By Rebecca Schwab

Justin Anderson, a second-year fiction MFA student here at WVU, claims to have gotten “lucky” when he was recently published in three separate literary journals. Well, once is lucky, three times is talented. Anderson, who lives with his wife Mary and young son Henry in Morgantown, writes concise fiction filled with subtle but effective emotion and dialogue-based plot shifts. Trained as a journalist with a history of newspaper reporting, he feels that writing in this way steers his readers toward understanding his characters without having to rely on interiority or first-person narration. Anderson finds himself most often writing from a distance in third person, and he also involves depictions of nature to reflect his characters’ situations and feelings.

Having graduated from WVU with a BA in English in 2000, Anderson worked as a newspaper reporter and went on to start the Journalism program at Point Park University in Pittsburgh. That didn’t last long, but he kept working as a reporter for the Wheeling News-Register, sharpening his talent for concise, to-the-point writing. In fact, newspaper reporting is still a plan B for him, though I don’t think he will fall short of his goal to be a professor of Creative Writing at a university and to be the published author of a collection of short stories. Oh, and he’ll do all of this while owning and living on a small farm. But, he also says, there’s always factory work if plans A and B don’t work out.

Influenced and inspired by “writers who use extremely simple language and straightforward structures to tell quiet stories,” Anderson published his first story, “White Balloon Seen Over East Hills” in “the now defunct, but wonderfully simple journal Bathtub Gin” in Issue 20 (Spring/Summer 2007). That was followed by “Brushfire” in Volume 4, Issue 1 of Whitefish Review (June 2010) and “Intruders” in the June 2010 online issue of Connotaion Press and “This Pivot” in the June 2010 Word Riot, also online. These last two stories can be found at http://connotationpress.com/fiction/477-justin-d-anderson-fiction and http://www.wordriot.org/archives/1401.

Lately, Anderson has been trying to find more time for writing, working on disciplining himself to make it part of his routine, and not just writing when the mood strikes him. He explains: “I figure if I’m really going to make a go at this writing stuff, I need to buckle down and work on stories in some way whenever I can; whether I feel like writing or not. That’s what I’ve been trying to do; make it a priority, because it is.” And if writing continues to be a priority for him, literary journals and their readers will see a lot more from Justin Anderson—quiet characters whose gestures speak volumes, plots that unfold through conversation, and stories with moods set by the weather. In other words, good fiction that we’ll want to read and that will make us scan the back covers of journals in search of Anderson’s name.