ISSUE 11.1 welcome issue contents > fiction > nonfiction > poetry > art contributors interviews our editors Amita Basu“The most powerful stories on this topic confront us with a problem, so vividly that we cannot look away—but then also offer a ray of hope. And that ray of hope is empathy and community.” Rachel Becker “Water can be deceptive and enticing, and that’s certainly how I felt about Caligula: drawn to the statue, to a man who was not who I believed him to be.” Bernadette Benda“I think we all have bottles inside us that need opening, I know I certainly do. Whether I return to this subject or not all depends on how many bottles I open up in the future.” Dominic Blanco“Not everything can or has to be captured, but everything can be considered. I put that onus on the reader to ponder what’s not there.” Stephanie Buck “I began looking back at all the tiny memories and details I had documented in an anxious frenzy. Then I pulled a few of the biggest emotional moments and packed the narrative around those.” Allisa Cherry“But just think about Lot’s willingness to throw his daughters to the predators outdoors to protect his guests from being assaulted. Hold that nightmare in your mind a minute.” Sebs Corrigan“I don’t want to sound like I am against therapy or medications, because I am not, but I do think we need to understand that they are not cures.” Chanice Cruz“When I found slam, I was in a very dark place in my life, and through poetry I was able to express, challenge, and come to terms with not only myself but the things around me. I am here because of poetry.” Jeff Dingler“So what choice do we have as entertainers and performers but to expose ourselves—the very nature of what we do is exposing ourselves. Being vulnerable is like being paid to bleed.” Megan Doney“My fury is not really about my own experience, but about our cultural inability to respond adequately to repeated male-perpetrated violence.” Tara A. Elliott“When we write poetry, we discover our own humanity. When we listen to others share their poetry, we are able to grasp the world more fully through their eyes.” Caroline Fox“More than the idea of intrusion, I was interested in toying with the registers of imagery that I might typically use to characterize the home, or more broadly, the interior.” Katherine Gekker “So, perhaps justice here is both for cobras who have no vocal cords and whose mouths are sewn shut, as well as for any of us who haven’t been able to speak, who’ve not been heard, or listened to.” Guiseppe Getto“I think art mirrors the society that creates it, so we don’t see more contemporary poetry in public schools because this would cause our young people to encounter objectionable parts of our society…” Al Graham“That got me thinking about how gold-mining ants might actually exist in the world today, which set everything else in motion.” Raye Hendrix“It’s felt like getting to know myself again. It’s nice to do that. I like getting to look back on that Raye with gentleness, now. I know what they went through to get here.” Thomas Holton“How could I live in a state for the first twenty-two years of my life and not know how I feel about it?” Hope Houston “In a culture where you are the Other, you are forced to hide, if not erase, who you are.” Persephone King“… I was also pondering what it means to feel our authentic emotions versus whatever it is we “should” be feeling in a given situation, especially when faced with something like toxic positivity from others.” H.L.M. Lee “Many stars have names with Arabic origins and several of the moons or Uranus are characters from Shakespeare. So it’s almost impossible not to be inspired by the classics.” Bryanna Licciardi“I dream all the time. Vivid dreams that are terrifying and hilarious in their strangeness.” Dayna Hodge Lynch “Rage and anger are beautiful emotions that do not get the deserved recognition. Rage can help you move forward as a motivation.” Michael McCarthy“When a painful experience occurs, poetry can come to the fore as a coping mechanism. It doesn’t always do this. It’s just there if I should need it.” Mrityunjay Mohan “I try to not fragment pieces of myself to fit into my work, and instead write to create an entirety within the work.” Meg Muthupandiyan “I wondered at how softly the bud of each thought formed, becoming the scaffold for another thought, and another. So many patterns emerged—fractal repetitions of old pleasures, and fears, and wounds.” Amy Searle“I think sometimes it is enjoyable to read something that doesn’t make any sense.” Lynn Sloan“What fiction does so well is take us inside someone else’s experience, makes them real, often, usually, it makes us care about them.” Adam Straus “The fact that those moments existed in tandem blew my mind in a simple way: I’m here, they’re there.” Sara Streeter“Then, for many adoptees, including me, reunion is not the ‘happily ever after’ many people think it is. Trying to forge relationships with biological family…” Molly Sutton Kiefer“I think we live in a world where we are haunted by so many things, and the literal and metaphoric blur.” Lucia Trujillo“I wanted to portray both a sense of displacement and of brutal honesty. I wanted the piece to be self-aware on its own, as well as unapologetic.” Angelica Whitehorne“I think devastation can almost have a positive connotation as well: the sunset was so vibrant it devastated me. You have to reach some level of devastation to find solace in writing poetry.” John Wojtowicz“The momentum started to build like a chess match where each player’s defenses are countered by the other but, in this case, the kings end up walking off the board holding hands.”
