In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Morgan Grayce Willow
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Morgan Grayce Willow
Tell us about your CNF piece “(Un)document(ing)” in Volume 22. How did it come to be?
I had been trying to come to terms with my own complicity in the theft of land from Native peoples. Each time I tried writing about it, I discovered that the notion of land ownership was embedded in ever-deeper layers of my emotional life and psyche. Meanwhile, some years ago I had done a fair bit of genealogical research, gathering documents – print documents, copies, etc. before the ubiquity of the internet, before Ancestry.com and so on – about my ancestors. In graduate school, I’d taken a class in the American 1890’s in which one of our assignments was to research how our own families – and, hence, ourselves – fit into the Zeitgeist of the period. So my task was to make some sense of the documents I’d gathered – land deeds, bills of sale, maps, etc. I later supplemented all that with internet sources, including, for example, Google Maps which gave me a current view of the farm I grew up on.
This thread converged with the current ethos of crisis about immigration, what immigration means to me personally and to us as a nation. So many are descended from immigrants, and survival has come at the expense of Indigenous peoples, who had been forced to migrate. It all felt so complicated, muddled, and painful. Writing the essay – finding a form to contain the layers – was an attempt to make sense of all this for myself. I set out to assay, or interrogate, the documents. What does it mean to be documented? What are documents? Which ones count and which ones don’t? Who gets to decide? etc. It was a way to name how my own personal narrative intersects with – and is partially culpable for – the historical narrative as represented in documents.
What was an early experience that led to you becoming a writer?
I didn’t really know that being a writer was something a person could do. Growing up on a small family farm, I didn’t have any role models for a writing life. Farm life is all about work. I do remember, however, falling in love with language. We had very few books in the house, but we did have a big, fat, black-covered dictionary. I recall pretending to read it before I actually knew how. I’d sit with it on my lap – my feet sticking straight out on the couch – and open its pages. At first, I often had the book upside down, but that didn’t stop me from running my fingers along the columns and saying words as though they were the words I was looking at. Fortunately, that dictionary – desk size, but it felt like an unabridged to me – did have lovely engraved illustrations. Once I figured out the pictures, I got the orientation of the book right. Eventually, as I learned the letters of the alphabet, I realized that the book followed that same order. Each “chapter” had a letter for its title. The order and accumulation of the words fascinated me. That early love of language, and subsequently reading, laid the foundation, I think, for becoming a writer. I still love an actual, physical dictionary, though my Merriam-Webster app is one of the most-used apps on my cell phone.
Do you practice any other art forms? If so, how do these influence your writing and/or creative process?
You’ve used the word practice, which tempts me to mention Tai Chi. I’ve practiced Tai Chi for more than a quarter of a century. I consider it one of the great gifts of my younger self to my current self that I started to practice and have kept it up, albeit in varying degrees and configurations over the years. Doing so, of course, helps with health and sanity, but it also supports my creative process by allowing me to think of writing as a practice, to focus on doing as much, if not more, than on product. If I focus too much on the product, I risk falling prey to perfectionism, which can very quickly stymie my writing.
I have also in the last several years become involved with book arts through workshops and classes at Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA). I completed their core certificate, which meant taking a balanced series of courses in bookmaking, printing, and paper making. The book arts gets me out of my head and literally onto the page – the made, printed, folded, stitched, or collaged page. They let me get my hands dirty and ground me in tactile experience. They nurture creativity in nonverbal ways, and sometimes they present opportunities to put some of my own text out into the world through a physical process.
What craft element challenges you the most in your writing? How do you approach it? What is your quirk as a writer?
Form, I suppose, challenges me the most – finding the form that best suits the particular message or moment that needs expression. Sometimes I experiment with form, and the form leads me to language for expressing things I didn’t know I needed to say. Other times, I have something in mind or gut that needs saying, and I have to try out whether it’s best said as a poem or an essay. And once I’ve found the genre that seems to be the right container, then the choices narrow – or broaden – to language, shape and sound . . . not in any particular order. It’s a recursive process of trying this and listening to that, and so on.
As to my quirks as a writer, my writing group can probably identify those better than I can, although one of them may be how I use journals and notebooks in my process. I’d be lost without them.
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 often wish I were more organized; however, my creative process is anything but. I admire writers and artists who work with intense focus on a single project at a time. But for me, images, ideas, phrases or titles come at me like the weather – unpredictable and getting wilder all the time. I keep track of the floods of them in my journals and notebooks – lists, notes, indexes, etc. Then during dry spells, I have a storehouse to dip into. I do some writing in the mornings, often in those journals. And I really enjoy sneaking away to my studio, which is separate from my house. It’s mostly quiet there – or at least the sounds are different from home sounds. And there’s no laundry to do there. Plus, I can make a mess – say, with a collage or visual journal – and leave it in process without having to move it off the dining room table.
What projects or pieces are you working on right now?
I have a couple poetry manuscripts – a collection and a chapbook – out searching for a home. While they’re circulating, I’m turning my attention again to the essay form. A number of subjects keep tapping me on the shoulder, reminding me they’re waiting in the wings. They’ve lost patience, so I think I’d better get to them before they decide to wander off. I like the adventure of following an inquiry, exploring it from different angles, finding the right shape and language for it. It’s also a marvelous moment when, after having been working on poems, I get to stretch out across the page and live in that different rhythm that prose makes. I’m looking forward to that.
Morgan Grayce Willow is the author of three collections of poems, most recently Dodge & Scramble. She has received awards in both poetry and creative nonfiction from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the McKnight Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the Witter Bynner Foundation. Her essay “Riding Shotgun for Stanley Home Products” is the title piece in Riding Shotgun: Women Write about Their Mothers. Morgan’s essay “Signs of the Time” earned honorable mention in the inaugural Judith Kitchen Prize in Water~Stone Review in 2011.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Purvi Shah
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Purvi Shah
Tell us about your poem “Moving houses, Maya pumps a music that cannot offer” in Volume 22. How did it come to be?
In some ways, I have an unusual New York City story – which is that I’ve lived in my same apartment for 23 years. NYC is a city of transience, a city of temporary destinations. I thought it would be so for me too. And yet, here I am, decades later, now a verified New Yorker. And I am often imagining moving, imagining what it is to pack, what it is to unpack.
Like the poems in my latest book, Miracle Marks, “Moving houses, Maya pumps a music that cannot offer –” draws upon Hindu iconography & philosophy – particularly concepts of sound as creation, the universe as vibration, vibration as constant. I had been pondering ideas of being/non-being, the illusions of life, infinite in the finite, and the mundane boxes of life (even before the unboxing craze!). I had been exploring sound energy, the white space of being and creation, how the physicality of poems is a kind of breath, an imprint, an energy-scape.
What is it to praise the unfinished? What is it to praise? What is it to live – between boxes, between musics? Like many of my poems, this piece came to be in the space of questions, observations, sounds, and wonder.
Do you practice any other art forms? How do these influence your writing and/or creative process?
My mom says there are two things she loves: looking good and dancing. And so I’ve inherited a love of dancing, the body in motion, the body in praise, the body in joy. As I wrote this, we were nearing the end of last fall’s Navaratri, the nine nights of the celebration of the goddess in Hinduism. I grew up dancing garba, a folk dance of Gujarat done during Navaratri, a dance done in a circle. I love garba because it’s fun & energetic – and because it’s a community art. Anyone can garba. Anyone can be part of the circle. Anyone can praise the feminine divine. Garba builds community through joy. This sense of the circle, of lila (divine play) is plaited in my poems.
And though I am not a visual artist, I have collaborated with visual artists, particularly the brilliant Anjali Deshmukh in embodied, public art. In July 2018, we created Weave & Woven, an event that explored home and belonging through interactive art. I had written my poems onto the walls of an art gallery while Anjali had created a magical architecture of arches, domes, and lines with ribbon. We invited folks to write & draw on the walls, learn garba & raas and dance with me, and be part of the art.
I love when art can be community creation, when artists make possible community creation. As the first artist in my immigrant family, I feel deeply a connection to communal art forms. For that reason, I’ve sought out ways to enable writing in community and writing through community.
How does the current political climate influence your art or creative process?
The current political moment is exhausting – and requires connection. I’ve been trying to keep joy, hope, resistance, and community in my practice, which means going to readings (such as fundraisers supporting migrant justice) and book launch celebrations while I do my work as an advocate for gender, racial, and economic justice. I feel a deep responsibility to affirm longings for justice, for possibility while recognizing the resurgence of white supremacy, misogyny, xenophobia, global fascisms (including in my two homelands of the U.S. and India), and oppressions facing us today. We need our truths to resist erasures. And I see creation as life-force, as part of continuing to live and love large, to bring about the world as we hope, the world we & future generations deserve.
What projects or pieces are you working on right now?
I developed more participatory art projects such as “Counting on Women” for Two Minutes to Midnight, a public art event in Sunnyside, Queens exploring climate and gender justice. In a public plaza, I asked folks: How do girls & women count? How do we count on girls & women? And I read excerpts of Miracle Marks in resonance & dialogue with the public wisdom.
October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and so I also shared from my work as an anti-violence advocate with book readings at CalArts and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I’m grateful to be creating in community, to be in dialogue with students & the everyday public, and to be moving across spaces, to be moving across possibilities, to be moving.
Purvi Shah won the inaugural SONY South Asian Social Service Excellence Award for her leadership fighting violence against women. During the tenth anniversary of 9/11, with the Kundiman organization, she directed Together We Are New York, a community-based poetry project highlighting Asian American voices. Terrain Tracks, her debut poetry collection on migration and belonging, won the Many Voices Project prize. Her latest book, Miracle Marks, explores women, the sacred, and gender & racial equity. She serves as a board member of The Poetry Project. You can learn more about Purvi’s work at her website, and follow her on Twitter @PurviPoets.
The Art of the Book Review, By Stan Sanvel Rubin
The Art of the Book Review, By Stan Sanvel Rubin
Earlier this year, we began to mull over the idea of highlighting the creative process of our poetry and CNF book reviewers, Stan Sanvel Rubin and Barrie Jean Borich. We wanted to devote a space to allow these long time reviewers and contributors the opportunity to share with our readers what the “essay review” means to them and why they enjoy working with Water~Stone Review.
This is a special two-part post. Our first post featured Barrie Jean Borich. This post was written by Stan Sanvel Rubin.
The privilege of writing long-form reviews for this excellent national magazine comes with a sense of personal responsibility. I’m a well-published poet myself, taught poetry at all levels for years, directed writing programs and a poetry archive, published dozens of interviews (and one book collection) with poets, co-edited a small press, and have been active in a national literary life. I’m working on my own new collection. I think I understand the risks, struggle, disappointment and joy from inside as well as from without. There’s never been a time when poets, with our perennial sense of exile, have flourished so well in America. But we’re not sure of our place. Reviews are part of this conversation. I look for the poetry that just might endure. If I can help it do that, that’s a bonus.
Years ago, I wrote professional film reviews, and enjoyed doing it, but the 1-5 star rating system that goes with that genre is wholly inappropriate to poetry. Reviewing involves evaluation, but I do not want my sensibility to pose as the ultimate judge. The keys for me are connection and context. I see my role as an intermediary and illuminator, connecting poets to audiences, making connections between poems within a book, connecting books to one another, so they can be rich and interesting to potential readers, rather than in competition.
First of all, I try to establish a larger context—a cultural, aesthetic, or philosophical issue—that expands the frame of consideration. 
A sense of history is part of this. The challenge is not to narrow my focus to books that are obviously similar, but the opposite: to embrace very diverse poets, to reveal the individual facets of each as well as what holds a specific collection together. This fairly complicated mission puts special weight on the selection process. I want there to be a lively mix in the final review. Nothing is determined in advance, regardless of fame and awards. I spend most of the year finding, seeking, and stumbling across new and recent titles that seem interesting for any reason at all. I end up with a small mountain of books by poets of diverse backgrounds and aesthetics. There are innumerable colored tabs sticking out like flags marking individual poems. I look for poets whose names, and sometimes presses, are unknown to me as well as the familiar, and usually introduce something of their biography with their work (I’ve had the distinct pleasure of writing about first books from small presses that went on to major national awards). I spend months skimming, reading, and re-reading, paring the pile down until I have a final set of several dozen that have taken hold of my mind or imagination. I sit and start writing my thoughts on these by hand on long legal pads before beginning a draft on the computer. The chosen books may have little or nothing in common, but each is a notable achievement in shaped language. They change and teach me. I hope to communicate that in a way that’s intellectually stimulating and maybe even entertaining.
As I write this, the overwhelming context for everyone is the pandemic-induced crisis and shutdown of national life that may never return to “normal.” With the time lag built into an annual review, we’ll know more by the time the next issue appears. My new review begins by taking up how, after the initial shock and disruption, poets and artists began to develop and invent new forms of connectedness– and maybe new ways for our poetry to matter. But this doesn’t mean the books I discuss necessarily will be about illness or healing, technology or crisis. Poetry works in the private, internal, and deep way of art as well as the assertive, communal, often loudly political way that is so American. The endless churn and enlargement of our culture is fascinating to me. We’re all part of it.
Stan Sanvel Rubin is the author of four collections of poetry, including There. Here. and Hidden Sequel, winner of the Barrow Street Poetry Book Prize. His work has been published in such journals as The Georgia Review, the Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, Ascent, and Poetry Northwest. His interviews with poets have been widely published. He is the founding director of the Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA at Pacific Lutheran University (PLU). He has also served as the Director of the Brockport Writers Forum and Videotape Library (SUNY), a multi-faceted literary arts program. He lives on the northern Olympic Peninsula of Washington state.
In the Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Juan Morales
In the Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Juan Morales
Tell us about your fiction piece “The Saddest Song” in Volume 22. How did it come to be?
The piece is based on a real grad school experience when I taught one of my first classes in a theater blackbox. I wanted to take a fictionalized version of this memory and connect it to the powerful relationships we have with music. Songs can capture specific times in our lives, and hearing those songs again can work just like a time machine. If it’s heartache, we can lose thousands of songs or specific ones we thought we would always love. They make us change the station or skip to the next track when it’s too much. I wanted the piece to take it a step further and ask, ‘Can we return to the music we’ve lost?’
What excites you as a writer? What turns you off, makes you turn away or stop reading a piece of writing?
First lines and titles always feel like an important priority. They set the tone, the expectations, open up possibilities, and entice us to return to what we just read. I also like those endings where I feel haunted and out of breath. There are a lot of common mistakes that I see as a teacher, while fully acknowledging I have committed those same errors before. This includes the twist everyone saw coming, confusing readers by using multiple points-of-view in a short amount of time, and the flashback within the flashback is really hard to pull off. Another one is using too many section breaks or chapter breaks. It can hurt the momentum and give the reader too many opportunities to put the book down.
What was an early experience that led to you becoming a writer?
I didn’t start taking writing seriously until my second year in college, but looking back, I realize that I have always been journaling and collecting scraps of writing in my notebooks since I was a pre-teen. Most of the time when I traveled, whether it be English, Ecuador, Scotland, Puerto Rico, or all over the US, I would always end my day by writing in my notebook, trying to reflect on everything I experienced. I also remember feeling good when the notebooks got beat up. The wear and tear mattered too. I wanted to preserve these places as best as I could. Even though I don’t feel brave enough to read most of them now, I still have all those notebooks.
What books, writers, art, or artists inspire you and your work? Do–or have–you had any mentors in your writing life?
As a kid, Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark, The Westing Game, and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH are examples of some of the books that were my sparks. I also regularly plundered the paranormal section of our library. When I started studying writing seriously, I then discovered a lot of writers that opened up the writing world more and made me want to write: Martín Espada, Flannery O’Connor, Kim Addonizio, Eavan Boland, Margaret Atwoodand Pablo Neruda. With mentors, I can cite my teachers, David Keplinger, Lisa D. Chavéz, and many others that still help me to this day. I also think back to my first AWP in Atlanta, when I was a young, scared writer, carrying copies of my first book in my backpack. It was writers like Richard Yañez, Francisco Aragón, and Rigoberto González that welcomed me to my community and also continued to help me find more opportunities. From there, I was able to find more support from all the writers I worked with at CantoMundo and Macondo too. All of this support and inspiration definitely helped me learn that we as writers are not alone, even when it feels like a solitary act.
Do you practice any other art forms? If so, how do these influence your writing and/or creative process?
In a previous life, I was in a band, regularly did theater, and I also used to paint. All three gave me a lot of foundational knowledge about performance, process, and persistence. I learned quickly that all of our mediums require practice and mistakes in order to capture our creative intentions. Some of these I would love to reintegrate into my life eventually and to see how they can intersect with my writing. I am currently working with my great musician friend, named Andrew Jones. He wrote 80s synth-based horror music to accompany poems from my third collection, The Handyman’s Guide to End Times. We did one performance and people loved it. We plan on recording them in the near future and doing more performances soon.
What craft element challenges you the most in your writing? How do you approach it? What is your quirk as a writer?
I’ve been told that I have strong title
s and endings, and some of my other quirks include gravitating toward creepy themes and imagery (maybe not so much in “The Saddest Song”). I tend to lean into my narrative and storytelling, so I continue to feel challenged to make my writing more lyrical and concise. Some questions that help me: How can I accomplish this story or poem with few sentences or lines? Can the piece end two sentences sooner? Are there repeated words or phrases that can be plucked out? Did I cut too much context? The last question helps me with balancing the work.
How does the current political climate influence your art or creative process?
Some days I feel paralyzed by my anger and outrage, and I feel overwhelmed. I can’t keep up with the scandals, the injustices, and complete lack of respect for our environment, people, and communities. On the more productive days, I look to my fellow writers that are often responding in real time to the Administration’s actions, the racism, the bigotry, and the hatred. They inspire me so much. They give me the energy to write and the realization that I have something to say. They also remind me that we can’t be silent and wait for things to change on their own. Our writing has the potential to create change and preserve what’s happening now. I think about social media fights going back and forth and never accomplishing anything. Then I think about how a story, poem, essay, or memoir can more effectively inspire change and action that can help us get through these ugly times.
What are some themes/topics that are important to your writing?
Social justice issues, my culture, my Ecuadorian and Puerto Rican heritage, and preserving places are important to my writing. So far, these themes have helped me build connections with other writers and readers. I continue to prioritize them, and I am also working to nurture humor and horror. Both are obsessions for me and new challenges I can’t wait to continue exploring.
What does your creative process look like? How does the environment you are in shape your work or where do you like to write?
Even now, I like to start all of my writing in notebooks whenever I can find time: morning dream transcriptions, travel logs, in-class writing with my students, and 30/30 challenges I try to do once a year. During a slower month (like May, July, or January), I will write one short piece a day in order to generate new work and to dig into the rougher drafts I keep in my notebooks. Once it’s typed, things really start to pick up even though time is still the enemy. I like to reassure my students that it’s okay if you can’t write daily, and I try to tell myself that too. I like to think the fight for writing time can actually become another way to raise the stakes.
What projects or pieces are you working on right now?
I have two projects underway. The first is a new collection of poems about my father who passed away in February 2019. The poems also explore my city of Pueblo, animals, Puerto Rico, ghosts, a few cryptids, and lucid dreaming. I am also working on a collection of flash fiction horror pieces, with each one titled after a pop song.
Juan J. Morales is the son of an Ecuadorian mother and Puerto Rican father. He is the author of three poetry collections: Friday and the Year That Followed, The Siren World, and The Handyman’s Guide to End Times, winner of the 2019 International Latino Book Award for Poetry, One Author, in English. His poetry has appeared on/in CSPAN2, Colorado Public Radio, Copper nickel, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Pleiades, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and others. He is a CantoMundo fellow, a Macondista, the editor/publisher of Pilgrimage Press, and department chair of English & World Languages at Colorado State University-Pueblo. You can follow Juan on Twitter: @moralesjuanj.
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In The Field: Revisiting a Conversation With Gabrielle Civil
In The Field: Revisiting a Conversation With Gabrielle Civil
From Gabrielle Civil:
“My Black Boy Dead” (Vol. 22) emerged from a kind of haunting. Although the poem resonates with recent anti-black violence, it came from a state of emergency in my youth. I grew up in Detroit during “the crisis of the black boy” and as people talked about their brothers, their cousins, their boyfriends, as teachers, preachers, and politicians wrung their hands and shook their heads, it was clear how much black boys were highly prized, precious, and deeply endangered. The poem emerges as a dream response to this state of impending loss. The black boy is loved, mourned, and never really known. A black boy becomes a stereotype, a target, a fortune, a consumer, a salvation. The poem exposes a desire to heal (man I cure ) and a deep craving for actual embodied connection (“someone to hold my hands”).
Photo Credit: Aly Almore
Gabrielle Civil is the author of two black feminist memoirs in performance art: Swallow the Fish, an Entropy Best Non-Fiction Book of 2017, and the recently released Experiments in Joy. Her writing has appeared in Poem-a-Day, Dancing While Black, Small Axe, Art21, MAI Journal, Kitchen Table Translation, and Obsidian. She has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Mexico and a 2019 Rema Hort Mann LA Emerging Artist Award. She teaches creative writing and critical studies at the California Institute of the Arts. You can read more about her work on her website.