Category: Recommended Reading

Conversation with Erica Plouffe Lazure

Denton Loving1 Comment

Erica Plouffe Lazure is quick to explain that she is not a Southerner nor a Southern writer. But what exactly is a Southerner or a Southern writer today? Are such distinctions based on the accident of birth? On the range of time and experience? How do perspective, talent and empathy work into the equations? I’ve heard every side of these arguments over the years. All I know for certain is that regardless of the way she self-identifies, the stories in Erica Plouffe Lazure’s linked-story collection Proof of Me authentically center on a small square of land called Mewborn, North Carolina, a place born out of Erica’s lived experience as much as from her imagination. Erica was kind enough to answer some of my questions about putting these stories together, about her submission process, and about winning the prestigious New American Press Fiction Prize.

DL: How long did it take you to write the stories in Proof of Me? Can you talk about how some of these stories link together and how those links impacted the shaping of the collection?

EPL: The stories in Proof of Me go back from when I first started pursuing creative writing—as early as 2005. Some were completed and published right away; others sat as drafts that I’d revisit and revise from time to time. I always keep a folder of stories that are “workable” but as of yet incomplete, and as I set out to help round out the stories and voices in this collection, they were integral.

I enjoy the editing process, and believe that, especially when you’re feeling stuck with a particular story, setting it aside for a while and returning to it can help shake loose its arc, and get it into publishable shape. Combing through each story one by one can help you to see how they might all fit together. Initially, I had not set out to link the stories (geographically or otherwise) in earlier configurations of the collection, but in the early days of the pandemic, I decided to dust off the collection, print it out, and see how I might more consciously connect each story to the other. I’d already written several pieces about some of the characters (like the Weaver sisters, or Cassidy Penelope), and so those stories became natural anchors for the larger collection. From there, I reworked some of the other pieces to connect more organically to other characters in the collection, or found ways to tie back stories that were set outside of Mewborn to the town itself. If I hadn’t allowed myself the flexibility to change certain aspects of the stories as I’d initially envisioned them, I’m not sure the collection would have been as strong.

DL: These stories are set in a range of locations such as Nashville and Boston and as far away as India, but each story is centered emotionally around Mewborn, North Carolina. Was it helpful in your writing process to create your own Yoknapatawpha County?

EPL: Mewborn the town is very much an imagined community, a bit of a hybrid of the small city of Greenville, in Pitt County (where I’d lived for about eight years), certain parts of Eastern Carolina, and my own hometown in Massachusetts. The name Mewborn is taken from a small crossing close to Kinston, but I chose it because I liked the sound of the name, and did not want (like Faulkner, I would guess) to have to adhere to the actual historical particulars of Pitt County while crafting a fictional work. And yet, a strong sense of place—about a small town, about how families and neighbors live and function alongside each other, about how even those who leave their hometown are still tethered to it—is what I hope surfaces in this collection. And as I mentioned earlier, I hadn’t intended the stories to be linked when I first set out to write them, but the revision process enabled me to see how I was, in fact, writing of, or about, the same place all along. And I should note that, for the record, I am not from the South, nor do I claim to be a Southerner, but I am very much a student of its literature, and I had never written a word of fiction until I moved to North Carolina.

DL: Can you describe the time between writing and publishing these stories? How did you connect with New American Press? Were there many rejections along the way?

EPL: Since about 2009, I had submitted various versions of Proof of Me to book prize contests offered by smaller presses. I like to joke how I almost renamed the collection The Bridesmaid, because it had been a finalist or runner-up in at least a half-dozen or so competitions (including New American Press, which eventually took it). But I think my effort to substantially rework the collection to make it more directly linked, geographically and thematically, worked in my favor. Rejection is part and parcel of the publishing game, and at some point, you understand that it’s not because the work isn’t any good; it’s more of what fits with the vision of the press, and the aesthetic tastes of the contest judge (or editor). I haven’t really gone the agent route—the agents I’ve had conversations with were always asking about my novel (! Don’t ask !) and were not interested in story collections. I’ve found there is certainly an interest and demand for short stories, but I guess we story writers have more work to do in making a convincing case to big publishers.

DL: Do you have advice for writers who hope to publish story collections?

EPL: This is rather technical advice, but something that helped me to envision my collection AS a collection was printing it all out (1.5 spacing, double-sided) and then read it aloud and edit with a pen in hand. I would make notes of key objects, characters or themes in a notebook, and then look for spots where those objects (sewing machines, dice, cars) might show up in another story. In some cases, I realized that, with a name change and a shift in a few key details, a story that might not have been part of the collection could be transformed into another piece of the Mewborn puzzle.

As far as submitting your work, I suggest that you research the publisher first to make sure it will be a good fit. Some publishers will want you to chip in for paying for a publicist (and there goes your advance), others might not do much in terms of promotion, or expect you to do much of that work yourself. I suggest researching a few past winners of story collections prizes of publishers that you’re interested in, and see how their books fared (via reviews, or press interest, or readings). Smaller presses tend not to have big budgets for book launches, so be aware of that.

DL: What are you working on now?

EPL: I’ve been working on a collection of flash stories under the thematic title Desire Path. It’s a term often used by city planners and landscapers to describe a “footpath made through foliage or grass by repeated traffic, rather than laid out by design.” I plan to take this literal definition in a metaphorical direction, where each of my characters will aspire for something guided by their desires, instincts and travels, and endeavor to carve a path of their own making to attain it. It is slow-going, but I’m enjoying discovering how each story might bend toward (or even challenge!) the established theme.

Huge thanks to Erica Plouffe Lazure for speaking to me about her new book. Don’t forget to order Proof of Me now. Stay tuned for my next post where I’ll share a writing exercise from Erica based on one of her short stories. Make sure you never miss a post by subscribing here:

“Waiting for the Diagnosis” by A.E. Hines

Denton Loving3 Comments

About a year ago, I read a book that completely captured my attention. It was A.E. Hines’ Any Dumb Animal, published by Main Street Rag Publishing. Although Any Dumb Animal is a collection of poetry, it can also be likened to a memoir, moving through time to reveal moments of Hines’ personal life story. I was excited by the mixture of craft and accessibility in Hines’ writing. Many of his poems lean toward the narrative as well as the confessional. The result is that reading each poem feels like you’re being let in on a secret that has the potential to change your personal outlook of the world.

I’m far from alone in recognizing Hines’ talents. Any Dumb Animal received Honorable Mention in the North Carolina Poetry Society’s 2022 Brockman-Campbell Book contest and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book award. His work has also appeared in some of the best journals of our time such as Alaska Quarterly Review, Southern Review, Rhino, American Poetry Review, Poet Lore, The Greensboro Review, Ninth Letter, The Missouri Review, I-70 Review, and Tar River Poetry, among other places.

He splits his time between Charlotte, North Carolina, and Medellín, Colombia. Last week, I reached out and asked if he would share one of his poems.

Waiting for the Diagnosis

Lying with the man I love,
I muse about a farm
high in the Colombian mountains
where terraced slopes of coffee
meander valley to peak
and disappear into mist.

There’s still time, I tell him,
to plant a thousand bamboo trees,
watch them leap into the sky,
to nail bat houses to the trunks
and hear the flitter of webbed-wings,
to hear the night monkeys
winding their way in the dark,
leaping branch to branch.

Let the shadows come
and wrap us
in their slippery shawls—
there’s still time to dig
our fingers into the black
brooding earth,
to taste the prickly fruit,

to believe we can grow old
listening to the bats shriek,
and night monkeys howl,
to bamboo trunks
rubbing together in the breeze,
their insistent music
like the luxury
of creaking old bones.

I asked A.E. Hines if he would share the inspiration for writing Waiting for the Diagnosis, and here’s what he wrote:

“When Any Dumb Animal first came out, a couple of friends contacted me after reading this poem to inquire about my health. “What’s going on?” one asked. As I told my friend, I’m fine now.  A few years ago, I did have one of those surprise health issues that stops you in your tracks, and leaves you worrying and waiting for the days and weeks it takes to get into doctor visits, to schedule and receive various test results. That gap in time was the genesis for this poem. I recall coming home after a particularly invasive test and wrote the title in my notebook. At the time, I was in a brand new relationship with the man who would later become my husband. We were still very new, and it was my first serious relationship after ending a twenty year marriage. Like all new couples, we were making plans for the future. But as middle-aged (and previously divorced) adults, we also understood time isn’t always on one’s side, and plans don’t always work out. Growing old (and doing it with someone you love) really is a luxury. This poem lives in the gap, that anxious moment of waiting. Of not knowing if plans will work out. But also in hope that they will.  PS:  As for me, so far, so good!”

Many thanks to A.E. Hines for sharing the background story of his poem Waiting for the Diagnosis. Just this week, he’s had new work published in the summer issue of The Southern Review and online at South Florida Poetry Journal. And don’t forget to order Any Dumb Animal from the Main Street Rag Online Bookstore, Powell’s or Amazon.

In my next post, I’ll share a writing exercise based on Waiting for the Diagnosis. If you’re not already subscribed, you can make sure you never miss a post by subscribing here:

Conversation with Tony Taddei

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For many years before Tony Taddei was creating characters on the page, he was creating them on the stage as a trained actor.  Born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut, Tony now lives in New Jersey. I first met Tony in 2014 when we both attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. A few years later, we reconnected through the Bennington College Writing Seminars. Though all of my interactions with Tony had been related to writing, I hadn’t had the pleasure to read his work for myself until the recent publication of his collection of linked short stories, The Sons of the Santorelli. What a joy it was to discover the craftsmanship and poignancy in these twelve stories about an immigrant family, particularly the men in the family who struggle with their desires and ambitions. Yes, this is a narrative about an immigrant family, but as David Gates said about the book, this is not “the conventional immigrant family saga.” Tony was kind enough to answer some of my questions about putting these stories together, about how he avoided convention, and how he infused a political slant into such personal, character-driven writing.

DL: How long did it take you to write these stories, and do you recall when you knew how individual stories would work together? Can you talk about your reasons for writing multiple, linked stories rather than a novel?

TT: I took my time writing these stories, so that the process from drafting the initial stories to finalizing the collection probably took five or six years.  The collection wasn’t the only thing I was working on during the time, and, in any case, I didn’t want to rush the process of writing the collection.  First, because I wanted to get the premise of each story right as well as to spend time considering what stories might need to be added, and second, because I was having a lot of fun writing about these people and I kind of wanted to savor it. 

During the process of working on the stories I don’t think I really had a master plan for how they would all work together.  That said, once I decided to write one story for each of the Santorelli sons and grandsons as well as at least one story about the patriarch, the linkages between stories started to become evident, and I was able to find ways in rewriting the stories and adding new ones to get them to work together as a piece.  My goal was to have each story stand on its own but also for a reader to be able to sit back and think about them in their entirety after finishing the collection to realize that the parts of the book made up a whole.

As to why I wrote the saga of this family as linked stories rather than a novel, I did it because it gave me the ability to tell multiple, smaller stories that I would not have been able to tell in a novel (while still trying to make the novel a cohesive whole).  It was also a lot easier for me to write about the individuals in this very complex and human family in separate stories than it would have been in a novel.  By telling the story of the Santorellis a character at a time, I think I did more justice to each individual while still creating the personality and a legacy of a whole family.

DL: One of the recurring themes throughout these stories is the idea of the immigrant experience, often depicted here in connection with “immigrant shame” and the idea that America “breaks” the spirit of immigrants. This is the antithetical American story. How conscious were you of making this kind of political statement during the writing? Do you have advice for other writers about incorporating political ideas into fiction?

TT: As the work progressed, I was very conscious of it.  Having come from an immigrant family and seen them fail more than succeed at the things they most wanted I can be somewhat cynical about the idea of an American Dream to begin with. I knew that cynicism would likely play a role in the situations I put my characters in.

That said, I didn’t I initially set out to tell stories that torpedoed the idea of what can be achieved in America.  I set out to write human stories that were compelling to read as well as funny and tragic with as many twists and surprises as I could manage.  In order tell the truth about the characters in this family as I saw them, I had to show the forces that were working upon them. The largest of those forces being that for most immigrants and, especially for the poor, this country very often only lets them get so far before it pushes them back down again.  This comes in the form of economic imprisonment, and it comes in the form of racial imprisonment where one wave of immigrants who’d faced bigotry visits their own xenophobia and bigotry on the next wave of immigrants to reach America’s shores.   

My advice for writers who want to incorporate political ideas into fiction is to first find an honest story that is personal and then begin writing it without focusing on the political or cultural connotations. If the story is honest and tracks with the world we live in, they won’t be able to help themselves from writing about the political forces that are acting upon their characters. Those forces come into play in our lives most of the time without us even realizing they are there.  After that, when the writer looks back on what they’ve written, they can draw out the more political aspects of the story to any degree they choose. To put the above more succinctly, all politics are personal. I think any political writing should follow that guideline.

DL: Many of these stories are told through the male point of view which makes sense given the title of the collection. But that’s not to say that you don’t give voice to women within the Santorelli family. How did you settle on the balance between male and female characters and points-of-view? Were there any challenges in allowing the women to have their say in this male-dominated cast?

TT:  Not at all, because I think if you look closely at each of the stories, you’ll see that the women in the backgrounds of these men’s lives are the real truth-tellers.  The stories would not have found the ballast they needed for their conflict and reasoning if it weren’t for the women characters. A reader will likely see this most clearly in a story like “Commedia Dell’Arte” which has the matriarch of the family as the protagonist trying to make sense of and tell the truth about male dominance in her life.  But it’s just below the surface of most of the other stories as well. From “Songs for Swingin’ Lovers” where a prostitute early on dominates a group of highly dysfunctional and misogynist men, to “Valiant” where the sisters and especially the mother in the family turn out to be stronger and more insightful then either the father or the son.

So, no, I did not find many challenges in allowing the women to have their say in my largely male-dominated cast.  In fact, I’d say that the challenge was being able to hold off in letting the women have their say long enough so that the men could act out in the wrong-headed and solipsistic ways that I think make the stories interesting and recognizable to readers.  Especially female readers.

DL: In an effort to demystify the process, I always ask writers about the process of submitting their manuscripts for publication. Can you describe the time between writing and publishing these stories? How did you connect with Bordighera Press?

TT:  The time between writing and publishing was, to some extent, concurrent.  I started to send the manuscript to publishers when I had most of the stories finished but was still revising the last two or three.  At that point it was rejection, rejection, rejection until I found Bordighera Press.

Bordighera is a small independent press that is partially privately funded with a mission to publish writing about the culture of Italy and Italian Americans—essays, fiction, poetry, what have you.  They publish a semiannual review of shorter work as well as a twice yearly run of new full-length work and are always looking for good writing that fits the themes of Italian life.   About 2 years ago, I submitted the title story of my collection to Bordighera for consideration in their semiannual review, and it was accepted.  Once I realized that they also published full length work, I sent the full and, by then, nearly completed manuscript, and I was thrilled when they said they wanted to publish it. 

I’ve been telling people who ask how you find a publisher for your work that you have to persevere until you find a publisher that is the right fit.  Most of the time that’s easier said than done.  In my case I believe it was a bit easier because the work was a more-or-less exact match with the kind of work Bordighera is looking for.

DL: What are you working on now?

TT: I’m finishing up another collection of short stories that revolve around the melancholy, indignities, and occasional pleasures that men face as they age.  Each of these stories also weaves in animals and their ability to live instinctually and unquestioningly as a humorous and (I think) affecting counterpoint to the men in the stories who are creating their own problems and then struggling to accept the circumstances they find themselves in.  These two themes may not at first glance seem to go together, but I think the stories work better because of their juxtaposition. I’m hoping to have these stories published as a collection sometime soon and readers can judge for themselves. For now, if any of your readers want to take a look a couple of these stories, they a can go to Animal Literary Magazine and The Florida Review online.  I’m also beginning a novel but it’s too early to say much about it, so I’ll have to get back to you on that.

DL: Are there any opportunities coming up for readers to hear you read from The Sons of the Santorelli either via Zoom or in person?

TT: Yes, I recently read an excerpt from a story in the collection – “We Now Conclude Our Broadcast Day” – online for the Prospect Street Reading series and readers can view that on Facebook Events at  https://www.facebook.com/events/413658933932101/?ref=newsfeed (no Facebook account required to view).

Folks can also go to the Selected Audio section of my website and listen to me read the first two stories from the collection.

Other readings are in the works, and I’ll post the particulars to my social media feeds when they’re set.  (@tony_taddei / Twitter; Tony Taddei / Facebook; tonytaddei / Instagram)

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Huge thanks to Tony for speaking to me about his new book. Don’t forget to order The Sons of the Santorelli now from Bordighera Press. Make sure you never miss a post by subscribing here:

“Epitaph” by Todd Hearon

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This week’s poem comes from the beautiful book, Crows in Eden, by Todd Hearon. Todd is a native of western North Carolina, and this collection of poems is placed in Eden, a small town in the Great Copper Basin of southeast Tennessee. A century ago, an African-American community was forced out of Eden after the lynching of three young Black men. Hearon’s poems are deeply-felt explorations of that particular time and place, and of the lives of both the victims and the perpetrators. This short poem essentially only 6 lines and an epigraph, is one of my favorite from the collection.

Epitaph

By his own hand to be engraved on copperplate and planted at
The edge of town under the sign that reads EDEN POP. 353

When this grave has eaten us alive
and slugs have blown the marrow from our souls
think not Wildflower Pilgrim as you drive
past this blot we were not particles
of the scene you seek its promise and its poor
mortal glory mirroring your own We were

You can read more samples from Crows in Eden and order a copy directly from Salmon Poetry by clicking here.

In other news… Head over to Americana Highways to listen to Tiffany Williams’ new single All Those Days of Drinking Dust. This song is the first to be released from her forthcoming album which will be available August 19th. Anuradha Bhowmik’s debut collection Brown Girl Chromatography is available now for pre-order from University of Pittsburgh Press. And for your immediate reading pleasure, check out Off the Coast to read Joel Ferdon’s poem Southwest, Southeast, and Rattle for Jeff Hardin’s poem At Least Something.

Thanks for reading. If you don’t already subscribe, make sure you never miss a post by subscribing here:

“When you are not there” by Ron Houchin

Denton Loving5 Comments

The writing community lost a fine poet and friend last month when Ron Houchin passed away from a rare form of kidney cancer. I first met Ron when he attended the inaugural Mountain Heritage Literary Festival (MHLF), and our paths crossed many times in the years since then.

Ron was a consistent attendee at MHLF, and he never missed the Saturday morning hike led by my friend Tony Maxwell. Each year, Tony chose a walk that would eventually lead to the Pinnacle Overlook at the top of Cumberland Mountain, and Ron was always there. In the photo below, taken in 2017 and shared by Thomas Alan Holmes, you can see Ron standing second from the left, wearing his trademark baseball cap.

Thanks to Tony’s suggestion and Alan’s organization, a small group gathered at the Pinnacle Overlook on Sunday morning to remember Ron.

I wish I could share all of the wonderful stories that were told. Ron was often quiet, especially in group settings. He was one of the most thoughtful people I’ve ever met. Those factors combined with his obvious talent as a writer could feel intimidating. And yet he was incredibly kind and generous with his time and energy, and he often surprised us with his witty sense of humor and his always perfect delivery.

Ron published a remarkable body of work ranging from poetry to short fiction and a young adult novel—ten volumes that will keep him and his voice from ever completely dying. We read a few of his poems on Sunday when we gathered on top of the mountain. I didn’t read a poem, myself, although for weeks now, I’ve been carrying around my copy of his 2009 collection, Museum Crows, one of four titles published by Salmon Poetry. The first poem I opened to was, “When you are not there,” a perfect poem for a time of loss.

When you are not there

Five granules of pepper
and three of salt lie on the table
beside two clear shakers.
On the floor a ray of sunlight
lands beside the dog dish.
It creeps over the bowl
while the dog sleeps.

In his dream, he growls,
but the sun beam does not hesitate.
Its bright tongue licking over
the edge of the dry food wets
it with light. The dog blows
out his breath, feet twitching.

Across the room, a tall glass,
empty but for three ice cubes,
clinks and settles its coldness.
Behind the refrigerator, frail
cobwebs, in the pattern
of someone’s initials, wave
in wind from the furnace vent.

Like the music of fear, the red light
of the security system keeps time.
When you are still not back, a full,
pastel moon peers in the big window
over the breakfast nook.

These things, and the bright planet
Venus shining through
the storm door, will not ask your
whereabouts or why the car is not
ticking toward coolness in the garage.

But the dog will wake soon
and whine for you and fresh food.
The philodendra will take
a week to miss you.
The tall water glass, still on the counter,
whispers tragedy in strains of evaporation.

Conversation with Patti Frye Meredith

Denton Loving1 Comment

I can’t exactly remember the first time I met Patti Frye Meredith. I definitely have memories of her at one of the early Mountain Heritage Literary Festivals making people laugh and playing music late at night. One thing I know for certain is that Patti can make anyone laugh. That’s true whether you’re fortunate enough to sit down and share a meal with her, or whether you’re reading her beautiful new novel, South of Heaven, a multi-generation narrative set in Carthage, a small town in the Sandhills of North Carolina. At the center of the novel are two sisters, Fern and Leona. Both have secrets they are keeping from each other and from the world. There’s also Fern’s son Dean who, as Fern says, doesn’t have any secrets. South of Heaven is a meaningful exploration of how the things we try to keep bottled up complicate relationships. The novel is deeply Southern, completely universal and wonderfully fun to read.

DL: South of Heaven centers on the McQueen family, and it’s set in the late 1990’s, a time not so long ago but a time that feels infinitely different in hindsight. Do you have any advice for other writers writing about the recent past?

PM: When Dean first “talked to me in my head,” he told me his dad was MIA in Vietnam, and how as a child he pretended to find his daddy in the overgrown bamboo patch in his backyard.

I wrote the book from that one scene. I knew Dean was in his early 20’s, and that his father went missing at the very end of the war. That’s why I set the novel in 1998. After I got into it, other 1998 occurrences came into play like the Clinton/Lewinsky drama. There’s a lot in the book about the lengths we will go to avoid the truth, so that worked.

Early readers suggested that I move the story up in time, to make it more contemporary, to use the Iraq War instead of the Vietnam War and put it in present tense. I tried, but I couldn’t make it work. By that time, too, I felt like I knew Fern and Leona very well, and I realized they wouldn’t be the same people if they hadn’t grown up like they did in the sixties.

There are pitfalls. It’s not historic, and it’s not contemporary. The characters are just modern enough for readers to wonder, “Why would they think that?” or “Why would they do that?” It’s embarrassing, but I had to do research to remember if everyone had cell phones in 1998, or if fax machines were still a thing. We’ve seen a lot of change in twenty-four years, and it’s amazing how quickly we forget recent history.

DL: I loved reading the “Backstory” on your website about your job at University of North Carolina Public Television, and how you met so many writers there. The authors you mention (Lee Smith, Doris Betts, Reynolds Price, Fred Chappell) all come from the Southern tradition, and South of Heaven feels like a very Southern novel. How natural was it for you to write in that tradition?

PM: Like so many others, reading Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Spencer, Lee Smith, Jill McCorkle, Tim McLaurin, and so on and so on, showed me that stories set in small towns were okay to write.

I grew up in Galax, Virginia, population around 6,000. So, it was natural to stick to the world I knew. Thinking about it, I’ve now lived in Memphis and Chattanooga, Tennessee, Huntsville, Alabama, Durham and Charlotte, North Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Cities large and small, but with the same southern sensibilities. (Or maybe I think all those places have the same southern sensibilities because “wherever you go, there you are”!)

DL: Did you feel any pressure to “live up” to the works of those writers you admired so much?

PM: If I thought I had to live up to their work, I’d never write another word! Back when I first started writing, I didn’t know what I didn’t know, however, it didn’t take long to realize I was never going to be in the same league with the writers I admired most. I’d give anything to see the world and put that world on the page like Fred Chappell, but I don’t have his complexity or depth. That doesn’t mean I don’t love reading his work. But, even when you study the craft and learn what makes great literature, even when you can recognize it, it’s still not possible to re-engineer your brain to create it. Thank heavens. There should be only one Lee Smith, one Jill McCorkle, one Darnell Arnoult.

That’s not to say I don’t spend a lot of time being discouraged! But you have to write what you write, be who you are, I mean, you can’t fake your subconscious! We all have our own perspectives and experiences, and we’ve all drawn our own conclusions.

I’m hooked on the joy of writing. The discoveries, the occasional good sentence, exploring the minds of my imaginary people. Writing helps me understand what matters and it’s my way of expressing what strikes me—good and bad—about being human.

And, since I love a cliché, I’ll say, “It’s the journey, not the destination.” Chasing after the “secret” to good writing has led me to friends who absolutely make my whole life better. Having the opportunity to be with other writers is the best reason to write!  Sorry for getting off on a tangent, but maybe that’s the southern tradition!

DL: How long did it take you to write South of Heaven? How many drafts did you go through?

PM: There’s no telling how many drafts I have. Dean’s voice came to me at Hindman Settlement School in 2005. I wrote the original draft in first person present tense. Then changed it to third person present tense for my MFA thesis at the University of Memphis in 2012. Then I wrote a draft in third person past tense. I was always changing something, adding, taking away. Starting over. We moved seven times in twenty-eight years for my husband’s job, so I had a lot of distractions (excuses) through the years.

When my husband retired and we moved back to North Carolina, I set up my little office and joined a weekly writer’s group. Then the pandemic hit. Everyone is different. I know there are many great writers with extremely busy lives, but for me, the stillness of the pandemic quarantine made it possible to devote the time I needed to work. No travel, no socializing. I don’t think I understood what it meant to really work until the pandemic. I discovered the long stretches of uninterrupted time helped keep the story together in my head, helped me play out the scenes I needed to make the story more cohesive. I think of it as bandwidth. Writing South of Heaven took a lot of bandwidth!

DL: Your novel is published by Mint Hill Books, an imprint of Main Street Rag which published my poetry collection, Crimes Against Birds. What was your experience like in finding a publisher?

PM: I can’t remember if I saw Main Street Rag’s call for novel chapters on social media or in Poets & Writers, but I had one of those “What the heck” moments and sent chapters. Months later, I got an e-mail saying they were interested in publishing the novel, and Scott Douglass sent a contract and a detailed explanation of how the process would go.

I had sent out query letters to agents off and on for years. (One agent had almost taken it years ago, but that fell through when the third reader in her office didn’t think they could sell it.) I knew South of Heaven wasn’t the kind of book that was getting the attention of traditional publishing, or the independent presses I was familiar with. It wasn’t full-blown literary, and it wasn’t quirky enough to be chick-lit.

I didn’t think it was going to set the literary world on fire, but I wanted my imaginary people to live in a real book. So, I asked you, Sue Dunlap, and Darnell Arnoult to read it and tell me if I was about to embarrass myself, and you all said, “Do it.” So, I did. I fiddled with it after I got it back from you all, and I hired an editor to make sure I hadn’t added a lot more typos. Then I fiddled with it some more, and my niece, Becki Vasques, found my last snafus. We made it a family and friend affair! You and Darnell suggested I put an emu on the cover, and my husband, Lee, and I put it together (with Darnell on the phone). It’s been fun. Not “have lunch with your agent in New York City” fun, but better. A true labor of love. And I like that my North Carolina story is published by a North Carolina press. Scott Douglass does something very special with Main Street Rag. He publishes wonderful poetry and stories. I’ve gotten to know him and his wife and his dog, Harley, and I really appreciate the work he does.

DL: Do you have any advice for other writers ready to send their novel out?

PM: Don’t discount the small independent presses. We all appreciate independent bookstores. These presses deserve our appreciation, too.

Do ask yourself if you’re ready to be in the book marketing business, though, and the weird thing is part of that is selling not just the book but yourself. The great thing about the small press is, “You have a book to sell.” The scary thing about the small press is “YOU have a book to sell.” Just be honest with yourself about what you want to accomplish and why you’re doing it.

For me, the experience has been amazing because it has reminded me that I have the very best family and friends in the world. The support has been phenomenal. People I haven’t seen or talked to in ages bought my book after seeing my Facebook posts. Friends talk about my characters like they’re real people they care about. So, if I don’t sell another book, I’m very happy with the response South of Heaven has gotten.

CYNICAL ALERT!

The truth is, without Facebook, I wouldn’t have sold m(any) books. South of Heaven is in two bookstores, Chapters in Galax, my hometown, and McIntyre’s in Chapel Hill, where I live now. I’ve had one reading at McIntyre’s. I hired a publicist, and maybe there will be more readings, but maybe not. Even if I devote a lot of time to driving around, going to bookstores, taking them a book and a nice press kit, there’s no guarantee they’ll carry it. I have a couple of book club gatherings coming up. The bottom line is: It’s up to you to promote your book, to make yourself known. I believe even if you have an agent and a traditional press, they want you to have a “platform” meaning they want you to use your social media connections to publicize and sell your book.

DL: You’ve described South of Heaven as coming out “late in life.” We could argue about what that means, but I’m more interested in something else you said which is that having the novel out in the world helped clarify where and on what you want to focus your energies. Can you talk more about that?

PM: I know for sure I don’t want to be an author who dresses up and talks about writing. I want to be a writer who writes. I want to spend more time with my imaginary people and less time telling real people why they ought to like my book! Ha! I recently got together with a group of my writing friends, and afterwards I realized all we’d talked about was how close each of us were to having finished products to try to get published. Like there was some big door we were all clamoring to walk through to get to a different, more perfect life. I want to spend more time talking about ideas, or break-through moments, or what we’ve discovered about the craft. I don’t want my energy focused on end-products. I want to focus on better writing and storytelling.

DL: What are you working on now?

PM: Not much. I’m caught up doing what I think I ought to be doing to sell books. It’s uncomfortable and not much fun. I did have a little “conversation” with one of the characters in South of Heaven the other day. So, I wrote that down.

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Find out more about Patti on her website, and don’t forget to order South of Heaven, now available from the Main Street Rag Bookstore. Coming soon, I’ll share my conversation with Tony Taddei about his debut story collection, The Sons of the Santorelli. Make sure you never miss a post by subscribing here:

Conversation with Julia Wendell

Denton Loving1 Comment

Julia Wendell is a poet currently living in Aiken, South Carolina. She is also a three-day event rider, the experience of which considerably informs her newest collection of poetry, The Art of Falling, published by FutureCycle Press. Amanda Moore said this about The Art of Falling: “…knowing how to fall allows Wendell’s open-eyed work to acknowledge pain but not be weighed down by it, moving instead to consider what blossoms and grows each passing season. Love here is represented by and extended to plants and animals—reluctant gladiolas, bursting peonies, a menagerie of dogs and birds—but nothing so beloved as horses, an anchoring and comforting presence throughout.”

I found The Art of Falling to be a powerful book encompassing decades of Julia’s life, moving from childhood traumas to complexities of adulthood. In one poem, Julia describes the art of falling as a practice perfected through pain and intense self-awareness, visible in “the coat hook / of my separated shoulder, / my spine’s bumpy lane, / sunspots littering my back— / the parts of me / I can’t see without mirrors.” In other poems, the art of falling is also made known in far less visible ways. Julia was kind enough to speak to me about her new book, her writing process, ekphrastic poetry and what it’s like to be married to another poet.

DL: Many of the poems in “The Art of Falling” touch on a fall you suffered from a horse that caused significant physical pain. But these poems reveal other traumas as well. What’s your process like for transforming writing about trauma into a well-crafted poem?

JW: It wasn’t one fall from a horse, but many: actually, a lifetime of falls. The old directive is true for me—you fall off a horse, you get back on. You fall off a poem, you get back on. Some falls are worse than others. And the older you get, the worse they tend to be, and the harder it is to get back on. Several years ago, I broke my hip as well as my leg falling from one of my horses, and that fall transformed my life for a year, as well as the writing of The Art of Falling. I found ways to live through the pain and to see through it. I had to change my life pretty drastically during that time, and my poems became both a respite and a way to work through the ordeal. I couldn’t get on a horse, but I could go to my desk with the help of a cane or just steadying myself on furniture as I went across the room.

DL: I was thrilled to read your poem, “Horse in the Landscape” which is an ekphrastic work related to Franz Marc’s painting with the same name. This is also the image used for the book’s cover. I recently taught a workshop on ekphrastic writing. Can you talk about the relationship that can exist between visual art and written work? Are you also a visual artist?

JW: No, I’m not a visual artist, but the piano is my brush; has been all my life, and music often finds its way into my poems. In reference to the above question about writing through pain: while writing the poems in The Art of Falling, I re-visited Frida Kahlo’s life and work. Her example taught me how to keep making art while in terrible pain. I read everything I could get my hands on about her life and artistic process, and studied her strange, surreal self-portraits. I even went to Mexico City after I had partially healed and visited her house, Casa Azul. I was drawn to her for the obvious parallel between her life and mine at the time. Both of us had our hips gored by rods, except that hers was put there by a bus and mine was put there by a surgeon. Here was an artist who experienced a lifetime of pain, and yet she kept getting back on the horse of her art to create her organic, visceral, paintings. The poem “Portrait Chinois” came directly from my re-experience with Frida’s work.

Similarly, the figure of the broken girl in Wyeth’s Christina’s World reminded me of my own plight; and through her semi-reclined pull and yearning for the gray house on the hill, despite her infirmities and inability to walk, drew me to ponder what it would be like for her to crawl to the house, to go inside, to open up her world and reach her dream destination.

I have always loved Franz Marc’s work for its ebullience and movement, and of course for its subject matter. But what pulled me to Horse in the Landscape is also what struck me about Christina’s World—we see a still landscape through the girl’s and horse’s perspectives, as they turn their backs to us. It is a world of no movement, only thought and perspective, possibility and possible movement, which is what my life had become during the time I was so badly injured. I had to contemplate my life through quiet and stillness, and find my poems there.

I chose the cover for The Art of Falling before I had written Horse in the Landscape. The pdf’s of the interior of the book were almost ready for the printer. Suddenly, I had the urge to write the poem and spent last Christmas season writing and re-writing it, thinking I would save it for some other project. Then Diane Kistner, the editor at FutureCycle Press, contacted me. Did I have another poem that might fit into the book? The way the pages were laying out, she needed one. Uncanny coincidence.

DL: I always ask writers about the process of compiling, submitting and publishing their books, and I’m especially interested in asking you because this is, I believe, your eleventh book. How long did it take you to write and shape the poems in this collection? How did you find and form a relationship with FutureCycle Press?

JW: The poems in The Art of Falling span at least a decade. The last book, Take This Spoon, had a very specific theme of poems about family, and the relationship to food and eating and anorexia, and even incorporated old family recipes. I was already working on the poems in The Art of Falling when Take This Spoon came out in 2016. The manuscript has seen many, many revisions: different title, different order, new poems. It’s actually my sixth, full-length collection, having published a number of chapbooks in addition to the longer books. I submitted to FutureCycle at the suggestion of April Ossmann, with whom I worked on an earlier draft of The Art of Falling. Diane Kistner, editor at FutureCycle, was very good at managing the publication details of the book, though not so much involved with line edits or broader editorial suggestions. For those I relied on April, Jack Stephens, D.W. Fenza, and most especially my husband, Barrett Warner.

DL: I have to ask you about Barrett Warner who is also a writer. To what extent do you and he read and comment on each other’s work?

JW: Barrett reads and helps edit everything I write, as well as a tone of what other people are writing. When he likes reading something his hand twists up his hair, and if he comes back to me with really messy hair, I know he liked it. I am dependent upon him as my first reader. He is a bit more independent of me, perhaps because as an editor he has such rich connections with other writers. I am more of an artistic recluse, and I like it that way. But everyone needs a first reader, and Barrett’s mine. In sickness and in first drafts, as they say.

DL: In addition to being a writer, you’re a three-day event rider. It’s also clear in your poetry how much you love and respect horses. Are there lessons from the equestrian world that also apply to writing?

JW: Ride the rhythm, create the energy from behind, send it forward, don’t let the poem go against your hand. Talk to your poem. Give it confidence by having clear intentions. Give it treats. There must be a daily devotion to the art of riding, as there must be to writing. The development of a poem, as well as a horse, comes in the smallest of increments, and must be addressed day after day after day. Writing is re-writing; riding is re-riding. The daily devotional is how you get there.

DL: What are you working on now?

JW: The next poem. Then, the one after that.

Seriously, though: recently I’ve collected poems I’ve written about my daughter in her lifetime (and even before that), and have compiled a collection called “Daughter Days.”  I have plans to get back to that manuscript to revise it and see if I still like it before I send it out into the world. Writing is re-writing, and submitting is re-submitting.

***

Find out more about Julia on her website, and don’t forget to order her newest publication, The Art of Falling. My next post will feature a writing exercise inspired by one of Julia Wendell’s poems. Make sure you never miss a post by subscribing here:

Conversation with Christopher Linforth

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I first met Christopher Linforth in 2014 at Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Our paths crossed again in 2019 at Writers in Paradise – Eckerd College Writers Conference. Christopher is a graduate of Virginia Tech’s MFA program, and recently, he was appointed Editor-in-Chief of Atticus Review. Christopher’s first two books are When You Find Us We Will Be Gone (Lamar University Press, 2014) and Directory (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2020).

His third collection of short fiction, The Distortions, was named winner of the 2020 Orison Books Fiction Prize and has just been released by Orison Press. The Distortions is a beautiful collection of stories, thematically linked by the Croatian-Serbian War, particularly its aftermath. In each story, the weight of the past continues to press against the present. For many of these characters, historical events have had generational effects. These are not war stories although the war is a villainous character, always looming in the background. More than war stories, these stories are often about love–all kinds of love including the kinds that are sadly insufficient as well as the kinds that keep trying.

Christopher is a gifted writer. His own experience living in Zagreb was surely useful in writing these stories, but each story is subtly elevated by detailed knowledge that must have required significant research. In the same way that these are not war stories, this is also not a book about Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, etc. as much as it’s a book about displacement and identity and the universal ways we humans struggle to put the past behind us. Christopher agreed to answer some questions about The Distortions as well as about his writing and publishing.

DL: Your new collection of short stories, The Distortions, centers on the aftermath of the Yugoslav Wars, mostly focusing though on the Croatian-Serbian conflict. Although you lived in Zagreb for some time, you come from a very different background. Did you find your outside perspective to be helpful or more challenging as you wrote these stories? Can you talk about how the kinds of research that were required for these stories?

CL: In some ways, my position as an outsider helped me to broach the aftermath of the war in new and different ways. Josip Novakovich talks in the afterword to Infidelities about the reluctance of people in the former Yugoslavia to talk or write about the war. Though this has changed in recent years and has led many writers from those countries to write compelling novels about the war, I still felt I had something to say. Over the years, to aid my poor memory, I read dozens of history books on the subject and watched documentaries, and delved into tranches of original documents and news reports, and I talked with people from that area. Much of that information, though, never appears in the book. Instead, I focused more on the characters and the stories while hewing—as much as one can—to the historical, political, and cultural realities of the time.

DL: So much of the tension in your stories comes from the weight of the past pressing into a character’s present. Moving back and forth through time can be tricky, but it can also enrich a narrative as it clearly does in your stories.

CL: Whenever possible, I try to eschew as much backstory as possible and instead focus the story on the present action. With the stories being set in former Yugoslavia and revolving around a major but little-known war, I tried to strike a balance of including information (in non-expository ways) that would help an American audience understand the ramifications of the war for the characters while also keeping the pacing tight and the stories interesting.

DL: Two of my favorite stories in The Distortions are epistolary. I’m thinking about “brb” (seemingly told through a long Instant Message) and “Sojourn” (told through a more traditional letter). What I appreciate about both stories are their gestures toward the confessional. Do you have advice for writers who want to explore the epistolary form? Does a story told through a letter have special considerations?

CL: It’s funny. For me, “Sojourn,” is an imagined letter, not an actual one. The story reads and feels like a letter and perhaps contains a vestigial element of that form. The story, to me at least, has an uncertain form: part letter, part monological confession, part a story being told. The hybrid nature perhaps also reflects the vacillating nature and identity of the narrator. Similarly, “brb” uses misdirection about the narrator’s identity to say something about the stylized IM form. The intersection of the confession and the letter form, or variants thereof, often work well together. They allow a “natural” unfolding of thought on the page addressed to someone off it. For me, that is where the intimacy and magic of the epistolary form lie.

DL: I’ve been working on a collection of short stories for several years, and through that time, the manuscript keeps shifting. How long did it take you to write and shape these stories? What was the submission and publication process like for The Distortions?

CL: The earliest stories were drafted around 2014 and the latest around 2019. It was a long process of revision and then discarding the lesser stories (perhaps another six or seven). Some stories, like “brb,” emerged fully formed, with only minor edits later. Others, like “The Little Girls,” I rewrote several times over the years. I entered the manuscript into a handful of contests in late 2019 and early 2020, perhaps only five or six altogether, while constantly fine-tuning it the whole time. The collection won the Orison Fiction Book Prize in July 2020 and then underwent another year of refinement.

DL: What are you working on now?

CL: I’m working on two books. One is a sister project to The Distortions. Tentatively titled The Homeland War, it’s centered on two young men in Zagreb just before the outbreak of war. The novel explores toxic masculinity and social class and the football hooliganism endemic in the 1990s. The other book, currently untitled, examines the intersections of internet culture and the New York art scene. Stories from this collection are forthcoming in Cutleaf and in the Irish magazine, Banshee.

DL: Are there any opportunities coming up for readers to meet you or study with you via Zoom or in person?

CL: Yes, I teach online creative writing classes for The Writer’s Center in DC, and I take on private editing clients now and again. I’m also available for workshops and readings and so forth. I also have some more on the origins of the book over at Necessary Fiction.

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Conversation with Walter M. Robinson

Denton Loving2 Comments

Walter M. Robinson is a writer and physician. Originally from Nashville, Tennessee, Walter now lives in Massachusetts. His collection of essays, What Cannot Be Undone—True Stories of a Life in Medicine, won the River Teeth Book Prize for 2020 and was published by University of New Mexico Press. Walter has been a fellow at MacDowell and Yaddo and was a PEN-New England “New Discovery in Non-Fiction.”

What Cannot Be Undone relates stories from a lifetime of professional experience, primarily working with cystic fibrosis patients. That experience expertly shows the complexity of cystic fibrosis, of the body in general, and of the inner workings of the mind and soul of a medical professional. Among the many aspects of Walter’s work, I admire how he is able to break down complicated medical information so that I, as a lay person, am able to understand it. Walter also served as a medical/hospital ethicist, and the ethical questions—about why and how a person is treated—are some of my favorite parts of these essays.

Walter and I first met as students in the Bennington Writing Seminars, and now we work together as editors at EastOver Press and Cutleaf. Walter agreed to answer some questions about What Cannot Be Undone as well as about the writing and publishing process. Come back tomorrow for a writing exercise inspired by Walter’s work in non-fiction.

DL: The full title of your book is What Cannot Be Undone: True Stories of a Life in Medicine, and yet, you explain in the book’s foreword that you’ve relied on an imperfect memory to write these essays. Can you talk about the challenge of relying on memory in nonfiction, some of the workarounds, and what added measures you took to protect the privacy of patients?

WR: Everything in the book is just as I remember it, but I acknowledge in the foreword that others might remember these events differently than I do. Everyone’s memory is imperfect because we only notice fragments of any event while it is happening, and as time passes, the act of remembering brings some things into sharper focus while others fade away. This is the fallible nature of human memory.

I chose the term “true stories” because these essays are not case reports or journalistic accounts, but nor are they fiction. I wrote them in a style that tries to give life to my experience as a doctor rather than simply recounting a clinical case. Medical case reports never use the first person, but I use it in some of these essays to accentuate that the story is about my perspective. In other essays I use the third person to remove myself somewhat as a character, while in still others I use third person to emphasize how I see myself in the past as a very different person. None of these approaches are typical in medical reports, so it seemed like the term “true stories” was the best fit.

I changed the identifying details of patients and families because I didn’t want my version of events to crowd out the families’ or patients’ versions. I was just one doctor among many, and I was often present at a very difficult part of their lives. I hope the story they live with now is not about me but about their loved one.

One way a nonfiction writer can address natural flaws of memory is to acknowledge in the essay that his version of events is not necessarily the only accurate account, as I did in “Nurse Clappy Gets His.” Another way is to take care not to re-configure the story to make himself look smarter, wiser, or kinder than he was in the moment. I hope I succeeded in that. As I wrote in the foreword, I am “no hero, no wizard, no saint.”  

DL: At the time we met, your goal was to find a way to write about your experiences as a doctor, particularly one who worked with cystic fibrosis patients. So it seems like What Cannot Be Undone is the successful answer to that pursuit. Is this book exactly as you imagined it?

WR: I didn’t call myself a writer when I started at Bennington, though I had written scores of academic papers. I had finished about 60% of what I called a “social history” of cystic fibrosis. It was overly academic and unbearably dull. I knew it, and anyone who tried to read it knew it. Thank goodness my teacher at Bennington, Susan Cheever, told me at our very first meeting, “Walter, this is terrible, just start over.” I will forever be grateful to her for that advice because it saved me from trying to rescue something that wasn’t worth the effort.

And while I started over, I followed the Bennington method: Read one hundred books to write one. Pay close attention to the work of others. Read the work of the past in order to make the work of the present. Gather up the tools of art to see if they fit your own work. What a gift those reading lists have been to me!

By the time I finished I had some idea of what I was doing, and I’ve just kept at it. So I’d say this book is the descendent of that early draft, but they have very little in common. Or at least I hope so.

DL: The essays in What Cannot Be Undone describe traumatic events, particularly for the patients whose lives you write about. But what has always been clear to me in reading your work is that you as a medical professional have carried much of that traumatic history with you. Do you have advice for writers writing about their own trauma?

WR: I think of my work as a doctor as meaningful, moving, difficult, exhausting, and completely absorbing. Yes, it was sometimes heartbreaking, but sometimes it was joyful. I loved being a doctor most of the time, even though I worked mostly with patients with life-limiting illnesses. I admit that I am a person who concentrates more than most on the tragic aspects of human life, and many of the stories in this book end with the death of a patient because being at the bedside of these patients may be the most meaningful work I have ever done.

In the most personal essays in the book, “The Necessary Monster” and “White Coat, Black Habit,” I write about my work in a way that most doctors keep private. I try to bear witness to my uncertainty about my value as a doctor and a human.

I think anyone trying to write about difficult experiences should be as honest as they can but also hold things in reserve. Not every part of a life should be open to public view.

DL: In my recent conversation with Lauren Davis, she said that it took her about five years and 48 rejections before she found a publisher for her first full-length collection of poems. How long did it take you to write and shape these essays? What was the submission and publication process like for What Cannot Be Undone?

WR: I worked on these essays much longer than I work on essays now because I was learning how to write while I was writing this book. I revised all of them over and over and started over with a blank page many times. I’ve gotten much faster over the years, especially in knowing what is not working and starting over.

Once I had enough essays for a book, I submitted the manuscript to an agent and was floored when she said “yes.” I thought it would be smooth sailing from then on, but eighteen months later most of the publishers had not replied. I thanked the agent for her time, and I gave up.

But then two friends from Bennington—one of them you––told me about contests for manuscripts run by journals, and so I submitted it to as many contests as I could find.  A year later, I had gotten form rejections from every single contest. I thanked my two friends, and I gave up, again.

I told myself, “This is no tragedy. You learned so much by writing these essays. This is your second career, and you started in your late fifties. What did you expect? Time to move on to something else.”

As is so often the case, I was wrong again. I thought I had gotten rejections from every contest, but one day I got a call from an unknown number. I didn’t pick up; surely it was those people who are so worried about my warranty expiring, right? But no, the voicemail was from the very kind editor at River Teeth, telling me I had won their Literary Nonfiction Prize. I smiled so hard the rest of that day my face hurt.

After winning the Prize, the publication process was a breeze. The folks at University of New Mexico Press have been delightful and kind to a first-time author. I didn’t count the number of rejections, but I wrote the first very rough draft of one of the essays, “Nurse Clappy Gets His,” in July 2012, and the book came out in February 2022. So it took about ten years.

DL: What are you working on now?

WR: I have been working on two projects. One is another essay collection about medicine and medical ethics tentatively titled “Deciding the Fate of Others.” The other is a more speculative book about the lives my ancestors did not lead so that I might be here to write a book. 

DL: Are there any opportunities coming up for readers to meet you or study with you via zoom or in person? (workshops, readings, interviews, AWP?)

WR: I’ll be at AWP with EastOver Press and Cutleaf, so please stop by our booth and say hello if you’d like to talk about the book. And I am happy to try to arrange readings or other interviews or talks about the book, over Zoom or in person. Contact me at words (at) wmrobinson (dot) com.

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My next post will feature a writing exercise inspired by one of Walter M. Robinson’s essays in What Cannot Be Undone—True Stories of a Life in Medicine.

“[The whole soldier doesn’t suffer]” by Lyudmyla Khersonska

Denton Loving3 Comments

I find it nearly impossible to accomplish anything at the moment without first checking the news to see what’s happening in Ukraine, hoping and praying that the Ukrainians can stay strong and hold off Putin’s forces.

In between news checks, I started looking for some Ukrainian writing, and I came across this poem written by Lyudmyla Khersonska, translated by Katherine E. Young, and published in 2016 by WORDS without BORDERS that I wanted to share.

[The whole soldier doesn’t suffer]

The whole soldier doesn’t suffer—
it’s just the legs, the arms,
just blowing snow,
just meager rain.
The whole soldier shrugs off hurt—
it’s just missile systems “Hail” and “Beech,”
just bullets on the wing,
just happiness ahead.
Just meteorological pogroms,
geo-Herostratos wannabes,
just the girl with the pointer
poking the map in the stomach.
Just thunder, lightning,
just dreadful losses,
just the day with a dented helmet,
just God, who doesn’t protect.