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.

“Transportation Fantasy” in Volume 28 holds such an imaginative liveliness. Where and how did the idea for this nonfiction first spring to life?

My first car was a thrice-owned glorious clunker of a Suburban named Scrungus. I loved that car, and her quirks and breakdowns and the way you needed to be gentle with her always made me think that I was working in tandem with a living thing. My favorite thing was driving home at night in the summer with the windows down, a necessity because she had no air conditioning. When I gave her gas and felt her buck under me I thought of digging one’s heels into a horse, and how it wouldn’t be much different than the beast I used to get around.

In the first half of the piece, there’s a lot of car terminology used for horses. How did you develop that and fit together what felt right?

I love defamiliarization as a craft strategy. I also love the idea of people being willing to switch to horses but still stubbornly refusing to let go of car culture.

You write with the combination of modernity moving forward even with horses (the DMV), but also the process of slowing down within society (in the final lines). How did you find a balance between these two ideas?

If the internet’s wealth of weaving and sourdough content is any indication, there always comes a time in the cycle of society where we turn back to practices that were commonplace in the past. I think as the world continues to get more complex we will turn away from the excess and leave behind the bare bones. Naturally, turning back will come with doing things slower, and I would think we would take advantage of the positive side effects of those choices.

I wanted the piece to make it clear that we could be advanced but still cut away the excess–the doctor could still have a 21st century knowledge of medicine even if he rode a racehorse to the patient. 

I feel like I could have read a much longer piece on this topic. Why did you decide to constrain it to flash?

I trend towards shorter pieces just in general in my prose; I always struggled in school to meet word counts for essays because I would get in and out and say what I needed to say! I also subscribe to something I’ve likened to a “whip” effect: the hand holding the whip retreats before the whip has even touched anything–the pulling back actually makes the impact of the tip of that whip white hot. 

I love the idea that everyone would use horses—and not only individuals, but companies as well. How else do you think the world would adjust with the return to horse-powered transportation? 

I would hope that empathy for living creatures would be on the rise. People in the Olden Days certainly weren’t always kind to their mounts (reading Black Beauty as a girl definitely made that clear!) but I think we would have to stop and think about another creature’s needs more often once our transportation wasn’t an unfeeling piece of metal and actually needed recovery time. And with any luck, that would bleed into compassion for the other beings with whom we share the Earth.

What themes do you find that you write about?

I usually write about “Hey lookit this” subjects: aspects of the world, mundane or exceptional, that I feel like people should think about for at least the amount of time it takes to read the words. There is so much delight and joy to be found in every speck and every smear of the world, and I am lucky not only to be able to experience it but to have an artistic outlet to share it with others.

What are you currently reading? What books and authors do you return to? 

I am listening to Watership Down on audiobook at the moment. I also just finished reading Born by Lucy Inglis. My favorite section of the library is the “new releases: Nonfiction” so anything there about plants or animals, memoirs of people who work jobs I would work if I had endless lifetimes, or science is fair game.

What are you working on right now?

I am working on poems that use strict forms and rules (Abcedarians in particular). It feels like such a wonderful kind of play to be constrained to specific structures while maintaining my voice and message. 

Aside from physical writing, I have also tumbled headfirst into oral storytelling, courtesy of my Pre-K students! I took to telling them stories to fill time and they love it, so I am deep into coming up with little fables and morals involving woodland animals, knights, and inanimate objects (magna-tiles can have adventures too!)

Anna Molenaar is a writer of poetry and prose concerned with nature, humanity, and the messes that occur when the two mix. Her work appears or will appear in The Nassau Review, The Tiger Moth Review, and The Columbia Review among others. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she received her MFA from Hamline University. She works as a preschool teacher and teaches writing courses at the Loft Literary Center.

“Departures” is the final poem in V. 28 of Water~Stone and focuses on a memory of an uncle’s death. When did you begin to write this poem?

I’d like to think I began writing this poem when I was thirteen years old and sifting through totems taken from my father’s uncle’s house after he died—one of these was a cedar chest that his sister had been given by her husband. On the inside of the lid was an inscription in pencil, “For Marcella, love George,” with the date: “December 25, 1916.” The inscription was faint, and I’d had the cedar chest in my basement bedroom for a few weeks before I noticed it. I had known neither George nor Marcella, but I understood how the chest had come into my uncle’s possession . . . and into mine. The fact that the chest had been purchased and given as a Christmas present during the middle of World War I, and to someone related to me, invested it with mystery, and I put other things I’d taken from my uncle’s house into this chest: spectacular silk bowling shirts from the fifties, which I wore to school for a while, a swagger stick, a cigar box with old watches he’d had in a dresser drawer—one was a trench watch from World War I, its crystal shattered and gone but the metal cage over its yellowed face intact, and it had an ancient leather band that was definitely original. I was like the narrator of James Joyce’s “Araby”—drawn to the romance of these objects. I would kneel in front of the cedar chest and open the lid, read its inscription, then rummage around inside, rearranging the objects within. Even then, I understood that I’d made it into a kind of altar. I suppose it was a way of resurrecting my uncle, a species of liturgy that helped me grasp the unfolding of time, the presence of death. It was a way to manage my grief.

The writing itself began after reading a poem by Peter Balakian in which the speaker sets personal experience against a series of national events marking historical or sociological rupture. The Education of Henry Adams comes to mind, the way we’ve all been educated for a world that no longer exists.

The timeline and setting is developed with references to the Columbia Record Club and Steve Miller, but you also weave in so many family details, drawing a whole picture of life in under 30 lines. How do you consciously build multiple in-depth scenes in your work?

In part, I’m drawing on memory. In the 70s and 80s, the work of the cartoonist Dick Guindon appeared regularly in the Minneapolis Star and Tribune. When I was fourteen or fifteen, my father tore a Guindon cartoon out of the paper and handed it to me. It featured a proud-looking young man standing a bit like Superman, flexing maybe, like he’d just defeated his arch-enemy. Instead of an S, he had the letter R on his chest. Behind him, dozens of record albums leaned against a wall. The caption: “Ira Stevens has escaped from yet another record club.” Something like that. On the one hand, music is like ice skating and driving a motorcycle. Music frees us. On the other hand, like all consumerism, it’s another kind of prison. How much time did I spend learning pop song lyrics? I wish I’d spent some of that time learning poems by Yeats or Keats, or reading Ecclesiastes or the Book of Psalms.

It’s gratifying to hear that these brief snapshots feel like fully realized scenes. I think this poem works a bit like a slide show, a series of still photographs that together produce a sense of animation, the feeling that time is passing. For me, this meant overwriting, then revising and compressing, finding the right details, the right touch. Words are the world embodied in sound. I think the richness of sound—alliteration, assonance, consonance, sound echoes of all sorts—helps us see and feel a verbal description as something real. 

The poem begins with efforts to escape. Psychologically, these are the beginnings of individuation. But the poem also foregrounds process, with its series of present participles. At some point in the writing I became aware of that chain of participles, and I now count eleven of them, in a poem of eleven stanzas. Even in the second-last stanza, where the speaker has become an object—he’s been taken by his father and grandfather to do something grammatically redundant—he describes his emotional state as a “growing feeling of pure forlorn,” an adjective-noun combination that echoes his own early attempts at escape and the uncle’s and grandmother’s present-participle responses to grief.

There’s a feeling of speeding past moments in the first half of the poem, and then a sudden pause and a refocusing on the family upon the uncle’s death. What was your thought process in creating this rhythm?

Those first five stanzas really foreground the speaker’s attempts at individuation, so the speed is essential, the idea being that if we can build up enough momentum, we can break the gravitational pull of family. But then the heat and friction of loss pull the speaker back into the web of family. It’s sticky, and it’s emotionally messy, complicated. It slows us down. After five closed stanzas in a row that feel quick and airy, we approach the climax of the poem, which unfolds across four stanzas and emphasizes the twining connections of family and loss. 

In the third stanza, the speaker at least temporarily escapes the weight of history by listening to Cat Stevens, who shows it can be done. But the uncle cannot escape the gravitational pull of the bottom of the stairs, the bottom of a bottle.

The idea of a departure is often given over to sadness, a goodbye; but in your work, there’s a hopeful note at the end of the poem, a sense of gathering into flight, literally and metaphorically. Can you talk about the title, how it played into the emotion behind your piece, and also the ending?

That’s high praise, hope being one of the cardinal virtues. The title reverberates, I think, referring to the speaker’s various strategies of escape (physical, mechanical, musical, consumerist, mythical), as well as to the uncle’s drinking, the grandmother’s prayer, and to departures that are the most mysterious of all, the deaths of the uncle and father. Finally, there’s the speaker’s literal departure, and we never learn where he’s going, only that he has accepted and embraced his family’s history and experience. Maybe there’s something hopeful and empowering about accepting sorrow and grief.

What books are your favorites? What authors do you admire?

Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Henry Beston’s The Outermost House come to mind, as do Berryman’s Dream Songs and Carver’s Where I’m Calling From. Then there’s B. H. Fairchild, Robert Cording, Bruce Smith, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, Bob Dylan, Robert Frost. I read and teach a lot of fiction, too, so Melville, Nathanael West, Annie Proulx, George Saunders, Joyce Carol Oates (her story “The Translation,” a rewriting of a John Updike story, is a masterpiece), William Gay. William Gay’s sentences might be as close to heaven as some of us get.

What are you working on now?

I’ve usually got my hands full just working on the next poem—and then going back to fix the last poem and the one before that. I try to write lines that I want to reread, in the hopes that other readers will find the lines similarly compelling. A good poem is like a good song. You just want to hear it again.

Where did the first spark of inspiration for ”Unidentified flying object” come from?

It’s hard to say now, but I think it has a lot to do with politics and history. I think it has to do with being disappointed with this country’s present and the future of this specific historical moment. Or maybe putting it into context with the rest of American history.

There’s a lot of level changes, with references of angels, helicopters and storms between trees and bushes and planetariums. What was the impetus for this yo-yo effect between the heavens and earth?

It’s a really perceptive question, but unfortunately I can’t account for those levels. I guess, things just happen in poems, levels, distances, directions. Sometimes out of incoherence, coherence.

Can you talk about how you chose the various images in your poem?

Yes, this goes back to the thing about history mentioned above. I haven’t workshopped very many poems, but I did workshop this one at a conference and the faculty member was very baffled by the allusions or references. And I think put off by their abstract or confusing nature. For context’s sake, I’ll mention here that I have a PhD in American history and teach it at the community college level, so these things are always kind of at the forefront of my mind. The bit about angels comes from James Madison (if men were angels, Fed. 51); Columbus, noted in his 1493 letter to the Spanish Monarchs, how he high-handedly took possession of islands by renaming them; the mention of parchment is in reference to the constitution; there is a history of minstrelsy in Stephen Foster’s music; the part about Wagner’s “Flight of the Valkyries” is an allusion to Apocalypse Now. I guess it’s all about this long legacy of conquest and brutality that seems, at this point, to be unstinting or never ending.

Without punctuation, this poem can be read in multiple ways, depending on where a reader pauses or places their own imaginary punctuation/breaths. What draws you to this phrasing? 

The punctuation question is a difficult one. In a way it’s just a habit I picked up, maybe like a rebellious tick, and I got very stubborn about it and kept at it. I think originally it had some theoretical purpose having to do with creating slippages, different interpretive frames, etc. But I’m not sure if putting a separate onus on the reader is necessarily a good idea.

What themes do you often write about?

I’m often drawn to the idea of dreams or dreamlike scenarios. Death comes up often, as does history and memory and nostalgia taken seriously (I wrote my dissertation on nostalgia). Shame as well, for some reason I like writing things that plumb the depths of my shame and humiliation.  

What books and authors are your favorites? What are you reading now?

My favorite writer is probably Roberto Bolaño. His book of poems The Unknown University is a little over-stuffed, but well worth it. There’s a line from his novel Amulet that I think about a lot: “Poetry shall not disappear. Its nonpower shall manifest itself in a different form.” Other poets I often turn to are James Tate, David Berman (and his band, the Silver Jews), C.D. Wright, John Ashbery (I’m reading The Tennis Court Oath now, very strange), and Diane Seuss, to name a few. In addition to the Ashbery, I’m also reading Lucy Sante’s book May the People be the Times right now and Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald, which I think can be read almost like an epic poem. It’s the kind of thing only a wizard or genius could write, very daunting.  

What are you working on currently?

There’s a lot of irons in the fire now. “Unidentified Flying Object” is from a manuscript of poems called More Poems about Birds, which is making the rounds currently (unsuccessfully so far, but who knows). I have a manuscript of prose poems called The Idiot. There’s a collection of stories, a novella, a chapbook of collage poems called The History of Letting Fragments Disappear. I’m always working on something.

Bryan D. Price is the author of A Plea for Secular Gods: Elegies (What Books, 2023). His stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in NOON Annual, Chicago Quarterly Review, EPOCH, DIALOGIST, and elsewhere. He lives in San Diego, California.

You have two poems in Volume 28: ”They Tried to Bury the Neighborhood” and “My Middle Name is Christian,” both of which deal with colonialism and white-perpetuated violence, but in different ways. Where and when did the spark for these poems come from?

As to where the spark for these poems came from, I’d say thirty years of lived experience and observation, but I’ll try to break down my process/thinking around these poems.

“They Tried to Bury the Neighborhood” was written in 2024, for a project that never came to be. It was inspired in part by a trip to New York, where I learned about the destruction of Seneca Village to create Central Park. As a person raised in Saint Paul, I couldn’t help but think of the destruction of the historically Black Rondo neighborhood. Destroying Black communities–especially wildly successful ones–is an American pastime; it’s as central to this country’s core as fireworks, football, lynchings, and concentration camps. (I encourage readers to look up Kowaliga, Little Egypt, Oscarville, Tulsa, Wilmington, and what the Black Panther Party was up to before it was sabotaged and dismantled by the FBI.)

I certainly wrote this poem to be a love letter to the Rondo neighborhood, where I went to school, skipped school, played basketball, and tried to refine my then-abysmal flirting skills. I wanted to write about the neighborhood where I stumbled, made mistakes, and slowly learned what it was to be a Black American adult. But moreover, since the destruction of Black communities has been such a common practice in the USA, I wanted this poem to be something of an ode to Black resilience in general. Yes terrible things are happening today, yes terrible things happened yesterday, but despite this, time and time again, Black folks manage to create joy, culture, and community. While it would be easy to abandon hope, my people never seem to for long. (Much to the chagrin of White America.)

~

“My Middle Name is Christian” was written in 2025, at my second Cave Canem writing retreat. It seeks to explore, and perhaps come to terms with, the inescapable reach of Christianity–especially white American Christianity–and how it not only props up white supremacy, but is essential to its survival. Though it would be untrue to assert that they’re one and the same, the two certainly thrive in a terrible symbiotic relationship. 

While I know there are many good Christians (many of my friends and family among them,) it is an objective truth that Christianity has been weaponized against BIPOC communities for thousands of years. It’s easy to look at white American Christianity, and the terror it currently wields in the USA, and sum it up to a few “bad eggs.” However, to my mind, it has long been the goal of Christianity to establish a monoculture by whitewashing the entire world, destroying what it cannot convert. To rob BIPOC communities, and even entire countries, of their original cultures. Why do we suppose there are so many African Christians? Black American Christians? Latinx Christians? Native American Christians? South Asian and East Asian Christians? Why has this white, European-descendant religion found a home in so many BIPOC communities? Do we attribute this to the awesome gravitational pull of the one true religion amongst many? Or do we attribute it to missionaries, slavery, re-education camps, and other brutal tactics?

Christian conversion, and therefore growth, has long thrived on a blend of brutality and missionary work. It’s a complex and layered history that dates all the way back to Christians converting Pagans through a mix of violence and missionary work. I won’t be able to speak to this massive history in its entirety, and I encourage folks to do their research. 

Throughout my life, I’ve met so many “good, upstanding Christians” who were quick to treat me differently based on my race, sexuality, political leanings, and outspokenness. Were it one interaction or two, I could attribute it to extremism or ignorance. But the reality is these experiences are common–profoundly so. All these experiences working in conjunction with one another creates a sort of social and political policing–a surveilling effect. It is one that non-Christian, non-white folk can feel everywhere–at work, in schools, at the grocery store, staring down the barrel of an ICE agent’s gun. And this effect is not solely American. It is the fruit that blooms wherever Christianity lays its roots. 

Consider Nigeria, a once religiously and culturally diverse land–the heart of the Oyo Empire, largely practicing Yoruba faith. Within Yoruba religion and culture, homosexuality is not a wrongdoing. During the height of the Oyo Empire, same gender sex was viewed indifferently and gender itself was not so heavily policed. The very notions of gender norms and policing sexuality came from Christian missionary work, chattel slavery, and other European influence. (Again, a mix of brutality and missionaries.) Flash forward to the present day, and Nigeria, which is roughly half Christian, is one of the least safe countries for LGBTQIA+ people on the entire planet. (Though America is doing its absolute best to give them a run for their money.)

For much of my adult life, I planned to leave this country. To pack my bags, figure out the insane process of getting my cats into a new country legally, and leave this country of systemic oppression at the hands of white Cis-het American Christians. But the more I looked into it, the more I was reminded of Christianity’s awesome reach. I realized it was near impossible to find a place that Christians haven’t influenced–often bringing homophobia and white supremacy with them. “On every continent a cross[…]”

The title, and indeed the very conceit of the poem, revolve around an odd contradiction that has followed me my entire life. The outspoken poet who teeters between atheism and agnosticism is partially named after the religion they are most critical of! It’s been the subject of many jokes throughout my life, though, it sometimes feels comparable to the brands of chattel slavery. No matter where I go on this earth, I will carry Christianity with me if only in name. No matter where I go, I will find evidence of the terrible history of Christian influence and its eternal relationship to white supremacy and homophobia.

In “They Tried to Bury the Neighborhood,” you start off this poem as if in the middle of a sentence, giving this feeling of an ongoing conversation. Can you talk about that and how it plays a part in the poem’s meaning?

The answer is kind of two-fold. 

I’m a big fan of titles that either A) interact with the body of the poem to heighten the meaning of both or B) essentially serve as the first line of the poem, cutting down unnecessary words. To me, poetry is the form of efficiency and truth. The poet’s job is to communicate as much as possible with as few words as possible. Ideally, each word should be a loadbearing pillar. 

I absolutely envision this sort of systematic and cyclical evil to be an ongoing issue. And Black resistance in the face of such evil is an ongoing conversation, for sure. Unfortunately, them people will always be trying to bury the neighborhood. And there will always be good neighbors looking to protect one another.

In that same poem, you encompass the hard-cornered city (“Corralled by crosswalks”) with nature (“dandelions sprouting fuzzy heads”). How did you find the balance in these two dynamics?

The very notion of nature and society are capitalistic white supremacist notions hailing from Europe. It’s one of many forms of othering that has created the cognitive distance that enables people to do awful things to beings they deem as “lesser.”

“If we raze a forest to build a military base or for-profit prison, that’s okay because it’s just a bunch of trees and animals,” they say. The very first step to inflicting mass violence is convincing people your target isn’t worthy of consideration, concern, or defense. 

In positioning Black folks with nature imagery, and whiteness with that of hard-cornered cities, I’m seeking to illuminate multiple forms of violent othering. In labeling a person as other, or lesser, we create a space where violence can be forced upon that body without fear of consequence. Why do we suppose white supremacists are so fond of reducing BIPOC folk to various unsophisticated animals? 

White supremacy is old hat and profoundly uncreative. It runs more-or-less the same game plan with every conquest. In a small way, I’m seeking to illuminate that basic game plan, while keeping an intentional focus on Black resistance, beauty, and community. 

(For more on this, I suggest reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s essays on the matter. Cheek By Jowl remains one of my favorite books I’ve ever read. I also recommend The Dark Fantastic by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas).

What themes do you find that you write about most?

It certainly varies. With my picture book work I tend to oscillate between different obsessions, interests, and issues that speak to me. 

With my poetics specifically, I spend a lot of time writing about race, religion, and social issues. In the infancy of my poetic career, and certainly in my debut collection TARTARUS, I did a lot of speaking about these grandiose and heartbreaking issues without offering much in the way of hope. 

These days, I’m very concerned with asking myself “so what?”

Yes, the world is burning. Yes, there are so many injustices it’s challenging to keep up most days. But so what? As poets, our work is partly truth-telling, and partly being brave enough to imagine alternate possibilities. With my work these days, I’m interested in more actively seeking joy and hope within my poetics, as I believe these are among the foundations of sustainable resistance work. I’m interested in not only presenting a problem, but doing my best to offer potential alternatives. 

What books are your favorites? What authors do you admire?

This is my very favorite unfair question. There are so many books by so many authors I’d love to shout out here. The particular trouble is that I both write and read widely. 

But I digress. For poetry, I’m an eternal fan of the homies Danez Smith, and Douglas Kearney. Their poetics push me in different ways, and have encouraged me to consider both life and the written word, differently. I have big love for my Cave Canem siblings generally, and encourage folks to read anything written by a Cave alum. Both Danez and Doug have also been huge influences on my poetic journey in more direct ways. When I was switching from full-time puppetry to launching a career as an author, Danez loaned me so many books to help bolster my chops as a reader and writer. And Doug has offered similarly transformative guidance in the way of workshops and mentorship. 

I’m a huge fan of Jason Reynolds as a writer and person. I feel so fortunate for his being involved in WITNESS, a poetry anthology about policing co-edited by myself and Ari Tison! Reynold’s works have taught me so much about how to write a story that grips young readers–particuarly in a time where attention spans are ever-shrinking. 

My first literary love was, and will forever be, Fantasy. I’ve always loved getting lost in fantastical realms full of magic, monsters, and maybe even swords. N.K. Jemisin is my absolute GOAT where fantasy and sci-fi writing is concerned. Her works sweep me away like few others do, and reading the Inheritance Trilogy played a huge role in my return to the written word back in 2018. I am also such a fan of William Alexander’s approach to writing fantasy for young people. He writes to his audience with such care and respect, and his worlds are as fantastical as they are unique. 

And now, since I love plugging my homies, please go read anything written by John Coy, Shannon Gibney, Ari Tison, and Sun Yung Shin.

What are you working on now?

As of writing this, Witness is freshly off to the printers in anticipation of its September release. With that, I suddenly have more time for other projects! I’m currently working on a YA verse novel that deals with the school-to-prison pipeline among other issues. It’s a project that is near to my heart and has earned me both a McKnight fellowship and an award at Vermont College of Fine Arts. 

I also have a tabled middle grade fantasy novel that I’ll complete and release at some point, and a seemingly endless well of picture book ideas. 

Early in my career, I was obsessed with releasing things as quickly as possible. I wanted to have as many publications as I feasibly could. These days, though, I’m more concerned with taking my time. The works will be published, and with the benefit of incubation time, I think they’ll be great. 

Photo by Anna Min

Ty Chapman is an award-winning author based in Minnesota. He has written many children’s books and a poetry collection, Tartarus. Additionally, he coedited the poetry anthology Witness with his friend and collaborator Ari Tison. He has published poems through The Academy of American Poets, Water~Stone Review, and more. He has received fellowships from the McKnight Foundation, Cave Canem, the Center for Arts + Social Justice, and The Loft Literary Center. He holds an MFA in writing for children and young adults through Vermont College of Fine Arts.