Profiles – Page 3 – Willow Springs Magazine

Issue 72: Maxim Loskutoff

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About Maxim Loskutoff

Maxim Loskutoff grew up in Missoula, Montana. After graduating from Pomona College, he worked in hospitals in Dallas and Chicago, on campaign trails, and in the Middle East. He holds an MFA from NYU, where he was a Veteran’s Writing Fellow. He’s received fellowships from the Jentel Arts Colony, Caldera Art Center, and NYU Abu Dhabi. His stories have been published or are forthcoming in Narrative Magazine, Witness, Hobart, and The Minnesota Review, among other publications.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Prey”

The idea came from a true story. A friend of a friend woke up in bed with his giant snake. I never met the guy and only heard the thirty second version, but still, it was helpful. It’s one of the first short stories I ever finished, so to have that thread of truth gave me confidence. To know I could get as weird as I wanted because, hey, real life is even weirder. Much of my writing I’ve done since then continues to explore the relationships we form with wild animals. How we want them to love us and guide us when—in my experience—the very thing that draws us to them is their essential wildness: the fact that they’d just as soon chew your leg off and drag it into the woods as snuggle.

Growing up, I was exposed to a great deal of Native American literature and folklore, and I always found the role animals play incredibly beautiful. Then I’d read in the local newspaper about some dude who tried to pet a bison and got trampled. There’s a tension there that I love, and more than anything in my work, I want to feel that awe of the wild, that shivering feeling you get when you walk a little too far and night is coming.

Notes on Reading

Honestly, I have a somewhat mixed relationship with reading. Growing up in small-town Montana, I read voraciously and it was purely a pleasure. Earth-shaking discoveries on the regular, running from Salinger and Hemingway to Didion and Carver—tears and getting turned upside down. I read a book called Warlock when I first got to college that made me want to run through a wall. That much joy.

Now, it’s become work in some respects. I’m so aware of the seams, the joints, trying to figure out how a story works, that it can burn me out, and only really really special stuff retains that transportive power. And I have to be careful of the really, really special stuff too, because I can be such a mimic. If I read too much Cormac, too much DFW, too much Denis Johnson or Lydia Davis, I start to sound like them. Or, to put it right, I start to sound like a pale, flailing imitation. So reading can be a fraught experience. All that being said, I do read. Most recently, I stumbled on a book of Kafka’s parables—absolutely killer. I sit down with them and never want to emerge.

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Issue 72: Nicole Cooley

About Nicole Cooley

Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana and now lives outside of New York City with her husband and two daughters. She is the author of four books of poems, most recently Breach (LSU Press) and Milk Dress (Alice James Books), both published in 2010, as well as a novel. She has received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. She is currently at work on a new collection of poems and a nonfiction book, “My Dollhouse, Myself: Miniature Histories.” She is the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College–City University of New York, where she is a professor of English.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Dolls”

I am fascinated by dolls, dollhouses, and miniature things. They all seem to cast a spell in strange ways and are both infinitely delightful and often disturbing, even creepy. As a child, I was obsessed with my dollhouse and my dolls, as my own daughters have been, too, and as an adult I love reading about dolls and dollhouses—the past histories of dolls, the stories of who owned and kept them, stories of artists who make altered art and jewelry out of miniature dolls, which is really amazing. I think dolls in particular raise a number of themes that interest me, from gender identities to mother/daughter relationships to questions about bodies.

This series of poems, however, was sparked by a walk I took in downtown Merida, Mexico where I was teaching for a week in January. Inside a store, I found the doll “H1N1 Baby” on the shelf. I went home and started writing. Oddly, or not, I finished the series of doll poems in Mississippi, when I was away giving a reading.

Notes on Reading

I love reading—it is truly one of my absolute greatest pleasures in life and always has been. And I will read anything, from a nineteenth-century novel to a cereal box. I start and end every day by reading. It’s my narcotic to fall asleep and my way to enter each day. And when I sit down to write, I always begin by reading.

Right now I’m reading the new nonfiction book by Eve Ensler about her recent illness, the recent British novel Alys, Always by Harriet Lane, the collected poems of Louise Gluck, a book about women who are standup comics who choose not to have children, an anthology of eco-poetry that was recently published, and Frank Bidart’s new book of poems, Metaphysical Dog. I like to have more than one book going at one time. I have my late-night books, my read-on-the-subway books, my reading-to-inspire-my-writing books.

5 Poems by Nicole Cooley

Found in Willow Springs 72 Back to Author Profile HlNl Doll – At a bodega in Merida, Mexico Baby in a green surgical mask, baby in a hospital gown, baby in … Read more

About Robert Long Foreman

Robert Long Foreman grew up in Wheeling, West Virginia and earned a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Missouri. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in journals that include Third Coast, Indiana Review, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, and Mid-American Review. He won a Pushcart Prize for his short story “Cadiz, Missouri,” which appeared in AGNI, and has also won creative nonfiction contests at The Journal and American Literary Review. His essays were listed in the Notable Essays of Best American Essays 2008 and 2010. Robert teaches Creative Writing and Literature at Rhode Island College.

More Robert Long Foreman

Robert Long Foreman at Michigan Quarterly Review
Robert Long Foreman on Twitter

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “The Man with The Nightmare Gun”

When I wrote this story in early 2012, I thought I could see what would make someone want to buy a gun for reasons other than self-defense or murder. I have always known that guns are killing machines, and I’ve always been afraid of them, but I could find them intriguing up to a certain point. For a while, I considered taking shooting lessons, thinking that since guns are a part of this world I might as well learn to use one. In order to write the story, or certain parts of it, I had to have this curiosity.

Very soon after I finished writing, I learned that Trayvon Martin had been shot, and soon after that were the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut. Both events helped to change my perspective on guns dramatically, in a way that no other shootings ever did, somehow. I couldn’t understand—and I still find it baffling in the worst way—how it is that so many people have responded to what happened in Newtown by hoarding guns with a vengeance.

Every time I write something, I go through a period of thinking I shouldn’t have written it, and that was much worse with this story than any other I’ve come up with. I couldn’t write this story now. I couldn’t portray a man’s descent into gun worship, now that gun-worshippers are arming themselves at such an alarming rate, and have it turn out like this story did. I’ve lost all interest in guns, and I no longer understand how someone can want to possess such a dangerous thing.

Notes on Reading

The short story that must have had the greatest influence on this one is Richard Wright’s “The Man Who Was Almost a Man.” Both stories feature a protagonist who is unreasonably bent on acquiring a gun, and whose ownership of the gun has regrettable, similar consequences. It was not an influence I was conscious of at the time of writing; I forgot the details of the story until I taught it recently in a literature course. Even the titles are similar, though, so clearly Wright’s story was exerting its influence on this one as it came together.

I wrote essays and memoirs for years before trying out fiction, so that many of the writers who’ve had the strongest effects on me are essayists and memoirists, like E. B. White, Mary McCarthy, George Orwell, Eula Biss, Nick Flynn, James Baldwin, Anne Fadiman, Virginia Woolf, William Hazlitt, and others. The last great short story I read was E. B. Lyndon’s “Goodbye, Bear,” which appeared recently in One Story and reminded me of one of my favorite books, Lore Segal’s Lucinella.

I love reading, and I rely on it for more than I can say. At the same time, I cannot talk honestly about reading without mentioning how discouraging it can be, how often I’ll start reading a book with hope and enthusiasm, to then find I can’t get past page thirty or forty. I’m getting better at abandoning books at that point and moving on, but it’s very hard, necessary as it is to do so in order to reach the book that demands to be devoured whole.

“The Man with The Nightmare Gun” by Robert Long Foreman

Found in Willow Springs 72 Back to Author Profile I AM NOT A SERIOUS MAN. I thought Carol understood this about me by our fifth date. I thought it was something … 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.

“The Vinyl Canal” by Robert Long Foreman

Found in Willow Springs 81 Back to Author Profile The Vinyl Canal IT STARTED WITH 1999. Ben scratched his copywhen he dropped it on his bathroom floor. I don’t know … Read more

Issue 81: Robert Long Foreman

About Robert Long Foreman Robert Long Foreman’s first book, Among Other Things, was published last year by Pleiades Press after winning the inaugural Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose. … Read more

Dana_Levin_photo_by_Anne_Staveley-e1456505075978

About Dana Levin

Dana Levin is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Sky Burial, which the New Yorker called “utterly her own and utterly riveting.” New poems and essays have appeared in he New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poets.org, Boston Review and Poetry. A grateful recipient of fellowships and awards from the Rona Jaffe, Whiting and Guggenheim Foundations, Levin teaches at Santa Fe University of Art and Design in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Melancholia”

I’d been finishing a manuscript obsessed with End Times— which is to say, anxiety about the future: the one being built by the extreme polarities of our age, the one the global technocracy wanted to put in every hungry hand. Then, at Christmas 2013, a cousin killed herself. There’s a lot of bipolar disorder and clinical depression in my family; my cousin’s death— the third suicide in seven years amongst my cousins and siblings (two “accidental,” this one not)— threw me back into thoughts of my father, an untreated manic-depressive for most of his life. A rager, an eater: he was the Jupiterian god who ruled my house when I was young, a father I adored and feared. Even as a child, I sensed we shared an ambivalence about being alive, though mine I think was more situational than biochemical. It seems ironic, in retrospect, that that ambivalence found expression in excess: eating, buying, sucking the air out of a room. Not so ironic: hobbies of risk. The stories I always told about him— the one about the helmet and the crash, the one about the fight he picked on a stranger’s driveway, the car and the flood, the way he hoarded candy— surged for the first time to the page. I kept writing, even though the material seemed such a strange swerve out of my End Times orbit, but by later drafts I understood: no swerve at all, just a layer down, into one experience of the psychological underpinnings of civilization and its discontents, to use Freud’s by-now understated phrasing. Raging, eating, hoarding “candy”: what is this world suffering under but unfettered consumption and hobbies of risk? How else to understand what drives the choices we currently make and refuse to make where the earth, the collective, is concerned? From world leaders balking at eco-conservation to my father’s wrath at my mother’s attempts to limit butter— my own excesses with food and media— the drive of want, its daemon of lack and desire, is the same. And driving that: the mind straining against the bonds of the body. What then, future?

I wrote these father stories down in a conventional narrative mode and thought at first I might be at work on an essay. I could see the path to memoir unfurling, but something in me resisted. I wanted prose and I wanted a poem: the resulting form is the bargain struck. In terms of narrative and timeline, I felt an impulse to make the visible a little hard to see, to quote Wallace Stevens. Later, that felt psychologically accurate: we remember things in flashes, in memories and reflections out of temporal sync, blurs of dream and life. I threw my father’s heavy shade like a stone into a pond, watched associations ripple: movies, images, dreams. The world too seemed to be ruled by a bi-polar father-god, unconscious, suicidal; the way we were living under regimes of extremity, from weather to wealth. The poem built a thought-nest to brood an egg of knowing: why I am where we are.

Notes on Reading

I don’t think “Melancholia” would have found its final form without the influence of three books I read a couple of years before writing it:
Pam Houston’s Contents May Have Shifted, Craig Morgan Teicher’s Ambivalence and Other Conundrums, and, especially, Lucy Corin’s piece “A Hundred Apocalypses” in One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses (my kinda book). All three work in short prose flashes; all three work with an economy and compression we associate with poetry. Teicher’s book especially blurs the thrum-lines between poetry and creative nonfiction; Corin’s between fiction and poetry. Houston’s book has ‘refrain’ sections (various tales of hair-raising plane flights—, horrifying!) that give it a sense of rhythm and return we find in poetry. I really loved the experience of reading these books: swinging from room to room, as it were, in the house of the larger piece; a modular, rather than linear, approach. As writers, I think we read to learn, even if we think we’re reading out of obligation or for pleasure. We read to find, and, sometimes, offer each other paths and permission.

Willow Springs 75 Cover shows pink pressed flowers on rough paper.

“Melancholia” by Dana Levin

Found in Willow Springs 75 Back to Author Profile 1 Dad and I on a summer motorcycle ride; I’m eleven. It’s incredibly hot, already, as we exit the pancake house. I … Read more

About Karl Zuelke

I, Karl Zuelke, earned a BS in biology and BA in English literature at the University of Cincinnati. I attended the writing program at Indiana University and earned an MFA in fiction. My doctorate is from UC as well, in American lit. with an ecocritical focus on nature writing and science writing as literature. I moved to Budapest, Hungary for awhile with my wife, Elizabeth, where we taught English at the Közgazdaságtudományi Egyetem (Budapest Economics University). I have also taught at Northern Kentucky University and the Art Academy of Cincinnati. Currently I am the Director of the Writing Center and the Math & Science Center at Mount St. Joseph University, in Cincinnati, where I also teach literature, writing, and environmental studies.

I have a Facebook page but no Web site yet, and I haven’t tweeted in years.

I have critical work published or forthcoming on Terry Tempest Williams, Peter Matthiessen, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and more.

My creative work has been published in The Antioch Review, The Journal of Kentucky Studies, Willow Springs, ISLE, and elsewhere.

A major project I took on two years ago was the blog Dreaming, Singing: Meditations on The Dream Songs. It features creative and critical responses to 385 Dream Songs by the poet John Berryman. I responded to one Dream Song a day for 385 days, plus an introduction and a reflection. These responses varied widely from day to day, depending on the material the day’s poem brought, my mood, my interests, the news, and the weather. They range from close analysis and literary criticism to poems, political rants, anecdotes, and stories. Sometimes I gripe at Berryman and call him a loser (it’s okay—he treated himself the same way). These meditations are mostly brilliant and I highly recommend them, especially if you start at day one and read all 385 subsequent entries in one sitting, plus the reflection.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Fire Artist”

I have backpacked for years, so some scenes from this story are lifted from experience. The bear under the waterfall is told much as I lived it, including that ancient perception of communicating with an animal through what the story’s narrator calls a “psychic wind.” The scene with the moths and the campfire is written exactly as we experienced it. The moose and her terrified calf on Isle Royale bursting through the trees above as they were pursued by wolves is another unforgettable image straight out of my experience. Other scenes began in experience but were altered, others were a retelling of stories I’ve heard, and others are pure fiction. Curt is an invented character. Phil’s rule-breaking personality began in my own brother’s individualist tendencies, but grew beyond them in a way surprising to me. Ultimately, his rule-breaking is not what does him in. It’s the more profound diminishment of his respect—for himself and his loved ones, and for the natural world that had such a defining presence for him but toward which he turned to conquer. His career choices may have tempted him down that path.

Most of the time when I write a story, it takes effort—I have to push, I get tired, my brain feels hollow. On a just a few rare occasions, a story has simply fallen into place. This was one of those. The plot, which develops over a span of forty years, was not preordained. The narrator’s self-aware mysticism and Phil’s rise in influence and wealth, as his character diminishes, all developed out of the characters as their adventures back and forth through time unfolded. The story was a pleasure to write.

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

Beach Boys. Steely Dan. Joni Mitchell. Bluegrass. I love a cold beer as much as anyone, but I I’m allergic to hops; I suffer for it—the hoppier the beer, the worse it makes me feel. I stick with red wine, and since I live in Kentucky, I also like a finger or two of good bourbon now and then, out of a sense of community-building and cultural solidarity. Horses, bluegrass music and bourbon lend a richness to the culture of Kentucky which I’m proud to associate with. I’m a pretty good painter in watercolors and acrylics, and I have some skill in woodworking. I can cook. I love cats and understand them, and while I never had one of my own, I grew up around horses. I love and admire them as well. But bees have my attention and heart these days. You wouldn’t think bees would evoke an emotional attachment. I’m just getting started and didn’t expect that. It’s not the individual bees, which are cute but expendable—the bees themselves would tell you that. It’s the hive, this pulsating collective of 30,000 fuzzy insects snugged into their warm, comfortable box. It’s consistently fascinating watching them. A couple weeks ago the temperature in December was in the 60s—too cold for foraging, but there were a few dead bees on the landing, dragged out the day before which had been even warmer. I flicked them away, and the colony heard me, gave off a deep, intimidating collective buzz, then sent out a single scout to see what was up. It was a drone. He hung in my face for a few seconds, decided, I guess, that it was only me, and went back inside. That was it—one scout to check out the disturbance and make a report. Amazing!

“Elodie” by Jennifer Christman

Found in Willow Springs 86 Back to Author Profile IT’S AROUND THE TIME my mother, formerly Roseclaire, emerges from the lower depths. She’s been living in the basement since I was … Read more

About Sonia Greenfield

Sonia Greenfield was born and raised in Peekskill, New York, and her book, Boy with a Halo at the Farmer’s Market, won the 2014 Codhill Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in a variety of places, including in 2010 Best American Poetry, The Antioch Review, The Bellevue Literary Review, Cimarron Review, Cream City Review, The Massachusetts Review, Meridian, and Rattle. She lives with her husband and son in Los Angeles, California, where she edits the Rise Up Review and co-directs the Southern California Poetry Festival.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Bearing Witness”

I had been reading a lot of Larry Levis just before I wrote this poem, and I decided that it would be a good exercise to write what would be considered a long poem. Or, at least one that couldn’t be contained by a single sheet of paper. I had been trying to get at this topic in the past, but the poems were very piecemeal. I guess you could say that Levis showed me how a poem can be exploratory. In that regard, I wanted to explore what I see as the origins of dysfunction in both the town where I was raised—Peekskill, New York—and in my own family.

I believe my mother would be hurt by this poem, or would feel defensive, but I wanted the poem to absolve her of any errors she made as a mother. When I wrote “she’s only human,” I hope I made it clear that we’re all only human and, therefore, prone to mistakes, especially if prior family dysfunction basically sets one up to fail in one way or another. Something has to break the chains of dysfunction in a family, or the dysfunction gets handed down like a genetic mutation. So let me just say, “Sorry, mom,” and “I love you,” and “I’m glad you survived the shit you survived.”

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

It must mean I have settled into a kind of adult maturity if I say that I just want to listen to Pink Martini and Elvis Costello all the time, but for good measure, and to keep me youthful, sprinkle in some EDM. I have a seven-year-old son, and I must admit that I’m trying to influence his musical tastes. However, he’s not that into Pink Martini. He’s more of an EDM kid.

This space feels pretty safe, so I’m going to just put it out there that I have a pretty serious cookie addiction, and I’m constantly surrounded by temptation. We have an unusual living arrangement: We live with an 89-year-old housemate who is in decline in many ways—memory, cognition, sight, hearing— but he still has a sense of taste and a fuck-all attitude when it comes to eating. Thus, we have a full cabinet of cookies: Oreos, Wally Amos Chocolate Chips, and tubs and tubs of Trader Joe’s cookies. Our 89-year-old consumes half his daily calories in cookies. And me? I have to have regular dialogues with my inner-addict. So I exercise and brush my teeth. A lot.

Actually, this train of thought has made me consider getting a tattoo of a cookie. For reals. I could add it to my small collection. There is the really messy-looking Kanji symbol for poetry on the back of my neck; the sea horses wrapping around my left arm; the illustration of femme fatales from Chandler’s The Big Sleep on my right calf, the enormous passion flower on my lower back (funny story: my husband couldn’t remember the term “tramp-stamp” and all he could come up with is “hag-tag”); and soon, I think, a tattoo of a chocolate chip cookie on my upper back. Because, really, why not?

Willow Springs issue 79 cover shows photo of a pink dress against a concrete background.

“Bearing Witness” by Sonia Greenfield

Found in Willow Springs 79 Back to Author Profile It rubs off on us like brushing up against a dirty car or the way a dusty window screen leaves a crosshatch … Read more

About Elizabeth Gold

I was born in New York City and after spending a few years in Montana I came back to New York, where I taught ESL and freshman English in different branches of City University. I also worked as a poet in the schools and had a brief, disastrous (but very fruitful) stint teaching high school. These days, I work as a freelance editor.

I write both poetry and prose. My poems and essays have been published in Field, The Gettysburg Review, Meridian, Guernica, and other journals, as well as on Poetry Daily. I’m also the author of Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity (Tarcher/Penguin), a book inspired by that high school teaching job. It’s definitely not a heroic-teacher-walks-into-the-classroom-and-turns-those-troubled-kids around kind of book (I loathe those kinds of books), but a black comedy about human failure.

My husband is English. How we met is a long and romantic story. But how we ended up in the UK is a short one. He asked me if I wanted to live here for a while, and I thought, What the hell. I’ve never lived in the U.K. before. Never counted on Brexit though. Never counted on Trump either….

As for my internet presence, you can find a few poems of mine online:

A Child’s Guide to the Icebergs, Absinthe, Cat Posing for a Portrait of a Dog, Hollywood, California

I’m also involved in putting together an online magazine of arts and commentary called Dark Wood. I’m very excited about it. The first issue isn’t out yet—it will come out in the summer—but if you link to the website, about dark wood, you can get an idea of what it’s like, submit something and/ or sign up for our email list. You can also follow us on twitter or Facebook.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Manatees”

I usually start a poem with a line: something I’ve heard, something I’ve read, or something that pops into my head unbidden. It doesn’t have to be “poetic;” in fact, I often prefer if it’s a little goofy. It’s more freeing that way. Then I follow that line wherever it needs to go. Often it goes nowhere. My notebooks are stuffed with stillborn poems. But every once in a while, the line pulls me forward, to a place I had no idea I was heading; a place that surprises me and feels, when I get to it, absolutely right. This was the case with “Manatees.”

I’ve been obsessed with manatees ever since I saw twelve in a row, swimming down a canal in Florida. They were exactly as I described them: ugly-cute, and so, so vulnerable, endangered not only by changes in the environment but by the propellers of speeding motorboats. And while I didn’t set out to write a vulnerable poem, that’s exactly what happened. I started thinking about how crazy it was that anyone could think of a manatee as good girlfriend material, and that led me to the loneliness and longing of those men who could think a thing like that, and that led me—well, to myself. I don’t think of myself as a particularly confessional poet—I actually am kind of shy—but there it was. There I was.

And why this poem took me there, I don’t know, and I don’t really want to find out. Just glad that sometimes I arrive someplace. And that I experience some thrills along the way.

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

Listening: The best thing I’ve listened to recently is not a piece of music but a podcast: S-Town. If you’ve listened to it, you know why. And if you haven’t, what are you waiting for? Among other things, it is a radical act of empathy and a genuine work of art. I can’t stop thinking about it, and I don’t want to.

Eating: I’ve been living in the UK for ten years, first in Edinburgh, now in Bristol. (Nothing I planned—which is the way I seem to do things). Bristol’s a good place for a greedy person like me. You can get an ace cup of coffee at the Small Street Cafe and a superior loaf of sourdough at Hart’s Bakery. Plus, it has Chinese, Indian, Afro-Carribbean, Middle Eastern, and Polish groceries where I shop for spices and fruits and vegetables.

But there are some foods I miss, and every year, when I go back to New York, I stuff my face with them. Like real Jewish sour pickles. And a tart Winesap apple, bought at a farmer’s market. Its perfume. And a BLT on rye toast made with crispy bacon. And a slice of pizza bought at a pizzeria for a couple of bucks. Sit down at the formica table, soak up the extra oil with a paper napkin, sprinkle on some hot pepper…

I know you can buy pizza in Britain, but honestly? It’s not the same.

Purring: I used to have a cat named Frank, named after Frank Sinatra because he was slinky and sophisticated looking and liked to croon. When I moved from New York, I brought him with me, which was insanely expensive but the only thing to do. He died a few years ago, aged eighteen, and we brought his ashes back and buried them in a friend’s backyard in Brooklyn. I don’t have any pets now, but I do like animals. Looking at them. Thinking about them. Knowing they will never express an infuriating political opinion…

“Manatees” by Elizabeth Gold

Found in Willow Springs 87 Back to Author Profile Maybe those sailors who mistook them for mermaids liked their women with a little meat on them, gray green skin patchy with … Read more

About Elizabeth Austen

Elizabeth Austen lives in Seattle and is the literary producer for KUOW, 94.9, public radio. Her audio CD, skin prayers, is available at elizabethausten.org. “What We Would Forget” was prompted by Ellen Lauren’s performance in the SITI Company’s production of Room.

elizabethausten.wordpress.com

A Profile of the Author

Three Poems by Elizabeth Austen

Found in Willow Springs 62 Back to Author Profile Her, at Two Sometimes a bone at the tender back of the throat requires a wracking, indelicate cough to survive it. … Read more

About Adrian C. Louis

A half-breed Indian, Adrian C. Louis was born and raised in northern Nevada and is an enrolled member of the Lovelock Paiute Tribe. From 1984-97, Louis taught at Oglala Lakota College on the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota. He is currently Professor of English at Minnesota State University in Marshall. He has written ten books of poems and two works of fiction. Louis has won various awards including two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the Bush Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Foundation.

A Profile of the Author

Notes

“Ghost Road” is simply a brief meditation on the grief that I was swimming in after my wife’s death. “Sunset at the Indian Cemetery” is self-explanatory up to a point and then intentionally muddles itself in irony. On one level it is an actual accounting of a visit to my wife’s grave. It also touches on loss of Native culture and land. Stylistically, these two poems seem typical of the stuff that I write.

Notes on Reading

In the past five years I have not read much that is new. I think this has something to do with aging. When I do read, I go back to books, especially poetry, that interested me when my life juices were flowing stronger. I read the collected T. S. Elliot, Life Studies by Lowell, Yeats, Neruda, even Stephen Crane. I read a lot of Native literature again and again and seem to keep returning to Silko, Ortiz, and Jim Northrup. Sometimes I like to open old books more for the smell than the words.

Two Poems by Adrian C. Louis

Found in Willow Springs 67 Back to Author Profile Ghost Road Somewhere nowhere & her not here & nothing but a weird & weary recitation of ever changing songs to … Read more

About Kathlene Postma

Kathlene Postma is currently finishing a novel set in both China and the US. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Hawaii Review, Los Angeles Review, Passages North, Natural Bridge, Rattle, Event, Green Mountains Review, Red Rock Review, and other magazines. She currently edits Silk Road Review and directs the Creative Writing program at Pacific University in Oregon.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on "He Was a Hell of a Cat"

Last spring my dad was dying of lung cancer. Every morning I wrote a poem as a way to cope or at the least try to come to terms with what was happening to him and our family as we prepared to lose him. My husband and I had this spectacular, insane cat when we were first married, a partly feral creature my dad referred to as “a hell of a cat,” or more accurately as a “helluva cat.” As I wrote the poem, I could hear my dad’s voice, his open, passionate awe at the good things in life—a big fish, a crazy cat, a good song. In the course of treating his cancer, a surgeon had to remove part of his vocal cords, and while I was grateful the procedure prolonged my father’s life it was devastating to realize his voice as I knew it was gone. He loved sandhill cranes, which flock in numbers to the fields behind my folks’ place in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. My reference to the wildness in their throats is my kiss to my dad. My husband, Scot, and I have been married twenty years, and during that time we’ve gained a mutual respect for the different ways we’ve mustered courage to face what shakes our world. We did have to put that cat down when he began to suffer. That last stanza is my shaped memory of how we managed it together. My father had no such simple, fast relief when his time came, but the hands of his people were on him as he passed.
When I write poems, I go to a different place than when I write fiction or nonfiction. Poetry is as close to prayer as I can manage. I know it’s a good poem when I feel myself lifted out of my chair as I write. I need to be up in the air meeting the image or voice chest to chest, so to speak. My pen races to hold me up there. I guess I want to believe at those moments there is a spirit that gathers us up, but beyond the power of the words and the voice rushing through in my head I can’t be certain.

Notes on Reading

I was an English major, so my reading was accelerated and shaped in idiosyncratic ways by professors who had their own preferences. For instance, I read all of Milton’s Paradise Lost when I was twenty years old, and that did some strange things to my head. In general, though, I have a ping pong approach to reading. If someone tells me a book is good or does something interesting or important, I’ll try it. My students are in particular fans of science fiction and fantasy, and they will talk my ears off on why I should read a book or a series of books they love. What’s become crucial to me are books that are taking risks, either in how far the language is being pushed or in what the writer is revealing about herself or himself. While writers are solitary in their writing, they often seem to speak to each other through their art. Through a coded language of encouragement and honesty, we tell each other to go the distance, to push on through. I’m increasingly drawn to writers who demonstrate true compassion not only in what they write but the way in which they create community and possibilities for other writers.
Here are a few books I’ve read or reread in the last year that have influenced me as a writer: Richard Russo’s Empire Falls, Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, Paulo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, Dorianne Laux’ Facts About the Moon, Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Once Upon a River, Ann Hood’s Comfort, A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Gehta Mehta’s A River Sutra.

“He Was a Hell of a Cat” by Kathlene Postma

Found in Willow Springs 69 Back to Author Profile He Was a Hell of a Cat It was a hell of a fish throaty with a mouth wide as a … Read more