Sundress Publications is an entirely volunteer-run 501(c)(3) nonprofit publishing collective founded in 2000 that hosts a variety of online journals and publishes chapbooks, full-length collections, and literary anthologies in both print and digital formats. Sundress also publishes the annual Best of the Net Anthology, celebrating the best work published online, runs Poets in Pajamas, an online reading series, and the Sundress Workshop Series which offers free virtual writers workshops.

The social media internship position will run from January 1 to July 1, 2022. The intern’s responsibilities include scheduling and posting promotional materials on our social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram), maintaining our newsletter, and promoting our various open reading periods, workshops, readings, and catalog of titles. This will also include creating promotional graphics, digital flyers, logos, and social media images. Applicants for this internship must be self-motivated and be able to work on a strict deadline.

Preferred qualifications include:

• Familiarity with Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, and/or Canva
• Familiarity with social media scheduling tools
• Ability to work under a deadline and multitask
• Strong written communication skills
• Knowledge of and interest in contemporary literature a plus

This is a REMOTE internship with the team communicating primarily via email and text messages and is therefore not restricted to applicants living in any particular geographic area. Interns are asked to devote up to 10 hours per week to their assignments.

While this is an unpaid internship, all interns will gain real-world experience of the ins and outs of independent publishing with a nationally recognized press while creating a portfolio of work for future employment opportunities. Interns will also be able to attend all retreats and residencies at the Sundress Academy for the Arts at a significantly discounted cost.

We welcome, encourage, and are enthusiastic to see a diverse array of applicants in all areas, including race, ethnicity, disability, gender, class, religion, education, immigration status, age, and more.

To apply, please send a resume and cover letter detailing your interest in the position to Staff Director Kanika Lawton at sundressstaffdirector@gmail.com by November 20, 2021.

A detailed application and interview guide can be found at: http://www.sundresspublications.com/internguide.pdf

Sundress Publications is an entirely volunteer-run 501(c)(3) nonprofit publishing collective founded in 2000 that hosts a variety of online journals and publishes chapbooks, full-length collections, and literary anthologies in both print and digital formats. Sundress also publishes the annual Best of the Net Anthology, celebrating the best work published online, runs Poets in Pajamas, an online reading series, and the Sundress Workshop Series which offers free virtual writers workshops.

The editorial internship position will run from January 1 to July 1, 2022. The editorial intern’s responsibilities can include writing press releases, composing blog posts and promotional emails, proofreading manuscripts, assembling press kits, collating editorial data, research, managing spreadsheets, and more. The intern may also be responsible for writing copy, conducting interviews with Sundress authors, reviewing newly released books, and promoting our catalog of titles.

Preferred qualifications include:

• A keen eye for proofreading
• Strong written communication skills
• Familiarity with WordPress, Microsoft Word, and Google Suite
• Ability to work under a deadline and multitask
• Knowledge of and interest in contemporary literature a plus

This is a REMOTE internship with the team communicating primarily via email and text messages and is therefore not restricted to applicants living in any particular geographic area. Interns are asked to devote up to 10 hours per week to their assignments.

While this is an unpaid internship, all interns will gain real-world experience of the ins and outs of independent publishing with a nationally recognized press while creating a portfolio of work for future employment opportunities. Interns will also be able to attend all retreats and residencies at the Sundress Academy for the Arts at a significantly discounted cost.

We welcome, encourage, and are enthusiastic to see a diverse array of applicants in all areas, including race, ethnicity, disability, gender, class, religion, education, immigration status, and more.

To apply, please send a resume and cover letter detailing your interest in the position to Staff Director Kanika Lawton at sundressstaffdirector@gmail.com by November 20, 2021.

A detailed application and interview guide can be found at: http://www.sundresspublications.com/internguide.pdf

Dayna Ellen Patterson excavates her family tree in If Mother Braids a Waterfall (Signature Books, 2020), digging into her roots to understand her ancestors and the religion she was born into. Through her poetry, Patterson seeks to understand the intricacy of heritage and genealogy, the burden of carrying the past into the future without knowing every detail, every piece that makes a person whole.

A unique addition to the poetry collection is a family tree which acts as a preface, introducing the readers to the complex nature of her Mormon genealogy beginning four generations ago. The slow pacing of the opening poem is reflective of the rest of collection. It sets the background for If Mother Braids a Waterfall, acting as a summary for the pieces that follow. In this way, Patterson comes full circle by visiting each point made in the beginning. The poem itself is beautiful, impactful, and holds a significant purpose in the overall book.  

The following piece, “Ode To Polygamy”, interestingly sets the tone and focus for the rest of the book; this is where the reader comes to understand that Patterson is seeking to make sense of the past. It is also where Patterson recognizes that her existence is an accumulation of the ancestors that came before her, that she is made up of every piece of her family history including the parts she doesn’t like. “Ode to Polygamy” is characterized by Patterson’s passion, candour, and reaches brilliance through her story-telling techniques. 

This piece also provides more background to the practice of polygamy. We see her attempt to justify the practice and cure the dissonance she feels between her own preferences and this part of her ancestral history. Polygamy returns frequently throughout If Mother Braids a Waterfall, alongside Patterson’s fear of it and her own jealousy. 

Many of my favourite pieces from this collection were of Patterson’s letters to different ancestors and some historical figures. Mentions of polygamy occur the most in these letters as she asks her family members how they coped, how they lived, what they thought of each other. What made me enjoy these poems though were Patterson’s lyrical and emotional writing. In “Dear May”, Patterson writes “You said the poet needs / no religion, that poetry and spirituality are redundant. / You rebaptized yourself with language, reconfirmed a tongue / of fire settling Pentecostal on your word-wilding art. Yours is the  / legacy I would name myself to, would willingly inherit. Yours / the prayer I would pray, an orison of sound and sense and shape.” Each word of this poem is so clearly intentional, so carefully crafted. The genuine passion of this piece turns it into a prayer itself. 

As the book progresses, it seems to capture her gradual transition from believing to questioning her faith to leaving the church behind. We see that her departure from Mormonism is influenced by many different experiences. She mentions her daughters questioning the exclusion of women in church positions, rituals, and rites, and struggles with her inability to answer them. In “Proselytizing by a Marian Shrine in Québec”, she speaks of her missionary trip in Montreal, where she meets a follower of Mary and asks “How can I, a traveller here, a woman, / ask these devotees to abandon Mary?”. There is also a recognition and appreciation of other religions and mythologies in “Former Mormons Catechize Their Kids”. This poem is a turning point in Patterson’s journey and in the collection as it is followed by a strong sense of awareness. In “Dear Susannah (2)”, her typically warm letters to her ancestors take on a bitter tone and Patterson directly names the colonial violence perpetrated by her white settler ancestors against Indigenous peoples. From this point on, Patterson’s poems depict the distance between her and her religion; she writes about the little things she had to do to adjust to a life outside of Mormonism as well as how and what she had to unlearn and relearn.

Dayna Ellen Patterson shows brilliant promise in If Mother Braids a Waterfall. Her complicated lineage and religious journey are wonderfully captured by her poetry and when she leans into her story-telling abilities, her writing is transportive. If Mother Braids a Waterfall is a good rainy day read for when you want to relax and reflect—especially for those interested in ancestry, migrant stories, and deep analyses of religion. I hope to read more of Patterson’s work in the future and to see her delve deeper.

If Mother Braids A Waterfall is available at Signature Books

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Iqra Abid (she/her) is a young, Pakistani, Muslim writer based in Canada. She is currently a student at McMaster University studying Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour. She is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Kiwi Collective Magazine. Her work can be found in various publications such as Stone Fruit Magazine, Tiny Spoon Lit Magazine, Scorpion Magazine, and more. You can find her on Instagram at @iqraabidpoetry.

Originally released in 2004, Samantha Hunt’s first novel, The Seas, was republished in 2018 by Tin House. It’s hard to believe that The Seas might be anyone’s first anything. The story moves masterfully, manipulatively, and with wicked, charming calculation at every turn. In her introduction to the 2018 edition of the novel, writer Maggie Nelson muses with regard to The Seas, “You know the feeling when you…suddenly find that a book has become more than a book, it’s become a talisman, something precious. A little scary, a little holy.” With The Seas, Samantha Hunt has given readers a gift—one that’s certainly scary and undoubtedly holy. 

The book’s story can easily be categorized as magical realism—but it’s a strange and beautiful thing to consider how much of this feeling comes from the more tangible realities Hunt constructs, versus from the story’s unusual narrator. The surreal nature of the story and its realities combined with the dreamy, disconnected essence of our narrator leads readers to enter a derealized state in which we’re swept along completely with the flow, completely without the ability to stop or even paddle for ourselves—similar in some ways to the feeling of existing in grief, or love. Or both. 

The novel itself begins with a section entitled, “THE MAP: A PROLOGUE.” In it, our narrator details the physical layout of her town—and the constraining social dynamics of it. “The highway only goes south from here,” she begins. “If you were to try to leave, people who have known you since the day you were born would recognize your car and see you leaving…It would be much easier to stay.” In these first paragraphs, despite the seemingly boundless, shifting quality brought on by the magical and unearthly elements of the story, our narrator lets us know that the boundaries she’s facing—the same ones we’re facing with her—are hard and fast. Those who fall within the physical boundaries are Here. Those who don’t are Gone. In laying this map, this “prologue,” the story’s narrator gives us the physical lay of her land; she also creates a feeling of being kept, and a glimmer of what it may mean to escape. 

Through elegant symbolism and remarkable narrative voice, Hunt explores love and grief and sanity in, remarkably, one fell swoop.  At once viscerally grounded and entirely unhinged, Hunt provides readers with a sense of being swept out with the tides; she provides both a feeling of constantly losing our footing, while feeling sure that this is where we ought to be—here, reading this book, feeling these things. For those willing to be swept away, dragged under, and washed ashore, The Seas is uncomfortable, wonderful, violent, romantic, and haunting. I’ll be careful never to stow it on too high a shelf.

Order your copy of The Seas.

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Kathryn Davis is a writer and editor from Michigan, as well as one of two current Sundress Academy for the Arts interns. She graduated in 2018 from Grand Valley State University, where she studied Creative Writing with an emphasis in Fiction, and served as editor-in-chief of the university’s literary journal, fishladder. She enjoys photography, her cats, and her dog (who might as well be a cat). You can follow her on Twitter at @kathrvndavis.

The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is pleased to announce the guests for the September installment of our virtual reading series. This event will take place on Wednesday, September 29, 2021 on Zoom (http://tiny.utk.edu/sundress, password: safta) from 7-8PM EST.

Laura Passin is the author of Borrowing Your Body (Riot in Your Throat, 2021) and All Sex and No Story (Rabbit Catastrophe Press). She earned her PhD in English Literature at Northwestern and her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Oregon. Her writing has appeared in a wide range of publications, including Prairie Schooner, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Toast, Rolling Stone, Electric Literature, and Best New Poets. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart prize and Best of the Net anthology. Laura lives in Denver with too many pets.

Susan Nguyen hails from Virginia but currently lives and writes in Arizona. She earned her MFA in Poetry from Arizona State University, where she won the Aleida Rodriguez Memorial Prize and fellowships from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. In 2018, PBS NewsHour named her one of “three women poets to watch.” Her work appears in diagram, Tin House, and elsewhere. She writes a lot about identity, the body, and the Vietnamese diaspora and also likes to make zines. Her debut collection, Dear Diaspora, won the 2020 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was published by the University of Nebraska Press on September 1, 2021.

Robin Rosen Chang is the author of the full-length poetry collection, The Curator’s Notes (Terrapin Books, 2021). Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Journal, Diode, North American Review, Poet Lore, Cream City Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and other literary journals and anthologies. She is the recipient of the Oregon Poetry Association’s Fall 2018 Poets’ Choice Award, an honorable mention for Spoon River Poetry Review’s 2019 Editors’ Prize, and a 2021 Pushcart nominee. She has an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Everything about Maggie Smith’s Goldenrod (One Signal Publishers, 2021) feels warm. Seeped in floral and faunal language and set against the arcadian landscapes of Smith’s native Ohio, even frigid aspects of the human condition (death, aging, divorce, sickness, motherly fears) feel more approachable and easy to dissect. In her three-part collection of poems, Smith contemplates such universal and confounding concepts as birth, death, motherhood, loneliness, and perseverance: “I’ve started calling the hum / the soul. Today I have to hold / my breath to hear it,” (“The Hum”) “If you feel yourself receding, receding, / and don’t tell anyone until you’re gone,” (“Poem Beginning with a Retweet”) “We birth the new citizens / & answer their bodies with our bodies,” (“Interrogators of Orchids”).

Upon first reading, we can effortlessly and vividly envision Smith interacting with the personifications of her familiar midwestern environment like they are wordless, wisened friends who, quite possibly, hold all great secrets of the universe. In “Starlings,” Smith writes: “Near the river’s edge, one birch holds a knot so much / like an eye, you think it sees you.” In “Junk Trees”: “False spring, too, is junk, not science. It serves us right / for asking trees to tell us the time.” Smith seamlessly blends her own body with the environment, sometimes unsure where the former ends and the latter begins– from “Poor Sheep”: “I’m reading too much / into the landscape again … My skin, / all forest and manifestation / of the interior. You can see / the mountains through me.”

Smith’s three “Marriage/Divorce” poems, which chronicle her divorce and its effects on her children, are sprinkled throughout the collection as brief musings on absence, renewal, and letting go. In the first, she likens her waning marriage to an overgrown backyard: “Late in the season, we sit ankle-deep / in weeds and flowers. In weeds we call flowers.” It is the kind of poem that can be appreciated by divorced parents and their children alike.

Recurring animals, plants, people, and places are diffused throughout Smith’s collection like increasingly familiar, charming characters. However, nothing appears more frequently than her two children; we see them grow, navigate, and “love by questioning” all while unknowingly informing their mother’s craft. Despite their differences in age, each individual seeks to understand their flawed, cruel, and mystifying world. Nonetheless, Smith includes the pain of knowing she cannot always protect them from it. In ”Half Staff” she asks: “Why don’t we leave / the flags at half-staff / & save ourselves / the trouble?”

Undoubtedly, Smith understands the importance of questioning and not knowing. “So often / the mind whispers / to the body, I am not / safe here, & the body / never bothers / to answer. Because / what could it say?” she she ponders in “Half Staff.” In “Poem Beginning with a Line from Bashō,” she asks: “How can something stand / for years, and then–? Just like that? / Where the roof was, all this night.”

By the final pages, instead of answers and conclusions, we find little solaces in how Smith has made peace with her anxieties and herself. In “Bride,” we find Smith “Married less / to the man than to the woman / silvering in the mirror.” Goldenrod offers a view of a mother’s mind with a refreshing dose of uncertainty, though not necessarily without the warmth of optimism.

Goldenrod is available through IndieBound.

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Alexa White is a senior at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the city where she grew up, and is pursuing a BA in Creative Writing with a Studio Art minor. She has enjoyed reading and writing, especially poetry, for most of her life and has had both art and poetry published in UTK’s Phoenix literary magazine.