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?

One of my first cassette tapes ever was Purple Rain. I listened to it so much on my headphones that the tape finally one day snapped from wear. I was devastated. “Will of a Prince” was just a visceral response to hearing the news that Prince died (and without a will).

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

Leaving home at 17 (with my life savings from working part-time jobs since I was 14), in my old Mercury with the vague goal of seeing as much of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico as I could. This was before cell phones, internet, GPS, etc. I had a Rand McNally atlas of North America and a sleeping bag and tent. Mainly, I wanted to get as far away from North Dakota as possible. Along the way, I started jotting down random thoughts and observations, which began to naturally take on the form of poems. I was super frugal and so my savings lasted a couple of years, and then I’d work at temp labor agencies that paid at the end of the day, and other jobs wherever I was, but I still always had a lot of free time on my hands. I’d visit used book stores during this time. Usually there was an overabundance of dog-eared Russian novels for a quarter or fifty cents. I didn’t pay attention to much in high school, but went through all the Russian books I could get my hands on, then got into other kinds of classic and modern literature from other countries (Japanese, French, Latin American, etc.), finally ending up with the newer, more contemporary American literature, because it was the most expensive. In retrospect, some of the used book store workers who’d recommend things were like nerdy angels. Since then, I’ve always preferred buying used books. The more worn, the more trustworthy, I feel.

3. How has writing shaped your life?

In the Bhagavad Gita, it says: “You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions. Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, nor be attached to inaction.”

This is an ideal, of course, for saints and angels. But, in a way, all art-making endeavors, or anything you really care about, is like farming. . . It feels good to see things grow, develop, from deep, inner seedness, which then blooms and then, if everything works out, goes out into the world so that people can perhaps partake in the fruits of your labor of love. I like to think it’s the quality and specificity of love in the fruit of your labors that really nourishes another person’s own inner seedness at the deepest level, whether it’s a poem or building or meal or song or painting or child or, equally possibly, even a business report. Along the way, if you do your work, you get to taste and be sustained by the very source of this aliveness and love on multiple levels while you’re however briefly in contact with it as the “creator” of it.

So writing helps keep things in perspective. And, for the record, unlike is articulated in the Bhagavad Gita, I do think it’s perfectly fine to pilfer from the orchard of your labors for survival. Or, at least for an artist, it’s only natural. I suspect this urge to eat the fruits of your own labor has something to do with what the writer Thomas Moore noted: “Soul is to be found in the vicinity of taboo.”

But it’s not just human artists. You get a feeling that mulberries and grapes in decline on the vine themselves want birds to get drunk on their own private experience of fermentation.

All artmaking can be addictive like this. For a poet, a poem is a “fix”. . . but a fix from the mind’s, and body’s, and sense’s shallower addiction to society’s drab, corrupt construction of the world and cosmos. And so, at some point, to survive spiritually as an artist, to manifest the full integrity of your art, you just have to give yourself over to the art, as in love.

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

Lately, and from that period I mentioned earlier, almost anything by Yukio Mishima. Earlier this spring, I spent a few days writing about the Armory Show at the International Fair of New Art in New York (31 nations’ artwork represented). It’s overwhelming, two giant hangers that once housed war equipment, now crammed with art in little stalls like a super high end flea market. I was able to take my time wandering around, spending time with the pieces; all speaking in their very different languages and dialects and attitudes and tones and styles and forms. Much of Mishima’s work is like the very few pieces of art that I experienced as having the deepest stores of power. I don’t find it the most formally interesting, it’s not flashy or fashionable like most of the art work at the Armory Show is, by necessity and design; but it does inject something uniquely vital into your core.

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

I have a new collection of poems that’s forthcoming in March (2019), called Mitochondrial Night (Coffee House Press). That and other poems and stories.

When I first moved to Saint Paul, I was lonely and unsure of my decisions.

My MFA program hadn’t started yet, my boyfriend was working, I was job-hunting, and the one friend I knew was so busy with her PhD program, she barely had time to eat let alone check on me. I had left a city I was familiar with, a job I knew I could do, family and friends and home, just to pursue writing, this thing I said was my passion.

Most days I walked to a coffee shop or up to the campus to try to write, read, or work on applications. Often I felt more like wallowing in my worries and uncertainties. My walks took me up Hamline Avenue, where I discovered poetry carved into slabs of concrete. Short poems appeared on almost every block, right around the corners.

They are all short poems, sweet and refreshing, and they became a guide to me. They were my path leading to school, a reminder of what I am pursuing. Somehow they brought me joy. In my head I made them a sign that I had chosen the right place to be, that any city that puts poetry on their sidewalks must be a beautiful place.

I have several people to thank for making these sidewalk poems happen.

First, the project is called Everyday Poems for City Sidewalk. It started in 2008 as part of the sidewalk maintenance program (since the city has to repair sidewalks every year, why not make them special). The goal is basically to create “a city-sized book of poetry.” According to the Public Art Saint Paul website (http://publicartstpaul.org/project/poetry/#about_the_project), 17% of city land is in walking distance to a poem now.

Marcus Young developed this program as a City Artist. He specializes in behavioral and social practice art and has been working with the city since 2006. His goal as a city artist has been to redefine the role of an artist working within government and to make art accessible. Because of his idea, the city has installed over 900 poems.

The poems that appear on the sidewalks have been submitted by local Saint Paul residents through a yearly contest. Here are the winners of the contest since 2008: http://publicartstpaul.org/project/poetry/#poems-poets.

The contest is currently closed, but you can email questions about it to Aaron Dysart, a current City Artist.

Thus, thank you Marcus Young and Saint Paul for creating this project and giving people poetry. Thank you for sharing with me a moment that has mattered.

One poem in particular struck me on my walks (and I have to preface I am not a baseball fan or more that the sport has never thrilled me). The poem is called “Steal It” by Ryan Ross:

Go.

Feel the rush.

Speed.

Take off.

The throw.

The catch.

The slide . . .

. . . Safe.

The poem seems so simple that at first I hardly paid attention to it. Yep, that’s a baseball poem, I thought. But as I kept seeing it walk after walk, it hit me that this poem is for me, about me. This poem is about risk, about losing one’s self in the daring of trying. This poems says to pursue the thing you love and honor the moments in that struggle. The poem suggests a hopeful ending, but the thrill is in the action, in going for something, regardless of the ending.

Well, I teared up. This was my reminder. I am here to write, to dare, to try, and it is important to feel all of the moments in this risk.

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If you are a member of the literary community in the United States, you probably know about the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Conference. It’s one of the largest events in the literary calendar, and thanks to my work with Water~Stone Review as the Assistant Managing Editor and the Creative Writing Programs at Hamline University as a Communications Assistant, I was fortunate to be able to attend the 2018 conference in Tampa, Florida, from March 7-10, 2018.

I’ve been coming to AWP through four years of changes in my writing life and have found it to be a place of inspiration and support. I’ve gone from being a junior in college looking at MFA programs to a graduate student working for my program and its literary journals. Through my work, I have the amazing opportunity to promote our contributors through our social media platforms and celebrate their writing and work.

Most of my time at the conference was tied to my iPad and phone, promoting our contributors’ panels and readings. Although I expected I would feel a sense of digital disengagement from the world around me by being on my devices so much, I found the opposite to be true. This is one of the greatest strengths of AWP—the conference is all about building community and connections and practicing literary citizenship.

By posting online through Water~Stone, I found I was entering into a dialogue with a plethora of other voices—those of our contributors, subscribers, readers, submitters, and followers. It was uplifting to see how much digital and real-life excitement came from readers of the journal as they discovered the work of our contributors and got to experience the same thrill we feel when we read submissions for the journal and put each volume together. So much of the literary life is spent working in solitude that it can be rejuvenating to connect with others and share that joy, face to face, with another. But sometimes connecting with others is also a way to process dismay and sorrow.

The sense of community at AWP this year was, as one might imagine, deeply impacted by the political climate in which we find ourselves. The mood of this year’s conference was different. Last year in Washington, D.C., panelists were in a state of subdued shock as the entire artistic community grappled with the recent election of Donald Trump and the proposed cuts to the NEA and NEH budgets. This year, the challenges and fears were met with the creative resolve and that only a true community of artists can craft. There was a sense of resistance, but also of responsibility spanning genres to tell one’s truth, speak out against evil, write boldly, and ask for help when needed.

This spirit of resolve and support across the literary community was deeply embedded in the panels and readings I attended. Compassion emerged as a major point of discussion across events. During his keynote address on the first night of the conference, George Saunders told us, “Art is a form of compassion training wheels.” He also highlighted how being present in the world is an act of resistance. In her AWP panel “The Facts about Alternative Facts,” Inara Verzemnieks (our 2018 WSR Summer Writing Workshop visiting faculty member in creative nonfiction) pointed out that creative nonfiction is resistance to the passive recording of the world. During her reading, Maggie Smith (another 2018 Summer Writing Workshop visiting faculty member in poetry) nearly brought the audience to tears with her reading of “Good Bones.” The Q+A session following that reading discussed how we can bend our work to compassion—and poet Ishion Hutchinson, whose work you should definitely be reading if you aren’t already, highlighted how poetry readies us for a fight and is the only armor that can’t be pierced.

“Tension channels detail into memory,” said Layli Long Soldier during her reading on the final night of the conference, and perhaps this is the best way to encapsulate the emotional experience of AWP this year. There is much suffering in the world for artists and many others, and deep tensions across our country, but these tensions have channeled the details and interactions of the conference into memories that strengthen my writing life and work at home.

I think most often about the experiences and interactions I had while working at our bookfair booth. When I handed the final free back issue of Water~Stone Review to a young woman and realized our extensive supply of back issues had run out midway through the second day of the conference, I realized just how powerful the connection with a publication could be. And that was humbling and inspiring in equal measure. We who are writers, editors, and publishers are also creators of communities, and there is a sustaining joy in the undertaking of that mission via the conduits of language. May we all do so boldly and with compassion.

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