Reader Meet Author: Amelia Gray

I'm not sure if it is a testament to inspiration or diligence, but over two small months in 2007 Austin's Amelia Gray made time to write. Every morning (AM) and every night (PM) Amelia would delve into any number alternate lives and places. Over sixty days she composed a series of vignettes, tiny visions in the form of flash fiction. That summer turned into her first collection which will be released by Chicago's Featherproof Books this summer.

Amelia Gray has been widely published, including several of the stories in AM/PM. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Award and AM/PM was shortlisted for McSweeney's Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award in 2008. Her work is refreshingly original and based in a real understanding of life. You can read an except from AM/PM in the Featherproof mini "Women/Girls".

Recently, Amelia was kind enough to answer a few of my questions.

Orange Alert (OA): As we are just days away from it's initial release what can you tell us about AM/PM? How did you select which pieces would make it in the book?
Amelia Gray (AG): AM/PM is a collection of 120 pieces ranging from vignettes to short-short stories. I wrote one in the morning and one at night every day for two months in the summer of 2007. The editing of the book didn't include much of a selection process because most of the stories did make it through edits and into the final copy. Some edits were drastic, taking a piece from one four-word line to two or three paragraphs, which is huge in AM/PM world. I cut only four stories.

OA: Featherproof has a big year planned, what has your experience been like with them?
AG: I'm so excited to be a part of Featherproof's 2009 lineup. I'm part of their "overly generous giveaway enticement" for a great subscription program called Paper Egg. Subscribers get two books this year, including Christian Tebordo's first short story collection, plus mine as a bonus. So, three books. Also this year, I can't wait to get my hands on Blake Butler's Scorch Atlas. I feel like this is Blake's year and he's got a beautiful book for it.

Zach and Jonathan at Featherproof have been wonderful to work with, as I figured they would be. The smart thing for writers to do is to shop their books around to multiple editors and houses, but as soon as I saw Featherproof's website, their mini-books, and the way they respect a book's design and function along with its contents, I knew I'd enjoy working with them.

OA: Several of the stories in AM/PM have appeared in on-line journals. Do you feel that the printed word still carries more weight than the virtual word? How do you view the realm of on-line journals in general?
AG: There isn't a reader or writer out there, even the ones who move around a lot, who doesn't have a huge stack of books somewhere. The ones who move around have books in boxes at their mother's house, perhaps, but they are there. Print will be around forever, and thank goodness for that, but I get a lot of value out of the community that forms around a story printed online. People comment and pick at a story and the writer is one degree away, sitting there in her pajamas with a sandwich and participating in this community of voices.

I read a blog post someone wrote about a story of mine that appeared online at Juked called "Death of a Beast." The blogger said, "I don't know if I have ever thought about a dead squirrel this deeply." It made me laugh. That's what's great about online journals and the online reading and writing community in general.

OA: Tell us about your new reading series, Five Things. How did you decide to incorporate live music into your series?
AG: Incorporating live music into a show seems like a no-brainer here in Austin. I've met so many solo acts and acoustic duos and bands interested in playing before, during, and after the show, and the musicians are so exceptionally talented in a way that mirrors and enhances the writers I've been lucky enough to convince to create pieces and read. Every time an artist gets on stage at Five Things, I feel like it's my birthday. I'm feeling pretty sentimental about the show because we just did one a few weeks ago and it was a lot of fun.

OA: You recently started at blog. Do you feel it is important for a writer to maintain a blog? Do you feel it helps connect to your readers on a different level?
AG: I'm still looking sideways at the blog, actually. I'm not sure what I want it to be. I was just talking about how I love the online community aspect of literature these days but I am not sure I'm brave enough to post writing, even personal writing, online without an editor to green light, a thumbs up from some thumbs that aren't mine. So far I'm just using it to write the kind of good news about the book and my stories, news I'd feel strange keeping to myself.

OA: What's next for Amelia Gray?
AG: I'm thinking of going on a little book tour over the summer, and I think I'm getting ready to get back to writing longer short stories.

Bonus Questions:
OA: If you could sit down to coffee with anyone (alive or dead) who would it be?
AG: Today, Fitzgerald. I'd tell him that a Super Bowl reporter trotted out his "There are no second acts in American lives" quote to describe a quarterback in the game. He'd ask what all that meant and then we'd laugh and go cliff diving.

OA: What type of music do you enjoy and who are a few of your favorites?
AG: I go slowly with music. I'm one of those who listens to a song over and over until it loses all meaning and attaches itself to one time in my life. I listened to "The Wind" for three months straight in Fall 2003 and went a little insane. These days, I've been listening to a lot of Pantera.

For more on Amelia Gray please visit her website.