Tell me a little about The Adventures of Petal. What was the first image or phrase or impetus that made you sit down and spin it out?

To be honest, this one was written because I wanted to write a pirate story, plain and simple. I like pirates, pirates are cool and things blow up and they storm into places and swashbuckling and ARRR MATEY and all that fun stuff. So I wanted to write a pirate story, but it’s me. And I can’t ever just write something normally.

So I decided, hey, what can I do differently? Well, we were making paper dolls with my daughter and the idea just clicked. Pirates made of paper doll, made of popsicle sticks, all that fun stuff. To make it a quest for being, for finding the creator of the world who had abandoned it goes back to movies like Puff the Magic Dragon and The Brave Little Toaster. In fact, you could say The Brave Little Toaster was a huge influence.

Nicole Kornher-Stace was born in Philadelphia in 1983, moved from the East Coast to the West Coast and back again by the time she was five. She currently lives in New Paltz, NY, with one husband, three ferrets, the cutest baby in the universe, and many, many books. Her short fiction and poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in several magazines and anthologies including Best American Fantasy, Ideomancer, GUD, Goblin Fruit, Lone Star Stories, Farrago’s Wainscot, and Idylls in the Shadows. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and her first novel, Desideria, is currently available on Amazon.

A few months ago in an editorial, I asked why we don’t often see as many comments on our fiction as we do on our non-fiction. The answers, opinions, and suggestions our readers offered were very illuminating and much appreciated. Since that time we’ve seen a rise in comments on fiction (which makes us very happy!) and we’re working on other ways to engage readers. One experiment we’re trying is to collect Author Spotlights together once a month or possibly every other week. Though fiction that appears in each month is not necessarily related, I do feel that the pieces and their authors are in conversation — with you, the reader, and with each other, if only by accident of placement. These spotlights are a continuation of that conversation — I hope readers enjoy them and are moved to ask questions, make connections, and think about the stories in different ways.

Where do you get your ideas?

Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader holds infinite possibilities. Then, too, I once saw a perfectly decrepit headstone in New Orleans with the name BASTIAN REBEL chiseled on it and vowed to use the name in a story. Yeah, sometimes vodka is involved. The most inspiring source for me though is history and travel. After reading about mortuary hospitals in Victorian times and making a visit to the UK, I wrote a story about a mentally handicapped man who invents a toe bell contraption meant to ferret out the living among the dead. That’s what history does to me — it sets pale lifeless digits to wiggling inside my head. History is better than anything I can make up.

I immediately zeroed in on the mention of ghost towns in your bio — having been to a few, I’m fascinated by them. Do you have any good stories from your visits, with or without ghosts?

Most of the stories that come to mind involve strange folks we’ve encountered in the middle of nowhere. Because we prefer to get off the beaten trail, it’s surprising enough to run into another four wheel drive bumping along in a similar direction, much less stray people. A man who looked like Charlie Manson once walked straight out of the ether and into our camp to mumble something completely incoherant, then disappear again. Because we were not far from Barker Ranch, where they arrested a large number of the family back in the day, his sudden appearance was even more spooky. Maybe it was a lost hippie still wandering the hills looking for his leader? I still wonder what he was trying to say. Another time, we passed a man standing outside his van in the blistering heat on a plain of endless scrub. He had an easel set up and he was painting, buck naked. Another naked fellow walked by us once and tipped his cowboy hat. He was wearing boots and a bandana around his neck and nothing else and I’ve never been able to cleanse my mind of the image.

Daniel Homan was born in Gainesville Florida and now lives in Austin, Texas. He teaches at Texas State University. In his free time, Daniel has been researching Ponce De Leon, the fountain of youth myth, and 15th century Spain for a new novel. Also, he is working on two internet series, one animated, the other involving puppets. Currently, Daniel is seeking representation for a narrative-nonfiction book, The Israeli Trail, about his travels in South America with Israelis recently released from the Israeli Defense Force.

Long before it was commissioned into a novel, I actually wrote The Queen of Hearts as a poem. This was in 2002, after an incredibly vivid nightmare, most of which made it into the major scenes of the story and forthcoming novel. What I remember most were the city scenes, a crowded, frenzied market, wave after wave of people spreading rumors and gossiping about a murder. Behind me was a striking woman, mysterious, ethereal, but I didn’t know why she was with me. The nearby market-dwellers, which I came to call the “louts,” were whispering about black hands and the murder, and there was something searching for me.

The nightmare flashed between these street scenes and a high-society poker tournament in a manor on the hill. After I had woken, I wrote out the verse quickly, just to rid myself of the images, but I found the images compelling and they stayed with me for many years, even past the completion of the book.

The nightmare was after 9/11, of course, and in the writing of the novel, I came to realize that this probably had played a large part in the nightmare. Then, as the Iraq War commenced, the Patriot Act, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, the heavy stuff of my generation basically, the essence of the story became clearer.

The first line of the story/novel I remembered word for word from the nightmare, spoken by some unknown narrator: “But one question remains, did it begin or end in theft?” That was the mystery that I wanted to explore.

Willow Fagan was born in Southeastern Michigan, during an April snowstorm. He now lives in Ann Arbor. He appears to be in the “twenty-something-not-really-sure-what-he’s-doing” phase of his life. Currently, he works part-time as a tenant counselor informing tenants about their rights, while reading Tarot cards and engaging in various writing and activist projects on the side. Of these projects, he is most excited about a workshop that he will soon present for the second time: “Sculpting the Chaos of Trauma into Narratives of Change.” In general, he is drawn towards the intersection of creative expression, social justice work, and personal healing. His stories have previously appeared in Fantasy Magazine and Behind the Wainscot.

Tell me a little about Scatter and Return, the Eyes of the Princess. What was the first image or phrase or impetus that made you sit down and spin it out?

When I sat down to write this story, I opened with the line that remained the same throughout all the drafts to the published version: “Yes, yes, the princess is locked in the tower.” But there was some contemplation and coalescing of images and situations that I did before I began to write. I knew that I wanted the princess to have locked herself in the tower as a response to abuse from her father. That image resonated with me because of my own experiences of abuse from my father.

So this story is an example of the type of stories — those which turn the chaos of trauma into narratives of transformation — that the workshop I’m presenting focuses on. Writing the story helped me process and integrate my own traumatic experiences, a process which is mirrored within the story by the narrator’s strategy of telling stories in order to coax the missing pieces back to the princess.

I’m hesitant to reveal all of this but I think it’s important for survivors to speak out about their experiences. I also hope that this story helps others in some small way to understand their own histories and perhaps even to catch a glimpse of a path towards wholeness

Sara Saab, author of A Trail of Demure Virgins, came wailing into the world at Al Najjar Hospital, Beirut, Lebanon, in the winter of 1984. The prime witnesses each recall a single stand-out feature of the event: her mother, the musk of hard liquor on the skin of the attending obstetrician, and her father, the worrying Klingon dent scoring the tiny nose of the ruddy and slick infant. This crease soon disappeared, but little Sara didn’t. Nowadays Sara works too hard and — embarrassingly — aches too much in the heart whenever confronted by rock anthems or perfect sentences. Every explanation for her actions can ultimately be traced back to her unruly fern of a hairstyle.

Sara has had / has / will have work in Electric Velocipede, the Vignette Press‘s The Death Mook, Word Riot, and a selection of fine campus literary journals and zines.

The story was written in a few drafts but the original impetus was very strong: on family roadtrips in the mountains of Lebanon, I was always struck by the Virgin Mary shrines left by the roadside. They’re all over the place, but as far as I can tell, never signposted. Who puts them there? Who brings the fresh flowers and incense? And why? The most recent explanation I’ve heard is that they mark the sites of fatal car crashes, but I have yet to close the case…

Without giving too much away, the very end of the story came to me word for word as this suspended image of irony and chaos.

Where do you get your ideas?

I trap them on glue pads. The little rotters squirm worse than mice and the ones that’ve gotten particularly grotesque and mangled trying to make an escape — those ones turn into the best stories by far