Category: interviews

Rachel Noelani Bovee, a hapa Native Hawaiian born and raised in San Francisco, received her MFA in Creative Writing from California College of the Arts. She mostly writes fiction & essays and is currently working on her debut novel. Her work appears most recently in NUNUM. Rachel lives with her partner and two preschoolers in Seoul where she writes and works as an English professor at Kyunghee University.

Her flash essay, To The Boy Who Looks Like My Ex, appears in Issue #25.

Tell us a bit about yourself, something more than just what’s in your bio. Perhaps something not a lot of people know. 

Every autumn, I read Anne of Green Gables. I first read her in the third grade. I’m on my umpteenth read currently, in fact. I’m not an orphan or a redhead or a white woman or from PEI or someone who has even been to Canada actually, but something about the big-hearted, bull-headed, awkward, emotional, wordy girl in that book struck some chords for little girl me and I’ve been drawn to visit her, both Anne and that little girl who felt seen, every year since.

What unique or surprising detail can you tell us about the revision process?

When I was probably 80% of the way through, my laptop crashed out and I lost more than half of the essay. At the time, I felt so precious about the words and the lines and the writing choices that I was so sure I couldn’t recover enough to repeat the assumed brilliance that was there before. Oddly enough, or maybe not because I feel like I’ve heard this from other writers before, the freedom that came with losing the work and having a second shot at really crafting and organizing the ideas that already existed into something more polished and more deeply considered was so much better. More natural, more rhythmic and true.

What did you learn (about yourself, craft, or life in general) through writing and revising it?

I love how you can write stories within stories, weaving back and forth between them. This piece has a bit of that happening and it was so much fun to stretch those muscles and improve the craft of that while writing this.

What do you hope readers take from the essay?

I hope readers can see themselves and their own complex interactions with their own pasts within the piece. I think often humans tend to be on either end of the spectrum when we consider parts of our past—either glorifying it as the good ole “better” days or shuddering at the heartbreaking challenges that had to be overcome and, thankfully, left behind. But I think the more common, less talked about case is that sometimes it is both of those things and, as a result, equals out to being kind of bittersweetly neutralized. There is a comfort and closure in realizing that; at least, that is what I experienced in creating this piece.

At what point in your life did you begin writing and working on creative nonfiction, and is flash your jam, or do you also write longer essays?

Although it makes me really uncomfortable, I’ve probably been off and on writing creative nonfiction for a very long time. In a formal way, that probably started when I was 18 or 19 studying under Chris Kraus in the Literature/Writing undergraduate program at UC San Diego. She really pushed me to search for honesty and be unafraid to meet it face-to-face. But this is my first time submitting and being published in CNF. I love that it is in flash because I adore flash. I remember the first time I read Lydia Davis in high school and realized that the short (very overwrought adolescent-y) slips of creativity I was scrawling in corners of my notebooks and in the backs of my books could maybe someday actually be legitimate and meaningful—be “real writing”. I do, though, also write longer pieces—essays, short stories, and, currently in the long process of drafting, a novel.

What was the most impactful part of your MFA experience?

Honestly, community. Learning from published and varied writers, getting opportunities to meet working writers in the community, building up my own peer community of writer friends who I trust as readers, as critics, as friends—that’s all been priceless. I don’t think getting an MFA is the only way to dive into the craft of writing but getting immediate unfiltered access to an entire community of writers is pretty magical.

What fuels your desire to write?

Is it strange to say because it feels like the thing I have to do? I’ve been doing it for so long and go in and out of productive seasons but its always there—like a birthmark or a mole. A desire to be read is what motivates the actual enagement aspect but writing feels survival, just like breathing or walking.

How do you make expression a part of your daily life, or how do you find a balance between your writing and other responsibilities?

This has been such a hard journey for me. I am a full-time working mom of two pretty young and really active (read: wild) boys. My husband, who also works a lot, and I have built parenting community around us but have no family or best friends nearby so we handle all of the real grunt of parenting ourselves without the support of a really close or interwoven village. Making time for my writing has, especially since having my first son in 2020, felt impossible and selfish. But over the past few years, I’ve worked hard to change that mindset and carve out time for it. I don’t have the ability to always write along the same schedule so instead I make broader, practical writing goals for myself—applying to a certain amount of residencies every season, submitting to a certain amount of lit mags every month, getting in a certain minimum word count done on my novel every day, etc. Sometimes, its done late at night for hours long blocks and, sometimes, its done in twenty minute pockets between work and pickups or in between the classes I teach.

What have been the biggest influences in your writing?

I think just women, as a whole. Women writers, women teachers, women artists, women activists, women in my family, women who are my friends, women in the news, women in the community.

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

Being next to the water, all the water, any water, especially the ocean’s water. Laughter. Nature walks. Holding hands. Lowered cortisol. Kids falling asleep in arms, on shoulders. Warm blankets. Full stomachs. Cool breezes. Lots and lots of beverages. Voice notes. Bills that are paid. Conversations that feel edifying. Hugs when happy, hugs when sad. Deep and cleansing sobbing. Future goals. Traveling to new places. Meeting people who surprise, in the best ways. Quiet nights after everyone’s asleep. Safety. Books and books, and so many more books.

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Thank you, Rachel, for sharing you flash CNF with us. We’re glad you found the courage to start putting more of your writing out in the world. Thanks also for taking the time to participate in this Q&A. We appreciate you being a part of our growing community and wish you continued success with writing, the novel, and all of life’s endeavors!

Lasha D. Goodwin is a poet whose work explores lineage, memory, and the quiet inheritances that shape who we become. Poetry has drawn on her heart since age eight, when she first recognized that language can paint intricate images. That early instinct matured into a practice rooted in reflection and storytelling. Her writing often centers on themes of home, ancestry, and continuity, and she’s particularly interested in the ways Black identity, womanhood, and generational resilience intersect to create both burden and possibility.

Her poem, Whine & Die, appears in Issue #25.

Tell us a bit about yourself, something more than just what’s in your bio. Perhaps something not a lot of people know. 

I’m an open book, so there’s little that people don’t know about me. In my 9-to-5, I work as an affordable housing developer. People are often surprised to learn that I’m also a poet!

What unique or surprising detail can you tell us about the poem, revision process, and/or the final version of it?

I’m blessed to come from a family of writers and performers. I typically perform my early drafts for my parents, grandmother, partner, and sister to glean feedback on how the themes and concepts come through in my writing.

What did you learn (about yourself, craft, or life in general) through writing and revising it?

I’ve learned that nothing is permanent, even when it is good. At times in my writing, I’ve become attached to words, lines, or stanzas even when they detracted from the poem. Growth as a writer looks like having the courage to let go of something I love and believe I need in service of a greater purpose. Similarly, life is always evolving. It is best that we learn to change alongside it, even if that means letting go of things we once thought we needed.

What do you hope readers take from the piece?

I hope people take away a spirit of resilience and gain a new perspective from reading this poem. This piece is extraordinarily vulnerable, as I share the discomfort of feeling like I don’t belong. Despite that discomfort, I continue to show up as my best self.

At what point in your life did you begin writing and working on this poem?

I began writing poetry at age eight. One of my earliest memories is winning my school’s poetry contest with a poem about a kite. Poetry became a constant medium for understanding complex feelings around love, mental health, and heritage. I’ve almost always carried a notebook with me to “catch” emotions, ideas, and feelings and translate them into poems.

What inspired you to try and get some of your poetry published?

Two years ago, I made a personal commitment to honor my art. Although I’ve written poems for many years, fear held me back from sharing much of my work. This year, I challenged myself to push beyond self-doubt and anxiety and pursue opportunities that would help me grow.

Do you write in other genres, and if so, what?

In addition to poetry, I also write jazz songs.

What fuels your desire to write?

As I mentioned, I made a commitment to myself to actively pursue my writing and other creative outlets, such as crocheting. Creativity also offers a welcome break from the demands of my job, where I spend much of my time crunching numbers.

What have been the biggest influences in your writing?

I draw my greatest inspiration from ordinary experiences and the revelations they can bring. For example, I wrote a poem about a blister on my thumb as a way to communicate that injury and hard times don’t have to permanently alter our identity. No observation is insignificant. Life is a muse.

How do you balance writing with everyday life?

It is essential that I make time to write every day. I carry a poetry notebook with me and set aside intentional time to think and write. I also make time to read poetry by others, as I consider that part of my writing process.

Are there any special projects, other pieces, or books you’d like to promote?

I’ll be attending a residency in France next September. Folks can follow my journey on Instagram at @life_is_goodwin.

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

When I hear “the good life,” I think of a life sustained by simple moments: coffee with a friend, cuddling with a pet, or writing poetry in front of a rain-streaked window. It isn’t flashy or hyped, but quietly and constantly blessed.

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Thank you, Lasha, for sharing your poetry with us and for participating in this Q&A. We are grateful to you for being a part of our growing literary community and wish you the best with writing, the residency in France, and all of life’s endeavors!

Patrick Strickland is an award-winning journalist and author from Texas who has reported from some fifteen countries across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, covering immigration, the rise of the far right, humanitarian catastrophes, armed conflict, and more. Based in Athens, Greece, he is the managing editor of Inkstick Media. His books are Alerta! Alerta! Snapshots of Europe’s Anti-Fascist Struggle, The Marauders: Standing Up to Vigilantes in the American Borderlands, and You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave: Refugees, Fascism, and Bloodshed in Greece, and most recently, the story collection A History of Heartache (Melville House, 2026). He was a 2024 de Groot Foundation Writer of Note.

His short fiction, Day Drinking, appears in Issue #25 ~ Autumn 2026.

Tell us a bit about yourself.

I’ve been living abroad for most of my adult life. After my undergraduate, I moved to the Middle East and started working as a journalist. I lived in Palestine, Lebanon, Qatar, and now Greece, with a couple stints back in Texas in between. Around fifteen years and some change, all told.

What was the inspiration behind Day Drinking?

I go on pretty long walks every morning, oftentimes for a couple hours, and one day last summer, I passed a bar near where I live. There were a few old guys sitting around in there, each staring into their drinks. It wasn’t much of a scene. Truth be told, I’d probably seen that image a hundred times. I’d probably lived it a few times myself. But I just had the realization I’d never written a bar story. Bars pop up in a lot of my stories, to be sure, but not simply putting a guy in a stool and putting him through the wringer. For me, every story starts with a voice. “Day Drinking” began with this line in my head about white lies. I don’t recall the exact words from that time, but it eventually became, “Truth was, why Mack sent me packing wasn’t much of a story. I’d stretched the truth a little. Harmless stuff. White lies. But he lost his shit on me, clawed my face bloody.”

From there the story came together fairly quickly. I wrote a sketch of the story that day and sat on it a couple weeks, then started revising and filling in details.

What unique or surprising detail can you tell us about the revision process, and/or the final version of it?

This is rare for me, but the story didn’t involve nearly as much revision as it usually takes me to feel good. I’ve had stories that got rejected more than a hundred times and went through several dozen revisions over the course of years. This one was a small blessing. I tweaked it now and then and got some very trusted feedback, but the only thing that took some work was settling on an ending. The original ending was in the same spirit as this one, but I initially clipped it and kept rewriting it. I tried something a little more overtly hopeful. That didn’t work. Finally, one of those morning walks led to me thinking about hope, and from there, the last paragraph came together neatly.

What did you learn (about yourself, craft, or life in general) through writing and revising it?

That hope is a small, precious thing in my mind. Everyone searches for it in stories. I certainly do. It’s why many of us read. But anytime I sit down to write, it starts to veer toward a darker, more bruised and mangled hope. I don’t expect everybody to see it there, but to my read, this story’s got something that resembles hope if you squint just right.

What do you hope readers take from it?

That’s for the readers to say. All I know is when the narrator spoke, I was drawn to the guy.

With a background as a journalist and much success with nonfiction work, we’re curious when you began writing and working on fiction.

When I was doing my undergraduate in Texas, I started writing fiction before I ever really considered journalism. This was maybe eighteen years ago. I had a couple of mostly forgettable stories picked up in magazines, but journalism offered something a little different. I was broke and graduated into the recession. I’d never traveled or seen anything of the world, and fiction didn’t strike me as something that could pay bills or put food in my stomach. I focused on journalism for several years while living abroad, but the notion of writing fiction still nagged me. It was all I really read, and it seemed inevitable that I’d give it a shot again.

What fuels your desire to write (or engage in other creative outlets)?

I never felt there was much choice involved in it. Whether it was nonfiction or fiction, I always wrote every day. A large part of it is the crushing anxiety that comes with going out each day and being alive in the world. Another part is I just enjoy it—picking up on a voice and really tapping into it is puts you in someone else’s head for a moment. It’s about empathy. The journalism and nonfiction are too, but fiction really forces you to ask how you’d react if you were saddled with another person’s circumstances.

What have been the biggest influences in your writing?

The answer to that question changes every day. I didn’t read a ton growing up. The first book I ever read on my own was Albert Camus’s The Stranger. I was already at university, and it rattled me in this unique and entirely new way. More recently, I’ve been reading a lot of old pulp noir paperbacks, as well as several novels by a fantastic writer called Megan Abbott. There are others. I dig a lot of gritty, rural writers. I also watch a lot of movies and listen to old radio theater programs. All of it influences the way I think about stories. Also, my writing and reading friends, the people who talk about books they love with me or give me feedback.

How do you make expression a part of your daily life, or how do you find a balance between your writing and other responsibilities?

I write before work and after work. I think about writing when I go on walks. It’s kind of baked into every free moment I get in a day. I make myself write a minimum of a few paragraphs a day, or at least revise a little bit.

Are there any special projects, other pieces, or books you’d like to promote?

The books I’ve recently read that cut me hardest were Megan Abbott’s Beware the Woman and Elliott Chaze’s Black Wings Has My Angel. If you like fast, dark, and very literary books with a crime bent, they’re about as killer as you could hope for. Another book I like to hype is Mark Richard’s The Ice at the Bottom of the World. It has some seriously interesting sentences. And to be a little shameless, my first fiction book came out in April. It’s called A History of Heartache.

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

I won’t deny its existence, but pull out a map and show me where, exactly.

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Thank you, Patrick, for sharing your work with us and for being a part of our growing community. We appreciate the time you spent on this Q&A and wish you success with the new book and all your writing endeavors.

Karla Hernandez Torrijos is a formerly undocumented writer and teaching artist. Beginning at an open mic in 2017, she has since read her work in venues across Nebraska, New Mexico, and California. An award-winning poet, Karla’s work interrogates our understanding of home, displacement, and the liminal space in between. She is currently at work on her second manuscript.

Her poem, Farmworker Dies Fleeing an Immigration Raid in Southern California, was a finalist for the 2026 Honeybee Poetry Prize and appears in Issue #24.

Tell us a bit about yourself.

Ironically enough, this was the hardest question for me to answer. In some ways, I like to think of myself as “the man behind the curtain” of a poem, the one pulling the levers of language to create an illusion. 

I am someone who grew up on the steps of the public library of a small Nebraska town, waiting for Laura to open the doors in the summers. I love tea with milk on the mornings when I don’t work, and whatever’s most caffeinated on the mornings when I do. I used to walk the mile home from middle school with a book held in front of me and the year I dropped out of high school, I only attended one class regularly— Language Arts. I love an em dash, I love an Oxford comma, and I still, still don’t know when to use a semicolon correctly. My favorite season is fall, though I often lie and say it’s spring, because I believe spring is the season of poets. I struggle to watch a movie without subtitles, a holdover from when my sister and I were learning English. I think the greatest genre of film is the romantic comedy, and that children make the best storytellers. And that fragments should be considered proper sentences. I talk a lot and I write even more and don’t always know when to stop. Finally, in the fourth grade, my teacher believed in my short story so much that she asked me to read it in front of the class. I never looked back.

What compelled you to write the poem?

I was undocumented from the ages of six to nineteen. The youngest, I was often protected from the harsher realities of immigration by my mother and sisters. While I did harbor some fear around my and my family’s safety, the 2000s and 2010s seemed like an entirely different world than the one we live in now— the rhetoric less vitriolic, the divisions between party lines less defined, and the general sentiment towards immigration, and immigrants themselves, less hateful. While this may simply be the world as seen through the eyes of a child, it seemed as if detentions and deportations were something that happened in other places, to other people. It is only now, within the safety afforded by my legal status, that I realize just how wrong I was, how close my family and I came to becoming another statistic, another headline.

I wrote this poem in July 2025, in the days following the news of Jaime Alanís’ death, caused by injuries he sustained during a fall, attempting to flee or hide from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents. Since this poem was written, I, alongside others, have watched as ICE has continued to rip apart families and communities. Most recently, footage from the fatal shootings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti went viral, with demonstrations and vigíls taking place across the country. While I am, of course, moved to see people mobilized to action (some for the first time), I have often asked myself to what extent legal status plays a role in people’s willingness to empathize. According to the National Immigration Project, thirty-three people died in ICE custody in 2025. As of September 1st of this year, at least twenty-six people have died in ICE custody or within days of their release from custody.

Geraldo Lunas Campos. Luis Gustavo Nuñez Caceres. Luis Beltrán Yañez-Cruz. Parady La. Victor Manuel Díaz. Heber Sánchez Domínguez. Lorth Sim. Jairo García-Hernández. Alberto Gutiérrez Reyes. Pejman Karshenas Najafabadi. Emmanuel Cleeford Damas. Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal. Royer Pérez Jiménez. José Guadalupe Ramos-Solano. Tuan Van Bui. Alejandro Cabrera Clemente. Aled Damien Carbonell-Betancourt. Denny Adán González. Mamuka Artmeladze. Felix Alcorta-Rodriguez. Adrian Andreas Florian. Jesus Manuel Arenas-Silva. Jose Chajon-Raxon. Priciliano Trejo. Edwin Lopez-Cornejo. Lianyong Wei. 

Perhaps, like me, your eyes moved quickly over the list of names. A list of names is just that, after all, a list. It is nearly impossible to find humanity in a wall of text. When I first read The New York Times article from which this poem takes its title, I was struck most by the indifferent tone of news reporting, the apparent detachment by which facts are presented. In writing this poem, I was forced to confront the limitations, and failure, of all language, including the poetic language I had long sought solace in. 

The poem’s form, a palindrome poem that breaks structure in its final line, was created by writer Nicole Sealey. In my opening line What is the right form / For laying down the dead man’s body? I contend with the central question of writing about Jaime Alanís at all, of trying to process my own pain without appropriating someone else’s grief. As a migrant writer, I have often felt complicit in the erasure of real people in favor of a gripping image or a moving story. A poem, despite whatever intention it begins with, can just as easily create caricatures of the very people it hopes to depict. This poem was my way of grappling with those feelings of complicitness, as well as an attempt to acknowledge the man at the heart of the headline. 

In many ways, all roads led me to that last line. Inspired by the work of Black activists, scholars, and the #SayHerName movement, I chose to end the poem with the simple fact of a name. Unlike a list, a single name forces us to sit in the uncomfortable and painful reality that many of us avoid: He was just like me or perhaps even more importantly, I was just like him. We can debate the sociopolitical and economic contexts surrounding a person’s death, the circumstances that lead to migration in the first place. We can disagree on immigration policy, about whether to build walls or extend pathways to citizenship. We cannot debate, or deny, one another’s humanity. 

Jaime, Mohammad, Tuan— they lived. They laughed, they sang, and in migrating, they dared to dream of a world bigger than the one they had inherited. And each, at one moment or another, was held in the arms of someone that loved them and wished for them a long and happy life. Just as you yourself were. The only difference is which side of the border you were born into. 

What unique or surprising detail can you tell us about the revision process, and/or the final version of it

I think perhaps the most surprising detail of the revision process is how little changed from the original draft to the final version! In reviewing my old journal, the first and final drafts of this poem look surprisingly similar— whereas the process of editing was more subtractive than additive, which is not usually the case for me. This was one of those rare cases where, once I knew the form I was writing in, the poem arrived nearly “itself”, so to speak. 

One small detail is that the original draft used Jaime Alanís’ full name. During the revision process, I decided to pare it down to just his first. This decision was born out of a desire for familiarity in the piece. A familiarity, that while unearned, allowed me to create a deeper sense of kinship and eventually, loss.

Do you write in other genres, and if so, what?

I do! I write creative nonfiction, using elements from both fiction and poetry to tell stories from my own life. I hid behind poetry for a long time because I feared the confines of memoir and the scope of fiction. I signed up for an introductory course on creative nonfiction in college, not really knowing what it was, and fell in love. 

I recently sent an essay to a journal for the first time and received the kindest, most encouraging rejection letter in return. It was a good reminder that I’m headed in the right direction, and to keep going, despite not always being the most confident in my prose.

What fuels your desire to write (or engage in other creative outlets)?

In considering this question, I began with Joan Didion, who once wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” I must admit that I did not know the full quote until recently, in which she expands on the idea that writers impose “a narrative line upon disparate images” in their attempt to create order from the chaos of existence. Truth be told, I had always assumed she meant We tell ourselves stories in order to survive, that stories existed in much the same way the first stone blade must have— a tool in our ancestors’ hands that could change the course of an entire species. Through stories, we could recount our past, and in doing so, shape our future. 

I came to writing from a place of desperation, just as a lonely lifeboat arrives on the edges of shore. For a time, poetry became a refuge. In a moment of my life when I did not believe that the things I said mattered, writing became a way of exerting agency within the sentences of someone else’s narrative. I am not the first to say that writing, that all creativity, is an act of survival; that survival itself demands creativity. However, as I grew older, I began to see writing less as a life raft and more as a practice, perhaps the building of a home—intentional, methodical, labor intensive. 

One of the central pillars of this house I’ve built is my belief that writing must serve a greater purpose than aesthetic beauty, a sentiment best encapsulated by the James Baldwin quote, “The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” 

All my writing is an attempt towards what Baldwin is describing. I am pointing out at the world, I am saying ‘Look at that barn swallow, look at that meadow, look at that child in the detention center’ and it is because I love you, and because I love you, I want you to see what I see. Not all

of it is pastoral and not all of it is painful but all of it is important. Palestinian writer Marwan Makhoul said in his now-famous poem, In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political / I must listen to the birds / and in order to hear the birds / the warplanes must be silent. 

You cannot write about the beauty of the meadow if it is engulfed in flames nor the barn swallow’s song if she is choking on smoke. I am not interested in writing as merely an act of witnessing, nor as a weapon by which the traumatized are re-traumatized in perpetuity. My desire to write is fueled by the foundational belief that we cannot face it if we cannot name it, or to say it in the words of Lucillle Clifton, “We cannot create what we can’t imagine.” 

Perhaps yesterday, writing was a lifeboat, today it is the house we are building, and tomorrow it is the front door that we must walk through to see what exists beyond these four walls. The work of writing is also the work of transfiguration. I am writing not simply to reflect, but also to reimagine. What worlds exist within our reach, at the edge of our pens? 

How do you make expression a part of your daily life, or how do you find a balance between your writing and other responsibilities?

Lately, I have been writing ten minute poems during my breaks at work. There is a kind of spark that ignites when you’re forced into such an inflexible constraint. I have found that this practice has made me a better writer, as the limitations of time demand that I move through the page swiftly and with confidence. I don’t have time to look up a word or to hand-wring over whether a particular image is working. Gone are the days of Walden Pond, a myth created in part due to the unpaid and unacknowledged labor of women. Nearly every writer I know has a day job that pulls them away from the page. 

The reality, somewhat laughable, is that I do not find a balance between writing and other responsibilities. Sometimes, the dishes lay heaped in the kitchen sink while I work on an essay. Other times, the poem lays unfinished as I get ready for that morning’s shift, muttering lines to myself. I remember reading once that famed poet and physician William Carlos Williams favored such short stanzas in part because he wrote poems in between patients at the hospital. Whether this is true or not is besides the point. The point, I suppose, is that all art is a give and take. On a more practical level, I carry a small notebook in my tote bag. I try to write as often as I can, which is still not nearly as often as I would like, and I let the dishes pile up more than I

care to admit. I ask myself what is non-negotiable and go from there. There are some responsibilities that cannot be shirked— morning shifts, doctor’s appointments. Still, in between these, there are brief windows of time. Now and again, I try to look through them.

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

Raised in Nebraska most of my life, I can’t help but think of our state sign when I hear those words. Nebraska… the good life in bold white letters against that specific shade of road-sign green. Home of Arbor Day. I am of the belief that a good life, the good life, is slow, intentional living. Like our sign, the good life is understated. It is not the highlights, although those are there too, but rather the daily work of building and keeping community. 

Another word for this might be family. It is your grandfather’s hands, time-worn as the recipe pages he turns, looking for a beef gravy that smells like a childhood home does. It is your best friend’s laughter, the kind that only emerges from relief, a sunray peeking through clouds, after an especially long year. It is the work of writing, often solitary, always deliberate, as you reach into an opaque river to try and find something glimmering. 

The good life is the small and miraculous occurrences that appear every day but are swept up by routine and responsibility. The perfectly brewed cup of coffee, the commute with only green lights, or the line in the poem that holds your gaze, the way only a reflection can.

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Thank you, Karla, for being generous with your time and your pen and for sharing so openly. The poetry of any age or time period is documentation of the state of the world and your answers and explanations are heartbreaking and also compelling.

We appreciate you being a part of our growing community, our TGLR family and we wish you the best with life and all your writing endeavors!

Mara Lee Grayson’s poetry has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Tampa Review, and Nimrod, among other literary journals, and has been nominated multiple times for the Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. An award-winning scholar of rhetorics of racism and antisemitism, Grayson is the author or editor of five books of nonfiction. She holds an MFA from The City College of New York and a PhD from Columbia University and was previously a tenured professor in the California State University system. Originally from Brooklyn, New York, she currently resides in New Jersey.

Her poem, How to Be a Jewish Woman in Amerikkka while Your Friends Sleep Fitfully in War Zones, was the winner of the 2026 Honeybee Poetry Prize and appears in Issue #24.

Tell us a bit about yourself, something more than just what’s in your bio. Perhaps something not a lot of people know. 

I acted before I wrote. (My father was a stage director, and I grew up surrounded by theatre.) In some ways, I came to writing through acting – I wanted to make moments come to life. Also, I have more piercings and tattoos than people expect me to have (which says a lot less about me than it does about people’s expectations).

As far as message and intention, the poem speaks for itself. What more can you tell us about what compelled or inspired you to write it? 

I actually began writing this poem in 2022, set it aside for a while, and came back to it in 2024, after hearing from friends and colleagues who had been running for shelter every night. I juxtaposed that with what I had been trying to make sense of a couple of years earlier.

What unique or surprising detail can you tell us about the revision process?

Believe it or not, this poem was originally a sonnet that I deconstructed about 20 different times.

What did you learn (about yourself, craft, or life in general) through writing and revising it?

As I returned to this poem, I wondered how much of my own experiences of identity and positionality reflect the experiences of my ancestors. What do we share across space and time? What is universal, so to speak, and what is particular? How do we draw connections without losing what makes us unique?

What do you hope readers take from the poem?

I never presume what readers will take from a poem. Over the years, readers and editors have shared with me interpretations of my work that I never intended, and I’ve come to not only be okay with that but to kind of appreciate it. I won’t say all interpretations are equally valid – they’re not – but we all bring ourselves to the work we read. If my work speaks to you, I’m glad, and I hope it makes you both feel and think about something just a little differently than you did before.

Do you write in other genres, and if so, what?

I do! My MFA thesis was a collection of short stories, a few I’ve since published. I wrote freelance briefly for a couple of newspapers, and I even once worked as a theatre and film critic. A lot of people know me primarily as a scholar.

What fuels your desire to write?

I want to say that I write to make meaning of the world and to feel like myself, and both are true, but, at root, it’s a feeling, a compulsion maybe. I feel driven to write. I don’t feel comfortable or satisfied when I don’t.

How do you balance writing with everyday life?

I have no idea what balance means, and I have yet to meet a writer or artist who does.

Are there any special projects, other pieces, or books you’d like to promote?

Readers can find my books here. 

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

Having time and space to do the things I want to do without feeling like I have to squeeze them in or compartmentalize them. Maybe the good life is really about finding that ever-elusive balance.

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Thank you, Mara, for sharing more about your life and writing with us. We are grateful to you for participating in this Q&A and for being a part of what is becoming a sweet history of Honeybee Prize winners!!

We wish you continued success with writing and that you will someday find that balance!

Ali McLafferty earned her PhD in History at UC Berkeley. Her work combines the historical with the fantastical and has appeared in The Forge, Fractured Lit, Flash Frog, Gone Lawn, and The Belmont Story Review and is forthcoming in Flame Tree Press’s Helen of Troy anthology. Her work has also been shortlisted for prizes, including Fractured Lit, The Manuscript Wishlist, and Unleash Press. She is also a visual artist whose work has been featured in Flash Frog, Centaur Magazine, and Foofaraw Press. More of her publications and artwork can be found on her website, alimclafferty.com.

Her short fiction, Salt and Sand, appears in Issue #24.

Tell us a bit about yourself, something more than just what’s in your bio. Perhaps something not a lot of people know. 

I’m an avid gardener. And when I say “avid,” I mean Texas Gardener avid: wake-up-at-5:30am-in-the-summer-to-water-everything-by-hand-for-an-hour-because-of-water-restrictions avid. My backyard is tiny, but I’ve packed every inch of it with plants. My current harvest includes lemons, oranges, figs, bananas, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, watermelons, honeyrock melons, pumpkins, onions, herbs, and even hops (yes—to make my own beer!). I have no idea how many plants I own at this point. Not enough. NEVER ENOUGH.

What was the inspiration behind “Salt and Sand”?

I was watching The Little Mermaid with my five-year-old daughter and–as I often do when watching Disney movies–entertaining myself by dissecting plot holes. How does Ariel instantly learn to walk? How does she know what things are food and what are not, how to breathe with lungs, or even how to lie in a bed? My own kids took months to figure those things out! The more I thought about it, the more bizarre being human seemed. I started wondering what life would really look like for a mermaid with no knowledge of the terrestrial world—and no voice—who chose to become human.

What unique or surprising detail can you tell us about the revision process and/or the final version of it?

I began the story with the intention of making Cordelia an actual mermaid. But as it progressed, I realized that I myself had no idea whether she was or not. I still don’t have an answer to that question. So I decided to lean into that ambiguity, even though that makes the ending potentially devastating, because that is how we experience every myth and legend: by balancing the fine line of truth versus fiction.

What did you learn (about yourself, craft, or life in general) through writing and revising it?

It was the first short story I ever wrote. I had no idea how to write them, and the attempt seemed daunting. But I realized that if I began with a general premise, emotional temperature, and characters who were clear in my mind, I didn’t have to have a strict notion of where it had to go. I could just enjoy letting it develop. That was a really wonderful experience, and how I go about writing all my short stories now.

What do you hope readers take from the piece?

That there is no clear, defining line between magic and reality. That the world is a place still full of mystery, and that resting in that space of ambiguity, wonder, and even discomfort can be rewarding.

At what point in your life did you begin writing and working on this story? 

I wrote it in June of 2025, six months after I lost my niece, who inexplicably died 6 hours after she was born. It was such a shocking, devastating occurrence that I spent months in a sort of daze trying to understand what had happened. We live in a world we feel should have answers, especially as our knowledge of science and technology progresses. And yet I kept thinking about the people of the past, who when they suffered the mysterious loss of a child chalked it up to witchcraft, or believed it had been stolen by fairies. So I began writing fiction that blended myth and reality in a way that felt true to my experience, and helped me process the grief.

Do you write in other genres, and if so, what?

My favorite genres are historical fiction and speculative fiction, and my favorite pieces to write are ones that blend the two together. I have a PhD in history, so I really love bringing to life historical time periods, settings, and beliefs. But I also love speculative fiction, so my pieces usually weave in subtle (and sometimes explicit) magical/fabulist/surreal elements.

What fuels your desire to write?

Wow…this is an interesting question, because I don’t really know the answer to it. I’ve always written—first academic, scholarly pieces and now fiction. I guess the most honest answer would be that a sort of compulsion fuels me–it just feels so GOOD to write, in the same way other people say it feels good to go on a run. I don’t understand running, because frankly I am pretty physically lazy. But I can appreciate the way people describe feeling both an intense joy and calm contentment, because that is what writing feels like to me. It’s also a blissful escape–an amazing way to just let time and worries and the outside world dissolve completely. Art and gardening give me the same feeling. If they made a candle that smelled of paint and dirt I would buy it.

What have been the biggest influences in your writing?

I have always been a voracious reader, and my favorite authors of all time are historical fiction writers: Maggie O’Farrell, Hilary Mantel, Geraldine Brooks, James Michener, Henry Wouk, and Isabel Allende. I love the way they bring the past to life, both with incredibly immersive descriptions of place but also by making the interior, emotional lives of their historical characters feel immediate. And Allende’s House of the Spirits revealed this whole new style of writing to me–historical magical realism.

How do you balance writing with everyday life?

I have a career, two kids, a dog, a cat, and an extremely demanding garden that take up a good deal of my time. But I also make sure to prioritize writing these days. This usually means waking up at the crack of dawn while everyone is asleep to hammer things out. I also tend to write piecemeal in time gaps: waiting in line at the grocery store, stirring a pot of dinner, walking the dog, sitting at the DMV….what would I do without iPhone Notes!!

Are there any special projects, other pieces, or books you’d like to promote?

Yes, thank you! My website, alimclafferty.com, has links to my published fiction, artwork, and upcoming projects. I’m also excited to have stories appearing in two forthcoming anthologies: Helen of Troy from Flame Tree Press this September and Missed Fits from Calendar of Fools in 2027.

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

I don’t necessarily think of a “joyful” life. I think a “meaningful” life. One that might have had grief, loss, and trauma but that ultimately finds richness and purpose.

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Thank you, Ali, for participating in this Q&A and for the direct and heartfelt answers. We are grateful to you for being a part of our growing literary community and wish you the best with writing, a bouuntiful harvest, and finding forgotten gems hidden among all the phone notes.

Etya Vaserman Krichmar https://www.etyawrites.com/ is a Kazakhstan-born writer who immigrated to the United States from the former Soviet Union. She writes literary nonfiction exploring identity, displacement, and belonging. Her work has appeared in Brevity Blog, Narratively, The Orlando Sentinel, Spillwords Press, MasticadoresUSA, White Rose, Write Launch, and international anthologies. She is currently seeking representation for her memoir “Citizens of Nowhere.”

Her short CNF, Love Flows Forward, appears in Issue #24.

Tell us a bit about yourself, something more than just what’s in your bio. Perhaps something not a lot of people know. 

I was born in Kazakhstan, raised in Ukraine, became a wife in Moldova, and came to the United States as a Jewish refugee from the former Soviet Union. Much of my writing explores memory, identity, and the invisible ways our past shapes the present.

One thing people may not know is that I didn’t begin writing seriously until later in life. A near-death experience changed the course of my life and compelled me to write. Before becoming a writer, I spent decades in the corporate world. I often say that I didn’t find writing—writing found me when I was finally ready to listen.

When I’m away from my desk, I paint with thread through needlepoint and enjoy creating elaborate cakes. I suppose storytelling isn’t the only way I like making something beautiful from scratch. Another little-known fact is that I’m a Reiki Master. That experience taught me to pay attention to silence, intuition, and the stories people carry beneath the surface.

Life is full of moments worthy of writing about. What inspired you to write Love Flows Forward? 

Sunflowers began with a childhood memory. Behind our housing development in the Soviet Union stretched endless sunflower fields. As a child, they became my refuge—the one place where I felt I belonged, and the only place where I could forget, for a little while, that I was different. Years later, that memory collided with another image: sunflowers blooming on land marked by suffering. I couldn’t stop wondering how beauty and tragedy could share the same soil.

As I wrote, I realized the essay wasn’t only about flowers. It became an exploration of memory, resilience, and the responsibility of remembering. Sometimes history returns quietly. Sometimes it blooms.

What unique or surprising detail can you tell us about the revision process?

The ending changed many times.

At first, I tried to explain everything I wanted readers to understand. Eventually I realized the essay became stronger when I trusted the image itself. The more I removed explanation, the more emotional space I gave the reader.

Revision, for me, is usually an exercise in subtraction rather than addition.

What did you learn through writing and revising it?

I learned that memory is never fixed.

Each time we revisit the past, we bring a different version of ourselves. The facts may remain the same, but our understanding evolves. As children, we experience events without fully grasping their meaning. As adults, we return with perspective, life experience, and, I hope, greater compassion for the people we once were.

As a writer, I also learned to trust restraint. My early drafts explained too much. Revision taught me that readers don’t need every answer. Sometimes what remains unsaid carries the greatest emotional weight.

What do you hope readers take from the piece?

I hope readers leave with a renewed appreciation for memory and for the ordinary people whose lives history often overlooks. We inherit more than family photographs and heirlooms. We inherit stories, and with them comes the responsibility to remember.

If the essay encourages even one reader to ask an older family member about their story—or to pause before allowing history to fade into silence—it has done its job.

At what point in your life did you begin writing nonfiction?

I began writing as a child in the Soviet Union. At first, writing was my escape. It gave me a place where I could imagine a different world and find a freedom that didn’t always exist in everyday life.

I returned to writing seriously much later, after a life-changing medical diagnosis. By then, my purpose had changed. I no longer wrote to escape reality—I wrote to understand it, to give voice to experiences that had shaped me, and to preserve the stories that might otherwise be forgotten.

I eventually realized I wasn’t simply recording memories. I was searching for meaning within them. Today, I write because I hope to leave behind more than my name. I want to leave behind stories that remind others their lives—and mine—matter.

Do you write in other genres, and if so, what?

Yes. In addition to literary nonfiction and memoir, I write historical speculative fiction, romance with speculative elements, and short fiction.

I’ve completed a historical speculative novel, The Watcher’s Testimony: Bearing Witness, and two memoirs, Citizens of Nowhere and A Flight to Freedom. I’m currently writing Accidental Witness, a romance with speculative elements, and another memoir, Awakened by Papa’s Spirit.

At the moment, I’m seeking representation for Citizens of Nowhere, which explores what it was like to grow up Jewish in the Soviet Union and the lasting effects of displacement, antisemitism, and the search for belonging.

Although I write in different genres, they all explore memory, identity, resilience, and the ways the past continues to shape the present.

What fuels your desire to write?

Curiosity fuels my writing, but so does memory. I’m fascinated by ordinary moments that reveal something extraordinary about being human. A single sentence, a photograph, a prompt, or a childhood memory can become the beginning of an essay or a novel.

I write because I don’t want meaningful stories to disappear. Whether I’m writing memoir or fiction, I’m trying to preserve the voices, experiences, and quiet moments that remind us of who we are. I believe every life holds a story worth telling.

What have been the biggest influences in your writing?

Life has been my greatest teacher. Immigration, family, illness, loss, and resilience have all shaped my voice.

I also grew up reading the Russian, European, and American classics. Chekhov taught me to appreciate the quiet moments that reveal character. Tolstoy and Bulgakov showed me the sweep of history and the complexity of human nature. Alexandre Dumas introduced me to adventure, while Émile Zola, John Steinbeck, and Theodore Dreiser revealed the dignity, struggles, and resilience of ordinary people. Nikos Kazantzakis opened a door to spirituality and the search for meaning.

As a writer, I’ve learned just as much from careful revision and generous mentors as I have from the books that shaped my imagination.

How do you balance writing with everyday life?

I don’t wait for inspiration. I write whenever life allows—sometimes for hours, sometimes for only a few minutes. Consistency matters more than perfect conditions.

I’ve learned that writing doesn’t happen only at my desk. It begins by paying attention. Conversations, walks, medical appointments, and ordinary days often become tomorrow’s stories. Living and writing are inseparable.

Are there any special projects, other pieces, or books you’d like to promote?

I’m currently seeking representation for Citizens of Nowhere, a literary memoir about growing up Jewish in the Soviet Union and the lasting effects of displacement, antisemitism, and the search for belonging.

I’m also finishing Accidental Witness, a romance with speculative elements that explores memory, identity, and the unexpected ways the past reaches into the present.

Alongside these longer projects, I continue to write essays and short memoirs because they allow me to capture life’s quieter moments—one story at a time.

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

It’s found in meaningful work, honest relationships, curiosity, and gratitude.

After growing up where some stories could not be spoken, I think the good life is the freedom to tell them—and the privilege of having someone willing to listen.

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Thank you, Etya, for sharing more about your life and writing with us and for being a part of our growing community. We are grateful for the time you spent on this Q&A.

We wish you luck in finding representation for your manuscripts and the best with all your writing projects.

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.

Her flash CNF, Beauty Like That, appears in Issue #24.

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.

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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!

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 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.

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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.

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.

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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!!