Profiles – Page 9 – Willow Springs Magazine

Issue 71: Alexandra Teague

About Alexandra Teague

Alexandra Teague’s first book, Mortal Geography (Persea 2010), won the 2009 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and the 2010 California Book Award for Poetry. Her poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2008 and Best American Poetry 2009, as well as journals including The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, and FIELD. She earned an MFA from The University of Florida in 1998 and was a 2006-2008 Stegner Fellow at Stanford and a 2011 NEA Fellow. She is Assistant Professor of Poetry at University of Idaho and an editor for Broadsided Press.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Transcontinental”

“Transcontinental” came out of research that I was doing about mid-to-late 19th century Westward expansion for my manuscript-in-progress, The Wise and Foolish Builders. The project originally began with my interest in Sarah Winchester’s story: her building—supposedly out of guilt over deaths caused by the Winchester rifle—a six-acre house in San Jose, California. While imagining her move from Connecticut to California in the 1880s, I became interested in the transcontinental railroad, which had been completed only a little over a decade before. At some point in my internet research, I ran into the story of Theodore Judah, who was one of the first great champions of the transcontinental railroad’s feasibility, and the one who plotted the northern route through Donner Pass that was eventually used. The idea of his being called “Crazy Judah” appealed to me—partly because Sarah Winchester has gone down in history as a crazy woman guided by ghosts to build her house, and partly because I’m interested in how often the architects of new plans are considered crazy at the time, then accepted, and then largely forgotten by history. So I started with a poem called “Crazy Judah,” and research in Stephen E. Ambrose’s Nothing Like It in the World, and I quickly started discovering all kinds of quotations and ideas that needed their own poems. So I kept adding jottings for starts of sections, and pretty soon, I had ten sections that I worked and reworked off and on for about four months.

Notes on Reading

I feel extremely fortunate to be a poetry professor these days and to get to spend much of my time having conversations with students about books. This past semester, I taught a Techniques of Poetry course at University of Idaho, and the books we read for that class have undoubtedly shaped my thinking about poetry and this manuscript. I go through phases (such as summer break) when I often read in the mornings for a few hours and then start writing, but during the academic year, I really only get one writing day a week, so all the reading and discussing I’ve been doing tend to be somewhere in the back of my mind when I start writing. I usually don’t consciously try to employ techniques that we’ve been discussing, but they have a way of showing up or helping me think about new angles for approaching subjects. Larry Levis is one of the poets whose work I’ve most returned to since I discovered him in 1994. And he’s someone we’ve been reading this semester as well, and who continues to influence me. Mark Doty is a contemporary poet I return to, and really admire (particularly Bethlehem in Broad Daylight) for his control of syntax and narrative. Phillip Larkin and Elizabeth Bishop were two of the poets whose work most shaped me in graduate school, and whom I still deeply admire. D.A. Powell’s Chronic has helped foster my recent thinking about colons. I’ve been reading, and returning to, a lot of books of historical poetry over the past few years as I’ve worked on this manuscript, including Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s work and Tyehimba Jess’s Leadbelly.

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Issue 71: Meggie Monahan

About Meggie Monahan

Meggie Monahan studied poetry at the University of Houston, where she served as nonfiction editor for Gulf Coast. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2012, Mid-American Review, Third Coast, Sonora Review, Cimarron Review, Ruminate, and elsewhere. Meggie lives and works in Houston. Her apartment is covered in the ugliest wallpaper you’ve ever seen.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Night Prayer of a Woman Living Alone”

“Night Prayer”; is an embarrassingly accurate representation of my daily prayers. A little whiny and ambivalent, a little bitter and pitiful. A swear or two and a few genie wishes thrown in there. I definitely struggle with fear and fear of fear;and that tends to perpetuate a lingering frustration and exhaustion with oneself. But if you can’t talk to a big, merciful God about those things, well that’s even more stressful. I don’t know when I started praying a lot of irreverently reverent prayers, to borrow a phrase from Anne Lamott. But I think it’s important to make a practice of trying to be honest with Something or Someone, even when you’re not entirely sure what that means and even when you’re not entirely convinced by this thing you’re calling honesty.

There’s this secret pride for women living alone “a quiet feeling of accomplishment that” we can tough it on our “in ways our married and shacked-up friends don’t/can’t/won’t” but yeah, it’s crap. We hate our jobs. We want to live in different cities, different apartments. We’re tired as hell from trying to impress everybody, ourselves most of all. We want a dog, but we don’t want to vacuum all the dog hair. We fantasize about having someone fold our laundry because they adore us. We want people to like us, we want to be cool but we know we’re not and that’s kind of heartbreaking. We doubt every decision we make. We crave alone time and we hate alone time. And (this one’s the worst), we can’t help but wonder sometimes if everything would be different if we were men.

The sandwiches take up a lot of room in this poem (about a quarter?). That’s probably way too much space to give sandwiches.

Notes on Reading

For about a year now, I have been trying to give myself permission to read only for pleasure. That has meant a big break from poetry, excepting only a couple of books (Mary Oliver’s selected, Rilke’s Book of Hours, and Eliot’s Four Quartets. I had been feeling really burned out and needed to take some space in order to remember what made me fall in love with poems in the first place. When you forget why you’re doing what you’re doing, you get really resentful and pissed off, and eventually you stop being productive (which makes you even more resentful and pissed off). So this year I’ve been reading some amazing novels: Justin Torres’s We The Animals, Julian Barnes’s The Sense of An Ending, Kevin Wilson’s The Family Fang, Herman Koch’s The Dinner, and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad to name a few. (It’s worth mentioning, though, that there was one thing I read this year that made me remember why I love poems, I had to stop and cause a weepy, pitiful scene in a bookstore and that was Tony Hoagland’s “There Is No Word.”

For every one thing we read because we feel we "have to," we should probably read two things for fun. That works both ways, though for every two things we read for fun, we should probably bite the bullet and read something bland or dense because we “have to” something that will help us grow or see the world in a new way. Unless we’ve had that equation wrong for a while. In which case we should take a break from poetry and read a lot of People magazine and breathe and get our joy back.

“Night Prayer of a Woman Living Alone” by Meggie Monahan

Found in Willow Springs 71 Back to Author Profile Lord, make me a glitter ceiling that sings Billie Holiday songs to distract me when the men start shouting down the street … Read more

About Charlie Clark

Charlie Clark’s work has appeared in Best New Poets 2011, The Laurel Review, The Missouri Review, The Normal School, Smartish Pace, West Branch, and other journals. He studied poetry at the University of Maryland and lives in Austin, Texas.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Selected Poems”

These come from a larger series of sonnets about the devil. Throughout the series— in these two poems in particular— see a couple of primary avenues of exploration that play off of and interact with one another. The first is content-based. I find something pleasurable in the humanizing of supernatural beings, and finding ways to describe objects and images that enrich that characterization. The second motivation is more structural: playing with the form of the sonnet, working with the breath of the line, and seeing how the accumulation of information line by line leads to something unexpected. With “Devil Collecting Roadkill,” I tried to have the information unveil in such a way that each line contains an intact thing/image/thought that relates to and informs/expands the reader’s understanding of what’s come before. The lines are mostly end-stopped or have end punctuation, so each line has a structural integrity. I like the idea of each line noticeably standing as its own discrete thing. The image/scenario in this particular poem came from seeing (and nearly cycling over) some actual roadkill on a bike route I rode for several weeks. It wasn’t the most pleasant thing to go past, but over time it kind of normalized into a familiar part of my ride. Then, one day, it was gone. And not just dragged away by another animal. Clearly someone had removed it. I found myself weirdly hyper-aware of its absence. There is something in that absence, and the removal of its attendant narrative, that I find compelling on a metaphorical level. “Devil’s Materials (Partial List)” is more explicitly “sedimentary” in that it is simply a line-by-line accumulation of descriptions of objects/images. The fact that the poem is all fragments and phrases highlights this, and emphasizes, for me, the pleasure of the utterance. There is also some pleasure in how these objects and images are implicated with the devil by their inclusion in the list. That all of these things are potential means by which one can achieve the kind of corruption or darkness one associates with the devil.

Notes on Reading

Given that I am a creature of my milieu, I am an avid consumer. The objects and ideas that I see play a huge role in informing my creative sensibility. Not only in that I absorb those ideas and objects, but in that I am very aware of the fact that they are shaping my sensibility. So my writing, on conscious and subconscious levels, is deeply indebted to the writing (music, visual arts, etc.) that I consume. While I was reading a lot of different books at the time, the specific initial trigger for these two poems (and the series as a whole) was reading some poems of Kevin Prufer’s from his book Fallen From a Chariot. In them, Prufer describes angels in different scenarios in the contemporary world. The angels had such a tactile presence that I couldn’t help but try and replicate it, albeit in an altered way (cue the devil!). I frequently find myself going back to Kevin Prufer’s work, both that book and National Anthem, for inspiration, or to see how he approaches different problems. I am particularly attracted to how he navigates the impossible as it is located in the actual. So please go read his work! Generally, I can’t say how important interacting with writing and art is to me. Actually, the book I’m currently reading, David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, is a great example of a work (of fiction) that engages with art explicitly. In it the narrator is frequently describing works of art she’s seen, read, and heard. It’s also a phenomenal piece of speculative fiction, exploring as it does the experience of suddenly being the only person left on the planet. Markson’s style in this book (and in most of his later novels)—, declarative sentences and paragraphs that frequently undercut and question those that have come before them— an amazing achievement in terms of representing how the mind (well, certain minds, my own most certainly included) operates. Really, there are a million amazing things happening in that book, structurally, philosophically. The fact that the narrator is typing the book out even though she is the last person on earth raises all kinds of interesting ideas about the compulsion to communicate, to create. It’s hard for me to get through more than a few pages of the book without having to find a pen and paper to scribble down some idea that it’s triggered. Without books, art, and music, I’d have nothing to write about and no idea how to go about writing.

Two Poems by Charlie Clark

Found in Willow Springs 87 Back to Author Profile Devil Collecting Roadkill So often little pieces of the bodies stay. Not just insects or the bleaching the roadside grasses take, … Read more

About Julialicia Case

Julialicia Case’s fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in such publications as Water-Stone Review, Confrontation, The Pinch, Descant, and Carolina Quarterly. Recently, she won the University of New Orleans Writing Contest for Study Abroad in the nonfiction category, and in 2006 she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Germany. Currently, she’s at work on a collection of essays about growing up in West Germany in the 1980s, and a collection of linked stories exploring the emotional and logistical challenges of the Internet.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Growing Like Houses”

I wrote “Growing Like Houses” several years ago, after leaving Philadelphia and moving to attend graduate school in California. My sunny new world, with its bicycles and farmer’s markets, contrasted so drastically with the dilapidated row house and the gritty neighborhood where I taught in Philadelphia, that it was difficult to reconcile the two, or to understand my relationship to either.
The years immediately following college were fairly confusing for me. Like many graduates, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life. The transition from my studious women’s college to the co-ed real world was more baffling than I wanted to admit, and my parents, normally very helpful, were struggling with a crazy, unexpected divorce. 9/11 occurred during my very first week of teaching, and my most vivid memory is of the day afterwards, sitting in my classroom and helping a young woman with a third-grade reading level decipher a newspaper article about the tragedy. We spent an hour reading that article, and as she read, I remember considering my new role as an authority figure and worrying what would happen when we reached the end, what questions she would ask and how I would answer them.
When my friend Katie and I reminisce about these years, I think we’re both awed by how accommodating we were, how quick to accept the harsh and bewildering nature of our house and our professional environments as something normal and common, and to attribute our confusion to youthfulness and inexperience. Now that I’m older, feeling desensitized to confusion seems to be a defining element of adulthood, but part of the challenge of writing creative nonfiction is to acknowledge that uncertainty while at the same time making sense of it.

Notes on Reading

The works I like most tend to have a strong auditory element to them, a sense of rhythm and cadence that makes reading a bit like listening to music. Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, and Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter are like this for me. I return to these books because the language won’t let me forget them. Recently, I re-read Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, because I wanted to listen more closely, to get a better sense of how its elements work together. Not surprisingly, I tend to feel best about my own work when I have a clear sense of its voice and rhythm, the sound that I would like it to make.
I’m not a picky reader, and I like to read several different kinds of things at once. Right now, for example, I’m reading Nabokov’s collected stories, Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Melanie Thorne’s Hand Me Down, Joy Williams’s The Quick and the Dead, and George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series. While reading, I hope most for surprise and honesty, a story that breaks from expected patterns and still seems uncontrived and completely authentic. I’ve fallen in love with a lot of recent essays and short stories for this very reason, and lately I’ve been wishing for a program (perhaps like iTunes) that would let readers purchase individual essays or stories and create personalized anthologies the way we create mp3 playlists. I would like, without bookmarks or photocopying, to be able to move from Peter Stenson’s honest, gritty essay, “Because Life Hasn’t Always Been This Good,” to Greg Hrbek’s beautifully surreal story, “Sagittarius,” to Melinda Moustakis’s unforgettable “The Mannequin in Soldotna,” to the driving, gripping beat of Susan Steinberg’s “Life.”

“Growing Like Houses” by Julialicia Case

Found in Willow Springs 70 Back to Author Profile THE RED AND BLACK BEETLES COME FIRST, settling in swarms on the white plaster of our Arnold Street row house. We come … Read more

About Miranda McLeod

Miranda McLeod’s short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Sunday Times of London, the Bridport Anthology, Evolver, The Writing Disorder, and Roots and Culture. She is a Pirogue Collective Fellow and Huston/Wright Foundation Fellow. She won the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize in 2011 and has been shortlisted for the Tanne Foundation Award, the Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Contest, and the Bridport Short Story Prize. She studied creative writing at New York University and Columbia University, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Literature at Rutgers University. She lectures on creative writing as a part of the Bryant Park Word for Word series.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Mrs. Schafer Gets Fit”

“Mrs. Schafer Gets Fit” was inspired by a real life event. I stepped out of the shower one morning and saw two little boys peeking into my bathroom window. I was horrified. I dropped to the floor and crawled into the bedroom, my heart racing. Later, I was struck by my reaction horror, instead of amusement, say, or anger. And why had I dropped to the floor? A more graceful person would have reached for a towel. A more assertive person would have scolded the kids. What would I have done if they had been girls instead of boys?

The experience got me thinking about the female body and the way it’s perceived by men, but also by women. And that led naturally to the relationship a daughter has with her mother’s body. It’s an intimate relationship, but also a fraught one. There’s the fact that a daughter is beholden, that her very existence hinges on her mother’s body. And there’s also the physical resemblance many mothers and daughters have. In their mother’s bodies, daughters can see their own, aged thirty-odd years. It’s a reminder of mortality, of change, of the chilling triumph of genetics over free will.

Once I had these themes, the main challenge was realizing them fully in a fictional world. I sometimes struggle with plot in my short fiction, but “Mrs. Schafer” came easier than most, maybe because the thematic elements were so clear to me before I started writing. The final version is very similar to the first draft. It’s a miracle when that happens!

Notes on Reading

I’m a bit reluctant to admit that I’ve been reading Alice Munro almost exclusively for about three years. When I tell this to people, they look alarmed and suggest I branch out. And I try. I had a successful Jhumpa Lahiri stint, and I’ve enjoyed Anthony Doerr’s stories, but mostly it’s all Munro. I’ve read each of her books at least twice, and am currently making my way through Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage for the third time.

For most of my life, I’ve been one of those hedonist readers who read as an escape from the tedium and anxieties of life. With Munro, though, I try to force myself to be more analytical. Her stories are satisfying and resonant, but the source of that resonance is often hard to pin down. I have to pause and trace an idea back through the text to find its source, or reread a passage that is as opaque as it is thrilling.

One subject Munro returns to repeatedly in her stories is the change the feminist movement of the 1960s wrought on the lives of married, suburban mothers. She depicts this change with some ambivalence, so that the surface of things the relaxed clothes and loose hair and casual affairs of these newly liberated women (and men) with the real emotional turmoil that comes with shedding one’s familiar habits and traditions. And maybe it’s this element of Munro’s writing that has me so entranced. Munro has much to teach us about the subtle expression of cultural and political forces in short fiction, about how advancement is as unsettling as it is liberating, and about how even the greatest societal shifts can be reflected in the quiet, inner lives of girls and women.

“Mrs. Schafer Gets Fit” by Miranda McLeod

Found in Willow Springs 70 Back to Author Profile MRS. SCHAFER IS GETTING FIT. Women don’t lose weight anymore, or slim down, or tighten up. They get fit. This is all … Read more

About Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay’s writing appears or is forthcoming in Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, New Stories From the Midwest 2011 and 2012, Salon, Oxford American, NOON, American Short Fiction, Indiana Review, Brevity, The Rumpus, and many others. She is the co-editor of PANK, essays editor at The Rumpus, and is currently at work on a new novel and essay collection.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Through the Womb”

I love to write about women who have complex relationships with their bodies and complex relationships with men. This story came about because I was talking one night with a guy, and he made this random statement about infertile women as being invisible to him. He wasn’t trying to be malicious but his words just shocked me, and I thought, “Does he have any idea what he is saying?” I kept stewing and stewing, and from there, the story started coming together about a man who loves to have children and a woman who can’t and the other woman who can, and the ways in which their lives would intersect and diverge. I also live in a small town where it is very easy to run into the former lovers of the people you date. Just around the corner from my home is a rehabilitation center/home for the elderly, and every day I drive by and see some of the elderly in the common room, sitting, mostly alone. I wanted to incorporate those things into my story as well. This is one of those stories that unfolded fairly easily. All it takes for me is a moment. I can do anything with a moment.

Notes on Reading

Every book I read shapes me as a writer in some way, by showing me craft I want to emulate, aspire to, or avoid. I love coming back to my favorite books though. I know a book is excellent when I never tire of rereading it. The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton, is a book I read regularly because it always grounds me if I am feeling lost with my own writing. The intricate detail, the muted emotional torment, the sharpness of the social responsibilities—I am enthralled by all of it. I also love rereading the Little House on the Prairie books—the lovely descriptions, the unwavering hopes of the Ingalls family, the profound sense of place. When I reread these books, I sink into them because they are so familiar and deeply satisfying. They remind me of how I want readers to feel when they read my own writing.

“Through the Womb” by Roxane Gay

Found in Willow Springs 70 Back to Author Profile WHEN WE FIRST MET he told me how much he loves children. He told me how much he loves women because they … Read more

About Laura Read

Laura Read has published poems in a variety of journals, most recently in Rattle, the Cincinnati readReview, and the Bellingham Review. Her chapbook, The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You, was the 2010 winner of the Floating Bridge Chapbook Award, and her collection, Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral, was the 2011 winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and will be published this fall by the University of Pittsburgh Press. She lives in Spokane, WA with her husband Brad and their two sons, Benjamin and Matthew.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Three Poems”

I wrote “When You Have Lived a Long Time in One Place” last summer when I was beginning to think of an idea for a second manuscript. I had written a poem entitled “The Northwest Room” about a room in the Spokane Public Library which contains a collection of local history, and I thought maybe I wanted to write a collection of poems about Spokane called The Northwest Room. I love having a project like this because it gives me ideas for more poems, and that’s where this poem came from. I started thinking about all the memories I have associated with places, like Lincoln Park where this poem is set, that might look innocent of memory and history (or at least of my memory) to someone else. “People Don’t Die of It Anymore” is another Spokane poem, but this idea came from a car ride home from the farms at Greenbluff with my husband, sons, and father. I remember my dad pointing out an old building and saying that it used to be a sanitarium, and I thought how close we were to where Spokane serial killer Robert Yates had hidden the bodies of his victims. These two pieces of history seemed so jarring to me in juxtaposition with the farms we had just visited and the late afternoon autumn sun, and I could feel the poem beginning.

“Bureau” has a very different origin. Last summer, I went to the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference and had the opportunity to work with Dorianne Laux, one of my favorite poets. Every day in our workshop, she gave us a different prompt, usually inspired by a poem. One day she read us Suzanne Cleary’s poem “Anyways,” which is about how the speaker’s family says that word with an “s” on the end and how the speaker’s husband does not. It’s a funny and a serious poem, and I loved it. Dorianne asked us to think of something our families say or do differently than other families and to write about it. I immediately thought of the word “bureau” because I’ve always been mocked for calling my dresser that, as if I am being extremely proper, when in fact that is just what my family calls it. I had fun writing the poem because I liked how the bureau literally travelled, and I liked how it became about my mother and my grandmother, the way Cleary’s poem is about “anyways” and also about where you come from. Even though it’s not specifically about Spokane, “Bureau” is about place and identity, so I think it fits with the other two poems in Willow Springs and with the poems in the collection. Or at least I hope so!

Notes on Reading

I have always been a big reader. I used to read even while I was walking to and from school, and according to my brother Tom, he saved my life once by pulling me out of the way of a cement mixer, which I hadn’t noticed because I was reading. The books that I’ve read and loved recently include The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender, Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, Room by Emma Donoghue, A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, and Where the God of Love Hangs Outby Amy Bloom. I really loved the Amy Bloom collection of stories, as I love all of hers, like Come to Meand A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You. And I always like Alice Munro’s stories as well—I return to her again and again, and to Lorrie Moore. I tend to like fiction by women, as you can tell! And I really admire short stories. I like the compression, the small and important gestures of character, probably the same reason I like poetry. For poetry, I often reread Dorianne Laux, and I liked her most recent book, The Book of Men. And I love and admire What the Living Do by Marie Howe—I like the individual poems and how they collect to tell a story, a coming-of-age story and a story about grief. I’m interested in the ways collections “collect,” and this one works so well as a long poem. In terms of shaping me as a writer, I think Hoagland has played a role, even though he’s much funnier than I am! I like how his poems twist and turn. Dorianne Laux does this too and really focuses on describing a moment and letting it reveal what it will. And Sharon Olds has been an influence. I like her form—I like to write in one long stanza and let the momentum carry me along. Sometimes if I break into stanzas too soon, I start controlling the poem too much. Also, Olds often tells brief stories, and her similes and metaphors are so memorable. I feel carried along by her voice, her images, her rhythms, and these qualities are all important to me in own work.

Three Poems by Laura Read

Found in Willow Springs 70 Back to Author Profile Bureau When my husband asks me where I put the keys, I say they’re on my bureau, and he says you … Read more

“Six Poems” by Laura Read

Found in Willow Springs 80 Back to Author Profile THE SPELL WE CAST She wore white flats and her feet always looked cold. I invited her to my house and … Read more

Issue 80: Laura Read

About Laura Read Laura Read’s chapbook, The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You, was the 2010 winner of the Floating Bridge Chapbook Award, and her collection, Instructions for … Read more

About Melissa Leavitt

Melissa Leavitt lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she works for a children’s healthcare nonprofit. She received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Montana, and her Ph.D. in English from Stanford University. In the summer of 2011, she was a resident fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her writing has been honored by the American Literary Review and the Baltimore Review, and her essay “Build the Story Backward” appears in the Spring 2010 issue of New Delta Review. She is currently working on a collection of essays.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Show Off”

I was about seven or eight years old, I spent a lot of Saturday mornings watching Nadia, a made-for-TV movie about the Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci. The opening scene depicts Nadia cartwheeling in her schoolyard. Actually, it depicts Bela Karolyi, Nadia’s future coach, watching her cartwheel, spying on her through the bars of her schoolyard gate. This is the moment Nadia is discovered, the moment she becomes a star. I mention this moment in “Show Off” as one of many discoveries that fascinated and terrified me as a child—the story of an ordinary girl plucked from obscurity by someone who just happens to see her. These girls could be catapulted to fame and fortune, or they could disappear forever. “Show Off” explores the possibility that stories of disappearance—in this case, kidnapping—are just another version of the discovery narrative that I used to find so compelling.

“Show Off” comes from a collection of essays (still in the works) about missing girls, in which each essay tells the story of a different disappearance. In the process of writing these essays, I’ve begun to reflect on all the different ways a girl can be lost, and all the different ways to put a lost girl in her place. Every missing girl becomes a taunt, of the I-know-something-you-don’t-know variety. We don’t just want to find missing girls; we want to know what they know. The challenge in exploring this idea is not falling into the trap of glamorizing the trauma of disappearance, and trivializing these true-life stories. After explaining the idea for this collection to a fellow writer, I was asked whether there was anything in the idea of being missing that I found appealing. “Of course not,” I answered. But what “missing” really means to me, I think, is that someone out there is looking for you. And I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t anything appealing about that.

Notes on Reading

“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself.” I sometimes think that all of my essays respond, in some way, to this quotation from John Berger, which I came across when I read Ways of Seeing as a college freshman. Since most of my writing has an autobiographical element, I feel I’m constantly engaged in watching myself—and that these acts of scrutiny and self-scrutiny are attempts to “see” some phase of my experience within the big picture of history or memory. Every time I reread Ways of Seeing, I’m gratified to realize, yet again, that the difference between the image of myself I carry around in my head, and the self that actually walks around in the world, will give me enough subject matter to last a good long while.

Plenty of people tell me that Berger’s ideas are too outdated to be of much interest, let alone use, and maybe they’re right. But since I like outdated things, I’ll also say that The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams has been another huge influence on my work. Adams’s book is one of the few memoirs I’ve read that unabashedly embraces its own arrogance. The book is a struggle to figure out whether one individual has any significance in the vast sweep of history, and Adams really, really hopes that he does. I think most memoirs struggle with the same question, but pretend it’s already resolved—as if the act of writing a memoir affirms an individual’s importance. I find it oddly reassuring that Adams remains pretty freaked out by the question throughout the entire very long, very dense book. And while I don’t think I’ll ever adopt his technique of writing about himself in the third person, I like the way it forces him to get lost in the shuffle of the world around him.

Show Off by Melissa Leavitt

About Michael Martin Shea

Michael Martin Shea is an MFA candidate at the University of Mississippi, where he is a John and Renée Grisham Fellow. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Salt Hill, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Meridian, Sycamore Review, and elsewhere.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “How to Say, ‘I Was Scared of Fire As A Kid'”

“How to Say, ‘I Was Scared of Fire As A Kid,’” began, actually, as a Facebook update—I don’t ever delete people from Facebook because that would involve, well, putting effort into my Facebook account, so sometimes I log in and am greeted with these updates from people I only sort of remember, all talking about really strange things. That’s what happened here: a distant acquaintance posted about a dream she had in which she was given six hours to live but had nothing she wanted to do. I thought that was wonderful, so of course, I stole it, and it became the first line of the poem. The rest came pretty naturally—I felt that if I started the poem with a dream, I had to continue to talk about dreams, so I did. Most of those dreams actually happened, too—the dog bite is entirely true, and the kitten dream is essentially true, with some distracting details removed. The hardest part was coming up with a title once it was finished. I made all sorts of terrible attempts. Eventually I was talking to a friend about the poem and he asked me what I was scared of, and I responded, “Well, I used to be scared of fire as a kid,” which was a total misdirection answer, but that sort of stuck.

Though the specific action of the poem is embellished, the piece is, to me, pretty autobiographical, at least as far as the two characters are concerned. I can pretty clearly identify some issues that were going on in my personal life at the time, but most prominent is this idea of what happens when a narrative moves from dream to reality (or anti-reality), and the loss that that might entail. This poem came at the height of a very autobiographical narrative period, which not accidentally coincided with my impending move for graduate school, and my girlfriend and I were dealing with how that would play out for us. In a way, this poem was my attempt to force these things to at least pause for a second. I’ve since backed off that narrative bent really heavily—maybe I ran out of stories to tell—but this poem is still one of my favorites from that time. It feels very honest—I can still see the person I was at that point in my life.

Notes on Reading

Reading is a really challenging experience for me. On one hand, reading is obviously great, just on a level of pure enjoyment. And I wouldn’t have started writing if I hadn’t at some point read the things that made me want to be a writer. I’m continually inspired by other poets—especially Josh Bell, Sabrina Orah Mark, and Frederick Seidel, all of whom are criminally underrated. On the other hand, it’s not infrequently that I find myself reading something and going, “Good Lord, that’s so incredible—and now I can’t write that.” With everything we read, we abandon one more possible way of expressing ourselves in a manner that’s authentic. Which is good, but it forces me to work harder and I don’t always like that. Additionally, there’s a big responsibility involved in being a reader that I don’t think the writer has. The writer—especially the poet—can essentially say and do whatever he or she pleases. There’s really not a lot on the line here in terms of social capital or actual financial capital, and the difference between being a celebrated poet and a nobody amounts, in a lot of cases, to things that are entirely outside the poet’s control. Which is really freeing as a writer—if there’s nothing at stake, why not write the most honest, authentic thing you can? It’s the reader’s job to make value judgments and decide, “Okay, this is good for such and such reason.” The problem is that it’s hard to take on that responsibility as the reader one moment, and then completely cast it away the next when it’s time to sit down and write, and it can lead to a lot of anxiety and self-censorship. Granted, some anxiety is necessary as a writer, and of course it’s only through reading everything else that we can really develop our own notions of poetics and determine if our poems are working in the ways in which we want them to work. But I find I have to really separate myself from what I’ve read in order to write—I need to read it, but then I need to forget it as well. Thankfully, I have a really bad memory.

“How to Say, ‘I Was Scared of Fire as a Kid'” by Michael Martin Shea

Found in Willow Springs 69 Back to Author Profile Last night, I dreamt I was shot in the head. I still had six hours to live, but there was nothing I … Read more

About Austin LaGrone

Austin LaGrone is the author of Oyster Perpetual, winner of the 2010 Idaho Prize for Poetry. His poems have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Brilliant Cornsers, Crazyhorse, Hayden’s Ferry, and Poetry International. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at John Jay College.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Two Poems”

“Foreseeable” is a poem that suffers nostalgia for a time and a place that has passed. I find all the hostility towards tobacco more offensive than cancer itself. It’s even illegal to smoke in Central Park now…likely a law that was passed to harass the homeless. These days, if you want to enjoy a puff without getting dirty looks, you have to travel all the way to Paris. And it’s only getting worse. I recently bought a pack of Delicados in Mexico and there was a picture on the pack of a man who couldn’t hug his daughter because his leg had been amputated. I ask you, who smokes until their leg falls off? And why bring the little girl into the narrative? When I buy a donut there are no pictures of grossly obese people. When I buy a Cadillac there are no pictures of the jaws of death. Anyway, “Foreseeable” goes out to the smokers.

“Tableau with Rockets Redglare” is a grab-bag of objective correlatives for the divorce I was going through at the time. All that ghastly business. The italicized language is “found poetry”—things I heard or observed in the world. The principle metaphor is the busted strip club marquee—Girls-Girls…and then just failed light. A kind of Duende. The very fact that the rule of three should fail to obtain in such vulgar circumstances is delightful. And for all I know, the marquee is still there…burning on Decatur Street.

Notes on Reading

I can talk influences, overlooked masterpieces like he Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You
and recently published beauties like A Lamp with Wings for aeons. A life of writing is principally dedicated to reading. I’ve kept the same office for five years just so I don’t have to move all the damn books. I suppose the poet who has most recently influenced my style is Cesar Viejo—both the collected and the posthumous. It is amazing to me that I lived without these poems for over forty years. I rarely leave the house without them. They say he drank so much beer that the bartenders gave him a significant discount…a beautiful, beautiful man.

Two Poems by Austin LaGrone

Found in Willow Springs 69 Back to Author Profile Tableau with Rockets Redglare At home with Wild Turkey, I hear someone yell Piss yellow gypsy cab colored moon! and, looking … Read more