Author: Christine Nessler

This week’s Author Q&A is with Ellen June Wright. Wright was born in Bedford, England but currently lives in New Jersey. Her poems have appeared in the Naugatuck River Review, New York Quarterly, Plume, Atlanta Review, Solstice, Tar River Poetry, Paterson Literary Review, Gordon Square Review, The South Carolina Review, Obsidian, Caribbean Writer and Tulsa Review. She’s also a repeat contributor here at TGLR and her poem, What They Carried With Them, is available in Issue #6.

Ellen June is a Cave Canem and Hurston/Wright alumna. She received six Pushcart Prize nominations between 2021 and 2022. When she is not writing, she enjoys crocheting, swimming and watching British crime dramas. You may follow her on https://twitter.com/EllenJuneWrites and https://www.instagram.com/ellenjunewrites/

Wright’s poem, I Remember Good Days, is featured in Issue #11 of The Good Life Review. 

Tell us about yourself.

My Jamaican mother and I came to the States from England in the spring of 1968. She had every intention of creating a new life for herself in her new country. I was five going on six and had a front row seat to her tenacious effort to eventually bring all her children together and give them an opportunity to make lives for themselves in America.

What inspired you to write I Remember Good Days?

The challenge for Black writers to write poems of joy because we are more than our trauma.

What message do you hope reaches your audience through I Remember Good Days?

It’s not a message poem. It’s just a memory of a beautiful day by the river and a single mom trying to give her kids a picnic afternoon out. We choose what we hold onto. You can spend all your time remembering things that wounded you, or you can spend your time remembering joy and things that made you happy, even if they were few and far between. Your focus is your choice. For my mental health, I’m choosing to remember the good days.

What impacted you most when writing it?

It’s easy to remember the pain of growing up, but I wanted to make myself remember the good times. The trip, on a weekend afternoon, to the Hudson River picnic area is a delightful memory, and that’s what I tried to capture.

Tell us about the work you have done or do that makes you most proud.

Years ago, I challenged myself to write one-thousand poems before deciding if I was a poet. I don’t think I’ve reached that number yet, but I’ve written a lot during the pandemic and have had the fortune to publish close to one-hundred-fifty pieces. I also completed two manuscripts: one in response to the NY Times 1619 Project and a woman called Angela who was among the first Africans enslaved in Jamestown, Virginia. I spent a year and a half thinking about this woman and what her life might have been, and I’ve completed seventy poems in memory of her. I hope to find a publisher this year.

What is your writing process? How do you make it a part of your daily life?

I often begin my day reading my favorite online poetry journals. I read until a particular poem speaks to me or sparks in me the impetus to create a new poem. It could be a word, phrase or line that sparks the beginning of a poem. I honor that impetus and try to capture whatever it is I’m feeling in response to what I’ve read. It’s also a way of never having writer’s block. If I can’t think of something on my own, I have a universe of poems that inspires me on any given day. I also have a trove of unpublished poems written over the last thirty years that I revise periodically.

How has your previous experience as a teacher impacted the way you write?

Many of the books that I taught over my thirty-three year career as a language arts instructor influence my poetry; particularly Romeo and Juliet, The Odyssey and Greek mythology in general permeate my poems. As a language arts instructor, I wanted to teach students how to write clearly and effectively; that also is a big influence on how I write poetry. I tend to say what I mean.

What is your favorite type of poetry to write?

I write about nature, eco-poems, history, African-American life, my mother’s life, coming of age, ekphrasis and ars poetica to name a few.

How has writing poetry impacted your life?

I began writing poetry in junior high school in my creative writing class, and I think it was the first time I felt I had a talent. I don’t think before that I had found anything unique about myself as a student or person, but my creative writing teacher seemed to enjoy my poems, and that made me want to write more. I found it was something that came naturally to me, and her response was affirming where there wasn’t much else that affirmed my humanity.

What part of the artistic process do you consider to be the most difficult, as well as most satisfying, and why?

My poems tend to be short, a page or less. My challenges as a writer are writing longer pieces, pieces that extend the metaphor or carry the narrative for a longer duration. Another challenge is creating new or unique metaphors. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of repeating something that you’ve read, heard or seen before. The most satisfying part of the writing process is surprising myself with poems I never knew I had in me. I also like trying forms that are new to me and exploring topics that aren’t always associated with Black writers. And like Jericho Brown’s duplex, I would like to create an original poetic form one day.

What advice can you give to beginning writers?

Write because you have to. Write because it feeds some starving part of you. Write because you want to be the best writer you can be. Write because if you didn’t, you wouldn’t be your truest self. Then try to write on a regular basis and study with the best writers you can. Major poets often lead workshops and classes. If you can’t afford to take workshops or classes then make each poem that speaks to you a class unto itself; study its structure, its tone, its syntax, its word choice. Then write your own version and do that as often as possible. I’m not in an MFA program, but every poem I read has the potential to become a prompt and teach me something about writing that I need to learn.

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

Every day I wake up I have a chance to create the life I want.

---

Thank you, Ellen, for participating in this Q&A and for your continued support of our journal. We wish you the best!!

This week’s Author Q & A is with Sara Burge. Burge is the author of Apocalypse Ranch, and her poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Virginia Quarterly Review, Willow Springs, Prairie Schooner, The American Journal of Poetry, Passengers Journal, River Styx, and elsewhere. She is the Poetry Editor of Moon City Review.

Burge’s poem, Mugshot, is featured in Issue #11 of The Good Life Review.

Tell us about yourself.

I grew up in the rural Missouri Ozarks, so cows and dirt roads tend to pop up in my poems. I earned my MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and teach creative writing at Missouri State University, where I’m also the poetry editor for Moon City Review.

If I could, I would save all the animals and plant all the flowers and spend every other available moment on a river. 

What inspired you to write Mugshot?

My mother sent me an article about two men arrested for stealing catalytic converters, though she didn’t say why she was sending it to me. When I realized one of those men was an old boyfriend of mine, I felt both shock and a deep sadness. The poem is pretty loyal to the back-and-forth my mother and I had. The whole situation made me think about how much older and different we are. And when my mother rhetorically asked what had happened to him, it made me wonder what his life had been like over the years.

What message do you hope reaches your audience through Mugshot?

At its core, it’s about the complexity of people. Even if someone has done a “bad” thing, that person isn’t necessarily a “bad” person. Each of us is a universe of complexities. We all have moments that haunt us, that change us forever, and we can’t know how changed we will be. It’s about how grief never truly leaves us, though it manifests in different ways for different people. 

What impacted you most when writing it? How was the process therapeutic?

The ending surprised me, honestly. I didn’t know that was where the poem was headed, which is a lot like how we don’t know when traumatic moments will tap us on the shoulder. I’ve written about my brother’s suicide in other poems, though not in a while. “Mugshot” isn’t about him, and yet, it is. I can’t separate that old boyfriend from my brother, as he was the one who found him. 

Tell us about the work you have done or do that makes you most proud.

I am proud of my first book, of course, but I’m most proud when people are affected by my poems. When I give a reading and someone takes the time to tell me it impacted them. Maybe they felt that way, too, but were afraid to write about it, or a poem made them laugh. When I move someone, I get that buzz that makes me grateful to be a poet. 

What is your writing process? How do you make it a part of your daily life?

I always write a few days a week. I don’t set a strict schedule for myself so that if I can’t write that day, I won’t beat myself up. Any time I get the kernel of an idea, I write it down somewhere. I have a huge list of ideas in my notes.

Most importantly, I have a small group of writers—people whose feedback I trust—I exchange poems with each week, and our deal is that if we don’t send a poem by the end of the week, we owe the other members $10. That will make you churn something out, even if it’s half-baked. We regularly send each other word lists, too, because poets love words. A good list of words can breed a poem, even if you sit down with zero ideas. 

How have your life experiences impacted the way you write?

I wonder about that all the time. How would I write if I grew up in a city instead of traipsing around the woods? Or if we’d had more money? Or if I’d been a boy? Or if I hadn’t experienced awfulness at a very young age? Would I even be a writer? The subjects I return to are misogyny, classism, disillusionment, and grief. But I like to laugh, too, so there’s usually some gallows humor thrown in there. And a cow pond. 

How do you encourage your students to draw on life experiences for use in their art?

The main thing I stress is to not let fear silence them. That fear can come from not wanting to open up or from being afraid of writing a “bad” poem. The poem doesn’t have to be perfect–what is a perfect poem? I also make sure they know they don’t have to write about anything they don’t want to. I tell them to lie whenever they need to because we’re poets, not memoirists or journalists. They can write persona poems to explore personal topics. I stress that their experiences are unique, so even if they are not drawing directly from their own lives, their perspectives will affect how the poem communicates–what it sees and how it speaks to an audience. 

What is your favorite type of poetry to write? Do you write in other forms as well?

I don’t have a favorite type, per se, though I love formal poetry and narrative poetry. But I also write lyrics and use experimental structures. I love sound and repetition in poetry–my favorite form is the pantoum, and you can’t beat a good litany.

How has writing poetry impacted your life?

It’s allowed me to meet a lot of fantastic people I never would have met otherwise, whether through my MFA program or getting to know other writers and editors through the submission process or at conferences. I’d probably be making more money if I hadn’t been a poet, but who knows. 

What part of the artistic process do you consider to be the most difficult, as well as most satisfying, and why.

The blank page is the most difficult. Can I do it again? Do I have anything to say? Throw in a little imposter syndrome, and that fear can be paralyzing. But I just put a word or image down and keep going. 

The most satisfying parts are the revision process and the live reading. When I find the way the poem needs to exist–whether it’s finding the right image or metaphor, the right form or pacing, the right ending or way in–it’s a full-body sigh of relief. I’ve created a dream a reader can slip inside. Poetry, ultimately, is communication, so when I finally get to perform poems in front of people and they respond positively (that’s key), it’s electric. 

What advice can you give to beginning writers?

Read. Write when you read something that makes you tingle. Find an element of poetry you love–sound, form, image, whatever–and focus on making the strongest image you can, which will lead you to explore diction, experiment with syntax, find the best turn of the line to make that image come off the page. Most importantly, don’t be afraid. 

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

I’m in a canoe, paddling home. There are cats purring all over the riverbank. One of them is frying me up some catfish and later will help me plant some flowers. Everyone I’ve ever loved is there. 

---

Wonderful answers, Sara, and great advice!! Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions and for contributing to our journal. We wish you the best on all your writing (and life) endeavors.

This week’s Author Q & A is with William Trowbridge. Call Me Fool, William Trowbridge’s ninth poetry collection, came out from Red Hen Press in September. Over 550 of his poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines and in more than fifty anthologies and textbooks. He is a faculty mentor in the University of Nebraska-Omaha Low-residency MFA in Writing Program and was Poet Laureate of Missouri from 2012 to 2016. For more information, see his website at williamtrowbridge.net.

Trowbridge’s poem, War Time, 1942, is featured in Issue #11 of The Good Life Review.

Tell us about yourself.

I was born in Chicago and grew up in Omaha. I have A.B. and M.A. degrees from the University of Missouri and a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University. I taught at Northwest Missouri State University for twenty-seven years and now am a mentor in the University of Nebraska Omaha MFA in Writing Program. I was there when that program started. I was Poet Laureate of Missouri from 2012 to 2016. 

Wartime, 1942 packs a lot of emotion in just a few stanzas, conveying to the reader the shock experienced by a young man transitioning from his peaceful home life to the horrors of war.  What inspired you to write Wartime, 1942 and in this dramatic fashion?

The poem describes a photo of my father cradling me, then an infant, before embarking for the European combat theater in World War II. His unit was to participate in the liberation of the Nazis’ Buchenwald concentration camp, where he encountered the horrors they left behind after fleeing the American forces.

What message do you hope reaches your audience through Wartime, 1942?

I hope the poem will help remind readers of the evils of the Holocaust, especially at a time when anti-semitism seems to be surging in this country. I can imagine what my father and others who risked their lives to defeat the Nazis would think seeing Americans hailing swastikas and Hitler photographs.

How have your life experiences impacted the way you write?

I suppose, like most poets, my poems come either from personal experience or books.

How has poetry shaped your life or helped you make sense of the world around you?

I think writing poems is certainly a way of trying to make sense of the human condition. Of course that’s a lifelong process. 

Tell us about work you have done or are doing that makes you most proud.

I guess I’m most proud of teaching students to appreciate and write poetry, both of which I think enrich their lives. 

How do you encourage your students to express themselves?

I try to encourage students to discover their particular path to writing poems. There are many such paths, but one often starts out writing like a favorite poet/s before developing a unique voice. I always stress how important it is to keep reading lots of good poetry. That’s a primary way to learn to write it. 

How does being an educator change the way you see the world?

I believe being an educator helps a person better empathize with one’s fellow humans.

How do you stay inspired as a poet?

I stay motivated by not waiting for a flash of inspiration. Such a wait can turn writers into would-be writers. I just keep busy at my desk.

What style of poetry helps you to best express yourself and why?

I write both in form and in free verse. My choice depends on the poem I’m writing.

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

Right now, the name of your magazine comes to mind first. I’m still working on that phrase’s meaning in the broader sense. 

This week’s Author Q & A is with Dustin Moon. Moon is a writer from Victoria, BC. His work has appeared in Freefall Magazine, Pulp Literature, and forthcoming in Acta Victoriana and Fusion Fragment. He lives with his husband and their two hyper puppies.

Moon’s fiction story, Roger and Flight 8124, is featured in Issue #11 of The Good Life Review.

Tell us about yourself.

Well, I live in Victoria, B.C. with my husband and our two puppies, both born last year (2022), which was a hell of a choice on our part; I don’t think I’ve felt energized since. We also have full-time jobs so we’re quite busy. I attended the Writing Program at the University of Victoria and finished with a Bachelor of Arts in the field, which thankfully I get to apply to my day job, and I’m just as big a film nerd as a writing nerd.

Roger and Flight 8124 was a touching and relatable story of forgiveness and coming of age. What inspired you to write this story?

Two things:

1. Roger is a character that already exists in other pieces I’ve written as part of a challenge to myself to write multiple short stories from different perspectives of this family. I don’t know if that’s cheating or not (I hope not) but the mention of this story, of Roger’s young trauma, came to me a long time ago when writing about him from one of his sibling’s viewpoints, and that always seemed like a story worth expanding, so here we are.
   
2. The setting for this story—the party at the house on the hill near the river—comes from a swirl of half-formed ideas I’d always had since I was about Roger’s age (in the memory). My teenage years were spent in that town and it’s such a confounding age where you have intelligence and emotions but they haven’t shaken hands yet. So you prioritize bizarrely. You have to drink. You have to smoke. You have to have fun in these prescribed ways even if your perfect notion of fun is a night in with friends, pizza, and a shitty B-movie on VHS. You become convinced that self-worth comes through milestones—and what’s a more salient milestone at fifteen than your virginity?

As an adult it can be powerful to return to the mistakes of youth with a different lens. How did reliving this memory help Roger to realize the predatory nature of his brother-in-law?

Roger is on a discovery of self-worth. If you’re the kind of person who beats themselves up a lot, has low self-esteem, stays quiet in group conversations, etc. then I think it’s a very powerful thing if you can one day tell yourself, “I have self-worth.” That’s enough—you don’t need to dig deeper than that—but Roger isn’t quite there yet, so he’s trying to rationalize his self-worth. Reliving these memories with this in mind I think grants him the ability to recontextualize the odd look across a dinner table, to admit how he felt but also admit he was fifteen (not to mention inebriated), and that it’s okay to shove his guilt on the actual offender, and permit himself to breathe a little easier for once.

What message do you hope reaches your audience through Roger and Flight 8124? 

Self-worth is the big theme of the piece, which popped up to my surprise while writing it. Maybe a good message is that the journey from being mired in self-deprecation to being comfortable with yourself is long, complicated, not always linear, and you’re not failing if you’re “in process” for a long time.

And also forgive yourself for the shit you did when you were fifteen.

What impacted you most when writing it?

Two moments from the story stood out to me after writing it: the first is when Roger and Pearl reunite mid-party in the kitchen and Pearl breaks Roger’s unkind characterization of her and tells him he doesn’t have anything to prove. That was kind of the a-ha moment—like, “Oh, that’s why I’m writing this story.” The other is the line, I wish none of us ever had to be fifteen because that’s a sentiment I’ve always kind of felt, somewhere, ethereally, but this was my first time trying to put it into words, and I think that’s a very universal take. Being fifteen sucks for a lot of people and I wish it didn’t.

Tell us about the work you have done that has made you proud.

One of my first publications was a story called Hey, Little Tomcat in Freefall Magazine, and it means a lot to me because it was a bloated mess in excess of ten thousand words and, after shelving it for the better part of a decade, I told myself I would rip it to shreds, get to the very core of it, and make it 90% better by cutting 90% of it. And I did—and thanks to Freefall for seeing something in it.

I’m proud of the full body of work that Roger’s story is included in. I’ve written four stories about the Ayer family and I can’t predict the future but I feel done with it now—like I did what I set out to do. Hopefully more of Roger and his kin will be available to read one day.

I have a story coming out this summer in Fusion Fragment called Permafrost. Won’t say much except it’s fairly different for me and it’s rare when I finish a story and my first impression is positive. That was this story.

One more worth mentioning is a story called At the End of the Breakwater, which was originally adapted for a podcast called A Story Most Queer. That’s the first story of mine that resonated with my fellow writers during my time at UVic and it has always been my favourite distillation of what high school was like for me: 2005, a quiet town, closeted, scared but also emboldened but also so goddamn scared. I think it’s still my most emotionally impactful story and I hope to see it in print one day.

What is your writing process? How do you make it a part of your daily life?

I know the old adage is write every day, and for good reason, but I also think that’s starting to become a more privileged dictum. Not in the sense that writing itself is difficult to achieve—you can do it whether you have the latest iMac or a dull pencil and sheet of loose leaf—but writing also takes energy and I think many of us are running low right now. I know I am. I think if you just do something for your art—write, read, watch, think, plan, edit—then you’re doing the modern day equivalent of writing every day. I wish I had a routine where I forced myself awake several hours before sunrise, but part of that self-worth journey is self-care, and I know this makes me sound so thirty-three, but holy hell I love sleep.

For me, I write when I can. It’s that simple. If that’s every day for a week, a fortnight, a month, great. If not, then I still read, I still watch, and I think, think, think. Thinking about my stories is invaluable for me—it’s like doing the daily crossword.

How have your life experiences impacted the way you write?

That’s a tough question. Content-wise, my long bout with depression and loneliness and self-loathing informed much of my less hopeful pieces. These days, I think that experience is still informing my work, but now I’m in a place where I can end stories looking off toward the future rather than remaining stuck in place and time, unmoved. If anyone wants to take that as an “it gets better” statement, please go for it.

How does writing help you to explore or make sense of the world around you?

Another hardball. The stock answer would be something about empathy and new perspectives, which isn’t a lie. Too often, though, I think it’s a way for me to learn more about myself. What are my limitations? Where do I feel challenged? Not challenged enough? What’s a pain I can soothe by giving it a voice? What’s a memory that won’t leave me until I give it a better purpose? I don’t know if that counts as exploring the world.

What helps to keep you inspired and out of creative slumps?

I should say books, but usually films. Sometimes shows, but usually films—a distinct beginning, middle, end. Even if the story doesn’t blow me away, I can still enjoy a profound performance or marvel at a technical achievement or feel all those inexplicable feelings when an expert cinematographer lights and frames a scene in a way I’ve never seen before. Seeing what I’ve never seen before—that has to be the answer.

The rest of the time? Being kind to myself helps. I used to give myself a hard time when I hit the odd slump or if I got too busy. But being kind to myself during those times has actually spurred me back to the writer’s chair more often than when I used to give myself mental thrashings.

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

A quiet, rainy evening, the family taking up the entire couch—dogs and all—with blankets, a nearby fireplace, and something engrossing on the TV.

---

Dustin.. Thank you for sharing your story with us and taking extra time to answer our questions. We are grateful for you and your work and wish you the best!

This week’s Author Q &A is with Rohan Buettel who lives in Canberra, Australia. His haiku appear in various Australian and international journals, including Presence, Cattails and The Heron’s Nest. His longer poetry recently appears in The Elevation Review, Rappahannock Review, Penumbra Literary and Art Journal, Mortal Magazine, Passengers Journal, Reed Magazine, Meniscus and Quadrant. 

Buettel’s poem, Turnings, is featured in Issue #10 of The Good Life Review.

Tell us about yourself.

I live in Canberra, Australia’s capital city, where I worked for more than thirty years as a lawyer and public servant, mainly advising governments on policy issues and developing legislative frameworks governing Australia’s communications industries. After retiring, I stumbled across a MOOC (massive open online course) called “How to make a poem,” and enjoyed it so much I have been writing poetry ever since. I undertook a number of creative writing units at the University of Canberra to improve my skills and this also gave me an introduction to the poetry scene. I convene monthly meetings of Tram Stop Poets, whose members workshop their poems together. I also lead mountain bike rides for cycling groups in the Canberra region, paddle a kayak and sing in a choir.

Turnings transforms a shared night of sleep into a beautiful dance. What inspired you to this poem? 

I participate in another poetry group ‘Majura Cafe Poets’ which meets weekly to share our latest writing and has a period set aside to write each week in response to a prompt. The first draft of this poem was written at one of those meetings in response to the prompt ‘turning.’ The poem was inspired by personal experience with my spouse.

What message do you hope reaches your audience through Turnings?

In the poem, I tried to capture the relaxed comfort that a relationship provides for both of the parties. I consciously chose to avoid references to sex and gender in the poem to make it relatable for as many readers as possible.

What impacted you most when writing it?

I had been thinking over the previous few days about how we sleep together at night, the prompt gave the impetus to express it.

Tell us about the work you have done or do that makes you most proud. 

I have written a lot of ekphrastic poetry, but I am most proud of my nature poetry, with much of the imagery prompted by things I observe, or encounters with wildlife while riding a mountain bike, bushwalking or even in my own yard. If readers are interested in looking at some of these works, examples include:

Semper Augustus — Passengers Journal Volume 3 Issue 2

Japanese Pagoda Tree — Reed Magazine Issue 155

Lorikeets — Meniscus Volume 8 Issue 2

Alpha Male — Fauxmoir Lit Mag Issue 5

Aeolian Geomorphology — Rockvale Review Issue 9

What is your writing process? How do you make it a part of your daily life?

I usually start to write when something attracts my attention, or I am suddenly struck by a good idea (all too rarely). When writing about art or nature, I start by closely observing the subject, taking notes and including any lines that come to me on the spot (including tangents and other associations). At home, I research the subject matter online. I write a first draft by hand taking into account my personal response and the research, usually in free verse, re-reading and revising earlier lines as I write new ones. I think about form as I write. If I think the work will benefit from a particular form I will start to rewrite the poem in that form, even before finishing the first draft. I put the first draft aside for a few days, sometimes I will try rewriting in a different form when returning to revise it. When reasonably comfortable with the work, I will type it into the computer, usually it just requires minor editing while doing this.

I don’t write on a daily basis, but if I haven’t written anything for a while, I start to feel a build up of tension and try and write. If dry, I sometimes resort to random techniques to spark creativity. For example, using a random word generator for a list of nouns which must be then used in the order created in a set number per line. This can lead to some delightfully surreal results.

Turnings is written in such a playful way. Is much of your poetry playful? What is your favorite type of poetry to write? 

Most of the poetry is serious, but playful elements find their way into even the serious poems. I also write deliberately playful poems, but these are often hard to place — perhaps they seem too lightweight.

Apart from nature and ekphrastic poetry, I also enjoy writing persona poetry as a way of trying to understand the perspective of people or things completely different to myself.

How does poetry help you to navigate through life?

Sometimes I do not know what to think about a particular issue. Writing a poem can help me clarify my thinking on the matter. Sometimes it performs a cathartic role. In early 2020, I poured out a series of angry climate change poems in response to the bush fires engulfing the region where I live.

What part of the artistic process do you consider to be the most difficult, as well as most satisfying, and why.

For me, the most difficult part, and the most satisfying, is coming up with a good idea or ideas. I find the writing process reasonably straightforward if I start with a good idea in mind. Some writers work better organically growing each line from the previous line, however I do not usually work like this. I like to know where I’m going when I start.

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

My parents owned an album released by Petula Clark in the sixties which while growing up I found inestimably sad. I loved listening to it when feeling miserable (like listening to The Smiths in the eighties). One of the songs was “The Good Life” and I am reminded of the bittersweet lyrics every time I hear the phrase:

“Oh, the good life, full of fun seems to be the ideal
Yes, the good life lets you hide all the sadness you feel …”

---

Rohan.. Thank you for sharing your poem with us and taking extra time to answer our questions. We are grateful for you and your work and wish you the best!

This week’s Author Q & A is with Soon Jones. Jones is a Korean lesbian poet from the rural countryside of the American South, and writes for the same reason they breathe. Their work has been published in Westerly, beestung, Juke Joint, and Moon City Review, among others, and can be found at soonjones.com.

Jones’ poem, This is How the Body Knows, is featured in Issue #10 of The Good Life Review.

Tell us about yourself.

I grew up in the rural countryside in the South where I was often the only non-white person for miles around. There’s been times growing up when I had to run away from people who meant me harm either because I was Asian or gay, probably both. That’s where the hyper-vigilance in the second stanza of the poem comes from.

All that being said, when I think about the things I’ve been through, including cancer, I just have to laugh because what can you do but move forward? Trauma, but laughing about it. That’s me in a nutshell.

This is How the Body Knows provides an intimate look at the devastating effects of cancer. Was this poem inspired by your own experience? How has the experience formed who you are?

Yes, this poem is autobiographical. I was trying to put into words the weird headspace I’ve been in, where all these things were running through my head, the surreal experience of being diagnosed with the same cancer that killed my mother during COVID of all times, how trauma and grief is a never ending cycle.

The cancer diagnosis really made me get off my butt and start writing like a ridiculous amount and send my work out, instead of waiting for my writing to be “perfect.” It’s made me a lot braver and more intentional with my work and my life, ’cause it’s like, “You might die, so better put your writing out there now.”

What message do you hope reaches your audience through This is How the Body Knows?

Listen to your gut instincts when something feels off about your body, even if it’s scary. Especially if it’s scary. Tell your loved ones you love them while they’re still here.

Was writing the poem therapeutic for you? What impacted you most when writing it?

Very much so! The act of taking an ugly experience and transforming it into a poem is incredibly cathartic for me. When I put something into a poem, that’s how I know I’ve reached a place where I can let this thing go. The biggest impact of writing This is How the Body Knows was that it helped me make sense of the last few years and grieve for my body.

Tell us about the work you have done or do that makes you most proud.

It’s completely unrelated to poetry, sorry to say, but I wrote a sci fi novel over the course of my cancer treatment and recovery that is very near and dear to my heart, and I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written to date. Hopefully other people will think that too. Of course, I put a lot of poet sensibilities into it!

What is your writing process? How do you make it a part of your daily life?

I’ll make a list of ideas I want to write poems about and some lines here and there. I always have my Notes app open on my phone to jot down poem snippets or story ideas as they come to me. A lot of first drafts of poems are written on my phone while I’m out walking my dog.

As far as my daily life, at the beginning of the year I make a list of writing goals like: write at least this many words and at least this many poems over the next 12 months. I keep track of all that month to month. But honestly, I’m just addicted to writing. It’s what I think about when I wake up and when I go to sleep.

This is How the Body Knows is written in such an honest way. Is much of your poetry direct? What is your favorite type of poetry to write? 

I’m pretty straight forward in general, so I think my writing just comes out that way, too. I don’t like to beat around the bush if I can help it.

My favorite type of poetry to write is surreal imagery, but I’m also terrible at it – probably because it’s not direct at all. I’m working on it though!

How does poetry help you to navigate through life?

When it comes to writing poetry, it’s basically my therapy. I feel so light and clear after writing something dark. The darker it is, the better I feel when it’s done.

When it comes to reading, I think poems are like magic. Every time I read a poem that just nails a feeling or mood and makes me feel so incredibly seen I’m just like, “How did they do that? How did they know?” I don’t know, poetry just helps me breathe.

What part of the artistic process do you consider to be the most difficult, as well as most satisfying, and why.

Titles! I cannot think of good titles for the life of me and it stresses me out. Sometimes I spend more time agonizing over a title than I do writing the actual dang poem. This is How the Body Knows is a rare exception, but that’s because I cheated and just used the original first line as a title.

Revisions are the most satisfying. That’s when it all really comes together for me, especially after I’ve had my poet friends read and give notes. They always have amazing insight that super motivates and energizes me to be a better writer in general.

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

Sitting in a rocking chair on a front porch on a nice warm day, sipping tea and shootin’ the shit with my friends. It don’t get much better than that.

Scott Sickles has been writing plays since the late 1980s. Like so many artists and other writers, he draws on his personal experiences as inspiration. He writes about what angers him, disturbs him, or makes him fearful. He can use his art as a weapon against or a magnifying glass up to the struggles he’s overcome in his life. But he also appreciates the value of humor in dealing with hard times. 

“I’ve gone as dark as I know that I can in a lot of places and by contrast I’ve been just abjectly silly, just ridiculous,” Sickles said. 

But that’s life. Sometimes it’s dark and ominous and sometimes there is joy rather than evil lurking around the corner. Through his career as a playwright, Sickles has written dozens of plays ranging from dark to silly, one-minute to a trilogy of full-lengths. They might leave an ache in your heart or a buzz of fear in the back of your mind, or they may make you chuckle. As a scriptwriter for the daytime serial General Hospital, he has spent over a decade capturing the hearts of audiences by telling the stories – tragic, comic, and melodramatic – of beloved television characters.

Sickles’ submission to The Good Life Review, “Guten Tag, Baby!”, covers the serious subject of sexual violence, but in an unexpectedly heartwarming way. His play about three generations of women beginning to understand each other in a new and meaningful way leaves the reader or audience moved by the curveballs life can throw at us.

He wrote “Guten Tag, Baby!” as a response to a submission opportunity through a theater that offers three images or pieces of art to inspire writers each year. Sickles chose to write a play based on a painting of an art deco building in Texas that is located en route to the Grand Canyon via Route 66. 

Sickles began imagining tourists going back and forth from the Grand Canyon. He discovered the Grand Canyon is a very popular destination for German tourists, so much so that restaurants around the Grand Canyon have menus in both English and German to accommodate the steady stream of German tourists.

“The phrase, ‘Guten Tag, Baby!’ popped into my head and I thought, what kind of a pickup line is that?” Sickles said. 

As a sexual assault survivor, Sickles also had visions of Thelma and Louise as he imagined this place in Texas. “I wanted to write a story that was predominantly about women and different generations of women.”

The story is about Eleanor, a seventy-five-year-old woman in the early stages of dementia. She has traveled to The U Drop Inn in Shamrock, Texas with her daughter, Vivienne and her fifteen-year-old, gender-neutral grandchild, Des. The Inn is triggering memories of when Eleanor met her husband, Armand, a man who left the family when Vivienne was a child, causing much hurt and confusion for Eleanor’s daughter.  

In this play and many others he has written, Sickles explores how people deal with trauma over time. Eleanor begins to retell the familiar story of meeting Armand but this time, she is revealing secrets never told. She’s sharing details previously left out because they would have been hurtful to her daughter, who was a child of a rape. Vivienne hears this detail for the first time at the diner along Route 66. 

“The thing that we suffer is very acute while we’re suffering it,” Sickles said explaining the effects of trauma, “and then a year later it’s a harsh memory. Three decades later it’s simultaneously lives in your body as something that is happening and it’s also a distant memory, but it’s never not present.”

Vivienne, who never felt a connection with Armand and resented him for leaving the family, now is presented with the information that he took care of her mother after she was assaulted and raised the resulting child as his own. Eleanor encouraged Armand to leave and find his own happiness when Vivienne was old enough that Eleanor thought she could care for her on her own. Eleanor and Armand’s was an unexpected story of love and respect between an asexual woman and a homosexual man.

“There is a lot of misplaced love and misplaced anger and the questions of ‘who the hell am I now?’” Sickles said. 

As a storyteller, Sickles says he doesn’t usually write with an agenda or theme in mind, but in this case, he hopes the reader gleans the message that we don’t really know what another person has been through.

“When your identity and relationship is based on a rock-solid belief that you later discover is not the case, then that is a trauma in itself and there is an adjustment that has to happen. I hope that is what people get from “Guten Tag, Baby!”” Sickles said. “A lot of life is not what we think it is and when we learn the truth about our lives, we still only know so much, and we still just have to roll with it.”

Life hasn’t always been easy for Sickles, but he has learned to roll with it himself. As a son of a Korean woman and a German American man he endured a lot of prejudice for being an Asian kid. He also was bullied for being gay.

“I heard chink and faggot constantly because I was not a masculine child and I did not play sports,” Sickles said. “There was a lot of bullying from the outside and a lot of pressure from my parents.”

When he started writing, he wrote a lot from the gay perspective.

“If I was going to go forth and be happy and live my life, that was an identity I had to dive into,” Sickles said. It wasn’t until a few years ago, he began writing plays and characters through other aspects of his identity.

Through his career, Sickles has been proud of much of his work, but a few projects stood out to him, including a trilogy of plays called The Second World Trilogy, written in response to the 2016 presidential campaign. 

“The 2016 presidential campaign was so filled with hatred for anyone who was not white, male, cis, hetero, pseudo-Christian-Evangelical that I had to get over my own issues and embrace my identity and heritage,” Sickles said. “Everyone’s heritage is a significant part of who they are and it is something they have to do something about.”

In The Second World Trilogy, the protagonist is a half-Asian, gay boy growing up in Pittsburgh.

“Teddy does not represent me,” Sickles said. “He is not the nerd I was; he is the nerd I wish I had been.”

Over the course of the three plays, eleven-year-old pen pals Teddy Passanante and Anzor Khasanov begin a love story that lasts until the end of the world, nearly 50 years later. The United States is divided into the liberal U.S. or Blue States, and a militant right-wing Christian theocracy that has overtaken what was once the Red States. Twenty-six years later the two men find each other and are forced to confront a collapsing nation while the climate reaches a catastrophic tipping point. Fifty years from the time they became pen pals, the couple and their family are forced into the long goodbye of the earth’s second ice age. 

His play Composure was the winner of the 2016 New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Original Full-Length Script. The play is about a man who returns to his alma mater to produce the play Romeo and Juliet to commemorate a school shooting. Producing the play and beginning a new relationship aren’t enough to distract him from the memories resurfacing of an emotionally and physically abusive relationship he endured as a young man while living in the town he returned to.

“Gay men specifically came up to me after that play and thanked me for writing it,” Sickles said. According to Sickles there is a lot of advantage taken with gay teenagers by their friends and older men.

Sickles also referenced being proud of Playing on the Periphery: Monologues and Scenes For and About Queer Kids. Each of the seven stand-alone pieces tell the collective story of four gay third graders as they navigate their feelings and the social and family pressures that threaten to keep the friends apart. 

“Your affections are drawn to the people who understand and appreciate you,” Sickles said. “It’s about like-minded souls seeking friendship and comfort from each other and the shit that they put up with while doing that from all areas.”

Through it all, Sickles stays grounded with what he calls his “fortune cookie credo.”  

“My personal philosophy is ‘All of the moments of your life have led to this one.’” Sickles said. 

His credo ties in perfectly to The Good Life.

“The Good Life is when all the moments that have led you to this one, lead you to a good place,” Sickles said. “Where you can look back on all those moments and say whatever they were, they were worth it.”

You can read “Guten Tag, Baby!” in the Issue #10 of The Good Life Review. Check out more about Scott Sickles at scottsickles.com.

This week’s Author Q&A is with Summer Hammond. Summer grew up in rural east Iowa, one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. She earned her MFA from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, where she served as editor on Chautauqua. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Texas Review, Sonora Review, and StoryQuarterly. She is a 2021 Missouri Review Audio Miller Prize Finalist and a 2022 semi-finalist for Nimrod International Journal’s Katherine Anne Porter Prize. Summer and her kindred spirit, Aly, currently live in Wilmington by the sea. Visit her at http://summer-hammond.squarespace.com/

Hammond’s non-fiction piece, iowa blues, and greens, is featured in Issue #10 of The Good Life Review.

Tell us about yourself.

I was raised as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses and remained in the faith for twenty-seven years. I mention this first because of the profound impact this religion had on my life. Because the faith is very academic by nature (Witnesses were first known as International Bible Students) I learned to read, study, write, and speak publicly quite early. However, I celebrated no holidays, did not participate in sports or extracurricular activities, carried a “No Blood” card in my wallet in case of an accident or medical emergency, believed that life should be devoted to the preaching work since Armageddon was on the horizon – and therefore turned down jobs, opportunities, schooling and other possibilities, believing that I was sacrificing for the True God and eternal life in Paradise. This delusion, fused with a dysfunctional family life and chronic illness, created a hobbling set of circumstances to grow up in. I didn’t get my driver’s license until age twenty-seven – the same year I left the faith, and celebrated my first birthday.

Tell us about the work you have done or do that makes you most proud.

In 2015 I started writing a novel called The Impossible Why based on some of the more traumatic experiences growing up that I hadn’t written about before, namely, my mother and my religion, and the very painful journey I had to take to free myself from both. Writing the novel forced me to relive that journey and pause in some terrible moments that had blurred the past while living through them but writing them forced me to reckon with and for the first time, really feel them. It was emotionally and spiritually grueling. I’m proud of the courage and grit it took to write The Impossible Why, and my reason for staying with it – to connect with others who might be experiencing similar struggles (those of us with painful mother relationships are often quiet about it). I thought of the book, the whole time, as a love letter, written to sisters and friends. Also, writing the novel helped me gain acceptance into a Masters of Fine Arts program, a feat I couldn’t have imagined for myself growing up. I never thought I would achieve a college degree, much less a Master’s! Although unpublished, I’m proud of the work my book has done, both inside me, and in the world.

What inspired you to write iowa blues, and greens?

We were assigned to write a list essay in one of my creative nonfiction workshops at the MFA. I had never heard of a list essay. I did some reading and research, and when I began to write, “Iowa Blues, and Greens” is what emerged. I’m still not sure it actually meets the criteria for a list essay! But it took me on a writing journey I had never been on before. For one thing, this was the first time I wrote about my family’s experience with “mobile home sickness” – chronic illness as a result of formaldehyde exposure.

What message do you hope reaches your audience through iowa blues, and greens? What impacted you most when writing it?

You are not alone in the complexity and the brokenness. I often felt, growing up, that I had a bizarre life that made me bizarre, and ultimately, unlovable. I understand now that everyone is dealing with strange and surreal aspects of life – in various manifestations – no one is safe from the cracks in the sidewalk, the grief. What impacted me most when writing was how frightened I was to write about the health impacts of formaldehyde exposure. I realized how much shame had accrued around this story. Sharing it in my MFA workshop was bracing! From past experience, I feared not being believed, or being looked down on. Writing this essay made me braver. After the MFA, I was able to write a more focused essay about my family’s experience with environmental illness called The Poison House, Causeway Lit’s 2021 Winter Nonfiction Winner.

How has your experience of growing up in rural Iowa shaped you as a person?

This is one of my favorite questions to ponder in life. My husband and I drove an 18-wheeler cross-country for a decade and as we trekked across the nation, I wondered constantly who I would be if I had grown up in that scorched, treeless town we passed through in Arizona, or if, as a child, I’d had the view of that mountain rising up, there in Montana. Or coming up amidst the skyscrapers in NYC – who would I be then? The question was endlessly intriguing during our travels because there was no answer. Cornfields and Mississippi, dump trucks and gravel roads, river boats and red barns – this landscape, these sights, knit my imagination in ways I’m not sure I will ever fathom.

What is your writing process? How do you make it a part of your daily life?

My writing process is daily and ongoing – although I do not put words on the page every day. I am in process when I am reading and communing with another writer’s mind. I am in the process when I am engaged in a vigorous conversation and discovering what I really think and struggling to articulate it. I am in process when I am walking, reflecting on, and trying to make meaning from the story of my life. I’m in process when I’m staring out the window, dreaming up absurdities– it is all a steady writing practice that grows, develops, and is refined, largely unseen, in the mind, before the hands ever hit the keyboard.

What is your favorite nonfictional prose genre to write?

Narrative nonfiction. I grew up filling notebooks with short stories and graduated with my MFA in fiction. Storytelling is not merely what I love, it is who I am and how I interact with every single little particle of the world. I can’t help myself, no matter what I’m doing, from making a story of it! 

What part of the artistic process do you consider to be the most difficult, as well as most satisfying, and why?

The most difficult and the most satisfying are separate parts of the process for me these days! This is a recent development. I would have answered previously that cranking out a rough draft was both difficult and satisfying. Only a few years ago, I could write fifteen to twenty pages in a day. However, since entering menopause, my attention span has changed, along with everything else. Now, writing a rough draft is painful, demanding a level of sustained concentration that is almost beyond me. Revision is, at this time in my life, the most satisfying – the work is already there, and the refining, shaping, molding has become an immersive and soothing form of play.

Do you have any fears as a writer?

I am steeped in fear as a writer! The most compelling fear, right now, is being a woman writer about to turn forty-seven. To be older than twenty-five – in any capacity – in our culture is anathema. I was the oldest woman in my MFA cohort. I was asked my age and resisted disclosure. I had a legitimate concern of activating bias, both conscious and unconscious, against me. Each time, during a workshop lecture and discussion, writer was paired with young (and those two words seemed always to arrive together, like a married couple) – I winced. It was like a door slamming in my face. I am not young, and I am a writer, and I still have dreams, and the dreams are beginning to hurt. They are beginning to feel like too late.

What is your favorite thing about writing nonfiction?

Being an excavator of the self and one’s own life story. Digging around in the things that have happened, paying deep attention to them – asking these things to tell a story, one that might be useful and perhaps even necessary to the world. Writing nonfiction invites you to witness your own life with wonder, tell the truth about it, and offer it as an act of love.

How has writing nonfiction helped you to grow as a person?

Nonfiction has asked me to confront hidden parts of my experience and hold these to the light, weak-kneed and trembling. It has asked me to be more honest – more – and the insistence is always there, each time, never dimming. I am always exerting myself to answer the call – more, deeper, truer.

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

This is my first interview, and answering questions about writing is just – bliss!
This.
This is The Good Life. 

---

Summer.. We are truly grateful you took the time to answer our questions and were so direct and vulnerable in your responses. Thank you for sharing your work and part of your life story with us and allowing us to share it with others. We wish you the best in life and with all your writing endeavors!

This week’s Author Q & A is with T. M. Thomson. Thomson’s work has most recently appeared in Soundings East and Bluebird Word and will appear in Pink Panther Magazine and Evocations in the upcoming months. Three of her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Awards: Seahorse and Moon in 2005, I Walked Out in January in 2016, and Strum and Lull in 2018. She is the author of Strum and Lull (2019) and The Profusion (2019), which placed in Golden Walkman’s 2017 chapbook competition, and co-author of Frame and Mount the Sky (2017). Her full-length collection Plunge will be out in 2023. She has a writer’s page at https://www.facebook.com/TaunjaThomsonWriter/.

Thomson’s poem, Ascension, is featured in Issue #10 of The Good Life Review.

Tell us about yourself.

I am a former college instructor of English who now focuses on my writing, both the creative process and publishing.  I am an animal lover, especially of cats; an art lover; a nature lover; a reader of mysteries; a devotee of Stevie Nicks; a huge fan of Steve Irwin and all that he stood for; a player in mud; a feeder of wild birds.

What inspired you to write Ascension? Why?

I wrote Ascension because I came across that lovely piece of art Swimming between Clouds by Niels Cortfitzen. The woman rising above this mundane world, combined with those words from Louise Gluck– “I am tired of having hands/she said/I want wings —/But what will you do without your hands/to be human?/I am tired of human/she said/I want to live on the sun” —set me to thinking about freedom and what it really is, especially for women, who have tended historically to be the ones stuck with the more tedious, home-oriented tasks.

What message do you hope reaches your audience through Ascension?

I am hoping to inspire readers to realize that, often, freedom lies in their own hands, their own minds. When we move beyond the normal expectations of this world, the notions of others, the landscape around and below us gets smaller and stranger, but our inner landscape becomes richer.

What impacted you most when writing it?

Writing Ascension became an act of rebellion in and of itself for me and has spurred me to write many more poems about personal empowerment.

Tell us about the work you have done or do that makes you most proud.

I don’t know if there’s really one poem, or even a group of my poems, that I can say makes me the most proud.  I will say that any of my work that takes readers to places they otherwise might not have gone, that makes them think harder about a concept or a reality, that helps them to find a piece of wisdom, is a source of pride for me.

What is your writing process? How do you make it a part of your daily life?

I set aside three or four afternoons each week for poetic activities—by that, I am referring not only to writing but to submitting my work for publication.  If I am not inspired to write, I will look at my cache of art from the Internet to find a springboard for a poem.  I believe it was F. Scott Fitzgerald who was asked, “Are you often inspired to write?” and who replied, “Yes, every morning at 9.”  Contrary to the popular belief that writing only happens when the writer is inspired, to be good at writing, one must write on a regular basis, even if not every resulting word or phrase or poem is amazing.  It’s the doing that makes one a better writer.

Do you have a specific genre you enjoy writing the most?

I write literary fiction. I love poetry, but I’m entirely in awe of people who are able to write it. There are wonderful science fiction writers (Samuel Delaney, Ursala K. LeGuin, Octavia Butler, N. K. Jeminsin), but I find much of this genre formulaic and uninspiring. 

What is your favorite type of poetry to write?

I’m a very visual person, even to the point of having synesthesia (the experiencing of one sense through another)—I see every letter, every word, every name, in color.  So it’s no surprise that I love to write poetry that is imagistic, poems that get to a truth through imagery, usually nature-based.

How does poetry help you to navigate through life??

The process of expressing one’s feelings and truths is cathartic and provocative; sometimes it even helps me to untangle and clarify thoughts and ideas that were muddled. 

What part of the artistic process do you consider to be the most difficult, as well as most satisfying, and why?

The most difficult parts of the writing process for me are those moments when I can’t get a poem to work, even after a few drafts. Any kind of writing requires patience, which is not a strong point for me. And sometimes I have to give up on a poem, admit defeat, which really bothers me.  

As for the most satisfying aspect of writing poetry, that would have to be the moment I complete a poem and know it’s a good one, even if it requires a few improvements, that creative “A-ha” moment.

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

To me “The Good Life” means having space for one’s creative process, whether that’s poetry, painting, terrarium-building, soul searching, making a new dish, pondering the nature of the universe—to have that room in one’s life to enjoy creativity, that’s a wonderful type of freedom, which I guess goes back to the theme of Ascension.

---

Wonderful! Thank you, T.M., for taking the time to answer our questions and for sharing your work with us. We wish you the best in life and with all your writing endeavors!

This week’s Author Q&A is with Marc Eichen. Eichen has a Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Geography, Clark University. From 2015 through 2022 he was a Visiting Faculty member at the State University of Zanzibar. His fiction focuses on life in Zanzibar and in red-state America. He has had stories published in Still Points Arts Quarterly, The Adirondack Review and West Trade Review and reprinted in Toyon. He is the winner of the Richard Cortez Day Prize in fiction. A book of short stories in Swahili and English will be published in Nairobi Kenya in 2023. He is represented by Kristen Carey at Blue Hen.

Eichen’s fiction short story, Who Takes the Bus in LA is featured in Issue #10 of The Good Life Review.

Tell me about yourself.

Many fiction writers are reluctant to talk about themselves – and I’m no exception. Where I stand out, where I hope to stand out, is on the page.

With that preface, ok, here goes. I grew up in New York and began life thinking I would be a musician. Life intrudes (and I wasn’t good enough) – so I spent much of my working life as an academic administrator, first in New York and then in Massachusetts, where I live with my wife, Deborah Drosnin, most of the year. 

When I’m not in Massachusetts, I live in East Africa, Zanzibar (Tanzania) to be specific where I’ve had the privilege to learn Swahili and teach natural resource management at the State University. 

Some of my fiction focuses on the intersection between the Swahili and foreign communities. This is particularly interesting and challenging for me. How do you make sense of that friction, or lack of friction because the communities don’t “see” each other? China Miéville’s novel, The City & The City is a good example.

I don’t think you need to come to Zanzibar to observe this. And some of my fiction, including Who Takes the Bus in LA?, is about the poor, the ragged, the old and otherwise marginalized and often unseen communities in the United States.

What is your writing process? How do you make it a part of your daily life?

I try to write four days a week and always in the morning. I tend not to write at home because the distractions are endless. So I’m lucky enough to have found The Writers’ Room of Boston and I work there. 

What inspired you to write Who Takes the Bus in LA?

Both Deborah and I grew up in New York City and we lean in toward public transportation. So when we were visiting LA before the pandemic, we took the bus. Taking the bus in LA is a meme. Many Angelinos would ask, who takes the bus in LA if they’re not crazy or unhoused?  

Riding the bus in L.A. is a parallel city. It is the purest expression of L.A.’s one-hundred-year dialogue of urban and antiurban, a bridge to the city’s streetcar past and an epitaph to its car-addled future. Riding enables another mode of looking, seeing, hearing, and smelling that “eludes the discipline” of automobility even as it reproduces it. (Hutchinson, Sikivu. “Waiting for the Bus.” Social Text, vol. 18 no. 2, 2000, p. 107-120. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/31869.)

For all these reasons, I find the stories of people taking the bus and driving the bus to be of interest.

Please tell me some unique details related to Who Takes the Bus in LA and what you learned from it.

I’m always interested in place. How does place influence what we see and who we are? How would the protagonists in this story live in Boyle Heights and yet have never been to Venice Beach? Why would they think Culver City was another world (because for them, it was)? Is it possible to transcend our individual world and tell a story which would resonate with someone from another place? 

What is your favorite book? Or who is your favorite author?

Wow, that’s a hard question. Ten authors in no particular order: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Donna Tartt, Richard Russo, George Saunders, George Eliot, Olga Tokarczuk, Russell Banks, Zadie Smith, Benjamin Lerner, David Foster Wallace. I could go on.

If there’s any common thread, with the exception of Olga Tokarczuk and David Foster Wallace, these writers embed you in the story. They are all wonderful writers, but they’re not self-conscious writers. Their work doesn’t say, “hey – look at this piece of genius.” 

What books did you enjoy reading as a child?

My mom read A Child’s Garden of Verses (Robert Louis Stevenson) to me and then, it was one of the things I wanted to read most, when I was able to read. As a teenager I would never leave the house without stuffing a book into the back pocket of my jeans. I went through jags, reading as much as I could of a particular writer before moving on to someone else: Thomas Wolfe, Henry James, Henry Roth, William Faulkner, Laurence Durrell. Even on the subway in New York, slamming through the tunnels with the windows open, their work would bring me somewhere else.

Do you have a specific genre you enjoy writing the most?

I write literary fiction. I love poetry, but I’m entirely in awe of people who are able to write it. There are wonderful science fiction writers (Samuel Delaney, Ursala K. LeGuin, Octavia Butler, N. K. Jeminsin), but I find much of this genre formulaic and uninspiring. 

What part of the artistic process do you consider to be the most difficult, as well as most satisfying, and why.

Interesting you ask this question. I’ve noticed that each individual in my wonderful writers’ group has a different strength. Mine happens to be drafting – getting an initial draft on paper. What I work on after that is the voice of the story, finding the voice which tells the story in the strongest, most authentic way. Re-drafting at the word level is the most difficult for me. But I try.

Do you have any fears as a writer?

Not having anything to say. Telling the same story over and over. My fabulous agent, Kristen Che at Blue Hen, who reads my first drafts, is able to say, “You’ve done this before – try it another way.”

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

Walking in the mountains in New England or on the beach in Africa with my family, talking about a book or maybe just watching the sunset. Tuko pamoja milele. (We are together, always)

---

Thank you, Marc, for sharing your words with us and we appreciate the extra time and consideration you put into answering our questions. It was a pleasure working with you. We wish you the best in life and with all your writing endeavors!