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 for Water~Stone Review. 

This is a special two-part post. Part two will feature Stan Sanvel Rubin. This post was written by Barrie Jean Borich.

I contribute what is commonly called “the essay review,” which, defined broadly, is a hybrid of the book review and the personal essay. I would not say that I have parameters in mind, but my models are the reviews Judith Kitchen wrote for Water~Stone Review for many years, which I will say include three notable features: identifiable voice, eclectic scope of reading, and connections back to creative nonfiction as a genre category.

Process is probably too formal a word in creating these reviews. Some of this has to do with whatever creative nonfiction question I am most interested in at the moment — perhaps because of something I’m teaching, or a craft essay I am writing for a conference or talk. Sometimes issues or concepts I’ve been teaching for years keep repeating through my classrooms, which leads me to write on these themes in order to pay attention in new ways. Otherwise the process is basically instinctual. Which books do I feel most drawn to write about? And what are their common moves, themes, or resonances? And how does that relate to where I am and what’s happening around me as I begin to write?

I honestly don’t feel I am any kind of expert on the book review form. I would say that there seems to be more of an appetite of late for reviews that wander a bit into the ideas and associations of a book or other work of art, as seen through the peculiar eye of the reviewer.  I’m not that interested in reading or writing reviews that simply recount storyline, or follow that old review model where the reviewer has to say one negative thing to justify the praise. Neither am I interested in positing my own judgment as universal. I am interested in the ways form moves story, in the way our proximity or distance from events changes story, in the way surprise, or vulnerability, or our relationship to what we call “the truth” interacts with story, and I am interested in the ways our memories and self-portraits interact with the places and people that made us. I am interested in the ways we all perform ourselves in nonfiction, and I am interested in what happens when books call attention to their own performances.

I can’t think of a time that I reviewed a book without prior knowledge of that book, or prior intention to read that book. This is perhaps one way an essay-review differs from a standard book review. The essay review is about the essayist’s reading sensibilities and reading desires, and puts conversation before judgement. In that context, I am always in the position of choosing the books I am going to write about and that choice has to do with how I want to weigh in on the current state of nonfiction literature, and the current state of the world. That said, when essay-reviewing, I do look for different resonances then I might if say, I was teaching a book, because I am writing to respond to some essayistic question.

I am a journal editor myself, and when requesting reviews for my magazine — Slag Glass City, a nonfiction journal of the urban essay arts — I am looking for a conversation about books that engages with our mission. We publish essay reviews that seek to expand our engagement with urbanity, identity, sustainability, and climate change. As the editor, I appreciate how critical writing expands our engagement and broadens our scope, while also allowing us to participate in the ongoing creative nonfiction conversation. As far as Water~Stone Review is concerned, I always harken back to my own days as the journal’s first nonfiction editor — an editorial point of view that grew out of the whole reason Water~Stone Review has a tradition of nonfiction reviewing. I’ve always loved the story about Judith Kitchen agreeing to be a regular reviewer for the then-new magazine only if she could focus on nonfiction. I have always understood her request as a dedication to nonfiction as an intellectual and artistic category, worthy of our lifelong attention. 

Aside from attempting some short pieces about living through the pandemic, I am working on a book called Oh What A Beautiful City — a book-length lyric essay that interrogates what it means to live in the palimpsest of urban history, memory, and the inevitably aging body. The particular city is Chicago, from the 1950s to the present day, though the writing reaches out to all urban spaces. The point of focus is my own, that of a queer female who has lived through addiction and recovery as well as a timeline of constantly shifting fields of understanding in regards to gender, sexuality, and the body.

Barrie Jean Borich is the author of Apocalypse, Darling, shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award which PopMatters said “soars and seems to live as a new form altogether.” Her memoir Body Geographic won a Lammy, and in a starred review, Kirkus called the book, “an elegant literary map that celebrates shifting topographies as well as human bodies in motion.” Borich’s My Lesbian Husband won the ALA Stonewall Book Award. She is the editor of Slag Glass City, a journal of the urban essay arts. She is an associate professor in the English Department and MA in Writing and Publishing Program at DePaul University in Chicago.

Tell us about your fiction piece “Where Strays Might Find Comfort” in Volume 22. How did it come to be?

My wife and son and I live in South Carolina. Behind our house is a small duck pond, and beyond that a strip of swampland. A few years ago, an alligator moved into the pond from the swap. He was enormous, six feet easy. We’d watch him patrol the waters and then come up on the banks in the afternoon to sleep in the sun. It was terrifying—I’ve read about those things taking people’s arms off, snatching children and dragging them under—but also fascinating, our proximity to this prehistoric killing machine (I might have been a little more invested than my wife, who was keenly aware that we don’t have a fence in our backyard). I wanted to craft a story around the experience, but as I began developing the characters I realized that one voice wasn’t going to cut it. I liked all of them and wanted to hear what they had to say. So, as an experiment, I wrote the story from multiple POVs. It’s something I don’t see very often in short fiction, but it’s really amazing when writers can pull it off. Whether I’ve managed to do that, I don’t know—that’s up to the reader—but it taught me a lot about voice all the same, and I like to think that if I can come away from a story with a least a little new perspective, that’s a win.

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

I’m drawn to characters who are damned in some way. Most of my fiction centers on people who are on the verge of crisis. I love exploring that brief period right before the rug is pulled out from beneath them—I’m probably more interested in that than the crisis itself, especially if I know that it’s the sort of trouble they won’t be able to bounce back from. Maybe I’m just a negative person, but I don’t really want to see them weather the turmoil and come through on the other side. Happy endings never ring true to me. I don’t like excessively sad endings, either, but I do want to see the characters struggle against the certainty of their own downfall. That’s sort of what fiction is, really—characters wrangling with circumstances beyond their control. Amazingly, it took me a long time to realize this; for a long time, I tended to write characters who had things happen to them but never made any major decisions of their own. As I’ve gotten older, however, I’ve become far more interested in watching characters decide things, and I’m especially drawn to characters who make bad decisions. For me, that’s what makes for a cool character, not the way he/she looks or sounds or behaves, but the way they deal with the consequences of their choices, and it’s always more interesting when those choices are misguided.

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

When I was a kid, my dad went through a Stephen King phase. At the time, I hated reading. It was something that school foisted upon us, and most of what we were required to read either didn’t seem to apply to us or was painfully outdated. (Or baseball. God, there are so many fucking stories about boys playing baseball.) It all seemed so safe. To me, that was what literature was, just a constant rehashing of bland morality tales, so I had little interest in books. That is, until the day that I pulled down from my parents’ shelf a copy of King’s The Wastelands, mainly because I thought the cover was cool. Man, it gripped me like no story ever had. There were gun battles and robots and dimensional portals and loads of curse words. Up until then, I didn’t even know that stories could do these things, not unless there was some lesson to teach. But there was no hidden agenda; this was just an author having a good time. So naturally, that began my own King phase, during which I began experimenting with fiction. It was all terrible, of course, a bunch of pseudo-horror dreck, but the feeling of putting the words on the page, of crafting characters and presenting them with some sort of trouble to deal with—that part was riveting. It helped me to make sense of the world, to place it in some sort of context. So, while I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I got older (though by high school I was fairly certain I was going to be a heavy metal rock star), I did know that I wanted it to involve writing.

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

There are certain books and authors I come back to time and again, particularly when I find myself stuck on a piece. I like Ben Fountain, the stylishness of his prose, and Curtis Sittenfeld’s understanding of character psychology. I’ve also been rereading lately Eric Puchner, Maile Meloy, and Adam Johnson. I’ve received plenty of support from the English departments at Virginia Tech and Coastal Carolina University, but I would consider author Ed Falco a true writing mentor. He was my advisor in grad school and is still a close friend. I think every writer needs someone with more experience than them to be supportive and encouraging, particularly when things aren’t going well writing-wise, and that’s Ed for me. Also, I know I can count on my friends Weston Cutter and Carrie Meadows, both of whom are outstanding writers, to offer honest feedback on my work. They aren’t afraid to let me know when I’m phoning it in, which is something else that every writer needs, a network of other writers who won’t bullshit you. Sometimes it can be hard to take, but we need to get knocked down from time to time, if only to realize that there’s always more to strive for, more to learn about the craft.

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

I play the guitar and I like to write songs. They definitely inform each other, though to be honest I’m not entirely sure how. All I know is that when I get sick of one, I can usually get some mileage out of the other. I’m not an especially gifted songwriter, but at the very least it gets my mind off of fiction for a time, which makes the writing process much more rewarding when I come back to it.

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

I’m more critical about my work than anyone else. I suppose most writers are like this to an extent. There are a few things I think I do fairly well, but I’m always trying to improve. To that end, I find myself making some of the same moves over and over again in a lot of my writing, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it keeps me from developing the confidence to try new things. I’ve always admired writers whose work can span a variety of styles and voices, whatever the story demands. So I’m constantly working to get myself out of that box. And it’s tough! Those habits you develop early on can be hard to break, so I think it’s important to expose oneself to as many different kinds of writing as possible.

As far as quirks go, I really enjoy writing in second-person. I like that it’s something you don’t come across very often. The first time I tried it was on a whim. I’d been struggling for years with a story, trying it from different points of view and different tenses, but nothing felt right. I don’t know how I got the idea to try second-person, maybe just because I was out of ideas, but as soon as I did it just clicked and I was able to finish the piece pretty quickly. Too much of it can get a little gimmicky (once, in an undergrad workshop, this dude wrote 40 single-spaced pages in second-person, which is just too damn much for me), but it’s something I like to experiment with. I appreciate the immediacy of it, the way it places you in the driver’s seat of the story, so to speak.

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

I can’t say I’m a very political writer, at least not consciously. I don’t trust my own opinions enough to weave them into a story. It’s not that I don’t have beliefs—I do, but beliefs are fickle, and too much certainty about them can be dangerous. So I’m always questioning mine, which makes me less inclined to produce anything politically-charged. I do, however, find that issues of violence, particularly gun-related violence, find their way into my work quite often. I was an MFA student at Virginia Tech when the massacre occurred (I was fortunate not to have been on campus at the time), and I remember the fallout when it was discovered that the shooter was from our department, so that’s an experience I come back to a lot. And it’s hard to write about something like that without it becoming political, though I try very hard to lecture or preach in my work. I’ve never been a fan of fiction that tries to sway me on an issue. What I’m interested in is the way arguments like the gun issue are publicly framed. Despite my own skittishness about firearms, I’m way more interested in using fiction to explore commonalities between people instead of exploiting differences.

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

I tend to cycle through various themes. My first book explored notions of sex and intimacy from a number of different perspectives. Of course, that was a while ago; now I’m married and have a kid, and my priorities are different, which means that the themes I invoke are different, too. As I mentioned, I’m interested in violence (which isn’t the same as writing violent stories); I’m curious about the longer-lasting and sometimes harder-to-see effects of violence. Each story is different and has its own agenda, but most of them seem to flirt in some way with the notion of how we harm each other, whether intentional or not. That being said, I’m not always conscious of this when I first begin a piece. Most of the time, I just begin with an image or a character, and as I write the theme develops around it. It’s sort of an automatic process. I don’t really understand it all that well, I just roll with it.

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 try to write every day, though with my family and work commitments that isn’t always possible. My process is messy, which I suspect is the case for a lot of writers. I prefer to work in the morning while I’m still fresh, especially if I’m drafting a new piece. Sometimes I work in my home office, though it can get kind of sterile, so I spend a lot of time at coffee shops as well. I’ve heard people talk about productive distractions, and I think there’s something to that, though really it just depends on my mood; sometimes I want to be alone to work, other times I need to be in proximity to others.

One thing that took me some time to accept about myself is that I’m a slow writer; while some pieces can come together in a matter of months, I’ve spent years working on particular stories. I used to think I was just doing it wrong—how was it that some of my favorite writers could churn out books yearly, while it might take me upwards of a year to perfect twenty freaking pages? The weird thing, though, is that once I accepted that I’m just not as fast as those folks, I started cranking out drafts much more quickly. Knowing your process and accepting it can give you confidence, I think. I’m still not as fast as I’d like to be, but I’m comfortable with my own process, and I think that’s way more important than the number of pages you’re able to produce in a given period of time.

What projects or pieces are you working on right now?

I’ve got a novel that I’m shopping around, and I’m working on a new collection of short fiction. I’ve also been dabbling more in poetry and creative nonfiction, neither of which comes naturally to me, so I’m sort of starting from ground up in those departments.

The Hub City Writers Project is hosting Jeremy Griffin for a conversation and Q&A on June 11, 2020. Tickets and more information about the event can be found here. 

Jeremy Griffin is the author of the story collections A Last Resort for Desperate People: Stories and a Novella from SFA Press and Oceanography from Orison Books. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as the Alaska Quarterly Review, The Greensboro Review, Indiana Review, and Shenandoah. He has received support from the South Carolina Arts Commission and he teaches at Coastal Carolina University, where he serves as faculty fiction editor of Waccamaw: A Journal of Contemporary Literature. You can learn more about Jeremy Griffin at his website here. 

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

I was lucky to grow up less than a mile away from both sets of my grandparents. I saw them all the time; they helped raise me. My sister and I spent most of our time with my paternal grandparents who spoke fluid English. In contrast, in my maternal grandparents’ home, everyone spoke Polish—my mom, grandmother, grandfather, and uncle but they never taught it to me. I always found that curious but came to understand it as a decision made by many immigrants at the time that felt to them like a break from the old country and a new beginning for the next generation.

Then in my thirties I found out that my grandfather had been in a Nazi prison camp and my grandmother had been held as a cook for the Germans. No one had ever spoken of it, but the air always had; I could feel its weight. Knowing this made me look at other moments in that house differently. Who knows what else was hidden from me?

So, I grew up around grandparents that in some ways left their past behind. My grandmother cooked all the Polish foods, they went to Polish mass, kept Polish friends and traditions, but planted them new in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. In fact, just this past summer I asked my mom if she wanted to visit Krakow, my grandparents’ home city, and she asked “Why would I want to go there?” I guess the longing for roots I feel skipped her generation, as well. That lack of desire to connect to the past creates a vacuum for me, a canyon of space I feel but can’t exactly name because, well, I don’t know what there is to say about it since no one ever told me.   

In addition to the language barrier and silence on the war, there were other moments in that house that felt heavy and I wanted to explore them to try and understand or grapple with my experiences. Now that my grandparents have both passed there is much I will never know. For someone like me who is open, curious, wants answers, investigates truth, it is hard to accept. This poem is me trying to make peace with it all somehow.

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

When I read poems I am looking to be swept in by the music of the language, held by the concrete detail of imagery, and surprised by new metaphors. Emily Dickinson famously said that she knew when she read a poem because it felt like the top of her head was taken off. Similarly, good poetry creates a physical reaction in my body’s center. I feel it in my belly.

Clichés, wordy syntax, and abstractions are an immediate turn off for me—an indication that the poet has not written a poem for the reader. Poems that are overly abstract remain private. They stimulate only the writer’s memory instead of creating an experience for the reader. They might as well hang a big sign on telling the reader to KEEP OUT.

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

As someone who has graduated from an MA, MFA, and PhD program, I have been inspired by and mentored by many writers. They have not only been those who taught courses, but the writers who went through the programs with me, and the writers we read. Inspiration comes from many places and happens on many levels.

I am endlessly inspired by the young Walt Whitman and his perception of poetry. His “Song of Myself” is the quintessential American poem and I would say the quintessential human poem for the 21st century. Every time I teach it I tear up in class and I find that every time I read it I am affected more deeply. As for living poets, I consistently return to Dorianne Laux whose poems are unpretentious, relative to my life, and aesthetically pleasurable. I also love Laura Kasischke, Sharon Olds, and Muriel Rukeyser. 

Since I was an undergraduate I have been blessed to have as a friend and mentor William Heyen who I will visit whenever I am in New York. He not only influenced my aesthetics, but more importantly has been to me an example of what it means to live as a writer. His devotion and discipline are inspiring. And he is always working on a new project, collaborating with and supporting visual artists, and forever engaged with the work of those writers who preceded him. His bits of advice echo in my head and I share them now with my own students. Some of these include: “Who cares if it’s true?” “The poem is always smarter than the poet.” And one I maybe haven’t followed so strictly, “Don’t get caught up in politics.” He thought that doing so would distract you from your real work: writing poetry. Of course, once I told him I remembered him saying I should have my kids young to which he replied that he couldn’t remember saying that and he wasn’t sure if that was the best advice—but you know, at the time, that’s what he could offer! So is life. As Whitman said about contradicting himself, “I am large. I contain multitudes.” And I think this is true.  Even if our understanding and opinions change due to new experiences it’s good to have a store hold of advice, that like pieces of puzzle, you can apply when it fits.

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

I do. Poetry and photography are my main art forms for which I have received awards and residencies. In fact, I have a photograph housed at the museum in Gettysburg National Military Park from the time I spent as an AiR [Artist in Residence] there. But as an artist I’ve expressed myself in all sorts of ways throughout the years—acrylic paintings, miniatures and jewelry with Sculpey clay, glass paint, beadwork, pastels. I’ve played piano, flute, drums, guitar. I danced tap, ballet, jazz all my life and minored in dance in college. Nowadays I will sing when my husband pulls out his guitar. I’d also place in this expressive category baking, cooking, and gardening which all contain elements of expression and a creative process. 

Currently I am dappling in collage that blends poetry into its form. In terms of poetry, photography and collage are certainly practices that depend on similar approaches—the image, the frame, and the relationships between objects in that frame. So often I will find myself poeming phrases and lines while I take photographs or piece together collages. In fact, I once wrote a poem about taking a photograph of a Swallowtail. Then my dad painted a portrait from my photograph. Then I wrote an essay about the poem-photograph-painting transformation. It’s like an ouroboros!

Aside from photography and collage though, the other art forms, for me, are more removed from the writing process. They offer me another way to release creativity and free up my mind for future writing projects rather than feed them directly.

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

As I tend to write poems that are politically aware or comment socially, current events have often influenced my writing by becoming subject or impetus. Lately, however, the opposite is true. Listening to and reading the news has become poison for my creativity—it is overwhelmingly difficult to process the immense irresponsibility and narcissism we as a country are demonstrating in regard to guns, immigration, and especially climate change. The actions by the Trump Administration in regard to all three are heartless, mindless, and embarrassing and I feel such an urgency, a siren blaring, that when I am engaged in reading or thinking about politics all I want to do is act. I begin to feel like these issues—global, neighborly, critically important-for-life issues—eclipse art making, because unless we intercede, we may not have a place to make art at all.  

In the human world, art has a place for implementing changes in consciousness. It is indeed an impetus for change but today’s political climate triggers in me a survival impulse rather than a creative impulse. I try to write and instead spin off into contemplating how fragmented we are as a citizenry, how difficult it has become to communicate with each other, and how isolated we have all become in our narrowing identities. Last year I published an article that addressed this—the need for what in his essay “Democratic Vistas” Walt Whitman called our common skeleton and greater morality that comes from a shared sense of history and body of literature written by our “great imaginators.” It is, like during the Civil War in his time, crucial that we individuals who comprise the United States find a way to unite. I agree with Whitman—and Thomas Jefferson for that matter—that we Americans must take pride in our great writers (and artists) and embrace our shared identities sung through their voices. I don’t know…maybe the answer to healing our current political crisis IS art and literature…

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

My collection of poems The Ghosts of Lost Animals is a good representation of the themes that wind their way through my poems. Women’s lives; the body; ecology; the relationship between humans and wilderness; love, marriage, and longing are all themes I frequently explore. The poems I am writing currently are focused on the medical experiences of infertility, environmental deterioration and our Earth’s sixth extinction, as well as American myths and the supernatural. I am interested in the ways individual experiences challenge common knowledge and inform our lives, how we build an understanding of reality. It seems, returning to the ideas of today’s political climate, truth itself is on trial. I am trying to explore what I can of this in concrete ways.

Michelle Bonczek Evory is the author of The Ghosts of Lost Animals, winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize (Gunpowder Press), and a book on craft, Naming the Unnameable: An Approach to Poetry for New Generations (Open SUNY Textbooks). Her poetry has been featured in the Best New Poets anthology and in many journals and magazines. In 2015, she and her husband, poet Rob Evory, were the inaugural Artists in Residence at Gettysburg National Military Park. She teaches in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and mentors poets at The Poet’s Billow. 

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

Photo Credit: Ana Min

I wrote the first draft of this poem in 2014 during my time in the Loft Mentor Series. We were having a workshop with one of the mentors and were given the prompt to “write a story in 15 minutes.” Many of my poems are narrative, so I wrote this piece as a kind of poetic scene mining my childhood memories. Writing about who and where I come from had been a go-to for me at the time, and still is because, really, we never stop trying to figure out how we got here. I also wanted to write a scene that held some joy.  I generally hand write my first drafts, so I still have it in an old journal. What I wrote initially was not heavily revised, but it wasn’t finished and I came back to it occasionally over the next few years until I figured out what else to say and why. Though the piece is a slice of my memory, it offers the larger narrative of my family, community, and to a certain extent, the Black experience in the U.S. 

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

I have a strong fascination with and respect for language, the potency of a word, the power of words to create meaning, feeling, and images or ideas that we’ve never experienced. So, in writing, wasted words are kind of my pet peeve, especially in poetry. Poetry allows us to put so much into a word and the possibility of packing such a great deal of meaning of feeling into one word keeps me excited and interested in the labor of writing. 

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

This may seem like a predictable answer, but voraciously reading books as a child got me here, and before that, being curious about the world led me to books. As a kid it seemed like adults had all the answers, but they got annoyed with questions after a while, so I figured I’d try books, considering adults wrote them. The older I became, the more I began to keep diaries and journals to express my thoughts about the world, which had been influenced by all the information, stories, and ideas I got from reading. By the time I was a teenager, I knew writing was not only an exercise in freedom of imagination but it was powerful. I want to be powerful and free. 

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

I’ve never lived in a political climate free of crisis and quandary for people like me. The only thing this current climate does for me is add to the already existing myriad of stressors, and because of this, I am beginning to withdraw from directly engaging my art in or with this political climate. I will leave that to those with the energy and those with surprise. So in a way, I guess, this climate has influenced me to seek things like rest and joy.

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

I write a lot about the Black experience in the U.S. which could encompass just about anything with the caveat that the content center Black folks. Some more specific areas within that include womanhood, motherhood, and chronic illness. I love writing about lineage and the ways in which history shapes and influences who we are. I am also interested in using anger as a tool in writing in a way that is healthy and productive.  

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

Messy. Sometimes I’m inspired to create new work and will turn out multiple pieces in a matter of days. But then there are times where I don’t write anything at all for weeks or even months, but the ideas are always simmering in the back of my mind; it’s almost as if the poem begins inside my body and when it’s time, the poem is born. In terms of environment, I’m not traditional, meaning I don’t necessarily need a room or silence. I can write in the middle of chaos, on trains, especially well on planes, and even in the middle of a work meeting. I’m really inspired by having people around me when I’m writing. I love people-watching and taking in the natural environment around me for inspiration. However, it has always been more difficult to write with my children around. When it comes to revision and editing though, I do need a more calm, focused physical environment. 

 What projects or pieces are you working on right now?

I have completed a poetry manuscript that I am sending out to potential publishers, a work that explores performance, politics, and Black womanhood. The funny part of “finishing” a manuscript is that it is never really finished, though at some point every book has to be done. 

April Gibson is a poet, essayist, and educator. She is the author of the chapbook Automation (Willow Books 2015). Her writing has been published in PANK, pluck!, Literary Mama, Origins, Naugatuck River Review, and elsewhere. She is a fellow of The Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, The Watering Hole, and she is a VONA alum. April teaches at the University of St. Thomas and the Loft Literary Center, and with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.  

Tell us about your fiction piece “Reading Aloud” in Volume 22. How did it come to be?

Just as the character in the story does, I read to my mother when she was in a nursing home for the better part of the last year of her life. She had read to me when I was a child, and as I read to her, it occurred to me that the roles were now reversed. She had always loved literature, but in the last 20 or so years of her life, she turned to reading mysteries and crime fiction. When she died, I was in the middle of reading the first Dexter novel, Dexter Darkly Dreaming, by Jeff Lindsay. (I did find it amusing that there I was in a nursing home reading such a dark and violent novel aloud. Her roommate seemed to enjoy it too!) It was a novel she’d read before. So after she died, I, of course, kept reading, and I realized that I wanted to know the ending that my mother already knew, which seemed like such an apt metaphor for her passing and my life continuing without her. I felt like there was a story in that. 

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

What most excites me as a writer is really pretty simple, and that is fiction that clearly has depth and says something honest about human nature. I also love to read fiction with a lyrical voice, but that voice always needs to be in service to the story. It shouldn’t be there only for show. I tend to learn toward traditional, realistic fiction, but I’m open to stories that break with traditional forms if they don’t sacrifice heart and depth. Stories that strike me as written only for the sake of experimentation turn me off. 

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

Probably my mother reading both Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn to me. I can still hear her voice as she read those books, and I can still recall my deep concern for Huck and Jim as they traveled farther and farther south on the Mississippi River. I knew that was the wrong direction! I also need to mention here that when I was a child I had dyslexia, and my parents learned of a program at the Philadelphia Institutes that could correct dyslexia through a series of “patterning,” where the child actually learns to properly crawl and creep in a coordinated fashion, even when the child has already been walking for years. Eye exercises are also involved. I won’t take the time to explain the theory behind it, but it works. My dyslexia was completely corrected. If it hadn’t been, I’m quite sure I would never have become a writer. But the point I’m trying to get to here is that while I would do my daily crawling and creeping, my mother read book after book to me. I know that words and stories must have crawled into my system and eventually made me want to see if I could write a story. By the way, I finally wrote a story a while back about a twelve-year-old boy with dyslexia called “This Is How Much I Love You,” which I hope will find a good home at some point.    

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

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, which celebrates its centennial this year, had a profound influence on me. I thought the stories were beautiful, and I loved Anderson’s language and the way the stories are connected by place and recurring characters. In fact, when I began writing stories, I discovered I was connecting stories by place and character, which hadn’t been something I’d set out to do intentionally. As for mentors, there were two writing teachers I had in the MFA program at Wichita State who taught me a great deal: Philip H. Schneider and James Lee Burke. I learned so much about craft from them, and they both pointed me toward the right books to read.

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

I play guitar, though not at a high level. I’ve never played in a band and have rarely played in front of anyone. But when I was in high school something made me want to take lessons, and as my ability grew, my taste in music improved greatly. I began to listen to music and lyrics in a different way, and I think that attention to language helped me move farther along toward becoming a writer.

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

I have to be careful with pacing. I can get too bogged down in a scene with too many details. It’s a matter of cutting, and listening to writer friends when they offer a critique. I never send a story out without someone reading it first and responding to it. As for a quirk, I don’t know if this qualifies, but I have a tendency toward writing a formal sounding prose. Maybe sometimes it’s more formal sounding than it should be. But I think I’m trying to capture something that can maybe best be summed by these lines from Emily Dickinson: “After great pain, a formal feeling comes--”  

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

I completed a novel called Children of Dust [forthcoming in 2021 from Regal House], which I’m now fine-tuning a bit, that’s set in the 1880s in rural Alabama. It’s largely about race, and I’ve written it from the point-of-view of two white characters and one who is mixed-race. I’ve tried to be very careful how I’ve dealt with the material because race is, of course, such a volatile topic. But this book is something I felt I had to write, and I’ve drawn from a lot of family history/legend/lore.   

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

I’ve found over the years that I often write about the nature of guilt, and how characters carry it within them and how they attempt to struggle with it. I’ve also written a great deal about my characters’ capacity for evil. So sometimes my stories use violence, but certainly not always. I’ve never been interested in writing about a completely evil character, what one might call a psychopath, because those characters are, by definition, one-dimensional. I want to write about fully rounded characters who have to struggle with all kinds of human impulses. 

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 like to write about three hours a day, and I tend to be slow and methodical. I’m certainly not prolific, but I’ve found if I simply keep at it, the work does get done. I’ve now written three novels, and I’m at work on a fourth collection of short stories. I may be a rarity, but I write first drafts in longhand on yellow legal pads, letter size and college rule, with a blue ink pen. Funny,  but if I didn’t have those materials, I don’t think I could write. It’s just what I’m used to. And on days when the weather is good, I like to write just below the house where my wife Rhonda and I live on the Alabama River. Almost all of my work is set in a fictionalized version of the small community where I grew up in the Black Belt region of West Alabama, in the fork of the Tombigbee and Black Warrior Rivers. So when I sit beside, and look out on the Alabama, it helps transport me to the place in my imagination that I need to reach.     

What projects or pieces are you working on right now?

I’m about nine stories into a fourth collection, of which “Reading Aloud” is a part, and I hope all the stories in the collection will find as fine a first home as “Reading Aloud.” 

Marlin Barton lives in Montgomery, Alabama. He is the author of three story collections Pasture Art, Dancing by the River, and The Dry Well and two novels: The Cross Garden and A Broken Thing. His stories have appeared in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and The Best American Short Stories. He teaches in a program for juvenile offenders called Writing Our Stories, and he also teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Converse College.