Virtual Book Tour: Her Own Vietnam, by Lynn Kanter

Posted on November 7, 2014 by Sheila Squillante

Today is the last stop of Lynn Kanter’s virtual book tour celebrating her new novel, Her Own Vietnam. Click the link to check out the other tour stops, each with unique content!

Could you tell me a little about the origins of Her Own Vietnam? How did you begin this work?

Like most members of the Baby Boomer generation, my youth was profoundly shaped by the war in Vietnam – and by the movement to end it. We had a military draft then, and the Vietnam war could reach into almost any American home that had a teenage son, including mine. (I have an older brother.) I was also deeply shaken in 1970 when college students peacefully protesting on their own campuses at Kent State and Jackson State were killed by uniformed troops.

Decades after the war ended, I was walking down the street one day when it struck me: What would it be like to be a regular middle-aged woman, just living your humdrum life, and have that experience in your past? To have participated in a war so hated by much of your nation that the hostility slopped over onto you and your comrades, the very people your country sent to wage the war?

How would you feel? Who would you tell? Who could ever understand what you’d been through?

To explore these questions, I began to write. I worked on Her Own Vietnam, on and off, for the next 14 years. Continue reading →

“facts are artifacts”: a roundtable discussion with poets from Women Write Resistance

Posted on October 29, 2014 by Sheila Squillante

October is Violence against Women Awareness month. This October we bring together four poets whose writing appears in the anthology Women Writing Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013), along with the book’s editor, to discuss navigating truth and fact, the historical record, and the influence of the outside world on poetry. Women Write Resistance views poetry as a transformative art. By deploying techniques to challenge narratives about violence against women and making alternatives to that violence visible, poetry of resistance distinguishes itself by a persuasive rhetoric that asks readers to act. Leslie Adrienne Miller, Jennifer Perrine, Sara Henning, Sarah A. Chavez, and Laura Madeline Wiseman explore poetry of resistance in this roundtable discussion. These poets were featured at this year’s Omaha Lit Fest.

How do you navigate fact when writing about the present and the past in your poetry and prose?

Leslie Adrienne Miller: Very few things qualify as fact for me. Those that do are generally concrete things. Once you add language, however, nothing qualifies as a stable fact because every word choice brings different tonal shadings. That said, I work on the magpie model; I look for the shiny bits and make a new nest of them. I’m attracted to things that appear to be fact, things that somebody (sometimes myself) once believed were facts, and the tension between those facts and the instability time has subjected them to.

Sara Henning: It would be silly not to argue that facts are artifacts of hegemony and historiography, though some things seem fairly unalterable—for instance, the riots at Kent State, or the shooting of Michael Brown. In my writing, logos is both a foundational principle and a site of exploration. I tend to allow things to bevel amongst a series of perceived moments that try to sustain their own truths. Continue reading →

Let’s Not Fuck Each Other Up: An Invitation from Arisa White

Posted on October 20, 2014 by Sheila Squillante

Dear Reader, If you’re a bastard, send me a letter. If your father was absent from your life, please do write. If you haven’t talked to your father in years and don’t know if you will– because he’s a bastard—an epistle of any style is welcome. Use words or visuals, no limit. I’m collecting letters from individuals who have been affected by the absence of their fathers for dear Gerald, an epistolary project I have been working on for the past two years.

We all seem to suffer fatherlessness, be it a particular father loss, through degrees of unavailability, estrangement, abandonment or death, and since we all are offspring of capitalist patriarchal societies, I find this to be interesting. Continue reading →

Lit World Spotlight: Lockjaw Magazine

Posted on October 6, 2014 by Sheila Squillante

Lockjaw Magazine’s inaugural issue will be coming out in late 2014/early 2015. General submissions are currently open. For more information, visit lockjawmagazine.com. Here’s an introduction to who they are.

Christina Collins, Poetry Editor: I was sitting in my brand-new apartment in Minneapolis a few days after I’d moved here from Seattle more or less on a whim, feeling the first pangs of deep loneliness that come from realizing you’ve left nearly everything you knew behind, when I thought “no, you didn’t, your writing life is infinitely portable and means nothing in terms of physical location.” So I started doing a lot of reading, and a lot of writing, and really trying to connect with that community. I graduated with my MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop in 2010 and since then had sort of dropped away from that life, only to realize, years later, that it was something that had always brought me happiness. That, coupled with my deep love of crafting mixtapes, was what brought me around to the idea of starting up a journal. Well, loneliness, mixtapes, and the realization that nobody was publishing exactly what I wanted to be reading. So loneliness, mixtapes, and ego, which I (naturally) think is perfectly valid. I mentioned it here and there, and then Dave, who I knew from working in the nonprofit arts where everyone’s a working artist in their real life, sent me a message along the lines of “so you’re starting a litmag, huh?” Which was fantastic, because he and I have a really consonant taste when it comes to literature—one of my favorite memories is of him staying at my house in Seattle for a week waiting for a visa, when we’d sit up late making stacks of books on the dining-room table that we each really needed to read right now, and more often than not (read: every time) he was dead accurate in his recommendations. So I trusted his taste, and was delighted that he was interested. I’d also been thinking about asking our friend Alex—who has a fantastic track record for knowing the weirdest, best music I’ve never heard and also makes art that I’ve always liked—to be the music and art editor, since I really wanted to make sure those things had a focus in the journal. Continue reading →

The Size Queens Video Premier of “Spinning World” + “Carefree” by Adam Klein

Posted on October 3, 2014 by Sheila Squillante

Spinning World from The Size Queens on Vimeo.

On their sixth album Save The Plant! The Size Queens interrogate the shape of contemporary protest. With allusions to the Baader-Meinhof group, Edward Snowden, Indian Maoists, Squeaky Fromme, Aum Shinrikyo, the escapism of pop S/M novels, and exploited workers in the service of government officials, “Save The Plant!” conveys the exultation and poignancy of revolutions, pointed and pointless. The Size Queens provide a glimpse of malcontents and those who wish to contain them: the prison industrial complex, the NSA, and worried parents. There’s no beeline to liberation, and those who are free must leave someone behind, shackled to the hope of returning to normalcy, or–in the case of the song Spinning World–to undertake the mission of saving at least one’s houseplant.

Video directed by Liz Bull
All Songs Adam Klein & Michael Mullen © 2014 Comfort Bringers Music
Musicians who played on this song: Adam Klein — Vocals. Michael Mullen — Piano, keyboards. Ethan Gold — Bass. Carlos Forster — Backing Vocals. The Wally Sound — recording, mixing, mastering.
On the Cover: Jose H. Villarreal “See What I See”
For more material on The Size Queens: https://thesizequeens.bandcamp.com

Continue reading →

Virtual Book Tour: From Here, by Jen Michalski

Posted on September 17, 2014 by Sheila Squillante

Today is the third stop of Jen Michalski’s virtual book tour celebrating her new collection, From Here. The twelve stories in From Here explore the dislocations and intersections of people searching, running away, staying put. Their physical and emotional landscapes run the gamut, but in the end, they’re all searching for a place to call home.

Thematically, how does this collection differ from your other books?

I think there are some similar themes of isolation and dislocation that I explored in The Tide King and also Could You Be With Her Now, but the stories in From Here are through the prism of many different narrators, who differ in age, sex, ethnicity, physical locale. I’d written these stories over a period of seven years, maybe, but I think there’s a lot more of me in them than the aforementioned work, my inner struggle of wanting to belong, to find a place to feel at home. But, at the same time, I think, like any story collection, is a good cross section of my work. Some of it I wrote when I was single, some when I met my partner, and I was deep into my thirties and some of my life priorities were changing, and maybe my perspective, too. Continue reading →

The Tangible and Strange: an Interview with Gina Keicher

Posted on September 15, 2014 by Sheila Squillante

Interview by Emily Coon

Consider the strangeness and dysphoria of modern existence in America. Poet Gina Keicher does in Wilderness Champion, which roams highways, explores curiosity cabinets, guards lawn volcanoes, and dances in a gun store after the apocalypse.

Emily Coon: Many – most – of the poems in this book are organized into paragraphs rather than lines. Some paragraphs include lines of dialogue. Can you tell me more about that choice?

Gina Keicher: At some point in revision, each of the prose poems saw line breaks. At some point, I also tried to offset the dialogue and give it more space on the page, but the momentum felt disrupted to me. If I write in lines, I tend not to give dialogue its own space, so when I transition to prose poems, I let that convention slide. The dreamy, fluid roll from prose to dialogue appeals to me.

Also, embedding the dialogue became a way to make turns on a technical level. In Wilderness Champion, things change, appear, and disappear. Things get weird. So, letting someone talk seemed like a strange crafty move instead of a strange subject maneuver. Continue reading →

Virtual Book Tour: The Amado Women, by Désirée Zamorano

Posted on September 10, 2014 by Sheila Squillante

Today is the third stop of Désirée Zamorano’s virtual book tour celebrating her new novel. Mercy Amado has raised three girls, protecting them from their cheating father by leaving him. But Mercy’s love can only reach so far when her children are adults, as Sylvia, Celeste, and Nataly must make their own choices to fight or succumb, leave or return, to love or pay penance. When tragedy strikes in Sylvia’s life, Mercy, Celeste, and Nataly gather support her, but their familial love may not be enough for them to remain close as the secrets in their histories surface. Forgiveness may not be accepted. Fiercely independent, intelligent, they are The Amado Women.

Melanie Page: Did you at any time feel like the characters’ jobs defined who they are?

Désirée Zamorano: I certainly feel that their jobs are an expression of who they are, the pressures they face, and the dreams they hold. I particularly enjoy the contrast between Mercy’s teaching experience and that of Sylvia’s. So many people think, either because they’ve gone to school all their lives or that there are so many teachers, that teaching is an easy job. It is actually probably one of the hardest unsung ones, equivalent to parenting. Continue reading →

Literary Flaneurs: Michelle Bailat-Jones

Posted on August 22, 2014 by Sheila Squillante

A guest series curated by Jeffrey Condran. Project intro here.

***

by Michelle Bailat-Jones

1. At the top of the toes, above the slender metatarsals and those little phalanges, sit three small wedge-shaped bones—the cuneiform bones—that help to create the arch of the foot.

2. Within the larger Kirishima Mountain Range, there is a smaller ridge dotted with several peaks that runs across the center of the island from Mt. Karakuni to Mt. Takachiho. The tops of these peaks rise above the forest with terrains like moonscapes—covered in scrubby plants, pebbles, and dust. Craters dot the ridge line, some dry, others filled with sparkling blue water.

3. In the 15^th century, a Venetian traveler named Giosafat Barbaro visits Persia and sends back reports of a strange and indecipherable writing found on clay tablets and on the walls of ancient city sites. Continue reading →