1. We’re still looking for your poetry chapbook submissions for our Hazel Lipa Chapbook contest! Get published, win money and prosper.

2. Find our table at AWP. Look for our awesome paper-mache tree, stop by for some freebies,  get information on subscriptions, and tell us who you are — we want to know!

3. Are you an artist or photographer? Looking for a way to get your work out there? Flyway wants YOUR art submissions for the cover of our upcoming Spring 2011 issue. Please send all inquiries to flywaypub@gmail.com! Attach your submission and write a cover letter in the body of the email. Submit before 3/20. We’re especially looking for art with a focus on place and environment — up for all interpretation.

Oh — and, have you found us on twitter? @flyway_journal

Who are your favorite authors?

That’s a hard question. Haruki Murakami, Lorrie Moore, T.C. Boyle, George Saunders, too many to all list here.

What is your favorite book?

No such thing.

What does “place” mean to you?

Place grounds experience and thought. There’s more to the story than what the characters think and do. Place is both the physical and intangible environment in which story happens. It’s what makes fiction resonate.

What is your favorite place or environment?

I haven’t yet become the kind of person to feel like any one place is home, so my favorite places are scattered around. I like quiet places. The high desert. The redwoods. The more rugged stretches of the Pacific coast. I like mountains. The Cascades. The alpine Sierras.

What do you look for in a piece of writing?

First I look for something that captures me as a reader, not an editor. I look for fiction that takes stylistic and structural risks. I look for a story that has something to say about the world but doesn’t beat me over the head with it. I want a story to linger with me after I have finished reading it.

What’s something surprising you learned last week?
Whales have different dialects and accents—each whale family has its own song patterns. That probably should have surprised me less than it did. There’s an online experiment called Whale FM where you can match similar whale songs to help scientists understand whale communication better.

Flyway editor, Chris Wiewiora, reviews John Brandon’s, Cirtus County.

John Brandon focuses Citrus County, his second novel, on a trifecta of characters: Toby, an orphan and the track team’s solo pole-vaulter, who lives in the muck house of his drug-dealing uncle; Shelby, the new kid in school, shadowed by her mother’s death that lingers over her father and sister; and Mr. Hibma—Toby and Shelby’s geography teacher at the middle school—numbed by a routine of student presentations and bogus lectures.

As a fellow Floridian, I appreciate that Brandon sets Citrus County west of Orlando’s Disney developments and north of Tampa Bay’s beaches. Instead of trite lush sprawl and touristy hot spots, Brandon submerges his characters in cracked concrete, dried palm fronds, and thick, sticky heat. Unable to escape, Toby, Shelby, and Mr. Hibma take drastic actions to redefine themselves. Toby kidnaps Kaley, Shelby’s younger sister, but discovers that “whatever had been wrong seemed more wrong now.” Shelby, who doesn’t know of Toby’s transgression, develops a crush on his loner attitude and then acts out in school to get his attention. Mr. Hibma plots to murder Mrs. Connors–the English teacher next to his classroom who tells him that he needs to post class rules identical to the school rules, reminds him his shirts are wrinkled, and has a poster in her classroom with the word PERSISTANCE underneath a sailing ship.

Just as Kaley needs rescue, Mr. Hibma, Shelby, and Toby need to be saved from themselves. However, is there a hero in Citrus County? Brandon reveals the crux of this question—you survive things by making it through them, alone—when Mr. Hibma tries to assure, but ends up over-sharing with Shelby:

“We never know what’s going to screw us up,” he said. “We think it has to be glaring tragedies, but that’s not always the case.”

Mr. Hibma wasn’t sure where he was going with this. He was, to his own surprise, taking a stab at being profound and helpful:

“Sometimes the tragedies strengthen us in the end. They make us more ourselves, you know—concentrate us.”

Mr. Hibma, Shelby, and Toby’s lives are braided together in Citrus County. However, their redemptions occur separately. And so, Brandon gives his reader the relief of being able to exit Citrus County along with the grief of leaving the three characters behind.

Flyway will be at AWP this year. Look for our paper-mache Flyway tree and snag some freebies when you stop by the table to say hello. We hope to see you there!

Here’s a reminder in Valentine’s poem to submit to our annual Hazel Lipa Chapbook Contest:

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
We want your chapbooks
Before the deadline is through.

..Submit your as-of-yet unpublished poetry chapbooks by 3/15! Submission costs include a one-year subscription to Flyway.

We’re also looking forward to Iowa State’s upcoming 8th Annual Symposium on Wildness  featuring the geniuses of Amy Nezhukumatathil, Rolf Potts, Daniel Woodrell and Anthony Doerr. If you’re in Ames, be sure to check out a few of the amazing events Sunday 2/26 and Monday 2/27.

Keep checking the Flyway blog for more updates and fun stuff.

What drives you to write?

Who is your favorite author? Sappho for the win! More recent obsessions include Carolyn Forché and Terry Tempest Williams.

What does “place” mean to you? Aldo Leopold’s “The Land Ethic” has really shaped my understanding of place—not a static backdrop, but a dynamic community. I find place in connection and relationship, all the complex ties that bind me to land, air, water, plants, animals, and other humans.

What is your favorite place or environment? Oh man, I miss Burlington, VT, so much. Church Street, Lake Champlain, slouching porches, weird talkative strangers, community gardens, art and music everywhere, quick summers and endless snow, Nader Guy, and visible mountains—little ones, but still, topography. What more could a person want?

What do you look for in a piece of writing? What most readers look for: a piece that sparks my interest early, keeps me reading, and stays with me after I’ve reached the end. I’m a sucker for beauty, authority, honesty, and fresh, compelling language. Humor, when it works, is also a plus.

What’s something surprising you learned last week? This story about a mysterious artist leaving gorgeous, intricate sculptures in Scottish libraries and museums made me ridiculously happy.

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LM: What is the story behind Fairy Tale Review? When and how did it come to be?

KB: I established Fairy Tale Review in 2005 after scheming it up over Bloody Marys at The Space Room in Portland, OR a few years prior to that. It had been on my mind for a very long time when I finally rented a post office box for the journal—the first thing I did officially for it.

The idea grew organically from the work I had been doing nearly my entire life, but especially since my twenties when I started my first novel based on fairy tales.  I had long noticed the profound influence of fairy tales on a great deal of contemporary books, yet as an avid reader of journals, it was impossible to ignore that overt fairy-tale work was marginalized into “special issues” dedicated to fabulism or magical realism. I knew of writers who had stories turned down because the work was deemed ‘not-literary’ or because editors had “already published a magical story this year [or in a special issue five years ago],” I had decided pretty consciously to advocate for fairy tales every way that I could, and give them a home. I did not realize at the time how many people would arrive at the scene.

In sum I established the journal as an act of resistance to the idea of dominant forms.

LM: Tell me a little bit about your new program, “Fairy Tale Book Repository”. Where did you get the idea? Can you give me a summary of the “long range plan” your website mentions, or is it a secret?

KB: I got the idea to establish a Fairy-Tale Book Repository over many years of finding discarded fairy-tale books at garage sales, thrift shops, or (along with other sad characters) in cartons on the sidewalk intended for garbage. I was frequently receiving new and used fairy-tale books in the mail from acquaintances, friends, and complete strangers who just thought I might like them. My shelves had become a sort of informal safe haven for fairy-tale books—an unofficial Island of Misfit Fairy-Tale Books.  So I decided to make it official and posted an announcement on the Fairy Tale Review website. So far The Fairy-Tale Book Repository exists in my study, my closets, my attic, and some boxes in the garage. I would love to give the books a more public home someday too, and I share these whenever I can. Anyone who knows me knows it is hard to leave my house or office without an armload of recommended fairy-tale reading.

Part of Fairy Tale Review’s mission is to “preserve” fairy tales of all kinds (more like preserving a delicious jam than some fragile artifact).  This is one of the ways.  I’m working on cataloguing the books and writing up descriptions of their contents and how they made their way to the Repository. Plans are not “secret” at all.  The Fairy-Tale Book Repository has been slow to venture from its current domestic space, but one day it will.

LM: Your website states you do not accept unsolicited submissions, but you put out a call for submissions for the Grey Issue– was this a one time event, or do you often accept unsolicited submissions, or plan to in the future?

KB: Fairy Tale Review Press, the book imprint of Fairy Tale Review, is not open to unsolicited submissions at this time.  Yet the annual journal, Fairy Tale Review, has always had, and has always relied heavily on, open reading periods.  Our next reading period is opening up at the time of the next AWP conference—the end of February 2012—and will be announced on our website, with submission guidelines available there.

In fact—and I really don’t know how common this is for other journals, perhaps many—100 percent of every single issue of Fairy Tale Review that I personally put together from 2006 to 2010 consisted of work I found exclusively through unsolicited submissions. Since then the journal has been guest edited and I don’t know the ratio of unsolicited to solicited work, but I do know the guest editors avidly and carefully read the unsolicited submissions (thousands of them) and responded personally in many cases to these.

To the open calls, of course, sometimes work has been submitted by writers whose work I know already, and this work, along with the rest, is screened anonymously by a dedicated volunteer team and then passed on to me for a final decision (I have in the past read just about every submission, though I’m now on a necessary editorial hiatus to meet other deadlines, and assigning Guest Editors to the new issues). Fairy Tale Review relies on the chance element of fairy-tale luck for what comes down our hatch.  We get many more manuscripts for each issue than we can possibly publish so decisions are hard—especially because the work we receive to consider is often lovingly, carefully sent in our direction by ardent fairy-tale fans. It’s not willy-nilly and so the whole endeavor feels very personal.

There was one exception to the open submission process: when I began Fairy Tale Review in 2005, I solicited work for the first issue, The Blue Issue (available as a free download here).  The debut issue was by and large gathered via word of mouth—I sent around an email to some writers asking them if they had anything for my new fairy-tale journal.  I didn’t know there would be such broad interest, and I started this way not to be exclusive but because I considered it a modest endeavor.  I did not establish any administrative apparatus (website, proper email account) before launching the journal. I guess I was following bread crumbs one by one as I tossed them down on the path. For all I knew, the plan would, you know, go to the birds before I put it together.  I intended the first issue to be a sort of personal revivalist announcement, a trumpet call for fairy tales, quietly putting forward the “fairy-tale feel” of the journal, its affect. I sent it around myself to readers once it was in print, and then sold out the few hundred remaining copies at AWP that year.

The Yellow Issue, the next issue we’ll be reading for (which will be the ninth annual issue, to come out in 2013) will be guest edited by Lily Hoang (Assistant Professor at New Mexico State University and author of Changing, a novel Fairy Tale Review Press published in 2008 which then won a PEN/Beyond Margins Award). She’s written a marvelous call for submissions that will go up on our website.

LM: Do you charge a reading fee for submissions? As an independent journal (not one connected to a university) where does most of your funding come from?

KB: I think it is very polite to ask about funding because people might be curious, when they send work to a journal or read it, “how” these things come to be and it’s good when things are transparent. Sometimes such information helps a reader understand a journal’s artistic vision or mission. Also it seems to me like a lot of people want to start journals, and actually need to know the range of answers to this very question.  So I’m happy to tell you about how funding works for Fairy Tale Review. In a nutshell, we have none! Before I founded the journal, for all I knew literary journals were funded by these marvelous patrons who also supplied their dedicated, bookworm editors with offices in Victorian houses with wood-burning fireplaces and bottomless pots of hot tea in flowered china. Au contraire. I had no funding when I started.  I asked for and received a gift from someone I knew to print up the first couple of issues, get my post office box, and have a website designed and hosted.

In my experience, people who edit and publish literary journals are pretty much doing it out of great love of reading and out of respect for readers and writers, paired with an inclination toward editing is an art form—not for pay.  No one I personally know who edits a journal is making any monetary profit from it—or a salary, even.  They earn income from elsewhere or editing a journal is a part of their other job—often journal editors have many jobs.  Universities that fund literary journals are actively supporting this work, and along with it, advocating for literacy—nurturing readers.  It’s great when that happens. Yet funding situations vary for many reasons and my journal does not have any funding. It’s just out of pocket and whatever comes in from sales goes toward replenishing the ever-shrinking funds available to me for it.  The journal would not exist were it not for the in-kind funding that comes via interns and volunteers (i.e. their valuable and generous time).

All human hours for Fairy Tale Review are donated.  The brilliant Tara Reesor of the Publication Unit of Indiana State University works with her talented students to design the journal and our books and get the files printer-ready.   I recently received a small grant from the Spanish Embassy to cover production costs for the recently published novel Irlanda by Espido Freire, translated by Toshiya Kamei.  Other invoices have been paid out of my own tattered pocket—these include things like the not-insignificant cost of mailing things to the distributor and reviewers and contributors; website hosting and updates;  tables at the Book Fair of AWP, etc. It takes sacrifice. But what a pleasure it is to give things up for fairy tales, and such small things, for me.

Fairy tales save people in all sorts of ways: it’s no accident Anne Frank wrote fairy tales. Historically a lot of authors say they first fell in love with reading through fairy-tale books.  The journal was established, quite simply, to give an open home to fairy tales and to preserve them for future generations of readers. It has never been about “silver coins,” though it takes some money to do this.  With a little fairy-tale luck the work will continue.

As for fees, no, Fairy Tale Review does not and never will charge a reading fee for general submissions. We will charge a fee if we establish a contest (and we’d offer something in return to those who enter).  We have had so many requests to conduct a contest over the years, so we think about it, even though contests are a little antithetical to the nonhierarchical art of fairy tales.  Still, there is a clamoring for one, so we are listening. I often toy with the idea of making the journal entirely free and online, but it’s actually less expensive to print it because getting all the back issue material up on a website would, you know, cost money itself (time, talent, technology).

LM: I’ve seen a lot of my favorite authors published in your journal, some that one wouldn’t necessarily think of when imagining a traditional fairy tale. How does your reading staff interpret the term “fairy tale” when go soliciting (or reading unsolicited) submissions?

KB: Thank you for the kind words about Fairy Tale Review’s diverse and growing list of generous writers who send work to us, from high school students to Pulitzer Prize nominees! It’s been pretty remarkable over the years to see how fairy tales provide so many readers an invisible key to the secret garden of story.  The journal has received submissions from indie darlings; bestselling authors with books prominently displayed in airports; writers who have stapled together their manifestoes; preschool teachers on behalf of their classes; and from MFA students, biology professors, nurses, janitors, chefs, psychiatrists, performance artists, sculptors, romance novelists, playwrights and, as many journals do, lonely prisoners too.

There is no singular, representative style to the work that we publish.  We have published work that falls all over the spectrum from mainstream to experimental.  From commercial to avant garde.  It’s the fairy-tale effect we look for—it’s a sensation, felt through a process of reading.  You get that special ‘once upon a time’ feeling, which can be a chill or a shudder, a glow or a pulse.   Certainly the team of readers I rely on have a certain dexterity with the aesthetics of fairy tales—an area I delight in teaching—but every new work is different and we could never say what we’re looking for except new fairy tales.  Fairy tales are possibility spaces—their borders cannot be closed. Fairy tales always are changing—that is their history, their present, their future.

Fairy tales are minoritarian: they elude definition by status quo terms. As such they survive via becoming—not by being defined. This does not mean that one cannot categorize their techniques (or style) in a given moment in history. To describe is not to identify, if those techniques themselves are seen as always evolving.

LM: Your blog on Jan. 31st states that you accept comic and illustration submissions–how often do you receive submissions of themed illustrations/art and sequential art? Do you often solicit visual art submissions?

KB: Timothy Schaffert, who guest edited The Brown Issue (now in print and available here), solicited work from an artist he admires named Peter Kuper, whose work is terrific.  For The Blue Issue, and for the journal’s cover, I solicited images from Kiki Smith; I had been invited to speak for the Museum of Modern Art about her work, and had fallen in love with it.

Recently, we were absolutely delighted to publish, as a downloadable PDF on our website, in conjunction with The Red Issue, a mini-comic by the artist Jennifer Parks, “They Met in a Dream.” Here’s an example where fairy-tale luck came into play.  A dear friend of mine, the amazing novelist and musician Willy Vlautin, had picked up a postcard in Portland, OR—I might be remembering wrong, but I think he’d picked it up from a pile of them in a coffee shop or bar, near where newspapers and ephemera like these things sometimes sit. It was a postcard advertising a gallery show for Parks’ work, and he gave it to me saying something like, “I think you’d dig this.” I promptly lost the postcard in one of the volcanic piles of paperwork on my desk and a couple of years later, after a move, the postcard showed up again. (I never lose anything—my papers are just nomads.)  I looked at Parks’ blog, where she had recently posted a few images from a Little Red Riding Hood graphic novelette and I loved them.   I asked if we could feature her work on our website and Justin Runge, whom I had taught in a graduate program, designed the PDF for the website (and for a special web edition of The Red Issue).  We also solicited a beautiful cover image from Parks for “Songs for Fairy Tales,” the CD of songs that Fairy Tale Review issued in 2010.

There is a deep connection between visual art and fairy tales. In many fairy-tale books language and image may not even be considered separate entities.  So we honor that tradition.

The journal receives many submissions of artwork but we cannot include much art with each issue, in large part because it is very expensive to reproduce artwork in color.  But I often write lectures and essays about fairy-tale art and keep images on file for those.

The National Book Foundation’s frustrating (and frankly, puzzling) exclusion of “collections and/or retellings of folk-tales, myths, and fairy-tales” is a prime example of how the “literary” field so often dismisses works involving fairy tales, myths and well-known folklore. How do you feel Fairy Tale Review is affected by this bias, and how has FTR already helped change it in it’s short life?

Harvard fairy-tale scholar and advocate Maria Tatar and I co-authored a letter to the National Book Foundation two years ago, respectfully asking that they kindly remove this little-known and, truly, not particularly actively followed, exclusion of folktales, myths, and fairy tales from their prestigious National Book Awards. When the response was very polite but not affirmative we posted our letter online on our respective websites and created a Facebook page, seeking “petition” support. Hundreds of people have signed on to the petition there, including several National Book Awards finalists, winners, and judges.  We would like to continue the conversation with the National Book Foundation; and I am trying to research the history of this exclusion, which must be a fascinating history indeed: who is the person who put this exclusion on the agenda list of a meeting? I would love to know how this person dressed and what cocktail he or she preferred.  The fear of fairy tales—fascinating, really, historically speaking. All kinds of prejudice bond up in the act.  Sadly, this literary prejudice is fairly widespread.

On a basic level, fairy tales are not considered ‘major’ art works.  Fine, by this fairy-tale author—as soon as something is by definition “major,” its ethics can reasonably be called into question.

But it is sad that fairy tales—and other underdog heroes—suffer from prejudice in many circles, among them certain literary circles, as you point out.  This trouble with fairy tales, it is a very American problem in its own way—I’m told by authors and editors in other areas of the world that the same prejudices don’t really hold—and this should be an area of research interest to someone, I think: a comparison of how fairy tales fare in contemporary “literary circles” internationally.  The prejudices, by the way, aren’t always visible to readers; a lot of people are astonished to learn fairy tales might be excluded from any prize. Fairy tales are also very popular, of course. And that too leads to an underestimation, etc.  It has to do with the fact that in order to have capital-L Literature, we must leave something out: how can you have something if it includes everything? To have a defined entity, how can the borders be open?  Fairy tales elude definition.

I cannot offer any objective assessment about whether Fairy Tale Review has helped improve the situation, but I think it may have.   I have long dedicated myself to the fairy-tale revival—to helping reverse the clichés and damages done to fairy tales (and thus to readers who need these stories so often about the weak triumphing over the strong) many years ago, and have never turned back.  I have received many letters of gratitude from readers and hear increasingly often from teachers using fairy tales in the classroom, and I see graduate students studying fairy tales and more and more writers working with a sense of awareness from them. I’m invited to talk about fairy tales at museums, universities, libraries each week—I have to turn requests down!  So from 1995, the year that marked my conscious dedication to fairy tales as an author and editor, when saying “I write fairy tales” could pretty much end a conversation with a lot of people I knew, things have changed one hundred percent.

It would be lovely to think my work at Fairy Tale Review has helped; and my own work couldn’t exist without the prior efforts of authors like Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, and current fairy-tale heroes Maria Tatar, Donald Haase, and Jack Zipes.

If you do plan to accept unsolicited submissions in the future, what advice would you give emerging writers who are interested in submitting to Fairy Tale Review?

It’s a very relevant question.  Read fairy tales—then read some more fairy tales, to paraphrase Einstein.
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Kate Bernheimer is the author of a trilogy of novels and the story collection Horse, Flower, Bird (Coffee House Press), and editor of three anthologies including the World Fantasy Award winning My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales (Penguin). Founder and Editor of Fairy Tale Review, she is an Associate Professor at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette. Her next book, a children’s book, comes out in April: The Lonely Book with illustrations by Chris Sheban (Schwartz & Wade/Random House).

Ian John Pisarcik: You were raised in Rocky Mount, North Carolina and currently live on a small farm in rural Vermont. How much does your environment shape your writing?

Megan Mayhew Bergman: I’m very focused on place.  I think that’s what happens with distance – moving from North Carolina to Vermont feels like expatriation – you see “home” with fresh eyes. 

Growing up I was tapped into that southern current which has been running through my family for generations.  It’s embedded in my language, my mannerisms, my blood.

Though I’m always homesick, my best life is in Vermont.  And that tension makes for great investigation, and I hope good writing.

IJP: Your first story collection, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, will be published by Scribner in March 2012. What advice can you give to writers hoping to get their work published?

MMB: Don’t rush to publish early; I have mediocre work out in the world that I wish I could take back.  Know what matters to you artistically.  Ask yourself why you want to write and why you want to be published, and be comfortable with your answer.  Make more time for reading.  Be patient.  Bottle up the small victories for later, when you haven’t had any for a while, and you need to remind yourself that being a writer can feel good.

IJP: You spent some time working as a reader for the New England Review. What do you look for in a story? What effect can a compelling story have on you?

MMB: I want to forget I’m reading (e.g. I don’t have the urge to check Facebook during the second paragraph).  I want to feel a certain amount of freshness in a narrative; you begin to realize, as a reader, that some ideas are just done and redone ad nauseum. I look for economical, controlled prose that doesn’t forego passion and energy.  I look for the writer’s own interest in a subject:  obsession, insight, or intellectual curiosity.  I want believable characters.  I’m an impatient reader; writing must hold me with beauty, promise, or narrative energy.

When I’ve read a good story, I feel it.  I usually swear.  This happened to me today when I was selecting stories from In Our Time to teach.  I read the last lines of Hemingway’s On the Quai at Smyrna – about the donkeys trying to swim with the broken forelegs – and I felt that punch in the gut, that visceral response to a story that I crave.

IJP: Animals play a prominent role in many of your stories. I suppose this is inevitable given that you are married to a veterinarian and share your home with several dogs, four cats, two goats and a horse. Aside from simply being present, is there something about animals that motivates you to explore them in your stories?

MMB: You’re right – mostly I write about the animal world because it’s just part of my life.  But it’s a life I opted into, and I like the physicality of it.  Physical lives take us outside of our heads and pixilated microcosms.  I don’t mean a run outside – I’m thinking of meaningful interaction with nature on a regular basis.  Throwing hay, trimming hooves, stealing an egg from underneath a broody chicken, hiking up a mountain, knowing the birdsongs in your yard.  I need that connection.  I need to break away from my computer and get my hands and eyes on something real.

I’m also interested in notions of primal innocence, and our own animal nature.  I’m intrigued by –and wary of – anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism.  Relationships with animals illuminate so much about characters.

IJP: You have a vegetable garden and participate in a farm share. On your blog you promote several local bookstores. Do you see a connection between these things?

MMB: Our livelihood is tied to a local business, so we try and reciprocate.  I like that about Vermont.  There aren’t a lot of jobs, so we support each other in a lot of agricultural and artistic endeavors.  CSAs and local bookstores can be more expensive than their bigger relatives, but I enjoy these places, and am thankful to have them in our community.  I think it’s important to put my money back into the local economy as much as I can.  I’d rather give my money to a friend, you know?

IJP: Who are the writers you get excited about reading today?

MMB: I just plain get excited about reading.  I have two children under 3, and I’ve been in Baby Mode, which can eat away significant reading time.  I have a friend who speaks beautifully and passionately about books, and at a recent dinner I realized that I was woefully under-read in comparison.  I re-committed to reading that night, and silently vowed to get hungry again, and to read more widely instead of feeding my biases.

I’m excited to read John D’Agata’s About a Mountain.  Lauren Groff has a book coming out in March called Arcadia which I can’t wait to read.  Stephen Dau, a fellow Bennington grad, is debuting in 2012 with Book of Jonas.  There are authors I return to, like Mary Gaitskill, Henry Miller, and Willa Cather.  I’m just going to stop now because this list is going to get long.  As I said above, I’m just excited about reading.

IJP: Congratulations on having your second child. Do you follow modern children’s literature? Is there a book, new or old, which you are particularly excited to share with your children?

MMB: I do not follow modern children’s literature, but should.  I go to the library every two weeks for my girls.  (Okay – every three to four weeks.  I pay a lot of fines.)  But I’m particularly excited to share The Secret Garden, The Westing Game, and, if I’m honest, vintage Nancy Drew.  None of that modern Nancy-with-a-cell-phone stuff, just Nancy in her convertible with her trusty friends, unmasking prowlers.  I want to expose them to wholesome and plucky stuff for their manners and sense of self, and mystery for their imaginations.

Read more about Megan Mayhew Bergman and pre-order Birds of a Lesser Paradise at: http://mayhewbergman.com/Home.aspx

Lydia Melby: What is the story behind Ecotone? When and how did it come to be?

Meredith Fraser: Ecotone was founded in 2005 and is published at UNC Wilmington. It is a semiannual journal that seeks to reimagine place. Each issue brings together the literary and the scientific, the personal and the biological, the urban and the rural. David Gessner originally began the magazine, then passed the editorship onto Ben George in 2008, I believe. From the start Ecotone has been run mostly by students at UNCW, along with a minimal (myself and Ben) paid staff.

LM:  Your magazine is published through UNC-Wilmington– does Ecotone receive support and/or funding from the university? As you don’t charge a reading fee for submissions, where does most of your funding come from? (if that’s polite to ask).

MF: The university is generous to us, and fronts most of our bills, although we do bring in a significant amount of money through subscriptions and the selling of individual issues. We operate on a very tight budget (hence our tiny staff), but we’ve been lucky enough to receive several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which have helped ease the costs tremendously. (On another note, we’re about to launch our online submission service, so writers can submit without the extra trip to the post office—our reading fee for online submissions will be $3.)

LM:  Your website defines the title of your journal as “a transition zone between two adjacent ecological communities, containing the characteristic species of each.” From one place-themed journal to another, how do you feel inhabiting the ‘grey man’s land’ between literary and scientific has helped distinguish your journal?

MF:  I think we get more science-related articles than your average lit journal, that’s for sure, but not as many as you may expect. In recent years, we’ve loosened our specific guidelines and focus on simply publishing the best writing we can find. If it fits our journal’s overarching theme, that’s just a cherry on top, so to say.

LM:  Your submissions page mentions Ecotone is “always looking for dynamic, original artwork which reflects the inherent themes of the journal, such as borders and boundaries between the natural world and the human world.”  How does your staff generally interpret how visual art submissions interact with these themes? What genres of art (traditional, graphic, sequential) do you generally accept?

MF:  In general, we leave the art selections up to our publishing laboratory experts, as they have more of an eye for good art than Ben or I. We actually rarely receive art submissions; usually we solicit our art from specific artists. We accept all forms of art, and there have been many inclusions of art that reflect our journal’s theme, but again, we’ve become less concerned with our content interpreting the theme than with finding the best art we can find.

LM:  Similarly, do you feel Ecotone‘s over-arcing theme gives writers some tangible parameters, or does it actually grant submitters more freedom in exploring?

MF:  It depends. I would say there are groups of writers who look at the theme in both ways; some stick to it very closely, while it clearly opens doors for others to think about new ways of looking at things and their work.

LM:  In the field of literary publications today, it’s really unusual to find a publication that does not accept submissions online– how has this affected your general submission pool, especially your ‘slush pile’?

MF:  There’s no way to know how it affects our slush pile, but we’re very aware that we’ll probably begin to receive more submissions once our online system is available. Submittable (the company we are working with for online submissions) should be available to contributors within the next week or so, so if you’d like, you can check back in with me in a few weeks and I’ll let you now how it’s going or what a difference it has made!

-Notes from the Field  entries are in and going through the second round of readings.  All 27 (27!) entries are read by at least 3 of our 5 editors, so the process takes a little while, but we’ll be in touch with the winners soon!

-We raised close to $3,000 at our annual auction/poetry slam this year!  Thanks to everyone who came out and supported us.  Without you all, we wouldn’t be able to publish such incredible writing.

-Fun fact:  Did you know that Flyway used to be Poet and Critic?  Former Poet and Critic editor, Michael Martone, came to town for a reading.  One of our bloggers had the opportunity to ask him a few questions.  Read the interview here.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours from the Flyway team!  We’re grateful for YOU.  What are you grateful for?

Ian John Pisarcik: First-year students in Iowa State University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment recently visited two publishing houses in Minneapolis to talk with editors about the publishing process. Some of the students came away from these discussions feeling discouraged. Before getting into what the publishing world looks like today, can you tell us a little about your experiences getting published?

Michael Martone: I always thought of writing as a kind of publishing. When I was in grade school, I was publishing a paper. It was a hand written newspaper for the neighborhood and I was publishing another newspaper in high school. So, I never divided these things into two different categories – here’s publishing and here’s a writer. I think that’s one thing that is really exciting today, the fact that those categories are completely collapsed. As a writer today, you expand into these other fields of being a writer, publisher, graphic designer and distributor. So it interests me that you say it’s discouraging. I don’t think it’s discouraging. I think it’s an amazing time if you are a writer.

IJP: Are you referring mainly to self-publishing, using tools such as Amazon’s Kindle Bookstore?

MM: Oh, yes. I always say to my students, do you want to be published? And they say yes. And I say, well I have a Macintosh and I have the software and I can publish you right now. And they say, well that’s not what we mean. And we spend part of the class trying to examine what it is we mean when we say we want to be “well published.” But your question was about me personally. I’ve been working now as a publishing writer for 30 years and in those 30 years [I've published] everywhere. I resisted what most people do, which is, in some very personal way, to have a hierarchy of what counts and what doesn’t. For me, Mudstump Review is as good as The New Yorker. Back in the old days, when these categories were more stable, you wouldn’t have said self-publishing; you would have said vanity publishing. Because it was thought to be a vain thing that all you wanted to do was be published but you weren’t going through the kind of rigors of this competition that was set up.

IJP: The gatekeepers?

MM: Exactly.

IJP: Do you see any disadvantage to there being no gatekeepers? For example, some people would argue that there needs to be quality control and they might point to the Internet and say there’s a lot of crap that you have to sift through. If book publishing houses disappeared and it was all self-publishing, would that be problematic or ideal?

MM: In my case, fine with me. But, I have a lot of colleagues who will whisper to me that there are too many writers – too much stuff. A long while ago, I threw away the notion as a teacher that my job is to get you to write well. My job is to make you write. So a quick answer to your question is no, I think it’s great. Usually when people ask that question they ask ‘are there too many writers?’ I don’t think there are enough. I think it’s great that people want to write, and as a teacher I want to help them write what they want. I’m no longer in the role of a gatekeeper which is, oh, I have to get you to write literary fiction or literary essays. If you want to write fan fiction, I’m here for that. I once had a colleague who said there are too many writers – there needs to be quality control. And I said to him, he was a marathon runner, I said, when you run the marathon do you get right up in front with the Kenyans? He said, well no. And I said, well then why do you run if you’re not going to win? And he said, there are all these other things— it makes me feel good, it’s good exercise, it’s good to be with all those people – to feel a sense of community. I said, okay, why not extend that to writing? Why do we have to think that the only people who get to write are the Kenyans?

IJP: That reminds me of something you said with respect to your teaching. You said that you’re not really interested in what’s good or bad, but rather in teaching the habit of curiosity and exploration. There’s a lot of debate among MFA students about what they are supposed to get out of an MFA program. There are people who say MFA students simply get time to write, but there are others who argue that MFA students need a job once they graduate and thus more time should be spent preparing them for the real world. You have already touched on this, but what do you see as your obligation, if any, to the MFA student?

MM: What I promise them is protected time and space. Nobody is going to go in debt at the University of Alabama. I view it as a gift. I’m giving you four years, do with it what you want. It’s been my experience that my students break up into several tracks. One thing we have is a magazine, the Black Warrior Review, and a significant amount of people go in that direction and end up being employed as editors. Other people, because we offer teaching opportunities, will take the teaching track. But also, we have people who graduate, get the job they had before entering the MFA program, but continue to write. Writing programs can train you in a general way so that you’re not the Kenyan winning, but you are someone who can run. The definition of what a writer is has to expand. The university is all about making the writer as a job – a specialist. But, what I try to teach is writing as a general pursuit that will adapt.

IJP: In talking about the traditional workshop format, you noted that there is a danger in distinguishing or making sense of what one is doing before one is done doing it. This idea of pigeon-holing the writer. Is there an alternative to the traditional workshop?

MM: What you’re getting at is the notion that, we thought the workshop would generate writing, but what it actually does is generate criticism. So in the traditional workshop, you have 12 people and the 12 people are usually broken up into 4 groups of 3. So over a 16 week term, you are up 3 times, maybe, if you’re lucky, and maybe 2 of those times you write a new story and 1 of those times is a revision. What are you doing the rest of the time? You’re reading everybody else’s work and in the classroom you’re actually critiquing. Years ago, I gave that up. My students now write a story a week and the critique section of that story takes only 8 minutes. Again, I think writers were naïve when they came into the university. Because this place is not a creative place by nature. Its DNA is all about criticism and what criticism is, as you were just saying, is pigeon-holing. And when that pigeon-holing is also connected to, this is good, this is bad, one of the things that happens is a person doesn’t write. Because if you’re sitting there writing this new story – you’re saying if I write this, Bobby is going to say that, if I write this, Jimmy is going to say that, if I write this, I’m going to say that. And all the sudden, nobody is writing because the criticism is so dominating. That’s not my job. Our job should be creating things, to be failing magnificently. To try things, because again, the way I view creative writing school is protected time and space. Other people say they give you protected time and space but then they criticize you and say they are running a simulation of the world out there – well why run a simulation of the world out there? This is a different world. This is a time when you can try things.

Also, in my workshop, I will have a ½ hour conference with each person. But in that conference, first I’ll have the person talk about their work. That is another flaw of the traditional workshop, the gag rule. Again you are just training critics. You are not allowing the writer to think out loud about what he or she is doing. In an 8 minute workshop, you don’t have what you have in a 45 minute workshop, which is that for the first 20 minutes people guess what it is the writing is trying to do and then we tell them it’s wrong. So what I say is, what is it you want to do? What was your intention and what are some of the problems you’ve already identified? Then we can talk about that. We can help you figure that out.

IJP: You play a lot with the line between fiction and non-fiction. This is something discussed in my non-fiction workshop. Does the writer have an obligation to the reader to identify whether something is fiction or non-fiction, or should the writing just be called art?

MM: Well, even that should be explored. One thing that happens with the workshop is that it talks about the thing on the table, but it doesn’t talk about the context. For example, most workshops won’t have a discussion about the workshop.

IJP: It is an important discussion because there are people who feel a violation when these lines are blurred. Just look at the James Fry case. People had a visceral reaction to that case.

MM: For the last 25 years, the dominant style of writing fiction and non-fiction was realism. Realism has these interesting and unexamined conventions, a sort of contract between the writer and reader. So it’s interesting that you said “violation.” The reader will only feel violated if the reader is set in a default position. If those things: what’s real and what’s not, when you get to use first person and not use first person, are agreed on by everybody. But there are other kinds of writing that don’t call into question the content of the truth or fiction, but the fact that you are actually reading an artifice – so that all things, fiction and non-fiction, are still artifice – and so those techniques of revealing the artifice or making the audience deal with the structure, the fabrication of a non-fiction, have an alienating effect.

The classic example of that is the Threepenny opera. Where, even though it’s a fiction, it’s realistic fiction up to a point. At one point Mack the Knife is about to be hanged and a guy runs in and says you’ve been reprieved and Mack throws off the noose and sings, “I’m reprieved.” But then he says to the audience, this always happens doesn’t it? In stories? While outside the theater, people are dying over loafs of bread.

So that violation of the audiences complacency and comfort is actually done for political purposes – for purposes that are meant to change a reader. Again, it goes back to patrolling. Isn’t it interesting that the writers themselves turn out to be policeman? There is this desire for a lot of people to come to school in order to get the credential to be the cop. And from my point of view, I’m an artist, and part of my job is to mess up the cops. Or at least to show that those boundaries that are natural and legal are just as artificial. What’s real 2 years ago might be completely unreal today.

This has been going on a long time as you know. Robinson Crusoe was originally published as non-fiction and thus the much more interesting question is why? What was happening that he wanted to do it that way? Or maybe another interesting question is, why don’t poets talk about this? Poets are poets – they are not non-fiction poets and fiction poets. So what is it about poetry that allows them to get away with that? I think part of it is that they have not done the transparent prose style that fictionally says this is real. People look at poetry and say, well this is a construction, this has an artifice, it has its own kind of truth.

IJP: There is a desire for people to know the artist behind the art. And some of this relates to that line between non-fiction and fiction. For example with James Fry or with Tim O’Brien, the reader wants to know what happened and what did not. The reader is unable to look at the art independent of the artist.

I think you’re right. A lot of my writer friends really resist this idea, but I was ready for it. We have to be careful because the university actually acts as sort of a buffer system. It doesn’t allow us to confront these interesting questions. I always tell this story about the anthrax outbreak. It was actually called the Ames strain because it was kept at the university here in Ames, Iowa. Why? Because the larger culture doesn’t want to mess around with anthrax, but it doesn’t want to get rid of it completely. So where do you store stuff like that? In a university. And what happens is people study it, write papers about it, and train others to take care of it. Why? In case there’s an outbreak. So there was an outbreak and they came to these guys and said tell us about it. So the university’s main function is cold storage. And what we forget is that that’s the way it deals with poetry and fiction. The poetry and fiction is mainly in cold storage and we have people who reproduce it and teach people how to do it this particular way. Anyway, there was a poetry outbreak in 2001 in Alabama and I got a phone call – a reporter from the Birmingham news –and he said we are getting a ton of poems. I said, you’re experiencing a poetry outbreak. I asked him what the content of those poems was and he said the content was the death of Dale Earnhardt. So I said, “In a time of trying emotional things, we turn to this ancient way of expressing emotions in this compact, blah, blah, blah . . .” And they quoted it in the newspaper. Just like the anthrax outbreak. A lot of our colleagues and students are being trained as curators rather than creators. We have to prevent ourselves from doing that. We have to create and we have to pay attention to what is being created.