The following interview with author Xhenet Aliu was originally published in Illyria on Oct. 18, 2013. The interview was conducted by Uk Lushi, a writer
and translator who lives in New York City. 

Several writer friends on Facebook asked me if I had heard of Xhenet Aliu. “She’s Albanian-American like you,” they said, “and an up-and-coming writer.” Her name sounded Albanian, but as far as her being an up-and-coming writer I had no idea since I’d never read her work. Long story short: after one of my Facebook peeps informed me that she’d won the 2012 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, I said to myself, “Well, if you’re not good, you’re not going to win such a prize.” So, I ordered the book and enjoyed reading it thoroughly. As a result I purchased another copy for a member of my family and sent a Facebook friendship request to Xhenet. I learned that she’s in fact only 50 percent Albanian, but is indeed 100 percent an up-and-coming writer. Via Facebook messages we had the conversation below and after you read it I recommend you to buy and read her brilliant debut book “Domesticated Wild Things and Other Stories,” published by Nebraska University Press in September of 2013.

Who and where are you from?

I’m Xhenet Aliu, 30-something years old, native of Waterbury, Connecticut. My father, an ethnic Albanian, emigrated to the U.S. from Strugë as a young man and my mother was born in the U.S. and is of Lithuanian descent. I was raised in the Waterbury area, and though I haven’t lived there for over a decade, I still set most of my fiction there.

How and why did you become a writer?

The most critical part of being a writer, which is being a reader, is something I’ve always done. My brother Kyjtim used to read me picture books when I was a little girl, and I skipped over learning the alphabet and went straight into reading words. By the time I was in high school I was reading things that were probably too advanced for me, like Nabokov, Yeats, Kafka, etc. I didn’t begin writing until college and immediately knew that I wanted to do it forever; but I didn’t consider myself a “writer” until many years later. It was impossible for me to use the same word for Kafka and for myself, and I sometimes still struggle with that. Even after publishing a book, I feel like I haven’t entirely earned the label. 

Other writers that I greatly admire are Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, Roddy Doyle, Amy Hempel, and dozens–if not hundreds– of others, who brought me around to more contemporary fiction and have greatly influenced how I think about voice, timing, conflict and precision of language. And of course I should not forget to acknowledge another of my favorite writers– Ismail Kadare, who, with a few turns of phrase, can reduce entire histories to mere words, and, reciprocally, can expand a few words into entire histories. So, the writers I like most don’t just look for beauty in the obviously beautiful– they’re unafraid of grit and humor, where truth and beauty have often gone undercover.

Writers such as Sherman Alexie and Kwame Dawes find your stories funny yet serious. Your book “Domesticated Wild Things” is full with biting humor, sharp wit, double-edged beauty of characters, and subtlety of language. It’s not easy to pair up humor and seriousness: is it real life experiences or artistic imagination that inspired you to create your stories?

I would say that real life and imagination play an equal role in my stories. Even if I were to write science fiction, my own actual life experience would inform my perception of what life would be like in a world that’s, say, suddenly been taken over by Martians. I’ve never witnessed a spaceship land in Central Park, but I can speculate how we would respond to it based on my past experiences watching humans respond to other shocking, terrifying, dreadful experiences. That said, I currently prefer to write realistic fiction because I’d rather just directly address the shocking, terrifying, dreadful experiences we’re more likely to encounter in our actual lives. It feels less coy to me, but that’s simply my preference. Even though the world in my stories resembles something “real,” though, I feel no allegiance to any kind of fact that doesn’t serve the truth of the story. Perhaps I read a story in the newspaper that inspires me to write a fictional account of the participants involved; if I find that the characters would serve my purposes better if they were of the opposite sex, or if the setting was a slum in another part of the world, then so be it. Studies have shown that imagined experience works as well to exercise our empathy as actual experience, so I feel justified going back and forth between the two.

As for the humor, the truth is I wouldn’t know how to engage with the world without it. Life is absurd as often as it’s beautiful and sad, so I would feel like I created something incomplete if I left it out of my fiction.

Continue reading “Xhenet Aliu: An up-and-coming writer”

The following article by John R. Salter, Jr. first appeared in Against the Current, issue #165. John R. Salter, Jr. (Hunter
Gray) is a long-time activist, social justice community organizer, and radical
university professor who now lives in the mountains of Eastern Idaho. His book, Jackson Mississippi: An American Chronicle of Struggle
and Schism, is published by the University of Nebraska Press (2011). The Journal of Southern History called Salter’s book an “Essential reading. . . . A valuable account of events and insight into the internal dynamics of the [civil rights] movement.”

Around 2 AM, September 1, 1961, my spouse Eldri and I crossed the
Mississippi River into the Magnolia State’s Closed Society. We were both in our
mid-20s. Married a few weeks before at Superior, Wisconsin, where I had done an
academic year of college teaching, we had come directly from my home town of
Flagstaff, Arizona. We were headed to private and all-Black Tougaloo Southern
Christian College, just north of Jackson, where a teaching position awaited me.
A sociologist, I also had a fair amount of grassroots organizing under my belt
and, before long, was to have much more.

At that point, the State
of Mississippi was very close to police state status. With its sanguinary
history, expanded and dominated by the post-1954 white Citizens’ Councils of
America (“State’s Rights and Racial Integrity”), it was a total and pervasive
segregationist complex, backed up by legions of white “lawmen” and
white vigilantes. African Americans, almost half the population, were kept
“down,” deprived of the right to vote or demonstrate, and mostly lived in
or close to poverty. Most whites either supported the system or remained
silent.

I came to know Medgar
Evers, Mississippi Field Secretary of the NAACP, very well from 1961 to his
death. Early after Eldri, and I arrived at Tougaloo, I was asked by an activist
student, Colia Liddell (later to become Colia Liddell Lafayette Clark), if I
would be the Advisor to the newly developed North Jackson Youth Council of the
NAACP. Very small at that point, it was the only youth council in Jackson and
environs. Of course, honored, I accepted. Not long thereafter, I become a
member of the board of directors of the Mississippi NAACP, and, still later, as
we entered a period of dramatic turbulence, chairman of the strategy committee
of the Jackson Movement. I worked with Medgar closely. And I always had
tremendous respect for him.

There was a significant
strain of Choctaw Indian in his family background. I, myself, am one-half
American Indian (Abenaki and Mohawk) — and that was only one of a number of
bonding factors that quickly developed between us.

Born in Newton County in
1925, he served in the European Theatre during the Second World War, was
educated at all-Black Alcorn A&M, and in 1954 became the first NAACP Field
Secretary in the history of the state. He wasn’t really an organizer; was sort
of a lone wolf who traveled lonely and mighty dangerous trails. He kept the few
dissidents that existed in the state together in little groups that did as much
as they felt they could do; persuaded people to attach their names to pioneer
civil rights lawsuits; investigated and tried to publicize the many atrocities
which occurred each week. And, on orders from the National Office, he sold
NAACP membership cards.

Medgar was a very stable,
very cool person. The only time that I ever saw him break down came in the Fall
of 1961, at an evening dinner session of the annual convention of the
Mississippi NAACP — in the “Negro” Masonic Temple on Jackson’s Lynch
Street. It was first time we had met him — and I was much impressed by his
cheerfulness and optimism. The police were parked outside and, inside, the
delegates from the scattered, and generally moribund NAACP units around the
state, had finished giving their reports.

Continue reading “Fifty Years: Remembering Medgar Evers”

The
publication of Katie Gale: A Coast Salish
Woman’s Life on Oyster Bay is the happy product of many years of work.
Katie Gale’s story started in the mid-nineteenth century. My path to her began
in the early 1970s when I was searching for a house and a little land. I didn’t
want anything fancy, just a basic structure; one I could live in while making
improvements. It had to have a well and power. That would save me money and
inconvenience, and I could get right on fixing up the place. Of course, it had
to have a road. I didn’t care about waterfront or a view. I had a partner then
who had built a house in the New Hampshire woods. We believed we could tackle
the humblest little dwelling and the most rugged of circumstances.

My real estate agent was a soft-spoken elegant woman with a
slight German accent that attested to her origins. She wore her blonde hair in
a sophisticated frenchtwist, walked like chilled champagne, and drove a bright
yellow Cadillac in which she transported clients for a look at her listings. I
had Janis Joplin hair, wore jeans and safari boots, and had a faculty position
at a brand-new, controversial local college. I had managed to buy a house in
Olympia with most of the first year of my salary. It was an okay house, but my
new friend wanted to live in the woods. She had already jumped her first local
ship for a loft in a barn out on rural Steamboat Island Road. I thought, having
no particular ties and being ready for adventure, why not make a move? I called
the real estate agent, and we began the search.

When we drove to the house I ultimately purchased, the
lovely, classy blonde behind the wheel was nervously apologetic. This property
was not something she would normally show or be caught dead in. The main
structure was all but smothered by locust trees, Douglas firs, and Himalayan
blackberry vines. Indeed, there was no hint of a view or Puget Sound, much less
Mount Rainier. All these yet-to-be-discovered perks of the place were well
hidden and not even known to my agent. Several goats were dancing around in a
barely fenced bit of land next to a large but shabby shed built on a framework
of logs. There was nothing but mud between the shed and the house, which was a
simple thirty-by-thirty-foot square. It was heated by an oil stove, the misuse
of which had stained the ceiling badly. But that was of no concern because the
rest of the ceiling and walls were covered with moss—or was it mildew? The
bathtub was settled into the sagging, termite-infested floor by several inches.
In my enthusiasm, I declared the house perfect.

Continue reading “From the desk of LLyn De Danaan”

A few months ago my four-year-old daughter and I drove to another state to visit my dearest friend, Charlotte. I was in the middle of a busy week at a writers’ conference, and Charlotte, flying in from the South, was … Continue reading From the desk of Erin Flanagan

I just returned from a weekend in Fort Worth, Texas, where a terrific group of Western history readers and writers had gathered for the Will Rogers Medallion Awards. This organization, originally founded to honor cowboy poetry but now honoring works … Continue reading From the desk of Nancy Plain

David George Surdam is an associate professor of economics at the University of Northern Iowa. He is the author of Wins, Losses, and Empty Seats, The Postwar Yankees and forthcoming Run to Glory and Profits: The Economic Rise of the NFL during the 1950s.

How
did I end up writing about the NFL? To borrow a line from Howard Cosell, “I
never played the game.” As a scrawny, bookish kid who could not throw or catch
a football with proficiency, I was not a prime candidate for the school team. I
also did not enjoy being hollered at. My parents prohibited me from playing,
both from fear of injury and from a dislike of the game. Still, the high school
football coach encouraged me to play, but to this day, I don’t know why. He
knew I couldn’t perform any of the fundamentals of the game; perhaps he wanted
me to raise the team’s grade point average.

I did, however, play Strat-O-Matic Baseball
and Football. I had long been interested in baseball history, having read
Harold Seymour’s Baseball. I can
still remember reading about baseball’s triumvirate, but mostly there were the
numbers. I can remember the day browsing in a local library when I chanced upon
the new Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia.
Sheer delight—page after page of statistics.
Strat-O-Matic creator Harold Richman did a wonderful job transforming
statistics into a game. While I mostly played the baseball game, the football
version was actually more fun. There were more tactical decisions to make, and
of course, you could compile copious statistics.

As a senior in the Robert D. Clark Honors College at
the University of Oregon, I used regression analysis to explain baseball run
production—slugging average and on-base
percentage were paramount. While I attended graduate school and started my
academic career, though, my interest in baseball and football was quiescent.
One of my friends and mentors at Loyola University of Chicago suggested that I
diversify my research. I had pretty much said all I wanted to about the
economics of the American Civil War. Researching sports was an obvious choice
for me.

Continue reading “From the desk of David George Surdam”

I just got back from the Western Writers of America (WWA) convention, held at the Riviera Hotel, in Las Vegas, Nevada, from June 24-29. In spite of the record-breaking 117-degree heat, it was one of the WWA’s best conventions ever. … Continue reading From the desk of Nancy Plain

Author Terese Svoboda, the winner of a recent Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction, will be in Omaha this Wednesday, July 10, from noon to 1:00 p.m. to join “Wednesday Words: The Braided River Series” at KANEKO in the KANEKO-UNO Library. Here … Continue reading From the desk of Terese Svoboda

Mary K. Stillwell is the author of the first-ever biography of Ted Kooser, available this September. Below she writes about Kooser receiving the Mark Twain Award.  Ted Kooser, Nebraska’s Pulitzer Prize-winning former U.S. poet laureate, traveled to Michigan State in early … Continue reading From the desk of Mary K. Stillwell