Contributor Update, Christopher Nelson

Join Superstition Review on congratulating past contributor Christopher Nelson on his new poetry collection, Blood Aria, out now. “In his powerful debut, Christopher Nelson examines the progenitors and forms of violence in the twenty-first century, from Cain and Abel to the damming of rivers. In everyday moments, spare poems depict pain with visceral sharpness, meditating on hate crimes against gay men, a father’s abuse of his son, and children murdered in their schools.” “There is loneliness in this poetry…but there is also redemption. We see glimpses of the speaker’s quest to find and know God, seeking answers everywhere, from Spanish cathedrals filled with holy relics to withered winter fields. The poems of Blood Aria ruminate on the sacrament of passing one day to the next, asking how much it matters what we believe.”

“In meditations ranging from a child’s incomprehension of a father’s violence to the suffering of those cast out for their sexual desires to the horror of mass shootings, the poems of Blood Aria pulse with an urgency that is both anguished and exalted. And transformative. To experience poems as passionate, as charged with wisdom as these is to enter into a kind of spiritual quest.”

Boyer Rickel, author of Remanence

To order your copy of Blood Aria click here. Also be sure to check out Christopher’s Twitter and website as well as his past work in Issue 15.

Contributor Update, Susan Wingate

Join Superstition Review in congratulating past contributor, Susan Wingate, on her forthcoming book, Bobby’s Diner, out March 31st. Winner of The 2020 Best Fiction Pacific Book Award and the first of a series, this suspenseful fiction novel explores the themes of life, love, death, grief, pain, loneliness, and redemption, as it details “a woman trying to find herself in a town where nobody wants her.” The story follows Georgette Carlisle who, fifteen years ago, went to the town of Sunnydale and fell in love with Bobby, who was not only “the owner of a diner named after himself, but… was also married.” Bobby has now died and “left his restaurant to both women.” However, trouble ensues as a Zach Pinzer begins to want the property for his own project and “is willing to kill to get what he wants.”

“A breathtaking story that will fill you with joy and laughter, Bobby’s Diner is a great read for any book lover.”

Coffee Time Romance

To pre-order your own copy of Bobby’s Diner click here. Also be sure to check out Susan’s website and Twitter as well as her past work in Issue 1.

Authors Talk: Kaylee Sue Duff

Today we are pleased to feature author Kaylee Sue Duff as our Authors Talk series contributor. In the podcast, Kaylee discusses the creative process behind two of her flash fiction pieces, “Nothing” and “The Deer,” and the intertwined nature of the stories themselves.

Kaylee states that “Nothing” is one of her favorite pieces that she has written, for it “takes ownership of those feelings that… are terrible and impossible to deal with, and turns them into something that other people can experience as well, something that is really beautiful.” She highlights that the inspiration for “Nothing” stemmed from her own feelings of loneliness and isolation upon moving away to college, which led to her “figuring out a lot about myself and my identity.” She goes on to express that the piece is “more like poetry than I would ever care to admit,” and that, “by writing what… I felt was right, I was able to tap into something that I would never have been able to otherwise.”

You can read Kaylee’s story, “Nothing,” in Issue 20 of Superstition Review.

 

 

Guest Post, Eric Maroney: Loneliness, as Discipline

Eric MaroneyWhen I started to become serious about writing as an experience that fully engaged every faculty, feeling, and inclination, I quickly realized that I must spend a great deal of my time alone.

Only in the stillness of loneliness can true writing take place.  On the surface of things, this appears counter-intuitive, as fiction writers write about people.  They chronicle loves, hates, struggles, victories, dreams.  Fiction’s subject matter is people as much as geology’s is stones.  Yet I have found that at the deepest level, writing must take place in solitude, with the mind keenly focused on only one, narrow task.

So how are these two impulses reconciled?  The fiction writer uses human reality as her template for art, yet she must frequently emerge, break free, and do what is demanded of her in the world.  Reality and its demands take the writer away from the solitude necessary to create art.  This is the high wire act of writing, and most writers fall off:  the world intrudes too heavily on their private space, and crushes writing and all its demands.

So writers must insist on time alone, for it is the backbone of successful writing. Only by securing solitude, guarding it, and cultivating it, does it become possible to navigate this often rewarding, sometimes disheartening enterprise.

The writer must sit alone and work with words, sentences, paragraphs, pages.  No one can help.   There must only be the writer and the world he is creating with his imagination.  Even if it seems sometimes unfaithful and as hard to manage as the very flow of human life itself, his imagination can only be harnessed in solitude.

It takes intense concentration to coordinate the different elements of the physical act of writing, the control and guidance of the imagination, and the discipline to continue to work beyond fatigue, struggle and boredom.  And through this, the writer must keep the world away.  This is the absolute key to make writing inviolable.  In order to have its own life, the work must be held up above the swarm of life.

But then comes an unnerving moment when the solitary stage of writing must conclude, and the writer must set about to conquer a different but just as difficult challenge: she must let the world in.  Eventually, that writing before her must be read by someone else.  Hopefully, this will be a sympathetic soul with precious distance from her work, providing the most helpful of advice: what works and what doesn’t — what rings true and what sounds hollow.  This seems simple, but is really a complex gift given to the writer. With good criticism, a writer can feel like a lens has been lifted that didn’t seem cloudy until it was removed, and now she has been given a wide open window to see through the eyes of another.

Then the writer is alone again, and struggling with the work once more.   Reading, cutting, writing, the work is still her work, but subtly less so.  The spell is already broken.  Once read by even one person, the intimacy of the writer and his work slackens.  The coolness of redaction demands distance.  The writer can now often edit the story at the cluttered kitchen table, with kids playing in the next room.

After repeated performances of this ritual, the writing is transformed into a more public object, and pulls away from its creator.  The work must stand on its own legs, and in order to do that, the writer must stop supporting it, having already begun to let it go step by step and stage by stage.

And if the writer is lucky, and the work is so self-sufficient that it leaves him or her (or you) one day for the solidity of a published form, the circle is complete: the writing is then part of the very world the writer fought against to bring it into existence.  At that point the loneliness the writer shared with the writing is truly gone, and the work, having been encouraged to leave its author’s protective wall of solitude, seems to walk away, as the writer seeks out loneliness again.