Tag: interview

Kelsey L. Smoot (they/he/Kelz) is a gender theorist, an elective Southerner, a writer, and a poet. Their autoethnographic style has become the lens through which they understand and reflect on their experience navigating the US sociopolitical landscape. They are the winner of the 2021 Sad Girls Club Spring Literary Contest and the Grand Prize Winner of the 2024 Button Poetry Video Contest. Kelz is a Tin House Workshop alum, a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Best of the Net nominee, and a Best New Poets nominee.

Their poem “For Kenny” won the 2023 Honeybee Poetry Prize, and their latest collection of poems, SOULMATE AS A VERB, is available now from MIT Press. Their previous chapbooks include: we was bois together and Muse.

You’ve described yourself as a self-trained poet. How has forging your own path shaped your voice and approach to craft?

I think being self-trained definitely means being intentional about studying craft elements in poetics by reading the work of other poets, by going out of my way to seek poetry resources. Those who know me well know that I definitely enjoy a good form. I think it trains a different muscle than free-verse poetry does, so to that end, I often tell people that I think that poetry is both an art and a discipline. The art component of it is so fun to engage and explore and share with the world, but I do think the ‘discipline’ component–which to me sometimes includes writing poems that are more functional practices and experiments than they are creative expressions–is definitely important for my overall development as a poet.

What poets or writers have most influenced your work, and in what ways?

So there are kind of the writers that are in my personal Mount Rushmore—so Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and James Baldwin—but also June Jordan, Lucille Clifton, and contemporary poets like Cameron Awkward-Rich and K.B. Brookins. Each of these writers (and many, many more that I don’t feel like I have enough space across a lifetime of empty pages to write about and express my gratitude for), has created something that I fully see myself in; they’ve reflected their experiences back to me, and my experiences back to me. And I have ultimately realized that I think that is also a huge goal in my writing. I think a lot of writers want to write something that’s completely original and to feel like they are pioneering something, whereas I am personally so thrilled and honored to be writing within the lineage of writers and thinkers that have come before me. Each of these writers has challenged me to think critically about my identities and how they show up in my work. They each are very reflective and nostalgic, but also highly forward-thinking and futuristic, and have a penchant for sharing hard truths and not shying away from literary honesty and authenticity—something I hope to do in my work as well.

I read about the story of your brother inspiring the title of SOULMATE AS A VERB in an Electric Lit feature, and I was struck by your idea that soulmates are created through “trust and mutuality.” The title reframes love as something we do rather than something we find. How did that conversation shape the larger vision of this collection, and what does that shift mean to you personally and poetically?

Yeah, so with regard to SOULMATE AS A VERB, with the title being something that was born of a conversation with my brother, it definitely informed the vision of this project as a body of work that would intentionally deviate from or complicate popular notions of “soulmates.” I certainly wanted the concept of soulmate to function in this collection as a tool, a lens through which we can see ourselves, our loved ones, our communities, and also our political orientations more clearly, and determine how to embody a practice of love that is less about predestination and romantic alignment and much more about commitment, agency, and devotion to others. Personally and politically, that has meant building out my concepts of love that don’t revolve solely around a romantic partner. I’m still always good for a love poem, but I think some of my best love poems within the collection are those written to and for non-romantic loves across the expanse of my life.

What do love and soulmates look like to you right now? Must soulmates be romantic, or can they take many forms?

Right now, love and soulmates to me look like choices. I absolutely don’t think that soulmates must be romantic. I’d argue that most people are more likely to connect with non-romantic soulmates in their lifetimes , just because I do think romantic love—especially operating in systems like patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy—is highly precarious and volatile. But I think that most people would say that they could not survive their daily lives without their communities, their families, and their friends, and I do think there’s always a radical potential to build soulmate connections within those groups and to take it a step further, to organize movements around viewing our communities as soulmates.

The description of your collection outlines themes of kinship, masculinity, grief, and desire. Which of these themes surprised you most while writing?

I would say none of these themes particularly surprised me, because they are themes that I am constantly thinking about, writing about, and discussing within my daily life. I think my creative work really is so truly an extension of my inner world as well as my academic writing and research, so to that end I think it just felt really beautiful and fitting to have a new space in which to explore these themes that could be messier, more honest, creative, and intimate.

Your collection blends various poetic forms. What draws you to experimenting with form? Is there one form you gravitate towards? What is it about that form that speaks to you?

Yeah, I think experimenting in form just makes poets so much more intentional. There is this poem called “The Quiet World” by Jeffrey McDaniel that I love, and in the poem people are limited to 167 words per day. For a chatty dude like myself, that’s a terrifying thought, but also in the poem it is clear that this restraint forces individuals to be so incredibly thoughtful about each word that they utter. And in the same capacity, I think that that’s what forms can do for a poet. I think they force you to be disciplined and make hard choices. I really like the Kwansaba, of which there are several in SOULMATE AS A VERB. It’s a short form with very specific limitations on line count, line length, and word length. To that end, I think you can cover so much ground in a Kwansaba because it isn’t supposed to be this sprawling epic form of writing. It’s this, for me, short, tight little glimpse into a topic or a moment or feeling. I have always loved writing poems that have left enough space for me and the reader to meet each other on the page and co-create some additional meaning that resonates specifically with them.

How does this collection differ from the poems you wrote earlier in your career or in your chapbooks we was bois together and Muse?

I think poems that I wrote earlier in my career were really written, by and large, to process my feelings, so some of them read a little bit more like diary entries. Some of them, I would also say, are lowkey embarrassing in that they are really me just fumbling around and discovering what my poetic voice was going to be. And then moving into we was bois together and Muse, I think those are both projects born of trying to create companion writings for my academic work, which I felt like was so much less accessible and available than these poems could or would be. But I think that SOULMATE AS A VERB really is an offering of reflections–refractions, theory, political advocacy, love poems, and just attempts to offer the world some documentation of what it’s like to exist in the body that I do, in the time that I do, still seeking love and connection. I think these poems are more outward facing.

How does writing poetry help you make sense of the world around you? How does it also function as a form of advocacy or witness?

I do think that poetry does still absolutely help me make sense of the world around me, in that it is the way in which I bear intimate witness to my life. I think that there are things that we can read in poems that might challenge us or awaken us in a capacity that feels more approachable or less politically intimidating. A lot of people have said that they’ve shared my poems with a loved one in order to shed some light on a particular aspect of an experience or social justice that they otherwise might struggle to converse about with that person. I definitely think that poetry has become my best method for activism at this point in my life.

These can feel like hateful and frightening times. Where do you find hope or resilience during difficult seasons?

Honestly, I find hope and resilience in youth culture. It feels wild to recognize how quickly I went from feeling so young and inexperienced to starting to feel like a bit of an elder, especially when it comes to younger queer folks, but I think that the younger people in my life—from Gen Z adults that I work with and/or little kids in my life whose adulthood will likely be shaped by a very different set of material conditions than mine currently are—are all so curious and loving and brave, I think, in comparison to how I felt at their ages. These are really scary times, and yet I’ve never lost faith in the radical potential for humanity to outlive these oppressive systems and for people to keep dreaming of a different world. I hope to do that in my work, but also I hope to embody that optimism in my life.

Writing often asks us to be both protected and exposed. How are you feeling after the debut of your first full-length collection?

I feel really proud. I look at how far I have come as an artist and just as a thinker, and I realize that I will likely look back on these poems with massively different perspectives and experiences down the road and still feel so glad that these are the poems that I got to kind of introduce myself with into the literary world. The people around me know that I am committed to a consistent sort of vocalization of my truth, and I also do still strive to protect the privacy of people that I talk about in my work, but I am always working toward becoming more courageous, more honest, and more free. So I think that’s my biggest priority at this time when the book is so newly in the world.

How do you hope readers respond to SOULMATE AS A VERB? What conversations do you hope the book inspires?

I hope that readers respond to SOULMATE AS A VERB by engaging their loved ones in more conversations. I hope they feel emboldened to take up more space in their bodies and and in their communities, and I hope that they feel galvanized to adopt a framework of love that decenters romantic connection, or at the very least, broadens the concept to include all different types of loves and all different types of soulmates.

What do you hope younger queer and trans readers might feel when they encounter this book?

I hope that younger queer and trans readers might feel seen when they encounter this book. I told a friend the other day I certainly think I’ve written many of the things that I really felt like I needed at 16 but didn’t have access to or couldn’t find because they didn’t yet exist. I hope that younger queer and trans readers also feel emboldened to write their own truths and make their own art, which could look like poetry but could also look like any other authentic expression of self.

After this debut, what kinds of stories or projects are calling to you next?

After this debut, I am working on expanding my arts writing, as well as longer-form essays, but I am also definitely in the works of developing a second full-length manuscript tentatively titled Hope Is the Next Best Thing to Certainty. I want my next iteration of poems to be forward-thinking, more experimental, but certainly still continuing some of the themes of this work around love, kinship, truth, and liberation.

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Congratulations, Kelz, on the creation of such a stunning debut full-length collection, and THANK YOU! for being a part of our growing community. We appreciate you and the time you spent with Christine on this interview. We hope you keep the celebration going for this book and wish you the best with future writing endeavors!

Shayna Brown is based in Austin, Texas, where she lives with her husband and seventeen-year-old son. Her writing explores themes of family, vulnerability, and emotional complexity, drawing inspiration from small, individual moments that blur the line between the surreal and the deeply personal. Writing has always been the way she experiences and makes sense of the world.

Her short fiction, Until it Ends, appears in Issue #23.

Tell us a bit about yourself.

I’m a Texan, born in raised deep in the heart in Austin. I’ve been writing fiction since I was a kid, but only in the past few years have I started treating it with more care and intention. Most of what I write circles the same terrain – family, memory, mismanaged emotions, a deep human ache. It’s such a pleasure for me to play with words.

What was the inspiration behind “Until it Ends?”

This piece started with a piece of dialogue, some casual words thrown out that stuck to me long past the conversation. I tend to spend a lot of my real life worrying, and this piece of fiction was a chance to play with a “what-if” situation, which is grounded in a lot of non-fiction love.

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

Most of the revision was subtraction for me. I had characters flipping on light switches and over-explaining house layouts and unnecessarily walking around just so they’d have movement with their dialogue. I don’t even remember writing those things, but the piece was much better once I took them out and let the piece breathe. I prefer the softer, more trusting final piece.

What did you learn (about yourself, craft, or life in general) through writing and revising it, and what do you hope readers take from it?

That I overexplain. This piece got so much better when I trusted the reader to feel through it, and took out a lot of the over-explaining. I also learned that I want my made-up stories to show real-life emotion, but that right when the emotion starts to burn super bright, my instinct is to turn away. I like using fiction to get close to it.

And I hope readers experience the feeling of having just peeked into a sweet moment of humans striving to be better versions of themselves.

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

I wrote my first pieces of fiction when I was about ten. I was homeschooled and obsessed with becoming a novelist. That continued until college, when life got too busy for written exploration. In my early adulthood I focused more on creative non-fiction, but not in a serious way. When Covid hit, I started writing short stories again. I made a schedule and took classes and started working on pieces I wanted to release out into the world for the first time. And that led me here.

When or why did you decide to start publishing your work?

I started trying to get published about two years ago. It’s a very difficult and discouraging process. I’m so grateful to The Good Life Review for believing in my piece.

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

I think it’s how I make sense of the world. It feels necessary to have some creative outlet to process being an adult in the world. I am often confused by internal contradictions (like wanting to run away but desperately wanting to stay, like being angry but also being so full of love) and writing helps me understand myself, too.

What have been the biggest influences in your writing?

I was homeschooled, along with two siblings, by my father. He taught me my foundation of everything. He didn’t have a curriculum or traditional structure for us, and our main schoolwork was to read The New Yorker Magazine cover to cover each week and discuss it. Sometimes he’d give us writing assignments like “Re-write the ending of this week’s short story.” I think that influenced how I write, and also how I read.

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

This is a struggle for me. The more regularly I’m able to have creative space, the better everything in my life feels. I put writing time on my calendar daily, but it’s not unusual for that to get pushed aside for a pressing life issue. I do find that I stay mentally connected to my work, whether the pages are in front of me or not. These are little worlds I carry around and think about always.

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

I love this question. For me “the good life” is presence and appreciation of small, specific moments. It’s bringing in the groceries with my kiddo and then making a sandwich and lemonade for lunch. It’s sitting outside with a pen and paper, word-doodling some ideas. It’s noticing a new freckle on my husband’s arm. Smiling at my dog’s early morning tail wags. Hearing the birds outside my bedroom window, greeting

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Thank you, Shayna, for being a part of our growing community and for sharing your work. We appreciate you and the time you spent on this Q&A with us. Cheers to those small moments of peace and joy. We wish you many, many of those and also the best with your writing endeavors!

Annie Rachele Lanzillotto is an American memoirist, poet, and performance artist whose stage presence has been called riveting and volcanic. She was born in the Bronx. Her books include: Dyke Rubicons (Quelle Press chapbooks), Whaddyacall the Wind? (Bordighera Press), Hard Candy: Caregiving, Mourning, and Stage Light; and Pitch Roll Yaw, (Guernica World Editions), L is for Lion: An Italian Bronx Butch Freedom Memoir (SUNY Press; finalist for LAMBDA Literary Award), and Schistsong (Bordighera Press).

Her short creative nonfiction essay, A Baby Named Freedom, appears in Issue #23.

Tell us a bit about yourself.

There’s a me/you ness in language that divides us. I / you and on and on.  These boundaries dissolve in altered states — I’ve had a lot of deep illness, and have been on post-operative medications that blur the distinctions of you/I. I have ushered loved ones through these altered states. In post-op recovery, we hit milestones of coming back into focus, into the stride of the world, into the distinctions of me/you/they.

It’s springtime. Pink season. Peach blossoms just outside the window. Grandma Rose tossed peach pits out the window, spit onto the earth, after she ate a peach. She wouldn’t throw a pit away in the trash. That didn’t make sense to her. She grew up in peasant culture, peasant wisdom, working the land as a child in the heel of the boot, Italy. Her literacy was of the earth and leaves and the cycle of life. It was strange for her to see me reading and writing all my hour and playing softball. These endeavors didn’t make sense to her; you couldn’t eat them. I wasn’t helping the family survive.  All children worked in her day. More children were more hands to work the land. 

Her first peach tree sprouted up after she died in 2001, at 100 1/2 years old. Now the third generation of peach trees are here, right outside the window. I call these peach trees my grandmother. Hello Grandma Rose, thank you for the pink blossoms.

I hope I become a tree after I die and bring someone blossoms then sweet fruit to bite into to remember how delicious life is.

An incredible story. The essence of her lives on in the trees and her lived experiece persists through rememberance and shring. Thank you!

Turning to your essay, A Baby Named Freedom… What unique or surprising detail can you tell us about the revision process or the final version of your essay?

In revising this essay, I went back to describe the physicality of the moment where the man confronted me in the café. That moment could have gone in many directions. I could have gotten defensive and cursed him out. I asked Shyla, the editor of The Good Life Review, how she read that moment. We decided I could add a moment of physicality. I examine at these public interactions where strangers argue, fight, cast microaggressions on one another.  Every day walking the streets of Manhattan I experience many of these moments. My superpower is to immediately peel back all the layers between the you/I ness of these encounters and laser in to connect, cross the vast oceans of space between us.

The circumstances around different parts of the essay are compelling and timely, with gun control and the general tension in the US, but you wove in other details, for example, the feeling of not being in control of your own body as a child. How did you decide what other details or aspects of your life to include?

In terms of the U.S.A. and gun violence, and this moment we are in culturally, I think if everyone recognized the rage within and if we created cultural ways to let the air out of the pressure cooker… Think primal screams at Cornell U, balcony singing during the pandemic on Italian balconies, banging pots and pans at 7pm in NYC during the pandemic, dancing around the fire, group singing, protesting, stomping, crying… I admire two-year-olds who throw tantrums. We all have that inside us. If we bring back tarantella dance trance, maybe we’d stop machine gunning in public…

We love learning something new! Tarantella, for those not familiar, is Southern Italian folk dance characterized by whirling movements, quick steps, and flirtatious gestures between two people set in time to music with a upbeat tempo played with a mandolin, a guitar, an accordion, and tambourines. And yes, if there were more dancing and singing going on, there would most certainly be less rage.

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

• Audio of my new chapbook of sonnets: DYKE RUBICONS
• Audio of story after story, all true: ANNIE’S STORY CAVE
• L is for Lion: An Italian Bronx Butch Freedom Memoir

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

When I saw the title “The Good Life” many points of light sparkled up at me. Dante’s “the delectable mountain” in Canto 1 of the Inferno. La vita bella. Gioia di vivere.  What is the good life for me as a writer? Is it strange to spend so many hours alone inside the cathedral of thought? I don’t know other ways to live. For me, life is work, and I am always on a mission. Reading has given me my best understanding of my inner life. I hope my writing expands readers sense of their inner life. I go back to reading James Joyce’s “Araby” in Dubliners. The echo of the soul in that vast space of the bazaar. The quest for connection, for love to land.

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Thank you, Annie, for trusting us with a slice of your life and for sharing your voice with us, through your story and your actual voice, which we love-love! We appreciate your time and willingness to participate in this Q&A. Whatever distant shore you find yourself on, we hope you always have time to sing a song, be outside, do something kind for someone less fortunate, and ruminate about the past. Cheers to the joys of living!

Bonus audio of Annie reading A Baby Named Freedom…

Wasima Khan is a Pakistani-Dutch writer, poet, and jurist from The Hague, the Netherlands. She won the 2025 Willow Springs Surrealist Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in About Place Journal, Fourteen Hills, Sky Island Journal, Santa Fe Literary Review, Third Wednesday, and elsewhere. Her flash fiction, As If Nothing Is Burning, appears in Issue #23.

Tell us about yourself.

I am a daughter of Pakistani migrants, born and raised in The Hague, a small coastal city in the Netherlands. Here, I find solace in gazing out at the sea, imagining what lies beyond the horizon. Yet growing up as part of an ethnic minority in this country hasn’t always been easy. 

Before turning to creative writing, I studied law and earned two Master’s degrees. That academic achievement did not spare me from explicit Islamophobia while working as a law lecturer. Later, as a legislative lawyer drafting laws for the Dutch government, I saw policy being shaped by anti-immigrant politics and exclusionary assumptions. When I entered journalism in the autumn of 2023, I became disillusioned with the – sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious – white supremacist undercurrents in Western reporting on Palestine. Even my own work on the occupation and settlements in the West Bank was partially filtered and censored to avoid unsettling certain audiences. Ultimately, that was something I could not accept.

In fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry, I can tell my own stories, in my own way. Through them, I can seek to offer a deeper understanding than the one I encountered in my own life.

What compelled you to write the story appearing in this issue?

I wrote this piece to highlight the often-unnoticed privilege of everyday safety in the West, set against the backdrop of genocidal violence elsewhere. It is also an attempt to show that, ultimately, we always have a choice in how we use that privilege.

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

While writing the story, I found it became a personal exercise in empathy. I do not fully agree with the protagonist, and I actually identify more with their more proactive friend, Amal. Still, I can understand the protagonist’s way of life; one that is, in fact, shared by many in the real world.

I deliberately chose to write the story in the second-person point of view. It’s a perspective rarely used in fiction, and it can be tricky, but here it served the story I wanted to tell. I avoided the first-person point of view because I didn’t want the piece to be mistaken for non-fiction, while the third person felt too distant. Instead, I wanted to slip directly into the reader’s mind. 

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

I’ve been writing for as long as I could hold a pen, though not always creatively. With a background in law, I previously authored award-winning essays on human rights and even compiled a law dictionary. Despite these accomplishments, I only began to call myself a writer – and a poet – last year. In 2025, I finally turned to fiction, driven by a desire to tell stories that not only engage the mind, but, I hope, also move the heart.

It helps that I came to fiction later in life. I bring with me a wealth of lived experience and a deeper understanding of people, which I can now weave into my work. 

You mention being a poet. Tell us about that or other genres that interest you.

I write poems, primarily in free verse. Poetry is the perfect form for exploring minimalism, ambiguity, and the beauty of language. Surrealist poetry, in particular, holds a special place in my heart for the way it allows me to unleash my imagination to the fullest. It takes me back to my childhood, when I would daydream about distant journeys and other worlds.

I also write creative non-fiction. I haven’t let go of my love for essays, but now I reflect on and share my own lived experiences. I have a personal piece forthcoming in Redivider, transatlantic in scope, which explores the impact of 9/11 on both my life and Muslim communities in the Netherlands and the United States. 

When or why did you decide to start publishing your work?

Last year, I made my creative writing debut with the politically charged poem “The Document” in About Place Journal.

As someone with Pakistani roots, I belong to an ethnic minority in the West, which is why I see representation as essential. I view publishing as an opportunity to amplify underrepresented voices. In doing so, I hope to help broaden and enrich the literary canon. I’m deeply appreciative of the work The Good Life Review is doing in a similar vein, helping to foster an inclusive literary community.

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

Writing is a powerful way to cultivate empathy and understanding. It allows me to step into other people’s lives and worlds, and I hope to bring readers along on that journey. 

At the same time, it is a way for me to reclaim agency over my own life and experiences. Too often, I have been confronted with Western biases – simplistic narratives about me, Muslim women, or Muslims more broadly – stories in which I barely recognize myself. In my own work, I aim to foreground nuance and emotional complexity as a way of challenging those assumptions.

I also don’t take the ability to read and write for granted. My mother is illiterate; growing up, she didn’t have the same opportunities I did to pursue an education, let alone attend university. For me, reading and writing are a way of honoring the sacrifices she made so that I could have a better life.

What have been the biggest influences in your writing?

There are literary icons I deeply admire, and it is no coincidence that many of them are Black writers such as Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates. They have shown me how powerful it is to remain faithful to one’s own perspective and vision, even when it is marginalized by patriarchal structures or a white-centered majority. They continue to inspire me and remind me of the importance of sharing underrepresented perspectives and ways of seeing the world.

In the Netherlands, we are still far from where we need to be in terms of literary diversity, equity, and inclusion. In the American literary community, my voice has so far been more readily received, which has, in turn, inspired me to begin writing transatlantic pieces. I look forward to continuing to contribute my transatlantic perspective.

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

I’m proud of two award-winning pieces I wrote over the past year. My poem “Stranger Fruits Grew Here” won the 2025 Willow Springs Surrealist Poetry Prize, and my flash fiction piece “Leaving” received first place in the 2026 Blue Frog Flash Fiction Prize. You never quite know how or whether your writing will resonate, so the judges’ positive feedback was both humbling and reassuring. It has certainly encouraged me to continue chasing writerly excellence. Both pieces, along with other work, can be found on my website: www.wasimakhan.com 

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

Being yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else. That is the greatest accomplishment, as Ralph Waldo Emerson would say.

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Thank you, Wasima, for trusting us with your story, for sharing your poem (which is fabulous!), and for taking on tough issues! We appreciate your time and participation in this Q&A, and we wish you the best with writing and all life’s endeavors!

Matt Mason served as the Nebraska State Poet from 2019-2024 and has run poetry workshops in Botswana, Romania, Nepal, and Belarus for the U.S. State Department. His poetry has appeared in The New York Times, and Matt has received a Pushcart Prize as well as fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Nebraska Arts Council. His work can be found in Rattle, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, and in hundreds of other publications. Mason’s 5th book, Rock Stars, was published by Button Poetry in 2023.

Matt’s Poem, 8 Beautiful Things (About this Last Year), is available in Issue #22.

These first few questions are about the piece that was published in the latest issue…

What unique or surprising detail can you tell us about the origin, revision process, and/or final version of 8 Beautiful Things?

8 Beautiful Things (About This Last Year) was sort of an act of desperation to focus on something positive after so much time in lockdown. I have diabetes, my wife has asthma, so Covid precautions weren’t theoretically about helping others stay alive, they literally hit home. I did originally plan it as 12 Beautiful Things but felt these 8 did a better job, less cluttered, less forced.

The poem does wonderful work infusing light into what was otherwise a very dismal time for people in the United States and the world. Tell us more about that act of reflection and counterbalance.  

Thanks. That was the goal, writing in spring of 2021, to find positives, to remind myself that the previous year had been about more than just surviving, that there was beauty in it, too.

Knowing that it was about a very specific time period, what can you tell us about the choice not to provide the context of the year? 

I hope that works. I think it’s obvious but, well, I think a lot of things are obvious which clearly aren’t in the world today so who knows. And though the details are specific to the Pandemic, I think it’s important to also lead a reader to reflect on their past year right now and find some beauty as times are always complicated.

What do you hope readers who encounter the poem take from it, especially now, given the current volatile and polarizing climate in our country? 

I hope what they take is just a minute in someone else’s perspective. That’s what poetry is about for me and that’s why I really believe if there was more poetry in our daily lives we’d have a more connecting us to one another. I read poetry not just for enjoyment but to also get to take a few steps in another’s shoes and see a world that’s different from the one my own experiences bring me. 

Switching topics to your recent transition away from being the Nebraska State Poet. In your tenure, you set a goal to visit every county in Nebraska, speaking, teaching, or both, which was a great success. Congratulations!

Now that that is squarely in the rearview, have you set your sights on a new goal or goals? 

Yes! I want to do it again… or keep doing it… or, well, just keep going. I started a new nonprofit, Poetry Forward (poetryforward.org) and am also working through Humanities Nebraska, the Nebraska Arts Council and others to keep doing poetry talks, readings, workshops and more. This is my job now, I see the value it brings into schools and communities as well as to me, so I want to do this forever. But, well, “Professional Poet” isn’t a well-broken-in career path, so it’s a bit of work but, so far, worth it to keep doing what I love and what I’m best at and what I see making a positive difference in the places I present to.

What can you tell us about your time as state poet that not a lot of people might know?

What surprised me the most is how hard it can be sometimes to get a response for a poetry event. Not always, but I think teachers are so busy, many librarians are time-crunched volunteers, and when someone you’re not familiar with calls or emails saying they’re a poet and want to come through, it can get weird. So, yeah, sometimes it got weird. I didn’t get hung up on ever until one county where three different libraries hung up on me when I phoned. 

How do you feel your writing changed through the experience of representing Nebraska as the State Poet? 

I felt I needed to show myself and my writing more value. I prefer being humble and taking more of a backseat, but I found I needed to show poetry as something valuable and you can’t be too humble when you have a title like State Poet unless you want people to think poetry isn’t important.

More about your writing… I seem to recall hearing you speak about writing a poem a week. Is that still something you continue to do? If so, where do you come up with new ideas to keep things fresh?

Yes, I have a deadline of Monday night at midnight and need to start at least one new poem each week. This started due to a poetry writing class I took in college, 1986 or ’87, where the teacher said we’d turn in a poem each week, 10 poems in 10 weeks, and I didn’t think I could do that. And then I wrote 15 poems in those 10 weeks. With a deadline, a serious deadline, you are looking for poems and not waiting for them, and when you look for poems they are all over the place. Mainly, they come in the things you find yourself involuntarily reacting to with a physical reaction: a double-take when you see something beautiful out your car window, a sigh at something ridiculous a friend says, a clenched jaw at some stupidity in the news. These are all things we forget 5 minutes later but, if we’re looking for a poem, we might at least write a note about it for later. In every day, there’s at least 5 or 6 poems for everyone to write if we’re looking for them.

Do you write in genres other than poetry? 

I really don’t. I have published a couple essays but really just love and focus on writing poetry. And emails. And answering lists of questions for literary magazines.

Give us some insight into your revision process? That’s a huge topic, so feel free to pick a specific aspect of craft or revision and speak to that. 

Revision is crucial. I don’t consider myself a great writer but I DO consider myself a great editor, so it’s in revision where my poems come together. I write by hand in a notebook, then scratch things out, change things up, often end up with a page that’s hard to read with all the additions and arrows and codes to insert a stanza from another page somewhere. I read the poem out loud over and over as it’s different in the air than on the page, showing me changes. Then when I type it up, the poem is completely fresh again, looks completely different, and I can work more on the shape of it (the stanzas, more with the line breaks, indentations, etc.). I enjoy revision because, for me, its takes the ideas which inspired me to write and helps them take a shape which does them more justice than my first drafts.

And finally, a few very TGLR questions…

In 2023, we asked you what the first thing is that you think of when you hear the phrase ‘the good life’. You responded that you “think of living with peace in your heart, living a life with integrity and value, truth and beauty.” What is the second thing you think of?

Life with less anxiety.

Many of the people we publish are early in their journey as writers. What advice would you give them about the road ahead? 

Enjoy it. Reinvent your genre: don’t write what you’ve been told a poem or a story is, write in the way and about the things you wish you saw more of in the writing world.

Do you think Lucia would share that cookie recipe if we ask nicely?

No. She’ll always be changing it.

Thank you, Matt, for being a big part of our literary community and for your involvement and support in helping TGLR grow and thrive. We also appreciate you for spending extra time with us on this Q&A and wish you the best with the Poetry Forward project, writing, and all of life’s endeavors!

Frank Gaughan is a fiction writer and educator based in New York. His short fiction appears in Arcturus, and he is completing a collection of contemporary short stories. His academic writing on composition pedagogy has appeared in College Composition and Communication and Inside Higher Ed. He teaches composition and ESL at Hofstra University. His short fiction, The Grieving Scar, is available in Issue #22.

Tell us about yourself.

I live with my wife and daughter in New York. I teach English composition at Hofstra University. I’ve worked there for over twenty years now. I appreciate the opportunity to continuously work with young people. Among other advantages, doing so helps you to see how reading and writing practices evolve.

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

I’m happy with the ending, and I’m rarely happy with the way my stories end. I wanted Susan and Carson to meet again, and I wanted AZZO and Bennington to have a legitimate story arc.

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

There’s an element of humor and absurdity to life. It’s hard (at least for me) to render those elements in fiction, but I was able to do it in this case by paying attention to Carson, by allowing him to be insistent on his feelings.

What do you hope readers take from the piece?

You mean a lesson? The piece was fun to write, and I hope readers take some joy from reading it. I didn’t have a specific moral that I was trying to convey, but Carson is interesting to me because he refuses to be indifferent about his breakup. I doubt he would think of things that way, but that’s how I see him. When Susan and Carson meet at the end, they have another kind of conversation about indifference.

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

It’s fun to write creatively. Where there was nothing before there is something now. I enjoy the process of making things. In this respect, I don’t see a huge difference between writing fiction and writing a course design or a lesson plan for class. Both are creative processes where I’m in charge of the direction and where I have to live with the outcomes.

What has drawn you to writing fiction? What other genres do you write?

We understand through story. In good stories, we also empathize. If I can create a story where there was nothing before and also have that story that help someone understand and empathize, I’ve done my job. I write poetry too, but I don’t think I’m especially good at it.

What have been the biggest influences in your writing?

My parents and my wife—excellent readers, all. My daughter, who has an intuitive sense of humor and narrative structure. My students, who as a group have a low tolerance threshold for boring stories.

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

You have to write even when you don’t want to, and even in suboptimal conditions. If you only have 30 minutes that day, then write for 30 minutes so that you’re in a position to do better the next day.

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

I came across Jan Kerouac’s Baby Driver recently, even though it’s been out in the world for 40-plus years. She was firing on all cylinders there. Beautiful stuff. 

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

People being good to one another, regularly and reliably.

Thank you, Frank, 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 with writing and all life’s endeavors.

Jake Bienvenue holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Montana, where he was the Editor-in-Chief of CutBank. His work has appeared in The Offing, The Baltimore Review, EcoTheo, and others. He is at work on a novel about the Oregon wine country. He lives in Brooklyn. His short fiction, Palimpsest, is available in Issue #22.

Tell us about yourself.

Sure. I’m young, handsome, and I’m getting crazy money. I’m overeducated and restless and by this point practically feral. I live in a windowless room. I have with me about a dozen items. The rest, mostly books and wine, is stuffed in a closet in my father’s basement in Folsom, California. I write ridiculous poems and stories at a desk which would be too small for a third grader. When I pass people on the street I pretend I have no face.

Palimpsest is such a uniquely funny and dark story that reveals a lot about our society. Can you tell us where the idea for this story came from? What other details would you like to share about the revision process and/or final version of this piece?

All my writing comes out of my hatred of work. All of it. In this case, my previous job was as a rentals manager at an arts center in rural Oregon, a role I actually kind of liked. So during the day, when I needed a break from sending emails, I’d wander the halls of this big building, daydreaming. I wrote some of these little fictions down. I kept daydreaming. I realized these daydreams had a perspective, a dreamer who was not me. From there it was a matter of shaping.

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

Nothing I’ve published is even remotely like this. It’s mostly been straightforward realism. But I think with “Palimpsest” I got more comfortable with weirdness, with just saying shit I think is striking or funny, and not worrying about how it’s going to cohere. It’s a trust thing, I think.

What has drawn you to writing fiction? What other genres do you write?

I just love stories, honestly. I love making things up. Like wouldn’t it be goofy if this happened? But with fiction, instead of wondering, you construct then inhabit a narrative perspective, you say, “Something very goofy did happen, and I was there, I saw it.” I also love poetry and that’s what I’ve been writing lately. I’ve published creative nonfiction and criticism too.

What have been the biggest influences in your writing?

Walt Whitman, the Bible, anime. In no particular order.

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

If art is the negative of productivity, and I think it is, then my writing consists of moments I’ve stolen back from my life, whether that’s work or leisure or laundry. Maybe I’m not explaining myself well. That’s okay too.

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

I think if you have any interest in me or my work, which you should not, I’d encourage you to read a very short nonfiction piece I wrote for The Baltimore Review, called “Gold Country.” It’s very different from “Palimpsest” but I think with both you get a sense of where my work is right now. Or where it was about a year ago, really.

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

I think of a huge pile of mulch I have to spread on a Saturday morning. I think of rows of white houses with two-car garages. I think of sapling poplars attached to growth stilts. I think of Traeger grills and cold pools. Heat, summer, Yeti coolers. Things I’m a visitor in. Probably this is not the answer you were looking for. Now I’ll think of an excellent literary magazine in Nebraska!

“Gold Country” is a fabulous piece, Jake! Thanks for sharing. Thank you, also, 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 with writing and all life’s endeavors, except maybe work, since your distaste for it seems to be particularly fruitful.

A native Floridian and dual US and Canadian citizen, Sarah Schiff earned her PhD in American literature from Emory University but is a fugitive from higher education. She now writes fiction and teaches high school English in Atlanta. Her short stories have appeared in Pembroke Magazine, Valparaiso Fiction Review, The Saturday Evening Post, and Cleaver, among others. She’s been twice nominated for a Pushcart prize, by J Journal and JMWW, was a finalist for the TulipTree Review’s Wild Women Story Contest, and was a 2024 Jack Hazard Fellow. Her flash fiction, Drained, appears in Issue #21.

Tell us about yourself.

I’m a Sagittarius who likes long walks on the beach. Just kidding—though both are true. What’s also true is that I’m pretty boring. I’m a mother but, as much as I love my kids, I don’t want to be “known” as that. I suspect that few male writers would identify themselves as “fathers”—unless speaking of the glorious work they’ve sired. I’m a high school English teacher, but I don’t consider that who I am. It’s not my calling. It’s something I do because it pays the bills, and I love literature, and I want future generations to appreciate its ongoing relevance despite all the flashy distractions and distortions of our world. I’m a writer, but that title feels especially fraught for all the usual reasons writers often feel like posers and imposters, and especially in a time when readers are an endangered species. What people often see me as is not what I am, and what I am (because of genetics and history) is not always how I identify. Ha, you were kindly asking me a straightforward question, and I got all angsty about it. Blame it on the teenagers I’m constantly surrounded by.

What unique or surprising detail can you tell us about the origin, revision process, and/or final version of your piece appearing in this issue? 

I drafted “Drained” a decade ago, so there’s a weird temporality to it. The world and our nation have obviously changed drastically since then. But with the renewed virulent rhetoric about immigration and the general state of our world, I felt drawn back to it, and I’m so grateful that The Good Life Review rescued it from my “Ghosted Stories” file. 

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

Despair, frustration, cynicism, hope, obsession, and a lack of awareness about what else to do with these few precious moments of my life.

What has drawn you to writing fiction, and/or what other genres do you write? 

We all know that fiction lies its way to the truth, so I want to promote truth in a world riddled with lies, and I want to add just a little bit of beauty to a world that, at times, can be heartbreakingly ugly. 

What have been the biggest influences in your writing? 

Libraries and bookstores. The more of them that close up shop, the closer we get to the brink.

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

If anyone has figured out a sane and healthy way to achieve balance between writing and work/family life, I would love to hear it—especially if it doesn’t involve getting up at 5am.

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

I wish! Although if anyone wants to check out other stories I’ve written, and since we’re all starving for “views” and “clicks,” a visit to my website would be a wonderful treat. If you do, please leave a message with a link to your own writing, and I’ll definitely check it out! 

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

If we’re talking about my personal idea of the good life, it would be sitting on the beach, surrounded by friends and family, getting to hear their joys and chatter while my face is buried in a good book. 

If we’re talking about a piece of writing, then it would be having the opportunity to come to life by being read. Thank you so much for giving my story its own good life!

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Thank you, Sarah, for trusting us with your story. We’re also happy we were able to rescue it from the fate of being ghosted! Thanks also for spending extra time on this Q&A. We appreciate you and wish you the best with writing and all life’s endeavors! Oh, and happy birthday!!

David Hutto’s work is forthcoming in Little Old Lady, Bookends Review, and Carmina Magazine, and has recently appeared in Southern Quill and Avalon Literary Journal.  In 2024 his work appeared in Paterson Literary Review, The Hemlock, Brussels Review, Literally Stories, Cable Street, Galway Review, Symphonies of Imagination, Mediterranean Poetry, and Mudfish. His experience as a writer includes a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in 2003, as well as writers’ retreats in Mérida, Mexico in 2024 and Dublin, Ireland in May 2025. His short fiction, A Boy Who Thinks Quite a Deal, is available in Issue #21.

Tell us about yourself.

It may sound strange, but I can sit and read a foreign language dictionary for an hour and feel entertained and contented. Everything about language compels me, from the fact that it exists at all, to the differences between languages, to the amazing magic of using writing to createpeople and worlds that did not exist before. I grew up on a farm in Georgia, I have lived all over the United States, and spent time in Russia as a student. By this point, I’ve also traveled the world a bit, which I find fantastically stimulating. My interest in language has sparkled through all of it, so that I’vestudied Russian and Spanish well enough to read them, and I have been writing almostas long as I’ve known the alphabet.

What unique or surprising detail can you tell us about the origin, revision process, and/or final version of your piece appearing in this issue?

This story began with the leftovers of another story that I eventually hated and threw away. That other story had a few fragments that I liked, the small stories that now appear on the radio in “A Boy Who Thinks Quite a Deal.” I saved those bits without a clue what I’d do with them, and eventually came up with an utterly different story, changing it from adults in New Jersey to a child in Great Britain.

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

Possibly, I learned more viscerally that some stories, no matter how heartfelt and how hard you work, just end up as trash and aren’t worth saving.

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

Can anyone truly describe that so another person can understand it? I can say that nothing makes me feel as contented, feel as if I belong on the earth, like writing, the actual process of using the words and creating sentences, describing images, discussing ideas. For all the difficulties that being a creative person can bring, I feel lucky to have been born with this in my life, to have a purpose.

What has drawn you to writing fiction and/or what other genres do you write?

I have written quite a few short stories, pushing hard to go in many directions and experiment with what writing can do, as well as writing a good many poems, but above all, I think of myself as a novelist, because a novel is where you really have room to explore what it means to be a human being.

What have been the biggest influences in your writing?

As to other writers, I’ve been directly influenced (in the sense of wanting to imitate them) by Shakespeare, Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Isabel Allende, Mark Twain, and of course, by other writers who aren’t coming to mind at the moment. I would also say that art, music, and travel also influence my writing.

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

(1) Feeling contented with who you are, and with how you live and what you do. (2) Having a glass of wine, some chocolate, and a comfortable couch, with something you really love to read.

Thank you, David, 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 with writing and all life’s endeavors!

Eve Addams is a Denver-based poet whose work mixes storytelling with elements of magical realism to explore love, language, religion, trauma, and time. She is a member of the 2025 Mercury Slam Poetry Team and a 2x Moth StorySlam winner. Her spoken word piece, “Airport Security,” appears in our autumn issue.

Tell us about yourself.

I grew up outside Chicago and in my adult life, have lived at over 15 addresses, visited over 30 countries, and worked over 40 jobs. The one consistent has been writing. It exists somewhere between something I have to do and something I want to do, but I am glad every time that I do it.

I was introduced to spoken word with Amanda Gorman’s 2021 inauguration poem, The Hill We Climb. But it wasn’t until 2023, a few days after October 7th, that I stumbled into slam poetry. I wrote out a poem where I processed my emotions as a Jewish person who had dated a Palestinian, and looked for open mics near me. The earliest one was that night at what was at the time The Mercury Cafe. I went knowing nothing, and when I got there discovered that it was not an open mic but a slam – and there were some rules. I was supposed to have 3 poems prepared that were under 3 minutes. Since I was already there, I split my poem into two and figured I wouldn’t make it to the final round. I was wrong. I ended up speed reading both parts as my ‘third poem, ‘dropping some lines to fit it in. It was both encouraging and humbling, and to this day is one of the things I like most about slam poetry: in its best form, anyone can walk in and you don’t know what will happen.  

What did you learn (about yourself, craft, or life in general) through the process of creating the piece?

Spoken word artists often draw on anger as an emotion to fuel their performances, but this is the first piece that I tried engaging with it more seriously. I realized that for my personal craft, to engage with anger means finding the hope and belief systems behind it. If I am to express anger in a piece, I want to leave the audience (and myself) a direction or avenue to land it with purpose.

What has drawn you to spoken word? 

I see spoken word as a dance with the audience. You have the opportunity to lead listeners on a journey through place, space, and emotion, and at the same time, follow the energy they give back to adjust delivery and pacing. It’s the most emotionally intimate interaction I’ve found as an artist, and I treasure that connection.

What have been the biggest influences in your creative life?

I was lucky to grow up in a family that encouraged creativity by living it. My mother is an artist and actress; my father is a photographer and videographer; my grandmother is a musician; my nana was a sculptor and painter. So many of my aunts, uncles, and cousins also play music, paint, or photograph, and both of my grandfathers danced. They have all influenced my creative life by encouraging every aspect of it and demonstrating that creativity lasts a lifetime. 

It continues to be humans who cultivate my creative curiosity. I love Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s writing for its beauty while engaging with darkness; I draw from Chanel Miller’s simultaneously certain and gentle observation in both writing and art; Johnny Osi’s spoken word performances have pushed what I thought to be possible in embodying emotion and engaging audiences, and his editing workshops show me the value and potential of writing communities and coaches; Matthew Brown’s poetic lyricism challenges me to expand the vocabulary with which I describe a given moment; and Ryan Boyland’s exploration of fairy tales and creation in performance poetry demonstrate how to create rich visual worlds without needing trauma to drive the whole story.

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

I used to be someone who only wrote on paper (and only when I wasn’t going to be interrupted). While that’s still when I feel most creatively free, I’ve found the best way to build in expression to daily life is to turn to my notes app on my phone in those moments when I’d typically be scrolling – and recording voice memos with lines that come to me when driving. 

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

Wanting to be exactly where you are. 

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Thank you, Eve, for sharing such a powerful piece with us and for spending time on this Q&A. We appreciate you being a part of our growing community and wish you the best!