“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.

Your essay “Listening to the Music of a Vulture’s Egg” from Volume 23 takes the reader on a philosophical journey through time and space, and it begins with this griffon vulture’s egg that you bought as a child. Starting an essay from unlikely objects seems to be a trend in your writing, and then you take a reader through a meandering process of exploration, and to me this feels so vulnerable for a writer to do. Do you ever feel overexposed in presenting such an intimate portrait of your interiority?

You’re right about unlikely objects being a trend in my writing. I’m fascinated by the way they can provide the impetus for an essay. Before I started to explore this genre, I never realized how many things are poised to spring ambushes, luring the essayist into astonishing mazes of meaning, memory, and association. Essays help attune the ear to the music of things. But I’m still startled – and delighted – by the sheer unexpectedness of the connections that proliferate once I start to really listen to the notes that sound in the objects that happen to catch my attention. The vulture’s egg was precisely one such object.

Do I ever feel overexposed in presenting such an intimate portrait of my interiority? I’m often surprised that I don’t feel more inhibited by the risk of this. I’m a private sort of person. The idea of writing as undressing in public doesn’t appeal to me at all; I certainly don’t set out to reveal my innermost thoughts and feelings on the page. But I go where the writing takes me. I guess focusing on objects makes it feel more as if I’m unravelling their secrets than mine. Clearly, though, in choosing objects, I tend to select those that are in some way implicated in my life, so when I delve into them, I also reveal aspects of myself. But the magic of the object is paramount. It lures me into following threads and connections that I might shy away from if I approached them directly.

As for vulnerability, a measure of this is a useful quality in a writer. You need to be open to things, to let them touch you, if you want to chronicle their nature. That can sometimes be painful, but I think it’s preferable to cultivating some kind of armour-plated indifference, or staying always at the superficial level of common-sense and routine description.

The way unlikely objects spark my essays is something I’ve touched on in two of the short pieces I’ve done for the Royal Literary Fund: a talk for their “Writers Aloud” series, entitled “Confessions of an Odd-Object Essayist”, and a film about a Japanese temple bell, recorded for their “The Writer’s Talisman” series.

There’s a line in your essay that always sticks out to me: “The slow wave of time’s tsunami, surging from beginning to end, is of course impossible to picture.” Time feels like such an essential component to this essay. Can you tell us a little bit about your process for writing this piece and how you tracked time in the narrative?

Yes, time is certainly central to this piece. I think part of the reason that objects have such an impact is because they often seem like frozen nodes of time. They reach our present still redolent of the past that birthed them, they bring aspects of their time into ours. The vulture’s egg not only took me back to the moment when my twelve-year-old self bought it, but to the moment when the egg was laid. And thinking about this specific object’s provenance and the journey that it’s made also nudged me far further downstream in the rivulet of time it occupies – thinking about time in terms of the evolution of a species rather than just the brief lifetimes of individuals. The bone flute and The Tibetan Book of the Dead were also suggestive of temporal perspectives that dwarf the lifespan of any single person.

You ask about tracking time in the narrative. It’s more a case of trying to make clear the depths of time that underlie the shallows of our everyday experience, showing that the trackings of memory and history, however gripping they may be, are only a kind of superficial lacework laid over something that can’t be caught in their calibrations.

As for the process of writing this piece, “process” sounds a bit too organized and planned. Like every essay, it starts with a chaotic jumble of ideas, impressions, and images. I slowly refine these through multiple drafts into the finished piece.

What is the “aha moment” for you in an essay, that moment when you know that you’ve spiraled enough to finally glean some connecting point to bring the essay’s meaning to its fruition? How long do you let yourself spiral until you either give up or continue to press forward?

I don’t think I follow any pattern that’s as regular and predictable as a spiral. Things unfold in a more erratic and less tidy way. But the key moment in terms of recognizing that a piece is viable, that it’s worth persisting with and bringing to completion, comes when it ambushes me with insights I hadn’t been expecting.

To explain what I mean by this, let me refer to a comment by the great Lydia Fakundiny. When she died in 2013, the world of the essay lost one of its keenest minds. She was perhaps the closest thing I’ve had to a mentor. I still miss the in-depth correspondence we exchanged. Lydia taught a course on the essay at Cornell and edited a brilliant anthology called The Art of the Essay. I can’t remember how we first came into contact, but it led to a whole series of emails. I valued her comments enormously. She was one of the most perceptive readers my essays have had. She once said: “If an essay doesn’t at some point surprise the writer, it probably isn’t worth writing.” I agree with that. It’s when a piece surprises me that I know I’ve found a thread worth following. So, I guess that’s my “aha moment.” If there are no surprises, I’m probably writing an article rather than an essay, or it may be one of those frustrating dead-ends that I occasionally get into where, despite initial promise, a piece just doesn’t gel. Then the best thing to do is abandon it, hopefully without having lost too much time trying to push forward.

This issue was birthed during this pandemic, and the political and social unrest that’s been spilling over on the streets in cities all over. 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?

Like millions of ordinary citizens, I find the routine mendaciousness of so many areas of public life dispiriting, and the ready resort to violence concerning. Politics seems often now to be little more than a squalid scramble for sectarian advantage, profit or self-aggrandisement. Humane ideals, a sense of duty, honesty, respect for evidence, valuing education and expertise – all seem in woefully short supply in our 21st century technopoly (to borrow a phrase from Neil Postman). It’s hard to know what to do in the face of this, and easy to become disheartened. When I heard the phrase “hunger for tiny things” it made me think first about all the ordinary routines and experiences that I miss in these days of pandemic lockdown – coffee with friends, a hug, a kiss, going on holiday. But the tiny thing I hunger for most is in fact massive – it would amount to a sea change – but it can only happen through countless, small-scale individual actions. I’m thinking of an embracing (or reembracing?) of basic decency and truthfulness, being kind to and respectful of each other, recognizing that education is a more worthwhile goal than profit, and that caring for the environment is everyone’s responsibility.

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?

When I’m writing an essay, I don’t think in terms of themes or topics. I’m just trying to get whatever’s in the mind – whatever sparked the essay – into as satisfactory a form as I can manage on the page. Each essay starts anew and doesn’t follow any pre-set pattern. It just unfolds according to whatever fits the particularities of its composition, as this addresses the ideas/feelings that brought it into being. The independence and unplanned nature of each piece notwithstanding, I think it’s fair to say that, overall, my essays are variations on the theme of highlighting the extraordinary nature of the (apparently) ordinary. In writing them I’m trying to see beneath the skin of the quotidian, the language of routine naming and assumption – our everyday diction – which tends to settle on things like a veil, stopping us from seeing their incredible real nature. 

The nineteenth century Scottish essayist Alexander Smith said “The world is everywhere whispering essays and one need only be the world’s amanuensis.” I agree with Smith that there are openings into essays all around us. But his use of the word “amanuensis” makes it sound as if essay writing is just a simple process of taking down dictation. First, you’ve got to hear the world’s whispering – and that’s harder than it sounds. There’s always plenty of distraction and of course it’s easier to lapse into conventional labelling and description rather than portraying things with the kind of depth and detail that hints at the incredible cargoes they carry.

In writing essays, a large part of my motivation lies in a desire to try to scrape away the dust of impoverishment from my vision and to see the astonishing richness of our experience. You don’t need to travel to exotic places or look for fantastical objects in order to appreciate this richness. All of the ordinary things around us are imbued with it. It’s just (just!) a matter of being alert to it, of not letting routine dull our perception. An observation of Mary Oliver’s sums up what I think of as my essayist’s credo: “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.” So maybe that – paying attention – is another underlying theme in my work. 

What books, writers, art, or artists inspire you and your work, now or in the past? Is there one book or writer that you would say has been most influential in your work?

I agree with Mary Oliver that “To write well, it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply.” Fortunately, I enjoy reading, so it’s a pleasure rather than a chore to keep on doing it. I must have drawn inspiration from scores of writers over the years, both ancient and contemporary, and across many genres. J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine stands out as a book I keep going back to, but I wouldn’t want to nominate any single book or author as “most influential.” I mean, in a list that would include Thucydides, Montaigne, William Golding, Seamus Heaney, Barry Lopez, Mary Oliver, Pierre Ryckmans, and lots more brilliant writers, how could I possibly choose?

The Best American Essays series, edited by Robert Atwan and with a different guest editor each year, is a treasure trove of good writing. I’ve derived a great deal of pleasure – and instruction – from these anthologies, which have been published every year since 1986. The appearance of a new volume is a highpoint in my reading year.

My fascination with haiku poetry also means that Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) and the other great practitioners of this form provide an important touchstone. I find myself repeatedly drawn back to this minimalist verse form. I first encountered it in my teens via one of those lucky accidents that secondhand bookshops are so good at engineering. The fact that the first volume of R.H. Blyth’s Haiku in Four Volumes, published in Tokyo in 1947, happened to be on the shelves of that particular bookshop on that particular day in 1972 seemed improbable. It was in an area of Belfast more noted for ugly sectarianism than an appreciation of Japanese literature, still less the Zen aesthetic in which this literary form is steeped. I’ve often thought there must have been an interesting story behind this battered volume’s journey. In the several decades since buying it, reading, composing, and occasionally publishing haiku has become part of my writing life. R.H. Blyth’s monumental – and monumentally eccentric – work has become well thumbed. The three other volumes were acquired along the way. I refer to haiku in the introductions to several of my books, using them as points of reference to cast light on what my essays do. My third collection even embedded the name in its title – Irish Haiku – a choice I sometimes now regret given how often the book is mis-shelved under Irish poetry (though there are worse things to be mis-shelved under!). Despite their obvious dissimilarities, haiku and essays share considerable common ground. Their modus operandi is different, but both are sparked by a desire to express as accurately as possible what falls on the fabric of their writers’ consciousness. They’re both concerned with seeing clearly what’s there and putting it into words as precisely as possible. Although they often start from something seen, haiku, like essays, are more about insight and realization – how a moment falls upon the mind, how extraordinary it is – rather than its purely visual components. Both forms foster a sense of wonderment at the familiar. I’ve always liked Graham Good’s assertion that “Anyone who can look attentively, think freely, and write clearly can be an essayist.” I think the same thing holds for haiku writing. Of course, Good’s prescription is easier to state that to put into practice. Looking attentively demands an alertness to the moment as it lays its presence upon us. This kind of looking occupies the same cognitive bandwidth as Mary Oliver’s paying attention. It’s a fundamental prerequisite of essays and haiku.

I’m also intrigued by the great Japanese artist Hokusai’s two series, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji and One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji. The latter is less well-known because it appeared in book form rather than as separate prints, and because it was in black and white not colour – but it’s no less brilliant. In all these scenes Hokusai explores his chosen idée fixe. The way in which Mount Fuji features so variously in so much of his work fascinates me. It underscores a simple but often under-emphasized truth that I think is encountered in essay writing too. Namely that there’s a richness in the familiar scenes around us, the things we think we know. If we keep looking at them attentively, they can appear in unexpected guises, suggest new avenues of meaning to explore. Whether it’s a majestic mountain or a vulture’s egg, there are extraordinary dimensions in the things that meet our gaze. No single account can come close to doing them justice; repeated framings can only hint at their fecundity. In my fourth collection, Irish Elegies, I was pleased to include an essay entitled “Thirty-six Views, None of Mount Fuji”. Inspired by his multiple takes on Mount Fuji, I attempted thirty-six views – in words – of a place in Ireland as close to my heart as Japan’s sacred mountain was to his. My essay in Vol.23 could easily be recast and expanded as “One Hundred Views of a Vulture’s Egg.”

What craft element challenges you the most in your writing? How do you approach it? You have such a prolific writing career; has this challenge changed over your career progression, and if so, how have you approached it differently?

What challenges me most is what I assume challenges all writers – how to put ideas and feelings into words. Flaubert once confessed to feeling “like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.” I’d be suspicious of any writer who couldn’t identify with that. I know all too well how horribly off-key my writing is in early drafts. It offers only the roughest approximation of the music that I want to play. After multiple re-writings I can approximate more closely to the notes I’m struggling to put into words. Then sometimes – those Eureka moments – what’s in mind and what’s on the page sing in harmony; they dovetail so precisely you can almost hear them click together. When that happens, it carries an extraordinary sense of completion and accomplishment. So I guess the “craft element” that challenges me is trying to ensure this dove-tailing happens as often as I manage it – and I don’t think that’s really changed over the course of my writing career – it’s always the same essential business of getting thoughts and feelings into words as precisely as possible.

I often bring to mind the advice given by Basho: “Let not a hair’s breadth separate your mind from what you write.”  In writing essays I’m trying for as close a fit as possible between words on the page and what’s in my mind and heart, trying (and of course failing) to push the hair’s breadth closed.

What projects are you working on right now?

In terms of book-length projects, I’ve got two things nearing completion. One is what I hope will become my 8th essay collection, which I’ll probably call Hidden Cargoes. The other – provisionally entitled Pages from the Vivisection of a Journey – is a kind of essayistic commentary and meditation on a bus journey that I’ve made hundreds of times. I’d like to think that by this time next year I might have secured publishers for both these manuscripts – but of course placing books in the shadow of a global pandemic makes the whole process even more uncertain than usual.

Although less well advanced, I also have plans for a book of haiku. I’m not sure yet what form this will take, possibly an illustrated book of bird haiku. A recent essay in the Scottish journal Northwords Now – “Zen and the Art of Catching Birds in Words”, which is accompanied by Vawdrey Taylor’s wonderful artwork – was a tentative try at some of what I might include in such a book. [Editor’s note: In order to view Taylor’s accompanying artwork, please see this pdf version, with permission from Chris Arthur.]

Books apart, I always have a cluster of smaller-scale things sitting on my desk. As one of their Fellows, I contribute now and then to the “Showcase” section of the Royal Literary Fund’s website. I sometimes take on commissions for single pieces if the subject interests me – recent examples would be an essay for World Literature Today’s climate change issue, and a short think-piece on what we’ve learned from the pandemic for Media Development. And I pretty much always have an essay that I’m working on. At the moment it’s one about the very different ways a photograph of a street in my hometown in Ireland can be read. I rarely write book reviews any more, but I thought a volume edited by Thomas Karshan and Kathryn Murphy might be interesting, so I’m reading On Essays: From Montaigne to the Present (OUP, 2020), and will soon be writing my assessment of it.

Chris Arthur is author of several essay collections, most recently Hummingbirds Between the Pages (2018). He has published in a range of journals such as Hotel Amerika, The Literary Review, Orion Magazine, Southern Humanities Review, and Threepenny Review. Among his awards are the Akegarasu Haya International Essay Prize and The Sewanee Review’s Monroe K. Spears Essay Prize. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays and is often included in that series’ Notable Essays lists. He’s currently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Dundee in Scotland. Listen to Chris read from “Listening to the Music of a Vulture’s Egg” on our YouTube Page. You can learn more about Chris and his work at his website.