Where Are They Now: An Interview with Past Contributors (Part 2)

With fifty-three issues published, nearly twenty-five hundred contributors accepted and tens of thousands of submissions read, we start to wonder where our previous contributors have run off to. Fortunately, I was able to catch up with a few of them, and we were able to go through a round-table discussion of questions and answers in order to find out what some of them have been up to!

Here's part two of our interview, featuring: Anthony Varallo, a fiction contributor in Issue 47; Hugh Sheehy, a fiction contributor in Issue 36; and Liz Prato, a nonfiction contributor in Issue 50. Check out part 1 here!

Sophean Soeun: If you could have written one bestselling book/series before the original author wrote it, which book/series would it be and why?

Hugh Sheehy: I don’t have a good answer for this. I mean, I feel like I should say Shakespeare, which is pretty awesome to imagine for myself, though I suspect a little boring for other people (they’d be let down to think of Shakespeare as being just five foot six, for starters). There are plenty of writers I admire--more recently, folks like David Mitchell and Jane Smiley--but I tend to read their work until I lose interest in it. (As a result, I’m always at a loss when people ask me about my favorite authors and books, or worse, about my influences, because I suspect that readers would be better at spotting them than I am.) One series of books that made a deep impression on me when I was young is John Bellairs’s Johnny Dixon novels. I haven’t read them since I was ten and eleven, and I doubt I’ll go back and look at them anytime soon, lest I correct my memory too much: I want to write books that make people now feel the way those novels made me feel then.

Liz Prato

Liz Prato: I just realized every title I was coming up with -- like Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret? and Ramona the Brave -- are from my childhood, so it’s not so much that I could have written those books, but that they taught me what I wanted to write. And that goes back to the question about bizarre ideas. I was never reading fantasy or sci-fi. I was just reading about ordinary people trying to figure out this being human gig, because I’ve always found that plenty mysterious. Any book that helps another person understand that better -- that’s what I want to write.

Anthony Varallo: I read a lot of Hardy Boys books as a kid. They had a whole display of them at the supermarket—right at the checkout lane—for some mysterious reason. That always impressed me, that you might need The Secret of the Old Mill or The Sinister Signpost as urgently as aspirin or breath mints. I guess I’d like to write a book like that.

SS: Why is there so little understanding among beginning writers of what actually constitutes a story/plot/conflict?

Anthony Varallo

AV: I had almost no idea what a short story--or a “literary” short story--was until I got to college. I simply hadn’t read many short stories; I read novels. That’s something I remind my students all the time: those of us who aspire to write short fiction come to short fiction through the novel, which is very different from the short story. I think we sometimes forget how confusing the short story can seem to beginning writers (“Why does nothing happen?” “Why is this so depressing?” “How could that be the ending?”) who have never seen a “plot” that’s closer to “a series of ordinary events ending in epiphany.”

LP: Funny -- my problem with a lot of short stories I see from young writers is that nothing happens. And by that, I mean there is no conflict, nothing at stake, nothing pushing against the character. I just read an amazing story by Joanna Rose that accomplishes what both Tony and I are talking about. It takes place during an average week in a small town bar, and the entire conflict is that a stranger comes in and acts like a dick. The tension comes from how these insular, dignified people will react. It’s a quiet story without enormous action and no life or death consequences, and the tension is still thick throughout. The epiphany at the end is what maintaining the integrity of their community looks like to these people. But that’s probably precisely the sort of plot that baffles beginning writers.

Oh, and I totally I agree that the issue is people try to write short stories without reading short stories, without making an effort to understand how and why they work. A lot of young writers struggling to get their work published ask me for advice, and I say, “Do you re-read your favorite stories and figure out the way they work?” and it’s not just that they say no -- it’s as if that never occurred to them. There’s a way in which writers are like astrophysicists, though: it’s not enough to imagine a world beyond our boundaries, and it’s not enough to just understand the math and the science. You have to be able to do both.

Hugh Sheehy

HS: I like to think of John Gardner’s statement about fiction having a moral imperative as deriving from the Latin stem mor-, which means “custom”: so fiction has to show us a theory of what people are, how they work in a certain place-and-time (which, since we’re talking about representation here, is interchangeable with “mind”). So fiction presents us with some kind of narrative (implicitly so, if there is no story to speak of in the fiction, as you see in some of the work, for instance, of Lydia Davis) that demonstrates how an author works out tensions she perceives between subjects she imagines in a more or less verisimilar way: they might be a particular bankrupt husband and wife with only a car left to their names and the bank coming for that on Monday, or they might be a forlorn cuckolded widower and a woman who grows teeth all over her body, or they might take some other form. I think what’s difficult for a lot of beginners--I know it was (is) for me--is learning to accept and then embrace the need to keep working with the tensions between subjects until the conflicts stand out clearly and drive or order the action. This is a wordy way of agreeing with the definition of fiction-writing Liz and Anthony are discussing. It also, I think, can shed some light on why writers just starting out often traffic heavily in cliches--sometimes composing stories using cliches of speech and writing in order to tell a story that is itself a cliche. Fiction writing is a kind of thinking, one many of us have to learn.

But I think there are professional writers who are confused about this stuff. Take the “story” versus “plot” issue. The difference goes beyond terminology into realms of metaphysics and aesthetics. I teach my students that “story” refers to the larger sense of narrative created by a story’s telling: the sense we have of characters having lives off of the page. And I teach that “plot” refers to the way the story is told: the point of view, the structuring of events, the personal narrative strategies each writer fashions to make things like tone work--in short, the writing. But there’s a problem some might see with this distinction, particularly that the “story” the reader imagines is inseparable from the “plot” they read as it is embodied in the words on the page. If the language that makes up a story cannot be separated from a reader’s reading-and-imagination of the story, then it makes no sense to distinguish between “story” and “plot”. Some folks might say I am guilty of reification when I speak of a story distinct from a plot; I would say that when I am writing, I am choosing to tell some things and not others. And then they might point out that the story I speak of does not exist apart from the words on the page, and I might say that if I am reifying it is with good intentions, and so on and so forth. I think there’s a poorly articulated conflict among creative writers over whether to privilege the word or the imagination, language or story. It’s been around since at least the mid-Twentieth Century quibbles over how to write, what to write about, the political role of writing--in short, whether story itself can make a difference, or whether creative writing has to move on to other effects to do more than provide a temporary escape for readers. Today there’s a lot of vague talk about experimental writing versus conventional writing, and while there are clearer differences between writing programs, creative writing teachers need to cover a lot of terrain and accommodate students who want to write, not understand critical ideas, even if those can be very useful. Add in small (or large) differences in aesthetic philosophy between teachers, and you can get a whole lot of confusion over basic things, like what is meant by “plot” (which is, unfortunately, commonly used to mean something like “narrative stencil”). In the face of a muddle like that, some students might just shrug their shoulders and write what they intended to write when they registered for the course. That’s too bad for the less sure writers, because a little learning can go a very long way in fiction writing. That said, I think the terminology problem may fade a little as we get better at teaching CW (a young academic field) and increase our library of craft books. Still, there will probably always be some conflict over the basics, because differences in fundamental understanding make way for invention and large scale innovations in arts.

Where Are They Now: An Interview with Past Contributors (Part 1)

With fifty-three issues published, nearly twenty-five hundred contributors accepted and tens of thousands of submissions read, we start to wonder where our previous contributors have run off to. Fortunately, I was able to catch up with a few of them, and we were able to go through a round-table discussion of questions and answers in order to find out what some of them have been up to!

Anthony Varallo is a fiction contributor in Issue 47; Hugh Sheehy is a fiction contributor in Issue 36; and Liz Prato is a nonfiction contributor in Issue 50.

Sophean Soeun: What are you currently working on? What have you accomplished since your publication in HFR? 

Anthony Varallo

Anthony Varallo: I am currently working on a novel and a collection of short-short stories. Since publishing my story “No One at All” in HFR, I’ve published my third collection of short stories, Think of Me and I’ll Know (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press). “No One at All” is included in the collection—thanks, HFR!

Hugh Sheehy: I’m nearly finished with a collection of stories and in the process of drafting a novel. Since publishing in HFR, I’ve published a first book, The Invisibles, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award in 2012. I’ve also made a sort of half-hearted run at reviewing books and drawn up plans for a few essays; I hope to get to those when I finish these next two books.

Liz Prato: I’m editing a short story anthology for Forest Avenue Press, which comes out in May 2014. I’m working on strengthening my short story collection, and have had a couple of stories and essays published, including a piece on The Rumpus which is an excerpt from my memoir-in-progress. So, yeah -- that’s the big thing I’m working on, a memoir, which I swore I’d never write. It surprised the hell out of me, but there I was one day -- writing a memoir.

SS: Where do some of your ideas originate from? Has there ever been a time where an idea came from somewhere you least expected? Do you have an idea you know you have to write but haven’t figured out how to do it yet?

AV: My ideas usually come from a) some small recollection of something in my past and b) other short stories I love. So, for example, “No One at All,” is a story about two boys vacationing at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, a place I remember visiting when I was a kid, a place where I used to see all these beach shops selling hermit crabs, even though I never bought one. But I remember those hermit crabs clinging to the sides of their cages--that memory was the point of departure for the story. The rest was me wanting to write a story about childhood in the style of John Updike (especially stories like “Pigeon Feathers” or “A Sense of Shelter”), James Joyce (“Araby,” of course), Sherwood Anderson (“I Want to Know Why”), and every other great story I’ve ever tried to shamelessly imitate in my writing. I have one story that was given to me--I mean just given--to me by my then 5-year-old son. One day my son started referring to one of his kindergarten classmates as “my enemy” as in “today at lunch I sat with Mark, Allison, James, and my enemy” or, referring to a TV show we were watching: “This is my enemy’s favorite show!” Well, even though I told my son we should not refer to people as “my enemy,” I secretly loved the idea of that, and ended up writing a story, “My Enemy” about a guy who believes his enemy is out to get him. I always credit my son with the idea, though. He’s kind of proud of that.

Hugh Sheehy

HS: I’m kind of always on the lookout for an idea. I can definitely identify with the motivations and process Anthony describes; that said, I look for stories most actively in my interactions with others and experiences of place. The other day, I made a discovery of a story idea I’ve since begun working on in the sparest of my spare time while talking on the telephone with a hotel receptionist who made an offhand comment about international tourism. I suspect that the mechanism for recognition of a potential story is, in my case, literary in a some way, though whether that’s primary or secondary is harder to say with much certainty; I think I recognize the structures and materials of my favorite works of fiction in my observations. But I’m never sure what came first: the fiction I read before I came up with the idea or the story I made out my experience and imagination. Beyond that, though--the grasping of the idea--I use whatever comes to hand to get the story drafted, then go back and refine, whether junking useless additions or working up weak parts into something strong, until the story seems to read itself to me when I look it over again, which is a way, I hope, of replying to your last question, a way of saying, yes, I never know how it’s going to happen on the page except in some general way.

LP: Ideas are rarely a problem. It’s just a matter of paying attention to my surroundings and actually writing stuff down. I tend to get these really great ideas when I’m lying in bed at night -- you know, when the subconscious mind is starting to creep in -- but I’m too stubborn/stupid to get up and write them down. I always think, “Oh, that’s such a great idea of course I’ll still remember it in the morning.” And I never do. Lather, rinse, repeat. I went through a LONG stretch after my dad and brother died when I had no ideas. Zippo. Zero. Nadda. That scared the living crap out of me. As far as an idea I have that I can’t figure out how to write about, yes -- I have a novel like that. I get back to it every two years thinking, “I know how to write it now!” and do a total re-write and take it to writers group or workshop or wherever, and hear, “Nope. Still not working.” I recently mentioned that project to a friend who I met in workshop 10 years ago. She sighed and said, “That poor novel.” I think Anthony’s onto something though . . . maybe I need to get a kid to steal some ideas from!

SS: How do you title your pieces? (Is it a process? Does it just come naturally? Are they usually relevant to the piece or irrelevant? Do you do it before? After? During?) 

AV: It depends on the story. Sometimes the title just sort of presents itself, ta-da, as you’re writing, but sometimes you finish a story and realize you are writing a Story That Has No Title. So, for example, one of the stories in my new collection, was titled “Story With a Gun in It,” which was the filename until I realized I couldn’t possibly call it that, and changed the title to “Time Apart Together” after I’d revised the story a few times. I once published a story under the title “Places of Comfort,” until a writing friend of mine said, “Dude, you cannot call a story ‘Places of Comfort.’” He was right; I changed the title.

HS: I title my stories after I’ve written them. I prefer titles that reveal a second meaning once one has read the story, titles that close a piece, like a coda. So I usually have to wait to figure out that part.

LP: I like titles that are voicey or idiosyncratic in some way, so it usually involves writing and understanding the language of my piece first. I often end up taking a line from the story itself. There are times, though, when I’ll just default to something sort-of-descriptive, but easy. One of my best experiences is when David Leavitt asked me to come up with a different title for a story. The previous title was really received -- something like “What She Left Behind,” and what David’s urging brought me to was “Underneath the Magnolia Trees When Magnolias Were in Bloom.” It has more words in it, which must mean it’s better, right?

SS: What is the most bizarre idea you have written about or thought of writing?

AV: That’s really hard to answer. I mean, all ideas seem pretty bizarre—or do I mean bad?—as you are writing them. The only thing I know is that if the idea seems somehow “unworthy” of being written about (hey, like two kids going to Rehoboth Beach!) that usually means it’s actually a pretty good idea for a story, but if the idea seems like a GREAT idea that everyone is sure to LOVE, that usually means you’re about to write a terrible story. It’s kind of cruel, when you think about it.

HS: I can’t be too forthcoming here because I’m still hoping to make several strange ideas I’ve found spellbinding for several years work in various pieces of fiction. But I will tell you that, as an undergraduate, I wrote very strange allegorical stories for my workshops, one of which ran to sixty pages (or would have, had I not handed it in 10 point font, and single-spaced--I was kind of a brat and feel I should go on apologizing): in one of these, four nearly identical figures make a road trip to California, only to discover, among many other things, that the state has fallen into the sea, and that, on the new western coastline, a very large orgy is underway.

Liz Prato

LP: Well, I’m instantly jealous of Hugh, because I seriously lack bizarre ideas. It’s a big fear of mine, that one of my greatest failings as a writer is my lack of imagination. I keep writing about the same themes -- love and loss -- again and again. There are no mystical portals or creatures which transmute, or really, any laws of the physical universe being broken. There is just someone losing someone they love and trying to figure out how to survive -- or not survive -- in that new world.

HS: It’s funny. I think writers who lean toward the visionary tend to envy writers who strive primarily for verisimilitude. In the end, though, I think the deep subjects Liz mentions tend to maintain pretty consistently across the spectrum between the visionary and the verisimilar, which disappear into each other anyway, or at least tend to in the literature I love most--the way Hemingway’s “The Killers,” to cherry-pick my example, reads as both a vaudeville act and a ‘realistic’ representation of possible events.

***
Check back here next week for part two!

Where are they now?: Mary Quade

Once you’ve appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, we’re never going to let you go! We love finding out what contributors have been up to since they’ve been in Hayden’s Ferry Review, and we feel a certain sense of pride and affection when we see them doing cool things (which they almost always are). Today, Sarah McCabe, one of our editorial assistants, catches up with Mary Quade, whose poem “To Bear” appeared in issue 48.

Sarah McCabe: Tell us a bit about “To Bear.” What inspired you to write this poem? Why polar bears?

Mary Quade: The manuscript I was working on was born of a fascination with the story of the passenger pigeons, those icons of extinction. Observing a flock on the Ohio River in 1813, John James Audubon wrote, “The air was literally filled with Pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse, the dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow; and the continued buzz of wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose.” A wonderful sight to imagine. One hundred years later, the last passenger pigeon died in the Cincinnati Zoo. When the Bush administration placed the polar bear on the Threatened Species list, but refused to enact any policies that would actually save it, i.e. reduction of greenhouse gases, I felt frustrated. We declare a species doomed, which allows us to ignore the problem and get on with our lives. We prefer the afterward, the autopsy of the disaster, to the sad story in progress; we’re essentially lazy and unwilling to take any steps to stop tragedy that isn’t directly our own. So the poem was an indictment of that mentality I think we’re all guilty of embracing, on levels both small and great. I love that we’re prey to polar bears, too. These aren’t pandas who nibble on bamboo and look defenseless. Polar bears will eat us, given a chance, and why not? The polar bear is sublime. I also just find the little facts about the bears ripe for metaphor.

SM: What about this poem surprised you as you wrote it?

MQ: These lines in the poem: “A walrus is twice the size, but/ this means nothing to me. What do trees/ missed by lightning know?” I was staring out my window, trying to figure out why I’m not in awe of the walrus in the same way, when lightning struck my front lawn, about twenty feet away from me. To me, that said it all. It was about missed inspiration, which is a smaller tragedy than extinction, but a similar sort of disregard for what’s outside of our immediate, selfish concerns.

SM: What kinds of responses to the poem did you receive after it was republished by Verse Daily?

MQ: I remember I got an email from a man who liked the poem but informed me that the polar bear recently has been increasing in number. But he missed the point. If the habitat is disappearing, if the future is in question, outside of the present, the current numbers are pretty irrelevant. I mean, where are they going to live?

SM: What is the hardest part about writing poetry?

MQ: Hard? Digging ditches is hard. Caring for sick people is hard. Writing poetry is sometimes a struggle, but it’s a pleasant struggle, an intellectual adventure, a puzzle to solve about one’s self. What’s difficult is finding someone else who wants to read your poem and think about your puzzle as well and maybe even share it with a few friends who find comfort or inspiration or awareness in it and, in doing so, make it a less useless exercise—so thank you for printing mine.

SM: What sorts of things do you find yourself obsessing over in your writing?

MQ: I obsess over etymology. I find the origins of words open up connections in meaning for me to explore between elements of a poem. For example, in my book Guide to Native Beasts, I have a poem titled “Cadaver” which grew out of discovering that the word cadaver may have come from the verb “to fall.” I’d observed a cadaver lab and felt a little guilty about digging around in the poor guy’s guts. I liked the echo between my wanting forgiveness for looking into the body and knowing its secrets and sins—that knowledge—and the sacrifice of the body as the mechanism for forgiveness, as in the crucifixion. I look up etymologies when I’m puzzling over words to use, places to go.

SM: What have you been up to since publication in HFR?

MQ: I’ve been mostly working on essays—about Superman and Cleveland; about mallard ducks who nest in my barn; about steam traction engines; about the kilogram; and about my recent travels to Vietnam, Turkey, and the Galapagos.

SM: What are you reading these days?

MQ: Just finished teaching Donovan Hohn’s epic environmental adventure Moby-Duck. I’m re-reading Muriel Rukeyser’s “Book of the Dead,” a poem that represents everything I wish I could do and that got me started writing poetry twenty years ago, and also Pat Moran’s fun collection of poetry Doppelgangster. I just started Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue.

SM: If you could spend a day with any literary figure in history, who would you choose, and what would you do?

MQ: I’d want to hang out for a day with Flannery O’Connor and her peafowl and then be her pen pal forever. If she wouldn’t let me, then I’d spend a day eating oysters on the half shell and drinking champagne with M.F.K Fisher until we had to stumble our separate ways.

***

Mary Quade is the author of Guide to Native Beasts. She’s been awarded an Oregon Literary Fellowship and two Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards. Her poems and essays have appeared recently in Fifth Wednesday Journal, Grist, Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment, West Branch, The Cincinnati Review, Wake: Great Lakes Thought and Culture, and Cold Mountain Review.

Where are they now?: Alison Stine

Today we continue our series of tracking down past contributors and getting them to tell us about themselves, their writing, and the love poems people write about them. This week, we hang out with Alison Stine, whose poems “Homer, Ohio” appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review 33.

Hayden’s Ferry Review: Tell us a little bit about “Homer, Ohio.”

Alison Stine: Homer is the name of a very small, rural town in Ohio that I used to pass through on my way from my parents’ house to my college. Right on the outskirts of the town, by the side of the road, was a farm that was falling into ruin. Every time I passed, it seemed to slip further: the house and barn needed more and more repairs; their tractors were set out for sale, then there was a sign advertising their horses—even their dogs. I saw two women walking through the long grass together. I assumed it was their farm, and two women farmers trying to make it in small town Ohio—and failing—seemed really sad to me. Over a period of several years the windows were boarded up, the roof collapsed, and the farm was abandoned.

Now I teach at the college in the summer so I make the drive every June, and the house and barn have been completely restored. Someone new is living there now, and I don’t look for them.

HFR: How about your first book, Ohio Violence? How does “Homer, Ohio” fit into the book?

AS: Ohio Violence is about a girl in a small town whose friend is killed, and she turns to the wrong people for support and love. “Homer, Ohio” was an aspect of Ohio I wanted to show: rural and ruinous. It’s also another example of a relationship not working; in this case, the relationship of the farmers to each other and of the farmers to the earth. No one helped them. I didn’t. I didn’t even stop, and turning away, turning aside—silent witness—happens again and again in Ohio Violence. We see but we don’t say anything. We know but never tell.

HFR: What have you been up to since your publication in HFR?

AS: My first two full-length books were published. I became a wife and parent. I bought a piano. I moved to California, New York, then Ohio. I taught at universities for a while, then returned to school to pursue my PhD, and I started working on more intensely on prose, fiction and nonfiction. My first book of essays has been a finalist in the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, and I’m in revisions on a novel.

HFR: Tell us a little bit about your second book of poems, WAIT. What’s the book like?

AS: WAIT was originally titled Persephone in Hell. The book still has a seasonal structure, starting with summer and going until spring. Everyone who read it agreed that Persephone was overdone, but I was thinking about her. I was thinking: What would have happened if she got out of Hades? Who do you date after the devil? Or what if hell was just a small Midwestern town? I had read Banner of Heaven. Child brides in Utah were on the news. I was thinking: What does a feminist marriage look like and not look like? How can a woman be herself, hold onto herself, and give of herself as well? So, poems about love, marriage, and hell, basically.

HFR: Any upcoming publications we should know about?

AS: WAIT came out last year from the University of Wisconsin Press. I have a third book of poems nearly done. New poems from this manuscript are forthcoming in Blackbird and Iron Horse Literary Review. One of the editors said the poems had an eerie quality she couldn’t figure out. They scare me too, but I’m attracted to what scares me, as a writer and a reader. I will say that this book is the closest to magical realism I’ve done so far. The poems are not set in this world.

HFR: What are you reading these days?

AS: I recently passed my PhD Comprehensive Exams, so to decompress from British modernism, I’ve been reading memoirs, something completely different: Just Kids by Patti Smith, Josser by Nell Stroud, Renee E. D’Aoust’s Body of a Dancer, Danielle Deulen’s The Riots. I also just finished the novels Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey and Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder. I crave narrative, apparently.

HFR: If someone were to write a poem about you, what would be the last line?

AS: Wow, good question! People have written poems about me, actually, so I’m going to let someone else take this one.

***

Alison Stine is the author of WAIT, winner of the Brittingham Prize (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), and Ohio Violence, winner of the Vassar Miller (University of North Texas Press, 2009).  A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and a recipient of the Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, Kenyon Review and others.  Her occasionally-updated blog can be found here.

Where Are They Now?: Teresa Milbrodt

Recently, we’ve been catching up with former contributors. This week, we spoke with Teresa Milbrodt, whose fiction appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review 38. Check out what she had to say about sideshow acts and extra limbs, as well as where you can find more of her work in the near future.

Hayden’s Ferry Review: Tell us a little bit about “Bianca’s Body,” your story about a woman with a second torso growing out of her stomach. Where’d the idea for the story come from? What intrigued you about it?

Teresa Milbrodt: When I got the idea for this story, I was reading books about the sideshows of the 1800s. In particular, I was intrigued by a photograph of a woman who had a parasitic twin attached to her side. Like Bianca, this parasitic twin was a lower torso and set of legs, but it was much smaller than Bianca is described in the story, about the size of a large doll.

The reading I did on the lives of sideshow performers made me wonder what would happen to such people in contemporary times, since that sort of exhibition isn't socially acceptable anymore (except perhaps on reality TV shows, which I consider to be a form of contemporary sideshow). “Bianca’s Body” was one of the first stories I wrote exploring the daily life of a woman who might have earned a living as a sideshow performer, but was born one hundred years too late.

The story is the first in my collection, Bearded Women: Stories, which focuses on characters who might be considered “freakish,” but who have very common social, economic, and relationship problems. Many of the stories in my book also question the contemporary definition of the “normal,” and why some people can be considered “normal” while others are considered “freakish.” Ultimately I wanted to break down that dichotomy, revealing the normal in the freakish, and the freakishness that exists within the normal.

HFR: Tell us a bit more about how that book that came about.

TM: “Bianca’s Body” was one of my first stories exploring what would happen to so-called “freaks” in contemporary society. I wrote a number of other stories with a similar theme, including ones about women with beards, a woman with four ears, a woman whose mother was half of a set of conjoined twins, and a woman who is considered a giantess. Over the course of five years, many of these stories were published in literary magazines. Once I had enough published works to constitute a book manuscript, I began submitting a draft of the collection to small presses. ChiZine was an excellent fit, because they specialize in fantasy, sci-fi, and slipstream fiction, and they also appreciate the literary bent of my work.

HFR: What else have you been up to since publication in HFR?

TM: I’m an assistant professor of Creative Writing and English at Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado. I’m working on a couple of novel projects, including a series of middle-grade novels, and an adult novel that expands on my story “Cyclops” which is in the Bearded Women collection.

HFR: Any upcoming publications we should know about?

TM: I’m going to have work coming out this summer in Indiana Review, as well as Denver Quarterly and the online magazine Exterminating Angel Press.

HFR: What are you reading these days?

TM: I just finished The Gift by Louis Hyde, which is an excellent book about gift economies and how creative artists fit in to that structure. I’m about to start reading an anthology of slipstream short stories called Feeling Very Strange, and I want to re-read Louise Erdrich’s fabulous novel The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse.

HFR: If you could have an extra body part, what would it be and why?

TM: Definitely an extra arm. It would be nice to type and sip coffee at the same time. I briefly considered an extra head so that I could write and sleep simultaneously, but I’d probably argue with myself too much and so it wouldn’t end up being terribly efficient.

Where are They Now?: Rachel Mennies

Have you ever picked up an old issue of Hayden’s Ferry Review, read one of your favorite stories or poems, and then thought to yourself, “I wonder what this writer is doing now?” Well, even if you haven’t, we’ve got the perfect solution: a new blog serial where we track down previous contributors and find out what’s going on in their lives and their writing.

This week, we pestered Rachel Mennies, whose poem “Barrenness is like a Large, Hungry Gull” was published in Hayden's Ferry Review #48.

Hayden’s Ferry Review: Tell us a little bit about “Barrenness is like a Large, Hungry Gull.”

Rachel Mennies: This poem started with the title simile, which came into my head whole like some sort of absurd joke. And I chased after the punch line—I wanted to know why A was like B, why my brain put this information together. It was one of the rare (for me) poems that requires only minimal revision once the first draft comes together. After the simile took root, I started toying with it. What would it be like to live with this wild animal in your home, situated between you and another person: a frustration that cannot be resolved because its origins are inherent, seemingly unfixable to the speaker? And the sonnet form felt natural to me for this piece, since the poem pivots between stanzas and shoots outward—how many others must have this same wild frustration? Am I alone in my suffering?

It’s also rare for me, and I wonder if it should be so rare, to play with fantasy, the sort of magic that’s present in the bird. The speaker sees this creature as very real, and it feels real to me: it takes over their house, growing to fill it and ever hungry.

HFR: You’ve got a chapbook called No Silence in the Fields out from Blue Hour Press. Tell us a little bit about working with them and the release of your chapbook.

RM: Working with Blue Hour Press, besides “just” being an all-around wonderful experience, has provided me with an imperative education in online publishing. The Press is doing work that I think is crucially important right now, especially for the chapbook form in particular: making digital documents that are as beautiful as their print counterparts, yet are easier to circulate and distribute. They’re doing it well at a time when many digital reproductions of poetry have failed (especially at the outset of the e-book).

The release has become more of a process than a one-off reveal, which has also proven a positive experience—getting the word out and watching the collection move around the Internet. I’ve already been having conversations with readers about it, both with friends/colleagues and with “strangers,” and those conversations have provided the best part of the publishing process thus far. I was able to share the first release news with folks at AWP, and I also had the opportunity to read from the chapbook last week at my alma mater, Penn State. That sort of homecoming, and the visibility of support that a reading gives, is quite affirming.

HFR: What’s the story behind the chapbook? How does “Barrenness” fit in to the collection?

RM: The chapbook makes a narrative study of two characters as they move into a barn in rural Massachusetts and hope to have a child. “Barrenness” comes early in the collection, providing a chance for the female character to express the depths of her frustrations with her body. This was one of the earliest poems in the chapbook: one of the poems from which many others emerged, one where I realized this character had more to say.

I’ve found myself, of late, thinking a great deal about a woman’s body: what it means to have one, certainly in today’s political climate; what it means to depend on one; what it means for one to fail. The female speaker in No Silence has a failed body, in that she wishes it into fertility and it cannot grant her what she wishes. This complication, since it cannot drive her from her body, drives her from her partner. I think, through her, I am still looking to understand fully what it means to possess the powers and failures that my own body surely also encompasses.

HFR: What else has been going on with you since your publication in Hayden’s Ferry? Any upcoming publications we should know about?

RM: I moved from central to western Pennsylvania last summer, and now I can claim onetime residence in all parts of PA (I’m from the Philadelphia area). Philly is my home, but I love Pittsburgh—my home for now. It’s a wonderful city to write in.

I’ve also been working on new poems and sending out work from a different, full-length manuscript. It all feels very cyclical: some new work coming in, some finished work going out. Indiana Review published a poem from No Silence in the Fields recently, and other poems have come out in the last year from Witness, Linebreak, and Cream City Review. And, in keeping with the earlier conversation about digital publishing, Sycamore Review, who published a chapbook poem about a year or so ago, will soon publish online a recording of me reading this poem. So now the Internet can hear poems from No Silence as well as read them—in reaction to which I can do nothing but celebrate.

HFR: What are you reading these days?

RM: Every spring (and here in Pittsburgh, it feels already like late spring—joyous and strange at the same time) I come back to Tony Hoagland’s “A Color of the Sky:”

…Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;

overflowing with blossomfoam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,

dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,

so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It’s been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.

The trees around our apartment are already shedding the same blossoms they’ve suddenly sprouted: they’re as shocked as we are that it’s spring already, and they’re unprepared to sustain themselves. When I see them, I hear this poem.

I’ve also found myself re-reading several contemporary women poets: Linda Pastan, Mary Oliver, Wislawa Szymborska. I admire the boldness of these women writers, and of other contemporary women poets like them—a boldness that feels intrinsic, because it is so honest and so good.

HFR: If you were a superhero, what would your powers be and what would be your only weakness?

RM: I’d take the power of flight—or the ability to make really good Mexican food. Truly, what I find myself wishing for daily is, always, for more time. So maybe my superhero self could make tamales and edit a poem at once…my weakness, of course, is also really good Mexican food.

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Rachel Mennies is the reviews editor at AGNI. Her work has recently appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Linebreak, Cimarron Review, Indiana Review, and Witness. She won the Leonard Steinberg/Academy of American Poets Prize and received her MFA in Poetry from Penn State, both in 2011. She currently lives in Pittsburgh and works for the University of Pittsburgh.

Where Are They Now?: A New Hayden's Ferry Blog Serial

Have you ever picked up an old issue of Hayden’s Ferry Review, read one of your favorite stories or poems, and then thought to yourself, “I wonder what this writer is doing now?” Well, even if you haven’t, we’ve got the perfect solution: a new blog serial where we track down previous contributors and find out what’s going on in their lives and their writing.

This week, we figuratively sat down with Shara Lessley, whose poem “Fallen Starling” appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review #35. Let’ see what she had to say!

Hayden’s Ferry Review: Tell us a little bit about “Fallen Starling.”

Shara Lessley: “Fallen Starling” was written during my first year of the Stegner Fellowship, although I discovered the unfledged bird while living in Alexandria, Virginia. I suppose I should have given it a proper burial. Instead, I watched its tiny remains evolve over several days. When it came to writing the poem, I couldn’t resist the obvious tensions: an “unliving” thing reanimated by the combination of erosion and weather, by scavengers and the simple fact of time. All the while, the bird’s one good eye (I believe the other was missing) darting up, fixed in self-study -- as if in denial of, and yet completely fascinated by, its own undoing. I’ve always found that if you meditate on the literal long enough, it transforms. That’s what happened with “Fallen Starling.” After thinking about the bird for an extended period of time, I couldn’t help but discover its metaphorical possibilities.

HFR: Have you written more poems about birds? Or things fallen from the sky?

SL: Thomas Lux once confessed he’d received endless jars of maraschino cherries after publishing “Refrigerator, 1957” (“...you do not eat / that which rips your heart with joy”). Those familiar with my work have given me an antique, peacock-lidded ink jar; Small Deaths, Kate Breakly’s post-mortem photographs of the natural world; as well as a tiny glass box identified as a “bird coffin.” When a friend texted “this made me think of you,” along with a photo of an ant-eaten finch she’d found half-devoured beside her doorstep, I knew it was time to reconsider my relationship with winged things! I’m not a birder by any means. I’m lousy at species identification. The title of my book, however, is telling. Although Two-Headed Nightingale features poems on dismantled sparrows as well as taxidermied hummingbirds housed in the Harvard Museum of Natural History, the collection also includes other expressions of flight. The title phrase, for example, not only gestures toward Keats’s “immortal bird,” but is also the 19th C. stage name of conjoined songstresses Christine and Millie McCoy.

HFR: What sort of things do you find yourself obsessing over in your writing?

SL: I obsess about what isn’t working. When I was an undergrad at UC Irvine and just starting to piece together half-formed lines and stanzas, James McMichael advised (warned?) our workshop that poets must think of everything. He went so far as to say that one misstep -- down to the syllable -- destroys a poem. That’s a lot for any twenty-one-year-old to handle, especially one who, as Merwin writes in “Berryman,” “had hardly begun to read.” Still, tough as it was to hear at the time, McMichael’s words are ones I carry with me.

HFR: What else has been going on with you since you were published in Hayden’s Ferry? What are you working on?

SL: A lot! Moves to New York, Maryland, Wisconsin, North Carolina. Lots of packing, unpacking, repacking. In 2009, my husband and I relocated to Amman, Jordan. It’s an absolutely fascinating time to live in the Middle East, given Arab Spring and the political changes sweeping the region. It’s also very interesting to read Western media coverage of what’s happening here on the ground. During our stay, I’ve been fortunate to experience the richness of the country’s cultural, historical, and geographical offerings. The lost city of Petra, Wadi Rum’s red deserts, floating in the Dead Sea, Jerash’s Roman ruins, the gorge and waterfalls of Wadi Mujib -- each of these is an adventure in itself. The people here are generous and inviting. I feel lucky to have this time and place in which to write.

The Middle East (and Jordan in particular) figures heavily in my current project, tentatively titled The Explosive Expert’s Wife. The manuscript includes poems that take place in average homes in Amman and along Golan Heights, for example, as well as stateside settings like the FBI crime lab and the Unabomber’s Montana cabin. I’ve been struggling for months to finish a narrative poem about Flaubert’s tour of Egypt. Who knows how that will turn out...  

HFR: What are you reading these days?

SL: Street signs, billboards, food labels -- since moving to the Middle East, I find immense pleasure in sounding out even the most basic words in Arabic. I studied the language somewhat intensely for about a year, but needed to take a break following the birth of my son. Arabic is both difficult and beautiful -- the alphabet itself is an artful series of valleys and peaks. Silly as it sounds, I love walking through the grocery store and testing myself: can I read the Arabic equivalents for pomegranate, yogurt, black pepper, salmon, and lamb? 

As for literature, I just finished re-reading Wallace Stegner’s wonderful novel, Crossing to Safety, and have moved on to Lysley Tenorio’s Monstress. This spring, I hope to take on Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad and finish Tablet & Pen, an anthology of Middle Eastern literature edited by Reza Aslan. I’m always reading poetry -- lately, it’s been Henri Cole, Marianne Moore (again and again!), Tracy K. Smith, Louise Bogan. I can’t wait to get Bruce Snider's new collection, Paradise, Indiana. It feels like I'm always waiting for Terrance Hayes or Brigit Pegeen Kelly to publish something new.

HFR: Any upcoming publications we should know about?

SL: My book, Two-Headed Nightingale, is now available. Poems from The Explosive Expert’s Wife appear in a recent issue of The Missouri Review and on Poetry Daily. Others are forthcoming in places like jubilat and The New England Review. My essay on ballet and Elizabeth Bishop will appear in The Southern Review’s summer issue – I’m pretty excited about that.

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Shara Lessley is the author of Two-Headed Nightingale. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry, her most recent awards include an Artist Fellowship from the State of North Carolina, the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship, the Tickner Fellowship, and a  “Discovery”/The Nation prize. You can find her at innsarenotresidencies.blogspot.com.

Got a previous contributor in mind who you think we should catch up with? Email samuelmartone@gmail.com and let us know!