Mark Fabiano: Your short story Roadside Flowers plays with images, scenes, and details of beauty in common settings. You begin with this lovely image of Hoa holding flowers, and you weave her into the story in other scenes involving photography. What led you to this title and how does it aptly capture the pulse of your story?

Karin C. Davidson: Images sometimes begin my stories. In writing “Roadside Flowers,” a story that stands alone and is also a chapter in my novel-in-progress, I originally described this image in another chapter – in which a young soldier on a Greyhound bus holds a worn photograph of a little girl standing on a dirt road. I wanted to know more about these characters and this photograph, and so I followed their lead. The title came from the first image, Hoa waving wildflowers that she’d gathered from the roadside. Afterwards, I thought about how close the phrase was to roadside bombs; at least, my mind went there. It seemed an unconscious acknowledgment of the beauty and horror that are side by side in war. Perhaps that’s how it captures the story’s pulse, in that a soldier carries a camera and an M-16, then is ordered to shoot photos, rather than the enemy, and through his lens, war is bathed in bravery, fright, handfuls of flowers, generosity and innocence, duty, anger, artillery, mud, exhaustion, and death. Life, a little girl, a fistful of flowers seemed a good way to begin.

MF: Faulkner says, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”  Roadside Flowers, like many of your stories, takes this to heart, whether consciously or not, in that the story’s timeline is not a linear one. That is, time—past and present—fluctuates according to the needs of the story, which is told in a natural innate narrative impulse of the character James Williams. Talk about the decisions you CONSCIOUSLY made about representing time in this story.

KCD: TIME. Joan Silber’s books—The Size of the World, Ideas of Heaven, Fools, and of course, The Art of Time in Fiction—have taught me so much about time. I do struggle with time in fiction, but my CONSCIOUS decisions about time in this story—yes, I can tell you about those. The time frame is, of course, during the war in Vietnam—namely, the Year of the Water Rat. 1972. Already, in terms of the politics, the military operations, the ongoing destruction, and the reaction to this war, a lot had happened: escalation, the Tet Offensive, Nixon doctrine and Vietnamization, the ongoing U.S. anti-war and counterculture movements, the bombing of Cambodia and Laos months away, and the draft one year from ending. This is off the page, but in my mind, as I wrote the story. So there is historical time.

For James, there is personal time, in terms of how young he is, what he knows before his tour of duty and what he learns during his tour. He was raised in Florida in the 1950’s and 60’s, and he is really still a boy when he is drafted. So there’s the sequence of time of boyhood into manhood.

And in the writing, there is what Joan Silber—in The Art of Time in Fiction—calls Switchback Time, in which the story zigzags among time frames, from the time in which the story is told, the time in which the story takes place, and a time further back. All of these moments in time work together to “clarify and expand what a story is about,” somewhat like associative thought. And this is where James’ way of telling the story comes in, reflective, but not removed from everything that happens to him in Vietnam.

MF: On research. Not to demystify the artful treatment that this story accomplishes regarding the Vietnam war, nor your mastery and love of language, but could you speak about the kinds of research you needed to do in order to make this story true. Specifically, the dialogue between James, Shields, the CO and other soldiers.

KCD: Years of research. I’ve read actual military reports, books on the history of the Vietnam War, fiction, poetry, memoir, letters from soldiers. I’ve watched films—documentaries and feature films. I’ve spoken with Vietnam veterans, via email and in person, especially CAP Marines, who had worked in villages with the South Vietnamese Popular Forces toward pacification, rather than with companies whose orders were to search and destroy. I’ve studied photographs, from the archives of Life Magazine and Stars and Stripes, and from personal and museum and art gallery collections.

The war in Vietnam was the backdrop to my childhood, and by the time I was a teenager, I knew a lot of boys who had returned home, no longer boys. We didn’t talk about where they’d been and what they’d seen. Conversations never went there. Later, I had to wonder. But these friends weren’t around anymore to ask, and maybe they still wouldn’t have wanted to talk.

And so I turned to art, literature, archives, films, and Vietnam veterans—some of them accomplished writers—for answers. The visual of a photograph, a line of poetry, a passage in a work of fiction, a conversation with a veteran, or a letter from a soldier to his parents—these are the media and moments that inspired me to keep writing the novel. The dialogue of the soldiers came from these moments, trying to understand how orders deployed led to duty. Even in the midst of the confusion and devastation, one followed orders.

MF: Tim O’Brien’s narrator in “How To Tell A True War Story,” says, “A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.”  What is it in this story that you want the reader’s stomach to believe? Or better yet, do you think you accomplished a “stomach-truth” for a reader to take away? If so, what might that be?

KCD: When I write a story, I let the viewpoint character take the lead. In this instance, to understand James, I had to go where he was at this point in his life, someplace completely new, a land exotic and beautiful and terrifying, the farthest from anywhere he’d ever been. In creating a sense of place, in creating the character as deeply as possible, I hope I’ve created this kind of truth for the reader.

MF: From the very start and continuing all the way through “Roadside Flowers,” you deftly layer in brushstroke upon brushstroke of details, confirming Tim O’Brien’s dictum that “True war stories do not generalize.” In a sense, this is true of all great stories, not just ones about war. How do you choose which details to use in your stories and where to embellish them, in general, and in “Roadside Flowers” in particular?

KCD: Details! Sometimes I get too caught up in the details and have to pull back. That said, I think that one must imagine the particulars of setting, scene, and characters in order to create the believability, complication, tone, and momentum that story requires. Without details, there is no story. Choosing details is never random, but purposeful, careful, sometimes tipping the story into unexpected places. As the story progresses, the details increase, revealing all of those images caught in James’ photographic lens, magnified, cropped, blown into and out of perspective.

Recently, I’ve taken a break from reading war literature. I’ve been reading Lee Martin’s novels, story collection, and memoirs, incredibly thankful for his portraits of farmland and family, seasons and time passing. Wheat kernels, killing frosts, marigolds and zinnias, the worn arms of a rocking chair, the trace of a smile. These details— perfectly placed, lingered over, returned to—ground us, allow us entry into and passage throughout the story. Exactly what I hope my stories accomplish.

MF: What are your thoughts about women writing on war? War veteran and novelist Cara Hoffman wrote in a MARCH 31, 2014 NYT Op-Ed that “stories about female veterans are nearly absent from our culture. It’s not that their stories are poorly told. It’s that their stories are simply not told in our literature, film and popular culture.” Do you think that “Roadside Flowers” contributes a female voice about war despite the use of a male character? How does it and or how doesn’t it contribute to war literature in general, and women’s war literature specifically?

KCD: A complicated question and a good one to end on, Mark.

Regarding Cara Hoffman’s article, “The Things She Carried,” I will have to disagree with her premise that women veterans’ stories are “not told in our literature, film and popular culture.” There are many women veterans writing fiction, poetry, essays, scripts, and screenplays. Perhaps what Ms. Hoffman means is that female veteran writers are not granted the same consideration as male veteran writers. Another gender imbalance in the world of literature worth questioning, another VIDA moment.

Among writers of war literature, specifically those who experienced war firsthand as soldiers, men have certainly had more attention than women. Of these men and women, the list is long. The women writers who are war veterans, approach memoir, poetry, and fiction with the honest emotion and wherewithal that comes from having been there, from the drills of training camp to the dust and adrenalin of war zones. They see the picture in ways very different from their male counterparts, in ways that search and pause and consider, turning a moment over and over and realizing it still cannot be completely understood.

That said, sometimes I feel like an imposter. I’ve never been to war. The war in Vietnam came to my generation on the nightly news, in the body counts, from the protests, and in the midst of those who returned but seemed elsewhere. There was a fellow I knew who’d flown Hueys (the UH1E helicopters used then mostly by the Marines). He came home to New Orleans and couldn’t find work that matched his training. So he worked odd jobs, just making it. He had a lot of time on his hands, and he’d come around, always ready for a beer, and sometimes in the middle of a conversation, he’d stop and stare off into space. He had a great sense of humor, kind of down-home and dirty, with a huge heart. He’d grin and carry on, always looking for trouble, but never finding it in the way he had in Vietnam.

In writing about war, as a woman who has never been to war, I have company. And here I will call out names: Bobbie Ann Mason, Toni Morrison, Jayne Ann Phillips, Siobhan Fallon, Roxana Robinson, Mary Akers, and so many more. Write what you know doesn’t live here; write what you want to know, what you need to know does. So yes, “Roadside Flowers” contributes a female voice to war literature, and I imagine how it contributes, whether in the context of war literature, or specifically as women’s war literature, would lie in the readers’ reactions. If James’ experience lingers in their minds, makes them consider the bright and dark design of war, then perhaps that’s how.

Mark Fabiano’s fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Green Hills Literary Lantern, The Long Story, and elsewhere. He was awarded an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award in Fiction for 2008. His scholarly work has appeared in Muses India: Essays on English-Language Writers from Mahomet to Rushdie, International Journal of Communications, FORUM: The University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture and Arts, The Facts on File Companion to the American Novel, The Facts on File Companion to the American Short Story, and others.He has an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from George Mason University, an MA in English from Wright State University, an MA in International Affairs, Communications and Development Studies from Ohio University, and a BA in English from Ohio State University. He served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Sri Lanka., a setting for many of his stories and his novel, The Road to the Singing Lagoon. He has taught creative writing, literature, and more at various colleges for over 11 years.

Valerie Fioravanti: In your Shorts On Survival piece “Spelunking,” you deliberately shut off your lamp in the black of a lava tube. This feels like the makings of a writing metaphor. Is it?

Danielle Collins: In real life, I did shut off my headlamp to conserve batteries, and I felt the heebie-jeebies of being alone in a dark cave. This unsettling memory became a great building block as I wrote the piece. As an English major, I definitely see the symbolism of extinguishing my own light, and wow, wouldn’t that be an awesome metaphor to play with. . . but in actuality, it was a happy coincidence in my writing.

VF: I thought of it, at least in terms of writing metaphor, as courage to face the darkness. That’s present in the best of writing, no?

DC: Yes, I see what you’re saying. I think it definitely takes courage to face our individual fears lurking in the metaphorical darkness. It’s really challenging to take a step back from these fears and observe ourselves, to talk to ourselves and understand why we feel scared. I also think it takes courage for writers to put ourselves on the page, and then share that with the public. Readers are eager to identify with the piece and see themselves reflected back, and the best way this happens is when the writer is able to authentically share.

VF: The setting, especially the line, “I could meld with these curtains of basalt right now,” suggests a connection with the natural world. Is that a theme in your work?

DC: You’re right, I do incorporate a lot of the natural world into my work. I write mostly creative nonfiction, and focus on my relationships, and the memories I bring to the page are often set against a backdrop of striking natural beauty.   I’ve written about beekeeping in Paraguay, about my grandparents in Appalachia, and about the natural wonders of the Southwest. I love traveling, especially to places off the beaten path, and this comes through in my writing. I also love photographing rural landscapes and forgotten spaces.

VF: Another line that struck me was, “I realize that a part of me wants to be free and alone, to disappear into this darkness — to retract like the lava in these tubes, leaving only a memory.” That desire for freedom speaks to me as a reader. Is this a thread you come back to in your writing?

DC: The desire for freedom is a common thread in my writings about certain romantic relationships. Looking back, I realize that in each of those relationships, we did the best we could – but I am left with this sense of frustration that I was unseen, when really want I want, and what most people probably want, is to feel cherished.

VF: Congratulations on publishing “Spelunking.” What’s next?

DC: My number one project is the writing of Surfacing, my in-progress memoir. Surfacing covers the eight-year period when I shifted from dating artists to becoming an artist myself. I am also finishing a braided essay about the relationship of my grandparents. This piece has evolved through many drafts and is almost fit for public consumption.

Another creative outlet for me is my website, JammieWalker.com. This site gives me space to blog, and to feature my writing and photography.

VF: What other piece in this issue of r.kv.r.y. would you recommend to readers?

DC: I enjoyed so many pieces, it was a rich issue. There is one piece that had such a strong voice, it still resonates with me, and that’s “Just Enough Hope” by Toby Van Bryce. He captures the confusion and longing that someone attending their first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting would likely feel. I appreciated that the narrator felt gratitude, rather than judgment, when he listens to people share at the meeting. Instead of telling himself he has nothing in common with the people in the room, he embraces their stories and finds comfort in their recovery. I was left feeling hopeful the narrator would find his way as well.

Valerie Fioravanti writes fiction, essays, and prose poems. Her linked story collection, Garbage Night at the Opera, won the 2011 G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction and is forthcoming from BkMk Press in 2012. Her nonfiction has appeared in Eclectica, Silk Road, and Jelly Bucket, and she is working on an episodic memoir of sorts.

Mary Akers: Hi, Jessica. Thanks for agreeing to talk with me today. In your introduction to Braving the Fire: Writing About Grief and Loss, you write: “After you’ve survived the death of a loved one, an illness, a broken romance, the loss of a home,  country, or even a social structure, the story of who you are changes.” Wow. I really like that. It’s one of those truths that seems simultaneously deep and yet also obvious. I read your first book, Invisible Sisters: A Memoir (and loved it), so I suspect you’ve long had a sense of wanting to explore and write about loss. But I’m curious: When did you realize that you wanted to help others learn to write about their losses? The two seem like very different animals.

Jessica Handler: When I was doing author events with Invisible Sisters: A Memoir, time after time members of the audience approached me privately to tell me that they, like me, were “an only one left,” and to ask not only about my process in writing the book, but what it was really like, emotionally and intellectually. I teach writing workshops, and I know that people struggle with the particular responsibility of telling their own stories of loss or trauma. I’ve been there, and I love to teach, so the two ideas came together naturally.

MA: Ah, of course. That makes perfect sense.

You talk about Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief in your book, and then you go on to add “renewal” as a sixth stage. Renewal seems like an important step in the process of healing. As you aptly put it, it’s a process of “building a bridge between who you were and who you have become.” Can you talk a little bit about what that bridge looks like for you? And, a related question, do you have multiple bridges?

JH: My bridge is paved with artifacts and actions that keep my sisters, my mother, and my father in my life. A bad day and I hear my mother encouraging me to enjoy life, to work in the garden, to pet the cat. I hear a song on the radio that reminds me of my sister Sarah and I sing along. A child’s picture book and I think of Susie. Social justice, and I act on my father’s behalf. All these people and interactions made me who I am now, and I try to keep that in perspective. And then there’s my husband, who loves me and keeps me grounded in the present and the future and our own past. He’s a bridge.

MA: I really like that you include analysis of and insights from the work of other authors in your book. How instructive/enlightening was it for you to contact these authors whose work you’ve admired and pick their brains?

JH: Wonderfully so! Some of the authors are writers who have been mentors to me and I know personally, and others I took a deep breath and reached out to, and every single person was generous and kind and insightful. Their insights helped verify my own thoughts and approaches. Despite our different personal experiences, writing styles, and levels of recognition, we had similar instincts and concepts about writing about grief and loss. And I learned a great deal from each of them. Those interviews were kind of a personalized master class, and I’m so grateful.

MA: Another thing I liked was the extended metaphor about the flame. The flame of grief and loss that burns through us, the way we have to be brave enough to put the hand back over the fire that has already burned us if we want to write about grief, but also the idea of afterward being “the keeper of the flame.” You are the keeper of the flame as the last surviving sister, and most of us who write are also keeping the flame in some form, or will be soon enough. No question, I guess, but would you care to comment?

JH: We’re the keepers of the flames of whatever’s gone behind us but has made us who we are, whether it’s the death of loved ones, the loss of a way of life, a home, a romance, or a way of being. That flame doesn’t always have to rage, but it’s like a spark, or a pilot light.

MA: In the first chapter, you discuss The Right to Write, which is an excellent guide to starting the process. As you know, I helped an older gentleman write about the time when he was five years old and watched his grandfather starve to death on purpose (in Siberia) so the children (my co-author and his younger brother) could have enough food. That was a very moving project for me, but I worried a lot about “getting it right,” especially since I wasn’t writing about my own experience. But I expect it’s just as easy to worry about “getting it right” when it is your own experience. Perhaps even more so. How do you satisfy your inner critic that you’ve gotten it right (or right enough)?

JH: I loved Radical Gratitude! My maternal grandfather was born in Siberia, so the book gave me some insight into his internal landscape. In a memoir, you’re getting your own story right, so some of what you have to honor – or learn to honor – is your recollection of an event, or your emotions or reactions to an event. These might not be another person’s feelings, but they’re your emotional or subjective truth. That’s the hardest to ‘get right’ because we naturally question ourselves as time passes, and that passage of time is part of memoir, too. That “right to write” means accepting that you want to write what you know to be true. This doesn’t mean that a memoir is entirely subjective. Our lives take place in the larger world, which means that facts are necessary. Those are objective truths, which are much easier to pin down; dates, weather, news events, and so forth, which can be corroborated with research. I love research, and devote a part of “Braving the Fire” to innovative ways to conduct research. That can also mean accepting that there will be things a writer will never know. How do you write about those things?

MA: Exactly! After we published Radical Gratitude, my co-author (a psychotherapist by trade) came up with this maxim: “What you choose to remember…and how you choose to interpret it…determines who you are.” I would say that also applies to the writing of memoir. Since we can’t write about everything, the selectivity serves to shape the book. Would you agree?

JH: I agree. I’m not a psychologist at all, but I know from personal experience that people remember things differently, or not at all. A memoir isn’t a tell-all that covers every moment of the author’s life, it’s merely a lyrical examination of an event that changed the author. Merely. 🙂

MA: And finally, if it isn’t too bold of me to ask a question that you have spent a whole book answering, what does “recovery” mean to you?

JH: Moving ahead, changed and aware and happy.

Mary Akers: Thank you for agreeing to talk with me today, David. I loved your story The Stars at Noon in this issue. It’s such an interesting point-of-view to write from–that of a dying nun. What was the inspiration behind this story?

David Jauss: I grew up surrounded by nuns. From first through eighth grade, I went to a Catholic school where all the classes were taught by the School Sisters of Notre Dame. My mother was good friends with several of the nuns, so I saw them frequently outside of school too. I always found them mysterious; I wondered what made them decide to become nuns and wear their black habits and white wimples. I tried to imagine what they were like when they were young girls, and I remember looking around the room at my female classmates and wondering if any of them would grow up to become a nun and, if so, why. For some reason, I didn’t find priests mysterious, and I didn’t wonder if any of my classmates would become one. Priests seemed pretty much like other men, but the nuns didn’t seem like any women I knew. So I was curious, and of course curiosity is what precedes every act of the imagination. I should also point out that two of the nuns who were my teachers died, so I was curious not only about what they thought and felt as young girls but what they thought and felt when they died.

MA: Fascinating. I find nuns mysterious, too. They’re generally more progressive than priests and more hands-on within the community of needy people, aren’t they? The front lines of the Catholic Church, so to speak.

Your collection Glossolalia blew me away. I read an ARC (advance reader copy) and loved it so much I had to buy my own copy. I think that’s the first time I’ve ever done that. The stories are New and Selected. I know you had many stories to choose from. Can you talk a little bit about what the selection process was like?

DJ: First things first: thank you to the nth power for your very kind words. They mean a lot coming from the author of Women Up on Blocks and Bones of an Inland Sea, two books I love and regularly recommend to my friends and students.

Selecting the stories for Glossolalia was both easy and impossible. The easy part was eliminating the dozen or so stories I’d published that just plain weren’t up to snuff. The impossible part was trying to choose which of the remaining thirty stories to include. I felt a bit like Styron’s Sophie, having to choose which of my children would die. Eventually I took the coward’s way out and sent all thirty stories—nearly 500 pages’ worth—to Press 53. Ultimately, I have to give credit to Christine Norris, my editor, for the selections. She sent me a list of seventeen stories—250 pages’ worth—that she thought would work well together, and if I remember right, I made only one substitution. But she and Kevin Morgan Watson, the publisher, said they wanted to publish the rest of the stories too. So there’ll be a second New & Selected Stories coming out, probably sometime next year, and it’ll contain a few things there wasn’t room for in Glossolalia, including a novella, plus several new stories.

MA: Ooh, I can’t wait! I hope you do another advance book tour. That was a lot of fun.

I’m always interested in who other writers read, but I know it puts them in an awkward spot to name names since many of their friends are also writers. So instead, I’ll ask (and find your answer equally as interesting) who did you read when you were 11 or 12?

DJ: I read virtually every novel Jules Verne wrote; dozens of books from the Landmark series about American history; Esther Forbes’s Johnny Tremain; Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island; Paul de Kruif’s Microbe Hunters; numerous Hardy Boys mysteries; Clair Bee’s Chip Hilton series of sports novels, especially those, like Fence Busters, that were about baseball; a slew of biographies of famous baseball players; and a Catholic propaganda novel called Knockout, in which a group of humble Catholic boys take on a group of over-confident Protestants and whoop them one by one in every major team sport and then, in the final chapter, the captain of the Catholic team takes on the captain of the Protestant team in a boxing match and—well, I think you can guess how that turns out.

MA: How fun! And that’s a great list. One of the reasons I ask the question is because Ray Bradbury has said that he believes those preteen years are the ones during which writers form their lasting obsessions, either in terms of pivotal events in their lives or books they read at that age. Would you agree? And if so, do you see influences from those years emerging in your own work?

DJ: He may be right about pivotal life events but I think he’s wrong about the influence of books read at that age. I would hate to think that our literary interests and aspirations are determined when we’re preteens. Mine definitely weren’t. I see little to no connection between what I read then and what I read and write now. I still love baseball and I’ve written one story about a baseball player, though it’s far from being anything like a Chip Hilton story. I have no interest in writing or reading science fiction or mysteries or sports novels and only minimal interest in historical fiction. And if I read Knockout today, I’d be pulling for those poor doomed Protestants who not only have inferior athletic abilities but are headed to hell for eating hot dogs on Friday.

Although I read a lot as a kid, it wasn’t until I was sixteen that I read any author who influenced me in any crucial way. I had a Current Events teacher then (this was 1967) who was rabidly anti-Communist and who argued that the only way to avoid WWIII was to rain atomic bombs on Russia immediately. I couldn’t stand the guy, so I went to the school library, asked the librarian if they had any books by Russians, and she led me to The Brothers Karamazov. I had no intention of reading it—I merely wanted to prop it up on my desk to irritate my teacher—but one day in study hall I started reading it and before I knew it I was living in a whole new world, one full of very different dangers than the kind I’d encountered in the Hardy Boys or Chip Hilton stories or Treasure Island. I finished that novel with my brain on fire and my DNA changed, and I began seeking out other writers of by-god Literature. Of them, two that I read incessantly in high school—Hemingway and Salinger—have been among my most enduring influences.

MA: You know, now that you say that, I think you’re right. Bradbury said it about events, not books read. I must have made that up to validate my early reading choices. 🙂

By the way, I really love that your introduction to by-god Literature came about as a way to spite a professor you despised. That’s brilliant.

You write and publish across all genres. I’m so impressed and awed by your list of publications. What haven’t you done? Or maybe I should ask: Is there something you’ve always wanted to do that you haven’t done YET?

DJ: Oh, there’s a lot I haven’t done—I’ve never written a novel or a memoir or a play—but there’s not really anything I wanted to do that I haven’t done. All I really want to do is write better stories, poems, and essays. I’ve never felt any desire to write a novel and, to be honest, I don’t even enjoy reading novels all that much. Even the novels I most love strike me as full of inessential details, characters, and events, not to mention long dreary bouts of exposition. I like the idea of trying to convey the world in a grain of sand, not an entire beach. And I think it’s much more possible to achieve something akin to perfection in a poem or story than it is in a novel. Novels seemed doomed by their very length to fail. As Randall Jarrell said, “A novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.” And I couldn’t possibly write a memoir—I have a very poor memory, and nothing too exciting or interesting has happened to me. And although I tried my hand at playwriting once when I was an undergrad, I’m too much of a control freak to want to write a play or screenplay and turn it over to a director and actors who’d bring it to a very different life than the one I imagined. So, for better or worse, I’ve found the genres that fit my temperament and aesthetic goals.

MA: A control freak, eh? I wonder if all short story writers have a bit of the control freak in them. It is such a deliciously containable form. I liken a novel to a great sprawling mural and a short story to a closely observed, meticulous sketch.

Margaret Atwood has said that a book is a form of brain transfer, that art takes two brains to be fully realized–the creator’s brain and the experiencer’s brain. Do you agree?

DJ: I do believe that art takes two brains to be fully realized, but I think it’s important to acknowledge that the experiencer’s brain often prevents the work of art from being fully realized—and, alas, the creator’s brain often does too. But let’s assume a writer creates a successful story, one that supplies all the essential information a reader would need to understand it and feel the emotions the author wants him to feel. If the reader fails to notice key facts of a story, invents her own details, imposes his own experience and opinions on it, or extrapolates wildly from some detail to a conclusion that’s not supported by the text, I think the brain transfer is partial at best. An example: I once had a student complain that a character named Brian in a classmate’s story couldn’t possibly lift an oak table by himself because he was “scrawny and weak.” In fact, the character was described as a longtime weightlifter; the reader had failed to notice that fact and imagined the character to be like a particular Brian he knew, someone who was scrawny and weak. He was reading a story, yes, but not the one the author wrote.

One more example: after reading a poem about a woman walking down a hallway of closed doors in search of a quiet, peaceful room where she can be alone, one student said he thought the poem was about driving through Texas and trying to get a good station on the radio. The poet’s reference to turning a doorknob had led him to think of turning radio knobs. And, not surprisingly, he had not too recently driven through Texas and had trouble finding a good station to listen to. So yes, art needs two brains to be fully realized, but it needs two well-trained and attentive brains. The reader has to be as well trained in the discipline of reading as the writer is in the discipline of writing. And he has to resist the temptation to treat the work as a Rorschach blot about which any opinion or response is as legitimate as any other.

MA: This is so fascinating! (And a little discouraging, I must admit.) So…we bring our own experiences to the table when reading–or experiencing any art form–but apparently sometimes we bring TOO MUCH of our own experience and it leads to a gross misinterpretation of the work. How very interesting. (Why had this angle never occurred to me?) I feel like this concept also begs a couple of (rhetorical?) questions. How much of that misinterpretation is okay? Is valid, even? Where is the line? As artists, we have to accept that no one is ever going to get all of our references, but how much can we expect them to get without feeling cranky that they didn’t get it? Your answer makes a good case for the argument that we should write the books we want to read.

And finally, because we are a themed journal and I never get tired of hearing people answer this question, “What does ‘recovery’ mean to you?”

DJ: I think “recovery” is just a synonym for “life.” Some people may be recovering alcoholics, but all of us are recovering human beings. I think life is largely a matter of recovering from what we’ve witnessed or experienced, of finding a way to go on after life gives us a kick in the teeth. And for writers, “recovery” could just as well be a synonym for “writing” too. Writing is a way to recover (or at least try to recover) from the wounds life has given us. And, I’d argue, recovery from the past is possible only through recovery of the past: we have to go back and relive in a way the traumas we’ve endured, finding this time a way to reimagine and revise the past in such a way that we can deal with it. Whether we write in an overtly autobiographical way or not (and I don’t), we’re dealing with our personal wounds and trying to put them into a context that heals them. To return to “The Stars at Noon” for a moment: when I was in first grade, my teacher, Sister Aloysius, got sick and had to go to the hospital. The other nuns told us all to pray that she get well, and we did so, daily and fervently, because we all loved her. But she died. It was the first time in my life that someone I knew died, and just as important, it was also the first time I realized that praying didn’t necessarily get you what you want. I didn’t understand why I wrote “The Stars at Noon” until well after I’d finished it, but now it’s clear to me that I wrote it to do two things at once: grant my childhood prayer that Sister Aloysius live and make the fact that she died more tolerable by imagining that she wanted to die.

MA: Oh, my. Beautiful Thank you, David. It’s been a real pleasure.

Mary Akers: I loved your poem To His Wife in our July “Endangered” issue. I had the pleasure of hearing you read it–and a few other poems–then I also found Chameleon online. These are really fascinating subjects for poems. Are they part of a series? Or are you simply drawn to writing about animals?

Mark McKain: I am drawn to writing about animals, plants, rocks and places. This has led to writing a series on endangered species: endangered humans (friends, relatives, indigenous groups) as well as nonhumans whose existence is in question. My rule is that I have to have encountered these endangered species by being in their physical presence, usually in places I have lived. For example, I went to high school in West Texas and the horned lizard (horny toad) was very common in our backyard. One day my youngest sister borrowed a white sweater from my older sister then went outside and picked up one of those lizards. Little did she know that they can actually squirt toxic blood out of ducts beneath their eyes. She got blood all over the white sweater. I was very surprised to learn those lizards are now threatened, and I wanted to write about that. I wanted to write about it so that it included my own teenage experience of this animal and of my family situated in the semi-desert of West Texas. And I then wanted to write about endangered animals in Kentucky, Puerto Rico, Louisiana, Texas, California and Florida—all places where I have lived.

MA: Do you consider yourself an environmental writer? I’m asking because I think of myself as one, but I’m not sure there’s a clear definition of what an ”environmental writer” is. Do you have a definition you’d care to share?

MM: I do consider myself an environmental writer, but I try to resist definitions. I have been reading a lot about this very question: what does and does not make good environmental writing. One author that has really nailed some the problems of environmental writing for me is Lawrence Buell. In Writing for an Endangered World, he makes the point that environmental writing becomes distorted when animals are Disneyfied or portrayed in anthropomorphic terms. This is a type of Romantic personification. Animals and plants have worth in themselves and are not just foils or reflections of our own emotions and values. So good environmental writing keeps other species strange and other, different than humans, valuable as a living being. I do want to show animals as valuable in and of themselves, but I also want to show humans (usually my family) as part of the environment, and that the environment has an impact on us, especially, for me in the places where I have lived. Sandhill cranes flying over the busy I-4 corridor remind me of a close friend who as died and who I want to say something to as the sun comes up. A lizard flashing it red throat scared me when I was kid and now seeing this reminds me of the strange tropical world I entered upon moving to Puerto Rico when I was seven. I think about the near extinct Puerto Rican parrot which I never saw, the (near) extinct Carib peoples—did I actually see a few survivors with my father on weekend trips into the rain-forested mountains? My father, who just recently died, was so important to introducing me to these experiences, so I can’t and don’t want to separate my experiences from animals and the environment.

MA: Who do you read for inspiration?

MM: I am drawn to poetry in translation as well as science and natural history: Karen Solie’s Pigeon, Raul Zurita’s Song for His Disappeared Love, Alfonso D’Aquino’s fungus skull eye wing, Kim Hyesoon’s All the Garbage of the World Unite, Lorine Niedecker’s Lake Superior, Ida Stewart’s Gloss, Alfred Russel Wallace’s Footsteps in the Forest, Forest Gander and John Kinsella’s Redstart, Matthew Calarco’s Zoographies.

MA: You traveled to Antarctica and that trip inspired “To His Wife” among other poems. Do you often travel for inspiration? What is it about travel that makes you want to write?

MM: I try to travel at least once a year. Last year to England as I followed up on my Antarctica/South American expedition, visiting the Polar Museum in Cambridge, which has great exhibits on the English Antarctic explorers Scott and Shackleton, and also to the Sedgwick Museum, where Darwin got interested in geology and fossils. London is so rich culturally and there something about being in a strange and wonderful place that opens my eyes, slows me down and lets me see things in a fresh manner. I scribble while eating lunch in the crypt beneath St. Martins. More sentences waiting for the waterbus to take me to the Tate. The notebook comes out at the café at Foyles bookshop, thinking about my visit to the Physic Garden. My rule is to just take notes of my observations and see what comes of them later.

MA: Where would you like to visit that you haven’t yet? Do you have a bucket list for poetry inspiration?

MM: Since I’ve been to Tierra del Fuego and through the Beagle Channel, I’m thinking of continuing to follow Darwin’s journey to the Galapagos. But this may be vanity. I would like to go to Alaska and to see a volcano in Iceland. I need to go back to Puerto Rico, but may go birding in Cuba instead. I’m going to the Grand Canyon after Christmas. My father died in June and now I am going to West Virginia where his ashes will be interred. I want to celebrate him and remember all that he gave me, including the desire to travel and learn about the environment and cultural history.

MA: And finally, because we are a themed journal, what does “recovery” mean to you?

MM: I do believe in healing and the power of writing to help us heal. Life, the earth, the body renews itself continually. The environment will not be what it once was—but it will heal. Nothing will be what it once was. I do think we can come to terms with our own powers, and we must treat animals, plants, things, and each other with dignity, respect and equality. The earth isn’t ours to exploit. It is a place for all living things to flourish. If we can recover the rights of all living things to exist, all peoples to exist, then we may be on the path to healing.

Mary Krienke: In your essay “I Am Always in Transition When Disaster Strikes,” you write about the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami that killed over 230,000 people in fourteen countries, with Indonesia being the hardest-hit country, followed by Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand. You also write about 9/11. I don’t need to give the stats on that one, which, of course, reveals so much. What I think you are writing about here, as you have touched on in some of your other writing, is that it can seem difficult for some to experience other people’s pain if that person does not look like them, does not have the same background, a similar-looking life. Do you think it is a conscious decision for people not to look or do you think it is a self-protective mechanism to create distance between them and those that are suffering? While it is a writer’s job to look at those difficult aspects of humanity and to bridge that distance, how does a writer successfully confront this resistance?

Vyshali Manivannan: It should go without saying that looking is hard. It leaves us vulnerable, speechless, guiltily ashamed of our comfortable lives, our failures to donate; it renders visible what we never want to see, the intimacy of a body destroyed mid-motion, ended without even a whimper. If we confront these images of death, we have to recognize that all bodies, laid open, are the same. We have to empathize or be labeled sociopath. We have to open ourselves to all the feelings described above. We can’t deny our culpability because when our troops kill, the corpses look like this too.

I’ve always, possibly to my detriment, chosen to look, because I felt guilty over my survivor’s guilt, feeling like I’d survived nothing; I wanted to simulate survival in the act of looking, and so I avidly consumed tragedy online. I can’t fault anyone for self-protection, whatever my own decisions are. But I think it’s crucial to be aware of why you’re choosing not to look. Two very opposed events come to mind: one, an article in The Onion about an everyman whose goal was to get through the Syrian conflict without reading so much as a single headline about it; and two, recent exhortations to refuse to view the beheading of journalist James Foley by ISIS. There’s an interesting contrast here, between the idea that not-looking equals willful ignorance, and the idea that we look to develop a tolerance for the grotesque. I think there’s room on this spectrum for a kind of looking that doesn’t glorify violence, doesn’t dwell on horror, but refigures the meaning of the image to an outcry against the ideologies that make such violence possible.

With regards to confronting the resistance to look, I think the first step is recognizing—before I even begin writing—that it’s not solely about the economy of taste and decency. There’s a whole network of practices that promote this resistance to looking: for instance, images of bodies are almost always bodies of foreigners in international situations presented as intractable or unsolvable, like the perpetual crisis in the Middle East, facilitating cultural indifference via cost-benefit analysis, practically telling us, “You can look, but looking won’t change anything, so why damage your psyche by looking?” So my first task is to change that evaluation and say, “Your looking at this will change something.” That something may be as invisible as ideology, but ideological change is paramount. It’s the first step in several regards: conflict resolution, post-conflict reconciliation, transitional justice measures, erasing the binary of Us and Them.

What’s left after that is to forge an emotional bond between readers and the narrator. Representing violence-in-process is, I think, an implosion of the moment itself, the individual experience of sense-making, and the tools used to do so, be they the Indian Ocean tsunami, HBO’s Tsunami, or the experience of watching both unfold.

MK: You are Sri Lankan American and you have family still living in Sri Lanka. You write about feeling both connected to and disconnected from a country you have visited twice in your life. You were born in New York and grew up in Louisiana and Missouri. You have written about feeling always outside of your own experience, that it is difficult to make something “your own.” In my experience of your writing, you respond to this sense of being an outsider by creating an identity that is always shifting, always evolving. How does this constant positioning and repositioning affect your writing?

VM: It’s my hope that this continual shifting of identity enables me to more accurately articulate, in writing, experiences that are mine, that are part of a larger collective experience marked by ethical and political variance, that I can’t claim as mine because I find it impossible to reconcile what I’ve survived with what victims of war have survived. Constantly repositioning myself mandates an acceptance of my struggles with hybridity and its associated grievances, and more importantly invites empathy with all parties involved. This repositioning ultimately strives to recognize Otherness and erase it in its tracks, to create humans where an “us” or “them” once stood, to deconstruct the binary and replace it with empathy and the possibility of reconciliation.

It’s strange to contrast it with my fiction process, because I think the goal is similar but the process itself is exacerbated, as it can only be achieved through inhabiting multiple characters and voices and playing out their interactions, whereas my nonfiction—with all its evolutions— ultimately feels more like the body I occupy in real life.

MK: You write a lot about the Sri Lankan Civil War, a conflict that was rarely covered in the U.S. media, until the endgame (and still then there was a media blackout and it was, as I recall, very rarely front-page news). Other international conflicts get consistent front-page coverage in the U.S., presumably because they are of “greater interest” or “relevance” to Americans. There always seems to be a privileging of one suffering over the other, a willingness to engage in one multi-faceted situation and not another. To me, it seems as though entire peoples, entire conflicts are invisible and that there is an effort to keep them that way. How do you address this in your work?

VM: Because the Sri Lankan conflict hits so close to home, I privately resent its invisibility in mainstream news. I’m sure I’m in the company of individuals who survived or grew up in the shadow of this or other conflicts. It was striking to me that Sri Lanka appeared in the news again at the precise moment its invisibility peaked, during the media blackout toward the war’s end, as though to suggest that absence is necessary to restore presence in the public eye. Like when it’s inaccessible, we want it.

I feel like in my work I’m constantly negotiating a balance between making conflict visible and asserting that it is worthy of visibility, that war doesn’t begin and end when the news media say so but simmers to a boiling point long before it explodes into Black July, or continues with refugees in camps, sexual abuses, privation, arbitrary detainment. We—be it countries or individuals—invest in conflicts that are the most worthwhile to us in terms of emotional costs, economic resources, cultural or political or physical similarity. There’s a concept known as “compassion fatigue,” where being inundated with stories and images of war in Gaza, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Ukraine, etc., etc., anesthetizes us to atrocity. But I think there’s more to it. While there’s some truth to inuring oneself through repeated viewing, as I’m prone to doing, it’s sort of a generalization that removes agency from the public, positioning the government and media as the purveyors of compassion. I want my writing to ask: Can we displace the register of compassion from governmental policy to public empathy, catalyzed not by war photographs (which never exist in isolation) but by intertextual narratives within a social, economic, political context at home and abroad.

And maybe that’s the best description of BLACK TIGER, WHITE VAN, which seeks to refigure the terms of looking—not at consequences but at violence in process, when intervention still seems possible, when we are more willing to engage.

MK: You’ve had quite a few pieces from your larger work BLACK TIGER, WHITE VAN published in various journals. When I met you, I knew you only as a fiction writer. BLACK TIGER, WHITE VAN, much like this piece, touches on the unreliability of memory and how memory is as much fiction as nonfiction. It is clearly a painstaking process, trying to sort out conflicting reports, memories, feelings. In your fiction, do you feel an opportunity to step outside of this constant dissection? How do the process and its effects differ for you?

VM: To run with your surgical analogy, writing nonfiction like BLACK TIGER, WHITE VAN feels like an unrelenting debridement at my own hands, a crude attempt to scrape off the dead tissue of the past to preserve what’s left, to encourage the healing of wounds I’m still unwilling to fully own. It’s a process of recovery in and of itself. Not only does it insist that I confront past experiences that are emotionally difficult or potentially re-traumatizing—and I’m thinking specifically of a recent publication, “ThisIsMyManifesto.htm,” where the narrator simultaneously confesses to self-injury, attempted suicide, disability, queerness, and vicarious trauma—but it also demands that I make this experience accessible to strangers. So I’d say half of my nonfiction process is bracing myself for reopening old wounds, while the other half is craft: putting enough objective distance between myself and, say, the hallucinations I used to have, to find a way to make them as terrifyingly present to others as they were to me.

Fiction, on the other hand, feels like human vivisection with a defter touch, maybe because the lives I’m crafting ultimately aren’t mine even if they reflect aspects of my reality. It’s less a question of “How do I articulate this?” than “What makes this person tick?”In some ways there’s more research involved to create people who come to life for me, who move naturally through their environments. Problematic as it may be, I try to occupy their minds and spaces as much as possible, and I let them inhabit me. If I had to give you a breakdown, I’d say 80% of my fiction process is understanding these people in their ordinary circumstances; 10% is sadistic mental experimentation to gauge their behavioral changes and see what makes them move their worlds; and the rest is the writing itself. Once I’ve sorted out the characters and their motivations, the writing unfolds naturally, like a Borgesian map, mile-for-mile matched to my imagining.

So, to address your first question, neither process is outside dissection. Where my nonfiction process is an inward-looking deconstruction, my fiction is eternally stargazing, world-building, but keen to possibilities to take apart and exploit. I actually think both processes boil down to the same thing: the need to figure out why we do what we do in the face of adversity, when pushed to extremes. It’s still a contradiction. It’s like reaching with one hand for an Answer, capital-A, while with the other rejecting the notion of absolute Truth.

MK: I know from your mention of Harvey Dent in this piece and various Batman references in other pieces (and from our mutual obsession with all things Batman), that the Dark Knight holds a special place in your heart. For me, my fascination with Batman cannot be summed up in words. It’s a feeling of being drawn to something self-destructive yet noble. There is something to be said about the self-destructive and constructive process of writing. We pick ourselves (and oftentimes our loved ones) apart, put ourselves (and them) on the line, and hope it is a noble effort, one that outweighs the damage we do to ourselves and those we love. When I read your writing, I am stunned at how brave and singular your voice is. For you, whether in process or after the work is already finished, published, out of your hands, is there a moment of separation, when you can look at what you’ve done and see you have given up a part of yourself to save yourself, to maybe save someone else? Do you feel the sacrifice is worth it?

VM: I couldn’t describe it better than “self-destructive yet noble.” Maybe because of that awareness that I’m breaking the code of silence, exposing myself, my family, my friends to an unfamiliar readership, I have difficulty revisiting my work after publication. I’m forever asking my agent or a close friend to read it and remind me that it’s emotionally compelling; or I hesitate until people, without asking, tell me they were moved, or that reading the piece in question was like hearing their lives told back to them. I like to cite an experience in high school in the Bible belt, where a short story I wrote—interrogating sexuality and religion, mind you—made the rounds in the band room, and at least one person was so changed by it she has the hard copy to this day. More recently, a reader told me, “I love you for having survivor’s guilt. I love that it is an homage to those who didn’t get out.” Moments like those, I can close my critical eye and feel fulfilled.

So the short answer is yes, the sacrifice is worth it.
MK: I have known you for I think nine years at this point, and what strikes me about you, as well as your writing, is how you are always trying to find meaning in every detail, which is, I think, the mark of a great writer. The details are not superfluous, they are not accidents, they are not artistic flourishes. They are at the heart of it all. At what point did you realize that you were a bit obsessed with the details, and what do you think pushed you and continues to push you to obsessively turn these details over and try to fit them into a larger narrative?

VM: Given my background in science, role-playing games, and having to piece together an early understanding of the Sri Lankan war from details lifted out of context, I think I was always aware of the primacy of details. I understood scientific inquiry as revealing and explaining details; RPGs demonstrated that a single choice could permanently alter the narrative; and the Sri Lankan conflict was nothing but details because there was no larger narrative to guide me, I had to fashion my own. So I honestly can’t remember a time when I wasn’t obsessed with details. When I’m writing, I begin with a detail and extrapolate a reality: BLACK TIGER, WHITE VAN coalesced as a project when I caught myself repeatedly looking at the face of a Tiger cadre corpse, one of many in an unfilled trench; the novel I’m currently working on started with the shape of an astrocytoma and the proceedings from the First International Conference on psychotronics in Prague in 1974. Existence is an experience of contingency and intuition, I think, and I think this is emulated in my writing process, like making decisions of plot or symbolism on the fly only to discover, twenty pages later, that that tiny choice dictated something much larger. I have great faith that, by writing the details, I’ll intuit the larger narrative. It’s resulted in rewrites in the past, but it hasn’t really failed me yet.

MK: You write a lot about creating order amidst the disorder. Does the process of writing help create order or are there moments when it feels like the opposite, that the process of writing is just a reflection of the disorder of your own mind, the world around you? Or is it a constant fluctuation between the two?

VM: I never personally escape chaos. I experience moments, while writing, when the stars align and the disorder unfolds exactly as it should on the page, and all the seemingly arbitrary choices I’ve made so far—a character’s birth year, a physical attribute, a name—make sudden, blinding sense. But between sessions, or when I’m interrupted, I think my process of mental (re)composition does reflect a chaotic landscape. In that sense, it fluctuates. Additionally, when I write, I bounce all over the page, leaving unfinished lines or words as signposts to be revisited, knowing they won’t make the same kind of sense in a future writing session, but trusting that they will make a kind of sense, a semblance of order.

It’s almost as though the work and my mind can only operate in inverse: while I prefer to write in marathon sessions to retain the feeling that I am sense-making and creating order, approaching a work-in-progress after I’ve lost the thread forces me to be more mentally organized, if messier on the page; but taken all together I think it culminates in the expression of an order that is fractured, and does not eschew disorder, which I think is an essential part of being in the world.

Mary Krienke is an agent at Sterling Lord Literistic. She received her MFA in Fiction from Columbia University and represents literary fiction, creative nonfiction, and realistic YA that pays close attention to craft and voice. She is especially drawn to new and emerging writers who seek to push boundaries of form and content, and she responds most strongly to writing that reaches great emotional and psychological depths. She is equally interested in work that illuminates through humor or by playing with genre. Her other interests include psychology, art, and design.

Susannah Clark: Lauren, your essay “Minnows” appeared in r.kv.r.y.’s July ENDANGERED issue. What is the advantage of publishing in a journal with a specific theme or focus?

Lauren Jo Sypniewski: I think that it has the potential to affect the writing process in really positive ways by forcing the writer to hone in on a specific theme. I know for me personally, I sometimes struggle with “what is this essay truly about” when I’m trying to force it to accomplish too much. Here, the theme of recovery opened me up to guiding the essay along the appropriate path.

SC: Elaborate on the “recovery” aspect of this piece. Is there more than one kind of recovering occurring within this text?

LJS: In some ways, yes. In my definition, recovery is a personal process unique to every individual, and something that doesn’t have to be restricted to mental or physical recovery from a negative source. This essay does speak to those forms of recovery, but it also speaks to a recovery from past perceptions: learning to deal with situations that are unfamiliar or uncomfortable, almost as though recovery and acceptance walk hand-in-hand through the pages of the essay.

SC: The first few lines of the essay are written in the imperative, as if addressing someone specific. Are you giving instructions to a specific person or group? Did you have a particular audience in mind while writing this?

LJS: While I’d like to say I know what is going on one hundred percent of the time in my writing and that I am the master of the process, there are times where the writing does its own thing. And I feel somewhere in the “unknown” within me that it fits and its right, even if I can’t quite explain it. Looking back, though, I can see those first few lines functioning as a past or future Lauren speaking to the “present” Lauren who is a character within the piece.

SC: Your writing consistently indicates a strong sense of place–be it urban or rural or completely foreign. Is there a certain setting in which you find writing easier? Do you prefer to write in a landscape similar to the one you’re painting in your prose, or is it easier to conjure said place from a completely different atmosphere?

LJS: Thank you! In the end, I prefer to physically write from a different atmosphere than the one I am writing about. Though it may seem illogical, I almost find it easier to work from memory than from what’s in front of me, particularly because memory is filled with perspective and emotion and nostalgia. The mood of a landscape, for me, is just as important as the physical characteristics of the scene. So working from memory, based in emotion, helps me conjure the mood alongside just the descriptors.

SC: I was struck by the line:  “I don’t want to be the one to talk, because I can never make words sound better than silence.”  How is your relationship with writing distinct from your relationship with speech?

LJS: That’s a really insightful question I’ve never considered much before. My initial reaction is the fact that writing is still silent. And so I have the ability to add to that silence without taking away from it, without just filling it with noise. It reminds me of my favorite quote by Gretel Ehrlich: “We fill space as if it were a pie shell, with things whose opacity further obstructs our ability to see what is already there.” The world is already such a chaotic, noisy, frustrating place, and silence gives us a brief moment to actually think and absorb and process. And writing within that silence gives me the ability to drop tiny words into the well of thought, and watch the ripples.

SC: The ending of this piece is anticlimactic in a most wonderful way. Obviously, your grandmother’s outcome is implied, but did you consider writing about what happened next more explicitly? Why did you end where you did?

LJS: This was one of the very, very few times I knew where I had to end the piece. I usually struggle with endings. I’m told often that I write four endings on top of each other, just because I need to get that last word or dramatic line in there. It was almost as though I couldn’t physically continue, as though that one line I said to my grandmother was a kind of punishment: “you couldn’t say more to her then, so you don’t have the right to say anything more now.” It was overwhelming to end the essay that way, and I wanted the reader to feel that as well, the duality of my emotions as a writer choosing to end the piece that way as well as a “character” who–though so desperate–could only say those few words.

Susannah Clark is an American essayist and journalist currently living in Northern India. Her work has appeared inPopmatters, Extract(s), BDCWire, andInside Higher Ed.

Lauren Jo Sypniewski grew up in woodsy and earthy Northern Michigan before moving to Boston to obtain her MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Since then, she’s wound around the world searching Australia for new words, new moments, and new concepts of place and space: ideas often grappled with throughout her writing. She now lives in Southern Utah, where she teaches writing. Her essays and poetry have appeared in The American Council for Polish Cultural Heritage, Discovering Arguments, and the Pine River Anthology.

Barbara Wanamaker: What drew you to Van Gogh and what inspired you to write a poem about his painting Starry Night?

Jillian Ross: I was fascinated with the concept of “nightscape” and captivated by his bold use of color to convey emotion.

BW: Your poem seems to emerge as more of an inspirational response than an ekphrastic response. Rather than reacting to the work solely, you delve beneath the canvas to address the artist’s demons. Was this intentional or did the poem take this turn as it came forth?

JR: The painting seems alive. The sky moves, there’s an element of turbulence—a chaos—that pulls me in. Simultaneously, there’s the undercurrent of deliberate design in the rhythms, and a pure sense of hope in the exaggerated brightness of the stars and moon.

If I didn’t know the backstory of his struggle, I’d have interpreted the painting differently—as an expression of fantasy, maybe the visual equivalent of the genre we call “magical realism.” There’s a child-like exuberance to the night sky, as if it’s a playground that comes alive for him while the rest of the world sleeps. In this night sky, Van Gogh created an entirely new world, and perhaps the stars in that world were actually portals to the afterlife.

Knowing Van Gogh’s history—and the fact that Starry Night was painted during his stay in an asylum—drew me toward interpretation in terms of that reality. The urgency seems to depict the beauty of a manic episode—soaring bold, bright, confident, larger-than-life. Unfortunately, the corresponding depression that follows mania can plunge one lower than is even humanly imaginable. I marveled at the brilliance of a mind that could capture, combine and portray these elements so exuberantly, and then I mourned the tragedy of his suicide. So yes, the poem’s journey was deliberate.

BW: Do you believe it is possible to write about a Van Gogh painting without addressing the artist’s troubled life?

JR:   Art is self-expression, so the artist’s life is embedded in his work. If genius borders on insanity, then that borderline is a trembling high-wire without a net. If Van Gogh’s genius was in his sense of sight—in his perception of light and his ability to convey the images he saw—then try to imagine how the darkness of depressive episodes affected him. How must he have felt when the light disappeared?

BW: You refer to Van Gogh as “the pastor’s son” in the second line of your poem. Was this fact important to you in revealing the man who lived behind the guise of an artist?

JR:   As a writer, I reacted to the painting in terms of “story.” Knowing the backstory of his childhood in the Netherlands as the son of a minister, the church steeple and the cypress seem to represent things he might trust and hold onto as “terra firma” in his swirling world of mental anguish. So the solid, structural elements of the work seem to be taken from his life experience.

I believe that the faith we are raised in has an everlasting influence on our lives—it’s impossible to “unlearn” these truths, although it is possible to ignore or abandon them. I chose to believe that Van Gogh’s early religious training permeated his being with an enduring sense of faith and hope, despite the torment of his illness.

BE: “Elixir—a green glide through/aqua sky to amber field./Stained hands clench/the revolver aimed inward.” In these four lines, you describe beautifully Van Gogh’s addiction and subsequent suicide. Can you share with us any allusions of addiction and suicide apparent to you within Starry Night?

JR: His medical diagnosis is unclear—psychosis, epilepsy, alcoholism are all mentioned—but Van Gogh was hospitalized more than once, and episodes of “maniacal” behavior (including cutting off his ear) were well documented. Today, he might be categorized with co-occurring disorders. He painted Starry Night while voluntarily institutionalized—he had both a room and a studio in the asylum. But the “view” from his window as depicted in Starry Night did not exist. Unlike his other work, Starry Night was apparently created from “memory” and “imagination” rather than from on-site observation. Three months after his release from the asylum, at age 37, he apparently shot himself in a wheat field. His death was not instantaneous—the bullet didn’t kill him, death resulted from infection because the bullet could not be removed. That’s the storyline, and I couldn’t tell the story without including the agonizing reality. I chose to relay the events in terms of color as homage to the artist. Absinthe (known as “The Green Fairy”) derives its glorious color from chlorophyll, wheat fields glow amber, aqua is blue tinged with chartreuse-green.

BE: Do you feel Starry Night is the one work Van Gogh created that best illustrates his personal struggles?

JR: I do. I appreciate the sunflowers, the black crows in the wheat field. I love the cypress series. But as a writer, I’m drawn to story. In Starry Night, I found the story. My response included extending the story as we know it with his soul’s final journey through that Starry Night with his eyes wide open, letting him see the glory of light and color as he moved toward his final destination.

Barbara Wanamaker holds a B.A. in English and Art History from Fairfield University. She subsequently earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Fairfield in 2013. She has worked as assistant editor for Dogwood, poetry co-editor for Mason’s Road and as a reader for Spry. Her work appears in Mason’s Road, Spry, Ebullience, What Next? A Guide to Life After the MFA, Time for Singing and is upcoming in Penwood Review. She is the author of ekphrasis iii – a poetry response in Haibun form to selected cast pieces in Fairfield University’s collection displayed in the Bellarmine Museum.