As part of the launch of our Spring/Summer 2018 issue, Let Us Gather: Diversity and the Arts, we sat down with contributors to talk 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.

Tell us a little about your work in Let Us Gather: Diversity and the Arts: what inspired it, how you came to write it, etc.

Years ago, I was driving through rural Minnesota and spotted a sign for Kanaranzi, an unincorporated town that’s home to about 70 people. I immediately loved the sound of it, Kan-ar-an-zi, and I knew someday I’d write a character who carried that name—and that somehow, some way, she’d be intimately connected to a small and overlooked place. I have a terrible memory, but for whatever reason, I never forgot Kanaranzi.

Do you have a favorite line, image, or scene from this work?

The whole story sprouted from the first sentence. I’d been toying for months with the idea of a small-town girl who made it really, really big, and then one afternoon, I just heard it: “We know Kanaranzi Kimball won’t come to the Waubeen Annual Kanaranzi Kimball Day, but every year we plan as if she might.” From there, I had to figure out who KayKay was—and, perhaps more importantly, who was the person still in Waubeen who kept waiting/hoping for KayKay to come back?

You were a finalist in the Francine Ringold Awards for New Writers, which means that this is one of your first pieces published in this genre. How long have you been writing, and what did being a finalist in the competition mean to you?

I’m so grateful to Nimrod and to the Francine Ringold Awards for selecting this piece as a finalist. I’ve been a writer for about a decade, mostly as a higher-ed marketer. In 2016, I left my cubicle to become a freelancer in Europe, and I also began working more seriously on fiction during that time. In fall 2018, I’ll embark on an M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of Alabama, and I submitted this story as part of my application. I wouldn’t have felt as confident about doing so without the nod of support from Nimrod on this piece.

What is your best piece of advice for aspiring writers?

Writers write. Nothing else makes you a writer — and nothing else can strip that identity away from you. I recently heard Chris Abani put it perfectly: “You have to write yourself into writing.” Don’t get too caught up in the “aesthetic” of being a writer, and accept that rejection is a huge part of the process. Just keep telling stories. That’s all there is to do.

My site is sandrabarnidge.com.

—

Sandra K. Barnidge is a Wisconsin native and holds an M.A. in journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She’s a freelance writer in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

As part of the launch of our Spring/Summer 2018 issue, Let Us Gather: Diversity and the Arts, we sat down with contributors to talk 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.

Tell us a little about your work in Let Us Gather: Diversity and the Arts. What inspired it, how you came to write it, etc.

Two of these poems, “Dalet” and “Zayin,” are parts of a longer sequence I refer to as a metaphysical love poem. I’ve studied some ancient languages in my life, and the beauty and strangeness of the Hebrew alphabet, and how the letters originally were pictograms, is fascinating to me. Hebrew also ascribes mystical qualities to its letters, and I’m hoping to capture what’s both knowable and unknowable in my own 20-year marriage to my husband, who is Japanese. The sequence will move on to Japanese alphabets when I finish the Hebrew part. “Letter to John Ashbery” is an elegy of sorts for him and is a true story about a likely apocryphal story he told me when I met him in graduate school.

Do you have a favorite line, image, or scene from this work?

I’m haunted by my memory of Ashbery’s brilliant blue eyes and his way of looking at you when you spoke, as if it was the most important thing to say in the world at that moment in time. I tried to capture that in the elegy for him.

What is your best piece of advice for aspiring writers?

Read as much as you write, and write as much as you possibly can. Seek out other writers you trust to give you honest feedback on your work. You can’t underestimate the importance of community, especially in poetry.

Tell us something fun, strange, or interesting about yourself. It can have to do with writing—or not!

I’m an American, but I lived in Canada for 10 years before returning to the U.S. in 2015 after the Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriages. My husband is a Japanese citizen, and after a while, there were no legal ways to keep him in the U.S. any longer. Not many people think about how the need to protect the equal rights of LGBQT people is even more imperative for binational couples like us.

What’s on the writing horizon for you/what are you working on now?

I have my first book of poems coming out next year (I hope). It’s called Ash Sonata. I only finished it at the end of 2017, so I’m waiting for the poems I’m writing now to reveal to me what a second book is going to be about. I’m listening and I think they’re telling me.

—

Steve Bellin-Oka is the author of a chapbook, Dead Letter Office at North Atlantic Station (Seven Kitchens Press, 2017). He earned his M.F.A. from the University of Virginia and his Ph.D. from the University of Southern Mississippi. He has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. He teaches at Eastern New Mexico University.

As part of the launch of our Spring/Summer 2018 issue, Let Us Gather: Diversity and the Arts, we sat down with contributors to talk 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.

Tell us a little about your work in Let Us Gather: Diversity and the Arts. What inspired it, how you came to write it, etc.

My poems are part of a series on jealousy. It may be counter-intuitive, but I believe that exploring jealousy (rather than transcending it) is a dynamic engine of spiritual growth. Better than yoga!

Do you have a favorite line, image, or scene from this work?

One of my favorite passages is these lines from “Sonnet with Clerk and Genghis Khan”: “Not mere love letters / but letters that would cut steel, show the blind / the Milky Way, a/k/a Winter Street, / Path of Cranes, the Road to Santiago.”

What is your best piece of advice for aspiring writers?

Read outside your comfort zone. If you love Armantrout, read Milton. If you love Milton, read Szymborska. If you love Szymborska, read Chekhov. If you love Chekhov, read Basho. If you love Basho, read Armantrout.

Tell us something fun, strange, or interesting about yourself. It can have to do with writing—or not!

I saw Jimi Hendrix set his guitar on fire at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. It was memorable, but from my perspective not as memorable as Otis Redding backed by Booker T & the MG’s. If you listen closely you may hear their influence in my poetry.

What’s on the writing horizon for you/what are you working on now?

I’m putting together a collection of sonnets. The working title is Sonnets with Carpenter and Dirty Snow. So far I’ve whittled 144 sonnets down to 96 for the collection, which is more like hacking with a machete than whittling.

Website: www.robertthomaspoems.com

Robert Thomas’s most recent book, Bridge, is a lyrical novella, published by BOA Editions, that won the 2015 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction. His first book, Door to Door, was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa and published by Fordham University, and his second collection, Dragging the Lake, was published by Carnegie Mellon. He has received an NEA poetry fellowship.

As part of the launch of our Spring/Summer 2018 issue, Let Us Gather: Diversity and the Arts, we sat down with contributors to talk 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.

Tell us a little about your work in Let Us Gather: Diversity and the Arts. What inspired it, how you came to write it, etc.

This poem started with a list of Hebrew words that sound or look like English words, but are actually unrelated. I set myself a goal: to write a poem with Hebrew letters that somehow allows their shapes and sounds to come across for an English-speaking audience. Transliteration isn’t enough for me. I want the beauty and inaccessibility of multi-alphabet code-switching, but I want it to sound good, like poetry should. So I started with words that sound the same, not paying attention to their meaning. Only after the words and I had hung out for a while did I try to coax some meaning out of them.

Do you have a favorite line, image, or scene from this work?

My favorite stanza is in the middle, starting with the Hebrew “HaAdam,” the character we call Adam in English. Christianity and English have created an idea of Adam as this first man, the originator of masculine gender. The poem is trying to remember who HaAdam was before English, before our contemporary understanding of what men are. It’s like trying to remember how dynamic gender was for me as a kid, who I was before I was asked to think of myself as a man, and subsequently started calling myself trans.

What is your best piece of advice for aspiring writers?

I’m someone who can get way too caught up in what I want to say, which is a prosy way to enter writing. I loved beginning with the false cognates for this poem, because it forced me to pick words, connect them through image, and only then apply any meaning. The advice I give myself is to force myself to play with language before I know what the poem means, to match sounds and shapes first. My brain and spirit know what they want to say. That’s the easy part.

Tell us something fun, strange, or interesting about yourself. It can have to do with writing—or not!

I’m a preschool music teacher, and a song leader at our local Jewish summer camp. Playing music with kids is probably the most fun work I could think of.

What’s on the writing horizon for you/what are you working on now?

I’m finishing the M.F.A. program at NCSU in May 2018. I’ve been writing poems about Shoshana, this girl-self character whose name would’ve been mine if I’d been born female. The poems are all about body parts, not her sex organs, but her tongue, her chin, her knees, and her back.

Joshua Sassoon Orol is a Jewish poet from Raleigh, North Carolina, writing with the texts, tunes, and stories passed down from their mixed heritage family. Josh is working on an M.F.A. at NCSU, and received an Academy of American Poets prize while at UNC Chapel Hill.

As part of the launch of our Spring/Summer 2018 issue, Let Us Gather: Diversity and the Arts, we sat down with contributors to talk 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.

Tell us a little about your work in Let Us Gather: Diversity and the Arts. What inspired it, how you came to write it, etc.

The genesis for “Pompeii” came from a Twitter account that posts pictures of weird, strange things, and they ran a couple pictures of the Pompeii statues. I was immediately fascinated by the idea that these poor people were forever poised, concrete iterations of their final agony. But as I researched the phenomenon, I found a paper by a volcanologist (what a profession!) that described how it’s probable a pyrostatic cloud killed all the citizens of Pompeii before they even knew what was going on. As a result, the “agony” was a bodily alteration caused by heat made permanent when the cadavers were encased in ash. And yet, I couldn’t dismiss the pain and fear I saw in them . . . which meant there was something inside me that I needed to interrogate. This poem came from that interrogation.

For “St. George and the Dragon” I was bored, and lonely, and reading the work of my former professor Jericho Brown. (This is a weird thing I do; when I’m feeling down I read the work of my teachers—their words are the comfort food of my soul.) He had just won the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award for his poem “Ganymede,” which is a searing and beautiful poem projecting a narrator’s want for a story onto the story itself, a kind of self-aware retelling. At the time I was working on some speculative writing and had dragons on the mind, and, guided by Jericho’s poem, remembered the myth of St. George and the Dragon. Using Jericho’s style and that myth as a nudge in the right direction, I wrote this poem.

Do you have a favorite line, image, or scene from this work?

I just love all the work “where once there were lambs / before she was saved” does. And the lines: “what will remain / will not be us but the shape of us, / and those ahead who think to look back / will see something else entirely, and shake / their heads, and wonder—”

Both of these endings are a bit on the nose, but not in a bad way! (I think.) Endings are something I often struggle with, so it’s hard not to choose endings I like as the favorite lines in my poems.

What is your best piece of advice for aspiring writers?

Read outside of your demographic, your wheelhouse, your presumed interests. Read wildly and voraciously and with kindness and love for the work you encounter. Don’t be cruel to writers or their work; that’s akin to being cruel to yourself. If you center celebration in your writing, the ways you see and experience and can describe the world increase in manifold ways. Your soul learns to sing.

Tell us something fun, strange, or interesting about yourself. It can have to do with writing—or not!

I change shirts five times a day, if not more! I hate wearing dirty shirts! I’ve been doing this for as far back as I can remember.

What’s on the writing horizon for you/what are you working on now?

I’ve begun submitting a poetry manuscript, so that’s taking up most of my focus. I am happy with it for now, but that could change with a new poem, or poems, or pretty much anything . . . I anticipate going through several drafts, just because that seems to be how these things go. Otherwise, I am pretty active on Twitter as @toddedillard, usually tweeting about poetry and the writing world.

Todd Dillard’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including Best New Poets, Barrelhouse, Electric Literature, McSweeney’s, and Asimov’s Science Fiction. His chapbook “The Drowned Hymns” is available from Jeanne Duval Editions.

As part of the launch of our Spring/Summer 2018 issue, Let Us Gather: Diversity and the Arts, we sat down with contributors to talk 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.

Tell us a little about your work in Let Us Gather: Diversity and the Arts. What inspired it, how you came to write it, etc.

A performance artist, Julie Coffey, asked me if I could be part of an experiment she was doing for a performance. She was distributing a card from a deck of cards to artists and asking them to create a response from the image or the numbers. She handed me a Queen of spades. At the time, I was working on my novel in progress, Almost a Life, and examining the lives of women in war. In my life, the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) had enormous impact, but no one talked about it. They call it war amnesia. This led me to the stories that are silenced—what are the secrets these women hold? As they now sit in parlors or go to work what memories are driven beneath the surface? This story, “Queen of Spades,” uses the protagonist’s spade to uncover one.

Do you have a favorite line, image, or scene from this work?

The first line: Linah failed miserably at misery.

What is your best piece of advice for aspiring writers?

1. Write a lot

2. Walk away from the writing and let it rest to get a new perspective

3. Don’t think about audience until your final drafts when you need to clear up fuzzy references and moments.

Tell us something fun, strange, or interesting about yourself. It can have to do with writing—or not!

For all my writing life, I have also been a fitness instructor—it’s the perfect balance to all the sitting. I teach Cycling, Pilates, Weight Training and Interval Training

What’s on the writing horizon for you/what are you working on now?

My novel in progress, Almost a Life, is about a woman who leaves Lebanon in the middle of the Civil War to marry her fiancé in Connecticut. She transitions from living in a family under siege, living in bomb shelters, and running from the fighting, to an everyday life as a banker in Connecticut. She finds herself in a new kind of fight.

A book of poetry in progress, Works of Mercy, is a series of poems about the kinds of unpaid work we do, the emotional labor of helping someone die peacefully, of finding a home, of giving love under duress, etc.

Website: www.elmazabinader.com

Elmaz Abinader’s poetry collection, This House, My Bones, was The Editor’s Selection for 2014 from Willow Books/Aquarius. Her books include a memoir, Children of the Roojme, A Family’s Journey from Lebanon, and a book of poetry, In the Country of My Dreams . . . which won the Oakland PEN, Josephine Miles Award. Elmaz is one of the co-founders of The Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA/Voices) a writing workshop for writers of color.

As part of the launch of our Spring/Summer 2018 issue, Let Us Gather: Diversity and the Arts, we sat down with contributors to talk 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.

Tell us a little about your work in Let Us Gather: Diversity and the Arts. What inspired it, how you came to write it, etc.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been working on reading queer histories into the paintings of Caravaggio. His process of using real-life people as models for figures in religious history is a huge inspiration. There’s also been a big cultural moment these past couple of years of remembering the history of AIDS, and Caravaggio’s devotional artwork seemed a fantastic way to recreate moments from the plague years of HIV/AIDS.

Do you have a favorite line, image, or scene from this work?

My favorite line/image is “an exemplary Assisi / ecstatic with Kaposi’s stigmata” from the poem “The Ecstasy of St. Francis.”

What is your best piece of advice for aspiring writers?

Write. Fail. Write. Fail. Write. Write. Write. (And between those . . . Submit. Submit. Submit . . . regardless of success or failure).

Tell us something fun, strange, or interesting about yourself. It can have to do with writing—or not!

Baking is a passion that’s just as sustaining/healing for me as writing. Both of them require a heady mix of process and magic that rhyme for me on a fundamental level.

What’s on the writing horizon for you/what are you working on now?

I just recently sent off a final book draft to my publisher, so . . . Right now I’m just trying to fail at poems/ideas again and looking forward to what’s lurking amidst all that failure.

Scott Chalupa writes and teaches in Columbia, South Carolina, where he earned an M.F.A. at the University of South Carolina. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in PANK, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Indianapolis Review, South Atlantic Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and other venues.