Author: Christine Nessler

Anne Falkowski’s work is upcoming or has been published in Hippocampus, Pithead Chapel, The Rumpus, Solstice Review, Hunger Magazine, The Coachella Review, Change Seven, and others. She has been nominated multiple times for Best of the Net. In 2023, her writing was placed in Solstice Fiction Literary Prize, Frank Demott Literary Prize., and Writers Digest Personal Essay Contest. In 2024, she placed first in the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize. Website AnneFalkowski.net.

Tell us about yourself. 

I started writing later in life, late forties. It took me that long to trust I could say the things I wanted to say, even if it challenged others and wasn’t always beautiful. My partner and kids are all practicing artists. I realized if I didn’t act upon my life-long desire to write, my own fear of rejection and failure could be internalized by my children. 

How to Be Made by Men, 1981 immerses the reader into the feelings of a young girl. How did you transport yourself back to that time to paint such a vivid picture of your experience?

I don’t believe we experience time as linear, especially when telling our stories. In a workshop with Lidia Yuknavitch, she taught portals as a way to drop in to a memory or experience. The Frank Zappa song, Dina Mo Hum, was one of those portals. I remembered exactly how I felt when those lyrics were playing through the van’s speakers. So was the vivid image of the van. Once I had those two portals, I let go into the scene, even though I wasn’t sure what I had to say.

Do you think young women still experience the need to be made by men? Why or why not? 

Today there is so much pressure to be curated or performative on social media, which adds a whole other dimension we didn’t have in the 80’s. The act of Roe V. Wade being overturned activates the power men have over women’s bodies. Also as a writer I’m aware of the blowback of personal narrative. Every time I publish creative nonfiction I run the risk of being deemed too real, too personal or intimate which I don’t believe is the same for men or as dangerous. Being vulnerable and getting harassed on social media is very real.

How do we break free from that conditioning?

We make truthful art. 

There are various forms of nonfiction writing styles. What made you decide on a “how to” model for this story? Did you consider other writing styles when developing this piece?

An undone version had been sitting in my slush file for five years. I knew something about it wasn’t right. In early 2024, a prompt in one of my writing groups was to turn a piece of flash you are struggling with into a set of instructions. A light went off. If I viewed my younger self as following an unspoken set of instructions which she didn’t create, or even have the capacity to fully understand, this story would be closer to the truth. Following a set of instructions feels necessary for her survival but maybe more important, it brought in compassion. Self acceptance was missing in my earlier versions of the story. 

How do you make time for your writing life? 

This is a big question for me because I have ADHD and OCD. I was diagnosed with both only a few years ago. Besides taking meds, I set a timer and work in half hour sprints. I also have writing buddies. We write together on zoom, Having another person to body-double with or be accountable to is super helpful. Last but not least, I meditate before writing, allowing my nervous system to relax and understand that writing is not life or death, success or failure, or my entire identity. 

Where do you draw your inspiration for your fiction and non-fiction pieces?

No matter what I set out to write, I always seem to have the same themes show up-Writing into the space of bodies and lost girlhood. I suppose when I feel finished with this (if ever) I’ll move on. 

Tell us about your memoir, “Ordinary Body.” 

It’s been revised a zillion times. I’m pretty confident it’s done. At some point, I’ll seek agent representation. Basically, it’s about a younger me becoming a yoga teacher and yoga studio owner, hoping to have the perfect life and get the perfect body, which of course never happens. I learn how competitive and under the wraps of male gaze the western yoga industry is. In order to accept my body as is, I go back into my childhood and examine my relationship with my mother and other women in order to find healing and self-acceptance.  

What do you think of when you hear “the good life?” 

Maybe the good life is looking up at the stars and knowing that you have loved at least one being unconditionally, have been loved by at least one being unconditionally, and have experienced gratitude for at least one thing in the path of your life.  

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Anne’s flash essay “How to Be Made by Men, 1981” was a team favorite in this year’s HoneyBee Prize and appears in our summer 2024 issue.

Thank you, Anne, for taking extra time on this Q&A with us! We wish you the best with writing, and all of your endeavors.

Genevieve N. Williams holds an MFA from University of Nebraska at Omaha, where she received two Academy of American Poets Prizes. She is a queer poet whose poetry won an Edward Stanley Award from Prairie Schooner and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, The American Journal of Poetry, Mid-American Review, and Verse Daily.

Tell us about yourself.

Okay, so I’m a queer type-1 diabetic poet who uses she/her pronouns, is white and (mostly)cis and passes as hetero in public, thus having the privilege that comes with that; has in the past dealt with depression and PTSD; and works in writing centers as both a coordinator and consultant. I enjoy reading, writing, walking/hiking, practicing yoga, living with mindfulness, practicing meditation, and spending time with people I love. I’ve worked a variety of jobs including working student on a dressage training farm, barista, bookseller, bartender, server, exotic dancer, adjunct instructor, teaching artist, nanny/auntie, and now, writing center consultant and coordinator. These experiences, along with my experiences growing up as a kid, often inform my work. My parents suffered abuse and instability as children, and the cycle stopped with them. I am forever grateful my parents went through years of therapy—and participated in the arts as well! My mother acted in theatre and was a voracious reader and activist, and my father is a photographer, routine library user/reader, activist, and gardener. I have a big family that also includes very close friends and their children.

A “Beginner’s Guide to Yoga” is an insightful look into how trauma manifests itself in our bodies. What is your take on generational trauma and how it affects us?

Generational trauma, I’ve learned, comes from trauma that our parents, grandparents, and so on have experienced. Both trauma and resilience can alter our DNA and pass on to our children. When I was in my 20s, my therapist at the time kept saying that I had all the symptoms of PTSD without a particular triggering event. Generational trauma can affect us not only through our thoughts and behaviors but also through our bodies. Memory and trauma, whether our own or our ancestors’, can get stored in the body. I believe yoga and other movement practices, alongside mindfulness and therapy, help to address this stored trauma and memory. They certainly did for me.

I love all the repetition of lines in “A Beginner’s Guide to Yoga,” specifically, “Trauma stays tucked in ribcage and hip.” What is the benefit of using repetition as a poetic tool?

For readers who may not be familiar, “A Beginner’s Guide to Yoga” is written in a form called villanelle; villanelles include repeated lines and particular rhymes. I think repetition can serve to remind readers of the persistence of a thing, create movement in the poem, and add emphasis. I’m thinking of a particular part of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen when the speaker visits a trauma therapist for the first time and the trauma therapist yells at the speaker to get out of her yard. When the trauma therapist realizes what she’s done, Rankine emphasizes the racism and terrible moment by repeating at the end words such as “pauses” and “sorry,” creating a space in which the awfulness of that moment sinks in. Another poem that uses repetition very well is Mark Strand’s “Elegy for my Father.” Strand uses epistrophe and anaphora, as well as repeating lines, in this gorgeous poem on grief. The repetition emphasizes the grief. A villanelle many poets are familiar with is “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop. The repetition in this poem creates a forward propulsion and emphasizes the loss experienced by the speaker.

What is your favorite form of poetry to explore? Why?

In terms of form and my own writing, I’ve enjoyed writing villanelles, sonnets, and pantoums. Mostly, though, I write free verse poems. In these poems, I still focus on sound as well as the meaning of lines and where they end/begin, whether to enjamb or create a full stop, and how to make each stanza.

How has yoga been a release for you? 

Yoga, especially in my early years of practice, helped me release a lot of stored trauma and memory. I found that hip openers and backbends especially would stir up and release stored emotion for me.

Does poetry also serve as a form of release? How?

Yes, I would say that poetry serves as a form of release in that I often discover what I feel or think about a thing only after I’ve written through it. I frequently make connections in poems that I wouldn’t otherwise make, whether between images, events, people, or sounds—it is very revelatory for me, and I feel that I would be less well-adjusted should I not have poetry in my life to remind me what exactly I feel and think and intuit.

As writers we often have repeated themes in our work whether we realize it or not. What is the repeated theme of your work?

Often, I return to themes of generational trauma and resilience, though I also return to images and connected narratives involving the farm, forests, oceans, and my childhood attic apartment. Sometimes, I enjoy writing queer love poems, so that, I suppose, could be another theme in my work—queer love. Usually, there’s something left unresolved or undiscovered, and the poem does some good digging for me.

Why do you think that theme keeps resurfacing?

I think anything that keeps resurfacing is an opportunity to learn. The fact that I am still writing about the trauma my parents experienced as children means there are lessons yet to be learned and communicated. 

What has been the key to developing your poetry?

Reading! I think that to write well, we must read well. Traveling. Getting outside of myself. Also, experience. Living a life with challenges and joys and love and grief—all the things that make us human—while taking note of the phrases, images, sounds, and temperature that surround an experience—helps me write and develop my poetry.

How is writing a part of your daily life?

Writing is a part of my daily life in that I am always observing—whether that observing is external or internal or a mix of both. I try to recognize and acknowledge the felt sense of my body in different situations and environments so that I can better understand. I am always trying to understand, and because of that, I write. I write to understand the associations and connections between experiences and people and to widen my view of the world and, subsequently, myself. I don’t have a particular time I write, though I often do so at my standing desk in my apartment, at one of my jobs between appointments, or at my often cluttered-with-unopened-mail-and-half-read-books dining room table. 

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Genevieve’s poem “A Beginners Guide to Yoga” was the runner-up for this year’s HoneyBee Prize in Poetry and appears in our summer 2024 issue.

Thank you, Genevieve, for allowing us to share your poem with our readers and for taking extra time on this Q&A with us! We’re glad we were able to connect and wish you the best with writing, and all of your endeavors.

Jaime Gill is a British exile living and working in Cambodia. His short stories have been published by Litro, The Phare, Fiction Attic, Exposition Review, Literally Stories, Voidspace, and more. Several have won or been finalists for awards including the Bridport Prize, The Masters Review Prize, the Exeter Short Story Competition, Flash405, The Bath Short Story Award and Plaza Prizes. He consults for non-profits across South East Asia while working haphazardly on a novel, script, and far too many stories. He can be found at www.jaimegill.com, www.twitter.com/jaimegill , or https://www.instagram.com/mrjaimegill.

Tell us about yourself.

Probably the most interesting thing about me is that I’ve lived for the last eight years in Cambodia, a thrilling place to be as a writer because it’s a country still in the throes of enormous change and rebirth after a very traumatic recent history. I ended up here after finishing a year travelling from England to Australia without flying – my life’s big, eye-opening adventure. It’s also a wonderful base to explore South East Asia in all its wild variety. When not travelling, my day-to-day life is quite boring. I gave up alcohol and other intoxicants twelve years ago – after fifteen very hedonistic and increasingly harrowing years in London – so most of my socialising now revolves around occasional board games and a kickboxing club. Otherwise, I’m usually to be found alone in my apartment overlooking the mighty Mekong, tapping away at a laptop, with occasional breaks to read books or rewatch “Beef” or “The OA”. Oh, and I’m gay, though that’s less interesting than it used to be.

How long has it been since you’ve been home to the United Kingdom? How has being exiled changed your view on your homeland?

I should stress that my exile is voluntary and not legally mandated. Most of my friends and family are still in the UK, so I go back every year to tour the country and catch up – the last trip was in May. My views on the UK probably haven’t been shaped by my decision to leave so much as the other way round. I was increasingly depressed by the UK backsliding into mean-mindedness, xenophobia and bitter dreams of past glories. I was then thrilled to discover Asia, where countries are so relentlessly future-focused. The UK has finally voted for a more progressive Government so I feel slightly more optimistic about its future, and do believe most Britons are fundamentally decent. Sadly, recent disgusting outbreaks of violence by the hard right mean my optimism remains tentative. The big difference in living 10,000 kilometres away (apart from now thinking in kilometres) is perspective: the UK seems much smaller when you live very close to China, and witness the enormous geopolitical battles being waged over the future of South East Asia. Also, I’ve realised too late that sunscreen really is important. I should have listened to Baz Luhrmann. 

Has this influenced your writing? 

Travelling around Asia has massively influenced my writing. It’s given me a much fuller sense of just how diverse this world is – culturally, socially and economically – and sharpened my sense of injustice over how precarious life is for people born by chance into the world’s poorer nations. These are themes I try to explore in my more outward-looking writing. I sometimes even risk writing from Cambodian perspectives, though not without a lot of help from local friends acting as informal sensitivity readers. However, when I’m writing my more character-driven stories, I often find myself reaching back into the past and British settings. Things To Talk To Jim About is set in the North-East of England where I grew up, because I most understand family dynamics in that setting (though thankfully not a family like this one). But I still had to enlist a sensitivity reader because I was worried I had forgotten the area I grew up in! I sent the story to my cousin and asked her if I was committing any cultural violations. She gave me the all clear, phew.

Things to Talk to Jim About is a powerful story about facing your personal truth. Do you think our narrator will ever be able to confide his deepest secret to Jim? Why or why not?

I find questions like this so interesting. Often people who read my stories want me to explain things that aren’t on the page, and I usually don’t know the answer. To make a story work I try and immerse myself fully in the character and understand everything about their personal history up to that point, but if my character doesn’t know something at the time I write the story then I often don’t know either, just as I can never guess the futures of real people I know. Life is too chaotic to predict. But I’d like to think that, yes, my narrator could one day tell his deepest secret to Jim, but it’s going to take him a lot of time. I’d imagine that once his mother is dead, he will subconsciously hope his history will die with her. With no family members to remind him of his childhood, he will hope the pain of it fades. But it won’t, and he may eventually realise that though he believes he is protecting himself by keeping his secrets, he is in fact poisoning himself. At that point he might finally keep his promise to Jim and tell him everything. The optimist in me hopes so. Don’t ask the pessimist.

Based on the mother’s insistent questions, it seemed like she already knew or suspected the dark secrets of her family. Why do you think it was so important for the narrator to protect his mother from the disturbing truth?

My favourite scene in “Psycho” (one of my favourite scenes ever in fact) is the heartbreaking one where Norman Bates and Marion Crane become friends, and Norman says “I think we’re all in our own private traps.” I think this is pretty close to a universal truth. My narrator has created a truly terrible trap for himself. While I don’t think he is very troubled by the fact he murdered his father, I think he is tormented by the fact his sister subsequently took her own life. The only thing he can do to absolve his guilt is to at least protect his mother from the truth and to “be the monster.” In order for this psychological safety mechanism to work, he has to regard her as blameless. The reader may think differently, and I won’t argue, but I do think it is possible for people – including the mother – to be oblivious to terrible things happening in their own family. That is why the mother’s questions create a panic reaction in the narrator during the story. They threaten to upend his understanding of the world and (maybe) break open the trap that he is in. And the thing about being trapped for a very long time is that you grow to not just tolerate but even love your trap. Birds that have been caged for a long time will often not fly away when released, they’ll perch near their own prison – it’s called “caged bird syndrome,” and it’s something I write about often.

The narrator’s shame regarding his own abuse is heartbreaking. What do you think could finally help him overcome the shame of his abuse and his regret for his perception of failing his sister? 

This is where my inner pessimist is quite stubborn. I don’t think he will ever be able to fully overcome either his shame or his regret. They are so deeply ingrained they are practically molecular now, and there is a point at which damage can’t be fully repaired or healed. What he might be able to do is learn to accept and acknowledge these feelings and place them in a more forgiving perspective. But that will indeed require him to talk to Jim, so let’s hope he does.

How has writing helped you to tackle the darkest parts of humanity, such as sexual abuse?

For me this question suggests another one – why do I want to tackle these subjects? Why does anyone? I’m often puzzled by how often my stories go to these bleak places, as I don’t think I am a particularly miserable or gloomy person. In fact, when this story idea first came to me (and it arrived fully formed, as close to a lightning bolt of inspiration as I’ve had in my writing life) I resisted writing it, until my friend Charlie told me that I had to. But I suppose the answer is something to do with empathy. When we look at the world, it’s possible to think that there are a lot of truly awful people around us – monsters everywhere. But these people don’t think of themselves as monsters, and I don’t think many of them are either. People who end up damaging other people are usually damaged themselves. I think if we want to understand our own species, we need to try and understand everyone, including the people we would like to pretend aren’t human – the abusers, the murderers, the hate-mongers. My narrator acts in ways that I personally despise and shrink from, not least in his use of casual violence to exorcise his own demons before the final act of violence against his father. And I don’t excuse them. But I do understand them, a little, and I got to that place by writing about them. If there’s one thing that would make this world better, it would be more empathy, and I think generating empathy is probably the most useful job a writer can do.

What do you hope your readers take from Things to Talk to Jim About?

I hope that it might make readers think about the hidden stories that we all carry around in ourselves. When someone behaves in a terrible way to us, it’s probably not because they woke up that day and decided to make you miserable – there is history at work, and they may be their own biggest victim. On a more prosaic level, this is a story about a life prisoner and I would ask the reader to consider whether he really deserves to lose his freedom for most of his life as a result of actions taken when young as a result of growing up in a terrible situation. I’d like to see the whole world move away from a criminal justice system focused on punishment and retribution towards one focused on rehabilitation. That applies doubly to any countries which have retained capital punishment, which I regard as pure barbarism.

Do you primarily write fiction? What other forms of expression have you dabbled in?

At last, an easy question! I’m horribly clumsy and have terrible eye-hand coordination so music, dancing, painting, etc, are all out. Many art and music teachers have confirmed this. I have a horrible voice but will howl along at karaoke if you let me, maybe taking on Madonna, Blur, or Frank Ocean. I have worked on a few short films, but primarily as a writer. Writing is pretty much the only thing I have ever been any good at, and I want to spend as much time as I can for as long as I have left getting better at it.

As Juliana Lamy said about your writing, “This stunning story is a brief masterclass in pacing and natural characterization.” Do you have any craft book suggestions for writers trying to fine-tune those skills?

It’s such a lovely comment by Juliana and I am so grateful to her for appreciating this story. For a craft book on pacing, I’d recommend “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” by George Saunders. He examines a series of exquisite Russian short stories and explores why they work and how. His metaphor of the writer and reader as being like a motorcycle and a sidecar – where a successful journey can only be achieved when both stay very close together – is a brilliant one to consider when thinking about pacing. Character is harder, and I don’t know if a craft book can help enormously. It would be better to spend a lot of time trying to understand the people you know and meet, and reading as many novels and stories as you can to see the way they translate the mysteries of human character into signals on a page. John Irving, David Mitchell, Edith Wharton, Junot Diaz, Elizabeth Strout – they’re all great places to start. Or you can shortcut everything I just said and watch “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” in its entirety three times. That’s a character masterclass.

What do I think of when you hear “The Good Life?”

The idea of the good life makes me think of a lyric from my favourite song, Joni Mitchell’s Amelia: “People will tell you where they’ve gone, they’ll tell you where to go/ But til you get there yourself you’ll never really know/ Where some have found their paradise others just come to harm.” The good life looks very different for every person, basically (and obviously). My own good life is built on personal freedom (something that shouldn’t be taken for granted in a world where so many people have limited freedom for political, social or economic reasons), good friends, discovering beautiful art, and writing anything I am proud of. And now, of course, the words good life will make me think of the wonderful magazine who saw value in a story of mine I loved and gave it such a wonderful home.

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Jaime’s stunning fiction story, Things To Talk To Jim About, is featured in Issue #16 of The Good Life Review ~ The HoneyBee Prize Edition.

Thank you, Jaime, for being a part of our growing literary community and for spending extra time with us on this Q&A. We appreciate your thoughtful answers and wisdom, and we wish you the best!

Jamie L. Smith is the author of “The Flightless Years,” forthcoming from Finishing Line Press (November 2024). Her chapbook “Mythology Lessons” was winner of Tusculum Review’s 2020 Nonfiction Prize and is listed as notable in Best American Essays 2021. Her poetry, nonfiction, and hybrid works appear in publications including Southern Humanities Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Red Noise Collective, and anthologies by Indi(e) Blue, Allegory Ridge, and Beyond Queer Words. Please visit jlsmithwriter.com for more information.

Tell us about yourself.

Let’s see, I’m a former therapist, (re)turned poet/writer, currently living in Salt Lake when I’m not in New York City. I’m very grateful to The Good Life Review for having me and having my work!

Beacons speaks to me as a poem that reflects on how a lifetime is too short to explore all the mysteries or appreciate all the small things our world has to offer. How did your father’s reflections make you think about what you wanted to do with your time on earth? 

My dad was someone who often came across as quiet, but he was fascinated by everything. The end of his life was very difficult. Because of the pain he was in, his world got progressively smaller as his mobility and the space he could physically orbit shrank. One of the beautiful things about his way of being in the world though, was that he really was someone for whom “The Brain—is wider than the Sky—” He was always thinking and noticing. He could be amused or engaged within himself sitting in an empty room. 

One of my dad’s catchphrases was, “Life is short, death is long.” Beacons came largely out of a conversation he and I had a couple of years before he died, well before the moment in the nursing home near the end that the poem describes. He was kind of trying to prepare me for the fact that his time was limited, and, resistant, I said, “Maybe you’ll outlive me,” and he said, “That would be the worst thing.” When he was gone, part of the grieving process was grappling with what I want my life to look like and questioning why I’m here, and it turns out the things that keep me here, the things I look forward to and enjoy most are, fortunately, very small. 

I have goals and aspirations and all that, but most of what matters to me is small moments I want to share with the people I love. Writing gives me a way of sharing those moments that often occur internally or when I’m by myself. I have so many friends living inside of Beacons, and as much as that poem is an elegy for my father, it’s also a thank you to them for lighting my way through a long darkness. 

In your poem, Beacons, I love the line, “Curiosity–that’s what keeps me here, he said.” How do you satisfy your curiosity through writing?

I think writing is a way of paying attention for me. Sometimes it’s a puzzling together of different elements that feel related on a level I haven’t quite been able to articulate for myself. Sometimes it’s a way of honoring what’s already just there in the world in a new way. Sometimes I get these floating lines that surface in my mind, and I just want to spend time with them and see how they resonate with other people.  

My dad was a very curious man, in many ways. I’m a bit like him in that sometimes some very small thing will strike me in a way that just halts everything unexpectedly—the way a reflection surfaces in my windshield, the silica that shimmers in certain sections of sidewalk at night—and I love those moments. Often, I’ll see something and have an urge to touch it, and I think poetry in particular is a way of trying to recreate, remediate, and translate that desire to connect with a moment or memory. 

What do you hope your readers take away from Beacons?

A couple of years ago I read Ocean Vuong’s Reasons for Staying at a time when I needed reasons to stay. Everybody has their own beacons, the things that draw us towards home or help us evade wreckage, and my hope for the poem was that it would signal both of those truths and help call the readers’ own beacons up for them. 

At its core, it’s a poem against suicide, or against the undertow most of us experience at some point in our lives, whether it’s in a period of grief or a pocket of grappling to find meaning.

Tell us about your book, The Flightless Years.

I’ve started thinking of The Flightless Years as a book for anybody who’s loved someone who’s behaved very badly or been loved through their own bad behavior. It weaves myth with memory, and it questions how well we can really know somebody, including ourselves, as we continue to morph and change and build meaning. 

It’s a hybrid: a poetry collection with a CNF lyric essay that’s broken apart and studded across the sections of the book. The essay is centered on my relationship with a dear friend who committed a violent crime while he was intoxicated and ended up taking his own life. He was this full-spirited, generous, beautiful person, and I struggled for a long time to reconcile who he was to me with where his addiction eventually led him. 

The poems and essay both move from the speaker’s childhood and her experience navigating her mother’s mental illness into the speaker’s own addiction history and early recovery. It’s heavy, but it’s also a book with a good deal of literal and figurative light running through it. 

It’s a project that I love a lot, and that I’ve had a lot of help with over the years. I’m so grateful Finishing Line wanted to publish it, partly because I think I could keep spending time with it and changing it forever, but it deserves to have its life apart from me now and vice versa. 

It’s coming out on November 29^th, and you can preorder it here: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/the-flightless-years-by-jamie-l-smith/

How have obtaining your MFA and pursuing your PhD benefitted your writing?

Both experiences have helped teach me to better love what I love. In both programs, the best thing has been the people I’ve gotten to work with and learn from. 

My MFA at CUNY Hunter was easily one of the best times in my life. I’d studied creative writing and psychology in undergrad, but went on to a career as a therapist, so the MFA was a hard reset for me. I needed to rebuild community, I needed good mentors, I wanted to feel compelled to write again, and Hunter gave me all of that and more. That program taught me to read deeply and write with greater openness. 

Doing my PhD at the University of Utah has given me the chance to read, write, and learn more than I ever imagined I would. One of the best parts has been being able to explore other genres and branch out in more unexpected and experimental directions. At the end of my first year, my chair suggested I take a Book Arts class and I fell in love with that practice. I’m defending in nonfiction even though I came in as (and still am) a poet. I’ve just gotten to do things I never expected I would attempt.

I wouldn’t trade either experience, but I don’t think you need a PhD or even an MFA to become a good writer or to build a writing community. I didn’t have the focus or self-discipline it would’ve taken to go it alone and rebuild when I began this process, but I know plenty of autodidacts whose work is absolutely exquisite. 

Your bio speaks of your poems, nonfiction and hybrid work. How has combining poetry and nonfiction deepened your artform? 

You know, I think about this a lot and the answer varies. Most of my poems are true or at least hold some kind of truth, but poems aren’t beholden to facts, and if fiction in its original form means to sculpt or to shape, then I tend to consider poems as fictions or something like true-fictions, if that makes sense. 

I came to nonfiction through poetry. My professor, Catherine Barnett, asked us to write a lyric essay about a book or work of art that we had a relationship with and that turned into the spine of The Flightless Years. Writing prose after years of practicing poetry was kind of like releasing the plunger on a pinball machine—chaotic at first but also a form of release that I gradually learned to rein in through revision. 

I usually have poems on a subject before I can form the prose. Sometimes when I’m writing a poem, I realize I’m leaving out things for sake of form or containment that I can’t shake, and that’s how the nonfiction projects begin—they’re a kind of spilling over. 

The lines between genres are permeable and that delta where they all get mixed together and recomposed fascinates me. My PhD wheelhouse topic is lyric hybridity and I’m kind of obsessed with things like multimodality and remediation. That combination of elements feels closer to the way thought operates in a certain way, and it also just allows extra room for chance and discovery in a new composition. 

What advice do you have for writers eager to have their work published?

Don’t be thwarted by rejection. If you love the work you’ve made and you want it to be shared, keep trying. Sometimes I pull up my Submittable page when my students get discouraged just so they can see how vastly the rejections outnumber the acceptances. 

It also helps to know that the words and form can change while the piece itself still holds the same truth—so be open to revision. The best thing is to keep reading and to have trusted readers or your own to share your work with, and to at least experiment with the feedback they offer.  

How has photography allowed you to see the world through a different lens?

I’m restless by nature. I feel better in motion than I do when I’m still, and photography is like a moving meditation for me. It helps me capture instances I wanted to attend to but knew I was already moving past. It’s a form of attention and time travel or a means of revisiting. 

The capturing of the image feeds that curiosity we were talking about earlier. I love remediating the images afterwards, sometimes long afterwards, using effects to bring something out of them that still honors the moment but also transmits something of what I found within that encounter that made me want to stop. 

What do you think of when you hear, “The Good Life?”

It’s funny, the first image that comes to mind is somebody lounging on the deck of a boat with a glass of prosecco, even though I can’t swim, and I don’t drink, so that can’t possibly be my good life. 

Part of me thinks of ease, and a desire I have for contentment and reprieve. The other part of me doesn’t think the good and the easy are bonded to each other. I have a good life. There are people, places, and things I love deeply and that love me back. There’s a lot I care about and am moved by that I get to invest myself in. There’s plenty I wouldn’t mind having for myself and for the world, but I also know I have enough and more and I’m grateful for that. 

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Jamie’s poem “Beacons” appears in our summer 2024 issue and her poem “What I’ve Tried to Ignore” was featured on our Buzz Blog for Micro Monday on August 19, 2024.

Thank you, Jamie, for allowing us to share your poems with our readers and for taking extra time on this Q&A with us! We’re glad we were able to connect and wish you the best with your upcoming book, future writing, and all of your endeavors.

Ryan Mattern holds an MA in Creative Writing from UC Davis and a BA in Creative Writing from CSUSB. He is the recipient of the Felix Valdez Award for Undergraduate Fiction. His work has appeared in Crazyhorse, The Santa Clara Review, and Westerly Magazine. He lives in Big Sur, CA.

Tell us about yourself.

I grew up in Southern California in a place called Norco—Horsetown, USA. I think there are more horses there per square foot than any other city in the US. Or maybe they just say that. We didn’t have streetlights or sidewalks, just horse trails. The Jack-in-the-Box had a hitching post, still does, I think. In high school I played in bands, wrote songs about girls. I think that’s when I started taking writing seriously.

I went to California State University, San Bernardino to study Creative Writing. They had an awesome faculty at the time—Jim Brown, Julie Paegle, Kevin Moffett, Juan Delgado, Chad Sweeney—as well as some really talented students. I guess they saw something in me and pushed me to write hard and try for grad school. I applied to a few MFA programs with little luck. But one night while I was hanging out at a coffee shop, waiting for my then-girlfriend now-wife to get off work, I got a phone call from Pam Houston. She said she thought I was a gifted writer, but that I had a dreadful GRE score and that UC Davis was reluctantly offering me admission to their MA program for Creative Writing. It was an immense experience to work with her, Lynn Freed, Yiyun Li, and Lucy Corin.

Now I live in Big Sur, California with my wife and daughter, which is as wild to me a notion as it is in general.

Veer illustrates the complexity of grief. How has your own experience of grief impacted this story?

It’s strange how varied the grieving process can be, given it’s a mainstay in the human experience. I lost my grandmother a few months before my wedding. To say she and I were close would perpetrate the greatest misunderstanding. She essentially raised me the first few years of my life and our codependence only grew as I got older. I’m sure it worked its way into Veer, the not knowing what you should be doing but knowing you need to do something. Feeling totally lost. Wrestling with how to do right by someone who is no longer around to see if you kept your word. The mild self-destruction.

I love this line from Veer, “But it was the expectation of her service—to weep, to join support groups, to pin a ribbon to her shirt, to start a foundation—that made her dream of exile.” Is there a certain amount of pressure or expectation that comes with grief? Why or why not?

There’s definitely an expectation associated with grief. You’re not meant to be visibly okay for a time, and if you are, people think it’s a farce. You’re acting tough to cover it up. Because my grandmother and I were so close—she made no bones about me being the favorite grandchild—and because I was a writer, I was asked to write a eulogy. I think everyone expected for it to be a doozy. It probably was, if not a tad overwritten. 

Do you have experience in law enforcement or a loved one who was in law enforcement? How has that shaped your worldview?

I have LEO friends and Firefighter/First Responder family. It’s definitely shaped my perspective. They’re people I look up to by and large, especially my brother-in-law. He belongs to the breed of people like many LEO and First Responders who train hard, put people first, and are always genuinely trying to do the right thing. 

What is the value of an artist experimenting across mediums? How has it helped your own work?

I think it’s very important for an artist to dabble. I don’t limit myself strictly to writing fiction—I try to follow my mood or whatever is most exciting to me at the moment. I tend to lean into whatever I think will get the job done. Sometimes that’s writing a song or a poem, others it’s sketching or cutting up articles from a hunting magazine to find two lines of dialogue. Sometimes it’s writing the theme song for my daughter’s summer camp troop, Condor Galaxy. I can’t remember if it was Bret Easton Elis or Denis Johnson who said they’re always working on a story, a poem, and a play all at once, that way they never had an excuse not to write. Always having something at hand, irrespective of medium, has definitely helped keep my artistic endeavor an essential element of my life, without all the pressure of having to get this one thing done. 

What is your favorite form of creative expression? Why?

Poetry. It’s very therapeutic for me, an unjunking of my brain. There are no rules or limitations—not that there are in fiction anymore (although I do think there is a fundamental rule in fiction or at least one to which I hold myself: The story must be the point after which nothing is the same). For me, poetry does a better job of mimicking experience. It can subvert the mind’s task of tidying up and indexing. Non sequiturs get to live together on the page miles away from meaning anything, or, sometimes, meaning something incredibly powerful without even the poet’s knowing. I feel less pressure, less confined when writing poetry. 

Where do you draw your inspiration for your creative work?

I’ve always had a pretty active imagination. I’m a millennial who isn’t addicted to his phone because I’m really good at daydreaming. I never thought that trait would be a value added to my life. Writing, for me, is compulsive. It’s something I feel I have to do—not always something I want to do. I would say very little of my own life finds its way into my fiction. I very much believe in the concept of the muse. Much of my stories begin with a line that has appeared in my mind at random, out of nowhere, with no seeming connection to my actual life. Then, I just feel compelled to run it down and see where I’m taken. The payoff for me is the surprise of what happened. Maybe that’s my inspiration. 

Tell us about your service in the US Army.

I joined the Army right after grad school, a little later in life than most. Two of the men I hold in very high regard—my father-in-law and my brother-in-law—are both veterans. I think I just wanted to be more like them. I have been on active duty for ten years and so far it has been great for me and my family. Some of the most intelligent, caring, and hardworking people I have ever met wear the uniform. I feel very privileged to serve. 

Does the structure of army life filter into your writing life? Why or why not?

The Army does an excellent job of instilling the value of discipline and that has certainly trickled into my writing process. I am much more regimented now as a writer than I ever was prior to serving. As a husband and father and full-time Soldier, I don’t have a lot of time to write. So, I have to be very strategic and disciplined about ensuring I make time for my writing. The Army has also made me an early bird. At 35, I’m finding the best stuff comes right at five in the morning, before I’ve let the world in. Much better than staying up and writing past midnight in my opinion. 

What do you think of when you hear, “The Good Life?”

When I was 18, I used to play poker at an Indian casino in Palm Springs. They would bus in all the old-timers from local retirement communities. They lavished in the opportunity to share their stories and age-old wisdom with a young, captive audience. When I think of “The Good Life,” I think of something one of the men wrote on the back of a lunch buffet coupon and handed to me, right before losing with a pair of aces to my triple queens on the river. Recipe for a happy life: (1) Something to do. (2) Something to want. (3) Someone to love. I still have that coupon in a box somewhere.

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Ryan’s flash fiction, Veer, is featured in Issue #16 of The Good Life Review.

Thank you, Ryan, for being a part of our growing literary community and for spending extra time with us on this Q&A. We wish you the best!

Cortez is a poet and short fiction writer in Brooklyn, New York. She is an MFA candidate at Stony Brook University and her work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail.

Tell us about yourself. 

I’m a fiction writer and preschool teacher in Brooklyn, New York. 

Why did you decide to get your MFA? 

I taught eighth grade for a year after graduating from The New School, and for that entire year, I didn’t write a single piece or read a single book. There were a lot of factors, it was a particularly intense, (anti-child in my opinion) charter school, it was the covid/zoom year, but I also felt that I’d be more likely to write again with some structure and deadlines. I picked Stony Brook because it was relatively inexpensive and there is a lot of flexibility for students to write across genre. Financially speaking, I probably should’ve just found a workshop group or something, but in terms of community/ my growth as a writer, it was the best decision I’ve ever made! 

How has your MFA program impacted your writing? 

My MFA program has shaped me completely. I studied under Robert Lopez and really found my style and voice in his workshops. He encouraged us to shed anything that felt artificial and to write out of a love of language, but also gave us permission to “fuck it up.” He assigned writers like Jenny Offill, Peter Markus, Joe Wenderoth, Garielle Lutz and Denis Johnson and totally opened me up to the world of experimental fiction. I entered the program as an essay writer and poet and he greeted my first short story attempts with enthusiasm. At the same time, he created an environment that made me want to be excellent. I’d been in so many praise party workshops and came to realize how much that had held me back. I took his class every semester. 

I also have a wonderful, supportive cohort and met people who are now some of my closest friends and forever readers. I think the MFA has shaped my writing on the technical level– I’ve received great feedback, and have been assigned writers that became major influences for me– but the community also imbued me with more confidence. I know to trust my instincts now, but I also just have better instincts. 

What inspired you to write Blue Light? 

I think it’s really embarrassing as a writer to describe something “coming to you,” but the scene in which the narrator fantasizes about telling her roommate about her high school girlfriend “came to me” one night in my bedroom, and I just feverishly wrote it down in my iphone notes. For a few weeks, it just existed as that, and I sort of had to work backwards to determine who was speaking. I knew I wanted to write something that dealt with pregnancy in some way, it’s kind of a fixation of mine– the loss of control in it, and the way it is so fundamentally out of sync with our world, so animal. The more I thought about it, the more I thought it would be interesting to see how someone whose world occurs so heavily online would negotiate something as primal as a pregnancy.

Social media was definitely an indirect inspiration as well. I work in early childhood and adore kids, and I’m pretty sure my phone’s vague knowledge of that, plus my age/ gender demographic info has made it so that my feeds are entirely “mommy” content. I didn’t intentionally set out to write about it, but I think my brain contains a very extensive bank of trendy parenting content that was waiting to be channeled into something. 

Blue Light is so honest. I love the details right down to “I hover my mouse over the document intermittently, so I still show up as ‘active’ on my boss’s end.” How do you feel the protagonist’s unplanned pregnancy has forced her to be honest with herself? 

Her honesty is interesting. She’s certainly blunt and is able to be honest about certain things– her annoyance toward her roommate/polyamory, her lack of investment in her job, her generally cynical outlook. But when it comes to the possible pregnancy, most of her insights are delivered as jokes. There’s the bit about the child’s high school graduation falling on the day that she and her “boyfriend” go out and the detail about childproofing his ridiculous luxury apartment, but no straightforward expression of any real fear. Because the reality of her situation hasn’t really sunk in, her anxiety is sublimated to this almost obsessive hatred of her roommate. The unplanned pregnancy tests this very matter-of-fact exterior she’s put up. I think the “arc” of the story has to do with her vulnerability beginning to seep through. It really comes out as she’s sitting in her bed, thinking of being young in her bed, and we get a glimpse of the part of her that is kept from us, the part that is a scared little girl. 

Your character voices are spot on, especially the self-righteous roommate. What’s your secret to channeling character voice? How do you get to know your characters? 

I really appreciate that! I mean, for the roommate I was definitely partially inspired by the like “your roommate Sock in Bushwick” memes, but I also wanted to just create a person who was earnest, maybe even happy, and who could starkly contrast the narrator. I’m not sure I have a secret for channeling voice. My stake in fiction is far more in the sentence and in character than in “story” in the conventional sense, so I have a lot of fun with dialogue and maybe that enthusiasm shines through. But I also just read a lot of writers with strong voices. I was reading Samantha Hunt’s story collection around the time I was writing this, and she continues to be a huge influence. 

What is your favorite genre to write? Why? 

Short fiction by far! I’m not technical about anything generally, but I derive so much joy from the rules and definitions of short fiction– that something needs to change/turn by the end, that the story has to occur in the first sentence, or a definition that my professor Robert often shares from V. S. Pritchett– that a short story is “something glanced out of the corner of the eye in passing.” There is also just something so fun and whimsical about making things up. And then, finding opportunities to subvert expectation, to find the margins of a moment that are infinitely more interesting than the moment itself.

How has writing impacted your daily life? 

I’m not someone who writes every day, not even every week, but I find whenever I’m “not writing,” I still am. When I’ve taken a period off and I finally sit down and start something, I find that the entire time I was technically “not writing” I was mining, and all of those little reflections and interactions make their way onto the page. So I think, inadvertently, I am always writing, and that’s its impact, that it’s just always there in the back of my mind, framing everything. 

What do you think of when you hear, “The Good Life?” 

I grew up in Omaha, and I think of that sign on the highway! When I think of the really joyous moments of childhood, they’re all in the car, when our family would road trip to Texas, or visit family in other towns in Nebraska or Iowa. Sitting in the backseat, listening to my iPod and looking out at the road, everything feeling so vast.

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Cortez’s fiction piece, “Blue Light,” is featured in Issue #15 ~ Spring 2024.

Thank you, Cortez, for allowing us to share your story with a wider audience and for taking extra time on this Q&A with us! We’re glad we were able to connect and wish you the best with your writing and all of your endeavors.

Cat Casey is an MFA candidate in Fiction at the University of New Hampshire. She currently serves as the Arts editor for Barnstorm Literary Journal, and as the co-host of the Read Free or Die live reading series. Her work has been published previously in the Long River Review.

Tell us about yourself.

I’m Cat. I’m a Cancer/Leo cusp, which means I’m about to be twenty-four soon, with a Pisces moon and a Capricorn rising. I grew up in Southeastern Massachusetts in a working-class, single mother household, whereas for the majority of my life my father has lived in Northern Ireland. I’ve spent most of my life between those two places. This dual identity influences most of my work, even when I don’t mean for it to.

How has your strategy of using one, long sentence in “smoke break” helped to paint a vivid picture of your narrator? Have you used this strategy before?

“smoke break” was actually the result of a writing exercise inspired by “Sweet Sixteen” by Gary D. Wilson, in which he utilizes the same strategy to tell a much different story. I really wanted to use the structure of the piece in a way that connected to the mindset of the narrator, and at the time I was at a restaurant job where I was constantly running around (and up and down a huge flight of stairs that lead to the kitchen) so it felt like a natural direction to go in for a frantic sort of stream of consciousness. This was the first time I had tried something like this, but I did eventually end up using it as a writing assignment for the creative writing class I taught at the University of New Hampshire this past Spring.

What do you hope your reader takes away from ‘smoke break?’

Not to ask your waitress for free favors! But in actuality, I often felt like I had to lose my sense of humanity in order to continue working in customer service, especially food service. It might sound like an obvious sentiment but if there’s one thing I can get across with ‘smoke break,’ it’s to treat service workers with some grace – and perhaps to highlight the complex inner worlds experienced by all people, even those that are paid to serve you. Sometimes our lives may seem small but that’s not really up to anyone else to decide.

How do you relate to your narrator? How are you different?

I always liked to preface public readings of ‘smoke break’ with the pre-warning that it’s fictive; I would never romance a line cook. (This is, however, a lie, because I have often found there is innate eroticism in the forced proximity of working together, but this is perhaps because I come from a very small town).

Despite that, the narrator is so close to me that this could honestly be considered some form of autofiction. I’ve been working in customer service since I was freshly sixteen, and I’ve been waiting tables/bartending for about three years now. Like the narrator, it often feels like I’m forced to think in one long interrupted sentence. She’s also so concerned about how the men around her are consuming her body, which definitely rings true for at least past versions of me. Like her, I find it hard to quit bad habits. Unlike her, I don’t think I’d let someone be so mean to me; but that’s a lesson she’ll learn eventually.

How has serving as the Arts Editor of Barnstorm Literary Journal affected your own creativity?

I’m a very visual person. When I’m stuck on a piece or I’m feeling a lack of ideas, I often draw people until one of them seems interesting enough to follow up with for some sort of character building or study. Arts editing felt like a much more professional version of that, in which I was constantly thinking about elements of storytelling and how they aligned visually with the library of submissions I had to work with. Additionally, it’s just interesting to see publishing from the other side and to see how much consideration goes into the selection process for submissions.

How has being the co-host of the Read Free or Die live reading series inspired you?

I loved hosting Read Free or Die. It was not only a very fulfilling experience by getting the chance to platform other writers and promote the sharing of their work, it was also just really fun. I worked for years in comedy event planning when I was in college, in which I was in charge of planning and booking events related to comedy and comedians, but this was the first time I was working on events related to something I have a vested professional and personal interest in. It definitely made me think of ways to better convey my ideas in written work that was specifically written for performance. Hosting the live reading series made me reconsider a lot of my earlier pieces and the forms in which I originally tried to write them – a lot of short stories might be performance pieces and monologues in disguise if you look hard enough!

How do you fill your creativity cup?

I like to go for long walks with a podcast or an audiobook, and even though I write fiction it’s usually creative nonfiction that I tend to listen to. I love to crochet, and I find that having my hands busy lets my mind wander more easily when it comes to writer’s block or thinking of new ideas – the same goes for drawing. Otherwise, I honestly dedicate a lot of my free time not working or writing to watching movies. I minored in film in college, and spent all of high school working at a local movie theater, so it’s always been a fairly generative experience for me to watch visual storytelling compared to the written kind.

How has your time in the MFA program at the University of New Hampshire helped you grow as a writer and as an individual?

It’s easier to think of how it hasn’t helped me grow. I’ve had such an incredible experience at the UNH MFA; I shudder to think of the work I submitted in my original portfolio with my application. I feel like I’m a completely different writer than when I started, thanks in part to the faculty and my friends and peers who I’ve had the pleasure of working with. Everyone always talks about the time portion of the MFA, how it forces you to really dedicate a lot of your time and mental capacity towards writing, but there’s also so many resources I didn’t know about that I only learned of thanks to the people in my program. 

On a personal level, I have met so many wonderful friends in my MFA, and outside of it in the New Hampshire seacoast area. They have encouraged me to grow and write better just by enriching my life the way that they do. 

What do you think of when you hear, “The Good Life?”

A life with people I love, who love me. A body that’s just a body, and a compassion for the self that outweighs anything else.

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Casey’s flash fiction, “smoke break,” is featured in Issue #15.

Thank you, Cat, for being open to doing this Q&A with us and for allowing us to publish your kick-ass flash story! Best of luck as you finish your MFA!

Jacqueline Goyette is a writer from Indianapolis, Indiana. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and has appeared in both print and online journals, including trampset, JMWW, Heimat Review, The Citron Review, Eunoia Review, and Cutbow Quarterly. She currently lives in the town of Macerata, Italy with her husband Antonello and her cat Cardamom.

Tell us about yourself.

Growing up in Indianapolis I was always a homebody. I preferred staying home on Friday nights rather than going to school dances, and I spent time writing or playing computer games, or getting lost in a good book. So this move to Italy that I made at 25 years old was a little bit of a surprise for everyone (myself included), and even now there are times all these years later when I wonder how this happened, how did I get here to this corner of the world? I miss home so much, but I love living here now, and I’ve spent twenty years (we just celebrated our anniversary) married to a shoemaker named Antonello who reads my writing along with me — but he reads it translated into Italian. We have a kitten too, and of course, she is bilingual. 

To me “Odore di Neve” not only felt like a response to being homesick but also a response to the fear of losing the memories of home. Tell us about that time of your life when you wrote “Odore di Neve” and how it inspired your writing.

I wrote this piece in the middle of January, and I was inspired by the drive to work, which is mostly side roads actually, and it weaves its way through countryside and farmland and small hill towns — beautiful places. I’m always inspired by the way the land changes in Italy, how seasons can craft a new world every few months, how the chill or the heat or the wind or rain makes such a difference, and the drive itself is always striking. In the winter, though, the holidays are still lingering and it’s homesick weather, and back in the Midwest those winters with their snow and their icy roads carry so much of my childhood with them. So there’s always a part of my heart being tugged toward home, and I think this piece reflects that, and the way we are always moving away from childhood as we grow up — in every year that passes.

At the end of “Odore di Neve” you reference ‘sniffing out the rest of the year like a prophecy.’ What does that prophecy hold for your upcoming year?

My niece Valentina does tarot card readings and before she places the cards down, she has you ask a question of the cards. Go on, she’ll say. What do you want them to tell you? She says that sometimes the questions are more interesting than the readings themselves, and I sense that now. This year feels like a year of questions, for me. Maybe the prophecy lies somewhere inside that notion like we can find the future in how we ask for it. Some years are like that, like Zora Neale Hurston says in “Their Eyes Were Watching God”: “years that ask questions and years that answer.”

What do you hope your readers take from “Odore di Neve?”

I talked to my dad about it when he read it, and he said that there are these universal questions, about friendship, about growing up, about aging, that make it relatable. So much of what we see is through the lens of our younger selves. But I also wanted to focus on the idea of these moments we have in which we observe our lives as we’re living them. Sometimes those moments hit us all at once — a spark, a surprise. I really love Marie Howe and her collection of poems “What The Living Do.” All of the normal stuff, the mundane and ordinary — how all of that everyday living adds up to a life. 

How long have you been living in Italy? What about Italy inspires your writing? 

Italy is inspiring in so many ways. It has made me more aware of my roots, my family, the things we give up before we are ready to, and the things we gain in letting go. I’ve lived here for a little over 20 years now, and Italy is the kind of place that inspires you to bear witness to your life, to take notes as you go. “Odore di Neve” is really just a moment in that process: the things that cause me to pull over to the side of the road on the way to work or wherever it is I’m going and just pay attention: to stop and see, to scribble a line or two about the sunflowers that flood the fields in summer, or the ancient aqueduct I go by on my morning drive.

How has living in a new country changed your perspective on American life?

Living in Italy has changed me immensely, and in many good ways, but for those first few years there was a very tangible sense of homesickness that made it difficult to adjust to life over here. I think I learned to appreciate American life so much more than I expected to: even in the midst of this beautiful backdrop of Italy, I missed the people back home, how friendly we are even to complete strangers — the way we nod, say hello, smile on the streets as we walk by. Just those courtesies. You notice it immediately when you are a stranger to everyone in a foreign country, and it took me a while to get used to the interactions here, how you get to know people better, but you have to give it time. It was the opposite for my husband when he first visited America with me. He kept asking me: why is everyone saying hello to me? What do they want? I don’t even know them! 

As an English teacher, what advice do you give to your students about writing?

I think sometimes I learn more from my students than they do from me when it comes to writing, but one thing I always remind them is to keep things simple. Don’t overcomplicate. Remember how beautiful English can be when it is just a clean line of prose. Great advice if I could only follow it myself! What I love about my students is how brave they are to just get started, to write something out in another language, brand new, however daunting that may be, and find a voice that is all their own.

What is a must-read craft book for any aspiring writer and why?

So many! I love Anne Lammott’s Bird by Bird which I read years ago, and I always find myself coming back to its dog-eared pages and notes in the margins. She’s been there from the start. I also love reading articles on craft, including Brevity Blog, and I love the Craft Talks webinars as well. One of my favorite books though that I return to again and again is Lynda Barry’s Making Comics. She is phenomenal, and I think approaching one art form with another art form in mind helps me to explore all avenues, see where a moment takes me, get my ideas down, and just go. 

“Odore di Neve” is a flash nonfiction piece. Is that your favorite form of expression? Why? If not, what is?

Yes, I do love flash CNF, but lately I’ve really been into writing hybrid work and micro prose, as well as prose poems. I love how visual arts can fit alongside written works — I love exploring new directions. Flash is extra special though, because it pushes us to get straight to the heart of the story, which is always a challenge for me as a writer.

What do you think of when you hear, “the good life?”

When I think of the good life, I think of my very first days in Macerata, twenty-five years ago as a study abroad student, back when I was brand new to this splendid country and my friends and I stood in oversized aprons in our fourth-floor apartment on Via Borghi, and we made up recipes and laughed until we cried and burnt French toast and fell in love with an entire city, an entire language, an entire country. I can’t think of a better life than that.

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Jacqueline’s Flash Creative Nonfiction, “Odore di Neve” is featured in Issue #15 of The Good Life Review.

Thank you, Jacqueline, for allowing us to share a slice of your life with us and our readers and for spending extra time with us on this Q&A. We wish you the best wherever life takes you!

L. L. Babb has been a teacher for the Writers Studio San Francisco and on-line since 2008. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming at the West Marin Review, Cleaver, the San Francisco Chronicle, Goldman Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, the MacGuffin, and elsewhere. She received a special mention in the 2022 Pushcart anthology for her short story, “Where Have You Been All Your Life.” Lorraine lives deep among the trees of Forestville, CA with her husband Cornbaby Johnson, her dog Smudge, and her cat Cosmo.

Tell us about yourself.

My writing life started when I was seven years old and I read The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland. It took me an entire week to struggle through it. Then I read it over again the next day and discovered the joy of being totally immersed in a book. I wanted to be able to do what Carrol did—write a story and take the reader somewhere magical, alien, and fantastic. Ever since then I’ve been creating people and watching what they do when I put them in motion.

Your story “Funny” was riveting, with the tension building to a shocking and thought-provoking ending. Do you have tricks to share with other fiction writers about keeping their readers engaged right up to the end?

My writing is usually (hopefully) character driven. Kiki creates a lot of tension as she moves through the story. Kiki is just out of prison but the reader doesn’t immediately know what she was incarcerated for. There’s a contrast between what a normal mother would do—see her children—and what Kiki does—focus her love on the dogs and fixate on a stranger in AA. Recovering alcoholics often have blunted or misplaced emotions. The very fact that the reader doesn’t understand Kiki’s actions builds tension and keeps them reading.

How much research did you have to do about life in a halfway house and the criminal justice system to write this story?

I don’t do a lot of research for my short stories. I looked up the official name for a halfway house in some states, the Residential Recovery Center. I did a little research on what the sentence might be for vehicular manslaughter while driving under the influence. If I do too much research, I have a tendency to try to smash it all in which ultimately turns a short story into a Sixty Minutes episode.

I once published a story about a woman who lived on a sheep ranch. I know almost nothing about sheep farming. After a public reading, several people approached me to ask where my ranch was in relation to the bookstore. You can make up most of the little details if the characters feel like real people.

What do you want your readers to take away from “Funny?”

Interesting question. I’ve noticed that many of the characters in my stories are overwhelmed or confused about how exactly to live their lives. Or alternatively, they think they have it all together and it’s quite apparent that they do not. Perhaps it’s important to me that we recognize the human-ness of these sort of lost individuals and acknowledge those traits in ourselves.

How has your life as a teacher provided inspiration in your own writing?

I teach writing part-time in the evenings. My full-time job is as a bespectacled accountant with a mechanical pencil tucked behind one ear. Teaching lets me wave my freaky flag and be myself. Since I started teaching, I’ve met so many wonderful students who have become friends and helped form an artistic community that bolsters all of us. Also teaching lets me exercise my barely controlled “know-it-all” personality in an acceptable setting.

What do you do to keep your writing muse energized and ready to create?

I read. I read novels, short stories and memoirs. I read the New Yorker short stories and the Pushcart Prize anthology. I read the classics. I sometimes read poetry out loud before I start writing. I read Charles Baxter’s essays on writing. No wait, I read everybody’s essays on writing. I read college textbooks on creative writing, dog-eared fiction anthologies that people stuff into little libraries on the street (which I cannot pass without pulling something out.) I subscribe to George Saunders’ Substack. I search constantly for words that surprise me, stick them on post-it notes, and try to work them into my own writing.

Which writing mantra do you lean more towards – ‘write what you know’ or ‘write what you want to know?’ Why?

I’m probably a “write what you know” kind of person. As I mentioned earlier, too much research usually backfires in my stories. I don’t need to do a lot of research to get into my characters’ heads, just a good imagination.

What advice can you give to new writers based on your own writing journey?

Read a lot. Try to write every day. Treat your writing like a job with a schedule and expectations to meet. Embrace rejection, allow yourself to feel bad about it for 24 hours, and move on.

What do you think of when you hear the words, “The Good Life?”

Interestingly enough, that is the motto of the little town where I live. It’s on everybody’s license plate frame—“Forestville. The Good Life.” So, I think of home and of my little writing studio in the trees. I think of my puppy at my feet and my cat stalking the lizards sunning on the retaining wall. I think of blue sky days or the foggy coastal mornings or the rain hitting the roof of my studio while my space heater purrs. I think of spotty internet and power outages that give me a chance to slow down and take a step back from hurrying through my one and only existence.

“When you say you’re going into work, as a writer, what you mean is you’re about to crawl into your fucking nerves.” From Roethke in the Bughouse by Kevin Barry

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L.L. Babb’s short fiction piece, Funny, is featured in our Spring 2024 Edition ~ Issue #15.

Thank you, Lorraine, for allowing us to share your story with a wider audience and for taking extra time on this Q&A with us! We’re glad we were able to connect and wish you the best with your writing and all of your endeavors.

 

Years ago, Jacob Orlando’s mentor, novelist Katharine Noel, gave him the advice to write what feels hot. According to Orlando, that advice has been a ‘north star’ for his writing.  As a member of a generation that grew up with mass shootings in schools, a hot topic for some of Orlando’s writing has been gun violence and mass shootings. 

“I grew up in a generation of increasingly normalized school shootings in particular and gun violence in general,” said Orlando. “Gun violence and mass shootings at schools and other places inflict so much trauma on this country and I think writers can help shine a light on why that’s happening and how it might happen less. We need to push back against the idea that this is something that we just have to live with.”

In Grasshopper Gut Punch, Orlando tells the story of two young men who’ve been at odds with one another but also are connected through their complicated relationship. After a boy named Cody Willis has died, the narrator reflects on his past with Cody and explains a prank he pulled on Cody by filling his truck cab with grasshoppers on the night of homecoming. Throughout the story we see two boys trying to figure out their feelings for each other.

It’s not until the very end that we realize the narrator’s reflection has been a way for him to mourn the loss of Cody, who died in a school shooting the same night of the narrator’s prank. It appears the narrator hadn’t fully understood his feelings for Cody and now regretted he would never find out.

“I hope that the sleight of hand in the opening gives the reader more power to draw their own conclusion about the actions and motivations of the narrator,” said Orlando. “I guess this can reflect that we don’t usually understand why a perpetrator makes his choices in these cases. Oftentimes we just get a news story, we get some numbers. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s closer to home than others. Maybe we know or have some connection to the community or the people who are affected directly. Maybe we are on the scene.” 

While the narrator went to elaborate lengths to fill Cody’s truck with grasshoppers as an act of aggression, a school shooter was the one successful in hurting Cody in a way that the narrator never dreamed.

“What I set out to do was show in sharp relief a more unthinkable act of perpetrating a shooting — taking the life of one or many people in a really violent, shocking, and painful way,” said Orlando. “To say to a potential perpetrator – go for the grasshoppers, not the gun.”  

Grasshopper Gut Punch could have just been a story about two young men figuring out their place in the world and how they fit into each other’s world, but instead, Orlando chose to follow what felt hot and show that while the grasshopper prank and the school shooting are both acts of aggression, the consequences of crossing that very clear between the two have dire and tragic consequences. 

“I hope that their complicated relationship gets at the trauma behind the numbers of dead and injured at these mass shootings,” said Orlando. “Everyone means something to someone, and relationships can be complicated and tangled and messy, even between two guys. That can include passion, envy, competition, anger, rage, and it can still be so meaningful to a person’s life and their personhood, and it can be so terrible to lose.”

Orlando has two other published pieces that include the topic of gun violence. Molten won last year’s New Millennium Writings Award for Flash Fiction. This piece focused largely on gun violence. Down too Many, was published in The Q&A Queerzine. Like Grasshopper Gut Punch, this piece had an incident of gun violence at the end, defining the story.

According to Orlando, he is just trying to tell human stories about people struggling with the consequences of their own actions and sometimes the actions of others. Gun violence isn’t the only thing he’s trying to work through on the page.

“I’m queer and interested in complicating, challenging my understanding of queerness and what that means for me and what it means for how I move through the world,” said Orlando. 

Orlando writes poetry, flash fiction and fiction. He is especially drawn to fiction and works that he says, ‘complicates our understanding of queerness.’ 

“I like fiction because it leaves a lot of space for nuance,” said Orlando. “I think there is so much room to express my thoughts about something. To conduct thought experiments with these made-up people and settings.”

Orlando has taken the advice from his former mentor about following the heat in his writing. He has been able to use his writing for his own understanding of his place in the world, but also as a platform against issues such as gun violence. 

Under the surface of his writing is a call to people to deepen their relationships, talk to the guy no one talks to, and help change the ending to a story such as Grasshopper Gut Punch.  

“There are lots of issues and I don’t think this is the only thing that I will feel that heat in,” said Orlando. “But I was a part of that generation for which gun violence was normalized and I feel that I can’t just sit back and say, ‘it is what it is, this is America.’”

Thank you, Jacob, for spending extra time with us on this interview. We are grateful for your passion for writing, the intention and care evident in your piece and your answers, and your willingness to take on such complex issues. We wish you the best.

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Jacob Orlando’s story, Grasshopper Gut Punch, can be found in Issue #15 ~ Spring 2024.