Profiles – Page 15 – Willow Springs Magazine

Issue 84: Maia Elsner

About Maia Elsner

I grew up between Oxford and Mexico City, with stints in France and Italy. I began writing poetry while studying migration, race and incarceration in Massachusetts in 2017. Recent work has appeared in The Missouri Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Colorado Review and Periphery.

‘Goldfinch’, The Missouri Review: https://www.missourireview.com/goldfinch/

‘Siqueiros “Birth of Fascism” and Rivera’s “The Arrival of Cortes”, The Ekphrastic Review: http://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/siqueiros-birth-of-facism-and-riveras-arrival-of-cortez-by-maia–elsner

‘Threshold to Coyoacan Plaza, Mexico City’, The Ekphrastic Review: http://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/threshold-to-coyoacan-plaza-mexico-city-by-maia–elsner

‘Lucrece’, Colorado Review: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/719651

‘Michelangelo’s “The Awakened Slave”, 1520’ and ‘Leonardo da Vinci “The Adoration of the Magi”, 1481’, Periphery: https://issuu.com/peripheryjournal/docs/03072019_issuu_copy

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Lullaby”

When my siblings and I were little, my mother would sing to us the songs of her childhood, before we fell asleep. It was as if she was willing Mexico into our dreams.

For me, the lyrics of the traditional Mexican song ‘Cielito Lindo’, popularized in the 1880s by Mexican composer Quirino Mendoza y Cortés, and ‘Amapola’, written in the 1920s by Spanish American singer José María Lacalle García, have always held within them my mother’s nostalgia for a world lost, the pain of years spent away from her loved ones, and the borders – not only physical, but also linguistic, psychological and emotional – that have characterized her experience in England, and mine.
Writing ‘Lullaby’ felt like tracing the echoes of my mother’s voice from the rubble of memory. Even now that I read my poem out-loud, I hear in my head the sound of her singing. In a way, ‘Lullaby’ is a love-song to my mother – to all she gave up, and all she gave to me.

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

My current favourite thing is listening to Havana meets Kingston, or Miles Davis or possibly Atahualpa Yupanqui, with a group of friends. I have recently become obsessed with underground rivers, the tributaries of the Thames that once shaped the landscape, but are now buried, alongside their stories, myths and gods, encased in concrete. Catch me at weekends walking London’s abandoned canals or with a sloe-gin in the corner of a pub. I’m a fan of candles, making figures out of wax, pockets, tostones, dancing, my orange-peal earrings and peach-stone necklace, jasmine-scent, jacaranda flowers.

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Issue 84: Ella Flores

About Ella Flores

Ella Flores holds an MFA from Northern Michigan University. She has recent publications in RHINO, Harpur Palate, Radar Poetry, and Barely South Review.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Last Universal Offspring (Uncommon)”

“Last Universal Offspring (Uncommon)” arose from water. My love of it, my fear of it, my lack of drinking enough of it. There are words and moments in this poem I found over five years ago, and many I could only have found much more recently. This is the poem I’ve been trying to write for all sea-like bodies. It has always been a conversation between the ocean and the speaker. For many years this poem felt unfinished and I’m still not sold that it’s quite done changing yet. The major turning point for its current iteration was the decision to include Spanish. While it felt more honest to me as the writer to include all the languages by which I’ve known the ocean, I believed it added a sort of linguistic expanse for the reader, bilingual or not, to be suddenly confronted with something so distant, yet familiar.

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

I live with a cat named Potato. I buy them food and they keep sticking around. I’m pretty sure this is the closest interaction I have to “love”, but it’s chill. My culinary interests involve being taught a new recipe by a friend and subsequently cooking only that meal for weeks on end. It’s great. My hobbies include reading, writing, socks, staying up too late, and looking up how to use commas, again. The US women’s national soccer team is rad and Julien Baker is a person I listen to who makes music, and magic. Tattoo discrimination should stop being a thing. The US government continues violating human rights at the border (and elsewhere). Happy Pride Month. And yeah, think that’s about it.

“Last Universal Offspring (Uncommon)” by Ella Flores

Found in Willow Springs 84 Back to Author Profile Hungover seagulls stumble dawn in. Who told you you came from water? The morning people attempt to slow it down, … Read more

About Ira Sukrungruang

Ira Sukrungruang is the author of three nonfiction books Buddha’s Dog & other mediations, Southside Buddhist and Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy; the short story collection The Melting Season; and the poetry collection In Thailand It Is Night. He is the president of Sweet: A Literary Confection (sweetlit.com) and the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Have You Eaten?”

“Have You Eaten?” started as a panel paper about food writing 3 years. My aunt had passed away, and she was (still is) foremost on my mind, especially when it came to food. I started thinking about how food writing as a form of loss. How, once we lose someone so close, we lose everything about them also–their touch, their voice, and the things they used to cook. Aunty Sue shaped my food life, my taste buds. When I was writing the panel paper, in that original form, I added a lot of footnotes and those footnotes were about my aunt. When I gave the panel presentation, I broke down. It wasn’t pretty, and I imagine pretty awkward for the audience, but it was necessary. This piece allowed me to venture into those memories, memories I tried not to look at. It made me recall all the foods my aunt had made, even the simple ones like a grilled cheese. The difficulty of the subject made the essay slow to develop. But I chipped at it a little at a time, and even now it seems to me unfinished. All creative nonfiction pieces are unfinished in a way. I will return to the topic of food. I will write about my aunt again. Her life and her cooking lives in memory.

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

I’m addicted to tattoos. I have a bunch. My newest one (pic included) I got before moving my entire family from Florida to Ohio. It’s a dragon and tiger in love with each other. I didn’t want any type of violence on my arm but rather two beings in harmony with one another. These tattoos of mine tell a different narrative of the body. One that I control. One that I shape. Not the culture. Not the world. For a big guy like myself, tattooing was how I learned love the body.

“Have You Eaten?” by Ira Sukrungruang

Found in Willow Springs 85 Back to Author Profile When my Aunty Sue arrived in Chicago in 1968-the summer hot and familiar like Thailand-she didn’t know how to cook. This seemed … Read more

About Eric Altemus

Eric Altemus is a graduate of Oregon State University’s Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing, and Indiana University, where he worked for the Herman B. Wells Library and Indiana Review. His most recent fiction has been published in Sou’wester and The Rappahannock Review. An employee of the University of Michigan Library, he lives near Ann Arbor, where he is currently finishing a collection of short stories.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Three Finnish Scenes”

“Three Finnish Scenes” is inspired by my experience at the University of Vaasa, Finland, in the summer of 2011. It’s a small coastal college town about four hours northwest of Helsinki. I was there as part of an intensive Finnish language program during my undergraduate years at Indiana University. My major was English, with a focus in editing and publishing, and at the time, I was interested in translation as well—this was all during the Scandinavian crime boom, when Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy was popular. With the Finnish literary landscape so untouched for English-speaking readers, I considered pursuing a graduate degree in translation.

The trip turned out to be a disaster: I dealt with homesickness and a significant health issue that I had difficulty managing while living abroad. Eventually, I realized that I was completely in over my head: most Finns already spoke fluent English, and I had no real claim to translation. That being said, Vaasa was an important and humbling experience for me, one I’m very grateful for, because it led me to focus solely on fiction. I ended up drafting these pieces while finishing my MFA at Oregon State, where eight were submitted to my final graduate workshop. I revisited these three scenes a few years later in Michigan, where they came to be what they are now.

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

My father’s in radio broadcasting, and I was raised in a household where I was exposed to lots of Oldies music from a young age: Philadelphia soul, the British Invasion, Billboard-charting hits from the Sixties and Seventies, mostly, because that was what people wanted to hear. I moved around the country often as a result of his career and spent a lot of time in the car. If we weren’t listening to an Oldies station, it was typically country, my mother’s preference. It’s no surprise, then, that music became a big part of my creative process. I often draw a lot of inspiration from records that I’m listening to while drafting or revising.

Like most teenagers, I rebelled with my music choices, gravitating toward Internet file sharing communities and genres like black metal, drone, and hardcore. I eventually came to appreciate some of the groups and singers that I grew up with, though, like The Beatles, The Mamas and the Papas, Marvin Gaye, and Otis Redding. For these short pieces, I was listening to a lot of music from Fonal Records, a Finnish label that reminded me of Vaasa’s endless summer sunlight: TV-resistori’s Serkut rakastaa paremmin and Paavoharju’s Laulu laakson kukista.

“Three Finnish Scenes” by Eric Altemus

KOTIPIZZA Yes! We put strips of all-natural reindeer meat on the Berlusconi. Thank God you asked. It’s named after the Italian Prime Minister. You know, the same one who believed … Read more

About Bridget Adams

Bridget Adams‘ fiction is published in The Sun, Hobart, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and SmokeLong Quarterly. A winner of the Devine Fellowship, she holds an MFA in Fiction from Bowling Green State University and is currently at work on her PhD at Florida State University. You can follow her on Twitter at @piratelawyer89.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Mushroom Boys”

“Mushroom Boys” developed in the same way that most of my work does—I began with a voice and an image (the young men unconscious under a ceiling fan), and I then followed the voice as I wrote. In revision, I realized it was very important to me that the story have an uneven relationship to point of view, and that the omniscience is roving but not necessarily all-knowing. I wanted to experiment formally with a method of collective storytelling. I kept thinking about the ways that deep friendships, even (especially?) those that are fraught or full of conflict, can create a sense of community experience and communal decision-making, and I was hoping to mimic that experience in the narration. This created various technical difficulties from the start; I am obviously not the first to observe that storytelling in the American tradition tends to belong to the individual, and that the majority of stories considered to be successful at their aims are usually connected to exploring the experience of the individual. My greatest challenge in writing this piece was keeping the reading experience from being so disorienting or confusing that readers might be unable to follow.

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

So, no tattoos, no pets, and I’m still listening to the same music I’ve been listening to since I was 16; I made my students listen to The Zombie’s “Care of Cell 44” on repeat accidentally this week, and I didn’t notice for like twenty minutes. They hated it. In all the things I consume I’m generally boring! So I think instead I’ll tell you about my favorite plant, who I call Purple Friend. He looks like a demon and he is impossible to kill. He has deep green leaves that are covered in a neon purple fuzz, and what he is, or where he comes from, cannot at this time be identified. After every attempt on his life he emerges stronger than ever. At the moment, he is mortally weakened because I watered him too much (he resists all forms of love) and he still has two long vines crawling down my bookcase, and at the ends they curl up and reach out, like beckoning hands. And a third vine has newly sprouted, jagged and inquisitive. Guests are afraid of and disturbed by him, and usually react in surprised horror when seeing him for the first time. I assume he is from hell and I would be honored to one day die by his hand.

“Mushroom Boys” by Bridget Adams

Found in Willow Springs 85 Back to Author Profile Lydia and Jools and RJ were very drunk and walking home, and the streetlamps made the sidewalk, the apartment buildings sprouting up, … Read more

About Andrea Jurjević

Andrea Jurjević grew up in Rijeka, Croatia, in the former Yugoslavia, before immigrating to the United States. Her debut poetry collection, Small Crimes, won the 2015 Philip Levine Poetry Prize, and her book-length translations from Croatian include Mamasafari (Diálogos Press, 2018) and Dead Letter Office (The Word Works, 2020). Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Believer, TriQuarterly, The Missouri Review, Gulf Coast and The Southeast Review, among others. She was the recipient of a Robinson Jeffers Tor Prize, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a Hambidge Fellowship, and the 2018 Georgia Author of the Year award. Andrea lives in Atlanta, Georgia, and teaches at Georgia State University.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Nastic Movements”, “Department of Dream Justice” and “Nevada Augury”

“Department of Dream Justice” is haunted by the idea of home and the question of reconstructing oneself after the loss of one’s home, or country, particularly as a parent, and especially as an immigrant parent. I’m often drawn to writing about displacement, and the sense of alienation, but this piece in particular attempts to reconcile the need for intimacy and security with realities of life. I reference a line from the song “La Pistola y El Corazón” by Los Lobos, a beautiful song that claims that there’s no cure for emotional pain.

I started writing “Nevada Augury” during a cross-country road trip with the man I was newly engaged to. At the time I was working on poems that explored the idea of abandon—both the sense of abandon and leaving something behind. The poem finished itself a couple years later, after the sudden death of that relationship. It now seemed the desert had forecasted, or forewarned this ending, and that the abandonment I wrote about might’ve been a premonition. I love Pieter Brueghel and his depiction of how foolish human nature is.

As for “Nastic Movements,” one night during a walk, I noticed a patch of dandelions, all closed up. Dandelions react to darkness, like tulips and poppies and many other flowers. These dandelions, though, looked like they have lost their ‘heads,’ and they made me think of different ways people lose their heads . . . to war, death, trauma, stupidity, love, deception. I wrote the ending lines of the poem first, including the image of a letter falling apart in rain, which I stole from Will Christopher Baer’s novel Kiss Me, Judas.

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

I used to be a big fan of Robert Smith and The Cure. I bought Disintegration at 13 from the local Jugoton, the chain record store in former Yugoslavia (Jugoton had a very limited selection of imported music), and every other of their albums from friends who travelled abroad. I wrote to The Cure fanclub in London and would in turn receive fat parcels filled with their newsletter and fan stories and black & white photocopies of the band. I also loved Siouxsie Sioux, Jesus and Mary Chain, Sisters of Mercy, The Smiths, Bauhaus (lots of alternative 70s and early 80s) and heaps of Yugo bands that are unknown to the American audience. Punk rock in particular meant a lot in Yugoslavia. It was a way to mock and attack the establishment… that kind of expression was very uncharacteristic of a communist country. It tricked us into thinking that having music as an outlet was freedom. My hometown, Rijeka, has always had a rich and distinctive music scene, and I grew up surrounded with phenomenal musicians. And I believe music made me the writer I am. I listen to music daily. Recently I’ve been listening to the Verve, Low, Nothing, the Black Ryder, Girls, the Mexican duo Lorelle Meets the Obsolete. I love their moodiness, their dark, sultry atmospherics. But I also love lots of Beck, Brian Eno, Tricky, David Sylvian, John Cale, Sparks, the Kinks, etc.

Three Poems by Andrea Jurjević

Found in Willow Springs 85 Back to Author Profile “Nastic Movements” Sweetness, back home the Adriatic tightens around the shore like a snake around a hot rock. in each … Read more

About Michael Hettich

Michael Hettich was born in Brooklyn, NY, and grew up in New York City and its suburbs. He has lived in upstate New York, Colorado, Northern Florida, Vermont, Miami, and Black Mountain, North Carolina, where he now lives with his family. His books of poetry include To Start an Orchard (Press 53, 2019), Bluer and More Vast (Hysterical Press, 2018), The Frozen Harbor (Red Dragonfly Press, 2017), Systems of Vanishing (University of Tampa, 2014), The Animals Beyond Us (New Rivers, 2011) and Like Happiness (Anhinga, 2010). His work has appeared widely in such journals as Ploughshares, Orion, The Literary Review, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, The Sun, Witness, and Poetry East. His awards include three Florida Individual Artists Fellowships, a Florida Book Award, The Tampa Review Prize in Poetry, and the David Martinson–Meadow Hawk Prize. He has served on the board of several organizations, including AIRIE (Artists in Residence in the Everglades) and WAIL (Word and Image Lab). Hettich holds a Ph.D. in literature and taught at the college level for many years. He often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and fellow writers. His website is michaelhettich.com

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “I Wake” and “The Hive”

Although neither “I Wake” nor “The Hive” is drawn literally from life experiences, both poems feel true to me in ways I always strive for but only occasionally achieve. Though at first they feel like very different kinds of poem to me, as I look at them more carefully, I realize they are actually quite similar in tone and even content, and that their apparent dissimilarity is due mainly to the different cadences that drive them. Both were written in the past year or so, after my wife and I moved from Miami to Western North Carolina; both feel haunted by spirits hovering in our new landscape, feelings and figures we might even stop noticing once we’ve become fully acclimated here. Perhaps that’s one reason I trust them.

Both “I Wake” and “The Hive” draw from random moments of experience, fragments unrelated to each other except in the landscape of the poem. These consist mostly of snippets of observation and overheard conversations that might have vanished entirely had I not remembered them as I wrote. In both cases the act of writing remembered these things for me. I do wake in the middle of the night to listen for night-creatures, and I have noticed that at a certain age, some people look suddenly old. I also know I have had that experience of driving through the dark while someone I love is suffering next to me, right beside me but miles beyond my touch. I’ve also recently had the experience—it felt like a moment of grace—of a bee buzzing wildly under my shirt—and not stinging me. And my wife and I often walk to the meadow a mile or so from our house, to watch the horses grazing there.

I’ve heard that those horses were rescued from abusive owners, nurtured back to health and granted new life in that meadow. Maybe the grace of that beautiful gift somehow sings in my little poem, too.

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

Like most writers, music is central to my life and art. I grew up living inside late-sixties rock and folk, as well as bebop and post-bop jazz and even the free jazz of Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. I still love all of that music and know a great deal of it in my bloodstream.

Lately, though, with so much chatter in the air, I often yearn just to listen to the songs and squawks of the actual world. I certainly want a music that engages rather than distracts.

The music that has touched me most deeply for many years, the work that connects with that part of me that aches to write, is neither rock, nor folk, nor jazz, but a more-difficult-to-classify music often called—perhaps pretentiously—“new music.” Among the composers I’m referring to here, I would include John Cage, Meredith Monk, Robert Ashley, Pauline Olivieros, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon. I’d include some of Brian Eno’s work here as well.

Of all contemporary composers, Terry Riley speaks most profoundly to me, from his earliest work, “In C,” which heralded a new kind of music and listening, to his most recent compositions.

And over the past few months, I’ve been marveling almost daily at John Luther Adams’s beautiful symphonies Become Ocean and Become Desert. All of Adams’s work feels “true” in fresh ways to me; it grows more interesting the more deeply I listen.

In other moods, I find myself turning to David Torn’s haunting Only Sky, and to Laurie Anderson & Kronos Quartet’s Landfall; as far as live music goes, living here in Western NC, we are graced with the likes of Al Petaway and Robin Bullock, two of the greatest acoustic guitarists alive.

By far the best live music I heard in the past year, though, was the Meredith Monk ensemble’s performance of selections from Cellular Songs at the 2019 Big Ears Festival in Knoxville. The work was (and is) literally beyond words

“The Hive”and “I Wake”by Michael Hettich

The Hive Someone else’s loss, buzzing through the garden like the bee that got under your shirt and landed in your chest hair but didn’t sting; someone’s grief right … Read more

About Roy Burgess

Jackson Burgess is the author of Atrophy (Write Bloody Publishing, 2018) and the chapbook Pocket Full of Glass (Tebot Bach, 2017). He is a graduate of the University of Southern California and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. His poetry and fiction are published or forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, The Cimarron Review, Rattle, The Cincinnati Review, PANK, Colorado Review, The Boiler Journal, and elsewhere. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is at work on a novel and his second full-length collection of poems. (jacksonburgess.com)

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Medicine”

A couple Thanksgivings ago, I sat down and wrote a chapbook-length series of poems like “Medicine,” trying to work through some life circumstances that felt a bit out of my control. Since then I’ve been gradually editing them and sending them out to magazines. I liked the idea of a prose poem responding to itself through an erasure “echo,” whittling itself down until it became a self-reflexive call-and-response. I thought, “If you’re gonna feel sad and solipsistic, you should probably lean into it formally, right?” Now I’ve been thinking about the process of revising old work, trying to re-enter the emotional or mental space you were in when you wrote the initial draft, respecting that original feeling while still incorporating what you have learned or become since.

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

Tom Waits and bottom-shelf whiskey feel pretty mandatory for me post-breakup—at the moment I’m revisiting The Black Rider, Waits’ and William S. Burroughs’ collaborative take on an old German Faustian tale. Love Phoebe Bridgers’ cover of “Georgia Lee” on the new Women Sing Waits album, too.
I just finished an advance copy of Jean Kyoung Frazier’s Pizza Girl and can’t get it out of my head. Pub date is June 9—do yourself a favor and pre-order a copy. Frazier’s the fucking truth.
I’m closely following Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, listening to old speeches from him and his surrogates (AOC, Dr. Cornel West, Killer Mike, etc.).
I spend an ungodly amount of time on YouTube. These days I think Conner O’Malley has the most unhinged and underappreciated channel on the platform. I’m also a big ASMR junkie. Anxiety’s a motherfucker, but ASMR seems to cut right through it.

“Medicine” by Jackson Burgess

Found in Willow Springs 85 Back to Author Profile You could spend half a lifetime trying to learn what another body needs, and believe me, I have, making eyes at the … Read more

About Roy Bentley

Roy Bentley was a finalist for the Miller Williams prize for Walking with Eve in the Loved City, is the author of eight books; including American Loneliness from Lost Horse Press, who is bringing out a new & selected in 2021. He is the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and fellowships from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs and the Ohio Arts Council. Poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Shenandoah, and Prairie Schooner among others. Hillbilly Guilt, his latest, won the 2019 Hidden River Arts / Willow Run Poetry Book Award.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “A Human Heart, Left Aboard, Sends Airplane Back to Where it Started” and “Fallout, or the Mother Tongue of Pinocchio Was the Wind Through the Trees”

“A Human Heart, Left Aboard, Sends Airplane Back to Where It Started” was a headline in The New York Times that struck me. Over the years, I’ve flown more than a few times, many times experiencing delays. Which is where I elected to start: with the pilot’s uber-authoritative voice blossoming into an explanation for turning the plane around. The heart that’s “in with the luggage” is the turn of the poem—where the poem coalesced. After I finished, it occurred to me that I was giddy-glad that an airline would behave in this way, regardless of inconvenience.

“Fallout, or The Mother Tongue of Pinocchio Was the Wind through the Trees” wrestles with the events I lived through as a small boy around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis—I’d have been 8 years old that October. I’ve tried to recreate what we had to contend with, and to recreate discovering what it is to be a boy at the moment the narrator’s life is threatened by the events of those days, aided by the odd detail of the bomb shelter model—which actually opened business and took orders that autumn. Gepetto has always fascinated me. Inspired me—I mean, all he wanted was a child. I love that, whatever else, he represents the creative impulse in males.

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

I have a tiger-descending tattoo the size of a big man’s hand above (and on) my left breast. Why did I get a tattoo? I wanted a tattoo somewhere on the body that many tattoo artists tend to avoid because of the pain. (I’d left a relationship that ended badly; I was numb and hoped the tattooing would jolt my consciousness into something approaching awareness—it took about 4 hours to get it done. And it worked.) The experience changed how I viewed my body. Twenty years later, the tiger has held up well enough that it often occurs to me that one backfoot is just wrong!

I recently finished a Michael Connelly novel. Haven’t jumped into anything else, as I’ve been readying copy for the catalogue promotion of a new & selected called My Mother’s Red Ford, which Lost Horse Press is bringing out next year. (Trying to stay sane in these insane times.)

“A Human Heart, Left Aboard, Sends Airplane Back to Where It Started” and “Fallout, or the Mother Tongue of Pinocchio Was the Wind Through the Trees” by Roy Bentley

Found in Willow Springs 85 Back to Author Profile “A Human Heart, Left Aboard, Sends Airplane Back to Where it Started” THIS WAS A PILOT coming on the intercom: Good … Read more

About Andrew Farkas

Andrew Farkas is the author of an essay collection: The Great Indoorsman (University of Nebraska Press 2022), a novel: The Big Red Herring (KERNPUNKT Press 2019), and two collections of short fiction: Self-Titled Debut (Subito Press 2009) and Sunsphere (BlazeVOX [books] 2019). His work has appeared in The Iowa Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Florida Review, Willow Springs, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize (with one Special Mention in Pushcart Prize XXXV), Best of the Net, and Best American Essays (with a Notable Essay in 2013). His novel was named one of the Best Fiction Books of 2019 by Entropy Magazine, and it was a finalist for the 2019 Big Other Fiction Award and the 2019 Foreword INDIES humor award. He is a fiction editor for The Rupture and an Assistant Professor of English at Washburn University. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on "When Hamburger Station is Busy"

One of the things I wanted to do in my essay collection, The Great Indoorsman, was focus on indoors spaces I like even though most people wouldn’t think of them as beautiful. Now, I’ve been going to Hamburger Station since I was a kid, and seeing as how my dad and I have a wacky routine about the lack of people there no matter what time we go, I figured I had to write a Hamburger Station essay. Thinking about the routine that’s described at the beginning of the essay, I realized it sounded like a thought problem, maybe Schrödinger’s cat. I then decided each section would be a proposed solution to the thought problem posed by my dad. The essay, then, is a purposeful collision of Hamburger Station memories/fantasies and philosophical/scientific thought, bringing together two different sides of my personality: the regular Joe (who chows down on burgers and fries) and the cerebral writer (who prefers mind-blowing works, rather than pieces that remain locked on everyday experience). At one point, I did have a little trouble with some of the science I use later in the essay; luckily my friend, Phil Jensen, helped me out there, since he showed me how I could balance the two sides, when it felt like the more difficult ideas had started to dominate the piece. I was then briefly stuck because I didn’t know how to end the essay. Then I remembered hearing Max Tegmark on a podcast (The End of the World with Josh Clark) and thought he’d be able to help me because I was dealing with the same sort of material Professor Tegmark does. Fortunately, I was right. The last section, especially the last paragraph comes from me pondering Tegmark’s comments on time and my hope for the perseverance of Hamburger Station.

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

While writing my novel, The Big Red Herring, I got interested in tiki drinks, since the Singapore Sling plays a big role in Part Two of the book. Although I have a small, two-seater tiki bar and a room decorated with tiki paraphernalia, I never really used it, mostly because I tend to go out for booze. During the pandemic, though, I opened what I called either the Isolation Tiki Bar or the Alienation Tiki Bar (since I was the bartender, the bouncer, the person hogging the jukebox, the nursing major, the dude who needs cut off, the dude drinking alone, etc.) and started making cocktails, my favorites (in no particular order) being the Jet Pilot, Black Pearl, Painkiller, Singapore Sling, Jungle Bird, Lorikeet, Dark and Stormy, and the Zombie. The weirdest one I made, though, had to be the Cradle of Life, since it requires you to hollow out a lime, fill it with Chartreuse, set the liquor-lime boat afloat in the drink, and then set it on fire. The fact that I didn’t burn down the Isolation Tiki Bar is pretty amazing.

“When Hamburger Station is Busy” by Andrew Farkas

When Hamburger Station is Busy Whenever I go to Hamburger Station for lunch with my dad and I point out there’s nobody there, he says, “It’s busier at dinnertime.” … Read more