New England Review

  • Subscribe/Order
  • Back Issues
    • Vol. 43, No. 3 (2022)
    • Vol. 43, No. 2 (2022)
    • Vol. 43, No. 1 (2022)
    • Vol. 42, No. 4 (2021)
    • Vol. 42, No. 3 (2021)
    • Vol. 42, No. 2 (2021)
    • Vol. 42, No. 1 (2021)
    • Vol. 41 (2020)
      • Vol. 41, No. 4 (2020)
      • Vol. 41, No. 3 (2020)
      • Vol. 41, No. 2 (2020)
      • Black Lives Matter
      • Vol. 41, No.1 (2020)
    • Vol. 40 (2019)
      • Vol. 40, No. 4 (2019)
      • Vol. 40, No. 3 (2019)
      • Vol. 40, No. 2 (2019)
      • Vol. 40, No 1 (2019)
    • Vol. 39 (2018)
      • Vol. 39, No. 4 (2018)
      • Vol. 39, No. 3 (2018)
      • Vol. 39, No. 2 (2018)
      • Vol. 39, No. 1 (2018)
    • Vol. 38 (2017)
      • Vol. 38, No. 4 (2017)
      • Vol. 38, No. 3 (2017)
      • Vol.38, No. 2 (2017)
      • Vol. 38, No. 1 (2017)
    • Vol. 37 (2016)
      • Vol. 37, No. 4 (2016)
      • Vol. 37, No. 3 (2016)
      • Vol. 37, No. 2 (2016)
      • Vol. 37, No. 1 (2016)
    • Vol. 36 (2015)
      • Vol. 36, No. 4 (2015)
      • Vol. 36, No. 3 (2015)
      • Vol. 36, No. 2 (2015)
      • Vol. 36, No. 1 (2015)
    • Vol. 35 (2014-2015)
      • Vol. 35, No.1 (2014)
      • Vol. 35, No. 2 (2014)
      • Vol. 35, No. 3 (2014)
      • Vol. 35, No. 4 (2015)
    • Vol. 34 (2013-2014)
      • Vol. 34, No. 1 (2013)
      • Vol. 34, No. 2 (2013)
      • Vol. 34, Nos. 3-4 (2014)
    • Vol. 33 (2012-2013)
      • Vol. 33, No. 1 (2012)
      • Vol. 33, No. 2 (2012)
      • Vol. 33, No. 3 (2012)
      • Vol. 33, No. 4 (2013)
    • Vol. 32 (2011-2012)
      • Vol. 32, No. 1 (2011)
      • Vol. 32, No. 2 (2011)
      • Vol. 32, No. 3 (2011)
      • Vol. 32, No. 4 (2012)
    • Vol. 31 (2010)
      • Vol. 31, No. 1 (2010)
      • Vol. 31, No. 2 (2010)
      • Vol. 31, No. 3 (2010)
      • Vol. 31, No. 4 (2010-2011)
    • Vol. 30 (2009)
      • Vol. 30, No. 1 (2009)
      • Vol. 30, No. 2 (2009)
      • Vol. 30, No. 3 (2009)
      • Vol. 30, No. 4 (2009-2010)
    • Vol. 29 (2008)
      • Vol. 29, No. 1 (2008)
      • Vol. 29, No. 2 (2008)
      • Vol. 29, No. 3 (2008)
      • Vol. 29, No. 4 (2008)
    • Vol. 28 (2007)
      • Vol. 28, No. 1 (2007)
      • Vol. 28, No. 2 (2007)
      • Vol. 28, No. 3 (2007)
      • Vol. 28, No. 4 (2007)
    • Vol. 27 (2006)
      • Vol. 27, No. 1 (2006)
      • Vol. 27, No. 2 (2006)
      • Vol. 27, No. 3 (2006)
      • Vol. 27, No. 4 (2006)
    • Vol. 26 (2005)
      • Vol. 26, No. 1 (2005)
      • Vol. 26, No. 2 (2005)
      • Vol. 26, No. 3 (2005)
      • Vol. 26, No. 4 (2005)
    • Vol. 25 (2004)
      • Vol. 25, Nos. 1-2 (2004)
      • Vol. 25, No. 3 (2004)
      • Vol. 25, No. 4 (2004)
    • Vol. 24 (2003)
      • Vol. 24, No. 1 (2003)
      • Vol. 24, No. 2 (2003)
      • Vol. 24, No. 3 (2003)
      • Vol. 24, No. 4 (2004)
  • About
    • Masthead
    • NER Award Winners
    • Press
    • Award for Emerging Writers
    • Readers and Interns
    • Books by our authors
    • Contact
  • Audio
  • Events
  • Submit

Meet the Readers

Evgeniya Dame

July 9, 2021


“I like stories that have no fear. They are not afraid to be misunderstood or to do things maybe not the way things have been done before.”


Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from and what do you do when you’re not reading for NER? 
I was born in Samara, Russia—a city known for its chocolate factory, river pirates (back in the day), and its connection to space industry. We made the engine that was inside the spaceship that Yuri Gagarin flew. Since 2014 I’ve lived in Maine with my husband, writing and working odd jobs. Last year I received the Stegner Fellowship in Fiction at Stanford University, so there was a lot of coast-to-coast moving during the pandemic. I plan to spend the next year in Northern California working on my first book.

What made you decide to be a reader for NER, and how long have you been on staff?
Some time after I finished my MFA, NER was looking to bring on a few new readers. A professor I worked with passed my name to Carolyn Kuebler. This was in 2014, I think. I’ve been reading submissions ever since.

Have you ever read a submission that later got selected for publication? 
There were two, some years apart. The first one was “The Relief Pitcher’s Mother,” by Perri Klass (NER 38.1). It’s strange how things work. I knew nothing about baseball when I read it, but the story really spoke to me, it transcended this terrible ignorance on my part. The second story was published in 2019. It’s called “Sweat a Wormhole,” by Andrew Gretes, and it deals with a father who comes back to his family after death as a chicken. And everyone is playing this video game based on Thoreau’s Walden. I was crazy about this story. I wrote Carolyn a long note about it and I remember looking up the game to see if it was real. I’m glad it ended up in the magazine (NER 40.2).

What is your reading process like? What do you look for in a submission? 
My reading process involves lots of hot beverages and a comfortable chair! I don’t really have a process, but generally speaking, I don’t look at the cover letter until I’ve read the story. If the author has a book or an impressive previous publication, or if they are unpublished—I don’t want that to influence me.

The more I read fiction, the more I begin to see that there are no rules. Over the years, the stories that blew me away have been structured and fragmented, witty urban and straight naturalistic, funny and nostalgic, with any number of characters and points of view, the shifty ones and the ones that stuck to the story at hand. I like stories that have no fear. They are not afraid to be misunderstood or to do things maybe not the way things have been done before. They are not afraid to bore you, because they know what they are working towards and will do anything to get there. In a good story, there is a sense of honesty and desperation. Honesty, because the author is telling the truth, maybe not the truth, but something vital they’ve discovered simply by being alive. And desperation to me means letting go of things that don’t serve the story. Desperation sounds like a very emotional state, but I think it’s a wonderful state in which to edit. When you are desperate to tell your story, you won’t waste time on things that don’t help it become what it needs to be.

Of the pieces you’ve read at NER—whether in the magazine or among the submissions—which was your favorite or most memorable to you personally?
There was a story by Lindsay Starck that NER published in 2020. It’s called “Baikal” and it’s about a marathon race on the frozen surface of Lake Baikal. I loved this image and later, when I got the chance to interview Lindsay, she shared a video with me of a female runner participating in the race. It was a real thing! It was beautiful and very otherworldly.

How has reading for NER influenced your own writing/creative pursuits? 
It is very hard to remain part of a writing world, a community of writers. It’s competitive and has few rewards and many people simply can’t afford to live this kind of life too long. Eventually, you need something stable, a plan. One of the best things that NER did for me is that it allowed me to remain part of the writing world during the years when I didn’t know whether I’d ever write a complete short story. I’d come home after working in a student writing center or a museum gift shop and read a few submissions. It was nice to know I was still connected to the publishing process that way.

What do you read for pleasure? Is there something you’re reading at the moment that you would recommend? 
My reading is a mix of classics and contemporaries, and your high school books, and rereads. Since I left my home country, I try to read in Russian every year because there aren’t many people around me who speak the language. So every year I read a few Russian novels, mostly nineteenth century. I love to recommend the same novel, which is Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov. This book is incredible. It’s excruciatingly boring for the first 200 pages, but those who survive are rewarded—what follows is the finest, most psychologically nuanced love story in Russian literature. Oblomov is sometimes called the novel of laziness, inertia, and that is true. Goncharov suffered from procrastination and only wrote four books in his (rather long) life, one of them a travel journal. I think of him often when finishing a story seems like an insurmountable task.

One of the best collections I came across in the last year is Marshall Klimasewiski’s Tyrants. It moves swiftly between centuries and continents, and the author has this amazing capacity of going into the mind of any character, anyone at all—a young Korean mother who just lost a child, a Swedish explorer, a bored teenager from Connecticut, or Joseph Stalin.

Last year, when I kept moving, I kept lugging the same two books with me—Aleksandar Hemon’s Love and Obstacles and Andrea Lee’s Interesting Women. I’ve read both before, multiple times, but I always want them near.


NER‘s staff readers, all volunteers, play an essential role in our editorial process and in our mission to discover new voices in contemporary literature. A full list of staff readers is available on our masthead.

Filed Under: News & Notes, Staff Reader Profile Tagged With: Andrew Gretes, Evgeniya Dame, Goncharov, Lindsay Starck, Marshall Klimasewiski, Perri Klass

NER Authors Selected for Pushcart Prize

Best of the Small Presses 2022

May 14, 2021

Two stories from the New England Review have been selected for inclusion in the next Pushcart Prize collection: McKenna Marsden’s “Suffering in Motion” (NER 40.4) and Lindsay Starck’s “Baikal” (NER 41.4). The XLVI edition will be published in November 2021.

McKenna Marsden, a current MFA candidate at the University of Maryland-College Park, grew up in Oregon and spent the majority of their adult life in greater Boston. “Suffering in Motion” was their first publication. Marsden talks to NER staff reader Laur Freymiller about “Suffering in Motion” in our Behind the Byline feature. The story is also read aloud by Madison Middleton in the latest episode of the NER Out Loud podcast, followed by a conversation between reader and writer.

Lindsay Starck was born in Wisconsin and raised in the Milwaukee Public Library. She went on to study literature and writing at Yale, Notre Dame, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She currently teaches at Augsburg University in Minneapolis. Starck shared the story behind “Baikal” in her recent “Behind the Byline” feature with staff reader Evgeniya Dame.


From the publisher: The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses series, published every year since 1976, is the most honored literary project in America. Since 1976, hundreds of presses and thousands of writers of short stories, poetry and essays have been represented in our annual collections.

Filed Under: News & Notes Tagged With: Evgeniya Dame, Laur Freymiller, Lindsay Starck, McKenna Marsden

Behind the Byline

Lindsay Starck

May 4, 2020

It takes a courageous runner to brave the race.

NER author Lindsay Starck (pictured left, walking the icy shore of Lake Superior) talks to NER editorial panel member Evgeniya Dame, sharing the story behind “Baikal” (NER 41.1) and its roots in the annual winter marathon across the largest and deepest lake in the world.

Evgeniya Dame: When I first read “Baikal” I couldn’t believe that its premise—a race across the frozen Lake Baikal in Siberia—was real. And yet it is! Could you talk more about the real-life marathon and how you went about the process of fictionalizing it?

Lindsay Starck: Yes! It feels so unbelievable. I remember reading the first few paragraphs of a news story about the marathon when I was standing in line at a coffee shop. I was so hypnotized by the video header, which showed a line of tiny runners trekking across an endless expanse of ice, that the barista had to call my name repeatedly. I’d never heard of this race, which has taken place annually since 2005 (when conditions permit) across the largest and deepest lake in the world. Baikal contains nearly a quarter of the earth’s fresh water, which is exceptionally clear; it’s ringed by mountains and is home to distinctive flora and fauna such as the famous Baikal seal; and it’s full of geothermic springs that bubble up, even in the winter, to melt holes in the ice. It takes a courageous runner to brave the race, and as I prepared to write this piece I sought out stories of those who had attempted it. I studied photos, videos, and written accounts, which is where I learned, for example, about the “hummocks” (ice rubble) that spackle the surface, the tents on the course, the hovercraft rescue-missions, and the perception of the lake as a living being.  

ED: Have you ever run a marathon? What helped you get in the mind of a runner?

LS: I am a runner, but not a marathoner. My father, however, has run thirty marathons; he tends to collect them as one would collect vintage coins or passport stamps. So I’ve been in the crowds, waving homemade signs and cheering the runners as they plod past mile fifteen, twenty-three, etc. I’ve attended the pasta dinners held in heated tents on the eve of the race, and I’ve been close enough at the finish line to see the faces of the runners as they take those final steps. I’m always astounded at their fortitude, but also worried about the toll that the race can take on their bodies!

ED: Visually, your story looks very distinct on the page: paragraphs interspersed with short questions. When I read the story, I immediately fell into the rhythm that those questions created. How did this structure arise?

LS: As someone who does not possess the fortitude or willpower necessary to run across Lake Baikal, I had questions for my character: namely, “How?” and “Why?” From the beginning, I was interrogating her. As I wrote more, it became clear that the central relationship of the piece had been shaped by unspoken questions. When I read that the founder of the race had described Baikal as “alive” and “breathing,” I wondered if the narrator could be the lake itself. I’ve long admired the “Ithaca” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which is written as a catechistic call-and-response, and also John Edgar Wideman’s “Stories,” which is a flash fiction piece composed of “question after question after question.” Finally, one of my favorite remarks about literature is Anton Chekhov’s observation that the artist’s task is not to answer questions but to pose the questions correctly. 

ED: I love the way “Baikal” engages the environmental themes while making them serve the story and the character. Are you often drawn to these themes in your writing? 

LS: Yes! Especially recently. It was late March when I came across the article about the marathon, which meant that soon the ice would be breaking up on the lakes near where I live . . .  And as I walked across the parking lot to my car, I imagined a woman running across the lake while the ice cracked open behind her, racing against time the way that we’re all racing against climate change. My stories are centered on relationships, but to me those relationships are most interesting—and truest—when set against the backdrop of a specific environmental, political, or cultural moment. I recently published a short story about the last remaining Pinta Island tortoise on the Galapagos Islands, and I’m in the process of sending out two pieces that are also climate-themed: one about a future water shortage in California, and one about a guy who leads tours for people who want to see species on the brink of extinction. 

ED: There is a beautiful passage in your story that describes the main character’s reaction as her husband reads poetry to her. “Sometimes, as she tilted over the towering precipice of sleep, her temple throbbing and her skin burning, she’d think she heard something between the lines: something the poet was reaching for but couldn’t find the words to say. The poem behind the poem.” This concept—the poem behind the poem— sounds fascinating. Is this a common notion?

LS: That’s a great question! I don’t believe the phrase itself is all that common, but to me the idea feels central to the work of countless writers. I’ve long been interested in the use of literary constraints—from sonnets or pantoums in poetry to specific word counts in flash fiction to the question-answer format you see here—in part because language itself is a constraint that writers strive to transcend. We always want to say more than what we can actually get onto the page; with every word we type, we lose the possibility of infinite alternatives. As Italo Calvino wrote, “The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.” That’s what I had in mind when writing this passage: the poem on the page is the ghost of the poem you were trying to write. And the idea seemed to work well with the image of the marathon’s finish line, which feels tantalizingly close but also unreachable even from the start.

ED: I guess literary constraints are restrictive and freeing at once. I remember reading a Rick Moody interview in which he spoke about his love for them. He said limitations make him feel “energized.” Is there a literary constraint you’re thinking of trying next?

LS: I agree with Rick Moody! The novel that I’m working on actually began with a constraint: there are a number of first-person narrators, and I wanted each narrator to be addressing someone else in the novel, rather than simply addressing the reader. Over the course of several revisions, I’ve had to let go of that original idea; but, like any good constraint, it propelled me through my draft and taught me a lot about the characters and their connections to one another, so it definitely served a purpose. 

ED: Could you share a book or two that you’ve been reading during these strenuous times?

LS: I’ve found solace in Richard Powers’s The Overstory, a gorgeous ode to the natural world which does a wonderful job reminding humans of how brief and inconsequential our lives are when compared to, say, the lifespan of a sequoia. I know that may not sound particularly comforting, but it helps me to remember that even though this pandemic feels like it’s lasting forever, it’s really only a blip. (The novel is also an important reminder that the pandemic is only one of many crises the world is currently facing.) 

I’m also trying to memorize more poems, as I find something meditative and peaceful and rhythmic in this act of complete attention. I’m grateful for the chance to inhabit someone else’s language and vision for a while. Some recent pieces I’ve memorized have been Jamaal May’s “There Are Birds Here,” W. S. Merwin’s “To the New Year,” and Naomi Shihab Nye’s “What Changes.” 

ED: Thank you!


Lindsay Starck was born in Wisconsin and raised in the Milwaukee Public Library. Her first novel, Noah’s Wife, was published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 2016. Her writing has recently appeared in Southern Review, Ploughshares, and Cincinnati Review. She teaches and writes in Minneapolis, where she swims in the lakes and skis in the streets. She lives with her husband and a geriatric golden retriever. 

Evgeniya Dame studied English in Samara, Russia, before coming to the US on a Fulbright Fellowship to pursue fiction writing at the University of New Hampshire. Her fiction appears or is forthcoming in Southern Review, Ploughshares, and Joyland, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her nonfiction and interviews have appeared in Electric Literature and New England Review online. She is the recipient of a Monson Arts Residency Fellowship, Martin Dibner Memorial Fellowship for Maine Writers, and the Young P. Dawkins III prize for best MFA thesis at the University of New Hampshire. 

Filed Under: Fiction, News & Notes Tagged With: Evgeniya Dame, Lindsay Starck

Lindsay Starck

Baikal

March 24, 2020

Photo by Katie Doherty on Unsplash

Fiction from NER 41.1

What was she thinking?

That depends. When she stepped onto the tarmac in Irkutsk, the sky crisp and glittering, she was wondering why it had taken her so long to come to Siberia. But earlier, when she boarded the stale plane in Beijing, she was trying not to think about the world’s first marathoner. (You know: the one who died.) And when her husband dropped her at the airport curb in Minneapolis, she was wondering if he’d miss her.

[Read More]

Subscribe today

Filed Under: Fiction, News & Notes Tagged With: Baikal, Lindsay Starck


Vol. 43, No. 4

Subscribe

NER Digital

Serhiy Zhadan

Literature & Democracy

Serhiy Zhadan

“That’s the appeal of writing: you treat the world like a potential text, using it as material, setting yourself apart, stepping out.”

Sign up for our newsletter

Click here to join our list and receive occasional news and always-great writing.

categories

Navigation

  • Subscribe/Order
  • Support NER
  • About
  • Advertising
  • Audio
  • Back Issues
  • Emerging Writers Award
  • Events
  • Podcast

ner via email

Stories, poems, essays, and web features delivered to your Inbox.

Categories

Copyright © 2023 · facebook · twitter

 

Loading Comments...