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

“Another Way” is a lyric essay about the acceptance of life as it is, a letting go that opens new possibilities for discovery and love. I remember when I wrote it that I wanted to draw on a lively mix of experiences to capture this openness to possibilities, stories that could fold into each other such as skinny dipping at Martha’s Vineyard, Julius Popp’s amazing water sculpture, dissolving sand dragons at Coney Island, and the canals of Mars to name a few. I shattered and rearranged these stories of art and public life in order to form a new whole that slowly emerges for the reader, a single story of acceptance and affection in a fallen world.

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

I think I became a writer because of the suicide of my mother when I was eleven years old. Writing became the way I could come to terms with experiences that otherwise have no shape for me. Eventually, I was able to write the story of my mother’s life and death in the memoir The Book of Knowledge and Wonder, a cathartic experience that shook me to the core but offered consolation.

  3. How has writing shaped your life?

As I shape the writing, it, likewater etching sand, shapes me. It continuously teaches me to look harder, think beyond received ideas, and open up to fresh possibilities. Its hours of silence make me a better listener and teacher. The intellectual challenge goads me. The research pushes me into the world. Through my website, The Humble Essayist, I meet new writers that I admire which enriches my life as well. I agree with Annie Dillard that it is a privilege to muck around with words each day. I learn so much!

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

I write less about myself now and more about the world, especially the world of books and art. My goal is to get as much of the world in my writing as I can. A reading of Henry Thoreau in college—the passage from “Walking” where he climbs a pine tree and sees his world in a new way—hadan enormous impact on me when I was young and Annie Dillard is the writer who introduced me to the contemporary essay. I admire the wide range of reading that informs their work. I’m also a fan of many of my contemporaries, writers such as Judith Kitchen,Charles D’Ambrosio, Eliot Weinberger, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Elena Passarello—to name a few favorites—who bring such varied subject matter into their writing and transform it elegantly.

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

This desire to write personal essays about public experience, mixed with anxieties about democracy in America,has led me, inevitably, to writing about politics. In an essay called “The Beloved Republic” published recently in the Antioch Review, I consider the role of art and culture in a world threatened by increasing authoritarianism. The title comes from an essay written by E. M. Forster in 1939 with Europe on the brink of World War II and describes “an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky” who lay low during dangerous times, continuing their creative work and resisting from within if possible, until the danger had passed. In my next book I am looking for fresh ways to explore art and literature as a tool for transforming a world drifting toward autocracy.

Visit Steven’s website here.

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

My third child was born in the springtime. The weather was absolutely luscious, and I spent a few days cuddling her in bed as my milk came in and I recovered from her birth. We left the windows open day and night. 

Between naps and nursing sessions I read the paper, watched the baby yawn and stretch after her months in increasingly cramped quarters, and listened to the gaggle of neighborhood children sweeping in and out of the downstairs rooms with my older children. The ideas began to percolate then but the poem was not completed until my daughter was in preschool.

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

A few years ago my father sent me a photocopy of a page in a journal he kept when I was eight years old. He described me running around with a notebook and the stub of a pencil in my back pocket and recorded my explanation that I planned to be a poet and write about my feelings. Capturing the emotional resonance of an image or experience is still a driving force in my work.

3. How has writing shaped your life?

Writing—and reading—allows me to experience my life more intensely and to be more fully present in it. It has also forced me to structure my life in order to make time to be at my desk.

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

Style of Desiderio da Settignano, Saint John the Baptist, 1400/1899, terracotta, Samuel H. Kress Collection 1943.4.83

Jane Kenyon was an early poetry love. I picked up her books as a college student in the poetry section of my local bookstore because one was blurbed by Annie Dillard, my favorite writer at the time. Living near Washington, D.C., I’m fortunate to have free access to many art exhibitions. Shows by Desiderio da Settignano and Bill Viola were touchstones that I returned to many times, as well as the work of local artist, Charles Ritchie who captures the mystery present in my domestic, suburban landscape. 

Charles Ritchie, Winter Night, 1999-2012

I’ve also sought out contemporary poetry about the experience of motherhood. Books by Rachel Zucker, Carrie Fountain, and Sarah Vap are some of my favorites, although I’m happy to say there are many, many more. 

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

My kids are getting a little older, and after a decade dominated by bearing, nursing, and mothering very young children, I’ve entered a new period of change and uncertainty and I’m looking ahead to what’s next. The manuscript I’m working on now reflects this shift and is full of poems of exploration and wandering.

Follow Emily on Twitter here.

In The Field is a series devoted to highlighting the writing life and artistic process of our contributors.

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

“Joy, Apoptosis” came out of a need to imbue my writing with some amount of joy and tenderness, something so readily found in my daily life but less so in my work. I wanted to tackle the challenge of balancing the sacred domestic with the dread sacred, to resign myself to the fact that the world can be both irredeemable and beautiful all at once.  

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

I honestly thought I’d become a statistician! I was an avid reader but thought creative writing was out of my reach.But my wife (girlfriend at the time) had read the absolutely worst rhymed and metered love poetry I wrote for her when we were undergrads and somehow thought there was value in them. She suggested I take a creative writing class and here we are. She was, and still is, my most important reader.   

3.  How has writing shaped your life?

Writing has allowed for a certain kind of focused care and intent to be put into my words and actions. People wield themselves and their words with such reckless abandon; I find the intentionality of writing to be a balm against harm, a way to not only understand our own impact but those of others as well. Whether poetry or prose, my life and its actions, I have tried to make each word count, each movement to mean something.

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

I could fill notebooks trying to answer this question succinctly. In the interest of brevity, I’ll stick to poets. There are writers like Li-Young Lee and Louise Glück who have been touchstones for decades, poets whose work strikes the core of me. Then there are more contemporary writers and thinkers like Meghan McClure who is never far from my mind. We have Kaveh Akbar’s joy-centered activism and divine-minded writing, Paige Lewis’ open-hearted devotion to wonder and curiosity, Devin Gael Kelly’s penchant for transformative vulnerability, Stephen J. Furlong’s quixotic personality combined with a drive to do good, be good, write and review well. I’m in perpetual amazement and made humble when I think of these writers. 

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

I’m working on a manuscript of poems that balance domestic panic with joy and softness, poems with an anxiety-induced tenderness. I’m also working on a book of “craft” essays, ones that mix memoir and my cultural lens (I am half-Japanese and moved to America when I was nine) while looking at a particular aspect of writing.

Visit Michael’s website here.

In The Field is a series devoted to highlighting the writing life and artistic process of our contributors. 

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

A threat of violence at my daughters’ school ended as a non-event, but the idea that we now have to face such things—with official communications and potentially life-or-death consequences—left its mark. Through the eyes of the narrator in this story—Threat Response–, I found myself exploring that lingering threat, in different circumstances and with very different outcomes. The piece went through many drafts, but the second-person point of view came from the beginning. I found it essential for this narrator, to enable her to speak through a deep sense of guilt and admit other ugly feelings.

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

I had English teachers in high school who encouraged my writing, and I had the foundation in a love of reading and language. I’m kind of a late bloomer in becoming a real “writer” generating my own creative work. In hindsight, I think parenthood sparked that need to write for me. The world became more amazing but also weightier. I felt greater responsibility and inadequacy. One of the first pieces I wrote for myself as an adult was about taking my two-year-old to her first day of preschool on September 11, 2001, when news of planes flying into buildings began seeping through the radio.

3.   How has writing shaped your life?

I studied journalism in college, held jobs in communications, and worked as a freelance writer. Writing fiction and creative nonfiction—beginning with a blank page and no instructions—reignited my enthusiasm for learning. I took creative writing classes and ultimately completed a low-residency MFA program (at Queens University). Beyond the insight into craft and the helpful deadlines, these experiences connected me to a new community. I’m continually inspired by my fellow writers, and the opportunities I’ve had in the last few years to teach creative writing classes in Chicago have been some of the most rewarding “work” experiences of my life.

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

I love short stories and their power to reveal the strange and poignant aspects of human behavior. Mary Gaitskill’s collection Because They Wanted To gets at bleak topics with surprising humor and captures feelings in an incredibly physical way. Lori Ostlund’s collection The Bigness of the World inspired me to write my first fan email. I still fall in love with single stories by unfamiliar authors in literary journals—and get excited when The New Yorker delivers a piece by Rivka Galchen, Yiyun Li, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Tessa Hadley, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, George Saunders, and more.

From a process standpoint, I discovered Ron Carlson Writes a Story and Alice Mattison’s The Kite and the String last year. Carlson’s book is deceptively simple but for me both validated and articulated the sentence-by-sentence process of getting a first draft down. Mattison covers more territory, sharing the underlying philosophy of letting the imagination lead. I recommend any writer struggling with the publication side of writing read Mattison’s sane and compassionate last chapter, “Revising Our Thought Bubbles.”

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

I’m submitting a completed short story collection to a few contests and small presses, and I’m writing and revising new stories. I attempted—and think I pulled off?—my first story with an omniscient point of view. Other recent pieces have had a more humorous tone while somehow allowing politics to creep in. I think about writing a novel—I think I should write a novel—but that’s the desire for publication talking and not my creative impulse yet. I’m trying to let my imagination lead.

Visit Linda’s website here and follow Linda on Twitter here.