In Mike Perry's New Book, Hope Is Everything

Stephanie Nesja

 Author and humorist Michael Perry is back, and this time he’s asking readers to persist in “connecting even if we never meet…” The New York Times bestselling author of Population: 485, The Jesus Cow, and Roughneck Grace gives us another glimpse of what it’s like living in small-town rural Wisconsin via Peaceful Persistence. Originally published in the Wisconsin State Journal between April 2018 and March 2020, this new collection presents a variety of brief essays, all of which offer anecdotes to readers of all kinds.

“From Perry’s Aesop-like morality tales on gratitude, family, farming, and fireflies, Perry proves, once more, that there is something to be gleaned in everyday moments, no matter how small. ”

Leading with his heart, Perry writes to connect to his readers. The essays in this collection “were composed during a time of personal and national unease, and often reflect that mood, but just as often veer into humor and hope.” Humor and hope, indeed. From Perry’s Aesop-like morality tales on gratitude, family, farming, and fireflies, Perry proves, once more, that there is something to be gleaned in everyday moments, no matter how small.

The author offers insight for his readers by way of lessons he teaches throughout the themes of his two-page essays. Perry, an everyday guy, connects to his readers while trying to enjoy life amid a difficult national backdrop. His desire to share these moments allow not only for solace and significance to be found in his words, but also hope.

If there’s one touchstone throughout the collection, it revolves around hope. In “Window Robin,” Perry teaches his readers the importance of persistence as he watches a robin diligently peck for worms in the softening ground. When Perry’s daughter is missing her mom in “Sunday Night Sads,” he reminds us that even in the smallest moments of grief, the stars will still rise, and tomorrow is a new day. In “Dad Suit,” Perry reflects on the joy of family values while trying on suits—a task he doesn’t enjoy. And in “Crowdsourced Truck Repair” we learn the importance of coming together, even virtually, through discussing the how-tos of repairing a truck. It’s clear Perry values many things in addition to the aforementioned, like traditions, friends, neighbors, nature, music, road trips, farm-fresh eggs, gardening, garlic, asparagus, hard work, relaxation, and the philosophy of Michel de Montaigne.

 While Perry’s down-to-earth scenes do much to hook the reader, it’s his poetic style that keeps readers fully engaged through vivid imagery, alliteration, and bountiful descriptions of various kinds amalgamated with a rich vocabulary, learned from his days of voluntarily reading the dictionary as a child, which will hopefully expand the reader’s own expressions.  

In his final essay, “Healing Day,” Perry offers advice as a nod to Bill Fay’s song of the same name. “Peaceful persistence,” he writes, “is its own reward. It isn’t a matter of winning, it is a matter of dignity. Be at peace with yourself.” It’s clear that above all, the author’s main value for his readers is to have hope.

5 Ways to Beat Writer’s Block

“However, could it be possible that “writer’s block” is simply a term coined to represent a writer’s anxiety to write? Writer’s block normally coincides with wandering attention, worrying about deadlines, and a fear or hatred of a blank screen: all signs of anxiety. The good news here is that anxiety is completely manageable, and tricks to combat that restless feeling whenever you sit down at your desk are conveniently available to your viewing pleasure right here! ”

Kensie Kiesow

 The most prolific writers in history have struggled with writer’s block so intense, it lasted for decades. Writer’s block was Ernest Hemingway’s greatest fear, and he drove an ambulance for the united states military during WWI! During his service in Italy, he was even injured by an Austrian mortar fire, and writer’s block was still his greatest fear. Although Hemingway swears it exists, some writers live in denial. Patrick Rothfuss, author of Name of the Wind, likened the idea of writer’s block to a magical muse, who “bestows the writing onto us, and we become inspired” rather than acknowledging that “sometimes, writing is super hard…just like any other job.” However, could it be possible that “writer’s block” is simply a term coined to represent a writer’s anxiety to write? Writer’s block normally coincides with wandering attention, worrying about deadlines, and a fear or hatred of a blank screen: all signs of anxiety. The good news here is that anxiety is completely manageable, and tricks to combat that restless feeling whenever you sit down at your desk are conveniently available to your viewing pleasure right here! Whether you’ve had writer’s block lasting hours, weeks, or months, we’ve got some tips to help you out!

Make a Cup of Tea or Coffee

Whether you choose to make tea, coffee, or some other drink in your kitchen, the point of this tip is not the beverage, but the walking away from your laptop or notebook that you’ve been staring at for three hours. Staring at screens is not only bad for your eyes, but it’s bad for your productivity. Instead, just get up, maybe stretch those stiff legs a little, and go get something to drink. Hydration is also a side bonus!

Take a Shower

I’m sure you smell like lilacs in full bloom carried on a warm spring evening, but taking a shower is a great way to turn off your brain while doing a task. Showering is so routine that you don’t have to think about how you’re washing your hair or shaving your legs because we do that all the time. In the fifteen-or-so minutes that it takes you to shower, your brain relaxes and that allows you to passively think about your project and let new ideas bubble up from your subconscious. Ever wondered why bright ideas always seem to take shape while in the shower? This is why! Give your brain a break and lather up!

Go for a Walk

I’m sure this piece of advice isn’t new, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. The brain and the body are connected in so many fascinating ways, and if you’re body is starting to feel sore from sitting, or you’ve been staring at a screen for so long that your eyes are on fire, get out of the house. Just get out and walk around the neighborhood or, better yet, walk the Putnam Trail or Chippewa River Trail. The Chippewa Valley is beautiful, and so much inspiration comes from the world around you that you may not even realize. Let your mind wander as you reconnect with nature and you’ll return to your desk with a more relaxed brain filled with some fresh ideas.

Do Something Else on Your To-Do List

Life is hectic and crazy, and sometimes taking a break to do nothing just leaves you feeling unproductive and more stressed than when you started out. Instead, switch over to something else you’ve been holding off. Does the front door still stick? Do you still need to get that oil change? During writer’s block is the best time to get that task out of the way and feel like you’re still getting things done and being productive!

Catch Up with a Friend

During this time when we are fighting an airborne pandemic, it’s difficult to see friends in person, but not impossible! Walking around town is absolutely something you and a friend can do together, and it’s already something from this list that will help with calming your writing anxiety! If you would rather stay extra careful, call or facetime your friend to chat and maybe explain to them your work that has tragically come to a halt. Friends, especially friends from your workshop group or high school poetry club, provide fantastic services as sounding boards. Taking a moment to hear about their lives in quarantine and what’s going on in their heads will also help you get out of yours.

5 Fun Writing Games to Play While You’re Waiting for Inspiration to Strike

“Creative people often get stuck in their heads about their projects and it’s difficult to escape that spiral, especially when a deadline is fast approaching. However, it’s important to take a step back from your work every now and then to give your brain something else to chew on for a while, so let’s play some games! ”

Kensie Kiesow

Have you ever been in a mood to write, but you’re not sure what to write about? Maybe you’re stuck on an idea that’s going nowhere, or a plot that’s going somewhere, but you don’t like where it’s ended up. Or, maybe you’re bored and this whole writing thing is something different to pass the time. In any case, games are a great way to relieve any stress or anxiety that might be preventing you from working on the next Great American Novel (cue waving flag and fireworks). Creative people often get stuck in their heads about their projects and it’s difficult to escape that spiral, especially when a deadline is fast approaching. However, it’s important to take a step back from your work every now and then to give your brain something else to chew on for a while, so let’s play some games!

 “Complete the Story”

This here game is the only one on this list that requires a group of writers (at least two, but the more the zanier!) and it can easily be adapted to a socially distant e-mail chain. Firstly, you will need a prompt. The more vague or ambiguous the prompt the better because then it opens each story up to multiple, vastly different interpretations, and we at the guild have found that prompts in the form of a picture or painting work wonders for this. Next, now that you’ve got a group of creative writers and an intriguing prompt, it’s time to start writing your stories. After each player has had a moment to divine a story from the selected prompt, they have three minutes of speed writing before passing the document onto the person next to them in a clockwise motion. If you wish to adapt this to a socially distanced, e-mail format, your group will have to devise a hypothetical circle around which to pass the documents. The number of rounds wherein your group passes the document is absolutely up to you and your group, but eventually, each story should be written to conclusion. Once the stories are completed and returned to their original writers, read them back to the group and try not to laugh! 

“From Beginning to End”

For this game, pick two books from your bookshelf completely at random. With your eyes closed, flip through the pages of the first book until some intuition from deep in your gut tells you to stop, then with that same gut intuition and your eyes closed, pick a line at random. This line will be what starts your story. Now, turn to the second book you pulled and choose another line using the same search process. As I’m sure you can guess, this second line will be the last line of your story. Write the starting line at the top of a piece of paper and the ending line on the bottom and try to connect these two, completely random thoughts!

“The Pantoum”

Some poem formulas present unique creative challenges, like the sonnet or villanelle, which require a specific structure when written traditionally. Contemporary poetry writing has all but thrown propriety out the window, but sometimes returning to your grandparent’s age of poetry can be fun game to pass that unproductive time staring at a blank page. The pantoum form consists of four-line stanzas wherein the second and fourth lines of the first stanza become the first and third lines of the next stanza, and so on and so forth. Your poem can be however long you want, but in the last stanza, the pattern switches up. Instead, the third and first lines of the first stanza become the second and fourth lines of the last, so your poem should end with the beginning line. Sound complicated enough? If your answer is no and you’d like to take this poem a step further, steal four lines from your favorite song or poem and build the rest of your pantoum from there! 

“Twenty-Six to One”

With one sheet of paper, write a story or poem wherein the first sentence or first line contains twenty-six words. No more, no less. As you write, knock off one more word from each sentence or line until you end up with just one word. If you’re writing a poem, you can use enjambment to cheat a little bit, but if you want to up the ante, try to make each line a complete sentence. Conversely, you could write a story that begins with a one-word sentence and grows to twenty-six!

“Dialogue”

Dialogue is notoriously difficult to write. There hasn’t been one writer in the history of the world who hasn’t, at some point, struggled with dialogue. It always sounds too unnatural or trite to their ears, so this game can provide you with a little no-stakes practice. Firstly, you’ll need three hats. Or, you could use envelopes, boxes, your friends’ purses, bowls, what have you, but you need three containers. Cut up a bunch of little slips of paper and write out as many places as you can think of in ten seconds and put them in the first hat. These could be rooms in your own house, a Macy’s, a national park, or the surface of the sun. Into the second hat, dump an equal number of slips on which you’ve written your characters: a mother and her son, three teen gal pals, a chicken and a goose, or a priest, rabbi, and monk. In the third and final hat, list some interesting topics like hiking in the Andes, dentistry, baking, Frankenstein, etc. Your topics can be anything you want, but make sure you can get a story out of it. Choose one slip of paper from each hat and write a scene about what happens using ONLY dialogue! Your dialogue must include a mention of the place in which the characters are talking as well as some action, body language, and most importantly, a narrative. Writing dialogue can be stressful, but practice makes perfect and games make practicing fun!

Now, go write!

"Turn Off Your Inner Critic" and Other Lessons From National Novel Writing Month

NaNoWriMo writer Karissa Zastrow / Credit: Justin Patchin

Krisany Blount

For many prose writers, the end goal is a novel. It doesn’t sound that hard to do. Really, it’s only about 70,000 words (on the low-end of average). Just a really long short story. And how hard is writing a short story?

If you’re laughing with a sort of bitter irony, you know what I’m getting at. Writing is deceptively difficult. Despite the number of people who remark that they’ve “always wanted to write a novel,” there’s a reason they haven’t done it already. Because it’s not as easy as it seems.

That doesn’t mean it’s impossible though. There’s all sorts of methods and advice out there to help writers make it through the first draft, and the second, and et cetera. One of these tools is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).

First started in 1999, NaNoWriMo takes place every November. The goal is to write 50,000 words over the course of the month. In other words, to “complete” a first draft of a novel in a month. This breaks down to writing 1,667 words a day, for all 30 days of November.

“Many writers, myself included, tend to flounder in the first draft process because we start to second guess ourselves, self-edit, and procrastinate. To tackle NaNoWriMo with any degree of success, you have to turn off that inner-editor and just write.””

“NaNoWriMo is an impetus to get writers to lay down a rough draft that they can spend time on later to add to, edit, and continue revising. Many writers, myself included, tend to flounder in the first draft process because we start to second guess ourselves, self-edit, and procrastinate. To tackle NaNoWriMo with any degree of success, you have to turn off that inner-editor and just write,” says Aimee Johnson, a long-time participant and Municipal Liaison for the Eau Claire area NaNoWriMo group.

As Municipal Liaison, Johnson organizes events like write-ins, where NaNoWriMo participants can show up with their writing instrument of choice and write for a few hours while hanging out with other writers. This year, these events have, of course, gone virtual. But Johnson cites the community as one of the keys to succeeding. Karissa Zastrow, another long time NaNoWriMo participant, agrees.

““I am incredibly motivated by achieving a goal, so when there’s the combination of setting the goal and having a support system of other writers who check in to see where I’m are at with my word count, it pushes me to keep going,” says Zastrow.”

“I am incredibly motivated by achieving a goal, so when there’s the combination of setting the goal and having a support system of other writers who check in to see where I’m are at with my word count, it pushes me to keep going,” says Zastrow.

Other advice for success? Keep everything you write. Yes, we all want to write a perfect first draft and writing “bad” words can feel counterproductive, but as my favorite writing motto goes: you can’t edit a blank page. Once you finish, you can make it better.

Carve out time to write and stick to it, but don’t be afraid to write outside of that time. A few minutes here and there can really add up in the long run. But just writing in short bursts likely won’t be enough to get you to the goal, so setting aside some time each day just for writing is also important. As is defending your writing time.

“It is so easy to say, ‘well, I guess I can go do this tonight and just write double tomorrow’ or ‘I’ll just make it up over the weekend.’ Before you know it, you are down almost 5,000 words and that is not a small number. When people ask you to give up your writing time, protect it,” says Zastrow.

But even by doing everything “right” you might not finish and that’s okay. NaNoWriMo isn’t a walk in the park, and the mental toll for creativity this year is more strenuous than usual, so just showing up and trying right now is a major accomplishment.

“Being able to have something to work with is the real prize at the end of NaNoWriMo. Plus, you deserve to be the writer you wish you could be, and NaNoWriMo is the perfect time to do that,” says Johnson.

Best of luck to everyone participating in NaNoWriMo!

Opening the Door To Fresh Knowledge: A Conversation with Wisconsin’s Poet Laureate Peggy Rozga

Elise Eystad

Have you been looking for poetry that you can relate and connect to?

“From Superior, Washburn, and Ashland to Racine, Sturtevant, and Milwaukee. From Door County to Madison and the Driftless area. Wisconsin, you are here. Your lived experience is here,” reads the press release for a new poetry anthology. Titled Through This Door: Wisconsin in Poems, this anthology was compiled and edited by Margaret Rozga & Angela Trudell Vasquez and includes poetry from all eight Wisconsin poet laureates, as well as various other poets from around the state.

The poet laureate is a long-standing tradition in the United States, its primary role being to give poetry “a public presence,” says current Wisconsin poet laureate Margaret (Peggy) Rozga. In a pre-pandemic times, this involved hosting readings and events across Wisconsin, but when Covid hit, this “public presence” had to take on new forms. In addition to learning about Zoom and online presentations, Rozga has also been working on this anthology.

Read on to learn more from Rozga about her role of the poet laureate, the release of Through This Door: Wisconsin in Poems, and how you can snag your copy today!

Elise Eystad: Can you give a brief synopsis of Through This Door: Wisconsin in Poems? Who are some of the contributors and where are they from?

Margaret Rozga: The fifty poets from across Wisconsin included in Through This Door contributed poems that resonated with the words of U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, "When beloved Sun Rises, it is an entrance, a door to fresh knowledge." This quote is the epigraph for the book, and two of its four sections pick up terms from the quote for their titles: "Through This Door," "Fresh Knowledge," "In the Quiet," and "Each Sunrise."  Among the poems are those that reflect on nature, those that consider personal or community relationships, some that focus on the pandemic, and one that gives a picture of the in-person voting during Wisconsin's April primary. The anthology concludes with a hopeful view of the future.

EE: Your press release quotes U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s book, Crazy Brave, as setting the overall theme for this anthology: “When beloved Sun rises, it is an entrance, a door to fresh knowledge.” What is the significance of this theme? The significance of doors?

MR: Doors are thresholds, passageways to new insights, often new beginnings.  Poetry is one way to open up new insights.  I particularly like Harjo's phrase "fresh knowledge."   A poem may present something the reader already knew in a way, but the poem sees that knowledge in a new light, in a way that sparks a deeper understanding.

EE: What did the selection process of compiling the anthology look like? How is the theme of the anthology, explained above, demonstrated in the poems selected?

MR:

A couple of examples:

One poet, Ethel Mortensen Davis, writes about being awakened at night by the moonlight coming in her bedroom window. She then goes outside and to her surprise finds "bees at night collecting nectar" and 'honey-suckle branches / laden with bees."

In Max Garland's poem "Joy," the speaker is outside in such cold that is hurts to breathe.  "I stood under the red pine, took a few more breaths // from deep in the glacial instant of my one and only life, / which hurt a little, by which I mean the edge of joy / where it sharpens itself for the work it has to do."

The selection of poems took over a year.  We knew we wanted to include all 8 poets who'd served as Wisconsin Poet Laureate and as many local poets laureate as we could.

The selection of poems took over a year.  We knew we wanted to include all 8 poets who'd served as Wisconsin Poet Laureate and as many local poets laureate as we could. Most poets sent us 3 to 5 poems.  We had to think about which ones best fit the theme.  Sometimes that changed when we saw how a poem by one person was complemented by a poem from another person.  Once we had a good start on the collection, we noticed work by others that would fill a gap in what we had.  We found at least three of what become poems in the book posted on Facebook where the person who posted them wasn't thinking about writing a poem for a book at all, but we saw how what they wrote opened a door to "fresh knowledge."  We're very grateful to them, as we are to all the poets, for allowing us to share their work in this book.

Co-editor Angela Trudell Vasquez

EE: Through This Door: Wisconsin in Poems includes poems by the eight Wisconsin Poets Laureate. Can you tell me more about the role of poets laureate in Wisconsin? 

MR: The first poets laureate in the English tradition wrote poems to commemorate official public events.  The most famous may be Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade." In the U.S., national, state, and local poets laureate are seldom commissioned to write poems for specific events, but in other ways they work to give poetry a public presence.  Editing this book is one way I'm bringing an inclusive range of poetic voices to public attention.  Another example, Kimberly Blaeser, 2015-2016 Wisconsin Poet Laureate created an online poetry recitation map.  All the poets laureate give readings and present workshops throughout Wisconsin, and now virtually

EE: As your time as poet laureate winds down, what can you tell me about your experience? What was it like to try to give poetry to the people in the midst of Covid? How is your role, and the role of books like this anthology, more important than ever?

MR: In the first 5/8ths of my term, I put 3500 miles on my car driving to poet laureate events.  In this last 3/8ths of my term, I've driven 12 miles for poet laureate events.  So it was a drastic change.  In March 2020 I heard of Zoom for the first time.  Since then thanks to Zoom and other online platforms, I've been able to continue to connect poetry and people throughout Wisconsin and beyond.  I've learned strategies to keep online presentations lively.  In the words of my introduction to this anthology, it is a way to "show the Wisconsin we have and help build the Wisconsin we need." 

EE: This anthology is a display of the Wisconsin lived experience. In general, what ways do you feel poetry has the power to demonstrate our lived experiences? And more specifically, how do you feel poetry written across Wisconsin, from Washburn to Madison to Door County, can connect the people of Wisconsin?

MR: I think of poetry as an epistemology, a way of knowing, that is different from the way of knowing, analysis, most often employed in schools and business.  Analysis divides its subject matter into component parts; poetry with metaphor at its heart, sees likenesses.  So we see the subject in a different light depending on which way of knowing guides our approach. 

“Poetry seeks to engage all the senses, so that we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch what is being considered.  In this attention to sight, sound, smell, taste and touch, there is more potential for engaging the emotions, and that’s where the depth of response comes from.  ”

Poetry seeks to engage all the senses, so that we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch what is being considered.  In this attention to sight, sound, smell, taste and touch, there is more potential for engaging the emotions, and that's where the depth of response comes from.  

I do not live in Eau Claire, I may not know how you love the river, but your poem can make that experience come alive for me. Then every time I drive west on I-94, I will not see Eau Claire roll by as just another freeway exit, but I'll appreciate it as a place where you live and a river you love flows.  

There are poets included in this anthology that I've never met in person, but we've connected through poetry.  They have and the poetry has enriched my life, my sense of what is possible.

An example from the book, Philomena Kebec writes of a cliff "once covered in trees and soft underbrush worn down to its bare clay foundation" and she concludes: "Water is writing its own story." The Bad River near her home in "Wiikwedong, also known as Ashland, Wisconsin" becomes for me a symbol of the living earth, even though I've never seen it and didn't know the indigenous name for what in English is Ashland.  The person and the place become important to me, part of what makes me who I am.

Crossing The Artificial Divide Between Academic And Creative Writing: An Interview With Asha Sen

Dr Asha Sen and her mother.

Krisany Blount

When you tell people you’re a writer, one of the first questions you get asked is “What do you write?” Fiction? Poetry? Scholarly work? Blog posts? If you write within multiple styles but don’t have time to explain in depth, you might just pick one. Inevitably, the genre you claim will be a lens through which people view you. If you’re a creative writer, you will be seen very differently than a scholarly writer. This divide is caused by a perceived skill distinction based on genre. Though each form of writing has certain techniques that are unique to each genre, there are also plenty of similarities that defy containment to a single form. Each piece of writing has a point to make, a purpose. There is significant overlap in the ideas being tackled and discussed. There is so much craft involved. And they all have a writer who, at least once, stares at a single word, dissatisfied, wondering what would be better.

“The divide between creative and academic writers can often serve as a barrier, preventing people from experimenting and branching out. Feeling as though you don’t have the skills to write in a different form can be intimidating, until you realize two things. First, we’re all writers. Second, the goal of all writers is the same: to say what we came here to say.”

The divide between creative and academic writers can often serve as a barrier, preventing people from experimenting and branching out. Feeling as though you don’t have the skills to write in a different form can be intimidating, until you realize two things. First, we’re all writers. Second, the goal of all writers is the same: to say what we came here to say. After that, it’s really only a matter of practice before anyone can successfully cross the divide.

Prior to last summer, UWEC English professor Dr. Asha Sen had primarily been an academic writer, publishing articles and even a book, titled Postcolonial Yearning: Reshaping Spiritual and Secular Discourses in Contemporary Literature (Palgrave Macmillan US, 2013). But in August, she published her first creative work in Volume One. The piece, “Dearest Ma,” is a series of letters written by an immigrant daughter for her mother back home. Somewhat based on her own experiences as an immigrant, the piece offers a glimpse into life as an immigrant and the myriad, complex emotions that come along with that experience.

I recently had the opportunity to chat with her about what it’s like to be an academic entering the realm of creative writing, the challenges associated with that shift, the connective power of writing, and the role of current events in writing.

Krisany Blount: “Dearest Ma” is described as “letters from an immigrant daughter to her mother back home” on Volume One. Why did you choose a series of letters as the form for this story?

Asha Sen: There’s this couple, Joyce and David Anderson, who work with JONAH, and they work a lot with immigrants, particularly Mexican immigrants in town, and they had thought to come up with this idea of doing readers theatre, where one could tell their stories. They were looking for writers who might help tell the stories of some of these immigrants, so that sort of got me thinking about my own immigrant story and so I sat down and I started writing. A lot of this is based on my own life; so part of it is when I came out as a student, my mother used to write to me three times a week and I really looked forward to those letters, so in a way this felt like a natural trajectory. And then I started thinking it would be interesting to have a stage with maybe six different women reading all their letters to their mothers.

“And I guess I’m at an age where my mother’s no longer with me and I think as a woman, sometimes we have that kind of need to say, “This is my life and this is what I’ve made of my life.” ”

And I guess I’m at an age where my mother’s no longer with me and I think as a woman, sometimes we have that kind of need to say, “This is my life and this is what I’ve made of my life.” And I was thinking it would be really interesting to have six professional women immigrants of color talking about their stories, talking to their mothers, because they’ve come across, they no longer live there, their mothers are in a different country, and they had to leave home. So that was what I was thinking about. And when I came to the States, we didn’t have social media, phone calls were really, really expensive, and letters were really the only way to communicate, so those letters were really important. I mean, we didn’t have anything other than that. And I thought this also connected back to the idea of immigrants in the U.S. and letters, which was all that they had, so it felt like there was a continuum and a way of connecting to our country’s immigrant past.

Asha Sen

KB: There was a lot that seemed very personal and like it came out of someone’s actual life that I was thinking about when I read it, so I definitely see where that’s coming from. And that contributes to the level of emotion, too. Each letter is relatively short, but there is so much emotion packed into each one. The large expanse of time covered also contributes to how powerful the piece is. How did you decide on the order for the letters? Was it a natural progression through time, or based more on the emotional trajectory, or something else entirely?

AS: It’s nice to know that you could tell that this was someone’s personal story, that that came through. There’s a kind of politics of vulnerability, of exposing yourself, and I think it’s difficult, because people know me, and they know me in a certain context. But because until my mother’s accident, she really was writing me these letters, it was like a natural progression, thinking in terms of mapping out my own life with her: through a job interview, moving to Eau Claire, the letters here until her accident. So it was a natural progression through time and I think I was also thinking of letters as a useful way to map a whole life, in little snippets of a whole life that basically told a story, because I felt like little bits of letters could cover a large span of time. I think it’d be fun to play with the trajectory, in a different context, in a different time, and to think of it in a more crafted way. This felt more – I don’t know, natural, I guess. But to think of it, to step back now and play with it again. . .

The other thing was the Nilesh and Aisha characters were fictional, but, though it was my story, I also wanted it to resonate with other immigrant stories, and that was why I brought them in. Nilesh was sort of loosely modeled on my husband, who was Ecuadorian-American but who passed away from cancer. When we decided to get married, I had already started the immigration process and we were thinking, “Would it be easier if we just got married?” but the university was already sponsoring me, so there was a little bit of biographical stuff there. But with Aisha, this daughter. . . Especially now, I’ve been thinking about what would it mean to have a child, to have a daughter, like that continuum from mother to daughter to daughter, that passing through in terms of ancestry. And really because what would it mean to have a child at this time and to be consciously a child of color, a partner of color. My husband was, like I said, a brown man, and it’s such an unsafe climate, so I’ve really been thinking about what it would mean to bring a child into this world, which feels very different than the world in the eighties, when I came here. But I also think I wanted to bring her in as a symbol of hope. I didn’t want to end with my mother dying, I wanted to feel there’s a future, and I wanted to try to talk about what it’s like, so it felt like the letters to Ma then became, even after she passed, a convenient way of talking about the climate and how difficult it is. So I guess I used that as a sneaky technical device also.

KB: Every piece of writing presents a different challenge. Was there one thing in particular that you found harder to work with?

AS: In terms of my own life, just on a realistic level, you have to have an employer who will sponsor your green card and employers are often not willing to do that because it’s so much paperwork, so much bureaucracy, it’s so difficult, it’s time consuming, it’s also expensive, but unless you have a spouse who is an American citizen and can sponsor you, your option is you have to leave the country. There’s no other way. You’ve finished being a student, you cannot stay on. You have to find an employer in a little bit of time. It’s becoming worse and harder and harder.

“For me, trying to find the job and the employer and then the green card took so long to come, and I think in terms of pain, that was the painful part of it, because you get tenure six years after being here, and I actually got tenure before I got my green card and I couldn’t leave the country.”

For me, trying to find the job and the employer and then the green card took so long to come, and I think in terms of pain, that was the painful part of it, because you get tenure six years after being here, and I actually got tenure before I got my green card and I couldn’t leave the country. So in my case, I was fortunate my parents did manage a couple of visits, but I couldn’t go back to India for over six years and that was very hard. Not being able to see family, not being able to see friends was hard.

So that was on the real life level, but I think the challenge then for me was, until my mother passed, it was very much my own life, so then thinking of creatively, how did I want to end it, and then bringing in the fictionalizing. It’s interesting – I’ve gotten flak from friends who’ve said, “Why? What is this about?” It’s a fictional piece! You know? And I guess creating that did bring back memories of my partner in real life, who did pass from cancer, and there was a sadness that I obviously didn’t want to bring into this narrative, because that’s a different narrative of itself. So writing the end without making it too didactic, trying to make it make a point, but also trying to open up my experience to other people’s experiences – certainly the racism was very true to what I’ve experienced and my real-life partner experienced – trying to move from that personal to slightly more general, slightly more political, but keeping the personal, was challenging. That required work. I didn’t want to lose the audience after my mother died, I wanted to keep that somehow going.

KB: As someone who has done more academic writing than creative writing, could you comment on the differences in your writing process between the two styles?

AS: In my writing, in my teaching, I always write and do scholarship about issues that are personal to me, like immigration, like racism, like colonialism, like cultural identity, all these things, so I’ve never really been able to have that personal or political scholarship divide. My scholarship in many ways feels deeply personal because I’m writing about stuff that means a lot and has affected my life. In some ways it’s a way of my thinking through my own life, but it’s certainly still scholarship, right? It’s detached, it’s almost like there’s a veil, and I’m writing as an academic, so I’m not vulnerable or exposed in the way in which I felt like with this piece I was. And at some point I’d love to, when I have the time, take a class or two to start to try to write more creatively. We have such amazing writers here. So far the creative writing I’ve been doing has been very personal to my own life experiences, but at some point I think I’m going to move beyond that and write about other things. But writing a piece like this, it felt like I was coming out from behind the veil, like I couldn’t be detached in the same way that I could in an academic tone. So it was risky. It felt like I was exposing myself. I don’t know enough about this, but people have been talking about a politics of vulnerability, so I’m trying to think about that in terms of scholarship. I need to learn more about that. Living in Eau Claire, which is fairly small and I feel like I have a professional identity, and suddenly people are finding out about my personal identity, so that makes me feel a little vulnerable.

“But I was thinking about how could I use vulnerability to make my points”

But I was thinking about how could I use vulnerability to make my points. I’ve been influenced by writers I teach and that helped. But I think one of the big differences has been when I was in grad school, I had an amazing professor called Ann Astell, who told me, about academic writing, “You should write like you teach.” That was really interesting and guiding and a good way of thinking about it. So if I’m writing like I’m teaching, I’m trying to explain and I’m trying to repeat a point over again and again in a different way. Writing like I teach is almost over-determined, in a way, and I guess in creative writing it’s almost underdetermined. One’s working with the nuance, with what was unsaid, rather than what was said. So I did have an agenda and I was just so happy that Volume One picked this up. Really, it meant a lot to me. Eau Claire is the place I’ve lived in the longest all my life.

But I was also writing for an audience. There’s so much anti-immigration rhetoric, that I kind of wanted to educate people about what it’s like to be an immigrant of color and I feel like stories like mine don’t really get told very much. And yet I was very touched by the way in which a lot of people responded. A lot of friends or people who I knew, other immigrants like myself, said, “This is my story.” They so identified with it and made me realize even more so how this wasn’t just my story, this was a story that needed to be told. Variations of this story keep needing to be told so people understand. So I guess I was using pathos a little in my vulnerability and my nuance to try to also educate people about a bigger point, about what it’s like to be an immigrant.

KB: I think there’s an artificial divide between academic and creative writing, when they use all the same skills and like you’re saying, you’re talking about the same things and using a lot of the same techniques to get your point across. It’s just that difference between, in academic writing, you’re doing the explicitly what is said, and with creative writing it’s a lot more of what’s unsaid. That’s a really interesting way of putting it.

AS: I’m glad that you think of it also as being an artificial divide. That makes a lot of sense. Because when we read Fanon for instance, in class, I think he’s a good example of someone who’s doing both in his writing. It’s very interesting. “Write like you teach” is very embedded in my head. . . A lot of the struggle in academic writing is still finding the right word. The craft is so important and I don’t think people realize that, always. Craft is really, really important – how you say what you’re saying.

KB: The events of the last six months have been a source of inspiration and a call to action for many other creatives. How would you say these events have influenced your writing?

AS: I do think so. It’s a feeling like the world we live in – and it’s not just the U.S., it is the world we live in – is very frightening. This goes back to my thinking of what it would be like to have a child and bring her into this world. And I guess as one gets older, one also learns things, gets wiser, but it feels very ugly, it feels like a lot of hate. As a woman of color, I’ve always taught about difficult things in the classroom, but it’s not just in the classroom. It’s on the street, everywhere. I feel hyper-visible and I feel like I’m constantly navigating and I don’t always feel that safe, and I feel that affecting my behavior and interactions in ways that it didn’t earlier.

“I wanted to do this about immigration because it was my experience and there is so much misrepresentation about immigration, so much anti-immigration rhetoric, so I felt like I need to take the skills that I have and try to use them to say something that is meaningful and I am really so grateful it seemed to have worked.”

I wanted to do this about immigration because it was my experience and there is so much misrepresentation about immigration, so much anti-immigration rhetoric, so I felt like I need to take the skills that I have and try to use them to say something that is meaningful and I am really so grateful it seemed to have worked. People really responded. I had a couple of people who wrote back saying “Thank you for laying this out like this, I had never really thought about it.” So it was to educate people about the process and how it wasn’t just easy.

I feel like we’ve got to be safe. Above all, we’ve got to be safe. But we’ve also got to speak out, because I am, like a lot of people, seriously worried about where we’re at at this point in time and so I think that call to action is very well put. I think a lot of us are feeling it; I’m certainly feeling it. I think as people of color, as immigrants of color, we need to speak out. And it’s interesting, because the Indian-American community has been traditionally quite conservative in its approach and you know the whole thing about the model minority and not wanting to push back, but I think even they are beginning to realize that they’re not that safe. So I don’t know, hopefully there will be more solidarity building. Some of the responses I got not from Indians, but from people from Mexico, other immigrants, other European immigrants, Americans – I was very touched by how so many people responded in different ways. It felt like that solidarity was happening.

The other thing is I am getting older and I’m feeling like I can take more risks. I’m not a young professor starting off a career and I have, in some ways, less to lose by taking those risks. I still have to be careful, but there is something about women, as we get older, we’re like “Okay, I’m not going to take this, this is my voice, I’m going to speak up now, I’ve put up with enough” kind of thing. There is something about that that is happening to me too, I find. I will say things and do things that I wouldn’t have even maybe ten years ago.

KB: You were saying how now there’s so much anti-immigration sentiment right now which is definitely true, and you touched on that in that author’s note you included with the piece as well. That, and the piece as a whole, was a really eye-opening experience for me. But it’s been forty years since the eighties, and with immigration there’s still so many similarities in those experiences, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, except that it also signals that we haven’t progressed very far in our treatment of immigrants in this country, which is unfortunate.

AS: Yeah, I actually think it’s gotten much worse, just the waiting time. . . In the eighties, there was anti-immigrant sentiment – there always has been towards people of color – but when I talk to people, it feels very, very rabid now. But also I think that immigrants are seen as threatening on so many levels, not just economically but on every level. They’re seen as a drain on the system, they’re seen as physically threatening, but people don’t really know what it’s like to be an immigrant or what the process is. So it’s not getting better. It should be getting better, but it’s not.

KB: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

AS: I’m really touched by Volume One, because I didn’t know that they would agree to publish this, you know? It’s different, in terms of what we hear about, not just in Volume One, but in Eau Claire. I don’t think that stories like mine in the Chippewa County are told that often and I think that’s why I was very touched that it spoke to the editors and very touched by the feedback I’ve gotten. It’s felt very life affirming and reaffirming because Eau Claire is actually the place I’ve lived in the longest all my life, so it feels very good, sort of like coming home, to have it here. And also the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild doing this interview is, again, very touching, because I am such an academic and a scholarly writer, and I’m just branching out. And like you said, it’s an artificial divide, but I still carry anxiety and baggage about the idea of being a writer as opposed to a scholarly writer, because I haven’t had formal training. So it’s felt reaffirming on lots of levels. It’s just felt really good and I’m so thankful. It’s so good to feel that people are willing to listen to these stories and are receptive because I think it could be a platform for as the Chippewa Valley is changing and there are more and more people of color coming in, we could have these multiple stories being told, and a balance of stories and everyone belonging, almost like what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks about in Danger of a Single Story. That would be good.

Be sure to check out “Dearest Ma” in Volume One.

A Poetry Playlist for the Overwhelmed

Elise Eystad

I have felt overwhelmed lately.  Between a global pandemic, a presidential election, and college courses now offered in various formats, it’s been hard for me to find ways to budget my mental space when it feels like there are so many voices calling for my attention.  In this season of hurry and anxiety, I’ve been drawn to art that feels comforting; art that can acknowledge the pain and anxiety around us, and not minimize it. Instead, it offers slivers of hope and healing alongside that acknowledgement. Most of this art often centers around nature, also. Nature: that steady reminder of life and beauty that comes with changing seasons and resilient wildlife.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote an article for CVWG interviewing four local creatives about what art has proven comforting to them in this season, specifically Covid. I suppose this article is my own swing at that prompt.

“Below, I’ve combined some of the art that I’ve found most comforting:  poems and songs paired together based on atmosphere and mood. The interplay between the two mediums has been significant in my own life. As a poet and songwriter myself, I see these two forms of expression overlapping in many ways. ”

Below, I’ve combined some of the art that I’ve found most comforting:  poems and songs paired together based on atmosphere and mood. The interplay between the two mediums has been significant in my own life. As a poet and songwriter myself, I see these two forms of expression overlapping in many ways. Often, my song lyrics start as poems, though the converse, is also true: sometimes I’ll take a lyric and turn it into a line in a poem. The first song on my EP was written when I rediscovered a line of poetry I had written when I was 15!

Music and poetry on their own have always held the power to comfort people, along with the catharsis of self-expression that comes with creating. Though both powerful individually, when combined, they take on a new power. Music can bring out the emotion of a poem more fully; words on a written page can give a reader space to feel lyrical words in a more contemplative way. 

Below you can find five poems and five songs. Feel free to scroll down, click the links to read lyrics or see the poems online. And don’t forget to log into your Spotify account to listen along with the playlist provided!

Read, listen, and may you find your comfort, too.

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Pairing #1

 “I Worried” by Mary Oliver &

“I Have Made Mistakes” by The Oh Hellos

I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers

flow in the right direction, will the earth turn

as it was taught, and if not how shall

I correct it?

Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,

can I do better?

Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows

can do it and I am, well,

hopeless.

Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,

am I going to get rheumatism,

lockjaw, dementia?

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.

And gave it up. And took my old body

and went out into the morning,

and sang.

Pairing #2:

“Making a Fist” by Naomi Shihab Nye &

“Sadness Don’t Own Me” by The Staves

    We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.

                                                                  —Jorge Luis Borges

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,

I felt the life sliding out of me,

a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.

I was seven, I lay in the car

watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.

My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

“How do you know if you are going to die?”

I begged my mother.

We had been traveling for days.

With strange confidence she answered,

“When you can no longer make a fist.”

Years later I smile to think of that journey,

the borders we must cross separately,

stamped with our unanswerable woes.

I who did not die, who am still living,

still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,

clenching and opening one small hand.

Pairing #3:

“The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry &

“Have You Stopped to Notice” by S. Carey

 When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron

reeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Pairing #4:

“Song for Autumn” by Mary Oliver &

“Autumn Leaves” by Tow’rs

 Don’t you imagine the leaves dream now

            how comfortable it will be to touch

the earth instead of the

            nothingness of the air and the endless

freshets of wind? And don’t you think

            the trees, especially those with

mossy hollows, are beginning to look for

the birds that will come—six, a dozen—to sleep

            inside their bodies? And don’t you hear

the goldenrod whispering goodbye,

            the everlasting being crowned with the first

tuffets of snow? The pond

            stiffens and the white field over which

the fox runs so quickly brings out

            its long blue shadows. The wind wags

its many tails. And in the evening

            the piled firewood shifts a little,

longing to be on its way.

Pairing #5

“Yellow” by Anne Sexton &

“On the Mend” by Brian Bulger

  When they turn the sun

on again, I’ll plant children

under it, I’ll light up my soul

with a match and let it sing, I’ll

take my bones and polish them, I’ll

vacuum up my stale hair, I’ll

pay all my neighbours bad debts, I’ll

write a poem called Yellow and put

my lips down to drink it up, I’ll

feed myself spoonfuls of heat and

everyone will be home playing with

their wings and the planet will

shudder with all those smiles and

there will be no poison anywhere, no plague

in the sky and there will be mother-broth

for all the people, and we will

never die, not one of us, we’ll go on

won’t we?

New Look, Same Heart: Introducing Volume One, 2.0

Kensie Kiesow

Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States in full force last spring, causing the majority of the country to shut down for a month, many people have seen this break in the norm as an opportunity for change and self-improvement.

Wishing you had more time to read? Boom, you got it, and now your friends will finally stop nagging you to finish Harry Potter.

Wanna get shredded? A quick Google search will find you quarantine workouts for rock solid thighs sculpted right in your living room.

Does your list of home improvement projects look like a CVS receipt? Now, everything fits on just one Post-It! Well, as long as you write really, really tiny…

And, just like you, Volume One has been busy changing and self-improving, too.

Shortly after Governor Evers issued the Safer at Home order in late March 2020, local businesses, including Volume One and The Local Store, began to face major headwinds. The store saw less foot traffic, while the magazine—which, in part, highlights major regional events—no longer had many events to highlight.

Yet the Volume One crew viewed this difficult moment not merely as a setback, but as an opportunity as well.

For the last five years, a proposed Volume One redesign had been put on hold. The team was already swamped with expanding the store and improving their video and photo content. But in the stillness of the pandemic (not to mention the subsequent loss to ad revenue generated by events), Volume One couldn’t afford to sit on their hands until the world returned to normal. And thus, the Volume One Membership Program was born!

“With this outpouring of support, the editors and creators of Volume One finally had the opportunity to reprioritize and add even more meaningful content to its pages.”

Just when the summer of 2020 reached peak hopelessness, almost one thousand readers and citizens of the Valley (including the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild!) signed up to support their favorite community organizer and advertising partner. With this outpouring of support, the editors and creators of Volume One finally had the opportunity to reprioritize and add even more meaningful content to its pages. For the first time since 2006, the Volume One magazine and website not only got a facelift, but they added new article sections, renewed their commitment to local creatives in the Chippewa Valley, debuted a first-ever monthly podcast, and are bolstering their commitment to providing a platform to lift up marginalized voices across the region. With this new, expanded platform, Volume One will include recurring paid columns and multimedia content to share the stories and faces of diverse folks across Wisconsin.

“Though there are many exciting changes afoot, co-managing editor Eric Christenson, confirms that “the ethos is still the same: The Chippewa Valley is cool.” ”

Though there are many exciting changes afoot, co-managing editor Eric Christenson, confirms that “the ethos is still the same: The Chippewa Valley is cool.”

As part of this revamping, the new “Voice” section will include in-depth feature stories, a greater emphasis on local news, info on that cool new podcast, all while amplifying the local experiences of a more diverse Chippewa Valley.

And this transformation is far from over. Volume One continues to inspire the passion and love this community holds for the Chippewa Valley, and they will never stop innovating and creating. Eric Christenson says the changes are “indicative of the greater community – inclusive of everybody that calls this place home.”

"Burning It. Breaking It. Revealing It": 5 Questions on Craft with Dr. José Felipe Alvergue

Alex Zitzner

When I first encountered Dr. José Felipe Alvergue’s writing, I was eighteen. At eighteen I was a first-year creative writing major attending the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and would visit The Local Store to buy books from UWEC’s faculty as way to “get to know them”. Reading José’s first book, gist : rift : drift : bloom (Further Other Book Works, 2015), opened up a new world to me of what was possible with writing. This world brought my attention to typography, etymology, overall crafting of books, and so many more ideas. Now, at twenty-three, after closely following José’s work and having the opportunity to study with him, I’m stoked to have had the opportunity to interview him about his latest book, scenery (Fordham University Press, 2020), winner of the Poets Out Loud Editor’s Prize. This is somewhat to say that these questions don’t only come from the month I spent reading/re-reading scenery, but also the past six years of engaging with José’s writing. Whether you’ve read all of José’s work or none of it, this interview touches on just five ways one can approach writing, which I hope inspires you (reader!) to read/re-read José’s work and ultimately, write. 

Alex Zitzner: After reading a “review” of scenery on Goodreads, one commenter claimed it felt like your writing was just, “stream of consciousness.” This confused me. I’m not sure if any writing comes unconsciously unless it’s slightly hypnagogic, but I’d like to use that comment as a prompt for how you approach the page. Philip Whalen said, “If you want a poem, find a blank page.” However, even notebook pages have lines which guide and confine writing within a space, and sketchpads, even without lines, limit writing with the size of their pages. Since you’re writing with Adobe Illustrator, I feel like you actually are approaching a “blank” page, or one without lines, and are met with a new set of confinements. With that being said, how does Illustrator influence your translation of thoughts/ideas into writing? How do you think your writing would be different if you primarily wrote in a notebook (lined or unlined) with a pen or pencil then transferred it into a computer program like Word/Pages?

José Felipe Alvergue: I’ve read that comment. It’s not a good idea to read reviews on Goodreads but that doesn’t mean I haven’t. Mostly because one doesn’t know who these folks are, what kinds of readers they are, and so on. But to speak to the comment, I think it reflects the situation of a reader that does not feel fulfilled in getting something from the text that is useful for them. And maybe even “useful” is not the most generous term, but I do think the engagement of reading poetry is something we have been conditioned to expect as a relationship of subservience of the poetic text to the experience of the reader’s emotional satisfaction. The commodification of literature has only underscored this.

In that relationship, we come to place a responsibility of the poetic text to, in turn, demonstrate emotional possibility within a narrowness which encompasses what is recognizable, what has been already. I’m not talking about conceptualism here. Just the emotional dimension. In many ways the unique “blankness” of an artboard vs. a document is rather daunting in the absence of confinement, even if simultaneously rewarding in the limits of possibility that can be explored.

“When I write I do write by hand on paper first. Sometimes in pencil. Sometimes in marker. I sometimes use a notebook. I sometimes use butcher paper that I unroll to a length that allows a lot of “vectors” to explore a physical limit. Or mapping if you want to call it that. ”

When I write I do write by hand on paper first. Sometimes in pencil. Sometimes in marker. I sometimes use a notebook. I sometimes use butcher paper that I unroll to a length that allows a lot of “vectors” to explore a physical limit. Or mapping if you want to call it that. And what poet doesn’t make notes or compose verse on random scraps of paper shoved into pockets? I use these multiple sources when finally composing a book in Illustrator. This also perhaps speaks to the other dimension of any one of my books and this reading of “consciousness”; my work is always an engagement with a question. I don’t write discreet poems. For me the artboard is more akin to the experience of printing on a letterpress, which might seem to be an odd association. But I see a greater freedom in printing than writing composing in a standard computer format. Especially if one has ever been around a truly talented printer that is familiar not only with typesetting but also really intuitive with the use of color, and using woodcuts, or other modalities of holding and transferring ink. These two realities come together in my books: a prolonged emotional-conceptual engagement, and a process that breaks down writing into compositional acts that are mitigated by writing technologies, and indeed the movement of text as type. 

The availability of “doing” more on the page translates into an availability of what you explore poetically in the language that occupies that page. Not only in a durational sense, but in the spontaneous manner of accidents-in-thinking. Realizations that suddenly emerge in the process of writing on paper, to transcribing into type, to “setting” said type in the software, organizing, and so on.

“When we think of “stream of consciousness” I think we assume a degree of non-intervention in the writing, which I find odd because in fact there is so much intervention between these different things I’m doing when I write. ”

When we think of “stream of consciousness” I think we assume a degree of non-intervention in the writing, which I find odd because in fact there is so much intervention between these different things I’m doing when I write. But what does resonate is the degree to which confinement is reframed in how I write, such that there is a purposeful engagement with it, and maybe this is what the author of that review is experiencing. Whether or not one, as a reader, is willing to go on that particular ride into “the limit,” so to speak, is a different question. And I get that. But that’s why there are so many different kinds of poetry. There’s something for everyone. As readers we should remember that poets are also readers, and they’re reading what they write. There are all kinds of poetry because there are all kinds of reading, and all kinds of needs. I need to feel the limit of an emotion, or a thought, or a “conclusion,” a history, an event, a relationship. I need to feel what fear or anxiety is present in that exploration, which is not purely academic but also braided to my experiences in my body, my memories, my language, my consciousness. There is much to fear right now, and fear is being exploited as a manner of sub-consciously molding people’s behavior. When the uncertainty of fear is disclosed in the public identity of poetic voice though, maybe this admits to our vulnerability. And admitting our vulnerability is the first crack in the settler-colonial vanity that is so much a part of American identity. Maybe this admission is the first step towards refusing the authoritative conclusions of a dominant voice that tells us it knows the answers, knows the solution to fear.

AZ: Building from how you approach writing, I’m curious how you approach voice in text. On pg. 44 you write in the first stanza, “Voice enacts context even while the demonstr / ative dimension, the enacting, transcends the / objective circumstances of what context brings / into relation”, and in the second stanza, “I am captivated by how voicing reaches and / approaches, finds new ways of speaking that / elude capture, elude detainment, export.” These lines reminded me a lot of Federico García Lorca’s ideas on duende. For one, how duende enters a voice when it tears in song (“deomstr / ative”) from its stretching, and two, his idea of rejecting the angel and Romantic ideas of poetry. With then thinking of his quote, “All that has dark sounds has duende”, I’m curious how you approached voice in the context of Whiteness (the background of a page, the literary canon, White Supremacy) and what it means to you for a voice to, “elude capture, elude detainment, export” ? Has Lorca or duende had any affect on your approach to voice? If not, who were the main people who influenced your approach to voice in scenery?

JFA: I can’t say I’ve ever been a big reader of Lorca, and I don’t mean that as a critique. I’ve just never really been drawn to it. But absolutely I think duende reflects performances of voice that can be found in a lot of writers from Jean Toomer’s complicated relationship to folk-songs, Hart Crane’s fugue, Walt Whitman’s geographical breath, Susan Howe’s archival specters recently embodied in her collaborations with the musician David Grubbs. I’d say even how contemporary docupoets work material documents and lyric simultaneously. The poet Douglas Kearny is working voice and mediatization in ways that floor me everytime I hear it. Claudia Rankine’s two books in the “An American Lyric”  series are thinking about that spirit-voice relationship from the pervaded landscape of knitted speech acts often flattened-over by our observance of the image. For me voice, not wishing to come to an ableist conclusion, is a situated and embodied primacy of language that belongs to the enactment of Being––and this cannot be thought or exhibited separately from History. That’s the one thing about my take on Voice in that sense, which is that it is always in the context of history. 

“To think about what different acts of “speaking out” have been across hemisphere and across history, this places a great deal of significance on that concept of Lorca’s duende, because acts of voice have not always been received without a violent and immediate silencing.”

To think about what different acts of “speaking out” have been across hemisphere and across history, this places a great deal of significance on that concept of Lorca’s duende, because acts of voice have not always been received without a violent and immediate silencing. Either a silencing that is directed purely at voice or voicing, as in forms of structural disenfranchisement, or worse, forms of violence directed more generally at bodies such that they can no longer voice. And in a way that makes violence pedagogical as it teaches others to fear-to-speak in the future. While educating others on how to enact tactics of silencing on their own authority as privileged subjects. So when I affect/effect voice in a textual field I’m thinking of the sieves and torture devices voices have historically had to physically be pushed through by the momentum of history, violence, by colonialism, positionalism. And I keep in mind that even in the aesthetic celebration of various artforms by previously silenced communities there is still great gloss, irredeemable violence, uncertain futures.

“It” is truly broken in other words. When that “It” is an experiential even if subperceptible encounter with Voice, with language. Even as it works. It works as Being, in rebellion, in demonstration, in subversion, in intimacies. The broken times are those times which still meet Being with skepticism or selective enfranchisement. This could become a very long answer, but that we still have to hear people say “All Lives Matter” is fucking infuriating and a reflection of It being Broken. What I suppose really frustrates me is that Voice, when I engage it, is then forced into the pressure or having to both educate and express Being, whereas for the entitled, throughout our History, Voice has always been a “window into the soul,” so to speak. Purely and without skepticism or refusal.

AZ: Typographically, with the combination of text and its voice, the, “blocks, pillars, and slabs or beams” from pg. 12 make me think about the construction of each page through text, image, or their combination. Pages which you refer to as being textually radical—where text intersects text to form contrapuntals, where slabs are jointed to horizontal pillars, where text forms blocks, where text can be italicized, bolded, and greyed depending on the light read in—this makes the reader read and re-read sections by rotating the book. From the act of flipping the book around to read certain portions, there’s an awareness of the act of reading, as well as the physicality of the book and its pages. Some people will say that a work “touched” them, but that refers more to an emotional sense, whereas reading scenery couples the emotional with an actual tangible sense of “touch” with holding the book that I’m not sure I’ve been aware of while reading before. Where has your interest in the meta-ness (maybe sentience is the better word that you’ve mentioned) of actually “reaching” out to “touch” the reader come from, making them aware of what they are doing, where they are, and creating a reality that exists both within and without the book?

JFA: My reaching out to touch comes from the primacy of the book-object, and my experiences with handmade chapbooks and poetic community/-ies. I think it’s also pretty magical how books survive, and you can come across books either in an archive, a grandparent’s home, a library, or any other space, and from an entirely different moment. My quote in that section is from Wittgenstein’s language games. And my take is the impossibility of a pure experience with the creation of a language, in the sense of an impossibility of language ever being manifested in a context not overdetermined by power or colonization. The embodiment or physicality that you are describing in scenery, and especially what you’re noting as the counterpuntal rhythm of it, is that “touch” as an intimacy that remains in pure difference. My lyric relationship to parenting, and the parts of the book that are memoir, and deal with my child and my partner giving birth, these are rather obvious examples of this pure difference as intimacy. But they are also the building blocks of more complex differences that require intimacy. A reaching out that is not touch or refuses the grasp as a concept of power’s will-to-know, but instead a reaching out that stops each time in the extension of an openness. As if to touch were not to grasp but to be both reception and reach at the same time. There is a decolonial undercurrent to all my work that truly seeks to understand Power, even while wishing at all times to draw a light on it so as to walk away from it, to see it in a nihilistic light.

AZ: In gist : rift : drift : bloom (Further Other Book Works, 2015) and precis (Omnidawn, 2017), there are no page numbers. scenery then approaches its pacing differently with having some pages numbered and some unnumbered. Similarly to your previous books, there is no table of contents. This brings to mind again the awareness of reading, but also the emphasis on where there are no numbers, in addition to how scenery can be read as one continuous work, or sectioned by the unnumbered, “blank” pages. On pg. 45 you confront your aesthetics, and also the confines of genre, and (potentially?) theorizing of a post-poetics, one which, “would give form / to the collaborative, cooperative / speech from scenery as an act / against the humming of continu / ity”, and how, “Such a poetics is elusive.” This focus on what can be counted or quantified makes me wonder how you envision the future (and present history) of the lyric? Also how your understanding of ontology relates to the lyric? As I will admit, I am still struggling with my own understanding of ontology.

JFA: It was tough because I never want page numbers. Fordham being a bigger press didn’t really want that, but the compromise actually worked in many ways because it does allow for “pacing” as you note. And as I describe above, I don’t write discreet poems. The work is an engagement with a question that I explore to its ontological limit. I think there will always be lyric as it might be conventionally defined. My hope is that experiencing the ontological limit of lyric begins to untrain our senses, and begins to truly open an inclusive space of the poetic commons. I think it’s easy for emotional exhibition to formulate shared conclusions on emotional being, literally bound limits on what can be known as lyric emotion, its conclusions and expression. We tend to fear what is possible outside of bounded limits. That’s the settler-colonial remainder that serves as the foundation of our American literary canon. This remainder can be extreme, but it can also work into benign interactions with text/s. I mean just see question 1, right. Another person’s consciousness might very well present itself as an unknown territory. Do we listen when others speak, when they speak on what they have concluded about what they feel?

AZ: In my own attempt at bringing in other influences to this interview, I did what may seem strange, but I let my Rider-Waite tarot deck charge on top of your book (Bob Kaufman’s collected poems were nearby however), then I read a few pages from your book to the deck before drawing a card. The card I drew was the Ten of Pentacles. The formation of the pentacles on this card comes from the same structure as the Tree of Life’s ten sefirot in the Kabbalah (Kaufman’s influence perhaps?) and its pillars. I know this may sound silly to a certain degree, but taking a prompt from this card, are you influenced by anything supernatural in your work? This could be “ghosts” or “spirits”, but also going back to duende, unseeable, “intangible” forces which cannot be observed, but still can be felt, potentially like music? You’ve mentioned that you’re sometimes a nihilist, so maybe that nullifies this question, but then, what does it mean to you to create meaning out of having nihilistic feelings, which can be optimistic and pessimistic?

JFA: I like this question. What I find interesting is that the “intangible” also encompasses pre-lingual/non-lingual events that form our consciousness. But I’m also culturally sensitive to the idea of spirits, and academically sensitive to the making of, and persistence of ghosts. Music is definitely a medium through which they travel, and one of my favorite experiences while composing is listening to music. Other poets have historically thought about other technologies as mediums for ghosts, like Kamau Brathwaite and his video Sycorax style which alluded to his computer as a medium for the ghost of Sycorax. I think if, in a hemispheric context, the “natural,” or nature exists as a contested space of settler-colonial occupation and simultaneously an opportunity for alternative epistemologies, for an indigenous ontology, then the “super-natural” must be included as a way of approaching decolonial research via an engagement like poetry. And not “super” as in an escape from, but literally a supernatural ability to leave the plane so as to look down upon it the ways ghosts or spirits can, and get a whole picture of it. Ghosts and spirits are only ghosts and spirits because they have chosen or are bound to stay with us. If it were truly an issue of a complete break or escape, we wouldn’t have these words in our vocabulary. That’s the nihilism I’m working from, a leaving behind of that which does not serve us, but very much also the labor of experiencing that leave-behind; from the decision to do so, to the anxiety of experiencing uncertainty, and the joy of the new. Burning it. Breaking it. Revealing it for its counterfeit reality and listening to/for the intangible in that there is something there worth considering in our attempt to exist towards shared realities––like Nation.

Co-sponsored with the L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library, José will be presenting, “Bearing Witness To The Truth Of Facts: Docupoetics And Documentary Writing In A Contemporary Context" on Tuesday, November 10th from 7-8PM, which you can learn more about here. To learn more about José, you can visit his website here. If you would like to purchase his books, just click the titles mentioned, otherwise, here they are again: gist : rift : drift : bloom (Further Other Book Works, 2015),

4 Spectacularly Spooky Reads to Get You In the Halloween Spirit!

Kensie Kiesow

 As the vibrant fall colors fade from the trees and ugly browns leaves begin settling upon the Chippewa Valley, the veil between what is real and what is nightmare grows ever thinner. Black cats and cackling witches gather in the night, preparing to raise the forgotten dead. Have you carved your pumpkins yet? Is that the devil dancing at your door?

If you’ve aged out of trick-or-treating, and now find yourself on the candy-dispensing side of the door, you’re not alone.  Thankfully, there are other ways to get in the Halloween mood! I personally love immersing myself in the spooky season with a freshly carved pumpkin and a mug full of spicy hot cider.  But my favorite way to celebrate is by way of a perfectly selected spooky book…

“I personally love immersing myself in the spooky season with a freshly carved pumpkin and a mug full of spicy hot cider.  But my favorite way to celebrate is by way of a perfectly selected spooky book…”

Whether the book is just a bit creepy or the stuff of nightmares, I want it to leave me looking over my shoulder. 

So, put the cheery, Christmas stories aside and pack up the turkey tales for a few more weeks.  From now until All Hallow’s Eve, enjoy these chillers and thrillers personally curated by me.  Beware, my dear readers, and prepare for a scare! 

“Frankenstein,” by Mary Shelley

First up on the list is an absolute classic. Hailed as the inventor of the science fiction genre, Mary Shelley first began writing “Frankenstein” at the age of eighteen as part of a writing game between her and her friends. It follows the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist obsessed with conquering death gives birth to a monster. The modern Prometheus is consumed by loneliness and a life without meaning, without purpose. But, when he turns to his creator for help, Frankenstein turns him away, disgusted. This book will certainly keep you looking over your shoulder for the lumbering monster.

“Dracula,” by Bram Stoker

Another classic, “Dracula” is a slower read with more buildup than more popular books written in this century, but the ending is worth the wait. Written from the multiple perspectives of Mina Harker, Professor Van Helsing, and more members of this vampire-hunting party through letters, diary entries, and voice-recorded journals. Each perspective writes with a different voice with different concerns about Lucy, the beautiful young lady fallen to Count Dracula’s thrall, and nightly vampire hunting missions which dredge up old loves as well as old fears.

“House of Leaves,” by Mark Z. Danielewski

Because books written during this century are also cool and spooky, “House of Leaves” is next up on this list! This book is written in the style of “The Blair Witch Project” in that it follows the growing horrors of the world around Johnny Truant as he reads a dusty old journal he found in a dead man’s house. Whole pages are mostly blank with swirls of letters and pictures scattered across the page, and the mystery of the expanding country house in a documentary that never existed becomes clearer and clearer. The more Johnny reads, the looser his grasp on reality becomes. Be sure not to lose too much of yourself in this book.

“A Collapse of Horses,” by Brian Evenson

If you’re craving absolute nightmare fuel BUT you aren’t interested in musty classics or commit to a full-length novel, “A Collapse of Horses” offers you a taste of terror at every turn. Horrifying stories of teddy bears with baby hearts pumping in their chests, Reno, Nevada remains forever on the horizon, and the ordinary becomes a home for the extraordinary. Our worst fears come alive in the pages of each story in this collection, and I suggest you read with the lights on.

A Lovesong for Literature: How Nickolas Butler's Shotgun Lovesongs Always Brings Me Home

Katy Hackworthy

The blurb on the back of Nickolas Butler’s debut national bestseller, Shotgun Lovesongs, aptly describes Little Wing, the tiny fictional town where the novel takes place, as “a place like hundreds of others, but for four boyhood friends - all born and raised in this small Wisconsin town - it is home”. Like many who’ve lived in the Valley, whether it be for a few short years at university or for decades, I feel the same way about our city nestled on the Chippewa. 

Despite almost 70,000 people calling Eau Claire home, to me, she’s always felt more intimate, like a hug from a childhood friend, like she’s all mine. I imagine many others feel this way; they have “their table” & “their bartender” at the Joynt, their favorite spot to watch the sun plop down over the patient river, the coffee shop where they spend almost as much time as they do in their own homes. They walk down the street knowing they'll probably run into someone they know, and they’ll welcome that familiar face, however fleeting. These are the ordinary things that make a place feel like so much more than that, and Butler’s many love letters to the Midwest remind me of that time and time again. 

“I’ve lived in Minneapolis for a little more than a year, but when I refer to “home”, I mean Eau Claire. ”

I’ve lived in Minneapolis for a little more than a year, but when I refer to “home”, I mean Eau Claire. Sure, there are things I love about the city. I’ve been entranced by my neighborhood full of kind hearted weirdos with passions for biking, social justice, and kick ass vegan food, and I’ve discovered a home teeming with laughter, cinnamon rolls, and books. I’m seeking delight here, and I’m cultivating joy, but when I think about the people & places who will always understand & embrace me, it’s the Chippewa Valley. Every time I’ve left the Valley— whether it be this past year just a short drive away, or halfway across to country to live with my grandma in Arizona—I turned to Nick’s books in moments where I needed to remember what “home” looks like: how the frost clings to your fingertips after that first snow; the sound of a pitcher being poured, then refilled, then poured again; the way you don’t have to do anything but be exactly who you are, and around here, that’s cause for celebration. 

“I know what it’s like to lounge in a supper club, stomach sagging with too many rolls and creamy soup. I know what it’s like to spend an hour or so at the town dump, just because my papa went to church with the parking lot attendant. It’s that intimate recognition that’s reminded me time & time again that even when I feel completely alone, there’s a community that makes me feel like I’m held up by hundreds of weather-worn, warm hands.”

When I was sitting in the Arizona desert, missing the river & the friendly faces who tend to her, I was comforted by characters who reminded me of the people I grew up with, by scenery that might seem boring to the untrained eye, but brimmed with beauty to me, a sucker for a coupla’ bluffs on a county road. I know what it’s like to lounge in a supper club, stomach sagging with too many rolls and creamy soup. I know what it’s like to spend an hour or so at the town dump, just because my papa went to church with the parking lot attendant. It’s that intimate recognition that’s reminded me time & time again that even when I feel completely alone, there’s a community that makes me feel like I’m held up by hundreds of weather-worn, warm hands.

There’s a warmth in Nick’s work that reminds me of the person I want to be, the person I’m trying to be. The kind of person who checks in on their neighbor, who isn’t afraid to slow down, who knows how to appreciate what they have & even more importantly, who understands the importance of sharing it. Sure, we can appreciate the simple joy of reading something that’s familiar to us, but it’s more than that. It’s like a friend whispering in my ear to never forget where you come from, and I’m here to promise I won’t. Don’t worry, Eau Claire, I’ll be back for you soon enough. 

As Shotgun Lovesong’s Leland Sutton says, “I came back here and I found my voice, like something that had fallen out of my pocket, like a souvenir long forgotten. And every time I come back here I am surrounded by people who love me, who care for me, who protect me like a tent of warmth.”

Will You Join the Guild's 20 x 5 Challenge?

On August 23, the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild did the unthinkable.  Six months into a pandemic, we joined forces with Pablo Center at the Confluence, the Eau Claire Area School District, Uniting Bridges of Eau Claire, the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Office of Multicultural Affairs, and Eau Claire Sport Warehouse to host an in-person (yes, you read that right!) event: a screening and conversation on the new documentary John Lewis: Good Trouble.

None of it was easy.  It’s hard enough for multiple organizations to come together to envision, fund, publicize and host an event of this caliber, but doing so in a pandemic only increased the difficulties.  Ensuring that we exceeded all public health guidelines added a new wrinkle to our planning process, but we were happy to do it to ensure the safety and wellbeing of our community members.

Despite a few setbacks (including rain delay!), the event was one of the most memorable I’ve been a part of here in Eau Claire. Perhaps 100 folks attended, each of them masked and socially distanced on the wooden benches at Owen Park.  Before the film began, I had the pleasure of chatting with students, alumni, well-known musicians, visual artists, and even Eau Claire’s chief of police.  People turned out because they wanted to learn about the late congressman John Lewis, and in particular, what the congressman meant when he spoke of “good trouble.”

Owen Park Band Shell, August 23

 By movie’s end, we’d created a little good trouble ourselves.  It was a modest effort, to be sure, though as we wandered back into our community that night, we began asking ourselves what more we could do to further promote equity, inclusion, and justice right here in the Chippewa Valley.  One thing we learned immediately is that to continue building momentum on this front (and all fronts!), we needed to double down on our partnerships. 

“The more you give, the more we can give.”

 In pandemic-ridden times such as these, partnerships are more valuable than ever.  The more we collaborate, the more we have to share.  But in order for the Guild to be a great community partner, we need to raise the funds to join in.  The more you give, the more we can give.

 Which is why today we’re thrilled to announce the 20 x 5 Challenge.  Simply put, we’re looking for 20 generous individuals to becoming sustaining members at the 5.00/month level.  What will 100.00 a month do for our organization?  An awful lot!

“What will 100.00 a month do for our organization?  An awful lot!”

For starters, it will allow us to continue to offer free virtual programming to the community and wider world.  Over the past seven months, rather than shut down our activities, we’ve pivoted to the virtual format.  You’ve enjoyed craft chats from writers across the country, including Tessa Fontaine, Nick Butler, Peter Geye, Kimberly Blaeser, Christina Clancy, Neal Griffin, and, this Thursday, Barrett Swanson.  In November, we’re thrilled to host Dr. José Alvegue, followed by Dr. David Shih in January.  And stay turned for more info soon about an amazing Sound & Stories event streaming your way this December.

But make no mistake: none of this is possible without you.  Which is why we’re asking you to please make a gift to the Guild today.  Help us fulfill our 20 x 5 Challenge by clicking here. 

Together, we can bring more to the Valley by partnering with so many admirable organizations.  Let’s show the world what words can do.  And let’s put action beyond our words. Let’s make a little “good trouble” together, and strengthen our community in the process.             

Get To Know Your Guild Interns: Three Questions With the CVWG’s Three New Interns

 Krisany Blount

When people hear the word “intern” the image that comes to mind is a person who fetches coffee and sometimes lunch. I can’t speak for other internships, but here at the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild, that is certainly not the case. For the past month, my fellow interns and I have been hard at work developing our writing, interviewing, and communication skills. We conduct interviews, write articles, and are thrilled to share our skills (not to mention those aforementioned interviews and articles) with the wider literary community.

In this increasingly digital age, compounded by the pandemic, it can be difficult to make connections, even in a community like our own. So, in the interest of fostering a more connected community, allow me to introduce Elise Eystad, Kensie Kiesow, and myself, Krisany Blount. We are so excited to continue sharing articles about big thinkers, great writers, and inspiring creatives in the Chippewa Valley and beyond.

Krisany

Kensie

Elise

Elise Eystad is a third year English-creative writing major with a certificate in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL). Originally from Chippewa Falls, Elise enjoys writing, reading, hiking and traveling. She also likes writing songs and creating music.

Originally from Hudson, Wisconsin, Kensie Kiesow is an English-creative writing and German double major. She enjoys the typical English major pastimes of reading and writing, but also loves embroidery, Dungeons & Dragons, and cooking. Kensie is confident she can convince any meat-lover to like tofu with her fried tofu recipe.  One day, she hopes to work at a literary magazine and make a living writing.

Krisany Blount is a fifth year English-creative writing major and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies minor. An Eau Claire native, she also coaches high school forensics at North High School. Krisany loves reading, writing, painting, and learning interesting things. In the time before the pandemic, she could frequently be found in a back corner of a library with either a book or her laptop.

Krisany Blount: Tell me about some good books you’ve read (recently or all-time favorites).

Elise Eystad: Definitely a hard question. Glancing over at my bookshelf now, I’ll name a couple. I finished the book The Girl with The Louding Voice by Abi Daré recently (and loved it), which is about a young girl growing up in Nigeria. My all-time favorite book of poetry is Mary Oliver’s collection, Devotions. And I do love The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. I read it for the first time on a long road trip when I was a senior in high school, so I have fond memories associated with it, despite the heavy/dreary content.

“Right now, I’m reading two books for two of my classes, Redefining Realness, by Janet Mock and The Translator, by Leila Aboulela which deal with Mock’s journey through transitioning and accepting her queerness, and the life of an Arabic translator from Sudan, respectively. ”

Kensie Kiesow: Right now, I’m reading two books for two of my classes, Redefining Realness, by Janet Mock and The Translator, by Leila Aboulela which deal with Mock’s journey through transitioning and accepting her queerness, and the life of an Arabic translator from Sudan, respectively. They are both fascinating reads that talk about subjects I’m familiar with, but I love the deeper insights into the lives of Mock and Aboulela’s character, Sammar. The Translator is written in an especially poetic way that is wonderful to read. Outside of class, I’m reading a graphic novel based on a D&D podcast hosted by brothers Justin, Travis, and Griffin McElroy with their father, Clint. The title is Here There Be Gerblins, and it’s delightful!

Krisany Blount: I’m currently reading Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado for a class and really enjoying it. It’s a collection of short stories and they’re all so different! Machado’s writing is so lovely and distinct—it’s been a real delight to read. One of my all-time favorite books is Nimona by Noelle Stevenson. It’s a graphic novel about a medieval steampunk society that follows a supervillain and his shapeshifter sidekick in their quest to expose the hero as a fraud. Something about it is so haunting. I first read it in 2016 and I’ve reread it several times since then, but I keep thinking about it and going back to it.

KB: What’s your favorite thing about the Chippewa Valley, within the “literary scene” or outside it?

EE: I really love and appreciate the creative and artistic culture in the Chippewa Valley. Growing up in the area, it was so easy to be involved in music organizations or go to local shows and events and I still reap the benefits of that accessibility now as a college student in a “creative” major. I think our community creates art and content that has the ability to reach audiences around the world, but has a certain familiar, nostalgic Midwest quality to it that I will always be drawn to.

KK: My favorite thing about the Chippewa Valley, within and outside of the “literary scene,” is the respect and appreciation for the arts. I feel like this area, tucked away in the farmlands of Western Wisconsin, is a little haven for creatives from the music, writing, and art worlds. Here, we have a fascinating mixture of hardy, Midwestern values and the eyes of an artist, trained to see both the beautiful and the ugly in the world around them.

“It’s been so wonderful growing up in such a creatively-rich environment. There’s always some sort of art-related thing happening. Theatre, music festivals, art shows, open mic nights, craft talks, the list goes on”

KB: It’s been so wonderful growing up in such a creatively-rich environment. There’s always some sort of art-related thing happening. Theatre, music festivals, art shows, open mic nights, craft talks, the list goes on. I love how active the art community as a whole is! My favorite thing outside of that is definitely Eau Claire in fall. We’ve got such beautiful scenery around here year round, but when all the leaves start changing color, it just feels even prettier.

KB: What’s your favorite thing about interning with the Guild so far?

“I’ve loved challenging myself to approach writing in ways that are unfamiliar.”

EE: I’ve loved challenging myself to approach writing in ways that are unfamiliar. Doing things like interviewing people and learning how to have a professional presence in my writing and interviewing was (and still is) daunting, but it’s been awesome to get to work with people on articles who not only want to share their story or information, but have genuinely wanted to see me succeed in the process, as well.

KK: I really love the freedom to choose what I want to write about and what I want to focus on. I don’t feel like the intern who’s shunted off to do the menial labor no one else wants to do; rather, I’m a part of this guild and the greater Chippewa Valley literary community.

KB: I’m so excited that this internship is giving me the opportunity to get to know a little more about the writing community in the Chippewa Valley and to help others continue to learn about our writers, organizations, and events! I’ve had the opportunity to chat with some incredible people and write about the amazing things they’re doing, and it’s been a true delight. I love hearing people talk about the things that really matter to them, and to be able to share in spreading that passion is a dream come true.

Thank you to our amazing interns, who are working so hard to keep you inspired and informed!

When Life Gives You Lemons, Make An (Online) Lit Mag: A Preview Into NOTA’s Covid-19 Pivot

Krisany Blount

From our shrinking social circles and expanded personal bubbles, to the disappointment of receiving a notification that an event you’d eagerly anticipated has been cancelled, we’ve all experienced the changes the pandemic brought with it. For we art-minded folks, being unable to visit a gallery or attend an open mic night or any other traditionally in-person gathering of artistic minds has been an additional disappointment. But just because we can’t meet in person right now doesn’t mean the organizations behind those events have gone into hibernation. On the contrary, just like so many of our wonderful local businesses, they too have adapted their operations and events to fit our new reality.

One such organization is UW-Eau Claire’s entirely student-run literary magazine, None of the Above (NOTA). Publishing biannually, they cover art, poetry, prose, and music. For the last 50 years, they have published a physical copy of each semester’s edition, and for the last one semester, they have published exclusively online.

The sudden shut down in the middle of March left everyone confused and uncertain, and organizations like NOTA had to quickly adapt to their new reality. Despite having never done a fully online issue before, NOTA’s staff was able to successfully make the switch from print to online, and they’re using what they learned in the spring to make this fall’s issue even better.

““I won’t deny that there’s an inherent appeal to holding a physical issue of NOTA—you get to smell the fresh-printed aroma of ink and pages, and for many of the creatives whose work we feature, publication in NOTA means the first time they see their work in physical print,” says Angela Hugunin, editor-in-chief of NOTA. “But an online issue also offers new opportunities.””

“I won’t deny that there’s an inherent appeal to holding a physical issue of NOTA—you get to smell the fresh-printed aroma of ink and pages, and for many of the creatives whose work we feature, publication in NOTA means the first time they see their work in physical print,” says Angela Hugunin, editor-in-chief of NOTA. “But an online issue also offers new opportunities.”

Some of these new opportunities include more flexibility in the timeline for staff to assemble the issue, expanded submission dates, potential new events, new ways to access the issue, and the ability for the issue to reach beyond the UWEC campus.

Another exciting change can be found in the fall submissions call: an optional theme relating to the “uniqueness” of 2020. Historically, NOTA has primarily received submissions from art and English majors, but with this optional theme, they hope to change that.

“Quarantine has been a time where many people have had the opportunity to try new things and experiment with art and writing and this is a perfect opportunity to show off these accomplishments,” says Meg Adlington, the art director for NOTA.

The creation and consumption of art and literature have become increasingly important in our lives in the last six months. They offer us a means of escape and a way to process the constant barrage of news.

“Consuming others’ work can put words or visuals to things we’ve been feeling but haven’t found a way to express. Sharing art can act as a little nod of recognition, an “I see you,” a way to touch someone in these days of physical distancing,” says Hugunin.

“We need to remember to take a step away and focus on something beautiful every once in a while, to give us time to take a breath and to help us get through it and art is a perfect way to do this,” adds Adlington.

Be sure to check out NOTA’s Facebook page for updates on events and the release of the fall edition. NOTA is accepting student submissions through Oct. 8.

Join Author Roxane Gay for a Blunt, Honest, and Intersectional Discussion on Race This Tuesday!

Elise Eyestad

Following the opening of the new Center for Racial and Restorative Justice on the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire’s campus, a flagship program was created, titled “Racing Toward Justice.” Their first event kicks off this Tuesday, September 29th, with a livestreamed conversation with New York Times best-selling author Roxane Gay, who will be “examining race through an intersectional lens and against a backdrop of current events.”

Dr. Christopher Jorgenson, Director of the Gender & Sexuality Resource Center at UW-Eau Claire, and Dr. Demetrius Smith, Program Director for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at UW-Eau Claire partnered together to create “Racing Toward Justice.” “Racing Toward Justice” will have monthly events, such as discussions, panels, or speakers, throughout this school year, excluding December and May. When considering who to feature for the opening event, they wanted to be intentionally intersectional, “highlighting voices that aren’t always highlighted in issues with race.”

Though planning events online because of a pandemic can be stressful, to say the least, it can also provide new opportunities that would have been impossible to do in person. Because of virtual, livestreamed events, new doors were opened for Jorgenson and Smith to reach out to speakers who would normally be outside of the university’s budget. With these new possibilities, Roxane Gay was brought up, and thankfully, she accepted.

Gay shot to fame with her New York Times best-seller Bad Feminist. She is also the author of the well-known books Hunger, a memoir, and Difficult Women, a collection of short stories. As a queer woman of color, Gay also offers blunt assessments of race, popular culture, and feminism.

“She speaks in ways that are accessible to everyone; ways that are not so esoteric but are really smart,” says Jorgenson. “She’s smart, funny, and in particular, she appeals to a lot of people who don’t normally see their experiences discussed.”

“She speaks in ways that are accessible to everyone; ways that are not so esoteric but are really smart,” says Jorgenson. “She’s smart, funny, and in particular, she appeals to a lot of people who don’t normally see their experiences discussed.”

This event is not campus-exclusive; anyone from our community is encouraged to join. Simply follow this link or scan the QR code on the poster. It’s free, and Jorgenson’s hope is that many will come and enjoy! Roxane Gay will speak for 30-45 minutes, then the online audience will have the opportunity to send in questions, which a moderator will ask to Gay.

“There are people who feel so frustrated in the United States right now because they want to do something, but they don’t know what to do. Engaging in these conversations are an excellent way to either begin or to continue and compliment your own advocacy,” says Jorgenson.

Mark your calendar and tune in for free to the livestream on Tuesday, September 29th at 6pm.

More Than Miscellany: Barrett Swanson on Research, Longform Journalism, and Crafting His Debut Essay Collection

Elizabeth de Cleyre

When people learn you’re a writer, the first question is usually, “What do you write?” Followed closely by, “What is your favorite book?”

 I secretly hate answering this question. How could one possibly choose between so many incredible authors and books?! But within the past week, two people asked me to name my favorite book, and the answer came quickly, easily, and unequivocally: Lost in Summerland by Barrett Swanson. It’s sort of a bad answer though, because the book won’t be published until May of 2021. But it’s so good it’s all I want to talk about for the next eight months.

The essays that comprise Lost in Summerland perfectly encapsulate the urgency and complexity of these strange times. It’s awe-inspiring, if not occasionally disconcerting, to see the world refracted back in pristine prose—especially in a time period which often evokes a funhouse mirror. And yet Swanson’s work feels simultaneously timeless and prophetic too, mining the past to find resonances and reverberations to carry us into the future.

The ability to see the world clearly and express it eloquently is a superpower, and Swanson’s prose doesn’t stop short of simply seeing; it’s obvious in these essays that the narrator also feels things deeply—a refreshing departure from the distant, feigned objectivity projected by most journalists.

In an upcoming craft talk for the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild, Barrett Swanson will discuss the role of personal material in longform narrative journalism, using his recent cover stories in Harper's Magazine to discuss the ways in which the "I" necessarily takes on many guises in creative nonfiction. He'll also share tips on pitching stories to editors and navigating the contemporary magazine world.

Swanson generously answered questions via email in anticipation of his talk on October 15th. You can read more of his writing on his website and preorder Lost in Summerland from Counterpoint, your local indie bookstore, or Bookshop.org.

Elizabeth de Cleyre: Your first essay collection will be published in May 2021 by Counterpoint Press. How did you go about determining which essays would make up Lost in Summerland? What was the process of organizing them like? Did the pieces that were previously published in magazines and literary journals change or evolve from their previous incarnations?

Barrett Swanson: The process of curating the essays for the collection was pretty intuitive, if only because I think I’m a victim of certain thematic preoccupations—narrative breakdown, loss of meaning, communal longing, national myths—and each of the pieces that made their way into the book dealt, in one way or another, with those ideas and arguments. There were a few pieces that were omitted that I still sometimes glance at with a kind of wistful, what-might-have-been resignation, but my editor (the wise Dan Smetanka) was helpful in preventing me from overplanting the garden.

“Above all, it was important to me that the book wouldn’t be read as a miscellany, but that each essay would complicate and refract some of the themes that emerged in the piece that preceded it, that the conceptual undertow of the book would pull the reader along, even as the topics and genres of the pieces shifted pretty dramatically (antiwar veterans to psychics and mediums, waterparks to disaster simulations). ”

Above all, it was important to me that the book wouldn’t be read as a miscellany, but that each essay would complicate and refract some of the themes that emerged in the piece that preceded it, that the conceptual undertow of the book would pull the reader along, even as the topics and genres of the pieces shifted pretty dramatically (antiwar veterans to psychics and mediums, waterparks to disaster simulations). My hope is that the later essays will function to click the themes into clarity and show how some Americans have been reckoning with life in this country from the late Obama era to our democracy’s present unraveling.

Because some magazines have house-styles and because I am pathologically obsessed with cadence and inflection, there were some slight alterations between the book versions and the magazine versions of these pieces. In most cases, though, the differences are so granular that I wonder whether anyone else would even notice them. One of the ways in which my OCD manifests itself is in the sculpting of sentences, and I get so irksomely particular about phrasing that it can be emotionally debilitating.

EDC: In “Political Fictions” for The Paris Review you mention you abandoned “aspirations to be a presidential speechwriter and enrolled in an M.F.A. program for creative writing.” Narrative is a through line with both of those career paths and the importance of story is threaded throughout your essays. What prompted you to focus on creative writing, and how did you get your start?

BS: I started writing seriously in undergrad and was fortunate to have had two tremendous fiction instructors—Laura Krughoff and David Michael Kaplan—both of whom pulled me aside after their respective creative writing classes and told me that I could pursue this as a possible profession. That kind of validation was ventricle-swelling for a young writer and gave me permission to take the idea seriously. At the time, I was interning on a presidential campaign and thought that eventually I would become some sort of hip, leather-jacketed political operative, loitering in the back of the campaign bus with the candidate and concocting little burbles of oratory that would help sway national elections (please know that I cringe to admit this). To the astonishment of my family and friends, I pretty swiftly jettisoned my political ambitions once I got into an MFA program.

During the program, I was writing and publishing short stories mostly, with the occasional foray into poetry, but it wasn’t until I graduated from the MFA that I started writing essays. For whatever reason, I almost never used material from my life for short stories—the vocal conceit of my fiction was almost always character-driven, a kind of dramatic ventriloquism—so once I started digging into my life, a whole little terrain of potential topics bloomed out in front of me. My early essays were memoiristic, and it wasn’t until I went to that utopian community in Florida—called The Venus Project, which I discuss in “Prophet from the Swamp”—that I tried my hand at longform journalism. As a reader, I tended to love that kind of excursion piece, where a writer jaunts off to some odd quadrant of the culture and tries to make heads or tails of a particular community and their place within it. The Venus Project piece was my first attempt at that, and I wrote it entirely on spec. From there, I just started submitting it like crazy until the recently shuttered and deeply mourned Pacific Standard made it a cover story. After that, some other magazines started reaching out and other editors started taking my pitches more seriously.

“People who know me well will tell you that it’s strange that I became so addicted to this kind of work because I essentially have the nervous system of a toddler—(even something as routine as flying on an airplane requires extreme levels of personal courage for me)—so a job where you’re constantly traveling to and spending time in offbeat communities doesn’t seem like the most congenial of arrangements for someone with my temperament.”

People who know me well will tell you that it’s strange that I became so addicted to this kind of work because I essentially have the nervous system of a toddler—(even something as routine as flying on an airplane requires extreme levels of personal courage for me)—so a job where you’re constantly traveling to and spending time in offbeat communities doesn’t seem like the most congenial of arrangements for someone with my temperament. But I think there’s something about that tension that makes me keep doing it, that the occasions for the articles kind of nudge me into the world and force me to scrutinize it more rigorously. 

EDC: What’s your writing process like and how has it changed over the years — on a craft level but also as you navigate changes in the publishing industry and your work as a professor?

BS: In the years after the MFA, saddled with student-loan debt, I did the adjunct hustle for seven years, teaching at as many as three different campuses at a single time in order to make ends meet. As a result, I learned to write at odd hours and interstitial moments. During that time, I would get up at 3:30 or 4AM and write until 8 and then head over to the college for a full-day of teaching. Possibly that sounds monastic or extreme, but it was a way of convincing myself that I was going to pursue writing even when no one was waiting for a piece. A few years ago, after several years on the job market, I was lucky enough to procure a tenure-track teaching position, so I’m a little more stable financially, although my writing routines and rhythms haven’t much shifted or varied. For whatever reason, I find that early morning hours tend to be the most generative, maybe because I’m too tired to entertain the Greek chorus of self-lacerating voices that would otherwise colonize my head. So a good day will be four hours or so of scribbling in the morning and then a couple hours in the afternoon for rereading and revision. Within the last year or so, I started writing all my first drafts longhand, which I couldn’t recommend more highly to anyone. There’s something about the kinesthetic labor of writing the words that allows me to better hear their music, whereas the choppy velocity of typing often results in me paying more attention to how the words look on the page (to the detriment of the narrative sensibility). Plus, I don’t like the visual trick of how Word processing platforms make even the filmiest draft seem “finished.” I’m trying to think of other quirks in my process.

“On reporting trips, I record EVERYTHING, so usually I’ll return home with 36 to 72 hours of recordings, and will spend a week or two listening, which allows me to relive the experience, and I will fill two or three notebooks with memories and rough scenes, frequently consulting whatever additional notes I took on the trip (usually on my phone). In those notebooks, I’ll start drafting scenes, and when I’ve written two or three of them, I’ll brandish a fresh legal pad and begin writing the actual piece.”

On reporting trips, I record EVERYTHING, so usually I’ll return home with 36 to 72 hours of recordings, and will spend a week or two listening, which allows me to relive the experience, and I will fill two or three notebooks with memories and rough scenes, frequently consulting whatever additional notes I took on the trip (usually on my phone). In those notebooks, I’ll start drafting scenes, and when I’ve written two or three of them, I’ll brandish a fresh legal pad and begin writing the actual piece. The first draft can take anywhere from a week to a month, depending on the nature of the reporting and the scope of the research, and at some point during that phase, I will switch over to my computer, which is a built-in assurance that I pour over the sentences again and do another version. I always like when writers disclose the peccadilloes of their work habits, so I will tell you that I type my stuff in Microsoft Word, with Times New Roman 12-point font, single-spaced, with the “View” at 115%, which makes the text small enough that I can see almost the whole page and keep track of the meter of the graf in question. I listen to “Brown Noise” or “Pink Noise” when I write, although sometimes I will throw on William Basinski’s “The Disintegration Loops” or Happy Apple’s “Homage Ritchie Valens,” particularly if I’m feeling autumnal or whatever.

EDC: Your craft talk on October 15th will discuss the role of personal material in longform narrative journalism, and your writing strikes a balance between journalism and essay. Without giving too much of the craft talk away, can you tell us a little more about crafting a persona for these pieces, or the importance of it?

BS: For fear of sounding redundant on the 15th, I will keep my answer brief. I don’t know about you, but when I was growing up, middle-school and high-school teachers tended to talk about personal writing as a matter of “finding your voice,” as if there were some Platonically ideal self that loitered at the rim of your consciousness, as if the act of writing was nothing more than the unearthing of this “real” identity. My own experience is that one’s persona is far more flexible and contingent, one’s voice far more protean, and the emergency of a given essay’s scenario requires that my narrative sensibility chameleon itself to its tone and register. All of us calibrate our social personas this way, but at least when I was an undergrad or an MFA candidate, I didn’t hear professors talk at much length about the “I” in creative nonfiction. A lot of times I think it’s hard for fiction writers to transition into essays because they forget that one of the fundamental tasks in nonfiction is self-characterization, which is something that, if they’re not writing autofiction, they probably don’t have much practice at. One thing I try to remind my students is that any topic they choose to write about is in some way a reflection of their affections, hopes or fears, and so the essay needs them to create an “I” where those resonances between the topic and the writer are immediately apparent. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this is an authorial masquerade, but I do think that essays present the writer’s revolving door of self.  

EDC: In addition to crafting and presenting a persona on the page, your pieces are incredibly well researched, and your work spans a wide range of topics: historical notions of masculinity in America, the Spiritualism movement in the mid-nineteenth century, school shootings, and the antiwar movement and organic farming, among other subjects. What’s your research process like? How extensive is it, and at what point do you know you have enough for the piece? Or do you ever find yourself with too much research?

BS: Oh, god. It’s different for every piece, but I tend to do gobs of research up front, if only because each of my essays almost always concerns a completely different topic than whatever I wrote about in the last piece. For this reason, I am apt to suffer debilitating cases of imposter syndrome. Grad school was helpful in this regard, because in having to build reading lists for one’s thesis or dissertation, you can’t help but become proficient at curating a list of research materials that will help you passably draw the contours of some historical moment or topic. With every piece, then, it can seem like I’m giving myself an intensive undergraduate degree in the subject. For instance, with an essay like the one in Harper’s about the contemporary men’s movement, I was fairly omnivorous in my research, reading as many as 20 books on masculinity and men’s groups, listening to (oftentimes hair-raising) podcasts on the subject, watching documentaries about body builders and the Proud Boys, and interviewing people in the community—all of which I completed before I went on the trip. Doing this kind of work up front allows me to have an intellectual framework for whatever community I’m entering and allows me to select more deliberately the details and anecdotes that I experience while I’m on the assignment.

The great odium that I’ve noticed about contemporary publishing is that the imperative of timeliness and the velocity of online publishing makes it harder to do the kind of research that will help a writer historicize their subject and allow them to understand that these aren’t new trends but part of a larger pattern, which is crucial if you’re a writer who’s interested in tracking the true etiology of our social problems. For instance, so much of the coverage about contemporary men’s groups—much of which was weirdly laudatory— failed to acknowledge that these sorts of communities were popular in the past and tended to enjoy periods of massive growth only when there were corresponding advancements in feminism (the Iron Johns during Third Wave, the Male Liberationists during the Second), which is an important thing to consider, especially if you’re going to insist that they can be efficacious in addressing things like toxic masculinity. Along these same lines, in advance of going on the trip to Lily Dale, the world’s largest community of psychics and mediums, I read a veritable deluge of trend pieces about how “millennials are going wild for astrology” or “why are CEOs embracing spiritual traditions,” but virtually none of these articles talked about how the birth of Spiritualism in the 1890s and the rise of New Ageism in the 1960s coincided with periods of epistemological confusion and narrative breakdown, which demonstrates the extent to which people will reach for an ideological ballast whenever the center is not holding.

That said, early on in my career, I think I tended to rely too heavily on research, or rather I didn’t know how to integrate it seamlessly into the narrative account of the excursion. As I’ve gotten more experience in the longform genre, I think I’ve become more adept at letting the research merely inform my observations rather than inserting all those factoids into the piece in question.

I don’t think you can do too much research. If anything an essayist like John McPhee, who does titanic, if not Talmudic, amounts of research, provides compelling evidence of the extent to which the real danger is not doing too much research but rather failing to develop a methodology for organizing the info one gathers. In order words, what’s debilitating for writers, I think, isn’t the amount of research, but the inability to successfully wrangle it.

EDC: Though your essays often deal with serious subjects, there’s a fair amount of humor and levity in your essays. In Lost in Summerland, you visit Wisconsin’s famed Noah’s Ark Waterpark to “summer” as a verb, discuss the connection between Kim Kardashian and Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist,” and attend a West Wing fan convention. In a darkly funny moment in “This is Not a Test,” your press liaison misidentifies you as a writer from Harper’s Bazaar, prompting you to “waste a bunch of time wondering how a fashion organ might cover the events at Disaster City: ‘Containment Couture: How Hazmats Will Overrun Athleisure as Your Work-from-Home Daily Water’ or ‘You Down with PPE? Yeah, You Know Me: How Gloves, Masks, and Protective Eyewear Will Soon Become the New Urban Chic.’” What role does humor play in your writing, and specifically when writing about serious or grave matters? 

BS: I can’t remember who said this—it was either a comedian (Gilda Radner?) or a philosopher (Wittgenstein?)—but they once described comedy as the truth told at a higher velocity. Part of me likes to think that whatever humor emerges in my essays is borne of that fact, as is hopefully legible in the example you mentioned, about the press liaison at Disaster City. The fictional headlines that I conjured ended up not being very far afield from the actual scareheads that certain fashion organs were publishing in April and May of this year, when the first wave of COVID-19 was peaking and when Work-From-Home couture became a booming industry. For me, it was grimly disconcerting to see such headlines rubbing shoulders with pieces about the pandemic’s death toll. And so whenever I’m on a reporting assignment, I’ll always bloodhound around for details like that, for those ironic little doodads that vivify not only the weirdness of the situation in which I find myself but also the absurdity of life in America at this tragicomic moment.

 On a practical level, though, the humor in my work emerges out of a larger agenda, which is to craft a narrative persona that faithfully reflects my personality. My favorite writing is where the person shows up in their work, and so, for me, every sentence tries to establish a companionship with the reader, something that an artist whom I’m close with describes as becoming “a friend of the reader’s mind,” which is a phrase I rather like.  

EDC: Last but certainly not least: favorite books or reading recommendations? And what’s your favorite piece of writing to teach and why?

BS: I’m going to answer a kindred but less stultifying question. The best essay collections I’ve read recently are Elisa Gabbert’s The Unreality of Memory and Jordan Kisner’s Thin Places. Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah’s essays are invariably exquisite and brilliant, and I’m waiting for her collection, The Explainers and The Explorers, with a kind of bated anticipation. And my god, have you read Elif Batuman’s recent essay in The New Yorker? About Zoom performances of Greek tragedies during the COVID-19 pandemic? I swear, it will ruin and restore you. I also love both Lauren Olyer’s and Patricia Lockwood’s criticism. Also, Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism.

Among my favorite things to teach is Zadie Smith’s NW, which a contemporary modernist novel that was, by my lights, insufficiently celebrated when it was first published and that my first year college students start out hating (because the prose isn’t linear) and end up loving (because Smith is an absolute genius, and she renders the sadness of our neoliberal moment in a way that is both energizing and elegiac). I also love teaching “The Hunger Artist” by Kafka (which I wrote an essay about) and “Notes from a Native Son” by James Baldwin. I can read these works again and again, and unfailingly they perform on me an emotional and intellectual resuscitation.

Tune into Barrett’s craft talk on Zoom on October 15 at 7PM. Here is the link. Meeting ID: 886 3826 7523
Passcode: 602055

Co-sponsored with the L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library.

Elizabeth de Cleyre is a writer and editor based in Eau Claire, WI. Find her at cedecreative.com

Quarantine Comforts: The Art That's Comforted Four Local Creatives

Elise Eystad

 When the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire went fully online last spring semester, I moved back to my parent’s house. Day after day was spent in front of my laptop screen, either in a Zoom meeting for work, an online class, or finishing a paper. It felt like every day blurred together with all of my screen time, yet I also felt as if the majority of the days were wasted, since I almost never changed out of my pajamas. At the end of the night, however, I would curl up in the living room with my parents and watch BBC shows; they had just gotten a BritBox subscription on Roku to fill our quarantined nights. I watched every British period piece that I could, then also re-read Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen became my best pal and quarantine companion. While this evening practice didn’t help me feel any more productive, I was comforted. It was fun to laugh at British slang with my dad and swoon over Darcy and Knightley with my mom. The period pieces also made me thankful that I was stuck inside with my phone, TV, and plenty of books, instead of having to resort to a “turn about the room” in my boredom, like a 19th century heroine.

Cesar A. Cruz said that “art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.” While I don’t know if “disturbed” is the first word I would have picked to describe our collective state during the Covid-19 pandemic, I do believe that we are all fairly disturbed, disheartened, and in need of comfort. And whether it be a movie, book, album, or visual piece, art has a way of comforting us, even while the reality of our own world seems uncertain and harsh.

With that in mind, I asked four local people in the arts about their own “Quarantine Comforts”: What art has helped lift their spirits in the time of COVID-19?

Thank you to Angela Hugunin, Michael Perry, Stephanie Turner, and Rebecca Mennecke for contributing!

Angela Hugunin: student, Editor-in-Chief at NOTA

“I found that it informed my now more frequent strolls and helped deepen my appreciation of the natural world around me—I’ve been grossly underestimating trees! ”

Like many others around the world, I’ve seen an exponential jump in my screen time over these past months due to a shift in working conditions. This shift has brought me a newfound longing to spend time outdoors. I’ve found myself drawn to nature in new ways, and this has shown up in the art I’ve taken in. I read Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees over the summer, and for me it brought a perfect mix of wit and discovery. I found that it informed my now more frequent strolls and helped deepen my appreciation of the natural world around me—I’ve been grossly underestimating trees! I also really enjoyed Wayétu Moore’s She Would Be King, which I got through the Dotter’s Books subscription (hooray for local bookstores!). Moore’s novel took me to faraway places, challenged my understanding of the history of colonization (in a good way), and had me rooting for the characters’ superhuman abilities and resilience. Both books expanded my thinking and buoyed my spirits.

Michael Perry: writer

“‘art’ doesn’t always have to spell itself with a capital ‘A’ to improve the world. ”

1) This is irredeemably self-centered, but honest: my own work has been a source of retreat, if not comfort. I don't mean reading my own work and going ooh, aah, I mean cranking it out. As a freelancer and a performer I've had to redouble my writing production to counter income lost from the road. This has included some self-published projects. The side-benefit of writing and writing and writing, is that I am able to disappear into the work. Even if I'm just editing a revision, taking pen in hand and bending to the task literally allows me to duck and cover. I am also very grateful that in writing my books, turning in my columns, recording audio, I am allowed to work through hope and unease in real time. And it's a chance for me--overtly and between the lines--to acknowledge and thank those people out there striving for good amidst the grim.

2) Given all the home time, I finally finished reading Voltaire, the biography by Jean Orieux, and Voltaire in Love, by Nancy Mitford. It was dreadfully fascinating to observe as Voltaire navigated social unrest and upheaval mirroring much of what we're observing or at the precipice of today. Again, I wouldn't say this lifted my spirits, but there's always something grounding about reminding ourselves that human behavior has been twisting itself into confounding knots forever, and in reading histories like these we are given clues as to how best adjust our own course. And even more importantly, how history will judge us.

 3) During the earliest months of the pandemic, my daughters hooked my wife and me into streaming the detective comedy-drama Psych. It is a silly show and I would never have chosen it for myself, but it quickly became a shared and goofy joy that we looked forward to on those dark early nights. Its implausible plots and running gags remind me that "art" doesn't always have to spell itself with a capital "A" to improve the world. The creators of that show gifted us with a nexus for cheer, and we needed it.

Stephanie Turner, UWEC English Professor

“Nothing ever goes away. Trouble circulates, manifesting first as a strange new virus, reforming into civil unrest over police murders and mask mandates, escalating as anxiety over returning to work and school.”

You Can Go “Away,” But You’ll Always Be Somewhere 

In grade school, when it seemed everyone was sporting sew-on patches with all the latest slogans, one of my classmates sewed a skull-and-crossbones “POLLUTION” patch to the seat of her pants. She had the right idea. The slogan her patch and its placement evoked was “there’s no such thing as ‘away’.” When you throw something away, like waste, it just ends up someplace else, in some other form, like the unthinkable things piling up in a landfill or bubbling through the sewage treatment plant. It’s a simple law of physics.  

Our shared crises during the pandemic remind me of this fact. Nothing ever goes away. Trouble circulates, manifesting first as a strange new virus, reforming into civil unrest over police murders and mask mandates, escalating as anxiety over returning to work and school. To get away from it all, I watched the Netflix series “Away.” In that series, a small group of humans with big differences work together to solve a common problem: how to reach Mars safely. If only it could be that easy here on Earth. Here, there’s no “away.” We are the common problem. Still, we’re finding out way through it with our forms of expression. In my visual rhetoric class, students are looking for iconic images that creatives are remediating to comment on the present time. Thus, Edvard Munch’s classic painting “The Scream” appears on a face mask; the man and woman in Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” stand the requisite six feet apart in a cartoon.  

I find comfort in exploring these extremes. “Away” streams into my living room; iconic artwork is used to comment on our times everywhere else. Challenging inertia, another law of physics, we change direction, pick up speed, create away.

Rebecca Menneke: Associate Editor at Volume One

“Art inspires art. It’s others, truly, that inspire me.”

“Arts, culture, and creativity are one of those three key sectors that drive regional economies,” said Jo Ellen Burke, the president of the Eau Claire Public Arts Council. “Any lasting damage to the creative sector will drastically undercut our culture, wellbeing, and quality of life.” 

I’m not sure many people would consider my line of duty “art.” Though I’m a writer (thereby, creative) reporting on often the artistic elements of the community (thereby, creative), it rarely feels like an artistic endeavor to write about the hard-hitting nooks and crannies of the community. Lately, I’ve covered how racism has impacted the Chippewa Valley, the ways in which people of color have had to tirelessly work to recreate unjust systems that unfairly benefit white people, how COVID-19 has impacted the arts, local farmers, how mental health has taken a solemn hit during these – dare I say it – unprecedented times. To say that writing about these challenging topics is “art” seems to undercut the depth and complexity of these issues. But that’s precisely what I consider my line of duty: art. And discussing these nuanced issues is, in of itself, a form of art. When interviewing Jo Ellen Burke about the recent profusion of public art in downtown Eau Claire, or Wayne Marek at the Eau Claire Children’s Theatre about how theatre is impacted by a pandemic or Bre Ferraro at the Eau Claire Film Festival about filmmaking during these times, I’m constantly reminded of how the arts thrive during challenging situations – they were made to thrive – and it encourages me to create my own art during these chaotic. And my art is this: I’m taking the complex issues of the day and making them less complex, more accessible. By writing about the new murals going up downtown, I’m creating my own art. And, to be completely honest with you, it gives me a sense of purpose and meaning. Before I got my job as associate editor at Volume One, you could most likely find me in my parents’ basement, watching yet another episode of Forensic Files, still in my pajamas, bundled under a blanket and feeling purposeless – defeated, uninspired. Now I feel I have an important mission: to tell the important stories of our community and to do those stories justice. Art inspires art. It’s others, truly, that inspire me.

Getting The Buzz About Honey Literary: An Interview With Co-Founders Dorothy Chan And Rita Mookerjee

Krisany Blount

Those of us who have lived for any length of time know what it’s like to be frustrated. Sometimes things just aren’t going your way. Sometimes life is overwhelming and there’s nobody around to help. And sometimes you’ve been dealing with racism, sexism, homophobia, or other forms of oppression for so long that you reach a tipping point. In instances such as these, you have two choices: calm down and continue with your life as it is or announce that you’re done and do something to change your life.

Dorothy Chan and Rita Mookerjee chose the second option.

Over the summer, Chan, an assistant professor in the English department of the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, and Mookerjee, an assistant professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Iowa State University, founded a literary journal. Fed up with the racism and sexism of the literary world at large, they set out to create a space that is run by womxn of color and focused on BIPOC voices. That space is Honey Literary.

I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Chan and Mookerjee about the founding of Honey Literary, the formation of their masthead, and innovation in the literary world. Be sure to check out their website for additional information and to see their submission guidelines.

Krisany Blount: Congratulations on launching Honey Literary! What was the impetus for founding a literary journal?

Rita Mookerjee

Rita Mookerjee: We needed something new and bold to break up the white literary scene. We kept hoping we would see diversity and innovation from journals. Many places offer that, but we still wanted more. It was clear that we had to sculpt our own space.

Dorothy Chan: Exactly. Over the summer I got fed up, so I tweeted that I’d start a BIPOC-focused, intersectional feminist literary journal run by all BIWOC. That tweet really picked up, and I realized: this is going to happen. I texted Rita. She said she was in right away, and since then, we haven’t looked back. But that’s really our attitude with everything in life. I’m thankful to have such an amazing co-founder and best friend. Rita motivates and inspires me every day.

KB: I love the name Honey Literary! Where did it come from?

RM: In brainstorming, we wanted something really femme and fun. Dorothy and I both study and write on food extensively, so that probably influenced the name as well. We were Googling a lot and making sure our brand wasn’t like anything else out there. The saint with whom I share a first name is associated with bees. I love them; I have them tattooed on my left arm. The texture of a honeycomb parallels our masthead and category breakdown—distinct segments linked by their borders. The honeycomb pattern is unmistakable. That’s what we want to be.

KB: I don’t think I’ve ever seen categories like Valentines or Animals in a literary journal before. How did you decide which categories to include? What attracted you to Valentines and Animals in particular?

DC: Fun. When I teach creative writing, some of my students are very form and/or genre oriented, while some are very prompt oriented. “Valentines” and “Animals” are instant prompts.

Honey Literary is really about breaking down barriers—enough with the gatekeeping! Part of that is challenging the idea of what a section/category in a literary journal means. We wanted fun categories. A lot of our editors write about animals and Valentines anyway. I mean, the sonnet is fourteen lines. Just like Valentine’s Day. It’s truly the perfect romantic amuse-bouche.

Rita edits and curates the poetry section, as well as the Sex, Kink, and the Erotic section. There’s really something for everyone. We’re opening up conversations and all kinds of writing. Bring it all on.

KB: Honey Literary’s masthead is quite the collection of talent! How did you select them to be editors?

DC: Rita and I have been lucky to meet so many brilliant people in our creative and academic careers. All these editors were such natural and instinctive choices, and what’s really amazing is that they all said yes immediately! We love you: Avni Vyas, Claire Meuschke, Jessica Q. Stark, Christina Giarrusso, Zakiya Cowan, Trinity Jones, Maria Clara Melo, and Gaia Rajan.

Please check out our masthead page. We each honor some of our favorite writers here. If you’re looking for reading and/or teaching recommendations, our masthead page is a great place to start!

In addition, many members of our masthead have published books and chapbooks. Check out Claire Meuschke’s debut poetry collection, UPEND (Noemi Press, 2020) and Jessica Q. Stark’s debut poetry collection, Savage Pageant (Birds, LLC 2020).  Check out Avni Vyas’ collaborative chapbook with Anne Barngrover, Candy in Our Brains (CutBank Books 2014) and Rita Mookerjee’s chapbooks Becoming the Bronze Idol (Bone & Ink Press, 2019) and Protection Rituals (Drum Machine Editions, 2020).

Gaia Rajan has a chapbook coming out with Glass Poetry Series in 2020-2021. It’s titled Moth Rituals. Can you believe Gaia is only 16? She’s brilliant. She designed our entire website, and we’re so grateful. I’m always blown away by how her mind works.

I’ll be using our Twitter page to continually highlight staff and contributor achievements as well.

KB: What kind of space is Honey Literary hoping to create within the literary landscape?

RM: We are so proud of the BIWOC writers and editors who helped pave the way for us. To honor them, we want to set a new standard, but really, an anti-standard. We are big on hybrid forms, experimental work, and multigenre writing. Dorothy and I see so many places still publishing pretty poems about trees. I’m like, “Who cares?” Where is the urgency? I think urgency needs to come to the forefront of contemporary writing. There must be exigency as well.

KB: What can people do to support Honey Literary?

RM: Share with friends and send us your work! You can follow us @HoneyLiterary on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. We are so excited by the warm reception we have had from writers and journals we love.

KB: Anything else you’d like to share?

DC: In early October we’re debuting a special artist spotlight section called “Sticky Fingers” (a play on honey, of course). Our first spotlight is the inimitable K-Ming Chang, and we’re publishing her short story, “Invasive Species,” along with an interview with Editor Zakiya Cowan.

Our first issue debuts Winter 2021. Stay tuned!

Be sure to follow Honey Literary on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, and check out their website. Submissions for their first issue are open through Dec. 1.

Local Stories of Work, Play, Love, and Prayer: Celebrating the Release of "Hope of the Crow: Tales of Occupying Aging"

caption: Hope of the Crow cover art featuring crow atop book.

Elise Eystad

After seven years of blogging and a year of revising, author Dr. Katherine Schneider’s latest effort, Hope of the Crow: Tales of Occupying Aging has, as she puts it, at last “flown the nest.” This newest work comes after three other books: Occupying Aging: Delights, Disabilities and Daily Life, To the Left of Inspiration: Adventures in Living with Disabilities, and the children’s book Your Treasure Hunt: Disabilities and Finding Your Gold.

Organized into four sections—work, play, love, and pray—Hope of the Crow is a compilation of Schneider’s blog posts and other writings that center around her life as an elderly, disabled woman. With humorous chapter titles such as “Mercury and I are in Retrograde,” “Sighted People are Strange,” and “What If Wonder Woman had a Disability?”, the book is filled with fun anecdotes and musings on aging, faith, friendship, living with a disability, and much more. In addition, there are thought-provoking entries on privilege and ableism, like “Only You Can Stop Ableism,” “The Many Faces of Privilege,” and “Is Accessibility Nice or Necessary to You?” that discuss practical tips for interactions between sighted people—medical professionals in particular—and blind or visually impaired person.

As displayed in the title, Hope of the Crow: Tales of Occupying Aging, spends a lot of time focusing on the relationship between growing older and living with a disability. “Half the people over sixty-five will develop a disability,” Schneider says, “so I want to share a few tricks of the trade and give some realistic hope about the good life still being achievable.”

Included in the book are also tales about Schneider’s Seeing Eye dogs, as well as two poems: “An Anthem for the Americans with Disabilities Act” and “Hope of the Crow.”

And why the title Hope of the Crow?

“Crows fascinate me,” Schneider says. “They’re smart—the females make and use tools. They survive and thrive in many environments, which gives me hope in these turbulent times. They can’t sing (neither can I), but we still try to caw out our hope somehow.”

Not only is the current release of Hope of the Crow: Tales of Occupying something to celebrate after eight years of writing and editing, but it also comes at a culturally fitting time. 2020 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. According to adata.org, “The ADA is a civil rights law that prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities in all areas of public life, including jobs, schools, transportation, and all public and private places that are open to the general public. The purpose of the law is to make sure that people with disabilities have the same rights and opportunities as everyone else.” As a self-proclaimed “disabled elder activist,” Schneider says that Hope of the Crow was published on this thirtieth anniversary for a specific reason.

“This book,” Schneider says, “is the living out of the ADA.”

Hope of the Crow is available from www.wheatmark.com and online outlets. It is available in accessible format from www.bookshare.org. You can keep up to date with Dr. Kathie Schneider and find other writings on her blog at http://kathiecomments.wordpress.com.

To The Class of 2024: Reflections on Learning to Lean

Katy Hackworthy

As I think about all the amazing students & teachers getting ready to head back to school during a time of deep uncertainty, particularly the class of 2024, I can’t help but reflect on my freshman year at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Caire. That first fall was one for the books, both literally and figuratively. I spent most of my high school career as an overly ambitious & overly socialized music kid, bopping between one rehearsal or production to the next with a gaggle of pals trailing close behind me.  I wanted college to be different.  And so, I decided my first semester would be all about quality time with me, my new city, and my ever-expanding book collection. Although I was a music education major, my first love was literature, and diving into the more appealing alternate realities found in the literary world was the comfort & escape I craved in order to avoid the more intimidating task of making new friends.

“Anyone who has spent time in the Chippewa Valley during the fall understands how breathtaking it is to witness the leaves turn, to feel the breeze off the river chill our noses & fingertips a little earlier each day, to cozy up at a local coffee shop and let yourself lean in to the momentary briskness before the bitter winter returns. I spent most of those first few months walking along the river...”

Anyone who has spent time in the Chippewa Valley during the fall understands how breathtaking it is to witness the leaves turn, to feel the breeze off the river chill our noses & fingertips a little earlier each day, to cozy up at a local coffee shop and let yourself lean in to the momentary briskness before the bitter winter returns. I spent most of those first few months walking along the river, acquainting myself with this city I was unsure about. Those freedom-filled days took on various forms, but I always ended up lounging on a park bench or laying under a tall pine with a book in hand. I almost never brought along the assigned readings slumped on the desk in my cramped dorm room, neglected in favor of something I picked up at the public library or at my hometown bookshop. Those unfamiliar benches & parks ushered in a welcome sense of anonymity & freedom, something I craved coming from a small river town where it was difficult to walk down the street without running into someone eager to talk your ear off. 

I reserved my afternoons away from campus for those intimate indulgences that added up to a whole lot of self discovery & a fair amount of earned solitude. I made sure to separate the city & all I did in it from the campus that often felt claustrophobic.  These efforts at keeping my worlds distinct allowed me to more fully fall in love with this incredible place that’s imprinted itself upon me forever. In my attempt to lean into that solitude, I was also making friends with this new city & the places that marked it with character, like the public library which felt like a secret I was keeping from my peers (pro tip, students: snag a few required readings from the public library before padding the pockets of the campus bookstore!), and the record store where I would spend chilly afternoons chatting with fellow music nerds that made me feel at home. In one particularly memorable moment, I walked across the bridge just after sunrise to make it to my appointment at a clinic near Water Street only to find out I had the wrong day. To make the most of my mix up, I stumbled into a tiny coffee shop called The Goat where I found a group of old men playing cards over mugs of coffee & cracking up with the kind hearted owner. I was the only other person in the joint that early, and sitting by myself, smiling at the group of pals over my copy of the local paper, made me feel like I was a part of something good.

“Students, never forget we all deserve and need comfort & company, and those two things are hard to come by during these days of physical distancing combined with a social & cultural revolution”

Students, never forget we all deserve and need comfort & company, and those two things are hard to come by during these days of physical distancing combined with a social & cultural revolution. That’s asking more from us than many have ever given in their whole lives.  And so, I’m here to remind you to lean in and lean on. Lean in to the discomfort, lean in to the learning, lean in the small joys like books & walks by the river & your favorite barista handing you a warm mug without having to ask for your order. And of course, never forget to lean on the places & people you love for the necessary comfort along the way.