Abecedarian Becomes Cancer Diagnosis | Anna Lisa Stork
Another hospital trip. You are bleeding again. It’s almost cold enough to see my death. I press my cheek to the window. Every day is a test, and I am always failing to make amends. God means prayer, half-assed prayer. I learn the lines, jester the psalms to keep you alive, living for the time being. Mom means daughter. No. I don’t want to meet the oncologist who tells me it’s pancreatic cancer. I ask questions that have no answer – all rust and ache. Sorry, so many apologies and yet the truth is still unbearable. Sorry pokes into another vein. Sorry don’t know where you bleed from. Xerox of a xerox. A final yuletide in the hospital. We plant zinnias after the last frost.
About the Author:
Anna Lisa is currently pursuing a BFA in creative writing at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Sink Hollow Literary Magazine, Prairie Margins, and Glass Mountain Magazine. Her writing explores grief through the lens of the Midwestern landscape.
The Beauty of Chronicling Life through Creative Nonfiction: Insights from Laura Westby Cannon
August 14, 2026
Laura Westby Cannon grew up in Valley City, North Dakota, where it was her job to water the flower garden. Her creative work has appeared in Tahoma Literary Review, Revisionist, and Blue Mountain Review, among others. She’s taught creative and academic writing at the College of Charleston since 2018, and her family resides alongside the zinnias in North Charleston, SC.
Tell us a bit about yourself, something more than just what’s in your bio. Perhaps a fun fact not a lot of people know.
Attending Super Asthma Saturday at the FargoDome one Saturday in the late-90s was an emblem of honor to my younger self. During the event, groups of us asthmatic kids were shuffled from station to station to learn about new spacer technology and talk about our feelings. It was all very important to me back then. I told a visual artist friend years later and she designed a Super Asthma Saturday shirt for me — and a matching one for my newborn daughter — which we still have!
Life is full of moments worthy of writing about. What inspired you to write Beauty Like That?
I was struck by the abundance of the zinnias in our planter last year and equally surprised by how much joy they brought not only me, but my family, our friends, and people walking by the house. As I drafted this piece, I began to consider how much work happens before the final blooms pop, which nicely mirrors human growth—there’s so much unseen work in the daily rhythms of both.
I also thought about how we — often girls —- are taught to quell their strength, talents, and beauty. The zinnias boasted in a way that offered a kind of permission to just exist for the sake of existing that I want my children to embrace in a way I haven’t always done. I was struck by how deeply moving it is simply to pay attention to the natural world for these lessons.
At what point in your life did you begin writing and working on creative nonfiction?
I took a Creative Nonfiction class in college. Before then, I didn’t even know this kind of writing was a possibility. I wrote an essay with a line about my grandmother and I credit that moment with the beginning of realizing my voice. I declared English as a major soon after.
In the States we call this style creative nonfiction, but there’s a beautiful word in Portuguese for capturing these moments: crónica. I like the concept of chronicling our lives; small proofs that we existed.
Do you write in other genres, and if so, what?
Yes! I finished the first draft of a fiction manuscript this summer, which was an absolute flurry of excitement.
How do you make expression a part of your daily life, or how do you find a balance between your writing and other responsibilities?
Creative expression is constant. I take a lot of joy from being in the kitchen, especially baking all kinds of bread. I also derive a lot of joy in giving much of it away. The excitement people have!
During these slower summer days, my children and I put on music and paint. Eat popcorn. Do crafts if we absolutely must. Dance.
At the risk of being overly-dramatic, I’ve had to learn to lean into the discomfort, which is a Buddhist principle. What I mean by discomfort is that my time is constantly being disrupted by my kids, my elderly dog, my spouse, the business responsibilities, teaching —- living. One day I’ll again have three hours every morning to write. But now, I’ve learned to write down lines as they arrive. I take time-outs on the back porch for 20-minute “writing sprints” and my family knows not to find me. I’m currently writing this answer with my children sitting in my personal space to watch, but I think it’s important that they see me do these things. I want them to live with joy, too, and I believe creative expression is a big piece of that.
Are there any special projects, other pieces, or books you’d like to promote?
My short story “Momma Had a Mean Streak” was published earlier this year in Blue Mountain Review.”
I’d love to promote a published book, but I’m not there quite yet. I’m looking for an agent (help!).
I’d also be remiss not to also mention the Revisionist Foundation, a new Charleston-area nonprofit that seeks to embolden women in their creative pursuits (art, writing, culinary), which I’m thrilled to help build and watch grow.
What do you think when you hear, “the good life”?
The posture of gratitude in all circumstances, which I don’t say carelessly.
Thank you, Laura, for sharing a slice of your life with us and for being a part of our growing community. We appreciate you and the time you spent on this Q&A. If you planted zinnias again this year, I bet they are amazing right now!!
We wish you a peaceful close to the summer season, and the best with all your writing endeavors!
I’m six years old when I marry my rabbit. After watching Princess Margaret’s black-and-white wedding on the television, I stand in our parquet-floored playroom, smart in my scarlet guardsman’s tunic and black trousers, holding Scrunchie, my black-and-white bride.
My younger brother, Andrew, archbishop-perfect in a gold-flocked curtain-cloak, chants gobbledygook from an upside-down encyclopedia. The wedding feast is a choice of carrot or half a bag of chocolate buttons.
Scrunchie has been married before. Daddy had paid five shillings for what was supposed to be two girl baby bunnies from Shepperton Pet Shop, but Pookie soon showed signs of what Mummy called dishonourable intentions. “He’s too amorous,” she said, as Daddy divided what had once been a chicken coop. “Maybe we’ll let him visit her when the time is right.”
My parents do not attend the ceremony. Daddy bangs around upstairs, packing for another trip. After he whizzes off, Mummy tells us they’re getting a divorce. None of my schoolfriends have parents who’ve got divorces and I worry they’ll need to be told, that the headmaster might announce it at Assembly, after the Lord’s Prayer.
Later, I’m sitting with my bunny bride on the piney sawdust of her chicken-coop house when Mummy calls from the back door to say it’s time for television, time for Crackerjack. I keep quiet and snuggle my cheek against Scrunchie’s warm, velvety ears, wondering if Daddy’s been too amorous, whether Mummy will let him visit us when the time is right.
About the Author:
Chris Cottom lives near Macclesfield, UK. His work features in 100 Word Story, Bending Genres, Fictive Dream, FlashFlood, Flash Frontier, Gooseberry Pie, Leon Literary Review, MoonPark Review, NFFD NZ, New World Writing Quarterly, Oyster River Pages, Roi Fainéant, The Lascaux Review, and elsewhere. Find him at https://chriscottom.wixsite.com/chriscottom
‘The way that we handle [geolocation] uncertainty is by taking a star sighting during missile fight, to then effectively correct for the initial position error.’
—pp. 206–7 from “Nuclear War: A Scenario”
Romance is nature under our mouths and our hands— flowers to gardens, sea foam to vineyards, smatter of stars to a city plan, hills to hips. If nature, however, begets only nature, such that our tending and lining and sucking are natural, as are the noisy babies and tools, then so are the four hundred and fifty–five kilotons wearing exhaust like a wedding band, poking out of the sea— love’s ground zero —and tracing a nail along the Great Bear’s grooves ‘til it snags a tuft of Beijing, woos in the new world with Titan Arum ikebana.
About the Author:
Costantino Toth is a researcher, warehouse worker, and writer. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Epiphany, The Rumpus, and Two Thirds North. She is currently pursuing her M.A. in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology at the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David, while residing in Florida with Romoletto, her little cat. Her writing and research trace the tanglings of art, ancient history, and divination.
“Red, red, red!” Everyone cheered, flinging crystal glasses of champagne into one another, grabbing me by my pastel-brown suit jacket. The dealer loaded a cheap plastic ball into the roulette wheel as a woman in a sparkly silver dress eye-fucked me into serenity. “Place your bets!” he hollered.
“Red!” I shouted back, shoving my $287,000 of life savings into the table. The crowd roared, hands raining down on me—slapping my back, nails rubbing into my neck.
“Don’t forget me,” the silver woman smirked, angling her lips toward mine, the scent of Hennessy curling into my nose. The soft feel of that cold Glock drifted into my mind, still lingering in my beat-up green pickup truck. Biding its time for the sweet release of black.
“Don’t forget me either,” I said softly, my lips almost pressed onto hers, the thought of my ex-wife’s cackling laugh nearly thinning into whisper. Closing my eyes, I tasted red—her smug smile dissolving into ash, custody papers ripping into the air.
The dealer shot the ball, rippling up and down the wheel. Red, black, red, black. The odd green swirling in. Every roll held a blissful future — the world collapsing into nothing or blooming under my palms. It wasn’t a fool’s bet. It was the opposite of marriage.
The silver woman rested her head on my shoulder, pulling me in. I looked into her eyes as I caught the soft glimmer of black, settling on the wheel. Smirking, I leaned in, grabbing her by her waist, my Glock smiling from the truck. She kissed me back as I devoured her lips, her raven lipstick claiming me. My hands found their way on her paper-thin throat, almost grasping—when I felt a tap on my shoulder.
Opening my eyes, the crowd was utterly silent. A man in a flamingo shirt covered his mouth, pointing at me.
“Thirty-six… red,” the dealer called out.
Hennessy drained from my veins. The crowd erupted in a frenzy, thudding at my back, reverberating up my spine as the silver woman cackled, rubbing at my groin. I sat still, vision blurring as red filled the edges. My ex in a white dress. My boy in a suit too big for him, calling another man Dad. The dealer already reloading the ball.
About the Author:
Sanum Patel is a South Asian writer and attorney based in New York City. He writes both to unsettle and make you laugh, often threading humor and horror in his works. His writing has appeared in outlets including Kweli, Out Front Magazine, and Decolonial Passage, and has received editorial recognition from The Missouri Review. He will attend The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and the DISQUIET International Literary Program in summer 2026.
Carolyn Williams-Noren is a poet, essayist, and maker of comics. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and have earned Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations, a Best American Essays notables mention, and the support of the Minnesota State Arts Board, the McKnight Foundation, and Writing x Writers. Carolyn lives in Minneapolis, where she freelances as a copy editor and writer. Besides writing poems and essays, she connects with readers everywhere via the emailed recipe comic “This is good.”
Carolyn’spoetry collection, Oil Courses, won the 2025 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and will be out September 8 from Kent State University Press. The book reckons with her childhood close to the oil industry in Alaska.
Cover art by Molly Megan Keenan
Carolyn was recently interviewed by Lee Colin Thomas, author of Honey in the Dark.
Lee: Tell us about Oil Courses. What is it “about” for you as a poet? What will readers find in the book’s pages?
Carolyn: My dad’s career was with an oil company in Alaska, and I worked for the company myself one summer. My life today is very different from that—I live in Minneapolis, doing work that feels distant from the project of taking oil out of the ground, if not always its opposite. The poems look back at that time “close” to oil with curiosity. I basically asked myself over and over, “When was I closest to oil? What did that do to me? What did I learn?” and wrote the answers.
Lee: How and when did this project start for you?
Carolyn: For a long time, I’d set aside this part of my history. I was ashamed of it. And it was easy not to talk about it. But a few things made me want to reconnect with those memories.
Throughout the 2010s, in conversations about racism, I took in the idea that when we’re not proud of our past, individually or collectively, we cannot make it disappear by declaring ourselves separate from it. We have to look at how injustice has shaped us. I thought a lot about the role of shame for white people in conversations about racism—how shame blocks learning and transformation.
I also had a key conversation with a friend who’s a leader in the climate movement. I mentioned to her that I have a hard time in rooms where the vibe is simply “Oil is evil.” I always feel aware of how much our lives depend on it.
Her answer, which I didn’t expect, was “You are describing the work that every single one of us needs to do right now.” Meaning to recognize how reliant we are on this form of energy, to acknowledge what we’ve done and are doing. And to choose something different anyway. Even while we’re still made of it, still powered by it. It feels impossible, and yet it’s what’s needed if we’re going to make any kind of livable future. I started to see that my story could have some relevance beyond my own internal mess.
Lee: The table of contents in Oil Courses is very interesting. You’ve titled each poem after an academic subject paired with a number and a date. How did you arrive at this schema?
Carolyn: For a long time, I kept the poems untitled, or I used first lines or dates as titles. You know this, Lee, because you were one of the patient early readers who would look at a poem, give me encouraging and constructive feedback, and then say “It needs a title!” … and listen patiently while I resisted.
I felt that adding individual titles too soon would keep me from seeing what else the collection could hold. I didn’t want to close off the possibilities too early.
The idea of a course catalog, the idea of poems titled with the names of classes—those came after the writing and revision and reordering, and after many months of doing nothing, just waiting for the idea that would hold all these together as a book. And then, after that idea came, it felt important to keep the dates; I want readers to have a sense of when and where they’re landing as they enter each poem.
Lee: What went into your decision to forego chronological order when assembling the manuscript?
Carolyn: Some of it had to do with inviting readers in. Some information needs to come early so the later poems make sense.
You’d think a chronological telling would be friendlier, but the book isn’t just about what happened over some years in the late 1900s—it’s about standing here and looking back at that time (re-entering some of those memories for the first time in many years), and what happens when we bring those events into now. I chose the order pretty intuitively. Maybe that’s just another way of saying I can’t explain all my reasons! In some ways, the order mirrors the process of remembering.
Lee: What do you understand differently now compared to before you wrote the book?
Carolyn: The biggest new understanding came from a conversation I had with a high school classmate. I hadn’t talked with this person for many years, and I (creepily?) found him online and arranged a phone call because I wanted to compare notes on some memories, and also to hear his reflections generally. His dad worked for the same company my dad did, and like mine, his family was only in Anchorage because of that job.
In the course of this conversation, he said in the most light, easy way, “I definitely feel a deep sense of hypocrisy every day of my life.”
And hearing that, I say in the poem, “I feel closer to home than I’ve been in a long time.” That posture—hypocrisy, embraced without anguish—was a real gift of my childhood.
In moving away from oil, hypocrisy is inevitable. If we’re paying attention, we’ll be suffused, constantly, with knowledge of our complicity, and we can’t let that stop us from pushing for change. To paraphrase another passage from the book, “rely” and “fight” do live in the same house—they must. We have to be ok with that discomfort if we’re going to get this world onto a different path.
Lee: The setting for much of Oil Courses is Alaska, a place often described as a wilderness or, as you put it in the book, for its vastness. How does that place of ice and snow, moose and bear, influence the individual poems and the book overall?
Carolyn: One thing is that wherever you live—especially as a child, but really always—is going to feel ordinary, possibly boring.
I worked retail jobs some summers, serving tourists who were walking around having moment-by-moment spiritual experiences: The mountains! The view of the inlet! They’d glow at me and ask, “What must it be like to live here?!” And I’d be like, “Lady, I’m just making the popcorn.” Or whatever.
And now I’m an outsider. These are my memories—of the moose encounter, of what I knew about bears, what I knew about the mud flats, what happened in our high school parking lot, and so on. When I lived them, they were ordinary (a word I maybe overuse in the book). But I’m using those stories now as an outsider. I haven’t set foot in Alaska since 2004!
So Alaska is a character in the book, or several. “Wild” and “far” are sort of the default metaphors for Alaska, aren’t they? I hope I’m also working against those a little bit.
Lee: What is the role of guilt in this work?
Carolyn: I read somewhere—I wish I could remember where—that we are too often taught that we’re both innocent and powerless, and that to repair what’s wrong we need to change both of those things. To see our complicity and our power.
In conversations about climate change, there can be a sense that we’re all simply victims of giant and evil companies that work in their own interests and not ours. There’s truth to that, but also we’re never as far from oil as we think we are.
I want to show that to be guilty, to be complicit, doesn’t look like you’d think it would. Chances are it looks like what you’re doing right now—whatever you’re doing. I think a lot about these lines from “Essay [1983–Now],” the longest poem in the book:
Your coffee cup in the morning: I’m telling you that’s exactly how it feels to be complicit, to benefit. I lay on the floor figuring out my math homework, I’m saying.
I’m saying I watched Three’s Company after school.
I want to be careful not to take that all the way to nihilism. “We’re all guilty no matter what, so why try to change things?” That can’t be it. We need that other part, too—to notice our power and use it.
Lee: Tell us about the cover art. What’s the story behind it?
Carolyn: I’ve loved Molly Megan Keenan’s collages for a long time, and I’m so grateful she said yes to creating this piece for the cover. She read the poems, we talked, and she did her thing. I couldn’t have predicted what she came up with, and yet it’s very true to the book—perfect.
One little treat: The oil derrick on the back cover is cut from the Isaac Asimov book How Did We Find Out About Oil?, which appears in a couple of the poems.
More About the interviewer:
Lee Colin Thomas is a poet, communications consultant, and university instructor. He is the author of Honey in the Dark, which won the 2020 Brighthorse Prize for poetry and was published in Fall 2021. Lee’s poems have appeared in Poet Lore,Water~Stone Review, Narrative Magazine, and various other journals. He lives in Minneapolis.
Thank you, Lee and Carolyn, for working with us on this interview. We appreciate you being part of our growing community, and we wish you both the best in your current and future writing endeavors.
Introducing Issue #24 ~ Summer 2026: The Honeybee Prize Edition
July 14, 2026
Cover art by Agata Lis
Dear Friends and Readers,
Welcome to the beating heart of summer… Days when the heat lingers long into the evening, and the cicadas serenade the sun as it slides out of view. Today, we are beyond thrilled to announce the winner of this year’s HoneyBee Poetry Prize, Mara Lee Grayson, and with this exciting news, the release of Issue #24!
In case you don’t know, this is our 6th year running the HoneyBee Poetry Prize, and by now, we are not surprised to have received a record-breaking number of submissions (over 240). A little bit of math, and one can conclude that our team read through over 1200 poems to select the eight finalists included in this issue. Narrowing the field to the finalists who were sent to our esteemed judge, Marya Hornbacher, was extremely difficult, and also means that all of the pieces selected are truly the best of the best.
Unsurprisingly, this was a difficult decision – the poems selected as finalists were remarkable in both caliber and range. After repeated readings, considerable deliberation, and a good deal of sitting with each piece, I have selected “How to be a Jewish Woman in Amerikkka while Your Friends Sleep Fitfully in War Zones” as the winner.
While its timeliness is undeniable – and brutal, and vital – the poem’s urgency and power derives as much from its linguistic and imagistic precision as from the subject matter. A palpable undercurrent of fury, desperation, and fear – not merely the speaker’s – is contained and given shape by the poet’s exacting syntactical design. Far from lessening its impact or cooling the poem’s fire, this deliberate restraint heightens the reader’s sense that the poem – like its subject – is barely contained, and may yet burn out of control.
This issue features Mara’s winning poem plus all finalists from this year’s contest, including:
Congratulations to all these fine folks for creating such wonderful work!!
Our list of contributors does not end there, though. This issue also features artwork by David Quady, Kirsten Clay, Ellen June Wright, Harrison Zeiberg, and Celine Lam, with cover art by Agata Lis. More about these artists is available on the Issue #24 Artwork page.
If this is your first visit to The Good Life Review, the 20th, or the 100th, we thank you. If you’re here to read a single poem that was written by someone you know or intend to read this latest release “cover to cover,” we thank you. And if you are just here for a taste of what we have to offer because you are considering sending us some writing or art, we thank you. No matter the reason, we are grateful and invite you to dive into Issue #24 ~ Summer 2026 and celebrate with us! We hope that you enjoy these pieces as much as we do!!
Cheers to Shade Trees and Honeybees, ~Shyla, M.A., Annie, Toni, and All of The Good Life Review Team
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Issue #24 Editors: Lea Pounds, Amy Crawford, Toni Allen, Ashley Espinoza, M.A. Boswell, Annie Barker, Jill Veltcamp, Erin Challenor, Patrick O’Dell, Tana Buoy, Cid Galicia, Terry Belew, Stepha Vesper, Michelle Pierce Battle, and Shyla Shehan
Issue #24 Readers: Madeline Torbenson, Tabitha Soper, John Cook, Mitra Vajjala, Michael Lundy, Miranda Jansen, Lori Vermeulen, Julie Johanning, Michelle Ray, Susan Loveland, Christine Nessler, Madi Palmer, Allison Weiler, Aida Eure-Chooran, Brooke Wiese, Judi B, Zach Vesper, and Jamie Wendt. .
Christopher R.A. Adams is a non-binary writer based in Nebraska. They hold a BA in English and Professional Writing, and their nonfiction has been nominated for the Dean Joseph H. Cash Award for Excellence in Writing.
Their flash fiction, The Evening Train, appears in Issue #23. It is their first published piece.
Tell us a bit about yourself.
My name is Christopher R. A. Adams (they/them), and I am an Omaha-based writer who is currently using my writing to explore that which cannot be escaped: death, the divine, love, and the oppression of capitalism. Beyond my writing, I love reading, weightlifting, hiking, thinking too much, and my beautiful partner.
What was the inspiration behind The Evening Train?
During my senior year of college, I decided to read Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying, which, from memory, is predominantly a series of interviews with end-of-life patients on the nature of life and their perspectives on its conclusion. The reading experience was harrowing; I was disturbed and fascinated by the first-hand descriptions of life’s final days. These thoughts mingled with my many bitter experiences in hospitals and with medical professionals to become “The Evening Train.”
What unique or surprising detail can you tell us about the revision process, and/or the final version of it?
My initial attempts to write what would become “The Evening Train” were mired by far too many ideas, such that it split into two (and potentially three) short stories. Where the current version shows a rather typical old man’s final moments, the original story was about an old Hollywood starlet’s recollection of her life and a neglected lesbian romance during her 20s as she dies from a fall. The many revisions that led to the final story were valuable lessons in the ancient wisdom of KISS.
What do you hope readers take from it?
I hope readers become more willing to think about their own death and final moments. Death is a chore we all must get around to doing one way or another. I don’t speak from experience (I’m sorry to ghost enthusiasts and my grandfather), but I have to believe the whole affair is easier if you have given it some forethought. I hope readers find in Mr. Ross a potential future for themselves or those around them and begin to think about how they may prepare for their own evening trains before they hear the whistle.
At what point in your life did you begin writing and working on fiction?
I’ve been writing since I was nine but decided to write things worth reading at twenty-one. I started as a child writing Star Wars fan fiction, and, by fifteen, I would have the odd stab at ripping off Tolkien while stealing elements from some mythology to hide my crime. When I went to college and was formally introduced to short fiction, I fell in love; “Hunters in the Snow,” “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” and “The Sculptor’s Funeral” stole my heart. The amount of meaning that could be shoved into so few pages made my head spin. Every short story I have written since has been an attempt to condense my understanding and insights into as few pages as possible.
When or why did you decide to start publishing your work??
In 2022, I was introduced to the idea of publishing work through one of my college courses. I was always told my writing was good, so why shouldn’t I? The following year, I submitted a story that I had become proud of to a journal, and it got rejected. That denial soiled my pride and kept me from trying again until this year, when I decided to try again in the hopes of making something of all the scribbling I had done. And now my story is available for all to read!
What fuels your desire to write (or engage in other creative outlets)?
What keeps me coming back to the keyboard is the chance to live beyond myself. Unlike the restrictions of my singular life, writing allows me to step into new modes of being, to see new perspectives, and learn from them. If I want to know if there’s life after love, I can step into being a widow and all its burdens. If I want to confront my mortality, I can become a man in his final days. If I want to be betrayed by God, I can become a prophet. I can’t deny writing, because it gives me more than mere living could ever.
What have been the biggest influences on your writing?
Leo Tolstoy and Albert Camus taught me how minimal a story could be and still enrapture an audience. T. S. Eliot and J.R.R. Tolkien showed me how to massage ancient symbols into new meanings and understandings. The stillness at 4 am made me pay attention, and the hustle at 5 pm kept me from lingering. The sex I’ve had sanctified hedonism, but the sex I haven’t had reminded me of the inevitability of regret. And Paradise Lost is proof that prequels and in-between-quels can be good if you actually give a shit.
How do you make expression a part of your daily life, or how do you find a balance between your writing and other responsibilities?
For better or worse, writing seeps into my life whether I make room for it or not. If I ignore it too long, I’ll become crotchety until I get behind a keyboard. To keep the desire at bay, I do my best to schedule at least a couple of hour-long writing sessions a week before I go to work so my mind is fresh. If I’m lucky, I can manage longer sessions on the weekend.
What do you think when you hear, “the good life”?
I think a slow spring morning with an open annotated book, a lover in arm’s reach, and a few dozen trees in view. String even a few such moments together, and a life can become good.
Thank you, Christopher, for sharing your writing with us, for spending extra time on this Q&A, and for being a part of our growing community. Best wishes for all your writing endeavors now and in the future! Write on, indeed!!
December, my son’s grandmother dies, so I take him to clean out her closet.
I grab her purple coat, shut the door, head to trample woods behind her house. From a log, I pry fallen shards and spy a brittle wood frog, forearms frozen in tiny prayer to leaf litter, unblinking lids retracting into its skull.
My son whimpers, so I explain it’s only a half-death, amphibian magic trick, superpower blood pushing against winter’s dark. It’s just a waiting game in the wooded shadows.
His child ears are only four years old so he hears nothing but flakes melting. His mouth is only four years old so he stutters afraid to d-d-die, not g-g-g-good at s-s-s-still.
The stutter worsens. By January, my neighbor can’t understand him. By Valentine’s, his teacher offers social-emotional sessions. I begin the worry, wonder how other women balance dying parents and not ruining children.
We try speech therapy, dentist, chiropractor. Even Mama comes out five syllables. Sometime in March, I dream the purple coat striding over a cracking lake. I wake to pull it from a box. I drape it over the dining room chair and announce Mimi is eating with us now.
We hold each other before meals from then on, one sleeve each grasped by my hand and his, a circle of human flesh and wool. We tell my mother’s coat about the day, fill her pockets with plastic dinosaurs, and sniff air around the notched collar.
May, the ground thaws. I begin the dig to bury her ashes under the birch. Halfway through the task, my son creeps from the porch. He is a spray of violets moving across the ground. He is pond ice tinkling into warming water. He stands by my hip taller than the branch he swung on last fall, chin pinkening, tears warming his tongue into a clever thing again.
We drop the ashes into the hole together. Words fall cleanly from his mouth, water the earth like prayers. My hands clasp in awe of moving things, of turning earth, of his hopping legs reborn.
About the Author:
Melissa N. Vincel is a writer from NE Ohio who has published poetry, prose, and travel writing for 25 years. She is re-emerging after a long break for motherhood. Recent prizes include a fellowship to the DISQUIET International Literary Festival, a feature as one of 30 Ohioan poets for National Poetry Month, and an Assembly for the Arts Boost grant. Visit her website: melissavincel.com.
Exploring Poetry with Kenton K. Yee: Insights and Inspirations
June 27, 2026
Kenton K. Yee’s recent poems appear (or will soon) in Kenyon, Threepenny, Cincinnati, RHINO, Quarterly West, Poetry Northwest, Plume Poetry, Poetry Wales, Rattle, Best Microfiction 2026, and other venues. His debut poetry chapbook is due to drop from Bull City Press in 2027. He writes from Northern California.
Originally trained as a theoretical physicist, I’ve delved into fields ranging from math and physics to law and business, trying on more hats than I’ll list here. One of my favorite hats is poet, which I put on during the work-from-home COVID years with no formal training. I’ve been writing ever since. Like Ode to the Guest Star, many of my poems have science allusions, but my aims in poetry are always artistic, not didactic or scientific.
What was the inspiration behind Ode to the Guest Star?
Memories of Caltech’s Millikan Library, my interest in astronomy, the long history of the Guest Star from its original sighting in China to its subsequent rediscovery centuries later in England—a reminder that humanity is just a blink of an eye in cosmic time.
What unique or surprising detail can you tell us about the revision process, and/or the final version of it?
I’m an obsessive, compulsive reviser. The more I like a poem, the more I keep tweaking it. I’ve been tweaking this poem for almost three years. The most noticeable recent change is the addition of two words, “Ode to,” to the original title.
What did you learn (about yourself, craft, or life in general) through writing and revising it?
What I learned is that life and everything in it—especially poetry—is a journey, not an end-goal or trophy, so one had better enjoy the journey, which means one has to pay attention. With each poem, I learned to pay closer attention, attention to every pattern, turn, break, word, comma, and surprise.
What do you hope readers take from it?
I want to pique readers and leave them curious about my work. Beyond this, I don’t have any message or meaning. I want a poem to be a “thing-in-itself and the thing-for-you,” to quote Rae Armantrout out of context.
At what point in your life did you begin writing and working on poetry?
When I began working from home in 2020 during COVID. I had participated in online writing and poetry courses off and on beginning in 2012, but never took writing seriously until I had the time to do it during COVID.
Do you write in other genres, and if so, what?
When I took up writing in 2012, it was to write my great American novel. But it was too hard to get the kind of handholding and feedback I needed as a novice to get far. I found poetry writing much easier to get into than longer-form writing. A few lines drafted every morning accumulated quickly into short poems, which I used to get feedback (mostly rejections) from literary journals, but this practice drew me in, made me feel like I was making progress.
What fuels your desire to write (or engage in other creative outlets)?
I guess I’m addicted now to the serotonin kick of an occasional acceptance. Also, since there’s no money, career, love, or friendship at stake, poetry submission is the closest approximation to a stress-free game I can play. And working on a poem for a couple of hours is a helluva lot more gratifying than playing video games or TV, which invariably leaves me feeling hollow.
When or why did you decide to start publishing your work?
Besides the serotonin kick I get from an occasional acceptance, I need the motivation and discipline that submission due dates provide to sit and finish poems. Without submission deadlines, my poems would all languish in revision purgatory. And without acceptances, I’d keep revising a poem forever. In short, the submission-acceptance process helps me pace myself.
What have been the biggest influences in your writing?
I’m primarily influenced by specific poems, not bodies of work. That said, several poems of Wallace Stevens, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Stanley Kunitz, Larry Levis, and Rae Armantrout spring to mind. This is an incomplete list.
Are there any special projects, other pieces, or books you’d like to promote? Feel free to include links.
My debut chapbook, “Making the Best of It,” will drop from Bull City Press in August 2027. It’s a series of poems that metaphorically and playfully tracks my circuitous journey from a blue-collar immigrant family to academic math and physics, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and (perhaps not so finally) art and poetry. I like to think of “Making” as my bungling attempt at Joyce’s “A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man.”
What do you think when you hear, “the good life”?
I think of a lit journal that curates art that sees the uplifting side of a situation, e.g., finds a burst of light in an otherwise dark sky.
Thank you, Kenton, for sharing your poetry with us and for the time you spent on this Q&A. We wish a peaceful and prosperous summer, and also the best with your writing endeavors!
