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.

For over twenty years, Water~Stone Review has been a collaborative passion project of students, faculty, and staff. While it is a staff member who holds the position of managing editor (Meghan Maloney-Vinz), and esteemed faculty (Katrina Vandenberg, Patricia Weaver Francisco, and Sheila O’Connor) who serve each issue as section editors, it is our current MFA (creative writing) students who work as invaluable editorial board members and graduate assistants. Led by faculty editors in a semester-long course, our editorial board members learn the art of careful consideration and in doing so curate the beautiful writing in our journal each year.

In this series of blog posts we introduce you to some of our incredible and accomplished student editors.  In this post we meet Robyn Earhart.

It’s been quite difficult for me to come up with a blog post to introduce myself as the newest and most recent Assistant Managing Editor for Water~Stone Review. Perhaps it stems from my Midwestern roots—that awkwardness of conjecturing some sort of self-promotional proclamation that feels both authentic and humble is something I’m uncomfortable with. Or, perhaps it’s because I’m unsure of how to follow in the footsteps of my predecessors—writers and editors who forged ahead through the thick and bramble of uncertainty in the publishing world, and in their wake, left behind their personalized, indelible legacies on this esteemed publication. I felt at an impasse to both preserve and uphold their past work, and to forge my own path, to which I am uncertain of what that will be.

When I first came to Hamline University—more accurately put, when I first attended an information session, led by Water~Stone Review Executive Editor Mary Francios Rockcastle, and considered coming to Hamline University to begin my MFA—I was offered a copy of Volume 19, that beautiful black and white issue, entitled Paper Bones, with its cover image of a woman with a gold chain overlay on her face. I went home, read several pages, and knew that I found my new home.

Water~Stone Review is the legacy of the Creative Writing Programs at Hamline University in the unwieldy field of literary journals and independent publications. This journal—this printed, preserved account of intertwining written text and visual images—lives on when so many print journals and newspapers are shuttering their figurative windows and doors. Water~Stone Review continues to push and transcend the boundaries of form, composition, genre, and voice. It continues to promote new, emerging, and established writers—my comrades in times of turmoil and uncertainty. It has lasted this long because it belongs to all of us—writers, readers, academics, artists, and conglomerative members of a creative ecosystem.

As I continue to learn and grow in the production process of Volume 22 and begin to forge my own imprint on Volume 23, I hope you’ll appreciate the process of growth and change along with me. I’m indebted to the work of my predecessors, and I hope you like what you see in the publications to come.

1. Tell us about your fiction piece, “For Ángel, The Ocean,” in Volume 21. How did it come to be?

Someone close to me struggled with substance abuse, and it’s very hard to know what to do in that situation. You want to help and be there for them, but where is the line between being supportive and being enabling? At what point is the healthiest thing (for everyone) for you to just walk away? There are no easy or correct answers to those questions, and this story was born out of that anxiety and guilt.

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

Most of what I read, and all of what I write, is short fiction. I love the short form and the way that a writer can pack a lot into a small space, but to do that, the writer has to trust the reader to jump right in. I find it frustrating as a reader when I don’t feel that trust. Science fiction and speculative fiction are very good at thrusting the reader into a world that is so thoroughly realized that it makes sense without much explanation. I don’t write in those genres, but I feel like I learn a lot from them. As a reader, I also want my fiction to be brave. I want it messy and mean, because isn’t that life? I’ll stop reading if it feels too gentle.

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

I’ve always read and written a lot. As a kid, my mom read books out loud to all of us (four kids piled on one bed, pretty cute). Writing assignments for school always came to me pretty easily, and I wrote a dissertation, which is probably my most impressive writing achievement to date. For all of the reading and writing I did, the one thing I was sure of was that I didn’t want to be “a writer,” and I certainly didn’t have any interest in producing fiction. Fiction seemed so frivolous, and in my elitist, youthful hubris I wanted to work on more important things. Fast forward to my early thirties. I felt like I had a lot of things to say and no means to express them. Then I read Steven Pinker’s Sense of Style, which is all about language and expression, and I was like, my god, of course, I can write. I also read a number of amazing short story collections (Kirstin Valdez Quade, Lauren Groff, Laura van den Berg) and realized I could write fiction that was truer to what I wanted to express than any essay or blog post that I was capable of producing.

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

Like many writers (I think?) I struggle with plot. Sometimes I’m so interested in the mood or the interior life of a character that I lose the thread that drives the story forward. The best thing I’ve found to address this is just to write the nonsense I feel like writing, even though I know I’m never going to use it. I currently have pages and pages of a character walking to work. It’s incredibly boring, but I liked writing it, and it gave me time with the character that I found helpful. And I love editing, so I’ll worry about trimming the scene later.

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

I have a couple of stories that I’m working on at the moment. I have a full-time job that has nothing to do with my writing life and doesn’t allow my mind to wander, so the bulk of my writing happens in the very early morning before the day begins. I have one stubborn story that has been sitting around for three years resisting my varied attempts to get it in line, but I also have some newer ideas that are either partially written or that I’m doing research for. I find it helpful to have a few pieces in various stages of readiness so that, in the forty-five minutes to an hour that I have once I stumble out of bed, I can best take advantage of my mood.

Analía’s work has appeared in New Ohio Review, Baltimore Editor, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter at @isleofanalia.

Dear friends, contributors, and readers,

As I pass along the mantle of Assistant Managing Editor and graduate from Hamline’s MFA program, I wanted to take the opportunity to thank you all for the incredible support and enthusiasm you have for Water~Stone Review.

The literary world, particularly in the realm of publishing, is a difficult place to feel at home in without the benefit of mentorship and guidance. In the case of Water~Stone Review, I had the opportunity to get experience and a great education in the finer details of editing, designing, producing, publishing, and selling an annual publication, in addition to learning how to use social media as a positive tool for creating community. I’ve documented much of the journey––from joining the Water~Stone Review team to AWP Conferences and beyond––on this blog, so it only seems fitting to conclude with sharing my gratitude.

To Meghan Maloney-Vinz, our Managing Editor and my super supervisor, I want to convey how grateful I am that this assistantship was available to me as an MFA student. Meghan helped me discern that I want to be involved in the sharing and promotion of writers and voices from all corners of the literary world and beyond as a career, and your mentorship has provided me with the tools to do so. Huge thanks to Mary François Rockcastle, Patricia Weaver Francisco, Katrina Vandenberg, and Sheila O’Connor for their tireless service to this journal and for being an extraordinary team of women doing marvelous work in the world.

During the process of working on Volume 20, Volume 21, and the forthcoming Volume 22, I’ve gotten to meet many of you and learn about your lives and work and projects, and that has been one of the greatest joys in the two years I’ve served in this position. Looking back on my time with the Water~Stone team, I am proud to have started the “In the Field: Conversations With Our Contributors” interview series during the celebrations for our 20th volume, and ecstatic as many of you found common ground and points of mutual interest with our contributors. To have the chance to get to know the artists creating the work we are sharing is an experience I will always treasure as a highlight of my time in the Hamline MFA program. To all of the contributors who I had the honor of interviewing, please know that your time and attention and vision meant the world to me, and I wish each of you all that you desire in life and in your work!

A number of you have asked me what comes next, and that’s a solid question. Graduation with a master’s degree is, in this creative field, a terminal academic achievement, but the term also implies gradual and gradient, two words more aptly encompassing the creative life. The process of writing my thesis manuscript, Current, taught me this accomplishment is not a bound book of endings but a document of admission into something I can only define now as what’s next. I wrote about the natural world and national parks and the duality of America’s attitudes towards wild lands and waters throughout history, and plan to continue documenting the ever-shifting developments that affect the nature of our small planet. There will be forthcoming visits to Minnesota’s only national park, Voyageurs, and the Boundary Waters, and I plan to spend as much time on the Saint Croix River as possible this summer. All is in service to the deep joy of research and writing, which––as I have learned from the wisdom of our contributors––is perhaps the most crucial point to remember in these turbulent times.

So, in closing, I leave with a line from Mary Oliver’s 2016 essay collection Upstream, a sentence that I keep on my own writing desk and remember each time I read an interview with our contributors: “The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work––who is thus responsible to the work.” May we all be responsible to our work, and to each other, and be energized continually by both.

With gratitude and respect,

Sophia

Author:

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

This poem is a commentary on the community where I grew up in western Wisconsin. I started writing it after hearing about the passing of the woman I mention in the poem, who was the mother of some of my friends from high school. When I got that news I was living on the coast of North Carolina, and felt very disconnected from home and from the community’s mourning process. I guess the poem is part elegy, part personal reflection on being raised in this really special and beautiful place. The name of the poem is a play on one of the many names for the part of Wisconsin I’m from: the Coulee Region.

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

I love the embrace of imperfection. Poetry that finds ways to expose it in creative and unusual ways. Poetry about living with everyday flaws, or the ways that those flaws and insecurities play out in unusual or desperate situations. The same goes for fiction. I love when writers are able to create characters that represent the sometimes ugly complexity of being human. I love non-fiction writing that teaches me something, as well as more subjective lyric essays, nature writing, and brutally honest memoir.

What turns me away is writing that uses flowery language as an end in and of itself. Writers who try to impress with their vast vocabulary or with shock value. Also, writing that is too dry or literal. I’d say a good writer finds balance between those extremes.  

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

I think I can attribute being a writer to a lot of experiences of receiving encouragement. My mom likes to talk about how when I was really little—before I knew how to write—I would make up stories and ask her to write them down for me; I appreciate that she always made time to indulge me. Once I was school-aged, I continued to get positive responses from teachers. Reading and writing were skills that came naturally to me, but in in high school I was lucky to have teachers who were encouraging, but also raised their standards for me. It seemed unfair to me at the time, but in retrospect, I see that they were trying to encourage me to keep improving and not get overconfident.

4. What themes/topics are important in your writing?

Interactions with nature are probably my most consistent theme. I’m an environmentalist and I love to travel, so my writing often reflects the natural world through imagery. I’m also drawn to explore human experiences of loneliness and otherness. Our instinct to be social creatures, to be part of a group, can have heartbreaking repercussions, from the experience of loneliness, which is so vast yet so interior, to the experience of being persecuted or disadvantaged for being different. I think poetry is a fitting medium for addressing these topics.    

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?

Environment is very important for me. I consider myself a place-based writer. Where I am physically plays heavily into my writing. I get energy and inspiration from being in nature, and from plants in particular. I would say that my writing suffers when I don’t have access to nature.

A lot of writers talk about forcing themselves to write every day. I’m not quite there yet, but I think it’s probably a useful practice. Luckily I get bursts of inspiration fairly frequently. At times when I’m feeling less inspired, I will often fill up notebook pages with stream-of-consciousness style scribblings in the hopes that maybe I’ll end up with one or two ideas or lines out of the mess that can be turned into a starting point or a theme for a poem. I also spend a lot of time revising. My poems tend to go through many incarnations, sometimes over a few years, before I consider them finished. Right now I’m in an MFA program and I’m expected to submit two poems every week, so that structure and accountability has been really great for generating material!

Tegan Daly is an MFA candidate at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.