Meet Our Contributors: Q&A with Chelsea Lemon Fetzer

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Chelsea Lemon Fetzer holds an MFA in fiction from Syracuse University. Her fiction and poetry have also appeared in journals such as Callaloo, Tin House, Mississippi Review, and Minnesota Review. Fetzer lives in Baltimore, where she is mothering, teaching, working on a novel, and serving on the board of CityLit project.

Chelsea’s poem, “Sponge,” appeared in LPR’s Winter Issue 2019 (available for purchase at this link).

We’re very grateful she’s willing to answer a few questions for us.

Q: Thank you so much for being part of our January launch. Do you have a favorite piece from the current issue?

I don’t think I could pick a favorite; this issue as a whole is stunning, but I’m going to shout out “Tamarind” by Sheila Black.

We broke our nails scratching off the brittle
brown skin and then we had to suck-

She captures the experience of eating this intense fruit so well, while we witness the narrator awakening to her own body and the mysteries possible within it. The poem ends with an idea for a necklace strung of the seeds. That image took me from a girl-child to a goddess. Beyond fertility, at least in my mind, the poem lands on the power women hold in all senses, her to decide when and how to wield it.

Q: We just did a post with Nicole Hylton. Her poem in the current issue, “the missing recipe,” begins with the narrator “standing before the stove.” Your opening line is, “Kitchen sink collects the morning light.” I don’t want to make too much of these similarities, or to ask you to speak about Nicole’s poem, but do you think there’s something about kitchens and food and mornings that suits poetry?

Yes, Nicole’s piece resonated with me–that solitude, a sensuous longing. I see the similarities. There is something about kitchens and food and mornings–the quiet routines that call to mind other imprints of ourselves, allow space to remember and imagine. It’s probably impossible for a writer not to reference kitchens at some point–but I think the influence here goes beyond what is referenced in any given piece. What happens if we reframe your question from what suits poetry to what spaces and times ignite us?

We know as writers we have to show up to the empty page, the writing room, or cafe. But the question of where to show up for the sparks, clicks, and oh damns!–that can be more elusive. Personal, changeable.

Real quick, here’s my working definition of “sparks, clicks, and oh damns!”: 1) a brand new idea catching you like the flu; 2) knowing the fix, all at once, the remedy for that line or chapter that had you stumped; 3) finally tuning into the big question your piece has been asking all along; and 4) other things/everything/ whatever that mysterious co-traveler, always knowing the way forward, turns the flashlight on for you to see.

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Concerning Craft: In Defense of the Multi-Genre Writer

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Nicole Hylton is a writer-of-all-trades from southern Maryland. She writes poetry, short stories, and nonfiction essays and has completed two novellas, Internet Official and Dropping Her Gloves. Her work has appeared in The Doctor TJ Eckleburg Review (where she is a regular contributor), Aethlon, and SlackWater. She holds a BA in English from St. Mary’s College of Maryland, with minors in sociology and women, gender, and sexuality studies.

Nicole’s poetry, “the missing recipe,” appeared in LPR’s Winter Issue 2019 (available for purchase through this link). She read this and another poem at our issue launch in January (video below). This guest post is part of our regular “Concerning Craft” series.

“So, what do you write?”

It’s perhaps one of the most common questions I’m asked at conferences and readings. It’s an innocuous question, an easy icebreaker writers ask other writers to start off the conversation, but I have struggled to find an easy answer to it.

I enjoy writing fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, all in different ways but in about equal measure. I do not have a default genre as I believe many other writers do. I go through cycles, of course, of writing a lot of one genre and less of the other two, but usually the genre comes to me at the same time the story does. The story often suggests the genre when it comes to me. I’ll think of an idea for a story I want to tell, and the story will say, “Hey, I think I would look really good as a poem.” For example, let’s say I watch the movie Wonder Woman for the first time and feel empowered by the way the titular character is written, given how female superheroes have been portrayed in past films. In about the same instant, I’ll think, “There’s a poem in here somewhere,” or “I could write an essay about this.” (For those playing along at home, I wrote an essay, and you can read it here at The Eckleburg Review.)

In general, though, when it comes to genre, there aren’t any black and white rules for me. In fact, I would argue there is a substantial amount of carryover between genres. And I’m not talking about cross-genre work (although I am particularly fond of prose poems). I mean that there is writing advice that applies regardless of genre that all writers can use. Here are some that I find myself using nearly every day.

Every sentence must serve a purpose. I’ve heard this advice from multiple sources and in a variety of ways, but the gist has always been that every piece of the written work (be it a sentence in a short story or a stanza in a sonnet) must serve some purpose. According to Kurt Vonnegut, “Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.” I don’t know how much I believe that exact claim, but I do believe that every piece of your narrative must be serving some kind of purpose: it must provide something new that has not already been said. Everything in there should be in there for a reason. Clutter is not useful.

The first line is a powerful thing. Not only should the first line of a work be attention-grabbing and put your reader’s butt in their chair, so to speak, but it should intrigue in other ways. The best first lines will disorient your reader, drawing them in to further understand. Most importantly, your first line (and the first couple of paragraphs of longer works) will teach your reader how to read the rest of the work. The first line is the entry point for the reader, the looking glass through which the rest of the work can be seen.

“The most important part of the story is the one you don’t hear.” This quote comes from the main character of Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Lacuna, a closeted gay man persecuted in the 1950s by the American government for his sexuality and relationships with communists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. What isn’t said and why is just as important (and often more interesting) than what is. What are characters holding back and why? What do they not feel at liberty to express out loud? What isn’t said can often reveal just as much about a character or speaker as what they do say.

There are a number of other writing recommendations I’ve received that could probably be added to this list, but these should give you something to start with. See if you can apply some of your own writing advice to other genres, and try writing in a genre you haven’t in the past.

So, what do I write? Well, I write a little bit of everything.

Interview with Ned Tillman, Author of The Big Melt

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This post comes from contributing editor Ann Bracken.

Columbia resident, author, and environmental activist Ned Tillman has been unusually busy spreading the word about climate change to audiences all over Maryland. I caught up with him one morning at a local coffee shop where we talked about his new young adult novel, The Big Melt. After having a great turnout for his book launch, Ned went on to be a featured speaker at the National Science Teachers Association where 40 teachers volunteered to evaluate the book and work on getting it adopted into the local curriculum. In addition to articles about Ned and The Big Melt in numerous local papers, here’s what Publisher’s Weekly/Booklife Prize Review had to say about the book: “Ned Tillman’s The Big Melt is a fast-paced novel for young readers that advocates taking care of the environment and illustrates the possible negative impacts that might occur if humans should neglect this responsibility. Tillman’s novel is certainly inspiring and unique, melding together a firm call to action for young people to consider the environment and a young protagonist’s decision to protect his town.”

I loved the book for its powerful story, dynamic characters, and cleverly embedded humor. Thank you, Ned, for this inspiring call-to-action.

Ann Bracken (AB): After writing two successful nonfiction books that delve into the topics related to climate change and community action, what made you decide to write a novel for young adults?

Ned Tillman (NT): A number of my readers asked me to write a book for young adults. I think we all can agree that they will need to get involved as soon as they can in understanding climate change and taking action before it is too late. I think many people, teenagers and adults alike, prefer reading fiction. It is often easier to get a visceral sense of a big problem through a fictional story.

AB: When I heard the title, I thought the book was going to involve a story about rising sea levels. What inspired your idea to use extreme temperatures and melting asphalt?

NT: I wanted to come at this challenge with something fresh—not just talk about the standard icons like polar bears and floods. I wanted stories that everyone could relate to, be surprised by, and get excited about. I wanted the reader to eagerly turn the next page to see what else might happen that they had not thought about.

AB: How would you describe the main character, Marley, whom we meet just as he’s about to graduate from high school and go on to college?

NT: I think everyone can relate to Marley. Like so many young people, he wants to get on with his life, but really does not know what he wants to do. We can then follow him through one climate-change challenge after another and see how he responds. He tries to seek out creative solutions, and he works with others to help save his town. He becomes this mythic kid that wants to fix things, make them right. I hope all my readers will be engaged by his actions.

AB: What have young readers told you about the effect that the book has on them?

NT: It is really interesting to see the responses the book gets. Readers have decided to pursue careers in science, politics, teaching—all sorts of things related to preventing and adapting to climate change. They have told me that they can’t stop thinking about the characters in the book.

AB: It’s clear from reading the book that you’ve done lots of research on the causes of climate change as well as the increased pace of change we’re all experiencing now. How did you decide on what information to include?

NT: I tried to include things the reader might not have thought about, everyday things that might disrupt their lives. Most of us are numbed by watching things happen to other people all around the world. I thought the readers needed something they could relate to better.

AB: Which part of the creative process came first—the story itself or the facts and ideas that you wanted to explore?

NT: I did not start writing until a rough idea of the story came into my mind. I met a teenager one day named Marley, and he was perfect for the lead role. He may not recognize himself in the character, because I did not know him that well, but my mind just took off. The ideas just flowed as the characters appeared. Some of the characters do things that I might do, many are named or fashioned after other people that I know. The facts were the easy part. Since I am fascinated by some of the stories I included, I had a hunch that readers might also enjoy hearing about them.

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Meet Our Contributors: Q&A with Sheila Black

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Sheila Black is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Iron, Ardent (Educe Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Puerto del Sol, the New York Times, and the Nation. She is a coeditor of Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability and The Right Way to Be Crippled and Naked: The Fiction of Disability. She currently splits her time between Washington, D.C., and San Antonio, Texas.

Sheila’s poem, “Tamarind,” appeared in LPR’s Winter Issue 2019 (available for purchase at this link).

We’re very grateful she’s willing to answer a few questions for us.

Q: You told me you’re feeling “craft insecure” at the moment (hopefully I’m not betraying confidence in asking about that!). I thought maybe you could pick one craft element then that you use in “Tamarind,” and explain if briefly for us. I think you’ll find there’s a ton to choose from.

Andrew—you are not betraying a confidence at all. I think most poets feel “craft insecure” fairly often. I don’t know if it is so much insecurity about the craft or form itself as the tension the critic Charles Altieri describes as the struggle in a poem between “craft” and “sincerity.” You want a poem to feel “sincere”—a truth or an observation that teaches the reader something; at the same time, a poem depends on form to distinguish itself, to catch on fire. I often—make that usually—write my poems in a headlong rush, one big block of text—and the revision process for me is often about finding form. Putting “Tamarind” into couplets sort of snapped the poem into shape. I think because it allowed the white space between each couplet to do some of the work of the poem. The speaker is talking about sexuality, coming of age, and within a particularly fraught Caribbean (I spent a good part of my childhood in Nassau, Bahamas) historical context. The couplet form, and the space it gave for a kind of breathing in the poem, I hope creates a kind of outline or ghostly sense of that pressure—the things the speaker apprehends, but not entirely. I care a lot about sound in my poems so the poem also moves forward with a lot of internal rhyming—slant rhymes, sometimes full rhymes, buried within the lines (she/seed/tree). The poem also uses repetition of words—again she/seed/tree, etc.—to tell its story. I love how in a poem you can shift the sense of a word through a poem simply by repeating it or how even the act of repeating a word gives it a kind of double presence—the sound and what it signifies somehow playing off one another.

Q: You’ve described yourself as “attracted to the unruly and confrontational elements of the confessional.” What does “confessional” mean to you? And would you describe “Tamarind” in this way?

I tend to think of the confessional in much the terms Cate Marvin has written about it—as a dramatic form, where what is dramatized is not merely trauma itself, but the speaker’s relationship to that trauma and the act of speaking that trauma. I think in what we consider the first generation of confessional poets—Plath, Sexton, Berryman, et al.—the speaker’s voice, the dramatic wrestling of finding a voice with which to speak, is often foregrounded; what was innovative in this “confessional poetry” was the way the poem encompassed their speakers’ stuttering, difficulty, self-mythologizing, etc., as they sought to deal with or reveal charged material or content.

A friend of mine—a very great poet—once took me to task for calling myself confessional; he said I didn’t really have the right kind of history or psychological make-up—no drunken father or absent mother, no real primal trauma I was attempting to exorcise. He also said that I did not seem to be a sufficiently unreliable or untrustworthy enough narrator to call myself confessional, which always amused me a little. I think what he meant was that in the classic confessional poem, part of the drama of arises from the ways in which the reader must interpret what the narrator or speaker really feels about the traumatic situation described. Think for example, of how Plath’s “Daddy,” ostensibly a furious repudiation of her father, is also in some sense a love poem. He said—my friend—that I was more a poet of unease. I’ve thought about that a lot, and I think it is true. I came of age in the Watergate years and something of that sense of profound lack of certainty or trust really infuses my work. I think my speakers are often grappling with a feeling that they are born into a world that is unreliable where various truths are always buried or concealed. That might also be a result of growing up in many countries as the child of a foreign service officer—I had a sense of being somewhat outside, in exile, not sure where I belonged or what I was supposed to represent. I think that is reflected in “Tamarind” when you look at the uncertainty of the speaker versus the more declarative stance of her friend.

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Why I Write: All It Took Was a Game of Tennis

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Jane Hegstrom is working on a number of memoir pieces about her midwestern childhood in the 1950s. She is a recent graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Masters of Writing Program and has a PhD in sociology with a specialization in social psychology and gender. Her academic writing has appeared in Sex Roles, Discourse Analysis, and Women’s Studies. She has also published in Bookends Review.

Jane’s nonfiction, “Mary and Carol Ann,” appeared in LPR’s Winter Issue 2019 (available for purchase through this link). She read excerpts from this piece at our issue launch in January (video below). In this guest post, which is part of our regular “Why I Write” series, she shares how she began writing.

My path to a writing life started, oddly enough, with an evening game of tennis. I was fifty-nine at the time and had played tennis for thirty-five of those years. I have a love affair with tennis, a sport that mentally transports me to a place where troubles and petty annoyances are lost in the sheer joy and focus of the game—what I imagine Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was talking about when he described the concept of flow.

My doubles partner that evening was a new player to the group. She was probably in her early thirties, the same age as my daughter. We won the racquet spin and chose to serve. I took my place at the net and when my partner served her first serve, our receiving opponent ripped a forehand return right at me. The moment I blocked the ball, an electrical malfunction caused the lights to go out in the tennis facility. We all moved slowly through the dark to the net to wait for the lights to come back on. Then my partner, in front of seven other players (the other court had joined us), asked me in a concerned voice, “Are you all right? I was worried that you’d get hurt by the ball hit right at you—you know, what with your age.”

No one said a word, and I was grateful it was dark because I’m infuriatingly prone to blushing. I forced a laugh and said something like, “We’re all used to having balls hit at us, not to worry.”

My partner’s remark left me feeling disoriented, as though I had walked into a room filled with strangers, a room I had never been in before. Her remark was a one-two punch. First, there was the shock that I was perceived to be old. Second, my confidence as a tennis player had been undermined. I thought, Maybe I’m not as strong, not as fast, and my reactions are slower. A younger player’s remark threatened a treasured aspect of my identity, and at that moment I assumed an altered identity: I was now old.

On my way home that evening, I thought of the French feminist writer and intellectual Simone de Beauvoir who, at fifty-two years of age, was shocked when she overheard a student say to one of his friends, “So Simone de Beauvoir is an old woman, then?” De Beauvoir’s conclusion was, “Old age is more apparent to others than to the subject himself.”

I began to wonder if other people were as stunned as I was when they discovered for the first time that others thought they were old. I made notes of my feelings and decided that at some point I would write about this particular event. I’m a sociologist whose areas of specialization are social psychology and gender, why not add the area of aging to my repertoire? I dreamily imagined my writing to be a hybrid of Malcolm Gladwell and Nora Ephron.

When I retired from teaching, I hadn’t forgotten about my startled reaction to the first time someone perceived me to be old. I immersed myself in the literature on aging and gathered anecdotal stories from acquaintances. One such acquaintance had a large number of Facebook friends and posted the following question on her Facebook page: Please describe the first time that you felt others perceived you to be old. It could have been a comment, an event, or even a feeling.

After a couple of months of collecting anecdotal data and organizing my thoughts, I was ready to launch my writing career. Except I couldn’t write! My years as a sociologist had produced a voice geared for peer reviewed academic journals and there was certainly no developed literary tone to my writing.

Enter Johns Hopkins University Masters of Writing Program. As a nonfiction student in the Hopkins Writing Program, I continued to draw upon my sociological background for essays on aging, but now I was learning to deliberate about structure, contemplate the importance of beginnings and endings, swap out weak verbs for stronger ones, add simile and metaphor, and remind myself every day not to over-explain—a lingering practice of my academic writing.

Then a memoir and personal essay workshop at Hopkins pushed me in another writing direction—my childhood. The result has been a collection of memoir pieces about my Midwestern childhood in the mid 1950s. And I’m grateful and proud that Little Patuxent Review published the first of my memoir pieces, Mary and Carol Ann.

Meet the Neighbors: Q&A with Dave Ring of OutWrite DC

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In this post, Erika Franz interviews Dave Ring, the community chair of the OutWrite LGBTQ Book Festival in Washington, DC. He was a 2013 Lambda Literary Fellow and a 2018 resident at both Futurescapes and Disquiet. Hard at work on a novel, he has also placed stories with publications like GlitterShip, A Punk Rock Future and The Disconnect. He is the editor of Broken Metropolis: Queer Tales of a City That Never Was from Mason Jar Press. More info at www.dave-ring.com. Follow him on Twitter at @slickhop.   

OutWrite DC is based out of the The DC Center. Can you explain the relationship between the two?

OutWrite is a program of Center Arts, which is the DC Center for the LGBT Community’s umbrella program for arts-based initiatives. Like other Center Arts programs, OutWrite is supported by Kimberley Bush, the DC Center’s Director of Arts and Cultural Programs. Aside from Kimberley, we’re staffed entirely by volunteers, including myself.

Can you explain a little about the genesis of OutWrite DC? What is the umbrella mission under which you are operating?

That was before my time. The festival was started as a program of the DC Center in a joint effort between David Mariner, the Center’s Executive Director, and poet Dan Vera. The umbrella mission is “The DC Center for the LGBT Community educates, empowers, celebrates, and connects the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities.” OutWrite does that by celebrating LGBTQ literature.

That actually touches on my follow up question: Who is the target audience? How far does the region extend?

There’s been a recent discussion on social media about queer communities connecting outside of bars. And while I think there’s value both historical and individual in “gay bar culture,” it’s been pretty great to curate this other space.

OutWrite’s target audience, like many LGBTQ organizations that exist in person and online, is both hyper-local—DC—as well as global—the internet. And by DC, in practice we mean the DMV.

There isn’t an LGBTQ literary festival in every town, so we also have folks attending from all over. It’s common for us to have folks coming to us from the Carolinas, Pennsylvania, or even California.

Can you explain the programming and what’s on offer from OutWrite? I am especially interested in the festival in August.

The Festival is our biggest event during the year. It will kick off on Friday, August 2, with an event—the details of which are still to be announced. Saturday, August 3, is the busiest day of the festival. It’s a full day of readings, panels and bookselling. Saturday will see about 650+ attendees, if we go by last year. Sunday, August 4, is quieter and more focused. We have six workshops for writers, two at 10am, two at 12pm, and two at 2pm. Those typically have 5-15 attendees each.

This year all events are free and open to the public.

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LPR Fundraiser Friday, April 5 at Columbia Arts Center

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Join us at a fundraiser for Little Patuxent Review at 7:00 p.m on Friday April 5, at the Columbia Arts Center (Long Reach village center) and enjoy Akimbo. You can click here for tickets or pay at the door.

Akimbo, an Improv Comedy Team, is a group of performers from Baltimore, Maryland who met through their various work at the Baltimore Improv Group. Akimbo performs the old school improv format known as the Harold and seeks to intrigue audiences as much as make them laugh. Every performance is entirely improvised using only a single word of suggestion from the audience, combined with that strange, sweet phenomenon we call improv group mind. You’ll laugh, you’ll ponder, and laugh some more!