In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Majorie Saiser
Tell us about your poem “The Citrus Thief” in Volume 22. How did it come to be? One of the joys of my life is to rock back and forth to summer on the Great Plains and winter in Arizona; the plants and birds of one environment to the plants and birds of the other. Our...
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In the Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Mitchell Jacobs
Tell us about your poem “Dialogue Between Colander and Self” in Volume 22. How did it come to be? In a Middle English class, I had been comparing manuscripts of a medieval “Debate between Body and Soul.” In that poem, a corpse and its departed soul are arguing about...
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Kevin Lanahan
Tell us about your cnf piece “There Is a Light” in Volume 22. How did it come to be? Years ago, a friend I’d met at the Bread Loaf writers conference visited. He was showing me sections of a nonfiction travel book he was working on about returning to the battlefields...
In the Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Jeanette Beebe
Tell us about your poem “[TK]” in Volume 22. How did it come to be? “[TK]” is a broken sonnet. It's dedicated to the journalists who kept working during and after the mass shooting at The Capital Gazette's newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland on June 28, 2018. They "never...
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Tessa Livingstone
Tell us about your poem “The Mystic Explains” in Volume 22. How did it come to be? “The Mystic Explains” was inspired by my favorite Tarot card, the Eight of Cups, which is said to represent things thrown aside as soon as they’re gained (i.e., success abandoned). I...
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Ed Bok Lee
Tell us about your fiction piece “The Ferryman” in Volume 22. How did it come to be? This short story about a group of Asian American friends (from all different cultural and ethnic backgrounds) is one of a dozen or so that I’ve had for some time. They are interlinked...
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Morgan Grayce Willow
Tell us about your CNF piece “(Un)document(ing)” in Volume 22. How did it come to be? I had been trying to come to terms with my own complicity in the theft of land from Native peoples. Each time I tried writing about it, I discovered that the notion of land ownership...
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Purvi Shah
Tell us about your poem “Moving houses, Maya pumps a music that cannot offer” in Volume 22. How did it come to be? In some ways, I have an unusual New York City story – which is that I’ve lived in my same apartment for 23 years. NYC is a city of transience, a city of...
The Art of the Book Review, By Stan Sanvel Rubin
Earlier this year, we began to mull over the idea of highlighting the creative process of our poetry and CNF book reviewers, Stan Sanvel Rubin and Barrie Jean Borich. We wanted to devote a space to allow these long time reviewers and contributors the opportunity to...
In the Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Juan Morales
Tell us about your fiction piece “The Saddest Song” in Volume 22. How did it come to be? The piece is based on a real grad school experience when I taught one of my first classes in a theater blackbox. I wanted to take a fictionalized version of this memory and...
In The Field: Revisiting a Conversation With Gabrielle Civil
From Gabrielle Civil: “My Black Boy Dead” (Vol. 22) emerged from a kind of haunting. Although the poem resonates with recent anti-black violence, it came from a state of emergency in my youth. I grew up in Detroit during “the crisis of the black boy” and as people...
