Eva Lugo: Your story “Motherlove” won the 2023 Peden Prize and was published in the Winter 2023 issue of TMR. Could you describe how that story came to be and then became the first chapter of your debut novel Skin Contact?

Elisa Faison: I wrote “Motherlove” in 2021, when I was working as a bookseller. I’d written another novel at that point, which was more commercial than Skin Contact and which was out on submission to publishers. To distract myself from the (painful!) wait, I decided to challenge myself. I wanted to learn to be franker in my writing, especially in writing about sex and sexuality; I suspected that I’d been a bit squeamish about it in my writing thus far. I decided to write and try to place a short story about sex and desire. This was “Motherlove”! I loved the story—and my then-agent did, too. We both thought the writing was sharper than what I’d produced thus far. I found I couldn’t stop thinking about the characters in the story—and soon I was writing a follow-up, “Group Sex,” which appeared in Electric Literature. At that point, I knew I wanted to expand on this project. I set out to write a collection of linked stories, and this became Skin Contact.

Skin Contact explores the boundaries of marriage, intimacy, and desire. What questions were you asking yourself when you began writing the novel? Did you set out to create a more nuanced conversation about monogamy, commitment, and desire, or were you more drawn to following the development of the characters and their relationships?

When I started writing Skin Contact, I was working as a bookseller, determined to sell as many copies of Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss and Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch as I could. I loved recommending books about complicated, angry women; about yearning, avoidant, bisexual women; about tumultuous and beautiful marriages. But as a reader, I was finding myself frustrated. Where were the portrayals of bisexual women who were actually sleeping with women? Where were the portrayals of open marriage that didn’t ultimately suggest they were a doomed or even dangerous phase? Where were the portrayals of polyamory that were as intimate as those of love between two people? In what ways were contemporary novels still repeating the tropes that were established in the earliest domestic novels—ending with marriage as an act both of narrative closure and of self-completion? When I began to see Skin Contact as a full-length project, I knew I wanted it to preserve the intimacy of the romantic relationship, while also opening it up to others. I wanted to depict a stable marriage while also describing the ups and downs of dating. I wanted to show a happy home that wasn’t always well kept, that could get messy. I wanted to show that getting married can also mean continuing to fall in love, to be confused, to be infatuated, to be disappointed, to be obsessed. In other words, I wanted to blast open the walls of the novel as I had been taught to read it. I did, intentionally, set out to explore these topics in a new way—but as I wrote, I found myself following the characters more closely, writing from perspectives I hadn’t considered before, and allowing my characters to make messier, more complicated, and more human choices.

What role does contemporary fiction have—or should it have—in adding to cultural conversations around the spectrum of romantic partnerships?

I’ve always believed, as many do, that fiction plays an important role in introducing readers to new experiences and new forms of identity—in doing so, it cultivates empathy and understanding. I hope that we continue to see more novels about alternative forms of love and partnership not only because these depictions help foster understanding in others, but also because it’s important to see oneself and one’s choices represented in fiction well. More and more people are choosing alternative paths, and I believe our fiction should reflect that.

Could you talk about which contemporary writers have most influenced your approach to voice and structure?

I’d say Lorrie Moore, Meg Mason, and Lily King, in terms of voice. Moore and Mason have a way of conveying—at the same time and in a few short sentences—the saddest and funniest thing I’ve ever read. There’s an unhinged-ness to their characters that feels real and earnest to me in a way that “unhinged” women characters often don’t. All three of these writers take girlhood, womanhood, and romance seriously, without throwing out the silliness. King has a way of describing something so small —the way one character looks at another, say—and conveying something enormous. I can only aspire to that!

Skin Contact reads like linked stories, one of my favorite book structures. I love being trusted as a reader to put the pieces together, to fill in the blanks. I was inspired by books like Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Candy House, Julia Phillips’ Disappearing Earth, and Morgan Talty’s Night of the Living Rez.

As a freelance editor, you’re accustomed to helping other writers refine their work. How difficult is it to apply that same editorial eye to your own manuscript?

It can be hard! I tend to edit as I write, so my inner critic never goes quiet. It means I can get stuck on a structural issue, or character backstory problem, say, for quite a while before I can move on! But being so close to the material is always a hindrance. I think every writer needs a good editor—someone who is able to read the story, first, without any prior knowledge.

Skin Contact has just been published, can you share what that has been like and what’s next for you?

It’s been wild! It’s such a long wait, between selling the completed manuscript and seeing it in print. I sold Skin Contact in September of 2024 and it was just released on June 23, 2026. I’m almost indescribably proud to see it out there in the world; I love when people send me pictures of it in different bookshops. And hearing from a readers who have found something that resonated with them in the book is wildly gratifying. I feel honored, I feel amazed, I feel incredibly grateful. And I’ve just recently finished revising a new manuscript, which I hope I’ll be able to share more about soon!

Peter Kessler lives in Philadelphia. His stories have won a Pushcart Prize (2024) and an AWP Intro Award and previously appeared or are forthcoming in Chicago Quarterly Review, Bellevue Literary Review, South Carolina Review, Potomac Review, Cream City Review, Gulf Coast, GSU Review, and Catamaran, among others. He received his MFA from the University of Arkansas, where he was a Truman Capote fellow.

Eva Lugo: What did winning the Missouri Review Editors’ Prize mean to you?

Peter Kessler: Winning the prize confirmed for me that it was time to retire from the practice of law. I gave notice within a week. In that way, the Missouri Review has cost me a salary, but has also purchased me a new life.

How long were you working on “Flight,” and when did you know it was ready to send out?

The initial draft came very quickly. Until a few months ago (that is, when I was working), the most important developments in my writing occurred on the periphery of my days: when I was waking up, or going to bed, or commuting, or gardening. I did all the heavy lifting over a collection of Saturdays. I shelved it for about a year, then revised it significantly one or two weekends thereafter.

I don’t really know how good anything is until I begin submitting. After submission, it began reverberating in my head at odd hours, and one morning I was walking to work in the rain and certain passages came back to me and gave me a good cry.

While this is a fictional story, you describe it as something you had to “fling out of yourself to avoid being eaten by it.” Can you talk about how you fictionalized a piece that seems so personal?

Most everything I do that anyone decides to publish is rooted in one or another memory. Hemingway has an early story called “Fathers and Sons” touching on the experience of being cajoled into wearing a father’s underwear. I have no idea whether Hemingway’s story contains elements of autobiography, but it feels that way. I’m still at the “Fathers and Sons” stage in my creative development.

Several aspects of this story hit home for me, from the bewilderment of the teenaged perspective to the alcoholic behaviors of a parental figure. Do you feel like Jim played a large role in the narrator’s adolescent development or understanding about what it means to be “a man”?

I think when you’re a boy, an adolescent, even a young man, you’re learning from basically every older man in your life. This is especially true if your upbringing is non-traditional. Those lessons vary significantly in their quality. As you mature, you realize that there are things that you have to unlearn, and that you had better do it fast.

I was really intrigued by some of the more interesting and particular dictions at play here, from the way each of the characters speak to the narration itself. How do you determine how this story is supposed to sound, and do you think that generates the opportunity for some sort of moral or philosophical revelation?

The voices come to me and I dutifully record them. I used to think that I should be less florid, but I’m getting older now. My primary duty as a writer is to please myself, so I just say a little prayer and let it rip. Honey badger don’t care.

Are you working on any new projects you’d like to share with our readers?

Most of my stories start out in my head as memoiristic novels, then over time I boil them down in my sleep, and then they pop out at about 5000 words. One of these days soon, I’ll figure out how to reverse-engineer the process, and it will be a Pekingese giving birth to a Great Dane.

If a stranger enjoys something I’ve written—well then, that’s truly wonderful. Thank you for sharing a moment with me!

Katherine Lawless: I’ve read a lot of Perkoff submissions for my internship here, but reading through your short story, it really struck me how different it felt. And I think for me, that was because it’s from the perspective of a psychiatrist, someone working in the medical field instead of someone that’s a patient. You, of course, are a psychiatrist yourself, and I’m curious to know how your work as a doctor impacts your creative process and vice versa. Are there any skills that you feel like you’ve developed in your writing that aid your work as a doctor?

Shala Erlich: I think it’s gone both ways. I think I’ve been drawn to medicine, psychiatry, and writing for similar reasons, in that, they tend to marry a kind of rational, intellectual, and analytical mode of interacting with the world, with an emotional, human connection.

Do you think that there are aspects of your work in the medical field that you find regularly bleed into your writing?

Well, a lot of it is curiosity about people, wanting to hear their stories, and trying to understand how they’re feeling and how they’ve gotten to the place where they are. And sometimes that also weaves in me trying to make sense of my own life and story.

When you write, are you trying to understand characters in the same way that you’re trying to understand patients?

Yeah, there’s a lot of the same process of curiosity, trying to make sense of what motivates people."Night Admissions" I’m curious about what happens when two people are trying to connect, but there are gaps, obstacles, or emotions that are in conflict with each other, which is what the story is about.

It’s based on what it was like when I was in training, where you’re meeting people very briefly but you’re trying to make a connection with them. And as you can see in the story, the volume of the work and the exhaustion are some of the obstacles. There’s also class difference and other problems that are getting in the way.

In my current professional life, I have much longer term relationships with people. I’m in private practice and I do psychotherapy and I prescribe medications. I’m working with the same people for months, if not years. And so there’s a whole other quality to these kinds of relationships. There are times when we’re understanding each other and other times when there’s some kind of impasse that we have to figure out. Which is part of what I love about the work, that challenge and that satisfaction when it does work.

You mentioned that this story, “Night Admissions,” is partially inspired by your own experience. I was wondering while I was reading this— because several of our Perkoff writers are also people in the medical field— since you’re subject to HIPAA confidentiality, but you’re also inspired by real life, how do you balance that in your work?

So, of course I want to be ethical and I absolutely respect HIPAA confidentiality. “Night Admissions” came out of a draft of a novel called Night Float that I’ve been working on for a long time that is finally in negotiation to get published in 2027, which is really exciting. They’re both stories about young women who are psychiatry residents, and although they are fiction, both stories drew on my experiences in training. The patient characters are either completely invented or amalgamations of many different patients that I worked with. They’re not based on just one particular person.  So that’s how I’ve dealt with the confidentiality in HIPAA. 

There’s a subtler issue that hasn’t come up much yet, but as I’ve been writing more, I think my current patients may have concerns. I wonder if they’re going to have questions about whether I would use the work we do as material. That would be an important conversation to have if people had those questions, to reassure them that I would do my best consciously not to do that. If there was some little piece of something we had talked about which I realized had come into my writing, I would check with them to get their permission, but I would minimize using anything from my patients’ stories or our work together directly. 

Since a lot of your writing is an amalgamation of different experiences, are there characters or aspects of your writing that are manifestations of a particular feeling or internal conflict, instead of a person that you know in real life?

Yeah, I mean, I would say that the “Night Admissions” story—and part of what was scary writing it is grappling with the experience of not feeling like I’m doing a good job as a clinician or having resentful, frustrated, unsympathetic feelings in the process.

You want to feel sympathetic and even a kind of professional affection for patients. You want to want to help them. You want to feel calm, patient, and grounded when talking to them. The story is really about working with people we used to call “difficult patients.” The resident in the story is so tired, she has these personal problems at home, and then she has a patient who isn’t receiving her care in an easy way. It creates this perfect storm of her feeling increasingly hostile and unsympathetic to the patient, which is, you know, a bad feeling to have when you’re wanting to be a good doctor. 

Writing this was scary because I want to think of myself and portray myself and even my fictional character as a caring clinician. Trying to get into the mind space of a clinician who’s pretty uncaring, who’s frustrated about not being caring, and who’s therefore becoming even more uncaring in the process, was a difficult thing to approach. But I also felt like it’s a very real experience.

I think you do this fantastic job of creating two very realistic, contrasting, characters in your work. There’s Lily, who is so terrified of missing out on these vital moments in her daughter’s life, and April who, for a lot of mental health reasons, doesn’t consider the impact that she would have on her child at all. Especially not in the same way that Lily is concerned with. I particularly loved the part where, right before Lily finally snaps, she remembers her daughter turning back to her father and rejecting her nursing. It’s such a gut punch and a great culmination of that internal conflict.

You mentioned while we were emailing that a patient’s problems or situations can trigger an intense emotional response in a doctor because of their own personal raw spots. I would love to hear more about that and how it impacted the story and your own personal experiences.

I think one of the effective tools we have in psychiatry is the concept of countertransference. It’s basically the emotional responses clinician has because something about the patient and their story is triggering something from the clinician’s life. It’s inevitable. When you’re caught up in that as a clinician, you tend not to do the best job for the patient. Part of what I really value in my work is that I participate in consult groups of other therapists and psychiatrists where we can talk about the emotional reactions we have to patient situations. It helps us understand our reactions better and therefore, have more ability to focus on the patient’s needs when we’re actually doing our work.

In this case, Lily is trying to do good care, but she’s feeling sad about missing out on her daughter’s life and frustrated about her daughter rejecting her (which is partly because her daughter Nora is getting older and might be ready to be done nursing). I think Lily feels that—she’s at the job trying to be a mothering, caring person for April, but she’s once again being rejected and feeling ineffective. That’s partly why it’s so painful, it’s a mirror of what’s happening at home.

Yeah, that really stuck out to me while I was reading, especially in the imagery and motifs you use with April, specifically the stuffed animals. You know, even though April is nineteen or twenty, and she has responsibility for her actions, she’s still very childlike.

I think one of the sad parts of April’s story is that she’s someone who’s been through a lot of trauma. She didn’t get parented, didn’t have a mother who protected her or gave her what she needed. And so she’s stuck in a younger stage of development. She’s trying to get her needs met, but because she’s been so neglected and traumatized, she does it in a way that’s immature and sometimes counterproductive.

That reminds me of the moment at the end where April bites someone, and [the nurses] are like, can’t we just call the police? It’s such a great moment because you’re able to see Lily say, well, no, it’ll be more helpful for her if we admit her to the psych ward. As much as Lilly is so frustrated with April and feels unable to do this, she is helping.

Yeah. She is still trying. She’s trying to protect April from the system doing something even worse to her.

I think this is true in the real world as well, that there’s all these levels at which people who are powerless and victimized wind up being further punished for being poor, for being female, or for using one of the few powers they have. It’s a power structure that can be even more further traumatizing. It’s a tragedy of the various parts of the healthcare system and the legal system and the socioeconomic system.

Going back a little bit, you mentioned that you have this great support system in your job where you’re able to talk to other doctors about personal experiences, would you say that writing serves a similar purpose?

Yeah... Part of what I love about it is that there’s something exploratory and playful about it.

I’m not doing it to please other people. Of course, I am trying to write for an audience and I want them to enjoy reading it. But I feel like a lot of doctors and mothers have been oriented to doing high level work that’s in service to other people. So it’s fun to write in a way that taps into a kind of playfulness and that’s less goal oriented.

It helps me figure out my own life story and my own emotions. I write nonfiction and fiction, and so I definitely tend to write about experiences that have been challenging or confusing or intense in various ways. And it is a way to explore it, to play with it, to in some ways take control over things that can feel overwhelming.

I feel like psychiatry, like writing, is also a study of humanity and the human mind. Do you have that same perspective for your work?

Yes. One of the great things about my work is that it’s endlessly interesting because so much of it is about trying to understand people and trying to help people understand themselves. And it’s not easy to be aware of all that. People are good at not paying attention to what we’re feeling or doing.

There’s one other thing that I’ve been thinking about as we’ve been talking. I think that this story is definitely exploring my thoughts on gender, feminism, and the ways people within medicine treat pregnant women differently than non-pregnant people.

People view the unborn fetus as something so precious that they don’t pay attention to the actual woman who’s pregnant. … I was feeling a drive to express the ways in which female patients, and also female clinicians, are often dismissed and not taken seriously.

Yeah, you mention this theme exactly when Lily calls down Dr. Jeffries. You write that Lily “knows how pseudo-protective people get with pregnant patients.”

Right, right, exactly.

That was something that was hard for me to—even now, I guess I’m having a little bit of a hard time putting it into words, but in some ways, you’re treating this person like a queen. April is acting like a queen in a kind of imperious way that is getting under Lily’s skin. People are acting as if this woman is really important, but they’re somehow not paying attention to the woman herself. It’s more the idea of her being pregnant that they’re all excited about.

I noticed, maybe you can talk more on this, this contrast between April as a queen and April as a child. Lily’s becoming frustrated because despite her childlike nature, April is responsible. She’s an adult. She has responsibilities to take care of herself and this child. I thought that was an interesting contrast and source of frustration.

I think some of the deep universal questions that are in this story are about power structures and power differentials between people, specifically in an ER. Having more education, having more money, having more expertise, being the one in charge, all of that gives someone power over, often, the patients.

Lily’s not at the top of that hierarchy. She’s got more power over April but Dr. Jeffries and the ER physician have some power over her.

But the other thing is, when people have even less power, they try to influence others, they try to take some power back. So April, even though she doesn’t have a whole lot of power, bosses around her boyfriend and tries to get Lily to do what she wants. I think it’s very human, natural, that we try to take whatever power we can get.

I think autonomy is such a relevant question now. Who has control over you? Should people have control over you and when? It applies so differently to different situations and different people. I think it’s easy to say that everyone should have a certain level of autonomy. But also, especially in the medical field, the question becomes: how do you define that level? When should you take care of a patient? When should you take care of a child? When should you take care of yourself?

Exactly. You were talking about April having responsibility for herself and her actions, and same thing for Lily. But I think that that is an endlessly challenging question, especially when people have mental illness. A lot of the decisions we make, and some of the less skillful decisions we make, come out of suffering.

We can have empathy for people who are being difficult or making bad choices. But it’s hard to know where the line is between when someone needs to take responsibility for their actions and when they kind of get a pass for their behavior; whether that’s because they have a mental illness or a hard childhood or they’re tired or scared or whatever it is.

I think those are always hard questions in general and specifically in the field of mental health. What are the limits of responsibility for yourself, your actions, and your choices?

Katherine Lawless: One of the things that stuck out to me in your work was how you balance themes of perseverance and exhaustion. You’re a geriatrician, and these poems focus on your experience working in the medical field as opposed to the perspective of a patient. I was wondering what aspects of your work in the medical field you find regularly bleed into your writing; that could be how it impacts either your creative process or even the subjects in your work.

Lisa Furmanski: I’ve been writing poetry for a long time and I usually don’t write a lot about my work. It’s not easily done because it kind of crosses into privacy issues and things like that. It can be kind of fraught to talk about individual patient encounters. But these poems seem to just be a little bit different, more about individual encounters and the general experience of being with people. It just seemed like a direction that I could use.

Since you don’t often write about your work, did you write these specifically for the submission or was this something that you had been working on that fit the theme?

Yeah, no, I already had them. They’re part of a larger manuscript about being kind of mid-life. I’m middle aged. The book talks a lot about being in the middle of things. I have a lot of older patients, but I’m also getting older myself. I have young adult children- college age children. I’m also a parent and an adult child of aging parents. Somehow, all these things started to seem to speak to each other. The other poems in the manuscript take on different aspects… these just happen to be about doctoring.

When you wrote these poems about your experience as a doctor, how did that fit into the theme of being in the middle of things? Do you feel like a middleman talking to patients?

I think it was more like in the middle of my career. When you’re a younger doctor you’re diving in, you’re learning how to do it and you’re making mistakes, but you’re also growing into the job. I definitely feel like I’m in a different place than that. I’m like, ‘How long am I going to do this?’ It’s very exhausting. So, it’s really about being in that place. How long do you just keep going in something that you’ve been doing for a really long time that’s also really taxing?

Would you say that writing is like a catharsis? What purpose does writing serve you in your life?

As you probably know, a lot of medical people are writers. It is such a human job that finding outlets for the human side of the job is really helpful. …

For me, it’s always been writing. I’ve been writing my whole life. And my process, you know, that I do every day is to write before I go to work. I find that having some kind of language puzzle to solve- I like having that in the back of my mind. It’s something that I can just carry around and think about, chew on for the day, that isn’t about the patient right in front of me.

I was reading your bio– which is beautifully written, by the way– and you said in it that you’ve been “writing into this experience for some time, and through poetry and memoir, find [your]self deeply altered”, which I thought was a really interesting phrase. I was wondering how different formats, poetry and prose, allow you to express yourself differently?

The two things that come to mind are—on the one hand, when writing there are all these leaps that you make, little risks of language, pulling things together that don’t always fit. But at the same time, you need to be really precise and very concrete and detailed.

I think that combination has been really helpful to me in medicine because it forces me to make big connections between things that normally wouldn’t seem connected while forcing myself to be concrete. I ask myself, ‘Why do you actually think that?’ or ‘What happened that makes you believe that’s true?’

I was reading a Zadie Smith essay recently where she talks about how writing is routinely described as creative but that that’s never struck her as the “right word”. She says that “Writing is control. Writing is resistance.” You’ve been talking a lot about this balance between making leaps and controlling the words that you’re using. Could you talk more about that?

Well, I think it’s a little bit like when I said that there’s this whole human piece to medicine. One of the things that’s challenging is that, when a doctor is sitting with the patient and has a lot of feelings about what’s happening, those are not-- you can’t express that in the room. You can’t say “You’re upsetting me,” or “You’re making me sad,” or “This is scary.” Those are simple emotions, but because your job is to be a professional and to help the patient, your side of the experience has to be kept internalized. And so, I think that being able to write allows us to say, “Why did I respond that way?” and “Why does that feel the way it does?” It’s altering. If you have that experience day in and day out of absorbing other people’s emotions, it does really change the way you behave, the way you think about the world.

Writing is a good way to interrogate that.

Your series of poems, Reasons for Staying and Reasons for Leaving, has a lot of really fantastic naturalistic imagery. You talk about, in particular, birds, light, and darkness; there are also recurring images of red. Can you talk a bit about why you chose to include those motifs and what significance they have? Whether they had any significance in your life, in your work, or if they were something you were choosing to include as a metaphor?

Birds show up in a lot of my work, and I’m not really sure why. I think even just out in the world, my eye is drawn to birds. I live in a beautiful, rural area in New Hampshire. Part of how I experience the world is through birds, watching birds, things like that. So, they just show up a lot.

The dark and the light—when I was writing these poems, I was reading a lot of Richard Rhor, and he talks a lot about being able to hold the dark and the light at the same time. We talk about that a lot in medicine, too, especially with older people. You know, here’s all the things that bother you, here’s the proximity to death, here’s all of the darkness. But where do you find moments of light? Where do you find moments of joy? How can you carry them both at the same time?

The redness I think came from the red winged blackbirds. I guess I could say blood, the body, stuff like that. But I think it was actually more the bird—how the red flashes on the wing mirror the flashes of joy and brilliance.

Talking about these flashes of red, of joy, of light—it reminds me of your themes of persistence. I think finding something like that to look for is kind of a persistence of itself. Would you say that trying to balance darkness and light is a kind of persistence too?

Yes. We all can call it and say there’s darkness and light, but can you stay there? Can you hold on to that and let that be kind of a guiding principle? That’s not easy for people.

That’s a lot of the coaching that I do. I see a lot of older people who are in pain. We’re never going to get rid of the pain. It will always be there. But are there moments of comfort? Are there moments of rest? And how do you live with those two things? That’s a big part of my job so it comes out a lot in my work.

It reminds me of a question you ask in Reasons for Staying that really stuck out to me. You say, “I do not feel a need to talk someone out of dying, only ask, how will you live while you wait?”

Yes. There’s a lot of that, of reframing death as a moment at the end of an interval. What do you do in the meantime? What do you do with yourself? What do you want that time to look like?

As someone that’s in the middle of their career, someone in an interval, do you ask that question of yourself, too?

Yeah. I think in the longer manuscript, there’s more of that thinking. How do I take my own advice? And it’s hard. I appreciate that more and more as I get older and watch my children turn into adults.

A big part of my book is about how—it’s okay to ask that question once or in reference to yourself, but when you’re doing it ten, twenty times a day, trying to help people have this perspective around health, it changes the way you think about yourself and life in general. It’s an alteration you’re not aware of.

As a doctor, you’re constantly having this same conversation over and over with different patients. Since we’re talking about persistence, is that something that you find tiring or do you find that invigorating?

I think it’s both and it shifts. Having done this for a long time, you get good at it, there’s a bit of wisdom there. … It’s like– well, now I know how to do it and not many people do, so shouldn’t I stick with it? But there are times when it’s exhausting and I feel like I can’t have these conversations anymore. So, I go back and forth day to day, you know, patient to patient.

And that’s a little bit why I wrote the series Reasons for Leaving, Reasons for Staying, because I kind of wanted to go back and forth a little bit.

There’s a poem called “Reasons for Staying” by Ocean Vuong. He asks a lot of questions and when I read it, I was like, oh, I could write Reasons for Staying.

I was reading earlier, at the request of Speer Morgan, an essay by T.S. Eliot about the artistic tradition, especially in poetry. It was about how you can’t be “an original,” you have to learn and echo past poets. How often do you find yourself taking bits and pieces of things you love from other poetry and using that as inspiration?

I do it a lot. I remember reading Reasons for Staying and thinking, “oh, look how much emotional ground he can cover.” I thought, “I wonder if I can do this?”

He does it as a list of reasons. Because of this, because of that. At first, I wrote it as one long poem that was a list of reasons for staying. And then I decided that’s not right, I’m going to break it up. I think I have like six of them. I wrote three that were reasons for staying and then I said, actually, I think there are reasons for leaving, too. If you look at the poem, you’ll see some of that structure, but I had to turn it into something that matched what I was trying to do.

Form, for me, is something that I often find in other places and take inspiration from. That helps me, then, to shape the language around the form.

How do you take different elements of structure into account when you’re writing?

I tend to be drawn to poems that have a strategy or have a form to them. I don’t mean the classic form. When I see a poem that really tries to use the individual lines, the page, the white space, poem that organizes itself, there’s something about the way my brain works that really draws me to that. … I find that it’s not easier, but it is more interesting to find language that fits the structure instead of the other way around.

Usually, I have an idea for how something should be formed or shaped and then I start to think about what would go in there. You can go a little wild within the form because the form is containing you. Again, it’s that funny balance.

I started with that structure, and I wrote it all out exactly the way he had it just to get ideas down. It allowed different events and emotions and things to be in there.

I also think that when you diverge from this structure that begins Reasons for Staying, it feels like suddenly the ideas you’re developing become a lot more complicated.

Sometimes the really important movements in the poem are when you break the structure because it draws attention to itself. I’m always really drawn to that element of craft when I’m reading other people’s work.

One thing I think is really wonderful about literature is there’s analysis at every level. You mentioned earlier how questioning yourself impacts what you write. Then when authors edit, they question why they write in a specific way. When someone reads it, they wonder why the author wrote it like that. It creates a conversation between artists and readers within the work.

Right. I think that also reflects the strategy a little bit. Structure is almost like a direct communication, as if they’re telling you, here’s how I want you to start.

When you wrote these poems was there anything besides structure that you played with that didn’t stick?

I think that I don’t totally remember. I tend to do a lot of drafting because I put a lot in, I take a lot out, then I add a lot, then I take a lot out again. Because it was part of this larger manuscript. I think I saw it as like the opening, big poem. It was going to lay out all the arguments of the book and all the pieces of it. I ended up, as I said, taking it apart. I cut a lot of that out and just stuck a little closer to the idea of medicine and how it affects the daily experience. I had to decide, what is this really about? It didn’t need to be one big opening event in the book, I could start slower and smaller.

— Jordan Lacey

So, let’s start with introducing yourself to the readers of DIG and the Missouri Review.

My name is AnnElise Hatjakes, and I’m a writer and professor living in Reno, Nevada, which is where I’m from. I did my PhD in creative writing at the University of Missouri, and that’s when I first started working for the Missouri Review.

When were you an intern?

My PhD was from the Fall of 2020 to the Spring of 2024. I can’t recall the exact years, but I think it was 2021-2023.

What was your favorite part of working with the Missouri Review?

The Missouri Review is a big deal. It is one of the only journals that I actually budgeted part of my paltry graduate student stipend for, so I felt accomplished just being able to be a part of the team. And in my role specifically as the contest editor, I really loved the opportunity to showcase emerging voices. That is one of the missions of TMR, and they really stick to that. There would be times where I was tabling for the University or the Missouri Review at the AWP conference, and writers would come up to me and say “Hey, you published my first story.” They would be recipients of the big prizes, and it completely shifted the trajectory of their writing careers, which was really cool to be a part of.

So how has the experience you gained from the Missouri Review helped you as an author or in the publishing sphere?

For writers, I really think there is no substitute for reading as broadly and as deeply as possible, and when you are reading submissions for TMR, you are just reading at such a tremendous volume that you get a great sense of the publishing landscape. I think that one of the main benefits is you’re reading such diverse pieces—not only in terms of the writing, but also the human experiences that are being represented in that writing. So, I think reading really widely, having to read with a critical and honed editorial eye was really helpful for me on a craft level as a writer, and also just participating in such a vibrant literary community. Working for the journal offers two aspects that are really helpful to writers: one, it’s just so well-established, and two, you have new students coming in every semester as interns so you have both this incredible institutional memory from the editorial staff, but then also these fresh perspectives from incoming undergraduate students that makes it always feel very alive, while also being very storied.

So, tell me a bit about your new collection, Matter Out of Place.

I started working on it in earnest during my MFA. I did my MA in English and MFA in fiction both at the University of Nevada, Reno. But since I’m from here, I felt self-conscious writing about the place where I lived. I would be writing about a bar downtown that we had all just been at as graduate students, and it just didn’t feel very interesting, and then I went to the University of Missouri. I remember doing some of the “getting to know you” activities with some of the other graduate students and describing the experience of going to a grocery store that didn’t have slot machines for the first time, and everyone was like “Huh, that’s so odd.” One of the icebreaker questions was “How do you like living in a different place?” and something I didn’t expect to be really excited about was not regularly getting nosebleeds, because it’s humid there, compared to the desert. It was at that point that I was able to turn back to my experience in Reno and really focus on place as the grounding force of the collection.

So, what was your writing process like while writing Matter Out of Place?

My writing process for any piece is very unromantic. I want to be the type of writer who is inspired by the muse and writing by candlelight, but really, it’s just a numbers game for me. I’m usually slumped on the couch, ideally with a cat nearby, clacking away on my laptop. I need to get a thousand words written, and then the next day, another thousand words and so on, until I have a draft that I can work with. Then for me, the real creative work starts with revision. Once you get over what Kafka called “the abyss of the blank page,” then you can shape and mold it into something that is resonant and—hopefully—beautiful.

Matter Out of Place has been described as “a love letter to the strange mirage of Northern Nevada.” What does that mean for you? Did you go into this piece wanting to do that or did it come naturally?

Nevada is a very strange place, and I think it’s largely misunderstood. Pop culture representations of Nevada generally and Reno specifically are often caricatures. In the early aughts, there TV show called Reno 911, and it opened with a bunch of B-roll footage that was actually done somewhere in California. It was a funny show, but that humor wasn’t sourced from a deep understanding of what it’s like to live here. I’ve always had this sense that Reno and some of the small towns in northern Nevada I grew up visiting have not been represented in a very layered or interesting way. I am in no way capturing the entire experience of different people who live here, but I do think I’m able to offer a loving portrait of this place while still honoring its complexity.

Did you go into this piece wanting to write a love letter or did it come naturally as you wrote?

I think it came naturally, as it evolved out of this impulse to justify and stand up for the place that I’m from. The critical focus of my dissertation was about mythmaking in the West, which is built on myths surrounding the “frontier,” one of the main ones being that it was wide open space when in fact, there were Indigenous people living here. So, one of my goals was to paint a rich portrait of this place while still acknowledging there is still a lot of ugliness. Reno specifically was built on divorce, that’s when it started to grow as a city. It’s built on a lot of sadness, but I think there can still be beauty in the richness of people’s experiences.

Where Matter Out of Place, or the idea for it, start?

I think it started mirroring my writing process, in that there was no moment of divine inspiration, it was just “Oh, I have to write a story for my workshop that’s coming up.” But since it took me so long to write these stories, it really evolved from this kind of passive reaction, where I was responding to a prompt or just trying to get a story in by the deadline, and it became much more active as I continued working on it. I just started with place, and that took me very different directions with the stories.

Do you have a favorite story, or one that is most emotionally significant for you?

The one that feels the closest to me is the story “Horseplay,” which was originally the title story of the collection. The story was originally called “Matter Out of Place.” That’s a term from the annual art event, Burning Man, which takes place in the Black Rock Desert. It describes anything that’s left at Burning Man that’s not supposed to be there, like the character’s feathers from her boa and sequins from her bikini top. The reason that it feels close to me is because place is really foregrounded in that story, and Burning Man is such an interesting way to explore a lot of the thematic visions that I had for the collection, namely this interrogation of what it means to shape yourself into the person you want to be and the degree to which that is even possible. Are we able to reinvent ourselves? Are we able to change our fundamental characteristics? Or are we born the person we are ultimately fated to be?

Many of the stories feature an unexpected twists and as a reader, I appreciated the way the tension would build so they didn’t feel unrealistic. How did you approach writing these twists?

One of my main goals, especially when I was revising each of the stories, was to avoid any of the shifts coming from plotting. I love an expected plot twist that I genuinely did not see coming when I’m reading a mystery novel or watching TV, but when I’m reading, I think that sometimes a plot twist can feel like it cheapens that story. As a reader, a reveal like “the whole thing was a dream” makes me feel like I just wasted twenty minutes. It feels like a small betrayal when I’ve invested in these characters and the world of the story only to be told that none of it was real. So instead, my hope is to plant those shifts in other craft elements—an unexpected change in a character’s perspective or an interesting observation of a place. There’s a great essay by Jennifer Pieroni called “Smart Surprise in Flash Fiction,” and she talks about how you can imbed surprise in the language itself, subverting our expectations with imagistic descriptions that’ll create movement at the level of the line. My hope is to not rely on plot where there is something totally unexpected that happens but instead rely on these other elements to provide for these interesting shifts for the reader.

Even though we are only with these characters for about 20 pages, they feel so real and incredibly fleshed out. How did you go about that?

One of the challenges that I set out for myself was to write characters who are unwilling to examine their own interior lives. The characters from the first and last stories are doing that in very different ways. In “Andromeda,” Sydney is trying to understand and grapple with her burgeoning sexual identity. We really don’t see that in the present narrative, but we see it through the use of formal experimentation. We see her sexual history narrative, and then we see her correspondence with her professor, and in that way, us as readers get to know that character even when that character is unwilling to reveal those parts of herself. Similarly, I’ve relied on my navigation of point of view. In the final story, it is the only story told entirely in first person and in that one, I tried to keep a really far psychic distance by using the main character’s job as a content moderator where she has developed this highly analytical eye as she thinks about the videos that she is screening, but isn’t willing to apply that same analytical eye to what’s happening in her personal life with her son biting kids at preschool.

Do you have a favorite character or a character you are most proud?

The characters that I’m most proud of writing are the ones that took me the most time to get to know. The main character from “Horseplay” was one of those. In the original draft of this story, there were only two scenes, which described her when she’s in her early twenties, and both the narrator and I were judging her, based on the kind of person I saw when I first attended Burning Man. There was a level of superficiality and shallowness that I was critical of. But then, as I continued writing and revising that story, I had just taken a workshop themed around time taught by Professor Trudy Lewis, who is a wonderful writer, editor, and reader, and I decided to move a lot through time. We pass through several decades, and the story ends with us seeing the protagonist much later in life, as she reflects on the person she has become. A character like that where I am able to provide a generous representation of who they are without cheapening their experiences or flattening them to any single archetype.

I hear you are currently querying a novel. What is it about?

It’s called Boomtowns! I originally wrote it as my PhD dissertation, and now it is unrecognizable from its original form. It used to have footnotes, and I was doing all sorts of wild stuff in support of my critical research about myth-making and the American western. But now I’ve leaned more into other kinds of formal experimentation like including primary sources. It’s also speculative now. The story follows a time-traveling historian named Nellie in contemporary Reno, Nevada and the subject of her study, an actual historical figure named Julia Bulette who lived in Virginia City during the Comstock boom. Nellie is studying her and discovers that she’s so much more than the brothel madam and folk hero history has made her out to be. Nellie decides to abandons her academic training and even risk her life to rewrite history.

*

Matter out of Place is out now and can be found at most major retailers (and Columbia locals can order it for pickup at Skylark Bookshop). AnnElise will also speaking on the “Boom Towns” panel at Unbound Book Festival in April with other Northern Nevada authors. Thank you so much to AnnElise for a wonderful conversation!

Elaina Rainwater, a fiction intern for us this just-past fall has selected “Eighteen People Every Hour” by Dennis McFadden, who sadly passed away in August. This story was the 2023 Perkoff Prize winner in fiction, and originally appeared in “Family Affairs,” our Winter 2023 (46.4) issue. Here’s what Elaina had to say:

“Eighteen People Every Hour” by Dennis McFadden is a moving meditation on memory, death, and desire. The story is told from the perspective of Henry, a Hartford insurance inspector battling lung cancer. Through Henry, McFadden explores how illness can weaken the body, but not the innate human need for connection.

The story balances dark humor, tenderness, and unflinching honesty- whether in Henry’s stubborn wisecracks, his uneasy encounters with lost loves, or his unexpected intimacy with his Polish cousin, Lidia. What emerges is not only a portrait of decline but also of resilience: the ways small gestures of care, especially with death on the horizon, can transform despair into something startlingly alive.

Read the story, as well as McFadden’s commentary on it here.

Dennis McFadden (1943–2025) lived and wrote in upstate New York. His collection Jimtown Road won the 2016 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction, and his first collection, Hart’s Grove, was published by Colgate University Press in 2010. His novel Old Grimes Is Dead received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews and was selected by their editors as one of their Best Indie Books of 2022. His stories have appeared in dozens of publications, including New England Review, The Sewanee Review, The Massachusetts Review, Arts & Letters, and The Best American Mystery Stories. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he was awarded a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony in 2018.

Hello, readers, writers, & friends,

From time to time, we like to have students from the Missouri Review Internship in Literary Publishing comb back through the archives in search of a piece that speaks to them and that they would like to say something about. This is one of those times.

Elaina Rainwater, a fiction intern for us this fall has selected “Drifting in 7-11” by Sara Beth Greene. This was the debut fiction publication for Greene, and originally appeared in “In the Altogether,” our Summer 2024 (47.2) issue. Here’s what Elaina had to say:

“Drifting in 7-Eleven” by Sarah Beth Greene takes readers on a journey through Tokyo’s neon lights, through the eyes of a young American expat stuck in a place between heartbreak and unexpected connection. This story is gripping, immediately tender in its portrayal of main character Becca’s psyche. Greene masterfully captures how something as simple as convenience-store snacks can anchor us in times of uncertainty.

Greene threads together themes of friendship, loss, and love, set in karaoke bars, micro-drinking dens, and the always present glow of the 7-eleven. What begins as a tale of survival after a breakup becomes a story of intimacy between two women finding solace in each other. This piece has vivid narration, and is as much about the city of Tokyo as it is about the characters in it. Readers will find themselves completely carried away by Becca’s longing and the beauty of moments that can’t last.

Read the story for free here, on our website. Enjoy!

Sara Beth Greene is an American film and music video producer currently based in London. She’s also the author of two children’s books, Los Angeles 1 to 10 and Portland 1 to 10, published by Sasquatch Books (Penguin Random House).

What inspired Groom? Did you draw inspiration from past projects in any way, or was this entirely new? Could you describe the process of composing the book?

I started Groom early in 2019 on a 7-month poetry fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Winter isolation and months of free time out on the tip of the Cape yielded poem after poem about a foundational and highly problematic relationship that I had with an older man when I was growing up in Alabama. The first poem I wrote, “Initiation,” was featured as a Poem of the Week in TMR (May 16, 2022). “Initiation” was an attempt to explain that relationship. Specifically, some guests at my cottage in Ptown were curious what my parents thought of me spending so much time with an older man when I was a teenager. The unstinted support and encouragement of a weekly poetry workshop of fellow FAWC poets Sara Martin, Gabe Kruis, Laura Neal, Philip Matthews, and Sophia Starmack was key to generating those poems. I’ve never written poems as quickly as I did the last four months of that residency, and I doubt I ever will again.

How did you approach writing a poetry book with a narrative woven through? What challenges did you face in writing a book where the poems serve that narrative while simultaneously maintaining their distinction as stand-alone poems?

I didn’t think about it one way or the other, and I think that was to my advantage. I didn’t think about the ways that the book was politically timely or theoretically positioned or part of a larger conversation. In retrospect, I can see that I was revisiting and reckoning with adolescent and teenage experiences from the vantage of middle age—from roughly the same age that older man was when he drew me into his orbit. Twenty-five years after the fact, I was able to see—or the poems were able to show me—what he was up to. In retrospect, I can see that the poems in Groom alternate between a narrative and what one reader called an “arch” lyrical mode. All I knew at the time I was writing the poems, however, was that months of honing a routine that balanced reading, drafting, walking, editing, and workshopping had come to heart-shaking fruition.

What does narrative mean? How is it different from descriptive poetry? From “accessible” poetry? Twenty-first century poetry has contracted a deep bias against storytelling (as it has against meter and rhyme). While pundits might cite political concerns (the hegemony of narrative, the fascism of form, the state surveillance of craft), I think there’s just as good a case to be made that these biases against fundamental aspects of poetry are the result of classism.

That said, I can think of two challenges with a central narrative: 1) containing the complexity of character and plot, and 2) a perceived/presumed need to know the story in order to “get” the poem. My plot is basic. It has a limited number of characters. In fact, it is largely a character, or rather, a relationship, study. What it lacks in characters and plot points it makes up for in emotional complexity. That is to say, ambivalence.

Hip poets worry about a poem being too “pedestrian,” straight-forward, or “on-the-nose.” Just as well, my mode is as clear as possible because what I’m depicting is fraught with confusion, secrecy, deception, and denial.

Do you have a favorite poem in this collection, or one that stands out to you as being the linchpin? If so, what significance does it hold for you?

I’ve had a great experience working with my press, Unbound Edition. Poetry editor Peter Campion, a poet-critic I’ve long admired, has been a dream editor. When I showed him my manuscript, he gave me many suggestions, including his hunch that there was another present-tense poem to write. At that point, I hadn’t worked on the book in about a year and felt confident that it was finished. But, if only to prove to myself that I was right, I dutifully complied. After a few false starts, “Take Back the Night” took shape—a crucial, major poem in the collection. Once again, Peter was right!

What do the different sections of the book represent to you? How did you mean for them to be interpreted by the reader?

I tend to have a micro-focus as a writer; I struggle with bigger-picture sequencing (longer poems are hard enough!). For Groom, I contracted with the legendary Jen Barber to help me order the book (as it happens, she published one of my first poems in Salamander back in 2006 or so). Jen’s order, a modification of something I had thrown together, built, in her view, toward a greater maturity of perspective. The sections themselves, that there are three—I think it’s pretty arbitrary/conventional. My favorite thing about the sections are Danny Ceballos’s brilliant bamboo-and-ink drawings.

Could you identify examples of poetry outside your own that you would call great? If so, what makes it great to you? How do you incorporate these qualities into your own writing to aspire to crafting great work?

These days, declarations of greatness get thrown around a lot. Everything is great. Except for what everyone used to say was great.

Groom engages with, in my opinion, great poetry by a number of 17^th century British poets, including Shakespeare and Andrew Marvell. This is an area of scholarly interest; I teach classes on both Donne and Milton, for example.

In the middle of my life, great poetry feels mostly like a matter of the vicissitudes of visibility and personal taste. I think I know what’s great; feeling like the top of my head has been lifted off, the spontaneous free play of the imagination—it feels universal, objective. But is it? Every famous great poet drags around a shadow school of unknown poets who can write circles around them.

I would classify very few poets as great. I can’t get through most poetry collections.

There is no key to writing a good poem. Other than reading, humility, persistence, luck… Elizabeth Bishop said she looked for accuracy, mystery, and spontaneity.

Easier said than done!

Hello readers, writers, & friends:

We hope that as autumn begins in earnest here in Columbia, Missouri, where the Missouri Review has lived since its establishment in 1978, that your own autumns are off to a crisp, rejuvenating, and peaceful start, despite the agonies of the world at present. In times like these, though, we understand as potently as ever the value of art, of creative acts, of making. It is this wonderful labor, after all, that asserts our common and extraordinary humanity.

As our annual fall contest, the Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize rolls through its 35th year, we encourage you to show us what you have been making, what marvelous, moving, brilliant fictions, poems, and essays you have been crafting. If you are interesting in sharing that, then all the relevant guidelines and processes are outlined here. We do hope you’ll grace us with your work.

In the meantime, though, for a limited time, we have made free three “special digital issues” in collaboration with our friends at Project MUSE. These issues, including Summit, Zenith, and Apex, that feature 15 years worth of Editors’ Prize winners. That’s 15 stories, 15 poetry features, and 15 works of nonfiction that we have honored with prize money and publication that you are free to explore through the end of this year’s contest. We hope you take the time to read and reflect on these excellent, brilliant writers.

Featuring fiction winners Jacob M. Appel, Otis Haschemeyer, Roy Kesey, Fiona McFarlane, and Anna Solomon; poetry winners Jonathan Fink, Jude Nutter, Frannie Lindsay, Christina Hutchins, and George Looney; and nonfiction winners Cynthia Coffel, Robert Kimber, Deborah Thompson, Joseph Murtaugh, and John Hales.

Featuring fiction winners Yuko Sakata, Rachel Yoder, Melissa Yancey, Rachel Swearingen, and Emma Törzs; poetry winners David Kirby, Katie Bickham, Kai-Carlson Wee, Alexandra Teague, and Phillip B. Williams; and nonfiction winners Peter Selgin, Terry Ann Thaxton, Dave Zoby, Andrew D. Cohen, and Genese Grill.

Featuring fiction winners Jason Brown, Tamara Titus, Amanda Baldenaux, Seth Fried, and Thomas Dodson; poetry winners Karen Skofield, Meghann Plunkett, Diane Seuss, Heather Treseler, and Chelsea B. DesAutels; and nonfiction winners Tyler Keevil, Rose Smith, Jo Ann Bennett, Jennifer Anderson, and Robert Stothart.

Enjoy with our compliments!

Warmly and hopefully,

The Editors.

Thanks to a generous grant from the University of Missouri Office of the Provost, we were able to embark on a year-long project to create a digital archive of conversations with writers, editors, and marketers to contemplate the life cycle of literary works in the present publishing climate. To do so, we invited three stellar writers for in-person author events here in Columbia, which we filmed. Now, having finished the process of editing, we are releasing them on our YouTube channel, along with videos featuring the editors and publicists that helped bring their books into the world and have an impact once they arrived.

Our first conversation featured Rachel Yoder, a former TMR Editors’ Prize winner in fiction (36.1), and was an absolute success. We discussed her widely-acclaimed debut novel Nightbitch (Doubleday, 2021) from its genesis, through the editing process and into its publication, reception, and eventual adaptation into a movie starring Amy Adams and directed by Marielle Heller. We also talked with Yoder’s editor, Margo Shickmanter, and her publicist, Patricia Cave. All of those videos are now live on our channel, with shorter excerpts of the longer interviews available for viewing. They are wonderful, insightful conversations that are ideal for writers and readers, as well as students who are interested in becoming published writers or working in the publishing field. Part 1 of the interview with Rachel is here, and Part 2 is here. We hope you’ll enjoy them all and share them with friends, colleagues, and students. It was a wonderful honor for TMR to participate in these conversations, and a greater honor to share them.

We have news for you about our partnership with Project MUSE, the electronic database out of Johns Hopkins, available in over 2000 libraries worldwide. The relationship between TMR and Project MUSE goes back over 15 years, and that for the past several years we have been the number one most read and downloaded literary journal in the database? Well, now you know.

Now, it used to be that if you belong to an institution that subscribes to MUSE (or if you get an individual subscription), you have virtual access to our entire archive. This includes not just each issue of the magazine, but the entire catalog of Missouri Review Books. This is still true of the archive previous to this year, but TMR and Project MUSE have embarked upon a new model going forward: Subscribe to Open (learn more about that here). Our Spring 2025 issue was the inaugural foray into this project, and that issue has been joined by our recently released Summer 2025 issue. We’re excited to watch the progress of this experiment, and thrilled that it will give even greater visibility and international distribution to the writers we are so honored and grateful to publish in TMR. Check out the Spring issue (“Outsiders”) here, which features the winners of our 2024 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize, along with much more. When you’ve finished there, go ahead and look at our Summer issue (“Location Location Location”) here, and pass the word along. We hope you enjoy reading them as much as we enjoy making them.

Marisa Marti: What drew you to creative non-fiction?

Marina Hastopoulos: Things happen in my life that make me write. While I’ve always loved writing short stories, and work hard on them, somehow these personal essays just organically come out. I try to utilize the craft I’ve learned about writing stories in my essays, although they are distinct genres. I relish the editing process, because I make personal discoveries about what’s happening in my subconscious. I can see certain things so starkly after I’ve written about them.

MM: How do you approach writing about difficult and emotionally heavy topics? How do you decide which parts to incorporate or leave out, especially in your Perkoff Prize-winning piece “Breathe”?

MH: I always worry about sounding melodramatic, so I try to veer away from “emotion” words and instead try to immerse myself in the sensory detail. I do this often even while I’m in the experience itself, running through the five senses to articulate in my mind what’s happening. In the case of “Breathe,” I was not emotionally ready to write the essay at the time, but I knew I would want to write about it later, so I took notes in order to keep track of the order of events, my observations, our conversations, tiny details, and funny moments. Months later, when I had some distance from the events, I read my notes, which brought back many memories that I might easily have forgotten. Then I started writing, and it just flowed. I try hard at that stage not to filter, and to just write everything down. When the draft is complete, I read it through to understand what my point is, and then I filter out details that are irrelevant, confusing, or misleading. (Creative nonfiction has an inherent logic to it that reality lacks!) I try not to worry about what readers will think of me, but I’m very sensitive to how the subjects of the essay will feel about reading it, so that leads to some material filtering as well. Finally, I try to recall any other details that might support my point, even in an abstract, metaphorical way.

MM: What led you to submit “Breathe” and when deciding where to submit your work, what factors did/do you consider?

MH: I try hard to keep my ego in check, and to always be writing from my center, but at the end of the day it’s wildly gratifying to have my writing be read by others—especially something as personal and emotional as the experience in “Breathe.” I’ve been reading Missouri Review for many years and admire the work it publishes, so I knew I’d be honored to have my writing in the company of its other pieces. It’s recognized as a top tier journal which means its readership cares about quality writing. Writing is a solitary endeavor without six-month merit reviews, so winning a prize and publication by Missouri Review represents independent validation. Finally, there is something very special about seeing my writing in print, on paper. When I saw the Perkoff Prize was focused on issues of health, I was really excited to submit, but at the time, my draft wasn’t ready. (The way I determine this is whether I can read through the whole essay without making edits.) I’d made the mistake in the past of submitting prematurely, so I forced myself not to submit by the deadline and told myself I’d submit a year later. When the submission date was later extended, I took it as a sign and worked hard to finish editing in time to submit. What a thrill to have won the prize! I loved working with the team at Missouri Review, cleaning up language and making it the best piece it could be. And finally, I loved seeing an image at the top of the essay and having the opportunity to write about the process as a post-script to the essay. The whole experience was a big deal, worthy of everything I put into it.

As for new work, I’m currently working on a novel, which is a monumental task that is so different than writing a short story or essay. I’m also working on some short pieces—essays as well as short stories and flash.

Sarah Molitor: How would you describe your writing?

Cynthia Marie Hoffman: With the publication of my most recent collection of prose poems, Exploding Head, I’ve heard readers describe my work as primarily surreal, strange, and lyric. Exploding Head inhabits the world of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which interrupts reality with vividly imagined—and often terrifying—events. Dead women wander through the kitchen, “clanging into each other like windchimes.” A lake swallows a cloud. My poem Receiving Angel, published in The Missouri Review, features an angel whose arms are so long you can lay across them “the skyscraper you fall from every night.”

The poems in Exploding Head feel surreal because they work to recreate the lived experience of intrusive thoughts. But all my work could probably be described as image-based and a bit strange. But I sometimes forget, because when I’m drafting the poems, imagery and strangeness arrive on the page so naturally that they seem not to announce their presence to me at all.

Accessibility, clarity of communication, and argument-based structure are what first come to mind when I think of describing my own writing, perhaps because these are the most hard-won aspects of craft that demand most of my attention. I truly labored to weave all that strange imagery together and make some sense of it, you know? But how would a reader know that? Good writers (not that I claim to be “good”—that’s for someone else to decide) make it look easy. When you’re the writer, it’s hard to see the forest for the trees—the poem I wrote rather than the process by which it was written. But we hope the opposite is true for readers; in fact, if the craft is highly visible to the reader, it’s a distraction. You shouldn’t see that glob of hot glue holding up the hem.

I’m honored when readers say they “devoured” Exploding Head in one swift sitting. I hope it means I did my job in making the book read like an accessible, page-turning memoir. But I’m also honored when readers say they read it slowly, needing to savor the language and imagery. I hope it means I made something strange and beautiful.

SM: OCD is in the forefront of your latest book ‘Exploding Head.’ What made you want to write about OCD? Was mental health awareness or representation in the back of your mind?

CMH: I’ve lived with OCD my entire life, but because most of my obsessions and compulsions are performed mentally (such as ruminating and counting) rather than physically (such as checking locks), for better or worse, I slipped through childhood and most of my adult life undetected. It meant that if I didn’t want to share my diagnosis, I didn’t have to. And I didn’t want to.

Shame, as well as a fear of being misunderstood, kept me from talking about what was going on in my mind. But eventually, the isolation and secrecy took its toll, so that by my late 30s, when I started writing these poems, it was becoming impossible for me to continue not talking about OCD. The page was a realm I could control, where I could share my story bit by bit, poem by poem, as I discovered a language for speaking about the disorder for the first time.  

Mental health awareness and representation were nowhere in my mind. I was so consumed by just finding the words to tell my own story that I couldn’t yet envision how publishing a book about OCD would be received by readers or how it might be positioned as OCD awareness advocacy. In fact, I had been so isolated for so many years, trying to manage my symptoms on my own, that I wasn’t aware of OCD-related resources that could have been helpful to me, let alone could I begin to imagine my book as a resource that might be helpful to others.

I didn’t even say “OCD” in any of the poems themselves. That’s how little practice I had talking openly about my diagnosis. It wasn’t until I started working through the back cover copy with my publisher that I heartily committed to naming obsessive-compulsive disorder in Exploding Head’s description and marketing materials. The more poems I’d published in journals, the more acutely I’d become of aware of just how misunderstood OCD is in popular culture. I’d thought what was going on in my poems was so obviously OCD that I wouldn’t have to name it. For example, repeatedly visualizing myself being shot is obviously OCD. Feeling unsure about whether I’ve run over someone with my car is obviously OCD. Seeing an angel in my bedroom at night who will whisper the secret of heaven in my ear if I don’t keep counting the four edges of the window in a pattern that draws a “4”; obviously, that’s OCD. Right?

Wrong. I was surprised to learn from some readers that they had not realized my poems were about OCD. That’s when I realized that my not speaking openly about it wasn’t helping and that in fact, I had a responsibility to contribute to OCD awareness. That meant I had to become aware of available resources, learn the proper language, study up on my OCD facts. I consider writing the book and doing OCD advocacy work to be two related but very separate efforts.

Poetry isn’t therapy. But writing Exploding Head and connecting with readers has changed my life. I feel much less alone. I hope it has made readers feel less alone, too.

SM: What was it like having your work in TIME?

CMH: It was a dream, certainly, in my first year of writing essays, to secure a byline like TIME. It meant that my words would find a wider and very different type of readership than my poems ever could. The topic of the essay, OCD and America’s gun violence problem, was perhaps more important to me personally than anything else I’d written, so I hoped (and still hope) the essay would find the readers who need it.

Of course, the exposure meant I was newly vulnerable to the potential trolling of internet strangers, especially when the magazine shared a quote from my essay on their main Instagram page. I tried to heed the general advice not to read social media comments, but this was my actual first rodeo, and I was curious—perhaps less about the comments themselves than about how I would handle reading them. But I surprised myself. I felt relatively unmoved by the words of those who disagree with me about gun violence or misunderstand OCD. More importantly, I was greatly moved by words of thanks offered in solidarity from others who believe in gun control, who have OCD themselves, or who love someone diagnosed with OCD. I’m glad I braved the comments section so I could receive those.

It was also my first rodeo working with an editor who would pull my lyric, poetic prose toward a magazine’s “house” style. The editor I worked with, Rachel Sonis, did a fantastic job of peeling it back in manageable, onion-thin layers. Each edit, I was encouraged to let go of a few more “darlings”—images that were presented without explanation, quiet metaphors. Through several rounds of edits, I understood that we were uncovering a core of directness and clarity the very likes of which I had been trained, as a poet, to veil.

It was an incredible learning opportunity. I walked away with a greater understanding of various types of readerships and a sharpened ability to interrogate moments in which I might be falling victim to an overreliance on vague suggestions rather than bravely stating the explicit argument outright. Yes, in my essays. But also, yes, even in my poetry.

SM: What has been your proudest moment in your career?

CMH: Writing the personal essay “The Beast in Your Head” and seeing it published in The Sun.

In early 2023, I set a goal to write essays. I hadn’t written a personal essay since undergrad (which was, gulp!, decades ago), and I was nervous about experimenting with a “new” genre. Of course, I’d decided I had to be perfect at it on the first try—and if you’ve ever felt that way, you know it really kills the vibe. I had a list of essays I would write, if only I could start.

I had the chance to sit down with two accomplished multi-genre writers, Jesse Lee Kercheval and Judy Mitchell, at a local coffee shop. I’d locked myself in as a poet for so many years, and I thought maybe they had the key to throw the gates wide open. I brought my notebook and a printout of the Excel spreadsheet where I’d been plotting (i.e., procrastinating) my two-dozen essay ideas that I “can’t write”! I must have looked as frazzled as I felt, but they assured me every writer feels this way—even they had felt this way moving between genres. The key was that there was no key—just the page. The wise words they had to offer were simply, “you can do it.” But there’s no understating how powerful that was to hear. We were reminded that writers supporting other writers often just looks like giving each other permission when we struggle to give it to ourselves.

I went home and got to work on the first essay idea that was truly burning a hole in my brain. “The Beast in Your Head” delves into OCD more deeply than I could in the poems in Exploding Head because the essay form is so expansive by comparison. Whereas the prose poem had felt like a solid brick on the page, the essay was a lung breathing. And for the first time, I was writing about music and joy, subjects that felt unfamiliar and invigorating. For a good six months, I lived in the world of that essay, figuring things out as I was driving, staying up late into the night listening to Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” on repeat.

The Sun happened to post a call for personal essays about music, and that’s when I fantasized that I’d not only actually finish this darn thing but that I’d publish it in The Sun, a dream mag with a wide readership and home to some of the most beautiful and memorable personal essays I’d read. And that’s exactly what happened.

But this was not my proudest moment just because of the publication; it was more about the experience of writing. I wrote a half dozen essays that first year. I was proud of myself. Some were published in great outlets, and some fell apart at the draft stage or became hopelessly tangled—but each attempt was an act of fiercely, stubbornly picking the lock of my own self-limiting beliefs.

Once I was free, those limitations seemed so dumb! I experienced a period of what I could only call mourning for what I perceived as decades of lost creativity. During all the years I’d been writing poems (or not writing anything), I’d also had ideas for short stories, novels, and essays, but I’d brushed them off because I thought I had to pick a lane, and my lane was poetry. I’m still moving through that regret.

If anyone reading this is feeling stuck and needs to hear this: I give you permission. You can do it.

SM: What does the writing process look like for you?

CMH: I make writing harder than it needs to be by self-imposing big expectations and grandiose ideas. I don’t recommend my process. But it comes from a genuine obsession with and curiosity about books. I’m fired up by how poems speak to each other. Even though I write one poem at a time, I write each poem toward how I envision it clicking into place in the final book. This means my poetry books are less “collections” (poems gathered together after a period of writing) than they are “projects” (poems written intentionally toward a preconceived theme or constraint)—a book of travel poems (Sightseer), poems about birth and superstition in early medicine (Paper Doll Fetus), a collaged journey of genealogical research (Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones), a memoir in prose poems about OCD (Exploding Head).

Writing toward the book gives me a sense of purpose, and I thrive in environments that stimulate obsessive, deep focus. Whenever I’m deep into a project, I’m never starting a poem from absolute scratch. Each day I return to the writing desk, I’m returning to the book I’m working on.

This process has its drawbacks. I’m like a horse pulling my carriage down a busy street with blinders on, blocking out anything that isn’t visible straight ahead on my singular, predetermined path. Might there be some gorgeous sunflowers for sale on this street corner? Certainly! But I’m not writing a book about sunflowers!

But, at its core, writing is a form of paying attention, and in order to look at one thing, we must look away from another. Writers are repeatedly called to make that choice. Sometimes I regret having chosen too narrowly.

SM: If you’re able to tell us, what are you working on currently? Any new projects?

CMH: For the first time, I’m writing poems that aren’t part of a preconceived project. I have no idea what the next book will be about or whether the poems will become a book at all. This isn’t an experiment I put upon myself on purpose, but I’m gritting my teeth as I move through it, nonetheless, trying to remain open to whatever lesson the experience has to teach me.

It just so happened that once I’d finished Exploding Head, I didn’t have another project idea ready to go, but I continue to be very active with poetry groups and creative peers with whom I share work. Looming deadlines mean I’ve been writing random poems about whatever. Over time, I’ve amassed a good 50 pages worth of revised and polished “random poems about whatever.” I keep thinking I just have to keep the writing muscle warm until the next book idea strikes, and then I’ll be ready to start writing. But what if I’ve been writing the next book all along?

With fewer self-imposed constraints, I’m finally free to engage with any idea that occurs to me, rather than saying “no” to ideas because they don’t fit the project. That’s a freedom I haven’t allowed myself in 25 years. But so much freedom has been unsettling. I’m not used to facing so much uncertainty on the blank page.

In the end, I know a collection of seemingly random poems will cohere simply because I wrote them, and I know I’m subconsciously exploring recurring themes simply because I’m a person moving through the world with the ideas and obsessions that make me me. I’ve taken some time to review what I’ve written so far by interrogating the themes that have cropped up (I love a Table of Contents color-coded by theme) and running the manuscript through a word frequency counter. Turns out, I’m currently obsessed with climate change, parenting, and friendship in midlife. It’s not a project, but perhaps it will be a collection.

I’ve also been writing more essays, which doesn’t come with the same pressure of book-making for me. Maybe because I’ve never written a book of essays before. There is so much more I want to write about OCD than I could put in the poems. I’m not done yet.

Amy Stuber’s writing has appeared in The New England Review, Flash Fiction America, Ploughshares, The Idaho Review, Witness, The Common, Cincinnati Review, Triquarterly, American Short Fiction, Joyland, Copper Nickel, West Branch, and elsewhere.

She was the recipient of the Missouri Review’s 2023 William Peden Prize in fiction, winner of the 2021 Northwest Review Fiction Prize, and runner-up for the 2022 CRAFT Short Fiction Prize. Her work received a special mention in Pushcart Prize XLIV, appeared on the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2021, has been nominated for Best of the Net, and appears in Best Small Fictions 2020 and 2023. She’s an editor at Split Lip Magazine.

Jackson Porter: TMR published your story, “The Last Summer,” which was later awarded our Peden Prize for best story in a volume year. Could you talk a little about what it was like to have that story honored in that way?”

Amy Stuber: I actually remember the exact moment I found this out because I was with my family in Mendocino, California, one of my favorite places in the country, and getting the email about this award while being in this beautiful place I loved almost felt like more good than I could handle at once, ha! I was so thrilled and excited and shocked. For years, I’d submitted to the Missouri Review, gotten rejections, some personalized, some not, but I kept submitting, thinking, “Maybe someday” because Missouri Review was really a “dream publication” for me.  Both of my kids are writers (they’re 16 and 19), and I’ve told them that writing and submitting results in 99% rejection, and if they aren’t okay with that, they should probably write for themselves but not submit their work too much. So, I guess winning this prize was a reminder to me that persistence does sometimes pay off - not always, obviously, because I could tell another story about submitting 50 times to another dream place and getting only rejections, but this one, this was such a happy outcome. And this particular story, “The Last Summer,” means a lot to me, so it’s always amazing when a journal really sees your work the way you want it to be seen.

JP: “The Last Summer” is in your forthcoming collection, Sad Grownups, which will be published October 8 of this year. Can you tell us more about this collection in general?

Stuber: When I wrote these stories, between 2018 and 2022 for the most part, I was really coming out of a long period of high anxiety and some depression in the years after the super intense young kids phase of parenting. I started writing again after a long period of not writing much in an attempt to process emotions and to feel once again like I had an identity separate from “mom.” (Don’t get me wrong—I love being a parent, and I adore my kids more than really anything, but the early years were hard for me.) Sad Grownups is ultimately about distance between people and how we attempt (and sometimes fail) to connect with each other and understand ourselves in order to find joy and meaning in life. It’s also a bit of a critique of America—how societally we’ve made a lot of the wrong choices, which has left us at some dead ends, and how individuals come to terms with all that but still lead lives that matter.

JP: Beyond the Peden Prize, you’ve also been cited in the Wigleaf Top 50 and other accolades. how have you grown as a writer since then?

Stuber: Writing and submitting is really such a strange process. You can get one great thing (like the Peden prize, which was so amazing to receive) and then a string of hard rejections, sometimes for months. It’s really easy to feel like one step forward, two steps back. So I think one way I’ve grown is maybe getting a thicker skin about rejection and trying to really enjoy the process of writing as much as any aspect of this whole writing life. Also, I’ve definitely learned to trust myself in terms of productivity. In 2018, I was writing a flash fiction every week. I wrote two novel drafts in two years. It was ridiculous. This year, I’ve written two stories and some other random novel pages, but it’s been a slow year. I am not panicking, though, and this is an acquired skill. I know I’ll carve out the time when I’m ready, and I guess I’ve learned to be calm and patient with myself.

Then, with regard to the actual practice of writing: I hope I’ve grown in the last few years! I guess the more I do this, the more aware I am of my own tendencies, tricks, and gimmicks. So it’s easier to ferret out those easy and obvious places I might go in a first draft than it was maybe five years ago. I am also really eager to finish a novel draft that I’m currently working on. I’ve been thinking of it as a collection of related stories because that feels less daunting to me. But real growth for me would be to write something over 200 pages that really pulls you through it but also makes you want to linger on or go back to individual sentences. I haven’t done this yet, but this is the goal.

How would you describe yourself? 

Five foot four(ish), blonde(ish), forty(ish), writer of fiction and creative nonfiction (katemcintyrewriting.com), coeditor of a flash speculative literary journal (hexliteary.com). 

And what about your writing?

I came across a term in Naomi Klein’s excellent new book, Doppelgänger, that gets at a quality I always chase in my prose, for which I’d never had language: zozobra. Klein learned the term from the philosopher Emilio Uranga. She unpacks the meaning, quoting Uranga, here: “[Zozobra is] generalized wobbliness: ‘a mode of being that incessantly oscillates between two possibilities, between two affects, without knowing which one of those to depend on’—absurdity and gravity, danger and safety, death and life. Uranga writes, ‘In this to and fro the soul suffers, it feels torn and wounded.’”  

I’m also forever interested in the workings of power—how characters seize and hold it, how they exert their will, how injustices and power vacuums in nations and states get reflected at the micro level, in personal relationships.  

What’s your creative process like? 

Long and slow. I taught from a wonderful new craft book this term, How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill, edited by Jericho Brown, and in one essay, Charles Johnson shares an anecdote from his teacher John Gardner. A reader meets Gardner and tells him she likes his work much more than she likes him as a person. Gardner points out that of course a reader likes his work best because all the best bits of himself, over time, have made it. This resonates with me, this buildup of fine detail that results in a text that you never could have fathomed when you first begun a draft.  

Why fiction, in particular? 

I have Midwestern distaste for discussion of the self, for putting the self forward. Fiction allows you to affix false glasses and a mustache to the self.  

Describe what you did at the Missouri Review.

I started at TMR in the internship in publishing class. From there, I took over as contest editor, and then as anthology editor. After I got my PhD, I served for two years as managing editor. 

As I tell my students, the single best education for a serious young writer is reading submissions at a literary journal. You figure out very quickly why some submissions work and others don’t, and you gain a perspective on what is getting written right now, in this moment. You can use this knowledge to figure out what makes your own work singular, and you can lean into these aspects as you cultivate your voice, your aesthetic. 

What did you learn while serving as an editor? 

Well, I learned how to run a literary magazine. Along with my co-editors Danny Miller and Joe Aguilar, who are also TMR alums, I cofounded the flash speculative literary journal hex (hexliterary.com). In our two years of existence, we’ve published extraordinary work by 100 authors, garnered major reprints (Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, a forthcoming Bloomsbury speculative fiction text), and taught fifty students about literary magazine editing through a course at WPI based on TMR’s internship.  

At TMR, I also figured out how to explain the importance and vitality of literary magazines to people from outside our world. It’s a case that must get made over and over again, and the more people who are equipped and motivated to speak up for magazines, the better. 

When you evaluated fiction, what elements did you look for in submissions?

I looked for stories that weren’t just about capturing a single character’s emotional landscape, but instead, pieces where a writer engaged with social, cultural and political movements in world, where the gaze was both inward and outward. I also loved humor. 

Can you recall any TMR submission you particularly liked that was eventually published? 

I teach a travel writing class at my current institution, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and each year I assign Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers’s essay “One Person Means Alone.” It’s a depiction of cultural difference, centered on a public swimming pool in China. She uses the pool as a mechanism to explore varying meanings of privacy, of belonging and comfort, and of being a good community member. I was also a first reader on C. Pam Zhang’s amazing story “And How Much of These Hills Are Gold,” which came to us as a contest submission, and I’m so proud we got to publish it. 

What are some other works, influential to you, that might serve as recommended reading?

Here are some books I’ve been thinking about lately: Trust by Hernan Diaz, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, Darkly: Blackness and America’s Gothic Soul by Leila Taylor, and ¡Hola Papi! by J.P. Brammer.   

Describe the inspiration(s) for your book, Mad Prairie.

The stories fermented in my hometown in rural Kansas and took cues from my study of nineteenth century literature. I wanted to write a contemporary gothic work, full of smart, weird Midwesterners. The book is equally a new Winesburg, Ohio, and a reinvigoration of the gothic (Frankenstein, The Monk, Jane Eyre, The Turn of the Screw) for the twenty-first century.  

Finally, tell us a bit about what you’re doing now!

I teach creative writing. I edit hex. I’m at work on a novel. I’ve also been writing flash. You can read my most recent flash at that other great Columbia, MO, magazine Wigleaf.

.  

Last fall was the Missouri Review’s last fall with Evelyn Somers. As associate editor since 1990, Evelyn has helped turn our journal’s offices into a powerhouse of literary excellence. I sat down with her back in September to hear her reflect on her career, and let me just say—it was the easiest interview ever. Evelyn is everything one could want in an editor: professional, precise, pertinent and passionate. Her time at TMR may be over, but her legacy of expertise lives on. Read on for invaluable insight into the editorial process at the Missouri Review, advice for those entering the literary publishing landscape, and a glimpse at what’s next for Evelyn.

Find us, plus a condensed audio/video version of this interview, on TikTok.

Find TMR on TikTok

Audrey Dae Bush: Give us a rundown of your history with the magazine.

Evelyn Somers: I started as an intern on the Missouri Review staff in 1986 as a graduate student. I was in my second year of my master’s program in creative writing, and then I went on and stayed here at the University of Missouri and finished a PhD in literature. I was reading primarily fiction submissions at first, and at that point in time the internship at TMR was much smaller than it is now. There were just a few of us, and typically what would happen is students would stay for a couple of semesters and then rotate off the staff to make room for other students to join. We just simply didn’t have the volume of submissions that TMR has now, so there probably wasn’t enough for interns to do—all of this is in pre-Internet days, right? Pre-social media days. There simply wasn’t this level of involvement in the literary scene that journals have now.

So, it got to the point where I should have rotated off, and I didn’t want to, because I was just very committed. I loved the reading, I loved the work, I loved literature. For a while, nonfiction had generally been handled by faculty members in the English department, but that was changing, so I asked to stay and read nonfiction submissions instead. So I stayed on the staff and the internship began to grow, so there was more room, and I continued to work as a volunteer on the journal until about 1990, when I became associate editor. At that point, much of that work was still volunteer work, unpaid. There was some grant funding—I got a little money for it—but I was still teaching and working on my doctorate while I began to do more hands-on editing of manuscripts. It was something I had always been interested in and knew I had a knack for. And of course, as a writer, I was continually refining my own process. I’m obsessive about the quality of my own writing: I believe perfection is unlikely but not impossible. That all fed into my editorial work.

ADB: And then?

ES: I simply stayed on. There was a point where there was funding for a part-time position doing a combination of clerical things and manuscript reading, editing, etc. My job continued to evolve and center exclusively on editing as the magazine grew. There was more money for salaries and more need for a full-time person. I became a regular, officially full-time staff member in 1995. So there was a period of nine years where I was some of the time a student, some of the time a volunteer, sometimes a research assistant, and teaching on the side to make a living and support our growing family. It wasn’t much of a living in those days—we grew our own vegetables, and my husband hunted and fished a lot of our meat.

ADB: Describe your editorial process, from submission to publication.

ES: When you’re reading manuscripts, if you happen to read several manuscripts by the same author, you begin to take note. You may interact with them more than just by form rejection, and you might start making more comments on their work and be more encouraging. So you can have relationships with submitters even without accepting their work. One of the highlights of the job for me was seeing a name over and over and beginning to take an interest.

Then, once you’ve actually accepted the piece, you’re in a different relationship with the author—you’re in collaboration with them. You both have hopefully the same aim, which is to make the piece achieve its closest-to-ideal form for publication. That can at times involve not very much at all, and I think that’s an important thing for an editor to know: that this piece doesn’t need to be messed with too much, that it’s very close as it is and that the author has made all the right moves and it’s just a question of a light copy edit. Or it can involve something considerably more extensive in terms of suggestions for the author, questions about phrasing, questions about structure, and substantive cuts.

ADB: What are you looking for that makes a story really “work?”

ES: A lot of what makes either a story or an essay work is structural. And a lot of what makes it work is thematic. And the genuineness of the voice—there should be a sense of urgency that this story needs to be told in this particular way or that this subject needs to be explored in this voice, using this specific material and these narrative or rhetorical moves. Over the years, I’ve had different ways of expressing “what I’m looking for.” That said, “What are you looking for?” is not a question I love, because you’re never really looking for something specific. You’re just looking to see what’s there and then see if it’s good.

ADB: Do you have any examples of pieces that check these boxes, or any favorites?

ES: That’s a good question, and it’s a little bit hard, because you want writers to understand that as an editor, you’re not interested in playing favorites. There are stories and essays I fell in love with, but I wouldn’t want to say what they are, out of courtesy to all the authors whose work I also edited. I’ve certainly developed relationships with authors over the years, but I wouldn’t want anybody who ever submitted to TMR to feel like their work got less consideration than somebody else whom I have formed a relationship with. As for what I like—isn’t there something in a voice, a story that you yourself couldn’t tell, that you admire so much, that really just sticks with you in some sort of profound way? For me, some of those pieces were pure literary realism, which is something I can’t do well myself, so when I see it and it’s good, especially if it’s emotionally honest, I’m in awe. My own work veers toward the comic and the slightly speculative. I can’t do the straight treatment.

ADB: What’s a misconception that writers or those new to the field have about literary editing and publishing?

ES: What many writers don’t understand is that editors are genuinely rooting for them. When they’re sending things out into the world, there’s a fear that, number one, they might be ignored, might not even be read at all. So writers are afraid of that, I think—that the editor’s not going to read it. And then they’re afraid that they’re going to do something to tick the editor off. That they’re going to send the wrong piece and get a strike against them somehow. I do believe that, at least in the case of good literary editors, a writer would have to work really hard to submit something that would be, like, a blot on their record. Editors really do want to publish people.

ADB: Do you have any advice for aspiring editors in the world of publishing?

ES: Keep an open mind, always, to what you could publish. As an editor, I always felt like I had to be asking questions. Second-guessing myself. Is this change I’m suggesting the right change? Is it the best thing for the work? Am I imposing my ego on it? Am I being fair to the piece? So I was always asking a lot of questions like that. One of my pieces of advice is to be constantly vigilant and striving to do better than you did yesterday. That means honest self-assessment—whether it’s self-assessment about a piece you rejected that you shouldn’t have rejected, an edit you made that you shouldn’t have made, an edit you should have made that you didn’t, et cetera. Even your communications with an author, all those things, should be examined: Was I encouraging enough? Was I truly collaborative? Unclear? Inconsistent? It’s always a revision process, right?

ADB: Finally, what are you up to now?

ES: Writing. I have several novels to get out into the world. I’m starting my own little editing and self-publishing business—Stylite Books—so that’s in the works and has been in the works for a while. That’s probably one of the main things. I do have family—I have three adult kids—and I like interacting with them as well. I want to continue to be, as a parent, a support person to them when and if they need it. I’m thinking about new writing projects. I’m also doing some freelance editing; if anybody’s interested, I’m super reasonable and super good!

Evelyn and Rico

Evelyn Somers, former associate editor of the Missouri Review, has edited prize-winning short-story collections, scholarly work, memoirs, and both  self-published and commercially published novels. She contributes to Bloom, an online publication featuring later-emerging writers. Evelyn is also a fiction writer and essayist whose work has appeared widely in literary journals. She teaches literature and women and gender studies and cares for shelter cats. You can contact her via Stylite Books at http://stylitebooks.com.

The Missouri Review: Can you describe your writing practice? You are such a prolific poet, and I’m curious to hear what your writing practice looks like on a day-to-day basis. Relatedly, how has your writing practice evolved over time?

Carolyne Wright: Thanks for the kind words about my being prolific! On a day-to-day basis, watching how I spend the hours in any given day, I don’t feel so prolific, but I do try to practice “Not a day without a line,” that old adage attributed to any number of writers and artists. I admire the novelists and nonfiction writers who sit down at dawn and write till noon, for example; or a writer like Isabel Allende who starts every new book on January 8^th and writes for several hours a day till she finishes. I don’t have a fixed writing schedule, but I do tend to settle down and write more at night, after daily tasks and get-togethers are done, classes and workshops are over, banks and offices are closed and phones don’t ring. Rita Dove has said that she often writes all night till dawn, then sleeps. I sometimes joke that I am a morning writer—I write from midnight till 4 a.m. I tend to stop before dawn, though, because if I hear birds singing and see the sky lightening, then it’s harder to finally go to sleep!  

I regard all writerly acts as part of the practice: whether it’s waking up from sleep with lines running through my head, or overhearing some scrap of conversation on the radio or on the metro, or reading some work that calls up new lines or phrases—I have to scrawl such gift lines by hand in my journal. Likewise first typing out a handwritten draft of a poem, or revising a prose piece or poem already in typescript, or organizing a manuscript in progress—moving poems or essays around to see how they “speak” to each other in sequence—or editing galleys of poems or prose pieces forthcoming in journals, or even typing out replies to these questions: it’s all part of the process. If I feel the need to write but can’t think of anything new, or no revision in process calls out for another pass, I go back through some of my journal pages (all organized by year, in banker’s-style storage boxes), look at handwritten first drafts (marked with post-it notes for easier discovery) till one of them stands out, and I copy those lines by hand onto scrap paper, making changes and additions as I go. After writing a poem out by hand at least once, then perhaps revising by hand a second or third time, I type it into a Word file, to see approximately what it looks like on a printed page. (Prose I tend to type directly into a digital file, but poetry almost always wants to begin by hand.) Some form of writing is always in progress. Actually, I have worked pretty much like this since graduate school—I set a “derriere-in-chair” schedule only if I have a hard deadline to meet, and that is usually for the few days till I meet that deadline.  Thanks for this question, by the way—it has inspired some thought about my practice. And the “derriere-in-chair” quip came to me just now, as I was writing this!

[I]t has been important for me to have a poem take place (great phrase, no?) in a real location, and to give my “airy nothings” of thought and memory and imagination and emotional dynamics between the speaker and other characters in the poem what Shakespeare called “a local habitation and a name.”

TMR: Reading through some of your poems, I was struck by the varied ways that place figures into your work: abstractly, temporally, culturally, and geographically. Could you describe how you think about place when you’re drafting a poem?

CW: For my 16^th birthday, I think it was, my mother, who had noticed my growing interest in poetry, presented me with a copy of Five Poets of the Pacific Northwest, edited by Robin Skelton, which featured work by Kenneth O. Hanson, Richard Hugo, Carolyn Kizer, William Stafford and David Wagoner. These poets of what was called the “Northwest” school, also including Theodore Roethke and Madeline DeFrees, were my earliest influences. All of them located their work very deeply in place—that place being the lush, temperate rainforest, the mountains and islands and inland waterways of Western Washington state; and also the regions east of the Cascade Mountains, the “Inland Northwest” of rolling wheat lands, steppes, foothills and deserts bisected by the Columbia and Snake Rivers, and the human lives that played out in these regions. I resonated with the sensibilities of these poets and the landscapes of their poems—indeed, in their poems they taught me how to look at the landscape, how to internalize it, take it in to a poem. Later, I was fortunate to study with some of these poets at conferences (DeFrees, Hugo, Kizer, Stafford) and be associated as a colleague with David Wagoner, and as a poet friend with DeFrees. Ever since it has been important for me to have a poem take place (great phrase, no?) in a real location, and to give my “airy nothings” of thought and memory and imagination and emotional dynamics between the speaker and other characters in the poem what Shakespeare called “a local habitation and a name.”  The place is not just literal, though—in a wonderful way the setting of the poem also becomes representative of those thoughts, feelings, and psychic dynamics between characters.

One critic, who honored me by calling me a “trustworthy naturalist, whose language of description, even when it is most figurative, has the ring and weight of fact,” also stated that the natural settings in my poems “figure situations in which gestures of the mind and elections of feelings. . . . map and re-map the inner life of ongoing relations with others and with oneself.” (Thank you, Donald Dike, for that most generous introduction to my first book, Stealing the Children!). And this habit of mind in the making of poems has traveled with me over continents and through countries, and into the human history and cultures that overlay and exist amidst the natural environment. At Sacatar, for example, I found in the library a copy of Aves do Brasil and one other big, National Geographic-style, Portuguese-language guide to the birds of Brazil, and left them on a table in the dining room. In this way, when birds flitted by, or perched outside the windows (always open in the day, no window glass in this tropical region), or even flew into the rooms (!), I could look them up.  Pretty soon, the other resident fellows were consulting these books as well!  It’s important to me to give correct specific names to the birds and other creatures, so wherever I go, I try to learn the local birds and animals, tree and plant species, rock formations and soils, and the human settlements as well—to honor these local habitations and inhabitants with their real names. And as much as possible, I try to learn the human languages as well—the languages carry and transmit the local human culture!

TMR:  In addition to being an acclaimed writer, you’re also an award-winning translator. Can you describe how your work as a translator informs your work as a poet and vice versa?

CW: As I wrote at the end of the previous response, human languages carry and transmit human culture, and translation is one form of carrying over the cultures and history embodied in languages. For me, the closest of all possible readings of poetry from another language is the practice of translating that poetry. I have learned a great deal about my own first language by trying to render another language’s poetry into English as fluent and graceful as if the poems had been originally written in English. I have always been drawn to learning languages—not lots of languages, but a few languages as deeply as I am able to enter into them. I began with Spanish, which I had studied for half a dozen years in school and then was fully immersed in for a year while in Chile on a Fulbright-Hayes Study Grant during the presidency of Salvador Allende. There I interacted pretty much only with Chileans and so became, as was my goal, as close to bilingual in Chilean Spanish as possible. I wrote a series of poems and essays about that time, and also sought Chilean poets to translate. Pablo Neruda had recently won the Nobel Prize in Literature, so there would be guaranteed interest in translations of his work, but Neruda already had a small army of established translators.

So I decided to focus on Jorge Teillier—like Neruda from the rainy South of Chile, but a generation younger, and whose work I first encountered in the bookstore of the Universidad de Chile in Santiago. Teillier had a substantial reputation in Chile, but he was not well represented in English translation.  His free-verse style and diction were contemporary and compatible with my own. The dreamlike, small-town, rainy ambience of Teillier’s poems appealed to me, a young poet from Seattle whose earliest contemporary poetic influences were the poets of the Northwest School I named earlier. My travels to the South of Chile, regions similar in geography, vegetation, and atmosphere to my native Pacific Northwest, made elements of Teillier’s poetic world feel very familiar. I never met Teillier, but we did correspond (by typed and handwritten letters!), enough for me to receive from him the permission to translate and publish his work, and to get answers to a few questions I had about passages in his poems. In Order to Talk with the Dead, a bilingual volume representing the entirety of his poetic career, was published by the University of Texas Press, and received the National Translation Award from ALTA, the American Literary Translators Association.

Years later, in Seattle, I met Eugenia Toledo, also from the South of Chile—in fact, from Temuco, Neruda’s hometown!—she had come to Seattle in 1975 to pursue a doctorate in Latin American literature, having lost her university teaching job in Temuco after the military coup. Eugenia visited a class of mine on Latin American poets at Hugo House, and she regaled us with anecdotes about some of the poets we were reading—she had known many of them! Meeting Eugenia was a real gift: we had Chilean poets and Chile itself in common! We hit it off and began to work together, translating each other’s poetry, team-teaching courses on Neruda and other poets at Hugo House and elsewhere, and having long talks, mainly in Spanish, about poets, poetry, politics and more. With support from Washington State – Chile Partners of the Americas, we traveled throughout Chile for a month in 2008, giving talks and readings in schools and universities and cultural centers from La Serena in the North to Valdivia in the South, visiting sites of literary moment and meeting fellow writers and poets. On this journey, I watched Eugenia re-connect with her past, including colleagues and friends she had not seen since before the military coup. There were emotional reunions with colleagues who had been exiled to different countries for decades before returning to Chile after the restoration of democracy. From this journey of re-encounter emerged the bilingual sequence of poems, Trazas de mapa, trazas de sangre / Map Traces, Blood Traces (Mayapple Press, 2017), featuring Eugenia’s poems in my translation, with notes from both poet and translator. This book was a Finalist for the 2018 Washington State Book Award in Poetry, and also for the 2018 PEN Los Angeles Award in Translation.

During that Fulbright year in Chile, I also crossed the continent to Brasil—to Salvador, Bahia, where I spent several weeks before, during and after Carnaval. I fell in love with the Brazilian people, their culture and language (which I was able to pick up more or less because of its many cognates and similarities with Spanish). For years afterward I longed to interact more fully with Brazil. That opportunity came in 2011 when I discovered Zumba and Afro-Brasilian dance, taught by Daniel Santos, from Salvador, Bahia, and his American wife Aileen—they are wonderfully dedicated teachers and creators of community through dance, capoeira and performances of their company, Bahia in Motion. Soon thereafter, I learned that I could take courses on a non-credit basis at the University of Washington for a nominal enrollment fee (our tax dollars at work at land-grant universities!), so for several years I took the whole sequence of Portuguese language and literature courses, and was fairly fluent by the time I returned to Bahia for the Sacatar residency in 2018.  Curiously, with Portuguese, I have been translating work by a few Brazilian poets and writers—Alex Simões, Márcia Tiburi, and Leonardo Tonus: Alex I met via Sacatar in 2018; I met Márcia and Leo when they visited the University of Washington in spring 2019 for the Primavera Literária Brasileira, a project to bring Brazilian writers and poets to universities and cultural centers throughout Europe and the U.S. So far, these translations of poems and fiction pieces have appeared in journals like Channel Magazine, The Common, The Kenyon Review, Nimrod International Journal, PRISM International, and Tupelo Quarterly.

Then there is the huge and still ongoing project of translation of the work of Bengali women poets and writers! I lived in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), India, for nearly two years on an Indo-U.S. Subcommission Fellowship for Advanced Research; and then for nearly two years in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship, to collect and translate, with the assistance of Bengali collaborators, the work of Bengali women poets and writers. An anthology of this work is in progress, entitled A Bouquet of Roses on the Burning Ground: Poetry of Bengali Women. So far, three volumes of poetry in my translation by Bengali women have been published: The Game in Reverse: Poems by Taslima Nasrin  (George Braziller, Inc., 1995); Another Spring, Darkness: Selected Poems of Anuradha Mahapatra (Calyx Books, 1996); and the anthology of poems edited, and with my critical introduction, Majestic Nights: Love Poems of Bengali Women (White Pine Press, 2008).  These translations have appeared in dozens of literary magazines, anthologies, and journal features, as well as in textbooks from Bedford / St. Martin’s Press, Macmillan, W.W. Norton & Co., Penguin, and Vintage/Random House, among others. 

In Dhaka, Bangladesh, in late 1989, I met English Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes, the guest of honor for a national poetry festival sponsored by the Bangladesh government. Conversations with him, particularly one in which he spoke at length about his life with Sylvia Plath, inspired reviews, essays and poems, as well as occasional correspondence with Hughes, and with his widow after his death in 1998. (Much of this correspondence is preserved with Hughes’s papers, which are housed at the Emory University Library.)  This encounter, as recounted in my memoir essay, “What Happens in the Heart: A Conversation with Ted Hughes” (originally published in the Poetry Review, U.K.), has been cited in subsequent biographies of Ted Hughes, including Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet by Elaine Feinstein (W.W. Norton, 2001); and Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life, by Sir Jonathan Bate (William Collins/Harper, 2015). 

In early 1990 in Dhaka, I met and began working with dissident Bangladeshi poet and writer Taslima Nasrin, to produce the first translations of her work into any other language. In 1993 and 1994, when fundamentalist death threats brought Nasrin’s case to international attention, I was instrumental in making my translations of her work available for the human-rights campaign on her behalf. These translations were published in The Game in Reverse, and in anthologies such as The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry, ed. J. D. McClatchy (Vintage / Random House, 1996); Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East & Beyond, ed. Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal, Ravi Shankar (W.W. Norton & Co., 2008); and Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, ed. Billy Collins (Random House, 2003), though translator credit was not given in this last instance. In addition, I was approached by jazz saxophonist and composer Steve Lacy, to provide my translations to English for The Cry, a “jam opera” / concert / CD featuring the poetry of Taslima Nasrin, set to Lacy’s music and sung by Irene Aebi.

For these translations, I have received a Witter Bynner Foundation Grant in Poetry and an NEA Grant in Translation. In addition, I was a Fellow of the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College,  and held research appointments with the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Harvard University, the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, and the Asian Studies Program at Emory University. For the past several years, my translation focus has been on Eugenia Toledo (Chilean Spanish) and on Brazilian Portuguese; but I have several more volumes in translation from Bengali to complete and get published! All in due course!

TMR: What are you working on now, and what are you reading right now?

CW: I have a few projects underway—besides the translations of Bengali women and Brazilian poets and writers that I describe just above, I am working on other poems for the Bahia series; also poems for a memoir in poetry that moves through childhood, adolescence and beyond, to confrontations with mortality via caregiving of ailing family members—this one is tentatively entitled Mother-of-Pearl Women; also a book of essays, interviews and reviews that was invited for one of the University of Michigan series of poets on poetry. Last year I put together a tentative TOC, which involved researching some of the internet-only and print format-only book reviews, interviews, and essays . . and a few for which I have no electronic copies so will have to type, 1950’s-secretary style, from original typescripts or original print journal copies, into Word files. This volume has a fun working title: Confessions of a Nonce Formalist.  And it is fun and illuminating to revisit all these pieces I have written over the years. And I’m also still giving readings and interviews, and teaching courses on poetry and memoir, based on my most recent book, Masquerade: a Memoir in Poetry (Lost Horse Press, 2021).

I’m always reading several books of poetry at once—new and recent books, as well as older ones from among my alphabetically arranged poetry shelves, books that I dip into over and over.  Kelli Russell Agodon’s Dialogues with Rising Tides; B. H. Fairchild’s The Art of the Lathe; Ada Limón’s The Carrying; the late Lynda Hull’s Collected Poems; Terrance Hayes’ American Sonnets for My Once and Future Assassin; volumes in the U of Michigan Poets on Poetry Series by Tess Gallagher (A Concert of Tenses) and Yusef Komunyakaa (Blue Notes); two books in the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series: Apricots of Donbas, by Lyuba Yakimchuk (translated by Oksana Maksymchuk, Max Rosochinsky, and Svetlana Lavochkina) and Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow, by Natalka Biloserkivets (translated by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky); the Portuguese pages of the bilingual Poemas do Brasil of Elizabeth Bishop, also Poemas escolhidos de Elizabeth Bishop, both volumes translated by Paulo Henriques Britto, regarded as the best translator to Portuguese of her work. It is fascinating to read in Portuguese this poet whose work I know so well in the original. . . . and to read the facing pages in English so that I can check on Britto’s translation choices!

And every night before sleep, as I have done since I was in Salvador, Bahia, in June and July 2022—the first segment of my 2022-2023 Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award—I read a few more pages of Minha vida de menina, the diary-format narrative written from 1893–1895 by “Helena Morley,” the nom de plume of Alice Dayrell (1880-1970) , a girl of English and Brasilian heritage growing up in the small city of Diamantina in the final two decades of the 19^th century. Years ago, when I worked in a bookstore in New Orleans, I had read Elizabeth Bishop’s translation of this classic, The Diary of Helena Morley, and had always hoped to learn Portuguese well enough to read it in the original. Minha vida de menina  has had the same degree of influence in Brasil as another Diary of a Young Girl has had world-wide; but unlike Anna Frank’s “forced maturity and closed atmosphere,” as Miss Bishop puts it in her introduction to The Diary of Helena Morley., Alice Dayrell captures “authentic childlikeness . . . classical sunlight and simplicity” in her diary.

I try to be in process of reading a book in Portuguese all the time, likewise a book in Spanish: poems of Neruda in the original—despite his repellent treatment of women at various times in his life, the linguistic energy and boundless fonts of rich imagery in his poetry, especially in works like Residencia en la tierra and Canto General, still inspire. And I am reading another volume of Eugenia Toledo’s poetry, her Casa de máquinas, about her growing up in Pueblo Nuevo, Temuco, where her father, don Eugenio Toledo, a pyrometallurgist who worked with high-temperature metals, operated a small foundry that crafted specialized tools and machinery parts. The family home was in the same compound, so Eugenia grew up observing her father’s work up close.

TMR: Do you have any advice for writers who are early in their publishing careers? 

CW: Read widely and voraciously: poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction—more widely in your major genre—learn about the major figures in your genre, as well as up-and-coming voices.Also read works of science and history and biography and fine arts and music—at least articles on these topics in magazines and online. Read literary journals, both print and online journals, to get a sense of who is out there, publishing in these magazines—writers and poets of older (and younger) generations as well as of your own—read to discover what kind of work each journal likes, the wide range of editorial sensibilities out there. Also, make sure to be able to afford to subscribe to a few journals, to support the magazines you hope will support you via publication. Many literary contests include a year’s subscription to the journal sponsoring the contest; or if the subscription is an added option, take it, especially if it’s discounted! I tend to do such subscriptions tied to contests; I don’t always renew, but I do get a good idea of each journal by reading the issues sent to me during that year or two.

A good place to start for a directory of literary journals is the Poets & Writers Directory of Literary Magazines and Journals. Find that directory under the Publish Your Writing tab, along with loads of other invaluable information under other tabs. If you have attended an MFA or other Creative Writing program, you may already be familiar with the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, along with its website which has valuable information about publication, writers conferences and literary centers, writing fellowships, contests, and other opportunities. And both of these organizations publish bi-monthly magazines. As an AWP member, I receive the AWP Writers Chronicle (which went to online-only format as of last year); and I have subscribed to Poets & Writers since I was a grad student in Creative Writing at Syracuse. P & W is still in print format, and you can also buy it on magazine stands, especially at independent and university-affiliated bookstores.

Write every day, revise a piece in progress if nothing new comes to you, write prose if no poetry comes, or (if you’re a prose writer) poetry if no prose comes. Keep a journal of notes and images and possible titles, also dreams and narratives of interesting interactions you observe or take part in, reconstructed dialogue, whatever. This will be your source material, a sort of hopper, as one artist friend calls it, to draw from. Keep the journal (or a few blank pages from it) with you at all times, so you can note down any line that comes, and not forget it. Who cares if people think you’re obsessive! Or you can write lines on your cellphone or tablet—though I personally would find using such devices unwieldy and intrusive. Learn to be unobtrusive and matter-of-fact about making notes, and other people finally won’t even notice. Your writing is an integral part of your life, and with low-tech devices like paper and pen, you can write anywhere, anytime.

We recently caught up with 2022 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize Finalist and TMR contributor Carolyne Wright, whose latest book is Masquerade: A Memoir in Poetry (Lost Horse Press, 2021). In Part 1, Wright takes us through the challenge of wedding poetic lyricism to social engagement, or in other words, getting poetry that is committed to witnessing contemporary and historical issues to also remain committed to the opportunities for heightened, musical language to which lyric poetry is heir.

Along the way, she gives us a rich annotation of the poems which were recently finalists, which gives us a lot more insight into the historical and regional contexts for the poems, and a wonderful beginning foray into the complex histories and politics of Chile and Brazil. Part 2 (coming soon!) will focus more on her individual process and ancestry as a writer, with additional insight into the work of translation.

The Missouri Review:  In praise of your collection, This Dream the World, Robert Cording said, “Carolyne Wright’s poems connect the personal and political and walk the difficult edge of poetic lyricism and social engagement. They are poems that search for ‘a language between us’ in which personal loss becomes a metaphor for an injured and debilitating world where political violence and conflict keep us from fulfilling ourselves in meaningful ways.” I saw this tension between personal and political in your poem, “Errância: The Caravan,” which was a finalist for the 2022 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize. Can you talk about your conception of the relationship between “poetic lyricism” and “social engagement”?

Carolyne Wright: What a great question with which to begin!  I love Robert Cording’s phrasing in that comment of his, and very much appreciate his praise.  When I first began seriously reading and writing poetry, in high school, I remember noting how so much anti-war poetry, even by the poetic luminaries of the day (poets I very much respected) was rather didactic and free of imagery and musicality, as if when poets confronted political matters, the nuanced, vivid and rhythmically varied diction that charged their other work just went away. Their poems protesting the Vietnam War were big on social engagement, but the prosodic and lyric engagement was absent—the language was impassioned but flat.  I wondered if poetic lyricism and social engagement could co-exist in the same poem; or was political poetry supposed to be mere “podium pounding.”

The first answers to this question came after I completed my undergraduate degree and spent a year in Chile on a Fulbright-Hayes Study Grant during the presidency of Salvador Allende, the democratically elected head of the Unidad Popular (a coalition of center-left and left-wing parties, similar to the social democratic coalitions that govern in many European countries, governments which the U.S. does not attempt to overthrow). As all the world knows, on the first 9-11—September 11, 1973—Allende was overthrown in a military coup supported and, to some degree orchestrated by the U.S. government under the leadership of those unindicted war criminals Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. In fact, the first memoir essay I published about this time in Chile, “El Compañero Presidente,”as published in . . . the Missouri Review!  I still recall with fondness and gratitude all the comments and suggestions that Speer Morgan—still the Editor!—made on this piece.

During that year in Chile, I became concientizada, as Chileans say: made politically aware, socially conscious—what some now call woke!  In the original Spanish, I read the lyrically charged and socially engaged poetry of Pablo Neruda and Nicanor Parra, among others; I listened to the songs and studied the lyrics of Victor Jara, Isabel and Ángel Parra, the surviving children of Nicanor Parra’s younger sister Violeta Parra (1917-1967), now universally acknowledged as the mother of La Nueva Canción, and in my opinion a more powerful poet, much more grounded in the life of the Chilean people, than her long-lived older brother.  I loved how all these poets could present issues of great political and social concern in powerful imagery and lyrical language, not to mention song. In this work, I could see and hear and feel the individual Chileans, farmers and fisherman and miners, weavers and healers and teachers, portrayed in these poems and songs. I could see the fields and mountains, the villages and towns, the seacoasts and northern deserts, of this proud and enterprising country.  I also came to perceive how most policies or political actions in Chile had immediate, visible effects in the personal lives of the citizens. In that era, there was no widespread sheltering affluence, as in the U. S., to diffuse public attention or provide economic buffering from the way that larger public events impacted peoples’ lives. So I determined that the poetry I wrote about Chile, as well as what I wrote about my own country (whose politics I now saw with very different eyes), would be both imagistically vivid and lyrically charged. 

To consider one example among the poems I sent for the Editors’ Prize—all poems set in the other country of South America and the global South that has had such a powerful influence on my imagination, Brazil!  “Errância: The Caravan” was a poem I drafted quickly, in response to the comments by Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino, about the imagery she had had in mind for her sculptural work—of the dry, impoverished, Northeast interior region of Brazil. This is not a region of Brazil I have visited, but its frequent droughts have made for ongoing environmental problems for decades, and the waves of migrants departing the region to look for work in the big cities farther south, have been a persistent theme of Brazilian literature, music, and films, much as the Dustbowl of the 1930’s Depression era continues to resound in North American culture and literary imagination.  In Portuguese classes I had read a good deal and seen Brazilian films that featured impoverished rural people (os retirantes, as they are called in Portuguese) fleeing that dry Northeastern region of Brasil called the sertão.

In fact, as I started this poem, I had in mind an image from the opening of a Brazilian film I had recently seen, of a caravan of retirantes straggling, on foot and horseback, across a vast stretch of blinding, white sand. And I thought of the iconic song, “Asa Branca” (White Wing) the most famous composition by the beloved singer-composer from the Northeast, Luiz Gonzaga—one of the first songs I heard the first time I was in Salvador, Bahia, decades ago.  I had always loved it, so I quoted the first two lines of the lyrics in the original Portuguese. In English: “When I saw the land was burning / like the bonfires of São João.” The poor man from the rural Northeast has lost his cattle and horses, and he has fled the sertão, like the asa branca, the white-winged picazuro pigeon native to the region; but he promises his beloved Rosinha that he will return when the rains fall and the fields of the sertão turn green again. As I wrote, the retirantes in the caravan of this poem began to appear to me more like penitents in some romaria, some religious procession, and the prosperous cities of the south like walled paradises that slammed their gates shut on these poor pilgrims.

TMR: Can you describe the genesis and development of the poems in the packet you submitted for the Editors’ Prize?

CW: Oh thanks so much for your interest in this group of poems! They form part of a series with the working title of Solstice in the South—this series had its genesis during the 2018 artistic residency I was honored to spend at the Instituto Sacatar on the island of Itaparica, Bahia. This residency was a dream come true for me, because I have loved Brazil since my first visit decades ago. These poems were inspired by the human and cultural life, as well as the natural history of Brazil, especially Bahia—not only the city of Salvador and the semi-rural island of Itaparica, but also by the plants, animals, birds and marine life. This project is my poet’s way to continue to dwell with the human and natural world of Bahia, as it has inhabited and continues to inspire my work.

I arrived at Sacatar fairly fluent in Brazilian Portuguese—after studying the language for a few years at the U of Washington, reading stories and novels by Brazilian, Moçambican and Angolan authors in the original Portuguese for those classes, and doing Afro-Brazilian dance in Seattle with teachers from Bahia. I was fortunate also that there was one fellow Sacatar resident, a photographer from Salvador, who spoke no English. It turned out that I was the only resident who spoke enough Portuguese to carry on conversations in depth with him, about the arts, politics, family, the human nexus!  So he and I talked a lot, which greatly improved my Portuguese and helped me to stabilize the regional accent (Bahian!) with which I speak the language. To be able to speak and understand the language being spoken around me, and the folk / popular as well as literary culture embodied in that language, really enables me to enter into the culture on its own terms, as much as possible, all of which informs this series of poems.

This is not the first group of poems I have written about Brazil.  The earlier ones were written about my first encounter years ago with Salvador, Bahia and other places in Brazil—I remained fascinated with Brazil ever since then. These earlier poems were included in my book, Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire, which as a manuscript received the Blue Lynx Prize and was published by Eastern Washington University Press / Lynx House Books (second edition, 2005). As a book, it was awarded the Oklahoma Book Award in Poetry and an American Book Award—one of the most important awards for a book with socio-political themes and resonance. During the Sacatar residency in 2018, I worked with Marcelo Thomaz, Communications Director of the Instituto Sacatar, to translate these earlier poems about Brazil to Portuguese; then my photographer colleague also took an interest and gave some suggestions on my translations of the first poems I wrote at Sacatar.

Okay, the poems themselves! The only pre-Sacatar poem in the group I sent is “Ghazal: Miss Bishop Dances the Samba,“ informed by my close reading of Bishop’s life and work, my study with her for that one quarter at the University of Washington in the year after my first travels to Brazil, my yearning to have spent more time in her presence during those several weeks, and my imaginatively entering into her life in Brazil. Miss Bishop spent the better part of 15 years, between 1952 and 1967, in Brazil, with the brilliant, aristocratic woman who was the love of her life, Lota de Macedo Soares. I made this poem a ghazal, turning on the refrain “dance the samba,” because I have a sneaky suspicion, that Miss Bishop did not, in fact, dance, not even the samba! She was the most unlikely (to use her own term) person to be in close communion with that aspect of Brazilian culture.

This ghazal, along with the two Errância poems, exist in Portuguese as well, as translated by me in collaboration with Emanuella Leite Rodrigues de Moraes (a post-doctoral research fellow from Bahia by way of Rio de Janeiro, at the University of Washington in 2018-2019, who became a collaborator and good friend), with suggestions as well from Décio Torres (poet, fiction writer and Professor Emeritus from the Universidade Federal da Bahia) and Marcelo Thomaz. Making my own writing about Brazil available in Portuguese for a Lusophone readership, in particular the poems of Solstice in the South / Solstício no sul, was part of the project for which I received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award to Brazil, which took me back to Salvador, Bahia for two months last year and for another two months in the near future.

The two Errância poems emerged from a sort of commission. In October 2018, I was invited by Hauser & Wirth Gallery in NYC (in conjunction with the Poetry Society of America) to write a poem in response to a work of art in an upcoming exhibit by Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino. The poem would be printed on a card featuring the artwork on one side and the poem on the other, and it would be free to gallery visitors. The hope of gallery staff was that the poem would enter into dialogue with the artwork and provide an additional way of viewing or experiencing the artwork while also occupying a space outside of the physical gallery.

The first poem, “Errância: Late Afternoon,” was to respond to a sculptural work in Maiolino’s new exhibit at Hauser & Wirth, Errância Poética (Poetic Wanderings), from Da Terra series. This was an amazing confluence, because I had only recently returned from the two months’ residency at the Instituto Sacatar, and my thoughts were full of imagery of Bahia, and the sounds and rhythms of Bahian Portuguese. This poem’s errância takes place on Itaparica, and incorporates terms and materials from Maiolino’s artwork—tactile images, shapes, and textures—as well as the human inhabitants, possibly artists of Sacatar, who are moving through the landscape of the poem.

After I sent this poem to my contact at Hauser & Wurth, he wrote back to say that the artist had seen it, and had said something to the effect that for the sculptural piece to which I responded, she had had in mind imagery of the dry, impoverished, Northeast interior region of Brazil, where the hot sun bakes the clay-based earth and creates cracks and shapes similar to her sculpture. Clearly, my poem uses a good deal of imagery of the littoral, the lush, coastal regions of Bahia, but it was too close to the date of the exhibit for me to write and submit another poem. The gallery had to go with the poem that they had. But Anna Maria’s comments sparked the second poem, “Errância: The Caravan,” which I wrote quickly, and have described above.

“An Act of Kindness in Bahia” recalls one afternoon early in my time at Sacatar, when I headed off on my own to the center of Itaparica town, to shop for a specific item—a white skirt to wear for a ceremony of the Eguns that would take place that evening. (It was an honor to be invited to this ceremony, by one of the Sacatar employees who was an active member of the Egum community, and we artist residents who accepted the invitation intended to honor the practice of wearing white!) But in this rural island town with few street signs, when I reached the main road, I turned left instead of right and walked for quite a ways away from town, before I decided to ask directions. I had been at Sacatar long enough to realize that the local people of the island spoke Portuguese with a different accent than the city people of Salvador, and I could barely understand them! If I asked directions, they could understand me, but I would not be able to understand their replies! That was my basic shyness, but the people of Itaparica (most of whom speak only Portuguese) were very kind and patient with those like me from elsewhere; and the woman who walked and chatted cheerfully with me for those few blocks as I walked in the wrong direction, simply included me in her walking and talking. I did ultimately ask for directions from a few other local women whom I passed on the street, and I finally reached the center of town, where in one of the few shops catering to tourists, I found a white skirt for the ceremony. Most of the details of that afternoon walk and shopping venture are not in the poem—a free-verse, lyric narrative which focusses on the walk itself, the sights and sounds and imagery of the neighborhood through which I walked, on the encounter with the cheerful lady who shared her umbrella with me, my efforts to understand and guess at what she was saying. But it was a pleasant challenge to get lost and then unlost in parts of the working-class Itaparica community that I had not experienced before.

“Ghazal: Friends” plays on the contrast between island and city (in this case, Itaparica and Salvador; but the rural and urban polarities could be represented by any island, any city) to underscore the transformation a friendship that began on the island undergoes when it attempts to continue in the city but ends instead, far from its Edenic genesis. This dramatic situation called for a stripped-down, understated treatment and close focus, which the ghazal readily provides, with its refrain / repetitions at the conclusion of every couplet.  I had actually written a pantoum about this friendship and its jarring conclusion; but in that form the poem got too convoluted and introduced too much inessential detail. But I may go back and work on the pantoum version again – it can be a fun challenge to treat the same subject matter more than once, as painters and photographers often do.

“Choices / Encontros Binários” is inspired by and modeled on “Choices” by poet colleague and friend Lynn McGee, a poem she had posted on her Facebook timeline.  In the epigraph to “Choices,” Lynn attributes its genesis to an episode of a Netflix series in which the protagonist must play an interactive game of binary choices. Ah, I thought, as my poetic antennae began to waggle! I could write what I call a “poetic palimpsest” in response! I also call this process “The Poet Writes Back / The Poet Strikes Back”: a poem written in response to an earlier poem, often in the form or rhetorical patterning of that model poem, always with acknowledgment, and with permission from the author of the original, if that person is living and able to be contacted. (Lynn said Yes!) My poem would be transposed to a setting in Bahia, signaled in part by the Portuguese part of the title— Encontros Binários—and like Lynn’s poem would conclude with a binary choice that is implicitly “decided” by being repeated. The binary choice repeated in my poem is to “wait for the ghost girl,” an image that occurs at the beginning and again at the end of the poem. According to stories I heard at Sacatar, the ghost of a young girl appears at dawn or dusk to some residents, sitting at the end of that resident’s bed. Since Sacatar’s main house, the casarāo or casa grande, was originally built as the summer residence for students of a convent school in the city of Salvador, ghosts of young girls are not so unlikely!

“Eguns”:  I was intrigued by these ancestral spirits celebrated in elaborate, all-night rituals now practiced only in a few traditional communities in Benin and Nigeria, and in Afro-Brazilian communities on the island of Itaparica, Bahia, Brazil. I attended only one ceremony during my time at Sacatar, at one of the main terreiros (ceremonial centers) on the island only a few miles down the road from Sacatar. That will be the subject of other writings! But later I read a memoir in progress, After the Eguns, by Taylor Van Horne, Co-Director of Sacatar, with whom I had hit it off during my residency. He appreciated my comments and suggestions on this manuscript, and I was fascinated by his many experiences with the Egum communities—the force and vividness of the rituals, the personalities of participants and practitioners, the history of struggles to maintain these traditions in the face of persecution from the Catholic Church and the police, and more recently, harassment from converts to the fast-growing, aggressive evangelical churches. But I was most intrigued by the way the spirits of ancestors can possess practitioners during the rituals, and in the poem I wanted to enter, in my imagination, into the inner beings of practitioners transformed by the visiting spirits of ancestors. The poem began to stir in my imagination when I read this marvelous and mysterious declaration in Taylor’s manuscript: “The eguns are more likely to be found / entangled in the roots of trees.” Though I don’t use this as an epigraph, I begin with the ghostly speakers untangling themselves at dusk from the aerial roots of banyan-like gameleira trees. They go forth into the evening along the shores of a setting very much like Sacatar and Itaparica, transformed into ancestral spirits.

Read the rest in Part 2:

Share

Jason Koo runs on New York City time, and when we linked up for a virtual interview in mid-May—graduation and the end of contest-reading season having eased me into a relaxing, yet distracting dreamspace—this embarrassingly slipped my mind. Koo is living not only an hour ahead of us Missourians, but has been quite active since his time as the Missouri Review poetry editor during his PhD program.

When asked to describe himself at the beginning of the interview, Koo didn’t immediately slip into specifics. Eventually replying that he could describe himself “in a thousand ways, probably” is indicative of his poetic mindset, and begins to encompass the wide scope of Koo’s accomplishments. While teaching creative writing and poetry at Quinnipiac University, he founded and executive-directored Brooklyn Poets, a poetry nonprofit, in 2012. Their first poetry festival took place in late May. Koo has also authored poetry collections More Than Mere Light, America’s Favorite Poem and Man on Extremely Small Island. 

Jason Koo: So those are the two main things I do professionally. Usually I tell people I’m a writer, or a professor, and if they’re still interested after those two words… [laughing] I also run a poetry nonprofit. So yeah, the “writer” is the third hat—that doesn’t bring in as much money in terms of regular pay—I have been wearing for a lot longer. I have three full-length poetry collections that I’ve published. The fourth one will hopefully find a publisher someday soon. I’ve also done editing, like how I was the poetry editor at TMR a long time ago, as a grad student. Since then, I have been a co-editor of several different publications. The Brooklyn Poets Anthology we co-published with Brooklyn Arts Press in 2017—the co-editor of that. And then there’s a few other things that I've done, sort of multi-editor anthology things. Anyway, that's the short answer, which is probably plenty for you.

Audrey Dae Bush: How’d you come to be the poetry editor at TMR?

JK: I was an intern; I worked for the magazine through the program. […] I think altogether, I started my program in 2003 and started working/reading for TMR shortly after that. I would say maybe 2004. They had that internship course, so I took the course […] and then after that I just stayed on, reading poems, and [after] a couple years I took over as poetry editor. 

I read a ton of submissions. I don’t know if they still have this system—we would get a little manila envelope. It’d have like, ten submissions in it, and you’d have to mark your evaluation of each one. Both as a reader and then especially as poetry editor, I would find stuff that I thought would be a good fit for the magazine and I would pass it on. When I was a reader, I would give it to [then] poetry editor [Steve Gehrke] and sometimes talk to him about it. And then he would either bring it to Speer or not, but usually Steve and I were in agreement about almost everything. 

When I took over as poetry editor, I would be the one making the recommendations. I feel like most of the stuff I was really excited about, he took, though there’s probably a few that I can’t remember that he didn’t take. In fact, the one I remember the most is the one I was most excited about: I don’t know if you know the poet Matthew Dickman, but he went on to become pretty well-known in the poetry world. And we were one of his biggest first publications. Shortly after that he won a pretty big book prize, and then it seemed like everyone was reading Matthew Dickman. 

Because we weren’t getting everything that we wanted in the magazine, and because we have the folio format at TMR, so it’s even tougher vetting—you’ve gotta have a good group of poems, not just one poem—and because Speer wanted me to do more online stuff, I came up with the Poem of the Week feature. That was a good way to publish people that I liked that didn’t make it into the print journal. Now it doesn’t seem all that big of a deal; everyone’s got online content. But back in 2007, it was pretty pioneering.

ADB: Talk a bit about the content of the poetry you would receive, what stylistic forms you would like, your tastes according to your trained eye.

JK: I think when I read TMR I would have a consciousness of: Okay, is this something that both I like and that I think Speer would like, too? Or is it maybe something that I am not crazy about, but think he might really like it? He tended to like more narrative poems, especially those that dealt with history. And we had taken a lot of […] sequences of poems—poems [that] kind of work together; Davis McCombs won the poetry prize, I think, while I was still a reader, and he had this sonnet sequence that was incredible. So I was reading with that in mind, but of course also reading for stuff that I thought really stuck out. And I have a pretty wide open taste. I think there’s definitely stuff that I leaned towards, probably at the time when I was in grad school, […] stuff that had humor in it, influenced by the New York School of poets. Stuff that was colloquially accessible, that wasn’t boring, that was alive and exciting. Referred to culture, pop culture, you know—but I was also really into stuff that was not like that at all, stuff that was linguistically intense or philosophical. I’m [also] personally really into long poems, so I was good for the job because I liked longer sequences.

ADB: At times I would get frustrated whenever we were reading a poem in class, and I would say: Hey, there’s nothing making this a poem but the line spacing. This could just be flash or micro-fiction. Our managing editor [Marc McKee] would have to tell me: Sit down there. Just give it a second.

JK: Just because something is a narrative doesn’t mean that it doesn’t use rhyme or meter. I’ve gotten a lot of the same questions about my poetry, like: Oh, what makes this a poem? And I’m just like: Uh, you would really have to read a lot of poetry to be able to answer that. [laughter] But then to be fair, sometimes on a technical level, there’s not necessarily a whole lot of difference, right? In fact, you can read prose writers that read like poets. Marcel Proust, Kafka, Henry James—their prose will often read like poetry. So, you know, I would say it’s more like a quality of the voice and the energy and the writing. It’s very different reading a prose-like poem than it is reading like, the prose of an email. […] I remember peers I had at the Missouri Review who would complain about Don DeLillo’s fiction because it was too much like poetry. They thought he was kind of like “a poet’s fiction writer.” But I really admire pieces that weren’t afraid to blur those lines—whether it’s genre, or even medium.

ADB: What were some important things you learned, or important skills you brought to TMR, that you thought helped build you as a writer and as a critic?

JK: There’s a lot I learned. I don’t know what I brought to the team other than a good work ethic and being an amenable guy—and, I think, having a very open taste. I think editors are less effective when they have a very particular taste. I’ve never been very much into people that say: I know what I like. I’m just like: How do you really know everything that you like? You might encounter something totally different from something you [normally like, and you might love it.] I think that was a good quality I brought to TMR. 

In terms of what TMR taught me, I mean, it taught me a lot—TMR was the first truly professional journal I worked for. [Former Associate Editor] Evelyn Somers taught me a ton about copyediting. […] When you’re a writer, you think you’re already just naturally an editor, and you kind of are, but you don’t know all of the ins and outs of copyediting that are also dependent on the stylistics or the in-house style of whatever publication you’re working for. I remember finding out that TMR doesn’t use the Oxford comma, or the series comma, which is something I agree with. Oh, I think commas are overused. 

ADB: Controversial, much?!

JK: Yeah. But TMR has been so influential; I basically follow their in-house style for Brooklyn Poets, with our publications where we generally would follow Chicago style but don’t use the series comma like Chicago recommends. So, yeah. A lot of things would come up in the editing of poems or prose features, and Evelyn would go over something that was particularly tricky. I think Evelyn was the one that taught me about the difference between en dashes, em dashes and hyphens. Those are three different types of punctuation, and most people, even professional writers, don’t know the difference. And why would you really, unless you had worked for a publication that took copyediting seriously? So now I can always spot when a publication is really run by professionals or not.

And then, you know, when I [first] had books published, it shocked me to discover that the presses were not doing any copyediting. It was all up to me. And thank god I had had the training at TMR so I could copyedit on my own. That’s intimidating, but really that’s not good; you should have a second person copyediting with you. But at least I had that so I could make sure the text was clean. I learned a ton under Evelyn.

ADB: Talk about your current projects. You mentioned the Brooklyn Poets poetry festival coming up?

JK: Yeah, this first one will teach us a lot. We’re doing a Thursday-Friday-Saturday festival. I love festival ideas. […] Ours was built more on our former retreat model—we used to do a summer retreat, but it was at this house that got sold during the early days of the pandemic. Most of the festival ideas I see are readings and panels, and there’s not usually a lot of ways for the audience themselves to participate as writers. Ours has two generative workshops in the morning, two 90-minute workshops where you come in and you work with a teacher and you write something all on different themes. There’s six of those in total. And then in the afternoon, there are 90-minute craft talks, or craft labs. We have three headliners; they’re all the ones doing the craft talks. Jericho Brown’s gonna be there, and then Edward Hirsch and Eugenia Leigh are doing the other craft talks. We have an open mic hour on each of the three days for the participants, and then we have panels on journal publishing, book publishing, and one on professionalizing as a writer without an MFA. In the evening we have readings by the festival teachers and panelists. So yeah, it’s going well.

ADB: And what about your current book?

JK: Yeah, I have a fourth book that is ready to go. I’ve just been hearing back about it from both some peers and places that I sent it. It’s called No Rest. It’s a book of all long poems. You would love it. I’m sure you would look at it and be like: What makes this poetry? [laughter] And the whole book itself is fairly long—it’s like, 180-some pages in manuscript—so that makes it a tougher sell for sure. […] But all the poems in No Rest have been published. It’d be one thing if I was sending this thing out and I was having a tough time publishing the long poems or something, but I haven’t. They’ve all been taken and I know the book works. […] And I’ve had people read them and tell me that [same thing, and when] I’ve read them out loud, people don’t have the sense that it’s this super long, tedious poem that’s going on forever. That was the stylistic challenge of the book, because long poems are my jam. I [have to think] like, how can I write these long poems that move super fast? I’m interested in writing essays too, but essays take me a lot longer to write and they move a lot slower. So I was more interested in thinking: Okay, how can I write something that’s kind of like an essay but moves a lot faster? And that’s where what we were talking about earlier—the difference between poetry and prose—is sometimes there. A poem can move through many different subjects faster than an essay can, so I was really interested in that space between poetry and prose.

ADB: I’m sure you’ll have great luck with it.

JK: I’ve been in this game long enough to know that everything eventually gets published if you’re persistent enough. [laughter] It’s just now the question is: how good is the publication gonna be? Because now I’ve seen the other side of the business, I know how much that matters. I’m at the stage of my career where I want to find a bigger press that can really help me find more readers.

ADB: Any final words you have for TMR?

JK: It was nice to work at TMR and be in the graduate school scene, because there was such a compulsion to do that work. Because you were getting publications as well. Whereas now, outside of school, I don’t have the time to do that stuff anymore, especially running a nonprofit. But when I look back, I have a lot of fondness for that experience at TMR. It’s not just about the stuff I learned with copyediting or the poems that I got published. It’s also the work that I myself was publishing as an editor. I really enjoyed that work.

Share The Missouri Review's DIG

The Missouri Review has a lot of fondness for Jason Koo, too. We thank him for sharing his limited time and unlimited thoughts! Be sure to visit his website jasonykoo.com and check out Brooklyn Poets at brooklynpoets.org.

Leave a comment

“The King of the Underworld: The Invention of Jelly Roll Morton” by Kristine Sommerville and Speer Morgan offers exciting material about the man who first took a dive into jazz waters. Being the very first musician to publish a jazz score back in 1915, Jelly Roll precedes pioneers Sidney Bechet and Louis Armstrong. Charles Mingus has a song in his honor on his ‘59 masterpiece Mingus Ah Hum and Wynton Marsalis put out an entire album of Jelly Roll’s music in ‘99, Standard Time, Vol. 6: Mr. Jelly Lord. Jelly is definitely the king, and he is timeless! But why only king of the Underworld?

Morgan and Sommerville’s careful research reveals the dirty dealings in the music business since the inception of jazz and help us follow the arc in Jelly Roll’s career. This engrossing bio on the trailblazing pianist is a treat, if you’re a music enthusiast. It includes personal letters that illustrate frustrated attempts at recovering the rights and back royalties to his music and even his original will. It’s no surprise that our hero had a sad ending, and we understand how it came about thanks to this detailed piece of writing. While Jelly Roll’s extraordinary music remains etched in the history of jazz, we now have a better notion of why “The King of the Underworld” never enjoyed the acclaim Duke Ellington, Fats Waller and Art Tatum did. But we most heartily thank him, for using his talent and labor to create a whole new genre of music. I wish he could feel the love and know that over a hundred years later we are still in awe of his New Orleans Bump.

Thanks, Vanessa! Read the essay in question below:

King Of The Underworld The Invention Of Jelly Roll Morton

21.6MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download