Brian Warfield on Stefan Milne
April 5, 2012

Brian Warfield, who contributed the superb story Whale to Issue Eighteen, talk about his favorite piece from the same issue: Stefan Milne’s The Elegiacs of Fruit and Chocolate.

***

Maybe people know that Alfred Hitchcock used Bosco chocolate syrup in Psycho for blood. Maybe they know he got the sound of stabbing flesh by stabbing casaba melons. Or these are secrets that even this story doesn’t exactly reveal.

This is a kind of writing that leaves its hand over the words to be discovered only as the author intends. It is a Hitchcockian versatility which utilizes symbols to get at deeper, psychological meaning.

There are loops in the story, loops within loops like life-sustaining blood-letting.

I feel bad now that I’ve so indextrously outed the mirrors. Hitchcock strived for utter control over making his movies and their perception/reception. And then someone comes around and, before you even have a chance to see it, tells you how the movie ends.

This story is a set of twin couplets — fruit and chocolate standing in for death and Hitchcock’s Psycho which I will leave for you to draw the representing correspondent.

Issue Eighteen: we’re not kidding
April 1, 2012

We’re probably breaking all the unwritten rules of when to publish a new issue of a literary magazine. It’s not only a Sunday but it’s also April 1 — traditionally a day when newspapers come up with less than hilarious spoof news stories and we tell each other something stupid in an attempt to fool the other person. Not us, though. Issue Eighteen of > kill author, with a guest introduction by Ian Sanquist and twenty-eight writers ready to knock you out of any sense of weekend complacency with their words (and, in some cases, their audio and video), is now online.

So avoid the babbling voices of the media today and read this latest issue of > kill author instead. Because we’re not kidding around.

Donald Dunbar on Fortunato Salazar
February 13, 2012

Issue Seventeen contributor Donald Dunbar offers his thoughts on Fortunato Salazar’s “Kudos to the Parasitic Arthropods”:

***

First: The drip of subject from paragraph to paragraph.
Second: Unique Google-hit for “dsidfrok swuabny lofelyad.”
Second: The drip of “Wayne” from paragraph to section.
Third: “Wayne” is the first name of my landlord.
Third-point-one: I am writing this instead of writing him an overdue email.
Third-point-one: I genuinely like Wayne, and have never had a better landlord.
Third-point-a: “Fortunato” is the best name I’ve heard in a week.
Third: I really have a difficult time writing tension-building engines—in this story, the increasingly complicated shots for the swishes, the cold, the hunger, the fate and origin of the caribou—and I have a fetish for the fibonacci sequence-ish distortion of memory and misrememberance, or the slight and constant revision of daily routine, so this whole story is right up my alley.

First: The tension between delight and exhaustion.
Second: Stan really doesn’t want buddy to keep swishing. Stan is not a capitalist, because a capitalist would see that a man who’s always swishing is some kind of moneymaking machine.
Third: However much buddy paid for his cellphone, it’s not doing him any good.

First.
There’s a particular kind of tint to the diction register, a vagueness that is not holding shit back for the mystery of it. It comes off as “cultural differences.”

Second.
Fortunato Salazar writes a lot, and publishes a lot. I’ve been reading his work for the past couple days, and there is this thing in much of it I’m trying to think about well enough to describe.

Third.
Fortunato’s structuring of his writing is pretty musical. There’s a rhythm, sometimes mounting, sometimes simmering, that builds my interest in his work, though not usually a rhythm in the verse sense of the word.

Fourth.
> kill author is especially concerned with voice—like they’re much more into who’s saying it than what exactly is being said. With regards to their anonymity, this is pretty interesting.

Fifth.
The voice Fortunato creates here depends not all that much on dialect and diction register, but depends a lot more on repetition and detail selection, and the pattern of thought.

Fifth.
I would like Stan to be thinking that what he would like to do, right now, is low bridge me.

When the phone rings, I say, Wayne residence. Every time it rings they ask for Wayne.

Fifth-point-first.
Samuel Beckett is for sure in Fortunato’s cabal.

Fifth-point-second.
Fortunato expresses less judgment via his speakers than Samuel does. When buddy in “Kudos to the Parasitic Arthropods” expresses desire for something to relieve a particular misery, we understand the misery to be caused by his habits and actions. Krapp and Estragon and Molloy and Murphy and all of them: their pointless actions are habits, and the misery is caused by being itself. In this way, Fortunato is a lot more

Sixth-point-third.
optimistic than Samuel.

First: A thing about Fortunato’s writing:
First: there’s an exactness and arbitrariness of numbering.

First: This extends into time as well.
For instance: I never should have slept in my jacket last night.
For instance: When he says “Wayne residence” when the phone rings, when does the phone ring?
First: But some of the speaker’s desires are rewarded.
For instance: I’m cold. I’m freezing. I would like to eat. I would like to go inside where caribou meat is simmering in a vat.
Turns into
I keep taking steps back until technically I’m indoors, then I lob one underhand. Swish.

Second: This story is basically about the figures in Ikea furniture assembly instructions.
Second-etc.: They talk in smiley faces and frowny faces.
Second-etc.: I can’t remember if it’s them talking or them being annotated.

Third.
“Kudos to the Parasitic Arthropods” is pretty arthropodic, but in a biological way too.

Editors in Conversation
February 9, 2012

Late last year, Portal del Sol approached us and Rae Bryant — then editor of Moon Milk Review, now editor-in-chief of the forthcoming Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, as well former > kill author contributor — to take part in their Editors in Conversation series. We really enjoyed the discussion with Rae, and the results are now available to read over at Portal del Sol’s site.

Issue Seventeen is awake, rubbing its eyes and making coffee
February 5, 2012

Maybe it’s something to do with the season or the turn of the year, but it seems like it’s been too long since we last released a fresh collection of > kill author writers out into the world (and no, that doesn’t mean we’re going monthly). Perhaps it was just a long hangover from the holidays. We’re back now though, and Issue Seventeen is finally here, ready to shake you from your slumber with wonderfully vibrant prose, poetry and that strange hinterland which exists somewhere between the two.

There’s lots to love, and we couldn’t possibly have any highlights — but do keep a look-out for Joseph Scapellato’s guest introduction (complete with audio reading) and Drew Roberts’ video animation accompanying his piece Shades of Dorsey. Otherwise, just settle back in your chair, pick your format of choice — online, e-book or PDF — and get reading.

Jordan Soyka on Maureen McHugh
January 7, 2012

From our December issue, Jordan Soyka writes about his highlight:

***

At the center of this grudge (called “Ammonia”) there is a body. Cold lungs & grinding teeth, stiff hands & soft hair, and knees, “patterned” from whatever they were pressed into (is the body forced to its knees? is it praying?). There is a betrayer that is also called “Ammonia.” There is a lot of slipping around, grinding, pulsing.

In the three parts of Maureen McHugh’s “Hallelujah Ammonia,” we’re dragged back and forth across town (JC Penny, townie bars) and time (“$ay it slant as Emily would $ay / the high school friend you shoplifted with”). Everything is dog-eared. Memories hang stubbornly, somewhere between old musk and menacing ghost: “Nothing in this dead town is special … You’ll forget the way he smelled /…/Like bar-soap. / Like fuck & rot.”

But at the center of it all is this body (the speaker? the betrayer? the grudge itself?). It’s clean the way a corpse is (“the arms stay clean as bleached toilets”) and it threatens to eclipse the poems.

The speaker tells me to “mop the black road…”. The speaker says, “Kill a weak grudge with water. Get you whiskey in paper cups for the bearded one who smells like bar-soap.” The speaker asks questions (“Who wept in parking lots?”), but I’m not sure to who. The speaker tells me to “Steal clothes off clotheslines / make ‘em the wrong size for Ammonia…”. I can’t tell if the speaker is bossing me around, or if the speaker needs me. But we know each other from way back.

“Night bums us something special so we ache & pull the sheets off mattresses with floral patterns.” There is ecstasy in these poems (“Hallelujah! Hysterical occasion!”), but it’s not what it could be—“For once let the grudge be the heart cock’d and clenched…”. It all starts to feel a little desperate. The past is collaged over the present and “beard’d bar-folk” are indistinguishable. It feels like wheels spinning in snow.

In the last poem, the speaker says, “Make it a grave,” but “it” already is. The grave is gaping. And we’re peering into it, trying to figure out—is it hungry or bored?

Write For Rights
December 2, 2011

If you’ve ever scrolled right down to the bottom of every page on this site, down there, you’ll have seen our disclaimer: “despite our name, > kill author is strongly opposed to the persecution of writers.” We’re being a little irreverent with that statement, of course, but it’s not just a joke. Click the link in the footer and you’ll be taken to the main Amnesty International portal. Why? Because authors, along with campaigners, activists, students, teachers, journalists and people from just about every walk of life, continue to suffer human rights violations in many parts of the world (and sometimes within our own countries too).

As with most literary journals, we’re well aware that the vast majority of our readers are also writers. That’s why we’re drawing your attention to Amnesty’s Write For Rights campaign, so you can pick up your pen and do some good old-fashioned writing. With ink. On paper.

From December 3 to December 11 (and including International Human Rights Day on December 10) Amnesty is aiming to hold the world’s largest human rights event. But this time it’s not simply about sticking your name on an online petition or sending off a pre-prepared email as part of a campaign for the release of a political prisoner. They want people to write a physical letter by hand and put it in the mail. It’s not digital, it’s not instant, and so—as a literary journal that believes passionately in the web and has half an eye on the e-book future—we should really hate the idea. The reason we don’t, and the reason we’re getting involved, is because in the 21st century a handwritten letter is a rare item; it possesses a power, a presence and a level of commitment that puts it above receiving just another email.

Amnesty is highlighting fifteen cases for this year’s campaign, covering issues like student activism, freedom of expression, women’s/LGBT rights, indefinite detention, justice and the right to housing. In each case you write a letter to the official in charge of deciding the person’s fate, as well as a more personal message to the prisoner of conscience themselves to show your support and let them know they’re not alone.

There’s Jabbar Savalan, a youth activist from Azerbaijan who was detained by police in February this year after posting a note on Facebook calling for protests against the government. Or Filep Karma from Indonesia, imprisoned in 2004 after raising an independence flag during a peaceful ceremony. But those are just two cases from the fifteen, and each national Amnesty branch also lists a few unique to their region.

We hope you’ll join Amnesty International’s campaign and write one or more letters for these prisoners of conscience over the next week. More details are on the following Amnesty sites:

• Amnesty International USA
• Amnesty International Canada
• Amnesty International UK

Sweet (Issue) Sixteen
December 1, 2011

We’d love to tell you about all the seasonal content in the latest issue of > kill author, but there isn’t any. We’re not the type to adorn our web pages with tasteless graphics of holly, put snow-tipped lettering on our title or have virtual snowflakes (shudder) falling across the screen.

Instead, what you’ll find is a memorable introduction by Caroline Crew and then 27 writers whose words you’ll want to read, read and read some more. We’ve also got probably the most audio we’ve ever had in any issue, with readings that make fantastic listening if you’re enduring long winter nights in your part of the world.

So what are you waiting for? Get reading (and listening to) Issue Sixteen, named in honor of Kobo Abe, right now.

Ilk: they are our kind
December 1, 2011

We’ve been looking forward to the first issue of Ilk Journal. Why? Well, we just had a feeling about it. A good feeling. And it’s a feeling that hasn’t disappointed now that the reality has come to pass. Ilk a poetry journal, for one thing, and there aren’t enough of them about. There are two good people behind it, that’s another thing. Oh, and they write a compelling manifesto — and everyone knows how much we at > kill author like a manifesto or two. This is Issue One, and it’s got names we don’t know and names we do know (including former contributors to our little corner of the web like Thomas Patrick Levy, M.G. Martin, Molly Prentiss, Daniel Romo, Mathias Svalina and Parker Tettleton). So go and read. Now.

Meanwhile, if you’ll excuse us, we’ve got our next issue to apply finishing touches to, ready for release later today...

Chris Emslie on KMA Sullivan
November 22, 2011

From one poet to another, Chris Emslie on KMA Sullivan’s work in Issue Fifteen:

***

For a long time I clung to punctuation. I felt like a poem that didn’t scoop each pause with a little comma spoon wasn’t letting me breathe right. Or that a poem that didn’t end with a stern full stop wasn’t finished. It was like the poem was still making up its mind, and that indecision (like all indecision) frightened me. Look at me, even now, reassuring myself with little regulatory marks.

The first of KMA Sullivan’s three poems typifies all the reasons I finally let go. I love her intersection of visual and written art and feel like it wouldn’t be so sharp if she allowed the reader the luxury of a comma to tell them when to pause. I know ‘between the lines’ is a horrid cliché, but that’s where the synthesis (the ‘almost ekphrastic’) occurs. In that first poem we find these lines:

[...]Pissarro’s work flourished
and burned
butter skies and violet trees
showed us who we are
in color and light

The clean lineation opens up a multitude of meanings here, and compelled me to return again and again to Sullivan’s poems. In “burned / butter skies” is “burned” the verb or part of the adjective? It’s both, at the same time, and it’s exhilarating.

I also love Sullivan’s pieces because they are just a little too real. The kind of real that will break your heart and make you laugh aloud in the same short text. ‘Postmodern’ opens “I wonder how long / this is going to take / to be free of you” and closes “my younger self / feather earrings and tasselled skirts / squeegee my face”. Now tell me you don’t know what I mean.

Sullivan has the two things I have always thought essential for poetry: an eye and an ear. The result is lines you can rejoice in, even if they’re only two words long (for example “sonorous color”, which embodies what it describes).

Ekphrasis is when verse pours libations to art. This is not what Sullivan does. She distils image into text and produces something that belongs definitively to neither, because it remains too human to merely be called a product. There are strains of visual art, yes, but what is offered here is only its most vital moving parts.

“poetry, that wild beast / could take what is left”.

Ashley Farmer on Molly Prentiss
October 24, 2011

Ashley Farmer gave us three glimpses into Farm Town as part of Issue Fifteen. Below, she tells us about one of her highlights from the same edition:

***

If there existed a natural world miracle scale, one might place the Grand Canyon on one end and the brief, delicate connection between two human beings at the other (modern air travel would fall somewhere in between). Molly Prentiss presents us with both the big amazing/little amazing and the relationship between these phenomena in her story “The Grand Canyon Brings People Together.”

The piece is brief, the language precise and taut and just a little bit muscular, and here we see prose that inhabits its space fully. So, too, do the characters—a girl who has to pee and a “mean lady” who we learn has been “bruised” by her life—occupy fully the few inches of legroom and chair trays they’ve been assigned. We don’t know their names or destinations, but the characters flying above the west feel fully realized and full-fledged.

There’s tension in flight: even someone like me who likes it wonders how the machine stays up. The chairs are uncomfortable, there isn’t enough space for our joints or limbs, and we’re pressed up against strangers in ways more intimate than almost any other public situation. In this story, the tension extends to both the bladder and psyche of the girl who needs the restroom and who wonders if this “bitchy bruised lady” at her side might have ever had a childhood. Even the woman’s pants (“They were khakis maybe. Capris”) suggest rigidity, the tightrope of flight and travel, of occupying a closed cabin with people you’ll never know.

If we readers feel a bit claustrophobic, worrying about the girl languishing in her seat or wondering if the mean woman will display the nastiness we’ve anticipated—or if technology may fail, a possibility in plane pieces—this tension is released when the girl sees the Grand Canyon beneath the plane. Floored by it, she invites the woman to look out over the gorge that’s “Like a life, but bigger, physically. Emotionally smaller.”

Here, for me, is the conflation of miracles. It’s in this moment that we see how these characters are emotionally bigger than we can imagine, that we’re passengers glimpsing them from a distance and for a moment only. The story ends with the woman confessing that yes, she did have a childhood once—a poignant moment and amazing not simply because the girl had never actually asked (not out loud at least), but because it’s always astounding to see a chasm bridged between our lives and the ones they brush up against.

Molly Prentiss on B.N. Landry
October 21, 2011

Molly Prentiss took us over the Grand Canyon in Issue Fifteen. Here she is on her chosen highlight from that same collection:

***

For the same reason I love seeing the insides of other people’s houses, I love B.N. Landry’s story “Free Architecture.” Call me voyeuristic, but I like to see how people arrange their objects. I want to see whether a couple shares the same tube of toothpaste, whether or not someone still has a land-line, what magazines are delivered to their house each week and how and where they stack them. In “Free Architecture” we are allowed into the rooms that contain the lives of John and Laura (John’s apartment, “an important new restaurant,” an art museum), whose indoor universes distort the very objects that they contain. It is only when we get to Laura’s place, where “the land was covered with tall green trees,” that we realize we have been cooped up inside for so long, contained in the walls of a (second? tenth?) date with John and Laura, attempting to translate the language of their objects and the object of their language: are these people in love or what?

But the reason it’s fun to see other people’s stuff is not because you actually want to know more about them, no. Precisely the opposite. You want to think you know. You want to see one little thing – the sock on the floor or the weird floral potholder – and you want to make up the story behind it, you want to imagine it yourself. Landry lets us do this at a micro level, letting his sentences cut before the story is entirely told. “When he looked in the mirror,” Landry writes of John, “he saw not himself but another person, who had made different decisions.” Do we get to find out what these decisions were? No. Never. Instead we are left in a nondescript room with John and his “large stomach,” imagining how the stomach got so large, how the bad decisions were made, why, and for whom. It’s like a song in which an important note is withheld, and in the space where the note should be you fill it in in your head. Those are the best songs, because the space allows for possibility and for invention, and for the meta-voyeur, the wonder at what the author himself imagined in that space.

But in all of Landry’s withholdings, in all his sparse, vague spaces and moments – the “large, white rooms” and the “clean and transparent” cities – there is an immaculate specificity. On the white walls of “Free Architecture” there are hairs stuck in the paint, in its transparent cities there are very definite reflections. The curator – “she wore a suit and new glasses” – is a curator that we all know, despite the fact that she has been so thinly defined. We all know the important restaurant with no customers, its suited, happy waiters. We all know the line “Everything is so fresh!” coming from the pretty mouth of our discomfited date. We understand the particulars of John and Laura’s universe, we have just never seen the particulars architected like this.

Architected, yes, but free: the story moves, or should I say holds itself up, in the manner of its title. It has a foundation and it will not fall, but it is built associatively and sporadically – it has windows in the strangest places, landings in the middle of the stairs, spurts of awkward extra space, hallways that lead to nowhere. John and Laura wear food instead of clothes, oil paintings are served for dinner instead of food, and museum curators are available for quasi-spiritual montages, while lying on the floor. Laura’s bedroom, for crying out loud, is in the middle of the forest! In these amorphous portals lives the magic that drives this short story. Some might call it magical realism, these almost hallucinatory distortions of what we know to be normal, but I’d call it a keen tap into the core of the world in which we actually do live – don’t we all feel like the glass of the coffee table we are laying under is too low sometimes, too low for us to move? And isn’t this noting of the surreal nature of real life at the essence of good fiction?

Of course we can’t ignore the splendid spiral staircase of a conversation at the end of the story, where Laura proclaims that she doesn’t think she could “ever have sex with a man so uncomfortable with spending money.” Money, a very real, very bland subject, is deliberated in the bizarre manner of the rest of the story – it turns into a captor (“Before you were a prisoner of not having money, now you are a prisoner of having money.”) and then shape-shifts into the chicken pox (“…once you get it and then lose it, you will never get it again”). And then, with the same perfect randomness with which we were given Laura’s apples and John’s banana, the narrator himself (the narrator himself!) cuts in to verify the truth of this last statement. And this, my friends, feels like picking up the telephone and hearing someone else’s conversation, and they’re talking about sex or personal embarrassment or cheating on their significant other. Not only the voyeur’s jackpot, but one of those wise moments, where you think, alongside the narrator, Which is true, Which is true.

Marcus Speh on Tania Hershman
October 19, 2011

Marcus Speh, who graced the last > kill author with “Three Berg Passages: a Triptych”, discusses a personal highlight from the same issue:

***

In “All Activity is Silent”, Tania Hershman shows us a couple that is slowly, in the course of “a year, another year, another year” drifting apart. Their drifting is personal, it’s intimate. It is well-nigh impossible for anyone outside a relationship to say what’s going on in that space carefully probed and explored by the author. At least this is what I felt when I read the piece and when I listened to Hershman’s own well-paced, meticulously accentuated delivery: that I was standing outside listening in, that it was perhaps wrong to listen to these two. The saddest moment of this story is when the words of remembering “tell her nothing. Or something, but she doesn’t see them.” There are moments in this short piece that bring back the best of Beckett. Dialogue that really is monologue and that could go on forever, painfully so. The author’s gaze upon this couple is somewhat surgical: they’re active like the busy microbes working inside them, but they’re drifting apart nevertheless. Or maybe I’m all wrong and these are two actors doing improvisational theatre. Or they’re robots from a distant future trying to sound happily married but not getting it. So many possibilities—that is the art of this piece, that the spaces between the few words written are so large and leave so much space for my imagination. I experienced the strain of having to fill them and I might have got lost in my own thoughts had there not been this wonderful moment when “all activity is silent and they are right right where they belong.” I loved this ending—and the way Hershman pulls it off using repetition to stretch stretch time.

Kenny Mooney on Marcus Speh
October 17, 2011

In the most recent > kill author, Kenny Mooney offered us a memorable and disturbing look inside the “Crank House” — here’s his take on one of his highlights from the same issue:

***

The beauty, for me, of Marcus Speh’s “Three Berg Passages: a Triptych” is that it doesn’t altogether make sense. It’s a trio of disjointed, isolated pieces. I spent quite some time reading and re-reading them, trying to find some links between them, and I don’t see one. Maybe there is and I just don’t see it. Maybe I’m just not that smart. I don’t really care. The joy, for me, in this kind of writing is in the odd, subtle absurdity of it all. Am I meant to find these stories funny? Because I do. But I find Kafka hilarious. Maybe there’s something wrong with me.

There is, of course, another kind of beauty – the beauty of the language. Speh’s writing is, for the most part, terse, precise and minimal. But when the desire takes him, he unleashes wonderful flourishes, such as “This hallucination, too, was part of his father’s heritage, as were the stark fishtail blue eyes and the fine, sensitive hair on the back of his hands. They had to make up for this distorted vision of half of humanity.” I imagine him like some kind of wordsmith boxer, hopping from foot to foot with deliberate ease, only to suddenly let loose a flurry of blows that leave you gasping.

My favourite piece is probably the last in the three, “Passages”, in which a boy pulls a horrible face and then reaches down into his own stomach to pull out a magic ring, only for the assembled crowds of people to be thoroughly disappointed when the boy cannot tell them if the ring is special or even what it does. This to me feels like a pointed critique at aspects of the society we live in now, where it is the end result that is interesting, magical; it is instant celebrity. Hard work, the effort, the path to that goal is unimpressive — “Anybody can find a ring”.

Issue Fifteen will see you now
October 4, 2011

As J. Bradley says in his guest introduction to the latest issue of > kill author: “Word choice in writing, in speaking, is powerful”. And our fifteenth issue brings with it a wealth of writers who make some very powerful word choices in their prose and poetry, that’s for sure, with many of them giving voice to their contributions in accompanying audio too. So whether you read or listen or both (even just look at the pictures), whether you browse online or download one of our e-book versions, we hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as we enjoyed putting it together.

(And though we don’t often mention the deceased writers whose names form the title of each issue, Ann Quin does deserve a few moments in the spotlight. She’s not nearly well-known as she should be, so do yourself a favor and pick up one of the four books she published during her far too short lifetime.)