1. Tell us about your fiction piece in Volume 20. How did it come to be?

When I was teaching at Hamline in 1994, Jimmy––an inmate at Oak Park Heights Maximum security prison––took two classes from me, one in the MALS (Master of Arts of Liberal Studies) program and the MFA core class which I co-taught with Quay Grigg. Each week we taped the class, mailed him the tape, and then he called one of us from the Education Director’s office. Quay and I visited him in the spring of 1995 and then my husband and I started visiting him every six weeks or so. We became friends. Years later, when he was at USP (United States Prison) Coleman in Coleman, Florida, he told me that he had been feeding the gulls. The guards weren’t happy about it and told him to stop because the gulls were pooping (he used another word) on their cars. Then, all the inmates began feeding the gulls. He laughed and laughed when he told me. It is my practice to write a quick, flash fiction story every morning, so it is not surprising that soon after, the image of a convict feeding the gulls appeared, but with what I believe was the true inspiration for Jimmy feeding those birds, the yearning to be connected to something on the outside, to be over that wall and free.

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

I don’t think there was any single experience. I was a voracious reader as a child and particularly skilled (or should I say distracted?) as a daydreamer with stories always unfolding in my head. I lulled myself to sleep each night by telling myself a story (in which I was usually the central character). Also, I was and am quite shy and writing comes more easily to me than talking.

3. How has writing shaped your life?

I don’t know that writing shapes my life as much as it informs it. Writing is a way for me to discover what I am thinking, what I am wondering about, what I am interested in. That said, you would think that I would have stacks of journals, but I am not really much good at writing in a journal; my real life isn’t that interesting. That is why I started writing quick little stories first thing every morning, just making something up quickly without much, if any, forethought or planning. I love the surprise and the discovery of those stories, people and events that didn’t exist moments earlier until I started writing.

4. What books, writers, art, or artists inspire you and your work?

I like writers who cherish language and take me to worlds I’ve never known. Louise Erdrich inspires me just now. She is so prolific, such a beautiful writer, and writes about people and stories that I could never imagine, but who I know are part of Minnesota and thus part of my life. I am awed by Marilynne Robinson‘s use of language and depth of character. She writes of extraordinary people in ordinary situations, which, perhaps means that we are all extraordinary in some way.

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

I am writing a book about Jimmy, the inmate who inspired “Gull Man,” telling his story against the backdrop of our broken criminal justice system. It is my first venture into nonfiction, and for me, much more challenging––I can’t just make it up! His is a long and complicated story beginning with his detention as a juvenile at age 13 for skipping school and running away from home. When he was sentenced, the judge said, “Now you will learn how to behave.” What he learned was how to be a tough guy, how to fight in order to survive the extraordinarily difficult and dangerous environment of juvenile detention in the 1970s. He called it “gladiator school” and that is indeed what the juvie system at that time turned out, young men groomed for conflict without any mediating influences, without anybody who believed in them as worthy human beings. In 1982 he was sentenced to 80 years without benefit of pardon, parole or commutation of sentence for a robbery of a deli with a fake gun in which nobody was hurt. His lawyer was disbarred a few months later for incompetence. Jimmy has repeatedly tried to appeal the sentence based on numerous errors committed at the original trial, but…it’s complicated. That’s my project now: following one man’s forty-five year journey through the morass of what we call justice in the United States has been both informative and discouraging.

Visit Kathleen’s website and follow her on Facebook.

1. Tell us about your poems in Volume 20. How did they come to be?

Both of my poems in this issue stem from contemplating the complexities of international adoption and examining my position of privilege within that system. While we were in the middle of a years-long adoption process, people would often ask my husband and me what made us choose international adoption. “International Adoption Story: It Didn’t Begin” emerged from how I feel when I try to answer that layered and complex question. Similarly, “Adoption: Becoming the Verbs” is my effort to convey the controversy surrounding international adoption and to illustrate how multiple emotions, such as love, gratitude, guilt, and failure mingle and co-exist.

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

I grew up in a town of 400 people, which meant there was no community library to feed my book hunger—except for the school’s tiny library, which was one small room. I asked for books for every holiday and birthday, rereading everything. I read The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton 17 times. Loving to read made me become a writer. I love the smell of a new book, the way a poem can turn my world sideways, the pleasure in playing with language. What else is like it?

3. How has writing shaped your life?

It would be shorter to answer how it hasn’t shaped my life! Writing is a challenge and a joy. The Twin Cities offers such a supportive writing community, and I’m grateful for it and my many talented writer-friends. Writing seeps in to my life professionally and personally—I teach it, I am the Poetry Editor for Midway Journal, I mentor in the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop program, I’m in two writing groups, and more. I’m grateful for the amazing people and experiences writing has brought into my life.  

4. What books, writers, art, or artists inspire you and your work?

I read fiction and poetry constantly, so I’d say whatever I’m currently reading is what’s immediately inspirational. During the last couple of weeks, that would be Louise Erdrich’s novel, Future Home of the Living God; E.J. Koh’s poetry in A Lesser Love; Melody S. Gee’s poetry in The Dead in Daylight; Charles Baxter’s short story collection, There’s Something I Want You to Do; and Emily Fridlund’s novel History of Wolves.

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

Terrapin Books accepted and published my full-length poetry collection titled Suspension this year, and I couldn’t be happier. I continue to work on new poems, many of which are inspired by the ongoing political upheaval. I’ve also just completed a middle-grade fiction book called Macaw Island, which I envision as the first in a series of six books featuring the same group of children. Each book will focus on a different, current environmental or social issue.

Visit Paige’s website here and follow her on Twitter.

For twenty one years, Water~Stone Review has been a collaborative passion project of students, faculty, and staff. For our next issue, we are bringing a new team member to the process with hope of expanding our chorus of voices in our pages as well as our reach and readership. 

 In this post we meet Vol. 22 Contributing Poetry Editor, Sun Yung Shin.

1. Your work as a writer and editor creates conversations and connections between voices, concepts, world views, and a whole galaxy of other elements. With so much to work with and work from, what excites you as an editor and as a writer?

What excites me as an editor is being surprised. I am looking to read something that’s unlike—in some compelling way—anything I’ve read before, although it doesn’t have to be formal, it can be any number of types of surprises. I’m always looking to be awakened or resurrected as a reader, and to explore new ways of being and feeling human (or animal, mineral, vegetable, vapor, liquid…sublimation…), a part of this universe.  

As a writer I get excited by the possibility of expressing complexity, of the effort to use the medium of language—which includes silence, and music. I am compelled to write in order to make a “dam against erasure,” as Solmaz Sharif has put it. Not just personal, individual erasure, but cultural erasure, and the continual mutilation of the subjectivities of being a woman, a person of color, an immigrant, etc.

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

There are so many, even though I came later to writing, because there was such a void in terms of role models, culturally, but I know that my early experiences in the Roman Catholic church and in the arts continue to feed my love of languages, rhythm, music, and mystery.  

3. What compels you to keep writing and working with words during challenging times?

I’ve never not existed in challenging times, although I myself am very privileged at this moment, in terms of my education and relative safety in global terms, and in American terms. I was born into a time when South Korea was ruled by a military dictator who had declared himself president for life. I am a naturalized U.S. citizen because of U.S. proxy wars in Asia and ethnic cleansing in Korea. As a woman, I am subject to violence all over the globe, past, present, and future. As an immigrant of color in the U.S., I am considered a parasite and a burden. As an Asian American woman, no one is interested in my history or my condition except others who share my subjectivity, and even then. This is just reality. I write from a place of displacement, dispossession, silence, and disrepair. From neglect and abandonment. My personal journey is as an orphan. Language is something that is, while not free, an aspect of my freedom. Reading across time and space gives me solace, gives me premises upon which to exercise and exorcise my grief and my connection to the human experience. I write as a way to live, as a way to feel my existence as potentially legible to myself and others. I also deeply believe in some kind of democracy or anarchy, and in freedom of speech and press, and in the power of collective movement and in the sanctity of individual life. Language and expression are a birthright and a human right. When we can push back against the forces that would silence us and dictate how we think and what we say, I feel strongly that we must. Poets and writers are dangerous, and authoritarian regimes know that.   

4. What books, writers, art, or artists inspire you and your work?

Of course, so many! But one of the most important to me has been the Korean immigrant woman poet Myung Mi Kim, whose work gave me a way in to poetry and poetics.

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

I’m working on another poetry manuscript that is loosely focused on evolution and mass extinction, and it’s a kind of elegy, I suppose, and I have several other non-fiction book and anthology projects cooking. I am very grateful to have wonderful collaborators and it’s a great time to be a poet. I am in love with all the new, thrilling work coming out from writers of color and native writers.

Visit Sun Yung’s website here and follow her on Twitter.

In perusing my treasured archives of Water~Stone, I found in the Fall 2003, Volume 6 issue a CNF piece worth revisiting, written by Naomi Shihab Nye. This notable writer was mentioned in a recent talk given by Hamline’s distinguished visiting poet, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, who found much inspiration from Nye early in her career.

The piece I refer to, titled “Someone I Love,” holds a poetic sensibility. It flows, with its concrete imagery, its nuanced tone of emotion, understated in its suggestion at first, and then becoming more apparent, even volatile.

The essay begins, “Someone I love so much cut down my primrose patch.” And so the journey unfolds. I read of the careful tending, I see the buoyant primroses, crimson and gold, offering their fragile “bonnets.” I imagine what the flowers, by their instinct, could remember, even deprived of the sun. I see the push mower Nye describes, like the one I use, the un-sharpened rotary, slightly rusted, blunt, in its methods of butchery. From Nye’s words, and the feelings pent up into them, I get the sense of the inexplicable things humans can do.

I gaze at the details Nye paints with her words. I witness the “Dutchman’s Pipe,” the clasping jasmine, and the cacti, that watched the destruction in silence. Nye writes of “wanting to feel tied to the earth again, as I always do when I get home…” I watch as she lets the garden hose fall from her hands when her eyes meet the terrible discovery. I feel her “cold stun of fury,” and her question: “how could anyone?” Nye writes, “this is the pain this year deserves.”’ The event evokes a memory of her father, and how he had responded to a similar circumstance. Her anger is tempered, for the moment, but with the next morning she erupts.

This is the human way, isn’t it? In this case I feel she is quite justified. I myself have felt anger at the rabbits for their wholesale destruction of everything, but I have less cause.

We express ourselves and deal with our anger, even with our rage. But I sense something more here.

This piece, beyond its rich description and straightforward force, digs deeper and reveals to me an element of the primal, just beneath the skin, that feels very close to the truth about humans. This ‘someone’ didn’t remember “flower things like that.” This piece could not help but make me think of the entire state of our union, and the mindset of so many Americans.

And should we ask what will be erased, cut down, maimed, or effaced today? And what if, in our response, as Nye writes, we choose the unthinkable? Can you guess what that is? Nye asks at the end, if the love did not exist: “who might I become?”

What if this horticultural incident happened again and again? Do we become desensitized in this, our most desensitized age?

Do we cover the primula vulgaris with heavy wire, or erect a barrier tall enough to state its purpose? Nye chose to “stay human,” because of love. To make a poem about this was a healthy choice for her, I think, and perhaps a lesson for all of us, to take the unthinkable and make it into art that might possibly redeem. In today’s political climate, it’s a tall order, but one perhaps it is our duty to consider. What are primroses known for? I found they meant ‘happiness,’ ‘satisfaction,’ and ‘I can’t live without you.’ All very fitting.

I assume the primroses came back up again, and perhaps after being so savagely mauled, they produced another, even stronger crop, of bloom. We hope so, for the poet’s sake, and perhaps for the sake of the perpetrator, as well.

Author: J. Wittenberg

Writing can feel like a solitary and often lonely thing. I’m of the belief that engaging with the larger artistic community can invigorate both your own work and the work of people around you. Go out there and see what other writers are doing. Share your work, collaborate, or just have some good conversations. The world might be big and scary, but it does not have to be lonely. Other writers are out there and thankfully, the Twin Cities is full of them. Here are just five ways to engage with the Twin Cities literary community.

Go to Local Events

Did you know the Twin Cities hosts a vibrant literary community and some of them like to give public readings? Now you do! See what other writers in the community are doing and share your own work. Take advantage of what the Twin Cities already offers.

Check out Hamline University’s Green Light Reading Series (https://www.hamline.edu/HUEventsDetail.aspx?id=4295036526)

And look at Raintaxi’s wonderful calendar of public events (http://www.raintaxi.com/literary-calendar/)

Support Independent Bookstores

No one will champion the work of writers more than bookstores. Thankfully, the Twin Cities hosts a number of them. Not only will you connect with the larger community of readers and writers in the Twin Cities, you can walk away with a good book and support a small local business.

Here’s a list of Twin Cities bookstores to get you started: (https://www.twincities.com/2017/04/29/independent-bookstore-st-paul-mn/)

Attend Writing Groups

Want a second pair of eyes on your work? Want to collaborate or just have conversations about craft with other writers? The Twin Cities have you covered. Want to meet up and talk with other women writers? How about aspiring novelists? Political writers? People of color? Thankfully, the Twin Cities is a hub of writers and like you, a lot of them would like to meet and talk shop. Here are just a few:

https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/154-twin-cities-readers-and-writers

http://www.juliebburton.com/tcwritingstudio/

https://www.loft.org/resources__awards/digital_resources/writing_groups/

https://www.meetup.com/topics/writing/us/mn/minneapolis/

http://mnwriters.org

Start Your Own Writing Group

Maybe you don’t see a group that fits your niche, or the one that does no longer fits your schedule. Rejoice, the universe has given you an opportunity! Want to sit down with coffee and talk about graphic novels? Make a group for that! How about spoken word poetry? The tools are in your hands. Start a group on meetup.com and spread the word today. If you have a passion and the commitment to sharing it with other people, then by all means: share. Art is better when we collaborate.

Support The Accomplishments of Your Fellow Writers

Celebrate when your fellow writers hit milestones. It’s incredibly lonely to go about this alone. Be happy when your fellows find success and they’ll celebrate you in turn. Find your joy with the people around you, no matter how great or how small. Don’t mistake, writing is hard work. But writing is something we do out of love – why shouldn’t there be joy in that as well?

Go out there, my friends. Write. Create. Connect.

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