The first time she camped out

she rewrote the game

so that one person did both

the hiding and the seeking,

and said that moons ago

was not a measure of time

but of distance. The second

time she decided

that the intervals on her sheet music

ought to measure both. She played school

with her stuffed frogs

and hid the attendance sheets

with her mother’s record albums.

Her father’s face filled more

of the windshield every time

he parked the truck, and she said

that he was gaining—not

weight, but others, like droplets

on a windowpane. In his world

people filed extensions

like they filed their nails, and coffee

cooled more quickly with each passing

midnight. Then—somewhere 

in this world I bet you

there’s a deaf man who hears

voices in his mind and thinks his name

is you. In her novel each week

has a pair of Tuesdays, and irony

is discussed in chemistry lab

and nutrition class.

She carried a purple flashlight

and declared that she saw the world

in a different shade. Her line

of vision would be clearer

if her eyelids weren’t in the way.

Sara Jean Lane is a musician and composer and currently attends Judson College, where she studies English, music, and mathematics. Her work has recently appeared in Otoliths and Blinders Journal.

Q&A

Q: What can you tell us about this poem?

A: This is one of several poems focused on an unnamed "she" who interprets our world through the words we use to describe it. I do not know who she is, and I do not know if I ever will.

Cut-off shorts, cowboy boots, pigtails, and halter top, 

age sixty, she had the sexed-up prance of a flirt who walked

into a rally tent circle one summer and never left.

So convincing was her proclamation of flesh-on-flesh satiety

that punks did not turn away even after the eureka 

it could yield no child-bearing, their virgin impulse to stare.

The second time she walked in for an interview, she did not bring a résumé.

To sell it she had to be it.

She became the ding they could not ignore.

The first interview, she’d naively misspoken, saying showroom tours

of dingers polished like horsed-up muscle cars 

would be like helping her youngest son decide between two pretty girls

or waitressing pancakes, easy, selling the irresistible things.

When the punk-boss thanked her “ma’am”

she understood this showroom did not sell dingers,

rather the promise a dinger will turn the buyer ne'er-do-well and youthful.

The second time she walked in for an interview and

her first day on the job and her second and so forth

she did what the dinger does — made them forget about mothers,

showed them go-go comes in all ages.

Steven Ray Smith's poetry has appeared in The Yale Review, Southwest Review, The Kenyon Review, Slice, Pembroke Magazine, Grain, Puerto del Sol and others. He is president of a culinary college and lives in Austin with his wife and children.

Q&A

Q: What can you tell us about this poem?

A: The poem "Dinger" attempts to confront the authority of youth culture in America. The main character asserts her sexuality as a way of being included in a workforce run by younger adults, even as she suppresses sharing her broader life experience.

Maria, like all the girls, had yesterday painted herself with sun-block stars and moons. Her skin had browned as she played on the beach, leaving behind a galaxy. She took Jamie now, away from the beach and all of the parents, across the road, and into the wooded area the other side. “Come on. I want to show you something,” she said. She was fifteen, he was fourteen. He watched the stars ripple on her sun-kissed skin and felt like a space explorer.

It made him uncomfortable.

“Are you sure it’s okay to leave the beach?” he asked.

“We won’t go far. It’s just the other side of that mound.”

And on the other side of the mound, sure enough, she stopped. With her toe – she was barefoot – she pointed at a small plant, a spine-like tendril ribbed by scores of tiny eye-shaped leaves. “Look!” she said, and she stroked the plant with her foot. In response, the leaves pulled themselves together and the whole plant curled in upon itself. “Isn’t that awesome?”

Jamie found another tendril and copied Maria with the same results. “Why do you think it does it?” he asked.

“It’s happy. Like a purring cat.”

Jamie disagreed. “Hmm. I guess it’s protecting itself.”

Maria smiled, and stepped in close to Jamie, so her feet touched his. Slowly, maintaining eye contact, in complete control, she lifted her finger in the air and ran it down the center of his face, from his forehead, down his nose, over his lips, to his chin. Then she stepped back and laughed. “Come on,” she said again. “I want to show you something else.”

She disappeared into the woods. Jamie, reluctantly, followed. “I think we should go soon,” he shouted after her.

“It’s not far,” she shouted back . She was already scrambling up a bank, so steep she needed to use her hands as well as her feet. “It’s at the top of this hill.”

Jamie followed her, but more slowly, more carefully. He didn’t want to fall. He took his time testing exposed roots for hand and footholds, and stopped more than once to look down and imagine tumbling all the way to the bottom. It took him about ten minutes to climb to the top, which was an exposed bank of baked earth, high above everything else. Maria was already lying on the chocolate red ground, stripped to her bikini.

“Long time no see!” she called. She waited for Jamie to lie down beside her, but he didn’t. He stayed standing. Looking at the view, which felt very far from everything.

“You can see everyone from here,” Maria told him, and after a while he could. The beach was not directly behind them, as he’d have thought, but some way over to the left. On their way here they must have turned around some without his realizing. His parents were lying on towels; his mum with a magazine on her face and his dad with a bottle of beer between his legs, the same pose they’d maintained every single day since arriving here. Maria’s parents were in the water, embracing. More than once they’d said this holiday felt like a second honeymoon, with added guests. The other kids and some of the other parents were playing football on the sea’s edge. They would be screaming and shouting, but Jamie couldn’t hear anything from here. “We can see them,” said Maria, “but they can’t see us.”

“I think we should go back,” said Jamie. “They’ll be worried.”

“They don’t look worried,” said Maria. It was true, they didn’t.

“I’m going,” Jamie said, and he started heading back. He knew Maria wouldn’t follow, and he didn’t care. Much. However, he had to turn around to make the descent down, and as he did he saw her taking off the top of her bikini. Revealing her naked breasts to the sun and the sky. Jamie, shocked, missed his toehold and slid a foot down the hill. Had he seen anything? He wasn’t sure, but her silhouette was burned into the back of his retinas. Sitting up, one leg bent, the other stretched, her hand in the air with the bikini top dangling from it, a hint of her breast maybe visible if he’d looked hard enough. Jesus. He clambered the rest of the way down the hill and back on to the beach as quickly as he dared, and took his place between his mum and his dad and tried to pretend everything was normal.

Hours passed, and Maria didn’t come back. Jamie kept returning to that image of her, half naked lying on the rocks. The sun painting over the constellations she’d left there the day before. And her stepping up to him too, stroking his face, her finger touching briefly on his lips. His body responded to the thoughts of her, and he went into the water so his parents wouldn’t suspect. Jamie, fourteen years old and never been with a girl. Never even been kissed. He’d told his friends he would probably kiss somebody on this holiday, but they’d laughed at him. You! Dude, just no. Just no.

Maria. He’d noticed her straight away, of course. The daughter of his parents’ friends. She was beautiful. And wild, he could tell that straight away. The first evening she’d disappeared from the table they all ate at for ten minutes, and came back smelling of cigarettes. The second day she’d commandeered Jamie, told him to stand in the water with his legs open for two hours so she could swim through them. The third day he hadn’t seen her at all, and was too shy to ask her parents if she was ok. She’d hung out with the girls instead, without telling him. And today, this. He kept looking to the hills, trying to see her on the exposed bank. She was invisible, but he knew that she could probably see him. See him looking.

In the water, like any fourteen-year-old boy, he started to touch himself, but the sound of a crashing wave scared him, convinced him someone would see what he was doing, so he stopped. He tried to think unsexy thoughts, but his mind kept returning to Maria, wearing nothing but flimsy bikini bottoms, stars all over her skin.

At lunchtime, someone asked if anyone had seen her. “I think I might know where she is,” said Jamie.

“Would you be a dear?” asked her mother. “Go fetch her. She needs to eat something.”

Jamie nodded, but her mother had already looked away, assuming he’d be a dear without needing to hear it from him. No one else, for that matter, was paying him much attention, and when he slipped away he doubted they even noticed him leave.

He was afraid he’d have forgotten the way, but he needn’t have worried. He stopped for a second behind the mound to tease the cowering plants, and admired the speed with which they hid themselves. Maybe there was something of a purring cat in them after all.

He climbed up the hill in half the time it had taken him before, but when the trees stopped and the grass wisped away and it turned into chocolate brown dirt, he hesitated. How would she feel about him walking in on her? Would she call him a creep and tell him to bog off? Or … maybe … she might ask him to lie beside her and make constellations across her back. She might be shocked at first, and reach to cover herself with her arms, then she would see it was him, and her face would unfold into a smile and her arms would fall by her side. She might ask him to kiss her there, on the rocks, under the sun.

He almost gave up and ran away then, to pretend to her parents he couldn’t find her. But goshdarn it, Jamie Taylor, not today! Be the dude!

He flew up the last ten yards, and of course the rock was empty. She was gone. He walked into the middle, where she wasn’t, and she didn’t creep up behind him and put her hands over his eyes and say Guess who! For a second he was lost, confused, but then he looked out to the beach and saw her there, lunching with everybody else. He must have missed her going down while he was going up.

He watched them preparing to eat, and decided not to join them this time. Instead, he stripped off his t-shirt and stepped out of his trunks and lied down on the rock. Completely, completely free, to wait until she maybe came back.

Christopher James lives, works, rides unicorns, fights pirates, saves planets and writes in Jakarta, Indonesia. Other stories have been published online and in print with Tin House, McSweeney’s, The Times, Smokelong and other places.

Q&A

Q: What surprised you most during the process of composing and revising this piece?

A: This story began with the suntan stars and the shrinking plant, both of which suggested a character – Jamie – who would go on a journey and shrug off his shyness at the end, so everything that Jamie did felt kind of inevitable, to me. The character of Maria, on the other hand, was constantly surprising. To me, anyway. I enjoyed writing her a lot.

Q: What’s the best writing advice you’ve received? Did you follow it? Why, or why not?

A: I’m a member of Zoetrope, and have been lucky enough to receive advice from many great writers and editors who’ve gone on to wonderful things. One piece of advice which springs to mind, that helped me spot something missing in my own writing, came from Mark Budman, the editor of Vestal. He said that most good stories are a quest. Protagonists search for treasure, for love, for peace. And I guess if they’re lucky they find it.

Before Mark spelled that out to me, my stories were mostly things happening to people – the end. They still often are, unfortunately! But now I see it in so many of the best stories I read – in the first few lines or pages the writer tells me what the hero wants, and the rest of the story is the unfolding of either achieving that dream or not. It’s satisfying to be allowed on that adventure with them.

Q: What three to five authors and/or books have inspired your journey as a writer?

A: I think everything by Roald Dahl, as a kid, inspired me to want to be a writer. Then 100 Years of Solitude nailed that in. More recently, I love Etgar Keret’s short, hilarious, profound stories – Guava is a favourite, and I tend to have a new favorite writer every few months. At the moment I’m in love with Amelia Gray, and am reading everything I can find by her.

Q: Describe your writing space for us. Are you someone who finds the muse in a public space such as a café, or in a cave of one’s own?

A: Anywhere will do, so long as there’s coffee or whiskey nearby.

The Face of Hunger

by Jason Peck

followed by Q&A

My daughter sold hunger. That was her on the billboards, leaflets and pamphlets for every campaign to end childhood famine, her maudlin features laminated and glossy on the photo inserts, her black-and-white eyes pleading by roadsides, the stare straight to your gut. People cowered and wrote checks to the needy like petty thieves with a sudden conscience. The money was hers all along.

At seven, she was America’s best hunger model. The top of her game since Day One, when I took her to auditions after my layoff, the mortgage long past due. She showed a panel of agents what hungry children should look like, and beat out the girls who actually hadn’t eaten.

One judge said that she simultaneously represented humanity’s hope and despair, while another slipped us grocery money. Those eyes, she said, reflect the sadness of the world.

My meal ticket at last. I pulled her from school and we toured the Rust Belt in cars that got more expensive with time. We hit tourist spots on the way to jobs, ate pancakes at roadside diners. We counted cows through backwoods, dipped our hands in all of the Great Lakes. Father and daughter – I remember her happy then.

Offers came fast. Charities hired us and watched their numbers quadruple. Fan mail arrived from all corners of the country. She spotted a Deep South campaign that shattered records. Her television ad with United Way broke hearts in the Midwest. The Food Bank asked for assistance – pro bono. Think of the children, they pleaded.

But what about mine? I retorted. And I held until they paid.

Charities don’t want kids from war-torn Sierra Leone, with stick legs and bloated bellies, posture bent and desperate mouths breathing heavy. No way our children get the Third World look. We’re scared by eyes of the true hungry – hollow, cracked and red like blood through a broken mirror. My girl made them imagine their own children. They saw the face battered by a world on the underside of their own.

Soon, we retired from touring. I built a basement studio and charities came to us. We moved to the house I’d wanted with an outdoor pool, I wired TVs to every room. I bragged to friends I’d avoided during my unemployment. Good fortune was mine at last.

Despite everything, I watched her sadness grow. This confused me, for our Christmas presents grew in number, until I stacked them under the tree like pyramids. Nothing like that in our food stamp days, I reminded her. Instead she watched her own hunger ads, recited the grave tones of the voiceovers. She said she needed practice. Maybe if she were more affecting, more moving, then she’d raise enough to end hunger.

End it? I asked. Shit. Hunger’s been good to us.

She didn’t stop. I disconnected the TVs. She called the hungry girls from her shoots. I pulled the cords. One year she asked us to surrender our presents to poor children. I refused.

Her eyes grew more affecting, the photo shoots improved. Only one take, and board chiefs wept. She reached professionalism without effort – the poise of a seasoned pro. She no longer needed handicaps like the dirt smudge under her eye, like a pinch of product to make hair look unwashed.

She couldn’t lose a job if she wanted. But it ended, of course. Careers happen like that – winning streaks that inevitably expire.

Soon after graduating high school, she took our last touring car, unused since her modeling days, and left for good. Ten years gone. My consulting business flopped, and I lost the house after all. A magazine called once, wondering: What happened to the girl from a thousand billboards? But my daughter left no number. All I have are opportunities she’s squandered.

Hunger was just the beginning. This could have been her in this pamphlet, hawking the teenage pregnancy circuit. This TV spot – her as a high school dropout perhaps, the old hunger sadness instead conveyed as regret for a lost education. I could even see her playing the war widow – arms full of children, melancholy eyes turned toward the front door for a hopeless homecoming.

A single mother – she could work the hunger circuit again.

A shame she’s gone. The careers we could have had.

Jason Peck’s fiction has either been published or is forthcoming in Smokelong Quarterly, Cheat River Review and Pretty Owl Poetry. He also serves on the editorial board for After Happy Hour Review, which recently celebrated its third issue.

Q&A

Q: What surprised you most during the process of composing and revising this piece?

A: I was shocked at how incomplete the initial drafts were. Out of all the stories I’ve ever written down for later, I was sure this one was ready to go with a few tweaks – I thought the focus was there. But things were missing; I needed more background, more resolution, more characters. I needed more and more while still keeping it shorter than 1,000 words. Finishing this story took way, way longer than I expected.”

Q: What’s the best writing advice you’ve received? Did you follow it? Why, or why not?

A: Avoid the indirect. I used to be a newspaper reporter and had it drilled into me like boot camp. Of course, I broke this rule a few times in the above story, but keep it to a minimum. There’s no time for the passive voice.

Q: What three to five authors and/or books have inspired your journey as a writer?

A: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Raymond Chandler, Alan Moore, Raymond Carver. Carver for me was the best, the last great American author. I hope I can live long enough to one day write a story that moves people as much as a story like “Errand” moves me.

Q: Describe your writing space for us. Are you someone who finds the muse in a public space such as a café, or in a cave of one’s own?

A: The muse can be found anywhere. But to actually finish a piece and revise it – that takes concentration I can’t maintain in public. No matter where the first draft starts, I can guarantee you the last draft was written in my apartment in as much solitude as I could arrange.

A day before solstice, longest night, nadir. The

earth turns. I am stuck, stopped, stone. We live 

in a world of our mind’s making, spurred, taunted,

blinded, enlightened by it. To change the world, 

change the mind. The mind is as hard to move as 

a stone, a tree, a river. Small failures of a day weigh 

like years. For all the joy, pleasure in my life, it’s 

shaded, muted at the moment. We add a mirror to 

the house, hang it on one of the doors; there’s a 

new plane, new dimension, dark gleam in which 

our light, our shadow shine darkly. Outside, a 

foot of snow, the season’s first. The snow-covered 

roof of the house across the street is almost 

indistinguishable from the sky; perhaps its white 

is darker than snow, less radiant. This morning

the mirror reveals two figures, resentment and 

guilt – sisters, lovers, incestuous twins – embracing

entwining parting kissing pulling apart or trying not 

to be pulled apart from each other, like Paolo and 

Francesca. Outside, a white gull’s wings in high 

branches of a gingko break snow’s aftermath of 

stillness, wind chimes sway wildly, wind and flight 

mirror each other. A taxi stops, someone gets out, a

man or woman in an orange jacket trudging up 

Tonawanda Street. If it weren’t for the dogs, I could 

stay here: the insistent dogs of morning, evening, 

dogs stubborn as the stone core of my heart.

Sandra Kohler’s third collection of poems, Improbable Music, appeared in May 2011 from Word Press. Her second collection, The Ceremonies of Longing, winner of the 2002 AWP Award Series in Poetry, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in November 2003. An earlier volume, The Country of Women, was published in 1995 by Calyx Books. Her poems have appeared over the past thirty-five years in journals including Prairie Schooner, The New Republic, Beloit Poetry Journal, APR, Slant, Tar River Poetry, and The Colorado Review. 

 “Mirror” is one of a group of poems Kohler recently wrote using a variant on Dante’s terza rima, poems that were influenced by a reading of Dante’s Commedia.

Each spring I knew what to look for

nights stretched sideways curved around hours

into dawn’s bright mouth. What I did

at night made me hate the sun, when I was

the only one awake the floodplain oiled with eels.

Others measured banks in the morning,

what impressions they left before they sank

to sleep in the river or traveled to the sea.

It was me, alone, watching animals close over terrain

like an curtain, a song that ended at first light.

I went out, sleepless, passed the closed eyes

of unlit windows, a silver pail swing to catch the moon in.

The windows were my own with whatever else

at rest behind them. The grasses yielded.

In just enough water to move, the eels knotted together

to overcome land. At my feet, they threw the earth

underneath, a single strain away from my grasp.

The sky pressed into their skin, the fins, the scales

near-hidden. No constellation was ever as well written

as on the back of that fish. The bucket heavied.

I wondered how long it would take before they tangled,

until each could not come away from each, until

my hand could be caught at the end of my reach

amongst them, where we were both the meat

on the edge of opening. Even now when they don’t run here

anymore, when the dark is empty of curves and pails

are overturned, I am caught, awake at dawn

with what’s missing: a black untangled, a lightness

unwanted, a search that appears everywhere. Even in shadows,

my rough hands seek them out, my palms heavy with scales.

Meg Reynolds is a teacher and poet living in Winooski, VT. She holds her BA in English and Arts and Visual Culture from Bates College and her MFA in poetry from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine. Her work has been published in Est, The Salon, Prelude, and is forthcoming from Prime Number Magazine and Wild Age Press. She teaches at Centerpoint School in Winooski, VT and is the co-director of writinginsideVT, an organization that offers supportive writing instruction at the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in Burlington, VT.

Q&A

Q: What can you tell us about this poem?

A: This piece was inspired by multiple conversations with older generations about diminishing ecosystems and the human practices that go with them. In this poem, I was thinking of harvesting eels, the sensory qualities of it, and the sensory experiences that become endangered or go extinct as our world changes.

The Real Hell

is you get through it

distracted by a leaking roof,

missing keys, moles

roaming your yard

the real hell is being

lifted by Beethoven’s

sixth, Monet’s sunrises,

lilies flashing crimson

the following spring

all lie next to the place

searing your heart

a burn you want to feel

forever

to hold the grief close

to savor its scent

to swallow its

memories

but they blur and

fade until one day

you wake as cool

dawn kisses

your face

and forget

for just a

moment

Claire Scott is an award-winning poet who has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize (2013 and 2014). She was also a semi-finalist for both the 2014 Pangaea Prize and the 2014 Atlantis Award. Claire is the Grand Prize winner of the White Pine Writing Contest for poetry. Her first book of poetry, Waiting to be Called, was recently published by IF SF Publishing.

Q&A

Q: What can you tell us about this poem?

A: I have been struck at the way grief changes over time. There is a sense of loss as memories fade and life resumes its petty pace. The second loss is almost as painful as the initial loss. It feels like a betrayal.

The men were drunk that night, the three of them. One after another, they splashed the hundred-dollar cognac from their glasses into the fire to see what would happen, and the flames exploded in cool blue vapor. The three women were not as drunk, and they exclaimed each time the liquid inflamed the fire, and they worried the fire would spread to the stacked firewood. They were all gathered around the outdoor fireplace and really, the rocks of the chimney seemed to catch fire as the liquor sprayed out of the glasses. While the women waited for a disaster, the flames died down and it was dark again.

The moon was not that bright, but it illuminated the hills beyond the landscaped patio. Earlier the men had set up the telescope and pointed it at the three-quarter moon rising in the violet sky. That was after they used it to focus on the next house over, which they estimated was about a mile away. They could almost look inside at the people behind the illuminated windows, see what they were up to, and that excited them, to wonder about the secrets happening in the house beyond the fields of tall yellow grass and wicked bent oak trees.

At first, the men were looking for mountain lions and bobcats. They wanted to see wild game. They didn’t find the big cats but saw, through the large round glass, antlers of a buck moving above the tall grass and closer, the velvet brown bodies of his three doe gracefully feeding in the dusky moonlight. Bored with looking through the scope, and because nothing was happening, they decided to go inside and check the score of the ball game. They had seen the moon, up close, the craters like yellow white dimes and quarters, the valleys like purple veins and blotchy skin but they did not see a mountain lion.

Inside, in the kitchen, they found the women standing around a large tray of meat on the island, two long muscles, each more than twenty inches long and as thick as a young man’s calf, at one end, tapered to a thin, finger size. It was meat from a cow, dark red, kosher-salted and rubbed, prepared for the barbecue dinner. The women wondered if the salt was too much. Didn’t it dry out the meat? Won’t the meat be too salty? The men stood apart from the tray of muscles, regarding the darkened and dried crust on the raw meat.

In the living room, the men found the room and its smells of appetizers too confining, and the cold blue glare of the television screen too modern for their wilderness mood. So after a moment of pondering the football game’s score, and then back to the kitchen, to take beer from the double-door Thermador, they walked outside again, single file, holding long-necked bottles until they could breathe in the wide mountain air and smell the darkening ridge, rough with leafless trees. They gathered around the telescope, three old men in shorts, their bellies round and their legs skinny, large caricatures of small boys.

They were restless and looked in turn through the muzzle of the telescope. The youngest of them spotted movement away from the group of grazing does, a subtle parting of the long yellow grasses almost too fluid to discern, and he whispered to the others to look into the scope, that he’d seen a lion, or maybe a bobcat. But before they could respond, the antlered buck and the does fled, jumping and leaping through the grass, and the cat sprang up at the neck of the smallest one. The others ran off without it. The men looked from the scope to the hillside and watched until the grass quieted, thinking of blood, and meat, and women.

The six of them sat around the long dining table, drinking red wine from flat-bottomed glass decanters and spearing bites of the tenderloin, bloody and barbecued, and talking about the game, the lion and the deer. The men were unsettled, shifting in their seats. Moving to the windows, looking out, they wanted to walk outside after dinner; the house confined them and made them sleepy.

Now they sat outside in the cobalt darkness in cushioned redwood chairs pouring shots of small batch Kentucky bourbon and smoking Cubans, the ashy ends glowing red. They sat in long silences peppered with talk about mountain lions, bobcats, deer and the wild boars that had ruined the landscaping, and death in nature, until refueled. They decided to look again at the neighboring house. The telescope focused on the distant illuminated windows and homed in on the people inside, a woman and a man. They watched, taking turns at the scope as the couple disrobed.

The moon had descended behind a fog bank on the horizon; the lights in the neighboring house blinked off. The men, silent and bent, stood tall to walk inside to find the women.

Anne B Wright has always had print and words in her blood since she grew up working for her family's weekly newspaper. She's presently a writer and artist living on the cliffs of the Pacific Ocean and has had short stories published in various journals, including Curly Red Stories, Negative Capability Press, and KYSO Flash. She's a devotee of Italian and visiting Italy, and of her two cats.

Q&A

Q: What surprised you most during the process of composing and revising this piece?

A: The wild-ness of the mountains and tall grass, and the natures of the lion and deer took on lives of their own, as the men, who were domesticated animals, responded in a way I had not anticipated when I began writing this story. It started with one vision, of the men becoming wild.

Q: What’s the best writing advice you’ve received? Did you follow it? Why, or why not?

A: It’s important to set a pattern, a habit of writing daily, and early, at least for a couple of hours and preferably more. That’s the only way I can get into the heads of my characters, when it becomes the big part of my consciousness. I like to think about my stories as I go to sleep, then my mind spends the night arranging and creating so I’m ready for the next day’s writing. This is my process based on a variety of advice, especially from author/teacher Janis Cooke Newman, who influenced my writing a great deal. For me, it’s what works.

Q: What three to five authors and/or books have inspired your journey as a writer?

A: To name just a few is difficult because I have always been a voracious reader:

Stephen King, On Writing;

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird;

Mary Karr, Liar’s Club;

Alice Munro, all her books, but if I had to pick one – Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories;

Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteredge;

and Susan Steinberg, Hydroplane.

Q: Describe your writing space for us. Are you someone who finds the muse in a public space such as a café, or in a cave of one’s own?

A: I like to write in my upstairs office with views of the wind-beaten cypress trees and fog, at a cluttered desk filled with books and papers and my pencil collection. Not that I write longhand – I have a computer but edit in pencil. Sometimes I like to put music on to set a mood that suits my story’s setting and characters. Writing in a public place does not appeal to me; I feel vulnerable because I get so lost in what I’m doing.