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Jon Sands on Workshops at Bailey House

February 7, 2018, 7:00 am
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Poetry

Jon Sands is the author of The New Clean (Write Bloody Publishing, 2011), as well as the cohost of The Poetry Gods podcast. His work has been published widely, and anthologized in The Best American Poetry. He is a youth mentor at Urban Word NYC, and teaches creative writing for adults at Bailey House in East Harlem, New York. Sands is a recent MFA graduate in fiction from Brooklyn College, where his work won the Himan Brown Award for short stories. He has represented New York City multiple times at the National Poetry Slam, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

How did your work at Bailey House begin? What drew you there?
I teach workshops at Urban Word NYC, where, in 2009, I met the son of then Bailey House CEO, the late Gina Quattrochi. She was an absolute force, and spent her whole adult life fighting for the rights of people with HIV/AIDS, specifically those who were homeless or housing insecure. She ran this huge agency providing on the ground services to some of the city’s most vulnerable populations. Gina and I got coffee, and she told me, “There are so many stories under our roof that aren’t getting told.” She knew she wanted poetry—specifically its capacity to humanize, break down barriers, and build communities—to be fully integrated into Bailey House culture. That kind of agency-wide strategic and financial buy in to the arts, in the public health world, is not to be taken for granted. She was a real visionary.

What has been the key to sustaining such a long-running program?
Consistency. It’s important that an organization is down for the long haul of a program. Clients have to be able to count on the fact that it’s every week, at the same time, no matter what. But then, most importantly, it has to involve a worthwhile product. Every week there’s a new prompt, new game plan, unless we have a guest, and this is one of the major keys: we’ve been blessed at this point to have had an unreal line-up of readers, Pulitzer Prize winners, poetry slam champions, MacArthur geniuses; it’s important that our authors see that the work they’re creating at Bailey House is connected to a larger movement. I remember when Willie Perdomo visited to read poems and answer questions, and there was this woman in the client waiting area with a great smile, but she was shy and kind of new to the space. I asked her if she wanted to join, and she said she wasn’t a writer, and didn’t read poetry. I promised she’d like it, and told her she wouldn’t have to say anything, and she kind of half smiled and rigidly agreed. Five years later, she’s been there almost every week, and she’s filled four notebooks with important, impressive work. It really becomes about how you coax people into the door, because you never know whose life it’s going to change.

Are there any techniques you employ to encourage shy or reluctant writers to open up?
I try to bring in poems that demonstrate both vulnerability and craftsmanship. I make it clear that our number one goal is not to “figure out” what the author means, our goal is to find as many ways as possible to look at what’s happening. I think some people have been preconditioned to think poetry is not for them because they don’t “get it” in the way they assume it’s meant to be “gotten.” I teach that we have to trust what it is we do “get,” and once we do that—once we allow our own personal narratives to be at play in how we understand a poem—then the conversation can go to some interesting places; the poem becomes a tool through which we process our own lives. So, you become a more seasoned reader, a more empathetic person, hopefully, but also the author is pushing you to partake in the telling, to write your own brave and urgent work. I also think a lot of readers are genuinely surprised to find out how many poems out there really speak to them. I feel like we’re in a golden age of poetry, and it’s ready-made for the masses, we just have to carve out the space for poetry to find readers.

What has been your most rewarding experience as a teacher? As an artist?
Every year, we publish in-house books of the best poems from the program, and there’s always this agency-wide release party. The clients invite family and community members, but also the staff gets this entirely new way of seeing the people they serve. Stigma is an important buzzword, the stigma of HIV, or injection drug use, or homelessness; but it has such limitations. Many of the clients, long before they walk through that door, have learned not to define themselves by the often difficult situations they’ve been placed in. But it’s undeniable that writer, artist, storyteller, these are positive labels that put value on, not just the story, but the storyteller. Art humanizes the self to the self. That’s important, culture shifting work, and it’s a testament to how creativity challenges the human spirit. That’s certainly been true in my life, and to be able to witness that in the lives of students, in thousands of minuscule ways, and to witness the way in which personal growth, in the presence of others, is the binding glue of community, it’s one of the most significant joys in my life.

Support for the Readings & Workshops Program in New York City is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, with additional support from the Frances Abbey Endowment, the Cowles Charitable Trust, and the Friends of Poets & Writers.

Photos: (top) Jon Sands (Credit: Jonathan Weiskopf). (bottom) Bailey House workshop participants (Credit: Jon Sands).
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Stephanie Powell Watts

February 8, 2018, 6:00 am
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Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

February 8, 2018, 7:00 am
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“When I am locked out of the gates of literature, I despair, brood, obsess. I believe wholeheartedly that I will never write again. I pursue this line of thought to the bitter end. It’s an excruciating process, but there are no shortcuts on the road to writing. I’ve come to consider the atmospheric disturbance that exists at the edges of laying honest sentences across a page to be character-building experiences. After all, writing demands resilience, self-respect, discipline. More exhilarating, perhaps, is the fact that it requires an equal measure of disobedience. It makes little sense, then, to pursue efficiency in lieu of the chaos writing causes when we are at a loss for how to begin the telling. So often, the inability to write is a sign that we are not yet ready to be honest, or reckless in our pursuit of subject matter. In the face of such a tall order, the only thing I know to do is to resign myself to the unpleasant experience of waiting patiently at the gates. To pass the time, and to build up courage, I return to Kafka, Nietzsche, Nabokov, Lispector. Eventually, I’ll read a sentence like, ‘Now I know how, have the know-how, to reverse perspectives….’ Suddenly, I’m reminded of how alien the world feels to me, and, before I know it, I am writing again. All I had to do was suffer long enough to remember that I am only spying on this strange and sublime world momentarily, and that I don’t have any time to waste.”
—Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, author of Call Me Zebra (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018)

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Writer Photo Credit: 
Kayla Holdread
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Fahrenheit 451

February 9, 2018, 6:00 am
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Piano Lessons: Do Writers Need a Teacher or a Coach?

February 13, 2018, 9:00 pm
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Jim Sollisch

On the day my son Max discovered his superpower, Raffi was singing “Big Beautiful Planet” on the car stereo as the two of us tooled around town doing errands while leaves fell like giant confetti from the sky.

Max ran into the house ahead of me, and as I put away the groceries, I heard the last song we’d been listening to in the car playing in the living room. I rushed into the room, and there was Max, three and a half years old, playing the antique piano that had sat mute in the corner all these years.

Possessed. That was the word that came to mind. Who was he channeling? The people in my family were nonmusical. The piano was simply a giant end table.

When he finished, I put on an album and played a version of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” by the great jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal. Before it was over, Max was playing along—Max and Ahmad, filling the room with tiny, syncopated stars.

It is an awe-inspiring thing to watch your small child do something you can’t do. I could listen—and I did for several weeks—but after a while I assumed he needed a teacher, not an audience.

There’s a difference between teaching and coaching. I learned this by teaching a composition class for beginning writers at the college level for seven years, having taught my last class just months before Max was born. I hadn’t yet articulated that difference, though, and it would be years before I saw that my struggling writing students needed the same things my musically gifted son needed.

Atul Gawande, author of four best-selling books, including Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance (Metropolitan Books, 2007), points out in an article in the New Yorker that the concept of coaching comes from sports and is a recent development in the history of skill acquisition. Teaching goes back to the beginning of history; coaching seems to have gotten its start at Yale around 1875 on the gridiron.

Max’s first piano teacher was eighty-two years older than he was. She lived in the neighborhood and came highly recommended. You could tell she loved kids, and she couldn’t have been more delighted with her newest, youngest pupil. She showed him how to draw notes, she had us buy him a beginner’s book, and within weeks Max wouldn’t go near the piano.

When I taught writing, I told my students there was no reason to worry about punctuation until they had written something worth punctuating correctly. I was trying to show them that the important part of writing—the part their teachers didn’t teach them—was the revision process. The stopping and starting, the rethinking, the crossing out, the sharpening of a thought—that’s writing. It’s a verb, after all. Punctuation, which their teachers had “taught” them, was simply politeness, no different from covering your mouth when you sneeze.

By the time Max was nine, we’d been through eleven teachers, including a Suzuki-trained theorist, a few classical pianists, a seventeen-year-old music student, and a series of jazz pianists, one of whom wore only pajamas and greeted us at his apartment door accompanied by the smell of pot. Even he could not stop himself from trying to teach Max theory and requiring him to read music. Every teacher started the same way, full of optimism and promising to meet my requirements, which were simple: Just play music with the kid for an hour a week. Help him master difficult sequences. Don’t try to teach him to read music.

The difference between teaching and coaching is the difference between thinking and doing. Teachers are in the concept business; coaches deal in the physical world. Theory versus practice. Admittedly there is overlap. Coaches teach and teachers coach. And there are gray areas made grayer by semantics. But the older I get, the more I believe we too often teach when we should be coaching.

We don’t teach basketball, we coach it. So is writing more like basketball or more like physics? To get good at physics, you need to know the laws that govern the universe. And to really grasp those, you need to understand the mathematical concepts behind them. You need a teacher.

To acquire the skill of basketball, you need only to watch others play and to practice. Imitation and repetition. Isn’t that how you learned to write: by reading essays and then writing? Like the kid who learns to play basketball without a coach, you acquired the basic skill of writing. You did it despite the teacher, who got in your way by trying to teach you concepts like the parts of speech or constructs like the five-paragraph theme. These are as useless to the would-be writer as a lesson about the dimensions of a basketball court would be to a developing basketball player.

A coach would have helped. But you got a teacher.

My wife, a gifted teacher-coach of young children, loves to say, “When the student is ready, the teacher will come.” When Max was fourteen, we finally found the coach he needed. Danny was a senior in high school, four years older than Max, and a jazz-piano whiz who was on his way to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He coached Max through the jazz standards. After a year or so, Max was ready to learn chord progressions, theory, and even history. And the teacher was already there.

We seem to believe that to acquire skills, especially academic ones, we first need to learn concepts and theory, and then put them into practice. But that’s not the way humans acquire language or learn the pattern recognition that leads to categorization, which is the foundational skill of the natural sciences. You practice and then you learn. More accurately, you learn while doing. But doing often precedes understanding. Learning is more like a sport than we think.

At forty-five, Atul Gawande, an accomplished Harvard-trained surgeon entering the peak years of his career, decided to hire a coach. He had all the knowledge and understanding he needed; he had practiced his craft—performing more than two thousand surgeries—but he wondered if his skills had plateaued. He wondered if he could get better.

Gawande makes the point that coaches are experts at breaking down the mechanics of physical actions into steps. His coach told him to keep his elbows lower and to change the way he draped the patient so the surgical assistant had better access; he recommended adjusting the surgical light. He tinkered with Gawande’s mechanics and approach like a tennis coach might. In surgery—as in tennis—insight can come from practice.

And so it is with writing. All writers know the same secret: Writing is the art of figuring out what you know, not the process of recording what you already know. I have told this secret to many classrooms, but it’s something that cannot be taught. You can’t know it till you experience it, and you can’t experience it without lots of practice. 

 

Jim Sollisch is creative director at the Marcus Thomas advertising firm in Cleveland. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and many other publications.

March/April 2018

The Teachable Talent: Why Creative Writing Can Be Taught

by
Gregory Spatz
September/October 2012
8.31.12
In Print and Online

Can creative writing be taught? I’ve always hated the question, in part because of its passive construction, which omits both students and teachers. It has always seemed to me to imply some abstract learning scenario wherein a generic would-be writer is acted upon by unnamed forces and thereby caused to understand the obscure codes and formulas of creative writing. There’s actually a name for this approach: Transmission Model Learning, wherein the teacher transmits information to a passive student, who memorizes and regurgitates the material until it is learned. While it used to be the dominant approach to teaching, no one really believes in Transmission Model Learning anymore, certainly not in the arts and humanities. So the question has always seemed to me to promise its own answer: Of course not. Besides, creative writing has no quantifiable body of information, its outcomes are difficult to objectively measure, it involves too much chatter and sitting around in bars and coffee houses, and anyway, real artists are born artists—people whose genius shouldn’t be corrupted by instruction. Right?

Even before I started down the road of becoming a full-time teacher of creative writing in an MFA program, before I’d entered a graduate fiction writing workshop and heard the late Frank Conroy’s staple first-day lecture on Occam’s razor, abject naturalism, the meaning-sense-and-clarity pyramid, and a long rant that included chalkboard diagrams with stick figures, coal bins, and something reminiscent of broken rainbows, during which he adamantly debunked not Transmission Model Learning but rather Transmission Model Reading (“It’s a dance! The reader is not a passive blank slate, reading-and-writing is always a collaborative endeavor!”), I knew writing was something I wanted to do—and that I could be taught how to do it better. I didn’t know how I’d learn it, much less how I’d one day teach it; I only knew that I wanted to be in the classroom, and that something about the whole endeavor was electrifying. 

I’d spent most of my adult life to that point playing and teaching violin for a living. I had some faith that, if I could learn to do that, then I could learn about writing and I could learn to teach it. Musicians and music teachers don’t spend a lot of time questioning whether or not their instruments can be taught. We take it for granted and share what worked for us as learners. We invent or research new techniques and approaches as students come to us with problems we don’t recognize, and we adjust the pace according to the student’s abilities and drive. Some of us are better or worse at this than others. Frankly, I don’t think I ever got to be very good at it. But when I was teaching music close to full-time, the question was never, Can this be done? The question was always, Why are some students so much better and faster at learning? Why do some of them have willpower and discipline and others don’t? All my students, if they applied themselves, could absolutely improve, but the ones with discipline and talent, the ones who practiced, could go faster and further.  

After fifteen years of teaching creative writing full-time, I’m pretty sure the question for writing teachers is, or should be, basically the same. It’s not, Can it be taught? Of course it can be taught. Anyone who’s sat in an effective workshop can tell you that. The question is, Why does it work when it works? When it works especially well, what’s happening? 

In order to answer, we have to make the original question active by returning to its true subject and object—student and teacher.

Every year my colleague Sam Ligon and I admit eight to ten new MFA graduate students to the fiction-writing track at Eastern Washington University. We review application files from across the country all winter and try to understand, based on a twenty-five-page writing sample, academic records, and a one- to two-page personal statement, which students show the most promise. Which ones are hungry, and demonstrate a mature relationship to or understanding of their work in its current state? Which ones can write gorgeous sentences already? Which ones are passionate and articulate about what they’re reading, and already have a story that pulls you all the way through? Which ones seem to have an earnest desire to learn, or some life experiences that might make for really good material, even if they don’t have the writing chops to pull it off at present? We puzzle over mysteries like the application file that contains an utterly bland personal statement paired with an arresting writing sample, or the brilliantly clever and intelligent personal statement matched with straight-across perfect GRE scores and a garbled, boring writing sample that never gets off the ground. In all this we’re looking for one thing, and it’s unknowable and we know that it’s unknowable: Who here is teachable, and why? Every year we guess about this and get it somewhat right and somewhat wrong. But because of limited financial aid and competition with other writing programs, we do have to guess; we have to decide, in advance, who looks to us like the learner most likely to succeed, and who causes us concern. Generally, we expect that all students we admit, if they apply themselves to the work earnestly and don’t resist learning, will improve. We expect that, and we also expect surprises—students who don’t develop according to the promise we saw in their application and those who exceed all expectations. 

The most interesting and informative surprises, year after year, come from those students who we let in based more on a hunch than a strong conviction (and sometimes with real worries), and who, by becoming astonishingly good, full-fledged writers by the end of their two years, show us not just that creative writing is learnable, but also exactly what the learning looks like when it happens, and why it’s worthwhile. 

In 2001 we admitted Shann Ray on such a hunch. He was not a front-runner, or even in the middle of the pack; he was the last student we admitted. Aside from the fact that he was local and therefore willing to enroll on short notice, what stood out to me in his application was the fact that he’d been a star basketball player for Montana State and for Pepperdine University and had even played pro ball in Germany, but he’d more or less walked away from a career in the sport (though he did continue playing for a faith-based organization for some years). Also notable to me was that he had a PhD in psychology, and had worked for years as a clinical psychologist before taking a full-time teaching job at Gonzaga University in something called Leadership Studies, and later Forgiveness Studies. I don’t watch basketball, much less play it, and I am about as unreligious as anyone you’ll ever meet. So the particulars of Ray’s achievements didn’t mean a lot to me, but they suggested a record of discipline and hard work. My colleague at the time, John Keeble, himself a minister’s son, and I talked about this at some length and agreed that though Ray’s writing sample was troublingly weak, he at least seemed likely to be agreeable and hardworking. We took a chance and let him in.

That year, in my fall workshop I tried very hard not to regret the decision. The stories Ray presented for workshop exhibited two glaring problems that I assumed he’d hang on to with all his might. Probably in imitation of some of his favorite poets and Bible passages, he seemed to be in love with gigantic, lyrically looping and garbled metaphors to describe a landscape, which all but devoured his characters and which I guessed would fog his vision and prevent him from finding his own voice and essential subject matter for a long, long time. He also incorporated a lot of heavy-handed, message-driven, didactic Christian themes that deadened the work at every level, and alienated me as a reader (and the rest of the class as well). In my experience, these were red-flag writing problems that I expected would be really hard to work around, and that I knew would seriously challenge my own reflexes as a reader-critic. We had so little common ground, and I didn’t have a lot of hope that I’d be able to show him the way. The stories were exhausting, and Ray’s persistent questioning of our feedback, mine and the class’s, sounded then more like resistance or refusal to hear than genuine curiosity or requests for clarification. 

With his rigorous background in psychology, theology, philosophy, and ethics, Ray always asked us, “How can you write anything without moral purpose? Why would you want to write without a moral purpose, and who are the great moral fiction writers of today?” I was surprised that though he was a voracious reader of academic texts and premodern poetry, he’d read very little fiction at all, and possibly no contemporary fiction whatsoever. For starters I assigned lots of Andre Dubus, Flannery O’Connor, and Marilynne Robinson. 

I remember during one class going off on a too-long diatribe about the power of metaphor to transform a reader’s experience of the world: how a writer needs to learn to use that power with discretion and purpose because nothing else we have at our disposal, at the line level, will quite so vividly illuminate the world for the reader as a really great metaphor, which simultaneously functions to reveal the author’s unique vision—the writer’s imagination’s “fingerprint,” if you will. This wasn’t something I’d ever articulated for myself until Ray pushed me for the explanation. I also remember talking a lot about message and meaning—the whole class talked to Ray about this, often—trying to describe for him how readers who feel corralled into a predetermined point or moral at the close of a story will feel manipulated and disrespected, their imaginations beaten down, as if they are being asked to believe in a one-dimensional reality. 

What Ray took from any of these craft lessons I don’t know. I do know that delivering them crystallized some things for me.

Ray’s next class was with Keeble. At the end of that quarter, Ray told me, he remembered going to talk to Keeble about the low grade he received and asking if it was due to a lack of effort. “No,” Keeble answered. “It was the writing.” The next quarter I heard from another of my colleagues, who asked somewhat angrily if Keeble and I hadn’t made a mistake letting Ray into the program. “What were we thinking?” she demanded. I gave her my reasons and told her we just needed to be patient. And then I tried to forget about it. At that point I suspected he’d never finish the program.

Aside from having taught at Memphis State, Eastern Washington University, the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, I’ve also participated in creative writing workshops at the University of Arizona, the University of New Hampshire, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and I was married to a poet while she was enrolled in workshops at Brown University and the University of California in Davis. I’ve seen, heard, and absorbed a lot of information through the workshop culture and can safely say that for one thing, no two writing workshop classes are the same. No teacher runs a workshop in quite the same way as another, and no program or workshop has ever managed to codify an approach to creative writing that would achieve aesthetic uniformity, or any kind of uniform outcome, period—nor does any program I know of seem to have that as a goal. In fact, the only generalization I ever felt I could comfortably make, as a student of creative writing, was that my teachers disagreed about everything and that trying to find any kind of consensus in their feedback on my work would have made me crazy. I had to learn to follow my gut and go with the advice that made sense.

This is what I share with my students at the start of every workshop class. I caution them that no story has ever been written by committee or by consensus. A workshop’s goal is not to write your story, or tell you how to write your story; its aim is to give you feedback on what you’ve already written—to point out where it succeeds and soars, what it seems to want to be about, where it might be improved, where it’s too slow or too rushed, and to give line-edits and suggestions for revision. A workshop can only respond closely and candidly to what’s on the page. I tell students that if at the end of the day 5 percent of that feedback is actually applicable to the story up for discussion, then that was a good workshop. The other 95 percent? It goes into your hard wiring to inform future stories, maybe—it gives you walls to reach out and touch later as you make your way through the dark. I advise participants against being prescriptive in their feedback, and ask that all participants lay aside their own aesthetic preferences as much as possible when reading one another’s work. I want their revision suggestions to work with a story’s best interests rather than against them. My role as a teacher, as far as all this goes, is also to widen my critical lens in order to understand each story on its own terms, regardless of how foreign the story feels—and to use examples from each story, as appropriate, for general craft tips and pointers.

Because I want students to write their own stories according to their own most strongly held convictions, I also tell them that the only hard-and-fast rule in writing that I know of is this: The student who figures out what is most loved, what is absolutely essential for that student to write about before the time runs out, and who figures out how to get started on that, is the one who will have a breakthrough and write something with lasting power. This is not something I can tell students how to do or find access to in themselves; the process is too individualized. I can only describe it by responding to the words on the page when I see it happening.

I also tell students that, aside from the many craft tips and pointers they will pick up from me in class, from one another, from assigned reading, from visiting writers, from other faculty, or from other classmates over drinks after class, the single most valuable thing they can hope to walk away from the MFA workshop experience with is a handful of lifelong faithful readers: two or three people with a shared vocabulary for stories, who will always be willing to trade drafts of new work no matter what else is going on in their lives and who will know how to get inside that work to give prompt, constructive criticism that makes sense, long after the MFA work is done.

The culture of the MFA program is itself one of the strongest components of the learning experience—the dialogue that carries on in class, after class, at parties, in coffee shops—and if students can find two or three readers to keep that culture alive in their post-MFA life, they will have gotten more than their money’s worth. 

By the time Ray showed up to work with me one-on-one on his thesis project, he’d already made significant strides as a writer. The work was no longer as clouded with overwrought descriptive language. The descriptions were still very dense, sometimes too dense, but he’d learned to couple that density with real physical urgency in the story action to always keep things moving and purposeful, no matter how heavy the language became. He did still tend to ram his black-and-white, good-versus-evil themes and messages through a little too hard, but I could see that by peeling back the language he had found the subject matter that was most essential to him and about which he felt a genuine urgency to write: basketball, life on and off the res and along the Montana Highline, hard living, true love, violent family life, and alcoholism, and through all of this an insistent pursuit of, or longing for, some kind of spiritual lightness, purity, and transcendence. I no longer felt that the stories were intended to persuade me to share his moral perspective; instead the stories felt inspired and illuminated by a moral vision that was essential to him and thus to his characters, and which consequently I couldn’t help but admire and feel moved by. When I asked him what had happened, he said simply, “I paid attention. A lot of it was talking to other students after class at the bar, going over stuff from class. I listened. And I realized I had to work a whole, whole lot harder.” 

During our time together we discussed many or most of the stories that later comprised his hugely successful, prizewinning debut collection, American Masculine, which was published in 2011 by Graywolf Press. Not many first books of stories have done as well in recent years. That Ray managed to write most of that book during his MFA years with us is probably the most astonishing thing I’ve ever witnessed in my years of teaching and stands as a model for successful and effective teaching and learning. Could he have done as well alone? I have real doubts, but of course it’s possible. I am certain that progress of any kind would have required that someone read and respond critically to his work. I’m also sure that without something analogous to the structure and intensity of attention he received from our program, the process would have taken him many years longer.

I learned to expect Ray to show up for our thesis meetings with a legal pad full of questions about whatever story of his we were discussing, and I learned to expect that he would ask every single one of those questions, all the while methodically and patiently taking notes, flipping back and forth between his notes and questions. The first round of questions would be followed up with a second, as he dug ever more persistently into the most sensitive and uncomfortable problems his stories faced. Rather than resisting or defending the material if I suggested something radical—or defined for him how certain story elements failed or alienated me as a reader—Ray asked more questions to understand better why I’d had these responses. He had a dispassionate, clinical curiosity about this. “Tell me just a little more about that, if you would—what you mean when you say…” was a familiar refrain. I also learned to expect full-blown revisions of each story addressing everything we’d gone over, within weeks of talking to him. 

Despite our notable cultural and aesthetic differences, it became apparent that my responses to Ray’s work were valuable for him precisely because of those differences; my responses could show him how to reenvision, reshape, and recalibrate his prose and his more message-heavy leanings so as not to exclude a reader like me. As it turned out, just by tuning in to the work and being honest and thorough in my own responses to it, modeling all the advice I always give in workshop, I in fact became an “ideal reader” for Ray. I also learned to expect our sessions to end with a lot of tough questions about my own writing—what was I working on, what problems was I facing, how was I integrating the writing work with family and everything else going on in my life. This seemed to matter a lot to him, which was unusual. He’d share, in kind, some of his own struggles to carve out writing time and to keep it balanced with a full-time teaching job and a busy family life. In one conversation it came out that he was rarely sleeping more than a few hours a night.

Ray’s stories got better and better. He had some solid bites from good literary quarterlies, and soon a few acceptances. When he brought in a draft of the story “When We Rise,” I knew he’d really broken through to a new level and come into his own as a writer, and that my role as teacher was just about done. I remember feeling something as I read the story’s first sentence, a kind of pleasure and awe as the sentences continued to build and build without a misstep. As a teacher, there is really no more pleasurable moment than this. I knew the best thing I could do for him would be to get out of the way. Not long after, he brought me another excellent story, “Mrs. Secrest.” It was all there, but had no ending, or had the wrong ending. He later reminded me that my advice was to pay attention to the characters to find the ending. Something like, “It’s perfect right up to here. Now you need an ending. So just write the ending and don’t fuck it up, because that’s about all you could do to wreck the story at this point.” I don’t remember saying that, but I don’t doubt that I did.

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Obviously, writing isn’t for everyone. I’m fully confident, though, that if MFA students want to learn, and if the environment is right, if they’re willing to work, tear down all defenses and hear the hardest news about their stories, they can and will grow as students at an astonishing rate. All writers, students as well as nonstudents, can become so overfocused on their own words that they cease having any useful perspective on them, making it difficult to understand how those words might register with anyone else. All of us need to be read. By providing good, candid readers, the workshop process breaks open students’ hyperfocus on their own words. That, by itself, can cause real shock and discomfort, but generally it moves them forward. And though moving forward and breaking hyperfocus can make for difficult, clarifying shake-ups in each student’s private writing-musing process, it’s not that part of it—the writer alone with the page—that I try to teach. Unlike teaching violin, where I could physically manipulate a student into a better bow grip or left-hand position, and could assign exercises that would strengthen good technique or specifically address technical weaknesses, there’s no hands-on way to manipulate a writer at a desk. It’s a private process. Its “mechanical” aspects are emotional, intellectual, and interior.

The real mystery for me is what happens to students after they receive their degree. All too often I’ve seen people leave our program with a handful of unique, published, or publishable stories, a head of steam to write more, and then…nothing. The disjunction may be explained by another silent but profound benefit of participating in the MFA culture: the provided structure of study and the pressure of deadlines. As long as a student is enrolled in MFA classes she never has to ask the really hard question, which is, Why? Why write at all? The MFA program, with its imposed workshop and thesis completion deadlines, can facilitate accelerated artistic development by temporarily removing that existential block. You write in order not to let down your workshop peers, who are expecting a story by next week, or in order to finish that presentation—in order to finish the degree. I warn students about life after the MFA. We talk about it and strategize. I encourage them to form a long-term network of friends and readers and stress over and over how important this will become in the years ahead.

All of which gets me back to why I argued to admit Shann Ray in the first place—something I saw in his admission material which was beyond or behind the page and which gave me hope for him: the record of discipline and the breadth of his interests. And though there were times while teaching him that I wanted to say, “My God, this is impossible, it’s too hard, writing is not like playing basketball,” in the end I learned that it kind of is like basketball, at least for Ray. He learned from our program and grew at a phenomenal pace as a writer, but in the end the real cause for his success is somewhere else, off the page, in him. I can’t say what it is and would never claim the ability to define it or the credit for having taught it to him; I can only guess that whatever it is probably looks a lot like the same set of character traits that drove him to be such an uncannily good ballplayer. I’d describe those as dedication, desire, drive, and discipline. He might have other words for it.


Gregory Spatz is the author most recently, of Inukshuk, published by Bellevue Literary Press in June 2012. His story collection Half as Happy was published by Engine Books in January 2013. He is the recipient of a 2012 NEA literature fellowship and teaches in the MFA program at Eastern Washington University.

Publishing, Empowering Teen Writers

by
Tara Jayakar
July/August 2017
6.14.17
In Print and Online

For Chicago teenagers with a passion for writing, there is no shortage of resources. Young Chicago Authors; 826CHI, a branch of the youth writing organization started by writer Dave Eggers; StoryStudio Chicago; and Writopia Lab, among other programs, have been offering writing workshops, open mics, summer camps, and poetry slams for kids throughout the city for decades. But a new organization has a more specific goal in mind for Chicago teens: to offer them hands-on experience in editing and publishing their peers. Launched last year by poet and educator Jennifer Steele, [Y]volve Publishing (YP) is an extension of Revolving Door Arts Foundation, which Steele founded in 2014 to empower and publish young and emerging writers and to get them actively involved in the publishing industry. Steele runs the organization almost exclusively on her own, with some help from a volunteer board that includes writers Fred Sasaki and Kenyatta Rogers. While Steele has other projects in the works for the organization, including workshops for young and new mothers, an anthology about postpartum depression, and a reading series, her primary focus is currently YP and its inaugural project, the Teen Chapbook Series, which features poetry chapbooks written and edited by teens. 

The chapbook series began last summer, when Steele asked four teenagers on the slam poetry team she coaches to each write five poems and then expand that work into a chapbook-length collection. The four young poets—Nyvia Taylor, Semira Truth Garrett, Kai Wright, and Jalen Kobayashi—worked with one another, along with Steele, to edit their poems. “Each book has been a personal journey for these writers, as they explore personal ideas and also think about how to expand the craft of their writing,” says Steele. “Semira, for instance, was really interested in learning how to write short poems. Jalen has learned about truth versus fact when writing a poem. And Nyvia has been writing brave poems that are confronting difficult, personal subjects.” 

The chapbooks, each featuring artwork the poets chose themselves, were published in May. Steele also invited four established poets, including CM Burroughs and Jacob Saenz, to write introductions to the chapbooks. For the young poets, seeing their words in print has had a powerful impact. “When you have a hard copy of something, it’s forever,” says Kobayashi in a video on the press’s website. “As poets, we share our work on social media, but that can only get you so far. Once you actually have that physical copy of all your words on the page, nobody can take that from you.” Wright agrees: “I’m just a little Chicago kid from the West Side, but to be able to put my work out there in a permanent way—these are just my words that are here and nobody can take my story, or my truth, or my life away from me as a result of that.” 

The Teen Chapbook Series will be published annually, and next year’s series will be expanded to include fiction and nonfiction. (Submissions will open this month, and the chapbooks will be released in Spring 2018.) Steele is also in the process of developing a teen editorial board, which will oversee the production of each book in the series from start to finish. “We’re hoping to have a full-fledged publishing program that includes graphic design, marketing, and promotion teams by 2018,” Steele says. Students will create a call for submissions, read and select manuscripts, and then be paired with a more established editor or writer to edit the selected manuscripts. They will also work on every stage of production, from layout and design to promotion. Steele plans for the press to release three to five chapbooks through the series each year and to put out other books as well. This summer she is working with a group of teens to curate, edit, design, and publish a book of poetry and fashion photography centering around the Gwendolyn Brooks centennial, which is being celebrated this year in Chicago. The anthology will be published in October. 

By teaching teens how to publish books, Steele believes she will help equip them with both entrepreneurial and collaborative experience that will be applicable within and beyond the creative industry. By taking on the role of an editor, publisher, or marketing executive, Steele says, the young people involved with the YP will acquire marketable skills before they even graduate high school. She also hopes to reach more teens by bringing YP books into classrooms. Starting in the 2017–2018 school year, she plans to provide the chapbooks to teachers in Chicago schools and help them develop lesson plans based on each book’s content or theme. “We often hear from teachers that they wish they had more books written by teens to share with their students, so we’re hoping this could fill that need,” she says. “As far as I know, there aren’t many collections of poetry being taught in the classroom, let alone collections by teens.” 

Steele’s commitment to empowering teens is partially motivated by her own experiences as a young person. “I didn’t know I could be an editor,” she says. “I thought if I got my English degree, I was just going to be a high school English teacher. But if someone had told me that I could be editing a magazine, I probably would have made different choices. We’re trying to create these experiences for kids at this age so they can make more informed choices about what they’re interested in doing. That’s the underlying point of all of this: creating, through the literary arts, skills that can be transferable to any career path they’re interested in.”

Tara Jayakar is the founder and editor of Raptor Editing. She lives in New York City.

[Y]volve Publishing's poets (from left) Semira Truth Garrett, Jalen Kobayashi, Kai Wright, and Nyvia Taylor. (Credit: Kikomo.p Imagery)

Amanda Gorman Named National Youth Poet Laureate

by
Maggie Millner
4.27.17
Online Only

Last night in New York City, at a historic ceremony at Gracie Mansion, nineteen-year-old Amanda Gorman of Los Angeles was named the first national youth poet laureate. The unprecedented title, to be awarded annually, honors a teen poet who demonstrates not only extraordinary literary talent but also a proven record of community engagement and youth leadership.

For Gorman, poetry and civic outreach aren’t separate interests. The Harvard University freshman knows firsthand that creative writing can build confidence and a sense of community among young people whose voices are often underrepresented in mainstream dialogue. In 2016 she founded One Pen One Page, a nonprofit organization that provides an “online platform and creative writing programs for student storytellers to change the world.” She continues to serve as the organization’s executive director.

Gorman’s own writing often addresses the intersections of race, feminism, and adolescence, as well as the changing landscape of her native Los Angeles. For both her poetry and her advocacy, Gorman has been recognized by Forbes, the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, the YoungArts Foundation, and the OZY Genius Awards. She has also performed on The Today Show, ABC Family, and Nickelodeon News, and helped introduce Hillary Clinton at the 2017 Global Leadership Awards.

“For me, being able to stand on a stage as a spoken word poet, as someone who overcame a speech impediment, as the descendent of slaves who would have been prosecuted for reading and writing, I think it really symbolizes how, by pursuing a passion and never giving up, you can go as far as your wildest dreams,” said Gorman at the ceremony on Wednesday evening. “This represents such a significant moment because never in my opinion have the arts been more important than now.”

Amanda Gorman, national youth poet laureate.
 

The event represented the culmination of years of work by arts organizations across the country. In 2009 literary arts nonprofit Urban Word NYC, in partnership with the New York City Campaign Finance Board and Mayor’s Office, began bestowing the annual title of New York City youth poet laureate on one visionary poet between the ages of fourteen and nineteen. Michael Cirelli, executive director of Urban Word NYC, says the program was founded on a belief that “young poets deserve to be in spaces of power, privilege, and governance, and to have their voices front and center of the sociopolitical dialogue happening in our city.”

Since the inception of New York’s youth poet laureate program, arts and literacy organizations in over thirty-five cities have followed suit, launching their own youth laureateship positions. As it spread nationally, the program garnered support from the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, and PEN Center USA, among other major poetry organizations. Finally, in 2016, the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities partnered with Urban Word to bring the program to the national level.

Last July a jury of prominent poets, including U.S. poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, Brooklyn poet laureate Tina Chang, and Academy of American Poets executive director Jen Benka, narrowed the pool of local laureates down to five national finalists. Poets were evaluated on the caliber and subject matter of their poems, as well as their commitment to serving their communities through volunteer and advocacy work, and each finalist was selected to represent a geographic region of the country (Northeast, Southeast, South, Midwest, and West). Along with Gorman, Hajjar Baban of Detroit, Nkosi Nkululeko of New York City, Lagnajita Mukhopadhyay of Nashville, and Andrew White of Houston were named the first annual regional laureates and finalists for the inaugural national youth poet laureateship.

Each finalist received a book deal with independent press Penmanship Books, which published Gorman’s first poetry collection, The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough, in 2015. Over the past year, the finalists have also had the opportunity to perform for large audiences at renowned venues, including the Poetry Foundation, the Kennedy Center, and the White House. As the national youth poet laureate, Gorman will continue to give readings and participate in events across the country throughout her yearlong term.

“The role of poetry, especially in marginalized communities, is to provide a voice to those who are traditionally silenced,” says Cirelli, “and the best way to effect social change is to provide platforms for youth to tell their stories. We hope to leverage our work to allow these diverse stories to be told in spaces that have historically omitted youth voices, and to energize and engage the issues that they are most passionate about.”

The ceremony at Gracie Mansion featured performances by three of the finalists, as well as a roster of current and former New York City youth poets laureate. The performers were introduced by a group of acclaimed poets, including American Book Prize winner Kimiko Hahn and four-time National Poetry Slam champion Patricia Smith. Nkululeko recited a poem about his hair, a metaphor through which he discussed his relationship with his mother and collective African American history. Baban, who was named runner-up for the national title, recited a sestina on language, family, and her Muslim name. Finally, Gorman delivered a poem about how her speech impediment led her to discover writing.

“I am so grateful to be part of this cohort of young creatives who are taking up their pens to have a voice for what is right and what is just,” Gorman said in her acceptance speech. “I don’t just want to write—I want to do right as well.”

 

Maggie Millner is Poets & Writers Magazine’s Diana and Simon Raab Editorial Fellow.  
 

Q&A: Yang Inspires Young Readers

by
Dana Isokawa
March/April 2017
2.15.17
In Print and Online

In 2008 the Library of Congress, the Children’s Book Council, and the nonprofit organization Every Child a Reader established the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature position to celebrate and promote books for children and young adult readers. The current ambassador, graphic novelist and recent MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient Gene Luen Yang, started his term in January 2016. Yang has devoted much of his work to his Reading Without Walls Challenge, which encourages kids to read books with unfamiliar characters, topics, and formats. Yang is the perfect advocate for such an undertaking: His popular graphic novels American Born Chinese and Boxers & Saints have pushed against cultural stereotypes and blurred the lines between the comic-book and book-publishing industries. More than halfway through his two-year term, Yang spoke about his work as the ambassador.

What inspired you to come up with the Reading Without Walls Challenge?
We want kids to read outside their comfort zones, and we want them to do it in three ways. One: We want them to read about characters who don’t look like them or live like them. Two: We want them to read about topics they don’t know anything about. And three: We want them to read books in different formats. So if they normally read only graphic novels for fun, we want them to try a chapter book, and if they read only chapter books for fun, we want them to try a graphic novel.

What are you planning next?
Right now we’re trying to promote the Reading Without Walls program. We’ve put together a bunch of downloadable materials: recommended reading lists, posters, and certificates of completion. We’re hoping librarians, booksellers, and teachers will download, print, and use these materials to promote the initiative with their classes. And we’re trying to do a wider national push for the summer.

What else is involved in the national ambassador position?
It’s pretty flexible. I have a few speaking engagements—I was at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., in the fall, which was a ton of fun. I’m going to go again this year, and I’ve done a few school visits, some of them in person, some of them over Skype. We’ve tried some online stuff. I have a video podcast called the Reading Without Walls podcast—it’s just me having conversations about children’s books with people I really like. I had one that came out with Lois Lowry, who wrote The Giver; another one with Patrick Ness, who wrote A Monster Calls. I also do a monthly column at Book Riot about making comics, and we’re probably going to start another podcast this year.

Why do you think it’s important for kids to read books with characters who don’t look or live like them?
There are studies that show that fiction in particular builds empathy—that when you read about characters who don’t look or live like you, you begin to understand them a little bit better. You understand what makes you similar and how vast the differences are, and it helps you to be a little bit more compassionate toward people who are different from you. Right now it seems like—not just in America, but around the world—we need a little more empathy. And I include myself in that too. I worry about how technology affects us. Just recently with the presidential election, there was all of [this research] about how Facebook basically shows you stuff you like to read. And then even beyond that, you can literally read about yourself all day. You could just fill your whole day with pure narcissism because of digital media. And I think fiction is the exact opposite of that. Well-written fiction pulls you out of your own mind space and helps you see into the thoughts and lives of somebody else.

Can you think of a book where you were reading without walls as a kid?
As an Asian American kid growing up in America in the eighties, almost every book that I read was outside of my own walls, because they were about kids that were part of the majority culture. I do think that maybe gender-wise there were books that pushed me outside of my walls. Like almost every kid in the eighties, I loved Beverly Cleary and I loved the Ramona books. I think as a character Ramona really broke stereotypes and cultural norms about the way little girls should act, because she was creative and rambunctious and kind of loud. And there was a lot of overlap in the way she saw the world and the way I saw the world as a little kid. So I think that that pushed me out. And there were also books that mirrored my life. I started collecting comics in the fifth grade and got really obsessed with superheroes. I wonder if part of that obsession comes from the fact that these superheroes negotiated two different identities—Superman wasn’t just Superman, he was also Clark Kent. In some ways that mirrored my own reality since I had a Chinese name at home and an American name at school; I lived under two different sets of expectations. And Superman is actually an immigrant too—he deals with the cultures of both Krypton and America.

Have your experiences as a graphic novelist informed the challenge, especially the part about reading in different formats?
Yes, absolutely. I think in America, up until pretty recently, the comic-book market and the book market were really two separate entities. They had their own stores, distribution systems, norms, and readerships. It’s only in the last ten or fifteen years that they’ve started working together. I really think I’ve been a beneficiary of that merging, and it’s exciting to see. It’s exciting to see how publishers and authors who are prominent in one area are starting to embrace the work from the authors in the other area. More and more we’re seeing publishers who typically only publish prose books start to add graphic novels to their list. On the other side, we’re starting to see comic-book publishers recruit writers who are primarily known for their prose, like Ta-Nehisi Coates over at Marvel.

Do you think that’s because people’s opinions or the form itself is changing? Can you diagnose why that shift is happening?
I think there are three prominent comic cultures in the world. There’s the American one; there’s an Asian one that’s centered primarily around Japan, and there’s a European one centered around France and French-speaking Belgium. And in those other two cultures, comics have been prominent for a long time. If you go to Japan, there will be people of every age and gender reading graphic novels and manga on the subways. In France, it’s the same way: They televise the comic awards shows. In both of those cultures, it’s always been a big deal. It’s only in America that comics have been in this backwater. And that really goes back to the 1950s when the child psychologist Fredric Wertham wrote a book called Seduction of the Innocent, in which he argued that comic books cause juvenile delinquency. The United States Congress took it very seriously and had a series of congressional hearings where they called comic-book authors, publishers, and artists to Washington, D.C., to testify to see if comics actually caused juvenile delinquency. These hearings lasted for a few weeks, but didn’t end conclusively—there was no congressional decision that came out of it. But they damaged the reputation of comics in the eyes of the American public, and that lasted for decades. That didn’t happen in Japan or France. I feel what happened in Japan and France was a much more natural development of the medium, whereas in America it was stunted. It wasn’t until the last couple of decades that people have forgotten about what happened in the fifties. People have finally started to realize that comics don’t cause juvenile delinquency.

What draws you to working with and writing for young people?
I think it’s kind of my natural storytelling voice. When I first started writing comics, I was a self-publisher. I was working at a tiny scale. I would Xerox comics and I’d try to sell them at shows. I’d sell probably a dozen or two—tiny scale. And when you’re working at that level, you don’t think about demographics. I wasn’t actually categorized as a young-adult author until I signed with First Second, my primary publisher. They come out of the book world, not the comic-book world. In the book world age demographics are huge; that’s how booksellers decide where to shelve their books and how to sell them. So I was categorized there. It’s not something I had in my head when I first started, but I think it sits well—probably because I was a high-school teacher for a long time. I taught high-school computer science for seventeen years, so I was just surrounded by teenage voices, and a lot of that just bleeds into you. When you spend so much time in the hallways of a school, the voices of those hallways just kind of get into you.

Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Academy Establishes Web Resource for Teen Poets

6.18.09
Online Only

Yesterday, the Academy of American Poets launched a new online poetry resource targeted at teenage readers and writers of poetry. The initiative was conceived after the organization conducted a survey of visitors to its Web site and found that 75 percent of users developed an interest in poetry before the age of eighteen.

The new home page features writing resources and a collection of poems for teens, as well as links to the organization’s discussion forum and a comprehensive index of Web sites and reference materials for poets. A "Leave Your Mark" feature prompts teen users to share indispensable lines of poetry, upcoming events, and to create virtual poetry notebooks of their own design featuring poems, writer profiles, and interviews culled from the Academy’s site.

Young writers are also prompted to sign up for the "Street Team" newsletter, which will notify them of poetry projects and contests in which they could participate. Planned programs include the Free Verse Photo Project, in which a line of poetry is written using a temporary medium and photographed before it disappears, the National Poetry Writing Month challenge and pledge drive, and Poem In Your Pocket Day.

The home page initiative was funded by close to five hundred Academy members, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, which supports advancement of artistic inquiry and scholarship, and the graduating class of 2008 from Holmdel High School in New Jersey.

In Print and Online
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Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin

February 13, 2018, 9:00 pm
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With so many good books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One offers the first lines of a dozen recently released books, including Feel Free by Zadie Smith and I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death by Maggie O’Farrell. 

“The universe heaves with laughter, and I’m all about my lopsided, self-defining tale.” Men and Apparitions (Soft Skull Press, March 2018) by Lynne Tillman. Fifteenth book, sixth novel. Agent: Joy Harris. Editor: Yuka Igarashi. Publicist: Megan Fishmann.

“I was having dinner with old friends in Rome when one of them turned to me and said: ‘But of course your writing so far has been a fifteen-year psychodrama.’” Feel Free (Penguin Press, February 2018) by Zadie Smith. Eighth book, second essay collection. Agent: Georgia Garrett. Editor: Ann Godoff. Publicist: Juliana Kiyan.

“You remind me of the Underground Railroad.” Threat Come Close (Four Way Books, March 2018) by Aaron Coleman. First book, poetry collection. Agent: None. Editor: Martha Rhodes. Publicist: Clarissa Long.

“Seated in a copper bathtub, Bear Bavinsky dunks his head under steaming water and shakes out his beard, flinging droplets across the art studio.” The Italian Teacher (Viking, March 2018) by Tom Rachman. Fourth book, third novel. Agent: Elyse Cheney. Editor: Andrea Schulz. Publicist: Olivia Taussig.

“At the Möbius Strip Club of Grief, come on in, the ladies are XXX!” The Möbius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House Books, February 2018) by Bianca Stone. Third book, poetry collection. Agent: None. Editor: Tony Perez. Publicist: Sabrina Wise.

“Alice was beginning to get very tired of all this sitting by herself with nothing to do: every so often she tried again to read the book in her lap, but it was made up almost exclusively of long paragraphs, and no quotation marks whatsoever, and what is the point of a book, thought Alice, that does not have any quotation marks?” Asymmetry (Simon & Schuster, February 2018) by Lisa Halliday. First book, novel. Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb. Editor: Ira Silverberg. Publicist: Anne Tate Pearce.

“My mother and I drove east across the flatlands, along the vast floor of an ancient sea.” The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border (Riverhead Books, February 2018) by Francisco Cantú. First book, memoir. Agent: Rebecca Gradinger. Editor: Becky Saletan. Publicists: Jynne Dilling Martin and Glory Anne Plata.

“On the path ahead, stepping out from behind a boulder, a man appears.” I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death (Knopf, February 2018) by Maggie O’Farrell. Eighth book, first memoir. Agent: Christy Fletcher. Editor: Jordan Pavlin. Publicist: Josefine Kals.

“I knew I had gotten older / when I noticed women no longer / wore bras, which // didn’t happen until my eyes / began slowly lightening with wrinkles, / though not in my eyes // was I old, / nor could I see myself as 40 / and still in college.” Post Traumatic Hood Disorder (Sarabande Books, March 2018) by David Tomas Martinez. Second book, poetry collection. Agent: None. Editor: Sarah Gorham. Publicist: Joanna Englert.

“In a week the inquiry into the collapse of the Baliverna begins.” Catastrophe (Ecco, March 2018) by the late Dino Buzzati, translated from the Italian by Judith Landry. Seventh story collection of more than twenty books. Agent: Maria Vittoria Albertini. Editor: Gabriella Doob. Publicist: James Faccinto.

“If I concentrate, I can see where the river should be.” Let’s No One Get Hurt (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March 2018) by Jon Pineda. Sixth book, second novel. Agent: None. Editor: Emily Bell. Publicist: Steven Pfau.

“Somewhere in this insomniac night / my life is beginning / without me.” Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf Press, March 2018) by Tarfia Faizullah. Second book, poetry collection. Agent: None. Editor: Jeff Shotts. Publicist: Caroline Nitz.

Staff
March/April 2018
In Print and Online
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I, Too Arts Collective

February 13, 2018, 9:00 pm
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For nearly ten years the brownstone at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem was silent. Once the home of celebrated Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes, who lived there for twenty years until his death in 1967, the three-story row house sat vacant, its dark stone walls overgrown with ivy, the paint of its once grand interior chipped throughout. The only evidence of the building’s literary history was a small plaque on the facade bearing Hughes’s name and designating it a landmark.

But today, thanks to the I, Too Arts Collective, the brownstone is once again bustling with creativity. On any given day one might hear the voice of a teen writer reciting Hughes’s poem “I look at the world,” or a community member reading at an open mic for the first time, or a distinguished author in conversation about the practice of writing. Established as a nonprofit organization by award-winning author Renée Watson, I, Too provides arts programming in Hughes’s house to underrepresented and marginalized voices. The collective takes its name from Hughes’s famous poem “I, Too,” which opens with the lines, “I, too, sing America. // I am the darker brother.”

“People need spaces where they can seek justice and stand up for what they believe in, spaces where they can be their full selves,” says Watson. “Often they are not able to do that in the world, so I wanted to have a space where they can come and create and engage with their community—that was really important to me.”

Watson, who lives in Harlem, walked past the vacant house for ten years, disappointed that nothing had been done with the space. She was inspired to take action in the summer of 2016, after hearing that Maya Angelou’s Harlem brownstone, located just a ten-minute walk from Hughes’s house, had been sold for $4 million. Determined that another piece of Harlem and African American culture wouldn’t be lost, Watson contacted the owner of Hughes’s brownstone and shared her vision of a space dedicated to preserving the writer’s legacy. The owner also didn’t want to see the building become gentrified, turned into condos or a coffee shop, but told Watson she’d need to come up with a year’s rent to turn her vision into a reality.

Watson, who in addition to publishing several well-received children’s books—including most recently Piecing Me Together (Bloomsbury, 2017)—has years of experience in business and nonprofit arts administration; she established the I, Too Arts Collective in July 2016 and launched #LangstonsLegacy, an online fund-raising campaign to lease the brownstone. In just a few months, with the help of the literary community and private donors, she raised $150,000 toward the lease, renovation, and programming costs. Watson signed a three-year lease in October 2016 and along with the I, Too team and a group of volunteers, cleaned, painted, and restored the building. On February 1, 2017—Hughes’s 115th birthday and the beginning of Black History Month—the Hughes House opened to the public.

I, Too now hosts weekly open hours at the Hughes House, during which the community and tourists can visit the space, walk the same parlor floor Hughes did, and snap photos of his piano and typewriter. Watson says the brownstone is less of a museum, however, and more of a space for people to create. I, Too runs a number of special programs and events at the Hughes House, including creative writing workshops for adults and young people, a recurring poetry salon with an open mic, a monthly social event for writers and artists, and discussions with writers about their process and work. I, Too also rents the space to other artists and nonprofits to hold workshops, readings, and performances. Writers who have visited the brownstone include Kwame Alexander, Tracey Baptiste, Andrea Davis Pinkney, Angela Flournoy, Nikki Grimes, Ellen Hagan, Jason Reynolds, Jacqueline Woodson, and Ibi Zoboi.

Watson and her I, Too colleagues— program director Kendolyn Walker, social media director Jennifer Baker, and graphic designer Ellice Lee, as well as working and honorary boards of directors made up of writers and artists—want to empower artists as well as honor Hughes’s legacy. “I wanted something that would add on to what he left behind,” says Watson. “I think that is a powerful thing, to not just celebrate his work in theory or by reading but also saying, ‘This is what he wrote, this is what he said—what do you want to say, and how are you continuing his legacy?’”

The program closest to Watson’s heart is the Langston Hughes Institute for Young Writers, which hosts writing workshops for young people during school breaks and throughout the summer. Funded by the Ford Foundation, the workshops allow teens to learn about Hughes’s work and share their own poetry. “I always say whenever young people are in the space, that’s when I get emotional and feel like this is why I am doing this work,” Watson says. “What moves me is when I see young people writing and finding their voices and expressing themselves.”

After a successful first year, the collective is working toward its long-term goals, including restoring the second floor of the house to create studio space and a library, as well as raising money to establish a fellowship program for writers. As part of the program, fellows would receive a residency in the Hughes House and hold workshops and readings in return.

The organization’s ultimate goal is to raise enough money to purchase the brownstone. “I want this to be a place that lives far beyond me or anybody involved with it now,” says Watson. “This is not just a trendy thing to do, but a sustainable space with roots in the ground for everyday artists to develop their craft and for established artists to share their stories and their voices.” 

 

LaToya Jordan is a writer from Brooklyn, New York. Follow her on Twitter @latoyadjordan.

LaToya Jordan

Publishing, Empowering Teen Writers

by
Tara Jayakar
July/August 2017
6.14.17
In Print and Online

For Chicago teenagers with a passion for writing, there is no shortage of resources. Young Chicago Authors; 826CHI, a branch of the youth writing organization started by writer Dave Eggers; StoryStudio Chicago; and Writopia Lab, among other programs, have been offering writing workshops, open mics, summer camps, and poetry slams for kids throughout the city for decades. But a new organization has a more specific goal in mind for Chicago teens: to offer them hands-on experience in editing and publishing their peers. Launched last year by poet and educator Jennifer Steele, [Y]volve Publishing (YP) is an extension of Revolving Door Arts Foundation, which Steele founded in 2014 to empower and publish young and emerging writers and to get them actively involved in the publishing industry. Steele runs the organization almost exclusively on her own, with some help from a volunteer board that includes writers Fred Sasaki and Kenyatta Rogers. While Steele has other projects in the works for the organization, including workshops for young and new mothers, an anthology about postpartum depression, and a reading series, her primary focus is currently YP and its inaugural project, the Teen Chapbook Series, which features poetry chapbooks written and edited by teens. 

The chapbook series began last summer, when Steele asked four teenagers on the slam poetry team she coaches to each write five poems and then expand that work into a chapbook-length collection. The four young poets—Nyvia Taylor, Semira Truth Garrett, Kai Wright, and Jalen Kobayashi—worked with one another, along with Steele, to edit their poems. “Each book has been a personal journey for these writers, as they explore personal ideas and also think about how to expand the craft of their writing,” says Steele. “Semira, for instance, was really interested in learning how to write short poems. Jalen has learned about truth versus fact when writing a poem. And Nyvia has been writing brave poems that are confronting difficult, personal subjects.” 

The chapbooks, each featuring artwork the poets chose themselves, were published in May. Steele also invited four established poets, including CM Burroughs and Jacob Saenz, to write introductions to the chapbooks. For the young poets, seeing their words in print has had a powerful impact. “When you have a hard copy of something, it’s forever,” says Kobayashi in a video on the press’s website. “As poets, we share our work on social media, but that can only get you so far. Once you actually have that physical copy of all your words on the page, nobody can take that from you.” Wright agrees: “I’m just a little Chicago kid from the West Side, but to be able to put my work out there in a permanent way—these are just my words that are here and nobody can take my story, or my truth, or my life away from me as a result of that.” 

The Teen Chapbook Series will be published annually, and next year’s series will be expanded to include fiction and nonfiction. (Submissions will open this month, and the chapbooks will be released in Spring 2018.) Steele is also in the process of developing a teen editorial board, which will oversee the production of each book in the series from start to finish. “We’re hoping to have a full-fledged publishing program that includes graphic design, marketing, and promotion teams by 2018,” Steele says. Students will create a call for submissions, read and select manuscripts, and then be paired with a more established editor or writer to edit the selected manuscripts. They will also work on every stage of production, from layout and design to promotion. Steele plans for the press to release three to five chapbooks through the series each year and to put out other books as well. This summer she is working with a group of teens to curate, edit, design, and publish a book of poetry and fashion photography centering around the Gwendolyn Brooks centennial, which is being celebrated this year in Chicago. The anthology will be published in October. 

By teaching teens how to publish books, Steele believes she will help equip them with both entrepreneurial and collaborative experience that will be applicable within and beyond the creative industry. By taking on the role of an editor, publisher, or marketing executive, Steele says, the young people involved with the YP will acquire marketable skills before they even graduate high school. She also hopes to reach more teens by bringing YP books into classrooms. Starting in the 2017–2018 school year, she plans to provide the chapbooks to teachers in Chicago schools and help them develop lesson plans based on each book’s content or theme. “We often hear from teachers that they wish they had more books written by teens to share with their students, so we’re hoping this could fill that need,” she says. “As far as I know, there aren’t many collections of poetry being taught in the classroom, let alone collections by teens.” 

Steele’s commitment to empowering teens is partially motivated by her own experiences as a young person. “I didn’t know I could be an editor,” she says. “I thought if I got my English degree, I was just going to be a high school English teacher. But if someone had told me that I could be editing a magazine, I probably would have made different choices. We’re trying to create these experiences for kids at this age so they can make more informed choices about what they’re interested in doing. That’s the underlying point of all of this: creating, through the literary arts, skills that can be transferable to any career path they’re interested in.”

Tara Jayakar is the founder and editor of Raptor Editing. She lives in New York City.

[Y]volve Publishing's poets (from left) Semira Truth Garrett, Jalen Kobayashi, Kai Wright, and Nyvia Taylor. (Credit: Kikomo.p Imagery)

Amanda Gorman Named National Youth Poet Laureate

by
Maggie Millner
4.27.17
Online Only

Last night in New York City, at a historic ceremony at Gracie Mansion, nineteen-year-old Amanda Gorman of Los Angeles was named the first national youth poet laureate. The unprecedented title, to be awarded annually, honors a teen poet who demonstrates not only extraordinary literary talent but also a proven record of community engagement and youth leadership.

For Gorman, poetry and civic outreach aren’t separate interests. The Harvard University freshman knows firsthand that creative writing can build confidence and a sense of community among young people whose voices are often underrepresented in mainstream dialogue. In 2016 she founded One Pen One Page, a nonprofit organization that provides an “online platform and creative writing programs for student storytellers to change the world.” She continues to serve as the organization’s executive director.

Gorman’s own writing often addresses the intersections of race, feminism, and adolescence, as well as the changing landscape of her native Los Angeles. For both her poetry and her advocacy, Gorman has been recognized by Forbes, the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, the YoungArts Foundation, and the OZY Genius Awards. She has also performed on The Today Show, ABC Family, and Nickelodeon News, and helped introduce Hillary Clinton at the 2017 Global Leadership Awards.

“For me, being able to stand on a stage as a spoken word poet, as someone who overcame a speech impediment, as the descendent of slaves who would have been prosecuted for reading and writing, I think it really symbolizes how, by pursuing a passion and never giving up, you can go as far as your wildest dreams,” said Gorman at the ceremony on Wednesday evening. “This represents such a significant moment because never in my opinion have the arts been more important than now.”

Amanda Gorman, national youth poet laureate.
 

The event represented the culmination of years of work by arts organizations across the country. In 2009 literary arts nonprofit Urban Word NYC, in partnership with the New York City Campaign Finance Board and Mayor’s Office, began bestowing the annual title of New York City youth poet laureate on one visionary poet between the ages of fourteen and nineteen. Michael Cirelli, executive director of Urban Word NYC, says the program was founded on a belief that “young poets deserve to be in spaces of power, privilege, and governance, and to have their voices front and center of the sociopolitical dialogue happening in our city.”

Since the inception of New York’s youth poet laureate program, arts and literacy organizations in over thirty-five cities have followed suit, launching their own youth laureateship positions. As it spread nationally, the program garnered support from the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, and PEN Center USA, among other major poetry organizations. Finally, in 2016, the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities partnered with Urban Word to bring the program to the national level.

Last July a jury of prominent poets, including U.S. poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, Brooklyn poet laureate Tina Chang, and Academy of American Poets executive director Jen Benka, narrowed the pool of local laureates down to five national finalists. Poets were evaluated on the caliber and subject matter of their poems, as well as their commitment to serving their communities through volunteer and advocacy work, and each finalist was selected to represent a geographic region of the country (Northeast, Southeast, South, Midwest, and West). Along with Gorman, Hajjar Baban of Detroit, Nkosi Nkululeko of New York City, Lagnajita Mukhopadhyay of Nashville, and Andrew White of Houston were named the first annual regional laureates and finalists for the inaugural national youth poet laureateship.

Each finalist received a book deal with independent press Penmanship Books, which published Gorman’s first poetry collection, The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough, in 2015. Over the past year, the finalists have also had the opportunity to perform for large audiences at renowned venues, including the Poetry Foundation, the Kennedy Center, and the White House. As the national youth poet laureate, Gorman will continue to give readings and participate in events across the country throughout her yearlong term.

“The role of poetry, especially in marginalized communities, is to provide a voice to those who are traditionally silenced,” says Cirelli, “and the best way to effect social change is to provide platforms for youth to tell their stories. We hope to leverage our work to allow these diverse stories to be told in spaces that have historically omitted youth voices, and to energize and engage the issues that they are most passionate about.”

The ceremony at Gracie Mansion featured performances by three of the finalists, as well as a roster of current and former New York City youth poets laureate. The performers were introduced by a group of acclaimed poets, including American Book Prize winner Kimiko Hahn and four-time National Poetry Slam champion Patricia Smith. Nkululeko recited a poem about his hair, a metaphor through which he discussed his relationship with his mother and collective African American history. Baban, who was named runner-up for the national title, recited a sestina on language, family, and her Muslim name. Finally, Gorman delivered a poem about how her speech impediment led her to discover writing.

“I am so grateful to be part of this cohort of young creatives who are taking up their pens to have a voice for what is right and what is just,” Gorman said in her acceptance speech. “I don’t just want to write—I want to do right as well.”

 

Maggie Millner is Poets & Writers Magazine’s Diana and Simon Raab Editorial Fellow.  
 

Q&A: Yang Inspires Young Readers

by
Dana Isokawa
March/April 2017
2.15.17
In Print and Online

In 2008 the Library of Congress, the Children’s Book Council, and the nonprofit organization Every Child a Reader established the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature position to celebrate and promote books for children and young adult readers. The current ambassador, graphic novelist and recent MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient Gene Luen Yang, started his term in January 2016. Yang has devoted much of his work to his Reading Without Walls Challenge, which encourages kids to read books with unfamiliar characters, topics, and formats. Yang is the perfect advocate for such an undertaking: His popular graphic novels American Born Chinese and Boxers & Saints have pushed against cultural stereotypes and blurred the lines between the comic-book and book-publishing industries. More than halfway through his two-year term, Yang spoke about his work as the ambassador.

What inspired you to come up with the Reading Without Walls Challenge?
We want kids to read outside their comfort zones, and we want them to do it in three ways. One: We want them to read about characters who don’t look like them or live like them. Two: We want them to read about topics they don’t know anything about. And three: We want them to read books in different formats. So if they normally read only graphic novels for fun, we want them to try a chapter book, and if they read only chapter books for fun, we want them to try a graphic novel.

What are you planning next?
Right now we’re trying to promote the Reading Without Walls program. We’ve put together a bunch of downloadable materials: recommended reading lists, posters, and certificates of completion. We’re hoping librarians, booksellers, and teachers will download, print, and use these materials to promote the initiative with their classes. And we’re trying to do a wider national push for the summer.

What else is involved in the national ambassador position?
It’s pretty flexible. I have a few speaking engagements—I was at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., in the fall, which was a ton of fun. I’m going to go again this year, and I’ve done a few school visits, some of them in person, some of them over Skype. We’ve tried some online stuff. I have a video podcast called the Reading Without Walls podcast—it’s just me having conversations about children’s books with people I really like. I had one that came out with Lois Lowry, who wrote The Giver; another one with Patrick Ness, who wrote A Monster Calls. I also do a monthly column at Book Riot about making comics, and we’re probably going to start another podcast this year.

Why do you think it’s important for kids to read books with characters who don’t look or live like them?
There are studies that show that fiction in particular builds empathy—that when you read about characters who don’t look or live like you, you begin to understand them a little bit better. You understand what makes you similar and how vast the differences are, and it helps you to be a little bit more compassionate toward people who are different from you. Right now it seems like—not just in America, but around the world—we need a little more empathy. And I include myself in that too. I worry about how technology affects us. Just recently with the presidential election, there was all of [this research] about how Facebook basically shows you stuff you like to read. And then even beyond that, you can literally read about yourself all day. You could just fill your whole day with pure narcissism because of digital media. And I think fiction is the exact opposite of that. Well-written fiction pulls you out of your own mind space and helps you see into the thoughts and lives of somebody else.

Can you think of a book where you were reading without walls as a kid?
As an Asian American kid growing up in America in the eighties, almost every book that I read was outside of my own walls, because they were about kids that were part of the majority culture. I do think that maybe gender-wise there were books that pushed me outside of my walls. Like almost every kid in the eighties, I loved Beverly Cleary and I loved the Ramona books. I think as a character Ramona really broke stereotypes and cultural norms about the way little girls should act, because she was creative and rambunctious and kind of loud. And there was a lot of overlap in the way she saw the world and the way I saw the world as a little kid. So I think that that pushed me out. And there were also books that mirrored my life. I started collecting comics in the fifth grade and got really obsessed with superheroes. I wonder if part of that obsession comes from the fact that these superheroes negotiated two different identities—Superman wasn’t just Superman, he was also Clark Kent. In some ways that mirrored my own reality since I had a Chinese name at home and an American name at school; I lived under two different sets of expectations. And Superman is actually an immigrant too—he deals with the cultures of both Krypton and America.

Have your experiences as a graphic novelist informed the challenge, especially the part about reading in different formats?
Yes, absolutely. I think in America, up until pretty recently, the comic-book market and the book market were really two separate entities. They had their own stores, distribution systems, norms, and readerships. It’s only in the last ten or fifteen years that they’ve started working together. I really think I’ve been a beneficiary of that merging, and it’s exciting to see. It’s exciting to see how publishers and authors who are prominent in one area are starting to embrace the work from the authors in the other area. More and more we’re seeing publishers who typically only publish prose books start to add graphic novels to their list. On the other side, we’re starting to see comic-book publishers recruit writers who are primarily known for their prose, like Ta-Nehisi Coates over at Marvel.

Do you think that’s because people’s opinions or the form itself is changing? Can you diagnose why that shift is happening?
I think there are three prominent comic cultures in the world. There’s the American one; there’s an Asian one that’s centered primarily around Japan, and there’s a European one centered around France and French-speaking Belgium. And in those other two cultures, comics have been prominent for a long time. If you go to Japan, there will be people of every age and gender reading graphic novels and manga on the subways. In France, it’s the same way: They televise the comic awards shows. In both of those cultures, it’s always been a big deal. It’s only in America that comics have been in this backwater. And that really goes back to the 1950s when the child psychologist Fredric Wertham wrote a book called Seduction of the Innocent, in which he argued that comic books cause juvenile delinquency. The United States Congress took it very seriously and had a series of congressional hearings where they called comic-book authors, publishers, and artists to Washington, D.C., to testify to see if comics actually caused juvenile delinquency. These hearings lasted for a few weeks, but didn’t end conclusively—there was no congressional decision that came out of it. But they damaged the reputation of comics in the eyes of the American public, and that lasted for decades. That didn’t happen in Japan or France. I feel what happened in Japan and France was a much more natural development of the medium, whereas in America it was stunted. It wasn’t until the last couple of decades that people have forgotten about what happened in the fifties. People have finally started to realize that comics don’t cause juvenile delinquency.

What draws you to working with and writing for young people?
I think it’s kind of my natural storytelling voice. When I first started writing comics, I was a self-publisher. I was working at a tiny scale. I would Xerox comics and I’d try to sell them at shows. I’d sell probably a dozen or two—tiny scale. And when you’re working at that level, you don’t think about demographics. I wasn’t actually categorized as a young-adult author until I signed with First Second, my primary publisher. They come out of the book world, not the comic-book world. In the book world age demographics are huge; that’s how booksellers decide where to shelve their books and how to sell them. So I was categorized there. It’s not something I had in my head when I first started, but I think it sits well—probably because I was a high-school teacher for a long time. I taught high-school computer science for seventeen years, so I was just surrounded by teenage voices, and a lot of that just bleeds into you. When you spend so much time in the hallways of a school, the voices of those hallways just kind of get into you.

Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Academy Establishes Web Resource for Teen Poets

6.18.09
Online Only

Yesterday, the Academy of American Poets launched a new online poetry resource targeted at teenage readers and writers of poetry. The initiative was conceived after the organization conducted a survey of visitors to its Web site and found that 75 percent of users developed an interest in poetry before the age of eighteen.

The new home page features writing resources and a collection of poems for teens, as well as links to the organization’s discussion forum and a comprehensive index of Web sites and reference materials for poets. A "Leave Your Mark" feature prompts teen users to share indispensable lines of poetry, upcoming events, and to create virtual poetry notebooks of their own design featuring poems, writer profiles, and interviews culled from the Academy’s site.

Young writers are also prompted to sign up for the "Street Team" newsletter, which will notify them of poetry projects and contests in which they could participate. Planned programs include the Free Verse Photo Project, in which a line of poetry is written using a temporary medium and photographed before it disappears, the National Poetry Writing Month challenge and pledge drive, and Poem In Your Pocket Day.

The home page initiative was funded by close to five hundred Academy members, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, which supports advancement of artistic inquiry and scholarship, and the graduating class of 2008 from Holmdel High School in New Jersey.

A New Center for Black Poetics

by
Tara Jayakar
September/October 2016
8.17.16
In Print and Online

From late nineteenth-century poet Paul Laurence Dunbar to Harlem Renaissance icon Langston Hughes to contemporary poetry stars Rita Dove and Toi Derricotte, the influence of African American poets on America’s literary culture cannot be overstated. But until recently there was no center that had significant institutional support and was specifically dedicated to sharing and studying the legacy of African American poetry.* Earlier this year, poets Dawn Lundy Martin, Terrance Hayes, and Yona Harvey decided it was high time to start one. The trio launched the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) as a creative think tank to spark conversation and collaboration among poets and other artists, and to promote and archive the work of African American poets for future generations.

“We recognized that there was this huge impact that African American and African diasporic poets were making on American arts and letters,” says Martin, who codirects the center alongside Hayes. “We wanted there to be a place where we could really think and work through what that means.” Housed at the University of Pittsburgh, where both Martin and Hayes teach in the MFA writing program, the center held its first event in March—a set of conversations and readings about race, poetry, and the humanities—and will host similar events throughout the academic year. Its first course on African American poetry and poetics, led by Lauren Russell, the assistant director of CAAPP and an English professor, will be offered to undergraduate and graduate students during the 2017–2018 academic year and will feature visiting speakers each week. Hayes and Martin also plan to launch a residency and fellowship program, through which poets, artists, and scholars can work at the center for periods between a month and a year.

Part of CAAPP’s core mission is to archive and document the work of African American poets, which will be accomplished through both a physical collection of books and an online archive of lectures, readings, and discussions. While organizations like Cave Canem create space to nurture new work by African American poets, and other university centers such as Medgar Evers College’s Center for Black Literature and Chicago State University’s Gwendolyn Brooks Center work to promote black literature, CAAPP will focus specifically on the research and scholarship of black poetics, particularly as it relates to historical, artistic, and cultural repression, as well as corresponding social justice movements. “Cave Canem is twenty years old, and there still hasn’t been a large body of work about how it came into being or archival work around it,” says Hayes. “Our organizations historically haven’t had an opportunity to take care of our own information, to build our own insights around that work.... Now we are in a position to be our own historians and our own archivists, and write our own biographies about the importance of these roots.”

The University of Pittsburgh has long been a home for the work of African American poets. The university press, with editor Ed Ochester at the helm, has published notable titles by both emerging and established African American poets, recently Derricotte, Ross Gay, Rickey Laurentiis, Nate Marshall, and Afaa Michael Weaver. Hayes and Martin hope to work with the press on a book prize, and harness other university resources. “What a university can do is provide infrastructure, in a way that’s just not set up in most sectors of our society,” says Hayes. “Infrastructure and research capabilities.” The pair have enlisted faculty from other departments, including English and Africana Studies, to advise CAAPP and possibly teach future courses. “We think of ourselves as a start-up,” says Martin. “And like innovators in tech, we want to be open and inclusive as we generate new ideas about what it means to work in the fields of African American poetry and poetics. This seems especially important in these trying and divisive times.”

A significant part of CAAPP’s work will also intersect with the university’s MFA program. Graduate writing students will be able to take courses offered by the center and have the opportunity to help curate, design, and teach these courses. This goes hand in hand with how Hayes sees the MFA as an opportunity to teach students the tools and skills needed to hold positions of power in poetry and arts organizations. “A person who is interested in getting an MFA and being a poet can learn how to live in the world, whether they are directing centers or working as librarians, archivists, or critics,” says Hayes. “Just to alert and inspire a poet to do that is a possibility. Maybe you want to run a press or be an editor of a press. I don’t see why the MFA can’t be an opportunity to begin that conversation, as opposed to assuming that all you can do is write or teach.”

*Editor's Note: After this article went to print, it was brought to our attention that a center dedicated to studying African American poetry was already established before the launch of CAAPP. The Furious Flower Poetry Center, housed at James Madison University and founded by Joanne Gabbin, has been cultivating and promoting African American poetry since 1994. We regret the error.

 

Hayes and Martin hope that the center will also help make the university’s MFA program a more welcoming space for writers of color, an important effort in light of increased discussion about race and diversity in MFA programs. For Martin, this means creating and maintaining a space of cultural inclusion. “Pittsburgh is a place where there are other students of color, and the graduate faculty is extremely diverse. There’s already some understanding between folks who are there, so you can start from a place of not having to work through your values and struggle to articulate your cultural perspective.”

The CAAPP directors plan to offer courses that intersect with visual art and music, in order to explore how thinking across disciplines can parallel thinking across cultures and perspectives. “Certainly, we feel like if anyone is prepared to build those new conversations, it would be African American poets and poets of color in general,” says Hayes, adding that CAAPP aims to include non-black people of color and other marginalized communities in the conversation. “We talk about collage and hybridity—that’s what people of color are. [We’re] not thinking about segregation, not thinking about fences around what we do, but looking across those bridges, saying, ‘Well, how are these people across the street interested in what I’m doing?’ even if they’re not poets. They might be architects, they might be scientists.”

Moving forward, the center will hold a community workshop, reading, and exhibition from November 9 to November 11 on poetry and politics titled “Black Poets Speak Out,” featuring Jericho Brown, Mahogany Browne, and Amanda Johnston. The directors also hope to host a reading by emerging women and trans poets. Martin and Hayes are optimistic about the social impact of the center’s work. “As far as I’m concerned,” says Martin, “especially given the state of violence in this country—violence against queer people, violence against black people, violence against women—it makes sense to take up things like African American literature, African American culture, African American history, African American poetry and art as a part of making the world better.”

Tara Jayakar is the founder and editor of Raptor Editing. She lives in New York City.

Q&A: Thomas’s App for Young Readers

by
Jennifer Baker
July/August 2017
6.14.17
In Print and Online

In the summer of 2014, eighteen-year-old Kaya Thomas launched We Read Too, an app that offers a comprehensive database of multicultural books for young readers. Thomas had been frustrated with the difficulty of finding books by and about people of color in libraries and bookstores, so she designed and wrote the code for the app (she recently graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in computer science), which now has information on hundreds of books and more than fifteen thousand users. “I knew that if my app had even helped one person feel represented and showed them that their stories are being told too,” wrote Thomas in a piece at Medium about starting the app, “I had done my job.” Word spread further about We Read Too in March after Thomas launched an Indiegogo campaign to expand the app and raised $15,000. In the next several months, Thomas plans to launch a website for We Read Too and expand its catalog to more than a thousand books. As work on the app progresses, Thomas spoke about her larger mission and hopes for We Read Too. 

How has the We Read Too app evolved over the years?
When I first released We Read Too, it had a directory that included 300 children’s and young adult titles. Each title had a detail page where you could view the book cover, title, author, and description. There was also a suggestion feature where users could send me titles they thought should be included. Since then the directory has expanded to more than 630 titles, and you can search by author or title. You can now share any of the books via text message, e-mail, or social media, and you can view the book on Safari to purchase it. There’s also a discovery feature now that allows you to see one random book at a time so you don’t have to search through the entire directory.

Was it a purposeful decision to include both self-published and traditionally published books in this list? 
I wanted to include self-published works because it can be hard for those authors to get readers to discover their work. A lot of authors who are self-published have reached out to me in hopes that We Read Too can be a place for them to get more reader discovery for their work. I know that for authors of color it can be hard to get into the publishing world, so I want to support those who haven’t gone through the traditional routes. I want all authors of color to have their work highlighted in We Read Too, regardless of how they got their work out there.

Do you have plans to include adult fiction in the app?
I eventually do want to include adult fiction in the app, but it would be a larger undertaking because there are so many different genres within that category. I want to make sure I have a significant number of titles in each genre before I add them to the app. 

We Read Too is free. Do you think you will ever charge for it so you can continue updates and expansion? 
We Read Too will always be free for individual users. I never want to charge users to access the directory of titles because that would be counterintuitive toward the mission. I want titles written by people of color to be easier to discover and all in one place, not blocked by a paywall. I want users to discover titles they can share with the young people in their lives and community. I want users to know that these titles exist and, more specifically, for users who are people of color, I want them to see that there are authors who share their background and are creating work that reflects their culture in some way.    

Jennifer Baker is a publishing professional, the creator and host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, the panel organizer for the nonprofit We Need Diverse Books, and the social medial director and a writing instructor for Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. She is the editor of the forthcoming short story anthology Everyday People: The Color of Life (Atria Books, 2018).

Kaya Thomas (Credit: Faith Rotich)

Q&A: Nicole Sealey Leads Cave Canem

by
Tayari Jones
May/June 2017
4.12.17
In Print and Online

Cave Canem was established by Cornelius Eady and Toi Derricotte in 1996 to nurture black poets both on the page and in the publishing marketplace. The Brooklyn, New York–based organization’s many programs include writing workshops, master classes, a reading series, publication prizes, and an annual retreat, which brings together more than fifty poets, or “fellows,” each year. In January Nicole Sealey, previously Cave Canem’s programs director, became the organization’s new executive director. A veteran arts administrator (including a previous role as the assistant director of Poets & Writers’ Readings & Workshops program), Sealey is also a poet; her first full-length collection, Ordinary Beast, will be published by Ecco in September. A couple of months into her new position, Sealey spoke about the future of Cave Canem.

Can you tell me a little bit about your relationship to Cave Canem?
Almost ten years ago I participated in Cave Canem’s eight-week fall workshop in New York City, facilitated by Marilyn Nelson. I was a very young writer and it ended up being a formative experience in my life. We got serious about craft and made lifelong connections in the process. I’ve met many of my closest friends through Cave Canem, the closest of all being my husband, John Murillo. The very least I can do for an organization that has served me well for the last decade is to return the gesture. 

How does being a writer influence the way you will lead the organization?
Cave Canem has always had a “poets first” philosophy, which has served the organization well for the last twenty-plus years. Remember, the organization was founded by rock-star poets and directed for the past decade by Alison Meyers, also a poet. In that tradition, I plan to lead with both head and heart, which are the qualities I value most in poetry. 

What’s ahead for Cave Canem and for you as the new executive director?
In May we’ll be capping off our twentieth-anniversary year with Cave Canem 20/20: A Panoramic Vision of Black Poetry, a two-and-a-half day poetry forum at Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn. The forum will offer readings, skill-building panels, artist conversations, and more. I’m also looking forward to my first retreat as executive director. The retreat takes place in June at the University of Pittsburgh in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. It’s our flagship program, and where, as Harryette Mullen says, “black poets, individually and collectively, can inspire and be inspired by others, relieved of any obligation to explain or defend their blackness.”

So much has changed since Cave Canem faculty member Elizabeth Alexander recited “Praise Song for the Day,” the inaugural poem for Barack Obama in 2009. What do you see as the role of Cave Canem, and poetry more broadly, in the new political climate?
“So much has changed” is a very gracious way to describe the political climate in which we now find ourselves. In “Praise Song for the Day,” the speaker asks, “What if the mightiest word is love?” I have no doubt that it is love, but the new administration would have me believe that the mightiest word is fear or, worse yet, the president’s name. It is neither. It is love. And what is love if not a society based on justice and equality? With this in mind, the role of Cave Canem in particular, and poetry in general, is and will be to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. With love. Bigly. 

Are there any outreach programs on tap to connect poetry with readers?
Cave Canem’s Poets Tour, a nonprofit speakers bureau, connects national audiences with Cave Canem fellows through readings and workshops. This year we hope to increase the number of participating fellows and reach out to presenting institutions, including high schools, universities, museums, libraries, and prisons. We want to bring black poets to diverse communities.  

Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.         

Nicole Sealey (Credit: Murray Greenfield )

Q&A: Yang Inspires Young Readers
March/April 2018
In Print and Online

Renee Watson, founder of the I, Too Arts Collective, next to Hughes’s typewriter. (Credit: David Flores)

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Literary MagNet: Dionisia Morales

February 13, 2018, 9:00 pm
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In her debut essay collection, Homing Instincts, Dionisia Morales takes on ideas of place and home. Framed by the day-to-day of Morales’s life—rock climbing, travel, pregnancy, moving from New York City to Oregon—the essays weave together research and meditations on the history of a place and how it can influence an individual’s sense of belonging and family. Morales published essays from the book, out in April from Oregon State University Press, in a number of journals, including the five listed below. Like Morales’s work, many of the publications are rooted in place and, as Morales writes in her book, “the tendencies of place—the expectations, values, and behaviors of where we live that evolve over time, and, with each generation, penetrate the soil that we walk, work, and crave.”

 

Dionisia Morales often writes about the landscape and values of the West Coast, making her work a good fit for Camas (camasmagazine.org), a print biannual that she says “wrestles with a wily concept—the nature of the West.” Edited by graduate students in the environmental studies program at the University of Montana in Missoula, the journal publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and art. “The editorial staff interprets the idea of the West broadly, not limiting the work it publishes to landscapes and wildlife, but also leaning into the intangible personality traits of a region,” says Morales. The magazine, which has published many environmentally minded writers, including Ellen Meloy, Rick Bass, and Robert Michael Pyle, is open for submissions in all genres until March 30 via Submittable for the Summer 2018 issue, whose theme is Rivers.

Focused on a smaller, but no less complex, region of the American West, Oregon Humanities (oregonhumanities.org) publishes essays and articles by writers living in Oregon. Published online and in print three times a year, the magazine has “an inward- and outward-looking quality,” says Morales. “The result is a channeling of ideas that are relevant to national and international audiences but described through the voices of people who share a sense of place.” The Fall/Winter 2017 issue, which carries the theme of Harm, included a feature by Joe Whittle on how Columbia River tribes protected ecosystems, an essay by Jason Arias about being an EMT, and an essay by Alice Hardesty about visiting the World War II Japanese American internment camp her father helped design. Submissions by Oregonians will be open via e-mail later this month.

Named after the literary device or gimmick that triggers a plot, the MacGuffin (schoolcraft.edu/macguffin) is based at Schoolcraft College in Livonia, Michigan, and publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and art. The journal originally published Morales’s essay “You Are Here,” about visiting Istria, a peninsula in the Adriatic Sea where Croatia, Italy, and Slovenia meet, which opens Morales’s collection and sets in motion one of the book’s primary concerns: the feeling of passing through and engaging with the historical and social layers of a place. Established in 1984, the MacGuffin is published in print three times a year. Submissions in all genres are open year-round via e-mail and post.

Morales credits journal editors for helping her improve pieces, including her essay “Home at the Heart,” which she revised twice with Stephanie G’Schwind, editor of the print triannual Colorado Review (coloradoreview.colostate.edu) before it was published. “Instead of rejecting the piece based on one faulty element, G’Schwind was invested in helping me rethink the section to bring the last sentences more squarely in line with the essay’s tension around language and communication,” says Morales. Established in 1956 and published at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, the journal publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction; recent issues have included poetry by Hala Alyan and Tyrone Williams, fiction by Kristen Roupenian—the author of the viral New Yorker story “Cat Person”—and nonfiction by Jennifer Itell and Clint McCown. Poetry and fiction submissions are open via Submittable or post until April 30; nonfiction submissions are open year-round.


Though two of the essays in her collection feature “quietly unconventional elements—seeing pregnancy through the lens of rock climbing, thinking that houses have personalities—that didn’t resonate with editors of other publications,” Morales eventually found a home for both pieces at Hunger Mountain (hungermtn.org), an annual print publication with an “eclecticism that invites writers and readers to assume a level of adventure,” she says. Located at Vermont College of Fine Arts, the journal publishes poetry, prose, visual art, young adult and children’s writing, and other literary miscellany. It also publishes an online companion, Ephemeral Artery, which includes selections from the print magazine along with book reviews, interviews, and craft essays. The 2018 issue of Hunger Mountain, themed Everyday Chimeras, comes out this month and was guest-edited by Donika Kelly in poetry, Melissa Febos in prose, and Ibi Zoboi in children’s literature. Submissions in all genres for the 2019 issue will open via Submittable on May 1 and close October 15.  

 

 

Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

(Photo: Ralf Dujmovits)
Dana Isokawa

Literary MagNet: Danielle Lazarin

by
Dana Isokawa
January/February 2018
12.13.17
In Print and Online

It’s no coincidence that most of the stories in Danielle Lazarin’s debut collection, Back Talk—a book about women, and edited, agented, and publicized by women—were first published in journals with female editors. “I committed myself to supporting women in publishing more fully,” says Lazarin, who now submits only to magazines edited by women. “It seemed a simple step in supporting journals that value women’s voices.” The voices of women ring out in Back Talk, which will be published in February by Penguin Books; the stories show women of all ages negotiating the minor and major travails of modern life. In addition to the journals below, Lazarin has published stories in the Colorado Review, People Holding, Copper Nickel, and Five Chapters.

Lazarin has a knack for placing her characters in situations that draw out their fears and relationship histories, as seen in “Floor Plans,” a story about a woman in New York City who, on the brink of divorce, befriends a neighbor who wants to buy her apartment. The story was originally published in the Southern Review, where prose editor Emily Nemens went back and forth with Lazarin about the piece until she accepted it. “I love that I placed one of my most New York stories in this journal,” says Lazarin, a native New Yorker. “Emily said that was a draw—balancing the regions is something they look for in submissions.” Edited at Louisiana State University, the eighty-two-year-old quarterly publishes many Southern writers, but also publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction by writers from all over the United States and the world, with recent contributions from Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Australia. Poetry submissions are open via postal mail until March 1; prose submissions will reopen in September.

Lazarin submitted to Boston Review after meeting fiction editor Junot Díaz at a reading he gave in 2007. Lazarin was the last person in a signing line, and Díaz encouraged her to submit, warning her to “make it good.” He eventually accepted her story “Gone,” which she then worked on with Deborah Chasman, the review’s coeditor. Previously a bimonthly print magazine, Boston Review—which publishes poetry and fiction alongside political and cultural reportage—recently shifted its focus to online content and introduced an ad-free quarterly print edition focused on themes such as “Race / Capitalism / Justice” and “Work / Inequality / Basic Income.” The website will also be free of commercial advertising beginning in February. Poetry and nonfiction submissions are open via Submittable; fiction submissions will open in early 2018.

Edited by sisters Susan Burmeister-Brown and Linda Swanson-Davies in Portland, Oregon, fiction quarterly Glimmer Train is “a magazine that has my heart,” says Lazarin. “The little extras they do—the back of the journal’s exploration of the story behind the story, the childhood photos, and the opportunity to write about writing for their online Bulletin—all these things allow a little bit more of you to come out with the story.” Established in 1990, Glimmer Train is highly respected in the literary world—Lazarin, who won the Family Matters contest for her story “Spider Legs,” says agents and editors contacted her for years in relation to that publication. The journal runs several contests and reading periods each year; the editors, who read all the submissions themselves and are keenly interested in emerging writers, review nearly forty-thousand stories a year. Submissions are currently open for the Short Story Award for New Writers.

Before she committed to publishing with just female editors, Lazarin published her first story in Michigan Quarterly Review, which is currently edited by Khaled Mattawa at the University of Michigan, where Lazarin got her MFA. The journal, which publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, has long featured an impressive list of women writers, such as Margaret Atwood, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Toni Morrison. The review also runs a frequently updated blog of interviews, craft advice, and cultural commentary on topics as far-ranging as the usefulness of a notebook and the novels of modern Iran. The journal is open to submissions in all genres via Submittable from January 15 to April 15. 

Lazarin describes herself as a ferocious, perseverant submitter—she once amassed seventy-five rejections in one year—and thus appreciates the enthusiasm and communication of the staff at Indiana Review, which is run by students at the MFA program at Indiana University in Bloomington, including editor in chief Tessa Yang. “With student-run journals there’s a sense that the editors are cheering for you,” says Lazarin. The biannual review publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including recent work by emerging poets Tiana Clark and Fatimah Asghar and fiction writer LaTanya McQueen. “We look for [pieces] that are well-crafted and lively, have an intelligent sense of form and language, assume a degree of risk, and have consequence beyond the world of their speakers or narrators,” write the editors. Submissions for the journal will open on February 1.   

 

Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Literary MagNet: Deb Olin Unferth

by
Dana Isokawa
March/April 2017
2.15.17
In Print and Online

In her latest story collection, Wait Till You See Me Dance, fiction writer Deb Olin Unferth—the author of three previous books: a novel, a memoir, and a story collection—brings together nearly forty of her distinctive short stories. The stories, many of which feature characters grappling with the seeming futility of modern endeavors (say, keeping pet turtles, working as an adjunct instructor, lodging a complaint against a pretzel company), are written with precision, deadpan humor, and a sharp but generous observation of human foibles. It’s no wonder that the editors of many journals have sought out her work; Unferth published pieces from the collection, released this month from Graywolf Press, in magazines such as Esquire, Harper’s Magazine, and Vice as well as in smaller literary journals such as the five below.

Unferth was previously an editor at the fiction and nonfiction biannual StoryQuarterly, back when it was published in Chicago and edited by M. M. M. Hayes, now the journal’s senior contributing editor. Established in 1975, StoryQuarterly is currently housed in New Jersey at Rutgers University in Camden and edited by writer Paul Lisicky. The print journal has plans to go digital soon and will open submissions in the fall. “We always like to see fiction and nonfiction that strikes us as impelled, written out of a sense of necessity,” says Lisicky. “It would be especially great to see some new work that’s attuned to the social and environmental upheavals of our times.”

Based in Columbia, Missouri, the online flash-fiction journal Wigleaf seems like a natural home for Unferth, who published her four-sentence, 161-word story “Draft” in March 2016. “I love their mission: small and bright,” says Unferth. “They publish only very odd short-shorts and photos of beautiful, strange postcards designed by the writers.” Instead of running extensive author bios, editor Scott Garson invites contributors to send a postcard. “Dear Wigleaf, The last time I saw you I was different,” writes Roxane Gay. “Dear Wigleaf, Your life would have been different if you had gotten milk from your thumb,” writes Kate Wyer. Submissions of stories less than a thousand words are open via Submittable during the final week of each month, September through May (excluding December); the journal publishes one piece each week during the academic year.

Unferth, who likes publishing her work in student-run magazines, published her story “37 Seconds” in the print annual Columbia Journal, edited by graduate writing students at Columbia University in New York City. Established in 1977, the journal publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction both in print and online—submissions are open for the website from October 1 through May 31 and for print from May 31 to September 30—and runs an annual writing contest. Last year the journal opened the contest for the first time to incarcerated writers, working with prison education programs to distribute a call for submissions. “We wanted to help give voice to an often under-heard population of writers,” says editor Daniel Lefferts. That work aligns with Unferth’s own efforts—she recently put together a journal of writing from the John B. Connally Unit, a maximum-security prison in southern Texas, where she runs a workshop.

Speaking of student journals, Unferth published her story “Online” in print biannual Timber, run by the MFA program at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where Unferth once studied philosophy as an undergraduate. The journal publishes all genres and recently moved to themed issues. “Themed issues are a way to open dialogue between genres and to open dialogue concerning ideas or issues that are important to us without imposing an aesthetic prescription,” says managing editor Sarah Thompson. The first themed issue, the “Ruination Issue,” is open for submissions in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction via Submittable through March 31.

When the print biannual Bennington Review made its comeback in 2016 after a thirty-year hiatus, Unferth was among the many who applauded its return. Her stories “The Intersection” and “The Applicant” were published in Issue 2, released in November. “We wanted to take to heart former editor Robert Boyers’s desire for the magazine to be ‘a testing-ground for American arts and letters,’” says editor Michael Dumanis. “We were also thinking about poet Dean Young’s call in his book The Art of Recklessness for poets to be making ‘birds, not birdcages’—the new Bennington Review is committed to publishing work that fuses recklessness with grace, that is playful but also relentless, that is at once innovative, intelligent, and moving.” The review’s third issue  will be released next month and is focused on the theme of “Threat.” Based in Bennington, Vermont, and Brooklyn, New York, the journal is open for submissions in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and hybrid work until May 15.  

 

Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Literary MagNet: Kiki Petrosino

by
Dana Isokawa
November/December 2017
10.11.17
In Print and Online

In her third poetry collection, Witch Wife—forthcoming from Sarabande Books in December—Kiki Petrosino reckons with the decision of whether or not to have a child. It’s a question she says has no yes-or-no answer: “This is one terrain I can’t navigate with any map,” she says. “It’s personal, it’s emotional.” The book is formally inventive, with prose poems and free-verse lyrics alongside villanelles and other traditional forms. With such a diverse set of poems, Petrosino says the editors who solicit her work also tend to promote an eclectic variety of styles in their journals. In addition to the five publications below, Petrosino has been published in jubilat,Tupelo Quarterly, and Poetry, among others.

With their incantatory language and sometimes dark, fantastical bent, many of Petrosino’s poems are right at home in the online journal Grimoire, named after a book of magical spells and invocations. Established in 2016 in Chicago, Grimoire publishes two biannual issues of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and artwork—plus spells, séances and fan letters to dead authors, and descriptions of dreams. “Despite Grimoire’s interest in dark subject matter, there is something buoyant, even festive, about the journal’s take on the macabre,” says Petrosino. “Being invited to contribute my poems was like being asked to attend a secret party in a glimmering, underground cavern.” Submissions in all genres are open year-round via e-mail; the editors are interested in work that echoes everything from Shirley Jackson and Miss Havisham to doomsday cults and “okay, maybe a really good vampire.”

While Grimoire presides over the magical, Forklift, Ohio bills itself as a journal of “poetry, cooking, and light industrial safety.” Based in Cincinnati and published one to two times a year, the publication is one of contemporary poetry’s treasures, says Petrosino, as well as one of its best-kept secrets. Editors Matt Hart and Eric Appleby have made every issue by hand since starting the magazine in 1994; the latest issue was constructed out of the blueprints of a slaughterhouse, and earlier editions have been made of materials such as carpet samples and wine corks. Forklift, Ohio publishes mostly poetry, as well as flash fiction, recipes, safety tips, and creative nonfiction related to topics like home economics, industry, and agriculture. The editors vow to “take poetry quite seriously, if little or nothing else” and keep the journal ad-free. Queries are accepted via e-mail during the month of May.

Petrosino says that for a long time she was too shy to submit to Crazyhorse. “This is a journal with a half century of magnificent literary history behind it,” she says—and she’s right. Established by poet Tom McGrath in 1960, the biannual print journal has published writers such as Raymond Carver, John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, Ha Jin, and John Updike. Housed at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, Crazyhorse publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. “The poetry contributions are always robust and formally diverse,” says Petrosino, “so my two strange little lyrics about the mysteries of marriage found a ready home there.” The magazine is open for submissions each year from September through May, except during January, when the editors accept only entries for their annual writing contest.

Edited by British poets Sarah Howe, Vidyan Ravinthiran, and Dai George, Prac Crit is an online journal whose tagline is “poetry up close.” Each issue of the triannual publication features only a handful of poems, but these are juxtaposed with a critic’s close analysis of the poem and an interview with the poet. “In a literary culture too reliant on vague statements of praise or blame,” write the editors, “we believe there’s a renewed need for readerly attention grounded in the specifics of actual poems.” Each issue also features “Deep Note,” in which a poet annotates a poem. Petrosino wrote one for her villanelle “Scarlet,” which enabled her to “curate a kind of guided tour of the piece” and share the experiences in her life—baton twirling, contracting scarlet fever, playing Super Mario Brothers—that informed the poem. The editors do not accept poetry submissions, but they do accept proposals for essays or interviews on contemporary poetry via e-mail year-round.

Focused on the notion of place, the biannual print journal Spoon River Poetry Review is located at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois. Established in 1976, the review publishes poetry and poetry in translation, as well as interviews with and chapbook-length portfolios of work by poets with a connection to Illinois. The journal allows for “traditional understandings of home and region to assume new meanings in our increasingly globalized world,” says Petrosino. She published her poem “Young,” a line-by-line reenvisioning of Anne Sexton’s poem of the same name, in the Summer 2015 issue. The poem explores the “potentially magic qualities of a suburban adolescence,” Petrosino says. “Of course, adolescence itself is a kind of place, one we pass through, briefly, on our way to everything else.” Spoon River Poetry Review is open for submissions via the online submission manager or by postal mail until February 15, 2018.   

 

Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Literary MagNet: Beth Ann Fennelly

by
Dana Isokawa
September/October 2017
8.16.17
In Print and Online

“A micro-memoir combines the extreme abbreviation of poetry with the narrative tension of fiction and the truth telling of creative nonfiction,” says Beth Ann Fennelly, whose new book, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (Norton, October), does just that. Varying in length from a single sentence to several pages, the essays in her book are told with wry self-awareness and compassion; each piece illuminates how the manners and minutiae of everyday life, from making small talk on an airplane to fixing an air conditioner, are underpinned by deep-rooted human needs and beliefs. The author of three poetry collections, a previous book of nonfiction, and a novel she coauthored with her husband, Tom Franklin, Fennelly has published micro-memoirs from her new book in the journals below, among many others.

 

When Fennelly began looking into publishing her micro-memoirs, it’s no surprise that the first place she submitted to was Brevity, the gold standard for short nonfiction. The online journal, which specializes in essays of 750 words or less (along with a handful of craft essays and book reviews), published two pieces from Heating & Cooling in its January 2016 and 2017 issues. Established twenty years ago by the “indomitable Dinty Moore,” as Fennelly says, Brevity is based in Athens, Ohio, and is published three times a year. “I was intrigued by what might be possible in whittling true stories down to such a small size,” says Moore about starting the journal. Essay submissions open via Submittable this month, and queries for craft essays and book reviews are accepted year-round via e-mail.
 

Meanwhile, Arkansas International, which featured three of Fennelly’s micro-memoirs in its inaugural issue, is just getting started; its second issue was released earlier this year. Fennelly admits a soft spot for the biannual print magazine: It’s run by the MFA program at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where she got her MFA and met her husband. The program is one of the few in the country to offer a translation track and has an international focus, which is reflected in the journal. “I love to be at a party where other languages are being spoken,” says Fennelly. “Very cool to rub shoulders with a master of Japanese haikus of the Meiji period or a French comic book writer.” Submissions in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and translation open via Submittable this month; this fall the journal will also launch an annual $1,000 prize for a short story.

 

“I tend to appreciate journals that pay,” says Fennelly. “I think it shows a kind of respect…. I often donate it right back to the mag, so I’m obviously not in it for the dough—no writers are.” This belief seems to be shared by Grist, which published Fennelly’s “Nine Months in Madison” in its current issue. Established in 2007 and housed in the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, the annual print journal started paying writers two years ago. “Even with a small amount, we think paying our writers is a huge step in recognizing the work they put into their writing,” says editor Jeremy Michael Reed. Grist publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and craft essays, and accepts submissions in all genres until September 15 via Submittable.

 

Fennelly published her first pieces in Blackbird in 2004 and has been publishing work in the biannual online journal ever since, including “Safety Scissors”—a micro-memoir about her older sister that swerves from the trivial to the heartbreaking in a few hundred words—and “What I Learned in Grad School,” a spot-on snapshot of jealousy among writers, in the Fall 2016 issue. Fennelly cites audio recordings of contributing writers reading their work and the editors’ willingness to publish longer sequences as two of the journal’s many draws. Based at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Blackbird publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and plays. Postal and online submissions in all genres open on November 15.
 

Fennelly advises writers who are submitting flash nonfiction or micro-memoir to consider packaging the pieces in a group to help readers latch on to the form. When she submitted five micro-memoirs to the Missouri Review, the journal ended up publishing an eight-page feature of Fennelly’s work, along with notes about the form and original artwork, in its Fall 2016 issue. Located at the University of Missouri in Columbia, the quarterly often publishes such portfolios by a single writer, which, along with “a history of excellent editing,” is part of what Fennelly says makes the Missouri Review special. The editors publish poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and release a print and digital issue that includes an audio version. The journal, which launched a new website this fall, is open for submissions in all genres year-round online and via postal mail.    

 

Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Literary MagNet: Deb Olin Unferth

Literary MagNet: Yuka Igarashi

by
Dana Isokawa
July/August 2017
6.14.17
In Print and Online

In August, Catapult will publish PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2017, featuring twelve debut stories that won PEN America’s inaugural Robert J. Dau Short Story Prizes for Emerging Writers. Judged this year by Kelly Link, Marie-Helene Bertino, and Nina McConigley, the $2,000 prizes are given annually for debut stories published in literary magazines in the previous year. The anthology, which prefaces each story with a note from the editor of the journal that originally published it, shows how literary magazines are often a proving ground for new voices. “A literary magazine puts a writer in conversation with other writers and, depending on the magazine, with a community, with a lineage or tradition,” says Catapult’s Yuka Igarashi, who edited the book. Below are five of the journals included in the anthology.

“Writers need to decide for themselves who they are in conversation with, what their genealogy is,” says Igarashi, “but there’s always a new and exciting energy when an editor or some other outside curatorial force says, you and you are interesting to think about and read together.” This curatorial force is on display in Epiphany, a biannual print journal based in New York City that prides itself on publishing established writers alongside emerging writers, such as Ruth Serven, whose story “A Message” appears in the anthology. Serven’s story first appeared in the Fall/Winter 2016 issue of the journal, which also showcased work by poet Patricia Smith and fiction writer Lydia Davis. Epiphany publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction; submissions are open via Submittable until August 1.

The editors of the Summerset Review don’t seek out debut fiction, but they do end up publishing first stories by two to three fiction writers each year, says editor Joseph Levens. Established in 2002, the journal, which is published quarterly online and occasionally in print, is based in Smithtown, New York, and publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. “We’re suckers for engaging first-person narratives, and especially those that make us empathize with the protagonist and root for the underdog,” says Levens in his introduction to Jim Cole’s “The Asphodel Meadow,” which first appeared in the Fall 2016 issue of the Summerset Review. Submissions are open year-round in all genres via e-mail or postal mail.  

“We read about 1,500 unsolicited short stories each year, always with an eye for work by new writers,” say publisher Vern Miller and guest fiction editor Rachel Swearingen of Fifth Wednesday Journal. Miller and Swearingen published Angela Ajayi’s “Galina,” about a daughter visiting her mother in Ukraine after spending a decade in Nigeria, in the Fall 2016 issue. Based in Lisle, Illinois, the print journal is published twice a year along with a separate online edition. The editors devoted the forthcoming Fall issue to work by immigrants and children of immigrants from Middle Eastern and North African countries. Submissions in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction for the Spring 2018 issue of Fifth Wednesday Journal open on August 15.  

San Francisco–based journal Hyphen published Laura Chow Reeve’s debut story, “1,000-Year-Old Ghosts,” in June 2016. The magazine, which originally came out in print two to three times a year, is now exclusively online, publishing poetry and fiction each month. Launched in 2003, Hyphen—which also publishes news, criticism, and interviews—is devoted to conveying the “enormous richness, contradiction, and vitality that defines the Asian American experience.” Editor Karissa Chen says about Reeve’s story: “It exemplifies what we’re looking for when we select fiction—lyrical writing, inventiveness of plot, a point of view touched by the Asian American experience, and, most importantly, a story infused with deep empathy and heart.” Submissions in poetry and fiction are open year-round via Submittable.

Katherine Magyarody’s “Goldhawk,” a story about a female immigrant working in the office of an IT company, stood out to the editors of the Malahat Review because of its subtle depiction of the modern workplace’s “sublimated misogyny and xenophobia,” says editor John Barton. Housed at the University of Victoria in Canada, the quarterly print magazine publishes poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and translations by  mostly Canadian writers (though the journal is open to work from writers from any country). Established in 1967, the journal also administers several contests each year, including the Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize—the award, given for an essay, comes with $1,000 Canadian (approximately $730)—which is open until August 1. General submissions in all genres are open year-round via Submittable.


Editor's Note: After this article went to print, the submission deadline for Epiphany was extended from July 1 to August 1. The article has been adjusted to reflect this change.
 

Literary MagNet: Deb Olin Unferth

Literary MagNet: Aaron Gilbreath

by
Dana Isokawa
January/February 2017
12.14.16
In Print and Online

Aaron GilbreathWhen I find journals that run essays containing bad behavior, deep reflection, and curse words, I send to them,” says Aaron Gilbreath, who published nearly every essay in his debut collection, Everything We Don’t Know (Curbside Splendor, November 2016) in literary magazines. This was no small feat—he submitted each essay anywhere between six and sixty-two times. “My essays aren’t really formally inventive or pushing the genre’s limits, so I go for journals that welcome voice-driven first-person nonfiction that explores universal themes through unusual narrative frames,” he says. “The essays in my book feature road trips, pop culture, drugs, music, and screwing up, and they incorporate research and reporting.” Below are five journals that published essays by Gilbreath.

Bayou Magazine“Lit mags feel like old-school garage bands to me. When they aren’t tethered to commerce or some sales team’s expectations, they can focus on delivering highly charged, less commercial creations to a dedicated audience,” says Gilbreath, who seems to have found this in the New Orleans–based print biannual Bayou (bayoumagazine.org). Despite its modest circulation of less than five hundred, the journal produces “physical issues as beautiful as its contents,” according to Gilbreath, and publishes many emerging writers in each issue. Gilbreath’s “My Manhattan Minute” won Bayou’s essay contest in 2008 under a different name; the journal now runs a poetry and fiction contest each fall. General submissions of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction are open until May 1 via Submittable and postal mail.

 

 

Cincinnati Review

The opening essay of Gilbreath’s collection, “Dreams of the Atomic Era,” was first published in the print biannual Cincinnati Review (cincinnatireview.com). Housed at the University of Cincinnati, the journal publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and translation, and was founded in 2003 by Nicola Mason, James Cummins, and one of Gilbreath’s favorite fiction writers, Brock Clarke. Gilbreath discovered the journal after seeing it in the acknowledgments pages of story collections he admired, as well as in Best American Essays (which in 2011 named Gilbreath’s Cincinnati Review piece a notable essay). Submissions are open in all genres until March 15 via the journal’s online submission manager; senior associate editor Matt O’Keefe says the editorial staff would like to see more submissions of hybrid forms.

Louisville ReviewThe closing essay of Gilbreath’s collection, “(Be)Coming Clean,” first appeared in the Louisville Review (louisvillereview.org) in a shorter form. Gilbreath admits he was not always open to having this essay published—the piece is about getting on methadone maintenance for his brief heroin problem—but he is grateful now that it was. “I want to talk about this part of my young life,” he says, “and the Louisville Review helped me start that conversation.”The biannual print journal, which recently celebrated its fortieth anniversary, is based out of Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky, and publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and drama. The editors pride themselves on not only publishing established writers like poet Stephen Dunn and fiction writer Ursula Hegi, but also discovering those who are just starting out; the journal published Louise Erdrich when she was still a student at Johns Hopkins. Submissions are open year-round online and via postal mail.

The Smart Set“When I wrote an essay about sleeping in my car and stealing hotel breakfasts in order to see bands play on a limited budget, and questioning my parental potential,” says Gilbreath, “the Smart Set immediately came to mind.” The Smart Set (thesmartset.com) is an online magazine housed at Drexel University in Philadelphia that posts new content three times a week. Taking its name from the journal H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan edited in the early 1900s, the magazine covers culture and ideas, arts and science, and global and national affairs. Gilbreath was drawn to the magazine for its track record of publishing compelling travel writing—many of its pieces appear in the Best American Travel Writing series—as well as personal and critical essays, reporting, memoir, and photography. Submissions are open year-round via e-mail; the magazine does not publish fiction or poetry.

Hotel AmerikaAccording to its editors, the print annual Hotel Amerika (hotelamerika.net) is “an eclectic journal that attracts an equally eclectic audience.” Gilbreath had unsuccessfully submitted to the magazine for years, but when he wrote a “very voicey, tumbling, digressive-type exploration of the word rad,” he decided to try again. The journal accepted and published “\’ra-di-kl\” in its Spring 2012 issue. Established in 2002 and based in Chicago, Hotel Amerika accepts submissions in all “genres of creative writing, generously defined” via Submittable until May 1. “I still can’t believe they wanted my essay,” says Gilbreath. “Sorry to say it, but: It was pretty rad.” 

 

Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Literary MagNet: Alex Dimitrov

by
Dana Isokawa
May/June 2017
4.12.17
In Print and Online

In his second poetry collection, Together and by Ourselves, published in April by Copper Canyon Press, Alex Dimitrov questions the myths and realities of loneliness and intimacy. The poems are tonally diverse—aphoristic in one moment, wondering in another, and emotionally stark in the next. When it came to publishing these poems, Dimitrov gravitated toward online journals where work is easily shared and accessible. “Someone trying to find a recipe, for example, may stumble upon your poem in someone else’s feed, and that’s an unlikely connection suddenly made possible,” he says. “I really care about poetry reaching as many people as possible.” In addition to the five journals below, Dimitrov has published his poems in Poetry, Boston Review, New England Review, Kenyon Review, and BOMB, among others.

 

A journal with a lively online presence, Cosmonauts Avenue published Dimitrov’s poem “Famous and Nowhere” in March 2015. Editors Ann Ward and Bükem Reitmayer, who have run the independent online monthly since 2014, publish poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, as well as a playful mini-interview series, Tiny Spills, in which writers dish on things like “your writer crush,” “tabs you have open right now,” and “your guilty literary pleasure.” The editors are eager to publish more “voice-driven and personal nonfiction” and are drawn to poetry, like Dimitrov’s, that “can house both intimacy and anonymity,” says Ward. The journal is open for submissions in all genres year-round via Submittable.

When he was in college, Dimitrov used to dream about publishing in the American Poetry Review. “It’s so classic,” he says, “a staple, really.” Established in 1972 and based in Philadelphia, the no-frills bimonthly newsprint tabloid has published consistently top-notch poetry, essays, interviews, and criticism by more than three thousand writers. The review published two poems from Dimitrov’s new collection, “Strangers and Friends” and “In the New Century I Gave You My Name,” and awarded him its annual Stanley Kunitz prize—$1,000 and publication to a poet under forty for a single poem—in 2011. “An Alex poem doesn’t sound like anyone else to me,” says editor Elizabeth Scanlon. “His syntax is so spare; it feels very intimate.” General submissions are open year-round; submissions for the Kunitz Prize close May 15.

Also based in Philadelphia, the Adroit Journal is released five times a year and publishes poetry, fiction, art, and interviews. Editor Peter LaBerge—who started the online magazine in 2010 when he was only a sophomore in high school—is unafraid of pushing the envelope and published Dimitrov’s poem “Cocaine” in the journal’s April 2015 issue. “I didn’t think many places would publish it because of the title,” Dimitrov says, but with LaBerge’s support the poem went on to win a Pushcart Prize. The journal’s contributor pool tends toward the younger side, as LaBerge is committed to connecting secondary and undergraduate student writers with the literary world; the journal administers contests for student writers and runs a free online workshop program in which high school students work on their writing with established writers for a summer. Submissions for the journal will open later this month via Submittable.

Established in 2010 by Kelly Forsythe—who also serves as Copper Canyon’s director of publicity—Phantomis the online poetry quarterly of Phantom Books, which also produces hand-sewn chapbooks and hosts a reading series in Brooklyn, New York. The editors are scattered around the United States, and as Forsythe said in a 2013 interview with the Poetry Society of America, their geographical diversity helps them to “consider—and strongly value—diversity of poetic tone, style, and voice.” Phantom is published four times a year and in 2015 devoted an issue to emerging poets. Dimitrov published his poem “Los Angeles, NY”—inspired by John Donne, religion, and the relationship between the body and the mind—in the Spring 2014 issue. The journal will reopen for submissions this summer.

Edited by graduate students at Ohio State University in Columbus, the Journal is published twice annually in print and twice annually online. Established in 1973, the magazine publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and administers an annual poetry book prize in the fall and a prose book prize in the winter. The Journal published Dimitrov’s “People” in the Fall 2016 issue, a poem that editors Daniel O’Brien and Jake Bauer were immediately taken with because of how it “reveals a private familiarity, and simultaneously welcomes the reader, but holds us at a bit of a distance.” Poetry and nonfiction submissions are open year-round; fiction submissions will reopen on August 15.         

 

Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths

 

Literary MagNet: Alex Dimitrov

by
Dana Isokawa
May/June 2017
4.12.17
In Print and Online

In his second poetry collection, Together and by Ourselves, published in April by Copper Canyon Press, Alex Dimitrov questions the myths and realities of loneliness and intimacy. The poems are tonally diverse—aphoristic in one moment, wondering in another, and emotionally stark in the next. When it came to publishing these poems, Dimitrov gravitated toward online journals where work is easily shared and accessible. “Someone trying to find a recipe, for example, may stumble upon your poem in someone else’s feed, and that’s an unlikely connection suddenly made possible,” he says. “I really care about poetry reaching as many people as possible.” In addition to the five journals below, Dimitrov has published his poems in Poetry, Boston Review, New England Review, Kenyon Review, and BOMB, among others.

 

A journal with a lively online presence, Cosmonauts Avenue published Dimitrov’s poem “Famous and Nowhere” in March 2015. Editors Ann Ward and Bükem Reitmayer, who have run the independent online monthly since 2014, publish poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, as well as a playful mini-interview series, Tiny Spills, in which writers dish on things like “your writer crush,” “tabs you have open right now,” and “your guilty literary pleasure.” The editors are eager to publish more “voice-driven and personal nonfiction” and are drawn to poetry, like Dimitrov’s, that “can house both intimacy and anonymity,” says Ward. The journal is open for submissions in all genres year-round via Submittable.

When he was in college, Dimitrov used to dream about publishing in the American Poetry Review. “It’s so classic,” he says, “a staple, really.” Established in 1972 and based in Philadelphia, the no-frills bimonthly newsprint tabloid has published consistently top-notch poetry, essays, interviews, and criticism by more than three thousand writers. The review published two poems from Dimitrov’s new collection, “Strangers and Friends” and “In the New Century I Gave You My Name,” and awarded him its annual Stanley Kunitz prize—$1,000 and publication to a poet under forty for a single poem—in 2011. “An Alex poem doesn’t sound like anyone else to me,” says editor Elizabeth Scanlon. “His syntax is so spare; it feels very intimate.” General submissions are open year-round; submissions for the Kunitz Prize close May 15.

Also based in Philadelphia, the Adroit Journal is released five times a year and publishes poetry, fiction, art, and interviews. Editor Peter LaBerge—who started the online magazine in 2010 when he was only a sophomore in high school—is unafraid of pushing the envelope and published Dimitrov’s poem “Cocaine” in the journal’s April 2015 issue. “I didn’t think many places would publish it because of the title,” Dimitrov says, but with LaBerge’s support the poem went on to win a Pushcart Prize. The journal’s contributor pool tends toward the younger side, as LaBerge is committed to connecting secondary and undergraduate student writers with the literary world; the journal administers contests for student writers and runs a free online workshop program in which high school students work on their writing with established writers for a summer. Submissions for the journal will open later this month via Submittable.

Established in 2010 by Kelly Forsythe—who also serves as Copper Canyon’s director of publicity—Phantomis the online poetry quarterly of Phantom Books, which also produces hand-sewn chapbooks and hosts a reading series in Brooklyn, New York. The editors are scattered around the United States, and as Forsythe said in a 2013 interview with the Poetry Society of America, their geographical diversity helps them to “consider—and strongly value—diversity of poetic tone, style, and voice.” Phantom is published four times a year and in 2015 devoted an issue to emerging poets. Dimitrov published his poem “Los Angeles, NY”—inspired by John Donne, religion, and the relationship between the body and the mind—in the Spring 2014 issue. The journal will reopen for submissions this summer.

Edited by graduate students at Ohio State University in Columbus, the Journal is published twice annually in print and twice annually online. Established in 1973, the magazine publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and administers an annual poetry book prize in the fall and a prose book prize in the winter. The Journal published Dimitrov’s “People” in the Fall 2016 issue, a poem that editors Daniel O’Brien and Jake Bauer were immediately taken with because of how it “reveals a private familiarity, and simultaneously welcomes the reader, but holds us at a bit of a distance.” Poetry and nonfiction submissions are open year-round; fiction submissions will reopen on August 15.         

 

Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths

 

Literary MagNet: Yuka Igarashi

by
Dana Isokawa
July/August 2017
6.14.17
In Print and Online

In August, Catapult will publish PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2017, featuring twelve debut stories that won PEN America’s inaugural Robert J. Dau Short Story Prizes for Emerging Writers. Judged this year by Kelly Link, Marie-Helene Bertino, and Nina McConigley, the $2,000 prizes are given annually for debut stories published in literary magazines in the previous year. The anthology, which prefaces each story with a note from the editor of the journal that originally published it, shows how literary magazines are often a proving ground for new voices. “A literary magazine puts a writer in conversation with other writers and, depending on the magazine, with a community, with a lineage or tradition,” says Catapult’s Yuka Igarashi, who edited the book. Below are five of the journals included in the anthology.

“Writers need to decide for themselves who they are in conversation with, what their genealogy is,” says Igarashi, “but there’s always a new and exciting energy when an editor or some other outside curatorial force says, you and you are interesting to think about and read together.” This curatorial force is on display in Epiphany, a biannual print journal based in New York City that prides itself on publishing established writers alongside emerging writers, such as Ruth Serven, whose story “A Message” appears in the anthology. Serven’s story first appeared in the Fall/Winter 2016 issue of the journal, which also showcased work by poet Patricia Smith and fiction writer Lydia Davis. Epiphany publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction; submissions are open via Submittable until August 1.

The editors of the Summerset Review don’t seek out debut fiction, but they do end up publishing first stories by two to three fiction writers each year, says editor Joseph Levens. Established in 2002, the journal, which is published quarterly online and occasionally in print, is based in Smithtown, New York, and publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. “We’re suckers for engaging first-person narratives, and especially those that make us empathize with the protagonist and root for the underdog,” says Levens in his introduction to Jim Cole’s “The Asphodel Meadow,” which first appeared in the Fall 2016 issue of the Summerset Review. Submissions are open year-round in all genres via e-mail or postal mail.  

“We read about 1,500 unsolicited short stories each year, always with an eye for work by new writers,” say publisher Vern Miller and guest fiction editor Rachel Swearingen of Fifth Wednesday Journal. Miller and Swearingen published Angela Ajayi’s “Galina,” about a daughter visiting her mother in Ukraine after spending a decade in Nigeria, in the Fall 2016 issue. Based in Lisle, Illinois, the print journal is published twice a year along with a separate online edition. The editors devoted the forthcoming Fall issue to work by immigrants and children of immigrants from Middle Eastern and North African countries. Submissions in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction for the Spring 2018 issue of Fifth Wednesday Journal open on August 15.  

San Francisco–based journal Hyphen published Laura Chow Reeve’s debut story, “1,000-Year-Old Ghosts,” in June 2016. The magazine, which originally came out in print two to three times a year, is now exclusively online, publishing poetry and fiction each month. Launched in 2003, Hyphen—which also publishes news, criticism, and interviews—is devoted to conveying the “enormous richness, contradiction, and vitality that defines the Asian American experience.” Editor Karissa Chen says about Reeve’s story: “It exemplifies what we’re looking for when we select fiction—lyrical writing, inventiveness of plot, a point of view touched by the Asian American experience, and, most importantly, a story infused with deep empathy and heart.” Submissions in poetry and fiction are open year-round via Submittable.

Katherine Magyarody’s “Goldhawk,” a story about a female immigrant working in the office of an IT company, stood out to the editors of the Malahat Review because of its subtle depiction of the modern workplace’s “sublimated misogyny and xenophobia,” says editor John Barton. Housed at the University of Victoria in Canada, the quarterly print magazine publishes poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and translations by  mostly Canadian writers (though the journal is open to work from writers from any country). Established in 1967, the journal also administers several contests each year, including the Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize—the award, given for an essay, comes with $1,000 Canadian (approximately $730)—which is open until August 1. General submissions in all genres are open year-round via Submittable.


Editor's Note: After this article went to print, the submission deadline for Epiphany was extended from July 1 to August 1. The article has been adjusted to reflect this change.
 

Literary MagNet: Deb Olin Unferth
Literary MagNet: Aaron Gilbreath
Literary MagNet: Alex Dimitrov

Literary MagNet: Beth Ann Fennelly

by
Dana Isokawa
September/October 2017
8.16.17
In Print and Online

“A micro-memoir combines the extreme abbreviation of poetry with the narrative tension of fiction and the truth telling of creative nonfiction,” says Beth Ann Fennelly, whose new book, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (Norton, October), does just that. Varying in length from a single sentence to several pages, the essays in her book are told with wry self-awareness and compassion; each piece illuminates how the manners and minutiae of everyday life, from making small talk on an airplane to fixing an air conditioner, are underpinned by deep-rooted human needs and beliefs. The author of three poetry collections, a previous book of nonfiction, and a novel she coauthored with her husband, Tom Franklin, Fennelly has published micro-memoirs from her new book in the journals below, among many others.

 

When Fennelly began looking into publishing her micro-memoirs, it’s no surprise that the first place she submitted to was Brevity, the gold standard for short nonfiction. The online journal, which specializes in essays of 750 words or less (along with a handful of craft essays and book reviews), published two pieces from Heating & Cooling in its January 2016 and 2017 issues. Established twenty years ago by the “indomitable Dinty Moore,” as Fennelly says, Brevity is based in Athens, Ohio, and is published three times a year. “I was intrigued by what might be possible in whittling true stories down to such a small size,” says Moore about starting the journal. Essay submissions open via Submittable this month, and queries for craft essays and book reviews are accepted year-round via e-mail.
 

Meanwhile, Arkansas International, which featured three of Fennelly’s micro-memoirs in its inaugural issue, is just getting started; its second issue was released earlier this year. Fennelly admits a soft spot for the biannual print magazine: It’s run by the MFA program at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where she got her MFA and met her husband. The program is one of the few in the country to offer a translation track and has an international focus, which is reflected in the journal. “I love to be at a party where other languages are being spoken,” says Fennelly. “Very cool to rub shoulders with a master of Japanese haikus of the Meiji period or a French comic book writer.” Submissions in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and translation open via Submittable this month; this fall the journal will also launch an annual $1,000 prize for a short story.

 

“I tend to appreciate journals that pay,” says Fennelly. “I think it shows a kind of respect…. I often donate it right back to the mag, so I’m obviously not in it for the dough—no writers are.” This belief seems to be shared by Grist, which published Fennelly’s “Nine Months in Madison” in its current issue. Established in 2007 and housed in the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, the annual print journal started paying writers two years ago. “Even with a small amount, we think paying our writers is a huge step in recognizing the work they put into their writing,” says editor Jeremy Michael Reed. Grist publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and craft essays, and accepts submissions in all genres until September 15 via Submittable.

 

Fennelly published her first pieces in Blackbird in 2004 and has been publishing work in the biannual online journal ever since, including “Safety Scissors”—a micro-memoir about her older sister that swerves from the trivial to the heartbreaking in a few hundred words—and “What I Learned in Grad School,” a spot-on snapshot of jealousy among writers, in the Fall 2016 issue. Fennelly cites audio recordings of contributing writers reading their work and the editors’ willingness to publish longer sequences as two of the journal’s many draws. Based at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Blackbird publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and plays. Postal and online submissions in all genres open on November 15.
 

Fennelly advises writers who are submitting flash nonfiction or micro-memoir to consider packaging the pieces in a group to help readers latch on to the form. When she submitted five micro-memoirs to the Missouri Review, the journal ended up publishing an eight-page feature of Fennelly’s work, along with notes about the form and original artwork, in its Fall 2016 issue. Located at the University of Missouri in Columbia, the quarterly often publishes such portfolios by a single writer, which, along with “a history of excellent editing,” is part of what Fennelly says makes the Missouri Review special. The editors publish poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and release a print and digital issue that includes an audio version. The journal, which launched a new website this fall, is open for submissions in all genres year-round online and via postal mail.    

 

Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Literary MagNet: Deb Olin Unferth
Literary MagNet: Yuka Igarashi
Literary MagNet: Alex Dimitrov

Literary MagNet: Kiki Petrosino

by
Dana Isokawa
November/December 2017
10.11.17
In Print and Online

In her third poetry collection, Witch Wife—forthcoming from Sarabande Books in December—Kiki Petrosino reckons with the decision of whether or not to have a child. It’s a question she says has no yes-or-no answer: “This is one terrain I can’t navigate with any map,” she says. “It’s personal, it’s emotional.” The book is formally inventive, with prose poems and free-verse lyrics alongside villanelles and other traditional forms. With such a diverse set of poems, Petrosino says the editors who solicit her work also tend to promote an eclectic variety of styles in their journals. In addition to the five publications below, Petrosino has been published in jubilat,Tupelo Quarterly, and Poetry, among others.

With their incantatory language and sometimes dark, fantastical bent, many of Petrosino’s poems are right at home in the online journal Grimoire, named after a book of magical spells and invocations. Established in 2016 in Chicago, Grimoire publishes two biannual issues of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and artwork—plus spells, séances and fan letters to dead authors, and descriptions of dreams. “Despite Grimoire’s interest in dark subject matter, there is something buoyant, even festive, about the journal’s take on the macabre,” says Petrosino. “Being invited to contribute my poems was like being asked to attend a secret party in a glimmering, underground cavern.” Submissions in all genres are open year-round via e-mail; the editors are interested in work that echoes everything from Shirley Jackson and Miss Havisham to doomsday cults and “okay, maybe a really good vampire.”

While Grimoire presides over the magical, Forklift, Ohio bills itself as a journal of “poetry, cooking, and light industrial safety.” Based in Cincinnati and published one to two times a year, the publication is one of contemporary poetry’s treasures, says Petrosino, as well as one of its best-kept secrets. Editors Matt Hart and Eric Appleby have made every issue by hand since starting the magazine in 1994; the latest issue was constructed out of the blueprints of a slaughterhouse, and earlier editions have been made of materials such as carpet samples and wine corks. Forklift, Ohio publishes mostly poetry, as well as flash fiction, recipes, safety tips, and creative nonfiction related to topics like home economics, industry, and agriculture. The editors vow to “take poetry quite seriously, if little or nothing else” and keep the journal ad-free. Queries are accepted via e-mail during the month of May.

Petrosino says that for a long time she was too shy to submit to Crazyhorse. “This is a journal with a half century of magnificent literary history behind it,” she says—and she’s right. Established by poet Tom McGrath in 1960, the biannual print journal has published writers such as Raymond Carver, John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, Ha Jin, and John Updike. Housed at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, Crazyhorse publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. “The poetry contributions are always robust and formally diverse,” says Petrosino, “so my two strange little lyrics about the mysteries of marriage found a ready home there.” The magazine is open for submissions each year from September through May, except during January, when the editors accept only entries for their annual writing contest.

Edited by British poets Sarah Howe, Vidyan Ravinthiran, and Dai George, Prac Crit is an online journal whose tagline is “poetry up close.” Each issue of the triannual publication features only a handful of poems, but these are juxtaposed with a critic’s close analysis of the poem and an interview with the poet. “In a literary culture too reliant on vague statements of praise or blame,” write the editors, “we believe there’s a renewed need for readerly attention grounded in the specifics of actual poems.” Each issue also features “Deep Note,” in which a poet annotates a poem. Petrosino wrote one for her villanelle “Scarlet,” which enabled her to “curate a kind of guided tour of the piece” and share the experiences in her life—baton twirling, contracting scarlet fever, playing Super Mario Brothers—that informed the poem. The editors do not accept poetry submissions, but they do accept proposals for essays or interviews on contemporary poetry via e-mail year-round.

Focused on the notion of place, the biannual print journal Spoon River Poetry Review is located at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois. Established in 1976, the review publishes poetry and poetry in translation, as well as interviews with and chapbook-length portfolios of work by poets with a connection to Illinois. The journal allows for “traditional understandings of home and region to assume new meanings in our increasingly globalized world,” says Petrosino. She published her poem “Young,” a line-by-line reenvisioning of Anne Sexton’s poem of the same name, in the Summer 2015 issue. The poem explores the “potentially magic qualities of a suburban adolescence,” Petrosino says. “Of course, adolescence itself is a kind of place, one we pass through, briefly, on our way to everything else.” Spoon River Poetry Review is open for submissions via the online submission manager or by postal mail until February 15, 2018.   

 

Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Literary MagNet: Beth Ann Fennelly
Literary MagNet: Yuka Igarashi

Literary MagNet: Beth Ann Fennelly

by
Dana Isokawa
September/October 2017
8.16.17
In Print and Online

“A micro-memoir combines the extreme abbreviation of poetry with the narrative tension of fiction and the truth telling of creative nonfiction,” says Beth Ann Fennelly, whose new book, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (Norton, October), does just that. Varying in length from a single sentence to several pages, the essays in her book are told with wry self-awareness and compassion; each piece illuminates how the manners and minutiae of everyday life, from making small talk on an airplane to fixing an air conditioner, are underpinned by deep-rooted human needs and beliefs. The author of three poetry collections, a previous book of nonfiction, and a novel she coauthored with her husband, Tom Franklin, Fennelly has published micro-memoirs from her new book in the journals below, among many others.

 

When Fennelly began looking into publishing her micro-memoirs, it’s no surprise that the first place she submitted to was Brevity, the gold standard for short nonfiction. The online journal, which specializes in essays of 750 words or less (along with a handful of craft essays and book reviews), published two pieces from Heating & Cooling in its January 2016 and 2017 issues. Established twenty years ago by the “indomitable Dinty Moore,” as Fennelly says, Brevity is based in Athens, Ohio, and is published three times a year. “I was intrigued by what might be possible in whittling true stories down to such a small size,” says Moore about starting the journal. Essay submissions open via Submittable this month, and queries for craft essays and book reviews are accepted year-round via e-mail.
 

Meanwhile, Arkansas International, which featured three of Fennelly’s micro-memoirs in its inaugural issue, is just getting started; its second issue was released earlier this year. Fennelly admits a soft spot for the biannual print magazine: It’s run by the MFA program at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where she got her MFA and met her husband. The program is one of the few in the country to offer a translation track and has an international focus, which is reflected in the journal. “I love to be at a party where other languages are being spoken,” says Fennelly. “Very cool to rub shoulders with a master of Japanese haikus of the Meiji period or a French comic book writer.” Submissions in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and translation open via Submittable this month; this fall the journal will also launch an annual $1,000 prize for a short story.

 

“I tend to appreciate journals that pay,” says Fennelly. “I think it shows a kind of respect…. I often donate it right back to the mag, so I’m obviously not in it for the dough—no writers are.” This belief seems to be shared by Grist, which published Fennelly’s “Nine Months in Madison” in its current issue. Established in 2007 and housed in the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, the annual print journal started paying writers two years ago. “Even with a small amount, we think paying our writers is a huge step in recognizing the work they put into their writing,” says editor Jeremy Michael Reed. Grist publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and craft essays, and accepts submissions in all genres until September 15 via Submittable.

 

Fennelly published her first pieces in Blackbird in 2004 and has been publishing work in the biannual online journal ever since, including “Safety Scissors”—a micro-memoir about her older sister that swerves from the trivial to the heartbreaking in a few hundred words—and “What I Learned in Grad School,” a spot-on snapshot of jealousy among writers, in the Fall 2016 issue. Fennelly cites audio recordings of contributing writers reading their work and the editors’ willingness to publish longer sequences as two of the journal’s many draws. Based at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Blackbird publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and plays. Postal and online submissions in all genres open on November 15.
 

Fennelly advises writers who are submitting flash nonfiction or micro-memoir to consider packaging the pieces in a group to help readers latch on to the form. When she submitted five micro-memoirs to the Missouri Review, the journal ended up publishing an eight-page feature of Fennelly’s work, along with notes about the form and original artwork, in its Fall 2016 issue. Located at the University of Missouri in Columbia, the quarterly often publishes such portfolios by a single writer, which, along with “a history of excellent editing,” is part of what Fennelly says makes the Missouri Review special. The editors publish poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and release a print and digital issue that includes an audio version. The journal, which launched a new website this fall, is open for submissions in all genres year-round online and via postal mail.    

 

Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Literary MagNet: Deb Olin Unferth
Literary MagNet: Yuka Igarashi
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A Novel in Five Residencies

February 13, 2018, 9:00 pm
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There was a time when artists residencies were reserved for the privileged and unattached—the Truman Capotes and Flannery O’Connors of the world, those lucky few who could take off for three months at a time with no trouble at all. Increasingly, though, it seems that residencies are for the kind of artists who need them: parents who can get more done in two weeks away than a year at home, visual artists without good studio space of their own, penniless poets who sublet their apartments to residency hop.

I’m in that first category. My daughters are ten and seven, but when I began my latest novel (The Great Believers, forthcoming in June from Viking), they were six and three, the youngest’s school schedule allowing me, at best, two hours of work time that I could never settle into.

The bulk of The Great Believers was written across five residencies, from 2014 to 2017. In these two- to three-week windows, I wrote the big, important pieces, the ones I could polish or add to for months afterward. I’d have finished eventually in any case, but without these five stays, I’d still be looking at a pile of notes and a hopeful Freytag pyramid.

 

Ucross, Sheridan, Wyoming, Spring 2014

It’s my first time at Ucross, and I’m instantly in love. I’ve stepped into a Wyoming calendar, in which wildlife troops past my window with Disney-movie regularity. There are newborn lambs, for Pete’s sake. The food is so good I gain five pounds and don’t care. (I’m one of only two residents without a mile-long bike ride from the dining hall to their studio—a disadvantage in the diet department.)

I know what I want to write, but just barely. I have an idea about an old woman who was an artists’ model in Paris around World War I. When a painting comes up for auction in the 1980s, she realizes it’s of her, and has to convince people of it. I told my husband my idea right before I left. He looked at me kindly and said, “Honey, that’s the plot of Titanic.”

So I spend a lot of time staring at what was supposed to be an outline, and revising my story collection (nitpicky edits I worry I could as easily have done in ten-minute spurts at Starbucks), and feeling unmoored. I see bald eagles—and are those antelope?—and remind myself that this marinating phase is essential too, that writing isn’t all about typing.

A week into my residency, my only studio-mate has a nervous breakdown that I talk him through, and then he’s gone; I’m alone in this building, everyone else a mile away. I edit the hell out of my stories, I write a mediocre new one about a religious cult, and I take long walks past fields of bulls, but I only write one page from the new novel, a letter from this old woman to a gallery director.

Ragdale, Lake Forest, Illinois, November 2014

Ragdale is my most habitual residency, partly because it’s only fifteen minutes from home (it works, I swear; the key is pretending you’re on another planet), and partly because it’s so physically beautiful. Miles of prairie trails, a big old gorgeous haunted house.

I know by now that the model is secondary to my story; the novel belongs to that gallery director, Yale Tishman, a man whose life, in 1985 Chicago, is being walloped by the AIDS crisis. That one throwaway page I wrote at Ucross turned out to be the entire novel in microcosm. I start my research, and every night at dinner I have stories for the other artists about gay life in ‘80s Chicago. I make it sound fun, but the research is dark. I find, in an online personal account, a detail I know I’ll use in my novel’s final scene. It becomes a magnet for my writing, a dot on the horizon.

I can always work till dinner but need to socialize afterward, and this group excels at fireplace hangouts. I always feel guilty when I have fun (why aren’t I at home with my kids right now? Besides the fact that it’s the middle of the night?), but I’ve learned that I get more done at residencies where I feel social. In three weeks, I manage to write my first sixty pages—a real foundation.

Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, New York, February 2015

I’ve stayed at Yaddo before, but last time it was summer, with a crowd of thirty. This time there are twelve of us, with only some of the residency buildings open. There’s snow on the ground when I arrive, and it keeps falling. I’m in West House, where our windows are soon barred by icicles. I’ve been given the third-floor studio where Sylvia Plath wrote The Colossus, and I’m mindlessly entertained by the men whose legs appear out my window as they shovel the roof.

I’ve reached a crisis in my writing: I’m a straight woman born in 1978. Who the hell am I to tell this story about AIDS? It feels more and more like appropriation. A sweet performance artist stands in the West House kitchen with me for an hour, indulging my doubts and nodding patiently. There’s a minor character, a woman named Fiona whom I added on a whim, who has captured my attention—Yale cries on her one night at a party, and there’s something interesting there—and it occurs to me that maybe this is her story too. That if we move back and forth between Yale in 1985 and Fiona in 2015, I’m not just telling someone else’s story; I’m writing a complex, messy novel. It feels like an escape hatch, a cowardly move, but I want to give it a try.

And then, at what would have been the halfway point of my residency, my wonderful father-in-law suddenly passes away. I have to get home to Chicago so my husband can get to Connecticut. But we’re snowed in. I can’t even reach the Albany airport, let alone fly out of it. I’m stuck for three more days, separated from my grieving husband and children, unable to write, unable to do anything other than write. Instead of experimenting with the new sections I’d planned, I stick an unexpected death into the novel—the story is already full of sudden illness, sudden death, but this one hits my character hard—and it’s the one thing I can write well.

John Cheever’s Dutch translator is in residence at the same time, thrilled to be on Cheever’s old stomping grounds (Cheever worked for years as Yaddo’s handyman) and to be surrounded by an amount of snow he hasn’t seen in the Netherlands since his youth. He walks around taking pictures for his friends back home, writing notes to himself about the way the flakes catch the light so he can better translate Cheever’s descriptions. Watching him out my window, an adult child in the snow, is a gift of grace.

Ragdale (again), November 2015

It’s going like gangbusters. The Fiona-in-2015 sections don’t seem like a chicken move anymore; the passage of thirty years, the long arm of grief, now feels like the whole point. I’m not sure what to do with her at first, but I remember that cult story I wrote at Ucross, and I pilfer it; Fiona’s daughter has disappeared into a cult. I’ve put Fiona in Paris, and I decide to see if I can write her sections in real time—if she can walk around on this day, in November 2015, if I can finish her morning by the time I have lunch. I navigate the Paris streets via Google Maps.

And I’m getting good signs from the universe. One night, I’ve filled in five answers on a New York Times crossword puzzle when I see that one is “Ian”—my first novel’s main character—and right below that are the words “Esmé” and “Sharp.” Esmé Sharp is a character in this new book. Ragdale has a notorious magic to it. I can’t quite figure out how it managed to change the crossword puzzle, but believe me: It did.

On November 13, as I’m writing about Paris on November 13, Paris is hit with a series of terrorist attacks. I’ve spent the day wandering the city in my mind, and mixed with my horror and grief is a selfish narrative crisis: The year and month are woven deep into the story. I don’t want to change the date. And I can’t use this. I have one more week, but I’ve lost my steam. I turn back and edit.

Ragdale (once more), January 2017  

The book is under contract now, due in June. I’d love to be revising, but I’m still writing; the election hasn’t helped my concentration. We bond well as a group, my fellow residents and I, and together we block out all the inauguration coverage; together we make posters (the artists’ are prettier than the writers’) and take the train into Chicago for the Women’s March. I can’t afford to take time off, but I can’t sit around, either. It’s a gorgeous day, and in the midst of 250,000 people, our group runs into Ragdale’s beloved chef. Ragdale magic, obviously.

The day is far from a writing wash: During the march I realize that I should leave the Paris attacks in my book—that my story is, anyway, about the brutal intrusions of the world. And I realize, as we’re walking and chanting, that my character needs to make it to the historic ACT UP rally in Chicago in 1991, during which the AIDS coalition protested the American Medical Association and the insurance companies—that he needs to march through the streets shouting for his life, hopeless but galvanized.  

On my last night at Ragdale, I hear my friend Todd brushing his teeth through the wall our bathrooms share—something we’ve joked about, one of the stranger realities of communal life—and I decide to stick a similar detail into my novel. It’s not as if my time at these residencies hasn’t seeped into the book enough, but I want this moment in there as a talisman. It’s one last, small reminder (if only to myself) of the connections that get us through our art, and through our lives. It’s been obvious to me for a while that my book is about community. I never want to forget how much it is also a product of community, of the generous people and places that took me in and gave my story its soul.

 

Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the novels The Great Believers (forthcoming in June), The Borrower, and The Hundred-Year House, and the collection Music for Wartime—four stories from which appeared in The Best American Short Stories. The recipient of a 2014 NEA Fellowship, Rebecca has taught at the Tin House Writers' Conference and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is currently on the faculty of the MFA programs at Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University. She is the artistic director of StoryStudio Chicago. Her website is www.rebeccamakkai.com.

Rebecca Makkai
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The Written Image: The Little Book of Feminist Saints

February 13, 2018, 9:00 pm
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Modeled after a Catholic saint-a-day book, The Little Book of Feminist Saints draws together the stories of a hundred women—scientists, activists, artists, engineers, civil servants, entertainers, and others—who have changed the world. “I would argue that all the women in this book have done something with their lives that makes them worthy idols,” writes author Julia Pierpont in the book’s introduction. “So let this be the little, secular book of feminist saints.” 

Illustrated by Manjit Thapp and released this month by Random House—which published Pierpont’s debut novel, Among the Ten Thousand Things, in 2015—The Little Book of Feminist Saints offers brief descriptions of women throughout history, from Hypatia of Alexandria, a mathematician and philosopher living in the fourth century, to poet Forugh Farrokhzad (above left), who spoke out against the repression of women in Iran in the 1950s and 1960s, to Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 at age seventeen. Each “saint” is also assigned a Feast Day and title: Valentine’s Day is the Feast Day of ancient Greek poet Sappho (above right), dubbed the “Matron Saint of Lovers”; June 14 is the Feast Day for the Mirabal sisters, the “Matron Saints of Rebels,” who led the Fourteenth of June Movement against the Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1960; and April 15 is the Feast Day for the Brontë sisters, the “Matron Saints of Dreamers,” since it is also the birthday of their mother, Maria Branwell. While the women vary widely in their pursuits and beliefs, they seem to share a determination, as Wilma Mankiller, the book’s “Matron Saint of Leadership,” once said, to “take risks [and] stand up for the things they believe in.”

Staff

The Written Image: The Poets Series

by
Staff
January/February 2018
12.13.17
In Print and Online

Poets have long drawn inspiration from visual art, from John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” to John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” to Robin Coste Lewis’s “Voyage of the Sable Venus.” Canadian painter and poet Melanie Janisse-Barlow is turning the tables on this tradition with her Poets Series project (www.poets-series-project.com), a collection of painted portraits of contemporary poets. Inspired by Ann Mikolowski, who painted portraits of poets in Detroit, Janisse-Barlow started her project three years ago and has since painted nearly eighty poets from North America, including Hoa Nguyen and Christian Bok (both pictured below), as well as Matthew Rohrer, Jordan Abel, and Claudia Rankine. Each poet selects an image to be painted—a traditional headshot or a broader interpretation of a portrait; for example, poet Anna Vitale sent a photo of the school she attended in Detroit—and Janisse-Barlow then reads some of the poet’s work before painting the portrait. While she initially chose her subjects, Janisse-Barlow now asks each poet she paints to choose the next poet for the series. The result is a map of portraits that trace a network of poetic influence and friendship. “I wanted the series to grow itself and expand and form along its own trajectories,” says Janisse-Barlow. “I have nothing but respect for the beautiful and challenging work of making poetry. Who better to celebrate than those who dedicate themselves to the reachings of language and ideas?”

The Written Image: David Sedaris Diaries

by
Staff
November/December 2017
10.11.17
In Print and Online

From his first “diary” (a Kodak film box stuffed full of ephemera from his travels through the U.S. Pacific Northwest, collected in 1977) to more recent notebooks of art, writings, mementos, and postcards, writer and humorist David Sedaris has kept 153 diaries in the past forty years. In May Little, Brown published Theft by Finding, a selection of text from the diaries, and in October followed it up with David Sedaris Diaries: A Visual Compendium. Edited and photographed by artist Jeffrey Jenkins, a childhood friend of Sedaris’s from their days in a Boy Scout troop, the book includes photos and cutout images from Sedaris’s layered and collage-like diaries.

The collection shows Sedaris’s skill as an artist; Jenkins says he was surprised by the “visual, interactive nature of the diaries themselves—the fact that every time you turn a page or element in the diary, it may reveal and reframe all of the pages below it into something new and different.” Jenkins also notes how thorough and disciplined Sedaris is in keeping a diary; in his introduction to the book, Sedaris admits it’s an unshakable habit and cops to obsessively going through the trash while out on walks so he can look for ephemera. The visual diaries embody the same talent Sedaris displays in his writing: the ability to transform what others might discard as trivial—whether a stray comment overheard on the subway or a luggage tag pulled from the garbage—into something humorous or arresting. And the diaries offer more than just insight into Sedaris’s work—they serve as proof that writing, or visual art, or even just keeping a diary, revolves around paying attention and finding that anything, no matter how small, is fair game for inspiration.

 

Photo by David Hamsley.

The Written Image: Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere

by
Staff
September/October 2017
8.16.17
In Print and Online

Neil Gaiman’s first solo novel, Neverwhere, takes place in a shadowy underground world filled with a fantastical set of characters: an elfin young woman with a magical power to open doors, an imperious marquis inspired by Puss in Boots, a man who speaks to rats (pictured below), and a pair of slimy assassins, to name a few. A new edition of the novel—published last year in the United Kingdom and this month in the United States by William Morrow—brings these characters to life with artwork by illustrator and U.K. children’s laureate Chris Riddell, whose black-and-white illustrations take up full pages and adorn the margins of the text. “One hopes it creates a mood—it’s a little bit like some good stage lighting,” Riddell says in a video filmed by the U.K. bookstore chain Waterstones, adding that the illustrations help the reader “concentrate on the very heart of the book, which of course are the words.” Gaiman originally published the book in the United Kingdom in 1996 as a novelization of a BBC television miniseries of the same name. The new edition, the author’s preferred text, also includes an alternative scene and an additional short story about one of the characters. “I wanted to talk about the people who fall through the cracks,” writes Gaiman in the book’s introduction. “To talk about the dispossessed, using the mirror of fantasy, which can sometimes show us things we have seen so many times that we never see them at all, for the very first time.”

 
(Illustrations copyright © 2016 Chris Riddell, from "Neverwhere" by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Chris Riddell.)

The Written Image: Imagine Wanting Only This

by
Staff
May/June 2017
4.12.17
In Print and Online

“Someday there will be nothing left that you have touched,” writes Kristen Radtke in her debut graphic memoir, Imagine Wanting Only This, published in April by Pantheon Books. Throughout the book, Radtke examines ideas of loss and decay as she travels around the world exploring ruined places after the sudden death of a beloved uncle from a rare genetic heart disease. With evocative black-and-white illustrations, Radtke explores the many ways in which ruin can pervade a life, whether it be mold creeping up the walls of a dilapidated Chicago apartment or the degeneration of the body through illness. “Anything we build will eventually crumble and decay,” she wrote in an e-mail to Poets & Writers Magazine. “It’s something I’ve come to find comfort in—that things we cherish can be both lasting and ephemeral.”

The Written Image: Library of the Infinitesimally Small and Unimaginably Large

by
Staff
July/August 2017
6.14.17
In Print and Online

In her ongoing project “Library of the Infinitesimally Small and Unimaginably Large,” South African artist Barbara Wildenboer (barbarawildenboer.com) transforms old reference books into intricate, fantastical pieces of art, like the one above, “Atlas (Parallel Universe).” Wildenboer, who started the project in 2009, takes found books—dictionaries, atlases, psychology manuals, astronomy and gardening books—and lays them out flat, then cuts their pages into hundreds of tiny tendril-like shapes. The symmetrical patterns of the pieces are reminiscent of other scientific phenomena: A book on biological psychology looks like a set of nerves, a dictionary suggests a pair of feathery wings, and a book on vertebrate morphology calls to mind rivulets of blood. “The intention is to draw emphasis to our understanding of history as mediated through text or language and our understanding of the abstract terms of science through metaphor,” Wildenboer writes on her website. Wildenboer’s work includes a broad range of sculpture, collage, and photography that has been exhibited around the world, including galleries in South Africa, Jordan, and Hong Kong. She recently held a solo exhibition, The Invisible Gardener, a collection of paper sculptures and other pieces, at the Everard Read/CIRCA Cape Town gallery.

The Written Image: Imagine Wanting Only This

The Written Image: B. A. Van Sise’s Children of Grass

by
Staff
March/April 2017
2.15.17
In Print and Online

In his ongoing series Children of Grass, artist B. A. Van Sise photographs American poets who are influenced by Walt Whitman. Each photo is based on a poem—the one below of Nikki Giovanni is inspired by her poem “Allowables”—and a concept developed by Van Sise in collaboration with the poet. Van Sise, who also happens to be one of Whitman’s closest living descendants, hopes to photograph eighty poets, and since he began the project in Spring 2016, he has featured more than twenty-five, including Robert Hass, Rita Dove, Ada Limón, Robert Pinsky, and Cornelius Eady. The project can be viewed on Van Sise’s Instagram account, @b.a.vansise.

 

The Written Image: The Art of the Affair

January/February 2017
12.14.16
In Print and Online

Creative people are drawn to each other, as notorious for falling in love as they are for driving each other insane,” writes novelist Catherine Lacey in her latest book, The Art of the Affair: An Illustrated History of Love, Sex, and Artistic Influence. “Seen a certain way, the history of art and literature is a history of all this love.” Throughout the book, out this month from Bloomsbury, Lacey maps many romantic entanglements, collaborations, and friendships between some of the most famous writers and artists of the twentieth century. Accompanied by Forsyth Harmon’s vivid watercolors of each writer and artist, the book spans many disciplines, with anecdotes about the legendary salons of Gertrude Stein, the modern-dance luminaries Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, and denizens of the jazz world of Ella Fitzgerald.  

       Caroline Blackwood                      Robert Lowell                         Elizabeth Hardwick

Lacey excavated these connections by reading artist biographies, obituaries, articles, and letters. While many of the liaisons discussed in the book are well known—like the fraught affair between Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas and the rocky marriage between Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald—Lacey also constellates seemingly disparate sets of artists whose lives happened to intersect: how, for instance, Pablo Picasso once met and drew on the hands of the heiress and writer Caroline Blackwood (above left), who later fell in love with the poet Robert Lowell (center), who then divorced the writer and critic Elizabeth Hardwick (right), who once profiled the singer Billie Holiday, who in turn had an affair with the filmmaker Orson Welles, and so on. The book is a reminder that art is not created in a vacuum, but arises out of the chemistry, envy, and camaraderie among those who love and create it.

The Written Image: B. A. Van Sise’s Children of Grass

by
Staff
March/April 2017
2.15.17
In Print and Online

In his ongoing series Children of Grass, artist B. A. Van Sise photographs American poets who are influenced by Walt Whitman. Each photo is based on a poem—the one below of Nikki Giovanni is inspired by her poem “Allowables”—and a concept developed by Van Sise in collaboration with the poet. Van Sise, who also happens to be one of Whitman’s closest living descendants, hopes to photograph eighty poets, and since he began the project in Spring 2016, he has featured more than twenty-five, including Robert Hass, Rita Dove, Ada Limón, Robert Pinsky, and Cornelius Eady. The project can be viewed on Van Sise’s Instagram account, @b.a.vansise.

 

The Written Image: Library of the Infinitesimally Small and Unimaginably Large

by
Staff
July/August 2017
6.14.17
In Print and Online

In her ongoing project “Library of the Infinitesimally Small and Unimaginably Large,” South African artist Barbara Wildenboer (barbarawildenboer.com) transforms old reference books into intricate, fantastical pieces of art, like the one above, “Atlas (Parallel Universe).” Wildenboer, who started the project in 2009, takes found books—dictionaries, atlases, psychology manuals, astronomy and gardening books—and lays them out flat, then cuts their pages into hundreds of tiny tendril-like shapes. The symmetrical patterns of the pieces are reminiscent of other scientific phenomena: A book on biological psychology looks like a set of nerves, a dictionary suggests a pair of feathery wings, and a book on vertebrate morphology calls to mind rivulets of blood. “The intention is to draw emphasis to our understanding of history as mediated through text or language and our understanding of the abstract terms of science through metaphor,” Wildenboer writes on her website. Wildenboer’s work includes a broad range of sculpture, collage, and photography that has been exhibited around the world, including galleries in South Africa, Jordan, and Hong Kong. She recently held a solo exhibition, The Invisible Gardener, a collection of paper sculptures and other pieces, at the Everard Read/CIRCA Cape Town gallery.

The Written Image: Imagine Wanting Only This
The Written Image: B. A. Van Sise’s Children of Grass
The Written Image: The Art of the Affair

The Written Image: Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere

by
Staff
September/October 2017
8.16.17
In Print and Online

Neil Gaiman’s first solo novel, Neverwhere, takes place in a shadowy underground world filled with a fantastical set of characters: an elfin young woman with a magical power to open doors, an imperious marquis inspired by Puss in Boots, a man who speaks to rats (pictured below), and a pair of slimy assassins, to name a few. A new edition of the novel—published last year in the United Kingdom and this month in the United States by William Morrow—brings these characters to life with artwork by illustrator and U.K. children’s laureate Chris Riddell, whose black-and-white illustrations take up full pages and adorn the margins of the text. “One hopes it creates a mood—it’s a little bit like some good stage lighting,” Riddell says in a video filmed by the U.K. bookstore chain Waterstones, adding that the illustrations help the reader “concentrate on the very heart of the book, which of course are the words.” Gaiman originally published the book in the United Kingdom in 1996 as a novelization of a BBC television miniseries of the same name. The new edition, the author’s preferred text, also includes an alternative scene and an additional short story about one of the characters. “I wanted to talk about the people who fall through the cracks,” writes Gaiman in the book’s introduction. “To talk about the dispossessed, using the mirror of fantasy, which can sometimes show us things we have seen so many times that we never see them at all, for the very first time.”

 
(Illustrations copyright © 2016 Chris Riddell, from "Neverwhere" by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Chris Riddell.)
The Written Image: Imagine Wanting Only This
The Written Image: Library of the Infinitesimally Small and Unimaginably Large
The Written Image: B. A. Van Sise’s Children of Grass

The Written Image: David Sedaris Diaries

by
Staff
November/December 2017
10.11.17
In Print and Online

From his first “diary” (a Kodak film box stuffed full of ephemera from his travels through the U.S. Pacific Northwest, collected in 1977) to more recent notebooks of art, writings, mementos, and postcards, writer and humorist David Sedaris has kept 153 diaries in the past forty years. In May Little, Brown published Theft by Finding, a selection of text from the diaries, and in October followed it up with David Sedaris Diaries: A Visual Compendium. Edited and photographed by artist Jeffrey Jenkins, a childhood friend of Sedaris’s from their days in a Boy Scout troop, the book includes photos and cutout images from Sedaris’s layered and collage-like diaries.

The collection shows Sedaris’s skill as an artist; Jenkins says he was surprised by the “visual, interactive nature of the diaries themselves—the fact that every time you turn a page or element in the diary, it may reveal and reframe all of the pages below it into something new and different.” Jenkins also notes how thorough and disciplined Sedaris is in keeping a diary; in his introduction to the book, Sedaris admits it’s an unshakable habit and cops to obsessively going through the trash while out on walks so he can look for ephemera. The visual diaries embody the same talent Sedaris displays in his writing: the ability to transform what others might discard as trivial—whether a stray comment overheard on the subway or a luggage tag pulled from the garbage—into something humorous or arresting. And the diaries offer more than just insight into Sedaris’s work—they serve as proof that writing, or visual art, or even just keeping a diary, revolves around paying attention and finding that anything, no matter how small, is fair game for inspiration.

 

Photo by David Hamsley.

The Written Image: Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere
The Written Image: Library of the Infinitesimally Small and Unimaginably Large
March/April 2018
In Print and Online
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Francisco Cantú

February 14, 2018, 9:00 am
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Amy Bloom

February 15, 2018, 7:00 am
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“I am not looking, usually, for inspiration. I am looking for an ambulance. I’m looking for a sturdy ladder. I’m looking for something that will make a good sentence seem possible. I read my Janes, Hirshfield and Kenyon, because they know what the dark at the end of the tunnel looks like. I hit my music very hard: Fats Domino, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Dinah Washington, Regina Carter, The Hot Sardines, Esperanza Spalding. I put on my baggiest jeans and my daughter’s coffee-stained Smith College T-shirt and I cook like a meteor is heading to Earth and only food can stop it. If I’m hungry, I make Cacio e Pepe: Boil pasta. Mash grated cheese and black pepper with some cold water and make a paste. Spread the paste in a bowl. Put al dente pasta into the bowl and stir. Add a little olive oil and a little pasta water. Sprinkle with more pepper and cheese. Eat. If I can wait, I make mandelbrot, the Jewish biscotti: four cups of flour, four eggs, baking powder, one cup of sugar, three-fourths cup of oil, one teaspoon of vanilla extract, and two cups of chopped almonds. Nothing else. Mix the wet, then add the dry and mix some more. Do not get adventurous. Raisins will not be an improvement. Neither will chocolate chips. Neither will…fenugreek. Stop it. Shape into two logs. Bake at 350 degrees for a half hour. Remove and cut into slices. Bake another ten minutes. Done. These are the best things in the world with tea or coffee. Inspiration, as Chuck Close said memorably, cruelly, and truly, is for amateurs. But the pasta and the cookies do help.”
—Amy Bloom, author of White Houses (Random House, 2018)

Writer Photo: 
Writer Photo Credit: 
Elena Seibert
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An American Marriage

February 16, 2018, 6:00 am
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“This is a novel about marriage and about what we owe one another and what you can expect from another person.” Tayari Jones speaks about her fourth novel, An American Marriage (Algonquin Books, 2018), and what she loves about bookstores in this video for Barnes & Noble. Jones shares her experience at Ucross in “The Writers Retreats Where Big Books Are Born” in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Tags: 
Tayari Jones | An American Marriage | Algonquin Books | 2018 | March/April 2018
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Seanan Forbes

February 19, 2018, 5:23 pm
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With whom do you prefer to work?: 
Any
In which languages are you fluent?: 
English
First Name: 
Seanan
Born in (Country): 
United States
Last Name: 
Forbes
E-mail: 
seananforbes@gmail.com
Born in (City): 
New York
Raised in (Country): 
United States
completed
Raised in (City): 
New York
Photo of the Author: 
Listed as: 
Poet
Private Phone: 
2129510057
Are you interested in giving readings?: 
Yes
Are you willing to travel to give readings?: 
Yes
Yes
Raised in (State): 
New York
Website: 
www.seananforbes.com
What I'm Reading Now, Book 1: 
Nine Gates
Private E-mail: 
seananforbes@gmail.com
Application Accepted: 
Application Accepted
What I'm Reading Now, Author 1: 
Jane Hirshfield
What I'm Reading Now, Book 2: 
The Shell Collector
What I'm Reading Now, Author 2: 
Anthony Doerr
473 Columbus Avenue 2B
New York, NY10024
220 West 93rd Street 15B
New York, NY10025
What I'm Reading Now, Book 3: 
The Immense Journey
What I'm Reading Now, Author 3: 
Loren Eiseley
What I'm Reading Now, Book 4: 
Quiet
What I'm Reading Now, Author 4: 
Susan Cain
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Craft Capsule: Hundreds of Eyes

February 19, 2018, 9:00 pm
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Dan Beachy-Quick

This is the twenty-sixth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each Tuesday for a new Craft Capsule.

I practice two arts—the poem and the essay—and I’m not good at keeping them apart. There are times, I admit, when poetry feels to me the primary vehicle of thinking, an epistemological experiment in consciousness itself, demonstrating line by line the way in which those wondrous wounds of the senses inform the mind, and the mind must work to find a word that fits—not recognition, but cognition. In this sense, the poem is the thinking that can happen only outside the mind, and the poet is one, so paradoxically, eavesdropping on her own innermost self (though the innermost is no longer exactly inner). It’s monstrous work. I mean it’s work akin to Mary Shelley’s monster fleeing through the woods and, bending over a puddle there, seeing the moon in reflection, hearing the wind in the branches, and seeing for the first time his own face. The poem’s thinking is fateful in just such fundamental ways: It does not recognize, it realizes.

And the essay, that mode of taking measure, that rational or reasonable weighing of a life, has become for me beauty’s own labyrinth. I suppose a maze is monstrous work, too—knowing those myths of the Minotaur. But sometimes I think the essay is a maze with no center at all; it is instead a bewildered initiation into what John Keats calls, in “Ode to Psyche,” the “untrodden region of my mind,” that place one finds only by getting lost.

Such wonderings have led me to think much on what I consider the most fundamental aspect of craft in each art: the line of the poem, the sentence of the essay. (One might argue the word is the fundamental aspect of both, and that might be true, but a word is a world of syllable and breath, of potency and chance, and carries, as Leibniz describes the monad, its complexity all within. I’m not sure I know how to think about words—a strange thing, I know, for a writer to admit.)

 

I. Lines

Ralph Waldo Emerson, though I can’t remember where, wrote down a thought I’ve never been able to shake loose: “Every line of a poem must be a poem.” I find this to be awful advice, by which I mean, advice that is full of awe—awful because it is so true. I apologize to my students when I repeat it them. I fear it could so burden every moment in a poem that the poet feels paralyzed, unable to forge any path into the wild blank of the page. But maybe that is just how it should feel, just that helpless, but a helplessness mined through with some urge to make in nothingness a world entire, a poem.

Emerson’s insight has unfolded in a number of ways in my thinking about poetry. If every line of a poem is a poem itself it must mean that every single line in a poem truly written contains within it all it can say, has exhausted somehow the resource of its perception until, by the last word, there is some silence that cannot be spoken past. It means each line of the poem possesses a knowledge and vision that is, in its way, wholly revelatory—a means by which to see the world anew, a way to grow a new set of eyes. Each line is a plank upon which the mind builds its whole edifice of reason—and for the length of the line, it holds.

But then, as Emily Dickinson offers it,

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then –

That last stanza of her great poem “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” reads to me as the lived experience of reading a poem—that plunge through every line that is itself a world entire. And of the “Finished knowing—then—,” I’ve never known if it means she has ended in knowledge, or if knowing itself is at an end.

I suppose the answer may be both, for it reveals the most astonishing aspect of the line when every line is itself a poem: that each line of a poem makes a claim for some sense of the world entire, a sense of which that line is the primary example, and then that singular sense is subsumed into the larger vision of which it is but a part. Then the poem may be the place Emerson suggests it is, where we “stand before the secret of the world, there where Being passes into Appearance and Unity into Variety.” I imagine the poem also this way: a peacock with tail outspread, and the phosphorescent circle on each feather an actual eye. The poem lets us see through every eye. Then it is, as Wallace Stevens has it, that art in which “hundreds of eyes, in one mind, see at once.”

 

II. Sentences

Emerson’s own essays are exemplary of the next suggestion, an extension of his poetic insight: Every sentence of an essay must be an essay. It might be worth going further, and to alter Stevens’s lovely line, to make the essay that art in which “hundreds of minds, in one eye, think at once.” The bond between logos and logic that seems to drive the sentence through its argument to essay’s conclusion may be a more tenuous thread than one cares to admit. Keats knows this, as over and again he examines the fraught relationship between beauty and thought, summed up nowhere more succinctly than at the end of his letter, written in 1817, to his brothers, in which he defines negative capability. There he concludes: “This pursed through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.” This obliteration of thought by beauty is something I’ve long pondered, but even more so as my own writing practice has turned to essays of lyric literary reverie and investigation. If Dickinson is right, and I think she is, that “This World is not Conclusion,” then the beautiful sentence might work to frustrate the considered logic of the essay’s larger aims, if not to obliterate them completely. I can imagine the mind as a knot trying to untie itself from within its own complexity, and though it may look from outside as if nothing’s changed, what’s inside has loosened its intricate ravel; I can see the sentences in an essay acting in just the same way.

Sometimes craft isn’t advice or technique, but simply a suggestion—a way of thinking, a method of approach. That is, craft can be revelatory of condition. When it is so, a poem teaches us what it is to think, and an essay teaches us what it is to see. We thought we’d entered into different lessons entirely when we picked up the book we’re reading, but when we put it down—whether it is essay or poem—we find both mind and eye opened. Not that it’s easy, in the end, to tell the two apart. 

 

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and author most recently of a collection of essays, fragments, and poems titled Of Silence and Song (Milkweed Editions, 2017).

Craft Capsule: The Craft of Humility, the Craft of Love

by
Dan Beachy-Quick
2.13.18
Online Only

This is the twenty-fifth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each Tuesday for a new Craft Capsule.

I’m teaching a class called Introduction to Poetry; I’ve taught it many times before. On day one, knowing many students are there not wholly willingly (a requirement, for many, for better or worse) I make the same tired joke: “Class, this is Poetry. Poetry, this is the class. I hope you’ll both be friends.” A few laugh.

But I mean it, that joke. I feel my job as a poet is to bring them into poetry in such a way that its difficulty becomes the means of admitting to and encountering their own complex lives, of finding in those nearly unspeakable reaches of mind or heart some companionship they did not hope to have—like a good friend offers. I hope the same for those easier pleasures in life—the sun-bright leaf, the bee in the bud, a rose—that a poem might offer itself to bear within it the sweet moment’s memory that otherwise might drift away into oblivion.

For those hopes to come true, the students need to learn how a poem works; inevitably, much of our delving into any particular poem requires an investigation into craft. I take something Ludwig Wittgenstein says about the nature of philosophy, and alter it toward poetic ends. I suggest that our condition is to find ourselves at sea on a craft that leaks and must be repaired as we float in it—that craft is our craft, the very thing that keeps the poem from sinking, and us along with it. For the honest poem, craft isn’t some willful choice of form, or any set of decisions binding the freedom of the poem to particular tropes; rather, craft is the helpless acceptance of what work is needed to keep the poem intact despite the extremity of its position—hovering there on the white abyss of the blank page, silence all around it, and you, riding in the thing you’re writing.

It is in such light that I want to offer the two most significant introductions to poetry and its craft that happened in my younger, proto-poet life. They are aspects of craft not typically thought of as craft at all, and yet, they opened me to poetry in ways I’ve yet to recover from—which is to say, I’m happy to still be here, fixing a leak while crossing the ocean.

 

I. The Craft of Humility

I thought myself a smart kid in high school, already something of a poet, dumb-drunk on some sense of my own “giftedness,” and out to prove it. I had the remarkable fortune then of having a teacher, Ms. Porter, who loved poetry and, just as important, could teach it. She broke the class into groups, and gave each group one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. My group was given number 173: “That time of year thou mays’t in me behold.” I lorded over the conversation, built some reading I cowed others into accepting, and when we presented to the class, of course, I was the one doing the speaking. I don’t remember—thank goodness—anything I said, or how it was I thought I saw that poem. What I do remember is the look on my teacher’s face—a teacher I loved. It wasn’t just disappointment, but a kind of anger. And I remember what she said, very loud, in front of everyone: That I had gotten the poem so wrong, I might as well have not read it.

I sat down and felt ashamed. That shame, the deep and burning sense of it, was my first true lesson in poetry. I realized that I’m not smarter than the poem I read, far from it; and that if I wanted, as I professed I did, to become a poet myself, then first I had to humble myself enough to know that I didn’t know much. I had to admit to myself my own insufficiency, that I needed a teacher to learn from, and the poem was both instructor and lesson itself.

Only years later did the true beauty of that poem find me: the bare ruined choir of those branches that, as the winter night darkens early with cold, become the fuel for the fire, those embers glowing and “consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.” Then I finally learned my lesson in craft, years after the hour in the classroom closed: that the poem is its own deepest resource, and the image it bears in the first lines, taken with all the literalness the imagination can muster, become the means of admitting to and countering crisis. For example: It is cold and dark and I’m getting old; but there’s a tree, and a fire, and a home. Even so late, the sweet birds sing.

 

II. The Craft of Love

Two years later, I had the same Ms. Porter again.

I had in the intervening years started reading and writing poems in earnest, and had started seeing a young woman, Kristy Beachy, who—. Well, who was everything to me.

We were reading John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” Humbled enough now to admit the poem made little sense to me, I was curious to see how Ms. Porter would teach it.

Stanza by stanza she led us through the metaphors, those metaphysical conceits, of lovers parting for untold time. Midway through those nine quatrains, which move from death to storm to the quaking of the planetary spheres, their gentle insistence that absence is no true remove, Donne admits to the kind of humility I’d come to recognize:

But we by a love so much refined
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less eyes, lips, hands to miss.

Right there, at the very crux of a poem whose gentle fury of intellect seemed to cast it past my grasp, was the admission of not knowing exactly what is this thing one is in—this life, this love. I don’t know, those abashed, holy words, uttered in the very crucible of needing to know, that in their honest urgency, admit no defeat, but instead open the mind to its next vision.

That vision, Ms. Porter showed us, that “gold to airy thinness beat” of two souls that are one, depended upon gold beaten down to the micron of its leaf while remaining absolutely whole. But if these twin souls are two—and here, Ms. Porter pulled out her compass, familiar to us all from Geometry class—and demonstrated those last, astonishing lines:

If they be two, they are two so 
As stiff twin compasses are two; 
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show 
To move, but doth, if the other do. 

And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must, 
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just, 
And makes me end where I begun.

Then she held the paper up on which she’d drawn her perfect circle. I don’t know if I gasped. I might have. For I’d learned my other earliest lesson in craft: that metaphor in poetry isn’t difficult because of its abstraction, but because of its accuracy. And I thought I’d learned something of that sense of accuracy, those feelings so poignant in their utmost singularity that they verge on the unspeakable: There was Kristy Beachy, sitting one row over and two seats ahead of me, and I was Dan Quick, mind-struck behind her, deeply, deeply, in love—with Kristy, of course, and with poetry. Not that it’s so easy to tell such matters of craft apart.

 

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and author most recently of a collection of essays, fragments, and poems titled Of Silence and Song (Milkweed Editions, 2017).

Craft Capsule: Left Brain, Right Brain

by
Sandra Beasley
4.25.17
Online Only

This is the tenth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each Tuesday for a new Craft Capsule.

 

***

I attended a high school geared toward professions in science or technology, so I have an active analytical streak and crave objective rubrics for understanding the wildly creative poems, stories, and essays that I read. I suspect I’m not alone in this.

One of my mentors, Gregory Orr, articulated four “temperaments” of poetry in a 1988 essay titled “Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry.” You can envision these facets of craft as quadrants, positioned on an X-Y axis. To the left, limiting impulses: “Story” in the upper quadrant and, below it, “Structure.” To the right, impulses that extend limitlessness: “Music” in the upper and, below it, “Imagination.” Though designed for poetry, I find these temperaments useful for prose as well. As writers, we each typically favor two of the four in our work. Which temperaments bring you to the page? Which come easiest to you? Which do you need to consciously strengthen in your work?

This system gives us a way to articulate differences in aesthetic without ranking them. I’m relieved to set aside presumptive hierarchies. I suspect I’m not alone in this.

 

Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.

Craft Capsule: Beware the Indeterminate “It”

by
Sandra Beasley
4.11.17
Online Only

This is the eighth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each Tuesday for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Beware the indeterminate “it,” I often say, when fine-tuning a draft.

But that word is so convenient. “It” carries the football from the previous sentence. Whatever “it” you just defined, you’re sticking with it for another ten yards, right?

Except that you’re fumbling the play. Too often, relying on “it” dissipates your language’s energy. Circle every “it” that leads off a sentence. Revising to avoid these instances will force your verbs into action, and clarify your intent.

This is not a hard-and-fast rule. Sometimes an indeterminate “it” will remain, one that has earned its place on the field. The pronoun can be strategic—signifying not just gender neutrality but an absence of comprehension or known name, a fumbling toward meaning, the building of suspense.

In the right hands, “It” can be a potent force. Just ask Stephen King.

 

Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.

Craft Capsule: The Art of Targeted Revision

by
Sandra Beasley
4.18.17
Online Only

This is the ninth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each Tuesday for a new Craft Capsule.

***

“Too many hours of revising—to no clear end!” my student complains. He is tired. He feels like the poem never really gets better. There’s always more work to do.

Welcome to revision: the arbitrary realm in which we debate “the” versus “an,” “this” versus “that.” Spend an hour putting a comma in. An hour later, take it out.

Part of the problem is that we complicate the revision process by making our aims abstract. One big revision, we promise ourselves, will make the poem “better.” Don’t privilege “better,” which is a meaningless term. Assign clear and objective tasks. Devote one round of revision exclusively to heightening your imagery, another to reconsidering your verb choices, a third to playing with lineation or tense.

Think of each revision as an experiment. Often these experiments will feel like evolutionary progress, and you’ll keep their results intact. Not always, especially as you near the end of the revision process. When the new version fails to appeal—when you find yourself resisting, reverting, defending an earlier choice—you are locating the poem’s true form. You are identifying what makes this poem yours, and yours alone.

 

Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.

Craft Capsule: Find Your Metaphor

by
Sandra Beasley
4.4.17

This is the seventh in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each Tuesday for a new Craft Capsule.

***

A friend of mine, a poet, was trying to figure out what bothered him about a draft of my poem. “A poem should be like a wall,” he told me. “You build it brick by brick.” He pointed out that, in his opinion, key bricks were missing.

I didn’t share his vision, but I admired that he had one. I’ve come to value developing a metaphorical model for your genre. A model can help you identify your goals, name your struggles, and proceed toward success.

Perhaps you follow the lead of “stanza,” the Italian word for “room.” You come to think of each poem as a house. How do the rooms differ in function, size, and occupancy? Where does your central drama take place? What comprises your roof?

Perhaps you come to think of your essay as a harp. Each researched fact glimmers, an available string in a golden frame. But you can’t play them all at once. Only in choosing which notes to highlight, and how to sequence them, can you create music.

Personally, I always think of memoir as an egg. I’m protective of the inspiring memory, smooth and undisturbed in its surface. But I have to be prepared to break the egg. I have to make the idea messy before I can make a satisfying meal.

Perhaps your novel is a shark. Perhaps your villanelle is a waltz. Perhaps your short story is a baseball game. Don’t adopt my metaphors. Find one of your own.

 

Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket

by
Christina Baker Kline
2.21.17
Online Only

This is the first in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each Tuesday for a new Craft Capsule.

***

As a project for school, my thirteen-year-old son, Will, spent several days carrying an egg around. His task was simple: Keep the egg from breaking.

The experiment was intended to show what it’s like to have a baby, to approximate the feeling of constant vigilance that never leaves you once you have a child. Ultimately, of course, it was supposed to make hormone-addled adolescents think twice before doing something stupid.

As a mother of three, though, I wasn’t convinced. A baby is nothing like an egg, unless it’s an egg that cries, wets itself, sucks on you constantly, and wakes you up four times a night. But as my son described the feeling of carrying his egg—he named it “Pablito”—I realized that it did remind me of something. “It’s always there,” Will said. “You can’t forget it or take it for granted. You feel protective and anxious all the time.”

Carrying an egg around is like writing a novel. No matter what else you’re doing, the fact of the novel is in the back of your mind. If you go too long without attending to it, you get nervous. It is always with you, a weight solid and yet fragile, in constant danger of being crushed. Like the egg, the weight of a book-in-progress is both literal and metaphorical. Within the accumulating pages, as inside the delicate eggshell, are the raw ingredients for something greater. Keeping it intact requires patience, time, attention—and, most of all, commitment. This concept applies to any stage of the process: The egg is both the idea that you nurture long before you begin to write, and the writing itself, which must be fostered and sustained.

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published this month by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident

by
Christina Baker Kline
3.7.17
Online Only

This is the third in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each Tuesday for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Jackson Pollock’s reply to an interviewer’s question about how he composed his paintings of “accidental” splatterings has stuck with me. “I don’t use the accident,” he said. “I deny the accident.”

The sheer bravado of this is thrilling, and as a writer I find it to be a useful way to think about my work-in-progress. When I’m putting words on the page it’s easy to second guess, to question the often-unconscious choices I make as I go: the trajectories of characters’ lives, shifts in direction and focus, minor characters who gain traction as the story moves forward. The editor in my head starts whispering: You’re going in the wrong direction. Why are you spending so much time on that character? You need to focus, get back to the story you originally envisioned, stick to the plan.

Over time I’ve learned to trust my impulses. Whatever else they may be, these unanticipated detours are fresh and surprising; they keep me interested, and often end up adding depth to the work. Not always, of course—sometimes an accident is just an accident. But believing that these splatterings on my own canvas are there for a reason, as part of a larger process of conception, gives me the audacity to experiment.

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket

Craft Capsule: Good Sense

by
Christina Baker Kline
2.28.17
Online Only

This is the second in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each Tuesday for a new Craft Capsule.

***

The problem of beginning…

The Southern novelist and poet George Garrett, who was director of creative writing at the University of Virginia when I was a graduate student there, always said that if you're having trouble getting into a chapter or a scene you should use all five senses right at the start, preferably in the first paragraph. Touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight. Your scene will jump to life, and you’ll have an easier time falling into the dream world of the story.

On a related note, Gustave Flaubert kept rotten apples in his desk drawer to evoke autumn when writing scenes that took place in that season....

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published this month by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket

Craft Capsule: Good Sense

by
Christina Baker Kline
2.28.17
Online Only

This is the second in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each Tuesday for a new Craft Capsule.

***

The problem of beginning…

The Southern novelist and poet George Garrett, who was director of creative writing at the University of Virginia when I was a graduate student there, always said that if you're having trouble getting into a chapter or a scene you should use all five senses right at the start, preferably in the first paragraph. Touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight. Your scene will jump to life, and you’ll have an easier time falling into the dream world of the story.

On a related note, Gustave Flaubert kept rotten apples in his desk drawer to evoke autumn when writing scenes that took place in that season....

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published this month by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket

Craft Capsule: Good Sense

by
Christina Baker Kline
2.28.17
Online Only

This is the second in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each Tuesday for a new Craft Capsule.

***

The problem of beginning…

The Southern novelist and poet George Garrett, who was director of creative writing at the University of Virginia when I was a graduate student there, always said that if you're having trouble getting into a chapter or a scene you should use all five senses right at the start, preferably in the first paragraph. Touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight. Your scene will jump to life, and you’ll have an easier time falling into the dream world of the story.

On a related note, Gustave Flaubert kept rotten apples in his desk drawer to evoke autumn when writing scenes that took place in that season....

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published this month by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket

Craft Capsule: Tolstoy’s Short Chapters

by
Christina Baker Kline
3.28.17
Online Only

This is the sixth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each Tuesday for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Anna Karenina is more than eight hundred pages long. So why does it feel shorter than many three-hundred-page books?

As I read this novel recently I noticed that Tolstoy cuts his long scenes into short chapters, usually no more than two or three pages. This makes sense, considering it was published in serial installments, from 1873 to 1877, in the Russian Messenger. Tolstoy often ends a chapter in a moment of suspense—a door opens, a provocative question is asked, a contentious group sits down to dinner, characters who’ve been circling each other finally begin to talk—which propels the reader forward into the next chapter.

The psychological effect of these short chapters is that this huge book is easy to get through. Reading in bed late at night (as I tend to do), I’m tempted to put it down, but then I riffle ahead to find that the next chapter is only three pages long. And I really want to find out who’s behind that door.

Three pages. I can do that—as a reader and as a writer. 

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: Visual Prompts

by
Christina Baker Kline
3.21.17
Online Only

This is the fifth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each Tuesday for a new Craft Capsule.

***

For many writers, visual and tactile stimulation is an important component of the creative process. William Faulkner used to map his stories on the wall in his study. If you visit Rowan Oak, his home in Oxford, Mississippi, you can still see the notes for his 1954 novel, A Fable, in his precise, small handwriting. Edwidge Danticat has said that she has an evolving bulletin board in her workspace where she tacks up collages of photos of Haiti and images from magazines.

I, too, have a new board for each book I write. When I’m starting work on a novel I gather scraps like a magpie. My Orphan Train board was covered with postcards from the New York Tenement Museum depicting the interior of an immigrant Irish family’s cramped apartment, a black and white photograph of a young couple at Coney Island in the 1920s, a map of the village of Kinvara in Ireland. I hung a hand-carved Celtic cross on a green ribbon and a stone shamrock on a red ribbon from Galway; a Native American dreamcatcher from Maine; a silver train pin from a New York Train Riders’ reunion in Little Falls, Minnesota. I tacked up note cards: “Food in Ireland 1900s” was one (“wheatmeal, hung beef, tongue, barley”). Another listed ideas I wanted to explore (“links between misplaced and abandoned people with little in common”).

For A Piece of the World, I included a print of Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World; photos I took, inside and out, of Christina’s home in Cushing, Maine; some Emily Dickinson poems (“This is my letter to the world / That never wrote to me”); and postcards of other paintings Wyeth did at the Olson house, including Wind From the Sea and Christina Olson (both of which make appearances in my novel). I photocopied sketches Wyeth made for his portrait of Christina. I even included a small handful of grasses I’d plucked from the field Christina sat in.

I find these idea boards fun to assemble and inspiring as I work. My mantra, always: Find inspiration where you can.

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

An outline of A Fable on the wall of William Faulkner’s study at Rowan Oak in Oxford, Mississippi. (Credit: Joe Bonomo)

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket
Craft Capsule: Good Sense
Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident

Craft Capsule: Making Conversation

by
Christina Baker Kline
3.14.17
Online Only

This is the fourth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each Tuesday for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Dialogue is hard to get right. It should sound like natural speech, but in fact it’s nothing like it. I like to send my creative writing students out to cafés and parks with notebooks to transcribe bits of overheard conversations. Then I ask them to type up these transcripts and turn them into dialogue between characters. Inevitably their written dialogue bears little resemblance to the overheard conversations. When you write dialogue you must eliminate niceties and unnecessary patter, and cut to the core of the exchange—unless the patter is crucial to the story, conveying a dissembling, depressed, incoherent, or boring personality. At the same time, it should sound natural, like something someone would actually say. The writer George Garrett called this dovetailing—trimming for verisimilitude and impact.

In direct and indirect speech, your characters should constantly be saying “no” to each other. Most of us (myself included) tend to avoid conflict in our real lives, but conflict is crucial in fiction. It keeps the story interesting.

Richard Price, in his novel Lush Life, allows his characters to talk and talk and talk. Price maintains a delicate balancing act; his characters’ words matter. What they say changes the direction of the story. But he never burdens his dialogue with exposition or forces it to convey plot points that don’t come up naturally. In Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway writes, “In order to engage us emotionally in a disagreement, the characters must have an emotional stake in the outcome.” Price’s characters are nothing if not emotionally invested.

Price’s dialogue is vital to the story because it moves the action forward. He constantly puts his characters in conflict with one another. Their conversations are full of surprises—self-revelation, inadvertent admissions, hearsay, evidence—and kinetic energy; they crackle with life. Real life.

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket
Craft Capsule: Good Sense
Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident

Craft Capsule: Making Conversation

by
Christina Baker Kline
3.14.17
Online Only

This is the fourth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each Tuesday for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Dialogue is hard to get right. It should sound like natural speech, but in fact it’s nothing like it. I like to send my creative writing students out to cafés and parks with notebooks to transcribe bits of overheard conversations. Then I ask them to type up these transcripts and turn them into dialogue between characters. Inevitably their written dialogue bears little resemblance to the overheard conversations. When you write dialogue you must eliminate niceties and unnecessary patter, and cut to the core of the exchange—unless the patter is crucial to the story, conveying a dissembling, depressed, incoherent, or boring personality. At the same time, it should sound natural, like something someone would actually say. The writer George Garrett called this dovetailing—trimming for verisimilitude and impact.

In direct and indirect speech, your characters should constantly be saying “no” to each other. Most of us (myself included) tend to avoid conflict in our real lives, but conflict is crucial in fiction. It keeps the story interesting.

Richard Price, in his novel Lush Life, allows his characters to talk and talk and talk. Price maintains a delicate balancing act; his characters’ words matter. What they say changes the direction of the story. But he never burdens his dialogue with exposition or forces it to convey plot points that don’t come up naturally. In Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway writes, “In order to engage us emotionally in a disagreement, the characters must have an emotional stake in the outcome.” Price’s characters are nothing if not emotionally invested.

Price’s dialogue is vital to the story because it moves the action forward. He constantly puts his characters in conflict with one another. Their conversations are full of surprises—self-revelation, inadvertent admissions, hearsay, evidence—and kinetic energy; they crackle with life. Real life.

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket
Craft Capsule: Good Sense
Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident
Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident
Craft Capsule: Good Sense
Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket
Craft Capsule: Beware the Indeterminate “It”

Craft Capsule: Visual Prompts

by
Christina Baker Kline
3.21.17
Online Only

This is the fifth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each Tuesday for a new Craft Capsule.

***

For many writers, visual and tactile stimulation is an important component of the creative process. William Faulkner used to map his stories on the wall in his study. If you visit Rowan Oak, his home in Oxford, Mississippi, you can still see the notes for his 1954 novel, A Fable, in his precise, small handwriting. Edwidge Danticat has said that she has an evolving bulletin board in her workspace where she tacks up collages of photos of Haiti and images from magazines.

I, too, have a new board for each book I write. When I’m starting work on a novel I gather scraps like a magpie. My Orphan Train board was covered with postcards from the New York Tenement Museum depicting the interior of an immigrant Irish family’s cramped apartment, a black and white photograph of a young couple at Coney Island in the 1920s, a map of the village of Kinvara in Ireland. I hung a hand-carved Celtic cross on a green ribbon and a stone shamrock on a red ribbon from Galway; a Native American dreamcatcher from Maine; a silver train pin from a New York Train Riders’ reunion in Little Falls, Minnesota. I tacked up note cards: “Food in Ireland 1900s” was one (“wheatmeal, hung beef, tongue, barley”). Another listed ideas I wanted to explore (“links between misplaced and abandoned people with little in common”).

For A Piece of the World, I included a print of Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World; photos I took, inside and out, of Christina’s home in Cushing, Maine; some Emily Dickinson poems (“This is my letter to the world / That never wrote to me”); and postcards of other paintings Wyeth did at the Olson house, including Wind From the Sea and Christina Olson (both of which make appearances in my novel). I photocopied sketches Wyeth made for his portrait of Christina. I even included a small handful of grasses I’d plucked from the field Christina sat in.

I find these idea boards fun to assemble and inspiring as I work. My mantra, always: Find inspiration where you can.

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

An outline of A Fable on the wall of William Faulkner’s study at Rowan Oak in Oxford, Mississippi. (Credit: Joe Bonomo)

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket
Craft Capsule: Good Sense
Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident
Craft Capsule: Making Conversation

Craft Capsule: Visual Prompts

by
Christina Baker Kline
3.21.17
Online Only

This is the fifth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each Tuesday for a new Craft Capsule.

***

For many writers, visual and tactile stimulation is an important component of the creative process. William Faulkner used to map his stories on the wall in his study. If you visit Rowan Oak, his home in Oxford, Mississippi, you can still see the notes for his 1954 novel, A Fable, in his precise, small handwriting. Edwidge Danticat has said that she has an evolving bulletin board in her workspace where she tacks up collages of photos of Haiti and images from magazines.

I, too, have a new board for each book I write. When I’m starting work on a novel I gather scraps like a magpie. My Orphan Train board was covered with postcards from the New York Tenement Museum depicting the interior of an immigrant Irish family’s cramped apartment, a black and white photograph of a young couple at Coney Island in the 1920s, a map of the village of Kinvara in Ireland. I hung a hand-carved Celtic cross on a green ribbon and a stone shamrock on a red ribbon from Galway; a Native American dreamcatcher from Maine; a silver train pin from a New York Train Riders’ reunion in Little Falls, Minnesota. I tacked up note cards: “Food in Ireland 1900s” was one (“wheatmeal, hung beef, tongue, barley”). Another listed ideas I wanted to explore (“links between misplaced and abandoned people with little in common”).

For A Piece of the World, I included a print of Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World; photos I took, inside and out, of Christina’s home in Cushing, Maine; some Emily Dickinson poems (“This is my letter to the world / That never wrote to me”); and postcards of other paintings Wyeth did at the Olson house, including Wind From the Sea and Christina Olson (both of which make appearances in my novel). I photocopied sketches Wyeth made for his portrait of Christina. I even included a small handful of grasses I’d plucked from the field Christina sat in.

I find these idea boards fun to assemble and inspiring as I work. My mantra, always: Find inspiration where you can.

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

An outline of A Fable on the wall of William Faulkner’s study at Rowan Oak in Oxford, Mississippi. (Credit: Joe Bonomo)

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket
Craft Capsule: Good Sense
Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident
Craft Capsule: Making Conversation

Craft Capsule: Good Sense

by
Christina Baker Kline
2.28.17
Online Only

This is the second in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each Tuesday for a new Craft Capsule.

***

The problem of beginning…

The Southern novelist and poet George Garrett, who was director of creative writing at the University of Virginia when I was a graduate student there, always said that if you're having trouble getting into a chapter or a scene you should use all five senses right at the start, preferably in the first paragraph. Touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight. Your scene will jump to life, and you’ll have an easier time falling into the dream world of the story.

On a related note, Gustave Flaubert kept rotten apples in his desk drawer to evoke autumn when writing scenes that took place in that season....

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published this month by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket

Craft Capsule: The Scourge of Technology

by
Tayari Jones
1.23.18
Online Only

This is the twenty-second in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each Tuesday for a new Craft Capsule.

***

The cell phone is the worst thing to ever happen to literature. Seriously. So many great fictional plots hinge on one detail: The characters can’t connect. Most famous is Romeo and Juliet. If she just could have texted him, “R, I might look dead, but I’m not. Lolz,” then none of this would have happened.

In my new novel, An American Marriage, both e-mail and cell phones threatened my plot. Here is a basic overview: A young couple, Celestial and Roy, married only eighteen months, are torn apart when the husband is wrongfully incarcerated and given a twelve-year prison sentence. After five years, he is released and wants to resume his old life with her.

A good chunk of the novel is correspondence between our separated lovers. In real life, they probably would have used e-mail. But the problem, plot-wise, is that e-mail is so off-the-cuff, and there is so little time between messages. I needed to use old-fashioned letters. Their messages needed to be deep and thoughtful, and I wanted them to have some time to stew between missives. But who in their right mind (besides me) uses paper and pen when e-mail is so much faster and easier?

The fix was that Roy uses his allocated computer time in prison to write e-mail for the other inmates, for pay. As he says, “It’s a little cottage industry.” He also explains that he likes to write letters to his wife at night when no one is looking over his shoulder or rushing him. 

So look how this fix worked: You see that even though he is incarcerated, his is still a man with a plan. The challenge was to figure out how to avoid e-mail in such a way that it didn’t read like I was just trying to come up with an excuse to write a Victorian-style epistolary novel.

The cell phone was harder to navigate. Spoiler: Celestial has taken up with another man, Andre, in the five years that her husband is incarcerated. A crucial plot point, which I will not spoil, involves Andre not being able get in touch with her. Well, in the present day there is no way to not be able to reach your bae, unless your bae doesn’t want to be reached. Trouble in paradise is not on the menu for the couple at this point, so what to do? I couldn’t very well have him drop his phone in a rest-stop commode!

To get around it, I had to put Andre in a situation in which he would agree not to call Celestial or take her calls—although he really wants to. Trust me. It’s killing him. But he makes an agreement with Roy’s father, who says, “Andre, you have had two years to let Celestial know how you feel.  Give my son one day.” Andre agrees and has to rely on faith that their relationship can survive. The scene is extremely tense and adds suspense to the novel. I had to get up and walk around while I wrote it.

I predict that future novelists will not grapple with this quite as much as we do, as technological advances will be seen as a feature rather than a bug. But for now, you can still write an old-fashioned plot that doesn’t involve texting or tweeting—you just have to figure out a work-around that enhances the plot and understanding of your characters.

Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. She is the author of four novels, including An American Marriage, forthcoming in February from Algonquin Books. Her website is www.tayarijones.com.

 

 

 

Craft Capsule: Finding Your Story

by
Tayari Jones
1.16.18
Online Only

This is the twenty-first in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each Tuesday for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Like most thoughtful people, I have noticed that the world is on fire and I want to use my skills to help extinguish the flames. To this end, I set out five years ago to write a novel that addresses the injustice of wrongful incarceration. I applied for and received a fellowship to the Radcliffe Institute and I became a dedicated researcher. I learned a lot, so much so that I got angry just watching Law & Order, my ex-favorite television show. I was informed, “woke,” and motivated, but I couldn’t write a novel because I had no story. The problem was that I was trying to write to the issue, and I can only write a story that is issue-adjacent.

I know I have a novel when I have a question to which I don’t know the moral/ethical answer. When it comes to wrongful incarceration, I am not torn. The state should not imprison innocent people. Full stop. Also without ambiguity: The prison system is cruel, corrupt, and in desperate need of reform, if not abolition.

So where was the novel?

The answer revealed itself in a food court where I spied a young couple. She was dressed in a lovely cashmere coat. He wore inexpensive khakis and a polo. They were clearly angry, and clearly in love. I overheard the woman say, “Roy, you know you wouldn’t have waited on me for seven years.” He shot back, “What are you talking about? This shit wouldn’t have happened to you in the first place.”

Just then, I knew I had a novel. The reason is that I understood that they were both probably right. I didn’t know him, but I couldn’t quite picture him waiting chastely by for seven years. At the same time, I couldn’t imagine her behind bars. But did he have a right to demand her loyalty when both seem to agree she would be in no position to demand the same? Was this question moot since she would not likely face this challenge? Was this a kind of privilege? Could she mitigate this privilege by waiting like a modern-day Penelope? Should she?

So we have a couple with a conflict, and at stake between them are issues of reciprocity, duty, and love. Yes, there is the injustice of mass incarceration. And yes, this injustice is fueled by racism and prejudice. Neither of them doubt this, and neither do I. But the question of “will you wait for me” is foremost on his mind.

The result is my new novel, An American Marriage. Roy and Celestial are newlyweds, married only eighteen months, when Roy is arrested for a crime he did not commit. When he is slapped with a twelve-year sentence, the questions of desire and responsibility are at the center of the characters’ lives. As a writer, I was genuinely torn: Roy needs Celestial to be a link to the life he left behind, and Celestial loves her husband, but she has only one life. I wrote this novel not only to satisfy my heart’s curiosity as to what they would do, but to also satisfy the part of my mind that wondered what should they do.

I realized that my passion for the issue of incarceration was the reason that I couldn’t write about it directly. A novel is not me, as a writer, telling the reader what I already know. And an honest novel is not about me pretending to take on “both sides” of an issue about which I have a clear opinion. I had to start with my issue and then walk away from it until I found the thing I didn’t know. To truly challenge the reader, I had to challenge myself as well.

 

Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. She is the author of four novels, including An American Marriage, forthcoming in February from Algonquin Books. Her website is www.tayarijones.com.

 

Craft Capsule: Gin and Scotch Tape

by
Sandra Beasley
5.2.17
Online Only

This is the eleventh in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each Tuesday for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Years ago a distinguished poet hosted our class’s workshops at her home in Virginia. The house was perched on an incline; down the hill was her writing cabin alongside a pond. We met at her dining room table and tried not to be distracted by the hawks swooping outside the windows.

A student brought in a draft that compared the scent of gin to Scotch tape. Setting aside all other matters of theme or craft, the discussion lingered on this comparison. The simile was bright and original. But was it accurate? That only a few in the room had ever sampled gin, and even then only of an aristrocrat variety, did not aid our analysis.

Reaching her limit, the professor sprang up from the table. “We’re settling this,” she said. She walked into the kitchen and retrieved a roll of Scotch tape. She went to a corner of the dining room, opened a cabinet, and pulled out a bottle. She walked the gin around the table so we could sniff accordingly.

Lesson one? To compare the scents of Scotch tape and gin doesn’t quite work, because the former obscures the latter’s floral qualities.

Lesson two? Always be prepared to have your simile put to the test.

Lesson three? Never let a turn of figurative language, no matter how vivid or clever, hijack what you’re trying to say. I can’t remember who wrote that poem, or where its heart lay. I only remember the gin and Scotch tape. 

 

Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.

Craft Capsule: Left Brain, Right Brain
Craft Capsule: The Art of Targeted Revision
Craft Capsule: Beware the Indeterminate “It”
Craft Capsule: Left Brain, Right Brain

Craft Capsule: Real Time vs. Page Time

by
Wiley Cash
9.26.17
Online Only

This is the twentieth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each Tuesday for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Several years ago I worked with a student who was writing a novel about a guy training for a career in the sport of mixed martial arts. The novel was exciting and interesting, and the writing was strong and compelling. Until the fighting began. The minute the bell rang and the fists and feet started flying, the pace of the narrative turned glacial.

This may come as a surprise to you; it certainly surprised me. The talented author was actually a former MMA fighter, so it seemed impossible that he was unable to write an exciting fight scene. Then I realized that fight scenes are rarely exciting on the page. I believe this is true for two reasons. First, a fistfight is a process, and processes rarely make for compelling reading. Second, fistfights are exciting because they unfold in real time, which is wholly different than page time.

I want to talk about process first. Process is part of our daily lives, and many of the processes we undertake are performed through rote memory: brushing our teeth, making coffee, pouring cereal. These processes aren’t very interesting, and they don’t really need to be written about in detail. Readers may need to know that your characters drink coffee, eat cereal, and brush their teeth, but they don’t need to see this happening. Telling them it happened is enough. This is an example of when telling should be privileged over showing. But sometimes you may want to show a process, especially if it proves a level of expertise. Perhaps you’re writing about a character who is skilled with firearms, and you want to show that level of knowledge and skill. Perhaps you should have a scene in which the character goes through the process of breaking down and cleaning a firearm.

Most often, when readers start down the road of reading about process they’re not interested in the process itself; they’re interested in the outcome. The fight scenes in my student’s mixed martial arts novel are a good example. While the scenes were very technical and showed the same level of skill and mastery that I just mentioned, as a reader I quickly became bogged down in the descriptions of the movements, and I lost a sense of the movements themselves. I found myself skipping through the process of the fight in order to discover whether or not our hero won the fight. I realized that as a reader I was more interested in the outcome than I was in the process. The scene hinged on the result of the fight as an event, not on the act of fighting.

Not only were the fight scenes weighed down by process, they were also slowed down by the act of reading. Let’s step out of the ring. Think about the fights or dustups or schoolyard shoving matches you’ve witnessed. How long did they last before someone stepped in or called the parents or the teachers came running? Thirty seconds? A minute? A few minutes, tops? These events almost always unfold very quickly. The movements are fast; words are exchanged at a rapid clip. Your eyes and ears are able to take in the movements and the verbal exchanges simultaneously. Now, imagine trying to portray these events verbatim on the page. Think about how many words would be required to nail down both the movements and the dialogue. It would take much longer to read that scene than it would to witness it.

There’s an old writerly saying that dialogue isn’t speech, but rather an approximation of speech. Sometimes, this is true of action, especially in terms of process. 

 

Wiley Cash is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Last Ballad, A Land More Kind Than Home, and This Dark Road to Mercy. He currently serves as the writer in residence at the University of North Carolina in Asheville and teaches in the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA program. He lives with his wife and two young daughters in Wilmington, North Carolina. His website is www.wileycash.com.

Craft Capsule: The Art of Active Dialogue

by
Wiley Cash
9.12.17
Online Only

This is the nineteenth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each Tuesday for a new Craft Capsule.

***

When I work with new writers, one thing I often notice is their lack of faith in their dialogue: They don’t trust that it’s strong enough to stand on its own. They feel that they must add something to really get the point across. These writers add action words to their dialogue tags in an attempt to hide any flaws they fear may be hiding in their characters’ verbal interactions. In other words, they do everything they can to make certain that the reader gets the full import of what the characters are attempting, consciously or unconsciously, to communicate.

Often, and unfortunately, these action words take the form of gerunds. Let me follow this with a caveat: Gerunds in dialogue tags are not always a bad thing if they’re used purposefully and sparingly. I use them. Other writers I admire use them. But if I’ve used a gerund in a dialogue tag then I can defend it because I’ve already spent a good deal of time trying to consider whether or not to use it.

The gerunds in dialogue tags that bother me are the ones that are clearly there to underpin weakness in the dialogue. This happens when writers feel they need an action to complement a line of dialogue. Here’s an example:

“What do you mean?” he asked, shrugging his shoulders.

Let’s add an adverb and make that gerund really awful.

“What do you mean?” he asked, shrugging his shoulders nervously.

The writer (in this case, me) felt the need to add that gerund (and perhaps the adjective as well) because the dialogue itself was pretty weak. “What do you mean?” is a boring question. Anyone can ask this, but your character can’t just be anyone. He has to be a particular person with particular turns of phrase and particular movements (what are often called “beats” in dialogue) to flesh out what he means.

Let’s give it another try, and this time let’s write a better line of dialogue that essentially says the same thing as our original, just more clearly.

“What am I supposed to say to that?” He shrugged his shoulders. “What does that even mean?”

I tinkered a little with the original line and split it into two, but I divided the two lines with the beat of action. I feel like my two lines are pretty strong, and they seem particular to this person, whoever he is. Because my dialogue is strong, it doesn’t need the support of action. So my action can stand alone.

The action also does something the dialogue cannot do. It illustrates visually what the dialogue means verbally. The phrase “What am I supposed to say to that?” is a phrase of exasperation, so the action takes this a step further and shows exasperation. The follow-up question of “What does that even mean?” amplifies both the original question and the action.

If I had kept the gerund shrugging it would have combined the dialogue and the action, which crowds the reader’s mind in asking her or him to do two things at once: see and hear. Let’s focus on asking one thing of our reader at a time. The act of reading is not the act of movie watching, which often requires viewers both to see and hear at the same time. Literature and film cannot do the same things in the same ways.

The gerund shrugging is also a weak action word because it does not have a clearly demarcated time of beginning. How long has this guy been shrugging? After all, we enter the word “shrugging,” and presumably the dialogue, as the shrugging is already under way. On the other hand, when we read the line “He shrugged his shoulders” we are entering the action at the moment it begins. It has not been unfold-ing since an indeterminate moment in time. The action feels particular, as if it is caused by the line of dialogue that precedes it. It gives us a chance both to digest the dialogue and imagine the action. It does not ask us to do both at the same time with the confusion of wondering when the shrugging actually began. This is deliberate writing. We should all be deliberate writers.

I want to close with a few lines of dialogue from my upcoming novel, The Last Ballad. In this scene, a man has just come up a riverbank and met a small boy standing at a crossroad. The boy is staring down into a ditch where his injured dog is lying. The man asks the boy where they are.

The boy lifted his eyes from the ditch and looked around as if getting his bearings.

“Gaston,” the boy finally said.

“Gaston,” he repeated. He looked down at the boy. “Do you mean Gaston County?”

The boy shrugged.

“Mama just says ‘Gaston’ when she says ‘here.’”

I worked really hard on this scene. I wanted it to communicate an edge of laconic strangeness. The boy’s poverty has rendered him a bit provincial. The man’s travels have rendered him a bit wistful. I purposefully separated the actions from the lines of dialogue and cordoned them off in their own sentences.

But what if I’d used gerunds?

“Gaston,” the boy finally said, lifting his eyes from the ditch and looking around as if getting his bearings.

“Gaston,” he repeated, looking down at the boy. “Do you mean Gaston County?”

“Mama just says ‘Gaston’ when she says ‘here,’” the boy said, shrugging.

Written this way, the scene unfolds too quickly. The boy gives his answer about their location before getting his bearings. The man’s quizzical repetition of the word “Gaston” is marred by his deliberate action of looking down at the boy. The words and the actions do not go together. They must be separated and addresses and experienced on their own terms.

My advice is this: Trust your dialogue. If you don’t, make it stronger. Then, once your dialogue is strong, bring in action beats that amplify the speaker’s message, not messy gerunds that clutter it.

 

Wiley Cash is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Last Ballad, A Land More Kind Than Home, and This Dark Road to Mercy. He currently serves as the writer in residence at the University of North Carolina in Asheville and teaches in the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA program. He lives with his wife and two young daughters in Wilmington, North Carolina. His website is www.wileycash.com.

 

Craft Capsule: Beware the Indeterminate “It”
Craft Capsule: Making Conversation
Craft Capsule: Find Your Metaphor
Craft Capsule: Beware the Indeterminate “It”
Craft Capsule: Left Brain, Right Brain
Craft Capsule: Good Sense
Craft Capsule: Left Brain, Right Brain
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February 20, 2018, 6:00 am
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Reflex/Response: Kaveh Akbar at the Poetry Center of Chicago

February 20, 2018, 7:00 am
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Natasha Mijares is an artist, writer, curator, and educator. She received her MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited at MECA International Art Fair in Puerto Rico, Sullivan Galleries, TCC Chicago, and Locust Projects and has been published in Container, Calamity, Vinyl Poetry, Bear Review, and Hypertext Magazine. She is a teaching artist for the Poetry Center of Chicago’s creative literacy residency program in Chicago public schools, Hands on Stanzas, and curates and hosts the Six Points Reading Series.

The Poetry Center of Chicago (PCC) was founded in 1974, and we work hard to promote poetry in Chicago through readings, workshops, and arts education. Something that I have been working on at PCC is to offer more workshops for adults. Last year, we had a poetry and dance workshop with Ana Castillo and the nonprofit organization Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble, thanks to the generous support of Poets & Writers’ Readings & Workshops program. With this continued support, I was able to organize a morning workshop with poet Kaveh Akbar as well as an evening reading and discussion with him and Tarfia Faizullah that took place on January 26. 

The workshop sign-up was open to the public and took place at Loyola University Chicago. We had twenty-three participants from all kinds of backgrounds, ages, and places in the city. Kaveh Akbar opened up the workshop by discussing the unique architecture of our psychic algorithms and how this allows us to create a restorative experience of language that is uniquely our own. He led two activities to be used as sustainable tools for the writing practice.

The first activity incorporated a “bibliomanic” response in which each participant picked words from poetry books that stood out to them. After acquiring a pile of dazzling words and ideas, the participants were able to craft their own poems and the responses were energetic, playful, and provocative. The second activity was the “one-word story.” In groups of three, two participants began a poem by saying one word at a time and the third participant acted as the scribe. Again, the activity was a trust of the psyche as opposed to any premeditated plan. Akbar stressed how certainty is the death of a poem and how we should trust our reflexive responses.

The workshop participants and the PCC staff had a wonderful experience. One of the participants noted: “He was a great teacher—full of curiosity and fun, and he shared that infectiously with us. Akbar’s prompts were really wonderful, they allowed me to get into writing immediately, and led to a great output of work for myself, and it seemed, for others too. I’m so grateful the center was able to offer this workshop for free.”

In the evening, both poets opened by reading Chicago poets. Tarfia Faizullah read a poem from Fatimah Asghar’s forthcoming debut collection, If They Come for Us (One World, 2018), and Akbar read “off white” by Nate Marshall, before reading from their own collections along with some new work.

Thanks to the support of a micro grant from Illinois Humanities, we were able to have the poets lead a discussion following the reading. Akbar used the space to interview Faizullah about her new book and the discussion lead to questions about Muslim identity, epigenetics, and when to address the self. The audience contributed questions and feedback that pulled us toward the roots of each poet’s work. It made for an evening of honest, warm, and powerful celebrations of poetry and the community that builds it together.

Editor’s Note: For more on Kaveh Akbar, read “The Whole Self: Our Thirteenth Annual Look at Debut Poets” from the January/February 2018 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. You can also hear Tarfia Faizullah read from her new poetry collection, Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf Press, 2018), in the eighteenth episode of Ampersand: The Poets & Writers Podcast.

Support for Readings & Workshops in Chicago is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

Photos: (top) Natasha Mijares (Credit: German Caceres). (middle) Reading attendees (Credit: Natasha Mijares). (bottom) Kaveh Akbar and Tarfia Faizullah (Credit: Natasha Mijares).
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Oliver Baez Bendorf

February 20, 2018, 11:46 pm
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With whom do you prefer to work?: 
Adults
Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender
Teachers
Iowa
In which languages are you fluent?: 
English
How do you want to identify yourself?: 
Feminist
G/L/B/T
Latino/Latina
Puerto Rican
First Name: 
Oliver
Last Name: 
Baez Bendorf
Born in (Country): 
United States
Born in (City): 
Iowa City
Photo of the Author: 
completed
Listed as: 
Poet
Are you interested in giving readings?: 
Yes
Yes
Are you willing to travel to give readings?: 
Yes
Website: 
https://oliverbendorf.org/
Private E-mail: 
oliver.bendorf@gmail.com
Application Accepted: 
Application Accepted
Madison, WI
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Asymmetry

February 21, 2018, 6:00 am
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Maggie O’Farrell

February 22, 2018, 6:00 am
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“Everything you live through changes you, inevitably, and I think as you change, your writing changes.” Maggie O’Farrell speaks about receiving Specsavers Bestseller Awards for four of her novels, including The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007), and how she has evolved as a writer. O’Farrell’s debut memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death (Knopf, 2018), is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Tags: 
Maggie O’Farrell | The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt | I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death | Knopf | 2018 | Specsavers Bestseller Awards | Page One | March/April 2018
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