TMR Editors’ Prize
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Current Issue: 35.1 (Spring 2012)
Poem of the Week- David Kirby: “If Any Man Have an Ear, Let Him Listen”
- Larry Levis: “Labyrinth as the Erasure of Cries Heard Once Within It or: (Mr. Bones I Succeeded. . .’ Later)”
- Amy Newman: “The Day After The Dean of Michigan State College Admits Him To Lansing Sparrow Hospital For Rest, A Naked Theodore Roethke Barricades Himself Behind A Hospital Mattress”
Category Archives: Interviews
Word Missouri: Between readings and signings, Missouri authors recall how they found their voice
Sci-fi romance author J.C. Hay
Last week Word Missouri told the story of a group of bookstores in St. Louis supporting each other through events like bookstore tours and literary speed dating. These events aren’t only good for booksellers – they also benefit local authors who write in niche genres and don’t have the support of an academic setting or a big-name publisher. Fortunately, the realm of social media is good to genre writers. There may only be a handful of people who write space opera romances, as J.C. Hay points out, but they tend to stick together, and blogs are a great place for that. I talked to a few of those authors during the tour, and asked them how they found publishers and got word out about their books – and whether they feel like they’ve really made it.
Profiled in the video above:
Children’s book author and creator of Petalwink the Fairy, Angela Sage Larsen, interviewed at Rose’s Bookhouse in O’Fallon
Gothic fiction author John McFarland, interviewed at Rebound in St. Louis
Sci-fi / paranormal romance author J.C. Hay, interviewed at Get Lost Bookshop in Columbia
Word Missouri: Eliot, St. Louis and the river
Word Missouri is a series in partnership with KBIA, Columbia’s NPR affiliate. It examines Missouri’s literary heritage, present and future. KBIA’s Davis Dunavin is the series creator and reporter.
I’m a die-hard fan of Modernism. More specifically, I’m a die-hard Thomas Stearns Eliot-head. Not always a popular stance; he’s certainly got his detractors these days. Which is why I was so thrilled to meet Frances Dickey, a professor and Eliot scholar at the University of Missouri, who speaks about Prufrock’s creator with the same excitement I still feel when I pick up Four Quartets or his fabulous criticism. (For you other Eliot-heads – I know you’re out there! – go pick up Eliot’s letters, recently published by Yale University Press.)
But Eliot just isn’t seen as a Missourian. Did he see himself as one? Fans like me know he read his poetry in a crisp, patrician accent that hung somewhere between New England and Old England. References to his home state in his writings are sparse – as are tributes to the man here. I think it’s time we change that. Dr. Dickey and I spoke about Eliot’s connections to Missouri. Have a listen to the interview as it ran on KBIA.
(By the way, the photo above was taken in St. Louis’s Central West End; busts of Eliot and fellow St. Louisian Tennessee Williams represent the first half of a project neighborhood groups call Writers Corner. More on that soon…)
This interview originally aired on September 26, T. S. Eliot’s birthday, on KBIA.
Happy Celebration Day
We at TMR hope you’re celebrating the birth of a nation by combining fun with safety. In honor of the triumph of the will of the American colonies in the war for independence, take a moment and hear what Diane Seuss has to say, in the guise of an animated cartoon, about her poems that appear in an upcoming issue of our magazine.
Robert Long Foreman is the Missouri Review’s Social Media Editor.
Interviews with Animated People
In case you missed the last couple of installments in our series of interviews with interns, here are two of them, featuring fiction reader Hannah Baxter and poetry reader Tori Ricciardi, respectively.
It turns out that Xtranormal – the web site that has otherwise been used by an insurance agency to create insurance advertisements, by teenagers to make bad sex jokes, and by Dinty Moore to dramatize a controversy in creative nonfiction – is a useful tool for featuring the insights and house pet preferences of our smart and dedicated interns. The Xtranormal format invites silliness, but at the heart of these cartoon interviews is evidence of the talent and intelligence of those who read submissions for TMR and otherwise make this journal function.
Look tomorrow at our Facebook page for still another such interview, this one with staff member and textBOX engineer Nell McCabe.
Robert Long Foreman is The Missouri Review’s Social Media Editor.
Visiting Hart's Grove
This week, we’re catching up with author Dennis McFadden’s, whose debut fiction-collection, Hart’s Grove, is just out from Colgate University Press. Snag your copy here. Dennis’s story, “The Three-Sided Penny” appeared in The Missouri Review’s Winter 2007 issue, which you can purchase here. He lives and writes in an old farmhouse called Mountjoy on Bliss Road, off Peaceable Street, just up from Harmony Corners, and took a few minutes this month to let us know how it feels to be a debut author. This interview was conducted by one of our summer interns, Andrea Waterfield.
1) You work as a project manager for New York State. Do you ever find yourself bringing experiences from your daily job into your writing?
For the most part, no. Work is work and fiction is fiction and never the twain shall meet. Well, never say never. I did write one story called “Building 8″ the protagonist of which is a career bureaucrat, and which takes place in the infamously “sick” title building, a building based, incidentally, on a real state office building here in Albany. The story is a wonderful, laugh-out-loud-funny parody of bureaucracy, but unfortunately I’m the only one it seems to make laugh out loud. It remains, as of this date, unpublished, though full of hope.
2) What have you been reading/spending your time with most lately?
My full-time job, which, as the term “full-time” might imply, occupies at least part of my time. When I’m not there, or writing or sleeping, I’m often reading historical novels. I try to read what I’m writing. For the last decade or so, when I was writing short stories exclusively, I was reading nothing but short stories. I seldom read collections (Alice Munro and George Saunders being the glorious exceptions); on the theory that if you want to write your best you should read the best, I read the prize anthologies for the most part – O. Henry, Pushcart and Best American Short Stories. As a matter of fact, I collect the latter as a hobby; I probably have 75% of all the volumes published since they were inaugurated in 1915, and I’m hoping they’ll rub off. With hard work and perseverance I hope to someday be included in Good American Short Stories, then work my way up to Better American Short Stories. I think Best is probably too much to hope for at my age.
3) You’ve just published your first collection of stories, Hart’s Grove. What did you find to be the most exciting part of the process?
Without question, the most exciting part is the launching of the book after all the hum-drum hard work and tedium is done. Any writer who says otherwise is either lying or a fool. Of course, I suppose he or she could be both, a lying fool. Or a foolish liar. At any rate, after years of laboring in rejection and obscurity, never sure if your little collection of letters and syllables will ever see the light of day, the bright sunshine of the limelight is pretty irresistible, not to mention metaphorically mixed. I could get used to champagne, adoration, and applause if I weren’t so humble.
4) What are you working on now?
I’m writing a historical novel right now. The protagonist is a young doctor in the year 1857 in, of all places, Hart’s Grove, Pennsylvania. It’s based on one of my Hart’s Grove stories (which is not included in the collection) and I’ve written over 200 pages. Some wonderful writing there, if I do say so myself, chock full of terrific characters, snappy dialog, beautiful settings. But, it’s beginning to dawn on me that I’m probably going to need a plot as well, so it could be a while yet.
Andrea Waterfield is a summer intern with The Missouri Review.
An Interview with Julia Wendell
Julia Wendell’s work has appeared in TMR vol. 8.2, 12.2, and 19.1. Her new collection The Sorry Flowers was published in November 2009 by WordTech Communications.
Q: The Missouri Review first published your poem Fireside” in 1985. What is the biggest change in your interests as a writer since that time?
A: There have been a lot of joys and disappointments since then, and lots and lots of change. Since I’m a writer who writes from my own experiences, what is happening in my life affects my poems in a singular way. Back in 1985, I was rather freshly out of Iowa, still a publisher and teacher. At 54, I’m an equestrian athlete (specifically a three-day event rider) and am about as far away from the academy as possible. Somehow that seems to suit me. I draw life and energy and purpose from my horses, in much the same way that I do from my poems. Three-day eventing is as much about determination and bravery as poetry is about self-doubt and questioning, and somehow these oxymoronic elements in my life feed each other.
Q: What poets do you read frequently or particularly admire?
A: In a pinch, I’d say, Billy Collins, Louise Gluck, Mark Strand, Wordsworth, Keats, T.S. Eliot, and Milton are my favorite poets. They’re the ones whose poems I can read a thousand times and still find something illuminating and delightful on the 1001.
Q: In the last poem of your new collection, you wrote, “I want to fly on my new wings / I want to leave the barn and its longings.” Does that sentiment apply to you as a poet?
A: In much of The Sorry Flowers, the poet is hemmed in by sickness, depression, loss of her parents, conflicts in family life and life in general. There’s almost a claustrophobic feel as she confronts these issues, but I like to think that the poems open up a bit at the book’s end, offering resolutions and [an] escape from the self-consuming earlier poems. Life is change, and if we can change with it, then we can escape our boundaries and limitations as poets and as people and even identify with the natural world, [becoming] the young bird in the rafters.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: After finishing a memoir about my life as a three-day event rider called Finding my Distance, I’ve gone back to writing some poems and am enjoying a new narrative element that is infiltrating them, probably because I’ve spent the last five years writing all the way to the edge of the page. I would love to write more prose in the near future, and am waiting for the right spark.