Jennings, Brittany – Page 30 – Willow Springs Magazine

Issue 64: Kim Chinquee

About Kim Chinquee

Kim Chinquee resides in New York. Her work has appeared in Mississippi Review, South Carolina Review, Sou’wester, and many other publications. Her book, Oh Baby, was published by Ravenna Press in 2008. She also won a Pushcart Prize in 2007. Her collection, Pretty, is due out in April from White Pine Press.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “The Waves Were Low”

This piece developed out of a set of prompt words: catfish, surgery, polo shirt, Elizabethan collar, and stitches. I think only a few of the words stayed after revision. “Catfish” was the word that prompted the guts of the story, reminding me of my days in Biloxi by the water, seeing kids catching catfish. I was trying to write a piece to complement “Labor.” I chose some of the same characters from “Labor” and put them in this setting. In this piece, I wanted the narrator to want something. In the end, I intended the rocking to soothe, sort of like the maternal hint of the fisherman’s wife as “as if she was a mother to all of us.” I wanted to imply, in the title, that this was a calm time compared to others, that the waves came and went. My biggest challenge is re-working the ending, trying to hit the right note.

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Issue 64: Blake Butler

About Blake Butler

Blake Butler is the author of the novella EVER (Calamari Press) and the novel in stories Scorch Atlas (forthcoming 09/09/09 from Featherproof Books). He edits “the internet literature magazine blog of the future” HTMLGIANT, as well as two journals of innovative text: Lamination Colony, and concurrently with co-editor Ken Baumann, No Colony. His other writing has appeared in The Believer, Unsaid, Fence, etc. He lives in Atlanta and has recently completed, in addition to the 50 lists of 50, work on 3 novels.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Hair Loop”

These lists began at random as a way to kill time at work, launched one day when early one morning I got pissed off about a coworker telling me, “Good morning,” one of my least favorite expressions in the world, especially on the premises of a shitty desk job. I sat down then and typed out a list of 50 thoughts, mostly associative and containing leaps of logic based on my constant interruptions at that shitty desk job. Immediately after finishing that first list of 50, I committed myself to do a series of them, not knowing how long it would take me to do so, especially after getting fired during the writing of list 13, thus changing the entire nature of the creative environment.

These two lists, then, come rather deep into the project, numbers 28 (‘Hair Loop’) and 47 (‘Word Count’) respectively, at which point I was having long periods between each list, rather than how early on I would write 1 or even 2 a day. The process of challenging myself to not repeat myself in the format, and yet to continue exploring its limitations and the spaces peculiar to it that would make it not only justify its form, but make it work as new: this became more and more difficult, and yet also more and more enlivening when I felt I could bring it home. Looking back now that I have completed at least drafts of all 50 lists, I’ve begun to realize how much realizing the form really helped me learn a lot about myself as a writer, especially the use of form restraints, unusual modes of diction or speech, and ways of putting thoughts on paper that I likely never would have broached otherwise. Lists are fun.

Notes on Reading

I honestly think the most underrated book of the last 5 years is David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. This might seem like a strange claim, considering how widely known and well regarded it is, but I’ve found that even among claimed Wallace fans, his masterpiece often remains avoided or placed aside (every time I hear a person say how much they love his nonfiction over his fiction, I cringe: yes, he’s a brilliant essayist, but dude…). It’s the nature of the doorstop-sized epic novel that it will be avoided by the majority, but what that books contains is multitudes far beyond even its mammoth size. Wallace gets consciousness, the movement of time, and intricately rendered real-time human thought processes and emotions more perfectlty than any other author you can name. That is a claim I’ll stand by to the end. Doesn’t hurt either that that is the book that made me want to be a writer. “Oh holy shit, this is what a book can do. My god.”

The same claim of underrated while seemingly overrated could be applied to Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Gass’s The Tunnel, two books which supremely affected my want to write and understanding of the power of text as object. I got to those early, and could not get them out, and never will.

Reading is everything to me as a writer: without the reading, the consumption of new light, you are hobbling yourself, crossed in the dark. Anyone that would go to try to write a viable text without the consciousness and understanding grown from imbibing not only your own personal old or modern masters, but the continually recreating new heads, the feed, well, good luck Jack. Reading comes first: your own babble is for later.

Two Lists by Blake Butler

Found in Willow Springs 86 Back to Author Profile Hair Loop My father used to tell me that he’d gone bald from holding the hair dryer too close to his head. … Read more

Issue 71: A Conversation with Blake Butler

Interview in Willow Springs 71 Works in Willow Spring 64 and 61 March 2, 2012 Samuel Ligon, Robert Lopez, Joseph Salvatore A CONVERSATION WITH BLAKE BUTLER Photo Credit: believermag.com In … Read more

About Denver Butson

Denver Butson is author of three books of poetry: triptych (The Commoner Press, 1999), Mechanical Birds (St. Andrews Press, 2000), and illegible address (Luquer Street Press, 2004). His poems have appeared in dozens of journals , anthologies, blogs, websites, and the likes, and have been praised by such figures as WS Merwin, Tomaz Salamun, Thom Gunn, Theodore Enslin, Jim Harrison, Agha Shahid Ali, Ned Rorem, and Billy Collins, and regularly appear on Writer’s Almanac on National Public Radio. He is at work on several children’s books, a cookbook with no recipes, captions for photographs that haven’t been taken yet, and a series of poems for the VIEWMASTER.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “The Drowning Ghazals”

I started writing drowning ghazals, once upon a time, before I moved from Richmond, Virginia, to New York, before I married, before the towers fell outside our kitchen window, before we had a baby, before I gave up teaching so I could do something that would potentially be more lucrative and closer to home and my daughter and allow me to write more without the conversations from the classroom and the struggles of my students stepping into the quiet of my writing studio. I was teaching a creative writing workshop to a mixed bag of writing students and non-writing students, to a self-proclaimed “manifest genius” and reincarnation of Mayakovsky and a charismatic “Jazz Poet” who clicked his fingers and pronounced every word, no matter how banal, as if it were his gift to whoever was listening, and trying to excite the rest with the possibilities of sound and form and image and not just personality and bombast.

We read poems aloud, we took them apart and imitated them; we did exercises in image and form. One such exercise was to write a ghazal with instructions in a craft book from the esteemed Persian poet Agha Shahid Ali. I explained the form, heard the groans, and went home, only to realize that I had asked my students to do something that I myself had never done. While I had been experimenting with form (after a failed attempt to shake my writing up and write traditional sonnets, I started writing 14-word poems, followed by 28-word poems, and then by 42 and 56-word poems), culminating in my first invented form, I believe, the textual marriage, in which I alternated lines from two different texts, unedited, to create a new “poem,” but I hadn’t really written in any prescribed and traditional forms.

The next morning, I decided I would write a ghazal. I read Ali’s instructions and started, but I couldn’t hold myself to the general form he outlined (I remembered the freedom of Jim Harrisons Ghazals and felt restricted) but I did like the music that was happening with the repetition. Still, I wanted to do something different with them, instead of simply writing 5 unrelated couplets, the second line of which ended with the same word as the first line of the poem—with the author’s name or signature in the last couplet. So, I decided to steal that first line from another source, giving me something to work off of. And, I decided because I was writing a lot of poems with drowning in them at the time (perhaps partly because of seeing Magritte’s painting of the woman washed up on the beach that summer in Chicago) to add the concept of, an allusion to, or the word drowning itself to the middle couplet.

It wasn’t until two or three years and dozens, possibly a hundred, drowning ghazals later (and even crafting a section of my first book, triptych) later that I realized that my ghazals were incomplete, even wrong. My wife and I went to a dinner party at Edmund White’s apartment in Chelsea with the likes of Peter Carey and other well-known literati, and I had the pleasure of meeting Agha Shahid Ali there. Edmund had given him some of my ghazals, and Shahid declared himself a “big fan” of them. However, he informed me, even though they were more faithful to the form than most American poets’ version of the ghazal, I was doing them wrong—I was leaving out the rhyme before the refrain. We walked him to Penn Station and he told me that I had to write more ghazals, that I had to do the refrain.

Shahid and my wife and I became good friends, in the couple years before Shahid died way too young, and he remained a strong supporter of my now more correct ghazals, even putting a few of them in his anthology Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English. Rather than struggle more with this new requirement, I was even more thrilled by the possibilities and music inherent in the refrain followed by the rhyme. I went back and “fixed” some of the older ones and wrote hundreds more. Now, seven or eight years later, I’m not writing as many as I once was, but I still find myself returning to them—reading a poem or a snatch of fiction and realizing that there’s an excellent first line there that could open a ghazal. There’s still the drowning in the third couplet. There’s still my name or a reference to it in the final couplet. It’s getting harder for them to feel fresh to me, but I still return, like a musician returning to the ballad long after he has stopped writing or singing ballads. Or, as Sonny Rollins says about melody, it’s a nice place to land from time to time to remind yourself (and your listeners) where you are.

Notes on Reading

Right now I’m mesmerized by Paul Harding’s Tinkers and Gary Young’s poems. After my mother died, I read a bunch of James Wright’s poems to my brother in his kitchen and was stunned by them all over again. I also regularly return to Anne Carson, Michael Ondaatje, Russell Edson, Charles Simic, and Vicente Huidobro. I can’t stop reading John Yau and Claire Malroux and Federico Garcia Lorca. I don’t read nearly as much as I used to—hard to with a child in the house—but I am reading a lot of great children’s books (and am especially in love with the simple straightforward and decidedly modern ones by Esphyr Slobodkina and Ruth Krauss and Arnold Lobel in the 1950s and 1960s and the more recent ones by Remy Charlip), and I read in my studio when I’m writing, pulling out books and reading whatever line my eye falls on.

Two Poems by Denver Butson

Found in Willow Springs 86 Back to Author Profile drowning ghazal first line by Vicente Huidobro I am absent but deep in this absence asleep but asleep in this absence glass … Read more

About Todd Boss

Todd Boss’s best-selling debut poetry collection, Yellowrocket (Norton, 2008), has enjoyed widespread critical acclaim. Todd’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, New England Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review, which awarded him the Emily Clark Balch Prize this year. His work has been syndicated on public radio’s The Splendid Table and Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry. His MFA is from the University of Alaska-Anchorage.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “O’Brian”

This poem started with a photo on flickr. I was randomly looking at photos one night (I never do that!) and came across a photo (it’s still there) of a sidewalk on which was written “WEREN’T YOU A KID ONCE O’BRIEN?” and without reading the caption (it actually turns out to be a protest against Ottawa’s mayor), I moved on. But that scrawl stayed in my head, and when I woke up the next morning, I started writing my own caption, which turned out to be this poem.

This rather chatty poem is very unusual for me (I tend toward shorter lines, simpler constructions, a breezier tone, and a lot fewer words!) and so it’s difficult for me to account for it entirely. It’s part of a new manuscript of poems called Overtures On An Overturned Piano, which explores the oft-forgotten music of the past. A father of two small children, I’m very taken with the notion that there’s a kid in every adult, and lately I’m exploring in my poems the various implications of that idea.

Notes on Reading

I’ll admit right now that I don’t read enough. I love to read, but I tend to do so only at night, before bed, and then I don’t get very far, so it’ll take me months to get through a novel. At that pace, I often lose momentum, which means my stack of unfinished novels is probably about twice as deep as my stack of finished ones. Poetry I read in daylight, usually in the morning to kickstart me, and then just a poem or two at a sitting.

Reading serves my process by lying very lightly on my consciousness. I value silence more than language, to be honest, because my poetry tends to take shape only in the long quiet spaces between whatever books I may be reading.

Two Poems by Todd Boss

Found in Willow Springs 86 Back to Author Profile Still We Like to Imagine that behind the front desk of every Quality Inn and Cracker Barrel in every hamlet in America … Read more

About John Hodgen

John Hodgen is married, with two daughters. He is Visiting Professor of English at Assumption College in Worcester, MA. He is the author of Grace (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), winner of the 2005 AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry; Bread Without Sorrow (Eastern Washington University Press, 2001), winner of the Balcones Poetry Prize; and In My Father’s House (Emporia State University Press, 1993), winner of the Bluestem Award from Emporia State University in Kansas. He is the winner of the 2005 Ruth Stone Poetry Prize from Hunger Mountain (Vermont College), and the 2005 Foley Poetry Prize from America Magazine. He also won the Chad Walsh Prize in Poetry for the best poems submitted to Beloit Poetry Journal in 2008, and author of Heaven and Earth, to be published by University of Pittsburgh Press in 2010.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Witness”

“Witness” grew out of a trip to New Orleans a year after Katrina. A good place for poets. There was that extra element in everything that happened, something alive and conflicted in every gesture and smell and sound, that cultural crossroad resonating with the reverberations of deep tragedy and that need to heal and find how to move on. Each busker, preacher and street dancer seemed aware that death was still in the air, as it always is, lingering somehow. Each song was a little more needed, each drink tasted just a bit better, and each word seemed a little more desperate and necessary.

The moment was just what it was, a bright, angry college kid suddenly erupting at a preacher in the French Quarter, just snapping, unable to contain himself, seeing in the man with the bullhorn a target for all his wrath. It seemed to occur in slow motion, a boozy explosion that might have gone unseen at first, yet filled with that sudden rippling violence as his friends dove in to pull him away. It was all there, the street a tableau, a modern morality play, the French Quarter, the place we go to lose ourselves, suddenly peopled with a preacher reminding us that we shouldn’t be doing that, and a young man saying that that’s the exact reason we come there. Each espoused his own religion, each saw his own deep truth, and each stirred up emotions and visions of the world as he saw it. For a moment it was possible to see each one as Jesus.

Notes on Reading

If Katrina were coming again, I’d grab the following: everything by Shakespeare; everything by Keats, including the letters; everything by John Donne; James Agee’s A Death in the Family and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with the unforgettable Walker Evans photographs; Willis Barnstone’s Modern European Poetry, where I discovered Lorca and Machado, and the Russians Mayakovsky, Yevtushenko, and Voznesensky; Hayden Carruth’s anthology of 20th century American poets, The Voice That is Great Within Us; Bly’s edition of Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems; two books by Frank Stanford, who loved Lucinda Williams and then shot himself, You and Crib Death, both out of print now from Lost Roads Press; Anne Sexton’s The Awful Rowing Toward God (which I let someone borrow and never got back); Carolyn Forche’s The Country Between Us, just for “The Colonel,” which I still teach every year; Philip Larkin’s High Windows; Billy Collins’ Picnic, Lightning; anything by Chris Howell; and B. H. Fairchild’s The Art of the Lathe. Great book.

Then I’d go back, water up to my neck, for Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Nine Stories. I’d grab Huck Finn, Sound and the Fury, Waiting for Godot, Gatsby, Farewell to Arms, To the Lighthouse, my daughter’s Jeweler’s Eye for Flaw, and Hello, I Must Be Going, and the collected screenplays of Charles Bogle, a.k.a. W. C. Fields. Then I’d climb Frost’s birch tree and wait for FEMA, happy as A. Pismo Clam.

“Witness” by John Hodgen

Found in Willow Springs 64 Back to Author Profile Predictable to some degree that a man with a red and white striped stick-on umbrella hat and a portable public address system … Read more

About Dorianne Laux

A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Dorianne Laux’s fourth book of poems, Facts about the Moon (W.W. Norton), is the recipient of the Oregon Book Award and was short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Laux is also author of Awake (1990) What We Carry (1994) Smoke (2000) and Superman: The Chapbook (2008). Co-author of The Poet’s Companion, she’s the recipient of two Best American Poetry Prizes, a Best American Erotic Poems Prize, a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from The NEA and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has appeared in the Best of APR, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, and many others.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “S Sgt. Metz”

I began the poem in the airport on my way to Spokane to read at Get Lit. I saw this beautiful man, not overly handsome, not sexually attractive to me, just a perfect specimen of the human figure, well-proportioned, easy in his body, a sculpture of a man. That struck me, and the fact that he was a serviceman. His uniform seemed to intensify his perfection. Neat lines, clean, precision-pressed, well-fitted. I stood behind him at the Starbucks and as soon as I got my coffee I made a beeline for the door to have a smoke. I began writing about him in the notebook I carry with me everywhere, just making a sketch, a quick portrait of him, as an artist would. When I looked up from my notebook I saw him standing there, right in front of me, waiting for a bus. I just kept writing. I showed the poem to my husband and he gave me a few suggestions for changes, which I made, and then I read the poem a few evenings later at the festival.

I often write as things happen, and I’m especially drawn to strangers. But it’s unusual to get a poem so quickly. The poem seemed to unfold before me as I wrote. As you can see from my answer to the previous question, it felt almost too easy to write. It seemed as if Metz just gave me the poem, and I guess he did. Without him, it would not have been written.

It’s not a departure, as I’ve written war-related poems before, though not often. It’s difficult to write poems on the subject without being polemical. I write them, I just don’t seem to finish them and I don’t publish many that I finish. If this one works at all, I think it’s because I felt stripped down by the moment, seeing Metz in the flesh, so strong and confident, and knowing what I know of the Vietnam war, how he might return, broken, fearful, confused—it was a powerful vision. I can’t see men in uniform without thinking of my own brother, a Vietnam vet who was a casualty of that war, my first boyfriend. I write about that era because it haunts me. I was a young girl, watching images of war flicker in black and white across the television screen, opening newspapers and magazines to naked human bodies in ditches, men knee-deep in mud, children covered in napalm, flag-draped coffins. The poem was trying to figure out who I was in the face of my history, my country’s history. The poem was as intimate as a private journal entry. Later, I put the pressure of form on it, and revised it back a bit, getting rid of any dross, but the poem is me, thinking out loud, trying to understand how I feel and what it means.

Notes on Reading

In keeping with the Metz poem, I don’t think I could have written it without the early influence of Neruda’s work. Also Carolyn Forche’s The Country Between Us, which includes poems about the war in El Salvador, and Doug Anderson’s The Moon Reflected Fire, a very under-read book about the Vietnam war and Yusef Kommunyakaa’s Dien Cai Dau. I re-read those books often as I teach them to my young students who often don’t know about either of those wars.

My experience of these poems is heightened when I see them through my students’ eyes, when I hear them get up in front of the classroom and recite them. One of my students read Anderson’s book and went to the Library of Congress online and found original drawings by Vietnam vets and made a broadside of the poem using one of the drawings. Another researched the French-Indonesian war to deepen his understanding of the poems. I didn’t ask them to do this. The poems engendered a curiosity in them, compelled them to know more. The poems became their teachers.

Forche’s book was written in 1982, and 26 years later the poems hold up. She’s a gifted writer. Dien Cai Dau was written in 1988 and again, the poems are just as fresh and moving as they were when it first arrived. Anderson’s book is newer, published in 2002 by Alice James Books, but it’s one of the most harrowingly spare and powerful books about war I have ever read. Anderson is coming out with a memoir about his service as a medic during the Vietnam war. W.W. Norton will publish it this year. I hope it brings more attention to his poetry.

I have been shaped by the books I read as a child and a young adult: Mother Goose, The Childcraft Books, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, novelists and poets of the period, Frost, Sandburg, cummings. Dickenson and Whitman. Later, I plunged into the work of women poets: Sexton, Plath, Rich, Levertov, Olds. They led me to Anna Akmatova, Ruth Stone, Lucille Clifton. They were my poetry mothers. All of these women spoke with a clear, direct voice of difficult and hidden things. I hope to speak clearly and directly, to try, at all times, to say what I mean, and mean what I say. There is no book I want to write, only one poem that’s fully true, that’s worthy of the world it was born from and into. And maybe another. And another. For a poet, that’s almost too much to hope for. As I tell my students, writing poems is difficult. Writing a good poem, a true poem, even a line that reaches out from the page and grabs a reader’s heart, shifts perceptions, is almost impossible. So much can go wrong. I have few thoughts of the future beyond writing more poems. I take it like an addict: one day at a time.

“S. Sgt. Metz” by Dorianne Laux

Found in Willow Springs 63 Back to Author Profile Metz is alive for now, standing in line at the airport Starbucks in his camo gear and buzz cut, his beautiful new … Read more

Issue 64: A Conversation with Dorianne Laux

Interview in Willow Springs 64 Works in Willow Springs 78 and 63 April 19, 2008 Terrance Owens, Shira Richman, and Tana Young A CONVERSATION WITH DORIANNE LAUX Photo Credit: divedapper.com Dorianne … Read more

About Kim Addonizio

Kim Addonizio is the author of five books of poetry including Tell Me, which was a National Book Award Finalist. She has also published two novels, Little Beauties and My Dreams Out in the Street, and a book of stories, In the Box Called Pleasure. She co-authored The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry. With poet Susan Browne, she collaborated on a word/music CD, Swearing, Smoking, Drinking & Kissing, available from cdbaby.com. Addonizio’s latest book is Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within, from W.W. Norton. Norton will also be releasing Lucifer at the Starlite in October 2009. Addonizio is currently at work on new poems and essays.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Long-Distance”

I wrote this after a guy I’d known many years ago found me on the Internet. He came back from the Vietnam war and then got a black belt in karate with a prosthetic leg. They really were wood back then. For a long time I had a few lines in the poem about the land mine he had stepped on and the guys who had hauled him out of the rice paddy. I kept trying to make a connection between them carrying him and the speaker “carrying” him in a different sense. Finally I gave up and decided the poem didn’t really need that idea, especially since I couldn’t say it in a way that wasn’t trite. And it focused the poem too much on the speaker. I wanted it to be about this man’s survival. Once I had the thought that the leg had an amputated man, just as the man had an amputated leg, I had a seed for the ending. I’ve never been wholly satisfied with this poem, but it has personal meaning for me. It’s more narrative than a lot of my work these days and I wish it made more surprising moves than it does. I think the ending may be worth it, though, and I really wanted the note the poem sounds to be in my next book, Lucifer at the Starlite, and I had a deadline. So there it is.

Notes on Reading

Everything I’ve read has either excited me as a model, a way of putting language and thought and emotion together–or shown me what I want to avoid. I don’t reread much. A couple of books I have gone back to more than once are Lewis Hyde’s The Gift and Denis Johnson’s first novel, Angels. I’m also reading a lot of Dean Young’s poetry right now. When I read him, I want to write, and odd phrases occur to me– like “God is a mental doll.” Words just start floating around my brain, like goldfish. I’m trying to work with that God line right now. It’s hard to strive to write the last book, so I’m usually striving to write the next one, which I always hope is going to be better. With every book, I want it to find its own voice and sense of self. And I want to be proud of it when it grows up.

Two Poems by Kim Addonizo

By Donhiser, Fiona | September 25, 2023

Found in Willow Springs 86 Back to Author Profile Long-Distance Your wooden leg stood beside the bed in its tennis shoe & sock, trailing its fasteners, its amputated man leaning invisibly against the wall. You pulled back the sheet so I could touch your stump, the small hole in your left foot. I touched everything. I … Read more

Issue 76: A Conversation with Kim Addonizio

By Jennings, Brittany | October 8, 2021

Interview in Willow Springs 76 Works in Willow Springs 63 and 37 July 16, 2014 JEFF COREY, KRISTEN GOTCH, AILEEN KEOWN VAUX A CONVERSATION WITH KIM ADDONIZIO Photo Credit: Lin Tan …I’m saying in the beginning was the word and it was good, it meant one human entering another and it’s still what I love, … Read more

Issue 60: Aurelie Sheehan

About Aurelie Sheehan

Aurelie Sheehan is the author of two novels and two short story collections, most recently, Jewelry Box: A Collection of Histories (BOA Editions, Ltd.). Earlier pieces from this project were published in Willow Springs 60. Her work has also appeared in Alaska Quarterly, Conjunctions, Epoch, Fairy Tale Review, Fence, New England Review, The New York Times, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review. She has received a Pushcart Prize, a Camargo Fellowship, and the Jack Kerouac Literary Award. Sheehan teaches fiction at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “5 Stories”

In these pieces (as well as in my new book, Jewelry Box: A Collection of Histories), I’m looking at story and history and autobiography and invention in a lot of different ways. I started this project with the idea of writing one hundred histories (also the original title). I’ve always been a chancy and bad student of history—can’t remember dates, presidents, etc.—and yet I’m also obsessed with history and how it plays out in our daily lives. These pieces are part of that inquiry. What is underneath a tube of suntan lotion or a T-shirt, or a strange profusion of plastic bits on the road? To me, these items explode with history.

So it’s not textbook history, of course, but a kind of subjective history. The place fiction and nonfiction really intersect here is in perspective. I think of these as “histories,” knowing full well there are just as many other histories to refute or echo or elaborate on them. A T-shirt means one thing to you, one thing to me, and another thing to me yesterday. Therefore, my history is fiction of a kind. It’s one perspective: it’s not reality.

But still, it matters to me that many of these pieces have origins in autobiography. As a fiction writer, I found it exciting to more boldly use my own experience as material. I think I’m realizing how many ways memory and imagination intersect, with or without my say-so. Here, I use my own life freely, but I also use third person, or imagined situations, when it feels necessary. (Luckily, we’re calling this fiction overall, so I’m not pulling the wool over anyone’s eyes in that less-than-pleasing way.)

Notes on Reading

It would definitely be the case that reading Lydia Davis’s short work gave me, years ago, a sense of new possibility. But the awesome joy of reading a book of fiction that I love is what transforms me and fuels me, no matter how removed the aesthetic or form is from my own current project. In fact, usually I read stuff that is far from what I’m trying to do at that particular moment, so I don’t get distracted by other writers’ voices and ideas. Sometimes I do go for something with a healthy antidote effect. For instance, Haruki Murakami’s prose can help me get over a case of the Adjectives.

I’m excited by some of the other short short work out there in this world—whether it is called fiction or nonfiction or poetry. Mary Ruefle, Maggie Nelson, Julio Cortázar, and Anne Carson come to mind. Some other favorite writers are Katherine Mansfield, Deborah Eisenberg, Frederic Tuten, Virginia Woolf, Zadie Smith, George Saunders, and Edward P. Jones.

5 Stories by Aurelie Sheehan

Found in Willow Springs 60 Back to Author Profile Cigarette It is a night like any other, except for the visitation. I put my head on the pillow, ready for bed. … Read more

About Sean Lovelace

Sean Lovelace lives in Indiana, where he directs the creative writing program at Ball State University. He has won several national literary awards, including the Crazyhorse Prize for Fiction. His books include The Frogs Are Incredibly Loud Here, Fog Gorgeous Stag, and How Some People Like Their Eggs. He likes to run, far.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Letters to Jim Harrison”

REPORTAGE: I would call these letters space travel and also “literary homage,” a term possibly I made up, not sure. Certainly we know Hours by Michael Cunningham, or the time Ben Greenman rewrote Chekhov’s stories, etcetera. Much of the Chinese poetry I’ve submerged myself in (I know “submerged” is hyperbolic, but it’s the best word I can find) all autumn is one poet writing through history to another. Homage. My particular project begins with the 1925 death of Russian poet, Sergei Yesenin. Possibly by suicide—a long story involving the Soviets, drunkenness, and writing poetry in your own blood (Apocryphal? Maybe). But jump Time and Space. To the early 1970s, wherein American writer Jim Harrison (of Legends of the Fall fame, if any) is suffering poverty, publishing failure, doubt, and the black dog of depression. He begins writing to Yesenin, letters/prose poetry. Jump again to 2006, I’m in Michigan. A southern boy suddenly alone in the cold. I eat my meals in bars and sleep a lot (or lay under blankets on the floor in a malaise/sleep-like state, sweat pouring off my body). I discover Jim Harrison’s books at the Grand Rapids public library. I fall in love with his writings, especially the poetry. I read all of his works. Jump to 2016, Jim Harrison dies at his writing desk, while writing a poem…This hits me hard like a river boulder to the chest. A gray winter cloud. In grief and respect, I begin to write him letters. So far, I’ve written 95 that are decent to okay good. I’ve written about 300 that didn’t leap from the water into daylight or even make it from the swirling eddy of writing, trying to. I’m still writing these letters.

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

I’ve been listening to a Mozart channel I found on my phone. It’s from Canada. I recently found another better one on Amazon Prime. Again, only Mozart. I only listen to Mozart or Morrissey. At least for the last twenty years. I also like the muffled sound of snow falling on snow, especially in a swamp or lowland area near a river, but that’s not technically music. As for eating, I only eat meat I personally kill. A lot of venison, since I’m a bow-hunter. A giant king salmon I recently caught up in Michigan. I thought I had hooked a runaway train or deep regret, etcetera. A giant fish. We fought for many minutes (they seemed extraordinarily long at the time, and, thinking the whole thing over, later on, I realized that in fact they were). I do eat shrimp, though I’m not sure why that exclusion to my rule exists but humans are inconsistent and odd, as we know. I eat a lot of nachos, with sharp cheddar, refried black beans, a wide array of hot sauces. I glow hot sauces. I have a new one a librarian (and heroin addict, though I’m not sure that’s relevant here) gave me that contains all four of the hottest peppers on the planet (Trinidad, Carolina Reaper, Bhut Jolokia, Red 7-Pot). Very tasty. Will clear your sinuses and soul. As for booze. I really like to drink beer and vodka and red wine but it’s also important to regulate that, you know, the main motive being so you can keep drinking. Alcohol is a variety of suicide, of course, but a lovely one and anyway this isn’t a dress rehearsal. This life. So I’m dealing with that balance right now. To drink wherein I don’t have to stop drinking. In brighter news I am getting a puppy soon!! A rat terrier. Cute as a narwhal cub and twice as smart. I do have mixed feelings about this endeavor, but life is nothing but mixed feelings. It will either work out grandly or not at all.

“Andy Warhol and the Art of the Bullet ” by Sean Lovelace

Found in Willow Springs 59 Back to Author Profile You return from shopping. Isn’t there something you forgot, baby aspirin or turpentine? Raspberries, razor blades, Hula-Hoops? Oven-fried-Corn Flake-chicken? Or maybe a … Read more

Issue 81 Cover shows Chris Bovey print of Spokane's famous garbage goat in teal and yellow with Willow Springs in decorative font.

Letters to Jim Harrison by Sean Lovelace

Found in Willow Springs 81 Back to Author Profile Letter to Jim Harrison #3 REPORTAGE: a Tuesday. And along the highways a rash of clowns with knives. Dead deer killed … Read more

About James Poissant

David James Poissant’s stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Chicago Tribune, Glimmer Train, The New York Times, One Story, Playboy, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and in the New Stories from the South and Best New American Voices anthologies. His writing has been awarded the Matt Clark Prize, the George Garrett Fiction Award, the RopeWalk Fiction Chapbook Prize, the GLCA New Writers Award, and the Alice White Reeves Memorial Award from the National Society of Arts & Letters, as well as awards from The Chicago Tribune and The Atlantic Monthly and Playboy magazines. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida and lives in Orlando with his wife and daughters.

His debut short story collection, The Heaven of Animals, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2014. He is currently at work on a novel, which is also forthcoming from Simon & Schuster.

A Profile of the Author

“Between the Teeth” by David James Poissant

Found in Willow Springs 58 Back to Author Profile Jill’s had James Dean since college, a gift from her parents before they died–car crash–which makes him extra special to her, a … Read more