In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Eva Song Margolis
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Eva Song Margolis
The illustration credit belongs to Dain Suh, courtesy of NPR. Dain Suh is a New York-based art director, illustrator, and digital content creator. You can learn more about Suh’s work via their website.
Your poem “A Pantoum for Family” that was published in Volume 25 examines how we talk about transnational adoptions of children. What was the impetus behind your poem? How did it come to be?
While participating in the Loft Mentorship Series last year, I learned about pantoums from one of our mentors, Chris Santiago. I had not worked in form much or fully understood how they can be used, so that experience was especially important.
“A Pantoum for Family” is the first pantoum I wrote. It started as a very different poem. I was exploring the possibilities of who my Korean mother, my first mother might be; I was holding these different and sometimes divergent things that have been revealed to me over the decades. I thought the pantoum was perfect for telling a story about fragmentation, for creating something whole from bits and pieces, woven across time, space, speakers. Those bits and pieces about my mother have been revealed in part by assumption and part reality, part in dream and desire, and part in record (however fabricated) that justify the reason for all of this unknowing in the first place.
As I worked on the poem, it seemed there was a lot of space to get creative with all the fragments and present them in an unconstrained way. Realizing this, at the time, a pantoum didn’t feel like the right form to explore my mother. Instead, I felt inclined to use pantoum for a topic that requires some rigidity, structure, something that conveys a need for control and process. The mainstream adoption narrative then seemed to be a more fitting topic. The adoption narrative requires certain assumptions-made-reality to be told repeatedly, to make everyone involved believe without question, lest the whole house of cards come crashing down.
By the end of the poem, by letting go of the pantoum form, I wanted to convey an unraveling and eventual abandonment of that narrative. I hoped to imply a sort of chaos that brings deeper understanding and creates space for questions. Although we might be led to believe otherwise, mainstream discourse about adoption is not opposite or unrelated to mainstream narratives about immigration, colonization, or capitalism for example.
If we know that memories can be altered by how we tell our stories, how do you think we can write our own stories authentically if what we’ve been told is only shared from one perspective? Do you have advice to share with aspiring writers who are working to tell their own origin stories?
When what we’ve been told about ourselves is shared only from a single perspective, and when we sense an investment in maintaining that perspective, then we can begin to see the cracks. I think my advice would be to allow yourself to seep into the crevices. (If you’ve already been taught to be malleable, perhaps this seeping will flow with ease.) Get to know how the cracks feel, sound, and taste. Sit with what they desire and fear, and question how that has or hasn’t shaped you. Is this my origin story or someone else’s? Question if the speaker of those stories still believes their own words—is there any internal conflict? How have you been asked to hold this conflict for them? Has this holding decentered your own desires, fears, senses?
Can you share with us a little bit about your process for incorporating lines from Fleur Conkling Heyliger’s “Poem for the Adopted Child” into your poem? What was your process for folding Heyliger’s lines into your own so it would feel seamless to the reader? Sometimes using another’s words among our own can create a type of scenario where the writing feels rigid or forced. Did you run into something like this, and if so, how did you continue moving forward? How did you know that using Heyliger’s work would further your own?
I decided to insert Fleur Conkling Heyliger’s poem after I finished the first draft. I wanted to create another layer and reinforce the speaker’s voice. “Poem for the Adopted Child” is true to the traditional adoption narrative; it speaks for the child and speaks from the adoptive parents’ perspective. I was curious about how that poem would perform differently when its lines were taken from their original context and placed somewhere new—an adoption of sorts. Even though Fleur Conkling Heyliger’s poem and the speaker in “A Pantoum for Family” come from the same perspective, I wanted to create conflict and discordance when the two voices are mashed together.
Who are some writers that you’re currently enjoying? Do you have writers or books that you return to for any reasons? 
I’m currently reading Tastes Like War by Grace M. Cho, which feels like an ancestral gift. I’m also slowing reading Concealed Words (숨겨둔 말) by Sin Yong-Mok and translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé, whose works are also in Volume 25! Two books that I’ve recently been coming back to are Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route by Saidiya Hartman.
What projects are you working on now?
My current goal is to prepare a manuscript for publication. I have themes and ideas in place in terms of how I’d like to structure it. I need to write more and then I’d love to work with a mentor who can provide feedback and guidance on how to refine and select poems to ensure they are presented adequately for a collection.
Eva Song Margolis’s poems frequently explore identity, kinship, and loss. She is interested in deconstructing ideologies and structures to question what liberation and justice could look like. Margolis’s accomplishments include being named a Loft Literary Center Mentor Series fellow, an Inroads Mentor fellow, and an Intermedia Arts Beyond the Pure recipient. Her work appears in Moonroutes, MOONFRUIT, and Unmargin.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Annie Trinh
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Annie Trinh
Your short story “Observation Notes on the Effects of the Vespa Mandarinia” from Volume 25 is about an entomologist battling an infestation of killer hornets in Seattle. What was the inspiration behind this story? How did it come to be?
First, I just want to say thank you for interviewing me and giving a home to “Observation Notes on the Effects of the Vespa Mandarinia.” I was really excited when the piece finally found a home in your journal, and as for how the story came to be—there are so many reasons. I wrote this story during my last year of my MFA at the University of Kansas, and it was during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, it wasn’t the first draft. The original piece was longer, the focus was immensely different, and it took place in the fall of 2019. It was also a frustrating piece too because I felt like it wasn’t going anywhere, so I put it away for a couple of months before I revised it again. The inspiration to write about killer hornets happened when I was reading the news about the COVID-19 pandemic and the state of it. Like everyone, I just wanted to know how as a country we were dealing with it and the spread of it. Then I came across an article about how Washington State found a large number of Asian Giant Hornets and it could pose a problem to the surrounding lands. And my first reaction was ‘Oh, no, I hope this doesn’t increase the number of anti-Asian hate crimes.’ Then the story came alive after that.
The heart of this story is the amplification of anti-Asian hate crimes, and it feels similar to what has continued to occur in real life in the US since the outbreak of Covid-19. The narrator says she feels safer wearing her lab suit because she fears being attacked not by hornets, but by people: “Maybe because the suits make me blend in with everyone else. I don’t have to worry about people attacking me when they see my face.” What is attractive to you about writing real life into fiction? Do you feel there is something about the genre that allows writers and readers to process real life differently?
What attracts me to writing real life in fiction is that it lets me see nuance in situations that I haven’t seen before. It kind of reminds me of the saying “write what you know.” I remember taking that literally—that you need to write everything that you know and only that. I also know that some writers are against it too; however, I take more of an abstract approach to that now. To me, it is more about finding the nuance in truths. So, to me it is to write what you know, write what you don’t know, and write what you need to know or to understand.
When I was at Mississippi State University one of my classmates asked a visiting professor about writing real life into fiction because she based it on her own personal life too much. He answered that the personal experience that you are writing into the story are events, but the fiction lies in the character development, the actions, and how they approach the situation. I would also add to this statement that it is the same for the reverse. I think that quote that you’ve pointed out is a great example of that and why the genre lets writers and readers process real life differently—it helps us understand our reality better. When I wrote that statement, it was not only referring to the anti-Asian hate crimes, but also experiences from other marginalized communities too. My experience as an Asian American will always be different from another person of color. I might not understand all of these experiences; however, I do experience macro and microaggressions and I use those emotions to write my stories when I put my characters into different situations. The events are not real, but the emotions are the truth, and it allows me to explore situations that I haven’t been in before and understand better. Then when I do face reality, I have a better understanding and perspective about the world.
Continuing from that previous question, something that I really love about your story is its fluid form; many times while reading it, I had to stop myself and ask if what I was reading was fiction or nonfiction. Can you talk to us about your process for blending fact and fiction, and your choice for structuring the story into segments?
That is an excellent question. In order for me to explain that I will need to start with the fiction and then go to the facts. These are things I know not to be true in the story: 1) hornets don’t grow up to a size of a bird (maybe); 2) an infestation that can cover a whole city can’t happen (maybe); 3) there is no way the U.S. would use DDT to kill an infestation at that level (maybe); and 4) people would really attack a lab just to get anti-hornet suits (maybe).
As you can see, I said “maybe” at the end of each statement, and here is why: 1) there are bugs that can reach the size of a bird or larger (check out the atlas moth; really cool, but scary); 2) infestations do happen, but more on a microlevel such as a hornet’s nest overtaking a house; 3) the U.S. still uses pesticides in crops today even if they are not at the same level as DDT; and 4) I think COVID has showed us that people do attack for various reasons. Each fiction that I have presented is very close to an actual event that happened—and that is how I usually blend it. It’s kind of like creating a thesis statement: the facts need to support the fiction. For example, if I wrote about hornets attacking the city, and then people become zombies—can that stand? It can stand, but that will require a lot of world building—and that is the key there. The facts that I have chosen don’t require an explanation because the readers are familiar with an event that is close to it.
In my original draft, the story actually had multiple points of views and multiple characters. It took me fifty drafts to find the structure of the story. I went from vignettes to diary entries to a typical narrative structure—nothing worked. It also didn’t help that the story was 5,000 words long too and it was unfocused. However, I started to realize that segments or a list story might be the best format for the narrative, especially since it is in a point of view of a scientist, and they had to be unbiased. Even with the realization, I had to figure out how long it was going to be and what I would focus on. That all became clearer once I read Lily Hoang’s “13 Remotely Related to South Bend, Indiana.” I love that piece because it centers on place as a character and what she was witnessing when she lived there; basically the facts were presented as segments. After that, I decided to do that in a similar fashion. I narrowed the perspective to one character and presented what she saw while working as an entomologist.
Your narrator is a complex character. What dialogue we get from her—both external and internalized thoughts—are bereft of emotion. Yet she works in a field with wide gender and racial disparities, she endures macroaggressions on egregious levels, and she climbs trees setting bait traps like it’s no big deal. This woman is a powerhouse! What was she like in draft versions? What was your intention with not naming her?
Those are great questions, and yes—she lacks emotions. It was a critique that I often got when I workshopped this story or submitted it to literary journals. The funny thing is that, in the earlier drafts, she had emotions. The reader saw both of her external and internalized thoughts. There was more of a sense of urgency from her in those earlier drafts; however, I took it out because the story became unfocused. I’m not saying emotions are not important—they totally are, but the story needed to focus on the surroundings and what she is observing during her job. We have to remember that she is a scientist—an entomologist that is doing her job to prevent an infestation of murder hornets. Like in every job, you want to separate your personal life from your job because that is how you get things done. Not only that, but she is also writing observational notes too, and those need to be unbiased as they can be. Most importantly, the lack of emotions made her a witness to all of the hate crimes that are happening within her community. Regardless of if there is a pandemic, infestation of bugs, or not—a lot of marginalized communities encounter these types of aggressions in their everyday lives and sometimes they just have to bear with it. For her not to have a reaction shows that these types of actions are normalized in her everyday life.
The lack of naming is important in this piece, but there is also the lack of information about the character in general. The only thing we know about her is that she is an entomologist and trying to prevent an infestation of murder hornets. We don’t know about her race, her family, or how she feels about the hate crimes happening within her own community. When she does, it doesn’t even add more clarity, just questions. She can be any person who is identified as Asian or part of a marginalized community. That’s why I didn’t give her a name. Yet, the lack of names for the main character has more of a darker meaning to it too. Within the story, people are performing these macroaggressions because they associate the name “Asian Murder Hornets” to Asian people. To us, we see her as an individual, a person who is trying to do her job, but to the people around her—she is just another person with Asian features; therefore, might be the cause of what is happening. However, it is more complicated than that because she is a scientist with all of this knowledge and doesn’t know what to do with it since people, in this story, don’t trust the scientists. Then what do you do when you have all of this information that could help, and people still don’t believe you? Basically, it is an erasure of your identity in the sense of race but in the world of one’s career.
Your story highlights the harmful legacy of spraying pesticides widely, in this case DDT. I’m very curious about the many paths of inquiry this recurring point in the story brings up, specifically pertaining to stubborn ignorance and blasé denial, about human consequence on the natural world. I’m wondering if you can talk with us about this. Why was it necessary for you to write this into “Observations…?” Do you often incorporate elements of science into your writing?
The funny thing is that I actually have a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, so science has been part of my identity since I was young. I still have a fondness for it even though I stopped continuing it, so to me science is like oxygen. I use it in everything I write. The science that I write is not heavy science, but it centers more on the ethics and consequences if one is not careful which is the reason why I wrote this story. This leads me to think of the quote “What is more precious than life?” The Earth, this land is the only home that we have, and we need to protect it. This is probably based on my own upbringing too. My parents are refugees from the Vietnam War, and they always taught me that my home and life is precious. If it is so important, then why don’t we do our very best to protect it? I think this came about when I was teaching an English composition class on visual analysis and one of the ads that I presented to my students had an endangered species ( I can’t remember, but I believe it was a type of whale), and it was wearing a mask of a panda—asking the audience, “Do you care now?” And then it made me realize, do we only care about the natural world if there is some value to us? For example, do we protect bald eagles because they are majestic birds and they are important to the environment, or is it because they have value to us as a nation and what it symbolizes? Then this leads me to think about the use of agent orange in Vietnam and in other countries, DDT and its effects on animals, and other chemicals that are used in warfare and displaced communities. We do this to benefit us—not the other way around.
This leads to another reason why I wrote it. In the story, there is a reference to space and how humans as a society have made leaps and bounds to understand the world beyond the Earth, but yet, we struggle understanding our own planet. Yes, the Earth changes constantly, so it is hard, but I don’t think that is a good excuse not to put in more effort into it. As humans, we need to understand how we can benefit and help the ecosystem around us (just like every other animal does) because if we don’t, it will be similar to what we saw with the pandemic, probably even worse. Therefore, it goes back to the question, “What is more precious than life?” If we as humans can’t even do that with each other, then how can we do that with the only home we live in? And that is really concerning.
Who are some writers you’re reading right now?
I am reading two books right now. One is by Paisley Rekdal’s The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee. Because she is a poet, I really enjoy how she is using language and images in her nonfiction work. I admire writers who can write in different genres seamlessly, especially when the writer is playing with words. Plus, her work centers on identity and the relationship between her mom, and I also center my works on familial relations too.
The second writer I am reading is Max Porter. One of my friends recommended his novel, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers: A Novel, because I wanted to explore grief and how an individual confronts it. I love how he plays with multiple points of view and structure. One of my favorite characters is the crow, and Porter has an amazing talent in writing from an animal’s point of view.
You received a Steinbeck fellowship at San Jose State University in 2022. What projects are you working on?
Currently, I am working on my short story collection that “Observation Notes of the Effects of the Vespa Mandarinia” is part of. The collection centers on women’s bodies, magical realism, and retelling of Vietnamese fairy tales. I hope to finish this collection in a year or two, but knowing myself and how I am such a perfectionist, it will take longer. Another project that I am also currently working on is a novel that takes place after the Fall of Saigon and the boat people. I am at the research and outlining stage right now, but I am planning by the end of this year to start on a draft soon.
Annie Trinh is a writer from Nevada and has earned her MFA from the University of Kansas. Supported by Key West Literary Seminar, VONA, and Kundiman, her work has been published or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Passages North, Joyland, and elsewhere. She is currently a 2022-23 Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Patrick Cabello Hansel
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Patrick Cabello Hansel
The featured image was taken from a broadside created by Nick Wroblewski displaying Roy McBride’s poem “Lilac Week” for the Powderhorn Writer’s Festival.
Your poem “Lilac Time Minneapolis, May 2020” published in Volume 25, reflects on the uprising in the days after Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd. Can you tell us a bit about what inspired your writing of this poem?
We live about a mile from George Floyd Square, and a couple blocks off Lake Street. My wife and I were serving a church that was two blocks from Lake, made up mostly of immigrant families. So many were traumatized by his death, the burning of Lake Street and the militarized response (after no action to stop the arsons). We had tried to work with the local precinct for 15 years to do real community policing for our diverse and poor neighborhood. But even before George Floyd’s murder, the police too often swung between no response at all to an occupying force that was more military than policing. This all was in the context of increasing anti-immigrant feeling and actions at the federal level, COVID and political division. So it was a tumultuous time, to say the least! And there, in the middle of that, the beauty of lilacs blooming all throughout our fair city.
Your poem acknowledges Roy McBride, a well-known spoken word artist, poet, and activist in the Twin Cities community. What was your connection to Roy, and in particular, to his work that opened up “Lilac Time Minneapolis, May 2020” for you?
I did not know Roy well; our paths had crossed at In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre, especially at the May Day Festival (when sometimes the lilacs had just started to blossom). I wish I had got to know him better. But as soon as I heard his poem “Lilac Week” I was so moved. The whole world is taken over by lilacs and their short, intense time of that intoxicating aroma and color. As Roy wrote:
It’s lilac week.
Lilac week.
The world
surrenders to lilacs.
As I note in my poem, lilacs were the flowers that we brought as children to the May Crowning at the church in Austin, MN where I grew up. Hundreds of girls and boys dressed in pastel brought flowers to honor Mary, and the church was filled with such wonderful aromas.
In May 2020, I went out some nights on our little 2nd floor back porch. I could smell the tear gas from the precinct, the smoke from the fires, see the helicopters overhead and hear sirens, shouts, gunfire. But in the midst of that, our dwarf lilac was still giving off its last scent. That’s where the poem was born.
I’ve read a variety of responses over the years as to whether poetry allows for political conversations, political activism, and building progressive change. What is your response to this?
I honestly can’t imagine a poet not being engaged with their world and then writing about it. The challenge is to do so without being pedantic. Self-righteousness, no matter how just the cause, does not make for good poetry. I don’t want to be told how to think or feel about an issue or event, I want to be invited into the poet’s engagement with whatever they are writing about. I’m more of a narrative poet, so for me the best way to get at issues is through stories rather than ideas. In my first book The Devouring Land, the first third of the book is about immigration, but I don’t lay out policy or shout slogans. Rather, I tell stories, including people I love who were hunted, deported, separated from their families. For example, the images of a medical examiner in Arizona trying to discover one person’s identity from their bones speaks to the issue better than declaring that hundreds of people die each year crossing the border. 
I’ve also found that if I get close to trying to solve the problems raised in a poem, I lose creative tension. Finally, imagination plays a key role for me; especially imagining what I call “the world beyond the world.” That means standing firmly in the world as it is, while living into the world as it will be. To me, that’s the definition of being incarnational; theologically, it is the word (promise) becoming flesh (reality).
You write and have published work across multiple genres, and you’ve also worked for decades in the faith community as a pastor, both in Minneapolis, the Bronx, and Philadelphia. How do all these avenues and mediums of work overlap in your creative writing? Do you find yourself exploring similar paths of thinking across your work?
I think faith has to do with creative tension as well. That is, holding together the reality of the pain of the world and the promise of liberation. The neighborhoods I worked in with my wife Luisa were communities of color, low-income, with many immigrant families. I was an effective pastor when I entered that reality as best I could and when I held onto a vision of a different reality. More often than not, it was the people I served who brought the abundance of faith. I was privileged to be the scribe and the speaker of that faith, in a dance with the scriptures and liturgies we had received and those we created. In every parish, we tried to bring the mythic and cultic practices of religion into the community we served. For example, with In the Heart of the Beast, St. Paul’s Lutheran developed La Natividad. It was a bilingual telling of the Christmas story from the point of view of an immigrant family in south Minneapolis. The whole audience processed with María and José as they sought shelter to have the baby. Living that ancient story in our current world—with music, art and of course, food—helped make it more alive for many.
Can you share with us about the mission and the work of the literary journal you edit, The Phoenix of Phillips?
The Phoenix of Phillips is a program of the Semilla Center for Healing and the Arts, which is a non-profit started by my wife and I as an extension of St. Paul’s community work. Semilla has taught mosaics, painting, puppetry, drama, urban gardening and many other arts to over 4,000 people, and installed 37 murals and over 50 other artistic place makers in the Phillips neighborhood and beyond. My wife is a mosaic artist, I am a writer, and it made sense to start a literary magazine for and by the community. Part of that was doing poetry workshops with seniors, new immigrants and especially youth. This past summer, I taught a group of youth and we wrote in different locations in the community. One of those was an historic cemetery, where we wrote poems to our ancestors and then from our ancestors. All of the photographs in The Phoenix, whether of street scenes or art we have produced, are done by youth.
The Phoenix welcomes submissions from people who live, work or volunteer in Phillips. We intentionally wanted it to be by the people it was for. But if anyone is interested, there are a lot of volunteer opportunities! You can see back issues of The Phoenix on Semilla’s website: https://www.semillacenter.org/creative-writing/
Who are some writers that inspire you?
Oh it depends on what week! Or day! When I started writing 45 years ago (!), two poets that really inspired were Gwendolyn Brooks and Theodore Roethke. The poets who’ve mentored me include Ed Bok Lee, Jude Nutter, Richard Terrill and Philip Schultz, among others. This week, I’ve been reading Sun Yung Shin, John Donne, Loren Niemi and Maya Abu Al-Hayyat. How’s that for eclectic?!
What projects are you working on now?
My third book of poems Breathing in Minneapolis will be published by Finishing Line Press in November. “Lilac Time” is in it. It’s about all that happened in 2020-2022. I’m working on a series about my mother (my second book Quitting Time was an extended elegy to my father). I continue to write poems about the city, social issues, family, nature and whatever else grabs me. 
I’m also working on a novel that I have been writing for 10 years! It’s based in a fictional small town in southern Minnesota and is kind of a coming of age story of a young woman in the context of all that was going on from 1900-1919. A lot of stuff then too: war, women’s suffrage, prohibition, labor agitation, anti-immigrant movements, not to mention a global pandemic!
While retired from pastoral ministry, I am active in my church. Being retired gives me more time to garden and spend time with family, including our granddaughter, who just turned one.
Patrick Cabello Hansel is the author of the poetry collections The Devouring Land and Quitting Time, and the forthcoming collection Breathing in Minneapolis. He has published poems and prose in over eighty journals, including Crannóg, The Ilanot Review, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Ash & Bones, and riverSedge. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, he has won awards from the Loft Literary Center and the Minnesota State Arts Board. His novella Searching was serialized in thirty-three issues of the alley newspaper. He is the editor of The Phoenix of Phillips, a literary journal by and for the most diverse community in Minneapolis. You can learn more about his work, along with his wife Luisa’s work, at their website https://www.artecabellohansel.com.
Smog Mother by John Wall Barger, Reviewed by Robyn Earhart
Smog Mother, John Wall Barger’s sixth collection of poetry, begins with an epigraph from the 1959 French New Wave film Hiroshima Mon Amour, written by Marguerite Duras:
SHE: The reconstructions have been made as authentically as possible.
The films have been made as authentically as possible.
The illusion, it’s quite simple, the illusion is so perfect that tourists cry.
One can always scoff, but what else can a tourist do, really, but cry?
Hiroshima Mon Amour follows two unnamed fictional paramours—one French and one Japanese—who meet in the city still ravaged from the atomic bomb dropped by Americans during the second world war. What, the lovers challenge each other, is true or false? The film depicts a common quandary for any writer of nonfiction on how to reconstruct the truth as authentically as possible with enough luster to attract readers.
In Smog Mother, John Wall Barger is our speaker-seer. Through his eyes, we experience kind connections among strangers, the chaos of public disorder, and the bonding love between friends and partners. While crisscrossing the Asian continent by bus, an Enfield motorcycle, or aboard the Trans-Mongolian railway, Barger repeatedly implores the reader to look, listen, and stay present with him. In the opening poem, the epic and titular “Smog Mother”, Barger addresses his readers with an invocation:
O reader listen closely lean in yes you just you yes
Throughout the collection, Barger’s work moves with a degree of cinematic flourish, particularly with his epic poems “Smog Mother”, “Samovar”, and “Dukkha.” It’s as if our speaker-seer is magnified under the lens of the camera witnessing that around him before the seer’s lens pans to an individual—a person, an animal, a natural element, and then we zoom into the encounter between the seer to the subject matter he is writing on. Often, what envelopes Barger to his subjects is his curiosity of a shared, personal connection.
In “Woman on a Hong Kong Bus at Night”, it is the empathy one stranger gives to another. In this case, it is a tired woman who falls asleep on the shoulder of Barger while riding the bus. We know nothing of this woman say for the initial scowl she presents him when he takes the seat next to hers, and as anyone who has ridden the bus knows, public transit offers a myriad of opportunities for personal encounters with strangers:
I wish this were a different world
One where we could lean on a stranger
without shame.
The woman’s grinding teeth, her drool on his hand remind him of his desire for his wife Tiina who sits behind him, and this sensation causes him to reflect that without physical connection to loved ones,
this life is torture,
torquere, twisting the child out of the adult.
While there are many illuminating encounters among strangers, Barger’s prose equally shimmers while he muses on his relationships to those closest to him. In the elegiac poem “Dying in Dharamsala”, Barger vividly renders a portrait of his friend Carlos who appears on the page as both dying and lively at the same time:
And we believe it,
how could we not believe it?
For God’s sake,
just look at his elfin grin,
his angel-fierce
mischievous eyes.
He is beautiful. And yet
something wobbles
It is poems like this, where Barger complicates the expected consequences of rendering the dying—the inevitable pity, sorrow, and despair—with love and tenderness, that his work really shines.
Tiina is a looming presence in this collection, and however brief her appearances are, it is clear that she reserves a special place in Barger’s writing. In “Dukkha”, while reflecting on a translated passage of the Indian mystic and poet Kabír, Barger worries about his feverish wife asleep in another room:
I have been wondering
What pain we share
And where we intersect
My tin ceiling drips
The hand of mist reaching in
I’m anxious about Tiina
His anxiety of Tiina’s pain seamlessly shifts to the pain Barger imagines the surviving town inhabitants of an earthquake experienced, or the pain that protestors felt after a Tibetan leader was arrested. Whether it be his wife or the friends he muses on, or the strangers and animals that he encounters by chance, Barger dispenses empathy to all. Pain, in its various forms, often serves as reverence for Barger’s melodious and philosophical parsing. He acutely delves into that eternally hard-pressed space that we as humans can feel a multitude of feelings at once—not an easy task for any tender-hearted writer to attempt! Life will always throw us curveballs, and therefore we can experience joy right along with heartache; this is part of the human experience. Barger masterfully probes these deep questions with solicitude.
“Sipping Tequila with a Friend on My Roof under the Cold Blowtorch Moon” is a particular standout poem that showcases Barger’s enlightening paradox of enjoying time spent with a friend on the unfortunate precipice of passing away:
What does it say about me
that I can feel joy
while bad things
happen? Is joy a thief
climbing in the window
we should clobber
over the head?
Further on in the poem, Barger attempts to honor and affirm what many of us feel when pressed into moments of sorrow and joy, lamenting that
It is forbidden
to love hurt things
more than nature does.
But joy, joy is the taproot.
We are allowed
to feel it.
In a surprising coda harkening back to Duras’s screenplay, Barger’s empathy is quickly turned inward, a shift that allows the reader additional clarity into Barger’s intentions with this collection. We too are impressed upon to see that what is around us may look the same, that life may proceed as it always has, but something about us, as with Barger in the coda, is different, altered with a greater wisdom and compassion for all life.
John Wall Barger’s Smog Mother is a searing and honest construction of imagistic poetry that sees the world with its flaws and its beauty. It’s a must-read for anyone seeking a book that exudes compassion and empathy for its subject matters. Fans of physical books will also love Smog Mother for its beautiful design. Thick, black pages partition the book into sections, and it features running images of a lone dog, emblematic of the canines who make appearances in several of Barger’s poems. The overall effect is visually stunning, and only adds to the alure of this finely crafted collection from a skilled seer and poet like Barger.
Robyn Earhart‘s work has appeared in Barren Magazine, Columbia Journal online, and the Under Review. She lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota with her husband and pets.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—J.G. Jesman
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—J.G. Jesman
In “Mr Chilombo’s Wife”, your short story published in Volume 25, the narrator describes the goings-on of her day as we begin to see that something is off in the relationship between her and her husband. How did the idea for this story originate?
Over the phone, a relative informed me that someone we knew (in Malawi) had died in a hit and run accident. A woman. I didn’t know her that well but I was moved by the untimeliness of it all. It seemed unjust; like she’d been shoved out of existence. What would happen, I wondered, if someone died so abruptly they never noticed? Furthermore, how does such a death affect the bereaved?
What was your decision to write this story from Mrs Chilombo’s point of view? What was it like to create a woman who is essentially existing in the margins of her husband’s memories?
The story attempts to explore the love and grief of a controlling husband through the perspective of his deceased wife. The word “chilombo” in Chichewa means monster. Therefore, Mrs Chilombo is Mrs Monster. I was inspired by the idea of Frankenstein’s monster’s bride and her place in the novel; a supporting character whose existence would have been only in service to her husband. By placing the “traditional” woman at the centre of this story, Mrs Chilombo gets to reclaim her narrative.
It’s not too surprising that the 2022 word of the year—according to Dictionary.com— is “woman.” Clearly, women—mothers, daughters, wives, aunties, nieces and so on, have been existing on the periphery of men’s lives; Adam’s ribs if you will. This story is no different. We have a man who subjugates his wife and yet he is so devastated by her death that his life spirals out of control. Are his emotions a result of love or dependency—or both?
Each time I’ve read your story, I notice how I gravitate toward the tiny details that clarify what I think of as the story’s truth-telling elements: the fly-ridden dog of simple breed, the cassava that’s ignored, how “in Malawi it’s almost commonplace for people to die suddenly.” Can you share with us a bit about your decisions in “revealing” the truth near the end of the story? Was Mrs Chilombo alive in earlier drafts?
Mrs Chilombo was always a ghost of sorts. Even before “the revelation,” she was a husk of her former self. She was a grieving woman. A ghost in society and a ghost in her marriage. What was difficult to pull off was maintaining why she didn’t know that she had died. It was as if her sense of marital duty outweighed her acceptance of this fact.
Grief seems to be a recurring concept that appears in your work. What draws you to writing about loss and grief?
Mono no aware, in Japanese, is an idiom about the awareness of the impermanence of things. It’s a good philosophy. If life is a collection of losses, then grief is a testament of our endurance. Every so often it’s important to look at grief and death as reminders of what we have been through and what’s to come—I mean that in the least despairing way possible!
You published your first novel, Chisoni, or Conversations on a Plane About Life and Death (Penguin Random Press) in May of 2022. What was the process for publication like? How did this book come to fruition from idea to publication? 
I am not a “trained” writer but as an animator/filmmaker; writing is a big part of the process. When my brother passed away some time back, I founded a blog to help me understand my emotions through studying the human condition. I had always been very interested in theology and I spoke to people of many religious backgrounds to find commonalities in how they dealt with loss—especially when reason fails. All of this “research” culminated in the start of a novel (in the course of about six months) which I continued to improve upon for some years. When it was done, I sent it to the editors at Penguin Random House South Africa, who I’m grateful to say, gave me a chance.
Tell us a little bit about your approach to writing short stories as opposed to your approach to something more longform, like a novel. Do they differ? How do you know when the form works for the story?
A short story is harder to put together, in my view. The reader is a lot less forgiving. One can judge whether or not they like a novel after a chapter, whereas the first paragraph of a short story can be enough to turn anyone off. A short story is truth concentrate. A novel is a carrier of multiple truths. I think the distinction is in how much the writer or the characters have to share.
Who are some writers that inspire you?
I really like the work of Richard Yates. Through his character’s struggles one sees that life happens on its own terms. In the short story format: Haruki Murakami (for his improvisation), Doris Lessing (for her study of details) and Kevin Barry (for reminding us all to have fun).
What projects are you working on now?
I am working on a short story collection to do with Malawian culture.
J.G. Jesman is a Malawian-British author and animator. His debut novel, Chisoni, or Conversations on a Plane About Life and Death, was published by Penguin Random House South Africa in May 2022. His short stories have appeared in the Fairlight Book of Short Stories and elsewhere. Jesman holds a master’s degree in film and media and has worked mainly in the video game industry. He founded a blog in 2014 centered on the human condition, exploring aspects of religion and spirituality. He is particularly interested in the pathos of things, and most of his stories deal with that theme.