Hello! My name is Hiba Syed, and as one of the new editorial interns, I can’t wait to work with the amazing team at Sundress Publications. I graduated just last year with a BA in English from Maryville University near St. Louis, where I am still based. Though my field is a highly unusual choice in my cultural community, I chose it because I believe books have been my life’s most constant passion for a reason.
Coming from a big family of people who don’t read more than they have to, I make up for it by reading enough for all of us combined. Some people stress-eat, or stress-clean, while I am prone to stress-read. Of all the problems my first-generation immigrant, engineer parents anticipated when they had their first child, having to listen to elementary school teachers explain that their daughter’s library book had to be confiscated mid-lesson was not one of them. My ability to focus has improved greatly since then, but even now, I always have an e-book or a physical novel within arm’s reach. So naturally, I couldn’t picture myself happily working with anything other than the written word.
In terms of reading tastes, my first love was definitely fantasy, but nowadays I gravitate towards translated literature, classics, and poetry. I am also always scoping out works, new and old, English and translated, by Muslim and South Asian authors. Some of my favorite titles are The Laughter by Sonora Jha, The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff, and Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier.
In my free time, aside from reading, I hoard recipes, try some of those recipes, and go on long walks until my audiobooks run out. My professional journey is only just kicking off, but I’m excited to see where this opportunity will take me. Thank you for reading!
Hiba Syed is a Pakistani-American writer and reviewer with an appreciation for all genres. Having recently graduated with a BA in English, she fills her time traveling, experimenting in the kitchen, and reading anything she can get her hands on. Currently she resides in St. Louis, Missouri.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is thrilled to announce its 2024 Poetry Retreat, which runs from June 1-2, 2024. For the first time ever, this event will be entirely virtual held via Zoom. All SAFTA retreats focus on generative writing, and this year’s retreat will also include the following craft talk sessions: “Let’s Talk About Prose Poems” and “Third Space Grief: The (Written) Performance of Intersectional Mourning.” The event will be open to poets of all backgrounds and experience levels and provide an opportunity to work with many talented authors and poets from around the country, including workshop leaders Amorak Huey, Sarah A. Chavez, and keynote speaker Barbara Fant.
Amorak Huey is author of four books of poems including Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021). Co-founder with Han VanderHart of River River Books, Huey teaches at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He also is co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024) and Slash/Slash (2021), winner of the Diode Editions Chapbook Prize. Huey is a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, and his poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, and many other print and online journals.
Sarah A. Chavez, a California mestiza living in the PNW, is the author of the poetry collections, Hands That Break & Scar(Sundress Publications), All Day, Talking (dancing girl press), like everything else we loved, (Porkbelly Press) and Halfbreed Helene Navigates the Whole (Ravenna Press’ Triple Series). Recent writing projects have received a 2019-2020 Tacoma Artists Initiative Award, as well as residencies at Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, the Macondo Writers Workshop, and The Writer’s Colony at Dairy Hollow. Her new project, In the Face of Mourning was awarded a 2023 Scholarship & Research grant from the University of Washington Tacoma’s (UWT) School for Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. Chavez teaches creative writing and Latinx/Chicanx-focused courses and serves as the poetry coordinator for Best of the Net Anthology.
Barbara Fant has been writing and performing for over 15 years. She competed in 9 National Poetry Slam competitions, and she is a World Poetry Slam finalist. She is the author of two poetry collections, Paint, Inside Out (2010) and Mouths of Garden (2022). Her work has been featured in the Academy of American Poets, Electric Literature, McNeese Review, The Ohio State University Press, Button Poetry, and Def Poetry Jam, amongst others. She has received residencies in Havana, Cuba and Senegal, West Africa. For over 12 years, she had led healing informed poetry workshops for both youth and adults who are incarcerated, those in community, adults in recovery, and survivors of human trafficking and domestic violence. She is certified as a Healing Centered Engagement specialist and holds both an MFA in Poetry and a Master of Theology. She is the founder of the Black Women Rise Poetry Collective and co-founder of The Senghor Project, West African International Artist Residency, and co-founder of We THRIVE Healing and Arts Collective.
Welcome back to Lyric Essentials, where we invite authors to share the work of their favorite poets. This month, Erika Walsh joins us to discuss the work of Chelsey Minnis, and the importance of taking risks in poetry, whether it be through form or humor, and how bending expectations in writing can be freeing. As always, we hope you enjoy as much as we did.
Ryleigh Wann: When was the first time you read Chelsey Minnis? Why did her work stand out to you then?
Erika Walsh: It was initially a bit disturbing to me that I couldn’t remember the exact moment I encountered Chelsey Minnis for the first time, but then it felt kind of fun and cool, as though she were part of my life all along; like there was never a time before her. I know for sure that the first book I read by her was Bad Bad, and that the first singular poem I read online by her was “Clown,” but I can’t recall how I came to find her, or which came first.
I remember being tickled by the wild aesthetics of Bad Bad, with its pink and white striped cover, a seemingly random drawing of a two-headed fawn at the center of the book, and “bad” reviews highlighted on its back cover, such as “Her poems take some getting used to” and “Many won’t find her…acceptable at all…” These poems took real risks, such as covering multiple pages nearly entirely with ellipses. I was especially struck by Chelsey’s “Anti Vitae” which made me laugh out loud, as it listed her “failures” as a poet, such as “Mispronounce ‘Kant’,” “Told poems ‘lack agency.’ Have to ask what ‘agency’ means,” and “Told that poetry is ‘loose’ by future poet laureate.” It was so refreshing to read poems by someone who is clearly an artist and a poet, but not in a way that adheres to any arbitrary expectations of the literary world as an institution.
RW: How has her writing inspired your own?
EW: I love how genuinely funny Chelsey’s poems are. I began writing poetry thinking there was a “right” way to write a poem, and my poems came out feeling stifled and forced as I tried to bend them into shapes I thought may result in others taking me more “seriously” as a poet. Now that I’m in my MFA, I think I maybe for the first time feel like I truly have the space and support to write poems that are less “safe.” I feel more free to not only write poems that are “weird” or “experimental” (but still aesthetically pleasing), but also to write poems that are absurd and maybe even a little bit crude, maybe a little bit ugly. Chelsey’s writing also shows me that there are not only many ways to write a poem, but also many ways to be a poet, and that validation from other poets or from literary institutions can only take you so far. Writing the poems you want to write solely because you want to write them is the real pleasure.
RW: Why did you choose to read these poems specifically?
EW: “A Speech About the Moon” (from Zirconia) puts me into a trance state every time I read it. It initially feels almost like a punch line, to have the poem start with one line about the moon before moving on to the birds and the fish and the sea, which quickly become the real adhering images of the poem. Then you begin to realize this poem is haunted. Whatever is haunting you rises to the surface as you read it, but in a surprisingly gentle way; gentler than you could have imagined. This poem gives you the space and permission to settle into the feeling; to not flinch away from your fear. I consider “Clown” (from Bad Bad) to be a classic. As I mentioned before, I believe it’s the first poem I ever read online by Minnis. This poem makes me laugh out loud, especially the last few lines: “You can’t imagine how jolly/ everything is. And the fright wigs… I don’t want to be a clown but I’m/ sure to be one. My mother was a clown.” Every time I read these lines, I know with absolute certainty that they must be true; that there is something clown-like in me, and in my ancestral lineage, and perhaps in every person who comes across this poem. Somehow, we’re all connected by both the fact that we are clowns, and the fact that we don’t want to be them. “Men Cry Because of the Heat” is another poem from Bad Bad that just makes me laugh. It really embodies the feeling of absurdity in Chelsey’s poems. The droll delivery of the speaker adds to this feeling. This poem also is in ways a parallel to “A Speech About the Moon,” with its attention to similar images, such as crying, ice, and birds. But unlike the speaker in “A Speech About the Moon,” the men in this poem aren’t paying attention; “If a bird lands on their shoulder….they don’t even think about it…they can’t realize anything…about birds.” The speaker in “A Speech About the Moon,” is alone with her thoughts, whereas the men in this poem have help (“You have to cut their shirts into half shirts….”). The sadness in this poem does not, after all, arise from the same place, or from an “enchanted misery.” It is only the heat.
RW: What have you been up to lately (life, work, anything!)? Got any news to share?
EW: I was recently named Poetry Editor of Black Warrior Review, the literary journal affiliated with my MFA at the University of Alabama, and will begin this position in January 2024. I’m very excited about this, especially since this is a journal I’ve been reading and following for many years! The 9th issue of A Velvet Giant, an online literary journal which I also edit and co-founded, also just came out last month. In terms of my own writing, my poem “My Baby” was recently published in Pigeon Pages. I have two poems coming out in VIBEin early 2024 (and the folio is available for preorder right now!) I’ve been writing lots of fairytale inspired poems lately, and have been writing ecopoetry as well and thinking about the connection between the violences humans commit against our planet and against each other. In terms of more life-related news, I recently moved into a new apartment with my partner. I’m planning a puppet show with one of my best friends, and starting to get back into studying tarot. I’m thinking about the future in a way that feels mostly exciting.
Chelsey Minnis studied creative writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the author of several collections of poetry including Zirconia (2001), which won the Alberta Prize; Bad Bad (2007); and Poemland (2009). She lives in Boulder.
Erika Walsh is an MFA candidate in Poetry at the University of Alabama, poetry editor of BlackWarrior Review, and co-founding editor of A Velvet Giant. Erika’s creative writing has been featured in Hotel Amerika, Booth, Pigeon Pages, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Peach Mag, and elsewhere. She has been awarded residencies from Sundress Academy of the Arts and Art Farm Nebraska, as well as a fellowship from Brooklyn Poets.
Ryleigh Wann (she/her) hails from Michigan and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. She earned an MFA from UNC Wilmington where she taught poetry and served as the comics editor for Ecotone. Her writing can be found in The McNeese Review, Longleaf Review, The Shore, and elsewhere. You can visit her website at ryleighwann.com
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present Poetry Xfit hosted by Alexa White. This generative workshop event will take place on Sunday, April 21st from 2 to 4 pm EST via Zoom. Join us at the link tiny.utk.edu/sundress with the password “safta”.
Poetry Xfit isn’t about throwing tires or heavy ropes, but the idea of confusing our muscles is the same. You will receive ideas, guidelines, and more as part of this generative workshop series in order to complete three poems in two hours. A new set of prompts will be provided after the writers have written collaboratively for thirty minutes. The goal is to create material that can be later modified and transformed into artwork rather than producing flawless final versions. The event is open to prose authors as well!
Alexa White is a mixed-race, neurodivergent writer and graduate of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she earned her BA in creative writing and studio art. While attending, she won the 2022 Bain-Swiggett prize for traditional poetry forms and her poetry and art has appeared in The Phoenix, the school’s literary and arts magazine. Alexa lives in Knoxville, her semi-hometown, and is the Grants Manager at Sundress Academy for the Arts. She takes delight in backroads, quarries, and the last few seconds of sunset and redefines her bedtime nightly.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “And yet … There’s still Joy: Joy as an Act of Resistance in Poetry,” a workshop led by Barbara Fant on April 10th, 2024, from 6:00-7:30PM ET. This event will be held over Zoom. Participants can access the event at tiny.utk.edu/sundress (password: safta).
Throughout this workshop, participants will learn how other poets over time have experienced and explored joy in their writing. We will read and listen to poems and discuss how joy shows up in poetry, from the small joys in everyday life to healing through trauma. We will specifically explore the work of Toi Derricotte, her usage of “joy as an act of resistance,” and how we can use our writing to explore and experience more deeply the small moments of joy in our daily lives.
We will also explore how to lean into writing when healing through pain, trauma, and grief, and ultimately, finding joy in the midst of it all. Participants will experience the poetry of contemporary poets, receive writing prompts, be offered time and space to write, and then receive the invitation to share with others.
Barbara Fant is the author of two poetry collections, Paint, Inside Out (2010) and Mouths of Garden (2022). Her work has been featured in the Academy of American Poets, Electric Literature, McNeese Review, The Ohio State University Press, Button Poetry, and Def Poetry Jam, amongst others. She has received residencies in Havana, Cuba and Senegal, West Africa. She has competed in nine National Poetry Slams and placed 8th out of 96 poets in the 2017 Women of the World Poetry Slam. She is a certified Healing Centered Engagement specialist and holds an MFA in Poetry and a Master of Theology.
While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, those who are able and appreciate may make donations directly to Barbara Fant via Venmo, PayPal, or Cash App. Her Venmo is @Barbara-Fant-1, PayPal is barbfant127@gmail.com, and CashApp is $Bloom127.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is pleased to announce the guests for the April installment of our reading series, poets Lexi McDonald and Chrissy Stegman. Join us on Thursday, April 18th at Pretentious Beer Co. from 7:00-9:00 PM for a reading followed by an open mic hosted by Shlagha Borah. Sign-up for the open mic begins at 7 PM sharp and is limited to 10-12 readers.
Lexi McDonald (they/she) is a queer poet from Central Pennsylvania who writes to make peace with their memories and explore the threads that connect past to present. She is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and serves as the Assistant Poetry Editor for UT’s literary journal, Grist. Lexi’s work appears in The FruitSlice, RiverCraft, The Sanctuary, and Essay Lit magazines.
Chrissy Stegman is a poet/writer from Baltimore, Maryland. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in: Rejection Letters, Gone Lawn, Gargoyle Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Poverty House, Stone Circle Review, Fictive Dream, The Voidspace, 5 Minutes, and BULL. She is a 2023 BOTN nominee.
My first memory is cradled in a fog so heavy, I can never be sure it actually happened. Three years old, I sat on my mother’s knee and asked her what my name was. She giggled and told me. I discovered I wanted to write when I turned 11. Those details are somewhat foggy too: I had a dream about a young farmer girl who came across a magical baby and had to use the powers of nature to fight the witch who created the infant. I woke up knowing what I wanted to do.
Throughout my school years, I found joy and excitement in any excuse to write. In tenth-grade chemistry class, I stared outside the window, admiring the Bradford pear trees, and jotted down haikus. (I barely passed chemistry, coincidentally.) Upon entering college, I felt I was ready to start a promising career in fiction, despite having written very little of it.
My advisor informed me I needed one fiction and one poetry class to earn my bachelor’s degree. My introductory poetry class changed everything. Earlier attempts at writing fiction made me feel like a cat chasing a red laser along the wall. I had fun, but I didn’t get it. Poetry was the red dot and more. By the time I realized I’d misunderstood my advisor and I hadn’t even needed to take poetry, there was no turning back.
At first, I wanted to write about anything but myself. I eventually learned to embrace myself through poetry, especially nature poetry. The world around me was incredible, and I was an incredible part of it. At this point in my life, my fog had taken the dark form of depression. This clarity poetry brought me, this sense of purpose—as well as finding something I could enjoy—was rare for me, so I held it to my chest.
In falling in love with the cyclical tendencies of the natural world, I realized I wanted to know more about the life of the poetry I read. I needed to know the history of the pages of poetry I flipped in my fingers. How did they transform from manuscripts to poetry collections? This curiosity pulled me in several directions, eventually leading me to Sundress Publications, where I hope to live through what I learn.
Whitney Cooper holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Kentucky University, where they served as editor-in-chief of Jelly Bucket, the graduate literary journal run by the university. They also work as a reader for Atlanta Review. A clerical error was made while earning their bachelor’s degree, and they have been passionate about poetry ever since. Their poetry appears in Glassworks Magazine, Stillpoint Literary Magazine, Calliope, Right Hand Pointing, and SHARK REEF. They live in Metro Atlanta with their partner, cat, and miniature schnauzer mix.
In Dear Outsiders(University of Akron, 2023), Jenny Sadre-Orafai carefully leads readers through a narrative landscape lush with themes of nature, lineage, and restoration. With a hint of magic and mythology, Sadre-Orfai writes a powerful conversation between (wo)man and nature, gripping my attention with larger themes of life, death, and the transitory states of grief in between. Of the 61 poems in the collection, most use a prose form, narrating the small moments from the author’s, and her community’s, life. Occasions like pool days (25, 35, 48) and mundane objects such as “bird feeders /… dogs on leashes /… paisley ties” (49) complete the vibrancy of their neighborhood; through these seemingly pedestrian details, Sadre-Orfai creates a fully flush background to serve her storytelling. The main throughline chronicles siblings in a coastal tourist town, struggling to deal with the grief of losing their parents and their displacement inland, showing the differences in natural surroundings which fueled their upbringing.
This sense of family is furthered by the consistent use of “we” to flesh out the sense of self within the poems. “What are we looking for? Why are we looking? A family eating oatmeal, folding socks into each other, reading in natural light, stirring simple soups into so small a house,” states Sadre-Orfai in one of the beginning poems, “Field Test” (10). Here, not only does the writer display her powerful emotional pathos towards the reader through convincing them their perspective, but also exposing the deeper intricacies of her desires. While we as readers subconsciously fill in the things we are looking for, Sadre-Orfai directly challenges the views at hand, showing her wants to the audience without any hesitation: a complete family that is colored in by the small details and testaments to tenderness.
What makes this collection special are the ties it has to not just Sadre-Orsai’s personal experience, but links to the Latinx Indigneous community being impacted as a whole. In “Locals,” Sadre-Orsai touches on the larger ignorance of community issues: “the lifeguards don’t say a thing. We aren’t worth the trouble” (29). And in “Decoys”: “Our mother makes us write down what we wear every day—a chart on the front door in case we’re abducted” (16). Both these examples compare in their external foundations: nothing that the children did warranted ignorance and abduction, but due to the pressures of the system, they are forcibly left overlooked and vulnerable.
The motifs of systematic failures and its impacts also connect to earlier mentions. In “In Case of Abduction,” the list format utilized, showing the clothing items of children until their vests disappear:
6/1 : flags tank camouflage pants
blaze orange vest striped shirt
stars leggings blaze orange vest. (64)
This highlights not just the realness of this clothing chart in relation to abducted children but also the erasure of community members and identity in real-time, further complicating the reader within Sadre-Orsai’s narrative.
Sadre-Orsai also writes of moments of triumph against these institutional erasures through collective legacy and lineage. In “A Field, A Flood,” she writes, “we walk out here with our knees high. It’s how everyone knows our parents chose water for us. We walk the packed land like walking against a cresting tide. They call it a march.” (43) Here, the writer shows a powerful moment of collective action; even a small act such as walking can become a signal for change.
Sadre-Orsai does not hold back with her use of imagery, battering the repeating themes of community and identity line after line to the reader. She furthers explores the themes of parenthood and inherited traits in “Levels of Force,” where she writes:
“At night, the shadow is our mother’s waist and hips and skirt … One of us stays in the house while the other pours water…with drenched shoes that belonged to our mother…louder! Louder! Make it like we were born here! And then we rake through our braids and our armpits for salt and sand.” (46)
The commanding voice which Sadre-Orsai utilizes furthers the idea of “Force” from the title, but also evokes a sense of motherly authority, furthering the emotional connections from page to page.
The last poem of the collection, “Send a Revival,” cements this sense of motherhood in conversation with life through its challenging ideas of birth and death. In “Send a Revival,” Sadre-Orsai writes, “here’s the rip that sweeps our bodies under… This is where we were born. This is where we became orphans, where we stayed on top of the water” (69). With this ending, the author lets go of the things that have held her back from her true being: a part of both the land and sea, nature itself. Through the collection, Sadre-Orsai brings the reader to a spot of contemplation and empathy for the world around ourselves. If you are a lover of nature and what makes us human, check this book out!
Saturn Browne (she/they) is a Chinese-Vietnamese immigrant and the Connecticut Youth Poet Laureate, East Coast Asian American Student Union (ECAASU) Artist in Residence, and the author of BLOODPATHS. Her work has been recognized by Gone Lawn, GASHER, Beaver Mag, Pulitzer Center, Foyle Young Poets, and others. She is an incoming undergraduate student at Yale University.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but I think there are a few more that I can say about this one. Yes, I am standing on a glacier. No, it really isn’t that cold, and I am currently reaching for a granola bar in my fanny pack (the only thing I decided to bring with me).
There’s so much that I could write, but I wouldn’t have the time nor the strength to fit everything I felt was important into one post. Currently, I am a 19-year-old student at the University of Tennessee pursuing a path in Creative Writing with the intention of attending law school. When I travel, the hardest choice I have to make is answering the dreaded question, “Where are you from?” No one else hiking a glacier in Alaska is going to know where Norris, Tennessee is. So, my answer is usually, “A small town about thirty minutes outside of Knoxville!” And if that’s still too broad, “Do you know where they made the atomic bomb? Yeah, I’m from around there.” They usually get that one.
The first memory that I have is of me sitting on our kitchen counter looking at brass pots and pans swinging above me. That has nothing to do with who I am today, but I do find it quite interesting that it the first thing I remember. My first fear was that a T-Rex was going to come get me from my closet. My first dream I remember is that I was flying.
I put such an emphasis on my “firsts” because people like to skip over what goes on in the middle and get right to the ending. But who can fault them? The ending is the best part! The last words I would hear before school every morning were, “Don’t forget the most important rule, have fun.” The last song that I became obsessed with was “Easy Lover” by Phil Collins. And the last thing I do every night before I go to sleep is pray.
I am not the most fashionable person known to man and most of my vocabulary is made up of cliché pop culture references, but still, I smile. I smile because I know now that a T-Rex can’t fit in my closet and that I continue to have dreams that I can fly. I smile because Phil Collins is still the best to ever do it and it is never too late to talk to God. I smile because until now, I was one of the only people to know that I dropped that granola bar right after this photo.
Erin Cantrell is a current junior at the University of Tennessee where she is studying Creative Writing with hopes to attend law school. She loves poetry, pickleball, and bad TV sitcoms. In her free time, you can find her on the volleyball court where she is coaching young girls with dreams bigger than their pigtails.
Heading North by Holly M. Wendtcontains sharp, seductive prose and a rare perspective. Viktor Myrnikor, one of the novel’s two narrators, is a young and talented Russian hockey player who keeps his sexuality a secret. Readers become intimate with Viktor’s mind, a place hidden from so many, resulting in magnified tenderness and awareness.
In this interview, Wendt provides invaluable advice on research, novel structure, dialogue, revision, and debuting.
Marah Hoffman: Because I know the depth and breadth of your passion for sports writing, I know you could have written a gripping story about almost any sport. I am curious, why hockey?
Holly M. Wendt: From the start, this was always a hockey story. The novel’s inciting circumstances—the real-life Lokomotiv Yaroslavl plane crash in 2011 and the foundation of the You Can Play Project, aimed at ending homophobia in sports, in 2012—are inextricable from the hockey world. And, as of both the beginning of the writing process in 2012 and this moment in 2024, there are no former or current gay players who are out in the NHL. (There is an out minor league hockey player in the Nashville Predators’ system, so I’m hopeful that fact will change, soon.) Both the writing process of Heading North and the plot of it are in conversation with these circumstances, which is to say in conversation with the world of professional ice hockey.
MH:Heading North traverses multiple years, lives, states, and countries. If you don’t mind divulging, how long did you work on this novel containing so many lifetimes? How did you stay connected to the world of the story?
HW: The functional timeline of the book and its events really only spans a few years—roughly 2009 to 2012—but my writing of it has taken eleven years, from the first words to the final pass of copy edits. And though I did put it away at various times in those years—to let the manuscript rest before each of its major revisions, to work on other things, to finally stop tinkering when I submitted it to Braddock Avenue Books—but each time I returned to it, returning felt right and good, just as urgent as before. That was especially true at the last opportunity I had to make substantive edits before publication, which was also the moment I worried most about. But the heart of my connection with this novel is my own inherent investment in both sports and queer representation in them, which is an ongoing conversation. It all remains relevant.
MH: In Heading North, the sounds of the Golden Gate Bridge at night and skates on fresh ice, the sensation of blood gushing from the nose–all come alive. Readers are expertly placed in the body of Viktor, a professional hockey player. They are also well-situated in place. I must ask: what was your research process like?
HW: I’m essentially incapable of liking something a little bit, so novel research is always carte blanche to give in to that obsessive quality, and it’s a process that I love. In this case, research meant sometimes setting an alarm so I could watch dodgy pirated streams of games broadcast only in Russian to get a feel for the international ice and the interiors of KHL arenas; sometimes that meant diving into the exciting sea of sports coverage that proliferated in the early 2010s: team staff Twitter accounts, player interviews, rookie camp scrimmages on streaming channels, and a wonderfully vibrant ecosystem of sports coverage from all angles that now, sadly, feels like a distant memory. I was very lucky to have been able to find exactly what I needed exactly when I needed it.
Other research involved simply paying attention when circumstances offer up gems: I heard a sound under the Golden Gate Bridge while I was road-tripping with a friend in the summer of 2011, about eight months before I started writing Heading North. I didn’t know when or how I would use it in writing, but I knew I would. And then I did. When my spouse needed stitches after taking a softball to the face, I asked permission and took notes while the doctor was sewing up his chin!
But invention matters, too. The cities of Svetlotarsk and Parov are entirely invented, but with the goal of making them feel real, even in their briefer presence. And sometimes it’s necessary to let go of verisimilitude in order to focus the work more tightly: there are so many more people involved in keeping an NHL franchise afloat than I managed to include in Heading North, but in terms of serving this particular narrative, less was very much more.
MH: As I indicated in my last question, you do a breathtaking job of immersing readers in professional hockey–a foreign terrain for many, including myself–without relinquishing tension. One of my writing mentors once said, “Stay out of the hallways.” How did you decide which moments were hallways?
HW: This was very much a process of editing for me. My worst writer trait is that I live in the hallways! When I’m giddy with that first draft process and falling in love with characters and places, I want to show everything, all the time. So my first drafts are always overlong and over-lingering, and the real work comes in removing everything that doesn’t need to be there. Reading the text out loud is a significant part of this process, too. When I have to say the sentences—and listen to them—I find it easier to know when I’ve gone on too long or when I’ve over-explained.
Having a few trusted readers who can help me navigate what is enough is also very helpful. I’m so grateful to the writer-friends who made their way through multiple iterations of this book over the course of a decade, especially because most of them are not hockey people, and they were able to help me see what details were going to be necessary so that anyone could pick up this novel and follow along, even without exhaustive hockey knowledge. That was very important to me: to make a book that’s both accessible and accurate from any of its entry-points. And together, all these things helped me find my way out of the infinite hallways.
MH: The point of view in Heading North feels special and well-suited for the story. It is third-person limited, including two perspectives: Viktor and Liliya, the general manager of Viktor’s team and the stepmother of Viktor’s secret boyfriend. What led you to choose this POV and what strategies did you use to pull it off?
HW: The close third-person point of view has long been my favorite, to be honest. It’s the one I always reach for first, and it was very easy to do that with Viktor. For a long time, though, there was another narrator for half of the novel, a character who no longer appears by name in the book. Removing and then replacing that character was the largest single revision point of the work. Though it was a difficult task to excise half the book, that narrator gave me a clearer view of Liliya and allowed me to get closer to her. Once I knew Liliya was my other voice, the rest came pretty easily.
It was important, though, to have that second voice, someone other than Viktor, present. His angle on the world (and his own life) is incredibly limited by his circumstances and his introversion, almost claustrophobic in its narrowness.
Once I decided on the person, it was really a matter of keeping myself quiet and paying attention.
MH: Your dialogue is true to each unique character. What makes this feat especially impressive is that English is a second language for some characters, including Viktor. What advice would you give to those struggling to create authentic dialogue?
HW: The best advice I can give is to listen carefully and listen with respect. Viktor’s experiences navigating English were a central part of the book because it evokes the real-life circumstances of other professional athletes. His is a privileged position, of course, in which he could be more well-supported than he chooses to be, and he doesn’t have the struggles of someone immigrating entirely in a brand new language. But his infelicities of language get recorded, reported, and scrutinized, and some of Viktor’s experiences in the novel are inspired by things I saw and heard happening as a hockey fan which were exceptionally rich in terms of beyond-the-boxscore coverage and took place before the current massive contraction of sports journalism as a field. I was able to listen to interviews with Russian players who were themselves at the same point in their work with English as Viktor and experience their speech patterns and grammatical constructions.
It was also important to me to try to show the places where Viktor experiences communication breakdown without presenting his speech as somehow “less than.” To that end, I don’t change any spellings on the page to mimic the sound of his voice; readers know he’s Russian and can bring that to the page. And, of course, everyone has an accent. Everyone’s voice, if represented faithfully, would not reflect standard English spelling, so there’s no reason to further other Viktor’s particular voice on the page.
MH: Since Heading North is your debut novel, would you mind describing how you navigated the process of debuting?
HW: The only way I could navigate any of this was with a great deal of help. As a debut novelist, I didn’t know what I didn’t know, so I tried to learn as much as I could. Reading Courtney Maum’s Before and After the Book Deal was very helpful, though that book focuses much more on the process of publishing with a large house rather than a small press. I also enrolled in a four-week seminar through the Dallas Writers Workshop on what book publicity was and how it worked, which was brilliantly useful and instrumental in my decision to hire an independent publicist. That publicist helped me navigate the world of organizing readings, connecting with podcasts, pitching companion pieces, and seeking out reviewers. I was also buoyed along the way by a host of writer-friends who were willing to be conversation partners at events, conduct interviews, offer advice, and simply—wonderfully—turn up at things.
The process of being a writer and being an author are very different things; the former is solitary, and the latter is social. Writing a book takes one set of skills and bringing the book into the world takes another, and for most folks, those skills don’t really overlap. So it’s important to reach out to friends and to be willing to let people help, which also means being willing to believe people when they say they want to help! I’m so grateful to the many people who were willing to assist along the way.
Holly M. Wendt is the author of Heading North (Braddock Avenue Books, 2023) and Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lebanon Valley College. Holly is a former Peter Taylor Fellow in Fiction from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and their writing has been supported by the American Antiquarian Society, the Jentel Foundation, Hambidge Center, Sundress Academy for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and others. Their prose has appeared in Passages North, Shenandoah, Barrelhouse, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.
Marah Hoffman is a poetry and creative nonfiction writer from Reading, Pennsylvania. She is an MFA candidate, graduate teaching assistant, and Ecotone reader at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. In the fall of 2022, she was the long-term writer-in-residence at Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA). Hoffman continues to support SAFTA as Creative Director.
