Caleb Ross’ stories do not behoove summaries. Let’s just get that out of the way. Let’s also just say that they contain blood drinking, deformity, death, and disfigurement, to varying degrees. These stories swirl like nightmares: a populace of anti-protagonists so wounded that there is generally no hope for their redemption. The reader acts as sponge, absorbing their pain. Making sense of it. As the reader, you are the first man on the scene; as such, you are to perform the tasks the characters themselves are no longer capable of performing: observe, record, and interpret. Seek your own closure. And be careful to distance yourself from these people, because they’re collapsing stars, and you could be swallowed right along with them. Your job is only to do the above, and to pretend you dont share something universal with each and every one of these poor souls.

Oh, it’s not as dire a task as it sounds. There is true wonder here: Charactered Pieces is a glass menagerie of deformity, a collection of short stories that is utterly fearless in its willingness to spill blood, shock, and soothe. Unlike most horror fiction, you can’t step away and dismiss these stories with simple logic– they do not contain supernatural bogeymen, mad killers or fiends. These stories contain normal people crushed under the wheels of circumstance and the weight of guilt. The characters within are far beyond damaged– they are wrecked. Busted parents and screwed up kids; scarred, ruined, and weighed down with ten tons of remorse and pain wrapped in cancerous silence. Like individual flaws in the same junk diamond, they share some unspeakable pain in one way or another. But all this hurt isn’t dreamt up for the author’s detached amusement, or for the titilliation of some nihlistic reader– this is a bid for communion where it is needed most. In each story the characters’ struggles are the result of some long-incubated despair, intimate and undeniable as a deathbed rasp. Come close. Listen: that the main character in The Camel of Morocco— an architect tortured by guilt after the collapse of a mosque on which he performed renovations— could reach the course of action that he does with the reader’s suspension of disbelief intact is a small miracle, if miracle is the word. These characters cry for empathy. You will be tested on whether you can abide.

This isn’t shock for the sake of shock. This isn’t to get a rise out of you; this isn’t a museum of cruelty. There is never the sense that Ross is toying with you, manipulating your sympathies. On the contrary, like a synthesis of Raymond Carver’s ability to paint in 100 shades of grey and Chuck Palahniuk’s reckless abandon for the limits of taste, Charactered Pieces is an honest look at the darkness that humans both create and endure; a catharsis by way of misery, sweating out the toxins. Apparently even pain can be beautiful– what else could explain feeling even remotely upbeat, as I did, at the end of the eponymously-titled first story Charactered Pieces, witnessing the main character lovingly painting the semi-formed toenails of an unborn fetus? Yeah. Out of context it sounds over-the-top, but withinin the context of the story it’s an act that is as loving as it is surreal.

Fathers fail; buildings collapse; people visit unending pain on themselves and their loved ones. Love. The word sounds unreachable, like a star whose death we haven’t yet recorded but whose light is still visible. Refracted through Ross’ prose— at turns both brutal and poetic— it can yield understanding. Maybe even hope. Like a collection of photos of our absolute worst moments, Charactered Pieces works to dull the edge of suffering through exposure; toughening the spirit, leading us into and through the places we fear. Though maybe we shouldn’t leap to conclusions on that hope business: “The wind sounds like wind,” closes The Camel of Morocco. The implication is that our guilt, however crushing, is to be dealt with. We are perhaps on our own.

Caleb’s website: www.calebjross.com

Caleb Ross is sometimes mistaken for a person from a television show called The Tribe. And though he accepts the adulation of his occasionally confused fans with a grin, his true identity is one that is far more interesting and, if there is justice in the world, one they shall soon know: that of a talented young writer from the Kansas City area, specializing in a prose style that walks a surreal line between the subtle and the explicit. While evoking moments of calligraphic insight in his shorter work, he is equally capable of the broader style that befits a novel, crafting for his readers surreal trips into the strange as he follows his characters into the oily dark of the subconscious; we accompany them on doomed, Sisyphean pilgrimages through forever-dark truck stops, museums of human oddity and towns overflowing with the dead. He is gifted, in that his characters exhibit grotesqueries that somehow seem encoded with the same flaws of the world they inhabit, as if they are not constructs, but victims: the fruits of a tree growing upside down.

His turn into a writer of formidable talents has all the characteristics of a religious awakening, in that an interested professor turned the nagging symptoms of a writer into a full-blown infection. He’s attended workshops and received scholarships on the strength of his work, and has been published in Flint Hills Review, Dogmatika, The Green Muse, and Vestal Review. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Caleb in a workshop environment, and recently, he was good enough to answer a few questions

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Your bio on your website claims an experience somewhat like kismet: fed up with your current major, you signed up for an English Literature class almost on a whim. This experience seemed to awaken something in your understanding and/or appreciation of language, and its power. What was it that made that class– or that decision– so special?

Amy Sage Webb. Simple as that. Amy was my writing professor throughout my university studies, and she almost single-handedly opened my eyes to what reading and writing, motivated by creativity, could do. I had always enjoyed the idea of reading, of what books could do, but I absolutely hated reading. Same goes for writing; I was in love with the potential of the written word, but I was just too daunted (or maybe just too apathetic) to apply myself to the task of tangifying whatever ideas I had at the time. But Amy, she sensed intent with my first few scribbles and nurtured that purpose into something usable.

Did you feel an immediate fit with your new identity as a budding writer, or did you feel somehow out of your element? What was it about the craft that appealed to you so?

The transition was not as jarring as one might suspect. At least not as far as technical concepts go. So many of the principals associated with visual arts have “sister rules” in creative writing. The concepts of unity, composition, color (or mood), and movement are just a few that come to mind. Honestly, I think I would be pressed to find any elements that are exclusive to one medium. I suppose there is a reason we have the blanket term “art” which we pin to so many creative forms.

I think both the hardest part of the transition, and the most appealing reason I had in making the jump, had to be the shift in creative motivation. I’ve long believed that every idea has a pinnacle medium. For instance, if I had the idea to express what a broken home situation does to the unstable family’s neighbors (not a bad idea, really) I should first ask myself what artistic medium would best express this idea. Would a poem work? Maybe…but would it be the best? Could I paint the image? Could I sculpt the idea? I believe that one of these methods would be best and it is up to the artist to know which one. This is not to say that ideas cannot transcend medium, not at all, but one of the roles of the artist is to know the difference between the almost best brush stroke and the best brush stroke. Choice of medium is just one of the many brush strokes.

So back to the original thought, making this transition in motivation was difficult at first. For my entire first semester I was trying to write a story that should have been a painting. I was trying to sketch a novel that should have been a sculpture. It was difficult, but it remains a change I welcome. Besides, do you have any idea how expensive canvases and paints and clays are? There’s a reason The Starving Artist is always depicted as a sculptor. As a writer all I have to do is buy a cup of coffee and scribble on the back of the receipt. I can use, and have used, toilet paper in an emergency.

Based on your writing success at Emporia State, you attended the Tin House Writer’s Workshop with novelist Peter Rock. Was this your first workshop experience? How did it unfold? What did you take from this experience, and what, if anything, did it offer you that your literary studies could not?

Lesson one: self congratulating writers—and there are a lot of them—are always the ones with the least amount to say. In a situation like the Tin House Writer’s Workshop (as I assume with all large writer meet-ups; this was my first) most of the people in attendance had to pay their own way in. And these things are not cheap. So what you get is a bunch of wealthy individuals with an inflated sense of self worth and paper to burn. One of the great lessons I took from that week is to never become one of these people. They are boring and hated.

But those few pompous attendees were by far the only detriments to an otherwise perfect week. The experience, even if ESU hadn’t footed the bill, would have been worth every penny. Peter Rock is an amazing author with more to offer than one week’s worth of workshopping could allow (which is why I chose to interview him for issue 9/10 of Flint Hills Review). I met Denis Johnson, Aimee Bender, as well as a slew of people I know will be huge some day. And from each of these people I learned so much about the craft of writing. But the most important benefit, for me, was the general experience of the whole trip. That’s something that a lot of budding writers forget, I think: craft will help you write stories, but experiences are what give you those stories.

And to top everything off my very best friend flew in with me and managed to bleed into the activity without much attention paid. At first. By the end of the week he was a bit famous for being “that guy who snuck in.” Seriously, he took in many of the writing seminars, got drunk every night with the writers, ate food I snuck for him from the university cafeteria, and did it all for the price of a plane ticket. Not a bad vacation for him.

You’ve had work published both online and in print. Do you prefer one over the other? Does the more untraditional outlet of electronic publication afford the writer certain unique opportunities unavailable in print, or does it suffer a certain credibility loss as opposed to traditional print?

Personally, I like holding a book. There’s a tactile legitimacy associated with a bound book that just isn’t there with online publications. Think of it like pornography versus person: both will satisfy, but until someone invents an anatomical magazine a real person is just going to feel a whole lot better.

I am definitely at odds with the electronic medium, but only because the format has not yet been supported like it should be. It is the responsibility of the literary community (writers, readers, critics, distributors, etc.) to legitimize internet publications. But the task won’t be easy. Unfortunately, due to the near-zero costs associated with electronic publications many publishers take the “see what sticks” route rather than to spend the time searching for an exemplary manuscript. This practice then manifests into an epidemic and eventually, as we have now, there exists a tainted response from “serious” writers regarding the clout of online journals.

But then again, the low cost with producing an online journal is the exact reason we are seeing a lot of new things finally gaining academic credibility. For instance, flash fiction probably would not have made much of an impact without easily accessible abundance, and online lit print journals make that easily accessible abundance possible.

But like most things in life, whether fairly or unfairly, money will ultimately continue to decide worth to the public. Because of the high monetary investment required to keep a bound journal alive print will reign as the preferred format for most readers for quite some time. Monetary investment equates substance in the eyes of the buying public. So there will remain a critical importance [maybe self-importance?] with printed publications.

The part we as writers can take in legitimizing online lit mags is to submit only great work. We know that online journals will print our crap, but that doesn’t mean we should let them do so.

What are your favorite books? Why?

My three reigning favorites are House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, The Stranger by Albert Camus, and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Each for unique reasons, but collectively speaking each handles the burden of writerly technique flawlessly. House of Leaves is the best metafiction novel since Jorge Luis Borges in his heyday. The Stranger forces the reader to understand and embrace alternate modes of thought in a very concise and direct manner. And Invisible Man is simply a masterpiece of language, plot, and character unified.

How important is the workshopping process to your work? What would you suggest for those out there who may be too timid or self conscious to get involved in a writing workshop?

If you’re too timid to workshop then you aren’t writing a novel or story; you’re writing a journal entry. Workshopping is an absolute must for a writer, especially a new writer. I’ve had only a few things published, and not surprisingly those published works are the ones that have received the most feedback from fellow writers. An online community like Write Club or here at The Oxy are great places for the timid writer to start. Or in cases like mine, they are the best places to stay. University workshops are great, but they aren’t easily accessible to the public.

Another way to look at it is to remember that what you get published will forever carry your name. Would you really want something sub-par out there with your name on it? Let’s say you eventually get famous for a masterpiece novel. Some reporter out there somewhere will dig through your personal catalog and say, “this new novel of yours is great, but I would like to talk about one of your earlier pieces, a story called The Man Who May Have Had Split-Personality Disorder…Or Maybe Not.” I doubt it is an enviable position to have to defend your failures. Workshopping can help curb this sort of trauma.

A number of times throughout your longer work, certain constants emerge. Foremost, that of a distorted landscape of relationships— whether those relationships be that of a parent/child, or a teacher/student. Often, your characters appear to be misled by circumstances into having distorted views of how these relationships ought to function. Is this a conscious effort, or does this unfold naturally? Is there something that draws you to this type of subject matter?

I’ve said it before, but you are one hell of a reader. Just the other day I was looking back through my work, and I came to your exact realization.

No, this examination of relationships was never a conscious goal. I’ve heard a lot of writers talk about how the themes of a novel seem to just materialize, and I’ve always assumed that to be bullshit; just a writer trying to sound self-important. But as I looked back through my works I suddenly realized that I was the asshole. It’s true; themes can just spring up organically without much fostering.

Freudians might say that I am drawn toward this type of subject matter because I never had a father. Maybe that’s true, but I think there is a simple basic interest at work too. Child/parent and teacher/student relationships imply a nice history that, as a writer, I embrace. I don’t have to spend pages describing a character’s history when all I have to say is “William’s child,” or “Knowles’s brother.” From this established relationship I can then embellish upon the situation and create a true story.

In contrast to your longer projects, there is a decidedly different tone in your shorter work. What is Flash Fiction to you? How does it come about? How does it differ?

Flash fiction seems to be a simple response to our increasingly “flash” culture. We’re all CEOs of our own lives and we have intricately itemized agendas. We simply have more to look at and less time to do so. More commercialized industries have adapted– energy bars, fast food salads in plastic cups (cup holder-friendly), popup advertisements– so why shouldn’t the literary community?

Some say our attention span is shrinking and so must all that demands our attention. I don’t know. I think maybe we, as a people, have learned what essentially keeps our attention and we’ve capitalized upon it. Do you really think audiences wanted to see six hour plays in the 1600s? Or is that just all they thought possible so they endured it? Just think if the half-hour sitcom existed to audiences in the days of Shakespeare and Marlowe; today we would miss a plot point if we blinked too long.
All that being said, flash fiction is a way to deliver a whole lot in a little amount of time. From my experience flash fiction offers readers a way to invest in language a bit more than they might otherwise. It’s like story driven poetry in that sense. Every word implies tens more. Every sentence must read like a full paragraph. For this reason I am drawn to flash fiction more than I am drawn to most “trends.” I am an absolute language snob. Plot is important, but language will always be my favorite son. Flash fiction allows me to exploit and utilize language in a way that if I tried doing the same with a novel or short story the reader would give up by page two.

It’s difficult for a writer to “advertise” his writing in a commercial environment, much more so than, say, a musician. Considering that, as a reader, what draws you to read a particular book or story? In a book store that holds thousands of titles, both classic and contemporary, what makes you choose one over another?

Luckily (for me, not the book distributor) the internet has allowed me to gather information on books before I even get to the store. I can’t remember the last time I went to a book store with no idea what I was going to buy. So, store gondolas, colorful book covers, giant posters, all of these things; if they appear only at the bookstore, they don’t affect me at all. Most of my reading choices come from either recommendations, word of mouth, or are titles from authors that I already know. I’m the kind of buyer book publishers hate, I think.

One increasingly rare method of publicity that works on me is the author tour. I will go to see any author whether I’ve heard of him/her or not. Unfortunately, I am the rarity in this case as all publishers will tell you that a book tour doesn’t sell books; a book tour is really just a courtesy to existing fans and micro-economies (I.E the bookstores themselves). To anyone reading this, go to a book event. You might like it. Sure, it’s really just watching someone read out loud, but sometimes they have free beer.

For an aspiring writer, it seems difficult to get started, and often to maintain momentum. Often times, it’s just you and a blank page. With that scary amount of freedom in the medium, how do you approach the matter of getting and keeping momentum, and of motivating yourself? Is there a “formula” for a successful narrative, as some genre writers might suggest, or is the process new each time?

My suggestion is to never come to a blank page with a blank head. This is one of the many reasons I advocate the outline. Start writing the story without paper: on the bus, on the elevator, in the shower, start getting the characters and plot points sculpted in your head before you even sit down at the computer. Get a loose outline generated (forget the I, 2, C, d outline you might be used to with scholarly writing; just get your thoughts on the paper). Then, start typing your story.

Another potential source of “writer’s block” stems from the idea of a pinnacle medium that I mentioned earlier. Maybe, if you are having a tough time keeping your ass in the chair you just aren’t meant to novelize your idea. Try something else. If you are absolutely sure a novel is the best way to get your idea across then maybe you just aren’t ready to write your current idea. Cough up a few “practice” flash fiction pieces. Read something terrible that has been published (always a great motivator: “this shit got bound, surely mine can too”). Study up on your subject matter for a few more hours.

I’m not saying that days don’t pass in which I write nothing—they do. But I don’t sit in front of a blank screen and force something. I get up, move around, take a shower, all the while elaborating on that outline in my head until I have something worth writing abwout.

What’s the most important thing in your opinion — be it regarding technique, or philosophy— for a budding writer to learn as quickly as possible?

Technique is extremely important. So many learning writers (as I still am, definitely) want to rebel against convention and toss away all established rules (which make up technique). What they often fail to realize is that you have to know the rules before you can break them. Every instance of defiance—defying grammatical rules, defying the conventions of structure, etc.—will cause a reader to question the writer’s motivations for doing so, and a reader will only gloss over so many “mistakes” before he will drop your book for a better one. You’ve got to build a technique using the established jargon, rules, and conventions before you can successfully create (and more importantly, defend under critical scrutiny) your own technique.

The writer’s personal agenda, or philosophies, will develop as stories are written. Actually, the philosophy is probably what originally drove the writer to write, so consciously developing this sort of thing might not be all that important.

With such an array of titles to choose from, what is it that makes a good book? Is success the decider of worth, or the other way around, or neither?

Technique makes a good book, for sure. Character development, story arch, character driven plot, and on and on with the “rules” of good literature all make a good book, definitely. But one factor that a lot of people forget is that the artist must be conscious of, and able to integrate his/her work into, the cultural context. How many stories of “the right place at the right time” do you hear with literature? A lot. Animal Farm, for instance. Would this book have had the impact it did in the 1940s if it were written today? No. Would it have been less of a “good book”? Yeah. Am I unfairly addressing books written with the conscious intent of social commentary? Probably.

Some books are simply well written and entertaining and would have been successful no matter when or where they were published. In these cases a good book, aside from matters of personal taste, are ones that keep a reader on the couch. Good pacing can do this. Vivid imagery can do this. Well rounded characters can do this. I don’t know; maybe the title “good,” though it incorporates all of the above rules, is given to books based a great deal on personal affection. I wouldn’t call most genre novels good, but I know plenty of people who would argue a genre fiction book’s merits to the death.

As far as the decider of worth, I don’t think I can attribute a book’s worth to its commercial success. Publicity comes into play a lot here. Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code is a perfect example. Was this book successful? Of course. Does it have a high worth? Not to me, not to most serious lovers of literature. Then take a book like The Wavering Knife by Brian Evenson. Successful? Not really. Worthy? More than most things I’ve ever read.

The decider of success is usually commercial investment. The decider of commercial investment is definitely not a books potential worth. So, unfortunately, in answer to your question, success is not a universal decider of worth.

Some people might consider that the written word is suffering. The publishing industry is experiencing somewhat of a downturn, pop-culture seems tailored to those with a short attention span, and the persistent popularity of reality television seems to point to a trend of shallowing in the American audience in terms of what it chooses for its free time. Do you agree, or has the role of the written word simply changed in recent times?

I thought for a long time that the written word was doomed. Reality TV had a huge impact on this conclusion. But I’ve noticed a resurgence of television drama and sitcoms within the past few years. Hallelujah! Not that I watch much TV, but at least non-reality TV requires story and character development and, most importantly, writers. If I can’t force people to read books at least they are watching crafted television.

Even so, though I think there is no doubt that the written word is suffering a bit—at least in comparison to the prominence it had in pre-TV-and-radio times—I don’t believe we have the need to fear its extinction. The majority of what the internet offers is text. Though I’m not talking exclusively creative writing here, I am excited by the fact that our culture is demanding literacy more and more. And literacy is step 1 to keeping literature around.

And though it may seem like pop-culture is tailored to those with a short attention span I argue that this is the very role of pop-culture. Remember, The Rolling Stones were considered “the devil” at one time. They were just some pop-culture phenomenon contributing to the delinquency of England and America’s youth. Now they are highly respected music innovators. It seems like we are at a time when the written word is having less and less impact on society, but I think in twenty years when we have the ability to look back we will understand this fallacy. I think it was Shakespeare (though I’m no Shakespeare expert, or fan really) who made a comment regarding the myth of a time period’s uniqueness; that we all believe the time we are living in is somehow more devastating and immoral than all others, but we will, in the future, always refer to past generations as “the good ol’ days.” This being said, it may seem like the written word is dying out, that our culture is suffering the reign of Reality TV, and that we are all doomed to a future that accommodates illiteracy, as opposed to correcting it, I don’t think we are headed toward a future depicted in Mike Judge’s hilarious Idiocracy.

Aside from that, have you heard about Sony Reader? I’m not sure how I feel about this invention as far as its potential for making the physical book obsolete, but just look what the iPod did to bring music to entirely new audiences. Maybe I should just embrace the time.

What do you hope to achieve with your writing?

I just want to give people something to do with their time that might change their perspectives a bit. I think of my favorite books and how my life may have never changed for the better had I not read them.

On a bit of a selfish note, I wouldn’t mind being able to make enough money to write full time. I’ve got quite a few ideas still driving me insane, and sometimes I fear I might get hit by a train or caught in gang crossfire before I’m able to empty them out onto paper.