DOUBLE CLOTHESLINE by Justin Bigos

We’re thrilled to announce the release of Double Clothesline, a thrilling new short story collection by Justin Bigos. A must-have for your Summer reading list — you won’t be able to put it down!

“These four finely wrought, evocative stories are packed with action, power, and heart. Justin Bigos is a fabulous writer, and Double Clothesline is a knockout collection of his work.”

— Peter Kispert, author of I Know You Know Who I Am

And so the story begins. Get your copy Here!!!!

Author Interview with David Scott Hay

Damien Roos, an incredible part of our PANK family, sat down to talk to David Scott Hay about his novel, The Fountain.

ORDER THE FOUNTAIN HERE

Intro: In David Scott Hay’s new novel, The Fountain, a water fountain at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago magically grants drinkers the ability to create exactly one masterpiece of their own, a gift that carries dire consequences. The Fountain is a mad dash, meta and epic and loud. Hay shreds fine art culture and all its pretensions, sounding the call for true artists to do the very thing they were born to do: Create.

His small press debut, The Fountain is scheduled for winter release by Whisk(e)y Tit, a publisher proudly “committed to restoring degradation and degeneracy to the literary arts”. It will also be translated and released in Russia in 2022. Order now at The Fountain | Whisk(e)y Tit (whiskeytit.com).

In this interview, we cover a range of topics such as authenticity in art, drugs as a creative crutch and Ted Lasso. Also, we drink.

Damien Roos: I decided on Yuengling Black & Tan for this interview. It’s sort of a November go-to for me. I assume you’re drinking the patented Old Fashioned you mention in your author bio? 

David Scott Hay: Yes, with less of the simple syrup in this batch. I’m actually drinking it out of a Whiskey Tit glass. Swag from the publisher. Can you see the logo? 

DR: Oh, that’s nice. Yes, the W logo.

DSH: When I pitched Miette, the editor of Whiskey Tit, my first line was, “If we end up working together, I’m going to get a tattoo of your logo.” And then I flew out to AWP (Association of Writers and Writers Programs) to meet her. This was just a year and a half ago, right before everything got locked down. And Miette was like, “Where’s the tattoo?” and I was like, “Where’s the book?”   

DR: [laughs] 

DSH: I haven’t gotten the tattoo because the book hasn’t come out yet.

DR: Well, as a read, The Fountain is the sort of book in which you can really sense the author’s glee. It seemed like you had a lot of fun writing it.

DSH: It’s funny that you say that. Lauren Groff was one of my thesis readers. She said the book felt like it was written with half-repressed glee, or something to that effect. 

Yes, the book was joyfully written. I wrote it in secret, so I didn’t have any outside pressure, or whatever. At that time, I was building furniture, and Bob Bellio (the real-life protagonist in The Fountain) was across the hall creating sculptures. If I had an idea, I would write a chapter here and there, just exploring different characters. I would go 6 months without looking at the manuscript. Then I’d check out a show or something, or have an inspiring conversation, and I would go back and revisit. I’ve done a number of screenplays and plays and books, but the process always seems to be a little different every time and I think that’s what keeps me from feeling like I’m just hammering out something. Which is different than building furniture, where there’s a very linear process. You design it, you go get the wood, you bring it back, you do your rough cuts, you sand, you put it together, stain it, lacquer it, and do the final touches or whatever. 

With a book, especially one that’s very scattershot, it’s like, “Okay, now I need to start connecting the dots and putting stuff together.” I finally gave some chapters to a good friend of mine and he was like, “Yeah, this is good, keep going.” And I got to a point where I realized it would take me another 10 years to finish the book. So I was like, “Oh, let’s go to grad school. I’ll already have the jump on things.” And then I went to work.  Smoothed it out to where everything worked craft-wise, solved head-hopping issues and what not.

But in the initial stages, I just wrote freely. Whatever amused me and made me laugh, I wrote. There are so many inside jokes with friends of mine and snippets of song lyrics in that book. Some of my favorite opening lines from books are even buried in there. I won’t say which ones but…it just made me happy. My thesis advisor got through it and was like, “I know there are a lot of coded references in here. The ones I caught were amazing.” It really elevated the joy of it. 

DR: And did you set out to do a takedown of art culture and commodification, or did the narrative just take on that message? 

DSH: Narrative on this one. I was at the Museum of Contemporary Art and I swear to God, this is what happened. We’re walking along, checking out contemporary pieces. I mean, you talk about the old masters and stuff like that, “I got no beef.” But with contemporary art, I’m like, “Well, that is a big red cube, I can do that. My kid has done that…is it art?” So, it gets controversial. My whole litmus test is this: “If I can do it, it’s not art.” So, I’m looking at the red cube and going, “Well, that’s not art,” But then sometimes you get some stuff that really affects you. I saw one particular piece at the MCA, and that was kind of the inspiration for Tabitha’s piece in the book. 

DR: What piece did you see that affected you?

DSH: It was a Lee Bontecou retrospective. I can’t remember a specific piece, but I know it was a combination of her mobiles and sculptural work. I don’t think I glanced at her ink work.  But her mobiles… “Oh, this is actually crafted and it’s doing something and I’m physically drawn towards it. Her work was not easily dismissed.” And we continued along and came upon a water fountain with a little bubble man on it and the little dots going up for the water. You know, like the generic bubble people they use on restroom signs? 

DR: Yes. 

DSH: It was one of those inspirational moments. I’ve only had a handful of those, a lot of times it’s just craft and curiosity, hoping for discovery. But every now and then I get an idea that’s like, “Okay, so, what if people took a drink of water from this fountain and became these brilliant artists?” And then they had the Kiddie Art Exhibit area at the MCA too. Same thing. I saw it and was like, “Oh, wouldn’t it be funny if somebody actually created something in the Kiddie Art Exhibit area that rivaled whatever? What would that look like?” I couldn’t shake the idea.

DR: I want to talk about the water fountain. Like, the device itself. As the story goes, a drink from it grants a person the ability to create exactly one masterpiece, and then they die soon after. I read it as basically symbolic of the often destructive nature of artistic creation, the “staring into the abyss” aspect that sometimes manifests as addiction, depression, or dysfunctional living. Is my analysis on track?

DSH: Perhaps in hindsight. It was really as simple as just going off the premise. So, literally, it’s not so deep– the inspiration, after all, was the little bubble man drinking the water and a question of “What if?”. Write for story and cut for theme.

That said, it’s really a matter of authenticity. Ross Robert, who starts as a minor character and becomes a main one by the end, has a problem with being authentic with himself. And the dilemma with the water helps him realize that. His wife is like, “No, there’s no instant anything to successful art. Art has to be self-expression and it has to be authentic.” So, there’s a little bit of that whole “just add water” adage, right? Literally, just add water, Damien, and you can have an artistic masterpiece, and fame and fortune. But no, for him art is therapy and he’s working out something. He’s exploring something. And that’s what I did with The Fountain. It started off as a joke, like “What would happen?” It’s the high concept pitch, right? And then I have to argue every side; for, against, and their temptations and rationalizations. 

DR: I believe one of the characters states that some artists use heroin, some are heavy drinkers etc. There’s that element of self-destruction. 

DSH: All those junkies and drinkers. Yes, yes, yes. That’s the thing that makes me happy, getting to explore all these different sides of the argument. Tabby, the character you mention, came from the Midwest, never had an artistic bone in her body, drinks from the fountain, suddenly gets all this attention. Right? 

DR: Yes. 

DSH: This younger art critic is suddenly like her little boy toy and she’s got these art students worshipping her. She justifies it like, “Why is this any different than doing heroin or taking LSD or doing anything else? It unlocked my potential.” That’s her argument and, as a reader, you’re going to be like, “Well, yes, The Doors, I’m sure did a little of something and Johnny Cash sure did something too.” Her argument is that everybody needs a little help. 

DR: Yes. I think it’s a compelling one, too. Maybe I took that thread and really ran with it in a way that you may have not even intended as an author. But that might also be because numerous pop cultural references you cite in the work would fall into that category. 

DSH: And what does that say about a successful artist? They all had access. There’s no leg up. I mean, what if the Beatles hadn’t discovered drugs? And thank God Fentanyl wasn’t popular in the ’60s.

But that’s also the time, right? Hendrix was doing drugs. Everybody was doing drugs. The Stones were doing drugs. The Beatles were doing drugs. The Beatles were thugs pretending to be gentlemen. The Rolling Stones were gentlemen pretending to be thugs. It is what it is.

I mean I’ve written sober, I’ve written stoned, I’ve written drunk, I’ve written however. I’ve written while feeling sick, I’ve written sober. The difference in output is negligible. As long as I’m not assholing my way from point A to point B.  But yes, you could argue it’s like a creative crutch. Right? 

DR: Sure. Could be to some. 

DSH: Of course, the water fountain is the ultimate crutch. The Beatles still have to sit together writing songs and they still have to figure out musical problems, even when they’re drinking or high or whatever… 

DR: And they had talent, of course. 

DSH: Tabby gives that as an excuse. But at the end of the day, she’s not drinking alcohol, she’s not getting high. She has no talent. No sense of craft. She took a drink of water and she made this thing. Suddenly, her whole life has changed. 

And then she was unable to replicate it. It’s the Sophomore Slump at age 70. There’s that panic with her, like, “I need another drink of water.” Because in her mind, that’s what did it. She’s craving the drug for success and I guess digging deeper into the idea that some artists use drugs or stimulants or whatever as part of their process. That her rationale.

DR: I guess I’m trying to even go a little deeper into the rabbit hole with this question. But it’s not even necessarily, like, the performance enhancement aspect. That’s not even what interests me as much.

There’s the quote from Nietzsche about gazing into the abyss, and how the abyss eventually gazes back. I feel like for artists, writers and musicians, their work may take a toll mentally, spiritually, whatever, that people feel they have to alleviate chemically or something. 

DSH: Are you talking about in terms of part of their process, or part of the recharge? 

DR: I would say the recharge. But I guess it can spill into either category. I think for some people, like the musicians in that era that you were just discussing, it was a lifestyle thing, too.

DSH: I think for the people we referenced from the 60s drugs were certainly a part of their lifestyle. But they were still working their craft.

If you want to talk about the Eagles, or Jackson Browne, or the Laurel Canyon scene, or whatever, those guys were building a network. They were jamming with friends. They were learning. They were listening to records, trying to figure out how the fuck they did certain things. 

For those guys, I think it was part of the lifestyle, maybe. Creatively, it was a baseline  throughout. But those guys talked to one another, they hung out with one another, they showed each other chord progressions, they sang campfire songs. They were really in a culture that fostered creativity and sharing. And yes, I’m sure there was mutual recharging as well. There’s a lot of pressure on every level.

DR: And everyone approaches their craft differently, of course. Writers, for example, prioritize different aspects of storytelling.

DSH: Yup. People in Hollywood and MFA programs talk about, “Raise the conflict. Conflict, conflict, conflict.” And for me it’s, “No, establish the connection. Bolster the connection. Conflict doesn’t matter if there’s no connection. Don’t bother upping the stakes if there’s no connection.”

Sometimes the level of conflict I want is Ted Lasso or Peppa Pig. Which if you don’t have kids, you wouldn’t know Peppa Pig. It’s a show for very young grade schoolers featuring pigs with English accents. It’s all polite misunderstandings or things being misplaced. Sometimes that’s the level of conflict I want. 

It’s a little “All right, let’s figure it out. Hey, we’re going to sing the song. Figure things out,” That’s what I want. Marvel’s like, “The known universe is going to be destroyed.” But with The Fountain it’s like, “Oh, it comes down to personal choice and whatever. I say that knowing it has apocalyptic undertones.” Do you watch Ted Lasso? 

DR: Everyone’s asking that. I guess I need to get around to it.

DSH: It’s very fun. It’s very heartfelt. But the conflict is very low. It’s just navigating relationships, hurt feelings and all that. If you have the connection, you can have that low-level conflict seem big. Then any conflict, whether it’s a misunderstanding or somebody’s ignoring somebody, it gets heightened emotionally. 

DR: Let’s go ahead and move to Bill Hicks, who you mention in this book. He was railing against over commodification and “brand culture” back in the 90s, when the idea of selling out was an actual problem that artists considered. This might be why I ultimately read your work as precisely the dystopian nightmare that Hicks seems to be warning us about. 

DSH: I think in retrospect, that works. I don’t know.  Consciously, I wasn’t trying to do it. Again, it was this kind of exploration of the premise.

DR: Retrospect would be fine. I mean, it’s a very dystopian novel for anyone who’s involved in the arts. It’s kind of frightening, right? 

DSH: Well, there is the commodification of the water, of course. And the curator of the MCA doesn’t know how it works. He doesn’t even care how it works. He knows you can only get one masterpiece out of each person who drinks. He’s not curious. That’s a big Ted Lasso thing, being curious. And the curator is not. He just knows this is good for the museum and good for his pockets. And later while the character of B is presented with a great financial opportunity, any sense of selling out is completely flooded away by the freedom the windfall would provide. He’s done with his war.

In regards to Bill Hicks, I always liked his joke about Willie Nelson selling out, and he’s like, “That’s okay. He owes the IRS a $100 million. He can cash in. Willie is given a free pass because he’s Willie fucking Nelson.” I love it.

DR: So, let’s get some insight into how you craft your characters. I notice for example that the antagonist critic Duckworth shares the same affinity for antique typewriters that you express in your bio. Likewise, the loveable badass Jawbone apparently suffered a similar miter saw accident as yourself. Do you believe there are pieces of writers in all the characters they create? 

DSH: Yeah. Part of it is laziness, I guess. Part of it is also that I’m a big fan of The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film by Michael Ondaatje. It’s such a great book. Michael Ondaatje, a not-too-shabby writer, interviews Walter Murch a few times over. It’s one of the few books I have. It’s dog-eared. I got Post-it notes everywhere in it. 

A lot of writers are like, “Oh, I can’t read your book right now because I’m writing and I don’t want it to influence me.” I adopted that for a while. Walter Murch was like, “No, no, no. These are spark points.” His dad was a painter and would lay out canvas in their New York apartment hallway. So, all these people would actually step and then walk on his canvas and then he would pick up the canvas and he would paint but he would still have the footprints of people on it. He talked about spark points and was like, “When I’m editing, I watch everything, I listen to the radio. If I hear a jingle that’s got a weird rhythm, I’ll try that in the editing.” He allows his outside world to influence him in terms of art at that moment. For me, that was really freeing. 

So, I was like, “Yeah, I’m going to give Jawbone my finger thing.”  Because I lost the tip of my finger in a chop saw accident, right? I’m going to give her that because that’s something that happened to me. I can certainly describe how it happened. Same with the chicken fried rice incident. But the old saying is “just because it happened to you doesn’t mean it’s interesting.” So how do I make that interesting and serve my story?

So, in The Fountain, every character has something that happened to me and/or a feature I thought was interesting or I had done a deep-dive into. 

DR: Well, tell me this, while we’re still on the topic of characters. I’m curious to know: Ross Robards’ character is inspired by Bob Ross, I assume? 

DSH: Uh-huh. 

DR: Yes. Okay. And how did that idea come about? 

DSH: Twenty years ago, I saw a stand-up comic who did a bit about Bob Ross being a Vietnam Veteran with PTSD. And he did a little 3-minute bit. It wasn’t super funny. My dad’s a Vietnam Vet. But the way he did it stuck with me for so long and every time I saw Bob Ross I was waiting for him to go off his tit. And 20 years later I needed an example of a commercially successful artist for my novel. I need somebody who has done the work and been successful. Right? 

DR: Yes. 

DSH: And Bob Ross seemed to be the most generic successful artist. I was like, “Okay, I’m going to make him Bob Ross. It’s going to be Ross Robards. I’ll change the name into something less obvious.” Which I never did.

DR: So, you basically stuck one of those disguises on him with the glasses and the fake nose thinking we wouldn’t know the difference.  

DSH: Yes, I Grouched him. So, it’s also, “Okay, that’s my character, what’s his reaction of the things that are going on? What’s his backstory? What’s his point of view?” And Ross is the commercially successful artist and fuck him for having had success. But in writing him I realized he probably has the strongest artistic point of view of anybody in there. Jawbone kind of equivocates about the water and Ross is like, “No. Art is about what comes from within, it’s about working out whatever problems you have, and it is an outlet.” I mean, he is a stronger point of view character. He doesn’t compromise his point of view about art. He digs his heels in and, actually, his point of view becomes stronger. So, that pleased me because he wasn’t becoming a joke character. 

DR: Probably my favorite question The Fountain presented concerned the value of the artistic end versus the inherent worth of the artistic process. And I know it’s something that you’ve talked a little bit about. And so, basically, a drink from the fountain is like the ultimate hack for hacks, allowing anyone to produce one masterpiece before the water kills them. I’m kind of curious to hear your direct thoughts about that question too. Process versus pure end result. Can’t beauty maybe just sometimes be easy?

DSH: Yes. Beauty can be easy. Like a dandelion or rose or nature. It can stimulate afterward. But we also know that’s evolution, the green fuse, that it takes time to get to that particular point. Writing The Fountain was a process. I came up with a premise and I explored it. And I’d gone through an MFA program and bolstered my craft and really focused on how to fold the story back in so it became coherent and cohesive. Connections, right?

But, sure, art can be effortless too. I can’t imagine that Jackson Pollock towards the end of his life was really stressing over those last paintings. I mean, somebody did a Red Cube at the MCA. Not a lot of talent is involved. Still, it’s kind of under the shield of art. Right?  Everything is art. It can be art. And it’s like, “Well, come on.” To me, art always needs to have a little bit of craft behind it. Even if we’re talking about a rose or a dandelion. There’s a line in Rian Hughes’ XX that gob smacked me. This SOB nailed it in one sentence: “In short, she saw that there was an art to Art, and that it was not something magical or transcendent, but a craft, and good art – the type that could really move you, that you felt with your diaphragm rather than your intellect – was simply the endgame of being very good at your craft.”

DR: I figure this is probably a good one to end on. I found it funny how Jawbone and B so often express the ultimate anxiety of any artist, the worry that they are frauds, doubting their own authenticity as artists. I wonder if this is something that you’ve felt yourself and if it’s a feeling that haunted you while writing the book. 

DSH: No, no, no. Well, maybe sometimes a fraud. I did Chicago Theater and I know so many actors and playwrights I talked to had that feeling of, “I’m a fraud and they’re going to find me out because I’m not Edward Albee.” Look, there’s only one Edward Albee, there’s only one Shakespeare. And there’s only one Jackson Pollock, and there’s only one whomever, right? I’m not competing with Tom Wolfe. I’m not competing with the Met. I think some people with talent and a dollop of self-awareness have a tendency to think, “If I’m not as good as the greats, then what I have to say doesn’t have value.” Again, I’ve never had that feeling where I’ve felt like a fraud. But I’ve had that moment where people have taken me seriously and I feel a certain responsibility to seem like I know what I’m talking about. To have answers and to present them in a coherent manner. 

The closest to feeling like a fraud vibe comes from working on a first draft and that a little voice telling me it’s not as strong as my last polished work. Of course, it isn’t. But that’s my biggest creative fear, I guess, or obstacle. I don’t trust the process. I’m very suspicious of it, for whatever reason.  But when I do it’s a very joyful process.

I think for some reason writers, and I’m projecting of course, with any kind of self-reflection or self-awareness feel like frauds because they feel like, as I said, if I can do it, it’s not art, right? Well, I wrote a book. I spent a lot of time on it, crafting it, making myself laugh. If people react well to it and connect with it, then there’s something of merit to it. I have to believe that whatever I’m working on has something of merit that people might connect with, maybe become a spark point.

David Scott Hay by Mycki Manning

David Scott Hay is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter and novelist who once lost the tip of a finger to a chop-saw in Chicago. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, son, dog, chickens and a dozen typewriters. Find him on DavidScottHay.com.

Damien Roos is an MFA candidate in Fiction at The New School, a former editorial fellow at Guernica Magazine and a reader for PANK. His work has appeared in such outlets as New South Journal, The Master’s Review and Gravel. He lives in New York City with his wife and bluenose pit bull. damienroos.com

Author Interview with Kim Young

Shelby Handler, an incredible part of our PANK Family, sat down with author Kim Young to discuss her book of poetry, Tigers.

ORDER TIGERS HERE!

INTRO: Tigers is an exploration of a series of mutigenerational landscapes of the feminine–female adolescence, womanhood, motherhood, and personal revelation.  Where the traditional coming of age story moves from “innocence to experience,” Tigers moves, through the excavation of trauma, addiction, recovery, adolescence, parenthood, and punk rock, from the ignorance and misunderstanding of a youth’s misbegotten “toughness,” into a turning inward toward tenderness and resilience—toward, in essence, what it really takes to be mature, “tough,” and–tigerly. With a principle focus on the dangers threatening girlhood, this book examines not merely the threat of degradation and assault, but, more deeply, the squandering of love through ignorance and inattention. Tigers here surely serve as symbols for such outward and inward threat, but also as a sign of the mature and tender maternal toughness of youth-grown-wise through trial and reclamation. 

SH: There are many lush and haunting layers to this book: the tigers, the mother ghosts, the marriage fragments, the “directional headings” that orient each section. For me, they created a chorus of different voices and conversations, across time and space. They orchestrated tensions between the mundane and the sacred, the living and the dead, creatureness and humanness, predator and prey. How did you come to some of these different threads? When and how did you know they all needed to ring together in Tigers? 

KY: I started the poems that make up Tigers after the birth of my firstborn and those early drafts initially wrestled with the more apparent theme of danger—especially given the formative trauma of my sister’s kidnapping and rape that I explored in my first book, Night Radio. The motif of the tiger had been a recurring dream of mine since I was in my twenties. It was about threat—yes—but more about power (in the dreams I learn to pass tiger without it pouncing and eventually I harness the animal and walk it on a leash). 

At some point in the writing of the manuscript, I noticed, too, all the other wild animals populating the poems—coyote, deer, raccoon. The urban wild. Fellow feral hearts. As a parent, I was growing increasingly uncomfortable with the role I played in a child’s domestication process: The ways we teach children to become social humans who don’t stick their toes in the oatmeal. My role as a parent raised questions for me about all that’s sacrificed in the process of maturation and how we spend so much of our adult lives trying to recover the wonder and wildness that we train out of children. 

I could see this, too, in the poems that were related to my adolescent self—that loaded girl living in her car with her shaved head and hairy armpits. She had something to tell the mother I had become. And so the idea of tiger kept opening up for me, kept yielding meaning, but at its core is what you are pointing to: a sort of tension between the past and present, the wild and tamed, predatory and prey. The threads you mention are ways for the poems to investigate moral complexity, states like shame, grief, ferocity, and tenderness. And they’re also a way to speak to what’s hidden, or what stands behind. I was interested in exploring that feeling, the unseen, the more unruly and concealed parts of the self.

SH: On the topic of the directional headings, I love that they basically make the book a compass, something that must be navigated by circularly: East, South, West, North, Center. In that way, I felt like Tigers resisted and played with chronology in fascinating ways. Though the collection thrums forward and has momentum, it simultaneously pushes against linearity. Inside each section, we move across generations, across eras of the speaker’s childhood, coming-of-age, recovery and adulthood. Quite literally, present and past tense are packed tightly together in the poems. For me, it brought up the ways that healing, particularly through violence, addiction and patriarchy, is non-linear, intergenerational, messy. How were you thinking about chronology in writing and ordering the book? Did you produce in a similarly non-linear fashion or was there any pattern in their original creation? 

KY: A central project of the book is a retrieval of the non-rational, the unbound—a part of the self that is often neglected in a world the overly values productivity. Inhabiting that space meant that many of the poems resisted notions of linearity, progress—stories that are told as a straight line moving through time. 

Also, I think of that line in Richard Rodriguez’s essay “Late Victorians” where he writes: “I do not believe an old man’s pessimism is necessarily truer than a young man’s optimism simply because it comes after. There are things a young man knows that are true and are not yet in the old man’s power to recollect.” And while I’m not necessarily exploring Rodriguez’s notions of optimism and pessimism in Tigers, I’m definitely interested in what my younger self knows that my older self might be trying to reclaim. The book is very much a project of going back to find the wisdom that might’ve been concealed or overlooked. And I think of reunification and retrieval as circular processes—maybe a spiral? 

I’ll say, too, that the prose poem has been a generative and spacious form, one that works against chronology, where I’ve enjoyed the ability to move more quickly between past and present, between interior and exterior, a form flexible enough to carve out the interior thoughts of the speaker along with dialogue, newspaper headlines, song lyrics, and other layers of text. 

SH: Ok, not to just keep talking about the directional headings, but hey, you give a queer witch a book that is structured with feminist witchcraft and this is what you get.  Clearly, I’m fascinated by the way they structure the book into five sections, each representing a cardinal direction but also an energy, a power, specifically, the powers to “know, will, dare, keep, change,” in that order. For any muggles out there, these directions are used to “cast the circle” for a ritual, to open the space. How did you come to these as the skeleton for the book? Are the poems themselves rituals, invocations or spells?

KY: Exactly—calling in the directions transports you between the worlds, between all the mundane details of daily life (the freeways, sunburns, and monthly payments) and the shadow world—the great vault, the unknown, the mystery. Most things are not as they seem. And the directional headings hopefully amplify the idea that the poems are spaces where the reader can enter and get a peek behind the veil (as I suppose all poems are on some level). 

The directional headings came later in the process of structuring the book (though they were how I was taught to cast a circle back in 1999). As an organizing structure, the directions—with all the connotations associated with each element (water as emotion and intuition, for instance, and air as inspiration, thought patterns, the cerebral) really helped me order and organize the poems and conceptualize how I wanted the book to function as a whole, again resisting a linear narrative that arrives at a destination or revelation. Instead, each section, each direction, is a place for a particular kind of knowledge. Given that this book is dedicated to my daughter, I wanted it to be a, sort of, book of shadows that I could hand down to her. I wanted it to be, not necessarily instructions, but instructive, the way a spiritual text can act as a map for what’s most mysterious.  

SH: Part of my fascination with how feminist witchcraft influences your work is because a central interest of Tigers is the delving into the speaker’s ancestry. We see this, in the Mother Ghosts series and beyond. Specifically, you seem to be exploring with what it means to have European ancestry, in Estonia, Hungary, and Ireland, and your investigations are matrilineal, focusing on the mothers and grandmothers who have come before. I’m so curious about this ancestor work, and how it is related to the other threads of the book, the childhood and coming-of-age stories, the tigers, the witchcraft, the marriage fragments. How did those poems come to you? Research, ritual, communication with ancestors, dreams? 

KY: I can hear the stories of my mothers and grandmothers, but I have little context to comprehend what they mean. Until I cross the threshold and stand at that age, or, in this case, with a child of my own, those ancestral stories had little significance. The very first poems I wrote came after I entered motherhood. Little by little, I began to understand the strength, compromises, and failures of my own mother and grandmothers in ways that were uncomfortable and profound. Questions of what we inherit and what pass down are central to this book, and I suppose the powerlessness I felt in handing down a certain legacy of suffering to my daughter meant an exploration of ancestry. In many ways the poems came from my ability to recognize the ancestral stories I had be carrying all along in new ways. 

SH: To extend the last question even more, I really appreciated the poems where you are grappling directly with whiteness and complicity with white supremacy in your family and yourself. As a fellow white poet, I believe it’s vital for us to do this work of unearthing complicity, reconnecting to ancestry lost in assimilation in our creative work, and of course, moving power and heeding the calls of BIPOC movement leaders. I’m curious how you’re thinking about contending with whiteness in the book? And is it related to how the book’s speakers are resisting other violences and oppressions?

KY: In a book so concerned with power, it makes sense that I had to at least begin the work of looking at white supremacy and, yes, my complicity in that system. In my case, the intersection between sexual violence and the fact that my father and other men in my family worked in law enforcement, the very people who brutally police and uphold the laws that protect white supremacy, seemed unavoidable. And because my father was an LA cop and because he is a man I love, I have a vantage point into that world that not everyone has. It’s a complex and fraught relationship to power, and I can only think that I would do more harm by ignoring it. 

SH: The way you move between different forms on the page is refreshing and dynamic. In Tigers, there are so many different textures alongside one another: prose-block poems, poems filled with gaps and spaces that sprawl across the page, short-lined poems that pull us along slowly, and so much more. How do see these poems singing with each other? Is your generative process different for different forms? 

One of my explicit experiments in Tigers was to explore forms that were different from the elliptical, image-laden poems that made up much of Night Radio. I was interested in syntax and repetition, in how to create music with the sentence. I felt drawn to the ways the prose poem contains all the stuff that makes up poetry—image, metaphor, compression, repetition—but is also interested in story-ness. I mean, these prose poems (and the prose poems I most love) still do what poetry does: they create a space for the reader to have an experience, to recover a more complex perceptive kind of knowledge. But there’s also less investment in silence, in the unsaid. And much more investment in velocity. There’s a meat & potatoes feeling to a prose poem—something substantial and filling. 

SH: Okay, last question. Do you have any “ghost books” of this collection, as Maggie Nelson calls them? What texts did you “lean against”, or what minds think along with, in the creation of Tigers? 

KY: Yes—I love Maggie Nelson’s notion of the “ghost books” and while I don’t think I have necessarily leaned against texts in this book in the same way Nelson describes, I love to think about the contexts out of which we write. I definitely turned to Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, another text that I returned to as an older human and saw with completely different eyes. And there are many quoted lines from Tich Naht Hanh’s writing, the 90s music I grew up with–The Cramps, Bikini Kill, and PJ Harvey. There’s the oral wisdom I was raised on in twelve-step recovery meetings. And then specific texts like Michelle Tea’s essay “On Valerie Solanas” in Against Memoir and poems like Robert Hass’ “My Mother’s Nipples.” 

SH: Ok, putting all those books and pieces on my to-read list. Thank you so much Kim for this stunning book!!

Shelby Handler is a queer ashkenazi writer, organizer, performer and educator living in Seattle on Dx?d?w?abš (Duwamish) and unceded Coast Salish land. Recent poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, PANK Magazine, Sugar House Review, The Journal, Gigantic Sequins and the Write Bloody anthology “We Will Be Shelter: Poems for Survival”, among others. Currently, they are an MFA candidate at the University of Washington.

PANK is Hiring!

Starting this fall, our team at PANK will begin reviewing applications for three new editorial roles:

PANK Assistant Books Editor

PANK Daily Editor

PANK Magazine Assistant Editor

We are excited to take the first steps toward continuing to grow our community of readers and editors, without whom this literary/arts publishing collective would not be possible! Please send us a CV and a brief (one or two paragraphs is fine!) description of your areas of interest, and the kind of writing and art you are interested in bringing out into the world. Tell us about your favorite writers and your favorite literary journals and small presses. Email us at pankmagazine@gmail.com with your name and the role you are applying for in the subject field. We can’t wait to learn more about you!

Assistant Books Editor – Aid in the publication process, including assisting with the selection process of submitted manuscripts, managing the flow of book publication, title marketing and distribution.

PANK Daily Editor – Helping to manage our ever growing online platform of book reviews, author interviews, craft essays and more. 

Magazine Assistant Editor – Assisting with the publication of our annual print issue, online issues and folio collections.

An Insomiac’s Slumber Party With Marilyn Monroe by Heidi Seaborn – JUNE 1ST!

We are thrilled to introduce the first of our contest winners. Heidi Seaborn’s second collection drops on June 1st — Marilyn Monroe’s Birthday! ORDER IT HERE

An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe is a middle-of-the-night poetic conversation with Marilyn Monroe that explores obsessions, addictions, abuse, objectification, marriage, work, children, childlessness and death. Pressing on the themes of her acclaimed debut, Give a Girl Chaos {see what she can do}, Seaborn illuminates the biographical and emotional journey of Marilyn as intimacies whispered between two women. These are women who have lived “on the glittering edge” and know that when a third husband “draws a blank page from his typewriter,” it means she needs to go to work in a world dominated by men. In An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn is a resilient, intelligent feminist who understands how to accumulate and wield power in the 1950’s. She is also vulnerable, exploited, and broken in so many ways. We see the speaker discover Marilyn until “then she is everywhere,” a haunting presence that becomes both muse and reflection. Seaborn invites us into the poetic soul of the world’s most famous woman with poems that celebrate and mourn. An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe is a sequined meditation on what keeps us up at night and what fills our dreams.

WOMEN SPEAK – Poetry Reading Series

We sat down with Khalisa Rae, one of the organizers of Women Speak Poetry Reading about this Saturday’s Event – Feb 13 7:30 – 9PM EST.

How did you get the idea for the series?

I saw the same readers, reading at every lit mag reading, and it frustrated me because I know so many other talented writers that never get an opportunity. I also had noticed that I hadn’t booked many readings that year, and wondered why myself and some of my other strong readers never get an opportunity. Even with the magazines we had been published in. I got so fed up  I tweeted that I wanted to do a reading with BIPOC womxn that don’t often get a chance to read. Gaia saw my tweet and reached out about partnering up.  It was pretty serendipitous because she had been thinking the same thing. We decided to team up to curate the event. 

What is your goal with the series?  The goal of the series was to bring together talented BIPOC womxn poets and prose writers that don’t often get shine, but would also never read together and may have never met. To foster community, unity, and anti-competition. We wanted to amplify folks that many platforms haven’t made space for. So many publications, limit access and opportunity and we wanted to create a space that gives access and creates ample opportunities. The idea is to counter gate-keeping and give opportunities to powerful, BIPOC voices that deserve recognition. 


What do you think makes a reading series stand out? I have been hosting readings and poetry slams for almost 10 years, and can honestly say that a great reading has not just a power-packed lineup, but a great host. One that is supportive, a true cheerleader, with charisma, grace, and audience engaging humor. Another aspect that makes it really special is the audience engagement and love. I come from the poetry slam world where readings are truly electric when there is call and response from the audience. Almost like church. A *snap*, a hand clap, “amen”, “say it sister”, makes the reading feel like a revival. It almost feeds the poet or reader energy and again makes it feel more like community and less like a popularity contest. 


What can we look forward to on Saturday?

Saturday is special because it’s our first themed event. The event was inspired by Taylor Byas’ poem Men Be Menning about toxic masculinity and it just spiraled into a Galentine’s type “sisterhood” event that gave space and platform for womxn to voice their experiences with sexism, misogyny, toxic masculinity, trauma, and just heinous crimes men commit against women.  


What can we look forward to in the future?

So we are booked up for the next three months with some powerhouses. The most exciting news is we have Patricia Smith and Ada Limon as our features next month for Women’s Month hosted by Gai Rajan and myself. It’s going to be amazing!! 

READING INFO: Join Honey Literary for the third installment of WOMEN SPEAK, a new monthly reading series geared towards creating a stage for BIPOC women-identified poets and prose writers of all stages of their career. Its mission is to counter poetic gate-keeping and bring together powerful writers with new and forthcoming work.

February’s featured readers are Diannely Antigua and Taylor Byas. Joining them will be Imani Davis, Raych Jackson, Itiola Jones, Khalisa Rae, and Jessica Q. Stark.

RSVP: https://www.facebook.com/events/2754380004813716

The Updrafts – Quick Fix

The Up Drafts is an ongoing series of essays and interviews that examine creativity, productivity, writing process, and getting unstuck.

BY NANCY REDDY

I love a slow meditation about why writing is hard, and what that difficulty might mean – that’s probably why I became a poet, so I could obsess on a moment and dwell on it and distill it in language – but I thought, early in this relaunch of The Up Drafts, it might be nice to start with a few practical, actionable tips. By late January, late in the pandemic, don’t we all just want a quick fix?

Four practical tricks, if you’re feeling stuck, plus a slightly more philosophical bonus tip.

When it’s hard to get started:

Set a Timer

Having hours and hours to write, uninterrupted, is magic, but if you don’t have that now (most of us don’t, now or ever), do what you can with what you have. Set a timer for ten or fifteen minutes, and see what you can do. I have the browser extension “tomato clock,” and it counts down in 25 minute chunks, or pomodoros; seeing the time moving can be very motivating. 

A quick example: last week, my older son was distraught about his art assignment and how complicated it was and how it was going to take him forever, and I told him to just set a timer and work on it for ten minutes and then, whatever he had done in that time, he could turn in and move on with his day. (Read: play Minecraft.) He worked for ten minutes, showed me how much he’d done, and then happily continued. A small amount of time – ten minutes or fifteen – is enough to get you started and often to overcome the inertia of not-writing. 

A timer works especially well for showing you how much you can get done in limited time. If you only have 10 minutes, you can still use those 10 minutes to write. Victoria Chang wrote Barbie Chang in her car while waiting for her children at language classes and school pickup. 

when you’re feeling stuck in the middle of a project:

Switch writing medium 

If you’re lost in the morass of a word document, it can help to switch medium. A printed draft is easier to grapple with and mark up; you can cut it, tape it back together, and scrawl in the margins. I often find that if I can see the whole thing at once, as a set of pages spread out on the bed or taped to a wall, I can see where I’m circling the same idea or where I’ve managed to avoid, even over 6000 words, saying the thing I’m really trying to say. An example: Katie Gutierrez, whose novel More Than You’ll Ever Know is forthcoming in 2022, shared this picture recently of a printed draft of her book along with scissors, pen, and tape, an old-school cut and paste.

And sometimes even getting started in a Word doc can feel too hard. When I was writing my dissertation, the word doc often felt really high stakes, like I am writing A Chapter, so it has to be Good. (This is why I never write in nice notebooks – too much pressure!) Instead, I did a lot of drafting in Evernote, where you’re just opening a new “note” rather than starting with a fresh, official Word doc. The interface in Evernote was unfamiliar enough that I could tell myself I was just taking notes, just jotting down ideas. Then, I’d print out all scribbly Evernote “notes” and have text to work with for revision. 

If the blank screen itself is stressing you out, switch to hand-writing. If a whole notebook page is too much, I’ll try a post-it or an index card. Sometimes I need more space, so I’ll use the large post-its I have taped to my wall to outline a project and see the connections. 

when you’re struggling to clarify your ideas

Talk about it (even if it’s only to yourself)

When you’re writing, you’re working to communicate something, whether you’re telling a story, or figuring out a problem, or making an argument. But it’s easy to get so stuck in the particulars of word choice or so lost in the steps of a complicated argument that you lose sight of what you’re actually trying to say. 

I used to share writing regularly with a good friend from grad school, and when I was getting ready to send something to her, I’d find places where what I’d written wasn’t as sharp as I wanted, or where I wanted her help. I’d start by opening a comment box and writing, “what I’m trying to say here is . . .” and, often as not, what I’d write, after I started talking to the version of my friend I’d conjured up, was what actually needed to go in the essay, so I’d just cut and paste from that comment box into the main document.

Talking to someone – even if it’s just yourself, even if it’s an imagined reader in the margins – is one of the quickest ways to get unstuck. Try explaining what you’re saying out loud, or record yourself with your phone or laptop. You can use the comments in a digital file; starting with “what I’m trying to say here is . . .”

When the words finally come: 

Say Yes

One of my favorite moments from last summer’s #1000wordsofsummer series was Carmen Maria Machado’s discussion of how she’s taught her brain to make more ideas. In that newsletter, Machado wrote that she’s never struggled with writer’s block 

because I am constantly nursing my obsessions: reading about what excites and interests me, rejecting ideas of high- and low-brow, letting myself indulge in narrative pleasures however and wherever they appear. And I’m constantly stumbling across ideas: riding the trolley, walking through my city, reading books, driving, cleaning. And the minute they come to me—no matter what I’m doing—I write them down. 

It’s that final part – recording the ideas – that really matters. If you have an idea, if you have a sentence, if an image or a voice arrives to you, record it. Teach your brain that those words matter, and you’ll also teach your brain to make more of them. Sometimes this means pausing mid-run to type something into a google doc on your phone, or getting out of bed as you’re falling asleep to capture the sentences that have finally aligned when your brain relaxed. This summer, I’d been working on an article for a week straight and was in the horrible phase of drafting where I was sure I was just too stupid to get it all to come together, when, at bedtime one night, my brain finally clicked it all together. The words were running through my head, and while I might have sometimes told myself I’d remember it the next day, during my real writing time, I’d just read Machado’s newsletter, and I got up and wrote, and that nighttime drafting became my Poets & Writers article.

If you’re feeling down:

You have everything you need

This final tip is more of a mental reframe than a writing tip. It’s easy, especially with the way writing circulates online, to confuse writing with publishing, and to always feel like everyone else is doing more and having more success than you are. But the reception of your work – by editors, by readers, by reviewers and people who screen for fancy prizes – is largely out of your hands as a writer. 

And more than that, it’s not your job. 

It’s your job to write the best poem or essay or story or book that you can. It’s your job to make the weird gorgeous thing that only you can make. And here’s the thing: chances are, no one asked you for your writing. 

You already have everything you need. As writers, our materials are simple: pen, paper, laptop. Maybe post-it notes and colored pens, if you’re feeling fancy. Time. 


No one has to publish your book or buy it or review it in The New York Times. But that’s also a gift. You don’t need anyone’s permission or approval to do your work. No one owes you and your writing anything. No one can stop you, either.

NANCY REDDY  is the author of Pocket Universe (LSU, 2022); Double Jinx (Milkweed Editions, 2015), a 2014 winner of the National Poetry Series; and Acadiana (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). She’s also co-editor, along with Emily Pérez, of The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood (UGA, 2022). Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg ReviewPleiadesBlackbirdColorado ReviewThe Iowa ReviewSmartish Pace and her essays have appeared in Poets & WritersElectric LiteratureBrevity, and elsewhere. The recipient of a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, she teaches writing at Stockton University in New Jersey.

Author Interview with Jay Deshpande – The Umbrian Sonnets

By Damien Roos

Buy THE UMRBIAN SONNETS HERE

[PANK] Team Member Damien Roos spoke with Jay Deshpande about his newly released little book, The Umbrian Sonnets.

Jay Deshpande’s body of work includes the poetry collection Love the Stranger (YesYes Books), the chapbook The Rest of the Body (YesYes Books), as well as publications in American Poetry Review, The New Republic, New England Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. A graduate of Harvard and Columbia, he is an instructor for Brooklyn Poets and has taught creative writing at Columbia, Stanford, Rutgers and the Fashion Institute of Technology. His new chapbook The Umbrian Sonnets, recently released by PANK Books,examines the tension between beauty and suffering, begging the question as to whether the beautifying impulse of the poet can be ethically useful, or whether it comes at the cost of effacing unbeautiful things.

Damien Roos: The series of sonnets was inspired by your 2018 Summer Fellowship in Umbria, a region in central Italy. Did you know going in that you would be writing sonnets specifically? What drew you to this form?

Jay Deshpande: No, I really didn’t know I would be working on this when I was there. I think the incredible privilege and good fortune of getting this fellowship meant that I would have the opportunity to consider different possibilities, different projects I might work on. I was wrestling with my second full-length manuscript, trying to understand the trajectory of where I was in my writing. I found myself very inspired and thinking about writing a lot of different things, and then also feeling the frustration that comes from an embarrassment of riches.

There was so much I wanted to work on it was difficult to choose. I felt the challenge of: what is the necessary work right now? That persisted for a couple of weeks while I was settling into how I would work there. But then there were a couple of influences. One was learning more about what was happening at the US-Mexico border in terms of the Trump administration’s family separation policy, and registering the sheer extravagance of that brutality; I wanted to be able to speak to this. Additionally, I was engaging with work by poets who have tried to speak in witness, or in conversation with the “poetry of witness” before, like Carolyn Forché and Solmaz Sharif.

I’ve always been attracted to the sonnet, especially to what an American sonnet can be and how one can manipulate the conventions of the form. I came up reading Denis Johnson’s sonnets in The Incognito Lounge in particular, which are very formal in their way, but also do not announce themselves as sonnets in the way that some poems might. Maybe not even as much as my own do.

DR: There is a strict adherence to guidelines when you are writing a sonnet. Do you find that useful or challenging?


JD: I find that the sonnet provides just enough constraint—at least in the way that I think about the form, which is mostly the compulsions of 14 lines. The use of blank verse or, like, a 10-syllable structure with 5 beats, is an underlying rhythm I can play with, manipulate, toss out when I need to, but have as a kind of heartbeat. These are the formal constraints that I adhere to. I also think that the rhetoric of the sonnet is really important. I have written a lot of sonnets that are introspective poems, or love poems, or erotic poems. I am interested in how the form automatically, historically goes to those modes; but it also is an argumentative form. The structure of the sonnet signals this: you move from point A to point Z in 14 lines, and the turn happens at the volta, even if you adjust where the volta occurs. It demands a kind of rhetorical development. One of the things that really excited me with this project was exploring what would happen if I tried to build an argument across not just one sonnet, but across the sequence.

DR: Yes. I particularly enjoyed the turn in Sonnet 6, in which you followed your description of an olive grove with the statement, “I think of olive trees as sacred beings”. As far as your writing process is concerned, what was it like during this fellowship, and how did that differ from how you would write at home?

JD: It was very different. At home, I usually have the mixed blessing of distraction. But during the Civitella Ranieri fellowship I was very immersed in my process, so that any time I hit a wall in the writing, I just spent those hours hating myself until I could find my way back in. But at the same time, writing this sequence gave me a certain technical satisfaction that I hadn’t known before in composing. I think it was because I was trying to manipulate argument and blank verse both at once. It made the poems feel more like puzzles to play with—how to figure out ordering, how to place the right images at the right times, and then how to just fit them into sentences. It all let me use the more analytical part of my brain. I get to use that part of my brain when I teach. I do not go there as often when I write.

DR: Many of the poems reference the sun, such as Sonnet 2, in which you write, “The daylight here has history inside it. / It dilates. It looks in cracked embrasures, / evaluating dust. It’s old enough / to wonder why I pause from writing poems / to watch sun slowly fill the garden.” Still, other poems reference the sun metaphorically such as Sonnet 8 in which you describe a patch of sunflowers as a, “hillside of small dawns”. Could you talk about the significance of sunshine? What does it mean to the work?

JD: I think the sun represented certain things to me subconsciously in this context. But I also think this is one of the challenges I face when I draw on conventional poetic diction: sun, trees, bodies of water, etc. At a certain point, some tropes become overly familiar; then it’s a matter of how you imbue the objects with fresh meaning so that we see them vividly again. What is it in the mentality of the voice that needs to seek out a tree, or the ocean, at certain moments in the poem? I have noticed it definitely happens with “sun” a lot in these poems. It also happens with the word “air.” In revising the sequence I had to stop and consider, what am I using air for here? When is it specifically about the texture or feeling of what I am inhaling, and when is it gesturing towards something capacious and vague? And what can I do instead of that?

I think the sun probably has such a role in these poems because it was omnipresent in the experience of being at Civitella. There was so much sunlight in July in Umbria. Every morning I would wake up and go running in the hills. I would sweat, and the heat was oppressive, and then I would go back into this dark castle that had been protecting people from the sun for hundreds of years. So I think that this sort of interplay between light and dark, on a very elemental level, was a big part of my sensory experience. But there is also something important about the sun and scrutiny, about what we can and cannot look at, about what is enlightened. I think that that was unconsciously at play throughout the work, too.

DR: It becomes clear early on that the poet is suffering a sort of push-pull internally. He is simultaneously experiencing a beautiful land while also beset by the world’s cruelties, in this case Trump’s mandate to separate illegal immigrant children from their families at the US-Mexico border. I would like to hear more about the genesis of this theme. For example, was there a specific moment you recall when the beauty around you really contrasted starkly with the human cruelty of the broader world?

JD:  I wish I could say there was. I don’t think there was a specific moment like that. I think that for me it was more like a crystallization of a problem I have had for a while. I am very drawn towards the beautiful and, I mean, we all desire beauty. We like to look at a work of art that is beautiful or a landscape that’s beautiful.

I find that often in encountering great beauty I end up being turned back on myself and my own desire to stay in it. In a kind of venal way, like, I just want more of it. I’ll think to myself, “This is great. But what would I have to do to be forever in the presence of this, the sunlight on a field of sunflowers or this joyful moment with my friends?”And it is that selfishness in the encounter with beauty that was turning me more and more towards the dark underside of a fetishizing impulse.

So, while reading the New York Times every day while sitting in a castle in Umbria, I felt even farther than my many interacting privileges already distance me from the brutalities of American foreign and domestic policy, the ways that our society is built on racism and oppression.I wasn’t consciously thinking about how this could enter these poems. But I was thinking about the responsibility of the poet. Not on the page but in terms of paying attention, of looking and seeing. Reading the news, which feels so quotidian sometimes, is something I have often had the privilege not to do every day. I could avoid it, I could just stay in my little writing world. But I found myself asking what the news actually was, what the actual facts were. In all of that, I felt like there was a duty to do a kind of research. Reading the news is the poet’s research, investigating things, looking for more information.

DR: The order of these sonnets is not chronological. This makes for a kind of dreamlike, pleasantly disorienting experience when reading the collection in full, with the reader sometimes unsure at what point in the fellowship the poet is writing from. How did you decide to order these?


JD: I think “pleasantly disorienting” is a wonderful way to put it. I had a lot of fun trying to figure out the order because it was a sort of puzzle. Not having generally written in extended sequences before, I have not had to do that same kind of work with manuscripts. So I found I had certain ideas. In my initial push I wrote, I think, something like 10 or 12 sonnets, just back to back in one day, initial drafts motivated by frustrations, by a search for inspiration, by the images around me, etcetera. Basically, nothing from that work remains in this collection. It was quickly thrown out. But it gave me some sort of spine to work with, and then I could remove vertebrae and insert new vertebrae as needed. I wanted to articulate some values and priorities early on. I wanted to keep making recourse to the same images, to echo the way an obsession can persist. When something is obsessing us, the idea feels continual in the mind, but what makes it feel continual is that you leave it for a little while and then you come back, and that demon is still there.

DR: In Sonnet 5, you compare nature’s cruelties to the cruelty of the current administration, making the point that focus must be placed on the latter, presumably because it is more constructive. One choice that really stuck out to me was your characterization of America when you state, “Back home late empire dreams /  of walls, demeans women, holds black men down.” I wonder, do you harbor any optimism that this country can be salvaged or do you feel, as some experts have suggested, that we are simply another example of an empire in decline with little to be done about it?

JD: I do very much think that the American empire is in decline, as it should be. There are so many elements that have brought us here: a late-capitalist materialism, a misunderstanding of human rights, a misunderstanding of love and of self-love, of property and of protectionism. A lot of these impulses are moving in the right direction, which is the direction of their own annihilation.


But also, hearing you read back those lines makes me think about the differentiation the poem makes between the natural world and human-made empire. Which is useful in an argument, but it is also a false dichotomy. Often when we aestheticize something in the natural world, we create this incorrect distinction: that is perfect, and we are not. So if we recognize that we are part of the world, then we can see it is our own nature that we are grappling with in various ways.

DR: With that being said, what role do you think ethics should play in art?

JD: I frankly change my mind on this all the time. But I think it is less that ethics should or should not play a specific role in art, and more about the dialectic: what matters is grappling with the question of politics. I think there’s enormous value in the dialogue between ethics and art. Can art empower us, speak to the angels of our better nature, and move us in positive ways? Yes. Can it mobilize us toward specific political action? Generally, the answer seems to be no, but I think that it is much more complex than that, too. The real power of art is in its access to the radical imagination: how art can move us to see differently, to empathize differently. That is not ethical action in and of itself, but it is essential to our growth and development.

DR: In Sonnet 14, which is perhaps my favorite, you write, “If it happened, was beautiful, I want / to preserve it. The impetus is always / my fear of death. I make things to make things / stay.” As an American in a castle in Umbria, a palpably ancient setting, did the weight of mortality feel heavier to you?


JD: That’s an interesting question. I do not think I felt more conscious than usual of mortality. But I think I felt more conscious of time, and I can describe that on a couple of scales at once. I could feel the days passing and how I was using my daylight hours. I knew I was only going to be at the residency for five or six weeks. So, what was I making of that time?

Then, my larger sense of time was also affected by what was happening in my personal life. The day I left New York for Umbria was also the day that I proposed to my now wife. So another interesting side of my experience was about engagement. And what does it mean to be engaged? What does it mean to make this contract? And what does that mean for me in relation to our society across thousands of years?

And finally, I was thinking about political engagement and what that could mean. So overall, I found myself asking how these forms of engagement in a moment related to the passage of time and who I was becoming. I found that all these elements of my life in that period created a certain sense of time, even if I was not thinking about my own death. In a word, I was thinking about change.

DR: Congratulations on the engagement and the marriage. That is definitely an interesting side note. I feel like marriage did the same thing for me. It definitely changed my perspective of time and made me consider time and eternity a little bit differently.


JD: There are so few moments in modern adulthood that can do that, at least for men. I think there are very few markers within that vast expanse of one’s 20’s and 30’s.

DR: The final sonnet is unnumbered. I wonder if you could speak on the decision to leave it unnumbered.


JD: Yes. I like the idea of how that can work in a sonnet sequence. I was thinking particularly of Adrienne Rich’s Twenty-One Love Poems. I always loved how there was one unnumbered poem in that sequence, and the notion that such a poem can disrupt the chronology and whatever ideas of development we have. Because poems are not meant to develop novelistically, where we have a beginning and we have an end and a linear progression between them. I like the idea that if there is an unnumbered hovering poem, it can sort of circulate through them all and can show another cast of mind that is happening at the same time as these.

DR: Perfect. What are you working on now?

JD: A few things. Right now, I am working a lot on translating Georges Henein, an Egyptian Surrealist poet who wrote in French. I’ve been tackling Henein’s poems for about a decade now. I am also working on my second full-length manuscript, which requires reconciling the many poems I’ve written since Love the Stranger was published in 2015. Additionally, I’ve been working on a few personal essays and craft lectures that I’m hoping to complete in the new year.

Damien Roos is an MFA candidate in Fiction at The New School, an editorial fellow at Guernica Magazine and a reader for PANK. His work has appeared in such outlets as Barrelhouse, New South Journal, and The Master’s Review. He lives in New York City with his wife and blue nose pitbull.

How to Start: Building a Writing Life in Uncertain Times

The Up Drafts is an ongoing series of essays and interviews that examine creativity, productivity, writing process, and getting unstuck.

BY NANCY REDDY

For me, the energy of a new year isn’t about cleanses or exercise regimens or even resolutions. Instead, it always calls up my Platonic Ideal of January: the interlude between my first and second semesters of my MFA. Each day, I’d bundle up, layering tights under jeans and donning the puffy mittens and trapper hat my sister had bought me for Christmas as a kind of joke, and walk along the frozen pond to the coffee shop where I’d sit and write. I’d lived in the south for six years before moving to Madison for graduate school, and I was utterly unprepared for the rigors of winter in the upper Midwest. But I loved the transformation of that landscape in winter, the way snow fell and stayed all season, the lakes freezing solid until they heaved and cracked with spring thaw. On the coldest days, it hurt to breathe, but those were the sunniest days, too, mornings so cold they were cloudless.

I can’t remember which poems I wrote that January, or how many of them ultimately made it into my first book. What I remember about that time is the clarity of my intention. I wasn’t thinking yet about where I’d publish the poems or who would read them or what anyone would say on twitter. Instead, I walked to the coffee shop and got to work.

I’ve been thinking about that January recently because it feels so far from my life now. Like so many of us, I’ve spent most of the last year indoors with my family. When I sit down to write now, it’s at the same desk where I teach online and grade and anxiously read the news. And most of the time, as soon as I sit down, a small face pops in the door to register a grievance or request a snack or get a hug. By the afternoons, once my sons have been freed from zoom school and let loose with Minecraft and NerfDart Wars (I know, it’s not what I wanted my parenting to look like, either), my brain has turned to goo and the distractions of the world have gotten loud.

So as I’ve been preparing to relaunch The Up Drafts after its pandemic hiatus, this question of how we’re writing now has been at the front of my mind. When I pitched this series to PANK last January, I was feeling stuck in my own writing life. (And I was considering another kind of January energy, the public counting of accomplishments, though there’s been blessedly less of that this year.) The plan was to use the insights of experts from writing studies, creativity coaching, psychology, and other fields to provide strategies for getting unstuck. In that initial run, the series explored why done is better than good; considered speed, productivity, and freewriting in an interview with writing studies scholar Hannah J. Rule; argued for the magic of one thing, which I learned about in an interview with cartoonist and creative mentor Jessica Abel; and considered how the fragmented time of the early pandemic changed my writing process; and more, in the archives.

As we begin a new year and relaunch the series, I’d like to offer two ideas, both of which I’ll likely expand on in future columns: the power of little rituals and measurement for sustaining a writing practice. 

An opening ritual tells your brain it’s time to start writing. Part of what was so magic about that January was that the ritual was built in: I’d walk and think about what I had written and what I was going to write, and then I’d order my coffee and sit down and begin. For right now, my ritual is simple: I write a note to myself about what I’m working on and why, then I open the sheet I’ve set up to track my work this year, then I start the clock on my computer that tracks my writing time each week. (One of my favorite parts of Charles DuHigg’s Smarter Better Faster is his explanation of how the why of your goals matters for your motivation; the section of this article that begins with the bold “To motivate yourself” does a decent job of paraphrasing it, though the whole book is a worthwhile read.) A ritual can be any small thing you do to tell yourself you’re getting to work. I have friends who’ve sworn by the magic of the same album or playlist on loop throughout a project like a talisman: you hear it, and your brain knows what you’re up to. Cal Newport writes a bit about rituals in Deep Work, and this post from his blog includes examples of rituals, if you’d like more ideas.

I’ll write more about tracking and measurement in the future, but for now, I’ll say that I’ve set up a couple simple systems, and I’m feeling really energized by it. The thing that finally tipped me over was a newsletter from Leigh Stein at the end of 2020, titled What Counts? As she described her approach to tracking her writing (and her finances and exercise and everything else, it seems), I realized something: I’d always understand tracking as a punitive practice, a way of conjuring a wagging finger to scold for not doing more or faster. But I could flip that: I could think of tracking instead as a way of defining what matters and measuring it to get more of it. So what I’ve done for this year is to set up a google sheet with two tabs, one with an entry for each day’s writing session, similar to what Leigh describes in this article, and a second I’m using to track submissions, applications, and pitches. I’m hoping that having some quantitative measures of my work will both motivate me to keep going and also help me to value how hard I am working, particularly in such a difficult time. (If you’re tracking your writing, I’d love to know how it works for you!)

In future columns, I’ll be exploring topics like writing with and through distraction, how audience and circulation shape writing process, how to make an at-home writing residency, and more. I’m setting up interviews with writers, researchers in writing studies and creativity and psychology, and more. It’s my goal for this column to explore problems we’re facing in our writing lives, from the practical (how do you write when there’s a kindergartener walking into your room for a hug every three minutes?) to the existential (does imagining how your work will be received help you finish it, or is it paralyzing to think about what people will say before you’ve even written it all?). I’m hoping that bringing in some experts from outside creative writing can help us think about these problems in a new light. I’d love to know what you’re looking for, and what you’d like to learn about. 

For now, wherever you are in your writing life, let’s harness the rest of this good January energy. Let’s begin. 

NANCY REDDY is the author of Double Jinx (Milkweed Editions, 2015), a 2014 winner of the National Poetry Series, and Acadiana (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Gettysburg ReviewPleiadesBlackbirdColorado ReviewThe Iowa ReviewSmartish Pace, and elsewhere, and her essays have appeared most recently in Electric Literature. The recipient of a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, she teaches writing at Stockton University. She’s working on a narrative nonfiction book about the trap of natural motherhood.

PANK Books Contest Winners

We are thrilled to announce the winners of our 2020 [PANK] Book Contest as selected by judges Elvira Basevich, J’Lyn Chapman, Melissa Ragsly and Jody Chan. Contest winners will be published this Spring!

We are grateful to have read so much incredible work, especially during such a hard year. Thank you to all who shared their words with our team and our judges.