In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—JC Talamantez
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—JC Talamantez
When did you first get the idea to weave your poem about sexual assault and rape with the violent film, “A Clockwork Orange?”
I suppose it’s partly because I’m fascinated with that film’s complex reputation in popular culture. Many people find it when they are young and first becoming interested in film as a medium; I assume that, like myself, many admire its audacity while also struggling to make sense of its use of violence. The novel is arguably less morally muddied, and I’ve always wondered if the film’s ability to inspire mayhem is due to the shift in mediums—from written narrative to visual—or to the idiosyncrasies of the director. I am genuinely fond of Kubrick’s body of work, but he wasn’t particularly good at representing women as characters.
In that sense, the use of “A Clockwork Orange” in this piece is perhaps a stand-in for that consistent experience of finding joy in art as counterculture, while also encountering exploitation and violence against women as representations of freedom, rebellion, or masculinity. While I tend to think we should be careful about how we moralize art, the need for such care shouldn’t preclude consideration of conflicting properties within aesthetic pieces.
Which is all a long way of saying that it’s always been a bit of a puzzle as to how sanguine we are with raising children who will need to come to terms with the reality of sexual assault. Grief over that sad fact should cost us something, I suppose, both as persons and as a broader culture.
You begin the poem with “—” which as a reader, I interpreted as a deep inhale before a release. What was your intention when you started your poem that way?
I also think of that element as a pause or an inhale, like a moment for gathering thoughts, or maybe as a way of interrupting some yet unspoken chain of events. Some poems seem to arise from a blank world, others in the middle of a river. This poem felt like the second to me. I suppose it’s a bit worrisome to begin a piece with an invocation, but maybe taking a breath is one gesture towards that older “o”/“oh” movement that now feels somewhat dated.
I want to thank you for the line “all that grief/should mean something,” which resonates with me. When writing trauma-based poetry, do you find this cathartic, or as a writer, do you find that you need to set boundaries with yourself and your art?
Thank you! That’s a difficult question for sure. It’s a careful line that writers navigate between resonance and exploitation, or clarity and confession. On the one hand, poetry reflects human experience, and should be capable of incorporating elements of grief and trauma as part of that overall tapestry—all forms of art can help us make sense of loss and violence. On the other, poetry is not therapy or confession, and pouring our emotional souls into line breaks strikes me as mostly an act of blunt narcissism rather than of love.
Writing about trauma seems to carry an additional burden as well, since the kinds of events that traumatize are experiences shared in some form by many people, and such representations require not just forthrightness but also, I think, kindness. The point there is not to shock, but to render otherwise inexplicable elements of living more visible and maybe thereby, at least give them some shape, boundaries, and conflict.
It seems that movement in stanzas is something much of your poetry reflects; I’m thinking of Flower in Corridors of Sun, published by Hopkins Review or Insect, published by Frontier Poetry. How did you develop this method of writing?
I used to fuss a lot with trying to press my work into shapes that, in the end, didn’t really fit my voice, but I’ve gotten better about letting a poem unfurl with just a bit of guidance. Spiraling lines and stanzas seem to animate these pieces and give them a certain kind of life. I think I’ve slowly developed a style of spacing and line breaks that help to emphasize certain elements in my work. It has taken a lot of refiguring to get to here, and some pieces have been reworked too many times for comfort, but eventually you learn a bit what suits your voice, and accept it.
What themes do you return to in your work? What themes are you still developing?
Part of developing an independent voice as a poet (which I’m now guessing is a life-long endeavor) is figuring out what you can bring to the work that no one else can, and leaning into it. I think that is one way in which very young writers eventually learn to temper themselves into maturity—as a young poet you kind of want to say everything, but you eventually learn to focus on saying one true thing well, with specificity and care. I used to think that the themes that come naturally to me—familial intimacies, petty injustices and cruelties—were too small to act as foundations for interesting poems that others might find compelling. But one small truth can be powerful. My more recent work has taken on a bit more of a political tone, and I’m happy to have that develop insofar as it is useful and honest.
Who are some authors who have inspired your writing?
Prose-wise, I have a long-standing love of Larry McMurtry, Annie Proulx, Jose Saramago; James Baldwin writes an incredible sentence. More recently I’ve become enamored with Graham Green and W. Somerset Maugham. John Irving’s pair of novels The World According to Garp and A Widow for One Year are bookends to my adult life—I’ve returned to them numerous times and they seem to age up as I do. Jeanette Winterson often bridges the gap, if there is one, between prose and poetry, as does Cormac MacCarthy.
Poetry-wise, I sometimes think that I completed an MFA just so that I could be exposed to Rilke—he is astonishing. James Tate’s use of broken narrative and elements of absurdity are utterly compelling to me. I’ve never grown tired of Leaves of Grass or Autobiography of Red. Also Galway Kinnell, e.e. cummings, Adrienne Rich. In high school I had a bit of an obsession with Richard Brautigan and Raymond Carver. Louise Glück’s simultaneously beautiful and dread-inducing tone has been a significant source of inspiration for many years.
What projects are you working on now?
My focus so far has been on literary magazines, and I really appreciate the readership and community that I’ve found there. I have a completed book of poetry and another in development, (though the magnitude of editing an entire book has sometimes seemed a truly monumental task). Perhaps these will eventually see the light of day!
Thank you for taking the time to chat with me!
JC Talamantez is a Mexican-American poet whose work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, New Ohio Review, Salamander, Smartish Pace, Hopkins Review, Frontier Poetry, Boulevard, Water~Stone Review, and others. She was a longtime student of academic philosophy and teaches writing and humanities courses across a number of disciplines.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—A. E. Wynter
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—A. E. Wynter
Your two poems, “Retching,” which deals with generational trauma and generational choices that live within descendants, and “Now & Later,” which examines how people are taught to open themselves at a young age to experiences they don’t want, are beautiful, tightly-woven pieces. What was the impetus for their creation?
I think at the root of these two poems is an “I” that has both experienced and witnessed the ways that life can rob us of our innocence and choices. In “Now & Later,” we see a father impart unwanted teachings on a daughter, and I wanted to explore that assault on the self. Meanwhile,“Retching” widens the lens beyond our immediate, exploring the fear of what fractured histories our bodies may be housing. Can our genetic and ancestral coding dictate the future self and its options? But even more than fear, even more than life’s cruelty, these poems became a way to push back.
There’s a beat to “Retching” that pulses with the internal rhymes and repetition. What was your process for crafting the rhythm of this piece?
In “Retching,” I wanted the movement of the lines to mimic a sort of heaving—a burden being unloaded with very few pauses. So, I used very little punctuation, which I hope translated effectively to a quicker pace and rhythm.
As for the internal rhyme and repetition, that seemed to come naturally in this piece and it felt present from the very first draft. In fact, I’d describe “Retching” as one of those poems that just came right out of me (which feels appropriate), and when I first shared this poem with my writing group, they said they could feel the ancestors talking through me. So, as much as I worry about what fraught and fractured histories my body might be housing, I also know it’s housing immense power. “Retching” felt born in this power, and I leave credit with my ancestors, who I feel had something to say to me the day this was written.
“Now & Later” emphasized the importance of a lesson it took me ages to learn: having the choice to say no. This piece really struck home. When writing, do you think about the impact your pieces will have on the audience, or is your creation more internal until the world sees them?
First, really glad to hear the poem struck home. Learning you have the option and every right to say no is so so important. And teaching others to hear and respect no is essential. For me, the act of writing is very internal. I am analyzing, distilling, questioning my experiences and this world through a very personal lens, one shaped by my identity as a Black woman and all of its intersections. I want that process to go uninterrupted. When, and if, the audience enters my creative space, it is during the editing stage. At that point, I have gone through my process of discovery, and I have learned for myself what a poem or story is about. Then, I lean even further into my formal choices—stanzas, line breaks, rhyme, rhythm—and how those choices might impact a reader.
When I initially wrote “Now & Later,” the final lines were: “each day the sharp animal in me spearing through / all I cannot digest.” But during the editing stage, I realized I didn’t want to leave the reader there, or myself. I wanted us to take something back. And in this case, the reclaiming was really an expelling: “we spit out toxins, bare red stained teeth / with wet acid muzzles.” I wanted that final image to be one of strength and prowess.
While these are separate pieces, they both end on a note of rejecting things you don’t want to include in your life. Was there a kinship between these pieces as you were crafting them, or is this a theme you find recurs throughout your work?
There was actually a lot of time and space between the creation of “Retching” and “Now & Later.” So, while there is certainly a clear kinship, this likely points to my writerly obsessions, and the ways that my interests and fears naturally weave into my work—across poems and stories, even in my drawings and visual art.
Nature versus nurture is one of the themes I often find myself returning to—what elements of a person (spiritually, emotionally, physically) have been passed down through genetics and generations? What elements of a person are circumstantial, environmental? I think both “Retching” and “Now & Later” end with images of spitting, of a forceful expelling, because I want to believe in choice more than anything. I want to believe in our ability to reclaim our bodies, despite all it may have unwillingly experienced or inherited.
You’ve also published Poem With an Absent Father with West Trade Review, and To the Protesters on Vandalia with New Millenium Writings, among many other poems. What themes do you find you return to in your writing? What role, if any, do you see your poetry, and poetry in general, playing in relation to being in conversation with the community?
I’ve already spoken about some of my writerly obsessions above, but as you can imagine, the list is long and ever growing. I’m also interested in, and often return to themes of family and womanhood; of spirituality and inheritance; of religion and ghosts; of truth and rumors; of being Black and American; of my Caribbean heritage; of mental health and caretaking; of land, absence, and memory.
Poetry is a medium of endless possibilities—it can be a record keeper; a justice seeker, a creator of worlds; a whittler of memory. But at its core, what I want my poetry to do, what I believe all poetry does, is create a container for the human spirit. And when that container is gifted to another person, I imagine they must, in that moment, feel seen, a little less lonely. I especially write for my Black community—to hold them, as they hold me, in love, in pride, in power.
What books or stories shaped the writing you do today? Who are some of your favorite authors?
Oh, dear god. I’m just going to write a very incomplete list of storytellers that impacted me at different stages of my life—from childhood to now. They are in no particular order: Lucille Clifton, August Wilson, Vievee Francis, Stan Lee, Hayao Miyazaki, Toni Morrison, Ross Gay, Mohsin Hamid, Helen Oyeymi, Edwidge Danticat, Jericho Brown, Yona Harvey. I’ll stop here, because I must stop somewhere.
You are a cross-genre writer, and were recently working on a novel-in-progress, Far Cry From a Woman, through the Loft Mentor series. How is that project going? What other projects are you working on now?
The Loft Mentor Series is such an amazing program. Shout out to its admin and organizers, and of course to the 2021 mentors and cohort. Everyone was so amazing! Far Cry From a Woman is in revision, and I’m feeling really excited about the direction the book has taken. I’m also working on a poetry collection and a graphic memoir, which is a very slow burn, mostly because my drawing skills are limited—but I love the challenge, and I love having a creative space to return to when my creative expression needs to move beyond words.
A. E. Winter is a Black writer from New York. She currently lives in Minneapolis, where she has received grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board, was a fiction fellow in the 2021-2022 Loft Mentor Series, and most recently, participated in a regional Cave Canem workshop. Winter won first place in the 53rd New Millennium Writing Award for Poetry, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in West Trade Review.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Danielle Lazarin
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Danielle Lazarin
Your flash fiction piece, “The Math,” is a beautifully-crafted work that compiles so much emotion in just two pages. What prompted the creation of this piece? What made you juxtapose the narrator’s agony of slowly losing a partner with mourning the house she will never have?
The house listing is real. I found it by stepping through the internet rabbit hole of StreetEasy, where I was looking at different versions of my apartment for the purposes of a renovation. This actual house is not far from where I live now, in the place I grew up. I grew a strange attachment to it that wasn’t quite longing but a sense of inexplicable familiarity. I’d visit the listing with some regularity as a sort of comfort spot on the internet (and though it’s no longer for sale, I still do, every now and again). This sense that the narrator has of the house belonging to her when it obviously never will came out of that attachment. It’s not uncommon for me to turn up the dial on a feeling I have, giving it more deeply to a fictional someone else who can run with it, as a way into story.
This was during the pandemic, when so many people were relocating not only physically but questioning the meaning and desires of their lives, asking where they should be. I myself did not long to be elsewhere, but I could imagine a character who would need to project herself into a very different life, for whom doing so would be a certain escape hatch. The story began as lines—the same opening, more or less—and the next part, about the grief, slipped its way in as it often does to my work, making the fantasy she’s inhabiting even more necessary and more painful. That this absurd wanting could be located around a viable if adjacent anger about fate and resources (money, yes, but time, most of all) gave the story the human current I needed to write it through.
The specifics you include in “The Math,” particularly in reference to the paintings, and their age in comparison to the age of her husband, are those extra details that make this piece even more heart-wrenching. What was your process for revising this piece to retain certain details and release others?
Though the paintings had always been there, that age comparison came in during revisions. In the earlier versions, I’d kept most of the details of the husband’s decline out of the story. My agent, Barbara Jones, encouraged me to not glide over the depth and specificity of what the narrator was feeling or experiencing, which opened up the story quite a bit. It’s flash, so I only added about 50 words, but in those additions I made an effort to show her inhabiting both the place of her fantasy about her future and its reality simultaneously. Since the story already had so many numbers in it, counting on the other side—in the small rooms with the dying man, living a life that will impoverish her emotionally—seemed a logical bridge to make in revision. It was a challenge to convey such a large house and moment in a person’s life in so few words, but those numbers helped a lot with scale.
In your work, you return to themes of relationships and couples, and the friction that occurs between them, as in Floor Plans, published by LitHub. What draws you to these themes? What other themes do you find that you return to throughout your work?
The larger arc of my work has always, and continues to, open and close the door on what is seen and what is unseen. I’ve always been drawn to the space where the private self meets the public projection of that self, and how our relationships of any sort ask us to—constantly, forever, till death and even beyond!—negotiate that space. Lately, I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about secrecy, about grief for what still lives, and about what it means to protect someone.
What authors shaped your writing? What are some stories or novels you love to return to?
My college writing professor was the great Dan Chaon, whose work I love and whose teaching wisdom I’m grateful rooted within me at the right time. Of the many things he taught me about how to approach writing, the nugget that I dig for the most is his reminder that all writers know their work—its literal and emotional landscape—better than anyone else, that it’s our job to make it as clear to the reader as it is inside of the place that makes us want to write stories about it. It was in Dan’s class that I first read Ann Beattie’s “The Burning House,” which is one of my favorite stories that I rarely teach because it’s too precious to me, but which I re-read frequently. Short story writers I teach a lot and who I admire greatly include Laura van den Berg, Jamel Brinkley, Samantha Hunt, and Nick White. On the novel front, the past few years I’ve found myself returning to Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, Kayla Rae Whittaker’s The Animators, and everything by Deborah Levy, who is an absolute genius on the sentence and story level.
What projects are you working on now?
I’m currently at work on a novel, in a second round of revisions that I hope will bring me to its finalish shape, and have enough short stories on the backburners that I’ll assemble into a collection. Like my last collection, this one also will have its share of shorter stories much like The Math, which I hope makes it into this future project.
Danielle Lazarin is the author of the short story collection Back Talk. Her fiction and essays can be found in The Southern Review, Colorado Review, Literary Hub, Glimmer Train, The Cut, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and elsewhere. Her work has been honored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Glimmer Train Family Matters Award, the Millay Colony for the Arts, The Freya Project, and the Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize. She lives and teaches in her native New York, where she is at work on a novel and a story collection. She has a newsletter, Talk Soon, that discusses the writing process.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Katie Yee
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Katie Yee
Image by swords4two
Your piece, “Pennies Only,” blends the steady life of a relationship with a fantastical gumball machine. Where did the inspiration for this piece come from?
Truthfully, the finding of the gumball machine is actually completely based in real life. It was 2020, at pretty much the start of the pandemic. (Read: a totally great and safe time to bring someone’s discarded trash into your home.) My boyfriend and I had gone out to walk the dog, and when we came back, there it was: sitting in front of the building, just like that. It felt like it had been left for us somehow, so we brought it back to his apartment (and cleaned it a lot). We’ve moved twice since then, and of course it’s come with us each time. I’m staring at it now.
I guess what I mean to say is, like a lot of writers, I draw bits from my daily life and then I take a step back from reality and ask, “What’s the most fucked up thing that could happen in this scenario?” And then we go from there.
The voice for “Pennies Only” is wonderfully distinct. Your slight breaking of the fourth wall throughout the piece draws readers in and seems to include us in the gumball secret. I’m thinking of your use of “our couple” or “Look, there they are…”. Was this the original voice of your piece? Who do you imagine your narrator being?
I like the way you phrased that: the “slight breaking of the fourth wall.” You’re totally right. It’s not a break. It’s just a little crack in the fourth wall. It was indeed the original voice of the piece; I think the tone of it mirrors something like narrating the make-believe lives of your neighbors. (In a sense, the narrator could be someone peering in.)
This crack in the fourth wall is something Kelly Link does really well: she invites you in, creates this sense of intimacy with the reader. Implicates you. Catches you looking.
It has an almost fairy tale quality when she does it: the sense of a story being told. Who narrates the fairy tales? That’s who I’m imagining.
Your work has so many delightfully fun layers and fluidly includes symbolism. Are those parts that you’ve intentionally laid out as you’re writing? Or are those pieces parts that surprise you in revision, which you then tease out in editing?
Honestly, I live to be surprised with each sentence! I’m not an outliner. (I so admire people who are that organized, though!) If you’re asking specifically about the odd items that come out of the gumball machine, I can tell you that at some point in the middle of drafting, I made a long list of jarring things that could conceivably come out of it. These are the ones that just felt right when I wrote them down. Something just clicked.
In the very first draft of this story, the ending was different. (Spoiler alert!) The gumball machine doesn’t break in that first draft. Instead, smoke pours out of it and floods the rooms of their apartment, and we’re left with the image of them unable to see through the smoke but reaching towards each other. That kind of symbolism felt forced, so it had to go!
Another one of your pieces, The Carols, published in Washington Square Review, also revolves around domestic partnerships and the windows into other people’s lives that living in close quarters brings. What keeps you returning to these themes? What are some other themes you return to throughout your work?
I love to walk my dog around to the fancier blocks and peer into brownstones and form a parasocial relationship with the people who live there (if I like their books or their decor). This is an endless well to draw from! Imaginary friends are fascinating. They teach you so much about yourself. Like, maybe you didn’t know you needed a mushroom-shaped lamp until you saw it illuminating someone else’s life! Similarly, putting your characters up against other characters can reveal so much about them. Other people add surprise.
When you move in with someone—even someone you know really well—you are surprised every day by the ways in which they are not you. For instance, I am surprised constantly by the inventive places in which my partner thinks to leave his dirty socks that are, in fact, not the hamper. Surprise!
And yet—despite the socks—I would say we are generally very happy. And it’s hard to capture mostly happy couples in interesting ways. I keep returning to this theme of domestic partnership because I don’t think I’ve cracked it yet. And because I can’t imagine ever not writing about love. You’ll never get to the bottom of it! You can dig and dig and you’ll find a different weird buried treasure every time. Love, like other people, will always add surprise.
What authors helped shape the writing you do today? What are some stories or writing you return to?
Oh, I love this question! I will take any opportunity to tell people to read Aimee Bender. The Girl in the Flammable Skirt is one of the most perfect short story collections that exists. She is a master at giving physicality to feeling. (In the title story, for example, a character wears grief as a stone backpack.) Other loves include Kelly Link, Karen Russell, and Ruth Ozeki—they’re each so singularly weird and gutting and wonderful. They’re my patron saints.
What else are you currently working on?
More short stories! And a little novel, too—it started as a short story but kept rolling away from me.
Photo by Roque Nonini
Katie Yee is a writer from Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in No Tokens, The Believer, the Washington Square Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Triangle House, and Literary Hub. She has received fellowships from The Center for Fiction, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and Kundiman. By day, she works at the Brooklyn Museum. By night, she chips away at a collection of short stories and a novel.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Anthony Ceballos
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Anthony Ceballos
Q: One of the lines of your poem, “Glassful of Prayer,” is used as the title of Volume 26—“wreckage of once was.” Where did your own title come from? What was the impetus for you to take readers on this poem’s journey?
A: One February day, I was faced with a blank page, alone with my writerly anxiety, and all I could think was, there’s nothing there. For some reason it brought to mind a glass. What does the glass hold? Alcohol? A prayer? And what happens if we feel both have failed us in some way?
Much of what I write revolves around reconciling the devastation of addiction and alcoholism I witnessed as a child in the adults around me. In this poem’s case I was thinking of my father whose life was cut short due to his own addictions. I never had a chance to meet him. That’s a very strange fact I have trouble wrapping my head around, that I will never meet my father.
I believe he would have snapped his fingers to change his situation if he could have, as I believe anyone dealing with addiction might, but life is never that easy, and his was the worst kind of outcome. The speaker of the poem is at the beginning of a lifelong journey to avoid his father’s fate and the finalization of that age-old adage “like father, like son.”
The particular line, “wreckage of once was,” is for me everything one stands to lose or has lost to addiction, all the stupid, irresponsible things we do in the midst of our addictions. The hope is that we find a way to build something new from that wreckage.
Q: I enjoyed hearing you read your work at Water~Stone’s reading this November; I always like understanding how an author hears their own work. What is your process when practicing for a reading?
A: For me, it is a tremendous part of a poem’s creation. From the moment I write the first words, I am speaking them aloud. As a draft progresses, I will often record myself reciting it as both a rehearsal of sorts and as an editing tool. After a draft is complete, I will speak it multiple times until its voice is found. The words on the page and the auditory expression are both equally important and necessary in my writing.
Q: This story of a father’s death and alcoholism is echoed in earlier poems; “A Poem About My Hair” published in Sleet Magazine and “Shot Glass Narrative” published by Midway Journal. What new experiences do you find occur as a writer as you return to this theme? Do you think you’ll return to this theme again?
A: As I’ve gotten older, I have understood more the complexities of my father’s life situation, as well as the complexities of addiction. I suppose I’ve always been somewhat keyed into those things, being raised with alcoholism so close at hand, but certain perspectives have come only with time’s passing and further life experience. I find also as I get older my need to write with full compassion and empathy only grows stronger. Where once I might have felt merely angry, frustrated, or hurt by my father’s absence, I now feel a more intricate array of emotions, still for his absence, but also for him. I imagine he will be with me in my writing for some time to come. Oddly, I feel closer to him now than at any other point in my life.
Q: Your previous work has also dealt with colonization and resistance; you had a poem as part of Pangea World Theater’s Poetry in the Windows Placekeeping Project. What role do you see poetry playing in relation to educating and interacting with the community at large?
A: I firmly believe the creative has the potential to spark new thoughts and ideas in any viewer. With Pangea’s Placekeeping Project and what I wrote about South Minneapolis’s beloved East and West Lake Street, I like the thought of someone who might have read it recalling their own cherished memories of the great thoroughfare. There’s a profound connection in that, and an even deeper appreciation for Lake Street through that connection.
There is something about the visceral quality of poetry, the melodic, the rhythm and cadence, the rawness of an image, that hits in a way so unique to its form. If you add the experience of hearing it read aloud, just a voice and the words and the exchange that happens with an audience…in that I find possibility truly infinite. You will hear not only my story, you will hear the stories of my family, of the wicked, ongoing aftereffects of colonization and displacement on Indigenous people, how it affected my mother and her family and how I’ve carried that into my adulthood, you will hear of the cruelty of the stigmatization of addiction in this country, how it silenced my father and began to eat away at me. Most importantly: You will hear.
Q: What writers inspire you? What novels or poetry books do you read or re-read?
A: I am inspired by so many authors. I am grateful everyday to work at Birchbark Books and Native Arts in Minneapolis, Minnesota, owned by the Turtle Mountain Ojibwe writer Louise Erdrich. Over my years there, I have come across so many wonderful books and writers that I cherish to this day.
Of course anything by Louise, and anything by her wonderful sister Heid E. Erdrich, who was just named Minneapolis’s first Poet Laureate!! Tommy Orange, Kaveh Akbar, Danez Smith, Joy Harjo, Layli Long Soldier, Michael Kleber Diggs, Billy-Ray Bellcourt, Patti Smith, Lynette Reini-Grandell, Joan Didion, Sun Yung Shin, Mona Susan Power, Kao Kalia Yang…I mean we could be here for months…at least a year if we start talking about books!
Q: What are you working on now?
A: In the now-now: Answers for these wonderful questions!
In the bigger now: Assembling a manuscript, which is quite the task. It is always shifting its shape, catching me off guard with unexpected inspiration or the slow burn realization of parts no longer working. It has had at least five different titles and any number of pages. It had a photographic element at one point. It still might have a photographic element. It’s been every font and every font size. It’s been double spaced, single spaced, one and one half spaced…
I am also enjoying writing every day for the sake of writing every day, be it poetry or prose. I am doing everything I can to nurture the creative spirit in whatever form it takes, whether writing, photography, drawing, long walks, reading, etc. If I am not nurturing the creative self, then I am not whole.
Anthony Ceballos is a poet/bookseller/enthusiastic reader/ all right cook. He lives in Minneapolis and can be found penning staff recommendations at Birchbark Books & Native Arts. In 2016 he was selected to be a Loft Literary Center Mentor Series mentee. In 2022 he was part of the inaugural Indigenous Nations Poets retreat in Washington DC. He is a first-generation descendant of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe.