ISSUE 9.1 welcome issue contents > poetry > fiction > nonfiction contributors interviews featured art our editors Lori Arden“I wanted to show that there’s always more going on there than just the passive exterior or open wound.” Joe Baumann“I like bending the world we live in but staying there, in large part, and exploring how bizarre and weird the world we actually live in is.” Katie Bockino“It’s such an exciting time, but it’s also so terrifying. Everything is new—the good, the bad, and the weird.” Jonathan Louis Duckworth“I think it’s important never to condemn or dismiss an entire region or its people, while at the same time having an outsider’s perspective is helpful in perceiving a culture’s foibles.” Miguel Eichelberger“The platform of science fiction lets us see how ordinary people live and act in extraordinary circumstances—under the extraordinary pressures of those themes.” Sarah Elkins“There’s an intimacy in the couplet form, I think. Somehow, it felt right for closing the walls in on myself.” Dom Fonce“It’s hard to articulate what writing—especially emotional writing—does to our minds. I talk about this idea a lot with my students. Writing out the problem is the opposite of repressing it and, because the words are etched out in front of you, the writing process allows for better reflection than even conversation.” Marcene Gandolfo“As a young woman, I worked to conceal my scars, now I come to love my scars; they remind me of my capabilities to heal and survive.” JT Godfrey“I grew up in a family of storytellers and truth-stretchers. When you grow up hearing the fourth or fifth draft of a barroom fable, you learn what lines in life make a story and start squirreling them away in notebooks.” Becky Kling“My oldest journals are filled with many pages of bad poetry that I cherish.” Seth Kristalyn“I view myself as a fiction writer who has merely dabbled in creative nonfiction. Although to be honest, I have often wondered if some of my fiction is too autobiographical.” Lorrie Ness“It seemed an apt comparison for human relationships…how we mirror each other, how we support, wound, separate and sublimate.” Mercury-Marvin Sunderland“I was known for having the most bizarre titles for them—such as ‘My Skin Is Covered With a Thin Layer of Peanut Butter’ or ‘I Am a Pear’.” David van den Berg“That’s usually the kind of voice I want in my pieces. Something cracked and broken and tellin’ about something honest and true.” Elinor Ann Walker“As usual, clarity comes in retrospect. Many of us have been in unhealthy relationships in which words can be like those drops of water. They may seem insignificant, but they accumulate.” Stephen Scott Whitaker“People project identity onto you, but that inherited identity has a weight, and sometimes life is about jettisoning weight to find joy.”
