Kyle McCord and Nick Courtright Southwest Reading Tour--May 14 in Phoenix!

Kyle McCord (who had a poem in HFR52) and Nick Courtright will be reading tomorrow (Wednesday), May 14th at 11th Monk3y Industries at 7 PM with alum Bojan Luis!

Nick Courtright is the author of Let There Be Light, out now from Gold Wake Press, and Punchline, a 2012 National Poetry Series finalist. His work has appeared in The Southern Review, AGNI, Boston Review, and Kenyon Review Online, among numerous others, and a chapbook, Elegy for the Builder’s Wife, is available from Blue Hour Press. He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, Michelle, and sons, William and Samuel; also, he teaches writing and literature at Concordia University.

Kyle McCord is the author of five books of poetry including You Are Indeed an Elk, But This is Not the Forest You Were Born to Graze (Gold Wake 2015) and Gentle, World, Gentler (Ampersand Books 2015). He has work featured in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly and elsewhere, and has received grants from the Academy of American Poets, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Baltic Writing Residency. He co-edits iO: A Journal of New American Poetry and American Microreviews and Interviews and teaches at the University of North Texas in Denton where he runs the Kraken Reading Series.

Interview with David James Poissant

On Tuesday, March 18^th at 8 p.m., writer and Hayden’s Ferry Review contributor David James Poissant will be giving a reading at The Tavern on Mill (404 S. Mill Ave.) from his debut book, The Heaven of Animals, a collection of short stories. The Heaven of Animals will be available for purchase at the reading, courtesy of ASU Bookstores.

Poissant teaches in the MFA Creative Writing program at the University of Central Florida, and his stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Chicago Tribune, Glimmer Train, The New York Times, Playboy, and Ploughshares, among others. His work has been awarded the Matt Clark Prize, the George Garrett Fiction Award, the RopeWalk Fiction Chapbook Prize, and the Alice White Reeves Memorial Award from the National Society of Arts & Letters. His story “The Hand Model” appeared in HFR52.

With The Heaven of Animals just released, Poissant is already hard at work on his first novel, Class, Order, Family, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster. Jake Adler recently had an opportunity to speak with Poissant about his work as he travels the country on his book tour.

Jake Adler: What are the central themes of Heaven of Animals? What ties your collection of short stories together?

David James Poissant: Well, while there are a number of animals that wander through the stories, I feel like the central themes include love, loss, and atonement. Many of the narrators in these stories are seeking to right a wrong, to atone for something they've done—some cruelty to a family member or loved one. I'm really interested in the ways by which we hurt those we love most, sometimes on purpose, though often without meaning to. There is a decent dose of tragedy in the book, but humor too, and hope. My hope is that some hope shines through!

JA: How long have you been working with the book and what inspired the collection? Did writing one story prompt or inspire you to write another? Do you have a favorite story from Heaven of Animals?

DJP: I wrote the earliest story from the collection in 2004, and I finished the final revisions on the book in 2013, so I guess you could say that the collection took me nine years. But that's a little misleading, since, during that time, I also wrote and published another twenty stories and several essays, plus began work on the book that will be my first novel. I wouldn't say that I have a favorite story from the collection. I think that it depends on the day and my mood. I know from giving lots of readings that “100% Cotton” and “What the Wolf Wants” make for the best out-loud reading experiences for audiences. Otherwise, I don't know. Picking a favorite feels like trying to decide which of my kids I like best!

JA: What can you tell me about your forthcoming novel? How have you approached it differently than Heaven of Animals? How do you know when a story is becoming a novel, rather than simply a short story?

DJP: So, I wrote “Venn Diagram” and “Wake the Baby,” two of the stories in The Heaven of Animals, with no plans to return to those characters. But I just couldn’t shake them. The novel picks up about thirty-five years later. Richard Starling is a physicist. Lisa Starling is an ornithologist. They’ve spent the bulk of their careers at Cornell and enjoyed summers at their lake house in North Carolina. Their sons, Michael and Thad, are now grown and in their thirties. Michael is a pharmaceutical rep married to an elementary school art teacher. They live in Texas. Thad lives with his boyfriend, an up-and-coming painter, in Brooklyn. Then, one summer, Lisa calls her sons out of the blue to inform them that she and Richard are retiring early and that the lake house (which was always supposed to stay in the family) will be sold. The sons and their partners are summoned to North Carolina for a final week together as family, and, as tends to happen whenever family gets together for a week, things get tense. When a tragedy strikes the lake community, it reverberates through the lives of these six characters in a way that causes them to question not only why they’ve come here, but what comes next and whether they still want what they thought they wanted when the week began.

It’s a long novel (growing ever longer) told in six roving, third person, limited omniscient viewpoints. I think that I always knew that it would be a novel, just based on the scope of the story I wanted to tell, which felt larger than the constraints of a story or novella-length work.

JA: As a Creative Writing MFA professor at the University of Central Florida, what sort of trends do you see rising among young writers today? What do your students tend to struggle with most, and what have they done that has surprised you?

DJP: What's great about the writing in MFA programs today is that I don't see many "trends." People sometimes worry that MFA programs churn out writers who all sound the same, but that hasn't been my perspective, at least not based on my limited experience. I have students writing stories and novels, magic realism and psychological realism, tragedy and comedy, and everything on the spectrum from traditional to very experimental. It really runs the gamut, which is great. We have good students here, hardworking and committed writers. It's really an honor to get to work with them.

JA: What advice could you offer Creative Writing undergraduates or young writers seeking to apply for MFA programs?

DJP: Getting into MFA programs is getting harder and harder. My best advice is this: You can't charm or joke your way into a program with your cover letter. Better to take it seriously and be professional about it. Likewise, reference letters are important, but they seldom make or break an application. I'd say that 95% of the decision on who gets in at UCF (and, by extension, probably most MFA programs) comes down to the writing sample. Put forward your best, most polished work. Really, the secret is that there is no secret. We're all just looking for the best writers we can find. And, of course, that decision is subjective, so best to cast a wide net. For example, when I applied to programs in 2004, I applied to twelve and only got into one, the University of Arizona. But, if the program's the right program for you, all you need is one.

Winners of the Elementary Writing Contest (4 of 4)!

We’re sad to say that today we will be posting the final winners from the HFR-hosted Elementary Creative Writing Contest. See how these two, talented seventh graders at Dobson Montessori School used Caleb Charland’s “Silhouette with Matches” (from HFR52) as a foundation to delve into much deeper and unexpected interpretations. These stories are a poignant finish to the eclectic group of submissions we received.

We would like to extend a special shout-out to the nearly 100 emerging writers from 1st-8th grade who submitted their work to the contest, as well as the educators encouraging these students to keep writing, and keep creating.

By Sydney:
Panic, screams, and fear were everywhere. New York quickly filled with blinding smoke and blistering flames. Mayhem and commotion came from the falling tower. Filthy ash and crumbling rubble flooded the streets of the Big Apple. Sirens began and the brave firefighters swarmed the streets. People wailed for help.

There I sat in the middle of the chaos, thinking I was in a dream. Reality didn’t set in until a police officer started yelling at me. I felt safe and sheltered with the officer. We began running through the streets that once were filled with joyful tourists, but now were filled with pieces of the World Trade Center. Smoke and ash obscured my vision, and I could no longer see the heroic cop. Panic set in. I began shrieking for help as I searched for him, getting more and more frightened. I started sprinting through the streets of the Big Apple when I tripped over a piece of the debris, and I tumbled to the ground. My mind was blank as I lay there with an expressionless face.

I soon heard a deafening sound, and rubble began crashing to the ground: the second tower had been hit. Pieces of flying wreckage began to fall near me, and I started to slowly crawl. Once I stood up, I started to run towards the bridge to get out of the city. Blazing flames surrounded me. It looked like fire crackers on the fourth of July. All I could see was a silhouette of a fearless firefighter running towards me in the middle of the flames. He picked me up and sprinted towards the bridge, his hands strong and determined. Once we were safely to the bridge, he told me to find shelter nearby. So there I ran, across the bridge and left Mayhem Manhattan.

By Claire:
This was the day I laughed and the day I cried.

I was six years-old at the time. It was my so-called “wonderful summer vacation.” But like life, you have your good days and you have your bad days. I awoke to the sound of my mom and aunt crying. I was staying at Mimi’s house in Ohio. I called my grandma Mimi back then, and still do. I liked staying at Mimi’s house because she had a secret garden hidden in her backyard where my little cousin and I pretended we were fairies, and where we would tell each other our deepest secrets. I crept down the stairs and peeked around the corner, and saw my mom, aunt, and Mimi standing in the kitchen. My mom had her hands over her eyes. I ran up to hug her and ask her what was wrong, but then I saw an American flag out of the corner of my eye. I remembered it was the Fourth of July.

I asked my mom where Uncle Rick was so that I could tell him it was the Fourth of July. Uncle Rick was one of the kindest uncles I had. He was very different than most people, but I loved him. My mom looked at my with an expression of sadness on her face. “Honey, Uncle Rick passed away,” she said. I looked up at my mom with tears in my eyes and hugged her tightly. The hug lasted for a long time. Then, I ran outside into the secret garden, and sat on the bench there. I didn’t know what to think. I couldn’t process it. I sat out there for a long time, so long that I fell asleep.

I woke up in my bed. I looked at the clock and saw that it was 5:30 p.m. I walked downstairs. All of my family was gathered around the house, hugging my mom, aunt, and Mimi, telling them how sorry they were. All of a sudden, I heard the booming sound of fireworks. I ran outside and saw that my little cousin had two sparklers in her hand. She gave me one. I smiled at her and we went running. We were laughing and blissful. Soon, we were in the secret garden and were jumping and flapping our wings like fairies. I stopped jumping, and looked up at the sky. I felt truly happy. Then, a firework popped in the sky. As it fell to the ground, I saw my Uncle Rick standing inside the firework. At that moment, I felt so peaceful and happy that I knew I would remember him forever. I didn’t feel sad anymore, because I knew that my Uncle Rick was shining in the sky like a blazing firework.

Winners of the HFR Elementary Writing Contest! (3 of 4)

We hope you are enjoying these student stories as much as we are! Just as we promised last time, here are three more winning stories from Meera, Zane, and Holly of Dobson Montessori School. Remember, these stories are all in response to Caleb Charland’s “Silhouette With Matches” (found below), featured in HFR #52.

By Meera, first grade
Once upon a time, there were very weird fireworks. Suddenly, they turned into fire. Then a magical creature popped out. In a low-toned, growling voice, he said, “I will offer you three wishes.”

I asked, “Can one of them be for my friend?”

“Okay,” he said, “but only one.”

I said, “Okay, but can I do it tomorrow?”

“No, no, no!” he said.

I said, “Okay, okay, okay!”

“I see in your mind that you want a giant bowl of ice cream,” he said. Then it just appeared.

“No, no, no. I didn’t want it, I was just thinking of it!”

He said in a grouchy voice, “Then what do you want?”

“Why are you mad at me?”

“I’m not mad at you!”

I said, “Okay, chillax, monster.”

“I’m not a monster!”

“I meant to say weird creature. Now, now, now, stop yelling at me.”

He said, “Okay. I’m sorry.”

I wished for a cute puppy and a cute little cat. For my friend, I wished for her to have a happy family.

The End.

By Zane, fourth grade
Once there was a man who lived in a cabin in a very pretty forest. The man’s name was Josh. Josh had brown hair and he was in his thirties.

One day, Josh was on a walk through the forest. He walked for a long time, but something seemed wrong about this walk, even though he had walked through this same forest many times. Josh kept walking because he knew that if he just kept following the dirt trail, he would find a house with people in it to guide him.

Josh didn’t find any houses anywhere, but he did find a castle at the end of the path! He got to the castle and knocked on the gate. The gate flew open and a wizard was there. “What do you want?” asked the Wizard.

“I’m lost and I’m hoping you can help me find my way home,” Josh said.

“Okay, fine, but you have to make one sacrifice. You will be invisible forever.”

“Why can’t you just give me the directions and let me go?” said Josh.

“I was going to instantly transport you there.”

“Oh, okay,” said Josh.

“Now, you must go into that fireplace. Say the name of where you want to go, and it will take you there. So go, before you miss the Fourth of July fireworks!” said the Wizard.

“It’s the Fourth of July?”

“Yes, now go! Quick! Before you miss the fireworks!”

Josh ran up to the fireplace, and said the name of where he wanted to go. He walked into the fireplace, and at once, his body hit the ground. He looked at himself and around him. The wizard was right: he was now invisible. Josh ran to an open field, and then he could see the fireworks.

By Holly, fifth grade
There was a young boy named Tommy. He was very interested in fire, and he loved anything having to do with fire and bright stuff. Then he grew older and turned thirty years old.

Today was the Fourth of July, his favorite holiday. Tommy was going to go watch the fireworks, which were probably his favorite thing. When he got there, it was five minutes until the show was going to start. Tommy thought to himself how he had to find a way to figure out how fireworks work. When the show started, he got up from his seat and went behind the tent to find the fireworks, where he could watch and learn. He saw the fireworks shooter, where they launched the fireworks, which were just shooting out one after the other. He thought it was just amazing. He just stood and watched. He watched as the fireworks flew high in the sky. He began to move closer and closer to the fireworks shooter until he was right in front of it. The shooter was so powerful that it knocked him down and he ended up being knocked unconscious.

When he woke up, he looked behind him and could still see the fireworks. He thought that this was the longest firework show he had ever seen! He started to walk back, but realized that no one was there. He looked everywhere. He could still see the fireworks coming out of the shooter. He turned around, and there was the most incredible display of fireworks he had ever seen. The ground even seemed to be covered with fire, but he did not understand how he could be standing in the fire.

Tommy also did not understand who was shooting off the fireworks. He realized he was dead, and no one was shooting off the fireworks. They were just going off on their own. He got to live in a place where there were fireworks all the time, around every day. He felt lucky to get to be where he could see his favorite thing all the time.

Winners of the HFR Elementary School Writing Contest (1 of 4)

compiled by Marissa Grondin

In not so many words, Flannery O’Connor once commented that anybody with a childhood has enough insight and introspection to last them a lifetime. With that said, some talented elementary students are proving that they have enough stories to fill an entire book (or two, or three).

We thought it would be cool to revive a blog feature that had been dormant for quite some time: Stories Inspired by HFR. So, we contacted the faculty at two local Arizona elementary schools to see if they might be interested in asking their students to submit a creative piece in response to artwork featured in previous issues. Lucky for us, they agreed—we are proud to post the winners of the first HFR-hosted Elementary Creative Writing Contest here.

To kick us off, here are two stories from third grade students at Legacy Traditional School in Gilbert, Arizona, both written in response to Caleb Charland’s “Silhouette with Matches” (image below), which was featured artwork in HFR #52. And stay tuned in the coming week for more winning stories from the students at Dobson Montessori School in Mesa, Arizona!

By Katie:
A long time ago in a cool place far, far away lived a little girl, about nine years-old, named Katany. She went to a school called Creative Learning. One day at recess, she was running down the sidewalk when she stopped to glance at the small spot she was at. Suddenly, something shiny caught her eye. She ran over to find a small, sparkling crystal shimmering in the bright sunlight.

“What the what?” Katany said in surprise. The crystal said, Please Activate. She picked it up and ran to the girls’ room.

“Hey, Tianna,” she said. “How are you?”

“Huh?” Tiana wondered. She heard a voice, but did not see anyone.

“I’m over here!” Katany said. She waved, but instead zapped Tiana. Katany ran over and put her small hands on Tiana. Zap! Tiana stood back up.

“Whoa! What happened?” Tiana stood back up.

“I saved you!” Katany yelled, only now Tiana could not hear her either. Katany looked in the mirror. She saw nothing but a figure her size with glittering, golden waterfalls shooting out of it. Suddenly, the waterfalls turned off, and she was not invisible anymore.

Katany stuffed the crystal back into her pocket and ran to her best friend, Kennedy. She whispered what had just happened. “Maybe you’ll get an awesome power too one day, and then we’ll save the enormous world! Imagine that!” Katany said.

“Hey! We should call you Watergold,” Kennedy shouted excitedly.

“Okay!” Katany answered, and then together they made a plan to save the enormous world.

By Annalise:
Once there was a ten-year-old boy named Mike. Mike was very adventurous and he loved porcupines! Mike had five brothers, seven sisters, and one best friend. When finally reaching his eleventh birthday, his mom told him that he could go into the backyard forest. So off he went! He grabbed his supersonic binoculars and his red and brown metal telescope.

First, he saw a gray squirrel and a blue jay, and then he saw a moose, deer, and, last of all, he saw a coyote. After walking for about thirty minutes, he felt the ground start to shake just a little. He also felt something that felt like a really sharp needle, but actually was a quill from a porcupine. In a few seconds, he turned invisible, and all the quills were shining. It was like he was the king!

He went home and his family was horrified, but he calmed them, and then they were fine. He tried to get himself back to normal, but unfortunately he couldn’t. He grew up trying to make friends, but didn’t. Then, one day, he met the friendliest girl in the world, and they got married and lived happily ever after.

The End.

Hayden's Ferry Pushcart Prize Nominations

We are so pleased to announce our Pushcart Prize Nominations this year!

From issue 52:
“News from Harlem” by Kwame Dawes (poem)

“The Lonely Hearts” by Rubem Fonseca, translated by Colin Rorrison (fiction)

“This is Why the Monster Stays” by Susan L. Lin (fiction)

From issue 53:
“Phrenology: An Attempt” by Chelsea Biondolillo (essay)

“Strawberries” by Staci R. Schoenfeld (poem)

From A Man: Klaus Klump by Gonçalo M. Tavares, translated by Rhett McNeil (fiction)

Contributor Spotlight: Caitlin Bailey

Margarethe Trakl, 1892-1917




There’s a kind of clarity in writing to you, in inhabiting that reality from these 21st century rooms. I’m drawn to this unattainability. I imagine you in every poem: stiff dress, fair skin, pouch kept filled with powders. You become my charm, my unluck, the only path through. I know how to love impossibility, to clutch what’s ephemeral, fleeting, how to not let go. Suffering in an act we've perfected. To be wrecked by anything we touch. Selfishly I live inside you, take up residence in your hands until words appear on the page. Here I can finally say that. And what could I do but write? My imperfect reverence. I invent the rooms you lived in, fill them with trinkets, the clothes you might have worn. I might never know your eye color. The cut of your favorite dress. The last sonata you played. Forgive me when I get it wrong. Perhaps this is your greatest trick: convincing me to write your story. Finally creating a world you could own. Wise Grete, always already in my bones.

***

Caitlin Bailey served as Water~Stone Review’s 2012 Assistant Poetry Editor. Her work has previously appeared in or is forthcoming from Bateau, Paper Darts, Lumina, Poetry City, USA, Vol. 2, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. She has three excellent poems in HFR52.

Contributor Spotlight: Zana Previti

A few weeks ago, I woke up very early and sat down in a nearly empty coffee shop. It was the beginning of a day I intended to devote entirely to writing, and to working on a few tricky passages that I had been avoiding. I desperately needed to concentrate. Desperately! A woman came in, ordered a cappuccino, and seated herself next to me. I stared at my screen, scribbled, typed, deleted, typed again. She opened her newspaper. And then she began to read. Out loud.

Look, I’m a nice person. Sort of. I wave to other runners when I’m running. I help elderly passengers with their overhead luggage. I tip. But when I’m writing – or, heck, even thinking about writing – I’m kind of a jerk. At that coffee shop, where I had gone seeking some quiet, some caffeine, some productivity, I looked up, turned my head, and I glared at that woman. She did not notice. I cleared my throat, furrowed my brows, glared a little harder. She kept reading. I ALL BUT GROWLED AT HER. She soldiered on.

The complication? I love reading. I love, particularly, being read to. I associate the act of reading aloud with the sensation of feeling loved. When I was very small, I would run upstairs after my bath, and scramble under my covers because I knew that the more quickly I was in bed, the more quickly my father would climb the stairs, choose a book, and read to me until I fell asleep. It was the best part of my day. It was the best part of my life. Stories were love, and reading stories aloud was the way we communicated love. But of course, one day I grew up, and I outgrew being read to.

When you read a story, you are distracted from your own life. But when someone reads aloud to you, you are more than merely distracted. You give up control. You hand over the reins: their speed is your speed, their emotion is your emotion; their voice is the voice in your head. It is a surrender, I suppose, but not a pathetic or desperate sort of surrender. It is a willful giving over of every intellectual weapon we usually use to either defend ourselves from the world or to attack it. Depending on our positions of the field, I guess.

No one reads to me, anymore. I’m thirty years old. I teach; I read aloud to my students. I compensate, albeit in a technological way. I listen to audiobooks on long car rides. I download podcasts for the airport. I attend readings and lectures. Sometimes I can even goad someone into reading aloud to me, even if it is just a paragraph or two. It’s a very small tragedy, that you outgrow the privilege of hearing a story told for you, only you. When the woman in the coffee shop begins to read aloud, you fidget, you glare, you sigh in impatience.

I wrote a story a while back, a fairly dark story set in a dystopian future. It was a sad and violent story, and as I revised it I knew that it was too violent, too dark. And the thing that could use to assuage the sadness and the violence – maybe not all of it, but some of it – was to allow the whole story to be someone speaking aloud, telling us a story. I revised it, sent it to Hayden’s Ferry, and they took a chance on it. That story, “The Union Made,” is in Issue 52.

I learned, when I was a child, that reading stories was a way to communicate love. One day, I outgrew the girl, the one to whom people read stories. So now, I write those stories, for others to read, and read aloud.

***

Zana Previti was born and raised in New England, but now collects MFA degrees on the West Coast. You can find her most recent story, “The Union Made,” in HFR #52. She lives in Northern California, and is hurrying to finish up her first novel.

Contributor Spotlight: David Ryan

“The Man with the Boat” is a chapter from a novel-in-progress whose idea came from a conversation about the worst jobs a friend and I’d ever had. Jobs so bad they attracted people who couldn’t really work anywhere else—cash-under-the-table people who were running from the law or who’d immigrated to the U.S. illegally. Others were simply dodging any of a million terrible choices they’d made, or that life had made for them. Choices few of them would probably ever paddle back from. Throughout my life, these people have been the best storytellers, and the conversation between my friend and I turned to the stories we’d heard these co-workers tell us, back then, about the worst jobs they’d ever had. Jobs whose circumstances were a rung or two deeper in the inferno. Jobs so bad that they didn’t seem possible.

In one sense the nameless main character in this story is a composite of all these people I once knew—many of whose names I’ve forgotten, a few of whose I haven’t. But very little from that conversation between my friend and I ends up in this story. The truth is, even in the earliest drafts, various anxieties from my own life began falling into place, entering this nameless guy’s life. I’m a new father, for one thing. The image of an infant swaddled, cocooned here, is drawn from a photograph taken just after my daughter was born, wrapped in the hospital blanket. Other personal details get displaced and condensed in the story, enough that the dreamlike, ghastly strangeness of this man’s life feels, to me, entirely reified and personal. Of course that's inescapable with writing fiction—I think most writers find themselves inside what they’ve written, even when it’s a story entirely apart from their own day-to-day experience. I suspect the displacement of ourselves, whether we think we intend it or not, is much of the point.

***
David Ryan’s fiction has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Fence, BOMB, Tin House, The Encyclopedia Project, failbetter.com, Unsaid, Booth, Denver Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, New Orleans Review, several Mississippi Review Prize issues, Nerve, Cimarron Review, Salt Hill, and Hobart, among others. His work has been anthologized in Flash Fiction Forward (WW Norton), The Mississippi Review: 30, and Boston Noir 2: The Classics (Akashic).

Contributor Spotlight: John A. Nieves

I was honored and excited to find out that another of my poems, “Apogee,” had found a home at HFR. “Apogee” is a very important poem in my forthcoming book, Curio (Elixir Press early 2014). It begins the second section (Talismans). The poem is an anti-sonnet that tries to recreate the imagined tale of a real fossilized dead bat, referred to by tour guides as “Splat Bat,” in Osage Caverns, Missouri. When I first saw the tiny and relatively new fossil and learned that the creature had starved and dropped on the spot, I knew I would at least attempt to tell its story. I believe nearly all poems are tiny acts of empathy. The section of my book the poem introduces deals with the way folk tales and stories create empathetic bonds with those who share them, how they resonate, how they mean. Some of these tales are well known, some obscure, some personally generated. In fact, the poem “One Booth Over,” which originally appeared in HFR 49, appears later in the section. I hope in some small way I have dignified the death of that little bat more than its very playful nickname has.

The other three sections of my book also take on the meaning of the things we collect and hold close to ourselves in order to better understand and cope with the world around us. Section one, Specimens, deals with personal memories and discoveries. The third section, Grave Goods, deals with the absences and enshrinements caused by people and things lost. The final section, Correspondences, deals with the relationships we collect and move through as a lens—a sort of epistemological alchemy—in which we transmute what we choose and experience into what we know.

Last night, I was reading through back issues of HFR and I was struck with how many poems have nuggets of mythos and epistemology. I went to other fine journals I subscribe to. The proportion was far less. Perhaps this is what draws me to HFR as I wait with anticipation for each issue. Hopefully, some of you (fellow HFR lovers) will check out and enjoy my new book when it makes its debut. Finally, I would like to thank the HFR staff and all the fine contributing writers for the inspiration they have provided through the years. Oh, and if you dig the poem, please visit my website johnanieves.com for links to some others on the publications page.

***
John A. Nieves has poems forthcoming or recently published in journals such as: Beloit Poetry Journal, Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Cream City Review, Ninth Letter, and Cincinnati Review. He won the 2011 Indiana Review Poetry Prize and is a 2012 Pushcart nominee. His work has also been featured on Verse Daily twice recently. His first book, Curio, won the Elixir Press Annual Poetry Award Judge’s Prize and is due out in early 2014. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Salisbury University. He received his M.A. from USF and his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri.

21st Century Reading: TONIGHT!

Just a reminder that our 21st Century Reading, featuring readers of prose, poetry and translations from issue 52, begins tonight at 7 EST. Join us here when the time comes.

Reader schedule
(all times EASTERN, order subject to change):
7PM-Introduction by Sam Martone
7:10-Alexandra Teague
7:20-Lydia Ship
7:30-L.S. Klatt
7:40-Pireeni Sundaralingam
7:50-David Ryan
8-Daniel Riordan
8:10-Aparna Sanyal
8:20-Christopher Watkins
8:30-Bradley Harrison
8:40-Katy Chrisler
8:50-Max Somers
9-John A. Nieves
9:10-James Henry Knippen
9:20-Zana Previti
9:30-Suzanne Marie Hopcroft
9:40-Anna Rosen Guercio
9:50-Susan Lin

Contributor Spotlight: Alexandra Teague

I started writing “The Journalists Set the Record Straight on Sarah Winchester” literally in the midst of researching at the History San Jose archives last summer. After three years of working on a manuscript revolving around Sarah Winchester—writing mostly from secondary sources—I had gotten a University of Idaho seed grant to spend two weeks doing archival research. Finally, I was able to read Sarah Winchester’s own letters to her lawyer and others; to hold the tiny book in which she recorded the list of Christmas gifts she planned to get her staff and relatives; and to look at original copies of pictures of her niece and the house’s grounds at the turn of the century. Amid these wonderful sources, I also encountered a trove of newspaper clippings—spanning from the 1880s (when Sarah first arrived in California) through the 1910s and ‘20s (she died in 1922).

I knew that rumors had been printed during her life that she was communicating with spirits in her large strange house, and was following their directions about building (the same rumors perpetuated by the Winchester Mystery House owners today). But I hadn’t realized how utterly conflicting the accounts of her life were, or how often the same inaccurate “fact” got picked up from article to article over the decades and repeated as truth. And of course as I started seeing these contradictions and outright mistakes, I became both frustrated and intrigued by the way in which the legends about her had built up in as piecemeal of a way as her famous house. The legend says that she was crazy or eccentric (claims I was already very doubtful of after my years of research), but here was page after page of ostensibly credible journalists making contradictory claims.

So—to respond to both my sense of irony and frustration—I started a prose poem that abutted these claims with one another. With a box of clippings in front of my laptop as I typed, I didn’t know where I was going—or if I would really end up anywhere. Very fortunately, the title, which I had uncharacteristically come up with as I started writing, led me to the final line, which felt like the right ending. I spent quite a bit of time playing with rhythm and spacing in the lines, but the basic form and content are still what I wrote that morning at the table in the San Jose Archives—sort of pretending to myself and the wonderful archive curators that I was just typing up notes.

***
Alexandra Teague is the author of Mortal Geography (Persea 2010), winner of the 2009 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and 2010 California Book Award, and The Wise and Foolish Builders (Persea 2015). Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in ZYZZYVA, Willow Springs, The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review and elsewhere. She is Assistant Professor of Poetry at University of Idaho and an editor for Broadsided Press. More at www.alexandrateague.com.

21st Century Reading: Issue 52

To celebrate the release of Hayden’s Ferry Review issue 52, we’re going to do another 21st Century Reading! That's right, a reading broadcast over the entire internet! The one we held for issue 51 was such a success, we could not resist giving you more of our lovely contributors reading more of their lovely words.

Across the country, contributors to issue 52 will read via web cam this coming Monday, May 13 starting at 7 o’clock Eastern time. The reading will last several hours, but since it’s online, you’ll be free to come and go as you please! So grab the popcorn, fix yourself a drink and prepare yourselves for another twenty-first century reading experience brought to you by Hayden’s Ferry Review! (Details of where to find the stream will be forthcoming. Stay tuned!)



Tentative reader schedule (all times EASTERN):
7PM-Introduction by Sam Martone
7:10-Alexandra Teague
7:20-Lydia Ship
7:30-L.S. Klatt
7:40-Pireeni Sundaralingam
7:50-David Ryan
8-Daniel Riordan
8:10-Aparna Sanyal
8:20-Christopher Watkins
8:30-Bradley Harrison
8:40-Katy Chrisler
8:50-Max Somers
9-John A. Nieves
9:10-James Henry Knippen
9:20-Zana Previti
9:30-Suzanne Marie Hopcroft
9:40-Anna Rosen Guercio
9:50-Susan Lin

Contributor Spotlight: L.S. Klatt

I’ve long been fond of something Wallace Stevens pointed out about the attraction of poets to the irrational: “those who seek for the freshness and strangeness in poetry in fresh and strange places do so because of an intense need.” I suppose I am one of those mendicants looking to be surprised by what they write and willing to follow language wherever it leads, even when it veers into the feral and nonsensical. Or to put it another way, one must risk nonsense if one ever hopes to make new sense.

My poem for HFR began with a profound experience of isolation. I was visiting Seattle, a city I love for its waterways and restaurants, but I was alone. That solitude generated a narrative. “Leadhead” came to my mind as a character who, cut off from family and employment, seeks the vibrant energy of the city while at the same time can’t keep up with it. It seems to me, as I reflect on the poem, that Leadhead is trying different strategies to assuage his grief—sightseeing, art, introspection, invention—but he can’t escape the omnipresence of his pain. Perhaps by donning a “suit of magnetic stripes,” he can engage, and do business with, his fellow consumers. Such interactions are tentative at best, and at times dehumanizing, but for better or worse commerce is how disparate Americans come together and commiserate.

I admire Leadhead’s resilience and the many ways he probes the world even as he is victimized by it. I see this kind of creative tenacity in friends and acquaintances who bounce back from ponderous losses to embrace the vitality still available to them.

In composing the poem, I was suspicious of and yet enjoyed the bizarre imagery: “leopard prints,” “coconut cream,” “giant propeller,” “monkfish.” As I considered revisions and continued to let the poem steep, I realized that these images were taking on and expressing the wild antics of the protagonist. Leadhead, though burdened with heaviness, is somehow irrepressible. He may wear his suit like a hair shirt, but he’s also subject to the hallucinations we often associate with mystics. Does this ennoble his suffering, transmute it, make of it a voice crying in the wilderness? I’m not sure, but I hope so.

For me, writing is a strange synthesis of abstraction and fellow feeling. The real world must be summoned, but it also invites extrapolation, at least if it is to activate the brain; emotion is essential as well if the imagination is to run hot, not cold-blooded. The wild card in any poem, though, is language, which, when all is said and done, has a mind of its own.

***
L.S. Klatt has published poems recently in Colorado Review, Washington Square, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review and New Orleans Review. New work will appear in The Common, Narrative, Blackbird and The Michigan Poet. His second collection, Cloud of Ink, won the Iowa Poetry Prize. He lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His poem, “The Suit of Magnetic Stripes,” appears in HFR 52.

Contributor Spotlight: Becky Hagenston

A couple of years ago, I was lucky enough to be able to spend five weeks in the South of France, staying with friends who teach at the Marchutz School of Art.

On one of the excursions, we went to the Abbaye de Senaque, and that’s where I saw the Cheshire cat creature. That stayed with me and worked its way into “Bay of Angels,” as did something that happened in Nice a few weeks earlier.

My husband and I witnessed the aftermath of a car accident on the main thoroughfare, the Promenade des Anglais. We saw motorcycle cops, a smashed car windshield, and—the worst part—a woman's high heeled shoe. Just a shoe. I kept thinking: Who is (or was) this woman? Why was she there? Who was she with? The combination of the idyllic abbey and this disturbing scene somehow combusted into this story—and into others, about the woman, her husband, and the people in their lives.


***
Becky Hagenston’s first collection, A Gram of Mars, won the Mary McCarthy Prize; her second collection, Strange Weather, won the Spokane Prize. Her work has appeared in Crazyhorse, Bellingham Review, Quarter After Eight, Cold Mountain Review, Hobart, and many other journals. One of the stories that connects with the characters in “Bay of Angels” (published in HFR 52) is forthcoming in Subtropics. She is an Associate Professor of English at Mississippi State University.

Contributor Spotlight: Kyle McCord

If were to make a list of things I don’t particularly care for, both math word problems and bus rides would rank pretty highly. I made it past Algebra II thanks to some serious nose on grindstone action, but bus rides, it seems, have yet to fade from my life.

A well-known secret about me is that I do much of my writing while I travel. The original version of this poem was written in a bus on the way to the Chicago airport. Melissa (my girlfriend) and I slept there overnight the evening of the Iowa caucuses. I stayed awake long enough to see Mitt scrape out his win, which he got stripped of later, after the recount. It was by a total of five people or something like that. That’s where you really need those folks who love numbers. But I didn’t think of them then. The next day we flew to Guatemala City where I wrote most of the poems in this collection while we bused around Central America.

Central America is one of the worst places to ride the bus. Don’t let people tell you otherwise. For example, Melissa and I had to take the bus from Guatemala City to the Mayan ruins at Tikal. The bus was comfortable enough, but the driver only had two settings for air—sweltering and freezing. Because he was at the front where it was toasty, he chose the latter. We covered ourselves with coats, but it was still so unbearable that no one could sleep. If you want to force yourself to study the darkened landscape of Guatemala, that is one way to do it. If you go to Tikal, there’s a great place to get pesto pasta while you look out on the lake. You can also choose to ride the chicken buses around Guatemala. If you research the chicken buses, though, you learn that they regularly run into things at fatal speeds, drive off cliffs.

When I was younger, I often rode the Greyhound or the Peter Pan buses. In the Peter Pan, they are absolutely serious that you must not talk on your cell phone. I once saw an angry passenger take a cell phone from a guy who wouldn’t finish a call from his business partner. The angry one took the cell phone to the driver, and everyone else on the bus applauded. I might have applauded too. I can’t remember. It was very weird. How many minutes did he talk more than was socially permissible? I don’t know. How can you calculate the margins on a thing like that?

But what am I even saying? I wrote the poem on the bus in Chicago, but it really became what is now when I revamped it in Riga, Latvia. Being in Latvia involved word problems. If I want to buy a movie ticket for 3 Lats and each Lat is worth 1.86 dollars, how heavy is my bag going to be because the smallest bill is 5 Lats, which is nearly $10. So, you have to carry around a small sack to keep your coins in. How else are you going to do it? You’re going to look like you’re in a Renaissance fair with your small sack of coins. You’re going to be Bilbo Baggins. Just accept it.

On a bus, someone will knock at the door if you’re in the bathroom too long. They will knock as if to remind you, “Hey, you’re in our bathroom.” In Latvia, I took baths a lot because I had this entire apartment to myself, and, hey, it relaxed me. Something about the water helps me keep rhythm or something. I’m not sure. But I always worried that the staff would complain. Maybe I was using too much water. I worried someone would knock at the door and say “Hey, you’ve been in your bathroom too long.” Maybe it would be that guy from the Peter Pan who took the cell phone. Maybe that was what he did. But no one ever came. They did ask me one time to come to breakfast a little bit earlier, which was fair. All of these things, these communal services, they’re a negotiation. They even had a negotiation when Mitt incorrectly won the Iowa caucuses. I mean, it was a negotiation that ultimately didn’t matter, but a negotiation none the less. It mattered to someone who voted for Santorum. Some guy who probably walked around knocking on doors.

***
Kyle McCord is the author of three books of poetry including Sympathy from the Devil from Gold Wake Press. He has work featured in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Third Coast, Verse and elsewhere. He’s the co-founder of LitBridge and co-edits iO: A Journal of New American Poetry. He teaches at the University of North Texas. His poem, “[for the sake of this mathematical hypothetical]” appears in Hayden’s Ferry Review 52.

Contributor Spotlight: Todd Davis

Environmental Indicators, Or a Middle-aged Rant Explaining

the Making of “What My Neighbor Tells Me Isn’t Global Warming”

Outside the village of Tipton, Pennsylvania, a 40,000 acre tract of forest that comprises Game Lands 108 and 158 climbs hand over foot up the Allegheny Front. It’s mostly forgotten by the outside world, and at times I can’t believe it actually exists. I know it’s not what most of my fellow citizens in the 21st century have in their backyards. Streams with native brook trout, canopied by hemlock and rhododendron groves; a healthy population of black bear and fisher, mink and fox; porcupines that waddle their way through the understory and wild turkey that roost in the limbs of white pine. Sometimes I’m scared that this prolificacy will fool me into thinking there’s plenty of this kind of land still being cared for, conserved, not under the threat of our disillusionment and greed.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s more than enough evidence of abuse in this tract: in the last 150 years it’s been timbered, quarried, and strip-mined. Trashed so many times it’s hard to keep count. The only reason it exists today as public land, the reason why the game commission could even afford to purchase it in the first place, is that it was so wrecked nobody could figure out how to ring one more penny out of it. Abandoned, it’s begun to take on some ghostly semblance of the wild place it was 200 years ago.

Of course, now we’ve figured out how to frack, how to break the plates of the earth, to drill down and release the natural gas, that slumbering giant we try to bend to our will. Some nights I wake in a sweat to the thought that the game commission will allow drilling in this forest, seduced by the idea that more money might help with later conservation projects.

Many of the people I live among, people I love and work with, kids my boys go to school with, even some of their teachers, don’t believe in global warming or climate change or whatever you want to call this uncanny shift toward ever hotter temperatures, crazy storms, and rising sea levels that science tells us we play a significant part in.

My mother had a wall-hanging in our house when I was growing up that said, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and I try to do just that. I really do. But I also believe in science and democracy, and I fret over the forests that help keep me sane, that let us breathe clean air and drink clean water.

I want the president I voted for to do more to save us from ourselves as we devour most everything in sight. I’m tired of advertisements telling me that if I only consume more I’ll be happy. I’m tired of being told that we can have a “green economy” but still continue our gluttony. Maybe I’m just tired and cranky. After all, I only have two more years before I’m 50.

Of course, that’s not what my poem is really about. There’s my friend, the poet Jim Daniels, and his snow peas blossoming too early in Pittsburgh. There are those donkeys who follow those horses all around the pasture, the courtesy and respect they show one another. Mostly there’s my love for my wife who I’ve known since I was 12 and the speckled wood lily (Clintonia umbellulata) that reminds me of her beauty.

And the attraction of a poem is that it doesn’t have to move forward in a straight line or a logical order. It’s pretty clear that we aren’t a logical species. We wouldn’t be in this mess if we were.

So through association, that blessed leap-frogging our brains tend to do naturally, a wood lily enters the poem, and when that happens—outside the borders of what I’ve written—I find myself walking a path along Bell’s Run, a trail that follows this stream that’s never been maintained, only used over and over again by humans and animals, their hoof prints and paw prints and foot prints beating a groove in the earth to follow.

Depending on the time of year, I’ll find the prodigious huckleberry scat of black bears, the brown pellets of deer that look like chocolate covered raisins, or the sawdust scat of porcupines, maybe even the comma shaped excrement of a ruffed grouse or the segmented leavings of a bobcat.

With this much fecundity littering the ground, no wonder wood lilies and foam flower and painted trillium rise up in ridiculous numbers. This small, hidden place at the center of those 40,000 acres has been protected because the mountains come shuddering down to the streambed so steeply deer have a hard time clambering up it, and the path is forced to narrow to less than two feet in width, and the machinery of destruction can’t slide its haunches into such a tapered space to wreak havoc. Here I must stop and make the blessed sign of problematic topography and give thanks for those it spared.

And then I’m at the mailbox again, or sitting in the barber’s chair, listening to folks tell me that tree huggers will be the death of us, that regulation only stops economic growth. Sometimes I’m disgusted with my neighbors, with all our ways of neglecting the truth, of not caring for the places we live in, of only caring about tomorrow and our insatiable appetites. Sometimes I weep over my complicity in the debacle, or get pissed that what I do best is write poems. How impotent my scribbling seems when I descend into such foulness.

I can’t even stand myself for long in these moods, and if I take a step back and am honest with myself, I have to say poems have saved me, saved my marriage, my relationship with my sons, even with my neighbors.

I’m not sure where I’d be if it wasn’t for those few remaining tracts of land I can lose myself in. It’s in the quiet of water purling around stone, in the bird song of warblers migrating, that I remind myself not to rant to my wife until she flees the house for relief. After all, this poem really is just a way to say I’m sorry to her and to the next generation as well.

***
Todd Davis teaches environmental studies and creative writing at Penn State University’s Altoona College. He is the author of four books of poems, most recently In the Kingdom of the Ditch (Michigan State University Press, 2013) and The Least of These (Michigan State University Press, 2010). He also edited Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball (Michigan State University Press, 2012) and co-edited Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets (State University of New York Press, 2010). His poetry has appeared widely in such places as American Poetry Review, Poetry Daily, Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, North American Review, and Iowa Review.

Contributor Spotlight: Bradley Harrison

Thoughts on “Sky are Dead” from Hayden’s Ferry Review 52

Perhaps language bursts. Comes in. Bursts. Perhaps the image is partial. Order disorder. Language attempts both, simultaneously. Perhaps. Poetry does, certainly. Sometimes. Poetry sometimes can fracture and mend simultaneously. Just as memory fractures and mends. After all. The opposite of dismember is remember. Like Ezekiel in the Valley. Chapter 37. Prophesy to these bones. As I was prophesying, there was a noise. Bone to bone. Tendons and flesh. And breath entered them. I am going to open your graves. I will open your graves and bring you up. And I have done it. I have.

And sometimes the features are all out of scale. Cubism. Or something deconstructed. The major movements of 20th century art are either centrally. Or peripherally. Concerned with the broken. Dada. Surrealism. Modernism, yes. The PoMo hobos. Et. Cetera. Et Al. Blah blah.

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. Chance. Physics. Shipping crate accident. Kinetics. Neural firings. He said it’s better. It’s better with the cracks. And he was right, that son of a bitch.

Look. Everything is ending. You see that, right? And it’s okay. See it now? There is something courageous, if vain, about grammar. An insistence on order. We are fools, though. Of course. The Second Law says so. Chaos is destiny. Yikes. And yet. We sit. With our feet in still waters. With our fingers interlocked. And isn’t it right to be like this a while? And isn’t it the body, for now, to feel whole?

Rimbaud shows up, as he will, in the foliage of caves. And your parents making love. And then you. And then parting. And the flicker. That’s it.

***
Bradley Harrison is a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas in Austin. His work can be found in New American Writing, The Los Angeles Review, Forklift Ohio, Gulf Coast, Poetry Northeast, Hunger Mountain, New Orleans Review, Best New Poets 2012 and elsewhere. His chapbook Diorama of a People, Burning is available from Ricochet Editions (2012).

Issue #52 Subscription Push!

Hello, Hayden’s Ferriers! Hayden’s Fairies? Hayfarers? Because we want as many people as possible to read our upcoming 52nd issue (!!!), we want to try to get fifty more subscribers! If you subscribe now, you’ll receive a year-long subscription starting with issue 52. We’ve also got some goodies for people who are quick on the draw!

The first twenty subscribers (or resubscribers) will receive a limited edition set of 6 letter-pressed postcards, made by poetry editor and international editor Christine Holm! Each postcard features work from two poets in the forthcoming issue. (See above! Work pictured above by Jon Thompson and L.S. Klatt on the left, Max Somers and Pireeni Sundaralingam on the right.)




The next thirty subscribers (or resubscribers) will get a bonus issue from our archives. After that, we’ll only be able to give you our love and affection, but, rest assured: it is everlasting! (And if you’re already a subscriber, subscription extensions will count.) Spread the word! Tell your friends! A one-year subscription is only $25 for two issues packed full of today’s best fiction, nonfiction, poetry, photography and translations. Find more info about issue 52 here.