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.  

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

A few years ago I was working on a play about rape culture—the heinous scourge of sexual violence throughout the world—writing in a variety of voices, exploring fictional characters from vastly different cultures and circumstances. This piece popped up unexpectedly one morning. Unlike the others it was wholly autobiographical—something that happened to me in my childhood. I’d had worse things happen to me back then, but this episode is one I could never shake. I felt so betrayed that my mother, who I knew cared about me very much, would completely ignore what I was contending with in the back seat of our car, trying to fend off the sexual advances of a drunk stranger.I’ve often wondered what kept her from hearing my distress? I can only imagine it was that we were part of an activist group, protesting the treatment of Native Americans lured to cities during the Relocation period––promised a better life only to find themselves in ghetto wastelands. To my mother’s way of thinking, if you were on our side, then you had to be one of “the good guys.”

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

My parents met in the publishing world and were both book people for whom reading was a sacred pleasure. I was the same way. Had my first library card by the age of two when librarians saw that I handled books with reverent care. I began writing before I learned to read, filling empty pages with a jumble of letters, pretending I was writing stories. I don’t recall what life was like before I was able to write. For me, writing is as essential as breathing. Perhaps because it was so much a part of my everyday experience I didn’t consider becoming a professional writer until I’d tried my hand at other things. By my final year in law school, when I knew I wasn’t cut out for a legal career (being such an Arts person), I decided to get serious about my writing and develop my talent.

3. How has writing shaped your life?

Writing saved me. When I was eleven years old I began to feel stalked by death—my beloved father died in mysterious circumstances, my grandmother died, several friends were murdered. For the next few years I wrote my way out of shock and depression. My imagination helped me escape, helped me create a safer world I could inhabit at least in my mind. Having never had children, my books and stories and essays are essentially my children. I am always happiest when I’ve tapped into a fertile writing thread. The excitement becomes physical. After a productive writing session I’m flushed and sweaty as if I’ve just had a workout at the gym. Wrung out with joy.

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

My mother couldn’t stand being cooped up at home during my pre-school years, so she took me all over the city of Chicago. We walked and bused from one end of the city to the other, visiting libraries and museums. I was quite taken with the Art Institute, came to know its exhibits very well and felt as if the great masters collected there were friends of mine.I was also a great fan of ballet and idolized Maria Tallchief––the remarkable Osage ballerina. My father and I shared a love for musicals and would sing together sometimes in the evenings—corny show tunes we sang as if our hearts were breaking. My father read to me each night and pretty soon I fell in love with poetry, especially epic tragedies. I’d memorize them and recite them to myself with grand dramatic feeling. Music is an important part of my writing process––I’ll find music (preferably instrumental, without voice or lyrics) to associate with a particular piece I’m working on. I’ll listen to it intently, swept away emotionally, jotting down notes on what material comes forward, downloaded from that place of creativity. 

Some favorite books? Shell Shaker by LeAnne Howe, every story collection by Alice Munro, The Round House by Louise Erdrich, Whereas by Layli Long Soldier, Cell Traffic by Heid E. Erdrich, Commonwealth by Ann Patchett, The Changeling by Victor LaValle, Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison.

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

Close to finishing a new novel, a spooky one, that was inspired by a frightening experience I had back in 2014, living for a month in what had been the girls’ dormitory of a former Indian Boarding School in Sitka, Alaska. I was there working on the aforementioned rape culture project, sharing the space with a fellow artist collaborating with me on the play. We were increasingly disturbed by the things we heard, felt, saw in that building which we supposedly had all to ourselves for the month. Eventually we were so troubled we reached out for help from local friends who told us it was a very haunted place. My new novel takes place in Massachusetts rather than Alaska, but the ghosts followed me into my book.

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

I have been thinking and writing (in scholarly ways) about post-9/11 poetry for years, but I could never figure out how to write a poem about that topic. Thinking about the Rapture as an allegory for 9/11—as it is, I think, in Tom Perrotta’s novel The Leftovers, to which I allude in the poem—helped me begin the poem, and my experience visiting the 9/11 Memorial Museum gave me specific imagery to work with. The poem originally had another, interwoven part relating to neuroscience and hysteria, about which I’d been writing a lot, but I eventually separated the two parts into their own poems.  

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

My experience in third grade with Mrs. McCabe, who encouraged us to write poems and then compile them into “books” (complete with covers decorated with potato-stamp designs) helped me understand how much pleasure writing poetry could give me. It didn’t help that that same year,  my babysitter, who was a poet, regularly read my poems at readings and told me that people were impressed that I was only eight years old!

3.  How has writing shaped your life?

Like many poets, I read a lot in childhood, especially during long, relatively solitary summers. I always wanted to be a poet, but it was also difficult to take that impulse seriously in myself and to live in a way that offered lots of what my teacher Sharon Olds called “poem food,” experiences that made me feel like writing poems. Writing isn’t easy for me, or rather, I draft fast and revise seemingly endlessly. But that process allows me to stay in touch with the often hidden part of me that, like writing poems, sustains me.

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

Because I’m a professor of literature, I’m very lucky, because reading poetry is part of my day job. Among the poets whose work has been important to me are Louise Gluck and Brenda Hillman, but there are many others. When I’m working on poems, I often try to read poets whose work will push mine to be a little wilder—I tend to seek out work that is illogical or nasty or associative. I also read widely in recent news and feature stories on a variety of topics, and I often find that this material gives me ideas for poems. I’m also really interested right now in the relation between the arts, and especially in the ways that poetry resembles and differs from fiction, nonfiction, dance, music, and visual art. Experiencing these other art forms sometimes gives me ideas for my own poems. 

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

I’ve recently started writing a series of what I call “hybrid essays” that try to bring together my scholarly interests with my preoccupations as a poet, often in the context of themes and events from my childhood. I’ve also just started what I hope will eventually be a new volume of poems related to visual art, forgery, and the art market. This work in some ways echoes my current scholarly project, which is a book about the ways contemporary economics informs recent North American poems.

Visit Ann’s website here.

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

The impetus for this poem came out of reflecting on a time when I was part of a group that traveled together.It is a compilation of places but Spain in particular. One young woman and I would gather up tomatoes and olives, bread and olive oil, and find a secluded spot by the sea—it was rare that we could get away from chores and kids so it really felt magical. Her friendship meant so much to me but once the group broke up, we didn’t stay in touch. I feel nostalgic for that friendship and those beautiful seascapes. The title “Recuerdos” can mean memories but I called it souvenirs because it was a tangible turning point. Trust later turned into disillusionment. My memories are souvenirs from a time before heartbreak and loss.

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

Oh I loved books since I was a very young child but I wrote a story in 6th grade about two teenagers in love (as if I knew anything about teen-aged love!) called The Sun Came Shining. I can still picture the construction paper cover I designed. The boyfriend saves the girl’s brother from an oncoming bus and dies at the scene. At the end, she goes to their special look-out spot and the “sun comes shining” again. I had every girl in my class sobbing. I thought, “This is what I want to do!”

3. How has writing shaped your life?

Writing has been a way to have a voice. It has given me a way to connect. Most importantly it also was a way to reclaim my voice when it had been silenced, because of being a woman, being told that my opinion didn’t matter, being a caregiver instead of a partner. Writing has been cathartic in coping with multiple losses and painful memories; it helped me heal and move on to joy. It is a way to grapple with the world’s injustices. Writing is a form of meditation for me. It nourishes my imagination. I teach writing workshops, which keeps me on my toes to find new ideas. In particular, facilitating writing for healing workshops always uplifts me because I witness the resiliency of the human spirit. My motto is “The shortest bridge between us is a story.” Turning trauma or grief or tragedy or loneliness into story is like the alchemy of turning lead into gold.

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

I am very eclectic. I go through phases of becoming entranced with a particular writer. As a young writer, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Bronte, and [Fyodor] Dostoevsky were my favorites. In terms of other artists and role models, I admire Frida Kahlo’s determination to portray her inner truth and Georgia O’Keefe’s fierce independence. I read everything: my range is from Alice Hoffman, Susan Power, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to Donna Leon, Louis Penny, and Anne Perry (I admit it, I read murder mysteries for entertainment). In poetry, from Pablo Neruda to Danez Smith, from Anne Sexton to David Whyte, from Joy Harjo and Naomi Shihab Nye to local poets Julia Klatt Singer and Athena Kildegaard, from Denise Levertov to e. e. cummings, from Sharon Olds to Kazim Ali. I love reading international poets: Miguel Hernandez, Yehuda Amichai, Mahmoud Darwish, Simin Behbahani, Zeina Hashem Beck. I get poems in my inbox from Split This Rock, Poets.org and a group called Panhala. I love the dynamics of spoken word and the spiritual depth of Rumi and Hafiz. I am either ingesting poetry because it touches my soul or because I admire playfulness with language and want to try it out for myself.

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

My novel Catch a Dream that takes place in 1980s Israel [is now available], so thinking about how to get it out into the world. When working on a short story, suddenly two characters popped up: one is Irish and they have a child with a birth defect. I don’t know how to write this story yet but I do know what it is like to have expectations crushed. I am putting together a collection of essays called Unlikely Predicaments and a “how to” craft book for writers who teach in community spaces. I enjoy experimenting and trying things out—sometimes they work, sometimes not. I have a pile of manuscripts: memoir, novels and poetry, so I am always submitting, revising, reading at open mics and overcoming writer’s fear of rejection and failure!

Visit Wendy’s website and follow her on Facebook.