In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Josh Nicolaisen
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Josh Nicolaisen
Your piece, “Sometimes I Walk Barefoot Through Freshly Tilled Soil,” wraps up Volume 27. Where did the inspiration for this piece come from?
Yes, and thank you so much for such a prized spot in the journal. I was truly awed and honored when my copy arrived. I wrote this poem one spring after prepping our vegetable garden for the season with my wife and daughters. I was thinking about our gardens and how they bring us together as a family. I was thinking about mental health and personal acceptance and possibility and Willa Cather’s O’ Pioneers and the goats we used to raise and a bumper sticker my wife once had that said “A good rind is a terrible thing to waste.”
There’s a beautiful dissonance of the title, which feels idyllic, and the text of the poem, which gets into the reality of the dirt. Can you talk more about the development of this idea?
Yeah, so that’s the O’ Pioneers part, and it has to do with the indulgences of being barefoot. It has to do with vices and acceptance and personal forgiveness. I think it’s best that I share Cather’s words:
“Ivar,” Signa asked suddenly, “will you tell me why you go barefoot? All the time I lived here in the house I wanted to ask you. Is it for a penance, or what?”
“No, sister. It is for the indulgence of the body. From my youth up I have had a strong, rebellious body, and have been subject to every kind of temptation. Even in age my temptations are prolonged. It was necessary to make some allowances; and the feet, as I understand it, are free members. There is no divine prohibition for them in the Ten Commandments. The hands, the tongue, the eyes, the heart, all the bodily desires we are commanded to subdue; but the feet are free members. I indulge them without harm to any one, even to trampling in filth when my desires are low. They are quickly cleaned again.”
You use a lot of taste and smell sensations. Were they part of the first draft or did they get layered in later? Do you use these senses in other pieces?
Those came quickly in this poem, which was one of the rare occasions where the first draft arrived pretty much as is. The piece underwent one minor set of revisions, but mostly still lives in its original form. I think tactful and relatable sensory language is the most effective way to bring readers into poems. My writing students might even say I overdo it in my asking for them to add additional sensory details.
Compost plays such a huge role in this piece. What does this idea of this sort of recycling mean to you?
Aside from teaching writing at Plymouth State University, I’m also a self-employed fine gardener. I work with compost a lot and appreciate the role it plays in our ecosystem. I use compost made at home with food waste, poultry litter, grass clippings, and sheep manure. I also use commercially, mass-produced compost in my clients’ gardens. Humans create an enormous amount of food waste. We eat far too much beef, and too many animals in general. We are obsessed with large, tidy, green lawns. We do these things despite knowing the huge contribution they have to climate change and I think about all of this a lot, probably too much. Additionally, as dirty and gross of a process making them is, most fertilizers (especially organic ones) are created with animal bi-products, and as much as the ethics around our systems of factory farming and big agriculture bother me and cause me to consider my impact and the impact of my business, I enjoy being able see beautiful things grow from what we destroy.
What themes do you write about?
My writing spends a lot of time outdoors, which has been much of my lived experience. I write a lot about boyhood and masculinity and what that even means. I write about family and ancestry and loss. I write about mental and physical health, and gardening, and the forest, and parenting, and love. I write into what I know and what I still wonder about what I don’t.
Who are some of your favorite authors? What books or poems do you love?
I could go on for far too long here, so I’ll try and pinpoint a few writers that really do it for me. Firstly, I have an obsession with Kurt Vonnegut. In my office he resides on a paperweight, a skateboard deck, on several pieces of art, and in the form of a stuffie. I have more than one t-shirt featuring his face and my right leg is covered in tattoo versions of his drawings. I implore you to read some Vonnegut. I always recommend people start with Breakfast of Champions or God Bless You Mr. Rosewater. Cormac McCarthy and Willa Cather are a couple classic fiction writers that I love. I recently finished a streak of new novels by some the Randolph MFA faculty and couldn’t recommend more highly, Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr, Julia Phillips’ Bear, and Clare Beams’ The Garden.
Gregory Orr and Ted Kooser are poets whose poems make me want to write poems. Their imagery, economy of language, and ability to see deeply into quotidian situations never ceases to amaze me. I feel much the same about Theodore Roethke, and “My Papa’s Waltz” is probably my favorite poem of all time. Sharon Olds’ odes have been so important to me. Chet’la Sebree was my mentor during the first semester of my MFA program, and her work, work ethic, and kindness are all to be adored. William Fargasson and Taneum Bambrick are two contemporary poets that I absolutely cannot get enough of and whose work I hope mine is in conversation with.
Additionally, I’m so excited to be sharing space in this issue of Water~Stone with NH Poet Laureate, Jennifer Militello, and with my friend and workshop partner Christopher Gaumer.
What are you working on now?
Right now, I’m writing to you from a weeklong residency at Hewnoaks in Maine. This past summer has probably been the most hectic one of my adult life, and I think I’ve only drafted two poems in the past year. I’ve needed this time and space so badly. It’s incredible to feel rested and creative again and I’m incredibly grateful for the good fortune of being awarded this time and space.
I’m working on a couple of things while I’m here. I’m working on a review of Samyak Shertok’s No Rhodendendron, which comes out October 7th. It’s incredibly touching and does some highly impressive work with invented and adapted forms. I highly recommend getting your hands on a copy. I’m also refining a manuscript for a chapbook and another for what I hope to be my first full-length collection. I’m digging into some long-awaited revisions and sorting through lots of highly appreciated workshop feedback that I’m finally finding time to work with. I’m writing some new stuff. I’m practicing patience and rest. I’m thankful to Jenn at Water~Stone Review for asking me these questions and to you for reading my answers. Thank you.
Josh Nicolaisen lives in New Hampshire and teaches writing at Plymouth State University. He holds an MFA from Randolph College and is a Pushcart Prize nominee. He has been awarded a grant from Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference and a fellowship from Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. His work has recently appeared in Colorado Review, Hunger Mountain Review, So It Goes, Appalachian Review, Poetry South, Bellingham Review, and elsewhere. Find him at oldmangardening.com/poetry.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Abie Irabor
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Abie Irabor
In your poem, “Movie Star,” you create a spotlight of excitement surrounding a parent coming home. What sparked this poem’s creation and the comparison of the homecoming to a celebrity?
This poem’s creation originated from a short story I wrote back in Graduate School. The short story was about my Dad. How his visits were always unexpected, inconsistent, and far and in between. So, whenever he did decide to visit my siblings, mom, and me it was rare, but exciting, to see someone I wish was more present in my life.
The comparison of the homecoming to a celebrity stems from the admiration a child has for their parent(s) like a person has for a celebrity. When it comes to celebrities, fans feel this sense of closeness, connection, and put them on this pedestal, but at the same time they know this celebrity is out of reach. I wanted to capture that in this poem. The child has put their father on a pedestal, he is a celebrity in the child’s eyes. Someone who is far away, rarely seen, and quite flashy (hahaha). I wanted to capture the “hype” around this person who appears close, but is really so far away.
How did you develop the symbolism with the balloons “holding their breath,” and the child waiting for attention, or was that image always part of this piece?
The symbolism with the balloons comes from the idea that my father’s visits were literally like an event, exciting. And balloons were one of the symbols that came to me while drafting this poem. It just so happened that the connection with balloons being filled with air, and air is also breath, and holding breath and balloons waiting to be noticed and pulled down made sense in relation to the child.
You set the scene quite perfectly with only a few details—the dissonance between couches, for example. How do you decide what to keep in and what to leave out when creating a brief poem like this?
This is a question I ask myself when editing poems; what to keep and what to leave out. I will say, I wanted to capture tension and the loud silence within a room filled with people and noise. I hope the brevity of the poem captured this. As I am completing my first poetry book, I find that fewer words capture the tone and energies of the relationship(s) I highlight throughout my writing.
What themes do you return to in your writing?
The themes that I return to in my writing are about family, ancestral lineage, culture, and healing—as of now.
Which authors do you admire? What books are your favorites?
A few of the authors I admire are: Natalie Diaz, Ada Limon, and Joy Harjo.
What are you working on now?
I am currently working on my first book of poetry, where the poem Movie Star will be included.
Abie Irabor is an American Nigerian writer and performing artist. She is currently working on her first chapbook. You can read her other published poems in Euphony Journal, Petigru Review, and California Quarterly, and forthcoming in Angel City Review. She resides in Los Angeles, California.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Jennifer Bowen
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Jennifer Bowen
There are so many facets of your nonfiction piece “Just the Song.” Where did the spark for this piece come from?
The pressure to write it came while watching my kid perform in Cabaret on the day of Donald Trump’s first inauguration. It was haunting to watch my son’s character, Cliff, grapple with the world as the Nazi Party and fascism were on the rise—history, but with foreboding. E was getting ready to go to college and I was a big fucking mess about it. For the first time in my life, I wondered whether art was the protective force I’d imagined it to be. Art can be life changing, for sure. But my kids, it seemed, were going to launch into a darkening world. If all essays arise out of a question, mine was something like, can art stop a bullet? And in the face of that question, are they prepared for the world that awaits?
When writing this work, what was it like to go back through and remember the plays E had performed? What was the impetus for this work to span nearly two decades? How did you decide on the organization for it?
It was bittersweet to watch the reel of his creative life tick through my mind’s eye. On the one hand, E brought so much joy and vibrance to the stage. As he got older, of course, the plays he acted in grew weightier and that was a different experience to relive. Reading it years after I wrote it, which was written years after I’d lived it, I see now where my perceptions about his experiences were flawed, which is always humbling. Writing is good at revealing your own misconceptions to you.
When I realized the structure of the essay would be a tour through my son’s theatre performances alongside his aging, it naturally took up most of his life, which was a few decades. My brain hops around in ways this essay illustrates. I don’t think I have ADHD. I think I have what I’d call Consistently Digressive Disorder (CDD). I sometimes think our writing is more an illustration of our limitations than our strengths, or maybe that, harnessed well, our limitations can be made into strengths? Cue every structure I’ve ever landed on, for better or worse.
There’s such a tenderness throughout the text. You talk about how it was strange to watch your child become someone else. Can you say more about that?
Thank you for saying that. It did feel tender to write. It feels tender to talk about now. When our kids are young, we (perhaps mistakenly) think we know them entirely. And so when you see them acting someone completely different from themselves—a slapstick cowboy for example—it’s funny and a little startling.
And of course it’s hard to see them acting pain. In Cabaret, again, my son was a man named Cliff—but with E’s very dimples, his very walk. When he got kneed in the gut by Nazis, it was my son’s voice I heard expressing pain. I didn’t have to imagine him in a fascist world, because I was watching it live. And watching your child act can really be a metaphor for watching them grow into their future selves. There are layers and complexities we can miss when they’re right under our nose, because we’re so used to seeing them as this one person we’ve always known. But humans are dynamic and layered and play, as the bard tells us, many parts.
Because of the way it’s structured, is this ever a piece that you’d ever want to write a part two of, as time progresses?
That’s interesting. I’ve never considered it. I could imagine writing something new or deeper about the way art functions or fails as both sanctuary and weapon in the end times, but I’m not sure I have the stomach to put either of my kids in it right now. I’d rather imagine them into a speculative world with free healthcare.
What themes do you find you return to in your writing?
I write about connection: how humans (and systems and cows and chickens) seek it, thwart it, imagine it, falter from the lack of it, and thrive when we find it. Themes that grow from that central concern are abandonment, magical thinking, mutual care. That all sounds heavy: I love being playful—with structure and language—across all themes. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about pleasure and the impulse to give. That’d feel like a nice space to explore.
What are some of your favorite books? What authors do you return to?
Oh gosh, so many. Some of the most brilliant contemporary writers alive today happen to live in our own backyard and I love and admire their books: Lesley Nneka Arimah (What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky), VV Ganeshananthan (Brotherless Night), Danez Smith (Bluff). I also love Marilynne Robinson’s novels and essays. Ali Smith, always. Wislawa Szymborska. Kristin Collier has a new book or memoir/reportage coming out called, What Debt Demands. It’s about student loan debt, but really also about family and class divide and caring for each other; it’s a beautiful, important book that’s fresh in my mind. Frog and Toad will forever hold a place in my heart and so will E.B. White, who probably shaped and parented more of me than I realize through Charlotte’s Web.
What are you working on now?
I’m not an everyday writer. My day job and my extra gigs take up a chunk of time and emotional energy. My brain seems to be scheming a novel, which I think is a very cheeky thing for it to do. We’ll see if it gets bashful when I actually sit in front of a blank page again. If past is precedent, it’ll change its mind about a novel and lead me to another chicken essay.
Jennifer Bowen is a writer, editor, and educator whose work appears in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Orion, The Sun, Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She’s a contributor to The Sentences That Create Us, Crafting a Writer’s Life in Prison (Haymarket). Her debut essay collection, Lightworthy, is forthcoming from Milkweed Press (2025).
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Lisa Higgs
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Lisa Higgs
Your two poems, “About Nothing” and “Pandemic Dreams” are beautifully-worked pieces. Where sparked the creation of these pieces?
As one might imagine with “Pandemic Dreams,” I wrote this poem at some point during the lockdowns or soon thereafter. I don’t think I was alone in finding it difficult to sleep during the pandemic, and I often woke to really bizarre recurring dreams that shifted about in small and large ways. Among my recurrent dreams were ones set in that iconic Minnesota setting, the northern cabin. So really, the poem is a list of the parts of those repeating dreams I found difficult to forget and, over time, felt I should not forget. Recalibrating my sleep as we came out of the pandemic proved to be more difficult than I thought it would be, and “About Nothing” began one February morning following yet another restless night of sleep, where motion outside my bedroom window kept triggering a sensored light. Perhaps the thought of those night animals–which I am not, being a true early bird–is what drew me to the images of teeth and gnawing, though I also tend to clench my teeth overnight, so it is equally likely I had a sore jaw that morning, too. The connected title and last words create a circle if you instinctively try to finish the phrase–much ado about nothing. A reflection of the repetitive thoughts that seem to drive my insomnia, yet also a reflection on sleep itself. The act of being asleep takes on such heightened importance as you toss and turn in the throes of insomnia. Could it really be the unimportant part, and the dreams and fears that so often kept me awake were the essential elements I needed to breathe, to be.
“Pandemic Dreams” opens with one of my favorite lines to start a poem, “My family wants dinner but a suitcase is not a cooler.” Can you talk about how that line came into existence and what made you start right there?
Now you’ve sent me back to my journals, as I know for certain that was not the first line of my first draft, which I can now verify was written June 24, 2020. The poem originally began with “I’m at the cabin again,” and had several lines about items I’d packed into a tiny red suitcase. The boring things: socks (unmatched), toothbrush (no paste). Because one does not usually go to a cabin by oneself, my family then intruded, hungry, and it was actually the perfect suggestion of one of my former mentors, Jim Moore, to begin the poem with that line, something that could only make sense in a dream. When you get good advice, you need to take it. I think I cut about a third of the poem during revisions, all with the intent of keeping the poem in an alien realm bordered by repeating details as if, sometime, they could recreate reality. They could make sense. How in the summer of 2020 could you find sense?
In “Pandemic Dreams,” there is a rattlesnake that features as another character. How did she come into the poem?
The rattlesnake was a dream companion on several occasions, so her presence was required on a literal level, yet she also embodied a sleeping threat. Is the rattlesnake a Covid stand-in? Does a suitcase offer security, both in what can be packed away and in where traveling might take you? I don’t know if I ever dreamed the rattlesnake bite, but I did for certain dream a silver fox carrying a dead rattlesnake across the road. Call in the dream interpreters, but make sure they’ve spent enough weeks near a lakeshore in Bemidji or Walker.
“About Nothing” takes a Shakespearean tilt, and even is a sort of sonnet—or at least it’s 14 lines. Can you talk a bit about that? In what ways, if any, did Much Ado inspire “About Nothing?”
I write a lot of sonnets. Probably as an outgrowth of having an early teacher, Bill Pauly, who required attempting the form, but also because when I started reading poetry seriously in high school, my favorites tended to be in that form. From my paperback Immortal Poems of the English Language: Shakespeare, Keats, the other Romantics. I tend to pay more attention to meter than end rhyme, though once and awhile, rhyme just fits. I rarely sit down and think, today I’ll write a sonnet, but often I realize very early that the poem I’m drafting will end up as a sonnet, and the form becomes part of my drafting. Less often, I write a poem without realizing it is a sonnet, and revision becomes a matter of addition, subtraction, and cleaning up the meter, which always, always makes the poem better. I’ve already mentioned a little about Much Ado, but I would add that I often take from that play an idea that we shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously, for fear of becoming rather ridiculous. All the things that can keep you up at night lose a bit of their power if you can place them in the “much ado about nothing” category.
Do you find that your writing centers around core themes?
At one point, I would have said that my writing is often centered around the tension between solitude and loneliness, but I’m not certain if that rings as true lately. I grew up in a very small grouping of homes on country-sized lots surrounded by farmland, so solitude was something I grew up with and something I crave when it’s in small supply. But how and when do loneliness and solitude rub up against each other, how and when do they overlap? I’ve always had an interest in place and where I fit into various landscapes, though this has grown to include how humanity fits, or doesn’t, into the rapidly changing environment. I also am curious about the tensions between science and religion, and by tension I mean less conflict and more the balancing of opposing forces. Yet I also have my “daughter” poems and my “dog” poems, and all those flowers budding and blooming, all those migrating birds…
What authors inspire you? What books do you keep nearby?
The lists we could make about authors we admire! In thinking back to a time when I was teaching, I would always bring Ada Limón and Tracy K. Smith to a class’s attention, along with Jim Moore, Eavan Boland, and Don Paterson. Wislawa Szymorska and Anna Akhmatova are often on my nightstand, as is Maryanne Moore. This year, I was glad to come across Melissa Kwasny, Marie-Claire Bancquart, and Vievee Francis. Speaking of Akhmatova, my most recent insomnia hack is picking up her biography and reading a few pages to lull me back to a point where sleep seems imminent. Luckily, my insomnia no longer happens with much frequency, but I have found plugging into someone else’s life allows me to keep my own recycled thoughts at bay. At least until the chapters on Akhmatova’s life in Lenigrand under Stalin. A bit too unsettling to induce drowsiness.
What are you working on now?
I do have a full manuscript that I began to pull together in 2023 and tinkered with quite a bit last year, which I’ve been sending around. But despite sometimes being a semi-finalist or finalist, I have yet to be the bride of a poetry publication contest. In some ways I feel between the work of that manuscript and something new, outside individual poems on any given day. Though the project of America is on my mind, and our degrading planet. I would love to find an antidote to hatred, but I’m not certain if all the love poems and poems of hope in the world could make a dent at this moment in time. Perhaps I’ll give it a try anyway.
Lisa Higgs is a recipient of a 2022 Minnesota State Arts Board grant. She has published three chapbooks, most recently Earthen Bound (Red Bird). Her reviews and interviews can be found online at the Poetry Foundation, Kenyon Review, The Adroit Journal, and Colorado Review.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Bill Marsh
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Bill Marsh
In your piece “Water Striders,” you emphasize the steps involved “in learning, once again, how to love.” Where did the idea for this piece come from?
I wrote the first draft in early 2021, deep into COVID, when life was unstable on many levels. At the time my wife and I were doing some serious relationship work, and I wanted to capture a few of the practices we were exploring without getting too clinical or preachy. For all its wordplay and metaphorical layering, “Water Striders” for me is very grounded in that concrete experience of interpersonal exploration and reevaluation. The steps refer to trust-building exercises but also the general process of looking back on lessons learned while laying the groundwork for future commitments. The story I tell (anniversary day trek to the river and back) offered a strong frame—facing unknown dangers, unstable terrain, etc.—but the experience in and of itself was both frightening and reassuring. For this essay I wanted to ride through that ambiguity without necessarily resolving it.
Your focus on the word course features heavily as part of something that leads to “synchronized action.” Can you talk about how you wove this idea into relationships? When did you get the idea to layer the history of emotions into the work?
The original title was something like “On Course” or “The Course,” but that always sounded too heavy. The word itself, though, is crucial for its multiple meanings: course of action, coursing through time, course as shared curriculum. Our relationship goal was (still is) to stay the course, to sync our respective visions for the future and get clear on the past, so that moment of mutual concern (sensing danger “down below,” acting on it) offered a unique opportunity to externalize emotions and basically live the danger we were feeling inside. All that became clear, at least, as I wrote about it later. I was trying to channel the emotional tension while interrogating my own pre-history, i.e., what I learned growing up about feeling/expressing different emotions. That research was integral to the writing process.
The “you” in the piece is not to the reader, but it draws the reader into a more intimate setting. When did the “you” become present in the development of this piece? What was your editing process like?
As I state toward the end, I want the piece to read, in part, as a ‘statement of purpose’ clarifying my motivations and commitments moving forward. It’s obviously written specifically to and for the person I’m moving through time with. In fact, that “intimate” direct address was a turn-off for some editors who found the essay too limited in its focus on the interpersonal. In response I worked through a few longer drafts with more research folded in, but in the end those versions felt forced and artificial—and a little dishonest, a betrayal of my original purpose. So I recommitted (!) to the earlier version assuming it would never appear as a published piece. I feel pretty fortunate that WSR saw value in such a deeply personal essay. The editorial suggestions I received were super helpful in both tightening the language and further grounding the piece in concrete detail.
What themes do you find your writing return to?
“Water Striders” is one of a few essays I’ve written exploring masculinity norms, specifically white masculinity and the prevailing logic (origins, causes, conditions) of heteronormative white male behavior. I’ve expanded that range a bit to include familial legacies of land ownership and more broadly the history of settler colonialism as a personal and political challenge (the setting for this piece and a lot of my work is a family farm in northern Illinois). In general I’m committed to personal writing that moves from self-discovery into analysis of social agency, something more like public self-witnessing in the context of inherited social norms.
What are some of your favorite books or authors? What texts do you return to?
In nonfiction/essays, Rebecca Solnit, Leslie Jamison, Claudia Rankine. In fiction, Toni Morrison, Elena Ferrante, Colson Whitehead. I also like to read history, cultural studies, political theory: Ned Blackhawk, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, David Graeber, bell hooks, Roxane Gay.
What are you working on now?
Lately I’ve been working on poetry (image-text hybrids), but I’m also trying to assemble my essays into a workable collection. The river, literal and figurative, continues to inspire most of my creative work.
Bill Marsh is a teacher and writer living in Chicago. His essays have appeared in Bayou Magazine, Briar Cliff Review, Cimarron Review, Copper Nickel, Ruminate, The Normal School, and Writing on the Edge, among other journals. His work has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations, and two of his essays are cited as Notables in Best American Essays 2021 and 2022.