Profiles – Page 11 – Willow Springs Magazine

Issue 66: Stacia Saint Owens

About Stacia Saint Owens

Stacia Saint Owens grew up in Kansas and is a graduate of Brown University’s MFA program in Creative Writing. She also holds a BFA in Theatre from Southern Methodist University. Her fiction has appeared in Southern California Review, Wisconsin Review, Willow Springs, Dos Passos Review, Smoke Signals, NIGHT, Confrontation, Quarterly West, and The Massachusetts Review. Her work was selected for Special Mention in the 2010 Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her short story collection, Auto-Erotica (Livingston Press 2009), was the winner of the Tartt First Fiction Award and was shortlisted for The Saroyan International Prize in Writing. She is a former Lecturer in English Literature at Harrow College in London, and now resides in Los Angeles, where she is writing a novel.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Color by Number”

My grandfather was a police detective in St. Louis, and I’ve inherited an interest in true crime. The family lore handed down from my grandfather’s career includes:

His very first day on the force, as a minimally-trained beat cop, when he set off walking and two blocks from the station was immediately accosted by “a raving lunatic running up and down the fence, naked as a jaybird,” an escapee from a psychiatric hospital.

Arriving at a domestic violence scene to discover that a man had beaten his wife, children, then himself to death with a ball peen hammer.

Bursting into “Negro pubs,” lining the patrons against the wall, and stealing money from their pockets, which he did reluctantly but could not figure a way out of as this practice was ordered by his superiors (who also collected the money), and he had a wife, seven kids, and two parents to support. To cope with his guilt over this and other institutionalized abuses, he began drinking at work and succumbed to alcoholism.

Part of my father’s driving ambition was the desire to keep his family safe. He shielded us from any urban exposure, raising us in the squeaky-clean suburbs of Kansas City and later in a nearby small town dominated by the law-and-order industries of a prison system and an Army fort. There was a blatant incongruity present in my father’s level of hyper-vigilance, the scare-tactic true stories he told us, and the sedate, congenial environment we lived in. This juxtaposition gave me a strong sense of subtext from an early age, an awareness that although I could not see it, very bad things were happening at this very minute.

As a teacher working with at-risk high schoolers and female prisoners, I found myself swimming with sharks, and it was crucial to learn to recognize and safely interact with people manifesting various psychological disorders. These experiences incited a lot of questions about nature vs. nurture, neurobiology, self-determination, and personal vs. societal responsibility.

I have always found appealing the phrase “an accident of birth,” the way it encompasses both luck and misfortune, its inarguable reminder that our very existence is ultimately due to a highly random meeting of a specific sperm with a specific egg. We are fiercely protective of our individuality, but it all could have so easily gone another way. Many different versions of ourselves were almost born. Many different versions of ourselves are continually shaped or eliminated or resurrected as we stride, struggle, or stroll through life experiences.

American culture encourages individuality and aspiration. There is a fine line between these qualities and self-absorbed ruthlessness. The latter is often considered acceptable, but can cause as much damage as the more-feared anti-social disorders. What is the difference between a corrupt police officer who is driven to drink and the one who steels himself and accepts that he must do what he can to survive? Which one of these two can be classified as sick? They are in an identical situation, so do they have exactly the same choice?

“Color by Numbers” is an exploration of these types of questions. The two main characters’ lives progress in rough parallel as they grow up in similar but crucially-different circumstances and eventually become responsible for their own choices. One is an outwardly-conventional, law-abiding person; the other is an outwardly-charming sociopath. They are both tormented by lack of connection, which may be due to their upbringings, heredities, personalities, levels of intelligence, or mere accident. The omniscient, measured voice is reflective of the clinical tone of an official report, and does not allow either character a narrative advantage. The characters are afflicted with frenetic, messy compulsions that they struggle to contain, just as the rigid, repetitive format of a police, medical, or science lab report attempts to coolly eviscerate emotion while describing events that normally provoke an impassioned telling. The structure is meant to shift the role of authority from author to reader. The reader is the one for whom all available information has been compiled, who will be expected to render the final diagnosis or judgment.

The numbered sections are episodes, in the dramatic sense of self-contained events in a series and in the medical sense of recurrent pathological condition (such as “psychotic episode”). In the original Greek, “episode” meant a digression between two songs in a tragedy, and I like the idea of seemingly-extraneous events causing significant repercussions. A numbered list always suggests authority and finality to me, along with an escalating inevitability. Yet I am simultaneously aware that a list could be created at any length, and that every list is excluding other items. This duality makes it more challenging for the reader to judge the characters—and such judgments should be difficult, made with thoughtful skepticism and humility.

The structure also evokes a color-by-numbers activity, which is creative, but prescriptive and limiting. There is little penalty for disobeying the color-by-numbers rules and choosing our own color combinations–even coloring outside the lines—; however, most of us are conditioned from an early age to honor the parameters of the game. Does this create the best picture? Once again, how much choice do we have?

The columns suggest lives unspooling on separate tracks, also the creeping, stalking energy of something sinister gaining momentum. The paragraphs that end each episode are attempts to draw conclusions, and do so imperfectly. The paragraphs do draw connections, pointing out that although the characters feel oppressed by isolation, they are actually all entwined and all impact each other, though they do not perceive this.

Notes on Reading

I am drawn to fiction that takes risks and meddles with language while remaining fundamentally accessible—which does not mean transparently knowable. I grew up in a household that valued literature, but the wider community was not especially literary, and I think that is an accurate description of almost anyplace in present-day America. How does a writer captivate and entertain while challenging both intellect and emotions? How can a work be innovatively provocative and enduringly universal? I admire writers who strive to construct these bridges, who sincerely and zealously invite the reader to get involved with the work. Check out the riveting historical re-imaginings of Edmund White, the muscular fabulism of Anna Joy Springer, and the elegant intoxicants of Carole Maso.

I read widely in other genres. This limbers my brain, loosens my self-imposed constraints, and builds my trust in the readers’ adventurousness. Poetry always knocks me into an enjoyable jumble, as do stage and screenplays, which have a more immediate mission to please the audience. I recommend the poets Sawako Nakayasu and Paul Foster Johnson; the playwrights Sarah Ruhl, Laura Zam, and Christine Evans; and the experimental public games of Rob Ray (www.robray.net/virtualart), a delightfully vital and forward-looking kind of “reading.” And if a million people have read it, I’m interested. I am fascinated by discovering what motivates people to read. So: magazines, horror novels, viral web pages, pop song lyrics, lasting classics. The plays of Agatha Christie are lovely little gems, compact and consumable and unsettlingly macabre all at once. Deceptively complex, like even the most ordinary day of your life on this lush, volatile planet.

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Issue 66: Brandi Reissenweber

About Brandi Reissenweber

Brandi Reissenweber’s fiction has appeared in Phoebe, The Briar Cliff Review, North Dakota Quarterly and other journals. She was a James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow at the WisconsinInstitute for Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin—Madison and a writer-in-residenceat the Kerouac Project of Orlando. She is currently at work on a novel.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on "What We’re Sure Of"

My first glimpse of the story was an image: a gaggle of women, all decked out in business casual, standing outside an elementary school while another woman wearing a long cotton skirt walked through the parking lot. I think this image may have come to me because I’d recently moved; after spending most of my adult life in large cities, all of a sudden I was in a town where the evening news regularly ran stories on local high school sports. So I was thinking a lot about what it meant to live in this new place: the culture of yard work, subdivisions, unattached garages and sidewalks that end abruptly because so few people walk.

With that initial image, I’d usually follow the lone woman. She’s a more natural choice for me. But I’d given myself a challenge around the time I was writing this story. I wanted to change things up and make choices that were uncharacteristic of my work, just to see what came of it. So, I went with the clutch of women instead. They seemed unfamiliar and a little daunting, but it wasn’t difficult to find their story. I was intrigued by their abundance and the deeper disatisfactions it might hide; the ways their entanglements might motivate their actions.

This choice also suggested the voice and narrative approach. I’ve long been taken by the collective narrator and the unexpected truths that can be revealed about characters who are on the outside, speculating.

Though the characters are a departure, they are also the point where the story veers right back into familiar territory. I’m drawn to characters who are unsettled, who don’t “fit” in their own relationships or circumstances, who are, for some reason, that one star on the periphery of a constellation. I like the idea of these women leading quiet, dutiful lives and playing out their roles in the community, but also experiencing a strong pull in another direction. Though they all feel it to varying degrees, they don’t share this. Carol Covington and the imagined wrong done to her heighten this pull and give them a cause to rally around. In the end, the noise they make is misdirected, but for a brief time they unshackle from routine and brush up against possibility.

Strangely, “What We’re Sure Of” was whole very early in the writing process. Though I didn’t know the ending when I started, I wrote it as if I did. My process is never that efficient. It’s usually filled with more detours, stops at roadside attractions and scenic routes. I did revise. Extensively. But the trip had more focus. I don’t know if that means anything for the finished story, but it was a very different writing experience.

Notes on Reading

When I write I often gravitate toward books that buoy my wonder and exploration of whatever knot I’m worrying. With “What We’re Sure Of,” I was conscious of the fact that the collective narration could ramble, sound gimmicky or worse. The voice came so strongly on the heels of the initial image that I knew—for better or worse—that was the direction to take. So I returned to stories that I admire that have a similar narrative approach: Jeffrey Eugenides’ Virgin Suicides, Anthony Doerr’s “For a Long Time This Was Griselda’s Story,” Carson McCullers’ Ballad of the Sad Café. Revisiting them helped me set the compass of this story.

Certain authors I return to again and again. I was astonished by Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, a book I stumbled upon at the public library when I was younger and chose books solely by their spines while trolling the stacks. I’ve since read much of her fiction, rediscovering with each book that initial astonishment. I read Russell Banks’ novels for the humanity of the characters. They can be genuine and kind hearted, but manage to get in their own way with such damaging results. The Darling still haunts me for the disconnection the narrator feels from her own husband and children; the knot and tangle of culture that she lets stunt the growth of deeper roots.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. It’s that devastating, that instructive for me as a writer. I read Cornelius Eady’s poems to remind myself of language’s grace and the way a brief moment on the page can unfold to fill an entire field of vision. I adore the way Andre Dubus III handles tension, particularly in House of Sand and Fog. Nelson Algren’s novels and Mary Gaitskill’s short fiction inspire me to be bold in my writing, to take risks and be unapologetic about my character’s truths and situations. A recent read—Uwem Akpan’s collection Say You’re One of Them—has renewed the urgency of this in my own work.

“What We’re Sure Of” by Brandi Reissenweber

Found in Willow Springs 66 Back to Author Profile What We’re Sure Of The day of Carol Covington’s departure from Whitman Elementary, we wait for our children in SUVs and … Read more

About Katie Cortese

Katie Cortese received an MFA in Fiction Writing in 2006 from Arizona State University and is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at Florida State University. For fiction and poetry she has earned several Swarthout Awards and two Sonoran Prizes, and her work is published or forthcoming in PANK, Passages North, The Superstition Review, The Ampersand Review, NANOfiction, St. Ann’s Review, Zone 3, The Comstock Review, Zahir, Willow Springs, and NewSouth. Currently, she edits The Southeast Review out of FSU, and is at work on a novel set in Italy and Boston in the early 1900s.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “International Cooking for Beginners”

I think the first inkling of “International Cooking for Beginners” came from a class on fiction writing that I taught at Arizona State University. One of my students was a little older than the rest of the class, and he had a hardened look about him. He dressed simply in dark t-shirts and jeans, and was unfailingly polite, but his voice was craggy and smoke-tinged, and he rarely smiled. He wasn’t a big guy by any means, but he was solid, compact. The definition of tough. I was struck by the corded muscles that stood out in his forearms and their tattoos, green, time-blurred shapes that intertwined with each other. Thinking back now though, I’m not sure if there were any tattoos, or how many there might have been. My mind might have just inserted them because it seems like they should have been there. I tend to do that, embellish the past with invented details that make it seem more interesting. In fact, I guess I consider it my job as a fiction writer to smudge that thin line between “fact” and “fiction.” In any case, this student made an impression on me, and that was before I’d seen any of his writing.

After he turned in his first story, I realized he’d had a life before entering my classroom. And of course this was something I knew about my students, something I still know, that everyone has a history. Everyone comes from somewhere and is shaped by the things they’ve done—or haven’t done, but wish they had. But this was one of the first times it hit me viscerally. His experiences were so far from mine. He was writing fiction, of course, not autobiography, but he was an expert in areas I’d only ever seen, distorted, on television or the silver screen. Those areas included prison (he once set the class straight on the key differences between prison and jail) and drugs, and he challenged my writing aesthetics in remarkable and unexpected ways because his prose wasn’t just interesting content-wise, it was damn good writing, too. He went to Columbia for an MFA after marking time in my class—must be close to finishing up there now—so I’m not the only one who was impressed by his work. In any case, it was thinking of this student combined with a desire to write something set in Saratoga Springs, New York, where I’d done my undergraduate degree, that resulted in “International Cooking for Beginners.” My student is not faithfully transcribed in the character of Arthur, but impressions of my student certainly informed Arthur’s initial development. The story required a considerable amount of research and imagination, too. For one thing, while I love to bake and am a champion eater, I don’t consider myself all that great a cook.

This story was a departure from my previous work in that it depended a lot on form, but the way those two disparate ideas from my past (my student and my college town) had to ferment awhile before I could connect them and get a sense of the logic they might make in proximity to each other, that mystical sort of synaptic accident is pretty typical of the way I work.

Notes on Reading

My longtime affections as a reader are divided pretty equally between Margaret Atwood, Barbara Kingsolver, Stephen King, and Shakespeare. But that doesn’t begin to cover the writers I’ve fallen in love with over the years, the ones that make me want to stop reading in the middle of a sentence so I can go revise a story a little further, or pull another one out of the air. I’m a constant reader and I don’t leave the house without a book. I like it when a book makes me forget the time and the year, when the story becomes much more real than the green couch I’m curled up on or the steaming coffee on the end table. The Poisonwood Bible does that to me, The Handmaid’s Tale and The Blind Assassin, The Stand, It and The Eye of the Dragon. My mother made me start memorizing speeches from Romeo and Juliet when I was three years old; I still remember parts of them. And in the second or third grade, my father read me The Hobbit in its entirety over the course of what must have been several hundred bedtimes. Every day I’m more and more grateful that my parents gave me that gift: a hunger for language.

Ron Carlson says in his book on craft that reading and writing are different activities because one is reactive and one is creative. He also says “you have to do one in order to do the other,” and I absolutely believe that. I go back to my favorite short stories again and again. “The Point” by Charles D’Ambrosio, “Brownies” by Z.Z. Packer, “White Angel” by Michael Cunningham, “Marzipan” by Aimee Bender. I’m drawn to books with young narrators figuring out how to survive the transition to adulthood like Margo Rabb’s Cures for Heartbreak, which is a funny, quirky and cringingly honest book I’m always recommending to people. I’m also drawn to books so complicated, so intricate and sweeping, that I’m reminded of how much I still have to learn. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer is one of those, or David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. I just read Tristam Shandy for the first time and was blown away. There’s so much out there, and I think it’s wonderful that I have no hope of ever reading it all. The worst fate I can imagine would be to run out of new books to discover.

“International Cooking for Beginners” by Katie Cortese

Found in Willow Springs 66 Back to Author Profile At first, I couldn’t help but think of him as the criminal. He chose an apron striped black and white, like the … Read more

About Katrina Roberts

Katrina Roberts has published three collections of poems (How Late Desire Looks, The Quick, and Friendly Fire). Her fourth collection Underdog is forthcoming from the University of Washington Press. Roberts is the Mina Schwabacher Professor of English & Humanities at Whitman College, and director of the Visiting Writers Reading Series. She and her husband Jeremy Barker are the founders of Tytonidae Cellars, and the Walla Walla Distilling Company, the first micro-distillery in southeast Washington state (where they live on a small farm with their three young children).

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Improbable Wings”

A friend my age died suddenly in the middle of the year, and difficult questions of mortality were upon us as a family, and then some creature in the night destroyed half our flock during the cold months, and the indelible gruesome images of that became a starting point for a kind of braided meditation — an accumulation of facts, of images, that — once rolling, introduced a narrative simply through accrual. With three young children, I’m constantly aware of bodies’ amazing transformations, and our chickens provide the visible miracle of eggs daily — as satisfying as the tactile delight of real letters from friends in the rusty old mailbox.

With a group of Whitman undergraduates, in a course exploring hybrid genres, I was reading rich and inventive pieces from throughout time in The Lost Origins of the Essay (ed. John D’Agata); as well as thinking about What it is (Lynda Barry); Plainwater (Anne Carson); Varieties of Disturbance (Lydia Davis); Things I Have Learned (Stefan Sagmeister); The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Bhanu Kapil Rider); and Most Wanted: A Gamble in Verse (Jeff Encke), among other texts, and “Improbable Wings” began as a response to a collective prompt — to compose lists of things we’d learned or come to believe so far in our lives… I was curious about how we frame and pin down the inscrutable and ever-changing. I became fascinated by the posture of claims, proclamations, conclusions, especially in the face of what can’t possibly be known. As well as by “wisdom” — what it means to know something for living it. The language of maxims hovered nearby. Sagmeister’s striking design book invokes a prophetic stance; its flashy oddness and language play; its deceptive simplicity and concision; its implications and cinematic juxtapositions, all interested me in those moments.

As well, I was thinking about synchronicity, the multiple identities/roles we inhabit and forge continually, and I was also deep in contemplation about the body’s astonishing capabilities and limitations. In my work, I’d been thinking about voices that have carried across continents and centuries to find me, (about the beauties and inherent risks of the dramatic monologue, as well), and doing research about lives in many ways quite unlike my own, at least apparently — life stories that nevertheless suddenly seemed crucial and topical to me to know and embrace. In a manuscript of new work (which has since gone on to become Underdog, my fourth collection of poems forthcoming from U of Washington Press as part of the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series), I’d been contemplating the palimpsest that place can be — the erasure and iterations the narratives of our lives make on this shared earth, and how language attempts to bridge us despite the subjectivity of perspective; and various notions of “truth” in memoir, in memory, in translation.

As I worked on the poems in Underdog, including “Improbable Wings,” I was reminded of riding in the back seat of a smoky car as a child, letting my eyes glaze on a bug on the interior glass, then letting them peer through to the moving trees zipping past – continually shifting my gaze back and forth through the distance, of miles and years, holding my head still to let my eyes and mind drift. That kind of layered experience, a polyphony of voices and sources, when you’re aware that you are multiple — here, now, as well as wherever you’ve ever been at any age — fascinates me. My work as a winemaker/distiller is similarly
vertical — challenging and satisfying: during any given week I’m doing radically different yet interconnected things: some days I practice the Zen art of pruning, other days the creative exercise of label design, some weekends I’m pouring to the public in the tasting room. I’m fascinated by simultaneity; focus and slippage. The crosshatches in my old 35 mm camera suddenly aligning. I return to William Carlos Williams’ “Perception is the first act of the imagination.”

What sort of footstep I’m making in this instant of environmental devastation/degradation is crucial to me, and I’m also interested in continually finding things to celebrate in poems as I think praise is an important karmic gesture.

Each book is an inevitable departure. My last book was a sequence of sonnets, and this next book is not, though ghosts of traditional forms continually interest me as the regular beating (often unnoticed) of my heart does. I remain curious about the way things are synchronous and multifaceted. “Improbable Wings” experiments with a short line, as some poems in Underdog do, while others stretch out across the page. In this moment, the variable forms feel apt for what I’m trying to comprehend.

Notes on Reading

Reading is a great part of the in-breathe to writing’s exhalation, the way all of living is for me. I read avidly, eclectically, incessantly. I’m a book junky; I love the heft and texture of the object, and the promise of intimacy each time it’s opened, though I’m also intrigued by all the possibilities the ether’s introduced.

Poets I’ve been reading and rereading recently: Gary Young, Sabrina Orah Mark, Emily Dickinson, Louise Glück, Randall Jarrell, Terrance Hayes, Ingeborg Bachmann, Naomi Shihab Nye, Rachel Zucker, Katie Ford, Norman Dubie, Robert Hass, Jorie Graham, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Robert Wrigley, Carolyn Forché, Paisley Rekdal, Sarah Vap, Jane Mead, Cate Marvin, Tod Marshall, Marie Howe, Dorianne Laux, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Ashbery, Lia Purpura, Dan Beachy-Quick, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Brian Turner, Li-Young Lee; Larissa Szporluk, Wallace Stevens, Laynie Browne, Laura Kasischke. I like to read many voices at once, though there are times when I’ll immerse myself in one writer’s work for a duration of months. At the moment, I’m reading many rather than one. I read lots of fiction and nonfiction, too, on my own, as well as with my children.

“Improbable Wings” by Katrina Roberts

Found in Willow Springs 66 Back to Author Profile After months the raccoon family finds a loose hem of chicken wire. Grey brindled steel wool, sticky viscera. Already somewhere within my … Read more

About Kathy Fagan

Kathy Fagan’s newest collection is Lip (Eastern Washington UP, 2009). She is also the author of the National Poetry Series selection The Raft (Dutton, 1985), the Vassar Miller Prize winner MOVING & ST RAGE (Univ of North Texas, 1999), and The Charm (Zoo, 2002). Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Slate, Field, Ploughshares, The New Republic, and The Missouri Review, among other literary magazines, and her nonfiction, in River Teeth. Fagan is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Ohioana, and the Ohio Arts Council. Formerly the Director of Creative Writing and the MFA Program at The Ohio State University, she is currently Professor of English and Editor of The Journal.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Self-Portrait as Sycamore in Copper & Pearl”

“Self-Portrait as Sycamore in Copper & Pearl” is one poem—one of the longest poems so far— in a new book-length manuscript, tentatively titled Sycamore. For over a year I’ve been researching and observing these trees, and I realized that I’d referenced them in previous books, sometimes misidentifying them, often not naming them directly. Clearly they’d been working at the periphery of my vision, vision meaning eyesight and foresight in this case, and I wanted to figure out what that could mean. The notion of self-portrait also, though somewhat trendy at the moment, helped me to bridge my natural persona-writing tendencies with something that felt more authentically autobiographical—except, of course, in this case, the self-portrait is presented as a tree. That imposed distance allows me to draw on elements of culture and history
that a single human lyrical speaker might not be capable of. The trees’ cultural ubiquitousness,
their longevity and silence, their vulnerability and enormity, their invisibility, adaptability, and
usefulness—all of that feels right now very close to me, and “other” enough to hold my interest.
In my 2009 collection, Lip, various personae speak—angrily, flippantly, loudly, bitterly—they
talk A LOT. It’s a talky book. The project of Sycamore is more about listening: like holding a
stethoscope up to the air.

My challenge, in all of these poems, is structure and scope. I won’t discuss scope here, but as for
structure, “Self-Portrait as Sycamore in Copper & Pearl” required a visually and syntactically expansive, branch-like stanza. I had to let enough light in and around the lines for the trees’
many colors to shine, but I also had to focus the eye—via the short lines—on less pastoral
images. Spiritually I think the poem has an ancestor in Frost’s “Directive,” in the sense that both
poems insist on acknowledging the flawed and moribund within an idyllic setting. Both “guides”
have only at interest our getting lost.

Notes on Reading

I’m sure I could think of at least three underrated books, but in the interest of not leaving anyone out let me just say that I recommend Christopher Howell’s Light’s Ladder to my friends and students and they devour it. I myself return to it again and again. I am also re-reading Lorca, Didion, Stevens, and Dickinson. I’m reading, for the first time, Ron Silliman’s The New Sentence and Francine Prose’s Goldengrove.

My major early influences were Poe, Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, and Philip Levine. I’m old enough to read them all again now and to love them freshly, and I realize I had awfully good taste as a child. I can’t write without words and pictures around. Dictionaries, field guides, poems, exhibit pamphlets. I have a picture file with literally hundreds of photos of sycamores at various times of the day in all seasons and locales. Word breeds word. Image begets image. I’m always striving to write a poem, but to think poetically—openly and expansively and minutely and emotionally and architecturally and musically all at once—that’s the exquisitest part.

“Self-Portrait as Sycamore in Copper & Pearl” by Kathy Fagan

Found in Willow Springs 66 Back to Author Profile I may look smooth shouldered just stepping from the soak, my planes flushed pink, angles ocher, my tresses oxidizing in reverse, but … Read more

About Matt Bell

Matt Bell is the author of How They Were Found, forthcoming in Fall 2010 from Keyhole Press, as well as a novella, The Collectors, and a chapbook of short fiction, How the Broken Lead the Blind. His fiction appears or is upcoming in magazines such as Conjunctions, American Short Fiction, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Gulf Coast, and Unsaid. He is also the editor of the online journal The Collagist.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “The Receiving Tower”

“The Receiving Tower” is a story set in a vague future but written in a diction and syntax meant to seem older, a stylistic pattern in my work which may have originated with this story but which has followed me throughout much of this past year’s writing. Once the language of the piece was underway—once the first sentences were written well enough that they could start pointing me toward what the next progression of sentences would look and sound like—then other supporting choices followed.

For instance, by the end of the first day’s writing I had decided on using Scottish names for all the characters, in an attempt to make the story feel foreign and estranged from our own day-to-day America (an idea I got from reading Brian Evenson, who often uses wonderfully disorienting character names, although I wouldn’t necessarily claim he picks his for the same reasons as me). The captain is the only character who remains nameless, both to distance him and to again make him seem like a character from an older tale—I wanted him and the other soldiers to feel like American civil war types, and so I set them in the harsh arctic setting, populated their days with a distant commander, a far-off war, a preoccupation with rations and coded messengers and constant accusations of treason. Even though they’re on land, trapped in their tower surrounded by expanses of ice and snow, I meant for the story to always feel confined, the far north setting framing Maon and his fellow soldiers like a band of would-be mutineers stuck aboard a ship lost at sea.

I also divided the story into small, numbered sections to add a journal-like feel to the story, even though the first person narratives within aren’t journal entries. I hoped this (very slight) confusion of forms would somehow complicate the ground truth of the narration by letting this diary-like sense make the story seem “true” even as Maon’s failing memories in the body of the story simultaneously make his telling of the story seem increasingly false.

Most of this I didn’t know about until I’d been working on this story for weeks, long after it already had a beginning, middle, and end. This was a story that started with a single image—the meteors falling through the northern lights over the tower—and absolutely nothing else. Discovering the rest of the story required dozens of iterations of key scenes and images and individual sentences, all of which required a lot of meticulous attention combined with an openness to revision and rewriting.

Notes on Reading

I get haunted by books, by novels and collections and poems and stories in magazines and snippets of fact or fiction that I pick up from web sites. For instance, a certain story will need to be read over and over, like Matthew Derby’s “The Sound Gun,” which “The Receiving Tower” certainly owes some debt to. Similarly, a certain book might need to stay close at hand, not necessarily to be read again in full but rather dipped into, as if to resample whatever it was in the book that affected me so much. I’ve reread Michael Kimball’s How Much of Us There Was and Robert Lopez’s Kamby Bolongo Mean River over and over this past year, not in a linear fashion but in a quicker, partial fashion. Last year I did the same with Evenson’s The Open Curtain, and the year before that it was Ander Monson’s essay collection Neck Deep and Other Predicaments and Charles Jensen’s chapbook of poetry The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon. I’ve read Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land every year since it came out, as I have with Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son for as long as I’ve known about it. Dennis Cooper’s Guide is so ingrained in my being that I can right now reach for my copy of it and open it directly to my favorite sentence, there on page 77, just before the halfway point of the page.

These are some of the ways in which my reading makes me the writer I am: The best words and sentences and paragraphs and even whole fictions tunnel inside me, and only the fever of making something new—of making the right something new—can get them back out. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

“The Receiving Tower” by Matt Bell

Found in Willow Springs 65 Back to Author Profile NIGHTS, WE CLIMB to the tower’s roof to stand together beneath the satellite dishes, where we watch the hundreds of meteorites fall … Read more

About Melissa Kwasny

Melissa Kwasny is the author of four books of poetry: The Nine Senses (Milkweed Editions, forthcoming in early 2011), Reading Novalis in Montana, Thistle, and The Archival Birds. Sheis editor of Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800-1950, and co-editor, with M.L. Smoker, of the recently released I Go To the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights. She is currently working on her fifth book of poems and completing a book of literary essays on the image, provisionally titled “The Imaginary Book of Cave Paintings.” She lives in western Montana.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Two Poems”

Gaston Bachelard, in his book The Poetics of Space, writes that a true image is one that, in order for it to speak to us, must engage our imagination and thus allow us to “think and dream at the same time.” It is not the image we “look at” which stays on the surface of the page or the wall or the mind, but the one that penetrates into our lives, reverberates like a voice in a cave, radiates out and into us. For two years, I have been visiting petroglyph and pictograph sites in Montana and Canada, reading the research on them conducted in the Americas and worldwide, and consulting with an archaeologist in order to better hear what these images, painted and etched on rocks and inside caves, have to say. As is evident in this selection, I am not interested in creating poems that are discursive or even narrative. Rather, I want to experiment with the image—whether encountered as visionary record on limestone; as dream figure; or as physical animal, bird, or cloud in the mountains where I live. I am trying to learn how to converse with the Image itself.

Notes on Reading

“Writing continues reading, returning action to the labors and delights of the day,” poet Donald Revell writes in his book of essays Invisible Green. Continues reading. To me, this is a marvelous way to describe the act of reading as an ongoing experience, one that doesn’t end when one closes the book or, as a writer, lifts the pen. The poem, Revell seems to be saying, is not a means to an end, an end-stop to one’s reading, or, as he says, an “obstacle to the energies,” but a moving discourse.

I used to work in a used bookstore. I became fascinated with the way people engaged with the text, most predominately in the margins. It was a private place to argue (how many times have we seen exclamation points denouncing something the author said right next to it), to underline, to check, to star, to make notes for further inquiry. In fact, it is a visual notation of the kind of responses we might make in conversation. As I got older—and tired of erasing all these marks in library books or embarrassing myself in ones I loaned—I made fainter marks and returned to them to copy them into my writing notebook, which has evolved over the years into a record of dreams, images from the day, emotional and spiritual questions, and a record of my reading. I add to it extended meditations on those quotes, which sometimes become poems, sometimes inhabit poems invisibly, like a soul of sorts, and lists of books I’ve read along lists of poems I’ve written during that time period. I copy paragraphs from letters, which are often regarding books my correspondents and I have read, and the reading continues.

Regarding underrated books, I agree with Paisley Rekdal that most poetry nowadays is underrated, given the fact that it is rarely reviewed and that many non-poets don’t have access to it, don’t know how to find what they would love. Most women’s work is underrated, or perhaps under-absorbed.

Two Poems by Melissa Kwasny

Found in Willow Springs 65 Back to Author Profile Pictograph: Bizarre Anthropomorph, Often with Interior Body Decorations Note left foot with interior spiral. Note the torso, storehouse of resins and gums. … Read more

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About Heather Brittian Bergstrom

Heather Brittain Bergstrom has won four awards from Narrative Magazine, most recently first place in the Fall 2010 Story Contest. She has also won fiction awards from The Chicago Tribune and The Atlantic Monthly, as well as other places. One of her stories was a notable in The Best American Short Stories 2010. Leslie Marmon Silko chose her story, “All Sorts of Hunger,” to win the Kore Press 2010 Short Fiction Award. She has published work in various literary journals and in the anthology Falling Backwards: Stories of Fathers and Daughters. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing.

Bergstrom was born and raised in Moses Lake, Washington. As an eastern Washington native, she was thrilled to have won the Willow Springs Fiction Prize. She currently lives in the Sacramento Valley, where she is putting the finishing touches on her first novel.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Slackwater”

Many contemporary Western short stories take place in motel rooms or on the road or in rented houses—as if the West has yet to be fully settled. My story is no exception. The protagonist in “Slackwater” returns to her hometown to visit her family, but winds up checking into a motel room instead of making contact. For three days, Jill longs for a sense of connection with her parents and with the dusty sage-covered land. In a last ditch effort to belong, she has an affair with the proprietor’s son, Clayton, who dreams of becoming a farmer. As a writer, I am interested in characters who grow up in farming towns but whose families do not own land. Does landlessness, especially in the wide open West, lead to restlessness? And how does this restlessness affect family and other relationships?

My protagonist used her body to get out of her hometown at a young age. I think the West (at least the Interior West) is a more isolating place for women and girls than for men and boys—who often enjoy hunting and fishing. This is a discrepancy I address in many of my stories. Much in the same way male characters partake in the mining, damming and intense agriculture that have partially destroyed the West, my female characters destroy their bodies.

I grew up in a small farming town in eastern Washington. The lake around which my hometown was built is at the tail end of an enormous reclamation project that begins at Grand Coulee Dam. I learned to swim in this slackwater lake and cooled off in irrigation canals. While growing up, my protagonist, Jill, liked to imagine the canals she swam in were actually the Columbia River. Though she supposedly hates the constant clicking of irrigation sprinklers, the sound helps her sleep better than she has in years. In the end, she forces herself to hear the river in the canal—and, in doing so, briefly reclaims her Western heritage.

I am intrigued by how landscape (place) shapes character. My often-wandering characters no longer seek furs or gold or large parcels of land, though their desires, in some ways, are just as unattainable: sleep, warmth, food, forgiveness, family, and clarity.

On a side note: after writing “Slackwater,” the proprietor’s son, Clayton, wouldn’t leave me be. He demanded I write his story, which is called “Farm-in-a-Day” and is available to read online at Narrative Magazine, Winter 2010.

Notes on Reading

I have been deeply influenced by Western writers like Richard Ford, Ray Carver, Jean Stafford, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and William Kittredge. Just as influential were Southern writers like Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and more contemporary Southern poets like Dave Smith, C.D. Wright, Judy Jordan and Nicole Cooley. A sense of place is a key element in the work of all the above mentioned writers. Alice Munro is the god of short stories. Of her, I am in total awe. Also, Jhumpa Lahiri writes stunning short stories. James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” however, is my absolute favorite short story. According to Baldwin, “For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.”

To Kill A Mockingbird is perhaps the most brilliant contemporary novel. All that being said, the writers I read over and over are much older ones—Henry James, Thomas Hardy, and Leo Tolstoy. I am a sucker for thick old-fashioned novels, and these three men write the opposite sex with such compassion and depth. And then there is George Orwell. He’s not so good with women but I absolutely love him—his essays and his novels.

A contemporary novel I have recently enjoyed: The Last Station by Jay Parini. Moral Disorder by Margaret Atwood is a fantastic new story collection. And as for books on the craft of short story writing, I recommend Narrative Design by Madison Smartt Bell.

“Slackwater” by Heather Brittain Bergstrom

Found in Willow Springs 86 Back to Author Profile Winner of the Willow Springs Fiction Prize Jill checks in to the Pioneer Inn under a fake name, shaking her head in … Read more

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.

“Labor” by Kim Chinquee

Found in Willow Springs 86 Back to Author Profile I got off at four, he’d come on at three, we overlapped a bit, but he’d be there until eleven. He worked … Read more

“The Waves Were Low” by Kim Chinquee

Found in Willow Springs 86 Back to Author Profile My neighbor chartered out his boat, catching shark in his net. Days before, he’d taken out my husband. Now the neighbor’s boys … Read more

“Goose” by Kim Chinquee

Found in Willow Springs 86 Back to Author Profile He said he’d gone to the dump to find a cheap ignition. But no luck and now the baby was crying. Duck, … Read more

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