Brenda Peynado’s fiction and nonfiction appear or are forthcoming in The O.Henry Prize Stories 2015, The Threepenny Review, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Cimarron Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from Florida State University, where she held a Kingsbury Fellowship and was Fiction Editor of The Southeast Review. Last year, she lived in the Dominican Republic on a Fulbright Grant, writing a novel. Currently, she is a Ph.D. student at the University of Cincinnati. Her short story, “Blue Baby,” appears in MAR 35.1.

Quick! Summarize your story in 10 words or fewer.

Ambulance with an asphyxiating baby gets stuck in the clouds.

What can you share about this piece prior to its MAR publication?

One of my good friends in graduate school was telling me about how her daughter was born and why the daughter still had lung problems that would send them all to the hospital periodically. She described a mad dash to a hospital across town after giving birth. It stuck in my head for awhile—that this amazing, beautiful kid could have easily died that night and how hard it would be if I was her mother to let go of that miracle. So, a few weeks later I was rushing to go to work in a similar fever dream of a mad dash, and the story just came to me in an outpour, these parents that loved their daughter and would do anything to save her. I sent it to my friend afterwards, and she was quite amused because she’s a very realist writer, and wondered how this story could have spun out from what she said. And then she gave it her blessing.

You’re at a family reunion and some long-lost relative asks about your writing. What do you say?

Oh no! This is my worst nightmare, and it happens all the time, especially last year, when I was in the Dominican Republic on a Fulbright. I have a large family of brilliant historically- and politically-minded folks who are invested in the 1965 civil war and invasion I am writing about. Many of them remember it first-hand. So I would be at dinner and the first thing people said was “So, we hear you’re writing a book. Why are you writing a book?” and then the next thing they’d say was “Here’s how you write your book.” They would tell me exactly which real life person should be a character; someone even outlined chapters they thought I should include. This wasn’t even just family, but people I’d never met before. The main problem explaining what I was doing, however, is that I write magical realism. How to tell them that the story was about the war, yes, but also about a girl that could see all possible futures and her mother who could reverse engineer any wound she saw, back to the face of the person that shot the gun or wielded the knife or launched the mortar? I’m hoping this slant version of the war will also get at the truth of living in those times, but explaining what I am doing, in Spanish, no less, was terrifying.

What do you consider your biggest writing-related success?

Perhaps this will sound strange, but loving what I do is something I treasure. I view it as a success, because I don’t think work-love for writing is always automatic for most people, and certainly not for me. I did start off loving writing when I was in high school. I’d always be writing strange stories and starting novels when I was supposed to be doing math. But then when I began taking workshops, writing stories turned into torture. It was a strange ambivalence, because I left a great tech job in IT security to go get my MFA. Party conversations in grad school often recounted how much torture writing was. It wasn’t until I finished my MFA that I stopped thinking about my workshop peers as my audience, stopped thinking about what they thought was worthy, and instead just wrote what I actually wanted to write, which it turned out was not realism. So my work ended up blossoming in all these strange ways. But then I had to figure out how to write a new kind of story, and beginning again was quite rocky territory—except that this time around I loved what I was doing. I turn back to realism every once in awhile, and the task is sustaining my joy even for those stories.

Tell us one strange thing about yourself that does not involve writing.

I bring my dog with me everywhere, if I can help it.

Tell us one strange thing about yourself that does involve writing.

My partner and I write each other children’s stories, starring each other. It started when I lived in the Dominican Republic for a year.

Do you have another favorite piece of writing in this MAR issue? If so, name it and tell us why.

I love “Puffin Season” by Kendra Langford Shaw, and the other stories were great, too. MAR’s aesthetic tends towards the uncanny and surreal, and it’s really exciting. It’s one of the reasons I keep picking it up. Kendra’s story reminds me of Seth Freid’s stories or Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” especially the horror we feel at the end for deeply embedded human traits, how cruel and desperate we can turn. This story haunted me after I put it down.

Thanks for the interview, Brenda!
Laura Maylene Walter, Fiction Editor

Becky Hagenston’s first collection of stories, A Gram of Mars, won Sarabande Books’ Mary McCarthy Prize; her second collection, Strange Weather, won the Spokane Prize and was published by Press 53. Her stories have appeared in Subtropics, Crazyhorse, The Southern Review, Indiana Review, and many other journals, as well as the O. Henry anthology. She is an Associate Professor of English at Mississippi State University, where she edits the Jabberwock Review.

Last year, Hagenston’s flash fiction piece, “Owls,” was a runner-up in our Fineline Competition, as selected by judge Lindsay Hunter, and appears in issue 35.1.

Quick! Summarize your piece in 10 words or fewer. Extra points if your answer rhymes.

Owl puke = gross fluff.
What if it was other stuff?

What was your reaction upon receiving your MAR acceptance?

I did some jumping up and down. I called my parents and said, “Remember those mouse parts we used to find barfed up on the pavement? I’ve put them to good use.”

Your biggest writing-related regret?

My mother sent me a copy-paper-box full of my journals from sixth grade to college. (“Can I read them?” she asked. “NO,” I said.) I have no idea what’s in them, but there sure are a lot. I used to entertain delusions that I could take my youthful diaries and turn them into Literature, but now I know that just the writing itself is what mattered: observing the world and getting those observations down on paper. I’ve had the box for six months now, and I still can’t bear to look at what my younger self was up to. I feel like maybe I don’t need to know. So while I don’t regret writing these journals at all, I regret not burning them already.

Tell us one strange thing about yourself that does involve writing.

I have a very demanding cat who likes to jump on my keyboard and bite me when he wants to play (which is often), so some of my writing routine involves periodically leaping up from my desk and doing a lap around the house with a piece of string.

Do you have another favorite piece of writing in this MAR issue? If so, name it and tell us why.

This is such an amazing issue that it’s really hard to choose a favorite. But I’ve been intrigued for years by the Pre-Raphaelite painters and their models, so I especially love the poem “Portrait of Rossetti Obsessed” by Kyle McCord. That final image is so lovely and precise, capturing a moment when obsession meets craft: “He whitens the loaves of her fingers, / devotedly laboring / over each imperfect tip.”

Can you show us a photo of you holding your MAR contributor’s copy?

Here’s a location shot! MAR goes to Amsterdam.

Thanks, Becky!
Laura Maylene Walter, Fiction Editor

Yael Massen is a first-year MFA student in poetry at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her work can be found in Ilanot Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and DIALOGIST. Her poem, “The Cartographer’s Daughter,” appears in MAR 35.1.

What can you share about this piece prior to its MAR publication?

“The Cartographer’s Daughter” is actually an ekphrastic poem, based on an origami dress made from an old map. The artist, Elisabeth Lecourt, has a series of origami maps in her collection, “Les robes géographiques.” The map-dress that serves as inspiration for this poem is titled, “Le Chateau deu Map of the World.”

What was your reaction upon receiving your MAR acceptance?

I was very excited for MAR to be my first print publication. My mentor, Cori Winrock, was chosen as Editor’s Choice for the James Wright Poetry Award several years ago. It was pretty special to celebrate a shared journal-milestone in our writing lives.

You’re at a family reunion and some long-lost relative asks about your writing. What do you say?

I usually tell people I write about love, in all forms. Love between friends, love between family, self-love, love for one’s country, etc. I am also interested in the consequences of love, the pain of betrayal, questioning the authenticity of our feelings of admiration or disappointment, and the magnitude to which we feel strong emotions.

Your biggest writing-related regret?

I tend to feel anxious before and after a writer gives a reading. I am never quite sure what to do or say before an author reads, and I don’t feel authentic when making small talk. I usually leave shortly after a reading ends. I wish I would spend more time talking to writers whose work really affects me, and it’s something I’ve decided to work on in the future.

Tell us one strange thing about yourself that does involve writing.

I don’t like people to know that I am writing, and I don’t like to be asked what I am working on. When I would return home during summer breaks from college, I’d sneak into the kitchen at 3 A.M. and write by the light of my refrigerator’s ice dispenser.

Thanks, Yael!
Laura Maylene Walter, Fiction Editor