Behind the Prose Transcript
Episode 4: This Monstrous Narrative with Aimee Baker
Broadcast date and time: Sunday, February 8, 2015 at 6 PM EST
Station: BlogTalkRadio.com/behindtheprose
Length: [00:59:30]
Host: Keysha Whitaker
Guest: Aimee Baker
Note: [italicized words in brackets were added in for clarification]
[KW] = Host Initials
[AB] = Interviewee Initials
[KW] Hey, It's the Behind the Prose Radio Show. The only one that explores and the
illuminates the craft of writing and its process through interviews with emerging and
established writers. I'm your host, Key Whitaker. Today, I'll talk to Aimee Baker whose
recent work appeared in the New Delta Review. Plus later you'll get a Behind the Prose
exclusive - an interview with New Delta Review Nonfiction Editor Michael Rands. But
first let's check in.
Did you write this week? Did you submit anything? I didn't write anything substantially
new but I finished an article on implicit bias that I'd been working on for about a month.
It's the first time I've done journalism in several years since I've been doing creative
nonfiction after finishing my MFA. I was kind of rusty. I had trouble with the intro and
figuring out what I needed to cut because I did some interviews with a sociologist, a
social psychologist, so I pitched it. And I'm waiting. So now its the waiting game. You
know about that right? My question is, how long do you wait to submit something
somewhere else before you decide that the silence is a no? Especially if your piece is
timely right? We'll get Aimee Baker's perspective when we talk to her. Right now, let's
pay some bills, sorta, in the metaphorical sense.
1:51 [PSA - YMCA]
2:54 [KW] So I've never read Frankenstein, and honestly I've never wanted to, but then I
found "This Monstrous Heart" by Aimee Baker. By the time she finished weaving in and
out of three narratives in this creative nonfiction essay I not only wanted to read every
autobiography about her messy life, I wanted to devour anything Aimee wrote including
her text messages. Aimee Baker is an adjunct instructor in English for Clinton
Community College in SUNY Plattsburgh, both located in rural upstate New York. She
holds an MFA in Fiction from Arizona State University. She is currently working a poetry
project about missing women in the United States, as well as a series of essays about
her brother's struggle with mental illness. Her work appears in journals such as the
Southern Review, Gold Coast, and the Massachusetts Review. It is with great pleasure
that I welcome Aimee Baker to Behind the Prose.
4:01 [AB] Thank you for having me.
[KW] 4:01 You are very, very, welcome. To start off, let's talk about your writing life. How
did you know you wanted to be a writer?
[AB] 4:15 I think the first thing I remember about writing was actually reading and sort of
loving and enjoying reading. My dad would take me to the bookstore, and even though
we didn't have a lot of money, he would buy whatever books I pulled out of the shelves.
That was part of my experience growing up. In eighth grade I wrote my first short story
which was filled with a lot of darkness and death because . . . you know, middle school?
[Laughter] And so, I turned it in for class and it got picked for our middle school literary
journal. So my teachers had read it and my math teacher actually read it. She stopped
me in the hallway. She said, "Your writing is very good but could you write something
nice?"
5:29 [KW] Your first criticism.
5:29 [AB] Yeah. 8th grade. Honestly, I sort of stared at her and walked away. I was
thinking in my head, "Nice. Nice? Nice." I didn't really have any ideas that fit that criteria
so I stopped writing. Let this be a warning to teachers out there. It wasn't until I went to
my undergrad and I met my now husband there, and he had majored in creative writing
and suggested that I might want to take some writing classes for fun because I told him
that story. I tried it and remembered my love for reading and writing and creating. So did
it for a guy, but . . . [laughter]
6:25 [KW] You started in eighth grade with fiction. What genre did you begin writing in
when you picked up again.
6:39 [AB] Fiction. I took almost solely fiction classes at my undergrad. I think I took one
creative nonfiction class. When I went to get my MFA, I focused in on fiction.
6:56 [KW] When did you begin to work with nonfiction?
7:01 [AB] I took an undergrad class in nonfiction. I was not particularly successful at
figuring out what to write or how to write my experience. My instructors were very
supportive, but I just wasn't mentally there yet. This essay, "This Monstrous Heart" which
is in New Delta Review is my first - my second real strong attempt to do it on my own.
This has been an evolving process.
7:50 [KW] What led you to the MFA?
7:50 [AB] Well, I had majored as an undergrad in history and writing. I thought about
majoring in English Lit, but I was debating for a really long time. Finally, I was just like let
me just do this thing: focus my attention on writing and allow myself the time to think
about writing without some sort of distractions. It was sort of just like a gamble on my
part.
8:39 [KW] How do you think going through the MFA process improved your writing?
8:51 [AB] Well through the MFA process, I found some really great mentors. I went to
Arizona State University where Melissa Pritchard and Jewell Parker Rhodes and they
were really instrumental in supporting my work and supporting me. I found some friends
there who I knew were reliable readers of my work. But what I learned most is that I'm
not great at workshops. [Laughter]
9:24 [KW] Why? Why is that?
9:27 [AB] I still get too internally defensive about the workshop process. I realize that I'm
not the person who can listen fairly to criticism. It hurts a little too much. Someone could
just be pointing out, you really need a comma here, and I'm like "What kind of comma?!"
Actually what I learned most to trust my own instincts for writing and to follow that path.
In a big sense, going through the workshop process was beneficial much more long
term. I don't have a writing group that I use. I don't necessarily always show people my
work before I'm comfortable with it, so that was a really growing experience for me as a
writer.
[KW] 10:35 In terms of your daily practice, when do you write?
[AB] 10:39 It's definitely not daily. Sometimes not even weekly. I have a toddler so it's
kind of at this point in my life; it's whatever small moments I can get. My drive to work
everyday is about 30 minutes, a nice quiet thirty minutes so I can contemplate and think.
So it's the writing process that happens in your head and not necessarily what happens
on the page. I try to grab five minutes here and ten minutes there when I can and accept
that I'm not in a place anymore where I have hours of time or dedicated time to write.
[KW] 11:42 Can you describe what your submission process is like?
[AB] 11:45 Yes. I've always been pretty solid about submitting regularly. Right now when
I feel like a piece is ready, and I'm ready to send it out, I usually give myself a challenge
of some sort. Usually it's a ridiculously unachievable challenge to myself, like: "You will
submit to five places every day for a month." [Laughter]
[KW] 12:16 I'm familiar.
[AB] 12:20 [Laughter.] It's really like, not sustainable in my life to actually have happen.
So I make that challenge to myself, and I manage like a week or two weeks doing it
before giving up. The amount of time that I actually spent doing it is what happened. So
every month I try to come with a little unachievable challenge for myself.
[KW] 12:54 Are you still writing more fiction than nonfiction?
[AB] 12:58 No, so I really haven't written fiction in quite a while. Mostly what I'm writing
currently is poetry and nonfiction.
[KW] 13:13 You said that you don't really have a readers or writers group, but you said
that you meant your husband when he had taken creative writing. Do you let him read
some of your rough drafts? Or are you really that private about it.
[AB] 13:28 I do. [Laughter] He's allowed to. It used to be that we - we are good
at critiquing each other's work. His MFA is in Writing for Children, and so we write really
very differently. We have different ideas of work can do and should do, which is not to
say that we can't read each others work. We'll occasionally exchange things, like if I
have a question. In "This Monstrous Heart" I needed someone to bounce ideas off of so
I gave it to him. Also, I sometimes share with friends that I met in my MFA program, but
it's mostly like, "Can you answer this thing for me?"
[KW} 14:32 Earlier you talked about learning from the workshop, how to trust yourself.
How do you decide? What is that when you allow feedback to alter your writing, even if
its something your husband says and when do you ignore it?
[AB] 14:49 That's a really good question because it's not that feedback isn't valuable and
important. I've made really dramatic changes to some work based on recommendations.
I guess it's the point where, if someone gives me feedback and I can say, "Oh they
actually have a good point there," or if my immediate reaction is "I really don't want to do
that to this piece" or "That's not what I want this to be or to do." It's really like that gut
reaction to it. And I trust it. I trust that somewhere, somehow there's a direction my work
needs to go and I internally know it, even if external factors are saying otherwise.
[KW] 15:55 The essay that we're going to talk about today, "This Monstrous Heart,"
is about your brother's mental illness. How does your family feel about you writing on
personal issues?
[AB] 16:08 Hmmmmm. So my brother and I are currently estranged. He doesn't know
this piece exists and he definitely doesn't know that I'm writing it, so I don't know what
his reaction would be. My mom - it took her until like last week to finally read this piece.
She really didn't have much to say either way about it. She said she wanted more to
happen towards the end. She wanted the continuation of the story, and I was like "Mom,
you know what happened."
[KW] 17:05 Did she want the continuation because she felt what would come after
because she felt that something that would come after would change the reader's
opinion of your brother or his outcome?
[AB] 17:23 She said the piece is a really realistic and true to life interpretation of what
happened. She felt it was that, but I think she wanted - that this is also a painful part of
her life - I think she wanted like a bigger wrapped up conclusion, how we all fared kind of
ending.
[KW] 18:02 You’re currently working on a poetry project on missing women. How did you
get that idea?
[AB] 18:09 So, it's now been years since I started working on it. I'm really only able to
write a few missing women poems, as I call them. I was living in Phoenix and there was
a news article. It was 2008, and this news article came up about how this woman who
they know as Maricopa Jane Doe. She was thrown from a car on the I-10 leaving
Phoenix. And they brought her to the hospital where she later passed away. In 2008 it
was the ninth anniversary of them finding her. They didn't know who she was. This news
article was to gather some more attention about her case. The facts about her were that
she had a small blue heart tattooed on her. And I think on some level of - maybe I was
naive - but I was like how many missing people are there with blue heart tattoos? Why
can't they figure out who she is? This feels like it should be open and shut and you
know. SO I did a quick Google search and typed in missing persons, blue heart tattoo,
and there were like eight cases, eight missing person cases where the missing people
had blue heart tattoos. I was like, "Oh, ohhh." So something that feels like it should be a
really strong identifying factor is not in this case. So sort of from there, I found out that
there's tons of people around the country, their hobbies, how they spend their free time
is trying to solve individual missing persons cases or unidentified person cases. From
there, I wrote my first poem about two sisters who had lived in Mesa, Arizona, who had
gone missing in 1974. So I wrote that poem trying to figure out their experience, sort of
in my small way, trying to call attention to this case, this case that people had forgotten
about.
[KW] 21:05 As you say that, the content sort of calls to mind your eighth grade teacher
who said "Oh it's too dark. Why can't you write something quote-unquote nice? And
hearing this you find yourself drawn to a missing person - absence - and darkness there
as well. And we talk about This Monstrous Heart we have there's a Frankenstein and the
death and everything that encompasses with Mary Shelley. Do you see that as - Is that
your zone? Is that your space?
[AB] 21:43 Yeah, it's the space that I am currently in. I get a lot of criticism for that. It's
kind of like that eighth grade teacher all over again. I have people who say to me, "Why
would you spend time thinking about this?" or "Why can't you think about other things?"
or that sort of stuff. I guess, I just try to think of how do I answer that? What's a good
answer for that? No one answer I could really think of sort of fits but sometimes it feels
like I'm falling into the darkness and once I'm in there, I'm turning on a light, once I'm
there. Maybe it's a small light or an inefficient light, but it's there.
[KW] 22:40 When we come back we're going to talk more with Aimee Baker. We are
going to get into the craft of "This Monstrous Heart" on Behind the Prose. Stay with us.
22:57 PSA: Foundation for a Better Life / Marlon Shirley. DHS - Say Something
[KW]
24:03 We're back. You're listening to Behind the Prose and we're talking to writer Aimee
Baker. We are going to get into "This Monstrous Heart" which was published in the
December 2014 issue of New Delta Review. I hope that you gone to our website earlier
in the week, downloaded the essay, pulled it up on the New Delta Review website, so
you can follow along, listen, and learn. Aimee, would you please read us an excerpt from
the essay?
[AB] 24:27 So I think I'm going to start with the opening three paragraphs of the essay
because they set up, sort of the experience and my drive to write this essay.
[KW] 25:37 Thank you. I'm actually glad that you chose to read the introduction. I spoke
to Michael Rands earlier who is the nonfiction editor of New Delta Review and I asked
him this:
25:51 [KW] Why did you select "This Monstrous Heart?"
25:53 [MR] Well, when we get a lot of submissions obviously. I'm generally looking for
something that is striking and catching right from the beginning. "This Monstrous Heart"
opens with a brilliant opening line and sets up a brilliant premise right at the beginning.
It's very nicely written; it's poetic and lyrical but the language is also really nicely
controlled. Then, obviously, if you read on a little further, it begins to become - it's really
complex. There's this personal narrative taking place; on another level, it's an
exploration looking at the romantic poets, Mary Wilson Croft and Percey Bushy Shelley,
and a third level looking at the story of "Frankenstein" which was written by Mary
Shelley, and she kind of uses them really nicely so that each element talks to the other.
It's just a really nicely layered, complex, well-written piece. It just stood out from all the
other stuff that I had read.
[KW] 27:16 How did you come to that opening: "My brother believes his body is
inhabited by the devil."
[AB] 27:26 Well, so that's not - that came later. The opening line sort of speaks to one of
my writing challenges I gave myself. On my car ride that I talked about earlier, I pass by
this church that has these huge church signs outside, with these sort of at times,
thought-provoking, sometimes - for me at least - angering signs that tell you various
things. This week it was a good one; it was "Like Scotch tape, you can't see God, but He
is there." And so I'm agnostic, sort of bordering on atheist, so I pass by these signs and
I'm in thinking mode, sort of thinking what they're trying to say and what they're trying to
convey. AT some point I got in my head I was going to write something based on these
signs. I didn't know what, so I started to write down all their sayings every week to try to
figure out what it was I wanted to say. At first I thought it was going to be a collection of
poetry. And so, then, one of the signs was "The Devil doesn't fear a dusty Bible." And so
I started thinking about the image of the Bible and what that means, and how that fits
into my life, which is really separate from biblical issues, then I realized, oh no, it's
actually not. At the end of the essay, there's an image, there's a Bible that our family had
that my brother ended up burning behind our barn, and that's the image that I started
with in my head. I was like, well how do I get there. Thankfully that sign had given me
the concept of the devil and I remembered a good percentage of his delusions revolve
around the devil, so that's where "My brother believes his body is inhabited by the devil"
seems like a fitting opening.
[KW] 30:09 How did you get the idea to weave the three narratives in one?
[AB] 30:15 I had read, Anna Journey's piece called "Strange Merchants" which was also
- you can read it online as well. When she rights her essays, she's been doing a lot with
the concept of the braided essays. I liked that technique; I thought it was an interesting
way to talk about personal experience through connects and disconnects in these big
ways. I had squirreled that away in my head, "Some point I want to write a braided
essay," and so I started to write this piece. I was going to write it not as a braided essay;
I was going to write it just as this experience with my brother, but I didn't know exactly
what I wanted it to say, how I wanted it to resonate in a way that's bigger than us, I
guess? I had this job where I was in a really public space and kept on encountering
people who knew us growing up, right? We live in a small town so you run into everyone.
Like, so it doesn't matter, anything that I've ever done in my life -if we've had a teacher,
they're like "How are you?" and I'm like, "I'm great" and then they're like, how's your
brother? So I sort of have to always answer that question. If I say to people, "Oh, I don't
know if you knew but he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and they want to know more
about it. I end up saying, "We're estranged. We don't really talk." Then I get "the look,"
this look of how could you not be connected with your brother? Like what kind of person
are you? Which then, in my thought process, I was kind of like, this is like the Victor
Frankenstein conundrum that he creates, this being and he should be connected to him
and he should have relationship with him but he doesn't. Essentially, what Mary Shelley
asks of us is to essentially really question who the monster is in Frankenstein. I was like
oh, that's a life question that I have. That's sort of how I was thinking that it seemed like
an appropriate question to my brother's illnesses is to actually ask that question myself.
Is he the monster? Is his illness the monster? Am I the monster? Who are we placing
that on?
[KW] 33:29 And, I believe Michael mentioned this as well, is what's interesting for me in
the very beginning and through most of the essay, until like the very end, the reader
doesn't get a sense that the narrator is putting any emotion into this experience with her
brother. How much did - Did you have to go back and tone down and edit out elements
that would have portrayed that? Was that intentional?
[AB] 34:00 Um, I don't think that was necessarily intentional. I think if you've lived
through experiences with violence or with sort of this overwhelming terror in your life,
you have to think and come up with a way to talk about it, either you talk about it or you
don't. Maybe most often, I don't talk about it, being that through a way of talking about it
that doesn't portray emotion, so I think that comes through unintentionally in the essay.
[KW] 34:46 How did you decide, we open with your brother and then we transition into
what Michael pointed out is literary criticism. I didn't realize it the first time I read the
essay because I was so engrossed with the story line, and I wanted to get back to the
brother when I was with Frankenstein, and then I wanted to get back to Shelly, but you
weaved in the literary criticism, that second element, how did you decide when to return
to the previous narrative?
[AB] 35:23 Um, so, I think that each section essentially is told in chronological order. So
my experience with my brother is chronological order; my experience recounting Mary
Shelley's life is chronological, and the retelling of Frankenstein with the literary criticism
also follows that path. So the real measure of control was mostly in creating tension
between all the sections. I didn't want the readers to get bogged down in literary criticism
and sort of leave that behind. I needed those to pull through in terms of image and
tension. Every section I leave off, I try to have a strong resonating image that resonates
through the rest of the piece or something that pulls in, some level of emotion.
[KW] 36:32 Actually the voice of the devil in the brother's narrative is something that is
pulled through, and it comes to a crescendo. I think at the point where it comes to that
crescendo is when Mary Shelley is now surrounded by all this death - or right at that
point. So, when you constructed this, did you write the stories separately and then
combine them, looking for those points?
[AB] 37:04 My writing process is really slow. And I really only like to move forward in the
writing. So when I'm writing pieces, so I would write the piece about my brother and
leave it there and try to figure out what parts of Mary Shelley's life sort of fit with that
piece. So I would write each section, and I wrote it in the current order than it is in.
[KW] 37:48 That's pretty amazing. [Laughter] You know, down south when someone
cooks something, and it's very, very good, the people say, "Oh you put your foot in it."
Aimee, you put your foot in this essay.
[Laughter]
38:04 [AB] Thank you. It was difficult to write. But, I had just had a baby when I wrote
this, so I was really thinking in general about family and what family means. I'd tried to
write about my relationship with him, my brother, before, the pieces just - it wasn't the
right time. This time, things fell together, much better.
[KW] 38:48 We're gonna take a quick break. I wanna give our listeners a chance to call
in to talk to Aimee and ask a few questions about craft. I'm going to go to an instrumental
- the music that you've been hearing at the beginning of the show the last few weeks is
by an artist in the UK, Redvers-West Boyle and you can find him through my website,
BehindtheProse.com. And this is his track, Mermaids Tears.
[Musical interlude]
[KW] 40:35 Hey we're back on Behind the Prose, and we're talking to Aimee Baker
about her essay, This Monstrous Heart. Aimee, if you remember, when did you start this
essay? How long was the process from drafting to submission?
[AB] 40:52 So I started this one, I know because I had my daughter, I started it in 2012. I
had something else that was due; I was doing a freelance piece that I didn't really want
to work on [laughter] so I had childcare, which is not always easy for me to arrange. So I
had someone watching my daughter, and I had this time that I was supposed to be doing
this freelance work, and instead I started working on this. This one is actually a really
faster write for me. I think it took me about two weeks, start to finish, maybe an hour a
day to work on it or edit it. In terms of submitting it, I tried to get my husband to read it,
but he didn't.
[KW] 41:56 Why?
[AB]
42:00 He's a really slow reader. I don't know what was going on. I was like, can you read
my piece? He was like, "I'm busy." He said it nicer than that, so I just said, I'm going to
do this; I'm going to submit it. So I submitted it to four or five places and got a few
rejections and a re-write request. The re-write request - it was very nice - they asked me
to do a pretty major overhaul of the piece, expanding on the personal sections with my
brother and coming to a different ending. So, at that point, I sent it - I wasn't sure I felt
about it. My gut wasn't telling me anything, so I think it over to my friend who is a poet Megan Brinson - and she's really excessively brilliant and thinks about things on a critical
theory kind of way, which my brain doesn't go that way. I asked her opinion of it. She
wrote back rather quickly, and said 'I think they have a point about the essay. Not
expanding the sections about your brother, but I think they have a point about where the
ending is.' So originally the ending left off with the image of the Bible behind the barn,
burnt. She felt like it didn't give enough closure. So I put the essay away for like two
years. So I was like I'm going to get back to working on it, and I just never had time. This
summer, I had time. I was lucky enough to be accepted at the Vermont Studio Center,
and so I had time to look at and decide what I wanted to do. What I decided what I
wanted to do was simply add on two sentences at the end.
[KW] 44:51 What portion of the process was researching? Had you studied Frankenstein
or Shelley?
[AB] 45:02 My first experience with Mary Shelley, I read her in my 12th grade English
class, so shout out to my teacher, Elizabeth Baker for having me read this.
[KW] 45:18 Any relation?
[AB] 45:21 [Laughter] No. No. She's very lovely so I wish there was. She had us all
read Mary Shelley at the time. She had us read Genesis and a Joseph Campbell excerpt
at the same time. Then when I was in my undergrad, I did a research project about
gothic novels, which there's some gothic elements in Mary Shelley. So I re-read it again
then. So it's been a book that I've thought about and have multiple copies of the book. I
highly recommend you read it. So her life, Mary Shelley's life is the part that I had to
research a little bit more. Originally I knew that I wanted to do the thread with my brother
and Frankenstein, but the third part of the braid, I didn't know what that was until I read
more about Mary Shelley's life, and I was like, that's the third part.
[KW] 46:46 I appreciate your intuitiveness, and I just want to share what Michael Rands
has to say about how he thinks other writers can benefit from your essay.
[MR] 47:01 What can writers learn? Well, I guess as I said about a striking beginning,
that's definitely always - that's the kind of advice an editor or people selecting work will
always give. You have to open with a strong sentence, a strong paragraph at the
beginning and people are looking at so much work and it can be quite overwhelming at
times, and you're always looking for something that is going to jump out at you. So I
think this Monstrous Heart, if people read it, they'll see how from the very beginning she
creates a striking exciting, interesting scenario. I think also in terms of the nonfiction
genre, it's interesting to see how you can really stretch that genre by mixing personal
narrative with literary criticism, with essay, so I think anyone who is interesting in writing
creative nonfiction should read this piece and see the way that you can weave these
multiple strands together because that really elevates the piece above a more kind of
straightforward piece that was just personal narrative or essay, for example.
[KW] 48:25 Kudos to you Aimee Baker.
[AB] 48:29 Thank you.
[KW] 48:33 Thank you for joining us on Behind the Prose, and by us, I mean me in this
closet in Pennsylvania, and all the rest of you writers out there listening. Stay with us.
When we come back, I'm going to give our exclusive interview with Michael Rands of
New Delta Review.
[BREAK] St. Jude's Cedric the Entertainer /
[KW] 49:28 Michael Rands is the nonfiction editor of New Delta Review. New Delta
Review is a literary journal produced by graduate students in the MFA Program in
Creative Writing at Louisiana State University. NDR has published work of emerging and
established writers since 1984. Each issue includes original fiction, creative nonfiction,
poetry, reviews, and artwork. Thank you for being here today Michael.
[MR] 49:58 Oh sure, it's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
[KW] 50:00 How did you become a staff member at NDR?
[MR] 50:03 Well, I'm not from this country originally; I'm from South Africa. I came over
here to do my MFA which I began last year. And Hannah Reed who is currently the
editor, she sent out emails to everyone who was going to be a new MFA and asked if we
were interested in working on it and in what capacity. There were a few positions open
and I was interested in either the fiction or the nonfiction, so I sent her my CV and
motivational letter, and then she asked if I would be the assistant nonfiction editor. So
that's what I did the first semester. And then the nonfiction editor moved to poetry, and I
took over the position as nonfiction editor, so that's where I am currently.
[KW] 51:03 Why is working on the staff important to you?
[MR] 51:06 Why is it important to me? Well first of all, for any writer, I think it's very
useful to be on the other side of the process. So, you know we are obviously always get
our own work published somewhere or eventually publish books, and it's very useful to
see okay, this is the kind of stuff that catches people's eyes. So from a personal
perspective, it's useful in that way. It's also interesting because you get the chance to
read a huge range of stuff that's almost just below the surface, just below the radar, but
there's so much good an interesting stuff that's there and it's exciting to know that you're
sort of on the forefront looking for new stuff and new voices. Also, there's very nice
people who work at NDR and Hannah as the editor makes quite an effort to organize
reading parties, social events, and it's nice to be a part of that team. It adds a good
dimension to the MFA experience.
[KW] 52:25 What are the strongest elements of nonfiction published by NDR?
[MR] 52:34 Well, I think what, our current aesthetic that we're looking for, we specifically
say that we like kind of hybrid pieces, experimental pieces, so something like this that
we were talking about earlier like Aimee Baker's This Monstrous Heart is a really fine
example of the kind of work we're looking for and we get excited about. So it's different
from a more kind of traditional nonfiction journal that would publish straightforward
journalism, but also we're not just looking a straightforward personal narrative with out it
linking to greater issues. We are really happy when we get these kind of multi-layered
complex pieces that are sort of able to marry personal narrative with investigative
through nonfiction essay. I think we've done quite well to find stuff like that in the last
edition, and hopefully in this next edition as well.
[KW] 53:48 On average, how many submissions does the nonfiction section see?
[MR] 53:59 I'm not sure where we are at right now. I guess we - it's probably nowhere
near what we get in fiction. I guess it's probably 120 submissions that we get for one
issue. Then we'll pick out maybe two or three out of that.
[KW] 54:24 What's the process like for whittling it down to those two or three? Are there
multiple readers doing that? Are you reading them all yourself?
[MR] 54:37 There's myself, the assistant editor Mary, who just joined us now in the last
few weeks; we all divide the pieces up between the two of us. Then we read them and if
we find something that we think is really strong, then we alert the other reader and say
won't you please have a look at this. There's a little sort of comment section on the side,
where if I like something or she like's something, we'll write a quick sort of write up about
why we think the piece is working. And then the other person reads it and then if they
agree that it is really good as well, then we will notify the editor, then maybe the deputy
editor will read it as well. So there will have been probably like, at least four people will
have read it before we would contact someone and ask if it's still available. Then, after
that, there's the editorial process; that involves myself of the deputy nonfiction editor as
well as the editor of the whole journal.
[KW] 55:48 So ultimately, who makes the final call?
[MR] 55:53 Well, I mean the editor of the whole journal can, if she feels very strongly that
something would not work, she can say no. But it's generally been the nonfiction editor
can make the call, if the nonfiction editor can make a strong case for it, then the editor
will be willing to go along with it. There's a dual decision process. The editor can finally
always say, no absolutely not, but that hasn't been the case so far.
[KW] 56:40 On average, how many nonfiction pieces do you run in each issue?
[MR] 56:46 Well, I think we run anywhere from two to four pieces. But that could change
if we found some really strong but much shorter pieces. Generally the pieces that we've
run are somewhere between three and four-and-a-half thousand words. But I'm also on
the lookout for like shorter things that might work really well, and that could perhaps
change the number.
[KW] 57:18 Thank you very much Michael Rands.
[MF] 57:23 Thank you for the interview. I appreciate it.
[KW] 57:27 Thank you. Our listeners appreciate it too and I'm sure they're going to check
out the website to find out how they can submit for the next issue.
[MR] 57:34 Yes, that would be great. So NDRMAG.org and there's all the information
about how to submit and what would be great if readers looked at some of the stuff we
have published already.
[KW] 57:50 Awesome, thank you.
[MR] 57:50 Great. Thank you and best of luck with your show.
[KW] 58:24 Thanks for joining me on this edition of Behind the Prose. I'm looking forward
to next week with Dr. Andrew Bomback. It's Keysha Whitaker. I'll see you next time.