Tag: marah hoffman

We Call Upon the Author to Explain—Holly M. Wendt

Heading North by Holly M. Wendt contains 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. 

A picture of the cover of the book Heading North by Holly M Wendt. A stylized illustration of a bridge is depicted with a backdrop of dark and light blue.

 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.

A picture of a person with short black hair and glasses who is looking at the camera. They are wearing a black button down shirt and are standing in front of greenery.

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.

A picture of a white woman with shoulder-length blonde hair who is smiling at the camera. She is wearing a white top and is standing in front of a wooden door.

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.

We Call Upon the Author to Explain—Zoë Fay-Stindt

Zoë Fay-Stindt’s Bird Body offers readers a fresh mythology, one that is avian and ardent, through which we may better understand ourselves. There are no black and white solutions, but there is humidity, desire, breath. The poems explain that, by accepting the harm our bodies have housed, we can find the wings to evolve, if not to escape. In their responses to my questions, Fay-Stindt discloses the transformations their manuscript underwent to become Bird Body.

A small bird, perhaps a chickadee, lays prone against a background of pinnatisect leaves. Both the bird and the leaves are drawn in soft shades of grey on a white background. Above the image reads "bird body," and below the image reads "poems by Zoe Fay-Stindt."

Marah Hoffman: The collection’s three sections–the priming, distress signal, and finally soft places to land–and their accompanying epigraphs gracefully provide context for the poems. How did you decide on these sections?

Zoë Fay-Stindt: Thank you! I’m glad they land—no pun intended. As a trauma recovery narrative, non-linearity is a really important element of Bird Body’s structure, so organizing the poems into clean, legible sections seemed really strange. That said, finding clarity through the containers that each section offered was such a relief for me! I owe that relief, actually, to the literal floorboards of Sundress’ Firefly Farms: I had all but given up on Bird Body when I came to Sundress for a writing residency, and I decided to give the chapbook one last overhaul to see if it might be salvaged. Spreading the collection’s pages out on the floor let me step into the mess of the project for the first time in several years, and from that chaos, these three sections gathered themselves up. These are the magic moments of writing: when it feels like the work is more in charge of itself than you are and you just have to step back to let it do its thing.

MH: Specifically in the section the priming, the poems pulse with wanting and the shame that follows. In “the last summer of innocence” are the lines, “I the shameful/leader of our trespasses, horrified/at my appetite, blooming predator” (15). And in “pap smear,” “my consumption/far beyond the suggested amount” (17). As the collection progresses, consumption continues to be a theme. How can birds help us understand our desires?

ZFS: Mmm, that’s an interesting question. It makes sense that want, shame, and consumption show up a lot. Writing this chapbook, I was trying to wrestle with the lessons that the body—especially an AFAB body coming into sexuality, desire, queerness, and hunger—gets taught about its worth as a sexual object. This first section, the priming, tried to hold these ideas of shame and desire up to the light without offering any clear answers. The poems in here speak to the real messy process of trying to make sense of that “priming,” and the language of shame that I microdosed all through adolescence.

ZFS: To answer your question about the birds, I’m actually not sure I know how they can help us understand our desires! But in Bird Body, at least, they helped me find a surrealist escape that wasn’t anchored in dichotomies of good/bad or right/wrong. Moving beyond the human world, I could let go of the shame I had inherited around my body, my desire, and the violence I had experienced.

MH: There is a tone of reclamation that sparks in distress signal. The speaker proclaims, “In my mythology…” (24). Overall, the poems express invention: symbols metamorphose, archetypes take flight. I say all this to bring me to my question, what was your research process like? It’s clear that amidst your experimentation is an awareness of the Bible, fables, and mythology.

ZFS: The speaker in these poems—and the younger version of me—was really hungry for a mythology that could step outside of the virgin-whore complex and greet their body as the beautiful, confusing animal that it was. My research process wasn’t very structured for this project, actually, but I did tuck into a lot of varying mythology to think about how birds have been represented in religious texts across the centuries, and birds often appeared as creators—or at least present during the creation of life. If birds were our guides or creators rather than a man-like figure, what kind of possibilities could that offer to envisioning a world beyond violent legacies?

MH: Were your poems inspired by any particular landscapes and/or seasons? I noticed a few pieces describe settings that are warm and wet–traditional descriptors of fertile places, despite the collection’s complicated relationship with maternity. To add a second question, would you like to speak to this juxtaposition?

ZFS: Oh, yeah. I was raised humid: growing up in North Carolina swamp country, the world around me was a rich and thick place. I still feel most alive when I’m in sweat-wet places—so much living goes on there! I love that humidity seeped through the poems so much.

MH: I am a huge fan of the second person, and I noticed you are too! “You” has many different owners throughout the collection: birds, a lover, the speaker’s mother, the speaker themself. What were your goals for point of view (and pronouns) as you wrote Bird Body?

ZFS: I think I’d be lying if I said I had any explicit goals for this, but thank you for the generosity of your question! Thinking about it retroactively, second person often takes hold in my poetry as a response to an always-shifting sense of distance between myself and the “outside” world. The boundaries around me feel forever in flux, and second person allows me to simultaneously hold the world at arm’s length (with boundaries, even as they fluctuate) while still stepping into deep intimacy. Beyond the page, that feels true to my experience of the world: I’m always in direct address. Always in conversation with you—you, Marah, or you, heron, or you, Mom, or you, cypress. These beings crowd my sense of self—delightfully, strangely—and the second person lets all those creatures in. I love how even that phrase, the second person, acknowledges a presence. A doubling. That feels true.

MH: While acknowledging the aches and ruptures, Bird Body spotlights awe. The personification of good’s malleability seems to be the heron, this otherworldly creature that can both swallow baby birds and bless a horizon. Would you mind explaining why herons are significant to you? What do they have to say about the notion of ‘good’?

ZFS: Hmm, that’s a really interesting question. I think, as I mentioned before, that a lot of my process of writing Bird Body was trying to figure out what the hell “good” meant in this world. Also, what does that even mean? The heron in Bird Body often appears as a complicated figure—a healer, a companion, but also, as you point out, a creature who hunts, who hungers. This felt important to me to sit with, and to, once again, step into a reality that’s almost never as black and white as we’d like to imagine.

MH: Lastly, a question I always love to ask is, what was your revision process like? Any advice to other writers who are compiling a poetry manuscript?

ZFS: Whew! Yes. An important question with an always-messy answer. As I mentioned earlier on, my revision process usually involves a lot of printed versions of the collection to make sense of the work as an embodied, separate being. Who are these poems, and what are the conversations they’re having? Spread out on the floor, I can get a real sense of them. I also like to take myself to a café and sit down with my manuscript-in-process to meet her again: who is she? What is she doing? What’s she been up to while I was sleeping, eating, taking a bath? After gathering a draft of my manuscript together and putting it down for a while, I like to come back to the work, read through it as a whole, and write down my general sense of what the collection is working towards and what questions it’s raising. I’m almost always surprised. I think that’d be my general advice: leave your manuscript alone for a while. Go for a several months-long walk. Then let yourself listen to what the work is telling you beyond what you thought you wanted the work to say, and see how you can honor that.

Bird Body is available on Zoë Fay-Stindt’s website

A portrait of a person with sunlit skin and dark hair that is tied back and framing their face. A red sleeveless top is visible, and they stand against a grey-green slatwall.

Zoë Fay-Stindt is a queer, bicontinental poet with roots in both the French and American South. Their work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, featured or forthcoming in places such as Southern Humanities, Ninth Letter, and Poet Lore, and gathered into a chapbook, Bird Body, winner of Cordella Press’ inaugural Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize. She lives in Ames, Iowa, where she is an MFA candidate at Iowa State University, poetry editor for the environmental journal, Flyway, and a community farm volunteer. You can learn more at www.zoefaystindt.com.

A person with pale skin and shoulder length blonde hair smiles widely at the camera. Their smile shows their teeth, and they are wearing red lipstick. They wear a white sleeveless top and stand in front of a brown door and a grey wall.

Marah Hoffman has a bachelor’s in English and Creative Writing from Lebanon Valley College. In college, she served as co-poetry editor of Green Blotter Literary Magazine and Sigma Tau Delta English Honors Society president. From the LVC English department, she won The Green Blotter Writer Award. She has been featured in journals including Green Blotter, LURe Journal, Oakland Arts Review, Beyond Thought, and Asterism. Now, she supports Sundress Academy for the Arts through her role as Creative Director. Marah loves creative nonfiction, intertextuality, whimsicality, cats, lattes, distance running, and adding to her personal lexicon. Her list of favorite words grows every week.

Interview with Marah Hoffman, SAFTA Writer in Residence

Our editorial intern Anna-Quinn French sat down to talk with our newest Writer in Residence at the Sundress Academy for the Arts, Marah Hoffman, to learn more about her goals for her time at Firefly Farms.

Marah Hoffman is a 2022 graduate with bachelor’s in English and Creative Writing from Lebanon Valley College. In college, she served as co-poetry editor of Green Blotter Literary Magazine and Sigma Tau Delta English Honors Society president. From the LVC English department, she won The Green Blotter Writer Award. She has been featured in journals including Green Blotter, LURe Journal, Oakland Arts Review, Beyond Thought, and Asterism. Now, she is discovering new literary communities and new methods of igniting creativity. She loves creative nonfiction, intertextuality, whimsicality, cats, lattes, distance running, and adding to her personal lexicon. Her favorite word changes nearly every week.

Anna-Quinn French: Your love for literature and language is brightly apparent in the writing you did for Project Bookshelf and Sundress Reads. If you were stuck with only one book for the rest of your life, what would it be and why?

Marah Hoffman: Thank you! What a wonderful and cruel question for a person who is currently reading four different books! I would have to choose The Best of Brevity edited by Zoe Bossiere and Dinty W. Moore. It was one of many impulse buys at AWP this past spring, and it does not disappoint. The collection celebrates Brevity’s 20th anniversary by compiling what the editors believe to be the best flash. It is likely the only book in the world that could satiate my fluctuating literary moods for the rest of my life. The themes, structures, voices, and economy of language are awe-inspiring. In my margin notes, I am writing wow over and over again. It masterfully showcases the spectrum of the form and humanity. 

AQF: At what age or time in your life did you recognize that writing or an English-based profession was the path you wanted to take? What influences or inspirations led you to that realization?

MH: I can remember being in sixth grade, standing on a tiny stage in my school’s commons room reading a poem I had written called “Sunrise” where I compared the sun to a coin in the pocket of heaven. It was not a good poem. I was definitely not a prodigy. But the rush of fleshing an experience with words, of creating enticed me. I considered other career paths such as flower arranging and environmental science, but I always knew that English brought me the most joy. In high school, taking AP Language and Composition gave me permission to consider an English major seriously. The texts we read in that class, among the most noteworthy being The Opposite of Loneliness by Marina Keegan and Wild by Cheryl Strayed, convinced me that writing was something I needed. This was the same year I saw Dead Poets Society, and Mr. Keating’s words, “medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for,” really struck a chord with me. 

AQF: I saw that you tutored throughout your undergrad, and I am in training right now to become a tutor at UTK! In what ways do you think tutoring and helping others with their writing aided in your own growth as a writer? 

MH: That’s great! Tutoring is a fantastic way to improve as a writer. It is true what people say about explaining a concept to others being the true test of your own knowledge. Tutoring reminded me that writing, at its core, is an act of communication. I had to explain to fellow students how readers might respond to their argument, the holes they might find if they don’t include counterarguments and rebuttals. When writing my own papers, I would often hear my tutor-self correct my student-self who was about to make a mistake.  

AQF: While I was reading your Intern Intro for Sundress, I related to the sentiments you stated about your father and the advice he gave you that has stuck with you through hard obstacles you’ve faced. Do you ever find yourself going through bouts of self-doubt or lack of fresh ideas? If so, how do you persevere through this type of writer’s block, and what advice would you give to new writers in overcoming similar difficulties?

MH: Throughout college, there were semesters where creativity struck me frequently and at the worst moments. I would have to force myself to finish my reading instead of starting a poem. There were also semesters where my brain felt trapped in analytical mode, unable to invent. The difference between the two, I am almost certain, was what I was reading. When I am reading the kinds of things I aspire to write, I find myself inspired and invigorated. This summer, I purposefully chose to read essay collections because I have been writing a lot of essays.

AQF: I also noted your long history in writing poetry and that creative nonfiction has been a new outlet for you. What aspects or changes in your life led you to this interest in writing personal essays? 

MH: Good question! I have an easy answer. In the fall of my senior year, I took Writing a Life which focused on creative nonfiction. That was definitely the genesis of this interest. The previous year, I had done a deep dive into the history of the personal essay, reading the work of pioneers like Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon. But Writing a Life exposed me to fresh, lush essays that I became obsessed with emulating. I still write poems, but my default seems to be more essays now which I never expected. 

AQF: Congratulations on your long-term residency at the farm! What projects are you currently working on or  hoping to write? Do you have any specific themes or topics you are focusing on? 

MH: Thank you! I’m mainly working on MFA applications, composing my personal statement, trying to make my writing sample as strong as it can be. A theme I can’t seem to get away from is ephemerality. The farm is a great place to ruminate on this theme because caring for animals showcases all sides of Mother Nature.

Anna-Quinn French

Anna-Quinn French is a junior at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville where she studies English, with a concentration in literature and a minor in Philosophy, and works as a student tutor in the Judith Anderson Herbert Writing Center. She is a sucker for fantasy romance novels and romantic poetry and is constantly on the hunt for the next story that she can fixate on for months.