Jennings, Brittany – Page 28 – Willow Springs Magazine

Issue 69: Michael Martin Shea

About Michael Martin Shea

Michael Martin Shea is an MFA candidate at the University of Mississippi, where he is a John and Renée Grisham Fellow. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Salt Hill, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Meridian, Sycamore Review, and elsewhere.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “How to Say, ‘I Was Scared of Fire As A Kid'”

“How to Say, ‘I Was Scared of Fire As A Kid,’” began, actually, as a Facebook update—I don’t ever delete people from Facebook because that would involve, well, putting effort into my Facebook account, so sometimes I log in and am greeted with these updates from people I only sort of remember, all talking about really strange things. That’s what happened here: a distant acquaintance posted about a dream she had in which she was given six hours to live but had nothing she wanted to do. I thought that was wonderful, so of course, I stole it, and it became the first line of the poem. The rest came pretty naturally—I felt that if I started the poem with a dream, I had to continue to talk about dreams, so I did. Most of those dreams actually happened, too—the dog bite is entirely true, and the kitten dream is essentially true, with some distracting details removed. The hardest part was coming up with a title once it was finished. I made all sorts of terrible attempts. Eventually I was talking to a friend about the poem and he asked me what I was scared of, and I responded, “Well, I used to be scared of fire as a kid,” which was a total misdirection answer, but that sort of stuck.

Though the specific action of the poem is embellished, the piece is, to me, pretty autobiographical, at least as far as the two characters are concerned. I can pretty clearly identify some issues that were going on in my personal life at the time, but most prominent is this idea of what happens when a narrative moves from dream to reality (or anti-reality), and the loss that that might entail. This poem came at the height of a very autobiographical narrative period, which not accidentally coincided with my impending move for graduate school, and my girlfriend and I were dealing with how that would play out for us. In a way, this poem was my attempt to force these things to at least pause for a second. I’ve since backed off that narrative bent really heavily—maybe I ran out of stories to tell—but this poem is still one of my favorites from that time. It feels very honest—I can still see the person I was at that point in my life.

Notes on Reading

Reading is a really challenging experience for me. On one hand, reading is obviously great, just on a level of pure enjoyment. And I wouldn’t have started writing if I hadn’t at some point read the things that made me want to be a writer. I’m continually inspired by other poets—especially Josh Bell, Sabrina Orah Mark, and Frederick Seidel, all of whom are criminally underrated. On the other hand, it’s not infrequently that I find myself reading something and going, “Good Lord, that’s so incredible—and now I can’t write that.” With everything we read, we abandon one more possible way of expressing ourselves in a manner that’s authentic. Which is good, but it forces me to work harder and I don’t always like that. Additionally, there’s a big responsibility involved in being a reader that I don’t think the writer has. The writer—especially the poet—can essentially say and do whatever he or she pleases. There’s really not a lot on the line here in terms of social capital or actual financial capital, and the difference between being a celebrated poet and a nobody amounts, in a lot of cases, to things that are entirely outside the poet’s control. Which is really freeing as a writer—if there’s nothing at stake, why not write the most honest, authentic thing you can? It’s the reader’s job to make value judgments and decide, “Okay, this is good for such and such reason.” The problem is that it’s hard to take on that responsibility as the reader one moment, and then completely cast it away the next when it’s time to sit down and write, and it can lead to a lot of anxiety and self-censorship. Granted, some anxiety is necessary as a writer, and of course it’s only through reading everything else that we can really develop our own notions of poetics and determine if our poems are working in the ways in which we want them to work. But I find I have to really separate myself from what I’ve read in order to write—I need to read it, but then I need to forget it as well. Thankfully, I have a really bad memory.

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Issue 69: Austin LaGrone

About Austin LaGrone

Austin LaGrone is the author of Oyster Perpetual, winner of the 2010 Idaho Prize for Poetry. His poems have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Brilliant Cornsers, Crazyhorse, Hayden’s Ferry, and Poetry International. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at John Jay College.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Two Poems”

“Foreseeable” is a poem that suffers nostalgia for a time and a place that has passed. I find all the hostility towards tobacco more offensive than cancer itself. It’s even illegal to smoke in Central Park now…likely a law that was passed to harass the homeless. These days, if you want to enjoy a puff without getting dirty looks, you have to travel all the way to Paris. And it’s only getting worse. I recently bought a pack of Delicados in Mexico and there was a picture on the pack of a man who couldn’t hug his daughter because his leg had been amputated. I ask you, who smokes until their leg falls off? And why bring the little girl into the narrative? When I buy a donut there are no pictures of grossly obese people. When I buy a Cadillac there are no pictures of the jaws of death. Anyway, “Foreseeable” goes out to the smokers.

“Tableau with Rockets Redglare” is a grab-bag of objective correlatives for the divorce I was going through at the time. All that ghastly business. The italicized language is “found poetry”—things I heard or observed in the world. The principle metaphor is the busted strip club marquee—Girls-Girls…and then just failed light. A kind of Duende. The very fact that the rule of three should fail to obtain in such vulgar circumstances is delightful. And for all I know, the marquee is still there…burning on Decatur Street.

Notes on Reading

I can talk influences, overlooked masterpieces like he Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You
and recently published beauties like A Lamp with Wings for aeons. A life of writing is principally dedicated to reading. I’ve kept the same office for five years just so I don’t have to move all the damn books. I suppose the poet who has most recently influenced my style is Cesar Viejo—both the collected and the posthumous. It is amazing to me that I lived without these poems for over forty years. I rarely leave the house without them. They say he drank so much beer that the bartenders gave him a significant discount…a beautiful, beautiful man.

Two Poems by Austin LaGrone

Found in Willow Springs 69 Back to Author Profile Tableau with Rockets Redglare At home with Wild Turkey, I hear someone yell Piss yellow gypsy cab colored moon! and, looking … Read more

About Jill Christman

Jill Christman’s memoir, Darkroom: A Family Exposure, won the AWP Award Series in Creative Nonfiction, was first published by the University of Georgia Press in 2002, and will be reissued in paperback in Fall 2011. Recent essays appearing in River Teeth and Harpur Palate have been honored by Pushcart nominations, and her writing has been published in Barrelhouse, Brevity, Descant, Literary Mama, Mississippi Review, Wondertime, and many other journals, magazines, and anthologies. She teaches creative nonfiction in Ashland University’s low-residency MFA program and at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, where she lives with her husband, writer Mark Neely, and their two children. Since the time surrounding the writing of “Bird Girls,” she has been working on her next book, a memoir entitled Blue Baby Blue, and she’s really hoping to finish it before 2012. Just in case.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Bird Girls”

The slumbering baby in the first paragraph of “Bird Girls” is our first child. Ella just finished first grade yesterday, so I have evidence in her they-grow-up-so-fast body to date the origins of this essay six years ago. At the time, we’d been in Indiana for a little over a year, and as a northwestern mountain girl adjusting to life in the Midwest in all its permutations of flatness, the present-tense moment that kicks off that essay was jolting to me in a reassuring way. Those trilling, chattering, whistling birds were so loud, so simultaneously cacophonous and differentiated, so sexual (after all, that’s precisely what the little buggers were getting up to in the pink dawn), I was indeed transported right there in my Indiana bed back to those Oregon woods. True story.

Because my body was curled around a sleeping baby, I couldn’t exactly move, and the combination between that circumstance and the sharp, Proustian memory of the collegiate birding trip collided to send me into an exploration of shifting female identity over the course of a long and mobile life: Who am I? Who was I? What is the relationship between the young woman on the mountain and the older one in the big bed?

In those early days of motherhood I was often stuck under a nursing child with my hands too wrapped up in petting and holding and feeding to be much use on a keyboard. I did a lot of writing in my head and then hoped for a moment to prop the baby between me and a laptop and get some of it down. That morning I got lucky. Six long years later, I figured out what the essay was really trying to be about and finished it.

Notes on Reading

As an essayist, memoirist, and teacher, I’ve been obsessing about the handling of time in nonfiction (for a great book on this subject, check out Sven Birkerts’s The Art of Time in Memoir), and I’m beginning to think that all our best questions come from folding time. I had a fabulous teacher/mentor in my graduate program at Alabama, Sandy Huss, who scribbled a note in the margin of one of my short stories way back when: Before the manuscript there is silence. The manuscript breaks the silence. Why here? Why now? These are important questions for nonfiction writers, too. Does the now-narrator have something she must ask the then-self? Can the reader be convinced that this excavation of the past and memory is real and necessary? My students are sometimes shocked when I tell them I never write anything when I know what I’m talking about, when I know the answer. Why bother? The work then has already been done and the inquiry is false. Give me the good, unanswerable questions any day.

The fundamental book for lessons in the essential shaping of life material, the artful folding of the magic carpet, of course, is Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak Memory. I return to that book—and Nathalie Sarraute’s Childhood—every year. I thought about Nabokov this semester when I read two books that were new to me: Kathleen Finneran’s astounding memoir The Tender Land: A Family Love Story (the first chapter could be a textbook for folding time) and Eula Biss’s provocative collection of essays, Notes from No Man’s Land (Biss’s juxtaposition of her own present-day navigation of her neighborhood with our national history makes an open-eyed look at race possible). Speaking of Biss, I’m also drawn to nonfiction that teaches me new things about the world, which is why I’m a steadfast Lauren Slater fan, and why this year’s nightstand books included Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Annie Paul’s Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives.

Also, my husband got me a Kindle in a red leather case for Christmas, and because our house is stuffed to the rafters with books with which no one can part—and because the red leather is so snappy—I’m trying to choose books I can bear to enjoy in e-reader form: Skloot’s Immortal Life was my first, and because my colleague Sean Lovelace says it should be, Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America is on my summer list.

Bird Girls by Jill Christman

Found in Willow Springs 68 Back to Author Profile I WAKE UP, a wife and mother, at five a.m. on a July morning in the middle of Indiana, not because my … Read more

About Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum

Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum is the author of two collections of short fiction—This Life She’s Chosen (Chronicle Books, 2005) and Swimming With Strangers (Chronicle Books, 2008). She has been the recipient of a PEN/O. Henry Prize for short fiction and fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the MacDowell colony. She teaches at Purchase College, SUNY and lives with her husband and two young children in the Hudson River Valley.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “The Remainder Salvaged”

“The Remainder Salvaged” was a long time in the making. Several years ago, my husband’s grandmother (who has been, incidentally, one of my few early-draft readers for over a decade now, and who still—even now that she’s in her 80s—occasionally writes me long, thoughtful, and hand-penned letters analyzing and critiquing my stories) sent me a newspaper clipping of a Wenatchee World article
featuring her uncle discussing the anniversary of the Wellington Train Disaster. The disaster happened in 1910 in the Cascades, near the town now known as Tye (then as Wellington). An avalanche swept two Great Northern trains from their tracks, killing 96 people. According to the clipping, my husband’s great-great uncle, who was a young man at the time of the accident, was one of those who received the bodies of the avalanche victims when they were tobogganed into Wenatchee following the accident. I knew I wanted to write about the disaster as soon as I read the article, but it took me years to finally find the right character through which to enter the story. Then, last summer my family and I, home in Washington for our annual summer visit, hiked the site of the avalanche (known as the Iron Goat Trail) along the now-defunct train route. The site struck me as eerie, though we were there on a bright, warm summer day. Pieces of the train wreckage are still there, beneath the layers of overgrown brambles and nettles and undergrowth; and the snow shed the railroad built following the accident is crumbling and scribbled with graffiti. The result of the visit to the disaster site was the emergence of the trio of characters that appear in this story—Nils, Iris, and the sister—and a first scene.

This story diverges from most of my stories in that it is fairly closely based on actual history. I’ve loved reading historical fiction since I was a little girl, but haven’t tried my hand at it as a writer until now. As I wrote this story, I wrestled with how accurate I needed to be about the history, and how clear I needed to be about the specific date of the accident; I made several revisions of the story, sometimes holding to the facts, other times veering far from them. In the end, I think I found some middle ground between fact and fiction, and am happy with the final version of the story.

Notes on Reading

As a reader I tend to favor short stories over novels (though there are plenty of novels I love and find myself turning to again and again as models of prose and structure). My new literary obsession is the work of Anthony Doerr, whose collection Memory Wall won the Story Prize this year. I was completely knocked out by the stories in that collection—especially the title story and one titled “Afterworld.” Both stories are fragmented narratives, and that form, too, is a new obsession. I also recently read Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, and though the book is a hybrid memoir/poem, it has really had an influence on my fiction. In fact, I’ve been reading quite a lot of creative nonfiction in the last year (in part because I taught a nonfiction workshop last fall at Purchase College), and shifting my genre focus as a reader has had the unexpected side effect of rejuvenating my short fiction. I went through a long phase of total fiction burnout following the publication of my second book of stories. I was bored of the standard structure, the standard realism (or, at least, my standard realism), and I needed something to wake me up again to the joy of making fiction. I think my attraction to Nelson’s and Doerr’s books has everything to do with the way both writers are blending and subverting traditional genre limitations and playing with structure, and though it’s not very evident in this particular story, I’m working on doing more of both in the new collection stories I’m currently writing. (And, yep, I’m writing a third collection before finishing a first novel. It’s probably a disaster to say that publicly, but what can I do? Stories are it for me—every new story a perfect challenge—and I don’t think I’ll ever lose my devotion to the short form.)

“Dear Mistress” by Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum

Found in Willow Springs 78 Back to Author Profile DEAR MISTRESS, You are the cancer in my family’s gut, our bleeding ulcer, a bile we cannot swallow. THIS IS THE … Read more

Online Exclusive: A Conversation with Kirsten Lunstrum

Works in Willow Springs February 3, 2005 Adam O’Connor Rodriguez A CONVERSATION WITH KIRSTEN LUNSTRUM Photo Credit: www.kirstenlunstrum.net KIRSTEN SUNDBERG LUNSTRUM WAS BORN IN CHICAGO and raised in the Pacific Northwest. … Read more

Issue 78: Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum

About Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum is the author of two collections of short fiction, This Life She’s Chosen and Swimming With Strangers (both published by Chronicle Books). Her … Read more

About Clare Beams

Clare Beams and her husband live in Massachusetts, where she writes and teaches 9th-grade English. She received her MFA from Columbia in 2006. Her story “We Show What We Have Learned,” originally published in Hayden’s Ferry Review, will appear in the Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011. Her story “Much Peace,” published in Inkwell, received a Special Mention in the Pushcart Prize 2011 volume. She has a story forthcoming in One Story and has just finished, she thinks, a novel called The Meditations of All Our Hearts. She’s at work on more stories.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Hourglass”

I think “Hourglass” began out of my fascination with a certain kind of lofty language that gets used sometimes in discussions about teaching. For the past five years I’ve been a ninth-grade English teacher at a small private high school, a wonderful place. I love the work, and I’m surrounded by colleagues who do, too. When people who love teaching talk about it, there’s a tone that can color things, a grandness that strikes me as unusual (as grandness goes) because it’s genuine. I think that for the most part we talk about teaching in lofty terms because we can’t help it. The kids really do make it hard to use any others.

In writing this story, I was interested in taking that kind of language in a darker direction. What if the idea of shaping others, which is at the heart of my understanding of a teacher’s job, were more literal and sinister? What kind of tyrant could have that kind of vision, and what kind of student might be tempted by it?

Of course, all of this makes the whole process sound much more conscious and calculated than it was. All I really had to go on when I started writing was an image of this old streaked-stone school and the sound of Mr. Pax’s voice. These elements combined to make the story feel somehow outside time in a way that was exciting to me. When I realized how Melody was going to have to transform, everything became much harder for a while—I knew pretty much where I wanted things to go, but not how to take them there convincingly—and the story and I are both indebted to Sam Ligon for his incredible insight and patience along the way. He helped “Hourglass” to become a much better version of itself.

Notes on Reading

As a reader, I have an enthusiasm for old British things that I think has left its mark on “Hourglass.” I love Keats and Tennyson and the thick, sprawling novels that have always reminded me of big houses with dark corners—Our Mutual Friend and Jane Eyre and Great Expectations and Middlemarch. There’s a kind of scope there, a feeling of entering a whole world, that I’ve found and loved in some more modern books, too. Chris Adrian’s The Children’s Hospital blew me away, as did Geoffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex and A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, and I just finished reading Julie Orringer’s wonderful The Invisible Bridge. Last summer I had a great time with Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger, a fabulously creepy and atmospheric ghost story. All of those books—though in very different ways—demand that a reader slow down and make space for them.

Recently I’ve been reading short story collections, something I tend to do when I’m revising stories of my own, as if I’m going to find some magic key that will make the whole process easier. That never happens, but I have found some wonderful books: recent highlights are Robin Black’s If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, Anthony Doerr’s The Shell Collector, Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen, and Kevin Wilson’s Tunneling to the Center of the Earth.

And then there are my longstanding loves, writers who fill me with feelings of inadequacy and admiration and most of all gratitude. I will never be able to read enough Alice Munro, who packs her worlds into small spaces in a way that amazes me. For pyrotechnic sentences, Nabokov and Woolf. And for the sheer beauty and density of what can be done with words, no one has anything on Shakespeare. Hamlet and King Lear are probably the most staggering to me, but
I teach Romeo and Juliet to my 9th-graders, and every year I find something new in it.

Hourglass by Clare Beams

Found in Willow Springs 68 Back to Author Profile A TRANSFORMATIONAL EDUCATION, the newspaper ad had promised, so we’d come to the Gilchrist School, which looked like a 19th century invalids’ home. … Read more

About Nance Van Winckel

Nance Van Winckel was editor of Willow Springs from 1990-1996. Her fifth collection of poems
is No Starling (2007, U. of Washington Press). She is the recipient of two NEA Poetry Fellowships as well as awards from the Poetry Society of America, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. She is also the author of three collections of short fiction and the recipient of an Isherwood Fiction Fellowship for a work in progress. She lives near Spokane, Washington and teaches in the low-residency MFA Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Her current project is something she calls pho-toems, a marriage of photographs and small bits of poetic
text. These have appeared in various literary journals, galleries, and shows.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Four Poems”

These poems are from a new book, entitled Pacific Walkers, that will be out in 2013 with the University
of Washington Press. The poems evolved from recalling my first “real” job: as a newspaper reporter. I was sent out to cover
a rash of unidentified corpses, John Does. Each poem I worked on seemed to call forth a next poem, and so on. I both love it
and hate it when this happens. I feel the poems invade me, take me over, make me theirs. The first piece I wrote about the job
was a little prose poem. It opened up the door.

THE JOB. I worked a week on the Bridal Desk and when I griped about it, the boss said, “Here then, Blondie, see if
you can get some legs under this.” And back in the last century I was a grateful person. Having scoffed at the brides and the
names of their laces, I was sent into a cold wind along a shoreline lashed by an icy froth and a third then a fourth John Doe
collected in black plastic bags and put in a black truck and me taking notes while the collector shook his head, saying, “Ain’t
no story here. There’s only one way to spell dead. Stand back.”

The two snaps of his green rubber gloves pulled on. He has a tag to attach to the dead man’s toe, but no toe. One
ankle but no foot. The collector says, “For someone who didn’t add up to much, this guy has quite the big number.” I write it
down. No one likes my story. I don’t like my story. In ten minutes I have to phone it in. What, per se, to jot? The filled-full
shadow becomes a shade.

I work for the paper. I can say this and flash a badge and walk into the cordoned-off places. I work for what I don’t
even know is itself about to die. The paper. The man’s big number sits beneath the small name—same as last week, as last year. I
jot: freedom fighter, according to the tattoo; Christ-lover, so claims the cross on its chain with its broken clasp. Loyal, yes,
to the end.

Notes on Reading

I’m always reading at least one book of poems, a collection of stories or a novel, and a nonfiction something. I go
back and forth between these in the course of a day. During my writing time, I take frequent breaks to read. Reading another poet gets my language synapses firing again. A new favorite collection of poems was Laura Kasishcke’s Space, in Chains. I loved how a poem of hers will start out in prose and then break into lineated lines, or vice-versa. Often right in the middle, the piece
morphs and moves from prose into poem. I liked how liberated that made the poems feel . . . as if they couldn’t be nailed down
to being one thing or another, which in turn seemed to go with the subject matter of the whole book, that transitoriness.

I’m also crazy about the poetry of Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Norman Dubie, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Mary Ruefle. I go back
to Transtromer frequently, and also to Wallace Stevens. In fiction I just read a wonderful short novel by Paula Fox called
Desperate Characters, and I’m now reading and thoroughly enjoying the collected short stories of William Maxwell
called All the Days and Nights. The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald was a recent favorite book of nonfiction. I also pour over books of visual art: photography especially but also paintings and all sorts of collage, assemblage, and montage.

Four Poems by Nance Van Winckel

Found in Willow Springs 68 Back to Author Profile “Outlaw Mentality” -that’s what the coroner says caught you up, brought you down. A life of that fuck-that stalled on the track. … Read more

About Matthew Dickman

Matthew Dickman is the author of All-American Poem (American Poetry Review/ Copper Canyon Press, 2008). The recipient of The Honickman First Book Prize, the May Sarton Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont College, and the 2009 Oregon Book Award from Literary Arts of Oregon. His poems are forthcoming or have appeared in Tin House Magazine, McSweeny’s, Ploughshares, The Believer, The London Review of Books, and The New Yorker among others. W.W. Norton & Co. will publish his second book in 2012. He lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on Two Poems

Both “Dog” and “Halcion” were, formally, a departure for me. For a long time my poems seemed to need at least a page and a half for me to figure anything out, for the poem to feel complete in some way, so it was an interesting feeling, a kind of departure, when I began writing shorter poems. “Dog” is part of a longer elegiac sequence written for my older brother after his suicide. Mainly it’s a poem that suggests our shadows are always with us. That we can tame grief and struggle enough to be house trained though they are still wild animals. “Halcion” was written after my first experience taking the drug of the same name. I took it before having my wisdom teeth removed. I’m terrified of the dentist and all things medical. Halcion took care of that fear! It’s a wonder drug. I love it. The poem tries to describe my feelings when I was on it.

Notes on Reading

For a writer, reading is one of the most important experiences that can affect their work. Reading is also a radical act. It’s humanizing in nature. It teaches us, in a natural and very sincere way, about compassion and understanding, about true empathy. Some important books for me, as of late, are Lucia Perillo’s “Inseminating the Elephant,” Diane Wakoski’s “The Butcher’s Apron,” Gary Jackson’s “Missing You, Metropolis,” and Dorothea Lasky’s “Black Life.” Each of these poets are very different from each other but they all have something important in common and that is a wildness of imagination. Each of them raises their freak-flags high which makes me feel brave, in turn,
when I sit down and write.

Two Poems by Matthew Dickman

Found in Willow Springs 68 Back to Author Profile Dog I’m hiding from the stars tonight. I’ve pulled every blind and turned off all the lights but one, which I’ve … Read more

Issue 69: A Conversation with Matthew Dickman

Interview in Willow Springs 69 Works in Willow Springs 68 April 15, 2011 TIM GREENUP, KRISTINA MCDONALD, DANIEL SHUTT A CONVERSATION WITH MATHEW DICKMAN Photo Credit: Academy of American Poets It’s … Read more

About Jan Beatty

Jan Beatty’s books include Red Sugar (2008), Boneshaker (2002), and Mad River (1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize), published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Beatty hosts and produces Prosody, a public radio show on NPR affiliate WYEP-FM featuring national writers. She worked as a welfare caseworker, an abortion counselor, in maximum security prisons, and as a waitress for fifteen years. She directs the creative writing program at Carlow University, where she teaches in the MFA program. She’s hoping to complete her fourth book of poems this summer.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “American Revolver”

I’ve been trying to write “American Revolver” for a number of years, but just couldn’t figure out how to write a poem about a guy who robbed whorehouses for a living. Not a lot of models out there. In my previous books, I have poems about prison, some of them reflecting the time I spent in maximum security as a social worker, and later as a teacher. I didn’t want to repeat or revisit the issues of these poems. What makes “American Revolver” work, I think, is highlighting the oddness of both the ex-con and the speaker—he’s robbing whorehouses and she’s decided to have sex with him while he’s reciting the 19th amendment. Can she be a feminist if she turns her back, so to speak, on the women’s right to vote? To what degree is she implicated, as someone who engages with him, knowing that he terrorizes people? How does desire relate to the oddness and danger, or does it? My hope is to make this messy and unresolved: having humor on the edge of desire/on the edge of self-destruction.

Notes on Reading

Right now I’m reading D.A. Powell’s Chronic, Anne Carson’s Nox, Ross Gay’s Bringing the Shovel Down, Stacey Waite’s the lake has no saint, Reginald Shepherd’s Red Clay Weather, A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos, and Scavenge by RJ Gibson. I’mreally looking forward to some books that are coming out: Judith Vollmer’s The Water Books, Toi Derricotte’s The Undertaker’s Daughter, and Aaron Smith’s Appetite. I always go back to Ed Ochester’s Unreconstructed, James Allen Hall’s Now You’re the Enemy, Wanda Coleman’s Ostinato Vamps, Off-Season City Pipe by Allison Hedge Coke, and work by Alicia Ostriker, Gerald Stern, and Etheridge Knight to name a few.

I read a lot of nonfiction—right now a lot of books on Canada, since I’m heading off on a train trip across Canada in August. I’m reading a book on Winnipeg, since I’m half-Canadian, and that’s where my birth father is from. I’m reading some books on arctic exploration. Nonfiction that I always return to: In-Between Places and The West Pole by Diane Glancy, anything by Gretel Erlich, Jon Krakauer, Terry Tempest Williams, Rick Bass.

“American Revolver” by Jan Beatty

Found in Willow Springs 68 Back to Author Profile I knew a guy named Red from Concord who robbed whorehouses for a living. You couldn’t tell just looking at him: his … Read more

About Buzz Mauro

Buzz Mauro’s stories have been published in River Styx, NOON, New Orleans Reviewz, Isotope, Tampa Review and other magazines. His poems have been published in Tar River Poetry, Fugue, Poet Lore, Main Street Rag and other magazines. He has an MFA in Acting from Catholic University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University, and believes you can never have too many MFAs. He’s published three books with co-author Deb Gottesman on the applications of acting technique to “real life”—primarily public speaking and job interviews—and has taught public reading skills at the Rainier Writing Workshop and The Writer’s Center. He’s co-founder and Co-Executive Director (also along with Deb Gottesman) of The Theatre Lab School of the Dramatic Arts, Washington, DC’s largest theatrical training center. He lives in Annapolis with his partner Steve Daigler.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Fractions”

The first fiction class I ever took was with Rick Moody, and when it came out that I was a math teacher (which I no longer am), he said I should write “the math book” that the literary world had yet to see. I liked the idea, and he was Rick Moody, so I’ve been writing stories with math in them ever since.

“Fractions” has a lot less math than some of my math stories. In this one I was more interested in the hellishness of parent-teacher conferences than the math itself. Also, less facetiously, much as some of us would like to believe we live in a “post-gay” society where everyone is “fine with it,” plenty of people still have trouble integrating their sexuality into their lives, and that’s an issue that finds its way into a lot of my fiction.

I ran sprints in high school, never more than 220 yards, and I tend to write super-short. At 4,243 words (ten Willow Springs pages), “Fractions” is one of my longer pieces. I wrote it in the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University, where the geniuses David Huddle and Ann Pancake had everything to do with getting it into its present presentable form. Thanks, too, to Sam Ligon for seeing something in the story and offering his amazing eye in the crucial final stages.

Notes on Reading

I’ve read gluttonously since I was a kid, and my family, who have always thought I needed more fresh air, make a lot of fun of me for it.

I never thought I’d be in a book club, because I couldn’t imagine having my reading predetermined to that extent, but I’m in one now and loving it. It’s a bunch of smart, interesting, nice people who have introduced me to some wonderful recent books I probably would not have gotten to without the impetus of our monthly meetings, including Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story and Marianne Wiggins’ amazing Evidence of Things Unseen. I tend to go for the classics (all-time must-not-miss: The Brothers Karamazov), but I love Richard Powers (all that science and linguistic agility and humanity) and Lorrie Moore’s short stories (so funny and heartbroken). And everyone in the whole world should read J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, because it’s the best example I know of that rare and wonderful thing, a truly important contemporary novel that’s an honest-to-god can’t-put-it-down page-turner. Oh, and one more: Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is the Great American Novel. For my non-contemporary lit fix, I’m currently reading the Hebrew Bible for the first time, and you really can’t beat it for crazy. (Read it from the beginning and tell me I’m wrong.) Some of it’s beautiful, of course, and all of it’s fascinating. I’m taking it slowly, in conjunction with Christine Hayes’ fabulous Yale undergraduate course, which—by the way—can be found in its entirety (videos of lectures, assignments, even exams), along with full courses on lots of other enticing subjects, at Open Yale Courses. (Yale happens to be my beloved alma mater, but the courses are free and available to anyone – and they include a great one on the American novel since 1945.)

I love to dip into certain books at random for a jolt of language energy to get my own writing going. The best book for that is David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which I’m ashamed to admit I haven’t read all the way through, but which I open all the time. I find that Nicholson Baker works well for that, too, as does Lydia Davis, and my new favorite inspirer is Jane Gardam (discovered in my book club!).

Fractions by Buzz Mauro

About Hugh Martin

Hugh Martin is a graduate of Muskingum University and now attends the MFA program at Arizona State. He served six years in the Army National Guard as an M1A1 Tanker and spent 11 months in Iraq. His work has appeared in CONSEQUENCE Magazine, Mid-American Review, Nashville Review, and is forthcoming in Gargoyle, Third Coast, and the American Poetry Review. His chapbook, So, How Was the War? (Kent State UP, 2010) was published by the Wick Poetry Center. His work was recently selected as part of the 7th Avenue Streetscape Series in downtown Phoenix, Arizona. In the summer of 2011, he will teach introductory creative writing classes at the National University of Singapore. He is at work on a manuscript of poems with the tentative title, The Burn Pit.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on Two War Poems

Like most of my work, these poems are triggered from my experiences in Iraq. “Friday Night, FOB Cobra” is a poem that tries to capture, using small and sparse details, the lives of the soldiers inside the FOB (forward operating base). Some of my goals when writing involve exploring those aspects of war outside of actual fighting, attacks—all those things that come to mind when thinking of typical stories of war. My goal was to make each section vivid and strong enough to give the reader a clear idea of what each soldier is like as a human being, and possibly what issues cross the soldiers’ minds regarding their own lives, outside of and away from the war. I hope the reader might better understand each soldier, and whatever flaws they may have. The poem began much longer, and over a few months and work-shopping, I trimmed it down. One thing I tried to do was give each soldier a voice, while juxtaposing some kind of action that helped exhibit the mundane, boring, redundant and sometimes disgusting routines of life on a base while at war. One thing I’ve found through my experiences in the military is that no matter the situation in war, no matter how dangerous, dull, horrifying, tiring, etc., people talk about their lives. A lot of my war experience was just that: arguing about the best American mafia-film in the street while EOD tried to blow up an IED; or listening to a soldier give another soldier relationship advice while we searched someone’s home for weapons. Besides the armor, the weapons, the training, I think telling stories, listening, talking to each other—that’s one of the ways soldiers survive. You could say this about all of humanity I’m sure, but I think it’s even more true with soldiers at war.

In “Observation Post,” I wanted to capture the death of an interpreter through the eyes of two men on guard duty (one of the most boring, but necessary tasks for any soldier in any war). The poem is based loosely on the death of one of our best interpreters, who lived in town and whose sons worked at our base. We’d just been out with him the day before searching random vehicles on the roads and the next day leaving the FOB, he basically drove down the road about a mile, and was shot through his windshield, probably by men who obviously didn’t like that he worked with the U.S. military. This was devastating for us and many of the locals, but in the overall bigger picture, interpreters were and are threatened and killed all of the time in Iraq. It’s obviously an extremely dangerous and risky job. That day they had the funeral for him and hundreds of people crowded the streets downtown and hoisted his wooden coffin as they walked to the cemetery. Members of the Kurdish army, the border patrol and other Iraqi security forces were swarming all over town, gathering information on suspects. I’d never seen so many people determined and thirsty for vengeance. I don’t remember if they ever found the shooters.

The poem itself underwent at least ten heavy revisions. When I begin any poem, I place my initial ideas, thoughts, and all notes on page 1 of a Word document and just work my way down. I’ll go to the next page when I begin the first draft, and as I make changes, no matter how major or minor, I’ll move the new version to the next page; I like this process because it allows me to flip back and see where the poem started and what was left out and added, etc. With this poem, I toyed a lot with form, usually playing with placement of the stanzas. At one point, the stanzas were pushed into blocks all the way to the left side of the page; I also had the poem in ten two-line stanzas; I had another version with asterisks between stanzas.

Notes on Reading

I’ve always tried to be a pretty eclectic reader. Being in grad school, I usually balance getting my work done and then reading what I want when I can. Right now, I’m in the middle of Doug Anderson’s The Moon Reflected Fire; Lorrie Goldensohn’s Dismantling Glory; W.S. Merwin’s The Carrier of Ladders; and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I have a long list of books (both prose and poetry) that deal with war either directly or indirectly and I am constantly chipping away at it. Over the past year or so, Bruce Weigl’s work has probably been the most inspiring and influential. I’d barely read him before grad school, but now I’ve read and reread all of his work. The way he approaches Vietnam using mostly plain-spoken language and clear, precise, but fresh imagery, is something I admire. He makes it look easy. His poems bring you in quickly and he’s very skilled with using line breaks and an internal rhythm to keep the reader moving. I also greatly admire many of his poems that deal with the speaker’s post-war life. “Song of Napalm” is one of my favorite poems dealing with war and I think Weigl covers a lot of ground in the poem; it serves as another attempt to try to understand a terrible event. The end of that poem strongly resonates with me because of its sheer realism and the way the speaker tries and wants to deny what he’s seen, but no matter what, cannot. The poem is not only about the speaker’s denial, but everyone’s denial of all the horrors of war that have taken place or are taking place right now. The speaker fights with the idea of this girl dying and the fantasy of her having wings and escaping; by the end though, the reality of it is acknowledged: she dies, and no one, and no thing, can or should deny it. I think it’s about taking responsibility, acknowledging suffering, and ultimately trying to learn from it so it doesn’t happen again.

When I returned from Iraq someone told me to read Yusef Komunyakaa and honestly, I don’t think my senses were ready for his work at the time. Revisiting Dien Cai Dau a couple years ago though, I found the work incredible. His lyrical poems are highly palpable and many of his images are stunning; they have literally stopped me on the page. “Thanks,” his poem where the speaker literally expresses gratitude to different aspects of nature—tree trunks, butterflies, flowers—that helped him avoid a bullet, mine, or tripwire, is still a poem that I can’t fully digest—it’s just too good, even the concept of it I find unique and beautiful. Komunyakaa is one of those poets that I will be revisiting throughout the years, finding more and more layers and nuances that I couldn’t before.

It’s hard to list “underrated” books over the past five years, so I’ll just list three that I enjoy: David Baker’s Midwest Eclogue; Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet; and James Harms’ The Joy Addict (actually that one came out pre-2000, I think, but I read it in 2005; it still remains a book I go back to).