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

In November 2014, my beloved grandmother was diagnosed with terminal uterine cancer and given 3-4 months to live. This was a tremendous blow––not only because she was almost 100 and still fit enough to be living on her own with help from my father, but because she had taken me in during a turbulent time in my 20s and was my sounding board and most stalwart cheerleader. Given that I lived over 8 hours away and had two young children, I knew I would not be able to spend as much time as I would want with her in her final months. Her move into a care facility meant the loss of our weekly phone call, as she was unable to bring her home phone that was designed to aid her hearing. At some point in the next month, I decided to begin writing her letters to make us both feel better. In one, I included a sonnet that I had written that morning––with the promise to write her a poem each and every week. Deciding to write a sonnet a week seemed easy enough for the few months [and] didn’t seem impractical. Having those months stretch until the last day of January in 2016 meant I was continuously forced to approach my grandmother’s life and her impending death from many different angles and approaches. This poem was written in the autumn of 2015, I think. I was obviously not sure what to write to my grandmother that very early morning, but the dogs kept me good company as I worked to the poem’s conclusion. Whenever I saw her during her final year of life, Grandma never failed to comment on how she was one of the few to receive mail, which made me glad and sad at the same time. All my letters and poems were in her nightstand drawer when she entered her last sleep. I have found that I can’t open a single one, though the packet is now in my possession.

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

My first desire was to write stories like Laura Ingalls Wilder––my best friend, Karina, and I had great ideas for a story about being chased by cows in a pasture near my house, but we never got all the way through a full draft. I also wrote odd news and bits and pieces for the Withrow Elementary newspaper, which another best friend, Ali, and I produced on the school’s very first computers – two on a cart that we’d wheel into the hallway to work. Poetry came to me for the first time while I visited our former exchange student in Spain for a month in the summer between sophomore and junior years of high school. Lots of time to think in a foreign country where you only understood every third or fourth word––I wrote my first “real” poem in Toledo.

3. How has writing shaped your life?

Writing makes me wake up way too early because if you have kids quiet isn’t all that easy to come by. It gives me a reason to listen deeply, think broadly, and stay curious. Writing keeps me reading, for inspiration and for information. I joke with my daughters that they will be responsible for making me as “famous” as Emily Dickinson after my death because poets seem to not always know they are bound for fame and literary fortune. I imagine there will be a lot of scraps and notebooks and reams of printed papers, but I can’t imagine a time when I don’t need to keep writing.

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

Eavan Boland, Tracy K. Smith, Louise Glück, Basho and Issa. The books that I review for KR Online always teach me new things about craft. The music of Hamilton for whenever you need 3 ½ hours to go quickly on a long car ride. Louise Penny and Jacqueline Winspear when you just need a good mystery to take you out of yourself.

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

Once I am done coordinating Rochester’s Regional Science Fair (don’t ask me how this happened), I’ll be working on revisions for my chapbook of grandmother sonnets––coming out sometime this year [2018] with Red Bird Chapbooks. My editor is challenging in all the good ways, so I can’t wait to dig back into about 20 of these poems, including the sonnet published here. The revisions also will help my current full-length manuscript, as the chapbook is my final section, more or less. I have enough poems for about half of a new manuscript, full-length, which would be my third unpublished collection. I did mention Dickinson, right? I also just recently started a new essay about God and my brother, which is only odd if you know one or the other. I used to think I was an essayist, not a poet, and I haven’t written in this form for many years, so I’m curious to see if that new writing path is opening again for me.

Visit Lisa’s website here.

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

Believe it or not, the inspiration for “All Saints” came from those sensationalized stories from my youth warning about the dangers of Halloween candy. Though such crimes only happened a few times that decade, we were all taught to fear our neighbors, our friends, strangers, family. We were trained to believe real world horrors exist behind the season’s joyously scary ephemera.

I used that mass panic as a backdrop for youth (and adulthood) in general: how we make our own monsters and pass them down generations as truths and lessons.

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

I’m not sure where the need to write originated. It seems like it’s always been there. Though I didn’t discover poetry until my twenties, I began writing short stories in middle school. One defining moment came when, unbeknownst to me, my eighth grade English teacher submitted a story I’d written for class to a young writer’s literary magazine. The next year, that teacher found me in the hall and handed me a copy of a print journal showcasing my story. That he believed in my work enough to do that was a shock that stays with me with each publication.

3. How has writing shaped your life?

It’s really stunning how the two infuse and inform each other. It’s almost like being a child again, though with all the darkness and light and in-betweens that come with seeing the world for what it is. Perhaps writing is a way to hold the what-is up against the what-could-be, knowing both are equally fragile, fleeting, indescribable. But in trying to describe it, everything changes. The world becomes one great metaphor. Shivering winter trees are anything but naked. Songbirds become so much more. And how we treat each other, not always virtuous, but still something writing allows us to learn from.

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

I’m enamored by the brutal emotional honesty and sonorous quality of many South American, Spanish, and Middle Eastern poets, as I am with the linguistic precision and experimentation of poets like Paul Celan and Octavio Paz. I’d say a few of the contemporary poets who most consistently inspire me are Carl Phillips, Eric Pankey, Ada Limón, Jamaal May, and Ocean Vuong.

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

I currently have two completed manuscripts, Skin Memory and Say Uncle, that I’m shopping around. My contribution to Water~Stone Review is included in the former. [Update: Skin Memory has been named the winner of the Backwaters Prize, judged by Kwame Dawes, and will be published by Backwaters Press in September 2019.]

Visit John’s website here and follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

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

I thought about this story for a long time before I began writing it. I’ve worked for years—in various roles—in the mental health field, and I’ve always been interested in the family dynamic and how it pertains to someone suffering from mental illness. Stories of lives prior to the break of a loved one can be fascinating in both tragic and inspiring ways. The fictional Babeckis family is a big one, and I’ve written stories about several of the other members—some appearing in magazines such as Fifth Wednesday Journal, South Dakota Review, and Red Savina Review–and I wanted to give Roger a chance to tell his.   

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

My parents are both avid readers, and I began making weekly trips to the library with them at a very early age. I’ve always been fascinated, and sometimes saddened, about the passage of time, how quickly it goes, and I wanted a way to capture and preserve the past, and one of the best ways to do that is through writing. I began keeping a daily journal and wrote a lot of bad poetry in college. I was a psychology major but I signed up for a Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction class on a whim my spring semester senior year, and fell in love with writing fiction overnight. Then I began banging my head a little as it was obviously too late to change my major, so I went back and got a Master’s [degree] in writing. I like to think both degrees have contributed to my writing though.  

3. How has writing shaped your life?

Winslow Homer, The Herring Net, 1885

When my kids—there are six of them––were little, writing for me didn’t usually start until late at night, after they all went to bed, but now, with them older, I can write earlier, and tend to the business side of writing at night; either way, I’ve done my best for years to make time for it every day, and most days don’t feel complete unless I’ve worked on something. It’s made me pay much closer attention to personalities, the way people talk and of course, trying to figure out the way they think; some puzzles are much harder than others.

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

Edward Hopper: Office at Night, 1940

After college, I was pretty much just writing horror stories until I picked up a copy of Hemingway’s First Forty Nine Short Stories at the old Victor Hugo bookstore on Newbury Street in Boston, and then that changed everything. Writers who inspire me are far too many to count, but offhand I’d cite Guy de Maupassant, Breece D’J Pancake, [James] Joyce, Karen Russell, Kazuo Ishiguro, Alice Hoffman, Shirley Jackson, William Trevor, Tobias Wolff, Tom Jones. Easy to keep going. And I’m not sure you can beat the last lines of A River Runs Through It, or “The Dead.” [Also] The Quiet American. As far as painters, I’ve always loved Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent, Peter Paul Rubens, and Edward Hopper. And for music, Bach, Pink Floyd, and [Bob] Dylan for lyrics.

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

I’m working on a speculative fiction novel right now which I have fairly high hopes for.  I’ve always loved ghost stories, and I enjoy bringing elements of the supernatural into much of what I write. I’m also revising an older fictional memoir, and working on a few new short stories. I like to have a few things going at once and that way if you get stuck, or blocked, in one piece, you can just pull out another and keep going. There’s always something to write about.

Visit Sean’s literary agency website, and follow him on Twitter.

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

I dread that day each fall when all color fades to phantom. I wrote this poem with Keats’ ode “To Autumn” as a reference point, but instead of earnestly reveling in fall’s beauty, I decided to approach the dying of the green and gold with gallows humor.

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

I wasn’t young. I was teaching fifth grade. I joined my students in writing exercises that our poet-in-residence brought each week. As he unveiled the ways he practiced writing and reading, I felt emboldened to write poems for the first time, believing I might actually be able to make some. For years more I lacked confidence–was I an authentic writer or a teacher who dabbled? Eventually, a short but scary illness shocked me into acting—what was I waiting for? I took a series of writing classes at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis studying with poets Robert Hedin, John Reinhard, Janet Holmes, John Minczeski, and Deborah Keenan. They helped me decide that I was a writer with a growing hunger for formal training. I joined a writing group and a dozen years later enrolled in the MFA Program for Writing at Warren Wilson. I graduated on my sixtieth birthday. My first book, Stunt Heart, was published eight years later in 2017. For me becoming a writer has been a long, slow evolution.

3.  How has writing shaped your life?

I honor my urge to make things. I pay more attention moment to moment and spend more time wondering. Always a reader, I now read like a writer. I ask not only what poems and other creative work mean, but also how they mean. My community has become more and more a community of people with similar impulses.

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

Wow. So many. Most recently, I’ve been blown away by poets Danez Smith, Jenny Johnson, and Lucia Perillo. Before that, a few of many seminal poets for me have been Ellen Bryant Voigt, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Jack Gilbert, and Li Young Lee. I’ve been reading mostly prose lately as I’m feeling a little lost about narrative impulses in my poems. I’m mad for essayist Rebecca Solnit and memoirist Mary Karr.

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

For a couple of years I’ve been accruing a body of poems and prose loosely responding to the idea of marriage as a daughter’s act of escape from the father’s authority. It sets the archetypal tale “The Handless Maiden” against my life and the lives of my 17th century French ancestors. I’m listening hard to hear what’s inside of these particular grandmothers’ humming silences. Almost all of them were surplus daughters from poor families who received a dowry from King Louis XIV to migrate to this continent if they agreed to marry a trapper, trader, farmer, or soldier once they arrived. The lack of white females in the New France colony had the French court in a panic—how could France populate the land with French speaking citizens? I’m curious if these women sent overseas by fathers and patriarchs married against their will? Did the harsh life of the colony improve on what had been dire prospects at home or did it compound the difficulty of their lives? When marriage looks like an escape, is it? I suspect that these women live in me the way dinosaurs live in birds.

Visit Mary Jo’s website here, and follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

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

There’s Nothing Wrong comes from considering what lying means, and also, as for many white writers, trying to understand through image how privilege works, or doesn’t. I also think about the power that people have who tell another person, “There’s Nothing Wrong”—how that phrase has been used to silence others, to convince others that the truth they are carrying around doesn’t matter.  

The Saint of Childhood says No to the Dreamland Tree is a pretty private reverie. There are nods to other poems ‘no to the linden tree outside the southern window’, for example, that tree, and that window appear in several poems in several of my books. There’s a gathering of images used by parents and guardians to usher children into sleep, there’s references to certain songs that were sung to me, that I now sing to my granddaughter, there’s the reference to the saint, (and this poem is part of my new manuscript, The Saint of Everything) and, key for this poem, an incantation around the idea of saying no when a child. Both poems chosen for this issue of Water~Stone Review have to do with power, who has it, and who doesn’t.

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

A father who was a drunk, travel that gave me a big world,  parents with a reverence for the written word, and spending much of my childhood outside. An impossible question to answer, of course. I could list a hundred more experiences, but I won’t!

3. How has writing shaped your life?

Since my early 20s, writing has granted sanity, private space, a clarity about what I value, a place to bring my bewilderment, my anger, my sense of beauty, my understanding of sorrow, my understanding and lack of understanding about race, class, privilege, a place to honor my children, and a place, in each poem, to come into deeper understanding about what to share and what to remain private about. Writing (and publishing) led to jobs that mattered, to thousands of remarkable students, to fellowships that helped me provide for my family, and to a million books to read and study and consider. I continue to be in a state of gratitude about what the act of writing poetry has meant in my life.

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

This is a much better question for a much younger writer! Most writers who do their work and stay humble have been inspired by so many

Joseph Cornell, Untitled (To Margaurite Blaches), 1939-1940

writers, artists, filmmakers, dancers, and musicians it is impossible to make a truthful list. Here are a few names from long ago and from more recently: Muriel Rukeyser, Joseph Cornell, Gwendolyn Brooks,  Laura Jensen, John Yau, John Ashbery, Elizabeth Alexander, Susan Ludvigson, Susan Stewart, Ross Gay, Shirley Jackson, Tomas Transtromer, Yehuda Amichai, Martin Espada, Adrienne Rich, Wendy Lesser, Charles Burchfield, Cornelius Eady, a thousand writers of great songs, a thousand more poets, painters, and, of course, my colleagues and friends in the artistic and literary communities that thrive around the world.

5. What projects are you  working on right now?

I have just finished (again) my book, The Saint of Everything, and hope to have the courage and the will to send it out soon to presses who do work that I admire. I am almost done with a new collection, John Brandon’s Sentences, that uses sentences from John’s books as my titles for each piece. I’m grateful to John for allowing me to make my art with his beautiful sentences. I am working on my first really three-dimensional collage piece, using an old screen from the house I grew up in.

Visit Deborah’s website here.