Kristina Marie Darling’s poem “Soirée (II)” appears in Midwestern Gothic Issue 4, out now.

How long have you been writing?
Although I wrote a few poems in high school, I started writing seriously when I took my first poetry workshop as a freshman in college. This class was definitely a transformative experience, since it was the first time I started reading contemporary poets. For me, a real writer has at least some knowledge of the literary conversation in which he or she is participating. Before learning about contemporary poetry, I think I would have been premature in calling myself a writer.

What’s your connection to the Midwest?
I was raised in Missouri and Chicago. I went to school at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Missouri-St. Louis before moving to the “Gateway to the Midwest,” Buffalo, New York. I’m working on a PhD in Poetics there at SUNY-Buffalo. I suppose you could say that I’m a lifelong Midwesterner.

How has the Midwest influenced your writing?
Living in the Midwest has helped me become more conscious of the beauty that can be found in fairly unremarkable things. My poems are filled with small, often broken domestic objects. I like to portray these discarded gloves, shattered tea cups, and rusted necklaces as having greater significance than the reader would initially expect.

Why do you believe there has never really been a regionalist push for Midwestern writing in the past like there has with the South or even the West Coast?
Most Midwesterners I’ve met see their surroundings as fairly ordinary, too unremarkable for regional pride. But I think there’s something unique about this self-deprecating attitude, and it seems to inform much of the fiction and poetry that comes out of the Midwest. I would really love to see more of a regionalist push for Midwestern writing.

How do you feel about social media to promote your writing, and do you use it?
I am absolutely shameless. I don’t think I’ve published a review, poem, or interview that hasn’t appeared on my Facebook page. And I love adding new literary friends. With that said, I think Facebook offers unique possibilities for collaboration and sharing ideas about writing, especially with writers who are outside of one’s geographic reach.

Favorite book?
Helen in Egypt by H.D.

Favorite food?
Thai pizza.

If you could have coffee (or tea or a beer) with any literary figure, alive or dead, who would it be?
I would have tea with Anais Nin. Although I’d really like to hear about her writing process, her inspirations, and her literary influences, I would also love to get some dirt on Henry Miller.

Where can we find more information about you?
I hope you’ll visit me online at kristinamariedarling.com/

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If you couldn’t make it down to Kansas for the first ever official Midwestern Gothic reading, you missed out on a good one! But no worries, we have some pics to show off—that way it’s almost like you were there, right?!

Thanks to all who read and attended, and thanks again to Raven Bookstore for hosting the shindig in the first place.

Photos courtesy of/copyright Matthew Porubsky.

Enjoy!

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Posted on March 6th, 2012 by admin

Hi everyone!

We had an amazing time in Chicago for this year’s AWP Conference—and lucky us, we managed to snag a table on the last day!

Thank you again to everyone who stopped by, asked about Midwestern Gothic, signed up for the newsletter, and/or picked up a copy of the journal. We have sent out all digital submissions/free digital copies, so if you haven’t seen an email from us, check your Spam folder or shoot us an email, we’ll make sure you get your copy. And if you have any questions for us—about anything—hit us up at mwgothic@gmail.com and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

We’ll be sending out a newsletter in about a week with some exciting announcements (and special deals), so those of you who couldn’t pick up a copy at AWP, or those who weren’t able to attend, fear not! You’ll be able to soon!

Thanks again to everyone!

Jeff + Rob

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Posted on March 5th, 2012 by admin

If you are on the Midwestern Gothic email newsletter list, then you received (last week) details on how to find us at AWP. Unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond our control, it looks like Midwestern Gothic is table-less for AWP this year…we think. Bear with us as things are still up in the air right now. That being said, we do have a back-up plan and we still very much want to, somehow, meet anyone and everyone willing. And of course, we’ll still have fantastic deals for back issues and subscriptions.

The plan, as of now, is for us (Jeff + Rob) to wander in the Bookfair area—we’ll be wearing matching red plaid shirts (and you can find what we look like from our various links, personal websites, and social media ventures). Wandering is not the most ideal, of course, but we will have many copies of Midwestern Gothic with us, as well as freebies to give away, and with our “uniforms” we should be pretty easy to spot.

Our goal is to stay pretty well camped out by the other exhibitors, so keep an eye for us there. And if you are one of the lucky ones with a smart phone (or, alternately, will be logging in to a computer at any point during AWP), we would recommend paying close attention to our Twitter feed (@MWGothic), where we’ll be giving up-to-date announcements on where we’re located, if we manage to snag a table (and where that might be), as well as any other special deals we may have going on.

We are sorry about the inconvenience.  Many of you have expressed interest in meeting us, saying hi, talking shop, etc., and we hope we are still able to do that. We’ll just be, you know, a bit more mobile than before.

If you have any questions whatsoever about our plans, feel free to email us at mwgothic@gmail.com and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

Hope to see you there!

Jeff + Rob

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Posted on February 27th, 2012 by admin

Against all natural odds here in the Midwest, spring is in the air. And to celebrate? We’re unveiling the cover and contributor listing for Midwestern Gothic Issue 5 (Spring 2012)—our biggest issue yet!

Beautiful, right? Cover image copyright (c) David J. Thompson.

And now…the contributor listing for this jam-packed issue:

We hope you’re as excited as we are for Issue 5. Stay tuned for more information, including an official release date—coming soon!

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Posted on February 26th, 2012 by admin

Christopher Linforth’s story “Fence” appears in Midwestern Gothic Issue 4, out now.

How long have you been writing?
Of course, since I was a kid I read—sci-fi, detective fiction, the classics—and wouldn’t stop. Still haven’t. But then came the hard part: writing my own stories. I’ve talked (pontificated, really) about doing it for a longer period than I’ve actually sat down and committed myself to the art. So perhaps the past five or six years I’ve been a writer. My first year of graduate school I had a story accepted into the Denver Quarterly, and that spurred me on, partly through the shock of having anything published and also the thought that people were out there reading my stuff. Sometimes my stories are rather bleak. In college, behind my back, they were christened: “Linforthian.” These days I see that as a complement.

What’s your connection to the Midwest?
For several years, I had the good fortune to live in Manhattan, Kansas. “The Little Apple,” as it’s called (also Manhappenin’), is a strange mix of liberals, conservatives, college kids, post-college hipsters, hardworking locals, returning soldiers, and a burgeoning art and music scene. Tallgrass prairie, manmade lakes, and the curvaceous Flint Hills surround it all. I would really like to move back.

How has the Midwest influenced your writing?
Once I left the Midwest and moved to Virginia Tech for my M.F.A., I had a vantage point upon which to assess that very question. Being physically separated from Kansas helped me write about the landscape, the people, and the atmosphere I remember. Moreover, the professors back there emphasized craft and pushing our work as far as possible. They also widened my purview to folks such as Charles Baxter, Antonya Nelson, Stuart Dybek, and Bonnie Jo Campbell.

Why do you believe there has never really been a regionalist push for Midwestern writing in the past like there has with the South or even the West Coast?
The Midwest always gets a bad rap—often by people who have never lived there. For me, in response to this question and others like it, I often like to cogitate on this quote from Patricia Hampl’s memoir The Florist’s Daughter: “The Midwest. The flyover, where even the towns have fled to the margins, groceries warehoused in Wal-Marts hugging the freeways, the red barns of family farms sagging, dismantled and sold as ‘distressed’ wood for McMansion kitchens, the feedlots of agribusiness crouched low to the prairie ground. Of all the American regions, the Midwest remains the most imaginary, ahistorical but fiercely emblematic. It’s Nowheresville. But it’s also the Heartland. That weight again: the innocent middle. Though it isn’t innocent. It’s where the American imagination has decided to archive innocence.”

How do you feel about social media to promote your writing, and do you use it?
So far I haven’t gone the Facebook or Twitter route, but I do have a blog.

Favorite book?
I’m split between Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy.

Favorite food?
I love breakfast food. So I’m going with scrambled eggs, wheat toast with butter and jam, fried potatoes, tomatoes, and a mug of steaming coffee.

If you could have coffee (or tea or a beer) with any literary figure, alive or dead, who would it be?
Gertrude Stein in her Paris salon.

Where can we find more information about you?
I have a couple of stories forthcoming in The MacGuffin and the Chicago Quarterly Review, and I maintain a blog at christopherlinforth.wordpress.com.

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Posted on February 22nd, 2012 by admin

Sarah Carson’s piece “The Building” appears in Midwestern Gothic Issue 4, out now.

How long have you been writing?
I’ve been writing since before I can remember. When I was in elementary school, our local newspaper, the Flint Journal, had a weekly section of children’s writing, and I was always rushing to compose something for it because the winner got to go to the newspaper’s offices and pick out a free Goosebumps book. I’m proud to report I got to take home three separate selections from the Goosebumps series. I always wrote poetry in junior high and high school, but it wasn’t until my junior year as an undergraduate, though, that I began to think about pursuing writing as a career, and I was almost done with my MFA before I felt like I’d written anything that was any good.

What’s your connection to the Midwest?
I was born and raised in the Midwest, and I love it. After some soul searching last year, I decided definitively to never move any farther east than Ohio or any farther west than Iowa.

How has the Midwest influenced your writing?
A lot of what I write deals with growing up in Flint, Michigan during the late eighties and early nineties when the economic landscape of the area began to change from one of the best places to live in America to consistently rounding out lists of the most dangerous cities in the country. Flint used to be home to many General Motors factories and many of the men in my family (my father, my grandfathers, my uncles) had jobs there. I can remember on several occasions overhearing conversations in my home about factories moving or closing or someone we knew being laid off. I vividly remember seeing my dad tear up at the thought of choosing between an early retirement or beginning to look for a new job. Of course, as a child this all seemed normal. It wasn’t until I went to college that I realized that not everybody grew up this way and that not all towns had fast food restaurants you shouldn’t go to after dark for fear of being stabbed for your hamburger. It was then that I really began to feel an urgency to write poems about where I came from. I felt like I came from a place that needed to be represented and shared with people who had never experienced it.

Why do you believe there has never really been a regionalist push for Midwestern writing in the past like there has with the South or even the West Coast?
I don’t have a whole lot of evidence to support this hypothesis, but I think there are generally two prevailing schools of thoughts about the Midwest. First is that there isn’t a lot going on here, an idea probably best exemplified in the episode of 30 Rock in which Liz Lemon is wearing an outfit that’s a little on the blah-side and Jack Donaguey tells her she looks like a “Midwest Lesbian.” The second school of thought is that what is going on in the Midwest is a little on the Jerry-Springer-I’m-sleeping-with-your-sister-who-is-a-man-and-who-also-cooks-meth-with-your-grandma-in-a-pop-up-trailer side of life. Generally, I think the academics who teach literature and writing like to turn up their noses at this type of content, but, really, it’s their loss, and I’m glad Midwestern Gothic understands this.

How do you feel about social media to promote your writing, and do you use it?
I’m not great at using social media to promote my writing. I know a lot of people who are successful with it, but I’m just not consistent enough to have had any success. When my first chapbook, Before Onstar, came out, I tried to promote it by networking with other writers online, but I found that I just ended up with a lot of random people as Facebook friends. And the odds were that they, too, were only friending me to try to sell their books. Now I mainly just use social networking to talk to people I actually know.

Favorite book?
Like most writers, I have too many favorite books to pick just one. My favorite book by a Midwesterner, though, is Rivethead by Ben Hamper. It’s a/an creative nonfiction/autobiography by an assembly line worker from Flint, Michigan. My mom got it for me when I was in high school, and I’ve never let it go.

Favorite food?
Fish Tacos from Tia Helitas on South Saginaw St. in Burton, Michigan.

If you could have coffee (or tea or a beer) with any literary figure, alive or dead, who would it be?
Definitely Raymond Carver. I can read his stories over and over and over and still be in love.

Where can we find more information about you?
www.etchedpress.com
www.facebook.com/sarahamycarson

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Posted on February 15th, 2012 by admin

Jane Hoogestraat’s pieces “At the Edge of a Time Zone” and “The Scholar From Inner Mongolia Visits Missouri” appear in Midwestern Gothic Issue 4, out now.

How long have you been writing?
I started being serious about writing poetry in my early twenties. But I’m the product of a wonderful public school system (in South Dakota) and a hyper-literate family, so the origins of my interests in writing and literature probably started much earlier.

What’s your connection to the Midwest?
I was born in eastern South Dakota, and educated at Baylor (in Texas) and at the University of Chicago. For the last couple of decades, I’ve lived and worked in southern Missouri, a corner of the world that is a rich and strange crossing between the Midwest and the South, technically named the “Upland South.”

How has the Midwest influenced your writing?
While I’ve spent my entire life in the Central Time Zone, I’ve had the gift of experiencing, in a lasting way, four very different places and cultures. I hope my poetry, at least in a small way, repays that gift, or rings true to the places I’ve lived. The challenge for writers is to be loyal to particulars of place and experience, including ways of speaking, but also to be critical, and self-critical, of blind spots and imperfections within a given place. I try to do that in a humorous way in “The Scholar from Inner Mongolia Visits Missouri.”

Why do you believe there has never really been a regionalist push for Midwestern writing in the past like there has with the South or even the West Coast?
I worry that the bias against Midwestern writing may be more apparent than real, and might result in a self-fulfilling prophecy where writers from the middle of the country feel a sense of exclusion or alienation that is really unnecessary. For the last three summers, I’ve attended writers’ conferences where the majority of writers were from the Northeast but seemed genuinely interested in reading work from other cultural and geographical landscapes. The experience also taught me the need to articulate features of landscape that I take as given. For example, somewhere Kathleen Norris has written that you need to be very careful when you write about the landscape of western South Dakota because so few people in the world will ever see it. I thought about her words a lot when I was working on “At the Edge of a Time Zone.”

How do you feel about social media to promote your writing, and do you use it?
I’ve discovered that writers tend to like Facebook, and perhaps use it differently than others. Midwestern Gothic caught my attention because a former student posted a link to it, for which I’m obviously grateful. Within reason, Facebook is a wonderful forum to discover glimpses of the intellectual and artistic worlds of other writers. And I usually post a note when I have good news about poetry. At the same time, I’ve been extremely stingy with “friend  requests” and as a result have only 23 friends, all of whom I’ve met personally.

Favorite book?
I have trouble selecting just one, so I’ll list (in order) six books of poems, a book about theology, and a novel: Ranier Marie Rilke, Duino Elegies; Elizabeth Bishop, Collected Poems; Franz Wright, Walking to Martha’s Vineyard; Natasha Trethewey, Native Guard; Jane Miller, Palace of Pearls; Gail Mazur, Figures in a Landscape;  Barbara Brown Taylor, When God is Silent; Graham Greene, The Quiet American.

Favorite food?
Dark chocolate with espresso.

If you could have coffee (or tea or a beer) with any literary figure, alive or dead, who would it be?
Rainer Marie Rilke (1875-1926).

Where can we find more information about you?
english.missouristate.edu/JHoogestraat.aspx
JHoogestraat@MissouriState.edu
Harvesting All Night available at www.Amazon.com
Winnowing Out Our Souls available www.foothillspublishing.com/2007/id153.htm

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Posted on February 8th, 2012 by admin

January’s session was absolutely the best turn-out yet, and we’re hoping to beat it in February. Due to AWP, we’re moving up February’s reading to the 22nd. Per usual, if you’re in the area, we’d love to see you! Details of where/when on the official Wednesday Night Session website. Bios of the readers involved below. Check it out!

Amanda Goldblatt is a writer of fiction and creative nonfiction. She has led workshops in both genres at Washington University in St. Louis and currently teaches at the University of Michigan. Her work has been published in American Short Fiction, The Collagist, Thermos, NANO Fiction, and elsewhere. Catalpa: This is Not True, a prose chapbook, was published by Cupboard in 2010. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of the online journal Super Arrow, and lives in Michigan.

Benjamin Paloff grew up in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and was educated at Harvard and at the University of Michigan, where he now teaches. He is the author of The Politics, a collection of poems, and has translated several books from Polish, including Lodgings: Selected Poems of Andrzej Sosnowski. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Program, he is a poetry editor at the Boston Review.

Matthew Olzmann is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Inch, Gulf Coast, Rattle and elsewhere. He’s received fellowships from Kundiman and the Kresge Arts Foundation. Currently, he is a writer-in-residence for the InsideOut Litereary Arts Project and the poetry editor of The Collagist.

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Posted on February 5th, 2012 by admin

Benjamin Cartwright’s pieces “January 31st, 1955″ and “[Unlabeled 1]” appear in Midwestern Gothic Issue 4, out now.

How long have you been writing?
I wrote my first short story after watching the silent, Lon Chaney version of The Phantom of the Opera at St. John’s cathedral in Spokane, Washington, when I was five years old. They showed it at midnight, on Halloween, complete with organ music and creepy sound effects. I had a really intense dream, after the movie, and when I woke up, I wrote it down in this red Hello Kitty diary I stole from my sister. What was with my parents, taking us to something that terrifying, that young? God bless you, mom and dad.

What’s your connection to the Midwest?
I moved to the Midwest from the Pacific Northwest for the first time when I was eighteen, after meeting a girl on the internet at a time when people did not meet people on the internet. That relationship went south, of course. Years later, living in Moscow, Idaho, working at an amazing bookstore called Bookpeople, I was trying to decide between going to graduate school in New York, or going to graduate school in Kansas. The owner of the bookstore, Bob Greene, a transplanted Brooklynite who’d moved to Idaho in the late seventies/early eighties, gave me some sound advice. He said: “Do you want to live with twelve other people in a studio apartment and work three jobs in order to pay rent, and write one poem a year, or do you want to move to Kansas and really work on your writing?” Bob was right. I moved to Kansas, and my future wife, a Topekan, was, by chance, the first human being I spoke to when I rolled into town. I’ve been here ever since, for over a decade, except for a stint in China. I have no family ties, or family history in the Midwest, but live here by choice, which is something many of my coastal friends and family are still confused by. It was the right choice, though. Kansas is a great place to write.

How has the Midwest influenced your writing?
I attended a lecture given by Larry Martin, a vertebrate paleontologist, who explained how the move of primate species from an arboreal habitat to the wide, open spaces of the African veldt, was one of the evolutionary causes of development in the human brain. The wide open spaces required primates to evolve and develop the capacity for abstract thought, because of the difficulty navigating terrain without visible landmarks. We like to think ourselves very advanced, we Homo sapiens, but I feel the open landscapes of Kansas, particularly the Flint Hills, affect my thinking, and my writing. The landscape here nudges you into grappling with ambiguity. In Kansas, there is the physical dimension of the wide, open spaces, but we also, almost reflexively, fill up those open spaces with thought. The physical, rural landscape of Kansas requires abstract thought to navigate, or make sense of it. Open space is the space of terror, as well as the frontier; the s