Each semester (and summer!), Nimrod’s interns make things run more smoothly and efficiently in the office—we couldn’t do our work without them. With this blog series, “Meet the Interns,” we’ll introduce you to the hardworking interns who often are behind the scenes, keeping up with daily tasks, sending mail, reading manuscripts . . . and much, much more.

This week’s featured intern: Elizabeth Young

Nimrod: Tell us a little about yourself:

Elizabeth: My name is Elizabeth, but I usually go by Lizzy. I am a junior at TU majoring in creative writing. I have 4 sisters (no brothers, yay!), and a cat who follows me around like a dog. I love to read, write, bake, and scrapbook. My favorite movie is You’ve Got Mail. If I am on campus but not in class or interning, you can find me in the reading rooms in the library. Around town I frequent the Central Library and Shades of Brown. Besides interning and taking classes I am also a nanny for 2 wonderful families.

Nimrod: What made you interested in working with Nimrod?

Elizabeth: I transferred in to TU in January of this year, and I was exploring the creative writing community on campus. My professor Dr. Stevens told me about Nimrod and introduced me to Eilis. I talked to Eilis and immediately knew this was something I wanted to do. I am interested in the publishing and editing field, and so I knew this would be a good fit for me.

Nimrod: What’s your major/what are you thinking about majoring in? Why are/were you drawn to that major?

Elizabeth: I am a creative writing major with an English minor. I have always loved to read and have been inspired by writers. I had never considered majoring in creative writing before college, but while I was getting my associate’s degree at TCC I had a wonderful professor, Josh Parish, who really encouraged me and mentored me and made me want to be a creative writing major.

Nimrod: Who are a few of your favorite authors?

Elizabeth: I am forever and always a Jane Austen girl. One of my favorite books is All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. It is so beautifully written and just a wonderful book.

I have also always loved Ally Carter as an author—Heist Society and Gallagher Girls. And I was greatly impacted by Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series as a teenager; those hold a special place in my heart.

Nimrod: What are you most looking forward to learning or experiencing with Nimrod this semester?

Elizabeth: I am most interested in reading people’s submissions and learning what editors are looking for in a manuscript. I am also really excited about the conference.

 

As part of the launch of our Spring/Summer 2018 issue, Let Us Gather: Diversity and the Arts, we talked with contributors about their work in the issue and more. The following interview is part of this series. Please visit our website to see the complete list of contributors to Let Us Gather, to purchase the issue, or to subscribe.

Nimrod: Your winning story is set in our world, but in the future after some sort of apocalypse, and it deals with themes of oral tradition, fairy tales, and more. What inspired you to write “Major Tom”—have you always been drawn to fairytales?

C.C. Lewis: I’ve enjoyed fairytales from a young age, particularly a 1940s anthology series of multicultural stories called Book Trails, among others. Like many children, I was drawn not only to the whimsical side but also to the dark undertones—and sometimes overtones—present in fairytales, despite the fact that the dark side of most modern tellings are watered down compared to the originals. In my experience, fairytales aren’t something one necessarily grows out of, and it occurred to me that maybe we discover more “adult,” non-traditional fairytales as we grow older, especially in popular culture. In the case of my story “Major Tom,” David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” is a song that greatly appealed to me as both a child and an adult, and I’ve been familiar with it for practically as long as I’ve been familiar with traditional fairytales. It interested me to consider the idea that other people might have had similar experiences: to some, the fictional character in a rock ‘n’ roll hit has become a household name, as well-known to them as the likes of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty.

It was this notion that partially inspired me to write the story, along with a desire to explore the nature of oral tradition and folklore. My mother’s side of the family, from the Appalachian mountain region, passed down rhymes and riddles through at least four generations, so that’s also a phenomenon that is of particular interest to me.

These concepts led me to the idea that the figures of today’s pop culture might become the fairytales of the future. And in the case of a creation as intriguing as Bowie’s Major Tom character, I hope they do.

Nimrod: Do you find that music often influences your writing?

Lewis: Yes, it absolutely influences my writing and has since I first started to write creatively. Even as a child I created comics involving members of real-life bands I listened to; as an adolescent I began to incorporate musical elements into my short stories. My first published story was named after the song “Green Onions,” and I recently completed an unpublished novel where the central narrative incorporates my knowledge of and passion for music.

When I read Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity as a young adult, I was inspired by the way the author included his own knowledge and love of popular music in creating his characters and themes. That novel shows how artfully music can inform a work of fiction and illuminate larger concerns and aspects of human nature.

At times I listen to music while writing, or I might have a specific song in mind when working on a scene. Occasionally I have tried to capture the mood of a song in the atmosphere of a scene, but I may or may not actually name the song in the piece.

Because music and writing are such important and vital parts of my life, it’s natural to me that the two so often intertwine.

Nimrod: How many times do you usually revise a story?

Lewis: I tend to go through several drafts, but the nature and extent of the revisions completely depend on the piece. Some changes might be limited to only a few sentences, while in other cases I might revise the work in a more drastic way.

 Nimrod: What are your 3 all-time favorite books? 

Lewis: Among many other favorites, High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon.

—

C.C. Lewis’s work has appeared in the Berkeley Fiction Review, from which she won second place in the 2016 Sudden Fiction contest. She was also a finalist for North Carolina Literary Review’s Doris Betts Fiction Prize in 2017 and 2018 and has received honorable mentions from Glimmer Train. She has a Bachelor of Arts in English literature and currently lives in western North Carolina.

 

 

Each semester (and summer!), Nimrod‘s interns make things run more smoothly and efficiently in the office—we couldn’t do our work without them. With this blog series, “Meet the Interns,” we’ll introduce you to the hardworking interns who often are behind the scenes, keeping up with daily tasks, sending mail, reading manuscripts . . . and much, much more.

This week’s featured intern: Anna Johns

Nimrod: Tell us a little about yourself.

Anna: I am a freshman who is undeclared for a major, which hints at my biggest talent: being indecisive. Learning will always be my biggest passion, and I am often overwhelmed by what knowledge could be at my disposal. There is a world I want to know so much more about, but finding precisely what I would specialize in is a daunting task. My mother is a high school English teacher, which caused my great love affair with literature. I have grown up analyzing and listening to classic novels, and my affection for fiction has never dwindled; in fact, my time at TU has only made it develop more.

Nimrod: What made you interested in working with Nimrod?

Anna: It goes without saying, but English is so important. I have always deeply admired the way authors can transfer indescribable emotions—loss, ecstasy, etc.—into something almost tangible, something I can feel. That’s what appealed to me with the Nimrod internship. I can use my passion for English in a productive manner (instead of procrastinating when it comes to reading a stack of novels at home), and I have the ability to see how a literary journal works and the intricacies of publishing.

Nimrod: What’s your major/what are you thinking about majoring in? Why are/were you drawn to that major?

Anna: I am undeclared, unfortunately. However, I am deeply considering English as a major; I thoroughly enjoy writing and its process—even though my writer’s block often leaves me in a cold sweat or playing some bird dating game simulator just because. The world of English is so vast in what one can do with it, and while the major intimidates me, it also inspires me.

Nimrod: Who are a few of your favorite authors?

Anna: Oh, boy. I love Chuck Palahniuk as an author. He plays with fractured narratives and huge twists in plot, and he really drags you along “for the ride,” so to speak. In one of my favorite books, Invisible Monsters, the name of the protagonist is unknown until the end of the novel. Palahniuk builds a mystery surrounding the characters and their motives, and his sense of humor as he creates these characters is admirable.

I also love the works of David Levithan, who writes LGBTQ+ young adult fiction. I love the characterization he uses because he makes the characters feel real, which is so, so important. He shows the reader how members of that community feel and how they love, and I cannot recommend him enough.

For more classic literature, I love Ernest Hemingway and Jane Austen. Their work inspires me to no end; their greatest abilities are describing emotion and absorbing the reader into their plots and surrounding society. Hemingway is, sure, rougher around the edges and almost callous, whereas Austen is gentler and more emotional; however, the contrast is what really sells the eras of fiction in which they write. They are worth reading at least once in your life.

What are you most looking forward to learning or experiencing with Nimrod this semester?

Anna: I was looking most forward to learning how professional editing works and seeing the writing process from inside the lens of a literary journal. It gives me insight as a potential submitter of creative works into how it would work in a career field. My most exciting experience thus far was when I was assigned some works of fiction to review for publication, and I am so glad I have had the opportunity to do what I love and talk about what I love (much to the dismay of everyone around me).

 

 

 

by Britton Gildersleeve

As I gear up to teach a class of adult learners about poetry, I’m revisiting what makes a “good” poem. And what makes a poem not merely good, but great?

For decades now, the “canon”—those poets and poems academics feel should be studied, presumably for their greatness—has been the subject of heated argument. Poets (and poems) wax and wane in stature: war poetry of WWI is seen as canonical, while students rarely, if ever, see poetry from the Việtnamese War in anthologies.

And while there’s certainly consensus on, say, Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson, the inclusion of other poets remains up for discussion. If you’re an avid reader of poetry—as most of us involved with Nimrod are—you’re familiar with a LOT of poets whom other folks have never heard of, even though English majors, poetry lovers, and literati types know them well. Like Marianne Moore, whose poetry I love. Or Ishmael Reed, whose poem “I am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra” was an epiphany for me. But I guarantee most of my friends outside English academia haven’t heard of either.

When you get to contemporary poetry it’s even worse. The lack of name recognition in general circles for many of the best contemporary American poets makes you feel like you’re speaking another language when you try to discuss them: Nimrod readers and those in poetry communities will be familiar with them, but other folks? Unlikely.

Since I’ve studied poetry, poetics, and the canon for decades, I feel like I ought to be able to give a nice, succinct definition to the students who will turn up next month expecting me to know stuff. But I can’t. Because I don’t: I’ve never understood the magic of inclusion, or the drama of exclusion, myself. Why is Shakespeare more familiar than Ben Jonson, who was a better poet? And sure: Jonson is canonical, but few high schoolers will ever get him in class. Why isn’t the entire English language world intimately familiar w/Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of the best poets ever? How did Mary Oliver manage to become a popular contemporary poet—almost an oxymoron—(although she certainly deserves it)? And how did we lose Edna St. Vincent Millay?

Canon:
A list of authors or works considered to be central
to the identity of a given literary tradition or culture.[1]

These and other questions about poetic worth are the stuff of literary conundrums. When you have only 12 hours of class time and you know at least half of those will be devoted (with pleasure) to discussing the poems, how do you justify the often arbitrary, highly personal choices made? What should folks read? How do you make sure the wide diversity of poetry is adequately addressed, while still giving attention to the canon?

Many of the participants in this class will have little or no familiarity with poetry. If other classes are any indication, there will be engineers and historians and biologists and doctors and counselors and all manner of professionals. There also will be women who have never worked outside the home and retirees bored by endless hours of alone time. Now, you and I—as fluent readers and lovers of poetry—know that there is poetry that will speak to each of those situations. And speak fluently, in poetry’s own inimitable way. But since I don’t know the class demographics before I have to make a schedule, I have no idea who needs what poems. In that befuddled case, what would you suggest I offer?

When I took this thorny problem of the canon to the hive mind of Facebook, I was met with the kind of responses I should have expected: It’s what lasts. It’s what university professors say it is. It’s historical context. Sigh. Those just don’t work for me. And maybe they would work for my students, but it’s hard to teach something you don’t believe. I’m sure to slip up and say something flip about the whole canonical mess.

Perhaps the reason I like the above definition from the Poetry Foundation is that it leaves the door open to the problems I have with the whole canon thing.

This includes the highly problematic (for me) exclusion/elision of excellent voices—the historical context named—that accounts for why Robert Hayden is considered African-American lit, which is still pretty much non-canonical, although certainly there are crossover exceptions. Hayden and other black/brown/gay/activist poets didn’t and/or don’t “fit” with various readings of the American cultural and literary identity. Not even Library of Congress status can change attitudes quickly. The changes to the identity of American literature brought by social movements and the inclusion of these other, traditionally excluded voices remain highly problematic for far too many of the canon-makers. But textbooks are changing. Because, as Henry Louis Gates argues, “You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it.”Or perhaps it’s as simple as that canonical master T.S. Eliot said (here I’ve paraphrased): these are the poems that touch on human experience. The canon changes as we recognize the value of different experiences.

And that’s probably where I’ll begin on the first day of classes next month. What do you think?

—

[1]Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/canon, 9/2/18

Britton Gildersleeve’s creative nonfiction and poetry have appeared in Nimrod, Spoon River Poetry Review, This Land, and many other journals. She has published three chapbooks and was the director of the Oklahoma State University Writing Project for twelve years.