The Contest: Book Review and Conversation with Kate Robinson

Posted on by - Fiction Favorites & Awesome Authors, Literary fiction

I recently made an exciting discovery I’d like to share with you, a story collection by authors new to me, Joe DiBuduo and Kate Robinson.

 

The Contest and Other Stories is exceptional in every respect: concept, writing quality, and pure entertainment value. The nineteen stories in this volume could stand alone as an exquisite collection of short fiction, but the authors have added so much more, framing them, uniquely and imaginatively, in the context of an engaging novella about a struggling art magazine in the 1960s. The magazine holds a monthly short fiction contest, challenging writers to submit tales inspired by classic oil paintings. The nineteen winners of the contest, with the artworks that inspired them, alternate with chapters of the novella.

The short stories run the spectrum from the delightful and fanciful to the macabre and horrific. A few of my favorites: A bone-chilling alternate history of Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo’s demise while exploring Santa Catalina Island in 1542. A look inside the mind of a hallucinating, mad artist, Vincent Van Gogh, negotiating with his muse. A seemingly sweet, romantic nineteenth century tale aboard a passenger ship that surprisingly creeps into a nightmare on the power of memory. A slowly unfolding mystery about the significance of an artifact from the time of Napoleon. A heartwarming paranormal story of reincarnation and transformation, from dead-of-winter tragedy to a sunny future of hope and life.

After each story, I thoroughly enjoyed the ensuing chapter of the novella, eager to learn what would befall the art magazine and its engaging cast of characters, eager to learn, after that, which artwork the editors would choose for the contest and to read the next “contest winner,” assured that it would be something entirely new and outstanding. The novella itself ends in a surprising twist. In short, this was a page-turner, and even better than that, a testament to the value and necessity of art and creativity.

The Contest is for anyone who loves great storytelling, a unique and different reading experience, and thought-provoking themes that honor your intelligence and spur your imagination. I’m thrilled that Kate Robinson, one half of the writing team, has graciously agreed to answer my burning questions about this unique, creative project.

Welcome to VBlog, Kate! Tell us a little about your background and that of your co-author Joe DiBuduo.

We like to say that Joe has the vivid imagination and I have the word-whacking toolbox, as stated in the book bio. Of course, in reality we both have the imaginative and editorial sides of author mind, though we often see things differently. That presents some challenges in collaboration, but it also brings many strengths—the ability to see characters and plots from various angles is helpful.

Joe and Kate

I began writing poetry in childhood and didn’t become interested in writing fiction until my forties, and my initial immersion in poetry fostered a lyrical aspect to my prose, or so I’m told. Joe began writing fiction in his sixties and later adopted poetry into his daily writing routine after he had a good feel for the mechanics of story. He’s developed a style he calls “poetic flash fiction”—he’s partial to telling stories within the confines of many of his poems.

I’m more an anything goes type of writer—I’m game for whatever my subconscious channels at any particular time, and my body of work is smaller than Joe’s but more diverse in that I experiment with many different styles.

How did you and Joe develop the concept for The Contest?

Joe is an artist who works in many media—glasswork, sculpture, and painting. So he has a natural bent for art and a strong interest in art history. He has a great love of coffee table art books and visiting art galleries and museums, and his walls at home are filled with paintings and his front yard is filled with his massive sculptures.

As Joe was learning to write fiction, he chose to use artwork as story prompts. While he worked with these stories inspired by paintings, he envisioned a connected collection of historical stories linked with a more contemporary story about a young man struggling to find his way in the world. And so, The Contest and Other Stories was born.

When I began crafting story, I used my dream journal entries rather than visual art as prompts.

I’m also a museum aficionado, but I lean more toward appreciation of the historical and anthropological aspects of museum collections. I have a BA in Anthropology with emphasis in Museum Studies and a big interest in indigenous peoples’ cultural stories and in their modern fiction.

So we each brought our unique interests and talents into this quirky collection of stories.

Tell us a little about how your collaboration worked.

Joe began presenting the artwork prompted stories to the critique group we both belonged to in the early ‘00s. I felt these stories were his best work at the time (and I still feel that’s true today). I was thoroughly intrigued with the stories and greatly enjoyed critiquing them. Eventually, Joe had a rough draft consisting of the connecting novella and nearly three dozen stories in various stages of completion. He felt bogged down with the enormity of fleshing out the incomplete stories and paring the collection down to a manageable size, and knowing I loved the stories, he invited me to share his vision as a co-editor and co-author. By this time (early 2011), he still lived in north-central Arizona and I had landed in California after a year of working on a Master’s degree in Wales. So the collaboration became one done via lots and lots of emails forwarded back and forth over the next several years.

In retrospect, Joe had the initial vision and the initial go at writing the collection draft, and I followed up with my two cents. In some cases, I simply line edited nearly finished stories, and in other cases, I did substantial research and writing to complete them. I also designed the book interior and did some marketing in the form of submitting stories to journals and anthologies to drum up interest in the collection. We had a half-dozen stories published in advance of the book.

Each story in this collection is unique. Do you have particular favorites?

I’m partial to the stories in which the artists appear, especially those in the context of magical realism or alternate history—or both. “Night Café” is my personal favorite. “Masterpiece” and “A Life in Flowers” are two others I enjoy reading time and time again.

Joe is also particularly proud of “Night Café” because he’s particularly fond of the work of Vincent van Gogh, and because the story won a quarterly New Short Fiction Award at a music website, Jerry Jazz Musician, in 2012.

Kate, thank you for this insight into your collaboration!

Dear Short Story Lovers,

I highly recommend The Contest! Get it here.

Stay tuned for more short story news, coming your way soon! I have three new stories, to be published this year in a magazine and anthologies. And…wish me luck. My latest collection, Your Pick: Selected Stories, is currently a finalist for the 2019 Montaigne Medal. The award, named for French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, is for “the most thought-provoking books. . .that either illuminate, progress, or redirect thought.”

Your Pick is a 5-star Readers’ Favorite and “recommended without reservation” by Book Viral.

White Plains: Book Review and Conversation with Author David Hicks

Posted on by - Book review, Fiction Favorites & Awesome Authors, Literary fiction

“When it comes right down to it, I’ve decided, almost every relationship involves two people with intense insecurities masked by whatever behavior it takes to keep those insecurities from being exposed, while at the same time revealing their equally desperate need to have them exposed, even embraced.” – from White Plains

White Plains by David HicksI’m pleased to welcome David Hicks to VBlog for this installment of Fiction Favorites & Awesome Authors. His debut novel White Plains is the story of a young man’s search for himself. We first meet the protagonist, Flynn Hawkins, when he’s twenty-two, a graduate student and teaching assistant in the English department of a fictional New York college. In the final chapter, we see Flynn at age forty, just beginning to internalize some valuable life lessons. He has taken a big step closer to self-knowledge, openness, and honesty with himself and others, but he still has a distance to travel.

Flynn’s journey is told in a series of connected stories from different viewpoints. As a fan and writer of short fiction, I relished each chapter as a standalone piece of great writing. Many of the chapters were previously published in literary journals. Most are told from Flynn’s viewpoint, in first person or third person, and several others are told by the people in Flynn’s life: a professor, a close male friend, a high school coach, Flynn’s sister, wife, son, and daughter. This technique renders the most fully-drawn character I’ve seen anywhere.

The stark contrast between Flynn’s perception of himself and how others see him is a variation on a theme that intrigues me and is woven into my courtroom fiction: what is truth or reality but a set of widely varying, subjective points of view? At a criminal trial, ten witnesses will describe the same event ten ways, often inconsistently. In the context of personal relationships, the inability to appreciate the impact of one’s behavior on others can be self-destructive. Flynn’s story, as told from different viewpoints, serves as a wake-up call for the need to step outside oneself as a means of self-examination.

What did I think of Flynn? I flip-flopped between loving and hating him, losing all respect for him and regaining it. He tries so hard that I wish him well. I don’t count my wildly shifting feelings for him as a detraction from the quality of the read. Quite the contrary. This book draws you in. There’s intensity, wit, depth, tenderness, and beauty in the prose. The good and the bad—that’s what makes a complete person. Throughout Flynn’s journey, dear reader, you are going to feel a lot of emotion, and that’s the stuff of great fiction.

I enjoyed this book right through to the last paragraph of the afterword. The author acknowledges his family for co-authoring the story of his life, “which, thanks mainly to them…, seems to be building towards a happy ending. May it, like the final chapter of this book, be just a tad too long.” The last chapter of the book may be the longest, but for me, it was the best. After all the ups and downs, I was glad to see, at last, that Flynn made some real progress in his quest for self-actualization. The people in his life are going to start feeling a whole lot better about him too.

And now, I’m happy to welcome David Hicks to VBlog. Thank you for joining me!

It’s my pleasure! A big hello to all your readers.author David Hicks

White Plains is a resonant work of art. Tell us about its conception and your process. Did the project start as a single short story that begged to be expanded, or did you plan a novel in the form of linked short stories from the start?

Neither! I was just going about my business as a short story writer, publishing in some wonderful literary magazines, when I decided I had enough stories for a collection. Most of my published stories are somewhat autobiographical—I tend to write about times in my life when something shifted for me—and while I was at an artists’ residency in Wyoming I made it my goal to put the stories together in book form. I tried out different arrangements, but it was when I experimented with putting the stories in chronological order (not according to their publication dates but according to the main character’s life) that I realized it could be a novel instead of a collection—there was, in other words, an overall conflict, crisis, and resolution to the whole book. But since it wasn’t written as a novel, I now needed to revise it as a novel, and that meant “filling in the gaps” of the overall narrative. I did that by adding chapters from other characters’ points of view. (I got that idea from a wonderful book called The Last to Go by Rand Richards Cooper.) After that, it felt more like a novel, and I felt justified pitching it as such.

Some of the chapters from Flynn’s point of view are written in first person and some are written in third person. How did you decide which to use?

As a general rule, when I write something that’s a little too autobiographical, I write in third person. It gives me a little distance from myself. I am able to say, “Wow, look at you, what the hell were you thinking when you did that?” And it also helps me to craft my real-life event as a story rather than emotionally “dumping” onto the page. And when it’s not very autobiographical, I narrate in first person, to force myself into a more intimate voice. It also depends on the situation: for example, the chapter that shows when everything changes for young Flynn—when he’s living in Manhattan during 9/11—was originally written in second person (my editor advised me to change it to third person), because it evokes the kind of shell-shocked feeling that seems appropriate for the subject matter.

Do you consider Flynn a reliable narrator? Tell us about your decision to incorporate other voices.

Absolutely not—he’s completely unreliable, especially at first. (Towards the end, he becomes more reliable.) Isn’t that how we all are? And that’s what we like; we like hearing unreliable accounts of events from our friends and family. (How many of us, when hearing a friend’s story of an argument with their spouse or a terrible boss, actively set about contacting the spouse or boss to get a fair version of the story?) It’s the same when we read. Think of Nick Carroway in The Great Gatsby (who has very little idea what has really happened during key scenes), or Dostoevsky’s narrator in Notes from Underground (who’s view of himself and others is irreparably distorted)—we enjoy it when narrators “tell the truth but tell it slant.”

One of my favorite chapters, a very suspenseful one, involves Flynn driving through a snowstorm and getting stranded in the Colorado Rockies. Did you have a similar experience that informed this scene?

That’s a good example of what I was talking about earlier: I wrote that story in third person because it’s almost one hundred percent autobiographical. For two years I lived in one of the most beautiful places in the country, but it’s also quite remote. I got a teaching job over four hours away and proceeded to “commute” there via an isolated route that traversed several mountain passes. I had no money (I was giving my ex-wife the bulk of my paycheck for child support), so I was driving on bald tires, and one week we got some serious snow and I almost died, both on the way there and on the way back. But at my worst moment, stranded in my car in a snowbank, I stepped out at four a.m. and witnessed a spectacular meteor shower in the clear night sky. And after that, I knew what I needed to do.

Do you have another novel planned or in the works?

I’m currently finishing a novel called The Gospel According to Danny, about the death of America as told by a waiter in Yonkers. It’s quite different from White Plains in that it’s a long, linear narrative with many dramatic events. I’m in love with it, but it’s been a very difficult novel to write, so I can’t wait to send it off to my agent.

Thank you for these illuminating insights, David!

Dear reader, to learn more about David Hicks and White Plains, visit his website by clicking here. To pick up a copy of White Plains, click here.