Thanks to Matt Briggs

A big thanks to Matt Briggs as his month in residence here at NF comes to a close. We trust you’ve enjoyed it as much as we have, and look forward to Matt’s forthcoming novel The Strong Man — and have perhaps been inspired to pick up some of his other books, too. You won’t be disappointed. And please join us in welcoming Amber Sparks for the month of September.

Writer In Residence, September 2010

When Amber Sparks’ story The Chemistry of Objects appeared in our submissions queue, I’m pretty sure my heart skipped a beat. Here was a story that didn’t use history as a convenient backdrop for characters who might just as well be anywhere else. Instead, it asked questions about history, about how one life in one moment is tied to what came before and comes after, and about why these connections should matter to us not only when a story is set in the past. Sure, at the heart of the story is a marriage in trouble, but that familiar situation can’t be separated from the far-reaching contexts in which it is set. It was the first I’d read by Amber, but since then I’ve made sure to keep tabs on what she publishes and have yet to be disappointed. So it’s a real pleasure to host her as our Writer In Residence for September 2010.

Amber is, as Roxane Gay wrote here at NF, “insatiably curious and […] uses her writing to satisfy, in some way, that desire to know and understand the world.” While Amber and I happen to share a number of interests from mythology and folklore to feral children to daikaiju, her stories always offer an unexpected, provocative perspective even on something I thought I already knew. In an interview at The Collagist she said, “I’m generally not very interested in characters who are a part of something larger, but rather, characters who are just apart,” but I beg to differ. Her characters are always part of something larger, because they are enmeshed in far-reaching webs of history and culture and time, the webs from which none of us can be apart no more than we can write with only one part of ourselves (the part that wants to write about marriage, perhaps) without also engaging the others (like the part that loves giant monsters).

And like her characters she’s part of something larger herself, wearing the hats of both writer and editor at Emprise Review. When asked by Dark Sky Magazine if she worried about overextension, she said, “I’ve always been involved in eighteen million different projects and pursuits and hobbies and jobs and I like it that way. I’d die of boredom if I only did one thing.” It’s that same attitude that makes her writing exciting to me, because without far-reaching curiosity what can we possibly have worth writing about? As she told Fiction Daily, “There is everything we can possibly imagine. And so we should get busy imagining it.”

So I’m glad to have Amber on board for the next month and look forward to what I already know will be an ambitious project. I’m so excited I can even forgive her for saying,

“The only thing that never inspires me is nature. I’m allergic to pretty much everything nature produces (pollen, trees, dust, plants, flowers, mold, etc.) so I feel a deep and probably pathological bitterness toward the natural world.”

But only because she also wrote this.

JA Tyler, The Tropic House

The Zoo, a Going: (The Tropic House) is a new chapbook by JA Tyler, available from sunnyoutside.

Tanzer's 99 Problems

99 Problems, a book of essays on running and life by Ben Tanzer, is available from CCCLap.

Cut Through The Bone

Congratulations to Ethel Rohan, whose book Cut Through The Bone is forthcoming from Dark Sky Books.

On The Clock

On The Clock, an anthology edited by Jeff Vande Zande and Josh Maday, is now available. It includes stories by contributors Matt Bell and Matthew Salesses.

Slime Me live

Sadly, we’ve never had the experience of hearing Tim Jones-Yelvington read live, but this description at Literary Chicago sure makes us want to.

Writer In Residence, August 2010

We’re glad to announce that August’s Writer In Residence here at Necessary Fiction will be Matt Briggs. My introduction to Matt’s fiction came with his American Book Award-winning novel Shoot The Buffalo, an outdoor story that avoided the too-familiar villainizing of wild places and instead complicated the romantic, foolish attitudes that allow those places to be blamed for disasters of human making. His fiction is what Christopher Frizzelle calls, “an underhanded and brilliant snub to the way the Northwest has been marketed to us all.”

It isn’t a snub to the Northwest itself, though, because Briggs is a committed regional writer — just not one who reduces “region” to stereotype and cliché, or pretends that one region and its literary style can stand isolated in a networked, mobile world. As Rebecca Brown writes, “it is this amorphous ‘something else’ seeping through his [fiction] that makes it seem so ‘Northwest’ to me. These are stories about different kinds of misplacement, like the sense you get after you have come west to the end of the country and know there is nowhere further left to go.” He pins down regional, historical, and personal myths like so many moths, letting us examine them slowly and from all sides. He’s called himself, “not an ‘experimental writer’,” but I disagree — his is an ongoing experiment of testing ideas and asking hard questions, if less often an experiment of language.

He’s also a regionalist in his commitment to local, independent publishers and his support of literary venues. It’s with good reason that Heidi Broadhead calls him, “a good book citizen.” He’s a good web citizen, too, and when I took over as editor here I knew right away I’d ask Matt to submit a story — “The Bay” — and I’m excited to have him back as our next Writer In Residence, and to see what he has in store.

Books by Bosworth, Bomer

Speaking of Roxane, two writers she featured during her residency have new books available for pre-order: Baby by Paula Bomer, and Grease Stains, Kismet, and Maternal Wisdom by Mel Bosworth.

Roxane Gay @ She Writes

At She Writes, NF favorite Roxane Gay has kind and thoughtful words for a couple of the stories we’ve published.