Profiles – Page 7 – Willow Springs Magazine

Issue 77: Paige Lewis

About Paige Lewis

Paige Lewis is the copy editor at Divedapper and serves as an assistant poetry editor at Narrative Magazine. Their poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as New Orleans Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Bennington Review, and elsewhere.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on "Open Your Windows in Welcome"

I often try to finish people’s stories for them. If my friend is telling me about a strange interaction she had with a supermarket cashier, I’ll interrupt with a million guesses until we’re both exhausted: “Did he try to smell your hair?” “He poked holes in the bread, didn’t he?” “No wait! Did he think you stole something?” When I read poetry, I try to fight against this urge to know before being told, but sometimes I give in, scanning the stanzas for indications of how the poem will end. This isn’t always a bad thing. In my quick scan, I often read a word or a line wrong, and create a new image that I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. I started writing “Open Your Windows in Welcome” after misreading ‘spit-shined’ as ‘split-shinned’ in a poem. I found the image of someone or something staggering toward me very unsettling, and I wanted to play with that uneasiness within the poem.

I wrote this poem in early August shortly after moving into a house with people I hardly knew. While August in Florida — with its humidity and its bugs and its burning seatbelt buckles — is already pretty unbearable, it was especially difficult this year because I had to adjust to living in a house where the temperature inside matched the temperature outside. I decided to write a poem rather than complaining to my friends about it, but I’m sure I complained anyway.

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

I listen to Colin Stetson’s New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges nearly every time I write. Even if I weren’t a huge fan of this album, which sounds like how I’d imagine a conversation between an extraterrestrial and a Neanderthal might sound, I’d still be impressed by the fact that Stetson recorded it all in one take. I’ve listened to this album so often while writing that my brain now clicks into poetry mode whenever I hear it. It’s fantastic, but I understand it’s not for everyone. When I played New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges for my students during a writing assignment, one student mumbled, “This is what anxiety sounds like.”

The album Romance, Conflict, Adventure by Best Friends Forever is another current favorite. The songs are all about the goofiest kinds of loving. In the song “Eisenhower is the Father,” the band thanks Eisenhower for the interstate highway system because it makes visiting long distance boyfriends easier, and “Ghost Song” is about how much cooler a ghost boyfriend would be compared to a living one. There’s so much joy packed into this thirty-minute album. It makes me want to dance, smooch my partner, and pet a million dogs all at once.

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Issue 77: James Kimbrell

About James Kimbrell

James Kimbrell was born in Jackson, Mississippi. He has published two previous volumes of poetry, The Gatehouse Heaven, and My Psychic, and was co-translator of Three Poets of Modern Korea: Yi Sang, Hahm Dong-Seon, and Choi Young-Mi. His work has appeared in magazines such as Poetry, The Cincinnati Review, Ploughshares, Field, The New Guard, and Best American Poetry, 2012. He has been the recipient of the Discovery / The Nation Award, a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He currently resides in Tallahassee where he teaches in the creative writing program at Florida State University.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on "First Publication"

“First Publication” began from a somewhat meta-poetic impulse to write a poem about a bizarre event that began when I, an unpublished poet, sent poems out to The Quarterly in 1990, a journal edited by Gordon Lish for Random House. I submitted there on a lark— a friend of mine had submitted and was astonished by how quickly Lish responded, and as I was about to leave for my annual military duty at Camp Shelby in South Mississippi, I thought a rejection from Lish might at least punctuate the boredom of my Army drills. When I received an unexpected acceptance from Lish, he also sent stamps, requesting more work.

Naturally, I neglected my military duties, hot on the trail of new poems for Gordon Lish. One night, after lights-out in the barracks, I fled to the latrine and sat on the toilet writing until about 3 a.m. when I heard my platoon sergeant summoning everyone to the training field for our annual fitness test, an event I’d completely forgotten, flush as I was with my newfound literary success. After doing my sit-ups and push-ups, I lost consciousness and was rushed to the hospital at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, and that’s where “First Publication” picks up. I wrote most of the poem in one sitting then revised it over a period of weeks, weeding, changing things, changing things back.

Muse Manor and Sergeant Laughter are true details, a case in which experience provided facts so strange that I found myself wanting to tone things down for the sake of believability, an impulse that I was, alas, able to resist.

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

I have no tattoos and generally choose coffee over food or alcohol.

I do, however, have a new dog, Tallulah, a one-eyed miniature pinscher / Chihuahua puppy that may well have been a cockatoo in a previous life. She was picked up by the pound after wandering the streets of Tallahassee with her sibling and remained at the shelter when her original owner arrived to retrieve his runaways, opting to leave Tallulah behind because of the eye she was born without. How could a person give a dog such a beautiful name, only to abandon the dog for cosmetic reasons? My wife found Tallulah online and fell in love. “But we already have three dogs,” I protested. Of course, once I saw Tallulah, I was a goner.

Now Tallulah has become the star of the show around here, shadowing our movements, wrecking my day with longing every time I leave the house. She’s tiny, maybe five pounds, and likes to climb up and lick my face, somehow managing to stay there even when I’m walking around, like a cockatoo perched on a pirate’s shoulder.

Maybe it’s the wisdom of blind Tiresias, or the empathy I’ve always felt for Homer’s Cyclops, an underdog if there ever was one, or maybe it’s blind Homer himself, or the abundance of gifted blind musicians, but I’ve always associated blindness, visual deficits of any kind, with a certain brand of seeing that imparts more wisdom than image, more knowing than witnessing.

I wouldn’t want to burden Tallulah with my own associations, but her sweetness is good counsel, and her carefree nature sets the right tone for my days lately. I feel an Ode to Tallulah coming on.

A dog might wish for a better poet, but no poet could wish for a better dog.

Three Poems by James Kimbrell

Found in Willow Springs 77 Back to Author Profile FIRST PUBLICATION I passed out in the barracks after reading the letter. The ambulance dropped me at Muse Manor. I was the … Read more

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About Annah Browning

Annah Browning is a Ph.D. candidate in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois-Chicago. She is the author of a chapbook, The Marriage, published by Horse Less Press, and her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Boulevard, Painted Bride Quarterly, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. Links to her work and periodic updates on albino alligators and other oddities are available at her website, www.annahbrowning.com.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Two Poems”

In the past year, I have spent a lot of time reading and thinking about witches—as feminist figures, as outsiders, and as irascible and powerful women generally. Witches—those accused of witchcraft historically, those represented in folklore, and those so self-defined—are often women on the margins of society, whether by choice or by exile. As I read, I began to imagine the voice of an older witch talking to a younger one who is still figuring out how to live alone and on her own terms. “Witch Doctrine” then emerged.

I have also been researching ghost narratives. I’ve read many ghost stories, historical and cultural histories of ghosts, and fallen down podcast rabbit holes listening to everyday people’s ghost encounters. (A personal podcast favorite: a shadowy figure approaches a terrified small boy in bed, only to whisper “happy birthday” in an incredibly earnest way.) What struck me was that in my favorite ghost stories, encounters with the dead are rather small and couched in the mundane. Many have the ability for double-reading you find in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw—these occurrences could be supernatural, or they could be the product of a lonely or distorted mind, a momentary shiver in perception, a palpable unease brought about by low frequency sound. (This last is a real phenomenon and possible explanation for ghosts, by the way—look it up.) “Dear Ghost” turned out to be one of my love letters to this kind of ghost story—the small ghosts, the quiet, un-spectacular hauntings that fill our lives. “Dear Ghost,” like “Witch Doctrine,” surprised me by also ending up being a poem about loneliness—though this speaker, instead of accepting her aloneness as the witch does, continues her search for connection, even if it is with the dead.

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

Since I don’t have any pets currently (much to my sadness, since I love animals), I will fill you in on the predatory animals in proximity to me. When I visit my family in rural upstate South Carolina, black bears become one of the things I have to worry about. We have a family of them, a mother and two cubs, living in a cave on our land. I enjoy taking walks in the woods by myself, and since I like watching the deer and the many very stupid wild turkeys that also live in our woods, I refuse to wear a bear bell or carry a gun. (A bear bell, for the uninitiated, is a bell you wear to broadcast your presence in the woods, so as not to startle bears going about bear business, since, apparently, they are more likely to attack when surprised.) So far, I am still un-mauled.

When I am in Chicago, I work beneath a family of peregrine falcons, who nest on top of University Hall at the University of Illinois-Chicago. My first day on campus, I walked out of the building to see a pair of pigeon wings, fully intact and missing their owner, as if the smallest, dirtiest angel had fallen. That was how I found out about the falcons’ existence. The female’s name is Nitz, and her mate is named Mouse, who is described in news articles as “a male of unusually small size.” There is a falcon cam online every spring, where you can watch them feed their white fluffy eyasses (the delightful proper word for falcon chicks). These birds are beautiful, and they frequently land on ledges outside your office windows to size you up for meat. I love them.

Two Poems by Annah Browning

Found in Willow Springs 77 Back to Author Profile WITCH DOCTRINE The old ones say to draw your broom across the step, then pull the latch. On the snow’s … Read more

About Hadara Bar-Nadav

Hadara Bar-Nadav’s newest book of poetry, The New Nudity, is forthcoming from Saturnalia Books in 2017. She is also the author of Lullaby (with Exit Sign) (Saturnalia Boks, 2013), awarded the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize; The Frame Called Ruin (New Issues, 2012), Runner Up for the Green Rose Prize; and A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight (Margie/Intuit House, 2007), awarded the Margie Book Prize. In addition, she is the author of two chapbooks, Fountain and Furnace (Tupelo Press, 2015), awarded the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, and Show Me Yours (Laurel Review/Green Tower Press 2010), awarded the Midwest Poets Series Prize. She is also co-author of the best-selling textbook Writing Poems, 8th ed. (Pearson/Longman, 2011). Hadara is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on "Latch"

“Latch” is the first poem I wrote directly about my son and my experience with early motherhood. The poem explores the idea of “the latch”—the term for when a baby latches onto the breast and feeds—as well as the metaphor of a metal latch for locking a case or chest. I was absolutely amazed that my body knew how to be pregnant and how to make me swell with milk whenever my son needed it.

“Latch” is a tonally cool poem that explores the weird, layered mechanics of breastfeeding. At times, my body was on auto-pilot, machine-like and marvelous (“I sense the metal/ of you and gush // under your clamp”). This is dream-feeding, when my son and my body would force me awake to nurse, propelling me forward to accomplish this singular task at 2 or 4 or 6 in the morning.

A phrase like “my glandular/affection” speaks to the strange, almost inexplicable relationship between the body’s ability to provide food, to become food, and the simultaneous swelling of emotion that accompanies breastfeeding—love, sadness, joy, isolation, etc. I found myself wondering if my love for my son could manifest itself in the production of milk and a desire to want to feed him. It also occurred to me that his unyielding demand for milk (usually every 2-3 hours morning and night, which is not unusual for newborns) was a way that his body enforced our bond and my near-constant contact with him—another kind of “latch.” Of course, there are many other ways to express love for, bond with, and feed an infant. But in those early months of my son’s life, reality and cause and effect warped and bent in their own ways and generated surprising insights.

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

Lately, I’ve been enjoying Wilco’s new album Star Wars. I’ve played the song “Satellite” many, many times. When I’m home with my son, I sometimes feel like Wilco is the satellite, or I am the satellite, or my son is, and we are all rotating around one another, singing. And lately I’ve been thinking that poems are satellites, emitting their small energy and receiving it every time they are read. “Latch” appears in my new book of poems about objects, The New Nudity, forthcoming from Saturnalia Books in 2017. [Some of these poems also appear in the chapbook Fountain and Furnace (Tupelo Press, 2015)]. The objects I write about often have a startling, vibrant, and super-charged energy. As I write, I become the satellite, physically and imaginatively rotating around these objects and considering their visceral, sentient lives, though the objects feel like they circle and imagine me, too.

I have also been listening to The Beatles daily. My brother tells me I learned to walk to The Beatles. My father had all these 8-track tapes we would listen to in his rust-colored Cadillac on our way to go fishing at 4 in the morning. He would whistle along (he was a master whistler!). Now that I have a little boy, I listen to The Beatles to share with him my own sense of joy and wonder that I experienced as a child. My father passed away in 2007, and listening to The Beatles with my son also makes me feel like my father is with us.

Other musical loves: P.J. Harvey, James Brown, Aretha Franklin (which my son likes to dance to), Miles Davis (In a Silent Way has been especially on deck recently), Beck, Bjork, Sonic Youth, David Bowie, Charles Mingus, The Makeup, and others.

“Latch” by Hadara Bar-Nadav

Found in Willow Springs 77 Back to Author Profile I sense the metal of you and gush under your clamp. A crushing dream, blistering pulse. Salty pressure beating the blood between … Read more

About Carissa Halston

Carissa Halston’s short fiction has appeared in Fourteen Hills, The Massachusetts Review, The Collagist, and elsewhere. She currently runs a small press called Aforementioned Productions, edits a literary journal called apt, and is at work on a novel called Conjoined States and a short story collection called Emergency Exit.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Call It a Map”

I had been looking at job listings on Craigslist—which is an art form in itself—and I saw an ad for a sleep study that sought healthy individuals whose participation would aid residents on an international space station. As soon as I saw the details, I knew I would write a story about the study. I went so far as to sign up just so I could have some insight into the process and its related details, but I wasn’t selected, so I added complications to my narrator’s life, complications that enhanced and troubled her decision to take part in the study: most obviously, her disability (which presented me with many hours of research), but more importantly, her relationship with her sister, Tilly.

When I was working on the sisters’ characters, I wanted to hint at the idea that siblings grow up in comparison to each other, and Liz’s and Tilly’s adult relationship feeds off of what one can handle that the other can’t, and vice versa. But in childhood (at least, in Liz’s memories of her childhood), it was a simple case of loving resentment. They can’t bring themselves to ask, Why aren’t you exactly like me?And in their joint inability to ask, there comes generosity and self-condemnation—one sister allows the other so much room in her life that it winds up stifling them both.

Formally, I wanted to push sensory details as far as I could without relying on imagery, which meant I was allowed to choose similes and metaphors that wouldn’t fly in another story. All stories rely on internal logic, but I find the most cohesive narratives are those that use their plot details to inform their diction.

Notes on Reading

Reading informs everything I write. When I read something that remakes me as a reader—the sort of story that divides your life into before and after you read it—then I’m in student mode, trying to figure out how I can learn from the success of that narrative. Fiction writers who I feel are constantly teaching me: Amy Hempel (the structure of her stories is astoundingly tight), David Foster Wallace (his diction is unparalleled, plus he could be funny and sad in a single clause), and Italo Calvino, as translated by William Weaver (every word matters—every single word).

Right now, I’m reading Kathy Page’s Alphabet, Lydia Peelle’s Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing, Porochista Khakpour’s Sons and Other Flammable Objects, and Michelle Tea’s The Chelsea Whistle, all of which contain incredible, helpful lessons. To wit:

I’m in love with Peelle’s sentences. She creates these complex, layered problems out of odd, yet recognizable scenarios, and lures us in via these gorgeous sentences, e.g., she tells us that there might be a wild cat loose in a city, and everyone is obsessing over it: “In the houses, the big cat creeps nightly, making the rounds of dinner tables and dreams.” Compression, concision, and phonetically pleasing, to boot.

Khakpour’s novel is an endurance trial in scope and form. She’s covering a metric ton of ground historically, including the Iranian revolution, the history of Persian royalty, and the interaction between Xerxes, the protagonist, and his father, Darius, which works in a series of reversed expectations, and if that weren’t enough, her sentences are magnificently lengthy: “And so on a train to Istanbul—fleeing, seeking neutrality, anonymity, normalcy, suddenly, both seized with the alarming reality that they were running away, fleeing from their homes, maybe forever—they looked at their young son, humming obliviously in his mother’s lap, and she brought it up with tears in her eyes, and he agreed instantly, that of all the naysayings they had done in their time together, perhaps the one they feared and regretted and hoped hadn’t cursed them the most was the one in the time of their dark courtship, when they had both agreed that if they ever had a child it would be miserable, untalented, ugly, uninspired, a nothing of an offspring, the end they would both deserve: an error even, at best.”

I just started Page’s Alphabet because it’s about a heavily tattooed man in prison, and I’m working on a novel that features an incarcerated populace, and my protagonist (on his way to being heavily tattooed) is threatened with incarceration. Every decision he makes steers him toward or away from entrapment, and I want that threat to feel genuine, so in order to achieve a higher level of believability, I know I need to read as much as I can about prison, including other novels, and Page’s grabbed me because its structure is non-linear (instead of ABC, it’s BAC), and I’m a sucker for time tricks in fiction.

And lastly: Tea. This is the third book of hers I’ve read (the other two: Valencia and The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America), and though I bought The Chelsea Whistleyears ago, I’m reading it now because I’m moving home to Boston after almost two years away. Tea’s memoir is about growing up in Chelsea, a town adjacent to Boston, so it’s preparing me for life going forward. That’s my take on reading: with the right book, I can prepare for anything.

“Call it a Map” by Carissa Halston

Found in Willow Springs 87 Back to Author Profile WHAT I WOULD’VE GIVEN to have been a magician, to say, “Now you see me, now you don’t.” But Tilly says I … Read more

About Jess Walter

Jess Walter is the author of eight books, most recently the short story collection, We Live in Water, and the best-selling novel, Beautiful Ruins. He was a National Book Award finalist for The Zero, won the Edgar Alan Poe Award for Citizen Vince, has been a finalist for the PEN/USA Award in both fiction and nonfiction and twice has won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. His short fiction has appeared Best American Short Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Harpers, Esquire, Tin House, McSweeneys and many others. He lives with his wife and children in his childhood home of Spokane.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Cheston!”

The ingredients for any single story are so random. You meet someone named Cheston. You write an essay about Donald Barthelme’s incredible story ‘The School,’ and it has you thinking about how that story moves from comic to slightly disturbing to sneakily profound. You think this is cool. Then you watch the first season of True Detective, and it pisses you off, goes from being darkly philosophical to a kind of cliched buddy-cop, southern-gothic bullshit. You hear yourself describe True Detective as a “Nihilist Happy Meal”—and this makes you think: who would order a nihilist happy meal? Next thing you know, you’re reading “Cheston” at Pie and Whiskey and people are laughing at it.

Notes on Reading

How does reading shape craft? Boy, how doesn’t it? I think the first impulse toward writing is to try to recreate those things that moved you as a reader. But I also react to things, think, Oh, no, it should be like this … like that. Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of the new memoir-tinged fiction (Knausgaard, Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, Jenny Offil, Sheila Heti) and when it’s done well, as those are, I think it can be sort of thrilling, taking away the coy sense of crafting that fiction writers often feel. But I also worry about this as a movement, a shrinking of the writer’s charge as nothing more than a looser memoir. I wrote in a review of TC Boyle’s newest novel that I fear a “selfie” movement in fiction because it seems to shrink the imagination. I think publishing should put a limit on the number of books about writers that can be published in one year.

“Cheston!” by Jess Walter

Found in Willow Springs 76 Back to Author Profile SOMETHING WAS THE MATTER with the baby. “He seems depressed,” said the father. “I don’t think babies can get depressed,” said the … Read more

Issue 66: A Conversation with Jess Walter

Interview in Willow Springs 66 Works in Willow Springs 67 and 58 February 20 & March 16 , 2010 Gabe Ehrnwald, Samuel Ligon, Brendan Lynaugh, and Shawn Vestal A CONVERSATION … Read more

About West Trexler

Wes Trexler is a writer, musician and abuser of vintage sailboats based in New York City. He was a founding member of the glam-punk band Hotter Than A Crotch, and driving force behind the short-lived Brooklyn underground DIY venue Club Plantation (2012-2013). He is an adventurer, a hustler and political radical who writes, performs, and organizes under various pseudonym. Born in West Virginia amid great natural beauty and crippling poverty, storytelling was in his genes. His grandmother Zelda, who’s still alive and well, used to write for the local newspapers back in the ’50s and ’60s. His other grandmother taught English for many decades, starting out in a one-room school house at age 17. She could recite pages from the Canterbury Tales from memory well into her eighties. Mr. Trexler has been up to no good recently, traveling in South America and Nepal for months at a time, living for years with no visible means of support. He has a problem with authority and hates cops more than anyone you will ever meet. He was once shipwrecked on a deserted beach inhabited only by wild horses. He thinks people should unplug their TV set and go live a life worth writing about. He is a graduate of the Inland Northwest Center for Writers, and attended the Squaw Valley Community of Writers in 2005.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “North Jutland Blues”

The thing you should know about “North Jutland Blues” is that a decade elapsed from the time I wrote it to the time it was finally accepted for publication. If the idea of a ten-year lead time to sell a hundred-dollar short story seems crazy, then you don’t understand what it means to lead a life in the arts.

It’s actually the first story from a collection of shorts I did years back that has yet to be published as a whole. I’ve sold a few of them recently, but “North Jutland Blues” was always one of my favorites. It was the first story I wrote where I felt I’d stumbled upon a genuinely original voice, and that voice and that protagonist became the heart of the story collection (titled Legend of the Night Shark).

After failing to find an agent for Legend of the Night Shark, I let it mellow for a couple years while I was busy making music and putting out records in the Northwest and New York. Then, a few months ago, as I neared completion of a very hefty nonfiction manuscript, I decided to sell the Night Shark stories off on their own. Enough time had passed that the constant volley of rejections lost their emotional sting. It was hard to care about stories written so long ago they seemed to be part of some other guy’s efforts, and I was much more interested in getting rejections for my next project.

What strikes me now, looking at it from a whole different epoch in my life, is the haunting desperation that lies beneath the wide-eyed abandonment and directionlessness of the narrator. There’s no way I could have written that story in 2015, and I’m glad I didn’t wait. There’s no doubt I would have made different choices had I composed it last week. I’m a different writer now, but the story as it is seems more honest than if I’d tried to substantially rewrite it.

Another thing I notice is the thematic consistency that is still present in my work. I’m still obsessed with jazz and entheogens, with stolen bikes and people-in-motion. These are all still prevalent themes in almost everything I write. The people I write about are always on their way somewhere, dodging something, driving a pickup or hopping a train, chasing or being chased into dark allies. My characters are always running after back-and-forth propositions, looking at their lives through that rearview lens which often consumes our thinking when we hit the road, when leaving a place or en route to somewhere new.

I decided a long time ago that I could only write fiction that’s set in places I’ve been. There’s no way for me to be really convincing about a scene if I don’t have access to the sensual rush of details that comes from reliving a certain place. Of course we all think of character as the building block of good fiction, but to me place is equally essential. There’s only so much you can do inside a character’s head. To keep me engaged as a reader, I need to be able to feel the setting, and without the depth of convincing place details, I lose interest in the character’s inner turmoil. So, like all my stories, “North Jutland Blues” was inspired by things I saw firsthand, in this case things I saw in Denmark many years ago.

I think the narrator is somewhat oblivious to his own turmoil, and it’s the internal strife of the Danish character Klaus that is more obvious on the surface. You essentially have two characters who are both incapable of dealing with whatever emotional vexations are plaguing them. The narrator seems to see himself from the outside, and he’s close enough to Klaus to see his conflict for what it is, but still he’s not really able to do anything with the insight. If loneliness and rejection is what’s bothering these guys, they sure don’t do much to remedy the situation.

A lot of my stories have a similar emotional undercurrent: lonesome people in search of ecstatic moments. I think that also sums up a lot of what life in Scandinavia is like, and the title of the story really broadcasts that idea from the very start.

Notes on Reading

Some writers write because they have something to say about the world, others write because they have something to say about the particular literary tradition they belong to. Either pursuit is valid, and we all do a bit of both, but I’m definitely in the first camp. It doesn’t matter to me one bit what’s happening in contemporary literature. I make it a point not to read any books by authors who are still alive. You could spend your whole life reading things that are hip, but who knows if anyone will still care about those books in twenty or thirty years? I prefer to spend my time reading books that have been vetted by time, works that still seem relevant after a few decades or a few centuries, things that have influenced everyone before me.

The older stuff is best for me because I find myself mining them for vocabulary. Any Mark Twain story will teach you a dozen technical terms, pieces of antiquated jargon, or bygone slang you won’t likely run into elsewhere. When I read newer stuff I don’t pick up as much. Contemporary writers have pretty much the same vocabulary as I do, so there is less immediate reward for the effort.

I think the way I was taught to read in grad school ruined my love for fiction. I didn’t read any fiction for a couple years after getting an MFA. I wasn’t able to read for the sake of reading, I was only able to study the fiction rather than just enjoying it for the storytelling. To this day I don’t read fiction at nearly the rate I did in my twenties (my “book devouring boyhood” as Kerouac put it). Now I gobble up news and newsish pieces, historical Anarchist propaganda, science articles, political commentary, citizen journalism, anything that spreads my consciousness to the real human experience, anything that fills me up with true details or bizarre ideas. I love this notion that the pursuit of wisdom and the pursuit of scientific knowledge seem to be coalescing in our times, and there are a million rabbit holes out there you can dive into and kind of instantly absorb other novel ways of looking at the world.

That being said, there are a few authors I can’t stay away from, the guys whose language is such a part of me that no amount of pedagogical scrutiny can dull my enjoyment, the writers who seem always to be speaking directly to me. I’m talking my personal triumvirate of lit heroes: Faulkner, Burroughs, and Dostoevsky. If you only read those three authors, it’s hard to say what you couldn’t learn about storytelling and the art of the line.

Faulkner is a Southern country boy like me, so his stories always have this collision of highbrow ideas and lowbrow characters. There’s always this tension between the genius of the narrative voice and the primitive, earthy insanity of those he is describing. Whenever I look at my own work, and it seems too protracted or too risky, or too heady, I reflect on Faulkner and his boundlessness. There’s no way that readers today are less sophisticated, or less receptive of daring, challenging prose than the readers of 1930s America, at least I hope not. So, I find myself asking, “Would Faulkner try to get away with this?” “Would Faulkner ask this much of his audience?” Few of us would dare to give multiple characters the same name in one book, and just leave it hanging like that, but Faulkner did. He gives me permission to go out on narrative limbs when I need to.

William Burroughs I love because his work, I think, managed to escape the realm of hip writing and end up in the canon of visionary thinkers in fiction. He inspires me to stick to my vision no matter how opaque it might seem to others. So much of what he does is both fantastical and hyper-real. He is a true surfer of the universal subconscious, yet, in the end, there is nobody grittier, realer than Burroughs. He proves that you can draw on the dream world for images and ideas without losing touch with the concrete stuff of humanity, the stuff that keeps us interested and engaged. I also like the way he can write about his own experience, use a version of himself as a character without sanitizing it. He and his narrators are well acquainted with their own shortcomings and flaws, acutely aware of them. We want to believe what his narrators are telling us because they seem so honest in their self-criticism, so unrepentantly human, warts and all.

All of Dostoevsky should be read and reread. We English speakers are at a great disadvantage here, since we can only look at translations, and there is no way for us to really experience the innate poetry of his language as it was meant to be. Nonetheless, when you look at his books you see the work of a man who was born to tell the story of his time and place, to become the official critic of his people. For the fiction I write, this is often the goal. I want to recreate my world as a literary universe, to dissect it and present it as though it were the only possible interpretation. This is what Dostoevsky does. His descriptions are so adept that there is no doubting their authenticity.

For writers, I think it is especially important to look at his Notes from Underground. This was his debut novel, and a very short one at that. When you read the work of young Dostoevsky, you can see that there is the capacity for genius, yet Notes from Underground is hardly what you’d call a masterpiece. So, how did he go from writing a great, interesting, flawed little book about Russian society to writing undeniable masterworks like Brothers Karamazov or Crime and Punishment? The unfortunate answer is hard work. True, he was born with the capacity for genius, but that doesn’t guarantee a masterpiece. The difference between young Dostoevsky and later Dostoevsky isn’t the result of a shift in the innate intellect of the author, but the result of years of craft that went into producing ever-greater works of art. You may be born with the capacity to create high works of art, but without the decades of toil and creative productivity, the genius has no way to express itself. Dostoevsky worked his way up to creating masterpieces, but he started from fairly humble origins, and that is one of the best lessons we writers can take to heart. Being the brightest smart-ass in a grad workshop isn’t the same as writing a genre-defining tome that will be studied and enjoyed for generations. Don’t mistake one for the other.

The other not-necessarily fiction writer I keep coming back to is Walt Whitman. His non-fiction Specimen Days has informed my style as much as Bukowski or Steinbeck or any of the Beats, and his descriptions of old New York and Civil War America are absolutely essential to understanding our cultural history. And, for understanding how lines work, how words can change shape and grow and shift infinitely, there’s nothing better than Leaves of Grass. His habit of spinning off long breathless lists of images and concrete details to expound on an idea, or to create an emotional sweep is something I definitely emulate. My more recent nonfiction works rely heavily on Whitmanesque litanies to create scene and mood, to document real world events I’ve been witness to.

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

“North Jutland Blues” by Wes Trexler

Found in Willow Springs 76 Back to Author Profile I SEE MYSELF next to a freeway onramp, leaning against a guardrail in Denmark. I don’t just see myself-it’s one of those … Read more

About Devin Becker

Devin Becker’s first book, Shame | Shame (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2015), was selected by David St. John as the winner of the 2014 A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize. He works as a librarian at the University of Idaho Library in Moscow, Idaho, where he lives with his wife, his daughter, and his dog.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on Ben Lerner Poems

My inspiration for these pieces is two-fold: 1) My jealousy of Ben Lerner and 2) My fascination with my own teenage years and Midwestern upbringing. The inspirations are intertwined. I am jealous of Ben Lerner partly because he’s in many ways the person I wanted so badly to become when I was in my late teens and early twenties: We are the same age. We both grew up in the Midwest—Lerner in Kansas; me in Indiana. We both went to well-known schools out east for college. We both wanted to be poets, writers. While I feel lucky to have done relatively well in the pursuit of this path (or as well as can be said of someone who now makes their living as a librarian in Idaho; OMFG WTF happened…), Lerner has achieved a kind of wild success, and deservedly so. I remember reading his first book, The Lichtenberg Figures, and being blown away (a response that Lerner has managed to garner from me with each subsequent book as well, that asshole). So not only did he achieve this success, he established early on that he was on that path.

And so I have had a somewhat complicated relationship in my head with Ben Lerner ever since I first encountered his work. This is doubly complicated by my own (possibly false and most definitely contrived-to-make-these-poems) belief that we share the similarly bleak cultural heritage of growing up in the pre-good-internet, 1990s Midwestern United States during the rise of the chain restaurant and big box store. And I call this upbringing bleak, but I keep wanting to go back to the sentence and delete the word “bleak” because at the same time there was something wonderful about what that type of experience does to someone, which is also what the poems explore, particularly the power of male friendships in that context.

And more generally, I also like the way “Ben” sounds, as it is repeated throughout these; I feel like it establishes a type of theme, like the tolling of a bell. My big dream for these and the other Ben Lerner poems I’ve written is to make them into a chapbook and enter that into a contest being judged by Ben Lerner so that the book would be called, if it won the contest, something like: Ben Lerner, Ben Lerner, Ben Lerner, and Other Poems, selected by Ben Lerner, and then of course Lerner would have a blurb on the back as well. I just think that would be really funny.

Notes on Reading

Part of a poem in my recent book, Shame | Shame, goes: “But I don’t trust big religions, I prefer little ones, like Reading. / Reading says, none of us, not one of us, is alone. / Reading says, we are speaking to each other even now from our little homes … ” I believe what I wrote. Reading is a type of religion, one made up of a certain type of person/reader for whom the act of reading has taken on a sort of transcendent importance in that it allows them relief from his/her self through participation in a tradition and community that connects people over large distances of time and space. That sounds a bit crazy/pedantic, I know. I also wouldn’t know exactly how to describe what constitutes my fellow believers in Reading, but I definitely know a fellow believer when I meet one.

But enough of the highfalutin. More importantly, what have I been reading:

In terms of fiction, I’ve been reading a great deal of post-apocalyptic books this year. I just finished Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, which I think is the best of what I’ve read so far, but I also read and enjoyed Edan Lepucki’s California and Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars. I find a great deal of peace in reading about the landscapes in these books. The violence and depravity found in this type of catastrophically driven environment is disturbing, to be sure, but I think the writers who do the genre well are able to capture a great deal of beauty in these altered landscapes as well. On a side note, this attraction to people-less landscapes is also what keeps me living in Idaho. (Please don’t move here; it’s beautiful.)

As for poetry, I’ve been rereading my fellow librarian/poet Philip Larkin lately. He’s a master; I will always have a great deal to learn from him. I have a number of poetry book stacks going as well, which always happens after AWP. Right now the main stack includes Richard Siken’s War of the Foxes, Cecily Parks’ O’Nights, Brian Blanchfield’s A Several World, Nin Andrews’ Why God is a Woman, Craig Morgan Teicher’s Ambivalence and Other Conundrums, and Erika Meitner’s Copia. I am finding each of these to be excellent in its own way. There is too much good poetry in the world these days.

Other excellent poetry books I’ve read this year include:

The Open Secret by Jenifer Moxley – If I were to write another series of poems to another contemporary poet, they would be to Moxley, whose work (including her giant memoir The Middle Room), I usually can’t put down once I start reading it;
The Errings by Peter Streckfus –like his first book, strange and beautiful;
Bugle by Spokane’s own Tod Marshall – dark, funny, formally fascinating and faithful to the Inland Northwest in a way I find admirable;
and This Can’t Be Life by Dana Ward – a mind-blowing work for me in both style and content.

I should mention that I read Lerner’s novel 10:04 this year, and disliked it through the first third until I got over myself and then really liked the rest, albeit slightly begrudgingly—this was not my best Reading moment, to be sure. I still prefer Lerner’s poetry, mainly because I learn a great deal from it as a poet. I think Mean Free Path is a particularly fascinating book, one that took me a long time to finally “get” but that really moved me when I finally found my way into it, which happened on a plane from Pullman, WA to Seattle very early one morning.
I also am lucky enough to work at a library, which allows for a type of serendipitous discovery of poets and books during the breaks I spend browsing the American Literature section (Call Number Range: PS 3550 -3576). My two big finds for this year so far are The Animals All Are Gathering by Bradley Paul and The Enormous Chorus by Frank Kuenstler. Both are books I can’t believe I didn’t know about previously to my happening upon them in the stacks.

Four Poems by Devin Becker

Found in Willow Springs 76 Back to Author Profile Ben Lerner Ben, my high school best friend, Ben, is nothing like you except you look very much like brothers. … Read more

About Lucas Southworth

Lucas Southworth’s stories are forthcoming from or have recently appeared in TriQuarterly, Mid-American Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Web Conjunctions, DIAGRAM, Meridian, and others. His collection of short stories, Everyone Here Has a Gun, was the winner of AWP’s Grace Paley Prize in 2012, and University of Massachusetts Press published the book in late 2013. He is also a professor of fiction and screenwriting at Loyola University Maryland and a co-partner at Slash Pine Press. Links to info on Everyone Here Has a Gun and other online work can be found at everyoneherehasagun.blogspot.com.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Copycats”

I wouldn’t describe writing as fun. I wouldn’t describe my stories as fun. But I enjoy writing when I’m doing it, and it’s probably the only time I can relax deep into my head where I’d spend all my time if the world would let me (thank you, world, for not letting me). For me, fiction is a way of extracting ideas from feelings and then twisting those ideas back to feelings. Feeling is probably a bad word for it, but I can’t think of a better one. What I’m referring to falls somewhere between sense and emotion and that thing that nags us, but it’s also pure and real and something that longs to be understood. My favorite writing by other authors falls willingly and unconsciously and sometimes effortlessly into that canyon between thought and feelings. As a writer, I constantly struggle with the divide. I think my work often documents that struggle as I strive, and usually fail, to push it over that edge.

“Copycats” contains an actual jump, an actual fall. It happened to an actual man who actually bought a plane ticket for an actual fake name. My version of the story started with a friend’s fascination. As we sat in a bar or maybe a steamy pho restaurant in the middle of winter, he explained what he knew about D.B. Cooper. I already felt removed, and I liked that feeling. I liked how the story was coming secondhand, and I liked how everything was actual and false at the same time. It wasn’t my story exactly, or my obsession, so I approached it with that skepticism and remove. I started with the disappearance and with those, like my friend, who connected with the disappearance—an actual that wasn’t actually there. I was drawn as much to Cooper’s copycats as I was to Cooper. Some were simply hijackers that came after, but the strangest were those that “confessed” to be him, often as a final, dramatic gesture on their deathbeds. One was even a woman who claimed she’d had a sex-change operation to conceal her/himself.

From what I could find, none of these people ever “proved” to be Cooper, and it struck me that if we were never going to reveal the actual hijacker or allow him to reveal himself, we were going to fill in his absence any way we could. In fact, maybe we preferred that. I wondered what caused these copycats to confess something that wasn’t theirs to confess. Why had they tried to take Cooper’s place? Why did they want to help him reappear? These questions didn’t have logical answers, probably, which is why I liked them so much. By the time I finished writing “Copycats,” I’d decided that Cooper had always set out to disappear. He must have known he could not spend the money, and he must have suspected that if he succeeded, nobody would ever see him again. If this thought was freeing for him before the hijacking, I wondered if that changed afterward. I imagined a diner—a timeless, American type of place—where all these copycats, all these different versions of Cooper, could meet. If they did, would some still be proud of what they’d done? Would some be filled with regret? And how much had they really disappeared over time? Would they allow themselves to recognize each other? Would they want others to recognize them? All this started as a feeling more than any kind of thought. I tried to form that feeling into something and then go back again.

Though I may not have had fun writing, Cooper was certainly a fun subject. He provided a mystery that couldn’t be solved, gaps that couldn’t be filled. I also couldn’t help but notice how as the writer of my version of his story, I was assuming the role of another copycat, and how readers would be doing the same. The decision to use second person came from that—from the image of more and more copycats rippling out from the center of the story.

Notes on Reading

I’ve been seeking out authors that are able to effortlessly bridge between thought and that indefinable feeling that I think is hinted at in the best fiction. Right now I’m reading the complete stories of Flannery O’Connor cover to cover. I love the way her messy moments and digressions are her most fascinating, and how somehow those moments still fit within the larger and unconscious logic of the story. I just read Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West too, and I think he’s able to find that space as well. On the absolute flipside, I’ve been teaching screenwriting and film this semester and thinking about classical story form. I’ve also been thinking about how elements of film must inform modern fiction, how those elements have become embedded in our story-telling consciousnesses, and how we can continue to learn from those strategies and use them. Critics have disputed this analogy, but I find it interesting think about, for example, how editing transfers to our use and understanding of the sentence, or how the framing of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines can work into my own descriptions and settings.

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

“Copycats” by Lucas Southworth

Found in Willow Springs 75 Back to Author Profile THE SUN WAS BRIGHT in the airport windows, shining through without any heat. At the counter you gave the name s you’d … Read more

About J. Robert Lennon

J. Robert Lennon is the author of seven novels, including Mailman, Familiar, and Happyland, and the story collections Pieces for the Left Hand and See You in Paradise. He teaches writing at Cornell University.

See more at jrobertlennon.com

A Profile of the Author

Notes on the stories

These pieces are part of an effort, throughout 2014, to do more of my writing by hand. I wrote them in coffee shops and bars—previously I didn’t seem to be able to do this. “Eleven” was a simple exercise in writing a two-sentence-long story; so was “Owl.” The latter story was inspired by a real event—my son was freaked out by something flying around in the barn, and it turned out to be an owl. It didn’t talk to me, though, when I freed it. “Eleven” is a riff on my own childhood OCD, though the actual events of the story are fictional. The Marriage stories are part of a suite of shorts about two awful people who are perfect for each other. These people are responsible for some of the most fun writing I’ve done this year. I adore the poor fuckers.

Notes on Reading

I actually don’t read enough. I’m too impatient. Reading more, or more consistently, is my only New Year’s resolution. I do, however, like to read broadly, rather than deeply; I won’t plough through an entire writer’s oeurve without a great deal of peer pressure. (I’m in a book group for that reason.) I’ll read almost anything when I do read, and often take inspiration from things that aren’t capital-L “literature.” I read a lot of comics in 2014, and some great science fiction. I also re-read Jane Austen. Actually, I think my work this past year lies somewhere inside a triangle formed by those three points.

Four Stories by J. Robert Lennon

Found in Willow Springs 75 Back to Author Profile Owl HIS SON WOULDN’T TAKE the garbage out to the barn because there was a bat, the boy said, flapping around out … Read more