INTERVIEW with WEAVE Nonfiction Editor Peter Kusnic

We sat down with Peter Kusnic, Weave’s Creative Nonfiction Editor, to talk about the limitations and rewards of creative nonfiction, as well as his own writing process. Peter has a B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh, where he studied fiction, creative nonfiction, and African American history. In 2009 and 2010 he earned national recognition as a semifinalist in the Normal Mailer Creative Nonfiction competition, for essays about memory and childhood, and the women’s history of racism in Selma, Alabama. His fiction has been featured in the Three Rivers Review, New Fraktur Literary Arts Journal, and The Original Thought. In addition to Weave, he is also a freelance magazine and news writer, and a waiter at Pamela’s Diner in Oakland. On days off he can be found in a coffee shop somewhere, at work on his first novel. He plans to enroll in an MFA program next year.

WEAVE: Why did you start writing?

Peter Kusnic: I’ve been writing since I was young—probably since I was six. I’ve always been obsessed with horror movies, Stephen King, Dean Koontz. I have a folder of my first short stories. All of which you could classify as “horror”—high body count, shallow depth, generally exploitative. Sometimes I go back and look at it and cringe. But I’m often surprised by how much detail I find in those stories; an interesting description or turn of phrase that reminds me why I turned to writing in the first place: I love language—reinventing it—creating unique metaphors, full characters, tangible settings. It wasn’t until college that I got serious about writing. Going in, I thought I was a writer. Coming out, I knew I was one. Studying both fiction and creative nonfiction at Pitt, I had wonderful mentors who helped me see the fallacy of objectivity in Nonfiction and the rewards of truth in Fiction. I found that, beyond content, there wasn’t much of a distinction between the two.

W: That actually leads into the next question: How do the genres compare, and where is the common ground?

PK: The essence of story is the same. Speaking from my personal approach: I find that both of the genres are about actively working to figure something out. In nonfiction, I start writing and it flows linearly. I have to pare the story down.

In fiction—I think Flaubert said this, but I’m not sure—the writing process is more horizontal. You begin with a skeleton and build outwards.

The limitations are different. In nonfiction, it’s a limitation of choice—what you choose to write about, what details/research/ideas you choose to illustrate the subject—and you’re also limited by the truth. And by truth I mean honesty. Is the narrator being honest with him or herself in relation to the subject? Does the narrator sound credible, trustworthy?

W: Can you say more about fiction’s limitations?

PK: In fiction, the limitations are nonexistent; anything can happen; but once you begin writing, you begin to see what the story is really about, and then you must impose limitations on the story that will enhance the story you see emerging. No matter what genre, we’re limited in what we can do with a given piece, whatever its length. But it’s up to the writer to decide what those limitations are. Writing exercises can be helpful to figure that out. “Now Write!” is a good exercise book. They can give you more perspective, can help shape an idea you’ve been toiling with. You can choose where to add emphasis. For example, building with setting—dedicating pages to the creation of a living, breathing space for your characters to occupy. You may scrap all of it, or decide to keep a sentence, a paragraph, an idea. The act of writing gets you closer to understanding your story. It may seem fruitless, all those wasted pages. But it's important to get all the muck out before you can start making sense of it.

W: How can creative nonfiction and poetry/fiction work together? In Weave for instance, the poetry and fiction have magical qualities. Along those lines, how can nonfiction incorporate the fantastical and/or the magical, and still be informed by truth?

PK: The creative nonfiction we’re generally looking at [for Weave] is memoir and personal essay. I think there are so many ways to tell a story in any genre, but the best ones reveal some kind of truth. In nonfiction, memory is truth; it’s what conjures the subject, defines a space for that subject to live, and invents the story. Memory is a very magical thing, ethereal and fleeting and always subject to change. It’s subjective, full of emotion, and hidden from everybody else. And it becomes history when we try to capture it in a medium—like writing. Truth is plastic and conveyable through infinite means. It’s up to the writer to determine what those means should look like on the page. There’s a lot of freedom in writing creative nonfiction. The writing has to be honest—if it’s forced, it will seem forced, and a reader won’t take your narrator seriously.

W: How does a nonfiction writer toe the line between honesty and creativity? Is it possible to be both creative and honest? As any story incorporates both poetry and prose, embellishments in the name of creativity, and the bias of perspective, can it ever be completely “true”?

PK: Every story can be “true”. How do you write about how it feels to experience death? It’s different for everyone depending on how you exist. You have to show how you feel or think. When writing about personal experiences, the “I” has to be there, a persona. Vivian Gornick talks about persona in her book on creative nonfiction, “The Situation and the Story.” The persona is sort of like a reader’s conceptual identity of the narrator, which in creative nonfiction, is inextricably linked to the author. As the reader reads, he or she gets an idea of this person telling the story, their values and beliefs. Reading established authors in any genre you can often find a fundamental topic uniting all their work. Sometimes characters and settings recur, or ideas from works long ago return in a different form, hopefully with greater lucidity. I like to think writers write because they have to. To be a writer is to be in a constant process of figuring out. It’s a dedicated practice, discovering your niche, your topic, your persona. A lot of writing, journaling, navel gazing. But ultimately it comes down to your emotional reality—that’s as true as anything else in this world.

W: Advice for emerging nonfiction writers?

PK: Trust that it’s what you want to do, because it means lots of work, grief, hours. You have to find the emotional energy to make your piece feel alive, to resonate with you, the writer. You have to be dedicated to learning the technical tricks of the trade, because even a good, evocative story can go awry without this foundation. There should be research, and outside contexts that serve as the narrator’s tools in figuring out the experience. I think research is the most undervalued component of nonfiction, because it shapes how the narrator’s reality fits into the broader landscape of the world. Without external voices holding it up, the essay can come off as being too self indulgent for a reader to find meaningful.

For me, the hardest part is knowing when done is "done." There's always something missing, something that isn't working as well as it should, a scene that can be filled out or pared down. It can be totally overwhelming. The sense that it's not good enough, it's not ready, unfinished. Those anxieties come with the territory of writing. They can be overwhelming, paralyzing. But it's important to plow through them and get the work as done.

W: What’s on your personal summer reading list?

PK: I just finished Factotum by Charles Bukowski. Raunchy, dirty, misogynistic—but the scenes were visceral, well paced. I also read The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, which revealed some really compelling evidence about how the Internet affects us culturally and psychologically. I have plans to get back into Madame Bovary, and I’m currently reading Breath, Eyes, Memory, a novel by Edwidge Danticat. And Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan, which is a memoir about gardening.

W: Critic Chris Anderson said that nonfiction, as a genre, can be split into two categories—the personal essay and the journalistic essay. Can you speak to this?

PK: It’s an oversimplification. When I write personal essay or memoir, I do a lot of research, read lots of theory, lots of poetry. I read a lot of Freud and Blake while writing a memoir about memory repression and my childhood. For an essay on the Civil Rights Movement, I interviewed participants in the Montgomery Bus Boycott and others, enigmatic people who pioneered profound changes in American society. I transcribed 16 hours of video, took a sex and racism class, another class on racial gabs in public schools, researched the history of lynching, repression. I mean, I did so much work on those essays, and it paid off. The journalistic flourishes—the epigraphs, the allusions, the integration of facts into narrative—turned the muck of my personal feelings and memories into a concrete narrative with resonance.

With magazine or news writing, the approach is a little different. I get an assignment, a deadline. The story is given to me in abstract and it’s my job to fill in the details through interviews and research. The content must always be factually accurate while being at the same time streamlined and compelling. I have to make decisions and tailor the story to both the readership and my editors. Details I might find interesting may not be right for the publication, and so I have to turn my filter on. That’s a reality nonfiction writers who want to work for newspapers or magazines should understand. The piece is yours, but it’s shaped by many forces. That I think is the biggest distinction between the personal and journalistic essays. But in the end it’s all just narrative.

W: Lots of young writers I interact with express concern that writing a memoir is just “navel gazing,” or that they don’t have interesting stories. What do you have to say about that?

PK: Memoir is the most intimate form of nonfiction. What’s incredible about a good one is that you are transported into a very private and intimate world that is at once totally personal and universal. The memoirist writes with great courage, and we have to respect that. Everybody has a story to tell. I don’t care if you’ve spent the last six months with the indigenous peoples of Bolivia, or in jail, or changing diapers. What matters is how you tell the story. As writers, we aim to capture both the zeitgeist and the fundamental human experience behind the story, and, if we’re ambitious, we want it to flow like a dream and make a reader stop and think in a way he or she never has before. There are all kinds of ways of doing that, but the first step is recognizing that you do have a story to tell.

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interview by Caitlyn Christensen

INTERVIEW with WEAVE Flash Fiction Contest Judge Bridgette Shade

WEAVE is pleased to announce our First Annual Poetry and Flash Fiction Contests. The judge for Flash Fiction is Weave's own editor Bridgette Shade.

Bridgette Shade earned her MFA in Fiction from Carlow University. Her short story “The Machinist's Son” won the Dana Award’s first honorable mention in 2010. Published works have appeared in The Oral Tradition, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Caper Literary Journal, Clapboard House, and Voices From the Attic: An Anthology among others. She is a lecturer in the English department at the University of Pittsburgh and Carlow University.

Bridgette took some time to answer a few questions for WEAVE. We hope you enjoy getting to know more about Ms. Shade as much as we did.

WEAVE: What is your earliest memory of writing?

Bridgette Shade: I remember writing a story called "The Red Spot." It had something to do with two girls: one who lived on Earth and one who lived on Jupiter (where the great red spot had some kind of power to turn people into the opposite of what they would be on Earth). Freaky science fiction stuff that I wish I could lay my hands on. It's in the attic, I'm sure, but there are likely to also be spiders in the attic, so ...

WEAVE: Do you have any writing rituals, such as writing with your favorite pen, pre-writing yoga, or sitting in your favorite armchair?

Shade: I have three typewriters. Two manual and one electric. I write poetry on these and letters. I love pencils above all and there are several pens which I keep hidden so that they cannot be absconded with. But ultimately, I write at the infernal computer, though some days I just play solitaire.

WEAVE: You have worked in the past as a journalist. What events lead you to write short fiction? Do you still write nonfiction?

Shade: Fiction and nonfiction are not so different, in my mind. But, truth, I think, is easier to get at in fiction. In nonfiction, truth is often strangled by the specifics of 'reality'. For example: In real-life, a boy who gets his mom to sign the paperwork necessary for him to enlist in the Army at 16 might tell the recruiter that he wants to become a Ranger so that he can shoot people who illegally cross over the border. The recruiter might tell him that he'll have to quit chewing tobacco while he's in basic training but after that he's free to do whatever he wants. The reporter taking notes might ask, "Can you get out of this contract? What if you change your mind?" The answer is No. He cannot change his mind but he doesn't care about shipping out before Prom; he doesn't have time for girls anyway. In nonfiction, the story ends with the interview. A journalist can paint the reader a picture, but she can only show you a fraction of the canvas. Grace Paley once said 'Every character - real or imagined - deserves the open destiny of life.' That's the long reason for my decision to become a fiction writer - because what I most love about stories is identifying with hidden truths, and fettering that stuff out requires imagination.

WEAVE: After listening to you read your short story “Posthumous Photography” on Prosody, it is obvious, through your animated reading, that a character’s voice and dialect, to some extent, heavily shape the story. Is this a conscious effort or does the voice emerge organically?

Shade: When I hear it, the voice always comes first. I never set out to write a story about a person with a particular vocabulary or inflection. I grew up listening to smart, opinionated people who very often spoke in slang and double-negatives. I think society unfairly equates regional dialect with lack of education or intelligence. Perhaps these voices come to me when I need to tell a story about a character who is more than what he/she seems.

WEAVE: Talk a little bit about your manuscript Cactus People.

Shade: Cactus People is actually not set in the desert nor are there any 'real' cactuses present in the story. Cactus People is a state of mind - a state reflective of the kind of people who populate my book. People who come to realize (often too late) that the things they blame for their unhappiness: a gay brother, a traveling salesman, or 'metal cactuses sticking out of the ground next to the catpee bushes when you don't live nowheres near a desert', are in fact, necessary as air.

WEAVE: Can you share some of your favorite writers and stories of all time?

Shade: Phew. Big question. My favorite overall story collection is Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. I love Barb Johnson's story "Killer Heart" and Tim O'Brien's "How to Tell a True War Story." My favorite line from a story comes from Grace Paley's "A Subject of Childhood". ("Then through the short fat fingers of my son, interred forever, like a black and white barred king in Alcatraz, my heart lit up in stripes." ) I also love Amy Bloom's "Silver Water" and Percival Everett's "The Fix." Jane McCafferty's collections: Director of the World and Thank You for the Music are among my favorites as is the story "Honey" by Anne Enright. Padgett Powell, Mary O'Donnell, Barbara Kingsolver, Eudora Welty and Benjamin Percy's "Refresh, Refresh." In terms of the classics, it's hard to beat Chekov or Katherine Mansfield, and I know as soon as I walk away from this screen, I will kick myself for not listing several dozen more.

WEAVE: What do you enjoy doing when you aren’t writing?

Shade: I am reading submissions to Weave, of course. Or teaching. Or taking the dog for a walk. Or listening to Selected Shorts on the ipod while walking the dog. Or reading while eating spaghetti in the kitchen after everyone has gone to bed - red wine near by. Or thinking/ telling someone about something I've read. Mostly reading, eating, drinking, and sometimes - on good nights - sleeping.

WEAVE: What are your current obsessions?

Shade: Well, I often have to get out of bed to check the stove and the locks (one more time). In the past I have been obsessed with making fleece blankets and baking the perfect batch of chocolate chip cookies. Obsession comes in waves, I suppose, but the things that remain constant are the need to check the stove and the need to write something that moves people closer to that moment of recognition. That's what really keeps me up at night - the fear of writing without substance.

WEAVE: If you had to choose a color, an animal, and a place to describe your work as an artist, what three things would you choose?

Shade: Red, definitely. The color of sauce. The color of my mother's hair. The color of our mouths.

A dog, I think, though if you'd asked me this question ten years ago, I would have answered differently. Dogs, I find, are representative of the duality of (wo)man. One minute they behave with such humanity - lovingly licking your face when you trip and are sprawled out on the asphalt, weeping and rubbing your split knees. The next minute, they're eating road kill and rolling around in dung.

The place would be a restaurant where the waitress already knows what kind of wine you like and how you take your salad (no cucumbers, please). Ella Fitzgerald and Dinah Washington sing through the speakers about a time before you were born when everything you love was new. And it's the same sisters in the booth next to you as last week. And the old men asking for a kind of dressing that doesn't exist - again. And the babies slapping their fat fists against the tables. It's familiar and inviting and the spaghetti is great. But it's the way they surprise you, these people and things. The way they startle you, interrupting your comfort - sometimes with fierce kindness or quiet cruelty - that keeps you coming back.


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For more information about WEAVE's First Annual Poetry and Flash Fiction Contests, please read our contest page.

For more info on Bridgette Shade, check out her brand new blog. Read her fiction at The Oral Tradition and Caper Literary Journal.

INTERVIEW with WEAVE Poetry Contest Judge Lisa Marie Basile

WEAVE has reopened for submissions for our seventh issue. In celebration of three years of publishing, we've decided to hold our first annual Poetry and Flash Fiction Contests. We are happy to announce that our guest judge in Poetry will be poet Lisa Marie Basile.

Basile author of A Decent Voodoo, (Červená Barva Press, 2012) and a chapbook, White Spiders (Gold Wake Press, 2010). She is a Creative Writing M.F.A. candidate at The New School in New York City and a member of The Poetry Brothel, where she performs as Luna Liprari. She is the founding editor of CAPER Literary Journal, a monthly poetry and prose journal. She is the publisher and editor of the micropress Patasola Press. She also works with PEN American Center's Prison Writing Program and is a bookseller at McNally Jackson Books in NYC.

Ms. Basile was gracious enough to answer a some questions about her writing process, obsessions and the intersection of poetry and performance.

WEAVE: What is your earliest memory of writing?

Lisa Marie Basile:  I sit at the kitchen table with my grandfather and a caligraphy set. We make sweeping designs and letters across paper. We write little stories (I must have been 5). I write thoughts and ideas on green stick-it notes with my grandfather. He was in the Navy. He had an anchor on his arm. He was very quiet but used to be sort of terrible. I think he is largely responsible for inadvertantly cultivating my love creative writing. I think this process changed him as a man too. My mother always said he gave me and taught me everything she never had or learned. So maybe this was his way of getting closer to me — and her? We used to write these little aphorisms. Lots of them. I still have one saved about islands: “Ilands : Ilands are suranded By water. Billions of peopel could be stuck on Ilands.”

W: Do you have any writing rituals, such as writing with your favorite pen, pre-writing yoga, or sitting in your favorite armchair?

LMB: I am painfully inconsistent. Aside from a preference for writing in garamond or didot font (I like serifs) I don’t have a ritual. Even if I weren’t so busy I wouldn’t have a ritual. I’m a little scared of ritual. When I plan my day or my writing, it feels wrong. In my MFA workshop, when asked to write on demand, I freeze. I write when I need to, and I don’t write otherwise. Sometimes I’ll write all day and then have to wait a week or so. I trust the “muse” as we call it, but nothing will coax her from her sleepy state. She hits me over the head and drags me down. Sometimes if I feel something strongly for the world or for my life, it goes through a filter and I just have to wait to get it down. I like it that way. Maybe that’s because I don’t know any other way?

W: What does your day look like as a writer and editor? What do you spend your time on?

LMB: Each day is different between work [as a bookseller] and my graduate studies. Writing comes first, and the inspiration sort of works around the other demands in my life. It almost knows when I have a free moment. I sometimes focus very heavily on editing. Typically, I manipulate my schedule to fit in an hour or so of submissions reading for CAPER Literary Journal and Patasola Press — more if I can. I read CAPER poetry on my lunch break. I spend all day sporadically updating the sites, the feeds, the Twitter and Facebook. I designate some days strictly for Patasola Press or CAPER. I write press releases and edit very, very late at night. I feel very dedicated to making enough time for my press and journal.

When I need to write (for myself, for class) or send submissions and work on my personal activities, it just manages to occur. I’m not sure how. I also am very active with The Poetry Brothel and other reading series. The Poetry Brothel is a wonderful organization that puts on elaborate, detailed poetic readings almost every month. Being involved is perfectly intense; who wouldn’t want to read poetry in an aesthetically overcharged environment with dozens of creative people? Today, I’m putting together a beautiful chapbook with a friend. I’m also editing my book, A Decent Voodoo and waiting eagerly for its publication (Cervena Barva, 2012). So I’d say it all gets done in tiny little bursts throughout each day. I’m very grateful for my life.

W: What do you enjoy when you aren’t writing?

LMB: I like burlesque, both performing it and watching performances. I perform as Luna Liprari. When I spend time at home, I often practice Spanish and try to read poems in Spanish. I’ve fallen for the language. A good day is a day with my loved ones and friends and some wine. I like watching Sci-fi too. And “B-rate Mind-Bending, Visually Stunning Paranormal” films on Netflix. I also used to think my world was about the TV-show LOST, but now that’s over and I’m completely heartbroken to bits. Please, email me if you know how to move on.

W: What was the impetus for starting Caper Literary Journal and Patasola Press?

LMB: CAPER was started in the summer of 2009. It began as a project and morphed into a lifestyle. I was inspired by working on a literary journal during college (Pace University’s Aphros). I wanted to promote beautiful work. I wanted to avoid the exhausted literary trends I was seeing at the time. Patasola Press began in 2011. I always wanted to make books, and like any book editor know, there is a life-affirming feeling when you know you’re putting something out into the world that you believe in and love. I also wanted to promote female writers and we're doing that by publishing an anthology of female writers. It's called La Pastaola. On a less sentimental note, I want to learn more about the world, the ways people work together and grow as an entrepreneur. I want to learn how to be a better writer through editing.

W: How does your work as an editor affect your work as a writer?

LMB: I was born first a writer. Sometimes I feel like editing is the sea and my work is just a tiny island. Sometimes it’s okay to have a dual identity but I forget how good it feels to just play with language. My former professor (a wonderful writer and poet) Jennifer Michael Hecht, told me last night that sometimes it just is good to give up the leadership role and be a part of the things produced by other people’s imaginations, to let yourself wind up somewhere that you didn’t create in the first place. I think that’s something I must try and remember.

W: How does your work with the Poetry Brothel as Luna Liprari inform your writing? How do persona and performance inform your work?

LMB: This is a great question! When I read with The Poetry Brothel, I must try to keep in mind that the poem needs to have a performative element. The poet must be acutely aware of how to say things, where to place the emphasis on thoughts and words and the speed at which one reads. Recently, I read on the Contemporary Poetry Review that poems should be recited, not read. This isn’t the case for some of my poetry and I don’t think it’s the case for a lot of poetry (I believe a poem can live a good life solely on paper) but being a part of the Poetry Brothel has made me aware of the poem’s power off the page. I think harnessing that power is a beneficial process for me right now.

W: What books/journals/blogs/etc. are you currently reading?

LMB: I’m in love with On Elegance While Sleeping by the Argentinian writer Tegui, both because of its form (diary entries) and its content. I recently read Aurorama by Valtat, a dazzling book of ice and Inuits and dream incubators and hover-ships and politics. I’m also reading Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism. I fall all over vintage and historical texts about sensuality and sexuality. I think the Victorian age speaks to a lot of how society today behaves, and it is fascinating. And, of course I read Weave.

W: What are your current obsessions?

LMB: I’m not sure where to begin: the history of the ectoplasm, vintage public domain images, the Steampunk aesthetic, the history and mythology of Mexico (I’m visiting this year for the second time). I’ve been obsessing over atlases and maps as a metaphor in my work. I’ve been reading about the psyche of Oppenheimer. I’m interested in the drive toward destruction, as it pertains to the world and the ways I behave sometimes, too. Obituaries, also, which are the inspiration for a collection I’m working on. I observe the world to a fault.

W: If you had to choose a color, an animal and a place to describe your work as an artist, what three things would you choose?

LMB: A gray owl in the desert.

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For more information about WEAVE's First Annual Poetry and Flash Fiction Contests, please read our contest page.

For more information about Lisa Marie Basile please check out her work at > kill author, Playground Journal and Prick of the Spindle. 
Also check out CAPER Literary Journal and Patasola Press.