This selection, chosen by guest editor Joey Gould, is from How to Playby Katie Manning (Louisiana Literature Press 2022).
Scrabble with E.B. White
His mustache still surprised me.
I’d assumed as a child that E was for Emily, but I smiled and pushed seven tiles his way.
He’d been dead for thirty years, but I’ll play Scrabble with anyone.
Runt. Ax. Child. Loving. Win. Web.
Our words were haunted.
I first read Charlotte’s Web when I was nine, I said. I still love it. Do you enjoy it too?
Yes, it’s a great story, he said, brow furrowed. Would you remind me who wrote it?
Katie Manning is the founding editor of Whale Road Review and a professor of writing at Point Loma Nazarene University. Winner of the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award for Tasty Other, she’s the author of eight poetry collections, most recently Hereverent (Agape Editions, 2023) and How to Play (Louisiana Literature Press, 2022). Her writing has been featured on Poetry Unbound, Tangle News, Verse Daily, and many other venues.
Joey Gould, who is Sundress Academy for the Arts Spring 2024 Writer in Residence, wrote The Acute Avian Heart (2019, Lily Poetry Review) & Penitent>Arbiter (2022, Lily Poetry Review), while their recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Meow Meow Pow Pow, Miniskirt Magazine, & Persephone’s Fruit. They also serve as Poetry Editor for Drunk Monkeys.
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.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Joey Gould, is from How to Playby Katie Manning (Louisiana Literature Press 2022).
The Domino Effect
The blue domino tin in the closet makes me think in multiples of five. How many games did we play? Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, two thousand… How many times did I sing you Help Me, Wanda, and listen to stories about how Grandpa always tried to block the game? I can’t add these games and stories up to anything but a wish for more. Memo- ries collapse into each other, a pile of your focused eyes large through your glasses, your hand hovering to place your last piece.
Katie Manning is the founding editor of Whale Road Review and a professor of writing at Point Loma Nazarene University. Winner of the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award for Tasty Other, she’s the author of eight poetry collections, most recently Hereverent (Agape Editions, 2023) and How to Play (Louisiana Literature Press, 2022). Her writing has been featured on Poetry Unbound, Tangle News, Verse Daily, and many other venues.
Joey Gould, who is Sundress Academy for the Arts Spring 2024 Writer in Residence, wrote The Acute Avian Heart (2019, Lily Poetry Review) & Penitent>Arbiter (2022, Lily Poetry Review), while their recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Meow Meow Pow Pow, Miniskirt Magazine, & Persephone’s Fruit. They also serve as Poetry Editor for Drunk Monkeys.
A towhee says ‘sree’ somewhere and I agree. Spring tips toward summer, balanced on one knuckle and full of pleasure.
Ten foamflower stems arc high above flat leaves, open like kids’ hands, asking for something.
Putting thoughts of my 4-year-old aside, I draw the breath that kindles beneath my sternum, and re-enter the world.
How content, in this place, is each thing to be what it is. Carolina wrens waiting for a calm to sing their voluble songs.
Towering maples and hackberries solid and strange as sliding boulders in the Sahara— both speaking and secret.
Jays and mockingbirds not caring who knows it.
My heart goes one way, my body goes another. Children are not the glue to keep them together.
The towhee pair keep a wary distance, always. One chestnut brown, one boot black, calling to each other.
Anna Laura Reeve is the author of Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility(Belle Point Press, 2023). Winner of the 2022 Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry, selected by American poet Jane Hirshfield, Reeve was also a finalist for the Greg Grummer Poetry Contest, the Ron Rash Award, the Heartwood Poetry Prize, and won the 2024 Emerging Writers Award from the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Salamander, Terrain.org, and others. She is a two-time Pushcart nominee, and lives with her daughter and husband near the Tennessee Overhill region, traditional land of the Eastern Cherokee.
Joey Gould, who is Sundress Academy for the Arts Spring 2024 Writer in Residence, wrote The Acute Avian Heart (2019, Lily Poetry Review) & Penitent>Arbiter (2022, Lily Poetry Review), while their recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Meow Meow Pow Pow, Miniskirt Magazine, & Persephone’s Fruit. They also serve as Poetry Editor for Drunk Monkeys.
Motherhood is putting a sock in it. Putting a sock on it. Motherhood is The Great Sock Hunt.
Curtains, pulling them. Invisible warpaths my feet beat every day but such little wars.
Motherhood is a visor I can’t take off. Kids’ TV show voice actors squeaking and scrambling, the little ha-has, merciless upward inflections.
Motherhood is a duststorm. I tie scarves over our mouths and noses, I yell close the door! I see motes in the air, regardless. The inside of my mouth, nose, is dry with fine layers of careful work, fast work.
I walk across the yard as my daughter calls me and I know I will stay inside, now, and start dinner.
My head is a balloon that wants to find its new form in those cumulonimbus up there,
oh this sky. How wide it is. How like an enormous bowl of light and cloud.
But with a hole in the unseeable center— if I loosed myself like a blue balloon I would roll, find a center, fall out.
Anna Laura Reeve is the author of Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility(Belle Point Press, 2023). Winner of the 2022 Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry, selected by American poet Jane Hirshfield, Reeve was also a finalist for the Greg Grummer Poetry Contest, the Ron Rash Award, the Heartwood Poetry Prize, and won the 2024 Emerging Writers Award from the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Salamander, Terrain.org, and others. She is a two-time Pushcart nominee, and lives with her daughter and husband near the Tennessee Overhill region, traditional land of the Eastern Cherokee.
Joey Gould, who is Sundress Academy for the Arts Spring 2024 Writer in Residence, wrote The Acute Avian Heart (2019, Lily Poetry Review) & Penitent>Arbiter (2022, Lily Poetry Review), while their recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Meow Meow Pow Pow, Miniskirt Magazine, & Persephone’s Fruit. They also serve as Poetry Editor for Drunk Monkeys.
Simple removal of child from parents fleeing fire. Simple wrapping of woman, mother, man, father, in wire.
Inside white tents, crèches of brown children mill,
waiting for the feeling of recognition to flood their bodies.
All we know of our parents is in the body: I knew my mother’s breast, because it was there that I turned outward to see the world. It was my floor.
I knew my father’s chest because for a while my weakness fit there, like a soft body under hard wing casings.
Anna Laura Reeve is the author of Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility(Belle Point Press, 2023). Winner of the 2022 Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry, selected by American poet Jane Hirshfield, Reeve was also a finalist for the Greg Grummer Poetry Contest, the Ron Rash Award, the Heartwood Poetry Prize, and won the 2024 Emerging Writers Award from the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Salamander, Terrain.org, and others. She is a two-time Pushcart nominee, and lives with her daughter and husband near the Tennessee Overhill region, traditional land of the Eastern Cherokee.
Joey Gould, who is Sundress Academy for the Arts Spring 2024 Writer in Residence, wrote The Acute Avian Heart (2019, Lily Poetry Review) & Penitent>Arbiter (2022, Lily Poetry Review), while their recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Meow Meow Pow Pow, Miniskirt Magazine, & Persephone’s Fruit. They also serve as Poetry Editor for Drunk Monkeys.
Chickweed and bird’s eye speedwell recede, the tiny white teeth and blue water of their flowers giving way to hairy bittercress, purple dead-nettle. White tufts flanked by dark javelins rise beside dragon heads.
Maple sap drips from sapsucker holes, and the green troll-hair of onion grass pocks the lawn
while each answering cardinal call splatters the air with a thin iridescent paint, here and gone.
When they decide it’s spring, it’s spring. Calendar be damned.
Now, year-old sage will sprout leaves from root crowns. Honeysuckle bushes will crack their green fireworks.
Yonder, a robin has been trying for ten minutes to break a beakful of shredded polypropylene twine from its tangle on a tomato cage.
Agricultural twine now appears in the nests of an increasing number of birds, who love it for its flexibility and strength, who often fly in search of it, whose feet it entangles, whose hatchlings
it orphans. Even chicks get tangled, limbs becoming deformed.
This is not a poem about survival.
The robin stops tugging and perches on the cage wire, preening.
In a moment, I will go to the tangle and she will fly away, while I cut the white threads from the wire, crushing them in my hand.
Anna Laura Reeve is the author of Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility(Belle Point Press, 2023). Winner of the 2022 Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry, selected by American poet Jane Hirshfield, Reeve was also a finalist for the Greg Grummer Poetry Contest, the Ron Rash Award, the Heartwood Poetry Prize, and won the 2024 Emerging Writers Award from the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Salamander, Terrain.org, and others. She is a two-time Pushcart nominee, and lives with her daughter and husband near the Tennessee Overhill region, traditional land of the Eastern Cherokee.
Joey Gould, who is Sundress Academy for the Arts Spring 2024 Writer in Residence, wrote The Acute Avian Heart (2019, Lily Poetry Review) & Penitent>Arbiter (2022, Lily Poetry Review), while their recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Meow Meow Pow Pow, Miniskirt Magazine, & Persephone’s Fruit. They also serve as Poetry Editor for Drunk Monkeys.
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.
