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.
Rob Jacques’s poetry collection Dust and Dragons (Fernwood Press, 2023) is a captivating exploration of the human experience, life’s balance of the good and bad, and the dichotomy between the metaphorical dust and dragons. Of the dust, Jacques writes of the dull and repetitious parts of life with resignation and questioning, but also with a dreamy, wistful tone that seems to relish in the meaningless. Of the dragons, Jacques captures the fear and unpredictable parts of life that make living intoxicating.
Dust and Dragons reflects on the spectrum of struggle and peace that life has to offer; Jacques navigates the complexities between innocence and experience, faith and doubt, love and the illusion of it, as he seeks to understand the intricate experiences of human existence.
In the collection’s name-sake, “Dust and Dragons,” Jacques writes of the way time falls like dirt, “coating, covering human help or hurt, / falling invisibly through air, through the mind” (15). Throughout this first poem of the book, he establishes the definitions and duties of life’s “dust” and “dragons.” With time being a central theme connected to Jacques’ dust metaphor, he analyzes the way time works to cloud like dust, saying,
“See it resting on passion. See it lying about
On love. On hope. On promises and prospects
Formed in the heyday of youth before doubt
Became the norm for all tomorrows.” (15)
Introducing the concept of the metaphorical dragon, Jacques continues,
“Dust previously hiding all things pure and strange,
dust grievously smashed and cleansed away by
dragons, dragons making us awake and aware
painfully, frighteningly, of our being only clay.” (15)
Here, the reader is introduced to the notion that chaos has the capability of revealing. The verses suggest that the chaos symbolized by the dragon’s fire—while highly feared and destructive, it also illuminates, providing clarity.
Using dust to represent the mundane, describing it as “pure and strange,” the dragon’s work as an agent of chaos is introduced to clear the dust away, suggesting that calamity is a necessary evil to live life fully and subsequently fairly. This poem introduces the poignant reflection necessary to chart the rest of collection with, forcing introspection out of the reader and questioning how the one navigates through, or balances the dust and the dragons.
Jacques allows the most natural human experiences to be isolated and picked apart, questioning the significance in insignificance. In “Once Upon a Time…” Jacques writes, “I saw a smile for the first time and I law awhile / in the arms of innocence, in the hands of simplicity, / imagining my early moments” (17). Sometimes the dragons are simple new discoveries, emphasizing the importance of experiencing the world—not just for the sake of growing, but to find new joy.
One of the greatest masterpieces of this collection is “A Good Day,” where Jacques captures the beauty of dust, suggesting that it is foolish to not appreciate the dusty, regular, unexpectant noons. It is thoughtless to assume that just because so many noons are similar that they are not special, that their slowness cannot be great. Jacques eloquently encapsulates these moments, writing,
“I want this noon to be like all noons
dividing light in halves, marking before
and after, sitting midway in diurnal circles,
the morning history, a remembered past,
the afternoon promise, hastening vast.”
…
Give it to me all blank to be written on
with indelible inks of blood and love,
a time never to be relegated to a shelf,
unending palimpsest, living never stayed,
malleable moments ever on parade.” (27)
Exploring the cyclic nature of time, with each noon carrying a piece of the past and a promise of the future, Jacques suggests that each moment carries layers, ongoing, and evolving—building upon what came before to entice what can become. This concept reinforces the idea that moments, even of apparent simplicity, contribute to the richness of living. The call to embrace life, find joy amid its brevity, is recurring throughout Dust and Dragons. Through beautifully lyrical versus, there is encouragement to be fully engaged, to appreciate love, to celebrate moments underscores the philosophy of this work.
The setting of Jacques’s poems are central to many pieces throughout, talking at first of witnessing the earth and the life on it, and then reflecting on it. In “Thatcher Island, Rockport, Massachusetts,” he writes,
“Today we row through danger to picnic,
laugh and dance, play at hiding, unaware
of the panicked, the drowned, the dead
whose bones rot our feet, the remains
of sailors’ forgotten stories abiding there.” (23)
Jacques beckons readers to contemplate the inherent volatility of life, raising the potential of its meaninglessness that paradoxically holds the transformative power to create profound significance. He uses examples like the light that passes through the midday; it never seems to change but has the great power to remind and to promise another noon.
Dust and Dragons outlines the injustice of not living life to the fullest extent possible. Jacques encourages readers to push limits and to discover, to feel pain from the dragons and to feel peace from the dust. A sincerely introspective collection of poetry that forces thought, demands emotion, and inspires action out of its readers, Dust and Dragons is an excellent collection on the depth that life may offer, an ode to resilience, and a celebration of the ordinary.
Caitlin Mulqueen is a senior at the University of Tennessee majoring in English and Journalism. She loves reading, playing piano, watching sports, and the Oxford comma. She has worked as an Editorial Graphics Production intern at ESPN, is a copy editor at The Daily Beacon, a student writer for Tennessee Athletics, a graphics and video operator for the SEC Network, and a marketing/social media intern for the Knoxville Ice Bears. With the majority of her undergraduate work being in sports media, literary media has remained her sincerest passion, finding stories that come out of sports to be as moving as those from literature.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is pleased to announce the guests for the March installment of our reading series, poets Joey Gould and Lenna Mendoza. Join us on Thursday, March 21st at South Press Coffee from 6:00-8:00 PM for a reading followed by an open mic hosted by Shlagha Borah. Sign-up for the open mic begins at 6 PM sharp and is limited to 10-12 readers.
Joey Gould, whose poetry explores faith, grief, longing, birds, & human connection, is SAFTA Spring ’24 Writer in Residence. They wrote The Acute Avian Heart (2019, Lily Poetry Review) & Penitent > Arbiter (2022, Lily Poetry Review), while their recent work has appeared in Meow Meow Pow Pow, Miniskirt Magazine, & beestung. They also serve as Poetry Editor for Drunk Monkeys. They have aided in the planning & execution of both the Massachusetts & New York City Poetry Festivals, while also performing as Izzy Hexxam in the Boston cast of Poetry Society of New York’s Poetry Brothel. Joey writes on location at cool-sounding places like Skunk’s Misery, Mount Desert, and Half Moon Beach.
Lenna Mendoza is a poet from Texas. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Foglifter, Salamander, Four Way Review, and Salt Hill Journal. She currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi, where she is an MFA candidate at the University of Mississippi.
While this is a free event, donations can be made to the Sundress Academy for the Arts here.
Each month we split donations with our community partner. Our community partner for March is Mountain Brigade Access. Mountain Access Brigade is a volunteer-run organization that provides secure and stigma-free support, education, and advocacy for individuals seeking abortion care in Tennessee. Currently, Mountain Access Brigade is fundraising for abortion access in Tennessee. To support their campaign, visit here!
In My Dear Yeast (Milk & Cake Press, 2024), Melanie Hyo-In Han masterfully guides readers far and wide, entering diverse terrains of both landscape and interiority. Han employs a variety of forms to her advantage as well, demonstrating a knowledge of poetics and a courage to approach reality from unexpected, and sometimes challenging, angles. With memory as her painter’s palette and words as her paintbrush, Han shares remarkable and moving truths throughout her debut full length collection.
Home is a central theme throughout My Dear Yeast, grounding Han’s speaker during difficult times. As a Third Culture Kid (TCK), Han can self-identify through multiple geographies. “Waiting for Water in Morogoro,” for example, exhibits incredible detail on daily life in Tanzania. Han invites readers to smell the spices of a mother’s sukuma wiki and feel her speaker’s “red-dirt heels / that have cracked / like the ground” (Han 3). Such sensory descriptions demonstrate how significant a role the body plays with memory and creating an idea of home, whether that home is remembered in a positive, negative, or more nuanced light.
Later in the collection, Han brings readers to Seoul. The poem “Stacked Memories” starts off right away with images of
“Hustle and bustle of lunchtime at Gwangjang Market. Fried chicken feet splayed out,
curled at the ends, rows of hanging chilis in different shades of summer sunset, dried
whole squids piled flat on top of one another, every tentacle preserved and intact.” (Han 23)
The specificity hereis both honest and stunning. Han’s attentiveness and precision across diverse landscapes is unique in the contemporary literary landscape, where so many writers feel pressure to hone in on one singular theme, identity-marker, or experience in order to find depth. Han, on the other hand, achieves both quality and quantity with care and skill.
Some of the maps Han uses to interrogate and explore are linguistic in nature. “Abecedarian in 한글 (Hangul)” puts a clever spin on a form popular in the English language. Instead of each line starting with the letters of the English alphabet in order, Han uses the fourteen consonants of the Korean alphabet. Even more inventive, and since the majority of the poem is in English, individual words are written using both alphabets together. For example, lines start with “ㄴineteen-nineteen” and “ㅅurvival” (Han 36). The hybridity of language employed throughout My Dear Yeast is delightful to explore; they additionally speak to Han’s successes as a translator. Whether readers know Han’s languages or not, the poems ring authentic and powerful.
And yet, home is always a question; at times, what constitutes home for Han is up for interpretation. Other times, when it’s in her grasp, it can later devolve or vanish. “Holding On,” at the heart of the collection, uses a consistent and neat form to allow the speaker access to traumatic memories. Each stanza, placed at a distance from one other, starts very plainly: “in the house at” followed by latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates (Han 20-21). The curious reader like me will pause to look up where these homes are located, to see how they too are scattered across the globe. Because of the emotional intensity of “Holding On,” Han uses an entirely lowercase lettering. She shares what she didn’t know, what she never realized, and what she had to do to survive. The quieter, more intimate tone demonstrates the trust Han is putting in the readers hands, as if she were revealing secrets to an old friend.
The collection ends with “Tell me 사랑해,” a poem that directly acknowledges the speaker’s desire. She craves connection, and despite having lived all over the world, she’s found it, often. But family, even when close, can feel far away. Almost entirely in the voice of the speaker’s grandmother, italicized lines signal all the ways a matriarch expresses love without saying so explicitly:
“Have you eaten? I’ll make you순두부 next time you come home.
Make sure you pay your 집세 on time.
You should read this article about happiness. You’ve been looking우울해 lately.
Do you have enough warm clothes? Why do you never wear enough layers?” (Han 42).
The list goes on, and the poem lands with the speaker replying back, or perhaps more accurately, confessing her desire to the reader:
“It was her way of letting me know
that she cared, but all I
ever wanted was to hear “사랑해.” (Han 42)
This final admittance is an act of vulnerability and bravery earned through the pages of My Dear Yeast that precede it. Through poetic excellence and the excavation of her own memories, she speaks plainly here. The last line is the culmination of all Han’s experiences, emotions, and homes. Hearing “사랑해” (I love you), Han asserts, is home.
Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of the chapbook Honey in My Hair and the Sundress Publications Reads Editor. She earned a Writers’ Room of Boston Poetry Fellowship, Breakwater Review’s 2022 Peseroff Prize, and Second Place in The Room Magazine’s 2023 Poetry Contest. Her writing has found homes in Gasher, Thrush, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from Emerson College, where she now teaches writing and literature. She is a cancer survivor.
Jennifer Funk’s poetry collection, Fantasy of Loving the Fantasy (Bull City Press, 2023) is a hypnotic journey through daydreams with undertones that reflect the fear and courage it takes to hope for more. From the glorious to the spiteful, the wistful to the contemplative, each poem is a compelling fantasy and a sincere exploration of wishes that linger in the recesses of our mind. Funk invites readers to dream along, to consider their wildest fantasies alongside their sincerest wishes as she touches on themes of self-love, self-doubt, and the complex emotions associated with yearning for something while grappling with the reluctance to admit those desires, nor truly wanting to see them through.
Funk’s tone throughout the collection is strikingly authentic. There is originality to the words she writes, yet they are still somehow familiar as she captures the wondrous nature of fantasy. In “Lady Brett Ashley,” Funk writes, “It seems impossible / for a woman to live without / a little fiction” (34), which seems to be the perfect explanation for the impossible familiarity a reader feels towards the fantasies of others.
Funk begins with “Make Me Familiar,” its story transporting readers to the hues of August. This establishes the general hazy, wistful aesthetic that resonates with the thoughts that come when staring out a window on a warm day. Funk writes, “I can find myself, creature of terminal haste, creature / ever mid-stride, reconsidering the world in the middle of the road” (4). Her style weaves together reflection and reverie as her speaker embarks on fantasy.
“Origin Story: 1” establishes the necessity of daydreams—their roots and desires that elude reality. Funk writes, “I am from the hot feelings / my mother suggested might ruin me the way / they ruined her, so I kept a meticulous record / of the fires I started” (Funk 12). This disclosure is central to the collection’s embrace of reverie, and the symbol of fire returns in the end of the collection with new meaning– a symbol of destruction turned into one of rebirth.
The range of fantasies displayed throughout this collection is outstanding. In “I Run Down All Roads,” Funk writes a testament to the fragility of romantic hopes. She captures the illusions that lead nowhere, the bitterness of unmet expectation:
“I go into every maybe this time already ahead
of the story, which is real, or not real, is real as the fog now
blurring the view ahead…
I run down the future, I am so so fast,
I chase down would you want to, I pant, I pant, I cannot be caught, I am not
being chased, it will never be as good as this. Silence. Eating alone.” (Funk 19)
Funk encapsualtes the dichotomy of yearning for an idealized love and the reality that follows. The acknowledgement that “it will never be as good as this” highlights the way reality cannot satiate a preference for what is fantastical. “Silence. Eating alone” paints a poignant picture of the solitude in the aftermath of unfulfilled wishes. Funk gives way to quiet, solitary reality.
The slightly sinister quality in these intense imaginations lies in the recognition of the darker side of daydreams. Funk’s awareness makes for a complex and multi-dimensional narrative. She doesn’t shy away from the matter of self-deception and emotional tolls.
Funk begins to close the circle of fantasy with “Consent,” navigating the societal expectations that often shroud our imagination. She writes,
“But I could be
caught, I could be lightning
Directed, flash inanimate. Out beyond
These walls…
I want to say
I never assented to any role I was not fully certain I could sell
but I, too, am susceptible to the suspicion I should be
dumb and grateful, like a cow or a potted plant.” (Funk 15)
The candid admission to the conflict between autonomy and conformity is a strong reflection on the external pressures that rouse one from a daydream, the consideration that it is selfish to wish for more, but impossible not to.
In “Who Can Say,” Funk writes, “This tight circle of my life. I have been intent to wish for less,/ and what has this restraint cost, what has been left uncalled for” (40). She still asks the reader if the cost of hoping in vain is greater than the cost of hoping for less altogether.
Fantasy of Loving the Fantasy is a fantastic collection that captures the essence of wanting and waiting. Funk’s ability to articulate the little things we all have dreamt about makes this collection a must-read for anyone looking to understand the landscape of their desires.
Caitlin Mulqueen is a senior at the University of Tennessee majoring in English and Journalism. She loves reading, playing piano, watching sports, and the Oxford comma. She has worked as an Editorial Graphics Production intern at ESPN, is a copy editor at The Daily Beacon, a student writer for Tennessee Athletics, a graphics and video operator for the SEC Network, and a marketing/social media intern for the Knoxville Ice Bears. With the majority of her undergraduate work being in sports media, literary media has remained her sincerest passion, finding stories that come out of sports to be as moving as those from literature.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present Poetry Xfit hosted by Emory Dinsmore. This generative workshop event will take place on Sunday, March 17th from 2 to 4PM 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!
Emory Night is a queer author from East Tennessee. They are currently a Senior at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and are working on getting their bachelor’s in creative writing. They have worked as an intern for both Sundress Publications and SAFTA. They have been published in The Phoenix, a literary magazine at the University of Tennessee. During their free time, you’ll find them hanging out with their cats, playing Dungeons and Dragons, or playing video games.
Each month we split donations with our community partner. Our community partner for March is Mountain Brigade Access. Mountain Access Brigade is a volunteer-run organization that provides secure and stigma-free support, education, and advocacy for individuals seeking abortion care in Tennessee. Currently, Mountain Access Brigade is fundraising for abortion access in Tennessee. To support their campaign, visit here!
Knoxville, TN— The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “Strange Ways the World Might Be,” a workshop led by Becca Hannigan on March 13th, 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).
You’ve likely heard of magical realism, but what about realism that’s simply strange? In this workshop, we will consider how fiction and nonfiction can—quite simply—“describe strange ways the world might be,” as one critic defines fiction by Samanta Schweblin. One way to do this—which we will practice—is to strip objects and social norms from their context, to examine and experience them phenomenally.
Together, will question assumptions and unpack cultural baggage, using “widowed images” and surprising narratives. Along with Schweblin, we will draw inspiration from such writers as Franz Kafka, Lesley Nnekah Arimah, and Martha Gelhorn, looking at the history of absurdism (with nihilistic roots) and the contemporary absurd, which (I argue) is the opposite of nihilistic. The class will be generative, with ample writing prompts, discussion, and time to share. Together, we will blur genres, producing and admiring prose that you might call surrealism, absurdism, or just plain weird.
While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, those who are able and appreciative may make donations directly to Becca Hannigan via Venmo @beccahannigan.
Becca Hannigan is a fiction writer based in Denver, Colorado. They earned a BA in environmental science at Sewanee, the University of the South. In May 2023, they graduated with an MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where they taught undergraduate students and worked as fiction editor for Ecotone. Along with teaching, she has led workshops in various settings, as an intern for the Brink Literacy Project and staff at the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference. Her work has been published in Story Quarterly, the Rumpus, 303 Magazine, Juked, and elsewhere.
Welcome back to Lyric Essentials, where we invite authors to share the work of their favorite poets. This month, Ashley Hajimirsadeghi (former Lyric Essentials editor and an all-around Sundress staff contributor!) joins us to discuss the work of Kim Hyesoon and the importance of female poetry, translation, and how everyone needs a break at submitting to marinate in ideas. As always, we hope you enjoy as much as we did.
Ryleigh Wann: When was the first time you read Kim Hyesoon’s work? Why did it stand out to you then?
Ashley Hajimirsadeghi: The first time I read Kim Hyesoon I was a freshman in college. I’d just moved back from South Korea after studying Korean at Ewha Womans University, and to curb the sadness of leaving behind a country I really loved, I was finding all of these ways to stay connected to the culture. I purchased a copy of Kim’s Autobiography of Death on a whim after reading about how she was one of the leading female poets in Korea–and one of the few who gets translated and brought into broader international discussions of literature made by Korean women.
What struck me then–and still strikes me–is how experimental Kim is with her work, and how unapologetically female it is. Autobiography of Death is specifically a reaction to the Sewol tragedy in 2014, but Kim generally uses the grotesque in a way that reminds me of abject theory, of artists like Meret Oppenheim and Cindy Sherman. It’s something I began to realize as an eighteen-year-old and now study today.
AH: I really do believe reading the work of women writers like Kim Hyesoon really helped hone in this instinct to focus on women’s stories. It was by consuming stories like these that I realized as a writer I was more comfortable anchoring pieces in narratives versus abstract concepts–and because of that, I began to lean more into documentary and ethnographic poetics. Reading Kim’s work also reminded me of translation and the power behind who and what gets translated–I wanted more from Korean women writers, and while we’re going through quite a bit of a Korean culture renaissance recently, it made me realize I wanted to read more broadly and translate myself. So I do Bengali poetry translations in my free time with books I sourced from a Bangladeshi bookstore owner in Jackson Heights, Queens. You learn a lot about language, power, and intentionality when you do this kind of work.
RW: Your chapbook, Cartography of Trauma, has a beautiful cover and title. What does this collection explore and what was your writing process like?
AH: Ironically, a lot of these poems are from high school and beginning of college. When it comes to exploration, I was in the beginning stages of thinking about how trauma is a ripple effect across periods, and I wanted to really hone in on women’s experiences. I have a tendency to blur fiction with reality, while delving into history, but I want to be really intentional and careful with the work I’m doing. Some of it is personal, some of it is research, but with fictional bends. I say I’m an accidental poet; I was a devoted fiction writer who kind of fell into this.
RW: What have you been up to lately (life, work, anything!)? Got any news to share?
AH: Right now I’m in my third semester of graduate school and preparing for my thesis. It’s going to be on colonial Korean women’s literature, so writers like Kim Myeong-sun, and this concept of hybridity as a form of self-expression for those suffering from the double colonization involved with the patriarchy. I’m trying to turn this into a digital humanities project, so maybe I’ll open it up to broader Asian feminist writers like Qiu Jin (if I have the energy).
Besides that, I’ve been taking a cute little break from submitting to marinate in my ideas and writing. I find it so liberating to step away from the submitting grind and just write. I’ve been doing this a lot more lately, and I think it’s helped my practice as a writer.
Kim Hyesoon is one of the most influential contemporary poets of South Korea. She is the first female poet to receive the prestigious Midang and Kim Su-yong awards, and her collections include I’m OK, I’m Pig! (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), Poor Love Machine (Action Books, 2016), and Autobiography of Death (New Directions, 2018). Kim lives in Seoul and teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.
Ashley Hajimirsadeghi is an Iranian American multimedia artist, writer, and journalist currently pursuing an M.A. in Global Humanities at Towson University. Her writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Passages North, The Cortland Review, Salamander, RHINO, Salt Hill, and The Journal, among others. She is the Co-Editor-in-Chief at Mud Season Review, a former Brooklyn Poets Fellow, and a contributing writer and film critic at MovieWeb. She can be found at www.ashleyhajimirsadeghi.com // Instagram: @nassarine
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
In a speech I was forced to give at the end of my senior year of high school, I spoke about books and the way that the stories I read growing up showed me how to be. To articulate my point, I used a quote from a young adult novel in which the plot centered around demon-hunting teenagers tasked with saving the world. The crowd did not need to know that fact. What they instead knew was that the book that I was quoting was entirely correct, irrespective of the absurdity of its plotline. The quote being, “One must always be careful of books and what is inside of them, for words have the power to change us.”
Now, as a senior in college, those words remain as true as they were back then. Reading gave me perspective, an imagination, aspirations, and a world beyond the comfort of my hometown. I could sit on a bench in my neighborhood and read about examples of bravery, war, love, betrayal, and triumph—and I did, because these things were not happening in Bradenton, Florida. Trust me, I looked.
I scoured swampy tree lines for vampires, werewolves, and any other supernatural being that might present itself. I opened many doors searching for Narnia, stared at the base of tree trunks wishing for rabbit holes to appear, directing me towards Wonderland. I waited for the letter summoning me to Hogwarts. Instead, I found retention ponds, alligators, and summer afternoons that were averagely above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. After doing my audit on the extraordinary, I came to the conclusion that magic, if it did exist, was not willing to present itself to me unless it were in the form of a couple hundred pages at a time. A childhood that was wondrous in its own right was made magical through literature. I was never “The Chosen One,” but I sure loved reading about them.
I am often thankful that the illustrated version of Alice In Wonderland was available in my elementary school library, because I was able to read the words “Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” setting a standard for imagination.
My love for stories and storytelling have brought me everywhere I’ve dreamed. Most unexpectedly, I realized that sports offer some of the greatest stories of the real world—triumph, tragedy, unimaginable loss, and unbelievable comeback.
For me, literature transcends the boundaries of reality, transforming ordinary moments into extraordinary tales. When it rains and thunders, I cannot help but joke to my friends that this is the sort of weather that vampires prefer for a baseball game—a joke about the iconic scene from Twilight.
In a book, words can create a world, a person, a feeling. If that is not magic, then I am unsure what could ever constitute. And so, how could one not want to work with literature and stories? I am thrilled to be starting this internship with Sundress Publications as I enter my final semester of college. It is a pleasure to delve deeper into the enchanting worlds of literature and in this final chapter of my academic journey, I am eager to contribute to the literary industry where each story holds the power to change us.
Caitlin Mulqueen is a senior at the University of Tennessee majoring in English and Journalism. She loves reading, playing piano, watching sports, and the Oxford comma. She has worked as an Editorial Graphics Production intern at ESPN, is a copy editor at The Daily Beacon, a student writer for Tennessee Athletics, a graphics and video operator for the SEC Network, and a marketing/social media intern for the Knoxville Ice Bears. With the majority of her undergraduate work being in sports media, literary media has remained her sincerest passion, finding stories that come out of sports to be as moving as those from literature.
