Research Notes: Megan Stielstra

Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their research for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Megan Stielstra describes the lengths — and depths — she went to for the sake of a story.

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The Right Kind of Water

The first hour is great. I’m in the bathtub, submerged to my neck. The water is warm and lovely, I’m more relaxed than I’ve been in months, and the best part? — what I’m doing here is work. It’s rewriting. It’s research.

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A conversation with Matt Baker & Mel Bosworth

Like many writers of a similar age and background, some of my most exciting memories of reading involve Choose Your Own Adventure books and playing/reading Interactive Fiction like Colossal Cave Adventure on my Commodore 64 (and, much later, discovering the more literary projects undertaken by Michael Joyce, Adam Cadre, Emily Short, Andrew Plotkin, and others. Lately I’ve had the pleasure of reading new works written and translated, respectively, by Mel Bosworth and Matt Baker both of which feature interactivity and hypertextuality in the service of literary fiction. So I invited the two of them to have a conversation about their recent works and their writing in general, then got out of the way to let them talk.

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Mel: Hey, Matt. Let’s begin by talking about The Numberless, a seemingly bottomless novel written by Jianyu Pên and translated by you. It’s being published online by the somewhat esoteric Beggar Press in an as-it-happens kind of way with fresh content appearing roughly once a week. And it’s going to continue until Pên’s death, or at least that’s the plan, yes? The whole concept is pretty mind blowing. I’ve got a million questions bubbling in my head already, but I’ll begin with just a few. What got you interested in doing work as a translator? How did you get involved with this particular project? Have you ever met Jianyu Pên, and if not do you ever plan to? What’s up with Beggar Press?

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Research Notes: Ben Nadler

Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their research for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Ben Nadler reflects on writing Harvitz, As To War, a novel about military experience, without having military experience of his own.

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Harvitz, As To War

When people ask what my novel, Harvitz, As To War, is about, I tell them that it is about not fighting in the Iraq War. The Iraq War is the central narrative of my generation; as I began my first book, it was the subject I felt compelled to write about. I have had a relative in every major war in United States history (including Iraq), but I myself never joined the military. So my novel is about not fighting in the war.

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Congratulations, Chad Simpson

Congratulations to contributor Chad Simpson, whose collection Tell Everyone I Said Hi has won the University of Iowa 2012 John Simmons Short Fiction Award. Here’s a description of Chad’s book from their press release:

The world of Chad Simpson’s Tell Everyone I Said Hi is geographically small but far from provincial in its portrayal of emotionally complicated lives. With all the earnestness of a Wilco song, these eighteen stories roam the small-town playgrounds, blue-collar neighborhoods, and rural highways of Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky to find people who’ve lost someone or something they love and have not yet found ways to move forward. In “Peloma,” a steel worker grapples with his teenage daughter’s feeble suicide attempts while the aftermath of his wife’s death and the politics of factory life vie to hem him in. The narrator of “Fostering” struggles to determine the ramifications of his foster child’s past now that he and his wife are expecting their first biological child. In just two pages, “Let x” negotiates the yearnings and regrets of childhood through mathematical variables and the summertime interactions of two fifth-graders. Poignant, fresh, and convincing, these are stories of women who smell of hairspray and beer and landscapers who worry about their livers, of flooded basements and loud trucks, of bad exes and horrible jobs, of people who remain loyal to sports teams that always lose. Displaced by circumstances both in and out of their control, the characters who populate Tell Everyone I Said Hi are lost in their own surroundings, thwarted by misguided aspirations and long-buried disappointments, but fully open to the possibility that they will again find their way.

Congratulations also to Marie-Helene Bertino, winner of the 2012 Iowa Short Fiction Award for her collection Safe as Houses.

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Research Notes: Ben Tanzer

Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their research for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Ben Tanzer considers how being simultaneously true to an experience and true to a story can be more complicated than it first seems.

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Tonic

I suppose one could ask what kind of research one has to do when they write about death, or maybe more accurately, why would they even want to? Where’s the gain there? None really. I don’t think. Maybe it’s even better not to do so. There are other, better milestones to write about and research certainly. Like losing your virginity for example. It may not be pleasurable, or fun, it may even be scary, something you regret, and wish you could take back. But there will be other chances to at least get sex right, or better, or you can even choose not to at all after that. It worked for Morrissey. Initially anyway.

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Now know Unknown Arts

Unknown Arts, the new collection by William Walsh, is now available from Keyhole Press. William wrote about the book recently for our Research Notes series.

Shut Up/Look Pretty: a roundtable

Recently published by Tiny Hardcore Press, Shut Up/Look Pretty is a new anthology featuring Lauren Becker, Erin Fitzgerald, Kirsty Logan, Michelle Reale and Amber Sparks. To celebrate the release of the book, and these five fine writers, we invited them to have a conversation about the anthology, writing, and whatever came up. Think of it as an interview without an interviewer — something we plan to bring you more of in the future.

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EF: I was extremely busy during the back half of 2011, and didn’t have the time to read that I would have liked. I would really love it if each of you could recommend something I should check out for myself as soon as possible.

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Preorder before your short flight or long drive

Jess Stoner’s book I Have Blinded Myself Writing This is now available for preorder from Short Flight/Long Drive books. Here’s the description:

I Have Blinded Myself Writing This was written by a woman with an affliction: her body needs her memories to clot her cuts, to heal means to lose parts of her past. It is a collection of the blueprints, lists, and photographs of memory meant to be private. It a book written for you. It is a question: as we lose our memories, do we become fragments of ourselves? It is a plea: participate with me in the remembering and the destruction of memory.

And while you’re there, don’t forget that Elizabeth Ellen’s Fast Machine (which we posted about recently) is also available.

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Thanks, January contributors

A big, big thanks to all the contributors to our “Origin Stories” project this past month. We hope you’ve appreciated — and enjoyed! — their brave willingness to share some early writing as much as we have.

Writer In Residence, February 2012

Three years ago this month, I took over editorial duties for Necessary Fiction and worked my way through a backlog of submissions. The very first story I accepted for the site was “Baby Love,” by a writer I wasn’t familiar with yet: Sara Levine. We weren’t the only ones who liked it, though, because Sara’s story went on from its humble origins here to be selected for Best of the Web 2010 and to appear in her Caketrain Press collection Short Dark Oracles. Lately, Sara has gone to even bigger things, with her novel Treasure Island!!! winning praise — and deservedly so — from the likes of the New York Times, the Star Tribune, and O Magazine. It’s a good thing we asked her months ago if she’d like to spend the month of February as Writer In Residence, because her schedule must be getting awfully full.

Writing at Big Other in 2009, Tim Jones-Yelvington described “Baby Love” as “lucidly whacked,” and that sounds about right to me. Whether it’s their own bad haircuts or the not-quite-welcome presence of their children, Levine’s characters and their stories capture precisely and perfectly those unexplainable, undefinable ways in which the our “lucidly whacked” brains make our lives strange and how that can be grim, but can also be essential for getting ourselves through one day then another. To describe her protagonists or sum up her plots might make them sound impossibly absurd and unsympathetic. But to read them is to marvel at how human, how complex, and how darkly hilarious these unlikely elements become in her hands. Treasure Island!!! is no different, and seeing those qualities in the larger space of a novel only makes them more impressive. We shouldn’t want to follow the book’s awful, unlikeable, unkind anti-heroine, and yet… well, just try putting it down after you’ve read a few lines in her voice.

As Levine recently told The Globe and Mail,

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