On Monday, we published Alan Sincic’s “The Slapjack,” selected by Dan Chaon as the third place finalist in our inaugural Novel Excerpt Contest. Today, we’re pleased to share with you this interview with the winner, in which we discuss the remarkable voice of the excerpt, the writer’s background in drama, and more!
Third Place - Masters Review 2021 Novel Excerpt Contest
Judge: Dan Chaon, author of Sleepwalk, Ill Will, Await Your Reply, and Stay Awake
“This excerpt is something of a wild card since it starts at chapter 5… yet the voice won me over—the unique and surprising vernacular, the grinning energy of the prose, the enthusiastic sense of scene and detail. I don’t know whether I yet know what this book is about, but based on these pages I’m willing to keep reading!” [Contest Judge Dan Chaon]
Interview by Cole Meyer, Editor — The Masters Review
In Dan Chaon’s intro for your excerpt, he remarks that it was the voice which won him over–“the unique and surprising vernacular, the grinning energy of the prose, the enthusiastic sense of scene and detail.” Every reader who read the excerpt during our contest noted the voice, too. It is remarkably unique, frenetic and memorable. Where did this voice come from?
First of all, thank you to the readers and to Dan for the words of praise. The writers I most admire take delight in the tunefulness of everyday speech—a touchstone for me as well. If you think of a word-for-word transcription as the “official melody,” then I guess you could say I’m a bit like a jazz musician who riffs along, up and down the melody line, diverging just enough to generate something new, but not so much that you forget the tune that anchors it all.
But there’s more. If what we call “voice” is the vessel that conveys the tale, then you can’t ignore the way the container shapes the content, including the imagery. We sometimes talk about imagery as if each image were a separate cell, crisp and complete, little set pieces flashed up onto a screen for silent viewing. Certainly it’s possible to write with an emphasis on the image alone (I’ll leave it to the scholars to list the ways), but I’ve always been partial to writers who embed the image in the body of a speech, as if it emerged—like the knots and the whorls in the grain of the wood—from out of a living thing. A conversation or debate or declamation. A scolding or a summons or a bit of banter in a circle of friends.
Think about it. If you’re a painter, you render the image with a stroke of the brush. If you’re a writer, what do you have to work with? Syllables. The right combination of syllables to conjure up an image. There was a time—back in the day of the bison on the wall of the cave—when every word was an utterance. The words ride the breath. You sing the story. But then a funny thing happened. Somebody came up with a way to shoot the words directly into the brain of the onlooker. The written word ushers in the era of the silent reader, and from that point on the two modes of story-telling proceed apace, converging or diverging depending on the venue and the market and the taste of the age.
Call me a primitive. I move my lips when I read. And when I write. If the cadence calls for a stress on the final two syllables, and I find that the lovely image I’ve concocted out of half a dozen words is simply not going to fit, I set out in search of a more distilled way of speaking.
Trimming the Universe
James McNulty (Editor):
A Conversation with Alan Sincic
Author of The Smile Contest
Winner of Driftwood Press 2019 Adrift Short Story Contest
Excerpt:
JM: Do you consider yourself a postmodernist, or do you think of yourself as belonging to any particular tradition? If so, who are your masters and who are your contemporaries?
AS: It’s a matter of taste, I suppose, and not a universal ranking system. From the tall tales and the folklore I read as a child (Dr. Seuss and Paul Bunyan and the Rootabaga Stories by Carl Sandburg) to Kafka, Beckett, Calvino, and Barthelme, I’ve always been partial to writers who have an eye for the absurd and a gift for hyperbole.
You could even argue that the fabulist is the true realist. Because we already have a label for the oddities that surround us, we forget how odd they really are. You have a hole in your head into which you insert objects that are not you. And then—presto change— they are no longer themselves. They’ve somehow become you. The writers who struggle to capture this sense of strangeness—the ball of fire that floats across the sky, the magical power I have to move my fingers by merely thinking it so, the invisible force that pins us to the floor—these are the writers who grab me, who remind me how weird it is to be dropped into a cosmos I had no say in the making, into a body I didn’t choose, and stamped with an expiration date that, like a brand behind the ear, I’m never quite able to read.
Then add to that the writers who freshen up the language, the playwrights (from Shakespeare to Stoppard) who carry, into every entanglement, comic or tragic, a child-like pleasure in the play of words. Playboy Of The Western World. Under Milkwood. Lion In Winter. And the poets who write to be read aloud, the line defined, not by an image alone, but by the length of a breath—Hopkins and Houseman and Frost. And the prose writers with the flavorful voices. Whether it emerges gradually (The Oranging Of America by Max Apple) or boldly (Nabokov) or somewhere in between (Flannery O’Connor), there’s a moment when you feel a shift in the center of gravity, the presence of another self with a stake in the outcome.
Short Story Contest Winner: Dear Mr. Gottlieb
Editor Rose Cahalan comments:
The winning entry in our ninth annual short story contest is unlike anything I’ve ever read. Alan Sincic’s “Dear Mr. Gottlieb” is written in an absurdist, stream-of-consciousness style that has shades of Hunter S. Thompson and James Joyce—but a voice all its own. Based extremely loosely on the format of a job application, the piece is a funny, nonsensical satire of corporate life.
Alan Sincic on “Dear Mr. Gottlieb”:
This piece bubbled up over the course of a year at open mics and other disreputable venues in-out-under and around Manhattan. At the West End Jazz Club on a stage the size of a shoebox. In the basement of the chapel at Columbia, dead of winter, the radiator stuck at a hundred, the crowd all glossy as a rack of ham in a smokehouse oven. On the back of a handbill I scribbled it, on the subway, at dawn, in the overlap of the bankers and the bums, and I smuggled it, a work in progress, under a stack of memos in a cubicle.
“Dear Mr. Gottlieb” is not so much a sendup of corporate America as it is a worm’s-eye view of what we all encounter when called upon to win our way in a world utterly, implacably, brutally indifferent to the love—and the hunger for love—that maybe, just maybe, could make us into something more (what would be the word?) human.
How do you preserve the personal touch in a letter engineered to lever your way into an immensity? Do you grovel? Do you strut? Behold. The song of the haughty amoeba, the offering at the altar of the God of Mammon, the Sacred Dance of the Seven Veils: the employment application letter.
An Interview with the editors of Haunted Waters Press.
Welcome! Today we chat with HWP Contributor Alan Sincic. Alan's work of flash fiction Respect is featured in the 2020 issue of From the Depths. His short story Bacon is showcased in Tin Can Literary Review Volume One. Enjoy!
What first sparked your interest in writing?
Certain moments in stories I read when I was young would stun me, not so much in the tale itself—the plot—as in the manner of the telling. “The Vertical Ladder” by William Sansom—the boy stranded halfway up a water tower and then—bam. That’s it. End of story. Stranded—the boy, the teller, the tale, the reader. A moment for me as memorable as any event in the real world. The strange shift of tone at the end of a book of Paul Bunyan tales, when suddenly the teller abandons the wisecracks to talk about the death of a legend. The loopy logic and twisty syntax in “Rootabaga Stories” by Carl Sandburg ("Blixie Bimber and the Gold Buckskin Whincher"). How the wind and the rain obscure the broken body of Doodle in “The Scarlet Ibis” by James Hurst ("I ran as fast as I could, leaving him far behind with a wall of rain dividing us"). When I finally began to write stories of my own, these were the moments that—in a gentle way—troubled me. How do you give a story a distinctive shape, how do you assemble the words in such a way that it’s the wording we remember and not merely the event?
Author, actor, and teacher Alan Sincic, The Furnace artist-in-residence and winner of Big Fiction’s 2014 Knickerbocker Prize, will be teaching a performance workshop at Scribes, Hugo House’s teen writing camp, on August 12. He’ll be performing “Sugar,” a new short story, at Hollow Earth Radio on August 13, with a soundscape designed by filmmaker Stephen Anunson.
In anticipation of these two events, made by possible by the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, we asked him about the mysterious shadow wall, which will be a part of his workshop, and about the intersections of theater and fiction. [Corinne Manning & Anca Szilágyi]
What is a shadow wall?
Well, you shine a light on an eight-by-fifteen-foot sheet of fabric, gather an audience on the far side, then step between the light and the fabric to paint—head to toe—your own shadow up onto the screen. Nothing fancy.
But whether you’re creating a frozen tableau, a writhing monster, a lyrical dance, or a shoot-em-up buzzing with action, when you step behind the shadow wall the light erases everything in the universe except your own silhouette. This is the theatrical equivalent of what what happens when, in fiction, the character steps out onto what was—up until that moment—the blank white page and defines himself by some significant gesture.
I think of those sentences that seem to stand out in vivid isolation from everything around them—the snapshot images captured on the fly that somehow contain within themselves everything we need to know about the character at particular moment.
Winner - Vincent Brothers Review 2020 Short Story Contest
Issue #24 Spring 2021
Contest Winner Alan Sincic comments on The End Of The World
I grew up in a threadbare middle class suburb not unlike the one depicted in the story – little cinderblock houses on the outskirts of Orlando. Now and again there’d be an event to shake us out of the nest and into the open air. Two moments in particular stand out. I was maybe five or six. One morning my parents – in the dark, a good hour before dawn – bundled us all, the four of us kids, still in pajamas and half-asleep, into the VW van for a drive. Not to any place familiar, or nearby, or that we’d ever talked about, no, but simply away. They’d flattened the rear seats to fit us all, each in sleeping bag, side by side. Through the whole of it they whispered so’s not to awaken us, but I could hear in the tone their voice (the tunefulness, the little jokes) that this was a good thing, this whatever-it-was we were so busy about. Thrilling is what it was – the chill wind at the window, the stars, the snug of the bedding and the rush of the road and, under it all, the whole of the earth. I felt as if we were not so much running away from home as running – with our home – away to where nobody had ever been before.
Storyteller Interview
Storyteller Journal - December 2023
Alan Sincic Interview plus Reprints:
Sugar — Mend — The Hawaiian Club — Bob Sanders
Let me go way back here, long before I could even hold a pencil. I’m safe on my mother’s lap, her arms around me. The object in our hands – the big volume of Childcraft that comes with the set of World Book Encyclopedias on the shelf – seems to possess a power of its own that travels, like gravity or magnetism, through the invisible air. It sounds out – the words, they sound out -- not from the painting on the page, or the binding, or the red leather bookmark with the embossment of the bear claw in the foil of gold, but, as if by magic, from out the very center of my mother’s body. Nursery rhymes and stories all buzzing with danger – the witch in Hansel and Gretel, the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, the Jabberwock. I can feel the hum – my little body a sounding board – even before the syllables all round up into shape. Once upon a time…