1. Tell us about your poem, “Landmannalaugar,” in Volume 21. How did it come to be?

When I was in college, I spent a week in Iceland as part of a study abroad program through my conservative Christian university. Our guides took us to this beautiful, remote hot spring up in the mountains—Landmannalaugar—and when we got there, the spring was filled with naked people, most of them elderly. We, of course, were not going to be naked in the hot spring. We were required to bring one-piece (not two-piece) swimsuits. But something about these peoples’ nudity struck me as so beautiful and pure, Edenic. I was jealous of their freedom to just exist in their bodies without shame.

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

In my (very limited) experience, life is so much weirder than I ever expect it to be. Emotions and situations are so much more complicated than most media has prepared me for. So when something captures an experience or a feeling that I’ve had, in all its bizarre complexity, I love that. It’s validating for me. And it takes so much skill to do well. In the same vein, if something rings false, it’s going to lose me (I can usually tell when a female character has been written by a man—I think most women can).

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

As a young writer, I’m very much still working on finding my own voice… so I find that my work often mimics whoever I’ve been reading most recently. I love Flannery O’Connor, John Steinbeck, Ann Patchett, Mary Oliver. I’m forever indebted to my high school creative writing teacher, Mr. Jacobson, who showed me that poetry didn’t have to be lame, and Dr. Engel, who taught my Writing Fiction class. 

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

I’ve fallen in love with cooking over the last few months. For the longest time, I told myself I wasn’t a good cook—mainly because I’d never really tried. Discovering that I can cook has been a huge confidence builder. There’s something really fulfilling about making something beautiful that’s also literally sustaining, to me or to people I’m sharing with. I think any kind of creative endeavor like that helps keep your artistic juices flowing even if you’re having a fallow period with your primary art. I’m not always writing, but I’m always doing something to keep that muscle working.

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

Most times, it starts with an uncomfortably long period where I’m just staring at a blank screen, and I’m drained of every creative thought I’ve ever had, and I forget how to write sentences. But I’m told that’s fairly normal. If I can find even one sentence, that can usually open the floodgates. I’ve had to learn to just write a first draft without asking myself if it’s good or not, because if I wonder about that too much, I won’t write anything.

I find I need to move around a lot when I write, especially if I’m hitting a wall. I’ll bounce around from my dining room table to the coffee shop to the library and back. I just need a change of scenery every so often.

Melissa Hite is a writer living in Little Rock, AR. Her work has appeared in Equinox: Poetry and Prose, Relief: A Journal of Faith and Art, and SchoolCEO, among others. You can follow her work at her website https://www.melissakhite.com/.

In a break from our normal protocol, we present this special In The Field featuring Elaine Ford. WSR published Ford’s piece “Briggate” posthumously, as submitted for consideration by her husband Arthur Boatin. In the following Q&A, Arthur has crafted answers on Elaine’s behalf, often gleaning from her previously published interviews and essays.

1. Tell us about Elaine’s fiction piece, “The Briggait,” in Volume 21. How did it come to be?

The fiction of Elaine’s final decade is mainly historical, based on the lives of real people. After her retirement from teaching in 2005, she threw herself into researching her Ford ancestors who, in the 19th century, lived in Alabama and Mississippi. Later she worked on my maternal line, the Mendelsons, who emigrated from Eastern Europe in the 1890s to Scotland, moving on later to America. In this research Elaine was not seeking material for fiction, but in time her fiction-writer instincts were activated by immersion in these bare-bones life histories. The eventual result was two book-length manuscripts: God’s Red Clay, a Ford family novel covering the years 1831 to 1880; and Bread and Freedom: Stories of an Immigrant Family’s Journey, whose scope in years is 1882 to 1933.

“The Briggait” is a Bread and Freedom story. Tillie Morgan, the protagonist, was my maternal great-grandmother. The real Tillie died in the 1930s, and Elaine could get little information from living sources about this woman’s character or demeanor. An existing studio photograph from the period may or may not show Tillie, but in her story, Elaine uses the dress worn by the portrait subject. From city and census records, ships’ manifests, and other historical documents, the writer knew Tillie’s place of birth and date and place of marriage, her occupation and addresses and cohabitants while living in Scotland, and the date and means of her travel to the United States.

Elaine’s self-imposed rule in writing historical fiction was never to depart from known fact. Why the characters do what they do, however, and how they feel about it: these she thought fair for imagining. In later Mendelson stories set in New York, Tillie plays a supporting role. For the character’s turn at center stage in “The Briggait,” Elaine zeros in on Tillie’s moment of decision: whether to abandon the life she has made in Glasgow and change countries yet again. Did the real Tillie struggle with this decision, as the character does? Vos iz deyn meynung? What do you think?

2. What excited her as a writer? What turned her off, made her turn away, or stop reading a piece of writing?

Elaine was attracted to fiction that vividly portrayed individual communities and cultures, especially small, tight communities (four of her five published novels fit this bill). She liked it when place and environment had significant presence in a story, shaping—for good or ill—the people of that place. She appreciated work that granted complex inner lives to outwardly unexceptional people. She valued precise writing that employed telling, rather than voluminous detail. Herself a careful observer and extensive researcher, she had little patience for anachronism in fiction and similar writerly sloppiness.

3. What are some themes/topics that were important to her writing?

Seemingly small decisions and events can produce profoundly significant results. Things rarely turn out as planned. We have less freedom than we imagine. Still, trying to choose and grow and overcome is the right course. “For me the whole point of writing is to tell it like it is, not like I wish it were.”

4. What books, writers, art, or artists inspired her and her work? Did she have any mentors in her writing life?

Elaine published her first novel at age forty-one, by which time she likely had digested any literary influences. In 1990, after the release of her fourth novel, she told an interviewer that “my style [of writing] has always been the same… I’m interested in doing the same things and have more or less the same way of telling the story as I did [in high school].” Nonetheless, Elaine readily acknowledged a youthful fascination with the novels of Thomas Hardy. Their underlying determinism may have helped shape her own worldview, or at least reinforced her independent conclusions about life and fate. Other favorite writers included Alice Munro, whose character-centered storytelling, and finding drama in the everyday, has much in common with Elaine’s own fiction. Elaine admired as well the short stories of Bernard Malamud and his novel The Assistant. Elizabeth Bream, a high school English teacher, encouraged her writing aspirations and remained a lifelong friend. In an autobiographical sketch on her website, Elaine credits an undergraduate creative writing course with the avant-garde novelist John Hawkes for having “taught me the values of significant detail and economy of language,” methods that she encouraged in her own students.

5. Are there other forthcoming pieces of Elaine’s work that we can look forward to reading?

At her death in 2017, Elaine left behind five book-length fiction manuscripts. One of these, This Time Might Be Different: Stories of Maine, was published posthumously in 2018 by Islandport Press. The story “Scare” from the Bread and Freedom manuscript was published in No. 94 of Crazyhorse in 2018. The story “Providence” from the Bread and Freedom manuscript appears in Volume 10 of the Westchester Review. Two new works by Elaine will be published in 2019. The story “Bearing Witness,” which is from the Bread and Freedom manuscript, will be published online at JewishFiction.net. A Civil Wartime chapter called “Under Cover” from the novel God’s Red Clay will come out in Arkansas Review. 

For more information on Elaine’s writing legacy, please visit her website at https://www.elainefordauthor.com/.

1. Tell us about your poem in Volume 21, “Panels from a Celestial Autumn.” How did it come to be?

It’s an invented form where each section or ‘panel’, as in a polyptych in painting is a separate voice but the sections hang together as part of a larger whole. I began this quartet of seasonal panels about 6 years ago with summer and this autumn panel was the last poem I wrote for the sequence and the last poem I wrote for my first full-length collection (currently in circulation), “Shade of Blue Trees.”

I wanted to see how far I could take imagery and metaphor to convey emotion; the language is intentionally heady and saturating, leaping and lyrical. Over the last few years, I had a long, slow recovery from major surgeries. It made me hyper-aware of my body and its limitations. The poem focuses on the body’s trials, of what it can and cannot heal from: injury, abuse, illness, addiction, aging/death. It’s a long poem with a challenging format. Meghan Maloney-Vinz and Dylan Cole deserve special thanks for their commitment to getting this right.

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

I love great language and sounds, interesting forms that support or extend the poem, clever titles that do the work they should, what’s not said, reticence, a choice volta, otherworldliness, strange beauty, landings that either detonate, utterly surprise me, or teach me something new. There’s a terrific quote from Alberto Álvaro Ríos: “The best line in a poem better be the line I’m reading.” I often think of this when reading, writing, and revising. I’m not interested in predictability, zero emotion, talky poems, or abstraction to the point of obstruction.

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

Grief, loss, the body, and the natural world are big themes in my past work and will be there in some way or another in the future. I gravitate toward exploring subjects that take a long time to unknot or don’t rectify themselves in a linear fashion. We’ve recently discovered my eldest son has a very serious life-threatening medical condition. I know when I’m ready the unbelievable shock and unfathomable worry of this will make its way to the page, but not now. I still feel I’m holding my breath or will wake from the worst dream.

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

Once upon a time I was going to be an art historian, and my connection to visual art has been strong from my earliest memories. In no particular order, art, poetry, music, and nature are my key creative touchstones, essential to how I make sense of things. Throughout my adult life I’ve been experimenting with painting, collage/assemblage, photography, and, back in the day, I played drums daily. Last year I started making visual poetry/erasures and a new avenue opened; a great discovery for me. When not writing, the other arts keep me happy but not fulfilled in the same way poetry does. I’m happiest when making something, working with my hands. I think it’s why all my poems are written and revised in longhand; the physical act of writing, ink on the page, is a joy I’ve embraced since childhood. All of these outlets help train and hopefully deepen my patience and observational skills. One feeds into the other. Everything fills the well.

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

Sometimes I write every day for a stretch and then won’t write again for several months. If snippets, threads, or lines come, I take those down immediately (notepads in the car, shower, kitchen, etc). If something starts to haunt me, I sit down, preferably in the morning, and see what happens. Whatever is making the most noise gets priority. The majority of my writing takes place either when my house is quiet or if I go on a retreat once or twice a year. We are a family of four in a small house—one son is at college but comes home often, another is in high school, and my extremely supportive husband. It’s challenging to carve out time and some weeks or seasons work better than others. It’s a constant balance between family life and solitude, and I protect my writing and quiet time fiercely. And candlelight is very important; all year long, it is a true comfort.

Kelly Cressio-Moeller is the associate editor of Glass Lyre Press. She’s had work published in North American Review, Salamander, THRUSH, Menacing Hedge, and elsewhere. Her poetry has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net. Her full-length manuscript “Shade of Blue Trees” is out in circulation. Visit Kelly’s website at www.kellycressiomoeller.com.

PASTE TEXT HERE; FORMAT AS NEEDED

1. Tell us about your CNF piece, “Preserves,” in Volume 21. How did it come to be?

Structurally, “Preserves” tells the true story of my experience learning to preserve food through canning. That straightforward narrative arc serves as a container to hold less straightforward elements of the essay: instinct, desire, ripeness, abundance, and apocalyptic fear.

I write fiction most of the time. The process of writing an essay is very different than writing a short story, though the craft elements can be similar. For me, essay writing is a little more mystical. This is how I write an essay: I have an experience, usually something pretty humdrum, but outside my usual routine. I find myself deeply affected by the experience, with the sense that I’ve been transformed in some unnamable way. But then, I want to name it. I want to find out exactly why the experience was so meaningful, so I start to write. I follow unexpected threads and rabbit holes and I invite my subconscious to come out of hiding. I make connections between the experience and what’s going on in the world at large. I make connections to my own history. Soon I have a sort of road map. It’s like a treasure hunt, and the treasure is epiphany. With enough revision, I can pass that sense of epiphany along to readers.

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

Lately, I am excited by research. I love to read books that show deep technical knowledge, but present the details elegantly, in a way that transmits emotion. Some books that do this beautifully are Weike Wang’s Chemistry and Anthony Doerr’s All The Light We Cannot See. I have novels on the brain because I’m currently working on a novel! I’m drawn to work that feels lush and generous. Sometimes I get bored when I read something that feels overly cold or withholding.

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

I started reading early, at four-years-old. I had the privilege of growing up with parents who read to me all the time, so I always saw books as a core part of life. In second grade, while I was processing the loss of my paternal grandmother, I wrote a story called “My Dead Grandma” which was very well-received by my teacher and classmates. I saw that I could use language to make something sad and hilarious at the same time.

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

I’ve noticed that themes of control and loss of control have been cropping up frequently in my work. I’m interested in the ways people influence and manipulate each other. I’ve become obsessed with group dynamics and the formation of subcultures.

I’m very interested in the body. I’m very interested in the human animal. Contemporary living can be such a disembodied experience, and I think literature and art can be an antidote to this. In my writing, I try to return to the primacy of the corporeal.

5. What projects or pieces are you working on right now?

I am currently working on my first novel, which grew from a short story I worked on for years. The short story took forever to finish because I was always struggling to rein it in. There were more trails I wanted to follow with the characters than I could do with the short form.

I’m grateful to have received funding from the Minnesota State Arts Board this year to support me in developing this novel. I’m a full-time marketing and communications professional, so I’m always battling to carve out time, and, perhaps more importantly, headspace, for my writing. The vote of confidence and financial support this grant provides is a huge boost. I’m really amped up and focused on the novel right now, but I start every day writing in my notebook about whatever I want. On the pages of my notebook, ideas for future stories and essays are definitely percolating.

Kasey is a writer based in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She was the recipient of a 2015-2016 Loft Mentor Series Award in fiction, and her stories and essays have appeared in CALYX Journal, Gulf Coast, Juked, Revolver, and elsewhere.