Water~Stone Review has always been a collaborative project of students, faculty, and staff at Hamline University Creative Writing. In addition to working with our faculty, and to fulfill a larger initiative of providing a place for new/emerging and underrepresented voices at Water~Stone Review, we now have rotating contributing editor positions. 

 In this post we introduce Vol. 24 Contributing Poetry Editor, Sean Hill.

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(photo credit: Tia Tidwell)

Hi Sean! We’re excited to welcome you back to Water~Stone Review (Sean’s poem “Above It All” was published in Volume 15). I’m curious if you have an early memory or experience in which you knew you wanted to be a writer? And more specifically, what has brought you to the form of poetry, or what brought poetry to you?

When I was a kid and could read and was old enough to safely wander off on my own, whenever my family went to the mall, I would always head for the Walden Books or the pet shop that was two doors down. My parents knew where to find me—either sitting on the floor in the Sci-fi & Fantasy section reading some adventure or in the little pet store looking at some animal from somewhere else. When I was twelve I came up with a life plan; I wanted to become a veterinarian. This was before the internet, so I looked up “veterinarian” in the encyclopedia and found out what I needed to do to go into that field. And I’d also found James Herriot and thought I could do that: Be a vet and write books too. In high school, I wrote fantasy vignettes. I hadn’t taken a creative writing class yet, and I wasn’t quite sure how to craft an actual story. I didn’t come to poetry until my first year of college. One of the guys in my dorm wrote poems, and when I expressed how that impressed me, he said something like, “I bet you could write a poem.” And knowing almost nothing of contemporary poetry, I gave it a shot and wrote something that felt like a cohesive whole thing. It felt done, finished, complete in a way that my previous efforts never did, and I got hooked.

Who are some writers you admire? What specific pieces of work do you find yourself drawn to for inspiration?

Judith Ortíz Cofer, my first creative writing teacher, told us to find our tribes—those writers who felt like our people—on the page and out in the world among the poets practicing in our time. These are the folks whose work speaks to us and inspires us to strive in our own work. Through her and other undergraduate and graduate professors I found Grace Nichols, Jean Toomer, Cornelius Eady, Toi Derricotte, James Baldwin, Marilyn Hacker, Ernest Gaines, and Toni Morrison, not necessarily in that order. The writing of my first collection, Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, was made possible by my reading [Rita] Dove’s Thomas and Beulah, [Seamus] Heaney’s Bog poems from his early works, Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, [Yusef] Komunyakaa’s Magic City and Neon Vernacular, [Marilyn] Nelson’s The Homeplace and The Fields of Praise,  The Collected Poems of Sterling Brown edited by Michael S. Harper and C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, edited by George Savidis. The things these writers’ works taught me about the craft of poetry and how to render the scope and scale of history and represent community and the individual and so much more gave me a way to write my poems and books.

Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady founded the Cave Canem Foundation, a home for Black poetry, in 1996, and I was a fellow and went to three of the annual weeklong summer workshops from 1999 to 2001. There are so many poets, both faculty and fellows, from that community I’m inspired by. Some of my fellow fellows—folks I met back then—were Camille T. Dungy, Douglas Kearney, Honorée Fannone Jeffers, Tyehimba Jess, Tracie Morris, Amaud Johnson, Cherene Sherrard, G.E. Patterson, Evie Shockley, Gregory Pardlo, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Joel Wayne Dias-Porter, Duriel E. Harris, Ronaldo V. Wilson, Dawn Lundy Martin, John Keene, giovanni singleton, and Jericho Brown. Most of us didn’t have books when we were fellows twenty or so years ago, and now most of us do. Cave Canem is just one of several inspiring communities of writers I’ve had the great fortune to be a part of over the years.

What are some trends in poetry that you find exciting to read? What turns you away from reading? 

I’m interested in ambitious poems, audacious poems. I’m interested in surprising poems.

I’m excited by poems that are in conversations with other poets and artists—the after poem. There’s a poem by Amanda Johnston, “Facing US,” that is after and in conversation with Yusef Konmuyakaa’s “Facing It.” I’m excited by poems that are in conversation with the present moment (when I typed “moment” a moment ago, it came out “movement”). The present moment is dynamic, so those poems often are too. I’m excited by poems that are in conversation with the past. The past is very present in shaping where we are, and so those poems illuminate that shaping either directly or indirectly. I’m excited by poems that recast relationships that have been understood as doctrine, poems that raise questions relevant to today and the future. I’m excited by poems that thoughtfully engage with the technology of writing through the technology available to us; I’m thinking about a poem like “EGGSHELLS” by Michael Kleber-Diggs from the current issue of Water~Stone Review, Vol. 23. I’m excited by poems that ruminate. I’m excited by poems that celebrate. I’m excited by the various ways of engaging the human condition as experienced through our various human bodies as it’s rendered on the page.

I lose interest in a poem when the poem seems to have lost its own logic, when the moves it’s making don’t seem to make sense or seem unnecessary. I’m cautious of poetic gimmicks, apparatuses designed to draw attention but don’t seem essential to the existence of the poem.

I like to hike, and when I’m on an out-and-back trail and should turn back before the end for one reason or another, I always hike up to the next bend in the trail to see what I can further down before turning back. Though a poem is a path, it’s not a hiking trail, so I’ll stay with a poem through its turns even when I begin to doubt it’s leading anywhere. I seldom turn away before the end of a poem, but I don’t always feel I’m rewarded by the end.

How do you see your position as contributing poetry editor leaving an imprint on Vol. 24? What will you look for in submissions?

Hmmm… I don’t want to make predictions, but I can speak about my desire. Your website says, “Water~Stone connotes the dynamic, transformative power of literature…” and I want to honor Water~Stone’s mission and showcase that dynamic and transformative power. This past summer at the Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference, Scott Russell Sanders talked about the ways cultural change happens. He gave examples of how it can happen by force or coercion. But he also presented another avenue—making cultural expressions, art & literature—and advocating for those expressions. As contributing poetry editor, I want Vol. 24 to be a display of the culture I want to see in the world at this moment. This is some of the small work toward cultural change. And toward that end, what I’ll be looking for in submissions is what I look for in poems in general—transformation and surprise. And I’ll be looking for poems that relish sound and poems that engage my senses and poems that engage my need for pattern and variation and poems that display an apt love of language. I’ll be looking for loud and ambitious poems and quiet and ruminative poems and audacious poems of all stripes. I think of poetry as practice of attentiveness, and so I’ll be looking for poems that display attentiveness to whatever world the poet is exploring and whatever craft she brings to bear in that exploration.

What projects or pieces are you working on now?

I’m working on my next collection of poetry and a book of prose. I consider these manuscripts to be the two parts of a project titled The Negroes Send Their Love. The project is a further exploration of the history of African Americans looking for and making a home in America. It also incorporates some of my experiences as an African American exploring the American West in the twenty-first century where I now live. I think of The Negroes Send Their Love as being a continuation of the trains of thought and threads conversation started in my previous poetry collections, Blood Ties & Brown Liquor and Dangerous Goods.

Sean Hill is the author of two poetry collections, Dangerous Goods, awarded the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, (Milkweed Editions, 2014) and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, named one of the Ten Books All Georgians Should Read in 2015 by the Georgia Center for the Book, (UGA Press, 2008). He’s received numerous awards including fellowships from Cave Canem, the Region 2 Arts Council, the Bush Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, The Jerome Foundation, The MacDowell Colony, the University of Wisconsin, a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Hill’s poems and essays have appeared in Callaloo, Harvard Review, New England Review, Orion, Oxford American, Poetry, Tin House, and numerous other journals, and in over a dozen anthologies including Black Nature and Villanelles. He has served as the director of the Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference at Bemidji State University since 2012. Hill is a consulting editor at Broadsided Press, a monthly broadside publisher. He has taught at several universities, including at the University of Alaska – Fairbanks and Georgia Southern University as an Assistant Professor. Hill lives in Montana with his family and is the Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Montana for the 2020-2021 academic year. You can learn more about Hill at his website. 

In The Field is a blog series devoted to highlighting the writing life and artistic process of our contributors. This week we continue with our series now featuring contributors from our most recent issue, Vo. 23 “Hunger For Tiny Things”. Vol. 23 is now available for sale in our online shop.

Tell us about your poem My grandparents’ house was razed—left in piles of stone, board, and debris in Volume 23. There’s such a delicate balance between tenderness and brutal destruction. Can you tell us how this poem came to be?

I love that you mention the delicate balance between tenderness and brutal destruction. I recognize this in the poem and in my writing generally. I think I’m circling a place where I can rest in the tenderness for a moment without losing track of the destruction. I don’t think one really exists without the other – in part because we are mortal and we continually lose what we love, including time. I worked on drafts of this poem for years, but only the title was consistent.

I’m interested in the possibility of a place being able to hold past time in a way that’s more tangible than memory, and that the past could be reentered somehow through the place. I’m thinking about the hotel in The Shining. And if places do remember, or even keep the past, what happens when the place is destroyed?

I brought these ideas and older drafts of the poem to a weekend-long workshop at Centrum that was led by Maya Jewell Zeller and Laura Read. Writing prompts have never yielded more than exercise for me – kind of like running scales – but Maya and Laura offered these multi-layered prompts as we were writing, and the experience was rich for me. At one point I was given a note-card with the word paramecium on it while I was in the act of writing and it was the right word at the perfect moment.

The house in the poem was an old farmhouse in Northern New Jersey, where my mother grew up. My Irish family came to New Jersey three generations before I was born. I wonder what it would be like to have a home in a place where your ancestral history reaches back for thousands of years. I wonder what it would feel like to return to Ireland especially because it’s the part of my family I know the most about. This house felt ancestral to me, though my family was only there for two generations. I think the oldest part of it, the room with the original stone fireplace, was built in the 1700s. It was a wondrous and slightly frightening house. There was a window you could see on the second floor from the outside, but there was no room there. There was an old stone well and a stone cellar that once had an enormous snake moving between the stones. I was shocked when it was torn down because I thought it had historical significance, but it was only significant to us.

We feel fortunate to have taken the line ‘hunger for tiny things’ from your poem as the title of our 23rd issue. At the time that our editorial board was working hard to select the final pieces for consideration, the pandemic was spreading globally, causing us all to pivot and wade through so many unknowns. We all craved those moments of humanness, of community, of tiny things that we took for granted, and so suddenly your poem, and this line, created a profound shift in how we thought about shaping this issue. What ‘tiny things’ do you hunger for these days?

I’m really moved that the line mattered to you in this way. I wrote this poem before my youngest daughter, Wish, took her life. I haven’t been able to feel much beyond searing grief and longing. Last night I was awake in bed for hours – waking and sleeping are painful these days because I can’t stand moving forward in time. But as morning approached, I thought – ok, I can close my eyes and rest for a few minutes, and then I was able to sleep. No big proclamations. So I’m trying to find these tiny things – the little moments when I connect to the living. I’m also desperate for new evidence of Wish – a thread from her coat, her hair in my brush. Tiny things that let me connect to her in the physical present. I can’t stand to think there might not be new evidence someday. A friend reminded me of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, and I know that’s how I sound. I’m trying to find Wish everywhere – especially in the places that might keep her past time. I want to go get her.

What projects are you working on right now?

I don’t have a book yet. I had three completed full-length poetry manuscripts and a chapbook, but it all collapsed into one full-length manuscript and I’m serious about sending it out right now. I’m writing about Wish but I’m not sharing it at this point. It might not be readable. But I want people to know about her and I want to try to reach the words for something I can’t express yet. I still believe in her, I’m still behind her. I’m still her mom.

Christine Robbins spent her childhood in Northern Virginia and has lived her adult life in Olympia, Washington. She has poems published in journals including Beloit Poetry Journal, The Georgia Review, New England Review, and Poetry Northwest. Her manuscript was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. 

Tell us about your CNF piece “Tending to Fires” in Volume 22. How did it come to be?

One of the strange things about growing up is that you start to see your parents as regular people. You start to notice their flaws and understand them in ways you perhaps couldn’t have as a kid. At least that’s been true for me. I live several states away from my parents, so when I see them, all of that sort of overwhelms me. I visited my parents just after the 2016 election. It was heavy on my mind. And there was my dad saying, “Remember Quint?” It brought everything, literally, home—how embedded certain attitudes are in our world and how they’re subtly reinforced by people we care about. My story with Quint in the grand scheme of things doesn’t seem like a big deal, but even my own sense of it as insignificant seems telling.

The piece was me trying to understand all this and say, here’s a man (my father) I love deeply, a man I have compassion for, a man who raised me in a really safe household. I’m grateful for that. And yet… And yet here’s also a memory that showcases how certain behaviors are so accepted to the point that women like myself question whether we have a right to be upset. And we do. I wonder if sometimes the small stories can be the most telling in terms of how we end up with a culture where the “big” stories become possible. You know, how did we get here? Well, this. This is how. Or at least one small piece of how.

What excites you as a writer? What turns you off, makes you turn away or stop reading a piece of writing?

I get excited when a piece of writing seems to open something in me. When it changes or challenges something in me. A sharp observation. A revelatory metaphor. I get excited if I sense myself widening somehow. My attention sometimes drifts if a writer goes with the easy thought/question instead of the hard one. Maybe this is also just me articulating what I want my own writing to do, what I’m striving to learn how to do better.

What was an early experience that led to you becoming a writer?

As a teenager I took a community college writing class from a woman named Barbara Lovenheim. After she graded our first set of essays, she read my essay out loud in front of the class. I’d written about my childhood game room, this mess of a space with headless Barbies and dress up clothes littering the burnt orange shag carpet.

Maybe it was that someone wanted to share my work with others, and maybe it was just hearing my words in someone else’s mouth. I was a quiet, anxious-to-please girl. Hearing my words out loud like that—I think I felt more solid and grounded in my body than ever before. I was terrified, and emboldened, and now I’m just after that feeling.

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

Right now is an exciting time to be a woman essayist, because there is a wealth of brilliant women essay-ing right now. Maggie Nelson was an important voice to come across early in my study of CNF, because she changed the game for me in terms of conceptualizing what was possible in the genre. I had a similar experience reading Eula Biss’ On Immunity. There are so many others. I wasn’t very aware of CNF as a genre before my mid-twenties, but at some point I felt like I’d accidentally wandered into a room full of intelligent, articulate women having interesting, useful conversations about this world, this life. Now, I’m quite happy to hang out here for a while—listening, learning.

Do you practice any other art forms? If so, how do these influence your writing and/or creative process?

I used to sing in choirs a lot. My sisters and I would all sing, and we were jokingly called the Von Trapp Family on more than one occasion. I love the sense of being among others, of being part of something—a moment, a feeling, a sensation. Writing doesn’t always give me that, but sometimes I feel this way at a reading when the energy is great and the room seems filled with a generous spirit. I like remembering that we make this art for ourselves, but also for and with each other.

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

I pleasure in collage, juxtaposition, and image when I write, and during the drafting process I take so much time with them myself that sometimes the connections I see are too implicit. I struggle to always know when I just need to tell my reader something. I rely on readers to let me know when I need to flesh more of my thinking out on the page.

How does the current political climate influence your art or creative process?

I suppose it’s just that certain ideas and questions are so prominent in the public consciousness that it’s hard not for that to also seep into the private consciousness. It’s hard to keep public obsessions from becoming private obsessions, and for those, in turn, to show up in the work. I tell myself often that I need to get off social media and see what other private obsessions might be in me that just aren’t getting room to breathe, but I also am really interested in the dynamics of public conversation and public narrative. It’s hard not to feel like I’ll be missing out on something. I wonder if I’ll actually see something more clearly. I go back and forth.

What are some themes/topics that are important to your writing?

Family. Heritage. Home. Place, and place-making. One’s sense of self, especially in relation to others. Women. Being a woman. Love. Uncertainty.

What does your creative process look like? How does the environment you are in shape your work or where do you like to write?

I pamper myself. I get a hot drink. Light some candles (or more lately, plug in the infuser). I listen to music—I find a song and play it on repeat for an hour or two or more, so it ceases to be a distraction and becomes instead a mood. I make a space I’m content to be in, because I need long stretches of uninterrupted time to make progress on a piece. I have to get into a certain headspace. So I make it an event.

What projects or pieces are you working on right now?

I’ve recently come to accept that Mankato, Minnesota is my home. That was never really the plan, yet the way things have worked out, I’ll probably be here a while longer. So I’ve begun thinking about Mankato and some of the complications with feeling at home here. I come from German immigrants who came to southern Minnesota in the nineteenth century. We have roots here. But in the grand scheme of history, those roots aren’t that deep, and our arrival was sanctioned and supported by a government that displaced a people with deeper roots. Yet this is where we’re now rooted. I’m not sure that we have any other roots to speak of. So I’m thinking about that.

Elizabeth Horneber’s essays have appeared in AGNI, Hotel Amerika, Tin House, and elsewhere. She has been awarded an Artist Initiative grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board and was a Loft Literary Center Mentor Series fellow. She is a mentor with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and teaches creative writing in Mankato, Minnesota. 

Tell us about your poem “Monster” in Volume 22. How did it come to be?

For several years I have been engaged in a series of reading-response rituals based on the sonnets of Shakespeare. The ritual involves writing out each sonnet by hand, recitation of the poem, a study of scholarly commentaries to better understand Elizabethan English, and a freely associative textual response to elements in the poetry that I find intriguing or perplexing or both. “Monster” grew out of the collaging of two 14-line texts that emerged through this ritual applied to Sonnets 19 and 22. 

“Monster” developed out of the presence of hummingbirds feasting on hostas outside of my writing window and the emotional resonance I felt from three words in the Shakespeare sonnets: “glass,” “paws” and “raiment.” The subject-scene-cluster that found shape out of these words became a reenactment of the absolute panic that I remember feeling as a ten-year-old viewing myself in a mirror and realizing everything I loathed about my appearance was egregious and irremediable. From an even wider vantage, I feel like semantic complexes develop out of processes like this and whatever texts emerge are a series of triangulations between the writer and the words on the page. I would suggest that, for me, the poem is not what is on the page but is the collective of invisible lines between the text and the unconscious complexes generated by its formative processes. What happens in the reader is beyond me.

What excites you as a writer? What turns you off, makes you turn away or stop reading a piece of writing?

Hearing Joseph Brodsky’s incantation of “Nature Morte” both today on YouTube, and in person when I was 17-years-old. Listening to Paul Celan recite “Todesfuge.” Besides improving my listening skills, I’m excited about exploring obsessive feelings on the page with experimental techniques from the visual arts, for example, what Rachel Rose does in work such as Everything and More, Palisades in Palisades, and Lake Valley. Now as a translator of Emily Dickinson into Italian, the most rewarding activity is translations, especially when English words begin to “sound foreign” and Italian begins to feel like Eden before the seraphim showed up with the burning swords. I am turned off by writing primarily focused on impressing me with its cleverness, by writing created to communicate a particular thought or idea or story, and by prose placed in linear notation so that it appears to be a poem when it is not.

What was an early experience that led to you becoming a writer?

Definitely having a stream of poets come to my junior high and high schools in Ann Arbor. This included getting one-on-one time with Joseph Brodsky, Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell, William Stafford, Tom Raworth, Donald Hall, and many other writers who visited our school and hung out in our classrooms.

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

For the last three years I have been working with Italian poet Pamela Proietti to translate her work into English. Working through her poems and helping her submit her work to Anglo-American literary magazines has been rewarding, for example, in helping her place one of her longer poems in the journal Asymptote. Besides Pamela’s work, I would have to say that I have recently been very excited by the work of Amelia Rosselli (Locomotrix), Alda Merini (Love Lessons), Alex Lemon (Another Last Day), and Robert Alter’s new translation of The Hebrew Bible.

Do you practice any other art forms? If so, how do these influence your writing and/or creative process?

I compose music and often play the instruments for which the music I write is composed. I love making films that explore poetry as a multimedia event, particularly creating dialogs between the work of visual artists and composers who have received little or no acclaim. Examples of a few of my recent projects are:

Clogged only with Music, Like the Wheels of Birds (2018)

 Islands in the Sky (2017)

 Steal Down the Rainbow (2015)

 The Minotaurs of John Elkerr (2014)

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

I am challenged by the extreme gravitational influences of hierarchical prose syntax infecting my work. I feel like the more focused I can become on the smallest phonological elements in what I hear before it goes down on the page, the more likely I may be in overcoming my current limitations. Translation is remarkably effective in keeping one’s mind focused on phonological elements. One of my quirks is to read texts I am working on into stereo microphones at very close range wearing headphones. This approach allows me to hear nuances in sound at a very low volume.

How does the current political climate influence your art or creative process?

Currently, I feel exhausted, hamstrung, and traumatized by the swirling barrage of neo-Fascist, Orwellian rhetoric going on around us here in the United States. The situation gives me renewed empathy for the fawning silence that becomes normalized across populations frightened and assaulted by autocratic regimes. I suspect that I will be writing about this period for the rest of my life.

What are some themes/topics that are important to your writing?

Obsession, madness, and the disturbing.

What does your creative process look like? How does the environment you are in shape your work or where do you like to write?

Chaotic, intermittent, and unpredictable.

What projects or pieces are you working on right now?

I am collaborating with Donna Mancusi-Ungaro Hart on an English translation of Eugenio Scalfari’s new book L’ora del blu. Donna is a Dante scholar and an absolute joy to have as my collaborator. I was preoccupied with preparing a presentation for the MLA Annual Meeting in Seattle on translating Emily Dickinson into Italian (“Is Translation a Loaded Gun?”). During the week I am busy on my job as a Research Associate on the Monitoring the Future Program at the University of Michigan.

Stephen Eric Berry is a writer, filmmaker, translator, and recipient of a Jule and Avery Hopwood Award from the University of Michigan. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Aji, Puerto del Sol, Sukoon, Tampa Review, The Ilanot Review, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. In the summer of 2018, his film Clogged Only with Music, Like the Wheels of Birds was screened at the Emily Dickinson International Society annual meeting in Amherst, Massachusetts. He lives in Chelsea, Michigan.

Tell us about your poem “The Citrus Thief” in Volume 22. How did it come to be?

One of the joys of my life is to rock back and forth to summer on the Great Plains and winter in Arizona; the plants and birds of one environment to the plants and birds of the other. Our little place in Arizona has three citrus trees, beauties planted long ago by someone I don’t know, and I’m still reaping the benefits, going out to pick fruit, never getting used to it, like a fairy tale.

What excites you as a writer? What turns you off, makes you turn away or stop reading a piece of writing? 

The word nestle turns me off:  if a town nestles in a valley, if a person nestles, I stop reading.  There are so many poems, novels, blogs to read in the world, and if something nestles, I go on to the next marvelous piece of writing. It’s unfair, I know, but I’m being honest here. For a novel,  I will read the first page to notice the sentences. The sentences have to be clean as a bone, as James Balwin told us. Adverbs are tricky. If, on the first page, I run into an unnecessary adverb, I usually turn to a different book.

What was an early experience that led to you becoming a writer?

In elementary school, Mrs. Fischer gave us free time to read. She didn’t view poems as puzzles to be solved, and when she read what I wrote, she seemed to read for enjoyment. When I was in a composition class at the University of Nebraska, Dr. Lemon read a paragraph of mine aloud and said it hit the mark for clarity and point of view. To hear my work read aloud by someone else was encouraging and helped me listen to my writing as a reader might listen.

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

William Kloefkorn at Nebraska Wesleyan University gave instruction that sticks with me: (1) Write from all facets of yourself:  the angry facet, the depressed, the euphoric, not simply the postcard-nice part; (2) Stay curious; (3) Follow the writing. When you happen upon an interesting lode, follow it down the page. Do not try to steer it to some predetermined ending. Let the writing lead you; you’ll learn something; and 4) Study your craft and the work of poets through time. Also go to readings and buy the books of your contemporaries. Study both the old and the new music. 

Today I count myself lucky to have writers to whom I send my new poems, but not for critique. I do belong to several critique groups. Critique is valuable, but this is different. This is holding out one’s hands to catch new work. We do this catching/receiving for one another and I consider these writers to be my mentors.

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

One of my challenges is to make the time to write.  There is much to do in getting the poems out into the world and that takes work and research. I call it po business; it’s fun, but can hijack the writing time.

I suppose one of my quirks is that I write at 4:00 or 5:00 a.m. I also write at other, more reasonable times in the day, but I keep my 5:00 a.m. appointment with my lamp and my chair.

How does the current political climate influence your art or creative process?

Like so many across this country, I am crying on the inside. I go about my day and my work, but if I stop for a minute to check out how I am truly feeling, I realize how sad I am. I keep going. I intend to work toward more fairness and inclusion, to work toward clean water and air and safe classrooms for students, as others before us have done for years. We can’t give up.

What does your creative process look like? How does the environment you are in shape your work or where do you like to write? 

Early morning is my time to write alone every day. Later in the day I may go to a coffeeshop to read and to revise. I also schedule writing time with my friends monthly or weekly, and we sometimes use a timer for twenty-minute sprints, one sprint after another. I call it “side-by-side industry.” We are each working on our own writing, but we are company for one another. A group of six or eight of us will take a writing retreat in a cabin on the river several times a year. We have a schedule of times we can talk and times we keep silence. Too much talking waters down your writing energy. It is motivating to be around people who are writing, to be in the same room while they are working on their craft. This helps me to focus.

What projects or pieces are you working on right now?

My latest book, Learning to Swim, was published in 2019 by Stephen F. Austin University Press. The poem, “Citrus Thief,” is in that book. Learning to Swim is mainly poetry, but the middle section contains memoir dealing with the same topics found in the poems. Also, I’ve worked on my own “New & Selected” which is scheduled into the Ted Kooser series at the University of Nebraska Press for publication in late 2020 or early 2021. 

Marjorie Saiser is the author of seven books of poetry, including Learning to Swim and  Losing the Ring in the River, winner of the Willa Award for Poetry in 2014. She has received four Nebraska Book Awards and the Literary Heritage Award. Her work has been published in American Life in Poetry, Nimrod, Rattle.com, PoetryMagazine.com, RHINO, Chattahoochee Review, Poetry East, Poet Lore, and other journals.