I didn’t consider myself a writer until I found myself wanting to drop out of college. Growing up, I told stories for my siblings to act out, stapled sheets of legal paper into booklets of poems, and kept locked or rubber-banded notebooks in every purse but hardly thought these actions different than other creative games like digging through the dress-up box or building tree forts in the woods. The fresh discomfort of studying books and writing at university surprised me. Literary activity in the first semester of my undergrad felt at odds with the freedom and bodily expression writing had been tied to in my youth. I struggled to read and write in sterile classrooms, under fluorescent lighting, on a rigid schedule between gen-ed courses and promptly decided to quit.
My resident advisor at Ohio State responded to my drop-out plans by asking me first to take my notebooks to a professor he knew. That professor turned out to be the poet Kathy Fagan, who, in an oft-recalled office visit, convinced me not to drop out, enrolled me in her hybrid poetry workshop, and pretty much changed the course of my life. Or, maybe better: helped me acknowledge the writerly course on which all those creative acts had already set me.
That acknowledgment—trying to write in workshops, failing to convey what I wanted, receiving praise here and there, bending myself to the task of producing work—enabled me to endure academia through the seven messy years it took to finish my BA in English. My need for freedom and space to move, learn, question, and play outside institutions never left, but neither did the desire for and act of writing.
Now, finishing an MFA program I can see as a total blessing most days, sending out a manuscript for my first real book, I know the potential utility in the academic classrooms I found stifling. But I still have a sweet spot for operations and writers who move in between academic and non-academic spaces and was tickled to learn about Sundress while working at the University of Illinois’ Ninth Letter.
This chance to work remotely as a Sundress intern has me envisioning again that writerly life I craved as a pissed-off undergrad all those years ago. Reading, writing, extending the literary circle bit by bit, and getting to do so under an open window, between hours of working on my own writing, next to a stack of marked-up books—dreamy. Of course, I’m romanticizing it. I am also interested in the ways this opportunity will challenge and surprise, how it will compare to my other (paid, university-associated) work. I hope, by the end of this internship, to see Sundress as a brief home, and to sense that my restlessness and drive may have been useful in the lives of other writers, readers, writers-to-be.
Aumaine Rose Gruich is an MFA candidate at The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She has received support from the Chautauqua Writer’s Workshop and the Illinois Department of Dance’s Choreographic Platform. Aumaine’s work is published or forthcoming in magazines such as Pleiades, Court Green, Phoebe, and Bluestem.
For this installment of Lyric Essentials, we talk with Denver writer Chris Moore. She reads poems from fellow Denver writer and artist Sommer Browning, and talks about the interconnection of written genres, art, and the experience of hearing poetry aloud. Thank you for reading!
Erica Hoffmeister: Why did you choose to read these two poems from Browning’s second collection Backup Singers for Lyric Essentials?
Chris Moore: I remember the first time I saw Sommer Browning read her work at BookBar in the Highlands area of Denver. She stunned me, shook me, and opened some timeless part of my heart that had been long closed off. I chose to read these two poems because of the way they touch such infinite parts of the human experience—loss, death, connection.
EH: Has Sommer Browning’s poetry impacted you as a nonfiction writer, or writer in general? What is your relationship with her poetry, specifically?
CM: Sommer has absolutely impacted me as a nonfiction writer. Her poetry, like her personality, is deeply philosophical to me and pushes me to take artistic risks in my own work. I think her mind and her work are truly one-of-a-kind, though I’m sure she would argue with me on that. When I want to get a little bit weird or tricky with my work, I look to hers for inspiration.
EH: In your podcast, The Situation and the Story, you discuss process and purpose with writers andpoets. How does keeping writing in conversation play into your own writing?
CM: To me, writing is conversation. We are conversing with one another as writers in the current canon, we are conversing with history, with society, with norms and status quo, and either perpetuating that, challenging it, or something else in the middle. In my one-on-one conversations with writers about their processes and their lives, I have gained more insight into my own process and growth as a writer than I ever could in an MFA program or at a writing conference, for example. Though so much of writing is done in isolation, as my recent guest Adrianne Kalfopoulou said, it really is an act of community.
EH: Is there anything you are currently working on that you would like to share with readers?
For the past 2.5 years I have been working on my first full-length memoir manuscript, which has consumed most of my writing time. Chunks of it have been published in small indie journals, such as the essays This Is Not a Test in Chapman University’s Anastamos literary journal, On Tuscany’s Operatic Magic in Allegory Ridge Magazine (online), and Peregrination to the Antithetical Sound of a Bird Smashing Into a Window in Hairstreak Butterfly Review. I imagine that’s all anyone will see of it for a long time. The first draft is done and the next couple years will likely be invested in a rewrite.
Sommer Browning is a poet and artist out of Denver, Colorado. She is the author of two poetry collections: Backup Singers (2014) and Either Way I’m Celebrating (2011) both from Birds LLC Publishing, as well as three chapbooks. As an artist, she draws comics and directs and curates the popup art space GEORGIA. Her poems and drawings have appeared in The New York Quarterly, Typo, Octopus, The Stranger, and more.
Further reading:
Listen to Brad Listi interview Browning on the OTHERPPL podcast. Purchase Backup Singers from Birds LLC Publishing. Learn about Browning’s popup art space GEORGIA in Denver.
Chris Moore is an elementary school teacher and poet-turned-essayist residing in downtown Denver. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Mile-High MFA Program at Regis University. Her work has been featured in the 2018 Punch Drunk Press Anthology, South Broadway Ghost Society, Hairstreak Butterfly Review, and Allegory Ridge Magazine, among others. She is host of the feminist literary podcast THE SITUATION & the STORY. She is currently writing and traveling whenever possible.
Erica Hoffmeister is originally from Southern California and earned an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English from Chapman University. Currently in Denver, she teaches college writing and is an editor for the Denver-based literary journal South Broadway Ghost Society. She is the author of two poetry collections: Lived in Bars (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), and the prize-winning chapbook, Roots Grew Wild (Kingdoms in the Wild Press, 2019). A cross-genre writer, she has several works of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, articles and critical essays published in various outlets. Learn more about her at http://ericahoffmeister.com/
What might it look like to drown in the floating world, the sometimes-pleasure world, a world where one may become momentarily, or, for longer, lost? Meg Eden looks at loss and states of lostness through water images in this collection of poems out from Press 53.
The book’s primary focus is the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and the following Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, as otherreviews note. Yet a particular generosity of Drowning in the Floating World is the way Eden, though using a largely documentary lens, occasionally includes an intimate first-person speaker and, in the book’s last section, extends focus to non-tsunami water imagery. These choices open hopeful possibilities, views to contrast the loss the book illuminates.
Much of this collection’s power comes from Eden’s clear, direct tone, which makes the poems feel like a door swung wide to their subject matter. Eden’s careful linework, even in experimental forms (a list poem, a back-and-forth conversation poem between radiation-poisoned cows and their owners), feels deliberate and spare. Traditional forms throughout the book—villanelle, triolet, ekphrastic, haiku—further emphasize Eden’s skills of clarity and compression. This surface level clarity allows the book’s narrative threads to shine; no stylistic decoration distracts from the swell of water, the response of cities, each important victim or survivor.
Images ground the narrative, here, showcasing human desire to contain sweeping sorrow and chaos. Eden’s images reveal our tendency for both cluelessness and care in the face of horror, as her speakers tend to not look away from what floats toward them in their long aftermath. One of the most moving things about the book’s images is the way they prompt a reader to recognize how disaster can turn objects of the lost into treasures. In the poems, it is easy to feel burdened by the long list of left-behind things: boats, jackets, a lunchbox, a litany of dead girls’ dresses. This burden feels appropriate, subtle, and powerful.
Eden tempers the weight of these images with playfulness in sound and voice, though, creating productive tension. Subtle rhyme in her spare lines makes me read them twice, finding unexpected delight or new shades of moods in otherwise somber stanzas. The multiple characters and personas that appear, too—speaking buildings, survivors, ghosts, spirits, corpse washers, and landscapes—create a complex, shifting chorus, introducing surprising perspectives to a tragic narrative. “Here I stand,/ a new tsunami stone,” a defiantly surviving town hall claims. Or, see the end rhymes in “NASA Satellite Triolet,” which sing with an almost sweet, wave-like longing: “Whatever happened to the beach/ has floated away into the sea,/ capping the bay with floating debris.”
Sandra Beasley says that poetry of witness and documentary poetry “cannot transcend the trauma that marks it.” Eden’s images are not transcendent, and her persona poems, even as they introduce variation and nuance, stay fully entrenched in the world of the disaster. And yet, amidst the necessary wading-through, she nestles what feels like a close “I,” providing intimacy in her documentary landscape. This particular speaker doesn’t have to say much, or profoundly, to give the collection depth, yet in two key places, it provides a meeting place, a center of warmth and observation within the loss.
A poem near the center of the book called “In Tokyo, three months after the earthquake,” says: “The air-conditioning is off in every building,/ saving for Tohoku, loving for Tohoku./ I drown in my sweat […]” and goes on to make a joke about an obnoxious, glittery sign out the window, which feels like a bothersome distraction to the speaker’s thoughts. How relatable this speaker feels, set in the midst of a city, embodied, watching her community try to leverage their comfort for others. Her irritation at the sign also highlights the intimacy this voice brings: she finds something manageable upon which to fix her attention, a detail easier to name and reduce than the inexplainable aftermath of the tsunami. A similar speaker arrives in the penultimate poem, “Okinawa Aquarium,” where she observes the preserved stomach of a dolphin, cut open to reveal swallowed debris. The sight causes her to imagine a conversation with God, where, as if voicing the dolphin, she admits, “I felt so full—even briefly, I thought I was really filled.”
Beasley’s assertion is not wrong: I cannot read any transcendence of disaster in this close “I.” Calamity cannot be annulled by observation, even by honor, or by hoping to benefit others through one’s own lack, nor by personal reflection in the face of the divine. Yet Eden’s choice to include a speaker who chooses these actions alongside her unfolding calamity suggests the possibility for, if not poetic transcendence, worthwhile response off the page—to and beyond the Tohoku and Fukushima Daiichi events—in the drowning world.
Aumaine Rose Gruich is an MFA candidate at The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the Assistant Managing Editor of Ninth Letter. She has received support from the Chautauqua Writer’s Workshop and the Illinois Department of Dance’s Choreographic Platform. Gruich’s work is published or forthcoming in magazines such as AGNI, Pleiades, Court Green, Phoebe, and Bluestem.
I can’t articulate to you how incredible it feels to have landed my first editorial internship, especially for an organization as fine as Sundress Publications. I spent most all of 2019 navigating my two intense jobs: working as a Community School Director at a small public high school in Queens, New York and working as a psychotherapist at a private practice in Washington Heights, Manhattan. As a queer, non-binary LMSW of color and as someone who identifies as a highly sensitive person, a day of working as a social worker would often deplete me to the point of exhaustion.
After working over 65 hours a week while juggling a dog, a chronic illness, and a small inner circle of friends and family, it was nearly impossible to find time to read and write. Most of my days would begin at 5:00AM and end around 10:00 PM. I was lucky if I managed to read a chapter or write 500 words during a lunch break without having to navigate a student crisis or tend to clients in distress. And while I loved having the privilege and opportunity to show up for so many different folkx and communities, I can’t deny some of the emptinesses it left me with: I was starting to feel like a fake.
Having barely any time to read, write, or apply to writing conferences left me profoundly dislocated: could I even call myself a writer anymore? Would applying for the MFA be a waste of time? Did I have the emotional willpower needed to suck it up and keep pushing through? These are but some of the questions that filled my brain space, that made me wonder if writing—and truly writing—was some pipe-dream I hadn’t yet critically debunked.
Having said all that, a new job landscape and some time off has left me energized and hungrier than ever to re-plunge into the literary world—a world that has always, through some variation or another, made me feel seen. Made me feel heard. Made me feel visible and important and here. With the start of 2020 and new opportunities ahead, I look forward to having more time to sit with writing, to devote to reading, and to decolonize the definitions of what really makes someone a writer.
I am writer because I say I am. I am writer because words have always fostered an intimacy and electricity within me. I am a writer because my soul-scape illuminates like spilled neon when I think of what it means to occupy a voice—to center stories that have been erased, to bring communities and people from margin to middle, and to continue to investigate and exfoliate what things in life bind us together, and what things in life cause us to bend away from one another.
I am so incredibly thankful to be given the opportunity to represent Sundress in the capacity of an editorial intern and am thrilled to discover what new areas of success and challenges await me.
Sabrina Sarro is a current social worker in the state of NY. They hold an LMSW from Columbia University and are currently pursuing an MFA from the City College of New York—CUNY. As a queer non-binary writer of color, they are most interested in investigating the intersectionalities of life and engaging in self-reflection and introspection. They are an alumnus of the LAMBDA Literary Emerging Voices for LGBTQIA* Writers Retreat, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Yale Writers’ Workshop, and many others. They have received scholarships from The Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing and the Community of Writers’ at Squaw Valley.
I fell in love with poetry the way a lot of teenagers fall in love with poetry, I stumbled across the Button Poetry YouTube channel and spent an entire day just consuming poetry—real poetry, loud, animated, alive, and so totally unlike anything I had ever considered a poem to be before. Poems were those things that rhymed and collected dust in old books. They weren’t something that could make you feel anything and they certainly didn’t have the ability to speak to my life in any way. But what I found in these three-minute videos was the exact opposite. I found in them my experiences, my emotions, but I also found windows into the experiences of others, glimpses into worlds I had never known even existed.
So, naturally, I began copying what I found in those videos and as I watched more and read more, my poems got better and eventually, I stopped purely imitating poems I loved and my own voice began to appear in my writing. For me, that’s one of the greatest lessons writing has given me: allowing me to truly discover who I was and who I wanted to be.
In the performances of the poets who had taught me to love language, I also found a love for the performances themselves, the way they embodied a poet, made it come to life. I did speech and acting events, I starred in plays, I bombed at poetry open mics. Any chance I could get to have my voice heard, I took it.
As high school ended, I left my home in small-town Kansas to attend Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas where I’m currently pursuing degrees in Creative Writing and Performance Studies, relishing in the opportunity to dive deep into the subjects I loved the most.
At Hendrix, I joined the staff of the Aonian, the school’s student literary journal and hosted a poetry review radio show where I got to sit down with a friend and share poems that I loved. I work on the committee for Word Garden, Hendrix’s student reading series and go out of my way to soak up all of the amazing student writing generated by my peers and to hear all of the visiting authors Hendrix brings. I’ve even cut class to hear poets read.
Even now, though my tastes have broadened and changed over time, I love reading and writing, poetry especially, for the same reason I did when I first discovered it. It makes me feel alive and it makes me feel like my being alive, my listening and feeling and loving, has some effect on the world around me. It’s through poetry that I feel connected to everything outside of myself and attentive to everything within.
Quinn Carver Johnson was born and raised on the Kansas-Oklahoma border, but now attends Hendrix College and is pursuing degrees in Creative Writing and Performances studies. Johnson’s poetry and other writings have been published in various magazines and journals, both in-print and online, including SLANT, Nebo, Right Hand Pointing, Flint Hills Review, and Route7 Review.
Sundress Publications is excited to announce that Anna Black and Brynn Martin will be taking the helm as our new chapbook editors. The two sat down with our editorial intern Nicole Drake to talk about some of the exciting titles and projects ahead of them. Black and Martin discuss their most treasured writing advice, some of their unique passions (natural building, embroidery), and the idea of editing as working toward a shared vision with the author.
Nicole Drake: How did you come on as an editor for the Sundress chapbook series?
Brynn Martin: I’ve worked for SAFTA since 2016 in a couple of different roles but I’ve always expressed to Erin that I’m interested in publishing/editing and the whole process of how a book comes to be. So when the editor position came open for the chapbook series, I jumped on it.
Anna Black: Sundress brought me on as an intern a long time ago. Since then I have worked as the editor of the Lyric Essentials series, the Poets in Pajamas curator, and now the Staff Director. Not all at once! I’ve been the assistant editor for most of our books over the last couple of years, and Erin knew I loved the editing side so of course when she asked me to, I was happy to be able to take on some chapbooks as an editor.
Drake: Can you give us an introduction to you and what you’re excited to bring to Sundress as an editor?
Black: My favorite works to read (and write) are eco and nature-based blow-your-hair-back-lick-your-neck words that rock with hard-core intersectional feminism and at least some hint of the grisly or magical. I love art and things that are weird — hybridity thrills me to the point of glee. I’m not sure what else there is to know about me. I’m a disabled, bi, animist, vegan Libra married to a Scorpio — we live in the PNW.
As an editor, I like to think that I’m looking not for what’s wrong (though that’s what people think of when they find out you’re an editor) because the book made it through our board and our judges to get selected in the first place (and we’re rigorous) so there’s not much wrong by that point.
But more that I’m hoping to use whatever vision I may possess by letting the writer look through my eyes. As when you point out new things to visitors in your town — you share with them a bit of the magic you’ve picked up by living there and knowing the space and when you point out the sculpture made by your friend or share the violent histories of your town, you see them shift, come alert, and spark with a connection born through seeing anew. I guess that’s what I hope to do as an editor more than anything — to let our writers see through my eyes and see their work in a new or deeper way. If we make a few changes here and there, together, along the way, then it’s because we shared a vision. So I guess that’s what I’m hoping for above all.
Martin: I’m a poet, Kansan, cat person, emerging foodie, and amateur macaron baker. I find a lot of peace in painting, embroidery, and other creative pursuits as well.
I’d say I bring my sense of humor, my passion for poetry, and my queerness to Sundress. The teams at Sundress and SAFTA are easily the most representative and welcoming that I’ve ever been a part of and it’s been refreshing to find a space that honors who I am while also allowing me to grow into my voice more.
Drake: What is the difference between a poetry collection and a chapbook?
Martin: The difference is primarily in the length; poetry collections are book-length manuscripts that run about 80+ pages. Chapbooks are often much shorter, between 10-30 pages. Because collections are longer, they will cover several topics and balance many themes, whereas a chapbook typically focuses on one theme or idea.
Black: Primarily the difference is the length. Full-length poetry collections are 45+ pages and chapbooks are “something less than that.” But it’s not as if chapbooks are unfinished collections. A good chapbook works within a shorter length and makes it a strength. A reader shouldn’t feel like the work has been cut short or that something is missing — so I guess rather than focusing on the length alone I would say that a chapbook is a book of poetry (or something else) that is at its best around 20-35 pages.
Drake: What projects are you working on now and what do you have coming up?
Martin: I run the Sh*tty First Drafts podcast with my roommate and friend Stephanie Phillips. We release new episodes about every two weeks, so follow us on social media and/or Spotify/iTunes/Google Play to see when we drop a new episode!
I’m also working on a manuscript of my own that I hope to send out this summer. Keep your fingers crossed for me.
Black: We just launched Hannah V Warren’s [re]construction of the necromancer which is an incredible chap that retells the Hansel and Gretel story in a skin-tingling feminist way. It’s witchy and wonderful in every way and Hannah and I made a few changes along the way that were just what I mentioned above: a shared vision. I’m really proud of this book and I know Hannah is, too.
Coming up: I’m still the assistant editor for most of our books so I’m buried right now as we try to get everything out the door for AWP. But if you have the chance, you should also check out Bury Me in Thunder by syan jay. which is just — wow — it’s an incredible honor to be a part of this book in whatever role. And we’re about to release The Familiar Wild, an anthology on dogs edited by Rachel Mennies and Ruth Awad. We’re about to release our first fiction title, too, by Robert Long Foreman, I Am Here to Make Friends — it has charts. Oh! And Maps of Injury is coming out, too. Chera Hammons’ writing is a pleasure. As a person who deals with chronic illness, this is a collection that will just shatter the ideas most people have of what an ill body is like.
Personally, I’m working on a few projects including a novel, my second poetry collection, and a couple of visual art and photography projects. I need more sleep.
Drake: Do you have a favorite poetry collection or chapbook from 2019 still rattling around in your head?
Martin: Oh man, so many! I read The Carrying by Ada Limón most recently on a trip to the mountains. I admire her work so much. Franny Choi’s Soft Science is also stunning — no surprise there. I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood by Tiana Clark was also a favorite, though I think it came out at the end of 2018. I could go on. There’s so much kick-ass poetry happening right now.
Black: Ruth Foley’s Dead Man’s Float was a world rocker for me. And Amy Watkins’ Wolf Daughter. Oh and Lessons in Breathing Underwater by HK Hummel. They were so good! I liked all of our 2019 titles, to be honest. This is too hard.
Drake: What book have you reread the most in your life?
Black: Oh um…okay you’re going to laugh. Probably Clan of the Cave Bear—the series up through the Mammoth Hunters. Though I haven’t reread it in many, many years—I’m afraid to. It would probably offend me now. I’d say it probably has the record though given my recollection of my twenties. There’s something about a book that grips you in your early years in a way that never leaves you and changes your view on the world. That’s special. I’d also have to say Mists of Avalon but not in many years and that was before I knew there was a controversy around the writer. In more recent years I turn to Loba, Woman and Nature, Bright Dead Things, The Chronology of Water, Gathering Moss, Object Lessons, We Who Love to Be Astonished—I’d better stop.
Martin: The most honest answer is probably The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. I loved that book so much and had it read to me so often as a kiddo that I’d memorized the words and would “read” it to myself before I’d ever learned how to actually read.
In more recent years, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. Breaks my heart every time.
Drake: What do you look for in a chapbook that really sets it apart from the rest?
Black: Well, the chapbooks aren’t chosen by an acquisitions editor at Sundress. They go through readers which include our board and then after the initial winnowing to the finalists, to a judge. So it doesn’t matter much what I like in that sense except that as a board member I do read like everyone else. I guess, though, that I’m always hoping for a chapbook that causes me to make little grunting sounds—which I do when something strikes me as I read. It’s like an “ungh” sound. Something like a person makes when they take the perfect bite of their favorite dessert. Which is to say, I want to be touched. I want to cry. I want to be mad or hurt or surprised as I read. I want to feel for the speaker. I want to feel present and absorbed. I want to hear it breathe in my head. I want to forget I’m reading.
Martin: I appreciate chapbooks that hone in on one thing: whether it’s an exploration of a relationship, or a theme, or even one image. Chapbooks that are focused and feel like one complete unit. Which is not to say that they can’t do weird or experimental things. In fact, I think a narrowed focus allows for more room to play and explore.
Drake: Do you favor the classically excellent or more innovative, experimental works?
Black: When I make my personal choices for reading it’s probably obvious by now that I bend toward the experimental, the strange, and the things that have been hidden from us all for far too long. But that’s just how I lean personally and not a rule. I’m not usually going to reach for things that aren’t pushing boundaries but when they happen into my life, I’m no less glad to have read them. As an editor, I honestly have no preference. I think there is room for all of the words except the hateful kind. There is incredible joy in an accessible poem. I love those, too. And just as much.
Martin: It probably sounds wishy-washy, but I have to say both. Innovative and experimental works can be really exciting and captivating, but only if those choices are grounded by craft. Using something like caesura for its own sake, rather than to illuminate or complicate something in the poem, is counterproductive in my opinion.
Drake: What is the most useful editing/writing advice you have ever received?
Black: Sally Ball taught me to read manuscripts in side-by-side view and I use this every day now for Sundress and with my other work as an editor, and I’m so thankful she taught me that and much more about close reading and pulling things out from the back edges of your brain so you can look at them…about when to fight over a cow, and when to let it go—she really is an incredible editor and one I aspire to be more like.
Martin: That it’s okay to not be writing all the time. So often advice to young writers is about a schedule and producing as much as possible and all these arbitrary things that you can only really do when you’re in a position of extreme privilege. Letting go of the expectation that I had to sit down and write for two hours every day to be considered a “real” writer was incredibly freeing. Everyone works at their own pace and in their own way.
Drake: If you could live as the villain in any book–across all years and genres–who would you choose?
Martin: Probably someone like Professor Moriarty. Having seemingly unlimited access to money and power is pretty sexy, not to mention getting to mess with and outsmart the hero. Plus, Andrew Scott’s portrayal in the BBC adaptation is spectacular.
Black: In Griffin’s Woman and Nature there is this horse. While not exactly a villain, it’s being tamed, or rather, some man is trying to tame the horse. And the horse is resistant and full of fight and passion and has these threatening hooves. And I guess it’s not really a villain but it is to the man, right? I want to be that horse. That daring, blasphemous, dangerous, wild horse. Or Medusa. I’m probably already Medusa.
Drake: As an editor, have you ever experienced regret at a line you absolutely adored but had to cut for the greater good? A literary “one that got away”?
Black: Hmmm, no? Not one that comes to mind anyway. Cutting is a good thing. It should be done when called for, and without compunction when necessary. But the trick is to know when it’s necessary, right? It may seem it, but then you read it back and realize that something was lost. So you put it back in. Cutting is never permanent. It’s like being able to try on any haircut with no regrets. That’s what makes editing fun — it’s not risky unless you’re mean to the author.
Martin: In my own work, absolutely and all the time, especially as a young(er) writer. I wrote lots of lines (even whole poems) that seemed, at the time, completely genius but were ultimately too saccharine or abstract to work. You have to be willing to be pretty brutal with your own work, in my opinion. Most of the poems that I’m proudest of are ones that were completely overhauled in their structure, form, image systems, etc.
As an editor for Sundress, not so much. Most of the work we accept is polished and more-or-less ready to go. Much of what I do is more about copy-editing, small edits for clarity, and working on ordering.
Drake: Finally, what is one non-editorial, non-bookish thing that you truly enjoy doing?
Martin: I mentioned this before but something I’ve gotten into recently is embroidering. It’s something to keep my hands busy while still allowing me to feel creative. The rhythm of it is really calming, too. I post my pieces up on Instagram @BrynnsieCrafts, if that’s something you’re into.
Black: Non-bookishly I love to kayak. I’m also a photographer. I love boats, natural building (cob, earthships, strawbale, earthbag and anything that equalizes housing). I frequently blast music like I’m still 17, so I must like it. I can easily be convinced to go to art galleries and studio tours, to spend time gardening, and doing anything that involves me getting to hang up my hammock. I can break the bank in an art supplies store. I’m not good at math.
Anna Black‘s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Collagist, The Seattle Times, Hotel Amerika, 45th Parallel, Bacopa Review, Wordgathering, SWWIM, The American Journal of Poetry, and New Mobility among others. Black received her MFA at Arizona State University. She works as an editor and web operator based in the PNW as well as the Staff Director and an Associate Editor at Sundress Publications, and the poetry editor for Doubleback Review. More of her work can be seen at http://bylineblack.com.
Brynn Martin is a Kansas native living in Knoxville, where she received her MFA in poetry from the University of Tennessee. She is an Associate Editor for Sundress Publications and co-host of the podcast Shitty First Drafts. Her poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Contrary Magazine, Rogue Agent, FIVE:2:ONE, and Crab Orchard Review.
Nicole Drake is a graduate of Florida State University with a BA in Creative Writing. She has served as a reader for the Southeast Review and the Seven Hills Review and currently works as the Social Media Manager for Capital City Tattoo’z. She teaches dance and works her way through her endless “To Read” list in her spare time.
Sundress Publications announces the release of Chera Hammons’ Maps of Injury. An unwavering study of the body and earth moved by pain, sorrow, and hope, these poems offer new ways of knowing the intricacies of our interwoven lives and the tender beliefs that keep us going.
Chera Hammons charts a cartographical understanding of the body—one marked with illness, change, and the bone-deep need to survive. Here, hope and sorrow weave between the grasses of the Texas Panhandle, a hard place “where the land is flat and tough and everything is against us.” Yet, memory roots itself firmly, urging us forward because “what we fear may not come to pass.”
Hammons writes with an honest tenor that sits in the throat, guiding us to the places where our hands—and lives—extend beyond our grasps. There is a grace here as wide as a summer sky, a forgiveness that carries you, even when your body cannot. These verses sing through the difficulty of life, making sure “each day leave[s] its own bruise” along the spine of our collected histories.
Sandy Longhorn, author of The Alchemy of My Mortal Form, says Maps of Injury “offers a steady wisdom born from a body and a land under siege. As the speaker confronts chronic illness and the land of the Texas panhandle weathers drought, we are assured that ‘Someone will always teach us how to grieve.’ And these poems do just that with subtle beauty and stunning revelations. Hammons’ lyric narratives sing in the face of difficult times and remind us to ‘let the dangerous world in.’”
Chera Hammons is West Texas A&M University’s Writer-in-Residence. Work appears or is forthcoming in publications such as Beloit Poetry Journal, Foundry, The Penn Review, Ruminate, The Sun, The Texas Observer, and Tupelo Quarterly. She is a winner of the PEN Southwest Book Award. Maps of Injury is her fourth book of poetry. A novel is forthcoming through Torrey House Press.
I’m currently a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying Library and Information Science and I will be graduating this spring (maybe in the summer, it depends on my financial situation). I graduated Summa Cum Laude from Fairleigh Dickinson University, where I majored in English literature and minored in psychology. I work part-time as a content writer and I’m looking to make it more of a full-time gig.
I’m a Contributing Editor for The Blue Nib, a literary magazine based out of the UK. I write essays and reviews for them but they have also published my fiction and poetry. My fiction tends to be about working-class women and deals with a lot of ethical and existential concepts but I also write a lot of humor so, go figure. Recently, I’ve been dabbling with screenplay writing—I want to write a queer Seinfeld. For the past several months, all of my analytical writing has been focused on 21st-century poetry. I’ve published an essay on Kaur’s work and an essay on alt-lit, critically examining their literary qualities and attempting to explain both their appeal and their function within literature as a whole. I feel such analysis is important as there is hardly any in existence, despite Kaur being the best selling poet of all time. That being said, I feel I should point out that I do not enjoy or admire Kaur’s work nor any of the alt-lit work I’ve read (and I’ve read a lot) but I believe the works to be culturally significant and therefore deserving of scholarly analysis.
Apart from all that, I’m also a huge music nerd. I play in two bands (Friendo and HoloFerns) and manage a music review site called My Little Underground.
As for the future, I’m still figuring that out. I applied to some PhD programs in the fall and so until I hear back from them, I can’t start planning anything. My main goal though is to write more and publish more—I hope the experience I gain at Sundress will aid me in this pursuit.
Ada Wofford is currently avoiding her 9-5 enslavement by studying library science at UW-Madison. She’s a Contributing Editor for The Blue Nib, has been published in various places such as McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and is currently residing in New Jersey.
I read voraciously as a child. I imagine anyone would in my position; I had a loving family, but I was teased mercilessly throughout elementary school. I spent most of my time alone: sitting in my favorite corner of the school library thumbing through the bookshelves, wandering into the forest next to my school and imagining being on a daring adventure. I became fast friends with a dog whose owner lived in a house right next to the field; I would tell him that, one day, we’ll explore exciting places far away from here.
My urge to read everything I could get my hands on got me into trouble. I was reprimanded in Grade Six for reading books meant only for Grade Seven students (the highest grade in my school) and scolded for reading Seventeen magazines when I was nowhere close to being in the “appropriate” age range. Still, I held onto books and the small sense of freedom and hope they gave me because, at the time, they were all I had. This world of brave girls and quests and imaginary lands made me feel less alone.
In Grade Five I started writing down the stories I would make up in my head to pass the time. They were strange—one was about a small snake trying to follow a wagon train à la Little House on the Prairie, while another was about a tennis ball who rolled away from his family—but my teachers liked them, so I felt encouraged to keep going. Eventually, I found my way into Honours English and AP English in high school, where I fell in love with Shakespeare’s plays and the Romantic poets and, surprisingly enough, James Joyce’s Dubliners (if you’re reading this Mr. Wallace, thank you for bringing us to so many Bard on the Beach performances and letting us read Dubliners). I read its final short story—”The Dead”—over and over again, struck by the epiphany that nearly brought Gabriel Conroy to his knees. Maybe this story came to me at the right time; on the cusp of graduation, not knowing what I wanted to do while telling everyone I had a plan. I bought a copy while I was in Québec the summer before I started college, holding it close when I made the sudden decision to change my major.
I’ve had a few small epiphanies since then: realizing this is what I’ve always wanted to do while sitting in my honors Arts program, when I decided to go to grad school for cinema studies, the first time someone told me my poetry meant something to them. I’ve been chasing that sudden clarity since, that breathless moment when everything either fits into place or shatter in the most exalting way possible. When I read, watch, or experience something that makes time stop around me, it etches itself into my memories, like it’s a part of me now.
Maybe that’s what drove me to establish my online literary and art journal L’Éphémère Review and dive deeper into writing and editing and becoming a better literary citizen; chasing epiphanies and sharing them with as many people as I can. Stories have intrinsically changed who I am as a person and giving back to the communities that shaped me is the least I can do. This is why I’m grateful I have the opportunity to work for Sundress Publications; we are all made up of stories that deserve to be told, and being able to help others tell their stories is something I feel like I was meant to do.
Kanika Lawton holds a BA in Psychology with a Minor in Film Studies from the University of British Columbia and an MA from the University of Toronto’s Cinema Studies Institute. She is the Editor-In-Chief of L’Éphémère Review, a 2018 Pink Door Fellow, and a 2020 BOAAT Writer’s Retreat Poetry Fellow. Her work has appeared in Ricepaper Magazine, Vagabond City Literary Journal, Glass Poetry, and Cosmonauts Avenue, among others.
Welcome back to Lyric Essentials! In this latest installment, Stephen Mills reads us Frank O’Hara and talks about how O’Hara’s poetry has not only helped shape queer spaces in poetry, but has most recently provided comfort while living in New York City during the COVID crisis. Thank you for reading!
Erica Hoffmeister: Why did you choose to read Frank O’Hara for Lyric Essentials – and why these two particular poems?
Stephen Mills: From the moment I first read Frank O’Hara as an undergraduate, he’s been a touchstone for me as a poet as he is for many. I did, however, debate choosing him because he’s such an obvious choice for me. But as I was making my selection and setting about to record poems for this project, things took a turn here in New York where I live.
As I began to deal with the reality of the COVID-19 health crisis in the city, I felt even more drawn to reading Frank O’Hara. I needed his poems and his New York. It’s hard to separate his poems from the city where he wrote a majority of them. He wrote with such joy and excitement, which was often tinged with darker themes or events. Some of his most famous poems are “walking poems” where he’s moving though New York and capturing everything that makes this city so thrilling and alive (though he often does so by reminding us of death). Due to the current situation, I haven’t really been out for four weeks and counting, so reading O’Hara was a way to reconnect with my own love of this city as well as his work.
I selected “Steps” because it is one of my favorite poems. There’s a thrill and a speed to it that really captures the excitement of New York but also of love. It’s pretty hard to get away with lines like “oh god it’s wonderful / to get out of bed / and drink too much coffee / and smoke too many cigarettes / and love you so much” but O’Hara makes us feel that and believe it so fully.
“St. Paul and All That” is a different kind of love poem. It’s full of an anxious feeling and an exploration of what it means to be with another person but to also be without them sometimes. In this case, O’Hara is writing about his lover Vincent Warren who was a dancer. I like the contrast between these two pieces which showcase O’Hara’s range.
EH: Has O’Hara influenced your own writing at all?
SM: Yes, in very profound ways. I am especially influenced by O’Hara ability to combine so many different things together from his own life and friends to history to art to pop culture to open declarations of love for another man. And to know he was doing this in a time when most of those things were very taboo in culture and in poetry, makes him a huge inspiration for me.
As a gay man who often writes about my own life and relationships, I found a deep connection to his approach. When I read him for the first time, it was like nothing else I had ever read. There wasn’t this secrecy or shame around his sexuality or love or life. There was excitement and joy and the thrill of being alive against a backdrop of the changing world of the mid-20th century (one of my favorite time periods). I’m very drawn to the personal set against the historical.
In a very clear way, you can see a lot of O’Hara’s influence in my second poetry collection A History of the Unmarried, which explores the concept of marriage within the queer community by examining many of the stereotypes of marriage and family from the 1950s and 60s. The book includes direct references to O’Hara as well as Jackson Pollock, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the tv show Mad Men, which paid its own tribute to O’Hara in season two.
EH: What is your relationship with reading poetry aloud?
SM: It is a huge part of my process as a writer. I read all of my work aloud over and over again as part of my writing and revision process. I’ve even at times recorded pieces just to hear them played back to me. Poetry is unique in that way. You want pieces that work both on the page but can also come alive when heard. The experiences can be very different.
Personally, I’ve really grown as a performer of my own work over the years. It has taken me a lot of practice and a lot of public readings, but I now feel more confident in giving my own work a voice. There’s something thrilling about having that immediate response when you are in front of an audience.
When I’m reading poetry by others, I almost always read it aloud. It’s very hard for me to read poetry silently, which means I normally have to read poetry books in private.
EH: How do you think O’Hara still speaks to readers, after all this time?
SM: In many ways, O’Hara was ahead of his time, so his work still feels very contemporary. You could replace a few names in his poems with current celebrities or artists and it would feel like the poem was written today. But I think it is more than that.
O’Hara is so good at walking a fine line between life and death. In the poem “Steps” he writes “and in sense we’re all winning / we’re alive.” O’Hara was well aware of how fragile life was from the deaths of friends and idols to living through World War II. There’s a rush to his work that acknowledges how close we all are to the end. This is magnified by the fact that O’Hara died young in an accident on Fire Island.
This exploration of our connection to death is something that still resonates with readers. Something we still seek out in the literature we read or the TV shows we watch or movies we go to. And it connects to this very moment as we face a pandemic like nothing most of us have ever seen.
Particularly for the gay community, O’Hara holds a special place for a lot of us because of the openness within his work. We don’t have to sit and decode all his poems to see his queerness and that is extremely refreshing and something that can still, at times, be hard to come by in mainstream poetry. Queers writers, like myself, are still questioned and sometimes pushed to the side for writers who are less open or direct.
EH: Do you have any current writing projects that you’d like to tell us about?
SM: I’m currently looking for a publisher for a new book manuscript called Shelter in Place that is my own exploration of our connection and fascination with death through a queer lens. The book looks at current events, historical events, personal events as well as TV and true crime documentaries for inspiration. I’ve also been working on playwriting and completed my first play last fall and I’m currently working on my second.
Frank O’Hara is a celebrated American poet known for his key role as a leader in the New York School of avant-garde poets and artists during the 1950s and 1960s Manhattan. He wrote ninety poems, and his poetry collections were all published posthumously, with the exception of Lunch Poems. O’Hara was involved with the art scene, and incorporated dance, theater, painting and music into his life’s work, and is known for his poetic observations of New York City. He served as a long time art critic, and was long associated with the Museum of Modern Art in New York City as a curator until his tragic death at age forty in 1966.
Stephen S. Mills is the author of the Lambda Award-winning book He Do the Gay Man in Different Voices (2012)as well as A History of the Unmarried (2014) and Not Everything Thrown Starts a Revolution (2018) all from Sibling Rivalry Press. He earned his MFA from Florida State University. His work has appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, The Antioch Review, PANK, The New York Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review, The Rumpus, and others. He is also the winner of the 2008 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Poetry Award and the 2014 Christopher Hewitt Award for Fiction. Two of his books have been placed on the Over the Rainbow List compiled yearly by the American Library Association. He lives in New York City with his partner and two schnauzers.
Erica Hoffmeister is originally from Southern California and earned an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English from Chapman University. Currently in Denver, she teaches college writing and is an editor for the Denver-based literary journal South Broadway Ghost Society. She is the author of two poetry collections: Lived in Bars (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), and the prize-winning chapbook, Roots Grew Wild (Kingdoms in the Wild Press, 2019). A cross-genre writer, she has several works of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, articles and critical essays published in various outlets. Learn more about her at http://ericahoffmeister.com/
