Issue 35 september 2025
A Story of Suffering to Eternal Sunshine
The Most Humble Genius of Garrett Dillahunt
Poetry, Essays, & Fiction
Benheart: The Fashion Icon Tragedy Transformed
The Creative Process of Octavio Quintanilla
Adam Nevill: An Author Making Horror His Ritual
by Dan Veach
Lynne Kemen’s writing appears in various literary journals and anthologies. She published her chapbook, More Than a Handful, in 2020 with Woodland Arts Editions. She contributes as an Interviewer and Essay Editor for The Blue Mountain Review, a culture-focused journal. She is a member of The Southern Collective Experience and is on the boards of two not-for-profit organizations. She lives with her husband, William Rossow, and their four cats in the Great Western Catskills of Upstate New York.
Lynne Kemen’s Shoes for Lucy is a beautiful and relatable collection of poems that explores a wide range of emotions. From grief to rediscovery, Kemen writes with a deft hand, creating vibrant and introspective pieces that remind us to cherish life’s simple pleasures.
— Kelli Russell Agodon
Author of Dialogues with Rising Tides (Copper Canyon Press)
Shoes for Lucy is like a beautiful summer storm on the porch - bursts of light, cool breeze, fragments of childhood dreams, and echoes spreading out in all directions.
— Jack B. Bedell
Author of Against the Woods’ Dark Trunks, Poet Laureate of Louisiana, 2017-2019
A genre-bending powerhouse of a collection. A spare, artful blend of poetry and fiction, Kemen combines masterful storytelling with lyrical prowess. A bit Oliver, a bit Forster, and a bit Bass, Kemen deftly invokes her literary heroes, while inking her heart on her sleeve. “I go outside and touch my flowers and wish it was you.” she longingly writes. Penned in the beautiful voice of a wise and witty friend.
Nicole Tallman
Author of Poems for the People (SCE Press) and Something Kindred (SCE Press)
Exiles of Eden by Clifford Brooks 978-1-7347498-6-1
978-1-7347498-0-9
Something Kindred by Nicole Tallman
978-1-7362306-1-9
Poems for the People by Nicole Tallman
978-1-7362306-2-6
Draw of Broken Eyes & Whirling
by Clifford Brooks
978-1-7347498-3-0
Things I Wish I Could Tell You by Casanova Green
978-1-7362306-0-2
the Butterfly by Tracy Hagan 978-1-7347498-8-5
The Ghost Gospels by Laura Ingram 978-1-7347498-7-8
Tell Me What You Saw and What You Think It Means by Steve Bellin-Oka
by dan veach
How many of us wake up at the darkest hour of the night, filled with rage and dread at what is happening to our country? Many of us spent the weeks after Trump’s inauguration trying to warn our friends and fellow citizens that this was not just the bumbling of a stupid, evil-minded clown, but a full-scale attempt to destroy American democracy.
Every aware and intelligent American now knows this to be true. What I want to talk about here is how caring, creative people (like the readers of this remarkable journal) can not only survive this crisis, but grow stronger and, yes, more joyful in the process.
Like most of us on January 20, I was “looking forward” to four years of nonstop misery. And Grump has done his best to fulfill that promise, with new assaults on democracy and human decency every single day.
But, like millions of other Americans, I resolved not to be a passive victim of his attacks on everything we value and care about. I contributed to organizations fighting back, politically and in the courts, and joined our local chapter of Indivisible and our county Democratic party. I rallied at the Washington Monument on April 5 with 100,000 genuine patriots, as millions marched through the streets of every American city.
And I discovered something remarkable. Fear was replaced by resolution, dread by unstoppable determination. I felt stronger, more powerful, and more hopeful than I ever had before. Equally remarkable, I had found a new family—for this movement is full of caring, intelligent, and creative people from all walks and conditions of life. These are people we would never ordinarily encounter, joined together at this historic moment by our great collective cause.
As artists and as human beings, we need to meet these people, and gather strength and inspiration from them. They are us. They are We the People. The media promotes the most hateful, selfish, and ignorant people on our planet, and makes us despair for the human race. But here, in our collective defense of democracy, we will find the truth and hope for America, and indeed for humanity.
BY DAN VEACH
José Augustín Goytisolo translated by Dan Veach
Goytisolo’s mother was killed in the Fascist bombing of Barcelona in 1938. He named his daughter Julia after his lost mother.
You cannot turn back because life is pushing you forward like an endless howl.
Daughter of mine, it is better to live with the joy of humanity than weeping before a blank wall.
You will feel trapped, you will feel lost or alone, maybe wish you had never been born.
I know well they will tell you that life has no purpose, that it’s all just a miserable sham.
Then always remember what I wrote you one day, thinking of you as I do now.
This life is beautiful, you will see, for in spite of its burdens you will have friends, you’ll have love.
One man, one woman alone, by themselves, are like nothing, like dust.
But I, when I talk with you, when I write you these words, think of others as well.
Your destiny lies with those others. Although your life is your own, your dignity belongs to everyone.
Those others will hope you resist, hope you will help them with your joy, your song in the midst of their singing.
Then always remember what I wrote you one day, thinking of you as I do now.
Never give up, never stand alone by the roadside, never say I can’t do any more, go any farther.
Life is beautiful, you will see how in spite of its burdens you will have love, you’ll have friends.
As to the rest, there is no choice. You will inherit this world just as it is. Pardon me for not knowing what else to tell you, but please understand I am still on this road myself.
And always, always remember what I wrote you one day, thinking, as I am doing now, of you.
INTERVIEWED BY NICOLE TALLMAN
Denise, what does your writing life look like?
Do you have a particular schedule, habits, or process?
I do have several ways to get into writing. I like to write every morning for about 10 or 20 minutes. Much of what I write in these sessions never makes it into poems, but then one day I’ll get a gift poem, a reward perhaps for showing up all those other days. When I’m teaching, or otherwise really busy, I don’t usually even get to look back on those scribbles until much later. At that point, I highlight any images that seem interesting and use those to start poems. I’m not fond of starting with a blank page… Too scary!
How do poems come to you? Do you have any specific muses?
Reading is a terrific way for me to get into writing. Sometimes it’s a poem that just knocks me out and I want to try something similar. But often it’s just a word or a phrase that will send me into my notebook. If something truly poem-worthy happens, I try to stop and at least jot down what I can.
Tell us about your latest solo full-length collection, PinkLady, and what inspired you to write it.
Pink Lady is a series of elegies for my mother. She was put into a nursing home in December 2019. Terrible timing given that she would be in lockdown… we all would be in lockdown… by early March 2020. The poems chronicle our separation, her separation from the whole family. She was a retired nurse and wound up in the nursing home where she worked as a young woman.
You also have a new collaborative book out, Tilt, written with the late and great Maureen Seaton. Tell us about your process for writing that book.
This is the last book Maureen and I wrote together. We wrote it through the pandemic and Maureen’s illness, and we hoped it told the story of a friendship rooted in collaborative artistic play. We were hyperaware we only had so much
time left to write with one another. We tried collaborative terza rima and abecedarians—which we hadn’t written together before—hoping that, by Maureen’s end, we’d covered all the “traditional” forms, even though our approach was very untraditional at times.
You also recently co-wrote a chapbookof ghazalswith Julie Marie Wade and won the Rattle Chapbook Prize, which led to the publication of the magical InWhich. How many books have you published over your writing career, and what’s the secret to your prolificacy?
Nicole, this is a great question, which sent me right to my CV. I should have known, but I didn’t. I have 20 full length books, the first of which was published in 1993. Four are collaborations with Maureen; one is a collaboration with Julie Marie Wade; and three are in translation. I have nine chapbooks, the first of which was published in 1988. Two are collaborations with Maureen; one is a collaboration with Julie Marie Wade; and one is in translation. I’ve also co-edited four anthologies! As I write this, I realize how lucky I am…but also how old! I guess that’s the secret— living long enough to write a lot and not being daunted by rejection.
What are you working on next? Any preview you can give us regarding themes, form, or subject matter?
I’m in that delicious free-fall of writing new poems and not sure yet how they will all add up. I’m writing a lot of political poetry, as I imagine a lot of poets are. It’s hard not to let these extraordinary events permeate our verse.
In addition to writing, you also teach. Tell us how teaching fits into your life, where and what classes you teach.
I’m currently teaching poetry workshops and prose poem seminars. Teaching cuts into my writing time—no two ways about it. But it also keeps me on my toes. My students challenge me and I’m always reading what they’re reading, and trying to stay on top of new books that come out so I can use them in the classroom.
What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Eve Babitz’s short stories Black Swans, which came out in 1993—the same year (I’m realizing now) that my first full-length book came out. Her book is much more dishy and glamorous! I just finished the poetry book Lucky Man by Michael Hettich, a gorgeous book of love poems for Michael’s recently deceased wife. Julie Marie Wade’s memoir The Mary Years is brilliant! And I am eagerly anticipating Lullaby for the Grieving by Ashley M. Jones coming out in September.
does a perfect day look and feel like to you?
Writing my poetry pages; a walk on the beach; reading under an umbrella on the beach, and returning to write on my computer.
Where can we find you online, Denise?
I’m not on social media, except for a fan page on Facebook run by the ever-competent and amazing Dustin Brookshire. It’s called “Fans of Denise Duhamel OR A Group of Duhamelites.” I have some NFTs up here: And here is one of my Barbie poems made into jazz song.
Denise Duhamel is the author of Pink Lady (Pitt Poetry Series, 2025), Second Story (Pittsburgh, 2021) and Scald (Pittsburgh, 2017). Blowout (Pittsburgh, 2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In Which (2024) is a winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize. She and the late Maureen Seaton co-authored six collections, the most recent of which is Tilt (Bridwell Press, 2025.)
Denise’s collaborations with Julie Marie Wade include The Latest: 20 Ghazals for 2020 (Small Harbor Publishing, 2025). A recipient of NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships, she is a distinguished university professor at Florida International University in Miami.
BY DENISE DUHAMEL
I walk into the Atlantic, the silt so soft I feel like I’m trudging through mud. I begin to swim towards the horizon. It is then I see the baby loggerheads, newly hatched, the size of quarters, paddling beside me. When they swerve, I swerve. When they bob on the surface, so do I. My mother has just died. I follow the turtles for two miles at which point I become one of them, or they one of me, our shells hardening. We eat kelp and fish eggs, keep each other company. We grow and have babies of our own. Theirs are inside eggs. Mine are inside little poems.
From Pink Lady by Denise Duhamel
INTERVIEWED
BY
LYNNE KEMEN
Welcome, Katie. Please introduce yourself to our readers.
Hi everyone! I’ve loved poetry since fourth grade when Mrs. Holland gave us an assignment to memorize a poem. I picked Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” because I was a suck-up and it was the longest poem (which no other kid picked). Lucky for me, I loved it! From there, I started reading all the poetry I could get my hands on, and then writing it by candlelight (to break the rules and for Poe-like drama).
While studying poetry at Florida State University, I became a professional poker player, and also went to L’Academie de Cuisine–a French culinary school. I’m passionate about encouraging others to discover and share contemporary poetry, and have poetry to thank for finding my husband, Timothy Green, editor of Rattle. Between us, we have four amazing kids.
I’m the creator of The Poetry Space_, a top-rated poetry podcast, Haiku Editor for ONE ART, and an editor at Rattle. I’m the author of Watering Can, and All That Glitter (forthcoming with Poetry Box), and the co-author of Hot Pink Moon and Have You Seen the Moon Honey (forthcoming). I love long conversations about short poems.
I wanted to ask you about your
role at Rattle Magazine.
Fun fact: long before I ever met Timothy Green, Rattle was my first ever poetry publication credit–through our Poet’s Respond series. Since you can submit as many current events poems a week as you want, and then get an answer within the week, I recognized it as a unique opportunity to potentially be published in a top-tier journal. As such, I committed myself to writing three poems a week until I was accepted. I even did the math and thought that I could expect to have a poem picked by the point I reached a year and a half of doing this. In fact, one of my three poems, “Transitory,” was selected that first week!
When I first found the Rattle community, I was shocked by the abundance of free resources. Tim’s Critique of the Week, a live poetry workshop he hosts every Friday, was immensely helpful to me for honing my craft, as is the Rattlecast–where he interviews a poet that was published in our magazine. For close to two years now, I have been part of that show too–with the open-mic-style prompt lines where anyone is welcome to share their poem written to the prompt I announced on last week’s show. One of the prompt poems is also published every month online, and I often recommend exceptional poems for publication in the print issue.
As of this year, I’m also an associate editor. I love reading for contests, bolstering the community, and figuring out ways to
promote the practice of poetry! Right now, we are in the early stages of planning a Rattle reading in conjunction with the AWP conference in Baltimore in March.
And tell us about your Rattle Podcast. What is it? Your role? What part of it are you proudest of?
Unlike the Rattlecast and the Critique of the Week, The Poetry Space_ is independent from the Rattle Foundation. Whereas the others are Tim’s shows that I assist with, The Poetry Space_ puts me in the driver’s seat with Tim as the co-host.
I was nervous when Tim encouraged me to start it, and suffered a bit from imposter syndrome. I was afraid no one would show up–but like most fears, that didn’t happen. We now average over a thousand listens an episode, and have produced over 100 episodes. I am immensely grateful to all the guests we’ve had on the show over the years. In addition to all the work my husband puts into it, I especially appreciate the Squad–composed of Joe Barca, Brian O’Sullivan, Dick Westheimer, and Nate Jacob–for the effort they put into our one-of-a-kind podcast.
What I love about our show is how we abandon the standard interview format, and instead manage to brainstorm/have transformative conversations around important topics in poetry. Episode #57 on the “Flow State” with Bob Hicok left me with writing tips that I think of on a near daily basis; Episode #73 on “Poetic Hospitality” with George Bilgere gets to the heart of why accessibility in poetry matters. I’ve also learned a lot from researching our more biographical episode, just as episode #49 on “Walt Whitman.” I pour a great deal of energy into making the show entertaining, honest, and informative–my document of notes is up to 300 pages!
I know that you are very interested in haiku. How did that interest begin? As a writer, what intrigues you most about haiku? Other Asian forms that you work in?
I can track my love of haiku to a very specific one. Before I was affiliated with Rattle, Tim published a haiku that I found both spellbinding and befuddling–because it was not the number of syllables I’d learned a haiku had to be back in school. Since I had suggested an NFT tribute
section for Rattle to Timothy, we were in touch, and I emailed him to ask. He patiently explained that haiku is not a syllabic form. Later, he came up with a definition of haiku that is, in effect, a haiku itself– “two worlds in one breath.” The haiku, by Josh Eric Williams, later won a Touchstone award, and we included it in our just-released Best of Poets Respond Anthology.
Like everything I love, I jumped in head first to haiku! The requirements to write excellent haiku are challenging–as is the idea of saying something new in only a handful of words. The best haiku feel like striking a match–an immediate spark, whereas longer poetry feels like a slow burn in comparison. For the last two years, I’ve edited the ONE ART Haiku Anthology, and reading those submissions was great fun!
If there is any form that I love more than haiku, it is another Japanese form—the haibun. I am obsessed with the combination of title, body, and haiku. So much so that my husband and I co-wrote a crown of them (a style that links the haibun much like a sonnet crown), called Hot Pink Moon, and then we have our second haibun chapbook Have You Seen the Moon Honey, coming out soon. Bolstered by the tribute section of haibun in Rattle this past spring, the form has never been more popular in English. In fact, Tim and I are teaching a few generative workshops on them this fall–online with the Fine Arts Work Center, and in person at Inprint in Houston. In addition, we have several episodes of The Poetry Space_ on haiku and haibun.
You are Associate Editor for Rattle, often work with One Art Poetry, have just gotten married, have young children– how do you juggle everything?
I wake up every day feeling grateful for the life I’ve built with my husband. I’ve realized that growth is necessary for me to feel fulfillment,
and growth requires nearly continuous “work,” but the old adage is true–very little of it feels like “work,” and a big part of that is trying to do as many things possible with Tim.
We love taking our four kids to the zoo and art museums, which are excellent, just a little south of us in Houston. Eating dinner together every night is a top commitment. We juggle everything around our kids and supporting their happiness. Days go by so quickly. I know this is not a great answer because, to be honest, I am never quite sure how we manage to pack so much in!
Practically speaking, I can offer that I drink a lot of coffee and live with Mary Oliver’s question, from her poem “The Summer Day,” floating in my head: “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” My answer is as much as possible with whatever time I am given!
are also a professional poker player! How do those skills/interests work with your life as a poet?
I do juggle being an investor on top of my poetry life, but I haven’t played poker full-time for a few years now. I love mass multi-tabling; playing around 40 to 50 poker tournaments online simultaneously. I recently went on my friend Jennifer Shahade’s award-winning poker podcast, The Grid, where we realized that I have probably played more poker tournaments than any woman. In talking with her, I had the revelation that, by making so many quick decisions while playing poker, I was training myself for reading the large volume of poems that we receive at Rattle (roughly a quarter-million a year). Ultimately what I love about poker is what I love about poetry–making the most out of the fewest words or chips.
Read contemporary poetry widely and trust your instincts. I used to feel a bit guilty about not enjoying many of the poems I saw published, even in impressive journals. My imposter syndrome challenged me, and I thought it was my problem that I didn’t enjoy esoteric riddles masquerading as poems. But years on, I am comfortable in feeling my criticism of specific poems is well-researched and valid. Now that I am on the editor side, I realize that
there are many reasons other journals publish poems, and I am proud that Rattle doesn’t solicit poetry. When you read poetry, read it critically–what’s working? What could be better? You’ll find that the best poems will be the ones you get lost in–both as a reader or a writer!
In submissions, it is obvious when a poet has not read very much contemporary poetry. A common thing in submission guidelines is to see something like, “please read our journal so you can know what to submit.” Journals practically have to beg! It’s a problem in poetry, that often people enjoy writing poetry more than they enjoy reading it. A great portion of my life is devoted to helping change that–by publishing excellent poems, helping people to write better poems, and lastly through writing my own poetry that honors those requirements.
X : @Katie_Dozier
Facebook: Katie Dozier Green
Instagram: @KHDPoet
Podcast: The Poetry Space_ Website:KHDPoet.com
A former professional poker player, Katie Dozier is the author of Watering Can and co-author of Hot Pink Moon with her husband, Timothy Green. She loves long conversations about short poems. Katie is the creator of the podcast The Poetry Space_, the Haiku Editor for ONE ART, and an editor at Rattle.
INTERVIEWED BY STUART DISCHELL
Askold Melnyczuk has published four novels and a book of stories. What Is Told (Faber, 1994), his first novel, was the first commercially published work of fiction in English to highlight the Ukrainian refugee experience and was named a New York Times Notable. Other novels have been selected an LA Times Best Books of the Year, and an Editor’s Choice by the American Library Association’s Booklist His most recent book is a collection of stories, The Man Who Would Not Bow. His selected poems, The Venus of Odesa, just appeared from Mad Hat in Summer, 2025. A book of selected non-fiction, With Madonna in Kyiv: Why Literature Still Matters (More than Ever) will be published by Harvard in 2026. He has edited a book of essays on the St. Lucian Nobel-prize winning poet Derek Walcott and is also co-editor of From Three Worlds, an anthology of Ukrainian writers from the 1980s generation, as well as the first ever anthology of contemporary fiction and poetry by Crimean Tatars (2025). He was the recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Three Year Award in Fiction, the Heldt Prize for translation, and the George Garret Award from AWP for his work in the literary community. Individual poems, stories, essays and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. Founding editor of Agni, for which he received the PEN-Magid Award for Editing, and Arrowsmith Press, he has taught at Boston University, Harvard, Bennington College and currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
I interviewed Melnyczuk over the telephone, through text, and mostly email.
You have been writing poems for most of your life and have published some in prestigious literary venues throughout the years. But the Venus of Odesa is your first collection, really a Selected Poems. Why now?
I “started” as a poet--though in truth, prose and editing have been ongoing engagements almost from the beginning. I won awards for poetry in high school and college, published my first poems in national
publications as a college sophomore....and in my twenties and thirties I did send out my manuscripts to the handful of publications with open submissions (in the 70s and 80s there really were only 4-5 viable presses--if that many) but nothing clicked. Then, in 1994, when I was nearly forty, my first novel came out and did reasonably well--critically--and from then on I focused my attention on fiction. But the poems continued to come--at their own pace, now and then. And I would file them away--or occasionally send them out to magazines, where they would sometimes appear. Then, a few years ago, I was going through some files and found a folder of poems. Reading over them, a number still felt alive for me, even though some had been published--I can hardly imagine it myself-half a century ago.
You have published novels and stories and now a book of poems. Can you tell me how you see the differences in process and product of each literary structure?
The first poem in the book, “The Dance of the Tomahawks,” appeared in the Village Voice in 1974. The poetry editor at the time was poet joel oppenheimer, himself an interesting poet linked to both the Black Mountain and the New York school of poets who was the first director of the St. Marks Poetry Project in the Bowery. What’s funny is that I never received any kind of acceptance letter. I didn’t even know the poem had been published until a friend who lived in New York called me one night while I was tending bar to say she liked the poem. The next week a check for $35. arrived--I still have a xerox of the first dollar I ever made from this noble art. Anyway, to cut to the chase, I reconfigured the manuscript I’d sent out a few times over the decades and mailed it to Mad Hat Press about which I’d heard from friends. A few months later I received an email from Marc Vincenz, Mad Hat’s editor and publisher, asking if the book was still available. Lord knows I’m grateful to him--it’s all the sweeter to have these poems finding their way in the world at age 70.
Ah, so many differences. The joy of poetry is that you’re free of the demands of plot, narrative (unless you choose it), characterization, dialogue, etc. I work with the lyric and eschew narrative and other forms. As a young writer I spent a lot time “working” out in the gymnasium of formal verse: I rhymed, counted stresses, wrote sonnets and bad villanelles and even a few mediocre sestinas. It seemed to me essential to inhabit these, to get a feel for them, to see if they fit. In the end, for the most part, they weren’t for me. I’m of the generation that grew up divided between Frost’s crack that writing free verse was like playing tennis without a net, and Eliot’s riposte that no verse if free to someone who wants to do a good job. What constitutes a “good job” in poetry is itself rather amorphous, and pretty impossible to define. But I do believe that poets who are steeped in the traditions of their language and culture--and for anyone writing in English that means the work from Chaucer (ok, Beowulf to the truly serious) to Howe-that these poets are better served. Every language has its own genius, its own sonic system--and for me--as I suspect for most readers--the first, the singular pleasure of poetry lies in its creating a pleasing verbal music. It’s the music that seduces the soul, and secondarily engages the intellect as readers probe the words’ implications and meanings.
It was only when I came upon the poems of Ferlinghetti and Ginsburg (also in high school) that I felt the form speaking directly to me. I’ll never forget picking up Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind when I was 16 at a Walden book-
store in a mall in Woodbridge, New Jersey. The immediacy of the poems, their accessibility, their lyricism, and their rejection of orthodoxies religious and political, were so bracing, so encouraging, that I was moved to write to the poet. That was the first time I’d done something like that--and I was encouraged to do more of it when Ferlinghetti wrote me back, sending along several inscribed pamphlets and broadsides which I still have. He became a gateway for me--through him I came to Ginsberg.
Reading Howl, with its frank language and openness about sexuality was a great experience. Indeed, Ginsberg was a great liberating spirit for many of us, no matter our sexuality. Somehow, I found out that he was holding a 24-hour New Year’s Eve marathon reading at St. Mark’s Church which I attended with a group of high school friends. This was in 1974. And it was quite an event. Four of us sat at a table at the very front of the church. Abbie Hoffman, who was on the lam then, living “underground,” came up to us and said hello. We listened to Ginsberg play harmonium while reading a poem about sexually servicing Peter Orlovsky. And a poet only slightly older than us by the name of Patti Smith came up and read a few poems. It was a heady experience for a 19-year-old.
One last thing about poetry, I’ve often said that my soul was birthed by English verse--and I mean it. The vocabulary and the spirit of poets like John Donne and George Herbert and Kit Smart gave me a language for understanding sensations I was experiencing--where else might one discover what it means for lovers to mingle souls if one hasn’t read Donne’s “The Ecstasy”? You won’t find in the Kama Sutra. Okay, in The Psalms, maybe. But those come to most of us in translation, without the sonic drama of a master of the mother-tongue. I could go on.....
Among your many literary accomplishments have been as the founding editor of Agni and more recently of Arrowsmith Press. Can you speak a little about how your work as editor has influenced your own writing?
The thing is, I’ve been editing nearly as long as I’ve been writing. Maybe because I was a sickly child and between the ages of 8 and 11, spent nearly three years at home, out of school because of heart disease, I had more time than most to pursue elective reading, writing, and related activities. As I wrote (and illustrated) my first stories--mostly about favorite monsters, I dreamed up a publishing enterprise called Horror Magazine. That was followed by De-
tective Magazine, which I typed up on my first Marx Bros. toy typewriter, and for which I wrote 100-word stories and short poems, while “advertising” “spying equipment” copied out of the backs of the comic books I was reading at the time (big fan of Spiderman and the Fantastic Four)....all of which eventually led to Agni, an underground newspaper I launched with high school friends (Tom Bahr, Bill Hayes, Lawrence Lee, Marianne Lynch, Charles Capro and Eric Weisgerber) which then morphed into Agni, the literary magazine when I went off to Antioch in the summer of ‘72, where we crossed paths.
All these activities, writing across genres and editing, arose more or less in tandem. What editing offered then was a direct way of engaging, and in tiny ways, influencing the “cultural conversation.” I developed a habit of writing to writers--mostly to poets--when their work moved me. What might have--perhaps should have--remained simple letters of appreciation became solicitations for the magazine. I recall being moved by Bly’s Silence in the Snowy Fields and by the very different work in The Light Around the Body, which included some powerful antiwar (Vietnam) poems (“If we could make the bodies smaller”) and then writing him (who knows how I got his address in those days before google) and asking for a poem for the magazine. He kindly obliged, scribbling an enigmatic sentence on the back of a postcard which, shamelessly, we published, thereby allowing our other, mostly undergraduate contributors to say their work appeared alongside Robert Bly’s. That became Agni’s MO, as well as my calling card into the world of literary publishing.
It was a great hands-on education in two arts--that of contemporary literature, and of contemporary publishing. It also led to the formation of many meaningful lifelong friendships.
I eventually left Agni in 2002--I’d grown tired of waking up 10,000 pages behind in my reading every morning. But it turns out I missed the possibilities publishing allowed--of staking a claim on behalf of a writer one believed in, often long before others came around to the work. So, in 2006 I launched Arrowsmith Press (named in honor of my former colleague at Boston University, the great translator William Arrowsmith), in order to publish a long story by Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko. Having accomplished that rekindled my appetite for the process--for the collective work that is publishing, making it a powerful antidote to the solitary nature of writing itself. We have by now published some 70 books, including firsts by National Book Critics Circle Award winners.
As an American author of Ukrainian heritage whose work has been translated and published in Ukraine, can you tell us something of your perspective on the ongoing war?
Ukraine has been a steady presence in my life. My family were refugees who spent five years in a refugee camp before coming to the US in 1950. The only reason they left was become my grandfather was on a Soviet “hit list,” and they expected they’d be able to return home in a few years, as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed. That process, alas, took 40 years. By the time it became possible to go back, they had established themselves too firmly in the US to pick up and leave. Thanks to my mother, mine was a very literary household. My mother had aspired to become a poet--I recently published an essay about the three-page rejection letter she’d received from an editor in Lviv which ended with a promise that, if she revised the poems, the press wanted to publish her first book. The letter was dated the same day that Hitler and Stalin, or rather their representatives, Molotov and Ribbentrop, signed a treaty making them partners in waging world war.
The other thing worth mentioning is that poetry holds
a particularly exalted place in Ukrainian culture. The poet and painter Taras Shevchenko, born a serf in 1814, has legitimate claims to the title of “father of the nation”--his poems, describing the plight of the peasants under Russian and Polish occupation were the first popular work written and published in the Ukrainian language, the language spoken by most of the nation’s population (as opposed to Russian, the language of empire, of the colonizer). His work, articulating the heart and soul of a people, gave them courage and validation and helped to unite very different parts of a large landmass in the desire for self-determination.
You asked specifically about the state of Russia’s current war against Ukraine. For Ukrainians it’s the continuation of a struggle in which they have been engaged for half a millennium. No one wants to live under occupation again--that’s why they are fighting so fiercely. They know that losing means the destruction of their culture, starting with their language. It means a return to a new kind of serfdom, a new kind of slavery. And the people of the country would sooner die than go back to living as subjects of a truly depraved, genocidal empire. Which is why I am confident that this time they will triumph--for good--in both senses of the word.
Askold Melnyczuk has published four novels and a book of stories. What Is Told (Faber, 1994), his first novel, was the first commercially published work of fiction in English to highlight the Ukrainian refugee experience and was named a New York Times Notable. Other novels have been selected an LA Times Best Books of the Year, and an Editor’s Choice by the American Library Association’s Booklist. His most recent book is a collection of stories, The Man Who Would Not Bow. His selected poems, The Venus of Odesa, just appeared from Mad Hat in Summer, 2025. A book of selected non-fiction, With Madonna in Kyiv: Why Literature Still Matters (More than Ever) will be published by Harvard in 2026. He has edited a book of essays on the St. Lucian Nobel-prize winning poet Derek Walcott and is also co-editor of From Three Worlds, an anthology of Ukrainian writers from the 1980s generation, as well as the first ever anthology of contemporary fiction and poetry by Crimean Tatars (2025). He was the recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Three Year Award in Fiction, the Heldt Prize for translation, and the George Garret Award from AWP for his work in the literary community. Individual poems, stories, essays and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. Founding editor of Agni, for which he received the PEN-Magid Award for Editing, and Arrowsmith Press, he has taught at Boston University, Harvard, Bennington College and currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
I interviewed Melnyczuk over the telephone, through text, and mostly email.
INTERVIEWED BY J.D. ISIP
The Imagined Lifeis a novel about discovery, about digging into the past and into the self. What drew you to these themes?
I have always been interested in the relationship between the past and present, between our current lives and memory, but this book is a little different in that the main character, Steven Mills, is trying to learn about a past he only partially understood and observed: the past of his father, who disappeared mysteriously in 1984 when Steven was twelve. As Steven drives up the coast of California, he talks to various old friends and colleagues of his father, trying to understand what his father’s life was like at that time and what events might have led to his disappearance. So, the story becomes a piecing together of a past that he was only partially aware of in 1984. After all, how much do any of us really know about our parents’ lives at age 12?
As for what drew me to this theme, I think I’ve always been interested in disappearances of various sorts—all of my books explore this theme—but the disappearance of a parent is a particularly painful and confusing one, especially if it happens when one is still a child. I wanted to see if I could write about a character who was able to accept the fact that he would never really know the answers to certain questions about his father and yet also still be able to move forward in his life.
This is your second novel and fourth book. Where do you look for stories? How do you find ways to keep the writing fresh?
Stories always begin for me with voice and with an opening sentence or opening paragraph. I have a habit of writing lots of potential opening sentences and paragraphs for stories I might one day want to write and then saving these openings in various files and folders on my computer. Every so often, when I’m looking for something new to work on, I’ll go back to these files and look through them for an opening that really stands out to me as particularly interesting or urgent. I never have any idea where my stories are going to go—for me, the fun part is not knowing, of discovering the story as I write—but I can always tell when there’s a particular kind of urgency behind a voice, and I always trust (when I sense that urgency) that there is a story behind that opening.
Many writers I interview recommend those looking to write and publish should read widely. I wholeheartedly agree. What books and/or authors would you recommend for someone looking for a crash course in novel writing or short fiction writing?
Well, I think my first piece of advice would be to read the writers who are writing the types of books you would most like to write. And if there is one writer in particular who is really doing what you would like to be doing, then read everything that writer has written, and then read it again. And again. I think a lot of the lessons we learn as writers are not things we can really explain or pinpoint; they’re things we’ve learned by internalizing the work of certain writers simply by reading them so many times. For me, as a young writer, the writer whose work I read over and over was Raymond Carver. Later, it was other writers—Marilynne Robinson, Sigrid Nunez, James Baldwin, and so on. At the same time, if you’re looking for a crash course in a particular form it’s also important to expose yourself to a lot of different approaches to that form. So, for someone looking for a crash course in the short story form, for example, I’d recommend going back and reading through a bunch of the annual Best American Short Stories anthologies, starting, say, ten or fifteen years ago. You’re not going to like every story you encounter, but you will be exposed to a lot of different approaches to the form and that will be an education in itself.
What would you say was the most rewarding aspect for you in writing The Imagined Life?Is it the same for every book you write?
I think my favorite part of writing The Imagined Life was being inside the world of it. I really had a lot of fun escaping into that word each day— Southern California in the early 1980s and in the present day—and I really spent a lot of time trying to evoke the feel of that world in my descriptions and scenes. My family still lives in California, and during the pandemic I found myself
missing being able to go out there to visit. So, in a sense, I suppose this novel was my way of being able to escape there for a few hours each day, and I think the daily ritual of that escape was probably the most gratifying part of the writing process for me.
Please let our readers know how they can get their hands on a copy of The Imagined Life(Knopf, 2025) and your other books. And please let them know about any upcoming readings/events and where to follow you online.
You can get a copy of The Imagined Life in both independent and chain bookstores and any place online where books are sold. You can also go directly to my website (www.andrewporterwriter.com), which will link you directly to my author page at Penguin Random House, and there you can find pages for all of my other books too. All upcoming events can also be found on my author page.
Andrew Porter is the author of four books, including the short story collection The Theory of Light and Matter (Vintage), which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the novel In Between Days (Knopf), which was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection, an IndieBound “Indie Next” selection, and the San Antonio Express News’s “Fictional Work of the Year,” the short story collection The Disappeared (Knopf), which was longlisted for The Story Prize and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and the novel The Imagined Life, which is available from Knopf this year. Porter’s books have been published in foreign editions in the UK, Australia and New Zealand and translated into numerous languages, including French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Bulgarian, and Korean.
INTERVIEWED BY CLIFFORD BROOKS
What gets you out of bed in the morning?
Lately it’s the puppy. I’ve never had a dog before, and the early returns are sleep deprived. But our kid is ecstatic, and it’s a new adventure in commitment and love for me, so I’m grateful for all of it even when it includes yips and cries and groggy walks in the morning dark. As far as work goes, the thing that motivates me most days is the chance to go somewhere I haven’t been before. I mean that writing is transportative. It can take you anywhere and anywhen you want to be. You get to go there, take in every detail, and report back what you find. I crave that experience every time I write. Whenever I’m blocked, I ask myself, when and where would you like to be right now? Then, I try to get there.
What makes you stand out in a crowd?
I don’t think I do stand out in a crowd. I think I’m mostly indistinguishable unless I’m at a Ted Nugent concert, though that’s a comment about race, and we’re not supposed to talk about race anymore because it makes the autocrats, zealots, and oligarchs feel squirmy and mad even though nobody’s more obsessed with race than all our idiot oligarchs, zealots, and autocrats. Anyway, I’m happy to go unnoticed. Makes it easier to pay attention what others are doing and saying and feeling, and that’s how I get to see and hear and understand things I otherwise wouldn’t if everybody were paying too much attention to me. It isn’t that I don’t think I’m unique or that I don’t have something singular to offer. It’s that I think the rest of the crowd is singular and interesting too.
Tell us about your childhood to young adult years. Did things shake out the way you planned?
I remember we had a clawfoot tub and no shower until we moved to a small townhouse in the suburbs when I was 8. I
remember the metallic scent of window screens, cicadas, struggling for sleep against the hot hum of the box fan in Chicago apartments, the wire handles of a fly swatter all white and peeling. I remember my fingers going numb in the wet of my Thinsulate gloves, the hollow smell of snow, and oppressive stretches of grey winter. Other than that, I grew up in an immigrant family that worked hard for me to have my chances at comfort, and what I remember most about growing up is the tension between fitting into my family’s culture at home and the American culture all around us and infiltrating our home. I can’t remember what I planned during that stretch of life, but things have certainly turned out in ways I hoped for and in ways I didn’t expect. I spend a lot of nights sitting in my reading chair, marveling at the seemingly random, seemingly inevitable sequence of events that landed me in that chair.
I try to let the sentiments out raw and hokey as I can, get the gist of whatever it is I’m feeling down. But the feelings almost always come out as descriptions, either of people or places. It’s like trying to describe an acute but fuzzy memory, and this makes my first drafts kind of blunt and not terribly interesting, but from there, I start playing around
with language, description, and expectation until something unexpected happens.
My practice tends to center on juxtaposition, on finding combinations of words and images and observations that I’ve never seen in combination before. If the poem is about love or politics or whatever, maybe it needs an otter in it or a nail gun or hydrocortisone cream. That raw and hokey thing I started with needs to attach itself to something it isn’t usually attached to, and those juxtapositions are what lead to any discoveries in the writing.
I have five books out, four poetry collections and one book of essays. What makes each of them special is that those are five different books written by five different Jaswinder Bolinas. I remember those guys, the things they experienced and felt, but I’ve had different experiences and felt different feelings than they did. So, the books are special to me because of how each of
them makes me remember. I’m not sure if or why they’re special to anyone else, but if they are, it might be because those Jaswinder Bolinas offer up experiences and feelings that are either helpfully different or differently helpful.
All I can think of with this question is Andy Richter’s and Conan O’Brien’s faces lit studio green and flashlight white and the guy in the band singing “In the year 2000...” The future is endless until it isn’t. The future is human until it isn’t. The future is mine until it isn’t. The future won’t always include me, and I’m sad about that, but I hope the part of the future I get to be around for includes the puppy growing into a dog, and the kid growing into whoever the kid will be. I hope it includes more reading and writing, much more time with friends and family. The future will be creakier, achier, and more mournful, but I think and hope it’ll be filled with gratitude and affection for life and with robots who can fold my laundry for me.
Links:
www.jaswinderbolina.com
https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/books/ english-as-a-second-language-and-other-poemsby-jaswinder-bolina/
https://bookshop.org/p/books/english-as-a-second-language-and-other-poems/19669775?ean= 9781556596575&next=t&affiliate=11503
Jaswinder Bolina’s most recent book English as a Second Language and Other Poems (2023) was awarded the 2025 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award from Claremont Graduate University. He is author of three previous poetry collections, The 44th of July (2019), Phantom Camera (2013), and Carrier Wave (2007), and of the essay collection Of Color (2020). He teaches on the faculty of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Miami where he also serves as chair of the Department of English & Creative Writing.
INTERVIEWED BY CLIFFORD BROOKS
You’re literary career careened into the poetry scene over a decade ago with work few will ever match. How did life lead you to this?
I’ve been in the poetry life since high school, but yes, after my first collection, If Go Missing, got published in 2014, I’ve been doing what I think I do best—that is, writing and thinking about poetry. I also teach, and for the last few years, I’ve been focusing on visual poetry and poetics. Of course, to get here, which I am not sure what here really means, a lot of work has to take place and a lot of time has to be invested. But in the course of ten years, I’ve published, most recently, The Book of Wounded Sparrows (Texas Review Press), which was longlisted for the National Book Award, and Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours, which won the Ambroggio Prize from the Academy of American Poets for a manuscript written in Spanish (with a translation). So my life is still much in poetry, and the making of it.
You stand out not only due to your genius, but also a passion to promote others who embody extraordinary talent, kindness, and professionalism. You never do it for a favor. How did you decide selfless promoting others took priority in your career?
It has always been a priority. I learned early on that in the poetry life, it is very hard to be without community. It can be done, I guess, but I think it is much better when you surround yourself with people that share similar interests, people that love poetry as much as you do. And sharing the work of others just comes naturally. I mean, I am a fan of poetry and poets. I truly like being around writers and poets and artists. And I am also aware that things don’t always have to be about me. I am happy in solitude, writing, or painting. Making things. I didn’t go into poetry because I wanted to be anything other than what I am now—that is, someone who appreciates poetry and creativity, someone who finds joy in making things, poems, for instance.
What guides you through life with a zen necessary to negate the irrational actions of those envious of your hard work?
I don’t think in those terms. I don’t live my life worrying about what others think of my work. I figure that that’d be a stupid way to lose focus, to lose energy, to allow someone’s else’s negative thoughts to control, in some way, what I feel about my own work, or how I do things. In the same way that I am not envious of others’ successes, I feel that others are not envious of mine. But who knows? Thing is, I don’t care much for that sort of thing.
How do you balance family and the creative life? Often romance is ruined due to the dedication it takes to make your mark on this landscape of madness. What’s your secret?
I like your take on “this landscape of madness.” It can be. As for family and the creative life, it can be hard, but communication is very important. Family and art for me are priorities, so I try to dedicate time to each, and when I do, it’s all the way, no half-assing. My family knows that when I am in my studio, I am working. I am writing, painting, or making music. I usually have peace here. And when I am with family, I try to be as present as possible.
How does home influence your poetry? Is home a place or mindset for you?
Home is where I usually eat dinner. Sit on my favorite sofa. Maybe read a book. Watch TV. Home is where I know I’m pretty much safe from the outside world. And I enjoy it. But to be honest, there is a sense of homelessness in me too. Maybe this has to do with my artistic temperament, or maybe it has to do with me being separated from my folk and siblings when I was a young boy. Maybe both intermingle to give me this sense of homelessness. Which I guess it was useful to write The Book of Wounded Sparrows, which is a book about familial separation and geographic and emotional dislocation. I guess home can be both. A mindset and a real place.
What do you consider three cardinal sins in writing poetry? What habits kill creativity?
I think there is only one cardinal sin in writing poetry: and that is, not writing it; that is, if you call yourself a poet. As for what kills creativity—probably the pressure to monetize. I could be wrong, of course. Also, self-censorship. That definitely murders it.
You are a professor of creative writing as well as a practitioner. What’s your philosophy behind being the guide new recruits best respond to?
Key word here is “guide.” That’s all I want to be. Give them as much as context and examples as possible for them to use as springboards. I try to get out of the way of their stories.
Read them with compassion and attentiveness and ask, “What was your intent here?” Then often they give themselves the answers they wanted to hear from me.
Tell us about your literary festival that’s already well known in such a short period of time.
I founded VersoFrontera in 2019 and our first event was in 2020, just before the Covid shutdown. The only year we didn’t have it was in 2021, but this year, 2025, will be our fifth holding an in-person event. The vision was for VersoFrontera to be an independent literary festival intended as a platform for writers and artists to showcase their creative work in an inclusive and community-oriented environment. Approximately thirty-two local, national, and international writers participate every year. As I said before, I had the opportunity, and energy, to create this event to showcase the work of writers and poets I admire. And so far, it has been fun.
sorely lack and should study before trying to slide into this game?
Definitely not treat it as a “game.” If you do, you are more than likely bound to lose. And definitely work on making relationships. Not treat others as competition. That’s probably a basic principle that I follow. It has more of a “human” element to it, but I think it can also translate into “business.” And by this I mean, if by “business” we are talking about money, then I must say that most of the paid gigs I get are due to the relationships I’ve made in the writing community. And in turn, when I get the opportunity to invite someone for a paid gig at my university, it usually happens because of someone’s relationship with me. In poetry, I think this is how things usually work when it comes to “business.” But I am not sure. At least this has been my experience.
Don’t leave without telling us about your new book.
I mentioned The Book of Wounded Sparrows already, but this past March, the University of Arizona Press published Las Horas Imposibles / The Imposible Hours, which is a bilingual collection (Spanish / English), and which I co-translated with San Antonio poet, Natalia Treviño. The book is comprised of two sections: one made up of lyric poems and Frontextos (visual poems); and the second section is a long poem. Instead of me talking about my own book, I rather let Rodrigo Toscano say a few words about it: “Octavio Quintanilla’s The Impossible Hours transforms the hyper-situatedness of the dispossessed, the alienated, the cursed, into a Cathedral of Light whose dazzling insights splash us with a searing new cosmovision.”
Octavio Quintanilla is the 2025 Texas Poet Laureate and the author of the poetry collections, If I Go Missing (Slough Press, 2014), The Book of Wounded Sparrows (Texas Review Press, 2024), which was longlisted for the National Book Award, and Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours, winner of the 2024 Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets (University of Arizona Press, 2025). He is the founder and director of the literature & arts festival, VersoFrontera, publisher of Alabrava Press, and former Poet Laureate of San Antonio, TX.
His Frontextos (visual poems) have been published and exhibited widely, including in the Mexican Cultural Institute in San Antonio, TX, El Paso Museum of Art, Southwest School of Art, Presa House Gallery, Brownsville Museum of Fine Art, and in the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center / Black Box Theater in Austin, TX. His poetry and Frontextos can be found in public spaces such as at the San Antonio Labor Plaza and at Poet’s Pointe.
Octavio is also the recipient of the Nebrija Creadores Scholarship which allowed him a month-long residency at the Instituto Franklin at Alcalá University in Alcalá de Henares, Spain. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Texas and teaches Literature and Creative Writing in the M.A./M.F.A. program at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas. He was recently inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters.
Website: https://www.octavioquintanilla.com/ IG: @writeroctavioquintanilla Twitter: @OctQuintanilla
INTERVIEWED BY CLIFFORD BROOKS
Tell us in two paragraphs why you’re the genius this world of words deserves?
(Don’t bother to be humble.)
I’m not a brilliant intellectual, but I’m a hyper-empathetic person. I think this—really exploring how situations and circumstances affect individuals (even individuals whose personal world view or ethical understanding of the world differs greatly from my own)—is what makes my writing worth reading. For me, fiction is always an exercise in empathy. The braided or mosaic structures on which I rely help cultivate empathy.
I’m also good at conjuring place, giving the reader a sensory experience in a particular landscape.
What does the process look like when you sit down to write - before, during, and after?
I believe in writing rituals. I start most days with half an hour of yoga, and then a few mornings a week, I drop right into my writing while I’m still calm and grounded from my yoga practice. I love to write in my yellow chair with my lap desk. I like the house to be quiet. I like to sip on an espresso drink. My husband (the writer R. Dean Johnson) and I try to do a Friday morning writing date at Purdy’s, our local coffee house. Walking home, we always talk about what we worked through on the page. At least once a year, I do a writing residency. In a few weeks at Yaddo or Jentel, I can drop so deeply and fully into my writing and stay there all day long. I get more done in residency than I get done the entire rest of the year. That being said, I also try not to be too precious about it. If the neighbor is up early power trimming his bushes or the steamer is broken
on the espresso machine, I still need to stay in the chair and get words on the screen.
I’m what I call a progressive editor. When I sit down to write, I read back through the entirety of whatever chapter, story, or poem I am working on, editing as I go. Because of this practice, very little revision happens after the fact. Most of what I do at the end, especially with a novel manuscript, is cutting back those passages where I have waxed a little too lyrical for too long.
How’s life working with your stellar, traditional publisher?
My three books have come out with very different presses. The poetry book came out with an independent press that folded after a few years. The novel-in-stories won a book contest and came out with Ohio State University Press. My recent novel, Five Oaks, was published by Lake Union Publishing, Amazon’s book club imprint. I had great experiences with each book, but the level of support offered by Lake Union has been pleasantly surprising—a developmental editor, a copy editor, a sensitivity reader, etc. They sought my opinions regarding the cover art and the voice talent for the audio book. The combination of lending support while still granting me agency throughout the process was just perfect!
Being outside. I love hiking, backpacking, gardening, walking my dogs through the woodland estate near my home. What my kids call “touching grass.” When I am walking outside, I get flooded with ideas for my writing projects.
Next summer my novel-in-poems, Bent Cedar Mountain, will be released from Broadstone Books. I’m simultaneously working on two new fiction projects: 1) a cycle of fabulist stories spanning two hundred years in Arizona, and 2) another intergenerational family novel that explores the reverberating effects of the opioid crisis, incarceration, and mental illness on Appalachian families. I’m excited about some upcoming writing residencies that will help me develop these manuscripts: Sisters of Loretto Convent in KY, Sheepscot Arts in ME, and Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts in AL.
But do I, really? It’s all about the yoga. And I chose a very steady partner. He balances my more manic energy.
If you could sit with one author and talk shop, who would it be and what would you talk about?
She just passed away in the past year, but I so wish I could have had a conversation with Edna O’Brien. When I was working on my MA at Kansas State, my Irish literature professor Donna Potts turned me on to O’Brien’s The Country Girls trilogy. I went on to read O’Brien’s entire body of work. Her early novel, A Pagan Place, remains one of my favorite books ever—for its dazzling use of second person point of view, its rich exploration of the way women pass secrets down generation to generation, and its vivid landscapes. I think O’Brien was brilliant and consistently overlooked by literary critics because of the way her work focuses on domestic conflicts. She was so prolific writing right up until the end of her life. She also had a reputation for being a bit bawdy and not pulling any punches, so she surely would have been fun to have a pint with. I would love to inquire about her practice, as well as how she kept true to her subject matter and style even in the wake of some negative reviews.
Julie Hensley, the South Arts Literary Fellow for the state of Kentucky, is the author of three books, Five Oaks (Lake Union Publishing), Landfall: A Ring of Stories (Ohio State University Press), and Viable (Five Oaks Press). She is also the author of two chapbooks, Real World (Artists Thrive) and The Language of Horses (Finishing Line Press). A Professor at Eastern Kentucky University and core faculty member in the Bluegrass Writers Studio LowRes MFA Program, she lives in Richmond with her husband, the writer R Dean Johnson, and their two children.
Tell us about the book you have out now.
Five Oaks is an intergenerational family novel narrated by Sylvie Pritchard. Sylvie is all grown up, but she is looking back on her eleventh summer, months spent at her grandparents’ cottage in the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas. Over the course of this summer in 1988, Sylvie enables her older sister, Wren, to sneak out to meet up with an older boy. It is a coming-of-age summer that sees the girls testing boundaries, and the consequences come hard and fast. Braided into this narrative, are chapters in which Sylvie imagines her mother’s and her grandmother’s passages into womanhood. Really Five Oaks is about memory—how it serves us and how it eludes us. Like most of my work, this book explores the idea from family systems theory that secrets are passed down generation to generation, sometimes without ever being explicitly reveals. Women, in particular, live around the previous generation’s secrets. They affect the decisions we make and the relationships we form.
INTERVIEWED BY J.D. ISIP
What demons inside you do you exorcise by bleeding them into the horror of your pages?
I’d say that I recognise and acknowledge situations, people, events, and consequences, that disturb and frighten me, or that simply make me uncertain about the world, others and myself. I often express these things abstractly through supernatural horror.
How do you approach the first draft?
I read around relevant subjects, so there is a research provision, and I draft a lot of ideas in notes that becomes a treatment; background, details, set pieces, things of that nature. I’ve used a step outline for three recent novels that were derived from my own screenplays; in these novels I knew the stories and characters from the inside out before I began writing the novels. That is a recent practice that coincided with writing screenplays. But, mostly, I have a swarm of ideas but no real story. As I begin writing a few scenes, however, a story grows; the act of writing itself seems to give me most of my stories.
What does your technical approach to writing look like?
A careful, slow first draft. With a break of four to six weeks between subsequent drafts, I then rewrite the work. I tend to rewrite each book around seven times. My new novel only needed six drafts; my record was sixteen; but it’s been seven for most of the novels. The second draft is the hardest and that’s when I know what I actually have, in terms of promise and shortcomings, and what can be done with the latter.
This entire process takes me between twelve months and two years, depending on the complexity of the story, or how horrendous the early drafts are, or whether I am achieving the desired effect. Sometimes I want a book to feel like a continuous dream; those take a lot of writing.
This is my 30th year as a professional writer, so the experience and knowledge that I’ve accumulated over that time, while continuously reading and writing, has evolved into a robust internal editor. I was also an editor of fiction for eleven years. I don’t kid myself either; I listen to my internal editor, or intuition, and keep revisiting a manuscript and revising it. Fresh eyes are so important too, so the breaks between drafts are crucial. Eventually, when I am merely tinkering with line edits, I know I am near completion.
I always have music playing for inspiration. It can be transporting. And as I become absorbed into my own zone, I stop hearing it and am unaware of time. Of equal value is poetry; I often read a great poet before writing, just to unlock and excite that part of my mind that fixates on language. Music and poetry are important to me because they are transporting. That’s my goal: to be transported and to transport a reader.
Threats to my survival in multiple situations, I’d say, filter into dream narratives. I can usually trace the dreams to their source. Anxieties from any context, ranging from physical dangers to social or emotional crises, I’d guess, are transformed into all kinds of frightening scenarios by my subconscious mind.
Writing horror takes a remarkably similar form; it can be like conscious dreaming. But with the latter, I have control over the outcome that I am denied when asleep.
What’s the back-and-forth between you and the movie business as you see your books come to the big screen?
It varies and is dependent on the type of development. If I am purely the author with a book in development, I either hear nothing at all, or am asked to read screenplay drafts and consulted on aspects of the story. If I am the screenwriter, I’m involved in all aspects of the development. As an executive producer, I’m consulted on the screenplay development and also casting.
I am creating the five editions of a new novel of pagan terror – Monumental – with a team of freelancers, that will be published April 2026, while also researching the following novel and writing early scenes. I’m also running our press, Ritual Limited, with my wife, and involved in a few film developments.
This has changed significantly. For a long time, personal freedom was everything to me; no incumbents or major responsibilities, other than looking after myself, was a clear goal. This was to serve a purpose: to fill my life with experience and culture and to become a writer and contribute something meaningful. From my mid-teens, I was guided by outsider writers of the past; writers and thinkers from before my time. Very much a post-war liberal philosophy. I can see that now. Secular, self-involved, art as a purpose. I probably ended up with so much experience, that it became impossible to process, or even convey. And though I became a writer and wrote a lot of books, I made my life incredibly difficult for myself. It was a transient existence and plagued by financial anxiety, insecurity, despair too. Somehow unnatural, at odds with instinct. I seemed to work hard to make my life hard.
Now, I live an inversion of my former life. I’m a parent, have a family, am responsible for others and consider their needs to be more important than mine. I have a stable, traditional life, away from bright lights and big cities. I’m a better person and writer because of this; more productive, calculably happier, far healthier. I suffer less. My purpose from one day to the next is more meaningful. Dare I say it, but I am not confined (as I once feared I would be) but somehow liberated by more of a traditional and moral structure. A simpler, less complicated existence, but one bound by responsibility with more at stake, better suits me as a man and a writer.
So, clearer values and better defined boundaries have become a good thing, essential. Even sacrifice and responsibility are also crucial, I’d say, to my internal peace. I spend as much time as I can in the natural world too. Use your body, exercise it. Consume knowledge as if it is food. Have children if you can. Be a work in progress; there’s no arrival. Making your forward journey better for other people, and yourself, is the best reward of all.
About fifteen years ago, I wouldn’t have said any of this. I didn’t know. I had a decent childhood, but this is the best life I’ve lived since then.
Adam L. G. Nevill was born in Birmingham, England, in 1969 and grew up in England and New Zealand. He is an author of horror fiction. Of his novels, The Ritual, Last Days, No One Gets Out Alive and The Reddening were all winners of The August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel. He has also published three collections of short stories, with Some Will Not Sleep winning the British Fantasy Award for Best Collection, 2017.
Imaginarium adapted The Ritual and No One Gets Out Alive into feature films and more of his work is currently in development for the screen.
The author lives in Devon, England.
https://brooks-sessions.teachable.com/p/adulting-with-autism
INTERVIEWED BY DEBBIE HENNESSEY
LET’S START WITH YOUR ORIGIN STORY, HOW YOU MET, AND THEN JUMP FORWARD TO THE YEAR OF MANY WEDDINGS.
SIMON: For all the numerologists out there: we met on Friday the 13th, December 2013 at Molly Malone’s in Los Angeles, where we were both booked to sing Aladdin Sane by David Bowie in a tribute show. So, the very first thing that we did together was sing a duet onstage!
CELIA: I had actually seen Simon play in his band Minibar several years prior at the Troubadour, when I had first come to LA from New York, so I knew who he was and was excited to sing with him.
Fast forward to last year, on Friday the 13th, December 2024, when he met me at the airport and proposed to me in front of everyone in baggage claim at LAX.
SIMON: I’m a cheeseball and I don’t care! It was really sweet, everybody around us in Arrivals applauded.
CELIA: As far as 2025 being our year of many weddings, this is because both of our mothers are in their 80s, so we needed to bring the party to them in England and Seattle. We only have so much time left with them.
SIMON: If we’d known how happy it’d make them — they’ve both been so joyful about all of it — we would have done it sooner!
CELIA: We did not always write together. In fact, while we collaborated as musicians and sometimes as song-doctors
on each other’s projects after we first met, we kept out of being in an original music project together until after we had dated for a while and things felt settled.
Simon: Writing songs together is the final plane of intimacy! So, we got our personal relationship sorted out first.
SOMEONE HAD NEVER HEARD YOUR WORK BEFORE, WHICH SONG/S WOULD YOU TELL THEM TO START WITH?
SIMON: I would say “Jodrell Bank,” off of the first Petty Chavez, and “Lucky at Cards.” They’re both emotional songs — the first recalls me being on a flight to try and see my father before he died, but I didn’t get there in time.
CELIA: Yeah, definitely “Lucky at Cards.” For both of us, that support from our friends and family has been so key to us being able to sustain our life as working artists, through times when it’s hard to see our way forward. Simon wrote that one; every time we sing it, it feels like a gratitude meditation.
HOW HAS YOUR SOUND EVOLVED OVER TIME, AND WHAT INFLUENCES HAVE PLAYED A ROLE IN THAT TRANSFORMATION?
SIMON: our forthcoming EP is still based around fingerpicked guitar and two-part harmony, but with the help of our producer, Greg Johnson (with whom we also share our studio), those key components are set in a more ethereal sonic soundscape.
CELIA: We started out with me playing cajon in the standard vertical position, which was awkward for me as a singer. Once I got it horizontally on top of a speaker stand, we both felt a little more freedom in our sound. I also like artists like Sharon Van Etten who marry their voice and acoustic instrumentation with electric and electronic elements, and push the processing on the mix side of things.
WHAT’S A MISCONCEPTION ABOUT BEING A MUSICIAN THAT YOU WISH MORE PEOPLE UNDERSTOOD?
SIMON: That it’s actually a job. I was also under the misconception that having a major label record deal meant that everything would be OK, and that other people would do our jobs for us, but even then, that was not the case!
CELIA: Haha! Yeah, but the funny thing is, this whole starving artist thing is not necessarily true. I have found that my music work, both singing for hire and playing my own music, and Petty Chavez gigs — it pays more than any other normie job I’ve had. It’s just inconsistent, so you have to plan for that. And also, it’s just entrepreneurship; we work as hard as any other small business owner out there.
SIMON: I just completed an MFA in Creative Writing, with a focus on poetry. Being exposed to so many diverse voices, and being mentored by brilliant contemporary poets has been hugely beneficial and invigorating for my creative process.
CELIA: I started painting a few years ago, and it makes me widen my view of the world. I think that the intentional curiosity it develops in me for noticing the play of light, shadow, gradation, and the dance of color shifts has helped me consider those texture variances in music as well. There’s a spatial aspect to the final mix of each song that borders on the visual, and I think that the experience of painting has opened my brain’s way of conceptualizing a song in broader ways.
YOU’VE WORKED AT ALL LEVELS OF THE INDUSTRY. DO YOU PREFER BEING INDIE ARTISTS AT THIS POINT IN YOUR CAREERS?
BOTH: YES. (laughing)
CELIA: I will say that it would be great to have things like tour support and a promotional budget like the major artists we’ve both worked with as side-people, but honestly the transparency and efficiency that we have to be agile in such a changing industry feels right for us today. We love the intimacy we have with our community, and the agency to make choices for ourselves, some of which are more about balance than unbridled growth. We’re not spring chickens; we don’t necessarily want the same kind of trajectory we did in our twenties and thirties.
SIMON: I agree — plus, when Minibar signed a five-album deal with Universal, we still didn’t get any tour support or promotional budget, so those things are not givens, even with a major label.
CELIA: It’s a four-song EP titled Radial Blur. We recorded it in our Santa Monica studio. It’s a miracle we are still in there, they’ve been slating the building for demolition for years. It’s our little creative oasis where things still make sense, even while things are spinning out of control in the outside world.
SIMON: There’s an elegiac feel to the songs on this EP, and yet all the songs are a celebration of love.
CELIA: That’s true, the vibe is that feeling on the edge of both those things, loss and love. The lead single is our version of the Korgis 1980 song, “Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime.” The guitar arrangement just emerged as I was noodling around after the devastating January wildfires here in LA.
SIMON: We tried to capture that bittersweet yearning in the verses and the world-weary acceptance of the chorus.
CELIA: Yes, I agree. Next, “Eurydice” and “Somewhere To Wait,” to me, both speak again to grief and longing, and even the limbo in between. Those songs also acknowledge a tender underlying faith that makes it possible for love to survive.
SIMON: The last song, “Half In Love,” is a sweet and slightly silly song I wrote for Celia soon after we first met. I was making a record up in the high desert near Joshua Tree, and she was back in the city with the flu. I sent her the song in 30-second segments because, at the time, my phone couldn’t record longer videos than that.
CELIA: It was so sweet! “Half In Love” is like the hope at the bottom of Pandora’s Box, our little treat to close the EP. We’ll be releasing all the songs as singles leading up to the full EP release in the fall. It’ll definitely be after our last wedding in October, because my brain can only take so much planning! (laughs)
Links: https://linktr.ee/pettychavezmusic
ABOUT SIMON & CELIA:
Petty Chavez is an indie folk songwriting duo whose intermingled voices and guitar coalesce into storytelling and soundscape. With vibes both nostalgic and current, their songwriting is shaped equally by the misty greys of Simon Petty’s native northern England, Celia Chavez’s Pacific Northwest, and the sunlit gold of Southern California, where their musical paths first crossed.
Simon flew out west when a record deal drew British band Minibar from London to Los Angeles to record with producer T Bone Burnett, and later, Rami Jaffee. Once in the USA, Simon refined his signature mix of world-weary optimism and musical eclecticism on tour with Pete Yorn.
Celia brings her own brand of wistful lyricism to the duo. A genre-hopping vocal powerhouse — demonstrated by years as an arena-level backup singer to international artists (Enrique Iglesias, P!nk, Julia Fordham, Melody Gardot) — she embraces Simon’s sound with radiant translucence.
The duo live in West Los Angeles and work in their Santa Monica studio with their producer and fellow artist, Greg Johnson. A four-song EP — featuring the advance single, a reinvention of the Korgis’ Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime — is currently receiving finishing touches for Autumn 2025 release and promises to be as intimate as it is expansive.
YOU WERE FORCED OUT OF SOCCER WITH A HEART ATTACK VERY EARLY IN YOUR LIFE. HOW DID YOU STAY STRONG DURING THIS TIME?
I had no other choice… It wasn’t about quitting football because of a broken leg, a move to another city, or even for family… It was about life or death. Only a heart transplant could save me. What truly saved me was the will to live — the one I had then, and the one I still carry with me every single day.
In football, I was chasing fame. I had the ambition to grow stronger every day, and above all, I was having fun. I’ve found all of that in fashion, too. Today, I’m here doing an interview with you — that’s fame. Every day I strive for meaningful progress — that’s ambition. And the fun? That never goes missing in this job.
I love attention to detail. I’m incredibly stubborn — if something doesn’t feel right, I won’t move forward, not even a centimeter. I’m passionate about quality, and I’m proud of it. But I have to admit: what truly makes Benheart special is also my presence — my face — especially with all our clients around the world. Because I personally stand behind every creation. And when there’s a problem, I want to face it myself, without delegating. Yes, the product matters — but the service matters even more.
My work takes up a huge part of my time. I deeply believe in my company and in Benheart’s future, so I never want to give up on any-
thing or leave things to chance. That’s why I work intensely on every single project. Passion drives me — it surrounds and fuels me. I try to make my family a part of this journey: my wife is by my side every day, managing almost everything with me, and my children feel involved — they love coming to the office, visiting the stores, and especially wearing Benheart.
I really miss training and playing for hours and hours with my friends. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of scoring a goal. Sure, today — even after the transplant — my health allows me to play football again, to run, at least at an amateur level. But honestly, Benheart takes all my energy. I don’t have the time — or maybe, deep down, my mind just doesn’t want to chase after a ball anymore.
Ideas come to me at any moment in my life — they can be born anywhere. But the place where I’ve imagined the most creations is on a train. Traveling by train relaxes me and opens up my mind. There are always so many ideas… and yet, they’re never enough. That’s why it never feels like hard work — it’s pure joy.
Honestly, I can’t really imagine it… but I hope I’ll be truly happy and in good health.
Florence is a magical city. It’s not a big metropolis — it’s more like a large village where everyone knows each other. Every corner of this city holds history. I have more than enough around me to feel inspired here in Florence.
The good life is when I see my family, friends, acquaintances, and even strangers smiling and living their lives — even with their struggles. Yes, because we have to accept everything life brings us.
A brilliant, ambitious warrior who never gives up in the face of anything… Certainly, just like the creator of Benheart — the brand that represents rebirth and encourages people to become organ donors to save the lives of those who suffer and await a chance… Ben
BY STUART DISCHELL
I visited Ealy Mays in his home and studio in the heart of the St-Germain des Pres neighborhood of Paris. Mays is a wellknown figure in the district. After I got the opportunity to see some of his new work, we walked down the many flights of stairs I had just ascended and across the street to the Relais Christine, a posh hotel where the likes of Johnny Depp and such lay their coiffed heads. Over the hour we spoke, he was greeted warmly by the hotel staff as they filtered through the lobby. It was a hot day in summer and we enjoyed the air-conditioned cool of the lobby and helped ourselves at the honor bar.
I’m out there in West Texas. I must have been about three or four years old. They call it shotgun houses—I’m a generational Texan—meaning that my family has been in Texas for about 400 years, if you count the Apache bloodline. I’m an African American and a generational Black American, capturing what I know of my culture. Here I am a little boy in the middle of nowhere, houses on bricks, I have this standard white piece of typewriter paper and I have a carbon pencil and I am scribbling all over page after page. Then I say to myself where do I start. Where’s that spaceship that will take me from point A to point B. I was doing my own thing even at three years old. Even at 67, I still go back to the period of what made me an artist.
It’s hard to say--but I can tell you when I made my first sale. I was in High School in Ohio—my Dad had become a doctor in Dayton--and I had a painting of a bouquet of flowers in the Governor’s Show. Someone bought it for one hundred
dollars, a lot of money then, but my teacher who was supposed to deliver the money to me never gave it to me. Can you believe that? My art teacher stole my money and then gave me an F. My first experience in the art world! I went on to Wiley College where I studied mostly science and chemistry. Wiley is a foundational Black American college-home of the great debaters—the oldest Black college west of the Mississippi—I was class president for sophomore and senior years, then went to University of Texas. After that I attended medical school in Guadalajara, at Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara School of Medicined. Actually, I didn’t want to practice medicine: I wanted to go to Mexico. What Mexico did for me was to open my horizons. My paintings still have landscapes and images from Mexico, the masked wrestlers and wild characters. I also met my French wife there, now divorced, with whom I have a wonderful daughter. That explains how I came to live and work in Paris.
WHAT ARTISTS DO YOU FEEL KINSHIP WITH? I KNOW ALSO YOU WERE MENTORED BY JACOB LAWRENCE AND WERE A GREAT FRIEND OF THE ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST ED CLARKE.
Artists I feel kinship: Frank Schoonover and Howard Powell from the Brandywine School of Painting. Wyeth was a student of Powell…As for Ed, I met him Cite des Artes in 1998. He was in the studio above me. One day I go up there and I’m “how are you Mr. Clarke.” He was like “get out.” Then he came down later and invited me to dinner. We talked and something was forging there. I always told Ed, “You may be old but I’m and old spirit. You still excited about stuff.” I had a dream about Ed last night. I am sitting in some studio in the universe and I have a glass of wine and Ed’s not supposed to drink wine. Last time I saw him he was dying of dementia. He came over and I know he wanted to see me one last time. I had this studio in Montmartre. I heard this voice outside, and it was Ed’s…. Jake Lawrence was the coolest dude in the world. In 1996 I met him at Skowhegan where he was an elder artist. I take a greyhound from Dayton to Maine. I get there I am a medical doctor. Most of the kids there are from New England art schools. My critiques were pretty negative, then Jacob Lawrence praised me as a narrative painter and then everyone treated my work differently.
SO MANY ARTISTS STILL COME TO PARIS—YET MANY ART-MINDED PEOPLE MIGHT SAY THAT PARIS IS NOT MUCH OF A SCENE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART. BUT YOU HAVE BEEN VITAL AND EXTREMELY PRODUCTIVE THESE YEARS. HOW DO YOU THINK LIVING IN PARIS HAS AFFECTED YOU AND YOUR PAINTINGS?
I consider myself a global contemporary artist, one who is both influenced and recognized by his own culture, in my case Black, but also by the other cultures I have lived in. Don’t try to put me in any one place. Like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, I am always time-tripping. I can be in many places. Don’t try to put me in any one corner of the universe. When I won prizes for my art in Mexico, I realized how my art is cross-cultural. Let me answer this in another way. I came to Paris in love with a beautiful woman, but when I got here I wound up out on the streets and living in
squats. What makes Paris, London, New York exciting is that you got the sleezy of the sleaziest and the heights of the refined. You meet and experience people of all types. I am surrounded by images. I am lucky to live in the heart of Paris. For me to sit here in this fancy hotel across the street from my studio, where I met Donald Southerland is fantastic. I told my daughter, “If you make your life interesting, interesting people will come your way.”
Ealy Mays is a renowned painter. Born in Wichita Falls, Texas, he has made his life in Paris, France for nearly thirty years. His paintings have appeared in many museums, galleries, and exhibitions in Europe and North America. He has attended residencies at the Cite des Arts and the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture, and his work hangs in numerous collections both public and private. Paintings have been featured in American exhibits both at the University of Maryland’s David C. Driskell Center For The Study of The Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and The African Diaspora,[9] and in Rice University’s Travelling Art Exhibition along with works by other major artists, such as Romare Bearden and Beauford Delaney.
BY LYNNE KEMEN
WELCOME! PLEASE TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF.
I was born in Buffalo, NY, to a working-class family. As a child, I was interested in art and history. I attended the State University of New York at Buffalo, where I received a BFA in Sculpture and a BA in Art History. After school, I moved to New York and attended Hunter College, where I studied in the Master’s Program in Art History. I soon realized that I was not an academic. I began painting in my small apartment, eventually working out of a studio in East Harlem. In the late 1980s, my wife and I purchased property in Sidney Center and built a house on it. We have been coming to this area since.
That’s a tough one. Does one ever truly “become” an artist?
I’ve been drawing and painting since childhood, but I would struggle to pinpoint when I became an artist. For me, it’s a journey — a path one takes to enrich the world.
I’ve worked in just about every analogue medium: oil, acrylic, watercolor, wood, metal, et. al. It’s all fair game.
YOU RECENTLY DID AN EXHIBIT ENTITLED Tantra. PLEASE TELL US ABOUT THAT- WHAT INSPIRED YOU?
I was shown a book called “Tantra Song” by a friend of mine. The book was based on the collection of the late French poet Franck Andre Jamme, who collected Tantras from the Indian State of Rajasthan. I was immediately struck by the power and beauty of these humble, anonymous works. I began to incorporate aspects of these Tantras into my own practice: the scale, the simplicity of form, the brilliance of color.
For the past two years, I have been working on my secular version of the Tantras. I am continuing to work on the Tantras and seeing if they can evolve into something other.
I HAVE VISITED YOU IN YOUR BEAUTIFUL STUDIO IN THE GREAT WESTERN CATSKILLS. WORKING IN THAT SPACE, HAS YOUR ART CHANGED?
Yes, certainly. A friend of mine said that my work changed from being evocative the energy of the city, to being about the moon and stars.
Not themes per se, but a fascination with beauty, a different kind of beauty. As for artists, there are too many to mention, but here are a few: Trecento painting, Orthodox Icons, Robert Fludd, Manet, Hilma af Klimt, Malevich, Pollock, the quilts of Gee’s Bend, and of course the Tantra artists of Rajasthan.
You can follow me on Instagram @jsmartski or my website jimnapierala.com (which is in dire need of being updated)
Jim Napierala was born in Buffalo, where he studied Sculpture and Art History obtaining degrees in both from SUNY Buffalo. Moving to New York after college, he studied in the Master’s Program in Art History at Hunter College, and at that same time turned to painting. Over the past 40+ years he has exhibited widely in New York, and throughout the country.
Napierala works out of his studio in upstate New York.
INTERVIEWED
BY
CLIFFORD BROOKS
It’s a mixtape, not a single. My love songs are made of breath and thunder. Black folks humming while working—low, strong, insistent, tender. It’s survival stitched to joy, grief bent into laughter, defiance that keeps humming even when the note catches. It’s whatever Donna Summer is singing about on MacArthur Park. It’s cicadas sliding into Prince’s falsetto. It’s lyric stitched from refusal, devotion, and survival, laughter too loud, and the audacity of joy. The hook? We’re still here. We’re still. We’re still fly. We fight hard, when we can. We keep showing up. It’s the ululating buraanbur of a Somali wedding stretched through the clink-clinkshout of a Detroit factory rhythm pressed into the greengreen of an old mimeograph print, and bless-you-ing the sneeze from chalkboard dust, stitched from the impossible fact that we’re still here, harmonizing. And somehow it all makes sense.
Broke: How human we are. Healed: How human we are.
Silence nearly took me out. The “don’t say that”ss, the “keep your head down”s, the losses too early, the violences we’re supposed to carry quietly. I write because the world tried to lock my mouth. Poetry pried it back open.
Writing didn’t so much heal me as it turned me into a hifi speaker. Writing is the scar. The record. The sharp testimony: we lived, we loved, we bled, we laughed anyway. I don’t write toward healing. I write toward truth.
IF YOU COULD SIT WITH THREE PEOPLE EITHER ALIVE OR PASSED ON, WHO WOULD IT BE AND WHAT WOULD YOU DISCUSS?
June Jordan—because, of course. my teacher, my comrade, my forever light. I’d ask her how she kept her fire lit while the world kept throwing water.
Both of my grandmothers—one of whom I never knew; the other was my lodestar. They are the keepers of vaults. I’d like the combination now, thank you.
Prince—because every table needs joy, audacity, and funk. We’d talk about genius and play, and probably end up dancing. Also, I need wardrobe notes.
BONUS: If reincarnation is real, I’ll add whoever I was before this mess. Let’s discuss our karmic debt and how to find balance.
Who said I stay objective? I don’t actually believe in objectivity. I’m more intrigued by a deeply informed opinion than an illusionary sameness or some kind of both-sidesism. Back in high school, already knowing I wanted to be a writer, I participated in a summer program with Gannett News and learned that journalism wasn’t the right path for me because I have thoughts and beliefs and blanket objectivity just never felt true to me. So, no, not objective: I stay messy and honest. I keep my receipts, even if I regularly misplace them. I stay rooted. I keep my people. I keep my work bigger than my ego.I stay choosing community over industry. The industry is fickle, but the work will outlive the circus.
There’s a reason for the unforgotten latchkey, for the GenX obsession with the wild hydration of a yard hose: we are wildlings stuffed awkwardly into a world new-built for surveillance and control.
I was raised between Midwestern cornfields and the barefoot drift of passing weed smoke, between the hippies and funksters and yuppies of the still too-young Boomers (appropriately known, when I was coming up, as the “ME Generation”) booming LOUDLY and forever insistent upon themselves and their righteousness.
But I also grew up with laughter that could cut through anything. I grew up with libraries as portals, silences as classrooms, and a body and mind that were always “too much.” Spoiler: I never did learn to turn down.
The eldest of my family’s generation, I raised myself inside the cracks of what wasn’t said. I learned too-young not just to listen but to hear and I came out holding poetry as magic.
A COOL FUSION IN YOUR CURRENT BOOK. EXPLAIN THAT TO US AND WHY YOU CHOSE SUCH AN
According to hundreds of Google pages, should they be believed, “there is currently no accepted theoretical model that would allow cold fusion to occur.” So while I experiment toward changing that fact, I chose to keep it cool.
I Hope This Helps is a book but also a portal. It behaves like a mixtape, sometimes a music video, sometimes a séance. This is poetry which scans into sound, light, moving image. I fuse because the world is fused: love with a data plan, grief with television memory, rage with heartbreaking beauty.
I needed form to keep up with life, to hold the complexities of both ourselves and our time: why would the poems stay flat when we don’t or can’t? Also? I need to play. We all do. It’s experiment, yes—but it’s also necessity.
1. Don’t wait for permission—permission is late if it shows up at all.
2. It begins to feel uncomfortably weird right when it starts to get good. Keep going.
3. Make it hot. Make it true. Make it useful.
4. Read, more than you write, like your life depends on it. Because your work does. Your language does. Your thinking does.
5. Protect your time like it’s sacred—because it is. (I am still working on this one.)
6. BONUS (because rules? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯): Remember: the work is bigger than you. Always.
That brilliance won’t save you. That publishing and writing are not the same. Writing is the love affair; publishing is the messy side hustle. Capitalism doesn’t care about your poem. But the poem can’t rely on capitalism either. The work outlives the gatekeepers and the disappointment. The work keeps finding the people who need it most. That, in fact, “we” and “the people” are one.
I am a patchwork of migrations and contradictions. Hippie-collegetown-Townie turned pseudo-academic. More melded Africanisms than I can count both trapped and set free by more Americanisms than I can count. My identity is more rooted in my birthplace than I like to admit, but it’s also stretched from coast to coast and ocean to ocean. I’m a nomad more than anything else. I’ve never been still in my life, often to my own detriment. My birthplace, my body, my people all infuse my work not as theme, but as marrow and pulse. They underscore every line. They are the rhythms my lines can’t escape. They are the ghosts that walk with me into every stanza.
Samiya Bashir, called a “dynamic, shapeshifting machine of perpetual motion,” by Diego Báez, writing for Booklist, is a poet, writer, librettist, performer, and multimedia poetry maker whose work, both solo and collaborative, has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, screened, experienced, and Oxford comma’d from Berlin to Düsseldorf, Amsterdam to Accra, Florence to Rome and across the United States.
Sometimes she makes poems of dirt. Sometimes zeros and ones. Sometimes variously rendered text. Sometimes light. Bashir is the author of three poetry collections, including Field Theories, winner of the 2018 Oregon Book Award’s Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry.
Her fourth collection, I Hope this Helps, was released to wide acclaim from Nightboat Books in 2025
In J.D. Isip’s second full-length poetry collection, KissingtheWound, readers are asked to look at “this long life” through a multiversal lens, to consider how our lives and our loves, our traumas and our triumphs, fold in on one another, how we are all connected to and reflected by one another. Isip crosses genres and poetic styles, nods to X-Men and Star Wars as well as Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and the Bible; he shows readers what wonders we miss between breaths and days. “When you pay attention,” Isip seems to tell us, “You just might find the healing you were looking for.”
If our memory could shatter like glass and be reassembled with no regard given to time, it would look like these poems: a shimmering window of stained glass whose patterns and glow create unexpected resonances of the many lives one voice can be given. As identities — familial, sexual, spiritual, amicable — intersect and intertwine, time folds in on itself. Everything can and does happen at once. Kissing the Wound is expansive, enveloping. With cross-genre bravery and unfettered honesty, J. D. Isip’s collection examines, at its core, a question of love: for each other, and for ourselves.
- Charles Jensen,
Author of Instructions between Takeoff and Landing and Nanopedia
There is a palpable struggle against powerlessness in J.D. Isip’s Kissing the Wound, and in its expertly crafted poems, the path to victory in that struggle always originates from within. Although its external expression varies from poem to poem (telekinesis, immense empathy, razor-sharp wings, conquering love), Isip shows us that the greatest power we have is our ability to remember, to render, and to navigate the “mess of lights and music” that is the human experience.
- Gustavo Hernandez, Author of Flower Grand First
J.D. Isip is the author of Pocketing Feathers (Sadie Girl Press, 2015) and several other works of poetry, fiction, and theater. His second full-length poetry collection, Kissing the Wound will be out in January 2023 from Moon Tide Press. He is also a full-time professor in Plano, Texas, and a contributing editor to The Blue Mountain Review.
INTERVIEWED BY CLIFFORD BROOKS
My husband and I are a team in every sense of the word. We’ve always shared a love for good food, good drinks, and, most importantly, good company. Our life together has been a constant collaboration, from planning dinners for friends to dreaming up what our future would look like. Hive & Vine is really the culmination of all that. It’s our shared vision brought to life—a place where we can share our passion for bringing people together, creating a cozy and welcoming space for everyone in our community.
We met in 2021 and together have a blended family of six children and two grandchildren. Mike is a computer engineer with a background in business and marketing (and he also makes a mean glass of mead). Jennie has been a social worker for over 20 years and recently stepped into a new role as a school counselor.
We live on a small farm in Talking Rock, where we enjoy the peaceful countryside and spending time outdoors. We both love music, going to concerts, and finding new adventures to share. Whether it’s working on farm projects, hiking, or just relaxing with family, we’re happiest when we’re together.
From the very beginning, our relationship has been built on teamwork and shared passions. We both love bringing people together and creating spaces where family and friends feel welcome and connected. Opening Hive & Vine was a natural extension of that—it’s a place where we can pour our energy into something we truly believe in, side by side.
Live music has always been part of our life together, so it was important for us to create a space that could support local musicians, especially those just starting out. We know how hard it can be to find that first stage to play on, and we wanted Hive & Vine to be a place where new talent feels encouraged and appreciated.
We’re both hard workers, but we balance each other out. Mike brings the vision, creativity, and hands-on skills (plus his mead-making magic), while Jennie brings the heart, organization, and people-first mindset. Together, we knew we could build something special, not just for us, but for others to enjoy too. It’s been a labor of love and dedication to creating a space where everyone feels welcome.
We love hosting special events for our customers. Jennie coordinates our events and works personally with each to make sure it’s exactly what our patrons want. We have hosted all kinds of fun and special events. Birthdays, wedding, engagement, or baby showers, holiday parties, family reunions, or anything else you’re celebrating, we’re here to be the backdrop to an amazing event. If you’ve got something different in mind, we’re always up for making it happen! We try and take great care and feel honothe feeling of peace you get from a simple, warm cup of coffee on a rainy morning, or the genuine smile you share with a stranger as you pass them on the street.
It’s also about having purpose. Knowing that the work you do, big or small, contributes to something meaningful. It’s the fulfillment of helping a friend through a tough time or the satisfaction of seeing a project you’ve worked hard on finally come to life.
Ultimately, I think happiness is about appreciating the little things and finding joy in the everyday moments. It’s a choice to focus on what you have rather than what you lack. Gratitude if you will. It’s not a destination, but a way of traveling.
When people walk away from Hive & Vine, we hope they feel like they’ve just been to a friend’s home—a place where they felt relaxed, welcome, and a little bit more connected. We want to be more than just a wine bar; we want to be a genuine part of our community.
We’re a small, family-owned business, and we pour so much of ourselves into creating a space where conversations flow as easily as the drinks, where laughter is always on the menu, and where people feel a true sense of belonging. We all need a little more kindness and a welcome smile in this world. If they leave with that feeling of being part of something special, then we’ve done our job.
https://brooks-sessions.teachable.com/p/the-working-writer
SARAH CHILDERS, YOU’VE KEPT THE LIBRARY, NOT ONLY RUNNING SMOOTHLY, YET YOU’VE ALSO HELPED IT GROW EXPONENTIALLY. WHAT’S SOME OF YOUR BACKGROUND, AND WHAT WOOED YOU INTO THE WORLD OF LIBRARY SCIENCE?
I grew up in the community that our library serves: Cherokee, Pickens, and Gilmer counties. I always knew that I wanted to have a career where I could give back to the community that raised me. It was fate that as I was graduating with my masters from Kennesaw State University, a brand new Marketing Manager position with Sequoyah Regional Library System opened.
Growing up, my grandmother would take me to storytimes in the very building that I work in now. I remember being so excited as a child to attend events, check out new books, and proudly hand my library card to the front desk staff. Now I market our events, showcase our collection, and proudly design materials to spread awareness about the library. This career is truly a dream come true.
TOO MANY
THE IMPORTANCE OF
LIBRARIES. HOW ARE YOU AND THE TEAM RAISING AWARENESS TO BRING BACK
Spreading awareness about the library’s services and events is all about meeting our community where they are. Whether it’s through in-person outreach such as Pop-Up Libraries, Storytimes, and presentations at City Hall, or digital
outreach on social media, our goal is give our community opportunities to explore, learn, and access the library no matter where they are.
Our vision is to be the community’s dynamic destination for discovery. In order to do that, we work hard to ensure that our libraries reflect the community. The materials, services, and programs we offer are important to us, because they are important to the community. We work to remain relevant and visible.
The biggest misconception about libraries is that they’re outdated, unused, and sitting quiet full of dusty books. This couldn’t be farther from the truth! In our last fiscal year, we had over 1 million total item check outs from our collection, over 130,000 SRLS cardholders, and a total of 952 free community events with over 33,000 attendees. Our library is more active than ever and growing every day.
Libraries are definitely more than a place to check out books. At our newly renovated Hickory Flat Public Library, community members can enjoy a musical courtyard, a third space with a community kitchen, multiple conference rooms available for reservation, and so much more.
In addition to physical books, our collection also includes digital books, audiobooks, and magazines available for checkout. Community members can also check out items from our Library of Things- these are items you wouldn’t
traditionally think about being available at the library, such as Chromebooks, WiFi Hotspots, Experience Passes for free admission to local attractions, and so much more. You can even check out a sewing machine!
Outside of our collection, we offer numerous community events for all ages throughout the year. Events can range from storytimes and ukulele meetups to our Summer Discovery and SequoyahCon initiatives.
Summer Discovery encourages continued literacy throughout the summer months with fun events and prizes while SequoyahCon is a multi-location, free to the public convention that celebrates all things fandom.
There are numerous services available to the community at SRLS as well, including Ask Us! Sessions that allow community members to “book” a librarian for oneon-one guidance, exam proctoring, 3D printing, community rooms available for booking, and so
much more. There truly is something for everyone at the library.
Our driving force is the community we are a part of. Guided by Open Access, Service Excellence, Community Engagement, and Continuous Learning, the Sequoyah Regional Library System has a vision to be the community’s dynamic destination for discovery. We are eight locations working together as one library, to serve our growing communities of Cherokee, Pickens and Gilmer counties. Our mission is to connect people with ideas and opportunities to explore, learn, and create.
Our hope is that we are a place of connection within our community. The library is meant to provide access, service excellence, community engagement and continuous learning. The hope is that we are able to accomplish that by connecting with our community members.
While I’m not a librarian, the most important trait one must have to work in libraries is a drive to better your community. From our library programming staff, who ensure we have the best events to fit community needs, to our library service staff, who keep shelves stocked and assist patrons every day, each staff member at Sequoyah Regional Library System is essential to our day-to-day operations.
For library marketing specifically, it’s incredibly important to know the community you serve, what their needs are, and how the library can meet those needs. From there, the goal is to determine how best to communicate the library’s services to the community members you serve. Library marketing is about creating, communicating, and connecting: creating marketing materials, communicating with patrons and staff, and connecting our community to the library services that can make a positive difference in their lives.
At SRLS, there are so many ways the community can support the library: from donating materials or financial gifts to volunteering or joining one of our county Friends of the Library groups.
The best way to support your local library is easier than you may think: sign up for a library card and use it! Checking out items from the collection, attending community events, and even following your library on social media are all great ways to support libraries.
Sarah Childers is the Marketing Manager for Sequoyah Regional Library System. A native of Cherokee and Pickens counties, she graduated from Kennesaw State University in 2020 with her Bachelor of Science in Media and Entertainment. She then went to pursue a Master of Arts in Integrated Global Communication from Kennesaw State University and graduated in 2022. As Marketing Manager of Sequoyah Regional Library System, Sarah manages the SRLS social media accounts, communicates with local media regarding SRLS events and news, creates content for in-house and online promotions, and more. One of Sarah’s favorite parts of her job is getting to meet with organizations outside of the library and spread awareness regarding SRLS events and services.
SequoyahRegionalLibrary.org
INTERVIEWED
INTERVIEWED
BY
BY
CLAYTON JONES
CLIFFORD BROOKS
WELCOME, LYNNE KEMEN. I’M DELIGHTED TO HAVE YOU HERE TODAY FOR THE BLUE MOUNTAIN REVIEW.
Thanks, Cliff. I’m happy to talk with you today.
YOU
Right now, I’m working on my second full-length poetry book and considering a chapbook of ekphrastic poetry. I’ve just stepped down from Bright Hill Press’s board to have more time for writing, though I’ll finish Word Thursdays—our Zoom and live reading series—to close their thirty-third season. And thanks to you, I’m re-issuing my first book, Shoes For Lucy.
I’ve also joined the Southern Collective Experience Community Outreach board, which I’m very excited about. I’ve been an editor for SCE’s Blue Mountain Review since 2021.
IN THAT
THEN TOOK A NEARLY FIFTY-YEAR HIATUS. TELL US ABOUT THAT JOURNEY BACK TO POETRY.
Life intervened in wonderful ways. I lived and worked in New York City from 1978-2016 in nonprofit theater administration, founded a Center for Dance Medicine, managed a large orthopedic practice for twenty-six years, went back to college for a second BA and PhD in biopsychology, then taught at Hunter College for sixteen years, as well as serving as the psychology department’s student advisor. Each experience exposed me to new people, allowing me to meet and talk with such different personalities. I’ve also lived in other parts of the country and done extensive travel. I can pull memories from each of those experiences.
When I retired in 2016 and moved full-time to our Catskills farmhouse, I immediately joined my local library board and Bright Hill Press. Taking Robert Bensen’s poetry class there in 2019 helped me rediscover my love of writing. I’ve been making up for lost time ever since.
I’m finally tackling the darker, more personal material. Initially, I was reluctant to reveal too much, but working with supportive mentors and writing groups taught me how to take those risks safely. I write more first-person poems now, experiment with internal rhymes and rhythms rather than forced end rhymes. I’ve written prose poems, ekphrastic work based on both visual and musical art, micro-fiction, various Japanese forms of poetry, erasure poems, Ghazals, limericks, Villanelles, Sestinas, Pantoums, Epics, Found, Rondeau, and List. Each is different and challenging. I like writing the same poem using different forms, too.
Working with BMR taught me so much about what makes a piece work—or not work. Reading hundreds of submissions, seeing what catches your attention in that first line, and understanding how a poem needs to earn its ending. It’s made me a much more discerning reader of my own work. Plus, organizing events like Word Thursdays meant constant exposure to diverse voices and styles, which expanded my own range tremendously.
The other wonderful thing about being an editor here is that I can meet and interview people who are artists or who support the work of artists, poets, teachers of the craft of poetry, painters, sculptors, publishers of small presses, and literary magazines.
Read widely—not just poetry. Find writers you admire and determine what draws you to them. Attend readings, whether in-person or virtual, and participate in open mics. Listen with your eyes closed sometimes to avoid distractions.
Read your work aloud. Notice where you struggle to breathe—that’s where your line breaks might need work.
Find what works for your schedule. One friend writes at 3 AM; I try to write something daily, even if it’s just a line or an idea. I meet weekly with another writer—we keep each other accountable and share drafts.
Community is essential. I have a Saturday breakfast with visual artists. Listening to painters and sculptors discuss their work and offer each other suggestions reminds me that creative struggle is universal. When we don’t meet, I miss it.
LYNNE, THANK YOU FOR THIS WONDERFUL
Thank you, Cliff. This was delightful.
ABOUT LYNNE:
Lynne Kemen is a poet whose full-length collection, Shoes for Lucy, was published by SCE Press in 2023. Woodland Arts Editions published her chapbook, More Than a Handful, in 2020. Her poetry appears in anthologies including The Memory Palace: An Ekphrastic Anthology (Ekphrastic Editions, 2024), Seeing Things (Woodland Arts, 2020), and Seeing Things 2 (Woodland Arts, 2024). Her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2024.
She served on the Board of Directors of Bright Hill Press from 2016 to 2025 and has been active on several other not-forprofit boards. She curates Word Thursdays, a twice-monthly reading series for Bright Hill Press. Lynne serves as an Editor and Interviewer for The Blue Mountain Review. Through her writing and editing, she continues to foster connections within the literary community. Libraries and literacy are another passion.
She lives in Delaware County with her husband in an old farmhouse that once belonged to her aunt’s aunt.
INTERVIEWED BY CLIFFORD BROOKS
DID YOU FEEL GROWING UP, YOUTH AND TEEN YEARS) THAT YOU NEEDED TO ACT OR WEAR A MASK AROUND PEERS? NOT A FALSE FRONT, BUT AS A MEANS TO GEL WITHIN GROUPS.
I never would have guessed, early on, that this is what I would end up doing for a living. I was in a couple plays in grade school, very typical stuff, (maybe one performance per) but it wasn’t on my radar as anything I could pursue further. Also, I was painfully shy getting up in front of people was not something I enjoyed doing, and would do so only under duress. I was fortunate to have a group of friends that I really felt safe among who were imaginative and funny and nerdy, so a small, skinny, young-for-his-grade kid like had support. It never occurred to me to wear a mask in every day life. I feel lucky, in retrospect, to have grown up where I did. Life was smaller, simpler. There was a river to swim in and bikes to ride and lots of time for imagination to be exercised.
WHAT’S THE FIRST FILM YOU SAW IN THE THEATER, WHICH WHOM, AND WHAT WAS THAT TOTAL EXPERIENCE LIKE?
I can’t remember the first film I saw in a theater. I remember there were programs in school where you’d pay a fee and could attend as many matinee movies as you wanted during the summer. Choices were Don Knotts movies, and such. THE SHAKIEST GUN IN THE WEST, APPLE DUMPLING GANG, etc. I finally got a girlfriend in my last year of high school, and she worked at the
local movie theater. One family owned all three theaters in town, so she could sign into any movie and bring a guest. We saw a lot of movies together. Our first was RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. That was a big night.
Not to bring things down, but the night we saw that film—one of our first dates, was the night my older brother was killed in a drunk driving accident. He was thrown from the passenger seat when the car he was in went off the road. Coming home that night, high from feeling like I was falling in love for the first time and seeing a film so full of imagination and fun, into chaos and tragedy and grief changed the trajectory of my whole life. No doubt made an actor out of me. No doubt propelling me into a lifetime of wearing masks and being someone else. Someone other than this one who was in such pain.
Never know how to answer this one. I feel like I should have more specific ideas in mind than I do, because I can’t ever think of a quick answer. Over the years I have read books that I thought no one had discovered and that I vowed to film—-A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT; ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD; BLOOD MERIDIAN and most of Cormac McCarthy’s work. Lately it’s the fantasy novels of Joe Abercrombie. All of these have been discovered by other people and made or are being made into films. So, I guess my point is I think I have good taste. Heh. I can say that I’m drawn to certain types of characters. Themes of shame and redemption are frequent attractions for me. KD in HAND OF GOD and Sherman Oliver in OLIVER SHERMAN are two career standouts for me, in terms of those parameters. I am attracted to physical roles—I like being challenged physically on projects. I like testing myself. I like a good fight.
As an English major with a writing emphasis (my degree is in poetry and short fiction) you’d think I would have written screenplays, but I haven’t. I only recently have found a writing partner, novelist Kevin McColley whose book THE OTHER SIDE fits right in with the previous question’s list. A great writer. We’ve been tossing an adaptation of another of his novels back and forth, but I can’t say I’m a screenwriter based on the meager suggestions I’ve made. I have too much respect for real writers.
YOU’VE MENTIONED YOU ESCAPE LIFE ON MOTORCYCLE RIDES. HOW DOES THAT ETHEREAL CONNECTION TO THE ROAD GIVE YOU PEACE?
I’m a new motorcycle rider, and I’m glad of it. I don’t have big speed ambitions. For me it’s all about the journey. I like being out in the air, feeling every temperature change in every hollow, smelling all the smells, seeing so much more of the world somehow, as I pass through. Being on a bike requires more frequent stops, both for gas and rests. I like this slower pace. I take time to see weird things I pass, meet more people as I stretch my legs. There’s a thing called “target fixation” that is applicable to riding a bike. If you encounter an obstacle of some sort, you can’t focus on the thing itself, you have to focus on the way through—otherwise you’ll drive right into it. I think the parallels to life when you think that way are pretty obvious and probably written about much more eloquently by other riders. (ZEN AND THE ART OF…etc etc).
I love poetry and need to read more. Raymond Carver loomed large for me in my college years and beyond. He had lived in rural Washington state for a while, so he seemed like a relative when he’d write about that kind of life. I love language and people who aren’t afraid to use it, or be oblique with it. Infer. Let people draw their own conclusions. It’s not unlike music, in a way. I have no doubt that I fell into this line of work because of a hope and a hunger to live frequently in a poetic space. I love those moments when the “art” side of film and television gets to exercise itself.
Finding a purpose is good. Not sure I’ve always felt like I have one. I can get caught up really easily in the chase, the hunt. I think sometimes it would have benefitted me to say “no” and wait for the thing that feeds the soul or meets a standard I look for—but sometimes you just need to pay the rent. There is glory in putting food on the table as well. I don’t do well when I’m not working. It’s going to be a hard road for me when I’m older if I don’t find some peace in my own company and a purpose outside of this wonderful, silly business.
Piggybacking off the last answer, I’m not sure I balance
work and private life very well. I strive to be in the moment, enjoying the down time as much as possible. My wife and I are getting better at giving ourselves proper rest time between jobs instead of just lining them up. A hidden blessing to getting older is your body TELLS you when it’s done. I know I will catch up on my fitness and my reading and maintain important relationships when I am between jobs.
I think there are many things left unsaid to my brother. I have a hard time thinking of anyone else I need to speak to who has passed on. I mean, I’d love to go back in time and warn JFK and MLK, sit in on the debates between Baldwin and Buckley, see some of the great old shows and performances I’ve heard about, but that’s not what you’re asking….and Eric needs to know I loved him and that we don’t blame him and that we miss him. That loss, that one event, perhaps so small viewed from space, was catastrophic for my family and sent all of us on a course far removed from the expected. I need to thank him for the gifts he gave through his unexpected passing. I’d like him to know we survived.
Well—what is good acting? It seems to be a sliding, very personal scale. My favorites make someone else’s skin crawl. It also feels generational, lately. I see a lot of acting winning awards that is a bit head-scratchy, the decisions seem to be about something other than the actual performance. Maybe that’s my own naïveté about how it’s always worked, but there is definitely a game to be played that involves fashion and glad-handing and being seen. I’ve never been much good at any of it. But I can’t be judgmental about it while simultaneously envious of the opportunities playing the game provides. I admire the people who are good at it. They have an understanding about how the business works that dwarfs my own.
I know what I like. I know what moves me. I remember being a young actor and watching some of my older predecessors and thinking, “I don’t want to do that. I don’t buy that. I’m going to do THIS.” I don’t see why the next generation will feel any different about mine. It might just be the way of things. Maybe it’s neces
sary. Everybody has to define it for themselves, as it’s an elusive target.
I think you need to be hard on yourself, if you’re an actor. Demand excellence of yourself. You know when you did good and, if you’re honest, you know when you didn’t do all you could have. Listen to that voice, and the voices of those you trust. Study performances and performers you admire and learn from them. It never ends. Rejoice in that fact.
I am on several addictive social media outlets—Instagram is my most active. I enjoy photography and the immediacy of it. I also have accounts on X and Facebook still, but to be honest, I don’t post frequently. I don’t share much of my personal life—you gotta keep some mystery, right? But every once in a while you’ll get a glimpse behind the curtain. It’s just my name on all of them—@garretdillahunt.
HOW HAS LIFE HONED YOU INTO THE CLASSICAL MUSICIAN, HIGHLYESTEEMED PHYSICIAN, AND DEVOTED MEMBER OF ROTARY?
Well, it started with reading — my mother taught me at age 4. Then it was music—up until then there was nothing in my life or my family that emphasized excellence for its own sake, until music. But music simply deserves our best, our best effort and our best attention, and when you make music with friends it
teaches you teamwork and collegiality. That carries over into medicine—excellence for its own sake , not for reward or recognition. And then that just dovetails directly into Rotary.
WHAT IS IT ABOUT ROTARY THAT STOOD OUT TO YOU IN THE BEGINNING, AND WHAT KEEPS YOU INVOLVED TODAY?
When I was a senior in high school, I had been selected for a Rotary award and attended lunch and was just blown away at the members—all the men in our town I had known and heard about that I looked up to were there—my family doctor, our banker, the school superintendent, the millionaire developer who had put himself through Auburn by waiting on tables...I decided at that meeting that some day I was going to be a Rotarian.
WHO INSTILLED IN YOU THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING A PART OF, AND AN ACTIVE FORCE FOR POSITIVE CHANGE, YOUR COMMUNITY?
The first people I met when we came to Jasper—Reverend Charles Walker, Dr Perrow, J.L. White, Lee Dunn, Don Boggus Sr, J.S. Darnell, and so many more. It was obvious that they gave to this community without expecting anything in return, and they were great examples.
My intellectual curiosity had gotten turned on in high school biology and chemistry and then when I worked at our local hospital one summer I made the connection between science and medicine. I worked with the nurses (all impressively smart women) on the front lines and the doctors (all very confident men) who had an understanding of disease and could make decisions and give orders. I realized that medicine was intellectually demanding, while at the same time it was the ultimate caring profession. So the combination of the challenge and the helping was too much to pass by!
I love to drive with the top down—for almost 50 years I have had Jeeps that I took the top off or a convertible. I listen to a jazz station turned up loud. At home, it is a book in my hand and a dog in my lap.
One with no regrets.
WHAT ADVICE DO YOU HAVE FOR FOLKS WHO WANT TO BECOME A DOCTOR, YET ONE THAT, LIKE YOU, CONNECTS WITH EACH PERSON. YOU’VE CREATED A SAFE SPACE FOR PEOPLE NOT ONLY IN THE COMMUNITY, BUT ALSO IN YOUR MEDICAL PRACTICE.
I tell young people that the process of becoming a doctor is not what they think. First, you have to become a scientist—it is important to be able to read and think critically, like a careful scientist. That is in undergraduate, and then in medical school you just pile on the factual learning to support your fund of knowledge that has to be your foundation. at the same time the well-rounded physician should develop a base in the humanities—literature, art, the social sciences, all prepare you for deeper connections to human beings.
So it can be long and hard to juggle all the moving parts, and that is why we see doctors with “poor bedside manner” and rampant “burnout” in the profession.
But as Dr Abraham Verghese said, when you are concentrating on taking care of someone else, you can leave your own troubles on the doorstep. Not a bad reward.
INTERVIEWED BY CLIFFORD BROOKS
I always knew I wanted to finish my career in school administration, but I never had a set timeline. I told myself I’d know when the time was right. I spent over a decade watching and learning from a principal I deeply respected—someone who led with consistency and care. He used to tell me, “You’ll be sitting in this seat one day.” When COVID hit, it changed everything. I saw firsthand how much our students and teachers needed support, stability, and leadership. Stepping into the role sooner than expected felt like the natural moment to lead.
It’s all about relationships. There’s a saying: “They don’t care what you know until they know you care.” My journey as a teacher—and as a coach—taught me that while subject mastery is important, the ability to build connections, set clear expectations, and relate content to today’s diverse students is what truly drives success.
I’m still very much an “analogy guy.” Coaching taught me invaluable lessons: how to stay present, think quickly on my feet, and maintain my composure in any situation. Today, I channel that same drive into equipping our teachers with the tools they need to succeed. Both roles require me to have a vision and to give those I support the tools they need to succeed.
I’ve always believed that culture is the root of the tree, not the fruit. If you want to cultivate something strong and lasting, you must start with culture. Over time, I began to see a shift: some of the most committed, hardworking people in our school communities weren’t always getting the support they needed. That bothered me. I felt a responsibility to be part of the solution. I wanted to lead in a way that helped shape a culture where teachers feel valued and students feel like they belong.
Absolutely! I always excelled academically, but I was that curious “kid” who couldn’t sit still and asked a ton of questions. My inquisitive nature and perhaps a hint of mischief have helped shape the leader I am today, always eager to challenge the status quo and learn from every experience.
To leave this place better than I found it. Pete Carroll says, “Do your job better than it’s ever been done before,” and that really speaks to me. Pickens is a great community with deep traditions, and I want to build on that—academically, athletically, and in the arts. My goal is to create a high school experience where every student feels seen, valued, and inspired. I want them to leave with memories, life lessons, and the confidence to be great parents, neighbors, and leaders—whether they stay in Pickens or take what they’ve learned here and better another community.
That’s a tough one. I try not to get too caught up in legacy. I just focus on being where my feet are. If I can make today better than yesterday, and tomorrow better than today, then I’m on the right track. I hope people will say I showed up, cared deeply, and helped create a place where people felt supported and inspired to be their best.
INTERVIEWED
BY
CLIFFORD BROOKS
HOW YOU TAMED MONSTERS TO BECOME A MAN WHO CHAMPIONS SECOND CHANCES.
I’m the king of second chances. My whole career has been built on failure, one way or another. The key is that I just kept failing forward, until I found my purpose and my true calling. Alcohol took me down twice, and then I embraced my true nature, the way my Creator designed me. “I am fearfully and wonderfully made. He knit me together in my mother’s womb and saw all the days of my life before one of them came to be.” My weakness became my superpower. Now I work with people who have made the worst mistakes and take that experience to help young ones go another way. My demons led me to where I am today. I used to think my addictive nature was a curse, but once I learned to channel it the right way, it has become one of the greatest blessings of my life.
Think of it like a five-lane super highway, five lanes, all unique, but heading to the same destination. The first lane is schools, this our prevention lane. It’s called Protect the Dream. We teach kids to design dreams valuable enough to protect from the Seven Dream Killers. Then we teach them to be Dream Protectors on their campus. The second lane is the courts and juvenile detention, this is our prevention lane. It’s called Forty Days to Freedom. We teach kids who are under court supervi-
sion healthy conflict resolution skills and how to work well with authority. The third lane is law enforcement, this is our public safety lane. We hold events like Cops and Kids Cornhole Tournaments and bring cops and kids together using healthy competition. The fourth lane is the faith-based community, this is our service lane. It’s called Forty Days of Prayer. We inspire congregations to get involved in their faith and serve the “least of these” in their community. The fifth lane is corporate, this is our speaking and teaching lane. I’m about to release my seventh book. It’s about how to create a peaceful culture in the workplace. We will have a book tour and begin seminars in early 2026. Plus, we are currently laying the groundwork for a docuseries in 2026 centered around my work in prisons. I’ve developed programs that bring rival prison gangs together forty days at a time and teach them how to create and sustain peace. I’ll be touring prisons in Cambodia, Brazil, and Argentina this Fall.
WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO GIVE SO MUCH OF YOUR TIME? WHAT DOES THE WORK PROVIDE YOU THAT NO ONE ELSE OR OTHER SUBSTANCE COULD REPLACE.
When I was twenty-five I stumbled into my passion. The wildest guy to ever become a preacher became one and shocked the world. After fifteen fairly successful years building and leading churches, I fell. The old me came back and I lost almost everything. Then I prayed a prayer that changed my life. I said, “If you ever let me preach the word again, I’ll go to the ones that nobody wants to go to.” Jesus called them the “least of these.” The guy under the bridge, the addict, the prisoner, the rejected, feared and forgotten. I meant it. I got sober in 2005 and I got busy. Then he gave me a chance. I walked into my first prison to serve in 2009. That one prison became over one hundred prisons, jails, detention centers and rehab facilities across the country and around the world. Nothing does it for me like “the least of these” do. I believe we need them more than they need us. They gave me my heart back, and a bigger dream than myself. I owe them everything, so I’ll never quit.
Walk a mile with someone who is different than you and serve them. That has been one of the greatest blessings of my life. My journey with the “least of these” has taken me to some of the toughest people and places on the planet. I admire them so much. We often judge them, but the poor and less fortunate can teach us so many things. If we’re open to it, they can teach us how to suffer. They have forever changed my perspective. It has forced me to be uncomfortable and helped me see things from a totally different point of view. If you’re in a rut, or stuck in the past, you need something to shift your perspective. You might just be bored and need a new adventure. Or maybe you’re wounded and in need of a healing. Do something you’ve never done before. Charge a hill. Storm a castle. Slay a dragon. Win a maiden. Battles break ruts, believe that.
I start every day with it, but I write things that no one will ever read. Unless it’s my family, when they get all of my journals after I’m gone. They’ll be able to read about my battles, heartaches, dreams, and victories. I start my day journaling and talking to God. I have to, otherwise I’m in my head all day, and that gets pretty loud. So I work it out with Him in the morning, and then just try to follow His lead throughout the day. It’s simple. It gets ugly sometimes, but it’s real.
I guess it’s all about legacy. How will the planet be different after I’ve walked on it for a while? The older I get, the more that word means to me. Mark Twain said, “The two most important days of your life are the day you were born and the day you find out why.” I believe the reason I’m here is to break generational curses. I’m striving to win some battles that men in my family line haven’t won in several generations. That means that somehow, somewhere along the way, I signed up to fight like hell and never give up, and leave a legacy for my kids, grandkids, and great grandkids. I want them to see what a life well lived looks like; with the scars and all.
There was a time when I didn’t balance my work and home life, and it almost cost me my second marriage. I was traveling the world and building my dream and I left my wife at home all alone. Luckily, I came to my senses before it was too late. In 2018 we got very intentional with our habits, and then the pandemic put our routines on steroids. After I come home from work, we walk the dogs and download the day. When we get back, the phones go off for the rest of the night. We cook together and we share a meal out on our deck and enjoy the garden. Then my wife goes upstairs to draw the bath and I clean the dishes. Then we take a bath together and let the world go. After that we watch our shows, and then whatever comes next. We are fiercely protective of our rituals. I don’t work at night unless we both agree, and the same goes with weekends. One thing I will not regret at the end of my life, will be wishing I had spent more time with my sweet bride.
I want to be remembered for being passionately curious, and for having a child-like heart. I want to be remembered as an adventurer, and someone who laughed easily and often. I want to be remembered as a faithful husband, a loving father, and a loyal friend. I want to be remembered as a man who cared deeply for those who were invisible, overlooked, and marginalized. Most of all, I want to be remembered as a man who lived out his crazy faith, totally in love with God.
KitCummings.com
PowerofPeaceProject.com
Kit Cummings on LinkedIn
Kit Cummings on Facebook
Kit Cummings is an award-winning author, teacher, and violence prevention specialist. In 2010, Kit founded the Power of Peace Project. Using the experience he gained resolving conflict in some of the most dangerous areas in the world, he applies his principles to bring about change in prisons, schools, juvenile courts, and the faith-based community.
On MLK Day 2020, Kit was recognized by the NAACP receiving their Martin Luther King, Jr. Living the Dream Award for his contribution to civil rights and his work with underserved youth and prison reform.
In 2021, he was appointed to the Georgia House of Representatives House Study Committee on Youth Gangs and Violence which led to the passing of the anti-gang bill HB750 under Chairman Rep. Carl Gilliard.
T h e U n i v e r s i t y o f G e o r g i a ’ s l o w - r e s i d e n c y M a s t e r o f F i n e
A r t s i n N a r r a t i v e M e d i a c a n h e l p f u l f i l l y o u r d r e a m s . B a s e d
i n t h e G r a d y C o l l e g e o f J o u r n a l i s m a n d M a s s
C o m m u n i c a t i o n , t h e t w o - y e a r p r o g r a m o f f e r s a t e r m i n a l
d e g r e e .
S t u d e n t s s p e n d a w e e k i n A t h e n s f o r a s e r i e s o f i n t e n s i v e
w r i t i n g w o r k s h o p s f o l l o w e d b y o n e - o n - o n e i n s t r u c t i o n t h e
r e s t o f t h e s e m e s t e r . T h e m e n t o r s a r e a c c l a i m e d a u t h o r s
a n d e d i t o r s w h o r e p r e s e n t d i v e r s e e x p e r i e n c e s a n d
b a c k g r o u n d s . M a n y o f o u r g r a d u a t e s h a v e
s
BY DWAYNE KEITH PETTY
Is there a correlation between a congregation’s vocal participation and the melodic difficulty of the songs?
Music is so very personal. The songs we add to our playlists are a reflection of the deepest parts of our existence, and because of this internal association, it is often challenging to entertain a healthy song discussion with colleagues, even friends and family, without the conversation becoming quickly tainted with offense or someone withdrawing completely.
Since 2012, I have noticed that publishers and songwriters are crafting and releasing songs for the church that have seemed to be increasingly difficult to sing. But how could we possibly debate such an observation that seems so subjective! Could we find a quantifiable method of assigning difficulty to a melody?
Since there are mathematical elements to music, we should be able to discover those bits of data that are impersonal and unemotional, and bring those data into a formula that can consistently give us a standard rating by which to speak about the ease or difficulty of performing a certain melody. The appreciation of crunching numbers that my retired math teacher mother instilled in me, combined with the sheer tenacity of my curiosity-based personality, led me to craft in late 2018, after several iterations and attempts, a mathematical calculation that directly indicates the difficulty of a song concerning the melody’s range and occurrence of pitches.
Please allow me to introduce myself. I am a songwriter and music minister. Years ago, my wife and I created a school of music in Athens, Georgia that we grew to 80+ students a week. When a few things shifted in our life in 2012, I went back into full time music ministry and began that journey of noticing that I mentioned earlier.
Concerning singing in my life, in the mid-90’s I studied classical voice with John Ramsaur and choral techniques with John Ratledge at a powerhouse liberal arts school in northwest Georgia. The extremely high music standards required of us during those years at Shorter College taught both my wife and I the value of digging into the minute details of artistic expression, music composition, form, and analysis. It was during those years that I began leading music and observing various sizes of vocal gatherings, from the 12-person home group Bible study to the large format church venues of over a thousand.
I have always contended that music at its very essence is an emotional and spiritual experience, therefore I have no intention of diminishing those aspects of music and melody. I do not intend for the reader to sit in judgement, or box in, or place limitations upon song selection or song creation, rather I hope that this system of observation can simply bring
concrete definition and a colloquial set of verbiage to the mathematical elements of range and pitch occurrence so that we may continue a respectful, educated conversation about these two musical elements which may be affecting the level of spiritual and emotional engagement of congregations who gather weekly.
Before we move much further, let me offer the calculated ratings of four fairly well-known songs for quick comparison. The specific set of pitches in the one-octave range of Amazing Grace (Newton) give it a Blanton Difficulty Rating of 9. The occurrence of notes in the minor-tenth melody of Blessed Assurance (Crosby/Knapp) garnered it a Blanton Difficulty Rating of 13. The Star Spangled Banner (Key/Smith) has a much wider melody range of a major-twelfth which helps it compute a Blanton Difficulty Rating of 24, but if you extend the range to a full two-octaves on the word “free” as some performers are able to do, that single additional note has now mathematically increased the difficulty to 30. The twentyeight occurrences of four notes in Mary Had A Little Lamb (Hale/Christy) lead to a very low Blanton Difficulty Rating of only 3.
This study has nothing to do with the atmosphere of being blessed by, or receiving encouragement from a song presented by an excellent solo vocalist. This study is only concerned with the congregation’s vocal participation during a quantifiably difficult song.
We are exhorted in Scripture to sing, some would even say commanded to sing together. It should stand to reason therefore that we should consider our congregational singing with some level of mental acuity and academic awareness in the selections we invite our congregations to learn and enjoy. The songs we sing together often become the very doctrine of our families and communities.
Since we have been given Scriptural directives to sing together, it seems to be within the purview of those of us who have musical understanding to gently and kindly nudge our congregations into vocal participation by intentionally selecting at least a few weekly songs whose melody fosters a greater outward singing response of the congregation.
By no means am I suggesting that we should shy away from difficult melodies. We humans have been given a much wider range of vocal possibility than the general public may realize. If we rarely push our congregations vocally, then we could be doing them a musical and emotional disservice. Consider the joyfully raucous sound of the overly-romanticized Irish pub, where men are unabashedly singing with the collective strength of their voices. There is a human connection of commonality created, a strong bond
that is welded when we lift our voices boldly in homophony together! Now more than ever, we need to be participating in gatherings where we combine our voices loud and strong, in common purpose.
However, I caution us: if we constantly push our congregations to the melodic extremes for multiple songs each week, then we might see our congregations singing together less, participating less in this outward expression of faith. In so doing, it’s possible that we might accidentally be widened the distance between the elite skills of those who hold the microphones and the average skills of the congregants who desperately need to be singing the very words of life that have been made more difficult to vocalize well. With the heart we may believe, but it is with the mouth that we confess.
Further confirmation and inspiration on the subject of congregational singing can be found in Ruth Goddard‘s excellent 2013 paper “Who Gets To Sing in the Kingdom?”
I will concede that there are some dangers in applying this rating to your song planning and/or songwriting philosophies. If you primarily consider the mathematical difficulty of a song, then you might be omitting from your catalog some of the more theologically rewarding content, and even, dare I say, some of the most emotionally rewarding melodic creations of the past thirty years.
We should not throw out the usage of a great song merely because its melody is unachievable by the masses. Difficult songs can certainly be utilized for the congregation in small doses. And an extremely challenging melody could be offered as a presentation, where the entire room is spiritually blessed by receiving the song, rather than the congregation producing a vocally strained offering.
If those of us who plan the weekly song sets of our congregations were to employ only a mathematical system to determine what we should be singing, I would conjecture to say that the eventual experience of the congregation might become devoid of certain emotional atmospheres that could be beneficial to our communities. But if we begin applying this rating system as simply a piece of the song planning puzzle, then I believe we could actually see the benefits of congregation involvement and engagement ever increasing, as we are making informed decisions about the number of difficult versus not-so-difficult songs we invite our communities to sing each week.
This difficulty scale gives no consideration to the rhythmic expressions of the melody, but instead focuses solely on the easily-quantifiable elements of range and pitch occurrence. (While rhythm is extremely important to the difficulty conversation, the amount of mathematical calculations required to parse such a logical expression could take weeks of analysis and computation to express even a single section of a single song.) Occurrence of pitches is not key-specific, as any song can be transposed to suit a vocalist’s personal range and vocal timbre. The data calculations are set up in such a way that a wider vocal range naturally increases the difficulty rating.
As a basic example, most vocalists would agree that an ascending scale with a range of a perfect fifth is not as taxing as an ascending scale with a range of a major 10th. In order to quantify the increase in difficulty, each chromatic pitch is assigned an increasing numeric value, where the lowest pitch of the scale equals one, and each additional half step is +1 until the full width of the melody’s range is achieved.
In quantifying a difficulty scale, we cannot consider the range alone. We must also give weight to how often the voice is required to press into the higher notes. If a song has an occasional occurrence of the highest notes, that song’s rating will not be affected to the same degree as a song whose highest notes are repeated many times over.
Upon discovering the “correct” mathematical formula, I needed to choose two well-known measurable melodies against which all other songs could be compared. Since my father, brother, and many extended family have served in various
branches of the U.S. military, the first was an easy choice. The Star-Spangled Banner is one of the most difficult broadly recognized melodies of our culture. But Americans of all ages attempt to sing it with gusto before sporting events and during early-July celebrations each year. In the Blanton Difficulty Rating, our national anthem has a score of 24. For comparison at the easier end of the spectrum, the childhood favorite Mary Had A Little Lamb has a BDR of 3.
I can cite the 2017 release of “Death Was Arrested” as the song that ignited in me an unquenchable passion to design an unemotional, quantifiable difficulty rating. Please don’t misrepresent me here; it’s a really well-written song that many churches will be singing for years to come. Our band loved presenting this powerful proclamation of truth! Our on-mic vocalists who could handle the Major 13th range enjoyed leading out with full expression and confidence! And our congregation was wildly responsive at first. But every subsequent time we did the song, it seemed as if someone was turning off a congregational vocal switch when we reached the pinnacle proclamation: “We’re free, free, forever we’re free!” I couldn’t discern the details at the time, but I now know that the majority of the congregation was taking that particular melody down the octave, which certainly altered the build up of sonic energy in the room.
The melody of The Star Spangled Banner has a range of a Major 12th, from low DO to high SOL, but that highest note occurs only 3 times. When studying the similarly-ranged Death Was Arrested, we find that the high SOL occurs 72 times, which is partly how Death Was Arrested scores a BDA of 28, which is higher than our national anthem.
I’ve also been noticing a recent tendency of modern church music songwriters to craft low-register melodies and then repeat that exact melody “up the octave” in the higher vocal register. This is a powerful emotional expression technique used in almost every genre of modern music, and when performed well, this “octave jump” can help to propel the listener’s attention-to-the-lyrics by increasing the vocalist’s intensity of presentation.
Sometimes this songwriting technique happens in the Verses, but most often in the Bridge. For example, SAME GOD (Elevation) opens the Bridge with a 4-note melody range of Do through Fa in the lower register, and then jumps to the higher octave of the same pitches for later repetitions of the Bridge.
The challenge is congregational inclusion. If we plan 1 or 2 of these extended vocal range songs weekly, we can certainly reap the emotional benefits of driving our communities’ voices ever higher together. But if we weekly include 4 or 5 of these more difficult songs, we might be accidentally turning our experiences into an atmosphere of spectating versus participating. “I can’t vocally join in with this song, so I’ll enjoy watching everyone else, and be inspired.” This response in and of itself is not wrong or bad; many homebound saints can no longer vocally
participate in the singing of their lifelong favorite hymns, but their active listening can still be of great spiritual and emotional benefit to them.
In an attempt to bring a more singable state to some of the modern songs that my pastor and I really want our congregation to sing, I have done a few experiments where I shrink the range by placing the opening verse/s in the upper octave, and then pitch down the Key. For example, we changed Maverick City’s original release of Firm Foundation (Carnes/Moore/Davis) from an original high BDR score of 27 all the way down to a BDR of 9 utilizing this method of range simplification.
Tessitura = Usage/Occurrence
Blanton Difficulty Rating: R*T/10, no decimal Difficulty 9
Because this is the weekly world in which I live, I have presented this idea from the viewpoint of a congregational song leader whose job it is to choose music in which we hope the congregation will participate. The very act of community singing enhances the possibility of the congregation being uniformly encouraged and enlightened theologically, spiritually, and emotionally.
Since the very first communities of humans, we have participated in large group format vocalizations, as an expression of our common bonds of purpose and belonging. Songs have been crafted for the masses and published for centuries now. It is my hope that this system, when applied, could bring more educated decision making on the part of church leadership and songwriters to consider the weekly difficulty that we are asking our congregations to vocalize.
My curious nature leads me to wonder if the benefits of this system could be seen beyond the local congregation, parish, or diocese. It may help college vocal professors inform their assignments of repertoire more appropriately among the abilities of their various students. Publishers might find it useful to include a BDR labeling on their cataloged pieces, to better assist their customers in finding realistically attainable pieces. Composers of concert band and orchestral music may find that this system could help quantify the performance difficulty level of each part of a score.
I would love to know your thoughts. Please drop me a line at chrisblanton22@gmail.com so that we may continue the conversation.
As a baritone vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, Chris Blanton has released many albums and singles of original music, but he’s equally passionate about informing and educating church volunteers to bring their very best efforts of music and technology for the Kingdom community. He also enjoys hiking, playing basketball, Scrabble, and Boggle.
BY HEATHER HARTLEY
It happened in a café in London. I was seventeen. I was with two girlfriends, we were having black coffee, we were laughing, abandoned to the moment—laughter about what? I don’t remember, there is much from that period that I don’t remember—and the only thing that mattered besides our laughter and the hot, bitter and sugar-sweet coffee—how sophisticated we were, sipping our coffees, so haughtily experienced and jaded in our greenhorn youth, one moment playing at being posh girls, the next joking as punk-rock sisters, pooling our collected life experience on the marble coffee table like the cool, smooth coins we had carelessly tossed in front of us, some coins dented and used, some bright and brand new—we’d just unpacked our big, cumbersome suitcases—freshly pressed miniskirts (thanks Mom!), black leather boots, purposefully faded rock band tee-shirts and maybe some sort of coveted, miniature talisman secreted away from the others—a tiny, nubby, beloved teddy bear, a dog-eared Beatrix Potter book that just fits in your hands, a rabbit’s foot rubbed raw in spots—I remember that we held our heads high, like fresh-stemmed tulips before their inevitable bend, that curve that leads back inescapably to the earth, slouching back to dirt, Here we are! we said without saying a word to one another, a few days fresh of settling into our tiny, crowded apartment that we would call home for part of the fall as students in an international study program and it was at that moment that I realized for the first time—awed—that yes! London! I was living abroad.
“Countries attract us in different ways,” writes the brilliant American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson in her short story Dorothy. “We are comfortable in England, musical in Germany, amused in Paris (Paris is a country), and idyllic in Switzerland; but when it comes to the affection, Italy holds the heart—we keep going back to her.” And as a teenager, curious and naïve and famished for travel and experience, I was most certainly attracted to London and to England and to the larger idea of living abroad. At seventeen, I was living a dream that I had cultivated growing up in Charleston, West Virginia. Right then began a life-long love affair with living abroad that continues today. It would be as an adult in my twenties that I would have the great opportunity and privilege to live in both France and later on in Italy, in Paris and Napoli respectively, and to make Paris my home for over twenty years now. But back then, in London, scared and excited and confused, I tasted life like that fated black coffee, bitter and sweet that it was, as if for the first time—the remarkable, compelling and unforgettable taste of living abroad.
As the inimitable Janet Flanner writes in the introduction of Paris Was Yesterday, her collected pieces from her bimonthly dispatches “Letter from Paris” for The New Yorker, “My satisfaction in living there [in Paris] was double: I felt I was living both at home and abroad—living surrounded by the human familiarity of American friends and acquaintances, and the constant, shifting stimulation that came from the . . . French.” And it is my hope and desire as European Editor to share work from abroad that will find its place, its home, in The Blue Mountain Review.
I grew up with the Blue Ridge Mountains nearby, vibrant and lush forestland that, when I think about it, takes me back to my youth—walks in the Kanawha State Forest, sitting down by the Kanawha River—and in one sense, joining the magazine is like coming home.
It is a privilege to join Clifford Brooks and all of the Editors and Staff of The Blue Mountain Review in this endeavor to share excellent and compelling and inspiring writing. I’m thrilled to extend my invitation to writers over the ocean, to welcome work and words of writers in Europe, the UK and all over the world that may be new to readers of The Blue Mountain Review. I had the wonderful opportunity to be Paris Editor for Tin House magazine for over fifteen years, and I’m thrilled to come on as European Editor and to share voices and pieces—poetry, short stories, non-fiction, interviews—of writers living and working abroad—with readers of The Blue Mountain Review. Today, I looked up the etymology of the word voyage—I love to learn about the root of words—and found that in addition to coming from the Old French voiage, “travel, journey, movement, course, errand, mission, crusade,” among other resources, the word also comes from classical Latin, “provisions for a journey.” It is my hope that the writing shared in the pages of The Blue Mountain Review will offer the provisions for a very bon voyage wherever the words may take you, at home or abroad or both. The door is open. Welcome.
Heather Hartley is European Editor at The Blue Mountain Review and author of the poetry collections Adult Swim and Knock Knock, both published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. She was Paris Editor for Tin House magazine for over fifteen years. Her short fiction, poems, essays and interviews have appeared in or on PBS Newshour, The Guardian, The Literary Review and other venues. For many years, she moderated author events at Shakespeare and Company Bookshop. She teaches creative writing to Masters students at the University of Kent’s (UK) Paris School of Arts and Culture and has also taught at the American University of Paris and the University of Texas El Paso MFA program.
BY JIM KELLY
“Ginger” my old buddy from growing up was saying, all in a rush in a late night call. “Ginger Baker. Ginger Baker died. He was eighty. How can Ginger Baker be eighty? Eighty and dead? Wasn’t it just last weekend we were sixteen and standing in front of his crazy big drum kit at the The Grande Ballroom, stunned. Remember all those drums? Never seen so many drums. And cymbals, high hats. Two tom toms and all going at once. Remember? His frizzy red hair pulled back, a wild red beard and he was in a zone, eyes closed, attacking those drums like a maniac. But a maniac who knew exactly what he was doing. How did he keep all that drumming going, faster, faster, faster? The guy was a whirlwind. Arms, hands, feet, non stop. Human tornado Ginger Baker. Goddamned human tornado. Like nothing we’d ever seen or heard. Ever. So how in the hell can he be eighty? Eighty and dead? Must be some fucking mistake.”
The Grande Ballroom in Detroit, when we were sixteen, seventeen, eighteen was where the music happened. Live and loud and every weekend. Local bands, English bands, bands from everywhere. Cover was a few bucks. Certainly less than five. It was an ornate old ballroom built in the nineteen twenties. Shuttered for years, it came back to life when a local promoter, disc jockey, hustler swung a deal to hold concerts there. Parking on dark city streets. Not much of a marquee, just a simple sign, Grande. Up a long flight of stairs, pay the couple of bucks at the top and then…
It was, for our sixteen year old eyes and ears, an explosion of lights and sounds. Strobe lights flashing, freezing dancers in mid jump, mid spin, a huge mirrored ball on the ceiling spraying, daubing walls, dancers, performers with waves of restless light, spinning curtains of brilliant, on and off dots of light. A long wide room, stage at one end, piled high with amplifiers, no seats. Just way too many people crowded in, dancing, leaning over the pots of day glow paint along the walls to adorn their clothes, faces, hair, a necessary prelude for hopping around under the back lights, becoming, abruptly, a sudden, madly fluorescent part of the spectacle, the deal that was the Grande.
Between 1966 and 1970, when we were regulars, it seemed that everyone playing great music played The Grande. Blues bands: Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf, Buddy Guy, Albert “Born Under a Bad Sign” King, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Brits: Procol Harum, The Yardbirds, The Who, Led Zepplin, Eric Burden and The Animals, Cream, Fleetwood Mac back when they were a blues band, two fiery lead guitar players trading scorching Delta slide licks, The Jeff Beck Group with a skinny, rooster haired singer with a voice like an ancient blues shouter, a strutting, microphone swinging young Rod Stewart. San Francisco bands: Moby Grape, Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane. Can’t classify them acts like Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Taj Mahal when he toured with a backing band of blues tuba players, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown…
Then my buddy, calmed down a bit, filled me in on his post hip replacement rehab ordeal. Using a walker to get around, having to buy a raised up toilet seat, a long pinch end device to help put on socks. “How in THE Hell” he said out of the blue “can we be seventy five? We’re sixteen. We’re standing at the foot of the stage watching Ginger Baker solo on “Toad.” So how can Ginger Baker be eighty. Eighty and dead?”
I had no good answer. But, both things were true. Talking about it, we were there. We were there and we were sixteen. We were head to toe back at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit when NOW was everything. NOW, NOW, full tilt NOW. And, aches, doubts, disappointments aplenty, we were seventy five. Sixteen and seventy five. Now and then, then and now blurring and blending, becoming one.
“Do you remember” he said then, louder, getting worked up again, when that skinny guy from Ann Arbor, Iggy, shirt off and howling jumped off the stage into the crowd, trusting they’d catch him, do you remember that…
A retired traveling salesman, Jim Kelly has had work appear in War literature & the Arts, Harvard Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Blue Mountain Review, The Coachella Review, The Galway Review and others. His story collection “Pitchman’s Blues” won The George Garrett Fiction prize from Texas Review Press.
BY CINDY SAMS
The tomatoes had barely cooled before we reached for them, our skittery fingers bracing for the heat coming up from their parboiled skins. Fresh from their hot-water bath, a dozen or so lay over ice, steam-fresh and peeling.
Georgia Tomatoes. Best Boys. Ripe and scarlet red. Just right for making our summertime Soup Mix.
“Watch it,” Grandmama warned. My 10-year-old attention span had reached its limit this June morning, and a tomato escaped my wet palms and landed stem-side-down with a soggy plop. Juice from the half-cooked pulp leaked onto the linoleum. I scooped it up, gave it a quick rinse in the sink, and carried on with the job.
Blanch. Ice. Peel. Repeat.
Our summertime ritual recurred each season. Grandmama drove us to the local farmers’ market where she visited the same vendors in lazy succession. A bushel of butter beans from the toothless old woman near the snow-cone machine. Okra from a young couple near the south-side parking lot. Silver Queen corn from bespectacled farmer on the opposite side of the vendor’s shed.
We saved our favorite farmer for last: a bushel of tomatoes from Lewis Courtney, the selfproclaimed Tomato King.
Back home, we got down to work. We labored side-by-side with the screened door open to the breeze, billeting ourselves at a round kitchen table covered in plastic to protect it from spatter.
The prepared tomatoes were tossed into a cookpot over low heat where I was directed to begin stirring and don’t stop. My hands ached from guiding the large metal spoon around the pot’s circumference. I chopped up the duty by stabbing at the more stubborn tomatoes that refused to break down on their own.
“Keep going,” Grandmama urged. “Don’t let it scorch.” I would not disappoint. Not then, not now when the ghost-scent of tomato lingers on my fingers, and my heart burns to work beside you again.
Cindy Sams is a teacher and writer in Macon, GA. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Reinhardt University with an emphasis on Literary Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Brevity Nonfiction blog, Pangyrus LitMag, High Shelf Press, The Chaffey Review, Canyon Voices Literary Magazine, Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine, and The New Southern Fugitives, which nominated her for a 2020 Pushcart Prize. She also is a volunteer reader for Hippocampus Magazine. Learn more at www.rebelforaclause and www.substack.com/@sammy11.
BY NINA-MARIE GARDNER
Chicago, 1931
‘But will it fly?’ asks the little girl in the seat compartment across from me.
Her large, dark eyes are a mix of wonder and concern as she stares at the oragami swan the man in the seat facing her has fashioned from a bit of newspaper. He holds it up between his fingers so they can both admire it, and she reaches out to touch it, her face beatific with awe. She might be five or six years old, with thick dark curls and an open, inquisitive face. I admire how sweet she looks, in her frilly blue dress with smart lace-up boots I would have coveted dearly at her age.
‘Thank the nice man,’ prompts her mother, an elegant blonde, equally well-dressed, with a kind face and the child’s same dark eyes.
‘Thank you, sir,’ says the girl, all shyness at first, but when the young man hands her the swan, her shyness is overtaken by sheer delight.
The exchange fills me with an unexpected rush of love – is it the kindness of strangers? The wonder small children bring to every discovery, every new interaction? A child, will I ever have a child of my own? A pang shoots through me at the thought. You are thirty-two, there is time. Oh, dear god, will I ever find my mate?
The train rattles on and I look away from the girl and her mother, run my hand over cover of the book in my lap –Essentials, a collection of definitions and aphorisms, by the author of Cane, Jean Toomer. Since it was published late last year I’ve returned to it again and again, the page corners folded over in multiple places. I flip through to the one that speaks to me most:
We want to be free from the things we want. Most of us feel we must be mentally fortified in advance of experience. This is one of the reasons why we are buffers rather than experiencers.
Life moves, things happen, when people care.
When people do not care, nothing can happen. There can be only events of inertia.
Caring alone produces events of force.
Beyond the wisdom in his observations, the voice behind the words exudes a stillness, something elemental and pure that fills me with light.
‘He’s simply great,’ Georgia O’Keeffe had said about him – with such warmth and gusto I suspected she was also a bit attracted to him – she and Steiglitz both, from the sounds of it. Steiglitz had photographed him, invited him to spend time at their place on Lake George, introduced him to all their art world friends in New York. When I’d heard he’d started a Gurdjieff study group in Chicago hosted by my friends the Groves, I’d seized my chance, I knew I had to meet him.
‘Mama, look! There’s a castle!’ the little girl across the aisle exclaims, pointing exitedly out the window.
In the distance, just visible amidst a parting in the trees is a large factory with four great stacks, two of them billowing thick streams of white smoke into the sky.
The child’s mother laughs, ‘Honey, it’s a factory.’
‘What’s a factory?’ asks the girl.
‘Where things are made.’ Her mother pulls a sweet from from her purse and hands it to her. ‘There now, here you go, just the one.’
The young man across from them catches me watching, and we hold each other’s gaze. He’s more handsome than I realized, with thick brown hair, a strong jaw, and a hint of mischief in his eyes that reminds me of Kenneth.
I want love. I don’t want to be looked up to or thought right or idealized. Just loved, accepted for all my faults.
I look away, out my own window, the fields and forests giving way to suburban sprawl. We are not far from Chicago now. A subtle longing surges through me, tinged with a sense of fate. Everyone has spoken of Jean Toomer with such praise – his sharp intelligence, his warmth and humanity, his gentleness. His talent for leading others to a greater understanding and practice of the teachings of Gurdjieff.
I’d seen Gurdjieff himself, that first year I’d spent in New York. Zona had sent me the tickets, urged me to go. It was at the height of our fascination with mysticism, when I was reading Ouspensky. Mavis had come with me, and Gurdjieff did not disappoint – for the spectacle as much as his philosophy. Such a strange, fascinating man, with eyes of such impenatrable intensity he seemed not of this world. Everyone had been in his thrall, the auditorium filled to capacity, and hushed, a sea of faces that hung on his every word for the entire two hours he spoke.
And there had been Alfred Orage, who carried on Gurdjieff’s teachings in New York when Gurdjieff returned to France – a man I simply adored, whose lectures I attended as often as I could, despite Kenneth’s scorn. At the coffee receptions after his talks, Orage always took the time to chat with me, showed great interest in my writing, encouraged my work. For a time, I suppose, I was swept up in it all – as much as was possible, given everything I had to do besides just to make ends meet. But in the end, I’d drifted away.
There was always a part of me that was wary of giving myself over completely to the group, lest I lose an essential part of myself – the part that was indispensable for my writing. And I could never risk that.
*
I feel him before I lay eyes on him, from the moment I enter the Grove’s brownstone.
‘Margery!’ Shirley Grove gushes, ‘Come in, we’re so thrilled to have you. Right this way, everyone is here, we’re just about to start.’
She ushers me into a large open parlour that spans the entire floor of the building. At one end French doors look out over a back garden and at the other a makeshift lecturn has been fashioned from a music stand, draped in a green velvet cloth. Chairs have been arranged before it to accommodate a small audience, and a dozen or so others mill about, chatting
quietly. As we enter, people turn and nod to us, warm smiles on their faces. Off to the side by the grand piano, I see him, Jean Toomer, deep in conversation with my friends the Lanes.
Nothing could have prepared me for the flash of disappointment that passes through me, although I try to hide it from Shirley. Oh, but he is not what I expected. Is he really all that attractive as Georgia implied? Stop it. You are monstrous, don’t look at him –
‘Margery, are you okay?’ Shirley asks, and I’m reminded I’m terrible at concealing anything.
‘I’m fine – is that him?’ I nod towards Jean. Now he’s gesturning with his hands, explaining something. The Lanes gaze at him, full of admiration, like he’s a god. It’s the way I used to stare at Zona.
‘Shall I introduce you?’ Shirley asks. ‘We’re about to start, but if you’d like to say hello –’
‘Oh, no, it’s fine, really, I’ll wait.’ I glance around for the nearest chair.
Shirley gently takes my arm. ‘Margery, what is it? Something’s wrong.’
I hesitate, then whisper, ‘He doesn’t really match the man who wrote Essentials. Don’t you think?’
‘What?’ Shirley says, startled, before bursting into laughter. ‘Oh Margery, but he does, you’ll see. Come, where would you like to sit? It’s time to begin.’
She leads me to a chair not far from the front but off to the side. As we make our way, I avoid looking in Jean’s direction. A young couple takes the seats beside me, speaking in hushed tones as they gingerly settle their things.
‘Have you heard him before?’ the woman whispers to me. She has lovely tortoise shell clips in her hair and lipstick a daring shade of vermillion.
‘I haven’t,’ I admit.
She places her hand on mine and looks me in the eye, ‘You will remember this day.’
I just manage to avoid rolling my eyes. What was I thinking coming here? Groups are destructive, something precious is destroyed. Stop it Margery. Zona’s made you too sensitive to any kind of domination –
Jean clears his throat at the podium and I shudder – I can’t bear to look at him and yet I can’t take my eyes off him. Breathe. I summon my kindness. You don’t have to come back, just give him a chance. Georgia says he’s great, hang on to that. As he stands there, calmly taking us all in, he does start to look like the few photos I’ve seen of him – the exceptionally fine features that give him a movie star quality, the striking, wise dark eyes, the neat moustache. Though I’ve heard as much about his mixed race as I have about his writing, I’m not sure I’d be aware of it if I didn’t know. Certainly, he has the most beautiful olive skin.
He tilts his head down slightly to see us better from beneath his round glasses, and for a second our eyes meet. Quickly, I avert my gaze and stifle the impulse to rummage in my purse. I dare not distract from the stillness by moving my body or making sound.
‘Welcome,’ Jean says at last, in a smooth, rich voice.
At the sound of it, I sense everyone seated around me opening to his presence like blooms in sunlight.
‘Thank you all for coming,’ he continues, ‘and I’d like to thank our hosts, David and Shirley Grove.’
He nods appreciatively to one side and I see Shirley next to her husband, beaming.
‘Right. I guess I’ll get started.’
He pauses, looks out again into the room. There’s a softness to his eyes, his whole being exudes a gentleness that sets me at ease. I can feel my resistance beginning to ebb. After a moment, he begins.
‘As Gurdjieff once said, awakening is only possible for those who seek it and want it. Those who are prepared to struggle with themselves, to relentlessly work on themselves for a very long time in order to attain it.’
He lets this sink in, before continuing, ‘And as many of you already know, at the heart of this work is the ability to detach, to self-observe. By doing so, we can begin to free ourselves from the thoughts and reactions, the unconscious habits that hold us back and prevent us from being our true selves.’
None of this is new to me – indeed, it has stayed with me since the earliest lectures I first attended in New York. I’ve even sought to practice it – but not relentlessly, and with nowhere near the desire I know he’s referring to. But hearing it all again as delivered by Jean, to my astonishment, I feel a renewed connection.
I want to be washed and cleansed of all that has thwarted me.
I am impure and blind.
Everything about me is reaction.
I have tried and I have tried, but I don’t know any way of getting free.
Though I haven’t entirely reconciled the man standing before me with the image I created finding such solace and grounding in his book, if I close my eyes and just listen, simply feel, I sense I might be able to start on the path that has eluded me for so long.
‘Through detachment and self-observation, we can free ourselves from the reactive emotions that are the result of mechanical influences from the outside – and when we are no longer slaves to these unconscious and external forces, we will regain our individualty and our will.’
I feel my body get lighter, as if lifted by a new clarity. My chest opens out into vast plans that stretch as far as the eye can see.
‘With this work, we can be reeducated to become as natural as little children – as we were before civilization stamped out our true or subconscious instincts.’
I see vividly the little girl on the train, experience the same rush of love, feel the purity of her delight in the simple newspaper swan. My energy must be palpable, for in that moment, Jean’s eyes are drawn to me – and as our eyes meet, I feel a shock of guilt, a sharp stab of shame. To think how I’d judged him, judged the group.
These are good people. Good people.
Better than you.
Afterwards, seated by the piano with Mr. and Mrs. Lane, Jean approaches, a warm smile on his face directly solely at me. I feel my body go still – but more than that, I sense something happening inside me, something changing. I feel myself being washed clean, so that all that is left is something tender and new, like a fresh shoot curling its way out of the soil.
‘You must be Margery,’ he says.
I nod, a cool tremor running through me. I open my mouth to respond, but before I can do so, he turns to the Lanes.
‘If I may, Mr. Lane,’ he says, ‘I’m going to take Margery’s hand.’
Mr. and Mrs. Lane beam and nod, as if they are all in on the most wonderful secret. Jean reaches for my hand and takes it in his, and for a moment, everything is blank. There is so much moving inside his hand that I can’t bear it for more than second before pulling my hand away.
‘You’re protecting yourself,’ he smiles. ‘You’ve heard things about me.’
‘I – I haven’t, truly. Well, only good things.’
‘Do you mind?’ he asks, gesturing to the seat beside me on the couch.
‘Oh no, not all.’
He sits gracefully, keeping his eyes on me, and the sense of cleansing, of a transformation inside me carries on. He smells of sandalwood and jasmine, with the faintest hint of cigarettes. Now he’s so close, our hips touching, I’m surprised at how calm I feel. Like water, so quiet, so flowing, just like pure, smooth, clear water.
‘Margery Latimer,’ he says. ‘Welcome to our group.’
Nina-Marie Gardner is a Paris-based American novelist and playwright. Her short stories, essays and reviews have been published in Necessary Fiction, 3AM Magazine, The Fix, The Frisky, Flavorpill and the anthologies Bedford Square and 3AM London, New York, Paris. She is the author of Sherry & Narcotics (Future Fiction London 2011) and her plays have been staged in London and Edinburgh. She has an MA in Creative Writing and PhD in Drama and Theatre from Royal Holloway, University of London and has served as a lecturer at Royal Holloway, Sciences Po and the University of Kent Paris School of Arts & Culture.
BY ANTHONY BORRUSO
There are shortcuts, and I know them. I say celibate and you think wunderkind. I say hydrangea and you blush blue or pink depending on the soil’s acidity. Who knows if you’re in the know, but I know many folks have come up to me and said Man, you are so far out, you’re in.
Which I assume puts me at the center of a vast conspiracy in a tight-lipped forest of acronyms and winking eyes. Just FYI, it was Occam slit Chekhov’s
throat, and Petrarch whose sighs ushered an era of unchecked lust and flagrant name-dropping. Come here, to me, on the outskirts of the outskirts. Speak softly and tell your friends to scooch so my seedling can suck some sun. Last week I arrived in a U-Haul
filled with nothing but styrofoam and packing peanuts. I swear I have nice things, but I can’t describe them and don’t care to.
My calling has always been supplication, querying big whigs for a curl to climb in exchange for focaccia recipes and my LetterBoxd watchlist.
I’m just here for the lols and fiber optic intimacy. I want to ply the group chat with Sopranos Memes that fell off a truck. Still, I need first to infiltrate,
to make these sweet signifiers speak, like the stethoscope, straight to the heart. Come in, make yourself at home. Have some pecan scones,
Chamomile tea. Oh, that’s just my brainchild, he’s the one stranded in the bathroom mirror mumbling vice versa, vice versa, vice versa.
ABOUT ANTHONY :
Anthony Borruso is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at The University of South Florida. He holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Florida State University where he served as Poetry Editor for Southeast Review. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Beloit Poetry Journal, Pleiades, The Cincinnati Review, The Journal, Gulf Coast, Frontier, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2024 Louise Bogan Poetry Award, his debut collection Splice will be published in July 2025 by Trio House Press.
BY CYNTHIA GOOD
I smacked the outdoor loveseat to get rid of the dust and ash from the fire. I slammed my fists into the cushion to rid it of dirt
and grime to lash back the only way I could against flames swallowing my hometown, as if brushing away
the taste of soot and scent of embers could rehoist walls and roofs, unburn my friend’s curtains, her cupboards and paintings and family photos,
her closet of brooms and winter coats, her old-school answering machine continuing to answer for days after her
house in cinders. I am still here in this shard of sunlight while three miles away cars and gardens and gemstones are burning back to coal while I pound
pillows, sift rising over my mouth and eyes as my body silhouettes in golden flames blossoming behind me.
Cynthia Good, an award-winning poet, journalist and former TV news anchor, is the author of eight books including two poetry collections; the chapbook What We Do with Our Hands, and In the Thaw of Day recently published by Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in numerous acclaimed publications including Book of Matches, Free State Review, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, South Shore Review, Terminus Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly and Waxing & Waning. An MFA graduate from NYU, Cynthia lives in Santa Monica and Mexico with her Havanese dog Zuni.
BY HAILIE COCHRAN
My shitty apartment’s shittier landlord said to never feed the mutt that loiters by the dumpsters— a sort of pit-lab-chow concoction that, turns out, is pretty sweet despite the nasty overbite and jowls—
is the kind of ugly that mesmerizes: knuckle-knees locked and swollen from years of protecting territory, coat of matted fur embroidered with fleas, burrs burrowed into skin stitched with scars and tumor-knots,
brown eyes as deep and dark as well-water—just as soft, too—gentle reminders to stay human, stay wanting—like Hachiko’s cold, patient nose waiting by the same gate at Shibuya Station every day—
not for a train, but for hands—the hands he’s known since puppyhood—now gray, gone. Yet he stays, unwavering—faithful to ritual—to his duty as companion for the walk back home—weight of a love so essential
it feels frozen in time—in stone and star like the night Laika spent wrapped in an orange fireplace-glow, finally safe enough to wag tail without whimpering— a taste of family before they blasted her into black, alone.
Do you think she knew to cherish the comfort? That the glow wouldn’t last? The next time she felt warmth, she was scared, little barking one—burning up in orbit— stray sacrifice overlooked in the name of science.
Out of spite, I started bringing all of my leftovers to the dumpster mutt, calling her ‘pretty’ so often, Pretty became her name—which did catch on with other tenants, though their voices were always too pitiful—or sarcastic.
Only the little ones knew how to care for Pretty: I’d watch as they’d sneak down spoons full of peanut butter, salty bits of lunchmeat—as earnest hands turned dumpster to altar with tiny offerings, innocent reverence—finally— something genuine.
Hailie Cochran is an emerging poet from Macon, Georgia and current MFA candidate and writing consultant at UNC Greensboro. She earned her bachelor’s in English and creative writing from Mercer University in 2023. Her work appears widely both online and in print.
BY MARJANA SAVKA
My god spends all night forming his battalions, Is a crack shot, wages wars.
My god forgives my curses
As he polishes his stones.
My god won’t hide behind my back, Throws quilted covers over children.
My god buys tourniquets
Then lines up to give blood.
My god can’t get a good night’s sleep
While the entire country’s standing guard.
My god allows me never to forgive And lets me call things as they are.
BY PAMELA S. WYNN
In a rush to see everything there is to see in York I climb quickly the fifty steep steps on the mound.
“Please come,” my husband begged, “The Venerable Bede is messing with my mind. I’ll scrounge a ticket.”
So here I am at the bottom of a steep narrow spiral staircase with a group of strangers while miles away in the rare books room he sits wearing white cotton gloves as he translates an ancient manuscript to strengthen his grasp of the shaky history on which the theory of “just war” stands.
I ascend the stairs to the top of the tower —once a medieval stronghold, once a castle now, a solitary tower with tour guides serving up over nine hundred years of history.
I doubt the mighty saw this day coming —tourists listening politely to spiels on the Battle of Fulford when a Norse king saw his chance for a raid; a Danish fleet burning the castle to the ground, the people of York cheering them on; or the tower used as a prison for Quakers, Jacobites, Luddites, Catholics resisting Reformation, Chartists demanding rights for the working classes; a prime location for political executions—to place bodies of a king’s enemies on public display.
We grimace and shift on our feet hearing of the massacre of the city’s entire Jewish community trapped in the tower by an angry horde, choosing suicide rather than slaughter, or forcible baptism by a Christian mob.
Humans—so damn good at bloody foul deeds though generally as tourists we’re a docile bunch.
What is it that would force us to our knees —tourists looking down on York atop a tower with outstretched arms reaching for heavens that flee us.
Pamela S. Wynn is a poet and retired professor of poetry, writing, and theology. She is author of Diamonds on the Back of a Snake: Poems (St. Paul: Laurel Poetry Collective, 2004), A Good Soul: Poems (Minneapolis: Rocking Chair Press, chapbook, 2000), and co-editor of the anthology Body of Evidence: Poems (Laurel Poetry Collective, 2012). Her work has appeared in numerous national literary magazines and journals. Pamela lived her first thirty years in the states of North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee. She now lives in Minnesota. In addition to writing, she is an amateur photographer.
BY LYNNE KEMEN
In this pre-war lobby, I wait for my friend to drift down from the floors above. Friday night pulls us toward the Multi-Plex Cinema.
The darkened mirror lets me check my windblown hair. At the glass’s edge, a warning flickers— movement where there should be stillness. Something surfaces– bare legs, bare feet, draped and distant. A Greek chorus player, lost in the maze of Manhattan.
Fear sparkles through me. Does the figure breathe? Am I slipping into some strange episode?
A smaller shadow peeks around a folding screen, child’s hand curled at its corner.
No sound. The silence swells and settles. Angels, I decide. Not muggers.
When I glance back, the space stands empty. Only the wheeze of the ancient elevator, the familiar footfall of my friend descending.
Lynne Kemen, a poet whose full-length collection *Shoes for Lucy* was published by SCE Press in 2023 and chapbook *More Than a Handful* by Woodland Arts Editions in 2020, has poetry featured in anthologies like *The Memory Palace* (2024) and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2024; she also served on the Board of Directors of Bright Hill Press from 2016 to 2025 and curates the Word Thursdays reading series while editing for *The Blue Mountain Review*. Passionate about libraries and literacy, she fosters literary connections through her work and lives with her husband in an old Delaware County farmhouse once owned by her aunt’s aunt.
BY LYNNE KEMEN
(After Frida Kahlo’s “Viva la Vida)
The creek water is so cold it’s slushy, shocking my ankles as I wade in. T he watermelon—heavy, striped, perfect- gets carefully chosen from the cooler and gently placed on moss-covered rocks that smell of wet earth and something green and ancient. My toes curl tightly to the sole, trying to trap what little warmth remains.
We spend the day splashing in the creek, , racing sticks. slipping and nearly falling on the moss-slick rocks. Laughing, yelling above the roar of the creek
By afternoon, our skin is sun-splotched and sunburnt, stinging as we slide into sleeping bags that smell of storage and summer plans. We’re camping in the backyard—close enough to hear the house settling, far enough to feel wild. Sleep feels impossible with so much night ahead of us.
This is when the divide happens. The youngsters start yearning first, quiet whimpers for their mothers, then the soft unzipping of sleeping bags. One by one, they creep back toward the house, seeking warmth and cuddles and the familiar weight of real walls. I watch their small silhouettes disappear through the back door, swallowed by yellow kitchen light.
But we older ones—eight, nine, ten years old and drunk on our own daring—we stay. We pull our sleeping bags closer together and begin the ghost stories, our voices dropping to whispers that make everything sound more true. Jean tells the one about the woman in white who walks the creek at midnight. Cousin Rick adds details about her wet footprints leading right up to the tent flaps. Our words hang in the air like smoke from the dying fire.
We shiver, but not entirely from cold. Half-hoping the haunts are real, that something wild might find us here in this liminal space between day and sleep, between the safety of childhood and whatever comes after. What are we hoping for? Some proof that magic still moves in the world. Some creature from the stories that would choose us, mark us as worthy of wonder. Some transformation that would let us return to the house tomorrow changed, carrying secrets the younger ones could never understand.
The watermelon’s sweetness still lingers on our tongues as we finally drift toward sleep, seeds scattered like promises in the dark.
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BY RIMAS UZGIRIS
for Kateryna Mikhalitsyna in Khmelnytsky, Ukraine
We sat down when the sirens sounded on the steps of a restaurant by the park. The birds grew quiet. A woman hurried along. It looked like she was worried about a bill. A child scurried by on a scooter. A young woman sat down in an outdoor café. Ordered. You checked the app to see what was launched. I watched a family stroll along the path. The men at the nearby recruitment center went out for a smoke. Some leaned on sandbags piled by the front door. Is this the way the world ends? I suppose someone is tending tomatoes in their garden as Miłosz imagined. Others just wait because they don’t believe. Or rather, they do have faith: It’s not today, not this moment now, their name is not written on the missile’s metallic head. The algorithm that moves the world has overlooked them. We are not important to it. We slip through its coils as it squeezes – slowly tightening over all and all. Blood runs out, urine, pus. But here, a cheerful young woman arrives to meet the first. They hug. You tell me the missiles have struck the airfield in Starokostiantyniv where the F16s are, or might be, no one really knows, not far from here, but not close. What is close? We rise from heavy stone steps and walk to the local museum. Photographs from Bosnia after the war – language infected by violence. We speak of nothing. But I imagine they might have pieces of us there someday. Mementos, as on the fresh graves of soldiers here: pictures, lighters, letters, words. Ash, ash, ash. Wait— You vanish inside. But I’m not ready yet.
Rimas Uzgiris is a Lithuanian/American poet and translator. His work has appeared in Barrow Street, Hudson Review, The Poetry Review and elsewhere. He is the author of North of Paradise, and Tarp [Between], (poems translated into Lithuanian, shortlisted for poetry book of the year), translator of eight poetry collections from Lithuanian, and the Venice Biennale Golden Lion winning operetta Sun and Sea. He was educated at UCSD, UW-Madison, Rutgers-Newark, with a Ph.D. in philosophy and an MFA in creative writing. Recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Grant and an NEA Translation Fellowship, he teaches at Vilnius University.
BY ROBERT CORDING
The Day Our Son Died was like the day hundreds of vultures, hidden just moments before, rose up from the swamp, and twisted into a dark cyclonic cloud until rain broke loose knifing leaves and branches; was like the fear, then helplessness we felt, thunder enclosing us, lightning bolting sky to earth, the two of us shelterless, save for the cypresses and frantic palms thrashing in the wind; and these similes?— ridiculous attempts to connect words to the day all syntax and sense left us, a poverty like nothing we had ever known.
Robert Cording has published ten collections of poems, the most recent of which is In the Unwalled City (Slant, 2022). A book on poetry, the bible and metaphor, Finding the World’s Fullness, was also published by Slant in 2021. Two new books, What’s Possible: New and Selected Poems and Taking the Shadows Apart are forthcoming in 2025 and 2026 from Slant. He has received two NEAs in poetry. He has won three Pushcart Prizes in poetry, and his poems have appeared in publications such as the Georgia Review, Southern Review, New Yorker, Poetry, Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, Image, The Sun, The Common, Agni, New Ohio Review, Orion, and Best American Poetry, 2018.
J.D. Isip serves as Poetry and Microfiction Editor for the Blue Mountain Review. His books include, Pocketing Feathers (Sadie Girl Press, 2015) and Kissing the Wound (Moon Tide Press, 2023). His next collection, Reluctant Prophets will be released by Moon Tide Press in 2025. He lives in South Texas with his dogs, Ivy and Bucky.
Nicole Tallman serves as Poetry and Interviews Editor for The Blue Mountain Review. She is the author of Something Kindred, Poems for the People, FERSACE, and Julie, or Sylvia, and she serves as the official Poetry Ambassador for Miami. Find her on social media @natallman and at nicoletallman.com
Debbie Hennessey was named AC40 Female Artist of the Year by New Music Weekly and scored a Top 20 Hit on their AC40 Charts. A song she cowrote recently hit the Top 5 on Roots Music Report’s Americana Country chart. Her songs have been honored by Great American Song Contest, International Songwriting Competition, Billboard World Song Contest, and others. Her music and videos have aired on USA/UHD Networks, NBC, GAC, Extra, and The Next GAC Star. She has over a dozen releases on her label Rustic Heart Records and is a voting GRAMMY member. In addition, Debbie was the managing editor of LA411 & NY411 for Variety and has created several magazines and directories for various industries over the years. Through her company Entertainment Editorial, she works with a diverse range of clients to meet their editorial needs. She also writes for Dante’s Old South Radio Show blog and the Blue Mountain Review. You can find Debbie at www.entertainmenteditorial.com and www.debbiehennessey.com.
Kristie Frederick Daugherty is a poet and professor who lives in Evansville, IN. She is the editor of Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift. Her work has been featured in the North American Review, Ponder Review, the American Poetry Review, and various other literary journals. She is a graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts, and she is a PhD candidate in Literature/Criticism at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher is the translator of The Cloud of Unknowing, a Georgia Author of the Year Awardee, and Practice of the Presence by Brother Lawrence, among others. Her dynamic work in spirituality and the power of language has garnered interest from various media, including the BBC and NPR’s Morning Edition. A Fulbright scholar at University of London and Fulbright Senior Lecturer at Sogang University, Carmen currently teaches in the College Writing Programs at UC Berkeley. Online at www.carmenbutcher.com and https://linktr.ee/ carmenacevedobutcher
Lynne Kemen lives in the Great Western Catskills of New York and appears in various literary journals. Her first full-length book of poetry, Shoes for Lucy was published in 2023 by SCE Press. Her chapbook, More Than a Handful, appeared in 2020. She is an Interviewer and Editor for The Blue Mountain Review and a member of The Southern Collective Experience. She is the President of Bright Hill Press.
Clifford Brooks is the CEO of the Southern Collective Experience and Editor-in-Chief of the Blue Mountain Review. He is also the journal’s content editor.
Aside from these duties, Clifford is the author of The Draw of Broken Eyes & Whirling Metaphysics, Athena Departs, and Exiles of Eden. These collections of poetry can easily be found online.
Clayton Jones is a writer, singersongwriter, and professor living in Chickamauga, GA. His poetry and prose has appeared in many journals and magazines including The Cortland Review, Boston Literary Magazine, and American Songwriter. He has written and recorded several albums of original music. He is founder of Southwind Media (southwindmedia.net) where he offers editing and other literary services. He is a professor of English at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and holds a M.F.A. in poetry from Georgia State University.
Jennifer Gravley has been published widely in such venues as Sou’wester, North American Review, Laurel Review, La Petite Zine, and Puerto del Sol, among others. She writes short fiction, essays, and poetry and is currently at work on a story collection. She holds an MFA from the University of Alabama, where she was a winner in the AWP Intro Journals Project in fiction and held a Teaching-Writing Fellowship, and has attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She was awarded a residency from the Ragdale Foundation. She is from the North Georgia mountains and now resides in the middle of the middle of the country with her husband and his plant.
Luke Johnson is the author of Quiver (Texas Review Press), a finalist for the Jake Adam York Award, The Vassar Miller Prize, and The Levis Award; A Slow Indwelling (Harbor Editions 2024); and Distributary (Texas Review Press 2025). Quiver was recently named one of four finalists for The California Book Award. Johnson was selected by Patricia Smith as a finalist for the esteemed 2024 Robert Frost Residency through Dartmouth College. You can find more of his work at Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Narrative Magazine, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere.
Stuart Dischell is the author of Good Hope Road (Viking), a National Poetry Series Selection, Evenings & Avenues (Penguin), Dig Safe (Penguin), Backwards Days (Penguin), Standing on Z (Unicorn), Children with Enemies (Chicago),and The Lookout Man (Chicago). His newest work is Andalusian Visions (Unicorn), a book of poetry, photography, and music with international collaborators. His poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Agni, The New Republic, Slate, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and numerous national and international anthologies, such as Best American Poetry, Good Poems, and the Pushcart Prize. A. recipient of awards from the NEA, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Ledig-Rowohlt Foundation. and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, he teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.
Chris Terry draws from his fanatic love of films & music when crafting his reviews. After receiving his Master›s in Fine Arts from the Savannah College of Art and Design, he’s gone on to work on numerous independent and major films along with producing film scores and music for a wide variety of genres. Chris is currently working with the film production company Fifteen Studios on upcoming projects.
January Gill O’Neil is an associate professor at Salem State University and the author. Her poems and articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, American Poetry Review, Poetry, and Sierra magazine, among others. She currently serves as the 2022-2024 board chair of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). O’Neil earned her BA from Old Dominion University and her MFA from New York University. She lives in Beverly, MA.
Georgia-native, Kaitlyn Young is a freelance graphic designer, specializing in both print and digital creative collateral.
H. Holt is a published poet whose work has appeared in a variety of literary magazines and blogs, most notably in Stone, River, Sky: An Anthology of Georgia Poems, alongside former President Jimmy Carter. She holds a BA in Creative Writing and English and is currently pursuing an MA in History. In her spare time, she enjoys exploring multiple forms of creative expression and is currently writing The Soldier and The Songbird, a time-travel novel set in colonial America.
Heather M. Harris is an emerging writer of memoir, poetry, short-stories, children’s books, and an illustrator who lives and writes in the New Orleans area. Heather holds a Master’s of Arts and Teaching and a Bachelor’s of Arts and Sciences in Psychology both from Southeastern Louisiana University. Heather is a contributor for The Blue Mountain Review, and a member of The Southern Collective Experience.
ASHLEY M. JONES is the Poet Laureate of the State of Alabama (2022-2026). She holds an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University, and she is the author of Magic City Gospel (Hub City Press 2017), dark / / thing (Pleiades Press 2019), and REPARATIONS NOW! (Hub City Press 2021). Her poetry has earned several awards, including the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, the Silver Medal in the Independent Publishers Book Awards, the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry, a Literature Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, and the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award.
Kristen Arnett is the queer Floridian author of With Teeth: A Novel (Riverhead Books, 2021) which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction and the New York Times bestselling debut novel Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, 2019) which was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction and was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Her next novel, STOP ME IF YOU’VE HEARD THIS ONE will be published by Riverhead Books (Spring 2025), followed by the publication of an untitled collection of short stories.
Echo Montgomery Garrett, a 40+ year journalist, author of 25 nonfiction books, and CEO of Lucid House Publishing, is mission-driven and concentrates on sharing stories that inspire greatness and help people to dream. Her biggest selling book MY ORANGE DUFFEL BAG: A Journey to Radical Change was originally self-published in 2010 and won five national awards for best young adult nonfiction and best self-help, including the American Society of Journalists & Authors Arlene Eisenberg Writing that Makes a Difference award that is given every three years to the book that’s made the biggest difference in society. That same year, Echo co-founded the Orange Duffel Bag Initiative (www.theODBI. org) based on the principles in the book to provide life plan coaching and ongoing advocacy for young people ages 14-24 experiencing high poverty, homelessness and aging out of foster care. In 2013, Echo was named Georgia Author of the Year from Georgia chapter of National League of American Pen Women. The Nashville native has won multiple awards for her articles that have appeared in more than 100 media outlets, including AARP, PARADE, AMERICAN WAY, THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION, MONEY, INC., SUCCESS, and more. A graduate of Auburn University, Echo left the New York City magazine world after a decade to return to the South. She and husband Kevin reside in Marietta, Georgia.
