Profiles – Page 9 – Willow Springs Magazine

Issue 70: Roxane Gay

About Roxane Gay

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

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Through the Womb”

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

Notes on Reading

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

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Issue 70: Laura Read

About Laura Read

Laura Read has published poems in a variety of journals, most recently in Rattle, the Cincinnati readReview, and the Bellingham Review. Her chapbook, The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You, was the 2010 winner of the Floating Bridge Chapbook Award, and her collection, Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral, was the 2011 winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and will be published this fall by the University of Pittsburgh Press. She lives in Spokane, WA with her husband Brad and their two sons, Benjamin and Matthew.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Three Poems”

I wrote “When You Have Lived a Long Time in One Place” last summer when I was beginning to think of an idea for a second manuscript. I had written a poem entitled “The Northwest Room” about a room in the Spokane Public Library which contains a collection of local history, and I thought maybe I wanted to write a collection of poems about Spokane called The Northwest Room. I love having a project like this because it gives me ideas for more poems, and that’s where this poem came from. I started thinking about all the memories I have associated with places, like Lincoln Park where this poem is set, that might look innocent of memory and history (or at least of my memory) to someone else. “People Don’t Die of It Anymore” is another Spokane poem, but this idea came from a car ride home from the farms at Greenbluff with my husband, sons, and father. I remember my dad pointing out an old building and saying that it used to be a sanitarium, and I thought how close we were to where Spokane serial killer Robert Yates had hidden the bodies of his victims. These two pieces of history seemed so jarring to me in juxtaposition with the farms we had just visited and the late afternoon autumn sun, and I could feel the poem beginning.

“Bureau” has a very different origin. Last summer, I went to the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference and had the opportunity to work with Dorianne Laux, one of my favorite poets. Every day in our workshop, she gave us a different prompt, usually inspired by a poem. One day she read us Suzanne Cleary’s poem “Anyways,” which is about how the speaker’s family says that word with an “s” on the end and how the speaker’s husband does not. It’s a funny and a serious poem, and I loved it. Dorianne asked us to think of something our families say or do differently than other families and to write about it. I immediately thought of the word “bureau” because I’ve always been mocked for calling my dresser that, as if I am being extremely proper, when in fact that is just what my family calls it. I had fun writing the poem because I liked how the bureau literally travelled, and I liked how it became about my mother and my grandmother, the way Cleary’s poem is about “anyways” and also about where you come from. Even though it’s not specifically about Spokane, “Bureau” is about place and identity, so I think it fits with the other two poems in Willow Springs and with the poems in the collection. Or at least I hope so!

Notes on Reading

I have always been a big reader. I used to read even while I was walking to and from school, and according to my brother Tom, he saved my life once by pulling me out of the way of a cement mixer, which I hadn’t noticed because I was reading. The books that I’ve read and loved recently include The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender, Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, Room by Emma Donoghue, A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, and Where the God of Love Hangs Outby Amy Bloom. I really loved the Amy Bloom collection of stories, as I love all of hers, like Come to Meand A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You. And I always like Alice Munro’s stories as well—I return to her again and again, and to Lorrie Moore. I tend to like fiction by women, as you can tell! And I really admire short stories. I like the compression, the small and important gestures of character, probably the same reason I like poetry. For poetry, I often reread Dorianne Laux, and I liked her most recent book, The Book of Men. And I love and admire What the Living Do by Marie Howe—I like the individual poems and how they collect to tell a story, a coming-of-age story and a story about grief. I’m interested in the ways collections “collect,” and this one works so well as a long poem. In terms of shaping me as a writer, I think Hoagland has played a role, even though he’s much funnier than I am! I like how his poems twist and turn. Dorianne Laux does this too and really focuses on describing a moment and letting it reveal what it will. And Sharon Olds has been an influence. I like her form—I like to write in one long stanza and let the momentum carry me along. Sometimes if I break into stanzas too soon, I start controlling the poem too much. Also, Olds often tells brief stories, and her similes and metaphors are so memorable. I feel carried along by her voice, her images, her rhythms, and these qualities are all important to me in own work.

Three Poems by Laura Read

Found in Willow Springs 70 Back to Author Profile Bureau When my husband asks me where I put the keys, I say they’re on my bureau, and he says you … Read more

“Six Poems” by Laura Read

Found in Willow Springs 80 Back to Author Profile THE SPELL WE CAST She wore white flats and her feet always looked cold. I invited her to my house and … Read more

Issue 80: Laura Read

About Laura Read Laura Read’s chapbook, The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You, was the 2010 winner of the Floating Bridge Chapbook Award, and her collection, Instructions for … Read more

About Melissa Leavitt

Melissa Leavitt lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she works for a children’s healthcare nonprofit. She received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Montana, and her Ph.D. in English from Stanford University. In the summer of 2011, she was a resident fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her writing has been honored by the American Literary Review and the Baltimore Review, and her essay “Build the Story Backward” appears in the Spring 2010 issue of New Delta Review. She is currently working on a collection of essays.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Show Off”

I was about seven or eight years old, I spent a lot of Saturday mornings watching Nadia, a made-for-TV movie about the Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci. The opening scene depicts Nadia cartwheeling in her schoolyard. Actually, it depicts Bela Karolyi, Nadia’s future coach, watching her cartwheel, spying on her through the bars of her schoolyard gate. This is the moment Nadia is discovered, the moment she becomes a star. I mention this moment in “Show Off” as one of many discoveries that fascinated and terrified me as a child—the story of an ordinary girl plucked from obscurity by someone who just happens to see her. These girls could be catapulted to fame and fortune, or they could disappear forever. “Show Off” explores the possibility that stories of disappearance—in this case, kidnapping—are just another version of the discovery narrative that I used to find so compelling.

“Show Off” comes from a collection of essays (still in the works) about missing girls, in which each essay tells the story of a different disappearance. In the process of writing these essays, I’ve begun to reflect on all the different ways a girl can be lost, and all the different ways to put a lost girl in her place. Every missing girl becomes a taunt, of the I-know-something-you-don’t-know variety. We don’t just want to find missing girls; we want to know what they know. The challenge in exploring this idea is not falling into the trap of glamorizing the trauma of disappearance, and trivializing these true-life stories. After explaining the idea for this collection to a fellow writer, I was asked whether there was anything in the idea of being missing that I found appealing. “Of course not,” I answered. But what “missing” really means to me, I think, is that someone out there is looking for you. And I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t anything appealing about that.

Notes on Reading

“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself.” I sometimes think that all of my essays respond, in some way, to this quotation from John Berger, which I came across when I read Ways of Seeing as a college freshman. Since most of my writing has an autobiographical element, I feel I’m constantly engaged in watching myself—and that these acts of scrutiny and self-scrutiny are attempts to “see” some phase of my experience within the big picture of history or memory. Every time I reread Ways of Seeing, I’m gratified to realize, yet again, that the difference between the image of myself I carry around in my head, and the self that actually walks around in the world, will give me enough subject matter to last a good long while.

Plenty of people tell me that Berger’s ideas are too outdated to be of much interest, let alone use, and maybe they’re right. But since I like outdated things, I’ll also say that The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams has been another huge influence on my work. Adams’s book is one of the few memoirs I’ve read that unabashedly embraces its own arrogance. The book is a struggle to figure out whether one individual has any significance in the vast sweep of history, and Adams really, really hopes that he does. I think most memoirs struggle with the same question, but pretend it’s already resolved—as if the act of writing a memoir affirms an individual’s importance. I find it oddly reassuring that Adams remains pretty freaked out by the question throughout the entire very long, very dense book. And while I don’t think I’ll ever adopt his technique of writing about himself in the third person, I like the way it forces him to get lost in the shuffle of the world around him.

Willow Springs 92 NEW

Hourglass by Clare Beams

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

Bird Girls by Jill Christman

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

“Blue on Blue” by Susan Maeder

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

Four Poems by Nance Van Winckel

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

Congratulations Pushcart Prize Nominees

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

WTAW will be at AWP

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

Jennifer Pullen’s New Textbook

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

“The Bridge” by Kerry Muir

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

Issue 92: Suphil Lee Park

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

Issue 69: Michael Martin Shea

About Michael Martin Shea

Michael Martin Shea is an MFA candidate at the University of Mississippi, where he is a John and Renée Grisham Fellow. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Salt Hill, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Meridian, Sycamore Review, and elsewhere.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “How to Say, ‘I Was Scared of Fire As A Kid'”

“How to Say, ‘I Was Scared of Fire As A Kid,’” began, actually, as a Facebook update—I don’t ever delete people from Facebook because that would involve, well, putting effort into my Facebook account, so sometimes I log in and am greeted with these updates from people I only sort of remember, all talking about really strange things. That’s what happened here: a distant acquaintance posted about a dream she had in which she was given six hours to live but had nothing she wanted to do. I thought that was wonderful, so of course, I stole it, and it became the first line of the poem. The rest came pretty naturally—I felt that if I started the poem with a dream, I had to continue to talk about dreams, so I did. Most of those dreams actually happened, too—the dog bite is entirely true, and the kitten dream is essentially true, with some distracting details removed. The hardest part was coming up with a title once it was finished. I made all sorts of terrible attempts. Eventually I was talking to a friend about the poem and he asked me what I was scared of, and I responded, “Well, I used to be scared of fire as a kid,” which was a total misdirection answer, but that sort of stuck.

Though the specific action of the poem is embellished, the piece is, to me, pretty autobiographical, at least as far as the two characters are concerned. I can pretty clearly identify some issues that were going on in my personal life at the time, but most prominent is this idea of what happens when a narrative moves from dream to reality (or anti-reality), and the loss that that might entail. This poem came at the height of a very autobiographical narrative period, which not accidentally coincided with my impending move for graduate school, and my girlfriend and I were dealing with how that would play out for us. In a way, this poem was my attempt to force these things to at least pause for a second. I’ve since backed off that narrative bent really heavily—maybe I ran out of stories to tell—but this poem is still one of my favorites from that time. It feels very honest—I can still see the person I was at that point in my life.

Notes on Reading

Reading is a really challenging experience for me. On one hand, reading is obviously great, just on a level of pure enjoyment. And I wouldn’t have started writing if I hadn’t at some point read the things that made me want to be a writer. I’m continually inspired by other poets—especially Josh Bell, Sabrina Orah Mark, and Frederick Seidel, all of whom are criminally underrated. On the other hand, it’s not infrequently that I find myself reading something and going, “Good Lord, that’s so incredible—and now I can’t write that.” With everything we read, we abandon one more possible way of expressing ourselves in a manner that’s authentic. Which is good, but it forces me to work harder and I don’t always like that. Additionally, there’s a big responsibility involved in being a reader that I don’t think the writer has. The writer—especially the poet—can essentially say and do whatever he or she pleases. There’s really not a lot on the line here in terms of social capital or actual financial capital, and the difference between being a celebrated poet and a nobody amounts, in a lot of cases, to things that are entirely outside the poet’s control. Which is really freeing as a writer—if there’s nothing at stake, why not write the most honest, authentic thing you can? It’s the reader’s job to make value judgments and decide, “Okay, this is good for such and such reason.” The problem is that it’s hard to take on that responsibility as the reader one moment, and then completely cast it away the next when it’s time to sit down and write, and it can lead to a lot of anxiety and self-censorship. Granted, some anxiety is necessary as a writer, and of course it’s only through reading everything else that we can really develop our own notions of poetics and determine if our poems are working in the ways in which we want them to work. But I find I have to really separate myself from what I’ve read in order to write—I need to read it, but then I need to forget it as well. Thankfully, I have a really bad memory.

“How to Say, ‘I Was Scared of Fire as a Kid'” by Michael Martin Shea

Found in Willow Springs 69 Back to Author Profile Last night, I dreamt I was shot in the head. I still had six hours to live, but there was nothing I … Read more

About Austin LaGrone

Austin LaGrone is the author of Oyster Perpetual, winner of the 2010 Idaho Prize for Poetry. His poems have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Brilliant Cornsers, Crazyhorse, Hayden’s Ferry, and Poetry International. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at John Jay College.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Two Poems”

“Foreseeable” is a poem that suffers nostalgia for a time and a place that has passed. I find all the hostility towards tobacco more offensive than cancer itself. It’s even illegal to smoke in Central Park now…likely a law that was passed to harass the homeless. These days, if you want to enjoy a puff without getting dirty looks, you have to travel all the way to Paris. And it’s only getting worse. I recently bought a pack of Delicados in Mexico and there was a picture on the pack of a man who couldn’t hug his daughter because his leg had been amputated. I ask you, who smokes until their leg falls off? And why bring the little girl into the narrative? When I buy a donut there are no pictures of grossly obese people. When I buy a Cadillac there are no pictures of the jaws of death. Anyway, “Foreseeable” goes out to the smokers.

“Tableau with Rockets Redglare” is a grab-bag of objective correlatives for the divorce I was going through at the time. All that ghastly business. The italicized language is “found poetry”—things I heard or observed in the world. The principle metaphor is the busted strip club marquee—Girls-Girls…and then just failed light. A kind of Duende. The very fact that the rule of three should fail to obtain in such vulgar circumstances is delightful. And for all I know, the marquee is still there…burning on Decatur Street.

Notes on Reading

I can talk influences, overlooked masterpieces like he Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You
and recently published beauties like A Lamp with Wings for aeons. A life of writing is principally dedicated to reading. I’ve kept the same office for five years just so I don’t have to move all the damn books. I suppose the poet who has most recently influenced my style is Cesar Viejo—both the collected and the posthumous. It is amazing to me that I lived without these poems for over forty years. I rarely leave the house without them. They say he drank so much beer that the bartenders gave him a significant discount…a beautiful, beautiful man.

Two Poems by Austin LaGrone

Found in Willow Springs 69 Back to Author Profile Tableau with Rockets Redglare At home with Wild Turkey, I hear someone yell Piss yellow gypsy cab colored moon! and, looking … Read more

About Jill Christman

Jill Christman’s memoir, Darkroom: A Family Exposure, won the AWP Award Series in Creative Nonfiction, was first published by the University of Georgia Press in 2002, and will be reissued in paperback in Fall 2011. Recent essays appearing in River Teeth and Harpur Palate have been honored by Pushcart nominations, and her writing has been published in Barrelhouse, Brevity, Descant, Literary Mama, Mississippi Review, Wondertime, and many other journals, magazines, and anthologies. She teaches creative nonfiction in Ashland University’s low-residency MFA program and at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, where she lives with her husband, writer Mark Neely, and their two children. Since the time surrounding the writing of “Bird Girls,” she has been working on her next book, a memoir entitled Blue Baby Blue, and she’s really hoping to finish it before 2012. Just in case.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Bird Girls”

The slumbering baby in the first paragraph of “Bird Girls” is our first child. Ella just finished first grade yesterday, so I have evidence in her they-grow-up-so-fast body to date the origins of this essay six years ago. At the time, we’d been in Indiana for a little over a year, and as a northwestern mountain girl adjusting to life in the Midwest in all its permutations of flatness, the present-tense moment that kicks off that essay was jolting to me in a reassuring way. Those trilling, chattering, whistling birds were so loud, so simultaneously cacophonous and differentiated, so sexual (after all, that’s precisely what the little buggers were getting up to in the pink dawn), I was indeed transported right there in my Indiana bed back to those Oregon woods. True story.

Because my body was curled around a sleeping baby, I couldn’t exactly move, and the combination between that circumstance and the sharp, Proustian memory of the collegiate birding trip collided to send me into an exploration of shifting female identity over the course of a long and mobile life: Who am I? Who was I? What is the relationship between the young woman on the mountain and the older one in the big bed?

In those early days of motherhood I was often stuck under a nursing child with my hands too wrapped up in petting and holding and feeding to be much use on a keyboard. I did a lot of writing in my head and then hoped for a moment to prop the baby between me and a laptop and get some of it down. That morning I got lucky. Six long years later, I figured out what the essay was really trying to be about and finished it.

Notes on Reading

As an essayist, memoirist, and teacher, I’ve been obsessing about the handling of time in nonfiction (for a great book on this subject, check out Sven Birkerts’s The Art of Time in Memoir), and I’m beginning to think that all our best questions come from folding time. I had a fabulous teacher/mentor in my graduate program at Alabama, Sandy Huss, who scribbled a note in the margin of one of my short stories way back when: Before the manuscript there is silence. The manuscript breaks the silence. Why here? Why now? These are important questions for nonfiction writers, too. Does the now-narrator have something she must ask the then-self? Can the reader be convinced that this excavation of the past and memory is real and necessary? My students are sometimes shocked when I tell them I never write anything when I know what I’m talking about, when I know the answer. Why bother? The work then has already been done and the inquiry is false. Give me the good, unanswerable questions any day.

The fundamental book for lessons in the essential shaping of life material, the artful folding of the magic carpet, of course, is Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak Memory. I return to that book—and Nathalie Sarraute’s Childhood—every year. I thought about Nabokov this semester when I read two books that were new to me: Kathleen Finneran’s astounding memoir The Tender Land: A Family Love Story (the first chapter could be a textbook for folding time) and Eula Biss’s provocative collection of essays, Notes from No Man’s Land (Biss’s juxtaposition of her own present-day navigation of her neighborhood with our national history makes an open-eyed look at race possible). Speaking of Biss, I’m also drawn to nonfiction that teaches me new things about the world, which is why I’m a steadfast Lauren Slater fan, and why this year’s nightstand books included Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Annie Paul’s Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives.

Also, my husband got me a Kindle in a red leather case for Christmas, and because our house is stuffed to the rafters with books with which no one can part—and because the red leather is so snappy—I’m trying to choose books I can bear to enjoy in e-reader form: Skloot’s Immortal Life was my first, and because my colleague Sean Lovelace says it should be, Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America is on my summer list.

Bird Girls by Jill Christman

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

About Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum

Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum is the author of two collections of short fiction—This Life She’s Chosen (Chronicle Books, 2005) and Swimming With Strangers (Chronicle Books, 2008). She has been the recipient of a PEN/O. Henry Prize for short fiction and fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the MacDowell colony. She teaches at Purchase College, SUNY and lives with her husband and two young children in the Hudson River Valley.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “The Remainder Salvaged”

“The Remainder Salvaged” was a long time in the making. Several years ago, my husband’s grandmother (who has been, incidentally, one of my few early-draft readers for over a decade now, and who still—even now that she’s in her 80s—occasionally writes me long, thoughtful, and hand-penned letters analyzing and critiquing my stories) sent me a newspaper clipping of a Wenatchee World article
featuring her uncle discussing the anniversary of the Wellington Train Disaster. The disaster happened in 1910 in the Cascades, near the town now known as Tye (then as Wellington). An avalanche swept two Great Northern trains from their tracks, killing 96 people. According to the clipping, my husband’s great-great uncle, who was a young man at the time of the accident, was one of those who received the bodies of the avalanche victims when they were tobogganed into Wenatchee following the accident. I knew I wanted to write about the disaster as soon as I read the article, but it took me years to finally find the right character through which to enter the story. Then, last summer my family and I, home in Washington for our annual summer visit, hiked the site of the avalanche (known as the Iron Goat Trail) along the now-defunct train route. The site struck me as eerie, though we were there on a bright, warm summer day. Pieces of the train wreckage are still there, beneath the layers of overgrown brambles and nettles and undergrowth; and the snow shed the railroad built following the accident is crumbling and scribbled with graffiti. The result of the visit to the disaster site was the emergence of the trio of characters that appear in this story—Nils, Iris, and the sister—and a first scene.

This story diverges from most of my stories in that it is fairly closely based on actual history. I’ve loved reading historical fiction since I was a little girl, but haven’t tried my hand at it as a writer until now. As I wrote this story, I wrestled with how accurate I needed to be about the history, and how clear I needed to be about the specific date of the accident; I made several revisions of the story, sometimes holding to the facts, other times veering far from them. In the end, I think I found some middle ground between fact and fiction, and am happy with the final version of the story.

Notes on Reading

As a reader I tend to favor short stories over novels (though there are plenty of novels I love and find myself turning to again and again as models of prose and structure). My new literary obsession is the work of Anthony Doerr, whose collection Memory Wall won the Story Prize this year. I was completely knocked out by the stories in that collection—especially the title story and one titled “Afterworld.” Both stories are fragmented narratives, and that form, too, is a new obsession. I also recently read Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, and though the book is a hybrid memoir/poem, it has really had an influence on my fiction. In fact, I’ve been reading quite a lot of creative nonfiction in the last year (in part because I taught a nonfiction workshop last fall at Purchase College), and shifting my genre focus as a reader has had the unexpected side effect of rejuvenating my short fiction. I went through a long phase of total fiction burnout following the publication of my second book of stories. I was bored of the standard structure, the standard realism (or, at least, my standard realism), and I needed something to wake me up again to the joy of making fiction. I think my attraction to Nelson’s and Doerr’s books has everything to do with the way both writers are blending and subverting traditional genre limitations and playing with structure, and though it’s not very evident in this particular story, I’m working on doing more of both in the new collection stories I’m currently writing. (And, yep, I’m writing a third collection before finishing a first novel. It’s probably a disaster to say that publicly, but what can I do? Stories are it for me—every new story a perfect challenge—and I don’t think I’ll ever lose my devotion to the short form.)

“Dear Mistress” by Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum

Found in Willow Springs 78 Back to Author Profile DEAR MISTRESS, You are the cancer in my family’s gut, our bleeding ulcer, a bile we cannot swallow. THIS IS THE … Read more

Online Exclusive: A Conversation with Kirsten Lunstrum

Works in Willow Springs February 3, 2005 Adam O’Connor Rodriguez A CONVERSATION WITH KIRSTEN LUNSTRUM Photo Credit: www.kirstenlunstrum.net KIRSTEN SUNDBERG LUNSTRUM WAS BORN IN CHICAGO and raised in the Pacific Northwest. … Read more

Issue 78: Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum

About Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum is the author of two collections of short fiction, This Life She’s Chosen and Swimming With Strangers (both published by Chronicle Books). Her … Read more

About Clare Beams

Clare Beams and her husband live in Massachusetts, where she writes and teaches 9th-grade English. She received her MFA from Columbia in 2006. Her story “We Show What We Have Learned,” originally published in Hayden’s Ferry Review, will appear in the Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011. Her story “Much Peace,” published in Inkwell, received a Special Mention in the Pushcart Prize 2011 volume. She has a story forthcoming in One Story and has just finished, she thinks, a novel called The Meditations of All Our Hearts. She’s at work on more stories.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Hourglass”

I think “Hourglass” began out of my fascination with a certain kind of lofty language that gets used sometimes in discussions about teaching. For the past five years I’ve been a ninth-grade English teacher at a small private high school, a wonderful place. I love the work, and I’m surrounded by colleagues who do, too. When people who love teaching talk about it, there’s a tone that can color things, a grandness that strikes me as unusual (as grandness goes) because it’s genuine. I think that for the most part we talk about teaching in lofty terms because we can’t help it. The kids really do make it hard to use any others.

In writing this story, I was interested in taking that kind of language in a darker direction. What if the idea of shaping others, which is at the heart of my understanding of a teacher’s job, were more literal and sinister? What kind of tyrant could have that kind of vision, and what kind of student might be tempted by it?

Of course, all of this makes the whole process sound much more conscious and calculated than it was. All I really had to go on when I started writing was an image of this old streaked-stone school and the sound of Mr. Pax’s voice. These elements combined to make the story feel somehow outside time in a way that was exciting to me. When I realized how Melody was going to have to transform, everything became much harder for a while—I knew pretty much where I wanted things to go, but not how to take them there convincingly—and the story and I are both indebted to Sam Ligon for his incredible insight and patience along the way. He helped “Hourglass” to become a much better version of itself.

Notes on Reading

As a reader, I have an enthusiasm for old British things that I think has left its mark on “Hourglass.” I love Keats and Tennyson and the thick, sprawling novels that have always reminded me of big houses with dark corners—Our Mutual Friend and Jane Eyre and Great Expectations and Middlemarch. There’s a kind of scope there, a feeling of entering a whole world, that I’ve found and loved in some more modern books, too. Chris Adrian’s The Children’s Hospital blew me away, as did Geoffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex and A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, and I just finished reading Julie Orringer’s wonderful The Invisible Bridge. Last summer I had a great time with Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger, a fabulously creepy and atmospheric ghost story. All of those books—though in very different ways—demand that a reader slow down and make space for them.

Recently I’ve been reading short story collections, something I tend to do when I’m revising stories of my own, as if I’m going to find some magic key that will make the whole process easier. That never happens, but I have found some wonderful books: recent highlights are Robin Black’s If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, Anthony Doerr’s The Shell Collector, Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen, and Kevin Wilson’s Tunneling to the Center of the Earth.

And then there are my longstanding loves, writers who fill me with feelings of inadequacy and admiration and most of all gratitude. I will never be able to read enough Alice Munro, who packs her worlds into small spaces in a way that amazes me. For pyrotechnic sentences, Nabokov and Woolf. And for the sheer beauty and density of what can be done with words, no one has anything on Shakespeare. Hamlet and King Lear are probably the most staggering to me, but
I teach Romeo and Juliet to my 9th-graders, and every year I find something new in it.

Hourglass by Clare Beams

About Nance Van Winckel

Nance Van Winckel was editor of Willow Springs from 1990-1996. Her fifth collection of poems
is No Starling (2007, U. of Washington Press). She is the recipient of two NEA Poetry Fellowships as well as awards from the Poetry Society of America, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. She is also the author of three collections of short fiction and the recipient of an Isherwood Fiction Fellowship for a work in progress. She lives near Spokane, Washington and teaches in the low-residency MFA Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Her current project is something she calls pho-toems, a marriage of photographs and small bits of poetic
text. These have appeared in various literary journals, galleries, and shows.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Four Poems”

These poems are from a new book, entitled Pacific Walkers, that will be out in 2013 with the University
of Washington Press. The poems evolved from recalling my first “real” job: as a newspaper reporter. I was sent out to cover
a rash of unidentified corpses, John Does. Each poem I worked on seemed to call forth a next poem, and so on. I both love it
and hate it when this happens. I feel the poems invade me, take me over, make me theirs. The first piece I wrote about the job
was a little prose poem. It opened up the door.

THE JOB. I worked a week on the Bridal Desk and when I griped about it, the boss said, “Here then, Blondie, see if
you can get some legs under this.” And back in the last century I was a grateful person. Having scoffed at the brides and the
names of their laces, I was sent into a cold wind along a shoreline lashed by an icy froth and a third then a fourth John Doe
collected in black plastic bags and put in a black truck and me taking notes while the collector shook his head, saying, “Ain’t
no story here. There’s only one way to spell dead. Stand back.”

The two snaps of his green rubber gloves pulled on. He has a tag to attach to the dead man’s toe, but no toe. One
ankle but no foot. The collector says, “For someone who didn’t add up to much, this guy has quite the big number.” I write it
down. No one likes my story. I don’t like my story. In ten minutes I have to phone it in. What, per se, to jot? The filled-full
shadow becomes a shade.

I work for the paper. I can say this and flash a badge and walk into the cordoned-off places. I work for what I don’t
even know is itself about to die. The paper. The man’s big number sits beneath the small name—same as last week, as last year. I
jot: freedom fighter, according to the tattoo; Christ-lover, so claims the cross on its chain with its broken clasp. Loyal, yes,
to the end.

Notes on Reading

I’m always reading at least one book of poems, a collection of stories or a novel, and a nonfiction something. I go
back and forth between these in the course of a day. During my writing time, I take frequent breaks to read. Reading another poet gets my language synapses firing again. A new favorite collection of poems was Laura Kasishcke’s Space, in Chains. I loved how a poem of hers will start out in prose and then break into lineated lines, or vice-versa. Often right in the middle, the piece
morphs and moves from prose into poem. I liked how liberated that made the poems feel . . . as if they couldn’t be nailed down
to being one thing or another, which in turn seemed to go with the subject matter of the whole book, that transitoriness.

I’m also crazy about the poetry of Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Norman Dubie, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Mary Ruefle. I go back
to Transtromer frequently, and also to Wallace Stevens. In fiction I just read a wonderful short novel by Paula Fox called
Desperate Characters, and I’m now reading and thoroughly enjoying the collected short stories of William Maxwell
called All the Days and Nights. The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald was a recent favorite book of nonfiction. I also pour over books of visual art: photography especially but also paintings and all sorts of collage, assemblage, and montage.

Four Poems by Nance Van Winckel

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

About Matthew Dickman

Matthew Dickman is the author of All-American Poem (American Poetry Review/ Copper Canyon Press, 2008). The recipient of The Honickman First Book Prize, the May Sarton Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont College, and the 2009 Oregon Book Award from Literary Arts of Oregon. His poems are forthcoming or have appeared in Tin House Magazine, McSweeny’s, Ploughshares, The Believer, The London Review of Books, and The New Yorker among others. W.W. Norton & Co. will publish his second book in 2012. He lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on Two Poems

Both “Dog” and “Halcion” were, formally, a departure for me. For a long time my poems seemed to need at least a page and a half for me to figure anything out, for the poem to feel complete in some way, so it was an interesting feeling, a kind of departure, when I began writing shorter poems. “Dog” is part of a longer elegiac sequence written for my older brother after his suicide. Mainly it’s a poem that suggests our shadows are always with us. That we can tame grief and struggle enough to be house trained though they are still wild animals. “Halcion” was written after my first experience taking the drug of the same name. I took it before having my wisdom teeth removed. I’m terrified of the dentist and all things medical. Halcion took care of that fear! It’s a wonder drug. I love it. The poem tries to describe my feelings when I was on it.

Notes on Reading

For a writer, reading is one of the most important experiences that can affect their work. Reading is also a radical act. It’s humanizing in nature. It teaches us, in a natural and very sincere way, about compassion and understanding, about true empathy. Some important books for me, as of late, are Lucia Perillo’s “Inseminating the Elephant,” Diane Wakoski’s “The Butcher’s Apron,” Gary Jackson’s “Missing You, Metropolis,” and Dorothea Lasky’s “Black Life.” Each of these poets are very different from each other but they all have something important in common and that is a wildness of imagination. Each of them raises their freak-flags high which makes me feel brave, in turn,
when I sit down and write.

Two Poems by Matthew Dickman

Found in Willow Springs 68 Back to Author Profile Dog I’m hiding from the stars tonight. I’ve pulled every blind and turned off all the lights but one, which I’ve … Read more

Issue 69: A Conversation with Matthew Dickman

April 15, 2011 TIM GREENUP, KRISTINA MCDONALD, DANIEL SHUTT A CONVERSATION WITH MATHEW DICKMAN It’s difficult to read a Macthew Dickman poem and not uncover some essential nugget of humanity. … Read more