Laila Lalami

StorySouth’s Million Writers Award was launched by the magazine’s editor, Jason Sanford, in an effort to promote the best of fiction published online. Last year, I asked all ten finalists to talk about their stories, and I’m doing it again this year. So here are the short-listed writers, on their work.

Terry Bisson: “Super 8,” published in Scifiction.com
I’m a science fiction writer, and rarely deal with my own history. Super 8 came to me when I saw a video that an old friend had patched together from “home-movies” of our dome-building commune days. I imagined the film itself as a character, and took it from there. I happen to be a Southern writer myself, and even thought of calling the story Rank Strangers.

Jai Clare: “Bone on Bone,” published in AGNI.
“Bone on Bone” was inspired while I was at a gig of a wonderful British contemporary jazz band. It was dark and the music was sexy and the pianist was marvelous and smiled broadly. Suddenly the words I fell in love with a pianist came to mind, though of course on this occasion it wasn’t autobiographical! And the next day I created this groupie vampiric type character who is in love with a man’s talent rather than the man himself. Some people have commented on the freeform shape of the story as if I was mimicking the music itself. If so that was totally unconscious. I just wanted to get as close to the feeling of listening to live music as I was capable of. And somehow show how obsession and love can develop.
It was a great honour to be published by Agni. They didn’t even change my English spellings! Many thanks to them and to Jason Sanford

Xujun Eberlein: “Second Encounter,” published in the Paumanok Review.
I once heard a story from an old man. In 1949, during the regime changeover in China, he was a political instructor for a Communist militia, and was acting under orders to suppress local bandits. One day they executed several arrested bandits, but at one point the execution of a man failed as one of the guns misfired. When the shooter, who had checked and adjusted his gun, asked whether he should shoot a second time, for some reason the instructor hesitated and did not say yes. A decade later, the instructor, who had become a high-level government cadre, returned to the same town on business. He ran into a happy farmer carrying rice on a mountain path who called on him, “Instructor Jin, do you remember me?” Jin didn’t, not until the farmer thanked him profusely for not taking his life.
Now, from the comfort of my American home, whenever I hear news about a teenage suicide bomber, my heart aches not only for the people hurt, but also for the teen bomber. There exist two irreconcilable worlds in our time, one views a suicide bomber as a hero and another views him as a terrorist. But to the family, he is most likely nothing more than a son, or a brother. He reminds me, painfully, of the Chinese teenagers I knew in my childhood. While my elder sister gave up her life at 16 during the Cultural Revolution for her reverence of Mao, her peers, those known as Red Guards, fiercely killed each other. They killed, not because they were ruffians, but because of their perceived differences in ideology, however small the differences really were. It seems only time can teach the lesson and wake us up from a nightmare of heroism. I can’t help but wonder, if the teenage suicide bomber had survived and lived for another 10, 20 or 30 years, what would he think and say about his action.
These two seemingly unrelated threads formed “Second Encounter.” I am indebted to Paumanok Review for publishing this story and to In Posse Review for publishing online my first story in English.

Alicia Gifford: “Toggling the Switch,” published in Narrative Magazine.
“Toggling the Switch” is the result of a moral dilemma I liked to pose to friends: What if you hit someone in your car, and killed them? Say, you’d been drinking. Maybe you’d smoked some pot, too. Say, no one saw it. Say, the accident was unavoidable. Say the victim was dead dead dead and nothing you could do would change that. Say, you had everything to lose. Would you turn yourself in? If you could get away with it? Would you be tempted?
All my friends unequivocally said yes, they’d turn themselves in. But I wasn’t so sure. The drive for self-preservation is a strong one, and it’s hard to say what anyone would do once confronted with the circumstances. And so I wrote this to explore it some, to pose the question.
Was Toni wrong to do what she did? Are there absolutes?
What would you do?

Richard Grayson: “Branch Libraries of Southeastern Brooklyn,” published in Fiction Warehouse.
Like many of the stories I’ve written over the past 30 years, this one is autobiographical. Although sometimes it seems as if half the writers in the country now live in Brooklyn, the part of the borough where I grew up was in some ways closer to Manhattan, Kansas, than the Manhattan across the East River. It’s a frankly nostalgic story in which I’m attempting to describe how libraries have influenced the narrator as a writer and a would-be adult. I used the different branch libraries as a framing device because I have a hard time writing linear fiction.

Trebor Healey “The Mercy Seat,” published in Blithe House Quarterly.
Things had been going badly wrong, and out of the frustration, anger and despair, I sat down to rant on paper, and it grew into something else-a door opened to all the chaos, the crap, the hideous mess of life. I started out in a fury but ended up with a broken heart. Along the way, I ranted and raved, thought twice, admitted it hurts, felt the hopelessness, remembered love is the answer. Tragic. Comic. Then I laughed until I cried, organized my thoughts, and wrote the damn pain into a love story.

Dave Housley: “Ryan Seacrest Is Famous,” published in Barrelhouse.
This story surprised me a little bit. I had this idea about a guy who is being driven crazy by the fact that Ryan Seacrest is famous and he isn’t. This may have something to do with my deep-rooted feeling that I should have been a Beastie Boy, despite the fact that I can’t rap and have no musical talent and grew up listening to hair metal in central Pennsylvania. I think men in their thirties, or at least a lot of the ones I know, have a tough time coming to grips with the fact that their lives are more or less settled, and they generally have NOT become rock stars or power forwards or famous gonzo authors. There’s an aha moment that really kind of sucks and you either get past that, as most do, or it drives you crazy, which is what’s happening to this guy. I hope the story gets at that a little bit, but does it in a funny, offbeat kind of way. After all, it’s really not that bad to not be Ryan Seacrest.

Joan Shaddox Isom: “Remade Tobacco,” published in Eclectica Magazine.
I live in NE Oklahoma, the end of the infamous “Trail of Tears,” (referring to the historical Cherokee removal from the southeastern part of the country.) While working as a writer-in-residence in Oklahoma schools, some Native American students often talked to me about conflicts, both cultural and religious/spiritual. I began thinking about how some of these young people were caught within two or more forces: one, their elders; two, their parents, often practical people just trying to make a living, and three, school and peer groups. Throw in a father emotionally damaged from a war, and you have a complicated household through which my protagonist must navigate. The reader may decide whether she is coping, or whether she has fallen into the dysfunctional climate around her.

Corey Mesler: “Madam Sabat’s Grave”, published in Pindeldyboz.
“Madam Sabat’s Grave” is a piece from my forthcoming, crazy-quilt novel, We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon. As such, its genesis is tied deeply to the 2-year genesis of the whole. The novel-and the story-stem from my belief that the 1960s entered my bloodstream like sickle cell anemia, setting up its gypsy camp, leaving me a hippie for life. That, coupled with my cockeyed, anti-research method of employing history, fashioned the mad impulses behind these tales.

Chika Unigwe: “Dreams,” published in Eclectica Magazine.
Ms. Unigwe is currently on travel and was not able to contribute.

Please take the time to read these fine stories, and then vote for your favorite here.

By Kirsten Menger-Anderson

I’ve been a fan of the expat writer since my sophomore year of high school, when I read Nancy Milford’s Zelda and fell in love with the Fitzgeralds. Gertrude Stein’s salon intrigued me, as did the friendship Fitzgerald and Hemingway formed while abroad-two such talented writers in the same place and time (though it was during that time that Fitzgerald informed his editor, Maxwell Perkins, about a relatively unknown young writer he’d befriended, a fact that may have played a role in Hemingway’s future success). For many years, when confronted with the question “If you could go back in time…” I simply answered, “1920s, Paris.”

Around the time I graduated from college, rumor held that Prague was the “Paris” of a thriving literary scene. I considered moving there in search of the place I’d idealized for so long. Instead I moved to New York City and scraped by on a retail salary while I pursued a career in film and television.

Ten years of video and, later, internet-related jobs passed before I began to question the value of the long work hours and seriously considered moving abroad again. Another three years slipped by before I finished my Masters’ in English and creative writing at San Francisco State, and the plans my husband and I discussed at last unfolded. Finding a literary scene played no part in the decision to move to Barcelona-a city we’d fallen in love with on an earlier visit-though I had, at last, identified myself as a writer.

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The shortlist for the 2005 IMPAC Dublin Awards has been announced. The finalists are:

• Gardening at Night by Diane Awerbuck

• The Half Brother by Lars Saabye Christensen
• The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut
• Elle by Douglas Glover
• Phantom Pain by Arnon Grunberg
• The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard
• Willenbrock by Christoph Hein
• Deafening by Frances Itani
• The Known World by Edward P. Jones
• The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

There are so many literary prizes around it’s hard to get excited about any of them, but what I like about the IMPAC is that the nominations are made by librarians from around the world and that the lists tend to be very eclectic. Last year’s winner was the Moroccan Tahar Ben Jelloun, for This Blinding Absence of Light (not that you could tell by reading the Times or anything.)

Related post: Mabrouk, Tahar.

Those of you in New York might like to check out Opium Magazine‘s fourth anniversary gala, featuring:

Pia Ehrhardt
Sue Henderson
Angela Himsel
Heather Kelley
Christopher Hickman
Pasha Malla
Todd Zuniga
and Mike Sacks

The reading will take place at the 92nd Street Y’s Steinhardt Building tonight at 7:30 pm. ($12 advance, $15 at the door.) Go and tell us how it went!

When Salman Rushdie visits Bozeman, Montana, this is how the local rag, the Billings Gazette reports about it: India Native Says Great Literature Changes World. Because, in case you missed it, the author’s claim to fame is that he was born in India. Wow. Did you know that Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in Colombia? Wild, I know.

Nilanjana S. Roy examines the merits of book lists.

This used to be disorienting, as though half the history of reading encoded in my memory before (and after) Rushdie had been deleted from the official record. Then last week, literary journalist and author Jerry Pinto gave a talk in Bombay on his personal selection of the 25 best books written in English.

It takes in about a century of Indian writing, it’s nicely contentious and very individual, it can be used as it stands as a rough guide for the neophyte, and it serves as the foundation for a great party game.

MOTEV (mother of TEV, for those of you not keeping up) gives her opinion about a handful of recent reads–Enduring Love, Amsterdam, Atonement, Transit of Venus, and “that Dog at Midnight book”.

Poet and fiction writer Naomi Shihab Nye has a new book coming out, a young adult novel called Going, Going and the Ann Arbor News has a brief profile.

Roy Kesey’s short story “Asuncion,” which appears in McSweeney’s No. 15, had inspired Sean Carman to write a manifesto. Will you join the revolution?

“For anyone who is unfamiliar with Rigoberto Gonzalez, it wouldn’t take many pages of reading Crossing Vines, his first novel, to suspect that his prior book was one of poetry, not prose,” Olivas says. “Every paragraph, each sentence possesses the clarity and music of poetry even in recounting the often harsh and always difficult lives of a crew of grape pickers. In a series of vignettes focusing on different characters, Gonzalez allows us into the lives and painful pasts of these workers, all the while steering clear of the melodramatic and cliche when it would be easy to fall into such traps. This is a beautifully rendered, powerful first novel.”

Daniel A. Olivas is the author of several books including most recently Devil Talk: Stories. His stories, essays and poems have appeared in many publications including the Los Angeles Times, The MacGuffin, Exquisite Corpse, THEMA, The Pacific Review, Red River Review and Web del Sol. His first children’s book, Benjamin and the Word, will be published this spring by the University of Houston’s Arte Publico Press.

If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.