Welcome Beth Forsyth as the Volume 29 Assistant Editor of Poetry. 

I know you write poetry almost exclusively. What is it you love about poetry

Concision! I’m pretty short-winded and I really admire that in poetry every letter, space, and punctuation mark has the opportunity to make meaning. There’s so much care that comes with attention. 

I’ve had the pleasure of hearing you read some of your poetry. What inspires your poetry? What topics do you find yourself returning to in your writing?

Thank you! Sometimes I think I’m just writing the same poems over and over again; I write about my dad, my truck, my dogs, and my best friend. If I had to give it a category, I’d say my work always comes back to love and its symptoms: the anxiety, the wanting, and most importantly the joy of it. 

Over the last few years, you’ve been a screener/reader for Water~Stone Review. What attracts you to a piece of poetry?  What do you look for in work that you read?

I think as a reader I’m always looking for something that makes me feel with the poet, even if I can’t explain what the feeling is. I also love a piece that is playful with language; as a reader you can feel the relationship an author has with their words. There’s a certain intimacy that comes with a piece that is completely comfortable with itself. 

As an editor, what makes a piece of poetry stand out to you? What will you be looking for in the poetry submitted to Volume 29?

Sincerity. I think it always starts there, if I believe a poem, if I feel a poem, if the poem moves me, it always starts with sincerity, even before understanding. 

Technically, I always love a piece that feels tight. What I mean by this is a piece where every part of the poem is working together to create a larger meaning. I especially adore pieces that use the line to their advantage. 

Where can readers find your work? (Include a link or two to things you’ve published if you like)

 To be honest, I haven’t done a lot of submitting since undergrad. But I do have a piece I was lucky enough to place in Plumwood Mountain Journal a few years ago. 

https://plumwoodmountain.com/poem/on-having-to-leave-my-dogs-alone-to-come-into-work-on-my-day-off/

Who are some of your favorite authors? Favorite books?

My all time favorite poet is Wendy Xu, especially her collection YOU ARE NOT DEAD, which was my first introduction to modern free verse. I also really admire Franny Choi, Ada Limon, and of course some Mary Oliver. I love poets that have a playful relationship with language and an eye for the ordinary. Recently I’ve been revisiting Terrance Hayes’ How to be Drawn, and Anthony McCann’s Thing Music. If I had to pick something outside of poetry, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong will always be a favorite. 

What are you working on now?

I’m currently in my thesis year at Hamline, so I’m working on a poetry collection. It’s a lot about love and the grief that comes with it, and also about redefining intimacy through queerness. If I’m lucky I might sneak some art in there. 

Beth Forsyth is a poet whose work has appeared in The Laurus and Plumwood Mountain Journal, and is a recipient of the Deborah Keenan Poetry Prize. She is currently creating in Minneapolis MN. 

Welcome Elizabeth Carls, the new Managing Editor of Water~Stone! Elizabeth has published creative nonfiction and poetry in Split Rock Review, River Teeth, and Under the Sun, among other journals. She has served on the editorial board of CRAFT Literary and Runestone Journal

You write both nonfiction and poetry. What do you find draws you to write in these genres?

With poetry I’m attracted to concision. The idea that poems have the ability to capture small moments in small packages. With nonfiction it’s the truth telling that appeals to me. I’m interested in language and what it can do. Most of my CNF tends to read lyrically. With both I strive to always say something true about what it means to be in this world. 

Over the last few years, you’ve been a reviewer and editor for several other journals. What attracts you to a piece of writing? What do you look for in work that you read?

First and foremost empathy. Always empathy. I’m looking for pieces that are engaged with larger cultural conversations and for a diversity of voices. Pieces that keep their promises to the readers and pieces that feel necessary. It’s always such a thrill when you happen upon that gem–that piece just shines.  

I’ve had the pleasure of hearing you read some of your poetry. What inspires your poetry? Do you sit down to intentionally write a poem or do you glean inspiration through your daily life?

Thank you! Much of my poetry is inspired by the natural world. I have a background in plant science and conservation biology. So I spend a lot of time thinking about place, how we affect the places we dwell, and how we carry place within us. I’m concerned on a daily basis with the environmental crisis we are currently living through.  I also consider myself a poet of the everyday, in the way that Jim Moore and Ada Limon are poets of the ordinary. I definitely glean inspiration from my daily life. My poetry tends towards plain-spoken. I really believe that a poet’s job is to pay attention. 

Are there other topics that you find your work returns to?

Home–how we define it, what it means to have one. Community–ecological communities and how we live and interact with each other as humans. Marriage. Those are a few.   

Who are some of your favorite authors? Favorite books?

Brian Doyle! I adore his essays and his novel, Mink River is a favorite. Patti Ann Rogers, Jim Moore, and Ada Limon are among my favorite poets. I think Terry Tempest Williams is a genius, I cherish Refuge and am currently savoring The Glorians. Favorite fiction includes Tommy Orange’s There, There and Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow. Oh, and I just read Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton, such a gentle, beautifully told story. 

What are you working on now?

I’m in my thesis year at Hamline. My thesis is a poetry collection, mostly about place and concerned with ecopoetics. I may throw in  an essay or two. 🙂 

Elizabeth Carls is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Wildness, Slag Glass City, River Teeth, Split Rock Review, Great River Review, Under the Sun Literary Magazine, and The Water~Stone Review. Her poetry has been anthologized by St. Paul Almanac and she is the recipient of the Deborah Keenan Poetry Prize. In the editorial space, she serves as the Managing Editor and Assistant Editor of Creative Nonfiction for Water~Stone Review, as well as Editor of Creative Nonfiction for Redbird Chapbooks. She reads and writes in St. Paul, MN.

It is with many emotions that I reach the end of my time at Water~Stone Review. While I look forward to the future, I will always hold a fond spot in my literary heart for the journal that taught me so much. My journey started with one question: What can I learn, and opened the door to many more.

I started with Water~Stone during the second half of Volume 25, “How Quiet Burns” after picking up from the wonderful previous Managing Editor, Robyn Earhart. There’s something humbling about working on the literary legacy of Water~Stone; the knowledge that dozens of people have come before you and crafted this, and dozens more will come after you. And we are but a small piece in this work and in this world.

I’m grateful to have had dozens of deeply heartfelt conversations with so many of our authors. While the ME is responsible for various tasks in relation to the journal, I was drawn to the intricacy and intimacy of the interviews. My very first interview was with later Contributing Poetry Editor Jose Hernandez Diaz about his piece “Ni de aquí, ni de allá: ni de la pinche luna.” He very generously answered my new-interviewer questions, which helped me to become a little braver and dig a little deeper in my future asks. To those of you who have taken, sometimes hours, out of your writing schedule and daily life to give readers a better insight into your work and thought process, thank you. I am someone who does not know much about poetry, and yet I learned about it by questioning all you poets. I am someone who does not write nonfiction, but I’ve learned to appreciate it through the lens of you who do. And to the fiction writers, you kept me on my toes with your imaginative works. It feels like I’m reading mini masterclasses when I go through interviews, learning tips on how I can improve or think about my writing. Through analyzing contributor pieces and asking authors about their work, I’ve come to question my own writing: “Why am I doing that? What is it that makes me want to use that phrase instead of another? Why not this way?”

In my younger years, I carried the strict idea of authorship as one person writing their own book. That idea of creating something that I made all by myself was very exciting. In this way, an author held all the answers. But as I’ve come to realize, even a single author does not create their full work alone; there’s the layout designer, the cover artist, the editors, the publishers, the first readers, and many more skilled people working on the text. Water~Stone is inherently a place where dozens and dozens of people come together to build the end product; the readers, the genre editors, the contributing editors, the copy editor and layout team… over the last 28 issues, there have been hundreds of people working on Water~Stone—a true legacy. There’s a beauty in a collaborative work like this, and that in itself was a thrilling understanding.

Despite this collaborative effort, none of this would be possible without the incomparable Meghan Maloney-Vinz. So much of her energy and love are infused into these pages. While I had dipped my toes into online publishing before coming on board, physically publishing a book was new to me when I joined the Water~Stone team. She was able to take me through the steps of what it took to create this artifact; the discussions with the art director and copywriter, the detailed and thoughtful ordering of all the pieces; the final proofreading. She carries so much of the work that goes into the process of creating a shared literary experience, weaving this all together behind the scenes. One of the steps that she taught me, and one I found surprisingly delightful, was determining the order of the pieces. This happens after Meghan and I read through the whole of the work, in whatever order it starts in, and afterwards we sit down to decide what piece goes where. It’s incredible how often we’ll get thematic groupings that just… fit, clusters of authorial ideas congregating around similar themes. It’s such a privilege to see how people think, and how our similar thoughts can come in such a wide array of literature.

As my time at Water~Stone comes to an end, I want to thank everyone who I’ve had the opportunity of working with on this journal for everything they’ve taught me. For those who are working on their own writing, my suggestion is this: find a team and become insatiably curious about their writing. Think of feedback as interviews, rather than critiques. Encourage your group to question you. Explore how you write and how you want to write, for there are infinite ways to put words on a page. Writing may be solitary, but it happens because we grow and learn from other people. I hope that everyone travels forward in their life with as much curiosity as possible.

Jenn was the Managing Editor of Water~Stone Review. Her piece, “Two Cents,” was published in The Under Review, and her sci-fi piece, “Promise to the Future,” was named as an honorable mention in Literary Taxidermy’s 2020 Short Story Competition. She currently volunteers at Red Bird Chapbooks and New American Press.

Your poem, “yazoo-mississippi delta” appears in Volume 28. When did you start writing this poem? What inspired it?

I wrote the poem in a single day on a recent-ish trip I took with my partner to New Orleans. It was my first substantive trip back in over a decade (I was born and raised there but moved to Baltimore, where I currently live, for grad school), and I had been working off and on on a sort of long form project in which I write a poem a day if I am visiting a place for a sizable chunk of time. And since my partner and I were going to be in New Orleans for about a week and a half, and it was my first time back home in years, I figured the trip would be a prime candidate for some site-specific writing, in a reckoning-with-old-ghosts kind of way.

The day I wrote “yazoo-mississippi delta,” my partner and I had spent pretty much all morning walking along the Mississippi down in the French Quarter; as we walked, some lines started to bubble up, but it wasn’t until we got back to our hotel room and I had a little bit of contemplative space that I actually sat down and wrote the poem. And at that point in the trip, I had already written I think three or four poems that were beginning to explore my relationship with a place that I once deeply held in myself as home and all of the shifts, both noticed and unnoticed, that had happened in me since then, so it felt natural that the river began to function as both the stand-in and the repository for the complicated and conflicting feelings I was trying to navigate, especially since I’ve always felt an affinity to large bodies of moving water, the Mississippi in particular.

The river is embodied in this poem; “the river / walks moonward” (I love that line) and “dreams.” When did the river as a character come into this piece, and how do you think it enhances the tone?

Oh thank you! I really like that line, too. I love how it functions as a break in the repetition / contemplative stuttering of the first part of the poem and allows for a moment of expanded rumination before returning to the repetition.

The river as a character showed up in the poem pretty much from the jump. Being that close to the Mississippi, it’s kind of impossible for it to not seep into your poetry, or even your very existence, and announce itself with that level of intensity. Once the first couple of lines came to me on that walk, I immediately knew what kind of poem it was going to be.

That’s such an interesting question. I don’t think I have ever really thought about how elements like making the Mississippi a discernible character would affect the tone of a poem. I mostly just kind of write what feels correct to me to write. Though, giving it some thought now, I think making the river a character gives a sense of largeness / scale to the poem. The poem reads almost like a fable or a myth to me: it is trying to hold things that are much older and much larger than a single life. And the Mississippi is an extension of that, the much larger thing that a single poem is trying its best to contain, and my hope is as the reader realizes that, they are ushered into the contemplative space that touches all of those other old and large ideas.

The lines flow, fittingly, like waves. When did you settle on this format?

Similar to the river as a character existing from the conception of the poem, the format was also there from the start. Which is unusual as I typically don’t write fragmented, visually spaced-out poetry. Part of me wonders if this was merely a visual manifestation of how the lines more or less appeared to me, over the course of hours and a very long walk. And part of me wonders if the poem itself had a hand in its own creation. 

A number of people have told me that the poem feels like it is an erasure, and someone even asked if I had the source material that the poem was excavated from. I like that sensation in the reader, that there are unseen elements that the poem is in conversation with. In that way, this poem feels to me adjacent to haiku as well—that there was a nuanced, complicated emotional experience I had, but these stanzas are the only bones I’ve recovered to give you. This is the only sediment that washed up and made its way into your hands.

What do you feel is your relationship with repetition, and how does it punctuate your poems, particularly this one?

I honestly tend to shy away from repetition. And the times I do employ it, I try my best to make whatever repeated line / image appear as variations whenever they show up again instead of exactly the same. I have nothing against repetition—I think it can be incredibly evocative and impactful, but I don’t feel like I’ve ever quite figured out how to use it. Even most of the songs I gravitated to as a kid (I feel very strongly that lyrics were my first introduction to poetry) tended to not adhere to the established verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure.

However, this poem wanted repetition. I actually think it needs it; I honestly don’t know if the poem would work without the constant arrival of the river. There is an incessant quality to it, something that feels almost unavoidable. But oddly enough, not overwhelming; it fades into the background, becoming the landscape noise that bleeds away when you’re not actively paying attention to it. I think you nailed it in your preceding question: the repetition hits you like waves, the intermittent pulse of water dragging itself against the shore. 

I think the repetition in this poem allows for its massive empty spaces. Despite straining, it keeps the poem from completely floating apart.

What are some themes you return to in your writing?

You know, I honestly don’t know that I’ve interrogated my work closely enough to say if I return to any particular themes. I think my writing group would probably be better equipped to answer that. I definitely have certain preoccupations, though. Like the site-specific poetry—I’m enamored with the idea of how different landscapes and locations and contexts change me, and by extension my poetry. That is something I am constantly looking for opportunities to explore.

When not writing site-specific poems, I tend to veer fairly nature-y, so trees, flowers, clouds (and skyscapes in general) show up a lot. As do birds. Birds are everywhere in my poetry. As is I think a general sense of pathos, or maybe just small sadnesses, but that’s unrelated to nature. Usually.

I also write almost exclusively autobiographical poems, so whatever I’m ruminating on or going through will inevitably wind up in some poem or another, since writing poetry is very much tied to how I process things emotionally. Case in point—I was navigating some depression and anxiety a few months ago and wound up writing some pretty sad boitm poems about it. So I guess in that instance I was essentially working on variations of a theme. 

What books or authors are your favorites? Do you always keep certain poets on your shelf?

Oh man, my list of favorites is extensive, but in the interest of time, I’ll just stick to poets / books that are constantly on my shelf / in my bag. First and foremost, Mary Oliver. She is without a doubt the poet I return to the most, specifically her collections House of Light and Dream Work. Charles Wright is another poet I frequently return to. His collection Sestets is perfect—no wrong note in the whole damn book. Jane Hirshfield and Anne Carson are two others that for a time were my go-to’s, but it’s been a bit since I’ve made the pilgrimages back to them. And, of course, I am never far away from any number of haiku collections, specifically anything by Bashō and Shiki. Shiki’s A House by Itself  has come with me on every trip I’ve taken in the last like five years. He’s incredible.

Oh, and Italo Calvino has become a reliable companion. I’ve re-read Invisible Cities every summer for the last handful of years, but have just recently started exploring his other works. 

What are you working on now?

Well, I’m trying to find a home for my collection of site-specific poems. And I have another kind of loosely connected pile of poems that I think is ready for manuscript assembly/editing. Aside from that, though, I think I’m in a soaking-up period. I haven’t written anything in about a month or so; I’ve been editing manuscripts for my press and settling down from some recent big life stresses, so I’m more or less just flitting from one book on my bookshelf to another, seeing what sticks and what shakes loose.

“Relume” is a beautiful poem that blends this idea of fireflies and relationships. Where did this idea stem from?

Inspiration for the poem came from Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. I first learned about the author and book four years ago from the Overlooked No More series by The New York Times. The obituary, four decades belated, acknowledges the life, work, and influence of an artist-poet who celebrated her ancestral heroines and experimented, heroically in my opinion, with poetic form.

Not mentioned in the feature is how romantic Cha’s writing can be. Near the end of Dictee, in a section titled “Choral Dance,” appears the relume quote. After reading it, I immediately took a picture of it with my phone. I knew then it would be an epigraph to a future poem called “Relume.” I held onto the quote for a couple years before developing an idea bank for the poem. I decided to research fireflies, discovering that they flash in unison to increase their chances of finding a mate. From there: the idea of partners rekindling their relationship.

How did you get comfortable with repetition and know when to use it? What emotions do you want to evoke when using it?

My use of repetition is sort of a default setting, a reflection of my meditative and minimalistic aesthetic, as well as perhaps a philosophical aesthetic that understands the limitation of words to convey meaning—hence, instead of bothering to clarify, I simply repeat myself. Going forward I hope to get more comfortable using, and not using, repetition.

There’s an italicized O twice throughout the poem, lending itself to drawing out the first tone of the word “open.” How did you land on this structure?

A couple years ago I started reading through the archives of The Antioch Review at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. I noticed that the journal used a zero “0” for the vocative O and found it amusing. Beginning my poem with the word “Opening,” I decided to put my own spin on the interjection.

I’m training myself to notice and appreciate subtle stylistic choices that have a visual effect, such as the logotype for Water~Stone Review that makes use of the tilde. This practice stems from my approach to creative writing. I attempt to present my poetry as visual art, and roughly a third of my published work could fall into the genre of visual or concrete poetry. I would not describe “Relume” as a visual poem; however, it does have an intentional visual aesthetic.

What are you currently working on?

I’m excited about new work forthcoming in South Dakota Review, The Louisville Review, and The Hong Kong Review. I’m also trying to position myself to attract a publisher for my first poetry collection. The collection will be romantic.