Authors Talk

SR Pod/Vod Series: Writer Sarah Einstein

Leah Newsom

Today we’re proud to feature Sarah Einstein as our eleventh Authors Talk series contributor.

This interview with Sarah Einstein was conducted in person at the NonfictionNow conference in Flagstaff, Arizona by Interview Editor Leah Newsom. Of the process she said, “though my memory of NonfictionNow is hazy with exhaustion, it was such a pleasure to meet with Sarah. Her writing is so honest and reveals the nature of complicated friendships. I appreciate how warm, how funny, and how kind she was, especially to take time out of the conference to meet with me.” In this interview, Sarah lends insight to the process of writing nonfiction, the ethics of writing about another person, the dangers of writing with an agenda, and the unique way she elicits memory to write memoir.

You can download the video on our iTunes Channel.

You can read Sarah Einstein’s interview in Superstition Review, Issue 16.

 

More About the Author:

Sarah Einstein is the author of Mot: A Memoir (University of Georgia Press 2015), Remnants of Passion (Shebooks 2014), and numerous essays and short stories. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Best of the Net, and the AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction. She is a professor of Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

About the Authors Talk series:

For several years, we have featured audio or video of Superstition Review contributors reading their work. We’re now establishing a new series of podcasts called Authors Talk. The podcasts in this series take a broader scope and feature SR contributors discussing their own thoughts on writing, the creative process, and anything else they may want to share with listeners.

SR Pod/Vod Series: Writer Maggie Nelson

Leah Newsom

Today we’re proud to feature Maggie Nelson as our tenth Authors Talk series contributor.

This interview with Maggie Nelson was conducted in person at the NonfictionNow conference in Flagstaff, Arizona by Interview Editor Leah Newsom. Of the process she said, “It was such an incredible privilege to interview Maggie Nelson. For days after, pieces of our conversation were swimming around in my mind, resurfacing at unexpected moments. Every time I watched the recording while transcribing, I discovered some new train of thought I hadn’t sat with previously, and I would have to stop and take a note. This was the same reaction I had to reading The Argonauts, so I shouldn’t have expected anything different.” In this interview, Maggie discusses the role of other people in her writing, the need to make space, and what it means to burn out a problem.

You can read Maggie Nelson’s interview in Superstition Review, Issue 16.

 

More About the Author:

Maggie Nelson is an American poet, art critic, lyric essayist and nonfiction author of the books Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions,The Red Parts: A Memoir, The Art of Cruelty, Something Bright, The Argonauts, The Latest Winter, Shiner, and Bluets.

About the Authors Talk series:

For several years, we have featured audio or video of Superstition Review contributors reading their work. We’re now establishing a new series of podcasts called Authors Talk. The podcasts in this series take a broader scope and feature SR contributors discussing their own thoughts on writing, the creative process, and anything else they may want to share with listeners.

SR Pod/Vod Series: Writer John Messick

Cass Murphy

John Messick_headshot1.jpgToday we’re proud to feature John Messick as our ninth Authors Talk series contributor, talking about the balance of creative writing.

Creative writing – whatever the genre or style – “should offer insight to our readers on the higher-order concerns of the world.” So begins John’s podcast, and it continues its heartfelt seriousness through explorations of the idea of “story.”

Striking his own impressive balance between the personal and the profound, John examines the modern-day role of writing and offers a wealth of ideas to think about and apply to one’s writing. As he says in one of my favorite lines, “we can make the world just a little bit better for having taken the time to observe it well.”

You can listen to the podcast on our iTunes Channel.

You can read John Messick’s nonfiction piece “Burn Operation” in Superstition Review, Issue 15.

 

More About the Author:

John Messick’s work has appeared in Tampa Review, Rock & Sling, Cirque Journal, Alaska Dispatch News, and other publications. His essay “Discovering Terra Incognita” was awarded the AWP Intro Journals Prize in 2013. He has worked as a wildland firefighter, teacher, fish researcher, and sled dog handler. He earned his MFA from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, and currently works as a freelance journalist covering Alaska’s Bristol Bay region. He lives on the Kenai Peninsula in southcentral Alaska.

About the Authors Talk series:

For several years, we have featured audio or video of Superstition Review contributors reading their work. We’re now establishing a new series of podcasts called Authors Talk. The podcasts in this series take a broader scope and feature SR contributors discussing their own thoughts on writing, the creative process, and anything else they may want to share with listeners.

SR Pod/Vod Series: Writer Elizabeth Frankie Rollins

Cass Murphy

ROLLINS-Author-Photo-BW-1Today we’re proud to feature Elizabeth Frankie Rollins as our eighth Authors Talk series contributor, talking about allowing writing to take its own rightful shape in her podcast “The Work.”

A writer’s work becomes a living, demanding entity in this podcast. According to Frankie, it ignores its writer’s whining, and doesn’t care much about the desire for companionable readers either. In five well-crafted minutes, she describes first “refusing to listen to something I didn’t want to hear,” then her eventual realization that each work has its own demands, regardless of the writer’s desires.

Frankie creates a place in her podcast where the writing itself is an active, though silent, participant in its creation. Here, “the work finds its true nature without the ego of the writer mucking up the process.” Here, “the work dictates what it needs, and you must comply.”

You can listen to the podcast on our iTunes Channel.

You can read Elizabeth Frankie Rollins’ story “The Ruins” in Superstition Review, Issue 9.

 

More About the Author:

Elizabeth Frankie Rollins has a collection of short fiction, The Sin Eater & Other Stories (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2013). Also, she has work in The Fairy Tale Review, Sonora Review, Conjunctions, Superstition Review, and The New England Review, among others. Rollins has received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, and won a Prose Fellowship from the New Jersey Arts Council. She teaches fiction and composition writing at Pima Community College in Tucson.

 

About the Authors Talk series:

For several years, we have featured audio or video of Superstition Review contributors reading their work. We’re now establishing a new series of podcasts called Authors Talk. The podcasts in this series take a broader scope and feature SR contributors discussing their own thoughts on writing, the creative process, and anything else they may want to share with listeners.

SR Pod/Vod Series: Writer Saramanda Swigart

Cass Murphy

Saramanda SwigartToday we’re proud to feature Saramanda Swigart as our seventh Authors Talk series contributor, discussing her story “Axiom of the Empty Set” in her vodcast “Love and Math.”

As the vodcast title suggests, Saramanda’s creation of “Axiom of the Empty Set” involved linking together seeming opposites. Themes of failed romances and lost children are a recurring presence in the story, alongside formulaic elements like roman numeral-headed paragraphs and “X” and “Y” as placeholder character names.

Behind the scenes, the same combination of opposites is true of Saramanda’s writing process. As she explains in her vodcast, this consists of two components: nerdy inspiration, and the deeply personal.

“I don’t really like the character me, much,” she says, cringing at the thought of memoir writing. Despite this, she discusses with candid feeling the incorporation of personal challenges into her story, a process that resulted in a dream come true for many writers: the piece coming out “almost entirely whole.”

You can listen to the podcast on our iTunes Channel.

You can read Saramanda Swigart’s “Axiom of the Empty Set” in Issue 15 of Superstition Review.

 

More About the Author:

Saramanda Swigart is thrilled to be writing fiction [almost] full time after years of writing ad copy and corporate literature. She has lived and worked in Italy, New York, San Francisco and Dubai. She has an MFA from Columbia University, with a supplementary degree in literary translation. Her short work has appeared in Superstition Review, Fogged Clarity, Caveat Lector, The Literati Quarterly, Ragazine, The Penmen Review and Thin Air, and she’s received an honorable mention in Glimmer Train. She is working on a collection of interlocking stories; a novel, Meaning Machine, about a family’s incompatible coping strategies in the face of loss; and a modern translation of the more salacious stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. She lives in San Francisco and teaches at City College of San Francisco.

 

About the Authors Talk series:

For several years, we have featured audio or video of Superstition Review contributors reading their work. We’re now establishing a new series of podcasts called Authors Talk. The podcasts in this series take a broader scope and feature SR contributors discussing their own thoughts on writing, the creative process, and anything else they may want to share with listeners.

SR Pod/Vod Series: Writer Pablo Piñero Stillmann

Cass Murphy

Pablo PineroToday we’re proud to feature Pablo Piñero Stillmann as our sixth Authors Talk series contributor, discussing his story “The Worst Thing about Having Sex with Me” with SR Issue 15 Fiction Editor Stephanie Funk.

The story is set in Mexico City against a backdrop of unrest, and as Pablo says, “lives go on in the middle of all this chaos.” This podcast, titled “This Sense of Place,” explores how he incorporated the subtleties of Mexico into his story. Pablo explains that geography, social class, and other explanations of place had to occur naturally within the story’s framework. And more challenging still, these subtleties had to be understandable to an American audience.

“I have to trust myself to portray the subtleties of my world,” Pablo says, also referencing the challenges he encountered when he began writing in English eight years ago.

Even with its glimpses into the editorial process, perhaps the most interesting thing about “This Sense of Place” is how a discussion on writing for a foreign audience lends itself to writers considering the challenges of creating any world, within any story.

You can listen to the podcast on our iTunes Channel.

You can read Pablo Piñero Stillmann’s “The Worst Thing about Having Sex with Me” in Issue 15 of Superstition Review.

 

More About the Author:

Pablo Piñero Stillmann’s first novel was published in the summer of 2015 by Tierra Adentro. His work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Cream City Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, The Normal School, and other journals. Follow him on Twitter @O1O111OO.

About the Authors Talk series:

For several years, we have featured audio or video of Superstition Review contributors reading their work. We’re now establishing a new series of podcasts called Authors Talk. The podcasts in this series take a broader scope and feature SR contributors discussing their own thoughts on writing, the creative process, and anything else they may want to share with listeners.

SR Pod/Vod Series: Poet Deborah Bogen

Superstition Review

Deborah Bogen_portrait 11_for internet copy-2For several years, we have featured audio or video of Superstition Review contributors reading their work. We’re now establishing a new series of podcasts called Authors Talk. The podcasts in this series take a broader scope and feature SR contributors discussing their own thoughts on writing, the creative process, and anything else they may want to share with listeners.

Today we’re proud to feature Deborah Bogen as our fourth Authors Talk series contributor, discussing “what it’s like to be a writer while you are not in school” in her podcast “Try This At Home.”

Writing courses and MFA programs provide much-desired support and resources for writers. But for people who have left these things behind, Deborah offers advice on how to create a different kind of structure. With topics like forming writing groups and partnerships, immersing yourself in the broader world so that it still benefits your writing, and achieving financial survival, she works through them all with a level of specificity and detail that’s all the more admirable for a 7.5 minute talk.

This is a tightly focused how-to that doesn’t disappoint. Flecked with alternating bits of humor and poignancy, Deborah takes advice you may have heard before and adds new insight and depth. The most resonating example for me came towards the end of the talk: “In the end, one person is responsible for your work.” Somehow, she makes this daunting statement sound like the most wonderful thing in the world.

You can listen to the podcast on our iTunes Channel.

You can read Deborah Bogen’s poetry in Superstition Review, Issues 12 and 10.

More About the Author:

Deborah Bogen’s three books of poems are Let Me Open You a Swan, winner of the Elixir Press Antivenom Prize 2009, Landscape With Silos, National Poetry Series Finalist and XJ Kennedy Poetry Prize winner 2005, and Living by the Children’s Cemetery, ByLine Press Chapbook winner 2002. Her poems and reviews appear widely.

In addition to writing poems, Bogen is currently at work on a trio of novels set in 13th century. Book One, The Witch of Leper Cove, explores traditional herbal medicine, blind ambition and the early Inquisition in England. Book Two, The Hounds of God, is set in Paris where Church politics, the strict structure of the noble classes and the power of art collide.

She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, teaching occasionally, playing ukulele in the Highland Park Mini Band and writing lots of prose poems for a new manuscript, Prayer Flags.

SR Pod/Vod Series: Writer Hannah Brown

Cass Murphy

Hannah Brown_0Today we’re proud to feature Hannah Brown as our fifth Authors Talk series contributor, discussing her story “On Any Windy Day” in her podcast “Nail Salon Grants PhD.”

Inspired by conversations in nail salons, “On Any Windy Day” is a deep examination of life. As Hannah says in her podcast, “somehow when someone is handling our bodies, we feel inclined to let them handle our hearts as well.”

The story exemplifies this by segueing from casual conversation to progressively more complicated topics, and back again. In one section, a character waits for laundry to dry by reading a tome of social criticism, then offers detailed step-by-step ironing instructions and muses about what ironing a man’s shirts means to her.

With the cheerful sincerity of its author, “Nail Salon Grants PhD” uses similar brain and heart to dig into the writing of “On Any Windy Day.”

You can listen to the podcast on our iTunes Channel.

You can read Hannah Brown’s “On Any Windy Day” in Superstition Review.

 

More About the Author:

Born in Hastings County, and currently living in Toronto, Hannah Brown has two degrees in Film from York University and taught English and film at the college and collegiate levels. She wrote screenplays for anyone who’d pay, and won first prize from the National Film Board for her screenplay, How to Call Cows. Her brief memoir about her brother, “The Education of a Class A Mechanic” was published in This Magazine. More recently, in June, two of her poems appeared in Lynn Crosbie’s Hood, two poems were published in the Untethered Magazine’s July issue, and The Harpoon Review published her short story, “Bangande” in October. Her story “The Happiness” will appear in the upcoming November issue of (parenthetical) Magazine.

About the Authors Talk series:

For several years, we have featured audio or video of Superstition Review contributors reading their work. We’re now establishing a new series of podcasts called Authors Talk. The podcasts in this series take a broader scope and feature SR contributors discussing their own thoughts on writing, the creative process, and anything else they may want to share with listeners.

SR Pod/Vod Series: Poet Deborah Bogen

Cass Murphy

Deborah Bogen_portrait 11_for internet copy-2

Today we’re proud to feature Deborah Bogen as our fourth Authors Talk series contributor, discussing “what it’s like to be a writer while you are not in school” in her podcast “Try This At Home.”

Writing courses and MFA programs provide much-desired support and resources for writers. But for people who have left these things behind, Deborah offers advice on how to create a different kind of structure. With topics like forming writing groups and partnerships, immersing yourself in the broader world so that it still benefits your writing, and achieving financial survival, she works through them all with a level of specificity and detail that’s all the more admirable for a 7.5 minute talk.

This is a tightly focused how-to that doesn’t disappoint. Flecked with alternating bits of humor and poignancy, Deborah takes advice you may have heard before and adds new insight and depth. The most resonating example for me came towards the end of the talk: “In the end, one person is responsible for your work.” Somehow, she makes this daunting statement sound like the most wonderful thing in the world.

You can listen to the podcast on our iTunes Channel.

You can read Deborah Bogen’s poetry in Superstition Review, Issues 12 and 10.

 

More About the Author:

Deborah Bogen’s three books of poems are Let Me Open You a Swan, winner of the Elixir Press Antivenom Prize 2009, Landscape With Silos, National Poetry Series Finalist and XJ Kennedy Poetry Prize winner 2005, and Living by the Children’s Cemetery, ByLine Press Chapbook winner 2002. Her poems and reviews appear widely.

In addition to writing poems, Bogen is currently at work on a trio of novels set in 13th century. Book One, The Witch of Leper Cove, explores traditional herbal medicine, blind ambition and the early Inquisition in England. Book Two, The Hounds of God, is set in Paris where Church politics, the strict structure of the noble classes and the power of art collide.

She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, teaching occasionally, playing ukulele in the Highland Park Mini Band and writing lots of prose poems for a new manuscript, Prayer Flags.

 

About the Authors Talk series:

For several years, we have featured audio or video of Superstition Review contributors reading their work. We’re now establishing a new series of podcasts called Authors Talk. The podcasts in this series take a broader scope and feature SR contributors discussing their own thoughts on writing, the creative process, and anything else they may want to share with listeners.

SR Pod/Vod Series: Writer Devoney Looser

Cass Murphy

Devoney Looser

Today we’re proud to feature Devoney Looser as our third Authors Talk series contributor, sharing her thoughts on the “Top 10 Ways That Being A Writer Is Like Playing Roller Derby.”

Devoney is an English professor at Arizona State University and, as her author bio below reveals, an accomplished scholar. She’s also probably one of the first roller derby scholars, penning multiple articles on the sport’s potential to impact our culture. Given this, it’s not that surprising that Devoney should analyze the similarities between writing and roller derby in her vodcast. What is surprising is that she chooses to do this in full derby bout gear, casually reading her essay while rolling around her kitchen wearing pads and fishnet stockings. Perhaps it shouldn’t be. Among other things, Devoney’s vodcast is a fresh reminder of what it means to be a modern scholar.

You can listen to the podcast on our iTunes Channel.

 

More About the Author:

Devoney Looser is the author of two books, Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850 (2008) and British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670–1820 (2000). She has published essays in Slate, the Chronicle of Higher Education, The London Magazine, and The Independent. Now at work on a study of Jane Austen’s afterlife, The Making of Jane Austen, for Johns Hopkins University Press, Looser has also played roller derby as Stone Cold Jane Austen. She is is professor of English at Arizona State University and faculty adviser to ASU’s collegiate team, the Derby Devils.

 

About the Authors Talk series:

For several years, we have featured audio or video of Superstition Review contributors reading their work. We’re now establishing a new series of podcasts called Authors Talk. The podcasts in this series take a broader scope and feature SR contributors discussing their own thoughts on writing, the creative process, and anything else they may want to share with listeners.