Carissa Halston on Robb Todd
August 30, 2011

Carissa Halston, who brought Kris and Tyler Compete to Issue Fourteen, discusses her highlight from the same issue, Everything I Think About When I Am Trying Not To Think:

***

Robb Todd’s narrator’s attempt to dehumanize himself emerges in his every action. He animates inanimate things: subways, lunches, words—“It occurred to me that ‘take a nip’ might be a nipple reference.” Also, he tags every negligent, thoughtless person he encounters with the ironic, reverent label, human being, the best example, “Another human being said this: ‘It’s weird watching movies where people aren’t getting shot.’” The reversal of what it means to be human is so obvious here as to be staggering. But it could easily be written off as irony for irony’s sake if the narrator didn’t liken himself to a machine or an absence, “I walked home and a bunch of birds, a lot of little brown dots, flew at my face and I blinked and while I blinked they must have flown through me.” Something about registering birds as little brown dots sounds like the way a robot might see things, but the fact that the birds flew through him insinuates that he’s not there at all.

That said, the narrator is the most thoughtful, humane presence in the story. Therein lies his charm.

He’s surrounded on all sides by racism, artlessness, and narcissism, which may be why he’s compiling this list of inconvenient, invasive thoughts, but he’s also afflicted with a sponge-like capacity for others’ grief. He takes everyone else’s awful facets and says, I feel bad for them. Further, “I am vulnerable to other people’s all-caps and emoticons.” The sensitivity inherent in the statement aside, it’s more telling that he’s willing to confess it at all. Also, it leads to Todd’s later heartbreaking use of an emoticon sad face, which would have otherwise felt out of place, if not cloying.

As with any realist fiction, I’m aware of the meaning-within-meaninglessness that authors attempt to dole out. But it’s the awareness of Todd’s narrator, his willingness to play the target for his own judgment, that lends depth to what could be dismissed as a list of thoughts meant to distract when life becomes overwhelming. Pusillanimous though Todd’s narrator believes himself to be, I feel drawn in—into his life, into his sink with its orange peels and egg shells—and despite the implication that he is any less human or present than anyone else, I care more about his absence than their existence.

Sean Ulman on Megan Martin & Sam Rasnake
August 26, 2011

The most recent > kill author concluded with the wonderfully alliterative ‘Seward’s Super Sewer Spelunker’ by Sean Ulman. Here’s his take on highlights from Issue Fourteen:

***

Megan Martin’s three shorts and Sam Rasnake’s three poems tied for my favorite works from a luminous Issue Fourteen. Candid dynamic narrators and their delivery of lyrical, yet tactile surprises tied these six gems up in a word-loot-laden bag of bookie booty.

I’ve been working even harder lately at balancing stylized prose with attainable sentences, to add support stilts to stories that are, admittedly, more like language puzzles. I’m assembling a wider, tauter net in a way — casting for all readers rather than writer/readers or myself, the writer/reader.

Reading Martin’s and Rasnake’s work provided tidy lessons on landing any reader type.

Both authors open their reading experience with graspable declarations: ‘... I do not want to ‘give back!’ MM; ‘First let me say I’m not thinking.’ SR.

It’s vital to earn readers early so the coming recreation with astonishing admission or bouncy language has unwound some narrative slack.

In ‘On a Cellular Level,’ Martin caused me to consider digging up the sympathy I felt for her narrator right after she had planted it — ‘You arrive. You do mean things to me… new mean things which are exciting...’ And then, a sentence later, an odd image arrangement rubs in plumb to the piece’s anchored foundation — ‘There is so much meaning in the world, for example how you just said rat’s nest on top of the cereal factory and slapped my tit.’

In Rasnake’s ‘Sketches: a Study for Three Heads, 1962,’ the story rests for a saucy series of tri-prefixes. We are cued to stop and soak in this sly poem within a poem. The narrative tangent then returns to its tangibility, rescued by the direct blued perspective ‘Three things to tell you, loss, loss and more loss.’

After a run of artist and character word-search name-dropping in the fun, very different ‘A Day in The Life,’ Rasnake craftily symbolizes the reader — “a stone for story.” I assume other readers, like me, used the flattery of unique inclusion to tighten focus for the next and final stanza, so we can be ultra-receptive to a closing line and image that any reader can digest (with options to digress imaginatively) — ‘the road’s dark hum disappears into Mobius belts of a starless sky.’

Rasnake’s gift for reading is most vibrant in the final piece, ‘For Now,’ which more than the previous two made me wonder if the work was etched hundreds of years ago on a clay tablet or cave wall, say. It smells like it has already lasted. The Wild West voice shutters through the first paragraph discernibly faster than in the previous two poems, using conversational remarks as convenient-platform’d pit-stops: ‘and it’s snowing — did I tell you that?’, ‘- meanwhile the phone doesn’t ring and that’s a good thing — and the letters aren’t mailed and there’s no one to read your thoughts.’ Then the tempo downshifts and rumbles steadily up to the final poignant detail of an edgy stare.

Martin’s ‘This Bitch Will Never Have a Dress’ opens with a clear setting and circumstance – Minnesotans put off by the bride’s breast hat at a wedding – which balances the paragraph’s quirky image of a bride in a sparkly leotard and fuzzy thigh-highs riding a unicycle down the aisle while the audience looks down at their spaceship phones.

Here again, a narrator, like a good friend or nurse, stays by our side carefully telling, to ensure that we process her experience in the same color and shape that she did.

This one closes with my favorite line of the issue: ‘I believe so ferociously in art.’ The adjective ‘ferocious’ suggests aggression and activity. I expect this narrator will not only create art, but fight for it. ‘I will keep on believing so ferociously in art, I say.’

Me too.

But in the post-swell lulls, I’m vulnerable to forgetting believing. So I thank these two authors for the motivating reminders.

Megan Martin on J. Bradley
August 18, 2011

For our fourteenth collection, Megan Martin brought us three short fictions. Here’s her choice pick from the other pieces in the same issue:

***

You can’t really not get excited about something titled ‘Raymond Carver’s Dance Party,’ or I couldn’t, because the idea of Carver plus dance party is so totally absurd and engaging. But the title also alludes to the piece’s gifts: it’s fantastical, over the top, bawdy, absurd and hilarious, but also admirably smart. I’m an impatient reader these days—a story has to grab me right away or I put it down—so lately what I appreciate in a piece of fiction is that it takes huge risks; I want to read things that destroy my expectations of what a story can or should be from the get-go. In part, what that means is: I don’t want to be bored; I want to be surprised/shocked/unsettled; I don’t want to read a story that is like anything I’ve ever read.

J. Bradley’s piece is surprising (and not boring) in the best of ways. A few highlights: the opening, wherein one character asks another: ‘fill me with your seed...[in] the handicapped bathroom’; talking ice cubes inhabited by ‘the ghost of 1992′ (who offers advice in the form of 80s song titles); a fruity drink described as a ‘pureed island.’ This is the kind of fiction I want to read, the kind that contains a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure book titled A Night At The Club’ where ‘Hillary and I were on the cover in our club clothes.’ I want ridiculous; I want things that would be utterly offensive and unacceptable to the New Yorker.

While the language and fantastical elements are what grabbed me initially, the real treat of the piece is how smart it is. In the middle, as the narrator tries to decide whether to take character Hillary up on her ‘seed’ proposition, the story takes this terrific and surprising turn toward metafiction by running through options of what would happen if this story were sci-fi, romance, after school special, etc. It suddenly moves in a direction I didn’t expect and creates this rocky ground where the reader suddenly has no idea where she’s located, what genre has to do with anything, or what’s about to happen. And when the piece finishes with the two gloriously ambiguous phrases, typical of Carver’s endings, it all comes together in this brilliant way: ‘The fourth ice cube said nothing. This is not how I helped make you, Bobby. One day, I’ll tell you how you were made. One day.’ Well, that just knocked my socks off. This smart, playful, funny piece made me feel refreshed and excited about what fiction can and should be.

Rose Hunter on Kevin Tadge
August 16, 2011

By now you’ve hopefully had enough time to soak up the general awesomeness that was Issue Fourteen of > kill author, so here’s the first of our blog posts in which writers from that collection discuss the favorite piece that caught their eye. First up, here’s Rose Hunter:

***

At first glance I felt I could not understand the narrator of Kevin Tadge’s ‘Golden Brown, since I love grilled cheese sandwiches. I cannot make grilled cheese sandwiches because I don’t have a griller or a stove, but if I did I would make them and eat them and not hoard them let alone ‘trade them with the air in my mattress’ because that would get moldy and stinky real quick. However, the idea of having an addiction to something that (on some level at least) you can’t stand, is one that I can relate to. Oh yes... I’ve had a couple of those. And how in this story/word object we have the return of the repressed, or the inevitability of relapse in some sense — or the way it makes me see giant grilled cheese sandwiches everywhere. The tide nibbling at their toes. The house on the edge of the cliff... OK by this stage he (I believe he’s a he which I realize is not stated, but to me he seems like a he so I will call him a he) has been taken in by a good waitress and is making other types of sandwiches. But it seems inevitable that this woman who is/was loved by the narrator’s dog is chopped cheddar when compared to the force of his original obsession as the cliff erodes onto the beach, like landsliding cheese coursing down a hot slice of bread, and of course the place floods and they have to sleep on the roof, where there is sand. Sand? Just like the dreaded grilled cheese: it ‘cools and hardens into rock. So smooth. So tasteless’.

I had never heard of Kevin Tadge and have not read anything else he has written, although I did click on his blog and look at some of his photographs. The first one is a chicken, I believe. His bio is also curious with that addition of the girl.

Issue Fourteen is here
August 7, 2011

The fourteenth issue of > kill author has arrived, spreading its words across the web or into your electronic reading device of choice. Yes, we know it’s a Sunday, but we’re not God-fearing editors. We realized that Sundays can be a bleak time, with nothing to do but mope around and dread the start of the working week only a few hours away. So forget all about the chores and the things you’ve told yourself you have to do, and instead sink down into your favorite old chair and immerse yourself in the work of the twenty-six writers who have honored us with their words on this occasion (plus an introduction by Gregory Sherl).

A few readers have previously told us that some issues of > kill author can appear to have a theme running through them. We remain puzzled by this, because if there are such themes present we can never spot them for ourselves (or maybe we can but we’re just not confessing to them). So once you’ve read through this latest collection, give us your best shot at what might have been on our minds this time. Sex? Religion? Catholic guilt? The economic crisis? Whether there’s life on other planets? Psychoanalyze us and reveal our deepest, darkest preoccupations. Just don’t charge us for your services.

Hope you enjoy the latest issue.

Online Literature Calendar
July 12, 2011

Back in September last year, we were really excited about the launch of Zine-Scene and its focus on online literary magazines — so much so that we invited Richard Mocarski from their editorial team to write a guest post right here on our blog explaining more about the project. Since then, we’ve kept a close eye on their various zine and author spotlights, as well as The Reprint, Zine-Scene’s literary journal which “liberates” words from the printed page (just our little joke there, you understand) and puts them online for all to read.

Now they’ve introduced another innovation with the Online Literature Calendar. The name tells you all you need to know — this is going to be a fantastic resource to find your way around the various publication schedules of the ever-growing number of literary magazines, whether they unveil a new issue every month, every other month (like us), or even just once a year.

If you’re an editor of an online literary magazine, make sure you get your publication signed up. Email Richard at editor [at] zine-scene [dot] com with your release schedule, a link to your journal, a one to two sentence description of what it’s all about, and your logo. And if you’re a reader, Zine-Scene is on Twitter too, so follow them to get all those quick 140-character updates on new online literature.

David Tomaloff on J.A. Tyler
June 19, 2011

Three poems by David Tomaloff featured in our most recent issue. Below, he tells us about one of his particular highlights from the same collection:

***

I’m humbled to be included among the excellent authors featured in Issue Thirteen. I feel as though every piece is deserving of positive reaction; however, J. A. Tyler’s ‘[ the fourth house /// rebuilt ]’ stands out to me as being particularly enchanting. J. A. Tyler has a knack for authoring almost freakishly limber sentences that manage all at once to be fluid, dense, poetic, heady, and, despite all of this, lean and effortless to read. His use of repetition and cyclical language dances in all of the right places, propelling the prose forward, allowing it to gather steam as it goes.

“A bear crept into this fourth house, and I was standing in the darkness, an open knife, waiting to take guts in my fingers, to feel the warmth of once was living. In this fourth house in this cave in this mountain in these woods, smearing bear-blood on black walls, a brother mine-field in front of me.”

and

“I am in search of my deer-brother because I want to tell him what it means to be like this. I want him to see beneath my own deer-skin that there is a brother-core, that there are love-words and moments of sky unencumbered by clouds. I want my deer-brother to see his deer-brother, no matter. Instead it was a note of dying, the death he handed me, dear brother, and the lost woods always circling, fourth houses built and burned and built and burned.”

Tyler’s fluidity is often punctuated and carefully guided by terse verbal uppercuts—sentences which provide contrast and tension to the freefall.

“In these woods I burn down everything that I don’t understand.”

and

“In these woods, the always instead.”

The cumulative effect is both gut-wrenching and exhilarating. It’s the kind of writing that makes me forget I’m reading; which is about as much as any writer can hope for.

Second Saboteur
June 16, 2011

We’re really honored that > kill author — and specifically Issue Eight — has been awarded second place in the inaugural Saboteur Awards for literary magazines, which is run by Sabotage, the site that reviews “pamphlets, small presses, poetry and fiction magazines, manifestos, online journals, stapled pieces of paper, installation poetry, performed poetry.” Thanks to all the judges involved in this decision, and for all the reviews you’ve done.

We were in good company, too. In third place was Issue 24 of La Petite Zine, while Issue 7 of Moon Milk Review was highly commended for its integration with the web. We’ll admit, though, that he winner, Polarity, was a new publication to us, but we’re certainly going to be checking it out based on what Sabotage had to say about it.

With so many publications around, online and offline, all competing for our time, we certainly recommend checking out the comprehensive reviews on Sabotage to see what’s caught their eye.

Ori Fienberg on Anderson Holderness
June 15, 2011

Ori Fienberg, who brought ‘Night Hungers’ to our most recent issue, tells us about the piece that particularly caught his attention in Issue Thirteen:

***

Anderson Holderness’ ‘How to Eat an Oriole’ takes a heavy stone and heaves it into the air with such convincing certainty that wings emerge from the stone and it begins to fly.

This post office is an infinite dimension filled with mail slots, wood paneling, and birds which the mail clerk oversees with a strangely benign malevolence. His violence would be heart-rending if the birds had not developed a curious protective adaptation. The narrator comes to comfortably inhabit the strangeness of this world, and while at the end the action seems about to take a turn for the Hitchcockian, Holderness makes the macabre roll over and beg for its belly to be rubbed.

As with my favorite pieces of magical realism it leaves me yearning to explore the rest of this world, but also convinced by the unique truth of this sequence.

Donald Dunbar on Ras. Mashramani
June 10, 2011

Donald Dunbar, who featured in Issue Thirteen with ‘For a letter to be any good’, writes about his favorite work from the same collection:

“Much of the work in Issue Thirteen is explicitly sexual, but nowhere is that more saturated than in Ras. Mashramani’s pieces. Both ‘I get clean...’ and ‘little girls...’ are obviously awesome. A lot of this awesomeness comes from the construction of the speaker’s sexual identity.

Neither speaker in either poem has any sense of self-value, but is determinately working on attacking the self for the benefit of the other. In ‘I get clean...’ she scrubs her teeth and tongue ‘So your dick your tongue have a clean plate to touch.’ In ‘little girls...’ she lies to “each man who thought they loved me” and provokes them into some hard-cock rage by including ‘a school photo of me at age 12′. That what she’s offering to provoke their attentions is an earlier version of herself is not much different than the promise to ‘scrub until it bleeds’—trying to erase the skin of her pussy is trying to erase the years from her life.

These/this persona is the submissive end of a staple, prongs held backward, inviting the reader to enter her at his or her pleasure, but by making the methods memorable/shocking enough, controlling the placement. Who would try to barter with the woman whose just scrubbed her mouth out for that purpose? ‘Baby, thanks for that, but would you also inject my semen into your nipples?’ No. And after she’s gotten you all worked up, all angry, it’s only then will you race to her house wanting to ‘murder her for hours’. But she’s been waiting with her tennis uniform on.

The ultra-power bottom?

The lamentation of the martyr, who has found heaven, and now only needs to be burnt at the stake?

But I think it’s more than that too. Where does the speaker’s pleasure come from? From her self-annihilation for us, her idealized other. But also from her secret control over us. And it’s her pleasure in this that is so inviting to the reader, who has already submitted his/her/etc. mind to Ras.‘s poems. That she’s given herself to us so completely makes us warm to her. That she’s given herself to us in the terms of her desire—a desire that overwhelms her self—makes us functions of it.”

The Thirteenth
June 1, 2011

Issue Thirteen of > kill author is now online, named in honor of George Orwell and with a (fascinating and thought-provoking) guest introduction by Elaine Castillo.

Though containing about the same number of writers as usual, overall it’s perhaps a shorter issue than recent editions. No reason, just the way the work we chose seemed to go — these were the pieces that really grabbed our attention and fired our collective imagination. But this has its benefits too, because it means you could read the whole issue in one sitting. Then read it again the next day. And again the day after that. Well, you get the idea. Just read it lots, and revel in every word.

Our submissions never close, so get sending us your work for our fourteenth issue now. Over the next few days and weeks, we’ll also be hoping to bring you some blog posts by the writers in #13 in which they tell us about their favorite pieces from this collection.

Coming soon...
May 20, 2011

We’re in the last stages of putting together Issue Thirteen of > kill author, and choosing to ignore the final judgement possibly happening tomorrow. If the Rapture does occur, we’ll have to cling to the hope that heaven and hell both have internet so you can all still read it. In the meantime, check out the following by two contributors from the forthcoming issue (yes, it’s a kind of preview, because we like you).

Ori Fienberg has a piece called ‘Night Hungers’ in our #13, but before then you can catch him being interviewed over on Monkeybicycle about his piece ‘Clockwork Dog,’ which is included in Monkeybicycle8. He talks more about his useful advice for people trying to beat insomnia: don’t count sheep, count Iowans.

Following in the footsteps of xTx, Marcus Speh and Neila Mezynski, the guest introduction for our thirteenth issue is being written by Elaine Castillo, who made her first appearance in > kill author back in Issue Nine with a piece called Envoi, which references Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai. She recently made a 40-minute film by the same name, and it’s strongly based on that story. Watch it below:

Tuscaloosa Runs This
May 9, 2011

“After the tornado, ‘Tuscaloosa Runs This’ became a rallying cry amongst friends involved in the recovery process. In one sense, when everything happened we didn’t know what to do, but we knew that we needed to do something. And so, we played to our strengths—our counseling, our writing, our ability to haul, to swing an ax. As a result there was a lot of attempts: some more successful than others, but attempts nonetheless. The works in this anthology are attempts (essays, Montaigne would call them) to capture what it is we love about this city and what it means to us to repair and rebuild our home. The quality of the people of Tuscaloosa is only matched by the quality of their writing. Here, we have some amazing work from amazing people—all with our city on our minds and in our hearts. Some of the work has been written long before late April, other pieces written shortly after the storm.” — Brian Oliu

Put together in only a few short days as a response to the tornado which caused such terrible destruction, Tuscaloosa Runs This, an ebook featuring writers from the area, is definitely worth your time to read or download — and then, of course, to donate. Do it now.

Fifty short fictions
May 7, 2011

Take one Wigleaf. Add in their choice of the Top 50 (very) short fictions of 2011. Stir. Season to taste. Serve the starter: James Tadd Adcox’s The Gift Shop, from our seventh issue. Devour the remaining forty-nine courses without spoiling your appetite.

Saboteur Awards
May 4, 2011

Sabotage is a site out of the UK which, in its own words, reviews “pamphlets, small presses, poetry and fiction magazines, manifestos, online journals, stapled pieces of paper, installation poetry.” They’ve said some good things about > kill author in the past, and we’ve now made the shortlist of their 2011 Saboteur Awards — or at least Issue Eight, published back in August last year, has. This award is a little different from the others out there as it’s based on just one issue of a literary journal.

There are some well-respected names we recognized on the shortlist — FRiGG, Moon Milk Review and La Petite Zine — but equally there are plenty of publications we’ve never come across before, which can only be a good thing, right? Go take a look.

Sabotage’s jury should be making a final decision on a winner at the end of this month, but our thanks to them for including us on the shortlist.