The Fix

Ira Sukrungruang: An Interview

Ira Sukrungruang is the author of Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy. His work has appeared in numerous magazines, including The Sun, Creative Nonfiction, and North American Review. He is the co-founder of Sweet: A Literary Confection and teaches in the MFA program at University of South Florida.

My initial email reached you in Thailand. How often do you visit and how does that country nourish your spirit?

I’ve been going to Thailand every other year since I was three. My family wanted to instill in me this other part of my life. Yes, I was born in America, but I am the product of two proud Thai parents. It’s funny that you asked about how my visit “nourishes” my spirit. It really does. In America, when I’ve been away from Thailand for a long time, I have these moments of yearning, moments of wanting to be in Thailand. These moments are not so much about the spirit, as it has to do with missing family. Since my mother and aunt moved back to Thailand after 36 years working as nurses in Chicago, I don’t have blood relatives in the states. So this time in Thailand is to connect with my mother and aunt and all the cousins and uncles and nephew and nieces. It’s also about learning or relearning another rhythm and pace of life.

You decided to be a Buddhist monk for a month during one of your visits. What did you learn from that experience?

I’ve always had questions about Buddhism. I was born Buddhist, and because of that Buddhism was more connected to family than to religion. As I got older, I realized I hadn’t a clue about what it meant to be Buddhist. I knew the prayers and the precepts and the noble truths, but I didn’t know the meanings behind them. For years, my mother has been urging me to become a monk. All Thai males have this obligation. It’s for the family, for good karma. I’ve been hesitant because I was a vain bugger, and the thought of losing my hair and eyebrows filled me with dread. Since my mother retired in Thailand, I decided why not do it Thailand. Why not be a monk and really try to answer some of my lingering questions?

The funny thing about my month as a monk was by the end I had more questions, questions I’m still trying to sift through even now. I feel closer to my religion, yes, but there are still things I wonder about. I’ve tried writing about it, but too many things enter my pieces. I remember reading Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story, remember how hard a time she had writing about her visit to Egypt. In many ways, I’m still too close to the subject. I need to sit with it a bit, ruminate, meditate on it.

I think I’ll always have questions. It’s the reason I write about religion so often. It’s a pursuit to understand, to make sense of.

Are you planning something as bold on this visit?

No, I think the boldest thing I’m doing on this visit is hanging with my seventy-six year old mother and her funny family. I had a few weeks this time, so I really wanted to saturate myself with family. Plus, my wife joins me later on the trip, and we got married here ten years ago, so

we’re planning an anniversary vacation. I think bold for two writers and teachers who are always working is sitting still and doing nothing. Kinda Buddhist if you think about it.

Tell me about Sweet: A Literary Confection, an online journal for creative nonfiction and poetry. What motivated you to be a co-founder? What have you discovered since its inception?

Sweet is a project my wife Katie Riegel and I decided to venture into. We are now in our fourth year, publishing three online issues a year, and also, we are now publishing handmade chapbooks. When Katie and I got married, we also married two genres: creative nonfiction and poetry. Sweet wants to explore the conversation between these two genres. There’s great

conversation to be had there, better than the fact vs. fiction one that seems to always trail creative nonfiction.

I think what I find most surprising about editing a magazine is how many good writers there are out there. We receive so many submissions, and a lot of them are extremely good. The decision to publish something becomes very subjective. Sweet does not want to overwhelm readers, so we try to keep our issues small. Sometimes the reason we have to pass on a piece is because of space.

There’s been an explosion of MFA programs in the last few decades. What are the pros and cons of this reality?

 To be honest, I don’t find anything wrong with having more MFA programs if you are realistic about your expectations as a writer. Don’t expect to be published. Don’t expect a teaching job. Expect three years of writing and reading and learning, and living a writer’s life, a thinker’s life. I am proof that writing can be taught. English is a second language for me, so without great professors guiding me in craft and technique and introducing me to writers that have changed and shaped my life, I wouldn’t be here. The MFA program was a selfish time for me to be an artist without other distractions. I was around others passionate about the art, others striving to write a good sentence. These writers made me want to get better, made me want to perfect my craft.

The MFA program was that first step, for me, as a writer. I’m always thinking of myself as a student of writing. I’m still learning. I’m still challenging myself. I still want every piece I write to be better than the last. I love language, the sound of it. I love the infinite ways one can write a sentence. This keeps writing fresh. This keeps me motivated.

And again, more honesty here, teaching in an MFA program and a strong undergrad program also keeps things exciting. I love my students. I feed off them. They come whole heartedly to learn. Seeing them progress as writers makes me want to do the same. Moreover, we are all in it together. Part of the same tribe. It makes me feel not as alone in the world.

You write creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and memoir. Which one challenges you the most? Which one feels most comfortable to you?

Creative nonfiction opened the doors to other genres. I had to learn about myself, my life. I needed to mature before I could even start writing fiction and poetry. To me all writing, regardless of genre, is about understanding the complexities of the human condition. Writing at the core is about communication. I had to believe what I was putting down on the page was worthwhile. If there isn’t anything at stake for me, then there isn’t anything at stake for the reader.

In terms of comfort, each genre presents its own difficulties. Because of this, I can’t write two genres at the same time. I have to write one genre, be done with it, rest my brain for a bit, before switching gears. It’s a completely different mindset.

Your memoir Talk Thai is infused with humor and poignancy. How do you manage to blend the two?

There are two things I tell my students when they are attempting to write humor:

1) What is the serious behind the laugh? Writing effective humor is about locating the source of the serious. The serious becomes the foundation, becomes what readers will remember most. Without a foundation, your story becomes a bar joke, easily forgettable. One of my favorite comics is Whoopi Goldberg. When she first came on scene, she did a routine that was utterly stunning. She did persona pieces—the crack addict, the abused child—and all I remember was how silent the theater was until she delivered the punch line. The audience erupted. They needed to. They were taken on such a sobering and solemn journey that the need to laugh was essential.

2) We possess different types of laughs. The quiet laugh. The laugh out loud. The obnoxious laugh. Watch a good comic at work, and he or she knows this. The trick is knowing what laugh to pull out at what time. It becomes about timing and execution.

You are a writer, educator, and editor. How do you know when you’re having a good day?

When I can’t sleep. When I’m left energized. Writing a good sentence. Teaching a good class. Finding an incredible essay. All of this feeds me. It makes me feel like I can run a marathon. Makes me feel like this artist’s life is worth it. There is no better feeling, I assure you.

—Interviewed by Ann Marie Byrd

Marianne Langner Zeitlin: An Interview

Marianne Langner Zeitlin is the author of three novels, Mira’s Passage (Dell), Next of Kin (Zephyr Press, which won a City of Toronto Book Award, and the just published Motherless Child (June 2012, Zephyr Press). Recent stories have appeared in Passager, Aethlon, Scribblers on the Roof and Jewishfiction.net.

“The Desecration of the Sabbath” appears in Fiction Fix 11.

“The Desecration of the Sabbath” is set in New York and begins in the moments leading up the 1953 execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. When did you write the story? Can you tell us anything about its history?

I didn’t attempt to write the story for many years after the actual event. I had to digest it slowly over time. When I did so I wrote a number of drafts and discarded them before I finally finished it.

As a Jew, for my generation, the defining historical event was the Holocaust. I was very young when the facts about the extermination camps were revealed and the images were seared into my consciousness. Around sixty of my mother’s family wound up in Auschwitz. Eight years later, the Rosenbergs were executed and for me it was like a mini Holocaust, though the term “Holocaust” hadn’t yet been coined.  I believe the night of their execution was a haunting and traumatic one, especially for Jews.

For starters, I’m against capital punishment. So whatever I felt about the Rosenbergs’ guilt, I would have thought the executions were a miscarriage of justice. Added to this is the fact it came during the height of the McCarthy era when all kinds of witch-hunts were in progress. Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here,” a cautionary tale about the rise of fascism in the United States, was still an active frame of reference at the time.

What made this trial particularly horrendous for me, however, was the fact that the main characters in this drama were all Jews. It was Roy Cohn who masterminded the trial, claiming in his autobiography that it was he who used his influence to appoint both a Jewish judge and Jewish prosecutor, and it was he who recommended the death penalty. By so doing he absolved J. Edgar Hoover, who called it “the trial of the century,” and Joseph McCarthy from the possible accusation of anti-Semitism.

Cohn manipulated David Greenglass, Ethel’s brother, to give testimony against his sister and brother-in-law in order to save his own neck. Greenglass recanted later, admitting that he’d testified that Ethel had typed the classified documents in order to protect himself and his wife, and that he’d been encouraged by the prosecution to do so. 

At the time I thought there was some guilt involved as far as Julius was concerned, but also thought he and his cronies had been misguided idealists, unlike Aldrich Ames and other spies who did it for mercenary reasons. In the hysteria of those McCarthy days, people forgot the Soviet Union was our ally during the war. But at no time did I think Ethel was guilty of anything except being the wife of Julius. We know from later intercepts of Soviet intelligence that Ethel was never a spy and the material obtained from Julius was trivial. Far more damning was the material from Klaus Fuchs who was a physicist. Klaus Fuchs was tried in England and received a sentence of 13 years. Contrast this with the Rosenbergs’ sentence.       

While the Rosenbergs never appear in the story, their pending execution is everywhere in it. The people around Sarah are either indifferent or viciously excited—“they should have torn them limb from limb.”  She feels it all so acutely, almost crumpling under the weight of it. Why is she so afraid and vulnerable?

Because of the prevailing political atmosphere, Jews were easily frightened and intimidated. The blacklist reigned and many people denounced other people, particularly in the entertainment world. “Naming names” was the inevitable second demand by the House Un-American Activities Committee, the first being to give yourself up. 

In Sarah’s memory of Hebrew School, she is the victim of Mr. Shkop’s summary judgment. He misinterprets her questions, sentences her, and executes that sentence. Her friends turn their backs on her. They are silent. Do you feel there is connection between silence and loneliness? Is loneliness part of her punishment?

Loneliness is the result of silence and abandonment. And yes, it is part of the punishment. There are parallels between Sarah and Ethel’s situations throughout the Hebrew School incident and others. She even has a brother called David who always gets her into trouble.

Sarah’s husband, Shlomo, is not there for her. He has sailed off in his “cell in the ship’s womb” to perform in Europe. A musician’s chair on stage is elsewhere likened to an electric chair. Is he under some sort of sentence, too?

In Sarah’s mood of the moment, all of the characters in her life seem like victims, and even certain settings—the ship, the stage—have associations with what is happening to the Rosenbergs. She sees everything through the prism of that pending horror.

For Jews the Sabbath is sacred time. We are traditionally instructed to put a fence around it to set it apart from ordinary time. In the story, clocks and the machinery of the world tick off the moments as time runs out on the Rosenbergs at the front end of the Sabbath. Sarah struggles to fence the other side by holding off labor. Do you sympathize with her struggle? 

Sarah is no longer religious when the story takes place. But Eisenhower’s ironic haste in carrying out the executions to avoid desecrating the Sabbath triggers all kinds of fear for Sarah in her drugged state. And in extremis—the highly emotionally charged state that childbirth elicits—she reverts to the prayers and beliefs of her childhood.

Ethel Rosenberg is a mother and Sarah is becoming one. Ethel’s execution is rushed to avoid desecration of the Sabbath, while Sarah hopes to stave off labor for the same reason. In the end, she can’t. The distance between execution and birth diminishes, and the desecration she was afraid of proves something else when she feels the “warm weight of the mitzvah in the crook of her arm.” Since Mitzvoth are the good deeds by which we mend a broken world, I wonder what you feel is mended here.

Tikkun Olam—repairing the world through social action—is a basic tenet of Judaism. The birth of the baby right after the execution absolutely connects Ethel and Sarah (she is now a mother too), as does the idea of which acts are desecrations and which are mitzvoth. Certainly, nothing can mend the execution. But the birth of a baby brings a sense of life and hope for Sarah, even in the midst of the tragedy that has just occurred.

“Motherless Child,” Marianne Langner Zeitlin’s newest novel, is set in the world of classical music, where a young woman searches for the truth about her family’s troubled past. A suspenseful page-turner, it has just been published by Zephyr Press and is available at www.zephyrpress.org and in bookstores.

—Interviewed by Mark Ari

Ladette Randolph: An Interview

(Above) Ladette Randolph standing in the Sandhills of Nebraska

Ladette Randolph is editor-in-chief of Ploughshares and the author of three books of fiction, two novels Haven’s Wake (forthcoming, spring 2013) and the award-winning A Sandhills Ballad and the short story collection This Is Not the Tropics. In addition, she is the editor of two anthologies: A Different Plain and The Big Empty. Randolph is on the faculty of the Writing, Literature, and Publishing department at Emerson College in Boston. Prior to joining the staff at Ploughshares she was an acquiring editor and associate director at University of Nebraska  Press. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Rona  Jaffe grant, the Virginia Faulkner Award, a Best New American Voices citation, and four Nebraska Book Awards.

How do you think your character is reflected in Ploughshares and how is the character of Ploughshares reflected in you?

What an interesting question. I would say the answer to both parts of this question are the same. My character intersects with the character of Ploughshares primarily through the guest editor program. While I had a great deal more power as a book editor (which I did before taking the position at Ploughshares) I always enjoyed collaboration, asking the right writer to do an introduction to reinscribe a book we were putting back into print. At Ploughshares, I have to work closely, and in the end defer to the tastes and passions of different guest editors. I enjoy the process, messy as it is, of working in this way.

What trends in writing have you noticed in your tenure as editor of Ploughshares? What trends worry you, and which ones please you?

I wouldn’t say any trends worry me per se. I think sometimes what surprises me most is how much the short story hasn’t changed. We’re certainly able to write about topics that might have been off limits in the past, but I don’t consider that a trend. There are stories written just for publication on the iPhone, Amazon singles, etc. but I think of these less as literary trends and more as experiments that help us learn what new technology can do and what readers will tolerate and accept. I think perhaps the biggest change is how the promise of technology has started to come together finally into something that might be considered a sustainable business model with electronic readers. There are problems, of course, and inequities involved in these innovations, but they probably don’t interest the readers of your blog. We now make Ploughshares available on Kindle and nook and are working hard to convert our digitized archive to files appropriate for electronic publication. We’re discussing a lot of things that we haven’t yet implemented. There are always exciting new writers and schools of writing that push us or disturb us, but I’m not seeing anything just yet that I think is radically changing the story itself.

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Tim Gilmore: An Interview

“It’s said by people who know things that can’t be documented that when Roosevelt Boulevard, Interstate-17, was paved, a number of the graves of former slaves were paved over.” —Tim Gilmore, Ghost ZIP Code, Yukon

Tim Gilmore is the author of the upcoming “This Kind of City: Ghost Stories and Psychological Landscapes,” as well as two collections of poems, Horoscopes for Goblins: Poems, 2006-2009 and Flights of Crows: Poems, 2002-2006. He teaches literature and English, including a course called “Ghost Stories,” at Florida State College at Jacksonville. In addition to editing deadpaper.org, his writing has appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Fiction Fix, 580 Split, Jack Magazine, and other publications. He has visited Panama and Mexico and England. He has driven forklifts and sold vacuum cleaners. He has grown beans and tomatoes and winter greens and herbs. He has held hatchling bluebirds in his hands. He has robbed bees. He knows the difference between the Sublime and the Beautiful. He’s bad at math. He needs to wash his car. He has horrible hay fever. 

In your work, the past is very much a part of the present.  Are these ghosts in the geography or hauntings, erasures, exorcisms?

Of course Faulkner said the past wasn’t dead, the past is not even past. Human landscapes are full of markers from the past—not just old buildings or neighborhoods, but the way neighborhoods are laid out, the way they’re named. Part of the feeling a lot of people have in suburban neighborhoods of the place being soulless may not only be cookie-cutter house design and poor building materials. It may also be the lack of an accretion of lives lived.

If you’ve been in an older place, a really old place, maybe a European city for example, you can feel that depth of history, layer upon layer. It’s as though the city you inhabit contains a city beneath and within it and that city contains a city beneath and within, like Matryoshka dolls.

I teach a “Ghost Stories” literature course every fall term, and I don’t tell most of my students that I don’t actually believe in paranormal ghosts. The kind of “ghost” I’m describing gives me a deeper sense of haunting than paranormal ghosts. This kind of ghost is a cultural ghost, a geographical ghost, a psychogeographical ghost. In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, Sethe talks about “rememories” and describes them as memories that live on, physically, outside of us, out in the landscape, and she says every place is haunted, that you can walk along and accidentally bump into someone else’s “rememories.”

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Duotrope Editor Interview

Check out our Editor Interview at Duotrope.