by WaterStone Review | Mar 12, 2019 | blog: all
1. Tell us about your poems in Volume 21, “That Far North” and “Drought.” How did they come to be? Both “That Far North” and “Drought” are typical and not-typical for me. Many of my poems arise from particular and beloved landscapes, and these two definitely do: the...
by WaterStone Review | Mar 5, 2019 | blog: all
1. Tell us about your poems in Volume 21, “My Boss Tells Me She Prays for Me” and “When I Say There Is Desire.” How did they come to be? “My Boss Tells Me She Prayers for Me” is actually a true story. I worked in her office as an assistant and spent most of my time at...
by WaterStone Review | Feb 25, 2019 | blog: all
1. Tell us about your fiction piece, “The Man from Lowville,” in Volume 21. How did it come to be? “The Man from Lowville” is one of those stories you decide to abandon only to return to years later. In fact, so much time has passed since the initial drafts that it’s...
by WaterStone Review | Feb 22, 2019 | blog: all
Rosali Borka is a self-defined cripple witch poet and dear friend of mine who is currently debuting as an Instagram poet. She is an incubator of intensity and has a profound command over each turn of phrase. Her first pieces in this iteration of her artistry have...
by WaterStone Review | Feb 19, 2019 | blog: all
Tell us about your poem in Volume 21, “Sunrise Village.” How did it come to be? It came into being the way most of my poems do: over time, various images lodge themselves in my mind and coalesce into something like a seed. When I feel it sprouting, I try to coax it...
by WaterStone Review | Feb 14, 2019 | blog: all
One way to swirl up imaginative juices with your partner, in times of potential lackluster fluttering or in a dry spell on romantic river beds, is to share in the experience of mutual poetic expression. An easy introduction to this exercise is to experiment with the...
by WaterStone Review | Feb 11, 2019 | blog: all
In The Field is a blog series devoted to highlighting the writing life and artistic process of our contributors. This week we continue with our series now featuring contributors from our most recent issue, Vo. 21 “Bodies Worth Defending”. 1. Tell us...
by WaterStone Review | Feb 8, 2019 | blog: all
No, you’re not technically writing, but creating “magazine poetry” is a good exercise to get you out of your own head. Experiencing writer’s block? Spread out, use new tools and muscles, find words that aren’t your own and claim them. Here’s a quick guide to magazine...
by WaterStone Review | Feb 4, 2019 | blog: all
1. Tell us about your poem in Volume 20. How did it come to be? “You’re the deciduous forest” was written a few years ago while I was writing a lot of poems that were basically litanies of contradictory statements. In truth, I tend to write quite a few of these. This...
by WaterStone Review | Jan 31, 2019 | blog: all
In my first semester at Hamline’s MFA Program, the poet Gretchen Marquette came to visit one of our classes. During a Q&A with our class, she was asked about her writing practice. The student asked whether she wrote everyday, and if she did, whether her...
by WaterStone Review | Jan 29, 2019 | blog: all
1. Tell us about your poem in Volume 20. How did it come to be? I’m working on a collection that’s in part about turning fifty, and it contains a lot of poems that riff on that number in one way or another—a poem called “L” in fifty-character lines, for example. I...
by WaterStone Review | Jan 23, 2019 | blog: all
1. Tell us about your poem in Volume 20. How did it come to be? I first wrote the poem “Ventriloquist” when I was living in the Rio Grande Valley. It’s by no means uncommon to hear English and Spanish (or a combination of both) spoken throughout the region. However,...
by WaterStone Review | Jan 17, 2019 | blog: all
Language and communication are essential to life and culture, but where is poetry’s place in a world where the emphasis is on speed and efficiency? If one can get past the notion that poetry is only for intellectuals and scholars, that it is boring and difficult to...
by WaterStone Review | Jan 14, 2019 | blog: all
1. Tell us about your short story in Volume 20. How did it come to be? A pretty huge percentage of the stories that I write begin as things that I just think are funny, just little jokes that I’m telling to myself. Initially, the only thing I knew about “How I...
by WaterStone Review | Jan 11, 2019 | blog: all
I wish I was a morning person. I really, really do. I wish I rose early enough to witness the morning sun kissing the horizon on its way up, to hear the birds early morning chatter. But I am not a morning person. Not even a little bit. I’ve tried everything from...
by WaterStone Review | Jan 7, 2019 | blog: all
1. Tell us about your poem in Volume 20. How did it come to be? My poem, “Aftermath,” was written the night of the election in 2016. I was in the process of writing a poetry collection about women who have suffered infertility and I had read some very negative...
by WaterStone Review | Jan 3, 2019 | blog: all
1. Tell us about your essay in Volume 20. How did it come to be? My essay, “Verdure,” is about the color green in different places I’ve been. It has a very mundane origin story: It was my turn to send some work to my writing group, and I didn’t have anything new to...
by WaterStone Review | Dec 17, 2018 | blog: all
1. Tell us about your poem in Volume 20. How did it come to be? The heart of “The Wild Plum” came from an actual experience I had, probably at age five or so, of coming across a wild plum tree while out walking, and my dad picking plums for my sister and...
by WaterStone Review | Dec 10, 2018 | blog: all
1. Tell us about your fiction piece in Volume 20. How did it come to be? When I was teaching at Hamline in 1994, Jimmy––an inmate at Oak Park Heights Maximum security prison––took two classes from me, one in the MALS (Master of Arts of Liberal Studies) program and the...
by WaterStone Review | Dec 4, 2018 | blog: all
1. Tell us about your poems in Volume 20. How did they come to be? Both of my poems in this issue stem from contemplating the complexities of international adoption and examining my position of privilege within that system. While we were in the middle of a years-long...
