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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What projects or pieces are you working on right now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Islands in the Sky (2017)

 Steal Down the Rainbow (2015)

 The Minotaurs of John Elkerr (2014)

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

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

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

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

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

Obsession, madness, and the disturbing.

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

Chaotic, intermittent, and unpredictable.

What projects or pieces are you working on right now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What projects or pieces are you working on right now?

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

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

Tell us about your poem “Dialogue Between Colander and Self” in Volume 22. How did it come to be?

In a Middle English class, I had been comparing manuscripts of a medieval “Debate between Body and Soul.” In that poem, a corpse and its departed soul are arguing about who is responsible for the man’s misdeeds in life. I guess that form, inner turbulence taking shape as a conversation, was spinning around my brain. I also talk to myself a lot, so the form is not entirely an artifice. It’s not too far off from a transcript of myself alone at home! For me, there’s less turbulence between body and soul than between inhabiting the body and utilizing the body. A colander became my second voice because, as an actual tool, its body is all utility, and yet, how would such a body be inhabited? Its holes are as much the emptiness as the physical matter around them.

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

My scalp tingles when I read a line that gets me. I swear it’s the same sensation Emily Dickinson must have had, when she said “I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off.” The only thing common to these moments is that I understand something in an instant, in perfect clarity, in a way I couldn’t have if I were told it plainly. Sometimes I look over the line again and can’t tell what it literally means. But still, it got me to that place, maybe on the slippery stepping stones of association rather than meaning. I’m turned off by figurative language that only works on one level. I once read a novel that compared falling maple leaves to “the severed hands of babies.” I would love that visual association, over the top as it is, if there had been something violent in the atmosphere to match its tone.

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

If you ask my mom, she’ll tell you how I’d linger in parking lots when I was a toddler. I didn’t care about going into the store. I cared about identifying the letters and numbers on the Minnesota license plates, which were at my eye level. This was back when they had those raised pale blue letters. I think the embossing made the letters seem more like entities, as if they had sentience and personality. For me, that magic was there before the magic of communicating actual meaning. As I learned to write, I was fascinated by how letters were these recognizable characters—I mean characters in both senses—that I could bring into being with a pencil, as many times as I wanted.

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

Too many to count, truly. Donald Platt (in WSR 19!) has been a great mentor to me, both as my thesis advisor during my MFA, and as someone to discuss challenging poems from my reading life. We talked a lot about James Merrill, whose epic The Changing Light at Sandover I’m reading again right now. I find Merrill very inspiring because I admire his dedication, wit, and breadth of knowledge, but at the same time, I am often frustrated by his obscurity and self-importance. When I’m in pure awe of someone’s work, I’m not inspired to write. I just want to absorb. But when I’m both awed and annoyed, that gives me a foothold, an idea of what I can do differently, and from there I might jump off into an idea of my own.

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

Embroidery. The writing process often feels nebulous, so it’s satisfying to create something tangible, whose progress you can see directly. There are plenty of metaphors for how embroidery is like poetry—the careful rhythm of stitching a line—but I don’t actually feel that resonance while I’m stitching, which is more about technique than creativity. Most of the creativity comes in designing the pattern beforehand. There’s that initial decision of form: is this going to be in back-stitched outlines, or filled in with satin stitch? Is it going to follow the grid of the fabric’s weave or be freeform? And that helps me understand, visually, what it’s like to embark on different types of poems.

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

Voice, if I had to choose. I have a hard time even calling voice a craft element because it’s such an elusive concept for me personally. But it does have ramifications for my language at the sentence level. There are competing voices in my head, each of whom thinks it’s what my poems should sound like. One is sarcastic and would like to tear down the page with sentence fragments and puns. Another is elegant, a little bit haughty, and would love to keep extending the same sentence by adding phrase after phrase with commas. I think I only stumble on my true voice, and through that a more natural syntax and rhythm, by battling down these other, more exaggerated, impulses.

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

How do you write when the globe is on fire? At times, the climate makes art feel urgent. At other times, hopeless. Sometimes both at once. I’ll be frank that an early impulse for my writing was to leave a record of my inner life, crystallized in beauty to last after I’m gone. Of course that record wouldn’t be permanent, since the sun will one day consume the earth and all that, but it could last a while. That idea was a bit naive, even before I understood that the world might become unlivable even during my lifetime. Art, it turns out, is for the present. I’m still not sure what that means for me, though. I believe I need to write beyond myself, but how? I hardly know who I am.

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

I’m interested in the limits of the mind. Sometimes that’s knowledge that can’t be accessed, like an undeciphered inscription or an ancient organism that left no fossils. Sometimes it’s relational, the impossibility of total empathy. This colander poem is about two entities trying to understand each other, but also about coping with an inherent lack. That discomfort with the mind’s limits is what often drives me into a poem: I imagine that writing will help me uncover what I cannot know. It never does uncover the unknowable, but it sometimes uncovers something else.

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 write early drafts in a notebook, then move to the laptop, then go back and forth between the two. For me, drafting is more natural in the notebook because I don’t care about my page looking messy. On the computer, I’ll get worried about making everything look nice too early, but it helps me sort out the form later. I do most of my writing in my apartment, switching between sitting at a table and lying on the couch, thinking. It’s not very efficient. I wish I were one of those writers who’s off writing away at a cafe or on the bus, but I cherish absolute silence and stillness.

What projects or pieces are you working on right now?

I’m most of the way through a novel draft, which is not a project I’d ever have imagined for myself a few years ago. With a poem, I feel like I can keep the entirety of the work in my mind at one time, thinking over its shape and trajectory. With the novel, it’s so large that I can only observe it in pieces, or in summary from afar. It’s like surveying a mountain. Or painting a mural rather than a portrait.

Mitchell Jacobs is a writer and occasional comics artist from Minnetonka, Minnesota. While earning an MFA in Creative Writing at Purdue University, he served as managing editor for Sycamore Review. Afterward, he completed a Fulbright fellowship, teaching English for two years at the National University of Laos. He currently lives in Los Angeles. His work appears in journals such as Gulf Coast, Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, Ninth Letter, and Ploughshares, as well as on The Slowdown podcast through American Public Media. You can learn more about his work at his website mitchellbjacobs.com or follow him on Twitter @mitchelljacobs.

Tell us about your cnf piece “There Is a Light” in Volume 22. How did it come to be?

Years ago, a friend I’d met at the Bread Loaf writers conference visited. He was showing me sections of a nonfiction travel book he was working on about returning to the battlefields of Vietnam with his father, a veteran of the war. We were up all night and into the morning exchanging stories of our childhoods, fathers and sons, family tragicomedy and adolescent calamities. At one point he said, “You really should write this stuff down.”

It took me a while to believe that myself. When writing memoir, whether you give it attention or not, other people are in your stead. That weighs on me. Flannery O’Connor said, “Anybody who has survived childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.” I started with that imperative. Her thoughts gave me a way to begin. Soon I was back there feeling what my adolescent self was feeling then, seeing what that kid was seeing, experiencing the fear again but moving forward in that space anyway. Maybe in spite of the fear.

We all have our story. This is a piece of mine. I said recently to someone very wise that I didn’t know why I wrote it. She said, ‘yes you do. It’s your attempt to connect to the world.’ I’ve thought a lot about that, and it’s as good an answer as I can think of. I suppose that’s true for most writing, and perhaps most writers.  

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

I’ve always been fascinated with language and the alchemy that comes from mashing up surprise words, images, sentences.  When I was a kid it was the lexicon of comic books.  Later on, rock and roll lyrics, and then texts like Finnegan’s Wake and Beloved.  I’m hooked by writing that grabs me by the lapels from the very start and forces me to sit up and pay attention in some way.  Is the character’s name weird or uncommon?  Is the dialogue a surprise that opens up some new subculture?  As I see it, we’re in a battle with social media and technology for our hearts and minds.  As writers I think we need to understand what we’re up against.  Don’t take the reader for granted.  Go out there and fight hard from the first bell for someone’s attention and imagination. With the short story form, especially, you can’t waste time.  I think a good novelist is aware of the importance of designing every sentence like it matters. It’s hard work but worth the effort.  Annie Proulx does this.  Rachel Kushner, certainly.  Can’t wait for what Justin Torres does next.

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

FILM ‘DEAD POETS SOCIETY’ BY PETER WEIR (Photo by Francois Duhamel/Sygma via Getty Images)

My high school English teacher, David Kissick, saw something in me I didn’t recognize in myself. This was 1981-85. A small, all-boys, Catholic, military school in a rough, upstate New York former mill town. He came from Philly after serving in Vietnam. The war wasn’t very far behind him and he brought a certain wisdom to the classroom I’m guessing can only be learned through that kind of horror. He was young, dynamic, and just knew inherently how to connect and inspire. He also challenged us with difficult texts he knew would prepare us for whatever was out there in the America we would have to navigate after high school: Joyce, Melville, Faulkner. Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun.  That one got the attention of the military staff there. Think Dead Poets Society. That movie came out after my class graduated. Kissick had moved on from the school by then and I remember calling a friend and saying “Did Kissick move to Hollywood and write a screenplay?” We thought he must have advised Robin Williams on the character. It was uncanny. He taught me how to be a reader first, and how reading well is the basis and foundation for good writing. He was the first person in my life that got me thinking ‘Hey, maybe I can be a writer one day.’ I wouldn’t be the person I am today without him and his classes. He taught us how to ask the hard questions of ourselves and the world, our place in it. This is at the core of why we write, isn’t it?

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

Like my taste in music, interests and influences run the gamut. My literary giants are Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O’Connor, DeLillo. Mark Richard’s short story collection, The Ice at the Bottom of the World and Adam Johnson’s Emporium are magic to me. Clarice Lispector’s Near the Wild Heart and her short stories. Everything Jim Shepard writes.

Richard Price was also an early influence. I think I was 11 when I found The Wanderers and then went on to Bloodbrothers. At this point I was reading H.G. Wells, Ursula Le Guin, but then suddenly became fascinated with New York City because my father was traveling there for long stretches of time for work. This was the late 70s. Part of the fascination was to define and understand this place he was disappearing to so often. Price gave me an entry point, and that eventually led to my discovery of punk music and the Ramones, which influenced me greatly in all sorts of ways. But I had to keep secret my interest in punk and the ancillary weird stuff that came with it. In the upstate New York suburbs where I grew up, you got clobbered for being different. Or worse, excluded and ignored.

As for mentors, in college I worked with Charlotte Zoe Walker. She’s a fine novelist, and a Best American and O’Henry prize winner. I walked into her writing class not knowing what I was doing. She took an interest in my work and was just so damn encouraging it confused the hell out of me.  She was the first published, award-winning author I’d met and she talked to me seriously and treated my writing with respect. It’s her voice that has stayed with me all these years and brought me back to the writing life after a long absence. I should probably let her know.  

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

The guitar is always within arms reach of my writing desk. When I’m stuck or need to catch my breath I pick it up and get the brain working in a different medium. A kind of creative cross-training.

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

I try my best to insulate myself and my family from too much of the dangerous language and behavior in that environment. But not so much we have our head in the clouds either. As the father of two girls, I have a responsibility to know what they’re up against and get them prepared for the world they’re going to find when they’re out there on their own. The dinner table talk is difficult but necessary. I believe a significant purpose of art is to teach. To promote empathy. Sadly, the modern political climate is really anathema to connection. So, in that sense, it seems to me an imperative is for writers and artists to band together and do our thing to communicate the commonality of the human condition. We need to understand the responsibility we hold to the balance of things. Be the counterweight and the ballast to the tribal mentality that tries to separate us. That’s always in the background somewhere when I’m working.

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

Self discovery through alienation, isolation. The influence of environment and place on our sensibilities. Violence and redemption. What McCarthy calls “the notions of fate and chance.” The world is elegantly designed to deconstruct. Human beings are coded to fight for survival.  When McCarthy’s Llewelyn Moss stumbles upon that scene in No Country for Old Men, he faces a pretty clear choice. He faces yet another choice when he’s lying in bed thinking about the man he left dying there. 

 What projects or pieces are you working on right now?

“There is a Light” is the opening of my non-fiction book about coming of age in upstate New York during the late 70s and early 80’s as a burn survivor, punk rock fan, and catholic military school kid. 

I think it’s a universal story in many ways. A bildungsroman with hopefully plenty of humor among the tougher, more difficult stories. As fun as the project has been at times, it’s also been a challenge. I think the natural assumption is that writing a memoir or a creative semi-fictional account like Justin Torres’ We The Animals is a cathartic experience. I haven’t felt a lot of that yet.  Maybe it’ll come at some point. There were hurdles with stepping back in time. There were mornings, waking at 5:00 am, I felt I had to go after the inspiration with a lasso and wrestle it down. But I’ve found that very little in life worth something comes without some struggle and amount of suffering.  

Kevin Lanahan has attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. He is at work on a memoir about his teen years as a punk rock fan and burn survivor attending an all-boys Catholic military school. He lives in upstate New York and the Adirondack Mountains.