{"id":39324,"date":"2025-11-17T15:40:30","date_gmt":"2025-11-17T23:40:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/?p=39324"},"modified":"2025-11-17T15:40:31","modified_gmt":"2025-11-17T23:40:31","slug":"issue-96-kathleen-flenniken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/issue-96-kathleen-flenniken\/","title":{"rendered":"Issue 96: Kathleen Flenniken"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Found in<\/strong><\/strong> <\/strong><\/em>Willow Springs 96<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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March 9, 2025<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Grace Anne Anderson, Polly Buckingham, Annalee Fairley, Abby Shaffer, Jeff Thomas<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A CONVERSATION WITH KATHLEEN FLENNIKEN<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n
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Photo Credit: https:\/\/kathleenflenniken.com\/<\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

KATHLEEN FLENNIKEN\u2019S POETRY<\/strong> ranges from hard-hitting docupoetics to personal and domestic poems; in the words of Albert Goldbarth, \u201cThe surface range of Kathleen Flenniken\u2019s . . . poems is admirably vast.\u201d Her poems are emotionally-charged experiences characterized by intellect and honesty, and infused with a poignant national and ecological awareness. Flenniken\u2019s humble, restrained style complements the disciplined formatting with which she shapes her poems. With a poetic voice that is wise but never dogmatic, her pages make space for readers to inhabit and return to.
Flenniken is the author of the poetry collections Famous<\/em> (Nebraska 2006), Plume<\/em> (University of Washington Press 2012), and Post Romantic<\/em> (University of Washington Press 2020). She was Poet Laureate of Washington State from 2012-2014, during which she curated the website The Far Field, featuring the work of Washington State poets. Her writing has received numerous awards, such as a Pushcart Prize in 2012 and the Washington Book Award for Plume. She has received fellowships from the Artist Trust and the National Endowment for the Arts. Hernewest collection, Dressing in the Dark, is forthcoming from Lynx House Press in September of 2025. In March of this year, we met with Flenniken for lunch and conversation at The Pearl Bar and Grille in downtown Ellensburg. Ahead of our meeting, she kindly sent us her new manuscript, Dressing in the Dark, in one of its earlier iterations titled, Waking. We were thrilled to review and discuss her new book, along with her poetic journey, work as an engineer, experienc\u0002es growing up in the Tri-Cities near the Hanford Site, cancer recovery, writing practices, and her process for getting a draft ready for publication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

POLLY BUCKINGHAM<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n


Can you talk about your experience as Washington State Poet Laureate?<\/p>\n\n\n\n


KATHLEEN FLENNIKEN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n


I was the first after a hiatus. Sam Green was poet laureate from 2007 to 2009, and then the program went dormant until 2012,
so part of my job was getting it rolling again. My special concentration was third, fourth, and fifth graders. And I edited an online blog\/magazine I called The Far Field. I invited people from around the state to contribute poems. I ended up with more than 350 poets. The site is still searchable. I was coming to the poet laureate program as an editor at Floating Bridge Press, and Floating Bridge\u2019s whole concentration is Washington State poetry, so I wanted to showcase the the rich Washington State poetry world I already knew.
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ABBY SHAFFER<\/strong>
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Do you still work with third graders?
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FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
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I did until I retired about two years ago from Writers in the Schools. I love third, fourth, and fifth graders. They\u2019re verycapable writers, they have easy access to their imaginations, and they have no self-consciousness. It\u2019s a wonderful combination. They want to perform. You have to set them up and make them feel comfortable and confident that they have something to write about, but once they have that security, they\u2019re just great. Their similes and metaphors are amazing. I bring in challenging poems, we\u2019ll talk through them, and I\u2019ll ask them questions: what do you notice, show me the similes, which is your favorite line? They\u2019re able to talk about poetry. That\u2019s one of my goals, too, to show children that they don\u2019t need to be afraid of poetry. They have, in me, somebody who really loves the art, and I try to demonstrate that they can love it, too.
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JEFF THOMAS<\/strong>
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How did you start writing poetry? What was the initial intrigue that drew you to the art form, and what inspires you now to keep returning?
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FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
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I got two degrees in civil engineering and worked as an engineer out of college. Then I took a break from that career to have my second son. I was home and feeling at loose ends; I needed something to get me out of the house. My brother had sent me a Lindsay Buckingham album called Out of the Cradle. I played it over and over. I knew it was the title of a Whitman poem, but I wanted to know the poem. This is before the internet, so I went to the library and checked out an anthology containing the poem and a lot of others by 20th century American poets. For the first time in my life, I was reading poetry on my own terms as opposed to reading it for a class. I could turn the page if I didn\u2019t like the poem instead of feeling inferior because I didn\u2019t appreciate it. All of a sudden I found myself really loving reading these poems. A few months later, I found an introductory poetry class in an experimental college catalog. I needed to get out of the house, so I took this night class on poetry writing and never looked back. I just loved it. I loved meeting all these newpoets. I had a wonderful teacher, Mike Hickey. He ended up being the Seattle Poet Populist years later. Wonderful person and writer. He was so enthusiastic and made room for all of us. We had these conversations about poetry I didn\u2019t know I would enjoy so much. When it comes to the \u201cBig P\u201d poetry world, I\u2019ve always felt a little bit like an outsider because I came from this unconventional background and started late, well into my 30s. You asked about what keeps me writing poetry. I\u2019ve always had the impulse to make\u2014whether that was poems or music. When I was a child, I played piano. But as an adult it became words. Poems helped me get what\u2019s inside out. I\u2019m very drawn to simile and metaphor. Simile is the ugly stepsister in the metaphor world. I think poets don\u2019t value similes enough. They\u2019re viewed as simplistic, but I don\u2019t think so at all. Alice Oswald compares metaphor to compression and simile to addition. She calls simile feminine, and likens it to pregnancy. That idea speaks to me. What I love about writing is taking something I know, and feel, and finding an analogy for it. That\u2019s really all poetry is. Poetry is simile.
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GRACE ANNE ANDERSON<\/strong>
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What was it like to leave your career as an engineer?
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FLENNIKEN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n


I graduated with an engineering degree in 1983. That was the peak of women in engineering. I really liked the idea of being part of opening up a whole engineering world with women\u2019s perspectives. I wanted to be part of that. But I didn\u2019t love the work. It didn\u2019t inspire my imagination at all. I decided to stay home with our kids and went on a sort of sabbatical from my job. I was groping for something, something to shape my world besides just the family. And that\u2019s when I found that anthology of poems and never looked back.
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BUCKINGHAM<\/strong>
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The engineering background obviously has an effect on Plume, but how else does the engineering part of your brain fit into your poetry?
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FLENNIKEN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n


It informs my sensibility, my preference for clean surfaces. I\u2019m drawn to poems that reveal a mind in action. All poems should go someplace unexpected. That unfolding of the mind is what really draws me, more even than language. I mean, interesting and precise language is essential too.
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SHAFFER<\/strong>
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Especially in Plume, you have to use a lot of technical language. How do you balance using the most precise language with what a poem should sound like? Do you struggle with that?
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FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
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No. Sound is always my guide. When I\u2019m writing a poem, it\u2019s as much sound as anything that draws me to the next line, though I also have a little bank of words available in my mind for the right moment. Using technical words was important to me. I wanted everything in that book to be true and accurate because I knew the audience might be a little different than the usual poetry audience. Engineers and scientists and others interested in the Hanford story might be reading it. But I wanted the poems to be real poems, first of all, not just little statements of opinion.
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ANNALEE FAIRLEY
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Is the composition of poetry spontaneous for you, or does a poem ruminate in your mind for weeks before you can write it?
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FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
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It can be both. I always feel like I write poetry the wrong way. I tend to wait for inspiration, which you\u2019re not supposed to doat all. I tend to write on a computer, while I think it\u2019s better to write free hand. And I sometimes do want to write about some\u0002thing; that\u2019s also sort of frowned upon by the purists. But while writing about something calls me to the page, a subject is not enough. If I don\u2019t have a first line, or a first image, or a voice I trust, I don\u2019t have an entry. So I do carry poems around for a while. And once in a while, I just need to get down and start writing something, anything, so I feel like a poet again. Then I might free write to try to get going.
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THOMAS<\/strong>
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How do you know when a draft of a poem is finished?
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FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
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I often don\u2019t know. I jump the gun pretty frequently. My poems seem to take forever. I\u2019ll write the first draft or the first few drafts in a couple weeks. I think, oh, it\u2019s close, it\u2019s maybe 85%. Then the last 15% may take years to finish. Sanding and polishing takes me forever. It may mean sending the poem out to a magazine to see if it\u2019ll get published, and it comes back rejected. There is some value to getting a poem back from the rejection pile because you have a brief opportunity to really see it critically. Other times I realize after some period of months or a year that a stanza doesn\u2019t fit or doesn\u2019t sit right. I didn\u2019t see it before, but now time has opened my eyes. Time is a great healer for poetry. But it does take a very long time. And even as I\u2019m working on this Dressing in the Dark manuscript that has a publication date approaching, I\u2019m still making slight changes, a word here, a different line break. I\u2019m polishing all the way to press.
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SHAFFER<\/strong>
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A lot of your poems have regular stanzas\u2014a lot of tercets, qua\u0002trains, couplets. Is that a choice early on in the writing, or do you revise towards that?
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FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
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For the first seven or eight years of my serious writing life, I wanted to write in tercets. I was reading a lot of poems in tercets, and I just loved the imposed order, the way the sentences sounded as they cascaded down the page, almost like a waterfall. There\u2019s a lot of enjambment. I was very attracted to the form, and yet I could not make my poems fit. They felt like they were wearing the wrong size suit. I would sometimes impose tercets as an editing technique, to isolate and kick out the parts that didn\u2019t need to be there. That was useful, but I still couldn\u2019t finish the poem in those tercets. Looking back, I\u2019d call the first poem I finished in tercets as the true beginning of my first book. Tercets or couplets are my fallback. It helps me edit, and it helps me hear the music. I tune the poem toward that form. Once in a while I don\u2019t hear that rhythm, so I try something else. But my go-to is three-line stanzas I think because it took so long for me to get there.
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SHAFFER<\/strong>
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There\u2019s a lot of tension in a tercet.
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FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
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There is. I love that tension. I love the little moments of suspense between the end of a line and the start of the next line or the end of a stanza and the start of the next stanza, not knowing what\u2019s going to come next. Sometimes you can play with that and have a little joke imbedded in the enjambment or some left turn the reader won\u2019t be expecting. I seem to have more access to that play in regular forms than I do in free verse.
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ANDERSON<\/strong>
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I\u2019m curious about what the process was like for incorporating documents into poetry.
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FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
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You\u2019re thinking of Plume. First, a document has to speak to me in some way. Just because it\u2019s factual or it fits with the story I\u2019mtrying to tell doesn\u2019t mean it moves me to write a poem. That can be very frustrating. I think, I have a spot here for this, or riffing off this document is going to work so well\u2014but I can\u2019t write the poem. So I read the documents, and I sit with my read\u0002ing for a while. Months, maybe. I let it filter down. For Plume I chose three documents and tried blacking out lines to get at some of the messages I wanted to include, and that time I was successful. Those three \u201credactions\u201d helped me communicate the competing visions of the Hanford scientific community and of the outside world. I put a lot of information in the notes in the back of the book that wouldn\u2019t fit in the poems. The data and history and background was too heavy, too freighted, for the poems themselves, and yet it was information I wanted to be available to bolster my case. Hanford is a story that not a lot of people know. Probably most Americans have never heard of Hanford, even though it\u2019s the most contaminated waste site in our hemisphere. The poems in Plume tell the Hanford story but it\u2019s incredibly complicated and they need each other for company. A single poem in a magazine just didn\u2019t work. What\u2019s this supposed to be about? But if the poems could be together, under one cover, with notes in the back, they could build a world.
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FAIRLEY<\/strong>
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Plume falls in the tradition of ecopoetics, and even Post Romantic does. Are you influenced by ecopoetics or see yourself writ\u0002ing in that tradition? Are there writers who inspire you in that regards?
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FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
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I don\u2019t because that\u2019s very intimidating. I always have to go at something large through a small door. It has to be personal, which does not mean I don\u2019t appreciate ecopoetics. But I don\u2019t consider myself of that school. When I was writing Plume, I was very influenced by Martha Collins, whose book Blue Front considers a lynching in Cairo, Illinois in 1905, which her father witnessed when he was a very small child. Her father was her entry point into the enormous subject of racism. It was personal. I focused my writing on my memories of being a kid in Richland, and my friend Carolyn, and her dad, who eventually died of a radiation illness. If I think, I\u2019m going to write about the environment, or nuclear waste, I can\u2019t do it. It\u2019s too big. But I can write about wind turbines I see on the Gorge highway I\u2019ve known since childhood and hope it stands for something larger.
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ANDERSON<\/strong>
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You described Plume as taking a huge subject and going at it through a small door. I feel like Famous is kind of the opposite of that\u2014like, smaller movements or ideas and then making them larger. How would you describe Dressing in the Dark?
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FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
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The new book is far more like Famous than Plume. I think I\u2019ve moved forward since Famous. One of the reasons these poems are harder to write is I\u2019m trying to do a bit more with them, and now I\u2019m preoccupied with memory, which comes with being 20-25 years older. But I\u2019m again looking at domestic life and trying to find the universal in it.
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THOMAS<\/strong>
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What kind of research do you do when it comes to writing personal domestic topics? How do you know that you\u2019ve found a new way into a familiar subject?
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FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
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Just living. Domestic poems are easy in the sense that I\u2019ve lived the material already, so I just have to let it trickle down and hope there\u2019s a poem there. I know many poets journal to find their material, but my method is the opposite. Anything that stayswith me, that I don\u2019t forget or lose interest in, might be worth writing about. I don\u2019t think I could add one of my old poems to the new book and make it fit. I would hear the difference in the voice and the life experience, and I wouldn\u2019t be able to mesh the two. I read\u2014I think this is so interesting\u2014that Robert Frost started a huge number of his best poems in the few years he lived in England, I think 1912 to 1915. Every book he wrote was seeded with a few poems from that period, and the new poems would coalesce around them. He did that over and over again. His poems essentially never changed with time. He was criticized during World War II because he didn\u2019t really respond to fascism the way other poets did. It\u2019s in part because he was still digging that same vein of ore that he had since the very beginning. I think that\u2019s fascinating; he\u2019s on a whole other plane. I\u2019m a mere mortal. My voice has changed, my life experience has changed, and my outlook on the world has changed. Certainly, the world has changed. I may be approaching similar subjects, but the poems don\u2019t have the same outcome.
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THOMAS<\/strong>
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What do you notice with the latest collection and writing the personal versus what you saw or felt with previous work?
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FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
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There\u2019s more gray area to explore as I get older. There are more things I don\u2019t know, It\u2019s harder to shape a poem about not knowing something. I like the potential of a poem that is being built in a very gray zone because there\u2019s so many ways it could go. It\u2019s harder to write, but it\u2019s also more gratifying.
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FAIRLEY<\/strong>
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Does the poem ever go sour and you give up on it, or do you continue to try to make it work?
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FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
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I give up a lot. I have a lot of poems I might have worked on a long time, and I can\u2019t fix them. Or they\u2019re no longer interesting. If they don\u2019t interest me, they\u2019re not going to interest anybody else. It takes me time to figure that out. I often find that poems about something are easier to write. They feel like I\u2019m coming out of myself a little bit. I get tired of the poems always being about what\u2019s going on inside.
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BUCKINGHAM<\/strong>
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The older stuff is more exterior, and Dressing in the Dark more interior.
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FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
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Yes. In Dressing in the Dark, I allowed myself to go interior without being critical, self-critical about being self-absorbed.
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SHAFFER<\/strong>
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Do you worry about self-indulgence?
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FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
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I do. That\u2019s always a concern to me. Too many I\u2019s. I\u2019ll find myself counting I\u2019s in poems. Oh my God, there\u2019s too many I\u2019s. Some\u0002one said once, very casually, never start a poem with an I. I took that to heart.
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SHAFFER<\/strong>
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That\u2019s so interesting given that you started with Whitman. He\u2019s the most self-indulgent poet I\u2019ve ever read. I love him. He\u2019s just very indulgent.
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FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
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Well, he\u2019s the universal I. The larger than life I. That\u2019s what you hope to achieve. But who am I to think I could achieve a universal I? It\u2019s very hard, and in the current political climate, probably not possible. I do like looking outside of myself because it feels more like a conversation than a monologue.
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THOMAS<\/strong>
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Some of the poems in the new collection are in second person. I was fascinated by the authority in those poems. Do you start writing a poem and then change it to second person, or do you start in second person?
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FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
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I don\u2019t know how many, but several poems in the new manuscript are actually written to my lost breast as though it were a friend, a lost friend. I felt an immediate intimacy. I didn\u2019t have to explain. We\u2019ve been through so much together. I can go straight to the heart of it. Then the reader is just listening in on a conversation, and if the poem works, they\u2019ll be able to understand what\u2019s going on. When I\u2019m able to enter that second person voice, I do think that authority comes very quickly for me as a writer. I\u2019m writing a letter in a way. And I love writing letters, so it feels much more natural. I trust my voice more quickly. It\u2019s almost a relief when I\u2019m able to find a way into a poem with a you.
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THOMAS<\/strong>
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You were talking about restraint and how that\u2019s important to you\u2014not being self-indulgent. With the breast cancer poems, which is such emotionally-charged material, how do you assess sentimentality when you\u2019re going through the editing process?
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FLENNIKEN
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I do feel I am a sentimental poet. For me, that\u2019s not a bad word. I know that there are terrible sentimental poems, but I don\u2019t try not to be sentimental. I just try to be as truthful about myself as I am about anything else, not sugarcoating anything. I measure the poem by how accurate it feels when it\u2019s done, and craft is part of it too, making sure it\u2019s crafted as well as I know how. That helps me discover whether it works or not. And then just living with it for a while. Can I bear for anyone else to see this? If I can\u2019t, then I don\u2019t. And that\u2019s about the emotion, too. Is this too raw? Too untransformed? I need to make sure that it\u2019s a poem and not just a journal entry. That\u2019s about craft, that\u2019s about restraint of a certain emotional kind. If it all adds up and I can sit with it and be comfortable with it, then I think it\u2019s something I can share.
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BUCKINGHAM<\/strong>
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I like the idea that the tightness of the craft is working as a counterbalance to the content of the poem.
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FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
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Right. When you have a container for your emotions, it gives them shape. Otherwise, they\u2019re shapeless, they\u2019re running out of the corners, and that\u2019s kind of uncomfortable. But if you have the shape you get from form, and craft, then you have a place to put everything. And it\u2019s not just a skeleton, it\u2019s filled out with emotion. So it\u2019s very cooperative.
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ANDERSON<\/strong>
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In an interview with Poetry Northwest, you said you had a project in mind for Post Romantic when you set out to write it. You said what draws you to the page is writing \u201cabout\u201d something. How was it different when you were putting together Dressing in the Dark?
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FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
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Yeah. I didn\u2019t choose the subject. I went through breast cancer surgery and then recovery. And there is a little bit of the pandemic in the manuscript, too, which I didn\u2019t want to highlight but couldn\u2019t completely ignore. I felt called to write about my recovery, and the only way I knew how was through poems. And then once I had those poems, all these other parts of my life started to stick to the breast cancer poems. Some of them were about very different subjects, but even though they weren\u2019t about my recovery, they filled in as though they were. I found that magical, actually, that these poems could serve as metaphors. So the manuscript started to form itself. This book came together quicker than any other book I\u2019ve written. It\u2019s very small. But it felt complete more quickly too.
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SHAFFER<\/strong>
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It\u2019s interesting you talk about these poems being about recovery when the poems are also so much about waking and coming out of a long sleep. How do you think about recovery as a type of waking?
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FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
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I think my body recovered more quickly than my mind. I had to accept my new body, wake up to my new sense of mortality, and that dragged behind my actual physical recovery. I was lucky because my cancer was caught early. Death was never on the table. I didn\u2019t need chemotherapy or radiation therapy that so many women go through. For me, it was really about losing part of my physical self. And as a poet, looking on, I found that interesting. I could have a dialogue with myself.
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SHAFFER<\/strong>
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I\u2019m also curious about the Roethke poem.
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FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
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Yes, the epigraph. That came very late. The line \u201cI wake to sleep and take my waking slow\u201d is such a wonderful paradoxical line, and I was feeling some paradox in these poems. So I went back to the poem, \u201cThe Waking,\u201d and found in that last stanza these three lines together. \u201cWhat falls away is always. And is near. \/ I wake to sleep and take my waking slow. \/ I learn by going where I have to go.\u201d It totally clicked\u2014this is what I want to build the manuscript around. It helped me order the poems, and it helped me understand the phases of my recovery, and it gave shape to the manuscript. The idea of waking was really central to me, so that\u2019s why it became the first title of the manuscript [Waking]. I don\u2019t always take advice, but I did have a close reader tell me that title doesn\u2019t speak very loudly. And as much as I hated to hear it, I understood. So I tried another title, I Take My Waking Slow. But then the title started to feel more like Roethke\u2019s than mine. It was actually only in the last week or so that I sat down and pored over the manuscript. I was listing phrases I thought could work as titles, and twice I wrote down Dressing in the Dark. Given where that comes from in the manuscript, from the poem \u201cThe Cat, Is Missing, Day Eight,\u201d that best suggested the ideas in the manuscript.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHAFFER<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s like going from night into day and going out into the world.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yeah. And not necessarily wanting to look at yourself, too. There\u2019s some element of that.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUCKINGHAM<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In \u201c61\u201d and in \u201cLate in Life Tomatoes,\u201d there is a theme of acceptance\u2014I thought I would be this person, I\u2019m not this person, this is who I am\u2014not just accepting, but in celebration of that.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yeah. I wrote those early breast cancer poems, and then I wrote dark stuff for a while. But this world is very dark, and I was tired of dark. I was completely tired of dark. I don\u2019t live that way either. I have inherited my mother\u2019s optimistic outlook and I wanted my nature to be reflected in the poems. Whenever I was feeling the world in a good way, I would try to work with that. I think of those two poems as sister poems. They\u2019re about trying to accept the self I have.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FAIRLEY<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an interview with John W. Marshall, he asked if Plume was a memoir in poetry. You replied, \u201cIs it still a memoir if I\u2019m not at the center?\u201d Dressing in the Dark does feel more in the center of your body, at least. I was wondering if you consider Dressing in the Dark as more of a memoir.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It does feel more intimate than I\u2019ve allowed myself to write in the past. I don\u2019t know if I\u2019d call it a memoir. I don\u2019t know if there\u2019s enough of the world around me to make it a memoir, but I am dead center in the middle of it. For good or for ill.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FAIRLEY<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Plume and Post Romantic feel more closely related in theme and more abundant in language and scope than your newest collection, which feels more like it\u2019s reaching out and seeking language. Did you find these poems more difficult to write than the other two collections, or did you struggle with the process of putting it together?
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The longer I write the harder it is to write. I question myself all the time. I\u2019m one of those people who thinks, well, that\u2019s the last poem I\u2019ll ever write. I\u2019ve been like that for years. Experience demonstrates that I do keep going, so I have to trust that. Post Romantic was very hard to complete because I had the title early on and I had this concept. I thought, oh, I\u2019ve written Plume, so now all my books are going to be projects. I thought, experienced poets work in projects, so now I\u2019m going to work in projects. I had this concept of a long marriage viewed against my relationship with my country and how they\u2019re parallel loves. I would bring them together, and there would be this enlightening conversation between the two. I could not write that book. I wanted to in the worst way, but I couldn\u2019t, so I had to be satisfied with what I could write. I was happy with the marriage part of that book. I found the America poems to be almost impossible. I don\u2019t view them as political poems, they\u2019re personal poems about a love gone sour, and those sorts of love poems are so difficult to make fresh or new. So I had to make concessions. The shadow of that original idea is there, but I wasn\u2019t enough of a poet to make it work out exactly as I imagined.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUCKINGHAM<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It does feel like abandoning the original concept is often the right thing to do. Has your opinion on how soon in the process that concept comes changed over time?
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes. With this newest, I thought, I am not going to put a project on the table. I\u2019m just going to write the poems I\u2019m writing. And yes, I was writing breast cancer poems because that\u2019s what I was going through. But I refused to call it that at first. I wrote more breast cancer poems in a second wind but I didn\u2019t like most of them and pulled them out. And then I did discover that some new poems I\u2019d written about memory, about my mother, about motherhood, were fitting together with the breast poems. I didn\u2019t title the collection until the very end because of that trouble I\u2019d had with Post Romantic.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUCKINGHAM<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whereas Plume could not have been anything else.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Right. Plume originally was just going to be a series of po\u0002ems. I could never have started if I\u2019d thought of it as a whole book from the beginning. I was writing about something far larger than me, which was intimidating. So I had to keep my eye very focused on the near until I had so many poems that it was like, okay, now I have enough that I actually do have a whole book.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUCKINGHAM<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What part did you play in the design of that book? It\u2019s incredible.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Isn\u2019t it amazing? This is one of the great joys of working with a publisher that has a designer in-house. I said, \u201cDo whatever you want. I just want to make sure that the definition of the word ‘plume’ is very clear from the cover. So not a feather plume, not a writing plume, but a plume of pollution.\u201d Ashley Saliba was the designer. Because the office was in Seattle, I was able to go in for a visit, and when she met me she was carrying a draft of the cover, and I got shivers. It was so expressive of the pollu\u0002tion without being explicit at all. And then those big letters, PLUME in bright radioactive green against a background green the same color as the control panels in the historic reactors on the Hanford site. I have a picture of myself holding my book in front of a reactor control panel, and it\u2019s the same color. Ashley did all of that just by instinct. She designed the interior, too, and figured out how to make the redactions, which were very finicky, work. She\u2019s just a genius. That book won a national design award.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FAIRLEY<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is she designing your new book cover?
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No. But my daughter is, which I\u2019m really excited about. My daughter is a designer. I absolutely love the cover of Dressing in the Dark.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FAIRLEY<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s this theme of silence inhabiting the poems of Dressing in the Dark. The poem \u201cIn My Hand\u201d reads, \u201cSilence strikes me now as the truest answer for what\u2019s missing.\u201d From these lines, I gathered a kind of thesis of the book. Throughout the collection, the speaker\u2019s asking questions to the mother: \u201cWhat did you do with the extra time?\u201d, asking questions to the self: \u201cHaven\u2019t I worn in my mind by now?\u201d and \u201cWhy couldn\u2019t I master my tangled poems?\u201d, and even asking a nameless bird questions, \u201cIs this forgetting just another lesson in humility?\u201d And the answers always seem to be made up of silence.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s a very good way to say, \u201cI don\u2019t know the answer.\u201d
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FAIRLEY<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yeah. As a reader, I don\u2019t get the answers, and it seems at the end the speaker is still searching. I was curious about the theme of silence in this collection, and in what ways is silence related to grief?
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

God, this is a great question. The silence at the very center of this collection is the silence of the breast that is no longer there. You lose your feeling where that breast was, and part of recovery is coping with that. If you lose vision in part of your eye, your brain will compensate and your eye tells you it can see everything. The nerves around the breast do that, too, I\u2019m learning. They make me think I can feel what I can\u2019t feel. It\u2019s this wonderful compensatory kindness of the body that amazes me. So silence is at the book\u2019s kernel, but recovery seems to be asking questions even if I don\u2019t have answers. Maybe the questions create a kind of cloud around the silence that feels comforting. I\u2019m growing more comfortable all the time with the fact that there aren\u2019t answers. One of the arcs in the book is coming to a kind of comfort with not knowing.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUCKINGHAM<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like \u201cIn a Watershed Year\u201d\u2014an acceptance of not knowing, a comfortability in not knowing, like Keats\u2019 negative capability.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yeah, me and Keats. That\u2019s definitely my pandemic poem. When we\u2019re all in it together, somehow it\u2019s communal and connecting to have those questions because we all have the same questions, I think.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHAFFER<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You mentioned before that you\u2019ve been part of a writing group for over twenty years. How has that collaboration influenced your writing process? Do you have any advice for young writers who are trying to build communities of their own?
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I love my poetry group. The first very practical advantage is that I know we\u2019re going to be meeting, so I need to have a poem; it urges me to write. Second is just to have people on my side. Writing can be really lonely, as you know, especially if I feel like I\u2019m not doing as well as I should, or everyone else seems to be excelling and I\u2019m not. It feels good to have compatriots. It\u2019s not important that they write the same way I do. It\u2019s even okay if we don\u2019t write in the same genre. The best thing we can do is to be there for each other, and be witness for each other. I also like the idea of a long-term relationship with other writers because they come to know your work deeply. They know your voice, they know what you\u2019re going to do next, and they can call you on the stuff you\u2019ve done over and over again. When I\u2019m finishing up a poem, I can hear my friend Peter say, \u201cI think the poem ends one line earlier.\u201d I can anticipate what he would say, and I do it for myself instead. That\u2019s so helpful. Not everyone needs a group. Some people are loners, and they don\u2019t like input on their work. That\u2019s to be completely respected. Some groups, some people, need only encouragement. They don\u2019t want criticism. There\u2019s a lot to be said for a group like that. Not everyone needs critique. But if you do have a critique group, it begins with respect for each other. You learn to know each other, you champion each other. It\u2019s been a godsend for me. Yeah, I love it.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHAFFER<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How did you find those people?
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The original group came out of that night class I took with Mike Hickey. It has changed through the years. In fact, I\u2019d say it actually represents three different groups. One ended, and then another one started, and that ended, but there\u2019s some overlap in all three. You look for kind people who are open to learning and to difference. We can tell when the balance is right, and when it is, we guard it with our lives.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUCKINGHAM<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While we were having lunch, you said Linda Bierds told you something that caused you to work on a manuscript for another four months. Could you talk about that a little more?
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sure. So, it\u2019s been a huge honor. I\u2019ve worked with two wonderful editors. My first was Hilda Raz at Prairie Schooner, and the second has been my editor on the last three books, Linda Bierds. She\u2019s the editor of the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, an amazing poet, a MacArthur Fellow, and she\u2019s been a wonderful reader and editor for me. When I submitted Post Romantic to her a few years ago, she read it and replied that she was interested but didn\u2019t think it was ready, that I had every right to take it somewhere else, but she would like to see it again. She listed one paragraph of ideas, things she saw that she liked and wanted more of, things she thought didn\u2019t work so well, but they were said in very broad terms. I worked for six months on the manuscript based on that one paragraph of feedback. That\u2019s what you get from a really insightful editor who gets straight to the heart of things. It doesn\u2019t mean pages and pages of response. Post Romantic is a braided collection. It only has one section, so the poems are rubbing up against each other. One poem seems to suggest another. In one case, there\u2019s a poem about my son pulling an imaginary sword out of a stone as he\u2019s listening to me read the story of King Arthur; the last line in that poem mentions the blade. The following poem describes the blade of a Chernobyl helicopter. Most people wouldn\u2019t notice it, but there\u2019s a connection. Linda wanted more of those intuitive connections. I immediately understood. She said all that in one sentence\u2014better than I\u2019m doing.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ANDERSON<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I noticed on your website, which is wonderful, that there are a lot of types of interdisciplinary collaboration, like music composition and documentaries, that pull from your work. How does that shape how you view your own work? And how much collaboration was there with some of those projects? What was that like?
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those collaborations were really on the side of the other artists who were using my poems, specifically Plume, as a jumping-off place. Plume has had a life of its own. It\u2019s been a great privilege to see that book go out into the world to audiences who are not necessarily poetry audiences, people more concerned with the subject of the book than with poetry, and also to inspire other artists in their work around Hanford. The filmmaker Irene Lusztig discovered my poems early on when she was making the film Richland, and she found it useful to ask the residents of Richland she was interviewing to choose a poem to read aloud. Four of those readings made it into her film. Reginald Unterseher, a composer in the Tri-Cities, used four of the poems in Plume as the lyrics for his compositions. It\u2019s been a huge gift.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ANDERSON<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Would you consider yourself an interdisciplinary artist? Do you create in any other mediums?
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t really perform in other mediums. Professionally speaking, I\u2019m just a poet. But I love playing. I\u2019m taking a class right now called \u201cHaiku Comics\u201d from the marvelous David Lasky, which is really fun. I\u2019m terrible at haiku and I\u2019m terrible at drawing, so it\u2019s a good combination for me. In the same vein, I wrote a screenplay a year ago set in Montana. I\u2019ve worked on other kinds of writing just simply to bring the joy back because I\u2019m so hard on myself when I\u2019m writing poems, and it gets to be a drag sometimes. You need to return to something that helps you you remember, oh, I actually really enjoy writing, you know? It\u2019s important to get to your joy.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ANDERSON<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What else do you enjoy? Not just professionally.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m growing to love travel more and more as we get a bit older. I walk every day and go to the gym. I love my TV shows, which are a mix of drama, and HGTV, and comedy. And I love writ\u0002ing letters. I like to cook. I love feeding my family. My friends are very important to me. I\u2019m in the going-out-for-lunch stage of my life and that\u2019s a very good stage.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHAFFER<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I noticed that after you write about being called back into your body at the end of Dressing in the Dark, in the third section, the poems that follow are rich with images of food. There\u2019s so much food in that third section. There\u2019s restaurant food, garden food, junk food, seafood, diet food, home-cooked food, and family food. This is immediately following the epigraph of the third section which is \u201cI learn by going where I have to go.\u201d How does your relationship with food and eating help you think about the world around you?
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fascinating observation which I was completely unaware of. The whole world I feel through food. I love to eat, but I find writing about food actually really challenging. It\u2019s hard to get the pleasure across to someone else. And it can\u2019t be just a list of food, although I do list food. That\u2019s why I don\u2019t take it on as a main subject\u2014because I struggle to evoke the sensual pleasures of food in a fresh way. I have a really hard time with the cooking reality shows because I can\u2019t taste the food, except of course The Great British Bake Off.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHAFFER<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When you write about really embodied topics, like a feeling in your body or eating something, is it difficult to access in language because it\u2019s so sensory?
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The kind of challenge that a poet loves, right? I don\u2019t feel like I have the skill set for describing embodied experiences so much, especially food, and I have always been reticent about writing about sex. That\u2019s not my lane; I\u2019m too reserved to write about it in the way it fully deserves, so I leave that for other people to do.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUCKINGHAM<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s interesting that the beginning of Dressing in the Dark is surgery, and the end is this richness.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I just love that you see it that way. That\u2019s wonderful.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ANDERSON
<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You borrow lines in this new collection from Adrienne Rich, Stephen Dobyns, and also from young students. I was wondering what that collaboration was like.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think if I didn\u2019t read, I would stop writing. That\u2019s what sparks my imagination. When I see what other people are doing with their lines and with their poems, it makes me want to be part of that conversation. Sometimes I come across lines that are a wonderful jumping off place like the Adrienne Rich piece. In almost every book, I have a poem dedicated to a poet or about a poet, usually multiple poets.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUCKINGHAM<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What are you reading?
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Right now, a lot of murder mysteries. I\u2019m in the middle of Richard Hugo\u2019s murder mystery about Montana; that\u2019s really fun and a bit weird. One of my favorite books this year was All Fours by Miranda July. Loved that. I\u2019ve actually been part of a poetry book club since 2017. One book we read recently that I loved is by a non-poet writing a book of poetry, No Ship Sets Out to be a Shipwreck by Joan Wickersham. It\u2019s all about the Vasa, the ship that sunk in the Stockholm harbor 300 years ago. They brought it to the surface in the 1950s and built a whole museum around it. She was there not expecting to like it at all. She became so obsessed with this ship, she went back like ten times to write about it. The Ruins of Nostalgia by Donna Stonecipher I thought was just magnificent. It\u2019s a book of prose poems\u2014every poem has the title \u201cThe Ruins of Nostalgia\u201d; they\u2019re just like jewels. It reminds me a lot of Victoria Chang\u2019s book Obit in structure. I wish it would get more attention. We read Lucia Perillo recently. I highly recommend her she\u2019s a poet from Washington State who died about five years ago. She\u2019s absolutely brilliant. She\u2019s smart, she\u2019s funny, she\u2019s brutally honest. I hate to name names because I hate to leave people out. We\u2019re going to read Anne Carson\u2019s new book, Wrong Norma, this month. That\u2019s waiting for me when I get home.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

THOMAS<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you think of yourself as a Washington poet? Who are some other Washington poets that you see yourself maybe in a group with or who are part of this tradition?
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of my first poets was Theodore Roethke. Before I ever wrote my first poem, I was a graduate student at the Univer\u0002sity of Washington in engineering, and The Daily, their newspaper, printed his poem \u201cDolor\u201d I loved it so much I cut it out and put it in my drawer, and every once in a while I\u2019d pull it out and read it. I should have attended to what it was telling me. It\u2019s about the extreme boredom of office work. It begins: \u201cI have known the inexorable sadness of pencils.\u201d I should have realized it was a message to me that I should not go into engineering, but I wasn\u2019t listening properly. The problem with good poems is you have to listen to them. I do think of myself as a Northwest poet, maybe a Washington State poet. Who else should I mention? Christopher Howell is an amazing poet; Richard Hugo, who we share with Montana but is an important voice in the Northwest; Linda Bierds, who carved her own route through poetry by taking history and her own voice and melding them, applying her voice to other characters in ways, which I think is fascinating. And my poet friends.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

THOMAS<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We just read Martha Silano\u2019s new book with Lynx House. It was phenomenal.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes. I just wrote a review of The One We Call Ours for Lily Poetry Review. So huge, and so full of heart. What I love about that book is that it\u2019s not a doomsday book. The humans that created this impossible situation with our environment are the same humans that she gives all of this leeway and joy and love to. I love that she includes both sides of it. There\u2019s plenty of blame to go around, but she\u2019s not really blaming so much.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUCKINGHAM<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you see yourself in any other school of writers or any that you share some sensibilities with or are influenced by?
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I used to want to see myself as part of the \u201cold white guy\u201d group of poets who were given permission to write about anything. They\u2019d write about driving down the highway to get their motorcycle fixed or going fishing. There was nothing they couldn\u2019t write about. In a spiritual sense, I love that idea of being able to write about doing laundry or taking care of the kids. Obviously, the world has changed a lot and so many more people need to damn the permission slips and speak, but I also need to let myself speak, too. Those guys were the ultimate models of permission. Like, I am going to write about putting leaves in bags and taking them out to the garbage. I love that permission. Back in the day, that\u2019s what allowed me to see myself writing poems.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUCKINGHAM<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How are you feeling right now that we\u2019re losing security and safety markers at places like Hanford?
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a threat that the government is going to reclassify high-level nuclear waste as low-level waste. It\u2019s a very, very se\u0002rious issue. Frankly, I can\u2019t really look at the news right now. Clearly, I wasn\u2019t able to determine the outcome of the election. I\u2019m retrenching and hoping that the people who should have known better will understand their irresponsibility and move in the right direction. I\u2019m hoping that the people who work at Hanford will get the funding they require. It will be hard on them. The community at Hanford is mostly conservative. There\u2019s some complicated self-examination required.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUCKINGHAM<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this political climate, amidst climate change, authoritarianism here and around the world, what does it mean to be producing art?
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I love going to poetry to walk in someone else\u2019s shoes, to try on someone else\u2019s life and see what that feels like. It\u2019s a way of learning about the world that I would never otherwise know. Those poems, those books, need to keep being written so that we can learn and remember empathy. If we could just try to keep talking to each other\u2014what worries me is when we be\u0002come so polarized that we stop talking to each other. I think art of all kinds is essential to keeping those conversations going\u2014poetry and also music and art help us describe what it\u2019s like to be alive. I do think that builds empathy and we\u2019re sorely missing that right now.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUCKINGHAM<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your books have a political conscience. Plume certainly does, and it\u2019s in Post Romantic, and it\u2019s even in Dressing in the Dark a little bit.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLENNIKEN
<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t set out to write political poems. To me those are personal poems. But I do have my own relationship with my country; it\u2019s personal and it\u2019s very troubled. I\u2019m trying to get that out on the page. It helps me process what I\u2019m going through.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUCKINGHAM<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The poems are in conversation with their surroundings and with a conscience, which not all poetry has. And in Post Romantic, there\u2019s that nostalgia.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a lot of nostalgia. When I first started writing poems, all I wanted to write about was what was happening in my lifeat that moment\u2014my parents passing away, my marriage, my children growing up. It was a very domestic and very small world. And now what I find myself writing about over and over again is looking back, remembering childhood and even beyond that. But I hope it\u2019s a complicated nostalgia, in search of truth.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHAFFER<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was fascinated in your new collection when you wrote that you remember your childhood self as if she were your own child. You also write that \u201cmothers are haunted by the children that their children used to be.\u201d I wanted to know if you feel like your childhood self is haunting you when you\u2019re writing and if you feel like you\u2019re, in a way, caring for her when you write about her.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLENNIKEN<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes. That\u2019s so well said. I do feel like I have a chance to love that child and be kind to that child in ways that I wasn\u2019t always kind to myself at the time. I understand her so much better than she understood herself. And that\u2019s a gift, to be able to round the corners of my young self. I do indulge in that, and it feels good.<\/p>\n\n\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

KATHLEEN FLENNIKEN\u2019S POETRY ranges from hard-hitting docupoetics to personal and domestic poems; in the words of Albert Goldbarth, \u201cThe surface range of Kathleen Flenniken\u2019s . . . poems is admirably vast.\u201d Her poems are emotionally-charged experiences characterized by intellect and honesty, and infused with a poignant national and ecological awareness. Flenniken\u2019s humble, restrained style complements … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5678,"featured_media":39325,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpo365_audiences":[],"wpo365_private":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39324"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5678"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39324"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39336,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39324\/revisions\/39336"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}