ISSN 2159-922X
ROLiT NEWS
Vol 2.3
ROLiT NEWS
Vol 2.3
Mimi Ferebee speaks to not only Gayla Mills & Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas,
but also Keith Moul about their recently released
RED OCHRE PRESS chapbooks
and the literary tools that helped them along their publication journeys.
but also Keith Moul about their recently released
RED OCHRE PRESS chapbooks
and the literary tools that helped them along their publication journeys.
***Interview with Finite Author Gayla Mills
Mimi Ferebee: Gayla, please tell our readers what inspired Finite? The motivation that founds it?
Gayla Mills: I’ve been writing short essays in my writing group each week for the last several years, expanding and developing some and abandoning others. So far I’ve accumulated a couple of hundred pieces. Although I’ve published several individually, I was looking to combine others into a longer form. The RED OCHRE Chapbook Contest inspired me to look for a common theme and connect them. This collection includes pieces spanning five years.
Mimi Ferebee: When you read through this collection, what is its strongest feature? I know editors typically like to leave this to the readers, but I always feel like we never hear what the author intended for us to take home. What do you take home from this work?
Gayla Mills: As the title suggests, life is finite, and I often find myself treasuring things more when I’m conscious of their fragility and transience. So the essays that move me most are ones in which I’m embracing objects, events, or people—a bouquet of flowers, a walk in the woods, fading youth, someone I’m close to—at the moment when I contemplate losing them. I feel more intense and alive because of it, I suppose, even though it can come across as rather dark. Because everything we’re given is finite, we’re always having to make choices—and that process of choosing is what defines our lives and selves.
Mimi Ferebee: And at what point did you decide to pursue publication for this piece? I think it’s important for authors to speak on this—the moment they decide that a work is finished enough to seek publication.
Gayla Mills: I decided this was ready for publication on the day of the contest deadline. You don’t finish things—you just stop working on them. But most of these essays had gone through at least ten drafts, and I’d gotten feedback from two readers, so I felt that they were far enough along.
Mimi Ferebee: I like that: “you don’t finish things—you just stop working on them.” With that mentality, how many compilations have you stopped working on to pursue publication, or is this your first chapbook?
Gayla Mills: This is my first chapbook, but certainly not my last. It’s given me a boost to apply for a writing fellowship and to look for other themes in my work that bind my essays together. I’ve come to accept that I write in a short form, and that’s not likely to change.
Mimi Ferebee: Whenever I have authors one-on-one, I always reach out to them to give fresh advice/tips to our novice and experienced writers. If you may oblige, what are your top three literary resources? I’m interested, particularly, in the current tools that help you refine your craft as a writer (e.g. websites, publishing lists, dictionaries, writing workshops, books, speeches, etc.). If you have any underground/excellent, not-as-well-known resources, please fill us in.
Gayla Mills: I depend on other writers for so much. My local weekly writing group meets, writes, reads aloud, and gives feedback. I’ve also met a community of regional writers through an annual artist retreat in Virginia, and we’ve been getting together a few times a year. These groups provide encouragement, a creative stew in which to work, and above all, lasting friendships. Ultimately, I think that what we do is secondary to how we do it, and writing has become far more socially and emotionally enriching than I ever could have imagined.
On a practical level, I depend on the creative writing opportunities listserv on yahoo groups. Getting an email each morning with five or six listings motivates me to polish and publish rather than letting my work languish on my hard drive. Since I index my essays by topic and word count, it makes it pretty easy to send something off in response to a journal posting. I think that’s how I found out about RED OCHRE LiT.
Mimi Ferebee: Yes, yahoo groups has been very beneficial to me as well, not only as an editor, but as a writer too. It’s a great literary resource—one that many people don’t know about. But before I let you go, tell us what are you’re currently up to. We definitely want to know where you’re headed.
Gayla Mills: I’d like to see what other options are available for collections of short essays. It may be that chapbooks are just the thing for me. I have several themes that I have already developed among my current essays, with plenty more ideas to flesh them out. For example, I recently traveled to Vietnam, and I’ve written one essay about that experience. I could add this to other pieces and create a travel collection. I also have a couple dozen essays I wrote during the last year of my father’s life, and I’d like to put those together into a polished form.
I post all my published work on my website, www.gaylamills.com. I don’t have a blog because I’m juggling too much to put together something like that on a regular basis. I’d rather keep my less polished pieces on my computer, wait until an editor has given me a stamp of approval, then post them. It’s old-fashioned, but it works for me.
Mimi Ferebee: Well, that works for us too! I encourage readers to check out Gayla’s website. We are so thrilled to be able to showcase your work and I wish you much success as you polish more collections and pursue publication.
***Interview with Before I Go To Sleep Author Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas
Mimi Ferebee: Carol, would you please tell our readers what inspired Before I Go To Sleep? The motivation that founds it?
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas: Thank you so much for the honor of this interview, Mimi. It’s interesting to read my work with the intent of putting some distance between myself and the writing in order to gain an objective perspective to the poems as well as the motives behind them, individually and as a compilation. I think my writing teeters between the feelings of melancholy and hope. I draw from my own life as a catalyst at the start and somewhere along the way; the piece takes on a life of its own. There’s a point during the process where something is triggered internally and a force guides the focus or tone of the piece. Often it may turn out completely different than intended and that can be a good thing if the unexpected happens. I think predictability in writing can be mundane for the reader and the author. I love it when there’s a sense of a subtle liberation taking place beyond the conception, allowing me to free myself and embrace the entire experience.
Mimi Ferebee: So when you read through this compilation, what’s its strongest feature? Typically editors like to leave this to the readers, but I always feel like readers never hear what the author intended for them to take away from their words. At this point in the book, readers have read and interpreted the pieces for themselves, so if you don’t mind giving a little more insight, what do you take home from this work?
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas: As to the strongest feature of the manuscript as a whole, I would hope a sense of gratitude comes through, but I would also hope that my voice is bringing something unique or distinctive to the experience of reading this collection. That would indeed be the most rewarding thing to hear a reader say. I would love a reader to walk away from this manuscript feeling good about their own life, maybe seeing the world and the people they love with a little more insight and thankfulness, as in the poem Before I Go to Sleep, which I wrote about my youngest child. My experience of being a mother, wife and daughter has made me the person I am today. I can only hope I’ve gained a somewhat compelling awareness that comes through, making my work distinctive and impactful. I would also hope that a reader would get a sense of my exploration into some darker themes as well, as I’ve always been fascinated with the work of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.
Mimi Ferebee: At what point did you decide to pursue publication for this piece? I think it’s important for authors to speak on this—the moment they decide that a work is finished enough to seek publication.
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas: That’s a hard one, I wonder if there’s ever a point any author feels their work is really done. I do think there’s an end stage where I feel I can’t make the poem any more authentic or any more true to what it’s supposed to be and that’s when I know I’ve done enough tinkering. It’s ready to meet the world and fend for itself, good or bad. As far as being ready for publication, I wait for the press that seems like the right fit, a press where I respect the authors published, knowing I will be proud to be a part of that family. It’s important to me that my work finds the perfect home.
Mimi Ferebee: Is this your first chapbook? If not, how different was your journey this time around? What did you learn that will buttress you for your next publication process?
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas: No, I’ve done several. Every time I finish a collection I become eager to start the journey for the next one. Usually one poem or idea will launch the grouping of poems and often I find that poems written during one timeframe speak well to each other as though an invisible thread has linked one to the next until they sort of float together making each piece a little stronger for it.
Mimi Ferebee: I love that concept of an invisible thread, almost as if each work then motivates what seems like a sister piece, until she takes on her own individual world. It’s fascinating. And this leads pretty well into my next segment. Whenever I have authors one-on-one, I always reach out to them to give fresh advice/tips to our novice and experienced writers. With such a strong creative foundation, I would appreciate you talking a little about your top three literary resources. I’m interested, particularly, in the current tools that help you refine your craft as a writer (e.g. websites, publishing lists, dictionaries, writing workshops, books, speeches, etc.).
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas: First, I’m a big believer in workshops. I have joined several online writers’ groups over the years. It’s always a great reality check to see how your work stands up to others or if your poems are meeting the criteria and formula that your peers deem worthy. I also find reading poetry through the ages from the old masters along with contemporary journals and poets of today, creates a wonderful spark within thus becoming an essential tool for improvement and ongoing development of the art of poetry. Writing is such a solitary journey, yet there’s a very intimate partnership that develops between the reader and the author. It’s a pairing of the two where a relationship is formed; a trust is developed, where each experience is private but a connection takes place in the heart and mind of both.
Secondly, if you are able to find a mentor or teacher to work with you individually, there is nothing more valuable than that one on one type of instruction and or criticism. I’ve been fortunate to have worked with some amazing teachers online. I think this has definitely helped me to push myself beyond what I’ve felt comfortable with. It’s important to try new things, get out of that safety zone and write in different personas, that’s when the magic happens.
Lastly, I find doing writing exercises or challenges keeps me thinking in fresh or new ways. Again, this is imperative if you want your work to maintain a renewed and captivating style.
Mimi Ferebee: Thank-you for that advice, Carol. I’m a huge proponent of workshops myself, especially local ones where you get a chance to sit down and really discuss your work with fellow literature lovers. It’s so constructive and rewarding, also, to be included in someone else’s journey. But before I let you go, we all want to know what you are currently up to? As a six-time Pushcart nominee and a 2010 Best of the Net nominee, I imagine you’re working on yet another nomination! Where can we look to find either your most recent work or pieces that are forthcoming?
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas: I am currently working on a collection titled, Housewife’s Psychic Dream, that I hope to be submitting soon and I’ve just finished a book titled Epistemology of an Odd Girl recently published by March Street Press. I’m very proud of this book as it took me a few years to put the collection together, but a part of me lives within the pages of every book I write and this is certainly the case with Before I Go to Sleep. I’m so honored that you selected it for publication.
Mimi Ferebee: It was our pleasure, and we thank you so much for your interview. Good luck with all your upcoming projects—we truly look forward to reading Housewife’s Psychic Dream.
Mimi Ferebee: Carol, would you please tell our readers what inspired Before I Go To Sleep? The motivation that founds it?
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas: Thank you so much for the honor of this interview, Mimi. It’s interesting to read my work with the intent of putting some distance between myself and the writing in order to gain an objective perspective to the poems as well as the motives behind them, individually and as a compilation. I think my writing teeters between the feelings of melancholy and hope. I draw from my own life as a catalyst at the start and somewhere along the way; the piece takes on a life of its own. There’s a point during the process where something is triggered internally and a force guides the focus or tone of the piece. Often it may turn out completely different than intended and that can be a good thing if the unexpected happens. I think predictability in writing can be mundane for the reader and the author. I love it when there’s a sense of a subtle liberation taking place beyond the conception, allowing me to free myself and embrace the entire experience.
Mimi Ferebee: So when you read through this compilation, what’s its strongest feature? Typically editors like to leave this to the readers, but I always feel like readers never hear what the author intended for them to take away from their words. At this point in the book, readers have read and interpreted the pieces for themselves, so if you don’t mind giving a little more insight, what do you take home from this work?
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas: As to the strongest feature of the manuscript as a whole, I would hope a sense of gratitude comes through, but I would also hope that my voice is bringing something unique or distinctive to the experience of reading this collection. That would indeed be the most rewarding thing to hear a reader say. I would love a reader to walk away from this manuscript feeling good about their own life, maybe seeing the world and the people they love with a little more insight and thankfulness, as in the poem Before I Go to Sleep, which I wrote about my youngest child. My experience of being a mother, wife and daughter has made me the person I am today. I can only hope I’ve gained a somewhat compelling awareness that comes through, making my work distinctive and impactful. I would also hope that a reader would get a sense of my exploration into some darker themes as well, as I’ve always been fascinated with the work of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.
Mimi Ferebee: At what point did you decide to pursue publication for this piece? I think it’s important for authors to speak on this—the moment they decide that a work is finished enough to seek publication.
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas: That’s a hard one, I wonder if there’s ever a point any author feels their work is really done. I do think there’s an end stage where I feel I can’t make the poem any more authentic or any more true to what it’s supposed to be and that’s when I know I’ve done enough tinkering. It’s ready to meet the world and fend for itself, good or bad. As far as being ready for publication, I wait for the press that seems like the right fit, a press where I respect the authors published, knowing I will be proud to be a part of that family. It’s important to me that my work finds the perfect home.
Mimi Ferebee: Is this your first chapbook? If not, how different was your journey this time around? What did you learn that will buttress you for your next publication process?
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas: No, I’ve done several. Every time I finish a collection I become eager to start the journey for the next one. Usually one poem or idea will launch the grouping of poems and often I find that poems written during one timeframe speak well to each other as though an invisible thread has linked one to the next until they sort of float together making each piece a little stronger for it.
Mimi Ferebee: I love that concept of an invisible thread, almost as if each work then motivates what seems like a sister piece, until she takes on her own individual world. It’s fascinating. And this leads pretty well into my next segment. Whenever I have authors one-on-one, I always reach out to them to give fresh advice/tips to our novice and experienced writers. With such a strong creative foundation, I would appreciate you talking a little about your top three literary resources. I’m interested, particularly, in the current tools that help you refine your craft as a writer (e.g. websites, publishing lists, dictionaries, writing workshops, books, speeches, etc.).
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas: First, I’m a big believer in workshops. I have joined several online writers’ groups over the years. It’s always a great reality check to see how your work stands up to others or if your poems are meeting the criteria and formula that your peers deem worthy. I also find reading poetry through the ages from the old masters along with contemporary journals and poets of today, creates a wonderful spark within thus becoming an essential tool for improvement and ongoing development of the art of poetry. Writing is such a solitary journey, yet there’s a very intimate partnership that develops between the reader and the author. It’s a pairing of the two where a relationship is formed; a trust is developed, where each experience is private but a connection takes place in the heart and mind of both.
Secondly, if you are able to find a mentor or teacher to work with you individually, there is nothing more valuable than that one on one type of instruction and or criticism. I’ve been fortunate to have worked with some amazing teachers online. I think this has definitely helped me to push myself beyond what I’ve felt comfortable with. It’s important to try new things, get out of that safety zone and write in different personas, that’s when the magic happens.
Lastly, I find doing writing exercises or challenges keeps me thinking in fresh or new ways. Again, this is imperative if you want your work to maintain a renewed and captivating style.
Mimi Ferebee: Thank-you for that advice, Carol. I’m a huge proponent of workshops myself, especially local ones where you get a chance to sit down and really discuss your work with fellow literature lovers. It’s so constructive and rewarding, also, to be included in someone else’s journey. But before I let you go, we all want to know what you are currently up to? As a six-time Pushcart nominee and a 2010 Best of the Net nominee, I imagine you’re working on yet another nomination! Where can we look to find either your most recent work or pieces that are forthcoming?
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas: I am currently working on a collection titled, Housewife’s Psychic Dream, that I hope to be submitting soon and I’ve just finished a book titled Epistemology of an Odd Girl recently published by March Street Press. I’m very proud of this book as it took me a few years to put the collection together, but a part of me lives within the pages of every book I write and this is certainly the case with Before I Go to Sleep. I’m so honored that you selected it for publication.
Mimi Ferebee: It was our pleasure, and we thank you so much for your interview. Good luck with all your upcoming projects—we truly look forward to reading Housewife’s Psychic Dream.
***Interview with Beautiful Agitation Author Keith Moul
Mimi Ferebee: Keith, can you tell our readers what inspired Beautiful Agitation? The motivation that founds it?
Keith Moul: The title borrows from one of the poems, “The Agitated Edge,” that confronts the elemental fear of the shark. That narrative is clear enough, but for as long as I struggled to write meaningful poems I found myself regularly coming back to the notion of beauty that so often arises out of varying degrees of physical or emotional stress. Such as the fear of death by shark attack resulting in a poem; or a menacing group of gulls that block the beach as an avenue of retreat for a young family, also expressed as a poem. But I also take photos and find a sample in the lone individual in the immensity of blasted landscape in Iceland. I continue to develop this even though it’s about 30-40 years since most of them were written.
Mimi Ferebee: When you read through this collection, what is its strongest feature? I know writers typically like to leave this to the readers, but I’m always interested in what the author takes from his/her own work.
Keith Moul: I always fashion my poems to be read, as little narratives moving over the landscape of lines. It doesn’t matter to me if I write a syllabic poem, free verse, a villanelle, whatever, if I can’t satisfy myself that it reads rhythmically and dramatically. I’ve also become much more confident in recent years that the simplest, most direct statement is best.
Mimi Ferebee: And at what point did you decide to pursue publication for this piece? I think it’s important for authors to speak on this—the moment they decide that a work is finished enough to seek publication.
Keith Moul: I sought publication only after years on the shelf. I did add and modify some poems in recent years with an eye toward publication. But most of my writing occurred during the print era when publishers demanded exclusive right of review and would hold the work for months to years. That is an exhausting and frustrating process that frankly I lost interest in. Digital documents and email or online submission opportunities have given me new enthusiasm.
Mimi Ferebee: Is this your first chapbook? If not, how different was your journey this time around? What have you learned to help make things go smoother for future publication processes?
Keith Moul: This is my second chapbook. Blue & Yellow Dog Press released The Grammar of Mind in November, 2010. A recommendation by another editor of a magazine in which a group of its poems appeared paved the way. The process was shockingly smooth, and quick. I won’t say I’ve learned anything, but I’m a malleable participant in the editing process, easily accept coaching to improve my poems. But in this case, the book consists of 260 epigrammatic poems (1-4 lines), 130 of which utilize the “the mind” as a subject of the sentence, 130 of which utilize “the mind” as the object of the sentence, thus the grammar of the title. Frankly I can only hope as well for this book.
Mimi Ferebee: That sounds like an excellent read, Keith. The grammar of mind: a fascinating concept for a poetry compilation. And this leads perfectly into my next question. Whenever I have authors one-on-one, I always reach out to them to give fresh advice/tips to our novice and experienced writers. If you can oblige me for a moment, what are your top three literary resources? I’m interested, particularly, in the current tools that help you refine your craft as a writer (e.g. websites, publishing lists, dictionaries, writing workshops, books, speeches, etc.). If you have any underground/excellent, not-as-well-known resources, please fill us in!
Keith Moul: Although I keep and update a list of favorite web sources when I look for new markets; I subscribe to Poets & Writers; and I mine Contributor Notes for magazines and publishers who seem to publish poets and/or photographers that I like. I can’t say that these offer me more than a foundation for writing success. Focus on the objective, and diligence in pursuing it, are what works for me. After forty years writing I started serious efforts to seek publishers in 2010. The internet has enabled my success as more than 120 publishers have accepted or printed almost 300 poems and photos in those 2 years. I couldn’t have imagined this 20 years ago. My craft has not advanced by direct instruction since I got out of college (PhD, U. of South Carolina 1974). I certainly look for tips from other writers, those I see published today. I developed in an isolated fashion because when I asked my PhD chairman, James Dickey, in 1974 what personal publishing advice he could give me, he said, “I ain’t nobody’s literary agent.” Crude perhaps, but it told me what I needed to know about my own obligations for my work.
Mimi Ferebee: That’s actually really great insight. And speaking about your own work, what are you currently up to? Where can we see your literature in the coming weeks or months? Any new compilations in the works?
Keith Moul: At present, I have 3 full-length collections seeking publishers: Not on Any Map (also poems from earlier decades); To Take and Have Not (poems from the 80’s and 90’s that I call idiomatic poems because each poem begins with the lines: “They agreed he/she was no thief/but surely he/she had taken, a bow, a back seat, words out of his/her mouth, etc.” and then alters the idiomatic phrase to mean a new thing in the context of the poem); and Bones Piled by Oracles (more recent work). I have a couple other manuscripts that I am building, but the most important is The Journal, which consists of poems written in response to my father’s journal from his time in World War II while serving on the carrier U.S.S. Lexington. I’ve written about 10 poems so far, many of which will be published in magazines soon. Four of my “taking” poems will appear soon in “Menacing Hedge”; three of the journal poems will appear soon in “Copaiba Literary Review”; and some of my translations from the Old English canon have appeared recently in “Forgotten Ground Regained” and “Oral Tradition.”
Mimi Ferebee: Well, I can certainly say that it was a pleasure getting to know you better as a writer and contributor. For readers who are interested in digging deeper into Keith’s world, I would encourage you to visit the “Menacing Hedge” website (http://menacinghedge.com/spring2012) anytime after April 1st so that you can hear him read four poems from “taking.”
We are truly excited to promote your work, Keith, sharing you with RED OCHRE’s readership. Our readers have made it known that they appreciate the opportunity to learn about our contributors, so I thank you for taking the time to share your experiences, for giving some insight into your personal publication journey. As so many of our readers are writers, these authorial interviews are vital for persons interested in staying current within today’s literary world. Thanks, again, for your participation, and good luck to you with all your upcoming endeavors!
Mimi Ferebee: Keith, can you tell our readers what inspired Beautiful Agitation? The motivation that founds it?
Keith Moul: The title borrows from one of the poems, “The Agitated Edge,” that confronts the elemental fear of the shark. That narrative is clear enough, but for as long as I struggled to write meaningful poems I found myself regularly coming back to the notion of beauty that so often arises out of varying degrees of physical or emotional stress. Such as the fear of death by shark attack resulting in a poem; or a menacing group of gulls that block the beach as an avenue of retreat for a young family, also expressed as a poem. But I also take photos and find a sample in the lone individual in the immensity of blasted landscape in Iceland. I continue to develop this even though it’s about 30-40 years since most of them were written.
Mimi Ferebee: When you read through this collection, what is its strongest feature? I know writers typically like to leave this to the readers, but I’m always interested in what the author takes from his/her own work.
Keith Moul: I always fashion my poems to be read, as little narratives moving over the landscape of lines. It doesn’t matter to me if I write a syllabic poem, free verse, a villanelle, whatever, if I can’t satisfy myself that it reads rhythmically and dramatically. I’ve also become much more confident in recent years that the simplest, most direct statement is best.
Mimi Ferebee: And at what point did you decide to pursue publication for this piece? I think it’s important for authors to speak on this—the moment they decide that a work is finished enough to seek publication.
Keith Moul: I sought publication only after years on the shelf. I did add and modify some poems in recent years with an eye toward publication. But most of my writing occurred during the print era when publishers demanded exclusive right of review and would hold the work for months to years. That is an exhausting and frustrating process that frankly I lost interest in. Digital documents and email or online submission opportunities have given me new enthusiasm.
Mimi Ferebee: Is this your first chapbook? If not, how different was your journey this time around? What have you learned to help make things go smoother for future publication processes?
Keith Moul: This is my second chapbook. Blue & Yellow Dog Press released The Grammar of Mind in November, 2010. A recommendation by another editor of a magazine in which a group of its poems appeared paved the way. The process was shockingly smooth, and quick. I won’t say I’ve learned anything, but I’m a malleable participant in the editing process, easily accept coaching to improve my poems. But in this case, the book consists of 260 epigrammatic poems (1-4 lines), 130 of which utilize the “the mind” as a subject of the sentence, 130 of which utilize “the mind” as the object of the sentence, thus the grammar of the title. Frankly I can only hope as well for this book.
Mimi Ferebee: That sounds like an excellent read, Keith. The grammar of mind: a fascinating concept for a poetry compilation. And this leads perfectly into my next question. Whenever I have authors one-on-one, I always reach out to them to give fresh advice/tips to our novice and experienced writers. If you can oblige me for a moment, what are your top three literary resources? I’m interested, particularly, in the current tools that help you refine your craft as a writer (e.g. websites, publishing lists, dictionaries, writing workshops, books, speeches, etc.). If you have any underground/excellent, not-as-well-known resources, please fill us in!
Keith Moul: Although I keep and update a list of favorite web sources when I look for new markets; I subscribe to Poets & Writers; and I mine Contributor Notes for magazines and publishers who seem to publish poets and/or photographers that I like. I can’t say that these offer me more than a foundation for writing success. Focus on the objective, and diligence in pursuing it, are what works for me. After forty years writing I started serious efforts to seek publishers in 2010. The internet has enabled my success as more than 120 publishers have accepted or printed almost 300 poems and photos in those 2 years. I couldn’t have imagined this 20 years ago. My craft has not advanced by direct instruction since I got out of college (PhD, U. of South Carolina 1974). I certainly look for tips from other writers, those I see published today. I developed in an isolated fashion because when I asked my PhD chairman, James Dickey, in 1974 what personal publishing advice he could give me, he said, “I ain’t nobody’s literary agent.” Crude perhaps, but it told me what I needed to know about my own obligations for my work.
Mimi Ferebee: That’s actually really great insight. And speaking about your own work, what are you currently up to? Where can we see your literature in the coming weeks or months? Any new compilations in the works?
Keith Moul: At present, I have 3 full-length collections seeking publishers: Not on Any Map (also poems from earlier decades); To Take and Have Not (poems from the 80’s and 90’s that I call idiomatic poems because each poem begins with the lines: “They agreed he/she was no thief/but surely he/she had taken, a bow, a back seat, words out of his/her mouth, etc.” and then alters the idiomatic phrase to mean a new thing in the context of the poem); and Bones Piled by Oracles (more recent work). I have a couple other manuscripts that I am building, but the most important is The Journal, which consists of poems written in response to my father’s journal from his time in World War II while serving on the carrier U.S.S. Lexington. I’ve written about 10 poems so far, many of which will be published in magazines soon. Four of my “taking” poems will appear soon in “Menacing Hedge”; three of the journal poems will appear soon in “Copaiba Literary Review”; and some of my translations from the Old English canon have appeared recently in “Forgotten Ground Regained” and “Oral Tradition.”
Mimi Ferebee: Well, I can certainly say that it was a pleasure getting to know you better as a writer and contributor. For readers who are interested in digging deeper into Keith’s world, I would encourage you to visit the “Menacing Hedge” website (http://menacinghedge.com/spring2012) anytime after April 1st so that you can hear him read four poems from “taking.”
We are truly excited to promote your work, Keith, sharing you with RED OCHRE’s readership. Our readers have made it known that they appreciate the opportunity to learn about our contributors, so I thank you for taking the time to share your experiences, for giving some insight into your personal publication journey. As so many of our readers are writers, these authorial interviews are vital for persons interested in staying current within today’s literary world. Thanks, again, for your participation, and good luck to you with all your upcoming endeavors!
______________________________________________________
ISSN 2159-922X
ROLiT NEWS
Vol 1.12
ROLiT NEWS
Vol 1.12
To mark our twelfth issue, we have a special treat for readers.
This month Editor-in-Chief Mimi Ferebee answers YOUR questions!
--What of RED OCHRE LiT--
Our Venture Into Quarterly Issues, International Missions
& Student Interns
Read Now, to also join Mimi as she speaks with experienced author, Mateo Amaral about "The Darkness Inside Me Is Sparkling" and it's relevance to urban America.
This month Editor-in-Chief Mimi Ferebee answers YOUR questions!
--What of RED OCHRE LiT--
Our Venture Into Quarterly Issues, International Missions
& Student Interns
Read Now, to also join Mimi as she speaks with experienced author, Mateo Amaral about "The Darkness Inside Me Is Sparkling" and it's relevance to urban America.
***Interview with Editor-in-Chief Mimi Ferebee***
Dru MacAuthor: Mimi, tell readers about this recent decision to evolve RED OCHRE LiT into a quarterly publication?
Mimi Ferebee: After many months of discussing this, the board and I have decided that a quarterly publication would allow us to do any even better job of showcasing the best literature being written today. In fact, this was always the goal for RED OCHRE LiT, however, we thought it was necessary to first create a presence in the world, building both a readership and a reputation for publishing gripping pieces.
Our electronic and print publications thus far will give great insight into our thoughts on premier literature. We advise writers to read our works before submitting. Many are archived online (free), and the rest can be back-ordered for $11.00.
While we will be publishing RED OCHRE LiT fewer times a year, we still hope to showcase a similar number of authors. That said, THINK BIG—with larger issues!
We are accepting submissions now, with publication of our next, print issue, VOLUME 2 NUMBER 1 SPRING 2012 scheduled for March of next year.
Dru MacAuthor: We have received a number of questions regarding the missions to Southeast Asia. Have you all decided whether or not you are accepting applications for readers to travel with you, working to help the students with their reading, writing, and comprehension levels?
Mimi Ferebee: This was a huge discussion, one that had the board split for awhile. Finally, we decided that as a safety precaution, it would be best to take our own employees and work to create a platform for volunteers in the future. Typically, we have had persons offer school supplies, clothing, monies, etc. After our Belize and Guatemala trips, we began receiving a number of inquires as to whether we would sponsor volunteers on our next missions. Obviously, the more help, the more we can accomplish in this cities. While this is something that everyone sees as a positive, we need to establish a foundation for such a program. This is way it is organized and safe for all parties involved. That being said, I want to personally thank everyone who sent in resumes and CVs. We will keep these on file and touch base with you once we have this program up and running. At this point, we believe we will reach out to the public for their volunteer support in 2013. We have not solidified where the mission will take place as of yet.
Dru MacAuthor: Since we are talking about the Southeast mission, talk to the readers about how different this excursion is when compared to Belize and Guatemala.
Mimi Ferebee: One of the main differences is that we will be taking our own literature. As poorer establishments, some of these third world communities that we visited had a shortage of literary material to even work with the students on. Luckily, we brought boxes of reading books with us to Belize and Guatemala as donations and were able to use those stories as teaching tools. As many of us were still reviewing submissions while abroad, some of us edited stories and poems for content and shared examples of international works with the students. They loved this. Several held the paper with this works on it as if they were actually touching international jewels. This being the case, RED OCHRE PRESS has decided to actually create textbooks that we can take to our students. We will review submissions specifically for our textbooks, using your works as tools for these students.
That said, I ask writers to help us strengthen the foundation of underprivileged youths in not only Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand & the Philippines, but other cities as well. We are taking your literature on these missions. So when we open the submission doors, please submit your prose and poetry. We will be publishing three, special 2012 issues for this purpose.
As stated before, your text will serve as our teaching textbooks. Right now, we are also accepting monetary donations to help sponsor several of the group homes we visit. Your support will aid students as they work to refine their reading, writing, and comprehension skills. It’s truly “Literature For A Cause”, and that is worth supporting.
Dru MacAuthor: And about interns? After your trip to Orlando, speaking at the CMA conference, we have received a number of students writing in about internships. Several inquires are coming from persons outside of the Hampton Roads area—hoping to get involved from a distance. Is this something that you all have tabled during your discussions? Are you interested in reaching out to students in this fashion?
Mimi Ferebee: Absolutely. We enjoyed our time in Orlando at the College Media Advisers/Associate Collegiate Press Convention and want to maintain the relationships that we built there. At the moment, we have a number of interns working from us from The College of William and Mary, Old Dominion University, Christopher Newport University, and others. We are even looking to join forces with students at SUNY Rockland in New York, allowing them to work for RED OCHRE PRESS as interns while obtaining college credit for their learning and participation. We have a few things in the works that are giving a number of students insight into the publishing world.
I have also invited a number of students that I met during my lecture at the CMA conference to be guest editors for one of the upcoming, 2012 issues. My lecture gave them the tools necessary to be effective editors for this project. This opportunity will give them a chance to review submissions, discussing merit and flaws within the works, and ultimately their feedback will influence our decision on what to publish.
While we have several plans in place that allow us to mentor students, we are definitely discussing other others as well. As a community service liaison, RED OCHRE PRESS prides itself on its work with not only students struggling to maintain academic excellence, but also those who foresee a future in this field.
Dru MacAuthor: And what of RED OCHRE PRESS’s 501(c)(3) plans?
Mimi Ferebee: For awhile now, we have been discussing the pros and cons and of both non-profit and for-profit status. As of late, the consensus is that non-profit status would serve the company better. With all of our endeavors this year, it has been very difficult to just sit down and complete the application—it is an extremely intense process. That said, we hope to secure our status within a couple months, beginning the new year as an official, non-profit organization.It is very important, though, to look at all that we have accomplished without this status. Our readers and our national and international supporters have carried this press and have work so hard to see our visions manifest. That is something many organizations can not say—and I am proud to be able to note this.
Dru MacAuthor: Is there anything else that you feel needs to be raised before we close out the year?
Mimi Ferebee: I think we have touched on just about everything. I want to let everyone know that we have decided to return to accepting electronic submissions. Please see our new Submission Guidelines for more on this. It's just easier on us and on the writer--so let's start that up again! We ask everyone to send their work to submissions@redochrelit.com. If you notice, we are transitioning into our professional work email, so this will be a change as well. For the first few months, we will still be checking editors.redochrelit@gmail.com; however, it is our goal to shift all general tidbits to our new database: info@redochrelit.com. All our staff have been given personal emails, which are listed on our guidelines page. Again, I ask that you review the guidelines before sending your work, so you can get a more in-depth understanding of what editors will and will not accept.
Lastly, I would to iterate my appreciation for everyone who has helped make RED OCHRE PRESS what it is today. Cheers to not only another wave of writing, but also literary commitment and advocacy. With that, I say it’s been a wonderful year and I’m ready to kickstart 2012.
***Interview with The Darkness Inside Me is Sparkling author Mateo Amaral***
Mimi Ferebee: Mateo I am thrilled to have you as our interviewee this month. It’s been a pleasure getting to know you this year and I am happy to present you to RED OCHRE’s readership. First, I think we should talk about your novella, The Darkness Inside Me is Sparkling. A poignant piece, this will undoubtedly ground our discussion. Tell the readers what this piece is about, and what you aimed to do with this work.
Mateo Amaral: Thank you for having me, Mimi. As always it is a pleasure to work with Red Ochre. Much of my writing begins with my job, which is teaching English in a low-income urban high school. For many years now our schools have been focusing on multicultural literature. We teach students about other cultures, and especially love to delve into the gray area where world cultures become blurred in the cities of America. Students read about the struggles of what it means to be Asian-American, or African-American, or Mexican-American. We put hyphens between everything and everyone. The protagonists eat food at Taco Bell and their digestion symbolizes this dichotomous struggle. I poke fun--Multicultural literature is a treasure, and I love teaching it. Yet as a society, I feel like we are moving past this into an area unexplored, and this is one lens I have chosen to focus on in my novel. Our young urban students of mixed ethnicities do not bring with them the cultures of their grandparents. Fourth and fifth generation kids don’t know squat about the food, language, or dance moves of their ancestors (I should know). Their only culture is America, and in an America where the wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, the only culture our youth have is one no one wants to name: The Ghetto. Our kids are increasingly multi-ethnic but monocultural—and their one culture is concrete streets, fast food, and gangsterism. My novel is about a young boy of many ethnicities who finds the only culture—the only world he has—is the ghetto. The Darkness Inside Me is Sparkling is about a young boy faced with tough decisions in a world where there doesn’t seem to be a lot of right, just lots of wrong. My aim with this novel was to write something short aimed at our urban young men, because I have a hard time finding books that they buy into. So I figured I would write it, being from the same kind of world myself.
Mimi Ferebee: Having spoken with you, you compare this work to Sandra Cisneros’ House on Mango Street, however, your work is geared towards a male audience. I find this particularly interesting as a writer and an editor because as much as I read, I often don’t run across writers who focus their works on the attention of low-income, urban students of mixed ethnicities and cultures—and especially young men. While our works may indeed incorporate characters that embody such attributes, it is quite rare to meet an author whose audience is this population. Naturally, this explains why there is not much of a literary genre for these boys. In your opinion, is this because writers are overlooking this particular audience or is it because publishers are not catering to them?
Mateo Amaral: I think it is a little bit of both. As you know, in the publishing world, the audience is almost as important as the writing. The larger audience publishers think your book will have, the better they feel about putting it out there. Young urban boys don’t buy books, so I guess you’d have to be pretty crazy to consider that your target audience. Luckily, most of my students think I’m crazy, so maybe I’ve just caught on to what they already know. Of course I am not looking at this in such purely capitalistic terms of supply and demand, I am writing for our boys.
We are losing our boys, it cannot be said any clearer. Our accelerated classes are filled with girls and our sheltered classes are wall-to-wall boys. 75% of Latinos who make it to college are girls, that is a complete inverse from just a few decades ago. Not to take anything away from the girls. Women have taken the opportunities afforded to them in the US and have run with them. But now it is our young men who are in trouble, and there doesn’t seem to be much help for them. The House on Mango Street is a perfect example of this idea. HOMS is a great book—great. But our urban boys aren’t interested in it. They flat out could care less about Esperanza and her chanclas. I’m not saying it isn’t good writing, maybe it is too good for them to appreciate. Either way, it is not an engaging book for boys, neither are many books taught in high school. At some point, we have to put dry, wordy literature aside and give kids storylines they understand with characters they can relate to in settings that look like the places our students live. We don’t have a lot of books like that, especially for our young men. In the end, my book is nothing like HOMS, but it began with it in mind.
Now, I’m not completely naïve about my audience either. I think anyone who reads my novel will learn something, and perhaps see our low-income communities in a different way. I think it will be an entertaining ride for any reader of books and literature. Many of my readers have admitted to learning something about these kids and about themselves in reading this piece. I think it is something everyone can read in addition to being geared at a certain segment of our population. Of course it wouldn’t hurt if middle and high schools bought tons of class sets either!
Mimi Ferebee: When you review this piece, what is the strongest feature? When I think of a young, male student struggling with identity and adolescence, the character that comes to mind is Holden Caulfield. This is one of the staples that Virginian teachers have used for years to reach our male students. A wonderfully developed character, Holden is a walking internal conflict. While this is all well and good, I imagine that Holden’s private school upbringing and his coming-of-age journey, built upon wealth and a conscious independence, may cause a bit of dissonance with everyday, male, urban students. How do you work to bridge this gap—to help these students identify with your main character, his upbringing, his daily development?
Mateo Amaral: I’m glad you brought this up. I think Catcher in the Rye is a book urban students can appreciate. But before they do, they need to get to a place in their reading and writing that is appropriate to understanding a character like Holden Caulfield. For many kids, this doesn’t happen until junior or senior year. The problem we have is we lose a third of our kids before they get to junior year. In our English classes, students become disillusioned with reading and writing because it is about characters like Holden Caulfield. We have to reach kids where they are at, and what that usually means is where they are at physically—where they live. Then we need to find out what they listen to and what they have seen. A kid like Caulfield might as well be an alien from Tramalfador as far as our urban poor are concerned, because that is about how much they can relate to him early in their reading lives.If we want the next generation to get hooked on Kindles and Nooks, the words need to be about them!
Mimi Ferebee: At what point did you decide to pursue publication for this piece? I think it’s important for authors to speak on this—the moment they decide that a work is finished enough to seek publication.
Mateo Amaral: I decided early on when I felt I had something special. I have a few writers very close to me who read my work, and with my early chapters I felt like I was onto something. I kept writing with a bull-headed brutishness that wasn’t going to take no from a publisher, and as I got to the end I thought I had a manuscript worth something. As far as it being finished enough, that hasn’t happened yet. You and your editors have read the latest, but even after sending it to you, I have continued to add small things. I don’t have much to do, just tinkering here and there, developing characters a bit more, adding scenes. I think that I need a week to fully finish it (I’m thinking Christmas Break), and after that I am going to have to force myself to leave it alone. I don’t know that a piece is every really done, I think it happens when someone finally publishes it and you can’t change the copies out there being sold in the world.
Mimi Ferebee: When we have authors one-on-one, we always reach out to them to give fresh advice/tips to our novice and experienced writers. Speak for a moment to our writers who are interested in writing pieces for our minority youths. Your main character refers to this as “Straight street-speak from the cracked lips of the sidewalk.” What does this mean for a writer? And if we are writing inevitably with publishers in mind, how does this change the process—how do we do so without compromising our characters, our scenes, our plots?
Mateo Amaral: I think Stephen King said readers want the writing to be true. They want it to feel like real life. I think that if you can get to a point where your writing is good enough that the reader believes you are telling them the truth, about life, about people, about relationships, then you can get a publisher to follow you anywhere. I think that is a hard truth in itself. It means you have to be a great writer. There are no gimmicks, no golden ideas, no unique plot structures—there is good writing and there is not. I think if you have a novel you want to write and it is coming from the truest place inside you then you write it, and then research publishing houses after. You can’t force yourself to write a book. Write it, and if it is good, they will come.
Mimi Ferebee: What advice do you have for individuals looking to publish their novellas? You have first hand experience, being at that point in your journey right now. What are a couple things that you would have done differently? Or what have you changed recently to make for a better outcome? Please share any resources that you are using, or avoiding.
Mateo Amaral: I think it is important to build relationships in your writing life. I think you need to put yourself out there, get to know editors, authors, and others who can help you on your journey. This is something I always want to do more of. I want to send more queries, get to know more editors, meet other writers. Every person you meet has a new idea, a fresh perspective, or heck, maybe a literary agent’s email address, and not the one that goes straight to their slush pile either. I love my email inbox. It is a fascinating place that daily carries inside of it many of my hopes. It also disappoints me frequently. But networking and putting yourself out there may be easier than it has ever been. You need to work at it, because your email box is your best friend. Although while I would tell you to get your email to work overtime for you, that still means you need to create personal relationships. Those email addresses have people on the other end of them, and if you want to network your way to success, you need to treat them like people, and get to know them on a human level in some way. That is easier said than done, but worth mentioning.
Mimi Ferebee: This is your spotlight, talk to readers. Where should we hope to see your work in the upcoming months? Feel free to speak about The Darkness Inside Me is Sparking as well as any other literary projects.
Mateo Amaral: You can always find me at Teach 4 Real <www.teach4real.com>, my blog for Real Teachers in our Toughest Schools. I write weekly posts about urban education and really have gained quite a following. My articles expose how life is on the campuses of our low-income public schools. Things are a lot worse off in our schools than most people know. I write to shine light onto those problems in the hopes we can move education in the right direction. My last post was about how a student punched a colleague of mine three times and was not expelled, and hardly reprimanded in fact. It is the normal course of our day in these schools, where neither the adults nor the students feel safe. Most of my work this year is going to focus around my blog and articles on education in places like Education News/Education Views where I am a columnist, and New America Media where I am a contributor. Aside from the Darkness Inside Me is Sparkling, I haven’t been sending out too much of my fiction and poetry lately. I will be seeking publication for my novel very soon, and hope to dedicate a lot of time, effort, and emails into making that a successful endeavor. Hopefully you will see it on bookshelves in a year. My ultimate goal is to bring it into my classroom and teach it to my students. They already want signed copies. In fact, a lot of my toughest boys have even said they’d buy it—go figure.
Thank-You Mimi & Mateo For Your Interviews
With RED OCHRE PRESS
With RED OCHRE PRESS
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ISSN 2159-922X
ROLiT NEWS
Vol 1.11
ROLiT NEWS
Vol 1.11
Please welcome Joe Amaral & Jesse Kaellis as they speak about their
poetry collections, current literary tools/resources, and future writing plans.
poetry collections, current literary tools/resources, and future writing plans.
***Interview with The Antiquity of Youth author Joe Amaral***
Mimi Ferebee: Joe, tell the readers about The Antiquity of Youth. What can they expect from this collection?
Joe Amaral: I hope readers will read these poems and be inspired to discover their own remembrance of youthful times forgotten, whether it transposes into their own writing or just brings the crinkle of a smile to their face. The poetry is from the viewpoint of an adult finding solace in childhood memories before the inexorable advance of age tarnishes their adolescence. At times, this person drowns in darkness, overcome by all the badness out there, but they are ever searching for illumination via the road traveled.I’m trying not to be too trendy with the world-weariness angle or past yearnings/love lost stuff. What I like to blend together is more nature infused with youth, but from an old soul traveling an ancient road perspective.
Mimi Ferebee: What inspired this piece? The motivation that found it?
Joe Amaral: I created “The Antiquity of Youth” based on the underlying rhythm that seems to weave throughout my poems, which can best be described by the closing line of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” When I look back on days gone, I usually skip the drunken college days or selfish teenager years. I go straight to my childhood and the awesome innocence and incredible sadness of it all as it bleeds away, but I write as an adult reflecting in the ruins of maturation swayed to pollution- a search for self and place in this confusing world.
Mimi Ferebee: When you review the collection, what is the strongest feature?
Joe Amaral: The strongest feature I wish to showcase is my love of the outside world and all it has to offer. I spend most of my free time spelunking around outdoors, whether it’s at the beach, hiking tall mountains like Africa’s Kilimanjaro, or strollering my new baby girl Zelia around town! My own personal travels and life experiences have allowed me to channel speculative truths into these poems. I strive for clever wordplay using nature and vivid descriptiveness. Poetry suits me well, because my prose always seems to be over-written with detail! It’s hard to cut cut cut sometimes!
Mimi Ferebee: At what point did you decide to pursue publication for this piece? I think it's important for authors to speak on this--the moment they decide that a work is finished enough to seek publication.
Joe Amaral: This collection went through many transformations as I slowly built it up- I started with a foundation of stronger poems and very slowly filled it with new pieces and constant editing until I felt all of them were solid. I submitted a version of this book last year but it was not nearly refined enough. I probably got ahead of myself but herding together my poems and selecting a group of them into a cohesive unit started the long process. Of course, submitting it for review to RED OCHRE also strengthened it immensely and I thank you and the rest of the PRESS for your genuine honesty, hard work, and constructive criticism.
Mimi Ferebee: Is this your first book? If not, how did your journey this time around? Had you learned anything to help make things go smoother?
Joe Amaral: Yes this is my first book- I have a second simultaneous one as well that I am compiling called “The Sun Will Still Rise- in spite of us.”
There’s really no way to make things smooth, you just have to scrawl out a large number of poems, repeatedly tinker with them, then handpick your favorites into something magical. Fortunately I have good readers like my wife Marina and my brother Mateo that help direct me. Writing is not a solo mission.
Mimi Ferebee: Many of our readers enjoy hearing about authors' submission processes. Do you have any anxiety about submitting your work for publication? If so, what helps to calm your spirits throughout this process? You have had a number of individual poems published, and obviously submitting a collection of them is much different than one at a time.
Joe Amaral: Beer is always good…
I’m still learning about how to submit a collection but I’ve become sort of an idiot savant when it comes to submitting individual poetry, complete with a foolproof system and spreadsheet to track it all.
I was very fortunate that my first poem ever submitted was accepted and a few more shortly thereafter. This boosted my confidence to proceed with submitting more. If I was rejected a lot to start, I don’t know if I would have kept going. I have no formal English background besides a couple of crashed MFA level classes. Writing regularly has only been my main hobby for two years now, though I’ve been a lifelong avid reader. I guess you can watch and read about something all you want but eventually you just have to do it to be good- sort of like sports.
I bank a lot on my own adventures through my job as a paramedic (tragically funny, sad and disgusting at different moments) and my itch for world travel and outdoor exploration.
It’s stressful every time to submit but each victory is so sweeeeeeet! Editors might not like hearing this, but I definitely learned how to submit by making mistakes and sending out some bad initial poetry, sort of a blitzkrieg attack! Slowly I learned and refined my system and I think I became a better writer by reading all those journals. I’ve also had a few poems published that were rejected by 7 or 8 other journals so I guess you just have to find the right person or people in your particular niche- it takes a lot of canvassing and selfish belief in each poem.
Mimi Ferebee: When we have authors one-on-one, we always reach out to them to give fresh advice/tips to our novice and experienced writers. If you can oblige me for a moment, what are your top three literary resources? I'm interested, particularly, in the current tools that help you refine your craft as a writer (e.g. websites, publishing lists, dictionaries, writing workshops, books, speeches, etc.). If you have any underground/excellent not-as-well-known resources, fill us in! I know from just out chats that you are a fan of CRWROPPS. Talk about that resource a little.
Joe Amaral: I’ve used CRWROPPS occasionally but it can be a bit cumbersome. My top source is actually Newpages. I love scrolling through the journals and checking each one out, which leads me to my secret source- all of you! I would say one of my best resources is the literary journals and writers themselves. I actually take the time to read the poetry and stories in each one I submit to. My rough stats show me I’ve submitted to over 160 different journals (and had 30 or so pieces accepted in only 12 of them). That’s a lot of rejections but reading that much poetry from all the great underground writers out there has really improved my own poetic style and appreciation more than any classroom could. I recognize author names in similar journals I have been in which is cool as well, but mostly I just read awesome poems by nameless people- it’s hard to remember every author, though some definitely stick out. From these people and my favorite journal’s links, I can find lots of other journals that may cater to my particular aesthetic to submit to. You just gotta go for it!
Mimi Ferebee: What advice do you have for individuals looking to publish their collections? You have first hand experience, being at the point in your journey right now. What are a couple things that you would have done differently? Or what have you changed recently to make for a better outcome?
Joe Amaral: I’m still figuring out how to publish my first collection so it’s too early for me to give any advice on that front. I think having RED OCHRE PRESS review it was my biggest step forward and I’m ready to take off from here!
I find it fun to pick 20-30 poems from my pile and fit them under a title. It helps me to edit them and realize their place amongst one another. I did the same thing last year when I wasn’t ready but it was still a start. With your help Mimi and another year of seasoning, I now feel very good about my accomplishments and I am looking forward to publishing my first collection!
Mimi Ferebee: This is your spotlight, talk to readers. Where should we hope to see your work in the upcoming months? Feel free to speak about The Antiquity of Youth as well as any other literary projects.
Joe Amaral: I have poems that recently appeared or are appearing in A Handful of Dust, amphibi.us, Carcinogenic Poetry, Certain Circuits, and Eclectic Flash. I love the small, free literary journals but I would like to start trying out the big dogs. Otherwise, now that I have two solid chapbooks to ply, I’d like to get back to improving my short story and novel writing, taking classes etc. Poetry is always what I seem to fall back into though…I love it all!
I think “The Antiquity of Youth” helped me come full circle with my life past, present and future. Now that I am a new father I want to live and cherish those young moments with my daughter. I can’t wait to show her the shape of the world, though I fear the direction it is heading. Every strand of fated time is precious and she has hooked me from drifting too far away. These poems are my tribute to her and my own way of illuminating the dark passenger inside me.
***Interview with Early Out author Jesse Kaellis***
Mimi Ferebee: If you had to sum up Early Out in a few sentences, what would be your driving points?
Jesse Kaellis: This is the hardest question here. I didn’t write it for catharsis, I’m leery of that. But it was a catharsis for me just the same.
When I touch readers, when my vision and perceptions made manifest in words resonates in another human being’s heart and mind it levels me. I’m reaching out of my isolation and it is a privilege that is difficult to articulate. If there is any one thing that I write for it is to bring the scene to life, what I saw, and what happened. I’m putting you there. The first story I wrote was called “Knock Out”. That day is burnt into my memory. A lot of my experiences were lonely, I have lonely memories. I’ll bring the reader there with me.
Mimi Ferebee: And the motivation behind this prose piece? Which writers inspired your work? And if not an inspiration from your literary peers or foremothers/fathers, explain what grounded you to write this?
Jesse Kaellis: I started reading late. I was eight years old before I could read. I was an undiagnosed dyslexic. Once I was finally able to read I became an avid reader but my memory is hazy. I recall a lot of books by black authors. My parents were left wing activists and that’s what we had around the house. They didn’t restrict my reading. I remember reading Ramparts Magazine when I was eleven and twelve years old. I was fascinated by Manchild in the Promised Land, by Claude Brown. I had a fascination for street life, life on the margins; maybe it was a portent. James Baldwin. I read Another Country no less than five times over the years; a very sensuous book. When I was 14 I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Alex Haley. I was mesmerized by his descriptions of street life, crime and hustling. I’ve read so many books that I can’t remember them all or list them all here. The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kozinski has devastating power. On Boxing by Joyce Carol Oates, I wept when I read that book. Dino, By Nick Touches, I read that when I was living in Vegas. I read his book a good three times. Dino is his best book; far and away. I went through a period of reading True Crime books. I went through the entire genre. I don’t know if a particular writer influenced my style but I should mention Primo Levy, the best of the Holocaust chroniclers. Primo was a witness, an acutely perceptive and lucid observer of unspeakable horror. He tells what he saw, that’s all. If these books, these authors influenced my style I don’t know, but I do see something here, I see that I was drawn to the intensity of life on the margins, the darkness of life hidden behind a mundane, pedestrian normalcy. What are humans really? What are we?
Mimi Ferebee: What will readers take away from this work? Having reviewed it and read the reviews of others, everyone seems to appreciate your unique narrative style. Raw, yet wondrously human, your main character has turned many heads. Is this what you take away from it? Or is there another point that should be raised as well.
Jesse Kaellis: It’s a good read; an entertaining story at the least and a compelling story. I’ve read my own work many times over of course and what comes through is a depth of compassion that I don’t think I’m big enough to carry. This compassion is coming through me. I really don’t feel that I’m big enough to carry that although maybe I could grow into it. This book won’t change the world, but maybe I could touch a few lives. People have remarked, “What a life!” Some people question whether it really all happened. I tell them that whatever subculture, whatever milieu I happened to be moving through at the time I was surrounded by people trying to negotiate pretty much the same circumstances that I was struggling with. It’s a big world out there.
Mimi Ferebee: On another topic, when did you finally decide to pursue publication for this piece? When was it that you looked at your manuscript and said, “That’s it. It’s finished. On to publication!”?
It likely will never be finished. I have pieces published; the manuscript can be published in pieces because it is short stories connected by the protagonist, by me. This is my vision, these are my perceptions.
Jesse Kaellis: What happened is that my girlfriend found a contest, The Simon Fraser University’s First Book Contest; created by The Writer’s Studio; their creative writing department. It was cosponsored by Anvil Press of Vancouver. At this point I had about 136,000 words on a free dating site writer’s forum and I had a following. Anyway I shaped it up on instinct and Kelli helped me proof it. It cost like 35 bucks to enter and we went and had it printed and I forgot about it. I knew I would never hear from them again. Meanwhile I was making hard copy submissions to Canadian publishers. I was pasting the rejections on my wall. Wallpaper. I’m on the phone talking to my girlfriend and reading emails; I’m double tasking. I see one from SFU, “Uh oh, another rejection…" I’m reading and it’s like a hand reached in and squeezed my heart. My chest tightened and I couldn’t talk, “What’s wrong?!” Finally I choke it out, “I’m on the long list...” I’m sobbing and two weeks later I shortlisted. More tears.
That’s when I started to believe.
Mimi Ferebee: Is this your first book? If so, how difficult was it to construct?
Jesse Kaellis: It is my first book and it was not difficult. I didn’t have a book in mind until I really already had a books worth of material. Early on I was sending stories to my girlfriend and she said, “Holy crap! You can write. I think you have at least one book in you.” We are not together anymore but this woman believed in me more than I ever did my own self. And I will never forget her for that.
I want to say something about difficult. If it’s hard for me to write then it seems as though I am forcing something. I don’t want my work to show. I’m not trying to exceed my talent or the parameters of my style. I am not into showing off. I’m not in love with words but I am in love with power. I’m thinking about what I want to say first. Then I want to get there fairly directly. I have a voice. Where it came from at this late stage in my life, I don’t know but, but, but, maybe I’ll just say it: I think that it is God given.
I revised the manuscript for a major NY publisher, made it linear; I stitched it together and made parallel, intersecting timelines but they didn’t appear to be interested. I mean they had read the original manuscript and suggested a more sustained narrative and yes that was work. It wasn’t onerous but it was work.
Mimi Ferebee: Many of our readers enjoy hearing about authors’ submission processes. Do you have any anxiety about submitting your work for publication? If so, what helps to calm your spirits throughout this process? Obviously submitting a book is much different that one, short story.
Jesse Kaellis: I know writers and I’ve met writers and I’ve read writers talking about this very subject and the big thing, what they all say is this: never quit; never give up. Some important and successful writers were half dead before someone offered them a contract, in a manner of speaking.
I started out doing snail mail submissions and that’s time consuming and expensive. I prefer electronic submissions, that way you can get a quick turnaround. You can get an auto reject sometimes within 24 hours with the usual BS about how even though you are not a person, don’t take it personally. And someone else may be interested in your tripe but don’t darken our door again. I have gotten gratuitously cruel rejections, particularly from agents but I have also gotten some very generous and encouraging rejections from editors. Those kept me going.
My mother is a published novelist and my father has been e published. My mother passed on five years ago. I had noted my mother’s struggles with the industry and I see my father’s broken heart. In Canada there are a lot of small publishers that exist on Canada Council grants. This can deform the equation. But the bottom line is it is not about good it’s about business and in my mind it is more about happenstance. When I submit I feel like I just bought a lottery ticket.
Rejections are going to hurt and make you doubt yourself. That’s what a rejection is. It’s a rejection. I have been lucky enough to have gotten positives along with the negatives. It’s not like my book has been picked up yet. I’m published but not nearly enough. My failing is that when I have a potential publisher on the line I slack off on submissions. I put all my eggs in one basket. I wasted a lot of time with one NY house. I had a back door to this editor because publishers like this do not accept unsolicited submissions. I thought they were going to bite and I reworked the whole manuscript for nothing. And they were pretty cavalier about it. This was after the guy offered to mentor me and to talk to me but he pretty much ignored me. All I wanted was an update.
I’m not terribly well organized. These people will instruct you on exactly how they want you to submit. Brief synopsis, word count, target market, samples… They hold all the cards so you need to obey. It’s like applying for a job. The hard print industry is contracting and it is what it is. I’m going to have to buckle down and play the game if I want this to happen. Everybody says it’s just business but you are talking to a guy who had 60 plus jobs in his life. So, no, I’m not good at playing the game.
Oh, yes, one final thing: make multiple submissions and if a target says no, pass them by, or lie to them. It’s an industry standard regardless of what anyone says. You can’t sit on your work for 3, 4, six months until they get to it, even a three week turnaround; you can’t wait. Not at my age. Not at any age. Just let them know when you submit. You don’t have to list them all. “Yes, multiple submissions” and that’s enough.
Finally, I don’t pay you, you pay me. Use your instincts. If somebody promises to help with your book for 600 bucks or even 5000 bucks imagine if a legitimate publisher tried to move your book for that money. If it seems too good to be true it is. Self marketing might provide results for some kinds of books but I’m not even interested in doing that at this time.
There are lots of self publish firms that prey on hard working writers. Be careful. And be careful of back end publishers. You don’t pay up front but they con you into buying your own overpriced books in an effort to move them and get reviews and signings and so on. Meanwhile they got copyright. If you want to go that way review them on-line. I can’t name them but everybody knows who the big players are. You can get publishers and agents’ lists from writer’s unions on-line. Google publishers that accept unsolicited submissions in whatever your target area is like which country. Obviously the US has more publishers than Canada, more, bigger and more powerful. And the same goes for agents.
Mimi Ferebee: That is great advice, Jesse. Thanks so much.That segues perfect into my next question.When we have authors one-on-one, we always reach out to them to give fresh advice/tips to our novice and experienced writers. If you can oblige me for a moment, what are your top three literary resources? I'm interested, particularly, in the current tools that help you refine your craft as a writer (e.g. websites, publishing lists, dictionaries, writing workshops, books, speeches, etc.). If you have any underground/excellent not-as-well-known resources, fill us in!
Jesse Kaellis: I use publishing lists for submissions. I have an old MS word program, a crappy Firefox spell checker. I got a cheap HP printer that’s pretty good. Literary resources, I guess I have researched Boxrec and other on-line resources. There is a site that lists the genealogy of every Nevada casino. I’ve used that. I have a dictionary, a grammar book, and a thesaurus but I rarely use them. My spelling sucks but I’m learning to spell from the spell checker.
It’s not like I’m some big shot writer but if I could say this; don’t overwrite. Less is more. Let the reader do their part. Let them use their imagination. My writing is not particularly descriptive; it is flat and unemotional but the emotion is there. See, but that’s just my style. That’s what works for me. I’ve said this before; words serve me. I don’t want to show off. I’m not looking to patronize the reader. First I think about what I want to say. I’m looking for that payoff and it could be one sentence or even a word.
Mimi Ferebee: What advice do you have for individuals looking to publish their novels or collections? You have first hand experience. What are a couple things that you would have done differently to make this journey easier.
Jesse Kaellis: Don’t alienate publishers regardless. They got power, you don’t. Not until you at least are published. When you have a verifiable market value you can get mad. Until then suck it up. I’m talking about myself of course. I had some words with a local editor and three days later I got a parcel and inside was my manuscript. This was the guy that published some of my pieces. Yeah, I had a bi-winning moment and I burnt the guy down and maybe every single publisher on the lower mainland. It isn’t too bad, losing them but I do regret it. We are the supplicants. It is like applying for a job so mind your P’s and Q’s.
Mimi Ferebee: This is your spotlight, talk to readers. Where should we hope to see your work in the upcoming months? Feel free to speak about Early Out, as well as any other literary projects.
Jesse Kaellis: I don’t really know Mimi. I’m hoping for a miracle but that’s okay, I’ve had them before. I use various on-line media to disseminate and promote my work, but I doubt it. For instance I write for an on-line boxing magazine, TheBoxingPost.com, they don’t pay, none of them do pay, but I get my stuff out there. I got my web site, JesseKaellis.com, the best kept secret on the net. I got video readings on You Tube under MrBodypro8.
I know I need to start submitting again. I feel the inertia. I’m getting auto rejections. I guess I didn’t submit according to their format. The days of getting discovered are long gone. I don’t know where my work would fit. Young people, maybe any people. It is strong, the book is strong and original. I know that it is.
Writing ain’t work but finding a publisher definitely is. It’s time consuming and frustrating. You go down the list; Oh! They accept creative writing submissions year round! You go to their web site and read all the stuff and go to the next page and then at the bottom it says we are closed for submissions at this time until further notice. I’m learning as I go, learning to save time, learning the hard way.
Well whatever. Boo-hoo. They got their own lookout. Hard print is under pressure. If getting published was easy then there would be more authors than readers. Everybody’s got a keyboard.
I appreciate this interview Mimi. I can reach out. I wouldn’t even be where I am now if it hadn’t been for my girlfriend’s help and encouragement. She was the wind beneath my wings.
I want to thank you and Red Ochre for giving me this opportunity and for giving me exposure. I stumbled onto your magazine when I was at low ebb and losing hope. Your review of my manuscript helped me to see the value and validity in what I am doing.
Thank-You Joe & Jesse For Your Interviews
With RED OCHRE PRESS
With RED OCHRE PRESS
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ISSN 2159-922X
ROLiT NEWS
Vol 1.10
ROLiT NEWS
Vol 1.10
Please welcome JW Drake & Howie Good as they speak about their
poetry collections, current literary tools/resources, and future writing plans.
poetry collections, current literary tools/resources, and future writing plans.
***Interview with BoomBoom author JW Drake***
Mimi Ferebee: What is the crux of "BoomBoom"? If readers were to read a tagline, what would it say for this piece?
JW Drake: “Everyone dances to his own personal boomboom.” That’s a quote from Tristan Tzara who was one of the European founders of the Dadaist movement. They wanted to do away with the artistic traditions and formalities of their day and free art and the artist. I like that idea, and I think the poems in “BoomBoom” reflect this.
Mimi Ferebee: And the motivation behind this work? Which writers inspired your work? And if not an inspiration from your literary peers or foremothers/fathers, explain what grounded you to write this?
JW Drake: I didn’t start out to create a collection of poems entitled “BoomBoom.” I ran across some references to Marcel Duchamp, studied some of his works, especially “The Bride stripped bare by her suitors, even”, wrote a poem about that, then one about his “Etant Donnes” construction. I was interested in writing poems that might somehow relate to artists and/or their works, and many of the “BoomBoom” poems do, but not all. For example, “Wake Up” was kind of inspired by a Roy Orbison tune ‘In Dreams’ as performed in the David Lynch movie “Blue Velvet”, and “Paintings” is about the very act of painting, not any particular one, but “Mr Natural” just came to mind one day and I wrote it all down, and “Seaside September,” which you were kind enough, Mimi, to include in your September issue, was just about a trip I took to the beach.
There are also the inevitable interactions: Duchamp’s ‘Bride’ is about perpetual desire, and I was looking at this later and ended up writing “Desire”, another “BoomBoom” poem.
It doesn’t always work out, of course. Often I follow what I think are great poetic subjects, but they just peter out. I got real interested in the Russian Faberge Easter eggs and studied them, their tiny, exquisite features, and the ill-fated Romanov donors and donees, but then moved on to something else and never wrote anything. Maybe later.
Briefly on the poets I have studied and enjoyed most, there’s Homer and those old ones, but more recently John Keats, Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Delmore Schwartz, Emily Dickenson, Anne Bradstreet, ee cummings, W.C. Williams, and my favorite Wallace Stevens. Note one of my poems in “BoomBoom” is a modest variation on his marvelous “Peter Quince at the Clavier.”
Mimi Ferebee: As a collection, what can readers expect to take away from BoomBoom?
JW Drake: Well, I guess I just hope they like a few of them and want to read more. I think art is very personal, it is what connects a reader or viewer or listener to the work. I’d like to connect to some people out there in ways that add to their enjoyment of what we have come to call life. Oh, and try not to take yourselves, or me, too seriously.
Mimi Ferebee: When did you decide to pursue publication for this piece? What was the deciding factor that told you it was complete enough to move forward?
JW Drake: I decided to self-publish it when I had enough to make a book out of.
Mimi Ferebee: Is this your first collection?
JW Drake: No, I self-published “Duckkerel” a few years ago. It’s a collection of poems written over about a 20 year period. I got my son, who is an artist, to design both covers for the books.
Mimi Ferebee: When we have authors one-on-one, we always reach out to them to give fresh advice/tips to our novice and experienced writers. If you can oblige me for a moment, what are your top three literary resources? I’m interested, particularly, in the current tools that help you refine your craft as a writer (e.g. websites, publishing lists, dictionaries, writing workshops, books, speeches, etc.).
JW Drake: I have a pretty large library of poetry and art books, plus the Great Books series from Britannica and their encyclopedia on CD. The internet, of course, is fun to surf and you never know what you will find that triggers an idea for a poem or fills in some lines. I look at ‘Poets & Writers’ online site and send poems in to their literary mag list – that’s how I found you, Mimi! And, for my fiction work, I finally went out and found a writing sensei in California, Bruce McAllister, whom I talk to regularly to help me move my detective novels along.
Mimi Ferebee: What advice do you have for individuals looking to publish their poetry collections? What are a few things that you would have done differently on this journey?
JW Drake: I’m not a good person to ask since I have just published my own, so far anyway. Using all the new social media seems to be today’s best approach, but I don’t know that much about it. I cancelled my Facebook subscription when I no longer knew half the people who had linked to me through it.
Mimi Ferebee: Self-publication is still a hot-topic these days. Please talk more about his. Do you have any do’s/don’ts for the reading audience? What did you take away from that process? Do you recommend it?
JW Drake: I’ve used Wordclay to self-publish the two books so far. They are reasonably priced and do send you your money if you sell. They also offer additional marketing and promotional services, like all of them, I suppose. If you can format a nice looking document, they do a good job pretty cheaply.
Mimi Ferebee: This is your spotlight, talk to readers. Where should we hope to see your work in the upcoming months? Your plans for BoomBoom? Do you have any other literary projects stewing?
JW Drake: My sensei says stop writing poetry and stick to your novel, so that’s what I'm going to try to do. Unfortunately, that’s when most of my poem ideas have come to me, so I don't know how focused I'll be able to stay. Good luck to you and Red Ochre, Mimi, and thanks for the interview. Let’s stay in touch.
***Interview with Love in a Time of Paranoia author Howie Good***
Mimi Ferebee: If you had to sum up Love in a Time of Paranoia in a few sentences, what would be your driving points?
Howie Good: At the risk of sounding unbearably pretentious, I have to say I don’t believe it’s advisable to attempt to sum up a poem in a few words or even many. I’m of the opinion that how a poem says something is identical to what it says. That’s the whole point of poetry for me. A poem isn’t a novel to be discussed in terms of plot or an essay to be dissected in terms of subject. To summarize a poem or book of poems strikes me as a form of trespass and to reflect a basic misunderstanding of how a poem works, which is as an aesthetic experience. It can be done, I suppose, but I don’t know why anyone would want to do it.
Mimi Ferebee: I can appreciate your line of thinking here. What about motivation? Let’s talk about the roots of this piece. Which writers inspired your work? And if not an inspiration from your literary peers or foremothers/fathers, explain what grounded you to write this?
Howie Good: Benjamin Krause, publisher of Diamond Point Press, invited me to submit a chapbook of 20 poems of 20 words or fewer after he had published a couple of my poems in his twenty20 journal. I was honored to be asked and excited to try it. Although the poems may resemble haikus on the page, I wasn't inspired by the haiku -- an alien form, as far as I'm concerned, for American writers. Rather, I have always been attracted to short vernacular poetry. Looking back, I would point to William Carlos Williams as a master of the form. Among poets still writing, I have to mention Jack Gilbert and Franz Wright.
Mimi Ferebee: As a collection, what will readers take away from this work?
Howie Good: The title says it pretty well. Most of the poems are lyrics that do what lyric poetry has always done -- lift a moment or perception out of the turbulent flow of time and preserve it for contemplation or celebration.
Mimi Ferebee: On another topic, when did you finally decide to pursue publication for this piece? When was it that you looked at your manuscript and said, “That’s it. It’s finished. On to publication!”?
Howie Good: Is a poem ever really done? I sometimes continue to tinker with a poem long after its been published because I’m still not satisfied with some aspect of it -- a line break, for example, or a turn of phrase. Sometimes I cannibalize a line from a previously published poem that I now think of as a failure and incorporate it into something new I’m working on. This kind of supports my early comment that summarizing a poem is an exercise in futility. Given my process, a poem that’s presumably embalmed in print can suddenly flare back to life.
Mimi Ferebee: That is absolutely true.
Mimi Ferebee: Is this your first book?
Howie Good: No, it isn’t. I have published three full-length collections of poetry and have a fourth scheduled for publication next month and a fifth scheduled for 2012. I also have published numerous --more than two dozen -- print and digital chapbooks, and have a couple more forthcoming.
Mimi Ferebee: Many of our readers enjoy hearing about authors’ submission processes. Do you have any anxiety about submitting your work for publication? If so, what helps calm your spirits throughout the process? Obviously submitting a collection is much different than a poem here or a poem there?
Howie Good: I’m never calm. And if I was calm, submitting would destroy that in a hurry. Face it -- submitting your writing to the judgment of others is intrinsically nerve-wracking. I find the best way to handle anxiety over whether a poem will be accepted or not is to move on to the next piece of writing and forget as best I can about the work out there that’s still being considered. It doesn’t make the wait for a decision any shorter, but it does make it more bearable.
Mimi Ferebee: When we have authors one-on-one, we always reach out to them to give fresh advice/tips to our novice and experienced writers. If you can oblige me for a moment, what are your top three literary resources? I’m interested, particularly, in the current tools that help you refine your craft as a writer (e.g. websites, publishing lists, dictionaries, writing workshops, books, speeches, etc.). If you have any underground/excellent not-as-well-known resources, fill us in!
Howie Good: I would advise your readers to check out the following Web sites if they’re interested in finding the latest calls for submissions: NewPages.com, Duotrope’s Digest, LitList, Every Writer’s Resource.com, and Poets & Writers. I check these several times a day. As I said, I’m never calm.
Mimi Ferebee: What advice do you have for individuals looking to publish their collections? As uou have first hand experience, what are a couple things that you would have done differently?
Howie Good: Don’t be afraid to submit. What’s the worst that could happen? Rejection isn’t easy to take, but it isn’t fatal either. In fact, rejection can actually be good for your poetry. I've reconceptualized rejected poems into new and much better work. Rejection doesn’t have to deflate or discourage you; it can be a spur to dig in and write what you should have written in the first place. . . but couldn’t until you got rejected.
Mimi Ferebee: That is brilliant advice, Howie.
Mimi Ferebee: This is your spotlight, talk to readers. Where should we hope to see your work in the upcoming months? Feel free to speak about Love in a Time of Paranoia, as well as any other literary projects.
Howie Good: I hope your readers will get a copy of Love in a Time of Paranoia. It can be downloaded to an eReader for 99 cents. We all should be supporters of the small press, not just writers for it. I also hope your readers will look up my full-length poetry collections Lovesick (Press Americana, 2009), Heart With a Dirty Windshield (BeWrite Books, 2010), and Everything Reminds Me of Me (Desperanto, 2011), as well as my print and digital poetry chapbooks, including most recently Love Dagger from Right Hand Pointing and To Shadowy Blue from Gold Wake Press.
Among future projects, I have a chapbook, Frequently Asked Questions, due out from Propaganda Press and another chapbook, Little Tragedies, due out from Graffiti Kokalata. I have a full-length collection, Dreaming in Read, coming very soon from Right Hand Pointing, and another collection, An Armed Man Lurks in Ambush, coming from Desperanto in 2012.
Busy, busy, as Kurt Vonnegut would say.
Thank-You JW & Howie For Your Interviews
With RED OCHRE PRESS
With RED OCHRE PRESS
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ISSN 2159-922X
ROLiT NEWS
Vol 1.9
Please welcome Joseph Grant and Meg Tuite to ROLiT NEWS.
Their interview offer critical insight into the most resourceful, literary tools
and practices.
Their interview offer critical insight into the most resourceful, literary tools
and practices.
***Interview with Mexicali Blues author Joseph Grant***
Mimi Ferebee: If you had to sum up “Mexcali Blues” in a few sentences, what would be your driving points?
Joseph Grant: Mexicali Blues is a collection of fictional short stories based on an American writer's journey to Mexico, a Mexico of the mind, perhaps, as it is fiction and is based on actual experiences and observations while traveling there. It is also a fictional take on the Mexican experience in the U.S. and the cultural exchange between the two, sometimes with pleasant and not so pleasant outcomes. The cultural meeting of the minds can sometimes produce what we define as culture shock and with that, the best and worst in human nature. In a sense, I write realistic fiction, so to speak.
Mimi Ferebee: And the motivation behind this piece? Which writers inspired your work? And if not an inspiration from your literary peers or foremothers/fathers, explain what grounded you to write this?
Joseph Grant: The motivation behind this piece is varied. Even as a child, I had an interest in Mexico and South America. I live and work in Southern California, which has the largest Mexican population in the United States outside of Mexico. My wife, Rebecca is of Mexican descent, although born here in Los Angeles but can speak the language fluently. She has inspired and has motivated me, certainly. The neighborhoods I've lived in and worked in and experienced have also influenced me. The writers that have inspired me are Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez as well as poets such as Pablo Neruda and again, Paz. Not all of these are Mexican, obviously, but of Latin American influence and/or culture. Hemingway is another writer who has greatly influenced me and has taught me to look beyond the borders, personal, mental and otherwise. It is with these influences I travel and observe people and places and make mental notes. What encouraged me to write this is my fascination with all things Mexican. The stories, the songs, the dances, the myths, the way of life, The Day of the Dead, the bullfights-all of it draws me in each and every time. I had to write about it to express my intense passion, I guess one could say.
Mimi Ferebee: As a cultural collection, what will readers take away from this work?
Joseph Grant: My hope is that people will see Mexico and America as a people that are not so different who want the same things in life. To work, raise families and to educate their children to do better than they did. To break down the barriers that separate us. It is highly ironic that we have put up a border to keep Mexicans out ,when California was their land to begin with as little as 150 years ago or so. I would like for the reader to drink in the story with interest and hopefully they will like the story enough to travel out of their predisposed vision of Mexico or anywhere else for that matter and see the world and travel and see that although we all come from different culturally-defined "races" that we as a human race are not so different and each has a lot to offer.
Mimi Ferebee: On another topic, when did you finally decide to pursue publication for this piece? When was it that you looked at your manuscript and said, “That’s it. It’s finished. On to publication.”?
Joseph Grant: I began writing about my interest. That's all it took, one story. Storylines would flow into my head during the day or during nighttime sleep and then I had a few more stories. I was sitting in traffic one day in Downtown Los Angeles and the Latina in front of me starting playing with her hair, picking it up in the back and messing with it, all the while looking at herself in the rear view mirror. It entranced me. My mind began to take me to a place in Old Mexico and of a girl doing the same in front of a vanity mirror. That observation and snippet of plot line grew into "Reflections in the Looking Glass". That story won me "Story of the Month" at Bartleby Snopes. A few more stories came to me and after I had about 10 or so, I found the central theme of Mexico or Americans going to Mexico and decided to make a collection of these stories. They were all about what each character takes with them from the experience. The moment I knew I had enough stories was when I felt that I could go no further as an observer in the stories, literally, as the last story in the collection ends at the sea.
Mimi Ferebee: Is this your first book?
Joseph Grant: I have had other brushes with publication, I guess you could say. I have had stories published in print reviews worldwide and Alpha Beat Press who published Kerouac, Ginsberg, Bukowski and other beat poets, published a book of verse I had written, Indigo. This is my first collection of short stories.
Mimi Ferebee: Do you have any anxiety about submitting your work for publication? If so, what helps to calm your spirits throughout this process? Obviously submitting a collection is much different than a story here or a story there?
Joseph Grant: Actually, I do not have any anxieties about submitting my work. I've done the best I can in writing the stories and the words are strong and each story is different. The only anxiety comes from waiting on literary agents who seem to take an exorbitant amount of time to come to the decision that it's not right for them. I appreciate that they are busy but it seems that they are in the business of saying no. It is important for a writer to develop thick skin by getting their stories rejected early and often. It makes that first publication so much more rewarding. It gives you enough armor to take on the literary agents later. The only thing that calms a writer's spirits are reading, writing something new, sleep and a glass or two of Merlot. In submitting a collection, it feels as if you've bundled all of your children up and sent them into the freezing cold world instead of one by one. I guess there is safety in numbers as they say. Some stories do well to stand on their own, but a collection is stronger in the long run. I would tend to worry, if at all, about that lone story out there.
Mimi Ferebee: When we have authors one-on-one, we always reach out to them to give fresh advice/tips to our novice and experienced writers. If you can oblige me for a moment, what are your top two literary resources? I'm interested, particularly, in the current tools that help you refine your craft as a writer (e.g. websites, publishing lists, dictionaries, writing workshops, books, speeches, etc.).
Joseph Grant: My two top literary resources are the website duotrope, a wonderful resource with drop-down boxes a writer can cater to their needs and which, incidentally, is where I came across your listing and A Moveable Feast by Hemingway, a must for any writer starting out. Regarding Hemingway, there are several fine websites out there, such as Allie Baker's The Hemingway Project that delves into his views on writing. If I were to give any advice, I would suggest that if writing is coming slow, it's okay to get up out of the chair and go take a walk or a drive to the park or a museum and get inspired by other stimulants, if the muse is being lazy at the moment. I remember I would go to the MOMA in New York when I couldn't write and instead of buying lunch, I pay the admission and would stand among the immortals and become inspired.
Mimi Ferebee: Do you have any advice for individuals looking to publish their collections? You obviously have first hand experience, please tell us a few things that you would have done differently.
Joseph Grant: My advice would be have a lot of patience, do your research and definitely use online resources. We have all written the best we can and want to get our work out there but there is an impediment in the way. The gatekeeper known as the literary agent. They are paid to stand in the way of being published so that the large publishing houses don't have to sort through mountains of manuscripts. This is a necessary part of the business. Many, if not all of the not-yet-famous writers have had their work rejected. "The Help" the bestseller out now? Rejected over 60 times by agents! Smaller publishing houses do not require agents, nine times out of ten. Go with the smaller, independent publishers with a first short story collection. Had I know that going in, I would not have wasted time and SASE's sending to agents and larger publishing concerns. Red Ochre is a wonderful place to start, might I add! Wish I had known about it earlier on. See? Research does pay off.
Mimi Ferebee: This is your spotlight, talk to readers. Where should we hope to see your work in the upcoming months? Feel free to speak about “Mexicali Blues,” as well as any other literary projects.
Joseph Grant: I hope that the readers like my stories. I have many more on which I am continually working. I have a few stories coming out in the next few months, but mostly I have been working on a new novel. All anyone has to do is do a search on my name and tons of my old stories do pop up. I have also started a blog to keep my published stories in some sort of order. That can be found at: http://josephgrantpublished.blogspot.com/. I thank you, Mimi and the staff at Red Ochre for your courteous care in which you've treated my work and I look forward to reading more of your wonderful Lit Review in the future. Above all to anyone who gets a story rejected-Keep writing!
***Interview with Domestic Apparition author Meg Tuite***
Mimi Ferebee: How long have you been writing?
Meg Tuite: When I was five I used to write very serious poetry about people killing and telephone billing on the cardboard from my dad’s new shirts. I’ve always kept a journal, but as for taking workshops and classes, it’s been on and off for over fifteen years.
Mimi Ferebee: Which writers inspired your work? Anyone inspiring you right now?
Meg Tuite: I have had so many writers inspire me, but I don’t know that they influenced my work. Flannery O’Connor, Bruno Schulz, Dylan Thomas, Flann O’Brien, Rilke have all been favorites of mine and I have read them over and over again. It’s always hard to pinpoint where your work comes from. I definitely go for the dark humorists.
As for inspiration now, I am reading so many different writers in online magazines and print magazines. I will be writing book reviews and am waiting for a few books from new writers to arrive in the mail.
Mimi Ferebee: When did you decide to pursue publication?
Meg Tuite: I have been publishing now for three years. And in that three years it has been a rapid movement. I now have fiction in over 50 magazines, journals and presses. My novel/collection “Domestic Apparition” was published recently by San Francisco Bay Press. Each chapter was published as a short story or flash piece and when I submitted it I changed the stories to work as a novel with the same narrator and family throughout.
Mimi Ferebee: Would you say you are more comfortable writing poetry or prose and why?
Meg Tuite: I am writing strictly prose right now, but am a deep lover of poetic prose and poetry. I have had some poetry published, but 99% of the work I have out there is prose. I read both poetry and prose, but am more comfortable writing a story, or a flash piece which gives more leeway to poetic prose.
Mimi Ferebee: Literary journals, magazines, etc., flood the internet. As every site can not possibly be high-quality, what would you advise as a method to sift through the thousands of sites when seeking publication for work? Do you have any personal red flags that detour you from submitting?
Meg Tuite: I read a lot of online magazines. I am a fiction editor of both an online magazine and a university print magazine. When I started publishing I sent out to magazines that were looking for manuscripts via Poets & Writers and recently, Duotrope. I have found that all magazines online or in print have value because they have readers and as a writer, I want readers. At first, I only sent to print magazines. I was afraid of the online venue, but my literary world has opened up immensely with the addition of online publications. I have made friends with many great writers online and editors are now seeking me out to send submissions to their magazines.
The only red flags for me would be magazines that publish strictly genre/horror, sci-fi, zombie, romance, etc. I haven’t written any genre pieces, so therefore those magazines wouldn’t be interested in my work. You have to look for what works with your writing. Read the magazines before submitting.
Mimi Ferebee: Generally speaking, what advice would you give to novice writers? One example of “what not to do.”
Meg Tuite: Don’t give up! Rejections are a part of the process of working toward publication. Send out to a lot of magazines and journals. Don’t take what an editor says personally. They have their own tastes and foibles, which may not jive with your submission. Some editors may send you back feedback and if you keep sending in work to their magazine you can build a rapport with them. And most definitely, read the magazines before you submit to them. Find out what they’re looking for.
Mimi Ferebee: What are your top three literary resources?
Meg Tuite: Duotrope and Poets & Writers have done me well for information about where to submit. I always like to keep myself in a writing community so I take workshops and also do readings of my work whenever there’s a venue for that. For me, it’s important to get out there and find an audience whether it be live or via print, video or mp3 recordings. There are so many avenues now for getting your work out there.
Mimi Ferebee: What is your ultimate goal as a writer?
Meg Tuite: I have gotten in some great print and online magazines and will very soon have my novel published. I have won some awards and placed as a finalist in others. My goal is simply to keep writing as much as I can and as well as I can. Getting a book out there was an ultimate and now it’s happening, so I’m on to the next.
Mimi Ferebee: Lastly, please tell us about any upcoming projects you are currently working on?
Meg Tuite: I am working on another novel and already have a few agents that have contacted me. I didn’t have an agent for this first book. I got the stories published and then when I had a manuscript together I sent it out to the presses until I had some interest. I know a lot of writers search for agents to do the work for them, but that’s not the only way! I’m starting to write book reviews and am still writing and sending out stories to magazines.
Mimi Ferebee: If you had to sum up “Mexcali Blues” in a few sentences, what would be your driving points?
Joseph Grant: Mexicali Blues is a collection of fictional short stories based on an American writer's journey to Mexico, a Mexico of the mind, perhaps, as it is fiction and is based on actual experiences and observations while traveling there. It is also a fictional take on the Mexican experience in the U.S. and the cultural exchange between the two, sometimes with pleasant and not so pleasant outcomes. The cultural meeting of the minds can sometimes produce what we define as culture shock and with that, the best and worst in human nature. In a sense, I write realistic fiction, so to speak.
Mimi Ferebee: And the motivation behind this piece? Which writers inspired your work? And if not an inspiration from your literary peers or foremothers/fathers, explain what grounded you to write this?
Joseph Grant: The motivation behind this piece is varied. Even as a child, I had an interest in Mexico and South America. I live and work in Southern California, which has the largest Mexican population in the United States outside of Mexico. My wife, Rebecca is of Mexican descent, although born here in Los Angeles but can speak the language fluently. She has inspired and has motivated me, certainly. The neighborhoods I've lived in and worked in and experienced have also influenced me. The writers that have inspired me are Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez as well as poets such as Pablo Neruda and again, Paz. Not all of these are Mexican, obviously, but of Latin American influence and/or culture. Hemingway is another writer who has greatly influenced me and has taught me to look beyond the borders, personal, mental and otherwise. It is with these influences I travel and observe people and places and make mental notes. What encouraged me to write this is my fascination with all things Mexican. The stories, the songs, the dances, the myths, the way of life, The Day of the Dead, the bullfights-all of it draws me in each and every time. I had to write about it to express my intense passion, I guess one could say.
Mimi Ferebee: As a cultural collection, what will readers take away from this work?
Joseph Grant: My hope is that people will see Mexico and America as a people that are not so different who want the same things in life. To work, raise families and to educate their children to do better than they did. To break down the barriers that separate us. It is highly ironic that we have put up a border to keep Mexicans out ,when California was their land to begin with as little as 150 years ago or so. I would like for the reader to drink in the story with interest and hopefully they will like the story enough to travel out of their predisposed vision of Mexico or anywhere else for that matter and see the world and travel and see that although we all come from different culturally-defined "races" that we as a human race are not so different and each has a lot to offer.
Mimi Ferebee: On another topic, when did you finally decide to pursue publication for this piece? When was it that you looked at your manuscript and said, “That’s it. It’s finished. On to publication.”?
Joseph Grant: I began writing about my interest. That's all it took, one story. Storylines would flow into my head during the day or during nighttime sleep and then I had a few more stories. I was sitting in traffic one day in Downtown Los Angeles and the Latina in front of me starting playing with her hair, picking it up in the back and messing with it, all the while looking at herself in the rear view mirror. It entranced me. My mind began to take me to a place in Old Mexico and of a girl doing the same in front of a vanity mirror. That observation and snippet of plot line grew into "Reflections in the Looking Glass". That story won me "Story of the Month" at Bartleby Snopes. A few more stories came to me and after I had about 10 or so, I found the central theme of Mexico or Americans going to Mexico and decided to make a collection of these stories. They were all about what each character takes with them from the experience. The moment I knew I had enough stories was when I felt that I could go no further as an observer in the stories, literally, as the last story in the collection ends at the sea.
Mimi Ferebee: Is this your first book?
Joseph Grant: I have had other brushes with publication, I guess you could say. I have had stories published in print reviews worldwide and Alpha Beat Press who published Kerouac, Ginsberg, Bukowski and other beat poets, published a book of verse I had written, Indigo. This is my first collection of short stories.
Mimi Ferebee: Do you have any anxiety about submitting your work for publication? If so, what helps to calm your spirits throughout this process? Obviously submitting a collection is much different than a story here or a story there?
Joseph Grant: Actually, I do not have any anxieties about submitting my work. I've done the best I can in writing the stories and the words are strong and each story is different. The only anxiety comes from waiting on literary agents who seem to take an exorbitant amount of time to come to the decision that it's not right for them. I appreciate that they are busy but it seems that they are in the business of saying no. It is important for a writer to develop thick skin by getting their stories rejected early and often. It makes that first publication so much more rewarding. It gives you enough armor to take on the literary agents later. The only thing that calms a writer's spirits are reading, writing something new, sleep and a glass or two of Merlot. In submitting a collection, it feels as if you've bundled all of your children up and sent them into the freezing cold world instead of one by one. I guess there is safety in numbers as they say. Some stories do well to stand on their own, but a collection is stronger in the long run. I would tend to worry, if at all, about that lone story out there.
Mimi Ferebee: When we have authors one-on-one, we always reach out to them to give fresh advice/tips to our novice and experienced writers. If you can oblige me for a moment, what are your top two literary resources? I'm interested, particularly, in the current tools that help you refine your craft as a writer (e.g. websites, publishing lists, dictionaries, writing workshops, books, speeches, etc.).
Joseph Grant: My two top literary resources are the website duotrope, a wonderful resource with drop-down boxes a writer can cater to their needs and which, incidentally, is where I came across your listing and A Moveable Feast by Hemingway, a must for any writer starting out. Regarding Hemingway, there are several fine websites out there, such as Allie Baker's The Hemingway Project that delves into his views on writing. If I were to give any advice, I would suggest that if writing is coming slow, it's okay to get up out of the chair and go take a walk or a drive to the park or a museum and get inspired by other stimulants, if the muse is being lazy at the moment. I remember I would go to the MOMA in New York when I couldn't write and instead of buying lunch, I pay the admission and would stand among the immortals and become inspired.
Mimi Ferebee: Do you have any advice for individuals looking to publish their collections? You obviously have first hand experience, please tell us a few things that you would have done differently.
Joseph Grant: My advice would be have a lot of patience, do your research and definitely use online resources. We have all written the best we can and want to get our work out there but there is an impediment in the way. The gatekeeper known as the literary agent. They are paid to stand in the way of being published so that the large publishing houses don't have to sort through mountains of manuscripts. This is a necessary part of the business. Many, if not all of the not-yet-famous writers have had their work rejected. "The Help" the bestseller out now? Rejected over 60 times by agents! Smaller publishing houses do not require agents, nine times out of ten. Go with the smaller, independent publishers with a first short story collection. Had I know that going in, I would not have wasted time and SASE's sending to agents and larger publishing concerns. Red Ochre is a wonderful place to start, might I add! Wish I had known about it earlier on. See? Research does pay off.
Mimi Ferebee: This is your spotlight, talk to readers. Where should we hope to see your work in the upcoming months? Feel free to speak about “Mexicali Blues,” as well as any other literary projects.
Joseph Grant: I hope that the readers like my stories. I have many more on which I am continually working. I have a few stories coming out in the next few months, but mostly I have been working on a new novel. All anyone has to do is do a search on my name and tons of my old stories do pop up. I have also started a blog to keep my published stories in some sort of order. That can be found at: http://josephgrantpublished.blogspot.com/. I thank you, Mimi and the staff at Red Ochre for your courteous care in which you've treated my work and I look forward to reading more of your wonderful Lit Review in the future. Above all to anyone who gets a story rejected-Keep writing!
***Interview with Domestic Apparition author Meg Tuite***
Mimi Ferebee: How long have you been writing?
Meg Tuite: When I was five I used to write very serious poetry about people killing and telephone billing on the cardboard from my dad’s new shirts. I’ve always kept a journal, but as for taking workshops and classes, it’s been on and off for over fifteen years.
Mimi Ferebee: Which writers inspired your work? Anyone inspiring you right now?
Meg Tuite: I have had so many writers inspire me, but I don’t know that they influenced my work. Flannery O’Connor, Bruno Schulz, Dylan Thomas, Flann O’Brien, Rilke have all been favorites of mine and I have read them over and over again. It’s always hard to pinpoint where your work comes from. I definitely go for the dark humorists.
As for inspiration now, I am reading so many different writers in online magazines and print magazines. I will be writing book reviews and am waiting for a few books from new writers to arrive in the mail.
Mimi Ferebee: When did you decide to pursue publication?
Meg Tuite: I have been publishing now for three years. And in that three years it has been a rapid movement. I now have fiction in over 50 magazines, journals and presses. My novel/collection “Domestic Apparition” was published recently by San Francisco Bay Press. Each chapter was published as a short story or flash piece and when I submitted it I changed the stories to work as a novel with the same narrator and family throughout.
Mimi Ferebee: Would you say you are more comfortable writing poetry or prose and why?
Meg Tuite: I am writing strictly prose right now, but am a deep lover of poetic prose and poetry. I have had some poetry published, but 99% of the work I have out there is prose. I read both poetry and prose, but am more comfortable writing a story, or a flash piece which gives more leeway to poetic prose.
Mimi Ferebee: Literary journals, magazines, etc., flood the internet. As every site can not possibly be high-quality, what would you advise as a method to sift through the thousands of sites when seeking publication for work? Do you have any personal red flags that detour you from submitting?
Meg Tuite: I read a lot of online magazines. I am a fiction editor of both an online magazine and a university print magazine. When I started publishing I sent out to magazines that were looking for manuscripts via Poets & Writers and recently, Duotrope. I have found that all magazines online or in print have value because they have readers and as a writer, I want readers. At first, I only sent to print magazines. I was afraid of the online venue, but my literary world has opened up immensely with the addition of online publications. I have made friends with many great writers online and editors are now seeking me out to send submissions to their magazines.
The only red flags for me would be magazines that publish strictly genre/horror, sci-fi, zombie, romance, etc. I haven’t written any genre pieces, so therefore those magazines wouldn’t be interested in my work. You have to look for what works with your writing. Read the magazines before submitting.
Mimi Ferebee: Generally speaking, what advice would you give to novice writers? One example of “what not to do.”
Meg Tuite: Don’t give up! Rejections are a part of the process of working toward publication. Send out to a lot of magazines and journals. Don’t take what an editor says personally. They have their own tastes and foibles, which may not jive with your submission. Some editors may send you back feedback and if you keep sending in work to their magazine you can build a rapport with them. And most definitely, read the magazines before you submit to them. Find out what they’re looking for.
Mimi Ferebee: What are your top three literary resources?
Meg Tuite: Duotrope and Poets & Writers have done me well for information about where to submit. I always like to keep myself in a writing community so I take workshops and also do readings of my work whenever there’s a venue for that. For me, it’s important to get out there and find an audience whether it be live or via print, video or mp3 recordings. There are so many avenues now for getting your work out there.
Mimi Ferebee: What is your ultimate goal as a writer?
Meg Tuite: I have gotten in some great print and online magazines and will very soon have my novel published. I have won some awards and placed as a finalist in others. My goal is simply to keep writing as much as I can and as well as I can. Getting a book out there was an ultimate and now it’s happening, so I’m on to the next.
Mimi Ferebee: Lastly, please tell us about any upcoming projects you are currently working on?
Meg Tuite: I am working on another novel and already have a few agents that have contacted me. I didn’t have an agent for this first book. I got the stories published and then when I had a manuscript together I sent it out to the presses until I had some interest. I know a lot of writers search for agents to do the work for them, but that’s not the only way! I’m starting to write book reviews and am still writing and sending out stories to magazines.
Thank-You Joseph and Meg for your interviews with ROLiT NEWS.
Good Luck to you and your next endeavors!
Good Luck to you and your next endeavors!
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ISSN 2159-922X
ROLiT NEWS
Vol 1.8
Please welcome C. Liegh McInnis, our experienced author & Mable Tigo,
our business manager. C. Liegh offers critical insight into the most resourceful, literary tools and practices, while Mables give insight into our Board of Directors.
our business manager. C. Liegh offers critical insight into the most resourceful, literary tools and practices, while Mables give insight into our Board of Directors.
***Interview with C. Liegh McInnis***
Mimi Ferebee: How long have you been writing?
C. Liegh McInnis: I have been a reader and a writer all my life. My parents’ homes were filled with books. They discussed books with their friends and with me for as long as I can remember—not necessarily so-called deep philosophical ideas, but they would give me a book or read a passage from something and ask me what I thought it meant or how it made me feel. So, in the deepest sense for me, writing grows from reading or being inspired by artistic exposure and life events. Reading, music, and movies have always stirred in me a sense to respond to how the works make me feel and think. Yet, probably the moment I began to conceptualize as a writer, use writing for a specific purpose, was when I was about eight or nine. As an only child, living in the Mississippi Delta, when I would get into fights, it would be with people who had siblings or cousins, which means I had to fight two often three people alone, which, of course, lead to a beat down. My only recourse was to go inside and create stories about them. Westerns were on television a lot in the late seventies and early eighties, Lone Ranger, Bonanza, Rifle Man, and Gun Smoke, so I would create westerns with me as the “good guy” and them as the “bad guy.” I did not know the terms protagonist and antagonist at the time. Those were the first stories I ever wrote. Until high school I would read stories and poems and then try to copy them, the style, word use. In high school music lyrics were added, not the rhyming, but my parents record collection had lots of “message” music—Stevie Wonder, WAR, Curtis Mayfield, Earth, Wind, and Fire, Parliament Funkadelic, Jimi Hendrix, and James Brown. I’d try to copy the subjects and a phrase or two that reminded me of the poems I was reading, like e. e. cummings, Amiri Baraka, Haki Madhubuti, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, as well as the James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, and Eudora Welty to which I had been exposed from sixth grade through high school. It was not until college that I was made conscious of literary devices, particularly those that helped me move from telling to showing and from being literal to being figurative. By high school I liked most the stories and poems that had dual meanings. They were like puzzles that I could decode. And when I got to college my lit teachers taught me how to “decode” or interpret them for deeper meaning. But, the fun for me was not the decoding but the encoding. I wanted to create these puzzles that people had to decode because I knew how much fun it was for me. So, I’ve been writing as long as I’ve been reading, growing as a writer as I grew as a reader.
Mimi Ferebee: Would you say you are more comfortable writing poetry or prose, and why?
C. Liegh McInnis: Though I have published more poetry and lit crit than fiction, I feel equally comfortable with all three though lit crit is mostly an intellectual engagement that does not have the emotional release as poetry and fiction. Probably because of the writers I began to love early—Baraka, or even in college, Kalamu ya Salaam, Jerry Ward, Reginald Martin, Charlie Braxton—all wrote in more than one genre, I never had strong lines in my head that divided the genres for me. In high school, reading The Iliad and The Odyssey or The Epic of Gilgamesh, Shakespeare’s plays and poetry, or even the Bible, the lines separating poetry from prose were never that distinct for me. What is Jean Toomer’s Cane? Is it a novel? Is it a collection of short stories? Is it narrative or prose poetry? Toni Morrison’s paragraphs are complete poems. Ahmos Zu-Bolton’s folklore poetry completely blurs the line between narrative and poem. So, again, I never had that line per se. That, of course, does not mean that I write them equally well; that’s for the editor of a journal or the readership to decide, but I don’t feel more comfortable with one or the other. Since I like both poetry and fiction to be figurative and driven by ornate imagery, I tend to separate the two by length. For me, a poem is about a moment, and a story is about a series of moments. And that doesn’t mean that a poem can’t have rising and falling action, but that action, for me, is somehow contained in a singular moment whereas a work of fiction is the tying together of several moments into a narrative that reveals a meaning. That is why I was surprised during my doctoral studies in creative writing that I had to choose between poetry and fiction, but that is also more about me not doing my research when choosing a program as I later learned that a great number, if not most, MFA and PhD creative writing programs force students to choose.
Mimi Ferebee: Which authors have influenced your craft? Do you have someone in particular who is inspiring you right now?
C. Liegh McInnis: James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and James F. Cooper are, for my money, the three finest writers of the American sentence. They can pile more meaning into a sentence than almost anyone. My father was active during the sixties in Mississippi, so a good deal of his books that I read as a child and teenager were of that era and ideology, especially the Black Power aspect of the Movement. So, Baraka’s boldness and beautiful power, Giovanni’s humor, Wright’s power, force, and unflinching honesty, Margaret Walker’s ability to weave the individual and group story into one narrative and her stern but humanist handling of Christianity, the hipness of Baldwin, Baraka, and later Salaam, Ward, Zu-Bolton, Martin, and Braxton to sound like the men who visited my father’s living room to discuss politics, sports, religion, and women, Morrison’s ability to paint like Jacob Lawrence and Salvador Dali, into my mid-twenties meeting David Brian Williams and Jolivette Anderson aka the Poet Warrior and having them force me to accept the importance and power of the performative in poetry (especially as an act of call and response even on paper), Zu-Bolton’s ability to paint the commoner full of grace and heroism like Walker—making small-town black communities epic in their ability to know their greatness despite being often trampled by powerful outside forces, learning that Shakespeare was a people’s poet who wrote for the groundlings and not the royalty, and reading essays by Larry Neal, Hoyt Fuller, Baraka, Barbara Christian, Houston Baker, Langston Hughes, W. E. B. DuBois, Maulana Karenga, Wright, Martin L. King, Jr., and Malcolm X that read like jazz and blues—all of this converged on me and fuels me. But, I would be a liar if I did not also state that while these people made me want to be a writer, Prince made me want to be an artist. From the moment I was ten and was exposed to his Dirty Mind album and was then taken to see him open for Rick James, Prince, for me, continues to be the baddest MF-er on the planet, sticking his middle finger in the face of the world, raising individuality to the height of its own religion. His ability to turn a phrase, to use sex as a metaphor to study the dichotomy and neurosis of humanity, and to construct his own world with his own rules spoke to me in ways that not much else had or has. For years after college when I read Karenga’s “Black Art: Mute Matter Given Force and Function,” I knew I would be torn between my belief that Black Nationalism is the most effective strategy for African people and my belief that individuals have the right to be free from any constraints of communal control as long as they are not limiting or arresting the development of others.
I’m still inspired by all of those folk, but younger writers, such as Thomas Sayers Ellis, Jimmy Kimbrell (who is an old friend), fiction writer James Cherry, and even Natasha Trethewey keep my feet to the fire as far as not doing the same things all the time. I was told about a writer calling Trethewey overrated to which I said “you ain’t overrated when you got a Pulitzer Prize in yo’ back pocket.” With Ellis I am inspired by his war over terminology, especially as he shows that the war over words is cultural warfare as is most literary criticism. With Trethewey, I’m impressed with her socio-political subtly even if I’m not that moved by her seemingly post-racial leanings. Yet, what she does with Ophelia in the “Storyville Diary” section of Bellocq’s Ophelia is masterful. She has Ophelia, who is merely an object d’art to the photographer who pays prostitutes to create pornographic photos, wage war for her humanity by resisting, modifying, or contemplating how he wants her to pose. This resistance of how she poses is by her and Trethewey an acknowledgement of Ophelia’s humanity in the same manner that Walker retrieves the humanity of the slaves in Jubilee from Gone with the Wind, which had completely objective the slaves in the fantasy of white supremacy, in a similar way that Gertrude Stein retrieves the humanity of the female domestic workers in “The Good Anna.” I am moved when a writer can draw from or pull from a wide spectrum of writing, even when denouncing that style or ideology as Ishmael Reed often does, because how one says (craft) is as important to me as what one says (subject).
Mimi Ferebee: Literary journals, magazines, etc., flood the internet. As every site cannot possibly be high-quality, what would you advise as a method to sift through the thousands of sites when seeking publication for work? Do you have any personal red flags that deter you from submitting?
C. Liegh McInnis: My advice to beginning writers is to submit to journals that you like. Often, as beginning writers, we submit to the “major” journals, and then are disappointed, if not crushed, if we are rejected. Along with the issue of one’s level or talent, it is important that the journal has the same aesthetic as the submitter. Although I had the so-called “big boys” or literary journals as my primary targets, my goal was to publish as much as possible so that I could be read by as many people as possible, but I also realized that getting published is as much about aesthetic and style as it is about objective craft. Two equally crafted writers can be published by one journal and rejected by another because of style/aesthetic and not craft. So, we return to reading. I submit to the journals whose work moves me and allow the chips to fall where they may. So, I don’t have any red flags, per se. I like what I like while trying to expose myself to as much as possible, trying to find people to teach or explain to me why something that I may not initially like is well-crafted. Yet, there are a lot of works that are well-crafted that do not move me, and when it comes to submitting work I tend to avoid the journals that publish work that does not move me.
Mimi Ferebee: Generally speaking, what advice would you give to novice writers? Please provide one example of “what NOT to do”.
C. Liegh McInnis: This answer depends on what the writer/person wants. Jerry Ward gave me some of the best advice when I was considering rejecting an offer to lecture about a writer who had just beaten me for an award. He told me as long as I respected the other writer, which I did tremendously, then I should accept the offer to lecture on the other writer because “writing careers are like God; they work in mysterious ways.” Interestingly enough, immediately after giving the lecture I was offered three paying jobs to lecture or coordinate workshops at two universities and a library. So, my first advice is to be honest. Many people spend years walking the wrong path because they are not honest with themselves so they do what they think is right for their career but not what is right for their personal fulfillment. Of course this has to do with basic security or inner peace, and as writers we tend to be insecure because we are sharing our inner most ideas and secrets with the world and because writing is considered an act of intellect so to be judged as a poor, flawed, petty, or insignificant writer in some cases is to be judged as a poor, flawed, petty, or insignificant thinker. And until one makes peace with oneself as a person one can never make peace with oneself as a writer because as Baldwin and so many others have asserted writing is ultimately an act of “getting at the truth.” I know a couple of writers who earn money with their work, but they are not that happy with the work, itself. I also know a few writers who claim to be revolutionaries but are bitter about not earning more money. In both cases, these are people who have not made peace with themselves, which keeps them from making peace with their writing or writing career. Two, reiterating what I said above, do not submit to journals just because they are the most noted journals if one does not like what the journal prints. Three, do not be afraid to or learn to remove the fear of falling on one’s face. I have published stuff that I hope nobody finds, but that was part of my growth. Trying something new, such as exposing oneself to new or different writers or writing in a different way, is how one grows. Finally, attend as many workshops and conferences as possible and submit as much as possible. No one can discover one’s work in a shoebox under one’s bed. (But, I do want to add that workshops and conferences are not so much about being “discovered” as they are about getting feedback from people one respects, expanding one’s talent and vision, and making contacts with other writers, editors, and publishers.)
Mimi Ferbee: And what about writers who are editors as well? As the editor of Black Magnolias Literary Journal & Psychedelic Literature, I’m sure you have some advice on how to balance it all. What would be your top three urging points for this population?
C. Liegh McInnis: One, learn to say “no” when one becomes overwhelmed with activities that keep one from writing and editing, which is more difficult for writers of color than our white counterparts. Because opportunities for success, however it is defined, are still more limited for people of color than our white counterparts, when an African person achieves what is considered a level of success in any field one is often asked to be more than just what one’s career choice is because the community needs that leadership—in some cases regardless of whether or not that person is qualified to be anything other than one’s chosen field. So an African writer or actor or musician or engineer or athlete or school teacher is often pulled into other areas of community work/service because of the shortage of leadership. Yet, one must know one’s limits. I’m not saying that one should not use one’s skills to improve the community, but, again, one must be honest and realistic about what one can and desires to do. Two, a journal is about an aesthetic. There are so many journals because there are so many aesthetics. Those of us who edit must decide what the journal’s aesthetic is and have the integrity to publish along those lines. Often, people are published for reasons other than aesthetic—whether it is political ideology or having a famous name—and that weakens the integrity of the journal. I want someone to be able to say “I don’t like the aesthetic of Black Magnolias, but they accept and decline based solely on that aesthetic.” Though I prefer image-driven political poetry and fiction, a poem where someone writes/says “revolution” forty-five times is not a poem; that’s just someone writing/saying “revolution” forty-five times based on the aesthetic I prefer. And three, surround oneself with people one respects and trusts. One can only master something of which one is a student so I try to surround myself with mentors and peers whose minds I respect and whose integrity I trust. I don’t have to agree with them, but I know that their ideas, comments, and feedback are informed and honest. (And four, though I sleep very little, I do believe in time from writing, editing, and publishing. There are very few one-dimensional people who do not burn out or go crazy.)
Mimi Ferebee: In regards to resources—for both writers and editors—what couldn’t you live without? I’m interested, particularly, in the current tools that help you not only refine your crafts (in writing and editing), but also help you reach your targeted audiences (e.g. websites, publishing lists, dictionaries, writing workshops, books, speeches, electronic tools, etc.).
C. Liegh McInnis: Since for me, again, writing begins with reading, I reference my book collection for almost everything that I write. So, books by individual writers as well as a few anthologies are a necessity for me. The library is still a solid resource for me because I can get out of print books even if just for a couple of weeks. And, of course, my collegiate dictionary is always by my side, especially when I am reading. Transitioning to my work as a publisher, the internet has helped me a great deal. Not only has it allowed me to gain greater access to journals to which I can submit, but as a journal publisher and as a writer with self-published books I am able to reach the world. In 1996 I did an online interview for my book, The Lyrics of Prince, and later that day I had orders from Germany, England, and France. I have even used the internet to locate book clubs and send copies of my work to them. Also, for Black Magnolias we have been able to use email to target professors at creative writing programs and libraries around the country, which is less expensive than traditional mail marketing. Finally, I participate in a bi-weekly creative writing workshop with a couple of my colleagues from Jackson State University. Sometimes we provide feedback to each other’s work, and sometimes we just discuss writing—an idea someone has, someone struggling to navigate life and writing, and any other issue that is affecting the writing.
Mimi Ferebee: What is your ultimate goal as a writer? We all have that one journal or magazine that we are striving to be published in OR that one press that we dream will one day publish our novel or book of poems! What’s yours?
C. Liegh McInnis: Twenty-one years ago as a college student my goal was to be published in as many journals as possible with Callaloo and African American Review being the top of the mountain. Now, at forty-one after being published in several journals and an anthology, I have accepted that I may never be published in Callaloo and African American Review because my poetry and fiction are a bit too ornate with imagery and the subject matter is a bit too nationalistic for their tastes. And that is a decision that we must all make as writers. No journal has the obligation to publish all writers, but all writers have the obligation to identify the journals that they love and master the aesthetic of that journal. So now realizing that the ship has sailed on getting published in Callaloo and AAR, my goal now is to teach, encourage, and inspire as many people as possible, but especially African people, with my writing and with Black Magnolias. Additionally, because I was introduced to poetry and fiction through journals, it was never my goal to have a book published per se. In fact, the only reason I began publishing my own manuscripts was because I was part of a four-year open mic venue in Jackson, Mississippi, and either at that venue or when some of us would travel to other venues people would ask me if I had a book. To be clear, I was never thinking about CDs or open mic as primary ways to share my work. The open mic for the writers with whom I was working at the time was a means, not an end, to getting local writers to attend workshops and other events where we discussed writing and publishing, specifically submitting work to journals. Black Magnolias grew from those conversations and from a moment when a teenaged writer at a workshop I was coordinating had written a very good story, but it had a subway in the plot. When I asked about the subway, he simply replied “Most of the stuff I read and see has a subway in it.” That’s when I realized that there were very few places for Afro-Southern writers to tell their story, especially if they were more prone to a Black Nationalist ideology. And, yes, we do publish more than Black Nationalist-driven work because I want to show the complete aesthetic spectrum of Afro-Mississippian and Afro-Southern writers. So, my goal is to try to write quality, well-crafted, poetry and fiction that teaches or inspires people to see their potential and be better than they are and to maintain Black Magnolias as a venue where writers of African descent can feel free to express themselves with well-crafted words, other writers can feel free to join the discussion, and readers can see African people painted with the beautiful and complex colors that they are, even if sometimes those paintings are painful to bear.
Mimi Ferebee: Lastly, please tell us about any upcoming projects you are currently working on? Fill us in on your personal endeavors as well as your publication efforts.
C. Liegh McInnis: As a writer, I am working on three projects. One is a second collection of short stories, which are a bit different than my first, as it was much more socio-political. This new collection will be driven by humor and imagery and focused on life lessons that it takes to raise a boy into a man. It is tentatively called The Mis-Adventures of Clyde. Clyde, by the way, is not my first name, and comes from the basketball star Walt “Clyde” Frazier as “Clyde” was a symbol for cool or hipster. The protagonist in my collection is not nearly as cool as he thinks he is, which leads to the humor and the lessons. I am also compiling and editing poetry that I have written since 2002, which was when I published my last book. I have written a great deal of poetry during that time, but I concentrated mostly on sending that work to journals. That time was a tremendous time of emotional turmoil and growth, and I want to see how the poetry documented that time and my journey. Finally, I am constructing a work of poetry titled 7, in which I am taking some of my more noted or published poems and editing them to seven lines as an exercise in economy and power. The most effective writers can say in four lines what it takes the rest of us fourteen lines to say, and I want to challenge myself as a way to grow. And as an editor, we have recently completed two special issues, so I am looking forward to returning to regular issues with no theme other than quality essays and image-driven poetry and fiction, studying and celebrating African people and their beautiful and complex lives.
***Interview with Mables Tigo***
Mimi Ferebee: So what is UP with RED OCHRE PRESS? Why have the Board of Directors decided to flip the script (pun intended) and steer us away from online publication?
Mables Tigo: Well, for anyone who has been following RED OCHRE from the beginning, they know that our mission is to “resoil” the grains of literature. We exist to bring contemporary literature under the scope in which our forefathers and foremothers constructed their works. With that in mind, it is only natural for us to attempt to take these important, multicultural pieces and print them. We want the world to see the importance of these pieces—as they are worth being circulated in this fashion.
Mimi Ferebee: And what of our reading audience? What kind of feedback are they giving?
Mables Tigo: From the emails that have been forwarded to us regarding this transition, readers are ecstatic. They are thrilled that we value our contributors’ works enough to attempt print publications. They have been so supportive. Many have even “pre-ordered” books. Their enthusiasm tells us that this is not only the right thing to do, but it’s the right time to do it.
Mimi Ferebee: So what does this means for our online presence?
Mables Tigo: We will maintain it. The only major difference is that instead of offering our entire issue to the public, well will present only a few pieces and ask that they support us in reading the complete, printed copy.
Mimi Ferebee: Before we speak about the Fellowships that we have in place, can you speak about our international charity projects? Readers have been overly supportive of our work in Belize City, Belize with the Dorothy Menzies Child Care Center and in Santa Elena, Guatemala with the Santo Domingo Orphanage. Can you explain a little about our missions here and how this ties into our work as a publishing press? Mables Tigo: Our mission with international charity projects is to simply extend our love of literature—reading, writing, and comprehending—to underrepresented and sometimes overlooked children. We do a lot of work here in the States with both gifted and at-risk students and we when thought about our multicultural foundation, we knew we needed to expand our work. When learning of our “literary trek” to Belize, an administrator from the Dorothy Menzies Child Care Center contacted me and ask if our editors would not mind speaking to her students about what we do here in America. She asked us to spend some time working with them on creative writing tasks. I don't have to tell you that that was a no brainer! Of course, we would. Soon, after publicizing our mission to Belize, we were asked to make a pit stop in Santa Elena, Guatemala along our route to Tikal. We aggred to go there as well. It is my hope that we will continue to be invited. Literature is everything to us, and it bridges national together. If we are invited, we will try to come, bearing the gift of words if nothing else. I ask that anyone interested in us coming to their city, please email: editors.redochrelit@gmail.com. For readers who would like to donate to our missions, please visit: http://www.redochrelit.com/donate.html.
Mimi Ferebee: Talk a little now about our local projects. What of RED OCHRE’s Virginia Fellowship Program?
Mables Tigo: This is a program that we are very excited about launching. RED OCHRE PRESS currently offers a few “fellowship” workshops to help writers refine their literary crafts. Our groups are geared towards youths and adults. We have the RED OCHRE Youth Fellowship and the RED OCHRE PRESS Fellowship. Under the umbrella of the RED OCHRE PRESS Fellowship, we have both a novice and an experienced workshop so that we can help a number of writers despite their level of writing experience. Our program, led by accomplished authors and literary teachers, ushers writers into their creative zone and takes them through an actual publication journey. The students will mold their skills, consummating their voice and writing style as they create premier, contemporary literature while building a readership. This is essential for writers who are learning to write, as well as writers who have refined skills and are looking to strengthen their competency.
Mimi Ferebee: I am truly excited for this program. As a contemporary society pushes its citizens away from reading, turning our attention instead to electronic play tools, it is imperative that we rebuild our literary foundation. I’ve said it many times before and I will say it again, we have to work twice as hard to snatch our peers away from their XBOXes, their Playstations, their Wiis and Gameboys. We have to stand on our soapboxes and scream out for their time, hoping that our voice rivers through the ever-present earphones…
Mables Tigo: Yes. When the Board of Directors sat down to discuss this idea, the first thing we agreed upon is the fact that we have solidify our own stance in this world, drawing readers back to us. And the way RED OCHRE PRESS will accomplish this is by forming a literary movement and inviting our peers to join us.
Mimi Ferebee: Before we move on, I want to direct readers to http://www.redochrelit.com/fellowship-program.html for more detailed information on our fellowship workshops.
Mables Tigo: For editors, we have something similar in place, but instead of the “review” part, we simply “promote”. We will publicize your call for submissions, your contests, your book publications, conference calls, etc. OK, now can you enlighten everyone a little on our Review and Promotion services for not only writers, but publishers too?
Mables Tigo: Certainly. Last month we launched the Review and Promotion services for writers. This has been a big hit where writers are submitting their longer manuscripts for professional feedback. Our staff will review poetry books, fiction collections, fiction books & nonfiction books. We are also open to other forms of creative literature.
Submissions can be sent by email or through Submishmash. Once received, we assign several editors to a manuscript. The team members read the work, come together for a critical discussion, and draft a professional statement of its quality. They discuss the strong suits and the weak suits with the author, which is something so rare these days.
Mimi Ferebee: Oh Definitely. As a writer, I am most frustrated when a work is rejected, not because I didn’t find a placement for it, but I am hardly given any direction on what didn’t work within my piece. I play a guessing game, trying to polish it up before submitting to another journal or review, but at the end of the day, I have no clue what detours editors from my work.
Mables Tigo: Precisely. So to address this concern, we have launched Review and Promotion. We will review the piece, discuss it with the author and should they be satisfied with our consensus, we will work with them to promote to both publishers and readers.
Mimi Ferebee: I’m sure many readers want to know how we will go about this and who will we promote to?
Mables Tigo: We will promote literary work through our online, print, and local communities. We are a very well-regarded press. Though small, we have made several friends during our tenure of publishing. For example, as a member of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), we would promote an author’s work to a number of reputable publishing houses and editors within this brotherhood.
The exposure would help with getting unpublished works published and published works sold!
Mimi Ferebee: I think that sums it up for writers interested in our Review and Promotion services.
For readers who are interested in this, visit http://www.redochrelit.com/review--promotion.html. Now about editors?
Mables Tigo: For editors, we have something similar in place, but instead of the “review” part, we simply “promote”. We will publicize your call for submissions, your contests, your book publications, conference calls, etc.
We have a number of national and international readers who want this information. They want to know what press is currently accepting poetry or fiction. They want to know about chapbook contests and recent publications.
Reach out to us, so we can inform our audience. It’s a win-win for everyone.
Thank-You C. Liegh and Mables for your interviews with ROLiT NEWS.
Good Luck to you and your next endeavors!
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ISSN 2159-922X
ROLiT NEWS
Vol 1.7
ROLiT NEWS
Vol 1.7
Donovan Mixon, our novice author & Lisa Marie Basile, our experienced author, offer critical insight into the most resourceful, literary tools and practices.
***Interview with Donovan Mixon***
Mimi Ferebee: How long have you been writing?
Donovan Mixon: I think that I’ve enjoyed ‘playing with words’ and story telling since I was teenager where a show of mental prowess was being able to artfully ‘bust’ on your friends through word play, occasional crass associations and rhyme. Another influence was my mother, who was into to rhyming and would put them to paper from time to time. I’d more or less followed her example by occasionally writing poems that evolved into lyrics for songs as I became more involved with music.
Perhaps I’d written my first actual story more than twenty years ago when I was living alone in a semi-rural section of southern New Jersey. It was when I’d stopped watching television and had a lot of solitude and quiet. It’s a humorous account of my first high school track competition.
I began to write seriously the last two or three years while living in Istanbul. I was lucky enough to hook up with a writing group composed of faculty at a local university. I was in the company of accomplished novelists and poets. We shared, discussed and criticized each other’s work in an atmosphere of encouragement. It was great.
Mimi Ferebee: Which writers inspired your work? Anyone inspiring you right now?
Donovan Mixon: My early inspirations came from writers such as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison. More recently I’ve enjoyed reading and learning from writers like Tom Robbins (love his word play and imaginary metaphors), Paul Auster (sparse minimalism), Phillip Roth, Arundhati Roy, Graham Greene, Jon Mcgregor, Murkami, Leonard Cohen, Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, Nick Hornby.
Mimi Ferebee: As an extremely accomplished musician, how does music play into your writing process? For instance, does it manifest through your topics, form, rhythm, etc?
Donovan Mixon: Absolutely! I’ve found writing the basic outline of a story is like writing a simple tune that could stand alone as a statement. An example could be ‘Take the A Train’ by Billy Strayhorn. As a stand alone juxtaposition of melody and harmony it is great. But then, when you hear the full arrangement and what Duke Ellington was able to do with it, you realize that now you are hearing the whole story! Developing the story, fleshing out the characters, their relationships etc., is like arranging music. You mine the composition for the essential melodic and rhythmic motifs and phrases that give the piece it’s character and use them to enrich the piece, to go forward in unexpected places while maintaining the feel and color of the original. I find that it is somewhat like improvisation as well in that you want to give a oneness of the familiar and the unexpected in order to bring your listener along with you.
Mimi Ferebee: When did you decide to pursue publication? Did you reach out for support/speak to anyone about your decision?
Donovan Mixon: The members of my writing group encouraged me to pursue publication. After a couple years with them, I began to look at my work with a more critical eye and found that it needed a lot of work. Over time, I’d become more sensitive to sentence structure, tone and flow. I’d discovered that I was quite good at writing the basic ‘tune’ of a story, but I needed to go deeper, bring more of the world into them to give the writings meaning. About a year later I’d decided to begin submitting.
Mimi: Ferebee: Did you have any anxiety about submitting your work? If so, what helps to calm your spirits throughout this process?
Donovan Mixon: Nope. I mean…what could I be afraid of? Ruining my reputation? :) I thought and hoped that I’d get valuable feedback. I am so grateful for some rejections in particular because they pointed out things that I couldn’t see.
Mimi Ferebee: As a novice author, what are two things you wish someone would have told you prior to beginning this journey?
Donovan Mixon: Start immediately. You’ll have a ball.
Mimi Ferebee: What are your top two literary resources? I’m interested, particularly, in the current tools that help you refine your craft as an emerging writer (e.g. websites, publishing lists, dictionaries, writing workshops, books, speeches, etc.).
Donovan Mixon: Well, I’m currently seeking another writing group. I don’t want to go the online route. I want to be in the same room with my critics. Reading is a valuable tool of course. Right now I’m reading Innocent Blood by PD James. The dictionary is a great help of course and a site called ‘the reverse dictionary’ is very useful. You to type in an idea, it spits out a list of words that are precisely or vaguely related. Very nice resource. I’ve also just begun an online creative writing course.
Mimi Ferebee: Do you have any further advice for individuals looking to publish their work?
Donovan Mixon: Write something good.
Mimi Ferebee: What advice do you have for our writers who are interested in pursuing music passions? Any words of wisdom on how to balance it all?
Donovan Mixon: Make a decision to practice everyday. Make a small commitment; you will know when you’re ready for more. But consistency is the key. You’ll be happy for it.
Mimi Ferebee: This is your spotlight, talk to readers. Where should we hope to see your work in the upcoming years? Your goals.
Donovan Mixon: Musically, anyone can visit my website: donmixon.com or buy a download of my latest recording, Culmination at Amazon.com or cdbaby.com. Other musical plans include a new recording with my Italian band. We hope to record at the end of the summer.
I am putting finishing touches on several other pieces. For example, I’ve just finished a rewrite of my story ‘Subway’ and am hawking my YA novella ‘Tim’, a coming of age story.
My goals are to be happy and to bring happiness to others through art.
Thank you Mimi and James for the opportunity.
***Interview with Lisa Marie Basile***
Mimi Ferebee: How long have you been writing?
Lisa Marie Basile: I have been writing since childhood. My first poem was published in a local newspaper. I think it was about God and littering. It's ridiculous. I wrote massive amounts of strange and bad poetry during my teen years. I wrote all my poetry by hand and taped them to my walls. My entire bedroom was wallpapered with questionable poetry. I had a fascination with the woods and so I wrote a lot about that then. People called me "the writer." It wasn't until my third year of college that I discovered Cesar Vallejo and became really interested in the craft. I won 1st place in a poetry contest at Pace University, and decided that I'd keep on writing because that was a boost! I wrote not only because I had to, but because it seemed that people were interested and invested in poetry.
Mimi Ferebee: Would you say you are more comfortable writing poetry or prose, and why?
Lisa Marie Basile: I am much more comfortable writing poetry. Prose is absolutely wonderful but so challenging. I feel really comfortable (yet challenged) contemplating line breaks and word choice. It's a different animal. I can swim through a poem, and still create the water. For me, prose is foreign ground. I don't know how to build worlds with so much structure. I admire people who can really steer a story. Poetry is home for me. Poetry allows me to be organic and wild, and confessional in my own way. It leaves room for interpretation. A poem involves the writer and allows the reader to find in it what they want to find, or what they need to find. It's open and uncharted, almost. Making sure it's grounded as well is also something I find really important. It helps me make sense of myself, even through abstractions, which is what we all are as people at the end of day anyway.
Mimi Ferebee: Which authors have influenced your craft? Do you have someone in particular who is inspiring you right now?
Lisa Marie Basile: Cesar Vallejo has undoubtedly changed me as a poet. I love his boldness, his ability to make each poem concise and honest, even through glorious and sometimes abstract language. He allows himself to be wild and passionate, unbridled and yet clean. He's able to talk about good and evil in his own way. In prose, I'm inspired largely by Marguerite Duras and Albert Camus. They write beautiful, clean little sentences that can hit you in the head with their simplicity and honesty. I love Isabel Allende, too, for her descriptive power.
Mimi Ferebee: Literary journals, magazines, etc., flood the internet. As every site cannot possibly be high-quality, what would you advise as a method to sift through the thousands of sites when seeking publication for work? Do you have any personal red flags that deter you from submitting?
Lisa Marie Basile: I think it's key that each website have good, solid writing. I think it's important that each have its own aesthetic and interests. It needs a little personality. It needs to not repeat the same names over and over again. It needs to not run all the same names that others run. I like when there is space for new writers. The journal needs to achieve a good balance. It's nice when a site is beautiful to look at, too. I won't submit if the website is awful, most times. I also think it shouldn't be boring. No boring. Try new things. New voices.
Mimi Ferebee: Generally speaking, what advice would you give to novice writers? Please provide one example of “what NOT to do”.
Lisa Marie Basile: My advice is to read a lot of poetry and fiction. Poetry and fiction from around the world. Recite your work aloud. Hear it, understand it. Notice its nuances. Don't be afraid to edit. Clip. Cut. If things get sloppy, get them out. If it's not necessary, it can probably go. Be open to criticism. There's nothing worse than a giant, close-minded ego. Read at readings. Meet people. Trust yourself. Write in different styles. Do no pigeon hole yourself into genres or styles. Do not lose sight of your strengths. Do not, not, not, not copy your peers. Learn from them, but for god sake, don't mirror them.
Mimi Ferebee: And what about writers who are editors as well? As the editor of Caper Literary Journal and Patasola Press, I’m sure you have some advice on how to balance it all. What would be your top three urging points for this population?
Lisa Marie Basile: Do not let the editing swallow you; allow yourself the time to write, too. Do not let other writers rule or zap your creative space and energy. Edit with the writer in mind; edit as you'd like to be edited in all ways: fairly, clearly, with knowledge of the work and with respect.
Mimi Ferebee: In regards to resources—for both writers and editors--what couldn’t you live without? I’m interested, particularly, in the current tools that help you not only refine your crafts (in writing and editing), but also help you reach your targeted audiences (e.g. websites, publishing lists, dictionaries, writing workshops, books, speeches, electronic tools, etc.).
Lisa Marie Basile: I like to read at poetry readings. Right now, I'm a part of The Poetry Brothel, and what we do is create an immersive poetry experience that allows the listener to have a private, intimate reading with a poet. I read to people a lot. Ask their ideas, opinions. I ask about their interests, note what lines caught them and where they said, "wait, wow..." or "wait, what?" I refine a lot of my work after reading to peers and out loud. I let the poem get comfortable with itself. That's my first intangible tool. I also am in an M.F.A. program at The New School in New York, and I like reading other people's work and genuinely trying my peers' suggestions. I like Duotrope's Digest so much because it's an amazing resource for finding journals of interest.
Mimi Ferebee: What is your ultimate goal as a writer? We all have that one journal or magazine that we are striving to be published in OR that one press that we dream will one day publish our novel or book of poems! What’s yours?
Lisa Marie Basile: My dream honestly is to become a better writer and poet. I want to move people. My goal is to remind people that beautiful poetry is still relevant. It wouldn't hurt to publish with Graywolf either! I am also big fan of Greying Ghost, Dancing Girl Press, Wave Books and Black Ocean.
Mimi Ferebee: Lastly, please tell us about any upcoming projects you are currently working on? Fill us in on your personal endeavors as well as your publication efforts.
Lisa Marie Basile: I am actively promoting Diorama, a chapbook I wrote with Alyssa Morhardt-Goldstein, a fellow poet. It's gorgeous. It has a very sensual, cultural tone. I am also working on final edits for A Decent Voodoo, which will be released on Cervena Barva Press in 2012, and on Andalusia, a chapbook that will be released by Brothel Books, sponsored by The Poetry Society of New York. I'm reading and working a lot with The Poetry Brothel, too, and we're hosting a festival this summer in our own 19th century historic house at Governor's Island I'm actively promoting Patasola Press, of course, and our first amazing book by Rae Bryant, The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals. We're going to publish some great people this year, including fiction, poetry and prose-poetry and translation works. I'm working on reshaping Caper Literary Journal, too -- and finishing my M.F.A. I'm going to Europe in a few days, so in the short term, I want to write a lot.
Thank-You Donovan and Lisa for your interviews with ROLiT NEWS.
Good Luck to you and your next endeavors!
Good Luck to you and your next endeavors!
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ISSN 2159-922X
ROLiT NEWS
Vol 1.6
To mark our sixth issue, we have a special treat for readers.
This month Editor-in-Chief Mimi Ferebee answers YOUR questions!
--What of RED OCHRE LiT--
Our Policies, Response Times, Print Publishing, Blogging Phobias & 501(c)(3) Future
Read Now, to also join our novice author, Kathy Boles-Turner, and our experienced author, Mimi Ferebee as they offer insight into the most resourceful literary tools.
This month Editor-in-Chief Mimi Ferebee answers YOUR questions!
--What of RED OCHRE LiT--
Our Policies, Response Times, Print Publishing, Blogging Phobias & 501(c)(3) Future
Read Now, to also join our novice author, Kathy Boles-Turner, and our experienced author, Mimi Ferebee as they offer insight into the most resourceful literary tools.
***Interview with Kathy Boles-Turner***
Mimi: Ferebee: How long have you been writing?
Kathy Boles-Turner: In earnest, for the past two and a half years. As an adolescent I toyed with poems and journal writing; however, I became increasingly concerned with privacy and was quite anxious about leaving any of my personal thoughts in print to be discovered (some of that stuff would have scared my mother to death!). I remained a voracious reader, but allowed the urge to write eventually to dwindle away. Two decades after leaving adolescence behind, I was in the throes of severe depression and suffering insomnia. Extreme insomnia. I started listening to music at night in hopes of relaxing and drifting off to sleep – one particular night, I was listening to Three Doors Down when inspiration struck.
For the next two weeks, in which I had plenty of sleepless hours, I gave my exhaustion and numerous, unnamable emotions to a character named Kaitlyn. She became an amazing motivator in every aspect of my life. I wanted to write! I had to write! Most astonishing of all, I wanted people to READ what I wrote! Despite being sleep deprived and on the verge of serious illness, I recognized that I had many obstacles to overcome in order to be able to write well. I needed to go back to college. This all took place in September-October, 2008. I got a new computer in November; by December I was enrolled in online courses and preparing for college level English Comp and Lit. The insomnia dissipated, the classes went extraordinarily well, but I was getting desperate for an opportunity to learn more about how to write Kait’s story effectively. I wanted people to meet her, to enjoy her, to understand her. My next step was to look for online writing communities – although, I wasn’t yet familiar with the term “writing community”, I did manage to stumble upon LiveJournal. At age 39 I was a freshman again and journaling sporadically.
Mimi Ferebee: Which writers inspired your work?
Kathy Boles-Turner: Oddly enough, it wasn’t the good, or great, authors that inspired me to write. It was those that fell into the ... less favorable categories that made me realize maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t wasting my time at this writing thing. Great authors, good authors even, inspire me to read more, not write.
I will refrain from naming those I consider less favorable and list some authors that have impressed me. The first novel I ever read (at age 11) was Gone with the Wind, so Mitchell remains a favorite of mine. I adore Edgar Allen Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Margaret Atwood, Harper Lee, Mark Twain, Charles Bukowski and so many more. Most recently, I’ve enjoyed Erick Setiawan, China Miéville, and Joyce Carol Oates.
I’m very attracted to gritty romances and crime noir, as well as anything with deep Southern undertones and emotionally evocative imagery – admittedly, these are the literary flavors I tend to experiment with, flavors enhanced by my Grandfather’s influential, very natural storytelling voice. My poetry, while definitely steeped in deep Southern undertones more than anything else, is a therapeutic exercise as much as an opportunity to express my writerly voice.
Mimi Ferebee: Anyone or anything inspiring you right now?
Kathy Boles-Turner: Although I am a lover of music, years as a portrait studio photographer and assistant to a professional wedding photographer has given me certain appreciation for the visual arts. Nowadays I only dabble here and there with a cheap digital camera, but the images I’ve captured never cease to stimulate ... to demand, more creativity from me. In March, I started a daily project using my own landscapes as visual stimulation. In April, I had the pleasure of meeting a semi-professional photographer online, Sheila Creighton. She accepted my invitation to collaborate, and wow! Her images drove me to produce and/or revise more than thirty stories.
I’m currently reading Joyce Carol Oates’ Dear Husband (I adore her talent for manipulating language, for effectively bypassing grammatical rules and conveying just the right emotional emphasis, making common stories extraordinary); quite often, I gravitate toward the works of Langston Hughes (favorite American poet), as well as various Imagists, and I’ve been listening to a lot (a LOT!) of Mumford and Sons and The Civil Wars lately. These art mediums and incredible artists don’t necessarily inspire me; they do something much more profound: their work soothes my soul, makes it quiet so that inspiration can do its magic!
I am, inarguably, an organic writer. You’ll never catch me devising an outline or character study – not that there’s anything wrong with a structured process, that’s just not productive for me.
Mimi Ferebee: When did you decide to pursue publication? Did you reach out for support/speak to anyone about your decision?
Kathy Boles-Turner: Three months after creating my online journal, I received an invitation to join a competitive writing community, Brigit’s Flame. Even now, I get emotional thinking about the world that unfolded for me after accepting that invitation. I found a home, friends, teachers, and so much more! It was a safe environment – yes, I was technically bearing my raw, uneducated writerly soul in public, but not IN PUBLIC. At first, I was dealing with faceless, fun strangers who confessed they were students of the craft – in real life, they were college kids, educators, spiritual leaders, musicians, housewives, medical professionals, etc. Regardless of their occupations or daily routines, they possessed a passion for inventing stories, and a passion for supporting each other. As time passed, they became incredible, devoted friends who encouraged me to try and try again. I was nurtured as a writer.
Though I went into the community expecting to hone my fiction skills and one day write the Great American Coming of Age / Romance Novel, my aspirations changed drastically. I discovered creative nonfiction, and eventually (in spite of my refusal to acknowledge its existence for a very long time), poetry took me by the throat and has yet to let go.
If not for my amazing friends at Brigit’s Flame, I would have never gained the confidence to do more than just write in the weekly contests. One or more of them have been integral to my branching out, experimenting with style, various venues, and yes, actually trying to get published. By the way, it was there I learned that literary journals hosted contests and open submissions all over the world. I had no clue! Later on, this past February as a matter of fact, it was one of my fellow Flamers, although indirectly, who inspired me to build a website where I could display my writing – publicly. All alone.
I’ve since met with time constraints and obligations that don’t allow me to participate in my beloved community as much as I would like, and I miss it terribly. But I will always count myself as blessed for the years I had there. The experiences, the people, are dear to me.
Mimi: Ferebee: Did you have any anxiety about submitting your work? If so, what helps to calm your spirits throughout this process?
Kathy Boles-Turner: The first time I decided to submit, I was on fire with excitement, with confidence! The nanosecond after I hit the ‘send’ button, I became a useless puddle of freak out. What did I just do?! I went whining to my online friends – who, thankfully – were intelligent enough to remind me to breathe. They were also around and ready to help me celebrate when I was soundly rejected.
Mimi Ferebee: As a novice author, what are two things you wish someone would have told you prior to beginning this journey?
Kathy Boles-Turner: Oh, I wouldn’t want to be told a thing. My journey began, I like to think, just the way it should have. The fumbling confusion, the surges of excitement for learning new things, all of it has been wonderful and I expect to have endless amounts of just the same as the journey continues!
Mimi Ferebee: What are your top two literary resources? I’m interested, particularly, in the current tools that help you refine your craft as an emerging writer (e.g. websites, publishing lists, dictionaries, writing workshops, books, speeches, etc.).
Kathy Boles-Turner: Besides the aforementioned Brigit’s Flame (whose amazing crew of volunteer editors taught me volumes!), I have sought information on several research communities within LiveJournal (including ask_a_cop), and the handy dandy thesaurus.com is bookmarked and used almost daily.
Mimi Ferebee: Do you have any further advice for individuals looking to publish their work?
Kathy Boles-Turner: Like most aspects of life, being open-minded and open-hearted is integral to self-satisfaction and success – success on any level. Fight off whatever fears, whatever traditions cause you to think it’s necessary to keep a narrow scope while you’re learning, because after all, this is a never ending learning experience – don’t forget that.
Read EVERYTHING you can get your eyeballs on: Classic, contemporary, multi-cultural works, history, advice from publishers and writers (including Stephen King’s On Writing –his brand of humor is as educational as what he shares of his professional experiences). As you read, listen to your instincts and be sure to filter advice, “rules”, etc., through your own unique sensibilities. It is not impossible to be open-minded and listen to instinct simultaneously.
Most importantly, write that story you’ve always wanted to read, those words you’ve always needed to hear, to purge. Regardless of whatever current trends are raging through pop culture, I have confidence that readers recognize, and respect, authentic storytelling.
Mimi Ferebee: This is your spotlight, talk to readers. Where should we hope to see your work in the upcoming years? Your goals.
Kathy Boles-Turner: In ’09, two new characters came to life for me, and their stories are novel length, but I’ve never had the necessary time to devote to them – I am looking forward to finally getting to work on those stories in the near future. As I said earlier, poetry took me by the throat a while ago, so what free time I’ve had in the past several months has been poured into this mysterious, yet undeniably therapeutic, form. (Sometimes the Universe gives you what you need even when you didn’t know how to ask for it.) Encouraged by many friends, and this unceasing drive of the muses, I am currently working on a collection of poems and photographs entitled Ramshackle Houses, which I plan to be sending out by June 1 – I’ll be contacting several chapbook publishers. This ambition to be a professionally published writer is relatively new ... and it’s growing magnificently! Regardless of what genre any of my work may one day be labeled or what publishers will offer contracts, to see it in print, to know that people want to read it ... I cannot imagine the intensity of personal satisfaction that will bring.
***Interview with Mimi Ferebee***
Dru MaCauthor: We have received an inordinate amount of feedback on the new look of the website. We’ve held a number of office meetings as well as conducted a forum discussion on Facebook. Readers, submitters, and staff are curious as to what is the final verdict on this issue. Has RED OCHRE found a permanent face? Or merely a new summer look?
Mimi Ferebee: I think we have definitely found a “good look” as the kids say these days. Would we consider it permanent? I’m not sure as of yet. The new look has mastered the eclectic tone of the journal, that is for sure. And, is it true that we have received an overwhelming positive response to the change. I’ve received emails, pokes and written love-notes all agreeing that the new look complements the feel of our literature. This was our intent with the facial lift, so I am pleased with the feedback. However, with any business, change goes hand in hand with progress, with evolution and development. So that being said, it is probable that the look will change again in the future…but I do think that we will flaunt this for awhile!
Dru MaCauthor: In regards to the website, many readers have asked about an area to blog or voice opinions. Some have even requested that we delegate space under the literature to allow for feedback. What is your opinion on this and why have you chosen to forgo the response space?
Mimi Ferebee: Good question, Dru.I do believe it is critically important for readers to give feedback to not only us, but also our contributors. Instead of providing a platform on the website, we have chosen to create RED OCHRE PEOPLE—our writer’s organization on Facebook—to offer a stage for readers, editors, and writers to discuss their opinions on everything literary…not just the work that is presented in RED OCHRE. While the majority of our readers would probably offer constructive feedback, whether positive or negative, I have seen where these “response spaces” can also be a gateway into random advertising, spam, distasteful conversation, etc. I believe that to allow such degradation to take place on an author’s page would debase their work. RED OCHRE LiT exists as a product of refined pieces and to leave the journal exposed to the possibility of such chaos, is simply irresponsible. So while I disagree with a blog area on the website, I agree with the notion that our readers must be heard. Through our electronic pages—Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn—we offer a well-kept space for dialogue and encourage everyone to discuss.
Dru MaCauthor: Many submitters write in asking if they can be interviewed for a spot in ROLiT NEWS—our monthly newsletter--without having their work accepted or even submitted to RED OCHRE LiT. While well tell them this is against our policy, can you explain these guidelines and your opinion on this matter?
Mimi Ferebee: Sure. The “policy” is that we only interview RED OCHRE PRESS contributors. ROLiT NEWS exists as a forum for literary growth. We interview novice and experienced writers, asking them for their advice on how to refine an author’s literary perspective and their works. Then, we go on to ask our interviewees for specific tools on how to get polished pieces published. A resource center, ROLiT NEWS hosts exclusive writers who come to talk openly and honestly about their journeys to publication. People who read these interviews are exposed to everything—the gritty rejections, the optimistic first-timer, the tired editor, the old-dog learning new tricks, the new-dog running through worn pastures.
The way we come to appreciate these writers and their words of wisdom is by reviewing their work—via submission to RED OCHRE LiT—and having the privilege of walking with our contributors through a publication journey. These are RED OCHRE writers—authors’ whose work we value and whose opinions on writing have been validated through their pieces.
We esteem their creations and feel as though they have the competence and experience neededto share with our audience.
Dru MaCauthor: I agree with you, Mimi. The bridge from RED OCHRE LiT to ROLiT NEWS is what makes our organization so connected and strong. While NEWS is a project of its own, it is directly tied to the journal, so to separate the two would induce a cavity… one that readers would undoubtedly feel. But to just expand a little further, can you speak about the interview process once you do reach out to contributors?
Mimi Ferebee: It’s quite simple, though ours may be a little more complex than with some others presses. We send the interview questions out to our contributors and once the documents are returned, we begin yet another review process to choose pieces that we believe will benefit our audience. Again, ROLiT NEWS is a contemporary, fresh resource, so we do not want to publish the same advice and tools over and over.
We encourage interviewers to shy away from clichéd responses, asking that they be honest, but as helpful as possible. I do not believe it is enough to tell a writer, whether novice or experienced, to “keep writing, keep writing, keep writing--don’t stop, keep writing”. Sometimes, writing just isn’t enough and where do you turn then? I can write all day long, but without the proper tools, my scribbles would collect dust for eons! So don’t tell me to “never stop writing,” tell me how to take my written piece, polish it up, and get it published. For answers to these questions, I direct people to ROLiT NEWS.
Dru MaCauthor: My next questionis one that has been raised by both submitters and staff members. What are your plans for staff expansion? Do you feel as though you have enough staff to handle the pieces that are coming through? Our submission pool has grown exponentially since the inaugural issue, so what are your plans for juggling the numbers?
Mimi Ferebee: I knew this question was coming! When submitters read our website guidelines (http://www.redochrelit.com/submit.html) and see that we typically have a three-month turn around, they are flabbergasted to receive our email—to their submissions—encouraging them to contact us after one month! As a writer, I understand the anxiety that accrues over weeks and weeks of wait time. So while I have given the staff three-months to make final decisions, I do apply pressure for us to make sooner turnarounds. I feel that if we know a piece is not a good fit for RED OCHRE LiT, advise the writer as soon as possible, giving him/her an opportunity to find a proper placement for their work.
Naturally, this goal of a quick response makes an editor’s day a little more time conscience. As submissions have been flowing in, a current in itself, I do believe that expansion is necessary. Right now, we have a small staff, working with you as our poetry head and James as the fiction head. Under you guys, we have several editorial interns, but we absolutely need to increase—if for no other reason than we all appreciate the value of swift turnaround.
In the meantime, however, my priority is a balance between a thorough read-through and a timely response. This means, currently, we spend a little over a month getting back to submitters. Well, I still say job-EXTREMELY-well-done! We read every line of every submission to make sure a piece is either a fit or not, and I will never jeopardize our review process to cut down on time.
We have created balance thus far and until we accrue more eyes, submitters will have to adjust to our month/month-and-a-half response time. It should make everyone feel better, though, to know that we are working to cut that time down.
Dru MaCauthor: Now a staff driven question:So given your desires for more staff, have you created job ads or posted for editors? Also, any raises in the near future? (Smile)
Mimi Ferebee: I have a few ads posted on various college campuses. I am seeking editorial interns to help us with a number of RED OCHRE PRESS tasks.
As an undergraduate, I was given a number of opportunities to have real-life experiences in both the editing and counseling field. These experiences shaped my life and paved a solid foundation for my career passions. So I encourage undergrads who are interested in editing, publishing and/or writing to come learn from us as they work to help in the process. This is a reciprocally beneficial relationship for interns and I have already noticed this with the group that we currently have.
That being said, I am in the process of finding a few more helpers.
Also, in a few months, as we work to complete our 501(c)(3) application, I will be pleased to offer full-time work to our interns who graduate with degrees & hopefully this means raises for everyone! Me included!
Dru MaCauthor: Speaking about the 501(c)(3) endeavors, what are your plans with this? We have received a number of Board of Director resumes, as well as readers who are interested in your goals after we achieve the official status. While the staff obviously understands our mission here, explain a little of our vision to the public.
Mimi Ferebee: First, let me say how thrilled I am at the feedback we have been receiving from readers in regards to our 501(c)(3) aspirations! We are still in the process of completing our application and raising the funds to send it off, but it will happen soon. Readers have been so supportive, in giving both words of encouragement and money. And in these desperate economic times, we do not take their monetary gifts for granted. So thank-you again to everyone who contributes in this fashion.
For a little insight into our visions: RED OCHRE PRESS has a number of projects that we will sponsor once we get our status approved. For instance, our Young Writer’s Project will assist about 50-75 at-risk students, who are struggling with reading and writing performance.
The objective of the Young Writer’s Program is to help local students improve their reading speed and comprehension and their grammar and syntax structuring.
This past year, we piloted the Young Writer’s Program with a small group of struggling students—meeting at local libraries for study groups. Even Dru can attest—as she worked (a phenomenal English instructor)—we saw dramatic improvements with most, noting an increased reading and writing ability by one to two grades. The program provides students with access to academic reading tutors and writing coaches!
We covered a number of their school novels and upcoming literary assignments, helping mold intrinsic bridges between the book characters and the students. Better connection there led to better feeling on paper!
Dru MaCauthor: Absolutely, Mimi, we made outstanding progress with the students and I’m getting excited for the second class this summer! In addition to the Young Writer’s Program, readers will be interested to know about our desires to fund print, yearly anthologies. This ties into the 501(c)(3) status as grants would help us see these projects into fruition.
Mimi Ferebee: Yes! Readers and contributors often ask about our plans for the anthologies, especially the one that will house the “Best Of” RED OCHRE LiT. And, in addition to this, the press would also like to branch into publishing chapbook and fiction anthologies, full-length poetry volumes, and novels.
We truly have big dreams here and we all believe grants and grassroot fundraising can help make literature more accessible and desirable to both children and adults. I won’t go on and on about reading and writing becoming dying pastimes—something I mention in almost every interview, but I will say RED OCHRE PRESS exist to help reverse this epidemic. Without a doubt, this is our short and long-term goal. So with each issue and local project, we accomplish a little more, getting closer and closer to ridding our population of this virus.
Dru MaCauthor: Okay, so as this month’s featured, experienced author, we want to know what are your top three writing resources? (To get a full scope on Mimi’s literary work, passions and future personal projects, readers can view the Editor’s Page (http://www.redochrelit.com/editor-in-chief-mimi-ferebee.html.) I’m particularly interested in current tools that help you refine your poetry and fiction works.
Mimi Ferebee: An avid reader, I tend to have books as my primary resources. While “reading” is a resource in itself, I have become partial to a few books that are purely intended to help mold my craft. For instance, relatively new to writing Creative Nonfiction, I have already found some help. A good friend of mine recommended, Barbara Lounsberry’s The Art of Fact, where—
Dru MaCauthor: Indeed, I did recommend that! An excellent writing resource.
Mimi Ferebee: (Smile) And it has helped me tremendously. The author argues that four characteristics constitute this genre: 1) A documentable topic 2) Exhaustive research 3) An interesting “scene” 4) A refined literary prose style.
Lounsberry stresses the critical importance of describing and revivifying the context of events in contrast to the typical journalistic style of an objective report. Ultimately, she argues, “Verifiable subject matter and exhaustive research guarantee the nonfiction side of literary nonfiction; the narrative form and structure disclose the writer’s artistry; and finally, its polished language reveals that the goal all along has been literature.” This book has been an extreme help to me. While the four characteristics may seem self-explanatory, especially when contrasting fiction to nonfiction, her intricate breakdown has aided in my tackling of this new genre. I read this book, using her tools, to draft my “The Distant Marshes.” A show of Lounseberry’s power, my first twenty-page creative nonfiction story was recently accepted for publication in the James Dickey Review!
Over the years, I have also been a huge student of Literature and the Writing Process (3rd Ed.) by Elizabeth McMahan and Susan Day of Illinois State University and Robert Funk of Eastern Illinois University & Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies by Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer of the University of Oklahoma. These books have refined my ability to both review and write about literature (fiction, poetry, drama). While not only sharpening my skills as a critic and editor, it has helped me as writer, because I can quickly identify strong writing within the works of others. This applies to my pleasure reading and submission reviewing. By noting skills mastered within literature, I can see and hear the crafts of competent writers. Then, I take what I have learned and apply it in my own work. Learning how to do this has been a great benefit and I would suggest these books to both novice and experienced writers.
And, I know you asked for only three resources, but I do want to note one that is currently helping me. Based on a number of positive reviews, I purchased a copy of The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron. Imagine a twelve-step program for writers—viola! Cameron argues that the foundation of creative expression is the natural direction of life. By following her twelve-week program, I am currently in the process of not only strengthening, but recovering my creativity!
The program is geared towards unleashing your mojo from the grips of everyday blocks and self-destruction (including defeating beliefs, fear, self-sabotage, what have you)—producing instead an unshakable artistic confidence and productivity.
Cameron links creativity to spirituality by illustrating how to tap into your creative energies through the chaos of life. With so much on my plate, my writing is sometime jeopardized and when I try to sit down, I just feel drained—almost as if I have nothing else to give. This is not a healthy dynamic, especially when I believe my ultimate purpose is to write…
So I don’t know about you, but I wanted to learn how to better hone in on my creative energies during chaotic time periods. If this is of interested to you, I recommend this book to show you how.
Thank-You Kathy and Mimi for your interviews with ROLiT NEWS.
Good Luck to you and your next endeavors!
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ISSN 2159-922X
ROLiT NEWS
Vol 1.5
Mike Miller, our novice author & Joe MacLean, our experienced author, offer critical insight into the most resourceful, literary tools and practices.
***Interview with Mike Miller***
Mimi Ferebee: How long have you been writing?
Mike Miller: On and off since the age of 16. There was also a short story I wrote before that age, I think when I was 10, but I have no recollection of what that was about, just a picture I drew remains in my memory of something that resembled a half man half tiger.
Mimi Ferebee: Which writers inspired your work? Anyone inspiring you right now?
Mike Miller: I try to read authors from many different genres and/or styles. At the time I was writing The Man Who Paid in Tears I was reading Charles Bukowski, which probably influenced the desolation of the main character, and also probably influenced the fantastical nature of the event that happens inside of the coffee shop. For my upcoming novel, Christopher James: A Story in Selfhood the influences span from many authors such as Ayn Rand, Jonathan Franzen, George Eliot James Joyce (not Ulysses), Herman Hesse, John Irving, James Baldwin.
Others include Samuel Beckett, Douglas Copland, Tim Robbins. And given my history in theatre, my influence on dialogue and set description I can add Harold Pinter.
Mimi Ferebee: When did you decide to pursue publication?
Mike Miller: Oddly enough I only recently pursued publication. I did once with a theatre play I wrote that ran for a weekend in London, but this seemed difficult. Usually a play needs to be running in a theatre for at least three weeks before going into publication. This has yet to happen for me. So, after finally feeling content with The Man Who Paid in Tears I decided to attempt to publish that. As far as reaching for support, I asked some close friends and my loving wife to read a copy to see what their feedback would be, and once I realized there were only tiny grammatical notes or idiosyncratic, I realized that the structure was in tact and that this was as confident/happy I could be.
Mimi Ferebee: Did you have any anxiety about submitting your work? If so, what helps to calm your spirits throughout this process?
Mike Miller: Occasionally. If so, time and my wife help.
Mimi Ferebee: As a novice author, what are two things you wish someone would have told you prior to beginning this journey?
Mike Miller: This is a difficult question as I feel I have so much more to learn...I feel like I have to mirror one of your first interviews with novice author, Jason Ulrich, I wish someone had conveyed to me the self-isolation and occasional lows experienced in dedicating yourself to something, which requires such obsession and perpetual restlessness. Also, I wish someone prior to Joyce had let me know its okay to make a mistake; that it's only in mistakes that lessons and wisdom may be gained. This last lesson is essential knowledge to anyone attempting to dedicate themselves to the arts, especially those like me, who like entertaining the notion that they are perfectionists.
Mimi Ferebee: What are your top two literary resources?
Mike Miller: Currently, as a novice the dictionary is a big help, as I'm learning what are my favorite words to use. As a playwright I used this less, because I was mostly focused on dialogue, channeling the source of voices I had heard before so the vocab was already there. But when describing the inner thoughts, scenery surrounding story, and how they might relate, the more words you know the better.
The second are books, fiction and non-fiction. I have read some good books, ones that I've been drawn to from the very beginning, and some that I still refer to in writing (The 7 Basic Plots), but there still are many good books I have yet to read and that I may possibly learn from and utilize as I continue to write. I would also include Literary magazines under books, such as Black Clock, Fiction Magazine, Granta Magazine, and others including Red Ochre Lit!
Mimi Ferebee: Do you have any further advice for individuals looking to publish their work?
Mike Miller: Keep writing. Get to learn structure, and the rest is your creativity and how you work with the structure.
Mimi Ferebee: This is your spotlight, talk to readers. Where should we hope to see your work in the upcoming years?
Mike Miller: Hopefully, like most aspiring writers, on the bookshelves of your nearest stores. But nothing I know of in the immediate future, as soon as this novel is finished (June is my deadline), I will begin promoting it.
Mimi Ferebee: And your goals?
Mike Miller: A writer or fiction and theatre. And director of theatre. Other than that I'm pursuing a teaching career.
***Interview with Joe MacLean***
Mimi Ferebee: How long have you been writing?
Joe MacLean: I began writing almost 40 summers ago but after an initial burst my writing amounted to a mere trickle for many years. I never totally quit, and returned with revived focus perhaps ten years ago.
Mimi Ferebee: Would you say you are more comfortable writing poetry or prose and why?
Joe MacLean: Definitely poetry, I enjoy reading prose but my creative energies seem to have a much more focused quality.
Mimi Ferebee: Which authors have influenced your craft? Do you have someone in particular who is inspiring you right now?
Joe MacLean: Early on I was inspired by the Romantics especially Coleridge, later by poets such as Frost and Dylan Thomas. The poet that inspired me to write myself, was Richard Brautigan. A number of popular lyricists such as Bob Dylan continue to inspire me but I concentrate on the poems I read rather than who wrote them. There is also a circle of poets in the online communities that I draw from.
Mimi Ferebee: Literary journals, magazines, etc., flood the internet. As every site can not possibly be high-quality, what would you advise as a method to sift through the thousands of sites when seeking publication for work? Do you have any personal red flags that detour you from submitting?
Joe MacLean: It is hard to tell sometimes...A well done website is a clue but even many of these don't even exist behind the curtain. Signs of intelligent life is a starting point.
Mimi Ferebee: Generally speaking, what advice would you give to novice writers? Please provide one example of “what NOT to do”.
Joe MacLean: I think that online workshops can be very helpful. Do not plagiarize. Other than that, a positive, growing attitude is best. ...and Oh, don't be long winded unless you are very very good.
Mimi Ferebee: What are your top three literary resources? I’m interested, particularly, in the current tools that help you not only refine your craft, but also present it to your targeted audiences (e.g. websites, publishing lists, dictionaries, writing workshops, books, speeches, etc.).
Joe MacLean: The online workshop "The Critical Poet" is a great place to learn and discuss. Duotrope is another well run resource. A third resource is being open to anything, even, or even especially, outside the literary circles. It has been said that "poets read poetry" and there is truth to that. Poets should step out.
Mimi Ferebee: What is your ultimate goal as a writer? We all have that one journal or magazine that we are striving to be published in OR that one press that we dream will one day publish our novel or book of poems! What’s yours? Joe MacLean: I want to publish a collection of what I've written. I don't care who publishes it and would be open to self publishing. I simply want to preserve the writing in the same way the writing preserves a portion of what is me.
Mimi Ferebee: Lastly, please tell us about any upcoming projects you are currently working on?
Joe MacLean: Very slowly the collection is congealing. Also the poems keep coming, like a leaky tap.
Thank-you Mike and Joe for your interviews with ROLiT NEWS.
Good Luck to you and your next endeavors!
Good Luck to you and your next endeavors!
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ISSN 2159-922X
ROLiT NEWS
Vol 1.4
Here, Whitney Scott, our novice author & David Sutherland, our experienced author, offer critical insight into the most resourceful, literary tools and practices.
***Interview with Whitney Scott***
Mimi Ferebee: How long have you been writing?
Whitney Scott: I remember writing my first poem in middle school, which would mean I’ve been writing for about nine years now. It was just this past summer, though, that I gave my poetry the time commitment it needed to grow.
Mimi Ferebee: Which writers inspired your work? Anyone inspiring you right now?
Whitney Scott: My favorite poets are Sylvia Plath and Margaret Atwood, and I would consider them to be a source of inspiration. I’m also a huge fan of several of my online friends’ works, and they keep me writing.
Mimi Ferebee: When did you decide to pursue publication?
Whitney Scott: I’ve toyed with the idea of publication for a couple years, mostly because of a creative writing class I took as a sophomore. I’ve talked with a couple of my professors and had some conversations with my online friends that write poetry to get myself geared to submit.
Mimi Ferebee: Did you have any anxiety about submitting your work? If so, what helps to calm your spirits throughout this process?
Whitney Scott: My biggest fear about submitting has been that my work isn’t good enough or that it will go ignored. The most reassuring thought about that anxiety is that my work doesn’t have to be published for others to enjoy it or for me to experience catharsis from the act of writing, though publication seems to augment these benefits!
Mimi Ferebee: As a novice author, what are two things you wish someone would have told you prior to beginning this journey?
Whitney Scott: If one person doesn’t like your style or you aren’t getting feedback, keep trying! Look at criticism reflectively, but most of all, never give up!
Mimi Ferebee: What are your top two literary resources?
Whitney Scott: I have a poetry livejournal (unabridgedone.livejournal.com) and I consider this to be a literary resource because I am constantly getting feedback and encouragement from my writer friends on the site. We share information about our publications, including lists of literary magazines that are accepting a particular type of submission and etc. As far as tools go, I tend to use a generic thesaurus more than anything else.
Mimi Ferebee: Do you have any further advice for individuals looking to publish their work?
Whitney Scott: Get your work out there. It will never be published if you never take that risk and submit.
Mimi Ferebee: This is your spotlight, talk to readers. Where should we hope to see your work in the upcoming years? Your goals.
Whitney Scott: As I am finishing up my undergraduate work, creative writing is more of a hobby than a career focus. I’ve been accepted into M.A. programs for literature, and for the next stage of my life I intend to continue studying other people’s works and eventually teaching. I will continue writing poetry and stories for my personal benefit and enjoyment, and I only hope to get better with time! In the future, look for me on sites like this one, and you can always keep up with me on my facebook (facebook.com/whitney0589) or my livejournal, if you use those social media.
***Interview with David Sutherland***
Mimi Ferebee: How long have you been writing?
David Sutherland: The desire to pen my thoughts started at around the age of eleven. I took a keen interest in language and especially how it was used on a cultural basis. I've had the good fortune of being born and raised in a multicultural family and learned quickly that expressing oneself correctly was often dependent on the audience you where speaking too.
Further, I truly enjoyed the variety of language growing up in NYC, and learned to understand what was often said was not necessarily meant. This, with the desire to understand the sciences, caused me to view things from a larger more philosophical perspective.
Mimi Ferebee: Would you say you are more comfortable writing poetry or prose, and why?
David Sutherland: Poetry seems to come more naturally to me. I find the thought process is meditative, sort of a relaxed mind-set, but also a very focused and alert awareness. The Aha! moment or epiphany felt as the poem begins to solve itself is a quiet sort of high for me. During the intense writing of a poem, it feels as if both the harder logical side of myself and the softer more intuitive side find common ground. To avoid sounding too esoteric or abstract, I can truly say it is one of the most peaceful states I can experience.
Mimi Ferebee: Which authors have influenced your craft? Do you have someone in particular who is inspiring you right now?
David Sutherland: I was taken by the work of Ezra Pound, Sylvia Plath, Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens. These classic poets stretched the envelope of word choice, sound, connotation and flow that has inspired me on many occasions!
Currently I am reading the work of Joseph Brodsky and working on a piece in memory of his life and works.
Mimi Ferebee: Literary journals, magazines, etc., flood the internet. As every site cannot possibly be high-quality, what would you advise as a method to sift through the thousands of sites when seeking publication for work? Do you have any personal red flags that deter you from submitting?
David Sutherland: A good “rule of thumb” for any author is to first visit the publication’s website and read the work that has been published by that magazine, journal or review. If the individual then feels comfortable with the quality, style and format of the publication, then they should by all means share their work!
Every day more and more well established magazines such as The New Yorker, The Boston Review and others are becoming web-accessible. Of course these are just a few of the many excellent publications and many more can be found in Writer's Digest and other referential publications.
Mimi Ferebee: Generally speaking, what advice would you give to novice writers? Please provide one example of “what NOT to do”.
David Sutherland: A simple piece of advice for the new and possibly seasoned author is simply DO NOT get discouraged....period. If the writer truly wants to publish, and see their work available both in hardcopy and soft (web), they should consider this a long term effort that will require time, patience, study and dedication.
Further, if an editor rejects your work but comments with suggested changes or edits, then the author needs to view this with an open-mind and REALLY consider if these changes would improve the piece. If your biggest concern is that of “hurt feelings” then you have no business in this craft, and should consider a less personal field to expose yourself.
Mimi Ferebee: What are your top three literary resources? I’m interested, particularly, in the current tools that help you not only refine your craft, but also present it to your targeted audiences (e.g. websites, publishing lists, dictionaries, writing workshops, books, speeches, etc.).
David Sutherland: The following is a good and frequently updated website for new and seasoned writers that are looking for web publications and visibility:
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/pbonline.html
This list is compiled continually by a Mr. Louie Crew at a Rutger’s University site. Further, Writer's Digest and Poetry Market now list Internet/Print based publications in their yearly release. Finally, publications are continually being “born” on the net, take the time to search through the many engines available (Google, Yahoo, etc.) and look for publications that may be a good fit for your work.
Mimi Ferebee: What is your ultimate goal as a writer? We all have that one journal or magazine that we are striving to be published in OR that one press that we dream will one day publish our novel or book of poems! What’s yours?
David Sutherland: My ultimate goal as a writer is to find a way (financially) to dedicate myself to the craft of writing full-time. I have been fortunate as an IT Specialist to travel quite a bit and see the world and its many different cultures. I would like to do this with pen in hand, carefree (yet comfortable :) and write much much more!
Eventually, I'd like to have another home near the beach in Puerto Villarta, Mexico and just kick back and write poetry to the Seagulls (if they care to listen:). I have been fortunate to see my work in many major publications, but have The Paris Review on my short list of a place I'd like to see my work in as well.
Mimi Ferebee: Lastly, please tell us about any upcoming projects you are currently working on?
David Sutherland: My current project(s) include a collection of Poetry called “Heart of the Fugue”, and a nonfiction book titled “On Being The Being”. Currently, “On Being The Being” is scheduled for publication next year by Archer Books in Santa Rosa, CA, and I am working hard to find a publisher for my collection of verse.
I find it important to always have one or more projects in progress as it helps motivate the writer or artist push themselves in refining their craft.
Thank-You Whitney and David for your interviews with ROLiT NEWS.
Good Luck to you and your next endeavors!
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