“The one thing I always know is mine is my artwork…my writing life…”
Frankie Rollins
Eric Aldrich
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.
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.
“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).
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Today we are pleased to feature poet Catherine Kyle as our Authors Talk series contributor. Join Catherine as she shares her thoughts on using a fantastical framework to talk about real feelings and experiences and how poetry provides a unique medium to do so.
“When you think of a metaphor, it’s almost like you’re casting a spell on one thing and turning it into something else.”
Hi,
I’m Catherine Kyle, and I’m going to be talking a little bit today about poetry
and magic. When I looked back over the two poems that were published in Superstition
Review in issue 11, all the way back in 2013, the biggest thing I noticed
was that both poems have this kind of sense of myth and mysticism that I think
is still really present in the kind of poems I write now.
So,
2013 was a long time ago—it’s seven years ago—and since then, I’ve experimented
with poetry and magic in lots of different ways. I’ve had a few chapbooks come
out since then, and one of them was about a kind of “guardian angel of art” who
wanders around an abandoned city rescuing library books and forgotten paintings
and things like that; the two poems that Superstition Review ran ended
up in a chapbook called Flotsam, which was all about the ocean as a
symbol of the unconscious that has a lot of mermaids and seaside villages and
kind of a fairy tale vibe—things like that. So it’s been a definite thread in
my writing for a long time, and in all these cases, I want to have stakes in
the real world, but it has always been really helpful to me to frame real
feelings and real experiences in this kind of mystical or magical light—to kind
of approach it through a different angle. Part of what I’ve been thinking about
a lot lately is why poetry seems like the best way to do that, as opposed to a
different type of art. Why I’ve gravitated to poetry specifically to do that. And
something I’ve been thinking about as I’ve been trying to untangle that knot is
that poetry is really rich in metaphor, and I think there’s something almost
inherently magical about metaphor. It’s transformative, right? Like, when you
think of a metaphor, it’s almost like you’re casting a spell on one thing and
turning it into something else. And to me, metaphor feels different from simile,
because when you’re using a simile, you’re saying, “This was like this,”
which is something you could do in creative nonfiction, for instance: say, “This
experience was like being in a fairy tale.” But in poetry, you can use
metaphor more freely, I think—in metaphor, you’re saying, “This was this.”
It’s just a little bit different, but it feels powerfully different to me. Again,
in a poem, you’re not necessarily saying, “This felt like a fairy tale,”
you’re saying, “This was a fairy tale,” and there’s room in the poem for
those two things to be true simultaneously. The literal thing is true, but also
the figurative thing is true, and they’re existing simultaneously in this almost
paradoxical and, to me, kind of magical way. It’s a liminal space where two
things can be true at once.
The
other thing I’ve been thinking about a lot as far as why magic is this thread
in my poetry is that honestly, I’ve loved science fiction and fantasy as genres
for as long as I can remember—my whole life. And it took me quite a while to
realize that part of what I really like about sci-fi and fantasy is also part
of what I like about poetry. I think they both have the ability to ask, “What
if…?” and answer it in some new way. They both rely on imagination to think
about things that maybe don’t exist yet or could never exist in real life, that
are only possible in the realm of art (at least at this point). For example,
about a year ago, I wrote this sequence of poems where, like, an older, cooler
version of me drives around in a car and picks up younger versions of me who
needed a big sister figure and shakes them out of whatever situation they’re in
and gives them a little life advice and dusts them off and kind of holds space
for them. Obviously that can’t happen literally, right? Like, I can’t literally
time travel. But the fact that it can happen in a poem makes a kind of
catharsis possible that’s not possible any other way that feels almost
supernatural to me. So those are a few of the things I’ve been thinking about.
I’ll just read you a couple of poems from my two collections that came out last year. I had a chapbook come out from Ghost City Press called Coronations that consists of some fairy tale retellings, and I had a book come out from a press called Spuyten Duyvil called Shelter in Place, which, unfortunately, now is a phrase many more people are familiar with. I’ll read you one from Coronations first and then one from Shelter in Place. In Coronations, again, my goal was just to revisit traditional fairy tales and give some of the princesses a little bit more agency. Other writers have done this, but I wanted to try it out for myself. I’ll read you one called “Collective,” which is inspired by Swan Lake.
Collective
Somewhere adjacent to the world, we rule, gowns our feathers.
When stars blink out like carbonated water, limbs re-human. We rub
ourselves with bath salts, make a bonfire, and dance. Lake a slice of armor,
silver breastplate we surround. When dawn begins to infiltrate
the copse with prying hand beams, we stamp out what orange coal still smokes,
pack up our camping gear. We do not wait around for arrows, heartbreak, drowning—
none of that. We pirouette to bird form. We sail beyond its reach.
Okay. So that was one inspired by Swan Lake. I just always liked the character of Odette and was sad that she meets a tragic end in the original. I think in some versions all her friends, her swan attendants die with her, so it was just putting them in a contemporary setting where maybe they would have a little bit more agency.
The other poem I’ll read you is from Shelter in Place. While fairy tales are my favorite type of magic or allegory that I visit in poems, Shelter in Place has more of a cyberpunk feel. The whole book is set across a backdrop of this dystopian, futuristic city, and I tried to use that not only to talk about some of the grief and heaviness I feel when I think about some of the problems the world is facing right now—environmentally, economically, in terms of human rights, all kinds of things—to articulate the pain of living in a time where we’re facing the things we’re facing, but also to look for metaphors of hope and resistance in the face of all of that. So, I’ll read you one that was inspired by a flower I saw on a walk one day that was just bursting through the cement. It was just bursting through the sidewalk, right in front of me. There were no other flowers around—it was just this sea of concrete and then this very healthy-looking flower somehow, despite it all, against all odds, living there and thriving in the sidewalk. So, this is called “Blossoming 1.”
Blossoming 1
On these evenings our heads tilt up and become flowers, busting out of our collars, all iridescent. Geranium, freesia, gladiolus erupting straight out of our used T-shirts. With smartphones in our pockets—our long winter coats. Our cheeks shift to druzy, a spiked hymn of glitter refracting and clutching the siren-scraped light. The red -green-yellow No Vacancy din. We are all wind, all magenta. Our laughter a rooftop vertigo, a circle of lips on a bottle’s swan neck. Geode heartbeats keeping time. A wallowing, a daisy in cement.
Okay. Thanks. I’ll stop there, but thank you so much to Superstition Review for inviting me to be part of this series. Thank you for listening in. It was really fun to be part of this, and I hope you’re reading and/or writing something fun today. Thanks again!
Today we are pleased to feature author Jennifer Martelli as our Authors Talk series contributor. In this podcast, Jennifer talks about her poem, “Yomi.” She uses her poem to discuss the process of revising one’s work and how she utilizes other poets and authors to help her in that process. Jennifer tells of the importance of a poetry community and how it affects her writing.
“I don’t have to tell the story exactly as it is, the truth is something different from the actual narration.”
As a bonus, Jennifer also shares another poem, “The Drop off.”
You can read Jennifer’s poem, “Yomi” in Issue 21 of Superstition Review.
Today we are pleased to feature author A. Molotkov as our Authors Talk series contributor. Anatoly is interviewed by Willa Schneberg.
Anatoly talks about a piece from his memoir, (Mis)communication, that tells of his early life in Albany, New York after having moved there from communist Russia. He tells of the language barriers and his experiences working the night shift at the deli as he begins his writing career. All the while he studies the conversations he has, both in Russian and in English, pulling them apart to find where they intersect, and where he fits between them.
In the interview, Anatoly discusses the differences of writing a memoir as opposed to writing fiction and the significance of his decision to write in English rather than Russian. He also talks about the difficulties of deciphering humor and romance in a non-native language.
You can read Anatoly’s work, “(Mis)communication” in Issue 24 of Superstition Review.
