Tag: editorial intern

Project Bookshelf: Jillian A. Fantin

A yellow board book propped up on a brown bookshelf. The book reads "The Wonder Book of Clowns" in black and red block letters. The cover illustration is of a bald clown with white face paint, a big red prosthetic nose, a black and red painted smile, and a stuck out tongue.

When people come to visit, they always tend to say a variation of two things in the same sequence:

Wow, that’s a lot of books. Have you read them all?

and

How do you sleep with that clown staring at you?

I love answering those questions, though sometimes it gets old convincing people that clowns* and I get on quite well. When you actually take a look inside this 1955 board book, you find it to be filled with amusing little quatrains bent on explicating the different ways various clowns use their physical bodies to produce laughter. Yes, The Wonder Book of Clowns is a children’s book, a product of a time when clowns—both as a concept and a vessel—functioned as a repository of/for humor. However juvenile, this thirty-five cent picture book serves as a reminder of the brilliant worlds that literature opens for exploration.

Although I recall a number of books from my childhood, I remember most of them all together in a big blob of language that encouraged my continued exploration of the literary arts. I do remember reading, however, one poem in one story in the November/December 2007 issue of American Girl Magazine: “Snow Angel.” The story is quite simple, with one sister plagiarizing another sister’s old poetry assignment, getting in too deep with the lie, and eventually coming clean and writing her own poem and gaining a new perspective on herself and her creative abilities. But that poem. That poem! Simply titled “A Christmas Acrostic,” the story’s central poem cemented itself to my heart and fascinated me to no end. Poems could spell words with their lines? Poems could invoke the senses? Poems could be written in color? Already armed with the power of language in stories, my nine-year-old self now recognized that the abilities of language extended beyond the words themselves.

An upward view of a bookshelf with books stacked both vertically and horizontally on top of each other. A porcelain "Pierrot" doll sits on the shelf, with a purple silk jumpsuit with white pom poms and a white ruff.

That recognition encouraged me to search out poetry that used language holistically and artistically. Rather than words static on a page, the words on the page had to move, glow, invoke the senses. To encourage thought, make me laugh, make me angry. To make me. The frenetic nature of my new craving for poetry reflects itself in the kitsch and stacks of books organized in an outwardly haphazard yet carefully tender abandon. One of the highlights from my bookshelf is Derrick Harriell’s Stripper in Wonderland, an intimate exploration of time and new fatherhood in the event of birth. The book itself serves as a moment in time, a memory of the day Harriell and I talked about poetry over tacos with other poets and some of my professors. His poetry struck me in a similar way as David Bowie’s Hunky Dory: a self-contained world of thought shown sensorially through lyric. Once I read Harriell, I couldn’t stop the force that is poetry. My bookshelf gained lots of new friends to hold, plus another bookshelf to its left to share the weight.

A view of a bookshelf with horizontal stacks of books and some vertically stacked books on the far right side. There is an instant camera in its pink case resting on the shelf.

Electricity in the form of CAConrad’s While Standing In Line For Death ran throughout my entire body, and the book that joined my 2019 hoard eventually leading me to a formal practice. Marilyn Hacker’s Presentation Piece and Joyelle McSweeney’s Toxicon and Arachne brought me in and out of bodies, of grief and of relationships; Johannes Göransson’s PILOT (“JOHANN THE CAROUSEL HORSE”) and Kim Hyesoon’s Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream revealed what happens when language is allowed to ebb and flow beyond the boundaries often placed on the written word; Spring Essence: The Poetry of Hô Xuân Huong introduced me to the erotic and often humor of a short sensorial poetics; and Ava Hoffman’s LOVE POEMS/smallness studies punched me in the face and forced my gaze upon the abilities of poetry to disintegrate structures of power and assert itself into new bodies that ask us to tag along rather than afford us any control.

I suppose it’s time for me to answer those questions from the start, though I think you already know the answers I will provide:

Yes, that is a lot of books. I don’t know if I’ll make it through all of them, but I’m certainly going to let the books that need me take me where I need to go.

and

It’s not the clown that prevents my sleep. It’s the excitement of tomorrow’s poetry that makes me a restless bedmate.

*NOTE: I would certainly be remiss to ignore the United States’ instances of clownery, past and present, used for racist caricature and the maintenance of oppression. Clowns in concept, history, and practice exist for multiple purposes, and I wholly and actively do not support any instances of clownery for the purposes of systemic racism, harmful stereotyping, and the mockery of marginalized communities.

Surrounded by blurred-out houses, fences, and grass, the author is shown from the waist up in a black compression tank with a gold septum ring and a gold nostril hoop. Their right arm contains a number of black and grey tattoos visible, including fuchsia flowers, an American Traditional snake, and an envelope with a heart seal. They have a medium-brown, wavy mullet, dark thick eyebrows, and are looking straight at the camera with a blank stare.

Jillian A. Fantin (they/them) is a poet with roots in the American South and north central England. They are a 2021 Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Poet Fellow, a 2020 Jefferson County Memorial Project Research Fellow, and the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of RENESME LITERARY. Jillian received BAs in English and Political Science with an emphasis in Political Theory from a small university in Birmingham, Alabama, and an MFA in Creative Writing with a focus in Poetry and a graduate minor in Gender Studies from the University of Notre Dame. Their writing appears or is forthcoming in American Journal of Poetry, Spectra Poets, Barrelhouse, and poetry.onl, among others.

Meet Our New Intern: Stephi Cham

Children have an uncanny way of latching on to specific snippets and remembering them for the rest of their lives. As a child, I once came across a quote that never quite lost its effect on me: “Chase your passion like it’s the last bus of the night.” I knew I would, so at age 11, I told my mother I wanted to be a writer. Today, I work as a book editor and a writer, and above all, I am still a lover of stories and words.

I completed my undergraduate education at Southern Methodist University, where I majored in music therapy with a minor in psychology. My music therapy work further solidified my goals. Everyone I worked with had unique struggles, hopes, and dreams, each person a main character in their own story. Though I loved my clinical work, I wanted to help people who tell their stories in their own ways. As a music therapist, I learned to focus on patients’ goals and avoid imposing my own perspective on them while gently providing guidance as needed; as an editor, I found that my professional relationships with authors were much the same.

In Dallas, I worked at Student Media Company, at the time a small private company that managed the SMU newspaper and yearbook. I trained under the editors there, then eventually became chief copyeditor and stepped in as a writer when needed. There, I found my passion for helping writers organize their thoughts, revise their writing, and realize their visions.

Editing became my focus. Working full-time with reading, writing, and editing showed me that I wanted to take the next step and become further involved in the publishing field. Now, I’m working on my MA in Publishing at Rosemont College, where I’ve picked up more industry knowledge and become a better publishing professional.

The first books I held in my hands that I’d authored were five books published by Capstone Press about Asian-American historical figures. The experience of writing about people from my own ethnicity, along with the publication process from an author’s perspective, motivated me to be part of creating these opportunities for other Asian-Americans. Having seen the numerous barriers to publishing for many disenfranchised and historically marginalized people, I hope to be part of the ongoing change to remove these barriers and increase the publishing world’s accessibility and diversity.

With this in mind, I’m so excited and grateful to join the Sundress Publications team as an editorial intern. The Sundress team has done a lot, and with this incredible opportunity, I hope to be not just a better and more knowledgeable editor, but also someone who contributes actively to the publishing field with compassion, insight, and care.

Stephi Cham holds a BM in Music Therapy with a Minor in Psychology from Southern Methodist University. She is currently working toward her MA in Publishing at Rosemont College, where she manages the publishing program’s communications as a graduate assistant. She is a freelance editor and the author of the Great Asian-American series published by Capstone Press, and her work has appeared in Strange Horizons.

Meet Our New Intern: Eliza Browning

When I was four years old, my mother taught me how to write my middle name, Catherine, to apply for my first library card. It took a few tries, and I remember being jealous that my sister’s middle name, Mae, was so much easier to spell. Growing up as the daughter of an English teacher and a history teacher, I was lucky to live in a household filled with a love of books and learning. My sisters and I often wrote and performed our own plays and made up imaginative worlds for our original characters and toys.

Although I’ve always loved to read, I didn’t start writing seriously until high school. My school lacked many opportunities for creative writers and artists, so initially writing was a solitary hobby. I was fortunate to discover a community of talented young writers online and to participate in free workshops, including with The Adroit Journal, the YoungArts Foundation, and the COUNTERCLOCK Arts Collective. These opportunities changed my trajectory and allowed me to gain confidence in my own writing, experiences I hope to reciprocate in my future path as a writer. I am especially passionate about providing accessible opportunities to young and emerging writers, particularly those from traditionally underserved populations.

As a junior at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, I major in English and art history because I’m fascinated by the intersection between literary and visual culture. I also read poetry submissions and serve as a program director for COUNTERCLOCK Literary Arts, edit poetry for EX/POST Magazine, and will be a fellow in the inaugural Strange Tools Writer’s Workshop this spring. I’m excited and grateful to have the opportunity to intern with Sundress Publications to help others on their writing journeys and immerse myself further in literary culture.

Eliza Browning is a student at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, where she studies English and art history. Her work has previously appeared in Rust + Moth, Vagabond City Lit, Contrary Magazine, and Up the Staircase Quarterly, among others. She is a poetry editor for EX/POST Magazine and reads poetry for COUNTERCLOCK Journal.

Project Bookshelf with Editorial Intern Kathleen Gullion

When I fantasize about home ownership, I dream of bay windows in which the cats will sunbathe, hardwood floors that heartily creak, and a massive library for all my books. 

A key part of this fantasy is owning enough books to fill an entire room. Currently, I own enough books to fill two small bookshelves.

These are some of my books. The bookshelf itself was purchased in a parking lot for $12. It’s wobbly and chipped, but it was the first bookshelf I bought on my own.

Most of these books were given to me by friends, or salvaged from giveaway piles, or bought secondhand. Some of the more yellowed ones belonged to my dad. I’d like to think they capture my essence pretty well, from the Dolly Parton biography to the Susan Sontag to the Miranda July to The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories. 

In March, at the start of the pandemic, I drove down to Houston to be with my family, thinking it would be a short trip and I would return to Chicago in a few weeks when the pandemic blew over. Since that hasn’t happened and won’t happen for a while, I ended up deciding to stay and make Houston my home. 

This is the bookshelf I have in Texas. The rest of my books are back in Chicago with my roommate, waiting for me to come back for them.

The bookshelf itself was my mom’s when she was a kid. The tchotchkes are mine (including the fake diploma from Sunnydale Highschool). These are the books I brought with me when I drove down to Texas and the books I’ve purchased since the start of the pandemic. And some more of my dad’s books. When Houston issued a stay-at-home order, books were a welcome escape, and I relied on them to inspire emotions in me other than the usual cycle of boredom and anxiety. Some of my favorites have been Bunny by Mona Awad (Heathers meets The Craft meets bougie MFA program) and The Girls by Emma Cline (cults, girlhood, the cult of girlhood).

These bookshelves are humble, and that’s because I rarely purchase books. For reading material, I usually check out books from the library. In 2019, I read 43 books. Out of those, 37 were checked out from the library. The Chicago Public Library has a branch in every neighborhood. There’s the Harold Washington Library downtown with its gargoyles and arched windows, and my local branch with its no-fuss brown brick. Generally, no matter where you are, a library is within walking distance. And in the fall of 2019, they eliminated all late fees to increase access citywide. Without the threat of fines, a book that had been overdue since 1934 was returned. 

My favorite emails to receive were the ones that told me my holds were ready. I loved walking to the library and seeing all the books set aside for me in the “holds” section. Every time, it was like my birthday. There were my presents, all wrapped up in laminate.

When I left Chicago, I had a copy of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West’s letters to one another checked out. I had checked it out months ago at my girlfriend’s recommendation, and since I figured I would be back to the city soon, I didn’t bother returning it. My girlfriend is a devoted lover of Virginia Woolf, and our courtship process included making Woolf memes, reading Mrs. Dalloway together, and reading snippets of Woolf and Sackville-West’s letters aloud to one another. 

Once a month, I receive an email from the Chicago Public Library telling me The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf has been automatically renewed. Because of the pandemic, I haven’t been able to explore the Houston Public Library yet, but I look forward to seeing if their collection of Victorian gay letters compares. 

As a kid, I was no Matilda. I’d check out a book from the school library every now and then, but it wasn’t a place I frequented. In college, the library was where I went to do homework, but I rarely checked out books. It wasn’t until my senior year that I fully realized I could read literally any book I wanted. For free! I checked out Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior and reveled at the idea of pleasure reading at no personal cost.

The library isn’t just amazing because of the free books. It’s amazing because it’s one of the only public spaces you don’t have to pay to use. Even without a membership, you can still enjoy the space. It’s open to anyone and everyone. When most institutions prioritize profit, an entirely free public space is a rare and special thing.

One day, I hope to have a sprawling library, books lining each wall. But no matter how large my personal library grows, I’ll always use the public library. It will always be my other bookshelf. 

Kathleen Gullion is a writer based in Houston. Her work has appeared in the Esthetic Apostle, Coachella Review, F Newsmagazine, and others. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Meet Our New Intern: Natalie Metropulos

Napa, California

My parents grew up poor. Dad’s situation was such that, on some nights, the only dinner option was a can of pineapples. Mom’s seven-member family lived in a two-bedroom house where she shared a cramped room with her four sisters. When these are your stories, money is everything.

Dad quit high school to support himself. My parents married before they were 20, and Dad worked day and night in the residential building industry to change the course of what would otherwise have been a poverty-stricken future. Mom made sure the money he brought home would get us through the industry’s busy warm months as well as the slower cold ones.

They made an exceptional team, providing a comfortable middle-class life for my three siblings and I. They also instilled in us a strong work ethic, ensured we were college-educated, and impressed upon us the importance of obtaining jobs we could be proud of. And of course, they wanted us to be paid well.

In 1998, when Hearst Publishing offered me an unpaid internship in New York City upon graduation from Penn State, my parents were perplexed. I remember the anger twisting Dad’s clenched jaw. He viewed a college degree as a golden ticket. People with college degrees didn’t work for free.

I turned down the internship. Ultimately, I became a lawyer.

For a long time, I thought that my parent’s unwillingness to support me financially so I could take an unpaid internship prevented me from pursuing a career I would have thrived in and loved. But I’ve come to understand that what I needed wasn’t so much money as it was validation. I needed someone to tell me that the fact that Hearst wasn’t going to pay me didn’t mean that I wouldn’t be doing something of value, or that I wouldn’t be valued. When money is woven into your being from birth as the only legitimate measure of professional success, it’s hard to see how value can be measured in other ways.

It took me more than twenty years to decide that, for me, financial compensation isn’t a reliable measurement for the significance of my experience or contribution. I think I have motherhood to thank for helping me finally come to that realization. I don’t get paid a penny for being a mother, but I see the results of the time and dedication I put into my job, and I’m pretty happy with my compensation package. 

Six months ago, I walked off the partnership path at a highly regarded Big Law firm to find the road I stumbled off of in 1998. I look back to the moment when I turned from that road and realize that I didn’t need money, I needed bravery and ingenuity. Now I’m pursuing a new version of a career I envisioned for myself when I was 20, glad for the opportunity to be an unpaid Editorial Intern at Sundress Publications. At 43, I finally feel brave enough and clever enough to be here.

Natalie Metropulos holds a BA in English from the Pennsylvania State University and a JD from Duquesne University. She is a candidate for an MFA in Creative Writing from Chatham University. Although it has been a long time since Metropulos’ writing has appeared outside of a legal document, she has been published (nee Natalie Rieland) in Kalliope, Research/Penn State Magazine, and Pitt Magazine. Metropulos writes fiction and narrative non-fiction for children and adults.

Meet our New Intern: Ashley Hajimirsadeghi

I wrote my first story when I was three years old. It was a classic feminist tale, one inspired by the frustration I felt while playing a Mario game on my older sister’s Gameboy. Why did I have to save Princess Peach every time? Why couldn’t Mario be the one who was kidnapped for once? So I wrote my own story, reversing the narrative. There were no damsel-in-distresses in my world: only women who beat up the antagonists with an umbrella.

I’d lock up the little rainbow Care Bear journal those stories were written in It was an artifact of a distant childhood, lost in history until high school, lost until I decided to become an archeologist and really dig deep into my personal lineage.

I went to a little arts school in Baltimore County, Maryland, where I majored in literary arts. Auditioning for the school, I thought writing was “kinda cool,” and when I got in, it only seemed natural to pick it over the two law magnet schools I’d gotten into. And, indeed, it was “kinda cool.” Our classrooms had couches, we had workshops with teenage angst poetry, there were literary feuds—it was the kind of surreal writing dream I never knew I wanted.       

So I began my descent into the rabbit hole at this school. I swore off poetry until my junior and senior year, proclaiming it for hipsters and nerds, but when I actually sat down and wrote a poem, I found that I kind of liked it. It turned out I was pretty decent at it, so I continued with it. I thought of my life as a black and white film, shot with a grainy 15mm lens, before I began to take writing more seriously.

Once, I used to briefly live and study in Gyeonggi-do, South Korea. I went to Ewha Womans University in Seoul and had to commute over two hours to actually get to my classes. On the crowded 900-bus from Anyang to the outskirts of Seoul, I used to translate Emily Dickinson poems from English to Korean, and I found myself memorizing these lines, writing them in Korean on the foggy windows. It was here I learned the power of writing, as I made new bus buddies who wanted to talk about poetry to the foreign girl. Literature truly connects in a unique way, transcending international borders and linguistic barriers.

Now I go to the Fashion Institute of Technology. I study International Trade, but I never really forgot how writing made the narrative of my life bleed from black and white into color. Yeah, sure I’m a business major, but I still discover pockets of poetry in my mundane everyday routine. I read for three different literary magazines, I’ve taken workshops with Brooklyn Poets, and now I’m interning at the Sundress Academy for the Arts! As I grow older, I’m finding that this is something I want to do for the rest of my life.   

–

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi is an undergraduate at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Her work has appeared in Into the Void, Corvid Queen, and cahoodaloodaling, among others. She attended the International Writing Program’s Summer Institute and was a Brooklyn Poets Fellow. Currently, she is trying to figure out a happy intersection between her writing, film, and photography endeavors.

Meet our New Intern: Nicole Drake

Lonely kids make the best creatives, I hear.  We play with dolls and direct the drama of their complex inner lives; we talk to ourselves; we read and read and read and read.

I grew up, homeschooled, in a tiny town in Illinois, current population 1,977.  My whole world could have fit inside a thimble. By the time I turned 15, I had read 362 books.  I jotted notes for stories down in the margins, half-cast scenes in the spaces between chapters.

I was lucky: my world didn’t stay small forever. A few years and a move to Florida later, I was applying to colleges, an impending major in writing or linguistics ahead of me, and found out I was accepted to a program that would have me move to Europe for a year. Specifically, Italy. My grandma called my mom four times in the span of two days to tell her that “She does know that they speak a different language there, doesn’t she?” and “How is she going to get there, is she going to fly by herself?”

I, despite my grandmothers expectations, made it there alive and continue to be alive to this day.

What living in another culture taught me is how expansive the world is. Writing, for me, has always been about expression. We write and read in the languages we have grown up in, that wrap cozily around us like blankets. But expression changes when it’s filtered through other mediums, through the half-garbled words of a language you’ve only just started piecing together, or through the stories of someone who has lived a life totally opposite to your own. We take for granted our perspective, our insular reality. But there’s a whole world out there.

I moved back to the states for the last three years of my degree at Florida State University. I took as many unique literature classes and writing workshops as I could cram in my schedule. I developed a passion for Post-Colonial literature and other genres that tell the stories of historically underrepresented groups. I was diagnosed with the type of illness I would never recover from. Despite that, I kept living. I graduated with a degree in creative writing, triumphant and exhausted.

In the year since, I have had so much opportunity to grow. I pursued my passion for books and publishing by serving as the Fiction Intern for the Southeast Review, which allowed me to channel the hard-won literary skills I gained in school into something tangible. I taught Argentine Tango for a scientific study focussing on tango’s effects on patients with Parkinson’s disease, and got to see the continual progress of each patient who, the day before, had said that they could never do that impossible thing. I’ve worked as a Social Media Manager for a tattoo shop, and trained others on my team in new skills that even a few months ago, I thought were impossible.

All of that has, gloriously, lead me here. It has been a year of never-ending expansion, and I am so grateful that I will have the ability to bring that growth as well as my passion for words to Sundress Publications.

Nicole Drake is a graduate of Florida State University with a BA in Creative Writing. She has served as a reader for the Southeast Review and the Seven Hills Review, and currently works as the Social Media Manager for Capital City Tattoo’z. She teaches dance and works her way through her endless “To Read” list in her spare time.

Project Bookshelf with Editorial Intern Emma Hudson

I’m going to start by admitting the image on the left is not my bookshelf. When I texted my mom to ask if she could take a picture of my high school bookshelf so I could write this transformative article about my finely-tuned reading material she sent a picture of my 16-year-old sister’s bookshelf.

Mom: Cate said hers is more artsy.

I had to laugh. We have the same black wood-finished bookcase from Target, but somehow, hers surpasses me in a made-up ‘Artsy Bookshelf Contest.’ I guess fairy lights must be the sole determiner of coveted ‘artsy’ titles.

Yes, my sister always had a talent for complimenting me and insulting me in one sentence—a quality I ultimately love about her. On one hand, the art on her shelf is art I made back in the days of free time, but on the other, she’s insinuating my bookshelf aesthetic is no match for her elephant tape dispenser

Maybe she has a point. I organize books by where they fit on my shelf. My one back home (the ‘high school’ one) is two rows deep on the top two shelves. Thinly painted metal bookends try to contain the young-adult chaos from overspilling.

My college shelf continues on the legacy of trying to contain the chaos with thin chicken-College shelf with bodiless Chimmycoup wires ( a ‘steal’ from Homegoods is what my mom calls it). Some books I have yet to read, others are textbooks of semesters’ past, and I have a good stack of albums I regard with childhood remembrance to my latest Waterparks album with catchy and personally unrelatable tunes like “I Miss Having Sex But At Least I Don’t Want To Die (a hit radio-bleeped classic).

A further example of my love for music is displayed on the middle outward-facing encasement at the top is specifically saved for my collection of treasured BTS albums. The brave yellow-hooded BT21 character, Chimmy, is bodiless, but a good guard nonetheless.

Again, I organize by where everything can fit in a somewhat immaculate state. The position of honor for my most beloved books does not stay on the shelf. They float.

Since my freshman year in the cramped, yet warm space of my Hess Hall room is where this concept and artistic need initialized. Books and music are my ultimate loves even if I’m not an expert in creating either, I admire their mere creation.

close-up of floating books

The grayscale posters surround my favorite book series. Monument 14 by Emmy Laybourne, is a series that shaped my interests in emotional and apocalyptic storytelling. The same descriptions apply to Issac Marion’s Warm Bodies. Zombies have been on my mind since my early middle-school-age fascination with “The Walking Dead.” As for a zombie who would learn love and understanding is the cure, I like to believe those words can cure all apocalypse epidemics (fictional and real as idealistic as it sounds).

Like my personality and appearance, my shelves have always been a semi-functioning mess with an element of chaotic good to keep things interesting—and on some appealing artistic level. Chimmy will remain guard with his fearsome tongue if anyone thinks they can touch my BTS albums without my permission.

Emma Hudson is currently a third year student at the University of Tennessee working on her double concentration BA in English: Rhetoric and Creative Writing, along with a minor in retail consumer science. She’s a busy bee; she is the Editor-in-Chief of the up-and-coming Honey Magazine. Emma is also a long-time member and leader in UTK’s Creative Writing Club and on the Executive Board for UTK’s Sigma Tau Delta, Alpha Epsilon chapter. In her free time, she figures out how to include K-Pop group BTS into her research projects and watches “reality” tv shows.

Meet Our New Editorial Intern: Emily Bradley

I was supposed to be in med school by now.  Actually, I suck at dissection, so scratch that.  I’d have probably wound up in a lab, looking at nice, sterile slides under a microscope.  Science was the plan. It had rules and tangible logic, a promise that greater study would positively correlate with greater understanding.  In high school, I was the everything AP science kid, the never-missed-an-exam-prep-session kid, the kid who origami folded what looked like a voice out of textbook pages and prayed it never got wet.  But then, of course it did.    

Perfection is a dead end.  A perfect test score ends in a zero, is applauded and then silenced on a transcript to be filed away.  I was a size double zero senior year of high school, the ideal anorexic for four and a half years by that point, not sick enough to demand attention, not well enough to quit walking round and round the same cul-de-sac whittling my stomach down.  I could achieve these goals, but without fresh air they would decompose into a dark garden inside me one day.

My cousin killed himself during the fall of that year. He was twenty years old. We were never close—spread across the eastern half of the U.S., my extended family typically gathers only every three or four years for a requisite wedding, graduation, or, in this case, a funeral.  Nonetheless, the image of his powdered face and overstuffed chest flash flooded my years of panicked perfectionism, dissolved carefully pleated calorie charts and diagrams of cellular respiration into bits of colored paper, arranging themselves into some visceral understanding of why he did it. Suicide—by gunshot, poison gas, alcohol, and silence—had marked both sides of my family tree, and I knew that no equations or scholarships could keep it from blossoming in my imagination as well.  Stuck in my cul-de-sac, I needed something open-ended. So, I started writing.  

It didn’t fix me.  I was bad at it, but I also learned how to honor imperfection.  My first poems were collections of teen angst clichés – hearts, oceans, and all – but poetry taught me resilience.  I started college as a biological engineering major, and by the middle of the first semester I switched to English and Spanish. The more I studied, the less things made sense.  Once, I wrote an entire paper about how I didn’t understand Ezra Pound, and that was okay.  

Junior year, I decided to seek professional treatment for my eating disorder and writing became a tool to free lies that had lain silent at the bottom of me for years.  I still struggled, still panicked watching my years’ worth of rules and self-control dissolve as I learned to cry open-ended instead of running in circles to numb out. But I learned to love open-ended too.  To give myself to others in a way that didn’t fit neatly into an equation; no matter the numbers, there was always some remainder left. And the better I learned to care for my body, the stronger my voice became.  Eventually, I heard about something called an MFA and decided to apply to graduate programs in creative writing (my undergraduate university didn’t offer a CW program).  

Graduate school has pushed me to rethink much of what I thought I knew about learning.  It’s introduced me to writers whose work has entirely shifted my relationship to language.  Poetry workshops have shattered my ideas about reading and writing and how a classroom can function.  Moving from a rather insular community in Arkansas to a new city stretched my sense of self in unexpected directions, and here I’ve found a group of writers and friends who continually teach me what it means to be fully human.   I’ve met mentors who honor my voice but also call me on my bullshit and push me to put my truth rather than just my intellect on the page. And I never would have guessed how hard that would be.  

So, I wasn’t born with a pen in my hand and a song in my heart.  Sorry if that’s what you were expecting. Hell, I didn’t even sing along with the radio as a kid.  But I do now. Writing taught me how to break patterns that would have tethered me to a legacy of silence and slow destruction.  Slowly, I’ve built a voice that’s no longer paper-thin, and it’s taken me far away from that old cul-de-sac, though I’ve still got farther to go.  

—

Emily Bradley is a second year MFA candidate at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where she teaches and serves as the assistant poetry editor of Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts.  She loves poetry, falling asleep on the couch, and the color yellow.

Meet Our New Editorial Intern: Emma Hudson

Sundress Headshot 1

I never dreamed of being a writer, yet here I am: writing. Growing up, I daydreamed while taking bus rides home from school about having superpowers. I played outside on historic military weaponry like military brats living on base typically did back then. I also played inside, but only with my younger sister, who’s five years my junior—she was the only one who understood the importance of maintaining societal standards that reflected High School Musical.

I especially loved to pretend I was going to become a mega-rockstar. Maybe I still have time to fulfill that dream despite my complete lack of musical talent.

Until the day comes when I absorb superpowers or musical prowess, I enjoy writing: I want to write no matter if I attain any of these seemingly unrealistic qualities.

In my own right, I feel like a rockstar. My experience as a writer in middle school and high school was nonexistent outside of papers for class. I didn’t think much about those papers. I thought more about the books I read in school and in my free time.

Each English class I took throughout my years in high school typically ended up being my favorite class. I annotated, took notes, and participated in class—giving my take on how I thought Romeo and Juliet were more desperate than star-crossed and how drawing comparisons between characters like Heathcliff and Edward Cullen weren’t as applicable as my peers believed.

I had no idea where I wanted to go for my higher education experience. I didn’t even know what I wanted to do or become. My dad, my forever peer-reviewer, pointed out I was always reading and writing. Sure, I wrote rough drafts of story ideas on my laptop: I even dreamed about publishing a novel, one that could surpass the likes of John Green, whom I later discovered would be the center of some UTK Creative Writing Club jokes (Apologies Mr. Green, we mean well and admire your success).

I only applied for two schools and only for their writing programs. I got into both, but I picked the University of Tennessee. It wasn’t the bright orange beckoning me or because my dad graduated from the university in 1989 that I chose to come here. I came to discover myself.

If someone from today’s present went back to tell college freshman me that I would become motivated to join a lot of organizations thanks to the empowering music by seven men from South Korea, I would have no idea what to think.

Today, I still write more for class than anything else, but I love writing more than ever. As an English Major with a double concentration in rhetoric and creative writing, I’m learning about various forms of writing, challenging myself to write within multiple disciplines.

Since freshman year, I’ve been a member of UTK’s Creative Writing Club. Without my friends, I wouldn’t have the bravery to share my work. In the following year, I joined Honey Magazine in its first semester. Now I’m the Editor-in-Chief and hope to finalize our first publication by the end of the 2020 spring semester.

During the same year, I became a member of Sigma Tau Delta and ran for the Executive Board. In the year I’ve been a member, I will get the opportunity to present my rhetorical research on K-Pop group BTS and their fandom BTS ARMY at an international conference that focuses on literature. It’s crazy and a wild dream come true.

Another dream come true is getting to intern for Sundress. I might’ve never grown up dreaming of becoming a writer, but learning how to become a writing rockstar sounds amazing to me.

Emma Hudson is currently a third year student at the University of Tennessee working on her double concentration BA in English: Rhetoric and Creative Writing, along with a minor in retail consumer science. She’s a busy bee; she is the Editor-in-Chief of the up-and-coming Honey Magazine. Emma is also a long-time member and leader in UTK’s Creative Writing Club and on the Executive Board for UTK’s Sigma Tau Delta, Alpha Epsilon chapter. In her free time, she figures out how to include K-Pop group BTS into her research projects and watches “reality” tv shows.