Jane Ann Devol Fuller: Art rejuvenates, allows us to transcend because it won’t let us turn our eyes away. That paradox. Like the dog in your poem “Rescue Dog.” The speaker is doing what he can to save her or lessen her suffering. Still he admits, “What the fuck, and Duh, we die.” That juxtaposition of sweet love and hard acceptance frees the readers from our own grievings.

Though we know the dog won’t recover, we must. And what happens is we see how everything is connected to everything else. The Jim Jarmusch film gets us through the night, takes our focus off the dying animal and reflects our loss right back at us, so though we can’t look directly into, neither can we look away. We find elevation through references outside ourselves and our situations. Rescue refers then not only to the dog we brought home to save, and couldn’t, but to our own deliverance from self-centered matters.

We know the poem is about not just the dog’s suffering, but the speaker’s. Talk about the “objective correlative” in light of what I can quote you as saying, “show, but don’t show.”

Roy Bentley: I like to think I’m a mechanic when it comes to poems: I can “wrench the vehicle” and make it work. However, why it works—well, I leave that to others. I’d say this: I read poems that are successful and follow their lead. I am so clueless when I begin to talk about why I did what I did. Also, I keep no drafts. Why? I live in the Now of the draft I’m working on. For me, it’s that simple. And I depend on a handful of people to tell me when I am barking up the wrong tree. (Pardon the pun.) I trust hearing what other writers say works and why they think it works. Truthfully, I’m sort of a 12-year-old when it comes to giving answers about my work: I’ll be flippant, if I’m not careful. Or I’ll say something that has the same effect as farting…

JADF: In this poem, as in most of your work, you layer experience extremely efficiently. I picture concentric circles or a spiraling of events, each recursive, but expanding outward into meaning. You’ve got the dog by the fire, Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise on the tube, the vet on the phone, the memory of the young boy, etc. The poem’s context is grounded in every day reality. But the reader senses a spiritual event that is wrought with varied emotions: compassion, anger, resentment, perhaps? Do you think the poem reconciles these things? And to what end?

That other good fortune

we have when whoever dispenses miracles is fresh out.

RB: To my way of thinking, what poems make happen is oftentimes a wonderful unintended consequence that we then label as magic in the absence of a better word for that. I believe in a spirit, after years of doubt and wrestling with evidence to the contrary—a process that is ongoing, to be sure. But the Unknowable is where I have to plant my flag when talking about what my poems do. Truthfully, I may be the worst person to ask. That said, it’s important to say what I do know: that spirit is spirit, whether dog or human. At least that’s my stance on that, which I hope rears its head in the poem. Animals are what they are apart from us, but they are also what they are with us. And the reverse is true for humans. That’s at the heart of the miracle.

JADF: We’ve all lost a dog. We all know what it’s like. And we are all betting on the dog….to live….to win. Jarmusch’s characters lose, like the speaker of your poem loses: the dog is going to die. But, there’s a rejuvenation in that richness and camaraderie that can’t be lost to death. I imagine this poem is almost completely autobiographical. Am I right? If so, can you talk about that a little?

RB: It is autobiographical. And true, though I’m not sure a poem has to stick to the facts as if the piece is an episode of Dragnet and Sgt. Joe Friday is leaning over our shoulder saying, Just the facts, please.

JADF: And at what point in this experience did you start writing this poem? Was it in the middle of grieving?

RB: Jupiter was not yet dead when I started the piece. In fact, the first several drafts were accomplished with him alive but declining. He lay at my feet, even as I wrote, blessing me with his panting gaze. Through that period of him fighting and then not fighting, the poem took a different shape. Then his death prompted going back to Square One. I still miss him. He was a mess—he had skin issues from the moment we got him, didn’t sleep through the night, then developed food sensitivities. He was a job in the beginning. But I did it—or my wife Gloria and I did it together, though his care and keeping fell to me at the end of the time in Florida, which was where we bonded. He got better. Not much, but enough that he could be with us.

JADF: The poem is all about recovery, and some folks see recovery as an end point, a success. Recovery is also a process that includes hard stages of grief but also epiphany, a final letting go of self. How do you define recovery in general and how do you explore it in this poem?

RB: I felt the Jim Jarmusch portion to be absolutely essential to this poem working. That was using what’s at hand, what fell to me. It’s that simple. Everything fits, if you think about it. Recovery is a fact of life. Death is, as well. But a fact of life isn’t something you can’t “bend” to fit your experience. For instance, caring for Jupiter was a kindness to an animal. Sure. But it was also something that “needed done,” a bit of work to be accomplished each day. Like writing.

JADF: Let’s get political. You write:

I hate how he has to carry the rot of 21st Century America,

Explain.

RB: It was flat statement. I risked it because disappointment shadows us all in the same way it shadowed that dog. At its best, politics is the art of setting aside disappointment and getting to work. Writing allows me to do that, even when I’ve lost hope. Caring for Jupiter, witnessing his struggles firsthand, did what nothing else could often: it gave me a path to follow after hope was gone or hadn’t yet returned. So he was a Being that I felt great pity for. And he loved me, which helped me stick with the hard work of caring for an older dog who was not going to recover.

JADF: The dog is so much more than dog, but still more than the speaker. The dog becomes all of us. Talk about that. (You can talk politics if you want though this poem transcends the realm of politics).

RB: Writing has been where I discover what to do in the absence of a way forward. The dog—and writing about the dog—is how I generated old-fashioned purpose; and in Iowa where I felt like a stranger. I wanted to let this gutsy Florida dog “live after”—which is pretty much how we do that as humans, I’m guessing: someone remembers us in whatever fashion. Maybe in a poem.

Jane Ann Devol Fuller is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and the co-author of a book of poems and photographs, Revenants: A Story of Many Lives. A teacher at Hocking College in Nelsonville, Ohio, she has written work published by Denver Quarterly, Pikeville Review, Aethlon: Journal of Sports Literature, Kaimana, and Riverwind, a literary magazine which she formerly co-edited. A poem will be forthcoming in Shenandoah this March. She is currently helping edit the StockPort Flats’ Confluence Series and completing her first full-length manuscript, tentatively titled The Torturer’s Horse.

Laurie Easter’s essay “The Polarity of Incongruities” appears in the Winter 2015 CAREGIVERS issue of r.kv.r.y.. Writer Jennifer McGuiggan comments, “I love essays for the way they unearth, explore, and extrapolate meaning from both polarities and incongruities. Laurie’s essay grapples beautifully with the spectrum of joys and pains that punctuate our lives.” Jennifer interviewed Laurie via email.

Jennifer McGuiggan: The title of your essay, “The Polarity of Incongruities,” really drives the essay’s content. Many of the paragraphs start with the phrase “It’s when,” with the “it” referring to the title phrase. It’s only in the very last paragraph that you finally name the “it” within the essay itself. I’m wondering which came first: the title or the essay. In other words, I’m wondering about your process for this piece. Were you thinking about all of these interrelated events when you first sat down to write, or did their connections reveal themselves to you over time?

Laurie Easter: I’m so glad you asked this because before I submitted to r.kv.r.y, I actually had an editor from a different publication request that I change the title and restructure the piece into a more straightforward narrative. But I chose not to because I had very deliberately structured the essay in this manner, with the use of “It’s when…” referring back to the title. The title came before the actual writing of the essay, and indeed was the driving force behind the writing in terms of structure. But before I ever came up with the title, I spent quite a lot of time pondering the whole concept of incongruities and how they are happening in our lives every day, constantly, as though on a scale tipping the balance back and forth. This thought process went on for about eight months and is typical of the way I work. I think about things for a very long time, let them percolate, while driving or washing dishes or as I’m falling asleep. I’ll make notes, and eventually I get down to the writing. It’s not the same with every piece, but in this case the connections revealed themselves to me over time before the writing happened. The kind of cool thing about being slow in my production is that in the process life continues and inevitably more experiences happen that relate to the concept of what I’m thinking about writing, which gives me more material.

JM: The focus of r.kv.r.y is on recovery, on “obtaining usable substances from unusuable sources.” So much about your essay speaks to that theme. The people in the essay gain gifts of time, of peace of mind, of connection, of money—often from unexpected sources and sometimes unwanted circumstances. Did you write with this theme of recovery in mind, or did it emerge on its own?

LE:  This is an interesting thing for me to think about because in general my essays are about intense issues—suicide, illness, death, grief—and I’ve always felt like everything I write is so dark; where is the light? The intensity of the pieces weighed so heavy in my mind that I couldn’t really see the recovery. What drew me to submit this essay to r.kv.r.y was this statement in the submission guidelines: “Our theme may be “recovery,” but that doesn’t mean all of our stories are about characters who are successfully recovering.” This really struck me because the nature of my essay is about that polarity where things constantly shift between positive and negative, and sometimes the space between those shifts can be mere hours, which doesn’t leave a lot of room for recovery in those moments, but, yes, over time recovery is possible in the full sense of the term, so the essay felt like a perfect fit with the journal. Now, with more perspective, I’m realizing that within these dark essays I’ve been writing, there is indeed some light and recovery. But to answer your question, evidently the recovery emerged on its own because I wasn’t fully aware of it until now!

JM: The theme of this issue of r.kv.r.y is “caregivers.” In your essay you explore your role as a caregiver (as a wife, a mother, and friend), but also as the one being taken care of (by your friend’s generosity after her death). Were you thinking about the concept of caregiving in these dual roles of both giving and receiving?

LE: No, I wasn’t thinking about caregiving at all when I wrote “Polarity.” I had other focuses in mind as I wrote. And when I submitted to r.kv.r.y, I didn’t submit to the “Caregivers” issue, just the general journal’s theme of recovery, so it was a surprise when I got editor Mary Akers’ email saying the piece was going into the “Caregivers” issue. Once I learned this, though, I definitely saw how it was a good fit due to the dual roles, as you mention, that are being explored in the essay. This is what I love about themes—how they can be interpreted, both in a common regard or broadly construed, and it is a subject I’ve been putting a lot of attention to lately as an assistant editor for Hunger Mountain. We’ve been curating several upcoming issues with themes of The Body, Masculinity, and Love, and it’s so interesting to read a submission that is submitted particularly for one theme and find that, in fact, it fits another theme perfectly. That is one of the joys of the submission and editing process when themes are involved—our many varied perspectives and interpretations.

JM: As essayists, you and I both know the particular joys and griefs that come with writing stories from our lives. But for me, even when I write about painful events, I find more joy than sadness in the process of shaping my life into art. Do you feel that way, too?

LE: I’d like to say that I find more joy than sadness in the process, but I can’t say that’s really it for me. Often, writing is a joy. And sometimes it’s downright painful. But I’d say mostly what I experience when I craft art from painful events is more of a sense of discovery and completion. And relief. Sometimes when I start, I don’t know where I’m going or what I’m really trying to convey. Or I think I do, only to discover that what I thought was the focus of a piece really wasn’t at all. I love that discovery and learning process. And I love the sense of completion when an essay is fine-tuned and finished, probably because I’m so slow and many of my essays take so long to write! For me, the joy comes later when I connect with readers who find some spark within a piece that they can relate to or gives them comfort or helps with their own process of discovery.

JM: We have talked before about how perseverance and tenacity are so important to living the writing life, how we need those qualities to keep writing, keep revising, keep submitting. Reading your essay, it’s easy to see that tenacity is the key to so much about living itself. How do you practice perseverance in the face of setbacks (either on the page or off)?

LE: Well, I used to be horribly stubborn. And in my younger years that trait could create problems because, you know, it’s hard to get along in life when you’re stubborn. But as I’ve aged, that stubbornness has transformed into the useful quality of tenacity, which aids and abets my perseverance to keep going in the face of adversity.

I’m of the mind that you won’t get anything you want unless you ask for it; if you don’t make an attempt, you’ll never succeed; if you don’t submit your writing, it will never be published. It doesn’t mean if you ask or try, you’ll get what you want or succeed, but without trying you’re guaranteed not to. Maybe that’s why I’m so drawn to essaying, the definition of which is “to attempt or try.” You could say that, in essence, I’m essaying my way though life.

JM: What are you working on now? And where can people read more of your work?

LE: Lately it seems I haven’t been working on anything! I’ve been a bit absent from writing these past few months. But over the long term, I’ve been working on an essay collection that addresses themes of loss and grief, illness and (now I can say since this interview) recovery.

Most of my work has been published online. My website (www.laurieeaster.com) lists my publications with links to the online works. In print, my essay “Something to Do with Baldness,” which was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize, appeared in the January 2014 issue of the wonderful micro-magazine Under the Gum Tree, an exclusively creative nonfiction publication. I also have an essay coming out in Chautauqua next June in their “Privacy and Secrets” issue.

Jennifer (Jenna) McGuiggan is a writer and editor based in southwestern Pennsylvania. Her essays have appeared in New World Writing, Connotation Press, Extract(s), and elsewhere. She is at work on a book of essays exploring the polarities of longing and belonging. One of those essays was chosen as a finalist for Prime Number Magazine’s 2014 creative nonfiction contest. You can find her online in The Word Cellar (www.thewordcellar.com).

Mary Lewis’ story “Quesasomethings” is published in the Winter 2015 issue of r.kv.r.y. focused on Caregivers. Writer Nancy Overcott comments “My heart went out to Dora in her discomfort that is so familiar and so well expressed in the story.” Nancy interviewed the author at a Mexican restaurant (in Decorah, Iowa) that serves quesadillas.

When did you start writing seriously and what inspired you?

I hated writing all through school, especially creative writing, so it astonishes me that now it is my passion. There were a couple of stages in the conversion. One was the practice of writing round-robin letters that my family kept going for a number of years in the days of slow mail, and I’d write a page that hit the high points of my life about once a month. I wanted it to be entertaining and found myself using writing skills I’d first learned in high school from Mr. Pink, my sophomore year English teacher. He insisted we give specific examples to support any statement, and once he leapt onto his desk to tell us not to bother to pick up a pen if we were going to write a stereotype. As a class we wrote Steinbeck to congratulate him on his Nobel Prize and were thrilled when we got a thoughtful answer.

Then there was the funeral of my uncle Danny in Washington State. I was touched by this whole community of interesting people who knew him so much better than I did, and I wanted to remember them. I also got to watch my mom interact with her colorful sister and brother in law, and wrote down some of their sayings, noted the way my aunt aligned the hairs of her eyebrows, the way he put her down. After the experience I wrote an account of it and showed it to Mom, and to my surprise, she was horrified that I could say those things about her sister. What astonished me was that she had been much more critical of her than I was, in fact I was just describing what I saw. I call it my Sinclair Lewis moment, because he was unpopular in his hometown when he wrote about them in “Main Street.” So I tried changing names, but that didn’t hide the real people well enough. Then I changed the incidents and details about he characters, and pretty soon I threw up my hands and just put in what I wanted to. And I loved the freedom. So that’s what I write mainly now, fiction.

Your endings don’t usually have clear conclusions or closures. In “Quesasomethings” we don’t know how the relationship turned out with Dora and Will. I like that, but what is the rationale?

I never think there’s an end to a story, it just gets to some different place from where it was at the beginning. I want to have some sort of satisfying conclusion, but I think that can be achieved by having something important change during the story. For example in “Quesasomethings,” Dora fails to communicate with people at the party, but does eventually find Will. The fact that they did so is to me the satisfying ending. I leave it up to the reader to imagine if their relationship develops.

Where do your story ideas come from?

The best advice I received about starting a story was from Brent Spencer at a workshop in Iowa City. He said, “Come up with a character and a setting, then put her in motion.” Even if I don’t have a good idea of a character to begin with, and that is the usual case, I have to figure out why they’re moving about, and that usually means there’s something going on that is upsetting in some way. That leads to more characters and more action.

I heard that people love dogs in stories, and guns, so I wrote a story with both. I wanted to do a “Twilight Zone” style story and invented a town in a hidden valley, out of sync in time and culture. I started my first novel, “The Trouble Swings,” by picking out an idea from a list I’d come up with that included a fireman who was afraid of fires, a dancer who hated to be touched, a teacher who couldn’t keep off the sauce. I was intrigued by a person who takes pictures of dead people. It rattled around for a while, and developed into a story of two young women struggling with their attraction to each other. It begins when Allie takes photos of Beth in a stage coffin as publicity for the school paper for a play about a prom queen who dies in an accident.

Have you studied other writers to come up with methods? Who are some of the writers you admire?

There are so many, Ann Tyler, Marilynne Robinson, Eudora Welty, Alice Munro, Stephen King, and the ones we don’t have to put first names to like Faulkner, Steinbeck, Chekov.

I read slowly to figure out how they do it. It’s like looking at a house and finding out how it was built. What I look for is voice, balance of showing and telling, precise language, arc, use of backstory. I can rarely just relax and read without thinking about craft. Now that I’m in an MFA program I’m doing that even more intensively, and practice what we call stealing from other writers. The understated poetry in Robinson’s fiction, the magic in the ordinary of Munro and Tyler, the writing from the inside of a character of Faulkner, the dry wit of Charlotte Bronte.

To what extent does your own biography enter your writing?

“Quesasomethings” draws more than most of my stories on my own experiences. For example, I teach college anatomy, commute by bike, and have experienced parties like the one portrayed in “Quesasomethings,” but Dora has a different personality from mine. In fact most of the time I invent characters who are different from me, though they may have some skills I know well, such as photography for my point-of-view character in my novel “The Trouble Swings.”

Since I love and treasure the natural world, outdoor settings come easily to me and are often a part of my writing, though not in “Quesasomethings.”

I have read many of your stories and feel I could recognize your writing if I didn’t know you were the author. What do you think contributes to the originality of your work?

It’s like holding up a mirror, but I don’t know if I see what others do in terms of style. I have an interest in physical details of both setting and characters, and I hope these carry emotional content as well. I have Dora doff her snowpants next to the stylish coats on the rack, and enter the party room steaming from her bike ride. Hopefully the reader will know right away this is a story about an outsider. I stay away from adverbs, especially for conveying emotions, and am so interested in showing, that exposition is a small part of my writing.

I like to get close to my characters, and I’ve been told I have a good ear for dialogue. I close my laptop if I see an agenda rearing up in my writing, and bring in information only as necessary to the story. I don’t explain a lot about a character before the story really starts, I just jump in. I prize clarity and struggle for the right word or phrase. For example, I describe Will uncoiling like a snail from his shell, and then add “but still attached to it.”

I usually work close in to a character, so as a narrator I take on something of her speech patterns, and what she pays attention to. In “Quesasomethings” I have Dora say, “Burned that bridge, but it was her own fault.”

Where can we find more of your writing?

I have a few stories in online literary journals. “Chimney Fire” is in the April 2009 issue of r.kv.r.y.  “A Good Session” is in the summer 2014 issue of Persimmon Tree. On my website you can find excerpts of my novel, “The Trouble Swings” (as yet unpublished) and of several stories. I also have a blog, which has some complete stories.

Nancy Overcott is also a writer and has three published books. Her inspiration comes mostly from experiences in a hardwood forest of southeast Minnesota where she lived with her husband for 25 years. She is a retired RN and was also a teacher of German and French.

Douglas Shearer’s story “Treatment” appeared in the Winter 2015 CAREGIVERS issue of r.kv.r.y.. Songwriter Adam Haggarty called the story haunting and said he loved the dark. direct style. He interviewed the author at his recording studio near Toronto, Canada.

Adam Haggarty: Your story, “Treatment,” is fictional, but does this story draw from real life or family experiences?

Douglas Shearer: Like the narrator, my father died from cancer when I was 15 and some of the narrator’s teenage memories mirror my own. My dad had a dry sense of humor, could not sing, and he liked to gamble. I’d never heard of cancer until my father got it, but it seems these days I always know someone who is fighting it. When my father-in-law got cancer, I thought I knew what to expect. I was wrong. I felt helpless and angry. This story grew from those feelings. My narrator took on a life of his own and explored topics I hadn’t originally thought of.

I wrote this piece in first person because I needed to climb inside my character, if that makes sense. But for me, I think my best writing comes when the character becomes so developed that he/she can push me aside (so to speak) and write for themselves. The narrator eventually re-wrote the ending. This story went through several revisions before I was happy with it, and I think the first person writing gives it a certain intimacy. The result was that some of my first workshop reviewers said they would pray for me. Others said I shouldn’t be posting non-fiction in the fiction section. I had to assure them that this piece is fiction, and without giving away the story for someone who may not have read it yet, I was a little worried that I’d end up with the police at my door.

AH: This story is quite dark, which I like. It’s very haunting. Does this represent your style?

DS: I started writing for young children, then I wrote my first novel-length manuscript for young adults. It’s a mystery/thriller called Chasing the Dragon Snake. It deals with some dark subject matter. I’m looking for a home for it, but there are no werewolves, vampires, or witches in it, and it’s not dystopian so I may have a tough time placing it. Most of what I write now is for adults. I recently fulfilled a New Year’s Resolution of submitting twelve new short stories in twelve months. Treatment was one of those stories and after looking back at the others, I’d have to say that yes, there is a little darkness to all my stories, some more so than others. I did write a humorous story, but it was about Satan and the Grim Reaper, so a little darkness there too.

AH:  Who would you say was your greatest influence on the way you write?

DS: It’s funny, but until recently, I couldn’t have answered that question. When I was workshopping one of my stories, a fellow writer commented that my style felt oddly remote and referred to Edgar Allan Poe’s writing saying that he somehow managed to engage our emotions with unhinged narrators but didn’t know how he did that. I got two more reviews that mentioned Poe and as luck would have it, I found an Anthology that was looking for original Poe-like story ideas. That story, “Intimate Enemy,” has survived the first round of cuts for the anthology. I will often read Poe, and sometimes even his word choice can give me an idea.

In an introduction to a collection of short stories, Ben Bova wrote about “The Art of Plain Speech.” Bova wanted the writer to be invisible to the reader. Isaac Asimov was quoted as saying he wanted his writing to be clear. Some of his critics called his writing simplistic, yet he won all sorts of awards. I’ve read a lot from both these authors and without knowing it, they’ve influenced my style. Like you said, dark and direct. Dark like Poe, and direct like Asimov and Bova. I know that not everyone will like my style and I’m okay with that.

AH: What is your approach to writing? Do you have scheduled writing sessions or do you jump onto the computer when you’ve got an idea running around in your head?

DS: I schedule myself to write every Saturday and Sunday morning until at least noon. On a good day, I get four hours in. If I go any longer, I’m exhausted. Sometimes I do put in more, but I know I’m going to pay for it. If I have an idea that pops into my head, I have to write it down. Whatever I’m doing, I excuse myself and go write the idea down. I have a pen and paper beside the bed for those moments when a dream inspires a story. The only problem is that sometimes when I read my notes later, they don’t make any sense to me. I have a note in my writing room (I refuse to call it an office because that sounds too much like work) that says, “Story about a homeless person living in the woods.” Unfortunately, I can’t remember what specifically I was thinking about when I wrote the note.

Normally I write at the computer, but one day this summer, I got up before anyone else, made a pot of coffee and decided to write in the back yard with pen and paper. I wrote a complete short story and entered the mess of scribbles into the computer the next day. It was a story that required very little editing and was ranked the best story for the month on the workshop I use. So maybe slowing down my mind to the speed of my pen produces good results. That story, “Hung Out to Dry,” has an ever-present ambiguity that requires the reader to make certain assumptions, which prove to be wrong, unless you read too quickly, then you will miss the whole point.

AH: R.kv.r.y. quarterly explores recovery: What does recovery mean to you?

DS: Recovery is the process of getting something back that you once had. It could be a lost wallet or pet, or it could mean getting back your health either physically or mentally. There is also recovery on an emotional level—getting back to a sense of calm after a loss, which can be one of the hardest things to recover from. Writing this story helped me with the recovery from loss.

Sometimes though, there are things that you simply can’t recover from, and perhaps realization and acceptance of that can be a form of recovery as well.

Adam Haggarty  is singer/songwriter/guitarist and frontman for the band Before the Curtain. He is currently writing/producing rock and pop acts in Los Angeles.