I N T E R V I E W S
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Inverted Syntax’s Editorial Assistant Allissa Hertz continues her talk with Kathryn Winograd in part two of this interview. They do a deeper dive into Katheryn's new book, Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children, which is releasing today, March 16th. Get your copy at https://kathrynwinograd.com/books/
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"This book was about, not just the environment, which I'm so passionate about, but my mother coming here. It was harder because, I worry, did I tread on my mother's privacy? We're trying to find that balance. I wanted to show my mother, and the journey she was going through, and how we were going through it together."
Listen to Part 2 of the interview:
Transcript of the Interview : |
A: Your last collection of essays was centered around your own perspective. Your new collection of essays is often centered around your mother’s perspective. How does that change the stories?
K: Phantom Canyon: Essays of Reclamation- I'd been raped when I was 13 years old. I had never written about it. I had been hurt by it. And there was something in The Denver Post a number of years ago, they used to have a section where readers could submit a piece. And I did. I had seen this prompt in a craft book called Write Something You're Afraid Of. So, I wrote about the rape and it was published in The Denver Post. As I started learning more about creative nonfiction, I wrote a new piece. We had the cabin and we had just moved in there. We got this beautiful bathtub. This will show you a strand, a beautiful clawfoot bathtub. We had it in our cabin. And I remember I was taking a bath and I had the window open. It was kind of cold outside. And if I lifted my leg up, there was steam that would come off my leg. I thought that it looked like milk. I ended up writing this draft of an essay about bathing. It was just how beautiful it was to bathe up here. We had a well and I knew that the water came from the well. We had to dig so deep, 460 feet down. It was awful expensive. So this water is coming up from the center of the earth. I just loved it. Then, my husband read it. He's a writer. And he goes, “Gah. You're not writing about bathing?” And I'm like, “Yeah, I’m writing about the bathing. I love my bathtub.” He says, “No. You're writing about having been raped.” I ended up writing that piece. It became a seminal piece in that book, because it was me recognizing that as a woman, I had come to terms with it. That book was really about me and my trying to understand what had happened to me. This book was about, not just the environment, which I'm so passionate about, but my mother coming here. It was harder because, I worry, did I tread on my mother's privacy? We're trying to find that balance. I wanted to show my mother, and the journey she was going through, and how we were going through it together. The book really ended up with an arc for me. But I didn't want to hurt my mother. I didn't want to overexpose her for what she is going through, which has been very difficult. My father's been dead since 1999. My mom thought she would die in her 70s. She wanted to die in her 70s. She's going to be 91 in April. She is not a happy camper. And then, here she comes to me and I suddenly have power of attorney. I feel all this responsibility. I think it was really trying to find a way to tell her story in these essays and the stories that were important to me, because I made important discoveries in this book that were honorable to my mother, but also true. I think that was the hard part. I remember as coming to Ashland to teach as a poet, hearing those creative nonfiction people talking about truth. I'm like, “what?” When did you ever worry about truth in a poem? I mean, you can lie. You can be metaphoric. It was so important. I never really understood what that meant. And then Regis asked me for the winter to do a seminar about the ethics of creative nonfiction and I did all this research for. And wow, that was a stunner for me to see all the facets of that. You know, I don't want to hurt anyone. Even if things were hurtful to me I hope that I can approach what happened to me, what I'm writing about, what my mother's going through, our relationship, trying to reconcile things that had happened between us, that had happened with my father in a place of wisdom, and empathy, and understanding. And I think that was the challenge, to make sure that I was there. And that there was nothing there that was out of anger, but out of understanding.
A: That’s a really amazing thing to be able to do.
K: You just have to be there spiritually and emotionally in that place to do it. So many off with students that I've worked with will try to approach something that has happened to them too early and they are still angry. They're still sad. They're still grieving. They still need to work it out. I think you need to take that space because I, myself, don't like writing is a place to attack people. It's a place to try to understand them and to understand my relationship with them, their relationship with the world. And that takes some time, a little bit of distance.
A: So you mentioned your husband, Leonard Winograd.
K: Yes.
A: He recently had an essay featured in River Teeth Journal Issue 21.1 called “The Physics of Sorrow.” You wrote a post on your blog about helping him revise this piece. You talk a little bit in that post about hot spots. And I always wonder whenever I hear that two writers are in a relationship together, how that goes. And you explore that a little bit in that essay. But I'd love to hear a little bit more about that. Do you step on each other's toes?
K: Well, this was a great experience. My husband's a playwright. I met him at Iowa 35 years ago. We ended up getting married. It's difficult in the playwriting world, because it's hard to get a play done. He has had some done. And I said, “why don’t you write an essay?” because he's very good at it. He never would do it. And then finally, I got him to do it. And I was able to teach him a little bit about the braided essay, because I said, “this is what you need to do.” And then it was fascinating to sit back and watch him just take over and just kind of explode this essay. Our daughter had, had some seizures at the beginning of last year that just totally, completely rocked our world. And my husband wrote about that. He ended up using black holes as a metaphoric frame for that. So he got that in River Teeth, which I was excited about. And then I went to Essay Daily, which is an online journal where people write essays about other essays. And I said, “look, my husband did this. I want to write about this 'cause I did a seminar for Regis last summer about Leonard's process of writing this, the process of revision.” And I said, “it got such great response. I feel like some people could learn from it.” And they said, “yes, let's do it.” So it was very cool. Leonard published that in River Teeth. Then Essay Daily published my essay about his essay. River Teeth then advertised that it was there. Everybody’s linked up. The internet is incredible. So that was really fun. Being married to another writer can be really wonderful. I mean, he is the person I can go to with my work and say, “read this. What do you what do you think?” And then he will give me an honest opinion. And he's very good. I will get mad at him sometimes because I'm like, “no.” But then I'll more often than not I’ll see what he’s saying. I understand what he’s saying. We can talk about writers. We can talk about what we read. I mean, it's a rich life. It's a rich life together, because we have that whole dimension, this whole thing that we're both very passionate about. It’s a good thing if you can be with another writer. If I was a playwright and we were competing against each other, maybe it'd be hard, but we’re doing such different stuff that it was kind of in sync, basically.
A: That's awesome. We talked a little bit about your book coming out. And we're gonna have a link on the site so that everyone can go and pre-order that.
K: Yes, they can pre-order the book!
A: If it's after March 2020 and you're listening to this, you can buy the book.
K: Yes. You can do that. And I'm doing a book celebration on March 29th at the book bar. People are invited to have food and drink and I'll read from it and celebrate. And then I’m reading at a few other places. But yes. Yes, the book. Get the book. That’d be great.
K: Phantom Canyon: Essays of Reclamation- I'd been raped when I was 13 years old. I had never written about it. I had been hurt by it. And there was something in The Denver Post a number of years ago, they used to have a section where readers could submit a piece. And I did. I had seen this prompt in a craft book called Write Something You're Afraid Of. So, I wrote about the rape and it was published in The Denver Post. As I started learning more about creative nonfiction, I wrote a new piece. We had the cabin and we had just moved in there. We got this beautiful bathtub. This will show you a strand, a beautiful clawfoot bathtub. We had it in our cabin. And I remember I was taking a bath and I had the window open. It was kind of cold outside. And if I lifted my leg up, there was steam that would come off my leg. I thought that it looked like milk. I ended up writing this draft of an essay about bathing. It was just how beautiful it was to bathe up here. We had a well and I knew that the water came from the well. We had to dig so deep, 460 feet down. It was awful expensive. So this water is coming up from the center of the earth. I just loved it. Then, my husband read it. He's a writer. And he goes, “Gah. You're not writing about bathing?” And I'm like, “Yeah, I’m writing about the bathing. I love my bathtub.” He says, “No. You're writing about having been raped.” I ended up writing that piece. It became a seminal piece in that book, because it was me recognizing that as a woman, I had come to terms with it. That book was really about me and my trying to understand what had happened to me. This book was about, not just the environment, which I'm so passionate about, but my mother coming here. It was harder because, I worry, did I tread on my mother's privacy? We're trying to find that balance. I wanted to show my mother, and the journey she was going through, and how we were going through it together. The book really ended up with an arc for me. But I didn't want to hurt my mother. I didn't want to overexpose her for what she is going through, which has been very difficult. My father's been dead since 1999. My mom thought she would die in her 70s. She wanted to die in her 70s. She's going to be 91 in April. She is not a happy camper. And then, here she comes to me and I suddenly have power of attorney. I feel all this responsibility. I think it was really trying to find a way to tell her story in these essays and the stories that were important to me, because I made important discoveries in this book that were honorable to my mother, but also true. I think that was the hard part. I remember as coming to Ashland to teach as a poet, hearing those creative nonfiction people talking about truth. I'm like, “what?” When did you ever worry about truth in a poem? I mean, you can lie. You can be metaphoric. It was so important. I never really understood what that meant. And then Regis asked me for the winter to do a seminar about the ethics of creative nonfiction and I did all this research for. And wow, that was a stunner for me to see all the facets of that. You know, I don't want to hurt anyone. Even if things were hurtful to me I hope that I can approach what happened to me, what I'm writing about, what my mother's going through, our relationship, trying to reconcile things that had happened between us, that had happened with my father in a place of wisdom, and empathy, and understanding. And I think that was the challenge, to make sure that I was there. And that there was nothing there that was out of anger, but out of understanding.
A: That’s a really amazing thing to be able to do.
K: You just have to be there spiritually and emotionally in that place to do it. So many off with students that I've worked with will try to approach something that has happened to them too early and they are still angry. They're still sad. They're still grieving. They still need to work it out. I think you need to take that space because I, myself, don't like writing is a place to attack people. It's a place to try to understand them and to understand my relationship with them, their relationship with the world. And that takes some time, a little bit of distance.
A: So you mentioned your husband, Leonard Winograd.
K: Yes.
A: He recently had an essay featured in River Teeth Journal Issue 21.1 called “The Physics of Sorrow.” You wrote a post on your blog about helping him revise this piece. You talk a little bit in that post about hot spots. And I always wonder whenever I hear that two writers are in a relationship together, how that goes. And you explore that a little bit in that essay. But I'd love to hear a little bit more about that. Do you step on each other's toes?
K: Well, this was a great experience. My husband's a playwright. I met him at Iowa 35 years ago. We ended up getting married. It's difficult in the playwriting world, because it's hard to get a play done. He has had some done. And I said, “why don’t you write an essay?” because he's very good at it. He never would do it. And then finally, I got him to do it. And I was able to teach him a little bit about the braided essay, because I said, “this is what you need to do.” And then it was fascinating to sit back and watch him just take over and just kind of explode this essay. Our daughter had, had some seizures at the beginning of last year that just totally, completely rocked our world. And my husband wrote about that. He ended up using black holes as a metaphoric frame for that. So he got that in River Teeth, which I was excited about. And then I went to Essay Daily, which is an online journal where people write essays about other essays. And I said, “look, my husband did this. I want to write about this 'cause I did a seminar for Regis last summer about Leonard's process of writing this, the process of revision.” And I said, “it got such great response. I feel like some people could learn from it.” And they said, “yes, let's do it.” So it was very cool. Leonard published that in River Teeth. Then Essay Daily published my essay about his essay. River Teeth then advertised that it was there. Everybody’s linked up. The internet is incredible. So that was really fun. Being married to another writer can be really wonderful. I mean, he is the person I can go to with my work and say, “read this. What do you what do you think?” And then he will give me an honest opinion. And he's very good. I will get mad at him sometimes because I'm like, “no.” But then I'll more often than not I’ll see what he’s saying. I understand what he’s saying. We can talk about writers. We can talk about what we read. I mean, it's a rich life. It's a rich life together, because we have that whole dimension, this whole thing that we're both very passionate about. It’s a good thing if you can be with another writer. If I was a playwright and we were competing against each other, maybe it'd be hard, but we’re doing such different stuff that it was kind of in sync, basically.
A: That's awesome. We talked a little bit about your book coming out. And we're gonna have a link on the site so that everyone can go and pre-order that.
K: Yes, they can pre-order the book!
A: If it's after March 2020 and you're listening to this, you can buy the book.
K: Yes. You can do that. And I'm doing a book celebration on March 29th at the book bar. People are invited to have food and drink and I'll read from it and celebrate. And then I’m reading at a few other places. But yes. Yes, the book. Get the book. That’d be great.
A: Awesome. And I know you're really gonna be working on promoting the book and that takes a lot of your time. Are you already thinking about what you're gonna be writing next?
K: Well, I'm already involved in another project. There is something called the Pink Progression Movement. And I found out about it because a friend of mine, Trine Bumiller, who's a wonderful painter here in Denver, shows everywhere. It's with the Arvada Center. She asked me if I would collaborate with her. She is doing a series of paintings. And I'm doing a series of poems. And they will be exhibited at the Arvada Center with a whole bunch of other people, other artists who are collaborating. It's a big collaboration called the Pink Progression Collaborations. The opening reception is at the Arvada Center and that is on June 4th from 6 to 9 PM. And we'll be doing a reading from that. And then as part of that, then they came back, the pink people– we call them the pink people– came back to me and asked me if I would be interested in being part of a book that they're putting together with artists and writers who are involved in this Pink Progression. I asked a dear friend of mine, Carol Guerroro-Murphy who's a poet and activist here in Denver, if she would want to do a collaboration. And we are finishing that up. We've done a series of letter poems back and forth to each other. They will be in a book. We will send that to them before the 8th, because it's due. So that's been really fun. And then there will be a reading for that. And that is going to be on March 14th at the McNichols Civic Center. From 1 to 3 PM is when the book people are going to read. And then the painters/writers thing is going to be on June 4th. So that's been fun. It's nice to have done the creative nonfiction and now come back full circle to poetry. My poetry has changed, I think, because I've done creative nonfiction. We'll see how it goes. But it's been great to do this collaboration. It's been a really cool thing with both Trine and with Carol.
A: Yeah. That sounds really amazing.
K: It is, yeah.
A: The last question that I like to ask is just anything that you would like to add that you'd like to say to your readers? Anything extra that's going on with you.
K: I'm going to ask them to go to my website. I do a blog now. We were just talking about blogs and snickering about blogs. But, you know, I think I'm practicing, because I actually want to start doing some freelance writing. I think I'm practicing doing this. I think what I would say to the readers out there is keep writing. Go to classes. Go to workshops and share your adventures with other people. This has been a pretty amazing last few months for me. I read something, and I cannot remember. I think it’s in Poets & Writers or something. I wish I could find it now. Some writer– and I think this is bigger than this, because I think some actress did this. But this writer wrote about the year of saying yes. And so the year of saying yes, you say yes to everything. And then you send out the things you never expected to have happen. And I thought, I am going to do the year of saying yes. I retired in May from Arapahoe Community College, which was really very nice, but very busy and time consuming. I just said, OK, yes, I'm going to finish this collection of essays. Because it had taken me so long. And then I got done. And I felt like I'm finally done. And just to finally put the period at the end of it. I thought, OK, this is going to take me forever to try to publish these, because I’m going to try to find an agent. I'm going to try to find an editor. But I'm just going to go to Poets & Writers. And I'm just going to see if there's any publishers out there that are looking for a book now. I found The Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize. And then there was the Saddle Road Press, they were having an open reading. I thought, all right, I'm going to send this there just because this is going to be my way of telling myself I'm done with this book. I'm going to move on to something else. And then seven days later, I got an e-mail from them. They loved the book. They wanted to publish it. And at first, I thought, oh, my gosh, no, because this can't be possible, because it was so quick. And I was planning on doing all this stuff. But then I thought, you know, if I say no to this, there goes the year saying, yes. I thought, this would be kind of cool to retire, say yes to this, to the book, and work on the book, and that's been actually a wonderful experience working with this press. They've been really so supportive and did just a wonderful job on the book design. And then I said yes to the Pink Progressions. And then I said yes to various other things that I'm doing. I guess what I want to say to people is have a year of saying yes. I mean, just say yes. And just go with it. This woman in Poets & Writers said she had more rejection than she'd ever had because she said yes. And she would also submit to things where she would always say, oh, no, I couldn't possibly get in there. But she said she got things that she never expected to get. And that's been pretty wonderful for her. And it's been pretty wonderful for me. I would say keep reading. Keep writing. Don't give up. Say yes. And, you know, there's so many different ways to become published, to just go for it
About
Kathryn Winograd, writer@9600ft, is the author of Phantom Canyon: Essays of Reclamation, an INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award Finalist, and Air Into Breath, a Colorado Book Award winner in Poetry and Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children, a collection of essays forthcoming from Saddle Road Press (March 2020.) Her essays have been notable in The Best American Essays and her poetry has received three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Special Pushcart Prize Mention as well as won the Chautauqua Literary Journal’s Poetry contest on War and Peace and the Writers Digest Annual Writing Competition for non-rhyming poetry. Winograd’s essays and poems have published widely in journals such as Fourth Genre, River Teeth, and Hotel Amerika and Cricket magazine and The New Yorker. She currently teaches poetry and creative nonfiction for Regis University’s Mile-High MFA program.
Kathryn Winograd, writer@9600ft, is the author of Phantom Canyon: Essays of Reclamation, an INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award Finalist, and Air Into Breath, a Colorado Book Award winner in Poetry and Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children, a collection of essays forthcoming from Saddle Road Press (March 2020.) Her essays have been notable in The Best American Essays and her poetry has received three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Special Pushcart Prize Mention as well as won the Chautauqua Literary Journal’s Poetry contest on War and Peace and the Writers Digest Annual Writing Competition for non-rhyming poetry. Winograd’s essays and poems have published widely in journals such as Fourth Genre, River Teeth, and Hotel Amerika and Cricket magazine and The New Yorker. She currently teaches poetry and creative nonfiction for Regis University’s Mile-High MFA program.
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Inverted Syntax’s Editorial Assistant Allissa Hertz talks to Kathryn Winograd about how to balance life as a writer and a teacher, writing in the woods, and Kathryn's new book Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children, which will be out March 16th and is available to order now.
"The title of my last book is Phantom Canyon: Essays of Reclamation. I am surrounded by and in nature. I write outside. I write at a table by the window. Nature is all the clichés. It brings me solace, and it brings me wisdom, and it brings me spirituality. A lot of the essays in Phantom Canyon came from short journal exercises. I would write at night after being out. I would try to remember what I’d seen. And then as I went back to them later, I realized there were images and moments I needed to develop into an essay. I think that’s how. It’s being out, it’s walking, it’s observing and just experiencing, and then coming in. And whether its writing something down in a journal or else putting it into an essay that you’re working on, all that comes together. My heart is in nature."
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Transcript of the Interview :
A: How long have you been a writer and a teacher?
K: Like so many writers, I started writing as a kid. There are so many people that have the knack or way of looking at the world. They have this language and they want to record it. I remember standing by my mom and having her type up poems that I had written or contests. I was very young then. I think I really got started more serious with writing in high school. There was this moment where this guy stood me up. I felt so bad. I went into this little pink bedroom and I was looking out. It was a very gray day and I started writing this poem. By the time I got done with the poem I felt great. Forget the guy. I felt great with the poem. So I’ve been writing for a long time. I got my BA at Ohio University in Literature and Creative Writing. Then I went to Iowa and got my MFA in Poetry. Then I went to the University of Houston and worked on my PHD in literature with a creative dissertation, which was poetry. That was for three years. I stopped for a while and ended up at DU and got my PHD there and did a creative dissertation. I started teaching at Iowa. I had a chance to be a tutor at the writing center and I loved it. I really liked being able to help people. Once I got to Houston and DU I got to teach some Creative Writing, which I like quite a bit. Then I started teaching Creative Writing workshops for various schools around here. I have taught for a lot of schools the schools in this area over the years, but I ended up at the Arapahoe Community College and started the Creative Writing program there. I developed the Writers Studio program and taught a lot of Creative Writing. Then I started teaching for Ashton University’s MFA program. I taught Poetry and Creative Non-Fiction. Now I’m at Regis University teaching for their Mile-High program, Creative Writing, Poetry, and Non-Fiction.
A: That’s awesome. That’s a lot.
K: I have taught every age. I have taught Kindergarteners. I did a book for Scholastic on stepping into poetry for teachers. I have taught 9-year-olds. I had this fabulous experience where I got to go down to the four corners with a history department at the University of Northern Colorado. They had a five-million-dollar grant when Obama was in office. We worked with the Navajo Indian teachers. My job was to teach them how to teach poetry writing to their students, so that they could write about the history of their life in context of the culture and history around them. So that was really exciting as well.
A: That sounds amazing. How do you find that balance between being a teacher and being a writer?
K: I went into teaching, because I knew I wanted to be a writer. I don’t think it’s as much about time. Though, for a while I worked for an internet company here for internet education called Real Education that become an e-college for I think three years. That was difficult, because my head was in a whole different area, very techie. But then I co-authored two books on online learning and teaching with a professor from the University of Massachusetts. Then I started writing for journals about education and technology. I think it’s not so much about time, but about the headspace. If you teach you are in the craft. You are reading the wonderful writers who are publishing all around you. You are reading craft books yourself that you can help your students with. You are reading your students work. All of that keeps you wanting to write your own stuff. It just becomes part of the daily rhythm whether you are somebody who gets up early in the morning and does that before you go off and teach or you are coming home at night and writing then. You just find space. I think for so many writers that I have talked to, they have to. I know I’m not the most pleasant person when I’m not writing. I get a little wacky. I get a little hyper, a little overly sensitive. When I’m writing and I’m deeply engrossed in a project it doesn’t really matter to me what’s going on in the world, because I’m in that space. It’s such a wonderful space to be in.
A: Like many of us in Denver, I recently saw the “Claude Monet: The Truth of Nature” exhibit at the Denver art museum. There were several paintings that he painted from the back of a boat. He was standing on the boat when he painted those scenes. Do you find yourself writing in nature? Do you physically go to the places that you are writing about?
K: I grew up on a farm. I grew up in the suburbs, but my parents had a farm in Indiana that I would go to every weekend until I was 12. I would spend my time out riding a horse, swimming in a pond, exploring creeks, and picking up all these dead things. And then we moved to a farm, so I lived on a farm. I rode on that farm. I was surrounded by our cattle, our sheep, our dogs, and our cats. My mom had promised me I could have any animal I wanted once we moved to a farm, and so I took her up on it. I spent a lot of time walking through the woods. I have a cabin now up in Phantom Canyon. The title of my last book is Phantom Canyon: Essays of Reclamation. I am surrounded by and in nature. I write outside. I write at a table by the window. Nature is all the clichés. It brings me solace, and it brings me wisdom, and it brings me spirituality. A lot of the essays in Phantom Canyon came from short journal exercises. I would write at night after being out. I would try to remember what I’d seen. And then as I went back to them later, I realized there were images and moments I needed to develop into an essay. I think that’s how. It’s being out, it’s walking, it’s observing and just experiencing, and then coming in. And whether its writing something down in a journal or else putting it into an essay that you’re working on, all that comes together. My heart is in nature. And as for the exhibit, I love the ones of the winter woods with those houses, because they remind me of my mom and dad's farm. The landscape is so stirring and beautiful in the snow.
A: You also have a new book coming out.
K: I do. I do have a new book coming out. It's coming out in March. It's called Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children. And that is the book that started in my immersion in the area around my cabin. We had 40 acres when I did that book and I just bought 80 more. Owner carry. Gotta make those loan payments. My cabin is up by Phantom Canyon, Victor, and Cripple Creek. It's a mining area. It's beautiful. There’s Aspen trees and then there's big, high-altitude meadows. There's conifer tree, large outcroppings, and fabulous 360-degree views of Pikes Peak. And gosh, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and the Arkansas Valley. It's not like Aspen. It's not like Snowmass. It's a little more arid. You look at it and you're thinking, OK, well, there’s another rock, there's another tree. But as soon as you start digging down into the history of the place, you start digging down into the natural science of the place, it's amazing. It’s so rich and incredible. So those essays in Slow Arrow came from a project I did with an online journalism site. I wrote a monthly column. I use my cabin in that area as a microcosm of both the natural wonders that I've found that are out there just waiting in the world for us to discover them and of the environmental concerns that are going on. But as I wrote those, I knew that they were just placeholders. I knew that I was going to use them and that they were going to become metaphor for the human migrations that were going on in my own family. I started by actually going around the area because my mother, who was 85 at the time, she's 91 now, she came out to be with me. She left Ohio where she'd been born and raised. She wanted to be close to me because she's going blind and she was readying herself. She thought she was going to die soon. Thank goodness she has not. I don’t think she's happy about that. But here was her migration. And I had not seen her– I mean, I've seen her every year, of course, with visits, but I had not lived with her since I'd been 18, before I went off to college. And I had not been home living near her since I went off for college. And so here suddenly I was responsible for this lovely woman who now wanted me to help her in this last stage of her life. I knew that these places I took her to, the places that I saw, the physical characteristics of those places, the history of it all, all those were just such ripe metaphors for the family story I had to tell. It became an interesting process of writing the book. I had the columns, but they were focusing on the environmental issues, which has become very important to me. Then I said, OK, but I want to braid in here– weave in here– the family story, my mother's, my daughter's, the spiritual journeys I've gone on. In Creative Nonfiction and the lyric essay there's a beautiful form of the essay called the lyric essay and the braided essay. And in the braided essay, you have a series of threads that you begin to weave against each other. And I think what's so exciting with that is when you try it with threads that you think, well, how did these fit together? But as you begin to weave them, they begin to speak to each other. They become very metaphoric. And so I would take these columns and I would look for what I always tell my students are like the hot spots. You can tell it's where the little hairs on back your neck go up like there's a deeper story waiting to come here. And then I would bring in these threads and just started spacing them through the piece and seeing what seemed to work with each other. Doing that led me into new directions and new discoveries I hadn't expected to meet. It was a exciting process of writing. It was a very long process of writing. And it was very frustrating because if they didn't come easily it took me a while to figure out how they were going to fit in there. But then once I did, I could just feel it inside me. And then the writing became much easier to do.
A: I love that metaphor of hotspots. Your writing is also very poetic. You're talking about the lyric essay, which I've often had trouble distinguishing the difference between a poem and a lyric essay. And I wonder what are your thoughts on that line between genres, especially when it comes to poetry vs. nonfiction?
K: I was hoping you wouldn't ask me that question, because it’s not a very easy question. I think the first misnomer people have about the lyric essay is that they think it's just about pretty language, being very musical and very rich with metaphor, etc. But it's more than that. It's more closely connected to poetry because it works metaphorically. If you think about creative nonfiction on a broad spectrum, you have nonfiction that is leaning more towards the journalism side and then you have nonfiction that’s more towards the poetry side. Journalism side, you're going to be factual, beautiful writing, narrative, informative, everything else. You're going to tell a lot, right? I mean, I think that as a poet going into creative nonfiction, that was the hardest part for me was the telling. Poetry, you're not going to tell anything, right? You don't tell. There's this whole thing about how you reflect and I'm going to write my reflections.
But as you get closer to the lyric side of it, then that changes. There's still the telling, but maybe it's in a different way. And then there's white space where you are asking your reader to trust you and to look out how image and image may bump up against each other. And then if they can then kind of feel their way into understanding what you're writing about. There's beautiful prose that's poetic. And then there's beautiful poetry that might be a little prosy. I've read from essays or written published essays that have been, five, six, seven pages long, and people say, “oh, that was a beautiful poem.” And I’m like, well, that was five pages long and they thought it was really a poem.
Yet, you'll read these beautiful lyric essays that are collage essays where you'll have a piece here, and then you have whitespace, and then maybe something else that’s coming in, an image. And they're very poetic. And they go on for very long. I think that there's such a genre blur now that I don't think I care if I don't know what is the difference between a poem and a creative nonfiction piece? I'll tell you this, a number of years ago I was asked to write this piece for a magazine about food, about my experience with food. I couldn't figure out what to write about it. And I found this poem that hadn't worked. I just took it out of its line breaks. And I gave it to them. And they published it as an essay. It was a short essay, but it was there. I think that's the beauty of writing is that you can blur genre. So I say creative nonfiction. It's fiction. It's poetry. It's nonfiction. It's just this beautiful melding of it all. I think that's why I've fallen in love with it so much.
A: Right. I definitely have to ask that question because at Inverted the blurring of genre is something that we focus on, being able to cross that line between, is this poetry? Is that nonfiction? I think it's just such a beautiful thing.
K: It is a beautiful thing.
K: Like so many writers, I started writing as a kid. There are so many people that have the knack or way of looking at the world. They have this language and they want to record it. I remember standing by my mom and having her type up poems that I had written or contests. I was very young then. I think I really got started more serious with writing in high school. There was this moment where this guy stood me up. I felt so bad. I went into this little pink bedroom and I was looking out. It was a very gray day and I started writing this poem. By the time I got done with the poem I felt great. Forget the guy. I felt great with the poem. So I’ve been writing for a long time. I got my BA at Ohio University in Literature and Creative Writing. Then I went to Iowa and got my MFA in Poetry. Then I went to the University of Houston and worked on my PHD in literature with a creative dissertation, which was poetry. That was for three years. I stopped for a while and ended up at DU and got my PHD there and did a creative dissertation. I started teaching at Iowa. I had a chance to be a tutor at the writing center and I loved it. I really liked being able to help people. Once I got to Houston and DU I got to teach some Creative Writing, which I like quite a bit. Then I started teaching Creative Writing workshops for various schools around here. I have taught for a lot of schools the schools in this area over the years, but I ended up at the Arapahoe Community College and started the Creative Writing program there. I developed the Writers Studio program and taught a lot of Creative Writing. Then I started teaching for Ashton University’s MFA program. I taught Poetry and Creative Non-Fiction. Now I’m at Regis University teaching for their Mile-High program, Creative Writing, Poetry, and Non-Fiction.
A: That’s awesome. That’s a lot.
K: I have taught every age. I have taught Kindergarteners. I did a book for Scholastic on stepping into poetry for teachers. I have taught 9-year-olds. I had this fabulous experience where I got to go down to the four corners with a history department at the University of Northern Colorado. They had a five-million-dollar grant when Obama was in office. We worked with the Navajo Indian teachers. My job was to teach them how to teach poetry writing to their students, so that they could write about the history of their life in context of the culture and history around them. So that was really exciting as well.
A: That sounds amazing. How do you find that balance between being a teacher and being a writer?
K: I went into teaching, because I knew I wanted to be a writer. I don’t think it’s as much about time. Though, for a while I worked for an internet company here for internet education called Real Education that become an e-college for I think three years. That was difficult, because my head was in a whole different area, very techie. But then I co-authored two books on online learning and teaching with a professor from the University of Massachusetts. Then I started writing for journals about education and technology. I think it’s not so much about time, but about the headspace. If you teach you are in the craft. You are reading the wonderful writers who are publishing all around you. You are reading craft books yourself that you can help your students with. You are reading your students work. All of that keeps you wanting to write your own stuff. It just becomes part of the daily rhythm whether you are somebody who gets up early in the morning and does that before you go off and teach or you are coming home at night and writing then. You just find space. I think for so many writers that I have talked to, they have to. I know I’m not the most pleasant person when I’m not writing. I get a little wacky. I get a little hyper, a little overly sensitive. When I’m writing and I’m deeply engrossed in a project it doesn’t really matter to me what’s going on in the world, because I’m in that space. It’s such a wonderful space to be in.
A: Like many of us in Denver, I recently saw the “Claude Monet: The Truth of Nature” exhibit at the Denver art museum. There were several paintings that he painted from the back of a boat. He was standing on the boat when he painted those scenes. Do you find yourself writing in nature? Do you physically go to the places that you are writing about?
K: I grew up on a farm. I grew up in the suburbs, but my parents had a farm in Indiana that I would go to every weekend until I was 12. I would spend my time out riding a horse, swimming in a pond, exploring creeks, and picking up all these dead things. And then we moved to a farm, so I lived on a farm. I rode on that farm. I was surrounded by our cattle, our sheep, our dogs, and our cats. My mom had promised me I could have any animal I wanted once we moved to a farm, and so I took her up on it. I spent a lot of time walking through the woods. I have a cabin now up in Phantom Canyon. The title of my last book is Phantom Canyon: Essays of Reclamation. I am surrounded by and in nature. I write outside. I write at a table by the window. Nature is all the clichés. It brings me solace, and it brings me wisdom, and it brings me spirituality. A lot of the essays in Phantom Canyon came from short journal exercises. I would write at night after being out. I would try to remember what I’d seen. And then as I went back to them later, I realized there were images and moments I needed to develop into an essay. I think that’s how. It’s being out, it’s walking, it’s observing and just experiencing, and then coming in. And whether its writing something down in a journal or else putting it into an essay that you’re working on, all that comes together. My heart is in nature. And as for the exhibit, I love the ones of the winter woods with those houses, because they remind me of my mom and dad's farm. The landscape is so stirring and beautiful in the snow.
A: You also have a new book coming out.
K: I do. I do have a new book coming out. It's coming out in March. It's called Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children. And that is the book that started in my immersion in the area around my cabin. We had 40 acres when I did that book and I just bought 80 more. Owner carry. Gotta make those loan payments. My cabin is up by Phantom Canyon, Victor, and Cripple Creek. It's a mining area. It's beautiful. There’s Aspen trees and then there's big, high-altitude meadows. There's conifer tree, large outcroppings, and fabulous 360-degree views of Pikes Peak. And gosh, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and the Arkansas Valley. It's not like Aspen. It's not like Snowmass. It's a little more arid. You look at it and you're thinking, OK, well, there’s another rock, there's another tree. But as soon as you start digging down into the history of the place, you start digging down into the natural science of the place, it's amazing. It’s so rich and incredible. So those essays in Slow Arrow came from a project I did with an online journalism site. I wrote a monthly column. I use my cabin in that area as a microcosm of both the natural wonders that I've found that are out there just waiting in the world for us to discover them and of the environmental concerns that are going on. But as I wrote those, I knew that they were just placeholders. I knew that I was going to use them and that they were going to become metaphor for the human migrations that were going on in my own family. I started by actually going around the area because my mother, who was 85 at the time, she's 91 now, she came out to be with me. She left Ohio where she'd been born and raised. She wanted to be close to me because she's going blind and she was readying herself. She thought she was going to die soon. Thank goodness she has not. I don’t think she's happy about that. But here was her migration. And I had not seen her– I mean, I've seen her every year, of course, with visits, but I had not lived with her since I'd been 18, before I went off to college. And I had not been home living near her since I went off for college. And so here suddenly I was responsible for this lovely woman who now wanted me to help her in this last stage of her life. I knew that these places I took her to, the places that I saw, the physical characteristics of those places, the history of it all, all those were just such ripe metaphors for the family story I had to tell. It became an interesting process of writing the book. I had the columns, but they were focusing on the environmental issues, which has become very important to me. Then I said, OK, but I want to braid in here– weave in here– the family story, my mother's, my daughter's, the spiritual journeys I've gone on. In Creative Nonfiction and the lyric essay there's a beautiful form of the essay called the lyric essay and the braided essay. And in the braided essay, you have a series of threads that you begin to weave against each other. And I think what's so exciting with that is when you try it with threads that you think, well, how did these fit together? But as you begin to weave them, they begin to speak to each other. They become very metaphoric. And so I would take these columns and I would look for what I always tell my students are like the hot spots. You can tell it's where the little hairs on back your neck go up like there's a deeper story waiting to come here. And then I would bring in these threads and just started spacing them through the piece and seeing what seemed to work with each other. Doing that led me into new directions and new discoveries I hadn't expected to meet. It was a exciting process of writing. It was a very long process of writing. And it was very frustrating because if they didn't come easily it took me a while to figure out how they were going to fit in there. But then once I did, I could just feel it inside me. And then the writing became much easier to do.
A: I love that metaphor of hotspots. Your writing is also very poetic. You're talking about the lyric essay, which I've often had trouble distinguishing the difference between a poem and a lyric essay. And I wonder what are your thoughts on that line between genres, especially when it comes to poetry vs. nonfiction?
K: I was hoping you wouldn't ask me that question, because it’s not a very easy question. I think the first misnomer people have about the lyric essay is that they think it's just about pretty language, being very musical and very rich with metaphor, etc. But it's more than that. It's more closely connected to poetry because it works metaphorically. If you think about creative nonfiction on a broad spectrum, you have nonfiction that is leaning more towards the journalism side and then you have nonfiction that’s more towards the poetry side. Journalism side, you're going to be factual, beautiful writing, narrative, informative, everything else. You're going to tell a lot, right? I mean, I think that as a poet going into creative nonfiction, that was the hardest part for me was the telling. Poetry, you're not going to tell anything, right? You don't tell. There's this whole thing about how you reflect and I'm going to write my reflections.
But as you get closer to the lyric side of it, then that changes. There's still the telling, but maybe it's in a different way. And then there's white space where you are asking your reader to trust you and to look out how image and image may bump up against each other. And then if they can then kind of feel their way into understanding what you're writing about. There's beautiful prose that's poetic. And then there's beautiful poetry that might be a little prosy. I've read from essays or written published essays that have been, five, six, seven pages long, and people say, “oh, that was a beautiful poem.” And I’m like, well, that was five pages long and they thought it was really a poem.
Yet, you'll read these beautiful lyric essays that are collage essays where you'll have a piece here, and then you have whitespace, and then maybe something else that’s coming in, an image. And they're very poetic. And they go on for very long. I think that there's such a genre blur now that I don't think I care if I don't know what is the difference between a poem and a creative nonfiction piece? I'll tell you this, a number of years ago I was asked to write this piece for a magazine about food, about my experience with food. I couldn't figure out what to write about it. And I found this poem that hadn't worked. I just took it out of its line breaks. And I gave it to them. And they published it as an essay. It was a short essay, but it was there. I think that's the beauty of writing is that you can blur genre. So I say creative nonfiction. It's fiction. It's poetry. It's nonfiction. It's just this beautiful melding of it all. I think that's why I've fallen in love with it so much.
A: Right. I definitely have to ask that question because at Inverted the blurring of genre is something that we focus on, being able to cross that line between, is this poetry? Is that nonfiction? I think it's just such a beautiful thing.
K: It is a beautiful thing.
A: This is kind of the oddball one. But when I was doing a little research, I saw that you have done a couple of audio magazines called Shoo Fly. And these are children's magazines. Can you talk a little bit about those?
K: I studied poetry so much when I was younger. I was only writing poetry up to till in my forties when I started looking around to prose. My daughters were born when I was 30. I had twins. as I was writer, and they knew I was a writer as they grew up, and I thought, well, you know, the old cliché about sex and death? I can't really share those poems with my daughters, but I'd love to share work with them. So I started writing a bunch of children's poems, which I loved doing. I had a few of them published in Cricket Magazine, which was wonderful, because you're getting Cricket Magazine, and they have a picture somebody has written. A lot of those poems ended up in a lot of nature magazines for adults. I really don't know if I was writing children's poems or just nature poems for adults. I was never quite sure what I was doing, but I was loving it. I didn't record them. I sent them. That was an incredible experience, because they did a story of mine and they did a couple of poems where they had an actor or actress tell the story and do the poem. They had fun music so I could put it in a little cassette player, because that was a while ago, for my daughters. And there would be this fun music playing and here comes this actress. They'd have noise effects and everything. It was really fun.
A: Yeah. That sounds awesome.
K: It was awesome.
A: That’s a really cool project. As far as your writing goes, who are some of the people that have influenced you over the years? And then, in addition to that, I have the question, who are your favorite writers? This is probably going to be a little bit of the same, but maybe a little different too.
K: It is a little bit of the same. Early when I was a poet, I was influenced by Louise Gluck, a poet I just could not get out in my head. Then as I got a bit older, Jorie Graham. She has this gorgeous book called The End of Beauty, which I love. There were a lot of women poets back then that I love. As I got older, I met some other poets like Deborah Digges. She died a number of years ago, but she writes beautiful poetry. I think that poetry then ended up influencing my creative nonfiction writing. Lia Purpura is an incredible poet who writes creative nonfiction. It's amazing what she does. One of the last books I read was On Looking. It's a beautiful collection of essays. Diane Ackerman, her book, The Moon by Whale Light, just that title. I read it when the daughters were young, before I really gotten into writing creative nonfiction, but I felt so inspired by that book. It's a series of essays. She goes off on these explorations and then writes this beautiful meld of lyrical, and scientific, and narrative pieces. I just love that. Another one is Gretel Ehrlich. She did The Solace of Open Spaces. That's been so instrumental to me. Brenda Miller, I think is someone who's been a wonderful example to me of what you can do with the lyric essay. She's very much about the braided essay. So that's been wonderful. And then there's Annie Dillard. And of course, there's Terry Tempest Williams. I think I'm drawn to the writers who are very involved with nature. And then there's my cohorts know that I had it at Ashland. Jill Cristman won the AWP Award and creative nonfiction a number of years ago. She's a fabulous writer. She will have some fabulous book coming up soon. Robert Root has published about 24 books. Steven Harvey. The nice thing is that as I've gotten older, and now that I am where I am, I've had the chance to be in these MFA programs where they bring in these just these fabulous writers. I've had a chance to meet them, and get to know them, and call so many of my friends. They influence me all the time. Recently, there was a piece in The New Yorker by Michael Chabon. It was about his father dying in the hospital. It's just these individual pieces. I ended up writing a blog about it, because I was just so struck by the writing of it. I liked reading anthologies. Joyce Carol Oates, I found an older one. She did The Best American Essays of the Century. This was a little while ago. But there was this essay in there by Gerald Early called Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant. And I just read that. It was written in 1990. That was when my daughters were born. It just blew me away. I mean, it's such a beautiful piece. And it's such an interesting piece in terms of craft, because he begins with this very everyday thing. You’re sitting with his young daughters and his wife. They have a ritual watching the Miss American Pageant. They're African American. And yet then he goes from there into this incredible, searing analysis of racism in America at that time. That's what I find so exciting about creative nonfiction. I can begin with this doorknob right here on this door and God knows where I'll end up if I do it right. And that's the beauty of creative nonfiction for me and of the writers that I like so much.
A: Right, those strands that you were talking about that don’t seem to connect.
K: That's right.
K: I studied poetry so much when I was younger. I was only writing poetry up to till in my forties when I started looking around to prose. My daughters were born when I was 30. I had twins. as I was writer, and they knew I was a writer as they grew up, and I thought, well, you know, the old cliché about sex and death? I can't really share those poems with my daughters, but I'd love to share work with them. So I started writing a bunch of children's poems, which I loved doing. I had a few of them published in Cricket Magazine, which was wonderful, because you're getting Cricket Magazine, and they have a picture somebody has written. A lot of those poems ended up in a lot of nature magazines for adults. I really don't know if I was writing children's poems or just nature poems for adults. I was never quite sure what I was doing, but I was loving it. I didn't record them. I sent them. That was an incredible experience, because they did a story of mine and they did a couple of poems where they had an actor or actress tell the story and do the poem. They had fun music so I could put it in a little cassette player, because that was a while ago, for my daughters. And there would be this fun music playing and here comes this actress. They'd have noise effects and everything. It was really fun.
A: Yeah. That sounds awesome.
K: It was awesome.
A: That’s a really cool project. As far as your writing goes, who are some of the people that have influenced you over the years? And then, in addition to that, I have the question, who are your favorite writers? This is probably going to be a little bit of the same, but maybe a little different too.
K: It is a little bit of the same. Early when I was a poet, I was influenced by Louise Gluck, a poet I just could not get out in my head. Then as I got a bit older, Jorie Graham. She has this gorgeous book called The End of Beauty, which I love. There were a lot of women poets back then that I love. As I got older, I met some other poets like Deborah Digges. She died a number of years ago, but she writes beautiful poetry. I think that poetry then ended up influencing my creative nonfiction writing. Lia Purpura is an incredible poet who writes creative nonfiction. It's amazing what she does. One of the last books I read was On Looking. It's a beautiful collection of essays. Diane Ackerman, her book, The Moon by Whale Light, just that title. I read it when the daughters were young, before I really gotten into writing creative nonfiction, but I felt so inspired by that book. It's a series of essays. She goes off on these explorations and then writes this beautiful meld of lyrical, and scientific, and narrative pieces. I just love that. Another one is Gretel Ehrlich. She did The Solace of Open Spaces. That's been so instrumental to me. Brenda Miller, I think is someone who's been a wonderful example to me of what you can do with the lyric essay. She's very much about the braided essay. So that's been wonderful. And then there's Annie Dillard. And of course, there's Terry Tempest Williams. I think I'm drawn to the writers who are very involved with nature. And then there's my cohorts know that I had it at Ashland. Jill Cristman won the AWP Award and creative nonfiction a number of years ago. She's a fabulous writer. She will have some fabulous book coming up soon. Robert Root has published about 24 books. Steven Harvey. The nice thing is that as I've gotten older, and now that I am where I am, I've had the chance to be in these MFA programs where they bring in these just these fabulous writers. I've had a chance to meet them, and get to know them, and call so many of my friends. They influence me all the time. Recently, there was a piece in The New Yorker by Michael Chabon. It was about his father dying in the hospital. It's just these individual pieces. I ended up writing a blog about it, because I was just so struck by the writing of it. I liked reading anthologies. Joyce Carol Oates, I found an older one. She did The Best American Essays of the Century. This was a little while ago. But there was this essay in there by Gerald Early called Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant. And I just read that. It was written in 1990. That was when my daughters were born. It just blew me away. I mean, it's such a beautiful piece. And it's such an interesting piece in terms of craft, because he begins with this very everyday thing. You’re sitting with his young daughters and his wife. They have a ritual watching the Miss American Pageant. They're African American. And yet then he goes from there into this incredible, searing analysis of racism in America at that time. That's what I find so exciting about creative nonfiction. I can begin with this doorknob right here on this door and God knows where I'll end up if I do it right. And that's the beauty of creative nonfiction for me and of the writers that I like so much.
A: Right, those strands that you were talking about that don’t seem to connect.
K: That's right.

About
Kathryn Winograd, writer@9600ft, is the author of Phantom Canyon: Essays of Reclamation, an INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award Finalist, and Air Into Breath, a Colorado Book Award winner in Poetry and Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children, a collection of essays forthcoming from Saddle Road Press (March 2020.) Her essays have been notable in The Best American Essays and her poetry has received three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Special Pushcart Prize Mention as well as won the Chautauqua Literary Journal’s Poetry contest on War and Peace and the Writers Digest Annual Writing Competition for non-rhyming poetry. Winograd’s essays and poems have published widely in journals such as Fourth Genre, River Teeth, and Hotel Amerika and Cricket magazine and The New Yorker. She currently teaches poetry and creative nonfiction for Regis University’s Mile-High MFA program.
Kathryn Winograd, writer@9600ft, is the author of Phantom Canyon: Essays of Reclamation, an INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award Finalist, and Air Into Breath, a Colorado Book Award winner in Poetry and Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children, a collection of essays forthcoming from Saddle Road Press (March 2020.) Her essays have been notable in The Best American Essays and her poetry has received three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Special Pushcart Prize Mention as well as won the Chautauqua Literary Journal’s Poetry contest on War and Peace and the Writers Digest Annual Writing Competition for non-rhyming poetry. Winograd’s essays and poems have published widely in journals such as Fourth Genre, River Teeth, and Hotel Amerika and Cricket magazine and The New Yorker. She currently teaches poetry and creative nonfiction for Regis University’s Mile-High MFA program.
Inverted Syntax’s Editorial Assistant Allissa Hertz has an inspiring chat with the poet Eric Baus about his writing practice.
“I think there’s a lot of weird ideas about what it means to be a poet and what our lives are like, so part of me is adamant that we allow poetry to be idiosyncratic and to exist in its own space largely separate from market concerns. The more I’m able to set aside my own understandings of why I write so that I can listen in a more open way, the more I’m able to reclaim the newness of how I came to poetry. Poetry is always larger than what one person can absorb. I want to gesture toward that largeness alongside other people.” |
How long have you been writing and how have you maintained your enthusiasm during times of doubt and frustration?
I originally thought of myself as a fiction writer, but I ended up liking the poetry teachers that I had and being more interested in what you could do at a smaller scale. I was good at zeroing in on fleeting impressions and assembling them together. Poetry was closer to how my brain naturally functions and how I made sense of the world.
I would say I wrote my first poems that I would consider readable around 1994 or 1995. One of them is in my first book of poems that was published in 2004. It doesn’t seem significantly different from some of the other poems, but I wrote one pretty good poem in 1994 and a whole bunch of crappy poems in 1994-1998. Then, something happened (I think it mainly had to do with reading more and more poetry) where I figured out how to write more poems that I was happy about.
The times that I got frustrated were the times when I wasn’t writing, which was often after I felt like I had completed something or after I felt like if I kept moving in the same direction I was repeating myself. Rather than beat myself up about it, I would just read. It was like I had to fill up my brain with books. I had to read eight or 10 books that I was excited about. I wouldn’t even think about writing. At a certain point I would figure out what the next thing was.
The things that were positive and were validating have always arrived at the right time for me. I certainly wanted to have a first book for a couple years before I had one, but thankfully the timing worked out and the book came out when I was ready. I’m not really someone who struggles with feeling bad about myself if I don’t write. Listening and reading are the things that make me most excited about writing. Sometimes you think you’re done with it, like you’ve cracked it, like I know how to do this and it’s just going to be easy from here on out, but I don’t think that state ever really arrives, or it doesn’t arrive in the ways that you would hope it will arrive, or it’s fleeting. I feel much more relaxed in the process of writing now. I think if I can surprise myself that helps.
The other thing that I do is cut-ups and processes. That’s something that I would do in addition to reading. I would cut up my previous work and combine it with other things that I had written. If I felt like I had exhausted the language or the style that I was writing in, I would try to disrupt it in a low-stakes way. I would watch a movie, print out a bunch of cut-ups of my poems that I had arranged on my computer, and then go through and circle interesting sentences. You have a low return on that process, so I might get a decent one-page poem every couple hours of writing, but that changed how I thought about composition.
There was a certain point where I was able to write to surprise myself, but without using as many techniques. I feel like I was changed by doing a lot of processes all the time. I thought more like a cut-up. A while ago I had cut up one of my manuscripts. I had my name in the title and my address on the first page of the manuscript. I did this cut-up where I smashed together all the different language from the manuscript, put it into columns, alphabetized it, randomized it, and tried to make it unfamiliar to myself. One of the cut-ups that came out was “Eric Baus is a result.” That’s actually kind of the closest thing I have to a poetics. It’s not that my writing is a result of my personality and my feelings so much as a lot of my personality and my feelings are the result of being a person who engages with language in this really precise, intimate way over large patches of time. It’s a reversal of those terms.
I originally thought of myself as a fiction writer, but I ended up liking the poetry teachers that I had and being more interested in what you could do at a smaller scale. I was good at zeroing in on fleeting impressions and assembling them together. Poetry was closer to how my brain naturally functions and how I made sense of the world.
I would say I wrote my first poems that I would consider readable around 1994 or 1995. One of them is in my first book of poems that was published in 2004. It doesn’t seem significantly different from some of the other poems, but I wrote one pretty good poem in 1994 and a whole bunch of crappy poems in 1994-1998. Then, something happened (I think it mainly had to do with reading more and more poetry) where I figured out how to write more poems that I was happy about.
The times that I got frustrated were the times when I wasn’t writing, which was often after I felt like I had completed something or after I felt like if I kept moving in the same direction I was repeating myself. Rather than beat myself up about it, I would just read. It was like I had to fill up my brain with books. I had to read eight or 10 books that I was excited about. I wouldn’t even think about writing. At a certain point I would figure out what the next thing was.
The things that were positive and were validating have always arrived at the right time for me. I certainly wanted to have a first book for a couple years before I had one, but thankfully the timing worked out and the book came out when I was ready. I’m not really someone who struggles with feeling bad about myself if I don’t write. Listening and reading are the things that make me most excited about writing. Sometimes you think you’re done with it, like you’ve cracked it, like I know how to do this and it’s just going to be easy from here on out, but I don’t think that state ever really arrives, or it doesn’t arrive in the ways that you would hope it will arrive, or it’s fleeting. I feel much more relaxed in the process of writing now. I think if I can surprise myself that helps.
The other thing that I do is cut-ups and processes. That’s something that I would do in addition to reading. I would cut up my previous work and combine it with other things that I had written. If I felt like I had exhausted the language or the style that I was writing in, I would try to disrupt it in a low-stakes way. I would watch a movie, print out a bunch of cut-ups of my poems that I had arranged on my computer, and then go through and circle interesting sentences. You have a low return on that process, so I might get a decent one-page poem every couple hours of writing, but that changed how I thought about composition.
There was a certain point where I was able to write to surprise myself, but without using as many techniques. I feel like I was changed by doing a lot of processes all the time. I thought more like a cut-up. A while ago I had cut up one of my manuscripts. I had my name in the title and my address on the first page of the manuscript. I did this cut-up where I smashed together all the different language from the manuscript, put it into columns, alphabetized it, randomized it, and tried to make it unfamiliar to myself. One of the cut-ups that came out was “Eric Baus is a result.” That’s actually kind of the closest thing I have to a poetics. It’s not that my writing is a result of my personality and my feelings so much as a lot of my personality and my feelings are the result of being a person who engages with language in this really precise, intimate way over large patches of time. It’s a reversal of those terms.

You listen to a lot of audio recordings of poetry. When do you find time to do this? Is the experience the same for you as reading or do you use this as a soundtrack to daily life?
Over the years the answer to that question has changed. I first started listening to poetry seriously in the late 90s before broadband internet, archives like PennSound, and before YouTube, so I would get cassettes from the library of canonical figures like William Carlos Williams or I would watch video cassettes of people. There was something about spending a lot of time with someone’s voice and the intimacy of that. I understood the books from the inside out, from a granular perspective. It was like reading a book letter by letter or listening to someone’s voice and hearing every small change in it. It tuned me in to an intimate scale of things and made me pay attention to small shifts in sound.
I wouldn’t say that reading a book and listening are opposed. They affect your body a little bit differently. Listening made it feel like I was hearing with my body and with — not just my ears — but with my lungs, because you can feel how the emotions that you’re feeling change your own breathing. I felt acted upon by the language in a way that was useful to me.
In the 2000s, more stuff started popping up online and I started getting involved in recording and archiving things. I felt like I had been living on the moon doing this weird thing with almost all my free time for years and then I just turned my head and there were thousands of other people who were interested in that kind of experience too. I still think that it’s a huge part of how I write and how I think about poetry. Before PennSound came out, you could have the illusion that you’d heard a lot of what was on the internet. In 2018 it’s this exponentially different universe of language where I can listen to William Carlos Williams or Fred Moten or reading the same poem in three different places.
Now I’m pretty casual about how I listen. I’ll put something on and do the dishes and see what comes back to me. If I listen to something four or five times, what are the patterns that I notice? I like settling into something and listening to a whole album or just picking something up and trying it out knowing that I have a certain kind of attraction to this kind of style and then deliberately interrupting it or antagonizing my experience of it. I am using myself as a weird test subject in some sort of ongoing experiment that has very undefined conditions. I do it with the same ease that I feel the need to go and take a walk when I’m feeling kind of overwhelmed. It’s a natural part of my life. I’m reflective about it. I have thoughts and feelings about it. It helps me solve problems. It helps me think about the world and my own work too. I am a big fan of repetitive ambient exposure to something. Then, I might settle down with it and have a sense of what textures I want to pay attention to. In the 90s, I listened to a lot of Indie rock, and I had a narrower set of aesthetic preferences. That was probably true of poetry at the time as well. I’m in my 40s now and it seems more interesting to just be surprised and let myself be changed by sound rather than seeking out some aesthetic I already know I’ll have an affinity with.
Over the years the answer to that question has changed. I first started listening to poetry seriously in the late 90s before broadband internet, archives like PennSound, and before YouTube, so I would get cassettes from the library of canonical figures like William Carlos Williams or I would watch video cassettes of people. There was something about spending a lot of time with someone’s voice and the intimacy of that. I understood the books from the inside out, from a granular perspective. It was like reading a book letter by letter or listening to someone’s voice and hearing every small change in it. It tuned me in to an intimate scale of things and made me pay attention to small shifts in sound.
I wouldn’t say that reading a book and listening are opposed. They affect your body a little bit differently. Listening made it feel like I was hearing with my body and with — not just my ears — but with my lungs, because you can feel how the emotions that you’re feeling change your own breathing. I felt acted upon by the language in a way that was useful to me.
In the 2000s, more stuff started popping up online and I started getting involved in recording and archiving things. I felt like I had been living on the moon doing this weird thing with almost all my free time for years and then I just turned my head and there were thousands of other people who were interested in that kind of experience too. I still think that it’s a huge part of how I write and how I think about poetry. Before PennSound came out, you could have the illusion that you’d heard a lot of what was on the internet. In 2018 it’s this exponentially different universe of language where I can listen to William Carlos Williams or Fred Moten or reading the same poem in three different places.
Now I’m pretty casual about how I listen. I’ll put something on and do the dishes and see what comes back to me. If I listen to something four or five times, what are the patterns that I notice? I like settling into something and listening to a whole album or just picking something up and trying it out knowing that I have a certain kind of attraction to this kind of style and then deliberately interrupting it or antagonizing my experience of it. I am using myself as a weird test subject in some sort of ongoing experiment that has very undefined conditions. I do it with the same ease that I feel the need to go and take a walk when I’m feeling kind of overwhelmed. It’s a natural part of my life. I’m reflective about it. I have thoughts and feelings about it. It helps me solve problems. It helps me think about the world and my own work too. I am a big fan of repetitive ambient exposure to something. Then, I might settle down with it and have a sense of what textures I want to pay attention to. In the 90s, I listened to a lot of Indie rock, and I had a narrower set of aesthetic preferences. That was probably true of poetry at the time as well. I’m in my 40s now and it seems more interesting to just be surprised and let myself be changed by sound rather than seeking out some aesthetic I already know I’ll have an affinity with.

You’ve said before that you don’t typically write every day or in consistent blocks of time. How does that have an impact on your writing?
I’ve come to think about it as collaborating with time and collaborating with forgetting. I have lots of notebooks that I’ll write in for short patches that I’ll go back to or that I’ll lose. Then, I’ll rediscover them months or years later and approach them like a stranger would. Those gaps in comprehension of what I was doing at the time have come to be important to me. The part of my brain that is not writing is kind of writing sometimes. When you’re cooking food, time is an element. It’s not just knowing what to combine and how much heat. Sometimes you need ten minutes. Sometimes you need six hours. I’ve tried to remove the anxiety part of that. I just try to put that to the side, because it’s not helpful. I use the same brain that I use to write poems to do a lot of things now. I find that I’ve spent so much time in this weird world of language that just the common, everyday stuff that I do, I do kind of like a poet. A lot of my daily life is about assemblage, looking at larger patterns, having a recursive process, stepping back from something, and then zooming in on something. It’s an expression of having done this activity in language for a relatively long time.
In a 2014 Interview with Touch the Donkey you said you prefer writing prose poetry because it has a built-in velocity to it and that you didn’t feel that you’ve exhausted the form for yourself yet. Do you still feel the same way? Are you exhausted? Do you think that you’ll continue writing prose poems?
I do, but I think that they’ll change formally. Sometimes people talk about prose poetry like it’s just one thing. I think it’s many things. It can be a paragraph or a couple paragraphs on a page. It can be isolated sentences on the page. It can be clusters of sentences. It can combine different kinds of forms too. I’m really interested in that aesthetic quality of multiplicity within surface sameness in anything I encounter, so that’s why I really like drone music and minimalist music. Someone else might listen to a repetitive note for 45 minutes and hear just the repetition and monotony. If you listen closely, you hear the difference emanating from each note. You hear the changes over time. Reading Stein is like that too. You attend to yourself listening to something. It allows you to have this meditative space. A lot of what I like to do when I write is assemble elements that I’m working with, so I can set everything out on a table that I might make a poem with and then gradually remove things that feel less relevant. Then I’m left with a couple things and decide, OK, I’ll make this poem out of three or four different gestures, or I’ll make this poem out of a couple different kinds of sentences. Then I’ll step away from it a little bit.
When I look at the books that I’ve written, there’s a certain vocabulary that’s consistent, but some of the books are very different than the other ones and they are all prose poetry. I have a book that’s coming soon that’s all prose poetry and the new manuscript that I’m writing is basically all prose poetry too. I would say the difference is that I’m interested in very short prose poems right now. I used to be interested in ornate, winding sentences, unusual sentence constructions, and breaking grammatical rules to create different kinds of effects in the reader. Now I’m interested in these very direct statements. My most recent book is all simple, past tense, declarative sentences. I wanted to spend time paying attention to the variation within consistency in that form.
Now I’m doing something similar, but it’s a little more human. It’s a little more in a conversational voice. These are sentences that a human being might plausibly say to another human being, which is new for me. I used to be interested in 90% just surprising myself, constructing and getting lost in these generative worlds that I had created like ongoing Sci-Fi writing that wasn’t really tied to plot, this endlessly unfolding novelty. I wouldn’t say that’s all that I did, but I was very interested in that sort of quality. Now I’m interested in beginning in that mode, paring it down, and having the poems be a little bit closer to ideas that I have about the world or experiences that I’m trying to convey. I’m writing closer now to how I think about the world. It took me a couple of decades to figure out how to do this thing that I think most people do naturally, which is to speak in a concise, precise way that’s also musical.
What do you feel is missing from the current literary and visual arts landscape? What do we need more of & more spaces for?
There’s so much variety right now. I’m interested in paying attention to what’s already here that I’m not paying attention to. For me, that’s reading outside the genre of poetry. I’m committed to creating a space where surprise will exist in poetry and I think that’s never going to go away. It’s less that I think there should be more of certain kinds of poetry, but more that we should be aware of all that’s happening simultaneously. I feel like it’s healthy to talk to other writers who are doing something similar, but also with a slightly different emphasis and world attached to it. I use my poetry brain to absorb other genres more than I did in the past. I’m a prose poet, so I can learn a lot from people who are writing in prose genres.
Polyvocality within people’s work is interesting. Maybe what we need is more space so that writers don’t feel like they have to be nailed down to one particular voice and that their writing can be surprising and can change. I really like filmmakers, writers, and artists who have a certain sensibility to their work, but there are huge differences project to project rather than developing a style that people recognize, and they’re rewarded for it, so they reproduce it until they drop over. I always admire writers with a lot of range. I would like for us to have more of a vocabulary to reward for people trying new things. I say that probably because I’m the kind of writer who will sometimes hone the same gesture for a decade. I appreciate the thing that is most difficult for me to do. I don’t think I have the answer to what needs to happen. I think the answer is happening and will continue to happen. It’s just paying attention to the variety that already exists. Almost any aesthetic can be interesting.
There is also something to be said for having an idea about what you want to do and why you want to do it, and consciously working with other like-minded people towards a certain goal. Especially if the aesthetics of what you are doing are connected to a politics you want to advance. I think that’s valuable and essential. I don’t necessarily think everything should dissolve into a genreless, aimless mishmash. As a poet, I’m always for poets and poetry because the larger culture doesn’t seem to understand or make enough space for what we do. I think there’s a lot of weird ideas about what it means to be a poet and what our lives are like, so part of me is adamant that we allow poetry to be idiosyncratic and to exist in its own space largely separate from market concerns. The more I’m able to set aside my own understandings of why I write so that I can listen in a more open way, the more I’m able to reclaim the newness of how I came to poetry. Poetry is always larger than what one person can absorb. I want to gesture toward that largeness alongside other people.
I’ve come to think about it as collaborating with time and collaborating with forgetting. I have lots of notebooks that I’ll write in for short patches that I’ll go back to or that I’ll lose. Then, I’ll rediscover them months or years later and approach them like a stranger would. Those gaps in comprehension of what I was doing at the time have come to be important to me. The part of my brain that is not writing is kind of writing sometimes. When you’re cooking food, time is an element. It’s not just knowing what to combine and how much heat. Sometimes you need ten minutes. Sometimes you need six hours. I’ve tried to remove the anxiety part of that. I just try to put that to the side, because it’s not helpful. I use the same brain that I use to write poems to do a lot of things now. I find that I’ve spent so much time in this weird world of language that just the common, everyday stuff that I do, I do kind of like a poet. A lot of my daily life is about assemblage, looking at larger patterns, having a recursive process, stepping back from something, and then zooming in on something. It’s an expression of having done this activity in language for a relatively long time.
In a 2014 Interview with Touch the Donkey you said you prefer writing prose poetry because it has a built-in velocity to it and that you didn’t feel that you’ve exhausted the form for yourself yet. Do you still feel the same way? Are you exhausted? Do you think that you’ll continue writing prose poems?
I do, but I think that they’ll change formally. Sometimes people talk about prose poetry like it’s just one thing. I think it’s many things. It can be a paragraph or a couple paragraphs on a page. It can be isolated sentences on the page. It can be clusters of sentences. It can combine different kinds of forms too. I’m really interested in that aesthetic quality of multiplicity within surface sameness in anything I encounter, so that’s why I really like drone music and minimalist music. Someone else might listen to a repetitive note for 45 minutes and hear just the repetition and monotony. If you listen closely, you hear the difference emanating from each note. You hear the changes over time. Reading Stein is like that too. You attend to yourself listening to something. It allows you to have this meditative space. A lot of what I like to do when I write is assemble elements that I’m working with, so I can set everything out on a table that I might make a poem with and then gradually remove things that feel less relevant. Then I’m left with a couple things and decide, OK, I’ll make this poem out of three or four different gestures, or I’ll make this poem out of a couple different kinds of sentences. Then I’ll step away from it a little bit.
When I look at the books that I’ve written, there’s a certain vocabulary that’s consistent, but some of the books are very different than the other ones and they are all prose poetry. I have a book that’s coming soon that’s all prose poetry and the new manuscript that I’m writing is basically all prose poetry too. I would say the difference is that I’m interested in very short prose poems right now. I used to be interested in ornate, winding sentences, unusual sentence constructions, and breaking grammatical rules to create different kinds of effects in the reader. Now I’m interested in these very direct statements. My most recent book is all simple, past tense, declarative sentences. I wanted to spend time paying attention to the variation within consistency in that form.
Now I’m doing something similar, but it’s a little more human. It’s a little more in a conversational voice. These are sentences that a human being might plausibly say to another human being, which is new for me. I used to be interested in 90% just surprising myself, constructing and getting lost in these generative worlds that I had created like ongoing Sci-Fi writing that wasn’t really tied to plot, this endlessly unfolding novelty. I wouldn’t say that’s all that I did, but I was very interested in that sort of quality. Now I’m interested in beginning in that mode, paring it down, and having the poems be a little bit closer to ideas that I have about the world or experiences that I’m trying to convey. I’m writing closer now to how I think about the world. It took me a couple of decades to figure out how to do this thing that I think most people do naturally, which is to speak in a concise, precise way that’s also musical.
What do you feel is missing from the current literary and visual arts landscape? What do we need more of & more spaces for?
There’s so much variety right now. I’m interested in paying attention to what’s already here that I’m not paying attention to. For me, that’s reading outside the genre of poetry. I’m committed to creating a space where surprise will exist in poetry and I think that’s never going to go away. It’s less that I think there should be more of certain kinds of poetry, but more that we should be aware of all that’s happening simultaneously. I feel like it’s healthy to talk to other writers who are doing something similar, but also with a slightly different emphasis and world attached to it. I use my poetry brain to absorb other genres more than I did in the past. I’m a prose poet, so I can learn a lot from people who are writing in prose genres.
Polyvocality within people’s work is interesting. Maybe what we need is more space so that writers don’t feel like they have to be nailed down to one particular voice and that their writing can be surprising and can change. I really like filmmakers, writers, and artists who have a certain sensibility to their work, but there are huge differences project to project rather than developing a style that people recognize, and they’re rewarded for it, so they reproduce it until they drop over. I always admire writers with a lot of range. I would like for us to have more of a vocabulary to reward for people trying new things. I say that probably because I’m the kind of writer who will sometimes hone the same gesture for a decade. I appreciate the thing that is most difficult for me to do. I don’t think I have the answer to what needs to happen. I think the answer is happening and will continue to happen. It’s just paying attention to the variety that already exists. Almost any aesthetic can be interesting.
There is also something to be said for having an idea about what you want to do and why you want to do it, and consciously working with other like-minded people towards a certain goal. Especially if the aesthetics of what you are doing are connected to a politics you want to advance. I think that’s valuable and essential. I don’t necessarily think everything should dissolve into a genreless, aimless mishmash. As a poet, I’m always for poets and poetry because the larger culture doesn’t seem to understand or make enough space for what we do. I think there’s a lot of weird ideas about what it means to be a poet and what our lives are like, so part of me is adamant that we allow poetry to be idiosyncratic and to exist in its own space largely separate from market concerns. The more I’m able to set aside my own understandings of why I write so that I can listen in a more open way, the more I’m able to reclaim the newness of how I came to poetry. Poetry is always larger than what one person can absorb. I want to gesture toward that largeness alongside other people.

What are you working on and what’s been on your mind lately?
I’m working on very short poems. A poem that I’ve read a couple of times that I am a little secretly proud of is a three or four long poem called “In Order to Form a More Patient Astronaut”. That’s the direction I’m going in now where it’s about time and scale. It’s about big things, but the poem isn’t big. It’s about putting two or three precise perceptions together and then walking away and trusting people to feel it. My new idea for a poem is that it should be like handing someone a cool rock, and then walking away and letting them look at it on their own. I’m trying to move more towards that.
Over the years I’ve been really interested in the poet, Ed Roberson. I’m re-reading his book called Atmosphere Conditions. Ed Roberson’s career is exciting to me. He’s been doing this slow modulation over a series of decades. He’s been evolving his way of working. He’s someone who works in book length sequences that are often subdivided into smaller sequences that are subdivided into smaller gestures too, so there’s a fractal structure to what he’s doing. He’s someone who pays attention to, among other things, the environment and ecology via the genre of poetry, which is maybe not the most efficient way to make an argument about ecology in the mass media, but it’s an amazing way to experience what it’s like to actually be part of an ecology.
I like a book that behaves more like weather than a book that tells you what the rules of weather are. Ed Roberson’s work is dynamic. It’s powerful, moving, deeply informed by history, and political in a way that I’m in awe of. He’s working with scale, perception, and time in stunning ways. He’s sort of like the actualization of this Wallace Stevens poem How to Live, What to Do, which is a pretty good poem, but it doesn’t especially tell you how to live or what to do. Reading an Ed Roberson book is basically how to live, what to do, or how to make sense of the world, particularly, human relationships to the natural world. I just really want to emphasize that more people should be reading Ed Roberson.
I’m as confused as anyone else in 2018. Every day I wake up and I have the same level of anxiety, worry, anger, and frustration as all my friends and family. I don’t know that I have a wisdom to bring to what is happening right now, but in place of that wisdom what I feel is important for me to do right now is to clarify perception and to make a space for paring things down and looking at things closely. In my poems I’m trying to be much more careful and say just a couple things that at a time. That feels implicitly political to me. I’m trying to be the opposite of a newsfeed or an endlessly scrolling sensibility. That’s the way in which I’m choosing to respond, to try and say a few precise things and then trying not get in the way of those things.
Photos by Eric Baus
I’m working on very short poems. A poem that I’ve read a couple of times that I am a little secretly proud of is a three or four long poem called “In Order to Form a More Patient Astronaut”. That’s the direction I’m going in now where it’s about time and scale. It’s about big things, but the poem isn’t big. It’s about putting two or three precise perceptions together and then walking away and trusting people to feel it. My new idea for a poem is that it should be like handing someone a cool rock, and then walking away and letting them look at it on their own. I’m trying to move more towards that.
Over the years I’ve been really interested in the poet, Ed Roberson. I’m re-reading his book called Atmosphere Conditions. Ed Roberson’s career is exciting to me. He’s been doing this slow modulation over a series of decades. He’s been evolving his way of working. He’s someone who works in book length sequences that are often subdivided into smaller sequences that are subdivided into smaller gestures too, so there’s a fractal structure to what he’s doing. He’s someone who pays attention to, among other things, the environment and ecology via the genre of poetry, which is maybe not the most efficient way to make an argument about ecology in the mass media, but it’s an amazing way to experience what it’s like to actually be part of an ecology.
I like a book that behaves more like weather than a book that tells you what the rules of weather are. Ed Roberson’s work is dynamic. It’s powerful, moving, deeply informed by history, and political in a way that I’m in awe of. He’s working with scale, perception, and time in stunning ways. He’s sort of like the actualization of this Wallace Stevens poem How to Live, What to Do, which is a pretty good poem, but it doesn’t especially tell you how to live or what to do. Reading an Ed Roberson book is basically how to live, what to do, or how to make sense of the world, particularly, human relationships to the natural world. I just really want to emphasize that more people should be reading Ed Roberson.
I’m as confused as anyone else in 2018. Every day I wake up and I have the same level of anxiety, worry, anger, and frustration as all my friends and family. I don’t know that I have a wisdom to bring to what is happening right now, but in place of that wisdom what I feel is important for me to do right now is to clarify perception and to make a space for paring things down and looking at things closely. In my poems I’m trying to be much more careful and say just a couple things that at a time. That feels implicitly political to me. I’m trying to be the opposite of a newsfeed or an endlessly scrolling sensibility. That’s the way in which I’m choosing to respond, to try and say a few precise things and then trying not get in the way of those things.
Photos by Eric Baus
About Eric Baus
Eric Baus is the author of five books of poetry: The Tranquilized Tongue, (City Lights 2014), Scared Text, winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry (Center for Literary Publishing, 2011), Tuned Droves (Octopus Books, 2009), and The To Sound, winner of the Verse Prize (Wave Books, 2004). How I Became a Hum is forthcoming from Octopus in 2018. He is also the author of several chapbooks, most recently The Rain Of The Ice (Above/Ground Press 2014). His poems have been translated into Spanish, Italian, and Finnish. He is a graduate of the PhD program in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Denver as well as the MFA program for poets and writers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He teaches literature and creative writing at Regis University’s Mile High MFA program in Denver. Read more here.
A few months ago our editorial assistant Allissa Hertz interviewed author Steven Dunn where he shared his thoughts on muddying genre and valuing all voices.
Allissa Hertz: Where were you first published and what was that experience like?
Steven Dunn: Foothills Magazine, the University of Denver’s literary journal. I remember feeling good seeing that it was in print. I got rejected from it about three times, so I finally got accepted my senior year. I don’t remember the exact feeling of it, but I feel some of the same feelings I have now, which is hard to explain. I’m happy something that I worked on is out there. It feels good to have that thing validated by other people.
AH: You cross a lot of boundaries in your writing when it comes to genre. Is genre important?
SD: That’s something I think about often. It’s important to me, because I know I publicly identify as a prose writer. I know I’m working inside of that, and I feel naturally influenced by poetry, so genre is important to me because I’m able to identify in one certain thing and make it odder by using other genres in that subject. It’s also a twist for me to call my books novels instead of experimental novels. I am honoring the work by calling them novels, but it’s also muddying the waters a little bit too.
AH: Are you interested in making people rethink genre?
SD: Yeah. I think it’s already rethought. It’s already muddied, but we don’t acknowledge that, so part of the way that I work is acknowledging that.
AH: What are some of your favorite places to read around Denver?
SD: I really like the Dikeou reading series and the F-Bomb. Still Cellars Distillery is up in Longmont. That is definitely one of my favorite places and Innisfree Bookstore in Boulder. I don’t read at Prodigy, because I don’t read at my own reading series, but I love it—not just because I run it—but I like their mission, and I like all the light in the big windows, and I like that it’s during the daytime, and it feels very welcoming to people. That’s one of my favorite places to listen to readings.
My least favorite is Syntax Physic Opera. It’s on Broadway. It’s a cool place, but it’s a music stage mainly and the room fills. The room is big, but then there is always noise going on next to the stage and it just doesn’t feel intimate, although we all like to have a lot of people at our readings. Counterpath is also one of my favorite places to read.
AH: What do you feel is missing from the current literary and visual art landscape? What do we need more of and more spaces for?
SD: I think we need more spaces for people of color, but that’s also linked to class to me. I think we need more bumpkins. We need more hood people, more rednecks, and more white trash writing. We need all of that and I think that’s missing. I’m not saying those terms negatively. I grew up around white trash and hood people and I feel like a lot of our voices are missing from literature and these public spaces and aren’t publicly valued as much.
AH: Do you feel like the market for writers is oversaturated?
SD:I don’t think it’s saturated. I think there is room. But I do think there is an oversaturation of a certain type of voice or a certain class. A lot of it is money driven. I’d guess in the US most of the people who by books are mid-age, mid-class to upper-class white women, so a lot of the books are pushed out for that reason, because that’s where most of the buying power is, so it’s all linked.
AH: What advice would you give to writers who are hesitant to share their stories knowing that maybe they don’t fit into that market?
SD: I would say that although the money isn’t there or a lot of the exposure, there are people who will benefit from your story. As small as my book was, people from my hometown read my book and a lot of people said, “I didn’t know how to talk about these things until I read this book.” I’m not saying I’m a great person or anything, but I’ve received some of the same stuff from art too. My advice is do it anyway, because there is someone who could benefit from it or even you could benefit from it in a way that makes you reevaluate and do some serious work for yourself or your community.
AH: Is there anything that you’re working on that you would like to share with the readers? Where can we find your work?
SD: I’m working on a novel now, which I’m struggling with in a lot of ways. I have a friend who asked me to write about her life but fictionalizing it. A lot of it is generational trauma and she’s doing a lot of research on her family. I’m writing the book as a woman, so I struggle with that aspect like do I even have a right to tell this story? I’m a dude. I have a lot of male privilege. Am I even aloud to do this? Is it responsible for me as an artist? But I have a social and artistic contract with her that I know what I’m doing is for.
AH: Is there anything else that you want to add? Anything on your mind?
SD: There’s something always on my mind. We have a couple lit fests, lit-crawl and lit-fests happening and I know the people who run these things are trying to do what they do and there are some limitations, so it can’t always be how I envision things to be, but a lot of our neighborhoods of color are disappearing in Denver and it seems like a lot of our grass roots art events are happening in well-established white neighborhoods, which bothers me a little bit. I wish things could be different on that end. And also, I have been vocal about organizers finding writers of color and I often refuse to do readings if I am the only person of color reading, because it doesn’t feel good. I don’t want to feel like a token. We need to work harder to be inclusive. Not just as a token situation, but as a public value, having readings with women and writers of color. I think more intersectionality and working harder. In art we claim that we oppose racist institutions, but it seems like we often recreate those things intentionally or unintentionally.
Allissa Hertz: Where were you first published and what was that experience like?
Steven Dunn: Foothills Magazine, the University of Denver’s literary journal. I remember feeling good seeing that it was in print. I got rejected from it about three times, so I finally got accepted my senior year. I don’t remember the exact feeling of it, but I feel some of the same feelings I have now, which is hard to explain. I’m happy something that I worked on is out there. It feels good to have that thing validated by other people.
AH: You cross a lot of boundaries in your writing when it comes to genre. Is genre important?
SD: That’s something I think about often. It’s important to me, because I know I publicly identify as a prose writer. I know I’m working inside of that, and I feel naturally influenced by poetry, so genre is important to me because I’m able to identify in one certain thing and make it odder by using other genres in that subject. It’s also a twist for me to call my books novels instead of experimental novels. I am honoring the work by calling them novels, but it’s also muddying the waters a little bit too.
AH: Are you interested in making people rethink genre?
SD: Yeah. I think it’s already rethought. It’s already muddied, but we don’t acknowledge that, so part of the way that I work is acknowledging that.
AH: What are some of your favorite places to read around Denver?
SD: I really like the Dikeou reading series and the F-Bomb. Still Cellars Distillery is up in Longmont. That is definitely one of my favorite places and Innisfree Bookstore in Boulder. I don’t read at Prodigy, because I don’t read at my own reading series, but I love it—not just because I run it—but I like their mission, and I like all the light in the big windows, and I like that it’s during the daytime, and it feels very welcoming to people. That’s one of my favorite places to listen to readings.
My least favorite is Syntax Physic Opera. It’s on Broadway. It’s a cool place, but it’s a music stage mainly and the room fills. The room is big, but then there is always noise going on next to the stage and it just doesn’t feel intimate, although we all like to have a lot of people at our readings. Counterpath is also one of my favorite places to read.
AH: What do you feel is missing from the current literary and visual art landscape? What do we need more of and more spaces for?
SD: I think we need more spaces for people of color, but that’s also linked to class to me. I think we need more bumpkins. We need more hood people, more rednecks, and more white trash writing. We need all of that and I think that’s missing. I’m not saying those terms negatively. I grew up around white trash and hood people and I feel like a lot of our voices are missing from literature and these public spaces and aren’t publicly valued as much.
AH: Do you feel like the market for writers is oversaturated?
SD:I don’t think it’s saturated. I think there is room. But I do think there is an oversaturation of a certain type of voice or a certain class. A lot of it is money driven. I’d guess in the US most of the people who by books are mid-age, mid-class to upper-class white women, so a lot of the books are pushed out for that reason, because that’s where most of the buying power is, so it’s all linked.
AH: What advice would you give to writers who are hesitant to share their stories knowing that maybe they don’t fit into that market?
SD: I would say that although the money isn’t there or a lot of the exposure, there are people who will benefit from your story. As small as my book was, people from my hometown read my book and a lot of people said, “I didn’t know how to talk about these things until I read this book.” I’m not saying I’m a great person or anything, but I’ve received some of the same stuff from art too. My advice is do it anyway, because there is someone who could benefit from it or even you could benefit from it in a way that makes you reevaluate and do some serious work for yourself or your community.
AH: Is there anything that you’re working on that you would like to share with the readers? Where can we find your work?
SD: I’m working on a novel now, which I’m struggling with in a lot of ways. I have a friend who asked me to write about her life but fictionalizing it. A lot of it is generational trauma and she’s doing a lot of research on her family. I’m writing the book as a woman, so I struggle with that aspect like do I even have a right to tell this story? I’m a dude. I have a lot of male privilege. Am I even aloud to do this? Is it responsible for me as an artist? But I have a social and artistic contract with her that I know what I’m doing is for.
AH: Is there anything else that you want to add? Anything on your mind?
SD: There’s something always on my mind. We have a couple lit fests, lit-crawl and lit-fests happening and I know the people who run these things are trying to do what they do and there are some limitations, so it can’t always be how I envision things to be, but a lot of our neighborhoods of color are disappearing in Denver and it seems like a lot of our grass roots art events are happening in well-established white neighborhoods, which bothers me a little bit. I wish things could be different on that end. And also, I have been vocal about organizers finding writers of color and I often refuse to do readings if I am the only person of color reading, because it doesn’t feel good. I don’t want to feel like a token. We need to work harder to be inclusive. Not just as a token situation, but as a public value, having readings with women and writers of color. I think more intersectionality and working harder. In art we claim that we oppose racist institutions, but it seems like we often recreate those things intentionally or unintentionally.
About

Steven Dunn is the author of the novels Potted Meat (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2016) and water & power (Tarpaulin Sky 2018)
He’s a faculty mentor at Regis University.
Learn more here
He’s a faculty mentor at Regis University.
Learn more here
Inverted Syntax is proud to announce that it will be featuring in its January 2019 print issue, previously unpublished poems from Andrea Rexilius’s fifth book of poetry, The Way the Language Was. She says, “this book considers history and artifact (relationships to past poetic traditions, current and past uses of language), and linguistics and botany (relationships between the environment and speech).”
We chatted with Rexilius about the poems that Inverted Syntax will be featuring from The Way the Language Was, her process, and how she presses into the emotional impetus of the work.
Your poems allude to birds/feathers etc. Are these poems part of a larger collection? I’m also curious about why and how your connections between language and bird movement came about. You’ve said before that you extend the metaphorical gestures of a bird to your writing "the way in which textual threads (sentences, insights) develop across the page”: why is that?
Initially, I thought about the bird in relation to writing because of a performance class I took at SAIC in 2004, when I was working on my first book, To Be Human Is To Be A Conversation. The performance work we did was based out of dance and/or gesture and it seemed that all of my dance moves/gestures relied upon the movements of birds. For example, one gesture (when I reflected on it in language/image/metaphor) became the beak of a bird gathering twigs from the floor of the performance space. I realized how this act of gathering is similar to poetic composition. For a poem, I tend to gather disparate thoughts, images, and influences, then juxtapose them (lines of the poem as twigs or thread) to create my poem (nest). The use of ‘bird/feathers’ in these particular pieces is more about the kind of scavenging I’m doing currently. As a hobby, I've been going for walks around my neighborhood to gather feathers. It's a good way to change your way of perceiving your environment--attuning your attention to something usually overlooked in the landscape. So the lines in these poems referring to "feathers" are literal rather than metaphorical (but they are also both). Nods to Modernist poetry have also been finding their way into The Way the Language Was, so the poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird Feather" is saying hello to Wallace Stevens. Plus I think it's kind of funny as a title.
How did each of the poems you submitted come about? The Sentence seems to deviate from your usual style; how did you compose that one in particular?
I wrote "The Sentence" very quickly. I was actually trying to revise another poem at the time, but my partner, Eric Baus, was blasting a poem by Barbara Guest and I found it difficult to concentrate. We had just gotten home from a feather walk at City Park. We go there all the time and it's usually fairly empty at 7pm. This time though, it was a full on party because Jazz in the Park was taking place. So there are those lines--plain as can be. The day before we ate honey-flavored candy and walked to the Botanic Gardens. I took this combination (honey & flowers) to mean we were pretending to be bees.
When we walk in the park at night we see bats. Once we saw what I thought was a fuzzy seed pod at the Botanic Gardens. When I got up close to it, the seed pod turned and looked at me. It was a tiny, sleeping bat. In terms of the current manuscript's nods to poetic predecessors, this poem is probably waving at Frank O'Hara.
You’ve said about your books that "each book opens a detailed nuance of the larger whole”. Assuming the poems you submitted answer questions posed in your other books, what are the questions asked/what are the poems answering?
I'm not sure I can speak to this in terms of questions/answers. But in terms of unfolding, the current manuscript (The Way the Language Was) is thinking about history and artifact (this is coming through in relation to past poetic traditions/use of language, and in relation to our current political moment). It's also thinking about linguistics and botany and how these two things (the environment and speech) are related. Hence the bees, sentences, and flowers.
I read in another interview where you said,"I consider both the front stitch—what is actually said in a text—the conscious parts and the back stitch—the secret narrative trajectory, the current that is unknown or known only subconsciously to the writer during composition”. How do you anticipate the 'secret narrative trajectory' is experienced via the front stitch? Is this so-called secret narrative how subtext gets embedded in writing? How can writers pay attention to their biases and avoid inappropriate subtexts in writing?
Yes, it's definitely another way of talking about subtext, but it's also related to the ways in which a poem is often smarter than its writer. It's how you allow yourself to make without controlling the process too much, so that something unfolds for you, as the writer. In terms of bias or inappropriate subtexts unfolding via this process, it seems important to become a good reader of your own work, to question the poem's nuances, its possible implications, its assumptions, to identify what it's privileging, and to recognize how it's entering into a field of conversation and what that conversation is. Revision is an infinitely helpful tool.
I am wondering how often you use photographs when composing your poems? I am guessing you are familiar with Roland Barthes term “punctum” in relation to photographs? (If I were to narrow it down, it’s the poignant/gut-punched moment in a photo). After Barthes' mother dies he goes looking for photos of her, finds one of when she is 5, and that’s the one that just gets him. He never shares it with anyone else. He says, "It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture.” How do you achieve ‘punctum’ in your writing?
I've always wanted to use photographs or paintings when composing my poems, but I've never done so successfully. I try to achieve ‘punctum’ primarily via revision as a process of sculpting the poem down to its essential resonances. I've actually just been doing this with the manuscript Sister Urn which will be released by Sidebrow Press in Spring 2019. I've been going through the manuscript to make sure I've pressed into the emotional impetus of the work deeply enough. It’s not a super analytical process. I look for the lines that embarrass me (out of laziness, cliche, lack of specificity, etc.) and I sharpen word choice, clean up lines, or cut vague lines. If I have to rewrite a line altogether, I try to lean into the emotion (that perhaps I've glossed over previously) to find out what is really at stake in that particular line or poem. The term ‘punctum’ isn't one that I necessarily invoke during this work, but considering ‘what is at stake here?’ is a question I constantly consider to get at that ‘poignant/gut-punched moment’ in my writing.
Initially, I thought about the bird in relation to writing because of a performance class I took at SAIC in 2004, when I was working on my first book, To Be Human Is To Be A Conversation. The performance work we did was based out of dance and/or gesture and it seemed that all of my dance moves/gestures relied upon the movements of birds. For example, one gesture (when I reflected on it in language/image/metaphor) became the beak of a bird gathering twigs from the floor of the performance space. I realized how this act of gathering is similar to poetic composition. For a poem, I tend to gather disparate thoughts, images, and influences, then juxtapose them (lines of the poem as twigs or thread) to create my poem (nest). The use of ‘bird/feathers’ in these particular pieces is more about the kind of scavenging I’m doing currently. As a hobby, I've been going for walks around my neighborhood to gather feathers. It's a good way to change your way of perceiving your environment--attuning your attention to something usually overlooked in the landscape. So the lines in these poems referring to "feathers" are literal rather than metaphorical (but they are also both). Nods to Modernist poetry have also been finding their way into The Way the Language Was, so the poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird Feather" is saying hello to Wallace Stevens. Plus I think it's kind of funny as a title.
How did each of the poems you submitted come about? The Sentence seems to deviate from your usual style; how did you compose that one in particular?
I wrote "The Sentence" very quickly. I was actually trying to revise another poem at the time, but my partner, Eric Baus, was blasting a poem by Barbara Guest and I found it difficult to concentrate. We had just gotten home from a feather walk at City Park. We go there all the time and it's usually fairly empty at 7pm. This time though, it was a full on party because Jazz in the Park was taking place. So there are those lines--plain as can be. The day before we ate honey-flavored candy and walked to the Botanic Gardens. I took this combination (honey & flowers) to mean we were pretending to be bees.
When we walk in the park at night we see bats. Once we saw what I thought was a fuzzy seed pod at the Botanic Gardens. When I got up close to it, the seed pod turned and looked at me. It was a tiny, sleeping bat. In terms of the current manuscript's nods to poetic predecessors, this poem is probably waving at Frank O'Hara.
You’ve said about your books that "each book opens a detailed nuance of the larger whole”. Assuming the poems you submitted answer questions posed in your other books, what are the questions asked/what are the poems answering?
I'm not sure I can speak to this in terms of questions/answers. But in terms of unfolding, the current manuscript (The Way the Language Was) is thinking about history and artifact (this is coming through in relation to past poetic traditions/use of language, and in relation to our current political moment). It's also thinking about linguistics and botany and how these two things (the environment and speech) are related. Hence the bees, sentences, and flowers.
I read in another interview where you said,"I consider both the front stitch—what is actually said in a text—the conscious parts and the back stitch—the secret narrative trajectory, the current that is unknown or known only subconsciously to the writer during composition”. How do you anticipate the 'secret narrative trajectory' is experienced via the front stitch? Is this so-called secret narrative how subtext gets embedded in writing? How can writers pay attention to their biases and avoid inappropriate subtexts in writing?
Yes, it's definitely another way of talking about subtext, but it's also related to the ways in which a poem is often smarter than its writer. It's how you allow yourself to make without controlling the process too much, so that something unfolds for you, as the writer. In terms of bias or inappropriate subtexts unfolding via this process, it seems important to become a good reader of your own work, to question the poem's nuances, its possible implications, its assumptions, to identify what it's privileging, and to recognize how it's entering into a field of conversation and what that conversation is. Revision is an infinitely helpful tool.
I am wondering how often you use photographs when composing your poems? I am guessing you are familiar with Roland Barthes term “punctum” in relation to photographs? (If I were to narrow it down, it’s the poignant/gut-punched moment in a photo). After Barthes' mother dies he goes looking for photos of her, finds one of when she is 5, and that’s the one that just gets him. He never shares it with anyone else. He says, "It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture.” How do you achieve ‘punctum’ in your writing?
I've always wanted to use photographs or paintings when composing my poems, but I've never done so successfully. I try to achieve ‘punctum’ primarily via revision as a process of sculpting the poem down to its essential resonances. I've actually just been doing this with the manuscript Sister Urn which will be released by Sidebrow Press in Spring 2019. I've been going through the manuscript to make sure I've pressed into the emotional impetus of the work deeply enough. It’s not a super analytical process. I look for the lines that embarrass me (out of laziness, cliche, lack of specificity, etc.) and I sharpen word choice, clean up lines, or cut vague lines. If I have to rewrite a line altogether, I try to lean into the emotion (that perhaps I've glossed over previously) to find out what is really at stake in that particular line or poem. The term ‘punctum’ isn't one that I necessarily invoke during this work, but considering ‘what is at stake here?’ is a question I constantly consider to get at that ‘poignant/gut-punched moment’ in my writing.
About Andrea Rexilius Andrea Rexilius is the author of The Way the Language Was (Letter Machine, forthcoming 2020), Sister Urn (Sidebrow, forthcoming 2019), New Organism: Essais (Letter Machine, 2014), Half of What They Carried Flew Away (Letter Machine, 2012), and To Be Human Is To Be A Conversation (Rescue Press, 2011). She is Core Faculty in Poetry, and Program Coordinator, for the Low-Residency Mile-High MFA in Creative Writing at Regis University. She also teaches in the Poetry Collective at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, Colorado. |
Intent Versus Reception: Flash Fiction Master, Kathy Fish On the Hybridity of “See How They Run"
9/6/2018
Kathy Fish’s new piece of writing, “See How They Run” will be featured in the January 2019 print issue. In this interview about her new piece, Kathy takes time from her busy schedule to share with us her writing process, the bending of genres, and more.
How did this story “See How They Run” come about? What was your process?
I was listening to the radio and the Beatles song, See How They Run came on and then it stuck in my head. That title and “Lady Madonna, children at her feet…”
My mind went to an image of boys, brothers, running. From what I didn’t yet know. But I started to write and this rhythm came to the sentences: “See” this or that, and “How…” etc. And I just wrote sentence after sentence that way and a world started to emerge and a feeling of kids, neighboring families, preparing for battle. They decide they’re enemies right away, based on their differences. I just wrote into that idea.
As a poet, I couldn’t help but notice something poetic about this piece. I’m wondering, about genre labels and what makes the writing flash and not prose poetry or another form?
I agree that it sort of straddles that line between flash and prose poetry, and I’ve been asked many times what the difference is. I’d argue that this piece could be classified as either. There is a definite “story” being told, with a definite arc and movement. While these things can be present in prose poetry, they must be present in flash fiction.
How much is “See How They Run” a hybrid piece of writing?
That this piece, I feel, could be classified as either flash fiction or prose poetry, points to it being essentially a hybrid piece of writing.
I think about “intent” vs. “reception” of a piece, too. My flash, “Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild” was perceived/received by many as a poem! Basically poets called it a poem and flash fiction writers called it flash fiction. But I have to say, I didn’t consciously sit down to write a flash or a poem when I wrote it. The same is true for “See How They Run.” I just created a piece of writing that was not in any way planned or organized around any structure or rules of, say, story writing or poetry. I don’t know if I’m being very articulate about this, Nawal. It will be interesting for me to see how “See How They Run” is perceived by readers. How it feels to them.
How did this story “See How They Run” come about? What was your process?
I was listening to the radio and the Beatles song, See How They Run came on and then it stuck in my head. That title and “Lady Madonna, children at her feet…”
My mind went to an image of boys, brothers, running. From what I didn’t yet know. But I started to write and this rhythm came to the sentences: “See” this or that, and “How…” etc. And I just wrote sentence after sentence that way and a world started to emerge and a feeling of kids, neighboring families, preparing for battle. They decide they’re enemies right away, based on their differences. I just wrote into that idea.
As a poet, I couldn’t help but notice something poetic about this piece. I’m wondering, about genre labels and what makes the writing flash and not prose poetry or another form?
I agree that it sort of straddles that line between flash and prose poetry, and I’ve been asked many times what the difference is. I’d argue that this piece could be classified as either. There is a definite “story” being told, with a definite arc and movement. While these things can be present in prose poetry, they must be present in flash fiction.
How much is “See How They Run” a hybrid piece of writing?
That this piece, I feel, could be classified as either flash fiction or prose poetry, points to it being essentially a hybrid piece of writing.
I think about “intent” vs. “reception” of a piece, too. My flash, “Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild” was perceived/received by many as a poem! Basically poets called it a poem and flash fiction writers called it flash fiction. But I have to say, I didn’t consciously sit down to write a flash or a poem when I wrote it. The same is true for “See How They Run.” I just created a piece of writing that was not in any way planned or organized around any structure or rules of, say, story writing or poetry. I don’t know if I’m being very articulate about this, Nawal. It will be interesting for me to see how “See How They Run” is perceived by readers. How it feels to them.
About Kathy Fish
Kathy Fish is a faculty mentor in Fiction at the Mile-High MFA at Regis University in Denver. Additionally, she teaches two-week intensive Fast Flash© Workshops. Her fourth collection of short fiction, RIFT, co-authored with Robert Vaughan, released in December, 2015 from Unknown Press. Fish’s “Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild” was selected for Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018, edited by Sheila Heti. The piece was also chosen by Aimee Bender for Best Small Fictions 2018. Previously, her story, “Strong Tongue” was chosen by Amy Hempel for Best Small Fictions, 2017. Her work also appeared in Best Small Fictions 2016, edited by Stuart Dybek. Her stories have been published or are forthcoming in The Lineup: 20 Provocative Women Writers, Black Lawrence Press, 2015, Richard Thomas (ed.), Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up to No Good, Upper Rubber Boot Books, 2015, H.L. Nelson and Joanne Merriam, (eds.), Electric Literature, Guernica, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, Yemassee Journal, Elm Leaves Journal, Slice, Mississippi Review online, New South, Quick Fiction, and various other journals and anthologies. She was the guest editor of Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web 2010. She is the author of three other collections of short fiction: a chapbook of flash fiction in the chapbook collective, “A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: Four Chapbooks of Short Short Fiction by Four Women” (Rose Metal Press, 2008), “Wild Life” (Matter Press, 2011) and “Together We Can Bury It” available from The Lit Pub. Professional memberships: AWP and Pen America. |
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