Caroline Mar’s Dream of the Lake (Bull City Press, 2022) explores the implications of generational trauma and the ways in which it manifests. This poetry collection captures the heaviness of grief that runs deep in the blood in conversation with the Chinese railroad workers who lost their lives during construction. Mar’s use of water metaphor embodies the absence of those lost and the ache that flows through those left behind.

The speaker questions their own identity and what loss means for them almost immediately, posing the question early on, “Where can I set this inheritance down?” Mar demonstrates this internal struggle of knowing who you are, and grappling with parts of yourself that have been missing for so long. Going on, the loss of breathing and feeling of confinement act as a parallel between the physicality of actual death in relation to the speaker’s identity. These drowning sensations turn the speaker’s grief into a pain that is visual, noting “It takes a certain force to move your limbs // as you tread water.”

In a thread of poems, Mar takes a more visceral approach in portraying the parallel between physicality and mentality through the process of drowning. The first stage captures the newness of feeling someone’s death, a fresh wound, as the speaker writes, “I have felt this shock in my own body. The delicate line // between body and brain” and “: fear of being found // : fear of being found too late.” In the second stage, Mar demonstrates the disconnect from the nature of drowning to the speaker’s own denial to tragedy. “When the waters rose, the forest stayed…” and “Sometimes a person isn’t a person at all, but a weight // to be freighted onto someone else’s shoulder” show how isolating numbness can be, and how sometimes, that’s all that can be felt when we carry our trauma with us.

One thing about loss is that you mull over all the different ways you lost that part of yourself. After establishing the initial drowning stages, the speaker revisits the rest of the natural world and elucidates the elements of grief through naturalistic imagery. Mar creates a longing for what once was through the ways the speaker interacts in the world, writing “… & look // I’ve become this // for you,” and later “it slips through one’s fingers even // if you press them tight.” Following closely, the pursuit of picking up those pieces of identity and rediscovering oneself after loss is seen here: “an ocean away from where you are not // a guest // where are you from // people ask me // ask people who look // like me.”

“Correspondence,” a nineteen-page prose piece, addresses the devastation of the speaker’s loss through a plethora of unanswered questions, encapsulating the whirlwind of acceptance of knowing you have to live with your grief. Mar addresses the unrest left by someone’s absence, “No body means nobody to bury // no body // to call home,” and the ways in which we look to fill those gaps, “Heaven could be the color of this water // at precisely twenty-two feet deep.” The evolution of the speaker’s grief comes full circle when they answer their own query, “I know the answers. There are // no answers. I am the only // possible outcome here.”

Dream of the Lake redefines what it means to live through generational grief, and how, in turn, ancestral pain lives through us. Mar shows us how our pain takes shape within multiple facets of grief, each one irrevocably lasting.

Purchase Dream of the Lake here!

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Zoe Sweet is a junior at Widener University, where she is a double major of English and Political Science with a minor in Legal Studies and Analysis. She is the vice president of her school’s literary journal, along with being on the executive board or a general member of a multitude of other clubs and activities. When not studying or working, she is active on campus, volunteers in the local prison, and spends time with friends. She loves reading and writing, and hopes one day to be a judge. 

The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is now accepting applications for short-term writing residencies in all genres—poetry, fiction, nonfiction, playwriting, screenwriting, journalism, academic writing, and more—for their fall residency period which runs from August 21st to December 31st, 2023. These residencies are intended to provide writers with the time and space they need to finish their creative ideas in a peaceful and effective environment.

Each farmhouse residency is $300/week, covering a private room as well as access to our shared kitchen, bathroom, office, and living area, plus wireless internet. Writers Coop residencies are $150/week and include your own private dry cabin in addition to access to the farmhouse amenities. Due to the low cost, we rarely are able to provide scholarships for Writers Coop residents.

Residents will stay at the SAFTA farmhouse, located on a working farm on a 45-acre wooded plot in a Tennessee “holler” perfect for hiking, camping, and nature walks. The farmhouse is a half-hour drive from Knoxville, a vibrant city with a strong literary and artistic community. For writers seeking a rural retreat with urban amenities, SAFTA is ideal.

SAFTA’s residencies offer a unique and engaging experience in addition to free access to workshops, readings, and events. Residents can participate in local writing workshops, lead their own workshops, and have the opportunity to acquire life skills like gardening and animal care.

As part of our commitment to anti-racist work, we use a reparations payment model for our farmhouse residencies which consists of the following:

1) 3 reparations weeks of equally divided payments for Black and/or Indigenous identifying writers at $150/week
2) 3 discounted weeks of equally divided payments for BIPOC writers at $250/week
3) 6 equitable weeks of equally divided payments at $300/week

Black and/or Indigenous identifying writers are also invited to apply for a $350 support grant to help cover the costs of food, travel, childcare, and/or any other needs while they are at the residency. We are currently able to offer two of these grants per residency period (spring/summer/fall). If you would like to donate to expand this funding, you may do so on our website.

For the 2023 Fall Residency Period, SAFTA will be offering the following fellowships:

● Fellowships for Women & Nonbinary Writers: one full and one 50% fellowship for women and nonbinary writers
● Fellowship for Black & Indigenous Writers: one full fellowship for Black and/or Indigenous identifying writers
● Limited partial scholarships are also available to any applicant with financial need.

The application deadline for the fall residency period is May 1st, 2023. Find out more about the application process here.

The application fee is waived for all writers of color. For all fellowship applications, the application fee will also be waived for those who demonstrate financial need. All other application fees will go directly towards travel grants for Black and/or Indigenous writers.

Made by the Sea and Wood, In Darkness is Alexandros Plasatis’s first novel. Published in 2021 by Spuyten Duyvil and shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize, the novel does more than carry you to Kavala, a city located in Greece, but transports you into the lives of locals and immigrants through language, setting, nature, and most of all, food. Told with both lyrical and crude language, Plasatis does not pull punches in those 226 pages and expresses a clarity of his hometown that is captivating to watch.

Framed between two main characters, Pavlo and Angie, the novel begins at its most critical location: Café Papaya. Café Papaya is inhabited by many locals, most importantly the Greek and Egyptian fishermen. Both locals, Pavlo and Angie work at the café and are drawn to the workers. The café becomes a sacred place in the narrative and is centered in nearly all conflicts.

A single chapter is filled with multiple sections where Pavlo and four Egyptian fishermen tell stories about women; the dialogue is crude and often harsh. But at the end of the chapter, the narration pulls back, and the reader is left with this:  

It would dawn soon, and each man had to take his own way home and face the reality of the day, the misery of their single beds. Tired, they sat back around the round table, just to enjoy for a little longer this sweet summer night, remembering with pleasure the stories they’ve shared, sucking back the smoke of a last cigarette, feeling free.

The writing turns lyrical and melancholy as the men reflect on their bond and the place they have shared their stories in. The entire novel is made of shared stories. Though Pavlo and Angie are the main characters, they are a device used to tell the immigrants’ and locals’ stories through.

One night Angie is working and begins talking to One Arm (aptly named because he has only one arm). He tells her how he became a fisherman and how he came to Greece from Egypt. Mentioned in nearly every story are caïques, a traditional fishing boat. They are described with romantic imagery and the reader imagines boats coming from the distant sea, lighting up the night. One Arm has a different description of the place where he makes his life’s work. “‘Army is fire and caïque is fire. I say to myself, “What the hell is this? Better die.” I want a bit of life: buy clothes, go to the disco, go with, you know, women. I want to taste some of the good life.’” He tells his life story with a melancholy that warns against romanticization and yet can’t help but do it to itself, anyway.

Set in a café, it is only natural that food becomes an important part of the narrative. The names of the food alone are enough to make someone’s mouth water, but it does more than that—it creates a rich air, characterized by the culture of the food. Sprinkled throughout one single chapter are foods like “‘Two spaghetti carbonara, one tortellini carbonara, one baked manouri cheese stuffed with red pepper and bacon,’” and “‘One fried tigania souvlaki in white wine and mustard sauce, one grilled lamb chops with fries, tomato-cucumber salad without the onions but with olives—with the olives—one retsina, one coke.’” This chapter follows Pavlo and his boss in an excruciatingly long night as they interact with the customers of the café. Filled with abuse against prostitutes and complicated orders and customers who seem bent against Pavlo, the reader gets a taste of the underground life of Kavala. A group of men arrive and tell Pavlo they want a traditional Greek soup. “Oh, no, they were patsa soup enthusiasts… Stay cool, Pavlo. They’ll try to intimidate you with their knowledge of patsa soup, but you can handle them. Stay cool.” Despite the mundane-ness and comical air of the situation, there is tension between Pavlo and the customers. These things matter.

The main draw of Made by the Sea and Wood, In Darkness is the variance between all the stories told. The connecting thread—life of the locals and immigrants in Kavala—does not get tiring to read because each character stands out. Talked about endlessly, it seems only fitting that the novel should end on a caïque as the fishermen take Angie out to sea to witness what they experience, every shift. She thinks about how other locals wouldn’t dare to go out to sea with the Egyptians, about how their lives are immensely different and yet similar. After the voyage, the narrator says, “She kept on listening with pleasure to the tales of the Egyptian fishermen at the café. She listened and learned, and learned again about their lives.” But still, her gaze is drawn to the caïques and what lay beyond it.

Made by the Sea and Wood, In Darkness is available at Spuyten Duyvil

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Amber Beck (she/her) is a writer with an MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing from Chatham University. She has been published in Calliope, Rejection Letters, Bindweed Magazine, Poets.org, and has a forthcoming piece with Bone Parade. She won second place in a Florida statewide writing contest, first place in NEA Big Read’s writing contest, and won the 2022 Laurie Mansell Reich Poetry Prize. She has worked as an editor for The Fourth River, 101 Words, and Chatham’s MFA Program’s Newsletter. She is the founder of Barmecide Press.

I’m really bad at letting go of things and despite my best efforts to try not to be, most people would describe me as a maximalist. I hoard memories and never delete any photos on my phone (I’m up to about 88,000 with pictures spanning from 2015 to the beginning of 2023). This idea of holding onto things, perhaps reminding me of simpler times, perhaps reminding me of the hard times I didn’t think I’d make it through, reflects itself on my bookshelf, too. 

Reading has always been an escape for me. It filled the void of not having friends in my classes to talk to and being able to immerse myself somewhere else. It also helped with all the car rides I took going from one house to the other every other weekend after my parent’s divorce. 

Much like my own thoughts, my bookshelves are only slightly organized, filled to the brim. I have several bookshelves scattered over the house, books stored inside the bottom of my TV stand’s storage, no doubt intended for DVD cases (or when I used it as a kid, good ol VHS tapes)—even books stacked in dangerously high piles I haven’t organized since they came home from me after the summer library sale. I still have books in boxes from my last move.

Just like my own personality, my books represent the weird complexities and paradoxes. I have a few poetry books mingling with Franz Kafka, series that shaped my early love for reading (The Hunger Games, Harry Potter), and Norton Anthologies I used in one class that I’ll never be able to give away. 

I haven’t actually finished The Lost Writings but it’s followed me faithfully from bookstore to apartment to bedside table. I’ve been interested in reading more Kafka ever since we read “The Metamorphosis” my senior year of high school and considered myself to be the only one open minded about it; it was probably then and there that cemented I was meant to be a Literature major. 

Some books on my shelves haven’t been read, let alone touched since I placed them there. Books I bought because they reminded me of someone, once again symbolizing my inability to forget or let things go that I really should. 

An early edition of The Hunger Games I found in a Half Price Books clearance section is pushed back with books about Harry Potter I bought on Ebay with allowance in 2011. I impulsively bought a collector’s edition of Michelle Remembers a year after a professor mentioned it in a class and its influence on what we were studying. A copy of Twilight, not my original copy, but a copy I got just to have the larger sized version. I bought Fan Art for a creative writing assignment and only read the first two chapters. 

An ode to my love for theatre shows itself in pocket-sized Shakespeare and books about Alexander Hamilton (a purchase influenced by Lin Manuel Miranda and my immense interest in American history). 

In another bookshelf sits a book of poems by Rita Dove whose lineation inspires me to dig deeper in my own work, a few books from one of the hardest semesters of college (yes, Spring 2020, which featured Wieland and Laura). A copy of The Outsiders—again, not my original copy but a book near to my heart. Counting by 7s, a book I bought because it had been sitting at a used bookstore for six months and I was intrigued by the annotations someone left behind. 

My bookshelves, as they stand while writing this, are not completely representative of what I tend to read, or what’s important to me now. In fact, I’ve probably been putting off cleaning and reorganizing my bookshelves for at least 7 years. But the mess, the clutter, represents me well. The eclectic nature of how I view my life mirrors itself here. I’m not ashamed to say Twilight got me into reading and creative writing when I was 10 and lead me to discover the greatest escape I’ve known—how could I possibly have the heart to get rid of them now?

My bookshelf made me think, question the world, imagine a new one. I thank it for becoming a vessel to hold all these small parts of myself and all my inconsistencies. 

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Amber Alexander holds a BA in English with research distinction and triple minors (Creative Writing, Professional Writing, and History) from The Ohio State University. They plan to pursue graduate level studies in the near future and currently works in higher education. She has previously worked on the Editorial Staff for Cornfield Review, where she has also been published. Alexander earned multiple awards for poetry, prose, playwriting, and creative nonfiction while an undergrad.