Ed Winkofsky

Ed Winkofsky is a writer and lawyer in Chicago. His short story “Walter” appeared in FWJ’s fall 2012 issue. He is currently writing more Walter stories. We asked him to tell us a bit more about Walter and his writing process. Here is what he says.

Why did you choose an amusement park parking lot as the setting for “Walter”?

There are really two answers to that.  First, and I think that this is always the answer, I picked a place that was interesting to me.  The parking lots at those parks can be astoundingly huge – shocking even, the way the size of a Wal-Mart use to be shocking.  There are, or seem to be, rules of procedure.  The attendees tend to fall into set classes (e.g. families with young children, tweens with chaperones, teens, etc.).  So there is a lot going on there, a lot of opportunity for exploration, and that is all I know when I get started.

Second, once I get going, I have to make sure that it is still working for the character and the story.  There is something sad about the parks themselves – everyone chasing amusement – or, if not sad, there is at least the opportunity to fail – seeking fun and not finding it.  At the same time, the parking lot is right next door to the fun.  Walter wants to genuinely be a part of that world and so he gets as close as he can.  At that point, I decided, Ok, the setting seems to be working, adding some real value to the story as a whole.

It is also a bit absurd – and I like that.  Maybe that was three answers.

Did you have a specific amusement park in mind when you were writing the story?

Growing up, we would spend occasional summer days at King’s Island near Cincinnati, Ohio, and later at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio.  Those places are both a part of it, but so is the parking lot at Six Flags Great America.  I can see it from the highway when driving up to Wisconsin.

Are there certain people in your life who provide inspiration for your characters? If so, do you piece together each character from a few people or just one?

The characters are, at a minimum, always composites of more than one person.  There is a little bit of me and a little bit of my family and friends.  For example, I knew a guy in college who drove a fabulous, gray Buick Century.  I remember the way it would rock from side to side whenever we hit a bump in the road, as if it was proving to the world just how elegant it could be.  Of course, the similarities between Walter and the kid who owned the Buick probably end with the car.  This may seem a bit ridiculous to say, but the characters are also made up.  A piece from this real person or that real person, sure, but also a piece from my concept of what “loneliness” or “middle-age” or “bearded man” means.

Loneliness is a very strong theme in “Walter.” Though brief, the personal ads give readers a quick yet deep glimpse into the lives of your characters. Do you use the personal ads device in some of your other stories? Also, how did you come up with using them to aid in character development?

I have not used the personal ad device in any of my other stories and, frankly, I have mixed feelings about [the ads].  They are gimmicky and are, I believe, a bit antiquated.  Yet, they are also so efficient and such an obvious talisman of the lonely life.  In the end, I left them in, telling myself that it is ok to do something that feels lazy and distracting if it is also working.

As to their origin, I, like everyone else, was reading David Foster Wallace, and, like everyone else, was enthralled with the footnotes.  So much information in such a small space.

As an aside, I do really enjoy loneliness as a theme and feel as if everyone completely underestimates the impact that it has on the trajectory of a life.

You mention David Foster Wallace as a source of inspiration. Which other writers have influenced your work? How so?

This one is always a tough one.  I am not messing around when I say that everything I read influences my work.  Example: Paul Luikart, a local guy and fellow [University of Chicago] Graham School alum, was just nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  Paul is a friend of mine.  He wrote me a funny Christmas card one year.  I find myself stealing from that to craft my next story.  But, I am sure that this is not what you were looking for when you asked this question.??Honestly, I really have no idea.  I am impacted by the stories that I read, certainly, but I cannot tell you who is channeled into my writing and who is not.  I read CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders just last year, and that resonated with me.  The way that he tells stories – blending real and unreal into irreverent and ridiculous truth – is the way that I would like to tell stories.  Paul Auster was big for me in some of my more formative years – college and immediately after – The New York Trilogy, The Music of Chance.  Gabriel Garcia Marquez was also a big deal – both short stories and his longer works.  I like stories that are accessible but not pandering.  I am insanely jealous of Patrick Somerville (another local), who seems to have the universe whisper the essence of dialogue into his ear while cranking out drafts of terrific novels.  All influences to be sure, but I don’t know how, exactly, or how much.?? And right now I am reading The Once and Future King and loving it.  Will T.H. White have a big influence on my work?  Who knows, but I will never look at the migration of geese in the same way and have been reminded how amazing it is to learn new things.

What is the main thing you want readers to take away from your writing as a whole?

Gosh, Annie, I don’t know.  I guess I want the same things for readers that I want for me – as reader, writer, husband, father, and person.  I want to be entertained and engaged, and to uncover unexpected and elegant but nonetheless messy truths.  I want to get done with something and say, “That was fun,” and to mean it in a simple way, but to also know that whatever it was took me someplace new and, at the very best, will come back to me to enrich a future moment or force me to reconsider the past.  Simple, right?

– Interview by Annie Bruckner, Media Assistant at Fifth Wednesday Journal.

Nina Corwin. Photo courtesy of Nina Corwin.

Poet, editor, literary curator, and psychotherapist are just some of Nina Corwin’s identities. She first became involved in Fifth Wednesday Journal (FWJ) in 2007, when the journal was just starting. “I agreed to edit one issue because I was afraid to get in over my head,” she admits. “I had to be careful since I have a tendency to get overcommitted.” After serving as the guest poetry editor of the journal’s inaugural issue, she started helping host FWJ events before returning as the guest poetry editor for the fourth issue. Nina is currently an advisory editor and still helps host FWJ readings. She has become an integral part of the FWJ team.

When editing the first issue, she and Vern Miller, the founder and publisher of FWJ, reckoned that having different guest editors for each issue would prevent one stylistic bias from overtaking the journal. She also mentions that having several readers screen submissions ensures that one reader’s aesthetic isn’t “weeding out” pieces that are truly good. As for her own literary preferences when editing FWJ, she says, “I was really interested in bringing in more of what some people call ‘experimental’ poets, what others might call ‘innovative’ poets.”

Creating a stylistically balanced journal is just one of the challenges editors face. Publishing a journal featuring both emerging and established writers is important because it introduces new talent to the literary world while attracting recognition from the literary world. Finding this range of writers, however, is difficult: “When a journal starts and has no reputation, some of the highest quality writers aren’t going to submit to a journal that hasn’t proved itself,” she says. Fortunately, Nina is great at connecting people and has helped draw in talented writers to FWJ. She is also very active in the Chicago poetry scene, which she describes as “incredibly and wonderfully diverse,” and she often curates poetry readings. She credits her days of waitressing as something that helped develop her interest in curating; she enjoyed putting together a pleasing meal for others and sees curating as a kind of extension of that: “[When you are] curating, hosting, you are welcoming authors and lovers of writing. You are serving both of those groups, and you are presenting—creating—a wonderful meal of literature.”

Sharing work and talking about it play an important part in the literary community, Nina says. While she relishes her role in bringing together readers and writers at readings, she also loves what happens in writing workshops. “The conversation between writers that begins,” she says, “is one of the vibrant, vital aspects of my experience as writer, curator, and editor. It brings me into conversation not only with my work but also [with other writers] in an exchange of ideas.” This exchange of ideas, Nina notes, can happen anywhere. She acknowledges that while social media sites are full of people sometimes connecting over silly things, they also provide a space for more serious conversations, including literary ones. “I think it’s the community aspects of those formats that draw people to want to read and to want to write. It’s great not only in fostering writers, but in engaging and motivating kids to take part in literacy.” Social media sites, she points out, play an important role in developing today’s and tomorrow’s literary community.

Nina’s focus on bringing things together—whether it’s poems in a journal, people at a reading, or writers in a workshop—reveals her own poetic inclinations. Her most recent book of poetry, The Uncertainty of Maps, brings together her diverse interests and identities in its themes: “The themes in the book—imperfection, uncertainty, and impermanence—really reflect [the] joining of my interests. It’s a convergence of my psychotherapist self, my poet self, and my aging philosopher self.” Gathering together these various aspects of her life and merging them into a larger work gives them more weight. And this, she says, is what FWJ is doing as well. “[Fifth Wednesday Journal] really creates something that is far more than the sum of its parts.”

– Interview by Annie Bruckner, Media Assistant at Fifth Wednesday Journal.

Sky diving in Dakar with Captain Jeannec Raphoz, 1976 © Dr Michel Royon / Wikimedia Commons

Let’s talk about risk.  Specifically, the lack of and misuse of risk in the construction of fiction.   When an editor rejects your work and sends you a note that says something like “The story is well put together, but it feels too neat” or “There’s something missing” or “I feel like I’ve read this story before,” they’re talking about a lack of risk.  In a successful story, readers sink down into the narrative and move moment to moment with the characters.  What compels them forward is often the frisson created by the unexpected.  Understand this: when a character behaves in a natural but unexpected way, that’s risky.  When you make a narrative decision that doesn’t conform to convention, that’s risky.  When you make stylistic or structural or voice decisions that feel fresh or that use an old technique in a new context, that’s damn risky.

These risks are the life-blood of fiction.  If you risk nothing, you bore your reader.  Every time you give your reader a little goose from the unexpected, you risk their abandoning your story because it doesn’t conform to expectations.  But readers don’t want you to conform.  They want you to hint at the conformity that makes them comfortable before abandoning it in favor of innovation that invests them in the world of your story.

Unearned risk is as bad as no risk at all. A story that takes risks that aren’t mandated by the core of the story irritates the reader.  Either way, you’re leaving your reader dissatisfied.  Stylistic, structural decisions have to be in service to the content of the story.  I don’t care about the voice trick you developed unless it leads to the heart of the narrative.  Characters who behave in risky ways just to be risky are marked with the heavy hand of a writer intent on shuffling characters around a board rather than letting them live organically within the world of the story.  Going to fracture your timeline?  Great, but you better have a reason for doing it.

The best way to learn how to earn the risks you take is to read the work of writers who take chances for a reason, and emulate them.  I’m not advocating the theft of their specific risks.  This leads to a world where there are a million uninteresting clones of David Foster Wallace.  I’m advocating copying the functionality of what they do.  I’m re-reading Adam Johnson’s masterful novel The Orphan Master’s Son. Halfway through the book, he changes the voice, structure, and focus of his narrative.  In the hands of a lesser writer, that shift would be hokey and distracting.  It would feel like Johnson broke the contract established by the first half of the book.  But the author earns that risk by making the shift reflect not just the thematic work he does in the novel but also the inner lives of the characters.

Great writers are honest to who their characters are and to the world they live in, and they take huge risks so that they can remain honest to those characters and to their stories because here’s the thing: in our real lives, we risk something everyday.  We hurtle around cities in little metal boxes, we flirt with strangers, we dance even though we don’t know how, we risk death and pain and embarrassment and loss and failure every single day of our lives.  Trying to be true to that basic truth of humanity isn’t the worst idea when sitting down to write a story.

– Christopher Lowe, assistant fiction editor at Fifth Wednesday Journal

One of the benefits of an MFA program for me has been the opportunity to read recommended works with an eye toward particular aspects of craft. How does an author manage time? Establish point of view? When the syllabus arrived for my next residency at Queens University, it felt like literary karma. I’d spurned Fifty Shades of Gray while others succumbed. Now, for a seminar on the “The Joy of Writing Sex,” I was required to explore a racy reading list with literary merit. Thank goodness I’d saved myself.

Every year I go upstream following the river from Mississippi to Chicago to attend the American Medical Association meeting. And every year the other doctors who go up there to work on the issues of the day and I give ourselves a break by going to the Cubs–White Sox game. We have always gotten good tickets and love being in either ballpark. What could be better than having the Blackhawks run through the stands at Wrigley throwing their jerseys and seeing the Stanley Cup held high over the combined tribe of Blackhawks, Cubs, and White Sox? Maybe a rained-out game when they sent everybody home and I came out of the first floor restroom to find both teams and their managers socializing in the main walkway, but you get my point.

Well this year everything was screwed up. It was Cubs–Yanks, and no good tickets left. I wanted to see this game. I used to go to old Yankee Stadium and watch games while I was assigned to the NYPD on loan from the Navy. So I had ties to both teams playing. It didn’t matter who won, it was going to be fine with me. So, because we couldn’t get tickets we liked in the stadium, we got tickets for one of the rooftop packages, dogs, pizza, beer, wine, whatever — all included in the price to sit up there and watch the game. This was my first experience with “wild” Chicago baseball, not in the domestic confinement of the ballpark, but free and unencumbered by cops, security guards, or the like (there were some bouncers, but I’m not sure what it took to get their attention, not the drunk girl balanced with one foot over the railing shouting at the guy she was with that he didn’t love her in the top of the eighth.)

Anyway, to get to the point, everything was like usual for the first four or five innings, but the guys in pinstripes started swatting and put the game pretty safely out of reach by the bottom of the fifth inning. It wasn’t much later that the coupling activities commenced. I looked over at some of the other rooftops and the same things were going on there. The female of the pair usually initiated these activities. The males were, at best, indifferent, hoping for the miracle comeback. But eventually their resolve would fail and after a little further encouragement would depart the premises, for a less populous environment.

My scientific conclusion from watching this series of events repeated over and over everywhere I looked is that if you are a single guy, in Chicago, and you’re having troubles of the repro-recreational type, try baseball! I’m not saying that you can’t lose, but it couldn’t hurt.

- Scott Anderson, Assistant Fiction Editor at Fifth Wednesday Journal

Photo Credit: ChristianMan16

Stay tuned for more news about the Fall 2012 issue, the release event at the Book Cellar in Chicago, and other FWJ events coming soon.

The Fall 2012 issue will arrive in November, but you can pre-order the issue here for $1 off the cover price. Order yours today!

Black Birds : Blue Horse by Natalie Peeterse

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In her first chapbook of poetry, Natalie Peeterse takes the reader through the complicated process of grief. Dedicated to Nicole Dial, who was killed in Afghanistan while working for the International Rescue Committee, this long elegiac poem captures the emotional urgency one experiences after such a loss, the slow acceptance that curtails it, and all points in between. With power and honesty, the reader is ferried through the blurred boundaries of landscapes, urban and rural, familiar and foreign, tangible and surreal. Although the elegy may seem like well-trodden poetic territory, Black Birds : Blue Horse experiments with both form and subject matter to give the poem a contemporary urgency that makes this sequence worth exploring and savoring.

The collection is comprised of one long poem in twenty-six smaller pieces and is written in second person, addressed to Dial. The poem begins with gunshots, in media res, so to speak:

One two : three four: then two more :
gunshots. I wake to some kind of tactical
counter-terrorism exercise, or some kind
of national emergency or
the dead body of a girl on the glittering road.
Either way, wind outside. In waves.
The heat blasts on and
off. I roll over and answer the phone : hello? (1)

These short lines recount Dial’s abrupt death and transcend the spaces between continents. At one moment, it seems as though we’re in Afghanistan, staring at that “body of a girl on the glittering road,” and the next, we’re with the speaker, waking up in bed back in Washington, D.C., receiving that phone call. Much like the speaker, the reader is left confused and decentered.

Few poets are as aptly able to put grief into such concrete terms as Peeterse. In the following part of the sequence, we see and feel the raw emotion in the father, who seems to cling to his lost daughter: “he’ll be holding a book / you made as a girl. A yellow duck hand drawn on the cover. / He will hold it all that day” (2). Another example of this comes a bit later, where the speaker contrasts the overwhelming feeling of loss with the world that goes on outside: “The heavy blanket of your absence now / folded perfectly in one hand, and the other filled / with worldly things : hooves and nickels, their brittle noises” (21).

Throughout the collection, the speaker goes about finding Dial in the everyday, in the “invisible flocks of blackbirds,” (14) or in “the clouds … at the hem of your skirt” (17). Perhaps in a more concrete sense, however, is in the sand. One section takes the reader to the excavation, presumably in Afghanistan where “the dark eyes of a bird” examine the earth to find “rows of gritting teeth and your / shoulderblade : your emptied days / compacted like sand. Into sand. Of sand … the architecture … of your beginning and your ending” (17). In the closing section, the image of sand returns to the speaker:

In the morning a jar of sand on my doorstep —
an entire population of little nameless particles
arushed in together, especially where the glass bells.
I want to take it down to Pennsylvania Avenue
and shake it into the street for blocks and blocks —
unhurried : to watch each bit
of intermittent light. To watch the road to Kabul
open up before me — (26)

Again, here, all the complications of grief are expressed so purely in grains of sand. This image reminds the reader of Dial’s death, and the journey across the vast continents of grief and longing, until they arrive home, at the speaker’s doorstep to be scattered into the world. Peeterse’s poem reminds us that grief is something both timeless and universal, yet so rooted in the concrete specifics of the everyday. This elegy simply gets it right, and readers will be made richer through this passage through the span of human experience.

– Katherine Hoerth, Assistant Poetry Editor at Fifth Wednesday Journal

The room is packed beyond capacity. I’m at an Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference listening to the panel “What Editors Look For” for the fifth time. It’s hot, the room is overcapacity, and I sit 300 feet away from the presenter. (“Can you hear me in the back?”) The presenters mirror the hundreds of submission guidelines for literary journals I read each year: “It’s all about the writing. Surprise me. Make me miss my subway stop as I read your story.” After two years of reading submissions for a literary journal, I can tell you that piece of advice is true.

First, I need to tell you why I volunteer for a journal at all. I work with Fifth Wednesday Journal, a print publication in Illinois. As I tell my friends, the paycheck is huge, literally. I got two size-large FWJ T-shirts and a subscription. My relationship with FWJ started haphazardly. After I earned an MFA, I read through the Poets and Writers’ database of journals to figure out where to submit pieces. I had no publishing credits and needed to fill out my cover letter. It was my summer intern phase where I needed to work for free just to get experience. FWJ was looking for readers, and their ad haunted me for several months. I wanted to understand how publishing worked, so I screwed up my courage to contact them. When I emailed the editor, he asked me to submit a piece of my own work. I heard nothing back. Two months later, I got an email asking for my bio. I was in as a reader.

By reading more than a hundred submissions each cycle, I see another side of publishing and the broad range of writing in the marketplace. It rounds out my writing career, and by reading submissions, I pay my submission karma forward. I submit, so I should also read. More than that, I have learned from the good stories that grab me from the beginning and keep the pace up so that I could miss my commuter train stop. I have also learned from those twenty-eight-page tomes that force me to refill my coffee twice before finishing. I feel like an editor; I read the good and the bad. I’ve found working with FWJ has been nothing but positive and helpful to my own writing.

As a submitter, I fret when I don’t hear a thing about my prizewinner for weeks, months, and sometimes over a year. As a reader with FWJ, I can see why the decision takes so long. Once a piece comes in, it is a slow, bumpy road towards acceptance. First the piece is ranked by the publisher. The cover letter submitted by the writer can pull a story from deep in the slush pile to the top based on publication history (not only quantity, but quality), a relationship with the guest editor, or previous submissions to FWJ, especially if a piece was accepted or was a “near miss.”

Each cycle, FWJ receives 600 to 700 unsolicited short stories. After a preliminary screen for complete trash, stories are assigned to readers. At FWJ we average eight fiction readers. Our readers come from a variety of backgrounds; many have published widely, have MFAs, and teach creative writing. They do a wonderful job of distilling the submissions down to a manageable list to forward to the guest editor. Each piece is read at least twice, and if it receives one “maybe” or “yes” vote, it is read several more times. I find that Vern Miller often pairs me with readers who have opposite tastes in stories. I hate a piece, they love it, or I love it and they can’t stand it. It is a good way to see both sides of a submission. After reading a piece, readers vote “yes,” “no,” or “maybe” and often attach a note identifying what is really good or what killed the story for them. It might be the sentence structure, confusing shifts in point of view, the pacing, poor characterization, or other more subtle problems. The strongest pieces go to the guest editor, usually between thirty and forty stories per issue. Vern Miller sometimes passes on positive editing comments made by our readers to the authors of pieces we cannot accept for publication. We don’t do this for every story we receive, only for the strongest ones that don’t quite make it.

As I said, it can be a bumpy and slow road from submission to final decision. FWJ publishes about ten stories in each issue, with five or six of those coming from the 600+ unsolicited submissions. The elapsed time from submission to final decision at FWJ can be six months, but usually is closer to four. Those final decisions can be the most difficult for the editor. With thirty or more stories that have been vetted as many as five times by competent writers, the choices will necessarily leave out some good writing. But that is another story.

– Gro Flatebo, Assistant Fiction Editor at Fifth Wednesday Journal

Well, here’s your chance. You get to name a book of fiction that should have won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Send us your choice by August 15th, and if your selection receives the most votes, you will win a one-year subscription to Fifth Wednesday Journal.

Rules:

• Only one vote per email address. The email address must be valid on August 15th.
• The book must have been published in 2011.
• The book must be fiction.
• The book must be by an American author.

Send your vote to: editors [at] fifthwednesdayjournal [dot] org. Put “Pulitzer Prize Should’a Been” in the subject line. Include the title of the book and the name of the author in the body of the message. Please also include your name and the city/state in which you reside. Add your comment. We’ll post it to the blog if we like it.

The top five novels will be posted on our blog by order of name, city, and state.

Remember: Only one entry per valid email address. We look forward to your nominations!

For more information, check out the article Berkeleyside has written about Edie and her recently published novel, Lola, California:

Novelist and Northern California Book Reviewers member Steven Simmons finds that, “Meidav gets the bustling intellectual and cultural intensity of Berkeley; the oddly exhilarating anomie of Los Angeles; the physical and psychological terror at the pot farms in Mendocino; and the sensory pleasures as well as the spiritual delusions of a neo-hippie retreat … She digs deeply and painfully into the changing relationships over three decades of husband and wife, parents and children, and friends.”

Congratulations again, Edie, and best of luck to you!