Washington Square.

On air is the audio town square for the Washington Square Review.

Lansing Community College's literary journal.

Writers, readers, scholars, publishing professionals, citizens of the world, gather here and chat about all things writing.

Hey there.

This is Melissa Ford Luckin, editor of the Washington Square Review.

I'm here today with Michael Feeney, whose piece across the River Styx is in our Summer 25 issue.

Hey there, Michael.

Hi.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, for sure.

Tell us a little bit about your piece.

Maybe give us a little summary for people who haven't read it yet, and then let us know how you came to write it.

Okay.

So across the River Styx essentially follows a married couple, Carrie and Travis, who are dealing with Travis's incarceration in a state prison.

And prior to the events of the story, Travis has sort of found himself in trouble from a couple of different directions.

He has gotten himself into trouble with people on the inside of the institution, and then his attempt to solve that has led him to find himself sort of between a rock and a hard place.

So he is trying to find his way out of that trouble and possibly involving his wife and family in ways that might not be conducive to them.

And so the genesis of this story is pretty old.

Probably seven or eight years ago, maybe 2016, 2017.

I was working in the state prison system out in Idaho.

And for a period of several weeks, I was detailed to fill in as a visitation officer for the primary visiting officer.

So that entailed the scheduling and facilitating and supervision of in person visits between inmates and their families.

So that was interesting in that it allowed me to see these men on like a, interacting with people other than other incarcerated people or staff members.

So sort of a different dynamic.

And then in that time, I developed a decent rapport with a specific inmate.

And then so, you know, you see their families, you see their kids.

And so I met his wife and his son, who was about the same age as my son at the time.

And then a few weeks after my tenure in visiting ended and I went back to the mainline.

The wife was actually caught bringing contraband into the institution in that child's diaper bag.

So it sort of got me thinking about what that must feel like to be caught in between all of these forces and the pressures of family and what we're willing to do for people we love, even if we know it's wrong.

So I wanted to explore that from a perspective that wasn't necessarily my own perspective from that incident.

One of the neat things about your story is the intense level of Humanity.

Each of the characters, the main characters, they're in a situation together, but we also get glimpses of their own separate lives.

So there's tension between them, but we can also get a sense of the tension of their own individual worlds.

So there's kind of like three worlds, right?

Their world together and then each of their worlds individually.

Talk a little bit about how your experience as a correction officer in that particular context change the way perhaps that you see those dynamics.

You know, it.

I'm no longer a CEO, but when I was, I did about five years as an officer.

And it does.

It forces you to see people at their worst.

And, you know, it's easy to.

This is a population that's very easy, I think, for everyone to generalize.

It's very easy to say in the word inmates and think of a total generalization.

Whereas the reality is that, yeah, every single one of them is an individual.

And the same goes for officers and prison staff as well.

Is there?

Everyone has a life outside of the institution.

And I think it's very easy to forget that when you're looking at numbers and uniforms and institutionalization and so all these forces that kind of force people into blocks, I guess it's easy to lose track of that.

But working, you know, every day, spending 50, 60 hours a week with these people, you have to see them as individuals, you know, you know them for years.

In some cases.

Did it change the way that you thought about their family life outside of the institution over time?

Yeah, you do have access to, again, this is from a period of 2015 to 2021.

So I mean, things could have changed dramatically since then.

But at the time I was working there, you did have access to like pre sentence investigations.

And so you would be able to read about, you know, you have the dossier on them.

So you also learn about their childhood, their upbringing, their things that they've done and things that have been done to them.

And so you do have this kind of broad picture.

And so then you, in dealing with that, you have to focus specifically on the individual in front of you, you know, and so it kind of, it really does simultaneously humanize and dehumanize.

And so I really never wanted to be someone that sees just a inmate's green scrubs.

You know, I always tried to see the person that they were and also.

Perhaps see beyond just the list of information that you're talking about.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I was interested in the dynamics of the story, like I said, in the way that you've managed to create these three different Worlds on so few sheets of paper.

So that, to me, was really fascinating and compelling.

When you think about other creative writing that you've done, how does this one fit in?

Is it quite a bit different?

Similar?

I'd say it's pretty similar.

Thematically.

I'm very interested in solitude and connection and these.

The connections that we form in dark places, whether that's mentally dark or physically dark.

So I think it fits.

It does.

I like to write about people in places that I am unfamiliar with and that I don't see represented very often in literary fiction.

Especially, you know, you.

I feel like you tend to see a lot of.

For example, in this story, you tend to see a lot of inmates and corrections officers and prison staff, but it's usually in genre fiction and it's often very thin.

And so I'm interested in exploring people in places that, yeah, are usually sort of just glanced over or a stock character in a detective novel or something like that.

Why do you think that is?

Probably because for me, that's the life that I have lived and do live.

And so I think it's easier to empathize for me with the, you know, quote unquote background characters, the people who would appear in the opening scene of a mystery and then disappear again after, you know, their statements taken or whatever.

So, yeah, I try to see the humanity in everybody.

And so I want to explore that humanity and people that would just disappear from the narrative.

I think in most stories you've let.

Me know that you're a father, and I'm wondering how that plays into this desire to kind of look underneath and look beyond the usual.

I think that just makes me more aware that, yeah, every single person out there is someone's son or someone's daughter.

And, you know, even the most forgotten person, even the person who's been institutionalized for 30 years, or even people who've been on the streets for 20 or 30 years.

You know, at some point they were someone's son or someone's daughter, and hopefully, you know, hopefully they were loved and cherished and.

But every person on this earth has that in common.

That they were born to someone, whether or not they were treated properly is up in the air.

But we all have that in common.

You know, everyone was someone's child at some point.

That's making me.

Making me think about how each person is way more complex inside than what you see.

Yeah, absolutely.

Every.

Every person is this mass of history and emotions and feelings, and every human is millions of moments.

You know.

Another thing that you And I were talking about before we started recording was your background in creative writing.

And you let me know that you don't have a lot of formal training in writing, that you belong to a creative writing club, and that you did take some creative writing courses.

Talk a little bit about those early writing experiences and how they propelled you.

Yeah, so I did.

While I was an undergrad at Boise State, I was in the creative writing club.

Developed very close friendships with some people there.

And then I did take a couple of kind of basic fiction, 101 fiction, 102 type classes with Nicole Cullen and Natalie Disney, who were both, I thought, excellent teachers.

They were really the first people to kind of make me think about writing in a way that's not just, you know, telling a story, that you have to look at it from a perspective that's not just this happened, this happened and then this happens.

You know, they made us look deeper that the content of what we were creating and so that.

How did they accomplish that?

Do you remember?

Because that sounds pretty amazing.

You know, I think it was just because it was the first time I'd ever been introduced to.

I still remember reading.

I don't know how to say his name, but I believe it's Brey DJ Pancake.

We read Trilobites by him and a story by Anthony Door.

And I think it was just the first time that I'd ever really been introduced to the short story as a medium for doing anything other than just telling kind of a very quick, like, action story.

I didn't really grow up reading a lot of literary fiction.

When I was growing up, I tended to read like fantasy or mystery fiction and stuff like that.

So I.

It really was very interesting to see that.

And that was also a br.

DJ Pancake.

I hope I'm not just absolutely bossing.

I don't know.

I can't help you.

Someone out there knows.

Yeah, he has a very.

He.

He wrote a lot of stories set in rural West Virginia in, I believe, the 70s.

And he really only.

I think he only had one collection.

But after I read that story in class, I went and bought his collection.

And yeah, he tells these stories from a perspective that's very much outside the literary, I think, norms.

You're reading about characters that are rural and poor and not necessarily the kind of polished urbanites that I used to associate with literary fiction.

I could see how that would have left a really strong impact on you, given what we were talking about earlier.

You know, I just grew.

I guess I could just grew up with this kind of misplaced idea that literary fiction is all just, you know, Henry James or very urbane and a little bit and sophisticated.

And I always thought it was sort of too something that was too above me, I guess.

And so it was cool to see a reality that I could recognize more easily.

So what happened next after the classes that you took?

Oh, gosh, almost nothing.

When I graduated, I was taking the LSATs and I was looking at going to grad school and law school.

I was interested in working for the Foreign Service, like working in embassies abroad.

But then I had my son and I.

There was sort of a paradigm shift there, and I just had to focus on the close in priorities.

And that sort of led me to working in the prisons, which I don't regret.

It certainly changed the trajectory of my life very much.

In what way?

I mean, I think certainly it changed me who I am as a person.

In 2021, I left the Department of Corrections and I moved back to California, where I'm originally from.

And while here, I met my fiance and I.

None of that would have happened if I had gone to law school and even if I had gotten to go to, you know, foreign Service, it was just a totally different trajectory and I think a totally different mind frame.

So I'm.

And I'm happy with the life I have now.

So it's.

Yeah, yeah.

So how did you come back to the creative writing?

At what point did that start to happen?

I always did it as a hobby, as a way to process things and internalize things, although I think I didn't really get serious about it.

Like, I didn't actually start thinking about submitting pieces up until about two years ago.

And I was finally, I think, in a place where I was just able to dedicate the time that it needed and deserved.

And so, yeah, I actually dusted out a few old stories, this being one of them, and kind of took the bones of that and then was able to think more about the craft of it.

And so the very end of 2023, I started submitting pieces and I started revising some old stories and creating some new ones and yeah, started sending them out.

Okay.

And it's.

It's very scary and fun and satisfying and a whole bunch of different things.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What makes it scary?

You know, it's.

It's hard to get used to the rejections at first.

That's still opening your email and seeing another rejection from such and such journal.

But at this point, it's just kind of more exhilarating than scary at this point.

You know, I, I get excited when I hit submit and so I have a word doc that's about four pages long of rejections.

But then in there, there's also a handful of acceptances in.

That definitely makes it worthwhile.

When you said it was scary, I was wondering, there must be people in your life that know that you're writing.

And so how does it feel to have your stories out in the world and having other people read them, people that know you is what I'm thinking about.

Yeah, I think everyone who knows me well, I don't really hide who I am, I guess.

So, like, I don't think that I don't necessarily write what might shock me.

I don't worry about my son reading anything I've written when he gets older.

But it's the people that I don't know that are a little, you know, that's, that's the nerve wracking thing, you know, sending.

You always worry about how people might perceive it if people are going to take things as insulting.

Especially when you write from perspectives that aren't necessarily your own.

I know that I can write authoritatively about the experience of the life I've lived.

But for example, even in this story, I'm sure that people could pick that up and be like, that's not my experience as someone married to an incarcerated person.

Or that's not my experience as an incarcerated person.

So a lot of the stories I do write are seen through the eyes of people that I don't necessarily share the same reality as them because I'm interested in exploring those different worldviews and different realities and places.

And so when I submit pieces, I try to portray it accurately and honestly.

There's always going to be that.

The reality that that is not my lived experience.

And so that's nerve wracking, I guess.

I think we've kind of wandered into a pretty complicated topic because it's something that all fiction writers deal with.

After you've written, you know, X number of stories, maybe it's five, maybe it's 12, I don't know.

But eventually you've written yourself out.

You know, you've imagined yourself, your own perspective that you have in a couple different situations.

But eventually you're gonna be tapped out.

And as a writer, like you said, you want to include other perspectives and look at other places and that I think, yeah, you've, you've raised a good point.

How do you deal with that when you're creating a character and you're Creating a character that has an experience not from you in your life.

Do you do a little research, talk to people?

How do you work that?

I do do as much research as I can about places and people.

I try to talk to people who have lived something similar to that, even if it's not, you know, the reality of it.

But it is.

I try to just be empathetic about it.

I try to look beyond the stereotype and I try to imagine myself in that situation.

I guess I move pretty slowly and I try to think about how it might be perceived to someone who, for example, that is the life they've lived or something similar to that, you know.

So, for example, one of the other stories I've had published, it's supposed to be coming out actually any time now in a magazine called Stone Crop magazine out of Idaho.

And it's about a wildland firefighter and it looks at class and climate change and a few other things sort of through that lens of that specific point of view.

And in that one, I talked to a friend of mine a lot about his own experiences as a wildland firefighter.

But again, it isn't my reality.

So I just do as much research as I can.

And then I also think about how would I want someone to tell my story if they were writing about me or someone like me?

So, yeah, just try to be sensitive, I guess.

What kind of stuff are you working on right now?

Oh, gosh, you know, I've probably got about 20 or 30 short stories split pretty evenly between traditional short story and flash fiction.

I'm interested in flash just because I have recently begun reading a lot of shorter, like punchier novels.

And I kind of like that, the ability to do that.

And so trying to condense what I write and sort of get at the core of the experience and distill it down.

And of course, you know, like every writer, I have the couple novels percolating and bouncing around.

And I do have one novel that I'm working on that is set in prisons.

And that sort of is difficult in that I think I'm able to write it a little more honestly now that I'm removed from that environment.

Because trying to write it while I was in it just felt it felt too much like a Romana clef or a autobiographical novel.

And I didn't want that.

And then so part of that is like, okay, how do I write one that's true to the experience but fictional, entirely fictional.

And then how also do I convince people that, oh yeah, this isn't a romantic Clef or not a biographical novel.

I promise that was something.

When I have stories set from perspectives closer to mine, I have to kind of tell people, like, okay, this isn't actually my experience.

This is a fictional story.

So, yeah, that can happen.

People read your fiction and start to think, is that what he thinks?

Is that what she thinks?

Yeah, no, that's what the character thinks.

I'm not the character.

Yeah.

And that's.

And that's kind of a thing I have to be wary of, too.

I have a story that I think I probably might need to reevaluate.

Seriously.

And this is set in an institution.

And again, I don't.

That's not everything, or not even a court or whatever I just said in the prisons.

But this one is another story that I. I do have, again, from an inmate's perspective.

And it gets rejected in almost instantly everywhere I send it.

So I'm like, okay, there might be something wrong with the story itself.

And so I'm kind of again, thinking, like, hopefully that readers don't think I'm advocating for a certain behavior and mindset that the character has.

And so, again, it's one of those things where it's like, okay, maybe I need to evaluate how.

Maybe it needs a new opening.

Yeah, it needs a new.

Definitely needs a new opening.

It needs a lot, I think, but we'll get it sorted out someday.

Awesome.

If people want to watch for you.

You told me that you don't have social media yet.

I don't.

I don't have any social media in terms of, like, a writing space.

I really should.

I only have a few publications either out or forthcoming.

So, yeah, I will hopefully get a writer's website up and running soon.

I always felt like it was too early to do that without, I don't know, this X, Y, or z amount of publications under my belt, but maybe I should start thinking about that now.

All right, well, in the meantime, they can just look for your name in the literary journals.

Yep, look for my name in Stonecrop magazine, forthcoming in the Bookends Review next year.

And of course, Washington Square Review.

Awesome.

Well, thanks a lot for coming in and talking to us today.

Thank you very much for having me.

Thanks for stopping.

Thanks for stopping by the audio town square of the Washington Square Review.

Until next time, this has been the Washington Square on air from Lansing Community College.

To find out more about our writers, community and literary journal, visit lcc.

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