Your poem “Still Life, with Pomegranates” in Volume 23 is rife with such visceral colors and imagery. This poem contemplates so many things: fruit, hibernation, solace, beauty, and art. Can you tell us a little bit about the inspiration behind it? 

I’m a visual thinker, and all of my work begins as an image in my mind, an image that stays with me for a few days. The act of writing about the image is a kind of translation, my attempt to make sense of the image in some greater context, and in a way that opens the image up to the reader. This poem was written in the winter, when there is so little color here in Minnesota. Something bright, something obviously not from here, like a pomegranate or any other piece of tropical fruit, can be a lifeline in the winter, a reminder that things won’t stay frozen forever. 

I’ve always been really struck by this line in the poem: “It’s always worth the cost and the waste” because it reminds me of a line earlier in the poem: “This is a fruit too beautiful to eat.” In terms of writing, what are some craft elements that you feel are worth the risk of trying out? How do you know if you’re successful at pulling it/them off?

I think it’s always worth trying out anything when you’re writing a poem. Poetry sits at the edge of what does and doesn’t make sense. We use language to try and understand what we can feel but can’t yet comprehend. I constantly play with line length, line breaks, coining new words to describe something for which there is no word in our language. Some poems take a very long time to finish, because I never know what each poem wants to do when I start writing. Sometimes I find the form and the language quickly, but more often, I write the poem out in a very rough form, just to get it on the page, and then work with it over a series of days or weeks or months. I know I’ve been successful when the poem feels finished, and ready to share. The real reward, and the final signal that the poem is successful, is when I hear from a reader that a poem resonated with her or him, that someone else has found meaning in my work.

You’ve collaborated with composer Timothy Tikach who has worked several of your poems into musical compositions. What is it like to hear your words in song? Has this influenced your writing or creative process in new ways?

I have a lot of musical people in my life: composers, musicians, singers. I love music, and often, it’s the musical quality of a piece of work that draws me to it, as both a writer and as a reader. I feel like composers and poets have a lot in common. We’re speaking two dialects of the same language. Sadly, I’m not a musically gifted person. I can barely read music, and I don’t play any instruments. However, I constantly hear music in my head, pieces of songs or symphonies. They’re always swirling around in my brain, along with images and ideas. It’s chaos. But it makes sense to me, or, I find a way of making sense out of the chaos. Working with Tim has been wonderful. We first met when we both participated in the Nautilus New Music Composer and Librettist Workshop in 2013. It’s a week-long program that puts together five writers, five composers, and five singers. Everyone works with everyone in a round-robin style workshop. Tim and I felt connected from the start. I think it’s our shared love of horror movies and death ballads. I’ve written several lyrics for him, and hearing my work come alive in his music is incredible! It opens us a whole new dimension of the written word, makes it come alive in a way that only live music can achieve. Tim usually commissions work from me. He’ll have a project he wants to do, and we’ll discuss what it’s about, what he wants to achieve, emotionally and intellectually. I’ll write a draft and share it with him. Then we begin to revise. Tim gives me his impressions of the text, lets me know if I’m on the right track. It’s a collaborative process. He doesn’t write the text, and I don’t write the music, but he works with me until I’ve come up with a text that satisfies both of us. Most writers don’t get the chance to collaborate with other artists, at least, not when we’re writing, so working with Tim has offered me a chance to stretch myself, and also a chance to look deeply at what does and doesn’t work. He’s not a harsh critic, but he’s very honest and clear about what he wants and needs in order for his composition to succeed.

We’ve been privileged to publish your work in previous issues; clearly our readers love you! I’m curious—who are some writers you admire? 

This could be a very long list…I’ll try to keep it short: I read widely, both poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction. Some of my favorite writers are W. G. Sebald, Alice Munro, Louise Glück, Mark Doty, Linda Gregerson, B. H. Fairchild, C. D. Wright, Julian Barnes, Steven Millhauser, Jeanette Winterson, Frank Bidart, Jenny Erpenbeck, Jack Gilbert, Adrienne Rich, Truman Capote, James Wright, Anne Carson…

You recently published your seventh book of poetry, Our Delicate Barricades Downed (Broadstone Books, 2021). What advice would you share with a poet working on a manuscript? What is something you wish you had known while you were working on your first book?

My best advice: don’t rush it. You’ll know when the manuscript is finished, if you’re honest with yourself, and don’t let it out of your hands until you know it’s ready, and can stand on its own. I wish I’d known how the publishing world works, what an author can realistically expect once a book is published, while I was working on my first book. Like a lot of first-time authors, I had a lot of big expectations going into the process, and these expectations were not always very realistic. I wish I could have seen that my first book was simply that, the first book in a series of books, not the summation of my existence or a validation of my person. Then again, I think these are lessons you must learn on your own, and that’s never an easy process. Discovering the differences between dreams and reality can be heartbreaking, but that’s life, isn’t it?

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? 

When I’m not writing, I’m often making visual art. I take photos and make cyanotypes, I make handbound books and collages. Lately, I’ve been making cyanotypes of flowers; extreme close-ups of the details of petals and stems. I know that I’m doing this because of the hugeness of the pandemic and violence and unrest in the world. I can’t control those things. I can speak about them, and protest them, and work for that larger change we all want, but I’m one very small part of this movement, and such change takes so much time, longer than my lifetime, I’m afraid. So I focus on smaller beauty, lesser beauty, things that often go unrecognized. I do this in my written work, and I do it in my visual work. Maybe it’s my attempt to find some balance?

Finally, what projects or pieces are you working on right now? Are you savoring the time between books, or are you already at work on something new?

I’m working on new poetry, but on individual poems, not on a book. The book will come in time, once I’ve written enough new work, and can look at it and see if there is some kind of pattern. I’m also writing lyric essays, or fragmented memoirs, or a hybrid of both. As with my poetry, I’m focusing now on generating new material. Once I have enough, I’ll see if it adds up to anything.

William Reichard’s seventh book, Our Delicate Barricades Downed, was published by Broadstone Books in 2021. Reichard is the author of six previous collections of poetry: The Night Horse: New and Selected Poems (Brighthorse Books, 2018);Two Men Rowing Madly Toward Infinity (Broadstone Books, 2016); Sin Eater (Mid-List Press, 2010); This Brightness (Mid-List Press, 2007); How To (Mid-List Press, 2004) was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; and An Alchemy in the Bones (New Rivers Press, 1999) won a MN Voices Prize. Poems from This Brightness and How To have been featured on NPR’s “Writers Almanac.” He has published two chapbooks, As Breath in Winter (MIEL Books, 2015); and To Be Quietly Spoken (Frith Press, 2001) and edited The Evening Crowd at Kirmser’s: A Gay Life in the 1940’s (Univ. of MN Press, 2001). Reichard’s anthology of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, American Tensions: Literature of Identity and the Search for Social Justice, was published by New Village Press in April 2011. You can learn more about him and his work at his website.

[The featured image comes from Therese Brown’s portfolio “This is What I See”, which you can view here.]

Your poem “Passenger Pigeon, Audubon Plate LXII” from Volume 23 includes repetition of the words ‘trust’ and ‘lesser’, which alters the meaning and tone of this poem in different reads of it. Can you tell us the inspiration behind this poem? What drew you to consider thinking and writing about this extinct species?

I took an amazing ecocriticism literature class with Christoph Irmscher while I was at Indiana University, and we’d visit the Lily Rare Books Library to look at Audubon’s original elephant folios of The Birds of America and The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America. It was stunning to see those huge prints of birds and animals I’ve been fortunate enough to see and encounter in my life, and others that I never will see. This longing for creatures I’ve never shared the earth with, that this earth has lost, is a true fear for me. The human species will become increasingly lonely as we continue to lose the other beings we share this planet with. What do we see as ‘lesser’? What do we ‘trust’ in?

 The off-kilter nature of this poem is seeded in the off-kilter nature of Audubon’s description of a passenger pigeon slaughter he witnessed along the Green River in Kentucky:

The birds continued to pour in. The fires were lighted, and a magnificent, as well as wonderful and almost terrifying, sight presented itself. The Pigeons, arriving by thousands, alighted everywhere, one above another, until solid masses were formed on the branches all round. Here and there the perches gave way under the weight with a crash, and, falling to the ground, destroyed hundreds of the birds beneath, forcing down the dense groups with which every stick was loaded. It was a scene of uproar and confusion.

The moment of my poem, a tender pausing of mouths and trust, is seated in unsettling language. Unsettled like the world is when it loses another member of its body.

We published your poem “Snapping Turtle on Loneliness” back in Vol. 20, Field. Body. Country. When we talked about what contributors we should list on the back of this issue, poetry editor Katrina Vandenberg immediately championed you, noting that you’re a recognized name in environmental literature. There is such a bounty of great environmentally-focused writing right now—why do you think people are interested in reading this genre? Who are some writers you admire or draw inspiration from?

That was very kind of Katrina Vandenberg, but I don’t know how recognizable my name was or is. However familiar it is now, she had a hand in helping me share my work, and for that I’m incredibly grateful.

 I think people are drawn to environmentally-focused writing because they are witnessing climate change in their backyards. We are in a ‘moment’. So much of writing is couched in longing and aching, and this moment utilizes these aspects. When the redbud blossoms arrive earlier in the spring and leave only a week or so later, we long for them. When we can’t see the blue sky because smoke from Oregon and California billow above, we miss that color. But because nature is a balance, nature writing also offers moments of joy. These moments don’t off-set the sorrow or doom, but make us weep with gratitude that beauty is still being made. Have you looked at the plants growing in a stream? How sometimes they look like fish tails for an instant? Or how a hummingbird perches on an impossibly small branch and doesn’t bend it an inch? Or how orange a duck’s feet are? Or good goodness, what about the leaves of a catalpa tree??? Bigger than my head!

Wendell Berry had an interview with Orion a year or two ago and the interviewer listed all the terrible happenings in the world. Listing them and asking how can any of this get better with Wendell’s localism philosophy? And Wendell answered back: “You realize, don’t you, that you’ve won this argument?… The argument for despair is impenetrable, it’s invulnerable.” And this was so powerful to me because it made me realize that wading into and immersing oneself into despair will do nothing against the despair. That doesn’t mean one should not acknowledge the despair-inducing aspects of the world, but joy doesn’t fly away because of despair. Maple keys are still spinning through slanted sunlight damn it! Revel in it!

There are so many writers who I admire and who inspire me and so here are the ones whose work I’ve been thinking about most recently: Bonnie Jo Campbell, Ross Gay, Rose McLarney, Todd Davis, Ron Rash, Eudora Welty, Frank X Walker, T’ao Ch’ien, Wang Wei, Li Po, and Langston Hughes.

Do you think there is a responsibility of environmental writers, particularly white writers, to reconcile with writers of the past who championed nature writing and ushered in a genre that was, and often still is, exclusionary? 

We certainly need to acknowledge the issues exclusionary genres and writers of the past erected, and root out the spaces where it still occurs, because I’m sure there are still folks out there who think if you’re BIPOC you’re from the city. And there’s also the idea that if you’re from the city, then you must not be connected to nature. While it’s true that nature takes on all kinds of shapes, depending on human habitation and the ways we change the landscape and ecosystems, the false divide over white folks and BIPOC folks, over urban and rural folks, and our relationship to greater-than-human nature must be overturned. We’re all in this together.

I think one of the most effective ways of planting a new tree (the metaphor here being the future of environmental writing being a tree) is to read and share a diversity of works. Just like how a healthy tree needs so many different microbes and nutrients to grow! And it’s there. You don’t have to look far to find the poetry of Geffrey Davis or buy M.L. Smoker’s amazing collection. Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s poems or essays. Crystal Wilkinson’s work. The superstar Robin Wall Kimmerer. J Drew Lanham’s work. Go pick up that work, nourish yourself with it, and pass it on. 

Let’s talk about your debut book Of This River (Wheelbarrow Books/Michigan State University Press, 2020). You said in this interview with Daniel Lassell that an impetus behind creating “Short-Haired Girl” was because of a societal perception and disconnect of who makes up rural populations. You touch on this idea of a “culture of care,” and you mention that “in a lot of ways, Of This River is about community” which is such an interesting way to think of the various bisections of nature writing. What can humans do in this politically divided age of accelerated climate change to create and sustain a culture of care for the non-human world? How might writers aid in this culture?

Thank you for that kind observation. Yes, community is very important to me, pride in community is very important to me, and I am quite sad now about how split communities have become. Not only politically, but ecologically. The Us vs Them mentality of our country (and world) extends beyond race, sexual orientation, gender, politics, and class to the human and greater-than-human world. The majority of Americans don’t view the earth and the animals on it as their neighbors, or their community. Which is why we’re draining rivers, clearcutting forests, peeling back mountain tops, and driving creatures to extinction. You don’t do that to neighbors you care about. And we wonder why there are certain cancers, why we can’t eat the fish in specific lakes, why we have to check the air quality before we go on a run. There is no Us vs Them when it comes to the earth. We’re living here, too. We’re doing this to ourselves.

What writers can do to aid in this culture of care is to tell stories. I went to a talk with the writer and environmental activist, Rick Bass, and he said that the time for spewing facts and figures to the climate deniers is probably over. That isn’t working. That wasn’t moving them. But maybe now is the time for story, for myth, which is intensely powerful still. Hell, the power of stories got Trump elected. Damn. Anyway, stories are our oldest and probably most influential tool when it comes to creating understanding, modeling, and empathy. Write stories about things people care about that are being lost by the warming planet. There are fewer trout and they’re getting smaller. Snow doesn’t stick around like it used to. More ticks are in the woods. The grass is dying and the cows can’t eat. Not a lot of water in the irrigation ditch. How can we make these things better?

Write stories that people can read and see. 

 One of the challenges of putting together a collection, instead of one longform work like a novel, is envisioning what the book will look like as one cohesive product. What is some advice you would share with new writers on what this process looks like?

Write! Hahaha! I think we as writers are obsessed with certain topics and that obsession is what drives us to continue to create. And writing through that obsession is so important to making something we call a “collection.” As you’re writing, don’t think about completion. Write until you’re writing the same thing, until you feel drained by the obsession. Then print the poems out and lay them on the floor and try to find a thread. When you’re handling the poems you can feel that thread.

Being from Minnesota, I wasn’t familiar with the Allegheny region of the Appalachians until I read your book. And judging by your Instagram account, you seem to spend a lot of time on the water! What is something you would like WSR readers to know about Of This River?

 Yes, on the water is probably my favorite place to be! I guess I’d like readers to know that they’ll follow characters in this book. From Short-Haired Girl, to her father and mother, to her brother, her grandmother, to herons, to rattlesnakes, to coyotes, to pink lady slippers, and the hollows. Readers will hopefully see the community of characters I love. Ripe pears, deer blood, and river muck.

 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?

 Huckleberries. Nikea [Davis’s spouse] and I are part of the privileged population who can go and find wild edibles not too far from our home. And these last few tiny afternoons we’ve spent searching for rather tiny berries that large bears also eat to knit their fat so they will be warm in hibernation. It’s an old sacred thing, to go and find food that birds planted. We have to be so careful when we’re picking, so specific with our fingers, so as to not drop each berry before we set them in the bucket. I hunger for that motion, for that space, for the sweetness between our teeth.

 What projects are you working on right now?

The poem “Passenger Pigeon, Audubon Plate LXII” is actually part of a long ekphrastic project looking at Audubon’s The Birds of America. I’m writing poems from the plates, but also Audubon’s life. It’s nothing too original, but it’s what I’m thinking about now. Audubon made beautiful art but was also problematic with his slave-owning and other colonizing issues. I want to write poems about those things. It’s how I learn.

 Thank you for this opportunity to share my work.

Noah Davis grew up in Tipton, Pennsylvania, and writes about the Allegheny Front. Davis’ manuscript Of This River was selected by George Ella Lyon for the 2019 Wheelbarrow Emerging Poet Book Prize from Michigan State University’s Center for Poetry. His poems and prose have appeared in The Sun, Best New Poets, Orion, North American Review, River Teeth, Sou’wester, and Chautauqua among others. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Poet Lore and Natural Bridge. He has been awarded a Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference and the 2018 Jean Ritchie Appalachian Literature Fellowship from Lincoln Memorial University. Davis earned an MFA at Indiana University. Listen to Noah read his poem “Passenger Pigeon, Audubon Plate LXII” on our YouTube page. You can learn more about Noah and his work at his website or follow him on Instagram. 

Your short story “Floating” in Volume 23 is about Timothy Okello, a young Ugandan refugee who learns that his father is the leader of an anti-government group that kills civilians. Can you tell us a bit about the inspiration behind this story?

I wouldn’t want the only takeaway for anyone who reads the story to be that this is an anti-government group that kills civilians. The group starts off fighting a liberation war but as wars go, they rarely remain true to their cause, and civilians are killed, and it’s the same story with this group. What inspired me? I’ve always been curious about freedom fighters who start off fighting for their people, for human rights, justice, but turn into war lords and unleash violence on the same people they’re fighting for. At what point does one cross that line? Given the multiple wars around the world, I often think about the price civilians pay and how far must it go before it stops? 

One of the things I’ve always loved most about this story is how the relationship between Timothy and Ma changes. I’m curious—how do you as the writer make a healthy, loving, mother-son relationship crack apart in such a short span of pages? How do you know that your reader will have an emotional reaction to the evolution of the relationship?

I am pleased when I learn that a reader somewhere had an emotional reaction to the relationship between Timothy and his mother. The truth is I don’t know that the reader will. Timothy and his mother are both victims of the war and the choices Timothy’s father has made. The situation they’re both put in – a wife and mother who loves her son and husband, and a son who loves his mother, who has grown up believing one thing, and then learns everything has been a lie. It’s this situation that a mother and son find themselves in that helped me to cover so much in a short time.   

“Floating” is the first piece of fiction that appears in Volume 23, and our readers really took its structure and compelling narrative, which feels both appropriate for a short story and also for something longer, like a novel. Did you ever consider sharing Timothy’s story in any other format?

“Floating” is actually a linked story. The other story is “Taboo” where we meet Timothy, his mother and father and Nana when they’re all in the refugee camp. For me, it has always been a short story but these days, I am considering expanding it into a novel. 

It seems like such a long time ago, but in October 2020, you won an Emerging Writer Fellowship from the Center for Fiction. What has that opportunity afforded you?

I was blown away when I received this fellowship. First, it’s been a huge boost for my own confidence and this in itself is very important. Over the past months, myself and the other fellows have been introduced to several agents, editors and authors to talk to us about the publishing industry. This has been extremely helpful as the publishing world is very opaque to me. I have also been given an editor to work with me on my collection of short stories and I get to use the studios at the center which is such a gift to a writer.. Because we’re in the pandemic, we haven’t had in-person opportunities to meet, which I have missed. The center is reopening in September and I am looking forward to some in-person events. 

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? 

We’re still in the pandemic which has further exposed the gap between the rich and poor across the world. We have countries like the USA which has more vaccines than needed for the American population and at the extreme end of this, only 1.1 percent of the 1.3 billion people in Africa have been vaccinated. This cannot be acceptable. This year, 235 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance and protection. We stilll have children going to bed hungry, not going to school, people fleeing their homes because of conflict, violence against women has increased. Racism, discrimination and prejudice continue unabated. I guess I long for many things. I long for wars and violence to stop. I long for social justice and a world where all human beings are equal, a world where no child goes to bed hungry.

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?

War, violence, social injustices, class, poverty, love, family. I don’t think I have a story that doesn’t have these themes.

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

I don’t know if it’s a craft element but I struggle with endings and completing a first draft. I write the beginning and perhaps a bit of the middle and keep revising rather than ploughing through so that I can have a draft. For my most recent story, I forced myself to break away from this habit and rather than write the story from beginning to the end, I wrote the different scenes, developed the characters and plot, and then weaved all these elements together. I found that this also helped me to deal with those days when I was paralysed and couldn’t write anything.

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

I have a list of writers for every genre. Literary fiction is my favorite genre and I read a lot of short stories and short novels. Writing, and art, for me is a vehicle to drive change so I am particularly drawn to writer’s whose work teaches me something, that is dealing with many of today’s challenges. To mention a few writers: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jim Shephard, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Magda Szabó. I interviewed Maaza Mengiste for my podcast and I was blown away by her perspectives on the role of fiction to raise awareness on war, gender, and so on. I’d recommend her book, The Shadow King. Then there are my mentors and friends who find the time to read my drafts and give me honest feedback: Denton Loving, Libby Flores, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Keith Lesmeister. It’s a long list. 

What projects are you working on right now?

I’ve just finished a draft for a new short story, I am editing my collection of short stories and I am also working on a novel.

Ruth Mukwana is a Ugandan fiction writer living with her daughter in New York. She is a 2020 Center for Fiction fellow. She is also an aid worker currently working for the United Nations, and co-produces a podcast and blog on storytelling and humanitarian advocacy.Her short stories have appeared in several magazines. Her story “Taboo” was a runner-up in the University of Alabama’s Black Warriors Review (BWR). Mukwana is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars (MFA). Listen to Ruth read from “Floating” on our YouTube page. You can learn more about her work at her website.

In “Safe”, your first of two flash fiction stories in Volume 23, there’s a palpable amount of tension simmering as the unnamed narrator unveils a fractured relationship with their partner. Can you tell us a little bit about the inspiration behind the story?

I think at the time I was interested in the idea of the snapshot or vignette in flash fiction. Some of my favorite pieces are scenes or tiny moments slowed down… magnified. The opening line, “Our anger kept us safe for a while that summer” was humming in my head for a while. It became this story of what happens to these two people when a cruelty, an affair, happens in a relationship and yet the kind, strange, and quotidian movements of life continue. 

I think one of my favorite things about “Safe” is its compression of time. The story spans a great width of time and space and yet it’s only three paragraphs long. I’m curious—can you talk about your drafting and revision process in how you whittled this piece down to its core without stripping away too much of the story?

When I write flash it comes out pretty contained. (That might just be an annoying answer.) The landscape of writing a short-short feels like whittling from an already small piece of wood.  From the opening line I sense that the story will be finite. So in my case (if I am lucky), the first draft is already at a word count that satiates the course of the characters, the scene, and the heat of emotion. Then the pruning shears come out, the fat is found, the bad metaphors, the sentence that over explains, the one that lies there not moving anything forward—those get cut. Revision after that is putting the draft out to my shrewd readers. I have dear writers that I trust, that level me, and also I get a gut check—is this enough? Do you feel pushed out of a moving car? Does it roll to a clean stop? 

Let’s move to “Toast”, your second piece in Volume 23. I love that in his editorial letter, your friend and contributing fiction editor Keith Lesmeister described your work as a “swirling nontraditional, nonlinear narratives driven more by language and lyricism than what we often think of as a narrative arc.” What does flash fiction mean to you, and what does it need in terms of craft in order for the story to be complete?  

Well, I just love Keith even more so now after that wild and lovely description. Flash fiction always reminds me of play. When I teach it, my wish is for the writer to move with the language, follow it, don’t think, and forget the fences. I suggest exercises: encapsulating a whole person’s life in a page, describing your character’s favorite object in two paragraphs without missing a single detail. I cherish breaking rules, testing false walls, and surprising yourself. When it is done right, flash does all of that. As far as it being complete or solid, I return to my professor Amy Hempel’s advice on the last line of flash being a “punchline.” That is always a good test to see if your work is done in an early draft. Did you stick the landing? 

Recently, after years of directing audience engagement and digital projects, you were named the new Associate Publisher of BOMB —congrats! I’ve always loved BOMB for its multidisciplinary approach to arts and culture. Are you able to share with us a bit about your vision and approach in your new role?

Thank you! I feel lucky to work at an organization that never fails to broaden my knowledge of the arts. For anyone that does not know BOMB Magazine, its mission is to place artists in conversation and to preserve and elevate the artist’s voice. I’ve learned so much from visual artists, and performing artists in particular, in reading and hearing their approach to craft. 

BOMB turned 40 this year so we are busy prepping more surprises that culminate our past and celebrate our future. We have just finished our second season of FUSE: A BOMB Podcast, and that I feel particularly proud of. In each episode, BOMB invites an artist to choose a guest from any creative discipline —an art crush, a close collaborator, or even a stranger they’ve admired from afar—and we bring them together. The result? Candid, unfiltered conversations on art, what inspires it, how it’s made, and what we can learn from it.

[Editor’s Note: Season 2, Episode 4 features a conversation between choreographer Miguel Gutierrez and Water~Stone Review contributor Gabrielle Civil. You can subscribe to FUSE on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.]

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?

Hmm, well I am writing this as the world has started to open up. So I have savored the hugs and recently got to return to Texas to see my family. I am finishing my book— so that definitely requires a daily yearning and hunger. 

I’d also love to see us continue the vigilance and attention we paid last summer and to hold on to this idea of individual responsibility. Specifically what one can do in their own world to support BIPOC communities. I mean the small choices that can make change. I think people can get overwhelmed about what to do next—but who you hire, what books your children read and how you speak to them about race, where you volunteer your time, who you vote for, how one can continue to educate themselves, all are possible tiny sparks of light. 

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’ve been writing a book about men for too many years to count, so in that regard I have been focused on the question: what does it mean to be a good man? I started it before the #MeToo movement and it has only become richer because of its existence. 

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

I’ve been lucky to have studied with people whose work I admire: Aimee Bender, Paul Yoon, Bret Anthony Johnston, Amy Hempel to name a few. As far as inspiration in art I wrote a story about a J.M.W. Turner painting I could not let go of and more recently seeing his painting, Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, was a real gut punch. The Julie Mehretu show at the Whitney was a stunner and mystified me. 

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

Dialogue can be a torture. I read better works to overcome the sheer stupidity I feel in writing first drafts. Keith is in fact a true master of dialogue—in his work it is seamless, true, and stirring every time. I recently listened to Tin House’s Podcast Between the Covers. Their episode with Dorothy Allison on dialogue covers so much ground on this topic.

I am not sure it is a quirk but, I listen to music every time I write on repeat. I have songs for my stories. Dustin O’Halloran, Devonté Hynes, and Max Ritcher are favorites. I am a contemporary composer collector.

Libby Flores is a 2008 PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellow. Her short fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, Post Road Magazine, Mc Sweeney’s, Tin House/The Open Bar, The Guardian, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She is the former Director of Literary Programs at PEN Center USA (now PEN America Los Angeles). She is currently the Associate Publisher at BOMB Magazine. Libby holds an MFA in creative writing from Bennington College. She lives in Brooklyn, but will always be a Texan.

Your poem “The Late Accommodations” from Volume 23 is an account of driving down a highway at dusk and witnessing a mare “moving through gauzy grasses.” Did you have some ‘aha’ moment to write a poem when you saw this? How did King Lear come into this poem? Are you a big Shakespeare fan?

I’m glad you chose this poem for Water~Stone Review because its origin and development are clear to me, and that’s not always the case. 

Let me begin by confessing that, although I’m a believer in ‘aha’ moments, for me they seldom come in the course of my daily living; rather, they come in the course of writing. I store things up and then, starting with nothing much besides a kind of faith in the generosity of the enterprise of poetry, I give the poem its head (horses again) and hope it takes me somewhere worth going. “The Late Accommodations” is a good example of that. 

“Late Accommodations”begins with an epigraph “The human eye can discern 500 shades of gray.” Gray is often associated with an absence of color. In the poem, vision is obscured; images blend and blur into each other. This was something that readers raved about when selecting your poem. You certainly seem like it to me, but do you consider yourself a visual or sensory writer? How do you make sense of images and give them meaning with language?

This poem began with the epigraph. I’m an obsessive collector of images, quotations, odd bits of knowledge. I highlight every book I read, transfer the highlighted passages to thick brown spiral notebooks bought specifically for that purpose and after a time I excerpt the most promising quotations to a computer file. Finally, I excerpt that file to a second file of “starting points.” Then I draft. In other words, I sift and sift and sift for those rare nuggets of gold that might have poetic potential.

Images work a little differently, although that process too requires a sieve. This time, the task is mostly left to my subconscious mind. If an image strikes me and lingers in memory long enough to sift itself down to a nugget of value, I know I can rely on it to rise when I need it. That horse, for example. Not only did her sudden beauty catch my eye as I drove the Missouri backroads, she came with accessories: a weathered fence, a windbreak of poplars, and a dusk changing shades so fast my words couldn’t keep up. I consciously stored away the visual and emotional experience, but I left that horse there in the mist to ripen (horses don’t ripen, but you know what I mean). 

Later I read in a book on photography that the mind can see 500 shades of grey, and right on cue, the image of the horse appeared. Such pairings of fact or phrase with visual images of personal experience seem to happen all the time. The trick is to notice that they are happening and to start writing. (I’m seeing that horse in the mist as I write this response.)

As for Shakespeare, well, he’s Shakespeare. Who doesn’t love him? The year after I retired from teaching, I set myself the task of reading all the plays in order along with commentary. King Lear had been my favorite since college and, though I taught Macbeth and Othello for years and love them dearly, the staying power of Lear for me was unassailable. Both Cordelia’s death and the scene on the heath were especially poignant because I was caring for parents with dementia, and I knew my next grief was imminent. As a bonus, when you steep yourself in Shakespeare’s language and a scholarly study tells you that “cerements” is of Shakespearean coinage, you write it down in your brown spiral notebook.           

This, then, is one of those times when a poem opens and invites you in. All you need to do is record your passage through its realm and feel grateful for the aha moments along the way. And then, of course, you edit it for two years.

You’ve published six collections of poetry, including your most recent collection, Walking the Mist (Ashland Poetry Press, 2021). In her praise of your book, Barbara Crooker says that your poems “resonate with images so perfect, they make me want to stand up and cheer.” What is something you’d love for readers to know about this collection? 

First, that Barbara Crooker is a generous reader, not to mention a superb poet. Perhaps it’s worth noting that the task of shaping the poems in Walking the Mist into a book gave me trouble. Despite the four parts I ended up with, it is, I think, a triptych considering loss and grief in three different voices. The central panel (made up of parts 2 and 3) follows the years of my mother’s decline and death due to Alzheimer’s, my father’s parallel decline and death due to hurt and anger and age, and, in the aftermath, the course of my own grieving. In lyric tradition, these poems are written in first person but there’s no need to employ the convention of “the persona.”  It’s my voice. 

Both side panels (parts 1 and 4) do employ personas. Section one was begun maybe thirty years ago with individual poems drafted on a trip to Ireland. I couldn’t make them jell, and I couldn’t let them go. The key was handed to me by Fernando Pessoa: “And as for the mother who rocks a dead child in her arms,” he writes, “we all rock a dead child in our arms.” This was an aha moment, a gift that allowed me to gather the drafts and edit them around the story of a young woman, not me, who travels to Ireland to mourn the loss of a child and, as Pessoa reminds us, the child that she herself had been. His beautiful lines from The Book of Disquiet and The Keeper of Sheep followed me into part 4 where they serve as epigraphs, and it is out of the sensibility of his voice—a wiser and more meditative voice than I could have found without him—that I fashioned poems examining the large questions grief leads us to when we begin to grieve our own life and its certain loss. 

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?

My first volume of poems was titled A History of Disappearance. The poems in it had come from an attempt to gather and give meaning to losses I had been too young to understand when they occurred. David Ignatow, who chose my manuscript for publication, wrote in his introduction that this was “a prayerful book.” That took me by surprise, but he was right and I’m still working that territory, trying to find meaning in loss, seeking answers that, if they exist, exist beyond me. 

What we have to lose in life is quite simply everything. In my work, I want to touch and handle and tongue and taste and bless as much of that everything as I can. I think the large answers are everywhere to be found. But time is short in its gorgeous unfoldings and relentless ongoingness. We aren’t here long, but, with good fortune, long enough to build a self, perhaps a soul. And then, too soon, we have to learn how to let it all go. 

I’m not conscious of these motivations as I write, so what I just wrote above seems a mite highfalutin’, but when a poem seems right to me, it is invariably because it shapes a meaning new (to me) about time and loss and gratitude. 

On a lighter note, I also love to write about critters—from octopuses to angels.

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

Two craft elements come to mind: 

I’m obsessed with the sound of words. More and more I trust sound to choose my words. I feel what number of syllables, what vowel or consonant sounds, what stress patterns are needed — not after I’ve written what I mean to say, but in order to find out what I mean to say. Weird, I guess. But true. 

I’ve also grown attached to a personal “Rule of Threes.” For a poem to feel worth working on for as long as I work on a poem, I like to approach from at least three directions hoping for an intersection in their future—like Cordelia’s death and the word “cerements” intersecting with the image of a horse at twilight and with that fortuitous fact about the 500 shades of gray. When and if those three roads meet in a draft, I feel as if I might have a poem on my hands. 

As for quirks, well, I fight excessive dashes and colons. And is it a quirk or a craft element to edit a draft for two to ten years before I pronounce it finished? Oh, and I’m lousy at titles – which is one reason it’s nice to have a few trusted readers who point out the glaringly stupid ones to me. 

What projects are you working on right now?

I’ve been working on a series of poems focused on artists in old age, more specifically, trying to identify how earlier life events manifest in a final drawing / painting / sculpture. I’m having fun with the research and with trying out different structures and points of view. For example, I used a triptych for Michelangelo’s third Pieta, a sestina spoken in the voice of Berthe Morisot, Hokusai offering advice to a student on “How To Paint Like Hokusai,” a museum visit that surprises the (invented) viewer with Agnes Martin’s tiny deathbed ink drawing. There are twelve so far. I may do these for the rest of my life. But that’s today. Yesterday, I wanted to burn the lot of them. Ah, Poetry.

Marjorie Stelmach has published six volumes of poems, most recently Walking the Mist, which was published in 2021 from Ashland Poetry Press. Her first book, Night Drawings, received the Marianne Moore Prize from Helicon Nine Editions. She was awarded the 2016 Chad Walsh Poetry Prize from The Beloit Poetry Journal. Her work has appeared in Arts & Letters, Boulevard, Cave Wall, Florida Review, Gettysburg Review, Hudson Review, Image, The Iowa Review, Miramar, New Letters, Notre Dame Review, Prairie Schooner and The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, among others.