Profiles – Page 8 – Willow Springs Magazine

Issue 75: Colin Pope

About Colin Pope

Pope grew up in Saranac Lake, New York. He holds an MFA from Texas State University, where he was the 2011-12 Clark Writer-in-Residence. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Slate, Harpur Palate, Texas Review, The Los Angeles Review, and Best New Poets, among others, and is currently a PhD candidate at Oklahoma State University, where he serves on the editorial board at Cimarron Review. He is at work on his first collection of poems.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on Two Poems

It’s funny to think about it now, but there was a time in the not-too-distant past when I disliked writing poems about myself. I suppose I thought it was antiquated or cliched or something, that the “I” was an overused mechanism. In any case, someone I love committed suicide and that changed real quick. It wasn’t a planned change or anything, but I couldn’t avoid myself anymore. It felt like my brain had been smashed across a floor and glued back together, and not all the pieces were there. Now I find it challenging to keep the “I” out of my poems.

I’ve written a number of poems about Jennie’s death, which took place five years ago. “Suspect” is about the actual moment when, after she was gone and the emergency personnel had arrived, I realized the officers were asking me questions as though I had something to do with it. They asked me where I was, what I’d been doing that night, who I’d been with. You’d think my first reaction would’ve been anger and frustration, but I was so devastated, so wide open, that I just wanted to help them. And being asked those questions was actually pretty calming. What they wanted were concrete answers, and it was nice to have something firm to lean against. The answers were real and comprehensible at a time when many things were not. This poem took about 3 years to write, not because it was hard work getting to the language but because it was hard work re-feeling those emotions and putting myself back in that living room with those cops.

“Phone Call to Plan Abortion, as Flood” is tough to discuss. But like many of the poems I write on personal tragedy, it helps if I have a metaphoric lens through which I can focus the experience. The reality of the emotional trauma is so indefinable and so amorphous that setting it against, say, a natural disaster, gives it shape and intelligibility. The speaker feels evil, the “she” feels overcome, and the emotional charge of the situation is so high that speech will inherently fail to provide comfort to anyone. It’s a situation in which everyone feels powerless, so the metaphor, in the end, focuses the reality in a way that is manageable. This is not to suggest that poems are therapeutic, but that the act of making the poem is at least a recognition that we’re human, that we’re trying to find meaning where it might not exist. Metaphor is human, I suppose, and it’s all we’ve got sometimes. But I always feel like my poems get a bit plain when I write in this mode. The question I end up asking myself is, “Does it sound true?” Which is an utterly ridiculous question to ask, really, since conveying “truth” is impossible to begin with, particularly in a poem.

Notes on Reading

It took me far too long to find Larry Levis, so I’m working my way through him right now. I bought Elegy a while back and it was one of those books that just sort of sat on the shelf. Then I finally picked it up a few months ago and *bang*. Now I’m going through everything of his I can find. I also keep preaching the word of Thomas James, which is a book I read when I was getting my MFA and still read often. Just when I thought Plath was inimitable, here comes this guy who just explodes on the page. Any poet who hasn’t read Letters to a Stranger should do so immediately. When I sit down to write, I usually have anywhere from eight to ten books on the desk. I leaf through them quickly and haphazardly, just to get my head into that world, and when I can’t read anymore I begin writing. Right now I have books by Anna Journey, Josh Bell, James L. White, Tomás Q. Morín, Ellen Bass, Henri Cole, Charles Simic, Sharon Olds, Louise Glück, and Levis on my desk. I also look for stuff online, in journals or on poetryfoundation.org or poets.org or any of the daily sites, like Writer’s Almanac. In my web browser right now, I have tabs with Terrance Hayes, Uche Nduka, and Andrew Hudgins open. I’ll usually leave these tabs open until my computer crashes. The idea is to literally bombard myself with poems until I’m compelled do one of my own. It’s kind of like looking at pictures of food or watching a cooking show. After a while, you get hungry, so you go in the kitchen and start opening your cupboards to see what you can make.

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Issue 74: Tom Howard

About Tom Howard

Tom Howard’s fiction has appeared recently in Quarter After Eight and Emrys Journal, and his stories have received the Tobias Wolff Award in Fiction, the Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Award, the Conium Review’s Innovative Short Fiction Award, and the Rash Award in Fiction. He lives with his wife in Arlington, Virginia, along with a strange, wonderful black dog named Harper.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Bandana”

I’d been working on another story for a while, this grim fantasy about the aftermath of a shooting, written from the perspective of a grieving father whose son had gone bad. The seriousness of the story just got to be too much for me. The father’s story felt too raw, his grief too complex for me to unwrap, and my whole approach just seemed unimaginative and obvious to me. I found myself writing around the tragedy, looking for other details to explore. I thought more and more about the son, and I kept coming back to this single idea: that we all start out good. We start off kind and vulnerable and trusting and goofy, with these fresh undamaged souls. I imagined the son, just a kid himself, knocking all that right out of another kid.

Notes on Reading

I’m a slow reader these days. I think it started when I discovered Pynchon, years back; it’s hard (and wrong) to read Pynchon quickly. But I’m trying to get faster, because I realized a few months ago that at the rate I’m going, I won’t actually live long enough to finish all the books on my reading list. It used to be that when I was in the middle of writing a story, I didn’t read much fiction because I worried about the influence on my own work. Now, I think it’s necessary just to keep me from getting boxed in and returning over and over to the same ideas and approaches.

I’m influenced by everyone, I think. Sometime it’s just a theme that resonates and sends me off on some tangent of my own, sometimes it’s the skill an author shows in teasing out character or subverting expectation, sometimes it’s just what a writer is able to do with a certain form. Last year, I read George Saunders’s “Sticks,” a two-page story from Tenth of December. You read that story and you shake your head, because you think it shouldn’t be possible for a two-page story to be so ridiculously moving. I wanted to understand how he was able to do that, to strip the story down to a narrative skeleton and still give it that kind of emotional richness. I realize the answer is, “Because he’s George Saunders,” but it got me experimenting with flash pieces myself, and trying to become more economical, to do more with every word.

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of short story writers. Karen Russell and Lorrie Moore, Saunders, DeLillo’s The Angel Esmerelda. I still have a stack of novels waiting for me, too, from Pynchon and Roth and Franzen and a dozen others. Plus, I still re-read a lot of old favorites: Vonnegut and Borges and Calvino and a lot of Shakespeare, which probably explains why the stack doesn’t get any shorter.

Willow Springs Cover 74 shows blue and brown paint smeared artistically across a rough surface.

“Bandana” by Tom Howard

Found in Willow Springs 74 Back to Author Profile OVER DINNER ONE NIGHT I told my dad about the League of Scorpions, just to break up the deathly silence. I told … Read more

About Doris Lynch

Doris Lynch was born in Pennsylvania but has lived in Indiana for the last 20 years. She’s also lived in an Inupiat village in Alaska (Kivalina), Indonesia, California, and Louisiana. She works as an adult services librarian and reviews poetry for Library Journal. She has one chapbook Praising Invisible Birds from Finishing Line Press and has won four Indiana Artist’s Commission grants for her writing. Her work has appeared in many literary magazines and in several anthologies.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Harvesting Crows”

“Harvesting Crows” was one of those rare poems that came out all of a piece. The writing flowed. The first draft was almost in its present form, leaving me to change only a few words, drop a few unnecessary phrases. I wrote it one night after walking, and I find my “night” poems more easily shed my writing censor— logical day me— allow escape to other places where the world has no logic, only images and emotions.

I’ve always been a feminist and that is an influence here, but also the poem is a gentle mocking of society’s expected gender roles— men are portrayed as outdoor chefs over their giant barbecue pits, spears (well, skewers) in hand, blood staining their aprons or in this case, their bare chests.

As for crows themselves, I’ve always loved crows: their communal fellowship, their keen intelligence, and wily survival skills. This is probably my eighth or ninth poem about crows. In winter they leave the nearby farm country and roost in high trees in town. During winter sunsets, they noisily converge from every direction and take over the neighborhood sycamores— gathering that always makes me stop and observe. Apologies to them for treating them rather brutally here, but I do so with great respect and besides the occasion is entirely fictional.

Notes on Reading

Reading provides inspiration, motivation, a call to arms (the keyboard), a sense of challenge, and ideas, ideas, ideas. It’s my travel ticket to exotic places and places down the road that I will never visit in person. It’s mainly how I learn and absorb the world. I read a lot, but I find that the Internet with its literary and political sites distracts from deeper book reading. Probably due to a lack of discipline on my part. But as a librarian and also because I love them, I read many novels so I can do what book people call readers’ advisory. Luckily, most library patrons can find the best sellers themselves, so I’m free to entice them to books that they might otherwise miss.

My favorite recent novel is The Light Between Oceans, a thrilling first novel by M. L. Stedman about a lighthouse keeper shortly after WW1 who finds a baby on an island off Australia. Other recent favorites are Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale For the Time Being, a novel that interweaves two stories: one of a young Japanese girl and the other of a North American writer who finds the girl’s diary as jetsam on the beach. Letters from Skye, by Jessica Brockmole, is one of those quirky epistolary novels about a poet living in a remote place in the early 1900s and the correspondence she develops with an American grad student from Illinois. Another wonderful take on life in a foreign country is Mohsin Hamed’s irreverent but utterly absorbing How to Get Filthy Rich in Asia, a fictional retake on the how-to genre.

Novels that describe life in other countries and time periods always draw me. Right now I’m reading one that combines both of these, Kathryn Ma’s The Year She Left Us about a Californian adoptee tracing her past in China and the States. Yiyun Li’s Kinder that Solitude tells the story of three people connected by family and residence in China, and the mysterious death of by poisoning of one. Li is a very perceptive writer who reveals people’s motivations and thoughts that they hide from those close to them.

Ever heard of Typhoon Mary? Mary Beth Keane wrote an inspired historical novel about her life called Fever. And the best war novel I have read in decades is Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds.

I love nonfiction too especially memoirs and writing about nature and travel. For our road trip this summer I have Paul Theroux’s The Tao of Travel that is a compendium of both his own travel writing and excerpts from many travel greats about all sorts of subjects from the inhospitable to edible food, travelers’ bliss and travelers’ ordeals, also the things they carried. Jeanette Winterson’s and Gail Caldwell’s memoirs are great reads as is Rebecca Mead’s paean to a great novel My Life in Middlemarch.

And I loved this biography that evoked the early days of our country from a woman’s point of view, Jill Lapore’s Book of Ages: the Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin.

And if you ever wondered what it would be like to be raised in a unique lifestyle, Joshua Safran’s Free Spirit: Growing up on the Road and off the Grid is a revelation. He shows that hippiedom was not all that it’s cracked up to be, in fact, for him it was something to survive with scarring.

Routinely, I scan the new poetry section also. This year my favorites were Gregory Orr’s The River Inside the River and Charles Wright’s Caribou. I’m fascinated by the forms of haiku and haibun and loved Haiku in English: the First Hundred Years edited by Philip Rowland, Allan Burns, and Jim Kacien.

Rebecca Lee’s Bobcat and Other Stories blew me away with the quality of her prose style and her interesting takes on reality. What a natural she is for the short story form.

Finally, (this list could go on and on) Sheri Fink’s chilling Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, a nonfiction book that could be a thriller, tells the extremely disturbing story of what happened at a hospital in New Orleans after Katrina struck. Reportedly, the medical staff there killed some of the oldest and weakest patients in the chaos that followed. The book paints a disturbing picture of what will happen, as more natural disasters caused by climate change strike because our preparation nationwide is weak and hardly formed. An afterward showed how the same thing nearly happened after Hurricane Sandy except that the electricity outage was much briefer.

“Harvesting Crows” by Doris Lynch

Found in Willow Springs 74 Back to Author Profile Only women can snag them and only females wearing red. Erroneously, many believe that you must prove yourself first by flying off … Read more

About Stacey Richter

Stacey Richter is the author of the short story collections My Date with Satan and Twin Study. She has received many prestigious and fancy literary awards, including a Pushcart Prize for the story “The Land of Pain,” first published in Issue 56 of Willow Springs.

http://dentfictionworkshop.blogspot.com/

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Mrs. Max Siegel’s Rules for Jewish Women”

I wrote this essay at the request of a young editor who was putting together a gift book of Jewish mother-themed essays. I’d never written a personal essay before (though I’ve pretended to), but I was excited when she said grandmothers could be included, too. This is because I am obsessed with my maternal grandmother, Eva Siegel, who died in 2001 and continues to visit my dreams with startling frequency. My fixation on her is somewhat mysterious to me, though it seems to revolve around many of the ideas I cover in the piece: notions of ladylikeness, certainty, the tension between one’s inner and outer self-presentation all anchored in the tense, confusing, and irreconcilable concept of womanhood. I thought I’d touch on my grandmother’s Jewishness, since it was the theme of the collection, but I was not especially intrigued by it. However, as I began to do research, I started to realize how important it was. I began to see how unique my grandmother’s childhood was, how singular and odd. In 1906, the year of her birth, most new immigrants from Europe settled into Jewish neighborhoods in eastern cities (not nearly as many went west). Being a Jew in Utah was remarkable enough, but growing up in the small town of Nephi as a member of the only Jewish family was truly exceptional. I began to realize how important Jewishness was to the formation of Eva’s character not necessarily Jewishness as a belief system (though it may have been that, too), but Jewishness as it was perceived by others since “others,” in this case, meant everyone outside her immediate family. She was profoundly an outsider. And because of this, she had a deep interest in keeping up appearances. I began work on the essay by making a list of colorful remarks I remember my grandmother saying, sentences lodged in my memory like stray bullets. I’m fascinated by utterances I can’t forget the power of words and the tenacity of memory can be so intense. Also, since I’m a bitter, unforgiving person, most of the things I remember are unpleasant. This automatically adds tension and conflict, which can be bad in life but is good in writing. A narrative began to hazily appear to me: I would move from Eva’s difficult obstinacy to the suffering and logic behind her meanness; she’d float from unsympathetic to sympathetic as the essay progressed. It would be like a camera lens pulling back, revealing more of a scene, until a picture emerges that, perhaps, is not what it first seemed to be. Quite promptly, these remembered sentences the idea of utterances and memory coalesced to form the structure and rhythm of the piece. It didn’t take me long to see I wanted it to be a series of rules hovering between white space on the paper. The form would follow the content: I wanted to explore the stubbornness and sense of certainty in Eva’s character, and rules are the fundamental language of unbending thoughts. But I liked how something about the white space undercuts this as well—white space is full of irony and silence; the gap allows for juxtaposition and the humor of contrast and repetition. In contrast to a rule, a pause allows the reader to stop, think, and doubt. There’s also something sad about blocks of text with blankness above and below. It implies endings, epitaphs, and the silence of the unspoken. Well, it turns out that all Jewish ladies, at a certain age, become obsessed with the Second World War (as do a lot of non-Jews), and what I ended up exploring far more than I anticipated was the idea of silence and the Holocaust. It wasn’t until after Eva died that I found the letters in the little escritoire in the living room, the ones from Grodno. (They weren’t hidden; I just hadn’t looked before. P.S. Some of those relatives didn’t live long enough to die in the Holocaust. That’s the most comforting thing I can say about that.) So the essay became much darker than I thought it would be. It no longer seemed like it was going to work in a gift book about Jewish mothers. As for the matter of how this essay connects with my larger work, I’ll defer to my dreams, since that’s where my grandmother and I now meet. Eva is usually in the kitchen; she’s old but much younger than when she died. She’s wearing a dress and an apron and moves on light feet, making her famous almond cookies. (In real life, no one else can make these cookies with any success, because even though we have the hand-printed recipe on a note card, no one has the patience to soften the butter, refrigerate the dough overnight, then cram it through a cookie press.) In my dreams, my grandmother is always silent, with no voice at all the settings may differ, but her silence is a constant. Also, she’s always dead. Each time, her deadness is a comfort and a jolt. Should I tell her she’s dead? She looks great; should I tell her she looks great when she’s dead? Is deadness good? I’m not the only woman who struggles with the silent, beautiful woman in the kitchen. I think most of us have a similar goddess of femininity in their heads a figure who seems to say that there’s a right way to be a woman, that there’s a template for it. But even if we have a clear, hand-printed recipe card, we still can’t get it right. We can’t put ourselves behind, we can’t make ourselves shut up, we can’t keep our nails from breaking and our hair from escaping the pins and anger from spewing out of our mouths. And why would we want to? Because we’re women.

On Reading

Reading has always been an important part of my life, but I used to approach it as a sane person would. Now, I am a disturbed addictI do it first thing in the morning, I sneak away, I hide it, my relationships suffer. This began around the time I stepped on my Kindle which had not charmed me away from paper and replaced it with the sublime Kindle Paperwhite, which almost has. I just finished Robinson Crusoe and The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. Those are the shortened titles. They’re actually called The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates; and The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe; Being the Second and Last Part of His Life, And of the Strange Surprising Accounts of his Travels Round three Parts of the Globe, respectively. Isn’t that awesome? I love how the second title shows restraint. I keep a journal of the books I’ve read, in which I note what I find interesting, disappointing, and amazing. I’d say most of this falls into the category of craft. In the last few years, this has evolved into a more quixotic project where I treat every book every novel anyway as though I’m an editor and it’s my task to figure out how to make it better. This is time-consuming and I may have to give it up, but I kind of love doing it. Like a lot of writers, I basically exist in a fantasy world, and in this alternate universe, I’m a superhero charged with making the world fall in love with fiction again (I’d like a hatchet and a bottle of lye for every person who’s told me they only read nonfiction because they “like information”). If people are willingly foregoing a deep participation in language, metaphor, and meaning in favor of Civil War histories and the brass tacks of marketing, then something is out of balance. So this is important work I’m doing, mentally. I must to do it with great assiduousness in order to make the world safe for books and enticing for readers. When I finish a book, I write down what I liked best usually this is something odd, with a metaphorical meaning or meaning that drifts in an intriguing way. I love how Defoe’s servant, Friday, calls praying “saying O,” as in, “Why you no say O to your maker?” Sometimes it’s more of a narrative strategy, like Defoe’s propensity for revealing what’s going to happen ahead of time (he’s “deliver’d by Pyrates”). But mostly, when I’m mentally editing, I’m concerned with what makes a book work as a whole. This doesn’t mean I’m only interested in characters and plots, since what makes a book work often happens on the level of the sentence or the paragraph. After all, we’re really only paying attention to what’s in front of us on the page when we’re reading. If there’s enough momentum, who needs a plot? To me, considering the whole is synonymous with considering the storytelling, and storytelling is something I’m constantly trying to grasp (I am no cocktail party raconteuse). When I take a step back and consider the story arc of an original, wonderful novel, sometimes it becomes clear that the story is pretty basic. This isn’t bad! It just means the complexity comes from somewhere else, particularly from the way the story unfolds. I’ve started to suspect that the only fundamental difference between a riveting tale and a stale one is timing. That’s why knowing how and when to give vital information is an art. I don’t mean plot points, though that can be part of it; mostly I’m talking about the sense of mystery and forward motion and narrative pleasure that comes when you don’t yet know everything in a book, a paragraph, or a sentence and how to pull this off without the more tiresome forms of narrative tension, like cliffhangers and clock-racing (though I do love Cinderella). When a writer doles out information with skill, we enjoy not-knowing. We sense that we’ll be satisfied eventually, even if it’s not in the way we expect. And when it’s done with skill, it’s also invisible. So I grapple with the mechanics of how good forward motion is created in the books I read (or isn’t created). I’ve managed to grasp a few of the ways: it can come in the form of foreshadowing in all its varieties, through strategic absences that arouse our curiosity, through paragraphs with strong first sentences and surprising last words, and by musical sentences that keep us reading through the force of rhythm and the need for resolution. A beautiful, tidy example of a strategic absence is how Mary McCarthy lets time elapse between chapters in The Group. There’s always an ellipsis between one chapter and the next; sometimes a day goes by, but often it’s months or years. McCarthy keeps jumping ahead in time, and the reader can’t help but wonder what’s happened to the characters during the gap. David Markson also uses strategic absences brilliantly, and he has an entirely different method. His fiction is made up entirely of short, stanza-like sections that are only obliquely related to one another (if they’re related at all). The effect of so many isolated paragraphs is that meaning accrues through juxtaposition and absence as much as through what he actually says. Markson seems to have influenced me in the writing of “Mrs. Max Siegel’s Rules for Jewish Women.” I say seems to because it’s difficult to know exactly what influence is or what it feels like, short of sitting down at the computer and saying, “Now I will write my own version of Moby Dick.” Pretty much all art is based on other art, but influence is so diffuse and unconscious, so mixed up with one’s own personality, that it’s difficult to trace. I think it’s only possible to be influenced by a writer who’s already on your wavelength. I can read John Updike all day long, but I’m never going to write like him: our sensibilities are too different. As for how my imaginary editing job/reading journal has affected my writing, it has certainly slowed me down. I have to wade through all the notations in my brain. A lot of writers use their strengths automatically, following their inner sense of language and narrative without agonizing over how they got there. Whereas I sort of take everything apart, then try to put it together again. It’s kind of like those geeky guys who learn how to pick up girls by studying the nuances of human behavior so they can reproduce it in a natural way. But even if it does slow me down, it’s important to me to know my choices. I want to know how I can begin and end things if I get stuck; I want to know how to keep something moving without pandering, and I want to know how to create meaning without hitting the reader over the head with fixed interpretations. Most of all, when I write, I want to be able to use my intelligence as well as my gut.

A Eulogy to Axed Rants: The only sentence that survived in the final draft [of my Notes on Reading] was the one about a hatchet and lye, which gives you some idea of my frame of mind. The rants had to go, but it pained me to axe them. If you don’t mind, I’d like to honor each one with a short eulogy.
Here are my dead: A love letter to the Kindle Paperwhite, likening it to a glowworm. A diatribe against non-readers singling out non-reading MFA students who nonetheless have time to get out of bed to analyze their twitter feeds. A rebuke of television, particularly long-form television dramas, which everyone seems to love because now they get to watch soap operas at night. A poetic, deeply felt passage about language, thought, and metaphor, in which I said some fancy stuff about the symbolic realm, etc. A long, bragging list of all the books I’ve plowed through on my latest reading tear. It included the word “stygian.” A tribute to the movie Blade Runner; this mostly covered the topic of eyeballs. I said some bad things about the Pulitzer Prize. A vigorous invective against/paean to the internet. Gum-chewing porn was mentioned in it, by me, as well as two-day delivery with Amazon Prime, OCD, and God. An audit of the peculiar-yet-necessary items I’ve been able to obtain on the internet (a ceramic dog wearing an Elizabethan collar), as well as the unlikely skills I’ve picked up on YouTube (dismantling the dishwasher to reveal the pile of compost rotting at the bottom). A long paragraph with very little punctuation on the subject of craft, as well as an interrogation of the word “craft.” Also the phrase: Death, death, death, with no elaboration. Rest in piece, rants. Yours truly, Stacey

“Mrs. Max Siegel’s Rules for Jewish Women” by Stacey Richter

Found in Willow Springs 73 Back to Author Profile A JEWISH WOMAN SHOULD BE modern, educated, and cosmopolitan; this will be signaled by the modern, educated, and cosmopolitan fragrance of Chanel … Read more

About Matthew Gavin Frank

Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of the nonfiction books Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and Its First Photographer (forthcoming 2014 from W.W. Norton: Liveright), Pot Farm, and Barolo, the poetry books The Morrow Plots, Warranty in Zulu, and Sagittarius Agitprop, and the chapbooks Four Hours to Mpumalanga and Aardvark. He teaches creative writing in the MFA Program at Northern Michigan University, where he is Nonfiction Editor of Passages North. This winter, he prepared his first batch of whitefish liver ice cream. It paired well with onion bagels.

More Matthew Gavin Frank

Matthew Gavin Frank’s Homepage
Read an excerpt from Pot Farm (University of Nebraska Press).
Read an excerpt from Barolo (University of Nebraska Press).
Matthew Gavin Frank at Black Lawrence Press.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “The Putting Down of the Mint Julep”

“The Putting Down of the Mint Julep” is part of a book in progress, tentatively titled, “Foood: 50 States, 50 Essays, 50 Recipes” (Yes: three Os). I’m hoping to stitch together this weird, lyrical, anti-cookbook cookbook of sorts. Each essay begins with a similar line of questioning, rooted in the state at hand, and its (perhaps strange) relationship to a particular food or drink often associated with said state: What does the mint julep mean? What does Kentucky mean? What ancillary subjects will I have to engage in order to grapple toward something that resembles an answer to these questions, however illusory and soft at the edges? Who will I have to uncover as interview subjects along the way? Sometimes, I’ll keep making phone calls and sending emails until I find someone who has worked at a bowling ball factory. Sometimes, the guy who worked at the bowling ball factory will serendipitously present himself, and redirect the essay in progress. So, the uncle in this piece is a composite character—one part my uncle, many parts other people’s uncles.

Oddly, many of these essays, even while having fun with form and digression, seem to gather peculiar little meditations on violence. It seems that if you scratch a state, you’ll find blood. If you scratch a beverage people like to drink while watching horses run really fast, you’ll find bone. To what degree is Kentucky at fault? To what degree is a specific breed of violence inherent in state “genetics,” in environment? To what degree does Kentucky’s ornamentation (the muddler, the sugar, the bowling pin, the horses on the television) impact the obsessions and moods of its inhabitants? Of course, when I sat down to cobble together a first draft of “Julep,” I had no idea as to the shape and trajectory of the essay; no idea what the fulcrum of the essay would look like, outside of Kentucky and Mint Julep—the springboards. When the ancillary subjects began attaching themselves, like burrs onto pant cuffs, to these springboards, the essay first became very expansive, until it had to be girdled in subsequent drafts. It’s so exciting when things like racehorse injuries and bowling ball names and ruined fingers and the implications inherent in crushing something to extract its best flavor begin to present themselves as viable digressive avenues, as stabs at some (illusory, soft-at-the-edges) truth.

I’m ever looking to find connections between seemingly dissimilar things in my work. How does the story of my first kiss relate to Alberto Santos-Dumont (the balloonist and dirigible pioneer) and locusts? I want to find out. I write essays, in part, to find such things out. Of course, we have allowed ourselves the power to manipulate connections between just about anything, via sufficient research, alchemy, contemplation . . . What is that perfect “bridge” ingredient that joins my lips, Dawn Liebermans’s lips, a blimp that ran on castor oil, and insectile plague? What does the archetypal first kiss have to do with flight, death? The journey to find out often embodies this weird, and addictive, bumping and grinding between moony incantation and mundane stakeout.

Notes on Reading

It’s funny: if I’m in New York City, by my third day there, I’ll start speaking with a New York accent. I may even start swaggering when I walk. If I’m in Memphis, I’ll be damned if by mid-week, I won’t start saying y’all. I know I’m not fooling anybody, yet I can’t help it. It’s almost malign how easily I succumb to particular strains of mimicry. Sometimes I feel like Zelig, from the Woody Allen movie. Certain books work on me that way, get into my bloodstream, affect not only the ways in which I’ll talk to my wife over dinner (both in choice of subject matter and diction), but also how I’ll kiss her goodnight, how I’ll plump my tongue, how I’ll blink against the pillowcase, what I’ll dream about afterward. Books work on me physically.

I often return to Norman Dubie’s poetry collection The Mercy Seat. I love Dubie’s poems for their drama, their characters, their social conscience, and their hilarity; how they combine the weirdest-ever lost episodes of PBS’s Nova with the joy inherent in the telling of a fabulously bad joke. I’ve been reading a lot of essay collections lately. “The Putting Down of the Mint Julep,” in its compulsion to interrogate, worships at the altar of Albert Goldbarth’s Many Circles. I remember reading Ander Monson’s Neck Deep and Other Predicaments a couple of years ago in my old backyard, and looking up from the page, bemused, as if I was now given the language necessary to crack the code in the patterns of bird shit on my car’s hood. After reading that book, I felt as if I understood the world a little bit better, or at least I was given permission for my confusion. Eula Biss’s Notes from No Man’s Land blows my mind every time I return to it. Elena Passarello’s Let Me Clear My Throat has its fingernails in me. That book, in examining the human voice via various lenses, exemplifies the dichotomy that lives in so many of my favorite essays: the sort of obsessive laser focus on a singular thing that compels the author to keep asking question after question about that thing, and the expansive subject matter attached to such singular meditations. Her essays breathe, send out feelers, and return to their sources a little more dazed than when they left. Passarello’s book stresses that in order to get at the center of the singular, we need multiple interrogations.

When I’m struggling with a piece, hitting a wall—when I feel like I have a poem or essay in my chest or the back of my throat that I need to dislodge, and it’s just not coming—I turn to my animal books, often the Audubon Field Guides to birds and fish. They almost always help me to shake something loose. There’s something about glossy bird or fish photos, their skeletal diagrams, their spectacular mating habits, that sets me to jotting something down.

“The Putting Down of the Mint Julep” by Matthew Gavin Frank

Found in Willow Springs 73 Back to Author Profile THIS SORT OF SIPPING has nothing to do with the martini, or anything as astringent as olive, resinous as juniper. This is … Read more

About Joseph Millar

Joseph Millar’s first collection, Overtime (2001) was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. A second collection, Fortune, appeared in 2007. Millar grew up in Pennsylvania, attended Johns Hopkins University, and spent 25 years in the San Francisco Bay Area working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. It would be two decades before he returned to poetry. His poems—stark, clean, unsparing—record the narrative of a life fully lived among fathers, sons, brothers, daughters, weddings and divorces, men and women. His work has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2008 Pushcart Prize, and has appeared in such magazines as DoubleTake, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, APR, and Ploughshares. In 1997 he gave up his job as a telephone installation foreman to try his hand at teaching. His most recent collection is Blue Rust(2012, Carnegie Mellon). He teaches in Pacific University’s low-residency MFA and lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on Two Poems

I once worked as a surveyor’s helper with a man who’d gone to high school with Antioch, California’s Mitchell brothers, who had their own studio and their own chain of movie houses, and whose O’Farrell Theatre still operates in San Francisco’s Polk Gulch. The Mitchells’ rise to success came to an end when Jim shot Artie to death in 1985. I wrote a poem for them—I still think they were an American phenomenon. My friend from the survey crew told me stories of the way they had to defend their turf and the way they had to scuffle. Most of their henchmen were ex-high school pals from Antioch, a small town up in the Sacramento Delta. The great Baltimore Colts lineman Gino Marchetti, who played with Unitas and Lenny Moore, also came from there. My friend was proud to have known the Mitchells.

Anyway, this led me into further study of porn stars, their lives and their ways of survival. I found that many of them live in the LA suburb of Van Nuys and that many of them (including the actor John Holmes, mentioned in the poem) were addicts. And that there’s quite a high rate of suicide among them. The holy grail for a porn director like Gerard Damiano or Jim Mitchell is an attractive woman willing to go through the physical and emotional ordeal of being a porn star. It was hard for me to imagine the lives of these women—women like Linda Lovelace, Traci Lords, Marilyn Chambers, to name three who eventually escaped—how difficult their lives must have been. No surprise there’s a lot of drug use, just as there is in prostitution.

So these thoughts went into that poem, under the surface of it: the narrator watching women in springtime, the undercurrent of sexual fantasy. The phrase “cleanliness of porn stars” came from an exercise suggested by my friend Jay Nebel. Its free verse structure is not based on anything more than random association of thought, though the images of rainwater and trees seemed to lend themselves easily to the subject. Its syntax is basically straightforward, driven by the repetition of the phrase “This time of year.”

“1972” is really just a nostalgic fragment for an old saloon outside Philadelphia, where I hung out as a young man. I think many of us, maybe men in particular, share this memory of a place one could go to pass the time in the company of like-minded knuckleheads, before adult life grabbed hold of us and we became more “stable” and “mature.”

Notes on Reading

Reading for me is pretty much a constant. I’m always reading something. Like most of us, I guess. I just finished Gabriel García Márquez’s Of Love and Other Demons and McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, his prize-winning study of the Civil War. I’m still struggling to understand North Carolina, this state where I now live, which has recently turned back the clock to the ’40s on everything from women’s rights to voters’ rights to education. These reactionary politics were never far from the surface here, and now they have exploded into full view. It makes one question whether the Civil War ever really ended. Bill Moyers recently did a frightening special on North Carolina, which you can find on his website, I think.

Poetry I’m reading now: Kwame Dawes’s Duppy Conqueror, David St. John’s Auroras, Chris Howell’s Gaze. Also The Poetics of Reverie: Gaston Bachelard and Denise Levertov’s The Poet in the World.

Two Poems by Joseph Millar

Found in Willow Springs 73 Back to Author Profile Next to Godliness I like to sit with the door wide open listening to March rain gush down on my street wearing … Read more

Online Exclusive: A Conversation with Joseph Millar

Works in Willow Springs 79, 86 , and 58 April 21, 2006 Jeremy Halinen and Zachary Vineyard A CONVERSATION WITH JOSEPH MILLAR Photo Credit: dodgepoetry.org RAISED IN PENNSYLVANIA, JOSEPH MILLAR RECIEVED … Read more

About Gary Copeland Lilley

Gary Copeland Lilley is the author of four poetry collections: Alpha Zulu (Ausable Press, 2008), Black Poem (Hollyridge Press, 2005), The Reprehensibles (Fractal Edge Press, 2004), and The Subsequent Blues (Four Way Books, 2004). He teaches in Port Townsend, Washington.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “A Proper Elegy for My Father”

I’m the oldest son, the oldest sibling, and I have had a contentious relationship with my father. I left home as soon as I could to get clear of this man, and stayed gone for many years. When we crossed each other’s path at family gatherings, the back history we shared and the resulting tension would ruin most occasions. So I would choose not to cross his path. I remember everything bad about him. I may have had some love for him, but I personally didn’t like him. We made a settled peace, to each give respect to the other, and lived like that for years. Then he died. And there was a hole in me. All his friends mourned him. The depths of their grief surprised me. Rough men broke down, and church people, a crowded church, prayed and sang him home. I already was mourning, shook by this departure of a man who had first left long ago. Then a flood of better memories came. Some Southern black man heroic things he’d done. And the more pleasant times of our shared fierce existence, like hunting with him in the early morning woods. I wanted to write something showing the teetering balance of his life, those things that would bring scorn upon my radicalized growth, those things that would make grown men weep at his being gone. I wanted to give him respect.

Notes on “Tobacco Road”

Lately I’ve been reading or reading again poets Yusef Komunyaaka, Tim Seibles, Amiri Baraka. I love storytellers, the narrative element. So of course I read fiction, too. Southern Gothic mostly, people like William Gay. There is a musicality in Southern language that fascinates me. I don’t force a dialect, but I sometimes like to recreate the language that falls on my ear. It marks class and race for the “speakers” of the poems without me saying so. I keep a load of images that I come across in my everyday life that I will draw from, the way somebody moves, the natural environment (whether it’s rural or urban), or the altered environment. I note situations that can be developed into poems. I’m a witness and I use observations. Whatever it is that I use I try to serve that particular poem. At the start I am never sure where the poem is going. I don’t want to know. The sense of discovery is exciting to me as I build my drafts. And there are many drafts of each poem. If I tell you how many, you may think I am obsessive-compulsive. I am not, except when I write.

“Tobacco Road & A Proper Elegy for My Father” by Gary Copeland Lilley

Found in Willow Springs 73 Back to Author Profile A Proper Elegy for My Father He is the black Marlboro man, the oldest son of a one-legged, gold tooth rounder. … Read more

About Cate Marvin

Cate Marvin’s third book of poems, Oracle, is forthcoming from Norton in 2014. She is Professor of Cate_Marvin_author_pic-243x366English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, and co-directs VIDA: Women in Literary Arts.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “An Etiquette for Eyes”

“An Etiquette for Eyes” showcases a lot of ugly emotions, jealousy being at the forefront. The speaker is merciless in her appraisal of the beloved (who, for obvious reasons, has decided to move on), and stinging in her assessment of an innocent woman with whom he has shared a drink. The poem launches from that moment—the speaker appalled that this man she’s fancied has the nerve to drink a drink she bought him with another woman (who does not pose much of a threat). One can also infer that the speaker has purchased this drink as a means to purchase his attention.

The opening lines, along with the sense of the poem’s form in general, came to me in the first draft. I wanted the short lines and their disorienting breaks to hand the reader down through a series of what appear to be nonsensical connections, only to arrive at the bottom—which is very much a pit—and be faced with the present state of the speaker’s psyche. At which point, she launches into her ad hominem(feminem?) attack. Here, I aim for a humorous affect.

The rest of the poem follows a somewhat different trajectory. Anyone with brown eyes knows the drill. The majority of people the world over have brown eyes, yet there exists an insufferable number of people with “blue,” “green,” and “hazel” (groan) eyes who love to endlessly elaborate upon how changeable the colors, hues, and shades of their respective eyes vary with light, the colors they wear, etc. Being on the listening end of this species of self-appraisal can be pretty tedious when your own eyes can only be described as “brown.”

I wanted the eyes to wander all over the poem, hence the final big stanza in which the speaker’s eyes try very hard to make the beloved look back at her, to only then compare them to the eyes of the objectified milk-maids’ eyes that look away from the eyes that ogle their breasts. That was a weird moment to arrive at in writing the poem. For me, it reveals the speaker’s tantrum comes not just from disgust, but also from desperation and desire. She is not only trying to face her plainness, but celebrate it, to say what is special about her—and, ironically, to convince the object of her (hostile) affections to take her seriously.

In a sense, the poem is quite simple. It’s an argument for being ordinary, launched against an individual the speaker once regarded as extraordinary.

Notes on Reading

You are what you eat. My reading informs everything I write. I believe deeply that, through the act of writing, one takes part in the literary continuum. And that this engagement is holy.

“An Etiquette for Eyes” could not have arrived at its form without my having inventoried the poetry of Robyn Schiff, author of Worth and Revolver. The manner in which her line operates taught me enjambment can be worked like a slingshot. It’s my opinion that the muscularity and her sheer inventiveness with form make her one of the best poets writing today.

“An Etiquette for Eyes” by Cate Marvin

Found in Willow Springs 72 Back to Author Profile I don’t know if l wore glasses when I met you but I know the last time I saw you … Read more

Issue 75: A Conversation with Cate Marvin

Interview in Willow Springs 75 Works in Willow Springs 72 February 26, 2014 Kristin Gotch, Stephanie McCauley, Kate Peterson A CONVERSATION WITH CATE MARVIN Photo Credit: Ploughshares blog “How I … Read more

About Ann Pancake

A native of West Virginia, Ann Pancake is the author of a short story collection, Given Ground, winner of the 2000 Bakeless Fiction Prize, and last year’s novel, Strange As This Weather Has Been (2007), which, according to Rick Bass, “crackles with this century’s great white background noise of loss, greed and dishonesty.” Pinckney Benedict refers to Pancake as a writer “who sees with a lover’s generous heart, with a prophet’s steel-hard gaze.” Pancake’s rhythmic prose creates what she calls “background music” to her stories. Rooted in her Appalachian heritage, her fiction weaves precise language with vivid attention to place and complexity of character.

Ann Pancake graduated summa cum laude from West Virginia University, obtained her MA in English from the University of North Carolina, and earned a PhD in English from the University of Washington. She has taught in Japan, American Samoa, and Thailand, and her numerous publishing credits include The Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Glimmer Train, Antietam Review, Quarterly West, and New Stories From the South. She’s been awarded a Tennessee Williams Scholarship in Fiction, a Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writers’ Fellowship Grant, the 2003 Whiting Award, the Glasgow Prize, and fellowships from the states of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Washington.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Our Own Kind”

I am primarily a fiction writer, so when I heard so strongly the first lines of an essay instead, I was surprised. Once I imaginatively placed myself in this frigid winter landscape right around the house where I grew up, the early drafts came fairly easily. I had a terrible time with the ending, but that’s typical of my work. I returned to the draft off and on for years, hoping that an ending would come intuitively, but it never did. I cobbled together this one with some advice from a very wise friend, and I think it’s passable, but I’m still not satisfied with it. What was hardest for me to understand was the relationship between the meditations on the natural world and those on gender.

As I wrote, I worried constantly about my brother’s reaction to this piece. I knew I couldn’t publish it without his okay, and because I was scared to show it to him, I contemplated not publishing it at all. Fortunately for me, even though it was a very emotional read for him, Sam generously gave it his blessing.

Notes on Reading

My writing usually comes to me by ear, so I am nourished by reading language-driven fiction and nonfiction. I am increasingly disappointed by the bulk of novels and short stories put out by commercial presses, who run for their lives when they see music or inventiveness in prose because they assume that makes the writing less accessible, thus less saleable. Fiction without music, in my opinion, is crippled fiction, art trying to function in two dimensions when three or more are available to it. I find myself searching for lesser-known presses and authors in hopes of finding the fuel I need for my own writing. Poetry helps, and I return again and again to older works, especially the Modernists or those influenced by Modernism. Faulkner, Jean Rhys, and Marguerite Duras are stalwarts, as are Toni Morrison, James Agee, Jayne Anne Phillips, Breece Pancake, Keri Hulme, and early Cormac McCarthy. The best contemporary novel I’ve read in years is Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward. One of the most beautiful new ones I read before that was Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys.

“Our Own Kind” by Ann Pancake

Found in Willow Springs 71 Back to Author Profile IF THEY CALL ME ANYTHING behind my back, they call me tomboy. For my brother, they have many names. Where we live, … Read more

Online Exclusive: A Conversation with Ann Pancake

Found in Willow Springs 84 and 71 April 20, 2007 Nicholas Arnold and Michael Beccam A CONVERSATION WITH ANN PANCAKE Photo Credit: garev.uga.edu A NATIVE OF WEST VIRGINIA, Ann Pancake … Read more

About Susan McCarty

Susan McCarty’s stories and essays have appeared in The Iowa Review, the Utne Reader, The Collagist, Conjunctions, Indiana Review, Willow Springs, and other journals. Once upon a time, she was an assistant editor at Penguin and Avalon Books. More recently, she’s been an administrative fellow for FC2, an artist-in-residence at VCCA and a Steffensen-Cannon scholar. She has an MFA from Vermont College and a PhD from the University of Utah. She teaches creative writing at Salisbury University.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Fellowship”

When I started “Fellowship,” I was working on a story about a group of high school newspaper journalists, which was somewhat inspired by the wonderful Sam Lipsyte story “The Dungeon Master” in terms of dorkiness and youthful obsession. After trying to get my story off the ground several times, I was ready to give up on it. To my ear it sounded too autobiographical, sentimental and anecdotal, like a story someone would tell at a high school reunion. Nostalgia is a tricky thing to wield: it can be a touchpoint for emotion, but it can also be shlocky, or worse, boring to everyone who is not you, like when you try to explain a really great dream to someone. So I backed up and thought about what I wanted to explore in a story set in my own teenagerhood (high school in Iowa in the ’90s): I wanted to tell the story of a girl who is really starting to struggle against the values of the culture around her in a way that was bound up with, but not directly caused by, her parents’ impending divorce. I wasn’t interested in revisiting specific details or scenes from my own life, but I did draw on my own emotional experience of my parents’ divorce when I was eighteen. I was interested in that moment when everything seems to be stretched to the breaking point, that moment right before the release of this person into the world, just before her escape. But I was uninterested in moralizing that tension. Sometimes it feels like every story about a teenage girl who has sex ultimately ends with the girl dropping out of high school, pregnant and alone and, yes, that’s a reality for some girls, but ultimately the dominance of that narrative in our culture speaks more to a fear of female sexuality and the resulting desire to control it.

I’m interested in another narrative, where girls have sex and parents and boyfriends disappoint them, and life goes on. In those ways, this story engages with some of my most favorite and recurring motifs: separation, abandonment, and how the (often sexual) body fields these losses. I can’t usually pull fancy French theorists out of the air, but I just started A Lover’s Discourse the other day, and in it Roland Barthes writes, “The love story…is the tribute the lover must pay to the world in order to be reconciled with it.” This is so wonderful because it acknowledges the raw-edged back seam to every love story, which is a loss that makes a reconciliation necessary, even if that loss is simply the loss of the self to love. I recognized in this quote something about what I’m often working toward in my own writing—an exploration of the emotional risk of all kinds of love.

Notes on Reading

I’m probably only slightly exaggerating when I say, like so many writers, reading is my primary experience of the world. It’s a strange thing to realize, at a young age, when you’re stuck in a sidewalkless subdivision in the middle of a cornfield and everyone in your house is yelling all the time, that books are so much better than real life, but that’s how it goes. We become writers because it’s how we know how to live and be involved in the world we’ve chosen for ourselves. For me, without reading there isn’t any writing. Everything I read is all potentially influential and disruptive but I really like that—I like feeling like my own voice and style are constantly shimmering in response to what I’m reading that day or month or year. I read 124 books for my PhD exams a couple of years ago, and as I read, I felt pulled in all these different directions—one day I was reading Middlemarch and the next day it was the Ethiopian Story. I’d read Blood and Guts in High School in the morning and Pamela at night. It was really wonderful for all this stuff to be jammed into my brain together without regard for genre, taste, school, or period, and it really opened my eyes to how utterly strange fiction is. I mean, it’s self-aware and it folds time and space, and makes a little world for you which you may visit and leave at will. It’s witchcraft.

All that reading has allowed me to find inspiration in some unexpected places. One of the things I loved about Jane Eyre when I read it during my exam year was how Jane had to wander through so many different genres—Gothic, conversion tale, fairy tale, ghost story, hagiography, etc.—in this heroic, Odyssean way in order to get back to her home and her proper love story with Rochester. Inspired by that plot, I’m mixing genres in my own novel-in-progress. In it, different characters are trapped in different genres of their own making (for one character it’s an unpromising romance, for another character, it’s a murder mystery without a murder) and the conflicts in the novel arise from these generic clashes and failures. Right now, I’m reading A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes, which is helping me rethink and reclaim my own work as love stories. I’m actively trying to read more poetry these days, too, because it’s also magic and I think it sharpens my word and sound brain. I just re-read my friend Tim O’Keefe’s beautiful book The Goodbye Town to help with the sharpening and to spend time with him even though he lives 800 miles away. Recently, I’ve found We the Animals by Justin Torres to be a stunning reminder of the new and different things stories and novels can do.

Fellowship by Susan McCarty

Found in Willow Springs 71 Back to Author Profile Seafood Night EVERY FRIDAY AROUND FIVE, we stack the sun chairs in the pump room of the Maple Hills Country Club and watch … Read more