Tell us about your fiction piece “The Saddest Song” in Volume 22. How did it come to be?

The piece is based on a real grad school experience when I taught one of my first classes in a theater blackbox. I wanted to take a fictionalized version of this memory and connect it to the powerful relationships we have with music. Songs can capture specific times in our lives, and hearing those songs again can work just like a time machine. If it’s heartache, we can lose thousands of songs or specific ones we thought we would always love. They make us change the station or skip to the next track when it’s too much. I wanted the piece to take it a step further and ask, ‘Can we return to the music we’ve lost?’
 

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

First lines and titles always feel like an important priority. They set the tone, the expectations, open up possibilities, and entice us to return to what we just read. I also like those endings where I feel haunted and out of breath. There are a lot of common mistakes that I see as a teacher, while fully acknowledging I have committed those same errors before. This includes the twist everyone saw coming, confusing readers by using multiple points-of-view in a short amount of time, and the flashback within the flashback is really hard to pull off. Another one is using too many section breaks or chapter breaks. It can hurt the momentum and give the reader too many opportunities to put the book down.

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

I didn’t start taking writing seriously until my second year in college, but looking back, I realize that I have always been journaling and collecting scraps of writing in my notebooks since I was a pre-teen. Most of the time when I traveled, whether it be English, Ecuador, Scotland, Puerto Rico, or all over the US, I would always end my day by writing in my notebook, trying to reflect on everything I experienced. I also remember feeling good when the notebooks got beat up. The wear and tear mattered too. I wanted to preserve these places as best as I could. Even though I don’t feel brave enough to read most of them now, I still have all those notebooks.

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

As a kid, Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark, The Westing Game, and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH are examples of some of the books that were my sparks. I also regularly plundered the paranormal section of our library. When I started studying writing seriously, I then discovered a lot of writers that opened up the writing world more and made me want to write: Martín Espada, Flannery O’Connor, Kim Addonizio, Eavan Boland, Margaret Atwoodand Pablo Neruda. With mentors, I can cite my teachers, David Keplinger, Lisa D. Chavéz, and many others that still help me to this day. I also think back to my first AWP in Atlanta, when I was a young, scared writer, carrying copies of my first book in my backpack. It was writers like Richard Yañez, Francisco Aragón, and Rigoberto González that welcomed me to my community and also continued to help me find more opportunities. From there, I was able to find more support from all the writers I worked with at CantoMundo and Macondo too. All of this support and inspiration definitely helped me learn that we as writers are not alone, even when it feels like a solitary act.

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

In a previous life, I was in a band, regularly did theater, and I also used to paint. All three gave me a lot of foundational knowledge about performance, process, and persistence. I learned quickly that all of our mediums require practice and mistakes in order to capture our creative intentions. Some of these I would love to reintegrate into my life eventually and to see how they can intersect with my writing. I am currently working with my great musician friend, named Andrew Jones. He wrote 80s synth-based horror music to accompany poems from my third collection, The Handyman’s Guide to End Times. We did one performance and people loved it. We plan on recording them in the near future and doing more performances soon.

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

I’ve been told that I have strong titles and endings, and some of my other quirks include gravitating toward creepy themes and imagery (maybe not so much in “The Saddest Song”). I tend to lean into my narrative and storytelling, so I continue to feel challenged to make my writing more lyrical and concise. Some questions that help me: How can I accomplish this story or poem with few sentences or lines? Can the piece end two sentences sooner? Are there repeated words or phrases that can be plucked out? Did I cut too much context? The last question helps me with balancing the work.

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

Some days I feel paralyzed by my anger and outrage, and I feel overwhelmed. I can’t keep up with the scandals, the injustices, and complete lack of respect for our environment, people, and communities. On the more productive days, I look to my fellow writers that are often responding in real time to the Administration’s actions, the racism, the bigotry, and the hatred. They inspire me so much. They give me the energy to write and the realization that I have something to say. They also remind me that we can’t be silent and wait for things to change on their own. Our writing has the potential to create change and preserve what’s happening now. I think about social media fights going back and forth and never accomplishing anything. Then I think about how a story, poem, essay, or memoir can more effectively inspire change and action that can help us get through these ugly times. 

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

Social justice issues, my culture, my Ecuadorian and Puerto Rican heritage, and preserving places are important to my writing. So far, these themes have helped me build connections with other writers and readers. I continue to prioritize them, and I am also working to nurture humor and horror. Both are obsessions for me and new challenges I can’t wait to continue exploring.
 

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

 Even now, I like to start all of my writing in notebooks whenever I can find time: morning dream transcriptions, travel logs, in-class writing with my students, and 30/30 challenges I try to do once a year. During a slower month (like May, July, or January), I will write one short piece a day in order to generate new work and to dig into the rougher drafts I keep in my notebooks. Once it’s typed, things really start to pick up even though time is still the enemy. I like to reassure my students that it’s okay if you can’t write daily, and I try to tell myself that too. I like to think the fight for writing time can actually become another way to raise the stakes.

What projects or pieces are you working on right now?

I have two projects underway. The first is a new collection of poems about my father who passed away in February 2019. The poems also explore my city of Pueblo, animals, Puerto Rico, ghosts, a few cryptids, and lucid dreaming. I am also working on a collection of flash fiction horror pieces, with each one titled after a pop song.

Juan J. Morales is the son of an Ecuadorian mother and Puerto Rican father. He is the author of three poetry collections: Friday and the Year That Followed, The Siren World, and The Handyman’s Guide to End Times, winner of the 2019 International Latino Book Award for Poetry, One Author, in English. His poetry has appeared on/in CSPAN2, Colorado Public Radio, Copper nickel, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Pleiades, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and others. He is a CantoMundo fellow, a Macondista, the editor/publisher of Pilgrimage Press, and department chair of English & World Languages at Colorado State University-Pueblo. You can follow Juan on Twitter: @moralesjuanj. 

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From Gabrielle Civil:

“My Black Boy Dead” (Vol. 22) emerged from a kind of haunting. Although the poem resonates with recent anti-black violence, it came from a state of emergency in my youth. I grew up in Detroit during “the crisis of the black boy” and as people talked about their brothers, their cousins, their boyfriends, as teachers, preachers, and politicians wrung their hands and shook their heads, it was clear how much black boys were highly prized, precious, and deeply endangered. The poem emerges as a dream response to this state of impending loss. The black boy is loved, mourned, and never really known. A black boy becomes a stereotype, a target, a fortune, a consumer, a salvation. The poem exposes a desire to heal (man I cure ) and a deep craving for actual embodied connection (“someone to hold my hands”).  

Photo Credit: Aly Almore

Gabrielle Civil is the author of two black feminist memoirs in performance art: Swallow the Fish, an Entropy Best Non-Fiction Book of 2017, and the recently released Experiments in Joy. Her writing has appeared in Poem-a-Day, Dancing While Black, Small Axe, Art21, MAI Journal, Kitchen Table Translation, and Obsidian. She has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Mexico and a 2019 Rema Hort Mann LA Emerging Artist Award. She teaches creative writing and critical studies at the California Institute of the Arts. You can read more about her work on her website. 

Earlier this year, we began to mull over the idea of highlighting the creative process of our poetry and CNF book reviewers, Stan Sanvel Rubin and Barrie Jean Borich. We wanted to devote a space to allow these long time reviewers and contributors the opportunity to share with our readers what the “essay review” means to them and why they enjoy working for Water~Stone Review. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What projects or pieces are you working on right now?

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

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

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