Welcome Siobhan Fallon, Author of You Know When the Men Are Gone

She turned to descend the stair, her heart in tumult. Had she better keep her distance and question him, her husband? Should she run up to him, take his hands, kiss him now?

…And she, for a long time, sat deathly still in wonderment–for sometimes as she gazed she found him–yes, clearly–like her husband, but sometimes blood and rags were all she saw.
–Penelope upon recognizing Odysseus, The Odyssey

The quote above is the epigram to Siobhan Fallon’s amazing collection of short stories, You Know When the Men Are Gone, and this vision of Penelope, hesitating but desperate to rediscover the man – her husband – behind the clothes of a warrior, prepares the reader perfectly for the kinds of experiences the characters in her book endure. So often, we hear of military life, whether in war or in deployment, from the perspective of the soldiers. Siobhan Fallon gives us a taste of those stories and more, taking us into the hearts and minds of the families left behind. Because, nothing we do in life affects us in isolation.

I’m honored to host Siobhan Fallon here to talk about her book, life, and writing. As a bonus and a gift, she has donated a copy of her book (recently released in paperback!) for one lucky reader. At the end of her interview, drop your name in the comments. The winner will be drawn on Tuesday, January 31st, at noon.

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CC: In two of my favorite stories, “The Last Stand” and “The Gold Star”, Specialist Kit Murphy makes a powerful impact. Through his experience and his interactions with the other characters, readers are given a profound, heartfelt, and panoramic view into the minds of a soldier, a wife left behind, and a wife widowed. Was there a specific character or story that impressed you the most while you were writing this book?

SF: I have to admit that I have some favorites, though it is hard to narrow it down to only one. I feel a certain affinity for Meg, of the title story, “You Know When the Men Are Gone.” She is my closest doppelganger, and I often found myself thinking her thoughts during my husband’s deployments (like staring at a grocery store’s packaged meat, the exposed bone and blood held together in saran wrap, and thinking of a soldier’s wounds). And I too I have a soft spot for Kit Murphy. I’d say that I worked on his story, “The Last Stand,” longer and harder than any other. Even after it was published in Salamander Magazine, I felt compelled to keep rewriting it, to infuse it with as much genuine experience as possible. Kit is the penultimate soldier in my eyes, the sort I unfortunately saw an awful lot of during my husband’s company command at Fort Hood, a young man just out of teenage-hood trying to do what he thinks is right, often unable to articulate how he feels, left wounded and untethered in some way when he returns from his deployment.

The final story, “Gold Star,” also gets me every time I read it. That story is my worst nightmare, the worst nightmare of every military spouse with a deployed soldier, but I also like to think that there is an element of hope and healing in the ending, when Josie and Kit are able to offer each other a moment of understanding.

CC: In this post on Quivering Pen, you make a excellent argument for the short story as the structure best fit for revealing the lives of the characters in your book, saying “the surge of electricity of a [short story’s] beginning, the disorientation dealt to readers as they suddenly find themselves with a new cast of characters, a new setting, and a new dilemma. . . . [mirrors] the military life.” Was it easy to accept that this book would be a collection of stories? Or did you struggle in the beginning to mold it into a novel?

SF: The stories came to me as just that: stories. When I started writing them, I wasn’t even sure if I would have a collection that would fit together cohesively. I wrote the title story first, about Meg listening to the seemingly glamorous life of Natalya. I had an image of a woman pressing her ear against her wall, desperately eavesdropping on her neighbor as a way to keep from worrying about her own deployed husband. The next story that came to me, “Camp Liberty,” had almost nothing in common with the first. “Camp Liberty” is about Moge, a US Army sergeant in Iraq who forms a tricky friendship with his female Iraqi interpreter. For that story, I had two themes in mind. One, I was struck with the way soldiers, even soldiers who were trying to get out of the Army, talked about their wartime exploits as if they were the most incredible and vivid adventures of their lives. Two, I wanted to write about the local national interpreters who are intrinsic to the lives of our troops, and whose stories often go untold.

Initially I had played around with the idea of writing stories all set in the housing complex where Meg lives and listens against the wall, but so often you just can’t write the things you want to write. Other things pop into your mind and seize your imagination, an overheard conversation at the mall, broken kid toys strewn across a lawn, a soldier crossing the street on crutches. People keep asking me why I didn’t writer certain stories, like a story from a female soldier’s point of view, or from the parents of a deployed soldier. All I can say is that the stories in the collection are the ones that filled me up, had me awake at night thinking about the sound of a character’s voice or his choice of childhood friends, these were the stories that excited me as a writer, these were the characters whose stories I wanted most to know.

CC: How has the publication of your book changed your experience as a writer, and/or your experience as a military wife?

SF: As a writer, there is something magical about having your words finally filling up the pages of a book and seeing that book on your shelf. I finished my MFA in 2000 (which is when I started to seriously write and submit my work). I’ve had plenty of rejections, most of the stories in YKWTMAG have been rejected by literary magazines, not to mention my often rejected story collection/MFA thesis and the two novel drafts taking up space in my home office. So having my book published is, of course, awesome, and makes the decade plus of dashed hopes worth it. But it also doesn’t get any easier. When you are slaving away, desperately hoping someone will say “yes” to your work, you imagine that once you are in a bookstore, you will only hear “yes” from then on. Not true. I finished a new story a couple of months ago and sent it off to my literary agent with the rarely felt euphoria of having written something great. But everyone he has shopped it around to turned it down. Then I was asked to write an essay for NPR’s Morning Edition. It took seven or eight ideas, pitched over a couple of weeks, before the producer found something she liked enough to put on the air. So there are still plenty of rejections. If anything, I feel like I have to work harder now, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

How has my book changed my experience as a military spouse… wow, that’s a tricky question. When I talk to civilian readers, I have to be careful that I don’t speak with too much authority. I am a fiction writer, my stories are not fact, and the things that occur in my book don’t happen to every military family in America. Those stories are from a very specific point of view, about life on a military base that had an extremely high deployment rate, during the height of the US involvement in the Middle East.

When I speak with military readers, I also walk a fine line. Sometimes mil spouse readers are disappointed that I didn’t give readers the rosy picture that an Army wife ought to show the world. But most often military spouses thank me for my honesty, for letting people see a side of our lives that we too often try to keep under wraps.

CC: What are you reading these days?

SF: Oooh, fun question. I just finished Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety. A poet friend of mine, Shara Lessley, recommended this novel, and it seemed like the perfect read for me at this point in my life. My family and I just moved from Amman, Jordan, to Falls Church, Virginia. Moving around is part of the Army lifestyle, and since 2004, when I married my husband, we have moved seven times. This transition from Jordan to Virginia was an especially hard one; we really loved the families who make up the Amman US embassy community, and leaving them made me gnash my teeth at the difficulties of sustaining connections when you move so often. Crossing to Safety is a story of marriage and lifelong friendship, and particularly resonated with me.

Other books I have read recently are Valerie Trueblood’s Marry or Burn and Shann Ray’s American Masculine, two short story collections. Reading them back to back was not intentional but they make a remarkable pair. Trueblood’s tales sometimes start with shocking hooks, a woman shooting her abusive police officer husband, or a woman attacking a bear with an ax, but the actual drama is much quieter, more about the intimacies women try to create and all too often irrevocably break. Trueblood’s stories spin out and envelope the reader, creating a kind of rapture. This is a book I will read again and again. Ray’s stories, as the title implies, deal with the other side of that gender coin, the shifting roles of men in today’s society, the idea of ‘masculine,’ the weight of expectations that can crush sons and fathers and husbands. But woven into these somewhat violent tales of the West is a current of redemption and possibility. Both books are masterful and I highly recommend them.

CC: Do you have any advice for writers on the rise?

SF: If you want it enough, don’t give up. Everyone dreams of writing a book and everyone has a story to tell (and will tell it to you, especially when they find out you are a writer)— but writers actually need to write. In the end, that’s what separates us from everyone else: the written page (and maybe those three or four discarded story collections or novel drafts under your bed).

It’s a long, long road to publication. You are going to spend a lot of time feeling like a failure and doubting every word you write. But having strangers in bookstores talk to you about the characters you created, well, that’s one of the most fantastic feelings in the world.

Siobhan Fallon’s debut collection of stories, You Know When the Men Are Gone, was listed as a Best Book of 2011 by The San Francisco Chronicle and Janet Maslin of The New York Times, has been called “the explosive sort of literary triumph that appears only every few years” by New York Journal of Books,a terrific and terrifically illuminating book” by The Washington Post,and a “searing collection” by Entertainment Weekly.
Her stories and essays have appeared in , Women’s Day, Good Housekeeping, New Letters, Publishers’ Weekly, among others, and she is writing a fiction series for Military Spouse Magazine. More can be found at her website www.siobhanfallon.com.

To Siobhan, thank you so much. And to readers, don’t forget to leave your name in the comments for a chance to win a copy of You Know When the Men Are Gone.

Megan Stielstra Talks Writing & Life: The Interview, Part 1

“…I brought up…childhood and past relationships and too much time thinking too hard…and maybe that’s why I’m writing this. I want to know if I can get into it with you. That look we shared? Over the cracked eggs? Was that about something more? If so, you can leave me a message at this email. We can get some coffee, maybe. Or breakfast. I could scramble the eggs. Make something good out of the destruction.”
~ from “Missed Connection” in Everyone Remain Calm

In a post on INK TEARS about flash fiction, Tania Hershman says, “The kinds of short stories I love are those that are storms in miniature teacups….” Megan Stielstra’s book, Everyone Remain Calm, is a collection of such stories. I have my favorites (“Incredible”, “Missed Connection”, “Shot to the Lungs and No Breath Left”), but each story deserves the spotlight. Some stories surprised me, others left me holding my breath, several touched on themes that struck a familiar chord. Each one is written with a voice that tugs at the reader with a subtle but insistent pull.

I’m honored to host Megan for an interview, which I’ll post in two parts. Her answers to my questions are full of experience and writer’s wisdom that should be read and savored. Today, Megan talks about the book and the stories. Tomorrow, she discusses the delicate balance between life and writing and reading.

CC: What are some challenges, and payoffs, in pulling together a collection of stories for publication? And, do you find that the Kindle format serves a book of short stories well?

MS: I love short stories. I write them, teach them, perform them, and, most importantly, I read them. My life has been profoundly affected by stories I’ve read: Misery, Temporary Matter, Mkondo, Nilda, Video, Compassion, On Meeting the 100% Perfect Girl, Pet Milk, Like a Winding Sheet, A Hunger Artist, Kubuku Rides Again, Sonny’s Blues and a thousand others have taught me something I desperately needed to know; made me laugh when I really, really needed it; or reminded me of what’s really important in my crazy, messy life. And to think that, in some small way, one of the stories in Everyone Remain Calm might do the same? Help someone laugh? Think? Feel less alone or more hopeful?—that’s a hell of a payoff.

Putting the collection together happened quickly and organically. I’m a big fan of Joyland, an online literary journal out of Toronto, and saw they were having a contest for a new digital short story imprint. At the time, I was working on a novel because one too many agents had said, “I love your short stories! But no one reads short stories! You should write a novel!” Granted—this was an awful, awful reason to start a novel, but what magically happened was I got excited about it. I found the characters. I loved chasing them around. I was having fun, which felt really vital at the time because sometimes, putting all your effort into selling your writing can… let’s say kill the mood.

Anyhow—I sent my stories to Joyland and got right back to the novel, and was actually pretty shocked a few months later when Brian Joseph Davis and Emily Schultz wrote to tell me they’d like to publish them. Can I take a second to sing their praises? Everyone, please imagine a big ol’ orchestra in your living room, playing for these two. They are wonderful. They are both editors and writers, but, most importantly, they are readers. The care about audience. Their conversations are not fueled by What sells?, but rather We believe in this so now let’s make it the best it can possibly be. I’ll tell you what: Emily worked my ass off, and she’s fucking whip smart. I was a little intimidated by her, which was sort of great. I want my editor to be smarter than I am. Makes me work harder. Plus, both she and Brian were really supportive of taking some risks with form, specifically in putting personal essays and more fantastical fiction back-to-back, and—in some cases—intertwining them within the same story.

I think the fact that this was a digital publication allowed us to take some chances that we may not have been able to pull off otherwise. I’ve heard many people say “You can’t do that.” I’ve heard many say “That won’t sell.” Many, many, many have said “No one reads short stories,” which, honestly, makes me want to light shit on fire. Personally, I’m excited about the opportunities that digital publication brings to short story writers, and to writers in general. What can we do with it? What can we make?

Lots of people have asked what I think about digital publication, and, right before turning in the final version of Everyone Remain Calm, I added a few lines to my story Professional Development in the hopes of answering that question: “For the record: I love poetry. And novels. And short stories and essays, all of it! I don’t care what you call it or where you shelve it or what it gets printed on, I just want the words, the ideas and the stories handed to me like birthday presents. I want to find my own feelings in someone else’s experiences. I want to live lives I couldn’t possibly have lived, exist in a reality that can’t possibly be real—that’s what a story can do.”

CC: Margaret Atwood says, “You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.” I love that you aren’t afraid to twist reality or broach tough issues in stories like “Incredible” and “Shot to the Lungs and No Breath Left”. What requires more courage: to let yourself write whatever it takes during first drafts, or to sit with some of those raw ideas – and raw emotion revealed in those ideas – during rewrites and edits?

 

MS: Definitely the rewriting. For me, the courage comes not in the act of writing, but in the decision to share that writing. I’ll write anything—emotional stuff, personal stuff, political stuff, ridiculous stuff, ranty stuff—but I’m not going to share the half of it. It’s in my journal. It’s a mess. It’s me working out ideas. It’s not a story yet. It’s like EM Forrester said: I don’t know what I think until I see what I say.

From there, if something pulls me, I’ll copy it into the computer. It becomes more serious, in a way. I’m thinking about the craft. I’m thinking about what I’d like to say. I’d like an audience to care about it as much as I do.

For example: Incredible. What happened was: I got dumped, and it sucked, and I was trying to write my way out of it which, predictably, resulted in a big mess of Poor Me and Life’s Not Fair. That’s not something I wanted to share with others—it wasn’t a story. But later, when I had some distance, I looked back at that raw material with enough objectivity to ask myself a few things:

Q: What is this about?
A: How to get over it.
Q: How did you get over it?
A: I fantasized.

—about finding someone new. About getting a new job and losing twenty pounds and running into your ex when you look really hot. Those things we imagine in order to fall asleep at night when we’re hurting—how we use the made-up to get through the reality.

Q: That’s your fantasy. What’s this character’s fantasy?

—that’s where the Hulk came in. I got the idea from a journal entry I’d written as a kid about being scared of the Incredible Hulk, and as soon as I added him to the whole Life’s Not Fair mess, I got that wonderful writerly feeling of Yes, yes, I’m on to something! Eventually, through the writing, I realized that fantasies don’t just help us with reality; they can also hold us back from really experiencing it. That—that—is a story I wanted to share.

Much of the work I’ve done over the past decade, both as a writer and as a teacher, has been with a personal narrative storytelling series called 2nd Story (www.2ndStory.com). You want to talk about nerve? About courage? I see our tellers get up in front of fifty, a hundred, five hundred people and share stories about addiction, family, heartbreak, identity, obsession, survival, race, faith and a thousand other topics in profound, hilarious, tragic and beautiful ways. And—I see that audience laugh or cry or sigh or gasp but always, always, always connect. That’s what I want in a story, as a writer and a reader: To see that—even as we celebrate our inherent differences—there are still multiple connections in our lives. We share sorrow and confusion and hope. We want our lives to be better.

See? You want to read more, don’t you? Stop back tomorrow for PART 2 of this interview. Megan talks about good days and bad days and how to find the story.

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Megan Stielstra is a writer, storyteller, and the Literary Director of Chicago’s 2nd Story storytelling series. She’s told stories for The Goodman, The Steppenwolf, The Museum of Contemporary Art, The Chicago Poetry Center, Story Week Festival of Writers, Wordstock Literary Festival, The Neo-Futurarium, and Chicago Public Radio, among others, and she’s a Literary Death Match champ. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Other Voices, Fresh Yarn, Pindeldyboz, Swink, Monkeybicycle, Cellstories, Perigee, Annalemma, Venus, and Punk Planet, among others, and her story collection, Everyone Remain Calm, was released in October 2011 from Joyland/ECW. She teaches creative writing at Columbia College and The University of Chicago.

The Secret to Writing While Driving

Last month I struggled to write a short story. It was longer than any of the short stories I’d ever written and came with a set of parameters that (for some reason) kept throwing me off balance. Too, just when a picture of where I wanted the story to go would begin to come into focus, that image would flicker and fade.

Except when I was in the car.

There I would sit, buckled in tight and cruising along, when my muse would mention – in passing – a secret to pulling the story together and making it work. With both hands on the wheel, my eyes would slice to the right to gauge the proximity of my purse and weigh the hazards in rifling through it for a pen and paper. I’d break out into a cold sweat, knowing that the idea might dissolve or fall apart with one false move – and fast – and I’d spend the next few hours or days chasing down the memory of it, like I do the name of my mother’s favorite perfume when struck with the faint, but familiar scent. It’s there, in my mind, if I could only draw it out.

What to do, what to do? I thought.

At times, I’ve fished out what I needed, though scribbling with two hands while driving with your knee is as dangerous as texting. Other times, I’ve let the ideas fall into that writer’s abyss, thinking, Maybe. With any luck. If it’s meant to be. I’ll remember.

Then, on a particularly long drive to a retreat, when I knew I’d be alone and might be fertile for a visit from my muse, I considered my options: driving while writing, or writing while driving.

There’s a difference. And, it has to do with how you record your thoughts.

I discovered on my iPhone, by chance almost, a picture of a microphone. The voice recorder. The memo-taker. The not-just-for-grocery-lists detail-maker.

iPhone voice memo

Of course!

I plugged in my ear buds, so I could do a test run hands-free.

“So…this is just to see how this whole recorder business works…Test…Boo…I’m so cool.”

Then, I played it back: the words were there, the sound was good.

It was magic, and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before. All those drives to work and back, this long road trip to a retreat? I didn’t have to worry. I could still write; I’d just keep my thoughts in digital form.

Those early recordings weren’t anything close to pretty. Many of them started off with a stumble of words and ended with things like, “So, there” and “What d’ya think of that.” Sort of like sass-talking with my muse.

Still, it worked. I visited and re-visited several parts of that short story with my tiny digital excerpts, and I jump-started a few blog posts and articles as well. I’m not particularly fond of listening to myself talk, there’s a nasal quality that worries me. But, I’ve found a new route to writing, on those days when I can’t get pen to paper or fingers to the keyboard, when I don’t want an idea to fall away unexplored.

What about you? Do you write while in transit or record your thoughts in digital format? What’s your secret?

*Photo credit: James Cridland on Flickr.com