In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Alice Paige
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Alice Paige
What inspired your poem, “An Untitled Hunt?” Where did you draw the title from?
This poem is centered around the miracle of survival and the expectation of violence and death to be visited upon the creature deemed huntable. The “untitled” aspect of this poem looks to elicit the unimportance of the hunt to the hunter, the everyday nature of death in his world, and the life viewed as forfeit by its lack of luck.
As a transgender woman, I often write about the miracle of survival. In a country continually searching for new ways to invisibilize and illegalize those of us in the margins—only more so in the last year—I always wish to mythologize our survival. To say yes, despite all the world will do to us, we keep going. The hunters will always come, but we are so much more than the hunt.
The doe at the end of the poem runs like an open wound. She survives to the magic of tomorrow, disappearing in the moment of the hunter’s mistake. His steps faltering and uncomfortable in her world.
I have always survived through a well-honed instinct for flight. When I was a homeless queer youth, this need to step out of harm’s way at the arrow’s flight was necessary. To let it bite the flank but not kill. Never kill. There were mornings drenched in alcohol where my survival was nothing but a miracle. And I’ve spent my entire life around queers performing this magic trick over and over again. I’ve also borne witness to what happens when this trick fails.
There are so many colors—of the doe, the forest, the hunter—that this piece incorporates. What was the process of weaving color through this piece like for you?
Color seeps into all my writing, whether fiction, poetry, or CNF. I tend to write from one image to the next hoping to leave a reader with the impression of life in their palm. I want more than the still image, I want the sights and smells to jump from the page and press beneath the reader’s fingertips with a heightened urgency. I want the doe’s fur to be felt.
Color informs so much of our experience of the world, yet is always able to surprise us when drawn forth in unexpected arrangements. Yellow can bring us to the onset of flesh decay or the brilliance of Van Gogh’s sunflowers.
Color, when I’m writing, is a conversation with the world. An invitation to be surprised by the image as I pull it to the page. When I can surprise myself in the presentation of an image, I know I’m writing in the correct direction.
I had the pleasure of hearing you read this piece at last year’s Water~Stone Review reading. What’s your preparation strategy for readings?
I started my writing career as a slam poet so I’ve spent far too much time thinking about how a piece is delivered aloud. I always begin by reading any given poem to myself repeatedly in search of the problem points. Where does one word have the potential to overlap another or become jumbled in delivery? What are the difficult turns in terms of emotion? By the time I perform a piece, I want to know it from the first syllable to the last. I’ll often mark spots on the page to look out for when reading to help myself over the hump of pronunciation or breath control.
What I don’t plan is the emotion of the piece. I always want to discover the emotional core of a performance as it is happening as the tone can change depending on the night, the audience, or the venue. I want to preserve the capacity for improvisation and surprise during a reading. If a line hits me especially hard as I am performing it, that can propel authentic creative choices in the performance of the following lines. I always view a reading as a conversation between author, audience, and context. The joy of the stage is how dynamic it can be as a home for our voices when rooms are left wide open for creativity to arrive.
What books and authors do you love?
Achille Mbembe coined the term Necropolitics to describe the allowable death we witness in society. It is a term that puts the agency back on the enforcers of various systems of oppression. To pull away the abstractions they hide behind. In this moment in history where the shadow of imperialism only grows, I am reading as many authors as possible who face down these enforcers and do not flinch. I wish to meet the world as one of those authors.
I recently finished Omar El Akkhad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, a book that faces the genocide in Gaza with pointed anger and condemnation. It was a book I sorely needed as it centered me in my humanity, empathy, and desire to affect change. I have a love for Akkhad’s willingness to wade into the world as a lifeline, a voice for change, and a witness.
What are you working on now?
I am finishing up edits on what will hopefully be my first book. It is a bit of supernatural historical fiction titled The Ghost Cabaret, and is an exploration of Germany in 1932. This is a time period when the city’s swinging transgender cabarets were being shut down by police order and queers were forced to flee, find new homes, or assimilate. I’m a little obsessed with history’s short memory and the personal apocalypses we are so often forced to live through by design.
So many queer voices were the doe in this time period, hooves beating toward escape. So many queer voices were caught up in the hunt.
Alice Paige is a transgender author, educator, and activist from Chicago, Illinois. She has her MFA in creative writing from Hamline University and her BS in biology from Iowa State University and is a LOFT Mentor Series Fellow. She writes about the healing power of community, the dangers of assimilation, and the ghosts of what we once were. Her work can be found in American Precariat, Take a Stand, Art Against Hate: A Raven Chronicles Anthology, Luna Station Quarterly, The Rumpus, and plenty of other strange places.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Cheryl Clark Vermeulen
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Cheryl Clark Vermeulen
What inspired your poem, “Patriarch“?
Thank you for your astute questions about my poem! It is lovely to have great listeners.
My inspiration for “Patriarch” was very much influenced by work meetings, whether corporate, academic, or otherwise organizational, in which larger societal forces impinge on the conversations in those meetings, and in particular—cue up sexism and patriarchy here—how men can be found talking over women or dismissing a woman’s idea then later regurgitating it as their own.
I love the line, “we are juggling/the slights.” It makes me think of boardroom meetings and corporate Zoom calls, where bosses talk over each other. Can you talk more about that line and how it came to be in this piece?
Now in my early 50s, I have plenty of anecdotal experiences of such “slights,” but more recently I have experienced meetings in which women have been aware of these dynamics and sought to interrupt them by listening and amplifying another woman’s idea. And please do recognize my simplification because women, having internalized sexism, can also diminish other women in the room.
The “diminishing” reference takes on an interesting angle when compared to the perpetrator, which is such a small mouse. Can you talk about the juxtaposition of choosing a mouse to represent such an overwhelming presence?
While I started writing about a single meeting in this poem, multiple experiences converged and I sought to distill my thoughts and feelings into a single, small poem. I also considered, then, that if someone in the poem, consciously aware or not, has an outsize presence, then in resistance to these forces, seeking a better “future,” the speaker has the power to shrink that presence and thus, in my imagining, become a mouse. Once poetic compression became so important, to call the poem “Patriarch” felt like a dare—I mean, can we actually talk about patriarchy and connect it to the individuals we interact with on a daily basis?
I am forever grateful that poetry gives me the space to reflect, question, and dream. Again, thank you for asking!
What are some of your favorite books? Which authors have inspired your work?
Alice Notley’s poems continue to inspire me, particularly her books Mysteries of Small Houses and The Descent of Alette.
Cheryl Clark Vermeulen is poet, editor, translator, educator, and author of the poetry books They Can Take It Out (The Word Works, 2022), This Paper Lantern (Dancing Girl Press), and Dead-Eye Spring (Cy Gist Press). She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is poetry editor at Pangyrus and visiting associate professor in humanities at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where she founded the department’s first creative writing minor. Originally from Illinois, she lives in Boston, with her husband and twin boys. Find her virtually on Twitter @apoeminthere, Instagra @cherwords, and Linktree at https://linktr.ee/cherylclarkvermeulen.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Josh Nicolaisen
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Josh Nicolaisen
Your piece, “Sometimes I Walk Barefoot Through Freshly Tilled Soil,” wraps up Volume 27. Where did the inspiration for this piece come from?
Yes, and thank you so much for such a prized spot in the journal. I was truly awed and honored when my copy arrived. I wrote this poem one spring after prepping our vegetable garden for the season with my wife and daughters. I was thinking about our gardens and how they bring us together as a family. I was thinking about mental health and personal acceptance and possibility and Willa Cather’s O’ Pioneers and the goats we used to raise and a bumper sticker my wife once had that said “A good rind is a terrible thing to waste.”
There’s a beautiful dissonance of the title, which feels idyllic, and the text of the poem, which gets into the reality of the dirt. Can you talk more about the development of this idea?
Yeah, so that’s the O’ Pioneers part, and it has to do with the indulgences of being barefoot. It has to do with vices and acceptance and personal forgiveness. I think it’s best that I share Cather’s words:
“Ivar,” Signa asked suddenly, “will you tell me why you go barefoot? All the time I lived here in the house I wanted to ask you. Is it for a penance, or what?”
“No, sister. It is for the indulgence of the body. From my youth up I have had a strong, rebellious body, and have been subject to every kind of temptation. Even in age my temptations are prolonged. It was necessary to make some allowances; and the feet, as I understand it, are free members. There is no divine prohibition for them in the Ten Commandments. The hands, the tongue, the eyes, the heart, all the bodily desires we are commanded to subdue; but the feet are free members. I indulge them without harm to any one, even to trampling in filth when my desires are low. They are quickly cleaned again.”
You use a lot of taste and smell sensations. Were they part of the first draft or did they get layered in later? Do you use these senses in other pieces?
Those came quickly in this poem, which was one of the rare occasions where the first draft arrived pretty much as is. The piece underwent one minor set of revisions, but mostly still lives in its original form. I think tactful and relatable sensory language is the most effective way to bring readers into poems. My writing students might even say I overdo it in my asking for them to add additional sensory details.
Compost plays such a huge role in this piece. What does this idea of this sort of recycling mean to you?
Aside from teaching writing at Plymouth State University, I’m also a self-employed fine gardener. I work with compost a lot and appreciate the role it plays in our ecosystem. I use compost made at home with food waste, poultry litter, grass clippings, and sheep manure. I also use commercially, mass-produced compost in my clients’ gardens. Humans create an enormous amount of food waste. We eat far too much beef, and too many animals in general. We are obsessed with large, tidy, green lawns. We do these things despite knowing the huge contribution they have to climate change and I think about all of this a lot, probably too much. Additionally, as dirty and gross of a process making them is, most fertilizers (especially organic ones) are created with animal bi-products, and as much as the ethics around our systems of factory farming and big agriculture bother me and cause me to consider my impact and the impact of my business, I enjoy being able see beautiful things grow from what we destroy.
What themes do you write about?
My writing spends a lot of time outdoors, which has been much of my lived experience. I write a lot about boyhood and masculinity and what that even means. I write about family and ancestry and loss. I write about mental and physical health, and gardening, and the forest, and parenting, and love. I write into what I know and what I still wonder about what I don’t.
Who are some of your favorite authors? What books or poems do you love?
I could go on for far too long here, so I’ll try and pinpoint a few writers that really do it for me. Firstly, I have an obsession with Kurt Vonnegut. In my office he resides on a paperweight, a skateboard deck, on several pieces of art, and in the form of a stuffie. I have more than one t-shirt featuring his face and my right leg is covered in tattoo versions of his drawings. I implore you to read some Vonnegut. I always recommend people start with Breakfast of Champions or God Bless You Mr. Rosewater. Cormac McCarthy and Willa Cather are a couple classic fiction writers that I love. I recently finished a streak of new novels by some the Randolph MFA faculty and couldn’t recommend more highly, Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr, Julia Phillips’ Bear, and Clare Beams’ The Garden.
Gregory Orr and Ted Kooser are poets whose poems make me want to write poems. Their imagery, economy of language, and ability to see deeply into quotidian situations never ceases to amaze me. I feel much the same about Theodore Roethke, and “My Papa’s Waltz” is probably my favorite poem of all time. Sharon Olds’ odes have been so important to me. Chet’la Sebree was my mentor during the first semester of my MFA program, and her work, work ethic, and kindness are all to be adored. William Fargasson and Taneum Bambrick are two contemporary poets that I absolutely cannot get enough of and whose work I hope mine is in conversation with.
Additionally, I’m so excited to be sharing space in this issue of Water~Stone with NH Poet Laureate, Jennifer Militello, and with my friend and workshop partner Christopher Gaumer.
What are you working on now?
Right now, I’m writing to you from a weeklong residency at Hewnoaks in Maine. This past summer has probably been the most hectic one of my adult life, and I think I’ve only drafted two poems in the past year. I’ve needed this time and space so badly. It’s incredible to feel rested and creative again and I’m incredibly grateful for the good fortune of being awarded this time and space.
I’m working on a couple of things while I’m here. I’m working on a review of Samyak Shertok’s No Rhodendendron, which comes out October 7th. It’s incredibly touching and does some highly impressive work with invented and adapted forms. I highly recommend getting your hands on a copy. I’m also refining a manuscript for a chapbook and another for what I hope to be my first full-length collection. I’m digging into some long-awaited revisions and sorting through lots of highly appreciated workshop feedback that I’m finally finding time to work with. I’m writing some new stuff. I’m practicing patience and rest. I’m thankful to Jenn at Water~Stone Review for asking me these questions and to you for reading my answers. Thank you.
Josh Nicolaisen lives in New Hampshire and teaches writing at Plymouth State University. He holds an MFA from Randolph College and is a Pushcart Prize nominee. He has been awarded a grant from Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference and a fellowship from Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. His work has recently appeared in Colorado Review, Hunger Mountain Review, So It Goes, Appalachian Review, Poetry South, Bellingham Review, and elsewhere. Find him at oldmangardening.com/poetry.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Abie Irabor
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Abie Irabor
In your poem, “Movie Star,” you create a spotlight of excitement surrounding a parent coming home. What sparked this poem’s creation and the comparison of the homecoming to a celebrity?
This poem’s creation originated from a short story I wrote back in Graduate School. The short story was about my Dad. How his visits were always unexpected, inconsistent, and far and in between. So, whenever he did decide to visit my siblings, mom, and me it was rare, but exciting, to see someone I wish was more present in my life.
The comparison of the homecoming to a celebrity stems from the admiration a child has for their parent(s) like a person has for a celebrity. When it comes to celebrities, fans feel this sense of closeness, connection, and put them on this pedestal, but at the same time they know this celebrity is out of reach. I wanted to capture that in this poem. The child has put their father on a pedestal, he is a celebrity in the child’s eyes. Someone who is far away, rarely seen, and quite flashy (hahaha). I wanted to capture the “hype” around this person who appears close, but is really so far away.
How did you develop the symbolism with the balloons “holding their breath,” and the child waiting for attention, or was that image always part of this piece?
The symbolism with the balloons comes from the idea that my father’s visits were literally like an event, exciting. And balloons were one of the symbols that came to me while drafting this poem. It just so happened that the connection with balloons being filled with air, and air is also breath, and holding breath and balloons waiting to be noticed and pulled down made sense in relation to the child.
You set the scene quite perfectly with only a few details—the dissonance between couches, for example. How do you decide what to keep in and what to leave out when creating a brief poem like this?
This is a question I ask myself when editing poems; what to keep and what to leave out. I will say, I wanted to capture tension and the loud silence within a room filled with people and noise. I hope the brevity of the poem captured this. As I am completing my first poetry book, I find that fewer words capture the tone and energies of the relationship(s) I highlight throughout my writing.
What themes do you return to in your writing?
The themes that I return to in my writing are about family, ancestral lineage, culture, and healing—as of now.
Which authors do you admire? What books are your favorites?
A few of the authors I admire are: Natalie Diaz, Ada Limon, and Joy Harjo.
What are you working on now?
I am currently working on my first book of poetry, where the poem Movie Star will be included.
Abie Irabor is an American Nigerian writer and performing artist. She is currently working on her first chapbook. You can read her other published poems in Euphony Journal, Petigru Review, and California Quarterly, and forthcoming in Angel City Review. She resides in Los Angeles, California.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Jennifer Bowen
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Jennifer Bowen
There are so many facets of your nonfiction piece “Just the Song.” Where did the spark for this piece come from?
The pressure to write it came while watching my kid perform in Cabaret on the day of Donald Trump’s first inauguration. It was haunting to watch my son’s character, Cliff, grapple with the world as the Nazi Party and fascism were on the rise—history, but with foreboding. E was getting ready to go to college and I was a big fucking mess about it. For the first time in my life, I wondered whether art was the protective force I’d imagined it to be. Art can be life changing, for sure. But my kids, it seemed, were going to launch into a darkening world. If all essays arise out of a question, mine was something like, can art stop a bullet? And in the face of that question, are they prepared for the world that awaits?
When writing this work, what was it like to go back through and remember the plays E had performed? What was the impetus for this work to span nearly two decades? How did you decide on the organization for it?
It was bittersweet to watch the reel of his creative life tick through my mind’s eye. On the one hand, E brought so much joy and vibrance to the stage. As he got older, of course, the plays he acted in grew weightier and that was a different experience to relive. Reading it years after I wrote it, which was written years after I’d lived it, I see now where my perceptions about his experiences were flawed, which is always humbling. Writing is good at revealing your own misconceptions to you.
When I realized the structure of the essay would be a tour through my son’s theatre performances alongside his aging, it naturally took up most of his life, which was a few decades. My brain hops around in ways this essay illustrates. I don’t think I have ADHD. I think I have what I’d call Consistently Digressive Disorder (CDD). I sometimes think our writing is more an illustration of our limitations than our strengths, or maybe that, harnessed well, our limitations can be made into strengths? Cue every structure I’ve ever landed on, for better or worse.
There’s such a tenderness throughout the text. You talk about how it was strange to watch your child become someone else. Can you say more about that?
Thank you for saying that. It did feel tender to write. It feels tender to talk about now. When our kids are young, we (perhaps mistakenly) think we know them entirely. And so when you see them acting someone completely different from themselves—a slapstick cowboy for example—it’s funny and a little startling.
And of course it’s hard to see them acting pain. In Cabaret, again, my son was a man named Cliff—but with E’s very dimples, his very walk. When he got kneed in the gut by Nazis, it was my son’s voice I heard expressing pain. I didn’t have to imagine him in a fascist world, because I was watching it live. And watching your child act can really be a metaphor for watching them grow into their future selves. There are layers and complexities we can miss when they’re right under our nose, because we’re so used to seeing them as this one person we’ve always known. But humans are dynamic and layered and play, as the bard tells us, many parts.
Because of the way it’s structured, is this ever a piece that you’d ever want to write a part two of, as time progresses?
That’s interesting. I’ve never considered it. I could imagine writing something new or deeper about the way art functions or fails as both sanctuary and weapon in the end times, but I’m not sure I have the stomach to put either of my kids in it right now. I’d rather imagine them into a speculative world with free healthcare.
What themes do you find you return to in your writing?
I write about connection: how humans (and systems and cows and chickens) seek it, thwart it, imagine it, falter from the lack of it, and thrive when we find it. Themes that grow from that central concern are abandonment, magical thinking, mutual care. That all sounds heavy: I love being playful—with structure and language—across all themes. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about pleasure and the impulse to give. That’d feel like a nice space to explore.
What are some of your favorite books? What authors do you return to?
Oh gosh, so many. Some of the most brilliant contemporary writers alive today happen to live in our own backyard and I love and admire their books: Lesley Nneka Arimah (What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky), VV Ganeshananthan (Brotherless Night), Danez Smith (Bluff). I also love Marilynne Robinson’s novels and essays. Ali Smith, always. Wislawa Szymborska. Kristin Collier has a new book or memoir/reportage coming out called, What Debt Demands. It’s about student loan debt, but really also about family and class divide and caring for each other; it’s a beautiful, important book that’s fresh in my mind. Frog and Toad will forever hold a place in my heart and so will E.B. White, who probably shaped and parented more of me than I realize through Charlotte’s Web.
What are you working on now?
I’m not an everyday writer. My day job and my extra gigs take up a chunk of time and emotional energy. My brain seems to be scheming a novel, which I think is a very cheeky thing for it to do. We’ll see if it gets bashful when I actually sit in front of a blank page again. If past is precedent, it’ll change its mind about a novel and lead me to another chicken essay.
Jennifer Bowen is a writer, editor, and educator whose work appears in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Orion, The Sun, Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She’s a contributor to The Sentences That Create Us, Crafting a Writer’s Life in Prison (Haymarket). Her debut essay collection, Lightworthy, is forthcoming from Milkweed Press (2025).