Profiles – Page 6 – Willow Springs Magazine

Issue 80: Kate Lebo

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About Kate Lebo

Kate Lebo is the author of Pie School and A Commonplace Book of Pie, and co-editor (with Samuel Ligon) of Pie & Whiskey, an anthology of writers under the influence of butter and booze. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays, New England Review, Gettysburg Review, Moss, and Blood Orange Review, among other places. Her new book of nonfiction, The Book of Difficult Fruit, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. She lives in Spokane, Washington, where she’s represented by Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the highest ranking Republican woman in Congress.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “A Prayer to Cathy McMorris Rodgers for the Preservation of My Health Insurance”

A couple weeks after the election I was driving from deep blue Portland to hot purple Spokane, and somewhere in the middle—north of the Tri-Cities but south of Ritzville, maybe near Connell, definitely deep in the fifth legislative district—it hit me all over again: not only was my president Donald Trump, but my representative, the person my neighbors had re-elected for a seventh term, was Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the most powerful Republican woman in Congress, the woman who would soon argue in a Washington Post editorial that she wanted to gut Obamacare because her son has a pre-existing condition, that she was doing it for him and people like him. It was a few weeks after the election, so much felt trashed and endangered, and she was my intermediary, she was my conduit, she was supposed to speak to government on my behalf. She was me, or a version of me, my representative, an extension of the will of my community. When I got home, I started my first Cathy poem.

I admit it’s hard for me to think of Cathy as anything but a cardboard construction of power hovering behind Trump’s shoulder, smiling for the camera. Democracy makes me complicit in anything she does on my behalf, so self-righteousness is useless here. The hardest thing about writing these poems (and the point of them for me, personally) is staying reasonable in the face of having no control.

This feels related to the ways I’m trying to resist feeling disenfranchised and resist dehumanizing or dismissing people I disagree with. A Prayer to Cathy helps remind me that I still have a voice, and that Cathy McMorris Rodgers is a real person who can hear that voice. Despite the conflict of our civic lives, we remain neighbors.

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

I had this cat, Swiffer. He loved men’s shoes and butter and tucking his head beneath my chin when I held him. He was the best cat, just this bottomless pit of affection, loved me so much that when I’d leave the house he’d pee all over the front door. He was awful and wonderful and when he died of old age, I thought I’d never have another cat like him.

The neighbors I adopted him from said he was a barn cat, but there’s no way he was a barn cat. Instagram taught me this. You can see exactly what he looked like if you type in #siberiancat. I mean exactly. Swiffer was a super designer breed of fluffy cat—hypoallergenic and bred to be friendly. My special little weirdo was actually a bundle of selected traits. I’m okay with that. It means I can buy a Swiffer II that looks exactly like Swiffer I. All I need is $1200.

$1200!! This is an immoral sum to spend on a cat.

If I had no shame I’d start a Swiffer II campaign on GoFundMe. People use crowdfunding to travel the world and go to Breadloaf and build monuments to grilled cheese sandwiches—why not raise cash for a fancy cat?

I do not do this for two reasons. 1) It’s too ridiculous to bear. 2) I buy health insurance through the Obamacare markets, and if Cathy McMorris Rodgers and her Republican colleagues succeed in torpedoing the market and/or stripping those benefits, I’ll need to save my community’s GoFundMe goodwill for my next medical emergency.

So here’s to not having designer cats—or cancer!

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Issue 80: Erin Belieu

About Erin Belieu

Erin Belieu is the author of four poetry collections, most recently, Slant Six, chosen as one of the ten best books of 2014 by Dwight Garner in the New York Times. All of her books are published by Copper Canyon Press. Belieu has been selected for the National Poetry Series, a Rona Jaffe Foundation award, and her work has appeared in places such as The New Yorker, Poetry, The Atlantic, Tin House, Ploughshares, Slate, The Rumpus, as well as multiple appearances in Best American Poetry. Belieu directs the writing program at Florida State University and teaches in the low residency MFA at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. She is also the co founder of VIDA: Women In Literary Arts and founder of Writers Resist/Write Our Democracy. Belieu lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “When I Am A Teenage Boy”

I love poems and stories that deconstruct their characters’ psyches. In this poem, I was thinking of Browning’s “My Last Duchess”—the duke unwittingly revealing himself as a monster while trying to impress the agent with whom he’s speaking. I hoped for some of that tension in my poem, in which the boy telling his story keeps showing the truth of himself to us, despite his attempts to front; his banality and overweening sense of entitlement. A learned superficiality that doesn’t even know to hide itself. To me, this boy feels like a plant his parents are shaping into a grotesque topiary. It felt purposeful to the parents’ dynamic to have the father barely mentioned in the poem. I wanted that absence to be a kind of presence the reader notices. I believe this boy is not undeserving of our sympathy, given the environment he’s coming from. This is one version of how a soul becomes so busted, a particularly American version, I think. And I’ve always loved that opening scene in Anna Karenina the end of my poem references—the moral sophistry Stiva performs while unselfconsciously stuffing his face. Oh, and I tried to create a distinct quality of speech for this boy—a slightly grandiose affect he’s learned from being an only child dragged in his bow tie and little suit coat to too many adult parties. That’s how I heard his voice in my mind.

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

Recently, I’ve been trying to teach myself how to make world class Korean barbecue (because we don’t have a good Korean restaurant in Tallahassee and this has made my life sorrowful in many ways). It’s going pretty well I think. I did a jeyuk bokkeum a few weeks ago that seemed legit compared to what I’ve had in Koreatown in NYC. I just started really cooking again in the last few years, and am obsessed with The New York Times cooking school videos. So helpful! I can now spatchcock a chicken like a BOSS. On other fronts, we just got a new kitten. My son named him Haggis, which was necessary given that Haggis is so excruciatingly pretty he needed a name to tone down the whole “too adorable to exist” vibe. He’s a cream point Ragdoll (inspired by Cate Marvin’s Ragdoll Mishi with whom I’m madly in love), and he looks mostly like a pile of whipped cream. So presently much hoopla in the household as we try to keep our older cat Winnie from eating him.

“When I Am a Teenage Boy” by Erin Belieu

Found in Willow Springs 80 Back to Author Profile I am like my parents’ house, in a state of constant remodel we can ill afford, the noise behind a tarp producing … Read more

Issue 71: A Conversation with Erin Belieu

Interview in Willow Springs 71 Works in Willow Springs 70 and 80 March 1, 2012 Tim Greenup, Kristina McDonald, Danielle Shutt A CONVERSATION WITH ERIN BELIEU Photo Credit: stlouispoetrycenter.org Erin Belieu’s … Read more

About Jessie van Eerden

Jessie van Eerden is author of the novels Glorybound (WordFarm, 2012), winner of ForeWord Reviews’ Editor’s Choice Fiction Prize, and My Radio Radio (Vandalia Press, 2016), and the forthcoming essay collection The Long Weeping (Orison Books, 2017). Her work has appeared in Best American Spiritual Writing, The Oxford American, and other publications. Jessie holds an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa and directs the low-residency MFA program at West Virginia Wesleyan College. You can find more at her website or follow her on Twitter.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Sunday Morning Coming Down”

The story of how this essay developed is built into the essay itself, which is a different kind of essayistic form for me. I’m always interested in bringing unlikely strands together in essays, to create something new from the juxtaposition of disparate elements, but I do that more intentionally here in an exploration of time, eternity, memory, childbearing, the strange emotional quagmire that is labeled “Sunday,” and the limitations inherent in making art with language as the only medium. My companion in writing and life, the R mentioned in the essay, is always inspiring me to push the language envelope, so the essay grew from his lecture on writers like Kay Boyle and William Goyen who layer narratives with point-of-view shifts. I already had some notes on “Sundayness” that were poking into the nature of time’s layeredness, so I cannibalized those notes for this essay. Somewhere in there I visited my mother; we canned tomatoes and discussed the year’s cabbage crop, so the kraut memories wormed their way into the essay-in-progress. It was a mess from the start, and I loved the process. It was exciting to try to push the sentence as far as I could: it was like talking until I absolutely had to take a breath. A main challenge was keeping the syntax controlled enough for a reader; another was how to keep the various elements in check, especially keeping the meta elements—the reflection on trying to write with as much dimensionality as possible—from becoming self-indulgent. Sam is a terrific editor and he helped me with these challenges immensely, making many judicious cuts.

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

I want to mention Kevin McIlvoy’s wondrous stories in The Complete History of New Mexico even though you’re not asking about the reading I’m up to! He somehow writes the way I want to live. My only ink is laundry-hung-on-bicep, and that’s about ten years old now. My friend Devon recently gave a beautiful lecture on “the endearing persistence of household objects” and included lines from Richard Wilbur’s “Love Calls Us to the Things of this World”—his lines about laundry (and the poem’s title) are usually all the answer I give to the why question about the tattoo: “The morning air is all awash with angels. // Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses.” Since I’m allergic to kittens, I brought a West Virginia stray hound into my home, Mona, named for Simone Weil because she meditates in the yard. I’ll include a photo of M and me on a hike—in Vermont visiting a dear friend, the K mentioned in the essay, incidentally. I am usually out of date with music, but I’ve been listening a lot to Joanna Newsom’s Divers, Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool, Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell, and Loyalty by The Weather Station (which is good Sunday music). Also the North Mississippi Allstars. Also some eerie PJ Harvey.

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

“Sunday Morning Coming Down” by Jessie van Eerden

Found in Willow Springs 79 Back to Author Profile WRITE THE WHOLE PAINTING and do not stop. Sunday is bitter cabbage and the glimpse of shapes down a brief hallway, involved … Read more

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About Lilly Schneider

Lilly Schneider’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Green Mountains Review, Hobart, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, Briar Cliff Review, The Summerset Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and elsewhere. Raised in the Pacific Northwest, she is currently an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Wyoming, where she loves and fears the wind. You can follow her on Twitter at @LillySchneidrrr, though she cannot really figure out how to use that website, for the record.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “B.Y.O.B.”

“B.Y.O.B.” was inspired by the accidental overdose, in 2012, of a young man in Olympia, Washington, where I have often visited but never lived. It’s a beautiful place, but it’s a place that makes it easy for people to lose sight of the line between happy hippie and drug addict. I didn’t know this young man well, but I was close with someone who did. I saw how the sudden loss shattered her, of course. I have also known beautiful young men who died too young, and have been left empty-handed by grief—writing about grief makes me feel, or hope, I suppose, that I am making something from that emptiness which I can hold onto. But for my friend, there was also a second, unexpected, great loss: the community she and this boy and all her friends had created for themselves shattered too. When they lost him, they also lost the youthful dream they were living in together. I wanted to examine a shard from the lives of each of the characters as they faced their grief alone. I was determined not to let the characters coexist together past the first section, to force a lot of time and space between them, but I still wanted the story to feel cohesive, and that was a challenge I rather enjoyed.

From the first page, I knew I had also set myself a challenge I did not enjoy: Of writing about those who were once and sometimes still are my people—knots of artsy, mostly middle-class, mostly white Pacific Northwestern kids whose love, friendship and art-making inspired and comforted me so much as I grew into an adult. Now that I am an adult, I am painfully aware of the privilege, fragile optimism, and frivolity of my friends (and myself) in those years. So, writing about these characters made me feel pretty damn vulnerable.

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

So, I have a mild Diet Coke addiction. It’s latent right now, because in Laramie, Wyoming, where I live, the roads and sidewalks are the devil’s ice rink and it’s not worth trudging to the Loaf N’ Jug even for that sweet, sweet sauce. The relationship—I mean, the bad, bad addiction—flowered when I was 23 and drove my 1996 Jimmy SLT across America. It was summer, and Jimmy doesn’t have air conditioning. Solution: soda filled with ice. But sugar! Solution: Diet Coke. But it’s bad for you and Coke is an evil corporation that covers the world in plastic bottles, lobbies against public health initiatives, and buys up indigenous water supplies. Solution…move 7,200 feet up in the mountains, where mild addictions just aren’t worth going outside for 9 months a year? Ah, but back when I used to daily cross the lonesome highway for my fix, I once met the soda-fountain shaman. It was late at night at the Loaf N’ Jug, and I turned the corner and was startled, being used to having the soda fountain area to myself at such an hour. He’d selected the biggest size cup available—44 ounces—and this prince of pop had sweetly laid down his sodas and syrups in layers, green, blue, yellow, green, pink on top, like an elaborate cruise-ship cocktail. The soda-fountain shaman is tall with curly surfer-shag hair and wears what we in the Northwest call a “drug-rug” (a cheap fake-Mexican poncho-coat-thing) and, like any proper yogi, sandals. His arm-hairs are golden. He comforted me in my shock and amazement, and tried to help me understand What it was he had created, and How he had created it, and Why. But it was beyond my understanding. I had thought myself a master of the soda fountain. But I was wrong.

I never saw the shaman again.

“B.Y.O.B.” by Lilly Schneider

Found in Willow Springs 79 Back to Author Profile THE HOUSE The house is not too near the university. No buses come this way. In the garage, on any given … Read more

About Maya Jewell Zeller

Maya Jewell Zeller is the author of Rust Fish and Yesterday, the Bees. She edits fiction for Crab Creek Review, edits poetry for Scablands Books, and teaches creative writing at Central Washington University. She lives in the Inland Northwest, which is a great place to raise tower-wrecking children. You can hear Maya read poems here & here, read a flash essay here, follow her on Twitter @MayaJZeller, and visit her website for more information: mayajewellzeller.com

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “The Pleasure of Ruin”

I wrote this two and a half years ago, during that post-modern phase of the post-partum brainspace, that time when nothing has absolute truth. That time when your kid is still kind of a baby but also not, and so you can sometimes just observe and fall into the hole of your thinking, or the story or poem you’re working on, and everything feels meaningless or relatively so. This is especially true if you have a pretty sentient five year old hanging with the two year old . . . Everything your kids do is both reifying and shifting your parent-citizen-artist paradigms. (I think I’d also been reading Kay Ryan again, whose work I love—her metaphors are deceptively simple, the slant and occasional rhymes and pacing enact these gorgeous, interrogative meditations on human nature.) So I guess I was thinking about story (there’s a Janet Burroway reference in this poem, and a Hamlet allusion, and W.C. Williams, and penicillin, but none of that is really necessary to read it), and I was thinking about ruin, and the reasons for it—the way we learn by destroying, the way we love a good conflict, a good skeptic, a big mess, and what can come out of all that decay. And, it’s just interesting to watch toddlers destroy things and take so much pleasure in that, isn’t it? You know: one person, with a sense of what’s at stake, painstakingly creates something: art maybe, fragile art, beautiful art, and another person just walks in and tears it apart joyfully, without thinking at all of the emotional consequences for the person who had a stake in its creation. Or maybe we do it to ourselves—just to experience the catharsis of the violence, the wreckage, the aftermath. Or maybe it isn’t violent, maybe it’s redemptive. Maybe both. Anyway, “The Pleasure of Ruin” is a weirdly ominous poem right now, as I write this little note about it, because we’re in the first week of the Trump Presidency and he’s so gleefully trying to destroy things that were so carefully created to benefit all of us: federal lands, water, art funding, trade deals, health care coverage, the earth itself, the nation . . . Anyway, the poem came out of considering that at a less frightening scale, but it’s all there in “Oh, dear,/ and/ some whole trees, and some more//trees, and water, oh, a baby,//or a lost job.” The poem was supposed to be a little ironic, but I’m not sure how to “begin the whole thing over” in the case of America. America’s not a poem.

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

Yesterday, I was listening to George Michael, because I wanted to feel sad about something less personal than the other obvious things around me. I needed a break. So I was rocking out to “One More Try,” because I’m a dork like that. And tonight I’m having some Barefoot Moscato, because I like cheap white wine. I just do.

I don’t have any new animals, because who has time for those with all the phone calls we’re making? Plus I already have two children, a dog, two cats, and three fish; about eight daily deer passing through the yard; and an occasional racoon.
Today, I ate some rice and vegetables for dinner, because that way I can save my poor caloric decisions for the wine.

“The Pleasures of Ruin” by Maya Jewell Zeller

Found in Willow Springs 79 Back to Author Profile is one of the easiest kinds of pleasure. Take this stack of colored blocks built by one child, rectangular green … Read more

About Steve Coughlin

Born and raised in a Boston suburb, Steve Coughlin received his M.F.A. from the University of Idaho and his Ph.D. from Ohio University. He now teaches writing and literature at Chadron State College in northwest Nebraska. His book of poetry, Another City, was published by FutureCycle Press in 2015. If you want to purchase a discounted copy, send an email to scoughlin@csc.edu.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “My Father’s Recitation”

My father does not believe in the runner’s high. He says he doesn’t remember ever settling into a smooth, even pace, his legs kicking forward in effortless strides. At various points my father (83, a walker now instead of a runner) has suffered from runner’s knee, shin splints, plantar fasciitus, Achilles tendinitis, and crippling leg cramps. When I was ten years old, I remember my father breaking into tears in the living room during a particularly painful calf cramp—it was the second time I ever saw him cry. In his sixty years of running my father insists he never encountered one moment of pleasure. He says every minute he ran, every day it snowed or rained or the summer sun beat down, was misery.

About a year ago I was running at our high school track and it occurred to me that I too have little fondness for running. Like my father, I hate icing my knees or waking up at two in the morning and trying to stretch through another leg cramp. I hate the mental and physical discipline, running up endless hills, the monotony of mile after mile. I did the math for a forty minute run and it came out to 2,400 seconds of misery. So why do I keep doing it? And why did my father? Why not join a basketball league or sign up for yoga? I started writing “My Father’s Recitation”—at least partly—to try and examine these questions. I wanted to know why someone would participate in an activity that feels like a burden.

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

Adult Beverages: For me it starts with Bear Republic’s Racer Five IPA, Russian River’s Pliney the Elder, and Dogfish Head’s Midas Touch (a wonderful concoction that’s part beer, part wine, part mead). In the summer I sometimes go with the very drinkable Live Free! Or Die IPA by 21st Amendment Brewery. When I was in graduate school at Ohio University my friend Jon and I only drank the Edmund Fitzgerald Porter brewed by Great Lakes, but that’s mostly because we were both enamored with the name. And when I’m surrounded by a bunch of people who, like me, adore American microbrews, I make sure, always, to order a Miller High Life. Did I mention my love for the dignified gin and tonic, the occasional cosmopolitan, and the incredibly-expensive/you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me-potent French 75?

CDs: A couple months ago my friend Alex made fun of me for still owning a CD player. Is that what the world has come to?

Music: When I got an iPhone last year my wife uploaded (downloaded?) all of the songs from her iPhone to mine, but for some reason the only songs that showed up were by the Dixie Chicks. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to “Goodbye Earl” while running. What a great song!

Tattoos: My father has Shirley tattooed on his arm. My mother, of course, was named Marie.

Movies: I could watch The Big Sleep for an entire month and never get bored. That said, I’ve yet to meet a single person who could completely explain the plot.

“My Father’s Recitation” by Steve Coughlin

Found in Willow Springs 78 Back to Author Profile MY FATHER RAN THROUGH my mother’s heart attack. He ran through the afternoon my sister was hit by a car, through the … Read more

About Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum

Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum is the author of two collections of short fiction, This Life She’s Chosen and Swimming With Strangers (both published by Chronicle Books). Her fiction has appeared previously in Willow Springs, as well as One Story, The American Scholar, and elsewhere. She’s been the recipient of a PEN/O. Henry Prize, and she is currently a Jack Straw Writing Fellow. She teaches at the Hugo House and at a private high school. She lives with her husband and their young children near Seattle and can be found online at http://www.kirstenlunstrum.net and on Facebook.

Check out her Willow Springs Interview here.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Dear Mistress”

“Dear Mistress” began as a response to a prompt I was given when I read for the Hugo House Lit Series in Seattle a couple years ago. The prompt was to write about/around the idea of the American Dream, and as I wrestled with where to take that, I thought more and more about the distance between that dream and the reality of most families’ lives. I wanted to write about that distance—the illusion versus the reality.

That same autumn I had begun teaching high school English, and I was suddenly immersed in the voices and lives of teenagers—and in the YA literature they were reading (which I loved). It returned me to my own teenage self, and I remembered how hard it was to let go of my childhood view of reality, and how painful it was to individuate from my parents (to whom I’d always been very close). Elisabeth is wrestling with the same struggles here. She has to separate from her parents—from her childhood—but it hurts. She has to distinguish childhood illusion from adult reality, and that hurts too. I think this is a tension a lot of teens feel, though, and I wanted to dig into that tension in this story.

The other thing I remembered early in the writing process was how much I loved soap operas when I was a teenager. I used to rush home from high school to watch Days of Our Lives. (There’s a shameful bit of personal trivia for you!) When I started drafting “Dear Mistress,” Elisabeth’s dad was unemployed (and that was another subplot in itself), but I quickly saw the fun (and the metaphorical benefit) of casting him as a soap writer instead. There’s no more delusional version of reality than the soaps!

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

I’ve been working for a couple of years on a longer narrative—unrelated to “Dear Mistress,” but also centered on a family in the midst of a divorce—and (maybe inevitably) my listening life has been infiltrated by songs of romantic sorrow. The Avett Brothers’ album I and Love and You played on fairly continuous repeat in my car for several months, along with a few equally sad songs—Outkast’s “Hey Ya,” The Wailin’ Jennys’ “Firecracker,” and Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine.” I love the range of emotions a song can tackle in the contrast between lyrics and music. Listening to these, I felt reminded that the dissolution of love is as complex as love’s making.

“Dear Mistress” by Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum

Found in Willow Springs 78 Back to Author Profile DEAR MISTRESS, You are the cancer in my family’s gut, our bleeding ulcer, a bile we cannot swallow. THIS IS THE … Read more

Online Exclusive: A Conversation with Kirsten Lunstrum

Works in Willow Springs February 3, 2005 Adam O’Connor Rodriguez A CONVERSATION WITH KIRSTEN LUNSTRUM Photo Credit: www.kirstenlunstrum.net KIRSTEN SUNDBERG LUNSTRUM WAS BORN IN CHICAGO and raised in the Pacific Northwest. … Read more

Issue 56: Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum

About Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum is the author of two collections of short fiction-This Life She’s Chosen (Chronicle Books, 2005) and Swimming With Strangers (Chronicle Books, 2008). She … Read more

About Brandi Nicole Martin

Brandi Nicole Martin’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Washington Square Review, Nashville Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Salt Hill, Crab Orchard Review, Harpur Palate, and the minnesota review, among others. She is at work on an MFA in poetry at Florida State University, where she was the recipient of the 2016 Emerging Writer’s Spotlight award, selected by D.A. Powell.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Two Poems”

I’m often drawn to wreckage, but especially since a near-fatal car accident I survived in 2008. I was thrown from the car and pinned under; most of my calf was burned down to tendons. I was in a coma for four days. I’d broken both my legs and shattered my left hip. My family was told I wouldn’t last the ambulance ride, and then that I’d never walk again. But I made a full recovery—I walk, I run—and though I spent a long time busting ass in hospitals, in therapy groups, with canes, pain pills, and wheelchairs, that time of my life is now mostly vague memory.

“They write Died at the scene” began where I was forced to revisit. Todd and I were driving home from a holiday spent with my parents, and we saw this burning husk of a car on the side of the road. Despite my protests we pulled over, and when he ran to help I noticed everything—the smoke, the height of the flames, a lone lifeless body in a ditch—and I was struck by the messiness of surviving. The poem’s end surprised me the most—the meta-poetic idea of studying poetry and finding patterns in language mirrored the patterns in my own life, life which bleeds directly and honestly into my poems, and patterns which are often destructive and inescapable. I’ll never know why I was thrown from my car, and I’ll never know why others were stuck who more deserved a second chance. But I know, and the poem knows, that the stench of smoke can linger forever in your skin. This poem was an attempt to show the thorny underbelly of happiness, how some things won’t ever leave you, and how that’s not necessarily bad.

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

Probably predictably, for me music is akin to religious experience. It’s a huge and ritualistic part of my writing process, a way to deal with significant emotional upheavals (aplenty), and I have something playing at all times. I like messy stuff, bone-chilling falsettos, reverb, blues riffs, and wails.

I’ve always said the first love of my life was Jeff Buckley. When I was younger he was the gateway to other good music (his Bob Dylan and Nina Simone covers got me hunting for more), but mostly his inhuman voice and uncut alt-soul-blues sound sent me to the moon. Sometimes I put him to the side to fend off emotions he only amplifies, but lately I’ve been remembering the rapture of sadness and the perfect artistry that goes into capturing that. Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, a posthumous release with an unfinished vibe, has been on repeat for a month. Songs like “The Sky Is A Landfill” and “Yard of Blonde Girls” are dirty, sexy, and very devil-may-care (“the garbage dump of souls” and “the streets where Lola played”), and that’s totally where I’m at right now. Any Jeff Buckley lover knows that a simple intake of breath or a certain inflection on a certain lyric can make the entire song. “Opened Once” is another I’ve had on repeat from this album, a perfect example of that. To me, Jeff Buckley is king of pining, and that’s what I’m about ninety percent of the time, which I’m told isn’t all bad. Who knows?

I was late to the game on another current favorite—Wowee Zowee by Pavement, most specifically the song “AT&T.” The lyrics in it (and others) are just complete nonsense, which I love. “Maybe someone’s gonna save me. My heart is made of gravy.” Et cetera.

Two Poems by Brandi Nicole Martin

Found in Willow Springs 78 Back to Author Profile FOR THEN THE EYES OF THE BLIND SHALL BE OPENED TO TODD Todd on the front porch. Todd in the side … Read more

About About Genevieve Plunkett

Genevieve Plunkett lives in Vermont with her husband and two young children.

See more from her online at the New England Review— here and here— and Mud Season Review— here and here.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Schematic”

“Schematic” began as a short screenplay written for a class during my first year of college. I attended college in my hometown, so at the time, I was still living at my parents’ house. My dad had a collection of vintage pinball machines in the basement that I would go home and play whenever school got to be too stressful (like, if a boy talked to me, or if someone complimented my shoes). Other times, I would walk in the front door and hear my dad playing, the chimes of the game coming up through the floorboards. It’s an old house, so it was always a kind of haunting experience. At one point, the lights on one of the games weren’t functioning properly and my dad went around studying the schematic like a crazy person, trying to figure out how to fix it.

Last year, when I decided to rewrite “Schematic” as a short story, I was surprised to find that the words were already there. I didn’t have to think about it at all – they just came out of my pen. As someone who likes to ponder and revise, I was extremely suspicious of this process and put the story away for a while, just in case I was having some kind of lapse in judgement. But I was still happy with it when I looked at it later, so I sent it out. I wish this would happen again, but it would probably require black magic.

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

I still listen to the same music that I did when I was thirteen: Radiohead, Oingo Boingo, David Bowie, Captain Beefheart—with the exception of Daft Punk, which I found later and, for two years now, has overtaken my life. It’s not that I haven’t found anything better, it’s just that I can’t stop listening long enough to search. My children are just as bad. Right now, they are obsessed with The Velvet Underground. The four-year-old likes the way Lou Reed sings, “I can’t stand it anymore,” —“ I key-Ant stand it any Mo-Ah Mo-Ah!” The two-year-old is fascinated by lines like, “Caught his hand in the door/ Dropped his teeth on the floor.” I understand this totally. Music was my introduction to the strangeness of words. I remember being five, trying to find out what the hell the lyrics to Bowie’s Life on Mars were about. I’m pretty sure that I became a writer just to take back some of the power those lyrics (and others) had over me.

Booze: I used to write for a wine and spirits magazine. People expect me to know what to order at a bar, but I don’t. I still don’t know what to order.

I have one tattoo. I want another. The problem is that I can’t decide if I actually want one, or just want the experience of getting one. It is a very succinct kind of pain—wholly satisfying. I would get a Jean de Bosschere illustration on the inside of my arm—the one where the guy with the tall hat is sawing the leg off a giant horse. It would be so cool.

“Schematic” by Genevieve Plunkett

Found in Willow Springs 77 Back to Author Profile THE INSIDE OF TOBY’S HEAD was lined with plaid and could be packed like a suitcase. It reminded Toby of the pattern … Read more

About Nick Fuller Googins

A graduate of the Rutgers-Newark MFA Program, Nick now lives in Venice, California. His fiction has been read on NPR’s All Things Considered, and has appeared in Narrative, ZYZZYVA, Oxford American, Shenandoah, The Common, and elsewhere. He volunteers as a writing mentor for the organizations 826LA and We Are Not Numbers.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Honeymoon Bandits”

My stories usually evolve from situations or characters rather than language, but when this line popped into my head—“We coined them the Honeymoon Bandits and we were pleased with our name”—I just went with it. That first line didn’t survive the final rounds of revision, but those original thirteen words told me a lot: the story would be written in first-person plural; it would feature a pair of young lovebird outlaws; and, most importantly, the community would feel a strong sense of pride and ownership for the Bandits. This is the only story I’ve written in first-person plural, and it took a number of drafts before I decided upon the scope of the “we.” For inspiration I turned to Alice Elliott Dark’s fantastic, “Watch the Animals,” told from the collective perspective of a small town. At first I tried something similar, by writing from the perspective of only Provincetown. I then extended the “we” to include all the mothers of Cape Cod, which in turn became all the parents. My hope was that the improbability of such an encompassing collective narration (the Cape is a big place!) would lend the story a slightly-absurdist, comic-booky feel that in turn would help the ending work. As for content, I began writing in early 2014, when I was living in New York and experiencing an acute case of Global Warming Anxiety because of an unseasonably warm December. I wanted to bring to life a cadre of people who don’t only worry about the fate of the planet but (unlike me) actually do something, and more than simply signing petitions or writing letters to Congress. A friend of mine, when I outlined an early idea of what I was going for, dubbed it “political fantasy.” What a fantastic name for a genre.

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

In the morning, before coffee and writing, I like to jump in place to music for five or so minutes. Sometimes my wife joins me. It’s great for waking up, shaking out the sleep, or dulling a very tiny hangover. For well over a year I jumped to one of two songs: “Adelaide” by Chadwick Stokes, or “Home,” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes. Lately, however, I’ve been listening to the radio again and rediscovering the joy of coming across long-forgotten or entirely new songs. Social Distortion’s “Story of My Life” came into my jumping rotation this way, as did Le Tigre’s “TKO” and, thanks to 91.5 KUSC, the Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi. I think I’m secretly hoping to become one of those happy 103-year-olds who are always being asked, “What’s your secret?” I love simple self-improvement tips and short-cuts, and it would give me such joy to have one to offer: “Five minutes of jumping before breakfast! It’s that easy! Really!”

“Honeymoon Bandits” by Nick Fuller Googins

Found in Willow Springs 77 Back to Author Profile THOSE OF US PRESENT at the first holdup in January couldn’t let the fact be forgotten. Over coffee and donuts, at the … Read more