FEATURED
Author Archives: Amber Sparks
Rescued Fiction #1
Hush by Meg Pokrass
We’re very excited to announce a new feature here at Emprise Review: Rescued Fiction. Each issue, we will feature a piece of fiction that we think is grand, and that sadly no longer has a home due to the demise of the online journal or magazine in which it was originally published. Most magazines can’t hang around forever, but we think good fiction ought to.
Our first featured author is Meg Pokrass and her 2010-Wigleaf-long-listed piece, “Hush.” This beautiful story was originally published in Bananafish; while we think it’s a sad sad thing that such a great publication has expired online, we are awfully glad to be able to present it to you here at Emprise Revie… Continue Reading
Interview: Matt Bell
I love that your stories are so varied in subject matter, in viewpoint, in tone—and yet, for me anyway, the unifying characteristic is this intense compassion for human suffering and weakness. Where do you find the ideas for your stories? Do you pull from life, from your reading, from art, from movies, from music—where does the variation come from? Are there any recurring themes you see in your writing? Any patterns?
I think anything and everything can be enough for a story. It doesn’t take much to make one go. In How They Were Found, stories were started from bits of language, from images, from historical stories, from fairy tales, from genre tropes. One was a dream before it was a story—which should not, cannot work, but yet thankfully did—and one came from wanting to focus in on a particular part of the body over and over, as often as I could in a story, to see what that did. A curiosity, then, and that might be the best way to describe the beginnings of most of my stories: I get curious, and then I get obsessed, and then I am off and writing. That’s really all it takes. Continue reading
Interview: Ethel Rohan
Your piece in the September issue of Emprise is so full of empathy for the man about to jump. It’s one of the things I love not only about this piece but your work in general; you have such compassion for your characters and this seems especially rare today when so many writers write in a more detached style–even the narrator is often alienated from him or herself. Do you think it’s important as a writer to care about your characters? And if so (or if not), why? Do you find stories working or not working because you do or don’t identify with or empathize with the people in them?
I do think it’s important to care about our characters. I also think care is complex and can run the range anywhere from the intention to honestly render our characters (be they lovable, despicable, or whatever) to flat out worrying for them, suffering for them, and even falling in love with them.
However, I don’t usually go into a piece with any conscious bias or particular sense of the characters I’m about to meet and how I will feel about them. Essentially, I enter the work blind, open to what will unfold.
More and more, I find the stories that don’t work are those where the characters and their dilemmas don’t interest, perplex, surprise, and move me. Continue reading
Interview: Anne Valente
The three pieces in Emprise this issue share a common theme: girls at the cusp of becoming women. Would you mind telling us a little more about the pieces and the series they’re part of? Where did the idea for the series come from? What was the urgency to write about girls, and particularly girls at this age?
This was a project that popped up out of nowhere for me a few months ago. I’d been writing short stories of longer length and also working on a novel, and had no real plans to create a series of any sort. But these short little vignettes started coming, in bursts between working on longer pieces, and I began to recognize the pattern among them. I also paid attention to my own interest in them. I’m not sure where the urgency comes from, other than my own attention to the ways girls change over the course of girlhood due to a number of external pressures and factors. I’ve linked together about 25 different years of ages for these separate girls, though I’m still not entirely happy with the project as a whole. I think I’ll call it a work-in-progress for now. My biggest challenge with it is finding an overarching umbrella to link them all without putting forth a voice for the experiences of all girls and women. Surely there’s some common ground that women share, but not a single narrative by any means. Continue reading
