Your poem “We Came to Dinner” in Volume 23 fuses modern and contemporary poetic styles. Can you talk through the inspiration behind this poem?

This poem started, as many of mine do, very literally, in this case describing a visit to my parents’ house. My struggle was cracking that narrative, and allowing the poem to expand and achieve some kind of liftoff beyond the literal events. Finally, after staying with it for a long time, the “I” began to slip into “we” and “my father” into “the fathers.” So the poem became something more public and shared, I hope. It’s no longer about that dinner or my father, but perhaps something broader.

One of the things our readers and editors raved about your poem is how people are yearning for guidance or wisdom, that fathers and forefathers are repetitiously woven into the narrative as some type of callback. If you could have dinner with any three guests alive or dead, who would you choose and why?

I’d love to have a veggie cheesesteak with William Blake. I read that when he first met his wife Catherine, he was apparently so mesmerizing that she fainted! I’d also like to have dinner with my parents, who live in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and who I haven’t seen in two years because of COVID-19 restrictions. Actually, those three together—Blake and my parents—would be very entertaining. I’d be curious to see if Blake would politely nibble my mother’s chick pea salad, or if he’d demand blood pudding, or maybe peel off his clothes, or break out into song with my dad!

We’re still a bit flummoxed—and let’s be honest, a bit bitter—that the New York Times once claimed grape salad a quintessential Minnesota dish, forever known in our hearts as  #grapegate. You live in Philadelphia; what’s a real Philly-identified dish you love and wish more people knew about?

The Philly cheesesteak seems to be the transcendent dish hereabouts. Since my wife and I are vegetarians, we order a delicious veggie “cheesesteak” at Hip City Veg, a plant-based fast food restaurant. I’m sure it’s not authentic, but it’s delicious!

Your fourth book, The Mean Game, was named a finalist for the 2020 Phillip H. McMath Book Award with fellow honorees Franny Choi and John Sibley Williams. What is one thing you would like to tell readers about this latest collection?  

I seem to write poems, without meaning to, in three different modes: confessional, long form, and parables. The Mean Game is a collection of all the most disturbing parables I’ve been writing over the past ten years. Although there’s not a reliable “I” voice in the book, I think that my energy—my voice, my thoughts, my self—is in every poem.

Writers tend to write what haunts or obsesses them. What are some themes/topics that are important to your writing, or tend to show up a lot in your work?

The idea of the twin haunts me. I’ve tried to write about it, but haven’t come close to doing it well yet. I can’t just say, “I ran into John Wall Barger on the street today.” That won’t evoke, for you, the eeriness of the Grady sisters in the hallway of the Overlook Hotel in Kubrick’s The Shining; or Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Veronique, where Irène Jacob suddenly sees her double boarding a tourist bus; or the protagonist in Saramago’s novel, The Double, who sees, in a VHS movie, his perfect twin acting a small role.

Does this fascination have something to do with how each of us, trapped within our respective solipsisms, continually tries to comprehend the enigma of other people? Since all we really know is ourselves, each person we meet seems, to us, like an extension of ourselves. Certainly, as writers, each person we write about is a part of ourselves. We feel that clearly, for example, in Hitchcock: each character in each film acts out a small aspect of a broader thought process, which is the fantasy life of the director.

The irrational, superstitious, hyperbolic part of ourselves is, I think, seeking some kind of magical, perfect self-manifestation. Our rational self knows that we’ll never find this “perfect” twin. If we ever did, we’d know—rationally, at least—that it indicates some kind of imbalance in the world, as if we were lucid dreaming. The world would then need to be corrected, which is where the violence and death comes in.

What books, writers, art, or artists inspire you and your work? Do–or have–you had any mentors in your writing life?

I watch a lot of movies: amazing and terrible movies. I’ve been obsessed with the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky for years. I’d give my right arm to write a poem, or a book of poems, that approaches what his film Stalker achieves. I recently wrote an essay arguing that the process of entering the alien Zone in Stalker is akin to writing a poem.

I’ve had mentors in the past, which have mostly been a good fit. I love them all, in different ways. But, each time, I began fetishizing their opinions, and had to let that go in order to move forward. I mean, if a mentor liked or disliked a poem of mine, I had trouble really seeing the poem in any other way. 

Eventually, a few years ago, I decided to step back and depend entirely on myself, my own opinions, for better or worse. There are still big gaps in my knowledge of poems, especially my own, of course. I attend workshops, take the advice of a few friends, and work with an editor for each book. For my forthcoming book, Resurrection Fail (Spuyten Duyvil Press, Fall 2021), I just finished going through edits with Erin Belieu. Erin is a wizardess. She can put her finger on the weak spot of my poem, and make me think I’d thought of it. The manuscript is much sharper thanks to her.

What craft element challenges you the most in your writing? How do you approach it? What is your quirk as a writer?

My early drafts are usually straightforward and grammatical, and I have to coax them—through many drafts—toward figurative and lexical wildness. Or they coax me, I should say. For me, “first thought best thought” is disastrous. I have to stay up until four a.m. with the poem—going for walks, talking back and forth, night after night—until I win its trust.

One quirk I’m trying to navigate at the moment is, the lines in my poems are getting shorter and shorter, as if of their own volition! I’m taking economy too far. I remember learning that Giacometti’s sculptures, at some point, became so thin that they couldn’t hold themselves up—they’d disintegrate—and I think that’s happening to my poems. They’ll “thicken” again, I’m sure, in time.

What projects are you working on right now?

I’m working on a collection of essays about contemporary poetry and films. I find critical prose excruciatingly slow, but very rewarding. Right now I’m writing an essay about David Lynch, Roland Barthes, Charles Simic, and Natalie Shapero, called “The Elephant of Silence.” It tackles my lifelong aversion to silence, which came to a head at a residency I did last summer at The Hambidge Center, in the forest of Rabun Gap, Georgia.

John Wall Barger’s poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Hopkins Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Rattle, The Cincinnati Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and The Best of the Best Canadian Poetry. His poem “Smog Mother” was co-winner of The Malahat Review’s 2017 Long Poem Prize. His fourth book, The Mean Game, was a finalist for the 2020 Phillip H. McMath Book Award. His forthcoming book Resurrection Fail will be published by Spuyten Duyvil Press in fall 2021. He teaches poetry workshops at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and lives in West Philly. You can learn more about him and his work at his website. You can also hear John read “We Came to Dinner” at our YouTube page! 

“Haibun for Early Autumn, Haibun for Buses & Sobriety” from Volume 23 follows the speaker along their bus route—images and sounds, thoughts and memories, included. I also ride the bus and every time I read this poem, I feel that distinction of it having a long rolling shot. It feels cinematic to me. Can you tell us about your process in crafting this poem?

This poem came from a prompt by Gretchen Marquette during my time as a 2019-2020 Loft Mentor Series Fellow. The haibun form traditionally includes a flash of descriptive prose, somewhat removed from the speaker’s emotional relationship to the events and images at hand, followed by a haiku illuminating a core abstract spirit of what’s been described. The first flash of prose came to me while walking to my bus stop at 5:30 am — at this time in my life, I was working the dreaded “clopen” shift, where I closed the store I was working at around 9:30 pm and then opened the next day at 7 am. I saw two folks walking arm-in-arm, smiling so wide, at that miserable hour — what poet Carolyn Forche calls the Blue Hour — that time of day when only an (un)lucky few are awake. Mothers and insomniacs, graveyard shift workers and clopeners. The tension between their joy and my exhaustion was, although physically painful, delicious!

There were a cluster of days like this which brought me to the state of transcendental sleep deprivation that a sizeable portion of my poetry comes from. I don’t mean to or want to romanticize insomnia and unbearable, exploitative retail shifts! But there is a sense of fluidity of experience and perception that happens in that state that I thought my take on the haibun was particularly suited to. Also, I had to take three different busses to arrive at this workplace (the 23, the Blue Line, and then the A Line). After recording a few days in September 2019, I came to see these small dramas as little vignettes or tableaus, moments of both pause and kinetic energy.

I’d say my poetry actually has a lot to do with the cyclical nature of time and movement, often in terms of labor and transportation. I’m inspired and a little obsessed with how we get from here to there, and aim for form and structure to reflect that. I played with each haibun being separate entities, and considered spreading them out through the poetry manuscript I was (and still am!) working on, but at this point I really like them clustered together to reflect that state of fluid consciousness, the sense of colliding worlds and economic classes.   

The poem starts on 38th and Chicago in Minneapolis, which we now know and recognize as the memorial site dedicated to George Floyd. You wrote this poem long before this horrific murder occurred, but when reading your poem, it’s challenging not to think about how much this location is different now. What do you think of writing as transforming change?

Every poem is written somewhere, and writing in America, I believe it is impossible to write anywhere apolitically, that every square mile is imbued with political and personal violences, current, historical, and future violences. Place-based poetry’s job, then, is to anticipate and remain porous to the significant events which may then color it. I’m not sure if my poetry can exactly influence change in the world, and I know there are more writers out there who are doing a much better job at that then me! I think my goal is more to, as accurately as possible, record the spirit of a place from my perspective as a poor, mixed and light-skinned, queer and visibly femme person actively moving through different layers of society, experiencing extreme contrasts in environment within a day and even within an hour. There are more poems out there responding to the catastrophic, systematic, and site-specific murders of BIPOC that people must read, including Junauda Petrus’ beautiful poem Give The Police Departments to the Grandmother’s, written after the police killing of Philando Castille. There is a vein of trauma running in this city between that pull-off in Falcon Heights and 38th and Chicago, and all other sites of police brutality and race-based violences. Site-specific poetry must work to present these locations as part of a physical continuum and not random flashes of disconnected violence. Writing transforms change by illuminating the interconnectedness of everything. 

Let’s talk about “Rust Belts”, your other poem in Volume 23 which makes me think about flyover states—a region that people, usually white, rich people only see from airplanes as they fly to some destination—Kansas often being referred as one. You’re from the Lake Superior region of MN/WI. What was your decision to use Kansas in a poem that also feels very Minnesotan? How do you see a region as something that shapes a writer? 

This poem comes from a road trip I took to the Gathering of Nations in 2015 — the largest inter-tribal powwow in North America! We’d taken the most amazing route to Albuquerque, through the South Dakota Black Hills, the endless skies of Wyoming, the Rocky Mountains of Colorado — the ancestral and contemporary homes of Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Shoshone, Ute, Apache, Diné, and many more Indigenous nations, to whom I feel so grateful for being caretakers of that beautiful, Western land. Our way back, however, I found less inspiring — we traveled up through Oklahoma and Kansas, on highways that made me feel depressed, dotted with Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO’s, for short) feed lots and junkyards, long drives through the same iteration of economically devastated agricultural communities. 

Yet I had to question myself — this highway eventually flowed north to my beloved Lake Superior home; was it totally worth my disdain? And I was short-sighted to exalt the tribal communities in the West while forgetting the Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa, Wichita, Osage, and Pawnee people who call and called Kansas home. Reflecting on this experience a few years later, I needed to express that we can romanticize or villainize any region we want, but both the positive and negative sides of communities, landscapes, and economies are all impacted by the American colonial project, and not inherent in the virtue of the land itself.

Having grown up in a heavily industrialized community, I’m sensitive to the imagery and sensory details of other industrialized communities. When you have a poet’s heart, and you smell taconite pellets or hear train horns all day long, I think one attempts to re-experience the sensory experience of that area, to make it more interesting, even beautiful. In writing “Rust Belts”, I wanted to observe the ways economies and landscapes flow into each other, from a first-person perspective. I want the reader to feel like they’re on that road trip with me. I think Mike Alberti’s short story collection Some People Let You Down observes rural, industrialized communities in a similar way.

This issue was birthed during this pandemic and the political and social unrest that’s been spilling over on the streets in cities nationwide. It feels like day after day we witness more violence and division, and we felt that the title “hunger for tiny things” took on a multi-faceted poignance for this issue. I’m curious—what tiny things do you hunger for these days?

I really miss running into friends, family, and acquaintances in the most unexpected places! I miss those intimate, five-minute conversations when you’re both really happy to see each other, but also have to get on your way. I hunger badly for movie theatre popcorn and air conditioning. I miss seeing folks wearing fabulous shades of lipstick! I also really miss teaching in person and taking classes, that first day of class when everyone’s trying to get a read of each other, an aurora of excitement but also hesitation in a physical room. And I also miss going into other people’s houses and seeing how they arrange their furniture, what art they have on the wall, and which of their house plants are thriving and/or dying. I’m really very hungry to see people in person again!

Writers tend to write what haunts or obsesses them. What are some themes/topics that are important to your writing, or tend to show up a lot in your work?

Well, I think the issue I’m trying to work out most in my writing is the relationship and tension between worldly and personal violences. The main story/family history I fixate on is my father’s heroin overdose, the violence he enacted on my family, and the internal battle I’ll probably always have on whether or not, and how, to forgive him. I’m an abuse survivor, and I think that undercurrent is there in all of my writing, no matter how far from the subject it may seem. I’m obsessed with the weather, and fear it (which isn’t too surprising given the reality of global climate change in our lifetime), but I’m also totally in love with the weather, particularly Midwest weather, which throws so many curveballs day to day, even hour to hour. Travel and transit is another big one for me. When my mother was 19, she traveled on an airplane all the way to Honolulu, by herself, with her newborn (me!), to be with my dad while he was stationed there with the National Guard for a few years. I’ve always been a traveler, to distances near and far, and love to record my observations on the way. There’s also a recurring theme of trespass — doing what you’re not supposed to do, being where you shouldn’t, and getting away with it, and what that means as a queer, Indigenous person. Also, I love obscure plants and rocks, especially what we commonly think of as weeds. So, trauma, forgiveness, weather, travel, and trespass — those are big for me! 

What books, writers, art, or artists inspire you and your work? Do–or have–you had any mentors in your writing life?

I’m inspired by so much and so many! Recently, I published an article with the Minnesota Women’s Press about Native women and Two-Spirit writers who I love, and who write so meaningfully about home, about place. I’m inspired by all the phenomenal writers and artists of the Twin Cities, many of whom I’m humbled to call my friends. But when pressed, I’d have to include the following books as being formative in my journey as a writer (a journey which will never end, and a list which by necessity must continue to evolve!): Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg, When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz, The Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke, Thrall by Natasha Trethewey, Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, and America Day By Day by Simone de Beauvoir. I think each of these books say something about the nature of radical love for self, other, and place that was essential to my development as a young writer, and my development as a person. Oh, I can’t forget — people are often surprised to hear that I’m kind of a Shakespeare nerd, but I absolutely love reading and watching Shakespeare, my two favorite being King Lear and Richard III. The hubris! The drama! The fall from power — such catharsis!     

I really have to acknowledge my mentor and friend Gretchen Marquette here, who has mentored me both in terms of being a writer, a teaching artist, and a good person out in the word! My writing professors Timothy Ziegenhagen and Cynthia Belmont at my alma mater Northland College were significantly supportive of my dreams as a young, aspiring writer, to whom I’m eternally grateful. My thesis advisor at Hamline, Juliet Patterson, helped me imagine my manuscript in several iterations and pushed me to write the best first-draft of a collection I could, all while reminding me to take care of myself when writing about harsh subject matters. Working with Maggie Smith at the 2018 Hamline University Summer Writing Workshop, she taught me so much about line breaks and enjambment, and working with Ross Gay for the Loft Mentor Series taught me a lot about play, about finding the heart and heat of a poem, and the virtue of reading it aloud many, many times!

I also had a great group of folks who mentored me at Aqueous Magazine, a small, Lake Superior regional literary magazine I had the pleasure of interning for and then being on the editorial board for, people who took me in and invited me to be a part of something where opportunities for young writers were there, but slim. Marissa, Kristin, Sara and Nick, plus Andy and Sean, your kindness and enthusiasm for literature really had a huge impact on me, then and now!   

What craft element challenges you the most in your writing? How do you approach it? What is your quirk as a writer?

I tend to land poems too neatly; I say what I have to say and then sometimes feel the need to rush out of it. Like someone who gives a pretty okay poetry reading and then, after making eye contact with the room, runs off stage, out of the bar and into the anonymity of night — that is how I sometimes end my poems! So I routinely challenge myself to, after writing a full draft of a poem, take the last line and use that for a title for a new poem, which maybe delves into some material I was skirting around in the second draft, and from there usually create some sort of mashed potato hybrid version of those two poems into one franken-poem. I also tend to rely heavily on imagery and sensory detail, and I try to balance that out with more narrative and, sometimes, analysis. 

What projects are you working on right now?

I’m really focused at the moment on publishing my first manuscript, but also trying to nurture the beginnings of a second poetry manuscript in the meantime. I really want to write more specifically about class and labor, and think that will be the focus of my next book-length project. I’m currently writing a poem about a plant called “Love Grass” and a poem about trivial pursuit cards. Maybe there’s a short story collection on the horizon (?), but I’m not making any promises! Finally, I’ve been writing a lot of articles recently for the Minnesota Women’s Press and for the Birchbark Native Arts newsletter, writing profiles and interviews of contemporary artists.

I will be teaching and facilitating a few classes and events at The Loft this coming year, including both a summer adult class on writing place and a youth class on writing climate change. I’ll be moderating the Wordplay Festival panel Tending The Earth with writers Kazim Ali, Diane Wilson, and Moheb Soliman. I’ll also be facilitating a short workshop on submitting writing to literary magazines for the Loft Wordsmith festival this fall — times and dates (and meeting method) TBD! 

Halee Kirkwood, a 2019-2020 Loft Mentor Series Fellow, received their MFA from Hamline University. Their work has been published in Lunch Ticket, Muzzle Magazine, The Under Review, Cream City Review, and others. Kirkwood was an inaugural teaching fellow for the 2019 Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writing Conference at Arizona State University, and their mini-chapbook, Exorcising the Catalogue, was published in 2018 with Rinky Dink Press. You can learn more about their work at their website. 

Your poem “Theories and Postulates” in Volume 23 is, as you wrote in your epigraph is, “an rdeb love poem”. You describe this painful scene in which you purposefully hot glue a skin wound shut in an art studio. What did it mean to you to write a love poem to your body?

It was years after I had written this piece that I started calling it a love poem. The idea of me calling it that was that some intimate things happen away from prying eyes, and then the “walk of shame” happens at first light.  

Now, thinking about the poem, I keep returning in my mind to a scene in the movie Drumline, where Nick Cannon’s character is giving a life lesson to the white boy bass drummer who just had his spot taken by another line member. Cannon says with a sensual shiver, “you need to love the drum,” insinuating that his friend is too mechanical, thinking too hard about the next steps. 

When I couldn’t stanch the blood in the sculpture studio, a life of living with RDEB made me act without thinking. There was blood I needed to stop, so I worked with what I had until I got it to stop. So, really, I would say this isn’t so much a love poem to my body as it is a love poem to the disease that I’ve cursed for so much of my life, and that disease allowing me to persevere, often foolishly, through pain and injury.

Now that I’ve said that, Drumline really has nothing to do with this but that scene is incredible.

One of the elements that most strikes me in your poem is how you engage with the double parentheses! I loved what felt like supplementary information given to me, and I see that double parens so rarely! I’m so curious—what was your intention with that? Is punctuation a craft technique you engage with a lot in your poetry?

Punctuation, like any other technique, is a tool in the box I must be comfortable wielding in order to craft the poems on the page that I see in my head. I think I shied away from punctuation early on in my poetry writing because I viewed it as an eyesore, something for prose writers. My teachers helped me see the utility of punctuation in verse, how I am able to guide the reader into a poetic rhythm that matches the one in my own head.

In this poem particularly, I had these two interjections I really liked but I couldn’t find a satisfactory way to fit in the piece. Putting them inside the (()) allows me to have my cake and eat it, too. The fragments exist within the poem but also exist out of space and time. The double parentheses mimic a hug, and the best hugs feel like home, echoing the poem.

You often write about your body and you’re very engaged and active in anti-racist work, including your work teaching poetry to incarcerated writers with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. How do you think creative work, like writing and art, can build toward dismantling systemic oppression?

Art is an equalizer. Consumed by everyone, created by anyone. Art is a window into the heart and mind of its creator, an acknowledgement of their humanity.

The very act of writing is a rebellion against annihilation, a way for so many people to tell the world “I’m here” when it tries to erase them at every turn. A poem is a prayer, each work of art is someone’s salvation. 

You’ve worked with Katrina Vandenberg in the roles of student and editor [Stokley was the assistant poetry editor for Water~Stone Review for Volume 21, and has served as a reader and board member]. What was it like working with her in the role of contributor?

Because I’ve spent so much time discussing and appreciating poetry with Katrina, it was really easy being on this side of the process. With some editors and publications you aren’t sure what to expect, but with Katrina and WSR, I was able to be completely trusting. All I had to do was say, “yes,” and let y’all do the rest. As expected, the issue is stunning.

This issue was birthed during this pandemic and the political and social unrest that’s been spilling over on the streets in cities nationwide. It feels like day after day we witness more violence and division, and we felt that the title “hunger for tiny things” took on a multi-faceted poignance for this issue. I’m curious—what tiny things do you hunger for these days?

I long to linger—in the candy aisle, during the movie credits, at the coffee shop where I’m pretending to write. I crave to remember why I don’t go to shows anymore when I can’t walk the next day. I hunger to avoid people at the grocery store because we went to high school together not because they might harbor a deadly pathogen. I miss the MPWW classroom.

Writers tend to write what haunts or obsesses them. What are some themes/topics that are important to your writing, or tend to show up a lot in your work?

I have one tattoo. It’s the word “skin”.

What books, writers, art, or artists inspire you and your work? Do–or have–you had any mentors in your writing life?

James Baldwin‘s artistic, technical, and moral clarity are daily inspiration.

I’ve been blessed with the right teachers at the right times. Chad Simpson and Barbara Tannert-Smith believed in my earliest stories that I never ever finished. The late Robin Metz taught me to persevere and to embrace the process, lessons for which I’ll be eternally grateful. Deborah Keenan continues to be a bonfire in the terrifying writing arctic.

What craft element challenges you the most in your writing? How do you approach it? What is your quirk as a writer?

I’ll focus on that last question because I would ask what craft element doesn’t challenge me on some level? That might sound pretentious but it’s just a poetic way of lacking confidence.

I suppose there’s a couple ways I could answer my ‘quirk.’ I only buy and write in unlined notebooks because I like the freedom it provides. Before the pandemic, I almost wrote exclusively at coffee shops because I felt like all the ambient activity would occupy my attention deficits and I could just focus on writing. Now, I guess my biggest quirk as a writer is that I don’t write.

What projects are you working on right now?

Lately I’ve been working hard on getting the vaccine. Once that project is done, I might try going outside.

Sam Stokley is a disabled artist, educator, and editor from Peoria, Illinois, living in Minneapolis. He teaches poetry through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. A 2019 finalist for BOAAT Press’s and Driftwood Press’s chapbook prizes, and a 2020 semifinalist for the Tomaž Šalamun Prize, Stokley has had his writing featured in The Arkansas International, Brevity, Fairy Tale Review, Poetry City, and other publications. Stokley was born and lives with recessive dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa. Follow him on Instagram @bovinii. 

Your short story “Renunciation” in Volume 23 includes a scene that depicts Giotto di Bondone’s famous painting Renunciation of Worldly Goods. What was your inspiration for incorporating di Bondone’s work?

Just prior to writing this story, I read Thomas Cahill’s Mysteries of the Middle Ages. One of the chapters in that book features several of Giotto’s paintings while also attempting to place Saint Francis of Assisi’s life within the greater context of history. A lot of that chapter of Cahill’s book is also about the artists of this time period, and how art was interwoven with religion. Giotto was himself a lay person in the Franciscan order. I briefly became obsessed with the merging of all of this information, especially with Giotto’s painting Renunciation of Worldly Goods. Obviously, the story’s title is derived from the painting.

There is an almost imperceptible shift in character perspectives in the story. How do these shifts compare with di Bondone’s work that there are spatial and narrative elements outside of the viewer’s purview?

This is really interesting to me, but it’s hard to talk about, primarily because it’s dangerous to compare your efforts to those of a master like Giotto di Bondone. What I can say is that for me a narrative’s structure is one of the most interesting elements of fiction. By structure, I’m referring to the way a story is delivered to the reader. In this story, I was particularly interested in telling a story that not any single character could relay by themselves. I was interested in each of the three POV characters. I still believe each could successfully carry the weight of narrating an entire version of the story. But any of those three versions would have been limited and less interesting to me. By allowing access to all three characters’ perspectives, I hope the reader gains insight that none of the three have individually.

In 2021, you began an editorial role for Cutleaf Journal and EastOver Press. How does working as an editor impact your own writing?

To begin with, it humbles me to realize how many fantastic writers are working so hard to tell their stories. Editing also helps me focus on the part of writing that isn’t merely creative. It’s easier to question if some part of a story is believable or too convenient, or if the character and action carries the right emotional resonance when it’s someone else’s work and not your own. But editing keeps those questions in the forefront of my mind when I return to my own work. I guess I would say that it helps give me an additional layer of perspective.

This issue was birthed during this pandemic and the political and social unrest that’s been spilling over on the streets in cities nationwide. It feels like day after day we witness more violence and division, and we felt that the title “hunger for tiny things” took on a multi-faceted poignance for this issue. I’m curious—what tiny things do you hunger for these days?

Most of my closest friends live pretty far from me. I’m like everyone else who is longing to see the people they love. But what I hunger for isn’t just the ability to travel and see people. I desperately want to feel like it’s safe and responsible to go back out to the world. I’ll be one of the last groups eligible to be vaccinated, and I’m okay with that. But I hope everyone who can get their shot will do it as soon as possible.

Writers tend to write what haunts or obsesses them. What are some themes/topics that are important to your writing, or tend to show up a lot in your work?

One of the obsessions I write about a lot is the complexity of familial relationships. What do we owe each other? In what ways do we fail each other? And how do we manage to move forward while carrying the weight of those choices.

What books, writers, art, or artists inspire you and your work? Do–or have–you had any mentors in your writing life?

There are two novels that I’ve been carrying around in my soul for a while now. One is The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason. The other is Salamanders of the Silk Road by Christopher Smith. Both books have haunted me for the last couple of years. Also, Kevin Canty and Michael Ondaatje are two of my favorite writers. Their work always leaves me excited to think about what can be accomplished on the page.

Mostly through sheer luck, I’ve had the opportunity to study with and be mentored by some amazing writers, and I’m hesitant to attempt to name names. But in general I’m inspired not only by the successful, best-selling writers, but by all of the writers who are emerging just now or will emerge someday soon. There are so many wonderful writers who haven’t published a book yet, but they are writing every day, and they make me want to keep going. 

What craft element challenges you the most in your writing? How do you approach it? What is your quirk as a writer?

Plot is definitely the element that I struggle with the most. My own work always starts with character and is focused on character. Sometimes I have to remind myself that plot is character plus action. Even after acknowledging that fact, I have to still question whether my characters’ actions are resonant enough.  

What projects are you working on right now?

I always have stories and poems in various stages. But I’m working now to complete a manuscript of poems that I’m tentatively calling Tamp. Most of the poems are about my dad who passed away in 2016. It has taken a long time to feel that the poems were working the way I wanted them to work. Initially, I was afraid that they would come across as overly sentimental. I guess they took a long time to write also because writing the poems was one of the ways I was expressing my grief, and it just wouldn’t be rushed. 

Denton Loving is the author of the poetry collection Crimes Against Birds and editor of Seeking Its Own Level, an anthology of writings about water. His writing has appeared in Iron Horse Literary Review, The Chattahoochee Review, The Threepenny Review, and other journals. You can learn more about Denton and his work at his website.

Welcome back to Water~Stone Review, Jason! Your poem “I Came Here” in Volume 23 pays homage to Chinese poet Du Fu. What was the inspiration behind this? 

The inspiration was primarily the natural setting at the time I wrote the poem. I was visiting my parents in New Hampshire during the Christmas week back in 2018. They live on a lake, which was frozen at the time, and there was a full moon around the solstice, a rare occurrence.

It is a beautiful place to visit, very quiet as compared to where I live and work, and I always look forward to getting some writing done there. That said, I feel pressure to write something when I am there, which is a challenge because A) writing poems does not often work that way and B) the house is usually full of family during the holidays. For reading material that week, I brought along Kenneth Rexroth’s translations of Du Fu poems, as well as those by David Young. I may have also had the Penguin Classics translated by Arthur Cooper. I drafted the poem one morning before Christmas Day, primarily inspired by the image of the moonlight “lying across the lake” and I wrote the final version, the one published in Water-Stone, on New Year’s Eve day.

We often see poems from you that feel like microscopic meditations. I’m thinking of some of your past work in Water~Stone Review (“Between Poems” from Vol. 17, and “The Reminder” from Vol. 18), as well as your latest poetry collection The Actual World. Each time I read your work, I imagine that you must just sit somewhere for hours, listening and wondering! Can you tell us a bit about your writing process? 

I write first thing in the morning before I am fully awake to, or aware of, the day’s tasks. I have a small desk in the basement next to the furnace, hot water tank, washer/dryer, and I can usually get an hour or so of writing in before there is somewhere to rush off to or, on the weekends, before the house becomes too loud—which for me is just above hearing a pin drop. My mind succumbs quickly to the practical demands of my day, and I rarely get a chance to sit for hours and write.

I teach during the year so I don’t get much writing done consistently, but I find that if I work a little bit on a semi-regular basis I am rewarded with stretches of a few weeks where I might draft three or four pieces. I wrote The Actual World in about three years this way. I enjoy reading poems that are calm, quiet, restrained, and I wanted the poems in The Actual World to convey these states

You have four books published. What advice would you share with poets who are working to pull together work for a manuscript?

Everyone has their own path, their own process, so I would not advise someone as to one way to do it! What I did for the last two books is refrain from sending the manuscript out until I had a critical mass of the poems (say over 80%) that had been published in quality journals, Water~Stone Review being absolutely one of them. Even then, it is not a sure thing that the book will be accepted, and one just has to have patience, be open to revision, and at the same time, realize that a book may never get published given the sheer number of manuscripts and the few presses that publish poetry.

Poetry for me has become more a part of the way I live, or the way I perceive, or receive the world. Writing poems is also something I do for fun! When I am discouraged by writing, it almost always has something to do with the publishing or promotion side of things, rather than the act of writing itself. We will see what happens with my latest manuscript that has been sitting on my desk for months, but unlike, say, ten years ago, I am not frantically thinking about its publication. Does that sound like advice?

This issue was birthed during this pandemic and the political and social unrest that’s been spilling over on the streets in cities nationwide. It feels like day after day we witness more violence and division, and we felt that the title “hunger for tiny things” took on a multi-faceted poignance for this issue. I’m curious—what tiny things do you hunger for these days?

I hunger for tiny things every day, and have done so prior to the pandemic! More and more in my life I look for and appreciate small acts of civility and kindness. My family and I have been very fortunate during the pandemic in terms of health, schooling, and work. We miss what I imagine many people miss: visiting family, socializing, traveling. A positive outcome of this past year is how much more time we have been able to spend together as a family during the normally hectic week.

Writers tend to write what haunts or obsesses them. What are some themes/topics that are important to your writing, or tend to show up a lot in your work?

I am most inspired to write when I have observed something in the natural world. I have also been fortunate to play a large part in raising my two children, which has meant a lot of time at home during the last ten years, and I have learned to allow this material into my poems. If I didn’t do so, I wouldn’t have much to write about! Lately, I find myself writing poems that do not extend beyond my backyard; I like thinking about Dickinson up in her room, or daydreaming at the edge of her garden—incredible the body of work she created within those confines. 

What books, writers, art, or artists inspire you and your work? Do–or have–you had any mentors in your writing life?

Almost all poetry I read inspires me, or puts me in a poetic frame of mind. I recently finished new collections by Andrea Cohen, Jill Osier, and Mary Ruefle, and all three books made me want to write. When I was writing my most recent book The Actual World, the poets I most often returned to for inspiration and guidance were Robert Bly, Mark Strand, Jane Kenyon, and W.S. Merwin. Most of my reading in the last several years has focused on Zen Buddhism and classical Chinese and Japanese poetry. I am always returning to Emerson, Thoreau, and the Romantic poets.

I took my last writing workshop fourteen years ago with Charles Simic when I was completing my MFA at the University of New Hampshire. Since then, I have neither taken a workshop nor belonged to a writing group. I do not show my poems or manuscripts to anyone besides my wife (and sometimes kids) before sending them out to literary journals or presses. For better or worse, I write my poems myself without input or suggestions, save for the occasional and welcomed comment from an editor.

What craft element challenges you the most in your writing? How do you approach it? What is your quirk as a writer?

The biggest challenge of writing short poems is leaving the reader wanting more, or the form not lending itself to extended meditation or some other rhetorical purpose. While I enjoy reading, teaching, and discussing longer poems, I am not interested in composing them, at least as of this interview! My long poems are typically twenty lines or so, and my average is around eleven. I like the idea of a poem as a brush stroke painting: a few words, lines, fragments, held together by a title that offers some metaphorical suggestion or situational locus. I have thought of my recent book-length manuscripts as one long poem that reflects my inner life from that time period.

What projects are you working on right now?

I have a manuscript of about sixty poems tentatively entitled This Far North, and as I wrote above, I am sending these poems out to journals. So far, I have about 50% of these poems published, and in a year or two, I’ll see whether the book is worth sending out into the world.

Jason Tandon is the author of four books of poetry, including The Actual World (Black Lawrence Press, 2019). His poems have appeared in many journals and magazines, including Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Beloit Poetry Journal, North American Review, and Esquire. He is a senior lecturer in the Arts & Sciences Writing Program at Boston University. Listen to Jason read “I Came Here” on our YouTube page. You can learn more about Jason and his work at his website. 

The featured image for this post is credited to Bob King.