In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Jana-Lee Germaine
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Jana-Lee Germaine
“February at the Johnsons’” is about a woman going through a divorce. Where did this poem come from?
I was right out of college when I married for the first time. It was a disaster, an abusive relationship. That didn’t make leaving any easier, though, because I was still in love with the person he had been before he started to hurt me.
The end of a marriage is difficult regardless of the circumstances; when we were splitting in two what had been a whole unit, there was incredible pain. The physical act of dividing up joint property was a reflection of what was happening on the emotional level.
I found comfort in repetitive movement and routine—packing and repacking boxes, running the same circuit every day, repeating a scripted prayer for help. It was incredibly hard to stay still. I craved movement, but movement that didn’t require deep thought, because at that point merely existing took up all my emotional and mental energy.
Penelope showed up in a very early draft—she who is the literary symbol of the faithful wife, undoing all her work at night to postpone a forced marriage to someone else. I began thinking of the alternative Penelope, no longer a wife, unpacking and repacking the same few boxes every night as she sought to be faithful to herself, now, instead of to a philandering (or in my case abusive) husband.
There’s so much beautiful specificity surrounding the division of the kitchen items; why did you choose to focus on that part of the house in the first half?
I chose it for several reasons. First, for me, the kitchen was a symbol of his controlling nature. I was a vegetarian when we got married, but he didn’t allow me to do the grocery shopping and forced me to eat meat during our marriage. So there was a lot of emotional weight around kitchen items in particular.
There is also something so intimate about a kitchen and the importance of sharing meals together. As a picture of the excruciating nature of divorce, it works really well: you take something that had been a symbol of family and fellowship and start ripping every piece of it in two.
Then there’s the idea of “equitable division of property”—rigorously dividing everything in equal portions. It served as another tool of punishment for me, but there was also an element of the ridiculous in the midst of the sadness of dividing a kitchen full of tools. Counting out forks to make sure each person gets exactly half. Taking turns picking the unique or singular items: I took my favorite dish towels, he took the big, manly carving knife. Good riddance to the knife; I had gone vegan when I first left him anyway.
While there’s the tension between this woman and her husband, there’s also this looming Other Couple—the Johnsons. Can you talk about how you find that their presence influences the text?
In terms of the narrative, when I left my husband, I lived for six months with a married couple whom I had known since childhood. It was one of those incredible situations; I was living halfway across the country from where I grew up, and it just so happened that these friends had bought a house half a mile from my apartment. So it was a safe space—they had known me before the abuse but also knew the self that I had lost under the abuse. I trusted them in a way I couldn’t trust myself at that time. They were incredibly kind and loving. And yet, I was an extra in their lives—the long-term houseguest. I lived in the back spare bedroom, cooked in a kitchen that didn’t belong to me, and used their utensils and furniture while everything from my marriage was boxed in their basement until I figured out my next move. I was never completely at home because it wasn’t my home; it was their happy house and full lives, and I carried my brokenness around with me as I tried to figure out how to begin healing. Their life wasn’t my life, their friends weren’t my friends; I had to figure out who I was and what my life was going to look like now. I lived in fear, too, as a result of the abuse; it’s why I wouldn’t answer the door if I was home alone unless I knew the caller.
The use of couplets in the poem up until the end when the couplet is split have such a wonderful significance, punctuated with, “learning to divide a life.” When did this structure appear in your editing process?
Unless I have a specific form that I’m writing in, I tend to write my early drafts in one big block and worry about stanza lengths and breaks later in the process. I focus more on line breaks first. When I write, I allow myself to overwrite to begin with, adding anything that feels like it might fit into my early drafts, and then spend my revision process ruthlessly cutting out unnecessary lines, images, and words. Once I feel like my lines are set, then I start thinking about how stanza lengths and structure will deepen the poem, and where those breaks are needed to slow the poem down or add breath.
I also tend to write slowly—it can take several years, sometimes, to finish a poem. Most of my poems go through many, many drafts. This allows me the freedom to experiment without losing an earlier draft that may have something I want to return to.
This was one of those poems that took me a long time to get right. It wasn’t until draft 24 that I split it into couplets—prior to that I played with varying stanza lengths and with only the last line dropped down alone. But it never quite worked. Once I split it into couplets, though, the whole thing opened up for me—I saw the couplets as the married couple and then the split couplet at the end as mirroring the impending divorce. It took me a long time to see that in the poem. It’s why I’ve learned to trust my subconscious; it so often leads me to the right solution in a poetry problem before my conscious mind can figure it out. People call it trusting the poem or trusting your instinct, but what it really means is that your subconscious mind has been working away steadily on something—for days, or months, or years—and will provide you with the answer when it’s ready if you can get the part of you that wants to force things in a certain direction out of the way and trust the process.
What themes do you find that your work revolves around?
My first manuscript, which I’m planning to finish this fall, centers around the long road of healing and recovery from that abusive marriage. For a long time after I escaped, I thought I’d never be happy again, but I did heal; I found that I’d grown in ways I’d never expected. It was a horrible experience, but I don’t regret it. It’s shaped who I am today. However, it took me a good ten years to have enough emotional distance to be able to start writing about that period of my life. “February at the Johnsons’” is in that manuscript.
I’m also a mom of four, and so motherhood themes enter into some of my work, especially recently. Although I don’t write specifically about my kids a lot, my worldview is filtered through the identity of motherhood. I also have a relationship with God, and so spiritual issues find their way into my poetry. I love being outdoors; the natural world has a huge presence in much of what I write, particularly in the way it can layer meaning into our human experience and emotions. My husband sometimes rolls his eyes and asks, “another bird???” when he reads a new poem draft. Birds do seem to find their way into my poems. I love to feed the birds, too, but if I forget to bring in my bird feeders at night in summer, I discover I’ve been feeding the local black bear instead.
What stories inspire you? Who are some of your favorite authors?
I love stories of hope, stories of redemption. Stories that make me remember what a gift our lives are. Stories of forgiveness—of choosing life over bitterness or hate. I love well-written novels because they are a counterpoint to poetry for me. I cried when I read Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country; it was incredibly powerful and beautiful. I love Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey Maturin novels—I read all 20 of them in the space of a couple months; I couldn’t put them down. The friendship between Jack and Stephen is one of the most inspiring and deeply true friendships I’ve ever read. My top books of all time include Middlemarch, War and Peace, Les Misérables, The War of the Rings trilogy and Watership Down. I’ve also got a bucket list of great classic novels I’m slowly working my way through. It’s about 5 pages long, so it’s going to take me years. When I need to laugh, though, to exult in amazing sentences and plots so twisted up it seems they could never untangle, to forget the seriousness of life for a while, I pick up P.G. Wodehouse. He’s my happy place.
In terms of poetry authors, I’ve too many favorites. Don’t we all? But who I return to over and over – that’s Marianne Boruch, Franz Wright, Lousie Glück. Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars, Joanna Klink’s The Nightfields, and the anthology Joy: 100 poems edited by Christian Wiman. I recently finished Pablo Medina’s Sea of Broken Mirrors and have almost every poem in there starred as a favorite. I know that will definitely become one I return to often.
What are you currently working on?
I’ve been working on my first manuscript for ten years. As I said, I’m a slow—or as I like to think of it, patient—writer. I plan to finish it this fall. I’ve also started working on poems that I know will be in a second manuscript. Those are poems that fit in a different emotional space. It feels good to stretch out into new areas and energies of writing after spending so long focusing on the themes of my first manuscript. I have a triptych of peacock poems from the two years we lived in a tiny village in England—one was in Iron Horse last year, the other two will be coming out in Poet Lore this fall. I’m writing more about challenges surrounding my elderly parents. I have a goal to write a short poem—half a page or less—that really works. I find short poems so difficult to write well. I keep thinking each new poem I start might be the one, but recently everything I’m completing ends up in the 2-3 page range. I’ll keep trying, though.
Jana-Lee Germaine is senior poetry reader for Ploughshares. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Iron Horse Literary Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Bracken, Chestnut Review, Tinderbox, New Ohio Review, Nimrod, Cimarron Review, EcoTheo Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the Patricia Dobler Poetry Award. She earned an MFA from Emerson College. A survivor of domestic violence, she lives with her husband, four children, and four rescue cats in semi-rural Massachusetts. She is a member of the Board of Trustees for her local public library, and she can be found online at janaleegermaine.com.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Cristina Herrera Mezgravis
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Cristina Herrera Mezgravis
Where did your inspiration for your fiction piece, “Ninina,” come from?
I drew inspiration for “Ninina” from my own relationship with different women in my life—my mother, tías, and abuelas. Like Nina, I was also once a female teenager growing up in a sexist society dealing with rising crime and economic hardship. These external factors put a lot of pressure on an already fraught mother-daughter relationship. In this story, I investigate how we fail and succeed to communicate and how we keep loving each other despite these difficulties.
The central relationship is a tense one between Ninina and her mother, punctuated by the line, “She liked to think the good things [about her] came from [her father], and the bad came from Ma.” Can you talk about this line? What made you develop their relationship in that manner?
That line represents Nina’s tendency to idealize her father and place her frustrations on her mother. Nina’s father died when she was 7 years old; additionally, since her parents took on very divided gender roles—dad as main breadwinner, mother as main caretaker—her dad wasn’t as present as Nina’s mother when he was alive. In his absence, it’s much easier for Nina to blame and criticize the present parent: Ma is around more and this leads to more friction and clashes between them. I wanted to be so deeply entrenched in Nina’s adolescent brain that statements such as these, even with their flawed logic, make sense to her. The line says Nina liked to think this way: for Nina, it’s a choice. It’s easier and rather childlike of her to think in dichotomies—dad, good, mom, bad—instead of sitting with, disentangling, and understanding her complex feelings for her mother. As an adolescent, she’s caught between being a child who thinks in simple terms and an adult who is better able to understand complexity.
The way you’ve crafted the setting, with the specific descriptions of the streets and the detritus and the feel of it seems like a character in itself. How did you craft the setting to have maximum effect in your story?
Thank you for this question. As an immigrant away from my birthplace, it makes me happy that Venezuela comes across as a character in itself. I didn’t set out to do it consciously—at least not in the first few drafts. It was all about being really present in the character’s mind and body. Since I grew up in Venezuela, I thought back to the objects and fauna that made up my experience: like Nina, I didn’t like the taste of nonfat long-life milk, but it was often what we had at home—with the food and product shortages, many times there wasn’t much of a choice. If Nina was going to walk out the front door, I knew she had to open a multi-lock gate, as crime was rampant back then. For the same reason, there would be a guard downstairs. In walking, Nina would have to step over or around fallen mangoes—a staple of the parks around my parents’ home. Muggings and kidnappings were on the mind’s of everyone I knew back in 2012. By being fully present in Nina’s experience, I was able to capture the details that shape her life organically—a lot of this, of course, happened through revision. With every new draft, I added details or scaled back.
I feel like Rafael plays a really interesting part between these two women, a sort of balm for Ma and a watchful figure for Ninina. Can you talk about his role in their relationship?
It’s an interesting relationship: on the one hand, he’s an employee of the building where Ma and Nina live; on the other, he’s been there for so long he knows many intimacies about their lives. Rafael has seen Ma go from pregnant to young mother to widow, and he’s seen Nina grow. He has insight into their lives that Nina and Ma don’t have into his—like Nina thinks, they stick to the same, superficial topics of conversation in part because of the employer-employee relationship and because of social norms. I wanted to represent this grey area on the page: Rafael is a witness, in a sense, to both Nina and Ma’s lives while their participation in his life is limited.
Ninina and her mother are caught in this circle of pushing against each other. At the end, Ninina’s mother is able to begin to break that cycle by reaching out to her daughter. What made you end the story in this way? Were there other versions that you worked on where they didn’t come back together?
Looking back at drafts from 2018, when I started writing this story, I found two or three other versions, but they all have Nina and Ma coming back together: in one version, Nina steps into the elevator, certain that her mother knows she’s on her way up; in another, Nina and Ma end up cracking up, laughing so hard they have to shush each other to keep from waking up the neighbors (it’s nighttime in this version). I think my instinct to have them come back together stems from a desire to communicate that Nina will always be Ma’s daughter, and Ma will always be Nina’s mother. Nothing can change that, no matter how much they hurt each other, no matter what happens. I believe family is family, meaning, we have to do our best to work out our differences rather than holding grudges or resentments because estrangement, although in some cases necessary, can ultimately end up hurting more. I believe in the power of love to move people past their fears and differences, so I guess the move to end the story with Nina and her mother starting to reconcile is a reflection of that belief.
Do you find that you return to certain themes in your writing?
Oh, for sure! I write about mother-daughter relationships, about migration and alienation; employer-employee relationships, often in the domestic sphere, female sexuality and desire. And, certainly, the big ones, the ones we can’t escape: love, not only in the romantic sense, and human resilience—how we’re able to keep going, laughing, dancing, loving, despite the trials we face.
What books and authors inspire you? What are some of your favorite works?
“Ninina” forms part of a novel first inspired by Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio—I love how he writes about a place through the experiences of different characters within the same fictional town. Ever since I read Gabriel García Márquez in highschool, I’ve loved how he captures the idiosyncrasies of a place with wit and without losing sight of tension, especially in his short stories. I greatly admire how James Baldwin writes about interpersonal relationships, more specifically about our ability to love and how it’s trumped by societal and gender norms. Tobias Wolff is a master of the short story, always writing with humility and humor. Junot Diaz mixes the rhythms of the Spanish and English language artfully, as does mi compatriota and fellow Michener grad Alejandro Puyana in writing about Venezuela in Freedom Is a Feast. In Dominicana, Angie Cruz tactfully writes about a woman’s immigrant experience, domestic violence and female sexuality. Ana Menendez’s short story “In Cuba, I Was a German Shepherd” made me cry and I still remember it with fondness. And there are many, many more authors and books that I could gush about.
What are you currently working on?
I’m currently working on a coming-of-age novel about Venezuelan migrants (of which “Ninina” is a part).
Cristina Herrera Mezgravis is a writer and eductor from Valencia, Venezuela. She earned awards in both fiction and nonfiction at Stanford University. She has worked in tech and in college prep in the Bay Area and in Lima, Peru. She currently lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband and their tabby cat, Lima. As a second-year Fiction Fellow at the Michener Center for Writers, Mezgravis is working on a coming-of-age novel about Venezuelan migrants. “Ninina” is her first publication.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Stephanie Early Green
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Stephanie Early Green
Your fiction piece tells the story of Sabrina, who begins a new job after the trauma of her last one where she was forced into sex work. Where did the idea of “Nojento” come from? Why did you set it at a summer camp?
The idea for this story sprang almost fully formed into my head. I’d been thinking about human trafficking, which, sadly, is a huge problem in Brazil, but I didn’t necessarily want to tell a human trafficking story. I was more interested in the aftermath: what happens once a person breaks free from an exploitative or coercive situation? How might a person escaping this life try to start over? The setting of a summer camp came from my own memories of my Girl Scout sleepaway camp in Michigan (shoutout Camp Innisfree). All of our counselors were young European women, many of them from Eastern Europe, and I always wondered how they ended up at a camp in southeastern Michigan, and what they thought of us soft, suburban American girls.
There’s a lot of intricacies with language in this piece; Sabrina looks up phrases she doesn’t know. Can you talk about how language informed your characters and played a role within the story?
I have a real fondness and appreciation for Brazilian Portuguese. My first job out of college was as a paralegal at a law firm in São Paulo, and I returned again four years later as an attorney. I loved learning and speaking Portuguese, which is such a fun, dynamic, and endearing language, in no small part because of how generous Brazilians are with people trying to speak their language. Brazilians absolutely love it when a foreigner attempts to speak Portuguese. They inevitably say, “Oh, your Portuguese is so good,” even when it’s not! But I always appreciated the ego boost. As someone who’s lived and worked in a language that is not my own, I can relate to Sabrina’s struggles to express herself fully in English, and the constant translation, appraisal, and comparison that happens when navigating mother tongue and adopted tongue. Sabrina in America – in English – is not the same person as Sabrina in Brazil, partly because of the experiences that have shaped her in America, but also because of the language that she must use to try to narrate and make sense of those experiences. Living in another language is a process of noticing cognates and false cognates, of searching for equivalences and finding, sometimes, absences. And for some experiences, there are no adequate words in any language.
Alissa is such a fascinating character; she’s a girl who has a wealth of knowledge, and her openness helps to bring Sabrina from her shell. Can you talk about how you developed her as a character, companion, and foil to Sabrina?
I was thinking a lot about silence when I wrote this story: what can be said out loud and what remains pushed down. Sabrina is someone who swallows things, for a number of reasons: hesitancy in a new language, shame, the desire to be left alone. But I see Alissa as someone with no hesitation about speaking out, a person calls ‘em like she sees ‘em, for better or worse. I always think of Charles Baxter’s essay “Counterpointed Characterization,” in which he says, and I’m paraphrasing, that as a fiction writer, you must put characters together who force each other to unmask, to expose the secret facets of their personalities. This is what Alissa does for Sabrina, allowing her to open up, but in the end, she goes a step further and speaks for Sabrina. And, maybe surprisingly, this unmasking feels liberating for Sabrina. On Alissa’s end, I thought of her as a child who does not easily make friends or fit in, and so to have the undivided attention of an older girl – a counselor! – probably felt really validating. Both of these characters were getting something out of their friendship; it wasn’t one-sided.
This piece jumps back and forth in time, talking about Sabrina’s past work. When first writing “Nojento,” did you have these time jumps included? What was your editing process like to shape the piece into what it is today?
I actually went back to my initial draft to answer this question, and the time jumps were in there from the beginning. In the beginning of the first draft, though, I spent more time on Sabrina’s backstory. I explored her relationship with the family whose house she cleaned, as well as her relationship with her parents and siblings back home. In the revision process, I ended up cutting this backstory because it slowed the plot down too much. I initially workshopped this piece at the Community of Writers (virtual) workshop in 2021, and went on to tinker with it for several years before it reached its final form.
What themes do you return to in your writing?
Girlhood, motherhood, foreignness and alienation, female friendship and rivalry, body image.
What authors or books have influenced you as a writer?
Oh, man, so many! In terms of craft books, I was introduced to Charles Baxter’s essays during the first semester of my MFA program at Warren Wilson, and they were so brain-expanding for me as I started to think more deliberately about craft. Some of my favorite fiction writers are George Saunders, Kate Atkinson, Anne Enright, Shirley Hazzard, Susan Choi, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Kirstin Valdez Quade, and Emily St. John Mandell.
What are you working on now?
I’m finishing my novel, which is an adaptation of a short story of mine that imagines a world in which some but not all women turn into neanderthals. At this point, three years into working on this novel, the plot only bears a tangential relationship to the story that inspired it, which was published in 2021. It’s been an interesting process of adaptation.
Stephanie Early Green‘s writing appears or is forthcoming in Narrative, The Chicago Tribune, New Ohio Review, The Cincinnati Review, Southeast Review, Juked, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2021 Margarita Donnelly Prize for Prose Writing (judged by Charlotte Watson Sherman) and her work was Highly Commended for the 2021 Bridport Prize (short story). She was also named a finalist by judge Rumaan Alam for the 2021 Crazyhorse Fiction Prize. She is a current MFA candidate in fiction at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Virginia with her family and is at work on a novel.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Sasha (Oleksandra) Lavrenchuk
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Sasha (Oleksandra) Lavrenchuk
Your poems, “Algae” (Algae untranslated) and “Babylon,” (Babylon untranslated) blend distinctly sharp images with emotion. How have you honed your writing and editing over the years into these poignant pieces?
Thank you, Jenn. I’ve been writing since I was a child, and I’ve come to a number of writing rules for myself empirically. Roughly they could be squeezed to two: 1) writing mainly when “it” comes itself, as an urge, not letting me do other things before I finish a text, not just when I have a spare moment and feel like I would gladly produce a poem now; 2) letting the poem that started going out define its own form and development, being merely its midwife.
How did you create and maintain the rhythm of Babylon? What inspired this poem?
Traveling almost every day in public transport in Munich (within the last 3 years) I enjoy observing faces from everywhere around the world, listening to all the imaginable languages. Surprisingly it’s Munich, not even Berlin, where statistically most of the foreigners live in Germany. Sometimes I close my eyes in an S-Bahn (city train) and immerse in the ornamental waves of different words around me; some of them I understand and it seems to be my secret because people in front of me have no idea that I do, some of them I really don’t understand, and they sound like mystical music to me. I’ve always been fascinated by letters, words, cultures, everything that is promising to bring me a new fairy tale, a new myth, a new colourful piece of mosaic in my world picture. So I was enjoying it, at the same time being very anxious inside, often at the edge of collapse, because of what is happening in my country, and therefore in my family and my life. And the mixture of these feelings is fully present in this poem.
Concerning the rhythm I would refer to my previous answer.
The idea of writing it in a mixture of two languages (Ukrainian and Russian) is rooted in my experiments of the University years, when I tried to make the most out of living in a bilingual environment and implementing Ukrainian into a creative field back then, when it was still unfortunately forsaken in a way.
Also it lay perfectly on the feeling of mine—turning into a Gorgon’s head, split into snakes of different languages I had to use here in Munich, switching them many times a day (English, German, Italian, Ukrainian, Russian), learning a new one (German). All that made my head almost blast at some points.
Algae encompasses this beautiful moment of being and grieving underwater. It’s a very physical and descriptive piece. Can you talk about where the idea came from?
There’s a small town at the sea shore in Bulgaria, where my family and I used to go almost every summer before the full-scale invasion (of Russia in Ukraine). There live parents of my two very close girlfriends, and it would be our gathering point, because one of the girls has been living long on the other continent, and the other one still lives in Russia, where they are originally from. I have never had doubts about my common grounds in political views with them, but it was still hard for me to go there the first summer of my refugee life (2022) when they heartily invited me to come with my children. First, because it was all too fresh, awkward and painful. I had to reassess all my feelings and thoughts upon it. Second, and probably even more painful was the idea of coming there for the first time without my husband, who wasn’t allowed (as all men under 60) to leave Ukraine.
In 2023 they invited me again (us – together with my children). And I agreed. I followed my heart which was saying to me that I love those two friends of mine. Besides that, my son was depressed, missing everyone and everything, and I felt it would do him good to see his close friend (the son of one of the girls).
When we first met with the girl that was still living in Russia, we both cried at the airport, at some points this meeting had seemed impossible to us. And at once, on the road from the airport, we had a long and hard talk—to clear up everything between us and also probably, once again—within us.
I know that some people, maybe even many people, might blame me for continuing this communication. But I felt I was doing the right thing. I felt we are friends and we are truly close people against all odds.
I’ve cut off communication with most of my blood relatives from Russia, because the dearest to my heart had expressed a very weird position at the beginning of the full invasion, when I myself was forced to flee with my children out of fear.
But with these friends of mine we’ve always found comprehension.
And this poem is mostly about this.
In general it was a very healing experience for me. I felt, if I could return to the place where I was happy, maybe my happy state could also return once.
And also there’s another aspect, a more physical one. That summer, entering the sea, I felt for the first time in my life, I’m neither repelled nor afraid of the seaweed as I previously was. Compared to the fears I went through since I had last seen it, some things have turned upside down for me. Now the algae, that I avoided even touching previously, were just another expression of life on the Earth, another living entity, tender and harmless, unlike some human species appeared to be.
While both pieces are distinctly different, there’s a theme of hair growing, hair being shed in both. Is this theme intentional?
Not intentional, rather subconscious. Thinking of it now, I can say, it expresses the overgoing changes through something happening to our hair. Stress causes hair to be shed. I was observing with every head wash how much of it stays in my hand, my daughter was losing it, everyone whom I talked to from the Ukrainians out and in Ukraine were losing it.
I first heard that people lose hair because of stress, when I was a teenager, and my godmother told me about her first strong but unrequited love and the handfuls of her own hair in the shower that struck her…
It was strange for me to observe how the whole country’s population is losing hair. Something so personal because of something so massive and impersonal. I was sometimes having thoughts that it had also to do with unrequited love, but the other way round. The unrequited sadistic love of a tyrant to the land he considers to be his, but that land doesn’t want him and she (the land) withstands.
At the same time hair was growing, to all of us, and it was a sign that life continued, notwithstanding anything, and also it brought other chores—it had to be cut somehow. Me and many of my refugee comrades tried to spare money, because a lot of us left homes with almost nothing and though we received help, no one knew what the next day was about to bring. Even the haircut seemed to be a luxury. We asked one another to give us a haircut.
At some point, I noticed, I started measuring time with haircuts, with hair getting in the eyes, and begging to be cut.
The waiting for an end to that period appeared to be longer than expected. I’m still in Munich. Temporarily. As nylon.
I stopped counting haircuts. I don’t know now how many times I had to cut it while here in Germany.
Both poems are translated into English from Ukrainian. What is the process of translating your own work like? What shifts in the narrative because of the change in language?
Translating is one of my favourite processes. Not necessarily of my own poetry. In general. I love the long, calm, thorough translation process. If not by writing, that is my second favourite way of earning money. I would love to be translating literature, especially poetry as much as possible. It’s again connected to my love of different languages and different cultures. The birth of a poem in every new language creates a new poem, even though I’m adept at the most precise word by word translation, with minimal translator’s artistic intrusions, only conveying the sense.
I usually always translate a text using a tool app, get myself a dummy, then start sawing and honing it out endlessly. And, oh, I enjoy that!
What themes or topics does your writing return to?
When I see something habitual for me with a new lense, or find a new way to return balance and harmony within me—I would write about it.
What are some of your favorite books? Which authors have inspired your work?
I’ll stick to poetry in the answer, otherwise it’ll be too long.
Ukrainian: Mykola Vingranovs’kyj, Vasyl Stus, Majk Johansen,
modern—Borys Khersonskiy, Vasyl Gerasymyuk, Ivan Malkovych, Kolya Kulinich, Roma Makljuk, Dmytro Maistrenko, Oleksandr Shumilin, Liudmila Khersonskaya, Lesyk Panasiuk, Daryna Gladun, Maksym Kryvtsov (killed in the war in 2024), Oleg Kyselytsia.
Italian: Bruno Tognolini
English language poetry: John Donne, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Ann Sexton
modern—Joan Naviyuk Kane, Ron Padgett, Moheb Saliman, Ed Skoog, Stuart Ross, Logan February
German modern: Karin Fellner, Nora Zapf, Sara Gomez-Schüller, Tristan Marquardt, Theresa Seraphine
Austrian: Ilse Kilic
What are you working on now?
I’m translating now my Munich-period poetry into English (apart from those that were originally written in English), and a very special wondrous Person, Poet and Translator—Karin Fellner—is translating it into German with the idea to publish my first book of poetry in German translations.
Sasha (Oleksandra) Lavrenchuk was born in 1982 in Kyiv (Ukraine) and started to write poetry at age four when, with help from her granny Galya, she produced her first work in red pen and folded sheets of paper. Lavrenchuk has published three books: #1, Toothless Goluba Is Getting Her Teeth, and Tourmaline. For the last decade, Lavrenchuk has been working as a screenwriter. Since fleeing to Munich with her children in 2022, she took part in the exhibition “Border//lines” and in poetry readings “meine drei lyrischen ichs” and “Kooperationen 2024.”
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Janée J. Baugher
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Janée J. Baugher
Your poem, “Andrew Wyeth’s Footnotes to Goodbye My Love 2008,” blends loss and love in a unique format. What inspired this poem from the painting of Wyeth’s? What made you choose the format of footnotes for this poem?
Wyeth was born in 1917. By the time he painted Goodbye, My Love in 2008, he had a sense that his life was in a dénouement. Ultimately, that work did become his last public painting, and it was a fitting companion image to the last poem in my book influenced by his life and art, The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles.
An important craft element in poetry is form-follows-function. My years-long work with Wyeth’s images led me to trying a myriad of options for how I should best present the content. Once I had decided on the poems’ point-of-view—persona poems from the perspective of Andrew Wyeth, artist-at-work—I then conceived of the poems’ cry-of-the-occasion. Ultimately, I imagined that my footnotes could be physically attached to the bottoms of each paintings’ frame, thereby acting like footnotes in a book, in that the text offers commentary or a new layer of information.
The phrase, “The sky’s orb? Whether moon or sun is my prerogative” is such a wonderful line. It gives so much license to the creator (or to any author or artist). It appears in the middle of the poem and ties everything together. Can you talk about the importance and creation of this line in relation to the poem?
I was actually thinking more about the viewers’ license which ultimately might differ from the artist’s idea. Whether we are discussing the visual arts or creative writing, there must be space for the viewers’/readers’ imagination. Art of any type is a symbiotic experience, wherein the audience’s active participation is part of the deal.
Some of the lines of footnotes are factual, as seen by your own footnotes. What was your process in crafting this piece, in weaving your interpretation with the facts of Wyeth’s life?
I’m always open to seeing how both primary and secondary research informs my creative writing. One of the reference books that I use was by Richard Meryman, in which Andrew Wyeth is quoted as saying, “I have this hate within me,” and also “sometimes I think I’m not very artistic.” These testimonials of self-doubt from a well-established painter were surprising but also authentic and relatable. Every little tidbit I learned about Wyeth offered me kaleidoscopic portals into his paintings from which I wrote over a hundred poems.
I love how much of your work is based in ekphrasis. What drew you to this? Where did your love of getting creative insight from imagery begin?
While in graduate school, I was interested in making poems in which the self could be subverted, as in the T. S. Eliot quote, “Poetry is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” It’s this philosophy that has informed and guided my ekphrastic poetry, though in my craft book The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction (McFarland, 2020), I encourage the readers to write from all angles of their personhood. Because I suffer from artist-envy, working creatively in the service of aesthetics I could call my raison d’être, but let’s not get too precious. Politically, things are very tense in this country. Because I know my propensity for depression, I must limit what ugliness comes into my life. I could write ekphrastically because the world is burning, but I choose to write because the world is beautiful.
You have a book The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles, coming in 2026, seen here: TUPELO PRESS PROUDLY ANNOUNCES THE RESULTS OF THE 2023 DORSET PRIZE . What draws you to this painter?
The Wyeth paintings that I’m enamored with are not only bereft of human figures, but are ones in which the quotidian is made beautiful—a white sheet on a laundry line drying in the wind or the shadows of sunflowers against a house, for instance. For me, his work (which is subtle, of nature, and abstract) lends itself to the act of deep-looking, which is another way in which I can detach from my ego.
What literature or other paintings influence your work? What authors do you return to?
Over the decades, I keep returning to the poetry of Jane Hirshfield. And because I have an interest in the artist’s creative process, I love rereading Betty Edwards’ book, Drawing on the Right side of the Brain. Moreover, poems that concern nature are also my favorite, and to that end, the newly released volume of the ecopoetry anthology, Attached to the Living World is my current obsession.
What are you working on now?
Since late 2021, I’ve been writing a book that treats mental health, tentatively titled “Suicide in the Mirror: A Lyric Memoir.” I am currently finalizing edits for that project, as well as working on the launch of The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles (Tupelo Press). On a non-literary note, I recently reignited my interest in the flute and will be auditioning for a community orchestra within the year. Regarding the next poetry book, I’m beginning to draft ideas for a collection influenced by my first love, human anatomy and physiology.
Janée J. Baugher is the author of the only craft book of its kind, The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction (McFarland, 2020). She’s an assistant editor at Boulevard magazine and has been a featured poet at the Library of Congress. The Seattle Office of Arts & Culture awarded her a 2024-2025 CityArtist grant. For her third poetry collection, The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles, Baugher won Tupelo Press’s 2023 Dorset Prize (forthcoming in 2026).