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.

Author:

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.

Author:

For twenty years, Water~Stone Review has been a collaborative passion project of students, faculty, and staff. While it is a staff member who holds the position of managing editor (Meghan Maloney-Vinz), and esteemed faculty (Katrina Vandenberg, Patricia Weaver Francisco, and Sheila O’Connor) who serve each issue as section editors, it is our current MFA (creative writing) students who work as invaluable editorial board members and graduate assistants. Led by the faculty editors in a semester-long course, our editorial board members learn the art of careful consideration and in doing so curate the beautiful writing in our journal each year.

In this series of blog posts we introduce you to some of our incredible and accomplished student editors.  In this post we meet Sophia Myerly.

Hello! I’m Sophia, the new assistant managing editor for the literary journals of the Creative Writing Programs at Hamline University. I’m a second-year student in the MFA program here, focusing on creative nonfiction with a deep passion for poetry. My own writing draws a lot of energy from the natural world, stemming from the fact that I live next to a National Scenic Riverway and find my everyday life influenced by many species and environmental considerations.

While I have just finished my first year of study in the MFA in Writing program at Hamline, I have been involved with the Hamline CWP for nearly six years. I graduated with a BFA in Creative Writing with a double minor in English and linguistics from Hamline in the spring of 2016. During my time in the BFA program, I had the unique opportunity to gain experience with the world of literary journals through the efforts of Katrina Vandenberg, the founding editor of Runestone Literary Journal. Runestone came into existence during my undergraduate years at Hamline, and I served as a member of the student editorial board for Creative Nonfiction for the inaugural volume of the journal. The experience was so rewarding and beneficial that I came back as an assistant editor for creative nonfiction for volume 2.

Runestone was created with Water~Stone Review’s literary tradition in mind, and it was through my time in the BFA program that I became familiar with the work that Water~Stone does in the literary community. The opportunity to gain further experience through reading and discussing submissions, learning more about the literary publishing world, and acquiring further editing skills through participating in the Water~Stone class was one of the biggest reasons why I chose to attend the Hamline MFA program. I served on the CNF editorial board for our upcoming issue, Volume 20, and am honored to now be working on the production and promotion of Volume 20 as assistant managing editor in addition to working with Runestone and the Hamline MFA’s in-house literary journal, Rock Paper Scissors.

Reflecting on my experiences working on Water~Stone Review as a student editor, I feel a deep sense of gratitude for the lessons I’ve been able to learn as a writer and an artist by looking at pieces of writing with an editorial eye. In looking at the work of others, I’ve gained the perspective to see my own idiosyncrasies as a writer more clearly and thus work towards writing with greater clarity and precision. Now, as I work on the journal from the production side, I’m also learning about the ways that design and visual art can interact with text to create thought-provoking intersections. Finding these connections requires a deep consideration and care for the work of all artists involved, and we take our roles as supporters of diversity in voice and form very seriously. All together, this experience calls for a ‘learning mindset’—a blessing for any writer who wishes to practice literary citizenship and be a meaningful contributor to this phenomenal community. I’m thankful to have the opportunity to gain these experiences during my MFA studies, and I look forward to what’s ahead.