1. Tell us about your essay, “Memory Palace,” from Volume 21. How did it come to be?

I wrote “Memory Palace” to explore my experience of teaching poetry to older adults with memory loss, as well as the way memory has shifted in my own life through parenting a young child. I wanted to pay tribute to some of the individuals and life stories I’ve witnessed in teaching—their grace and sheer presence. At the same time, my neurological wiring has changed dramatically through parenting (and middle age). Time feels different. So many memories and former selves have long disappeared. The essay is one way of reaching this question of how we say goodbye to others, and to ourselves. And what we embrace by letting go.

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

I read primarily poetry and nonfiction. In both, I’m excited by lines or sentences that bring the writer’s consciousness into sharp relief, as well as the human and natural world. I’m drawn to slant and strangeness. What turns me off? Melodrama. Lack of awareness of political or social contexts beyond yourself. Narrative only. Too much positivity or closure.

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

I wish I could say I feel emboldened by late stage capitalism, the extremes of climate chaos, or the cruelty of our current administration, but I’m more aware than ever of how little one voice matters. I write less. Perhaps another way to say this is: I know it’s more important than ever to fight the power with creativity and spirit, but I’m also aware of this hall of mirrors aspect of American life right now. I think we’re all talking too much, and about ourselves. I aim for hope and balance. I’m also working on daily practices to get off my screens and into the (remaining) natural world we have left–whether that’s my neglected garden or a single tree on our city boulevard. I think that world desperately needs us to pay attention and wake up. And getting off a screen feels like the ultimate creative act for me right now.

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

Inspirations change with my reading list! This month, I’ve been inhabiting Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Ed Bok Lee’s Mitochondrial Night, Brian Teare’s Doomstead Days, and Amy Fusselman’s The Pharmacist’s Mate. Poets Deborah Keenan, Mark Nowak, G.E. Patterson and Elizabeth Robinson have been particularly generous teachers or mentors, as have the peers who’ve inspired or held me accountable to a regular writing practice.

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

I have a poetry manuscript and a prose chapbook under development. I’m probably writing about the same thing in both: how to be a good relative to my ancestors (the past) and to my son (the future).

Visit Rachel’s website, and check out My Caesarean: Twenty-One Mothers on the C-Section Experience and After, a collection of personal essays which Rachel co-edited, recently published from The Experiment.

1. Tell us about your fiction piece in Volume 21, “Double Jack Slip Jig.” How did it come to be?

Moseman “Double Jack Slip Jig” is the opening chapter of a novella, Snippet, that I wrote to inhabit/explore the aftermath of a murder-suicide. Before Google, the only information my family had about my great grandfather’s life in mining camps was an 1857 newspaper which revealed that as a one-year-old, he witnessed his aunt get murdered for refusing a marriage proposal. The spurned miner shot her with a revolver, then finished himself. Pure fiction, “Double Jack Slip Jig” imagines that one-year-old on his 18th birthday. In her introduction to Volume 21, Mary François Rockcastle refers to the language of this short story as “dizzyingly original.” That is because word choices are highly processed. Early drafts were written as prose; then, I broke the sentences into verse, rationing each page to seven stanzas of two lines each. To make those lines more musical, I limited each line to a set syllable count. Editing to meet these formal constraints forced me to clarify the sequence of action and to better parse exposition. It also created a violent concision. Then, I put the text back into paragraphs.

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

Discovery excites me as a writer and as a reader. I cherish new information or innovative techniques. When I read, I often place more intent on formal structures than on experiencing catharsis. Certainly, I resort to experimental reading if I am tempted to close a book. I will skip ahead or hover somewhere making haikus out of each page. Impatient with one book, I got out colored pencils and started drawing so as to group words into meaningful patterns. Words are inherently exciting. If I am bored, I am not working hard enough. Contemporary poetry practices like “erasure” or collage allow me to treat anything I read like an improvisational score. Jorie Graham once asked me, “Where do you get energy to write?” “From reading,” I said.

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

Do you mean childhood traumas like watching a mother wade waist-deep into a muck pond screaming for her kid, certain water had swallowed him? It had not. Or, watching a kid jump off a cliff and crack his skull open? Right now, I am flashing on my four-year-old self writing my first word (“bob”) in the margins of a Bible my grandmother had given me. Was that supposed to be “God”? To this day, I still flip pot-belly letters. I didn’t dare to write on the blank lines embedded in ornate pages between the testaments, but clearly, I was supposed to someday fill those in. Clearly, all God’s children are supposed to become readers and writers. In my house, books were holy, but not so holy you couldn’t interact with them.

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

Art play has been part of my creative process since the 1990s when The Little Magazine went digital. I was part of a pioneer crew of writers at the University of Albany exploring new media. Suddenly, we needed images and sound to accompany our words. At first that art was digitally generated, then I started making art with my hands. You can find my recent Vispo in my book Light Each Pause (see excerpts online at Gramma and Really System). Playing with mixed media and photography creates energy that I can take to my writing even if it is not part of the final product. But the most generative endeavor is to collaborate with professional artists. Check out my recent collaboration with Sheila Goloborotko at the Talon Review. Goloborotko is working with me on Snippet; in a skype session, I read a chapter aloud and she draws. Within days she has artwork for the book.

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

Because Snippet is fiction, I need a textual space in which to process all my research that doesn’t add up to a story. I am constructing a hybrid book, FED, that examines the settler colonialism and ongoing environmental degradation that my ancestors (and I) participate in. A kind of bricolage, it weaves family artifacts, cultural propaganda, and book critiques. The setting of Snippet—the landscape my ancestors invaded— is home of the Newe (Western Shoshone) and Numu (Northern Paiute). Some of the mines my ancestors labored in and land they farmed were encompassed by the Project Faultless Atomic Explosion Site north of the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository. Did you hear the Department of Energy just secretly shipped a half ton of weapons-grade plutonium? Two books I am currently reading for this project The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America by Andrés Reséndez and Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.

Visit Lori’s website, and check out her latest book of poetry, Y from The Operating System. Lori’s poetry book, darn is forthcoming from Delete Press in 2019.

1. Tell us about your poems in Volume 21, “To Shade a Green We Say a Noun” and “O Pie of Grace.” How did they come to be?

“To Shade a Green We Say a Noun”: I was frustrated with sea-green, forest-green, mint-green. There are so many greens! Description is so hard! I thought I’d experiment with different nouns in front of green. What new colors and concerns might emerge? Could I describe, discover, distinguish more fine shades of color? It was just after New Year’s, and I’d resolved to work on description.

“O Pie of Grace”: Recipes are so picky; I wanted to argue with them. As a friend I frequently cook with says while we’re putting together fruit, butter, and sugar, “How bad could it be?”

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

One test: Is it more interesting to look out the window than it is to read the poem, story, essay, novel? Of course, this may be more about what’s out the window than what’s on the page, but my backyard tree and the weather are always interesting to look at. So how long can I stay on the page without suddenly needing to look up? Apologies: that’s an apples-to-oranges answer. But otherwise my answer’s the same as you’ll hear everywhere: I want surprise and sound and a balance of mystery and clarity. And to learn new things. Also, I really love sentences, so I look for interestingly formed ones.

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

Poems that were read to me when I was little: Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Counting-Out Rhyme”: “Silver bark of beech, and sallow / Bark of yellow birch and yellow / Twig of willow.” And Walter de la Mare’s “Silver”: “Slowly, silently, now the moon…” In both poems, I loved how the sound created the image, and in “Counting-Out Rhyme,” how the poem was made of a list of trees, and then the poem seemed to become the trees you could see and say in your mind.

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

I’m so angry and depressed about what’s happening in this country that all my old concerns seem irrelevant, and my new ones, well, other voices do it better. So I’m doing a lot of scribbling and journal writing and trying to figure out what my writing is in this place. I’m excited to be reading a lot of the urgent voices being published now.

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

One of my mentors was my aunt, who was a painter, biologist, botanist, birdwatcher, chef, hiker, adventurer, conversationalist, gardener, tea-drinker and letter-writer. She studied Zen with Suzuki Roshi, was one of the early residents at Tassajara Zen Center in California, and then studied Chinese brush painting. Her lifelong project was to use the Chinese brush to paint the plants, animals, and landscapes of Los Padres, Big Sur, and the Marin coast. It’s not like she guided or commented on my writing, but her letters to me have always been a big influence, full of description of her hiking adventures, sunsets, meals, conversations, gardening tales. The way she was, the way she observed things, the way she practiced painting, repeating a brushstroke a hundred times a day, deciding which one was best, trying to do more just like that, and then going with paper and ink into the woods, in one movement on the page, flash the brush across to make a branch. Her bay trees blowing in the wind are on the wall by my left shoulder.

Visit Molly’s website here, and purchase her latest book, Mytheria (Two Sylvias Press, 2017) here.

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

I really did have a dream in which long threads that extended from my mother’s tongue were stitched through my fingertips. She spoke, my hands typed. I was her marionette. When I woke up, I thought, what a useful image. For many months, I’d been attempting to write a poem about my family’s relationship with the garment industry. The dream image gave me what I needed to enter the world of the poem.

The second half of the poem is taken from an experience I had during a research trip to Dhaka, Bangladesh. There I interviewed garment workers, mostly women, who told me stories about their work in Dhaka garment factories. I always sensed a gap between what I said in English, what the workers replied in Bangla and what the translators told me in English –– until the interview I wrote about in the poem.

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

I’ve learned to be a patient reader because writing that bugs me usually ends up teaching me something new about what writing can do. It’s a bit like the experience of learning to read in a foreign language. What makes no sense at first ends up expanding my fluency as a reader and writer.

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

My current poetry project is inspired by several authors but I keep going back these specific books for help: Muriel Rukeyser‘s The Book of the Dead; Seam by Tarfia Faizullah; Bao Phi‘s Thousand Star Hotel; Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders; Daniel Borzutzky‘s The Performance of Being Human and Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith. These books use inventive language and great heart to create politically charged historical and personal narratives that shout out to the present. They read like verse plays.

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

Before I took writing seriously, I was an animator. For 20 years I made experimental animated films and worked on commercials and children’s TV shows. I chose animation because it was an interdisciplinary art form that integrated my love of theater, dance, drawing, painting and music. I tend to approach writing as animation made with words, a call and response to other art forms.

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

I’m currently immersed in a poetry project about the garment industry propelled by the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse. When the Rana Plaza building fell to the ground in Dhaka, Bangladesh, killing over 1,134 Bangladeshi garment workers in 5 garment factories and injuring thousands more, I took it personally. I come from a family of NYC garment workers who made a living in garment factories during the time of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire (NYC, 1911) that killed 146 immigrant garment workers, any of whom could have been one of my relatives. The poems I’m writing animate the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire and the Rana Plaza collapse; bring to light my present day connections with garment workers in Bangladesh and reflect on my role as an American consumer in the fast fashion supply chain.

A group of these poems were originally written as part of a multi-media installation made in collaboration with visual artist Rachel Breen and exhibited at Carlton College’s Perlman Museum and the Sabes Jewish Community Center in 2018.

Photos from reading of Alison’s poems during the Price of Our Clothes exhibit at the Perlman Museum. Artwork by Rachel Breen. Poems by Alison Morse. First photo reader: Sara Paller.

Visit Alison’s website here and follow her on Facebook here.