SmokeLong Quarterly

What made you decide to start Mr. Bear’s Violet Hour Saloon? How do you choose the writing that you feature on the show?

The tagline for the show is “Making the lonely a little more bearable.” I wanted to shine a tiny spotlight on writers and share beautiful words (and music — I pair the writing with songs carefully selected for each piece). I thought maybe the writer will hear and know someone loves their work or maybe people will discover and like writing they might not have found otherwise. Writing can be lonely work and then you send it out into the world and don’t necessarily know if anyone’s reading it, connecting with it, if it makes a difference. (Radio is a bit like this too: Is anyone out there listening?) Mr. Bear’s Violet Hour Saloon is about making those connections. At least, that’s my hope.

How do I choose the work? Good question! Complex internal algorithms that I can’t explain, intuition, synchronicity, desperation, deadlines, LOTS of reading… It’s a mystery to me that I manage to do this every week.

Which magazines—besides SmokeLong—do you think people should be reading? Why?

There are many magazines that I love — too many to name here! I’d just say READ. Read anything and everything that interests you, and even things that don’t interest you. If you’re published somewhere, read the whole issue. If your friend is published, go read what they wrote and read something else in that magazine by someone you don’t know. If you like a story, look up other places that writer is published and go read those magazines. Ask Twitter for recommendations. Search the Internet — Google is your friend.

But if it feels like I’m evading the question and you really want some names, here’s a (chronological) list of magazines that have published my words in some form: PANK, Bop Dead City, Bitterzoet, The Collapsar, Almost Five Quarterly, WhiskeyPaper, Cartridge Lit, Bird’s Thumb, Sundog Lit, Synaesthesia, Little Fiction, Lockjaw, Noble/Gas Qtrly, People Holding, Alternating Current, Cheap Pop, matchbook, The Vignette Review, Literary Orphans, SmokeLong, Windy City Greek, and Wigleaf (very soon!). And a very small (alphabetical) selection of magazines I would love to someday be published in: Catapult, Corium, Ink Brick, New South, Numéro Cinq, The Offing, Syntax & Salt, Third Point Press, Thrush, Zetetic.

Now I feel guilty for all the wonderful magazines I haven’t named.

One of the things that I think is interesting and great about you is that people know you as not just a good writer, but a good reader. You’re one of the rare writers where I think I have a slightly better idea of what you love to read than what you love to write. What texts do you think made you fall in love with reading?

Dictionaries, Roget’s Thesaurus, The Velveteen Rabbit, The Little Princess, Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, fairy tales and folktales, The Goblin Princess, all of the Narnia books, the Freddy the Pig series, The Monster at the End of This Book, The Poky Little Puppy, Bunnicula, Little Women, On the Banks of Plum Creek, Charlotte’s Web, Half Magic, Five Children and It, A Wrinkle in Time, books on: ancient Egypt, the Salem Witch Trial, paranormal activity, graphology, lucid dreaming, dream interpretation, marine biology…I could go on and on. I can’t remember a time without books. I love reading and my childhood was defined by it.

A short story I really enjoyed by you is “Love, Cliff.” One of the things that’s really striking to me is the last image. For me writing this story based on the image, I probably would’ve been like: “What is this trash? the man said and threw the antlers in the garbage. The End.” But you’ve turned it into this lovely, resonant strange image that captures character and lyric beauty: “They were heavy but he imagined them picking up some faint signal from beneath the grass and reassembling the broken particles of sound back into whole songs, electromagnetic pulses that would travel across state lines and reach Margot in her new home next to her new lover.” How did you approach writing “Love, Cliff”? What about the image drew you toward lovelornness?

First of all, that is not how you would have written it! You’re a great writer and I’m a fan of your work. But thank you for your kind words. “Love, Cliff” was a fun story to write but challenging. I carried the image around with me for almost two months. I didn’t like the image! I thought, I don’t want to write about this guy. I would pull the picture out of my bag and look at it and put it back in my bag. And I did that over and over and hoped some work was happening in my brain on a subconscious level. What drew me toward lovelornless was the way he held the antlers above his head. The pose kept bringing to mind the scene from “Say Anything” with John Cusack holding the boom box. So that led me to think about the ’80s and mixtapes. I originally referenced the movie in the story but thankfully the wonderful editors of People Holding (then Holding Antlers) pushed me to go deeper, which led to the final image I used. I researched antlers and learned that they can act as hearing aids for moose, which meant there was a more scientific explanation connecting them to my first boom box impression. So then I did research on cassettes and sound and electromagnetic pulses and other things I don’t understand and eventually wound up with what you read.

I love going down that rabbit hole of research, reading one thing, and then another, and another, and finding connections in places you don’t expect. Reading (and writing) turns on lights in my brain and heart. I want to share that light with others.