Our second podcast is up for your listening pleasure (see our podcast player in the right hand column of this page). Fiction writers Caitlin Newcomer ("Only This Torn Room Forever Sleeps") and Stephen Tuttle ("Amanuensis") discuss their stories from issue #42. Hear Caitlin and Stephen talk about the birth of the stories, how they took shape, and how they felt being included in our grotesque issue. And hear their questions for each other. As a special treat, this podcast ends with the writers and HFR staff getting a little personal.If you haven't yet read Caitlin and Stephen's stories, head on over to our website to read before you listen.
You can listen to our first podcast from issue #42 with photographer Ellen Shershow-Peña and poet Gabriela Jauregui here.
We'd love to hear your comments, questions or feedback!
Caitlin Newcomer lives in Columbus, Ohio. Her current work is forthcoming in Nimrod International Journal and The Cincinnati Review.
Stephen Tuttle's fiction has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, The Colorado Review, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Utah.
1 comment:
Yay! I'm so happy this was posted today. As one of the prose editors who selected these works for issue 42 I was eager to hear Caitlin and Stephen talk about their pieces.
I was the first reader on Caitlin's piece. It'd come in for the Grotesque call and at that point we were weary of the grotesque. Not that the other stories submitted weren't good, but they just weren't what we were looking for. By the first paragraph of "Only this Torn Room" I thought "this is it!" I frantically read the rest of it hoping that it lived up to those first lines. It did that and more. For Caitlin's benefit, I knew it was using the Bluebeard story, but my co-editor Matthew Brennan didn't. We both loved it.
As for Stephen, I remember when we passed on his story that's featured in BWR (sorry Stephen!). It's titled "The Two Mr. Greens." After we did that we all looked at each other wondering what we had just done. We still talked about it for months. As in "Remember that amazing story?" In any case we got "Amanuensis" in to the office and weren't about to let it out of our sight. Stephen's work is simply amazing. I'd be excited to read anything by him.
When we sat down to organize the issue, the poetry editors had piles of grotesque poems and we had Caitlin's piece. As we talked about each of the stories, we realized that each of them fit our definition of grotesque in some way. We sat down and arranged our own "bloody puzzle" where each piece somehow, inexplicably connects to the rest.
These authors, along with the others featured, represent the best of what HFR has to offer. I'm so happy to have worked on this issue and thrilled to listen to the authors talk about their process.
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