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metal fabrication and eventually participated in the Core Fellowship at Penland School of Crafts. In 2014 Andrew returned to Penland as an artist in residence. Since 2018 he has been working out of his studio in Asheville, NC. He creates sculptures that are exhibited nationally, including solo exhibitions. www.andrew-hayes.squarespace.com

NILS HINT is a blacksmith artist from Estonia. He received his MA and BA from the jewelry and blacksmithing department in the Estonian Academy of Arts. He has had solo exhibitions in New York, Thailand, and throughout Europe. He has participated in numerous group shows internationally and his work can be found in public and private collections around the globe. www.nilshint.com

MYRA MIMLITSCH-GRAY is a metalsmith whose studio practice is at times speculative and theoretical, refl ecting pedagogical concerns. Her work has been exhibited widely and is held in signifi cant museum collections in the US and abroad. Fellowships include the United States Artists Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Mimlitsch-Gray maintains a studio in New York’s Hudson valley. www.mimlitschgray.com

SARAH PERKINS received her MFA at Southern Illinois University – Carbondale and is Professor Emerita at Missouri State University. She has shown her work in the USA, India, Canada, Europe and Taiwan. Her work can be seen in Metalsmith, Ornament, American Cra and in the books Contemporary Enameling, The Penland Book of Jewelry, and The Art of Enameling www.sarahperkinsenamels.com

ALEX PICKENS lived for two decades in the Appalachian mountains of Virginia, where he spent his spare time writing songs, reading the classics, and exploring every stretch of backcountry he could. Most recently his work has been accepted by Crab Orchard Review, Hawaii Pacifi c Review, Texas Review Press, Constellations, and won Appalachia’s 2019 Waterman Fund Essay contest, while his screenplays and fi ction regularly place in national contests. He just completed a novel called Mountain and Valley, inspired by the wilderness and people of Appalachia. He now lives in Raleigh with his wife.

JOHN RAIS has an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. He has been a blacksmith artist since 1998, where he designs and creates one-of-a-kind forged metal art. He has had many solo and group shows. His work is regularly featured in numerous publications, and books. He is also in many permanent collections including Yale Art Galleries and the National Metals Museum. John lives, works and teaches in Philadelphia, PA. www.johnraisstudios.com

SHARAMANG SILAS is a poet and literary facilitator from Nigeria. A two-time winner of the Korea-Nigeria Poetry Prize, he is a 2018 fellow of the Ebedi International Writers Residency. He lives somewhere in Northern Nigeria.

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JUDITH SORNBERGER’s full-length poetry collections include Angel Chimes: Poems of Advent and Christmas (Shanti Arts), I Call to You from Time (Wipf & Stock), Practicing the World (CavanKerry), and Open Heart (Calyx Books). Her prose spiritual/travel memoir is The Accidental Pilgrim: Finding God and His Mother in Tuscany (Shanti Arts). She is professor emerita at Mansfield University of Pennsylvania where she taught English and Creative Writing and founded the Women’s Studies Program. She lives on the side of a mountain outside Wellsboro, Pennsylvania. www.judith sornberger.net

American artist, STACEY LEE WEBBER was born in Indianapolis Indiana in 1982. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Ball State University in 2005 and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 2008. Webber moved from the midwest to Philadelphia in 2011. She has been living and working full time as an artist in the Globe Dye Works building since 2015. www.staceyleewebber.com

MELISSA SPOHR WEISS is a graduate student at the University of New Brunswick. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Riddle Fence, The Malahat Review, CV2, Prairie Fire, The Maynard, Oakland Arts Review, and elsewhere.

SUNNI BROWN WILKINSON’s poetry can be found in Western Humanities Review, New Ohio Review, Sugar House Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, SWWIM, The Maynard and other journals and anthologies. She is the author of The Marriage of the Moon and the Field (Black Lawrence Press) and The Ache & The Wing (winner of the 2020 Sundress Chapbook contest). She also won New Ohio Review’s NORward Poetry Prize and the 2020 Joy Harjo Prize from Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts. She teaches at Weber State University and lives in northern Utah with her husband and three sons.

JOHN SIBLEY WILLIAMS is the author of As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press), Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize), Disinheritance, and Controlled Hallucinations. A twentythree-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Wabash Prize for Poetry, Philip Booth Award, American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Laux/Millar Prize, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize, and others. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and works as a poetry editor and literary agent. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

MARGOT WIZANSKY’s poems have appeared online and in many journals, such as The Missouri Review, Crab Orchard Review, Moon City Review, Salamander, and The Maine Review. She edited two anthologies: Mercy of Tides: Poems for a Beach House, and Rough Places Plain: Poems of the Mountains. In Don’t Look Them In The Eye: Love, Life, and Jim Crow, she transcribed the oral history of her friend, Emerson Stamps, a grandson of slaves and son of sharecroppers, her poems and his story. Margot has recently retired from a career developing housing for adults with disabilities. She lives in Massachusetts.

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The word “forged” immediately brings to mind Brigid, the Celtic goddess of poetry, healing, and the forge. My poem considers a mural created by Diego Rivera in which a woman is weaving. I love the triple “forging” involved here—the weaving, the painting, and the ekphrastic poem—in which three creators across time, medium, and space are bound together. Certainly, my poem is inextricable from Rivera’s painting, as is his mural from the woman’s weaving.

My poem is now “forged” into a collection of poems and essays—issue 59 of Ruminate. And, like the iron whose form is forever changed by heat and hammer, I believe our collective writings are altered by their new context, are forged into a new shape together and, perhaps, even additional meaning(s).

“Of The Eating Variety” is a fi ction forged of my own experience with an eating disorder. The piece emerged as a way to grapple with my own history and slowly transformed into a fi ctional work, a work not about me but about a character. This character, of course, is then forged of me. I think, to a certain extent, I am always part of the characters I write. Even the bad guys. This is how humanness happens to them, how they live and breathe on the page. Call it narcissistic, but I believe it is about empathy. How we feel with a character. Many of my stories, then, including this one, are something beyond fi ction, are something more like autofi ction.

I wrote “Communion” as I walked along the Susquehanna River on a hot July morning. Those summer days, with the fog of humidity and pollen so thick everything seems to blur and melt together, made me think about walking up to the red-carpet altar years ago and having the priest place that dry wafer on the tip of my tongue and the sacred forging between bodies that happens during transubstantiation and how I wanted to partake in that again. I realized I could by simply replacing the altar and wafer with the plants and animals of the riverlands I live in.

Craft is for something. This notion has challenged me deeply over time.

My earliest training was rooted in craft, with its certain technical requirements, learned expertise, and presumed outcome of a thing that does something. In the 1970s I joined in the family project to build a house, an A-frame with plans pulled from The Mother Earth News. As the youngest, I was given simple tasks—among them, the straightening of double headed nails to be repurposed in scaffolding. I forged the spikes on an anvil fashioned from scrap wood and stored them in coffee cans, enjoying their gathered density, order, and the sound of metal in the can. The result was deeply satisfying. I grew to swing hammers, sledges, pickaxes and the like, gaining confidence and appreciation for handwork of all kinds.

It takes a hammer to make a hammer. I am not one to throw away a shovel when the handle can be replaced. There is a stubbornness that comes with skill, and I can sometimes be drawn to absurd lengths simply because I can fi x something or improve it. While nourishing, this is discrete from my creative research.

Craft is for something that can be easily identifi ed, or not. “What is it for?” This is often asked about my work: its purpose is to provoke the question.

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