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.

Author:

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.