In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—luna rey hall
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—luna rey hall
Your poem, “wearing a dress for the first time,” is rich with tension. The first phrase, “do you want me to be honest?” carries so much emotional weight. What prompted you to start with this question?
i think that honesty is an inherent part of the trans and/or gender nonconforming experience—not only asking honesty of people in my life but of myself as well. that line acts as an opening into me being honest with my experience. the uncomfortable nature of the experience and not being afraid to talk about that with people that love me. obviously, it also works for the narrative and introduces the mother figure as this voice of uncertainty and confusion, that eventually becomes the throughline for the entire poem. the most interesting aspect of the trans experience to me has been how it affects and shapes the people around you and ultimately, this poem is one moment in that story.
As I read this piece, I equated the spacing you use in this piece to difficult pauses. While it’s a friction-filled scene, the language flows beautifully across the page. What was your creation process like for this poem? Did the spacing come later or when you were writing? What was the revision process like for this piece?
space and spacing are always in the front of my mind when i write pieces. i learned early on in my writing career to allow the white space to be as important as the words and because of that a lot of my writing is shaped by those pauses, the little moments of brevity in often hard truths or dense imagery.
i look back on the creation process, and really the revision process too, for this poem in particular as something i could replicate in more poems as it didn’t change much from the original free write to the finished version that appeared in print. the content and structure remained the same, the key differences were line breaks, small details, etc.
I heard you read this piece at the Water~Stone reading in November, where you said this poem was based on an actual day. How did you decide to put this moment into poetry instead of nonfiction prose?
at this point, my brain simply functions best in poetic lines. prose, in all its infinite forms, is scary—i say as i’m working on a novel.
What themes do you find that you keep returning to in your writing? What are new themes you want to explore?
right now, it’s extinction(s) that i keep returning to and continue to explore in possible future books. i’m very much an obsessive person by nature, for better or for worse, and i do tend to get stuck on a subject for years. for a lot of my writing it’s finding the intersections of my obsessions, whether that be gun violence in America, masculinity, queerness, mental health, the body, transness, grief, family, isolation, AI, or any number of true horrors that permeate the human experience.
What are you writing now?
i’m always juggling several different projects at the same time—right now, i’m finishing up my next novella (the bizarre disappearance of bella riley) that comes out next year, working with a publisher on a chapbook about
transness and loss, starting the early stages of revision for a novel, and then putting together the next full-length collection.
luna rey hall is a queer trans nonbinary writer. they are the author of four books, including the patient routine (Brigids Gate Press, 2023). their poems have appeared in The Florida Review, The Rumpus, and Raleigh Review, among others. they live in St. Paul, Minnesota.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Michael Levy
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Michael Levy
Your nonfiction piece, “Abscission,” details your grandmother’s life and your relationship with her as she aged. It asks the question what memories we will recall later in life. What prompted you to write this piece?
I’ve always been a bit preoccupied with memory and the passage of time—the nature of how fleeting a life and the moments that make it up really are. I’m also a pretty sentimental person; I think in my piece I say something to the effect of being “prone to wistfulness.”
When the scenes that bookend the piece happened—of my grandmother meeting my nephew Nathan, who was her first great grandchild; and sitting outside with my grandfather in Straus Park—they just felt so rich, and such a great way into a possible story that would deal with those themes. I remember frantically pecking away in the Notes app on my iPhone to get details and ideas down.
I didn’t know where it would go from there, but I did know that I wanted to write something and wrestle with those ideas.
“Abscission” is told in pieces; we get glimpses of your grandmother during various parts of her life as it intersects with yours and your family. Memory can be a fickle thing, not only in old age, but even as we look back on fond or difficult memories of our own. How did you approach this idea of memory as fluid in “Abscission?”
That’s a great question. Part of what makes memory so interesting is that, though it is in theory a collection of fixed moments (or events or people or emotions, or what have you) from the past, they change over time; that is, as we have new experiences, gain new wisdom, it all shapes how we relate to our memories. How we perceived a memory ten years ago might be totally at odds with how we think of it today. So, in that sense, memory is always in flux.
Add to that the fallibility of memory and the things that happen to us in old age and, well, it’s an endlessly interesting and complex topic.
Part of how I approached that fluidity was with structure—I didn’t want things to be purely chronological—but also to just try to juxtapose memories of young Michael with adult Michael. And then of course, simply juxtaposing an old woman whose memory is disappearing with a baby whose memories are just forming—it felt like that spoke volumes on its own about the nature of memory.
What sort of family research did you do to write this piece, or did you draw from events and history you already knew?
A lot of the “research” was just being a grandson and son—spending time with my grandfather, chatting with my mother on walks. Very little of what is in the story did I seek out with a mindset of, I need to get this information so I can write this piece.
Much of it I already knew. Then there were other bits that I thought I knew, but as I sat down to write, realized that I didn’t. So for example: My great grandparents and their children emigrated from Hungary to the U.S. in the 1930s. They were Jewish, as am I. I kind of always assumed their emigration was related to pogroms, rising anti-semitism, Hitler. But when I was discussing it with my mother, I learned they actually left because my great-grandfather Benjamin had accrued a serious amount of debt in Hungary, so essentially fled to America! My great-grandmother Rose, my great aunts and uncles, and my grandmother (then a toddler), joined him soon after. Learning that felt like a strange little variation on the classic Jewish refugee tale of woe—a bit endearing even?
How long did it take you to craft “Abscission?” Did you find yourself leaving out pieces that you originally put in? If so, is this a theme one you’ll return to?
Years? That’s not entirely true, but neither is it entirely not true. In one of the previous questions you refer to the “glimpses” we get of my grandmother. I had always wanted to write something about my grandparents. Originally, I thought I would probably focus more on my grandfather, to be perfectly honest. I wrote a number of longer scenes and descriptions about my grandfather—about his obsessive book collecting, in particular—that just didn’t find a home in “Abscission.” Perhaps one day I’ll still write a companion piece, focusing more on him, as I’m quite fond of some of the stuff that I cut out.
As an editor of several magazines (Summit Journal, American Alpine Journal, and Appalachia), how does your professional experience influence your personal writing?
Most of my other professional experience is in the quite niche world of rock-climbing and mountaineering journalism. It’s my greatest passion—practicing it and writing about it—but it can also feel limiting. Writing a personal essay like Abscission is an escape from that stuff, a chance to flex my creative writing muscles in a different way. That being said, writing about climbing and mountaineering is ultimately just a vehicle to tell affecting human stories—and so reading and writing non-climbing literature feels critical in terms of learning and finding new ways to approach those stories.
What books and authors are your favorites, or are ones that you keep returning to?
Tough question! I’ll give you one fiction and one non-fiction writer.
I’m a huge fan of Wallace Stegner, whom I don’t think always gets his due. I think his final book, Crossing to Safety, is a real masterpiece.
I’m also a big admirer of Chris Offutt, particularly his memoiristic works. His first memoir, The Same River Twice, I came across by chance in a used bookstore years ago, and was floored by how good it was. I’ve gifted it to a number of people over the years and gone on to read everything he has written.
What new projects are you working on now?
Editing and publishing Summit Journal is so time-consuming that I find it difficult to write much beyond my editor’s notes these days. But perhaps I’ll start tinkering with that possible essay about my grandfather soon…
Michael Levy is the editor of Summit, the oldest monthly rock-climbing magazine in America. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Outside, Men’s Journal, and Sierra, among other publications. He lives in New York City. Read his website for more information.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Jennifer Martelli
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Jennifer Martelli
Picture by Clement Falize from Unsplash
“The Hunter,” is a beautiful poem that uses many sensory images; you bring us to this ideal summer’s eve in the work. When did you first start writing this piece, and where did the spark to write it come from?
Thank you so much–both for your generous words and for publishing the poem in Water~Stone Review! I began writing this poem as part of a wonderful ekphrastic group I belong to. I came across the image, “Orion (Space Paintings Series),” by Alma Woodsey Thomas (USA, 1973). I loved the depth and movement, the color; the image looked like a curtain, a drapery. It has a very Twin Peaks energy to it! Orion is the hunter, which is where I got my title. My friends will tell you that I have many (too many?) poems that use these big sliding doors in my bedroom that look out to trees growing and being felled—the doors almost work as a vehicle into a meditation. So, to answer your question, the poem began in my ekphrastic group, but probably is part of a series of “looking out.”
I like how the titled hunter has multiple meanings, referencing both the bat and the speaker of the poem. How did the title come about in relation to the piece? In general, what is your creation process like?
Yes, I love all the meanings of “hunter.” Again, there is the reference to Orion—both the myth and the constellation. I love astronomy and astrology for all the great language and the sense of circularity, of being on a wheel. Orion is a Northern Hemisphere constellation (as opposed to The Cross, as the end). I have to think with all my looking out this window, that I must be hunting for something! The bat is so thrilling to me—this strange flying mammal! I used the image of the bat throughout my book, My Tarantella, which was about a murder. The bat, in that book, was a witness, but also a defense; the victim’s gloves were all cut up. D.H. Lawrence compared bats to gloves in this poem, “Bat,” and this stuck with me. I have heard, on warm nights, something heavier than a bird. But, to answer your question about my creation process: I have obsessions that I return to. This can be dangerous, though, and I have to make sure I’m not being lazy; that I just don’t want to think of newer concepts or images. I’m inspired by different things: collections of poems for their music; imagery through art or film. I belong to a couple of writing groups where we commit to daily writing for a month; sometimes, something sparks! I usually write in the morning. And I hate starting a new poem! I do love revision!
Your lines are filled with both story and visuals. When you’re writing, how do you find balance between keeping the poem moving and letting readers linger in the beautiful details?
This is a great question—and my answer is elusive and illusive! I can become lost in the beautiful weeds of music and imagery. Many times, I’ve sacrificed a narrative thread for loosely tethered images, that in my mind, go together. My mind alone. This is why my writing groups are so important. These are poets with whom I’ve worked for years; we don’t try to rewrite each other’s poems. We are very honest, while keeping the sensibility of the poet in tact. More than once, I’ve been told to clarify, or to make the connection just a bit clearer. I’m not sure if this answers your question, but any balance I strike between the movement of the the poem and letting the reader linger is truly collaborative.
What themes do you return to in your work? What themes are you still developing?
“The Hunter” is a poem in my forthcoming collection, Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree (Lily Poetry Review Books, Fall, 2024). The book concerns itself with long-term abstinence and recovery. This poem is in the middle section, which confronts the speaker’s atheism (thus, the constellation of The Cross, which would be in the Southern Hemisphere, is not seen by the speaker). But the book is also filled with snakes and knives and bowls and tarot—images that circle throughout the collection. I think, though, in terms of overall themes, I tend to lean to the political (lately, the attack on reproductive rights), and have been using these same images in these poems, too. I’m very interested in the sense of belonging—or, the opposite of that. Going back to your question of balance: in my life (poetry and otherwise) there is the need for being alone and the fear of being alone! This is a theme that is always in development.
What books are your favorites? What authors inspire you to write?
So many. I’ll start with the books/poets I return to over and over (especially when I can’t hear music): Lucille Clifton (Blessing the Boats); Elizabeth Bishop (Geography III); Laura Jensen—anything; Lucie Brock-Broido; Marie Howe.
Lately, I’ve been really into Yona Harvey’s You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love—very exciting structure! Also, Erika Meitner’s Useful Junk and Rachel Mennies’ The Naomi Letters; Monica Youn’s From From. And of course, anything by Diane Seuss.
I’m so into horror poetry too! Dorothea Lasky’s The Shining and Mothman Apologia by Robert Wood Lynn—amazing!
What projects are you working on now?
Speaking of horror poetry—I’ve been working on this series of poems that respond to Luca Guadagnino’s revision of Suspiria. I have about 20 poems—I’m interested to see where they go! This is a very horrific time; I feel like this genre meets the moment!
Jennifer Martelli is the author of The Queen of Queens and My Tarantella, named a “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book and awarded Finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. Martelli’s chapbooks include All Things Are Born to Change Their Shapes, After Bird, and In the Year of Ferraro. Her work has appeared in POETRY, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, The Tahoma Literary Review, THRUSH, Cream City Review, Jet Fuel Review, River Mouth Review, and elsewhere. Martelli has twice received grants for poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is co-poetry editor for Mom Egg Review.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—David Melville
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—David Melville
Your poem “Shelter” in Volume 25 focuses on the experience of two young boys who find a doe trapped in a coyote snare. What was the inspiration behind this poem? How did it come to be?
This poem describes a true event. I grew up in small town Nebraska, and was invited, on the spur of the moment, by another boy (whose identity is altered in the text) to drive out to check his coyote traps. Things happened much like in the poem with a few adjustments for clarity and pacing. As a country kid, he knew more of what would happen to her than I did. The choice was difficult, but it seemed the only humane one. The hardest part for me was when he let go, and I was holding her as he took up the rifle.
I imagine the experience of finding a vulnerable creature caught in danger to be very profound, perhaps traumatic, for a young person. These boys have to make a very quick and mature decision that impacts the livelihood of someone else. The way the speaker locks eyes with the doe continues to reverberate throughout the poem. How do you work to amplify the tension and emotion in your poems? With this poem in particular, what helped you to mine memory and place yourself back into the younger self?
This poem originated more than a decade ago when I was working with David Biespiel who was a superb mentor to me and many other poets. He devised tasks to challenge me, and one was building tension through a delayed ending. That early draft was the first thing of mine I’d shown him that caught his eye, but I didn’t have enough skill yet to finish it. So I put it away and let it sit in a pile with other rough drafts. A couple years ago, I remembered it was there, composting so to speak. When I took it up again, it came together fairly quickly.
The poem works by establishing the boy’s contact with the doe’s eyes. That contact was part of the experience itself. Brown and sensitive, they gave me this overriding sense of connection. Describing her eyes in the opening words was an intuitive choice, there from the beginning; it just felt right; but I can see now how it works on a technical level. The boys also have a physical connection with her through the silver wire. Our dilemma was the more poignant for it: this beautiful creature was caught, so close to us; not a carnivore like a coyote, but a gentle animal who was now literally connected to us. Once the stake popped loose, we understood there wasn’t much else we could do for her but this one thing. As we become adults, we learn, sooner or later, that hard choices can’t be avoided, not really; and we are called upon to do things we really don’t wish, and which affect other beings, choices which don’t seem ours by right to make, but we have to make them nonetheless.
At that age, the experience was profound. Growing up in a rural area, I was closer to the natural world back then, and this friend who was from the country more so. As the years go by and I’ve lived in a city, I’ve become increasingly aware of the distancing effect of modern urban life. Not being able to see the stars at night is part of it, but only part. For some years, I would do things like climb mountains or kayak or dive which resulted in a few hair-raising moments; yet it was I who had sought out the wilderness. For those who earn a living from the soil, it’s different. They have a relationship with animals and the elements I just don’t have. Our modern life removes us – and I am definitely included in this – from the sorts of choices they encounter more often, the kinds of decisions that our ancestors had to make.
One of the reasons these traps are used is to kill coyotes so the deer population will increase. These traps kind of “shelter” deer so there are more to hunt, and so it’s a kind of irony that in your poem “Shelter” the deer is the unintended victim of happenstance. Can you share with us about your intention in how you titled this poem? What did the word ‘shelter’ mean to you as a young boy out hunting with his cousin? What does that word mean to you now as the older poet?
That’s interesting. I hadn’t thought of providing shelter for the deer through population control of their predators. I like that. It does fit nicely with the title’s intended resonance: the ways we try to create shelter, and the ways that our sense of shelter can suddenly vanish. We have all these internal buffers that keep us from facing reality, and in certain flashes, something can open us. When we drove out there, I had never seen a coyote trap before, and neither of us had an inkling what was about to happen. That often seems to be the case; we don’t know when we are about to be changed. Shelter is something we look for, and try to build, and sometimes we let ourselves sense how tenuous it can be.
Now that I’m years older and a city-dweller, I am sheltered from certain types of experiences like the one that happened with the doe. Living in the city, on the other hand, has offered other types of experiences I wouldn’t have had in a small town. It seems we grow, at least partly, through this kind of process, our sheltering and un-sheltering.
We had the honor of publishing your poem “45” back in Volume 23, and one thing that I noticed that both your poems consider is an idea of shared empathy. They both make reference to something I think feels philosophical, as if the speaker is breaking the 4th wall to say ‘you’re not alone in this scenario or in this world.’ What are your thoughts on this? Do you see these two poems in connection? Do you think “45” and “Shelter” speak to other subjects you write about?
I can see what you mean by the shared empathy in this poem and in “45,” now that you’ve mentioned it. Both poems do point towards connection within our isolation. Rather than a conscious intent, it comes more from my understanding of the world. We are all deeply interconnected, with each other and with everything around us – deer, the stars, the hills, the concrete, everything – in ways we don’t often see. It is more than a metaphor; it is how things actually are. Much of our pain comes from our loss of that sense of connectedness, which is the fundamental truth behind reality. Our human journey is that we lose that sense and have to grope our way back to it. Writing, at its most essential, for me anyway, points us back toward home. I believe the main reason we write, and read, is to know we are not alone.
I know you used to work as a lawyer; you’re actually not the first lawyer-turned-poet we’ve published, which I find so interesting! These two forms of writing seem like such polar opposites to me, but maybe I’m wrong! What drew you to poetry, both as a reader and a writer, while you were practicing law? Is there anything about your former career that seeps into your life now as a writer?
Law and poetry do seem polar opposites in many ways. The hidden link is an affinity for words. Lawyers spend their days wrangling over words and their meanings. A love of language – and the subtle shades words can have – is what drew me to poetry. It took a while to unlearn the kind of writing that works in the law. The legal practice, however, did underscore the importance of finding the right words, and taught me a certain amount of patience in going about that process.
It’s a well-kept secret that some great poets in history had legal backgrounds. Wallace Stevens practiced law for a while in New York. Chaucer studied at London’s Inns of Court. And the one I’d never have guessed is Petrarch. Yes, it’s true: the most love-struck troubadour of them all had gone to law school! Who says that deep down, when no one’s looking, lawyers aren’t tender at heart?
Who are some writers that you gravitate towards or return to, and for what reasons?
A.E. Stallings has long been a favorite; she’s so deft with poetic forms and I have a fondness for the classics, so her way of playing with ancient tropes appeals to me. Lately, for instance, I’ve been going back to the Romans like Ovid and Plutarch, and even managed to pick my way through the King James Bible. I also really admire George Kalogeris’ Dialogos, which pairs his excellent translations of everyone from Sappho to Cavafy so that poets of disparate times and temperaments speak to each other. Among contemporary fiction writers, John Crowley, who wrote Little, Big, both inspires and daunts me.
What projects are you working on now? I think I read in a bio of yours somewhere that you were working on a novel at some point; are you still pursuing that?
Yes, my main project right now is a fantasy novel, which I’m in the midst of writing. It started by accident. For a role-playing game, a friend asked me to write a few pages, and the beginning of this story came out. The two people who read it wanted more. Their enthusiasm clued me in that lurking in those pages was a tale worth telling. So I decided to follow the fire and am devoted to finishing it.
I’m still active in poetry too. I’ve been putting together a collection – organizing it, tinkering with the running order, and rounding it out with a few more poems.
David Melville’s recent poems have appeared in journals such as The Atlanta Review, RHINO, and Tipton Poetry Journal. This is his second appearance in Water~Stone Review. His poetry has also been anthologized in the college textbook Listening to Poetry: An Introduction for Readers and Writers (2019). For many years, he earned his living as a lawyer. You can learn more about his work at his website.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Teri Ellen Cross Davis
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Teri Ellen Cross Davis
You have two poems in V26 of Water~Stone, “River Phoenix at 46” and “The Brain Confesses About Those Six Weeks.” With “River Phoenix,” I feel like I get something new from the text every time I read it. What inspired this poem’s creation?
As a teen, I had a serious crush on the actor River Phoenix. I had a poster from one of his films, “A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon” on my wall. River seemed intellectually deep and rebellious and open enough to maybe understand me as a skinny black girl from Cleveland, or at least that is what I dreamily told myself. When he died, so early in his career, it felt like fabric being ripped from the quilt of my dreams. I wanted more for him. I wanted him to have had an award-studded career, to have eventually stepped back from acting, to at some point have a complete life away from Hollywood’s lens. In this imagined world, he could have had a family of his own. Poetry gave me the space to imagine that longer life, to toy with ideas of Halloween and the veils between worlds, to summon an alternate path for the actor.
This poem draws up many vivid images and phrases. When writing this piece, what drew you to these images? What was your process building this piece and this world with River Phoenix in it?
I tried to envision an alternate reality that could hold both Phoenix and some of the ways mainstream culture has grown to be more culturally diverse and inclusive since his death in 1993. I knew the legend of the Sunset Strip club “Whiskey a Go Go” from a crush on Jim Morrison and the Doors so it was a fun way to imagine the inside of places I had read about, but never experienced. As a poet, I could play director. I could create a 90’s style montage of Phoenix’s imagined life with language.
In “The Brain Confesses,” the narrative explores the trauma and post-processing of rape, and how people often shut those memories away. The use of em dashes gives readers that painful, jolting feeling. Can you talk about your process in crafting this poem with short lines and specific punctuation?
I wanted to use the em dashes like gloves, or tongs handling something so toxic it could not be near the rest of the body. The brain is “reading” the body—being honest and unforgiving, but couching both in love. I wanted the shape of the poem to contain and direct that energy downward until it eventually escapes out of its own hypothetical hatch.
In both pieces, I felt there were moments of double meaning; “a life well-heeled,” for example. When writing, how much of your original drafts do you keep, versus rewrite to add these gems into the work?
Thank you! I have language I fall in love with in a poem and sometimes, when things go right, I can keep it. Trust me, there has been a lot of theoretical blood on the cutting room floor. From original to final version, there is a lot of whittling, of reworking lines and form—things move forward based on what the poem needs and sometimes, it may not need my favorite line.
What themes do you find that inspire you, and that you return to in your work?
Parenting seems to be a ripe vein at the moment. I feel this double vision of me at this age and now my child at this age. Each progression feels like a peek into my teen psyche and it is well, weird, frustrating, acute, blunt, nuanced, and comical. From tending my own vegetable and flower garden to understanding the long-term impacts of climate change, gardening and my relationship with nature is another area of my life that is fueling me.
As a poetry curator, what do you look for in your job? How does your interaction with other poets influence your writing? What texts or authors helped shape the writer you are today? I look for poetry that moves me and brings a fresh voice to the page or stage. To ignite my own creative appetite, I read Lucille Clifton, Linda Pastan, Rita Dove, Hayes Davis (my husband) and more. Right now, I admire the ancestry research and communing in Tracy K. Smith and Remica Bingham-Wisher’s work, the wit and brevity in Beth Ann Fennelly’s micro essays, and the expansiveness in Camille T. Dungy’s SOIL.
What are you working on now?
I am working on a third collection and the moment I feel I have a handle on a new direction for it, I feel a pull to write poems about something else. It’s wild, but I am trying to hold on and get something on the page as I do. I hear my ancestors rumbling with answers and I am trying to figure out the right questions.
Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the author of a more perfect Union, awarded the 2019 Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize, and Haint, which won the 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. She is the recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Robert H. Winner Memorial Award and a Maryland State Arts Council award. Her work has appeared in print, online, and in many journals and anthologies including Harvard Review, [PANK], Poetry Ireland Review, and Kenyon Review. She is the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series curator and Poetry Programs manager for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC.