Jennings, Brittany – Page 25 – Willow Springs Magazine

Issue 78: Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum

About Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum

Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum is the author of two collections of short fiction, This Life She’s Chosen and Swimming With Strangers (both published by Chronicle Books). Her fiction has appeared previously in Willow Springs, as well as One Story, The American Scholar, and elsewhere. She’s been the recipient of a PEN/O. Henry Prize, and she is currently a Jack Straw Writing Fellow. She teaches at the Hugo House and at a private high school. She lives with her husband and their young children near Seattle and can be found online at http://www.kirstenlunstrum.net and on Facebook.

Check out her Willow Springs Interview here.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Dear Mistress”

“Dear Mistress” began as a response to a prompt I was given when I read for the Hugo House Lit Series in Seattle a couple years ago. The prompt was to write about/around the idea of the American Dream, and as I wrestled with where to take that, I thought more and more about the distance between that dream and the reality of most families’ lives. I wanted to write about that distance—the illusion versus the reality.

That same autumn I had begun teaching high school English, and I was suddenly immersed in the voices and lives of teenagers—and in the YA literature they were reading (which I loved). It returned me to my own teenage self, and I remembered how hard it was to let go of my childhood view of reality, and how painful it was to individuate from my parents (to whom I’d always been very close). Elisabeth is wrestling with the same struggles here. She has to separate from her parents—from her childhood—but it hurts. She has to distinguish childhood illusion from adult reality, and that hurts too. I think this is a tension a lot of teens feel, though, and I wanted to dig into that tension in this story.

The other thing I remembered early in the writing process was how much I loved soap operas when I was a teenager. I used to rush home from high school to watch Days of Our Lives. (There’s a shameful bit of personal trivia for you!) When I started drafting “Dear Mistress,” Elisabeth’s dad was unemployed (and that was another subplot in itself), but I quickly saw the fun (and the metaphorical benefit) of casting him as a soap writer instead. There’s no more delusional version of reality than the soaps!

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

I’ve been working for a couple of years on a longer narrative—unrelated to “Dear Mistress,” but also centered on a family in the midst of a divorce—and (maybe inevitably) my listening life has been infiltrated by songs of romantic sorrow. The Avett Brothers’ album I and Love and You played on fairly continuous repeat in my car for several months, along with a few equally sad songs—Outkast’s “Hey Ya,” The Wailin’ Jennys’ “Firecracker,” and Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine.” I love the range of emotions a song can tackle in the contrast between lyrics and music. Listening to these, I felt reminded that the dissolution of love is as complex as love’s making.

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Issue 78: Brandi Nicole Martin

About Brandi Nicole Martin

Brandi Nicole Martin’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Washington Square Review, Nashville Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Salt Hill, Crab Orchard Review, Harpur Palate, and the minnesota review, among others. She is at work on an MFA in poetry at Florida State University, where she was the recipient of the 2016 Emerging Writer’s Spotlight award, selected by D.A. Powell.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Two Poems”

I’m often drawn to wreckage, but especially since a near-fatal car accident I survived in 2008. I was thrown from the car and pinned under; most of my calf was burned down to tendons. I was in a coma for four days. I’d broken both my legs and shattered my left hip. My family was told I wouldn’t last the ambulance ride, and then that I’d never walk again. But I made a full recovery—I walk, I run—and though I spent a long time busting ass in hospitals, in therapy groups, with canes, pain pills, and wheelchairs, that time of my life is now mostly vague memory.

“They write Died at the scene” began where I was forced to revisit. Todd and I were driving home from a holiday spent with my parents, and we saw this burning husk of a car on the side of the road. Despite my protests we pulled over, and when he ran to help I noticed everything—the smoke, the height of the flames, a lone lifeless body in a ditch—and I was struck by the messiness of surviving. The poem’s end surprised me the most—the meta-poetic idea of studying poetry and finding patterns in language mirrored the patterns in my own life, life which bleeds directly and honestly into my poems, and patterns which are often destructive and inescapable. I’ll never know why I was thrown from my car, and I’ll never know why others were stuck who more deserved a second chance. But I know, and the poem knows, that the stench of smoke can linger forever in your skin. This poem was an attempt to show the thorny underbelly of happiness, how some things won’t ever leave you, and how that’s not necessarily bad.

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

Probably predictably, for me music is akin to religious experience. It’s a huge and ritualistic part of my writing process, a way to deal with significant emotional upheavals (aplenty), and I have something playing at all times. I like messy stuff, bone-chilling falsettos, reverb, blues riffs, and wails.

I’ve always said the first love of my life was Jeff Buckley. When I was younger he was the gateway to other good music (his Bob Dylan and Nina Simone covers got me hunting for more), but mostly his inhuman voice and uncut alt-soul-blues sound sent me to the moon. Sometimes I put him to the side to fend off emotions he only amplifies, but lately I’ve been remembering the rapture of sadness and the perfect artistry that goes into capturing that. Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, a posthumous release with an unfinished vibe, has been on repeat for a month. Songs like “The Sky Is A Landfill” and “Yard of Blonde Girls” are dirty, sexy, and very devil-may-care (“the garbage dump of souls” and “the streets where Lola played”), and that’s totally where I’m at right now. Any Jeff Buckley lover knows that a simple intake of breath or a certain inflection on a certain lyric can make the entire song. “Opened Once” is another I’ve had on repeat from this album, a perfect example of that. To me, Jeff Buckley is king of pining, and that’s what I’m about ninety percent of the time, which I’m told isn’t all bad. Who knows?

I was late to the game on another current favorite—Wowee Zowee by Pavement, most specifically the song “AT&T.” The lyrics in it (and others) are just complete nonsense, which I love. “Maybe someone’s gonna save me. My heart is made of gravy.” Et cetera.

Two Poems by Brandi Nicole Martin

Found in Willow Springs 78 Back to Author Profile FOR THEN THE EYES OF THE BLIND SHALL BE OPENED TO TODD Todd on the front porch. Todd in the side … Read more

About About Genevieve Plunkett

Genevieve Plunkett lives in Vermont with her husband and two young children.

See more from her online at the New England Review— here and here— and Mud Season Review— here and here.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Schematic”

“Schematic” began as a short screenplay written for a class during my first year of college. I attended college in my hometown, so at the time, I was still living at my parents’ house. My dad had a collection of vintage pinball machines in the basement that I would go home and play whenever school got to be too stressful (like, if a boy talked to me, or if someone complimented my shoes). Other times, I would walk in the front door and hear my dad playing, the chimes of the game coming up through the floorboards. It’s an old house, so it was always a kind of haunting experience. At one point, the lights on one of the games weren’t functioning properly and my dad went around studying the schematic like a crazy person, trying to figure out how to fix it.

Last year, when I decided to rewrite “Schematic” as a short story, I was surprised to find that the words were already there. I didn’t have to think about it at all – they just came out of my pen. As someone who likes to ponder and revise, I was extremely suspicious of this process and put the story away for a while, just in case I was having some kind of lapse in judgement. But I was still happy with it when I looked at it later, so I sent it out. I wish this would happen again, but it would probably require black magic.

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

I still listen to the same music that I did when I was thirteen: Radiohead, Oingo Boingo, David Bowie, Captain Beefheart—with the exception of Daft Punk, which I found later and, for two years now, has overtaken my life. It’s not that I haven’t found anything better, it’s just that I can’t stop listening long enough to search. My children are just as bad. Right now, they are obsessed with The Velvet Underground. The four-year-old likes the way Lou Reed sings, “I can’t stand it anymore,” —“ I key-Ant stand it any Mo-Ah Mo-Ah!” The two-year-old is fascinated by lines like, “Caught his hand in the door/ Dropped his teeth on the floor.” I understand this totally. Music was my introduction to the strangeness of words. I remember being five, trying to find out what the hell the lyrics to Bowie’s Life on Mars were about. I’m pretty sure that I became a writer just to take back some of the power those lyrics (and others) had over me.

Booze: I used to write for a wine and spirits magazine. People expect me to know what to order at a bar, but I don’t. I still don’t know what to order.

I have one tattoo. I want another. The problem is that I can’t decide if I actually want one, or just want the experience of getting one. It is a very succinct kind of pain—wholly satisfying. I would get a Jean de Bosschere illustration on the inside of my arm—the one where the guy with the tall hat is sawing the leg off a giant horse. It would be so cool.

“Schematic” by Genevieve Plunkett

Found in Willow Springs 77 Back to Author Profile THE INSIDE OF TOBY’S HEAD was lined with plaid and could be packed like a suitcase. It reminded Toby of the pattern … Read more

About Nick Fuller Googins

A graduate of the Rutgers-Newark MFA Program, Nick now lives in Venice, California. His fiction has been read on NPR’s All Things Considered, and has appeared in Narrative, ZYZZYVA, Oxford American, Shenandoah, The Common, and elsewhere. He volunteers as a writing mentor for the organizations 826LA and We Are Not Numbers.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Honeymoon Bandits”

My stories usually evolve from situations or characters rather than language, but when this line popped into my head—“We coined them the Honeymoon Bandits and we were pleased with our name”—I just went with it. That first line didn’t survive the final rounds of revision, but those original thirteen words told me a lot: the story would be written in first-person plural; it would feature a pair of young lovebird outlaws; and, most importantly, the community would feel a strong sense of pride and ownership for the Bandits. This is the only story I’ve written in first-person plural, and it took a number of drafts before I decided upon the scope of the “we.” For inspiration I turned to Alice Elliott Dark’s fantastic, “Watch the Animals,” told from the collective perspective of a small town. At first I tried something similar, by writing from the perspective of only Provincetown. I then extended the “we” to include all the mothers of Cape Cod, which in turn became all the parents. My hope was that the improbability of such an encompassing collective narration (the Cape is a big place!) would lend the story a slightly-absurdist, comic-booky feel that in turn would help the ending work. As for content, I began writing in early 2014, when I was living in New York and experiencing an acute case of Global Warming Anxiety because of an unseasonably warm December. I wanted to bring to life a cadre of people who don’t only worry about the fate of the planet but (unlike me) actually do something, and more than simply signing petitions or writing letters to Congress. A friend of mine, when I outlined an early idea of what I was going for, dubbed it “political fantasy.” What a fantastic name for a genre.

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

In the morning, before coffee and writing, I like to jump in place to music for five or so minutes. Sometimes my wife joins me. It’s great for waking up, shaking out the sleep, or dulling a very tiny hangover. For well over a year I jumped to one of two songs: “Adelaide” by Chadwick Stokes, or “Home,” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes. Lately, however, I’ve been listening to the radio again and rediscovering the joy of coming across long-forgotten or entirely new songs. Social Distortion’s “Story of My Life” came into my jumping rotation this way, as did Le Tigre’s “TKO” and, thanks to 91.5 KUSC, the Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi. I think I’m secretly hoping to become one of those happy 103-year-olds who are always being asked, “What’s your secret?” I love simple self-improvement tips and short-cuts, and it would give me such joy to have one to offer: “Five minutes of jumping before breakfast! It’s that easy! Really!”

“Honeymoon Bandits” by Nick Fuller Googins

Found in Willow Springs 77 Back to Author Profile THOSE OF US PRESENT at the first holdup in January couldn’t let the fact be forgotten. Over coffee and donuts, at the … Read more

About Paige Lewis

Paige Lewis is the copy editor at Divedapper and serves as an assistant poetry editor at Narrative Magazine. Their poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as New Orleans Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Bennington Review, and elsewhere.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on "Open Your Windows in Welcome"

I often try to finish people’s stories for them. If my friend is telling me about a strange interaction she had with a supermarket cashier, I’ll interrupt with a million guesses until we’re both exhausted: “Did he try to smell your hair?” “He poked holes in the bread, didn’t he?” “No wait! Did he think you stole something?” When I read poetry, I try to fight against this urge to know before being told, but sometimes I give in, scanning the stanzas for indications of how the poem will end. This isn’t always a bad thing. In my quick scan, I often read a word or a line wrong, and create a new image that I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. I started writing “Open Your Windows in Welcome” after misreading ‘spit-shined’ as ‘split-shinned’ in a poem. I found the image of someone or something staggering toward me very unsettling, and I wanted to play with that uneasiness within the poem.

I wrote this poem in early August shortly after moving into a house with people I hardly knew. While August in Florida — with its humidity and its bugs and its burning seatbelt buckles — is already pretty unbearable, it was especially difficult this year because I had to adjust to living in a house where the temperature inside matched the temperature outside. I decided to write a poem rather than complaining to my friends about it, but I’m sure I complained anyway.

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

I listen to Colin Stetson’s New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges nearly every time I write. Even if I weren’t a huge fan of this album, which sounds like how I’d imagine a conversation between an extraterrestrial and a Neanderthal might sound, I’d still be impressed by the fact that Stetson recorded it all in one take. I’ve listened to this album so often while writing that my brain now clicks into poetry mode whenever I hear it. It’s fantastic, but I understand it’s not for everyone. When I played New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges for my students during a writing assignment, one student mumbled, “This is what anxiety sounds like.”

The album Romance, Conflict, Adventure by Best Friends Forever is another current favorite. The songs are all about the goofiest kinds of loving. In the song “Eisenhower is the Father,” the band thanks Eisenhower for the interstate highway system because it makes visiting long distance boyfriends easier, and “Ghost Song” is about how much cooler a ghost boyfriend would be compared to a living one. There’s so much joy packed into this thirty-minute album. It makes me want to dance, smooch my partner, and pet a million dogs all at once.

“Open Your Windows in Welcome” by Paige Lewis

Found in Willow Springs 77 Back to Author Profile August is split-shinned lurching into your front yard. It laps at the dog’s water and leaves a layer of slime that shines … Read more

About James Kimbrell

James Kimbrell was born in Jackson, Mississippi. He has published two previous volumes of poetry, The Gatehouse Heaven, and My Psychic, and was co-translator of Three Poets of Modern Korea: Yi Sang, Hahm Dong-Seon, and Choi Young-Mi. His work has appeared in magazines such as Poetry, The Cincinnati Review, Ploughshares, Field, The New Guard, and Best American Poetry, 2012. He has been the recipient of the Discovery / The Nation Award, a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He currently resides in Tallahassee where he teaches in the creative writing program at Florida State University.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on "First Publication"

“First Publication” began from a somewhat meta-poetic impulse to write a poem about a bizarre event that began when I, an unpublished poet, sent poems out to The Quarterly in 1990, a journal edited by Gordon Lish for Random House. I submitted there on a lark— a friend of mine had submitted and was astonished by how quickly Lish responded, and as I was about to leave for my annual military duty at Camp Shelby in South Mississippi, I thought a rejection from Lish might at least punctuate the boredom of my Army drills. When I received an unexpected acceptance from Lish, he also sent stamps, requesting more work.

Naturally, I neglected my military duties, hot on the trail of new poems for Gordon Lish. One night, after lights-out in the barracks, I fled to the latrine and sat on the toilet writing until about 3 a.m. when I heard my platoon sergeant summoning everyone to the training field for our annual fitness test, an event I’d completely forgotten, flush as I was with my newfound literary success. After doing my sit-ups and push-ups, I lost consciousness and was rushed to the hospital at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, and that’s where “First Publication” picks up. I wrote most of the poem in one sitting then revised it over a period of weeks, weeding, changing things, changing things back.

Muse Manor and Sergeant Laughter are true details, a case in which experience provided facts so strange that I found myself wanting to tone things down for the sake of believability, an impulse that I was, alas, able to resist.

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

I have no tattoos and generally choose coffee over food or alcohol.

I do, however, have a new dog, Tallulah, a one-eyed miniature pinscher / Chihuahua puppy that may well have been a cockatoo in a previous life. She was picked up by the pound after wandering the streets of Tallahassee with her sibling and remained at the shelter when her original owner arrived to retrieve his runaways, opting to leave Tallulah behind because of the eye she was born without. How could a person give a dog such a beautiful name, only to abandon the dog for cosmetic reasons? My wife found Tallulah online and fell in love. “But we already have three dogs,” I protested. Of course, once I saw Tallulah, I was a goner.

Now Tallulah has become the star of the show around here, shadowing our movements, wrecking my day with longing every time I leave the house. She’s tiny, maybe five pounds, and likes to climb up and lick my face, somehow managing to stay there even when I’m walking around, like a cockatoo perched on a pirate’s shoulder.

Maybe it’s the wisdom of blind Tiresias, or the empathy I’ve always felt for Homer’s Cyclops, an underdog if there ever was one, or maybe it’s blind Homer himself, or the abundance of gifted blind musicians, but I’ve always associated blindness, visual deficits of any kind, with a certain brand of seeing that imparts more wisdom than image, more knowing than witnessing.

I wouldn’t want to burden Tallulah with my own associations, but her sweetness is good counsel, and her carefree nature sets the right tone for my days lately. I feel an Ode to Tallulah coming on.

A dog might wish for a better poet, but no poet could wish for a better dog.

Three Poems by James Kimbrell

Found in Willow Springs 77 Back to Author Profile FIRST PUBLICATION I passed out in the barracks after reading the letter. The ambulance dropped me at Muse Manor. I was the … Read more

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About Annah Browning

Annah Browning is a Ph.D. candidate in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois-Chicago. She is the author of a chapbook, The Marriage, published by Horse Less Press, and her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Boulevard, Painted Bride Quarterly, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. Links to her work and periodic updates on albino alligators and other oddities are available at her website, www.annahbrowning.com.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Two Poems”

In the past year, I have spent a lot of time reading and thinking about witches—as feminist figures, as outsiders, and as irascible and powerful women generally. Witches—those accused of witchcraft historically, those represented in folklore, and those so self-defined—are often women on the margins of society, whether by choice or by exile. As I read, I began to imagine the voice of an older witch talking to a younger one who is still figuring out how to live alone and on her own terms. “Witch Doctrine” then emerged.

I have also been researching ghost narratives. I’ve read many ghost stories, historical and cultural histories of ghosts, and fallen down podcast rabbit holes listening to everyday people’s ghost encounters. (A personal podcast favorite: a shadowy figure approaches a terrified small boy in bed, only to whisper “happy birthday” in an incredibly earnest way.) What struck me was that in my favorite ghost stories, encounters with the dead are rather small and couched in the mundane. Many have the ability for double-reading you find in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw—these occurrences could be supernatural, or they could be the product of a lonely or distorted mind, a momentary shiver in perception, a palpable unease brought about by low frequency sound. (This last is a real phenomenon and possible explanation for ghosts, by the way—look it up.) “Dear Ghost” turned out to be one of my love letters to this kind of ghost story—the small ghosts, the quiet, un-spectacular hauntings that fill our lives. “Dear Ghost,” like “Witch Doctrine,” surprised me by also ending up being a poem about loneliness—though this speaker, instead of accepting her aloneness as the witch does, continues her search for connection, even if it is with the dead.

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

Since I don’t have any pets currently (much to my sadness, since I love animals), I will fill you in on the predatory animals in proximity to me. When I visit my family in rural upstate South Carolina, black bears become one of the things I have to worry about. We have a family of them, a mother and two cubs, living in a cave on our land. I enjoy taking walks in the woods by myself, and since I like watching the deer and the many very stupid wild turkeys that also live in our woods, I refuse to wear a bear bell or carry a gun. (A bear bell, for the uninitiated, is a bell you wear to broadcast your presence in the woods, so as not to startle bears going about bear business, since, apparently, they are more likely to attack when surprised.) So far, I am still un-mauled.

When I am in Chicago, I work beneath a family of peregrine falcons, who nest on top of University Hall at the University of Illinois-Chicago. My first day on campus, I walked out of the building to see a pair of pigeon wings, fully intact and missing their owner, as if the smallest, dirtiest angel had fallen. That was how I found out about the falcons’ existence. The female’s name is Nitz, and her mate is named Mouse, who is described in news articles as “a male of unusually small size.” There is a falcon cam online every spring, where you can watch them feed their white fluffy eyasses (the delightful proper word for falcon chicks). These birds are beautiful, and they frequently land on ledges outside your office windows to size you up for meat. I love them.

Two Poems by Annah Browning

Found in Willow Springs 77 Back to Author Profile WITCH DOCTRINE The old ones say to draw your broom across the step, then pull the latch. On the snow’s … Read more

About Hadara Bar-Nadav

Hadara Bar-Nadav’s newest book of poetry, The New Nudity, is forthcoming from Saturnalia Books in 2017. She is also the author of Lullaby (with Exit Sign) (Saturnalia Boks, 2013), awarded the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize; The Frame Called Ruin (New Issues, 2012), Runner Up for the Green Rose Prize; and A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight (Margie/Intuit House, 2007), awarded the Margie Book Prize. In addition, she is the author of two chapbooks, Fountain and Furnace (Tupelo Press, 2015), awarded the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, and Show Me Yours (Laurel Review/Green Tower Press 2010), awarded the Midwest Poets Series Prize. She is also co-author of the best-selling textbook Writing Poems, 8th ed. (Pearson/Longman, 2011). Hadara is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on "Latch"

“Latch” is the first poem I wrote directly about my son and my experience with early motherhood. The poem explores the idea of “the latch”—the term for when a baby latches onto the breast and feeds—as well as the metaphor of a metal latch for locking a case or chest. I was absolutely amazed that my body knew how to be pregnant and how to make me swell with milk whenever my son needed it.

“Latch” is a tonally cool poem that explores the weird, layered mechanics of breastfeeding. At times, my body was on auto-pilot, machine-like and marvelous (“I sense the metal/ of you and gush // under your clamp”). This is dream-feeding, when my son and my body would force me awake to nurse, propelling me forward to accomplish this singular task at 2 or 4 or 6 in the morning.

A phrase like “my glandular/affection” speaks to the strange, almost inexplicable relationship between the body’s ability to provide food, to become food, and the simultaneous swelling of emotion that accompanies breastfeeding—love, sadness, joy, isolation, etc. I found myself wondering if my love for my son could manifest itself in the production of milk and a desire to want to feed him. It also occurred to me that his unyielding demand for milk (usually every 2-3 hours morning and night, which is not unusual for newborns) was a way that his body enforced our bond and my near-constant contact with him—another kind of “latch.” Of course, there are many other ways to express love for, bond with, and feed an infant. But in those early months of my son’s life, reality and cause and effect warped and bent in their own ways and generated surprising insights.

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

Lately, I’ve been enjoying Wilco’s new album Star Wars. I’ve played the song “Satellite” many, many times. When I’m home with my son, I sometimes feel like Wilco is the satellite, or I am the satellite, or my son is, and we are all rotating around one another, singing. And lately I’ve been thinking that poems are satellites, emitting their small energy and receiving it every time they are read. “Latch” appears in my new book of poems about objects, The New Nudity, forthcoming from Saturnalia Books in 2017. [Some of these poems also appear in the chapbook Fountain and Furnace (Tupelo Press, 2015)]. The objects I write about often have a startling, vibrant, and super-charged energy. As I write, I become the satellite, physically and imaginatively rotating around these objects and considering their visceral, sentient lives, though the objects feel like they circle and imagine me, too.

I have also been listening to The Beatles daily. My brother tells me I learned to walk to The Beatles. My father had all these 8-track tapes we would listen to in his rust-colored Cadillac on our way to go fishing at 4 in the morning. He would whistle along (he was a master whistler!). Now that I have a little boy, I listen to The Beatles to share with him my own sense of joy and wonder that I experienced as a child. My father passed away in 2007, and listening to The Beatles with my son also makes me feel like my father is with us.

Other musical loves: P.J. Harvey, James Brown, Aretha Franklin (which my son likes to dance to), Miles Davis (In a Silent Way has been especially on deck recently), Beck, Bjork, Sonic Youth, David Bowie, Charles Mingus, The Makeup, and others.

“Latch” by Hadara Bar-Nadav

Found in Willow Springs 77 Back to Author Profile I sense the metal of you and gush under your clamp. A crushing dream, blistering pulse. Salty pressure beating the blood between … Read more

About Carissa Halston

Carissa Halston’s short fiction has appeared in Fourteen Hills, The Massachusetts Review, The Collagist, and elsewhere. She currently runs a small press called Aforementioned Productions, edits a literary journal called apt, and is at work on a novel called Conjoined States and a short story collection called Emergency Exit.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Call It a Map”

I had been looking at job listings on Craigslist—which is an art form in itself—and I saw an ad for a sleep study that sought healthy individuals whose participation would aid residents on an international space station. As soon as I saw the details, I knew I would write a story about the study. I went so far as to sign up just so I could have some insight into the process and its related details, but I wasn’t selected, so I added complications to my narrator’s life, complications that enhanced and troubled her decision to take part in the study: most obviously, her disability (which presented me with many hours of research), but more importantly, her relationship with her sister, Tilly.

When I was working on the sisters’ characters, I wanted to hint at the idea that siblings grow up in comparison to each other, and Liz’s and Tilly’s adult relationship feeds off of what one can handle that the other can’t, and vice versa. But in childhood (at least, in Liz’s memories of her childhood), it was a simple case of loving resentment. They can’t bring themselves to ask, Why aren’t you exactly like me?And in their joint inability to ask, there comes generosity and self-condemnation—one sister allows the other so much room in her life that it winds up stifling them both.

Formally, I wanted to push sensory details as far as I could without relying on imagery, which meant I was allowed to choose similes and metaphors that wouldn’t fly in another story. All stories rely on internal logic, but I find the most cohesive narratives are those that use their plot details to inform their diction.

Notes on Reading

Reading informs everything I write. When I read something that remakes me as a reader—the sort of story that divides your life into before and after you read it—then I’m in student mode, trying to figure out how I can learn from the success of that narrative. Fiction writers who I feel are constantly teaching me: Amy Hempel (the structure of her stories is astoundingly tight), David Foster Wallace (his diction is unparalleled, plus he could be funny and sad in a single clause), and Italo Calvino, as translated by William Weaver (every word matters—every single word).

Right now, I’m reading Kathy Page’s Alphabet, Lydia Peelle’s Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing, Porochista Khakpour’s Sons and Other Flammable Objects, and Michelle Tea’s The Chelsea Whistle, all of which contain incredible, helpful lessons. To wit:

I’m in love with Peelle’s sentences. She creates these complex, layered problems out of odd, yet recognizable scenarios, and lures us in via these gorgeous sentences, e.g., she tells us that there might be a wild cat loose in a city, and everyone is obsessing over it: “In the houses, the big cat creeps nightly, making the rounds of dinner tables and dreams.” Compression, concision, and phonetically pleasing, to boot.

Khakpour’s novel is an endurance trial in scope and form. She’s covering a metric ton of ground historically, including the Iranian revolution, the history of Persian royalty, and the interaction between Xerxes, the protagonist, and his father, Darius, which works in a series of reversed expectations, and if that weren’t enough, her sentences are magnificently lengthy: “And so on a train to Istanbul—fleeing, seeking neutrality, anonymity, normalcy, suddenly, both seized with the alarming reality that they were running away, fleeing from their homes, maybe forever—they looked at their young son, humming obliviously in his mother’s lap, and she brought it up with tears in her eyes, and he agreed instantly, that of all the naysayings they had done in their time together, perhaps the one they feared and regretted and hoped hadn’t cursed them the most was the one in the time of their dark courtship, when they had both agreed that if they ever had a child it would be miserable, untalented, ugly, uninspired, a nothing of an offspring, the end they would both deserve: an error even, at best.”

I just started Page’s Alphabet because it’s about a heavily tattooed man in prison, and I’m working on a novel that features an incarcerated populace, and my protagonist (on his way to being heavily tattooed) is threatened with incarceration. Every decision he makes steers him toward or away from entrapment, and I want that threat to feel genuine, so in order to achieve a higher level of believability, I know I need to read as much as I can about prison, including other novels, and Page’s grabbed me because its structure is non-linear (instead of ABC, it’s BAC), and I’m a sucker for time tricks in fiction.

And lastly: Tea. This is the third book of hers I’ve read (the other two: Valencia and The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America), and though I bought The Chelsea Whistleyears ago, I’m reading it now because I’m moving home to Boston after almost two years away. Tea’s memoir is about growing up in Chelsea, a town adjacent to Boston, so it’s preparing me for life going forward. That’s my take on reading: with the right book, I can prepare for anything.

“Call it a Map” by Carissa Halston

Found in Willow Springs 87 Back to Author Profile WHAT I WOULD’VE GIVEN to have been a magician, to say, “Now you see me, now you don’t.” But Tilly says I … Read more

About Jess Walter

Jess Walter is the author of eight books, most recently the short story collection, We Live in Water, and the best-selling novel, Beautiful Ruins. He was a National Book Award finalist for The Zero, won the Edgar Alan Poe Award for Citizen Vince, has been a finalist for the PEN/USA Award in both fiction and nonfiction and twice has won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. His short fiction has appeared Best American Short Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Harpers, Esquire, Tin House, McSweeneys and many others. He lives with his wife and children in his childhood home of Spokane.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Cheston!”

The ingredients for any single story are so random. You meet someone named Cheston. You write an essay about Donald Barthelme’s incredible story ‘The School,’ and it has you thinking about how that story moves from comic to slightly disturbing to sneakily profound. You think this is cool. Then you watch the first season of True Detective, and it pisses you off, goes from being darkly philosophical to a kind of cliched buddy-cop, southern-gothic bullshit. You hear yourself describe True Detective as a “Nihilist Happy Meal”—and this makes you think: who would order a nihilist happy meal? Next thing you know, you’re reading “Cheston” at Pie and Whiskey and people are laughing at it.

Notes on Reading

How does reading shape craft? Boy, how doesn’t it? I think the first impulse toward writing is to try to recreate those things that moved you as a reader. But I also react to things, think, Oh, no, it should be like this … like that. Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of the new memoir-tinged fiction (Knausgaard, Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, Jenny Offil, Sheila Heti) and when it’s done well, as those are, I think it can be sort of thrilling, taking away the coy sense of crafting that fiction writers often feel. But I also worry about this as a movement, a shrinking of the writer’s charge as nothing more than a looser memoir. I wrote in a review of TC Boyle’s newest novel that I fear a “selfie” movement in fiction because it seems to shrink the imagination. I think publishing should put a limit on the number of books about writers that can be published in one year.

“Cheston!” by Jess Walter

Found in Willow Springs 76 Back to Author Profile SOMETHING WAS THE MATTER with the baby. “He seems depressed,” said the father. “I don’t think babies can get depressed,” said the … Read more

Issue 66: A Conversation with Jess Walter

Interview in Willow Springs 66 Works in Willow Springs 67 and 58 February 20 & March 16 , 2010 Gabe Ehrnwald, Samuel Ligon, Brendan Lynaugh, and Shawn Vestal A CONVERSATION … Read more