Andrew Keating is the publisher and managing editor for Cobalt Press and Cobalt Review. Thumbnail Press published his first collection of fiction, Participants, in 2012. He holds an MFA from the University of Baltimore and an MBA from Johnson & Wales University. Keating lives and teaches creative writing and literature in Baltimore, MD.

Your two stories, ‘The Club,’ and ‘Three Berry Pie,’ are a nice juxtaposition of the female adolescent narrator and the male adult as narrator. In ‘The Club,’ the poor girl is trying to find her place in a family of athletic males: ‘Baseball was the family way.’
Instead of being excluded she is brought into the fold by her second-oldest brother with patience and a sweet scene.

In ‘Three Berry Pie,’ we have a brutally awkward moment. One that could have turned many ways, but ends up smacking the narrator in the face, literally and figuratively.

What were your inspirations for these stories? Do you have any siblings?

My brother, Ben, is a year younger. My mother and I are slowly force-feeding a love of baseball to him. He’s participating in my fantasy league for the second year in a row, and started doing MLB PrePlay (an online game in which you predict each play in real-time and accumulate points for each correct guess) with us recently, though I don’t think he likes having to pay that much attention to the games. It’s hard to hold it against him. After all, he is currently managing the top team in our league.

In a family relationship, there is always a need to fit in. As a kid, baseball was a way of life for me. My friend Jeff and I, much like the two boys in “Davis Field” would find a way to play almost every day. That kind of passion is what I wanted to explore, and “Davis Field” was my first experience writing about it. “The Club” was a different experience. I wanted to approach that same passion, but from the perspective of someone who understood it, but maybe didn’t feel it. I also realized that each main character in Participants is an adult male. “The Club” was my way of taking a shot at writing from the POV of a completely different type of character.

“Three Berry Pie” does not have a very fluffy back story. I needed to write a story that was under 500 words, so I did. The funny thing is that, of all of my stories, this is the one that people were most concerned about at the outset. They wanted Gordon to be hit with the pie. Everything takes place in the 10-20 seconds after the pie was smashed on his face. There is no action, just a what now? moment swirling in the narrator’s mind upon realizing what he has done. Though I would say that “Davis Field” is my favorite, “Three Berry Pie” has crept up the list. It is definitely the most fun to read aloud.

Tell us about your collection, Participants, that was published last year. I really loved it! And was so great to hear you read one of the stories at AWP this year.

Thank you. I was thrilled to be at AWP in Boston. The whole event was a great excuse to go home and brag about how I used to spend weekends over there or how the first bar I hung out at was adjacent to what used to be a movie theatre where I saw The Green Mile. AWP Heat, where I read “Three Berry Pie” was an odd and exhilarating experience. Of course, I forgot to bring a sweater (even though it was snowing), so I had to run to the mall a few blocks away and purchase one to fit the “sexual in a sweater” introduction that Robert gave.

I am really glad that you’re running “Three Berry Pie” in this issue, along with the video of me reading it. When I read it at AWP Heat, I was trying to find a way to make one of my stories fit the theme, so I decided to prompt the audience to say/shout “hot” every time I lifted my hand (at the end of every sentence). Holy crap, it was fun! At one point, I stopped saying it with them and just lifted my hand rapidly and repeatedly as everyone shouted “Hot! Hot! Hot! Hot!” while I read. I’m guessing that most people left with uncertainty over what the story was actually about.

Anyway, the collection as a whole focuses on the way that we define ourselves. This usually starts with work. A few people have categorized this as “workplace fiction” – a term that I had not heard before, but have quickly adopted. Mel Leopold is a great example of someone who defines himself by his work, and I’ve written about 200 pages worth of stories about the guy. In one way or another, Mel is having to redefine some part of himself, and that usually begins with something that happens at work. There are only three Mel stories in the collection, but the other stories each approach this idea of self-definition in one way or another.

Are you working on any projects at this time?

Cobalt takes up most of my creative time. We have recently started reading manuscripts for book publishing, a new venture. The first book we accepted came from Dave Housley, Ben Tanzer, Tom Williams and BL Pawelek, tentatively titled Where You Should Be. It’s a blast, and it’ll be coming out shortly before Father’s Day 2014. As for my own writing, I’ve been focusing on baseball for subject matter. “The Club” was the first story I had written in a few months, and was followed by three more baseball-themed stories in the weeks that followed. I feel silly for waiting until I was 27 to start writing about one of my greatest passions, but now that I’m doing it, writing has never felt better. So you can expect me to be shopping a manuscript of all baseball-themed fiction in the next year or so. I am also hosting a baseball writing contest at Cobalt: the first annual Jim Palmer Prize, which will result in an all-baseball issue during this year’s All Star Weekend.

How is it working as a publisher, managing editor and a teacher, on top of writing? Do you feel like these other jobs enhance your writing or keep you from it?

Absolutely. Every time I give a writing assignment for my creative writing classes, I do it as well. Our workshops are always anonymous, and my story or poem will be mixed in with the rest of them. Three things come out of this: 1) the students feel that I’m in it with them; 2) they get a chance to dig into me, which always feels good; and 3) I am forced to write new stuff every couple of weeks.

In another interview, I spoke to great length about how I consider myself a publisher first, educator second, and writer third. What I have realized this semester is that the three do not need to be mutually exclusive. In fact, they shouldn’t be. Maybe I’m late to this party.

These jobs inform each other endlessly. I am a better writer because I have the opportunity to watch, daily, a group of young writers struggle through the things that I once struggled with. I am a better teacher because I am surrounded by exceptional writing every time I am working on a new Cobalt publication.

I think this answer would be a lot more interesting if I were a chemist, or if I operated a very large drill. All of the work I do centers on the same key ingredient, so it is hard to truly separate them from one another.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in New England. My parents were split up: my father in Boston and my mother in Providence. I was lucky to be a part of two great cities, each pumped with a vibrant arts scene. But I do root for the Dolphins.

How did the MBA fit into your life choices?

When I finished college – having studied English and theater – I started taking jobs in advertising. It was mostly copywriting or editing pharmaceutical advertising material pre-FDA approval. There were a lot of opportunities like this in New York/New Jersey, and it gave me the resume credentials to land a gig working with real estate investment trust reports in the penthouse of the Boston World Trade Center. The problem: I could produce high-quality writing, but I often had no idea what I was saying. So I went over to admissions at Johnson & Wales, where they told me that I was accepted (“but I just want to take a couple classes…”) for the MBA program. I took accounting and economics, just to find some footing, and fell in love, so to speak. My projects were all about sports business and e-publishing. So I stayed in the program.

My mother is quite possibly the first person to ever ask her child: “An MBA? What the heck are you going to do with that?” She had a point, of course. I wanted to study creative writing and publishing, and an MBA would be 2-3 years dedicated to something entirely different.

It made sense, eventually. Now, my greatest strength in the classroom is my ability to adapt my business knowledge into the fundamental information that I am transmitting to students. It is much easier for me now to ask my students to challenge me with how they can use the skills I am teaching in their real lives. The only time this didn’t work for me is when I may have accidentally outed my student as a drug dealer in one of these practical application challenges.

Any ‘pie in the face’ experience that you’d like to share?

Well, there is a certain video that will be going up alongside the interview. That was a blast to film. I kind of wish we had more pies so that Timmy and I could have filmed multiple takes. Timmy said, at the end, that he “didn’t know it would be so traumatic.” That stayed in the video. I couldn’t cut it.

When I was younger, my friend Jeff and I would make a lot of videos. I say younger, but if we weren’t living on opposite sides of the country, we’d probably still have a series of webcam-produced videos called “Smart People Talk with Dumb People in the Background.” Though I don’t think we ever hit each other with pies, we did some very strange things.

In college, I was very dedicated to the production of Nimbus, Wagner’s literary arts journal. I pushed hard for extra funding, better printing and distribution, etc. One year, I wanted to put out a full-color cover, which was something that we never had the budget for. Some local businesses got involved with advertising, and that was nice. But the highlight of the fundraiser was getting 500 eggs donated by dining services so that people could pay $1 to smash an egg over my head in front of the student union. I stood on a large blue tarp, and if you loved me, you thought it was funny and supported the cause. If you hated me, you had an excuse to smack me with an egg (a few were even thrown at me) and supported the cause in the process. We made over $300 and omelets.

That’s hilarious! What are you reading now and whom would you say were your biggest influences as a writer?

I’m reading a bunch of stuff by Victor LaValle (currently Big Machine); D.T. Max’s biography of David Foster Wallace, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story; and Timmy Reed’s Tell God I Don’t Exist.

I started with writing plays, actually, which stemmed from my love of improv comedy. This pushed me toward people like Ionesco and Beckett, and pretty much anyone that could be called an absurdist. More than anything, I was really interested in the strange. Then I found poetry, particularly Robert Frost, which pushed me in a completely different direction all the way through my college years. I never studied creative writing until after I had graduated from Wagner, though I had maintained my love for theater and literature there. My senior year, I took an independent study course which centered around Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” but by then it was pretty clear that poetry was not bringing out my love for storytelling in its greatest capacity. That year, I read Palahniuk’s Choke and thought “Hey, this feels right.” That was when I sat down and wrote “The Cost-Effectiveness of a Relationship,” which appeared in the North Central Review a few months later.

Now, I’d point someone like DFW as an influence, or Ben Marcus, or Vonnegut. I always loved Heller. Most of my writing has an undertone of humor, but for reasons that are very sad. In “Mel Leopold the Brave,” a story from my recent collection, there is a moment in which Mel is soaking his shirt under a faucet in the men’s room of his office, and trying to scrub out a mustard stain with a paper towel. The pain he feels cannot be overlooked, but the scene is definitely comedic in nature. This is a kind of we’re going to laugh about this later moment, and I am always drawn to authors who can accomplish the very difficult task of making us laugh in the face of pain.

I’m waiting for Timmy Reed’s book to appear in my mailbox and read the biography of DFW. Love him and loved it. Give us a quote that speaks to you as a human on this strange planet.

“He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt.” – Joseph Heller, Catch-22

I sometimes write this when somebody asks me to sign a copy of my book. Ron Tanner had commented on my stories as being (I paraphrase) about characters that ultimately just want to live. Of course, Yossarian, in Heller’s novel is talking about living in a literal sense. He’s in a war and he doesn’t want to die, and they won’t let him go home. People are often surprised by the wide range of things I’ve done in my life (not stuff like skydiving or fist-fighting Sherpas on Everest, but a variety of oddly-connected everyday experiences like mascotting for a professional baseball team or befriending Broadway producers for the sake of free tickets). The truth: I just want to do everything that I want to do, every day, until I die.

Great quote! Thank you so much, Andrew, for being the featured writer for our mid-May issue.

You rock it!

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