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The Pedestal Magazine -Interview with Bruce Holland Rogers
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Interview with Bruce Holland Rogers |
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Stories by Bruce Holland Rogers have won a Pushcart Prize, the World Fantasy Award, and two Nebula Awards, among other honors. He teaches fiction writing for the Whidbey Writers low-residency MFA, and also teaches writing seminars in Greece (www.write-in-crete.com) and Italy (www.write-across-europe.com). Subscribers from all over the world receive his newest stories by email. See www.shortshortshort.com for more information. His most recent collection is The Keyhole Opera ((Wheatland Press). Rogers lives in Eugene, Oregon.
Interviewer: Sarah Kingery
SK: There is over a decade worth of writing awards and honors listed on your website. Your honors and demand as a teacher illustrate your success as a writer. But what do you personally consider to be your biggest success and what part of your career are you most proud of?
BHR: I'm uncomfortable with superlatives. My discomfort with the idea of "the best" starts with literary and other artistic awards. One of the awards I've won is supposed to be for the best work of its kind published anywhere in the world that year [2004] in the English language. If the jury for that year consisted of a different five people with different tastes and reading experiences, I might not have even been nominated. I wrote a good story, and I'm proud of the World Fantasy Award. I'm not giving it back! But I don't believe there is any such thing as "the best" in art. The same applies for my biggest success or the part of my career that I am most proud of.
Some writers choose one kind of story that particularly suits them—police procedural or stylistically experimental literary fiction, say—and that's what they do. I can't see myself happily choosing one kind of writing and sticking only to that. I've had stories in The North American Review, The Sun, Realms of Fantasy, Ellery Queen, the Polyphony anthologies, Woman's World, and Good Housekeeping. My work is apples, oranges, and plantains.
A few stories stand out. “The Dead Boy at Your Window" and “Tiny Bells" are stories that I could happily leave behind as my legacy. I'd like to think that those stories will [continue] to be read after I'm gone.
SK: You recently joined the staff of the Whidbey Writer’s Workshop MFA—the first MFA program in the country not associated with an educational institution. What do you find most attractive about this program for yourself as a teacher?
BHR: The model of the Whidbey program is like that of a music conservatory or a graduate acting school. We do one thing, and that's writing. As a teacher, my focus is all on working with my students—my junior colleagues, really. Without the structure of a college or university, I think the Whidbey program fosters much more of an all-in-this-together spirit among students and faculty. And I don't waste my time on broader institutional business. I write, and I teach. For the faculty, it's ideal, and I think that translates into a good experience for students, too. The energies of the faculty are focused in the most helpful way for students.
Our MFA is low-residency, so after the ten-day residency, all instruction is online. But whereas most programs structure the online experience as one-on-one tutoring, we run a real workshop. The students offer their help to one another in addition to hearing from the instructor. I think this is much better for the student writer because learning to articulate what works and what doesn't in another writer's work is a vital step in developing insight into how writing works.
SK: What are the benefits and pitfalls associated with this type of workshop?
BHR: The benefits are obvious in the flexibility of time and place. Workshop is in session whenever one student or faculty member is logged on, reading manuscripts and offering commentary on them.
The pitfalls are mostly emotional. The chemistry of sitting in a room face-to-face is superior to exchanging phosphors. We do have the residency, where we practice in person what we later continue to do online. But you do lose something by not being in the same room. It's harder to check in on one another emotionally.
Criticizing one another's writing is hard on everyone. Saying what you really think can be risky, especially when you're pointing out ways in which the writing fell short or let you down. Sometimes giving honest and complete feedback is even more difficult emotionally than receiving it. Online, you can't look at the face of the other person and communicate your distress or your friendliness. We want everyone to be able to both say and hear what needs to be said about a piece of writing, and it's harder online to make sure that everyone still feels that criticism is being offered and received in the right spirit.
I think it's essential for online instructors to be especially sensitive about group dynamics. In a face-to-face workshop, you can have a gruff instructor who just advises everyone to "get tough." But face-to-face, it's easier to get a coffee with your classmates after they have found a hundred flaws in your short story. You can establish in person that it's not personal.
SK: Very short fiction, short-shorts, flash or fast fiction, vignettes—there seems to be a lot of different labels for this type of story. How do you define this type of story, not just in length but in purpose as well? What do you find most appealing about writing them.
BHR: Kate Wilhelm wrote the introduction to my first collection of short-shorts. She said that a novel invites the reader to explore the entire house and even snoop in the closets. The short story makes the reader stand outside of an open window and witness what happens in one room. And the short-short requires that the reader kneel outside of a locked room and peer in through the keyhole. This definition emphasizes the degree of collaboration that a short-short demands of the reader. The writer has to be careful to put just the right elements in view of the keyhole to allow the reader to absorb the whole story. Kate's definition gave me the title for my new collection, The Keyhole Opera (Wheatland Press, November 2005).
I first fell in love with short-shorts as a young reader because I liked getting to the end of a story. Later, as a young adult, my hobby was literary translations, and I could translate a very short story from a language I didn't really know provided I had a good enough dictionary. So I translated a lot of short pieces. Because I was so slow as a translator, I got to know those stories very well, and I came to appreciate how carefully they had to be put together.
I like them because they are hard to write and are a pleasure to read.
SK: Do you sit down to write knowing that you are creating a short-short? Or is there something that happens during the writing process that lets you know the story will be short?
BHR: Yes. Usually I sit down knowing that I am trying to write a very short story. But sometimes a short-short expands, and sometimes when I thought I was writing a longer story, I discover that the best part of it, perhaps the only part worth keeping, is a short-short.
SK: You have offered an online short-short story subscription since 2002. How did you come up with this concept?
I started my email story subscriptions, www.shortshortshort.com, precisely because of the shrinking fiction markets and my identity as an unpredictable writer. I wanted to have paying readers for the kinds of stories for which there often wasn't a paying market, and I also wanted to have readers who would come along on whatever journey I went on, into whatever genre or manner of story.
I was working on a publicity plan for my book Word Work: Surviving and Thriving as a Writer. My budget was modest, so I was looking for ideas in a book called Guerilla Marketing for Writers. The authors cited an anecdote about a man who wrote limericks and decided to offer them by email subscription. For $1, his subscribers received a limerick a day for one year. Supposedly he was overwhelmed by the flood of envelopes, with a dollar inside, and he soon had a list of 100,000 subscribers.
I've never been able to verify that this story is true, but it did give me the idea of charging $5 a year for my short-short stories by email. At first, the number of stories I sent out was tied to the total number of subscribers so that as I had more readers, I had to write more stories. Later, I settled on three stories a month.
I doubt I'll have 100,000 subscribers, but I do have 600. The list is growing.
SK: Describe some of the successes and challenges you’ve experienced maintaining an online subscription.
BHR: The chief success is that this is viral marketing. People who enjoy the stories give gift subscriptions to friends, who in turn give gift subscriptions. Another success is just having the service at all. It gives me a regular deadline for short-short stories and an immediate audience. I also like hearing back from readers, even when the message is more of a raspberry than fan mail. And the raspberries do come. Not often, but enough to keep me humble.
Challenges? Currencies! I have a global reach, but I can only receive checks in U.S. or Canadian funds. One subscriber in Austria sends me 5 euro in cash each year. My subscribers in Bulgaria and India sent local currency, which I can't spend but was happy to receive anyway. For some overseas subscribers, payment is such a barrier that their subscriptions are paid for by generous American or Canadian readers.
The biggest challenge of all is the nature of email. I have cost advantages with email distribution, and the advantage of a global readership. But some readers who love the stories tire of reading them on the screen, either because they want to curl up with a real book or because they get so much email that one more message, even one containing a good story, feels like a burden.
SK: You provide your subscribers with three short-shorts every month. Are you ever afraid that you'll run out of ideas?
BHR: I have always been afraid of running out of ideas, which is why I've made a decades-long study of how writers get their material. I think I'm now equipped with so many invention techniques that I will never run dry. Of course, the writer can always come up with an idea. The real question is whether or not the idea is worthwhile. So far I keep finding stories that I, anyway, consider worthy of a reader's time. I hope readers continue to agree.
SK: You have been using the internet as a means of promotion and point-of-contact for many years. What advice can you offer writers considering their own websites? At what point in a writer’s career should he consider using the internet for promotion?
BHR: It's never too early to have a website and a business card. I also believe that writers should start submitting their work even when they're pretty sure it isn't yet publishable. Having a public face for the business side of writing is just a good thing to practice and have ready in advance.
As much as I admire really sexy websites, my advice to writers would be to remember that most of the world still connects by dialup. For a site devoted to words, I'd keep graphics simple. Put the most important part of what you want to convey on top. In short, keep it simple.
SK: You successfully write across many genres: science fiction, literary, mystery, and non-fiction to name a few. This makes attaching a label or description to you difficult. How would you describe yourself as a writer?
BHR: Perhaps the word is "confused." Certainly that's what my agent must think sometimes. I am not an easy client. I don't produce the same product over and over. She never knows what I might send her.
Actually, I have a much better word than "confused." It is a word that has suffered by recent usage. Dilettante. That word is derived from the verb that means "to take pleasure in." As a writer, I want to go where my tastes take me, and I have broad tastes.
Unfortunately, literature is marketed by brand name these days. As consumers, readers often want "more of the same, but different." On television, that gives us CSI, CSI Miami, and CSI New York. This kind of marketing is smart for the producer or publisher. But it frustrates the desire of creative people to try completely new things, even when they have found one thing that is very successful.
I'm working on a novel now (Steam), and I'm excited about it, but I'm also a little worried that if it's successful, I'll have to battle the expectation that the next novel I write will be a lot like it. The advantage of short stories, and short-short stories, is that they are so insignificant in the literary landscape that it doesn't matter what the writer writes. There is freedom in writing in a dying genre. And the short story, while very much alive as an art form, is dying in the marketplace.
So perhaps another kind of writer I am destined to be is "marginalized." I'm not thrilled by that prospect, but I also love having the readers I do have. I can do a lot of interesting, edifying, and subversive work from the margins. And if being a marginalized writer is the price I pay for writing what delights me, so be it.
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