Rusty Barnes
Rusty Barnes grew up in rural northern Appalachia. He received his B.A. from Mansfield University of Pennsylvania and his M.F.A. from Emerson College. His fiction, poetry and non-fiction have appeared in many journals. After editing fiction for the Beacon Street Review (now Redivider) and Zoetrope All-Story Extra, he co-founded Night Train, a literary journal which has been featured in the Boston Globe, The New York Times, and on National Public Radio. Sunnyoutside Press published a collection of his flash fiction in November 2007. If you want to know more, check these links to an interview conducted by Wayne Yang of Eight Diagrams: Part I, Part II, Part III. Or, friend him on Facebook.
Here is a list of writers and subjects I like and/or find kinship with; hopefully this will help submitters decide if Fried Chicken and Coffee is right for their work.
rural literature
working-class literature
Appalachian literature
grit lit
Rough South
rednecks
white trash
flatlanders
ridgerunners
hillbillies
Harry Crews
Larry Brown
Dorothy Allison
Paula K. Gover
Lisa Koger
Chris Offutt
Silas House
Chris Holbrook
Lee Smith
Ron Rash
Richard Ford
Jim Harrison
Donald Ray Pollock
Tom Franklin
Cormac McCarthy
Andre Dubus
William Gay
Charles Frazier
Tom Cobb
Breece Pancake
Pete Fromm
Nelson Algren
Dorianne Laux
Mary Lee Settle
Mary Hood
Daniel Woodrell
Dagoberto Gilb
James Lee Burke
Isabel Zuber
Willy Vlautin
James Crumley
Gwyn Hyman Rubio
Jayne Ann Phillips
Charlie Smith
Andrew Hudgins
Richard Hugo
James Dickey
Chuck Kinder
Gurney Norman
James Still
Wendell Berry
Mark Richard
Pinckney Benedict
Tim McLaurin
Brad Watson
Steve Yarbrough
Rick Bass
Richard Currey
Bobbie Ann Mason
The Submissions:
No word limit/no content guidelines, within the broad categories I’ve established in my first post to this blogazine. Anything more than 8000 words would have to be done in serial form, I would think, and be exceptional too. Send me rural, funky, dirty stories about churchgoing women who never sin. I’d like to read that. What about the story I lived, the one where the kid moves away and goes to college and becomes a writer, and until he’s thirty, his male relatives hitch their drawers and ask him when he’s going to be out of school? Except don’t write about writing. I don’t care much, since I live it. I would love to see more stories about women, though. Get to the grit, get to the love, show me the scars, and take Harry Crews to heart: “Blood, bone, and nerve, that’s fiction. Show me the stuff that cuts to the quick.”
In case you’re coming here cold, I’ve been editing other writers for nearly fifteen years now, and for the last six of these I’ve read hundreds and thousands of stories. Your Bukowski knockoffs are not going to make it, son. Sorry. Nor do nostalgic o-it-was-better-back-then stories stand much of a chance, unless they really, really transcend. If it all sounds good to you, hit me at rusty DOT barnes AT gmail DOT com with FCAC SUBMISSION in the the subject line. I’ll be in touch soon.
The Payment:
If I publish your work here, I will send you a book from my personal collection. You get to choose, poetry or fiction. It might be a new book, it might be well-loved, it might have my notes in it. But you’ll get a free book. It may take me a while to send it. Be patient, as this is my labor of love.