The Artist’s Statement has only been around for a little over 2 years, but in that time, some amazing writers have been featured there, writers such as Nikki Giovanni, Kathy Fish and Colm Toibin, just to name a few. Somehow, I am fortunate enough to now be included on that list. Huge thanks to my friend Davin Malasarn for inviting me to talk about Tamp, and some of the ideas that Tamp explores such as ancestry, mythology, and our interactions with both the natural and dream worlds.
In addition to producing awesome podcasts that talk about writing, The Granum Foundation is also doing wonderful work to support writers and their projects through the Granum Foundation Prize and the Granum Foundation Translation Prize. The Foundation Prize is a $5,000 award for one writer, and up to three finalists are awarded $500 or more. The Translation Prize is an award of $1,500 or more.
Coming up later this week, I’ll share a new list of submission opportunities for writers. And next week, I’ll be in conversation with Erika Nichols-Frazer about her memoir, Feed Me, sponsored by Birch Bark Editing. The online event is free, but registration is required. Hope to see you there.
In my previous post, I had a wonderful conversation with J.D. Isipabout his new collection Kissing the Wound. One of the threads in these poems explores the way we are connected to place. One of the places J.D. writes about is The Carmelitos Public Housing Development where he grew up. While reading Kissing the Wound, I admired the way he was able to write about that place and others from multiple views such as from the present and the past, from the inside and the outside. I mentioned to J.D. how place-based writing is always on interest to me, and I asked if he had any advice for writing about place. I’ll share J.D.’s response here:
J.D. Isip: Yes, after reading Tamp, I can definitely see how important place is to you. My time in Carmelitos was from my childhood, over forty years ago. I think that distance in time helped me to be more objective. I like a lot of the ideas of psychogeography, the idea that there is a spiritual imprint on a place that never goes away, that there are times that keep playing over and over just beyond our vision. One might say that I write about Carmelitos from a place of disdain, but I don’t think that’s entirely true. It was a difficult place to exist in, but, going back to the idea of trauma, I think any place can be difficult to exist in depending on what you might be going through. Yes, I lived in the hood at the height of the Crips and the Bloods, but how does that compare to a middle-class woman in a seemingly loving relationship who just can’t find the will to get out of bed, the depression is so bad? So, for me, I try to think back to whatever I was holding onto – maybe it was my mom or my brother, maybe it was the beautiful neighbor boy who was kind to me, maybe it was my white-hot hatred for being poor or hungry. Whatever it was, I think you have to excavate it like an anthropologist (or whatever Indiana Jones was). You have to be willing to look at a past where you weren’t always right, where you made mistakes, where things weren’t always black and white.
My best advice here, and again, after reading your work, I think you might agree, is you have to talk to everyone you can who existed where you existed. Get their stories. See what they verify or contradict. If you can, use their voices. I like having other characters speak in my work. Yes, I am giving them those words, but I feel like there’s a little more ethos there. It’s like, “Oh, I believe everything about Spoon River, cause all these dead folks told me so!” Also, one of my mentors, Frank Gaspar, told me that the more specific you get in the details, the more universal your message can be. So, it’s not just this tree or that flower, it’s the specific kind, the color, the stage they are in growth, etc. For Camelitos, in “Carmelitos Ever After,” I wanted to take the reader through that psychogeographic journey – this is what was, what is, what ever shall be.
DL: One of my favorite poems in Kissing the Wound is “Leaving Krypton”. I quickly knew that I’d love to share this poem on my blog because the conceit is so interesting and makes for a wonderful prompt. Thanks to J.D. for allowing me to share the poem here.
Leaving Krypton for Anne
It is better you had not stayed long enough to know what alchemy binds us to a place, how extracting yourself begins a dissolution, the cloud-capped towers, the cracked cement slab you’d jump every day on your way to school, the band you worshipped, a dog you pet in your sleep, friends, parents, all
melt away before you think to look back, you think turning around, just a glance, will be too much for you and you are right, some ancient knowledge forces your stare forward, drowns out the chain-reacting atoms, the splitting crust of a world where once you were essential as its gravity, its rotation, its sun—
But, O! What crests into view? A light you never felt pulls you closer, a strength you’ve never had takes over, and you are flying this foreign galaxy, feeling yourself for the first time yourself, arms outstretched, open to embrace a brand-new atmosphere, the sweet air, a woman you kiss to sleep, adopted parents, friends, all
will need your new powers to survive this new adventure: x-ray vision to see the imposters; piercing heat to bore deep into layers of tradition, stubbornness, scars; a cold breath for those who call you a false god; and the wisdom to keep that shrunken city from this place as a reminder we never fully lose the past, but what we knew is gone
the instant that we leave it.
DL: One reason I love “Leaving Krypton” is because it is infused with all of the qualities of place-based writing. Even though a specific place isn’t named, the reader gains a sense of the place based on the place’s specific imagery. The sense of that place is expanded by ideas of what will be left behind as well as what will be gained, as well as the strengths that were gained (and will be exported) as we leave the place we’re from. The title allows us to connect the place with the fictional Krypton even though we retain the sense that a more-realistic setting is being described. I asked J.D. if he could relay the inspiration for this poem, and how he came up with the idea to write it from the angle of what I assumed was Superman.
JI: Thank you for asking about this poem, means a lot. One of my best friends, Anne, whom the poem is dedicated to, had hit a real crossroads in her life. I talk a little about it in Kissing the Wound, specifically the prose piece, “A Wedding at Cana.” She’d been in this long, emotionally abusive relationship, her work situation was getting pretty bad, and she had just, pretty late in life, accepted that she was a lesbian. I mean damn, one of those would put me under! After a lot of me and other friends telling her to leave this place, she finally did. She did it for her and for her son. And it was one of the bravest, scariest things I’d ever seen a person do.
I wanted to write something to say goodbye. Superman is one of my favorite characters, so of course I thought of him. But I actually thought of Kara, Supergirl. But Anne and Kal shared more, so I just followed Kal’s story. And I threw in a couple of nods to things she’d know were me saying goodbye – the “O” for Walt Whitman and the “cloud capped towers” for Shakespeare. I wrote it in one night, and I read it to her as she was driving away. We both cried. My hope was that she would see her move as so much bigger than it was, and that she wasn’t only running away from her past but running toward her future. I’m a cheesy person. It took everything in me not to say somewhere, “The S stands for hope” – but it’s implied.
Prompt: If you’d like to use “Leaving Krypton” as a prompt for your own poem, then you probably need to begin with the title by which I also mean you begin with a fictional place. This should be informed by your own interests and likes. J.D. Isip loves to call himself a nerd because he likes, among other things, comic books and superheroes. Krypton is immediately recognizable to most readers. So begin by selecting a fictional place to draw on that will also be fairly recognizable: Gotham, Neverland, The Emerald City, Mansfield Park, Yoknapatawpha County.
Begin your poem, not with this fictional place but with details from the real place that you are writing about. Or from your life if you’re writing about yourself. Think about J.D.’s “cracked cement slab you’d jump every / day on your way to school.” That could be from anywhere, but it feels meaningful because the reader understands it’s from personal experience.
The important factor about the fictional place you pick is that you must know some strengths about the character related to that place. Because you will want to draw on those strengths as your work through your own poem.
I think this is an exercise that can be applied, not only to poetry, but to creative nonfiction and fiction. Give it a try. And if you are able to write something from this prompt, send it to me. I’d love to see it.
J.D. Isip is originally from Long Beach, California, but has lived the last decade or so in Plano, Texas. He received his MA from California State University, Fullerton, and his PhD from Texas A&M University-Commerce. He is a Professor of English at Collin College in North Texas, and he serves as an editor for The Blue Mountain Review. His poetry, plays, short fiction, and essays have appeared in a variety of journals and magazines. His first full-length collection, Pocketing Feathers, was published by Sadie Girl Press (2015). His new collection, Kissing the Wound, was published earlier this year by Moon Tide Press. In Kissing the Wound, J.D. asks readers to look through a multiversal lens to consider how our lives and our loves, our traumas and our triumphs, fold in on one another. J.D. was kind enough to answer some questions about Kissing the Wound, as well as to offer advice about how to approach writing about trauma, and how to mix forms—including fragments—to inform a larger narrative.
DL: I love the title of your newest collection, Kissing the Wound, and how it speaks to the ways our most traumatic experiences shape us. I’m thinking too of the beautiful opening lines from your poem Tornado Radio, “Nostalgia, defined, is a scar in your mind, / that pulled at or picked, bleeds across time…” Do you have advice for writing about trauma, particularly the difficult task of stepping outside of yourself to craft personal experience into art?
JI: Thank you so much, Denton. The story behind this title, but also behind a lot of things I’ve written and revised over the years is that we (the writers) are sometimes too laser focused on a particular idea. This can be useful, and I personally love many poets who would fall into this category (Victoria Chang, Richie Hofmann, and Patrick Phillips come to mind) of being meticulous almost to the point of obsession. With this book, I had picked the title Number Our Days early on. There’s a lot of Bible in much of what I write, so it seemed a good choice. Plus, the fragmented nature of the book seemed to pair well with this idea of trying to count or recount the days we live, have lived, and will live. Well, very late into the editing process, my publisher calls me and says, “We have a problem, J.D. Neil Hilborn has a book and a poem called Our Numbered Days, and, man, I just don’t feel comfortable doing something that sounds so much like that title.” I kinda panicked, but I had just finished a poem that I moved to the front of the book – “Kissing the Wound.” I suggested it as an alternative, and my publisher, Eric, was like, “Oh man! That’s perfect! It’s better!” That was that.
See, in my mind the book was about recounting, about “memoir-izing” my past in lyric form. But, as you point out, it was much simpler than that. It was about trauma, both individual and collective. What I want to say, the advice I would give here about writing trauma, is maybe not something I always follow, but it is certainly something I strive for. I think it’s important for us to push against two impulses: one, to relive the trauma in some masochistic or voyeuristic way; two, to homilize the trauma to the “all things happen for a reason” point of dishonesty. Instead, I think it’s better to pluck out the particulars, as much as you can remember, and let the scene and/or the action take the lead over whatever “lesson” we are trying to communicate. Also, be gut-wrenchingly honest, or what is the point? I think of student papers where maybe they spend pages talking about a really screwed up relationship with a parent or an abusive love, then the last paragraph is, “But I am happy that happened, or I wouldn’t be who I am today. I don’t even think about it anymore.” Um, Sure, Jan.
To that final point of, to paraphrase, moving from “Dear Diary” to something more universal, or at least welcoming to readers – read, read, read. What you are talking about is something that we learn by watching (reading) others do it well. How can I read Audre Lorde or John Keats and feel like I have anything in common with them? But I do. Why? Because I may have never felt romantic love for a woman, but I have felt love… and longing, and all of that. I think when you read widely, your writing starts to feel more like you are in conversation rather than screaming from a soapbox. You’re not under the impression you’re the only one who ever said this or felt this, but your story adds to what has come before. So, yeah, there’s my traditionalist leanings showing!
DL: Kissing the Wound is described as containing “poems and fragments”. I would describe some of these fragments as prose pieces, even as essays. How do poems and nonfiction overlap in terms of their autobiographical qualities? Are there other ways the two forms connect in your mind? Are there challenges to interweaving different genres into one cohesive book?
JI: I love that more and more writers are crossing genre lines or hobbling together so-called “new” genres. Not to get too pedantic, but I think we generationally tend to congratulate ourselves for innovation that has always been there. Take this delineation between poem and play and essay and recipe and whatever else. Alexander Pope, Christine de Pizan, Borges, Eliot, tons of folks were crossing those genre lines decades, centuries before us. But, we forget, and it is always nice when some memory of “permission” stirs in us: Can I do this? Why the hell not?
That preamble is my way of saying, “I know what I am about to say has probably been said before.” Years ago, I had started jotting down “fragments” I thought might be part of something bigger. A book? A memoir? Poems? Maybe. For the most part, I was a little desperate not to lose these moments or images that would pop into my mind. I’ve seen a lot of friends and family die now, and it pains me to see them try to recall something. You see it in their face, in that disappointment: they can’t, it’s gone forever. As writers, we have this unique gift to preserve a little time. That’s how the fragments started.
Because they are more like prose, these pieces definitely lean more into the “lesson” aspect, or homily. Unlike poems, I feel like prose needs to land somewhere for a reader (a poem can just leave you hanging – many times, that’s the point). Donald Murray said that all writing was autobiographical, and I tend to agree. Walt Disney chose Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as his first feature based almost exclusively on the fact that he remembered reading the story to his daughters. Charlie Brown is basically Charles Schulz. If we accept that whatever we write is going to tell our story, I think it gives us permission to tell bigger stories, stories with more characters, stories where we don’t have to be at the center of the action.
The first prose piece in the book, “How Long Was I Gone,” helped to pull the whole collection together. The night I wrote the first draft, I sent it to my friend Allyson (who wrote my spectacular forward). I was over the moon because all of a sudden I had this idea of how to tie everything I had been working on together. My first book was published in 2015, so it had been years since I had even thought about pulling together another collection. However, just like with that first book, I think when you know you’ve landed on something you have to follow your gut. That’s tricky, because there are many, many writers who will tell you, “My gut tells me every day I should be jotting out a whole collection.” I mean, if that works for you, awesome. Darren Demaree, Nicole Tallman, and Jenn Givhan are my friends who do this—and they just pump out gem after gem. For us mere mortals, it takes a little more time. I think you have to trust your writing to lead you… and you can’t do that if you’re trying to keep up with others. I am a lot happier being able to be truly happy for my friends getting published all over, getting all of the awards – rather than grousing about things being unfair, or “they’re just so much more talented” or “so much more connected” etc. Who cares? Do you. You’ll be okay.
Oh, the interweaving of the prose and poems. One, I saw someone on Twitter griping (shocker, I know) about “people who divide their poetry collections into individual sections”; it’s such a specific and therefore hilarious thing to be miffed about. I have done it with both of my collections, and I am doing it with my third collection. I don’t have any plans to stop. It helps to have those guideposts. It gives you more freedom so your collection can be about one overarching idea but also several smaller ones. Not that a collection has to be about anything, but I tend to like collections that are about something. I feel like the hodgepodge approach is an odd one. If I wanted a grab bag of subject matter, I can just read a poetry journal or magazine. Anyway, the prose pieces in Kissing the Wound started working as these kinds of guideposts, too. I could group them with poems that would, hopefully, emphasize or challenge the point or lesson of the prose piece. I liked that idea of having my cake and eating it too – here’s a lesson, but do I actually buy it? Should you? I had a lot of fun pulling it together, moving things around. I was lucky to have a patient and enthusiastic publisher. And good friends to read over drafts! So important!
DL: I’d like to go back to the idea of the word “fragment” as you use it alongside “poem”. Can you talk about what a poem is or does, for you, in its perfect form? Is it supposed to center on a single moment, an image, an emotion? All of the above or something else?
JI: I did an interview a couple of weeks ago, and I thought of an answer to this question after I said whatever I said during that interview. So, thank you for this chance to redeem myself! For me, poems are questions at their heart. They can sometimes sound like statements, proclamations, edicts, arguments, solutions, and all of that. But not so far behind even the most self-assured poem is a do you think? And I don’t think there is any other genre that has that consistency (except maybe American musical theater). The gift of a poem, then, is that it comes alongside you when “shit doesn’t make sense,” and it says, “Yeah, why is that?” Not, “so let me tell you why that is.”
Prose pieces allow ideas to breathe. That is important. But poems, for me, are in a bit more of a hurry. Prose are the divorced couple in front of the lawyers or the marriage counselor. Poems are the fights before bed, the one liners to poison the kids against the other spouse, the angry sex. You can probably guess which I like reading more. But I make a point to read both and read lots of everything. I think it would be foolish to think prose take longer to write than poems. That was not the case in Kissing the Wound – generally speaking, the poems almost all took longer than the prose pieces. And, because I set up the prose to be fragments – meaning I didn’t have to flesh out each scene, just layered them on top of one another – they were even easier to pull together. Truth be told, we always have a little more fun doing the thing we don’t always do. It was really fun, even freeing to play between genres.
DL: I often 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 Moon Tide Press?
JI: It took me years to write the manuscript, a solid eight years of plugging away. It’s not because I am meticulous or anything like that. It’s because I work full time as a professor, like most other artists I know. I like to think if I were given some sort of writing fellowship, I’d just crank out book after book, year after year. But that’s not true. I’d probably do what I did with my dissertation and with this book – let it simmer for years, then bang it out when I finally get tired of simmering.
I gave myself $300 to send out manuscripts to contests or editors. That’s honestly not a lot when you consider most contests are $25 or more to enter. There are also editors who will take manuscripts via email, so that costs you nothing (no printing, no postage). Moon Tide Press had been on my radar because it’s pretty big in Southern California, where I grew up. You have Red Hen Press, Write Bloody Publishing, and Moon Tide Press – those were the places I was a fan of in grad school, and the places where I had met or seen most of the writers they published. Eric Morago picked up the press years ago. I didn’t know that—but I had read his first collection a while back, and I watched him do some of his slam stuff. I was a big fan (Eric’s easy on the eyes, he has lots of fans).
Anyway, I wrote to my friend who published my first book, Sarah Thursday with Sadie Girl Press. She’d semi-retired at the time, but she was enthusiastic about me getting another book out. I think that’s important. You need to have a group of folks doing this writing thing who you can turn to who will give you honest feedback. This isn’t your mom saying she likes the pretty things you write (though that is nice if you can get it). It’s the friends who will tell you this is what you were meant to do, and they aren’t bullshitting you. They have no reason to. She told me about Moon Tide being open to unsolicited submissions. That’s worth knowing about. A lot of places, especially big publishers, are not going to look at your work unless they have sought you out (this is rare). It’s often in contests where “unknowns” get picked up by the big presses. That’s good, but the odds are generally stacked against you. Especially if you didn’t go to a specific MFA program, didn’t publish in the big magazines, haven’t gone to AWP.
That’s all to say, yeah, I got a lot of rejections. But not as many as I feared. And, as luck would have it, I got an offer for a chapbook the same week Eric accepted my full manuscript. I felt terrible about having to turn down the chapbook, but the publishers were so excited, and that I learned you shouldn’t feel bad if you have to say no to a publisher. They probably have dozens of folks waiting in the wings and, if they are decent folks, they are gonna cheer for you – after all, they just chose you. It should make sense to them.
My friend R. Flowers Rivera came to do a reading at my alma mater, and when I came up to talk with her afterward, she said, “So, when am I going to see a book from you?” This was maybe 2012, and I told her I had submitted to contests for years, but nothing ever came of it. She said, “If the contests don’t pick you, pick yourself. Send out your manuscript.” It took about a year and some kismet with a friend from high school, Sarah, but I got my first book published a few years later. The point is that if you feel like your work needs to be out in the world, you will find a way. It might take some hustle. It might take years. It sounds cliché, but you just have to keep at it. Also, honestly, and you probably know this well, just be incredibly humble when dealing with publishers. They are almost always doing it as a passion project, and they are almost always getting paid far less than they are worth. Being patient and humble goes a long way.
DL: Are there any upcoming opportunities for readers to hear you read from Kissing the Wound either via Zoom or in person?
JI: I will be on #SundaySweetChats with Charles K. Carter on Sunday, May 28th on YouTube. I’ll be the featured reader at The Ugly Mug in Orange, California, on Wednesday, May 31st. And I will be on a future episode of Be Well: A Reading Series hosted by Nicole Tallman. I’d love to see folks in California, and I highly recommend folks check out Charlie and Nicole’s shows. Both have several videos already up.
Huge thanks to J.D. Isip for speaking to me about his new book. Don’t forget to order Kissing the Wound now. Stay tuned for my next post where I’ll share the advice J.D. shared with me about writing about the places we come from, as well as a writing exercise from J.D. based on one of his poems. Make sure you never miss a post by subscribing.
Since it’s still January, it feels acceptable to still wish you a happy new year. In yet another attempt to get the year off to a good start, I spent much of yesterday sorting through these calls and submitting my own work. I was reminded both of how much time and effort it takes, and how important it is. Submitting is vastly different than the work of writing. We can be steadfast writers, dedicated to our craft, but the act of submitting our work forces us to evaluate our words in new ways. Which of my poems work together? Which of my essays is the most ready for others to read? Which of my stories is a good fit for this journal? Sometimes we’re lucky and our work is accepted. But even rejection can prompt us to see our pieces under new eyes. If we’re very fortunate, a kind editor takes time to offer a word of encouragement or advice. So yeah, I believe submitting is an important part of our job as a writer. Toward that end, I offer this list of one dozen submission opportunities. Good luck!
Glass: A Journal of Poetry Glass is back and now actively accepting submissions. We’ll be publishing weekly, a single poem every Wednesday, starting in July and we’d love to see your work. We’ll never charge reading fees and we’ll read year-round (except in March when we’ll be reading chapbook submissions). Past contributors have included Rane Arroyo, Saeed Jones, Lisa Fay Coutley, Adam Tavel, Sandy Longhorn, and Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, among many many others. Past work has been included in Sundress Publication’s Best of the Net and on Verse Daily. Submit 3-5 poems, any style, any length. http://www.glass-poetry.com/journal/submit.html
Café Review Submit up to three unpublished poems in one file. The Café Review welcomes both new and established voices and has no limitations or preferences as to form or style. We publish the most exciting, impressive, and affecting poems that come to us. https://www.thecafereview.com/submissions/poetry/
Prelude Prelude is a journal of poetry and criticism based in New York. We publish online quarterly. Send us up to 8 pages of poetry. Send us a draft or a description of an essay. It could be a critical essay, an experimental essay, a personal essay relating to poetry, etc. https://preludemag.com/about/
Hawai`i Pacific Review HPC is Hawai`i Pacific University’s award-winning online literary magazine. While we often publish work about Hawai`i and the Pacific, we accept great work from all regions and on all subjects. Submit no more than 3 poems at a time. Fiction and Creative Nonfiction submissions should be less than 4000 words. We also accept flash fiction and flash nonfiction up to 750 words. Deadline: February 4, 2023. https://hawaiipacificreview.org/submissions/
Orange Blossom Review OBR publishes innovative poetry, short fiction, creative nonfiction, and visual art. Submit short fiction and creative nonfiction up to 5,000 words. Submit up to three poems. We accept unsolicited general submissions through February 15, 2023. https://orangeblossomreview.org/
Swing Swing is home for the emerging writer to the renowned, the discovered to the too-long neglected. We are creating a magazine with the energy and verve of its home city, Nashville, a town of vagabonds and roots, where new influences course through the old. Swing wants the poetry, fiction (auto-, hybrid, very short, or regular but extraordinary), nonfiction (creative, travel, personal, hybrid, surely there are other variations), and comics that could only have been written by you. Submit up to 5 poems or up to 8,000 words of prose. Deadline: February 16, 2023. https://www.porchtn.org/swing
Dunes Review The Dunes Review is published in northern lower Michigan, a place of exquisite natural beauty and hardy local culture. Place is really important to us. Not only physical place, but the place created in a piece of writing. The feeling of being rooted in any somewhere grounds our work. If your work expresses or includes a significant tie to a significant somewhere, we are bound to love it. You and your work do not necessarily need a tie to a Michigan location, but we do appreciate work that fits Michigan-like themes or motifs. We consider short fiction or creative nonfiction up to 3,000 words, or up to 4 poems. Deadline: March 1, 2023, or when we have received 300 submissions, whichever comes first. www.michwriters.org/dunesreview/dunes-review-submission-guidelines/
Gulf Coast Stories and essays should be no more than 7,000 words. Send up to 5 poems per submission. Gulf Coast typically commissions book reviews, but unsolicited reviews are accepted and occasionally published. We are particularly interested in reviews of first or second books. Interviews should not exceed twelve pages. Deadline: March 1, 2023. http://gulfcoastmag.org/submit/
Barrow Street BS is a nonprofit literary arts organization that was started in Greenwich Village, NYC in 1994. Submit up to five manuscript pages. Response time is one week to four months. Deadline: March 31, 2023. http://barrowstreet.org/press/submit/
Raleigh Review General submissions are open from January through March for Poetry. Send up to 5 poems. Deadline: March 31, 2023. https://www.raleighreview.org/submit.html
Salamander Published biannually, Salamander features poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Submit no more than five poems at a time, OR one story or memoir at a time, OR up to three flash pieces in either fiction or nonfiction. Deadline: April 1, 2023. https://salamandermag.org/how-to-submit/
Asheville Poetry Review APR is an annual literary journal that publishes 180–220 pages of poems, interviews, translations, essays, historical perspectives, and book reviews. Send 3–6 poems of any length or style. We are open for regular submissions from January 15 through July 15, 2023. http://www.ashevillepoetryreview.com/submissions
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A lot of journals and magazines are opening up now that schools are also starting back. This month, I’ve compiled a list of a dozen opportunities for writers in every genre. So take advantage of the timing and send them some work.
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Anomaly CALL FOR BLOG & FEATURE WRITERSWe’re looking for writers who are interested in contributing in an ongoing manner to the Anomaly Blog, either by proposing a column or series, or by joining a team of staff writers who both pitch and take on assigned pieces for the blog. We are particularly interested in writers to focus on reviews, interviews, and profiles of artists and writers; and in getting pitches for columns or series that focus specifically on a particular artistic or writing community within the purview of our expanded mission. If you are interested, please send an email to Features & Reviews Editor Sarah Clark [sarah (at) anomalouspress (dot) org] with a paragraph about what you’re interested in writing about and your CV attached. https://anmly.org/calls/
Bodega Bodega releases digital issues on the first Monday of every month, featuring poetry, prose, and occasional interviews by established and emerging writers. Submit up to 3 poems or up to 3000 words of fiction or nonfiction. http://www.bodegamag.com/about
Lime Hawk Lime Hawk, a quarterly independent online journal of culture, environment, and sustainability, seeks new, unpublished submissions of short fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and visual art. No deadline to submit. No reading fees. www.limehawk.org/journal
Four Way Review FWR accepts poetry and fiction from both established and emerging authors. We look for work that demonstrates fine attention to craft while retaining a powerful and compelling voice. We want writing that showcases the imagination’s unique ability to refine the raw materials of human experience. Unsolicited submissions are considered year round. Submit 3-5 poems or up to 6,000 words of fiction in a single document. http://fourwayreview.com/submit-3/
CRAFT Our creative categories are open year-round to any emerging or established author. For flash fiction and flash creative nonfiction, send work up to 1,000 words. For short fiction or creative nonfiction, send work up to 6,000 words. We will also consider previously published creative work. We pay our authors $100 for original flash and $200 for original short fiction and creative nonfiction. https://www.craftliterary.com/submit/
BULL We are dedicated to examining and discussing modern masculinity: what works, what doesn’t, what needs to change and what needs to go. We’re in quickly shifting times and more than ever this conversation is crucial. We want fiction and essays that engage that conversation from every angle from men and women, gay and straight, Americans and citizens of the world. Everybody has a stake in making men better and, by proxy, culture as a whole. We want stories of exemplary masculinity, cautionary tales, accounts from every possible perspective and persuasion. https://mrbullbull.com/newbull/submit/
2022 University of New Orleans Press Publishing Lab Prize We are looking for the best unpublished novel or short story collection. The Publishing Laboratory at the University of New Orleans seeks to bring innovative publicity and broad distribution to authors. We collect submissions through August 31, 2022, deciding on 15-20 finalists. The finalists are read by students from The Publishing Laboratory in the fall, and one is chosen for publication. The work does not have to be regionally focused. There is no word limit. There is no limit on subjects covered. https://unopress.submittable.com/submit
Another Chicago Magazine We’re open through August 31, 2022, for poetry, fiction, nonfiction, reviews, and translations on the theme of Trans/formation. (Trans/formation: shifting, fluidity, change, and rediscovery in all forms, big and small. Consider how trans/formation raises the ideas of both a continuing process of becoming, and of some kind of coalescence. What does trans/formation mean to you?) We have no restrictions on length or style. https://anotherchicagomagazine.net/submissions/
Apple Valley Review Apple Valley Review is currently reading submissions of poetry, personal essays, and short fiction. Several pieces from the journal have later appeared as selections, finalists, and/or notable stories in Best American Essays, Best of the Net, Best of the Web, and storySouth Million Writers Award. We accept poetry, short fiction, flash fiction, and essays. Submissions are read year-round, but the deadline for the fall issue is September 15. http://www.applevalleyreview.com/
Cream City Review We devote ourselves to publishing memorable and energetic fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and artwork which represent a broad range of creators with diverse, unique backgrounds. Both beginning and well-known writers are welcome. We are currently reading for our Fall/Winter Issue from now through November 1, 2022. For Fiction and Nonfiction, send fewer than twenty double-spaced pages. We are interested in dynamic, well-crafted nonfiction, including creative journalism, personal essays, travelogues, flash, and polemics. We seek book reviews of any CCR-published genre and relevant author interviews. Please submit no more than five poems at a time. https://uwm.edu/creamcityreview/general/
Scholarships & Fellowships Available for the 2023 Eckerd College Writers’ Conference: Writers in Paradise Located on the coast of the picturesque Boca Ciega Bay in St. Petersburg, Florida, Eckerd College Writers’ Conference: Writers in Paradise offers an intimate experience of workshop classes in Crime & Suspense, Memoir, Non-fiction, Novel, Poetry, Structure, Short Story and Historical Fiction, along with craft talks, panel discussions, Q&As, readings, book signings, and receptions with our award-winning faculty and lecturers. The workshop is scheduled for January 14 – 21, 2023. Deadline is November 1, 2022. www.writersinparadise.com
Outlook Springs Send us stories we can’t put down. Our emphasis is literary fiction, but we aren’t biased against genre. Send poems that ooze with sonic pleasure and stagger from line-to-line with an animated corpse’s lingering bravado. As for nonfiction, send us your travel narratives, your lyrical essays, your personal essays, and everything in between. If it’s real, if it’s interesting, if it’s well-written and gives us a new and exciting way to see the world (or – even better—inside your head), then we’ll publish it. Our current reading period ends December 14, 2022. http://outlooksprings.com/
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Thanks for reading. Please feel free to share these opportunities with other writers. If you’re not already receiving these posts directly to your inbox, please visit my wordpress site and subscribe.
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!”
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:
It’s been nice this month to have heard from a few different blog readers. I still owe responses to a few of you. Please know they’re coming. It’s always great to hear from anyone following the blog. Please know how happy I am if you find the content here useful to you and your writing.
It’s easy to forget about submitting in the summer. Many university journals close during the summer break, but many are still open. In this post, I’m sharing a list of 10 opportunities that range from journal to book publication. There should be something here for everyone.
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The Peauxdunque Review Whether your podunk is a small town in Alabama, middle-of-nowhere-Indiana, a working-class block of slab-houses in New Orleans East, piney-wooded East Texas, a Tennessee hill or holler, or an Atlanta apartment house, send us your expression to the world. Fiction and nonfiction should be no longer than 7500 words. Flash fiction should be no longer than 750 words. Please send no more than 3 poems per submission. https://peauxdunquereview.com/
Image We welcome unsolicited submissions and consider all submissions carefully. We produce two publications: Image, a quarterly journal, and Good Letters, a daily blog. All the work we publish reflects what we see as a sustained engagement with one of the western faiths—Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. That engagement can include unease, grappling, or ambivalence as well as orthodoxy; the approach can be indirect or allusive, but for a piece to be a fit for Image or Good Letters, some connection to faith must be there. Please submit no more than five poems or ten pages total. For fiction and nonfiction, we have an upper limit of approximately 6,000 words. We rarely publish stories or essays under 3,000 words. https://imagejournal.org/journal/submit/
New Orleans Review For web features, New Orleans Review seeks fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and book reviews. Submit fiction and nonfiction pieces up to 5,000 words. Flash pieces welcome. Submit up to five pages of poems. We are looking for reviews of books (all genres) forthcoming or published in the last year. Query us if you’d like to submit or propose an interview. http://www.neworleansreview.org/submit/
Virginia Quarterly Review Submissions are open through July 31, 2022. Submit poetry of all types and length, short fiction between 2,500–8,000 words, and nonfiction between 3,000–7,000 words. We are generally not interested in genre fiction (such as romance, science fiction, or fantasy). We publish literary, art, and cultural criticism; reportage; historical and political analysis; and travel essays. We publish few author interviews or memoirs. In general, we are looking for nonfiction that looks out on the world, rather than within the self. Submissions are limited to one prose piece and four poems per reading period. https://www.vqronline.org/about-vqr/submissions
2023 Howling Bird Press Nonfiction Prize Howling Bird Press, the publishing house of Augsburg College’s MFA in Creative Writing, seeks submissions for its 2023 Book Prize in Nonfiction. The press welcomes innovative, original work from established and emerging authors. Recommended length is between 20,000 and 60,000 words long although exceptions are permissible. The competition is open to all writers in English, whether published or unpublished. Author of the winning manuscript receives a cash award of $2,500, which serves as an advance, with book subsequently published by Howling Bird Press under a standard book contract. There is a $25 entry fee. Submit through July 31, 2022. https://augsburghowlingbirdpress.submittable.com/submit
The Boiler The Boiler began in 2011 by a group of writers at Sarah Lawrence College. We publish poetry, fiction, and nonfiction on a quarterly basis. We like work that turns up the heat, whistles, and stands up to pressure. Our writers include authors such as Thomas Lux, Bruce Bond, Joseph Millar, Cynthia Cruz, Emma Bolden, Marina Rubin, Paul Lisicky, Raena Shirali, and others. Our current reading period extends through August 15, 2022. http://theboilerjournal.com/guidelines/
Gold Line Press & Ricochet Editions Gold Line Press and Ricochet Editions are sibling presses run by students of the University of Southern California’s PhD Program in Creative Writing. Ricochet will be open to hybrid manuscript submissions through July 31 2022. Gold Line will be open to chapbook submissions in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from August 1 to September 30, 2022. https://goldlinepress.submittable.com/submit
Bat City ReviewBCR is published annually. Submissions are open through September 15, 2022, with responses typically sent within two months of receiving a submission. We are interested in poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, art, and cross-genre pieces that experiment with language, form, and unconventional subject matter. We also welcome traditional styles as well as translations. Send us writing that plays, that strikes out, that enjoys itself, that makes its own rules. http://www.batcityreview.org/submit
Ponder Review Ponder Review is a student-run publication of the MFA program at Mississippi University for Women. We welcome fiction, flash fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, short plays, new media & visual art. Our current reading period runs through September 15, 2022. https://www.muw.edu/ponderreview/submit
I-70 Review The I-70 Review welcomes submissions of poetry and fiction through December 31, 2022. For poetry, submit 3-5 poems of 40 or fewer lines. Fiction and flash fiction should not exceed 1500 words. Publication of I-70 Review is annually in the fall. http://i70review.fieldinfoserv.com/submissions.html
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Thanks for reading. Next week, I’ll share my recent conversation about writing and publishing with Tony Taddei, author of The Sons of the Santorelli. To receive posts like these directly in your inbox, subscribe here:
One of my top priorities for the month of May was to compile a list of submission calls to share here. If you have followed my posts for a while (and if you’ve only recently subscribed, thank you and welcome), then you may be aware that there was no list last month. I build these lists in part to share with writers, but I also depend on the process to ensure that I’m submitting my own work. Anytime that I haven’t shared a list, it’s a safe bet that I probably haven’t been submitting either. Such is life, I suppose. But I like to be intentional about these kind of priorities. So here, finally, is a list of journals, presses and contests open this month. Good luck submitting!
Carolina Quarterly The Carolina Quarterly welcomes unsolicited submissions of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and visual art. Submissions are accepted year round. As of Winter 2020, we pay contributors to our print volumes $50 upon publication, plus a free copy of the issue in which the work appears. Submit no more than 6 poems at a time. Submit no more than one prose piece, per genre, at a time. We charge a $2.50 submission fee. https://thecarolinaquarterly.submittable.com/submit
Kestrel Kestrel is now accepting submissions year-round. Kestrel publishes fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction by established and emerging writers. We are especially happy to publish work by West Virginia and Appalachian writers. Kestrel features reviews and visual art in each issue. All accepted work is for the print publication; select work may be featured on our website. Kestrel submits each issue to Verse Daily, Poetry Daily, and Vox Populi, and, therefore, work published in Kestrel may be chosen for reprint in those venues. https://www.fairmontstate.edu/kestrel/submission-guidelines
Monologging For Monologging’s Autumn 2022 edition we are seeking stories and artwork that explore the theme of Influence. Who influences us? What compels a person to urge another to follow their lead, and when we follow? What questions of morality arise from these relationships? Our 2022 edition will be an exploration of the realms of influence, a profound meditation on evolving online ethics and etiquette as well as a quest to celebrate the lives of friends, neighbors, loved ones and mentors who have been our most devoted anchors, advocates, muses and guides. http://monologging.org/submit/
32 Poems We welcome unsolicited poetry year round and accept simultaneous submissions. As a rule we publish shorter poems that fit on a single page (about 32 lines), though we sometimes make exceptions to accommodate remarkable work that runs a little longer. We charge a $3 reading and processing fee. http://www.32poems.com/submission-guidelines
Florida Review & Aquifer: The Florida Review Online We are looking for innovative, luxuriant, insightful human stories—and for things that might surprise us. Please submit no more than one piece of fiction, nonfiction, graphic narrative, review, or digital story at a time. Poets and visual artists may submit up to (but no more than) five poems or artworks as a single submission. We charge a $2 or $3 submission fee depending on category. https://floridareview.submittable.com/submit
2022 New American Fiction Prize The New American Fiction Prize is awarded each year to a full-length fiction manuscript, such as a story collection, novel, novella(s), or something that blends forms, like a novel in verse. The winner receives $1,500 and a book contract, as well as 25 author’s copies and promotional support. Final judge is Weike Wang, the author of Joan Is Okay (Random House 2022) and Chemistry (Knopf 2017). Deadline is June 15, 2022. There is a $25 submission fee. https://newamericanpress.com/category/new-american-fiction-prize/
Los Angeles Review The Los Angeles Review is open for general submissions year-round. (Submissions for the Los Angeles Review Awards are open through June 30, 2022.) Send fiction, flash fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, translations and book reviews. We charge a $3 submission fee. http://losangelesreview.org/submission/
Cheap Pop Cheap Pop is open for submissions during the month of June. We’re looking for your best work in 500 words or less—please, nothing greater than that. We don’t differentiate between Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, and anything in-between, nor do we have restrictions on genre—if it pops, it pops! What we want to see is good writing, your best writing, and that’s it. Please note: CHEAP POP does not publish poetry, so please do not send it. Deadline: June 30, 2022. http://www.cheappoplit.com/submit
Black Lawrence Press Through our annual contests and open reading periods, we seek innovative, electrifying, and thoroughly intoxicating manuscripts that ensnare themselves in our hearts and minds and won’t let go. During our June open reading period, we accept submissions in the following categories: novel, novella, short story collection (full-length and chapbook), poetry (full-length and chapbook), biography & cultural studies, translation (from the German), and creative nonfiction. We also enthusiastically accept hybrid submissions. https://blacklawrencepress.submittable.com/submit
Alien Magazine Alien Magazine is currently open for all types of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and visual art submissions. We are nice people; don’t be afraid to send us anything. We are not a science fiction magazine, though we are open to SF work. By “Alien” we mean “outsider” or anything that exists outside the societal norm. Deadline for Fiction and Poetry: July 1, 2022. https://alienmagazine.submittable.com/submit
The Orison Chapbook Prize We are accepting submissions through July 1, 2022, of chapbook manuscripts (20 – 45 pp.) in any genre (poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama, or hybrid) for The Orison Chapbook Prize, judged by Orison Books founder and editor, Luke Hankins. The winner will be awarded publication, a $300 cash prize, a 2-year Duotrope membership ($100 value), and 20 copies of the chapbook, in addition to a standard royalties contract. We plan to announce the winner and finalists by October 15, 2022. Submission fee is $12.00. https://duotrope.com/duosuma/submit/orison-chapbook-prize-6T0fK
Thanks for reading. In the coming weeks, I’ll share my conversations about writing and publishing with Patti Frye Meredith and Tony Taddei. To receive posts like these directly in your inbox, subscribe here:
In my previous post, I had a wonderful conversation with Julia Wendell about her new poetry collection, The Art of Falling. One of the subjects we discussed was ekphrastic writing, and particularly her poem, Horse in the Landscape, which works in dialogue with a 1910 painting with the same name (sometimes titled Horse in a Landscape) by Franz Marc.
Born in Germany in 1880, Franz Marc was an Expressionist painter who died in 1916 during a battle in France. Many of his paintings feature animals whom Marc believed had a spirituality that had been lost in humans. This article from wikiart.org mentions that in works such as Horse in the Landscape Marc “tried to emulate the animal’s point of view and experience of the world.” This is meaningful because Julia Wendell makes the same gesture in her poem, shared here with Wendell’s permission:
Horse in the Landscape
I was given the power to gaze and ears pricked to hear across the mustard-yellow distance. I wait and listen.
I was created before Franz Marc ever marched into a trench, created because he yearned for the opposite of movement.
I gaze out to a slice of water, to the stillness of the future, its impenetrable line. Think of all the other horses he never painted during the years he never had.
Surely beauty, for young Franz, lived only in the present tense, in the twitch of an ear, color splashed on canvas, confirming the impulse to be.
I sport a bold red coat and blue mane, more than a century of perception behind me. My heart taps out on its old chest a staccato that just might make the landscape tremble.
For this writing exercise, I ask you to focus on the way Wendell identifies or writes from the perspective of the horse. One of the most important elements to consider in an ekphrastic work is the angle or the specific point of view that the writer/narrator chooses. One way to write about a piece of art is from a more-literal angle, meaning from your own perspective as a person viewing the art work. Sometimes, a writer using this more-literal angle will then enter the image, usually as themselves.
What Wendell does in Horse in the Landscape is to give voice to the horse inside the painting from the very first sentence: “I was given the power to gaze / and ears pricked to hear / across the mustard-yellow distance.”
It’s entirely up to you as the writer to judge which mode is better for the image you’re working with and for the poem (or story or essay) that you’re attempting to write. But for this exercise, do try to capture the voice of one of the subjects within the art work. As I’ve written about in the past, taking on the voice of a non-human form sometimes allows us to better express our very human emotions.
There are other important elements to Wendell’s poem such as the nod she gives to Marc’s tragically short life. You could interpret this poem as speaking in some ways to the waste of war, and there is also a great deal of simple but beautiful description. Your own work can move in similar directions or branch off in a new way. But begin from the perspective of the subject within the work.
Ekphrastic writing is not limited to poetry. I’ve read wonderful ekphrastic prose in addition to ekphrastic poems. For examples of ekphrasis in every genre, have a look at The Ekphrastic Review which might be a great place to send the finished draft of this writing exercise.
You can try this exercise with any painting or any other piece of art. But why not start with one of Franz Marc’s many paintings which you can see by returning to the wikiart.org page. Horse in the Landscape is one of Marc’s best known works. It’s not his only painting that features horses, but he also depicts animals like weasels, cattle, foxes, goats, etc. I’ll leave you with one of my favorites, The Steer, from 1911.
Huge thanks to Julia Wendell for speaking to me about her new book and for inspiring this writing exercise. Make sure you never miss writing exercises like this one by subscribing here:
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.
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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:
Denton Loving 