Category: interviews

Michaela Evanow lives, writes and gardens by the sea in British Columbia with her husband and three small kids. Life makes sense in the garden, so on a spacious day, her fingers are covered in dirt and she’s collecting things to dry and hang in a dark corner. Her work has appeared in Hippocampus Magazine, Five Minutes and elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram at: @michaela.evanow

Her flash CNF piece, “The Crush of Dusk,” is featured in Issue #17.

Tell us about yourself.

I’m a mother of four souls, a little bit haunted in a good way, a deep feeler, avid thrifter, and have been drawn to writing since my first Language Arts creative writing project in grade three when my whole body broke out in goosebumps after the teacher announced what we would be doing. My favourite place to walk is the old cemetery in our neighbourhood. After spending almost a year in India, incense, chai and world music are staples in my home. We lost our first born daughter, when she was three years old. Florence was an old soul, and her story was too short. I couldn’t make sense of it for years. I was completely overwhelmed by the depths of my feelings, and in an effort to keep moving onward, found helpful ways to numb myself. This is a human thing to do. Not until I had some space, and was done birthing children, did my body begin to tell the hidden stories. I am so grateful that I listened, instead of turning away. This has changed my life.

Your story, “The Crush of Dusk,” captures the pain of loss, but also the heartbreak of seeing life go on after that loss. How has writing helped you navigate through your grief?

Writing was a kind of medicine for me, during Florence’s diagnosis and life. I wrote a lot in those early blogging days and amassed a following. However, I didn’t really understand at the time that writing doesn’t actually heal you from that kind of trauma. It’s a beautiful tool in a really big excavation. I deleted my blog many years later as I was diving into healing and processing because I had changed, my brain had changed and life was altogether different. And more private, especially regarding my family. Writing online has changed so much over the years and I’m still not sure it’s helpful to process online, which is what I did. These days, I find the challenge of writing about the tenderness of grief in new, more complex ways a wonderful thing. I really enjoy writing rich, condensed pieces about the human experience of surviving loss, coming back home to ourselves and finding peace. Grief is something we can all relate to, in one way or another. My grief no longer overwhelms me, but it does inform a lot of my writing.

You’ve had other stories about your grief published as well. How do you think your stories have helped other grieving parents?

I think it’s really helpful to feel less alone in a world that labels your particular kind of loss as the worst thing possible, unimaginable or the worst club to belong to. It gives parents the message that integrating their loss will be impossible. It can feel isolating, terrifying and lonely, but there is hope for healing. I hope my words allow not just bereaved parents, but others touched by loss, a deep exhale, comradery and curiosity. We all experience grief differently, because our stories of loss are so nuanced. I find it so extraordinary to bear witness to others grief, and perhaps when folks read my work, they feel the same way.

Tell us about the “heart medicine” of moving your body.

I grew up dancing. It was my thing. When I was 16 I had a major spinal surgery to correct the rapid curvature of my spine from scoliosis. My spine was fused together with rods, I lost a rib and gained a lot of referred pain. I struggled to dance in structured classes, because I couldn’t move or jump the way I used to, and it wasn’t actually recommended. It took me a long time to come back to appreciate my body and all it’s been through. I discovered conscious/ecstatic dance, and it became my preferred embodiment practice. I enjoy the sensuous experience of riding out emotions, with music, in community, without the need to perform or look good. I call it my heart medicine, because it does just that. It can be highly cathartic at times, which can also mean I always want it to feel that way, and the reality is, it doesn’t. Rather, the practice is teaching me to stay with it all: my body, emotions, stuckness, pain, joy and environment.

How are writing and dancing similar in artistic expression? 

I’ll happily tell you how they both tend to the same parts of myself. Both require intention, effort and time. Both offer creative release and expression. I can move robotically to music or under the influence of alcohol on a sticky dancefloor, as I used to do as a 20 something or just shoot off an email. Conscious dancing requires much more meaningful attention and practice, much like a well honed piece of writing.

On your Instagram page you shared your love of “making moving environments & rituals.” How have you shared those loves with your children?

Our house is a hodge podge of vintage treasures, old paintings, secondhand furniture, patterned rugs and dishes, dried garden flowers, I mean, I love all things old and eclectic, because I love an atmosphere that’s rich with story. There’s always something to look at. I’m not sure how much my kids notice now, but I do think they will remember as they get older, what it felt like to be in an ever changing, layered environment. Sometimes I get an idea of what it feels like for them when my son says “the colour of the sky is like grapefruit slices and it smells like a cozy place, it reminds me of something, I think it’s camping, and maybe Christmas. I love autumn, just like you.” Or my daughter picks out flowers from the garden to make fairy soup or an arrangement, boldly creating, asking if we can light some candles, and noting that the music feels “kinda sad but feels like I’m in a movie.” In those moments, I hear my own words and I pause, deeply moved, slightly spooked. What a profound gift and responsibility it is to influence and show this magnificent world to my kids, whether it’s outside or inside our living room.

How has your Instagram community supported you on this healing journey?

I have met hundreds of bereaved mothers through the hashtag I created after Florence’s death, #MamaGrief. It seemed like such a simple form of expression, yet 9 years ago, there wasn’t really a space for this on Instagram. I was desperate to share and in retrospect, I can see where I overshared. Writing, like grief, changes over time, and in those dark depths of searing pain, I needed an outlet. I was a young mother, with a baby at my breast and I didn’t have energy or capacity to explore outside of the comfort of my own home. Writing became something for me to heavily lean on. It turns out there are a lot of others out there like me from all the corners of the globe: big feelers, bereaved mothers, others touched by grief or by Florence. It feels really good to have those connections, knowing people have been around since the early days of my grief journey, cheering me on as I have shared, evolved, healed and explored.

What advice or words of comfort can you share with anyone experiencing grief?

I wish I had a space to be with others, outside of an institution, that invited ritual, remembrance, movement, writing and grief tending. My goal is to create a space like that one day soon, because I believe the need is still so great for these old ways of communal grieving with creativity and purpose. Therapy is incredibly helpful for grief, and it’s also comforting to know there are many other ways to really integrate our experiences. I wish I had known of these things, but I’m thankful I do now. There is nothing like knowing another soul with a similar lived experience can bear witness to your story, pain, tenderness and not leave you, but sit with you until you reach the other side together.

If I could speak to my younger self I’d reach out and share: Grief will stick with you, until one day when you’re ready, you’ll find the time and space to look it in the eye, and know it will not destroy you. And you will emerge changed and still tender, still hopeful.

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

It reminds me of the old song by the Weepies, “Simple Life,” that my husband and I listened to a lot during our early years of marriage.

I suppose the good life is a life lived with intention, paying attention to the tiny details that make up our lives, feeling gratitude for the time we have together, however long it may be. The luxury of homemade food on the table, the ability to communicate our love for each other, to repair and respond and really take it all in. I don’t want to miss any of it anymore. 

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Thank you, Michaela, for allowing us to share your essay with our readers and for taking extra time on this Q&A. We’re glad we were able to connect and we wish peace and prosperity for you and your family.

Randy Bynum’s work appears in Cirque (contest winner), Arboreal Literary Magazine, Metonym Journal, Atticus Review, New Plains Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, and others. He explores people, places, and social inequity. He’s seeking publication for his collections Tulips Talking Behind My Back and Dragons Who Type: Poems of Whimsy and Wishes. He’s a former speech/theatre teacher, an award-winning playwright, and believes KMHD Jazz Radio can help save the world. He lives in Portland, OR with his wife Dani and rescue dog Cooper.

Tell us about yourself.

I am so grateful that The Good Life Review honored my poem Electric Eclectic Strong. I feel incredibly fortunate to still be here. I just turned 70, still feel 20, and think: how did this happen? I couldn’t do this without my wife’s support, a far better writer and actor than I am, who now works an intense healthcare surgical coordination/support day job. 

I grew up a farm kid in small-town Oregon, went to work very young, and was raised by Great Depression hard-working blue-collar, high school-degreed parents who encouraged my love of music, reading, and writing. Mom was a half-Cherokee/Native American from hard-scrabble Oklahoma. Dad was a WWII front-line Navy vet and a master carpenter artist with wood. In 2006, my folks passed away within 22 hours of each other, giving me one last lesson on courageously facing the final curtain. 

I’ve worked as a farmhand, carpenter’s helper, horse stable cleaner, grocery clerk, audio and music gear salesperson, musician, radio announcer, copywriter/editor, and actor. I studied music and journalism in college for my BA, played in a pro jazz swing band, and eventually got a graduate teaching assistantship and an MA in theatre and speech. I taught college speech and theatre classes and met diverse students from everywhere. I left teaching in 2017 after 28 years and began to write again. I didn’t start submitting work until fall of 2023. 

Most importantly, I’m healthily alive. In my late twenties, I had Hodgkin’s disease lymphoma cancer, major surgeries, and treatments, along with resultant appreciation of mortality, staggering medical bills, and admirable doctors. I am lucky and grateful—still writing, reading, curious, and digging music 24/7. 

“Electric Eclectic Strong” has a strong sense of musicality. How has music influenced your writing? 

As I answer this question, Louis Armstrong is Satchmo-crooning “Your Cheatin’ Heart” on the radio with my wife and I sighing out a collective “aaaahhhhh, soooo good.” 

Music was my first language from the minute I was born. Though my folks weren’t musicians, they always had an old AM radio playing on the kitchen counter or in Dad’s shop. As little kids, my sister and I would constantly beg to hear their records (33, 45, 78 rpm) on the old RCA “Cobra” phono/radio combo as a treat. Want candy? Maybe. Music? YES!  I was a trumpet player by fifth grade. Sang in a choir. Became first chair. The music room and the practice rooms were my second home, a safe place away from bullies, with other like-minded kids. I was the first person in school around 6:30 a.m., from junior high through high school waiting to be let in at the back door of the band room. Played in two jazz bands, one classical orchestra, and in a brass choir. Several of us became either professional or semi-pro musicians. Very thankful for falling in love with and being introduced to so many types of music. I consumed writers and music like food, (sometimes forgoing food for both books and records).

Even as a kid, when I was writing, or working on anything, music was on or I was playing it:  Buddy Rich, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Brubeck, right next to Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, Otis Redding, Bach, Dvorak. Same holds true now. Up early, turn music on, write.  Sometimes, I’ll write in silence, buried in a word tangle but music is on nearly all day either on a stereo, or inside my head or in a poem that’s forming in subconscious genesis. The beauty of poetry IS its music, how language works in its varied notes, textures, metaphors, sounds. Music and poetry are like breathing to me. And when Nina Simone comes on, or the radio DJ reads Joy Harjo, well, I’m reminded, breathe it all in deeply.

What poet most influenced your writing? Why?

After I left teaching, it had been over 10 years since my folks had died, so I started capturing memories and it all came out as poetry. I began reading the 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford. I found his work so direct, spare, precise yet layered. My wife, seeing that I was writing, got me Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook and I used it and began to read her work. It was helpful in my daily discipline. At that time, most importantly, my wife also became serendipitously close friends with poet Tess Gallagher who was finishing her Is, Is Not collection. (I read that, too.) My style is not at all like hers, but just hearing the unique way she thinks, imagines and uses language had an impact. The biggest influence: I very distinctly remember reading her deceased husband Raymond Carver’s poems in Fires while waiting for my car at a Kia service center. That’s when I finally felt like I had permission to let my writing voice roll out. He lit me up. I keep his A New Path to The Waterfall on my nightstand. 

Additionally, I’ve been lucky to hear Maya Angelou several times, read lots of Roethke, I liked Miller Williams, (and Lucinda), particularly his poem The Curator, Terrance Hayes Ode to Big Trend, damn near all of Naomi Shihab Nye, Langston Hughes. I like Joy Harjo and N. Scott Momaday and was lucky enough to be invited to a Joy Harjo Zoom reading/talk/Q & A for a class at Peninsula College in Port Angeles, WA sponsored by their Native American students. She’s so authentic. I enjoy the way her stories and images unfold and turn. Listening through the cellular mystery of my mom’s double ethnicity identity, and hearing Harjo speak with the Native American students, I was surprised to find myself holding back tears. 

I read the Poetry Foundation site every day, the list of what I love there is too long, a veritable quandary. I will never forget Stevie Smith’s Not Waving but Drowning and Philip Levine’s During the War. I’m like a big open sponge for everything, with a ton of poets on our shelves (Nikki Giovanni, Billy Collins, Tony Hoagland, Akhmatova, Neruda, Lorca, Yeats, anything Tess says to read) and have over 200 poets bookmarked on my laptop. I’m still just a kid in a big candy store.

What themes do you often explore in your work?

My initial sets of poems loosely formed into a collection titled HomeMade and focus on family, nature, animals, ancestry, childhood, work: capturing and reframing memories, observed moments. I often try to tell a specific story in short, spare form. (I so appreciate Mary Oliver’s eye and voice.)

I tend to be obsessed about mortality, our journey, all its challenges, cruelty residing right beside beauty, the inevitable end, our place in space, this world, and even the mystifying science of it. Probably a result of my life-death wake-up call and all its physical after-effects I guess, after a happy, healthy, though lower-income early life. At my age, I’ve watched quite a few family and friends die. My wife, who is much younger than me, just lost her mom after a two-year battle with cancer, holding her hand as she passed just like she did for both my own parents. Grief is a howling beast. One of my first early poems as a teen was about my deaf and mute single-mom cousin who died of cancer, leaving her three young children to be raised by their grandma and granddad. 

I do write some protest/activist-themed poetry. Just staying angry or upset about unfairness, dogmatism, and discrimination isn’t enough, somehow channeling it into a poem or action feels better. I really like writing quirky wry humor, too. Something that made me absolutely bust up (and try to recapture it) was one day for my wife’s work break I began reading aloud Pablo Neruda’s poem A Dog Has Died. I got partway through, and out of nowhere, her cellphone-Siri suddenly loudly said, “I can provide access to Suicide Hotlines and other mental health services.” We laughed so hard we cried. 

My Dragons Who Type characters overcome obstacles, challenges, and discrimination, turn myths/stereotypes on their heads, and try to take the reader into new magical realism worlds.  

How has your heritage affected your writing and creative expression?

It makes me search inside more deeply and try to look beyond the surface of people and situations, see all things with more complexity, confront my own beliefs and prejudices if I can. I was born a writer and musician, kind of an anomaly in my family. One of the reasons I began writing again was to recapture memories, honor my ancestors on all sides. Both mom and dad came from poor, hard-working labor roots, the 1920’s and the Great Depression. You went to work as a kid or you didn’t survive; even then you might not. Mom was a waitress, also worked at JC Penney’s, and was a remarkable plant whisperer. Dad returned from WW II scarred, fierce, but so thankful to be alive after being on 11-member Pacific Island pre-invasion “suicide squads” where only half came back each time. He built everything we had, became a smiling master carpenter and known as THE guy to hire if you wanted something built to last. I like to think I work on a poem or piece of writing to get it right, just like dad worked with wood and structures. 

They started with nearly nothing except what they scrapped and saved but gave everything they had to us kids. We lived out of our huge gardens and fruit trees, and raised animals. Family meant everything and they had an innate sense of fairness and justice. As conservative as they were, they’d be appalled if they were alive in this new era of grifting hypocrisy, twisted self-serving evangelism, fascism-cult-worshiping, and violent bullying discrimination. When I look at a picture of my mom and specifically, my dad, welcoming Yoichi, my good Oregon State friend from Tokyo, it always chokes me up. He still visits me from Japan. We’re living proof of peace, across generations.

I learned late in life that my mom’s real dad, my biological grandfather, was not the grandpa I’d grown up with. All her siblings were half-siblings, though they all loved each other. Her dad and his family were Cherokee, very dark. She never talked about it and when she did only had a few remaining pictures of him. She was extremely close to her mom, her grandparents and I think even more so after her father left them, mom’s stillborn brother, mom’s two-year old sister who died from diphtheria. My grandmother was a remarkably kind survivor straight out of hard-life Oklahoma. Mom’s Cherokee relatives were kind to her too, aunties and uncles taking her to pow-wows as a kid. However, she was taunted by ignorant people, cut off from friends as “that dirty little Injun kid” and finally just started internalizing all of it, hiding her emotions and scars until later in life. She eventually opened up, then urged my sister and I to get tribally-enrolled and she started taking friends and family to pow wows in Grande Ronde, Oregon. I’m basically a mixed kid who never knew it as I had all the privilege of my white looking skin. 

All this material circulates inside me, changes my perceptions of how I see and appreciate our world (original inhabitants), identity and eventually comes out in my poetry. 

I write to keep mom’s story, and all my ancestors’ stories, alive. 

What helps you sort through the madness of the world? 

That’s always the question. It’s hard at times to stay positive, isn’t it, seeing so much death, destruction, war and hate? Love. And gratitude. Music. My wife. My rescue doggy. Poetry. Humor. The Olympics. Community of any sort, whether actors, writers, musicians, ex-teachers, old radio pals, friends, a few neighbors, fellow tennis/exercise addicts. I bake pies. Give them away. Doing some small thing for someone else can blunt the depression of a world gone crazy. Having chanced upon KMHD 89.1 Jazz Radio about seven years ago, I settled on their morning shows to keep me perked up from 7:00 to 10:00, and 10:00 to noon, accompanying my writing time. The theme of DJ Derek’s show is to help stay strong, start the morning out on “the good foot.” I still stay excited about learning, reading new things. Writing letters to leaders and protesting. When I was teaching, I was energized by the students, it kept me young, made me want to keep learning more and providing better, more fun, effective lessons. I miss being able to stay on my toes and make them laugh. It’s OK to dream but it also takes getting our hands dirty. 

I rediscovered a former teaching colleague who’d gone off to a different job and lived several hours away. She ended up reading and liking all my Dragons Who Type poems and then sent me fantastic illustrations of several of them, unbidden. I also rediscovered a long-lost friend who I’d grown up with, played music together, in our old hometown. One winter I was helping dig out a young woman’s car stuck in snow/ice on a hill two houses up from us, and some guy came out to help me. It was Bill and we hadn’t seen each other for decades. Couldn’t believe we’d moved just a couple houses away from each other. He’d worked as a physicist, and still played piano. We haven’t stopped talking since. Those things: Serendipity. And it can be a lifesaver

I think artists, writers, creatives can feel lonely and isolated as it requires such intense solitary time and focus. Building community helps us get through. That’s why The Good Life Review matters. I’m not sure anything will make sense of human sociopathy, of intense greed, violence, shootings, war, the destruction of our environment—but one thing that does make sense is how much energy we can generate doing positive things rather than negative. It takes exactly the same amount of energy. We just get to choose which. 

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Randy’s Poem, Electric Eclectic Strong, is the winner of the 2024 HoneyBee Poetry Prize and is featured in Issue #16.

Thank you, Randy, for being a part of our growing community and for spending extra time with us on this Q&A. We appreciate your young spirit and thoughtfulness, and we wish you the best!

Kelsey Ferrell is a multi-medium creative from California. She holds a B.A. from UC Berkeley and is a second-year MFA Candidate at UC Riverside. She has written and released a punk album, Trauma Portfolio, and four singles, under her artist name, Feral. Kelsey directed a tragicomic film about the feral Inland Empire donkey herds titled Donkumentary as a recipient of the 2023 Gluck Fellowship for the Arts. She is the winner of UC Riverside’s 2024 L.M. and Marcia McQuern Endowed Graduate Award in Nonfiction Writing. Kelsey performs stand-up comedy and dreams of owning a cat one day.

Her CNF piece, Eloise, was this year’s first runner-up in the HoneyBee Prize for creative nonfiction. It appears in our summer issue and is her first publication.

Tell us about yourself.

I grew up in Santa Cruz, California, and spent most of my childhood reading. I was always a heavily academic person, so when I started college at UC Berkeley I studied interdisciplinary social sciences and was somewhat surprised by how many of my extracurriculars ended up being creative pursuits. I didn’t really know what I wanted to become, but I loved learning and discovered how fun it was to create. Halfway through college, I released a punk album, and from that point onward, my artistic journey was irreversible. I simply couldn’t do anything else. All I wanted to do was make art and tell stories. I found myself continuing to try new mediums, like stand-up and screenwriting. Wanting to do an MFA was in the back of my head for many years, so I finally sent in an application and now I am lucky enough to be more than halfway through UC Riverside’s MFA. At UCR I have gotten to become a prose writer and filmmaker, which is so fun and exciting! I’m also a cancer sun and cancer moon, a lover of horror movies and cringe comedies, and I teach creative writing classes at UCR to really awesome undergraduates.

As a multimedia creative, you’ve dabbled in various art forms, which art form speaks most to you? Why?

I think at this point, songwriting, as well as performing my music, is the most intuitive art form because I’ve been doing it the longest. It’s become sort of a meditative second nature. Yet, I would say stand-up comedy is the most rewarding art form because getting a room to laugh feels way better than getting a room to applaud. Filmmaking and prose are more recent endeavors to me, so I’m still experiencing a bit of a learning curve in storytelling in those mediums, but their challenges make them interesting and serendipitous in ways that songwriting and stand-up aren’t. It might be a cop-out answer, but what really speaks to me as an artist is getting to tell stories in different mediums. It’s so fun to have a variety of options to explore the human condition. I think it improves my art to take the time to find the right container for every story, instead of forcing every story into one form, regardless of if that’s the best one for it. 

Do you find your various art forms overlapping? Why or why not?

Oh, definitely. I think the core of my work all comes from the same well, regardless of the form it takes. I find myself writing jokes and satire into my lyrics all the time. Songwriting also makes you really focused on delivering devastating lines, finding the most gut-wrenching phrasing to end a verse. I find myself paralleling that when I’m finding the final sentence for a paragraph or the final sentence for a prose piece. A song also repeats the chorus, looping around to the same refrain. I don’t do this exactly in my prose, but I think being accustomed to writing a chorus in music has created an artist’s instinct to use callbacks as much as I can. I did that in Eloise several times, making small references to previous paragraphs as the story progressed so that every cut keeps hurting no matter how far back it is. The piece is pretty meta in that way. With filmmaking (which I’m still quite new to), I think being on stage frequently for stand-up and music makes it easy to switch to being on camera. In my opinion, there’s no reason to overspecialize in one thing, it’s counterproductive. Switching it up between mediums is what takes me deeper as an artist. 

Eloise, like many creative nonfiction pieces, is deeply personal. Was it challenging to put this piece out into the world, or liberating? Why?

I’m not sure what it’s like for other creative nonfiction authors, but personally I don’t find it emotionally challenging to write this kind of piece. If the story is already bleak, barren, and resigned, there’s nothing left to lose. As the story says, I had already lost the partner I wanted, the one other connection I found was a dead end, I couldn’t adopt the cat, and I couldn’t rely on my biology. At that point, the scariest, shittiest things have already happened, so writing them down and people being able to read about them doesn’t intimidate me. So, Eloise was not really challenging to me in that specific way (though a different creative nonfiction piece might feel challenging to divulge; I don’t want to homogenize). I also wouldn’t call putting out Eloise liberating. It’s exciting and cool to be published, and it feels awesome to have written what I wrote. I think I would use the word salvaging over the word liberating. I might not get to be with Theo, or Ben, and so on, but I get to keep them inside this piece. It’s like, what slivers of my dreams can I preserve when I write them down? It’s a very precious thing to write about these losses because in many ways it’s the only way I can keep what’s gone, or what may never be. 

How do you hope Eloise will connect with your readers? What do you want them to take away from this piece?

You know, this is the hardest question to answer for me, because I’ve never really thought about having “readers” before. Thanks for publishing me so that this is something I can think about now! Haha. But let me think through this. First things first, I see Eloise as a very bleak story. It’s about the impossibility of not only the dream but the consolation prize as well. People always joke about how if you can’t find romantic love, you can become a crazy cat lady; or how if you’re single, you can have a bunch of fun casually dating around. In this story, those silver linings are just as out of reach as the original dream. It’s like, okay, I don’t get to be with Theo, but maybe I can adopt a cat and have fun with Ben, right? But no—I can’t afford the cat and Ben never texts back. And there’s something humiliating about not even getting the next best thing, so to speak. I want this piece to find readers who have their own version of this kind of lack, who have a barrenness in their lives regardless of if their body is physically mirroring that barrenness. I want readers to separate hope and desire in their minds, to see this piece as proof that hope isn’t the only way to keep going. The last paragraph doesn’t show it—it’s just me in my room by myself—but readers know that at some point after that night, I got up and wrote it all down. I had no hope that Theo would come back or that Ben would text me again or that I’d get a cat— but that was irrelevant to me continuing to put one foot in front of the other one, living my life despite that. Desire without hope exists. It’s a strong enough force to keep someone on their feet. 

How does writing help you cope with the trials of life?

Not to be dramatic, but writing is lowkey the only way to cope with the trials of life. Well, I would put reading/studying philosophy as runner-up in that race. I’m not saying this is advice for everyone, but if I could go back in time to myself at 18, I’d tell her, “Don’t go to therapy, write everything you’re drawn to write, and sign up for more philosophy classes.” I think humans have been trying to understand the human condition for thousands of years, and we can join that extremely normal experience through engaging in art and philosophy. I feel like I’m a part of the oldest tradition in the world when I’m writing my stories trying to understand the world around me. I always think of the James Baldwin quote: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” 

Do you find yourself writing similar themes for your creative nonfiction pieces? If so, what theme keeps reoccurring? Why do you think that is?

Yes absolutely, I find myself constantly investigating the ways things go wrong. Failure to connect, failure to achieve, that sort of thing. Especially when it’s irreversible. I’m drawn to tragedy and comedy in equal measure, and I’d argue that that is due to the fact that those are equally represented in one’s failures and losses. When things go wrong, that often hurts the most in interpersonal relationships, so I find myself writing about heartbreak and grief. But heartbreak and grief are consequences. Recently I’ve been a bit more interested in what precedes them, uncovering the way things fall apart. As far as why I keep returning to that, I think the easy answer is that things simply go wrong a lot, so there’s a lot to write about. But still, why is that as opposed to something else equally as bountiful in reality? I guess it goes back to what I said about salvaging. If things go wrong, it’s because they once went right. Holding onto those slivers of what was good and beautiful, that’s important to me, and so is honoring the story of how those things were lost. 

How has your MFA program changed you as a writer?

It’s changed me so much as a writer. I’m so grateful to the UCR MFA. I’d never taken a formal creative writing class until my MFA; my undergraduate degree was in the social sciences so I wrote academic papers. I had some solid creative instincts and passion before the MFA, but I didn’t have any skills or even a framework for what makes a story well told. That’s something I learned at UCR. I am deeply indebted to the faculty there and my classmates for teaching me things I would never have figured out on my own. 

Who has influenced your writing the most? Why?

I have to say my professor Reza Aslan. As I said, when I applied to my MFA program, I had some good creative instincts going for me from songwriting and stand-up. But I’d never really taken formal creative writing classes—and I had no experience in prose specifically. My prose submissions were really messy, and Reza knew right away exactly where I was going wrong and taught me how to level up. He’s an excellent teacher. Plenty of people in life are going to put you through something painful, beautiful, and unforgettable to write about. But very few people say, “Okay, stop crying, this is how you’re going to tell the story.” But that’s what I needed to hear as a writer and that’s how Reza influenced me.

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

When I hear “the good life,” I think of the life one gets when the dream life is discarded. I remember a quote from Maureen Dowd, which Ariel Levy wrote about in her memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply. Maureen said, “Everybody doesn’t get everything” and I think that’s what the good life is getting at. Okay, you’re going to lose, and you’re going to lose often, but what are you going to do with what’s left? That to me, is the good life: when you discover how to create a life in the ruins. 

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Thank you, Kelsey, for allowing us to share your essay with our readers and for taking extra time on this Q&A with us! We’re glad we were able to connect and wish you the best with the completion of your MFA, teaching, future writing, and all of your endeavors! <3

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

Tell us about yourself. 

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

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

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

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

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

How do we break free from that conditioning?

We make truthful art. 

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

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

How do you make time for your writing life? 

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

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

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

Tell us about your memoir, “Ordinary Body.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tell us about yourself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How has yoga been a release for you? 

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

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

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

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

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

Why do you think that theme keeps resurfacing?

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

What has been the key to developing your poetry?

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

How is writing a part of your daily life?

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

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

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

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

Tell us about yourself.

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

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

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

Has this influenced your writing? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tell us about yourself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you hope your readers take away from Beacons?

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

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

Tell us about your book, The Flightless Years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tell us about yourself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is your favorite form of creative expression? Why?

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

Where do you draw your inspiration for your creative work?

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

Tell us about your service in the US Army.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tell us about yourself. 

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

Why did you decide to get your MFA? 

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

How has your MFA program impacted your writing? 

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

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

What inspired you to write Blue Light? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is your favorite genre to write? Why? 

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

How has writing impacted your daily life? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tell us about yourself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you fill your creativity cup?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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