Join the Young Authors’ Studio’s Writing Retreat this Saturday, February 18, at ASU’s Polytechnic Campus! This event is free and open to everyone of all ages. Beginning at 9:30am, Dr. Wendy Williams will lead attendees through nine YA books to spark their creativity. Then, attendees will have the option of choosing three breakout writing sessions from 10:30am to 12:00pm. After, there’s lunch and spoken-word poetry.
This event has free parking, free pizza, and b00k giveaways! To learn more and register, go here.
Carolyn Lavender, Monica Aissa Martinez, and Mary Shindell
Artists Carolyn Lavender, Monica Aissa Martinez, and Mary Shindell, known for their previous exhibitCreature-Man-Nature at Mesa Art Center, have come together for a projecttitled Unintended Consequences to be showcased at Center Space at Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts. The project tells the story of life in Arizona through a combination of biology, botany, and zoology, all expressed in paintings done by the three artists.
Registration and directions can be found by visiting the Center Space’s website here. Their project’s opening ceremony is on Friday, February 17th from 7:00PM to 8:00PM Arizona time. Tickets are free. Beyond the opening ceremony, the group’s paintings can be viewed at the Center Space from February 17th through May 28th.
Carolyn Lavender and Monica Aissa Martinez’s drawings were featured in issue 9. Mary Shindell’s artwork appeared in issue 11. Learn more about them and their works: Carolyn Lavender’s website, Monica Aissa Martinez’s website, and Mary Shindell’s website.
Joanne Diaz is the author of two poetry collections, The Lessons and My Favorite Tyrants. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her recent poems have been published in American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, New England Review, Poetry, River Styx, and Waxwing. She is the Isaac Funk Endowed Professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University. She is also the co-host of the Poetry for All podcast.
Her poem “Facts in Review” appeared in Issue 30 of Superstition Review, accompanied by one of Jason Reblando’s photos. We are pleased to present an interview with Joanne Diaz below, conducted by Madison Latham, one of SuperstitionReview’s poetry editors for Issue 30.
Madison Latham: What was the process like for creating the mixed media?
Joanne Diaz: I created the collage that accompanies this poem during a residency at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts (VCCA). I am by no means a visual artist, and I hadn’t made a collage since I was in elementary school, but I knew that I wanted to try this, just to see where it would take the work. The black-and-white image is from a film that documented the Berlin book burnings of 1933. I had known about that image for years, and it haunted me—the way the face of the Nazi youth is facing away from the viewer, and toward the flames—and I used a simple color blocking technique to emphasize the shape of his body and he hurls the books into the fire. For a long time, I was feeling stuck with this poem, but when school boards all over the United States started banning books, I knew that I had something to say.
This collage is one of a few in the collaborative project that I’ve been working on with Jason Reblando. The majority of the word-image pairings in this collection are comprised of my poems and Jason’s photographs.
ML: How did you decide what sources to use for the poem “Facts in Review”? What makes a reliable source? What is your advice for poets that want to include facts in their own poetry?
JD: Well, the title of the poem is actually a lie. As I say in the note to the poem, Facts in Review is the title of a Nazi propaganda magazine that was sent to American subscribers between 1939-1941. I first learned about this magazine when I read Mark Monmonier’s amazing book How to Lie with Maps, which provides an analysis of how maps never tell the whole truth, and how often nations and empires use maps for propagandistic purposes. Monmonier included some examples of Nazi maps in his book, and when I saw his citation of the magazine, I read through every issue, just to see what was published there. I noticed something right away: the magazine was full of lies about Nazi aggression—lies that made the Nazi regime seem benign, even beneficent. So many times in my life, I’ve wondered what it must have been like to live in Europe during the rise of fascism in the 1930s. Reading Facts in Review helped me answer that question. It also helped me understand the rise of fascism in our own nation right now.
ML: How would you describe your experience working with one another on collaborative media? What did you learn from the collaboration?
JD: In brief: Jason’s photos came first, and my poems came second. For Jason to create the photos, he had to walk La Ruta Walter Benjamin, a difficult mountain pass that begins in Banyuls sur Mer in the south of France and ends in Portbou, Spain. For millennia, the Pyrenees have been the site of many kinds of crossings, but there are two kinds of crossings that interest us most: the trek that writer Walter Benjamin took from France to Spain in 1940 when he was escaping the Nazis who were set on persecuting him; and the walk that 500,000 Spaniards took from Spain to France in 1939 in order to escape persecution in Franco’s fascist regime.
As Jason walked the route, he took photos that not only attended to the natural landscape, but to the history and culture of the land as well. As I meditated on his photographs, I conducted research—on the Spanish Civil War, on the Nazi regime, on Walter Benjamin—and wrote poems that helped me to understand the terror of that time. Jason is often my best editor, and he provided a lot of important feedback on the poems.
When we share excerpts of this work in art galleries, we print the poems on vellum and position the photographs underneath the vellum. That way, a viewer can read the poem, then lift the vellum to see the photo that inspired it. This palimpsest effect allows the reader to think about the layers of history and language embedded in every landscape.
ML: We see that you both teach at universities in Illinois. How do you know each other? And what is the story behind the collaborative media? Have you done collaborative work before, and would you do something like it again?
JD: We’re married! Jason is a photography professor at Illinois State, and I’m an English professor at Illinois Wesleyan, just a mile down the street. We’ve never collaborated on a project before, but we’ve really enjoyed this experience and would happily do it again.
ML: What are each of you working on next?
JD: In recent months, we’ve completed work on La Ruta and are looking for a publisher. Meanwhile, Jason is creating a series of new collage pieces that draw upon archival photographs of the Philippines from the turn of the last century. You can see some of his amazing work here.
Addison Rizer, Interview Editor for Issues 20 and 21
We’re excited to share Addison Rizer, a past Interview Editor, has just joined Publishers Weekly as a nonfiction reviewer. Addison’s academic and professional accomplishments have bloomed since her time at Superstition Review. She graduated from NAU with an MA in Professional Writing in 2022.
She began working as a contributor for Book Riot in December of 2020. Her Book Riot article “I Wrote a Poem After Every Book I Read in 2020” was featured in an episode of CBC’s As It Happens with Nil Köksal and Chris Howden posted on February 21, 2021. She is a guest in the episode about 58 minutes in, or you can read the transcript.
Before graduating from ASU and starting her MA at NAU, Addison was part of ASU’s Psyche Inspired program from 2018 to 2019, a program that gathers undergraduates from all disciplines as interns creating content for NASA’s Psyche mission. You can read about her experience as part of Psyche Inspired here.
Addison Rizer was our Interview Editor for issue 20 and issue 21. Her work can be found on her website.
Superstition Review is excited to share a podcast project planned and produced by SR intern Claire van Doren. In this four-episode audio series, Claire will be talking with SR’s queer contributors. In today’s final episode, Claire interviews Gretchen Rockwell, who is a queer American poet and educator. Xe is the author of the chapbook Lexicon of Future Selves (published by Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), which was nominated for the 2022 Elgin Award. Xe has work published in Drunk Monkeys, theLumiereReview, Up the Stairs Quarterly, Glass:Poets Resist, and elsewhere. To learn more, visit xer website website.
The following transcript has been edited for clarity. Credit goes to FreeSound.org for the sound effects.
Claire van Doren: Hi! My name’s Claire van Doren, and you’re listening to the Superstition Review Pride Community Project. Today, we’ll be hearing from Gretchen Rockwell. They’ll be discussing their experiences with the queer community and how it impacts their work. This is one of four Pride Community specials. Stick around to hear from more of Superstition Review’s queer contributors.
[Phone ringing]
Gretchen Rockwell: My name is Gretchen Rockwell—pronouns xe/xer, the “xe” as in “xenomorph,” but I’ll also use they/them. So my work is—how I do I summarize it… A friend of mine told me my brand is space, science, and the deep sea, and I feel like that pretty much sums up a lot of what I write about. I also write about gender. I’ll write about mythology sometimes.
I also really enjoy writing about unusual connections. So, a lot of times my work will start one place and then pivot abruptly to something else and then come back. I really enjoy taking things that don’t really go together and saying, “No, yes, they do, and here’s how.” I find a lot of joy in exploring connections like that.
I like to combine gender and sexuality with history, myth, with science-based, the deep sea—for a lot of reasons. I think partially it’s because my process of discovering my own gender and sexuality has been a lot of discovery and a lot of self-questioning and self-interrogation and a lot of probing myself. I feel like that really mirrors a lot of what we’ve done with space and the deep sea, in terms of you have to send these probes into this mysterious, unknown territory that you learn only as you explore it. And there’s something in that that resonates with gender and sexuality—for me, at least.
I feel like part of why I shift between these disparate things is part of my ADHD—that my mind just kind of pinballs around. I see the connections, and sometimes I have to trace them out for other people, say, “Here’s how I got from A to G. You don’t see the steps, but they’re there.” In my poetry, that’s something that really has shaped it as well—just pulling those thought processes together.
For me, it’s always been about my own interests and my own experiences, rather than trying to tell a unifying story or speak for a group of people. I really can only speak for myself. And so I think that’s something that my identity—in a lot of ways—has shaped. I’m very aware of my identity and what it is and what it isn’t. I really try to be conscious of only speaking from that and to that, rather than trying to speak for other people.
I have never really felt, necessarily, a connection to the broader queer community as such. My queer community has always been my friends and the people around me, and somehow we’ve all just discovered our own queerness, kind of side by side, and unintentionally we’ve just found each other, somehow. But I don’t necessarily feel that I have a broader queer community that I’m connected to. Figuring this stuff out about myself has been something that’s done either in isolation or with close friends. And so the way I feel, the connection to the broader community, is that I’ve always kind of hoped that putting my work out there, and putting out my voice, someone—like an individual somewhere—can find it and see themselves and feel connected to it. Rather than necessarily writing for a community or to a community.
It’s just kind of funny how we all seem to find each other. It’s just something that we sense in other people that we’re drawn to. I’m not sure how that happens or why that happens, but you just feel that sense of sameness. Like I have a lot of neurodivergent friends as well because we just all flock together.
I guess that kind of unusual connection that I find in my work is represented to an extent in how I relate to other queer people. Because it’s this… Counter-cultural is maybe the way to put it. Counter-this is heteronormative, making it by default unusual. I don’t know if I’d call it an unusual connection, but I think that the threads of connection and finding those threads of connection—in small ways and in small things—has been more evident to me than finding big connections.
What I’m hoping to accomplish with my writing in the future is, again, just putting myself and my work out there so that maybe someone who hasn’t seen themself in poetry so far or hasn’t seen themself represented in art so far—can maybe one day find my work and be like, “Oh, this person gets it, xe gets it.” Just to have it resonate with even one person is what I would love for my work in the future. There’s so many projects that I’m sure will come to me; they seem to kind of spring out of nowhere.
I can’t wait to see what’s coming, I have no idea what’s coming, but I’m sure it will be interesting.
[Phone hangs up]
CVD: Thanks for joining us! Be sure to check out our YouTube page for more audio and video content, as well as our official Superstition Review blog.
At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf (Ig Publishing, 2023)
Join award-winning author Tara Ison at the following bookstore events! There, she will be discussing At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf, her new novel set in World War II France. Centered around Danielle, a Parisian Jewish girl who’s gone into hiding as a Catholic orphan, this book reveals how some lies can grow so large, we deceive even ourselves.
February 22 – Washington DC – Politics and Prose, in convo with Susan Kelesinko Coll, 7 pm
February 24 – Los Angeles – Vroman’s Pasadena, in convo with David L. Ulin, 7 pm
February 25 – San Francisco – Book Passage, Ferry Building, in convo with Meredith Hall, 3 pm
March 2 – Phoenix – Changing Hands, Phoenix, in convo with Devoney Looser, 6 pm
March 9 – Boston – Brookline Booksmith, in convo with Doug Bauer, 7 pm
March 16 – Flagstaff – Brightside Books, in convo with Nicole Walker, 6 pm
March 22 – Chicago – International House at University of Chicago, 6 pm
A Jewish girl comes of age in Vichy France, relentlessly deformed by the spiritual rot of her era… Ison is unflinching in her depiction of the self-inflicted corruption that replaces the character’s moral core with a twisted version of Christianity, brilliantly illustrating the epigraph from Solzhenitsyn: ‘To do evil, a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good.’…Free of sentiment but not without hope of redemption, this is a suspenseful and chilling story.
Kirkus
Tara Ison is the author of The List (Scribner), A Child out of Alcatraz (Faber & Faber, Inc.), a Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Rockaway (Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press), featured as one of the “Best Books of Summer” in O, The Oprah Magazine, July 2013. Her essay collection, Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love, and Die at the Movies, was the Winner of the PEN Southwest Book Award for Best Creative Nonfiction. She earned her MFA in Fiction & Literature from Bennington College and has taught creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Goddard College, Antioch University Los Angeles, and UC Riverside Palm Desert. She is currently Professor of Fiction at Arizona State University. To learn more, visit her website.
Superstition Review is also pleased to announce an upcoming interview with Tara Ison about At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf.
At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf will be released February 21st. To pre-order it, go here.
Superstition Review’s blog is now accepting new submissions!
We feature Guest Posts and Authors Talks posts on our blog. These are short essays, videos, or audio recordings that examine current literary topics and trends. Submission guidelines for our blog can be found by clicking submit on our website.
We do not publish poetry or short stories on our blog.
On February 11th, this Saturday, Tom Leveen will be leading a workshop about crafting a novel. Mainly a young adult horror author, Leveen has written nine books and won a variety of awards: ALA/YALSA Best Book of 2013, the Westchester Fiction Award, the Grand Canyon Reader Award, and others.
The Young Author’s Studio, which is hosting this event, works to support literacy education through community outreach of various kinds: writing institutes, Sparky Slam competitions, Open Door sessions, online writing workshops, and an online journal.
This workshop is geared especially toward teachers and writers of young adult fiction, although it’s open to anyone who’s interested. To learn more and register for this free event, click here.
Superstition Review is the online literary magazine produced by creative writing and web design students at Arizona State University. Founded in 2008, the mission of the journal is to promote contemporary art and literature by providing a free, easy-to-navigate, high quality online publication that features work by established and emerging artists and authors from all over the world.
We publish two issues a year with art, fiction, interviews, nonfiction, and poetry. We also enjoy honoring all members of our Superstition Review family by maintaining a strong year-round community of editors, submitters, contributors, and readers on our blog and social networks.
Trainees
Trainees will register for a 3 credit-hour ENG 394 course. The course will offer a study of the field of literary magazines.
Upon successful completion of ENG 394, trainees will enroll in ENG 484 and become active interns with the magazine.
All work is done completely online.
We welcome interns from all fields.
The internship is not available to ASU Online students.
Applications are accepted on a rolling basis.
What Interns Say:
This class has been a huge eye-opener for me and I feel so lucky to have had the opportunity to work in the publishing and editing industry before graduating.
The skills I learned have given me a huge amount of confidence as I begin my search for a job, and I’m so glad this course was available.
I feel I got a great internship experience that will help me post graduation.
Superstition Review is excited to share a podcast project planned and produced by SR intern Claire van Doren. In this four-episode audio series, Claire will be talking with SR’s queer contributors. In today’s episode, Claire interviews Robin Gow (they/ze/he). They are the author of a number of chapbooks and novels for young readers, many of them forthcoming in 2023. Their works include Honeysuckle at Finishing Line Press,Backyard Paleontology at Glass Poetry (Forthcoming 2023), and A Museum for That Which No Longer Exists at Alternating Current Press (Forthcoming 2023), A Million Quiet Revolutions, Ode to My First Car (forthcoming 2023), and others. They are the managing editor of The Nasiona. To learn more, visit his website.
The following transcript has been edited for clarity. Credit goes to FreeSound.org for the sound effects.
Claire van Doren: Hi! My name’s Claire van Doren, and you’re listening to the Superstition Review Pride Community Project. Today, we’ll be hearing from Robin Gow. They’ll be discussing their experiences with the queer community and how it impacts their work. This is one of four Pride Community specials. Stick around to hear from more of Superstition Review’s queer contributors.
[Phone ringing]
Robin Gow: My name is Robin Gow, and I use any pronouns but she. I’ve worked in a lot of different genres: I do poetry, young adult and middle-grade books, and kind of hybrid essay work, too. I think of myself as a very hybrid writer, and I think that’s because the way my brain works and the experience I’ve had as a trans person don’t fit neatly into things. My narratives are very messy. I turn often to poetry because poetry is very forgiving of strangeness and welcoming toward narratives that break apart and fracture and that kind of thing.
But I’m trying to find that space in fiction and essay, too. I definitely think that it influences me in that way. Like every non-binary person, that kind of translates into having non-binary impulses in genre. Like, I don’t totally believe in genre. I think having that knowledge about myself as “between” a lot of things has definitely affected me and my writing.
I like to think of my poems as mini-conservations that I can start with someone else. There’s this essay by Frank O’Hara, where he talks about a poem as squarely between himself and another person. And I guess I think of my poetry like that. I always want it to be in conversation. Or, if not in conversation, then maybe a letter to someone. I think that I’m often writing towards a community because I feel like the word community is really complex, and the spectrum of people so diverse as LGBTQ+ people. And I see that in my work at the LGBTQ+ Center—working in social services in general. It makes me very interested in the small, beautiful intricacies of peoples’ lives—because a lot of the work that I do is creating programs and space for queer people. And I think I’ve just learned a lot about community and its expansiveness.
I think it often motivates me a lot in terms of my more narrative work—like the young adult fiction I write. But I think that it impacts my poetry, too. I guess that it motivates me, it makes me more interested in creating, because I know that there is contact with the community that I write for. Because I feel that I write primarily for other queer people.
It makes me go back to high school and some of the books I read that really sparked my interest in literature as a whole. And I think that I had a long period of reading a lot of stories in the magical realism genre. Specifically I read 100 Years of Solitude alone in high school, and I think there’s so much I didn’t get because I was a high schooler. I didn’t get the global context that Gabriel García Márquez is writing in.
The ways in which writers of that movement are writing into complete strangeness in day-to-day life has always affected me. Because I think reading that work in high school had a lot of impact on me. And it’s interesting, then—at the same time I was reading that, I was also watching a lot of anime. Which I think sounds funny as a huge influence, but I think it had a huge influence on me because anime is very fantastical. There’s a lot of questions of what it means to be a person in the world that are addressed in some of the animes I really like.
And then more lately, I just other queer writers—like Jos Charles’ book Feeld is very influential. I wish it could influence me more because it’s just so brilliant. And then I think also, currently, I’m really into horror—because I feel like, in current cinema, that’s a place where people are committed to being really weird. And I think I’m just really fascinated by that. That’s also something that I think influences my work.
As a trans person, and also as someone who’s neurodivergent, who experiences the world in some strange ways, I think that that has always drawn me into thinking about where an image or something can spin off into something bigger than the mundane. Especially religious imagery. Because I was raised very Catholic, I had a lot of negative experiences with religion, especially as a queer and trans person. But I’m so fascinated by it. I’ve taken a lot of personal interest in saints and the ritual around Catholicism. Something I was always intrigued by is that the bread that they have actually transforms into Jesus’s body. They don’t believe it’s a symbol; they believe it’s an actual transformation. I think that that’s kind of sparked an interest in me, where the mundane goes into the magical in the day-to-day world. I find an interest in where day-to-day life can slip into something surreal or something absurd. But it’s still out of respect for mundane life or interest in it, too.
I want to write toward younger people. I think that, a lot of times, writers are against writing for youth. And I actually think that—when I think about the books that impacted me the most–it’s the things that I read when I was younger. So I’m trying to write towards—or in solidarity with—queer youth. And I hope that my writing can create some of those conversations.
And then I’m also interested in exploring a hybrid fiction novel. It’s hard because I write in very strange genre formations, but I guess what I’m trying to achieve in the future is not letting that baggage I have about genre influence me creating something.
Because if I don’t finish it, then it will never be a thing, you know?
[Phone hangs up]
CVD: Thanks for joining us! Be sure to check out our YouTube page for more audio and video content, as well as our official Superstition Review blog.
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