Jennings, Brittany – Page 27 – Willow Springs Magazine

Issue 73: Gary Copeland Lilley

About Gary Copeland Lilley

Gary Copeland Lilley is the author of four poetry collections: Alpha Zulu (Ausable Press, 2008), Black Poem (Hollyridge Press, 2005), The Reprehensibles (Fractal Edge Press, 2004), and The Subsequent Blues (Four Way Books, 2004). He teaches in Port Townsend, Washington.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “A Proper Elegy for My Father”

I’m the oldest son, the oldest sibling, and I have had a contentious relationship with my father. I left home as soon as I could to get clear of this man, and stayed gone for many years. When we crossed each other’s path at family gatherings, the back history we shared and the resulting tension would ruin most occasions. So I would choose not to cross his path. I remember everything bad about him. I may have had some love for him, but I personally didn’t like him. We made a settled peace, to each give respect to the other, and lived like that for years. Then he died. And there was a hole in me. All his friends mourned him. The depths of their grief surprised me. Rough men broke down, and church people, a crowded church, prayed and sang him home. I already was mourning, shook by this departure of a man who had first left long ago. Then a flood of better memories came. Some Southern black man heroic things he’d done. And the more pleasant times of our shared fierce existence, like hunting with him in the early morning woods. I wanted to write something showing the teetering balance of his life, those things that would bring scorn upon my radicalized growth, those things that would make grown men weep at his being gone. I wanted to give him respect.

Notes on “Tobacco Road”

Lately I’ve been reading or reading again poets Yusef Komunyaaka, Tim Seibles, Amiri Baraka. I love storytellers, the narrative element. So of course I read fiction, too. Southern Gothic mostly, people like William Gay. There is a musicality in Southern language that fascinates me. I don’t force a dialect, but I sometimes like to recreate the language that falls on my ear. It marks class and race for the “speakers” of the poems without me saying so. I keep a load of images that I come across in my everyday life that I will draw from, the way somebody moves, the natural environment (whether it’s rural or urban), or the altered environment. I note situations that can be developed into poems. I’m a witness and I use observations. Whatever it is that I use I try to serve that particular poem. At the start I am never sure where the poem is going. I don’t want to know. The sense of discovery is exciting to me as I build my drafts. And there are many drafts of each poem. If I tell you how many, you may think I am obsessive-compulsive. I am not, except when I write.

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Issue 72: Cate Marvin

About Cate Marvin

Cate Marvin’s third book of poems, Oracle, is forthcoming from Norton in 2014. She is Professor of Cate_Marvin_author_pic-243x366English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, and co-directs VIDA: Women in Literary Arts.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “An Etiquette for Eyes”

“An Etiquette for Eyes” showcases a lot of ugly emotions, jealousy being at the forefront. The speaker is merciless in her appraisal of the beloved (who, for obvious reasons, has decided to move on), and stinging in her assessment of an innocent woman with whom he has shared a drink. The poem launches from that moment—the speaker appalled that this man she’s fancied has the nerve to drink a drink she bought him with another woman (who does not pose much of a threat). One can also infer that the speaker has purchased this drink as a means to purchase his attention.

The opening lines, along with the sense of the poem’s form in general, came to me in the first draft. I wanted the short lines and their disorienting breaks to hand the reader down through a series of what appear to be nonsensical connections, only to arrive at the bottom—which is very much a pit—and be faced with the present state of the speaker’s psyche. At which point, she launches into her ad hominem(feminem?) attack. Here, I aim for a humorous affect.

The rest of the poem follows a somewhat different trajectory. Anyone with brown eyes knows the drill. The majority of people the world over have brown eyes, yet there exists an insufferable number of people with “blue,” “green,” and “hazel” (groan) eyes who love to endlessly elaborate upon how changeable the colors, hues, and shades of their respective eyes vary with light, the colors they wear, etc. Being on the listening end of this species of self-appraisal can be pretty tedious when your own eyes can only be described as “brown.”

I wanted the eyes to wander all over the poem, hence the final big stanza in which the speaker’s eyes try very hard to make the beloved look back at her, to only then compare them to the eyes of the objectified milk-maids’ eyes that look away from the eyes that ogle their breasts. That was a weird moment to arrive at in writing the poem. For me, it reveals the speaker’s tantrum comes not just from disgust, but also from desperation and desire. She is not only trying to face her plainness, but celebrate it, to say what is special about her—and, ironically, to convince the object of her (hostile) affections to take her seriously.

In a sense, the poem is quite simple. It’s an argument for being ordinary, launched against an individual the speaker once regarded as extraordinary.

Notes on Reading

You are what you eat. My reading informs everything I write. I believe deeply that, through the act of writing, one takes part in the literary continuum. And that this engagement is holy.

“An Etiquette for Eyes” could not have arrived at its form without my having inventoried the poetry of Robyn Schiff, author of Worth and Revolver. The manner in which her line operates taught me enjambment can be worked like a slingshot. It’s my opinion that the muscularity and her sheer inventiveness with form make her one of the best poets writing today.

“An Etiquette for Eyes” by Cate Marvin

Found in Willow Springs 72 Back to Author Profile I don’t know if l wore glasses when I met you but I know the last time I saw you … Read more

Issue 75: A Conversation with Cate Marvin

Interview in Willow Springs 75 Works in Willow Springs 72 February 26, 2014 Kristin Gotch, Stephanie McCauley, Kate Peterson A CONVERSATION WITH CATE MARVIN Photo Credit: Ploughshares blog “How I … Read more

About Ann Pancake

A native of West Virginia, Ann Pancake is the author of a short story collection, Given Ground, winner of the 2000 Bakeless Fiction Prize, and last year’s novel, Strange As This Weather Has Been (2007), which, according to Rick Bass, “crackles with this century’s great white background noise of loss, greed and dishonesty.” Pinckney Benedict refers to Pancake as a writer “who sees with a lover’s generous heart, with a prophet’s steel-hard gaze.” Pancake’s rhythmic prose creates what she calls “background music” to her stories. Rooted in her Appalachian heritage, her fiction weaves precise language with vivid attention to place and complexity of character.

Ann Pancake graduated summa cum laude from West Virginia University, obtained her MA in English from the University of North Carolina, and earned a PhD in English from the University of Washington. She has taught in Japan, American Samoa, and Thailand, and her numerous publishing credits include The Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Glimmer Train, Antietam Review, Quarterly West, and New Stories From the South. She’s been awarded a Tennessee Williams Scholarship in Fiction, a Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writers’ Fellowship Grant, the 2003 Whiting Award, the Glasgow Prize, and fellowships from the states of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Washington.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Our Own Kind”

I am primarily a fiction writer, so when I heard so strongly the first lines of an essay instead, I was surprised. Once I imaginatively placed myself in this frigid winter landscape right around the house where I grew up, the early drafts came fairly easily. I had a terrible time with the ending, but that’s typical of my work. I returned to the draft off and on for years, hoping that an ending would come intuitively, but it never did. I cobbled together this one with some advice from a very wise friend, and I think it’s passable, but I’m still not satisfied with it. What was hardest for me to understand was the relationship between the meditations on the natural world and those on gender.

As I wrote, I worried constantly about my brother’s reaction to this piece. I knew I couldn’t publish it without his okay, and because I was scared to show it to him, I contemplated not publishing it at all. Fortunately for me, even though it was a very emotional read for him, Sam generously gave it his blessing.

Notes on Reading

My writing usually comes to me by ear, so I am nourished by reading language-driven fiction and nonfiction. I am increasingly disappointed by the bulk of novels and short stories put out by commercial presses, who run for their lives when they see music or inventiveness in prose because they assume that makes the writing less accessible, thus less saleable. Fiction without music, in my opinion, is crippled fiction, art trying to function in two dimensions when three or more are available to it. I find myself searching for lesser-known presses and authors in hopes of finding the fuel I need for my own writing. Poetry helps, and I return again and again to older works, especially the Modernists or those influenced by Modernism. Faulkner, Jean Rhys, and Marguerite Duras are stalwarts, as are Toni Morrison, James Agee, Jayne Anne Phillips, Breece Pancake, Keri Hulme, and early Cormac McCarthy. The best contemporary novel I’ve read in years is Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward. One of the most beautiful new ones I read before that was Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys.

“Our Own Kind” by Ann Pancake

Found in Willow Springs 71 Back to Author Profile IF THEY CALL ME ANYTHING behind my back, they call me tomboy. For my brother, they have many names. Where we live, … Read more

Online Exclusive: A Conversation with Ann Pancake

Found in Willow Springs 84 and 71 April 20, 2007 Nicholas Arnold and Michael Beccam A CONVERSATION WITH ANN PANCAKE Photo Credit: garev.uga.edu A NATIVE OF WEST VIRGINIA, Ann Pancake … Read more

About Susan McCarty

Susan McCarty’s stories and essays have appeared in The Iowa Review, the Utne Reader, The Collagist, Conjunctions, Indiana Review, Willow Springs, and other journals. Once upon a time, she was an assistant editor at Penguin and Avalon Books. More recently, she’s been an administrative fellow for FC2, an artist-in-residence at VCCA and a Steffensen-Cannon scholar. She has an MFA from Vermont College and a PhD from the University of Utah. She teaches creative writing at Salisbury University.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Fellowship”

When I started “Fellowship,” I was working on a story about a group of high school newspaper journalists, which was somewhat inspired by the wonderful Sam Lipsyte story “The Dungeon Master” in terms of dorkiness and youthful obsession. After trying to get my story off the ground several times, I was ready to give up on it. To my ear it sounded too autobiographical, sentimental and anecdotal, like a story someone would tell at a high school reunion. Nostalgia is a tricky thing to wield: it can be a touchpoint for emotion, but it can also be shlocky, or worse, boring to everyone who is not you, like when you try to explain a really great dream to someone. So I backed up and thought about what I wanted to explore in a story set in my own teenagerhood (high school in Iowa in the ’90s): I wanted to tell the story of a girl who is really starting to struggle against the values of the culture around her in a way that was bound up with, but not directly caused by, her parents’ impending divorce. I wasn’t interested in revisiting specific details or scenes from my own life, but I did draw on my own emotional experience of my parents’ divorce when I was eighteen. I was interested in that moment when everything seems to be stretched to the breaking point, that moment right before the release of this person into the world, just before her escape. But I was uninterested in moralizing that tension. Sometimes it feels like every story about a teenage girl who has sex ultimately ends with the girl dropping out of high school, pregnant and alone and, yes, that’s a reality for some girls, but ultimately the dominance of that narrative in our culture speaks more to a fear of female sexuality and the resulting desire to control it.

I’m interested in another narrative, where girls have sex and parents and boyfriends disappoint them, and life goes on. In those ways, this story engages with some of my most favorite and recurring motifs: separation, abandonment, and how the (often sexual) body fields these losses. I can’t usually pull fancy French theorists out of the air, but I just started A Lover’s Discourse the other day, and in it Roland Barthes writes, “The love story…is the tribute the lover must pay to the world in order to be reconciled with it.” This is so wonderful because it acknowledges the raw-edged back seam to every love story, which is a loss that makes a reconciliation necessary, even if that loss is simply the loss of the self to love. I recognized in this quote something about what I’m often working toward in my own writing—an exploration of the emotional risk of all kinds of love.

Notes on Reading

I’m probably only slightly exaggerating when I say, like so many writers, reading is my primary experience of the world. It’s a strange thing to realize, at a young age, when you’re stuck in a sidewalkless subdivision in the middle of a cornfield and everyone in your house is yelling all the time, that books are so much better than real life, but that’s how it goes. We become writers because it’s how we know how to live and be involved in the world we’ve chosen for ourselves. For me, without reading there isn’t any writing. Everything I read is all potentially influential and disruptive but I really like that—I like feeling like my own voice and style are constantly shimmering in response to what I’m reading that day or month or year. I read 124 books for my PhD exams a couple of years ago, and as I read, I felt pulled in all these different directions—one day I was reading Middlemarch and the next day it was the Ethiopian Story. I’d read Blood and Guts in High School in the morning and Pamela at night. It was really wonderful for all this stuff to be jammed into my brain together without regard for genre, taste, school, or period, and it really opened my eyes to how utterly strange fiction is. I mean, it’s self-aware and it folds time and space, and makes a little world for you which you may visit and leave at will. It’s witchcraft.

All that reading has allowed me to find inspiration in some unexpected places. One of the things I loved about Jane Eyre when I read it during my exam year was how Jane had to wander through so many different genres—Gothic, conversion tale, fairy tale, ghost story, hagiography, etc.—in this heroic, Odyssean way in order to get back to her home and her proper love story with Rochester. Inspired by that plot, I’m mixing genres in my own novel-in-progress. In it, different characters are trapped in different genres of their own making (for one character it’s an unpromising romance, for another character, it’s a murder mystery without a murder) and the conflicts in the novel arise from these generic clashes and failures. Right now, I’m reading A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes, which is helping me rethink and reclaim my own work as love stories. I’m actively trying to read more poetry these days, too, because it’s also magic and I think it sharpens my word and sound brain. I just re-read my friend Tim O’Keefe’s beautiful book The Goodbye Town to help with the sharpening and to spend time with him even though he lives 800 miles away. Recently, I’ve found We the Animals by Justin Torres to be a stunning reminder of the new and different things stories and novels can do.

Willow Springs 92 NEW

Hourglass by Clare Beams

Found in Willow Springs 68 Back to Author Profile A TRANSFORMATIONAL EDUCATION, the newspaper ad had promised, so we’d come to the Gilchrist School, which looked like a 19th century invalids’ home. … Read more

Bird Girls by Jill Christman

Found in Willow Springs 68 Back to Author Profile I WAKE UP, a wife and mother, at five a.m. on a July morning in the middle of Indiana, not because my … Read more

“Blue on Blue” by Susan Maeder

Found in Willow Springs 68 There were tables of shining blond wood in the restaurant in my neighborhood where I took him on a dare. Stiff white napkins, too many … Read more

Four Poems by Nance Van Winckel

Found in Willow Springs 68 Back to Author Profile “Outlaw Mentality” -that’s what the coroner says caught you up, brought you down. A life of that fuck-that stalled on the track. … Read more

Congratulations Pushcart Prize Nominees

Poetry “Mississippi Snow” by Kerry James Evans “The Future of Nostalgia” by Randall Watson “War Poem” by Anzhelina Polonskaya, translated by Andrew Wachtel “Sexy Fish” by Sara Burge Fiction … Read more

WTAW will be at AWP

WTAW will be at AWP January has been flying by, and AWP is now only two short weeks away. If you plan to be at AWP in Kansas City from February … Read more

Jennifer Pullen’s New Textbook

Congratulations to Eastern Washington University Alum Jennifer Pullen for receiving tenure at Ohio Northern University! Her textbook Fantasy Fiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology is out from Bloomsbury Academic.

“The Bridge” by Kerry Muir

Found in Willow Springs 66 Back to Author Profile CAMMY TUTTLE IS THE SMARTEST, toughest girl in our whole fifth grade. She has red hair, straw-straight, and wears boys’ clothes. Her … Read more

Issue 92: Suphil Lee Park

About Suphil Lee Park Suphil Lee Park (수필 리 박 / 秀筆李朴) is the author of Present Tense Complex, winner of Marystina Santiestevan Prize (Conduit Books & Ephemera … Read more

Issue 71: Alexandra Teague

About Alexandra Teague

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

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Transcontinental”

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

Notes on Reading

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

Ten Poems by Alexandra Teague

Found in Willow Springs 71 Back to Author Profile Transcontinental 10 Poems “In a railroad to the Pacific we have a great national work, transcending, in its magnitude, and in … Read more

About Meggie Monahan

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

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Night Prayer of a Woman Living Alone”

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

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

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

Notes on Reading

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

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

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

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

About Charlie Clark

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

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Selected Poems”

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

Notes on Reading

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

Two Poems by Charlie Clark

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

About Julialicia Case

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

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Growing Like Houses”

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

Notes on Reading

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

“Growing Like Houses” by Julialicia Case

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

About Miranda McLeod

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

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Mrs. Schafer Gets Fit”

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

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

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

Notes on Reading

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

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

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

“Mrs. Schafer Gets Fit” by Miranda McLeod

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

About Roxane Gay

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

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Through the Womb”

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

Notes on Reading

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

“Through the Womb” by Roxane Gay

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