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.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Jonathan Wittmaier
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Jonathan Wittmaier
“Terrarium” really reflects the chaos of the family cooped up during a summer COVID lockdown. What prompted you to write this story?
Being cooped up myself during that initial COVID lockdown is what prompted me to write this particular story. At the time, I was living in a small one bedroom in Queens. And I remember reading about how certain members of the one percent had fled the city right at the start of lockdown, had stocked up on supplies and were holed up in their mansions somewhere. So then I set out to write a story about those people.
Daniel is a very complicated character. Tell us how you developed this jealous family businessman.
I wanted to tell the story of someone experiencing the pandemic from a place of wealth and privilege. Fiction, for me, has always been about trying to understand other people, especially those with differing views and opinions. When it came to developing Daniel as a character, I really wanted to get inside the head of someone used to getting his way. I also wanted to explore what kinds of stressors exist for someone who, on the outside, might seem to have everything they could want, even during a pandemic.
A large conversation is between Daniel and his unnamed affair partner. Can you talk about the significance of not naming her? And about the fact that her dialogue takes up most of the conversation in this story? Do you think it reflects something about communication?
The decision to keep her unnamed comes from a place rooted in character. Since the story is being told from the first person point of view, I imagined that Daniel wouldn’t want to disclose her identity to whomever he happens to be telling this story to. This of course speaks to how he might feel about her and also to what extent he may or may not feel guilty about the affair.
The reason their dialogue exchange takes up a good portion of the story was, for one, to show how someone even has an affair in a COVID lockdown. And two, I wanted to give the readers a chance to see Daniel truly open up with someone. He’s very much isolated, like many of us were during lockdown, and in his case surrounded by a family he finds mostly exasperating. So for Daniel, the affair is a much needed release from pressures of lockdown.
The tension within the story starts out high and gets higher throughout. Is that how you usually approach a piece? How did you create this high stakes arc? How do you order the pet death, affair, escaped ants, and more, for peak chaos?
Day in the life stories can sometimes be quite boring or meandering. But I really wanted to capture, almost in real time, how the COVID lockdowns affected someone psychologically, especially someone used to getting their way.
When it comes to structure, I typically like to start with a hook and build from there. I don’t necessarily set out to raise the stakes with each consecutive scene but I do try to make sure there is some sort of underlying tension or conflict in every scene. Otherwise, where’s the drama?
For this particular story, I knew I wanted the death of the family rabbit and the escaped ants to bookend the story. Then it was just a matter of filling in what happens in between. The song “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” by The Smashing Pumpkins was also a big influence. There’s that famous line in the chorus, “Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.” That was the feeling I was trying to emulate. Daniel sees himself as someone who is trapped by both lockdown and his responsibilities as a father and husband. And like a rat in a cage, or even ants in an ant farm, he’s desperate to escape.
What are some themes you notice in your writing?
The theme question is always tough for me because I write about such a wide array of topics across the different genres. When it comes to fiction, I typically write about American suburbia mainly because that was the environment I grew up in. But, as a minority who grew up in a predominately white middle-class suburb, I was always a bit of an outsider, which naturally lent me an outsider’s perspective. This is why, with most of my short fiction, I tend to focus on exploring what’s often hidden behind the myth of the white picket fence.
What are some of your favorite books? Do you have a few favorite authors? Which texts have inspired your work?
Emma Cline is my favorite writer of short prose. The way she writes about white suburbia has definitely inspired much of my fiction writing.
I’m also a huge fan of Charif Shanhan and how he writes about male interiority and the complexities of the biracial identity.
I’ve also been reading a lot of Jack Kerouac as of late. Some of the writing he did while living in the PNW has been a big inspiration for a music project I’ve been working on.
What are you working on now?
Right now, I’m currently working on a revision of my first full-length poetry collection. I’ve also been trying my hand at songwriting. I’ve written a few songs with a friend of mine, who is also a guitarist, and we’re hoping to put those out in the world in near future. And as a writer by trade, I’d say we’re a hard rock band with a literary sensibility.
Jonathan Wittmaier is a Korean American writer and educator. Born in Seoul, he was raised in southern New Jersey. His writing can be found in The Museum of Americana, WordCity Literary Journal, and Weave—a PNW Kundiman zine project. He is the winner of the 2018 Creative Writing Award fro Dramatic Writing (Adelphi University). He currently resides in Seattle, Washington.In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Todne Thomas
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Todne Thomas
Your poem, “day of the dead,” tells a story within a multi-generational family structure. Where did the inspiration for this piece come from?
The inspiration for this poem came from my son. His grandfather died the year before he was born. One day in our apartment, he looked at family photos and asked who the man in the photos was. It was his question that made me contemplate the space between family–spatial and existential.
Can you talk about the title and how it weaves into the poem?
The title of the poem “day of the dead” speaks to the mundane ways in which we interact with our departed and bygone days. Mourning and nostalgia are kindred affects.
In the poem, there are strong ties between the women in the family, linked through blood, while the men have a harder time grasping a similar connection. There’s not a soft landing spot for them, but there’s an empathy that they don’t share that connection. How do you think that lack of generational ties plays out within the poem and within society?
That is an interesting reading of the poem that never occurred to me. The gendered aspect of familial connection is not intentional. It is incidental. The father of the narrator and grandfather of the narrator’s son is deceased. But death does not necessarily cancel familial connection. The inquiring boy is young and is questioning what counts as family. He and his questions are held by the narrator, his mother. His queries evoke an explanation, a conversation, a connection, and perhaps even a visitation of his departed grandfather. The call of blood between the living and the dead, across households separated by distance is felt and extended to all.
Generational ties are a complex thing, right? In our society, distance, conflict, death, social mobility, changed understanding of families, and other factors can shorten or mute generational connections. But then again, we also have a society in which people are using ancestry and other applications to find their family and forge broader family connections. In the poem, distance and death create some barriers to intergenerational connection as a matter of face-to-face communion. Yet, for my own part, I do not perceive a lack of generational ties in this text. Once again, just a figuring and working them out through questioning and feeling.
The phrase “Passed on” in the middle gives the connotation of gifting, of inheritance, and even of death and the lack of presence. Can you talk about the layered meaning, and how it influences the tone of the poem?
“Passed on” is a vernacular phrase in the South for the departed, of the dead who have moved to another realm. I like this term. It has momentum. “Passed on” replicates the movement that exists elsewhere in the poem like the descent of blood, or a person’s descent down a mountain trail. “Passed on” is also different than passed away, which connotes a movement away. A person that has passed on perhaps might return for a visit. I think this suggests the potential for presence instead of a perpetual lack of presence.
I am really intrigued by this other reading of the phrase, of “passed on” as gifting or inheritance. What do our ancestors, known and unknown, bequeath to us in the wake of their passing? What gifts, memories, presences or curiosities, in the wake of their arms around us? Passed on as inheritance opens up a beautiful questioning that I like very much.
As a professor of religious studies, how does your work come into play in your writing?
That is a great question. I think an abiding concern with the spiritual/ancestral and kinship informs a lot of the thinking, noticing, and writing I do. This is present in “day of the dead.” But in many ways, the economy of poetry, its imagery and visionary qualities, and its theoretical insights is very important to my work in religious studies. My first book’s title Kincraft is informed by an observation of poet Elizabeth Alexander on the work of the poetic work she analyzes and her professed “veneration of the sweat of the craft.” And Nikki Giovanni’s insight that “Black love is Black wealth” is very central to my thinking in my second book. So poets are some of my favorite theorists.
What themes do you find your creative work revolves around? What authors or works have been influential for you?
As I mentioned above, some of the themes I tend to write about are religion, spirituality, and kinship. I’m increasingly more interested in more amorous and oracular themes these days, as well as humor. So we’ll see where that goes. Authors that really inspire me (in no particular order) are Nikki Giovanni, Elizabeth Alexander, Lucille Clifton, Zora Neale Hurston, Sonia Sanchez, Kwame Dawes, Marla Frederick, Jericho Brown, Hortense Spillers, Maya Angelou, Ashon Crawley, Langston Hughes, Todd Ochoa, Octavia Butler, Deborah Thomas, Elizabeth Povinelli, Dianne Stewart, Jacob Olupona, Casey Golomski, Aimee Villareal, and so many others.
What are you currently working on?
I’m currently finishing a book about a Black church arson in my hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee.
Todne Thomas is an Affrilachian, mother, and anthropologist. She is an associate professor of divinity and religious studies at Yale University. This is her first poetry publication.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Sheila McMullin
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Sheila McMullin
Your poem “Thank You” blends the telling of past histories and the present conflict in a relationship, as well as imaginative statements. What was your inspiration for this poem? What was your process for blending history and imagination?
“Thank You” comes from my epic inner battle about how we write about personal histories as though everyone, unilaterally, has clean, verified access to them. I’m constantly stumped by how to speak honestly about something I feel I should know more or better about—my own family history, the inner workings of my brain. The medicine of writing this poem, for me, was to try to get to a point where that not-knowing isn’t perceived as a personal failure, when the not-knowing is often the result of systemic, often colonial, forces. With “Thank You,” the aim was to acknowledge that the stories I do have about family, my place in it, and how these experiences have shaped my decisions are stories made up of feelings as much as facts, shaped by the complexity of inheritance and the silence that sometimes protects, sometimes estranges.
In this poem, imagination is a method of self-permission. The spectrum runs from: what if I had access to everything I needed to know—a fantasy in itself—to what if I accepted that not knowing is its own kind of truth? Especially as someone who identifies as mixed-race, I’ve learned from community that liminality isn’t an obstacle—it’s a soft architecture. Ambiguity isn’t a problem to solve.
The poem establishes that there’s danger in not inheriting legibility and danger in seeking it. So, I want to ask, who is clarity for? Who is legibility for? And how do we gently hold the evolution of self-understanding to be better/responsible/more understanding toward those who come next in our lineage?
One section of the poem speaks to my search for legibility. Earlier in my mother’s academic career, she wrote an article on being an “ambiguously brown” academic called “Beyond Lip Service” in the anthology Mentoring Faculty of Color. I’m struck by her language of “ancestral clarity” and the perceived requisite to achieve it within white society. Achievement is a type of currency as is becoming legible. This in and of itself is a blending of history and imagination. Perhaps “Thank You” was seeded in this article, and now, this is another way we keep evolving our ancestral clarity.
After each section, you have a statement that a percentage of the previous section was true; “50% of this is true,” for example. The percentages vary. Tell us about how this part of the poem developed.
The percentages emerged as a way to interrupt my (and therefore the reader’s) certainty. Thinking back on it, in an uncanny turn of events, the speaker became the most certain of the bunch. Why do we believe the speaker? Do I believe the speaker? Does belief depend on what type of truth I understand her to be qualifying; emotional, factual, artistic? Which parts are the true parts? If it’s not true, then is it automatically false? “Truth” seems to be something constantly renegotiated. “True” maybe is striving to be the revolving light in the lighthouse. The percentages can become a signal that what’s being shared lives somewhere between memory, fantasy, fear, and desire. Even when we feel we’re being deeply honest, in the form of storytelling—especially in confessional storytelling—we are still shaped by omission, pressure, self-protection.
I wonder when narrative instability makes the reader too uncomfortable to continue believing and when narrative clarity functions for the reader (and for myself) like the emotional caregiving as referenced in the poem. By naming the truth as understood, does the poem acknowledge the instability of that truth? Where can the beauty of language help to stabilize the reader to give the writer greater permission to play with ambiguity or difficult subjects? I’ve been learning about this from Ta-Nehisi Coates.
And then, even after all this theorizing and exploring, what if I’ve still gotten it wrong? What was there to get wrong in the first place? Does getting it wrong negate the feeling that shaped it, or the experience of living it or not living it? The constant questioning and doubting gets annoying.
In all this unknowing and destabilization, the medicine in the wound is that we always get to redefine and evolve. We can live the lifecycle of a plant again and again, each time stepping into what is being asked of us. Today, I am the leaf, yesterday I was the bloom, tomorrow I am the roots, and again I am the compost.
The end of the poem is a plea for a relationship. Can you talk about that within the framing of the poem?
Thank you for helping me gain greater insight into my poem! This question transports me to the moment I was generating the poem, and yes, I was making a plea for a relationship, wasn’t I? Although at the time, I think, I was trying to verbalize all the things that I felt were my fault but I wasn’t responsible for. Isn’t that why we’re all born screaming? Calling out for another to witness our hurt and help to soothe it?
Another way I understand the poem’s ending is as a conceit for wanting an accounting that we are unlikely to get at this moment. It’s a call to acknowledge what we need to be responsible for, who we need to be responsible for, and understand that no one thing or solution is coming to save us. We’re going to be the ones who protect us and make meaning of our lives.
In the same way the statements play with the meaning of “true,” the ending plays with concepts of choice. I want to still choose you. I want you to still choose me. Not because someone did the math—but because we decided it matters.
What prompted the title, “Thank You?”
Short answer: Adventure Time season three, episode seventeen—it’s one of my favorites and it’s titled Thank You. I saw it and thought, “Hey, that’s a cool title.”
Highlights from the deeper answer: It’s also a framework I’ve been working with—thank you as offering, as resistance, as daily practice, and as a kind of semi-autobiography. It shares a title with other poems in the manuscript including one about environment harm and injustice that was published by Air/Light Magazine. The manuscript’s working title is also Thank You.
What themes do you return to in your writing?
Recently, infertility and how to write about medical experiences, and environmental and intergenerational care.
What texts inspire you? Who are some of your favorite authors?
Do gardens count as text? They really inspire me these days. And compost too. I love the metaphor of compost–the catapulting into decay and fertile renewal. My dear friend, community poet, and children’s book author Michelle Andrea Bracken inspires me and reminds me of the importance of why we write for intergenerational knowledge. I’m celebrating the life and work of Andrea Gibson. The lectures of Michael Meade who “looks at culture through a mythic perspective” have been a north star. I regularly return to Ram Dass’s Be Here Now, Diane Wilson’s The Seed Keeper, John Francis’s The Ragged Edge of Silence, and Rumi’s and William Blake’s works. Sarah Vap’s End of the Sentimental Journey is a stalwart. She is forever among my favorite authors–I understand my writing as a descendent in her lineage. JoAnn Balingit’s work has helped me access writing on my Filipino heritage. Joan Kane’s, who was the contributing poetry editor for volume 27, lyricism teaches me how the heart and mind always have greater capacity for expansion than we may have previously thought possible.
And new to me is the mind-bending and heart-stretching work of Stargazer Li, who pulls lessons from the stars and “rehydrates language.” Stargazer Li goes deep into etymology and lore and reminds us that the path to our thinking is often embedded into these early meanings. If we can spend the time building relationships with language on this level, we know ourselves more deeply and how culture has twisted itself into its current context. I remember to fall in love with language through Stargazer Li’s lectures and rehydrations.
And those also with important places in my heart are Mary Oliver, Chiwan Choi, Ross Gay, CA Conrad, Lauren Groff, Ursula K. LeGuin, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Mita Mahato, and on and on and on.
What are you currently working on?
I’m currently sending out my poetry manuscript Thank You (wish me luck!) and am venturing into fiction. I’ve been playing in the romance genre through a story about a couple trying to conceive, reimagining what a happily ever after can look like—one that I think the Trying To Conceive (TTC) community may appreciate.
Thank you so much for spending time with my work and words!
Sheila McMullin is a poet, writing coach, and community gardener. She is the author of daughterrarium from Cleveland State University Poetry Center and proud co-editor of Humans of Ballou and The Day Tajon Got Shot, both written by teen authors and published by Shout Mouse Press. She teaches nature writing classes with Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation and sits on the board of the Contemporary Irish Arts Center of Los Angeles. She holds her MFA from George Mason University. For more, visit www.sheilamcmullin.com.