LR: What is your relationship with the natural world?

SM: That’s “church” for me.

My family had a summer cabin on the Chesapeake Bay when I was a kid. I grew up on the water. And because those were gentler times, even as a very little girl I could spend a lot of time off on my own, exploring. To this day I can close my eyes and put myself right back there. As an adult I’ve been a hiker/backpacker/camper/birder. I run my dogs at Pt. Isabel Regional Park, right on the San Francisco Bay. Rain, wind, fog, doesn’t matter. If we don’t get out there at least 3 times a week I start to feel a little crazy.

LR: Do you still consider yourself a regional writer?

SM: I’m not sure I ever did! I spent my early years in Virginia; now I live in California. It’s true that a fair amount of my fiction is set in the south or on the west coast, but some is set in New Jersey, where I lived for a number of years. It’s true that setting tends to be pretty important in my work, to the point that it functions almost as a character, but sometimes the setting is as anonymous as a mall.

LR: You grew up in Virginia, I understand, where you spent a lot of time training and riding horses. How has this early experience influenced your writing?

Catch Rides, my first novel was full of all that. Pretty typical of first novels in that way. That said, growing up in the south in the 1940’s and ‘50’s leaves a mark. I remember segregated movie theaters. I remember “white” and “colored” bathrooms and water fountains, and white folks in the front of the bus. I lived through that. You don’t come through something like that unchanged. You just don’t.

The other thing is that Jane Marshall Dillon, my riding instructor, really taught me how to think. At horse shows she’d make us kids stand by the arena and analyze all the other performances. Analytical skills are analytical skills; whether it’s a rider and horse jumping fences in a ring or “13 Ways of Looking At a Blackbird,” when you’re breaking it down and understanding it, the brain-tasks aren’t that different.

LR: When did you write your first story?

SM: I was probably 8 or 9. Everybody in my family told stories. Southerners are storytellers, and as it happened the midwesterners, my father’s side, were even better at it than the Virginians. I came by it naturally, and at some point started writing things down. Mostly about about animals. I did my own illustrations, too.

My first story was published when I was 12. I got paid for it, $25!

LR: Have you kept your unpublished early work?

SM: No. I’m a believer in Grand Gestures, so at several points in my fledgling career I had (unpublished) book burnings. Before Catch Rides I had written at least two other novels, unbelievably bad. I suppose they were therapeutic. I used to drink a bit, back in the day, and I’d get drunk and set fire to a manuscript, burn it page by page, slowly enough that if anyone wanted to burst into the room and rescue it for posterity there might be something for them to rescue. Alas, that never happened.

It seems funny to me now, but I must have been in despair at the time. Maybe just drunk and melodramatic…

A friend of mine from my first attempt at college does seem to have some stuff I wrote back then. Every so often she’ll mail me a “poem.” It always makes me cringe.

LR: What are you working on now?

SM: I have 2 book-length projects ongoing. Baggage is an experimental novel – some readers call it magical realism, though I prefer García Márquez’s “literature of alternative realities.” There’s a place in the seam between “real reality” and imagination/dream where as a writer (and reader) I’ve always been very, very happy. The stuff that goes on in my mind, the stories I tell myself and that tell themselves to me, are at least as “real” as the stuff that actually, physically hurts when I stub my toe on it.

The second book, working title SteelWork, is a more straightforward narrative. It has a plot and everything. On the surface it’s kind of an elegant suspense tale, but it also muses on the nature of families, and of loss. Everything I write is about loss, even when it isn’t.

LR: What draws you to your subject material?

SM: That’s an interesting question, and I don’t have a good answer. My work is character-driven, and often I start getting a voice, and then if I’m lucky the voice will start telling me things. Or I’ll observe something, or experience something, and it’ll stick in my mind and I’ll poke at it and sniff it for awhile. If I’m lucky a voice will associate itself with whatever the experience or observation has morphed into by that time, and start talking to me. Sometimes stories arise out of jobs I’ve had, though I must say I’ve never been tempted to write a novel with an academic setting.

What I don’t do is a lot of conscious decision-making in the early stages of the work.

LR: Did teaching writing and Literature affect your practice?

Sigh. There are people who can teach a full load, perform their committee and advising duties etc., and still keep producing the creative work at a respectable rate. I know people like that, but I’m not one of them. On the other hand, teaching a course in the short story once a year kept me alert for new writers to introduce to my students, and that was a Good Thing. Developing and then teaching a workshop in women’s narrative opened up several new areas for me. The first time I taught the women’s workshop the students were writing such wonderful, honest stuff that I had to write something of my own in response. That turned out to be the first of several pieces about my mother.

LR: Which writers do you read? Which writers do you teach? Why?

SM: I read all sorts of stuff, non-fiction as much as fiction. I’d read John McPhee’s laundry list. Contemporary fiction writers? Off the top of my head, Junot Diaz and Alice Munro are two I’ve been reading recently. Munro is a particular favorite of mine.

When I taught the Short Story there were a handful of writers I felt I had to include, not because I loved them best, necessarily, but because their work was so important to the development of the genre. Poe and Hawthorne, of course, and Gogol, and the Turn of the Last Century Big Four: Chekov, Joyce, Anderson, Mansfield. Then Faulkner, Wright, O’Connor, Welty, Hemingway. Carver. You could make an argument that Faulkner was more influential as a novelist than a short story writer, but I tried leaving him out one quarter and it just felt weird. Oddly enough, I had no trouble at all leaving out Lawrence or Woolf.

Beyond that core, there are hundreds to choose from, more and more all the time. If I were stranded on a desert isle and could only have one story to read over and over forever, I’d choose Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” even though I’ve read it and taught it so many times I just about know it by heart. If I could have two stories I think I’d add Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet In the Brain,” even though I know it by heart too. If I could have a third, it would be Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” There aren’t many perfect things in this world, but that story comes close.

LR: When teaching beginning writing workshops, you often assigned Flash Fiction, what value you find in this form?

SM: Discipline! Compression, word choice, discernment!

LR: What would you recommend that a writer study? What did you study?

SM: Anything and everything. Honestly I don’t think subject matter matters.

I was one of those bright kids who was bored, and not very well served, by school – we’re talking the late ‘50’s, when girls took home ec and boys took shop, and it was clear to me who was having more fun. I spent a lot of time staring out of windows and drawing cartoons. There was stuff going on in my family, too. My father had died and I was just kind of rattling around without any particular direction. But I was always a reader, and if I liked a book I looked for others by the same author. In high school, I binged on Faulkner, Orwell and Lawrence Durrell.

As for courses of study, my college career is a good example of “do as I say, not as I do.” It was the ‘60’s, after all; I did a lot of dropping out, a lot of relocating. I attended 7 different schools and had 5 different majors. At least. It took me 13 years to finish my undergraduate degree. Even then I don’t think I’d really met all the requirements. I’d ended up an English major, and I think the department just got sick of having me underfoot. I had about twice the number of units I needed for graduation, but nothing quite added up. They kicked me out.

LR: What has been the impact of online magazines on your writing?

SM: I got interested in online journals early on –1994, I think. I was fascinated by hypertext for awhile, but ultimately gave it up. Mainly because I discovered I really do want control over my own narratives.

Online publishing allows for one thing that’s important to me that would be difficult, or at least costly, in print, and that’s to create a journal that’s rich in graphics as well as text. When Tattoo Highway was created, in 1998, we had a choice to make. We could have an online journal that looked and “read” like a print journal, or we could have one that consciously didn’t look like anything you’d be likely to find on a magazine rack. We went with door #2, and I’ve never regretted it.

I know there are purists who think there should be nothing on the page but the poem its pristine self; these folks are not TH fans. Far more seem drawn to the combination of art and text. Two different aesthetics.

LR: Are all words equal to you? What feeds your vocabulary?

SM: “All words are equal, but some words are more equal than others.” I like the quirky, the regional. Slang. Neologisms. Mis-hearings (e.g. “easedrop.”) I hang around and easedrop, er, eavesdrop, shamelessly. Malls, street corners, check-out lines in supermarkets and banks, other people’s company picnics, other people’s cellphone conversations (just try and avoid ‘em!). Poetry lives!

LR: Does revision play a large role in how you work? Or, does a work come to you nearly whole?

SM: I revise and revise and revise and revise and revise and revise and revise and revise. Often the end product bears almost no resemblance to what I started with.

LR: In the early 1990s you were one of the pioneers on the web starting an online e-zine and teaching classes on writing and editing online magazines. By 1998, you founded Tattoo Highway, which is now in its 10th year and an important web journal. How do you see the future of magazines and journals on the web?

SM: It’s pretty clear that’s the way things are trending. Print journals nearly always have a web presence now. But focusing on web-only journals, there are things you can do using new media that you can’t in straight print. Audio, video, animation, hypertext. . . .

As web journals gain readers and “respectability,” the quality of the prose and poetry they publish improves. Only a few years ago there was a heated discussion on a writers’ listserve about whether publication in an online journal would “count as real publication” for purposes of hiring, retention and promotion. There was a lot of hand-wringing, a lot of worry that senior faculty wouldn’t have heard of web journals and wouldn’t take them seriously. I think there’d be less worry today. And this wide(r)spread acceptance of such journals’ legitimacy does seem to encourage print-mentality writers to branch out. Certainly at TH we’re seeing more submissions from poets and writers whose prior publication has been in the university presses, even Harper’s and The New Yorker.

LR: Today, many people are writing BLOGs. Do you have one and what is their value? Or, not? Is it more like sharing your journal with readers?

SM: I do have a blog, but probably not the kind you mean. My dogs compete in agility trials, and I blog about that.

LR: How much time do you spend on the internet including email? Is this a blessing or a distraction?

SM: I spend way, way, way too much time online. Just ask my partner! It’s both blessing and distraction. Blessing because of the way it connects me with people (hence ideas, stories, poems, opinions, and yes, jokes) I’d otherwise never know. What did we do before email?

Distraction? Because it’s there.