The Interstitial Arts Foundation is so pleased to announce the launch of the newest installation of our Interfictions series: Interfictions: A Journal of Interstitial Arts, edited by Christopher Barzak, Meghan McCarron, and Sofia Samatar, with IAF Co-Founder Delia Sherman as Executive Editor.

The new, bi-annual online journal seeks to push the boundaries (of course!) of what it means to publish on the web. To that end, the editors have gathered pieces from wildly different corners of the writing, visual arts, and music worlds in order to showcase weird and wonderful work that falls outside conventional categories. The results are truly fascinating. We’re immensely proud of this inaugural issue, and we can’t wait to share it with you in less than a week!

Note: If you will be attending WisCon 37 in Madison, Wisconsin, please join us at our LAUNCH PARTY on Saturday, May 25th at 9 pm in Room 607. Enjoy mixed drinks, create interstitial art, and win prizes, including signed copies of Christopher Barzak’s new collection, Before and Afterlives, and Sofia Samatar’s debut novel, A Stranger in Olondria.

To whet your appetite, here is a preview of our first issue from the editors:

In this first issue, we’ve assembled an exhibit of fiction that remixes and re-imagines form, genre, and voice. Jedediah Berry’s “The Thing Under the Drawing Room” mixes an homage to adventure narratives, especially those of Conan the Barbarian, with a mannered tale of intrigue. Kiini Ibura Salaam’s “The Taming” inhabits the perspective of a captured wolf. Keith Miller’s “The Tale of Robin Duck” mixes text and illustration in a slideshow format to create a different kind of reading experience. And Janalyn Guo’s “Acting Lessons” presents a play-within-a-story that examines, and perhaps expands, the roles we play in life.

Our nonfiction and poetry offerings broaden the field of the Interfictions anthologies, allowing for even more innovation and genre play. In nonfiction, Sunny Chan’s “a Collection of things arranged in order” uses lists to link the personal essay to a range of preoccupations: literary, cultural, and environmental. Dan Campbell’s “Codex to Weave a Spell Unspoken” responds to the work of J.R.R. Tolkien in both words and images. And Brit Mandelo’s “Gonzo: The Real, the Surreal, and Hunter S. Thompson,” examines the roots of the outrageous blend of fact and fiction known as gonzo journalism.

In poetry, Rose Lemberg’s “Bone Shadows” mingles the literary with the speculative, and the personal with the magical. Gwynne Garfinkle’s prose poem “Ginnie and the Cooking Contest” works in the spaces between genres, forms of experience, and continents. Paul Jessup’s “all the houses on sesame street are haunted houses” echoes children’s rhymes to express adult loss. And “A Pentatonic Moon” combines words and music: these original translations of five Tang dynasty poems, by Emily Jiang and C.L. Jiang, have been set to music by Emily Jiang.

All of our offerings contain elements that make them hard to classify. The categories “fiction,” “nonfiction,” and “poetry,” should be taken with a healthy dose of salt. Never prescriptive or closed, they are intended as signposts, as question marks, and as a challenge.

The IAF would like to thank Delia Sherman, Christopher Barzak, Meghan McCarron, and Sofia Samatar for their hard work and brilliance, as well as Interfictions webmistress Tara O’Shea. We hope you love Interfictions as much as we do and will consider submitting to our next issue!

by RON BASS

Chester Anderson’s entire career was nothing if not interstitial. Born in 1932, he was part of the Beat Scene in Greenwich Village and North Beach. He published three books of poetry and several little magazines. He performed as a musician, playing two-part inventions with two recorders simultaneously. He wrote rock criticism for and later edited several issues of Crawdaddy! Prior to writing The Butterfly Kid, he co-authored Ten Years to Doomsday with Michael Kurland. In Haight-Ashbury in 1967 he was one of the co-founders of The Communications Company, the publishing arm of the Diggers, and wrote extensively about what was going on during the Summer of Love. (Joan Didion wrote about her unsuccessful search for Anderson in Slouching Towards Bethlehem.) Later he moved to Mendocino County and published several more volumes of fiction.

The Butterfly Kid, which was nominated for a Hugo for best novel in 1968, is itself interstitial – it’s a science-fiction novel, a detective story, and a comedy of manners (or lack thereof) that depicts Greenwich Village undergoing a psychedelic sneak attack of unknown origin. The visuals are quite vivid and in places potent enough to trigger a contact high.

It begins with a teenaged boy sitting in Washington Square Park, generating hordes of wildly colored and patterned butterflies by rubbing his fingers together. The first-person narrator of the novel, a fictional Chester Anderson who plays electric harpsichord in the band Sativa and the Tripouts, observes and befriends the teen. Shortly thereafter he observes a halo above the head of his porn-writer friend Andrew Blake. Someone, it turns out, is distributing what come to be known as Reality Pills.

At a party that weekend Reality Pills are mixed into a blue drink concoction everyone imbibes. Anderson’s hallucination that night conjures up a period orchestra playing Handel’s Water Music: “Authentic livery of purple watered silk and plum plush with lots of lace, authentic instruments like serpents, recorders, krumhorns, sackbuts, oboi d’amore, cornets, brasses without valves and woodwinds without keys, two almost Turkish kettledrums carried by two husky ‘prentices each, all absolutely authentic and brand new and being played by virtuosi.”

Anderson observes: “The pill was obviously a brand-new drug, we decided, some kind of projective hallucinogen. You have the hallucinations and everyone gets to see them.” Riots erupt as the effects of the hallucinations multiply, and the National Guard is called in.

The source of the Reality Pills turns out to be the despised Lazlo Scott, an inept coffeehouse poet and conniver who embodies the comedy of manners (or lack thereof) aspect of the novel. Scott’s: “major joy was to bring trouble and discomfort to everyone he encountered… He once caught a social disease and spread it broadcast, especially among the naïve and virginal, for upward of six weeks, until it got too uncomfortable even for him.”

Anderson and his friend and roommate, a fictional version of the writer Michael Kurland, decide they have to save the planet from this menace. They try to solve the mystery of who is supplying the Reality Pills, but they prove to be inept (Anderson) and feckless (Kurland) detectives. Anderson eventually tails Scott to a warehouse on Canal Street, where he winds up being imprisoned and tortured by Ktch, the leader of a phalanx of a dozen six-foot tall blue lobsters who employed Scott to distribute the Reality Pills as the first stage of their plan to take over the earth. Although Anderson proves to have some ability to blunt the will of the lobsters by singing to them the Sativa and the Tripouts song “Love Sold in Doses,” they eventually leave him bound up in the warehouse, and drive upstate to Croton Reservoir, into which they are planning to pour billions of doses of the Reality Pill.

Kurland and associates eventually free Anderson, and the race is on to round up a van-full of Greenwich Village Irregulars to drive upstate and foil the lobsters before it’s too late. The intrepid band does not have any weapons. But then Anderson remembers they have hundreds of Reality Pills he rescued from the warehouse. They are faced with the challenge of creating hallucinatory weapons and warriors to combat the monsters doing the bidding of the lobsters. The battle scenes at the end of the book are alone worth the price of admission.

The Butterfly Kid was last in print in 1980. Copies can be found on Amazon and Abebooks starting at around fifteen dollars.

IAF Blog Contributor Ron Bass

This week, the play Stand-Up Tragedy opens in the East Village in Nativity Church, the actual church where the final scene takes place and where the playwright Bill Cain, who is also a Jesuit priest, once ministered. The concept of both play and production is interstitial—using the idea of stand-up comedy, but standing it on its head, telling a fact based story of a new teacher in a Lower East Side Catholic school where “You can tell the new residents of the neighborhood by how high they jump when a gun goes off.” The young priest has ideas of “starting a new religion…. One that doesn’t use a dead young man as its logo,” but encounters challenges in reaching out to the students to whom he is striving to connect. The play moves beyond genre, drawing not just from stand-up comedy, but from hip hop music, comic book art, and a variety of dance traditions to create an entirely new work which nonetheless has deep roots in the community.

Interstitial blog readers might be familiar with the work of comic book artist Rick Veitch, who is doing the illustrations and poster art for the play. When artistic director David G. Schultz first contacted Veitch, he said, “I really want to work on this show because I was that kid with the rotten family who was making comic books to escape.” Schultz said, “Rick actually sent us sketches of work he’d done when he was a kid, and it was very much on the themes of the kid in Stand-Up Tragedy. His comic book was called ‘Hero!’ and this one is called ‘Saga,’ but the same theme—the hero saves his family.  What was amazing about him, aside from the great work he did, was that he said, ‘Find me a student from the school,’ and he made that kid’s work the centerpiece of what he did.”

When I spoke to the director of Stand-Up Tragedy, Nicolas Minas, he also elaborated on the theme of apprenticeship—using students in the production.  Minas, who first studied Acting at Pacific Conservatory of Performing Arts in California—a regional theater with a training program—believes the future of the arts lies in apprenticeship  “It’s the history of where we’ve all come from in the arts, and especially in theater. It’s the strongest way of training.”  It was at the Pacific Conservatory he first saw Stand-Up Tragedy.  “I had no idea theater could be modern, I didn’t know it could have hip hop music, I didn’t know so many things about it.  It changed my idea of what theater could do and how you could tell a story.”

Like many interstitial artists, Minas, who ran his own theater company for ten years in Chicago, has found he had to create his own opportunities. “If I want to do something, I’ll find a way to do it, raise the money and find people passionate enough about it to make it happen. We weren’t—I’m not—interested in doing a genre of theater, being a community theater or experimental theater.  People kept asking us, what’s your niche, what’s your niche? But it actually took us years to figure out, and what we figured out is that we don’t have one.”

When working as Arts at Education Director at the arts center of the Chicago YMCA, he saw potential in an unused dance space, and the opportunity to create an apprenticeship opportunity, bringing kids and professionals together for a production of Stand-Up Tragedy. When both he and David Schultz, who had acted in the Chicago production, met again in New York, the idea of doing Stand-Up tragedy came up again, and were excited to do it in the space where Bill Cain had once said mass.

“David has a mission to bring theater into space the community already has a relationship to and say, “What can we do to develop new audiences for the theater? So that has led to us being here in the actual corner of the world where many scenes take place and to have a relationship with LaSalle Academy—many of their students play students in the production, as well as professional New York actors. And there’s a larger apprenticeship going on—just like the kid who helped created our poster actually got to work with the comic book artist who created the artwork for the show. A student who is interested in music is working with the sound designer and musicians to create some of the beats that we’re using for the hip-hop sections of the show. So there’s a bigger thing going on here, bring kids in to do the things they are interested in, not just acting on stage.”

One of the most interesting aspects of the production, in addition to the many sources it draws on, is how the director, actors, and musicians, are using the space to enrich the work. As Minas said, “Just walking into this space, you fill the history of this space, and the energy here. And that the final scene, the graduation scene—they actually did do graduations here.  This room is such a big part of the community, and of where this story took place.”

Stand-Up Tragedy will run April 15 through 20, April 24 through 27, and May 1 through 4 (there will be two shows on May 4, one at 2pm, another at 8pm). Friday and Saturday performances at 8pm; all others at 7pm. Tickets are $18. At Nativity Church, 44 Second Avenue, New York, NY 10003. You can purchase tickets at: http://standuptragedy.brownpapertickets.com/For more information please go to: http://categoryseven.org/.

Sometimes genre cannot hold an artist, and their gift for telling a story spontaneously overrides the confines of traditional form. William S. Yellow Robe, Jr., is just such an artist, and on Friday night an excited audience jammed Space on White in New York City to celebrate his work.

Many of us in New York spend any evenings of our lives in readings of work in progress, whether it is poetry, fiction, music, or theater, and once in a while you walk into something exciting just because it is so unexpected. I attended an event called W’anishi (Thank You in Lenape), produced by The Eagle Project, a very new theater company dedicated to exploring the American identity through performing arts and their own Native American heritage, and this particular reading and celebration was being held in support of their future production of the play Wood Bones by Mr. Yellow Robe.

Mr. Yellow Robe, an enrolled member of the Assiniboine tribe of the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, is an energetic and exciting artist, and introduced his work by reading two poems and a “Facebook rant,” before yielding the stage to a performance of a scene by from his new play Wood Bones. What made the half hour, and perhaps the entire evening, interstitial in my mind, was the lack of boundaries between the forms as presented by the playwright/performer, a master story teller. He began with two poems, written for his late wife as she was dying from cancer; his told their story and the poems were incredibly moving, both on their own, but even more so because of the context he had given He moved directly to the poems to a “Facebook rant” (he described Facebook as the cheapest and easiest form of publishing) about the difficulty of creating and producing theater work in America. This provided a segue to the scene from Wood Bones.

We only saw a few short scenes from the play, but they were powerful, moving, and mysterious, exploring issues of the loss of both personhood and culture.  The actors, in their short moments on stage, were extraordinary; Veracity Butcher as 121, conveyed the pain of being invisibly chained and deprived of her memory with wonder physical movement that drew you into her agony; Albert Ybarra portrayed Leroy, who seemed to be a kind of caretaker/jailor/potential liberator.  Director Bob Jaffe, who has been working for a decade will the playwright on a variety of projects, clearly has an understanding of the work, and helped convey, in a few short moments the depth of its message.

Albert Ybarra and Veracity Butcher in Wood Bones

Earlier in the evening, we were tantalized by several brief scenes from other productions this very young theater company has been working on.  Waaxe’s Law by Mary Kathryn Nagle is a play about an early law suit in Oklahoma that fought to improve the legal position of Native Americans. Tyree Giroux as Chief Standing Bear and John Mazurek as General Crook made unlikely but effective comrades as protestor and defendant. The scene from In the Boneyard by Ian McDonald showed two brothers fighting over whether to exhume their mother; Ryan Victor Pierce, founder of the company, directed both scenes with a sure hand, and offered a very amusing performance as

Playwrights Vicki Lynn Mooney and William S. Yellow Robe, Jr.

“Doom,” one of the brothers, in the second, playing opposite Tony Torn as the outrageously obstreperous “Gloom.” as the second. “Broken Heart Land” by Vicki Lynn Mooney managed to be both entertaining and deeply upsetting, as it portrayed the terrifying wedding night of an innocent and unprepared bride in the 19^th century. There was a brief performance by Mariah Gladstone, who engaged the audience in a touching call and response song.

Of course, you can’t really review theater or concert readings, which only offer a glimpse of art which will be fully realized later, but I was so knocked out by the story telling and beautifully framed communication which leapt over traditional boundaries and yet was rooted so deeply in tradition that I wanted to share.  Congratulations to The Eagle Project on their remarkably productive first year, and I sure everyone who was there can hardly wait to see what they will produce in their second.

All images and photos supplied courtesy of The Eagle Project. You can also find them on Facebook – The Eagle Project.

I’m delighted to share news of the Interstitial Arts Foundation’s movement and growth this past year. With your help, we were able to lend our support and promotion to more artists, reach wider audiences in new locations, and begin an exciting new project. As we head into 2013, I invite you to join us by renewing your membership and coming to one of our salons or town halls (or hosting one!)

The Interstitial Arts Foundation (IAF) is a non-profit group dedicated to the study, support, and promotion of art that crosses borders, working to break down the many barriers—commercial or creative—that force artists into categories and genres.

In 2012, you enabled us to:

• Offer salons and town halls open to all interstitial artists in New York, Boston, and Indianapolis
• Introduce the new work of exciting interstitial artists to others on our blog and Facebook page
• Help our friends and supporters achieve their crowd-funding goals through publicity boosts and sharing of their ideas
• Continue sales of our groundbreaking international anthologies, Interfictions and Interfictions 2
• Publish Interfictions Zero, a rolling online anthology of interstitial criticism on interstitial texts

And in particular:

• Conceive of and begin work on our newest project, launching in Spring 2013, Interfictions: A Journal of Interstitial Arts, to be edited by Christopher Barzak, Meghan McCarron, and Sofia Samatar, with IAF Co-Founder Delia Sherman as Executive Editor

The upcoming, bi-annual Interfictions is a new and critical direction for us. Beginning as an online literary anthology, it will grow to include all kinds of art—visual, performing, interactive—that transcends boundaries and refuses to be kept in a box.

Interfictions and Interfictions 2 were revolutionary anthologies at a time when genre-bending fiction had difficulty finding a market. Thanks in part to these anthologies, many forms of interstitial literature are now practically mainstream. Five years later, the online Interfictions is a major step in our ongoing goal to support visual and performing arts and literary criticism as much as literary art. I’m tremendously excited about our new anthology and will keep you updated in 2013 as the project continues.

The Interstitial Arts Foundation, unlike many other nonprofit organizations, is entirely run by volunteers. We don’t have a physical building, but meet mostly on the phone and online to create the results you see. But it still takes money to maintain our Web activities, organize meetings and salons, and promote the ideas and dreams of the artists who we support. We rely on contributions from members like you, so please consider renewing or joining us today.

To become a Friend of the IAF in 2013, we ask for a gift of $25 (although if you could give a little more, it will help pay our professional rates for contributions to Interfictions). We’ll list you on our Web site, and you’ll be the first to hear about upcoming salons, town halls, and other local and national activities. The IAF is a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization, so your contribution will be fully tax-deductible. But more importantly, your gift will help today’s most innovative artists continue their work by breaking down outside definitions of how and what they should create.

The easiest way to contribute is through our donor Web site. Or mail your contribution to P.O. Box 35862, Boston, MA 02135. If you include your URL, for donations of $25 or over we will link your name to your Web site.

Thank you so much to all of you who have donated in the past, and a warm welcome to those of you who are new to us—artists and art-lovers alike. The work we do at the Interstitial Arts Foundation is vitally important, but we can only do it with your help. I hope you will be able to join us for 2013, which promises to be a wonderful one for Interstitial Arts!

All the Best in the New Year,
Larissa Niec
President

By Deborah Atherton

Last Saturday, one of the hottest tickets in Manhattan was for a concert presented by the contemporary chamber music group Ensemble Pi at the cell, a diminutive theater on 23rd Street that did not have room for the people lined up outside the door. The lights had only gone on downtown a week ago, and the gasoline shortage has emptied the streets of cars. But people were lined up in Chelsea to hear an interstitial presentation of some diverse works of art, all of which had an element of contemporary chamber music. Within an hour, we were treated to a beautiful piano/violin duo, a poem read in German but projected in English, sketches for an opera with an ensemble that included accordion and Apple laptop, and a moving puppet show.

The theme which united these elements, which could have been disparate but instead worked across genre boundaries and were enormously moving together, was What Must Be Said, taken from a recent poem by Nobel laureate Gunter Grass about the issue of nuclear power in Iran and Israel which sparked controversy all over the world. The concert was the seventh Annual Peace Project concert offered by Ensemble Pi, which “hopes to offer a dialog between music and ideas on the great issues of the day” (last year’s concert was on the environment.) Although the theme and ideas were serious, and the emotions evoked were sometimes profound, the presentation was inspired and often fun.

The first piece offered, Lament: The Fallen City by composer Susan Botti, was a duo for piano and violin. The powerful and passionate performances of violinist Airi Yoshioki and Idith Meshulam in this piece, which used the fall of the city of Troy as a metaphor for “modern cities that have experienced human-made or natural disaster,” had more than one audience member in tears. The emotional movement of the piece reminded me a little of the unfolding of The Trojan Women. The violin felt like a human voice, at first furious, enraged, and inconsolable, then through reflective interactions with the piano, came to a kind of reconciliation and understanding. For an audience which had been through its own natural disaster in the last week, it resonated deeply.

We moved next to a reading of excerpts of Gunter Grass’ poem, What Must Be Said, which was read in German by Kai Moser, and projected in English on a screen. This is often done for opera in performance, and as it turns out, works really well for poetry as well. Idith Meshulam spoke a little first about the meaning of Günter Grass’ poem and his courage as an artist, who revealed, at the age of 85, after a distinguished writing career, that as a youth he had been part of the Nazi army. A few years later, he followed that revelation with this anguished poem, which questions whether Israel, and not just Iran, has become a nuclear power, saying what he felt must be said. As Ms. Meshulam pointed out, whether or not one agreed with his position, his courage in taking it was impressive.

Because the program was short (which is seldom a feature of contemporary music concerts, but ought to be) we moved without intermission to Three Character Studies by composer/soprano Kristin Norderval with text by Naomi Wallace. The piece (which will one day be an opera) describes the life of Argentinean architect Patricia Isasa, a survivor of Argentina’s Dirty War, who brought her abductors to justice 30 years later. It began with a radiant portrayal by Emily Donato of Isasa as a young girl, dreaming of becoming an architect—”I’m already a city inside. I feel the design just under my skin.” We next heard a song, delivered with appropriate chilliness by Daniel Pincus, from one of her torturers—”To keep the house clean there’s a small price to pay. . .Don’t point a finger at me.” And lastly we heard Kristin Norderval perform the adult Isasa: “Ask me of torture, I’ll spell it out clear. I won’t hold back details, I’ve long lost that fear. But why don’t you ask of love?” The ensemble which performed the music included an accordion, an inventive percussionist, and Ms. Norderval, who not only sang with tremendous emotional depth but created electronic accompaniment with her laptop as she performed. Although the subject was dark, the lively performances and music included humor and surprise, which brought out the humanity and dreams of Isasa, and did not limit her to a victim’s role.

Last up was Great Small Works, a theater collective that performed, with Idith Meshulam and Kristin Norderval, the lively songs and music of Hans Eisler, written with his collaborator Brecht. Although they are also known for their giant puppet pageants, the roots of Great Small Works work for the small stage lie in Victorian Toy Theater. They perform on a traditionally-sized puppet stage, which they call the Jewel Box stage, not with hand puppets or marionettes, but with beautifully, intricately drawn cutouts which are moved with little hooks and puppeteers hands’ across the small stage, and projected overhead on a large screen. Their interpretation of the song “Supply and Demand” was really fun, with occasional contemporary interpolations like a depiction of students struggling up a mountain labeled “One trillion dollars in student debt.” The images of the puppet show also reflected the tragedy of composer Eisler’s life, in which he first had to flee the Nazis in Germany because of his politics and artistic experimentation, and then was placed on the Hollywood Blacklist and deported for his early Communist party connections. The bent, drawn figures, moving through crazy cityscapes that reflect Depression-era art, evoked both the composer’s life and music. The songs were sung with humor and lilt by Kristin Norderval in her elegant soprano, and the excerpts from Eisler’s chamber works were played with deep understanding, spirit, and élan by pianist Idith Meshulam.

Contemporary chamber music is often known to take itself a little too seriously, and, had it been a traditional two hour, one intermission, performance of music alone, the topic of this evening could have easily led to a kind of depressing introspection. But instead, by abandoning the borders that separate art forms, by introducing new ways of presenting and performing, and by doing it in the tiny but lovely space that is the cell theater. Ensemble Pi said What Must Be Said with intelligence, humor, and compassion, and offered its audience, which had been through enough in the last few weeks, an opportunity for both reflection and inspiration.

The IAF is grateful to blogger/photographer James Wagner for allowing us to use the photos he took of this concert. All photos in this post are credited to him, with all rights reserved. Please check out his Web site at www.jameswagner.com.

This is the first in a series of interviews with the editors, curators, and supporters of the Interstitial Arts – the people who help artists get their work to an audience.  Today we’re interviewing Mike Allen, long-time IAF member and editor of last year’s March Madness on our blog.

IAF:   Can you introduce yourself and give us a little background on who you are and what you do?

MA:  I like to say I wear a lot of hats. I write poetry and fiction, and I edit poetry and fiction, I record narrations for podcasts and occasionally act in amateur theater. To be more specific about a few things, my poetry collection Strange Wisdoms of the Dead was a Philadelphia Inquirer Editor’s Choice Selection in 2006, my short story “The Button Bin” was a Nebula Award finalist in 2008, and I’ll have my first collection of short stories, The Button Bin and Other Horrors, out from Apex Publications later this year. For fourteen years I’ve been editor and am now publisher of a little poetry journal called Mythic Delirium, and I’m also the editor of a a critically acclaimed and hard to classify series of fiction anthologies called Clockwork Phoenix.  

IAF:  Please talk about your latest project.

MA: I’ve talked about Clockwork Phoenix in this space before – it’s an anthology series that puts artistry above all else, and that actively seeks out stories that don’t fit into any predefined category. The series wound up without a home after the third volume came out due to the rough economic times, so my latest project has been to fire up a Kickstarter campaign to edit and publish a fourth volume myself.  Amazingly, from the time I started writing the responses to these interview questions, until now, as I type this sentence, the campaign has shot right past the $5,000 benchmark to be fully funded and now we’re pushing toward our $8,000 goal to secure payment for our writers at professional rates. Publishers weren’t interested in picking up this series, but Kickstarter gave me a means to take my problem start to the people, so to speak, and ask if they would help to make this happen. And I’m so glad I did. And of course, I must ask that folks come check us out, we still need all the help we can get.

IAF:   How has being an editor of interstitial work (i.e. work that falls outside recognized easy genre or marketing categories) created difficulties for you?

MA:   Well, the obvious difficulty is this one: I’ve created a critically-acclaimed anthology series that has showcased a number of stories that have gone on to land award nominations or reprints in “Best of the Year” anthologies, including pieces by Vandana Singh, Saladin Ahmed, Deborah Biancotti, Ann Leckie, C.S.E. Cooney, Gemma Files and Stephen J. Barringer, Claude Lalumière, Nicole Kornher-Stace and more, and yet once my original publisher could no longer publish it, it had no hope of finding a new backer as it’s just too weird.

IAF:   What advice would you give to another artist in a similar position?

MA: Kickstarter has been a godsend, though I’m lucky in that I was able to show I already had a track record of success when I launched the campaign. I think, addressing the unique position of an anthologist hoping for enough funding to be able to self-publish at a professional level, I’ve seen several other off-beat anthology projects turn to Kickstarter and end up successful. It’s definitely a viable alternative for those who want to work outside the mainstream. Just make sure you’re striking the right balance between keeping your goals realistic and yet setting an amount to reach that doesn’t end up shortchanging you when it comes time to actually put the book together.

IAF:   One Wish–If you could change one thing about your current situation as editor and publisher (or writer!), what would it be?

MA:  Well, I have a curious problem as a writer, which is that I’m known so extensively as a poet that people seem to forget I also write fiction, even though I’m a Nebula finalist. My first collection of short stories, The Button Bin and Other Horrors, is scheduled to come out later this year from Apex Books (the title story was my Nebula award nominee) will perhaps help. We shall see.

More generally, if I had the power to change the environment I’d work on, I’d ask for readers to be more open to things that are strange and different, and more curious in general. We’d all benefit then. Luckily at least a few of these ideal readers seem to have found me, at least enough to help support a new Clockwork Phoenix.

From the Editors: The Clockwork Phoenix project will be available on Kickstarter until August 9th.

[Our recent New York City salon was so much fun that we asked host K. Tempest Bradford to share her wisdom. Want to host an IAF Salon in your city? Worried that no one will come? Read on!]

Since the IAF started doing salons we’ve seen a lot of interest from folks outside of NYC (where the salons started) who want to do salons of their own. I’m all for that, especially since I have such a great time at salons myself and want other people to have the same great time. Creating and hosting a salon isn’t hard, though it may seem so from the outside. And we often get the same questions from folks who are interested. So I thought I would share how I put our salons together. It’s actually easier than it looks!

Finding A Space

I spent a lot of time worrying over where we could have IAF salons because I wanted to find somewhere perfect that didn’t cost any money and would work no matter how many people showed up. Our first salon had around 70 people. Our second had 10. So flexibility had to be a big part of it.

However, I realized recently that I needed to shift my perspectives about how a salon would or should go, which then helped me find a great space to have them. Instead of thinking of a salon as an event where we needed to take over an entire venue, I realized it should be more like a get-together were you stake out a table in a bar or café and expand outward as needed.

I have a favorite café in NYC called The Vagabond Café that I practically live in, so I know the owners well. I also observed that Tuesday evenings are very slow because there’s no scheduled music. So I asked the owners if they minded if I planned an event that would bring a bunch of people in on Tuesday evenings. (Spoiler: they did not.)

Other than letting me take over the music selection for the evening, the employees didn’t have to do anything special for the salon. At Vagabond we have the option of doing a short reading or musical performance if we want (luckily the cafe has a setup for that) but these things are not at all necessary. Overall, we were pretty low maintenance and everyone left good tips, thus making all parties concerned happy.

We started out in just one section of the café, but as other patrons left we took over their tables as needed. We could have expanded into the entire café had we wanted to and if we had the numbers. And all of it happened organically.

This model for finding a location will also work outside of New York City. You don’t have to be on personal terms with the owner of a café to make it work, either.

You just need a space that fits the following general properties:

• A place where people gather regularly for informal hanging out. Cafes, bars, bookstores, community centers, galleries, hacker spaces, hotel lobbies, etc.
• A place that has weekday evenings or weekend times when business is slower than usual. If you don’t know from experience, don’t be afraid to ask the manager or owner.
• A place where they serve drinks and/or food.
• Somewhere easy to get to, especially in cities where most people use public transportation.

I’m lucky in that I live in a city where there are many cool indie cafes. You might not. That doesn’t mean you’re out of luck, though! Your local Barnes & Noble may be more willing to host a salon than you think. Even a Starbucks can work out if it has the right vibe. The most important aspect in that case is that you’re bringing these venues business — people who will eat or drink during times when there’s a natural lull. That appeals to the business end of things.

Getting The Word Out

For our most recent salon we used Facebook’s events feature to advertise, plus we tweeted and posted on blogs and stuff. Given the nature of a salon, word of mouth is probably the most effective tool you have for advertising your event.

Other methods to consider:

• The new Google+ Events feature
• Submitting the event to a local paper that artsy people read
• Asking friends to post on their blogs, Tumblrs, Twitters, Facebooks and other social sites
• Creating flyers and posting them in places artsy people hang out
• Email announcement lists for artsy groups

At every salon you should have a mailing list sign up sheet specifically for the local salon community. This way it’s easy to remind people of future salons.

What If No One Shows Up?

One of the mistakes I made early on was expecting every salon to be like the very first one where we had over 50 people show up. Even in a big city you’ll have salons where only a handful of people will show. That’s perfectly okay!

Again, this going back to my shift in thinking about what a salon should look like. It doesn’t always have to be a large number of people milling around; sometimes it will just be an intimate conversation between a few people. It’s up to you as host to be prepared for either outcome.

Also keep in mind that the salon doesn’t have to be a one-off thing. We’re now doing them monthly in NYC. Holding salons consistently gives them time to grow. The group may be small at first but get larger as more people learn about it, regular attendees make new friends and invite them, and new folks move into the area.

Now Go Host!

Hopefully this answers some of your questions about how to run a salon. There’s also a more detailed How To available here. And if you have any questions about the ones we’ve done in NYC, ask in the comments!

[K. Tempest Bradford has been a core member of the IAF's New York City branch for years. She is an Interfictions author, the mastermind behind our Interfictions art auctions, and a fascinating example of an interstitial person. Her fiction has appeared in the Federations anthology, Strange Horizons, and Electric Velocipede and Sybil's Garage, amongst others.]

We’re thrilled to announce that longtime IAFer Tempest Bradford is starting up a monthly salon in New York City! The salon will have it first event on June 26th and meet every 4th Tuesday thereafter.

It should go without saying that artists and art-lovers of all types are welcome. Feel free to bring calling cards, business cards, postcards, CDs or other things you can hand people to remind them that they met you and where they can find your work. If you’re a musician, bring your MP3 player/iPod or a USB key with your music and we’ll play it during the salon. If you’re a visual artist, bring digital images of your work on a USB key and we’ll add it to the slideshow that plays during the salon.

IAF members will wear Host badges, so if you have any questions about the salon or the organization or you just need someone to safely begin a conversation with, you can find us easily. We hope to see you there!

The Vagabond Cafe
7 Cornelia Street
Tuesday, June 26th
7pm to 10pm (drop in any time)

To get reminders for this and future New York salons, you can join the Facebook group.

Recently, we posted about interstitial artist and sound art pioneer Liz Phillips’ new work Biyuu, featuring Butoh dancer Mariko Endo Reynolds. This weekend on June 2nd and 3rd  you will have the opportunity to see it in Brooklyn at Roulette’s magnificent new space at 509 Atlantic Avenue at 8 PM. To recap: Liz Phillips will explore the body electric, ground, and tides to reveal a fragile ecosystem. In this performance of  ”Biyuu” (a Japanese word which mimics the sound of bamboo bending in the wind) Liz and Mariko will investigate the body moving through both potential energy fields and in nature—bringing to the stage the sounds of bamboo, tall reeds and water.

I will be there, and I hope those of you in the New York area who can make it will be there, too.  I once had the privilege of seeing Liz’s work with the legendary Merce Cunningham and it is an experience that has lived on in my imagination ever since.  Biyuu will be a piece which uses electronics with extraordinary delicacy. Although I am guessing there will be video to share after –you really have to be in the audience to engage in the total experience.

Below, the  IAF interviews John Frame, an interstitial artist whose work is complex and profoundly moving, evoking for this writer Tim Burton, the Wizard of Oz, and Charlie Chaplin–I am sure you will have your own responses! But do check it out here: The Tale of the Crippled Boy .

IAF: Please Introduce Yourself.

John Frame: “If John Frame were in the movie business, he would be a costume designer, stylist, set decorator, prop master, lighting specialist, writer, director, editor, producer, agent and publicist all rolled into one…”   This quote taken from David Pagel’s 2005 Los Angeles Times review of my midcareer retrospective, has proven to be prescient.   Unexpectedly, to that list would eventually be added photographer, animator and composer.

IAF:  Please talk about your latest project.

Between the years 1980 and 2005 I was recognized primarily as a figurative sculptor in Southern California. I had a solid career, though it was always a bit at periphery of the contemporary art world. My concerns as an artist centered around fundamental human questions, “Where do I come from? What am I to do while I’m here? And what, if anything, happens when I die?” My approach to making art was founded on a desire to strike a balance between the intellectual, emotional, and technical aspects of the process. I believed then, as I do now, that the only way to achieve this balance was through the use of one’s intuition. From the beginning, there was consistent support for the work both publicly and privately. I received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and had a major solo exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1992 and a midcareer retrospective at the Long Beach Museum in 2005. My studio in downtown Los Angeles was the focal point for many of the figurative artists working around Southern California.

From 2000 to 2005 I experienced a very serious creative block and felt that my career had probably come to an end. In May of 2005 I let go completely of the idea of continuing my work.

Within a matter of days of having given up on being an artist, I received the biggest creative download of my life. I awakened at about two o’clock in the morning to find myself suspended in what I now know to be the hypnopompic state.  In that state between waking and dreaming I was able to see a world unlike anything I’ve seen before.  There were highly individualized characters, art forms and architecture, as well as a very clear overarching narrative. Even though I was seeing the story in the middle, I was somehow able to understand both the past and the future of this world I was looking at. Most importantly, all of the characters were moving in space. I knew that this was leading me into becoming a filmmaker, and more specifically, a filmmaker who would use stop motion animation.   Having spent several hours memorizing the world I was seeing and translating what I saw into copious notes, I resolved to attempt to bring the world I saw into this world and began that work the following day.

For the next almost six years, I worked constantly toward realizing what I had seen. This involved creating highly detailed characters that were able to move convincingly in space. In many cases, the character’s eyes, mouths, fingers and, of course, limbs moved.  In addition to creating the characters, I also set about building the sets and creating a working theatrical stage where I could film them in motion. At the same time I was learning to use a complex digital camera so that I could create the photography that would eventually become the book that accompanies this body of work. I very quickly realized that in order to animate this world on my own I would have to become a lighting technician, photographer, animator, editor and eventually composer.  To date there are approximately 35 characters, multiple sets, the stage, thousands of photographs and about 12 ½ minutes of finished film. The entire project was exhibited at the Huntington Library, Art collections, and botanical Gardens in San Marino, California in 2011 and at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon in 2012.   In both venues attendance ran well above expectations and the audience response the sculptural work, photography and films could not have been warmer.  That exhibition, “Three Fragments of a Lost Tale” was Part I of a much larger project entitled, “The Tale of the Crippled Boy,” and we are currently at work on Part II.

IAF: Where do you find your inspiration?

I’m not entirely sure what the source of the inspiration for the work is. I am driven by something inside me that I don’t clearly understand. From the external world, I find multiple sources of inspiration including literature, poetry, dance, music, and spending time in direct contact with the natural world.  (Specific influences would include Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Shostakovich, Mahler, Ingmar Bergman, Pina Bausch and too many others to mention.)

IAF: How has being interstitial (i.e. creating work that falls outside recognized easy genre or marketing categories) created difficulties for you?

Working in the interstitial zone has presented numerous problems, most of them having to do with technologies that were new to me. In a very short time, I went from being a person who had never photographed his own work, or had much exposure to computers beyond simple word processing and Web surfing, to using multiple cameras and computers.  Along with this I needed to learn to use highly sophisticated software packages including Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and Dragon Stop Motion. The difficulty lies primarily in utilizing these technologies to serve the project while never losing sight of the aesthetics involved.  It is important to me that each component of the project be a stand-alone work of art with the capability of moving the audience.

As I pursue my goal of creating a feature-length stop motion animated film one of my biggest ongoing problems has been financial. In the past, when working as a sculptor, I had a body of pieces available for sale every few years. Now working as an animator with a coherent cast of characters that also happen to be works of art, I find myself in a rather awkward position of having no visible means of support.  In order to animate we must keep all of the figures together, probably for many years to come, and at the same time we have significant expenses.

IAF: “One Wish:” If you could change one thing about the situation, what would it be?

My one wish would be to find either a patron interested in supporting this project to its conclusion, or an institution willing to acquire the entire project upon completion for the purpose of making it permanently accessible to the public.

On the Interstitial (or not) Nature of My Poems

by C.S.E. Cooney

The question I had to ask myself beginning this blog was, “How is abook of unabashedly fantastical poetry at all interstitial?”

In a way, How to Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes is the exact opposite of interstitial – at least, the way I understand the word “interstitial,” though I wouldn’t be surprised if my understanding was a bit dim. This little book can actually claim a genre, for better or worse, as it dances on the graves of Shakespeare and Ogden Nash, pickax in hand, wearing little rainbow wings and curly horns, with its forked tongue tucked firmly in its cheek.

But I got to thinking about the origins for some of the poems, the whole reason I wrote them, the purpose they were to serve – before they served in chorus as a collection. That’s where we get interstitial, I think. That’s where we can start saying, “Sure, it’s a goofy rhyme, but it’s also X and B and Q and a cup of PG Tips too.”

This is the Age of Communication. What this means for me, personally, is that most of my best friends and dearest family are miles and states and countries and oceans away, and they are also at my fingertips. Email, Facebook, LiveJournal and other blog sites keep my interest and affection firmly tethered to people I might’ve otherwise let drift off into the ether of forgetfulness, wishing them happy while waving firmly farewell.

But these days your friend might announce, from a different time zone but with her text full of stress and tears, “I’m having a Terrible Day, because…” A.) Job Trouble B.) Boy Trouble C.) Thesis Trouble D.) Car Trouble, and it hurts your heart to read of it. That tough but tender organ is squeezed in the vice grip of human sympathy! “The world’s more full of weeping,” et cetera, but what can you do?

You could write a little L emoticon in their comments section. Or you could write a poem. Lavish them, loudly and in public, with rhymes and ballads. Let them see themselves as you see them, with swords at their sides and moons in their hair and lips like strawberries and hearts like supernovae.

In this way, I guess, the poems of this collection aren’t only poems. Sometimes they slip sideways and behave as kisses and shoulder rubs and all the dinners you can’t make when your friend has a cold or your mom has a migraine. The title poem of the collection was one of these, as well as “Sing Hey Caity-Hey.”

Then there are the times your friends are making things like jam. And trading their jam for the jam of their friends. Except you, the author, have no jam. Because not only do you not garden, you wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to make jam if you did, and even if you did, you’d probably wouldn’t out of sheer laziness. Nevertheless, you want jam. You’re desperate for it. And your jam-making friends grin evilly and say, “What do you have to barter?”

You tell them, “I will rhyme for jam.” In which case, the poem isn’t a poem anymore, no matter how it may look to a stranger coming fresh to it. No, that jumble of metaphor and meter itself becomes a metaphor. That poem is blackberries and peaches and apricot, sealed up in glass jars and sent to you in the USPS. Delicious. And they say you can’t eat your words. Or if you do, they say it tastes like crow. Not so.

But the most interstitial of all the poems (if I’m using interstitial correctly, which I doubt) is The Sea King’s Second Bride. Let me tell you about it. The roots of it go way back to my fourteen-year-old self who had a big, not to say GINORMOUS crush on a fictional construct, who happened to be the King of the Sea. We probably all have an equivalent. A Hades, a Beast, a Neptune. Something from the dark and the deep. Well, mine stayed with me. I used to have delicious serial dreams about him. Gone now, sadly. But I’ve been a bit in love with Sea Kings ever since then.

So, in my late twenties, along comes singer-songwriter S.J. Tucker with her song “Neptune.” Now, her Sea King and my Sea King aren’t the same Sea Kings, but they are like enough that I sang that song obsessively while washing dishes and going for walks on windy days. It’s just that kind of song.

Possibly because I was pretty vocal about my love of Tucker’s “Neptune” and also about my hot Sea King dreams (vocal as I mourn the loss of them anyway), poet Nicole Kornher-Stace brought my attention to a painting by John Bauer, entitled “Agneta and the Sea King,” sometimes called “Coronation of the Sea Queen.” This was from a story by the same title, in a collection of Swedish Folktales, edited by Polly Lawson. (http://www.amazon.com/Swedish-Folk-Tales-Polly-Lawson/dp/0863154573). Straightway, I pined for this painting. I drooled. I panted. I coveted. I did all those things reasonable people don’t do. And it paid off.

You know why? ‘Cause my girls – Nicole Kornher-Stace, Amal El-Mohtar and Jessica P. Wick (the latter two being the editrices of Goblin Fruit magazine) – put their wallets together and bought me the print for my birthday. After that, I couldn’t just tell myself that the hardcover of Swedish Folk Tales was too expensive for my blood. I blew my wad on that book. Amazon.com sent it to me so fast I could hear the breeze of its passing.

When I sat down to finally read – at last, read!!! – “Agneta and the Sea King,” I was staggered to see not only the painting I so adored (which now belonged to me), but also three more illustrations just for that story. My love knew no bounds. Except it did. As I was reading, I was conscious of a great, dreadful rage of red leaping to my cheeks. My heart pounded. My mouth curled into something less like a grin than a grimace of… WTF?

Another stolen bride story! With a pitiful, lonely, beautiful but also clueless and cruel and totally tyrannical Sea King, and his pure, passive milksop of a lily maid just sort of bending to his every will until she can escape him and flee headlong into Religion.

Okay, it worked for Agneta. But it would not work for me!

It was very late at night. All I had at hand were a ballpoint pen and a magnetic memo pad. But I needed to have this conversation with the story, and the only way to talk to a story is either to do some high end Lit Crit, which alas is not my bag, or write my own dang story.

I threw everything I had into it. I even threw in a reference from Tucker’s “Neptune.” I wrote what I couldn’t have imagined writing at the age of fourteen, when I’d've given my teeth, eyes and arms to be Agneta. I was declaring myself, at last, to the Sea King of my dreams, about whom I could no longer dream. I was also standing up for hundreds of years of stolen brides tales and pale katabasis maids and overbearing underworld lords. And speaking for myself, as a woman of the 21^st century, with all the longing and expectations and pressures upon us.

That poem, weirdo tangle of conversation and collision that it is, was the best thing I’d ever written. It won the Rhysling in 2011. But I was and am acutely aware that it never would’ve made it even to the scribbling stage without Tucker’s music, Bauer’s art, Nicole’s Googling, pretty much every WisCon I’ve ever attended, and three poets pooling their resources to give me a birthday present. I had to stand in the interstices of all kinds of art forms and pathways of communication to find my way into the writing of it.

To crown it all, Rebecca Huston, my artist friend, who illustrated my poem collection, paid homage to Bauer’s style in her illustration of “The Sea King’s Second Bride.” My cup spilleth over. We come full circle. I hope one day to lay a wreath of white lilies on John Bauer’s grave. But I don’t know if he even has one. I read somewhere that he died at sea.

C.S.E. Cooney is a fiction writer, poet, blogger, and web mistress. She attended college in Chicago for college, where she received her degree in Fiction Writing with a minor in Theater.

Her fiction and poetry can be found in Apex, Subterranean, Strange Horizons, Clockwork Phoenix 3, The Book of Dead Things, Ideomancer, Goblin Fruit, and Mythic Delirium. She has novellas forthcoming withBlack Gate Magazine, where she is currently Blog Mistress. She keeps her own blog athttp://csecooney.livejournal.com/.