Join us as we celebrate the release of Laura Krughoff's new story collection, Wake in the Night, with a reading at King's Books in Tacoma. Laura will by joined by Renee Simms and Suzanne Warren. 

Wake in the Night comprises six stories that span a century of rural American women. Marriages occur in the 1930s for lack of other opportunities; a young girl dances to Thriller for her friend’s older brother; a pastor remembers her childhood spent fantasizing that she is the prophet John the Baptist. In the small towns of the Midwest, girls and women dream of finding voice and forcing the world to listen.

Laura Krughoff’s debut novel, My Brother’s Name, was a finalist for a 2014 Lambda Literary Foundation Award. Her current novel project, based on her Pushcart Prize winning short story, “Halley’s Comet,” follows the personal and political lives of two women as they navigate the decade between Massachusetts legalizing same-sex marriage and the U.S. Supreme Court overturning the Defense of Marriage Act. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in publications ranging from literary journals such as The Threepenny Review to the Gay Voices section of The Huffington Post to the podcast of the Chicago-based story-telling performance collective Second Story. She teaches in the English Department and in the Gender and Queer Studies Program at the University of Puget Sound.

Renee Simms the author of Meet Behind Mars. She is assistant professor of African American studies and contributing faculty to English studies at University of Puget Sound. Her work has been widely published, appearing in Callaloo, Southwest Review, North American Review, Salon, and elsewhere. She received a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.

Suzanne Warren is a fiction writer and essayist at work on a manuscript of linked short stories entitled The Country of Husbands. Her story of the same name was originally published in Gulf Coast and won a Sequestrum Editor’s Reprint Prize, and Post Road selected her story “The Raspberry King” to appear in its Guest Folio and awarded it third prize in its annual Flash Fiction Contest. Other work appears or is forthcoming in Narrative, The Cincinnati Review, Memorious, The Prague Revue, and Versal, whose editors nominated her story “The Reindeer Daughter” for a Pushcart Prize. Writing awards include residencies at the Whiteley Center at Friday Harbor, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Ucross Foundation. She teaches at the University of Puget Sound.

While taking a much needed break from election anxiety, we interviewed author Patrick Crerand. (Hooray for the House, and special congratulations to Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Deb Haaland, Sharice Davids, Ayanna Pressley, Veronica Escobar, Sylvia Garcia, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and also to Governors Jared Polis and Lou Leon Guerrero!)

Patrick Crerand is the author of  The Paper Life They Lead: Stories published by Arc Pair Press, 2018. His stories have appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Conjunctions, New Orleans Review, Ninth Letter, Indiana Review, Cimarron Review among others and have received special mention in The Best American Nonrequired Reading and Best American Fantasy anthologies. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at Saint Leo University in Florida, where he lives with his wife and three kids.  

Q: Right away, at the beginning of just about any Patrick Crerand story, one gets a sense of the fantastic, the magical, and the absurd. One of your stories, “The Paper Life They Lead,” was mentioned in a Best American Fantasy anthology. And, of course, like most literature, no matter the genre, there is often a more serious, human undercurrent about what it means to live in this world. But that isn’t easy to achieve with the style you are using. When writing in the realm of the absurd, one runs the risk of being too quirky, or too simplistic, or too gimmicky. Given the current moment of the world, how do you see stories of magical realism or fantasy fitting into the larger literary landscape? Is any bit of “seriousness” important?

As funny as it sounds given some of the premises of these stories, they all derive from some aspect in real life, something terrifying or troublesome that happened to me. And I think magical realism has always been rooted in the political. Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Kafka are the prime examples. But writers like Angela Carter, Rikki Ducornet, Aimee Bender, George Saunders (all of whom are much more accomplished than I am) they are all confronting real problems through different means than straight realism. When I first started writing, I tried realism but kept getting pulled into absurd premises that I realized I could take seriously and maybe I could say something about life easier than if I was writing about real life in a small town or a city, though there is nothing wrong with writers who do it. Cheever was one of those writers who could bounce back and forth, and I love his stories like “The Enormous Radio” as well as a more straightforward story like “Reunion.” 

Q: Another element of a Patrick Crerand story is humor. The stories are funny, but as I recall reading once, humor often works because of its connection to the taboo. (I’m pretty sure my source is Portraits of “The Whiteman”: Linguistic Play and Cultural Symbols Among the Western Apache by Keith H. Basso. I remember examples about jokes that deal with dreams that work for the Apache only because speaking of dreams is taboo; they don’t work for “the whiteman” who doesn’t see dreams as a taboo subject. He simply doesn’t get the joke.) Yet, as any comedian knows, crossing too far into the taboo, or too far into political incorrectness, makes the joke crass, and it’s no longer funny. How do you balance humor with appropriateness? Is this something you think about?

I aim for funny before appropriate, for better or for worse. Jokes and stories often work on similar premises of confronting taboo or looking at a problem of language from a canted angle. Some of the humor crosses too far, I’d imagine, as taboo is sort of a shifting goal-line, depending on perspective. I remember once I caught my mom reading a section of a story I had written and just putting it down with a sigh and a disappointed look. I imagine she doesn’t like some of these stories, but her “taboo” is more restricted than mine is. In short, I do think about it though, and in early drafts I try to push as far as I can, though I do pull back sometimes.

Q: That leads me to your novel project. You’ve mentioned that you are working on a novel that involves Jesus. I imagine that raises a lot of eyebrows in some circles. Can you say anything about what this novel might entail?

My mother’s disappointment concerned a section of this book. So the novel presupposes a universe where Jesus is hit on the head during a stoning and forgets to die and ends up living for a very long time, until our current era. For the most part, he forgets he is God really, though some small, uncontrolled, and generally useless miracles do seep out from time to time. The book picks up after he somehow stows away on a cruise ship where he turns all men passengers’ penises into flowers and hysterically impregnates all the women. He is arrested in Florida and then hospitalized with heart trouble. Before he can be deported, Althea Turner, the dying head of a local fast food company called Snack-O-Ham, meets him, recognizes him as her personal savior, and bequeaths him her company. After Turner dies, her executor, Sharla Heck, a one-armed atheist accountant, is charged with protecting him from the interests of a CEO of a big hedge fund, an apocalyptic investigation from the Vatican, and the sadistic impulses of a local minister who runs a live-action passion play in Florida.

Q: I know you grew up Catholic. Does Catholicism, with its elements of the magical (in the form of Christly transubstantiation, or maybe even in the form of paganism and the kinds of magic associated with “heretics”), inform your writing at all?

Yes, very much so. It was my first introduction to magical thinking, mysteries of faith, incongruent symbols, etc. The magical always has real consequences, and I think that balance made sense to me. Maybe it still does. You raise Lazarus from the dead, but you can’t escape the Romans. You inspire a ticker-tape parade into Jerusalem with hundreds of people but can’t keep your closest friends from turning on you. I met a lot of people there with one foot in and one foot out, which is a perspective I’ve never been able to shake really. 

Q: I want to end with a more general question about writing. Do you have a philosophy on literature? What should a writer strive toward? What should a story try to achieve?

I guess I don’t have a philosophy really, but the more I teach, the more I admire writers who invite readers into their work, no matter how different the world is from the one we live in. That’s something I try to inculcate in my students here, as many of them like to write about fantasy or science fiction or techno-thrillers. But no matter what we’re all dealing with humanity, whether or not the characters are human even. That’s the lens through which we see, so those common traits—fear of death, love, family, disappointment, humor—have to be in there no matter what where we are or how much happens. Dragons or AI robots or laser gun calibers are all secondary concerns to these issues. That’s the hill I’ve been dying on lately.
 

Check out Deirdre Hines thoughtful review of THE PAPER LIFE THEY LEAD on the Riggwelter Press blog. 

Thank you to visual artist AVA ROCKAFIELD for the delightful cover to WAKE IN THE NIGHT! This 6-story collection is expected to be available October 15. 

Six stories span a century of rural American women. Marriages occur in the 1930s for lack of other opportunities; a young girl dances to Thriller for her friend’s older brother; a pastor remembers her childhood spent fantasizing that she is the prophet John the Baptist. In the small towns of the Midwest, girls and women dream of finding voice and forcing the world to listen.

​Laura Krughoff’s debut novel, My Brother’s Name, was a finalist for a 2014 Lambda Literary Foundation Award. Her current novel project, based on her Pushcart Prize winning short story, “Halley’s Comet,” follows the personal and political lives of two women as they navigate the decade between Massachusetts legalizing same-sex marriage and the U.S. Supreme Court overturning the Defense of Marriage Act. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in publications ranging from literary journals such as The Threepenny Review to the Gay Voices section of The Huffington Post to the podcast of the Chicago-based story-telling performance collective Second Story. She teaches in the English Department and in the Gender and Queer Studies Program at the University of Puget Sound.

You can now pre-order your copy of MOUTH TRAP here.

 “I don’t know what to call these, and neither will you—protest poems or tiny prose laments? But as a speaker in one of them says, it’s not actions that are taboo, but the breaking of silences that surround them. And so, poet Rebbecca Brown sets out to smash them to pieces, all the dark unsaids rising up from soil and field, root and vine, barn and cell, blood and booze and loveless boys and girls to haunt our reading and contaminate our dreams. In equal measure, anguish and outrage, unsilenced, refuse to be anything but mouthy and here now in this strange and all-too familiar world where women give birth to bees, earth swells, and heat is heat. Downhome Americana has never sounded off as lyrical—or as brutal or tormented—as in the countless beating wings and throats of Brown’s ecstatic testaments to our sad humanity.” 
-- Katharine Haake, author of Assumptions We Might Make About the Postworld and The Time of Quarantine
 
“With its rich, evocative music, this book presents us with a decidedly democratic buffet completely devoid of snobbery, where no tasty word is too far off on the amuse-bouche spectrum to be excluded. To read this book is to feast!” 
-- Shane Book, author of Congotronic and Ceiling of Sticks.
 
“Mouth Trap drops the reader into a world that is at once elemental and evocative. Steinbeck would feel right at home in these gorgeously dust-filled landscapes, replete with chicken claws and cabbages, at least until the center falls away and we meet ‘a lady who aged into a tumbleweed’ or a character who offers ‘fleeting moments and a sack of teeth.’ In this artful blend of the sensuous and surreal, Rebbecca Brown delights us with her word play before she duct tapes us back to the reality that ‘This is not a tome to grow old in.’ Perhaps not, but Mouth Trap is a collection to savor for a good, long while.” 
--Melody Mansfield, author of The Life Stone of Singing Bird and A Bug Collection.

First of all, thank you to Christine Mugnolo for the beautiful cover art and design! We can't wait to see it in print. 

Rebbecca Brown's prose poetry collection renders birds, beasts, and surroundings from the lens of an artist who structures form with feeling. Acute observations are captured with music and tangled in emotion. Through the creation of portraits and landscapes, Brown fashions an exhibit of dynamic lyricism and word play. Speakers experience the biological as ephemeral, all the while bewildered by the promise of transformation. 

MOUTH TRAP will be available on September 17. 
BLURBS:
 “I don’t know what to call these, and neither will you—protest poems or tiny prose laments? But as a speaker in one of them says, it’s not actions that are taboo, but the breaking of silences that surround them. And so, poet Rebbecca Brown sets out to smash them to pieces, all the dark unsaids rising up from soil and field, root and vine, barn and cell, blood and booze and loveless boys and girls to haunt our reading and contaminate our dreams. In equal measure, anguish and outrage, unsilenced, refuse to be anything but mouthy and here now in this strange and all-too familiar world where women give birth to bees, earth swells, and heat is heat. Downhome Americana has never sounded off as lyrical—or as brutal or tormented—as in the countless beating wings and throats of Brown’s ecstatic testaments to our sad humanity.” 
-- Katharine Haake, author of Assumptions We Might Make About the Postworld and The Time of Quarantine
 
“With its rich, evocative music, this book presents us with a decidedly democratic buffet completely devoid of snobbery, where no tasty word is too far off on the amuse-bouche spectrum to be excluded. To read this book is to feast!” 
-- Shane Book, author of Congotronic and Ceiling of Sticks.
 
“Mouth Trap drops the reader into a world that is at once elemental and evocative. Steinbeck would feel right at home in these gorgeously dust-filled landscapes, replete with chicken claws and cabbages, at least until the center falls away and we meet ‘a lady who aged into a tumbleweed’ or a character who offers ‘fleeting moments and a sack of teeth.’ In this artful blend of the sensuous and surreal, Rebbecca Brown delights us with her word play before she duct tapes us back to the reality that ‘This is not a tome to grow old in.’ Perhaps not, but Mouth Trap is a collection to savor for a good, long while.” 
--Melody Mansfield, author of The Life Stone of Singing Bird and A Bug Collection.

We are so happy J. David Stevens sent his manuscript to us. I and You is a beautiful collection of stories about first- and second-generation immigrant experiences and the difficulties of understanding and knowing those with whom we are most intimate and close. 

David's Mexico is Missing won the Ohio State University Prize in Short Fiction in 2006.  His work has appeared in a variety of national magazines, including Harper's, The Paris Review, Tin House, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, River Styx, and Mid-American Review.  In addition, several stories have been anthologized in collections from W.W. Norton and Longman, as well as in The Best American Nonrequired Reading series.  He lives in central Virginia with his wife and two children, where he teaches English and creative writing at the University of Richmond.

I and You will be available in the early months of 2019.

Our first essay collection, PLEASING TREE by Brooke Larson, will be available in the early months of 2019. It's about Mormons hiking in the desert and the human relationship with the wilderness. It's really good. 

Brooke Larson is a writer, collagist, and fungi enthusiast.  She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University, and is currently a PhD student in English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.  Her poems, essays, and art have recently appeared in Foothill Journal, Split Rock Review, Gravel, The Swamp, Timber, Split Lip Magazine, and The Journal of Creative Geography.  She calls home Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, where she is a sometimes wilderness guide.  ​

Announcing our final 2018 author:
Laura Krughoff.

Laura's six-story collection WAKE IN THE NIGHT will be available this fall through our website.

​Laura Krughoff’s debut novel, My Brother’s Name, was a finalist for a 2014 Lambda Literary Foundation Award. Her current novel project, based on her Pushcart Prize winning short story, “Halley’s Comet,” follows the personal and political lives of two women as they navigate the decade between Massachusetts legalizing same-sex marriage and the U.S. Supreme Court overturning the Defense of Marriage Act. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in publications ranging from literary journals such as The Threepenny Review to the Gay Voices section of The Huffington Post to the podcast of the Chicago-based story-telling performance collective Second Story. She teaches in the English Department and in the Gender and Queer Studies Program at the University of Puget Sound.