Objects – Pigeons, Vowels, and Teeth (Part III)

This is the final installment of the three-part Authors Talk by Mackenzie Polonyi.

Transcript:

Welcome to the third and last part of my series. I will talk now, and finally, about fogak, or teeth. Post Volcanic Folk Tales

Teeth very quickly became a significant motif in my book. I was drawn intuitively to the strata of meaning teeth encapsulate: human beings have two sets of teeth, adult teeth and baby teeth (also called milk teeth or deciduous teeth), which speaks, for me, toward a profound harmonic twoness or doubleness I repetitively play with in my poetry (reality and [rather than versus] myth, devotion and [rather than versus] disobedience, for example) and also toward subjects like growing and time; the emergence of the adult set is called eruption, like active volcanic discharge, which is a prominent psychoemotional image in my book; and lastly, teeth are distinctive, unique to each skull, each person, just like fingerprints––forensic odontology relies on teeth for identification of human remains, even after decades, centuries, millennia.

Here are some instances in Post-Volcanic Folk Tales in which I write about teeth:

‘A deciduous

tooth for a twoway ticket!’

‘I heat-sought the molars of my foremothers’ graves without names.’

‘Subcarpathian tooth after Transylvanian tooth after Ural tooth,

my own mouth palate-staticked with ice particles, with fractoemissions.’

‘(O her lard-stained apron rippling

music of scaled tooth after scaled tooth;

a Balatonian school of tuning forks!)’

‘I listen I grip my Subcarpathian millstone tooth (my ticket!)’

‘And when our train reached Eger from Keleti Pályaudvar, I stuck my Subcarpathian phantom molar back into my jaw like a tulip bulb.’

I also have a poem entitled ‘Self-portrait with Fangs’ and a poem entitled ‘Ameloglyphics.’ Teeth are knots in the network of my relationships with both dead and living women-relatives from Transylvania and Subcarpathia, women whose long-ago origin is placed within the Ural mountain range. The transmutation of nameless graves into teeth provides unrecognized dead women-relatives with recognition. A tooth provides me the right to enter, exit, move, peregrinate, participate. A tooth is an acoustic resonator, producing pitch, amplifying sound waves, gauging vibrational sensations among generations of women, across death’s distances. (Tuning forks are also, interestingly, present in sound therapy.)

During my drafting of Post-Volcanic Folk Tales, I researched tooth print subpatterns and in ‘Ameloglyphics,’ brushed away dirt from the alphabetical letters of each subpattern’s name or title, revealing metaphorical petrified prehistoric organisms of reaching underneath:

From WAVY BRANCHED, I uncovered A ACHE,

From STRAIGHT, I uncovered RIGHT,

From LINEAR––EAR,

From TURNING LOOPS––RING OO,

From WAVY UNBRANCHED––A UNACHE,

From OPEN WHORLS––PEN WHO,

From BRANCHING––RING,

From LOOP––OO,

From RADIATING––RING.

The OO is a multidirectional coo, a polyphonic movement of air through a shared syrinx.

What, then, do pigeons, vowels, and teeth propose intratextually (among or across the pieces in Post-Volcanic Folk Tales, how do my objects operate like propulsive forcesand sustain pedals)? With pigeons, I can jump or leap into pools of memory, past dialogues, relationships I mourn and celebrate and nourish beyond death’s distances; I can dig into multiplicitous meanings of home without limit, skyward, renouncing gravity. With portal-vowels, I can world-build in lyric-narrative poetry, bridging individual pieces together, honoring my own understanding of and experience with a mythic-factual homeland, while simultaneously condemning Hungary’s dangerous, scary, and violent political realities (like those of the U.S.), and practicing my mother’s mother-tongue; fluency regrettably kept from me for my mother’s former fear of difference and ridicule and laughter. A linguistic reclamation. With teeth, I can move in, around, about, out of a mythic-factual homeland, and move in, around, about, out of imagination. Rather than claiming I can in my book, my objects let me do.

If you are interested, I put together the following writing and revision activity centering objects.

An object activity for writers:

You can complete this activity with a single poem, a group of poems, or even a manuscript. Whether nascentand still-in-progress or already relatively complete, fleshed out, and in a more final state of revision-refection, this activity will help you form fuller relationships with your pieces. First, identify your poem’s orienting details (or scene-making-adjacent details, place and time, where[s] and when[s] and what[s] and their various descriptions)and granular details (hyper-specific, hyper-vivid: for example, lost belongings, furniture, instruments, utensils, jewelry, trinkets, fabric, insects, animals, anatomical particulars, botanical particulars, geological particulars, inheritances or archival particulars, etc.). Highlight them so that they stick out for you.

I combed through an already finalized poem from my book and highlighted the following orienting details: metallic, fleshy, rainclouds, candlelit, shadow-casting, rainy, medicinal brine, mineral water, and the following granular details: portrait, mouth, auroral doorways, lachrymatory lily-mirror, involuted uterus, orbweaver’s spinnerets, navel, genealogical bottle, rainy shoe prints, masks, masks, arachnidian hands, oviparous throats, live coals, ear canals, nutrient-rich narrative.

Now I ask myself: what do these words chart? Across my poem, what space or state is being spell-casted into existence? Many of the orienting details I have recorded gesture towards fluidity. Perhaps, in refection, I better understand that my poem is, at its core, about transgenerational movement, permeability, trickling, omnidirectionality, reverberations, the medicinal qualities of storytelling.

What do granular details suggest, indicate, demonstrate about relationships, psychoemotional gravitational bodies, tensions, stakes, etc. This poem is called ‘Doorways’ and it is the first poem of my book. A prelude, an overture. Many of my granular details are anatomic, especially in relation to voice, vocality, sound, polyphony, digestion, indigestion, giving or providing and receiving or internalizing. An interior-exterior corridor or passageway: mouth, throat, navel (umbilical cord), uterus. Transmission and inheritance of narrative. Furthermore, spider spinneret sand fingers that resemble spiders suggest, for me, multitudes, polymorphism, sewing or spinning. The oviparous throat signals voice box, incubation, hatching, perhaps of utterances, truths, wounds, secrets. Live coals or cinders denote survival, persistence, endurance. And masks occur twice, why?


These are some of my notes:

The portrait, genealogical bottle, and live coals become calcified or set chronic objects throughout my book. A portrait, in itself, is a two-way mirror, a medium or vessel for psychometry, telepathy, invocation. My second poem in Post-Volcanic Folk Tales is called ‘Megidézni Ilona Dédnagynéni Szellemét’, meaning To Summon The Spirit of Great Aunt Ilona, which I do by way of an old portrait. The genealogical bottle is either of Egri Bikavér meaning Eger Bull’s Blood, a famous red wine from Eger, Heves County, Hungary (near Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén, the county wherein my grandmother was born and raised; Gönc District), and Barackpálinka, apricot brandy, made in Gönc, a district of apricots. Ancestral alcohol often used medicinally represents absorption, being ‘under the influence’ of imagination, and even folk topical medicine for tooth pain and numbing. The word bottle can also be reminiscent of milk for an infant.

Ask yourself the following questions:

  1. What do such granular details or objects propose about (or how do they inform) what you itch, wish, hunger and burn for in your poem, what you doubt, dread, are apprehensive about, what risks exist?
  2. What do such granular details or objects propose about (or how do they inform) your gut sensations, hunches, instincts, intuitions. In your poem, what goosebumps arise, what butterflies, stomach pits, why?
  3. What have you resolved to do in the ecosystem, realm, scope of your poem? What must you reconcile? How are your objects involved or implicated? Regarding your decisions, actions, resolutions (in the world of your poem) what reversals, transitions, shifts, revisions, innovations, developments, modulations, repercussions, aftermaths occur because of them?
  4. In your poem, what have you interrupted, what have you unlocked, unspooled, unearthed, what have you precipitated, set in motion? What is the seismographic activity in your body, in your relationships, in your understandings and beliefs and perceptions? How are your objects involved or implicated? How are your objects their very own language?
  5. What are your movements now (within your poem, beyond your poem, into your next poem)? And where will the trajectory of your footprints lead, into what landscapes of thought and feeling? Are you rooting, ascending, alighting, leaping, resting, burrowing, hibernating, embracing, reaching, birthing, etc.? How do your objects teach your reader about your movements?

I hope you will have meaningful revelations while experimenting with this exercise.

Five questions inspired by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s teachings on desire, danger, discovery, decision, and diference in narrative craft.

Objects – Pigeons, Vowels, and Teeth (Part II)

This is the second installment in a three-part series Authors Talk by Mackenzie Polonyi.

Transcript:

Welcome to the second part of my series. I will talk now about magánhangzók, or vowels.

In Post-Volcanic Folk Tales, I sculpt portals from vowels, particularly A, which occurs thrice in my
grandmother’s first name, and O, which is a poetic Apostrophe; a figure or integer of address.

In her Literary Hub interview with Michael Prior, entitled ‘I Trust Nothing But Music,’ Valzhyna Mort writes of apostrophe: ‘There is an intense connection between the experience of dislocation and apostrophe. It’s an address at a safe distance. Unlike other forms of address, apostrophe talks to somebody or something but doesn’t really want to receive an answer, at least not an answer made of words.’

Michael Prior writes: ‘Apostrophe is closely related to prayer – and can be form of consolation – active, a way to speak to and of people and places lost.’

In Hungarian language, O has four variations (including the original), differing by diacritical markings: O, Ó, Ö, Ő.

For me, my mother-language’s four O’s are cardinal directions or the absence of. They are generations of feathering throats. All together, they form a compass made from a string quartet of circular vowels (soundholes of resonance chambers) but the compass is broken. A weather vane, but the weather vane is broken. An answer made of words, there is no such thing.

I write, for example, throughout Post-Volcanic Folk Tales:

‘O umbilical chord’

‘O stone ruins cob-webbing my sternum,

O sacral orchards erupting pedunculate oak,

O fossa echoic with ubiquitous dog-song’

‘O sunflower’

‘O sheaves of wheat O wetland reeds’

‘O glucose of oak’

‘O cipher O stuck note’

‘O blood-whisperings’

‘O her’

I reach out for, towards: anatomy, landscape, place, environment, rural village, architectonics, beloveds, sugar of the blood, arterial-venous-capillary plaits of the circulatory system, ecological music. I cast my telluric prayers. I endeavor to console. But to console what or whom? My grandmother? Her many selves, shadows, hackled-angels, wounds? To console land we are hurting

‘a pikeperch skeleton haunting a poisoned river,

punishing gold miners with temporary gills,

swished its hour hand tail,’

land I love? To console my mother? Myself? Eldest or only daughters of diaspora, tasked with archiving, preservation of tongue, scriptotherapy, caretaking, cycle-breaking? The libraries of wolf-birds we are? I reach out for the only language left after dementia took unyielding insurmountable hold of my house: music.

O, an object, is a mirror, a window, a keyhole. An eye, a mouth, a navel, a grape, a gate, a star, a moon, a sun, a whole note, a birth canal. O is entrance, exit, crater or vent of volcano. The diacritical markings: antennae, beaks, wings, knitting pins, binary star systems, ash clouds, umbilical cords, cuspid teeth.

A is another portal-vowel. Arrow, roost or nest, fang, bull or ox, sky-ladder, soil-ladder. A allows for my hopping from time to time to time, place to place to place, poem to poem to poem. Using the trinity of A’s in my grandmother’s name, each A being a compartment for pigeon nests or funerary urns, I portal into: A volcaniclastic lake formed in an abandoned millstone quarry (or the absence of it), a sessile oak forest from which botrytized wine casks are made of (or the absence of it), a subcarpathian village orchestrating annual apricot fiestas (or absence of it).

I write recurrently about what I call an ‘inverted negative surface.’ Inverted is inside out, reversed, transposed, retrograde, backwards, turned back. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, negative is: absence, without, an absolute lack of something. In arithmetic, subtracted from or a quantity less than zero, denoting a direction of decrease or reversal; in photography, light and shade reversed from original; in physics (like a magnet), an electric charge carried by electrons, beckoning a positive charge (who or what am I calling upon and who or what is calling upon me?); in astrology, earth or water, passive in nature: soil and river.

Reading ‘inverted negative surface,’ one may initially understand that the surface is hyper-nonexistent, upturned, under, but in arithmetical operations (multiplication), two negatives make a positive, and in English grammatical operations, double negatives reveal an opposite meaning. Then, a surface (according to my own syntactic-semantic ‘equation’) that is both real and not real, material and immaterial, above and below, earth and sky. A and O are portals into amalgamated mythical realities. The grammatical lack of a comma between inverted and negative allows for multiple readings, multiple meanings.

In her Catapult essay, entitled Writing Letters To Mao, Jennifer S. Cheng questions: What does it mean to experience a history of trauma and blood in ephemeralities, in residue?

‘Knowledge in an immigrant household,’ she writes, ‘comes in tides that approach and recede.’ ‘There are always gaps and missing ghosts.’ ‘All the fear and protection and silence and love comes so mixed together, it would be a falsehood to separate them.’ For the child of an immigrant (or one raised like the child of an immigrant), ‘history,’ Jennifer writes, is ‘blurry, leaky, vague,’ a ‘specter.’ Involved are ‘complicated feelings of anger, curiosity, tenderness, intimacy.’ ‘There is so much I did not know,’ Jennifer continues, ‘and even if I asked questions, I never received a straightforward or comprehensive answer.’ ‘At some point, I decided that either my parents didn’t know much of their family narratives––a lineage misplaced among the turbulence––or they didn’t have the language, linguistically or emotionally, to communicate with me about it. As for so many children of immigrants, their lives came to me in little fragments and echoes that I collected in my palm like rainwater.’ I experienced what Jennifer has articulated here deeply, fully, precisely. The cupped palms of A. The bucket of O. Such rainwater-like fragments often require supplementary information. For a refugee with dementia, because of trauma, imperfections and limitations of memory, disease, displacement or dislocation, linguistic barriers, silence, archival holes, storytelling becomes tattered, honeycombed, frayed.

In my experience, for one raised like the child of a refugee, a true narrative, then, is only made truer, fleshier, by certain mythic or imaginative additions. The story of my relationship to my mother’s mother-country cannot be told truly without mythical inclusion, for along with research, how else can I fill the gaps hacked by shame, fear, borders, exile, violence, distance, and time? Home is real, a shape on a map, it has coordinates, it has airports and train stations, it has buses and trams, people live there, my family lives there, I have gone there. But, for me personally, home can also only be touched in my grandmother’s stories of it when I was a child. So, intricately, it is also a far-far-away. How does a daughter of diaspora who loves her language, land, gastronomic traditions, folk embroidery, folk music, thermal spa culture, and wine-growing culture, but is categorically ashamed of, revolted by, and in opposition to her home country’s political reality, its dictatorial, kleptocratic, propagandistic prime minister wielding misogynistic, homophobic, racist, anti-immigration rhetoric reconcile her longing for home while necessarily condemning violent political materialities (painfully similar to those within my birth country) of home itself?

Home is neither a matter of geography, nor graveyards; neither a matter of nation, nor nostalgia; neither a matter of tickets, nor time zones. It is more fabled, more relational, more private, more ineffable. I cannot name it myself, but I do get whiffs, whispers, glimmers of it: dirt vibrations, interoceptive and exteroceptive insight, uterine ambient nose, oven-warm candlelit magic of traditions. A is the only aircraft that can reach it (a dragon), O is the only worm-like phantom train.

Objects – Pigeons, Vowels, and Teeth (Part I)

This month Superstition Review is presenting a three part Authors Talk by Mackenzie Polonyi.

Below is the audio file for her author talk and under that is the transcript.

Transcript:

Thank you for being with me here, for your intentional listening. My name is Mackenzie Polonyi, I am the author of Post-Volcanic Folk Tales, my debut poetry collection, which was a winner of The National Poetry Series 2023 and is under contract for publication with Akashic Books, 2024. In my three part series, I will be talking about objects and their possibilities, particularly notable objects from my forthcoming book: pigeons, vowels, and teeth.

In Laura van den Berg’s craft essay in Craft Literary, entitled Object Lessons: An Exploration, Laura writes first about orienting details (her examples: ‘Is a character inside or outside? Is it sunny or raining?’ They ‘ground readers’ and establish scene) and granular details (According to Laura, they are ‘hyper-specific, hyper-vivid.’ They ‘hold layers of time and meaning … and resonance,’ they ‘introduce questions and dimensions,’ and they ‘startle and destabilize’). The latter has the potential to develop or metamorpihize into an object. Here is Laura’s accumulative definition of an object; inter-knitting her own thoughts, theories, and conceptualizations about the presence, purpose, promise, power, and aboutness of objects along with those of Italo Calvino, Virginia Woolf, Charles Baxter, and Alexander Chee:

An object has the power to shift, deepen, and even reshape moments; it is charged with a special force and becomes like the pole of a magnetic, a knot in the network of invisible relationships; it takes on a luminous halo; it contains worlds, troubled and fractured histories, unanswerable mysteries, forcefields of thought and feeling; it communicates the matter that exists beyond the limits of language; it is a mirror and a window and a refraction all at once, it extends both keys and questions, at once deepening and further unsettling our understanding of characters and their inner worlds; it evokes shaping forces, both known and unknown, visible and invisible.

Now, while Laura applies her accumulative definition of an object directly to the craft of fiction, it is also pertinent to the craft of poetry.

Today, in the first part of my series, I will talk about galambok, or pigeons.

In a poem called ‘The Shoe Maker’s Daughter’ from my forthcoming book, I write about how my grandmother, who suffered for years from dementia, would get vacuumed back into German-occupied and Soviet-occupied Hungary in dreams, reliving fragmented traumatic occurrences. Her dreamscape and my dreamscape coagulate or clot together and I try sending her warnings (of sexual violence and other psychological injuries and thieveries) by way of lily-of-the-valley, pollen, nectar, and pigeon. All are granular details, but only the pigeon materializes recurrently (enigmatic then epiphanic then enigmatic again) in ‘The Shoe Maker’s Daughter’ and throughout Post-Volcanic Folk Tales. I write:

‘My dream ripens like an angel-

trumpet into a prehistoric forest where her ubiquitous

nocturnal pings are lightning splitting deciduous beech.

Where soldiers’ stereoscopic scent-hound snouts

desecrate Southeastern wetlands, Northeastern wheat fields, proboscises

sucking bone-marrow from earth-built homes, ectoparasitic.

Kleptoparasitic––swarming willowing villages.

Rose-knobbed sugar bowls, jam pots, sauce boats, stale bread, spoiled

meat, women’s shucked bodies now belonged

to hives of field-grey then red soldiers.’

I provide context for my reader; showing my reader a woman’s reality in an occupied country, under authority of a hostile military threat. Later, I write:

‘She zeroes in on a distant

iridescent pigeon. Her private focal point

for survival. My failed holographic mail.’

and

‘She vomits

a stiff pigeon foot gripping a pinwheel bouquet of bile-wrinkled letters.’

What is the ‘special force’ of the pigeon, what is the ‘luminous halo’? What troubled and fractured histories, unanswerable mysteries, forcefields of thought and feeling does it contain? What keys and questions does it extend?

A mirror: A grand-daughter must stomach and reconcile the fact that she could not have protected, rescued, or safe-kept her grandmother; furthermore, she is a powerless presence still in her grandmother’s nightmares.

A window: In their present together, in day-scape, in belatedness, what are alternative spells, gestures, or measures of protection, rescue, safekeeping, and reverse-mothering?

A refraction: Perhaps healing is not in having had an impossible, inverted, retrograde alphabet of warning. (I am not prescient omniscient.) Perhaps healing, instead, is in helping a grandmother (from a generation of silence) tend to and find a language for a physical-psychical wound of the past in the future rather than wishing for its very prevention in the frst place. How is a pigeon a multidirectional ‘reaching’?

The vomiting is representative of the impossibility of receiving, internalizing, digesting the heraldic pigeon and all of the portentous correspondences from the future it gripped stiff in its foot. The bile is the immediate indigestion of it. My grandmother, in the poem’s many ‘heres,’ is empty-stomached; unknowing, uninformed. The sodden, warped, unreadable letters, however, are also simultaneously of her own past making. What words was she desperate to cast like stones into the future? How is the act of saying interrupted? Some questions, extended: A carrier pigeon generally summons up suggestions of arrival and departure, delivery, homecoming, but here, delivery and homecoming are non-existent, they are ‘nevers.’ There is a sense of deadendness. What can be said about direction? What can be said about a refugee’s sense of home; her rejection of home’s perceived rigid one-dimensionality? Her orientation, her balance, her splintered compass? Or that of the child of a refugee, or one raised like the child of a refugee? What do longing and returning mean? Along with such complications and complexities involved in weather-vaning home, trauma, additionally, often annihilates articulation. Is trauma-facing dialogue between grand-daughter and grandmother––especially tacking on the interpersonal or intersubjective distances notched by dementia––only possible then in a liminal subconscious dream state, in other words, a poem?

Here area few lines throughout Post-Volcanic Folk Tales in which pigeons manifest again:

‘Whenever I opened my blood-sucking beak,

you regurgitated homesick pigeon

milk like a tonic.’

‘Iridescent pigeons nest like nonsensical sentences in my

unbrushed bat roost hair.’

‘Here: I once measured volumes of your voicefall.

The water in my right ear is a pigeon nest,

the water is cooing what is lost.’

‘There is pigeon traffic between us.’

The Grief Manuscript: An Interview with Frankie Rollins and Eric Aldrich


An Authors Talk


“The one thing I always know is mine is my artwork…my writing life…”

During her divorce in 2017, Frankie Rollins began creating her most recent work: The Grief Manuscript, as both a “compulsive and cathartic” way to channel the grief she found herself experiencing.

As humans, we are no stranger to grief—it can come in many shapes and forms, and it often affects us in ways we cannot predict. Oftentimes, we see grief as a negative experience, but, during this raw and vulnerable podcast, Frankie shares how grief can produce beautiful things—if we let it.

Frankie also discusses the power that art and writing provided her with in overcoming grief and turning it into a project that propelled and inspired her.

This Authors Talk with Frankie Rollins and Eric Aldrich is a rejuvenating, gentle (and much needed) reminder that though we may feel the grief of what we have lost, we can always hold onto the one thing that will always be ours—art.



Learn more about Frankie at her website.

Learn more about Eric at his website.

Submissions for Authors Talks and Guest Posts

The Superstition Review blog posts two types of content from past contributors to our magazine, guest posts and Author Talks. Both of these are posted regularly on the blog and are a great way for us to hear authors talk about their writing process and what they have been up to since being featured in the magazine. We now have an easier way for past contributors to submit both guest posts and authors talks to the blog. Both can be submitted by following a link to Submittable, an online submission form found on the front page of our magazine, or by clicking here.

Mirrors and Doors with Patricia Ann McNair

An Authors Talk

Patricia Ann McNair

“Reading to relate is like looking in a mirror; I want to walk through a door.”

In this insightful Authors Talk, Patricia Ann McNair delves into the idea — and issue — of readers and writers only finding value in work they can relate to.

Many times she has heard the phrase, “I can’t relate,” from students and peers in regards to stories. As readers, it can be easy for us to become uncomfortable when confronted with stories that we cannot relate to and we cannot understand, but Patricia argues that it is exactly these stories we need to be reading.

When we read only stories we can understand, we are simply looking in a mirror; but, when we read stories that do not resemble our own, we are shown through an open door into a world we never would have encountered before.

“Write what you don’t know….”

Listen to her full Authors Talk below.

Check out Patricia’s newest work, Responsible Adults, coming out in December of 2020 (Cornerstone Press).

Learn more about Patricia here.

Turning Out, An Authors talk with K.K. Fox and Hananah Zaheer

Joining us for this week’s Authors Talk are writers and editors at LA Review, K.K. Fox and Hananah Zaheer.

K.K. discusses her story, “Mile Marker 232” featured in Issue 18 of S[r]—a piece based off a car accident she experienced in her childhood that has now become a story collection.

She also discusses the journey of her story and book throughout their creation and shares an excerpt from her latest story, “The One Who Hurts.”

Be sure to keep an eye out for K.K.’s forthcoming story collection, “Mile Marker 232.”



Want to learn more about K.K. and her work? Follow her on Twitter.

Want to learn more about Hananah and her work? Check out her Twitter.

Working with the “What-Ifs,” An Authors Talk with J.M. Jones

J.M. Jones

We are so pleased to welcome J.M. Jones on our Authors Talk series to discuss his piece, “The Course of a Marriage,” published in Issue 24 of Superstition Review.

In this week’s Talk, J.M. delves into the minds of writers—poking at our curiosity about “what-if” scenarios and how we turn to writing to explore how they might have played out.

For him, this is where his story, “The Course of a Marriage” all began. Be sure to listen to to his captivating Talk below.



Want to learn more about J.M.? Check out his website here.

Cannibalizing Your Work, An Authors Talk with Lisa Duffy

Lisa Duffy

This week we are excited to feature author of The Salt House, and past Superstition Review contributor, Lisa Duffy on our Authors Talk series.

In Lisa’s talk she discusses her third novel, My Kind of People, the advice she once received to “cannibalize your work,” and what it looks like give your work 9 lives.


You can order Lisa’s novel, My Kind of People, published by Atria Books here.

Check out Lisa’s interview, “Thinking about the Characters” from Issue 21 of Superstition Review.

Authors Talk: Sarah Carey

Authors Talk: Sarah Carey

Today we are excited to welcome back poet Sarah Carey on our Authors Talk series. In this podcast, Sarah shares some tips for getting “unstuck” in your creative process. She revisits an unfinished poem and walks us through her process of revision with fresh eyes—giving us some incredible insight along the way.

“Don’t give up, explore the hidden…practice self-love, forgiveness, kindness towards yourself and others, and rest.”


You can read Sarah’s poem, “Exotic Taste” in Issue 18 of Superstition Review.

Want to hear more from Sarah? Follow her on Twitter.