Congratulations to these writers whose pieces have been selected by the South 85 editors for the Editor’s Choice Longlist for the Spring | Summer 2026 issue. You can read their work–and every fine piece in the issue–here.
The award winner and finalists will be announced shortly.
reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com
Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?
These essays are interested in all varieties of disappearance: Voluntary, involuntary, coerced, professional, intellectual, transcendent, mortal. Ghosts of dead friends, driving Uber after Hollywood work dried up, narcissism in writers, social class and upward mobility, the Polish diplomat Jan Karski who failed to stop the Holocaust, folk art and synesthesia and transcendence, Bernard Moitessier and c. diff. and the sickness that might find its way into our song.
Which essay did you most enjoy writing? Why?
The real pleasure was writing “Junk Temples,” a novella-length essay-in-digressions toward the end of the book that is intensely interested in the notion of transcendence in art and the idea of how we make temples out of all kinds of things, including junk, and ascribe elevated meaning to them. I got to visit the folk artist Howard Finster’s Paradise Gardens, a couple of acres of his life’s work in junk collage and painting on everything, which is located right across the street from a state prison, and in a neighborhood full of Rottweilers chained to rickety stakes in every other front yard. And I got to spend time in the work of Henry Darger, who left behind one of the largest books ever assembled, which has at its center a phalanx of Charmin-girl angels with penises fighting a Civil War in some kind of troubled heaven. And I got to think about the nature of love and forgetting and music and books alongside Susan Sontag and William Goyen and a lot of poets, all through an overlay of synesthetic color and light.
And which essay gave you the most trouble, and why?
The most difficult essay was the one at the end, “The Sickness and the Song,” which is an attempt at a personal reckoning with what art and writing are for, and how narcissism distorts, and what matters in life, even if you are chasing art. I was thinking about an around-the-world boat race in which the Frenchman Bernard Moitessier was in the lead, but he quit because the sailing—the water, the wind, the sky, the fish—had come to matter more than the race.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.
I injured my brain a little playing hockey, and for a little while I had some trouble reading. Then I got sad. Then there were some complications with clearing permissions. The book was a little late to press. By then, the world had changed again, and it started to mean new things it hadn’t meant when I wrote it. Maybe it was for the best.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
Quit this shit and go to medical school, so you can make enough money to eat.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
I think I might have found a path out of despair and into hope.
Who is your ideal reader?
You.
We’re hard at work on the new issue! Until then, enjoy a trio of bonus photos from our artist-in-residence, Brian Bouldrey.
reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com
We don’t expect an elevator pitch from a poet, but can you tell us about your work in 2-3 sentences?
Echoes Carry is a collection throughout which familial and ancestral echoes weave through each poem in subtle and stark ways. It raises the question of how much we are influenced by our families and friends, including ancestors or distant relatives we’ve never met face-to-face. Tangentially, it seeks to understand the connections humans have with one another.
What boundaries did you break in the writing of this book? Where does that sort of courage come from?
I wouldn’t say I’ve broken any boundaries per se, but I wanted to create a collection that could speak to readers, not just academic readers. I wanted my audience to see the possibilities in their own lives and the connections they may have to family, friends, ancestors, without really knowing that their influence has been present since the beginning. It’s something I’ve thought a lot about. The human condition and where we get the impulse to choose one action or feeling over another and how much of that can be nature and how much can be nurtured. Even things that seem unique to us, like writing poems, can be something that our ancestors did before us, and we may never know. The possibilities are endless.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.
The high is seeing a print copy in a box that you open at your house with your child videotaping the unboxing. Yes, I did this social media craze. Why? Because I want to share that joy, if not with the internet world, at least with my child. Definitely a fun moment: videotaping goofy mom. The lows are the length of time between when you’ve finally got the manuscript where you want it and you send it out over and over and over ad nauseum to places that reject it. You have to put your energy into another creative project or that process will depress you.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
I think Billy Collins once said, “Write the poem only you can write.” That’s probably the best advice you can have with regard to poetry. But I’ve also taken Stephen King’s advice to heart about manuscripts. In On Writing, he mentioned that manuscripts should have a period of rest in a drawer. I believe he says six weeks, but sometimes, my poetry manuscripts have needed far longer than six weeks.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
It wasn’t the writing that surprised me or the collection of poems or the ordering of poems. What surprised me was the fun I had creating a book cover on Canva. Yes, I had help with the design, but the vision is all mine. I loved that creative part of the process. It was unexpected. Thinking about all the possibilities suggested by others and by the publisher, but knowing what I wanted to see and then being able to create it was the biggest surprise.
How did you find the title of your book?
The title of the book is a modification of a line in one of the poems. I’ll leave that mystery for readers to uncover.
reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com
Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?
The Last Supper follows three months in the chaotic life of Amanda, who has just turned 40, has two young children, and is searching for something more in her life. She’s failed at being a momfluencer, she’s failed at MLM entrepreneurship, and she’s living in terror of what to make for dinner. Desperate for something more than the isolated world of her suburban home, but consumed by parenting, her illusory stability collapses when the cracks in her marriage finally split open so wide she sees a way out, and a pathway to reclaim her own creative and economic agency.
Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And which character gave you the most trouble, and why?
The character I most enjoyed creating was the mother in the novel—Camille is a successful attorney who specializes in family law and clawed her way into financial stability after being a single parent. The reason I felt energized when I was in her perspective is because she’s a successful woman who is not defined by caregiving relationships. She’s just who she is and doesn’t really care what other people think about her.
The character who gave me the most trouble—and I think this will track for other writers—was the protagonist, Amanda. She is the hinge the door of the novel hangs on, and it is from her perspective the plot unfolds.
With the most space and time with a protagonist, there’s also more chance for narrative discontinuity or character motivation issues to arise. She goes through a period of awaking in the novel, and while I think it is fair to say all writers of literary fiction or character-driven fiction want to represent the change that occurs, sometimes I have to work on not being didactic or too interior.
Still, from a process perspective, I enjoy the building of a character, inclusive of the hard parts. (This is why I don’t understand would-be creatives leaning on generative AI.)
If you can’t sit with your characters and really think about them, what’s the point?
While sure, it can be difficult, there’s also so much joy in figuring out a tricky sentence, so much satisfaction in revising a critical scene.
How I have come to think about AI chatbots (which you didn’t ask about but is on my mind all the time) is that chatbots are all output, in contrast to creative writing being largely about input.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.
This is my fifth book, so at this point I can mostly roll with anything. That said, for me there is always the high of getting to contract with a manuscript, and the low of worrying about it.
The thing that has not changed at all—the thing I roll less well with is worrying how the book will be received.
I often say to people that I have this conundrum of: What if nobody reads it? And then: Oh crap, what if they do?!
Writing and publishing are just two different animals.
However, I do want to say to anyone out there shopping a manuscript: you might (will probably) at some point have a weird interaction with an agent, an editor, a publisher that will shake you. You might wake up in the middle of the night wondering if you wasted the last five years or more of your life.
It’s fine. Not every editor will get you. Lots of agents won’t. Do your work.
When you find the right publishing partner/model, you will know.
The lows are getting through the doubt. The highs are knowing you honored your work—whether it is published or not.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
Over a decade ago, before I had a single book in print, I went to a panel where Andre Dubus III talked about the need for tension in every narrative.
That idea has crystallized over the years into really thinking about stakes.
On the panel, Dubus III said something like “If there’s no tension, who cares?” I think about that a lot.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
I love your writing advice.
What surprised me in writing The Last Supper was the way the manuscript changed over time. At first, I was writing from a character sketch, then I was developing in earnest. The beginning versions were very different, both in tone and plot.
But! That’s part of the whole point of the process. Which is also, again, why I can’t get down with AI, as there’s no process there.
How did you find the title of your book?
I am notoriously bad at titles.
Once, I turned in a book to my publisher called “Office Stories” – and talk about a snooze in the title department (thank goodness I was already under contract). And definitely no tension there, à la Dubus III. With some help, the title of the book became What If We Were Somewhere Else, which does have tension and also is appropriately descriptive of what it feels like to work in an office.
The title for The Last Supper came from a highly trusted reader.
I’m pretty transparent as a person and a writer, but my beta titles for what became The Last Supper are too embarrassingly bad for even me to share publicly.
reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com
We don’t expect an elevator pitch from a poet, but can you tell us about your work in 2-3 sentences?
I tend to write my way through challenges – both internal ones and external ones – so a lot of my poems have to do with questions of identity and purpose as well as with navigating complicated relationships. My recent work also concerns parenting a young adult son, helping him find meaning in the world when I struggle to do so myself. I like to play with form, so a lot of my poems adhere to formal constraints of some kind.
Which poem/s did you most enjoy writing? Why?
I had a lot of fun writing the gloses. This is an obscure Spanish form that takes four lines – a “cabeza” – from an existing poem. Those lines then each become the final lines of four 10-line stanzas. Lines 6, 9, and 10 rhyme. In general, I enjoy working in form – it takes me out of my emotional brain and puts me in that logical, puzzle-solving brain. I think this is good for creating some distance from the subject, allowing me more objectivity. The form also encourages a dialogue with the poem from which the cabeza is taken, and I loved spending time with those works.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.
The publication process for The Sky Will Hold took longer than expected. Initially, Alan Squire Publishing was going to release this collection in March 2025. They published my first two collections and we were excited to work together on this one, but for various reasons in the spring of 2024, ASP decided to go on hiatus. I was disappointed and discouraged and spent a few months convinced that I would never find a publisher, but ultimately Riot in Your Throat took the book. The delay allowed me to add a few poems to the manuscript that I think make the collection stronger, so it all worked out in the end.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
The older I get, the more I appreciate the advice that many of my teachers have given over the years – and that is simply to have fun with it. I’ve been writing for long enough that I see little reason to continue unless it brings me joy, so I have been trying to get back to that original sense of discovery and wonder that made writing appeal to me in the first place.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
I don’t think of myself as a very optimistic person, but I increasingly believe that my purpose in writing is to highlight the beauty and connection I see in the world. When I read through the collection, I am surprised and pleased to see that many of the poems are actually pretty hopeful.
How did you find the title of your book?
Rose Solari, a fabulous poet and teacher and the publisher of my first two books, came up with the title. She was helping me with the order of the poems, and we were chatting about title options, and she suggested The Sky Will Hold. The more I thought about it, the more I felt that it was the right title.
reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com
Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?
Bodies in Bags is a grit lit/crime collection so visceral you can smell it. A bad cop in New Hampshire dealing with the consequences of shooting an intruder, a drifter who wakes up next to her dead companion in Atlantic City, a veteran fleeing to South Jersey after an impulsive crime: these are stories of desperation and recompense, told in tough and sometimes tender voices. The stories deal with issues of masculinity, consequences, violence, and uncontrollable impulses.
Which story did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which story gave you the most trouble, and why?
Of all the stories in Bodies in Bags, I think “Night Moves” might have been the most enjoyable to write. The setting takes me back to a volunteer position at a hospital I had when I was a teenager. The world feels familiar, and the main character is someone I like a lot, a woman like some of the women I worked with at the hospital: tough but kind. The story “Dream a Little Dream” probably gave me the most trouble. It took me so long to finish. I had the character and the opening scene for years, and I must have started three or four novels based on that opening before finally coming up with a shape and a voice that I’m proud of.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.
This is the second book of short stories I’ve published in two years. For both books, many of the stories go back a ways. Once I had found the shape for my first collection, I realized that I had a bunch of noir/grit lit pieces that all seemed to hang together. After years of facing rejection, this book was pretty easy to get out there, thanks to the support and faith of Ross Tangedal at Cornerstone Press.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
I tend to think all writing advice is pointless, unless it works. As a young writer, I was lucky enough to be in a writing group run by Andre Dubus III. Many things Andre said stuck with me, but I particularly remember him talking about perseverance. “If you put it under a magnifying glass long enough, eventually it’s going to catch fire.”
My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
The best stories are almost entirely surprises. As a writer, especially when I’m between stories, I’m always listening for voices and waiting to hear one that works. This collection features a lot of voices that surprised me. I have no idea why they feel real to me or where they came from.
What’s something about your book that you want readers to know?
I think readers should know what they’re getting into. This book is definitely not for everyone, but, for people who like things dark, I think it will provide exactly what you’re looking for. It doesn’t flinch.
reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com
Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?
A poetry professor at a small college in Asheville, NC, Asa Flowers comes home one stormy evening to find his wife Betsy, inexplicably distraught. As the evening goes on, the couple end up in a heated argument that sends him to sleep out in their garage apartment for the first time in twenty-five years of marriage. The next morning, he wakes to blue sky and an altered world.
Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And which character gave you the most trouble, and why?
They’re one in the same for me. Wendy is the college girlfriend of Mitchell, the son of Asa, who is the main character. She was one of the most difficult to write because she and I come from very different backgrounds and have dramatically different beliefs. She’s conservative and very religious, the daughter of a minister of a small Pentecostal church. However as I spent time with her I discovered how sensitive and compassionate and wise she was. She surprised me a lot over the course of writing and the more time I spent with her and the more I got to know her, the more fond I became of her.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.
I worked on The Marriage Bed off and on for over a decade, writing several drafts between working on two YA novels. My agent at the time never felt my revisions were good enough to send out to publishers. Finally, much to my hesitation, I had to tell my agent that I had no choice but to look for another agent. That was a hard decision, but it was a very amicable parting. I was grateful to her for all she’d done for me over the years, including selling two novels. And we’re still friends. I found another agent who believed in the novel and after a few months she found a wonderful home for The Marriage Bed at Blair, a small but mighty publisher out of North Carolina. I could not be happier. As long and as hard as I had to work on The Marriage Bed, I’m so glad I didn’t give up.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
Lower your standards.
Thirty years ago, I was in a fiction workshop taught by the writer Allan Gurganus. Another student in the workshop had asked what to do about writer’s block and Allan said, “Lower your standards.” As a writer, I was critical of my writing, hard on myself often to the point of paralysis. So the idea of lowering my standards, of settling for something less (for the moment anyway), of escorting the editor out of the room and leaving the writer to his own devices, was liberating.
What surprised you in the writing of this book?
That I finished it.
How did you find the title of your book?
I asked a trusted writer friend if she might think of one. She went to bed thinking about it. The next morning it came to her.
by Anna Petty
Kristine Langley Mahler is more than a writer of creative nonfiction. She is a memoirist, an archaeologist, a researcher, an essayist, and a poet. I compiled seven questions that delve into aspects explored within Kristine’s work. Her newest collection of hybrid essays, Teen Queen Training: Essays after The Seventeen Book of Etiquette and Entertaining, 1963, was recently released on February 17, 2026, with Autofocus Books.
AP: You wrote an article titled “Erasure: It’s For Nonfiction Writers Too!”, about your new book, Teen Queen Training, debuting on February 17th. This line caught my eye, “Flipping through the book, I got caught up on a chapter titled ‘Boys, Boys, Boys.’ So many lines mildly offended my sensibilities—it opened with the promise that ‘any girl can get a date,’ which was a flat-out lie in my experience…” Shortly afterward, you began “blacking out lines” of the original text and creating your own version. Your essay, “Boys, Boss” is the erasure of that chapter. It’s my favorite essay in the book and it’s also the longest essay in the collection. Can you tell us why this chapter in particular set the entire project in motion and how the idea that male relationships determine a woman’s worth affected and shaped you growing up and how you view that idea now?
KLM.: That original chapter from the Seventeen book, “Boys, Boys, Boys,” really set me off—like a tinderbox just waiting for a match—because one of my primary frustrations during my teenhood, which I return to over and over in Teen Queen Training, was how I never felt desirable to boys, regardless of what I did (or didn’t do). I don’t think that’s a particularly novel feeling—it’s deeply teenage—but my self-consciousness ate me alive.
Because I’d moved three times before arriving in the city where I spent my high school years, I didn’t have any familiarity with childhood friends who could turn into something more. I would say that—and this is very specific to my conceptualization of valueat the time—my reaction was less about relationships with men as defining a woman’s worth, and more about wanting to be found desirable by the people you want to find you desirable.
If I had been a queer teen, I would have been obsessed with wanting other queer teens to want me—my reaction was less gendered/weighted toward the power of men, specifically, as much as it was that I was attracted to boys as a teen and I wanted boys to be attracted to me. That being said, the Seventeen Book of Entertaining and Etiquette, as a product of the 1960s, was quite heteronormative, so their instruction fit my yearnings as well.
I still think that we all want the people we find desirable to desire us back!
AP: Your hard work and dedication to your craft have been widely recognized with several Fellowships. You also won a Research Grant in 2017 for a researched creative nonfiction project on immigration and inhabitation on native land. One of the many things you accomplished was transcribing eighteen years of your grandfather’s diaries into more than five hundred pages. With your expertise in research and as a nonfiction writer, how do you channel your efforts into a cohesive finished product? Can you give writers who may be new to researching for a large project pointers for sifting through storehouses of information and how they can keep their finished product in mind? Can you briefly describe your research process?
KLM: I love being in the archives, I love gathering information and letting it sit in my brain before shaking the sifter and seeing what filters through. I’m very much a packrat in that way, I have a shelf full of books from that project you referred to—the researched project on immigration/inhabitation on native land—and I’ve got several giant Word docs filled with my responses to those books, with questions I found myself wondering, with attempts and gestures toward making sense of them. And I wrote a handful of essays with some of the material that I was able to digest a little quicker. But—and this has come with practice and learning to trust my own processes/processing—I’m less concerned, now, with needing to turn that research into a product as soon as possible.
As a memoirist, I know that some material is sitting on the top of my consciousness, ready to be processed, and I know that other material is still composting down in my subconscious. I’ve been doing this long enough to trust myself and to know that, when I’m ready to see that material, it will surface. So, I’m not the best example of someone who can suggest ways to keep your finished product in mind when researching, as much as I might suggest relaxing your grip on your INTENTIONS for your finished product and letting the research itself, and the material you find interesting during the process, guide what you keep.
AP: In one of your previous interviews, you spoke about spending time not writing while quietly accessing your subconscious. This idea of the subconscious brings to mind a quote from your book, A Calendar is a Snakeskin, “Fear needs to be met with trust because the universe will bring us into the places we need to face.” Can you talk more about the role chance, mysticism, going with your gut, and listening to your subconscious has in your work? What other practices do you employ to ensure you are going where you need to go with your writing?
KLM: This is definitely related to my answer to the previous question about letting my subconscious do the work! That quote you mention about meeting fear with trust is perhaps at the center of what I think many of us writing memoir have to do—to encounter the self (and often others) we’ve averted our eyes from, and to see ourselves and others with a kinder, gentler, more considerate gaze. No one needs to be excoriated from the pain they’ve caused, but I find, over and over, that when I return to my most harrowing experiences with enough distance, I’m brought to my knees when I’m finally able to recognize the humanity in everyone involved—including myself.
AP: In your book, A Calendar is a Snakeskin, there is an essay titled “Wound watch” where you count down from twelve to one, with each number representing a different memory, a precious moment in time. Where do you find inspiration for your many, varied essay forms? Many of your essays have a poetic bend, can you explain what role poetry plays in your work and creative process?
KLM: That’s the contrarian in me that insists on bringing poetry into my essays, honestly. I like seeing boundaries and then I like walking up to the fence and leaning my elbows on it, looking across at the other side, my feet grounded in one form and my eyes taking in another. I would argue that poetry itself lives inside every form, anyway. Lineation is the only distinction, and even that is suspect! The language, the movement of sentences, the implied metaphor and surprising juxtaposition—that belongs to us all.
AP: For many writers, part of realizing you want to be a writer comes from falling in love with the work of others. Can you tell us who some of your favorite writers are and who most heavily influenced you as you grew into the writer you are today?
KLM: Jo Ann Beard was absolutely pivotal. I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about this before, but I went to high school in Terre Haute, Indiana in the late ‘90s, and we had a Waldenbooks in the mall and a Books-a-Million, which is another way of saying I had access to pop fiction and that’s about it. I was taking a creative writing elective as a high school senior in 1999 and I had written a piece, which I was calling a short story, that my advisor read and said, “This sounds a lot more like nonfiction.” I was like What is nonfiction??? So, I went to our public library and followed the Dewey Decimal System call code, and The Boys of My Youth was sitting there, and I took it off the shelf because I liked the cover, and I took it home, and I was never the same person again. I’d never in my life read anything like that before. IT WAS LIKE SHORT STORIES BUT THEY WERE TRUE!
Later—and I mean MUCH later—I would read interview after interview with other writers who came of writing age at the same time as me, and they talked about how formative Jo Ann Beard’s book was to them, and I was so, so surprised that other people KNEW ABOUT IT. For me, The Boys of My Youth was that book that we’ve all read, at some point, where we thought it was only ours. Kind of hilarious to remember now, how insular I thought it was. I see now how much that book shaped nearly all of us!
Other writers whose work continues to inspire me: Jenny Boully, Elissa Washuta, Annie Ernaux, Kate Zambreno, and Jeannie Vanasco.
AP: Are there cohesive threads that run throughout your work that you hope readers are able to recognize and apply to their own experience? Can you elaborate on those threads and what they mean to you?
KLM: Reconsidering the things from our past that we thought we knew. Gosh, that is at the core of everything I write and everything I ever expect to write. When you can return to formative experiences with more practiced eyes, or a softer heart, or with new information, it provides illumination, but—and this is very true for me—it provides empathy and the reminder that we are all flawed, fallible humans, trying to do the best we can most of the time with the tools we have.
AP: What advice can you give to writers that would like to experiment with different forms of writing in the nonfiction realm: such as essays and hybrid forms that you orchestrate so beautifully?
KLM: Be willing to consign work to the folder! Truly, so often writers are afraid to take formal risks with a project because if it doesn’t work out, it feels like a waste of time. Or material. Or whatever. But the folders on my hard drive with all of the essays I’ve attempted—or edited—or published—are full of drafts where I tried something, wasn’t sure if it was working, so I clicked Save As and gave the document a _3 or _4 or _12 before trying again. You never know when you’ll hit your stride with a form.
~~~
Kristine Langley Mahler is the author of three nonfiction books, Teen Queen Training, A Calendar is a Snakeskin and Curing Season: Artifacts. Her work has been supported by the Nebraska Arts Council and Art at Cedar Point and thrice named Notable in Best American Essays. A memoirist experimenting with the truth on the suburban prairie, Kristine makes her home outside Omaha, Nebraska. She is the director of Split/Lip Press.
Anna Petty is an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at Converse University, where she also received a Bachelor of Arts in Music. She is a mother and teacher by day, and writer by night. Currently, she is working on her first novel, a work that blurs the lines between memoir and fiction. She is a reader for South 85: An Online Literary Journal, as well as a South Carolina native.
You can find Kristine @kristinelangleymahler on Instagram, @suburbanprairie on Bluesky, and on her website: https://kristinelangleymahler.com.
You can find Anna @annapettypens on Instagram.
reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com
We don’t expect an elevator pitch from a poet, but can you tell us about your work in 2-3 sentences?
Amerigun brings together the tragedy of my brother’s death and the cult of gun worship in this country, where even children are gunned down in schools. Grief, disbelief, discovery, gratitude and love, are what underpin these poems, as I try to hear my brother’s voice again and make sense of his death.
What boundaries did you break in the writing of this book? Where does that sort of courage come from?
I broke my own personal boundaries in writing about my brother’s death. Over the years I have written a few poems that never really captured the grief and shock surrounding his death. I never planned on writing about him, he was buried inside me and I rarely thought of him. But then the title poem “Amerigun” came to me in such a flood that although I was in the middle of doing something, I had to sit down to try to get down what I was hearing, feeling. That first poem began with anger. How could he have done this to our parents? How could he have been so careless? Was there any kind of death wish that led to this tragedy? Suddenly I had so many questions. Over the course of two years I learned what most of my family already knew about his death. As I wrote that first poem, the fact of him shooting himself and the whole horror of our country’s love affair with guns, came together. One seemed inseparable from the other. Tragedy after sickening tragedy and we continue to protect guns over the lives of children, over all Americans. My personal connection to our national shame gave me a way into the subject of guns and helped me tell my brother’s story, helped me find a way of translating, or bringing back, his voice after forty years of keeping him at bay, of not really acknowledging my own grief. The word Amerigun just came to me. I continue to be shocked by how relevant this subject is, now more than ever.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.
I finished writing Amerigun literally a few days before Trump’s 2024 election. At that moment the poems felt not only personal, but timely. I didn’t expect what was coming, I thought we would finally have a woman president. Once he was elected the poems felt even more pressing and my publisher, Persea Books, agreed to bring out the book rather swiftly. In all, the book, from writing it to its publication, happened rather quickly, especially for me since I can be a slow writer.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
My advice for writing is also for living. It’s a practice that writing encourages in me, though maybe it’s harder in everyday life—and that is to rest in the unknown, to let work arise out of mystery, out of questions, and not out of certainty or control. Certainty is a killer of art and it’s not much good in life either, it cuts us off from learning and possibility. It might create a sense of safety, but it is illusory and even joyless.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
I was surprised that I had any of these poems in me and then surprised that they kept coming. But especially feeling that in some strange way my brother and I were speaking to each other after forty years.
How did you find the title of your book?
The title of my book, Amerigun, simply came to me. I heard the word when writing the title poem, which is also the first poem I wrote. It brought together in one word the personal and communal tragedy.