Carly Miller’s story “Inside the Smoker” appears in Midwestern Gothic‘s Winter 2018 issue, coming February 20th.

What’s your connection to the Midwest, and how has the region influenced your writing?

I was born in Michigan, which is part of the Midwest but sometimes does feel a little different from where I currently live. Michigan has a lot of forests, a lot of lakes and rivers. Now I live in Illinois, which feels to me more like the essence of the Midwest. It has the fields, the huge skies, in some places even remnants of the great prairies. The skies of Illinois really influenced Inside the Smoker—there is a scene where the main character is sitting outside gazing up at the stars. I used to climb onto the roof of one of the buildings at my college, which I’m not sure you’re supposed to do, exactly, and I’d spend a lot of time there, just looking up. When I moved to Illinois there was a lot more sky than in Michigan—the trees tend to block it out—and it was completely startling, unsettling. The Midwest sky is an important part of almost everything I write.

What do you think is the most compelling aspect of the Midwest?

I’m almost certain this is a very unpopular opinion, but for me the it is the winters. I know that sounds…absurd. But the winters here are so fierce—they’re awe-inspiring. I’ll walk out the door completely draped in coats and scarves to go to a night class in February, and every single time the sheer force of the cold takes my breath away. I think this is a unique disposition; I hate the summers. Midwestern summers are the least compelling aspect of the Midwest.

How do your experiences or memories of specific places—such as where you grew up, or a place you’ve visited that you can’t get out of your head—play a role in your writing?

Michigan has the great lakes, of course, but also so many inland lakes, and rivers too. I always joke that you can’t drive more than 20 minutes without hitting water. I spent so much time in the water as a kid. In the spring, as soon as the ice melted we would start swimming, so I have pictures of my cousins and I swimming in the lake by my grandmother’s home in March. So I can’t get water out of my head. I almost never write anything that’s void of water; I’m just not interested in that.

Discuss your writing process — inspirations, ideal environments, how you deal with writer’s block.

Writing is a lot of work, obviously. I’m a twelve draft person. I can’t write a good first draft to save my life, but I’m okay with that because I’m always changing my mind about how I want a story or a poem to go. So it gives me something to do. And when I just can’t write, I don’t make myself. I go do something else. I feed my brain something different. I’m a psychology student, so I’ll hang out in the lab if I need a break.

How can you tell when a piece of writing is finished?

I can’t yet. I normally stop working on a project because I’m obsessing so much it’s making me sick and then someone, one of my friends—bless them—will tell me to stop.

Who is your favorite author (fiction writer or poet), and what draws you to their work?

There are too many. I will say that right now I’m working on a project which is influenced and inspired by Catherine Lacey’s Nobody is Ever Missing and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life.

What’s next for you?

Well. Graduate studies? I hope.

Where can we find more information about you?

I have a Facebook page—Carly Anna Miller. I also can be reached through Unify Galesburg’s website.

M. Drew Williams’ piece “A Bastard of Transit” appears in Midwestern Gothic‘s Winter 2018 issue, coming February 20th.

What’s your connection to the Midwest, and how has the region influenced your writing?

I moved to Omaha, Nebraska a year and a half ago to begin my MFA at Creighton University. Whereas my writing prior to this move was predominantly introspective in its focus, my poems have since become more apt to incorporate more descriptions of things in the external/physical world. Because I had never personally seen or admired a Midwestern landscape before moving to Omaha, I feel as though my new surroundings served as a catalyst to the aforementioned descriptive shift in my poetry.

What do you think is the most compelling aspect of the Midwest?

As is true for any place, the best aspect of the Midwest is its people. This may seem like a cliché response, but I feel it to be true nonetheless. In the short amount of time that I have been living in the region, I have met numerous people whom have simply been amazing. To me, the people who occupy this portion of the country are genuine, sincere, and incredibly passionate. Here, there seems to be an undeniable sense of togetherness that I have personally never experienced in any other place I have lived.

How do your experiences or memories of specific places—such as where you grew up, or a place you’ve visited that you can’t get out of your head—play a role in your writing?

I have made it a habit to not explicitly declare the exact locations which my poems either take place in, or pull specific identifiable details from. In doing this, it is not my goal to reject or deny the places from which the inspiration for my poetry was gained. Rather, I hope to provide readers with a more generalized conception of place onto which they may more easily apply personalized place-centric details from their own lives. With this being said, while my own experiences and settings were necessary to a poem’s conception and eventual realization, it is ultimately irrelevant to the reader’s interaction to said poem.

Discuss your writing process — inspirations, ideal environments, how you deal with writer’s block.

I consider my process to be one long, drawn-out method of combating writer’s block. First and foremost, I try to read for at least two hours every day: the less time I spend reading, the less likely I am to gain the inspiration needed to write anything of merit. Throughout my workweek, I try my best to jot down a few interconnected lines (or interesting words). By Saturday, I often force myself to write a poem, and even though I am not always successful in my efforts to do so, the effort itself at least gets me one step closer to actually writing a worthwhile poem.

How can you tell when a piece of writing is finished?

Usually, I equate the completion of a poem with a kind of hunger: it is finished when I am satisfied and cease to feel a pit in my metaphorical stomach. While this explanation is admittedly vague albeit pretentious, it is the only one I have for now.

Who is your favorite author (fiction writer or poet), and what draws you to their work?

While my answer to this question could be different from one day to another, today I would have to say that may absolute favorites are Cormac McCarthy (fiction) and Mark Strand (poetry). The work provided by both of these writers is imbued with a compelling starkness and realism. Because both of them are able to expertly incorporate minimalism into their craft, I have to commend the clarity of their prose and verse respectively. Honorable mentions to William Faulkner, J.D. Salinger, Hart Crane, John Steinbeck, and Richard Hugo.

What’s next for you?

I have been gradually sending out the manuscript for my second chapbook for publication. Apart from this, I will be graduating with my MFA this May.

Where can we find more information about you?

Find me at my tumblr page which I update sporadically: m-d-williams.tumblr.com

“Beware, O wanderer, the road is walking too.” – Jim Harrison,  After Ikkyu & Other Poems.

Midwestern Gothic staffer Carrie Dudewicz talked with author Danielle Lazarin about her book Back Talk, the relationships between intimacy and femininity, motherhood, experiencing the Midwest as a New Yorker, and more.

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Carrie Dudewicz: What’s your connection to the Midwest?

Danielle Lazarin: I spent most of my advanced schooling years in the Midwest. My undergrad degree (in creative writing) was at Oberlin, in Ohio, and my MFA at the University of Michigan. I remained in Michigan for a few years afterward before moving back east. When I think Midwest, I think walking to a workshop through some amount of snow, in the most pleasantly nostalgic way.

CD: You spent a lot of time in the Midwest, but you’re from and currently live in New York. What are some of the differences you see between these two places? How did/does each place affect your writing differently?

DL: I have affection for much of the Midwest but wouldn’t say I feel at home there. Being an outsider bred curiosity about the kinds of things we take for granted about the places we are from: the landscape, and childhoods, and expectations, the way a day is lived. In Michigan specifically, I lived a more suburban life than I had in cities I’d previously settled in. The lack of population density — that I could be so easily isolated — did not sit well with me, and I felt more disconnected in the Midwest than I’ve felt elsewhere. I suspect, looking back, that those feelings were good for various stories that touched on themes of loneliness and longing for a different kind of life.

When I moved back to New York after 15 years living elsewhere, I was surprised at how deeply I felt connected to earlier versions of myself, as I was encountering a long-lost friend. Some of it was the basic sense of being home, of being comfortable in a way I never was when I lived in the Midwest or California. But some of it was quite literal, as I was retreading of the ground of my teenage life but in a different skin: as a mother and wife, as an adult — which helped me create necessary perspective on those experiences to write about them. I don’t think I could have finished the collection without moving home, or without feeling out of sorts in places like Michigan.

CD: Back Talk is your first published story collection, and it’s getting a lot of advance praise from many prominent writers for its portrayal of realistic women. How did you go about writing stories incorporating women whom readers can love and relate to? Obviously, it’s important that women are portrayed this way, but why do you think it’s so pressing to have a book like this one come out right now?

DL: My work has always been realistic; it’s my default mode. But realism is often messier than what many narratives offer us, particularly when it comes to how women should behave or want, and that is what I wanted to create on the page; women and men who were complex and believable. Plus, I don’t think realistic or true necessarily means lovable — we often love imperfect people.

As for relatable, I do hope some readers see a part of themselves in a character, but even more, I hope they have their own experiences expanded — or simply begin to believe that another experience exists. We have so far to go as a culture in making space for stories that are different from what we’ve seen. This is a small thing literature can do. I hope that the stories in Back Talk might give someone the fuel to write their own experience or the experience of women they know. The work of so many women writers has done that — and is still doing that — for me now.

CD: In multiple stories of this collection, unexpected relationships arise between people — the seller of an apartment and the potential buyer, a widower and his babysitter. How did you come up with these unique relationships?

DL: In any city, but particularly for one as crowded and fearless as New York, you often bear witness to very private moments whether that is through apartment walls or passing someone in the street. Knowing when to respect that space and when to step into it is something I’m hyper-aware of as a native New Yorker. There’s a lot of story in how a character reacts or changes from those boundaries being loosened and crossed, in particular the empathy that is possible in those moments, between not-exactly strangers. Also, for this collection I thought a lot about the conflation of the feminine with intimacy and care taking — women often don’t ask for the intimacy they are in, and are assumed to be comfortable in it, when of course many of us are not — and so it seems natural that many of the characters in my stories find themselves in deeper than expected.

CD: Each of the stories in this collection revolves around common and/or un-extraordinary events, some of which are portrayed in a slightly different-than-normal light, and as mentioned in the last question, many are based around perhaps accidental, perhaps fleeting relationships. For example, Back Talk is about a hookup at a party between a girl, the narrator, and a boy she barely knows. What made you decide to title your book after the story Back Talk?

DL: The story itself contains a lot of themes that are important to my work: a young woman at a pivotal moment in a conversation with herself, disappointments, a moment of choosing silence or talking back, the consequences of wanting if you’re a woman, questions of power. I wanted, too, to turn that idea of what that phrase means — mouthy, rude, out of line — on its head some.

CD: You’ve said that some of the stories in this collection were written as long as ten years ago. How did it feel compiling a full book of stories? How did you decide which to include? In your opinion, how do the stories from when you were in grad school differ from the ones written more recently?

DL: It feels amazing to gather work that’s been ongoing for a long while, since roughly 2002. At some point I cut a couple of stories that centered on male characters, not simply for this fact, but because I couldn’t make them as strong as the others, and wanted to make room for more women in the collection. The more recent stories were, for the most part, quicker to write because I had simply gotten better at writing, and often knew sooner what I was aiming for in a story, what I wanted to say or how I would say it. I think they’re more direct, less afraid than my earlier stories (though some have been revised to be bolder than I could have been when I drafted them). They also benefit from the life experience I’ve amassed in that time, personal shifts and aging for myself and those around me, that opened me to new experiences less available to me in my mid-twenties, when I was in graduate school.

CD: How do you balance being a mother to two daughters with writing? How does being a mother affect your writing?

DL: Motherhood or writing is the day job, depending on the day. It gets balanced the way anyone with any other gig does it: flexibility, and in my case, lots of timers and reminders to segment my time. Parenthood ignited the sense of time passing (a.k.a. the inevitable march toward death); it reinforced the understanding that no one was waiting for my work. It made me more aggressive with both my subject matter and putting myself out into the world. I’d also say that early days at home with babies made my mind restless in a necessary way, and taught me how to use what time I had in a way that wasn’t possible for me in my pre-child life.

I’ve always written about women and girls and family life — most of the stories about young girlhood were in fact written before I had kids — but experiencing something I’d only imagined definitely heightened my work on the page. I gained a sense of my childhood from the other side, and an introduction to new universes of people and what they cared about and feared and the particular complications of family life. I began to think more carefully about the through lines of those stories. Here I was at playgroups and playgrounds and classrooms, with their attendant rules and expectations and cultures. In these spaces, all these women (and they were mostly women) were carrying the girls they were, how they had been mothered and wanted to mother themselves, what they’d given up and still wanted.

CD: What advice do you have for young writers?

DL: Make friends with other writers, seeking not just your best readers, but people with whom you can be forthcoming about your challenges and triumphs. I could not survive the particular weirdnesses of the writing life without my circle of support cheering me on and commiserating and doling out tough love when necessary, nor without doing this myself for them; it helps to be engaged in conversation with folks who help you see the big picture.

Believe in process over product. Don’t obsess over the number of words you put down or publications. Committing the time to the work is the most you can do, the little thing you can control. There’s no guarantee that you’ll produce what you expect in that time, but getting comfortable with being in that chair in a disciplined way is the best you can do, and it’s enough — whatever amount of time that is. Over time, that collective work will end up in your product, even if you delete a lot of the words.

CD: What’s next for you?

DL: I’m currently working on a novel about motherhood and women’s movements and memory.

Halee Kirkwood’s story “The Old Main Street Opera House” appears in Midwestern Gothic‘s Winter 2018 issue, coming February 20th.

What’s your connection to the Midwest, and how has the region influenced your writing?

I grew up in the Twin Ports area, oscillating between Duluth and Superior for most of my life. I saw Lake Superior almost every day, and having such an incredible body of water serve as my point-of-reference for so long has made me attuned to environment in a way I think is unique to folks who grew up around, well, big things, vast things, a landscape that refuses to be ignored. I’m a direct descendent of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, so the lake plays a large part of my spiritual and ancestral life as well. It’s temperaments are hypnotizing, from placid and glass-smooth to raging swells that can throw boulders. I try to channel this sort of unpredictable energy when considering pacing in writing.

And while beautiful, the area I call home also suffers from the boom-and-bust that is so common in communities whose economies rely on extractive industry—this has made me fascinated with the hubris of industry, and it’s affects on community life, especially on lives not commonly thought of as in extractive industry’s reach, is a major concern of my writing.

What do you think is the most compelling aspect of the Midwest?

I’m fascinated by the unstable borders between country and city, how you can be in an urban center such as Minneapolis or Chicago, drive a while out of city limits and suddenly find yourself surrounded by farmland. The diversity of landscape and ecology—despite the popular idea that the Midwest is all corn and cows—also fascinates me. Just the other day, I was driving through Gurnee, Illinois, with some friends and on the side of the highway two Sandhill Cranes were violently tossing a snake up into the air and jabbing at it with their long beaks. I couldn’t believe that this animal drama occurred amidst banal, suburban traffic going to and from a large shopping mall! In this way, I think of the Midwest’s landscape as distinctly liminal. Wildness can be found in the ditch of almost any highway.

How do your experiences or memories of specific places—such as where you grew up, or a place you‘ve visited that you can’t get out of your head—play a role in your writing?

There was a period of time in my childhood when my father worked security at an oil refinery. My family only had one car, and he had to work at 5:00 am, so me, my brother, and sister had to wake up that early to go with in the car so we wouldn’t be home alone. I have incredibly dream-like memories of entering the oil refinery, the ripe smell of it in the air, all these mysterious lights blinking everywhere, and feeling as though I had trespassed. Having now grown up to be antagonistic toward extractive industry, this feeling of trespass is even more resonant now. There have been several instances of trespass now in my adult life, which I will not name here, but in every case I have trespassed into institutions which have sometimes been antagonistic towards me.

I think of the Midwest is a perfect site of trespass—as someone who is both white and native, my very body is a site of trespass on several levels. This is embedded in my writing. Further, I think that a few significant characteristics of the Midwest (loneliness, alienation, desertion, desperation, empty streets, empty buildings) create the conditions for which trespassing can occur with lesser threat of being caught. This is often the ignition for my fiction writing—where is my character, and why should they not be there?

The inspiration for my story in the Winter 2018 issue of Midwestern Gothic, “The Old Main Street Opera House,” came not from my own trespassing experiences but from my partner. She grew up in the upper peninsula of Michigan and as a child, she and her friends would play in the abandoned iron ore mines sprinkled throughout the town. That’s so creepy! And just further proof that the Midwest is full of excitement and real danger.

Discuss your writing process—inspirations, ideal environments, how you deal with writer’s block.

My writing process involves a lot of staring out of windows and taking showers. I currently work a retail job to support myself throughout the weekend, and I just cannot write on the days I come home from work. I make up for this by spending each day I don’t work writing, or working toward writing, whether that be having new experiences or critically engaging with the world, or just tending to a poem or a short story as though it is a small fire. And a couple days out of the year I wake up at 3:00 am after a dream has really shook me, and I just have to turn it into something—that’s the most unsettling rush I’ve ever felt. I would say that I’m a rush-writer first, and a reviser second—revising is an element of writing that I have to pay the closest attention to, or else I’ll let it fall by the wayside.

I keep a notebook near me whenever I read. If a writer is doing something I admire, I attempt to pin down how exactly they astonished me, and then make a writing prompt for myself based on the techniques I noticed, whether that be on the micro or macro level. I don’t always make it to the prompt immediately, but I know it is there for me to try if I ever do hit writer’s block.

I’ve also consulted my humble Tarot deck for inspiration on plot or theme or character development—there’s a wonderful book out there called The Creative Tarot by Jessa Crispin that revolutionized the relationship between creativity and intuition for me. Highly recommend!

How can you tell when a piece of writing is finished?

I don’t know if I can necessarily tell when a piece of writing is finished but I can certainly say that I feel intuitively about completion. The only way I can describe it, and this might come off as corny but I don’t mind, is that the piece in question feels like it fits perfectly in your heart.

Who is your favorite author (fiction writer or poet), and what draws you to their work?

This is always a hard question for me (isn’t it for us all!), but I think my favorite author is Louise Erdrich. She has such a large range of work, and she’s still writing! As someone who can’t sustain attention on one project for too long, I admire that immensely. But I think what most draws me to Erdrich’s fiction is how much compassion she offers her characters. I think specifically of Romeo in a newer novel, La Rose. Romeo is detestable at first, but rapidly the reader develops a love for even him, and she does this by seamlessly intertwining concerns of intergenerational and personal trauma. I’m also drawn to how you can read her novels independent of her other work, but if you do choose to read the novels which complement each other it enriches the experience. I think that she demonstrates a brilliant control over character and plot and landscape and, just, ahhh! I’m a huge fangirl.

What’s next for you?

A lot of thinking about my nascent thesis as my time in an MFA program crescendos. That, and revising. Lots of it.

Where can we find more information about you?

I haven’t developed my own website yet, but you can find my other published writing at Strange Horizions, The Eastern Iowa Review, and at Cream City Review.

Guinotte Wise’s piece “Leaks and Dams” appears in Midwestern Gothic‘s Winter 2018 Issue, coming February 20th.

What’s your connection to the Midwest, and how has the region influenced your writing?

Born and raised, though moved a lot, and last big move was Los Angeles, which actually strengthened my midwest ties, made me appreciate it more–though L.A. was quite good to me, no complaints.

What do you think is the most compelling aspect of the Midwest?

Not sure it’s easily explained, though space is important to me, living rural, big skies, stars, less light pollution and less pollution of any kind–though the big weedkiller giants are doing their best to screw that up too.

How do your experiences or memories of specific places—such as where you grew up, or a place you’ve visited that you can’t get out of your head—play a role in your writing?

Immeasurably. Places, senses, smells, sounds, plants, accents, the dirt color, building materials from place to place, as in Missouri, lots of brick buildings from earlier eras, things you notice when you come back.

Discuss your writing process — inspirations, ideal environments, how you deal with writer’s block.

I don’t really acknowledge that “block,” and, as a result, can’t use it as an excuse. There are prolific times, and sparse times. It’s just the way that is. I don’t beat myself up. I leave the Macbook and the journal and do stuff like welding sculpture–what I left often solves itself by being left. I’m at a slow place in an already sold novel right now, and I don’t care. The mail will get through. The forty will get plowed. It’ll get done. Or it won’t. My favorite place is a kitchen booth, looks like a Denny’s.

How can you tell when a piece of writing is finished?

It appears to me to be at that place where nothing more needs to be said. Even though it may not be “the end” and not much is definitively settled. I used to read New Yorker stories like that, still do, that sort of leave you wondering. But that’s okay. It used to bother me. I no longer tie things up neatly.

Who is your favorite author (fiction writer or poet), and what draws you to their work?

Thomas McGuane. His fluid mesmerizing prose and startling irony. His ability to put you there, where it’s going on.

What’s next for you?

I just finished a second collection of poetry and am about 200 pages into a second novel. I have my next sculpture show in May and that will be a balancing act, but one I always enjoy.

Where can we find more information about you?

The pages for my books on Amazon have a fair amount of information, and my highly unreliably narrated blog and website at www.wisesculpture.com

“What a midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on the sleeve, in plain sight.” – Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love.

Midwestern Gothic staffer Carrie Dudewicz talked with author Will Boast about his new novel Daphne, the relationship between journalism and fiction, how to reconcile a Midwest identity with international travel, and more.

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Carrie Dudewicz: What’s your connection to the Midwest?

Will Boast: An unusual one, perhaps. I was born in England and grew up partly there and in Ireland. When I was seven, we moved to Wisconsin for a job my dad was offered here in the States. We essentially came sight unseen, and I remain the only member of my extended family living in the U.S. I went to grade school and high school in Wisconsin and college in Illinois. Then I lived in Chicago for a couple years, before hopping around a bit geographically. Now I’m back in Chicago, where I have a teaching gig at the University of Chicago.

CD: You’ve lived all over the world — the UK, Germany, New York City, the west coast, Rome, and more. How does your experience as a world traveler affect your view of the Midwest? What is most striking about the Midwest to you?

WB: Until I was about seventeen or eighteen, I would’ve called England my real home, even though I hadn’t lived there for over a decade. Later, I felt a Midwestern identity quite fiercely, especially when I was living in San Francisco — which I’d moved to along with several Wisconsin friends — in a kind of strange and abrupt exodus. Regional identity — really any kind of identity — is such a slippery thing that we often seem to define it in the negative. I know who I am because I’m not this other thing, I’m not of some other place or position. Sometimes that’s powerful and necessary; and sometimes, of course, it’s absurd and even dangerous.

I suppose I would ascribe some truth to the things that get commonly said about Midwesterners — that they invest fairly heavily in decency and friendliness, while at the same time being less demonstrative and more guarded than those in other parts of the country. Then again, if I visit L.A. (or the Gambia or Myanmar), I’m usually bowled over by how surprisingly friendly everyone is. And a kind of watchful, proud, hunched stoicism is a trait that seems to get pinned to a lot of different cultures (often, it must be said, the ones in cold climates). So I’m not sure if these qualities are inherent to the Midwest (or any place), or if they’re perceptions that visitors bring with them. Or, I suppose, they might be borne out of that constant correspondence between inside and outside perspectives. Now I feel like I’m trying to paraphrase Calvino’s Invisible Cities!

I would say that, on a very broad level, I’m most struck by how much the Midwest keeps changing. German, Swiss, Swedish, and Irish immigration remapped the Midwest a hundred and fifty years ago. Now, of course, Midwestern towns and cities are just as likely to have sizable Hispanic populations, or H’mong or Somali or Yemeni communities and so on. I learned the other day that the suburbs northwest of Chicago support a semi-professional Indian cricket league. So, I’m often struck by just how multicultural the Midwest can be — but I think it’s more quietly multicultural than other parts of the world, if that makes sense.

CD: Is there a certain region/country/city that feels the most like home to you?

WB: To be honest, I’m either still searching for home or I’ve sort of given up on the idea. I haven’t really, truly unpacked and settled into one place over any other in maybe twenty years now. Most of my stuff has been in storage for nearly fourteen years. While I’m looking for ways to, you know, not keep living that way, I also have serious admiration for journalist pals who’ve, say, spent six months hiking Eastern European national parks to write a long feature. Or friends in the State Department who move to a new foreign capital every three years and learn an entirely new language along the way. I feel a bit like a homebody in comparison. Though that’s actually fine, because I sort of need to be in one place for a couple months at a time to get any real writing done.

At this point, I would say that there are a handful of cities I keep going back to again and again, and that in some ways that global City has become more home than anywhere else. A few years ago, I noticed that I was just as likely, even more likely, to see good friends in some random city, often abroad, that none of them actually lived in. I don’t think we’ve still quite reckoned, as a culture, with just how easy and cheap travel has become, how radically technology has changed how we communicate and live with one another over distance, and how unmoored certain parts of the population are from a geographic home.

CD: You’ve published short stories (Power Ballads, 2011) and a memoir (Epilogue, 2014), and your first novel, Daphne, is forthcoming in February 2018. Since you have experience in all of these genres, how does writing in each one differ from the next? Was writing one book more challenging than writing another and if so, how?

WB: Each form has its own demands, and you have to be cognizant that, for example, a character who can exist comfortably in a short story may not be large enough, to use a loose term, to sustain a novel. Or that the reader’s inclination to identify or sympathize with a first-person narrator doesn’t work quite the same in a novel as it does in a memoir. And there are a hundred other things that you’re learning, forgetting, re-learning, and playing with as you move from one form to the other.

It’s all challenging, beautifully so. Though I won’t go into detail about it, Epilogue was extremely difficult to write, and the difficulties didn’t stop once it was finished. I thought Daphne might be a bit of a reprieve, a chance to slip back into the slightly less revealing clothes of fiction. In some ways, however, Daphne is more autobiographical — even confessional. But maybe only to me or those who know me pretty well. So book tour will be a little less taxing this time around.

CD: Daphne is a reimagining of the classic Daphne and Apollo myth. What drew you to this subject matter, and to this myth specifically? Was it difficult to take a centuries-old story and transform it into something new?

WB: I was first drawn to the myth of Apollo and Daphne when I encountered Bernini’s sculpture (of the same name) at the Galleria Borghese in Rome. It depicts the very moment when Apollo, driven into a frenzy of lust by an arrow from meddling Cupid’s bow, is about to catch the river nymph, Daphne, who he’s been madly pursuing through her forest home. Daphne, in her terror, prays to be saved and is turned into a laurel tree. The sculpture, much like the myth, is ravishing, in both senses of the word, as lurid as it is beautiful, as beguiling as it is upsetting.

At some point, I made the connection between the myth and my Daphne, her struggle with high emotion and the way paralysis can be both a seizing up and a release — an escape. But I also wanted to recast the myth, to see it through Daphne’s eyes. I think we’re fascinated by myths because they feel so familiar and so foreign all at once. We see them as foundational, perhaps even primal, even though they were themselves part of a very particular culture. Recasting a myth speaks back to this deep cultural inheritance and asks what it still tells us, and what, perhaps, we would like to move beyond.

CD: In addition to all of your work in creative genres, you’re also a reporter and your work has been published in many reputable sources — The New York Times magazine, The New Yorker, Guernica, and many others. For you, what is different about writing creatively from writing journalistically? How does each type of writing inform others?

WB: I have an incredible admiration for journalists — real journalists — because I consider myself a novice in the form. I think the ambition, willingness, and/or courage to go out into the world and truly learn as much as you can and report back to the reader in ways that make us all truly more worldly is profound and necessary, now more so than ever. And to get fact-checked and really, really closely edited is one of my very favorite experiences as a writer. I think journalists, long-form narrative journalists especially, create as much as any poet or novelist does. They often experiment with form and language as much as “creative writers” do, and, likewise, they make meaning and understanding where, previously, there may not have been much. When you go into the field — when I reported on traditional nomadic sports in Kazakhstan recently, I spent a week in a literal field — you might talk to a hundred different people. And there are a hundred different ways to present what they tell you. By necessity, you winnow down what you find, but the best journalists keep as much complexity in as they can — just like the best poets, fiction writers, playwrights, and screenwriters do.

My admiration for journalists challenges me to do as much first-hand research as I can when I write fiction. The temptations to rely only on Internet research are high, but that kind of research often lends shallow results. Also, I think we live in a world where people are inclined to stake out an ideological position — often a very reductive and reduced one — and then simply look for any bit of information that makes their stance easier or more seductive to live with. I think it’s incumbent on any kind of serious writer to be more curious and patient than that.

CD: Advocacy is another important part of your career, as you’re a teacher at a refugee center in Rome. Why is this an important cause to you? What have you learned from your students?

WB: I spent a year in Rome on a fellowship that I was incredibly lucky to get. The previous summer the European migration crisis was very much in the news, and I knew that Italy was one of the centers of that crisis. I had two impulses that drove me to get involved. One was just the simple human concern we have when others are struggling and we might, in whatever tiny way, help out. The other was a journalistic concern, if you will, to learn more and report back. So I got in touch with this refugee center and offered my services, both as a teacher and a writer. I started teaching ESL there, once or twice a week, and continued for an entire year (and beyond, as an occasional sub). There was also some discussion of me leading a writing workshop at the center, but that became logistically difficult — mostly because the language barriers were so high, on my side as much as anything. Then I tried doing an oral history/storytelling project, which was partly successful but also, for various reasons, very tricky to pursue.

Because, really, most of the center’s guests come for very pragmatic needs: a meal, clothes, toothpaste, etc. There’s a big demand for help with language, especially English. And I felt that trying to gather and present stories (that were, inevitably, often about serious trauma) was compromising my effectiveness as a teacher. It became more important to me to be available to my students, foremost, as a practical resource. Though teaching was 95 percent of what I did at the center, I also helped with some of the “navigation”: helping people contact lawyers, attend appointments, and find other resources. And I ran a small study group for advanced students interested in continuing in or starting higher education. Actually, as I type this, I’m back in Rome for a month on a grant from Fulbright, helping with similar efforts at the center.

Reading and writing prose is, obviously, one of the best ways I know of understanding the world. But it can start to feel a bit solitary, even solipsistic, at times. I guess I’m a little hung up on the utility of what I do, and teaching at the center has been a great way to feel a little less selfish somehow. All of this said, I want to emphasize that are a lot of people far more involved with this kind of advocacy than I am. [COPY: I’m?] Also a novice in this realm!

What have I learned from my students? An incredible amount, and more than I can mention here, I’m afraid. Mostly I’ve learned, or continued to learn, how ignorant I am about the world.

CD: With your impressive and diverse bio, it’s obvious that you’re an extremely busy person. How do you balance all of these different jobs? How do these jobs connect or overlap? Where do you find joy in each of your jobs?

WB: Ha, thanks! To be honest, I feel incredibly lazy and idle most of the time. Ninety-five percent of this stuff gets written in my pajamas. There is no balance, really. Some things get finished relatively quickly, some take such an enormous amount of time and revisiting that despair is the only reasonable response to them. There’s a problem-solving element to writing prose, and I often find that really gratifying. My dad was an engineer, and I used to watch him have flashes of inspiration, sketch things out on a pad quickly, then spend weeks redrawing and recalculating. Strangely, I find word games and board games pretty tedious. But I really, really enjoy puzzling out a short story or an article or a novel chapter.

CD: What’s next for you?

WB: For now, I’m back to writing mostly fiction. I’m working on a second collection of stories and a new novel, both about travel and migration and how I think the 21st century has already redefined those concepts and literary traditions.

**

Will Boast is the author of, most recently, Daphne, a novel (Liveright/Norton, Feb. 2018). His fiction, reporting, and criticism have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The American Scholar, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications. He’s held a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford and a Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. He currently teaches at the University of Chicago.

“Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.” – Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love.

Winter is in full blast, doesn’t seem to be ending any time soon, but you know what? We couldn’t care less—we’re just too ecstatic about how the Midwestern Gothic Winter 2018 issue is coming together to care:

The gorgeous cover art is by Erica Williams.

And we’ve assembled a truly amazing lineup of contributors for this issue—check it out!

The Winter 2018 issue will be released on Tuesday, February 20, 2018—mark your calendars! Additionally, we’ll have copies at AWP 2018, in Tampa Florida, so if you’re coming down, stop by our table (T237) and pick one up!