In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Jennifer Bowen
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Jennifer Bowen
There are so many facets of your nonfiction piece “Just the Song.” Where did the spark for this piece come from?
The pressure to write it came while watching my kid perform in Cabaret on the day of Donald Trump’s first inauguration. It was haunting to watch my son’s character, Cliff, grapple with the world as the Nazi Party and fascism were on the rise—history, but with foreboding. E was getting ready to go to college and I was a big fucking mess about it. For the first time in my life, I wondered whether art was the protective force I’d imagined it to be. Art can be life changing, for sure. But my kids, it seemed, were going to launch into a darkening world. If all essays arise out of a question, mine was something like, can art stop a bullet? And in the face of that question, are they prepared for the world that awaits?
When writing this work, what was it like to go back through and remember the plays E had performed? What was the impetus for this work to span nearly two decades? How did you decide on the organization for it?
It was bittersweet to watch the reel of his creative life tick through my mind’s eye. On the one hand, E brought so much joy and vibrance to the stage. As he got older, of course, the plays he acted in grew weightier and that was a different experience to relive. Reading it years after I wrote it, which was written years after I’d lived it, I see now where my perceptions about his experiences were flawed, which is always humbling. Writing is good at revealing your own misconceptions to you.
When I realized the structure of the essay would be a tour through my son’s theatre performances alongside his aging, it naturally took up most of his life, which was a few decades. My brain hops around in ways this essay illustrates. I don’t think I have ADHD. I think I have what I’d call Consistently Digressive Disorder (CDD). I sometimes think our writing is more an illustration of our limitations than our strengths, or maybe that, harnessed well, our limitations can be made into strengths? Cue every structure I’ve ever landed on, for better or worse.
There’s such a tenderness throughout the text. You talk about how it was strange to watch your child become someone else. Can you say more about that?
Thank you for saying that. It did feel tender to write. It feels tender to talk about now. When our kids are young, we (perhaps mistakenly) think we know them entirely. And so when you see them acting someone completely different from themselves—a slapstick cowboy for example—it’s funny and a little startling.
And of course it’s hard to see them acting pain. In Cabaret, again, my son was a man named Cliff—but with E’s very dimples, his very walk. When he got kneed in the gut by Nazis, it was my son’s voice I heard expressing pain. I didn’t have to imagine him in a fascist world, because I was watching it live. And watching your child act can really be a metaphor for watching them grow into their future selves. There are layers and complexities we can miss when they’re right under our nose, because we’re so used to seeing them as this one person we’ve always known. But humans are dynamic and layered and play, as the bard tells us, many parts.
Because of the way it’s structured, is this ever a piece that you’d ever want to write a part two of, as time progresses?
That’s interesting. I’ve never considered it. I could imagine writing something new or deeper about the way art functions or fails as both sanctuary and weapon in the end times, but I’m not sure I have the stomach to put either of my kids in it right now. I’d rather imagine them into a speculative world with free healthcare.
What themes do you find you return to in your writing?
I write about connection: how humans (and systems and cows and chickens) seek it, thwart it, imagine it, falter from the lack of it, and thrive when we find it. Themes that grow from that central concern are abandonment, magical thinking, mutual care. That all sounds heavy: I love being playful—with structure and language—across all themes. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about pleasure and the impulse to give. That’d feel like a nice space to explore.
What are some of your favorite books? What authors do you return to?
Oh gosh, so many. Some of the most brilliant contemporary writers alive today happen to live in our own backyard and I love and admire their books: Lesley Nneka Arimah (What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky), VV Ganeshananthan (Brotherless Night), Danez Smith (Bluff). I also love Marilynne Robinson’s novels and essays. Ali Smith, always. Wislawa Szymborska. Kristin Collier has a new book or memoir/reportage coming out called, What Debt Demands. It’s about student loan debt, but really also about family and class divide and caring for each other; it’s a beautiful, important book that’s fresh in my mind. Frog and Toad will forever hold a place in my heart and so will E.B. White, who probably shaped and parented more of me than I realize through Charlotte’s Web.
What are you working on now?
I’m not an everyday writer. My day job and my extra gigs take up a chunk of time and emotional energy. My brain seems to be scheming a novel, which I think is a very cheeky thing for it to do. We’ll see if it gets bashful when I actually sit in front of a blank page again. If past is precedent, it’ll change its mind about a novel and lead me to another chicken essay.
Jennifer Bowen is a writer, editor, and educator whose work appears in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Orion, The Sun, Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She’s a contributor to The Sentences That Create Us, Crafting a Writer’s Life in Prison (Haymarket). Her debut essay collection, Lightworthy, is forthcoming from Milkweed Press (2025).
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Lisa Higgs
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Lisa Higgs
Your two poems, “About Nothing” and “Pandemic Dreams” are beautifully-worked pieces. Where sparked the creation of these pieces?
As one might imagine with “Pandemic Dreams,” I wrote this poem at some point during the lockdowns or soon thereafter. I don’t think I was alone in finding it difficult to sleep during the pandemic, and I often woke to really bizarre recurring dreams that shifted about in small and large ways. Among my recurrent dreams were ones set in that iconic Minnesota setting, the northern cabin. So really, the poem is a list of the parts of those repeating dreams I found difficult to forget and, over time, felt I should not forget. Recalibrating my sleep as we came out of the pandemic proved to be more difficult than I thought it would be, and “About Nothing” began one February morning following yet another restless night of sleep, where motion outside my bedroom window kept triggering a sensored light. Perhaps the thought of those night animals–which I am not, being a true early bird–is what drew me to the images of teeth and gnawing, though I also tend to clench my teeth overnight, so it is equally likely I had a sore jaw that morning, too. The connected title and last words create a circle if you instinctively try to finish the phrase–much ado about nothing. A reflection of the repetitive thoughts that seem to drive my insomnia, yet also a reflection on sleep itself. The act of being asleep takes on such heightened importance as you toss and turn in the throes of insomnia. Could it really be the unimportant part, and the dreams and fears that so often kept me awake were the essential elements I needed to breathe, to be.
“Pandemic Dreams” opens with one of my favorite lines to start a poem, “My family wants dinner but a suitcase is not a cooler.” Can you talk about how that line came into existence and what made you start right there?
Now you’ve sent me back to my journals, as I know for certain that was not the first line of my first draft, which I can now verify was written June 24, 2020. The poem originally began with “I’m at the cabin again,” and had several lines about items I’d packed into a tiny red suitcase. The boring things: socks (unmatched), toothbrush (no paste). Because one does not usually go to a cabin by oneself, my family then intruded, hungry, and it was actually the perfect suggestion of one of my former mentors, Jim Moore, to begin the poem with that line, something that could only make sense in a dream. When you get good advice, you need to take it. I think I cut about a third of the poem during revisions, all with the intent of keeping the poem in an alien realm bordered by repeating details as if, sometime, they could recreate reality. They could make sense. How in the summer of 2020 could you find sense?
In “Pandemic Dreams,” there is a rattlesnake that features as another character. How did she come into the poem?
The rattlesnake was a dream companion on several occasions, so her presence was required on a literal level, yet she also embodied a sleeping threat. Is the rattlesnake a Covid stand-in? Does a suitcase offer security, both in what can be packed away and in where traveling might take you? I don’t know if I ever dreamed the rattlesnake bite, but I did for certain dream a silver fox carrying a dead rattlesnake across the road. Call in the dream interpreters, but make sure they’ve spent enough weeks near a lakeshore in Bemidji or Walker.
“About Nothing” takes a Shakespearean tilt, and even is a sort of sonnet—or at least it’s 14 lines. Can you talk a bit about that? In what ways, if any, did Much Ado inspire “About Nothing?”
I write a lot of sonnets. Probably as an outgrowth of having an early teacher, Bill Pauly, who required attempting the form, but also because when I started reading poetry seriously in high school, my favorites tended to be in that form. From my paperback Immortal Poems of the English Language: Shakespeare, Keats, the other Romantics. I tend to pay more attention to meter than end rhyme, though once and awhile, rhyme just fits. I rarely sit down and think, today I’ll write a sonnet, but often I realize very early that the poem I’m drafting will end up as a sonnet, and the form becomes part of my drafting. Less often, I write a poem without realizing it is a sonnet, and revision becomes a matter of addition, subtraction, and cleaning up the meter, which always, always makes the poem better. I’ve already mentioned a little about Much Ado, but I would add that I often take from that play an idea that we shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously, for fear of becoming rather ridiculous. All the things that can keep you up at night lose a bit of their power if you can place them in the “much ado about nothing” category.
Do you find that your writing centers around core themes?
At one point, I would have said that my writing is often centered around the tension between solitude and loneliness, but I’m not certain if that rings as true lately. I grew up in a very small grouping of homes on country-sized lots surrounded by farmland, so solitude was something I grew up with and something I crave when it’s in small supply. But how and when do loneliness and solitude rub up against each other, how and when do they overlap? I’ve always had an interest in place and where I fit into various landscapes, though this has grown to include how humanity fits, or doesn’t, into the rapidly changing environment. I also am curious about the tensions between science and religion, and by tension I mean less conflict and more the balancing of opposing forces. Yet I also have my “daughter” poems and my “dog” poems, and all those flowers budding and blooming, all those migrating birds…
What authors inspire you? What books do you keep nearby?
The lists we could make about authors we admire! In thinking back to a time when I was teaching, I would always bring Ada Limón and Tracy K. Smith to a class’s attention, along with Jim Moore, Eavan Boland, and Don Paterson. Wislawa Szymorska and Anna Akhmatova are often on my nightstand, as is Maryanne Moore. This year, I was glad to come across Melissa Kwasny, Marie-Claire Bancquart, and Vievee Francis. Speaking of Akhmatova, my most recent insomnia hack is picking up her biography and reading a few pages to lull me back to a point where sleep seems imminent. Luckily, my insomnia no longer happens with much frequency, but I have found plugging into someone else’s life allows me to keep my own recycled thoughts at bay. At least until the chapters on Akhmatova’s life in Lenigrand under Stalin. A bit too unsettling to induce drowsiness.
What are you working on now?
I do have a full manuscript that I began to pull together in 2023 and tinkered with quite a bit last year, which I’ve been sending around. But despite sometimes being a semi-finalist or finalist, I have yet to be the bride of a poetry publication contest. In some ways I feel between the work of that manuscript and something new, outside individual poems on any given day. Though the project of America is on my mind, and our degrading planet. I would love to find an antidote to hatred, but I’m not certain if all the love poems and poems of hope in the world could make a dent at this moment in time. Perhaps I’ll give it a try anyway.
Lisa Higgs is a recipient of a 2022 Minnesota State Arts Board grant. She has published three chapbooks, most recently Earthen Bound (Red Bird). Her reviews and interviews can be found online at the Poetry Foundation, Kenyon Review, The Adroit Journal, and Colorado Review.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Jennifer Militello
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Jennifer Militello
Your two poems, “Wax Self Portrait/” and “Wax Portrait of a Marriage/” are beautiful short prose pieces. What inspired you to write them?
These two pieces are centered around the story of Anna Morandi Manzolini, an 18th-century Italian artist and anatomist who was in a marriage with another anatomist, her working partner, who suffered from depression and eventually died, leaving her to raise their children alone. Because of her gender, she wasn’t paid a livable wage once he was no longer a partner in their studio and had to give up one of her children for adoption because she couldn’t afford to support her family. She left behind these strange and stunning wax portraits of the two of them, along with a collection of wax sculptures of parts of the body. My forthcoming hybrid collection, Identifying the Pathogen, due out in January 2026, explores her story as one of its threads.
“Wax Self Portrait” reads a little like a spell; indeed, the phrase, “small spell” is repeated. What was the purpose of coming back to that phrase?
I love incantation in that it weaves a sense of expectation and builds tension, and also stitches in music. Each repeated phrasing is a marker a reader returns to like a rest in a musical score, but also an emphasis, this this this, the act of making, the movement and action, the rising tautness of anticipation. Then of course the expectation can be broken and that creates surprise. I felt that Manzolini was infusing this wax portrait with a magic, with an embodiment of the self that would last. The same way we do with our writing! I think she was placing inside it some spirit of her own so that we might see it centuries down the line and find her there. Which has of course happened. It’s a haunting object. The energy is what that repetition is all about. And this harnessing or calling up of energy is the spell she placed on this wax replica of her form and the driving force of the piece itself.
In that same piece, there’s a lot of internal rhyming. Do you find it difficult to rhyme within a prose piece? What sort of rhythm are you looking for when you write/edit?
Rhyme is challenging because it can easily be comic or overdone. But in recent years I’ve embraced it as a way to go over the cliff or over the waterfall of a piece of writing in a barrel, to purposefully give a little too much when the emotional stage of a piece might call for it. And once you give yourself permission to repeat sounds, you can simply follow the music. Once I give this horse of rhyme its head, loosen the reins, it just runs and runs. So I follow that instinct. In a lyric prose piece, I don’t think the sense of the sounds are that much different than in a poem, and we each make the rules whenever we write. We decide what gets done where, and hope it works, and decide to revise if it doesn’t. The difficulty for me comes in reining it back in for the next piece where I want a more measured sense of the music. I find the overdoing of music and the duende of that extremity a bit addictive, a bit of an endorphin rush.
That first sentence in “Wax Portrait of a Marriage” ending in, “not on the instinct but on the wit” is a really profound way of perceiving different intentions. Can you talk about where that thought process for that line came from?
I think marriages are challenging, and I hope this piece communicates that. People act like it’s a natural state to be married, but I don’t think that’s the case for everyone. It’s strange how partnership like this comes with a bliss and also with a curse. So that sentence—about surviving in a communal way, alongside others, hivelike—references the fact that you must move beyond the ‘instinct’ and make some savvy choices, think on your feet, be quick, if you are going to survive within this duality which, especially if you are a woman, will likely quash your shining self. You aren’t traveling forward on the things your body and your nervous system have learned over time through evolution. You are creating brain wirings for survival, and you must use them to get through this and not disappear.
Each title has a “/” after it. Why is that? Are there more poems that are part of “Wax Portraits” in this series? What was your intention with the connection between pieces?
Yes—this is a marker for the visual division of the title from the work, which I felt was appropriate for a piece about a work of visual art. I was thinking about the carving tools Manzolini must have used to create the wax sculptures that were her legacy, and let this simple line reference their sharpness. It demarcates—and in the book it marks a particular kind of piece, a piece grouped with this particular ‘wax portrait’ series, that is different from the other pieces, which consist of a collection of pieces tracing the narrative of a scientist in a laboratory as they engage in a series of experiments investigating the nature of the body.
What themes or topics does your writing return to?
Oh, more and more I realize that I am a science writer of sorts. I am obsessed with the natural world. I’m obsessed with the nature of the body, how corporeal we are even if we feel spiritual. No matter what I am writing about—love, family, identity, illness—that element is there. So the themes change, but the materials, the images and threads, stay very similar in some ways. I’m obsessed with the dangers of technology. I’m obsessed with the way soil smells and the way insect wings look. I live on two acres of land in New Hampshire and that space feeds my writing—the alone version of me facing the world with no filters but my own lenses. So the topics change—wasn’t it Louise Gluck who said she invoked a different ‘style’ with each book?—but those threads continue. Making different clothings or quilts, maybe, with different patterns or designs, but the cotton doesn’t change, the wool doesn’t change, the dye flows the same, the pace and the needle remain constant.
What are some of your favorite books? Which authors have inspired your work?
This is always such a tough question. But I’ve been reading a lot of amazing novels lately—and love how the novel is being reinvented. I love Matt Bell’s work and Max Porter’s Lanny, Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation. The work of Sabrina Orah Mark is absolutely brilliant. In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado is a nonfiction book everyone should read. And poets of course—like Chen Chen, an amazing friend who is so intelligent and fluid, Jericho Brown’s The Tradition is amazing, I’m always inspired by the way Cate Marvin uses a line break—and of course the work that all our work is built on. My life was changed by Dickinson, was changed by Lorca and Rilke—I could of course go on and on…
What are you working on now?
I’m currently working on both a new book of poetry, including poems like “Mansplaining” and “Endangered Ghazal with Telegram and Natural World” which explore some of the complex political and existential challenges of our age, some of the ‘endangerments’ we are face to face with, and also a secret-ish larger prose project which may or may not see the light of day at some point in the future. Who can tell?
Jennifer Militello is the Poet Laureate of New Hampshire. She is the author of the forthcoming hybrid fiction collection Identifying the Pathogen (Tupelo Press, 2025); the memoir Knock Wood, winner of the Dzanc Nonfiction Prize; and five collections of poetry, including most recently The Pact (Tupelo Press/Shearsman Books, 2021). Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, and Poetry. She teaches in the MFA program at New England College.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Bill Marsh
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Bill Marsh
In your piece “Water Striders,” you emphasize the steps involved “in learning, once again, how to love.” Where did the idea for this piece come from?
I wrote the first draft in early 2021, deep into COVID, when life was unstable on many levels. At the time my wife and I were doing some serious relationship work, and I wanted to capture a few of the practices we were exploring without getting too clinical or preachy. For all its wordplay and metaphorical layering, “Water Striders” for me is very grounded in that concrete experience of interpersonal exploration and reevaluation. The steps refer to trust-building exercises but also the general process of looking back on lessons learned while laying the groundwork for future commitments. The story I tell (anniversary day trek to the river and back) offered a strong frame—facing unknown dangers, unstable terrain, etc.—but the experience in and of itself was both frightening and reassuring. For this essay I wanted to ride through that ambiguity without necessarily resolving it.
Your focus on the word course features heavily as part of something that leads to “synchronized action.” Can you talk about how you wove this idea into relationships? When did you get the idea to layer the history of emotions into the work?
The original title was something like “On Course” or “The Course,” but that always sounded too heavy. The word itself, though, is crucial for its multiple meanings: course of action, coursing through time, course as shared curriculum. Our relationship goal was (still is) to stay the course, to sync our respective visions for the future and get clear on the past, so that moment of mutual concern (sensing danger “down below,” acting on it) offered a unique opportunity to externalize emotions and basically live the danger we were feeling inside. All that became clear, at least, as I wrote about it later. I was trying to channel the emotional tension while interrogating my own pre-history, i.e., what I learned growing up about feeling/expressing different emotions. That research was integral to the writing process.
The “you” in the piece is not to the reader, but it draws the reader into a more intimate setting. When did the “you” become present in the development of this piece? What was your editing process like?
As I state toward the end, I want the piece to read, in part, as a ‘statement of purpose’ clarifying my motivations and commitments moving forward. It’s obviously written specifically to and for the person I’m moving through time with. In fact, that “intimate” direct address was a turn-off for some editors who found the essay too limited in its focus on the interpersonal. In response I worked through a few longer drafts with more research folded in, but in the end those versions felt forced and artificial—and a little dishonest, a betrayal of my original purpose. So I recommitted (!) to the earlier version assuming it would never appear as a published piece. I feel pretty fortunate that WSR saw value in such a deeply personal essay. The editorial suggestions I received were super helpful in both tightening the language and further grounding the piece in concrete detail.
What themes do you find your writing return to?
“Water Striders” is one of a few essays I’ve written exploring masculinity norms, specifically white masculinity and the prevailing logic (origins, causes, conditions) of heteronormative white male behavior. I’ve expanded that range a bit to include familial legacies of land ownership and more broadly the history of settler colonialism as a personal and political challenge (the setting for this piece and a lot of my work is a family farm in northern Illinois). In general I’m committed to personal writing that moves from self-discovery into analysis of social agency, something more like public self-witnessing in the context of inherited social norms.
What are some of your favorite books or authors? What texts do you return to?
In nonfiction/essays, Rebecca Solnit, Leslie Jamison, Claudia Rankine. In fiction, Toni Morrison, Elena Ferrante, Colson Whitehead. I also like to read history, cultural studies, political theory: Ned Blackhawk, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, David Graeber, bell hooks, Roxane Gay.
What are you working on now?
Lately I’ve been working on poetry (image-text hybrids), but I’m also trying to assemble my essays into a workable collection. The river, literal and figurative, continues to inspire most of my creative work.
Bill Marsh is a teacher and writer living in Chicago. His essays have appeared in Bayou Magazine, Briar Cliff Review, Cimarron Review, Copper Nickel, Ruminate, The Normal School, and Writing on the Edge, among other journals. His work has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations, and two of his essays are cited as Notables in Best American Essays 2021 and 2022.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Jonathan Wittmaier
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Jonathan Wittmaier
“Terrarium” really reflects the chaos of the family cooped up during a summer COVID lockdown. What prompted you to write this story?
Being cooped up myself during that initial COVID lockdown is what prompted me to write this particular story. At the time, I was living in a small one bedroom in Queens. And I remember reading about how certain members of the one percent had fled the city right at the start of lockdown, had stocked up on supplies and were holed up in their mansions somewhere. So then I set out to write a story about those people.
Daniel is a very complicated character. Tell us how you developed this jealous family businessman.
I wanted to tell the story of someone experiencing the pandemic from a place of wealth and privilege. Fiction, for me, has always been about trying to understand other people, especially those with differing views and opinions. When it came to developing Daniel as a character, I really wanted to get inside the head of someone used to getting his way. I also wanted to explore what kinds of stressors exist for someone who, on the outside, might seem to have everything they could want, even during a pandemic.
A large conversation is between Daniel and his unnamed affair partner. Can you talk about the significance of not naming her? And about the fact that her dialogue takes up most of the conversation in this story? Do you think it reflects something about communication?
The decision to keep her unnamed comes from a place rooted in character. Since the story is being told from the first person point of view, I imagined that Daniel wouldn’t want to disclose her identity to whomever he happens to be telling this story to. This of course speaks to how he might feel about her and also to what extent he may or may not feel guilty about the affair.
The reason their dialogue exchange takes up a good portion of the story was, for one, to show how someone even has an affair in a COVID lockdown. And two, I wanted to give the readers a chance to see Daniel truly open up with someone. He’s very much isolated, like many of us were during lockdown, and in his case surrounded by a family he finds mostly exasperating. So for Daniel, the affair is a much needed release from pressures of lockdown.
The tension within the story starts out high and gets higher throughout. Is that how you usually approach a piece? How did you create this high stakes arc? How do you order the pet death, affair, escaped ants, and more, for peak chaos?
Day in the life stories can sometimes be quite boring or meandering. But I really wanted to capture, almost in real time, how the COVID lockdowns affected someone psychologically, especially someone used to getting their way.
When it comes to structure, I typically like to start with a hook and build from there. I don’t necessarily set out to raise the stakes with each consecutive scene but I do try to make sure there is some sort of underlying tension or conflict in every scene. Otherwise, where’s the drama?
For this particular story, I knew I wanted the death of the family rabbit and the escaped ants to bookend the story. Then it was just a matter of filling in what happens in between. The song “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” by The Smashing Pumpkins was also a big influence. There’s that famous line in the chorus, “Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.” That was the feeling I was trying to emulate. Daniel sees himself as someone who is trapped by both lockdown and his responsibilities as a father and husband. And like a rat in a cage, or even ants in an ant farm, he’s desperate to escape.
What are some themes you notice in your writing?
The theme question is always tough for me because I write about such a wide array of topics across the different genres. When it comes to fiction, I typically write about American suburbia mainly because that was the environment I grew up in. But, as a minority who grew up in a predominately white middle-class suburb, I was always a bit of an outsider, which naturally lent me an outsider’s perspective. This is why, with most of my short fiction, I tend to focus on exploring what’s often hidden behind the myth of the white picket fence.
What are some of your favorite books? Do you have a few favorite authors? Which texts have inspired your work?
Emma Cline is my favorite writer of short prose. The way she writes about white suburbia has definitely inspired much of my fiction writing.
I’m also a huge fan of Charif Shanhan and how he writes about male interiority and the complexities of the biracial identity.
I’ve also been reading a lot of Jack Kerouac as of late. Some of the writing he did while living in the PNW has been a big inspiration for a music project I’ve been working on.
What are you working on now?
Right now, I’m currently working on a revision of my first full-length poetry collection. I’ve also been trying my hand at songwriting. I’ve written a few songs with a friend of mine, who is also a guitarist, and we’re hoping to put those out in the world in near future. And as a writer by trade, I’d say we’re a hard rock band with a literary sensibility.
Jonathan Wittmaier is a Korean American writer and educator. Born in Seoul, he was raised in southern New Jersey. His writing can be found in The Museum of Americana, WordCity Literary Journal, and Weave—a PNW Kundiman zine project. He is the winner of the 2018 Creative Writing Award fro Dramatic Writing (Adelphi University). He currently resides in Seattle, Washington.