T.J. Beitelman has been a one-man publishing wrecking crew over at Black Lawrence Press, having published two poetry collections and a novel prior to joining the ranks of short story collection authors. His Communion was published last November
EWN: Your short story collection, Communion, was published in 2016. What story within the collection had the earliest publication history outside of being in the collection, and what was that history?
T.J.: The story that is now called “Delivery” was published as “Rooster” in Quarterly West in 1998. They also nominated it for a Pushcart Prize, which hadn’t happened to me before and, sadly, hasn’t happened since. Also sadly: 1998 was a really long time ago. I was still in grad school then, and being published in such a reputable literary magazine—then the extra honor of the Pushcart nomination—was a huge encouragement to me. The composition of the story—it’s a flash fiction—took one sitting of maybe thirty minutes. I based it not-so-loosely on something that actually happened to me. The essential elements of the story—pizza delivery, apartment, rooster, cock fight—are true. The rest “[suits] the truth of fiction,” to quote Michael Ondaatje in the acknowledgments to Coming Through Slaughter. I don’t know, all of that—the unfussy composition, the willingness to tell the truth (but tell it slant), all of that still informs me. It doesn’t always hold the day, but it does inform.
EWN: How did the publication of this particular collection come about? Were you solicited by the publisher, win a contest, agent submission, etc.?
T.J.: Classic grad-student desperation: write something in thirty minutes, think, “Hey, that’s…I mean, not bad.” Put a stamp on it (they had this thing called the “Post Office” then), wait for a while and get a nice note in the mail saying, “We’ll take it.” Delusions of grandeur, that it’s all gonna be easy as pie, clean sailing from here. Twenty years later, the story finds its way into a collection.
EWN: Where do short stories fit within your life as an author? Primary form to work with, or something you write when an idea hits, or …?
T.J.: I kind of think everything I write is a short story—and I write poems, novels, scripts, essays, memoir, blog posts. Etc. Actually, I have also said everything I write is a poem—or this: that I’m a poet who writes novels, stories, scripts…etc. I suspect it’s the same idea. Brevity. Intensity. A singular premise. Voice, structure—the way the words find their way onto the page, their arrangement. A dash of epiphany—a mystery carried rather than solved (to paraphrase John Berger). That’s my primary form, and it tends to suit short fiction.
EWN: Where do short stories fit within your life as a reader?
T.J.: I teach creative writing at a fine arts high school. The workshop model still informs what we do, at least to some extent; the short story is well-suited to that form too. I read a lot of student stories (luckily a lot of them are very good), and I teach a lot of excellent stories. I read new ones a lot for that reason, but I also re-read old ones a lot for that reason too. The best ones, of course, are gifts that keep on giving. Lahiri, Diaz, Munro, Moore. Denis Johnson (a poet writing stories, for sure), Edward P. Jones (who writes stories, purposely, so that they feel like novels). Too many to enumerate, right?
EWN: How will you be celebrating National Short Story Month this May?
T.J.: I will be re-reading Dubliners and (hopefully) publishing (at asfa-cw.org) an interview my students conducted with Cate O’Toole regarding her chapbook collection O, My Darling. Like the collection, the interview is in “choose your own adventure” form. Cleverness abounds!
EWN: Thank you very much for your time!
T.J.: Happy to do it.
TJ Beitelman is a writer and teacher living in Birmingham, Alabama. He’s published a novel, John the Revelator, and a collection of short fiction, Communion, as well as two collections of poetry: In Order to Form a More Perfect Union and Americana, all from Black Lawrence Press. His stories and poems have appeared widely in literary magazines, and he’s received fellowships from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and the Cultural Alliance of Greater Birmingham. He taught writing and literature at Virginia Tech, where he earned an M.A. in English, and at the University of Alabama, where he earned an M.F.A. in creative writing and also edited Black Warrior Review. He currently directs the creative writing program at the Alabama School of Fine Arts in Birmingham. He can be found on-line at www.tjbman.com.
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