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

As an Iowan by birth I had always been interested in the actress Jean Seberg, another native Iowan, and created an imaginary interview with her. I knew nothing about the earlier Jean whose last name Harlow stands for the whole. An Old Hollywood sex symbol, the original blonde bombshell, I assumed she couldn’t compare to the trilingual, intellectual Seberg. A quick google search cued me to Harlow’s uniqueness, and then I read all the Harlow biographies I could find and was dumbfounded to learn that she too was a reader and achingly intelligent. In that era the ironic fate of the dumb blonde was to be brilliant. Before my research I had no idea she died at age 26 of uremic poisoning after acting in 42 movies, having had 2 abortions, having been twice divorced and once widowed. She suffered from a suffocating and manipulative mother, as well as her own passivity. I identified strongly with her passivity and set to work trying to open a conversation with a ghost.

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

Language, imagery, intensity are my holy three. I’m a reader in love with the power and beauty of words. It’s glorious to be in love with something that embodies the best in human culture. You can’t buy the talent to write Bonnie Jo Campbell’s darkly humorous American Salvage or the electrifying work Darcey Steinke has accomplished in Suicide Blonde. Sybille Bedford’s Jigsaw is infinitely more valuable than a gold train or a 1-percenter’s fortune. Nothing can buy an inspired poem, story, or novel.

Recently, I judged a regional contest for books (in the fiction category) published during the prior year. Some of the books had been published by major houses, one being a Pulitzer Prize finalist, others hailed from prestigious fine arts presses, and many were self-published. Three-quarters of the entries, both highbrow and lowbrow, could be classified as thrillers, and while some achieved excellence and deconstructed the genre, others followed the conventions, drearily. I wonder if even serious writers are so anxious for readers that they turn to the thriller genre. The category is a tricky one as the matter-of-fact language tends not to reach me and the descriptions are often too familiar. After finishing the best of them there is no desire to return to the prose again, whereas my fictional favorites I read and reread. The genre is comforting to many readers and sells, so there’s a great attraction in the world of literary writing where there are too many delicious offerings that suffer lack of readers.

The year a certain book excited the publishing world, I heard co-workers talk about it being the first book they’d bought and read in years. The subject matter of sadomasochism has been handled beautifully by a number of literary writers, so the subject matter can definitely be character-driven and fascinating. When a writer friend lent me her copy of the book, as she too wanted to see what the fuss was about, she called it an S&M Gothic romance. She managed to force it down and I tried but couldn’t persevere past the first chapter. The descriptions, the language, the dialogue, the everything fell flat as if a machine had written it and the only element allowed to live was the cliché. These are the kinds of things that cause me to stop reading.

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

I have books everywhere but my special shelf consists of about 30 favorites including Jill Hoffman’s Jilted, Cynthia Cruz’s The Glimmering Room, Stefan Zweig’s The Post Office Girl, Charles Bowden’s Blues for Cannibals, Jean Rhys’ After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, and Rosalind Palermo Stevenson’s The Absent. My earliest mentor was the poet Philip Dacey, who I studied under as an undergraduate and who became a lifelong friend. William Packard, founding editor of The New York Quarterly and a truly overlooked American original, was also my teacher (albeit much later) and a mentor. His masterpiece, the “Ty Cobb Poem,” written in the long-form tradition, is a gift to literature. For years I’ve attended Mudfish editor Jill Hoffman’s salon-style Glass Table Workshop in the heart of Tribeca. Poet, novelist, and artist, her work integrates those previously mentioned three elements of language, imagery, and intensity. We meet on Wednesday nights, a close group often starting late and going to midnight. Most of us are longtime writers working in the jobs unrelated to literature. It’s wonderful to gather in Jill’s apartment where her art covers the walls and her enthusiasm and insights are transformative. The candles flicker over the bread and cheese. The world melts away and the interior world opens.

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

In the beginning of my writing life I smoked and drank coffee until I jittered. Now I make do with green tea and gum. I still jitter but not with a hard-edged caffeine high. On weeknights I write in the deserted office where the afterhours are hushed. My muse is a solitary one. Aloneness is her one requirement. Other writers have muses that appear to them best in the presence of others. I envy those who sit in the Olive Garden or at The Bean, hunched over their laptops and able to concentrate. Quiet isn’t easy to come by in Manhattan. On weekends I write in the red room of the East Village walkup I share with the poet Rob Cook and our feline Vallejo. The red room is stacked with books and stuffed with clothes, as it’s a closet too.

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

I’ve been working on a hybrid non-fiction manuscript entitled Maximum Compound. Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women houses New Jersey’s female violent offenders. Two of the women imprisoned there, Krystal Riordan and Lucy Weems, are longtime correspondents. Their friendship is storied among the prisoners—almost a thing of wonder. I’m weaving lyricism into the harshness of that world. The two women eat mac n’ cheese, shower together after work, hold dance contests and laugh. On nights Lucy can’t sleep, Krystal swaddles her, wrapping her in sheets and blankets.

I’m also working on the prose poem fictions that will make up the Jean Harlow / Bessie Smith Postcards. The two icons represent two worlds, one white, one black, and two art forms, one an actress, the other a singer extraordinaire. I find myself thinking about the importance of friendship and its ability to enlarge and anchor us. In both projects friendship seems thematically central.

Visit Stephanie’s website, and check out the journal Skidrow Penthouse, which Stephanie co-edits and runs with Rob Cook, as well as the affiliated publishing collective Rain Mountain Press.

1. Tell us about your poems in Volume 21, “That Far North” and “Drought.” How did they come to be?

Both “That Far North” and “Drought” are typical and not-typical for me. Many of my poems arise from particular and beloved landscapes, and these two definitely do: the Catskill Mountains (the woods in “That Far North”) and the San Francisco Bay Area (the trail in “Drought”). But the poems are quirky/unusual in the sense that the others who inhabit them are actual, real people. So often when I write, a poem’s “you” or other is an imagined person, or a combination/hybrid of loved people, or an aspect of myself, or not actually a person at all.

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

When I read, I think I most want what a poet friend of mine once called “old-fashioned”: I want to be moved, to feel. She wasn’t being critical when she said that! But it surprised me, and I’ve never forgotten it. I hope that feeling deeply, in response to art, never goes out of fashion. I don’t need to receive or be moved to any particular kind of feeling when I read. I just (just!) want to have a sense of an individual soul illuminating the poem. (That doesn’t mean I only want poems that feel explicitly autobiographical or narrative or confessional, though I love many poems that are members of those particular families.)

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

Living near the Everglades in south Florida as a child. We visited the park all the time when I was little; I remember sawgrass, alligators, anhingas, and water and water and water. I think even then I wanted to respond, somehow, to this place I felt bonded to in a mostly wordless way. I keep feeling that desire, though it’s harder and harder for me to write about Florida. Partly because it is so far away in distance and time. But partly too because it’s a place where the effects of climate change and human habitation are especially terrifying and visible and present. There’s so much grief I don’t know how or where to begin.

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

It feels like a rich, deep time for poetry, for people practicing as poets. I love that there are so many of us. I get inspired and heartened by all the people writing and making and creating, particularly people making poems, even now, especially now. We don’t know what it’s doing or how it is helping – at least most of the time we don’t – but on good days I feel a sureness that it is helping – all of us pouring energy into art – even in ways so small and subtle we can barely register them.

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

Slowly, on a second manuscript of poems.

Visit Kasey’s website and follow her on Twitter.

1. Tell us about your poems in Volume 21, “My Boss Tells Me She Prays for Me” and “When I Say There Is Desire.” How did they come to be?

“My Boss Tells Me She Prayers for Me” is actually a true story. I worked in her office as an assistant and spent most of my time at the receiving end of her rantings. At one point, she asked me to swear that our current president was the only person who can save the country. I got fired after two weeks. I’ve never been happier to lose a job.

I wrote “When I Say There Is Desire” as a way to describe – I hesitate to say “define,” as I don’t quite think that’s possible – how I experience desire as an asexual woman. It’s also a poem about extending the idea of desire to include a positive, passionate, intimate connection to the world outside of the bedroom and the home.

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

I find myself most excited when form and function meld to open up new possibilities on the page. I’m thinking of Tyehimba Jess’ Olio, a book that struck with a lightning so brilliant it made me understand the word “awe” in a way I never have before. I find myself least excited when a piece of writing feels insincere, or when it feels as though the writer is holding back, afraid to take risks.

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

It is impossible for me to write a poem that is not political now. When I was younger, the idea that poets shouldn’t write about current events if they want to get publish seemed ubiquitous. This is an incredibly dangerous idea. Whenever I write, I remember that silence is acquiescence. I approach the page with an intention to speak out, to resist, and to fight. The work I do seems small, but small actions put together can, I hope, make change.

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

I started crocheting six years ago. It started out as a way to deal with severe chronic pain, but it’s developed into a meditative practice for me. It’s also helped me when it comes to problem solving; it’s as if working with my hands in this way has re-trained the way my brain approaches problems and mistakes.

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

The truth is that I never quite know exactly what I’m working on – I tend to follow my instincts and interests and then, after I’ve been doing that for a few months, I try to lean back and take the long view in the hopes of learning more about what I’ve been doing for all that time. I do have (I think I have?!) that long view of two things I’m working on: a memoir about my hysterectomy and a collection of poems about my love/hate/bless-your-heart relationship with the Deep South.

Visit Emma’s website and follow her on Twitter.

1. Tell us about your fiction piece, “The Man from Lowville,” in Volume 21. How did it come to be?

“The Man from Lowville” is one of those stories you decide to abandon only to return to years later. In fact, so much time has passed since the initial drafts that it’s difficult for me to recall what the impetus of the story exactly was. And I suppose, for me at least, it doesn’t really matter—all of my stories come about in different ways, and I’m not interested in making a routine around it. With that said, I do remember wanting to create a narrative that examined the perpetuation of toxic masculinity, and although historical fiction is not something I tend to write, at the time it seemed WWII-era America added a unique dimension to the piece, when some of the men—those who were 4-F’ed, unfit for military service—often struggled with feelings of inadequacy and unmanliness while at the same time women were stepping up and taking over roles in the workforce. But the truth is, unfortunately, this story could have just as easily taken place today as it did seventy-odd years ago.  

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

At the moment, what excites me most as a reader and writer is narrative voice. I’m more than happy to read a 500-page novel where nothing happens as long as I find the narrator captivating. Falling in love with a voice, becoming hypnotized by language and cadence, can be one of the most powerful experiences for a reader to encounter. It’s also something I’m attempting to achieve within my own work. The other thing that excites me, and always has, is the bizarre. I simply feed off strange.

As for the second part of the question—it’s difficult to say. If I’m not struck by the voice or the characters or the prose of a novel, then I’ll simply move on. Sometimes this has nothing to do with the strength of the work itself, but with my own taste, or perhaps where I’m at emotionally or mentally at the time of the reading. Either way, I no longer feel guilty about giving up on a book—there’s merely not enough time in one’s life to read stories that don’t move us.  

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

It permeates everything I write whether I want it to or not. At times I attempt to tune down the political part of my mind because I can sense my work becoming didactic, and that’s not what readers want. Because of that I constantly remind myself to balance my politics with my love of characters, to make them real, fully fleshed, and not mere pawns. But in the back of my mind I often find myself asking: Why is this story important to tell right now? And I always make sure to have an answer.  

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

I owe being a writer largely to my early love of film. That’s really where my interest in storytelling began. I have just as much passion for filmmaking than I do for writing stories and essays. The thing is, it’s a hell of a lot cheaper to write a story than to make a movie. Although it’s a bit difficult fluctuating between the two mediums, it also has its perks. I both love and hate the collaboration of filmmaking. I also both love and hate the solitude of writing. When I tire of being stuck by myself writing stories, when I start to feel that incessant need to work with others, I usually take a break in order to do some sort of visual project—as little as it may be—and once that project is completed, after dealing with all of the particular struggles of filmmaking (funding, equipment, egos, etc.) I’m excited to once again hide out in my apartment to write some fiction. It’s a strange pattern, but overall beneficial to my creative output.

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

For the past few months I’ve been working on a feature-length screenplay. It’s something I wrote around the parameters of a micro-budget so that, possibly, I can assemble a crew and make it myself. We’ll see what happens. But I’m looking forward to returning to some short fiction for the time being.

Zachary F. Gerberick received his MFA in Creative Writing at Florida State University. His short stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in River Teeth,New South, Water-Stone Review, among other journals. Recently, his short story “Adirondack Express” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by New Limestone Review.