Issue 3.3 Contributor Interviews

Liz Ahl

“Sound is, of course, a kind of touch — in that sound is, essentially, the tiny organs of your inner ear being touched by sound waves. That linkage is something I will try to think about more deeply — and I thank you for taking me there.”

Maggie Bailey

“This poem is absolutely nostalgic, and I was drawing from my own childhood summers spent in Wareham, MA on the Cape Cod Canal. For me, the poem lives in that space where you are old enough to roam freely but young enough to be unbothered by puberty.”

Bobby Bolt

“I hold tightly to the belief that language has a life of its own, and often resists our control which we sometimes see when we struggle with the syntax of a line or group of lines in a poem.”

Austin Eichelberger

“I think the surest way to build a world around a reader is through the senses, so it’s how I try to ground all my writing, no matter what I’m portraying.”

Jennifer Highland

“The voice kind of created itself in response to the subject, but once it emerged I tweaked it during the revision process to better match the various moods of the city that had moved me to write the piece—from sass and grit to a certain nostalgia.”

Sarah Kosch

“Don’t be afraid to get weird! And don’t shy away from heavy revision. It’s easy to get attached, to call a piece ‘good enough’ when the work seems like to much, but sometimes what a story really needs is to be slashed into ribbons and rebuilt from the ground up.”

Jenny McBride

“Something about the creative process of sculpting a poem requires my hand wrapped around a pen and the ink trailing across the page; letters appearing on a screen seem far less intimate, almost disconnected.”

Kelly Morse

“I come to prose as a poet, so I’m very interested in creating rhythms within sentences, and looking at ways to tighten images. When I’m revising, I’ll break the sentences into lines, like I would a poem, so that I can look at their internal structure more closely.”

Brenda Miller and Julie Marie Wade

“At this point, I’m not thinking too hard about the meaning of these pieces; I’m putting them together the way I might a jigsaw. I think, especially in this information age, that our jobs as writers is to become a particular filter for the variety of experience and information we encounter hundreds of times a day.”

Larry Thacker

“I have a simple working mantra: Write, edit, read, submit. I try to be engaged in all of these at all times. If I feel the well running dry, I’m probably not reading enough.”

Patti White

“In one way, it’s just following the recipe: preheating the oven, the yellow mixing bowl, egg yolks, then flour and salt, vanilla extract, and lots of sugar. The spin of the mixer, and then the whole thing goes into the oven.”

Katherine Williams

“When you want to get better at chess, you play people who are better than you. Same thing in poetry, jazz, science, conversation, anything that involves learning. First you copy the greats. When you feel experienced enough, you might ask a master a question and try to understand the answer. Eventually you enter into dialog.”

P.J. Williams

“Certainly writers know just as well as anyone the shortcomings of words as merely representational things. While this poem may be the closest thing I can come up with to attempt to communicate the multitudinous tension I feel for death and how I witness it, I’m drawn to that gap, too – that inability to fully communicate, to fully grasp despite the perpetual longing to do so.”

Andrea Witzke Slot

“When a new piece is coming—when I hear a new line circling and feel that urgent need to get to my desk/journal/computer—I just kind of jump in and see what emerges. Only once I get started do I see what rhythmic space(s) might be required for that emerging piece.”

Annie Woodford

“I write about my daughter and my childhood pretty obsessively. I don’t really know what draws me to these themes, but I guess they’re where I feel most alive and aware. On some level both of those poems are about being on the cusp, developmentally, as a child. They are also about the presence of death and aging in our lives.”