In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—JC Talamantez
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—JC Talamantez
Welcome back to Water~Stone! You had a piece last year, “Learning to Live With a Clockwork Orange,” in Volume 26. This year, your poem, “Half-Life of Krill,” puts oceanic and celestial imagery on the page. What gave you inspiration for this piece? Where did the title come from?
Thank you! I’m so glad to return to your excellent magazine. This piece is quite different from the previous, but now that I’m looking at them together, they are both rather anxious poems! Half-Life of Krill started life during a trip I had taken, back to a beautiful place where I was once young. My connection to the scenery seemed at once seemed far away, but also parallel, to the way my younger self has experienced it. That distance between moments in time looms quite large in my own life, but from the broader perspective, the gaps between the person I was and the person I am is actually rather brief. The title likely plays on this idea too, with the notion of a half-life as a measure of time and decay. That’s where it started anyway—this poem did end up taking a few turns.
There’s a lot of natural imagery in here, and you’ve said that you like to add nature into your work. In this poem, there are many references between sea and sky. What drew you to using these aspects of the natural world?
Indeed, I like to see nature shining through the organized, civilized world, such as when you watch a hawk hunting over a city street—it provides some elemental sense of fundamental creation in structuring our carefully constructed modern life. Some of this poem is rather literal—images lifted from places I’ve seen or moments that stood out for a particular significance. I think poetry sometimes is about picking out elements, what you see as important or meaningful, and fitting them together into a coherent mood.
Can you speak to the sense of fragility throughout the piece—not only mentioned at the very beginning, but later on through lines like, “bones swimming / taxidermic,” which gives an image of something delicately put together?
It is interesting that you point to that element as a bit of motif. It’s there, I think, not just because life itself is fragile—our bodies, the short lives of the animals that inhabit the world—but also because of the random nature of experience and our tenuous ability to communicate it. All of these things can give the appearance of solidity, but solidity is often an illusion. Still, fragile things can also be surprisingly strong, like carefully made lace, as well as adaptive and competent at surviving.
I love how you end on the phrase “the dowser’s bobbin,” as if there’s a question, some continued searching. What led you to that ending—or did you have it in mind when starting?
As some inside baseball, the end of this poem came about for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted something brief and punchy, thinking it would have more impact given the overall somber tone. And, I wanted to include some phrasing around taxidermy, which has a kind of morbidity about it while also being a craft of genuine skill. There’s something about how taxidermy captures an animal in motion but is produced by their death, that seemed appropriate (and just a little gruesome).
“Jawset” is taxidermy terminology, but I couldn’t find another requisite part with the right sound drawn from that jargon. So, the last two words of the poem are indeed a phrase I had set aside, and thought they had the right mood. Dowser’s relates to dowsing, a kind of divination or magic, while bobbin is drawn from, in my mind, sewing. Sewing and leatherwork are adjacent to taxidermy as crafts, and I had always found comfort in the sound of my mother’s sewing machine when I was young. Since I find this poem a little dark, or at least resigned, I was glad to end it with an image that seemed warmer and offered the possibility of carrying on. After all, what we can do is keep going and keep making.
Do you ever find your poems as a continuation of others, interlinking in their ideas or characters?
There was a time when each poem was pretty much its own separate world, but these days I am happy to embrace repeated ideas, images, even characters. Sometimes poems seem to cluster around an idea because there’s too much to say without crowding, and I think I’ve gotten better about letting the language breathe a little. So, one piece may start to bud off into other related pieces, and I’ve learned to let them develop and then separate them out when appropriate. I also sometimes get taken by a particular word, so individual words or even very brief phrases have a way of creeping back in from prior work if they really speak correctly.
What have been some of your favorite pieces or authors that you’ve read in the last few years?
I read literary mags as I can, especially while writing and submitting myself, and there is terrific stuff published all the time. I always notice the beautiful work of Sarah Ghazal Ali and have recently been enjoying some of Tony Hoagland’s later pieces. I’ve been reading a lot of fairy tales recently, sort of as research for a few poems but also just to appreciate their fascinating texture.
What are you currently working on?
A fair number of what I hope are strange and moving poems! I also write some academic philosophy in the area of political theory, and am doing publishing submissions for both areas. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me!
JC Talamantez is a Tejano poet whose work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, New Ohio Review, Salamander, Smartish Pace, The Hopkins Review, Frontier Poetry, Boulevard, Water~Stone Review, Nimrod, Guernica, Colorado Review, and others. She was a longtime student of academic philosophy and teaches writing and humanities courses across a number of disciplines.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Sam Stokley
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Sam Stokley
What was the spark behind your poem, “Ark/ee/awl/uh/gee,” that appears in Volume 27?
The spark was an ancient, buried loneliness that hit me while I was at home on an average day. Other disabled people might experience a similar feeling at times—knowing that every day will be a fight for life, and there’s often not a pearl at the end of all the physical and emotional pressure. I think I also rewatched Jurassic Park.
You use a lot of geographical references (“flashed forged rivers/sunken atolls”) within this piece. How did you come up with the idea of equating the body to geographical space?
This was easily the hardest question here because I think I lack the words to pinpoint a time when the body and the land were separated in my mind. My skin shifts like tectonic plates, blisters come and go like severe storms; when I bleed, I am the Mississippi River, remembering.
The ending, “to you know/what it’s like to feel/the pearl under your skin/not even bone can convince/doesn’t exist” is haunting. Can you talk a little about why you chose to end on this note, and what drew you to this particular ending?
There are tiny white balls called milia that grow under the skin inside damaged hair follicles, as I’ve come to understand it. You mostly see them in babies around their eyes and mouths, but they are especially prevalent in people with Epidermolysis Bullosa, and when they’ve been growing out of sight for long enough, they become, almost literally, perfectly hard little pearls that, using a small sewing needle, I can pop out of my skin like spring loaded relief. Often I don’t see the milia, but, like the princess’ pea, I feel something inside me, under the skin, stretching my flesh from the inside, and so I dig, and I dig, probing for the fossil that stops my tool in its tracks, knowing I’ve found the motherlode. Occasionally I’m wrong, and I can’t find the pearl, can’t put to rest the feeling of stranger living under my skin, and I know, like a when I’m writing a poem, that I have to stop before I’m left with a sink full of blood and not much else.
What is the significance of the title broken into syllables? Did the shape of the poem come right away or later in the process of creation?
Two questions in a trench coat! Re: the title—it seemed to echo many of the ideas and images that birthed the poem: the aged layers of dirt that represent times & eras, the idea that geography & time are pre & post language, the different sections of the finger where milia most often live. Once I broke it up phonetically, I also appreciated the words and ideas I was given: the “uh”s and “gee”s of people trying to navigate conversation with disabled people, the sharpness of an awl piercing leathery skin, an ark where loneliness was spiritually mandated out of existence by systemic soulmates.
Re: the shape—I tell myself, and my students, to stop writing boring poems. To me that doesn’t mean superfluous decoration, but rather a job assigned to me by the poem that I use every technique at my disposal to squeeze all the juice out of the poem. In this case, the shape serves many purposes, all designed to create more echoes bouncing around for the reader to catch. It is hopeful, pointing a way forward out of the loneliness and pain; it is sharp, like the archeological tools I use for my flesh digs; it lies in sections and layers like the millennia of souls I follow as a human and artist.
Do you find yourself circling back to particular themes in your writing?
Skin, politics, family is my go-to answer for what I “write about.” Skin because it has shaped who I am, politics because the radical idea that everyone be allowed a dignified life, that children deserve food, hospitals, all their limbs, is political, and family because it’s an idea I’m still working to understand.
What authors or titles have influenced you as a writer?
Inger Christensen, Monica Berlin, Olio, Spoon River Anthology, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sin Yong-Mok, Emily Oliver, Deborah Keenan, my Uncle Shawn’s life.
What are you working on now?
I am acutely interested in and investigating ways to take poetry from the page and into the world as an active disruptor and connector. Stay tuned.
Also, a book. And my IG: (@)bovinii
(This is unrelated to any question, but if Hamline follows through with the shuttering of their Writing Programs and of this very Water~Stone Review, they will feel the reverberations for generations and likely never will recover spiritually, artistically, academically. Sunset deez.)
Sam Stokley is a disabled artist and educator from Peoria, Illinois, and living in Minneapolis. He teaches with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and at SPCPA, a high school for artists in downtown St. Paul. His writing lives, among elsewhere, in Narrative Magazine, Brevity, Barrelhouse, Cagibi, Puerto del Sol, Fairy Tale Review, and The Arkansas International. Dystrophies, a chapbook manuscript, has been a finalist with BOAAT Press and Driftwood Press, twice a semifinalist in the Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and longlisted by Frontier Poetry. Stokley has recessive dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa. Follow him on Instagram @bovinii.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Amy Pence
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Amy Pence
Your poem, “Red Oak, Black Oak” blends nature and family into a real family tree. Where did the inspiration for this piece come from?
Thank you for these questions, Jenn. I wrote the poem looking out a picture window in my previous home. I faced 100 acres of woods: in the spring, the trunks would glow with new growth. On winter mornings, the two trees closest to my window were stark and imposing against the dark. Getting up early for work, I also passed the black and white photo of my father’s college graduation ceremony: two grandmothers, my uncle as a boy, my elder sister–still a toddler–holding my father’s hand and my mother holding me as a baby. I suppose it was a metaphorical conflation: I felt surrounded by ancestors–the ones outside my window and those I lived with in my memories.
What prompted you to split the poem into two columns, or trunks, as it were, with the spacing mimicking bark?
Very much that visual tableau: I took quite a while with the poem, building it over the course of a month or two from the top down and seeing how the lines would read down each column and across from one tree to another and how spacing within each line might affect the appearance of the poem as well as the disjunctive or fluid pacing of each line. I remember savoring how long the process lasted because I felt so awed by those trees.
I had previously played with the contrapuntal form in my book Armor, Amour, (Ninebark Press, 2012) so using the form felt natural. For me, contrapuntals are often about a split consciousness, but also about recognizing a sympathy or coherence between contraries or dualities.
In the case of this poem, new data was just coming out, primarily from Suzanne Simard’s theories on plant intelligence, about how trees communicate through their roots. By writing the poem slowly, I arrived at that conjoining at the end.
You very economically describe a picture in the poem, but even with the specifics, there’s a sense that the reader knows the family. Can you talk about your use of language, how you choose your words for a piece, and how you built the connections between the picture and the reader?
I’m pleased to hear that the photograph is vivid enough that you have a view of, and into, the family. I feel so gratified that this poem found a home. I don’t keep count, but I would guess that the poem was rejected more than 20 times; the spacing of the poem really has to be by hand which can be daunting for a publisher. Your excellent executive editor Meghan Maloney-Vinz got me in touch with Logan Myers who formatted the poem to fit the page so beautifully.
In terms of word choice, I’m probably too in love with adjectives when I’m writing a first draft and while a contrapuntal reins me in, the oaks definitely needed pruning, which I did quite a bit (with each rejection :). In terms of the connection between picture and reader, the poem’s form allows for gaps. There’s so much we don’t know about our family’s interior lives; hopefully those silences are suggested by the gaps in the poem.
What is your favorite book or author? What texts were influential to your writing career?
Dickinson’s life and poems have been very influential to me– and I spent a few years immersed in both. My hybrid [It] Incandescent (also Ninebark Press) arose from that obsession. Jane Hirshfield’s Nine Gates was crucial to me as a poet, especially her essay on silence in poetry. There are so many good poets! These days I focus more on the book projects that move me. Just a couple I love: Tyehimba Jess’s masterly contrapuntals in Olio as well as Franny Choi’s Soft Science. The books are of the moment, while looking forward and back.
What are your current projects?
Just so happens that “Red Oak, Black Oak” will be the first poem in my forthcoming book We Travel Towards It due out this spring from Serving House Books. Weirdly–or maybe not–a couple years after writing the poem, and in a new home, a 90 foot oak tree destroyed my house after Hurricane Irma as I fled the premises! The poems chart my experience with that natural disaster and the nature of climate-change fueled disasters. I still love trees and that I lived to write about it was an act of grace. I’m at work on a new novel, and in 2026, Red Hen Press will release my debut novel Yellow.
Thanks so much!
Amy Pence has authored two full-length poetry collections and the hybrid [It] Incandescent (Ninebark Press)—as well as two chapbooks. Her most recent is Your Posthumous Dress (dancing girl press, 2019). She’s a freelance tutor in Atlanta and has taught poetry at Emory and in other workshop settings. Her novel, Yellow, will be published by Red Hen Press in 2026.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Rob Arnold
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Rob Arnold
Chimera by swords4two
Your pair of poems, “Chimera” and “Chimera” speak to growing up, terror, and a cycle of life and death. What was the impetus for these poems? How did they evolve from single poems into a pair?
These two “Chimera” poems are, in fact, part of a longer sequence of poems that interrogate boyhood, cycles of family violence, self-harm, and monstrous expressions of masculinity. The origin is in my personal experience, but, like much of my work, I began writing the poems before knowing quite what I was trying to say. I was going through a very painful period in my life—marked by depression and self-destructive impulse—and I was writing to understand what had brought me there.
At the same time, I became interested in chimeras—amalgamations of unlike creatures—which felt metaphorically significant to my experience both as a biracial adoptee and a young man living what felt like a split life. The poems themselves are chimerical, both narratively and syntactically, with threads of story and imagery conjoined to evoke the messiness of human experience. Sometimes, in fact, individual poems in the sequence were formed from the remains of two or more separate pieces that became combined in the revision process. So, the sequence itself is chimerical, and individual poems in the sequence are chimeras as well.
The titles evoke a mythological monster turned real. How did you land on the title for each piece? Are there different meanings associated with each title?
Fundamentally, the poems are about monstrosity, the monstrous cycle of boyhood violence and toxic manhood in my family as well as the divisions of self that come from sustained trauma. Each poem either tells different pieces of the story or examines different expressions of human monstrosity. The linkages between poems and even different movements within each poem is often intuitive rather than rational or logical, but they’re all part of the same collective monstrosity and using the same title is a way to signal that collectivity.
In the first Chimera, there’s a stream of unanswerable questions that make up the end that feels similar to a Greek chorus in a play. There’s this combined culpability between the characters in the poem and the reader. What led you to end that way?
I’m glad you picked up on the shared culpability. The question is a powerful rhetorical device to me because it requires the reader to become an active participant in the poem. This poem, like many of the poems in the sequence, is also about memory, which is inherently unstable—both unreliable in a narrative sense and our only interface with the personal past. Asking questions without offering answers is my way of acknowledging this ineffability of experience.
Extending the idea of culpability, some of the poems in the sequence (although not this one) use the second person point of view, which acts as both a distancing tool—allowing me to write into very difficult subject matter—and also as a way to further implicate the reader in the violence of the poems.
Chimera the second has color imagery and a steady rhythm throughout its lines. What was the development process of this poem like? How did the beat evolve?
This poem came more intuitively. It began as a meditation on the colors of the American flag alongside the color black which is simultaneously an absence of color in the visible light spectrum and a combination of multiple pigments in basic color theory. Blackness is also the inverse of whiteness, and because we live in a country where color is racialized, there’s also a sub-thread of the poem that interrogates race and belonging, a refraction of my identity as an Indigenous adoptee raised in whiteness. The propulsive rhythm helps pull the reader through the cognitive disjunctions of the poem, which mirror the cognitive disjunctions caused by institutional and personal trauma. Like the previous poem, this piece uses rhetorical tension—in this case the withheld promise of the if/then construction—to extend and deepen the discomfort.
What authors and literature influence your work? Do you have favorite books you return to?
I’m always interested in the interplay between order and chaos, and few writers dance between those constructs better than Denis Johnson. There’s often a moment in his work when the narrative derails and expectations upend. In those moments, it feels like anything might happen, which is thrilling as a reader, and I feel his spiritual influence on this sequence specifically. Reading his novella Train Dreams, for example, helped me learn how to resist the tautness of the lyric narrative form and let the subconscious take over.
More recently, I’ve felt in creative conversation with Thresholes by Lara Mimosa Montes, mother by m.s. Redcherries, and Song of My Softening by Omotara James, all of which are exquisite examples of finding one’s power through difficulty.
What are you writing now?
I’ve just finished a new draft of my first book of poetry, which will include the “Chimera” sequence, and which also examines the larger family story.
I’ve also been working on a long epistolary essay about my father, male violence, and masculinities both inherited and rejected. It’s part of a larger collection of personal essays I’m writing, which I hope will come together in the next couple years.
Finally, I’m working through some poem ideas around maps, portals, confession, Indigeneity, and Oceania. As a project, it still feels quite nascent but I’m excited to explore where it takes me.
Rob Arnold is a CHamoru poet, essayist, and arts leader whose work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry Northwest, RED INK, Hyphen, Harpur Palate, The Volta, and Solstice, among others, and has been anthologized in New CHamoru Literature and Na’huyong: An Anthology of CHamoru Literature. His poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and have received support from the Somerville Arts Coundil, the Jack Straw Cultural Center, and Artist Trust. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he serves as executive director of Poets House.
In the Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—April Darcy
In the Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—April Darcy
Your fiction piece, “The Bright World,” is about a daughter losing her father to cancer, and how she’s trying to balance her own life, a complicated friendship, and caretaking. How did this story come about?
First, thank you for reading and for asking such thoughtful questions.
I worked on this story, off and on, for more than ten years. It’s the story that taught me how to write fiction, by which I mean, how to take some elements in which I had experience (what family doesn’t, ultimately, experience loss?) but to break from my personal reality into a bigger and more imaginative narrative world. I’ll always be grateful for this story.
You’ve layered this piece with beautifully complex relationships, from Megan and her mother, to the sisters and the father, to Megan and David. How did you develop these relationships as you wrote?
Oh, this story went through maybe a hundred drafts. Some centered on Megan’s complicated relationship with David, and some didn’t. There were years where Jessy wasn’t even in the story, and yet she eventually became a primary focus. Bringing Megan up against these challenging relationships is how I figured out who she is, or maybe, who she wants to be.
Going off of the above question, can you talk about the caring, yet tense, relationship between Megan and her sister—the jealousy that she has of Jessy’s freedom, and the time constraints it puts on her? It feels like her caretaking responsibilities have doubled or even tripled because her sister has moved.
What’s interesting to me about this pair of sisters is how hard they are both trying to do right by each other and by their parents. For instance, all Jessy did “wrong” was grow up first and move away from home, which of course, isn’t wrong at all. That’s just birth order! But a byproduct of that is Megan’s perception of being left behind. Megan knows there’s not really anything to be mad at here. But it’s easier sometimes to be mad at someone else than it is to deal with reality. Megan learning how to handle her new realities is what interested me about this story.
You do a smooth job of simultaneously keeping readers in a scene with a running commentary of Megan’s internal dialogue. What was your process like when crafting her thoughts and memories in the actions around her?
This is a fabulous question, and I have no idea. I will say that writing emotional states comes more easily to me than scene-writing. I tend to free-write piles of emotions and thoughts and vibes, and then go back and force myself to create scenes and scaffolding after the fact. Whenever it works out I am pleasantly surprised!
At 18, the age Megan is, we all hold onto unrealistic ideals, just as she holds on to David. We do get a bit of her future, where she’s able to move forward without him, but she hasn’t reached that point yet. What do you think is the event that Megan is able to move past him? To move past her father’s accusation of: “What I worked for my entire life isn’t good enough for you either?”
I love this question. Megan is, without fully realizing it, using David to distract herself from her life at home. She’d rather be a normal college freshman, going to parties and dating and having adventures, than navigating terminal illness. Obviously. Their connection is real but the intensity is misleading, a kind of pretend-world. After her father’s death she’ll have to accept reality and move on—she intuits that in the story.
As for moving on from her father’s statement, I suspect she actually won’t.
Do you find that you return to similar themes within your writing?
I am endlessly interested in writing about caretaking, the pressure it puts on us, and of course the beauty it brings out in all of us. Who is good at it, and who isn’t? Who can face it, and who can’t? Does it steal from us, or does it give back in growth and in love? It’s all so complicated. And I’m super interested in place-based writing, and how people use travel as a means of escape or adventure, etc. A writing teacher once told me my characters were fond of “the geographic cure” and I love that way of looking at it. Who isn’t cured, at least a little bit, by really good geography?
What authors inspire you? Who are some of your favorite books?
Lately I’m super into Claire Keegan, and I’ve always loved Anne Enright. Irish writers, man. A biblical story for me has always been Our Town, which I read or try to see staged every five or so years. More recent favorites are Marie Helene-Bertino, Emily St. John Mandell, Andrea Barrett, Yiyun Li, etc. I go to poetry a lot to calm myself down or when I’m stuck in my own work—Jack Gilbert and Elizabeth Bishop are steady go-to’s.
What are you currently working on?
A novel about Megan and Jessy, of course! So far each chapter is a new geography, but who knows how it’ll wind up. There’s a lot of Jersey in it, but hey, you cannot write about diners and disco fries too often, I am finding.
