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.

Your two poems, “Pine Needles Fall on a Green Snow” and “Asymmetry” appear in Volume 28. Both poems feature father figures and colorful imagery. What inspired these poems?

My father died suddenly in 2019. It was a shock to me as a person and to my writing practice. I stopped writing for more than a year. These are some of the poems I wrote when I eventually started writing again.

Both poems draw their images from my mom’s neighborhood: I was on a fellowship year during my doctoral program when my father died, so I ended up moving home for a few months to support my mother in the aftermath of his death. So though I wasn’t writing, I was soaking in her Northern California environment in a way that I hadn’t since I was young. Especially images of pine trees became immensely appealing, I don’t know why. And I spent time in local parks, something I never did otherwise in my life in Los Angeles. It took me a long time to return to writing, but when I did, all those images were waiting inside me, like gifts. 

In that same poem, there are several points of repetition, used cleverly with the line spacing, that make it feel like an echo. Did you think about that as you were writing the poem? What was the feeling you wanted to evoke with this poem?

Thanks for noticing the unusual form. When I did start writing again, I returned to the page knowing I couldn’t write the same way I used to. I’ve always loved a strong line and a contained form, but I felt stuck. I didn’t feel like a lot of forms I knew allowed me to embody my grief. I wanted to find emotional structures for my poems. I wanted emotional line breaks and syntax, and so I started experimenting with how to do that. Repetition, but ugly repetition, felt like a good way to emotionally express grief. 

In “Asymmetry,” the lines go back and forth between couplets and singles, mirroring the title. When did this formatting enter the poem?

This is a poem that I’ve played around with a lot. For a long time, I thought this poem wasn’t working at all and completely abandoned it. At some point, I got interested in it again and I think at that point it got titled “Asymmetry.” When that title entered the piece, it caused me to adjust the form to the variation of couplets and monostiches. I like that stanzaic variation because of how much pressure it puts on the single lines. I think sometimes poets hide boring lines in couplets, because couplets are so perfect and intrinsically beautiful. I tell my students couplets are like putting on a top and jeans: an outfit that always “works.” Take any poem, put it in couplets, and you can hide your flaws in their beauty. Disrupting that cohesion is what the single lines are trying to do here. They’re trying to be a little ugly and dramatic, and to resist that perfection of simple couplets. I’m not sure if they achieve that, they might still be too beautiful. I’ve been reworking this poem since publishing it in Water Stone, so we will see where it ends up landing formally! Playing with form is what I love so I consider this the fun part. 

Fathers and loss feature heavily in these poems. What other themes do you return to?

Since my father died and I started spending significantly more time in graveyards, I’ve been writing about graveyards and different sites of mourning. Graveyards became of interest to me for the way they attempt to cosset grief: they keep the mourners and the dead out of view. But grief doesn’t work that way. Sometimes you’re in line in the checkout aisle and the person in front of you is buying Werther’s and it reminds you of your loved one, and a profound grief comes over you. As a culture, we don’t want to look at grief, we want to forget about it. I am also always aware of how temporary they are; all graveyards will eventually “fill” and become places no one goes any longer. I’m especially interested in what happens to those people in those forgotten places.

I’ve also been exploring poems set in places possibly unexpected or temporary for mourning, such as roadside memorials. Grief that doesn’t fit easily into a container (emotionally or in the case of poetic form!) is emerging as a primary theme for me. 

What is your writing and editing process?

My friends tell me that I’m a prolific writer, but I consider myself very slow. My poems take years. I need the gift of time to revise my poems, and my poems are borne of revision, so they need a lot of time. 

I like to do a lot of low-pressure handwritten drafting, most of which doesn’t lead anywhere. The process is intentionally unorganized and messy, and I lose a lot of drafts. I believe good ideas come back if they are good ideas. I store up these scribbled drafts over a long time and months or years later, I type some of them and try to shape them into a poem. Sometimes the first draft might just have an image or a few images, and the final draft changes drastically. I feel like I write about my father all the time but I can tell you that probably neither of these poems were about my father in the first draft and a few versions after; it sometimes takes a long time for me to understand what a poem actually wants to be about and, in this case, it might take a while for my father to enter the poem even though he’s been the topic all along. 

I often think about it less as writing and more that I’m trying to help the poem to speak. It can take years to find out what a poem wants to say. 

What are you working on now?

Thank you for all these lovely questions! I love Water~Stone and I’m so glad to be a part of this fantastic journal!

I’m working on editing my debut book of poems, tentatively titled Lost Music, which is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in fall 2027. I am editing each poem included like my life depends on it! It’s been a long journey to my first book, which was disrupted profoundly by the sudden passing of my father, so I’m really looking forward to finally achieving this long-held dream. 

I’m also in the middle of writing a super long essay for the forthcoming critical edition of the poetry of Hildegarde Flanner, which is coming out in the Unsung Masters Series and is being edited by Devin Kelley and George Kovalenko. I love her work! She is a fantastic California poet. My favorite of her poems concern sex and ecology, and she’s so freshly inventive. I hope that my essay can help invite readers to her work. I want her to be known more broadly.

L. A. Johnson is the author of Lost Music (Milkweed Editions, forthcoming 2027) and an Associate Editor of Swirl & Vortex: Collected Poems of Larry Levis (Graywolf Press, 2026). She holds a PhD from University of Southern California, where through academic years 2023-25 she was a Mellon Humanities and University of the Future Postdoctoral Fellow. The winner of the 2022 Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, the 2022 Greensboro Review Poetry Prize, and the 2021 Arts & Letters Rumi Poetry Prize, her poems appear in The Atlantic, Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is currently a Hughes Fellow at Southern Methodist University. Find her online at http://www.la-johnson.com.

“Red Pine” is a beautifully creative poem in Volume 28 that details the melding of trees and octopus. Where did the inspiration for this poem come from? 

I wrote “Red Pine” during my time at the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Workshop. We were given an assignment to observe something from our immediate environment and build a poem out of that observation. I remember walking along campus and coming across a red pine and getting caught on the bark. I was drawn to the tree’s color and texture. I started thinking about what it would mean to wear the bark, like clothing. Then my mind moved, as it tends to, toward octopuses. They’re one of my favorite non-human animals. They’re capable of play behavior even as adults, which I love, and their ability to camouflage, to blend into their surroundings, started to feel connected to that earlier thought about wearing the tree. After that, the poem began to assemble itself.

What sparked the image of the octopi walking on two legs?

I love reading about the cognition and behavior of various species of octopuses, and one of the most interesting facts I’d learned was that they can move across land for short periods of time. There’s something about that movement that stayed with me. I visualized this clunky, speedy movement of a body meant for one place, but compelled to move toward an environment foreign to its own for some unknown reason. 

What was the impetus to make the poem sound information and/or educational?

I’ve spent a lot of time with texts on non-human animal behavior and conservation, both academically and on my own, and I think that language has stayed with me. I’m drawn to language that’s meant to observe, to document, to describe something living without ever fully pinning it down. Then to apply that language to something fantastical was too appealing to resist. 

Was this poem always in this format? What is your editing process?

The format came early. Once the voice of the poem arrived, I held it close. My process isn’t linear, it’s pretty scattered, actually. It feels more like working on a jigsaw puzzle. I start with an image or a feeling, and I don’t really know what the poem is until it’s finished. I move pieces around, take things out, follow something until it disappears. The ending is usually the last thing to reveal itself.

What are your favorite books and authors? Or which stories do you continue returning to?

I have a trio of poets I keep returning to: James Tate, Charles Simic, and Russell Edson. They let strangeness sit next to you in a corner, dress it in a hat and coat, ask if it’s cold, then offer it a cup of coffee. I’m interested in that kind of play—where something can happen without needing to explain itself.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on a manuscript of prose poems. The work moves through different ecosystems and inhabits different bodies. I like it when crows speak, when fields get up and walk, when giant lizards fall in love with beauty queens. I keep returning to the same questions: how thin is the veil between what is human and non-human? How easy would it be to become something else entirely?