Tag Archives: #writinglife

Interview with Thaddeus Rutkowski

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reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com

We don’t expect an elevator pitch from a poet, but can you tell us about your work in 2-3 sentences?

Tracks in Snow is a collection of lyric poems inspired by my life as a biracial child in northern Appalachia and later as an adult in New York. The poems focus on themes of alienation versus belonging, closeness to nature, parenthood, and aging. Each poem contains telling details—the flapping of a bird’s wing, the sound of a mantra, the smell of charcoal briquettes—and a conceptual twist on the subject.

Which poem/s did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which poem/s gave you the most trouble, and why?

I most enjoyed writing the poems that have a strong sense of play. I’m aware of the shifting meanings of words, my method is a sort of systematic free association. For example, in the opening poem, “My Mother’s Name,” I look at my mother’s last name, Wang. It’s a surname in both Chinese and Scandinavian. The Chinese Wang can mean “king.” The Scandinavian Wang is derived from the Norse Vang, meaning “meadow.” Then there is the assonant Lang or Liang, which in Norse means “tall.” My mother and I cannot have that name because we are not tall people.

I also like to find the unexpected in the predictable. In the poem “Activist,” for example, a couple of young women try to prevent the clearing of trees next to New York’s East River. I learn that one of them usually wears a deer’s head when she protests, but she is not wearing it on this day because she doesn’t want to lose it. The women are detained and put into a police car as “guys in fluorescent vests” approach the trees with chainsaws. But the women aren’t daunted: They “saved four trees.”

What was most difficult was writing about loss. This can mean a response to the loss of a person, or it can be a feeling of emptiness or loneliness. When I took on my brother’s passing in a poem titled “Where My Brother Went,” I began with a question from our young daughter: “Where is he now?” I couldn’t answer that question, so I let her answer it. She says, after seeing his ashes scattered in the ocean, “He’s with the whales and dolphins.”

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

The main task was assembling the manuscript. I had a week at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts a couple of years ago and used that time to go through a number of poems. I kept the ones that seemed the strongest and put aside the weakest. I ended up with seventy poems, which I arranged in roughly chronological order. I ended up with a more or less unified manuscript.

I don’t have an agent, so finding a publisher was like shooting in the dark. I happened to see a submissions call from Finishing Line Press, which had declined an earlier manuscript of mine. I was surprised the publisher accepted this book. That was definitely a high. Then began at least of year of gathering blurbs, photos, and cover art; announcing presales; waiting for proofs; etc.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

My background is in fiction writing (I’ve published five books of prose, three of poetry). My graduate-school teacher John Barth said that you should have a baseline story. You can improvise and riff off that baseline, but you should always come back to the foundation.

My own advice is to do as many writing-related things as you can: Take workshops, attend readings, go to conferences, reside at colonies. Do these things in addition to sitting at your desk. If you increase your connections, and your chances, something is bound come through.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

Each poem offered a surprise in the form of a new perception or understanding. The way I came to that result was through trial and error. That’s a simple way of putting it. I have some experience and purpose, and brought those to the process.

On a larger scale, the surprise was that all of these individual poems added up to something. What they formed was a picture of lifetime that is not so unusual, but that is filled with lived moments.

How did you find the title of your book?

I found the title of the book through childhood memories of identifying animals by the tracks they left in snow. I could recognize the tracks of deer, rabbits, squirrels, birds. . . . That led to a poem, “Tracks in Snow,” on why a squirrel came to my family’s door and left, probably because it couldn’t open the door and find food.

The title of this book also follows the title of my previous book of poetry: Tricks of Light. The two titles have the same meter, and “Tricks” and “Tracks” almost rhyme.

The Christ-Haunted Low Country: Kyler Campbell on Everything That We’ve Buried

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By Jo Underwood

I interviewed Kyler Campbell on his debut short story collection, Everything That We’ve Buried. Campbell’s collection is set in the low country of South Carolina; he skillfully encapsulates, and diverts, Southern Lit traditions. Campbell incorporates his personal life into his work to tell stories that are both intimate and gritty, following characters that confront their faith, violence, and loss.

This is a deeply Southern collection. In writing it, were there any elements of Southern Lit traditions that you purposefully adhered to or subverted?

Adhered to, yes. Subverted, never intentionally. My first year at Converse, the best advice I got was from Marlin Barton, that “your first job as a writer is to just tell a good story.”

Flannery O’Connor said that the South is “certainly not Christ-centered. It is most certainly Christ-haunted.” That idea always stuck with me as I portrayed faith in my work. “Zombie Jesus” does that, as well as “Floodlines.”  Southern fiction is about life in the South, and our experiences and trials. A lot of it is about tradition and family, too. I leaned into that a lot, especially with how family dynamics haunt the characters in “The Last Dreamer.”

That was one of the big things for me: How do family dynamics define us, and how can we redefine them to become our own person? How does religion do the same?

As for the setting, some are set in a generic South but several are implied or confirmed to be in the Lowountry of South Carolina. What draws you to writing in that setting, is it writing what you know, or is there something creatively special about the low country?

The Lowcountry of South Carolina is defined by Charleston. Nobody talks about anything that’s outside of downtown Charleston. My goal was to show that the Lowcountry is way more than just Charleston. I wanted to go into the working, blue-collar Lowcountry.

I helped my wife while she worked for the Salvation Army, and I spent a lot of time in Moncks Corner and talking to people. People who grew up in and around Huger and Cross and Eutawville, which is a little outside of Berkeley County, around the Lake Moultrie area. Their stories were fascinating. They’re quintessential, traditional Southern stories about Al Capone and The New Deal, but with their own experiences laid into them. A lot of it came from just working in the area and talking to people and not being the writer in the ivory tower, but working in a thrift shop for a while, sorting through books, sorting through memorabilia, and having conversations with people who run a bread store down off White Street in Moncks Corner or whatever else and just hearing their stories.

At a reading of “How Will They Remember You?”, you mentioned this story and perhaps others holding personal connection to your own life. Are there any stories of that personal connection that you think enrich the experience of reading your stories?

Three of them in particular connect to my life. One of them is “Zombie Jesus,” which I mentioned before, because I grew up in a very religiously intense church. The story is about a family who doesn’t celebrate Halloween and a boy who’s kind of wrestling with why, and then a father who decides to proclaim the gospel to the neighborhood with a seven-foot-tall crucifix in their front yard. That one, in particular, is very personal to me. It’s kind of a goofy story compared to the rest of them, but it still deals with some of those same themes we were talking about—religion and how religion shapes us and causes us to do wild things sometimes. That one’s born out of my own experience when I was a kid. My family and I decided one year we weren’t going to celebrate Halloween, so we put a sign out in our front yard that said, “We don’t celebrate Halloween. We celebrate Jesus.” Then we sat in the living room with all the lights out. No porch light, no interior lights, like nobody was home. People still came to our door trick-or-treating. I just remember sitting there thinking, “This has got to be weird. This can’t be normal.” My parents and I have laughed about this for a while.

The second one that is deeply personal to me is the last story, “The Last Dreamer,” the novella that’s at the end. That one, in particular, deals with the aftermath of a parent’s suicide and a kid reeling from that and trying to find his own identity through it. I’ve had a lot of mental health struggles in the past. That one, in particular, came out of a conversation with my own counselor about how suicide affects the next generation. This story was me exploring mental health struggles as a generational curse.

The third one is “How Will They Remember You?” I did a genealogy project in school and found a father son pair that were both drafted into the Confederate Army together. They ended up in a POW camp up in Maryland. During the next census, only the father is reported. Piecing it together, my professor and I realized that the son probably didn’t make it.

Most of your stories in the collection feature scenes that do not play out in order of when they occur. How do you make the decisions on when to shift the chronology and when to go into flashback?

For me, it’s just a feeling thing. Some stories need to be in chronological order. A couple of them are. One like “Chucklehead,” in particular, is just one afternoon between two brothers. For me, I like a linear story, but I also like having those gaps filled in. The flashback is always kind of essential to understand what’s going on. I think you always want to make sure that they are correlating in some way. I’m thinking about the story about the parking attendant who finds the lost little girl on Folly Beach. Every time he mentions something that’s happening in the present, we’re kind of flashing back to a relevant part of his past. The same thing for “The Last Dreamer,” the novella at the end, where you’ve got a character who’s seeing these visions of his mom in a bloody bathtub. We flash back before that, and it’s kind of, “Here’s the scene, and this is what he sees. Here’s the scene, and this is what he sees.”

As far as when to break it and when to say, “Okay, now we go to a flashback,” or, “Now we go back to the present action,” it all depends on where you feel like the story ends. There’s so much instinct in writing, and instinct comes with time. Instinct also comes with failure. The more you fail, the better your instincts get.

What is something about the collection that you hope people will notice that they may be less likely to?

I hope people notice that there is faith in this book, that there are elements of redemption, elements of forgiveness, and maybe penance in some ways, too. There are stories here that seem very anti-religion in some ways, but, like I said at the top, I’m a religious person and count myself as that. What I hope people take from it is that there is a lot of faith in this book and a lot of faith-based themes and ideas, even though it may not seem like it on the surface.

The other thing that I hope people take from this is that the Lowcountry of South Carolina is a complex place. It’s not just beaches and downtown and Francis Marion Square and all of that. It doesn’t always look the way that we want it to, but it’s still there, and it’s still kind of present and active.

I just started the MFA program from which you graduated. How did the program prepare you for writing this collection?

What the MFA program did for me was help me build habits of writing. You have to carve out that time to write. One of the things I learned going forward is that it gets more complicated as life goes on. You add in a family, you add in kids, you add in a full-time job, a second job, whatever else, and things get more complicated. But the MFA program taught me how to discipline myself and how to expect better things from myself as well, and how to push myself.

~~~~~

Kyler Campbell lives and teaches in Charleston, South Carolina. His work has been featured in Driftwood, Cumberland River Review, and elsewhere. This is his first book.

Jo Underwood is a writer from Greenville, South Carolina. She is an MFA candidate at Converse University. Her creative work has been featured in Ambient Heights, Trace Fossil Review, The Library of Poetry Collection, The Lindenwood Review, and Olive & Ash. She is the recipient of the 2024 Gilmore Award for Excellence in Creative Writing. When not writing, she spends most of her time teaching English or playing Dungeons and Dragons on Youtube.

Godhunger & the Commodification of Faith: An Interview with Emma Galloway Stephens

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By Renee Kalagayan

Emma Galloway Stephens is a poet, a native Appalachian, a professor of English literature and creative writing, and, most recently, a book author. Her debut collection, No Billboard Gospel (Solum Literary Press, 2026), is driven by the question, “If God exists and is good, then why does he allow evil?” Written in the Southern Gothic tradition, her poems lead readers along a kudzu-ridden, red Carolina clay path to uncover the answer. I asked Emma a series of questions that each deal with a subject, technique, or quality present in No Billboard Gospel.

This collection is very outspoken against “the commodification of faith.” I especially love your use of the term “Godhunger” to describe your insatiable drive to uncover the roots of your doubt and your anger toward injustice and hypocrisy. How have you seen faith emerge as a commodity in modern times, or even in the arts? How is poetry uniquely suited to answer this issue? Did anything ultimately quell your Godhunger, and if so, what?

I think faith, and Christianity in particular, has a centuries-long history of commodification. Christ drove out money changers from the temple. The Protestant Reformation happened in part as a response to indulgences—the church collecting money from parishioners to buy their loved ones’ passage out of hell—allowing church authorities to live in luxury at the expense of the poor worshipers. There’s a reason Jesus spent so much of his time warning against the dangers of hoarding wealth. There’s something about religion’s universality that attracts those who would use it to manipulate people. Godhunger is universal—I think we’re born craving a knowledge of something higher than ourselves. Godhunger makes us want to know and be known. It’s a good desire—but it’s unfortunately an exploitable one.

Poetry, I think, is an inherently spiritual art form, and therefore a good vessel for articulating this universal Godhunger and condemning those who would exploit it. Poetry is among the oldest art forms in human history, and we’ve used it for communicating with and about the Divine for as long as we’ve had it. It connects to the soul in the same way music does because it depends on musical conventions of patterned sound and rhythm. I think it’s significant that so many of the Bible’s books of prophecy are written in verse—poetry has always spoken truth to power. I think its inherent spirituality is part of why it’s less marketable than fiction or nonfiction—and that is a mercy. You won’t find many billionaire poets.

Godhunger is insatiable, I think. The more you know of God, the more you want to know. This unending curiosity is exciting to me. I think I’ll get many more poems out of it.

How did you select the title of your collection?

I wrote “No Billboard Gospel” (the poem) in one hour-long writing session. It’s one of the few I’ve written that arrived fully formed, and not in need of significant editing after I wrote the draft. This poem was among the last I wrote for this collection. After around two years of ruminating on its themes and images, I sneezed out a poem that summed up what I felt the collection was about—that faith is a redeeming force that crushes the sins that cripple us, and not a cheap commodity or cultural identifier or easy answer to hard questions. Up to that point, the book was called River Songs. I retitled the book to match the poem I decided was now its centerpiece.

You said in an interview with Skipjack Review that your favorite way to end a poem with a “gut punch” is to use rhyming couplets. Are there any heroic couplets in No Billboard Gospel that surprised you? Which one is your favorite?

There’s a couplet at the end of “The Devil Beats His Wife” that surprised me. It’s not quite heroic—the final line is only two iambs, not five—but most of my formal verse follows “the rules” selectively, anyway. The poem in the book is a revision of a much longer poem that I wrote in the fall of 2024. I’d sent it around to several magazines without success, so I decided to revise it a yearish later by cutting out some couplets. The line “and so’s the sky” was a new line I added after I cut whatever else I’d had after “She knows his oily well is nearly dry.” It’s a poem about the inevitable end of evil—that it’s self-exhausting and self-devouring—and will end with the same certainty that we know a rainstorm will end. I liked the parallelism it offered to the opening image.

No Billboard Gospel is rife with critters. You describe them in “Roadkill Sonnet” (my favorite poem) as “saints of every shape.” How did you come to connect animals with sainthood/priesthood? Also, St. Joan the Opossum is a recurring mascot throughout the book. How did St. Joan come to be? What is she symbolic of, or the “patron saint” of? Do you plan on writing more about her or Friar Raven in the future?

I’ve always suspected that animals intuit more about the nature of God than humans have riddled out over centuries of arguing. The idea of a possum as a kind of priest is not original to me—I got the idea from the song “Possum by Night” by The Mountain Goats, which is in the voice of a possum going about his nightly routine, calling on the bugs on his body to “praise the Lord” and naming garbage collectors “true sons of the living word.” Possums are “sin eaters” of a sort—they eat disease-spreading insects, trash, things other creatures won’t touch. They aren’t well-loved, as their appearance can be off-putting, and their lifespan is short. You’re more likely to see them dead on the road than alive in the wild. If any creature were to become a sainted martyr (venerated for their short, difficult lives; known better for their deaths than their lives), a possum fits the bill.

The name Saint Joan the Opossum is just a pun on Saint John the Apostle, the disciple who wrote the prophetic Book of Revelation. Saint Joan’s vision of God both empowers and disables her, with one eye retaining regular sight but the other going white and blind, yet able to perceive the spiritual world. In my mind, she’s the patron saint of childlike faith. Her poems are intentionally whimsical and light. Faith is as natural as breathing to her because she’s capable of understanding more than the book’s human speaker. She embodies the notion that faith can be natural and even feral.

I’ve floated the idea of a children’s book featuring St. Joan and friends, but writing for children is a precise and sacred science I’d need to take the time to learn first.

Your poems largely employ the use of form, specifically what you call “messed-up sonnets.” Can you elaborate on how form serves your work, and how it guides your writing process? Are there any forms that jump out at you in No Billboard Gospel that helped you to communicate your message more effectively? How is form in conversation with content in your collection?

I enjoy writing in forms. My best poems are “messed up”/slant sonnets. And most of those sonnets are accidental. I’ll try to write something longer, start revising, and end up with a 14-line poem with a discernable five-foot rhythm pattern, a volta, and a rhyming couplet at the end. I just like the shape and brevity of a sonnet. But I’m an imperfect formalist—the rules don’t always serve me, so I don’t follow all of them for every poem.

There are a lot of sonnets in NBG—over a quarter of the collection. Sonnets are great for creating swift, memorable impact. They’re not long; you have to be selective in the images that you choose. They require some manner of rhyme, at least at the end, which allows for the one-two punch of a rhyming couplet to the gut. The journey from beginning to end is short and satisfying, in the reading and the writing. Most of the sonnets in this collection grapple with some kind of grief. The form doesn’t prolong the grief, but contains it. I think I gravitated towards sonnets in this collection because they’re good for making difficult subjects feel more digestible.

I’ve tried to branch out to other forms, like villanelles and pantoums and sestinas. Usually they turn out stilted instead of inviting surprising revelations or phrases. One day I’ll figure out how to write well in other forms, and then I’ll be unstoppable.

You’ve mentioned to me that you have a friend who has prayed through a few of the poems in No Billboard Gospel, like a liturgy. Faith is very important to you and your work. How did your faith inform the writing of No Billboard Gospel, especially in relation to the commodification of faith and the political threads you touch on? Did any poems begin as prayers?

Most of the poems in NBG are prayers. I wrote the book when I was having a hard time praying the way I’d grown up praying—in silence, with my hands folded and eyes closed. I couldn’t sustain the practice. So I started writing poems as a way of processing what I’d wanted to pray about. “Psalm 4” became a prayer—it started as an interpretation of the images of its namesake psalm in the Bible, but became a genuine expression of my own frustration. All of the “River Song” poems, “Contusion,” the last two lines of “The Last Summer of the Kumquat Tree,” “Poetry of Witness,” “River Wade,” “March on Paris Mountain,” “The Whirlwind,” “This Feral Faith”—all [these are] prayers of a sort. I had many questions (and complaints) to bring to God, and they all took this shape.

While I wrote the poems for this book, I was assessing my faith after years of running on spiritual autopilot. The poems reflect this process of assessment—others have called this process deconstruction, but that’s not the term I prefer for my experience. I prefer restoration, which is why the last poem of the collection has that title. The more I understood about Christ—the originator and center of Christianity—the more dissatisfied I grew with how American cultural Christianity functions more like a brand identity and a useful voting bloc. Christ offers radical transformation and relationship—even friendship—with God. His promises have outlasted many empires, and will outlast today’s. I gravitated towards older expressions of the Christian faith that include liturgy, early Church creeds, and focus on the centrality of the Gospel. My faith simplified and solidified the more it engaged with Christianity’s mysteries. I’ve learned I don’t have to have all the answers. I’ve learned that loving Christ should transform me into a more loving neighbor. That perfect love casts out fear. I think the poems in NBG reflect this arc.

My favorite way you’ve ever described writing poetry is as an avenue of “soul care.” How has No Billboard Gospel served as soul care for you? What do you hope your poems do for others?

I wrote these poems as a way of sorting through my personal doubts and griefs. Writing the poems helped clear a besetting fog. My habit is to write poems about subjects that trouble or puzzle me. In this way, writing feels a bit like praying. It’s an inherently spiritual process to me.

I’ve had a reader or two tell me that my poems captured many of the complex feelings they’ve had about their faiths—I think, from their reports, that I’ve done what I set out to do. I would like those who read my poems to feel less alone in their doubts. I want them to feel hopeful in the ongoing mystery that is the process of living out our faith.

~~~~~

Emma Galloway Stephens is a neurodivergent poet and professor from the Appalachian foothills of South Carolina. Her poems have appeared in Red Branch Review, The Christian Century, Door is a Jar, Salvation South, and many others. She is a co-founder and the Educational Director of Arbor Institute for the Arts in Greenville, SC. Read more at egstephenspoetry.com.

Renee Kalagayan, an Asian-American writer and native South Carolinian, is an MFA candidate in poetry and nonfiction at Converse University, where she is the assistant poetry editor of South 85 Journal. Her work is featured or forthcoming in, among others, HAD, Relief, About Place, SoFloPoJo, and the city-wide GVL Poetry Trail in Greenville, SC. Find her on social media @rkalagayanpoet.

Interview with Kate Christensen

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reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

Okay, here are three (it’s very hard to boil it down): A middle-aged, midlist novelist named Julia Heimdahl spends a weekend at a literary festival at Baldwin College, her alma mater, to promote her memoir. She’s on a panel with a fawning, unctuously charming fellow first-time memoirist, a literary biographer named Ellis Blackwell. Her alliance with Ellis threatens her hard-won stability, and excerpts from her memoir interspersed with the present narrative illuminate exactly why he’s particularly dangerous for Julia; simultaneously, she’s forced to reckon with the past as it intersects with the present.

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

I had the most fun creating Ellis Blackwell. I seem to have a troublesome soft spot for men who hate women—in fact, that is exactly what Good Company is about, my own complicity in misogyny. I enjoy inhabiting the point of view of horrible men because I understand them so deeply, I’ve studied them so closely, the dialogue writes itself. My survival, I thought when I was younger, was predicated on winning their approval. Good Company turns this idea on its head and explodes it.

The hardest character for me to write was Lexi/Alex Shapiro, a composite of women I’ve known in my life, women I’ve been deeply attracted to both sexually and emotionally. I think that Alex was complicated for me primarily because of my own largely unexpressed queerness, which has been largely latent all my life. Creating this character meant not only facing the attraction but acknowledging the reasons it has stayed underground: fear; internalized misogyny; and an innate conventionality, a kind of homophobia. Writing about all this made me sad, but it also ultimately felt bracing and clarifying.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

I conceived of this novel in the summer of 2024, when I was teaching in the summer graduate program at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I had written a story based on a passionate, complicated friendship I’d formed when I was a student there in the 1980s with a woman I call Norah who died when we were in our early 50s, estranged for many years. I chose that story for my faculty reading. The audience’s response was unlike any I’d ever had before after a reading: electric, excited, buzzing. Normally any enthusiasm was muted: this was a roar. They asked, “When is this book coming out?” And I realized over the next few days, thinking about it, that this was in fact part of a book, and that the book was going to play with time and memory and identity.

There haven’t been any lows (yet): my editor at HarperCollins, Sara Nelson, bought the manuscript and gave me incredibly helpful edits, and the book’s road to publication has been smooth (so far). But internally, I’ve undergone a long inward reckoning with what I’ve written. Good Company contains many hard truths, many levels of exposure, and a lot of difficult subject matter. It’s a raw, honest book, and it was galvanizing to write—but now that it’s emerging into the world for people to actually read if they want to (and I hope they do want to), I’ve had to overcome my terror and fear. Actually, I haven’t entirely overcome it. But that’s just the price you pay for telling the truth.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

This is something I tell my writing students over and over: you can only write like yourself. Your authentic voice is the only one you have. Banish the anxiety of influence. Don’t try to be someone else, don’t try to be “great.” It won’t work. It never works. Trust your gut, let yourself tell the truth, give yourself permission to write “badly” (meaning authentically), and always remember: no one is watching you.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

I was surprised by how inevitable this novel’s form felt while I was writing it, how necessary, apt, and urgent. Inspired by Heidi Julavits’s brilliant memoir, “The Folded Clock,” I wanted this book to take a structural risk with temporal sleight of hand, simultaneously spanning both a weekend and a lifetime. I wondered if would work and was prepared to fail. But to my surprise, not only did it strike me as right and organic while I was writing it, but this strategy also felt inevitable. Every time I finished a chapter in the novel’s present, the next memoir excerpt presented itself as the obvious next step.

How did you find the title of your book?

I chose the title “Good Company” because it’s something a certain kind of man has called me since I was a teenager. I used to see it as a badge of pride: I was good company! That meant I was fun, easygoing, a good sport, smart, sexy, and—most importantly—not a killjoy.

But then, when I started getting older and wiser, I saw the term for what it really is: a misogynistic, backhanded compliment that’s actually a means of keeping me under control. The book is about my own complicity for much of my life in trying to please such men, to win them over. And the title is meant to be loud and clear: no more.

The Watersmith: An Interview with Yance Wyatt

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By Harris Quinn

This interview was conducted over a series of phone calls between Yance in California and me in South Carolina. We talked for several hours, mostly about trying to find time to write while raising kids and reading books. It’s funny how much we find we have in common with people we’ve never really met. 

Why did you write this novel?

I’d say I’m most at peace when I’m in, on, or around water. I started wondering why that is. What finally occurred to me is that water seems so mundane on one hand, but on the other hand there’s something sacred about it. Something that draws all religions to it. All origin stories are centered around it. Most things tend to be either finite and temporary (our food, our bodies, fossil fuels) or infinite and eternal (space and time, the universe, love). Water is one of the few things that splits the difference. It’s finite yet eternal. There’s only so much of it, and yet it’s been around since the beginning of time. And if our bodies are mostly water, then it’s the same water that ran through our ancestors. It’s the throughline, the thing that animates and sustains us. I suppose I was trying to say that all of us, past and present, are connected through water. With this family’s story I was trying to get at that connectedness, that sameness in all of us.

How long did it take you to write?

It took a total of a decade. I started drafting in 2015 and it went under contract with Regal House in 2025. But it was incredibly bottom heavy. By that I mean I wrote the first draft in a manic caffeine binge way back then. I went to my aunt and uncle’s cabin in Tennessee, which very much resembles the cabin that serves as the setting of the book, to just get away, to focus, to put both feet down. And I was able to write it, start to finish, in about nine weeks. Then I spent the next nine years revising it.

Are you a Southern author, and is this a Southern novel?

It’s a Southern novel if you define it by setting or dialogue. But not if you define a novel by intangibles like theme and conflict. I would say that forgiveness, or the inability to forgive, regret, redemption, grief, all these are part of the human condition. So, I don’t necessarily think it’s a Southern novel outside the setting and speech. Those are important veneers, but I think what’s underneath them—the heartwood—is more universal.

I did grow up reading Faulkner and Welty and Flannery O’Connor. And I still read that stuff, but now I’m into more contemporary Southern authors like Padgett Powell and Silas House.

You play with point of view in this novel. In particular, at the beginning and at the end. Was that planned out beforehand, or was it a spur of the moment decision?

I always planned on JJ (one of the main characters) returning to The Reservoir, let’s say, and doing so in a way where he and his voice gradually ebb like the tide going out. That was planned. What I didn’t know was that the novel would start from his perspective too, which creates a set of bookends. It opens with him telling his father’s story, a prologue that I call the Inlet (noun: a narrow strip of water extending from a larger body of water). Then at the end, we return to his perspective in an epilogue that I call the Outlet. I wanted all the sections in between—Fog, Water, Vapor, Ice—to reflect JJ’s literal state as he changes material form throughout the book. In other words, he actually is a water molecule at one point. And he is an ice cube at one point. And he is melting. We’re all melting. Ultimately, we will all shrivel up and spill our water back into the earth. I’d been pondering these themes for years but never had a vehicle for them until JJ came along. Paralleling the life cycle with the water cycle gave shape to the book so I could write it.

Which novelists do you go back to for inspiration?

The southern lit folks that I’ve already named, and I would add William Gay. He does some stuff I really love on the sentence level. And tonally, he has a very bleak sensibility, but also a deep sense of humanity. Plus, he’s from Hohenwald, Tennessee, a stone’s throw from where I grew up.

I was reading Charles Frazier while writing this. I’m a big Cold Mountain fan, but I was on Thirteen Moons at the time. I have to be careful with what I read while I’m writing. It rubs off. Though if a little Frazier rubbed off on my book, it’s all the better for it. 

Waffle House features fairly prominently in this novel, doesn’t it?

I was getting sick of microwaving burritos and pounding bitter coffee at the cabin. I started dreaming of Waffle House, but the nearest one was ten or twenty miles away.

How do you take your hashbrowns?

Scattered and smothered!

I figured, because that’s what the character always orders in the novel. Yeah, you’re definitely a Southern author.

Ha! That’s probably true. Our true colors shine through in our appetites.

~~~~~

Yance Wyatt is from the outskirts of Nashville, Tennessee. He studied fiction at the University of Southern California, where he now teaches writing. His stories have appeared in dozens of nationally circulated literary journals and received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. He lives with his wife and son in the Pasadena foothills. The Watersmith is his first novel. To learn more or preorder, visit www.yancewyatt.com.

Harris Quinn lives and writes in South Carolina. He is a US Navy veteran and a graduate of the Converse University MFA program. He is working on a novel.

Interview with Jamy Bond

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reprinted with permission from workinprogressinprogress.com

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?  

After my sister, Shelby, is killed in a car crash while serving in the Peace Corps, I travel to Mozambique to locate her boyfriend, Idasse, who survived the crash. Together we retrace Shelby’s steps across a landscape of memory and loss. Part memoir, part investigative journey, The Island of Ghost Ships navigates the wreckage of grief through a series of short essays and a central haunting narrative.

Which essay did you most enjoy writing? Why?

Writing about grief is very cathartic for me; it’s a way of processing emotional pain, so I guess I felt that kind of enjoyment while writing every essay in this collection. “Your Broken Hands,” however, was the most difficult to write. It is a letter to my sister’s friend who fell asleep at the wheel. The car accident didn’t just kill my sister, it killed his father, too, and gravely injured his sister. I‘ve felt every emotion toward him from rage to compassion to forgiveness. I know it was devastating for him, and I often wonder how he carried on and where he is today. In that essay, I had to take all of these emotions and funnel them into just a few poignant words. That is the beauty and the challenge of the short form: how to convey enormous things through a single image, sentence, phrase, or word.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication. 

Oh gosh, where to start. I began this book about 20 years ago when I was awarded a Fulbright scholar grant to spend a year in Mozambique researching and writing about my sister’s death. Based on just a handful of pages, I ‘d signed with an agent, and she had a high-level editor at Knopf interested in the book. It was a lot of pressure. On top of the pressure, I was still drowning in grief over losing my sister and learning new details every day about the crash that killed her. Every sentence I wrote was painful. When I completed a page I’d get up and jump rope 100 times. I was in excellent shape by the end of it! The Knopf editor passed on the book. My agent sent it to dozens and dozens of publishing houses and they all passed. We’d get glowing letters about how wonderful the writing is, how moving the story, but in the end it was “too hard to sell.” I was devastated. I put the manuscript away for a long time. Then I pulled it out and started cutting huge chunks and reshaping what was left. I asked the amazing Meg Pokrass to help me expand it again, because I was still in this mindset that it had to be longer, but she said, “I think it’s beautiful as it is, just submit it,” So I did and a few months later Finishing Line Press accepted it.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

It comes from Richard Bausch. Read your work out loud. It’s the single most important thing I’ve ever learned about writing. I do it a gazillion times with everything I write. It trains your ear to hear where even the smallest edit (a word, a comma, a period) will improve the clarity, refine the prose, and perfect the lyrical rhythm of your sentences. I do it so much that I can almost recite every one of my pieces from memory.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

There’s one piece, “Shipwrecked,” where time is compressed into a kaleidoscopic reality. I was surprised by how effective this technique can be at capturing both the feeling of my sister being gone forever, and the feeling I often have that she’s come back to me in form of my daughter. Time, of course, is a construct, and emotions know nothing about its passing, especially in the case of grief. Still, the details of an experience can blur and change and give way to new definitions: Here I am walking through a game park in South Africa with my sister, and here I am walking through a field of bluebells in Virginia with my daughter. There are 25 years between those two experiences and yet, they are happening simultaneously.  

How did you find the title of your book?

The book’s title, The Island of Ghost Ships, comes from something my sister said to me when we were visiting Catembe, which is an island in Maputo Bay off the coast of Mozambique. This was before they had built the suspension bridge that now connects the island to Maputo and we had to take a ferry to get there. As we pulled in to dock, we saw the wreckage of a ship and a few small boats in the sand. It was strange to see these abandoned pieces of history glistening there in the bright sun. We invented stories about where these boats had started their journey, who they carried, why they were left there to rot. And my sister said, “Welcome to the Island of Ghost Ships where even decay can be beautiful.”

An Interview with Kyle Minor

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reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

These essays are interested in all varieties of disappearance: Voluntary, involuntary, coerced, professional, intellectual, transcendent, mortal. Ghosts of dead friends, driving Uber after Hollywood work dried up, narcissism in writers, social class and upward mobility, the Polish diplomat Jan Karski who failed to stop the Holocaust, folk art and synesthesia and transcendence, Bernard Moitessier and c. diff. and the sickness that might find its way into our song.

Which essay did you most enjoy writing? Why?

The real pleasure was writing “Junk Temples,” a novella-length essay-in-digressions toward the end of the book that is intensely interested in the notion of transcendence in art and the idea of how we make temples out of all kinds of things, including junk, and ascribe elevated meaning to them. I got to visit the folk artist Howard Finster’s Paradise Gardens, a couple of acres of his life’s work in junk collage and painting on everything, which is located right across the street from a state prison, and in a neighborhood full of Rottweilers chained to rickety stakes in every other front yard. And I got to spend time in the work of Henry Darger, who left behind one of the largest books ever assembled, which has at its center a phalanx of Charmin-girl angels with penises fighting a Civil War in some kind of troubled heaven. And I got to think about the nature of love and forgetting and music and books alongside Susan Sontag and William Goyen and a lot of poets, all through an overlay of synesthetic color and light.

 And which essay gave you the most trouble, and why?

The most difficult essay was the one at the end, “The Sickness and the Song,” which is an attempt at a personal reckoning with what art and writing are for, and how narcissism distorts, and what matters in life, even if you are chasing art. I was thinking about an around-the-world boat race in which the Frenchman Bernard Moitessier was in the lead, but he quit because the sailing—the water, the wind, the sky, the fish—had come to matter more than the race.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

I injured my brain a little playing hockey, and for a little while I had some trouble reading. Then I got sad. Then there were some complications with clearing permissions. The book was a little late to press. By then, the world had changed again, and it started to mean new things it hadn’t meant when I wrote it. Maybe it was for the best.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Quit this shit and go to medical school, so you can make enough money to eat.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

I think I might have found a path out of despair and into hope.

Who is your ideal reader?

You.

Interview with Serena Agusto-Cox

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reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com

We don’t expect an elevator pitch from a poet, but can you tell us about your work in 2-3 sentences?

Echoes Carry is a collection throughout which familial and ancestral echoes weave through each poem in subtle and stark ways. It raises the question of how much we are influenced by our families and friends, including ancestors or distant relatives we’ve never met face-to-face. Tangentially, it seeks to understand the connections humans have with one another.

What boundaries did you break in the writing of this book? Where does that sort of courage come from?

I wouldn’t say I’ve broken any boundaries per se, but I wanted to create a collection that could speak to readers, not just academic readers. I wanted my audience to see the possibilities in their own lives and the connections they may have to family, friends, ancestors, without really knowing that their influence has been present since the beginning. It’s something I’ve thought a lot about. The human condition and where we get the impulse to choose one action or feeling over another and how much of that can be nature and how much can be nurtured. Even things that seem unique to us, like writing poems, can be something that our ancestors did before us, and we may never know. The possibilities are endless.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

The high is seeing a print copy in a box that you open at your house with your child videotaping the unboxing. Yes, I did this social media craze. Why? Because I want to share that joy, if not with the internet world, at least with my child. Definitely a fun moment: videotaping goofy mom. The lows are the length of time between when you’ve finally got the manuscript where you want it and you send it out over and over and over ad nauseum to places that reject it. You have to put your energy into another creative project or that process will depress you.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

I think Billy Collins once said, “Write the poem only you can write.” That’s probably the best advice you can have with regard to poetry. But I’ve also taken Stephen King’s advice to heart about manuscripts. In On Writing, he mentioned that manuscripts should have a period of rest in a drawer. I believe he says six weeks, but sometimes, my poetry manuscripts have needed far longer than six weeks.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

It wasn’t the writing that surprised me or the collection of poems or the ordering of poems. What surprised me was the fun I had creating a book cover on Canva. Yes, I had help with the design, but the vision is all mine. I loved that creative part of the process. It was unexpected. Thinking about all the possibilities suggested by others and by the publisher, but knowing what I wanted to see and then being able to create it was the biggest surprise.

How did you find the title of your book?

The title of the book is a modification of a line in one of the poems. I’ll leave that mystery for readers to uncover.

Interview with Wendy J. Fox

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reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

The Last Supper follows three months in the chaotic life of Amanda, who has just turned 40, has two young children, and is searching for something more in her life. She’s failed at being a momfluencer, she’s failed at MLM entrepreneurship, and she’s living in terror of what to make for dinner. Desperate for something more than the isolated world of her suburban home, but consumed by parenting, her illusory stability collapses when the cracks in her marriage finally split open so wide she sees a way out, and a pathway to reclaim her own creative and economic agency.

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

The character I most enjoyed creating was the mother in the novel—Camille is a successful attorney who specializes in family law and clawed her way into financial stability after being a single parent. The reason I felt energized when I was in her perspective is because she’s a successful woman who is not defined by caregiving relationships. She’s just who she is and doesn’t really care what other people think about her.

The character who gave me the most trouble—and I think this will track for other writers—was the protagonist, Amanda. She is the hinge the door of the novel hangs on, and it is from her perspective the plot unfolds.

With the most space and time with a protagonist, there’s also more chance for narrative discontinuity or character motivation issues to arise. She goes through a period of awaking in the novel, and while I think it is fair to say all writers of literary fiction or character-driven fiction want to represent the change that occurs, sometimes I have to work on not being didactic or too interior.

Still, from a process perspective, I enjoy the building of a character, inclusive of the hard parts. (This is why I don’t understand would-be creatives leaning on generative AI.)

If you can’t sit with your characters and really think about them, what’s the point?

While sure, it can be difficult, there’s also so much joy in figuring out a tricky sentence, so much satisfaction in revising a critical scene.

How I have come to think about AI chatbots (which you didn’t ask about but is on my mind all the time) is that chatbots are all output, in contrast to creative writing being largely about input.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

This is my fifth book, so at this point I can mostly roll with anything. That said, for me there is always the high of getting to contract with a manuscript, and the low of worrying about it.

The thing that has not changed at all—the thing I roll less well with is worrying how the book will be received.

I often say to people that I have this conundrum of: What if nobody reads it? And then: Oh crap, what if they do?!

Writing and publishing are just two different animals.

However, I do want to say to anyone out there shopping a manuscript: you might (will probably) at some point have a weird interaction with an agent, an editor, a publisher that will shake you. You might wake up in the middle of the night wondering if you wasted the last five years or more of your life.

It’s fine. Not every editor will get you. Lots of agents won’t. Do your work.

When you find the right publishing partner/model, you will know.

The lows are getting through the doubt. The highs are knowing you honored your work—whether it is published or not.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Over a decade ago, before I had a single book in print, I went to a panel where Andre Dubus III talked about the need for tension in every narrative.

That idea has crystallized over the years into really thinking about stakes.

On the panel, Dubus III said something like “If there’s no tension, who cares?” I think about that a lot.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

I love your writing advice.

What surprised me in writing The Last Supper was the way the manuscript changed over time. At first, I was writing from a character sketch, then I was developing in earnest. The beginning versions were very different, both in tone and plot.

But! That’s part of the whole point of the process. Which is also, again, why I can’t get down with AI, as there’s no process there.

How did you find the title of your book?

I am notoriously bad at titles.

Once, I turned in a book to my publisher called “Office Stories” – and talk about a snooze in the title department (thank goodness I was already under contract). And definitely no tension there, à la Dubus III. With some help, the title of the book became What If We Were Somewhere Else, which does have tension and also is appropriately descriptive of what it feels like to work in an office.

The title for The Last Supper came from a highly trusted reader.

I’m pretty transparent as a person and a writer, but my beta titles for what became The Last Supper are too embarrassingly bad for even me to share publicly.

Interview with Elizabeth Hazen

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reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com

We don’t expect an elevator pitch from a poet, but can you tell us about your work in 2-3 sentences?

I tend to write my way through challenges – both internal ones and external ones – so a lot of my poems have to do with questions of identity and purpose as well as with navigating complicated relationships. My recent work also concerns parenting a young adult son, helping him find meaning in the world when I struggle to do so myself. I like to play with form, so a lot of my poems adhere to formal constraints of some kind.

Which poem/s did you most enjoy writing? Why?

I had a lot of fun writing the gloses. This is an obscure Spanish form that takes four lines – a “cabeza” – from an existing poem. Those lines then each become the final lines of four 10-line stanzas. Lines 6, 9, and 10 rhyme. In general, I enjoy working in form – it takes me out of my emotional brain and puts me in that logical, puzzle-solving brain. I think this is good for creating some distance from the subject, allowing me more objectivity. The form also encourages a dialogue with the poem from which the cabeza is taken, and I loved spending time with those works.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

The publication process for The Sky Will Hold took longer than expected. Initially, Alan Squire Publishing was going to release this collection in March 2025. They published my first two collections and we were excited to work together on this one, but for various reasons in the spring of 2024, ASP decided to go on hiatus. I was disappointed and discouraged and spent a few months convinced that I would never find a publisher, but ultimately Riot in Your Throat took the book. The delay allowed me to add a few poems to the manuscript that I think make the collection stronger, so it all worked out in the end.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

The older I get, the more I appreciate the advice that many of my teachers have given over the years – and that is simply to have fun with it. I’ve been writing for long enough that I see little reason to continue unless it brings me joy, so I have been trying to get back to that original sense of discovery and wonder that made writing appeal to me in the first place.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

I don’t think of myself as a very optimistic person, but I increasingly believe that my purpose in writing is to highlight the beauty and connection I see in the world. When I read through the collection, I am surprised and pleased to see that many of the poems are actually pretty hopeful.

How did you find the title of your book?

Rose Solari, a fabulous poet and teacher and the publisher of my first two books, came up with the title. She was helping me with the order of the poems, and we were chatting about title options, and she suggested The Sky Will Hold. The more I thought about it, the more I felt that it was the right title.