It’s a snow day, Tennessee-style (which means we’ll get maybe two cm of snow, but tons of ice which we don’t have the infrastructure to combat), so I am home from work.

I’ve got a bunch of changes in my professional life planned for 2016: I am minimizing the number of titles Upper Rubber Boot Books puts out every year (in 2015, we had 5 titles including two anthologies I edited or co-edited, and in 2014 we had 11 titles—9 were short stories so less work than a full-length book, but still). For 2016 and 2017, I will be releasing two titles only: Floodgate and an anthology. 2016’s anthology is The Museum of All Things Awesome and That Go Boom, an adventure sci-fi anthology I am also editing (Facebook updates here), and 2017’s is not announced yet (but stuff is happening, and that one I won’t be editing).

All of this is in the service of being able to write more. I want to keep this site more updated, instead of (or in addition to) posting all my thoughts to social media where they effectively disappear after a few days. I have ideas for three different novels, two of which I’ve written a bit on, and about 20 short stories, and I need to do some writing (probably mostly poetry, and some non-fiction) about my trip to Kenya.

My day job is supporting four otolaryngologists (ENT doctors) who mostly concentrate on head and neck cancers and other issues of the head and neck. (I do a bunch of other stuff too, like running some lecture series, etc., but that’s not important for the purposes of this story.) They have medical missions in Africa (currently: Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda) and took me to Malindi, Kenya this past October to help with their two-week surgical camp in Tawfiq Hospital.

The University of Nairobi has an ENT residency, and Kenya has about 60 practicing ENT surgeons. What they don’t have is an equivalent for our head and neck fellowship program, and the State of Tennessee makes it difficult for us to provide fellowship training to doctors whose residency was done outside the US and Canada because we have to jump through too many hoops to get such doctors credentialed for it to be practicable. We have cobbled together some extra training for these surgeons which consists of them doing visiting observational scholarships at our hospital (observational means they don’t touch patients, because of the licensure/credentialing issue) and also attending our surgical camps, where we concentrate on education, so the surgeries are done by our doctors and their doctors in concert. The patients pay nothing, which is a tremendous benefit to them because surgical care is so expensive in relation to the average salary.

The power keeps going out; they have a backup generator for the OR but not for the clinic. Here we’re using a surgical headlamp as a flashlight.

A big keloid (a kind of scar that keeps growing). If I remember correctly, this patient had had jaw surgery and this keloid grew from his incision. Keloids are benign, but can cause problems—this one was painfully pulling on his face. Keloids are very common in Kenya, not for environmental reasons (afaik anyway) as people keep assuming when I tell them this but because they’re something like fifteen times as common in African-descended people than in Caucasians. As you might guess, Africa has a few more Africans than the US does; we saw a lot of keloids.

Typical breakfast, including arrowroot, passionfruit, and these great little bananas that were way more flavourful than ours (and pineapple that was almost flavourless).

A Swahili adult literacy class I was lucky enough to attend. The Caris Foundation, who paid for our hotel and helped a lot with logistics, took a group of us to see their other local projects.

Bank book for a microfinance group for single mothers who run their own businesses. They had spent ten months paying back a 5,000 shilling (US$50) loan and had paid back 2,600 shillings in that time.

We had the weekend off, and I went with a smaller group on a safari (privately paid for by each of us). Yay elephant!

Giraffe.

Lions.

NBD, just me hanging out in Africa.

It was an amazing, humbling experience, and as I get pieces published about it, I’ll be sure to link to them.

In writing news: Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good, which I co-edited with H. L. Nelson, was nominated earlier in January for the This Is Horror Award (voting ends January 24—go vote now if you liked it!). That was really cool, and also surprising since I hadn’t been thinking of it as a horror anthology. We’d been marketing it as “dark fiction.” But once it was pointed out, I realized it’s totally horror—it contains slashers and zombies and people turning into animals and so forth—it’s just also genre-crossing. I’ll be surprised if it wins (the other anthology nominees are all really good too and probably better known) but it was lovely just to be nominated.

I edited and co-edited, respectively, two new anthologies that came out in March from my press, Upper Rubber Boot Books: How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens and Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good (with H. L. Nelson).

Have only just realized it’s been nearly a year since I’ve updated. I’m very active at Facebook, and otherwise my time has been basically completely subsumed by my press Upper Rubber Boot Books (website; FB; Tumblr; Twitter) and hiking. I expect it’ll be awhile before I update again since I only think to do so when I get something published, and I haven’t been writing let alone submitting, because of URB keeping me so busy.

For fun, here are some photos from my life for the past year.

Hard-to-see Canada geese at Old Stone Fort Archeological State Park, May 2014.

Me with Ben from Said the Whale at Mercy Lounge, May 2014.

Author Roundtable at Hypericon, June 2014.

Me with my folks, in Eastern Pasage, Nova Scotia, July 2014.

Baby kangaroo in my arms, North Georgia Zoo, July 2014.

With my friend Anne in front of the Step Falls (Little Duck River), Old Stone Fort Archeological State Park, November 2014.

White-tailed deer, Percy Priest Lake, Long Hunter State Park, November 2014.

November leaves on the Shelby Bottoms Greenway.

Simon Kewin was born and raised on the misty Isle of Man, but now lives and works deep in rural England. He divides his time between writing SF/fantasy fiction and computer software. He has had around fifty short stories published in a variety of magazines and anthologies, along with a similar number of poems. He has a degree in English Literature from the Open University. He is currently learning to play the electric guitar. It’s not going that well, frankly. He lives with Alison, their two daughters Eleanor and Rose, and a black cat called Morgan to which he is allergic.

What is your writing process?

I write every day, although it can be tough fitting that in and around everything else. Some days I only manage 30 minutes. If I don’t manage any I start to get antsy. I’ve basically gotten used to grabbing any time I can here and there and my family are very good at giving me a little space. I envy madly those people who can spend all day writing, but on the other hand there’s nothing like knowing you’ve only got very limited time to focus your mind. If I did have hours and hours each day, it would be interesting to find out how much more I write. One day, that’s something I shall discover…

What’s some writing advice you’ve received, that works for you?

I’m wary of writing advice, I have to say, because I find it tends to make me think I’m doing lots of stuff badly and that’s a creativity killer. The most basic advice for any writer is to read a lot and write a lot and I don’t think you can go far wrong with that. And then just be true to yourself. And, yes, the adverb thing. I do find it useful to think about my next idea/chapter/scene when I’m not writing and then, when I do sit down, I know where I’m going to start. Even just the first sentence will do. Then I’m not faced with a blank page and that little blinking cursor…

Can you say a little bit about the genesis of your most recent book?

Engn is a kind of fantasy book—although it has no magic or fantasy beasts in it. It’s a sort of alternative-world steampunkish sort of book. One or two people have compared it to Gormenghast, and that’s something that pleases me beyond measure. As to its genesis, it was basically the collision of two unrelated ideas. I find a lot of stories start like that: what happens if I take this idea and this idea and smash them together? So, I had the idea of a vast, steam-powered, city-sized machine that people live and work within. It is huge and incomprehensible and strange. It seemed like it could be a pretty good setting for an adventure story. The other idea was to do with being true to youthful ideals. I imagined two young people making promises to each other about what they’re going to do with their lives and the question becomes, do they remain faithful to that or do they move on?

How much research do you do?

Very little. I write mostly fantasy and SF because you can just make it all up. I will obviously check facts where I need to. With Engn, there’s quite a bit of stuff about steam engines and the like and, while it is a made-up (probably impossible) world, I did try to stick to realistic details for the machinery. My father, as it happens, is an engineer and knows a lot about this sort of thing. He spotted only one mistake, to do with a soldering iron, which I was pleased about…

Have you had to sacrifice anything in the rest of your life to write?

Time, money and helpless animals. I’m kidding about the last one.

Why do you write?

I don’t know. It’s just what I do. My question would be why don’t some people write?

This interview is part of Intermittent Visitors: a multi-author blog tour.

Lucas Stensland’s most recent book is Fun Again, a collection of short poems from Yet To Be Named Free Press (UK). In 2011 he co-authored my favorite thing (bottle rockets press), which was shortlisted for the Touchstone Distinguished Book Award. He is the co-founder of Montague Street Journal: The Art of Bob Dylan and author of the novel Name Your Poison. He lives in Brooklyn with his cats Delia and Sadie. I was delighted to get to interview Stensland, who I know from his submissions to 7×20 (which I used to edit). And I blurbed his book! I said, “Stensland writes with an unerring ear for the rhythms of marriage and breakups. His haiku are fierce, uncompromising, and will inspire you to read them aloud to the stranger sitting next to you at the bar. Pointed and funny, these short poems don’t spare anybody, including the poet, from his sharp wit.”

Can you say a little bit about the genesis of your most recent book?

I submitted some poems about a year ago for consideration in an anthology Yet To Be Named Free Press was doing about, I think, mental health issues. Brendan Slater, its editor, rejected all of my poems, but said he enjoyed them; they just didn’t fit the tenor of the collection. I believe he singled out the below as ones he enjoyed.

I’ve always had
the same penis
she’s had others

and

one night stand
two
too many

He asked if I’d be interested in putting together a proposal for a book of humorous short poems. It grew and shifted direction from there.

Though in the end the book morphed into a sort of chronology of breaking up and drinking through long and wasted years, I tried to maintain a droll tone—especially with riffraff poems, the stand-alone jocular ones that didn’t further the narrative. The end, in a way, is upbeat—but I wanted to avoid any kind of disingenuous statements of eternity: that life will now be free of strife. Fun Again isn’t about twelve-stepping, getting sober or finding true love. It’s just about a struggle to have and be fun again.

What is your writing process?

I used to carry tiny notebooks with me, in my back pocket or bag. I was a lot more prolific when I did. It stopped a few years back when I got a smartphone. Now I write in its notepad app. With my phone I look much less pretentious when writing in public, but I write far less. My smaller turn-out isn’t entirely blamed on my adoption of the smartphone, but writing with pen and paper was more enjoyable and yielded greater results. I liked having a history of all my drafts in tiny notebooks. But I got lazy and now just phone it in.

Which writers inspire you?

I like simple, direct writing. My taste in literature is pretty stereotypical for my demographic. I’m fairly certain thirtysomething men living in Brooklyn are issued Bukowski and Carver books by the State Department. And I fall in line. As for Carver, I always preferred his Gordon Lish-edited works. In college when I read Carver’s “Fat” and got to the unexpected end (“‘My life is going to change. I feel it’.”), I understood I was reading something special, something that didn’t leave me cold like all that magical realism or Milan Kundera or Tom Robbins. I never cared for Bukowski’s poetry, but I loved his novels. The end of Women where he feeds the pregnant cat influenced me a lot; it was subtle and organic, and it did not draw attention to itself in a precious literary way.

This interview is part of Intermittent Visitors: a multi-author blog tour.

Ranbir Singh Sidhu was born in London and studied archaeology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Good Indian Girls (HarperCollins India/Soft Skull Press), a collection of stories (which has its own Tumblr!), and Deep Singh Blue, a novel (forthcoming 2014). He is a winner of the Pushcart Prize in Fiction and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and other awards. His plays include True East, Conquistadors, and Sangeet. His fiction appears in The Georgia Review, Fence, Zyzzyva, The Missouri Review, Other Voices, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Barcelona Review and other journals and anthologies. Stories are forthcoming in The Happy Hypocrite (UK) and The Literary Review (USA).

What is your writing process?

Messy and undisciplined, with no clear schedules. I write in bed when I can, and I often try and get away and write while traveling, where I can keep the laptop next to my head, wake, sit up with some pillows behind my back and pull the computer onto my lap and get immediately to work, often still half-asleep and remembering dreams. Last year, I was very fortunate to be able to spend several months living on Crete and in Berlin, which was marvelous. The latter city was far more productive, but the Greek island much more beautiful. When I feel I’m becoming too sedentary, I use an improvised standing desk, usually built onto a dresser at home. I hate sitting and writing. I suspect the latter reminds me of awful days as a child in school in England when I felt locked into a desk while a faceless teacher droned on about something useless at the head of the class.

What’s some writing advice you’ve received, that works for you?

I’ve never received writing advice that was worth anything, and as a rule, I’d advise any writer starting out to ignore all the advice they’re given (there’s advice for you!). What has been important to me are the times I’ve worked with great editors. Three come to mind: Stanley Lindberg, the former editor of The Georgia Review; Monique Wittig, the French avant-garde novelist; and Lynne Tillman, the novelist and former ficton editor at Fence. All three were invaluable to me as a writer at various times in my life. As I was editing the manuscript of my new collection of stories recently, the one question I kept returning to was: What would Lynne Tillman do? This is amusing as this question is also the title of Lynne’s new book and at the heart of a viral poster campaign in New York City (so that I find myself walking down the street and discover the question shouting back at me from a wall). During the editing process, I took the question very seriously. If I thought Lynne would cut a line, out it would go. I am sure the book is much stronger for it.

Which writers inspire you?

I’ll give one example, though there are many. I remember reading the Scots writer Alasdair Gray’s epic novel Lanark when it was first released in the US in 1985 and knowing immediately that he had done everything I ever wanted to do, and done it much better. It was both extremely exciting and terrifying, because that novel was so good, so monumental, so all-encompassing, that it was a tremendous thrill to read, but it also left me with the feeling that I could never surpass, perhaps never come close, to what he achieved. I still hold Gray’s singular accomplishment as one of the stars I guide my writing life by, and I hope, with each passing book, that I come a little closer to its unique brilliance.

This interview is part of Intermittent Visitors: a multi-author blog tour.

Kasey Jueds’s poetry has appeared in numerous publications, including Crab Orchard Review, Barrow Street, 5 A.M. and Verse Daily. She has been awarded residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Soapstone, and the Ucross Foundation. A native of Coral Gables, Florida, she lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her debut collection, Keeper, is from the Pitt Poetry Series.

What is your writing process?

For such a long time, it’s been the same, or at least very similar. I write meandering sorts of notes in longhand, in my journal, and write them over and over again until (maybe) lines start to emerge, music, something that feels like a poem. And then I write that over and over again, sifting and revising and moving things around. I try to keep whatever it is (I don’t even call things “poems” until I’ve worked with them for ages) open for as long as possible—open in the sense of being still malleable and pliable and able to be entered. I don’t type things up until I start to have a stronger sense of the poem being, in some essential way, the way it wants to be. (I’m weirdly superstitious about the typing part—once I do that, the poem starts to feel more fixed!) And once I’ve put a poem into a word doc I still type it over and over, although at that stage I’m mostly fiddling at the level of words and line breaks and not making big radical changes.

That process (long drawn-out, rather serious) has taught me so much, and it’s how I’ve worked ever since I’ve started to make poems. But now that the book is done, and almost published, I’m realizing I would love to experience more play in my process of writing. I don’t want to abandon that older, more familiar (yet still always strange and new and surprising) way of making; most of the poems that fe