A4 contributor Steev Gillies ruminates on life at the end of the world. Conclusion: humor is essential and so is being the fiercest cannibal on the ruined streets of Pittsburgh.

Steev was born in Brazil but mostly grew up in the town in Alabama that has Space Camp. Artifice 4 contains his first published fiction, although his writing has appeared in The AV Club and the American Journal of Orthopedics. Also, The Believer once published an essay calling his great-great-great grandfather "quite possibly the greatest failure that ever lived." So there's that.   

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1. Preferred type of apocalypse (plague, nuclear holocaust, ice age, etc.):  

I grew up figuring it would be nuclear. I guess I’d want to be proven right?

2. Preferred post-apocalyptic city: 

Well, I live in Pittsburgh and tend to agree with the majority of Hollywood location scouts.

3. Preferred anti-zombie weapon: 

Brains.

4. Top five necessities to bring to the fallout shelter: 

Flashlight, blanket, box of comic books, Ramen noodles, Snoopy doll.

5. Describe said fallout shelter: 

They say in the event of nuclear war, the human race will regress to its earlier forms. My fallout shelter would be a place I could get a head start.

6. Who would be in your post-apocalyptic gang? 

Someone for comic relief, a scheming rival to keep me on my toes, and a pet dog, but mostly sniveling yes men. 

7. You’re the new charismatic leader of a cult of your choosing. What do you wear to your first meeting? Barcelona jersey. 

8. Spirit guide?

 Xavi Hernandez

9. If you had to eat another author (in Artifice 4 or otherwise) who would it be and why? 

I would take any opportunity to eat any author for the simple reason that this is a competitive business. 

10.  Sigmund Freud had a morbid fear of ferns. Elaborate. 

This is news to me. My Sigmund Freud action figure fears nothing.

Please welcome Dan Brady to the final wrap-up weeks of the Artifice Author Dossiers. He is the poetry editor of Barrelhouse.  His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Big Lucks, BlazeVox, Circumference, Dark Sky Magazine, Gargoyle, IsReads, Shampoo, and ARTIFICE 4.

We agree that most things during the apocalypse should be "kind of swanky and decrepit at the same time"...

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1. Preferred type of apocalypse: 

Earth swallowed by our Sun as it balloons into its Red Giant stage. At least we’d know it was coming.

2. Preferred post-apocalyptic city: 

I’d probably stay in DC. There are will be plenty of hidden bunkers, fortified buildings, and surplus military equipment to keep me going for a while.

3. Preferred anti-zombie weapon: 

Maybe a taser? Do zombies have a central nervous system?

4. Top five necessities to bring to the fallout shelter: 

Food, water, family, books on post-apocalyptic survival, board games.

5. Describe said fallout shelter: 

Deep underground, all concrete, but well-lit. Furniture that looks unused and old – kind of swanky and decrepit at the same time.

6. Who would be in your post-apocalyptic gang?

A who’s who of 80s TV drama stars: MacGyver, Mr. T, Poirot, Cliff Huxtable. There would be no problem we couldn’t tackle.

7. You’re the new charismatic leader of a cult of your choosing. What do you wear to your first meeting? 

Jeans. My people are a casual people.

8. Spirit guide?

No, thanks.

9. If you had to eat another author (in Artifice 4 or otherwise) who would it be and why? 

Probably a cookbook author. If they’ve stuffed themselves with only the best flavors for the past 20 years, maybe some of that will carry over. It’s a Kobe beef approach.

10. A cockroach can live several weeks with its head cut off. What does this mean to you?

It says something about the difference between having life and being alive and the tragic gap that can exist between the two.

A veritable lovefest dedicated to our talented contributors.

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Richard Chiem's short is featured on Small Doggies. Also, more recently, find his words on Metazen. He is the editor of this literary journal which celebrated its first print issue last August. 

Turn the virtual pages of Birding by Kat Dixon for FREE here, but also please consider buying the excellent chapbook-- if you haven't yet. Look for her new book of poems Temporary Yes on February 21st. 

Listen to this recording of "The Earth is What Happens", presented by Jen Besemer and Tim Armentrout at the 6th annual Chicago calling event, Long Now and Then, at Myopic Books. Jen also has a new video poem to share.

Caroline Crew has three poems up on >kill author 15 and two on the Killer Vinyl 4.

Confessions [of a Variety] by Trisha Low is available as an echapbook on Gauss PDF. Download it!

Find two poems by Rebecca Elliot on Diagram. Be them new or old, they're still exceptional. 

Remember to get your copy of How the Days of Love and Diptheria (Nephew/Mudluscious Press) by Robert Koss, it will hold you over until The Alligators of Abraham is released in 2012. 

Mark your calendars: Colin Palombi's band Velvetron has a gig at Chicago's Nightingale Theater on Friday, Novemeber 4th.

Glen Shaheen's book Predatory has gotten some stellar reviews. Check it out. And check out that beautiful cover art... 

(Don't worry all you other talented contribs, more features to come!)

As always, we are excited to share with you the thoughts and feelings of our wise contributors-- especially on the gruesome topic of mass human extinction!

This week we are featuring Kat Dixon, who can be found in Artifice 4. She is also the author of the poem-book TEMPORARY YES (Artistically Declined Press 2012) and several chapbooks. She can be found blinking here.

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1. Preferred type of apocalypse (plague, nuclear holocaust, ice age, etc.): 

I hold no stock in apocalypse. I live in a city with one of the highest densities of Jews in the country, so I am legally obligated to whisper during this conversation.

2. Preferred post-apocalyptic city: 

Any in Florida because they have the most funeral homes.

3. Preferred anti-zombie weapon: 

Someone weaker than me.

5. Top five necessities to bring to the fallout shelter: 

Gregory Sherl x 5

6. Describe said fallout shelter: 

Bed. Preferably not an air mattress with a leak.

7. Who would be in your post-apocalyptic gang?

The cast of the 90s television show Felicity.

8. You’re the new charismatic leader of a cult of your choosing. What do you wear to your first meeting? 

$600 shoes.

9. Spirit guide?

Giraffe – tall and yellow; concerned with eating

10. If you had to eat another author (in Artifice 4 or otherwise) who would it be and why? 

Millie, George Bush’s dog - - because why did that dog “write” a book? Someone is lying and another someone deserves to be eaten.

11. A cockroach can live several weeks with its head cut off. What does this mean to you?

Find a better way to kill it.

***

The Chicago band Velvetron formed in 2002. As Velvetron, Anthony Mizicko, Colin Palombi (The Homoticons), Tim Berthiaume, and Seth Vanek (Roommate, Thin Hymns, Tom Comerford) got their start playing parties and events at the now defunct underground space known as the Ice Factory. They went on to open for local and touring acts such as Sybris, The French Kicks, Scout Niblett, Office, and the Octopus Project. 

After going on a west coast tour to promote their 2005 album Things to Don't, the band broke up for several years, reuniting in 2008 after the use of their song "Snoozebar" in a prominent Obama campaign video reignited interest in the group. After releasing music through a short-lived podcasting format termed The Velvetron Vlogcast, the band decided to release their music the old-fashioned way - as a full-length album. 

4 combines Velvetron's instrumental post-rock with even more concerted efforts at pop song-craft. The single "Misty Mountain Hop" finds the band sharing vocal duties for the first time, delivering perhaps their most concise and catchy tune to date. 

Instead of performing their music for the public in the traditional album release mode, the band has decided to celebrate the release of the album by hosting a full-scale, single-elimination, refereed Rock/Paper/Scissors tournament where 32 entrants will be able to compete for a grand prize. The occasion will also function as the premier of a short video entitled, Velvetron: Now, Where are They? that documents the band's rise and fall through the course of the last decade. Other music videos and shorts that band has produced over their career will be screened as well.

For more information about the album or event, please contact seth.vanek@gmail.com.

It's a good day for a dossier. This week, Joseph Scapellato explores warmth as weapon, lakes as life source, and bread as backbone. 

Joseph was born in the suburbs of Chicago and earned his MFA in Fiction at New Mexico State University. Currently he teaches English/Creative Writing at Susquehanna University and Bucknell University. His work appears in Kenyon Review Online, Post Road, Gulf Coast, Unsaid, The Collagist, and others-- like Artifice 4!

1. Preferred type of apocalypse (plague, nuclear holocaust, ice age, etc.): 

Displeased creator-god.  Specifically when the source of the deity’s displeasure is not mankind’s disobedience, impiety, or cruelty, but merely mankind’s inability to function properly. People made of mud who melt.  People made of matches who burn.  People made of mouths who eat each other up.

2. Preferred post-apocalyptic city: 

Chicago, the big-shouldered hog-butchering windy mecca of the Midwest.  There are many reasons to live in Chicago (here are the personal ones: I was born in the suburbs, have lived in Chicago, have loved Chicago, still love Chicago, want to be in Chicago right now, and look forward to Michael Czyzniejewski’s Chicago Stories), but in an apocalypse, when many will go thirsty, those reasons become one reason: the Great Lakes.  

3. Preferred anti-zombie weapon: 

Campfire.  Stories, woodsmoke, and whiskey.

4. Top five necessities to bring to the fallout shelter: 

garden

dried sausages from every culture in the world that produces dried sausages

Settlers of Catan

books

(this is so corny but I’m so serious) friendship 

5. Describe said fallout shelter: 

As much like the hollowed-out skull of an ancient giant as possible.  With couches.

6. Who would be in your post-apocalyptic gang?

My Chicago chombattas (especially Slicer Miller and Mr. D), Dustyn Martincich, JJ Turowski, Misty Bags, Little-Man-With-Hair-All-Over, Antonya Nelson, and Odysseus.

7. You’re the new charismatic leader of a cult of your choosing. What do you wear to your first meeting? 

A moustache for my moustache.

8. Spirit guide?

Bread.  If a day goes by that I don’t eat bread, my soul gets stale.  Then powdery.  How on earth did we discover bread, a substance so strange, ordinary, and essential?  Bread.  Pane.  Chleb.  It’s my favorite food and my favorite smell and maybe even my favorite feeling.  I’m no good at making it but it’s damn good at making me.

9. If you had to eat another author (in Artifice 4 or otherwise) who would it be and why? 

In Artifice 4: Melissa Goodrich.  As if it isn’t enough for her work to be so thoroughly beautiful, every time, her last name also happens to sound like a wholesome candy bar.  

Or Otherwise: Russell Hoban.  When you take a swing at The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, good stuff falls out.  Different good stuff each time.  But always good to eat.

Or Otherwise: Evan Lavender-Smith, whose work has head and heart and is generous with both.  David Foster-Wallace said in an interview that “a lot of the avant-garde has forgotten that part of its job is to seduce the reader into being willing to do the hard work.”  Mr. Lavender-Smith has not forgotten.

10.  Some say a planet called 'Nibiru' will collide with the earth in December 2012. Tell us about Nibiru. 

Nibiru, like most Babylonians, follows Hammurabi’s Code.  This means that if Nibiru grows a beard, Nibiru’s beard is curly.  This means that if Nibirub builds a house and the house collapses and crushes its residents to death, Nibiru will be put to death, death by crushing.  This means that if Nibiru is smart, which Nibiru is, Nibiru is afraid.

Melissa Goodrich enlivens the Artifice blog this week.

She is that handprint in the mirror she swears she didn’t put there, the canoe in the canal, the underbelly of the stone so glad to be turned over.  She does that MFA thing at Arizona. Her fiction appears in PANK, Phoebe, American Short Fiction, and in Artifice 4 (!) alongside friend and old prof, Joe Scapellato.

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1. Preferred type of apocalypse (plague, nuclear holocaust, ice age, etc.): 

Ice age. I like the image of us (whoever the us is) circled around a fire, the front of our bodies thawed, the backs of us freezing, frozen, our hair brittle to snap, our backbones, and how there are no body boundaries; we’d all be rediscovered some thou-million years later pressed and inseparable as bricks.

2. Preferred post-apocalyptic city:

Well not New York. And not London. And certainly not Des Moines.

3. Preferred anti-zombie weapon: 

A hanzo sword.  A gun.  A taser.  Two tasers.  (Let’s face it, I’ve seen Zombieland, I know I’m on the A list to die.)

4. Top five necessities to bring to the fallout shelter: 

A piano.  A water bottle.  Scissors.  Some cereal.  George Saunders.

5. Describe said fallout shelter: 

Dark and tight as a fist.  It’s a miracle we squeeze in the piano, a miracle we could carry it so far, as pianos always are.  We make cave-drawings with our fingers and some soot.  We pee in the corner of the room, where it’s unbearably rank.  It’s pretty cold.  We’re pretty hungry.  Thank God there’s at least two of us, to tell stories, and to sing Regina Spektor, and to make shit up.

6. Who would be in your post-apocalyptic gang? 

Ira Glass.  Daniel Day Lewis, although he’s scary.  I think he’d scare the zombies off.  Natalie Portman, to make me lithe and brave and beautiful.  My younger sister, so I’m not the child.  (Why is it, when we get to pick a gang, we pick people impossible to know to gang up with us?)

7. You’re the new charismatic leader of a cult of your choosing. What do you wear to your first meeting?  It’s the post-apocalypse, and I have wardrobe options.  For the first time ever.  I pick your hat up off your head and wear it.  I knot a blouse above my navel so my stomach shows.  A long skirt, so I move seemingly without feet, I move like fog.

8. Spirit guide? 

The wolf.  She is sleeksmart, gunning through her woods.  She holds the moon up with her howl.  She wades all the way into the river to drink.

9. If you had to eat another author (in Artifice 4 or otherwise) who would it be and why? 

Joseph Scapellato, of course.  He has this post-apocalyptic mustache, no zombie could break through, and by eating it, you ingest those special properties.  (Also, he probably tastes Southwest and warm and filling.  A burrito with whimsy, that sauce.)

10.  Sigmund Freud had a morbid fear of ferns. Elaborate. 

They are so utterly meticulous.  They are so utterly alive.

Richard Chiem joins us for a dreary day dossier about solitude, forgotten things, headlessness, and Paris in the rain (always).

Richard is the author of two e-books WHAT IF, WENDY and OH NO EVERYTHING IS WET NOW (with Ana C.) He is a Pushcart Prize nominee. His work has appeared in Monkeybicycle, elimae, and Everyday Genius. His first collection of short stories YOU PRIVATE PERSON is forthcoming from Scrambler Books (2012). Find his piece no school five // for stephen tully dierks in Artifice 4. 

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1. Preferred type of apocalypse (plague, nuclear holocaust, ice age, etc.):

Maybe an apocalypse where everyone is poor. Everyone has been poor for quite some time, ten or twenty years or more, to a point where they have forgotten the use for cars. There are people who bike through the cities and people who walk alone. There are still a few buses up and running during the apocalypse, organized by a group of lonely men who just love to drive buses. But they would be more like big taxis and filthy inside. 

2. Preferred post-apocalyptic city:

I am new to Seattle and already I have can imagine myself surviving here. It gets pretty cold and going from place to place is almost inherently passionate here, enduring the freezing cold from point A to B. Downtown Seattle is also particularly gorgeous and gray, with high-reaching and creative architecture (The Columbia Building) near large bodies of water (the Puget Sound). I want to stand on 5th Ave. and look up at the Columbia Building and its rows of black and broken windows, holding hands with the one I love.

In the apocalypse, taking time to look at the architecture of buildings will be a bigger thing. Clouds are important, too.

3. Preferred anti-zombie weapon:

 I don’t like to talk about weapons. I want to talk about quick thinking. Your environment is at your service, if you’re thinking quickly on your feet. Getting over being scared is how you should try to have fun. You must first learn how to love someone, and then you learn how to do things, like not die. Many scenarios will boil down to quick thinking and how you emotionally react to things coming at you.

Getting home is my ‘anti-zombie’ way of thinking.

4. Top five necessities to bring to the fallout shelter:

1 miscellaneous 

2 miscellaneous 

3 miscellaneous 

4 miscellaneous 

5 miscellaneous 

5. Describe said fallout shelter:

We would have to be able to take our homes with us. After a while, all the fallout shelters will vary less from neighborhood to neighborhood and begin to look the same. In an ideal world, I want to be able to say I can make my home come alive with a few portraits and wall decorations, or a small plant I take with me everywhere I go. But in an ideal world, the scenery and way of life will have changed: everyone is happy. In an ideal world, people somehow communicate successfully, food is served from the air, and no one is looking to leave the room, or imagine being elsewhere. I don’t think everyone is happy here, but I want to say going from fallout shelter to fallout shelter with the one I love is what makes me understand most things from day to day.

She knows to bring knives places.

6. Who would be in your post-apocalyptic gang?

Frances. With guest appearances.

7. You’re the new charismatic leader of a cult of your choosing. What do you wear to your first meeting?

I always choose what I wear before I leave the house. I can’t imagine that ever changing.

8. Spirit guide?

Your dearest friend should always be your spirit guide. 

9. If you had to eat another author (in Artifice 4 or otherwise) who would it be and why?

Under no circumstance will I eat anyone. 

10. A cockroach can live several weeks with its head cut off. What does this mean to you?

There were months where I have done the same things, for months at a time. Meals were interchangeable, my outfits moved on and off me, and there were days I had no opinion, walking home following palm trees. I remember looking around during different parts of the day: leaving the apartment complex, cruising around The Whole Foods near work, reading at a bar after work, having a smoke. Everyone was having a different conversation than I was; all the strangers, everyone was moving quickly in and out of the rooms we were in together, anxious to be somewhere in the future. I was watching and imagining I was away from here: I was gone, walking around with Frances, somewhere in Paris, going somewhere to be with friends. I don’t know why it was always Paris in the rain. 

There were months I felt as though I had no head, or I did the same things for long stretches of time, and it became surreal. Days were less responsive, meaning people often refused eye contact or looked spaced out. I pretended I was indestructible to pass the time, serving customer after customer, and slept alone in bed when I was exhausted. I was watching wall clocks and digital timers. Sometimes, I would change positions in bed to have fun. My foot would be where my head was, and my head where my foot was. I slept every way I could in my twin bed, creating solitude. 

I would walk in the daylight without wincing my eyes, thinking about Frances. It was my favorite activity, repeating the cycles, in uniform, until I would be closer to her. When we reunited, it felt so good it was as though I survived some sort of natural disaster, becoming a person. I remembered watching zombie movies as a way to make fun of myself, in the situation, in how alone and quiet everything was, away from her.