Well, that came and went pretty fast, eh? And if you missed your chance to submit, fear not…submissions for Issue 3 will be here before you know it.
In the meantime, we’re still looking for photos, and make sure you check out all the wonderful interviews we’ve been posting.
Thanks to everyone who submitted!
Roxane Gay’s story “Down to Bone” appears in Midwestern Gothic 1.
How long have you been writing?
I have been writing as long as I can remember and seriously since I was in high school.
What’s your connection to the Midwest?
I was born in Nebraska and have lived in the Midwest, off and on, for most of my life.
How has the Midwest influenced your writing?
The Midwest has definitely helped me to create a sense of place in my writing. Most of my stories take place in the Midwest because I spent a great deal of time here during my so-called formative years. I love how complex life in the Midwest can be and how so many Midwesterners have these quiet surfaces and these wild lives that run deep that you can’t see if you don’t know what to look for.
Why do you believe there has never really been a regionalist push for Midwestern writing in the past like there has with the South or even the West Coast?
A lot of people assume that the Midwest lacks a distinct culture and as such have yet to recognize the richness of writing that is uniquely Midwestern.
How do you feel about social media to promote your writing, and do you use it?
Social media is a great tool to promote writing provided you don’t get obnoxious about it. I do use Facebook and Twitter and I blog mostly to connect with people and talk about fun things but I also use these tools to share my writing when it is published here and there. You don’t need to use social media as a writer but it can be a valuable tool when used in moderation.
Favorite book?
Little House on the Prairie
Favorite food?
Steak
If you could have coffee (or tea or a beer) with any literary figure, alive or dead, who would it be?
I wouldn’t mind chatting with Edith Wharton.
Where can we find more information about you?
www.roxanegay.com
http://htmlgiant.com/author/roxane/
http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/knife-man/
http://therumpus.net/2011/03/the-careless-language-of-sexual-violence/
Aaron Hamburger is an award-winning author who draws heavily on his experience growing up in the Midwest. He talks with us about traveling the world, the state of the publishing industry, and his journey to getting published.
MG: Can you tell us a bit about your connection to the Midwest?
AH: I was born there and went to college at the University of Michigan, where I studied creative writing with some wonderful professors, including Eileen Pollack, who now directs the MFA program there.
MG: How long have you been writing?
AH: Since I was a kid. I’ve always been a reader, and then I began trying to produce the stories I loved to read. As I got older, so did the people I wrote about.
MG: How has the Midwest influenced your writing?
AH: Before I answer, let me just say that this is my particular experience of the Midwest, which is perhaps idiosyncratic and by no means conclusive.
I think there’s a certain emphasis on friendliness in the Midwest. For example, if I go to the store in New York, where I live now, it’s perfectly acceptable to leave fifty cents on the counter, grab a newspaper, and walk out, without exchanging a single word with the person behind the counter. By contrast, recently when I was in the Midwest, I was standing in line at the grocery store for a while listening to a lengthy exchange about the weather between a person buying diet Coke and the cashier. There’s something nice about that. So I like to take Midwestern characters who believe in those principles and plunge them into foreign territory where those same useful principles don’t always apply, like Mrs. Michaelson, the heroine of my novel Faith for Beginners.
I’d also say that going to college in Ann Arbor influenced my writing a great deal. When I was there, and I suspect this is still true, there was a huge sense of literary community, a vibrant culture of readings, a great English and creative writing department, great bookstores, cafes, writing workshops. There were lots of people around who cared about good writing, and it seemed easy to find each other. Ironically, now that I live in New York City in the age of the Internet, I find it much harder to feel a part of a community like that.
MG: You’ve spent some time living in Czech Republic, which was the setting for your first collection of short stories, The View from Stalin’s Head. How has traveling and experiencing different cultures influenced your writing?
AH: Actually, I think this may also be connected to the question of being from the Midwest. At the University Michigan, I took a class on American literature from Professor Robert Weisbuch, who once said that one of the fundamental conditions of living in the Midwest was a desire to get the hell out of it. I think as a kid I felt that way too, hungry to experience new cultures and different kinds of people, so much so that I think I failed to see clearly the unique culture from which I came. In any case, I think that residual feeling of ennui with the Midwest explains in part why I like to write stories set abroad.
When I’ve lived and traveled abroad, I was always struck by how people would say things about me that I’d never believed about myself. “You’re so American.” Really? What did that mean? You could live in America all your life and never feel you were “so” American. Or “It’s so obvious that you’re Jewish.” It is? How did they know? I became interested in these identity questions and how people communicate aspects of their identity without realizing it.
MG: Has it made you more appreciate of the Midwest? Or Less?
AH: I think it has made me more appreciative of the unique qualities of the Midwest and specifically the Detroit suburb I’m from, West Bloomfield. After getting to know Prague, for example, I would then come back home and think, okay, if I were foreigner here, what cultural norms would I have to learn to fit in and make my way around? The things that once seemed annoying (for example, a lack of public transportation) then became descriptive, interesting.
MG: What kind of characters do you like (when either reading or writing) and/or do you identify with?
AH: When I read, my fictional heroes are above all sensitive. For me, it’s not enough for a character to be intelligent or muscular or successful. I want my characters to possess what I recently heard called “emotional intelligence.” Characters like Margaret Schlegel or Fielding in E. M. Forster’s novels Howards End and A Passage to India, or Elizabeth Bennet in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. People who are earnestly trying to make sense of the world and cognizant of their own limitations in trying to do so.
I wish I could write characters like those, but when I create stories, I tend to be drawn to flawed characters that to me are all the more human for failing at the business of social interaction. In other words, they’re outsiders, but not in the cool James Dean Rebel Without a Cause way. More in the way of Miss Brill from Katherine Mansfield’s story of the same name. Or Mrs. Bridge from Evan S. Connell’s novel Mrs. Bridge. (Maybe it’s just eponymous characters I like?)
MG: How much do you draw on personal experience when writing?
AH: A deadly question. Not at all. Never!
When you’re near a writer, you should pretend you’re with a spy who’s trying to ferret out your secrets to broadcast to the world. Anything said to a writer really does become fair game. Some writers are extremely scrupulous about basing anything on real life. I try to find a balance if I ever base anything on reality, using some details from life, changing others. After I published my work, I was often surprised by things that people thought were autobiographical which were actually completely removed from my experience.
Not that I admit to ever drawing on personal experience when writing.
MG: Can you tell us about the road to first getting published?
AH: It feels less like a road than a meandering stream. But when structured into a narrative, it does look like a road. I got an undergrad degree in creative writing (and art history) at U of M, lived abroad, worked in publishing for a year in New York, got my MFA in fiction at Columbia, where I wrote a thesis that then became my first book, the story collection The View from Stalin’s Head. When I graduated, I sent a couple of the stories to various agents, and one got back to me and took me on. Story collections are notoriously difficult to sell, but in my case, it was easier to sell the book than to place the stories in literary magazines. My agent had a good idea of an editor who might like my work, and he did.
This all sounds simple in the re-telling. In the living, it was not. It took years, and it felt very slow, as if I were wasting my life pretending to be a writer. I often still feel that way.
MG: What are your thoughts on the state of the publishing industry? Do you have an opinion on self-publishing vs. traditional publishing?
AH: I have no idea where the publishing industry is headed. Every time I think I know, the status quo changes. Look what’s happening to that venerable Midwestern company Borders. I’d say self-publishing is great if you’re a natural at selling yourself to the public, not exactly the typical writer type. However, today, self-publishing may be going from an option to a necessity. That said, no one knows where publishing is going, particularly the people who claim to know. You just have to do the work that matters to you. What the universe does or doesn’t do with it is a business question, and that’s all it should be, for your own sanity as a writer.
MG: What advice do you have for authors both in and out of the Midwest trying to get their work noticed, or get published?
AH: Write as much as you can for any venue you can. Your local penny saver newspaper. Your alumni newsletter. Post on blogs. Try to create a writing name for yourself any way you can. Just as there are no small roles, only small actors, so too there are no “small” places to get published. I’ve had things appear in prestigious venues that only a handful of people actually read, and then I’ve published stuff on my blog that a lot more people read and even resulted in their going out and buying one of books. You really do never know.
But more important than any of this is simply to write, write hard, write well, write honestly. Don’t stop for anyone or anything. Read as much as you can to get inspired and get better. Travel to dark, secret places in your work and expand your knowledge of vocabulary, grammar, and syntax so you have all the tools at your disposal to express your vision. Good writing gets noticed, and sometimes it gets published. The same is true of bad writing, but writers are so little paid and read these days, is it really worth it to become recognized for bad, insincere, shoddy work?
MG: Where can we find more information about you?
AH: On my website, www.aaronhamburger.com or my dessert blog www.aaronsweetspot.com. Or just read The View from Stalin’s Head or Faith for Beginners!
Issue 1 contributor Lindsay Hunter was in Champaign, Illinois, recently at the Stories & Beer reading series.
Watch her read her story “Food Luck” below. It’s tres awesome.
Marc Watkins’ story “The Gelding” appears in Midwestern Gothic 1.
How long have you been writing?
I’ve only been writing for about seven years. Reading wasn’t an important part of my life until I hit college, neither was writing. I dropped out of high school at sixteen and worked for a couple of years before I went to a community college and then onto university. I think I sat down and read a book a day for almost a year before I decided that I wanted to write.
What’s your connection to the Midwest?
I was born and raised in Sedalia, MO. My entire family is located in central or southern Missouri. I lived in Sedalia up until I was twenty-four when I left to study writing in Texas.
How has the Midwest influenced your writing?
Place is a key feature in my writing because it informs my character’s thoughts and actions. I’ve been told by quite a few editors that I have a “quiet” style of writing. I value stories that allow for the privilege of silence. I think too many writers jump into dramatic action or a character’s anguished interiority without much thought given to the power of silence. It may not be a Midwestern tic, but silence was certainly something I grew up around in my part of Missouri.
Why do you believe there has never really been a regionalist push for Midwestern writing in the past like there has with the South or even the West Coast?
That’s a good question, especially considering that the West Coast and the South have annual regional award anthologies, with no Midwestern equivalent. I think the Midwest occupies too vast a region to be ignored in literary circles, yet it also sits in a liminal space between virtually every well defined geographic and cultural region in the lower forty-eight, so it’s hard to have a unique identity when areas of it straddle the South, East and West Coasts.
Some aspects of my writing have strong Southern roots, yet my writing doesn’t fit into typical Southern Realism. Likewise with a growing number of writers from the Midwest that struggle to form a regional identity like Daniel Woodrell, who has been compared to a number of famous Southern authors, though I find that his style is distinctly Midwestern. I also think John Brandon’s novel Arkansas and Frank Bill’s forthcoming collection Crimes in Southern Indiana have distinct Midwest regional vibes.
How do you feel about social media to promote your writing, and do you use it?
I like social media. I also really fear social media. The internet has spurred an amazing amount of new platforms for all things involving literature. It’s also raised anxiety levels in authors to new extremes. Every farmer I know has a DSL connection and knows how to use Google. I cannot tell you how many awkward phone conversations I’ve had with my mother which began with “So and so looked up what you said online, and . . .” disaster ensues.
But we live with it.
I’ve been on Wordpress for a few years now, and started a blog called The Rankings to track the number of times literary markets are represented in the various annual award anthologies. The research and data I’ve gathered are put on the site so that people can see what markets are under or over represented.
Favorite book?
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (The non-edited version).
Favorite food?
Anything served at the Missouri State Fair.
Did you know that they can deep-fry anything at a State Fair? I’m serious. They can deep fry Twinkies, ice cream and even Coca-Cola.
If you could have coffee (or tea or a beer) with any literary figure, alive or dead, who would it be?
Probably Barry Hannah. I missed my chance to go on a road trip to Oxford, MS, in 2006 to do an interview with him, which I really regret now that he passed away.
Where can we find more information about you?
My personal website
Bonnie Jo Campbell is a National Book Award-nominated author with a strong tie to the Midwest. She talks with us about being influenced by the region, how social media plays a part in her life, and having a beer named in her honor.
MG: Can you tell us a bit about your connection to the Midwest?
BC: I was born in Michigan, and I now live in Michigan. I have lived in the Midwest forty five of my forty eight years. I feel most at home with the people of my region, and when I go to New York City or Oregon, I find that my favorite people are the displaced Midwesterners.
MG: How long have you been writing?
BC: I have been trying to write since I was fourteen. I gave it up over and over again as a serious pursuit, but then came back to it and tried to write some more. I finally figured out how to write in about 1994, when I was thirty two, while I was studying in a mathematics PhD program. I got my master’s degree in math and headed over to the English Department where Jaimy Gordon was teaching.
MG: How has the Midwest influenced your writing?
BC: In a thousand ways. My places and people are all Midwesterners. In fact, most of them could have come from Comstock, Michigan, my home down. I have a Midwestern sensibility, and I find that life here makes sense, and that’s the sense I work with in my stories.
MG: Your short story collection, American Salvage, was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. How has that changed your outlook on writing (if it has at all)? Do you find your approach to writing has changed with the accolades you’ve received?
BC: Well, it was a great pleasure to have folks like my book, and that goes for New York City critics as well as my brother the plumber, my brother the custodian, and all the other people I encounter around here. I don’t think my approach to writing has changed at all. Starting a story is still just as confusing as it always was, and my anxiety about making the story good enough is just as powerful. I still have a recurring eye twitch. Every finished story still feels like a miracle. I just finished the proofreading on my new novel, Once Upon a River, and having finished it absolutely feels like a miracle. Now I’ll start hoping that people like it.
MG: Can you tell us about first getting published with your collection Women & Other Animals?
BC: I won the AWP short fiction award in 1998 and so the University of Massachusetts Press published the collection in hardcover. What a thrill! Diane Glancy was the judge. All contests are a crapshoot, in the sense that you have to hope for a judge who will appreciate your work, but all writers with a finished collection need to enter contests, because it’s the best way to get a collection published.
MG: Did you have to find an agent? Was it hard to get noticed?
BC: Because my collection got a starred review in Publisher’ Weekly and because I had a novel ready to go, I was able to get an agent. Winning a well-established contest helps a person get noticed, and a starred review really helps.
MG: Have you found it’s more difficult to write shorter stories, or novels?
BC: Novels are harder because they’re longer. Seriously. I approach both the same way.
MG: What are your thoughts on the state of the publishing industry? Do you have an opinion on self-publishing vs. traditional publishing?
BC: I love all the options for publishing nowadays. I also feel the frustration of many friends who are having trouble getting published in traditional ways. Right now, it’s working out for me that a big publisher has an interest in me, but I know that might not always be the case. I’m also interested in university presses, small presses, and for some projects, self-publishing. For every project about which we are passionate, we have to weigh all the publishing options and hope we can find a way for our miracle to make its way into the world and into the hands of folks who will appreciate it.
MG: How do you feel about social media (such as Facebook and Twitter) used as a tool to promote one’s work?
BC: I’m not sure how I feel about it, but I use those methods to communicate with friends and fans. I enjoy Facebook and Twitter, and I don’t know if I’m using them to my advantage, but I’m a person who loves to communicate with other people, and so I enjoy having newfangled ways to do it, and if it helps promote the book, then that’s great. I also have a blog called “The Bone-Eye” that I’m trying to update three times a week, so show people what a Midwestern writer’s life is really like: http://www.bone-eye.blogspot.com/
MG: You have a new novel coming out this year, Once Upon a River. What can you tell us about it?
BC: It’s about a girl who loves the river and tries to make her life there when her family fails her. It contains elements of a story from my first collection (“The Fishing Dog”) and American Salvage (“Family Reunion.”) So I guess you could say that I’ve been writing this book since 1995 when I took my first writing class with Jaimy Gordon, for that is where I first wrote “The Fishing Dog.” It’s also a pre-quil to my first novel, Q Road, and is about the mother of the protagonist in that earlier book. Booklist just gave it a starred review, so I’m pretty cheerful about that.
MG: You had a beer named after your novel Q Road at the Kraftbrau Brewery in Kalamazoo. That has got to be one of the best accolades a writer could receive. How did that come about, and how did you did you feel when they told you that was happening?
BC: I love my home town; people here have supported me in so many ways. Kraftbrau no longer exists (R.I.P.) but they were very sweet to do this for me. A few friends and I were sitting and chatting over beers, and Peter Brakeman, a local designer, pointed out to me that he’d designed beer labels for Bell’s Brewery. He said my book cover mock-up would make a good label. So he designed me a label, and I suggested to Kraftbrau (where I was having my book release party) that maybe a special beer was in order. They ran with it. I was very honored.
MG: You seem to have held a wonderful variety of jobs (including traveling with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus and leading bicycle tours in Europe). How have these life experiences molded your writing?
BC: Oh, heck, I don’t know. There are some experiences I’ve written a lot about (the circus) and some, such as practicing martial arts for ten years, that haven’t really made it into my writing. It seems as though a good idea to have a variety of experiences in this life, and working different jobs is a good way for a poor person to get a lot of different experiences.
MG: What advice do you have for authors both in and out of the Midwest trying to get their work noticed?
BC: Just keep making your work better, send it out into the world, and it will get noticed. Midwestern writers are getting published all over the place, as much as writers from other regions. We don’t have much confidence about our work, and sometimes we’re not as good as some other folks at promoting ourselves, but a lot of us have a really strong work ethic, and it has turned out for me that the key to writing good stories is simply to work really really hard. So work hard and work smart, and send that work out when it’s ready.
Find out more about Bonnie Jo Campbell at her official website.
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Molly Gaudry’s poem “War Wear” appears in Midwestern Gothic 1.
How long have you been writing?
I’ve been writing stories and making little chapbooks since I was very young, but I began studying Creative Writing in high school. I attended the School for Creative and Performing Arts in Cincinnati, Ohio, and it is now the nation’s only K-12 school of the arts. I have to credit Sara Berry, my junior and senior English teacher, who taught me how to write essays. It was only when I discovered that I had something to say about the literature I’d read, and it was only after I learned how to clearly define my thoughts on paper, that I realized I might also be able to pursue the study of creative writing. This was in the ‘90s, and I finally made up my mind to leave my Jazz Theory major behind and switch to Creative Writing in ’98. I then went to the University of Redlands and declared Creative Writing as my major there, and two years later when I transferred to the University of Cincinnati, I declared English as my major but also earned a Creative Writing certificate in 2006. In 2008, I earned an MA in fiction from the University of Cincinnati as well.
What’s your connection to the Midwest?
I grew up in northern Ohio and then spent over a decade in Cincinnati. I’m a Midwesterner at heart. I think this means I’m friendly, I trust people, and I’ll never think I’m as cool as people from the east or west coast.
How has the Midwest influenced your writing?
I would say that having been educated in the Midwest, my academic experiences are very much informed by the teachers I learned from and studied under. I am very grateful to the education I received in Ohio, and I am very grateful to Sara Berry at SCPA, and UC professors Michael Griffith, Maria Romagnoli, Beth Ash, and former-UC professor Brock Clarke—all of whom taught me so much about how to read and write.
Why do you believe there has never really been a regionalist push for Midwestern writing in the past like there has with the South or even the West Coast?
I don’t know.
How do you feel about social media to promote your writing, and do you use it?
I’m as guilty as the next person of posting a new publication or announcing writing-related news on Facebook. But social media is so much more than that. I blog, I leave comments on others’ blogs, I rely on Google Reader to tell me the latest, I check in on friends’ Tweets, I watch YouTube book trailers, I rate Amazon reviews as helpful or not helpful, I check out Goodreads every so often, I buy books on small press websites all the time, and so I would say that Social Media is not only an interesting phenomenon but a major part of how I interact with literature today. That said, I’m interested in learning more about these new media outlets in order to create a more viable literary environment for today’s readers.
Favorite book?
Lydia Millet’s My Happy Life.
Favorite food?
Ramen noodles. Korean.
If you could have coffee (or tea or a beer) with any literary figure, alive or dead, who would it be?
Virginia Woolf.
Where can we find more information about you?
mollygaudry.com
We are now accepting submissions for Issue 2, with a deadline of May 13 (just about a month, if you’re counting).
Check out our guidelines here, and happy submitting!
Here it is folks, the very first Midwestern Gothic contest! We’re looking for stories (sorry poetry people, but we’ll get you next time) inspired by the prompt at the end of this post. All you have to do is follow a few simple rules, and it’s open to anyone who wants to participate who has a connection to the Midwest in some fashion (school, work, born/raised/died here/etc.).
RULES
That’s it. Simple, right? Now on to what you really care about…
PRIZES
The fiction editors here at Midwestern Gothic will review the entries, and every week or so, we’ll post any particularly striking entries to the website. When submissions close for Issue 2, we’ll select a winner from all the entries and post it to the site as well.
The winner receives:
PROMPT
And away we go!
Nick Arvin’s story “The Beauty Engine” appears in Midwestern Gothic 1.
How long have you been writing?
Taking the question literally, I suppose I’ve been writing since I was six or seven years old, in about 1980. I do still remember one or two stories I wrote as school assignments early on. But I first began to take my fiction writing seriously when I was in college, 20 years ago.
What’s your connection to the Midwest?
I live in Denver now, but I spent most of my life in the Midwest. I grew up in Clio, Michigan, and studied engineering at the University of Michigan. I worked for a time at Ford, in Dearborn, and later I studied writing at the University of Iowa.
How has the Midwest influenced your writing?
Because I grew up in the Midwest, my first instinct is for settings that are Midwestern, and the for character personalities that are Midwestern. I sometimes find that I have to make an effort to write in a way that doesn’t feel Midwestern.
Why do you believe there has never really been a regionalist push for Midwestern writing in the past like there has with the South or even the West Coast?
There’s a general sense in the larger culture that the Midwest and things Midwestern are flat and dull. I suspect that a lot of writers in the Midwest internalize this, and so they tend to deemphasize the Midwestern settings of their writing, or simply set their work elsewhere. I’d love to see Midwestern Gothic start to change this.
How do you feel about social media to promote your writing, and do you use it?
I’m instinctively uncomfortable with self-promotion (after all, I did grow up in the Midwest), but I am on Facebook, and I like it well enough.
Favorite book?
It’s always hard to pick just one, but for anyone interested in Midwestern fiction let me recommend the work of Wright Morris. A good place to start is his novel Plains Song.
Favorite food?
Pretty much anything from Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor. Unless I’m more in the mood for a plate of greasy stuff, in which case I want something at the Hamburg Inn No. 2 in Iowa City.
If you could have coffee (or tea or a beer) with any literary figure, alive or dead, who would it be?
Homer.
Where can we find more information about you?
www.nickarvin.com
