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I'm Trent Walters. I've had a few dozen publications--literary and genre--the biggest genre mag being LCRW. I'm not sure what qualifies me to say anything, but what qualifies anyone? I'll post again after work or early tomorrow since I'm working late. Anyway, it's my theory that Interstitiality isn't what it thinks it is (at least in part). Midori has given me two stories to read--Brockmeier's "The Ceiling" and Link's "The Girl Detective"--and so far they seem anti-Interstitial to me, by present definitions. In other words, Interstitiality is far more broad in theoretical scope than perhaps one fellow can tackle, so it's good there are a number of us here. I'll demonstrate my meaning soon.

Can people give me short stories (as short as possible since I am very slow and semi-methodical) they consider quintessentially interstitial to further my investigations?

Thank you. I love forward to working with you all. I am a lot more excited about it than those outside IAF now that I've done a little legwork of my own.

Cheers,

Trent Walters

I'm Terri Windling -- a writer, artist, and editor best known in the fields of fantasy and mythic arts. I'm one of the people behind the scenes at the Interstitial Arts Foundation, where I've been helping Midori with web site work, among other projects. And in my spare time (heh, what's that?), I'm director of the Endicott Studio, an interdisciplinary arts organization for contemporary writers and artists who work with myth and folklore. And I'm one of the people running Endicott West, an arts retreat in Tucson, Arizona.

Like Midori, I don't really consider the writing I've published to date to be interstitial -- it's mythic fiction, children's fantasy, and nonfiction on folklore topics. But I'm a great fan of interstitial writing by authors such as Angela Carter, Steven Millhauser, Haruki Murakami, Joyce Carol Oates, Heinz Insu Fenkl, and Carol Emshwiller, among numerous others. And I'm excited by the interstitial works of a new generation of writers including Kelly Link, Kevin Brockmeier, Judy Budnitz, Steve Stern, Emma Donoghue, Katherine Vaz and the Ratbastard group. Reading works by border-crossing writers such as these gives me the desire and encouragement to cross a few borders in my own work as it evolves.

Though as a writer crossing borders is new to me, as an editor I've been doing it for many years. For sixteen years, I co-edited the annual Year's Best Fantasy & Horror anthologies with Ellen Datlow for St. Martin's Press -- and in those volumes, I crossed many genre boundaries to publish magical fiction by Carter, Millhauser, Murakami, Oates, Emshwiller, Marquez, Budnitz, Brockmeier, Marquez, Erdrich, and numerous other fine writers alongside equally excellent works drawn from the fantasy, horror, mystery, and children's book genres. I suppose this is where my interest in border-crossing comes from. (I recently retired from Year's Best, and passed the editorial torch to Kelly Link and Gavin Grant.)

My primary interest in my involvement with the IAF is finding ways to help interstitial arts-makers to find a broader, more varied audience -- and ways to encourage art-lovers to become border-crossers themselves, willing to give works in genres and disciplins unfamiliar to them a try. I also hope that the discussions here and the postings on the bulletin board will lead me to discover new works and new writers/artists/musicians/performers outside my own field of mythic arts.