Brit Graham

Recently I’m fixed in the mire between an uncertain creature which plants itself firmly in the realm of creative non-fiction and an unruly piece which tosses its head toward full-throttled, all out verse. An ungainly things lobbing itself into every chipped wooden door frame and jabbing its uncoordinated girth into the edges of glass tables, threatening to impale itself in order to avoid my dry eyed stare. This cumbersome beast lumbers about in place of my swift and brutal fragmented shards of poetry.

The two abstracts perch at opposite ends of the spectrum. Tying them together is like drowning a cat. It doesn’t happen often. Nor does one relatively return unscathed from such encounters. Nor are all things welcomed. Non-fiction should be simple–in theory. You have all your material tossing back shots in the back of your greasy cranium. Bereft without discipline they succumb to creep-crawl spiral of loathing.

The writing. She’s not enough to be sleek and gilded like some long legged gazelle at the edge of a undulating valley of grass rippling in the gentle sun-mottled breeze. No. She needs to have teeth. A little bit of crunch satisfying the itch we can’t quite scathe. Fact is rarely beautiful. The truth hardly unfolds like the pink origami crane your fourth grade best friend diligently creased for you every eighth period. The hand model’s appendage cracks, bone protrudes like a whale breaching the surface of flesh. The ripples, stunning in a certain slant of light, but no matter how beautiful, the wound still aches rips raw decade later.

In this tangled bronze thread of narrative it’s difficult if improbable to enter the spearing shards of fragment my writing has so heavily relied upon. It is difficult to write the benign sentence. The sort that carries brown boxed cargo, containing dusty facts the reader requires in order to make the leap of association needed in order to throw their pitter-patter hearts over the blinding crags of self-pity come chapter twenty-two.

It is difficult, unwieldly for my poetry-trained brain to unhinge from the short and succinct to flush out the full rack of a sentence hiding in this particular copse of wood. Heavy-footed, he does not bend easily to the flutter or breath and brevity. A proper narrative requires order and russet-rutted risk and canary-tinged reward. One must bear down, grind one’s molars together, and drop the beast in order to dissect its steaming inner workings.

It takes a different breed of finesse to shape and deepen those pivotal moments. Honing their bark to the same sharp white-silence retort as the barrel of a sniper rifle in verse. Swift as a soot-dusted memory by line three. Filling the spaces between. That’s the hard part. For it all snow blitzing across old black and white television set, the buzz of a fly beating against the screen door, the smack of the frame batting against the house in a gale. These unnecessary everyday things are required in a piece of fiction, a large piece. Spanning several thousands of words. Grains of sand in a jar, snow buzzing against the back drop. The need for a back drop at all infuriates.

The poet relies on the delicate path, carved by the chipped hooves of mule deer, the poet capable of spotting its black rip through the earth despite the summer’s cascading grasses pitching high over it. These are the short cuts, these are the jumps from line to lone-bitten line, relying on the razor sharp proper associations for their reader to make that leap over the live-wire.

Remain diligent, creep down the path sideways, if you must, gain a little grit, perhaps some dust. Settle alongside her as if you’d been there all along.

For now Brit Graham traverses the tundra that is South Dakota, while tripping over things while stargazing in the all too brief summer months. She is the crux of an ongoing love affair between the Pacific and Atlantic. She managed to pry an MFA in Poetry from the grasp of Converse College. You can read her poetry things in publications like Devilfish Review, The Night Owl, RealSouth Magazine, and The OWL.

Jennifer Brown Banks

Writing, like motherhood, is a thankless job. Despite the countless hours we spend in labor formulating thoughts, worrying, sacrificing sleep, in nurturing the needs of businesses and clients, it seems that everybody’s getting fed except us.

The misconception of our real roles continues to compromise our inherent value. Writers are historians, thought influencers, educators and modern-day messengers. Writers are quite often the faceless “voices” behind powerful political speeches, brand-building commercials, and scripted movies that generate millions at the box office. Still, we are undervalued and misunderstood.

For example, the online ads that entice today’s displaced workers to become a writer and work from home because: “all you need is an Internet connection and English speaking ability.” Another ad I stumbled across recently went as far as to picture a monkey sitting at a typewriter.

Further exacerbating the problem are the numerous publications that adopt the mantra of Wimpy in Popeye: “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday, for a hamburger today!” Translated? We hope to pay you for your contributions in the future, if our operation can find a way to make a profit now.

What other workers receive compensation in this way?  As soon as you sit in a cab, before you pull off to your intended destination, the driver has the meter already running. If your hairstylist gives you a bad cut, she still wants her “cut” before you leave her chair.

And where is our National Appreciation Day? Let’s see. Congress mandates a National Secretary’s Day, a Teacher’s Appreciation Week, and even a National Ice Cream Sandwich Day. Who knew?

A National Writers’ Appreciation Day would communicate to the world that writers are note-worthy, solid, contributing members of society; as worthy as any other profession of a tee-shirt, once-a-year discount, and Hallmark card line. Not to mention, a specially designated day would go a long way in at least feeding the egos of today’s starving artists! Most importantly, it would trumpet to the world that scribes are much more than couch potatoes, pencil pushers, and dreamers…

Still, like motherhood, our love for this way of life is unconditional. No matter how messy it gets, no matter how overlooked our efforts are, we write because it speaks to our soul. We write to silence the voices in our heads, saving thousands on therapy.

We write because we believe we can make the world better in so doing. We write because it makes us proud. We write because it’s part of our legacy.  Sometimes, we even write to prove that a degree in liberal arts can actually be useful.

And for the opportunity to write, we are thankful.

Jennifer Brown Banks is an award-winning blogger, relationship columnist, and poet. Over the last decade, her work has appeared in numerous print and online publications including: Pro Blogger, The Well-Fed Writer, Technorati, Mahogany Magazine, and Date My Pet.

Featured image photo:  “Monkey-typing” by New York Zoological Society – Picture on Early Office Museum. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Monkey-typing.jpg#/media/File:Monkey-typing.jpg

Patty Somlo

I thought I was better than this. Haven’t I taught my writing students to just forge ahead, ignoring the critical voice whispering, “You’re no good?” Don’t I say that when you first sit down to write, to spew out whatever comes into your head, that you are getting stuff down and this will be the basis for a good first draft? And, yes, haven’t I said a zillion times that writing and rewriting make the work sing. It doesn’t have to be perfect the first time. That’s what I’ve said and it’s what I believe.

So, why am I in this muddle? Why am I writing and feeling disgusted with myself? Why am I comparing what I’m writing to the fantastic books I have read and reread, and feeling like my work is shit? And why do I keep thinking if I wrote a different novel, started all over from scratch, it would be better than what I’ve written?

This is why. I’m doing something new. For many years, I have written short pieces, both fiction and creative nonfiction. I have published one short story collection and have gotten publishers for two forthcoming books, an essay collection and another short story collection. It is time to work on a novel. And, boy, am I finding it hard.

Some writers plot a course and follow it from start to finish. I have never been one of those writers. I nearly always begin with the thinnest thread of an idea and do my best to follow it through the dark, usually having faith that it will lead me to a good place. I have approached writing my first novel the same way. But I’ve quickly seen what should have been obvious at the start. In a short story, the path might be dark and the destination uncertain. But the path is short. A novel is a cross-country journey, one that might take a year or a lifetime.

So every day after I finish getting down at least a few pages, I have a little talk with myself. I remind myself that even with shorter work, I often go through a phase where I hate what I’ve written. A voice in my head that has helped me through some difficult times reminds me of how often I have revised rough work multiple times and ended up with a final draft that works. Another voice that sounds like my former therapist Dr. Lori suggests I just have fun and enjoy getting to know my characters and discovering their stories. Dr. Lori also says that I shouldn’t forget to breathe and visualize the path that will lead me to the end of this novel.

I listen and nod, knowing they are right. But then the voice I call the Dark Dread tells me that no one will be interested in reading this novel. There are too many characters, he says, no romance, no violence, nothing of interest to anyone but me.

But years of living with the Dark Dread have taught me to not let it win, so I argue back. I remind DD that I’ve just started getting to know the characters and they may turn out to be folks I want to hang out with for a while. There’s Michael, who lives on the second floor of the building where all my main characters live. I picture his blond hair, after he’s gotten it spiky with gel, and I think of how I like him because he blows small problems way out of proportion the way I do. And there’s Anna on the first floor, a once-famous modern dancer who’s hiding secrets I haven’t yet had time to uncover. There’s also the mysterious boy, who suddenly showed up from who knows where, before curling up on the first floor, a few feet from Carlos’s front door.

Then the voice I think of as my Greatest Fan, who’s been there for me more times than I can count, especially in the face of rejection, brings up the novel, The Help, as she often does. “Remember the sixty rejection letters Kathryn Stockett got for The Help and she didn’t give up?” she asks.

I take a deep breath and slowly exhale. I remind myself that I can’t know at this point if my novel will be a total dud or win the Pulitzer Prize. All I know is that I love to write, even when it’s hard, and this novel is what my gut tells me I need to be working on now.

Patty Somlo has received four Pushcart Prize nominations, been nominated for storySouth’s Million Writers Award and had an essay selected as a Notable Essay for Best American Essays 2014. Her forthcoming books are Even When Trapped Behind Clouds (WiDo Publishing), a memoir in essays, and Hairway to Heaven Stories (Cherry Castle Publishing). Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review, the Santa Clara Review, Under the Sun, Guernica, The Flagler Review, and numerous anthologies.

South 85 Journal is pleased to announce recognition for one of the fiction pieces published in our Fall / Winter 2014 issue.  “Blowing Smoke” by Rachel Moore has been selected to receive the Write Well Award sponsored by the Silver Pen Writers Association.

According to the Write Well Award website, “This award seeks to recognize outstanding short stories and flash fiction from both print and online journals and to give readers a way to experience stories that they might not otherwise be exposed to.”  Thirty-six different fiction stories were chosen for the award this year.

When South 85 Journal notified Rachel Moore of the honor, she said, “I’m very excited and honored to be receiving the Write Well Award. I am proud of ‘Blowing Smoke,’ and it is incredibly rewarding to share this piece with a wider audience.”

Moore is a twenty-three year old Pittsburgh native. She lives and works on her family’s small farm outside of the city. Moore has a B.A. in History from Allegheny College and is currently a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, where she will earn a Master of Library and Information Sciences (MLIS) degree.

Check out all 36 winning stories in the 2015 Write Well Anthology, which is now available on the Kindle and in paperback format through Amazon.com.

After a nice summer break, the South 85 Journal staff is back at work!  We are sad to say goodbye to David Colodney, who has served on the South 85 Journal staff since our Spring / Summer 2014 issue.  Most recently, he was the Managing Poetry Editor of the Spring / Summer 2015 issue.  Also, we will miss Ellie Rodgers, who served on staff as a Poetry Co-Editor for our previous issue.

However, we are happy to welcome back all of the other staff members from last issue.  In addition, we would like to welcome Shianna Whitner, who will serve as a Fiction Co-Editor, and Reed McFarlin, who will serve as a Poetry Co-Editor

As of today, our reading period is open!  We will be accepting poetry, fiction, and non-fiction through April 30, 2016.  We will continue to accept blog and visual art submissions year-round.  For more information, check out our submission guidelines.  Or visit our Submittable page at https://south85.submittable.com/submit to submit now!

We look forward to seeing your work!

David Raney

Years ago my dentist found out I wrote. He said “God, I used to be really good at that. I could write answers on these insurance forms and stuff – nobody could make head or tails of it.” Writing as obfuscation. I had implements in my mouth so fortunately was not required to respond.

If you’re a writer, either you admit to it in social settings or you don’t. Cop to it, and the range of responses is discouragingly slim.

I asked a few writer friends about this. “When I say I’m a writer,” one told me, “people assume I have a book out with my name on it, and I’m possibly a famous person they’ve never heard of.” The next moments don’t go very well if that isn’t the case – if for example you’ve published something (or dozens of somethings) without spies or raised gold lettering.

“Even a lot of my old friends seem to be shaky on what I do,” another one said. “I’ve had people say ‘Oh you write for the paper?’ when I’ve been reviewing there for the past six years. And even when I explain, the bemused look stays in their eyes. The whole livelihood is fuzzy.”

I don’t often tell people I’m a writer, partly because I’m never quite sure I am. It’s not usually part of my job description, but that’s not the real reason I hesitate. Mostly it’s to avoid what follows. The polite cocktail party response – although to be perfectly accurate I’ve never attended a cocktail party – is “Oh how interesting, what have you written?” If the answer isn’t a novel, things can get hazy fast. When people learned I was a college teacher I used to get plenty of “Must be great to work three hours a day and have summers off.” But writing is, if anything, even less understood.

I think I’ll start answering “What do you do?” with just “I write” – and the inevitable follow-up with “Whatever seems true to me and might be interesting to someone else.” This will engender a few good talks with fellow sufferers and many premature trips to the bar for refills. But I’ve come to think of it as what I do, and also to feel less apologetic than I used to.

I’ve had a little luck publishing my pieces, but that’s not what has changed. (No one wants to hear your list of rejections and acceptances anyway.) I think it’s just that I’ve finally spent enough hours, weeks, years with my butt in a chair trying to get words to come. You pick the time and place, smells, drinks, noise level, favorite pen, whatever works, and you do it. Do it long enough, even (especially) when you don’t want to, and you’re a writer.

For me it’s legal pads and no capital letters (this fools my brain that things are already flowing, there’s no forbidding “Once Upon a Time” gate to open), plus a little background noise and some coffee. It isn’t so much superstition as training. You’re saying to your body “This is what happens now.”

So tell your friend/lover/barista/dentist you’re writing a novel or poem – or don’t. Say you’re a writer or else let it be your secret power, whatever makes it real. Just sit down somewhere, or stand on a ladder, and make words. They stand a good chance of begetting other words. Some you make better, some you throw out. That’s what we do.

David Raney is a writer and editor living in Atlanta with a great wife, two great kids and an enormous dog. In a previous life all that was true but he was a better writer living in, let’s say, Paris. His writing has shown up in about thirty places including Flash, Compose, Gravel, Referential, Texas Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and the Hollins Critic.

Dallas Woodburn

After I broke off my engagement, I was often haunted when I sat down to write. All you care about is what other people think. My ex-fiance knew how to cut me deeply with a few precise words. He was right: I did care, perhaps too much, what others thought.

As a writer I had a difficult time distancing myself from my audience. Even when writing a first draft, part of me wondered what readers would think. This habit grew paralyzing while pursuing my M.F.A. degree, when I workshopped stories with the same eight people for two years and could anticipate how they would respond to a piece before I even turned it in. While writing a descriptive sentence, I would hear Craig’s voice in my head: Too flowery. Tammy would chime in, arguing the opposite: Lengthen this description so it comes alive on the page. I could hear Anna’s critique of a character (stilted and flat) while Rick would comment on theme (too heavy-handed; you’re telling the readers what to think instead of letting them come to their own conclusions.) If my story tanked in workshop, my confidence was shaken for days. Attempting to heed the disparate voices in my head only watered down my work. By trying to please all, I pleased none.

Three weeks after breaking off my engagement, I sat at a conference table with a panel of professors for the culmination of the M.F.A. program: my thesis defense. I had spent the past year working on draft after draft of my manuscript under the guidance of one professor, whose response had been positive. I expected to receive a fair amount of feedback and suggestions, but to overall feel encouraged.

Within ten minutes, I was shell-shocked by criticism. The defense lasted two hours.

I trudged back to my car through the early April slush, my mind spinning, feeling drained and utterly defeated. Because real life is often stranger than fiction, I bumped into my ex in the parking garage. He asked if I’d passed my thesis defense. I nodded. “Congrats,” he said coldly, and then he climbed into his Jeep and sped away.

I missed him—the old him—terribly in that moment. There were myriad reasons we ultimately were not compatible, but until the breakup he had genuinely supported my writing. When others were critical of my work, his had been the voice I turned to: Ignore them…This is really good… I like what you did here. Suddenly that supportive voice was gone. When I thought of my ex, what I now heard was contempt. All you care about is what other people think.

Weeks passed, and I confessed to a friend that I was struggling to get past his hurtful words. Even worse: I didn’t know how to make them false.

“You already proved him wrong,” she said. “If you only cared about other people’s opinions, you wouldn’t have broken off your engagement. But you heeded your inner voice. You can do it in your writing, too.”

I realized she was right. Leaving my ex meant losing shared friends and mutual acquaintances. Some people, looking in from the outside, spoke ill of me. But I never doubted I did the right thing. I trusted my gut, and that was enough.

My ex’s words—and other people’s criticisms—stopped troubling me so much. I dove back into my thesis manuscript with renewed vigor and a wellspring of new ideas. I completed a young adult novel that had been languishing in my hard-drive for years, ever since some of my colleagues had scoffed that YA fiction was not “serious” writing. I wrote essays and plays and blog posts without worrying about being judged by readers. Ironically, once I stopped concerning myself with the opinions of others, my work began to receive more acclaim: a short story won second place in the American Fiction Prize, a play was produced Off-Broadway, and I received the John Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing. However, my confidence as a writer is no longer tied to what others think of my work. I know now that the only voice I need to listen to—the only voice that truly matters—is my own.

Dallas Woodburn, a former Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing, has published fiction and nonfiction in Fourth River, The Nashville Review, The Los Angeles Times, North Dakota Quarterly, Passages North, and Monkeybicycle, among others. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her short story collection was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and the Horatio Nelson Fiction Prize. Woodburn is the founder of Write On! For Literacy, an organization that empowers young people through reading and writing endeavors: www.writeonbooks.org. She blogs frequently at http://daybydaymasterpiece.com/

Our Spring / Summer 2015 is up and ready for viewing!

Creative Work

We are pleased to present work by the following contributors:

• Artwork – Vivian Calderón Bogoslavsky
• Fiction – Connie Bull Stillinger, Graham Bowlin, Janet Schneider
• Non-Fiction – Francis DiClemente, Krista Varela, Susan Vespoli, Timothy L. Marsh
• Poetry – Christine Grimes, Christopher Muravez, Disa Turner, Donald Levering, Iain Macdonald, Jevin Lee Albuquerque, Jonathan Travelstead, Kevin Brown, Koal Gil, Marlin M. Jenkins, Tom Montag

Reviews

Looking for a good summer read?  Check out our reviews of these books:

•  City of Ladies by Sarah Kennedy (Fiction)
•  Lifted by the Great Nothing by Karim Dimenchkie (Fiction)
•  The Lost Child by Caryl Phillips (Fiction)
•  The Last Two Seconds by Mary Jo Bang (Poetry)
•  What I Came to Tell You by Tommy Hays (Young Adult)

Special Thanks

South 85 Journal is published by the Converse College Low-Residency MFA program.  Thank you to our staff of volunteers who put countless hours into making this issue happen.  We hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as we enjoyed putting it together!

Anthony Reese

As primarily a fiction writer, one of my favorite moments in the midst of the daily grind is the point of discovery. Every writer knows what I’m talking about. It’s a Wednesday, and I’m avoiding my laptop at all costs—thinking to myself that if I have to stare at a blank Word document for one more second I’m going to scream—walking through the grocery aisles with my two kids or driving out to my favorite lookout spot in the mountains. Anything, really, to get my mind off writing. And then it happens. The tail-end of some strangers’ conversation reaches my ear, or two squirrels scuttle across my footpath, or the smell of fresh-mowed grass fills my nostrils, and suddenly I’m inspired. Suddenly, I have a story—or a scene of a story, anyways—and I couldn’t be happier. But then reality sets in.

What is the plot of my story? Who are its central characters? What do they look like? Sound like? Smell like? How do they interact with each other? What do they wear? How old are they? What scenes will drive my story along? And where will they take place? Are the settings real places, or are they fictional? What year is it? What’s my motif? My theme? My tone? My perspective?

I ask myself all of this and more when I sit down to write, and before I know it, I’m back to square one: treating my laptop as though it’s a source of some terrible disease, something I shouldn’t touch, can’t bear to look at.

From where I’m standing and based on what I’ve learned so far, two methods exist for answering these questions. One—from a logical standpoint—seems obvious: outlining. You sit down with a notepad and a pen, and you force yourself to answer all the questions that keep bugging you. What color hair does your protagonist have? Your brain tells you brown, so you write down brown. What is the climax of the story? The resolution? You put the answers down on paper and craft your story around them. The crux with this premeditated strategy of writing is that it often results in stories that feel, well, premeditated–unnatural, forced.

On the opposite end of the spectrum another, less obvious strategy seems to avoid such problems. Most (if not all) seasoned writers are familiar with discovery writing. Critically acclaimed authors of all genres swear by the types exercises that give you a one-line prompt and thirty minutes to scribble out as much on the topic as possible. The reason? Because the most well-informed writers know that we tend to get in our own way. We question our stories, our characters, our plotlines, and our themes with the preconceived notion that we have to know it all, that we have to understand every single detail of our works in progress in order for them to be great. But that’s the cool thing about language, right? It doesn’t depend on us. Sometimes, we writers have to accept that our stories, our characters are going to surprise us. They’re going to take us on their own journeys, lead us down their own paths.

But can it be so simple? Choose one strategy, stick to it, and you’re good to go? Personally, I don’t follow either method orthodoxly. For example, while I understand the benefits of discovery writing, I have to know what my characters look like before I can go any further. Or on the flip side, I try my best to avoid asking the question, “What is the resolution?” My reasons are my own, and I’m sure you have your personal preferences as well. I’m curious, though. Where do you fall on the spectrum? Are you a discovery writer or an outliner? A fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of guy (or gal) or someone who airs on the side of caution? Maybe you fall somewhere in the middle. Let me know in the comments below.

Among many things, Anthony Reese is a father, a husband, a travel addict, and a writer. He has a Bachelor’s degree in interdisciplinary studies with concentrations in English and print media from North Greenville University and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Converse College.

Lisa Hase-Jackson and Gary Jackson

To people who are not involved in the writing life, the idea of poets in a committed relationship can strike a romantic cord. Many acquaintances have suggested that it must be great to have someone at home who understands what it’s like to be a poet: someone who reads closely and provides just the kind of considerate critique needed to revise and edit toward the perfect poem; someone who will contradict every rejection and celebrate every great (or mediocre) publication; and someone who, above all else, provides love and support when the rest of the writing world seems to have turned its back. Since writers in love seem to hold a great deal of mystery for writers and non-writers alike, we thought we’d explore some of the more common assumptions that we’ve encountered during our 10+ year relationship.

“You guys must talk about your poetry all the time.”

Lisa: Though we discuss favorite poets and books, craft, and theory as well as keep each other informed about markets we’ve submitted our work to, we probably talk about the business of poetry more than anything. By that I mean that a lot of our “poetry conversation” is peppered with academics, especially since we are both teachers, and we tend to discuss the latest gossip about who won the latest award or who was hired at what institution for which position. Honestly, because we talk about writing at our jobs everyday then spend our evenings writing and researching markets, we tend not to talk about writing and academics in our down time and prefer to focus on some of the simpler joys of life and marriage, like what albums to buy on Record Store Day or what movie to see on date night.

With that said, I have to admit that far more of our time is probably spent deciding what we are going to have for dinner.

Gary: If we’re considering poetry a (part-time) career, then I don’t think we talk about poetry any more than two people who talk about working in the same field. But it’s more than a career too, right? I mean it’s a passion, and it’s a passion we share, but for me poetry has always been this type of paradoxical experience – it requires solitude, yet the goal is communal – to reach out. So though we share and talk about poems – our own and other authors/books we adore, we don’t usually engage in these long, passionate, critical discussions. Every once in a while, sure, but we’re more likely to say “you check out that Natalie Diaz poem on poem-a-day? It’s pretty dope. It reminds me of…” and then we move on to talking about dinner, who needs the car and when, what we need to buy at the store, what’s on TV. Similar to what Lisa already said, our lives at this point could entirely revolve around poetry if we allowed it, and who wants to be identified by a single passion? To riff on Carver, This is what we talk about when we talk about poetry.

“How convenient to have a live-in editor/workshop partner.”

Lisa: When it comes to sharing my work, I don’t necessarily want my spouse to weigh in on every piece of writing I compose. I rather believe it’s healthier for our writing, and our relationship, to keep our respective voices distinct and relatively unadulterated by the other’s opinions. I rely more on my own instincts these days, which will sometimes tell me consult an outside reader, one that I am NOT married to.

When it comes to editing, I do often ask Gary to read something before submitting. This generally works fine unless I am overly attached to what I have written and therefore less receptive to his comments. As a result, we might get snappy with each other and wind up sulking in our offices, and honestly, I can think of about a million other things I’d rather do with my husband than sulk.

Gary: Ha! Is convenient the right word? We haven’t work-shopped or edited each other’s poems in a long time. We’ll help edit each other’s documents, letters, and other pieces (like this blog post for example), but going back to the idea finding solace in the solitude of writing: we tend to only show one another poems just to get a general sense of a yay or nay if we’re feeling a little unsure (or super excited about a newborn poem). It seems to work best for us that way. Too many cooks in the kitchen and all that jazz. And yes, two can be too many cooks.

“It must be great to live with someone who respects your writing space.”

Lisa: I am fortunate to have a room of my own. One with a desk, lots of books, a window that opens and a door that shuts. There is a bed, too, so the space can double as a spare bedroom for guests, or as a great spot to read and take a nap. Still, when I am stuck or bored with my work, feeling lonely, or have a random question about our plans to fly home or some other trivial matter, I am sorry to admit that I will barge in on Gary on occasion. I could, perhaps, claim to have picked this habit up from him, but I suppose I should just admit to my flawed behavior. I also have to admit that his interruptions are, sometimes, quite a welcome distraction from my work. When it comes down to it, though, we respect each other’s space when we know the other is working on a big project.

Gary: I think it’s essential for a couple to have separate workspaces, and we’ve been fortunate enough to live in places with space for separate offices, otherwise it gets more difficult to respect that writing space – when your writing space is, let’s say, the living room coffee table. Though you do what you gotta do when you don’t have the luxury of space (and we’ve been there before too). And yeah, I’ll take that blame for encouraging Lisa to barge in on me. And I do it way more to her than she does to me.

“You must have a lot in common.”

Lisa: Our relationship is built on many commonalities. We met in undergrad where we attended many of the same classes, writing circles, readings, and, eventually, parties. We discovered we shared interests in comic books, though I am far less zealous, as well as movies, art, and music. In areas where our tastes diverge, we enjoy introducing each other to new things we may not learn about otherwise. We have many separate interests, too. Gary, for example, likes playing video games where I prefer to do just about anything else. Likewise, Gary isn’t too interested in knitting, sewing, painting, or yoga. Where I like a quiet house, he prefers the hum of the television or, occasionally, music. Where I like salad, he prefers red meat, grilled if possible. I guess our biggest differences are gender and skin color, which I rather consider complimentary.

Gary: Ditto to everything Lisa said. For once, I got nothing to add!

“Do you write about each other? Do you show up in each other’s work often?”

Lisa: The first poem I ever published was about an evening Gary and I spent together when we first started seeing each other and, recently, I wrote a poem based on something he did. Of course, I take a lot of poetic license when I write about anything in my life, including my marriage, and what suites the poem will prevail even if it isn’t factual truth. It’s emotional truth that I am after.

Gary: Of course, but it’s not as titillating as you may think. And like all poetry, when you read those poems – know that everything is true and nothing is true. We don’t ask permission either, we just trust each other enough to realize it was something potentially upsetting, we’d give each other a heads-up first, and more importantly – I don’t know if there’s anything we could write about the other that could even be potentially upsetting!

Lisa Hase-Jackson holds a Master’s in English from Kansas State University and is an MFA candidate at Converse College in Spartanburg, SC. Her current projects include an anthology of poems celebrating New Mexico’s 2012 centennial and a manuscript of her own poetry. Her poems have appeared in Sugar Mule, Kansas City Voices, Pilgrimage and elsewhere. She teaches English and Poetry at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC, and is the Review Editor for South 85 Journal.

Born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, Gary Jackson is the author of the poetry collection Missing You, Metropolis, which received the 2009 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Callaloo, Tin House, Tuesday, and elsewhere. He is the Associate Poetry Editor at Crazyhorse, and an Assistant Professor at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC.