Jesse Lee Kercheval is a writer, translator, and graphic artist. Her recent books include the short story collection Underground Women and La crisis es el cuerpo, a bilingual edition of her poetry, translated by Ezequiel Zaidenwerg, published in Argentina by Editorial Bajo la luna. Her recent essays and graphic narratives have appeared in The Sewanee Review, Blackbird, Brevity, The New England Review, and The Quarantine Public Library.
This interview was conducted by Paress Chappell, our Nonfiction Editor for Issue 28 via email. This post also features one of Jesse’s essays, Typhoid Blue. We’re so excited to share her work and the inspirations behind it!
Paress Chappell: What have you been writing during the pandemic?
Jesse Lee Kercheval: I think my illustrated essay, “Typhoid Blue,” that you are featuring is the answer to that question. I started writing essays. I’d already written a whole memoir, Space, about growing up during the moon race so I am not new to nonfiction, but I had always been frightened of essays. Then suddenly I was locked down in Montevideo, Uruguay in the first days of the pandemic and I just started writing essay after essay. One of the first, “The New Troy,” about Montevideo and all its plagues was published in Guernica with a photo of my neighbors tango dancing on the roof of their high-rise.
The other thing I took up was drawing—just to get away from my computer and have something to do while confined to my rented apartment. I bought a box of colored pencils at the supermarket and started drawing—really, for the first time in my life.
Then I began putting the drawings in my essays. “Typhoid Blue” is one. It deals with a long time interest of mine in the life and poetry of the French surrealist poet Robert Desnos. His life story is important in my novel, My Life as a Silent Movie. And I have written a number of poems inspired by his work. One, “Next Tuesday” appears in my poetry collection, America that island off the coast of France. Robert Desnos even has a connection to my interest in silent films. He wrote a long poem “La complainte de Fantômas” based on the popular crime novels about a master thief. The Fantômas books were also turned into an equally popular silent movie serial by the great French director Louis Feuillade. That movie had this amazing poster.
Fantômas (1913)
Another of my illustrated essays (“The Fox Sister”) just won an Editor’s Choice Award will be out soon in New Letters. It is about actual foxes, the early spiritualist Fox Sisters, and a Korean folk tale about a changeling fox sister who eats her human brothers. And another, a full graphic essay or comic, “Falling” —about breaking my back when I was ten, 9/11, and the pandemic—was published in Waxwing.
Now I am easing off the essays a bit and back into poetry. I have a new collection of poems, I Want To Tell You, coming out from the University of Pittsburgh Press. But I am still drawing like mad. Art was the one gift the pandemic gave me.
PC: Why did you decide to become a translator and how has that opened doors for you in the literary world?
JLK: In 2010, I decided I wanted to learn Spanish. I had a sabbatical and, for completely random reasons, I choose Montevideo, Uruguay as the place I would live and study. I did not set out with the intention of translating poetry—learning Spanish over fifty seemed challenge enough! I spent the sabbatical just going to language classes and trying to live a normal life in a different language. But I did begin reading Uruguayan poetry. Then, when I returned to visit Uruguayan friends, I began going to poetry readings. Uruguay is a small country (3.3 million people) but one FULL of poets. In Montevideo, there are poetry readings or events most of the nights of the week. It is also country with a strong and unbroken chain of poetry by women.
As I quickly discovered, almost none of this work was available in English translation. So I started work on my anthology, América invertida: An Anthology of Emerging Uruguayan Poets (University of New Mexico Press, 2016) which features the work of young Uruguayan poets, each paired with an American based poet/translator. That book turned out to be a whole wonderful project. I placed many of the poems in literary magazines. I took three of the poets on a reading tour around the U.S, including the Library of Congress and the Associated Writing Programs annual conference. We were even featured on Chinese television. Many of the individual poets in the anthology have gone on to have books published in the U.S. And I have gone on to translate books by Uruguayan poets such as Idea Vilariño, Circe Maia, Tatiana Oroño, to co-translate others and edit several more anthologies as well.
Translation opened the doors to not one, but two new literary worlds for me. The world of Uruguayan poets, which is very much my second home now, but also the world of translators, who are wonderful, generous people. I tell my students it is worth studying translation just to be able to spend time with other translators.
And translating made poetry gave me another great gift. It made poetry come alive for me again. After years of reading, teaching, writing poetry—I think I had become a bit numb to it. But reading, hearing, really trying to understand poetry in another language brought the magic back. I also love this moment where, perhaps because we are living through this pandemic, literature is getting wonderfully hybrid, in all the senses of that word.
So maybe to tie all these obsessions of mine together, I should write an illustrated lyric essay about an Uruguayan silent film. Honestly, that is a very tempting idea!
PC: What’s the connection between your writing and your interest in silent films?
JLK: Ah, there you touch on an obsession of mine that predates drawing. My husband was a special archivist at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. He first went to a Le Giornate del Cinema Muto/ The Pordenone Silent Film Festival in 2000. The festival is the premiere location for screening silent films made from 1880s into the 1930s. He suggested I might like to go the next year. I thought, Italy! Of course, I want to go! But I thought I would sit in a cafe and write poems, not attend the movies. Instead, I ended up watching films from 9 am to 1 am—nearly without stop—for the entire eight days of the festival. It was like finding the lost world of Atlantis. And then I began writing poems about the films. These eventually became my book Cinema Muto (Southern Illinois University Press, 2009) which takes the form of the eight days of the festival.
I attended Le Giornate del Cinema Muto every year right up until the recent pandemic pause—eighteen years. And I still love silent films.
Typhoid Blue
Do poems exist? After a plague year, nothing is a poem to me anymore. Or everything is.
In 1924, in his surrealist manifesto, André Breton said, “We are living under the reign of logic, but the logical processes of our time apply only to the solution of problems of secondary interest.”
But we are not living in logical times. Breton, writing four years after WW I, a decade and pocket change before WWII, was not either.
Now, everything I draw is blue.
Blue lips. I am giving everyone blue lips.
The poet Robert Desnos was a surrealist before Breton expelled him from the movement. In 1945, he died of typhoid in Terezín concentration camp a month after the camp’s liberation. In severe cases of typhoid, the lips and fingernails may turn bluish in color.
Or so it says in a very old article, as old as Desnos’ last poem, said to have been found on him when he died:
Le Dernier Poème
J’ai rêvé tellement fort de toi, J’ai tellement marché, tellement parlé, Tellement aimé ton ombre, Qu’il ne me reste plus rien de toi.Il me reste d’être l’ombre parmi les ombres D’être cent fois plus ombre que l’ombre D’être l’ombre qui viendra et reviendra dans ta vie ensoleillée.
Except his poem never existed.
A Czech newspaper published his obituary, which ended with a part of Desnos’ poem, “J’ai tant rêvé de toi” (I Dreamt About You So Much), translated into Czech by a Czech poet, Jindřich Hořejší. When it was republished in France, the sentence was retranslated into French again.
A poem that never existed—existed. And made people weep.
The French newspaper said he had written “Le Dernier Poème” for his wife Youki Desnos. Youki means snow in Japanese. When I draw snow—I add blue. White, white alone is never cold enough. Except Desnos’ wife wasn’t Japanese. Her name was Lucie Badoud and Youki was a nickname given to her by her lover Tsuguharu Foujita before she left him for Desnos.
In his portrait of Youki, Tsuguharu Foujita uses on the slightest touch of pale blue for her eyes.
The poem Desnos never wrote Youki from Terezín ended up engraved on a wall behind Notre Dame Cathedral that is the memorial to the 200,000 French deportees to Nazi death camps. President Charles de Gaulle inaugurated it in 1962, before anyone discovered the mistake of the double translation.
Once a poem is engraved in on a wall, can there be any doubt it exists?
The poem is even famous in English:
Last Poem
I have dreamt so very much of you, I have walked so much, talked so much Loved your shadow so much, I have nothing left of you. All that remains to me is to be the shadow among shadows To be a hundred times more of a shadow than the shadow To be the shadow that will come and come again into your sunny life.
And there is also no doubt that a shadow of a shadow of shadow is blue, blue, blue.
Wave after wave.
André Breton’s surrealist novel Nadja is dotted with photos, most of them random, found art that make a story even more surreal—perhaps not unlike the illustrations in this essay. But Nadja also includes these photographs by Man Ray of Robert Desnos sleeping.The young Czech medical student, Josef Stuna, who cared for Desnos’ last days in Terezín, recognized him from the book. The caption on the photos in the book reads: “Once again, now, I see Robert Desnos . . . ”
It didn’t save him.
Besides the story about the fictional last poem, there is another one from the camps about Robert Desnos, this one probably true. The scholar Susan Griffin tells it in her article “To Love The Marigold: Hope & Imagination.”
I am thinking of a story I heard a few years ago from my friend Odette, a writer and a survivor of the holocaust. Along with many others who crowd the bed of a large truck, she tells me, the surrealist poet Robert Desnos is being taken away from the barracks of the concentration camp where he has been held prisoner. Leaving the barracks, the mood is somber; everyone knows the truck is headed for the gas chambers. And when the truck arrives no one can speak at all; even the guards fall silent. But this silence is soon interrupted by an energetic man, who jumps into the line and grabs one of the condemned. Improbable as it is, Odette told me, Desnos reads the man’s palm.
Oh, he says, I see you have a very long lifeline. And you are going to have three children. He is exuberant. And his excitement is contagious. First one man, then another, offers up his hand, and the prediction is for longevity, more children, abundant joy.
As Desnos reads more palms, not only does the mood of the prisoners change but that of the guards too. How can one explain it? Perhaps the element of surprise has planted a shadow of doubt in their minds. If they told themselves these deaths were inevitable, this no longer seems inarguable. They are in any case so disoriented by this sudden change of mood among those they are about to kill that they are unable to go through with the executions. So all the men, along with Desnos, are packed back onto the truck and taken back to the barracks. Desnos has saved his own life and the lives of others by using his imagination.
And at least one of them lived to tell this story.
It wasn’t Robert Desnos.
“I have walked so much, talked so much”—an imaginary Desnos says in his imaginary “Last Poem.”
I think he would have loved being that imaginary, to be honest.
Not all blues are dark blue.
I should draw Desnos and color his eyes the same light blue as Youki’s. Instead I draw this.
Kate Cumiskey (The Canovas Photography) | The Women Who Gave Up Their Vowels by Kate Cumiskey (Finishing Line Press 2021)
Kate Cumiskey lives with her partner Mikel in coastal central Florida. She has a social justice novel, Ana, forthcoming with Finishing Line Press, and a biography, Surfers’ Rules: The Mike Martin Story, forthcoming with Silent e Publishing; both will be out in late 2022. She is currently concentrating her writing to reflect her perspective of social justice without judgement or paternalism as regards homelessness, and continuing her work in meeting the needs of homeless human beings in her community. She also leads efforts locally to ascertain safety and educational fidelity for students within the public school system through boots-on-the-ground advocacy.
Our Poetry Editor, Bree Hoffman, read and reviewed Kate’s recent book of poems, The Women Who Gave Up Their Vowels and was lucky enough to also interview Kate about the book. The interview was conducted via email.
Bree Hoffman: “Candor” is the first poem in your book, and it lives up to the name by truth-telling right away. What was your thought process when opening the book with “Candor,” and what is the desired effect for the reader?
Kate Cumiskey: I’ll start with answering the second part of this question. This poem, I hope, serves as a bit of a warning to readers, “there be dragons here.” I don’t want readers to be surprised by the literal candor in the book. It’s important to me that writers speak truth, and with this book I particularly wanted to focus on truths we don’t normally speak out loud, but which do keep us isolated in that they make us feel alone. In fact, such things as hemorrhoids, death, and rape, while two of those are fortunately not universally shared, are common and lose a bit of their power when acknowledged as such. I had been struggling with a bit of inertia when this book was initially accepted by Finishing Line Press – how do we speak truth in such horrific times? – and I reread Candor to get myself back into the fray of writing what is happening to all of us, right now. FLP was gracious enough to allow the book to change with the rapidly changing, deadly times through the publication process. Candor had originally been the title poem of the book, but that too changed through this process. The title reflects my own grappling with deliberately losing my deep Southern drawl as a married teenager living in California, where nobody deigned to speak to me in public. I trained the South out of my voice, and I miss it. This book is an attempt not to recover those vowels, but to speak, now, with the voice I’ve developed on issues which are absolutely vital to me. So, Candor is a warning for readers.
BH: In poems such as “Dirge” and “Favoring Boys” your activist roots come through. How does activism influence you as a writer, and how do you hope to factor them into your work in the future?
KC: It is interesting that you choose “activist roots,” as I think of this book as very active in voice, and independent from my roots, so to speak. I do not tend to think of my parents as activists, but you are spot-on; certainly they were, both of them. I hope it is evident in the poems that my mother and I had a very complex relationship, but she was in fact the bravest person I’ve ever known. She did things I’d never dream of, and that I’d consider down-right dangerous, for example, always picking up hitchhikers no matter what, until literally the week before she passed away in 2017. That’s activism. She also reserved judgement on people outside her own circle, such as homeless individuals panhandling, saying judgement was for God-she’d give out money and when less radical individuals called her on that, saying, “what if they spend it on drugs?” She’d say, “It’s a tough life, maybe that’s what they need to get through the night.” My father was a NASA pioneer, and even though his designs were crucial to getting humans to the Moon and our technology into interstellar space, when I asked what he was proudest of in his career, he replied, “I couldn’t keep a secretary. Every one of them out-degreed me and went on in the Program. I helped them all do that.” Activism in the workplace, helping females move forward in what at the time was absolutely a male domain. So, yeah, activist roots. Right now, I’m working on a series of poems about withholding judgement. In fact, one of the central poems to that book, Cokeheads I Have Known, is forthcoming in an anthology, The Literary Parrot, Series Two. I am pushing myself hard to speak about our shared humanity, and to encourage readers to strive to leave judgement behind. Again, there be dragons here. It’s hard to examine your own boundaries.
BH: I noticed recurring themes of motherhood and generational trauma several times. Could you discuss why those themes resurface in your work?
KC: Again, you bring up something about the book I’d not noticed! Brava; I love it! I remember discussing what I was most concerned about in my work with my dear friend and mentor, Robert Creeley. He’d asked, and I responded, “Being labeled a ‘domestic poet’.” He replied with his fabulous candor, “Well, you are a domestic poet, but you’re in good company.” He was saying he too was a domestic poet. That long-ago conversation freed me of the concern, and I allowed my work to truly reflect my domesticity–what’s more domestic than parenthood? I took a sort of semi-conscious approach to this book, letting it be whatever it wanted to, even to the point of playing with, allowing myself to play with, voice in person. That evolved into my writing some of the easier poems first person, and dealing with more difficult topics, like that generational trauma you cite, in second person, and letting the poems stand that way. It’s subtle, but there, and I hope creates a bit of chaos and discomfort and puzzlement in readers. Like trauma does. I believe the deepest root of that trauma goes back to my father’s loss of his parents before he was eight; he was a Mississippi Depression orphan, son of a sharecropper and a teacher, and although he missed them, as a practical Christian he knew he would be with them again, and told stories about them as if they were just away for a while. Which, from a Christian perspective, they are. So, I really missed my grandparents growing up. In fact, as a small child in school I was confused by other children having two sets; I thought of my Atlanta grandparents, my mother’s, as my father’s parents, too, before such things were explained to me. It came as a real blow that I had missing grandparents. This deepened as it became very apparent I most resemble my paternal grandmother, who was also incredibly domestic, and a teacher; my mother was decidedly not. In fact, because I loved these things and she didn’t, she had me take lessons in sewing, cooking, even deportment and etiquette. Because back in the day a woman should be graceful and I was clumsy as a child, I also took dance lessons for several years; I still love to dance. As far as my work, the obvious answer is also that I use these underlying specificities in my past to attempt to connect with readers. It is important to me that each reader experience each poem differently; what the reader brings to the reading through their own past is as important to me as the words on the page.
BH: What advice would you offer to our readers about writing?
KC: Connect! Read! Reach out to writers whose work speaks to you, if they are living, and ask the questions you are burning to ask. Ask for help. If you are stuck too deeply in your own, isolating experiences, force yourself to look outward and write just what you see, sans analysis. Take a piece of rotting fruit, put it on the table, smash it to bits, and sit down and write that. Keep the self completely out of the work. That’ll get you writing. Work outward from there: write the doorway, then the hall, then the threshold. Then, write what’s outside that door.
BH: What does your personal writing process look like when you are building a book of poetry?
KC: It’s a mess! In fact, I’ve recently opened an office in a classic old building in order to grapple with my lack of organization, and am working on a schedule. Seriously, although outwardly I’m a bit of a mess, I’m actually pretty organized and disciplined. I keep poems in print and on the computer, and when they start to build up in number, I have a serious look at them to see if they belong in a group, in a book. And I am always sending out finished poems to find a home in a journal or anthology. My mentor Mark Cox worked hard with me on how to put together books when I was in graduate school, and I still use his method, which is deliciously physical. I find a space with a large surface area – The Women Who Gave Up Their Vowels was put together in my brother’s beautiful kitchen, in the afternoon overlooking Turnbull Bay, Atlantic Center for the Arts just visible on the opposite shore–and lay out the printed verses. I choose the opening poem, and circle until I find the poem which calls to it, which wants to be next. I keep going until the book is finished. Any poems left I simply hold for another day. Another book or spoken word venue.
Kate’s brother’s kitchen: assembling the book
Review
Kate Cumiskey’s, The Women Who Gave Up Their Vowels, is her latest and perhaps most intimate book of poems published thus far. In a recent interview with Superstition Review, Cumiskey said of its origins:
“The title reflects my own grappling with deliberately losing my deep Southern drawl as a married teenager living in California, where nobody deigned to speak to me in public. I trained the South out of my voice, and I miss it. This book is an attempt not to recover those vowels, but to speak, now, with the voice I’ve developed on issues which are absolutely vital to me.”
The Women Who Gave Up Their Vowels expands on this promise, and provides a candid, autobiographical collection of poems relevant to Cumiskey’s lived experiences. This includes the appropriately titled, “Candor,” a poem that opens up the collection and lives up to its name.
Cumiskey’s writes,
Write your history; write that fear at 2 a.m. the night
your son overdosed. Write tile beneath your knees.
Write rats in the kitchen, raccoons in the roof, your dog
over the fence, gone all night.
I found Cumiskey’s poems to be moving and sincere in their attempts to reclaim ownership over her lived experiences. Her poems cover topics including sexism, assault, politics, loss, and hope for the things she cannot fix. It’s hard to separate the author from the poems in this particular collection, because the two feel so intrinsically linked, and it’s readily apparent when reading them.
Cumiskey writes,
Bit by bit my body settles into age: fractious, screaming all the way
down. Only in twilight sleep I feel my lower jaw shift, relax, offset
to the right, the side I sleep on. My mouth clamps, thin-lipped, crooked,
and settles for sleep into Mother’s fighting look, the one she wears
when will not be moved. Then I can rest. And it feels good
like falling into my own skin.
(From “Just Lately I Feel My Body Settling”).
To purchase a copy of The Women Who Gave Up Their Vowels, head to Finishing Line Press. Congratulations and thank you, Kate!
Keene Short is a writer and baker in Spokane, Washington. His work has appeared in jmww, Bridge Eight, Blood Orange Review, and elsewhere. In this post, we feature an essay of his, “Jeremiad,” along with an interview our Nonfiction Editor, Paress Chappell, conducted with Keene about the piece.
Jeremiad
Day 1
I wake up before dawn to drive to a small airport in Cascade, Idaho, in time for the one flight by bush plane into a research station in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. I am the only passenger on the bumpy flight, the plane full of faded yellow and orange upholstery and a few remaining patches of brown shag carpeting. After the plane takes off and whirs over the Idaho wilderness, I look out at the tiny crystal lakes in the rocky ledges and drops below. The pilot flies close enough to some of the slopes that I can see the frost on the trees and the waves in the alpine lakes. There are so many unmapped, tiny lakes, as blue as veins.
I am here for a short fellowship to write about climate change, history, and public land use, but I find myself mostly thinking mostly in religious terms. My parents and teachers framed the public lands system in the US for me as a model of an environmental utopia, an iteration of the commons shared co-equally among all humans and non-human animals. A paradise on Earth, the Kingdom of Heaven, easy and teleological.
The one book I bring with me to the River of No Return is a copy of my father’s dissertation, Ronald Reagan and the Public Lands, which he expanded into a book and published in a limited run in 1989, predating my older brother by a year. It’s been on my shelf for a long time, but I only committed to reading it while spending a week writing in the same public lands my father would have studied.
The plane lands bumpily in a long stretch of grass next to a tributary of the Salmon River called Big Creek. The pilot pulls a lever repeatedly to start the brakes, and the plane finally stops just short of the research station’s only human inhabitants waiting in the cold to greet us: Pete, the manager, his 9-year-old daughter, and five college students staying the in the fall for a semester’s worth of credits. The sun is still behind the mountains, and the air will be cold all morning, they tell me.
I settle into the situation: No phone service and only a few hours of internet slower than dial-up during the day when the sun hits the station’s row of solar panels. There is one electrical outlet in my cabin, which I use to charge my laptop, also only when the sun hits the solar panels. There is no heat, and I’m not permitted to use the fireplace this late in the dry season.
I write a few paragraphs in my cabin, then wander up the grass landing strip. I follow a deer into the brush who lets me get startlingly close in a shady trail next to the landing strip, munching on this and that, looking up at me with an unreadable expression.
Day 2
Outside my cabin is a grassy field that ends at the row of solar panels. The river separates the field from the blond-grey mountainside, crisscrossed with ponderosa pines. The research station, with so few humans living so far off the grid, feels like the setting of a post-apocalyptic novel. This shared, off-the-radar community blends technological limits and twentieth-century agricultural methods to sustain itself, as if after some war or disease or atomic fallout. Maybe there are shades of utopia as well. Everything here is an extreme, and everyone here takes these extremes for granted. The cabin’s solitude, the river’s noise.
My father breaks the old guard conservation movement into two sects: “the mystics, such as John Muir, who considered wilderness preservation to be an ‘act and obligation of worship,’ and the more pragmatic utilitarians, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot.” Both sects drew upon white settler colonialism, dividing the land according to what they wanted, a religious project of reorganizing stolen land rather than preserving it.
When I hike upstream in the early afternoon sun, I’m struck most by the burned trees that still loom over the trail from a series of wildfires. I pass three in a row on the trailside. I want to pick at them, strip off bits of charcoal, see how deep the damage goes. I want to see if there are still tree rings, what they might look like deep inside. I think of toasted marshmallows allowed to let burn to a crisp on an open fire, turning to ash on the outside but gooey on the inside. In the burned trees, will there be untouched streaks of sandy orange and sandal? Or will it be gnarled and drooping, the innards melted, disorganizing the lifespan of these ponderosa up until the fire? I want to peek inside and see proof of life. Does that make me a mystic?
When I return, I peruse the library in the other half of my cabin, filled with taxidermized rodents and hawks caught in competition above the shelves. Most of the books are standard ecocritical texts from the last four decades. A lot of Terry Tempest Williams, a lot of Scott Slovic. A lot of Barry Lopez and Edward Abbey and Rachel Carson. There are few novels and even fewer books of poetry. For inspiration, I snatch the Ecocriticism Reader and the library’s copy of the Bible.
When I finally sit down to write after a quick meal the sun is far below the mountain, and a bird flies into the window. I am in denial about the meaning of that awful low smack until I see the creature on the cabin deck. The bird’s chest and eyes move in equally violent rhythm.
I don’t want a bird to die on my watch, and I don’t know how to help. I go to find Pete, but he is nowhere to be found. When I return, the bird is still there, but as I climb the steps, he hobbles onto his feet, his talons tight between the wood of the deck. He looks around, not cocking his head but unsure, rocking a little bit. The bird is in shock, I think, feeling my own heart speed up. The little body is in shock.
I don’t know the species. His feathers are black with a white underbelly and chest. The creature is small, so so small. I go back inside to get a plate of water, spilling it on the way out again. The cabin door makes a short squeaking noise, a barely audible chipper. When I place the plate in front of him, the bird seems to jump and his eyes open much wider. I nudge the water closer, leaning in a little. The bird shakes a bit, then takes flight, giving one small squeak on his way out. I lift the plate, dump the water into a nearby flower pot, and go back inside, my hands shaking. I wonder if an omen is still an omen when the omen flies away again.
Day 3
I read in the Book of Amos: “’But I gave you empty stomachs in all your cities and lack of bread in all your towns, yet you have not returned to Me,’ declares the Lord. ‘And furthermore, I withheld the rain from you while there were still three months until harvest. Then I would send rain on one city and on another city I would not send rain; one part would be rained on, while the part not rained on would dry. So two or three cities would stagger to another city to drink water, but would not be satisfied; yet you have not returned to Me,’ declares the Lord.’ I smote you with scorching wind and mildew; and sent locusts to destroy your many gardens and vineyards, fig trees and olive trees; yet you have not returned to Me,’ declares the Lord.”
Mystics used to emphasize the land, air, and water in their prophesying, denouncing tribal kings for their iniquities with threats of very real earthly punishments attributed to God. The land gives and the land takes away. The prophets knew what they were doing when they warned of impending drought and famine and disease, when they warned of refugee crises and wars and political collapse, a central part of their rhetoric.
Frank Church himself, a former US Democratic Senator for Idaho, is more difficult to place. He ran in the presidential primary election of 1976 as a progressive environmentalist, though he only won a few primaries in Western states like Idaho, Montana, and Nebraska before withdrawing when it became clear that the more moderate Jimmy Carter had sealed the nomination. My dad tells me that he volunteered with the radical environmentalist Church campaign as a college student, helping to put up posters for Frank Church with the Idaho Young Democrats. He always tells me this same story about the candidate:
Frank Church came to Rupert, Idaho, my dad’s hometown an hour from Pocatello. He hung out after giving a campaign speech at the town’s high school and my dad stuck around too, asked a few more questions as Church waited for a friend to pick him up. I imagine him in a trench-coat, smoking a cigarette, talking shop with a college student version of my dad.
Forty years later, when I was a graduate student in Nebraska, it felt like a big deal when Bernie Sanders came to Lincoln, the state capital. Thousands of students skipped classes to wait six hours in line to hear him speak, waiting to pass through metal detectors and have their bags checked on the way in. A large crowd for a college town. I wonder if Frank Church drew a large crowd for a small rural town. I’ve been to Rupert so many times. It’s a community of farmers and immigrants, not the place a presidential candidate visits even in primary season, a small, isolated town that has only become smaller and more isolated.
Day 4
I hike upstream along the river with my camera, along the dusty trails rising and falling, narrowing closer to the thrashing edge of the rapids and into the quiet grassy hills away from the river, its churning locomotion. Past the rapids and a set of caves I worry will be filled with bears, I cross a bridge, maneuvering myself between the looming post-burn charcoal pillars and the emergent stubble of regrowth.
The Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness is on stolen and occupied Shoshone-Bannock and Nimiipuu land. The US began imposing restrictions on land usage first with the establishment of the Idaho Primitive Area in 1930, then the Wilderness Act of 1964, and finally the Central Idaho Wilderness Act of 1980, which Frank Church successfully sponsored.
The land is useful today for scientific research, especially for the stability of the Salmon River in a changing climate, but the original purposes were more sentimental. According to the legislation, congress finds that “certain wildlands in central Idaho lying within the water shed of the Salmon River—the famous ‘River of No Return’—constitute the largest block of primitive and undeveloped land in the conterminous United States and are of immense national significance.” Through an act of congress, Frank Church was able to create a legally designated block of wilderness for its immense national significance. This is an act of mysticism, a gesture toward environmental utopianism.
The Taylor Ranch has regulations to prevent overuse of resources, and it functions as something close to communal living. I share the kitchen and outhouse. We clean up the spaces and items we use. The regular inhabitants work in the garden, the farm, or with the water and solar rigs. In exchange for restraint, the land is renewable for another year. White Americans are new to this longstanding concept, and we’re still very bad at it. A bush plane flies in twice a week to bring supplies and relieve us of our garbage.
A list of Pete’s commandments hang above the door to the kitchen and dining cabin, the common cabin, written on butcher paper in blue marker, emphasizing personal responsibility, solitude, and companionship. While cooking my morning oatmeal next to someone else boiling water for tea, the gas ovens go out, and the regulars jump to change the propane tanks, instinctively volunteering to maneuver the gigantic beige metal cannister as tall as I am to a storage place while hauling in another equally large cannister.
For a while, I wonder if this is the kind of shared collaboration Hardt and Negri suggest is necessary to reestablish the commons, “produced socially, through communication and cooperation, by a multitude of singularities.” Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz, though, points out that Hardt and Negri’s limited idolization of the commons perpetuates settler colonialism by conveniently ignoring the Indigenous people whose land would then be shared in common by the colonists’ descendants. Even if proposed in good faith, the federal public lands system enacts a version of this erasure. Utopia for some is dystopia for the rest.
I imagine someone like the prophet Amos visiting this place. I picture him quickly turning bored, running his hands through his long hair and getting itchy with cabin fever, biting his nails, pacing the library and looking out the window at the deer in the field, walking up to the windows in their grazing, wondering about the nervous, shaking creature they see inside.
Day 5
The Sagebrush Rebellion, consisting of libertarian western landowners fed up with the environmental policies of the 1970s, plays a key role in my father’s analysis. White landowners, generations removed from the government-subsidized colonization of the 1800s, rebelled against the conservation policies that figures like Frank Church helped to enact. The environmentalist response to the Sagebrush Rebels’ theatrical protests was a carefully designed, science-driven counter-insurgency that “often employed research data in making their claims, in which environmentalists abandoned ‘their own brand of symbolism (invoking the founding fathers, for example) in favor of evidence.’”
Is this a pattern? The New Right, coalescing around Reagan, appropriated the environmentalist left’s strategies of symbolic rhetoric, and so conservationists shifted from mysticism to pragmatism. What strikes me is that ways of justifying land use, one way or another, are grounded in mythology more than history or sustainability. My father points out that both camps reached as far back as the Puritans, who “saw in the American frontier a ‘chosen nation in progress—a New Israel whose constituency was as numerous, potentially, as the entire people of God, and potentially as vast as America,” for a model of relating to the land.
As I read this, I start to feel self-aware. I wonder how radical my dad used to be. I wonder about the Idaho Conservation League, the ecoterrorists he used to research, maybe even hung out with. I wonder, and then I worry. I’ve never known either of my parents to be radicals except in past lives, before they were teachers and back when they were students. I worry what the furnace of academia can do to people, about credentials, publications, tenure, administration with a corner office overlooking campus protests, above the fray, above where battle lines are drawn.
Maybe the question for me is not between mysticism and pragmatism, but rather a more pressing iteration of the same dichotomy: Am I an activist or an academic? Will I make the practical decisions my parents made and simply study the rhetoric of environmental movements, or will I participate in those movements at the frontlines? Will climate change give me a choice?
Day 6
I decide to hike the mountain today. The further up the trail I trudge, the more silent the wilderness becomes. The fabric of this place is deceptive. I wait for animals, anticipate them, turn my head and stop to listen, nervous each time I pass a thick ensemble of trees that I might encounter a bear. For the longest time, I see nothing but the odd grasshopper.
My imagination wanders. I wonder what I could become in twenty years isolated here. There could be fires and floods to wash me out. I imagine myself alone like in so many post-apocalyptic stories, wandering long lost paths and making my way laboriously north. I look at a burned tree standing over a storm-grey hillside which surely hides a thousand spiders and a dozen snakes, and I step forward. Crickets bounce away from me on the trail with each step I take, moving out of my way like I’m a boat parting the waves.
At the highest point overlooking the river, there is a graveyard of trees in a green slope of shrubbery and grass, their shadows like fingers pointing east in the afternoon. My body is weary up here, and my face and limbs are hot. It is quiet I’m alone and ambivalent. I sit on a log surrounded by trees, living and dead, and listen to the wind, the birds, waiting for something to find me, but nothing does. I contemplate myself, the place, the geography and how it’s organized strategically into cartography, which, this far into the mountains, is hard to see from my vantage. I could die up here and nobody would know. A bear could find me, or I could trip and spiral down a sharp edge. Rattlesnakes, falling trees, dehydration.
As Jennifer Ladino puts it, “Contemplation is shaped by narrative, of course. Narratives provide us with details to mull over, but there’s an affective dimension to contemplation as well.” She has also come to the Frank Church to teach and study, and I think about that narrative, as well as the story of what my life is or could become given a wrong turn. She favors constructive, life-affirming emotional responses to ambivalence: “Compassion needs words, stories, reflection,” which geographic places (as narratives) can encourage. The prophets relied on stories of apocalypse, as environmentalists do today. Places of injustice tell stories of injustice. What about this place inspires hope? I mull over the seconds in which I feel grateful.
One story my grandmother recently told me: Teaching is my destiny. My mother teaches, and my grandmother taught, and her mother taught too. I’m a fourth-generation teacher. She was in high school during the Second World War, and she was required to tutor her mother’s male students to ensure they passed the minimum requirements so they could join the army and fight overseas. When she should have been studying for her own calculus tests, she instead taught algebra to future Marines, and the next day, exhausted, she failed her calculus exam.
I hike back down the mountain, hungry and running low on water. I poke around a short way upriver before returning to the cabin, and there on the trail a herd of bighorn sheep encounters me. They drink from the river as I make my way around the bend. One sheep stands in the middle of the trail and stares me down. I stop. We are directly in each other’s way. The sheep could charge, and I would have to stumble down a rocky slope into the river or trip uphill into a fallen, blackened tree, the charcoal rubbing into the cuts I would make on my palms. But the animal looks to the side, indifferent. The rest of the herd ambles uphill on the trail behind the sheep. I wait until they give me permission to move forward.
Day 7
“More significant, however, was the loss of two allies, Senators Alan Simpson and Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming. The two New Right regulars cosponsored legislation to ‘bar all oil and gas exploration in their state’s wilderness areas.’ Why would two conservative, western politicians turn their backs on [the New Right]? ‘Constituent pressure,’ responded a Simpson aid. ‘They [Wallop and Simpson] are quite aware that a great many people in Wyoming want those wilderness areas left as they are.’ One week later, Senator Henry Jackson of Washington announced that fifty-one senators had agreed to co-sponsor legislation to prevent oil and gas drilling on millions of acres of national wilderness” (Short 65).
I wake up early and try to write a few more words, but my fingers are too cold and the bush plane is arriving anyway. It only took one week to acclimate to the situation, or so I tell myself as I stuff my lightened backpacks into the plane and climb into the passenger seat.
The pilot picks up two hunters in another station, landing on another long stretch of grass. There are a few donkeys, cabins, a stream. The hunters have much more than I do, and I’m glad when they place their firearms in the plane aiming away from the seat I’m sitting in. But I know Idaho hunters, as friends and family. They’re not stupid enough to put a loaded firearm in a vehicle (as some suburban gunowners I know have done). They also have a garbage bag of soda cans and single-use plastic, better to take home than leave out here. I notice they have no animals, no deer carcass or pile of coyote skins.
The plane lands in Cascade, and the hunters exit first, their stuff piled onto my stuff, their import pressing mine into the corner. I sit in my car in the airport parking lot for a long time scrolling through news feeds while storm clouds move over the hills before I drive north past red and orange leaves in the trees and small towns advertising pumpkin pie, espressos, free wi-fi. I pass church signs advertising Sunday service, visions of hope and despair intertwined together. Apparently we are sinners but we are also saints.
I want to stop in one of these many Idaho small towns. I want to walk into a roadside diner and order a cup of black coffee and a slice of pie and linger in the early autumn chill and listen to the old-timers in the corner talk about how warm it’s been these last few years, how dry last year was. But I don’t. I never do. Instead, I drive a few miles over the speed limit through each town like I’m a lost insect.
Paress Chappell: What were your goals as you were writing this piece?
Keene Short: This piece began as the daily journal entries I wrote when I went to the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness in 2018. That year, I kept a daybook, which was inspired by Brian Blanchfield. Originally, I wanted to record my experiences in the Frank as meticulously as possible, every hike and animal and conservation practice, to get an understanding for what a place is like after a specific type of conservation policy is enacted. Most of that journaling has been scrapped (the original draft I had was 25 pages, including a lot of quotes from the books I read at the time). I kept the original structure and focused on observations about climate change and conservation and rhetoric—I focused on a few recurring ideas and concerns I had.
PC: How has writing in different forms like fiction and poetry affected your nonfiction writing?
KS: Writing nonfiction for me often feels like solving a puzzle, and poetry and fiction (for me at least) require a different kind of creativity. They’re more constructive, more like creating puzzles for other people to solve. As a reader, at least, I like fiction and poetry that gives me an opportunity to think. In nonfiction, the pleasure so often comes from watching someone else’s thinking, from seeing someone else work through their own experiences or a complex set of ideas. This might be a false dichotomy between the genres, of course. I know they’re more nuanced than I’m presenting them. Where I find the pleasure in reading often differs from where I find pleasure in writing, and I think those moments are surprising enough to make me rethink my writing.
The inventiveness I try for when writing fiction or poetry can often bleed into nonfiction, when I face a problem of dots I can’t connect to make a cohesive essay. When I’m stuck in nonfiction, I might start to move from idea to idea through associative leaps or a more narrative structure or a scene. My most creative works of nonfiction have borrowed from the generic conceits of fiction or poetry, through things like extended metaphor, persona, or even fiction. I use these craft techniques to get around difficult problems I encounter in nonfiction, especially when it comes to subject matter.
PC: In “Jeremiad” you mention a dissertation written by your father about public lands. How did your father influence your view on the environment and public lands?
KS: My dad—both my parents—introduced me to environmentalism early in my childhood. Environmental destruction was one of my earliest fears, and one that has lasted with me and grown, as I’m sure is true of many people. My dad in particular had a range of academic and pragmatic environmental authors on his shelf, including some activists.
I took my father’s dissertation to the River of No Return because it seemed like an ideal place to read it. It had been sitting on my shelf for years, and I wanted to finally sit down and read it. The Frank is an excellent example of the strengths and limits of twentieth century land conservation policies like those advanced by Senator Frank Church himself, as a project of preservation but with a limited scope of the beneficiaries of that preservation. I wanted to think through the problems and arrive at a better understanding of what I can do now, today, in the midst of environmental catastrophe. But I also found myself wondering how effective academic approaches can be as climate disaster is already here. My dad embedded himself in academia, and I found myself wondering if he left anything behind in that decision, if I would likewise have to leave something behind if I chose to follow that same path or try another route toward environmental justice.
From my parents, I inherited a broad range of ideas about nature, but I never really knew what to do about them. Maybe this is what I mean when I separate academics from activists. In my own experience, it’s easy to write an academic paper about the need for climate action, but too often this becomes an ending point rather than a starting point, and academics can fly home self-congratulatory that they’ve contributed to solving the climate crisis by artistically or rhetorically articulating the urgency of the problem. It’s a divide between theory and praxis. One needs the other, but theorists who don’t engage in praxis, I think, are taking the easy way out. It’s no longer enough to study the forces that are destroying our planet. What matters now, and has mattered for a long time, is recognizing that the people killing our planet have names and addresses and stock portfolios. I’m not at all trying to indict academics of the past. What I want is for academics to start taking action now, before it’s too late.
PC: How has growing up in Flagstaff shaped your view on the environment?
KS: Flagstaff is a niche, fun, weird, and also very touristy town, and I think its contradictions made me prickly when it comes to the environment. It’s a beautiful town that white settlers built on stolen land (like every beautiful place in this country). I directly benefit from the compartmentalization of land into large public recreational sectors (for hiking, biking, birdwatching) but I know that this compartmentalization comes at a cost, and produces a distinctly artificial definition of nature as one that can be framed for an audience. For years, it’s had a housing crisis, and it’s the only place in Arizona that can sustain a ski resort, which is only possible now through the use of artificial snow, which has its own environmental and cultural concerns that the ski resort has chosen to disregard for profit. I miss Flagstaff dearly and I’m mad that its leaders have leaned into its worst tendencies, emphasizing tourism and privatized student housing over community-centered events and affordable housing for residents. The people who make Flagstaff a lovely town, the artists and activists and teachers who live there and taught me to care about the world, are not the people who have the power to make these decisions, and I think that realization has equipped me for understanding climate change as a conflict rooted in power disparity, in class struggle to be specific. National leaders at COP26 who are most vocal about the urgency of climate change are from countries that contribute the least to the greenhouse gas emissions but are already bearing the worst effects of climate change. Meanwhile, the biggest emitters (such as the US) hesitate to implement necessary changes. This is the same power dynamic in Flagstaff. And, like Flagstaff, what I want is partly to reconcile the past, but changing the future is significantly more important to me.
To learn more, visit Keene’s website. Thank you for sharing, Keene!
Watch Me Trick Ghosts by Robert Krut (Codhill Press/SUNY 2021) | Robert Krut
Our Issue 28 Poetry Editor, Bree Hoffman, interviewed Robert Krut, a three-time SR contributor, about his new poetry collection Watch Me Trick Ghosts. The interview was conducted via email.
Robert Krut is the author of four books: Watch Me Trick Ghosts (Codhill/SUNY Press, 2021), The Now Dark Sky, Setting Us All on Fire (Codhill/SUNY Press, 2019), This is the Ocean (Bona Fide, 2013), and The Spider Sermons (BlazeVox, 2009). He teaches in the Writing Program and College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lives in Los Angeles.
Bree Hoffman: In a previous interview with Frontier you said that as a writer it is important to be “open to new ideas, new voices, new styles, [and] new suggestions.” What role has teaching poetry professionally played in the conception of your own poems? What have you learned from experiencing writing both inside and outside of the classroom?
Robert Krut: I don’t think I can overstate the importance teaching has played in my own writing, particularly recently. It has helped with my attempts to stay agile, excited, and engaged over the years. Working with students means working with numerous types of writers, each an individual requiring different suggestions, both in terms of reading and writing. There is a responsibility to share the entire scope of literature with them, and present them with the latest and most exciting poetry out in the world right now—this, in turn, helps keep me engaged, as well, and not complacent in my reading and participation.
During lockdown, in particular, my poetry courses were more than classes I was teaching—they were biweekly opportunities to talk with other writers (over Zoom, of course) who were all fully engaged in their process. If any of them happen to read this, in fact, I’d like them to know what an impact they had on my energy and enthusiasm toward writing over the past two years—their interest and passion really provided a spark for my own writing. In Norman Dubie’s great The Clouds of Magellan, he wrote “Work with young writers—never for them,” and it’s a quote I’ve thought about for years and years. It becomes more and more clear to me as a teacher. Working with poetry students isn’t a top-down operation. In the best cases, it is truly an interactive community.
BH: One recurring theme of your poems is the element of grimness that is present in the mundane. In “Walk Don’t Walk Walk Stand Still” we see it in the things people avoid, and in “The Dinner Party” we see it in the wounds people share with one another, sometimes willingly and sometimes not. What were some of your influences when writing these poems?
RK: Grimness in grimness has always been boring—I have always been fascinated by its presence, or at least the implication of its presence, in the mundane, that mysterious element in the everyday, as I’m sure many people are.
Way back in high school, my part time job was at a video store, which was perfect for a movie-obsessed teenager, but also meant I wound up working just past midnight. I would drive home through suburban New Jersey, fascinated by what I was seeing at that hour: stopping at my favorite 24-hour place and seeing people arguing in the parking lot, driving past the school and seeing people smoke right in the middle of the football field, passing a stray dog scratching at the church door near our house. It was all engrossing.
That job not only afforded me a reasonable excuse to be out so late, but it also led me to watch David Lynch’s Blue Velvet for the first of many times, which solidified this interest, and put it right there on the screen—in those opening moments, when Jeffrey finds the ear in the field, I saw the perfect representation of what I found interesting in the world, and it served as a sort of concrete seed for what would come, years later.
That was the same year I read “A Supermarket in California,” which shares similar DNA, the other side of a quiet town, slipping into something doomed. Those are the worlds where this book finds most of its poems; there, or in the flipside, in the mundane of the grim—they go hand in hand.
BH: There is a really interesting relationship that these poems have to other people as well as the world, creating a tone that is isolating and internal. For you, what is the role of these interpersonal connections in “Watch Me Trick Ghosts”?
RK: I sensed from the earliest stages of writing this book that it was going to be a quieter one, one that is, indeed, internal. As the themes began to become clear, it seemed to be the introverted sibling to the extroverted previous collection. This was led by the ideas I wanted to explore, but was surely enhanced by the fact that the vast majority was written during lockdown, where we were all isolated by circumstance. When you mention interpersonal connections, I flash to the fact that I wasn’t walking outside to talk to neighbors up close; there were simple hand waves from across the street. I wasn’t meeting strangers in crowded places; I was driving past closed up shops. This book is not “about” that particular time—that would be too narrow for my taste—but the writing couldn’t help but be influenced by it. In the end, it is indeed an internal book, centered on solitude in some ways, voices you hear when you are alone, and spirits tethered to your body as you move through the day. The title poem was one of the very first, and it served as a sort of guide.
BH: What are you currently working on in your writing and various workshops?
RK: In terms of my own writing, I’ve just been trying to write a little each day right now—sometimes that’s a whole draft of a poem, and sometimes it’s just a few lines. After a book comes out, I typically have an “deep breath” period where I’m writing, little by little, getting back to full momentum for where the poems will go next. As for my courses, this Winter I’ll be teaching a class specifically designed for third-year students who are beginning the process of creating a manuscript for their upcoming senior projects—I’ve taught this for the past few years, and it’s always an exciting process, and never the same. I’m looking forward to reading some great new work, and the chance to work closely with the students.
BH: What advice would you give to fellow writers and readers?
RK: The old standbys still hold. Write every day. Try to write every day. I know that’s an easy thing to say, and it’s hard to truly follow it all the time, but I have found that periods where I really try to write something every day, even something that turns out to be garbage, the momentum leads to truly productive periods.
And read a lot. Specifically, read people who are writing differently than you—don’t wind up in a literary echo chamber.
Finally, writing is such a solitary experience, which is often one of the nicest aspects of it, but it can slow down inspiration and growth. Reach out to friends, and other writers, while working. One of the rare benefits of social media is that, even if you don’t have someone in your immediate circle who writes, or reads poetry, there are ways to find a community, even if it is online. I love the independent nature of writing, alone, in the early morning hours, or late at night, but it’s not until I start sharing, editing, revising, and sharing again, that the poems start to breathe.
Michelle Ross | Shapeshifting by Michelle Ross (Stillhouse Press 2021)
We’re so excited to share an interview with past contributor Michelle Ross about her new short story collection, Shapeshifting. The book came out in November from Stillhouse Press. The interview was conducted via email by our blog editor, Sara Walker.
Sara Walker: Just about all the stories center on motherhood, children, and those relationships. What inspired this?
Michelle Ross: My first story collection There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You was less unified in its focus, so for my second collection, I wanted to be more deliberate with theme. As the mother of a young child, I found myself, perhaps inevitably, drawn to writing fiction about motherhood and mothers. Motherhood has been a big part of my lived experience these last eleven years. It’s on my mind. I’ve been mentoring high school writers for several years now via the Adroit Journal’s Summer Mentorship Program, and there’s this passage I quote from Lorrie Moore in my syllabus about the importance of writing about what’s on your mind, what you care about. One of the things she says is “You really have to write from the center.” She talks about how one of the big mistakes her students make is that they write about topics they don’t really think about or care about. I think it’s impossible to write well about a topic you’re not at least a little bit obsessed with. Trying to fake it won’t do. The story will be missing something crucial. I see that in the submission queue for Atticus Review, where I’m fiction editor: some stories are missing that spark of energy that you just can’t fake, and I think that whether or not a story has that spark has a lot to do with whether the writer is writing from the center.
SW: Why is it important to you to highlight the imperfection of motherhood and feelings of imposter syndrome?
MR: I was grappling with many questions in these stories—the impossible pressures put on mothers, the erasure of motherhood, what mothers owe their children, the tremendous power mothers have over their children, the violence and cruelty of children—but most of all I just wanted to write honestly about motherhood. No sugarcoating. No prettying things up. That’s what I want to do with any topic I write about. And one of the truths of motherhood is that no one is born a mother. There’s so much mythologizing about motherhood—that nurturing comes naturally to mothers, for example; that it comes naturally to women and girls in general. But the truth is more complicated. Nurturing isn’t an inherently female trait. It’s at least partly a learned trait. If you’ve rarely, if ever, been nurtured by someone, how do you learn to nurture another person? It wasn’t until my son was born that I really and fully grasped how incredibly vulnerable children are and how, therefore, incredibly easy it is for parents to harm their children; and, of course, the world is full of adults who were harmed by their parents, and many of those adults have children of their own.
SW: What is it about “Shapeshifting” that made you choose it as the title story?
MR: While the book’s title did come from the title story, the book was not titled after the title of that story; at the time, “Shapeshifting,” the story, had a different title altogether. It was originally published in The Pinch as “Gestation.” The real inspiration for the book’s title was a metaphor within the story. The pregnant protagonist in the story says that as a kid she liked the idea of being a shapeshifter but that it didn’t occur to her that pregnant women are shapeshifters, too: “Shapeshifting isn’t the way I’d imagined it. I’d always pictured myself behind the wheels of other bodies I assumed. This is the opposite. I’m the wheels, not the driver.” I wasn’t yet finished writing all the stories in this book when I decided that Shapeshifting was the perfect title. All humans are shapeshifters (consider puberty, for example), but I’d say mothers are a particularly interesting kind of shapeshifter. Motherhood is a strange metamorphosis. Mothers might come out of pregnancy looking more or less like they did before, but the world sees them as other than who they were. Whatever kind of mother one is, motherhood changes one in a deep way. There is no going back.
I’m not much of a fan of books sharing the same title as a story within. I’m wary of giving so much weight to one particular story. But when the editors at Stillhouse Press suggested I retitle this story to match the book’s title, I agreed that it was a better title for the story, too; and I kind of like that the story was titled after the book rather than the other way around.
SW: “The Sand and the Sea” is written in a different format – almost like vignettes, rather than a straightforward narrative. How did you make that choice?
MR: This story originated in a weekend workshop I took with the phenomenal Kathy Fish some years ago. The exercise was to write a braided flash piece. If I remember correctly, I think we started by creating three columns on a piece of paper and each column was dedicated to a different thread. I know that one of the threads was to be composed of lines that began with language such as “I wonder…” or “I wish…” I believe the other threads were supposed to be two different time periods in the character’s life? I played for many, many months after that workshop with the pieces I’d written—rearranging, cutting, adding, trying to get the right pieces in the right order. In a way, I felt like I was going back to my roots in this story. When I first started writing short stories seriously in college, the writer who changed everything for me was Amy Hempel. I had struggled with plot, with how to string sentences and paragraphs together in such a way that they were a story. Long scenes, long exposition felt unwieldy. Then I read Reasons to Live and fell so in love with how Amy Hempel constructs her stories out of these concise little fragments—scenes lasting no more than a paragraph or a page or so. Of course, some of those stories aren’t just pieced together somewhat like a series of flash fictions, but some are flash fictions. I didn’t learn the term “flash fiction” until several years later, and I don’t think I tried writing my own flash fictions until many years after that. However, I did start writing and thinking about writing differently after reading Hempel—thinking about stories in a more modular way, as composed of these tight little units that I could rearrange to different effects. Many years would pass before I would try once again to write stories that weren’t so modular.
SW: Which story was the most challenging to write? Why?
MR: Most stories are challenging for me, honestly. I work on stories, including flash fictions, for many months, often many years, before finishing and submitting them. Maybe I should answer this question backwards. One of the easiest stories for me to write was “A Mouth is a House for Teeth.” The general premise and tone of it came to me quickly. Then, before I’d written much of anything down, I floated in one of those so-called sensory deprivation tanks for the first time. I spent pretty much the whole hour thinking about that story. It was a weird and wonderful experience. I felt like I was alone floating out in the middle of a dark ocean, and this story was building in that darkness. After, I went to a coffee shop and wrote pretty much all day—by hand in a notebook, which I hate to say I rarely do these days, and probably should do more often. Writing by hand has a different kind of energy and rhythm. I can easily remember which stories of mine I first drafted by hand and which I first drafted on the computer. Anyway, after that I spent several weeks typing up the pieces, fitting them together, discovering what was missing, what could be cut, and so on. I think that from start to finish, that story took only a few months to finish, which for me is incredibly fast.
SW: “Keeper Four” approaches motherhood in a way different from the other stories; it’s sci fi-esque. What inspired this story?
MR: One of the primary inspirations was a book I’d read with my son when he was younger: Unlikely Friendships: 47 Remarkable Stories From the Animal Kingdom. The photos and stories in the book are endearing, but at the same time, this book creeped me out. Some of the unlikely friendships involved predators befriending prey. Some of the unlikely “friendships” weren’t friendships at all, but mother-child relationships. For example: a dog mothering a monkey. Of course, a mother-child relationship is quite a different kind of relationship than a friendship. We expect friendships to be reciprocal, not so much mother-child relationships. Sure, young children can be loving and kind, but even many of their more charming behaviors are largely driven by their own needs, their own survival. A very young child clings to their mother more for security and safety than out of “love.” That’s not a judgment; I think it’s only natural for a creature that is vulnerable and helpless to charm larger, more capable creatures into protecting it. Anyway, this book disturbed me. Something about the mislabeling of these relationships. Something about the way humans praise females of a species for being nurturing. Something about the oohing and aahing over predators refraining from doing what it is in their nature to do—to prey. From that disturbance was born the idea of humans experimenting to develop a drug to induce mothering behavior even in the most unlikely of candidates.
SW: What do you hope readers will keep with them after finishing Shapeshifting?
MR: I hope that readers find Shapeshifting to be greater than the sum of its parts. I see these stories as being in conversation with each other, and I think I’m able to achieve something more in the book as a whole than I could in individual stories. But that said, mostly I just hope readers find something of value in this book, whatever that may be for them as individuals—whether it be that they feel seen, that they feel less lonely, that they’re entertained, that these stories make them think, or that something is illuminated for them.
SW: You also write collaboratively with Kim Magowan. How did your experience with collaborative writing influence this collection?
MR: It’s when I’m feeling a bit in a slump that I’m mostly likely to nudge Kim into writing something together. Collaboration reminds me that writing is as simple on some level as making choices, and that all choices can be unmade, too. It helps train me to make choices quickly, to keep moving forward, instead of allowing a story to stagnate in indecision. It trains me to keep a story’s momentum going. When we collaborate, we typically pass a story back and forth rapidly, several times in a day sometimes. I write a few paragraphs, she writes a few paragraphs. Even a long story gets drafted within a week or so. That energy carries over into my own writing. Writing with Kim always renews my excitement for my own projects.
SW: What does your writing space look like?
MR: When my partner and I bought our house about fourteen years ago, it was important to me to be able to have a home office of my own. I wanted a room with a door, a room that was all mine, a room meant for nothing other than writing (and reading). This was important even back when we were in an apartment, only then we didn’t have all that much space so I had converted our walk-in closet into my writing space. Since the beginning of the pandemic, my home office is no longer just my writing space; it’s also where I do the job that pays the bills. Most of 2020 was a struggle because I was trying to do both these things at the same desk and on the same computer. When I tried to write fiction, I was distracted by work clutter. Early this year, I brought in a second desk and computer so that I have a writing half of my office and a work half of my office. Everything has gone much more smoothly since.
SW: What does writing mean to you?
MR: Writing is how I discover meaning and how I discover what I think. Writing is how I communicate most effectively. Writing is how I push back against the things that bug me. Writing makes me more present in my life, more observant. Writing is hard work but also immensely pleasurable. There’s no other way I’d rather spend my time.
Shapeshifting won the Stillhouse Press 2020 Short Fiction Prize and is available for purchase from Stillhouse Press. Check out more from Michelle on her website and read her stories in Issue 17 and Issue 20. Thank you so much, Michelle!
Heart Radical by Anne Liu Kellor (She Writes Press 2021)
We are thrilled that we recently had the chance to interview Anne Liu Kellor about her first book, Heart Radical: A Search for Language, Love, and Belonging. Heart Radical is a memoir about Anne’s experiences navigating her ethnicity, heritage, and place in this world. The interview was conducted via email by our blog editor, Sara Walker.
Sara Walker: Could you describe the inspiration for this memoir?
Anne Liu Kellor: Between 1996 and 2001, I traveled back and forth between the Pacific Northwest and China, my mother’s homeland, as well as to Tibet. Growing up bilingual, I set off as a young, twentysomething mixed-race Chinese American woman searching for my connection to my linguistic roots, as well as to my greater path in life. Underneath this, what I discovered was my desire to speak truth, to break silence, and to follow my intuition. To give voice to all the moments where I knew something in my body, but could not find the right words to own what I knew. And to give voice to how I come from a lineage of silence—of stories not told, trauma not named, feelings not expressed.
SW: Much of the book is written in present tense, but you’re recalling your past. What precipitated that choice?
ALK: Originally, I wrote a lot of the chapters as stand-alone pieces, experimenting with voice and form. Eventually it became clear that my writing in present tense felt more charged, whereas past tense got too bogged down in reflection—reflection that in some cases had not had enough time to gestate, so it could not say all that I wanted it to. As I revised the memoir over many years, my perspective on this period also kept deepening, and thus there was the temptation to keep revising, adding layers to what the story was “about.” Finally, by changing it all to present tense (and interspersing chapters that were purely backstory or more lyrical), I tried to create both a traditional arc-driven narrative of my outer journey, and hint at all of the deeper layers of spiritual questioning. All of this was a challenge because my story ultimately resisted one tidy arc and redemptive ending. It was hard for me to explain my spiritual unfolding at the time, because some of those lessons I’m still living out to this day. So while I wanted to keep the narrative focused on a certain time period, there were deeper layers I just couldn’t get to yet. The point of view choices were in part a response to this tension.
SW: I’m sure some of your past was challenging to write about. How did you navigate that? How did you get into the headspace to write in depth about your past?
ALK: Since I worked on the book on and off over twenty years (!), when I wrote a lot of the early drafts, the events I was describing were only a couple years in the past—still relatively fresh. Plus, I had a ton of journals to mine for details. Often I would first spend time reading my old journals and free-writing, and then I would find an image or scene or line that carried energy, and use that as a point of departure to begin a more crafted piece. Sometimes I played music that evoked the emotion of that period for me, and I also had the gift of long consecutive days to settle into writing. I find I need that extended silent, alone time to get a discovery draft out. Later, with all the stages of editing, I can dip in and out more easily.
SW: As we all know, the Covid-19 pandemic brought forth intensely anti-Asian-American sentiments. What was it like to work on and release this book in a year when Asian-American violence was so high?
ALK: I don’t tend to watch a lot of news or let myself get swept up in Facebook scrolling if I can help it, so while I stay abreast with headlines, I also often feel insulated from the sudden impact of the rise and fall of violence. I choose when to let it in. I don’t need to read the details to know how it impacts me; I feel the swell of pain continually, the pain of being alive in this ignorant, racist world. The ways in which all of our pain is connected. I have, however, continued to deepen my relationship to other Asian American and mixed-race writers over the last several years. I’ve offered more classes for our communities, as a way for us to share hard stories, interrogate complicated relationships, own our voices, and join the crucial conversations around race that our world is having more of these days. What does it mean to be Asian American—to be so often erased from the conversation or seen as a model minority monolith, and how can we own our inherited biases, privileges, and participation in white supremacy culture?
In implicit bias tests, Asian American women are the group that is viewed as the least capable of leadership. How have we been conditioned to see ourselves as silent or weak too? The outer violence against Asian Americans—or any racial group for that matter— starts with these kinds of fucked up biases and dehumanizing beliefs. Becoming a more visible, public writer and more fully owning the political identifier as Asian American, raises the stakes for me and my writing. I am increasingly aware of how I am a part of a lineage, and how sharing my story creates more space for other people to believe that their story matters too.
SW: In Heart Radical, you’ve captured countless experiences from your life and share them in a remarkably lyrical and straightforward way. Which memoirs and memoir authors inspire you?
ALK: A lot of my early writing was influenced by my mentor from grad school, Brenda Miller. I learned a lot from her about how to trust that images can carry deep metaphorical resonance, or that one can convey so much through juxtaposition and white space. Poets are often my favorite memoirists. So much can be encapsulated in one line—so much of what is not being said, for the reader to fill in. Recently, I’ve been super inspired by memoirs like Tastes Like War by Grace M. Cho, The Magical Language of Others by E.J. Koh, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T. Kira Madden, and Made in China by Anna Qu. Old favorite non-linear collage memoirs include The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn, and Safekeeping by Abigail Thomas.
SW: You’re a teacher in addition to a writer. How has your role as an educator shaped you and your writing?
ALK: So much so. In all of my courses, my students and I spend time writing together from prompts. I always participate to make sure that I stay engaged with the vulnerability and presence it takes to show up in the moment and write, then share. Teaching also keeps me actively exploring new voices and forms. Whatever I’m reading then bleeds into my own work. Writing never gets old; even if some of my thematic material can feel well-tread, there’s always a new angle or way to approach it—if I can keep experimenting and staying receptive. Also, being a teacher connects me to so many amazing writers. The work of a writer can be very isolating, so nurturing community has become increasingly important to me. It helps me remember who I am writing for and why I am doing this. Why words matter. What kind of healing and connection can be forged through the often long, slow, plodding process of shaping a piece on the page.
SW: Heart Radical is your first book. What does that mean to you?
ALK: It means it’s about f’ing time! It means hallelujah, it is finally out of my meddling hands, fears, and perfectionism, and into the world of my readers, completing the cycle from fruition to full completion. 😊 It means that I learned SO much through writing this book and revising it over the years, especially about not giving up. It means I have a really strong sense now of who I am as a writer, and I’ve also written so many essays along the way that I also have a full collection that I’m ready to publish, called Uncertainty, Trust, and the Present Moment: Essays from In Between. And I have another memoir, Artifacts of Longing, that I’ve been working on for over a decade. I suppose I now can say that I’m a writer who works on books in cycles—write, let it rest and work on something else when it is driving you crazy or being rejected, but always return, return, return. Return to that seed of trust that a story or book needs to be written. Return to what calls you back, won’t let go. Book-length memoirs especially demand their own timeline for the lessons of a longer period of life to metabolize. We may think we are “ready” or “done,” but so much of the writing—and publishing—process is also not in our control.
SW: What does your writing space look like?
ALK: I write at one end of a big room with an A-frame roof and warm cedar walls. It’s a cabin in residential Seattle, a special place, a home I inherited from my old neighbor (a part of my second memoir’s story). I look out on cedar branches, salal, Indian plum, and moss—a classic Pacific Northwest landscape. Otherwise you can find me at the window seat journaling, or propped up on my bed with my journal or looking through binders of work, music playing, incense lit. I find that when I’m not at the desk I often sink into the more emotional or poetic aspects of my work… mining for new insight or lines, connections. Whereas when I’m at my desk I’m editing on the computer and in productivity mode.
SW: What does writing mean to you?
ALK: Writing is my meditation, my daily practice. It’s work too, yes, but primarily it’s a way of being in the world—a way of paying attention, honoring small details, honoring the wide span of history and time, timelessness. Writing is a way to capture all that is hard to express, a way to revisit old wounds and heal, a way to make amends, a way to see clearly, and sometimes, to forgive. Writing can do so much. It’s a way of connecting, a way of witnessing, a way of praising and mourning, and a way of being.
SW: What advice would you give to up-and-coming Asian-American writers?
ALK: Do not be afraid to put anything down on the page in early drafts. To write what you can’t imagine yourself publishing or sharing. To write it all. To trust, that in time, with practice and community and mentorship, you will be able to name and share more. But this is a lifelong practice—you don’t have to say it all at once. You don’t have to share it with your parents. Your writing has important value, even if it just lives in your notebooks or is entrusted to a few readers. Your writing can help you grow as a human being. And yes, if you want it to, when you are ready, your writing can also challenge long-held familial silences or legacies or beliefs. Make sure you find community to share this journey with. Seek out classes and teachers who are supportive. Create writing groups with fellow students you admire. Trust that if writing truly calls to you, you won’t regret following this path. There is nothing more exhilarating than finally giving yourself permission to do what you love.
To learn more about Anne, visit her website or Twitter. Heart Radical is published by She Writes Press and available for purchase from Bookshop. Our heartfelt thanks to Anne for agreeing to the interview and sharing so eloquently!
Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, The Poetry Review (UK), and TriQuarterly, as well as other journals and magazines.
Jane’s Poem, “Still Life With”, originally published in Basalt:
Still Life With
There is nothing with which
you can still life.
Even so, the painter strives
in his atelier to ransom hams
from perishability
and greater his art
who can garnish the dish
gone off
with a blood-sozzled fly.
Less stunning are the lobsters
and fish in sequin sheaths
and mundane
is the unplucked duck
that dangles on the wall.
…
There is nothing with which
you can still life.
Even the veriest vase
in trompe-l’oeil
is subject to cracks
under lacquer
as sure as silver ewers cloud
and handmade goblets drip
because sand-made
glass is viscous,
a deserter
who waits and waits.
…
There is nothing with which
you can still life.
Even the twin halves
of fruits ferment
and peaches’ cheeks
go weak
as the jowls of a gran
who takes her dentures out.
Art cannot halt
this lavish thing
that pockmarks
lemon peels.
With life still so unsated
and so corruptible,
nothing, nothing
can still it,
shifty iridescent life.
Jane’s Poem, “Rarity”, originally published in The Shore:
Rarity
My sons, given crayon bins, mine for the rarities: cadmium
red and razzmatazz. Given a baseball diamond, they kneel
in a kibble of limestone, each sifting for chipped jewels,
each sure to come home with his fist of small stones, asking
to be told they are gems. Already they have learned to want
what is scarce.
Blame me.
I want to draw such afternoons
a corral of colored wax. I want to rake a moat around them,
to defend as an island this trove of gravel, this now.
Jane’s Poem, “I read that the moon is rusting”, originally published in Wilderness:
I read that the moon is rusting
My son defines time--its river, not its measure--
as the way one event changes into another.
I am letting what my son knows of time
climb and turn a laddered wheel in my mind.
I am letting the river run the mill that changes
one kind of unknowing into another.
. . .
Once a student told me that her mother kept
vases of flowers long past their prime.
She thought them still beautiful, wizened tulips,
their petals knuckling into pecans.
. . .
I read that the moon is rusting. Here on earth
a breeze kicked up by passing cars
fans a dead katydid. Invisible thumbs shuffle
her wings’ gauzy underthings.
. . .
One event is turning into another. My son grows
tall but is still young enough to trail
a hand, offhandedly, in the current that carries him.
There is so little we can demand from time
but I would ask to be like a tulip, like a katydid,
like the henna-chinned moon:
one of those who, done or undone, changes next
into another kind of wonder.
The following is an interview conducted by Superstition Review‘s Poetry Editor, Carolina Quintero, on April 27, 2021. It regards Jane’s poetry, looking specifically at both her process and inspirations.
Carolina Quintero: Hi, Jane! Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview with me. It was such a joy reading your poetry. You have such grace with your word choice and craft… Motherhood is a frequent theme in your work. How has your writing evolved through motherhood?
Jane Zwart: Early on, having kids meant I wrote fewer poems, but that was a matter of time and mental space, not any shortage of material. On the contrary, the raw material I found for poetry multiplied wildly when my boys were born. Of course it did. Babies are fragile enough that you can see the miracles pulsing under their skin and gripped in their tiny irrational hands. As for toddlers, they tutor you in the ways language works and breaks, its patterns and exceptions; in picking up syntax, they are full of defiance and delight, and that’s a good thing for a writer to steep in. So I did, when my boys were little, rake in so many gems. But most of them I had to store for those years, that season. Which is why I labeled a folder “poem crumbs” and stuffed it with notes, giving myself something to mine when they got bigger, more independent. I’ll add this: as Wendell (11) and Ambrose (7) grow older, I find whole lines of poetry in things they say. I borrow their wonder. And their tenderness toward the world heightens my tenderness toward the world.
CQ: Your poetry is dense with imagery and concise with word choice. What is your process like to achieve these traits in your work?
JZ: Well, thank you. The images come to me first, almost always, and I suppose that’s why the poems are, as you say, “dense with imagery.” Sometimes that density occurs collage-wise, through a bunch of images testing their angles and echoes against each other. But sometimes in a poem, a single image grows dense; the poem stuffs and coats the picture or object with so many hints and arguments. And this will sound foolish, but for me the process behind wielding imagery is looking and thinking. I owe my art history professors, Henry Luttikhuizen and Charles Young, a huge debt of gratitude for training me to do just that: to look and to think. I’m also indebted when it comes to word choice. To my parents, who filled our house with shelves and shelves of words. To other poets, who have sent me to the dictionary but who have also let me fall in love with perfectly ordinary words transfigured by their neighbors on the page. And to Roget.
CQ: What inspired you to write about time and its unpredictability?
JZ: The easiest way to answer this question would be to name writers I love who capture the way time snags, how the past and future breathe down the neck of the present, how history loops. I think of novelists first: Toni Morrison, W.G. Sebald, William Faulkner, Gabriel García Márquez, Virginia Woolf, David Mitchell. But of course the answer is also subjective, and for me it has to do with the awful mortality of all these people I love, the shortness of a life–which I hold in tension with the belief that our souls are not mortal but, rather, each breathed by God into the little husk of a self. I use poetry, then, to adjust my grasp on time. A poem slows time, a little, but it is also a way of loosening my grasp on the perishable world of people and things that I tend to hold too tightly. After all, to write something is to relinquish it as well as to preserve it.
CQ: What are your poetic influences as of late?
JZ: Amit Majmudar. All of his books–What He Did in Solitary is the most recent–have influenced me. Or at least I hope they have. Amit balances wit and weight so deftly; with him, “the work is play for mortal stakes,” as Frost put it. Amit, though, has also influenced me more directly–an immense kindness on his part. Over the past couple years, he and I have “mirror-written” a great deal, taking turns conjuring titles for which we both then improvise a poem, swapping them when time’s up. Put simply, Amit has taught me to write to fill in a given shape. Before, I always waited on the poem to sprout on its own. But there are many others, too. For instance, I love Catherine Pierce’s work so much that it borders on covetise. And her new book, Danger Days, has more or less converted my husband into reading contemporary poets to whom he is not married–no small feat. Who else? Well, Danusha Laméris’s Bonfire Opera is vivid and heartbreaking and heartmending, and having finished it, I still keep it in my bag for good company in long lines. And I return to Christian Wiman and Naomi Shihab Nye and Wisława Szymborska’s poems (Szymborksa’s in translation) again and again. Finally, I cannot wait to be further influenced by Kasey Jueds’s new book (I loved Keeper), Kaveh Akbar’s Pilgrim Bell, and W.S. Herbert’s Dear Specimen.
CQ: What advice would you give to young writers?
JZ: Read. Read the dead and the living. Read in translation. Read the work of writers who make you feel less lonely and of writers who feel like absolute strangers. Pay the world around you the sweetest, fiercest attention that you can, and take notes. Write. Write hoping that you outgrow your art again and again. Write as if you were unafraid. Write as if you were patient. Find your kin. Review books. Send fan mail. Register for the workshop. Attend the reading.
CQ: What are you currently working on in your writing?
JZ: I keep writing poems, and I keep writing book reviews. I keep trying to figure out where to prune for clarity’s sake and where to embellish for beauty’s. I’m also trying to find a publisher for my full-length manuscript. The odds are always so slender, of course, but perhaps this latest incarnation of the thing–which the brilliant poet W.S. Herbert reordered for me, schooling me in manuscript construction along the way–will be lucky. I do think a little luck is a must.
Brittney Corrigan is the author of the poetry collections Navigation, 40 Weeks, and most recently, Breaking, a chapbook responding to events in the news over the past several years. Daughters, a series of persona poems in the voices of daughters of various characters from folklore, mythology, and popular culture, is forthcoming from Airlie Press in September, 2021. Corrigan was raised in Colorado and has lived in Portland, Oregon for the past three decades, where she is an alumna and employee of Reed College. She is currently at work on her first short story collection and on a collection of poems about climate change and the Anthropocene age.
Brittney’s poem, “Whale Fall”, originally published in Thalia:
The ocean’s innumerable tiny mouths
await the muffled impact like baby birds.
Sediment clouds up at the deadened
settling, and the flesh is set upon. How
the weight of loss can be beautiful
in its opening. Luminous worms undulate
like party streamers as isopods
and lobsters arrive to feast. This body
holds an ecosystem unto itself: species
found nowhere else but here, cleaved
to the sunken remains. Sleeper sharks
move in slow and gentle, ease
the messy carcass to gleaming bones.
And then, how the skeletal rafters
of grief fuzz and bloom. How sometimes
the coldest depths allow for such measured
undoing. All the while hungry lives
swarm and spread, come to stay.
Limpets attach to the unhidden core. Sorrow
in its abundance crushes, cycles, feeds.
How the body rests, rich in what sustains.
Brittney’s poem, “Iteration”, originally published in Feral:
after the Aldabra rail
One flightless bird evolves twice, before and after extinction.
Collective bodies remember what it is to feel safe.
You remember this, too. Before the world came lapping.
A coral atoll—lagoon brimming with black-tipped sharks,
no people—flourishes. Giant tortoises wander between
turquoise worlds of sea and sky. The birds have no
reason to fly away. A body with no enemies simplifies.
There was a time when you didn’t need wings.
Nothing is wasted. The birds push their long, ruddy necks
through the coastal grass. Nothing chases them down.
There was a time when you never looked behind you.
The first time the ocean takes the island, every species on it
goes extinct. A mass drowning. Thousands of years later,
the water recedes. Fossils and sand surface; flora blooms.
The bird’s white-throated cousins land on the shores.
There was a time when your throat was open to the sky.
The bird evolves again. Again relinquishes its wings.
Again has no enemies. Again is a singular kind of being.
You can do this, too. Sharks circle but can’t cross land.
Bodies remold. Bodies wingless. Bones tell stories. Versions
of stories. You recolonize your body. What it is to survive.
Brittney’s poem, “Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit”, originally published in The Wild Word:
The night a neighbor girl knocks on our door,
baby rabbit in the bowl of her hands, I place
it in a darkened box of straw, know it won’t
make it to morning. My grandmother’s tradition
for the first day of each month: stand at the edge
of the bed upon waking, make a wish, yell
Rabbit! Rabbit! Rabbit! and jump. Tiny rabbit
body in my palm, soft and cold and still.
Rabbit sitting on the moon, pestling herbs
for the gods. A chant of white or grey rabbits
to ward off smoke. The Black Rabbit of Inlé:
his taking of this small life, his taking of my
grandmother when I was still small. I must
give this little un-rabbit back to the ground.
Oh, to be so frightened that your heart cannot
go on. But first, I must wake my young child.
On this first of the month, I ease tangles
separate through my hands. Sense something
quivering just beneath what’s real as I leave
the room. From down the hall, I hear
the bedframe sigh. Little undone heart cupped
in my hands. Little voice shouting a herd
of rabbits onto the floorboards. I hop
from foot to foot as they run past.
The following is an interview conducted on April 28, 2021, by Superstition Review‘s Poetry Editor, Carolina Quintero. It is in regards to Brittney’s works, writing process, and inspirations.
Carolina Quintero:Hello, Brittney! Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview with me. I really enjoyed reading your poetry. You have such a passion for animals and our environment and you put their importance into beautiful words. I also thought it was really striking and genius how you connect animal life to human life…Your writing frequently involves animals and the environment. What experiences or special interests have driven you to center your writing around this topic?
Brittney Corrigan: I’ve been drawn to animals and the natural world since I was a small child. I grew up in the gorgeous landscape of Colorado where my family spent a lot of time in the mountains and generally outdoors. And when I wasn’t playing outside or surrounded by a zoo’s worth of pets, I was watching episodes of Wild Kingdom. For years I wanted to become a marine biologist, drawn to the ocean and its creatures from my land-locked home. Though I’ve always felt connected with and protective of the environment, living in Oregon for the past three decades—with its wild coasts, wild animals, and wildfires—has strengthened that affinity and resolve. As the realities of climate change have made their way into my consciousness over the years—from my founding of an “environmental action club” in high school in the 1980s, to my love for the flora and fauna of the place where I live, to raising up my children in a world fraught with natural disasters and extinctions—I wanted to move toward action to preserve this planet and the life forms with which we share it, beginning with bringing awareness to these issues through my writing.
CQ:Your poems carry thorough knowledge about animals and ecosystems. What inspires you to learn about this?
BC: Voracious curiosity! I subscribe to countless email newsletters that showcase all things weird, wild, and wonderful (such as Atlas Obscura and National Geographic), and I love listening to podcasts of that ilk, as well (such as RadioLab and Ologies). I keep a running document of links to articles and oddities I find particularly fascinating that I come back to time and again to mine ideas for my work. In both my science-oriented poetry and my short fiction, the research is one of my favorite parts of the writing process. I love diving headlong into educating myself about a place or a species that I haven’t encountered before or that I just want to learn more about. In a high school English class, my teacher once presented me with a quote by Henry James: “Be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!” I carry that desire to notice, explore, and elucidate the world around me into my writing life.
CQ:What advocacy do you hope your poems will achieve? What audience do you hope your poems will reach?
BC: By bringing the plight of various ecosystems and species into my work, I hope to make what can seem like an overwhelming problem to tackle both particular and personal. I think if folks feel connected to the natural world and its creatures in specific, tangible ways, they will want to help and make change in small, meaningful ways. I hope that my poems reach folks of many interests, backgrounds, and generations and move them to learn more, and to do more, to combat climate change, extinction, and the effects of our current Anthropocene age.
CQ:What are your poetic influences as of late?
BC: My current favorite poets are Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Ada Limón, Ross Gay, Natalie Diaz, and Camille Dungy. I’m also enjoying reading essays on topics of extinction and the natural world by writers such as Michelle Nijhuis, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Elena Passarello, Linda Hogan, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs.
CQ:What advice would you give to young writers?
BC: I would say start with what you know and move outward toward your passions and ideas or topics you want to find out more about. First write for yourself, and then, when you are ready to share your writing with others, find your people. Seek out your fellow writers and readers with whom to share your work. Find a group of folks you trust and can share your roughest drafts with, and also find the mentors whose feedback will help your writing become stronger. And don’t be afraid to write outside of the boundaries you’ve been taught or the parameters you’ve been given. Break the rules and bust the genres open.
CQ:What are you currently working on in your writing?
BC: I recently completed a manuscript of poems about climate change, extinction, and the Anthropocene age. I’m now exploring those same topics in my first collection of short stories. As to poetry, I think science, ecology, and the natural world will always find their way into my work. I’m not sure exactly what’s next, but I’ve no doubt it will reveal itself to me, like bright animal eyes blinking out of the dark.
Be sure to check out both Brittney’s website and Twitter.
Following is an interview conducted by Superstition Review‘s Poetry Editor, Erin Peters.
Jaclyn Youhana Garver is a freelance writer in Fort Wayne, Indiana. She writes fiction and poetry, and she has been featured in Narrow Road, Poets Reading the News, and Prometheus Dreaming (forthcoming). Her work has also been chosen by the Wick Poetry Center as a Traveling Stanza selection.
Jaclyn’s Poem:
A COLLEGE GIRL MAKES WARDROBE DECISIONS BASED ON THE POSSIBILITY OF A RANDOM TSA SCREENING
1964
White kid gloves / cinched waist / her perched hat the
precise plum match to her two-piece suit / a corsage
(seriously, a goddamned corsage)
/ a Cherries in the Snow pout / a blushing visage
coral or rose / a fur, perhaps, in beaver or lamb.
2004
Pajama pants, peppered in cartoons / flip flops
with jewels that stud the thongs / pigtails
(seriously, goddamn pigtails)
/ a gray T-shirt that boasts,
“Journalists do it daily.”
Don’t look at me, Terry, standing in line. I know
you’ve a quota to meet, so many at random
searches to complete to assure you don’t permit on
the plane any drugs, bombs or hydrogen dioxide.
(Water, Terry, I’m talking about water.)
It doesn’t matter, though. You’ll search me nonetheless,
just like that agent last time and the agent who’ll be next.
And anyways, I’ll stick with PJs and pigtails, my sandwich
board to shout I’m threatening like sidewalk chalk, an eagle scout, freckles, and winks, but apparently, the extra melanin
in my skin, a gift from my father, means you must pull me
from the line, away from my friends—none of whom you
also select at random, I see, goddamn it, Terry—so you
run the backs of your Caucasian hands along my Persian arms,
my cartooned inseam, my Assyrian torso. Then you make me move
my Iranian pigtails from my Middle Eastern shoulders.
You look so bored, Terry, and I wonder if you notice:
We’re quite the chatty portrait of our country tis of thee.
Interview With Jaclyn:
The setting of your poem is very specific and relatable for people who have travelled in American airports. What inspired you to write about the experience of a TSA screening?
This summer, I found a photo of myself at an airport in 2004, with two college friends, on the way to a Society of Professional Journalists conference in NYC. For the three or so years after 9/11, I began to be “randomly” searched on every flight I boarded. Seriously. Every flight. I thought it would help if I dressed in an unintimidating way. I remember I did this each time I flew, but it was wild to see photographic proof, especially compared to two other young adults who were dressed in, you know, normal airplane-appropriate clothing. Finding the photo, seeing how 21-year-old me felt like she had to dress, seriously pissed me off.
You’ve spent an impressive amount of time working for daily newspapers during your professional career. How do you feel this writing experience impacted you creatively?
I can’t even imagine writing creatively without my journalism experience. Writing for a daily newspaper made me completely deadline-focused. If a journalist doesn’t finish her story on time, there could an actual hole in the newspaper. Plus, the piece needs to be done well and accurately, often in hours or less—journalists don’t have days and days to perfect a piece of writing.
I adore the saying Done is better than perfect. Writers, especially creative writers, can get stuck in this I can’t show this to anyone because it’s not perfect hole. Then nothing ever gets finished. Writing for a daily newspaper was a wonderful way to keep from being too precious about my words. What I write matters, and it’s important to me, but once I turn in a story, it’s on to the next thing.
Writing for daily publication also gave me tough skin. I adore editor feedback and love seeing how subsequent drafts improve. Similarly, I also trust my gut. Writing is a wonderful mixture of both subjectivity and objectivity, even in poetry. My newspaper experience gave me an almost scientific approach to being creative.
What audience do you hope to reach through your poetry? Why is this audience meaningful to you?
As a reader, the best feeling is “Oh my goodness, you too? I thought I was the only one.” As a writer, then, that’s who I want to reach—anyone who has felt like me, to help them feel less alone. Strangely, the opposite is true, too: It’s such a rush to be told “I never thought of it in that way before.”
Those audiences are meaningful to me because it means we have a shared experience. Especially in 2020, feeling a connection—to anyone, even some writer you’ve never met—is vital.
How has the global pandemic impacted your creative process?
The pandemic hasn’t impacted my creative process so much as it’s impacted my creative output. I’ve written poetry since I was about 12 and I had a writing minor in college, so writing creatively has always been a part of my life. However, the pandemic made me itch to do more. I answered that by enrolling in a poetry class. The instructor helped me figure out what was missing from my poetry unlike any writing teacher I’ve had before. After the class, I asked where she was teaching next, and I signed up for that class, too. She helped me see where and how my work could be improved, which simultaneously showed me how to edit my own work.
This year has been hard, and there are a few things I can point to and say “That, specifically, made things a little easier.” Writing poetry is one of those things.
What is the most important piece of advice you have received as a writer?
In college, a journalism professor taught us to let the other person have the last say. When someone reaches out to a reporter to complain about something they wrote, the caller or emailer doesn’t actually care what the writer has to say about it. They just want to be heard (and maybe to be nasty). That knowledge, that someone who has something mean to say isn’t looking for a response, is incredibly freeing.
What are your upcoming projects?
I have a number of manuscripts in the works, but two are currently taking up the most of my time—a poetry book and a women’s fiction novel, which I will be pitching to agents early next year. I also write horror short stories. I love bouncing between genres and working on projects of varying lengths.
Following is an interview conducted by Superstition Review‘s Poetry Editor, Erin Peters.
Paul Chuks is an emerging Nigerian poet, writer and song writer, studying philosophy at the University of Benin, Edo state, Nigeria. He has appeared or is forthcoming in StreetCake Magazine, Kalahari Review, Neurological Magazine, Afritondo,The Remnant Archive and was recently shortlisted for The 49th Street‘s top ten poets in Nigeria. When Paul is not reading or writing songs, he’s critiquing the hiphop game or mimicking Michael Jackson.
Paul’s Poem:
To the Man Standing at the corner lifting the placard that said “All Lives Matter” as a protest against Black Lives Matter.
Your ancestors have apparelled in seem like bruteness in the past
But in this one, you are standing in a corner watching black lives evanesce like lights beholding a murky sky.
You think about justice, but your soul is
a leaky faucet, expelling your empathy
into an abysmal pit.
My ancestors’ tears are the ghosts of this poem/appearing as metaphors/telling you to drop that placard, go home & shut your mouth like Trump’s border[s]/because you are slow-dancing with the injustice of their history.
You are sipping our pain into a black-
hole/& our cries go out like a bird’s
tweet against a horrendous wind-
storm.
This poem is a scar tissue/like the body of a slave/telling the world/that blacks wouldn’t clamour for their lives to matter if there was fairness/as the world wouldn’t know dryness if there were no tongues.
Interview with Paul:
What motivated you to write your poem as a direct address? What impact do you hope this form will have on your audience?
I wrote the poem as a direct address, because many have allowed themselves to elude the important message of the movement, that is: take black lives seriously as you take others. When George Floyd’s sad situation happened, & the BLM movement kicked off to an almost untamable situation, many on the internet, sewed threads that ran counter to the BLM movement, with the prevalent theme: ALL LIVES MATTER. It irked me because they have not recognized that ALL LIVES MATTER remains a superstition, if a black boy can be shot at, because he reached into his car for his hair-brush, but the officer mistook it for a gun. And the jury acquits the officer on account that he tried to clamp down a druggie. ALL LIVES MATTER is a remark of the ignorant, or the devil, who enjoys the maltreatment of black people.
What has inspired you to write about the Black Lives Matter movement?
I think my biggest inspiration to write about the BLM movement, is the fact that I’m black. I have an ambition of taking a Masters course in America. The moment I get there, I’ll wear the profile of a black boy. I also write about them, because I can feel & perceive their pain. The Injustice makes all of us bleed from sealed places.
What audience do you hope to reach through your poetry? Why is this audience meaningful to you?
My poetry is intended to be variegated with everything possible to make a subject of, so i want the whole world to listen to me, while i play the game of painting pictures with words & inkling of my feeling(s). B: the audience is meaningful because without them, my tag as a poet is a facade. My pets can’t read, neither can the birds that perch on the trees behind my house.
How has the global pandemic impacted your creative process?
The pandemic has not affected my creative process, so far. Rather, my academic life. It has cancelled an academic year, pushing my future farther..all in this transient life.
What is the most important piece of advice you have received as a writer?
My best advice as a writer was gotten from another awesome writer I admire: Nome Patrick. He said: Paul, read more than you write. It was an interesting discussion on the essence of reading and the miracle it does to one’s repertoire. It has worked so far.
What are your upcoming projects?
More & more poetry. In fact, a chapbook is in sight. But for now, more poetry.
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