Interview by Rebecca Landau

Sonja Condit’s debut novel, Starter House, was published by William Morrow Books, a subsidiary of Harper Collins, in December 2013 and received strong reviews, with Kirkus describing it as “good, scary fun, packed with emotional nuance.” The novel follows a young couple as they move into a charming fixer-upper in South Carolina ready to start a family. Little do they know the house has a reputation as place that “eats babies,” and the further along in her first pregnancy wife Lacey becomes, the more in danger she and her unborn child are to the same sinister presence that has tormented generations at 571 Forrester Lane.

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Is there a horror trope you’d be happy to see go away?

There are some things that have always bothered me about haunted houses, specifically. First, the houses are usually ancient, and huge, and obviously evil. Why would anyone live there? You should know better. The 19th century robber baron’s mansion with doors to nowhere, and a torture chamber imported from France—you shouldn’t try to make it into a bed-and-breakfast. The house that used to be a mortuary, and still has vats of formaldehyde in the basement—that’s not a good place to raise your family. The house in Starter House has a history, but it’s a common, ordinary house, newly renovated, and not that old. It was important to me that it be an ordinary house. That’s why it’s identical to the house next door.

I understand that Starter House is based on an actual house in your neighborhood that often is vacant, or only can keep tenants for short periods. What is the status of the house now?

It’s currently empty. Two months ago, a real estate company cleaned it up, scraped the oak saplings out of the gutter, and painted inside, but nobody has bought it, even though the sign says, “Down Payment $100.”

In a horror novel like this, how did you approach maintaining and building suspense for the reader? Were you ever scared that a scene wasn’t scary enough and in revision, amp up the intensity, or feel a scene might be too much, and tone down the horror elements?

It’s hard for me to know the effect. After all, everyone reacts differently. Whenever I could make something worse for the characters, I did. I never went the other way. Some readers tell me they were terrified, others say it wasn’t all that scary, so this is a reaction the writer can’t control. I was going for creepy-scary, not gory-scary, and creepiness is a very personal reaction.

Without spoiling too much, what would you say was your favorite chapter to write and why? By extension, was there a character in whose point of view you most enjoyed spending time?

I don’t have a favorite chapter, but I enjoyed writing Lex Hall because his mind was so different. The two other point of view characters, Lacey and Eric, see themselves as being very different in terms of background and character, but truly they are more alike than they think. They’re the same age, they grew up in the same state, and they were educated in the same schools—after all, they met in college. Lex being so different allowed me to triangulate Lacey and Eric’s relationship; Lex has his own relationship with each of them. Even though Lex and Lacey don’t meet until the end, they do have a relationship throughout the story, beginning with the similarity of their names. Everything Lex does is a reflection of something Lacey does. She breaks a window to get into the house; he breaks a window to get into his mother-in-law’s apartment. She can’t wash the dog; he can’t wash the baby. The smell of crayons reminds her of the first day of school, and later, the smell of crayons reminds him of something he can’t remember. This was fun to write.

As a teacher yourself, can you speak to why you made two of your characters teachers: Harry (who also is a musician like you) and Lacey?

Lacey being a teacher comes down to reasonableness. If you truly believed your house was haunted, wouldn’t you find a way to get out of it? It has to be reasonable for the characters to stay. Writers spend a lot of authorial energy locking their characters into the bad place. For instance, in The Shining, Stephen King spends hundreds of pages locking his people into the haunted hotel, first economically, and then emotionally, and then physically with the snowstorm, and even then he had to break the woman’s spine to keep her in there. How could I do that in a suburb? The only way was to make Lacey a person who could not be afraid of a child, somebody whose personality and training and self-image were all about teaching and helping. Harry is a violin teacher so that he can have children coming in and out of his house, and so he can be home in the daytime. That was a logistical choice.

Is there a theme you’d love to address but have not yet explored? Is there a type of writing (a different genre, even a different narrative style) you would love to try but have not yet explored?

I don’t know about themes. For me, the theme develops out of the characters and their situation. I greatly admire writers who can create enormous, multi-volume works, but probably don’t have it in me. My attention span is too short. Three hundred pages, yes. Three thousand, no. Sometimes people ask me if I’m writing a sequel, but no, those characters have done their work.

Now that the book has been out for awhile, do you have any insights for aspiring authors on the process of publishing the book, the experience of promoting it, etc.?

There is so much rejection. It’s very painful, and you can’t avoid all of it, especially in the early stages when you get all those “thanks but no thanks” form letters from agents and editors. You just have to struggle through that. I’ve been avoiding reviews—there were good reviews early on, which was great, but more experienced writers have told me not to read the reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, particularly the bad ones, and never, ever, ever respond to them. It’s hard to see the book as “something I made” and not “something that’s part of me,” but that separation is necessary.

What are you reading now? Is there a book you recently read that you would recommend?

I just finished The Cove by Ron Rash and The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates, and they’re both very good, in different ways.

What can you tell us about the book you’re working on now?

I am revising a book and am also in the very early stages of figuring out the characters in the next one. The one I’m revising is a family mystery with a ghost in it, set mostly in Finland, and the new one is suspense with no supernatural element, although it’s based on a medieval Flemish vampire legend. I thought it was time to try something naturalistic, so of course I went straight to medieval Flemish vampires, only I’m translating them into modern South Carolina doomsday preppers. This is leading to some exciting research.

About the Author (from the publisher)

Sonja Condit received her MFA from Converse College, where she studied with Robert Olmstead, Leslie Pietrzyk, R. T. Smith, and Marlin Barton. Her short fiction has appeared in Shenandoah magazine, among other publications. She plays principal bassoon in the Hendersonville Symphony Orchestra and the Greater Anderson Musical Arts Consortium. She teaches at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities.

About the Interviewer

Rebecca Landau received her MFA from Converse College in June 2014 and serves as Artistic Director of South85 Journal, selecting work for publication and redesigning the online site for the Converse College literary journal. She is also a communications assistant at the Mountain Area Health Education Center in Asheville.

Jake Wolff

So I’m working on a novel set in early 2003, and I’m stuck on this one scene. I’ve had this thing baking forever but it keeps coming out like a sugar cookie—way too plain. It needs frosting.

I go to the facts: What was happening in the world at that moment? Now I’m surfing the web. And I remember, duh, that the Space Shuttle Columbia blew up on February 1st of that year, killing all seven crewmembers. I think: Perfect! I think: That will set the mood for my scene.

So now I open the scene with a description of Columbia reentering Earth’s atmosphere. Everything seems normal. Then the shuttle starts to shake. Then the alarms go off. Then the fire starts, and the temperature rises, and the astronauts look at each with depth, because they know what’s happening. And at this point I’m doing some serious, look-at-me-go Creative Writing. I pretty much have the Pulitzer wrapped up.

I finish the three paragraphs on the Columbia disaster just as the reminder on my phone goes off. The reminder says: Hey, moron, you have to teach a class called Fiction Technique in twenty minutes so why aren’t you in the car already?

I get in the car. I turn on the radio. It’s loud. My wife, who last used the car, blasts NPR like it’s heavy metal. I lower the volume but keep the station. Terry Gross is interviewing some guy. He’s an astronaut. Weird coincidence!

Terry says something like: Have any of your crewmembers ever died on the space station?

And this astronaut, I don’t know his name, I’m joining the interview halfway, says something like: No, but of course I was already an astronaut when the Columbia exploded.

And then he starts to cry.

He’s crying but talking through it. He says: I’m guilty for what happened. He says: I felt in my gut that something was wrong but I didn’t speak up about it. He says: Terry, I helped kill those guys.

And now I’m crying!

I get to campus, and I find a parking spot eventually, and I teach this fiction workshop—it’s Halloween and half the class doesn’t show—and then I drive home and I turn on the computer and I delete every last word about the Columbia explosion because I don’t care whether it happened ten years ago or ten thousand, if I’m going to write about the deaths of seven human beings for no other reason than cookie frosting and if I’m going to write those seven deaths without really feeling them, deep in my heart, like that poor guy on the radio, like it happened yesterday and I’m to blame for all of it, well, then I can pretty much go fuck myself.

Jake Wolff‘s work has appeared in journals such as One Story, Bellevue Literary Review, and Tin House. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and he’s currently pursuing a PhD in creative writing at Florida State University.  Visit him on the web at www.jakewolff.com.

Stephen Kolter

I suppose I’m a blue-collar poet. I have a factory job, yet I write poetry. My sporadic formal education has been all but forgotten. A lot of my poems are written while working at the factory or about working there. So, that settles it, right?

It was only within the last year that I realized there is such a thing as “blue-collar poetry”. We could possibly say that Whitman got the ball rolling with his odes to American life, though there are earlier examples from other countries. Sandburg kept it rolling for a while with an entire career of workman’s dirges in the beginning of the last century. Still, I felt like I was writing to their ghosts.

Whenever I would pick up a lit mag I would first flip to the contributors’ bios. MFA, MFA, BA with an MFA in progress, MFA. It seemed that we uneducated folk weren’t allowed to publish poetry. Or anything else, for that matter. “Take your played-out AC/DC songs and be happy!”

I thought I was weird, an anomaly. I mean I know the guys I work with don’t read anything but sports scores. In fact, their genius for interpreting statistics blows my mind. The only writing they do is on the bathroom wall. Still, am I that strange?

Then, one amazing day, I found out about a journal called Blue Collar Review and the door opened up for me. Starting there, I found tons of like-minded writers doing what I had been doing; working hard, writing when they could, and just doing the best they can in a world that doesn’t seem to want them to thrive. Eureka! I began buying their books and e-mailing some of them. A world finally opened for me.

I have tried to find a definition of “blue collar poet”. I found plenty of blue collar poets but nothing specifically about the subset as a movement. From what I’ve been told, a blue collar poet is someone who works. I don’t like to get too deep into exclusive delineations and won’t say what kind of work the poet must be employed in, but let’s just say it is usually something that makes you sweat.

I have also heard that blue collar poets ordinarily lack formal training. This is probably why they are working in a blue collar job in the first place. However, I don’t think a degree would necessarily bar someone from the gang. I would go to school if I could. Would that alone cast me out of Eden? It probably depends on whom you ask. I’m sure there are some anti-snob snobs who have a clear-cut set of mandates that are not to be broken. I hate that. That mindset is just elitist as the elitists it opposes.

To me, and I am an expert on nothing whatsoever, “blue collar poetry” is real. It deals with real life issues that real life people can almost unanimously relate with. Then, it spins that mundane universal into something beautiful, poignant, and maybe even profound.

There is more, though. There is a special kind of suffering in blue collar poetry, a confirmation that the poor in spirit, those who possess little in the way of tangible goods or power, truly are blessed. In fact, blue collar poetry is, at its very core, a beatification of those tiny figures nobody sees. Who made all your gadgets? Who brought you your coffee and eggs at the diner this morning? Whose sweat brought you your comforts? Your needs?

There is fight in the voice, a struggle with something very tangible yet alluding to the intangible. It is a fight to remain alive even if unnoticed. More than a fight, it is a celebration that we made it to this moment in time, roughed up, beaten and weary, but nevertheless very much alive.

One of the things I like most about what is usually called “blue collar poetry” is that its surface is easy to grasp yet the depths go on infinitely. If I like something about the story, I go deeper and deeper. There are no riddles to decipher in some secret post-modern language. I did enough of that in my few years of college. Give me something to make me want to read it again and find the universal truth hidden between the lines. That is what “blue collar poetry” usually does for me.

I close with reiteration of the assertion that I am not an expert. This is not meant to be a definitive article on a new movement in creative writing. I just want to get a discussion started. Maybe there is a new movement happening here that people will discuss in centuries to come. Maybe not. Or maybe there is someone who will read this who is just like me and is yet to discover that there are others of a similar ilk.

I am a blue collar poet. What’s more, there are legions of us out there working, struggling, surviving, writing. What we lack in formal education we make up for with grit. Honest, real-life, grit. There are calluses on our hands and feet, sweat stains on our undershirts, and silent prayers in our boisterous profanity. We write because we must. The compulsion in our spirits will not rest.

People have told me writing is a waste of time. Once in a while I even believe them. Yet, every day that little black notebook comes out of my back pocket and opens up like a door to a better world where all of this means something. I hope to find more people in that world. Together, we can affirm the stirring in our psyches that says, “Hold on. Keep your eye on the prize and never stop moving forward. Never.”

Stephen Kolter is a poet, editor for Creeping Lotus Press, and a factory worker. Much of his writing is done on the factory floor or is about his co-workers. He has a chapbook of blue collar poetry titled From the Floor forthcoming from Cat in Sun Press. His work has appeared most recently in Blue Collar Review, Relief Journal, Lucid Moon, and other independent magazines. He won the 2014 Charlotte Simon Miller Award for poetry. Visit him on the web at www.stephenkolter.com.

To celebrate our Spring / Summer 2014 issue and our new Reviews section, we held a contest to give away copies of the books reviewed in this issue.  Here are the winners:

@jacquelinejules (Twitter)
@cherylrussell (Twitter)
Josh Webber (Facebook)
Ben Furnish (Facebook)

Thank you to everyone who helped promote our latest issue!  Go to our Sweepstakes page for more information about the contest.

Our reading period for the Fall / Winter issue will begin September 1, so polish your best pieces!  We are excited to read your work!

In the meantime, keep reading our blog, which features weekly posts from accomplished writers offering a variety of interesting perspectives on the writing life.

Annie Liontas

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The fourth annual DISQUIET International Literary Program was held in Lisbon in 2014. Run by a group of North American writers with ties to Portugal, the program aims to deepen mutual understanding among writers from North America and writers from Portugal. The program takes its inspiration from The Book of Disquiet, the great Lisbon poet Fernando Pessoa’s masterpiece; from the city of Lisbon itself; and from the late Portuguese poet Alberto de Lacerda, who believed above all in the importance of literary community.

“Write yourself naked, from exile, in blood.”—Denis Johnson, Disquiet Writer-in-Residence

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After working in isolation in Philadelphia for the past year, I started to realize that I’ve been waiting to be disquieted for some time. I was ready to be unsettled: I felt it in my bones, the restlessness, the need to find others like me. Somehow I knew I’d have to travel 3,500 miles before I could be reminded that there is but one nation, and that is the nation of writers.

It’s been a long time since I’ve traveled, and never have I traveled for writing. This summer I answered Disquiet’s call, which proclaims that “stepping out of the routine of one’s daily life and into a vibrant, rich, and new cultural space unsettles the imagination, loosens a writer’s reflexes.”

Write Yourself Naked…

In Portugal, everyone goes naked, on and off the beaches. By this I mean that what I found at Disquiet were people, not writers, not speakers, not editors, not panels. Over two very potent weeks, I got a chance to see my colleagues up close for who they really were and not for their titles. I heard their work, broke Pao de Deus with them, and realized that there is something alarmingly honest about Disquiet’s mission: when the time and place are right, we writers become true to ourselves, both on and off the page. I realized wasn’t just among writers at Disquiet, I was among colleagues in a shared experience of discovery. We were all in it together, questioning and exploring and celebrating over vinho verde—lots of vinho verde, with every meal, and at the end of every night during raucous breakdancing and awkward writer-dancing at the strange hallway that is club Oslo. Yes, there was some getting naked in that way, too.

Some of my favorite moments during this conference were connecting with writers who were disarmed by the truly seductive, creative city that is Lisboa, talking—as I did with poet Erica Dawson—about how you need to let go of previous, precious selves in order to reach new work. Or hearing from Denis Johnson about how his first wife asked him when he was going to get a real job and he answered, “Never.” He’d simply write on that bench outside and when he got tired, he’d sleep under it.

From Exile…

Disquiet contends that to be a writer, you must at all times be in exile. Writing can only come from a place of foreignness, because the writer is both within and without the world. This experience, in fact, is what led Fernando Pessoa to write The Book of Disquiet. The work, which refuses to be defined, originated in Pessoa’s wandering of the bohemian, labyrinthine streets of Lisbon. It leaves us with fragmented insights like, “you’ll discover your landscapes.” The Lisbon that greets you at Disquiet, refusing to be mapped, is undoubtedly Pessoa’s Lisbon. The city has even built the house of Jose Saramago to feel exactly like his brain, full of multiplicity and clauses. We had a chance to hear a number of readings at the Saramago House. This is just one of the many things that the conference does right.

At Disquiet I was reminded that there is something joyous about exile when you understand that you are not alone in it. Even the pain of disorientation becomes a kind of ecstasy when it’s in communion. Patrícia Portela, Luso writer and winner of the Prize Acarte/Madalena Azeredo Perdigão, talked literature, politics, and octopus with some of us participants over dinner. With these lines from her novel The Banquet, Patrícia Portela reminds us how we—all of us members of the nation of writers—write from exile, together but apart.

I am at my funeral and I am speaking to a crowd of hundreds. I know them all and I remember the first time I met each and every one of them. They are all seated and I, on foot, divulge the secret of life.

In Blood.

True Artist Paula Rega: “Go to all this trouble to find out, all this fear you carry, how to depict it.” @disquietilp #binders

There was blood in Portugal. On the Camino Portugues pilgrimage. In the willful, heart wrenching song of the fado. On a visit to the Casa das Histórias Paula Rego in Cascais, where Paula Rego, prolific and intense, does things you have never seen done with dog-women. Most of all there was blood on the page, when the writer dared to go deep and write honestly.

During my favorite workshop at the bar Maria Caxuxa, Alissa Nutting told me exactly what happens to a woman’s vulva after pregnancy. Spoiler alert: it turns “rotisserie-chicken brown.”  This was over a round of ginginhas, talking about our obsessions, which, for a writer, is often the lifeblood of one’s work. Later in actual workshop, Alissa asked us to write about an object that your character can’t and won’t get rid of, even if it brings pain, even if it draws blood. Mine was the bones of an owl.

I think when Disquiet Writer-in-Residence Denis Johnson tells us to write “in blood,” he means leave nothing of yourself behind. Hold nothing back. But sometimes writers need to feel that they are part of a community that can support such a sacrifice. Disquiet, paradoxically, becomes a safe space even as it pushes you, urges you, to get outside yourself—even as it requires nothing less than you meeting yourself in a new place in the world.

Maybe you’ve been feeling a little disquieted lately. If so, join the nation of writers next year, in exile, in Portugal.

Annie Liontas‘ debut novel, Let Me Explain You, is forthcoming from Scribner in 2015. She is the recent recipient of a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund to conduct research in Trinidad for her newest work Badeye, which also received Honorary Mention in the 2013 Dana Awards. Her story “Two Planes in Love” was selected as runner-up in Bomb magazine’s 2013 Fiction Prize Contest and was published by Bomb in December. Other stories and poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, Night Train, and Lit. She graduated from Syracuse University’s MFA Program and co-hosts the TireFire Reading Series in Philadelphia.  Follow her on Twitter, @aliontas.