I have been a fan of the work of Kim Chinquee (Salsa) for a long time. Her flash fictions feel so real to me–gritty and unflinching and honest–and yes, even sexy. And all written with such wonderful economy of word. Can you tell I’m a fan?

And it occurs to me, that rather than blather on about how great her work is, how fabulously she writes, how cool she is in person, and on and on, the quickest way to make you a fan, too, is to point you to some more of her excellent work. So, without further ado, please take a moment to check out:

It Wasn’t Supposed to Be Permanent
Two Stories: I Wanted to Believe This Was My Life & Lockbox

Some Days He Could See

Physics
Please Just Come to the Door

And if those have whetted your appetite and you are craving more, here are links to her two marvelous (and very attractive) books:

OH BABY

Pretty

MA: Hi, Craig. Thanks for agreeing to answer a few questions about the creative process in general and your work in particular. I like the narrative voice in your story 1984. One of the things that sticks with me is your narrator’s feeling of being invisible. He’s in a crowd of people, dripping wet from his frozen clothes thawing, and no one notices. This strikes me as an apt description of modern life. Would you care to comment on that?

CB: While writing 1984, I tried to create a dissociative voice. I think that dissociation—both in a social and a personal sense—provides an interesting parallel. The narrator is not only a cipher to the people around him, he is simultaneously a stranger in his own body. He does not experience sensations of discomfort or pain, but merely becomes aware of them as they occur to the body he inhabits. He experiences the people around him in much the same way.

MA: Yes, I see that. He’s sort of an observer of his own life. I love the image that our guest illustrator, Kristin Beeler, designed to accompany your piece. I’m interested to hear what you think of it. What did you make of the spider and the drain?

CB: I also loved Kristen Beeler’s piece and found it incredibly appropriate for 1984. The colors of decay, the implied silence, and the ominous presence of the spider perfectly echoed the mood and foreshadowed the ending. The drain, for me, illustrated the waste of addiction while the spider invoked the threat of destruction.

MA: Yes, “implied silence.” What a great descriptor. There is a lot of silence in both the image and your story. And at the end, your narrator clearly still feels voiceless and invisible, even as he writes an inflammatory phrase on the wall in his own blood. What events do you think could occur that would make him feel seen/visible?

CB: The question I struggled with while writing 1984 is a question I encounter everyday in my work: Is it the responsibility of the sufferer to appropriately cry for help or is it the responsibility of those who can help to be more aware? In a clinical setting we become almost hyper-aware; in the real world, that level of awareness is much more difficult.

MA: I agree. I struggle with that in my life, too. And I would say that even when we are aware, it can be tough to gauge when it’s time to step in and when to simply stand by. You’ve depicted your narrator in a way that makes me care what happens to him. I think that’s really important in a story of any kind. In this case, I want him to recover from his addiction, to turn his back on the numbing effects of alcohol. Given that you have created something that is artistic and also speaks to addiction, I’m wondering what role you think art or “The Arts” plays in recovery?

CB: The Arts provide an outlet for deep honesty, beyond the mere reporting of events. Honesty can become, through storytelling, a shared experience. For me, that honesty has been the foundation for recovery.

MA: And finally, what does “recovery” mean to you?

CB: For me, as someone who was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder at the age of 31, insight was the beginning of recovery. The next and most difficult step was asking for help. The final step is my daily awareness that every morning I must choose to continue recovering.

MA: Insight, yes. We could all use more of that. Thanks so much for this discussion, Craig, and for sharing your fine work with our readers.

Mary Akers: I really love your essay “Beadwork.” Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how art and recovery are often inextricably linked. A song can help us heal, a piece of writing, even a beautiful painting can speak to whatever is weighing heavy on our minds. And your mother’s beading of rosaries strikes me as a creative act, too–the hand-making of something beautiful and meaningful designed to share with others. Would you care to comment on that?

Anjali Enjeti: Perhaps there’s a sort of yin yang thing going on when it comes to recovery. I think after tragedy, the soul needs creation to balance out the destruction.  Or maybe the mind just needs distraction to comprehend grief. Regardless, I think there’s something particularly therapeutic about creating something physical, something tangible, to hand to someone who is hurting. The creative energy my loved ones poured into beading a rosary, baking cookies, handwriting a note, knitting a pair of socks— sustained me through my darkest times. Creation, just like recovery, is a necessary process of life.

MA: I agree–creation to balance out the destruction. That’s a nice way to look at it. Light to balance tha dark. Do you feel that writing about painful experiences actually helps us to recover from them? And do you have any thoughts on how or why that process works?

AE: Absolutely.

There are very few socially acceptable ways to react to pain. I couldn’t scream in the middle of a park, have in a massive meltdown in the aisle of a grocery store. I couldn’t crawl into a deep dark hole and stay there until I felt better. I couldn’t quit life or stop time.

The only thing I could do was write.

Writing was a means for me to relive my pain over and over and over again until I could somehow grasp its depth and complexity. Once I compartmentalized my emotions into metaphors, italics, paragraphs or ellipses– once I committed my silent voice to a narrative form– I began to heal.

MA: Yes. A friend of mine survived banishment to Siberia during Stalin’s brutal regime and he swears that retelling the story for 70 years now has taken out all the sting of it in a very healthy way. (And he’s a psychologist, so he ought to know!) One image from your essay that really sticks with me is found in the line: “I try to picture American soldiers combing the desert with dog tags hanging around their necks, M16s secured to their chests, and black rosaries stuffed in their pockets.” As soon as I read that, I try to picture it, too, and I think it’s important that we do. It also links you and your struggles, and your mother and her rosary group to men halfway around the world, fighting for their lives and also fighting to recover from their own traumas. Did you feel that connection, too?

AE: Recovery is a battle, isn’t? A war zone with no boundaries. When we hurt, we are bruised and battered soldiers, trying to find meaning in senseless violence. We are stunned by the assault on our senses. The harder the fight, the more aggressive we have to be to find a way out.

When I held the rosaries for the soldiers my mother made, I felt stronger, more ready, to face the remainder of what I hoped would be a successful pregnancy. But the black rosaries were also a sobering reminder for me that what others faced in the world was far worse than my own individual pain. This perspective was crucial to my recovery.

MA: You also talk about faith in terms of Catholicism, and Hinduism, and an unusual melding of the two. I’m not convinced that the word “faith” has to be a stand-in for organized religion, despite what so many politicians would have us believe. I think faith can exist on its own. Do you believe that the act of recovering requires faith in some form?

AE: Ultimately, the type of faith that got me through a very stressful pregnancy did not originate from organized religion or a particular philosophy. It was my mother’s faith in me.

I will say this—the older I get, the less I understand faith. But if faith is the belief that the tide will eventually turn, that the storm will blow over, that the fire will burn out, then yes, I think recovery requires faith. What kept me going on my very worst days was faith in the words of friends with similar losses: You won’t always hurt this badly.

MA: And finally, what does “recovery” mean to you?

AE: Recovery to me is self-forgiveness. It’s the freeing of oneself from any blame that may or may not have contributed to the trauma. It’s the shelving of infinite “what-ifs,” the relinquishment of 20/20 hindsight.

I knew I started on my road to recovery when, instead of going in circles, I took a step in a new direction, toward a new normal. Though I knew I would never, ever be the same person again, I also knew that it was OK that I’d never be the same person again.

MA: Yes, a new direction. I like that. Thank you for participating, Anjali. I’ve really enjoyed it. And for our readers, here is more to enjoy–a few links to additional essays:

Carousel

Fade to Brown

Am I Raising Feminists?

A Different World

Mary Akers: Your essay (Saint Jerry Wants a Medium Pizza with Half Pepperoni) really spoke to me, Sonya. Particularly the beginning, where you say that when you heard the list of what qualifies as abuse, you realized that you knew it already, but only for others, not for yourself. I’ve been there, and it’s a shocking moment when we realize that what we’ve been putting up with ourselves, we would call something very different if we saw someone else being subjected to it. Could you speak a little bit about that moment of realization and the perspective that it gave you?

Sonya Huber: I appreciate you saying that you’ve been there. I found it so difficult to get my bearings, and I had many moments in which I made notes to myself, trying to collect enough internal evidence to add up to clarity. It was like a version of the movie Memento, where the main character loses both his memory and sense of chronology and covers himself with tattoos and notes to retrace his own steps. I was just cleaning out some files today and found yet more notes and a pamphlet about domestic violence from a time before I thought I had concerns. I was trying to persuade myself that what I was experiencing was real. There were several small moments that each connected to the next realization; one powerful insight wasn’t enough. I had to fight every day to get back to the reality in which my opinion mattered. I made a numbered list with black marker of things I needed to do to take care of myself, and I hung it on my fridge. One of them was “Don’t keep secrets.” I had it hanging up for about a year.

I have always taken pride in my resilience. For me, that led to a sort of pride in being “tough” or “strong.” I told myself that I could handle anything, that the measure of my freedom was how much I could take without blinking. I thought that was peace. I thought that I could withdraw deep into myself like a snail or a hermit crab, and that at some point in the future, I could just come back out. But humans are not mollusks; I’ve seen the limits of my resilience. I know that there are many things I can’t handle. It took a long time to admit that, but it also led me to understand that I shouldn’t have to handle those things and that I should run from them. Certain experiences are truly dangerous, and they have lasting negative effects. Being exposed to cruelty changes a person. I guess I should have picked that up somewhere along the way, but at least I know it now.

MA: When you and I were working together on revising your piece early on, you said something like, “Well, that idea sort of took over the piece.” (It was the idea of tying into the Pizza Hut specials.)  Clearly, revisions can take our work into unexpected areas. Do you find that exciting? Or burdensome?

SH: I love it. That’s the whole of writing, to me—that’s my experience every day when I sit down at the computer. I always start out with a clear idea of what I want to happen, and it never works out the way I imagined. It’s a great reminder for me in the rest of my life: my idea of “finished” and “happy” and “perfect” is never as good as what happens when I get feedback from other people, when my work collides with the rest of the world, and when I get another viewpoint. It happens in revision, too–I get to have conversations with different versions of myself on the page, and the Wednesday version of myself is usually more than willing to delete Tuesday’s paragraphs.

MA: This is one of my very favorite lines from your essay: “Other women were smart were myself were stupid were somehow here.” I just love that more than I can express. It says so much to me about how we get here, who gets here, our aloneness once we arrive and yet the universal ties we share. I realize I’m bringing my own experience to your words and creating something meaningful to me, but really, that’s what readers do, isn’t it? I’m fascinated by the idea that readers can take our words and imbue them with their own meaning. Can you tell me if what I took from that line is what you meant? And if not, does that bother you?

SH: Thank you! That’s one of those weird sentences that revision sometimes provides. I think I was in the midst of deleting a phrase and had too many verbs. The semi-nonsense pattern with all the passives made a loop that felt true to my experience. That’s exactly what I meant—that moment of each woman being alone between these verbs, just stuck. It seemed to reflect the surprising truth that I was no better or worse than anyone else in that situation—and then the shock that being stuck also meant I was part of something bigger than myself, that my experience might therefore have meaning.

MA: Ah, yes, the accidental creativity that we simply have to be open to. Isn’t that the best? Speaking of creativity, our guest illustrator, Kristin Beeler, read each piece of writing for this issue and designed a unique image for each. It’s really such a gift that an artist is willing to do that for us each issue. To me, it brings the written work to life in a new and exciting way. Her image for your essay was a very simple one, but sometimes simplicity can be the most powerful approach. What did you think of the image she chose for yours? How would you describe it as relating to your essay?

SH: That image is heartbreaking to me, the more I look at it. At first glance I thought the many small circles were pennies or pieces of pepperoni–but then I looked close and realized the hearts are formed from hammered nails. The weathered look of the metal and wood reminded me of how carefully we can compose a situation and yet how desperately we hold on to what looks like love. Those careful hearts–they remind me that nothing is simple. I’ve been in difficult situations with people who I loved and who truly loved me, and the experiences were so hard to figure out because they were mixes of care and cruelty, and neither of us knew which was which. And I’m reading about the history of Christianity right now, so it evokes the image of crucifixion. And a third set of associations is very personal, but I will say that the image itself is eerily connected to elements of my life story. Yes, the image is utterly appropriate.

MA: And finally, a question I especially love to read the answers to: what does “recovery” mean to you?

SH: Recovery evokes many beautiful /images for me: the space to breathe, to have contact with the spiritual side of my life, a chance to understand how my head works, and to learn from other people’s experiences.

For me, recovery is the opposite of the misleading term “self-help,” because I would not have glimpsed sanity without other people in intentional, structured communities. I have spent years sitting in rooms with mismatched chairs and strangers in the well-known organization for friends and family members of alcoholics and addicts. That’s my second family. So I have to go back to the basics: for me, recovery will always mean that free network where the clarity makes you laugh, the coffee is usually pretty bad, and the love helps you redefine what love means.

MA: Beautiful. Thanks for your time and insightful answers, Sonya. I really enjoyed your responses, and I think our readers will, too.

Here are links to more of Sonya’s excellent work:

Her newest book, Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir

Sonya’s website

A photo essay about the writing process called “How Do I Write?” that originally appeared in The Oxford Magazine

The Amazon link for Cover Me

and for her first book, Opa Nobody 

Mary Akers: Hi, Helen. Thanks for agreeing to speak with me about your writing process. One of the things that struck me right away in your marvelous short story “Mermaid Rock” was your use of sensory details. I love it when a story takes me there in terms of touch, taste, sounds, smells, and of course /images. You do this so well. Is this a conscious act of yours as you write? Or does it come naturally out of how you interact with your world?

Helen Branch: The initial idea for the story came out of a writing workshop I attended. The workshop energized my writing and as a result I started a word sketchbook. I wrote what came to mind, and for the story that became “Mermaid Rock” I had an image of a woman backing down the steps of a dock into a lake. I thought, how does that feel and how do I communicate it? It’s a common enough experience. We’ve all braced ourselves to go into the cold water. We anticipate the feeling, but it’s still a shock to feel the water move up your legs. I tried to capture the experience by breaking down all the sensory details. Then, my description sat in my sketchbook for about six months. When I found it again, I wondered, who is the woman backing down the steps, and why is she there at that particular moment?

MA: Wonderful. What a great way into a story. And it strikes me that the structure of your story is very unusual. It is definitely not a linear story, but I think it works quite well to get at Adele’s memories and her thoughts. Could you say a little bit about why you chose to structure it the way you did? And how much do you think a story’s structure influences the reader’s experience of the story?

HB: I couldn’t really use a conventional, linear structure with this story. Except for the ending, when she goes for a swim, Adele’s action is recalling events from her past. Of course, the act of remembering can be hard work. I tried to imitate that dynamic, and build tension as her memories culminate in the realization that her marriage failed her. When we remember the past we try to make sense of it and find the pattern. With Adele, I wanted to present a character that was reviewing her past, and her relationship, and coming to terms. And, I wanted the story to feel immediate and intimate and to mimic how we replay the past.

MA: When we were working together on revising the ending of your piece, we talked about the final image the reader is left with and the importance of “resonance,” by which I mean something like a tuning fork that once struck keeps on reverberating. I felt like you did a wonderful job with that in the revision, especially invoking the ripples on the water moving outward from her perch on the rock. How do you find your endings? Do you plan them out and then write toward them? Or forge ahead and find the ending in the writing?

HB: Endings are tricky. In an ideal world an ending would appear like a rabbit pulled out of a hat, but, instead, I’m frequently chasing it around the room. My first draft is just a narrative outline complete with where I think I’ll end. Then, the real writing begins. I try things on. I cut and paste. I reorder events, change names, add and delete characters. Sometimes I am surprised where the writing takes me. I hope, though, that the ending is an organic result of the story’s action. I want the reader to feel that, of course, this is how the story should end. Not that the ending was predictable, but just right, appropriate. I want to understand the ending too. I hate it when I am captivated by a story until the very end, and then left wondering, what just happened? And, of course, it’s always great to have an extra set of eyes look it over.

MA: Water plays an important role in myths, in our belief systems, even in the practice of faith. It’s cleansing, rejuvenating, life-sustaining and always changing but always staying the same. It can also drown us. How important was the lake to Adele’s transformation? How important was it to you as the writer, in accomplishing what you wanted to in the story?

HB: Water is central to the story. I use the characters’ interaction with the lake to reveal key aspects of their personality. The first time Tim sees the lake he strips off his clothes and jumps in. Adele is, at first, passive and sits high on the cabin’s deck watching the water. The reader knows she has a relationship with the lake. She learned to swim there and the rock jutting out of the water is ‘hers’. And the water here does perform an important, almost baptismal, function. The act of taking a midnight swim reunites the split Adele; the woman who recognizes the failure of her marriage and the woman who accepts the essential right to be herself.

When I was thinking about your question, I realized that water also plays a critical role in the novel I’m writing. The novel, “The Pebble Collection,” is about a woman who finds mason jars filled with pebbles in her aunt’s pantry. The pebbles were taken from a river on the property and they have a magical effect on the person handling them, allowing the person to believe in what they most desire. But, the river wants the pebbles returned. So, in this case, in the novel, water is a malevolent force. Like you said, water can both heal and hurt.

MA: Your novel sounds fascinating.

Our guest illustrator, Kristin Beeler, designed a unique piece of artwork for each story, poem, or essay. It’s a great gift to have an artist adopt each issue. To me, it brings the written work to life in new and exciting ways. The first image that she submitted for your story felt menacing to me, with the figure of a man in shadow, over a woman on the ground. It was interesting, but since we had revised the ending to be more hopeful, I went back to Kristin and asked if she wouldn’t mind changing the image. She did, and I was very intrigued by the one she came up with. What did you think of it? How would you describe it as relating to your essay?

HB: When I was ten or eleven I spent several weeks at a cabin on a lake like the one I describe in the story. There were seats hanging from chains under the porch roof and cushions made out of a course fabric like the webbing on a lawn chair. The cushions had a green plaid design. When I saw the picture Kristin had taken, I had a flash of recognition. I thought of those cushions. Of course, when I looked more closely I saw that it was parallel lines of rail road tracks. Good photography can do that. Like Edward Weston’s “Pepper #30”, it can represent more than just the literal image. The photograph ties in with the memory Adele has when she and Tim hike out to the train tracks. But the image with its repeating pattern of parallel lines is suggestive too of the patterns in her life that Adele is reviewing.

MA: I love that! How fabulous that your own experiences made it exactly what you wanted it to be on first viewing. Just like good writing can conform to the reader’s needs. Which leads us to my favorite question of all: what does “recovery” mean to you?

HB: I think we humans are fundamentally hardwired to tell ourselves and others stories. We are always trying to put ourselves into a larger context. We are finding patterns, revising, projecting where the storyline will go. And, we can get caught up in the wrong story. I believe that recovery requires us to step aside, to consider the story we’re telling. And, then rewrite it. Sounds simple, right? Of course, it’s not, but recovery lies in the process of rewriting. That’s why I was so excited to be published in r.kv.r.y. I thought “Mermaid Rock” fit with a vision of reclaiming, or recovering one’s story.

MA: Wonderful, Helen. We’re excited to have you in r.kv.r.y., too. And thanks so much for the discussion. It’s been great.

Mary Akers: Hi, Jason. Thanks for agreeing to let me pick your brain today. First let me say that I just loved your piece “Enough.” One of the things that struck me right away was the voice of your narrator. I especially like how he stays detached from the proceedings enough to describe them to us, and yet engaged enough to be frustrated and somewhat bemused by the speaker he is watching (and the reaction of both his father and the audience to the speaker). I know you are primarily a poet (and I’m a fan!), but it strikes me that a lot of your work has this same sort of engaged/clever/bemused starting place to its voice. Can you say a little something about voice in general and the voice of your work in particular?

Jason Schneiderman: I work really hard to reach that place of detachment. I have this sort of excessively expressive face, and I’ve always gotten in trouble for being too emotional. I am fascinated by the ways in which we are constantly refusing interdependence. The United States of America has this weird foundational tension between the inter-dependence of democratic governance and the rugged individualism of colonizing expansion. It’s like the Whiskey Rebellion never ended. I wanted the detachment in this piece to sort of switch sides– the advocate for inter-dependence has to separate from the individualists. Then again, a fantasy is often more powerful than reality, so the speaker loses. It’s like Oscar Wilde said in the Portrait of Mr. W.H. No one ever kills himself to defend the truth. You kill yourself to defend your lies.

MA: True. I also feel like the liars are the ones who shout the loudest, as if volume alone can make their words true.

When we worked together on turning this into a short piece as opposed to a poem, you said it would be your first publication as fiction. Congratulations on crossing a genre! But I’ve always felt that short-shorts like yours exist somewhere outside the realm of strictly fiction or non-fiction…in the same way that poetry does. A poem can be confessional, have a voice, and yet can also be not be the personal experience of the author. Do I have that right? Would you like to say something about this?

JS: I think that since modernism, poetry has been less defined by any set of consistent criteria than as something that is not distinctly another genre. If you look at some of the “poems” of Tristan Tzara or Jackson MacLow, their poems can seem more like a game to see what can be in poetry’s big-genre tent than as poetry proper. In some ways, that big tent playfulness and experimentation has destroyed the popular audience for poetry, because poetry is so exhausting to the novice who realizes just how much there is to know. The poems that a popular audience loves tend to be the poems that are defined as poetry via rhyme, meter, repetition, etc. The-capital-P-Poets, on the other hand, sort of love what the poets are doing. I liked thinking about the piece as fiction, because it clarified for me the genre conventions: Character, setting, narrative arc, conflict, crisis. I don’t want to be reductive about the nature of fiction– but it was nice to work in a genre with larger sets of rules. Then again, my first successes as a poet were all with sonnets. So maybe I’ve always been a rule bound kind of boy.

But I think that fiction writers want to enjoy the fun. I like that when the essay wanted to have more fun it got called the “lyric essay.” I was like, right on essayists. Get lyrical. Go big tent.

JS: The image is very delicate and a bit disturbing, in that the flower’s bloom has this sort of tubular, worm like quality. It’s pretty, but it looks like a distended colon too. I couldn’t quite find the membrane attaching the picture to my piece, which in a certain way was a relief. It avoids the danger of illustration, which I vehemently distrust/dislike– even though there is interesting work being done on the relations of text to image (and text as an image itself). But I don’t do that work myself.

JS: I’m not sure I believe in recovery. I mean, I understand “recovery” in the most literal sense of “getting back”– but you never really get back something you’ve lost. And if you do, its fundamentally different. I think that the metaphor of recovery is often a refusal of loss. In the vernacular, I have “recovered” from my mother’s death, but isn’t that a way of masking the fact that I can never literally “recover” my mother? The comfort of the metaphor masks the horror of the literal.

I think “recovery” does make sense in the context of naming the experience of living after trauma, grief, addiction, dissappointment, etc. But “recovery” then cannot mean a way of returning to wholeness, but rather must name a way of being functionally damaged– of trying to let the scar be the skin. My understanding is that addicts never get to leave “recovery”– that it’s an endless process. One is always recovering, never recovered. I’m not much for denying myself pleasures (again Wilde: I resist everything but temptation), but I can imagine that if denial is a fundamental part of one’s life, it has to be omnipresent. Recovery becomes an asymptote that you can never reach, even if you can get closer.

To return to the material, I’ll give you an example of what I mean about recovery. I have a CD I kept as a memento from my first boyfriend (“kept,” “stole,” who’s keeping track?). He periodically asks about it, since the deal was that he could have it back the next time we meet. But even if I were to give it back to him, he’d never “recover” the same CD. The object would be as fraught with meaning on his shelf as it is on mine. He could download the songs and listen to it on iTunes, sure. But the actual object is unrecoverable. The transformation is ineluctable.

MA: Great example. The concept of “ownership” begs its own myriad of questions, doesn’t it? (Here’s hoping your friend doesn’t read about his CD here!) Your answers have been wonderful, Jason. Thanks so much for taking the time to consider and respond. You’ve given me and our readers a lot to think about.

I have long been a fan of the fine work of Cathy Smith Bowers and was delighted when our poetry editor Tom Lombardo selected her work to feature in this issue. The body of her work expresses such a fresh and yet intuitive sensibility. In fact, I think what I admire most about Cathy’s work is the fact that it contains–nay, embodies!–so many logical contradictions. Her poems surprise, even as they make perfect sense. They are innocent yet full of wisdom. They make you want to cry even as they give you hope in humanity.

If you haven’t had a chance to read the poems we featured in this issue, I highly recommend checking out Groceries and Learning How to Pray (which took my breath away the first time I heard her read it). Also be sure to read J. Stephen Rhodes insightful review of her most recent (and fabulous) book of selected poems: Like Shining from Shook Foil, published by Press 53.

And, I am happy to report, that Cathy is not only a fine poet but a kind and generous individual. Fred Leebron once called her “The beating heart of the Queens MFA program.” In her role as North Carolina Poet Laureate, she has said that one of her main goals is to make poetry accessible to those who are not computer savvy, so she made time to appear once a month on an Asheville radio station. Her poems have been published and appreciated widely, from The Atlantic Monthly to The Kenyon Review. In addition to her book of selected poems, she has written four other wonderful collections of poetry: The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas; Traveling in Time of Danger; A Book of Minutes and The Candle I Hold Up to See You.

And, finally, so you can see the woman in action and get your own sense of her magic, here are two excellent YouTube videos of Cathy reading from her work:

Language

Snow

Self-portrait, oil on panel

We are thrilled to announce the guest illustrator for our upcoming April spring/summer issue: Morgan Maurer! Morgan graciously agreed to adopt the next issue and has already begun reading the work we have accepted. I’m really excited to see the issue start to come together. Here’s a snippet about his work:

Morgan Kirkland Maurer is a painter currently residing in Portland, Maine. A 2002 graduate of The Maine College Of Art, Morgan’s work synthesizes his love for the representation of landscape and portraiture with more abstract compositional choices such as the interplay between differing pictorial depths and how surface, material and mark-making interact. Examples of his work can be viewed online at www.morgankirklandmaurer.com

And here are a few samples to get you as excited as we are:

The Four Songbirds of the Apocalypse, acrylic on panel

A Breeze Off the Bay, oil on panel

Amalgamation, acrylic on panel

Welcome, Morgan! We are so excited to have you illustrating this issue!

This week, I’m thrilled to introduce you to Lu Livingston, the author of Macaroni & Cheese, a Shorts On Survival piece from the current issue. And Lu had the great idea to mix up the format of the blog this time and instead of talking about herself (she’s very modest), she preferred to talk more about the writing process. So I happily conducted a little mini-interview that I’m pleased to include below.

Mary Akers: Thanks for the great interview suggestion, Lu. I’m interested to hear your answers. I’ll start with a very basic but important question: What does “story” mean to you?

Lu Livingston: Sorry, but I’m a traditionalist when it comes to what “story” means. X wants Y, but Z is in the way. Tell me a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end (the same thing Aristotle wanted); give me an imperfect protagonist who wants something hard to get and is capable of change. I like a ground situation with plenty of potential for screwing-up and a monumental barrier to attaining the goal. Whether X gets Y isn’t as important as realizing the potential for change, even if it’s small. This may come from my instructor David Payne brow-beating into me “What’s cranking this story?” Or maybe from parents who read to me every day. I’m sick to death of postmodern and ready for literary gears to shift.

MA: I’m with you on that score. In terms of inspiration, do you find that you mostly read the kind of work that you write? Or do you mix it up?

LL: Do I read the kind of work I write? I try to always read very much better, don’t you? There’s too much really good stuff out there to waste on consumer fiction (although [don’t tell a soul] I was mad about The Girl Who—trilogy). Lately I’m reading all the Icelandic sagas and reread Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf.  I’m trying to read all the Man-Booker award winners, too. I get on one writer and try to read everything I can get hold of, like Eric Linklater, James Robertson, or Neil Gunn, or currently, George Mackay Brown. Interesting now that I look at it—those are all European or Scottish writers. To make me think I (try to) read the theorists. Of course that makes writing fiction nearly impossible, but the literary theories are fascinating. Theory is integrated into the college English curriculum very early now, so to teach it, I always have to think it.

MA: I know you like to travel. How have your travels influenced your writing and/or your career?

LL: Yes, I love to travel, and it certainly does influence my writing. I’m studying the notion of “narrative” time and place right now in the poetry of Meg Bateman (from Skye) and Robert Alan Jamieson (from Shetland), and I am astounded at how complicated a concept “place” can be. My sister and I go to Scotland about every other year for a month in the summer, and even though I can get around and have friends and haunts there, I will always be an incomer, and even though that’s an uncomfortable “place” to be when you’d love not to be ridiculed for the East Tennessee accent, it’s exactly where you want to be as a writer in order to see place from the edge. I want to master “place” as not just setting, but as time/space interaction of people with the potential for relationships materializing, disintegrating, or just brushing elbows in the crowd on a train platform. When I travel, I’m quicker to sense potential. Now, that makes no sense whatsoever, does it?

MA: Oh, I don’t know. It seemed to make pretty darn good sense to me. But the idea of the mutability of place fascinates me, too.

LL: Well, Mary, it has been delightful chatting with you. Must go feed the horses now!

MA: Thank you, Lu! It was a pleasure to talk with you. And to the r.kv.r.y. readers, thanks for checking in. Keep Lu Livingston on your radar screen–she’s a name to watch!