Interview: Literary Arts Fellowship Winner, Margaret Malone

A: Hi Karen. Thank you so much. The fellowship was an Oregon Literary Fellowship in Fiction with an award of $2500. I’m still so bowled over from winning in the first place that I’m not exactly certain how I’ll use it, but my front-runner plan is to simply take three or four weeks off from my day job, wear my pajamas all day and work my butt off on my collection of stories.

Q: One of your many hats is as a volunteer facilitator for Write Around Portland.  Can you say a little about that work?  How did you get into doing it, and how’s your experience been with it?

A: I can’t say enough about Write Around Portland. The work they do, providing a safe place for people in the community to write and share and listen, is some of the best work I’ve ever been involved with. I am grateful to be a part of what’s going on there.

I found my way to Write Around Portland in 2005. My husband had been diagnosed with a brain tumor that year, and our friends and family provided us with an incredible outpouring of love and support. I wanted to return that support and send it back out into the world somehow. The organization was the perfect way for me pass that on.

I’ve had the privilege of facilitating workshops for a range of different folks, adults living with a disability, at-risk youth, women living with cancer. I always walk away feeling lucky to have been present as they shared their stories.

Q: You also co-host SHARE…what’s up with that?

A: SHARE was concocted by my friend, the fabulous writer Kathleen Lane. Several of us had been meeting for a reading series every month, but Kathleen wanted it to be more. We brainstormed and came up with SHARE. It’s a monthly get-together where different kinds of artists (writers, painters, sculptors, actors, musicians, illustrators, designers…) all gather and create something based on a prompt. We usually have about ten to twelve people. We meet at seven pm and start making art in our separate corners of a cozy studio space in Chinatown, and then at nine we share what we’ve created in a sort-of impromptu performance.

Q: Aaand you’re one of the Dangerous Writers in Tom Spanbauer’s basement.  How did you get involved with that group, and what goes on in that cellar?

A: Really this is a much longer and stranger story than can be conveyed in a few sentences. The nutshell version is that I came to Tom’s basement because I met local writer Steve Arndt in a coffee shop. He gave me Tom’s phone number and a couple weeks later, blam! There I was. As for what goes on down there in that basement…. There’s a lot of cursing and deconstruction of received text and a lot of wonderful writers baring their hearts on the page every week. I love that damn basement.

Q: Are you working on a particular writing project at the moment?

A: Yes, I’ve got two projects going right now. One is a collection of short stories I’ve been working on called People Like You. (I usually feel like I need to qualify this answer with a snarky comment like, You know. Because books of short stories are sweeping the country). But I love writing short stories, there’s nothing like it.

I’m also working on a memoir with my husband about the year he was diagnosed with and treated for a brain tumor. We trade the narrative back and forth, and tell the story chronologically. It ends up feeling a little bit like a couple telling you a story at a party, his version, my version, often we’re re-counting slightly different versions of the same event. It’s titled The Year of Travel & Good Fortune.

Q: You’re reading this Thursday night at Mississippi Studios for True Stories.  Can you describe True Stories for people who’ve never been?  And can you give us any hints about what you’ll be reading?

A: True Stories is an all-memoir evening of literary readings and music at Mississippi Studios. It’s usually heavy on the funny. That said, I’m leaning towards reading a piece that involves an old friend, an ex-fiance and Einstein, and despite that explanation, the piece is really more sad than funny.

Q: And last but not least, what are you reading these days?  What book has been sitting on your night/kitchen/dining table for the last six weeks, waiting for you to get to it?  If the next book you read HAD to be a re-read, what would it be?

A: I’m just finishing up Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich. And before that I read Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter, which I loved. Walter’s book had my favorite kind of narrator – imperfect, realistic, steeped in trouble and usually making a bad decision at a very important moment.  On my table waiting to be read is Donald Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff.

And as for the re-read… without thinking the first thing that came to me was Lionel Shriver’s We Need To Talk About Kevin. I both desperately want to read that book again, it was so fierce and heart-breaking and devastating; and I desperately don’t ever want to read it again, because it was so fierce and heart-breaking and devastating. But for me, it was a perfect book. It made me forget I was a writer while I read it. I simply lived inside the heart-breaking world that Shriver created. Amazing.