Interview with Meg Eden About Her Book Drowning in the Floating World

Meg Eden

"I wore driftwood / & got dressed for the ocean."
- from "All Summer I Wore" by Meg Eden

(Interview was conducted via email in October 2020 by Nancy Chen Long.)

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Meg Eden's work is published or forthcoming in magazines including Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Crab Orchard Review, RHINO, and CV2. She teaches creative writing at Anne Arundel Community College. She is the author of five poetry chapbooks, the novel Post-High School Reality Quest (Rare Bird Books, 2017), and the poetry collection Drowning in the Floating World (Press 53, 2020). She runs the Magfest MAGES Library blog, which posts accessible academic articles about video games. Find her online at www.megedenbooks.com or on Twitter at @ConfusedNarwhal.

Side note: Meg Eden is poetry guest editor for Issue 197 of Press 53’s Prime Number Magazine and will be reading submissions for that issue until November 9, 2020. Writers who are interested, please see the following link: https://www.press53.com/issue-181-guest-editors-issue-197.

Overview of Drowning in the Floating World
"Drowning in the Floating World by Meg Eden immerses us into the Japanese natural disaster known as 3/11: the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, and subsequent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Relentless as the disaster itself, Eden seizes control of our deepest emotional centers, and, through insightful perspective, holds us in consideration of loss, helplessness, upheaval, and, perhaps most stirring, what do make of, and do with, survival. This poetry collection is also a cultural education, sure to encourage further reading and research. Drowning in the Floating World is, itself, a tsunami stone—a warning beacon to remind us to learn from disaster and, in doing so, honor all that’s lost."

Review of Drowning in the Floating World
https://sundressblog.com/2020/04/28/sundress-reads-review-of-drowning-in-the-floating-world/

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Response to the Brother Who Wants to Move in After the Earthquake: 

by Meg Eden
(a poem from Drowning in the Floating World)

You are not welcome here.
You are contaminated.
You have radiation in your skin.
You breathed in that nuclear air.

You are contaminated;
a power plant lives in you now.
There’s already radiation in your skin,
and I can’t risk you rubbing off on me.

You carry that power plant inside you,
but we are genki here,
and I can’t risk you rubbing off on us.
We want to live—

We are genki here, but
he who mixes with vermillion turns red.
I want to live,
I don’t want to think about Fukushima.

Mixed with red ink, anything becomes red.
It can’t be helped.
I don’t want to think about Fukushima.
There are places for that sort of thing.

Shikata ga nai.
You breathed in that nuclear air.
There are places for that sort of thing, but
you are not welcome here. 

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NCL: Please tell us a little about your book Drowning in the Floating World and how it came to be. Some say that one of the primary difficulties a poet may have with a first full-length poetry manuscript is shaping it into a book, as opposed to of a collection of disparate poems. Drowning is solidly coherent with respect to theme. Did you set out to write a series of related poems, or was it something that unfolded as you went along? 

ME: Drowning in the Floating World is a collection about the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and Fukushima power plant disaster. It explores the literal destruction, as well as the idea of water, and how deeply rooted water is conceptually in Japanese language and mythology, this dual function of killing and sustaining life. The first poem was probably written shortly after the event—I don’t think it made it into the collection. I was haunted by the footage of 3/11, and as I went to Fukuoka that summer, I was disturbed by how normal everything seemed in the rest of Japan—how there was this devastation in part of the country, but everything else was going on as usual. That’s life, but it’s also shocking and troubling. I couldn’t stop thinking about the disaster, and over time the poems collected. The most recent poem(s) were a couple of rewrites once the collection was acquired—I remember the pantoum and “Town Hall” were both rewritten right before printing, and became stronger as a result.

I think once I had several poems about 3/11, I realized I was going to have a collection. When I write more than one poem about a thing, and those different poems are saying different things (and not just me rewriting the same poem), I tend to have some sort of collection, whether that be a chapbook or a full-length. At first, I set out to gather and create thematically similar poems. By playing with forms, I tried to diversify my perspective on the theme and flesh out gaps in the collection. Through feedback from some amazing readers, I saw how I could open up the collection and go beyond just 3/11 to water at large, and the idea of the floating world. I submitted it over and over, got rejections, and kept tinkering. It was a conscious process of making a full-length manuscript, but at the same time, it felt organic. I’ve tried to make collections happen before and they just didn’t. You can’t brute force it. So I think that combination of intent with natural rhythm was important for the collection to actually become a collection.


NCL: I’m intrigued regarding your use of Japanese language in these poems. For example, some of the poem titles contain Japanese words, cities, or characters in them. There are also Japanese words and phrases peppered throughout the collection. I couldn’t help but think of my Taiwanese mother and how she interjects Taiwanese or Mandarin in her sentences, a type of code-switching so to speak. Please share with us a bit about your use of Japanese in the collection and the impact of the Japanese language and culture on your writing. For example, how long did you live in Japan? Are any of your ancestors Japanese? Have any of your poems been published in Japanese journals or have you written any poems entirely in Japanese?

ME: I love this question! Code-switching is a natural part of speech, so it only makes sense to me for it to happen on the page. Some things just can’t be translated—and they shouldn’t have to be. Something is always lost in translation. As I wrote, I used the words that came to me, the ones that made the most sense. For example in “Town Hall” I wanted to recreate the visceral experience of the do not enter signs by using their exact language. In “Response to a Brother,” I use both shikata ga nai and its “translation,” “it can’t be helped.” Really, shikata ga nai means shikata ga nai. It’s such a common Japanese phrase, such a big part of the way of thinking in the culture, that using that exact language was critical to me. Interacting with Japanese kanji is such a visual and animated experience that sometimes I wanted to capture a taste of that richness on the page. Translating it into roman letters felt like it would cheapen it. Sometimes that was necessary, but especially with some of the titles, I wanted that visual element.

While I have not formally lived in Japan, Japan has always been a significant part of my life. My father has been working in Okinawa since I was in grade school. We would visit as a family, and I spent a summer there when I was in college. When I was in high school, my father was there every other month. I ate up everything I could get my hands on, growing up: Japanese mythology texts, J-pop CDs, language courses, manga. It’s hard to explain—I guess I haven’t written enough poems about it yet—but Japanese language and culture just make sense to me. There is a system, a kata, a way of doing things. You know what to expect from others, and what’s expected of you. I love the feeling of the language in my mouth—it’s like rich chocolate. In America, I’m always anxious, never knowing what to expect from others. Americans are so unpredictable sometimes. But in Japan, even though they certainly have their own problems as a country, I have a sense of relief at the expectations—for example, I know the man at the kombini will wrap my croquette the same way every morning! My husband spent several years as a teenager growing up in Japan, so it’s a common closeness for us. I think of it as our heart-home. I do not have Japanese ancestry that I know of. It’s interesting though—my grandfather was based in Hokkaido during the Korean war. Before he passed, he expressed how much he loved it there, how much the culture made sense to him, and how he almost stayed. We both carried that love in our blood.

Japanese language and culture have had a huge impact on my writing—not to mention how I think and see the world. I have not yet written poems entirely in Japanese, though in my MFA program, I took an amazing translation course with Michael Collier, and spent the semester focused on translating poems of Shuntaro Tanikawa. That was an incredible experience. Studying his work really exploded all these possibilities on the page for me. His language is so accessible yet clever, and his images so shocking. He also translates the Peanuts comics into Japanese! There’s this magical realism to his work, which I suppose is very Japanese, very Shinto—the lack of boundaries between the mythological and the everyday. This has hugely shaped and influenced my perspective for Drowning. As a Christian, I really resonate with this, as I also believe that the spiritual and the everyday have no boundary; they are interconnected and impact each other. For my writing, this magical realism aesthetic gave me an entrance into disaster, being able to imagine and create and open a little window of light into a situation that can seem so relentlessly heartbreaking.


NCL: I read most of the poems as persona poems—i.e., as a distinct person who is not the poet—as poems in the voices of those who have suffered in the catastrophes, for example “Radium Girls”, “I Ask My Mother What It’s Like, Living at the Bottom of the Ocean,” and “Response to the Brother Who Wants to Move in After the Earthquake:,” which is printed at the beginning of this interview. How did you approach writing the persona poems? For example, did you conduct any interviews of survivors? or perhaps had a particular person in mind? On the other hand, some of the poems, such as “Corpse Washing,” come across as possibly something experienced by the poet-speaker. I’m curious, were you in Japan for the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, and subsequent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster? Tell us a bit about your research process for this book.

ME: Many of the persona poems were rooted in interviews I read online, or videos of footage I saw. Others were inspired by that Shuntaro Tanikawa brand of magical realism, as well as Patricia Smith’s collection Blood Dazzler. When I first read that book in school, it blew me away. I was so inspired by all the creative perspectives she brought in, and the voice she gave Hurricane Katrina. As I fleshed out the collection, I wanted to explore the fantastical angles—like the idea of living in the bottom of the ocean, or the voice of a town hall or a doll that was lost in the ruins and unable to get a proper burial.

I was not in Japan during the earthquake and tsunami, but I was in the country that summer. Some poems were from personal experience; for example “原爆 – Atom” was a sort of response to my visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. “In Tokyo, three months after the earthquake” was in response to my time in Tokyo during 2011. “Corpse Washing” was a response to the incredible 2008 film Departures (おくりびと).

I think my research process was basically absorbing everything I possibly could about the disaster. Surrounding myself with it. At some point, reading and writing and researching, it becomes more than just distant facts, but a visceral feeling. I remember being in a theater with a preview for the movie San Andreas Fault in the middle of the research process, and there was a scene of water flooding into a room. I almost started screaming and sobbing in the middle of the theater. All I could think of was Rikuzentakata. That it wasn’t just a movie; this was something that people lived through, that really happened in Japan. How can we let ourselves forget?

NCL: What is one of the more crucial poems in the book for you?

ME: It’s so funny, because I think this has changed over time, as the collection has been out in the world and I’ve done readings. I seem to always want to read “Town Hall.” This was one of the last poems to come together for the collection. I completely rewrote it when the collection was acquired. Something about the voice of the town hall, its anger, its insistence on not being forgotten—I’m haunted by it. As we are increasingly talking about the injustices in our country, I keep thinking about the Town Hall’s anger, it’s refusal to fall or be forgotten. There is so much suffering, so many people suffering that we completely forget. The town hall reminds me to never forget, and to speak out.

This poem is inspired by the town hall in Rikuzentakata, which I believe was the only building left standing after the tsunami. In my research, I was reading about tsunami stones, stones marking where previous tsunamis hit—physical warnings to future generations of where to not build your homes. Unfortunately, just enough time passes between disaster for us to forget. If we listened to the tsunami stones, if we did not build below them, so many lives would have been saved in 3/11. The town hall is a kind of tsunami stone, standing to remind us of what has happened, what can come again, how we should not become complacent and forget.


Town Hall

Watching the town resurrect,
I remain unfixed,
mouth filled with birds.

My eyes are dusty & split
down the middle; my bowels
washed in mud. A car

rests in my intestines.
The dog in my chest
just delivered puppies.

I’ve been given many names:
Dangerous,
Do not enter,

Tsunami, you may have
erased my neighbors,
but still I remain!

I defy you, Tsunami.

I defy you, Town.

I will always remember

should you mistakenly
forget. Here I stand,
a new tsunami stone.


NCL: When do you remember first being interested in poetry? Was there a mentor who encouraged you?

ME: Poetry was what my friends were doing in middle school, so of course I conformed! But I got hooked. Up to that point, my interest was in the visual arts. I wanted to be a cartoonist, or a manga-ka. But I found that poems gave me another way to express my thoughts and process the world around me—one that I could do with or without a whole set of artist’s tools. I have had the privilege of having so many amazing mentors to encourage me. The first was my mother. A history teacher in middle school told me I was a good writer. In community college, I was so blessed to have an instructor work closely with me and believe in my poems. I think that was the spark that made me become serious about this whole poetry thing. 


NCL: You also have a fiction book out. A number of years back, at an AWP panel on the poetry-prose dynamic, some of the panelists said they found it difficult to smoothly switch between poetry and prose. One panelist said it was, in part, because she wanted to break or control the line. Another said it was because of the compression of language that his poetry seeks. Of course, some of the panelists said they had no difficulty going from one to the other. What is your experience with switching between genres? Do you prefer one over the other?

ME: I used to THINK I was good at switching between the genres, but many of my poems should’ve been novels, and my novels poems! So I think for me the difficulty has been based on content—what container does this content need? Is it a whole story? Or is it a brief moment? I think recently, I’ve been drawn more toward prose, and haven’t written as many poems. But there are seasons. For a while, all I wanted to do was write poems. Now, all I want to do is write stories. This summer, I wrote a novel in verse, which merged the two sensibilities—and that was so much fun. I definitely want to do more of that. 

NCL: I see you teach creative writing. What is one thing that you impress upon your students with respect to poetry?

ME: That it’s for them—that it can be for them if they want it. For so many students, poetry equals Shakespeare, or poetry equals “only for smart people” (whatever that means). I want every student to be able to see poetry as an outlet for their own voice. That there’s a place at the table for everyone. And for my intro students, I want them to see that poetry can be fun—when I learned poetry could be fun, that was everything 

NCL: What are you working on now?

ME: I just finished a middle grade novel in verse, which was so fun. I’m also working on a contemporary young adult novel. I’ve not been focusing much on poetry, but every now and then a poem will pop out.

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Purchase Drowning in the Floating World: https://www.press53.com/poetry-collections/drowning-in-the-floating-world-by-meg-eden


Find Meg Eden online:

- Website: http://www.megedenbooks.com

- Twitter: @ConfusedNarwhal.


All poems printed or quoted in this post © Meg Eden Drowning in the Floating World (Press 53, 2020)

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Nancy Chen Long is the author of two books of poetry: Wider than the Sky (Diode Editions, 2020), selected for the Diode Editions Book Award,  and Light into Bodies (University of Tampa Press, 2017), which won the Tampa Review Poetry Prize. Her work has been supported by a National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing fellowship and the Poetry Society of America Robert H. Winner Award. You’ll find her recent work in The Southern Review, Copper Nickel, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. She  works at Indiana University in the Research Technologies division.

Interview with Katerina Stoykova About Her Book Second Skin

"praise the wound / opening and closing / like a womb"
- from "Praise Song for the Wound" by Katerina Stoykova

Katerina Stoykova and I have been acquainted for almost ten years. We both attended Spalding University, and I have long admired her work and her dedication to the literary community. I heard her read from her book Second Skin last year and knew that I wanted to interview her about it. Before you get to the interview, below is a bit about her, as well some information about the book.

—Nancy Chen Long

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"Katerina Stoykova's poetry collection How God Punishes came out in English in 2017 from Broadstone Books. The Bulgarian version of this book was published in 2014 by ICU press and won the Ivan Nikolov National Poetry Prize. Katerina is the editor and translator of The Season of Delicate Hunger: Anthology of Contemporary Bulgarian Poetry (Accents Publishing, 2014). For six years Katerina hosted the literary radio show Accents on WRFL 88.1FM, Lexington and recorded hundreds of hours of conversations with poets and writers from the USA and around the world. Katerina acted the lead roles in the independent feature films Proud Citizen and Fort Maria, both directed by Thom Southerland. Additionally, Katerina was the co-writer for Proud Citizen. The film received a number of festival awards, including Best Narrative Feature, Best of the Fest, Audience Favorite, Best Cinematography, as well as two special acting awards for Katerina's performance."

Overview of Second Skin
"Second Skin by Katerina Stoykova discusses the horrors of growing up in domestic violence, and focuses on some of the long-term effects of such upbringings. This poetry collection features three main characters—a mother, a father and a child. The story of the family is told from the child's perspective. Initially published in Bulgarian by ICU Publishing, Second Skin received wide acclaim and attention, including a 2018 Creative Europe grant by the European Commission for the book to be translated and published in English. Upon publication in Europe and launch in London, ICU Publishing and Accents Publishing partnered for the distribution of the book in the USA."

Praise for Second Skin: 

Second Skin by Katerina Stoykova is a brief, but more than sufficient book. It is more than sufficient to expose the issue of domestic violence, and along with one child's fear—the fear of every child forced to love an abusive parent. The second skin you wear to hide what happens at home; second skin that cannot contain you. A book about the guilt due to the inability to forgive, about hatred towards the one who has moved on and forgotten. A book about the children cowering in the corners of their own powerlessness, who thirty years later continue hearing the screams from the other room. Difficult, true, and exceptionally important. ~Natalia Deleva

Review of Second Skin
https://www.theusreview.com/reviews/Second-Skin-by-Katerina-Stoykova.html#.XhkPiuhKhPZ

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How Are You, Child? by Katerina Stoykova
(a poem from Second Skin)

Wherever I go,  I bring my own prison.  My restrictions are

animate. And hazardous. And all-encompassing. Reflective

of  my  past  like a rearview mirror.  I can  talk  to someone

and, without asking, surmise what kind of parents she’s had. 

And  those  mastering  spiritual practices I can spot with the 

naked  eye.  And those  in need  of therapy.  And  those who 

can’t manage their own lives,  and those who shun the truth,

because it’s too much.

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Please tell us how Second Skin came about. Also, how did you decide on the title?

KS: Second Skin has a long and complicated history. I worked on it for close to ten years in various forms. At first I wrote the idea of the book into a play dealing with family relationships and domestic violence, titled Black Coat. Then the play became a portion of the screenplay for the narrative feature film Proud Citizen, directed by Thomas Southerland. The movie depicted a Bulgarian playwright coming to Kentucky to see the premiere of her play, Black Coat. In the film actual actors act out scenes from Black Coat. They act out a few of my poems. After the film I rewrote the material into a 300 page memoir, which I’ve since abandoned. I felt I needed to put the manuscript aside for some time and published the surprisingly funny poetry book How God Punishes and then returned my attention to Black Coat. By that point I had written a stack of new poems and felt ready to tackle the material as a poetry book – or a mixed genre book – in Bulgarian. I completed it, though I needed further time to be able to get used to the thought of publishing this book. The title Second Skin came from a line of a short poem discussing growing up in fear in a domestic violence situation.


The book has a dedication page (or is it an epigraph?) that says “How are you feeling, Child?”, a phrase that is repeated in the book. Can you speak a bit about that?

KS: Yes. The book is dedicated to all of us unimportant children, having grown up distant second to parents’ alcoholism and dysfunction. All of us who haven’t been asked this kind and simple question. All of us who’ve cowered alone in rooms, waiting to be the next recipient of an angry parent’s violent outburst. Having grown up in such environment, I had to learn to reconnect to myself and my own feelings. I had to develop the habit of asking myself how I am feeling, in order to learn to get in touch with my self and my own needs. The book in a way mimics my own process.


As can be seen in a number of your poems, for example, “You Have the Right to Mourn, Dear One,”, domestic-violence victims frequently feel trapped in their abusive relationships and often feel a loss of identity—a loss of a sense of self—in the midst of those relationships. They also often grieve the loss of the abusive relationship, a mourning that is necessary in order to move on. I imagine some of these poems were difficult to write. How did you work through the emotional aspects of these poems? Did you encounter any other difficulties or challenges in writing some of the poems?

KS: The difficulties were not so much in the writing of the poems, as in living in the energy of the book. As most poets I know, I take my craft seriously and edit extensively, and take my time in completing the project. So, activities such as reading the entire book out loud multiple times was difficult, reading separately for grammar, ordering and re-ordering the material – that was much more difficult, because it kept me immersed in the book for hours at the time. I learned quickly that I shouldn’t work on the book in the morning, because after that I wouldn’t be able to do much else for the rest of the day. But also I shouldn’t read the book too late in the evening, either, because wouldn’t be able to sleep. I found out it was best to do my editing at about 5 or 6 pm, right before dinner, when I still had energy to do the work, but no big plans afterwards.

 I consider personal breakthroughs the act of writing of the individual poems. I believe not that the breakthrough is difficult, but what leads to it. The process could be lengthy, involved and unclear. To quote a line from my bilingual "Bird on a Window Sill”: “Finding your way out of the same labyrinth 1000 times is not the same as exiting once from each of 1000 labyrinths.” I feel that every one of these poems has been the exit of some complicated labyrinth I’ve wandered through for years.

 At some point I knew that I needed to stop working on this book. And the only way to stop working on it was to publish it.

Have you given a public reading of the work? What was the audience response? Did you encounter anything you were not expecting?

KS: I’ve given public readings, yes. At the beginning I was very nervous and apologetic. I didn’t want to depress anyone. But then again, normally there are no random people at poetry readings. You go to a poetry reading because you want to be there, and you want to listen. So, people knew in advance what the book was about, and still came to the reading.

I set aside time for Q&A after reading from this book. That’s something I’ve never felt necessary to do before. But with this book people want to know things, to ask questions, and I make it clear that I don’t mind being asked personal questions. Most attendees ask questions publicly, but also there are always a few who approach me after the reading to let me know that my book describes their story, as well. Usually I can recognize these people while I’m reading. I can see it on their faces.


In Second Skin, what is one of the more crucial poems in the book for you?

KS: At different times nearly every one of the poems in the book has been critically important to me. Why? Because each poem has been the next step forward, and I believe that each step is critical, even the seemingly small ones. I choose to share the second poem in the book, because it quickly walks the reader through much of the story. (Here is an audio of Katerina reading the Bulgarian version of this poem: https://soundcloud.com/toestbg/katerina-stoikova-chete-terasata-na-osmiya-etazh.)


8th Floor Balcony Ghazal

If I catch you smoking
I'll throw you off the balcony.

If something happens to you
I'll jump off the balcony.

Dad stopped hitting me: Go ahead, he laughed, scream for help.
Then opened the door to the balcony.

To free space in the kitchen,
we moved the stove to the balcony.

Dad got mad and started
dragging Mom towards the balcony.

You could see the sun rise
out of the Black Sea from the balcony.

When the guests for Mom's funeral arrived,
Dad hid, smoking on the balcony.

I hated him in the house,
as well as on the balcony.

I've been faking all my orgasms,
I confessed to my first ex-husband on the balcony.

I stared out for a month, waiting for my pen pal to arrive,
as I was scrubbing the windows on the balcony.

Your marriage will last at most three years,
Dad told me on the balcony.

When I was leaving for America, I looked up from the cab and saw
my best friend waving from the balcony.

I'm ready to let go of everything that happened
except the balcony.

Katerina, there is no heaven or hell,
there is just this balcony.



You are a master of aphorisms, epigrams, and the short poem. The first issue of your journal Literary Accents featured poems that were less than 50 words long. Blaise Pascal once wrote that he would have made document shorter, but he didn’t have the time. What is it about the short poem that calls to you? Do you find that with your own short poems, that they take more time to finish? Or do you naturally tend toward shorter poems?

KS: I naturally tend to write shorter poems, or if it’s longer piece, it’s normally written in smaller parts. I am not sure why. Perhaps I find writing so intensely emotional, I can take it only in brief bursts. Also, I believe that there are many ways of saying something. As a reader of poetry, I’ve taught myself to appreciate all of these ways. Probably the biggest influence, however, is cultural. I’ve grown up reading poetry from the Balkans, the language of which tends to be more direct. Well, if you say something more directly, chances are you’ll need fewer words. That’s what I think.


You started Accents Publishing 10 years ago. I remember attending your first release of, I think it was something like 7 chapbooks at one time. It was such a wonderful celebration. What is happening at the press at the 10-year mark?

KS: The press is more alive than ever. We have expanded beyond chapbooks into full-length poetry books, added a printed literary journal. We provide workshops and craft teachings. We’re about to announce results for our novella contest. In near future we plan to add memoirs and short story collections to our catalog. We would like to do more with our blog, as well. At the tenth year mark, we feel inspired to be an active and recognizable voice in contemporary literature in the USA and beyond.

What are you working on now?

KS: Right now, with the generous support of a grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, I’m working on a poetry book about the relationships between the self and others. Waking up to love. Understanding it. Living it.

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Purchase Second Skin: http://accents-publishing.com/secondskin.html


Find Katerina online:

- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/katerina.stoykovaklemer

- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katerinastoykova/


All poems printed or quoted in this post © Katerina Stoykova Second Skin (Accents Publishing, 2019) (Initially published in Bulgarian by ICU Publishing)

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Nancy Chen Long is the author of two books of poetry: Wider than the Sky (Diode Editions, 2020), winner of the Diode Editions Book Award,  and Light into Bodies (University of Tampa Press, 2017), winner of the Tampa Review Poetry Prize. Her work has been supported by a National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing fellowship and the Poetry Society of America Robert H. Winner Award. You’ll find her recent work in The Southern Review, Copper Nickel, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. She  works at Indiana University in the Research Technologies division.

Interview with Kwoya Fagin Maples about Mend

I am an aching shell but her touch says I am worth tenderness.
- from "My Mother Bathes Me after I Give Birth" by Kwoya Fagin Maples

Kwoya Fagin Maples is a writer from Charleston, S.C. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama and is a graduate Cave Canem Fellow. She is the author of Mend (University Press of Kentucky, 2018). In addition to a chapbook publication by Finishing Line Press entitled Something of Yours (2010), her work is published in several journals and anthologies including Blackbird Literary Journal, Obsidian, Berkeley Poetry Review, The African-American Review, Pluck!, Cave Canem Anthology XIII, The Southern Women’s Review, and Sow’s Ear Poetry Review. Her most recent poetry collection, Mend, was finalist for the AWP Prize. Mend tells the story of the birth of gynecology and the role black enslaved women played in that process. This work received a grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation. Maples teaches Creative Writing at the Alabama School of Fine Arts and directs a three-dimensional poetry exhibit which features poetry and visual art including original paintings, photography, installations and film.

from the University Press of Kentucky

In the 19th century, James Marion Sims performed experimental surgery on enslaved women.

In Mend: Poems, Kwoya Fagin Maples gives voice to the enslaved women named in Sims' autobiography: Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy. In poems exploring imagined memories and experiences relayed from hospital beds, the speakers challenge Sims’s lies, mourn their trampled dignity, name their suffering in spirit, and speak of their bodies as “bruised fruit.” At the same time, they are more than his victims, and the poems celebrate their humanity, their feelings, their memories, and their selves. A finalist for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, this debut collection illuminates a complex and disturbing chapter of the African American experience.

Reviews of Mend:

* at Broadway World Books

* at New York Journal of Books

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Kwoya Fagin Maples and I met when we did a reading together, along with Kate B. Gaskin, at Desert Island Supply Co. in Birmingham, AL. She gave a powerful reading from her manuscript Mend before it was published and I am delighted to be able to interview her about now that it has been introduced into the world.

—Nancy Chen Long

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ELEGY FOR A STILLBORN by Kwoya Fagin Maples

from Mend

          To the One Who Carries Him Away

All of my children have died or wandered away.

           —Molly Ammonds, Alabama Slave Narratives

Here are the milk and songs from my breast.

Here is his cover sewed from calico scrap

and dyed with peachtree.

Take it for nights when he is cold.

Here is the sheet I stole soap for

and washed in secret,

to catch him when he came.

It was to give him a clean start.

Take the old dresser drawer I meant for a cradle.

You will need pins from the washwoman

and this wrap from my hips—

You can carry him against your back.

Take the knife from under my bed

that they used to cut the pain.

I did not make a basket of medicines

I did not want to mark him sick.

But here is pine-top tea, and elderbrush.

Here are mullen leaves for when he cuts teeth.

Here is his corn husk doll.

And take the place I prepared for him near the fire:

the quilt folded in half, then again,

so he would rest against something soft.

Take the room full of times

my hand crossed over my belly,

a prayer on my lips.

© Kwoya Fagin Maples, Mend (Univ of Kentucky Press, 2018), used with permission of University Press of Kentucky

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Please tell us how you decided on the title for the book.

KFM: The title is related to my purpose for the collection. I wrote Mend in tribute to the women who suffered under Sims’ hands. This book is an effort to bring to light this injustice, to elevate and reverence these women’s story, and to continue conversations regarding the current medical treatment of black mothers’ bodies. (Due to persistent medical biases, black mothers are still 3 to 4 more times likely to die after childbirth. In 2019.) This book was written to counter the previous inaccurate and harmful portrayal of this history. It was written to invalidate perceptions that people have of black women and our ability to bear pain. Mend is my attempt as a writer, a child of my ancestors and a mother, to fix something.

Poems in Mend are written in the voices of Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy, three of the slave women on whom James Marion Sims experimented. In a March 2015 Girls Write Now post “Challenges & Rewards in Persona Poetry: A Mentee-Mentor Perspective,” Cindy Chu, in an interview with Katie Zanecchia, writes: 

At its core, persona poetry forces poets to better identify themselves in order to take on another’s perspective. After all, how do you become someone else without defining who you are, in addition to who they are? While poets construct poems from the view of their chosen characters, the resulting poetry is their own. Whether through use of vocabulary, syntax, or punctuation, poets shape others’ voices into wholly unique works of art. Therefore, persona poetry says as much about the poet as it does her subject. The way that personas are presented on paper provides great insight into poets’ sense of self. 

Did you find the above true for you? Please tell us a bit about voice and persona in your poems. Have you ever started a persona poem and had the poem take a turn away from persona to the personal? 

KFM: I’d certainly agree with Chu. My attempts to purely portray individual voices in persona are sincere, but ultimately the voices I create are influenced by my own. There is no way to cleanly separate the poet from the voice of the speaker. My aim with Mend was to be as accurate as possible based on research. I made an attempt to let go of the writer and editor within me to allow what the women could have said and how they would have said it take the lead. Here’s a small example that was indicative of a greater struggle: there’s a line from the poem, “Prayer Meeting,” wherein the speaker meets a guy she is attracted to. She describes him as having, “the straightest string of pearls for teeth.” It almost makes me laugh to think about how difficult it was for me to not edit that line. All of my training as a writer makes this line uncomfortable because I see it as a pat and expected. However, this description for teeth could have been familiar to the speaker. I was also trying to create the impression of the story being shared during conversation. While writing Mend, word choice, vernacular and syntax were a struggle. Voice was constantly in question. My biggest question: how do I allow these women to speak their story with authenticity without making the writing appear less poetic? How does an enslaved woman—who may have never made it past the end of her captor’s land—speak? What made the final decision was my initial desire—which was to write a book in tribute to the women of this story. To set aside “the editor,” more often than not. I also decided that if the writing was too heavy with vernacular, it could be too big of a distraction to the reader.

“The Door” was the first poem I wrote for the collection. It is written in my own voice. Without knowing it was the first poem I’d written for Mend, my editor chose it to be the prefatory poem of the book. After that first poem, I decided I would not write towards this collection until after I’d spent time reading about it. A year later, after research, all of the poems came in persona. I’d spent a significant period of time reading slave narratives and those voices significantly impacted Mend and the way the voices of the women were portrayed on the page. After truly considering the story, I knew I’d have to write in the voices of the women if I wanted to convey their humanity. They’d already been portrayed as extras in their own lives by Sims. After the experimentation in Mt. Meigs, Sims wrote an autobiography entitled Story of My Life, and only briefly referenced the women. For contrast, quotes from Sim’s autobiography are included in the book. The voices of Mend serve as a direct refutation of his story.

The second section of the book contains poems about your research travels to Mt. Meigs, Alabama, where James Marion Sims lived and conducted his experiments. I imagine that was not an easy trip to make. Please tell us a little about your experience there.

KFM: What made that trip hardest was getting there. At the time I had young twin babies who’d been born premature. They required so much of my energy and time. Becoming a mother while I wrote Mend impacted the book considerably. This impact was rewarding but it also was increasingly difficult for me to get things done. I had to learn to do both things simultaneously— writing and being a mom. Mt. Meigs is about an hour and a half away from Birmingham, but it took me awhile before I was able to get there. Now it seems so funny that I titled a poem, “I Can’t Seem to Get to Mt. Meigs.”

Once I arrived in Mt. Meigs, I found hardly no one there knew the story. When I went to the library I met a local historian of Mt. Meigs and she told me that she’d heard of Sims. She said that he operated on an African American woman and saved her life. I was startled at how distilled and inaccurate the story had become over the years. From at least eleven women to one. For the operation being essential to save a life. It was hard to believe.

The sonnet corona “What Yields”, in which Anarcha addresses James Marion Sims, is unflinching. Please share a bit about the writing of it and about the sense of harvest or plantation that threads through the sequence, beginning with the title.

KFM: In this section of the book I handled voice differently than anywhere else in the work. “What Yields” is an eleven-sectioned sonnet corona and there is one speaker, Anarcha—the woman who endured the most surgeries (beginning when she was 17 years old.) Sims conducted his first experiment on her and she was also the one he claimed to have “healed” by the end of his experimentation in Mt. Meigs. In every other part of the book the voices are not overtly resistant. However, in “What Yields,” Anarcha confronts Sims. The language, voice, and syntax is markedly different here. Anarcha is assertive and direct in her resistance. She clearly expresses her disgust and anger towards Sims and references the ideologies that allowed him to consider her unworthy of human consideration.

The title of the poem, “What Yields,” is based on a concept found in Harriet Washington’s book, Medical Apartheid. In her book, Washington uncovers several cases of exploitative medical experimentation on black bodies throughout history. During slavery, Sims was not the only doctor who utilized enslaved bodies for experimentation without their consent. He was one among many doctors who profited and built their family’s wealth on the backs of enslaved people. Washington says that these doctors were usually not plantation owners who oversaw crop production. Instead, they profited from what she terms as “medical plantations.” The medical discoveries they made in the name of scientific advancement contributed to their career advancement and wealth. While writing the poem, I considered the idea of the medical plantation in connection with the story of Mend. Sims is now known as the father of gynecology and obstetrics. He developed the speculum which is still used today. After that four year period in Mt. Meigs, Sims published his findings, moved to New York and became well-known and admired by his peers. He opened a hospital, traveled to Europe where he examined and aided a member of the monarchy, and finally established wealth for his family. Sims’ “medical plantation,” in Mt. Meigs yielded greatly, indeed.

I wanted the poem to occur in an arc, so the narrative builds towards harvest. Anarcha refers to herself and the women as “rotting fruit yet our bodies yield.”

What is one of the more crucial poems in the book for you? Why is it important to you? How did it come to be?

KFM: One of my favorite poems in the book is “I’ve Got Life.” In the poem, the speaker considers what she still possesses in spite of what happened to her, and she wields a subtle resistance—by watching. Who’s to say what she’ll do with the details she collects? The poem is celebratory and almost joyful, but then it ends with a threat. I think this kind of dichotomy appears a lot in the collection. The impulse for joy and survival is often combined with darker emotion or imagery. But then that’s life—the human experience is complex, and it would have been no different then. I also like this poem because it serves a break for the reader. It’s also an opportunity to highlight the speaker’s resilience.

I’ve Got Life

What I've got

is calves and heels to carry me

and this heart that only God can stop.

I've got these fingers

to snap in time

I've got this behind for sitting

so I don't sit on my spine.

I've got these shoulders only I can shrug,

breasts that letdown when I get the feeling,

and a bird neck that carries my head and all my blood—

These lips only move if I tell them to, if I want them to.

There is so much my body can still do.

Plus, I've got these eyes for watching you.

© Kwoya Fagin Maples, Mend (Univ of Kentucky Press, 2018), used with permission of University Press of Kentucky

As your first full-length manuscript, when Mend was published, were there things you thought would happen, yet didn’t? unexpected things that did happen?

KFM: Something unexpected that happened during the publication process of Mend that I could never have anticipated: I organized a protest. Sims has statues dedicated to him in New York, S.C., and Alabama. Months following a 2017 NY protest that went viral on social media, Sims’ monument was removed from its Central Park location. Still months later, the mayor of Columbia, S.C. stated that of all the statues at the S.C. statehouse, the Sims monument should be removed. After I read his statement, I immediately began making calls. Finally, I got in touch with a current MFA student at USC, Joy Priest, and she and I planned a protest on the statehouse grounds. It was indeed poetry as protest. All day and throughout the evening USC students and local activists read poems by women writers in protest, directly in front of the Sims’ monument. It gained media coverage and I was proud when a participant shared that it was the most peaceful protest that she’d ever attended. I’d attended protests in the past but I’d never organized one. The story of Anarcha, Betsey, Lucy and the unnamed women has impacted me in ways beyond what I could have ever imagined.

You, Kate Gaskin, and I read together at Desert Island Supply Company in Birmingham, and I was so moved by your reading. You’ve given a number of readings since then. What has the audience response been in general? Did you encounter anything you were not expecting?

KFM: The audience response has been varied. Some people have said they feel disturbed and saddened with the reality of the story. Mend has particularly moved mothers in audiences. There are several poems descriptive of nursing or losing children. “My Mother Bathes Me after I Give Birth,” a poem written in my own voice shares my personal experience with childbirth. I suppose if there’s any emotional reaction from audiences that I prefer, it’s to that poem. Childbirth can be emotional traumatic and I suppose it’s validating when I can share my story and know another woman understands completely. Lastly, I have a couple of poems in the collection that are humorous—regarding my trip to Mt. Meigs for research. It’s always nice to feel the audience loosen up and laugh. I let them know it’s intended to be funny and that it’s okay to laugh.

When do you remember first being interested in poetry? Was there a mentor who encouraged you?

KFM:  I became interested in poetry when I was about 14. I’ve always been an avid reader. Maya Angelou was the first contemporary black poet I read. I’d read several of her autobiographies so I felt like I knew her. When I read her poetry it was accessible because I’d began with her prose. I suppose at first I read her poetry like it was a translation of her narratives. I was thrilled to find this mysterious way of writing in what I thought was a secret code within the English language—with ideas hiding in plain sight that had yet to be discovered. The idea of it was intoxicating. I already loved language and I was secretive teenager (laughing here). It was a perfect fit. I began writing poems by mimicking her writing style and using similar themes. After I read all of her books of poetry, I kept going and it took off from there. Later, in undergraduate, Abraham Smith became my mentor. He went above and beyond—did more than he had to. I took my first poetry workshop with him, and even after the workshop was over, he offered to read our poems. Every week I submitted a poem to his box in the main office of the English Department, and every week he’d respond with notes and tiny stars on my poems. He was what Maya Angelou would call my rainbow in the clouds—a person who invested in me and made all the difference.

Finally, what advice would you give to an aspiring writer?

KFM:  Read. Read widely. Spend time thinking about the ways in which the writing you encounter is successful. No literary organization, journal or prize should decide the future of your writing. Seek community. Go to open mics and readings. Participate in local workshops. Be respectful of feedback on your work. Be generously and lavishly patient—with yourself.

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Find Kwoya Fagin Maples online

- Author website: https://kwoyafaginmaples.com/

- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kwoyafaginmaples/

- Twitter: https://twitter.com/kwoya_maples

- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kwoyafagin/

Purchase her book Mend

https://www.kentuckypress.com/live/title_detail.php?titleid=5518#.XGWR1DNKhPa

All poems printed or quoted in this post © Kwoya Fagin Maples, Mend (Univ of Kentucky Press, 2018), used with permission of University Press of Kentucky.

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Nancy Chen Long is the author of Light into Bodies (University of Tampa Press, 2017), winner of the Tampa Review Poetry Prize. She is the grateful recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing fellowship and a writer residency at Ox-Bow School of the Arts. Her work was selected as the winner of the 2019 Poetry Society of America Robert H. Winner Award and featured in Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Indiana Humanities. You’ll find her recent work in Ninth Letter, Pleiades, Smartish Pace, The Adroit Journal, Tar River Poetry, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She  works at Indiana University in the Research Technologies division.

Charles of the Desert by William Woolfitt

William Woolfitt
Charles of the Desert 

Paraclete Press
http://www.paracletepress.com


By the numbers 

ISBN 978-1-612-61764-0 
Publication: 2016
Total pages: 77
Number of poems: 52

While I've never met William Woolfitt in person, I'm a fan of his poetry, especially his devotion to evocative detail, for example his recent poems in HEArt, an online journal that promotes the role of artists as human rights activists. I'm glad to have a chance to review his second book of poetry Charles of the Desert: A Life in Verse. 

 —Nancy Chen Long

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William Woolfitt is the author of three poetry collections: Beauty Strip (2014), Charles of the Desert (2016), and Spring Up Everlasting (Paraclete Press, forthcoming). His fiction chapbook The Boy with Fire in His Mouth (2014) won the Epiphany Editions contest judged by Darin Strauss. His poems and short stories have appeared in Blackbird, Image, Tin House, The Threepenny Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, Epoch, Spiritus, and other journals. He is the recipient of the Howard Nemerov Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Denny C. Plattner Award from Appalachian Heritage.

__________

Charles of the Desert by William Woolfitt brims with beautiful writing. In the book, Woolfitt tells us the story of Charles de Foucauld, a Frenchman born in 1858 to a wealthy Catholic family who, after a youthful season of debauchery, experienced a religious conversion in 1886. Charles subsequently rededicated himself to Catholicism, becoming a monk and then an ordained priest. A searcher, both spiritually and physically, his travels took him from France to Algeria, Morocco, Syria, the Holy Land, and then back to central Sahara where he lived as a man of the region in a commitment of solidarity with the local people. Charles was killed at the age of 58, some say by thieves searching for weapons and gold, some say by rebels. He had few converts while living. His influence came primarily after death, as others learned of his life and writing. The order called the Little Brothers and Little Sisters of Jesus was inspired by the example of Charles' life. He is perhaps most known for the Prayer of Abandonment and was beatified by the Catholic Church in 2005. 

Charles of the Desert isn't divided into sections like most poetry books. It flows from beginning to end as a biography, one enriched through Woolfitt's exquisite imagination. The poems in the book are each marked with a year and location, except for the final poem, which depicts Charles' assassination. To give an overview of the entirety of Charles' life, Woolfitt also provides both a synopsis and a chronology at the end of the book. 

All of the poems in the book are told in the first person, with Charles de Foucauld as the speaker. The first three poems concern Charles when he was a young boy, six-ish, while his parents were still alive. The first poem "My Father as Weather Formation," introduces Woolfitt's fine attention to detail that carries throughout the book. For example, in one stanza, Charles described his father veering from tree to tree after they arrive in the woods after a family drive:

               He presses his hand to the bark, rips a leaf, scribbles, 
               picks a thread from his tweed coat (its sleeve 
               scours my cheek, becomes burlap in memory), 
               bites a spotted plum in half, exposing the stone that glistens 
               like the pig hearts I saw, on tiptoe, at the butchery.

The five poems that come after the ones in which Charles' parents are still alive touch on his life with his grandfather, his teenage years and early twenties, and his service as a soldier in military. The remainder of the book—the bulk of it—is dedicated to Charles' search for meaning, his subsequent conversion and embrace of the Catholic church, and his life as a monk, hermit, and ordained priest.

The poems in Charles of the Desert range from highly narrative to tightly compressed lyric. An example of a poem that leans more narrative is "Tether," in which Charles tells us how he spent the day while in living in a monastery in Ardèche, France, " After high mass, I turn / to chores: I pull thistles, rub the brass .. // ... In my free hour, I read the breviary." 

An example of a more lyrical poem is  "Meditation on the Hands of the Ex-Slave," set in Algeria in 1903. After Charles became a monk, he returned to Algeria, having served there earlier in his life as cavalry officer. Returning as a religious, Charles secured the freedom of slaves by paying for their ransom.  In "Meditation on the Hands of the Ex-Slave," Charles studies the hands of a slave whose freedom he has purchased. This poem does a great deal of heavy lifting with few words. Looking at one stanza as an example, Charles us "He clenches them / like tree buds—never open, / always spring." One possible reading of the poem is through synecdoche, in which the slave's hands represent the whole of the man. Aristotle wrote in "On the Soul" that "the soul is analogous to the hand." If hands are a stand-in for the person, then the comparison of the ex-slave's scarred and weathered clenched fists to tree buds that never open leads to sorrow and a sense of choked promise. Those feelings are amplified in the next line, "always spring," which confronts the reader with the open-wound in the soul of the man, a wound inflicted by slavery: At first blush, one would assume the slave's freedom would be a kind of spring and that the idea of it being "always spring" might be a good thing. However, for this reader at least, I felt the opposite—that the fullness of the ex-slave's life, the unfolding of his soul here in this world, might never flower into its summer, instead remaining hidden and stifled, always tight in the bud. 

Woolfitt is brilliant at balancing both the lyric and narrative in one poem, an example of which can be seen in the "Gold Eater," set in Pont-à-Mousson, France during Charles' early twenties, when he was a womanizer and given to excess: 

          Gold Eater

             Give me fruits, spoils, fats, touches, tastes. 
             The buds of my tongue cry for mushrooms, pungent cheese,
             magic foods charmed from the dark, delights slurped
             or torn with teeth. I take, and take, and take.
             I take from the bent man who crept the cellar stairs
             each day to riddle the champagne bottle an eighth of a turn,
             nudging it upside down to settle the cloud of dead

             yeast cells in its wired neck. And from a goose
             in a wooden crate (so small, she could not move);
             she ate forced portions, never saw the sun. 
             Augers slid into an airhole (drilled in the crate’s lid),
             slid into her beak and craw; then kernels slid down
             the auger’s grooves, to stuff her gut, and pillow
             her liver in golden fat. And hats, brooches, furs,
             these I strip from the merchant’s rack for Violette,

             who ripped her hem the first June night she flitted
             over my sill, laughing and moon-gilt. Violette poses
             while I sketch her. I like her soft and naked as a bud. 
             I thumb the fat of her arm, count the time
             before my mark fades. When she bores me, I try
             horse races, quail, grouse, and buntings by the brace,
             card games, and imported cigars. Violette rigs a beggar
             costume that I will don to sneak away from officer duties. 
             We shutter the windows, stuff scarves under the door-crack
             to banish the coming day. We stagger, topple two chairs,
             our bodies prodigal and blind, my hand reading her face. 

           (first published in Saint Katherine Review)

In addition to free verse poems, there are sonnets, as well as poems that follow a patterned rhyme scheme, for example one intriguing poem, "Desert Bath at Sunset." It employs the same end word using the repetition pattern of a pantoum: ABCD BEDF EGFH and so on.  In addition, prose poems and epistolary poems are positioned throughout. Several of the epistles are written to a possibly fictionalized sister named Beatrix. (Biographies of Charles indicate he had one sister, whose name was Marie.)  The epistolary and prose poems read like flash fiction, fleshing out the story, for example the prose poem "The Rope Maker," a version of which you can read here on page 20 under the title "Metamorphosis."

The book also has a sense of immediacy to it. Woolfitt makes frequent use of the present tense, giving the story a freshness, a feeling that is just happened. This can be seen in the final poem of the book, "Someone Knocks," shown below. It's unlike the other poems in the book, with its use of white space to impact the pacing of the poem and its lack of punctuation. It leaves the reader seeing Charles' pages of translated Tuareg poetry flying with the wind, and perhaps analogously, his spirit as well scattering with those pages when he was killed. The lack of punctuation and final image render the story open-ended, suggesting that Charles lives on, which he does in a way, inspiring the Catholic faithful and others even today.

Charles of the Desert is a beautifully written biography-in-verse that holds a reader's attention from the first poem until the end. Woolfitt's imagination and gift with detail bring Charles de Foucauld to life in a compelling and fresh way. Woolfitt wrote in the book's Preface that, after much research and what seemed like a stepping away from his previous autobiographical poems, "I may have made a version of Charles in my own image." Indeed, the Charles de Foucauld depicted by Woolfitt is highly personal. Perhaps that's because we can feel the heart and soul of the poet in each poem. It's a book worth reading more than once.

__________

Someone Knocks
by William Woolfitt

and I fling open my door
                 it isn't the man who brings my mail
but men with guns            my neighbors           Haratin
and Tuareg             joined in a fellagha rezzou
they wrench and tie my arms                    slam me against
the wall ransack my little fort                 unbind
               and fling
                                    my Tuareg dictionary
                                                my sheaves of Tuareg poetry
drag Jean from supper and his wife
                                                                           tie him beside me

tear the cross       the heart        from my robe
my chest is puny               white as glue
                my ribs like my mother's fan
my spirit an egret               my belly a roost
I feel       the breath       and the burn
as my lips form                       the word I choose
                                    and my pages scatter in the wind


"Gold Eater" and “Someone Knocks,” © William Woolfitt, Charles of the Desert  (Paraclete Press, 2016)

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Nancy Chen Long is a National Endowment of the Arts creative-writing fellow. She is the author of Light Into Bodies (Tampa University Press, 2017), which won the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, and Clouds as Inkblots for the Warprone (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013). You'll find her recent and forthcoming work in Prairie Schooner, Ninth Letter, Alaska Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Zone 3, Briar Cliff Review, Bat City Review, and elsewhere. Nancy received a BS in Electrical Engineering Technology and an MBA, worked as an electrical engineer, software consultant, and project manager, and more recently earned her MFA. As a volunteer for the local Writers Guild, she coordinates a reading series and works with other poets to offer poetry workshops. She lives in south-central Indiana and works at Indiana University.