Profiles – Page 14 – Willow Springs Magazine

Issue 84: Gail Martin

About Gail Martin

Gail Martin’s book Begin Empty-Handed won the Perugia Press Poetry prize in 2013

and was awarded the Housatonic Prize for Poetry in 2014. The Hourglass Heart (New Issues Prose and Poetry), was published in 2003. She works as a psychotherapist in private practice in Kalamazoo, MI. http://www.gailmartinpoetry.com/

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Switches” and “What Pain Doesn’t Know About Me”

Switches

My theory is that we develop a kind of “health identity” when we are young and that when it starts to erode and shift, we are stunned. These bodies, once reliable are no longer so steadfast. It is disconcerting. Both these poems were written during a period when I was trying not to be browbeaten and cowed by some health issues—both my own and those of close friends.

What Pain Doesn’t Know about Me

I had bi-lateral hip replacements within six weeks of each other. During the on-ramp to these surgeries, I kept looking for the parts of me that were not taken over by the pain. Personifying pain and talking back to it helped me diminish it some. (along with drugs.)

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

In Michigan, we are always five miles from a lake and that suits me well. If I can’t get to a lake, there are pools. Swimming keeps me moving and keeps me sensible. Nothing can get to you underwater. No incoming. I am most at peace at our family cottage in northern Michigan, on the lake that Hemingway called home his first 20 summers. I am not a fan of Hemingway, but I am a big fan of Walloon Lake whose waters are deep, cold and clear.

My psychotherapy practice has become part-time and my weeks are peppered with play dates with my nearly 3-year-old grandson. Who knew the joys of CARS, CARS, CARS— building “car homes” from toilet paper rolls, from dominoes, parking cars in perfect alignment, stacking them, building roads with the pinochle deck? It never gets old.

Music plays in my head all the time. (Is this normal?) Last year I’d wake in the night with the “Hamilton” soundtrack rapping along. My taste is various although more often it runs toward Keb’ Mo’ rather than Bach: Bonnie Raitt, Lyle Lovett, Pink Martini, Sam Cooke, Allison Kraus, The Beatles, The Band. Closer to home, I am a total fan of May Erlewine.

As I write this, it’s early summer and I am literally toting a big bouquet of peonies from room to room so I don’t miss a moment of that fragrance. A fleeting season. At my age, each quotidian day is quite exemplary and lovely. The more ordinary the better. I take nothing for granted. The pathos of time passing is genuine.

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Issue 84: David Dodd Lee

About David Dodd Lee

David Dodd Lee is the author of ten books of poetry, including Animalities (Four Way Books, 2014), Orphan, Indiana (Akron, 2010), Arrow Pointing North (Four Way Books, 2002), Abrupt Rural (New Issues, 2004), Downsides of Fish Culture (New Issues, 1997), as well as a forthcoming book of collages, erasure poems, and new original poetry, entitled Unlucky Animals (Wolfson Press, 2019). He has also published two books of Ashbery erasure poems. He writes and makes visual art and kayaks in Northern Indiana, where he lives on the St. Joseph River. He is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University South Bend. His Twitter handle is @davdlee1 and his blog (which showcases his visual art) is at seventeenfingeredpoetrybird.blogspot.com.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Hawks”

“Elodie” “Hawks” was written after I actually spent a day acting in a music video in which I played a priest. (You can see it on YouTube here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWjfRYXz6S0). So, not a lot of premeditation was involved. But if there is a time when I feel absolutely unlike myself it’s when I’m acting in a video (I’ve, hilariously, acted in four). Anyway, forget the narrative offered up by the song the video was scripted to accompany, I somehow got in touch with the soul of this former member of an Alice Cooper tribute band, who it turned out was simply happy to have something expressive to do since he was in the process of grieving after a break-up. I will say I wrote “Hawks” in early 2019 when I was writing a series of “short fictions,” one per day in fact, for a period of about two weeks. So I wrote the first draft in probably about an hour, having had no idea, before I sat down, what was going to emerge. But I had been involved with the video production a day or two earlier. The details reported in the story are totally made up, by the way, though I do own a five pound cat. I just sat down and started to type. The whole WORLD of the story spilled onto the page, including the narrator’s voice and the various details. Otherwise, I enjoyed the opportunity to go all expressionistic and gothic with the imagery, perfect for communicating the protagonist’s emotional state and the sense of delight he took in being rescued by artifice totally steeped in the theatrics of the macabre. There was very little revision after the initial draft.

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

My world, recently, includes six wood ducks, the mother and her ducklings, who gather in my yard, daily, and intermingle with two adult swans and their four cygnets, as well as a heron, who posts itself nearby most evenings, and who, occasionally, I’m able to watch as it goes about the business of swallowing a three pound carp. I live on a shallow bay, a wetland, really, so creatures are a minute by minute thing—muskrats, snapping and softshell turtles, the red fox that comes by at dusk, and birds birds birds . . . After far as music goes, the album I most recently listened to (several times over) was John Prine’s Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings, which features songs such as “Lake Marie,” which is a dark song about our romance, American history, violence, and place. (I also wanted to mention this because I first heard this Prine album in Jonathan Johnson’s truck, years ago.) As far as sustained listening, I’ve been immersed in Scott Walker’s music (Walker recently passed away), especially his operatic, avant-garde, anti-fascist Bisch Bosh. Talk about walking through brightly-lit darkness. I’ve been writing some to Gary Numan’s lesser known albums, his later funk-driven, industrial rock stuff, and in fact I believe that was something I was involved in when I wrote “Hawks.” Also Chrissie Hynde’s new solo work as well old Pretenders albums. I work, if I’m not traveling or out fishing for the day, quite often in a Starbucks that appeared in my very rural Indiana neighborhood recently, so it’s numerous Americanos a week for me . . . I’ve mostly been focused on writing and exercising, so my food menu has been reduced to basics—chicken and asparagus, yogurt and blueberries; repeat. I’m cataloguing recipes for Brussel’s sprouts though. I have been eating the trout I’ve been catching in various secret, cold-water, spring fed lakes, along with the occasional crappie.

“Hawks” by David Dodd Lee

He was shooting me from across the street, me in my priest’s collar, my black gown. St. Sebastian’s was a flood of electric light. I could see the outer fringes … Read more

About Bruce Bond

Bruce Bond is the author of twenty-three books including, most recently, Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (U of MI, 2015), Black Anthem (Tampa Review Prize, U of Tampa, 2016), Gold Bee (Helen C. Smith Award, Crab Orchard Award, SIU Press, 2016), Sacrum (Four Way, 2017), Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997-2015 (L.E. Phillabaum Award, LSU, 2017), Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods (Elixir Book Prize, Elixir Press, 2018), Dear Reader (Free Verse Editions, 2018), and Frankenstein’s Children (Lost Horse, 2018). Presently he is a Regents Professor at the University of North Texas.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Lost Language #11” & “Narcissus in the Underworld #9, #26, #28, & #29”

These poems were born of a larger project: a series of three long sequences in a single book entitled Scar. The first sequence from that book is the title sequence—a poem that explores trauma, fracture, and the search of a mind alienated from itself and others. In my next sequence “Narcissus in the Underworld,” I first set out to look at the internet as a kind of contemporary hell that had, instead of concentric circles, more of the un-centered, un-mastered, infinite and unruly—something imagined as a totality but never experienced as such. I thought of modern loneliness as a shared condition, a kind of narcissistic wound that sets us on our journey. In rereading Dante, I found a kindred struggle that challenges the empathy in the book. It exposes the problematic nature of an exclusive, if not sadistic, moral order. Dante’s hell is to me a psychological space, still alive in us, still oddly compensatory, destructive, inspirational, and worthy of understanding. In many ways, the obsessive-compulsive and self-centered means of negotiating anxiety engenders extremities of both law and lawlessness, both of which disengage us from one another. The third section of my book Scar—“The Lost Language”—was written last, and there I explore, via the theme of music, the sense of loss and longing and sublimities of the unspeakable and near at hand that haunts all language.

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

I run all my poems by two people: my wife and my cat. My wife is the best critic I know. For me anyway. Somehow, she gets me and I her. Our recent 35th anniversary was a good day. My cat too gets me, though he cannot understand my poems. I respect that and his undying patience as I read them aloud. I also respect my cat’s apparent lack of any sense of failure or success. Good kitty, I say. It’s my way of saying, “The End.” I can’t explain it, but I find his tiny repertoire of priorities oddly inspiring.

Five Poems by Bruce Bond

Found in Willow Springs 84 Back to Author Profile THE LOST LANGUAGE #11 If you are searching for a friend online, an insomniac to break the bread of misery and … Read more

About John Sibley Williams

Jennifer Christman

John Sibley Williams is the author of As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize, 2019), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press, 2019), Disinheritance, and Controlled Hallucinations. A nineteen-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Wabash Prize for Poetry, Philip Booth Award, American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, Nancy D. Hargrove Editors’ Prize, Confrontation Poetry Prize, and Laux/Millar Prize. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and works as a literary agent. Previous publishing credits include: The Yale Review, Midwest Quarterly, Southern Review, Sycamore Review, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, Poet Lore, Saranac Review, Atlanta Review, TriQuarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, and various anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Website: https://www.johnsibleywilliams.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/john.sibleywilliams

Twitter: https://twitter.com/JohnSibleyWill1

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “My Heart is in the Mouth of Another Heart” and “Suture”

“My Heart is in the Mouth of Another Heart” hurt to write as much as it hurt to experience. One afternoon while strolling by a local cemetery I noticed a family of deer nuzzling the grass between headstones. Being the veteran section of the cemetery, these gorgeous animals cut a stark contrast with the flaccid, windless, yet still colorful flags and the stoic, age-stained white crosses that differentiated one religion from another. Witnessing the astoundingly simple, loving gesture of grazing, almost kissing the earth, I was flooded with contradictory emotions. Yes, something natural, even nutritional, is blooming from the dead. Yet these dead took lives, animal lives too, I’m sure. This poem was my way of coming to terms with this contradiction. Not to judge the dead. Just to kick their dirt around a bit to see what I could unearth. And in the end, I found the living equally guilty. I found myself as guilty of contradiction.

I’m not wholly sure where the inspiration behind “Suture” came from. Perhaps, like most poems, it sprung from a variety of sources that happened to converge at just the right moment, sparking something unique to that brief convergence. As a New Englander by birth yet an Oregonian the past 10 years, I was reminiscing about the old covered bridges that haunted and intrigued my youth. I’d also recently read an article about a bridge collapse in another part of the country. Given my intertest in how the lives and landscapes of small towns affect and define each other, “Suture” sort of wrote itself. Yes, silly as it sounds, I believe poems know what they want to be, and it’s our job to listen to the unwritten poem. The structure also came naturally, on the first attempt, as, at least to my eyes, it resembles a bridge collapse…that failing attempt to span so much white space.

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

As a parent of twin toddlers, I haven’t been able to keep up with the newer music I love. My house’s foundations continuously quiver with Baby Shark, Wheels on the Bus, and the like, and such songs drill into my head so deeply as to drown out the rest. But I’ve been steadily infusing the kids’ musical experience, and therefore my own, with the tunes that drive and inspire me. My three-year-old son has finally admitted the “okay-ness” of David Bowie, as long as I don’t sing along with it. He recently said “I don’t hate this” to a Joy Division album, so that’s a step forward. And they’re both beginning to recognize New Order, Tom Waits, and Nick Cave, whose songs I turned into lullabies to rock them to sleep in their infancy. Luckily, Motown utilizes such simple rhythms and pitch perfect harmonies that even the kids allow me some Ronettes, Crystals, Sam Cooke, and Smokey Robinson without complaint. We’re getting there.

“My Heart is in the Mouth of Another Heart” and “Suture” by John Sibley Williams

Found in Willow Springs 84 Back to Author Profile My Heart is in the Mouth of Another Heart May the deer navigate this field of white crosses … Read more

About Andrew Gretes

Andrew Gretes is the author of How to Dispose of Dead Elephants (Sandstone Press, 2014). His fiction has appeared in New England Review, Witness, Sycamore Review, Booth, and other journals. His Twitter handle is @acgretes.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Mind Graffiti”

“What if God got dementia?” That’s probably where the story began: as a question you ask yourself in the shower, eyes closed, mind squinting. If I’m being more honest, I suppose I would say that the story was overdetermined: my dorky loyalty to Lord of the Rings, my fascination with the philosopher George Berkeley, my experience of being recently divorced—too many causes to count. Among other things, it’s also a story about friendship. Going on an insane quest and knowing that at least one person will have your back, no matter what happens: there’s something quite comforting about that! So perhaps the story is an ode to Sancho Panza.

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

What I’ve been listening to? Well, recently I’ve become a little obsessed with a podcast called “Entitled Opinions” by Robert Harrison. What if Jimi Hendrix was a Dante scholar at Stanford? The answer is Robert Harrison. As for music, The Kinks are always fun. I had a nice moment watching one of the new Marvel movies (Endgame). Halfway through the movie, a lesser-known Kinks song began playing (“Supersonic Rocket Ship”). In the theater, I immediately perked up and turned to my brother, excited to inform him of my vast knowledge of the British music-hall genre. My brother preemptively said, “Shut up, I don’t care.” The song ended. Thor and Hulk engaged in dialogue. I felt special.

“Mind Graffiti” by Andrew Gretes

Found in Willow Springs 84 Back to Author Profile THE WORLD WAS GLITCHY. Mount Rushmore lost one head (Teddy) and sprouted another (Ulysses). The Big Dipper was upside down, spilled. Birds … Read more

About Maia Elsner

I grew up between Oxford and Mexico City, with stints in France and Italy. I began writing poetry while studying migration, race and incarceration in Massachusetts in 2017. Recent work has appeared in The Missouri Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Colorado Review and Periphery.

‘Goldfinch’, The Missouri Review: https://www.missourireview.com/goldfinch/

‘Siqueiros “Birth of Fascism” and Rivera’s “The Arrival of Cortes”, The Ekphrastic Review: http://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/siqueiros-birth-of-facism-and-riveras-arrival-of-cortez-by-maia–elsner

‘Threshold to Coyoacan Plaza, Mexico City’, The Ekphrastic Review: http://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/threshold-to-coyoacan-plaza-mexico-city-by-maia–elsner

‘Lucrece’, Colorado Review: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/719651

‘Michelangelo’s “The Awakened Slave”, 1520’ and ‘Leonardo da Vinci “The Adoration of the Magi”, 1481’, Periphery: https://issuu.com/peripheryjournal/docs/03072019_issuu_copy

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Lullaby”

When my siblings and I were little, my mother would sing to us the songs of her childhood, before we fell asleep. It was as if she was willing Mexico into our dreams.

For me, the lyrics of the traditional Mexican song ‘Cielito Lindo’, popularized in the 1880s by Mexican composer Quirino Mendoza y Cortés, and ‘Amapola’, written in the 1920s by Spanish American singer José María Lacalle García, have always held within them my mother’s nostalgia for a world lost, the pain of years spent away from her loved ones, and the borders – not only physical, but also linguistic, psychological and emotional – that have characterized her experience in England, and mine.
Writing ‘Lullaby’ felt like tracing the echoes of my mother’s voice from the rubble of memory. Even now that I read my poem out-loud, I hear in my head the sound of her singing. In a way, ‘Lullaby’ is a love-song to my mother – to all she gave up, and all she gave to me.

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

My current favourite thing is listening to Havana meets Kingston, or Miles Davis or possibly Atahualpa Yupanqui, with a group of friends. I have recently become obsessed with underground rivers, the tributaries of the Thames that once shaped the landscape, but are now buried, alongside their stories, myths and gods, encased in concrete. Catch me at weekends walking London’s abandoned canals or with a sloe-gin in the corner of a pub. I’m a fan of candles, making figures out of wax, pockets, tostones, dancing, my orange-peal earrings and peach-stone necklace, jasmine-scent, jacaranda flowers.

“Elodie” by Jennifer Christman

Found in Willow Springs 86 Back to Author Profile IT’S AROUND THE TIME my mother, formerly Roseclaire, emerges from the lower depths. She’s been living in the basement since I was … Read more

About Ella Flores

Ella Flores holds an MFA from Northern Michigan University. She has recent publications in RHINO, Harpur Palate, Radar Poetry, and Barely South Review.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Last Universal Offspring (Uncommon)”

“Last Universal Offspring (Uncommon)” arose from water. My love of it, my fear of it, my lack of drinking enough of it. There are words and moments in this poem I found over five years ago, and many I could only have found much more recently. This is the poem I’ve been trying to write for all sea-like bodies. It has always been a conversation between the ocean and the speaker. For many years this poem felt unfinished and I’m still not sold that it’s quite done changing yet. The major turning point for its current iteration was the decision to include Spanish. While it felt more honest to me as the writer to include all the languages by which I’ve known the ocean, I believed it added a sort of linguistic expanse for the reader, bilingual or not, to be suddenly confronted with something so distant, yet familiar.

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

I live with a cat named Potato. I buy them food and they keep sticking around. I’m pretty sure this is the closest interaction I have to “love”, but it’s chill. My culinary interests involve being taught a new recipe by a friend and subsequently cooking only that meal for weeks on end. It’s great. My hobbies include reading, writing, socks, staying up too late, and looking up how to use commas, again. The US women’s national soccer team is rad and Julien Baker is a person I listen to who makes music, and magic. Tattoo discrimination should stop being a thing. The US government continues violating human rights at the border (and elsewhere). Happy Pride Month. And yeah, think that’s about it.

“Last Universal Offspring (Uncommon)” by Ella Flores

Found in Willow Springs 84 Back to Author Profile Hungover seagulls stumble dawn in. Who told you you came from water? The morning people attempt to slow it down, … Read more

About Ira Sukrungruang

Ira Sukrungruang is the author of three nonfiction books Buddha’s Dog & other mediations, Southside Buddhist and Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy; the short story collection The Melting Season; and the poetry collection In Thailand It Is Night. He is the president of Sweet: A Literary Confection (sweetlit.com) and the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Have You Eaten?”

“Have You Eaten?” started as a panel paper about food writing 3 years. My aunt had passed away, and she was (still is) foremost on my mind, especially when it came to food. I started thinking about how food writing as a form of loss. How, once we lose someone so close, we lose everything about them also–their touch, their voice, and the things they used to cook. Aunty Sue shaped my food life, my taste buds. When I was writing the panel paper, in that original form, I added a lot of footnotes and those footnotes were about my aunt. When I gave the panel presentation, I broke down. It wasn’t pretty, and I imagine pretty awkward for the audience, but it was necessary. This piece allowed me to venture into those memories, memories I tried not to look at. It made me recall all the foods my aunt had made, even the simple ones like a grilled cheese. The difficulty of the subject made the essay slow to develop. But I chipped at it a little at a time, and even now it seems to me unfinished. All creative nonfiction pieces are unfinished in a way. I will return to the topic of food. I will write about my aunt again. Her life and her cooking lives in memory.

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

I’m addicted to tattoos. I have a bunch. My newest one (pic included) I got before moving my entire family from Florida to Ohio. It’s a dragon and tiger in love with each other. I didn’t want any type of violence on my arm but rather two beings in harmony with one another. These tattoos of mine tell a different narrative of the body. One that I control. One that I shape. Not the culture. Not the world. For a big guy like myself, tattooing was how I learned love the body.

“Have You Eaten?” by Ira Sukrungruang

Found in Willow Springs 85 Back to Author Profile When my Aunty Sue arrived in Chicago in 1968-the summer hot and familiar like Thailand-she didn’t know how to cook. This seemed … Read more

About Eric Altemus

Eric Altemus is a graduate of Oregon State University’s Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing, and Indiana University, where he worked for the Herman B. Wells Library and Indiana Review. His most recent fiction has been published in Sou’wester and The Rappahannock Review. An employee of the University of Michigan Library, he lives near Ann Arbor, where he is currently finishing a collection of short stories.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Three Finnish Scenes”

“Three Finnish Scenes” is inspired by my experience at the University of Vaasa, Finland, in the summer of 2011. It’s a small coastal college town about four hours northwest of Helsinki. I was there as part of an intensive Finnish language program during my undergraduate years at Indiana University. My major was English, with a focus in editing and publishing, and at the time, I was interested in translation as well—this was all during the Scandinavian crime boom, when Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy was popular. With the Finnish literary landscape so untouched for English-speaking readers, I considered pursuing a graduate degree in translation.

The trip turned out to be a disaster: I dealt with homesickness and a significant health issue that I had difficulty managing while living abroad. Eventually, I realized that I was completely in over my head: most Finns already spoke fluent English, and I had no real claim to translation. That being said, Vaasa was an important and humbling experience for me, one I’m very grateful for, because it led me to focus solely on fiction. I ended up drafting these pieces while finishing my MFA at Oregon State, where eight were submitted to my final graduate workshop. I revisited these three scenes a few years later in Michigan, where they came to be what they are now.

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

My father’s in radio broadcasting, and I was raised in a household where I was exposed to lots of Oldies music from a young age: Philadelphia soul, the British Invasion, Billboard-charting hits from the Sixties and Seventies, mostly, because that was what people wanted to hear. I moved around the country often as a result of his career and spent a lot of time in the car. If we weren’t listening to an Oldies station, it was typically country, my mother’s preference. It’s no surprise, then, that music became a big part of my creative process. I often draw a lot of inspiration from records that I’m listening to while drafting or revising.

Like most teenagers, I rebelled with my music choices, gravitating toward Internet file sharing communities and genres like black metal, drone, and hardcore. I eventually came to appreciate some of the groups and singers that I grew up with, though, like The Beatles, The Mamas and the Papas, Marvin Gaye, and Otis Redding. For these short pieces, I was listening to a lot of music from Fonal Records, a Finnish label that reminded me of Vaasa’s endless summer sunlight: TV-resistori’s Serkut rakastaa paremmin and Paavoharju’s Laulu laakson kukista.

“Three Finnish Scenes” by Eric Altemus

KOTIPIZZA Yes! We put strips of all-natural reindeer meat on the Berlusconi. Thank God you asked. It’s named after the Italian Prime Minister. You know, the same one who believed … Read more

About Bridget Adams

Bridget Adams‘ fiction is published in The Sun, Hobart, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and SmokeLong Quarterly. A winner of the Devine Fellowship, she holds an MFA in Fiction from Bowling Green State University and is currently at work on her PhD at Florida State University. You can follow her on Twitter at @piratelawyer89.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Mushroom Boys”

“Mushroom Boys” developed in the same way that most of my work does—I began with a voice and an image (the young men unconscious under a ceiling fan), and I then followed the voice as I wrote. In revision, I realized it was very important to me that the story have an uneven relationship to point of view, and that the omniscience is roving but not necessarily all-knowing. I wanted to experiment formally with a method of collective storytelling. I kept thinking about the ways that deep friendships, even (especially?) those that are fraught or full of conflict, can create a sense of community experience and communal decision-making, and I was hoping to mimic that experience in the narration. This created various technical difficulties from the start; I am obviously not the first to observe that storytelling in the American tradition tends to belong to the individual, and that the majority of stories considered to be successful at their aims are usually connected to exploring the experience of the individual. My greatest challenge in writing this piece was keeping the reading experience from being so disorienting or confusing that readers might be unable to follow.

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

So, no tattoos, no pets, and I’m still listening to the same music I’ve been listening to since I was 16; I made my students listen to The Zombie’s “Care of Cell 44” on repeat accidentally this week, and I didn’t notice for like twenty minutes. They hated it. In all the things I consume I’m generally boring! So I think instead I’ll tell you about my favorite plant, who I call Purple Friend. He looks like a demon and he is impossible to kill. He has deep green leaves that are covered in a neon purple fuzz, and what he is, or where he comes from, cannot at this time be identified. After every attempt on his life he emerges stronger than ever. At the moment, he is mortally weakened because I watered him too much (he resists all forms of love) and he still has two long vines crawling down my bookcase, and at the ends they curl up and reach out, like beckoning hands. And a third vine has newly sprouted, jagged and inquisitive. Guests are afraid of and disturbed by him, and usually react in surprised horror when seeing him for the first time. I assume he is from hell and I would be honored to one day die by his hand.

“Mushroom Boys” by Bridget Adams

Found in Willow Springs 85 Back to Author Profile Lydia and Jools and RJ were very drunk and walking home, and the streetlamps made the sidewalk, the apartment buildings sprouting up, … Read more