Profiles – Page 7 – Willow Springs Magazine

Issue 76: Jess Walter

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.

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Issue 76: West Trexler

About West Trexler

Wes Trexler is a writer, musician and abuser of vintage sailboats based in New York City. He was a founding member of the glam-punk band Hotter Than A Crotch, and driving force behind the short-lived Brooklyn underground DIY venue Club Plantation (2012-2013). He is an adventurer, a hustler and political radical who writes, performs, and organizes under various pseudonym. Born in West Virginia amid great natural beauty and crippling poverty, storytelling was in his genes. His grandmother Zelda, who’s still alive and well, used to write for the local newspapers back in the ’50s and ’60s. His other grandmother taught English for many decades, starting out in a one-room school house at age 17. She could recite pages from the Canterbury Tales from memory well into her eighties. Mr. Trexler has been up to no good recently, traveling in South America and Nepal for months at a time, living for years with no visible means of support. He has a problem with authority and hates cops more than anyone you will ever meet. He was once shipwrecked on a deserted beach inhabited only by wild horses. He thinks people should unplug their TV set and go live a life worth writing about. He is a graduate of the Inland Northwest Center for Writers, and attended the Squaw Valley Community of Writers in 2005.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “North Jutland Blues”

The thing you should know about “North Jutland Blues” is that a decade elapsed from the time I wrote it to the time it was finally accepted for publication. If the idea of a ten-year lead time to sell a hundred-dollar short story seems crazy, then you don’t understand what it means to lead a life in the arts.

It’s actually the first story from a collection of shorts I did years back that has yet to be published as a whole. I’ve sold a few of them recently, but “North Jutland Blues” was always one of my favorites. It was the first story I wrote where I felt I’d stumbled upon a genuinely original voice, and that voice and that protagonist became the heart of the story collection (titled Legend of the Night Shark).

After failing to find an agent for Legend of the Night Shark, I let it mellow for a couple years while I was busy making music and putting out records in the Northwest and New York. Then, a few months ago, as I neared completion of a very hefty nonfiction manuscript, I decided to sell the Night Shark stories off on their own. Enough time had passed that the constant volley of rejections lost their emotional sting. It was hard to care about stories written so long ago they seemed to be part of some other guy’s efforts, and I was much more interested in getting rejections for my next project.

What strikes me now, looking at it from a whole different epoch in my life, is the haunting desperation that lies beneath the wide-eyed abandonment and directionlessness of the narrator. There’s no way I could have written that story in 2015, and I’m glad I didn’t wait. There’s no doubt I would have made different choices had I composed it last week. I’m a different writer now, but the story as it is seems more honest than if I’d tried to substantially rewrite it.

Another thing I notice is the thematic consistency that is still present in my work. I’m still obsessed with jazz and entheogens, with stolen bikes and people-in-motion. These are all still prevalent themes in almost everything I write. The people I write about are always on their way somewhere, dodging something, driving a pickup or hopping a train, chasing or being chased into dark allies. My characters are always running after back-and-forth propositions, looking at their lives through that rearview lens which often consumes our thinking when we hit the road, when leaving a place or en route to somewhere new.

I decided a long time ago that I could only write fiction that’s set in places I’ve been. There’s no way for me to be really convincing about a scene if I don’t have access to the sensual rush of details that comes from reliving a certain place. Of course we all think of character as the building block of good fiction, but to me place is equally essential. There’s only so much you can do inside a character’s head. To keep me engaged as a reader, I need to be able to feel the setting, and without the depth of convincing place details, I lose interest in the character’s inner turmoil. So, like all my stories, “North Jutland Blues” was inspired by things I saw firsthand, in this case things I saw in Denmark many years ago.

I think the narrator is somewhat oblivious to his own turmoil, and it’s the internal strife of the Danish character Klaus that is more obvious on the surface. You essentially have two characters who are both incapable of dealing with whatever emotional vexations are plaguing them. The narrator seems to see himself from the outside, and he’s close enough to Klaus to see his conflict for what it is, but still he’s not really able to do anything with the insight. If loneliness and rejection is what’s bothering these guys, they sure don’t do much to remedy the situation.

A lot of my stories have a similar emotional undercurrent: lonesome people in search of ecstatic moments. I think that also sums up a lot of what life in Scandinavia is like, and the title of the story really broadcasts that idea from the very start.

Notes on Reading

Some writers write because they have something to say about the world, others write because they have something to say about the particular literary tradition they belong to. Either pursuit is valid, and we all do a bit of both, but I’m definitely in the first camp. It doesn’t matter to me one bit what’s happening in contemporary literature. I make it a point not to read any books by authors who are still alive. You could spend your whole life reading things that are hip, but who knows if anyone will still care about those books in twenty or thirty years? I prefer to spend my time reading books that have been vetted by time, works that still seem relevant after a few decades or a few centuries, things that have influenced everyone before me.

The older stuff is best for me because I find myself mining them for vocabulary. Any Mark Twain story will teach you a dozen technical terms, pieces of antiquated jargon, or bygone slang you won’t likely run into elsewhere. When I read newer stuff I don’t pick up as much. Contemporary writers have pretty much the same vocabulary as I do, so there is less immediate reward for the effort.

I think the way I was taught to read in grad school ruined my love for fiction. I didn’t read any fiction for a couple years after getting an MFA. I wasn’t able to read for the sake of reading, I was only able to study the fiction rather than just enjoying it for the storytelling. To this day I don’t read fiction at nearly the rate I did in my twenties (my “book devouring boyhood” as Kerouac put it). Now I gobble up news and newsish pieces, historical Anarchist propaganda, science articles, political commentary, citizen journalism, anything that spreads my consciousness to the real human experience, anything that fills me up with true details or bizarre ideas. I love this notion that the pursuit of wisdom and the pursuit of scientific knowledge seem to be coalescing in our times, and there are a million rabbit holes out there you can dive into and kind of instantly absorb other novel ways of looking at the world.

That being said, there are a few authors I can’t stay away from, the guys whose language is such a part of me that no amount of pedagogical scrutiny can dull my enjoyment, the writers who seem always to be speaking directly to me. I’m talking my personal triumvirate of lit heroes: Faulkner, Burroughs, and Dostoevsky. If you only read those three authors, it’s hard to say what you couldn’t learn about storytelling and the art of the line.

Faulkner is a Southern country boy like me, so his stories always have this collision of highbrow ideas and lowbrow characters. There’s always this tension between the genius of the narrative voice and the primitive, earthy insanity of those he is describing. Whenever I look at my own work, and it seems too protracted or too risky, or too heady, I reflect on Faulkner and his boundlessness. There’s no way that readers today are less sophisticated, or less receptive of daring, challenging prose than the readers of 1930s America, at least I hope not. So, I find myself asking, “Would Faulkner try to get away with this?” “Would Faulkner ask this much of his audience?” Few of us would dare to give multiple characters the same name in one book, and just leave it hanging like that, but Faulkner did. He gives me permission to go out on narrative limbs when I need to.

William Burroughs I love because his work, I think, managed to escape the realm of hip writing and end up in the canon of visionary thinkers in fiction. He inspires me to stick to my vision no matter how opaque it might seem to others. So much of what he does is both fantastical and hyper-real. He is a true surfer of the universal subconscious, yet, in the end, there is nobody grittier, realer than Burroughs. He proves that you can draw on the dream world for images and ideas without losing touch with the concrete stuff of humanity, the stuff that keeps us interested and engaged. I also like the way he can write about his own experience, use a version of himself as a character without sanitizing it. He and his narrators are well acquainted with their own shortcomings and flaws, acutely aware of them. We want to believe what his narrators are telling us because they seem so honest in their self-criticism, so unrepentantly human, warts and all.

All of Dostoevsky should be read and reread. We English speakers are at a great disadvantage here, since we can only look at translations, and there is no way for us to really experience the innate poetry of his language as it was meant to be. Nonetheless, when you look at his books you see the work of a man who was born to tell the story of his time and place, to become the official critic of his people. For the fiction I write, this is often the goal. I want to recreate my world as a literary universe, to dissect it and present it as though it were the only possible interpretation. This is what Dostoevsky does. His descriptions are so adept that there is no doubting their authenticity.

For writers, I think it is especially important to look at his Notes from Underground. This was his debut novel, and a very short one at that. When you read the work of young Dostoevsky, you can see that there is the capacity for genius, yet Notes from Underground is hardly what you’d call a masterpiece. So, how did he go from writing a great, interesting, flawed little book about Russian society to writing undeniable masterworks like Brothers Karamazov or Crime and Punishment? The unfortunate answer is hard work. True, he was born with the capacity for genius, but that doesn’t guarantee a masterpiece. The difference between young Dostoevsky and later Dostoevsky isn’t the result of a shift in the innate intellect of the author, but the result of years of craft that went into producing ever-greater works of art. You may be born with the capacity to create high works of art, but without the decades of toil and creative productivity, the genius has no way to express itself. Dostoevsky worked his way up to creating masterpieces, but he started from fairly humble origins, and that is one of the best lessons we writers can take to heart. Being the brightest smart-ass in a grad workshop isn’t the same as writing a genre-defining tome that will be studied and enjoyed for generations. Don’t mistake one for the other.

The other not-necessarily fiction writer I keep coming back to is Walt Whitman. His non-fiction Specimen Days has informed my style as much as Bukowski or Steinbeck or any of the Beats, and his descriptions of old New York and Civil War America are absolutely essential to understanding our cultural history. And, for understanding how lines work, how words can change shape and grow and shift infinitely, there’s nothing better than Leaves of Grass. His habit of spinning off long breathless lists of images and concrete details to expound on an idea, or to create an emotional sweep is something I definitely emulate. My more recent nonfiction works rely heavily on Whitmanesque litanies to create scene and mood, to document real world events I’ve been witness to.

Willow Springs Issue 76 cover shows a rustic painted wall in yellows and browns.

“North Jutland Blues” by Wes Trexler

Found in Willow Springs 76 Back to Author Profile I SEE MYSELF next to a freeway onramp, leaning against a guardrail in Denmark. I don’t just see myself-it’s one of those … Read more

About Devin Becker

Devin Becker’s first book, Shame | Shame (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2015), was selected by David St. John as the winner of the 2014 A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize. He works as a librarian at the University of Idaho Library in Moscow, Idaho, where he lives with his wife, his daughter, and his dog.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on Ben Lerner Poems

My inspiration for these pieces is two-fold: 1) My jealousy of Ben Lerner and 2) My fascination with my own teenage years and Midwestern upbringing. The inspirations are intertwined. I am jealous of Ben Lerner partly because he’s in many ways the person I wanted so badly to become when I was in my late teens and early twenties: We are the same age. We both grew up in the Midwest—Lerner in Kansas; me in Indiana. We both went to well-known schools out east for college. We both wanted to be poets, writers. While I feel lucky to have done relatively well in the pursuit of this path (or as well as can be said of someone who now makes their living as a librarian in Idaho; OMFG WTF happened…), Lerner has achieved a kind of wild success, and deservedly so. I remember reading his first book, The Lichtenberg Figures, and being blown away (a response that Lerner has managed to garner from me with each subsequent book as well, that asshole). So not only did he achieve this success, he established early on that he was on that path.

And so I have had a somewhat complicated relationship in my head with Ben Lerner ever since I first encountered his work. This is doubly complicated by my own (possibly false and most definitely contrived-to-make-these-poems) belief that we share the similarly bleak cultural heritage of growing up in the pre-good-internet, 1990s Midwestern United States during the rise of the chain restaurant and big box store. And I call this upbringing bleak, but I keep wanting to go back to the sentence and delete the word “bleak” because at the same time there was something wonderful about what that type of experience does to someone, which is also what the poems explore, particularly the power of male friendships in that context.

And more generally, I also like the way “Ben” sounds, as it is repeated throughout these; I feel like it establishes a type of theme, like the tolling of a bell. My big dream for these and the other Ben Lerner poems I’ve written is to make them into a chapbook and enter that into a contest being judged by Ben Lerner so that the book would be called, if it won the contest, something like: Ben Lerner, Ben Lerner, Ben Lerner, and Other Poems, selected by Ben Lerner, and then of course Lerner would have a blurb on the back as well. I just think that would be really funny.

Notes on Reading

Part of a poem in my recent book, Shame | Shame, goes: “But I don’t trust big religions, I prefer little ones, like Reading. / Reading says, none of us, not one of us, is alone. / Reading says, we are speaking to each other even now from our little homes … ” I believe what I wrote. Reading is a type of religion, one made up of a certain type of person/reader for whom the act of reading has taken on a sort of transcendent importance in that it allows them relief from his/her self through participation in a tradition and community that connects people over large distances of time and space. That sounds a bit crazy/pedantic, I know. I also wouldn’t know exactly how to describe what constitutes my fellow believers in Reading, but I definitely know a fellow believer when I meet one.

But enough of the highfalutin. More importantly, what have I been reading:

In terms of fiction, I’ve been reading a great deal of post-apocalyptic books this year. I just finished Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, which I think is the best of what I’ve read so far, but I also read and enjoyed Edan Lepucki’s California and Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars. I find a great deal of peace in reading about the landscapes in these books. The violence and depravity found in this type of catastrophically driven environment is disturbing, to be sure, but I think the writers who do the genre well are able to capture a great deal of beauty in these altered landscapes as well. On a side note, this attraction to people-less landscapes is also what keeps me living in Idaho. (Please don’t move here; it’s beautiful.)

As for poetry, I’ve been rereading my fellow librarian/poet Philip Larkin lately. He’s a master; I will always have a great deal to learn from him. I have a number of poetry book stacks going as well, which always happens after AWP. Right now the main stack includes Richard Siken’s War of the Foxes, Cecily Parks’ O’Nights, Brian Blanchfield’s A Several World, Nin Andrews’ Why God is a Woman, Craig Morgan Teicher’s Ambivalence and Other Conundrums, and Erika Meitner’s Copia. I am finding each of these to be excellent in its own way. There is too much good poetry in the world these days.

Other excellent poetry books I’ve read this year include:

The Open Secret by Jenifer Moxley – If I were to write another series of poems to another contemporary poet, they would be to Moxley, whose work (including her giant memoir The Middle Room), I usually can’t put down once I start reading it;
The Errings by Peter Streckfus –like his first book, strange and beautiful;
Bugle by Spokane’s own Tod Marshall – dark, funny, formally fascinating and faithful to the Inland Northwest in a way I find admirable;
and This Can’t Be Life by Dana Ward – a mind-blowing work for me in both style and content.

I should mention that I read Lerner’s novel 10:04 this year, and disliked it through the first third until I got over myself and then really liked the rest, albeit slightly begrudgingly—this was not my best Reading moment, to be sure. I still prefer Lerner’s poetry, mainly because I learn a great deal from it as a poet. I think Mean Free Path is a particularly fascinating book, one that took me a long time to finally “get” but that really moved me when I finally found my way into it, which happened on a plane from Pullman, WA to Seattle very early one morning.
I also am lucky enough to work at a library, which allows for a type of serendipitous discovery of poets and books during the breaks I spend browsing the American Literature section (Call Number Range: PS 3550 -3576). My two big finds for this year so far are The Animals All Are Gathering by Bradley Paul and The Enormous Chorus by Frank Kuenstler. Both are books I can’t believe I didn’t know about previously to my happening upon them in the stacks.

Four Poems by Devin Becker

Found in Willow Springs 76 Back to Author Profile Ben Lerner Ben, my high school best friend, Ben, is nothing like you except you look very much like brothers. … Read more

About Lucas Southworth

Lucas Southworth’s stories are forthcoming from or have recently appeared in TriQuarterly, Mid-American Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Web Conjunctions, DIAGRAM, Meridian, and others. His collection of short stories, Everyone Here Has a Gun, was the winner of AWP’s Grace Paley Prize in 2012, and University of Massachusetts Press published the book in late 2013. He is also a professor of fiction and screenwriting at Loyola University Maryland and a co-partner at Slash Pine Press. Links to info on Everyone Here Has a Gun and other online work can be found at everyoneherehasagun.blogspot.com.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Copycats”

I wouldn’t describe writing as fun. I wouldn’t describe my stories as fun. But I enjoy writing when I’m doing it, and it’s probably the only time I can relax deep into my head where I’d spend all my time if the world would let me (thank you, world, for not letting me). For me, fiction is a way of extracting ideas from feelings and then twisting those ideas back to feelings. Feeling is probably a bad word for it, but I can’t think of a better one. What I’m referring to falls somewhere between sense and emotion and that thing that nags us, but it’s also pure and real and something that longs to be understood. My favorite writing by other authors falls willingly and unconsciously and sometimes effortlessly into that canyon between thought and feelings. As a writer, I constantly struggle with the divide. I think my work often documents that struggle as I strive, and usually fail, to push it over that edge.

“Copycats” contains an actual jump, an actual fall. It happened to an actual man who actually bought a plane ticket for an actual fake name. My version of the story started with a friend’s fascination. As we sat in a bar or maybe a steamy pho restaurant in the middle of winter, he explained what he knew about D.B. Cooper. I already felt removed, and I liked that feeling. I liked how the story was coming secondhand, and I liked how everything was actual and false at the same time. It wasn’t my story exactly, or my obsession, so I approached it with that skepticism and remove. I started with the disappearance and with those, like my friend, who connected with the disappearance—an actual that wasn’t actually there. I was drawn as much to Cooper’s copycats as I was to Cooper. Some were simply hijackers that came after, but the strangest were those that “confessed” to be him, often as a final, dramatic gesture on their deathbeds. One was even a woman who claimed she’d had a sex-change operation to conceal her/himself.

From what I could find, none of these people ever “proved” to be Cooper, and it struck me that if we were never going to reveal the actual hijacker or allow him to reveal himself, we were going to fill in his absence any way we could. In fact, maybe we preferred that. I wondered what caused these copycats to confess something that wasn’t theirs to confess. Why had they tried to take Cooper’s place? Why did they want to help him reappear? These questions didn’t have logical answers, probably, which is why I liked them so much. By the time I finished writing “Copycats,” I’d decided that Cooper had always set out to disappear. He must have known he could not spend the money, and he must have suspected that if he succeeded, nobody would ever see him again. If this thought was freeing for him before the hijacking, I wondered if that changed afterward. I imagined a diner—a timeless, American type of place—where all these copycats, all these different versions of Cooper, could meet. If they did, would some still be proud of what they’d done? Would some be filled with regret? And how much had they really disappeared over time? Would they allow themselves to recognize each other? Would they want others to recognize them? All this started as a feeling more than any kind of thought. I tried to form that feeling into something and then go back again.

Though I may not have had fun writing, Cooper was certainly a fun subject. He provided a mystery that couldn’t be solved, gaps that couldn’t be filled. I also couldn’t help but notice how as the writer of my version of his story, I was assuming the role of another copycat, and how readers would be doing the same. The decision to use second person came from that—from the image of more and more copycats rippling out from the center of the story.

Notes on Reading

I’ve been seeking out authors that are able to effortlessly bridge between thought and that indefinable feeling that I think is hinted at in the best fiction. Right now I’m reading the complete stories of Flannery O’Connor cover to cover. I love the way her messy moments and digressions are her most fascinating, and how somehow those moments still fit within the larger and unconscious logic of the story. I just read Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West too, and I think he’s able to find that space as well. On the absolute flipside, I’ve been teaching screenwriting and film this semester and thinking about classical story form. I’ve also been thinking about how elements of film must inform modern fiction, how those elements have become embedded in our story-telling consciousnesses, and how we can continue to learn from those strategies and use them. Critics have disputed this analogy, but I find it interesting think about, for example, how editing transfers to our use and understanding of the sentence, or how the framing of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines can work into my own descriptions and settings.

Willow Springs 75 Cover shows pink pressed flowers on rough paper.

“Copycats” by Lucas Southworth

Found in Willow Springs 75 Back to Author Profile THE SUN WAS BRIGHT in the airport windows, shining through without any heat. At the counter you gave the name s you’d … Read more

About J. Robert Lennon

J. Robert Lennon is the author of seven novels, including Mailman, Familiar, and Happyland, and the story collections Pieces for the Left Hand and See You in Paradise. He teaches writing at Cornell University.

See more at jrobertlennon.com

A Profile of the Author

Notes on the stories

These pieces are part of an effort, throughout 2014, to do more of my writing by hand. I wrote them in coffee shops and bars—previously I didn’t seem to be able to do this. “Eleven” was a simple exercise in writing a two-sentence-long story; so was “Owl.” The latter story was inspired by a real event—my son was freaked out by something flying around in the barn, and it turned out to be an owl. It didn’t talk to me, though, when I freed it. “Eleven” is a riff on my own childhood OCD, though the actual events of the story are fictional. The Marriage stories are part of a suite of shorts about two awful people who are perfect for each other. These people are responsible for some of the most fun writing I’ve done this year. I adore the poor fuckers.

Notes on Reading

I actually don’t read enough. I’m too impatient. Reading more, or more consistently, is my only New Year’s resolution. I do, however, like to read broadly, rather than deeply; I won’t plough through an entire writer’s oeurve without a great deal of peer pressure. (I’m in a book group for that reason.) I’ll read almost anything when I do read, and often take inspiration from things that aren’t capital-L “literature.” I read a lot of comics in 2014, and some great science fiction. I also re-read Jane Austen. Actually, I think my work this past year lies somewhere inside a triangle formed by those three points.

Four Stories by J. Robert Lennon

Found in Willow Springs 75 Back to Author Profile Owl HIS SON WOULDN’T TAKE the garbage out to the barn because there was a bat, the boy said, flapping around out … Read more

About Colin Pope

Pope grew up in Saranac Lake, New York. He holds an MFA from Texas State University, where he was the 2011-12 Clark Writer-in-Residence. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Slate, Harpur Palate, Texas Review, The Los Angeles Review, and Best New Poets, among others, and is currently a PhD candidate at Oklahoma State University, where he serves on the editorial board at Cimarron Review. He is at work on his first collection of poems.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on Two Poems

It’s funny to think about it now, but there was a time in the not-too-distant past when I disliked writing poems about myself. I suppose I thought it was antiquated or cliched or something, that the “I” was an overused mechanism. In any case, someone I love committed suicide and that changed real quick. It wasn’t a planned change or anything, but I couldn’t avoid myself anymore. It felt like my brain had been smashed across a floor and glued back together, and not all the pieces were there. Now I find it challenging to keep the “I” out of my poems.

I’ve written a number of poems about Jennie’s death, which took place five years ago. “Suspect” is about the actual moment when, after she was gone and the emergency personnel had arrived, I realized the officers were asking me questions as though I had something to do with it. They asked me where I was, what I’d been doing that night, who I’d been with. You’d think my first reaction would’ve been anger and frustration, but I was so devastated, so wide open, that I just wanted to help them. And being asked those questions was actually pretty calming. What they wanted were concrete answers, and it was nice to have something firm to lean against. The answers were real and comprehensible at a time when many things were not. This poem took about 3 years to write, not because it was hard work getting to the language but because it was hard work re-feeling those emotions and putting myself back in that living room with those cops.

“Phone Call to Plan Abortion, as Flood” is tough to discuss. But like many of the poems I write on personal tragedy, it helps if I have a metaphoric lens through which I can focus the experience. The reality of the emotional trauma is so indefinable and so amorphous that setting it against, say, a natural disaster, gives it shape and intelligibility. The speaker feels evil, the “she” feels overcome, and the emotional charge of the situation is so high that speech will inherently fail to provide comfort to anyone. It’s a situation in which everyone feels powerless, so the metaphor, in the end, focuses the reality in a way that is manageable. This is not to suggest that poems are therapeutic, but that the act of making the poem is at least a recognition that we’re human, that we’re trying to find meaning where it might not exist. Metaphor is human, I suppose, and it’s all we’ve got sometimes. But I always feel like my poems get a bit plain when I write in this mode. The question I end up asking myself is, “Does it sound true?” Which is an utterly ridiculous question to ask, really, since conveying “truth” is impossible to begin with, particularly in a poem.

Notes on Reading

It took me far too long to find Larry Levis, so I’m working my way through him right now. I bought Elegy a while back and it was one of those books that just sort of sat on the shelf. Then I finally picked it up a few months ago and *bang*. Now I’m going through everything of his I can find. I also keep preaching the word of Thomas James, which is a book I read when I was getting my MFA and still read often. Just when I thought Plath was inimitable, here comes this guy who just explodes on the page. Any poet who hasn’t read Letters to a Stranger should do so immediately. When I sit down to write, I usually have anywhere from eight to ten books on the desk. I leaf through them quickly and haphazardly, just to get my head into that world, and when I can’t read anymore I begin writing. Right now I have books by Anna Journey, Josh Bell, James L. White, Tomás Q. Morín, Ellen Bass, Henri Cole, Charles Simic, Sharon Olds, Louise Glück, and Levis on my desk. I also look for stuff online, in journals or on poetryfoundation.org or poets.org or any of the daily sites, like Writer’s Almanac. In my web browser right now, I have tabs with Terrance Hayes, Uche Nduka, and Andrew Hudgins open. I’ll usually leave these tabs open until my computer crashes. The idea is to literally bombard myself with poems until I’m compelled do one of my own. It’s kind of like looking at pictures of food or watching a cooking show. After a while, you get hungry, so you go in the kitchen and start opening your cupboards to see what you can make.

Two Poems by Colin Pope

Found in Willow Springs 75 Back to Author Profile Phone Call to Plan Abortion, as Flood She says she’s lost so much weight since our breakup that she can see … Read more

About Tom Howard

Tom Howard’s fiction has appeared recently in Quarter After Eight and Emrys Journal, and his stories have received the Tobias Wolff Award in Fiction, the Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Award, the Conium Review’s Innovative Short Fiction Award, and the Rash Award in Fiction. He lives with his wife in Arlington, Virginia, along with a strange, wonderful black dog named Harper.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Bandana”

I’d been working on another story for a while, this grim fantasy about the aftermath of a shooting, written from the perspective of a grieving father whose son had gone bad. The seriousness of the story just got to be too much for me. The father’s story felt too raw, his grief too complex for me to unwrap, and my whole approach just seemed unimaginative and obvious to me. I found myself writing around the tragedy, looking for other details to explore. I thought more and more about the son, and I kept coming back to this single idea: that we all start out good. We start off kind and vulnerable and trusting and goofy, with these fresh undamaged souls. I imagined the son, just a kid himself, knocking all that right out of another kid.

Notes on Reading

I’m a slow reader these days. I think it started when I discovered Pynchon, years back; it’s hard (and wrong) to read Pynchon quickly. But I’m trying to get faster, because I realized a few months ago that at the rate I’m going, I won’t actually live long enough to finish all the books on my reading list. It used to be that when I was in the middle of writing a story, I didn’t read much fiction because I worried about the influence on my own work. Now, I think it’s necessary just to keep me from getting boxed in and returning over and over to the same ideas and approaches.

I’m influenced by everyone, I think. Sometime it’s just a theme that resonates and sends me off on some tangent of my own, sometimes it’s the skill an author shows in teasing out character or subverting expectation, sometimes it’s just what a writer is able to do with a certain form. Last year, I read George Saunders’s “Sticks,” a two-page story from Tenth of December. You read that story and you shake your head, because you think it shouldn’t be possible for a two-page story to be so ridiculously moving. I wanted to understand how he was able to do that, to strip the story down to a narrative skeleton and still give it that kind of emotional richness. I realize the answer is, “Because he’s George Saunders,” but it got me experimenting with flash pieces myself, and trying to become more economical, to do more with every word.

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of short story writers. Karen Russell and Lorrie Moore, Saunders, DeLillo’s The Angel Esmerelda. I still have a stack of novels waiting for me, too, from Pynchon and Roth and Franzen and a dozen others. Plus, I still re-read a lot of old favorites: Vonnegut and Borges and Calvino and a lot of Shakespeare, which probably explains why the stack doesn’t get any shorter.

Willow Springs Cover 74 shows blue and brown paint smeared artistically across a rough surface.

“Bandana” by Tom Howard

Found in Willow Springs 74 Back to Author Profile OVER DINNER ONE NIGHT I told my dad about the League of Scorpions, just to break up the deathly silence. I told … Read more

About Doris Lynch

Doris Lynch was born in Pennsylvania but has lived in Indiana for the last 20 years. She’s also lived in an Inupiat village in Alaska (Kivalina), Indonesia, California, and Louisiana. She works as an adult services librarian and reviews poetry for Library Journal. She has one chapbook Praising Invisible Birds from Finishing Line Press and has won four Indiana Artist’s Commission grants for her writing. Her work has appeared in many literary magazines and in several anthologies.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Harvesting Crows”

“Harvesting Crows” was one of those rare poems that came out all of a piece. The writing flowed. The first draft was almost in its present form, leaving me to change only a few words, drop a few unnecessary phrases. I wrote it one night after walking, and I find my “night” poems more easily shed my writing censor— logical day me— allow escape to other places where the world has no logic, only images and emotions.

I’ve always been a feminist and that is an influence here, but also the poem is a gentle mocking of society’s expected gender roles— men are portrayed as outdoor chefs over their giant barbecue pits, spears (well, skewers) in hand, blood staining their aprons or in this case, their bare chests.

As for crows themselves, I’ve always loved crows: their communal fellowship, their keen intelligence, and wily survival skills. This is probably my eighth or ninth poem about crows. In winter they leave the nearby farm country and roost in high trees in town. During winter sunsets, they noisily converge from every direction and take over the neighborhood sycamores— gathering that always makes me stop and observe. Apologies to them for treating them rather brutally here, but I do so with great respect and besides the occasion is entirely fictional.

Notes on Reading

Reading provides inspiration, motivation, a call to arms (the keyboard), a sense of challenge, and ideas, ideas, ideas. It’s my travel ticket to exotic places and places down the road that I will never visit in person. It’s mainly how I learn and absorb the world. I read a lot, but I find that the Internet with its literary and political sites distracts from deeper book reading. Probably due to a lack of discipline on my part. But as a librarian and also because I love them, I read many novels so I can do what book people call readers’ advisory. Luckily, most library patrons can find the best sellers themselves, so I’m free to entice them to books that they might otherwise miss.

My favorite recent novel is The Light Between Oceans, a thrilling first novel by M. L. Stedman about a lighthouse keeper shortly after WW1 who finds a baby on an island off Australia. Other recent favorites are Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale For the Time Being, a novel that interweaves two stories: one of a young Japanese girl and the other of a North American writer who finds the girl’s diary as jetsam on the beach. Letters from Skye, by Jessica Brockmole, is one of those quirky epistolary novels about a poet living in a remote place in the early 1900s and the correspondence she develops with an American grad student from Illinois. Another wonderful take on life in a foreign country is Mohsin Hamed’s irreverent but utterly absorbing How to Get Filthy Rich in Asia, a fictional retake on the how-to genre.

Novels that describe life in other countries and time periods always draw me. Right now I’m reading one that combines both of these, Kathryn Ma’s The Year She Left Us about a Californian adoptee tracing her past in China and the States. Yiyun Li’s Kinder that Solitude tells the story of three people connected by family and residence in China, and the mysterious death of by poisoning of one. Li is a very perceptive writer who reveals people’s motivations and thoughts that they hide from those close to them.

Ever heard of Typhoon Mary? Mary Beth Keane wrote an inspired historical novel about her life called Fever. And the best war novel I have read in decades is Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds.

I love nonfiction too especially memoirs and writing about nature and travel. For our road trip this summer I have Paul Theroux’s The Tao of Travel that is a compendium of both his own travel writing and excerpts from many travel greats about all sorts of subjects from the inhospitable to edible food, travelers’ bliss and travelers’ ordeals, also the things they carried. Jeanette Winterson’s and Gail Caldwell’s memoirs are great reads as is Rebecca Mead’s paean to a great novel My Life in Middlemarch.

And I loved this biography that evoked the early days of our country from a woman’s point of view, Jill Lapore’s Book of Ages: the Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin.

And if you ever wondered what it would be like to be raised in a unique lifestyle, Joshua Safran’s Free Spirit: Growing up on the Road and off the Grid is a revelation. He shows that hippiedom was not all that it’s cracked up to be, in fact, for him it was something to survive with scarring.

Routinely, I scan the new poetry section also. This year my favorites were Gregory Orr’s The River Inside the River and Charles Wright’s Caribou. I’m fascinated by the forms of haiku and haibun and loved Haiku in English: the First Hundred Years edited by Philip Rowland, Allan Burns, and Jim Kacien.

Rebecca Lee’s Bobcat and Other Stories blew me away with the quality of her prose style and her interesting takes on reality. What a natural she is for the short story form.

Finally, (this list could go on and on) Sheri Fink’s chilling Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, a nonfiction book that could be a thriller, tells the extremely disturbing story of what happened at a hospital in New Orleans after Katrina struck. Reportedly, the medical staff there killed some of the oldest and weakest patients in the chaos that followed. The book paints a disturbing picture of what will happen, as more natural disasters caused by climate change strike because our preparation nationwide is weak and hardly formed. An afterward showed how the same thing nearly happened after Hurricane Sandy except that the electricity outage was much briefer.

“Harvesting Crows” by Doris Lynch

Found in Willow Springs 74 Back to Author Profile Only women can snag them and only females wearing red. Erroneously, many believe that you must prove yourself first by flying off … Read more

About Stacey Richter

Stacey Richter is the author of the short story collections My Date with Satan and Twin Study. She has received many prestigious and fancy literary awards, including a Pushcart Prize for the story “The Land of Pain,” first published in Issue 56 of Willow Springs.

http://dentfictionworkshop.blogspot.com/

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Mrs. Max Siegel’s Rules for Jewish Women”

I wrote this essay at the request of a young editor who was putting together a gift book of Jewish mother-themed essays. I’d never written a personal essay before (though I’ve pretended to), but I was excited when she said grandmothers could be included, too. This is because I am obsessed with my maternal grandmother, Eva Siegel, who died in 2001 and continues to visit my dreams with startling frequency. My fixation on her is somewhat mysterious to me, though it seems to revolve around many of the ideas I cover in the piece: notions of ladylikeness, certainty, the tension between one’s inner and outer self-presentation all anchored in the tense, confusing, and irreconcilable concept of womanhood. I thought I’d touch on my grandmother’s Jewishness, since it was the theme of the collection, but I was not especially intrigued by it. However, as I began to do research, I started to realize how important it was. I began to see how unique my grandmother’s childhood was, how singular and odd. In 1906, the year of her birth, most new immigrants from Europe settled into Jewish neighborhoods in eastern cities (not nearly as many went west). Being a Jew in Utah was remarkable enough, but growing up in the small town of Nephi as a member of the only Jewish family was truly exceptional. I began to realize how important Jewishness was to the formation of Eva’s character not necessarily Jewishness as a belief system (though it may have been that, too), but Jewishness as it was perceived by others since “others,” in this case, meant everyone outside her immediate family. She was profoundly an outsider. And because of this, she had a deep interest in keeping up appearances. I began work on the essay by making a list of colorful remarks I remember my grandmother saying, sentences lodged in my memory like stray bullets. I’m fascinated by utterances I can’t forget the power of words and the tenacity of memory can be so intense. Also, since I’m a bitter, unforgiving person, most of the things I remember are unpleasant. This automatically adds tension and conflict, which can be bad in life but is good in writing. A narrative began to hazily appear to me: I would move from Eva’s difficult obstinacy to the suffering and logic behind her meanness; she’d float from unsympathetic to sympathetic as the essay progressed. It would be like a camera lens pulling back, revealing more of a scene, until a picture emerges that, perhaps, is not what it first seemed to be. Quite promptly, these remembered sentences the idea of utterances and memory coalesced to form the structure and rhythm of the piece. It didn’t take me long to see I wanted it to be a series of rules hovering between white space on the paper. The form would follow the content: I wanted to explore the stubbornness and sense of certainty in Eva’s character, and rules are the fundamental language of unbending thoughts. But I liked how something about the white space undercuts this as well—white space is full of irony and silence; the gap allows for juxtaposition and the humor of contrast and repetition. In contrast to a rule, a pause allows the reader to stop, think, and doubt. There’s also something sad about blocks of text with blankness above and below. It implies endings, epitaphs, and the silence of the unspoken. Well, it turns out that all Jewish ladies, at a certain age, become obsessed with the Second World War (as do a lot of non-Jews), and what I ended up exploring far more than I anticipated was the idea of silence and the Holocaust. It wasn’t until after Eva died that I found the letters in the little escritoire in the living room, the ones from Grodno. (They weren’t hidden; I just hadn’t looked before. P.S. Some of those relatives didn’t live long enough to die in the Holocaust. That’s the most comforting thing I can say about that.) So the essay became much darker than I thought it would be. It no longer seemed like it was going to work in a gift book about Jewish mothers. As for the matter of how this essay connects with my larger work, I’ll defer to my dreams, since that’s where my grandmother and I now meet. Eva is usually in the kitchen; she’s old but much younger than when she died. She’s wearing a dress and an apron and moves on light feet, making her famous almond cookies. (In real life, no one else can make these cookies with any success, because even though we have the hand-printed recipe on a note card, no one has the patience to soften the butter, refrigerate the dough overnight, then cram it through a cookie press.) In my dreams, my grandmother is always silent, with no voice at all the settings may differ, but her silence is a constant. Also, she’s always dead. Each time, her deadness is a comfort and a jolt. Should I tell her she’s dead? She looks great; should I tell her she looks great when she’s dead? Is deadness good? I’m not the only woman who struggles with the silent, beautiful woman in the kitchen. I think most of us have a similar goddess of femininity in their heads a figure who seems to say that there’s a right way to be a woman, that there’s a template for it. But even if we have a clear, hand-printed recipe card, we still can’t get it right. We can’t put ourselves behind, we can’t make ourselves shut up, we can’t keep our nails from breaking and our hair from escaping the pins and anger from spewing out of our mouths. And why would we want to? Because we’re women.

On Reading

Reading has always been an important part of my life, but I used to approach it as a sane person would. Now, I am a disturbed addictI do it first thing in the morning, I sneak away, I hide it, my relationships suffer. This began around the time I stepped on my Kindle which had not charmed me away from paper and replaced it with the sublime Kindle Paperwhite, which almost has. I just finished Robinson Crusoe and The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. Those are the shortened titles. They’re actually called The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates; and The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe; Being the Second and Last Part of His Life, And of the Strange Surprising Accounts of his Travels Round three Parts of the Globe, respectively. Isn’t that awesome? I love how the second title shows restraint. I keep a journal of the books I’ve read, in which I note what I find interesting, disappointing, and amazing. I’d say most of this falls into the category of craft. In the last few years, this has evolved into a more quixotic project where I treat every book every novel anyway as though I’m an editor and it’s my task to figure out how to make it better. This is time-consuming and I may have to give it up, but I kind of love doing it. Like a lot of writers, I basically exist in a fantasy world, and in this alternate universe, I’m a superhero charged with making the world fall in love with fiction again (I’d like a hatchet and a bottle of lye for every person who’s told me they only read nonfiction because they “like information”). If people are willingly foregoing a deep participation in language, metaphor, and meaning in favor of Civil War histories and the brass tacks of marketing, then something is out of balance. So this is important work I’m doing, mentally. I must to do it with great assiduousness in order to make the world safe for books and enticing for readers. When I finish a book, I write down what I liked best usually this is something odd, with a metaphorical meaning or meaning that drifts in an intriguing way. I love how Defoe’s servant, Friday, calls praying “saying O,” as in, “Why you no say O to your maker?” Sometimes it’s more of a narrative strategy, like Defoe’s propensity for revealing what’s going to happen ahead of time (he’s “deliver’d by Pyrates”). But mostly, when I’m mentally editing, I’m concerned with what makes a book work as a whole. This doesn’t mean I’m only interested in characters and plots, since what makes a book work often happens on the level of the sentence or the paragraph. After all, we’re really only paying attention to what’s in front of us on the page when we’re reading. If there’s enough momentum, who needs a plot? To me, considering the whole is synonymous with considering the storytelling, and storytelling is something I’m constantly trying to grasp (I am no cocktail party raconteuse). When I take a step back and consider the story arc of an original, wonderful novel, sometimes it becomes clear that the story is pretty basic. This isn’t bad! It just means the complexity comes from somewhere else, particularly from the way the story unfolds. I’ve started to suspect that the only fundamental difference between a riveting tale and a stale one is timing. That’s why knowing how and when to give vital information is an art. I don’t mean plot points, though that can be part of it; mostly I’m talking about the sense of mystery and forward motion and narrative pleasure that comes when you don’t yet know everything in a book, a paragraph, or a sentence and how to pull this off without the more tiresome forms of narrative tension, like cliffhangers and clock-racing (though I do love Cinderella). When a writer doles out information with skill, we enjoy not-knowing. We sense that we’ll be satisfied eventually, even if it’s not in the way we expect. And when it’s done with skill, it’s also invisible. So I grapple with the mechanics of how good forward motion is created in the books I read (or isn’t created). I’ve managed to grasp a few of the ways: it can come in the form of foreshadowing in all its varieties, through strategic absences that arouse our curiosity, through paragraphs with strong first sentences and surprising last words, and by musical sentences that keep us reading through the force of rhythm and the need for resolution. A beautiful, tidy example of a strategic absence is how Mary McCarthy lets time elapse between chapters in The Group. There’s always an ellipsis between one chapter and the next; sometimes a day goes by, but often it’s months or years. McCarthy keeps jumping ahead in time, and the reader can’t help but wonder what’s happened to the characters during the gap. David Markson also uses strategic absences brilliantly, and he has an entirely different method. His fiction is made up entirely of short, stanza-like sections that are only obliquely related to one another (if they’re related at all). The effect of so many isolated paragraphs is that meaning accrues through juxtaposition and absence as much as through what he actually says. Markson seems to have influenced me in the writing of “Mrs. Max Siegel’s Rules for Jewish Women.” I say seems to because it’s difficult to know exactly what influence is or what it feels like, short of sitting down at the computer and saying, “Now I will write my own version of Moby Dick.” Pretty much all art is based on other art, but influence is so diffuse and unconscious, so mixed up with one’s own personality, that it’s difficult to trace. I think it’s only possible to be influenced by a writer who’s already on your wavelength. I can read John Updike all day long, but I’m never going to write like him: our sensibilities are too different. As for how my imaginary editing job/reading journal has affected my writing, it has certainly slowed me down. I have to wade through all the notations in my brain. A lot of writers use their strengths automatically, following their inner sense of language and narrative without agonizing over how they got there. Whereas I sort of take everything apart, then try to put it together again. It’s kind of like those geeky guys who learn how to pick up girls by studying the nuances of human behavior so they can reproduce it in a natural way. But even if it does slow me down, it’s important to me to know my choices. I want to know how I can begin and end things if I get stuck; I want to know how to keep something moving without pandering, and I want to know how to create meaning without hitting the reader over the head with fixed interpretations. Most of all, when I write, I want to be able to use my intelligence as well as my gut.

A Eulogy to Axed Rants: The only sentence that survived in the final draft [of my Notes on Reading] was the one about a hatchet and lye, which gives you some idea of my frame of mind. The rants had to go, but it pained me to axe them. If you don’t mind, I’d like to honor each one with a short eulogy.
Here are my dead: A love letter to the Kindle Paperwhite, likening it to a glowworm. A diatribe against non-readers singling out non-reading MFA students who nonetheless have time to get out of bed to analyze their twitter feeds. A rebuke of television, particularly long-form television dramas, which everyone seems to love because now they get to watch soap operas at night. A poetic, deeply felt passage about language, thought, and metaphor, in which I said some fancy stuff about the symbolic realm, etc. A long, bragging list of all the books I’ve plowed through on my latest reading tear. It included the word “stygian.” A tribute to the movie Blade Runner; this mostly covered the topic of eyeballs. I said some bad things about the Pulitzer Prize. A vigorous invective against/paean to the internet. Gum-chewing porn was mentioned in it, by me, as well as two-day delivery with Amazon Prime, OCD, and God. An audit of the peculiar-yet-necessary items I’ve been able to obtain on the internet (a ceramic dog wearing an Elizabethan collar), as well as the unlikely skills I’ve picked up on YouTube (dismantling the dishwasher to reveal the pile of compost rotting at the bottom). A long paragraph with very little punctuation on the subject of craft, as well as an interrogation of the word “craft.” Also the phrase: Death, death, death, with no elaboration. Rest in piece, rants. Yours truly, Stacey

“Mrs. Max Siegel’s Rules for Jewish Women” by Stacey Richter

Found in Willow Springs 73 Back to Author Profile A JEWISH WOMAN SHOULD BE modern, educated, and cosmopolitan; this will be signaled by the modern, educated, and cosmopolitan fragrance of Chanel … Read more

About Matthew Gavin Frank

Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of the nonfiction books Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and Its First Photographer (forthcoming 2014 from W.W. Norton: Liveright), Pot Farm, and Barolo, the poetry books The Morrow Plots, Warranty in Zulu, and Sagittarius Agitprop, and the chapbooks Four Hours to Mpumalanga and Aardvark. He teaches creative writing in the MFA Program at Northern Michigan University, where he is Nonfiction Editor of Passages North. This winter, he prepared his first batch of whitefish liver ice cream. It paired well with onion bagels.

More Matthew Gavin Frank

Matthew Gavin Frank’s Homepage
Read an excerpt from Pot Farm (University of Nebraska Press).
Read an excerpt from Barolo (University of Nebraska Press).
Matthew Gavin Frank at Black Lawrence Press.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “The Putting Down of the Mint Julep”

“The Putting Down of the Mint Julep” is part of a book in progress, tentatively titled, “Foood: 50 States, 50 Essays, 50 Recipes” (Yes: three Os). I’m hoping to stitch together this weird, lyrical, anti-cookbook cookbook of sorts. Each essay begins with a similar line of questioning, rooted in the state at hand, and its (perhaps strange) relationship to a particular food or drink often associated with said state: What does the mint julep mean? What does Kentucky mean? What ancillary subjects will I have to engage in order to grapple toward something that resembles an answer to these questions, however illusory and soft at the edges? Who will I have to uncover as interview subjects along the way? Sometimes, I’ll keep making phone calls and sending emails until I find someone who has worked at a bowling ball factory. Sometimes, the guy who worked at the bowling ball factory will serendipitously present himself, and redirect the essay in progress. So, the uncle in this piece is a composite character—one part my uncle, many parts other people’s uncles.

Oddly, many of these essays, even while having fun with form and digression, seem to gather peculiar little meditations on violence. It seems that if you scratch a state, you’ll find blood. If you scratch a beverage people like to drink while watching horses run really fast, you’ll find bone. To what degree is Kentucky at fault? To what degree is a specific breed of violence inherent in state “genetics,” in environment? To what degree does Kentucky’s ornamentation (the muddler, the sugar, the bowling pin, the horses on the television) impact the obsessions and moods of its inhabitants? Of course, when I sat down to cobble together a first draft of “Julep,” I had no idea as to the shape and trajectory of the essay; no idea what the fulcrum of the essay would look like, outside of Kentucky and Mint Julep—the springboards. When the ancillary subjects began attaching themselves, like burrs onto pant cuffs, to these springboards, the essay first became very expansive, until it had to be girdled in subsequent drafts. It’s so exciting when things like racehorse injuries and bowling ball names and ruined fingers and the implications inherent in crushing something to extract its best flavor begin to present themselves as viable digressive avenues, as stabs at some (illusory, soft-at-the-edges) truth.

I’m ever looking to find connections between seemingly dissimilar things in my work. How does the story of my first kiss relate to Alberto Santos-Dumont (the balloonist and dirigible pioneer) and locusts? I want to find out. I write essays, in part, to find such things out. Of course, we have allowed ourselves the power to manipulate connections between just about anything, via sufficient research, alchemy, contemplation . . . What is that perfect “bridge” ingredient that joins my lips, Dawn Liebermans’s lips, a blimp that ran on castor oil, and insectile plague? What does the archetypal first kiss have to do with flight, death? The journey to find out often embodies this weird, and addictive, bumping and grinding between moony incantation and mundane stakeout.

Notes on Reading

It’s funny: if I’m in New York City, by my third day there, I’ll start speaking with a New York accent. I may even start swaggering when I walk. If I’m in Memphis, I’ll be damned if by mid-week, I won’t start saying y’all. I know I’m not fooling anybody, yet I can’t help it. It’s almost malign how easily I succumb to particular strains of mimicry. Sometimes I feel like Zelig, from the Woody Allen movie. Certain books work on me that way, get into my bloodstream, affect not only the ways in which I’ll talk to my wife over dinner (both in choice of subject matter and diction), but also how I’ll kiss her goodnight, how I’ll plump my tongue, how I’ll blink against the pillowcase, what I’ll dream about afterward. Books work on me physically.

I often return to Norman Dubie’s poetry collection The Mercy Seat. I love Dubie’s poems for their drama, their characters, their social conscience, and their hilarity; how they combine the weirdest-ever lost episodes of PBS’s Nova with the joy inherent in the telling of a fabulously bad joke. I’ve been reading a lot of essay collections lately. “The Putting Down of the Mint Julep,” in its compulsion to interrogate, worships at the altar of Albert Goldbarth’s Many Circles. I remember reading Ander Monson’s Neck Deep and Other Predicaments a couple of years ago in my old backyard, and looking up from the page, bemused, as if I was now given the language necessary to crack the code in the patterns of bird shit on my car’s hood. After reading that book, I felt as if I understood the world a little bit better, or at least I was given permission for my confusion. Eula Biss’s Notes from No Man’s Land blows my mind every time I return to it. Elena Passarello’s Let Me Clear My Throat has its fingernails in me. That book, in examining the human voice via various lenses, exemplifies the dichotomy that lives in so many of my favorite essays: the sort of obsessive laser focus on a singular thing that compels the author to keep asking question after question about that thing, and the expansive subject matter attached to such singular meditations. Her essays breathe, send out feelers, and return to their sources a little more dazed than when they left. Passarello’s book stresses that in order to get at the center of the singular, we need multiple interrogations.

When I’m struggling with a piece, hitting a wall—when I feel like I have a poem or essay in my chest or the back of my throat that I need to dislodge, and it’s just not coming—I turn to my animal books, often the Audubon Field Guides to birds and fish. They almost always help me to shake something loose. There’s something about glossy bird or fish photos, their skeletal diagrams, their spectacular mating habits, that sets me to jotting something down.

“The Putting Down of the Mint Julep” by Matthew Gavin Frank

Found in Willow Springs 73 Back to Author Profile THIS SORT OF SIPPING has nothing to do with the martini, or anything as astringent as olive, resinous as juniper. This is … Read more