A headshot of Kristina Saccone.

Dementia’s Orphans by Kristina Saccone: An Interview

Kristina Saccone


Six sets of plants and cut flowers surround my mother in varying stages of life and decay. She sits in silence while I help the movers inventory her things. A ficus holds on to the north-facing window. A poinsettia in red foil hasn’t moved since Christmas, and its curled, dried leaves litter the floor. Standing water smells rank in the iris bowl. Bulbs pop out of a wood planter, packed with straw, supposed to foster new spring growth. Instead it’s swampy—she watered it, forgot, then watered it again, and then again and again.

Like a plant, my mother’s mind wilts, molds, droops. First, little things—dates and times—slipped her mind. She fell victim to fraud. She lost words, and without language, she stopped engaging with friends and family. She forgot how to plug in the blender and how to turn off the oven. She failed a driving test.  

Now, movers measure the furniture to see if it will fit in her new apartment in the care home. “This?” they say, pointing to a four decade-old lamp with moth holes in the shade. “This?” to a CD tower, untouched in years. “This? This is a good piece of furniture,” they point to the teak dining room table.

“Let’s try to take as much of it as we can,” I say. Mom sits on the couch, silent with cheeks sagging, biting skin off her fingers. When I hug her, she leans in with her head on my stomach but then abruptly pushes me away.

The movers don’t notice the burst of anger. One of them points: “This ficus is a good, hardy plant.” Its spindly, six-foot branches drink in the suburban sun in the same place it’s sat for decades. “We see this all the time: orphan plants,” they say. Pots that can’t possibly move to a space with three windows instead of twelve. Plants that are easier to throw in the dumpster than stack in a moving truck. “It’s sad,” they say, “to see these thriving, living things left behind.” The movers adopt them, give them a new home and attention. They bring them back to life.

This is the revival I envision for my mother, too. She will move into a building with professional caretakers who understand age and infirmity. She will have everything she needs, from a bistro to a salt water pool and spa. Workout classes, lectures, and concerts all day to keep her busy. A new home to give her water, light, and companions.

Before she forgot how to use her email, she sent notes titled “Memories” with no message, just photos from years past. These images show her holding her grandchildren with a recognition and love unseen now for years. The Christmas cactus blooms pink in the background. Fresh cut lilies extend their stamen and perfume the room. These are echoes from the past: the smiles, the smell, the growth and bloom.

I bring fake peonies to her new home, arrange the stems in a crystal vase, and set it on the sill. The next time I visit, I catch her watering them. The sturdy ficus stands nearby, reaching for its new window. All of us are resilient, despite Mom’s forgetting.


Kristina T. Saccone (she/her) writes short fiction and nonfiction. Her work appears in Fractured Lit, Cease, Cows, Gone Lawn, Flash Flood, Luna Station Quarterly, LEON Literary Review, Emerge Literary Journal, and others. She edits a limited-run online literary journal with stories about caring for our aging parents, called One Wild Ride, and she’s querying an anthology on the same topic. Kristina is also a Randoph College MFA candidate.

The following interview was conducted by Taylor Montaño, our Nonfiction Section Editor for issue 30, via email.


Taylor Montaño: One Wild Ride is a unifying development that allows those that we care about to be safe and cared for. How might the readers of S[r] contribute?

Kristina Saccone: Thank you for this question. I started this project to help writers find community in reading others’ stories and sharing their own lived experience. One way to contribute is to read the stories on One Wild Ride and then share them widely. You can keep up with the project by signing up for One Wild Ride’s weekly newsletter. I also encourage writers to keep writing and publishing on this theme. Once I find a publisher for a printed anthology of new pieces about the topic, I’ll open for submissions. Every one of us is affected by caregiving at some point in life, and it’s important to embrace these narratives in several ways! 

TM: The permanence of impermanence is explored within Dementia’s Orphans through the decaying of plants. How did you come to understand that this element would help the reader better understand your message?

KS: I think the pandemic amplified impermanence for a lot of us. In my bubble, we had a five-year old struggling with online kindergarten and my mother who, at a distance, was beginning a steady decline into dementia. I had no control over whether my son would flourish, and the situation with my mother was the definition of unpredictable; we suspected something was wrong, but it took a series of crises to be certain she was ill. 

My mother always loved flowers. It was part of the rhythm of her life, now turned upside down. So, when I saw my mother’s plants in such decay, I was struck by the parallels between her dying houseplants and her declining mind. Despite well-intentioned caregivers who tried to stop her, she insisted on watering them again and again and again. By overfeeding them, she interrupted their cycle of nourishment. When she moved and we faced throwing them in the dumpster, I realized that the plants had actually been abandoned long ago by a mind that didn’t make sense anymore. 

Ironically, I find some stability in the impermanence of living things. Plants, whether in our garden or our homes, are a regular reminder that we can grow something anew from a seed; with nourishment, it flourishes; and at the end of its season, it decays and returns to the earth. That life cycle actually brings me hope. 

This year before the frost, we planted allium bulbs. They will blossom in the spring. They will live for a few weeks and then, with summer’s warmth, decay. The cycle of growth mimics how humans hope to live our lives: we are born, we live, and then we die—all things being, hopefully, mostly comfortable, predictable. It is never quite that straightforward though, is it?

TM: How does writing your experiences fulfill closure, both internally and externally?

KS: Writing about my experience with my mother is a necessary thing; I often feel like I’d like to move on from it, write about something new or more creative, but I always return to it. It sometimes brings me closure, but often in the process of writing, I’ll discover connections or truths about the situation that I may not have noticed before. An example from this piece is, as my mother moved, I felt grief for all the things she had to leave behind and the home that we were losing as a family. When one of the movers called the plants “orphans,” it helped label that grief in the moment. But later, writing about it, I realized that the mover had this label in her lexicon because she took personal care with families through these moves. She had deep respect for the lives they were leaving behind. As I wrote, I tried to recenter my experience outside my own grief, tried to see through the eyes of those who do the moving, who experience these types of losses day after day after day. It gave me empathy for this work and immense gratitude for the people who help families like mine through life’s difficult transitions. 

TM: At the end of your piece, there is a feeling of hope and reassurance that is undeniably pulled from the reader. What words—aside from your finishing lines—would you like to give to those of us that are in need of support during these situations?

KS: I started this project because, at the beginning of this journey with my mother, I found comfort and support in reading flash-length stories about caring for our aging parents. It was hard to find these pieces scattered across the internet, so I created One Wild Ride to compile some of the reprints in one place. I hope that those who are in need of support can find it there, through the words of others who have been through similar experiences.

TM: Would you mind further discussing how nature has affected your writing in terms of personification, imagery, and syntax?

KS: Before her dementia, my mom liked to remind me how much I hated the outdoors as a child. Then, after moving from the east coast and living in Colorado for 15 years, I adapted to the bluebird skies, the dry climate, the crystalline snow. I learned to love low-water plant environments, with deciduous trees, grasses, alpine Columbine flowers, twin Goldfinches in the neighborhood trees, the rhythm of the breezes. These memories—which are now just images—flow through much of my writing. 

When I moved back to the east coast about five years ago, the contrast in climate and nature was disorienting for me. I went from arid to humid summers; tall blowing grasses to tangles of hanging vines like a rainforest; from drought to hurricane conditions. It all felt heavy to me, this wet and gloomy environment, also mirroring the sagging plants overwatered by my mother. Nature here in the mid-Atlantic feels Gothic, and lends to lush-but-often-haunted personifications of people and spaces. 

TM: Do you often do research on the plants you write about to better understand how it can benefit your writing?

KS: I’m a former journalist, and one of the old habits I can’t shake is the need to research details in my creative nonfiction. It’s sometimes my downfall because researching for accuracy can go on ad nauseum—sometimes to the detriment of the writing. My process for this story began with a strong image that is linked to a deep emotion. I find that when my writing begins that way, research sometimes derails whatever has inspired me. So for this piece, I went as far as to ensure I was naming the plants correctly, but I left it at that.

A few years ago, I wrote a piece of creative nonfiction about a rogue tomato plant that popped up unexpectedly in my flower bed in October and November. I was fairly sure it would be a story about climate change, but I didn’t want to assume that tomatoes don’t grow that late in the year in my part of the U.S. I did a lot of research about climate zones, tomatoes, and the changing seasons. I wouldn’t have been comfortable putting that story out for print without that research. 

So, I believe that sometimes research is absolutely necessary in creative nonfiction, but other times, if you feel it getting in the way of your writing process, I think it’s okay to let it go.


Kristina Saccone can be found on Twitter at @kristinasaccone and @one_wild_ride.

Guest Post, Brandon Amico: The Cover Letter Advice Post to (Please, God) End All Cover Letter Advice Posts

No Junk Mail
“Message to the mail man” by gajman is licensed under CC by 2.0

I’m going to be honest with you: I hate blog posts that tell people how to get published faster, how best to submit or write cover letters. More accurately: I hate the number of them. I understand that the process of submitting to journals can seem daunting to a newcomer, but I see more social media sharing of posts that offer submission tips (and submission “strategy”) than those that offer writing tips, which seems backwards to me, and beside the point of what would hopefully be an artistic endeavor.

Furthering my frustration is that many of these articles make cover letters, and the submission process as a whole, seem like an intricate, mysterious process. Truthfully, it’s not. And I fear that all the attention and worry about the logistics of submitting, namely the cover letters which seem to give those new to the process the most trouble, is distracting. As an editor, let me tell you: I believe a lot of people are over-thinking this.

Because the reality is: we’re spending a lot of time talking about what hardly matters today.

As an editor, I’m only looking to determine two things in a cover letter:

  1. That you take the publication seriously
  2. That you take your own writing seriously

That, essentially, is it. Sure, all editors have pet peeves, but those are minor, and for any editor who gives a crap (which, since most editorships are purely a labor of love and not paying gigs—even then, paying very little—is essentially all of them) it will always come down to the quality of the writing itself. Those annoyances (more on those later), while worth being wary of, in the end don’t matter. Only a lack of one of the two things listed above would actually impact the way I read a submitter’s work.

Of course, if there are any specific instructions with regards to cover letters in the guidelines, like specifically asking for you to include or omit a bio (generally you would include one if not specified), make sure you follow them. But usually there are not, and the presence of a cover letter of some kind is simply implied, which I think is where a lot of the confusion can come from. So having a sense of what a typical cover letter should do might not be second nature to newcomers, but it’s hardly complicated once you’ve been on the editorial side and read a few directed at you.

Cover letters, remember, came from a time when submissions (and job résumés, for that matter) had to be mailed in physically. A writer would have to type out a cordial hello to editors on a typewriter, insert the letter and the submission into an appropriately-sized envelope, affix postage, then, I assume, ride their donkey to the nearest township and hand over the parcel to the Post for the next time a train came through town (again, this is based on my assumption—kind of before my time, submission-wise. My foray into publishing didn’t start until the late 00’s). The cover letter was necessary because for an editor, receiving an envelope that is a product of a fair amount of effort already and opening it to find nothing but the work to be considered—the effort stopping short of the formal hello and thank you—would come off as impolite and impersonal.

Today, however, nearly all submissions are handled online. While this has made the process far less cumbersome, it also means a few things have changed about the act of submitting and considering work for publication, for both writers and editors. For one, it makes the ability to submit one’s work faster, easier, all around more accessible for people to start sending out their work. Therefore, submissions are far more numerous. Editors are inundated with submissions, plenty of it high-enough quality to put together stellar issues of course, but still many to read and consider. That means more cover letters to read, which many writers hate writing anyway—so for both sides a shorter letter becomes preferred.

Also, the proliferation of online submissions more or less makes cover letters…well, not terribly useful. What can one put in a cover letter about oneself that an editor can’t already tell? Most submissions are coming through Submittable or another submission manager that already provides name and contact information. If an editor wants to know more about you or your past work, a Google search takes all of a couple seconds. You quite possibly have a website for that very purpose. What I’m saying is that there isn’t a need for cover letters in the sense that there used to be. I do think they are polite to include, and show some personability (always a nice thing to see from makers of art, no?), but editors combing through their “slush piles” really have all they require already—they want to read your work. (For that matter, cover letters for employment purposes have largely become irrelevant as the hiring manager wants to get down to the meat of the résumé.)

Which is not say that you shouldn’t pay attention to this part of the social contract between writer and editor, but rather that it’s not something worth troubling yourself over past the few moments it takes to do it right.

So, even though I railed against this exact thing up front, allow me to explain why those two points above (taking the publication and your own work seriously), are all that matters to me in regards to cover letters.

For me, it’s nice to see that someone submitting to my publication is either a fan—nothing pleases an editor more than to hear some kind words about a poem or story the submitter enjoyed in a past issue of the journal—or, at the least, cared enough to look at our Masthead and write mine and/or my co-poetry editor’s name. If I get the sense that you don’t even know who we are as a journal and are just submission-bombing every place with an open listing on Duotrope, it doesn’t reflect well on how seriously you take us while simultaneously asking us to take your work under serious consideration. The number of submissions that start “Dear Editor” or otherwise reflect that the submitter views a journal as the same as all the others out there—just another poetry/fiction publication, undifferentiated—is unfortunate. It also strikes me as likely that those writing “Dear Editor” are sometimes the same people who bristle, publicly on social media, about receiving a rejection that opens “Dear Writer.”

When in doubt, it’s best to keep a cover letter short and cordial. If it’s your style, you can be witty, enthusiastic, and more in your cover letter—I like seeing the writer’s personality outside of the work!—but please, don’t do so at the expense of your own writing. I received one submission whose author told me the poems within were written in a period of severe dietary distress—not exactly the association you want to build as I move on to your poems. Some cover letters preface the work with something along the lines of “These probably aren’t very good.” This, to me, is baffling; if you, the person who spent time and effort to build these works of art, don’t think they’re of any quality, why should anyone else? And if you truly think sending them out is a waste of time, why would you then knowingly waste the time of an editor? Some of this language may come from an attempt at appearing modest, but direct communication with an editor is not the place for that. Neither is arrogance, mind you—that’s actually far worse—but all that matters is that you believe in your work, and think it’s worth an editor’s time and consideration.

In that sense, the way I look at a cover letter is like checking a box. Did the writer demonstrate that they take the journal and its editors as well as their own work seriously? Yes? Okay, then let’s see the poems. Everything else is a distant second. I’ll always appreciate a bit of warmth or sociability from other members of a community that I’m happy to be a part of, but writing past that makes it far more likely that you’ve added something unnecessary or questionable. Editors do have pet peeves, as mentioned above, and while none of them will disqualify you from fair consideration, pretty much any of the following things won’t help your chances:

  • “Cute” bios. I don’t care about your pets’ names. Yes, I’ll enjoy all the pet photos and videos shared with me on social media, as everyone enjoys them, and I’m sure your animals are lovable and adorable, but unless your poems were written while under a hypnotic spell put on you by your Jack Russell Terrier, Juno, leave the pets out of the bio. I’ve seen some humor tucked into the final line of some bios, and sometimes they are amusing while still fitting into the main two points of criteria above, but more often than not they come off as unprofessional or at least distracting. Also worth remembering is that these bios will often be pared down by editors if your work is accepted anyway.
  • Don’t explain your work in your cover letter. To wit, I’m not further explaining this bullet point.
  • Read. The. Guidelines. Some editors will not consider a submission from someone who clearly couldn’t be bothered to take 60 seconds to read the guidelines for submitting (yet again, not showing respect for the journal that one is asking to spend well more than that amount of time reviewing one’s work)—as is their right. Personally, I’m not in that camp because I want to find the best possible poetry I can, no matter what, but clear disregard for the very reasonable guidelines given (as they always are, no matter the journal) will not be setting one up for success. Your work will have to shine bright to make an editor forget the fact that you couldn’t be bothered to follow their instruction. It certainly does happen, but if you want to help your chances, take the time to be considerate.
  • Bios that state number of publications. “FirstName LastName has been published in over 200 journals.” Hm. I don’t doubt that claims like this are true (though like hell am I going to count to verify), but it says something about a writer’s priorities, implying that one cares more about publication than creating good work; quantity over quality. List a handful of relatively recent publications you’re proud of, and leave it at that. If you have a book or multiple out, you probably don’t need to list more than those. Notably, I get the sense that someone who’s published in 200, 300 (I even saw one submission that claimed over 1000) journals is just sending the same batch or two of poems indiscriminately to as many journals as they can.
  • Are you sure you followed the guidelines? Never hurts to double check.
  • Address the submission to the proper editor(s). For example, if you’re sending fiction, address it to the fiction editor(s) by name. If there are no dedicated fiction editors for whatever reason, addressing it to the editor, managing editor, or editor-in-chief is your best bet. In rare occasions a journal might have more than a couple editors for a given genre, in which case “Fiction Editors” or “Poetry Editors” is an acceptable substitute to listing six or seven names out. Worth keeping in mind is that unless submissions are read blind, these are the very first words read in your submission and to get them wrong (like saying “Dear Editor” when there are multiple editors in your genre, or getting the gender of the editor wrong—I’ve seen it) is not a good first impression.

Editors want to read your work, and if it fits what they’re looking for, they’ll want to publish it. Submissions are the lifeblood of many journals, and certainly the one I work with. Cover letters are usually necessary, but there is rarely a need to make them more than a friendly, professional hello. Don’t trouble yourself more than you need to with this. Check the box and move on to the work—it’s what both writers and editors care about most.

Guest Blog Post, Mark Lewandowski: Paper vs. Plastic; or a Tale of Two Essays

MarkLewandowskiFor many years I resisted submitting my work to online journals.  I suppose I was afraid they didn’t have the reputation of paper journals, and that my university wouldn’t consider them legitimate venues for a creative writing professor’s work.  Or maybe there was something off-putting about reading something on the same plastic device I composed it on.  Reading my work in published form already makes me squirm; too often I want to declunkify numerous sentences.  At least if the story or essay is already in a book or journal there’s not much you can do about it.  It’s there with all its blemishes permanently intact.

Words on a computer screen, on the other hand, seem so ephemeral.  All writers want their work to survive the ages.  A book might become thick with dust, but you can still store, and then later find it on a shelf.  With one click on a computer you can replace your work in an on-line journal with Miley Cyrus’s latest twerking pic.

But two years ago my attitude towards online journals changed completely.  At AWP one year, novelist Leslie Pietrzyk asked me to submit something to Redux, a new on-line journal devoted to “reprinting” stories, poems and essays that had once appeared in journals now “languishing on dusty library shelves.”  No one had ever solicited work from me before.  I was thrilled, even it was “only” for an on-line journal.  Some months later I sent Leslie “Tourist Season at Auschwitz,” which originally appeared in The Gettysburg Review.  (I found out later that the issue containing my essay sold out.)  It appeared in Redux a month or two later.  The journal is a simple affair.  Each weekly issue contains just one story, essay or poem, followed by an account of its composition.  Leslie uses a simple WordPress blogging program with few bells and whistles.  This being a labor of love, Redux can’t pay its contributors.

At about the same time Traveler’s Tales published A Small Key Opens Big Doors, one of four anthologies celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps.  It contains my essay “Caroline,” which first appeared some years ago in Cimarron Review. (Like “Tourist Season at Auschwitz,” “Caroline” sprang from the same frantic pile of material I wrote after my three visits to Auschwitz in the early 90’s.)  It’s a beautiful volume—thick, creamy paper, an eye catching, dark red cover.  It looks like an appropriate Christmas gift, or something you’d give to someone going into the Peace Corps.  My remuneration?  Contributor’s copies.

I pushed both the anthology and the online journal, using all the social networking I could stomach:  My blog, Twitter, Facebook, etc.  Because the essays are drawn from a common material I was able to broadcast both on any number of Facebook pages, including ones devoted to Peace Corps Poland, Polish American Writers, and stories of World War II.  I included links to the journal, and links to the appropriate Amazon page.

I soon realized what I’m sure is obvious to others: more people read “Tourist Season at Auschwitz” than “Caroline.”  You can track hits on Redux, same as you can track sales on Amazon.  People responded to “Tourist Season” on all the Facebook pages.  Most of them even said nice things about it.  It got around.  People shared it on other pages. Some still do, in fact. “Caroline?”  Not so much.  Maybe it’s a weaker essay.  I don’t know.  More likely, the anthology is simply harder to share.  Asking someone one to click on a link and read is far easier than asking someone to click on a link, pony up $20, and then wait a week for the book to show up.

And Amazon makes it easy with books.  What about those beautiful literary journals?  Numerous times on my travels around the world people have asked me if they could find stuff I published.  “Sure,” I might say, “just send a check to this university.  Make sure it’s not during the summer.  No one’s going to be there.  Oh, and I really don’t know the volume number containing my story, so just tell them it came out in 1998.  But, given all the delays journals are prone to, the appropriate issue, even though it appeared in 1998, is really, officially, a 1996 issue.  You could just give them my name, but interns come and go; whoever gets your check might not recognize my name.  Just go by the cover art.  Tell them you want the issue with the dog on the cover.  I’m pretty sure there’s only one dog cover.”

I don’t have to do that as often anymore.  Now, I can just say, “Superstition Review.  My name is in the index.”  Not even that, actually.  If they have a smart phone, I can find my work for them immediately.

The other day I was talking to my friend and colleague, Matthew Brennan.  He’s a very well published poet.  I asked him if he ever submitted to online journals.  He shrugged and said, “Nah, I like how the journals look on my book shelf.”

And they do.  I can’t deny it.  I like the feel of them.  I even like how some of the issues containing my work have begun to yellow and grow brittle.  It was a big deal to me when my first story made it into print.  It took a lot of years for it to happen.  When I see that issue of Red Cedar Review on my shelf it’s like looking at the trophy I won for little league baseball.  When the journal first came out I didn’t give much thought to readers.  First and foremost I wanted to see my name in print.

Now I think more about an audience.  I have enough paper journals on my shelf; I want to be read.  For good or bad it’s simply easier to reach an audience with an online journal than with a paper one.  Besides, if someone likes my work, say in Superstition Review, they can click on the appropriate link, pony up $20, and in a week my book will be in their mail box.  Sure, journals containing your work look nice when you get them.  You know what else looks good?  Royalty checks.