Profiles – Page 4 – Willow Springs Magazine

Issue 63: Dag Straumsvåg

About Dag Straumsvåg

Dag Straumsvåg is the author of: Eg er Simen Gut (Aschehoug, Norway) A Bumpy Ride to the Slaughterhouse (Red Dragonfly Press, USA)
Louis Jenkins: Fisk på tørt land (Pir forlag, Norway) Transl. by Dag T. Straumsvåg
Robert Hedin: Hus ved polarsirkelen (Pir forlag, Norway) Transl. by Dag T. Straumsvåg

Currently, he is working on a new book of prose poems, which will be published in Norway in 2009 or 2010.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on "June"

“June” was written quite spontaneously, I didn’t know where I was going when I started out, and I am not sure where I ended up when it was finished. Being spontaneous isn’t enough, though. After writing the first draft, I put the poem away for a while to cool off. Then I start revising it. I spend a lot of time revising, and for the most part, I believe the poem benefits from it. There are always things you can change or cut. The first draft of “June” was much longer than the final version. If memory serves me right, the line that made me start writing it was one of the lines that was cut in the end.

Notes on Reading

I like Joseph Cornell’s Shadow Boxes, and they have been a source of inspiration for poems like “June.” Picking up objects, bits of conversations overheard on the bus, personal experiences, anything really, and putting them together in a box in the hope that they will become alive and start to interact, creating something new. It hardly ever happens, of course, but on the few occasions I have felt something stir to life in “the box,” it has felt like nothing else. If there has been a major change in my writing, it occurred when I discovered the prose poem. It opened a new world to me, both as a reader and a writer. I have always been fascinated by the little absurdities of everyday life, and the prose poem seems to be the perfect place for it. Minnesota prose poet Louis Jenkins has written great poems about growing old, several of them can be found in his book North of the Cities. He is also one of the funniest poets in America. And I love Crawling Out the Window, a collection of prose poems by Tom Hennen, another Minnesota poet. There is something of the ancient Chinese poets in him, of Clare and Thoreau, although he is very much a contemporary poet. Today I Wrote Nothing by Russian absurdist Daniil Kharms is a great collection of poems and prose. Kharms was a true original, one of a kind. He will take you to places you have never visited before.
I always go back to the Scandinavian poets Olav H. Hauge and Tomas Tranströmer. If not for them, I wouldn’t have become interested in poetry at all, and when rereading their respective Collected Poems, they probably inspire and amaze me even more now than when I first read them. Their writing is very different from my own; Hauge is the master of the short, economic poem, Tranströmer is the master of the metaphor. I read a lot, also during periods of writing, which probably isn’t such a good idea. Things tend to get mixed up, and it all becomes a mess. I am not striving to write a particular book, I think. Any book will do, so long as I haven’t written it before.

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Issue 69: Diane Lefer

About Diane Lefer

Diane Lefer is an author, playwright, advocacy journalist, and activist whose most recent short story collection, California Transit, was awarded the Mary McCarthy Prize and published by Sarabande Books. With Colombian exile Hector Aristizábal she is co-author of the nonfiction book, The Blessing Next to the Wound (Lantern Books, 2010) while their theatrical collaboration, Nightwind, has toured the world, including for human rights organizations in Colombia and Afghanistan, as part of the global movement to end the practice of torture. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Diane taught for 23 years in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has been a guest artist at colleges, writing conferences, and festivals and has led arts-based workshops for young people in foster care as well as those caught up in the juvenile in/justice system. In 2011, she offered Spanish-language workshops at the International Theatre Festival for Peace in Barrancabermeja, Colombia and will do so in February 2012 in Cochabamba, Bolivia for Educar es Fiesta, a nonprofit that works with families in crisis, including children who live in the streets. On her return she hopes to finish the first draft of a novel-in-progress and plunge into publicity for Nobody Wakes Up Pretty, her short crime novel which Rainstorm Press will publish at the end of May.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on "Sin-Tra-La!"

After “Sin-Tra-La!” was accepted, Laura Ender at WS asked specific questions about the legalities of shipping bodies. I love it that she raised issues of factual accuracy. When I have to make my fiction conform to reality, it almost always opens up new possibilities for revision and acts as a spur to my imagination. But the origin of the story goes back decades, to when I had a clerical job with the airlines in order to get travel benefits—free flights. I was briefly in Portugal and spent only a couple of hours in beautiful Sintra. In those days, my idea of a great weekend was to take the shuttle bus to JFK after work on Friday and fly all night to Rio de Janeiro, then fly back to NY Sunday night and make it to the office by 8:30 AM. One day in 1972, on the cable-car traveling up Pão de Açúcar I sat directly across from a row of somber men dressed in black. They never smiled. They seemed unmoved by the views of Ipanema, Corcovado, Guanabara Bay. It turned out they were members of a delegation from Portugal tasked with delivering a special gift to Brazil: the exhumed body of Emperor Pedro I, dead since 1834. I was haunted by these men and their mission. I knew this would work its way into a story someday but I didn’t know how. So why now? And why Santa Monica? Months ago I would have said all I know is that a writer who lives long enough gets to use everything. But the question about the origin of the story and how it evolved made me think harder.
Here in Los Angeles I was spending a lot of time with young people and with families who’d survived or had perpetrated violence or had to mourn the violent death of people they loved. And there were the sidewalk memorials, the car washes to raise money for funeral expenses, and all the emotions that come up at these times. Maybe it was all percolating in the back of my head, the different ways of mourning and the rituals and behaviors we fall back on to cope with grief and to find the words and actions we offer the grieving.

Notes on Reading

As a freshman in college, El Señor Presidente came into my hands, a novel by the Guatemalan Nobel Laureate Miguel Angel Asturias. My Spanish was rudimentary, but the poetry of his language and the sociopolitical power of the book hit me so hard, I became intent on learning his language. His novel also opened up my curiosity about Latin America. Soon I was reading all the authors of the Boom. At the time, I felt oppressed by the so-called rules young fiction writers were supposed to abide by in the U.S. You can’t switch point of view. (Tell that to Carlos Fuentes or Juan Rulfo.) Show, don’t tell. (Good thing García Márquez didn’t hear that. Or if he did, he ignored it along with the point-of-view rule later when he was writing Autumn of the Patriarch.) As I read, I was also learning about U.S. intervention in those countries and of the ongoing struggles there for social justice. I dropped out of school and ran away to Mexico. My first published stories were set there and my ongoing connections with Latin America tend to combine activism with art. I guess you wouldn’t know that from “Sin-Tra-La!” which I set in California instead of Brazil!

“Sin-Tra-La!” by Diane Lefer

Found in Willow Springs 69 Back to Author Profile My FATHER HAD BEEN DEAD going on four years when his widow phoned from Portugal. “I’m sure you don’t want to talk … Read more

About Michael McGriff

Michael McGriff is the author of several books, most recently the poetry collections Early Hour (Copper Canyon Press, 2017) and Black Postcards (Willow Springs Books, 2017). A new edition of his co-authored story collection (with J.M. Tyree), Our Secret Life in the Movies, has just been released from Deep Vellum. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Poetry London, The Believer, American Poetry Review, and on PBS NewsHour. He teaches creative writing at the University of Idaho, and his work can be explored online here [https://www.npr.org/2014/11/02/360859192/our-secret-life-watching-the-quirky-criterion-classics] and here [michaelmcgriff.com].

Author photo credit: Marcus Jackson

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “That the Deer Tick Is the Pilot Light of the Universe” and “4 AM”

I think of “4 A.M.” as I do much of my work—it’s a kind of lovechild between Yannis Ritsos, Tomas Tranströmer, and Frank Stanford. In that power trio I continue to find a model for how to write about the intersection of solitude, inwardness, and a kind of metaphysical landscape. Description and image-making are what electrify poetry for me, especially when those elements become proxies for the inner life of the writer, no matter how opaque or obvious such a life may be. “That the Deer Tick Is the Pilot Light of the Universe” is dedicated to my friend, the unofficial arts mayor of Marfa, TX, Tim Johnson. This isn’t a private poem, but its quick associations and leaping motions are meant to reflect what I admire in Tim’s imagination and artmaking. All my poems carry the DNA of other artists; those who inspire me the most are friends who defiantly live and breathe art and human subjectivity in a world that increasingly values Internet fame and group-think.

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

Records? Come over some time and we’ll slide the KEFs out from the wall, warm up the tubes, and listen to all the new pressings from the Neil Young Archives.

“That the Deer Tick is The Pilot Light of the Universe” and “4 AM” by Michael McGriff

Found in Willow Springs 85 Back to Author Profile “THAT THE DEER TICK IS THE PILOT LIGHT OF THE UNIVERSE” for Tim Johnson Or let me be reborn as that … Read more

About J. Stilwell Powers

J. STILLWELL POWERS was born and raised in Western Massachusetts. A graduate of Greenfield Community College, he went on to earn his B.A. in English from Amherst College, and his MFA in fiction from the University of Oregon. His story “Salvage” won the 2017 Dogwood Prize in Fiction, and appeared in Dogwood 16. He lives with his wife and their two black cats in Eugene, Oregon.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Saturday Night Special”

I started writing “Saturday Night Special” after the loss of a childhood friend to a heroin overdose. At the time, I was still working toward my MFA, living a pretty cushy life in Oregon—teaching, writing, reading, and taking lots of naps. His passing brought me back to a time and place in my life that was less pleasant, to rural New England, where I was born and raised, and where I struggled with my own addiction. I’ve written a lot of terrible stories about addiction. As I’ve grown as a writer, I’ve stopped writing fiction that approaches the subject directly, primarily because I find a consciousness consumed by the desire to blot itself out rather limiting. So with this story, I felt the need to write toward the subject, but knew from experience the pitfalls of taking it up directly. I found an angle that worked in Preston’s consciousness, which placed addiction in the periphery and brought other (perhaps more interesting) subjects to the forefront.

One danger I’ve found in writing stories about kids (and dogs) is slipping into sentimentality. I overwrote the first drafts of this story, spending too much time in Preston’s head as he tried to make sense of his circumstances. This was helpful in getting to the heart of the story, but as I looked back at these moments in revision, they felt cheap. Beyond this, I’m not sure kids Preston’s age can actually make sense of the world, especially a world like the one he comes from, which is a piece of what the story is driving at. I spent a great deal of time in revision asking myself if the emotion I was attempting to conjure was earned. I found a similar danger in the use of irony with regard to his perspective. There is so much room to see around a child’s consciousness, which is great fun to write, but can also feel like the character is being mocked. Though kids might be unable to make clear sense of the world, I suspect they know a lot more than we give them credit for. Finding the right balance between what Preston knows, what he thinks he knows but doesn’t, and what he doesn’t know took lots of fine-tuning.

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

I haven’t had any booze or gotten a tattoo in a quite a while. My friend’s mom gave me my first tattoo. I was sixteen and paid her $25 to get my initials forever engraved on my forearm. I’m not sure why this seemed like a good idea, though I’m pretty sure there was booze involved. I’ve gotten a few tattoos since then. Some of them I like more than others, but the one I still love as much as the day I got it is a portrait of the fox from the cover of Breece D’J Pancake’s collected stories. In terms of music, I remember listening to John Prine, Sun Kil Moon, and The Felice Brothers around the time I wrote this story. The Rolling Stones are an institution. Recently, my wife has been on a serious kick with the Who, so I’ve been with her in that. She’s also has a deep love of Selena from her childhood in Texas, so I know all of the words to “Como la Flor”, even though I never meant to. About a year ago, we got two black cats. Luna and Lorca. I always thought myself a dog person, but I’ve grown quite fond of them. It’s easy to win a dog’s love. Cats are complex; they make you work for their affection. I don’t understand them, and my constant failure to win their hearts keeps me humble.

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

“Saturday Night Special” by J. Stilwell Powers

Found in Willow Springs 81 Back to Author Profile PRESTON DASHED THROUGH THE GRASS toward the barn, which stood paper-gray in the fading light, the color of a hornet’s nest. Barking … Read more

About Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Faiz Ahmed Faiz was born at Sialkot in 1910. Educated at Government College in Lahore and at Punjab University Oriental College, he began his career as a lecturer but gave this up to work with illiterate people, teaching them to read. After the Second World War he worked as a journalist and was editor of The Pakistan Times for many years. He has many critical essays and poems published, and is considered the most significant poet in Urdu after Iqbal. He died in Lahore in 1984, shortly after receiving a nomination for the Nobel Prize.

Agha Shahid Ali was born in New Delhi on February 4, 1949. He grew up Muslim in Kashmir, and was later educated at the University of Kashmir, Srinagar, and University of Delhi. He earned a Ph.D. in English from Pennsylvania State University in 1984, and an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona in 1985.

Ali received fellowships from The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and was awarded a Pushcart Prize. He held teaching positions at the University of Delhi, Penn State, SUNY Binghamton, Princeton University, Hamilton College, Baruch College, University of Utah, and Warren Wilson College. Agha Shahid Ali died on December 8, 2001.

A Profile of the Author

6 Poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Found in Willow Springs 10 Back to Author Profile #1 Victory is to return alive after death in one’s palms the lines of martyrdom I loiter in … Read more

About Ed Skoog

Ed Skoog is the author of Mister Skylight, Rough Day (Winner of the 2014 Washington Book Award), and the forthcoming Run the Red Lights, all from Copper Canyon Press. He is the poetry editor of Okey-Panky and co-hosts the Lunch Box Podcast with novelist J. Robert Lennon.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “1978 Buick Station Wagon”

I walked down the gravel driveway in my bare feet to the swimming pool and asked Gary Stearns, a friend of my dad’s, who had sold us the station wagon of the poem “1978 Buick Estate Wagon,” what its name was, because it seemed to me that cars had names, and he said “Beulah.” He always had plaid slacks and sideburns and maybe a Coors. In gospel songs, Beulahland is somewhere between Heaven and Earth. When I started driving, at 14, that was my car. I drove it between Heaven and Earth all the time. At the end of high school my friends Mike and Cooper went with me to the salvage yard and sold it for twenty dollars, and we rode back in Mike’s Honda or Cooper’s Mustang, can’t remember which. There was an ostrich in a pen by the salvage yard. About that time I bought my first banjo from Capitol City Pawn, maybe with the cash from the car. I eventually learned to play it. I’ve had the same banjo since 1993, a Deering Deluxe. I intended to trade it for a Gibson archtop but never have.

Notes on Reading

I have mostly been reading what literature is appealing or diverting to a toddler, mostly aloud, though sometimes, on rereading, I just point to the pictures, or tell an abbreviated version. I have been reading fiction otherwise: The Tartar Steppe, by Dino Buzzati; For Rouenna, by Sigrid Nunez; Regeneration, by Pat Barker. But I am always reading poems, especially new books from Tavern Books, Wave Books, and Copper Canyon. Three poets whose work everybody should know, and will, are Matthew Lippman, Carl Adamshick, and Catherine Barnett. The Greg Pardlo book, Digest, which won the Pulitzer this year, is extremely good. I pay attention to whatever Ben Lerner and Kevin Young are doing. I try to keep up with whatever people are reading in Seattle, Portland, Spokane, and Missoula. I spend a lot of time with the poems of Jean Follain and Roque Dalton. This year is the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina; I will be reading what smart people from New Orleans and Mississippi will have to say about that. I recommend one ebook in particular about the Katrina aftermath: Lee Mullikin’s Hardcscrabble Days, Milky Way Nights.

“1978 Buick Station Wagon” by Ed Skoog

Found in Willow Springs 76 Back to Author Profile Like a diplomat with an assassin closing in, I never take the same way home twice through Topeka streets, making string figure, … Read more

About Matthew Lippman

Matthew Lippman is the author of 6 poetry collections: Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful, winner of the 2018 Levis Prize, Four Way Books, to be published in 2020, A Little Gut Magic, Nine Mile Books, 2018, Salami Jew, Racing Form Press, 2014, American Chew, winner of the Burnside Review Book Prize, Burnside Book Press, 2013, Monkey Bars, Typecast Publishing, 2010, and The New Year of Yellow, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize, Sarabande Book, 2007; finalist for the 2008 Patterson Poetry Prize. He has also been awarded the Levis Prize (Four Way Books), the Anna Davidson Poetry Prize, the Georgetown Review Magazine Prize, the Jerome J. Shestak Poetry Prize from The American Poetry Review, the Michener Fellowship in Poetry, the New York State Foundation of The Arts Grant, and more. (matthewlippmanpoetry.com)

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Flew It All Around”

Like most of my poems, it’s the little things that get me going. My daughter messed up my hair one morning. When she was doing it, in the moment, it felt like a little annoyance but once I let go into the tussle, it was lovely and whimsical. That’s where the poem came from. The lovely and the whimsical. Just that little experience. The bubbly nature of that moment. I am always looking to turn those tiny things into little poignant poetic narratives that somehow speak to larger terrains, movements. It’s also important to me to have some kind of sweetness and hope in a poem. So, that’s the reason for the lines, “That we all can wake up and have someone come upstairs to fuck up/our hair/for fun.” Getting to the world outside the self. That’s the turn, the surprise, in the poem. There has to be a surprise for me, a place where things can get a little dark, rough, raw, and edgy. The sweetness/tenderness is important but then so is the hard stuff. That is reason for the end, that last line: the sun that “smashes our face to pieces.” Because it’s both, this living, and there has to be both in a poem or else you are just writing postcards and postcards are wonderful but, for me, they are not enough. There has to be some kind of rumble that makes the reader turn their head and go, “Uh-oh.”

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

Quarantine has been rough but it’s been a great place, space, to listen to music and I love
music. I have been setting my ears and heart ablaze with Phoebe Bridgers, Kamasi Washington, Robohands, Aaron Parks, Talib Kweli, Yussef Dayes, Joan Armatrading, Brian Eno, Makaya McCraven, and Robert Glasper. All the while I have benn perfecting the art of baking homemade Challah and hanging out with the cat, a Siberian, named Sammy, on the front porch. The front porch has been my refuge. I will spend hours out there in my plastic Adirondack chair with a cold beverage, watch the cars and people, the sky, write, read, nap, as one day morphs into another, and we wait for a day without masks and isolation.

“Flew It All Around” by Matthew Lippman

My kid did my hair this morning. She got her fingers in my mop and fucked it up. Made all these spikes and railroads trestles. Threw in some twirls and … Read more

About Maggie Smith

Maggie Smith is the author of three prizewinning books: Lamp of the Body, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, and Good Bones, the title poem from which was called the “Official Poem of 2016” by Public Radio International. Her poems and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Tin House, APR, The Believer, The Paris Review, the Washington Post, Ploughshares, Best American Poetry, and on the CBS primetime drama Madam Secretary. Smith has received a Pushcart Prize as well as fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Academy of American Poets.

Read her Willow Springs interview here.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Three Thoughts After Crossing Nameless Creek”, “For My Next Trick”, “How to Build a Fire”, and “Poem Beginning with a Line from Basho”

“Poem Beginning with a Line from Basho,” “How to Build a Fire,” and “Three Thoughts After Crossing Nameless Creek” are very new poems, and all of them deal, I think, with anxiety, change, and how we process shifts in our lives. I gravitated to Basho’s words for their optimism—the idea that a burned-down structure has its perks. “For My Next Trick,” though, is a poem I’ve been trying to write for years. It’s taken different forms; it’s begun differently, ended differently, and had different titles. But the core was always my daughter’s words. Like some of the poems in my last book, Good Bones, this one began with my daughter’s questions—this time about where she came from and how. I think she was about four when she asked these questions, and my son asked similar questions at that age, too. One of them asked if they were dead before they were born—as if nothingness equals death. How could I not write about these moments?

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

What I’ve been listening to: the new Sharon Van Etten, the new Neko Case, 80s new wave radio on Pandora, Sufjan Stevens, Superchunk (my six-year-old son’s favorite band, now that the indoctrination into 80s/90s indie music is well underway), The Replacements, Jenny Lewis, Pavement, The Mountain Goats, Margo Price, Aimee Mann, The National.

What I’ve been drinking: black coffee, Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout, Basil Hayden’s—and the occasional fizzy glass of Alka-Seltzer Cold Medicine, because winter.

What’s been saving my life lately: see drinks above, see music above, poetry, my kids, dog snuggles, my friends close by and faraway, yoga, sunshine even on cold days, Ritter Sport, my mother, making travel plans, knowing spring is coming.

Four Poems by Maggie Smith

Found in Willow Springs 83 Back to Author Profile POEM BEGINNING WITH A LINE FROM BASHO The moon is brighter since the barn burned. And by burned I mean to … Read more

About Natalie Sypolt

Natalie Sypolt lives and writes in West Virginia. She received her MFA in fiction from West Virginia University in 2005 and currently teaches writing at WVU. Her work has appeared in various journals, including Kenyon Review Online, The Queen City Review, Flashquake, Potomac Review, Oklahoma Review, and Kestrel. Natalie’s writing has received several awards, including the 2009 West Virginia Fiction Award from Shepherd University, judged by Silas House, and the 2009 Betty Gabehart Prize sponsored by the Kentucky Women’s Writers Conference. Her stories have also been honored by writers Ann Pancake, Amy Greene, and Bobbie Ann Mason. Her story, “Love, Off to the Side” (published in Still: The Journal) has been short listed for the Pushcart Prize. Natalie’s first collection of stories, tentatively entitled Kitchen Accidents, is currently seeing a home.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Lettuce”

I wrote the first draft of this story nearly in one setting. This is my favorite way to write stories, though it seldom happens, and it always feel like a sort of gift when it does.

This story was inspired by a poem called “Everything Good Between Men and Women” by CD Wright. I was listening to the podcast “Poetry Off the Shelf” from the National Poetry Foundation on my way home from work one day, and Wright was the featured poet. I had the first pages of the story written in my head before I entered my driveway.

Of course, there has been much research. I’ve been really nervous (and still am, actually) about getting important things, like the information about Chris’ prosthetic arm, right. Taking on a story of a veteran who has brought home wounds—both those that are visible and those that are not—is not something I take lightly.

I also must mention the awesome writer Ann Pancake who worked with me during the West Virginia Writers Workshop in Morgantown, WV last summer. She helped me tweak this story and refine some rough edges; most of all, though, she gave me confidence that this was a good piece that people would want to read. Both she and the incredible Appalachian writer Silas House have been so instrumental to my writing career thus far and I can’t thank them enough.

Notes on Reading

I don’t read as much as I would like to, or as much as I should. This is a constant source of frustration for me, and I’m guessing also for many writers who also teach in order to survive financially. I enjoy my classes, helping students refine their writing and come to the understanding that words really are important—that they really do matter. Unfortunately, though, between August and May each year, what I read the most of is drafts of undergraduate essays. For those reasons, it can take me quite a while to finish a book, and when I do get the opportunity to read, I don’t want to squander that time reading something I’m not completely in love with.

I’ve recently really enjoyed two collections of short stories out of Greywolf Press: Mattaponi Queen by Belle Boggs and Volt by Alan Heathcock. Heathcock is currently getting a lot of buzz (including a review in the NY Times), and it’s well deserved. His collection is truly impressive. Both of these are collections of connected short stories— connected sometimes by character, but always by place. I suppose I’m attracted to these books because having a strong sense of place is also something that is so important to me and my writing. My current “collection” of stories is not a linked collection, but I’m interested in creating a cycle of stories someday.

Also very important to me are the writers Ann Pancake and Silas House, who are currently showing the literary world that Appalachian literature is alive and strong. Ann’s book Strange as this Weather has Been is incredible. Not only does she tackle timely and crucial issues (like Mountaintop Removal), but her sense of language always amazes and inspires me. Her writing is lyrical, beautiful, and so real to the people she’s describing. I’ve been lucky in the past two years to meet both Ann and Silas through writing contests that they’ve judged and am continually impressed by their work, both as writers and as voices for Appalachian issues (which, really, are also important American issues).

Lettuce by Natalie Sypolt

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About Kathryn Nuernberger

Kathryn Nuernberger is the author of The End of Pink (BOA Editions, 2016) and Rag & Bone (Elixir, 2011). She is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at University of Central Missouri, where she serves as the director of Pleiades Press.

A Profile of the Author

Willow Springs Issue 76 cover shows a rustic painted wall in yellows and browns.

“The Saint Girl Opens the Window and Closes It as She Pleases” by Kathryn Nuernberger

Found in Willow Springs 76 The saint girl was wretched with desire. Even a slice of cracked wheat bread tasted like sex, though she didn’t know to hear her throbbing tongue. … Read more