you actually write out a story?

I have no idea.  I write a sentence and then another sentence and pay close attention to the rhythm and words.  I don’t understand people who bother to write stories and then they’re full of typos and misplaced modifiers (I just wanted to write misplaced modifiers).  I write about what interests me, what I’m obsessed with.  Over the holidays, it was: loneliness, texting with a tall stranger, Christmas, and returning home.  The stories were repetitive and not very good.  That being said, I’m trying out more “real” fiction, writing from the perspective of a man (as in “Diner”) or trying out lives in which I have no experience, and it’s pretty exciting.  I still end up in the stories but they are also “totally made up.”  My other stories were just “sort of made up.”  My brother picked up an issue of Indiana Review over Christmas and read one of my stories and said it was like reading my diary entry and I got mad and told him not to read anything of mine ever again.  He doesn’t know what would be in my diary, anyway, he just assumes because the circumstances look similar.

8. It’s a popular supposition that there is everyday communication between you indie/small press writers. That you all hang around in bars and smoke cigarettes and talk about readings and apartments and broken glass and the fog and such.

I hang around with the other Michener fellows and we talk about how lucky we are.  We talk about this a lot and probably everyone hates us.

The small press scene is kind of weird in that people feel like they know each other when they don’t—you’ve read their work, you’re Facebook friends.  But this isn’t a relationship.  Most of us don’t know each other and we don’t hang out and there is no fog and/or broken glass.  That being said, I have quite a few small press/indie writer acquaintances, people I like but don’t see very often.

9. What do you think about academia as provider for the artist?

I can’t speak to this, really, because I’ve only ever been a student.  Academia has been good to me so far, though.  I’m earning a second master’s degree, have no debt, and am able to pay all of my bills.

10. Could you discuss objects in your fiction?

The objects that surround my characters are typically objects that surround me.  They like books and swimming pools and hotels.  They drink vodka, beer, and Diet Coke.  If you read a bunch of someone’s stories, you can piece them together in a way based on these objects.  I once pointed out to a friend that her stories were full of snow globes and she didn’t particularly like this; it was like I’d unlocked some code, discovered something she didn’t want known, as if a snow globe collection is a bad thing.  I think writers have to be careful, let them drink Sprite, play golf.

11. Holy shit, your book, Big World, is being reissued! I’m not surprised—that book broadsided me like a secret truck. Congratulations.

“Like a secret truck” is the best simile ever.  And thanks!  I loved your review, and how that one guy said he liked it better than the book.  That made me laugh.

]]> http://htmlgiant.com/author-spotlight/diner-interview-with-mary-miller/feed/ 5 http://htmlgiant.com/random/14-holding-backs-of-diatribes-on-the-2011-radio/ http://htmlgiant.com/random/14-holding-backs-of-diatribes-on-the-2011-radio/#comments Mon, 03 Jan 2011 13:29:29 +0000 Sean Lovelace http://htmlgiant.com/?p=53637 Continue reading →]]> 3. Mud Luscious Press goes all web update, all Heidi Blair Montag with a touch of Birdman. It detaches the retina in a kind way. Go look.

3. A get-off-my-plot-of-lawn-quote:

The others aren’t that much fun to describe: somebody gets into trouble, and then gets out again; somebody loses something and gets it back; somebody is wronged and gets revenge; Cinderella; somebody hits the skids and just goes down, down, down; people fall in love with each other, and a lot of other people get in the way; a virtuous person is falsely accused of sin; a sinful person is believed to be virtuous; a person faces a challenge bravely, and succeeds or fails; a person lies, a person steals, a person kills, a person commits fornication.

9. Joan Fontcuberta

55. Harmony Neal uses repetition at January 2011 Hobart. You know, repetition, like this, via BHR:

The requirement that we change words is arbitrary.

3. The Girard Perregaux 925 Silver / Celluloid “Tourbillon” Fountain Pen goes for $1785.

14. Off The Internets for 8 days and what does that do? Doesn’t make you write, I say. I didn’t, sans two checks and an entry in a running journal. But it do refill the synaptic bathtub, me thinks, possibly with bubbles. Things brighten, shard, slow. I would like to write today, I’m saying. So. I ponder what happens when you leave The Internets?

17. Seventeen Andy Warhol audio files (thanks, test)

33. Fascinating:

I wouldn’t push it too hard, but the experimental novel is actually the main river. The conventional novel is a popular sidetrack.

There’s crazy, avant-garde, weird, experimental novels going back almost to the very beginning.

7. The Independent asks: Is popular fiction getting more literary, wiser, good?

122. From flash to novel: Tarah Masih reviews Sherrie Flick.

I am not a fan of the outdoors, camping, nature, or the wilderness even though for the past five years I lived, basically, in a forested wilderness and now I live, literally, in a cornfield. It was with a bit of trepidation that I approached Hobart 11: The Great Outdoors for no reason other than that because I don’t love the outdoors, I am not likely to want to read about the outdoors. Then a trusted friend said you have to read this story, “Evitative” and so I found renewed enthusiasm for the issue, which, conveniently, happened to be next on my To Read list. I’m glad she gave me a kick in the ass because Hobart 11: The Great Outdoors issue is so damn good. (So is the movie starring John Candy.) I never cease to be impressed by how meticulously Hobart is edited.

Evitative by B.C. Edwards is a post-apocalyptic story that isn’t annoying as such stories are sometimes wont to be. There’s a man (JoJo) and a woman living in the trees and the man has lost his words and she has lost her food memories and they are being menaced by men in canoes and she’s pregnant and there is a whole lot going on in this dense and incredible story. What I found even more interesting than the story was how the narrative voice felt very true to the circumstances and made everything that much more believable. Throughout the story there is a yearning for a different life, for food, for normalcy that is tangible.

There are some lines in this story that will make you jealous like:

And the itch at the back of my jaw and the hunger rolling along me like clouds. And I stare at the patch and when the water stills, the reflection that stares back up at me is more terrible than ever, her eyes are wicked but calmer and clearer and I’m so frightened of her.

The story is a journey and it transports you in really interesting ways.

Stories like The Fish by Patrick Somerville and The Lake by Becky Hagenston are expertly written and take unique approaches to relationships between parents and children. In both stories, sons are trapped by obligation in ways with which they are not comfortable. Elise Winn’s Picture Our Mother will just break your heart. It is sensually vivid with descriptions so lovely that you can taste sea salt on your tongue and truly mourn for two girls who desperately want to find their mother and their father who is forever searching the sea for his wife.

Mike Alber’s A Deer Big Enough to Show is about a man who refuses to let go of a relationship with an ex-girlfriend who has moved on. He endeavors to kill a deer big enough to show her how much he loves her. As such things always go, his gesture which is only partially realized through his own efforts, is too little too late and you cannot help but pity him and his small life and the futility of his feelings. In many ways, this story reminded me of Rob McCarthy’s Stag which appeared in One Story in September 2009.

Another highlight was Meghan Kenny’s All These Lovely Boys about a man struggling to accept his cross-dressing son. In the end, that’s hardly what the story is about because the one true thing in the story is that the father loves his boy. The ending, involving ballerinas and skydiving, literally sparkles:

Kirk’s toes were in a perfect point, his goggles sparkled form the sun, and I wondered if he spotted me, my boy, all bright and pretty and lovely, falling from the sky.

In Person, Place, or Thing, by Eliza Tudor, a middle-aged woman is geocaching when she slips and falls, a circumstance that awkwardly magnifies the indignities of aging and elderly parents and adult children. I loved the use of coordinates throughout the story and narrative asides. Person, Place, or Thing was a fine example of how a story can be told in a circuitous way. All of the writing in Hobart 11 is exceptional and never does the theme become more prominent than the prose. Instead, Hobart has assembled an incredibly strong collection of writing that reminds us of the power, beauty, and mystery of the outdoor world in very subtle, original ways. There are some gorgeous hand bound editions of this issue available. You should check that out. There are also some great Extras.

I loved John Jodzio’s If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home (Replacement Press) and have been recommending it to all my friends for the past two days. Jodzio is a writer with whom I wasn’t at all familiar so it was great to read a book I knew absolutely nothing about from a writer I knew absolutely nothing about. This is a collection where every single story had an ending that made me say, “Goddamn.” This book is worth the price of admission for those endings alone because every story comes to such a perfect close and leaves you with a real sense of satisfaction. These stories were my kind of stories–a little weird and magical and bittersweet. A lot of the characters are lost or sad  or really fucked up and dealing with rather impossible circumstances. In Flight Path, a cutter makes out with a comatose man while befriending his pregnant girlfriend at a “spa” which is really an institution. There are unique and hilarious details in so many of the stories. In Flight Path, the narrator has the tattoos of her former boyfriends on her chest. “I tried, with limited success, to cover up their names with a new tattoo of a rose or a butterfly. Now my body looks like an English garden, but one grown only to cover up a tagged-up wall.”

In Whiskers, a man opens a veterinary clinic in his home so he can watch over his suicidal daughter who he keeps chained all day and night just to keep her alive. A man brings his cat to the (not) veterinarian and asks him to attach wings to his cat and when the cat flies, you don’t focus on the improbability of a flying cat, you (or at least I) cheered. Jodzio is able to dance along that line between the possible and the impossible deftly. Every odd thing that happened in these stories feelsutterly believable.

There is a real tenderness in many of these stories, like in Gravity where the narrator has developed a fondness for dropping coins from his high rise office.

“Things falling from above have always perplexed people. Some forget that the sky is an easy option for violence, that the heavens can open up on you at a moment’s notice.”

He has a wife, Jeannie, who enjoys being dropped during sex. One day, she is dropped by the man with whom she’s having an affair, she ends up paralyzed and the narrator, he has to live with her betrayal while caring for her. Somehow, he is able to do this and in one of Jodzio’s perfect endings, he finds some kind of grace.

You’d forgotten this feeling; you’d forgotten how all of these things cradle your body, how they surround you, how they stop you from being pulled into the center of the goddamned earth.

In Alejandra, a woman moves into an apartment that used to be inhabited by a prostitute who likes to be choked and this was one of those stories that reminds me of a word puzzle where everything fits together as it should. The narrator picks up a man on the street who has an STD. This doesn’t faze her. She garners her lover’s attention with a line about having too much food.

It was a vicious cycle, this thing with men and food and desire, one that none of us would ever break no matter how hard we tried.

And then there is an ending that will leave you breathless, literally. Jodzio writes women very well and I always admire that.

My favorite story, there is always a favorite, was the final story in the collection, an ideal ending among ideal endings, The Girl With the Gambling Mother. The protagonist is a grade school teacher with some kind of substance abuse problem fresh out of rehab who has a student with a missing pinky and a gambling mother who might be responsible for that and a married colleague with whom she had an affair and a student’s father who is persistent in his pursuit of her, and her interior life is so complex and detailed so well as to suffocate. I don’t want to give the story away but it is sad, this woman, trying to do something right and getting so many things wrong.

The term “uneven” is often used with regard to short story collections but it in no way can be used to describe If You Lived Here, You’d Already Be Home. This is a finely written collection of short fictions that are both memorable and moving. This book is available at Amazon.com. This book is available at local bookstores everywhere and Indiebound can sort you out.

Some publishers make great books

Other publishers holy wow I gotta call my mom

Happy New Year one and all!

As is pretty much our way, we’re running a little late, but the January issue of Hobart web is online now. We’re kicking the year off strong, including:

* Fan Fiction in the voice of Kobe Bryant, by Karl Taro Greenfeld
* Sad, Sad, Sad, by Stace Budzko
* Three Stories, by Amy L. Clark
* The Turtle, by Matthew Lansburgh
and the first half of an interview with Laird Hunt, by Jim Ruland.

Dig in and enjoy and thanks, as always!
http://hobartpulp.com/website/