Alethea Black's Nocturnal Habit

In the 39th in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, intern Phedra Deonarine interviews Alethea Black, author of I Knew You'd Be Lovely  (Broadway Books).

Phedra Deonarine: Is there a story collection you consider your ideal of what a collection
should be?

Alethea Black: An ideal collection would be one that surprises me and enlists my heart. I suppose I'm drawn to the same things in stories that attract me in people: charm, inventiveness, humor, compassion, intelligence. When I was first learning to write, collections by Lorrie Moore and Ralph Lombreglia moved me deeply. This year, I'm loving the new books by Jim Shepard and Steve Almond. My all-time greatest hits include Jesus' Son and The Things They Carried.

PD: Which story in your collection required the most drafts or posed the most technical problems?

AB: "Mollusk Makes a Comeback" It was one of the first stories I ever wrote, and it went through many, many drafts (and many bad titles, including "Doughnut Holes" and "Please Continue to Hold"). I don't save all the iterations of a story as I work—if I did, my desktop would be even more cluttered than it is—but the collected drafts of that story would almost be an archaeological record of someone learning how to write.

A story in the making: (L to R) dog, bone, dog

Conflict is the engine that keeps a story rolling—I sometimes tell aspiring writers that every story is about two dogs and one bone—yet "Mollusk" was a story about a woman in conflict with herself. Inner conflict is difficult to portray without committing any number of literary sins, and I struggled with a way to dramatize her paralysis and boredom without making the story itself boring and inert.

PD: What are you working on now?

AB: I'm still tweaking a short novel called The Key, even though it's officially finished and with my agent. (I think I've entered the editing phase Oscar Wilde described: "I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.") I also have notes for the next book, called The Lucky Brother, but I'm circling in the grass and have yet to lie down with it.

PD: Which writers were mentors to you as you worked on early versions of these
stories?

AB: I've had the most wonderful teachers, to whom I'll always be grateful: Lee K. Abbott, Alice Elliott Dark, David Gates, Joshua Henkin, Jeff Jackson, Thom Jones, and Meir Ribalow.

PD: What is your writing process like?

AB: I often write at night, in bed. I felt bad about writing in bed until I learned that Sid Mukherjee is also a bed-writer. I wish I could wean myself from the nocturnal schedule, but I suppose I should simply be grateful the work gets done. (I wrote about this habit recently) I have little method or ritual, and I confess I'm not a big self-disciplinarian. If I'm in the thick of a project, I might write all day for weeks, but there are also fallow weeks when I don't write at all.

PD: Were there any stories you wrote and wanted to include, but that didn’t make the cut for this volume?

AB: I have a triptych of short shorts that my editor and I briefly considered including, but we already had an Author's Notes appendix, telling the stories behind the stories; to have some sort of dim sum surprise as well felt too complicated. I'm now glad we didn't. I don't think flash fiction—my own, at least—provides as satisfying a narrative experience as longer stories. And I like to satisfy.

Story Prize Judge Louise Steinman: "Reading Is Crucial to My Life"

Story Prize intern Phedra Deonoarine recently caught up with Louise Steinman, one of this year’s three judges for The Story Prize (along with Sherman Alexie and Breon Micthell). Steinman is the curator of the award-winning ALOUD reading/conversation series for the Los Angeles Public Library, and co-director of the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC. She is the author of the memoir The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War — selection of several all-city reads programs— and The Knowing Body: The Artist as Storyteller in Contemporary Performance. Her articles and reviews are published widely and her essays have been anthologized, most recently in The Devil's Punchbowl: A Cultural & Geographic Map of California Today. She is also a contributing editor at The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Phedra Deonarine: What led you to your role as a curator for the ALOUD reading and conversation series at the Los Angeles Public Library?

Louise Steinman: Many things! I studied literature at Reed College, wrote my thesis on poet Robert Creeley. The Beat poet Lew Welch was a mentor. Took a slow bus to Naropa Institute (Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics) in 1976-- studied (and later performed) with Meredith Monk. For ten years I co-directed a performance company, SO&SO&SO&SO, based in Portland, Ore. I explored my own family stories through a theater of images and movement. My first book, The Knowing Body, is subtitled “The Artist as Storyteller in Contemporary Performance.” My graduate degree is in interdisciplinary arts. I'm interested in thinkers and writers and visionaries of all kinds.

And then there’s the element of luck. The Library Foundation of Los Angeles was looking for someone to create and produce public programs back in 1993, when the (rebuilt) Los Angeles Central Library reopened after a series of disastrous arson fires. I was in the right place at the right time; though in the beginning, I didn’t think I’d last six weeks.

That was eighteen years ago this fall and now we’ve presented over 1,000 free programs.

PD: How does you work as a writer relate to your work as a curator?

LS: My own work as a writer frequently explores memory and reconciliation. That interest is reflected in some of my choices for ALOUD. We recently hosted Leymah Gbowee, the Liberian peace activist. That same week she won the Nobel Peace Prize. Last week we presented Karl Marlantes, author of the great Vietnam war novel Matterhorn. His crucial new book is called What It is Like to Go to War. My own memoir, The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War, was an investigation into my father’s experience in the Pacific War and how it shaped our family life in Culver City, Calif., in the fifties. Marlantes writes about how we need “ceremony and counseling to help returning veterans move from the infinite back to the finite.” I’m concerned with the issues our returning vets now face. I’ve led writing workshops for veterans at the library. As Marlantes notes, by writing a story, one can take oneself by surprise, get past the usual defenses.

Reading is crucial to my life as a writer and also as a curator. My idea of heaven as a kid was to take a book and climb the neighbor’s Chinese elm and hang out there reading for hours. Reading is also part of my job. I’ll spend a day reading Alexandra Fuller before I interview her; or immerse myself in the work of poet Adam Zagajewski or Joan Didion before writing my introductions. It’s tonic for my own writing.

PD: The Web site for the ALOUD series offers a wealth of author podcasts. Which ones stand out for you and why?

A recent ALOUD program with Alexandra Fuller
and Louise Steinman

LS: The program on "The Short Story and the Art of Unknowing," with Sarah Shun-lien Bynum and Yiyun Li—moderated by Bridghe Mullins—is excellent. Carlos Fuentes is another good one—his grasp of world literature is so wonderful. I loved the program with poet Jane Hirshfield and physicist Sean Carroll on "The Nature of Observation" because they're each both canny and open about the differences and possible overlaps in how they view the phenomenal world. Our recent program with Anita Hill on the 20th anniversary of the Clarence Thomas hearings was very moving. Howard Rodman's interview of John Sayles makes for great listening. Danzy Senza and Attica Locke talking about "Navigating History: Truth in Fiction" was excellent and Michael Silverblatt's conversation with Marilynne Robinson unfolds in surprising ways. If you listen to the Isabel Allende podcast you'll hear her erotic dream about Antonio Banderas in a tortilla. (There's guacamole involved as well.)

PD: What are you hoping for from the three short story collections that will
 be the finalists for The Story Prize? 

LS: I love that feeling of being so deep in a story that you don't want it to end. I love when I enter a world that is familiar and yet strange. I love when I love a sentence or a paragraph so much I have to wake my husband up in the middle of the night and read it to him. 
I love when a story haunts me for days on end.

Piece of Cake: Nick Ripatrazone's Standing Oblations

By Phedra Deonarine

The Cake Shop in New York sells cake, but it’s also a bar, a record store, and a live music venue. In short, it seems an unlikely place for a reading. A deep stairwell leads down to a long room with a low ceiling and a stage decorated with yellow Christmas lights and red and gold tinsel. None of this, though, distracted from Paul Lisicky's and Nick Ripatrazone’s reading on Sunday for the release of Ripatrazone’s Oblations.

Author Nick Ripatrazone at the Cake Shop

Paul Lisicky is the author of Lawnboy and Famous Builder. He teaches at NYU. The work he read from was a primer on the value of travel for writers. He read first from work inspired by his stay in North Carolina while teaching at UNC Wilmington. Usually a first person stylist, Lisicky ventured into the third person for his new work. Highlights included a story about a boy who finds that he no longer loves the ocean as he once did and an unusual piece about an alligator who lived in a containment pond behind a Walmart. As always, Lisicky balanced an economy of language against the urge to lyricism in his work. He concluded with a pair of stories written in recent months.

Ripatrazone teaches AP classes in public school, recently completed his Masters of Fine Arts at Rutgers University-Newark, and works as an adjunct there. Yet despite all that, he still managed to put together Oblations, a collection of prose poetry published by Gold Wake Press.

The collection itself is broken into five parts: barns, baseball, miscellanea, work, and parishes. He spoke to this design during his reading. His move to rural New Jersey helped renew his interest in the tension between traditional rural living and the new energy which infuses such places with the arrival of transplants from the city.

Ripatrazone’s pieces unfold through a series of short utterances. His writing is pared down and gives an impressionistic sense of people, places, and language that few writers are patient enough to record. He finished with a reading from his new work, more conventional poetry than Oblations.

Tiphanie Yanique and Elizabeth Nunez at The Center for Fiction

By Phedra Deonarine

Tiphanie Yanique at The Center for Fiction, June 15, 2011

I recently went to The Center for Fiction’s conversation between Elizabeth Nunez and Tiphanie Yanique. The Center for Fiction is located on East 47th Street and has a wonderful bookstore full of new and used books. The discussion was held in a cozy room, which afforded a more intimate atmosphere between the audience and the two writers.

Yanique started the evening off by acknowledging the work that The Center for Fiction does for writers as “the only non-profit in the U.S. dedicated to celebrating fiction.” She read from the title story in her collection How to Escape from a Leper Colony. She then sat down to speak with Nunez, award-winning author of seven novels and fellow Caribbean writer.

Yanique’s first book spans the Caribbean, but Nunez pointed out a shared connection between the two writers: Both wrote about the Leper Colony located on the island of Chacachacare off the coast of Trinidad. It was interesting to hear these two writers speak of Chacachacare because even though I lived in Trinidad for eighteen years, I’ve never actually been to the island. Listening to Yanique describe the file cabinets located on that island made me think that perhaps I should visit one day.

Nunez requested that Yanique read a story that involved the beating of a young child. Both writers then discussed child abuse in the Caribbean and the role of the author in dealing with this charged issue. Nunez was also interested in Yanique’s choice of including a Caribbean jail cell in her story because the jails in the Caribbean are located near the sea and have the special torment of offering spectacular seaside views to the inmates.

Prompted by an audience member, Nunez discussed the seduction of writing in first person and the distance that writing in third person allows. Fielding a question from the audience, Yanique spoke on the burden placed on Caribbean writers to explain perceived strangeness in their stories. She used “calalloo” as an example and stated that if a reader was genuinely curious about calalloo they would research it. She went on to say that explaining such a dish would harm the authenticity of her characters who would never describe something so well known to them. This was a highly gratifying answer for me because I’m often confronted with the burden of explaining minor details in my own creative work.

Both writers also responded to audience questions on the benefits of MFA programs and the business of writing. The evening concluded, and I was able to ask Elizabeth Nunez to sign my copy of Grace, newly purchased from the Center for Fiction’s bookstore located on the ground floor.

New Assistants Phedra and Patrick Extend the Reach of The Story Prize

We're pleased to introduce two writing students from the Rutgers-Newark MFA program, Phedra Deonarine and Patrick Thomas Henry, have just joined The Story Prize as assistants:

Phedra Deonarine lived in Trinidad for eighteen years. She then moved to Vancouver where she earned a B.A. in English from the University of British Columbia. Her short story "Pelau" was long-listed for the 2010 CBC Literary Awards. She is currently the Truman Capote Fellow in the Creative Writing M.F.A. Program at Rutgers University-Newark.

Patrick Thomas Henry is a graduate of the Writers Institute at Susquehanna University and has also earned an MA in English literature at Bucknell University. Currently, he attends the MFA program in Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Newark.  His fiction is forthcoming in Revolution House and The Writing Disorder; he has published review essays in the journal Modern Language Studies, and he is the author of the critical head notes in On Writing Short Stories, edited by Tom Bailey. He blogs about literature and related topics at The Penguin in the Machine.



Sarah Bridgins, who is now a literary agent with the Francis Goldin Agency, served as an assistant for several years, and Brett Duquette, now working as an editor for Sterling Publishing, helped out more recently.

One of the main jobs of our assistants is to contact publishers about short story collections we're interested in reading to make them aware of our deadlines. They also provide another perspective on some of the collections we receive.

This time around, however, we're doing something different: Phedra and Patrick will also be attending literary events in New York City and elsewhere and reporting on them for this blog. Other sites, such as Electric Literature's The Outlet have been doing this for some time. It seems like a good way to broaden our focus on short fiction and to support bookstores, institutions, reading series, and literary magazines that are essential to the short story.

If you'd like TSP to cover your event, please feel free to contact us at info@thestoryprize.org (a week before the event, if possible).