Tag: writers

A Conversation with Jeremy B. Jones about his New Book, Cipher

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One of my favorite reads this year has been Cipher by Jeremy B. Jones. I first heard Jeremy speak about his work on this project more than five years ago, and when I finally got my hands on the finished book, I devoured it. I often feel a sense of pleasure from the books I read, but some books actively call for some kind of engagement with the text or the writer. Cipher spoke to many of my interests, notably place, history, genealogy and genetics. As quickly as I read Cipher, I found myself laying the book aside, over and over, for just long enough to make notes and jot down questions. I’m fortunate that Jeremy was willing to answer those questions, and the result of our conversation is available for you to read at Electric Literature.

I said that I had a lot (a lot!) of questions, and they didn’t all make it into the final publication. So I thought this would be a good place to share Jeremy’s responses when I asked him about editing nonfiction books and teaching nonfiction to his students at Western Carolina University.

Denton Loving: You’re also an editor for In Place, the nonfiction book series published by WVU Press. What makes an essay or a memoir resonate with you?

Jeremy B. Jones:  I read and write a lot about place. When I was presented with the opportunity to pitch a book series to WVU Press, I thought immediately of books that had shaped me in my younger days, books like Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Gretel Ehrlich’s The Solace of Open Spaces and Wendell Berry’s The Long-Legged House. It’s hard to imagine those books being released by a big publisher today and getting the press and attention they deserve in the process. The publishing landscape (pun alert) has changed, so my hope with In Place was to create a space for thoughtful books about place to find a home.

Serving as series co-editor (alongside Elena Passarello) can be pretty catalytic for my writing, as I’m getting to see manuscripts that are engaging with the physical world in exciting (often formally exciting) ways. Even if the manuscripts aren’t quite right for the series or quite ready for publication, just getting access to drafts of these projects spurs on my own work and my own thinking.

DL: What about as a teacher? How do you teach students to shape their work, particularly nonfiction?

JBJ: Nonfiction is especially fun to teach at the undergraduate level because few of the students know exactly what they’ve gotten into. “Nonfiction” isn’t an especially helpful term—it only tells us what the form isn’t. That means I get to open up lots of possibilities for young writers, and that’s a gift. That opening of possibilities was my experience in college. I wrote a short essay in a first-year writing course in college that I now recognize was a memoir, even though I don’t think that was a term I knew then. My professor, Dr. Jane Stephens, pushed me deeper into that form and encouraged my explorations of memory and place that semester, and it was life-changing. I recognize that not every student who shows up in my classroom is going to have their life changed by literary nonfiction, but it’s a privilege to be able to show them what they can do with the world around them, especially if their default nonfiction form is the academic essay. Because of that, I tend to offer students tons of models and encourage lots of experimentation. I want them leaving with a lit spark more than I care about a perfect, polished essay.

Thanks to Jeremy B. Jones for taking the time to talk with me about Cipher. I hope you’ll read the book as well as my full conversation with Jeremy over at Electric Literature.

In case you missed it… Last week’s guest post featured a conversation between Ruth Mukwana and Lynne Sharon Schwartz, and I recently was a guest on Ben Tanzer’s podcast with the wonderfully apt name, This Podcast Will Save Your Life.

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Guest Post: A Conversation with Lynne Sharon Schwartz and Ruth Mukwana

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Last month, EastOver Press published the novel A Stranger Comes to Town by Lynne Sharon Schwartz. This project was very dear to me not only because I think the novel is superb in every way but also because Lynne Sharon Schwartz has been an incredible mentor and friend to me since I studied with her at the Bennington Writing Seminars. It was an honor and joy to help usher this book into publication. In today’s guest post, my friend and fellow Bennington graduate Ruth Mukwana speaks to Lynne about her new novel.

Ruth Mukwana: I met Lynne when I was an MFA student at Bennington College. She was my mentor and advisor in my last year at Bennington. Before working with her, I had read her book, Disturbances in the Field, an ambitious book about family which I’ve gone back to several times when searching for craft ideas. Lynne and I have remained in touch, and she has always been very kind and generous to me. Her words of encouragement and belief in me have spurred me on in moments of doubt. So, I was thrilled and honored to talk with her about her new book, A Stranger Comes to Town.

Set in the Upper West Side, a neighborhood that Lynne knows very well, A Stranger Comes to Town is a masterful novel of self-discovery, revealing the multitude of histories and lives we each inhabit, as well as the many ways we seek to reinvent ourselves and reshape our pasts. The novel’s protagonist, Joe, searches to discover his true identity, exposing how even the most ordinary aspects of our lives are often extraordinarily felt.

~

RM: You’ve written a lot. How were you able to write thirty books?

LSS: It was over a long period of time, and many of them are essay collections by other writers and translations. For W.G. Sebald’s anthology – The Emergency of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald – I researched and curated interviews with W.G. Sebald. I worked hard at writing and treated it like a regular job. I taught at Bennington, and I used to get these manuscripts every month and wrote letters to my students, but it didn’t take the whole month. On the days I didn’t teach, I’d get up, do what I had to do and then sit down and write. But I was also free. One day if I wanted to have lunch with a friend, I could do that. I didn’t have a set schedule.

RM: Where did you get inspiration for all your work?

LSS: They’re all different. Some were based on events that happened, but I altered them a lot. Two-Part Inventions is based on a pianist, Joyce Hatto, whom I read about in the newspaper. She was a good pianist, not great. Her husband, a recording engineer, wanted her recordings to be better known and put her name on recordings by more distinguished and famous pianists. All of this was written about in the newspapers, and there was a court case. The central question in the novel is whether the character was aware of the deception. In Balancing Acts, which was my second novel, I wanted to write about older people. Disturbances in the Field was a big undertaking; it was about family. And then this one, A Stranger Comes to Town, I started writing at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. I had just finished something, and I didn’t know what I was going to do next, and I wanted to do something that’d get me through the pandemic. And it did.

RM: It’s a short book and easy to read. What was the process of writing it like for you?

LSS: Indeed, it’s not a long book, about two hundred pages, but it wasn’t quick to write. It took me more than three years for a short book. The pandemic was going on, and I was teaching. So, there were other things happening. But it was very hard to write, and there were times when I didn’t know where to go with it. What would happen to the main character, Joe? I let it go where it wanted to go, but I’ve always been interested in amnesia, in forgetting, in what makes the self, and I set it in a neighborhood that I know very well. I researched amnesia and found several books, but they’re mostly mistaken about amnesia. Your memory often comes back, and in A Stranger Comes to Town, Joe’s memory starts to come back.

RM: At some point the narrator says amnesia isn’t a disease, and it isn’t, but given how debilitating it is, I’ve always thought of it as a disease. Trying to remember or reconstruct your life when everyone else around you knows it.

LSS: He’s searching for who he is. He no longer knows whom he is or what kind of person he is. And every time he discovers a lot of negative things about himself (that’s what happens when you start looking) or finds another negative thing or something that he did to somebody close to him, he has to go back and reflect about it. And it’s a very hard process for him. When you reflect about your life, when you remember it, often you wonder, why did I do that? How did I do that? What was it in me that made me do that kind of thing?

RM: And one of those negative incidents is that he let his sister take the blame for an accident. He wrestles with himself as he can’t comprehend how he could have done something like that to his sister.

LSS: When we meet Joe, he’s blank and you think, what a nice guy who seems nice to everybody. But then you learn these terrible things he has done. He’s wondering how he could have done such horrible things that he has forgotten and that he now has to integrate into his conception of whom he is. I wish there are more good things that he has done, but he has done more bad things than good, and he doesn’t remember all the good. He does have a good marriage. His wife got pregnant, and he didn’t quite know what to do, and they got married. Their marriage has turned out good, and their children are great. But all these terrible things he’s being told he has done, not only can’t he remember doing them, he also can’t fathom how they’d have happened because he’s not the sort of person who’d have done such things! And he’ll never know unless the people he wronged decide to tell him everything or if his memory comes back.

RM: And it’s incomprehensible to him that the things he has forgotten are things that are unforgivable like the death of his baby brother.

LSS: There are memories from his childhood that barely registered with him. But on the other hand, his mother didn’t want to make her children dwell on that tragedy, the death of their brother. It slipped to the back of his mind, and he forgot, but it’s lodged somewhere in his brain, and it’s hard that it happened. I think there are things that happen when we’re very young that we forget. But if his mother hadn’t tried so hard to keep it from the children, he might have had an easier time remembering it. She was pained by her son’s death, and she didn’t want her children to also suffer.  He’s carrying a lot that we don’t know and he doesn’t know. Does he have more? Is he carrying around more sad stuff? He asks himself, What else might I have done? What else have I forgotten? This is a book that makes you think about your own life.

RM: The other reason the book was easy for me to read is because it also has a great plot. I was expecting to discover that the family that took him in wasn’t his real family, something Joe wonders about!

LSS: He’s thinking any woman could have come to the hospital, somebody looking for a husband, and claimed to be his wife. And when he meets the children, the awkwardness of meeting them is overwhelming for him. They know him, of course, and he doesn’t know them, and they don’t know that he has lost his memory!

RM: Amnesia is a horrible thing to happen to anyone. But for Joe, it has given him an opportunity to examine his life and confront who he really is. Every time he finds out he did a hurtful thing, it’s an opportunity for him to repent and repair which wouldn’t have happened otherwise. He’s rebuilding his relationship with his sister and has the opportunity to acknowledge how he has wronged her and apologize, which he wouldn’t have otherwise done.

LSS: That’s a nice point. I hadn’t thought of that. If he hadn’t had an accident and lost his memory, he’d have just gone on doing what he was doing. He’d remember all these things, but he probably would never think about them. You know he did those things, some of them when he was about eighteen years old and moved on, but this time he’s a grown man, and as a grown man, he must confront that. If you look back on your life, you might find there are things that you wonder how you did them. How did I do that? Did I really do that? Not all our lives are so dramatic, but his life is, and there are many things that he must reconsider and go over and integrate into his conception of who he is and who he is going to be from now on.

~

Lynne Sharon Schwartz is the author of thirty books of fiction, essays, and poetry, including her novels Leaving Brooklyn, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and Rough Strife, a finalist for the National Book Award. She has also published two memoirs, Ruined by Reading and Not Now, Voyager, and has translated from the Italian. Schwartz has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts in Fiction and, separately, for Translation, and the New York State Foundation for the Arts. She has taught widely, most recently at the Bennington College Writing Seminars and the Columbia University School of Arts.

Ruth Mukwana is an Adjunct Lecturer at Columbia School of International and Public Affairs. She has formerly worked with the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process (UNSCO), and the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS). Ruth is also a fiction writer and a 2020 Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil NYC Emerging Fellow. Her work has appeared in several magazines including Bomb, Solstice, Consequence and the Black Warriors Review.  She is the Creator and Host of the Stories and Humanitarian Action Podcast and a Fiction Co-Editor for Solstice magazine. Ruth is a Ugandan national with a Law degree from Makerere University, a Masters in International and Comparative Law from the Free University of Brussels, and a Masters in Fine Arts from Bennington College. She is currently working on a novel and a collection of short stories.

Thanks to Lynne Sharon Schwartz and Ruth Mukwana for sharing their conversation. I hope you’ll read and enjoy A Stranger Comes to Town, available wherever books are sold.

In case you missed it… I have three new poems published online at Porchlight: A Journal of Southern Literature, and I recently read some poems from Feller with Kendra Winchester on episode 50 of Read Appalachia, and I had a fun time hanging out with Ben Tanzer on episode 371 of This Podcast Will Save Your Life.

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A Conversation with Yearling Editor Manny Grimaldi

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Earlier this month at the Kentucky Book Festival, I met Manny Grimaldi, who gifted me with a beautiful copy of Yearling: A Poetry Journal for Working Writers. Yearling is an annual publication that operates under the umbrella of Workhorse of Lexington, which in itself is a cool, wide-ranging operation that supports publishing and building community for writers. Manny is Yearling’s managing editor, and he agreed to answer a few questions about the journal that will be interesting and helpful for those of you looking for good publications where you can submit your writing.

DL: It was great to meet you at the Kentucky Book Festival, and to find out about Yearling. How long has Yearling been publishing? How long have you served as managing editor?

MG:  It was a pleasure conversing with you, Denton. Yearling: A Poetry Journal for Working Writers is an offshoot of a poetry feedback program through Workhorse of Lexington. I approached our editor-in-chief for work, and he instructed I take helm of the feedback program where folks sent in work only for response. Soon after in 2021, we launched Yearling with that ethos.

DL: The fact that Yearling provides feedback to submitters really sets the journal apart from so many others. As an editor, I know that requires a lot of work, but it’s also such a benefit to submitters. As managing editor, do you still provide that feedback yourself?

MG: I do provide the feedback, and a resounding yes to what you are stating, this is difficult work. But I do this with the helpful impressions of team readers. Never in the community of artists, whether actors, poets, editors, musicians, or novelists do I claim to do and develop in a vacuum. We help each other. In the end, I re-read each poem, draw together our conversations, solidify my impressions, and compose meaningful feedback. I read much gratitude for the deep reads from our authors, and some encounters with poets create avenues to their outstanding revisions.

DL: Yearling is a journal dedicated strictly for poetry. Are there any specific forms or styles that you’re especially looking to publishing in Yearling?

MG: As managing editor, I focus upon this principle: Does the work move me to forget I am reading a poem? A sonnet can do that. A villanelle can transcend form. I also hold anyone can do that, Denton. Provided they are telling the truth, and telling it well! Short answer: any style, any length, any form, we can print—we enjoy a book format now. We take everything from single poem submissions, up to six poem. Currently, in this issue, I hope to cull the heart of Kentucky writers and our surrounds as much as possible. That said, everything is read, considered, and published if it sings.

DL: If I understand correctly, then Yearling publishes in December of every year, and acceptances for that issue are sent out by October 1st. Is Yearling currently accepting submissions for the 2026 issue?

MG: We process submissions all year. Yes. Yearling prints December of every year, once a year. In practice, we have closed a year’s volume with the requisite number of poets, which is 40, as soon as April. We respond generally, schedules permitting, as promptly as possible.

DL: In addition to being an editor, you have also published multiple books of your own writing. Where can readers find your work, and how can they connect with you?

MG: Three books! Two are self-published—Riding Shotgun with the Mothman (2024) and ex libris Ioannes Cerva (2024), and the latest was published by Whiskey City Press, entitled Finding a Word to Describe You.

Mothman and Finding are full length. ex libris is a satirical chapbook released by anonymus scriptus. Mothman connects people with a window into family and personal demons. Finding is about romance, reveling in poetic forms, from the historical persona poem, to the broken sonnet, to tanka.

My work pops up on internet and print in everything from Club Plum, Rye Whiskey Review, Moss Puppy Magazine, and Jerry Jazz Musician. I appeared on Katerina Stoykova’s ACCENTS Nov. 5, 2025, podcast on WUKY, also available on Apple and NPR. I am easily reached by email: m.grimaldi2019 (at) gmail.com.

~

Thanks to Manny Grimaldi for taking the time to speak to me. Be sure to take a look at Yearling’s full submission guidelines and to follow on Patreon.

In case you missed it… check out some of my past conversations about writing and publishing with Kendra Winchester, Melanie K. Hutsell and Georgann Eubanks. Also, I hope you’ll have a look at Bill Griffin’s wonderful site, Verse and Image, where he recently shared some poems from my newest collection, Feller.

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Submission Call for Disabled Writers from Appalachia: An Anthology Edited by Kendra Winchester

Denton Loving2 Comments

Many readers of this blog will be familiar with Kendra Winchester’s name from her work as the host of the popular Read Appalachia podcast, which celebrates Appalachian literature and writing. Kendra is also a Contributing Editor for Book Riot where she writes about audiobooks and disability literature. Kendra and I had a chance to spend some time together in person this past summer during the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop. One day while we were having lunch, Kendra started to tell me about her new project to compile and edit an anthology of work by disabled writers from Appalachia. The dining hall that day was so loud with conversation and laughter that we struggled to hear each other. So Kendra agreed to answer some questions over email about this anthology, which is actively accepting submissions.

DL: I was excited to learn that you will be editing an anthology of work by Appalachians writing about disability. How did the idea of this anthology form?

KW: Far too often, disabled people are treated like we’re invisible. When we are mentioned, we’re featured as inspirations, side characters, or burdens for the nondisabled people around us. Sometimes the very existence of our disability makes other people uncomfortable.

When I first read Disability Visibility, edited by Alice Wong, I didn’t realize how rarely I saw my disabled self in books. Reading stories about people like me was something I never knew I needed. This led me to seeking out as many books by disabled authors as I could get my hands on. Little did I know that there was a whole disability community waiting for me. We have our own culture and history. People just have to realize that it’s there.

In the vein of Disability Visibility, I wanted to bring together Appalachian writers to tell their own stories of what it’s like being disabled in Appalachia. With poetry being such a vibrant tradition in the region, I also wanted to include poets, and my goodness, so many Appalachian poets have shown up in such a big way. My hope is that this anthology will be the first of many anthologies of disabled writers from the region sharing their work with the world. The more voices, the better.

Sometimes people ask me if their disability “counts,” but we’re using the big umbrella for disability. So anyone who is disabled, chronically ill, deaf, or neurodivergent is most welcome to submit.

DL: Do people with disabilities in our region face challenges that are unusual or different from other regions?

KW: Appalachia has higher rates of disability than the national average. Some disabled people have had to completely leave the region to seek treatment. Some disabled people can still live in the region but have to travel back and forth to urban centers to see specialists. And others are disabled because they worked in major Appalachian industries, such as coal mines and paper mills. Whatever our experience, we all have stories to tell. 

DL: What genres are you seeking for this anthology, and how long should submissions be?

KW: I’m looking for creative nonfiction essays—around 2,500 – 3,000 words—that center the writer’s experience with living with disability in Appalachia. I’m also looking for poetry—3-5 poems—informed by personal experiences with disability in the region. I also welcome previously published work.

DL: Are you only looking for work from published, experienced writers?

KW:  I’m looking for writers of all experience levels! The anthology includes experienced, prize-winning writers and people who have never had a published piece before. 

DL: How can writers submit to your anthology, or reach out to you if they have questions?

KW: To submit their work or if anyone has questions, they can reach me at Kendra (at) readappalachia.com. I’m happy to answer any questions that they may have.

DL: When we were at the Appalachian Writers Workshop this past summer, you read a wonderful piece about growing up with a disability. Where can readers find that essay or any of your other recent work?

KW: Owning It: Our Disabled Childhoods in Our Own Words just came out in the U.S. this past August. It includes dozens of essays by disabled adults who were also disabled as kids. I was so honored to be included with writers like Ilya Kaminsky, Imani Barbarin, Ashley Harris Whaley, Rebekah Taussig, and Carly Findlay. I also write for Book Riot and have an occasional newsletter called.

Many thanks to Kendra Winchester for this important work and for answering my questions. You can find out more about Kendra and all of her projects by following her on Instagram or Twitter, or by subscribing to her occasional newsletter called Winchester Ave.

In case you missed it…Check out past conversations about writing and publishing with Melanie K. Hutsell, Zackary Vernon, and David Wesley Williams, whose new novel, Come Again No More, is out this week.

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Where the Story Demands to Go: A Conversation with Melanie K. Hutsell

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I’ve lost track of how long I’ve known Melanie K. Hutsell, but it’s been a few years. She’s a native of East Tennessee, and we share a mentor and many writer friends from this region. In the time we’ve known each other, she has published two novels, The Dead Shall Rise: A Tale of the Mountains, and The Book of Susan, which received the Award of Merit in the fiction category of the 2023 Christianity Today Book Awards. About a year ago, I ran into Melanie at a writers conference, and she told me about her new collection of short stories, The Art of Lost Souls, which she was in the process of sending out to publishers.

The Art of Lost Souls and Other Stories quickly found a home with Main Street Rag (MSR), and is currently available for pre-order. MSR and Editor Scott Douglass have a long history of publishing beautiful books. MSR is the press that published my first poetry collection, Crimes Against Birds. I’m forever grateful to MSR and Scott for taking a chance with my book, and I’m always excited to see MSR continue to publish good work like Melanie’s collection of short fiction.

In The Art of Lost Souls Melanie has created a cast of characters that are both achingly strange and sad. They are misunderstood dreamers, people on the verge of big transitions, wonderers asking what life would look like if all the pieces fit together. But as Hutsell’s characters face loss and uncertain futures, they reveal themselves to be creative souls with imaginations that help them survive. Melanie agreed to answer a few questions about writing, publishing, and not giving up on old projects.

DL: The title of this collection sets up how so many of your characters are some kind of artists, and usually, it’s their creativity that provides a sense of salvation to their stories. You’ve written in the past about having bipolar disorder. How does your background and your own experience of being a creative inform the characters you want to write about?

MH: This is interesting for me to consider. I’ve been aware that I do tend to write characters who are creatives—but until you asked this, I’d never really considered how seldom I write about writers. Because I do tend to think of my background as being fairly focused on words and pages, from an early age. And my fictional creatives tend toward other pursuits, like music or cooking or visual art. Maybe I tend to think, fictionally, of creativity as a way of expressing a character’s superpower, and of course, not everybody writes. I guess I tend to subscribe to the notion that all humans are here to create. I’m drawn towards the philosophy/theology in books like Divine Beauty by John O’Donohue or Art + Faith by Makoto Fujimura, which suggest humans are here to do and experience beauty and that creativity can be expressed in doing anything with love, and by love I mean with intention and giving, in the direction of God and humans.

DL: Some of the stories in The Art of Lost Souls are set in towns and locations that are real places, meaning you didn’t create them out of thin air. The first story is even titled Still Life in Townsend, referencing the town of Townsend, Tennessee. When you’re writing a story, how much do you draw on what you know about the place where it’s set?

MH: For someone who grew up reading a lot of fantasy, my adult work is pretty grounded in the Appalachia of East Tennessee. And I grew up in upper East Tennessee, and that is where most of my work is set, and Appalachian identity almost always is an important facet of my characters. Most of my settings are fictional, with strong underpinnings of reality to them. My two novels, The Dead Shall Rise and The Book of Susan, share some fictional towns with the short stories. Creating a fictional geography allows me to create needed settings or maybe to transport real-life places and set them down in new locations. But, yes, I do sometimes use real settings. In The Art of Lost Souls and Other Stories, both “Celestial Images” and “Still Life in Townsend” are set in real places, and the settings there really define the kind of stories they are. “Celestial Images” is about a homesick Appalachian living in Bloomington, Indiana, and “Still Life in Townsend” is about a motel family who specifically runs a business in the quiet—as opposed to the more tourist-deluged—side of the Smokies, and that’s pretty central to the story. The title story in the collection is set in Knoxville, though it’s a rather magical Knoxville. I was going there for a sense of urban history in that setting, something about time and distance. And sometimes I will invoke real places to make my fictional ones seem more real.

DL: One of the things I admire with the stories in The Art of Lost Souls is that you’re not afraid to go into some pretty dark spaces. But you usually bring some relief to the reader, too. Do good stories require pushing into that darkness?

MH: I do think the best writing is that which costs the author something to make and also requires great honesty. Often when something’s false in what I’m working on, it’s because I haven’t pushed myself enough in that spot, really faced what’s trying to be said there. I haven’t gone to where the story is demanding to go. And I think all of this is true whether one is writing realistic fiction or not, literary fiction or not. Because art is about being human. And there is a lot of darkness there. I consider myself to be generally wired up as someone who believes, but it’s dishonest not to acknowledge the dark.

DL: The Art of Lost Souls is your third book publication. But you’ve also been working for a long time on a magical realism novel. How do you balance multiple projects at the same time? And what keeps you returning to this unfinished novel?

MH: Well, the short answer is, I really don’t balance multiple projects at once. I actually become very absorbed in my writing projects, which is one reason—among many—that the unfinished novel remains unfinished. It’s a work that I’ve been wrestling with in many different variations since college. It began life as a fantasy novel and is a magic realism novel now. The Dead Shall Rise actually started, when I was in graduate school twenty-five or so years ago, as a manuscript written around a misbehaving character carved from the other work. After many years plagued by mental illness (though I didn’t know at the time that was what ailed me) and then devoted to recovery, the unfinished novel came back to me. But I set it aside to focus on writing and publishing short fiction to hone my craft and get a publication history. And then I opted to revise The Dead Shall Rise and seek publication with it, being a more complete manuscript, than to finish the messy, half-done one. And then The Book of Susan got written because of an agent’s interest engendered by reading one of my published short stories. (The agent ultimately passed on Susan.)  And I’ve long wanted to have a collection of my short work appear all in one place, and Main Street Rag publishing The Art of Lost Souls is a realization of that dream. Meanwhile, in between these projects, I’m writing along on the poor, longsuffering, untitled novel, because I can only do one thing at once. I suppose I find the protagonist compelling. Possibly he is my alter ego, more so than any other character I’ve written.

DL: I think you know that I have so much respect for small and independent publishers. Now that you’ve published three books with different small presses, do you have advice for writers about how to get published?

MH: You don’t need an MFA, and you don’t need an agent. Not that those are not good, helpful, and desirable things. But I have neither. I say: write and be a student of writing. I was fortunate to have a mentor when I was in high school, poet Jane Hicks, who was my guidance counselor and who taught me to approach writing professionally. Back then, it was the Writer’s Market and SASEs. Now it’s Submittable and Substack and unknown frontiers. Stay abreast of the ever-evolving business. Always read the guidelines. Don’t be afraid to submit. Don’t let rejection define you – learn from it. And definitely consider small presses as options for submitting your work. I’ve loved working with each press I’ve worked with. Each has devoted such care to seeing my manuscript through the process, helped me better realize the vision I’ve had for that particular work. I’ll pass along advice once given to me—you’re looking for the press that loves your manuscript as much as you do. There’s a lot to be said for sending your work to an indie press.

Many thanks to Melanie K. Hutsell for answering these questions. Find out more about Melanie here, and be sure to pre-order The Art of Lost Souls from Main Street Rag Publishers.

In case you missed it… I recently read with Georgann Eubanks for the Spoken & Heard series. And I’m so grateful that Feller has had some great reviews from Jake Lawson in MicroLit: a Tiny Journal of Prose & Poetry, Noah Soltau in Red Branch Review, and from Meredith Sue Willis in Books for Readers. I hope you’ll take a look.

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Permission To Be Ourselves: Conversation with Zackary Vernon

Denton Loving2 Comments

I was in Asheville back in April for the North Carolina Writers Network Spring Conference. Zackary Vernon was there teaching a workshop on writing young adult literature. I had met Zack only once before in person, about a month earlier in the Los Angeles International Airport following AWP. But the world is small, especially the world of writers, and I used to work with Zack’s wife, Jessica Martell, when she taught about a decade ago at Lincoln Memorial University. It was fun to spend some time with both of them between conference sessions, and just before I headed home, Zack slipped me with a copy of his novel, Our Bodies Electric.

Our Bodies Electric is a coming-of-age story set on Pawley’s Island, South Carolina. We meet the main character, Josh, when he’s in the sixth grade and follow him into high school and his sexual awakening. Despite the very conservative and religious shadows cast by his parents and community, Josh finds surprising refuge in the words of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, which gives him the strength to love his body and his desires in all their forms.

Zachary is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at Appalachian State University. He is a co-editor of Summoning the Dead: Essays on Ron Rash, and he is the editor of Ecocriticism and the Future of Southern Studies. His scholarly research and creative nonfiction and short fiction have been published widely. Zack agreed to answer a few questions about his writing, the need to accept differences in people, and his relationship with Walt Whitman.

DL: I think you and I are not too far apart in age, which is based partly on the fact that there was a lot I recognized from my own youth in Our Bodies Electric. How much of your own life and experience factored into setting the time and place for this novel?

ZV: Our Bodies Electric is set in my hometown of Pawleys Island, South Carolina, during the early to mid 1990s. It’s a southern coming-of-age story about a teenager named Josh who struggles against the pressure to conform to social conventions placed on him by his religious family and community, particularly as he enters his teenage years and tries to understand his body and sexuality. Josh hangs out with a bunch of outcast teenagers who get up to all kinds of hijinks, but more importantly they help each other through this period of rapid change and development. They need each other because they don’t get much help from their families or school or church. Those institutions fail them, because they constantly tell young adults that the things they think and do are evil. Some teens end up conforming to conservative conventions, and some decide to break the mold.

I am Josh, or at least Josh is some version of me. All of those details come from my own life and the lives of my friends between the sixth and nineth grades. I think that period might be the one in which we change the most rapidly; there is a fluidity during these years. We go from being kids to being hormonal teenagers who all the sudden possess very adult ideas and desires.

Throughout the novel, Josh sets off on an adventure of experimentation and self-discovery, which is of course natural and healthy. But the puritans surrounding him want nothing more than to police his behavior and stamp out any curiosity they believe is abnormal and thus dangerous. His journey is strange and uncomfortable at times, but hopefully he’s a better and more authentic person at the end of it.

DL: Walt Whitman and Song of Myself play a fairly pivotal role in this novel, and your students report that you really enjoy teaching Whitman. Did you know from the beginning of Our Bodies Electric that Whitman and Song would be part of Josh’s narrative? Or did that come later in the writing process?

ZV: Walt Whitman was a huge inspiration both for the form and the content of the novel. Regarding content, I’ve been a massive fan of Whitman since I first read him in high school. So his ideas have been rattling around in my head for decades. The year that I started earnestly working on Our Bodies Electric was the year I turned 37. And Whitman in “Song of Myself”—or the Whitman-esque persona that narrates the poem—is also 37. The first section contains these lines:

I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

So I decided that during my 37th year of life, I would read Whitman every single day. And I didn’t miss a single one. I read various portions of Leaves of Grass for 365 consecutive days. Some days I’d only read a few lines, and some days I’d really dig in. So this year steeped me in Whitman’s language and ideas more than ever, and that happened to also be the time that I was seriously writing the novel.

For the protagonist Josh, Whitman becomes a sort of life coach and an inspiration. Josh reads Whitman and his ideas help him understand and accept himself.

In terms of form, I divided the novel into 52 sections, which are in dialogue with the 52 sections of “Song of Myself.” That’s not to say that there is a one-to-one mirroring going one—i.e. Section 1 of “Song of Myself” is in dialogue with Chapter 1 of my novel. It’s not that similar. But I did borrow the 52-section structure, and I tried to add a Whitman easter egg into every chapter. These are mostly subtle. There are only a handful of passages that actually allude to Whitman directly. But I’d say in a more general sense, Whitman pervades the entire novel.

DL: Besides the fact that the scenes throughout your novel sing all the way through, the thing I love best is how empathetic this book is. Josh is a compassionate character—to others and usually to himself—but you as the author give so much compassion to characters who aren’t compassionate to others. I’m thinking in particular about Josh’s fire and brimstone minister. Is there a person or situation that instilled so much empathy in you as a person and a writer?

ZV: My hope is that the novel has a message about the necessity of accepting difference. I think one could read it as being a harsh critique of Pawleys Island. But it’s not. It’s a critique of the stultifying impulse to conform that is often thrust onto kids and teenagers in conservative, religious communities. This exists everywhere. It’s not unique to Pawleys or even to the South. I taught for a year at a catholic college just north of Boston. The students there felt conflicted about themselves just as much as anyone I’ve ever seen in the South.

My novel is set in Pawleys simply because I happened to be from there; I lived there during those formative years that seem to make us who we are for life.

So I want to be clear too that I’m not making fun of Pawleys Island in any way. The novel is not mean-spirited or tragic. It’s humorous, and if anything it makes a plea to celebrate life. Also, the heroes of the novel come from Pawleys. Yes, the protagonist feels tortured by the conservative community here. But it is also locals who show him that there are different ways of being in the world. In other words, that place, like all places, contains good and bad. Josh doesn’t have to flee to find himself. He does that there, with the help of the many small-town eccentrics he meets along the way.

I was always fascinated by the black sheep I encountered in Pawleys Island. Some of them you could spot easily, but others didn’t look like punks or drifters. Take, for example, my high school English teacher Mary Ginny DuBose.

Miss DuBose was the most transformational teacher I’ve ever had. I’m talking about ever—more than any teacher I had through college or grad school.

She taught us to be independent thinkers. She cued us in to the fact that there was a great big world out there. And in it people thought in ways that were very different from our parents and our church leaders and members of our communities. That’s not to say that local folks were wrong all or even some of the time. But our world was limited in certain ways, and then Miss DuBose came along and started opening doors.

It’s cliché perhaps—very Dead Poets Society—but Miss DuBose expanded our minds. She was a tough teacher, but also very kind. I don’t know how she pulled that off. I’ve been teaching now for nearly two decades, and I’ve never been able to get that balance right—tough enough to prompt and prod even those most reluctant of souls, but kind enough to empathize and inspire.

And crucially it was Miss DuBose who first introduced me to Walt Whitman. Along with Miss DuBose, Whitman gave us permission to be ourselves; or perhaps both of them made us realize that we didn’t need permission in the first place.

DL: I understand you wrote a lot of nonfiction before you turned to fiction. Can you talk about your path to publication, both in general and specifically this novel? How did you come to work with Regal House/Fitzroy Books?

ZV: I’ve wanted to be a writer since high school. I don’t know why exactly. It’s not like I knew any writers personally. Maybe I’d seen writers romanticized in films, or maybe it was my Whitman obsession. But somehow I viewed writers as being subversive, and that’s what I wanted to be.

I was really into music in high school. And I think I was a decent musician, but that never felt like a good fit. Plus I could never write songs. I tried and tried, but it just never came, so at best if I had continued in music, I’d be in some kind of cover band, or playing backup in someone else’s band.

Writing stories and novels, though, was a different matter. When I got to college, I had no problem writing. In fact, I couldn’t stop. I wrote obsessively. That’s not to say the stories I was writing were good. They weren’t. They were terrible. But they flowed out of me. Something was there, some inclination. But I had to read a lot and study for a long time before the stories became halfway decent.

Samuel Johnson said, “The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.”

I read voraciously and wrote about a million stories and two novels in college. Again, these were terrible and will never see the light of day. But I was very disciplined, and I produced a lot.

Then after undergrad I desperately wanted to get an MFA, but instead I got a PhD. I foolishly thought that this was the practical way of going about things. I had no idea at that point how bad the academic job market was.

What ended up happening was that for my MA and PhD and then when I got my first two teaching positions, I only wrote scholarship and nothing creative. It was a creative dry spell that lasted for close to a decade and a half. I wrote and published a lot of scholarship during that period, and I love that kind of writing, but it wasn’t what I was most passionate about.

When I got tenure, I decided that I was going to write fiction again. I dropped all my scholarly projects and dove into what would become Our Bodies Electric. The writing came as effortlessly as it did in college, except this time I think it was decent, or at least it was genuinely me. I was no longer trying to be someone I’m not—to write like Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor. I was no longer trying to be pretentious, writing serious historical southern gothic tales. Instead, I wrote humorous stories, and most of them were true in some way—things I’d experienced, things I’d heard about during my childhood and adolescence in Pawleys.

I wrote the novel is a strange roundabout way. I drafted the chapters more like short stories than chapters in a novel. And then I tried to weave together the best ones. And since they were mostly autobiographical, it wasn’t hard to create a coherent overarching narrative.

I got involved with Fitzroy Books, the YA imprint of Regal House Publishing, through my friend and colleague Mark Powell. Mark had read my book and helped me revise it, and he also had a book accepted at Regal House around this time. He recommended the press, saying it was the up-and-coming new indie in the South. So I sent them the book, and they seemed to like it right away.

DL: When we saw each other last, you were teaching a workshop on writing young adult fiction. What’s one of the most important lessons or advice you try to pass on to writers interested in YA fiction?

ZV: I came to YA accidentally. I didn’t write Our Bodies Electric as a YA novel. The main characters were adolescents, but I was imagining it being akin to books like Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, or Lewis Nordan’s Music of the Swamp. In other words, I thought of the book in this lineage of coming-of-age adult literary fiction. And I hope my novel is that. But I also don’t want it to be merely read by adults.

It was my editor Jaynie Royal who had the idea of marketing the novel as YA. I was resistant at first, but Jaynie ultimately convinced me when she asked who I thought needed to read this book: other middle-aged liberals like me or young adults who might be struggling in the same ways that I struggled. I found and still find that idea very compelling.

In terms of advice for YA writers, I would just say that it’s important to be authentic. Teenagers can smell a phony from a mile away. You can tell about your own experiences or you dream up stories, but make sure they have an emotional or ideological truth to them. We desperately need to be reminded right now of the better angels of our nature—to be understanding and kind, even when people in power aren’t doing so.

I hope that’s what comes across in my book. In it, a small group of teenagers try like hell to discover who they are, even if their real identities go against the established community they live in. They rebel nonetheless, and as a result they learn to live more authentically, to celebrate and sing themselves.

I’m so grateful to Zackary Vernon for answering these questions. If you haven’t already read Our Bodies Electric, be sure to order your copy, available at bookshop.org or wherever books are sold.

In case you missed it… I have a new book of poems called Feller that will be published on August 5th. I’ve been making the rounds to talk about the book and the general state of poetry. See my recent conversations with Emily Mohn-Slate in her “Beginner’s Mind” Series and with Greg Lehman in Episode 4 of Moon Beams. And for a limited time, pre-order Feller and get a 25% discount through Tertulia. Just enter the code FELLER at checkout.

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Official Cover Reveal for Feller

Denton Loving3 Comments

Friends, I’ve been really excited for today to come! After what feels like a long wait, I can finally share the cover for my new collection of poems, Feller. But first, here’s one last teaser:

To view the entire image, head over to Electric Literature who very graciously is hosting the official cover reveal. I’m incredibly grateful for Electric Lit’s support and help in launching this new book.

Exclusive Cover Reveal of “Feller” by Denton Loving

I’m also grateful to Mary-Frances and Jim Burt of Burt & Burt who designed this cover image. It’s really striking and hits the exact right emotional key. I’m always grateful to Mercer University Press, especially my editor Marc Jolley, for believing in my work in general and Feller in particular. And huge thanks to Kelly March for coordinating this cover reveal in the first place. She’s amazing!

Feller is a book that has been a long time in the making. Some of these pieces took over ten years to transform from first draft to finished poem. There will be more opportunities later to talk about the individual poems and what the collection is about. And as always, I’m more excited to hear what the poems and the book mean to you. So I hope you’ll read Feller. The official pub date is August 5th, 2025, but if you want to hear a few of the new poems, you can listen to this episode of The Beat, a poetry podcast hosted by Alan May.

And don’t forget to take a look at the whole image over at Electric Literature. I hope you like it as much as I do.

Book Launch for Claudia Stanek’s Beneath Occluded Shine

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Last week, I was invited to be part of the launch of Claudia Stanek’s poetry chapbook, Beneath Occluded Shine. This is a short collection of 16 powerful poems all written in response to poems from Pablo Neruda’s Book of Questions. Neruda’s questions are essentially unanswerable. Claudia doesn’t attempt to answer Neruda although responding to a question with a question is sometimes its own answer. But I prefer to read these poems as wrestling with all of the deepest parts of our shared humanity.

You can read one of Claudia’s poems, Sunday Morning in Broken November, originally published here in Bitterzoet Magazine.

The book launch took place virtually as part of Jules’ Poetry Playhouse, hosted by Jules Nyquist and John Roche, who are based out of New Mexico. In one of the most unique reading events I’ve ever been part of, Claudia invited Jules and John, as well as poets Catherine Faurot, Gail Hosking and me to alternate reading all of the poems in Beneath Occluded Shine. The result was something that felt meditative if not downright spiritual.

You can watch and listen to our reading of Claudia’s work on YouTube.

And don’t forget to order Beneath Occluded Shine from Finishing Line Press.

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And in case you missed it, I celebrated National Poetry Month by reading new poems from my forthcoming collection, Feller, forthcoming in August 2025. You can listen to the reading by following the links here.

Wrapping Up National Poetry Month

Denton Loving1 Comment

I don’t ever remember a past April where I could visibly see poetry celebrated so often and in so many ways. Maybe one of the things we couldn’t predict about living in a dystopian world is how people would turn to poetry. Regardless, it was beautiful.

For my part, I had the privilege of reading poems to the monthly book discussion group, All Over the Page, at Lawson McGhee Library in Knoxville, Tennessee. I read poems from Tamp, as well as some new poems from a new book that will coming out in August.

Yeah, I sort of just buried the lede there, didn’t I? But that’s right. I have a new collection of poems coming out in August from Mercer University Press. It’s called Feller. I just saw the cover for the first time this week, and I love it so much. I can’t wait to share it with you all very soon.

In the meantime, that reading at Lawson McGhee Library was recorded as an episode of their podcast The Beat. You can listen to the episode here: https://the-beat.captivate.fm/episode/denton-loving-joins-us-live-for-all-over-the-page.

Special thanks to Alan May, Lawson McGhee librarian and host of The Beat, who invited me. Alan has a great book of poems out himself: Derelict Days in That Derelict Town: New and Uncollected Poems, published through BlazeVOX Books. I hope you’ll check it out.

There’s another lovely book recently out that you should know about, and that’s Beneath Occluded Shine by Claudia Stanek, published by Finishing Line Press. Claudia will be celebrating an online book launch on Wednesday, April 30, 2025, at Jules’ Poetry Playhouse. I’ll also be there reading a couple of poems along with poets Gail Hosking and Catherine Faurot. The reading is at 6:00 p.m. Pacific / 9:00 p.m. Eastern. It would be so nice to see you there.

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Submission Calls for Writers 1/11/2025

Denton Loving4 Comments

It’s been a while, friends.

Last year, submission posts like this one fell by the wayside, and I’m sorry. When I looked back at 2024, I saw that I did not submit enough of my own work, and I realized how building and sharing these lists and my own submissions go hand in hand. So I’m trying to start 2025 off the right way by sending some of my own work out into the world.

As we move forward, I want to give some extra energy to finding new journals and magazines to recommend to you. There are so many great outlets, and there are new journals emerging all the time. I often feel overwhelmed by all these magazines I’ve never heard of. So you’ll see on this list of ten submission opportunities a few names that are new to me. I hope they are new for you also.

How do we rank these new journals or compare them to some of the ones we’re more familiar with? I don’t know that yet. Please take a look at each one to determine if it feels like a good match for your work and your publication goals.

Today was a great day for me to think about all this, as I was somewhat snowed in. I’m guessing some of the rest of you in the South and East might stuck inside, too, if not by snow then probably by these Arctic temperatures. I hope the timing is right for you to receive this list.

For those of you in Southern California, especially those directly affected by the wildfires, please know that there are so many of us heartbroken by the extreme loss that you’re experiencing. I’m praying for your safety. To anyone and everyone reading this, I wish you all the best for the new year. Happy submitting.

The 2025 Yeats Poetry Prize is a public program since 1997 of the all-volunteer WB Yeats Society of NY. Our 2025 Judge is January O’Neil who also served as last year’s judge. Poets of any age from anywhere in the world may enter through February 1, 2025. There is no limit on entries, and they can be on any topic. They must also be in English, unpublished, and no more than 60 lines in length. First prize is $1,000, second prize is $500, and two or three honorable mentions are usually awarded at the judge’s discretion. The entry fees, which help to underwrite the competition, are $15 for the first poem and $12 for each additional poem. Winners are announced in early March, and awards are presented in New York City in April. https://yeats.submittable.com/submit

Deep South Magazine accepts original fiction, short stories and shorts, nonfiction and poetry during open reading periods. For fiction and nonfiction, we will do special themed calls. We will announce a new theme sometime in 2024. For poetry, our reading period will be open through February 14, 2025. We will mainly publish poetry in April during National Poetry Month, so around 30 selections will be chosen. All submissions must have a Southern connection, whether the author lives in the South, used to live in the South, has family in the South or was inspired by a visit to the region. Poetry submissions can be up to five poems of any length. Fiction, short stories and nonfiction are limited to one work at a time and may not be longer than 3,500 words. https://deepsouthmag.com/submission-guidelines/

Beaver Magazine publishes poetry, flash fiction and nonfiction, hybrid works, art and anything else you have to offer during our open reading periods. For poetry, send 3-5 poems of any format, each beginning on a new page. We love work that plays with traditional forms and modes. We want the lyric, the narrative, and everything in between. For prose, send up to 3 flash pieces of no more than 1,000 words each (though we do prefer brevity). Creative nonfiction can include personal, research, or lyric essays as well as memoirs. Fiction can be of any genre or style. Hybrid work can be whatever you want it to be! We celebrate and yearn for work from LGBTQIA2S+ and BIPOC. Submit through February 15, 2025, for the Spring Issue. https://beavermag.org/submit/

The Santa Clara Review is a student-edited literary magazine that publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and visual art. The magazine is published biannually in February and May, drawing on submissions from Santa Clara University students, faculty, and staff, as well as from writers around the nation and globe. Please submit works of fiction or nonfiction prose under 6,000 words. Please submit no more than five poems or pieces of artwork at a time. Submissions for Volume 112.2 are currently open through February 15, 2025. https://santaclarareview.com/submit

Canary is published four times a year to welcome each new season on the solstices and equinoxes. We will be open from February 1- 28 for Spring-themed work for the Spring Equinox issue due out March 21, 2025. Please submit no more than 5 poems, or essays/short stories of not more than 1500 words. We look forward to reading your work on your experience of the losses to the natural world in your home environment and the joys of that natural world that we stand to lose. https://canarylitmag.org/submissions.php

Brevity publishes well-known and emerging writers working in the extremely brief (750 words or fewer) essay form. We have featured work from Pulitzer prize winners, NEA fellows, Pushcart winners, Best American authors, and writers from India, Egypt, The Netherlands, Ireland, Spain, Malaysia, Qatar, and Japan. We have also featured many previously-unpublished authors, and take a special joy in helping to launch a new literary career. While Brevity (the magazine) publishes the finest examples of flash nonfiction, the Brevity Blog offers a place to discuss issues related to the writing of creative nonfiction. https://brevitymag.com/submissions/

Pine Hills Review seeks submissions of previously unpublished fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and visual art. We are interested in quality work, no matter the genre, form, or style. Hybrid and experimental works are especially encouraged. Poetry submissions should include no more than six poems total. Nonfiction, fiction submissions, and hybrid or cross-genre work should be no more than 3,000 words total. Our regular reading period ends April 30, 2025. https://pinehillsreview.com/submit/

The Baffler is America’s leading voice of incisive and unconventional left-wing political criticism, cultural analysis, short stories, poems, and art. Founded in 1988 by Thomas Frank and Keith White as “the journal that blunts the cutting edge,” the magazine is currently edited by Matthew Shen Goodman. Nonfiction should be submitted in pitch form (no complete manuscripts, please), consisting of two paragraphs that describe your project. Poetry and fiction are welcome; our preferred length for prose is between 2,200 and 5,000 words. https://thebaffler.com/about/submissions

Forge Literary Magazine publishes one prose piece per week selected by a rotating cast of editors. Free submissions open on the 1st of each month. If there is no free link, we’ve hit our quota. We will reopen at the top of each month, except for September and December. We prefer stories under 3,000 words but will consider up to 5,000 words. We love flash and micro! We consider previously unpublished pieces only. We are open to all genres and voices, and stories with any background, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual or personal identity from all over the world. Literary excellence is our only criteria. https://forgelitmag.submittable.com/submit

Streetlight Magazine reads year-round and typically responds to submissions within three months. Send us 3-5 unpublished poems in a single document. Please send one story at a time, 2,000 words max. We currently seek creative essays/memoirs with an emphasis on the interaction of place and one’s personal relationship to it. We also welcome guest bloggers. We’re interested in topics about the literary and visual arts as well as personal perspectives on much more. Blogs should be between 300-700 words and may be edited to fit SL format. https://streetlightmag.com/submissions/

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