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MAR Asks, George Choundas Answers

How can you possibly not read a contributor interview in which the writer describes his story as “Little Red Riding Hood kicks all manner of ass?” So please, read on and learn more about George Choundas, whose fiction and nonfiction appear in over twenty-five publications, including The Southern Review, The American Reader, and Subtropics. He is winner of the New Millennium Award for Fiction (Winter 2014-2015), a former FBI agent, and half Cuban and half Greek. His darkly imaginative short story, “The Girl Who Not Once Cried Wolf,” appears in MAR 35.1.

Quick! Summarize your story in 10 words or fewer.

Little Red Riding Hood kicks all manner of ass.

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

My daughter is four years old. She likes her bedtime stories. I read them to her sometimes, and sometimes I make them up. In the fall of 2013 I launched into a telling of Little Red Riding Hood. I realized by Sentence Three that Riding Hood had no need of hunters. And that Claire—born in the Year of the Tiger, on Bastille Day, with enormous eyes of mischief green—had no need of stories suggesting she was less than. I told her a different version. The story grew each time I told it. Longer, more detailed. Finally I wrote it down. I spent nine months revising and editing. And engineering progressively more disgusting ways to describe wolf innards.

What was your reaction upon receiving your MAR acceptance?

You read and write short fiction for years—decades. For decades you admire this icon called Mid-American Review and the stories in it because they’re good and, well, it’s iconic. And one day you receive an email that this same institution would love—“love”—to publish your writing. You do not fully comprehend this. You cannot reconcile it with what you know. So you do three things: First, you keep your reply email short for fear of writing something that inadvertently confirms some background suspicion on the editors’ part that this acceptance is not simply implausible but in fact a mistake. Second, you continue thereafter to play along and pretend everything’s cool, everything’s as it should be. Third, you show fate some gratitude the best way writers can: you keep writing.

My reaction? One day I’m daydreaming about space and rocketships, the next I’m in an astronaut suit bearing a NASA insignia going, This is fucked up.

What do you consider your biggest writing-related success?

I recently learned I’d won the New Millennium Award for Fiction for a story that originally appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review. That was kind of incredible. Then I learned that the award’s founding editor, Don Williams, called it among the best stories to ever win the prize. That was kind and incredible.

Your biggest writing-related regret?

That I did not realize at a much earlier age that writing has little to do with knowing what to write about, or with having something to write about, but rather with writing and having written and determining to write some more and thereby finding out, to your surprise and (ideally) delight, what there always was to write about.

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

I can’t shoot pool or play a musical instrument without sticking out my tongue. It’s an unconscious tendency over which I have no control. It’s as if my tongue needs to get out and aloft to receive some kind of homing signal. This is a problem because my son five years ago agreed to play the cello if I learned along with him, and now I’m the one whom the instructor gently chides for resembling at our summer recitals an overheated dog, and at our winter recitals a deranged one.

Thanks for an entertaining interview, George!
Laura Maylene Walter, Fiction Editor

Accepted: “Inaccurate (self)Portraits of Water by the Artist Victor Vaughn” by Travis Vick

In our “Accepted” column, Mid-American Review editors discuss why they selected stories, poems, or essays for publication. In this post, Assistant Fiction Editor Lydia Munnell discusses a story that appears in our Fall 2014 issue. (Above image: Ollbac)

Genre: Short fiction
Title: “Inaccurate (self)Portraits of Water by the Artist Victor Vaughn”
Author: Travis Vick
MAR issue: 35.1
First line: “A popular art critic once wrote of Victor: ‘I guess all things, even art, must come to seed.’”

From its first page, “Inaccurate (self)Portraits of Water by the Artist Victor Vaughn,” introduces four different voices: the third person narrator, the voice of an art critic, the curatorial description of a painting, and the voice of the artist—Victor himself. The rules are clear and the principal figure is revealed. Victor Vaughn is a product of fragments; it’s the structure that’s always central.

And as the story progresses, Victor’s life and history are relayed in his paintings, in the musings of his critics, in his own words offered by way of interviews. In that way, the act of reading “Inaccurate (self)Portraits …” mimics what it means to understand a life—that people are remembered through fragments and episodes. And while author Travis Vick’s structure is remarkable here, it functions as well as it does because it contains the traditional stuff of great stories too: compelling characters with complicated histories, desires, ghosts.

The specters, here, are Victor’s parents. His art and life are haunted by his mother, drowned in a nearby lake; his father, hung in the barn after the death of his wife; and Mr. Powell the neighbor whose house burned and who is linked to a single fond memory of Victor’s father. And Victor maintains his own shadow over the story. In death he is remembered by his critics, his work, his widow.

These fragments are balanced skillfully. Vick maintains distinctive voices for each piece of the narrative, and the look of the thing—its format on the page—signals changes in speaker, commands a different kind of reading. Beyond the formatting and the voices, though, the fragments work because of deftly woven images. Victor is a painter, and “Inaccurate (self)Portraits…” is visually alive. Upon the death of Victor’s father, the farm animals he forgot to shut in are left, “cantering augustly” across neighbors’ lawns. And the water death of Victor’s mother determines much of the story’s imagery. “And, when out in public,” says one of Victor’s critics, “doesn’t he always seem to be moving about a room more by the aid of his hands than of his feet, as if lost, as if swimming through dark water?’”

In the end, to read “Inaccurate (self)Portraits of Water by the Artist Victor Vaughn” is to wade. The structure commands that readers adjust their pacing, that they move through it in slowly, steadily. But carefully curated images cement the fragments together. Here are water and fire: the elements, the stuff of great paintings.

What MAR editors said about “Inaccurate (self)Portraits of Water by the Artist Victor Vaughn”:

“I like the repetition and the sense of cataloging his life, and I think the author uses effective snippets/portraits/scenes to show who Vaughn was.”

“The many voices all felt clear and distinct, and the episodes were well chosen. They illuminated Vaughn as well as the particular world of the story.”

“The repetition worked well, and the multi-genre feel was very intriguing. … The writing was strong and inventive.”

Lydia Munnell is pursuing her MFA at Bowling Green State University, where she serves
as assistant fiction editor of Mid-American Review. She comes to BGSU by way of
Cleveland, where she hosted a weekly folk radio show called Revival and wrote for
Cleveland Scene magazine.

MAR Asks, Doug Ramspeck Answers

Today, we’re pleased to introduce Doug Ramspeck, whose poem, “Unblessing,” appears in MAR 35.1. Ramspeck is the author of four poetry books. His most recent collection, Original Bodies, was selected for the Michael Waters Poetry Prize and is published by Southern Indiana Review Press. Two earlier books also received awards: Mechanical Fireflies (Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize), and Black Tupelo Country (John Ciardi Prize). Individual poems have appeared in journals that include The Kenyon Review, Slate, The Southern Review, and The Georgia Review. He is an associate professor at The Ohio State University at Lima, where he teaches creative writing.

He also apparently plays tic-tac-toe with chickens. Read on to learn more!

Quick! Summarize your poem in 10 words or fewer.

Cut-up-for-pieces poem (this needs explaining).

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

One of my favorite methods of producing a poem is to take, at random, four or five poems from my “Failed-Poem Folder,” cut them up for pieces, then combine them into what I hope will be a coherent whole. That is how “Unblessing” was produced. Each time I try this approach, I am amazed by how, when I am done, I am able to convince (delude?) myself into imagining that the pieces longed to be together all along, and my role was as simple matchmaker.

What was your reaction upon receiving your MAR acceptance?

My wife likes to claim that my response to acceptance by any journal is akin to the Groucho Marx quotation: “I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.” In other words, she claims that my evaluation of the journal’s prestige is reduced in my mind because I received the acceptance notice. In truth, though, I was delighted to be included.

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

I like to tell the story about when my first book of poems was published, and I told my daughter about the royalty payment I would receive for each copy that was sold. She did some quick calculations in her head, and said, “That means that if you sell a million copies, you will make _____!” I didn’t have the heart to explain just how many zeroes she was off in that estimate.

What do you consider your biggest writing-related success?

After I had a poem published in Poetry Salzburg Review, I was contacted by a student who was writing a long essay about the poem. She sent me the paper when it was completed, and it was a very nicely-written piece. Of course, it had almost nothing to do with anything I had thought about when writing the poem, which I took to mean that my child was now making its way independently into the world, and didn’t need my guidance any longer. There was something both very gratifying and a little lonely in that. My actual daughter is teaching 9^th grade in Micronesia this year, and I feel exactly the same way about her.

Your biggest writing-related regret?

I suffered from horrible and self-inflicted writer’s block as a fiction writer from about age thirty to age fifty, when I began writing poetry.

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

When I tell the story about how my wife once lost at tic-tac-toe to a chicken in San Marcos, Texas, I seem to think that I come off better in the story because I explain that I was able to tie the chicken.

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

I don’t like to imagine that I actually write anything I produce. I simply listen to the voices in my head and write down what they say. I am, in short, an amanuensis. This way, it seems to me, I take neither credit nor blame for the work that my fingers transcribe.

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

I am a sucker for a beautiful death poem, and “Stillborn Lamb,” by Sarah Burke, is about as beautiful as they come.

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

Pets with MAR: RosyJo

The MAR blog has a new design to reflect the current issue, and this black-and-white beauty is here to help us look our best. Meet RosyJo:

RosyJo belongs to MAR 35.1 contributor Cynthia Marie Hoffman, whose poem, “Open Window,” appears in the issue’s special section for prose poems, flash fiction, and everything in-between. Hoffman points out that RosyJo is clearly head-bonking MAR because she loves it. We’ll take the compliment!

Want to include your pet in this special Pets with MAR blog series? Simply send your photo, along with your pet’s name and any other relevant details, to mar@bgsu.edu with “Pets with MAR” in the subject line.

MAR Asks, Rebecca Foust Answers

Today on the blog we have Rebecca Foust, whose poem, “Dynamic Response of Multi-Layered Soil Media in the Frequency Domain,” appears in MAR 35.1 and was recently reprinted in Poetry Daily. Foust’s fifth book, Paradise Drive, wonthe 2015 Press 53 Award for Poetry and will be released in April. Here, she discusses living in Robert Frost’s house, writing while miserable, and how proofreading seventy pages of scientific writing inspired her MAR poem.

Quick! Summarize your poem in 10 words or fewer.

Existential musings on geodynamic principles, rendered in long-line couplets.

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

The poetry workshop I attended in the summer of 2013 at the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown was part of a consciously-adopted program to wean myself away from writing in form. I’d taught my grad school class three years earlier on the sonnet, and for a time became obsessed with the form. I learned to tell a Miltonic from a conventional volta, a Spenserian from a Shakespearian rhyme pattern, and a curtal from a caudal sonnet (but don’t ask me about any of those things now). I was transfixed by Hopkins, Herbert and Donne. I suffered with Anne Bradstreet and cackled and winced my way through Berryman’s Dream Songs (OK they have 18 lines but I’m not the first reader to see them as variations on the sonnet form). I reveled in Rilke. Gobbled up anthologies (Penguin’s is the best) and ferreted out sonnets written by modern poets, by contemporary poets, and poets (like Pound, Merwin and cummings) who I never in a million years would have guessed were sonneteers. And along the way wrote hundreds of my own fourteen-liners. Some evolved into tolerable sonnets, and 80 of the best went into Paradise Drive, the book that will be released by Press 53 this April. Like many other writers, I found an unexpected freedom a discipline that, in the process of forcing me to choose words for sound rather than sense, unhooked the carabiner of logical thought.

Eventually, though, I began to feel the constriction of writing poems that Annie Finch noted can fit on the palm of the hand and William Drummond likened to “the bed of Procrustes” I wanted more room. I wanted my poems to be bigger, to have room to get up and walk around, to breathe. But no matter how I tried, I still found myself coughing up neat little bundles of bones wrapped up in skin and fur. When I began dreaming in sonnet, I knew it was time to take steps. So I signed up for the generative workshop taught by Victoria Redel, whose fierce, funny poems are mostly in free-verse.

It was one of those rare workshop experiences where the dynamics were just right and the class gelled into a perfection of intimacy, inspiration and late afternoon swims at Herring Cove. Midway through the week, Redel gave us an assignment to write a new poem using long lines all in one-syllable words.

No way was I going to show up the next day without a new poem. But I had a problem. My daughter, a grad student in Structural Engineering, had just emailed me her master’s thesis, asking could I please proofread it by the next day. I also had anotherproblem: no internet connection. So that night I read 70 pages of scientific writing on my phone and also wrote the assigned poem, pretty much at the same time.

It took hours to slog through those pages, which might as well have been written in Greek and one page of which—all equations—actually was. But now and then its language resonated with a weird kind of math-music, and some bits were interesting. Who knew that waves are constantly moving through the ground we stand on and that some of those undulations are called “Love Waves?” Every time I saw something like that, I copied it down.

Later I focused on writing the poem. Because it was 3 am and I was exhausted, I began by throwing in the towel and giving it the same name as the thesis. Then I played around with the extracted lines, rendering the technical jargon into the simplest possible one-syllable vernacular. I got the idea of writing in couplets, using the first line to hold the quoted material and the second its truncated translation. All the time, of course thinking about my daughter—the child she’d been, the young woman and engineer she was about to become.

That first draft ran to three pages and was a holy mess, but I had a new poem that didn’t look anything like a sonnet, and yea the sun was beginning to rise. So I fueled up on espresso at The Wired Puppy and headed over to the FAWC student center to print it out. My memory is that all the poems read in workshop that day were very good first drafts. I know I left feeling like I had something worth working on.

The following week, “Dynamic Response” got put through its paces at a second FAWC workshop led by one of the best teachers on revision I know—Martha Rhodes. It was Martha who, noticing that the epigraph was after “a daughter’s master’s thesis” asked “It’s your daughter, right? Why not just say that? I changed the “a” to “my” and then felt able to allow the speaker to address her daughter directly as “you,” allowing intimacy to offer counterpoint to the extreme impersonality of the lines using technical jargon. Subsequent revisions cut all but the most interesting lines from the thesis, and where insistence on one-syllable words resulted in clunky syntax, I allowed polysyllabic words to sneak back in. Summer ended, and I put the poem away for a few months. When I looked at it in November it seemed ready, so I sent it out to MAR and two other journals.

What was your reaction upon receiving your MAR acceptance?

That was in July. I was the Dartmouth Poet in Residence at the time, living in Robert Frost’s house in Franconia, NH and picking up my mail once a week from the Frost Place’s administrative offices a few miles away. When handed the fat envelope, I acted nonchalant. But I was elated. For one thing I’m a fan of MAR and have been sending poems there regularly for the past six years. For another, getting a poem accepted on the third try is not exactly my norm. And finally, the acceptance was like earning a chip at AA—something tangible I could hold onto when I felt myself slipping back into the habit of spitting out owl pellets instead of poems that had some meat on their bones and could breathe and bleed.

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

I don’t write it, it writes me, so quit bitching.

What do you consider your biggest writing-related success?

Getting to live alone in Robert Frost’s house all summer before going on to a residency at MacDowell last year was amazing. But the best thing has been to watch the emergence of two poets I’ve been working with over last few years. One, a young man who crossed the Sonoran desert when he was seven in order to reunite with his parents in this country, may be the youngest poet ever to wait tables at Bread Loaf. Last year he graduated with an MFA from NYU, and a few weeks ago he received an NEA grant. My other mentee lives in a retirement home and won’t tell me her age. But she just published her first chapbook, a moving and delicately-wrought slave narrative called Unicorn in Captivity. These things feel bigger than anything that’s happened to me.

Your biggest writing-related regret?

I’m supposed to say here that I regret not taking my writing seriously until I was in my fifties, but that’s not true. Things have happened exactly as and when they should have. Sometimes I regret the decision, made in 2007, to start publishing my work. Writing was more fun—and pure—when I was doing it without any expectation of seeing it in print. On the other hand I was writing like one poem a year, and not really trying very hard.

Your biggest non-writing-related regret?

Wasting three years in law school? Or maybe moving, 36 years ago, so far away from my family in Pennsylvania? But relocating to CA is also one of the best things I did in my life so it’s hard to say.

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

I collected rocks, fossils, and artifacts obsessively for the first 25 years of my life, and then carried that collection around with me from house to house for three decades. Last year we moved again, and when the guy finished loading it onto his truck, I gave it to him—just like that.

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

I write best when I am miserable. It can be emotional or physical. The corollary is that when I feel great, my writing pretty much sucks.

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

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