Thursday, April 30, 2015

Watchlist Countdown, Day 11: “Sleeping Where Jean Seberg Slept” by Katherine Karlin


     But Jean was a woman. A woman who had ideas. An attractive woman who had ideas, and this is why she had to be neutralized.

       from “Sleeping Where Jean Seberg Slept” by Katherine Karlin

A lot of characters in the Watchlist anthology are monitored, followed, interrogated, and harassed, but perhaps none meet as sad an end as Jean Seberg, the gamine, too-sexy-for-her-own good movie star of the mid-twentieth century. In Katherine Karlin’s short story, Seberg is an oblique character--seen only as an object of fascination to the story's narrator, Odile Dahlqust, a 38-year-old who returns to her hometown of Edna, Iowa--a small, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it place just down the road from Marshalltown, Seberg’s birthplace. Odile naturally has a geographic connection to the long-dead movie star, but as the story progresses, she starts to feel a deeper kinship as well.

In today’s guest blog post, Katherine Karlin talks about the “story behind the story.” Here’s her account of how she came to write “Sleeping Where Jean Seberg Slept.”

I moved from Los Angeles to Kansas in the summer of 2009, just after the Iowa Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in that state. For me, it was a good sign: I was leaving California with the bitter taste of the passage of the anti-gay Proposition 8, and the confused, at times racist, backlash (I actually attended a rancorous gay rights march where participants were loudly blaming black voters, who turned out heavily to elect Obama, for the proposition’s ratification). The Midwest struck me for a moment as a quiet haven for civility and progress.

Of course, the reality is more complicated, and history unfolded with startling speed. Same-sex marriage is legal in so many states—even Kansas, now—that we have forgotten Iowa’s brief distinction as the Midwestern beacon for human rights. Still, the Midwest keeps asserting its political relevance. It was a group of indomitable, loosely-organized, and tireless Missourians who exposed the truth about police brutality and forced the issue to the center of a national discussion, where it has remained. The Midwest is a surprising place. That’s the lesson I keep learning over and over, living here. Every time I am dispirited by assertion of some state legislator that, say, dinosaurs walked the earth with people, I am cheered by the sheer ballsiness of the response, of the ragtag group of kids who have set up shop across the street from the Westboro Baptist Church, of the “Dreamers” who confront local politicians on their anti-immigrant measures, of the black college students who conduct a die-in on the floor of the union amid racist taunts. Let me tell you, you have never experienced a Gay Pride march until you’ve frolicked with drag queens in a small town in Kansas.

The film actress Jean Seberg came to represent, for me, the push and pull that exist in the Midwest, the alternating impulses of decency and despair. Seberg’s no longer a household name, and to orient those unfamiliar with her work I would compare her to the more famous and extant Jane Fonda. The two women were born within a year of each other; both had a period as free-spirited, blonde ingĂ©nues; both married older, Svengali-like Frenchmen (Fonda, the film director Roger Vadim, and Seberg, the author and diplomat Romain Gary). Seberg was a bigger film star in France than she ever was in the United States, and she never had the kind of breakout Hollywood parts that Fonda had in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Klute.


But what the two women shared above all was the ruthless and determined persecution by the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO program. Hoover’s extralegal counterintelligence project was meant to “neutralize” the influence of leftists, and was aimed not only at political figures like Martin Luther King and Stokely Carmichael, but at celebrities who used their fame to support radical causes. Male artists like John Lennon and Leonard Bernstein were scrutinized by the FBI, but the agency reserved a special venom for women who dared to be outspoken, and few were more outspoken than Jane Fonda and Jean Seberg.

Here, though, their stories diverge. Jane Fonda, a fixture in the movement against the war in Southeast Asia, not only withstood the dirty tricks of COINTELPRO but parlayed her notoriety to gain even greater fame, reinventing herself again and again. Seberg, a supporter of the black struggle, was not so lucky. Pregnant with her second child, she withered under the whisper campaign, initiated by Hoover, that the child’s father was a Black Panther. After a troubled pregnancy, Seberg lost the baby, and spiraled into a ten-year vortex of despondency that ended with her suicide.

I traveled to Marshalltown, Iowa, where Jean Seberg grew up in the 1950s. Like many towns in this region, Marshalltown has undergone profound demographic changes in the last thirty years. A Swift pork processing plant dominates the community, and like the rest of the meatpacking industry it has facilitated speed-ups and wage cuts by recruiting immigrant workers, mostly from Mexico. Marshalltown was the site of the most massive Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid in U.S. history, in 2006, which resulted in the arrest of 90 workers. The arrest and deportation of these workers left some school children stranded, and the town, particularly the Catholic Church, scurried to identify the affected children and guarantee their care.


Like so much of the Midwest, Marshalltown is a bundle of contradictory political legacies. Before the ICE raid it was hailed as a model of community relations, embracing its new Latino residents and offering services to hasten their assimilation. These efforts were not without resistance, though, and Marshalltown remains polarized. Of course, these sweeping changes in the meatpacking industry occurred long after Jean Seberg’s childhood; she grew up the daughter of a pharmacist and his wife, decent and loving parents, in a town that was mostly Anglo. But like so many American teen-agers, awakening to her surroundings, Jean was alert to the poor treatment of the town’s black residents. At fourteen she mail-ordered her membership to the NAACP.

I looked for Jean everywhere in Marshalltown: in her father’s old pharmacy, now a sandwich shop; outside the Swift plants where truckers hauling live hogs line up at the gate; in the microfiche of the local newspaper that followed, with breathless excitement, her ascendancy to stardom; under the willows in the quiet cemetery where Jean’s parents, Ed and Dorothy, are buried, as is her infant daughter. What was it about this town that gave rise to her stubbornness, her willingness to risk everything for a cause, and what young girls are being formed there now, what reserves of strength will they have to speak out when they are warned to shut up? In the Marshalltown library I see them, mostly Mexican-American girls, bending over their books, swarming out the front steps, these daughters of the Midwest who come out of towns like this with their imaginative powers intact and their desire to be right. They make me hopeful.

Katherine Karlin’s recent stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Cincinnati Review, [PANK], Triquarterly, and Kenyon Review. Her work has been selected for the Pushcart Prize and New Stories from the South, and her 2011 story collection, Send Me Work, won the Balcones Fiction Prize. She lives in Manhattan, Kansas.

Watchlist: 32 Short Stories by Persons of Interest, edited by Bryan Hurt, will be published by O/R Books on May 21.  The “persons of interest” contributing short stories to the anthology include Etgar Keret, Robert Coover, Aimee Bender, Jim Shepard, Alissa Nutting, Charles Yu, Cory Doctorow, David Abrams, Randa Jarrar, Katherine Karlin, Miracle Jones, Mark Irwin, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Dale Peck, Bonnie Nadzam, Lucy Corin, Chika Unigwe, Paul Di Filippo, Lincoln Michel, Dana Johnson, Mark Chiusano, Juan Pablo Villalobos, Chanelle Benz, Sean Bernard, Kelly Luce, Zhang Ran, Miles Klee, Carmen Maria Machado, Steven Hayward, Deji Bryce Olukotun, Alexis Landau and Bryan Hurt.



Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Watchlist Countdown, Day 10: “What He Was Like” by Alexis Landau


     Once she took a photograph of us, the flash reflecting off the glass and I screamed, which my husband thought unnecessarily dramatic. When my husband confronted her, she explained in a lilting little girl's voice that she was only taking a Polaroid of her cat. After that we hung curtains in the living room and planted more ficus trees along the border of our property.

       from “What He Was Like” by Alexis Landau

In this short story by Alexis Landau (author of the just-released novel The Empire of the Senses), the narrator and her husband live next door to the proverbial crazy cat lady--a wispy-haired old woman who may or may not have given the evil eye to the couples unborn child.  Theres a lot more nuance to “What He Was Like” that just this Peeping Thomasina aspect--the narrators blossoming relationship with Nadia, a convenience store clerk, for instance--but since the Watchlist anthology is all about surveillance, the idea of neighbor spying on neighbor is what interests me most. Its as fascinating and unsettling as James Stewarts telephoto lens in Rear Window. All I can say is, Thank God for ficus trees.


Watchlist: 32 Short Stories by Persons of Interest, edited by Bryan Hurt, will be published by O/R Books on May 21.  The “persons of interest” contributing short stories to the anthology include Etgar Keret, Robert Coover, Aimee Bender, Jim Shepard, Alissa Nutting, Charles Yu, Cory Doctorow, David Abrams, Randa Jarrar, Katherine Karlin, Miracle Jones, Mark Irwin, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Dale Peck, Bonnie Nadzam, Lucy Corin, Chika Unigwe, Paul Di Filippo, Lincoln Michel, Dana Johnson, Mark Chiusano, Juan Pablo Villalobos, Chanelle Benz, Sean Bernard, Kelly Luce, Zhang Ran, Miles Klee, Carmen Maria Machado, Steven Hayward, Deji Bryce Olukotun, Alexis Landau and Bryan Hurt.



Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Watchlist Countdown, Day 9: “Terro(Tour)istas” by Juan Pablo Villalobos


     This story begins when Joao sees a photo of the K2 mountain on Facebook. We'll call him Joao instead of using his real name in order to respect, at the very least, that miniscule detail of his privacy.

       from “Terro(Tour)istas” by Juan Pablo Villalobos, translated by Annie McDermott

If ever a story in Watchlist was epitomized by the unblinking, all-seeing eye on the cover design of the book, “Terro(Tour)istas” by Juan Pablo Villalobos is it.  It is a downward-spiraling, stomach-acid-churning tale of paranoia and a sharp reminder of one thing: They Are Watching.


Watchlist: 32 Short Stories by Persons of Interest, edited by Bryan Hurt, will be published by O/R Books on May 21.  The “persons of interest” contributing short stories to the anthology include Etgar Keret, Robert Coover, Aimee Bender, Jim Shepard, Alissa Nutting, Charles Yu, Cory Doctorow, David Abrams, Randa Jarrar, Katherine Karlin, Miracle Jones, Mark Irwin, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Dale Peck, Bonnie Nadzam, Lucy Corin, Chika Unigwe, Paul Di Filippo, Lincoln Michel, Dana Johnson, Mark Chiusano, Juan Pablo Villalobos, Chanelle Benz, Sean Bernard, Kelly Luce, Zhang Ran, Miles Klee, Carmen Maria Machado, Steven Hayward, Deji Bryce Olukotun, Alexis Landau and Bryan Hurt.



Monday, April 27, 2015

Watchlist Countdown, Day 8: “Adela, Primarily Known as, The Black Voyage, Later Reprinted as, The Red Casket of the Heart. By Anon.” by Chanelle Benz


     We did not understand how she came to be alone. We wished to know more, the more that she alone could tell us.

       from “Adela, Primarily Known as, The Black Voyage, Later Reprinted as, The Red Casket of the Heart. By Anon.” by Chanelle Benz

I think fans of David Mitchell, George Saunders and Emily Bronte will particularly dig Chanelle Benz’ story in the Watchlist anthology. Benz describes “Adela, Primarily Known as, The Black Voyage, Later Reprinted as, The Red Casket of the Heart. By Anon.” as a 19th-century found object piece narrated by a collective We in a baroque, Gothic style. It’s one of the cleverest (and creepiest) stories I’ve come across in the anthology so far. “Adela” first appeared as a chapbook, Our Commutual Mea Culpa, from a small press called The Cupboard. Here’s an excellent summary about the chapbook written by Dustin Luke Nelson at In Digest magazine’s blog:
This book, it asserts, is primarily known outside the U.S. as “Adela” and was originally published in 1829, and was later released as “Red Casket of the Heart.” While it formally has an anonymous author, it appears to have been co-written by a small group of children, years after the incident they describe. The children are, collectively, the protagonist, telling the story of their commutual mea culpa, of their relationship with Adela, an aging local woman, entering “spinsterhood,” with moderately hermetic tendencies who isn’t quite despised or shunned by the community, though the neighbors are wary. They aren’t sure what to make of her, and the children’s parents don’t love that they want to hang around her so much. The children love Adela, and upon learning of what they perceive to be her great lost love, they take it upon themselves to right this cosmic wrong. Much in the manner of the contemporaries of the anonymous author it poses as a story of romance, a comedy of errors. But where Benz — our true author — takes us is some place far darker.
Dark, indeed. Like The Turn of the Screw dark. Like Heathcliff on the moors dark. Like little children banding together to kill a tragic heroine dark.

Reader, I loved it.


Watchlist: 32 Short Stories by Persons of Interest, edited by Bryan Hurt, will be published by O/R Books on May 21.  The “persons of interest” contributing short stories to the anthology include Etgar Keret, Robert Coover, Aimee Bender, Jim Shepard, Alissa Nutting, Charles Yu, Cory Doctorow, David Abrams, Randa Jarrar, Katherine Karlin, Miracle Jones, Mark Irwin, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Dale Peck, Bonnie Nadzam, Lucy Corin, Chika Unigwe, Paul Di Filippo, Lincoln Michel, Dana Johnson, Mark Chiusano, Juan Pablo Villalobos, Chanelle Benz, Sean Bernard, Kelly Luce, Zhang Ran, Miles Klee, Carmen Maria Machado, Steven Hayward, Deji Bryce Olukotun, Alexis Landau and Bryan Hurt.



Sunday, April 26, 2015

Sunday Sentence: Recipes for a Beautiful Life by Rebecca Barry


Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.


Meanwhile last night I dreamt that I lived in a house that had been literally built on a lawn, meaning the floors were all green grass, and I was standing in the middle of my living room, looking around thinking, Great, now someone is going to have to mow these damn floors.

Recipes for a Beautiful Life: A Memoir in Stories by Rebecca Barry

Bonus Sentence! From later in the book:

It was a cloudy day, but the best thing about living here [upstate New York] in the fall is that even on a gray day the scenery is luminous, maybe even more luminous with that steely background, and things like a black bird on a branch of orange sumac in front of a bright green pasture seem like miracles.


Watchlist Countdown, Day 7: “Ladykiller” by Miracle Jones



     “We are gonna talk about Facebook in the future like our parents talk about cocaine,” he said.

       from “Ladykiller” by Miracle Jones

Miracles Jones’ story in the Watchlist anthology may start out in familiar territory landmarked by such things as Facebook, Buzzfeed listicles (“13 Things That Only People Born in 1990 Would Know”), and the ubiquitous Chili’s restaurant (the “place you went when your life was over and you were ready to die”), but it quickly morphs into a nightmarish vision of the future. Sex-starved drones are a real thing in “Ladykiller” and our hapless protagonist, Tre, is easily seduced by one with “high definition red lips and big soft cartoon eyes” as he sits in Chili’s drinking bad wine and eating fried cheese. It’s like a Fatal Attraction-Blade Runner mash-up and it has totally put me off of android sex for good.


Watchlist: 32 Short Stories by Persons of Interest, edited by Bryan Hurt, will be published by O/R Books on May 21.  The “persons of interest” contributing short stories to the anthology include Etgar Keret, Robert Coover, Aimee Bender, Jim Shepard, Alissa Nutting, Charles Yu, Cory Doctorow, David Abrams, Randa Jarrar, Katherine Karlin, Miracle Jones, Mark Irwin, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Dale Peck, Bonnie Nadzam, Lucy Corin, Chika Unigwe, Paul Di Filippo, Lincoln Michel, Dana Johnson, Mark Chiusano, Juan Pablo Villalobos, Chanelle Benz, Sean Bernard, Kelly Luce, Zhang Ran, Miles Klee, Carmen Maria Machado, Steven Hayward, Deji Bryce Olukotun, Alexis Landau and Bryan Hurt.



Saturday, April 25, 2015

Watchlist Countdown, Day 6: “Scroogled” by Cory Doctorow


     “Now you're a person of interest, Greg. You're Googlestalked. Now you live your life with someone constantly looking over your shoulder.”

       from “Scroogled” by Cory Doctorow

Friends, I don't want you to freak out, but...They.  Are.  Watching.

Cory Doctorow's contribution to the Watchlist anthology, “Scroogled,” is a sharp needle pricking our skin, reminding us that it's Google's world; we just live in it. Resistance is futile.

Have a nice day.


Watchlist: 32 Short Stories by Persons of Interest, edited by Bryan Hurt, will be published by O/R Books on May 21.  The “persons of interest” contributing short stories to the anthology include Etgar Keret, Robert Coover, Aimee Bender, Jim Shepard, Alissa Nutting, Charles Yu, Cory Doctorow, David Abrams, Randa Jarrar, Katherine Karlin, Miracle Jones, Mark Irwin, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Dale Peck, Bonnie Nadzam, Lucy Corin, Chika Unigwe, Paul Di Filippo, Lincoln Michel, Dana Johnson, Mark Chiusano, Juan Pablo Villalobos, Chanelle Benz, Sean Bernard, Kelly Luce, Zhang Ran, Miles Klee, Carmen Maria Machado, Steven Hayward, Deji Bryce Olukotun, Alexis Landau and Bryan Hurt.


Friday, April 24, 2015

Friday Freebie: The Daylight Marriage by Heidi Pitlor


Congratulations to Charity Duprat, winner of last week's Friday Freebie: The Turner House by Angela Flournoy.

This week's book giveaway is The Daylight Marriage, the new novel by Heidi Pitlor (author of The Birthdays). Read on for more information about The Daylight Marriage...

She still had time before work. She could go food shopping. She could fold the kids’ laundry and get the car washed and return some library books. Or Hannah could do something else. She could do something that she had never done--drive to a part of town where she had never been, pretend to be someone that she was not.

Hannah was tall and graceful, naturally pretty, spirited and impulsive, the upper-class young woman who picked, of all men, Lovell--the introverted climate scientist who thought he could change the world if he could just get everyone to listen to reason. After a magical honeymoon, they settled in the suburbs to raise their two children. But over the years, Lovell and Hannah’s conversations have become charged with resentments and unspoken desires. She has become withdrawn. His work affords him a convenient distraction. And then, after one explosive argument, Hannah vanishes. For the first time, Lovell is forced to examine the trajectory of his marriage through the lens of memory. As he tries to piece together what happened to his wife--and to their life together--readers follow Hannah on that single day when a hasty decision proves irrevocable. With haunting intensity, a seamless balance of wit and heartbreak, and the emotional acuity that author Heidi Pitlor brings to every page, The Daylight Marriage mines the dark and delicate nature of a marriage.

If you’d like a chance at winning The Daylight Marriage, simply email your name and mailing address to

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on April 30, at which time I’ll draw the winning name.  I’ll announce the lucky reader on May 1.  If you’d like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week newsletter, simply add the words “Sign me up for the newsletter” in the body of your email.  Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning?  Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter.  Once you’ve done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying “I’ve shared” and I’ll put your name in the hat twice.


Watchlist Countdown, Day 5: “The Relive Box” by T. Coraghessan Boyle


     Most people, when they got their first Relive Box, went straight for sex, which was only natural. In fact, it was a selling point in the TV ads, which featured shimmering adolescents walking hand in hand along a generic strip of beach or leaning in for a tender kiss over the ball return at the bowling alley. Who wouldn't want to go back there? Who wouldn't want to relive innocence, the nascent stirrings of love and desire, or the first time you removed her clothes and she removed yours?

       from “The Relive Box” by T. Coraghessan Boyle

Most of the short stories in Watchlist are about people watching other people, but The Relive Box asks, What would it be like if we could watch ourselves?” In this frightening, sharply-observed tale of obsession, T. C. Boyle (The Harder They Come) holds a mirror up to the narcissim of our social-media culture.  This isn't Facebook, it's Memory Box--more specifically, the five-thousand-dollar, second-generation Halcom X1520 Relive Box with the In-Flesh Retinal Projection Stream. Wes, the narrator, brings home the “slick black metal cube with a single recessed glass slit” and spends increasing amounts of time sitting in front of it, virtually-projecting himself back into his past, replaying his mistakes over and over again. As you can imagine, this turns out to be somewhat less healthy than a carrot-and-whey protein shake. In this interview with The New Yorker, Boyle says, “With Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the like, not to mention pizza delivery and the drones Amazon is planning to employ to ship us things, we just, as a society, don’t seem to get out much anymore.”


Watchlist: 32 Short Stories by Persons of Interest, edited by Bryan Hurt, will be published by O/R Books on May 21.  The “persons of interest” contributing short stories to the anthology include Etgar Keret, Robert Coover, Aimee Bender, Jim Shepard, Alissa Nutting, Charles Yu, Cory Doctorow, David Abrams, Randa Jarrar, Katherine Karlin, Miracle Jones, Mark Irwin, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Dale Peck, Bonnie Nadzam, Lucy Corin, Chika Unigwe, Paul Di Filippo, Lincoln Michel, Dana Johnson, Mark Chiusano, Juan Pablo Villalobos, Chanelle Benz, Sean Bernard, Kelly Luce, Zhang Ran, Miles Klee, Carmen Maria Machado, Steven Hayward, Deji Bryce Olukotun, Alexis Landau and Bryan Hurt.


Thursday, April 23, 2015

Watchlist Countdown, Day 4: “California” by Sean Bernard


      We go with slick refilled glasses of wine into the living room, we sit on sofas and chairs, on the floor like children. The lights dim. A screen is pulled. Tape flaps, a fan whirs, a soundtrack clears its throat, and we watch film from an old projector. The projector reminds us of moments we’ve seen in movies, a nostalgia for a time we never knew.

       from “California” by Sean Bernard
Sean Bernard’s contribution to the Watchlist anthology is such a good example of voyeurism that at times it almost feels like the story is watching us. In “California,” as you can see by the brief excerpt above, a group of friends gathers on a regular basis to watch film clips which have arrived in the mail from a mysterious, anonymous source. The grainy, shaky-hand footage mostly shows a renowned public television host (known for his travelogue videos of various spots around California) as he goes about preparing for his on-air segments. But then, film clips arrive which show something different: surveillance footage of the film club members themselves. I won’t reveal what happens--you’ll have to read “California” for yourself when Watchlist is published next month--but let’s just say it turns out to be an unsettling (and satisfying) reading experience.

In today’s guest blog post, Sean Bernard talks about the “story behind the story.” Here’s his account of how he came to write “California.”

Jim Crace once told me in relation to a very simple story I’d written (I met him once for about fifteen minutes, I don’t want to overstate our interaction) – Jim Crace once told me: when you write a story, Sean, keep throwing more balls into the air. Just keep throwing more and more, and once you’re juggling without dropping any, you’re on your way.

So: “California.” This happened in spring 2009, around the time I started teaching fiction courses more regularly and, not coincidentally, greatly improved (at least in my mind) as a writer. In a fiction class one day we read Donald Barthelme’s story “The Genius,” an absurd and biting and tender collage-portrait of a genius (who very much resembles Barthelme). In class we imagined out other potential profile stories – a fictional story about, say, Arnold Schwarzenegger. A crazy family member. An angsty teen. Etc. As the students began working on their ideas, I started thinking about my own: if I were to write a profile, who would I write about?

If you’ve lived in California in the last twenty-plus years, there’s a very good chance you know about the magnificent Huell Howser, who sadly passed away two years ago. Huell Howser hosted a series of shows on PBS for almost thirty years, shows in which he serves as tour guide to both famous and hidden spots in California. Onscreen he is several parts good cheer mixed with, I think, a strong dose of feigned stupidity (likely a nice streak of sarcasm): he beamingly shoves his microphone in people’s faces and happily exclaims how amazing anything is. He is the living representation of joyful absurdity.

Huell Howser on the job
I began to imagine Huell in quieter moments. Driving alone at night. Drinking coffee at home. Having doubts about the past. A darker side behind the toothy smile. As I started (this was now well beyond the class session; the story took a couple months to draft) – as I started to compose various fragments about Huell, I felt a little guilty about imagining and dramatizing the life of a living person. Even the way I was writing the fragments – a very judgmental, very cold third-person narrator – felt, almost, creepy.

So I embraced the creepiness and made the story one of voyeurism, of surveillance. Rather than a blank narrator describing a TV host’s behaviors and thoughts, I had a real person watching him and filming him without his knowing. I soon added a working title: “California,” which raised my ambitions: the story was no longer just about Huell and the person watching him, but it was also about the entire state. I thought: I should add noir. I should add a foreboding sense of disaster. So the story grew more complex. And I kept adding. I added a collective first-person – a ‘we’ that has been receiving these strange films of a TV host – and then stepped slowly out of the collective voice into a singular first-person narrator struggling, greatly, with life and loneliness. I added rants and riffs on California and bits and pieces of the crazy state: Charles Manson. Ronald Reagan. Mulholland Drive.

Basically: I started the process with formal inspiration drawn from a great story. Then I came up with a subject. And then I started adding layer after layer after layer until the story felt, finally, whole. “California” is, I think, as good a story as I’ve written. It’s been anthologized, it’s helped garner an NEA grant, it won a very competitive prize from Poets & Writers . . . and I say all this not to brag but to remind myself and hopefully illustrate to any writers reading this that the process in writing it, and especially the ambition of the project – all those balls in the air – are what led to its success.

Sean Bernard lives and teaches creative writing in southern California, where he serves as fiction editor for The Los Angeles Review and also edits the journal Prism Review. His debut novel is Studies in the Hereafter (August 2015, Red Hen) and his debut collection, Desert sonorous, won the 2014 Juniper Prize. He holds degrees from Arizona, Oregon State, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals including Epoch, LIT, Glimmer Train, and Sequestrum.


Watchlist: 32 Short Stories by Persons of Interest, edited by Bryan Hurt, will be published by O/R Books on May 21.  The “persons of interest” contributing short stories to the anthology include Etgar Keret, Robert Coover, Aimee Bender, Jim Shepard, Alissa Nutting, Charles Yu, Cory Doctorow, David Abrams, Randa Jarrar, Katherine Karlin, Miracle Jones, Mark Irwin, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Dale Peck, Bonnie Nadzam, Lucy Corin, Chika Unigwe, Paul Di Filippo, Lincoln Michel, Dana Johnson, Mark Chiusano, Juan Pablo Villalobos, Chanelle Benz, Sean Bernard, Kelly Luce, Zhang Ran, Miles Klee, Carmen Maria Machado, Steven Hayward, Deji Bryce Olukotun, Alexis Landau and Bryan Hurt.


Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Watchlist Countdown, Day 3: “Testimony of Malik, Israeli Agent, Prisoner #287690” by Randa Jarrar


They think I'm a spy. Me. A Kestrel. A very small falcon.
       from Testimony of Malik, Israeli Agent, Prisoner #287690  by Randa Jarrar

In her short story, Randa Jarrar (author of A Map of Home) writes about a literal eye in the sky, a kestrel wheeling in circles through the clouds above the Mediterranean and the Middle East.  It's a good life, chasing moths and falling in love with a seagull, until the bird is captured and put in a small metal cage.  The story is sad, short, and very effective.  It makes me want to find a falcon, stroke its feathers and whisper, Please bear in mind, not all humans are like that.


Watchlist: 32 Short Stories by Persons of Interest, edited by Bryan Hurt, will be published by O/R Books on May 21.  The “persons of interest” contributing short stories to the anthology include Etgar Keret, Robert Coover, Aimee Bender, Jim Shepard, Alissa Nutting, Charles Yu, Cory Doctorow, David Abrams, Randa Jarrar, Katherine Karlin, Miracle Jones, Mark Irwin, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Dale Peck, Bonnie Nadzam, Lucy Corin, Chika Unigwe, Paul Di Filippo, Lincoln Michel, Dana Johnson, Mark Chiusano, Juan Pablo Villalobos, Chanelle Benz, Sean Bernard, Kelly Luce, Zhang Ran, Miles Klee, Carmen Maria Machado, Steven Hayward, Deji Bryce Olukotun, Alexis Landau and Bryan Hurt.


Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Watchlist Countdown, Day 2: “Nighttime of the City” by Robert Coover


She drifts through the bleak nighttime of the city like an image loosely astir in a sleeping head, disturbing its rest, destined for the violent surreality of dreams.
       from “Nighttime of the City by Robert Coover

This short story which opens Watchlist is Grade A noir from one of our most interesting writers of short fiction.  Fans of Robert Coover (Pricksongs & Descants: Fictions, The Origin of the Brunists, etc.) will find much to love here; those new to Coover's mind-bending metafiction might feel like they've just walked through a four-page maze.  “Nighttime of the City” begins with the clock of heels on wet pavement and ends with the rattle of gunfire.  In between, it's a delicious mindfuck of a story.

Watchlist: 32 Short Stories by Persons of Interest, edited by Bryan Hurt, will be published by O/R Books on May 21.  The “persons of interest” contributing short stories to the anthology include Etgar Keret, Robert Coover, Aimee Bender, Jim Shepard, Alissa Nutting, Charles Yu, Cory Doctorow, David Abrams, Randa Jarrar, Katherine Karlin, Miracle Jones, Mark Irwin, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Dale Peck, Bonnie Nadzam, Lucy Corin, Chika Unigwe, Paul Di Filippo, Lincoln Michel, Dana Johnson, Mark Chiusano, Juan Pablo Villalobos, Chanelle Benz, Sean Bernard, Kelly Luce, Zhang Ran, Miles Klee, Carmen Maria Machado, Steven Hayward, Deji Bryce Olukotun, Alexis Landau and Bryan Hurt.



Monday, April 20, 2015

Watchlist Countdown, Day One: “The Taxidermist” by David Abrams, and an Introduction by editor Bryan Hurt


      "A blue-eyed elk would serve the son of a gun right for getting lucky his first time out," Tucker said aloud in the dead silence of his workshop. His voice was muffled by the feathers piled in soft mounds, the furs folded and stacked like blankets and the naked styrofoam mannequins stored in a jumble along the west wall.
       At forty-eight, Tucker Pluid was no longer embarrassed by the sound of his spoken thoughts. He'd worked alone in the drafty plywood-walled workshop for so many years, it had ceased to worry him. His trailer was on the outer limits of Flint where not even the strongest Wyoming wind could carry his voice into town.

       He picked up a handful of glass eyes, most of them the tame amber the hunters expected; but a few of them were brighter and more exotic -- the color of showcase gems or Caribbean lagoons. He shook them across his palm like dice, trying to decide.
       For Tucker, this was the most critical step in the mounting process -- never so crucial as that moment with that head, Herman Knight's elk head.
      Herman Knight was sleeping with Tucker's ex-wife and that made all the difference in the color of eyes his elk received.

That’s from a story of mine, “The Taxidermist,” which is featured in an upcoming anthology called Watchlist: 32 Short Stories by Persons of Interest, edited by Bryan Hurt.  The story, about a beat-up rodeo star turned taxidermist who spies on the residents of his small Wyoming town through the eyes of his wildlife mounts, is sprinkled with more than a few tablespoons of magical realism.  I wrote “The Taxidermist” many years ago, but my love for it has never faltered and I’m so pleased it’s finally getting its day in the sun.  I hope you like it as much as I do.

Watchlist will be released by O/R Books, a favorite independent publisher of mine (they also put out Horn! by Kevin Thomas), and it will be available 32 days from now.  I’m honored to be part of the line-up of the authors who constitute a rock-star roster: Etgar Keret, Robert Coover, Aimee Bender, Jim Shepard, Alissa Nutting, Charles Yu, Cory Doctorow, Randa Jarrar, Katherine Karlin, Miracle Jones, Mark Irwin, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Dale Peck, Bonnie Nadzam, Lucy Corin, Chika Unigwe, Paul Di Filippo, Lincoln Michel, Dana Johnson, Mark Chiusano, Juan Pablo Villalobos, Chanelle Benz, Sean Bernard, Kelly Luce, Zhang Ran, Miles Klee, Carmen Maria Machado, Steven Hayward, Deji Bryce Olukotun, Alexis Landau and Bryan Hurt.

You can pre-order Watchlist at the publisher's website.

In celebration of the pending release, and because it’s a personal mission of mine to help small publishers like O/R Books by doing what I can to spread the word about their literary endeavors, I will start a 32-day countdown here at the blog.  That’s right, astute reader, you’ve just figured out that I’m going to feature one story per day--usually an excerpt of a few sentences, but when we’re lucky, we might have contributions from the authors themselves.  Today, we begin with an excerpt from our editor’s introduction.  My thanks to Bryan Hurt for allowing me to re-publish this essay here at The Quivering Pen.

It began with the baby monitor. Months before I’d conceived of this book, my wife and I bought an Internet-connected camera to watch over our infant son as he slept. With a swipe of our fingers we could call him up on any of our iDevices—on our phones while we were out to dinner at our favorite Thai restaurant, or on our tablets while we watched TV on our couch—and there he’d be, butt lifted cartoonishly into the air, breathing softly but visibly, in grainy green-and-black. We could swivel the camera 180 degrees taking in all corners of his room, or zoom in on his face, and then past his face, filling our screens with two giant, dilating nostrils, an open mouth. Then we could go back to eating our vegetarian spring rolls, or watching whatever it was we were watching on TV. Seeing him was a comfort. Watching him meant we knew that he was safe.

When I told my neighbor about the camera, she asked if he could see it. Did he know that he was being watched?

We were at the park, pushing our kids on the swings.

I told her that the camera was on a table next to the crib, a few inches away from his face. “It’s not like we’re spying on him,” I said.

But her question lingered. Were we spying on him? Was my son aware of the camera we had trained on him while he was sleeping? At the time he was six months old and the only direction he had figured out to crawl was backwards. I doubted that he was aware of the camera, and even if he was so what? I shrugged and went back to pushing.

Get used to it, little dude. Being watched is part of life.

#

We are being watched. That this statement probably no longer shocks is itself somewhat shocking. But ever since Edward Snowden revealed the NSA’s massive, clandestine surveillance program in June 2013, we’ve been inundated with news—seemingly every week—about yet another aspect of our once-thought-private lives that is now subject to some kind of scrutiny. Since the Snowden revelations, we’ve learned that the post-9/11 U.S. government or one of its allies has been reading our emails, listening to our phone calls, and watching nearly everything we do on the Internet—Facebook posts, Google searches, instant messages, World of Warcraft gaming sessions. Nothing is hidden, everything is on display.

And we’ve responded to news of this surveillance with…

…a burp of indignation…

…some outrage in the Op-Eds…

…but by and large, a collective shrug.

Perhaps we’re largely untroubled by this news because it doesn’t register as anything new to us. Every private thing that’s been taken, we’ve already been giving away for free. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram—since the advent of social media, and long before it, we watch ourselves more closely, keep tabs on each other better than any government agency ever could.

The technology certainly helps. Pew Research estimates that we, the human species, now spend 700 billion minutes on Facebook each month. But in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, aristocrats would also invest lots of time and money to pose for intimate portraits that they would put publically on display. There’s value in being seen—always has been—and so it’s funny but not coincidental that the word “status” is linked so integrally with today’s social networking: the more you see me, the more I’m worth.

Watch something and you change it. This is something that we all know pretty intuitively, and something that’s been documented and explored by science. Photons change from waves to particles when they’re observed under electron microscopes. There’s the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat.

We act differently, perform differently, when we know we’re being watched. Or even when we think we are. That’s the logic of the Panopticon, the circular prison in which the inmates can’t escape the watchman’s eyes.

The question that this book seeks to address is how are we affected by this constant surveillance. Does a camera trained on a sleeping child change him? How does an ever-present, faceless audience alter who we are? One way to interpret the old Delphic maxim, “Know thyself,” is to take it as a warning to ignore the masses, their judgment and opinions. But what does it mean when our notion of self is tied so inextricably with our notion of audience? In a world without privacy what becomes of the private self?

I decided to explore these questions through fiction not because fiction gives us good or definitive answers—good fiction is very bad at that—but because fiction allows for the widest range of inquiry. Through stories we can document, verify, speculate, scrutinize, judge, and watch. Fiction, then, is another kind of surveillance technology. We read to better see the world around us—other places, other people, other lives. But the best stories inevitably do much more than that. They help us see ourselves by revealing the unacknowledged and undiscovered parts within us, the parts of ourselves that we had not uncovered, that we had not yet known. We read to see the world and to see ourselves.


Bryan Hurt is the author of Everyone Wants to Be Ambassador to France, winner of the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction. His fiction and essays have been published in The American Reader, The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New England Review, Tin House, and TriQuarterly. He lives in Colorado.


Sunday, April 19, 2015

Sunday Sentence: I'd Walk With My Friends If I Could Find Them by Jesse Goolsby


Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.


His war is his rifle in his hands, gunpowder in his nose, a girl in the road.  How could he tell that story?  Why would he want to?

I'd Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them by Jesse Goolsby
(due out in June--pre-order now)

Friday, April 17, 2015

Friday Freebie: The Turner House by Angela Flournoy


This week's Friday Freebie book giveaway is the acclaimed debut novel by Angela Flournoy, The Turner House.  Read on for more information about the book...

The Turners have lived on Yarrow Street for over fifty years.  Their house has seen thirteen children grown and gone—and some returned; it has seen the arrival of grandchildren, the fall of Detroit’s East Side, and the loss of a father.  The house still stands despite abandoned lots, an embattled city, and the inevitable shift outward to the suburbs.  But now, as ailing matriarch Viola finds herself forced to leave her home and move in with her eldest son, the family discovers that the house is worth just a tenth of its mortgage.  The Turner children are called home to decide its fate and to reckon with how each of their pasts haunts—and shapes—their family’s future.  Already praised by Ayana Mathis as “utterly moving” and “un-putdownable,” The Turner House brings us a colorful, complicated brood full of love and pride, sacrifice and unlikely inheritances.  It’s a striking examination of the price we pay for our dreams and futures, and the ways in which our families bring us home.

If you’d like a chance at winning The Turner House, simply email your name and mailing address to

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on April 23, at which time I’ll draw the winning name.  I’ll announce the lucky reader on April 24.  If you’d like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week newsletter, simply add the words “Sign me up for the newsletter” in the body of your email.  Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning?  Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter.  Once you’ve done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying “I’ve shared” and I’ll put your name in the hat twice.


Thursday, April 16, 2015

The Return of The Quivering Pen (aka Son of Blog, aka QP 2.0), plus: A Sneak Peek at the Next Novel


Then Jesus shouted, “Lazarus, come out!” And the dead man came out, his hands and feet bound in graveclothes, his face wrapped in a headcloth.  Jesus told them, “Unwrap him and let him go!”
      John 11:43-44

As it turns out, this blog was not dead, merely dormant.  Or, in the words of The Princess Bride, it was only mostly dead.


The Last Word, exclaimed with the bell-clapper bang of decisive finality was--well, it would appear to have been The Next-to-Last Word.  Hitting the STOP button the blog was a press of the PAUSE button instead.  Resume PLAY.  Recommence blogging.

BUT--!

But on a limited, less-robust basis.

Yes, The Quivering Pen is back (gives shy, hesitant “hello” wave from across the crowded room), but on a reduced scale (or so I tell myself now).  Friday Freebie, Sunday Sentence, and the monthly Front Porch Books features will be here; and of course I’m always on the lookout for reader-contributed book reviews and My First Time accounts from published writers detailing their “virgin experiences” in writing and publishing.  Beyond that, I’m afraid I can’t allow the blog to ride shotgun in my life.  “Hop in the backseat, buddy.”  My creative writing--specifically, the novels and short stories “swimming in my head like aquarium fish”--must be at the steering wheel (gives a wink and a thumbs up to his agent and editor).

Ah yes, the novel, the novel--the spouse for whom I gave up this mistress of a blog four months ago.  What of that novel?  Was it the recipient of all that energy I formerly poured into The Quivering Pen?  Did I work maniacally on the manuscript?  Is that first draft finished and ready for polishing?  (Pause for embarrassed cough; agent and editor turn and walk away, shaking their heads sadly.)

Progress was made...but it was measured in inches, not feet or miles as I’d hoped.  What happened was--

Well, I could sit here and give you a bunch of excuses, a list which would unscroll and stretch the length of a football field, but that would be counterproductive, all water under the bridge, and contrary to my above-stated goal for maintaining the brevity of this 2.0 blog in my life.  Let’s just say I managed to fill the Quivering Pen vacuum with other things: reading books (more than 30 in three-and-a-half months), extra-long sessions on the treadmill (weight loss: 17 pounds in three-and-a-half months), and long bouts of staring vacantly out the window above my writing desk.  Oh, I got some work done--much of it writing I’m very proud of--but it wasn’t at the full-clip machine-gun pace of which I’d dreamt.

Since I was continuing to offer Friday Freebie giveaways at my Facebook page and was still posting Sunday Sentences on Twitter, and because I genuinely missed the contact with other like-minded readers which this blog fostered, I figured, “Why not pick up the Pen again?”  So, here we are.

Before I go (brevity, brevity!), I thought I’d leave you with a short sip from the novel-in-progress--you know, so this particular blog post doesn’t totally lack in content.  Here are a few paragraphs from the book whose current title is Braver Deeds (previously known at times as FOB Sorrow and Crossing Baghdad).  This new novel, set during Operation Iraqi Freedom, tells the story of a squad of U.S. soldiers walking on foot across Baghdad to attend the memorial service of their platoon sergeant, killed the week before in a roadside bomb attack.  This is a selection from one of the chapters I worked on during the blog’s hiatus, so it’s still very raw and unpolished--very much subject to change before it sees print (if it ever sees print)--but it gives you a general idea of the book’s flavor:
     We pass a soccer field: open ground, a vacant lot choked with weeds and paper trash on one side, low-lying buildings on the other. Ahead of us the street looms large with spears of buildings and mosque turrets. A stone arch, dating back to ancient Persia, rises out of the billboards and laundry, defying its centuries of steady crumble.
     We enter the business district and spread out along the street. We hug the walls of the shops, gratefully slipping into the shade, but not allowing the five-degree difference to distract us. We walk with our rifles at the ready, trigger fingers poised for action. We stir a haze of dust as we advance through the thickening crowd of Iraqis. They’re out in full force. The market is black with abayas, white with dishdashas. The air gurgles with tongues, voices that sound more like singing than talking.
     “Jesus,” says Drew. “Look at all of them. There’s too many.”
     “Easy, easy,” says Arrow. “Let’s just play it cool here.”
     “We’re cool, we’re cool,” says Drew.
     Park goes, “Too cool for school.” Which is odd, because Park rarely speaks unless spoken to. So even he is freaked the fuck out.
     Men, women and children watch our approach. The dust sparkles in the hot bright light and makes the locals appear fuzzy, a little out of focus. The older Iraqis, those who spent decades in Saddam’s “correctional” facilities, smile at us, exposing stumps of rotten teeth. They sip their hard coffee and sweet chai and nudge each other. When they lift their hands to wave, we notice many of the hands (if they aren’t outright missing) have only three or four fingers. The women keep their eyes averted and go on with their shopping, chatter-singing at the men selling meat and vegetables. The younger men—military-age males, the MAMs we’re always targeting—stare with undisguised hatred at us, the intruding infidels. This is Sunni territory and most of them have already grown weary of the American presence and, in the cases where relatives had been killed by soldiers firing at cars which approached checkpoints too quickly, have lately felt the slow simmer of anger come to a rapid boil. The children, as usual, skip along beside us chanting, “Mister! Mister!” waiting for that golden moment when one of us reaches into his ammo pouch and comes out with a ziplock baggie of Jolly Ranchers.
     We ignore the wavers, the haters, the beggars. We sweep our eyes over the crowd, darting into every nook and cranny and rolling upward to the top-floor windows, a visual circle which clicks like a checklist inside our heads. We are focused, laser-intent on the mission. Get through the marketplace like a shaft launched from a taut bowstring. Out of our way, motherfuckers, we’re coming through! America Big Boots will stomp you flat if you get in our way. We wait for no kid, we pause for no mister.
     We pass a beauty salon. Some of us, our knees go weak when we slow long enough to stare through the large plate-glass window. There, under Hollywood-bright fluorescent lights, stands a bride being primped for her wedding. Her veil, her dress, her gloves—they’re so dazzling, some of us have to squint to keep from going blind. The salon is brighter than the sun on the street.
     This bride, this vision, stands in the middle of the beauty salon, surrounded by a half-dozen other women in black abayas. These ladies-in-waiting, these dark bridesmaids, they’re moving around the bride—checking the hem of the dress, fluffing the veil, nipping, tucking, smoothing.
     We can’t hear anything through the window, but we guess the beauty salon is full of chatter, and the whining hiss of a hairdryer, and the rhythmic scratch of a rusty fan in the corner. We do know one thing for certain, the bride is laughing. We can see that; in our minds, we can hear the coin-jingle of her throat, we can feel the warm breath coming from her lipsticked mouth, the fire-engine-red lips we want to press against ours, the mouth we want to taste and by which, in turn, we want to be swallowed. It is beauty, it is light, and we are stunned right down to our rubber knees.
     We remember something Hoover, the chaplain’s assistant, once said in passing not too long ago: “Did you know the number of marriage licenses issued in Baghdad is double this year over what it was last year?”
     “No shit?” we said (we always took every opportunity to swear around chaplain’s assistants—even though they usually gave as good as they got).
     “It’s all due to the collapse of the Baath Party,” Hoover said. “For years, they controlled who did and didn’t get married, but now that they’re gone—” He made a crumbling motion with his left hand. “—it’s a free-for-all out there. A real fucking party of joy.”
     We don’t have time to do much more than crane our necks and slow to a giddy wobble, before pushing past the beauty salon. Arrow is moving out at a rapid pace. He hasn’t seen—or hasn’t wanted to see—the bride. His neck is stiff, his eyes are straight ahead.
     We want to call out, “Hey, Arrow, wait up, will ya?” But our voices die to a croak on the “Hey.”
     It’s no good. Arrow won’t wait. This is no party of joy for him today.
Painting: Raising of Lazarus by Guercino, c. 1619