In the Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Rebecca Johnson
In the Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Rebecca Johnson
“Daybreak Comes and I Offer Light,” opens Volume 26 of Water~Stone. Your poem speaks to watching a parent grow older, and the emotional difficulties that accompany that, a longing to return to an earlier time. What was the impetus of this poem? Have you done other work focusing on this theme?
I would say that a lot of my work centers around the sticky fluidity of time. I feel that I am often overcome with this intense nostalgia that influences my writing heavily, and as I am growing into “adulthood,” I am often reflecting on my relationship to my mother. It’s funny to see the ways I find myself replicating her in my day-to-day. Whether it be the way I make a certain soup, or what record I might put on. I cling to the parts of her that she has shared with me, and I think often about my mother’s resilience. She is such a maker, a sculptor. She has made a life, and that is never an easy feat. In my later teen years, I experienced a traumatic relationship that left me changed. Throughout my processing of what had happened to me, my understanding, compassion, and sense of community has developed in different, more complex ways. And I suppose, in this poem, I am exploring what that means—the necessity of community, how to continue creating, post-trauma, and an attempt to reconcile the binary belief of two existences—the pre-trauma child and the post-trauma continuation. Throughout this, even if she may not know, my mother holds me in healing and in this, there is palpable wish to pause time, rewind, hold her hand a little longer. But she pushes me to continue growing, enjoying life as it is happening.
The line, “And I practice peeling the layers of myself, in replication,” creates this beautiful, if painful, image of self-discovery. What sort of surprises of self-discovery do you find as you write?
I feel like writing, for me, is an attempt at meaning-making, so I am constantly in the process of understanding. And that’s ongoing; I don’t know if that’s something that ever stops—the work of understanding, I mean. In that, I think writing opens me up for greater compassion. A lot of my work is me sifting through feelings of connection, community—how I fit in the world. Writing, and poetry specifically, has allowed me a vessel to explore. I think it used to surprise me how often certain images or themes would crop up in my work, but now I greet them like old friends.
You’ve been on both the artistic side and the production side of literary magazines. What balance do you strike between creation and production in your own work?
I was lucky enough to work on The Tower during my undergrad at the University of Minnesota, and I truly loved my time there. I felt so inspired being surrounded by other creatives while working on its production. Balance between creation and production can be tricky, of course everyone has that internal editor, and it can be hard to turn that off when in your creative space.
What are some literary or artistic works that inspire you?
There are so many! For poets I would say some would be Natalie Diaz, Mary Oliver, Saeed Jones, and Alice Oswald. I am often drawing inspiration from songwriters such as Ethel Cain, and artists like Hilma af Klint.
What other projects are you currently working on?
I am currently working on a short story that explores the idea of “unbecoming” through a lens of trauma response, compassion, and roadkill.
Rebecca Johnson is a graduate of the University of Minnesota, where she studied English literature and Asian Middle Eastern studies with a focus in Korean. She held positions at The Tower from 2022 to 2023 as an art editor, a poetry editor, and a marketing director. You can find her on Instagram @teeny.bee.
A Conversation with Kathryn Savage—WSR Contributing Creative Nonfiction Editor
Water~Stone Review is a collaborative project of students, faculty, and staff at Hamline University Creative Writing Programs. In addition to working with our faculty, and to fulfill a larger initiative of providing a place for new/emerging and underrepresented voices at Water~Stone Review, we now have rotating contributing editor
This is a wonderful opportunity for our graduate student assistant editors to collaborate with renown writers in order to expand our reach and further innovation. Past Contributing Editors include Sun Yung Shin, Keith Lesmeister, Sean Hill, Carolyn Holbrook, Mona Power, Kao Kalia Yang, and Ed Bok Lee.
In this post we introduce Vol. 27 Contributing Creative Nonfiction Editor, Kathryn Savage
Welcome! We’re delighted to have you as our contributing nonfiction editor for Volume 27. As a hybrid author and lyric essayist, how do you find the connecting threads of your pieces? Do you have a process for bringing your nonfiction characters to life on the page?
Thank you for the warm welcome! I’m equally delighted to be serving as a contributing nonfiction editor for Volume 27 of the very wonderful Water~Stone Review. A lot of what informs my approach to nonfiction comes from the dual influences of short fiction and poetry. Before I wrote essays, I studied fiction and poetry writing. Now, I apply what I’ve learned about plot and character, lyric precision, and the pleasures of language, to nonfiction. I attend to character interiority and descriptive language as I write. On finding the connecting threads—thank you for the question, I love it—I draw inspiration from Lidia Yuknavitch’s insights about the braided essay. In short, I try to understand the threads within essays as physical and woven, and, like strands of a braid, weave them together as I work.
You are an assistant professor at The Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD), where you teach creative writing courses. What are some essential craft lessons that you impart to your nonfiction students?
I encourage the nonfiction writers I meet in the classroom to trust themselves. To read widely, with respect to both form and content, and find ways to cultivate stillness and patience within their writing practice. I think nonfiction writers, all writers, have an innate wisdom about what we write about and the shapes our stories take. Even more exciting, I teach at an art and design college. The writers I meet at MCAD are illustrators, filmmakers, textile artists, photographers—I could go on! It was encountering Montaigne’s characterizing of essays as “attempts” that nudged me to radically reconsider what the essay is, can be, and what my relationship is to it. Now, I love thinking about collage and visual elements alongside nonfiction writing, and I actively encourage experimentation across various media forms. In my classrooms final writing portfolios have been accompanied with photography; poets have woven their words into textile installations; essayists have animated their memoirs. I draw inspiration in my writing and teaching from works that are hybrid or multi-genre, like Victoria Chang’s Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief, and Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle’s multi-genre memoir SIR. I believe it was Marilynne Robinson who said, “Find the dense warm urgent place in your imagination.” This is what I encourage in the writers I have the honor of working with: find the dense warm urgent place in your imagination, show it tenderness, and then see what emerges in your work.
When reading nonfiction, what elements often make you remember
the piece after you’ve set it down?
I think reading is incredibly intimate, and I find a feeling of closeness stays with me. Reading Natalie Diaz’s poetry; Lesley Nneka Arimah and Amy Hempel’s short stories; Teju Cole’s essays–how to describe it? I feel drawn in, close. Maybe more practically, aspects of interiority, by which I mean the reader’s ability to perceive a character’s thoughts, feelings, internal reactions, and impressions, is compelling. I am also interested in place. Currently, I’m reading Charles Baxter’s Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature and have been drawn to what Baxter calls wonderlands. Places where (I paraphrase), setting is as alive as the characters. (Think the Overlook Hotel in The Shining or the Manhattan apartment building in Rosemary’s Baby). There’s something psychically or psychologically supercharged in wonderland narratives. Whether the genre is horror or otherwise, tension held in the balance between what’s known and unknown, and known but unspoken, compels me. I had the honor of studying with Douglas Kearney when I was an MFA poetry student at the U of M, Twin Cities. I remember when he quoted Fred Moten in class about how poetry, inspired by music, can attempt to, (quoting Moten): “Get at what is essential to that music, perhaps it will approach the secret of the music, but only by way of that secret’s poetic reproduction.” The idea of something being invaluable yet beneath the surface draws me in. Related, here’s a wonderful interview between David Naimon and Douglas Kearney that gets further at some of Fred Moten’s ideas. I highly recommend their conversation!
Are you working on any new pieces now?
Thank you for asking! I am writing short stories and poems. I have a new idea percolating for a second work of lyric essays (it’s so fresh it’s mostly something I think about while walking the dog). I used to think, naively and mistakenly, that writers’ chose the genre they worked in, and never departed. But recently, I’ve drawn inspiration from Ocean Vuong and Diane Wilson and other writers whose work spans genres. Mostly, I’m focused on process now. Just making more time in the days to write. Reinvigorating my writing routine, and seeing what comes.
Kathryn Savage’s Groundglass: An Essay (Coffee House Press), explores topics of environmental justice and links between pollution and public health. Recipient of the Academy of American Poets James Wright Prize, her writing across forms has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Jerome Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, Ucross Foundation, and Tulsa Artist Fellowship. Recent writing appears or is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, BOMB Magazine, Ecotone Magazine, Guernica, VQR, Water~Stone Review, World Literature Today, and the anthology Rewilding: Poems for the Environment. Currently she is an assistant professor of creative writing at The Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD).
A Conversation with Juan Carlos Reyes—WSR Contributing Fiction Editor
A Conversation with Juan Carlos Reyes—WSR Contributing Fiction Editor
Water~Stone Review is a collaborative project of students, faculty, and staff at Hamline University Creative Writing Programs. In addition to working with our faculty, and to fulfill a larger initiative of providing a place for new/emerging and underrepresented voices at Water~Stone Review, we now have rotating contributing editor
This is a wonderful opportunity for our graduate student assistant editors to collaborate with renown writers in order to expand our reach and further innovation. Past Contributing Editors include Sun Yung Shin, Keith Lesmeister, Sean Hill, Carolyn Holbrook, Mona Power, Kao Kalia Yang, and Ed Bok Lee.
In this post we introduce Vol. 27 Contributing Fiction Editor, Juan Carlos Reyes.
Welcome! We’re thrilled to have you as our contributing fiction editor for Volume 27. When crafting fiction, what’s your key to finding the arc of a story? Do you craft plot or characters first, or do they develop as you write?
I wonder sometimes how answering this question might best inform young writers, particularly because so much of my process has always been to get going and try discerning what the character seems to want as the lines and paragraphs unfold, as I acclimate to the narrator’s voice.
I usually start with a premise, something like the opening situation, the character at the center of it, and what their most urgent relationships are. By urgent, I don’t mean that something needs to happen or that the character needs to go about doing something. Instead, I’m most interested in who a character feels themselves at odds with, who they’re mourning or who they’ve lost, and what they imagine will seal some rupture or help them relive some memory. Every decision they make to imperfectly claw at something leads the fiction from page to page.
What I imagine by “decisions” includes the choice, for example, of the language (word choice, syntax, etc.) with which to evoke a memory, who to be in touch with, how to move their body or speak their mind, and why they’re trying to determine what matters about the next thing they get into. This, eventually, becomes my plot, that series of choices that incrementally has more at stake and becomes more intense as we approach some end.
In this sequence, I often like to work numerically, in increments of three or four or five. When I first started writing, I didn’t consciously set out to work with pattern generally speaking, but I realized in the early going that pattern-making helps me track the momentum of a character’s life, at least the brief glimpse we have of them in the fiction I write. I don’t always set up this kind of rhythm, but when I do, it’s largely because I’m still working to understand who I have in my hands, the kind of person and the kinds of motivations they carry. Sometimes I revise to omit these explicit structures. Sometimes I revise to enhance their significance. But I find that in the drafting process, at least, they’re so helpful for me to understand how the choices they make are building towards something.
You are the executive editor of Big Fiction Magazine and an associate professor at Seattle University. What is a skill that fiction writers should work to develop?
Storytelling, in the broadest sense. We might enjoy the fiction we make, even the kinds of stories we find ourselves returning to when we write. But the story behind the story, the imagined narrative behind the fiction we write, is so very important, and it’s a skill we can learn to cultivate: not just an elaboration of why we write, but a considerable consideration of why/how we wrote to complete some particular piece.
I don’t think it’s enough to simply say that our process is mysterious, that we’re not sure how our characters emerged or where they got to. I think it’s important to acknowledge, almost like artistic therapy, what creative, personal, and social lineage (the fullness of experience) might have brought us to a story, its drafting and revision, the choices we made along the way and how completed it. Note here that I’ve emphasized “might have” because in this mining of ourselves, we really can only arrive to a set of possibilities that could have influenced or driven us into and through the creation of a text. We’ll never completely know, and that’s part of the real mystery of our process, how we discover what we do and how we choose to hold it, examine it, interrogate it, and draw correlations from it. This is the practice, I think, that can be most helpful to fiction writers. It keeps us in the practice of the form, and it’s an important skill to bring to the community, to share what we do beyond the texts we produce and to remind ourselves that investment in the form can be a full-body experience.
When reading fiction, what draws you in and holds you until the end? What do you feel creates the basis of stories you return to?
I’m finishing up right now Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, which feels like such a proper model upon which to base my answer. In the book, two narrators weave time and space together: a teenager who wrote a journal about herself and her grandmother’s legacy, and a writer who comes upon the teenager’s journal after it traveled the Pacific Ocean in a lockbox after the 2011 earthquake. The teenager has the prescience to direct her journal at some initially disembodied “you,” and it’s this imagined conversation between this girl and the writer that carries the box. Increasingly, for the writer in British Columbia who found the lockbox and journal and is insistent to not only try understand every word but try to find this girl and return the journal, this becomes more than just a reading and translation exercise. She’s invested in this girl’s story, and her life, for which she’s already become resentful for reasons that become clear as she narrates her life on this remote Canadian island of mainland, is also fodder for examination, interrogation, and correlation. And so the books that hold my attention feel like this, a single narrative or interwoven stories that unfold according to a narrator’s whims, in turns impatiently and patiently, in turns afraid and fearless, very much reflecting a mimesis of the real sounds and psychologies we imagine must be true around us, if we only spend some extended time with them to hear them out.
You’re working on a novel that focuses on the superhero genre. Can you talk more about that? What other projects are you working on?
I just revised the final draft of my first full-length book, Three Alarm Fire, due out with Hinton Publishing in fall 2024. The fiction collection comes together as a set of stories that explore our experience into and through violence in the U.S. We begin with a triptych that examines this notion of a bystander and, really, how we wrench ourselves from that and into walking beside one another. To begin with, three male-identifying perspectives, at three very different stages of life, are forced to confront the pain and trauma of women in their lives who’ve endured sexual violence, and from there the collection groups its stories and corresponding perspectives by the kinds of encounters they have: with the digital world, with downright horror, with love, with creative work. The collection culminates with a re-issue of my novella, A Summer’s Lynching, revised and built to more clearly fit into this collection. It was my publisher’s insistence to include the novella, feeling that it didn’t get the readership it could have six years ago, and I’m thankful to them for insisting.
The novel I will now venture into is that superhero story you mention, whose first chapter is a featured story in this collection. The title of the novel, also the title of the story included in Three Alarm Fire, is Tomorrow Everyone Lives. The novel will be about a migrant boy detained by ICE, who is then experimented upon by rogue doctors during a pandemic as they test different versions of a vaccine. The cocktail of chemicals in his body turns the boy into this freak with superhuman powers, and part of his transformation is very much a test of what vengeance means, what healing means. The book, I hope, will also be an interrogation of our decade-plus long fascination with comic book superheroes on the big screen, especially their willingness, eagerness, even, to be state actors, to test their mettle with big and sexy things, and their general lack of interest to address the injustices at the margins of the geo-political power they’re always caught up in. The book will very much test the Kilmonger theory of what role a superhuman should have, but Tomorrow Everyone Lives will, I believe, see that idea into grace and maturity, from something like anger into something like humility with necessity, even if, contrary to the title, not everyone survives to see it through.
Juan Carlos Reyes has published the novella A Summer’s Lynching and the fiction chapbook Elements of a Bystander. He has received fellowships from the PEN America, Jack Straw Cultural Center, the Alabama Prison Arts & Education Project, and the WA State Artist Trust. His forthcoming full-length collection, Three Alarm Fire (Hinton Publishing), will release Fall 2024.
Meet the Editors: New Assistant Managing Editor, Jenn Sisko
Meet the Editors: New Assistant Managing Editor, Jenn Sisko
This introduction is a little late, seeing as I took on the position of Assistant Managing Editor in the waning days of May. However, these last few months have given me the time to learn my way around Water~Stone, and comes just in time for our next edition, Volume 26, to be released.
Cover by Aaron Wojack
I’m someone who enjoyed the turning of season, the cusp of something new—even as I dread change. Perhaps that’s why I love writing, which is something both fluid and timeless, both ever-changing and yet it’s hard to get those ink stains out of the tablecloth permanent. I’ve often been on the other side of the page, the side of creating, molding, editing, and restarting; only recently have I discovered the magic of production and publication.
And the production and publishing side of writing is, indeed, magic. Dealing with the various aspects of it might be a roller coaster (as you can see by the cover picture of Volume 26) of deadlines and red lines, of decisions and precision. But it’s worth it for the end result. As my brilliant predecessor, Robyn Earhart, put it, coming to Hamline was like finding a new home; I echo that sentiment, as finding a place in Water~Stone Review was that for me.
It’s an honor to work on this journal, to uplift the amazing storytellers who join us in this Review’s quarter of a century (plus) history, to learn from the incredible Meghan Maloney-Vinz, and to release these tales and treasures to you and to readers everywhere.
I’m ready for this next chapter.
Jenn is a fiction writer with a love for the speculative and a deep affection for sonnets. She serves as Assistant Managing Editor of Production for MAYDAY, and as Fiction Editor for Upper New Review. A grad student at Hamline, she is working towards an MFA in creative writing.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Nadia Born
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Nadia Born
I love the unique setup of “The Swimming Lesson,” as this story follows two characters’ internal monologues within the same moment of time. What inspired this story’s creation, particularly in this style?
I actually wrote “The Student” section first, but it felt like the story was incomplete somehow. So, I leaned into the areas that intrigued me. I started to wonder about the instructor and how her story could serve as a mirror for Howard’s. This helped crystalize certain themes for me: how they’re both trying to say goodbye, in what way they’re students/instructors, etc. The side-by-side “reflection” format was born from this fascination.
While the entirety of this work is set in the present, the pivotal moments of this piece took place in the past, and are presented as memories. How do you work to ground the reader in the present while drawing from the past to form the situation in front of us?
In very short fiction, I like to choose liminal moments where there’s a crucial change about to happen. (Here, Howard’s about to jump into the pool, while Masha’s about to leave for college). Though there’s a clear present happening through the swimming lesson, it’s a natural time for these characters to ponder the past and future.
The column structure of this story is fascinating. Can you talk about how you expect people to read this story, and what you did to make sure they read it in the order you wanted?
On the first read, I think the greatest impact is reading “The Student” in full and then “The Instructor.” But my hope is that it may be read in different ways, especially a second or third time. For example, starting with “The Instructor” or even reading the lines side-by-side may emphasize different connections.
You write a lot of flash, including Checking For Ticks published by SmokeLong Quarterly; also, your piece “The Prohibition,” recently won the Anton Chekhov Award for Flash Fiction at LitMag. Can you talk about the craft in flash and what drew you to it?
I love flash because it’s such an innovative form. Somehow it reminds me of that silly “gold panning” activity we did as kids. Flash is lowering a pan into the river to see what nuggets and pebbles you’ll discover. Usually you get unexpected, odd little things. Though I write longer stories as well, I always come back to flash to capture those tiny-sized weirdos.
What authors are you reading now, and do you have favorites that you keep returning to or who influenced your writing?
As a reader, I love anything fantastical. For example, I just finished C.L. Clark’s The Faithless and Fonda Lee’s Untethered Sky. That said, I have certain favorites I always return to: Ursula K. Le Guin, Jhumpa Lahiri, Gabriel García Marquez, Elena Ferrante and T. Kingfisher.
Today’s flash scene is also so wonderful and I try to keep tabs on authors including Allegra Hyde, Tara Isabel Zambrano, Jasmine Sawers, Latifa Ayad, Candice May, Exodus Oktavia Brownlow and Regan Puckett.
What projects are you working on now?
I just started a longer myth-based work this month – exciting times! But I also tend to get pulled into short stories at any given moment, so we’ll see what happens.
Nadia Born writes peculiar fiction, both literary and speculative. Her work has been published in Gulf Coast, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. She also has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best Microfiction. She holds a BA in creative writing from Northwestern University.