Your creative nonfiction piece “Taking Each Other In” from Volume 23 is a flash essay that our editorial board members said “really earned its place” in this issue due to its lyricism and economy of space. Can you tell us the inspiration behind this essay?

This flash essay was part of a larger segmented essay on fears of what might happen toward the end of my working life. I was working several part-time jobs in education and retail businesses and worried I’d end up like an aunt working at a Woolworth’s, but we don’t have Woolworth’s anymore, so that was a worry, too. I included situations that explained my fears and worries and opinions–ungenerous at times–about the people involved. I applied for a seasonal job at an apple orchard gift shop and heard a mother of a 16-year-old kid tell him to put down on his application that he was good with people. If he was that good with people, did he need his mother telling him? I didn’t get a job there and wondered if he did. There was a young woman I worked alongside at a card shop who bragged about her psychology degree who was openly inpatient with me when I needed to hear cash register procedures two or three times when I had just started a job there. I had other examples of what worried or annoyed me, how these jobs didn’t pay much and limited what I could do and where I could go. One night as I did dishes, I thought about a friend’s father-in-law who had just died and how he took care of his family over the course of his long life. I don’t like doing dishes, but it gives me time to let my mind wander, and I thought I should include some solutions in the essay, rather than just my worries and complaints, to balance the essay and maybe improve my mindset at the time. The idea of a group of us living together when we were older, sort of a Midwestern version of the Golden Girls with no beaches or year-round sunshine spending time together and looking after each other, had been happy hour talk from time to time. It seemed that idea would be a change of feel for the other sections included in the essay. 

The ending to “Taking Each Other In” is delightfully surprising and I think I’ve often unconsciously put my hand to my throat each time I’ve read it. I think the ending was a risky move that really paid off. How did you know that you nailed that? Did you make several revisions on it, or did it just work out in one take?

When I write, I usually over-explain with too many details that need to be edited out. So with the idea for this paragraph I again wrote down more explanation on what we’d do together, until I just asked myself what was it I wanted to do with my friends, and I simply wrote the list, and let the reader imagine what the errands and car rides and walks around the lakes and the poetry readings would look like. And then I stopped before I added too much. It seemed so simple and straightforward, and at the same time, said a lot. 

After I had written the first paragraph I wondered if it could really happen–would it be a solution to my worries? There are lots of curves thrown at us in life and, like stories, they don’t always turn out the way we’d like. The ending is a reflection on the reality of the living arrangement and balances out the sweetness of the idea that it could work. Sometimes when I write poems and letters, when I get to the end, I think all I’ve provided is information without any personal comment, so I add a few more lines of my opinion. At the end of this one, I hated to say the plan might not work out, but it needed saying.

What do you think flash pieces in any genre need in order to be successful?

Boy, I wish I knew. I’m not an expert on good flash writing, but I know it when I see it, as the saying goes. It needs to have enough in it to make sense, and maybe not enough to make the reader stop and ponder, what if or how can that be. I’m still learning.

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?

My tiny hungers are very simple. I want to wear earrings again and not worry about losing them because they might get tangled in the straps of my face mask. I want to linger in the aisles of quilt shops and look and caress bolts of fabric while talking with quilters on their projects. I want to sit and visit with my friends over coffee and rhubarb desserts or wine and cheese. They are tiny, but not unimportant to me.

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 read lots of obituaries in papers and funeral home sites. I find out more about people I know, and find a connection because I went to school with their children or parents, or people I knew from the places I lived but never knew personally. I learn who they are or were, what they did, what brought them pleasure or pain. It seems like death shows up in my essays, but I think maybe it’s really their lives I’m remembering and writing about more than their deaths. It just happens that some people I write about are dead, and they had good stories.

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

I like reading essays that involve several seemingly unrelated topics that the writer winds together at the end. Joni Tevis and David Sedaris are masters who do that exceptionally well. Sigrid Nunez’ The Friend reads like a lyric essay though it is a novel about a woman remembering, and living with the memory of, her dead friend, and living with and helping his dog do the same. Colum McCann’s Apeirogon is another novel that looks like essays at times with information about the history of Israel and the Palestinians, birds, munition manufacturing, and mathematics, and reads as fiction in the story of two men–one Muslim and one a Jew–whose daughters were killed by gunfire. It’s a novel of 1,001 sections, some a line or two long, others a few pages that deftly tie all the topics together. Lydia Davis is another writer who makes me ask, “Is this fact or fiction, and how can I do this, too?” I read them for enjoyment, but I learn so much from their writing. 

I used to be a snob about mystery books, thinking they weren’t serious or relevant, and probably weren’t good writing–I didn’t know because I didn’t read them–and then I came across Henning Mankell who writes about social problems in Sweden and his troubled detective Kurt Wallander who deals with them in his city of Ystad. When something annoying used to happen to me, I’d say, “I’m moving to Sweden where things like this don’t happen,” but then I discovered life there wasn’t as perfect as I assumed. I soon found other Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and Icelandic crime stories with their troubled characters suffering through long winters, living in difficult marriages, and dealing with irritable workmates, and though the stories were good, I also learned political and societal problems can be weaved in to make them serious stories–more than just crime stories. Last summer an old friend (from the essay) introduced me to the Nick Herron Slough House series of spy stories set in contemporary London and full of more troubled characters barely hanging on to their jobs and lives. These are books of good storytelling that make me look to understand how he writes, too. 

Gwen Marston and Freddy Moran are two quilters I admire because of their use of color and design and ability to use what’s good and set aside what isn’t working. They lived across the country from each other, so had to work remotely making “parts,” different pattern pieces, that they’d put together when they met to make quilts. They’d audition the “parts” and use what worked, not feeling they had to keep anything. They “liberated” patterns to free up the idea that all squares had to look like old quilt patterns and brought new life to the quilt world. I took several workshops from them and learned to trust myself. They wrote guidelines in one of their quilt books that give advice that works for quilting or writing. 

Make what you want to make, and make it the way you want to make it.

Your chances of making a remarkably good quilt are increased when you take chances.

Quilts with energy and surprise are more likely to delight the viewer.

Never point out a mistake.

Don’t be afraid to abandon a project that isn’t working for you.

Work as much as possible every day.

Most important of all–make it.

(From Collaborative Quilting, Freddy Moran and Gwen Marston, 2006)

What projects are you working on right now?

I made a quilt this spring for a niece’s graduation from college. I used a pattern of overlapping circles I had made before so I knew the pattern, and I used black, white, gray and teal colored fabrics. After cutting fabric for a while I thought it needed some more zing, so I added a few spots of peach. Usually adding black and white to a quilt provides somewhere for the eye to rest, but in this case, it’s the peach that serves that function. Making that quilt was just what I needed after this pandemic year–it let me play around with colors, pattern, and design to be creative. I hope it’s what I needed to keep my creativity and work continuing.

Jackie Trytten has been a K-12 and postsecondary educator for over 30 years. She is an artist of textiles, watercolors, and stained glass, and holds an MFA from Hamline University. Her work has appeared in Rain Taxi. 

Your creative nonfiction piece “The Jellyfish Tide” from Volume 23 is a philosophical lyric essay that explores simultaneities and fate. Our board members who read and voted on including it in Volume 23 said it has “strategic imagery and language, with strong questioning from the writer.” Can you tell us a little bit about the inspiration behind this essay?

It’s funny to think of it as an essay. It seemed more like an effort, which I guess essai is the French word for, to try something. And for me to try to write something, I need a voice with more confidence than my own, one which utilizes whatever details service its needs—and yes, sometimes copying those details from my life’s history, from my memory, as in “The Jellyfish Tide.” So it’s both an essay, for that reason, and a piece of fiction for the cohesion which knits it together, that I owe completely to the voice. Call it a literary alter ego.

The inspiration for this piece was my home, where I live on the Northumberland Strait, and my own life, my own dreams. It was written five years ago actually. Since then I’ve changed my approach quite a bit, I’ve begun to find ways to interact with my immediate environment—more effectively than sitting down in front of a computer can allow for. Now I walk around, outside, with my voice recorder. Go to the grocery store with my voice recorder. Go running with my voice recorder. Whatever it takes.

So the inspiration for this piece, and what has inspired me since, is immediacy. 

Water is very central to this essay, from the setting where you witness the jellyfish tide, to the resonating metaphor that life and death very seamlessly flow into each other. How does place and natural settings play into your writing?

The world is the other half of it, the part I can’t control—not to say I can control my own writing, or how I write, but without the natural world I wouldn’t have anything to write about, except my states, except my change, which I could do, be like Beckett in his room—like Molloy or Malone or any of his avatars, getting down to the bare bones of what can be communicated in literature. But that’s Beckett’s playground. My playground is the natural world, the things that happen around me, my memories, the lives of my characters, affected by an occasional literary twist. At least for now.

You quote Nietzche in the epigraph—this idea of being in love with fate. Do you feel that writing is a fateful act? Or rather, what does fate mean to you and your writing practice?

In order to answer this question I’ve had to Google the definition of “fate.” It says, “a power beyond human control that is believed to determine what happens.” It’s funny how we so rarely know the full definition of the words we use. But I’ve trusted “fate” meant something like this. And is writing a fateful act? Well, I suppose if you’re a writer—one who writes—then it is. Especially if it comes to take up your whole life, as it has mine, especially since the beginning of the pandemic. I think if you write, and you search honestly in your writing, and try not to lie to yourself, it improves your conscience, sharpens it, which is a painful thing to do, but you become a better person for others and for yourself. Sure, maybe it heightens your nerves and shortens your life-span. Sometimes I think if I didn’t write I wouldn’t have to feel so guilty. So writing truthfully is a fateful act. You uncover yourself each time you do it (do it honestly I mean). And here’s the definition of honest, as I Google it: “free of deceit and untruthfulness, sincere.” 

If you’re an artist you do it in your work. And perhaps as an artist you have the great privilege, which talent allows you, to live honestly, at least in your work—I think this is a quality missing in a lot of literature these days. But I’ve dedicated myself to it because I believe that it’s also a quality that’s slipping away from humanity constantly, and has been ever since we became humanity. There need to be writers and artists, who despite all odds, write honestly. I hope this answers the question. 

But in summation, simplistically, what does fate mean to my writing, to my practice? It means the fulfilment of who I am at the moment of writing. It allows me to move past the strictures of my self into a new being.

A new being, you could say, I was fated to become. But only through writing do I become that being, so there’s the rub. 

Because, if fate is beyond human control, then I didn’t choose to be a writer. But I choose each day to write, and that creates, perennially, and recreates who I am. So you see, also, this is why it’s hard to draw a line between fiction and non-fiction. Every writer, who writes truthfully, which I think is the greatest commodity in literature, the rarest commodity, embraces who they are, no holds barred, at the moment of writing. Disagree with me if you want, this is just how it seems to me at this moment.

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?

As I answer these questions, I have my first dose of Pfizer coursing through my veins, and feel maybe a little bit feverish. So I’ll shoot from the hip and say what it is that I hunger for—tiny things—which are hard to pick, because there are really a lot of tiny things in the plenum of matter. Several of those tiny things are my friends. I hunger for my friends—I haven’t seen them, most of them, since before 2019, when I left England where I was doing my MA. If a city could be called a tiny thing, I would say I hunger for Berlin, where I lived before that. But now as I walk around my yard, I realize all that longing for faraway stuff, even my friends, is a poor substitute for this tiny thing I touch now: the fresh and nubile leaf of an alder. I hunger for this, I’m grateful for this—it’s such a peaceful thing.

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?

At the time of writing “The Jellyfish Tide” one major obsession of mine was metaphysics. The philosophies of Rene Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz. The idea that underlying all matter was a substance connecting us to it, and to each other, and to God. I think I liked Spinoza’s idea the best: that all things are one substance, all things are God.

But since then, and probably beginning in “The Jellyfish Tide”, I grew the balls needed to write about my sexuality, my changing sexuality—what I’d missed out on in high school by trying to be heterosexual. So, maybe not sexuality, which seems to tokenize desire, but rather the psychology of change, the psychology developed under the strife and pressure that are set upon young people who cannot lie to themselves but are forced to lie to those around them and end up lying to themselves—like me trying to be heterosexual, being in a relationship with a girl, whom I did love. The psychology that I’m obsessed with exploring is the emergence of a self that has been pushed under, that has been terrified into hiding. This is not an easy thing to write about, but it’s a cathartic thing to write about. And I suppose you could say, for the last five years since writing “The Jellyfish Tide” I’ve been obsessed with this catharsis. The catharsis of denuding oneself of shameful or limiting fictions.

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

Yeah, I’ve had a handful of mentors—people who’ve told me to keep to my path, no matter how far it strikes out from the norm of publishable literature. People who’ve told me that writing is all that matters: Nathan Filer, Richard Kerridge. Novelists and poets I studied with in England. My therapist, from the time I lived in Victoria, BC, Madelaine Tiller—who I credit with being the first person who actually listened to me. 

Writers who I admire immensely include Dostoevsky, as you can guess because of his psychological and deeply personal profiles. How much of his novel consists of page-by-page spiritual evolution. The same with Clarice Lispector. And I know I’ve probably misinterpreted all my favourite authors, you know, as Harold Bloom says, but I also think I’ve taken from each of them what it was I needed to begin writing my own way. To begin giving page-by-page the spiritual evolution of my avatars. 

Writers who write sex, like Marguerite Duras in The Lover. Jean Genet. Bolaño. I even have a soft spot for Louis-Ferdinand Céline, that disturbed human being, who tromps roughshod through Europe, Africa, and North America, hating equally all people he sees, with such style and passion, uncovering hypocrisy like it’s nobody’s business. 

There are other writers on this list, but I think it’s risky telling people all of your favourites.

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

Haha! What is my quirk? Like, what is my Zooey Deschanel quirk, what are my bangs? I don’t know what my quirk is. I suppose I tend to ramble a bit in my writing. I’ve been accused of that before by my professors, but I do it to fill the spaces between truths that are apparent to me at the moment of writing, and all the in-between stuff is necessary for the synthesis of said truths.

“I’m searching, I’m searching,” Clarice Lispector’s book, The Passion According to GH, begins. 

So I suppose, due to this, due to the way I write, and due to the demands of what I’m trying to write, plot is definitely something I’ve yet to completely get comfortable with. It so often seems arbitrary—this happens, that happens. Things are happening all the time. I believe between two trees, walking across a lawn, you could contain an entire psychological novel.

So, plotting, in the novelistic sense, I’m not sure I know how to do that. I’m not sure I wanna know how to do that, but still sometimes, I feel pushed, from beyond, perhaps by the demands of the publishing world, and the demands of the novel form, to plot my novels. However, that’s a part of the literary world that enough writers already occupy, and if it makes it harder for me to get published because I don’t feel like walking into their territory and trying to fit into their camp—a thing which I tried to do so much throughout my life, walk into other peoples’ territories and fit into their camps—then so be it. I’ll strike my own path as usual. Maybe that’s my quirk, I’ve always been very solitary, and rarely know how to do anything that adds up to something of use, except pursue a thought and hopefully reach a conclusion that relieves me, or the reader, of some spiritual agony.

What projects are you working on right now?

The last two years I’ve been isolated on the Northumberland Strait with hardly anyone to talk to. So you can imagine a lot of writing’s gotten done. There are three projects, novel-sized, and one collection, which “The Jellyfish Tide,” will appear in, that I’m working on. One of the novels is called William’s Workbook and it’s about a young man who was molested as a child, and who has no memory of the event, but is visited as a thirty-year-old by his abuser. That novel caused me a lot of pain and took me to quite a few personal hells. I still have a hard time looking at it. I’m also working on something lighter at the moment, called The Heir, and it comprises the day-to-day life of a person waiting for the pandemic to end. It’s about a young white guy, Burpee Walker, who inherits property on the beach after the death of his fiancé, Thomas, who was much older than him. The idea of the book is that everything Burpee experiences, whether its Hey Google! playing Ravel, or his disquiet over what’s happening in Modi’s India, whether it’s his Wikipedia search into “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima”, that terrifying piece of music, or the property disputes with his neighbours over his inheritance, all of it is permitted to the page as he looks out and sees a world that seems to have no use for him. Or at least that’s what the book seems to be at this point. 

*Thanks for these wonderful questions, I hope you enjoyed reading my answers as much as I enjoyed answering.

Krischan Stotz is a queer writer from Canada. His writing is concerned with finding the new and unused parts of the modern soul and expressing them in symphony with nature. His work has appeared in EVENT and The Antigonish Review and has been published in chapbook by Anstruther Press. Currently, Stotz writes from his home province of Nova Scotia, where he’s querying agents for his first novel, Trespassing, and creating his second novel. Krischan is a co-collaborator at www.locussolus.club. You can learn more about him at his website. 

Your poem “Primate” in Volume 23 explores traits and knowledge, things we learn from each other, from our ancestors. Can you tell us about the inspiration behind this poem?

Yes, exactly. “Primate” sits atop a mantle of Maker stories, starting from time immemorial. One is the myth of Prometheus the Titan who formed man in the gods’ image from river clay and gave us creative fire so that we could become makers. Another is the story of Victor Frankenstein, who, inspired by 19th-century scientific advances, built a thinking creature he would come to fear and pity. And of course, Adam, as the Book of Genesis tells, brought with his birth the knowledge of good and evil. John Milton gave Adam the lines,“Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay/To mould me man? Did I solicit thee/From darkness to promote me?” 

James Marsh’s documentary Project Nim, which involves the story of women choosing to adopt chimps as their own children (in the name of a language experiment which attempted to determine whether a chimpanzee raised from birth in a human environment can acquire the rudiments of grammar), presented itself as a place to enter the oft-told tale, powered by the creative force’s call to violate nature–and the suffering it can engender.

The concept of language is very powerful in this poem. There’s the line “But I’m as far from who I was as you are near” that sticks out to me; when I read it I sense the fluidity of language and its transcendence of power. What does language and our ability to converse in a multitude of ways mean to you?

Those lines speak to inescapably contrary impulses—creating, civilizing, naturalizing—precisely at their point of intersection, which is language. The narrator is voluntarily surrendering to the urges of the wild that draw her back to Eden, shedding her intellect in order to become more symbiotically connected to the chimp/baby even as that chimp/baby is learning language and, as humans will, learning how to employ it as a manipulative tool, a power grab. An earlier draft has the final couplet: “…One day/he’ll read these words, forget we came from clay.” I guess I switched that out because it was too summarizing but here it may serve to show the purpose of intent.

What are some pieces of knowledge you would pass on to newer poets still learning the craft?

Your timing is uncanny: I just finished a poem titled, “To a Young Poet.” Though it offers no technical advice, it does address how to nurture and “go with the flow” of inspiration. Write down even infelicitously phrased ideas. Scavenge everywhere (what you see; what you hear; what you read; memory, of course) to discover your objective correlatives. Be alone as much as possible. Bask.

I’ve been enjoying watching Alena Smith’s Dickinson which imagines many scenes that provoke Emily to pick up her pen.

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?

Coincidentally– or predictably?–some of them appear in “Primate”: mother/child relations; the individual’s experience foregrounded against our collective story known as history; the purposes of memory; domestic scenes against natural ones; hands; and windows, always windows!

What books, writers, art, or artists inspire you and your work? Who are some mentors in your writing life?

Wallace Stevens, Richard Wilbur, Jorie Graham, James Merrill, Derek Walcott, Charles Wright, A.E. Stallings, Rachel Hadas, Don Paterson, and Roberto Calasso.

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

In other words, what’s the weakest arrow in my quiver? I’d say everything that revolves around the work of revision is a challenge for me. During the second winter of the pandemic, I dove into a dusty file marked “To Mine for Other Poems,” and what I found there were mostly drafts of poems half-written. The fact that I’d not even labelled the file “To Revise” shows the extent to which I’d resisted the advice often dispensed: “When you come to an impasse, put your draft aside to return to later.” Somehow, that never felt right to me, felt like abandoning a child, so, though I actually committed that act, I couldn’t name it. The difficulties posed are threefold: 1) How to re-enter the mental space I’d inhabited when I quit the poem. What were the concerns that were successfully written and which not?; 2) Being receptive to new directions that are not apparent in the draft. This is how something stunted called “Passages” resulted in the finished “To a Young Poet”. Once it had an addressee (originally it was written in the second person but the “you” was entirely generic), all the ideas that had been lazily consuming too much space found a direction; and 3) Determining when it is finished. This problem obviously rears its head during the creation of any writing. Molly Peacock told me a long time ago to lower my expectations on this, not to wait for it to click: “You’ll never know for sure when it’s done and you may find yourself years later thinking of the perfect substitutive word or phrase, even for something already in print.”

What projects are you working on right now?

Just tackling my folder of Revisions. I’ve done three or four so far and if there is a reward aside from the delayed gratification of plucking these mature blooms, it is in the sensation that’s something like setting the poems before a mirror and recognizing an earlier self.

Amy Bagan’s manuscript, “Native to Now,” was selected as a finalist for the Richard Wilbur Book Award 2021.  Her poems have been awarded the Grolier Poetry Prize,  finalist for the 2016 James Hearst Poetry Prize,  finalist for the 2019 Able Muse Write Prize, finalist for the 2020 Frost Farm Prize, and finalist for Southwest Review’s Morton Marr Poetry Prize, among others. Her manuscript “Sand-Blind” was selected as a National Poetry Series prize finalist. Her work appears in Measure, The Cortland Review, Denver Quarterly, Northwest Review, Southern Poetry Review, North American Review, Mosaici, Western Humanities Review, Able Muse, and Salmagundi, among others.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What projects are you working on right now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What projects are you working on right now?

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

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

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