In the Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—April Darcy
In the Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—April Darcy
Your fiction piece, “The Bright World,” is about a daughter losing her father to cancer, and how she’s trying to balance her own life, a complicated friendship, and caretaking. How did this story come about?
First, thank you for reading and for asking such thoughtful questions.
I worked on this story, off and on, for more than ten years. It’s the story that taught me how to write fiction, by which I mean, how to take some elements in which I had experience (what family doesn’t, ultimately, experience loss?) but to break from my personal reality into a bigger and more imaginative narrative world. I’ll always be grateful for this story.
You’ve layered this piece with beautifully complex relationships, from Megan and her mother, to the sisters and the father, to Megan and David. How did you develop these relationships as you wrote?
Oh, this story went through maybe a hundred drafts. Some centered on Megan’s complicated relationship with David, and some didn’t. There were years where Jessy wasn’t even in the story, and yet she eventually became a primary focus. Bringing Megan up against these challenging relationships is how I figured out who she is, or maybe, who she wants to be.
Going off of the above question, can you talk about the caring, yet tense, relationship between Megan and her sister—the jealousy that she has of Jessy’s freedom, and the time constraints it puts on her? It feels like her caretaking responsibilities have doubled or even tripled because her sister has moved.
What’s interesting to me about this pair of sisters is how hard they are both trying to do right by each other and by their parents. For instance, all Jessy did “wrong” was grow up first and move away from home, which of course, isn’t wrong at all. That’s just birth order! But a byproduct of that is Megan’s perception of being left behind. Megan knows there’s not really anything to be mad at here. But it’s easier sometimes to be mad at someone else than it is to deal with reality. Megan learning how to handle her new realities is what interested me about this story.
You do a smooth job of simultaneously keeping readers in a scene with a running commentary of Megan’s internal dialogue. What was your process like when crafting her thoughts and memories in the actions around her?
This is a fabulous question, and I have no idea. I will say that writing emotional states comes more easily to me than scene-writing. I tend to free-write piles of emotions and thoughts and vibes, and then go back and force myself to create scenes and scaffolding after the fact. Whenever it works out I am pleasantly surprised!
At 18, the age Megan is, we all hold onto unrealistic ideals, just as she holds on to David. We do get a bit of her future, where she’s able to move forward without him, but she hasn’t reached that point yet. What do you think is the event that Megan is able to move past him? To move past her father’s accusation of: “What I worked for my entire life isn’t good enough for you either?”
I love this question. Megan is, without fully realizing it, using David to distract herself from her life at home. She’d rather be a normal college freshman, going to parties and dating and having adventures, than navigating terminal illness. Obviously. Their connection is real but the intensity is misleading, a kind of pretend-world. After her father’s death she’ll have to accept reality and move on—she intuits that in the story.
As for moving on from her father’s statement, I suspect she actually won’t.
Do you find that you return to similar themes within your writing?
I am endlessly interested in writing about caretaking, the pressure it puts on us, and of course the beauty it brings out in all of us. Who is good at it, and who isn’t? Who can face it, and who can’t? Does it steal from us, or does it give back in growth and in love? It’s all so complicated. And I’m super interested in place-based writing, and how people use travel as a means of escape or adventure, etc. A writing teacher once told me my characters were fond of “the geographic cure” and I love that way of looking at it. Who isn’t cured, at least a little bit, by really good geography?
What authors inspire you? Who are some of your favorite books?
Lately I’m super into Claire Keegan, and I’ve always loved Anne Enright. Irish writers, man. A biblical story for me has always been Our Town, which I read or try to see staged every five or so years. More recent favorites are Marie Helene-Bertino, Emily St. John Mandell, Andrea Barrett, Yiyun Li, etc. I go to poetry a lot to calm myself down or when I’m stuck in my own work—Jack Gilbert and Elizabeth Bishop are steady go-to’s.
What are you currently working on?
A novel about Megan and Jessy, of course! So far each chapter is a new geography, but who knows how it’ll wind up. There’s a lot of Jersey in it, but hey, you cannot write about diners and disco fries too often, I am finding.
In The Field—Conversations With Our Contributors: Anne Piper
In The Field—Conversations With Our Contributors: Anne Piper
Your poem, “Already all the ghosts,” is a beautiful and haunting look at pre-grief. The speaker compares their past to the present, and looks ahead into the future. What made you write this poem at this time?
I wrote this poem in February of 2023, when old age and Parkinson’s were getting the best of my dad, and when my mom’s memory was undeniably deteriorating. They were in their 90s, so their decline was not unexpected, but the anticipated loss of a parent hit hard, and the loss of any person is the loss of a whole world, and I suppose I was trying to brace myself for what seemed inevitable—and close. I realize that the healthier choice is to make my life into an open hand—accepting what comes and not clinging to things as they are—but in the poem I just keep grasping.
The stanza, “I dried a dozen sweetheart roses, hung them/in the corner of the doorframe,/forgot them until today” is cleverly written, and shaped within the poem like a corner itself. Its format is even mimicked later in the poem. When did that visual framing come into play in your piece? When in the process of creation or revision do you find the visual flow (like in the first to second stanza)?
In the first draft of this poem, all the lines are left justified. I write in notebooks and when I have something that feels promising and interests me, I type it up. I play more with the visuals in various versions of the typed drafts than I do in my notebook, although I do play around with shapes and configuration there, too. In this poem, the visual framing happened after I typed up the draft.
I love the line, “What were my intentions? My good/intentions?” implying that there may have been bad intentions along the way. It feels like the speaker is almost chiding themself for thinking about sad or negative things before they happen. Can you speak more to this idea of intentionality?
The speaker is definitely chiding herself! Her brain is making the same tired moves from beauty to fear, from what’s perfectly enjoyable in life to dread. I can hardly stand it, how I ruin things for myself. It makes me want to escape to the kittens in the next stanza, though they are mortal too. As for intentionality, I guess “Hardly thinking, hardly thinking of now” is my default, no matter how much I intend to stay present.
You evoke a lot of the senses within this poem, really grounding it for the reader in sight and smell, and even memory. How do you create something so universal from such specific details?
My mentor when I was an undergrad—the late Arthur Spring, who ran the St. Mary’s University honors program —would quote Carl Rogers: “What is most personal is most universal,” and that stuck with me. The MA program I graduated from in Human Development let you design your own degree, and mine focused on the concepts of shame and honor. Those most shameful, hidden things, they’re often universal, as you find when you let them out into the light. I wasn’t thinking consciously of trying to connect universally when I wrote the details of the poem, but Carl Rogers’ words are part of my belief system.
What themes do you return to in your work?
I suppose I write a lot about what I fear and what I find myself grappling with. I currently find myself writing the drafts of a lot of poems about my mom’s dementia, because she’s in the midst of that and I’m always trying to find ways for both of us to cope—compensatory strategies, shifts of focus, ways to help her fill her remaining time in Memory Care, a place that makes her very sad. I feel like I am always wrestling this big, heavy snake of existence, trying to understand it and feel safe in its presence. Plus, I truly believe Frost’s “No way out but through,” and have found I need to write about things to accept them.
What books and authors influence your work? Do you have favorite stories or poems you return to?
Marie Howe’s What the Living Do was an important book for me, as was Love, An Index, by Rebecca Lindenberg. (Talk about grappling with painful realities.) And I connect with much of what Ada Limón writes. Stylistically I love Anne Sexton and her wild metaphors. Bob Hicok is a hero, although the leaps he makes amaze me so much; reading him stops me and makes me just want to curl up in a ball. The way his mind works astounds me. Jim Moore and Deborah Keenan are my main poetry mentors, and their work has had a strong influence. As far as poems I go back to, I have “Spiderweb” by Kay Ryan and Ada Limón’s “How to Triumph Like a Girl” on my bulletin board at work, so I think about those two poems regularly. I have those there because walking into work drains the poet right out of me and I’m trying to keep my worlds connected. I work with good people, but I don’t think they care about poetry. (And in keeping with that, no one has ever noticed those poems on my office wall.)
What are you currently writing or working on?
I’m always playing with my manuscript and never sending it out often enough. I do take a lovely 2-hour poetry class every week and often write from the poems we read there.
Anne Piper lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, where one of her poems is stamped into a few sidewalks. She has an MFA from Hamline University and an MA in human development from St. Mary’s University. Piper provides quality improvement services for homes of people who have disabilities. Her poems have appeared in Water~Stone, Poetry East, Black Warrior Review, Sleet, The New York Quarterly, The Under Review, and other journals. She is working on a book.
In The Field—Conversations With Our Contributors: Christopher Gaumer
In The Field—Conversations With Our Contributors: Christopher Gaumer
It’s always wonderful to have a graduate of our MFA program in Water~Stone! What sparked the creation of your poem, “On a Farm in Iowa?”
Hi, Jenn! It’s wonderful to be close to Hamline again through Water~Stone!
My family lived in Perry, Iowa until I was nine. My mom took my two older sisters and I to a farm just outside of town. I recall this being a trip where we were being given a bag of corn from church friends. At some point, we all stood in the long gravel drive beside a field of corn and watched a snake slowly consume a rather big frog. What I remember clearest is that the frog’s head was inside the snake’s mouth, the frog was not totally dead, and it took a very long time to swallow the frog. We maybe even left before the meal was complete.
The line, “old gravel road corn field killing, church friends,” lingers in my mind with this sharp edge. Can you talk about why you placed these phrases beside each other, and about the layered relationships that appear in this poem?
This is a description of the literal action of the moment and also, I realize, an image that begs one to draw more associations. This type of layering is why I love poetry. I crave ideas that are clear on the literal level and deeply suggestive.
There’s a theme of consuming within this poem—the snake and the frog, the corn, Seth and the narrator. How did you develop this thread in your work? What other themes do you find that your work revolves around?
The honest answer is that I did not consider this theme during the writing or revising of this poem. This is how I like to work in general: revise until the poem is surprising and a bit beyond what I understand.
You teach at Randolph college. What is a piece of writing advice that you always give to your students?
Risk huge leaps of logic because they activate the reader’s imagination to invent narrative connections.
What stories or books inspire you? Who are some of your favorite authors?
Bianca Stone, Diane Suess, Gary Dop, Karl Ove Knausgård
What are you currently working on?
I have a completed poetry manuscript titled M O N S T E R on submission. Writing wise, I’m working on a feature film script and ramping up, with a whole crew of people, to direct a music video for a band, New Boss, out of Charlottesville, VA.
Christopher Gaumer‘s poetry and creative writing appear in The Southern Review, Sugar House Review, No Tokens, The Cortland Review, McSweeney’s and elsewhere. Gaumer won the 2019 Poetry Society of Vermont’s National Poetry Prize and has fiction in the Best Microfiction 2019 anthology. Gaumer writes and directs films and music videos. He is a founding director of the Randolph College MFA and a graduate of the Hamline University MFA program.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Davi Gray
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Davi Gray
Your poem, “Caravan of Wounds,” crafts a dramatic setting and builds a world where pain and injury are clearly visible. Where did the inspiration for this piece come from?
I have consumed a lot of dread-inspiring media, more written words than anything else, but it does capture the imagination. I’ve especially relished, at times, the works of Clive Barker, Ted Chiang, N. K. Jemisin, China Miéville, Jesmyn Ward (more present-apocalypse than anything).
I wrote the first draft after waking up from a dream, which provided the storyline. The core images and idea, though, of traveling through a world where pain and injury are clearly visible to anyone looking—that’s what the world has been all my life.
I feel like the line, “Freedom is a longing / in every piece and part, duct tape a wonder // for holding selves together” really grounds the reader in both the world you’ve created, and our real world. Can you talk about this line and its significance in the poem?
I think that freedom, or what we (I) think of as freedom, is something most people want, or think they want, and sometimes conceive of as separation from “others,” as if a world with a single person in it were a paradise. In the poem, “every piece and part” (of a body, of a community) thinks/feels it would be better off away from the rest. As in life, that may not turn out to be the case. We hold ourselves together (as bodies, as communities) as best we can with materials at hand.
This work carries such distinct visuals that it could have been extended into a longer story. What made a poem the perfect vehicle for this piece?
My general inclination is more toward poetry than prose, in part because I deeply love poetry and have all my life, and in part because I’m better at completing shorter works. I can write prose, and have, but it’s a discrete set of tools with only some overlap. Perhaps someday a film….
The turn in the last stanza—towards a feeling of community and togetherness —gives hope to the reader, even though it is still honest in its vivid descriptions of desperation. What do you think this turn does for the poem? For the idea of humanity?
I think it’s far too easy to give up hope, and though hope by itself doesn’t do much, if anything, for some situations, it does open up the space of possibilities. For many people, the world is a desperate and dire place most of the time, and yet we go on. We do the best we can with what we have until we are no longer here. I want to acknowledge that, the good and the bad, and work with others to stitch together what songs we can.
What themes do you find you return to in your writing?
Nature is a constant presence, whether it’s directly visible or not. History, myth, religion. Race, class, money, and politics are deeply woven into much of my work. Trauma shows up a lot, in the form of childhood, memory, death, loss, incarceration, grief, self-harm, and the body. I also have a fair number of works about poetry itself (as Michael Torres thoughtfully pointed out).
What books inspire you? Who are some of your favorite authors?
Some inspiring recent reads have been Christina Sharpe (Ordinary Notes), Ross Gay (everything), Billy-Ray Belcourt (A History of My Brief Body), and Danez Smith (Bluff). I’m really looking forward to the forthcoming memoir, “My Weight in Water,” by Michael Kleber-Diggs.
What are you currently working on?
I’ve got multiple poetry manuscripts for which I’m seeking publishers. I’m also working on a hybrid/cross-genre book of poetry, essays, and visual art. I have a one-person poetical play I hope to find a theatrical home for later this year. I’m producing a podcast with a possible summer or fall launch. I continue to work with the ReEntry Lab, which is an organization building bridges between formerly incarcerated writers and artists and communities ready to receive them. And, of course, there are always the poems.
Davi Gray (they/she) is a queer, trans, nonbinary poet, writer, storyteller, artist, activist, and abolitionist. Their work has appeared in Poetry, Hayden’s Ferry Review, NonBinary Review, Rogue Agent, and elsewhere. They received Honorable Mention in the 2023 Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry contest and have won several prizes in PEN America Prison Writing Contests. They live in North Minneapolis (Bde Óta Othúnwe), on unceded lands of the Dakota and Ojibwe, and can often be found performing their poetry around the Twin Cities.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Samantha M. Sorenson
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Samantha M. Sorenson
Your work, “How to Eat an Elephant” creatively blends the idea of consuming both information and food. Can you talk about what sparked you to write this piece?
The journey of writing “How to Eat an Elephant” began when I started working toward recovery for my eating disorder. I found myself interested in exploring how deep the mindset of my particular relationship with food went and what other areas of my life that mindset was also influencing—turned out most of my life was driven from the same need for control and the same feelings of always being out of control. Much like moving into recovery is a slow process, so was the drafting of this essay—“How to Eat an Elephant” went through many iterations over the course of five years as I wrestled with the realities I have put on the page.
When did you start writing? What is your process for beginning a piece? How do you edit that work?
I started writing at eleven years old, although literary nonfiction came into my life much later. All of my work stems directly from curiosity and obsessions and a love for language. Though a paradox, I write what is on my mind to discover what is on my mind. One of the joys of crafting essays is the not knowing—not knowing what a piece wants to be or where it will end up. In my experience, it is only once a piece reveals itself to you that you can really start to think about revision. My revision process is different for everything I write, but it always begins by getting feedback from trusted readers and ends by scrupulously going line-by-line and word-by-word through the piece until I am satisfied. By that time, I have read my work out loud dozens of times over, and there is still always room for improvement.
Are there other phrases, like “how to eat an elephant,” that have stayed with you and had a profound effect on other areas of your life?
Yes, and perhaps I will write about those at some point as well. For now they flitter across my consciousness at the most inopportune times.
What themes does your work circle back to, if any?
I find that my work circles back to the human body a lot, as I mention in “How to Eat an Elephant.” We only experience the world through our individual bodies, and every body has limitations, biases, desires, etc. that I find fascinating.
What authors or texts inspire you? What are some of your favorite books?
Since my reading habits (like so many of my other habits, see “How to Eat an Elephant”) are on the obsessive side, my favorite books are constantly changing. Five of my favorite reads from 2024 were Sex with a Brain Injury: On Concussions and Recovery by Annie Liontas, On Women by Susan Sontag, One Long River of Song by Brian Doyle (edited by David James Duncan), Holy American Burnout by Sean Enfield, and Let Me Count the Ways by Tomás Q. Morin. I found each of these works inspiring in their own right—both for my writing and my life, and I highly recommend them.
What are you currently writing or working on?
I am currently working on a collection of essays centered on relationships and censorship. I am interested in the way we censor language, experience, thoughts, and behavior, as well as how we ourselves become censored through illness, injury, disability, and grief. My current project explores these themes by looking at the dynamics and motivations in my personal relationships over time.
Samantha M. Sorenson is pursuing her MFA in creative nonfiction at Brigham Young University. She currently serves as the managing editor for Fourth Genre. Her work has appeared in Under the Sun.