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.

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.