Tag: Dani Shapiro

Interviews

“Writing has been my window.” A conversation with April Bradley

Kathy Fish

Nancy and I are so excited that the wonderful April Bradley will be joining us for Rendezvous in the Rockies this August in Breckenridge, Colorado! Here, April chats with me about her writing life and her story, “Little Wake,” which is my personal favorite.

You’re coming to Breckenridge in the summer for our retreat. What has been your writing workshop/retreat experience in the past? How do you find ways to honor your writing in your day to day life?

Along with several workshops with Kathy Fish and thematic ones on the craft of flash and revision offered by Nancy Stohlman, I’ve taken two hybrid writing workshops, one each with Robert Vaughan over at Word Tango and Jonathan Cardew with Bending Genres. I took a workshop on Surreal Flash from Meg Pokrass as well.

I met Kathy while taking Hannah Tinti’s fantastic workshop over at One Story. Last summer I began my MFA program and had my first academic fiction workshop at the Sewanee School of Letters with Jamie Quatro.

I read like a lunatic regardless if I am actively writing. I love the idea of honoring one’s writing. That’s so much better than feeling guilty about not writing.

Respond to this quote by Dani Shapiro:

“Writing saved my life. Writing has been my window — flung wide open to this magnificent, chaotic existence — my way of interpreting everything within my grasp. Writing has extended that grasp by pushing me beyond comfort, beyond safety, past my self-perceived limits. It has softened my heart and hardened my intellect. It has been a privilege. It has whipped my ass. It has burned into me a valuable clarity. It has made me think about suffering, randomness, good will, luck, memory responsibility, and kindness, on a daily basis — whether I feel like it or not. It has insisted that I grow up. That I evolve. It has pushed me to get better, to be better. It is my disease and my cure. It has allowed me not only to withstand the losses in my life but to alter those losses — to chip away at my own bewilderment until I find the pattern in it.”

This is such a wonderful expression of what writing can do for the life and mind of writer, and some of it articulates my own experience. I did not start writing fiction until I was in my 40s and found different ways of attaining and experiencing what she describes, mostly through my own graduate work in philosophy and theology and though my experiences in motherhood. Creative writing, however, pushed me in ways I’ve never imagined. I’ve cried, walked away from a story, swearing I was done with it, only to sit down and work with it more. Writing has been that only thing as Shapiro writes, “…has allowed me not only to withstand the losses in my life but to alter those losses…” Writing has revealed things to me about human nature I didn’t expect. It has revealed things about my own life and past I did not recall. Writing is closely related to reading and to other writers. Writing and reading opens up new worlds for me, allows me to me to express more fully the different aspects of myself but when it reaches others, and when readers tell me something I’ve written takes on meaning for them, there is the gift.

What is your favorite story that you yourself have written (“favorite” doesn’t have to mean “best” or more successful or whatever). And why is it your favorite?

My favorite is “Little Wake.” CHEAP POP published it last year, and I was thrilled. I managed to convey a moment in time and expand it to something so much more and capture the emotion I felt in that moment, that sense of magic, bittersweet loss, love, even a childhood fascination and an adult crush. I can still hear the frogs croaking along to Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da when I think about that story. Got lucky on that one.

Tell us something we don’t know about you that you are happy to share. : )

I meet people I know in unexpected, surprising places like in Venice or New York, in airports, concerts, interviews, courtrooms, emergency rooms. Neat things like that happen to me, and I love it.

Love that! And thanks so much, April. See you in Breckenridge in August!

April Bradley is from Tennessee and lives with her family outside New Haven, Connecticut. Her short fiction has been recently nominated for The Pushcart Prize as well as The Best of Small Fictions. Her writing has appeared in CHEAP POP, Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Narratively, NANO Fiction, and Smokelong Quarterly’s “Why Flash Fiction” Series, among others. She has a Master’s in Ethics from Yale Divinity School and is an MFA candidate at the Sewanee School of Letters.

 

Interviews

Holly Lyn Walrath on Tuning Out the World & Staying True to Your Artist Self

Kathy Fish

Holly Lyn Walrath will be joining us this summer for Rendezvous in the Rockies in Breckenridge. She graciously allowed me to ask her a few questions to find out a bit more about her life and writing and her forthcoming poetry chapbook, Glimmerglass Girl, from Finishing Line Press (available for pre-order April 9th!).

We’re so thrilled you’ll be joining us for a writers’ retreat in Breckenridge this summer! What are your thoughts on honoring creativity and/or creative play? How important are these to you?

I think a lot about Ursula K. Le Guin’s speech at the National Book Awards (http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Index-NBFMedal.html) where she says “Resistance and change often begin in art.” Honoring creativity to me means staying true to who you are as an artist and not chasing the market. This is so hard to do, because as writers we need to self-promote. But to me, the moment when we break free of the external world and instead let the internal world guide our process is the moment when we are capable of true art that will enact change.

When I feel a piece is enacting change in myself, that’s when I know it’s working. That’s what I strive for in creativity—break through, surprise, unsettling, resettling, a quiet dawning of realization.

You described your recent (amazing) flash in Fireside Magazine, entitled “knick knack, knick, knack” as one of your own favorites. Can you talk about the process of writing it and why it’s one of your favorites? I love that first line by the way…

I think the title of this piece is one of the best I’ve written so far, a nod to the old children’s rhyme, This Old man. Conceptually, I was inspired by the work of Hayao Miyazaki and his use of the Japanese tree spirits called Kodama, which appear in his film Princess Mononoke. But the piece is mostly drawn from the personal experience of struggling to put aside the demands of a parent. I’m interested in stories that put a new twist on the Mother-Daughter story. My own Mom has pretty much never known how to handle my creative side. I wanted to acknowledge that we don’t all have great relationships with our mothers, we don’t all want to follow in our parent’s footsteps.

Respond to this quote by Dani Shapiro: “If I dismiss the ordinary — waiting for the special, the extreme, the extraordinary to happen — I may just miss my life… To allow ourselves to spend afternoons watching dancers rehearse, or sit on a stone wall and watch the sunset, or spend the whole weekend rereading Chekhov stories—to know that we are doing what we’re supposed to be doing — is the deepest form of permission in our creative lives.”

Oh man, how do I struggle with this! Lately my schedule has been cram-jam full of lovely writing-related things that make me happy and give me a deep sense of purpose. But I’ve found it really hard to turn off lately, to explore the small, quotidian pieces of life that make it worthwhile on a deeper level.

The only way I’ve found to recapture this lately is going out canoeing with my husband. We paddle out on Armand Bayou and there’s always a moment when the water quiets, we slip away from the shore where people are picnicking and playing with their dogs, and everything we left behind sinks into the stillness. Cranes and vultures circle the sky, gators lurk in the shallows, and that’s how I turn off the rest of the world.

Anything else you’d like to share? Something we probably didn’t know about you?

Pre-orders for my first chapbook, Glimmerglass Girl (Finishing Line Press), start April 9th. This chapbook is a series of illustrated poems about femininity. Information on my website: Holly Lyn Walrath

If you’re a writer, check out The Weird Circular, my free e-newsletter full of curated submission calls and writing prompts.

I have subscriber-only content on Curious Fictions if you want to leave me a tip! 

A lot of people don’t know that I worked in finance for three years. My mother is still disappointed that I quit that job, ha. Now I’m a freelance editor, but I still get random phone calls from my family asking for advice on money matters.

Well, we’re glad you pursued writing (and editing) instead! Thanks so much, Holly, and best of luck with your upcoming poetry chapbook!

Holly Lyn Walrath is a writer of poetry and short fiction. Her work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Fireside Magazine, Liminality, Crab Fat Magazine, and other places. She is a freelance editor and volunteer with Writespace, a nonprofit literary center in Houston, Texas. She currently resides in Seabrook, Texas. Find her on Twitter @hollylynwalrath or at hlwalrath.com.