Reader Spotlight: Allen Kratz

Today our Reader Spotlight shines on Allen Kratz, who admits he only discovered Raymond Carver recently. (Better late than never!) We ask him to tell us a little bit about himself, how he discovered Carve, and what he looks for in a good story.

Allen Kratz, reading Carve since 2013What would you like to tell us about yourself?

I’m a Computer Programmer from Des Moines, Iowa. I’ve always been a reader and a writer but have gone through different stages of ignoring both of those things. With my daughter off to college, I found a lot of new free time and have been enjoying reading again.

What first attracted you to Carve magazine?

Somehow, I made it to 43 without reading any Raymond Carver or Flannery O’ Connor. Carver’s name kept coming up in things I was reading about writing, so I bought Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and have been hooked ever since. Around that time, I made the pleasant discovery of Carve magazine at a Barnes & Noble. Sometimes it’s nice to miss out on stuff like this so there can still be something “new” in the forties.

What characteristics do you look for in a good story?

I think I’m drawn most to characters and how fast some authors are able to create that interest. Sometimes its even just the first sentence. I like a voice where I immediately know I am in for a good ride.

What Carve story in particular would you recommend to our readers?

I will go with a recent one and choose “The Possibility of Fire.” I loved how Jessica Barksdale weaved the crisis of past, present, and future. That’s one I still think about after finishing it, and it left me wanting to know more of the narrator’s story.

We appreciate Allen letting us shine the spotlight on him. Follow him on Twitter to stay connected to the Carve community.

Follow @AllenKratz

Reader Spotlight is a chance for us to turn the spotlight on you. We get to know more about you and what you like about the magazine. Whether a new fan or a longtime reader, we want to hear from you. Email us at readerspotlight@carvezine.com to be featured.

What constitutes a literary legacy in the age of the laptop?

Earlier this week Sotheby’s auction house put up for sale what a press release calls “the largest and most important group of William Faulkner material ever to appear at auction.” The sale included an unpublished short story entitled “The Trapper’s Story,” as well as a handwritten draft of Faulkner’s 1950 Nobel Prize speech which, according to Sotheby’s, differs significantly from the address Faulkner gave at the awards ceremony in Stockholm. The medal and diploma Faulkner received upon being awarded the Nobel Prize will be bundled with the handwritten speech into a lot expected to sell for upwards of $500,000, according to a pre-sale estimate. All told, the auction of the late author’s possessions—which will also include letters, postcards, and manuscript drafts—is expected to fetch upwards of $2 million.

Yet while exclusive collectors bid on Faulkner’s papers and awards, we as a society are exiting the historical period of the book as a fetishized object. Yes, many of us still prefer paper over LED, and bibliophiles’ hearts still leap at the news that a new Faulkner story may be published, but even those of us who hoard paperbacks like preternaturally intelligent squirrels compose on our laptops from time to time. Instead of typescripts and holographs, twenty-first century writers leave behind Word documents and partially completed blog posts. In twenty-five years, will collectors be jockeying for the chance to bid on Jennifer Egan’s hard drive?

While those bemoaning the death of print media usually focus on the consumer, the move toward a technology-based writing process will affect literary culture perhaps as much as a technology-based reading process. Microsoft Word allows writers so much freedom—to alter, to move, to erase and replace—that unless we’re careful, intermediary drafts can disappear with one click of the touchpad. Dangerous for writers who may later wish to return to a draft already gone, this phenomenon also poses an interesting challenge for scholars.

Bibliographic scholars study books as physical and cultural objects, and their work relies heavily on the physical evidence authors leave behind. In the 1950s, Fredson Bowers, a bibliographer from the University of Virginia, rediscovered the order for Walt Whitman’s Calamus poems—twelve homoerotic poems published in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass but later excised—by examining the remains of the notebook in which Whitman originally wrote them. Because the notebook had since been taken apart, Bowers examined extant physical clues, such as the arrangement of needle holes on each page, to recover Whitman’s original order for the poems.

In twenty-five years, will collectors be jockeying for the chance to bid on Jennifer Egan’s hard drive? Bart van de Biezen / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA

Even works that have not been dismantled or lost have benefitted from a bibliographer’s eye. In 1985, Noel Polk’s first volume of the “corrected text” of Faulkner’s novels appeared. Polk, a Faulkner scholar, examined typescripts, holographs, proofs, and hand-written notes to produce a text of each novel that adheres as closely as possible to the author’s indicated preferences in wording, spelling, punctuation, and capitalization.

Though Faulkner claimed he wrote As I Lay Dying “in six weeks, without changing a word,” manuscripts betray this claim as an exaggeration. Now that writers compose via laptop, will the new frontier of bibliographic studies move from page to screen? Instead of the needle-holes in Whitman’s notebook, will scholars scour files for their “created on” date and other caches of data? I worry such a transition will position the genius writer even farther from the everyman reader, that without scribbled drafts and scratched out phrases, the final book will seem to appear from nowhere, fully formed, an electronic Athena.

When a cache of Faulkner’s papers go up for auction, our lust for this archival material likely is, at its core, less than academic: seeing a writer’s original manuscript is a semi-spiritual experience. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to examine Allen Ginsberg’s original typescript to Howl; I nearly fell over. My heart beat at 150% its normal rate for the rest of the day. Recently, I handled a number of Walt Whitman’s letters, written in his own hand, and my eyes welled up. How intimate, to touch the paper he touched, see the personality of his handwriting. As if I could touch his genius itself, and yet these handwritten pages—and Ginsberg’s smeared typescripts—bring me back to the material world, to the recognition this writer was a man. He misspelled words and scratched out false starts. As we transition into electronic means of composition, I hope literature doesn’t lose its humanness, this evidence that writing is work.

Story Spotlight: "Poetry" by Dionne Irving

“Poetry” appeared in the spring 2009 issue of Carve.

Dionne Irving’s “Poetry” is poetic fiction told in four sections, one for each decade in one’s life (teens, twenties, thirties, forties). Undercutting all these life stages is the agony and soul-redeeming act that is poetry.

The story’s main character is the second person “you,” leading a penniless existence by virtue of her/your profession, and foisted into a succession of ever unfortunate hookups and heartbreaks (read: fodder for poetry).

In this fiction version of a poem, each section essentially stands for a stanza. And Irving sets apart each meaningful stanza with the relatable stages of a fated-to-starve artist’s life:  The rebellious teens; the prime but torturous decade that is one’s twenties; the onset of conservative practicality in one’s thirties; and finally the pursuit of echoes of the past in one’s forties. The story’s ending begs the question:  What follows then?

Irving captures so well the allure of poetry and poets themselves (“Some man asking to see your poetry, the disappointment that comes when the poetry isn’t about them.”). She also captures with such great insight various nuances of a poet’s life. How it might for some be “navel gazing to the point of tedium.” How it’s ridden with hope and potential, too often unfulfilled (“Plan to write an epic poem, one with sex, death, and remorse. One that will move people to tears. Write one verse. Save it as epic.doc on your computer. Don’t open that file again anytime soon”). The story culminates in one sterling last line (which I will not spoil for you here).

I dare any poet (or artist for that matter) to not relate to this beautifully composed poem/short story.

Revisit the spring 2009 issue to (re-)read “Poetry.”

Happy Birthday Raymond Carver

Today marks what would’ve been Raymond Carver’s 75th birthday. We invite you to tell us: how will you celebrate?

We always enjoy sitting down with a collection of his stories or poems, but doing so this Saturday will feel extra special. The editor’s favorite is Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories.

Tell us yours and send us a Tweet, Facebook message, or leave a comment on this blog post. Let us know how Raymond Carver shaped your fiction or poetry, or perhaps your life.

If you’re in Port Angeles, WA, there’ll be a special event commemorating Ray, with Tess Gallagher in attendance.

Happy Birthday, Ray. Thanks for everything.

Introducing the Carve Store

25% off today only

We’ll also celebrating Carver’s birthday anniversary today by opening our new Carve store this Saturday. Our new store makes it easy to browse past Premium Edition issues and our NEW 9x12” matte prints of our covers. The store design is simple and sleek, just like our magazine.

For today only, we’re offering 25% discounts on subscriptions, single issues, and our new 9x12” matte prints of covers.

Become a Premium Edition subscriber and receive an additional 10% off — a perk that will last the length of your subscription.

And by popular demand, our new store will offer Gift Subscriptions year-round.

Browse the store. →

Carver Contest Q&A with Jia Tolentino (2012 1st Place Prizewinner)

What better way to end our Carver Contest Q&A series than with last year’s first placer, Jia Tolentino. She had the great fortune of having her first ever published story also be a contest winner. She shares her reaction to winning, and tells us a bit about her other current writing endeavors.

Carve: Describe your reaction when you found out “The Odyssey” won top honors in the fall 2012 Carver contest.

Jia Tolentino: I was totally surprised! At that point, I had only been writing fiction “seriously” for a few months, and I’d only ever sent out “The Odyssey,” and only to a half-dozen contests. Actually, even though a year has passed and I’m playing a more directed long game with my writing, that’s still true—I haven’t submitted any other stories anywhere. So I truly got lucky, and winning this contest was a lovely and encouraging introduction to the world of lit mags.

C: Has the contest affected your writing in any way, and if so, how? Did you get contacted by the agency?

JT: I did get contacted by the agency, and by several unaffiliated agents besides who had just happened to come across the story in Carve. Those occasions have been important ones in terms of having to articulate a plan for the book that I’m working on, which has evolved a lot over the last year, both plot-wise and formally—it’s now reading much more like a novel than a collection of stories. 

C: Can you give us an update on your writing since the contest? Any forthcoming publications/projects we should be on the lookout for?

JT: I’ve been writing pretty regularly for The Billfold, The Hairpin and a music website called All Things Go. I’ve been absolutely loving the freedom and space that the Michigan fiction program gives its writers, and I’m halfway through a first draft of a novel that I’ve been shopping around a bit, as well as laying groundwork for long-form nonfiction pieces that I plan to investigate and write this summer.

About the Author: Jia Tolentino is a writer in Michigan.

The 14th annual Raymond Carver Contest is now open until May 15th.

Carver Contest Q&A with Amber Krieger (2010 Editor's Choice Prizewinner)

We recently featured Amber Krieger’s “It Was So Long Ago” for a Story Spotlight, and this time it’s the author’s turn to talk about her work, which was named “Editor’s Choice” back in 2010.

Carve: Can you tell us what inspired “It Was So Long Ago?”

Amber Krieger: This story came together over a number of years. It started with the image of Henry, newly retired, sitting in front of his computer, looking at a news site and hitting refresh, hoping for a break in a local tragedy. That eventually became a different story, with a much different character, but Henry and his wife Helen stayed in my mind. In recent years, I’ve become very interested in the idea of culpability and individual responsibility. For a little while there as a lot of news about a young woman jogger who was killed in a hit and run in the Columbia River Gorge. The driver was at fault and he fled the scene but I started to think about what would happen if it were an accident. It turns out that sober drivers are rarely charged for pedestrian deaths, at least in Oregon. If you’re following the rules and someone steps out in front of you—it’s not your fault. There’s something even more terrible at the heart of that, having to hold that guilt inside you, or within your family. I’m not sure when I realized that this was the background that Henry needed, but once I did, the story took off from there.

C: What was your reaction like to your story winning Editor’s Choice for the 2010 Carver contest?

AK: I was thrilled! I’m a big fan of Carve and had been submitting stories to the magazine and contest for a few years. It was such an honor to receive the award. Also, the year before, I’d had to withdraw another story from the contest, and Matthew had responded with a nice note, saying he liked the story. So having him select another of my stories as Editor’s Choice felt like, wow, here’s an editor who likes my work! I’d heard about that happening from other writers, but hadn’t experienced it myself. It was a great feeling.

C: Has the contest affected your writing or the direction of your writing career in any way? If so, how?

AK: When you’re doing a lot of submitting and getting a lot of rejections, you start wondering if that story you thought was done really isn’t. I do, at least! People talk a lot about carrying on in the face of rejection, but I think part of getting tough is also learning to trust your instincts about your work and not keep retooling something based on every little reaction from your writing group or your mood that day. At the same time, sometimes a story isn’t done—and you need to be able to figure that out, too. Getting the Editor’s Choice award was a great confidence boost for me and helped me set that internal bar for my stories.

C: Can you give us an update on your writing since the contest? Any recent or forthcoming publications/projects we should be on the lookout for?

AK: For the last couple of years most of my creative energy has gone into mothering, but I have a flash essay in Brave on the Page: Oregon Writers on Craft and the Creative Life, which is a really great collection of interviews and essays on craft from Oregon writers—including other Carve authors like Yuvi Zalkow, Gina Oschner and Stevan Allred! And my story “Night” just received an honorable mention in Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction contest. No home for that one yet, but I’m hoping to find a place for it soon!

About the Author: Amber Krieger’s award-winning writing has appeared in Carve Magazine, cream city review, The Adirondack Review, elimae and in Brave on the Page: Oregon Writers on Craft and the Creative Life. She lives and writes in Portland, Oregon.

The 14th annual Raymond Carver Contest is now open until May 15th.

Carver Contest Q&A with Jodi Paloni (2012 2nd Place Prizewinner)

 With just one week to go until the Carver Contest closes, next up for our Q&A series is fall 2012 2nd place prize winner Jodi Paloni. She talks about the making of her story, “screaming silently” about the news of her win, and a fun, new project she’s currently undertaking involving reading one online mag/journal short story a day.

Carve: What inspired “The Third Element?”

Jodi Paloni: I’m working on a collection of stories linked by place. Every now and again, characters walk in and out of each other’s stories and either start trouble or help out. In two other stories I wrote, a secondary character, an art teacher new to town named Meredith, showed up to serve as a “fulcrum character.” Since she popped in twice, I became curious about her. But I didn’t sit down and say, now let’s see, what could Meredith get up to today. Instead, I thought about where she would be hanging out in her free time and she appeared in my imagination, sad, lonely, surrounded by art supplies in her garden shed. Then the neighbor boy arrived in the yard and started up a mower. I was bummed because my plan was to write a story in the quiet of the afternoon. I decided to go with how I felt about the “intrusion” and Sky Ryan arrived on Meredith’s porch.

Carve: What was your reaction like when the story won 2nd place in the fall 2012 Carver contest?

JP: August 13^th, 2012. I remember being alone in the house, a summer evening, when I casually scanned e-mails and saw “RE: [Carve Magazine] in my inbox. On behalf of everyone at Carve Magazine, please accept our congratulations!” I freaked. Quietly. I don’t know about you, but when I’m alone, I’m more likely to feel self-conscious about skipping around the house and yelling swears, so that’s why I screamed silently, although I had a writing teacher once tell me not to write stuff like that. How can you scream silently? The dog barked. I think I sent an e-mail or two to close writing pals. Then I talked with Carve editor-in-chief Matthew Limpede about an interview, and what a treat that was.

C: Has the contest affected your writing or the direction of your writing career in any way? If so, how?

JP: A year ago, I wasn’t submitting much. In fact, I was terrified about submitting. I’d sent out one story to a dozen places and not until nine months later was it accepted by upstreet. I had almost forgotten about it! Then on the afternoon of the deadline for the Raymond Carver Short Story Prize, a friend who swaps stories with me for edits sent me an e-mail reminding me to submit to June 30 deadlines. Again, I was alone in the house, cleaning my kitchen and everything was all over the tables, counters, and floor: half empty jam jars, pickles, bags of stale grains, shriveled fruit, pots and pans; you get the picture. For some reason, I told myself to drop what I was doing and get a story out. “The Third Element” was a favorite of mine. I polished it up and pushed “Submit.” It was easy. A month and a half later, I got the news that I won.

I guess winning and publishing shouldn’t be an important aspect to writing, because submitting with success is a complex endeavor. It takes guts to get stuff out and a tough skin to field rejections. Eight months later, I’ve submitted a dozen more stories to three or five or seven places per story, depending on the story. I’ve gotten a few stories accepted, some encouraging rejections at journals I greatly admire, and some flat-out no’s from a few of the “tough boys” as we call them in our writing group. This is my long way of saying that the editors and readers and the guest judge at Carve helped me feel like my work was worthy, which boosted my confidence. Success is 95% confidence, I’d say, after you’ve done writing you can be proud of.

C: Can you give us an update on your writing since the contest? Any recent or forthcoming publications or projects we should be on the lookout for?

JP: You couldn’t tell from the length of my interview answers, but I am enjoying writing flash these days. Since Carve, I’ve had three short shorts published in online journals:  Monkeybicycle, Spartan, and The Lascaux Review. I did a couple of really fun readings at the AWP Conference in Boston, where I also got to have lunch with Matthew Limpede. That was a bunch of fun. We talked and talked. Meeting writers and giving readings is maybe more interesting to me than publishing. I don’t know, though. I’m ready for another acceptance or two soon and I hope the editors are as wonderful as Matthew. I have a lot of stuff out there right now. It’s been a long cold winter in Vermont. I’m also working on a project called 365 Short Stories in 2013, which is a forum where I read and give a brief review of an online short story every day of the year. I’m almost to 100! Curating the project has introduced me to more magazines and writers than I ever imagined. One link always leads me to another. I needed the discipline to get out of my “print only” mindset. Anyone can join. Search for the group “365 Short Stories in 2013” on Facebook to find me.

About the Author: Jodi Paloni lives and writes in southern Vermont. Her short stories appear in Carve, upstreet, Monkeybicycle, Spartan, and The Lascaux Review. She earned an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She curates the forum365 Short Stories in 2013, in which she reads and comments on one short story a day. She blogs at Rigmarole.

The 14th annual Raymond Carver Contest is now open until May 15th.

Story Spotlight: "It Was So Long Ago" by Amber Krieger

“It Was So Long Ago” appeared in the winter 2010 issue of Carve.

When he was twenty-five, Henry Skinner killed a man. 

It was an accident. Driving in the dark, Henry couldn’t make out the figure on the road until the last minute. Not charged with any wrongdoing (it was technically the pedestrian’s fault), he was able to walk away. 

But as we learn in Amber Krieger’s winter 2010 Carve offering, walking away does not necessarily equate to moving on. Now at seventy-five, Henry remains haunted by the spectre of that pedestrian about whom he knows very little, other than that his name (whether it is his first or last, he is unsure) is Parker.

Krieger’s story gingerly explores the idea of legal versus moral culpability. In essence, just because Henry had no intent to kill Parker and is legally able to get off scot-free, at the end of the day the fact that he killed a man lingers on. How does someone live with himself, carrying that on his shoulder on a daily basis? Henry serves as a pathos-inducing exhibit of how such a life-changing event still echoes after fifty long years.

The story offers an interesting array of supporting characters, from Henry’s solicitous wife Helen (whom we only come to know of through snippets of phone conversation), his elusive daughter Jeannie, as well as, in the story’s climax, two Jehovah’s witnesses he encounters at the park offering promises of saving people’s souls.

By story’s end we are left to ask: “But can Henry’s soul actually be saved?”

Read “It Was So Long Ago” to find out.

Carver Contest Q&A with Susan Finch (2011 3rd Place Prizewinner)

Susan Finch (photo by Third Muse Portraits).

In this installment of the Carver Contest Q&A series, we touch base with Susan Finch, the 3rd place prizewinner from 2011. Soon to be an assistant professor at Belmont University, she recently talked with us about helicopters and life after the Carver Contest.

Carve: Can you tell us what inspired “Promises, Promises?”

Susan Finch: “Promises, Promises” is a story that I wrote for Mark Winegardner’s workshop while I was in the Ph.D. program at Florida State University. That semester, I’d also been teaching a class that required students to do research for a short story, and I thought it might be a good challenge for me as well. At the time, my mother’s girlfriend was working as a nurse for Air Evac, an air ambulance provider, and she had recently taken my mother up in the helicopter for a tour of the city. I’m always looking for interesting professions for my characters and I couldn’t think of another story that featured a main character who was an Air Evac nurse. I love thinking about how what my characters do for a living defines them and shapes their worlds. The research I did for that story added a certain texture to the plot that I wouldn’t have been able to provide without it. Actually, when I met Matthew, Carve’s fabulous editor, in Boston at AWP recently, I was delighted to discover he thought I had a lot more experience with helicopters than I actually do. I’ve never even been up in one!

C: Please describe your reaction to “Promises, Promises” being the 3rd place prizewinner for the 2011 Carver contest.

SF: I was thrilled when I found out that I was a prizewinner for Carve! The contest and the magazine are both fantastic. After “Promises, Promises” was published, I was contacted by Irene Goodman’s Agency as well as Nat Sobel’s, and both asked for a synopsis and excerpt of my novel. Ultimately, both of them passed on the manuscript I’m working on, but despite the initial disappointments, it’s always nice to have some outside feedback.

C: Has the contest affected your writing or the direction of your writing career in any way? If so, how?

SF: Hmmm, that’s a tough question. It’s always wonderful to be recognized, and I love the fact that my story is online in a great magazine available for anyone to read. I’m not sure who might come across the story, but I feel lucky that it’s out there on the airwaves.

C: Can you give us an update on your writing since the contest? Any recent or forthcoming publications/projects we should be on the lookout for?

SF: Most recently, I was published in Pembroke Magazine, a great literary magazine out of University of North Carolina at Pembroke. I’ve been working on a manuscript for a novel that I plan to start sending out again this month. But, perhaps, the most exciting change in the last few months is that I’ve just accepted a position as an Assistant Professor at Belmont University. I can’t wait to join the faculty in the fall!

The 14th annual Raymond Carver Contest is now open until May 15th.