When Life Gives You Lemons, Make An (Online) Lit Mag: A Preview Into NOTA’s Covid-19 Pivot

Krisany Blount

From our shrinking social circles and expanded personal bubbles, to the disappointment of receiving a notification that an event you’d eagerly anticipated has been cancelled, we’ve all experienced the changes the pandemic brought with it. For we art-minded folks, being unable to visit a gallery or attend an open mic night or any other traditionally in-person gathering of artistic minds has been an additional disappointment. But just because we can’t meet in person right now doesn’t mean the organizations behind those events have gone into hibernation. On the contrary, just like so many of our wonderful local businesses, they too have adapted their operations and events to fit our new reality.

One such organization is UW-Eau Claire’s entirely student-run literary magazine, None of the Above (NOTA). Publishing biannually, they cover art, poetry, prose, and music. For the last 50 years, they have published a physical copy of each semester’s edition, and for the last one semester, they have published exclusively online.

The sudden shut down in the middle of March left everyone confused and uncertain, and organizations like NOTA had to quickly adapt to their new reality. Despite having never done a fully online issue before, NOTA’s staff was able to successfully make the switch from print to online, and they’re using what they learned in the spring to make this fall’s issue even better.

““I won’t deny that there’s an inherent appeal to holding a physical issue of NOTA—you get to smell the fresh-printed aroma of ink and pages, and for many of the creatives whose work we feature, publication in NOTA means the first time they see their work in physical print,” says Angela Hugunin, editor-in-chief of NOTA. “But an online issue also offers new opportunities.””

“I won’t deny that there’s an inherent appeal to holding a physical issue of NOTA—you get to smell the fresh-printed aroma of ink and pages, and for many of the creatives whose work we feature, publication in NOTA means the first time they see their work in physical print,” says Angela Hugunin, editor-in-chief of NOTA. “But an online issue also offers new opportunities.”

Some of these new opportunities include more flexibility in the timeline for staff to assemble the issue, expanded submission dates, potential new events, new ways to access the issue, and the ability for the issue to reach beyond the UWEC campus.

Another exciting change can be found in the fall submissions call: an optional theme relating to the “uniqueness” of 2020. Historically, NOTA has primarily received submissions from art and English majors, but with this optional theme, they hope to change that.

“Quarantine has been a time where many people have had the opportunity to try new things and experiment with art and writing and this is a perfect opportunity to show off these accomplishments,” says Meg Adlington, the art director for NOTA.

The creation and consumption of art and literature have become increasingly important in our lives in the last six months. They offer us a means of escape and a way to process the constant barrage of news.

“Consuming others’ work can put words or visuals to things we’ve been feeling but haven’t found a way to express. Sharing art can act as a little nod of recognition, an “I see you,” a way to touch someone in these days of physical distancing,” says Hugunin.

“We need to remember to take a step away and focus on something beautiful every once in a while, to give us time to take a breath and to help us get through it and art is a perfect way to do this,” adds Adlington.

Be sure to check out NOTA’s Facebook page for updates on events and the release of the fall edition. NOTA is accepting student submissions through Oct. 8.

Join Author Roxane Gay for a Blunt, Honest, and Intersectional Discussion on Race This Tuesday!

Elise Eyestad

Following the opening of the new Center for Racial and Restorative Justice on the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire’s campus, a flagship program was created, titled “Racing Toward Justice.” Their first event kicks off this Tuesday, September 29th, with a livestreamed conversation with New York Times best-selling author Roxane Gay, who will be “examining race through an intersectional lens and against a backdrop of current events.”

Dr. Christopher Jorgenson, Director of the Gender & Sexuality Resource Center at UW-Eau Claire, and Dr. Demetrius Smith, Program Director for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at UW-Eau Claire partnered together to create “Racing Toward Justice.” “Racing Toward Justice” will have monthly events, such as discussions, panels, or speakers, throughout this school year, excluding December and May. When considering who to feature for the opening event, they wanted to be intentionally intersectional, “highlighting voices that aren’t always highlighted in issues with race.”

Though planning events online because of a pandemic can be stressful, to say the least, it can also provide new opportunities that would have been impossible to do in person. Because of virtual, livestreamed events, new doors were opened for Jorgenson and Smith to reach out to speakers who would normally be outside of the university’s budget. With these new possibilities, Roxane Gay was brought up, and thankfully, she accepted.

Gay shot to fame with her New York Times best-seller Bad Feminist. She is also the author of the well-known books Hunger, a memoir, and Difficult Women, a collection of short stories. As a queer woman of color, Gay also offers blunt assessments of race, popular culture, and feminism.

“She speaks in ways that are accessible to everyone; ways that are not so esoteric but are really smart,” says Jorgenson. “She’s smart, funny, and in particular, she appeals to a lot of people who don’t normally see their experiences discussed.”

“She speaks in ways that are accessible to everyone; ways that are not so esoteric but are really smart,” says Jorgenson. “She’s smart, funny, and in particular, she appeals to a lot of people who don’t normally see their experiences discussed.”

This event is not campus-exclusive; anyone from our community is encouraged to join. Simply follow this link or scan the QR code on the poster. It’s free, and Jorgenson’s hope is that many will come and enjoy! Roxane Gay will speak for 30-45 minutes, then the online audience will have the opportunity to send in questions, which a moderator will ask to Gay.

“There are people who feel so frustrated in the United States right now because they want to do something, but they don’t know what to do. Engaging in these conversations are an excellent way to either begin or to continue and compliment your own advocacy,” says Jorgenson.

Mark your calendar and tune in for free to the livestream on Tuesday, September 29th at 6pm.

More Than Miscellany: Barrett Swanson on Research, Longform Journalism, and Crafting His Debut Essay Collection

Elizabeth de Cleyre

When people learn you’re a writer, the first question is usually, “What do you write?” Followed closely by, “What is your favorite book?”

 I secretly hate answering this question. How could one possibly choose between so many incredible authors and books?! But within the past week, two people asked me to name my favorite book, and the answer came quickly, easily, and unequivocally: Lost in Summerland by Barrett Swanson. It’s sort of a bad answer though, because the book won’t be published until May of 2021. But it’s so good it’s all I want to talk about for the next eight months.

The essays that comprise Lost in Summerland perfectly encapsulate the urgency and complexity of these strange times. It’s awe-inspiring, if not occasionally disconcerting, to see the world refracted back in pristine prose—especially in a time period which often evokes a funhouse mirror. And yet Swanson’s work feels simultaneously timeless and prophetic too, mining the past to find resonances and reverberations to carry us into the future.

The ability to see the world clearly and express it eloquently is a superpower, and Swanson’s prose doesn’t stop short of simply seeing; it’s obvious in these essays that the narrator also feels things deeply—a refreshing departure from the distant, feigned objectivity projected by most journalists.

In an upcoming craft talk for the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild, Barrett Swanson will discuss the role of personal material in longform narrative journalism, using his recent cover stories in Harper's Magazine to discuss the ways in which the "I" necessarily takes on many guises in creative nonfiction. He'll also share tips on pitching stories to editors and navigating the contemporary magazine world.

Swanson generously answered questions via email in anticipation of his talk on October 15th. You can read more of his writing on his website and preorder Lost in Summerland from Counterpoint, your local indie bookstore, or Bookshop.org.

Elizabeth de Cleyre: Your first essay collection will be published in May 2021 by Counterpoint Press. How did you go about determining which essays would make up Lost in Summerland? What was the process of organizing them like? Did the pieces that were previously published in magazines and literary journals change or evolve from their previous incarnations?

Barrett Swanson: The process of curating the essays for the collection was pretty intuitive, if only because I think I’m a victim of certain thematic preoccupations—narrative breakdown, loss of meaning, communal longing, national myths—and each of the pieces that made their way into the book dealt, in one way or another, with those ideas and arguments. There were a few pieces that were omitted that I still sometimes glance at with a kind of wistful, what-might-have-been resignation, but my editor (the wise Dan Smetanka) was helpful in preventing me from overplanting the garden.

“Above all, it was important to me that the book wouldn’t be read as a miscellany, but that each essay would complicate and refract some of the themes that emerged in the piece that preceded it, that the conceptual undertow of the book would pull the reader along, even as the topics and genres of the pieces shifted pretty dramatically (antiwar veterans to psychics and mediums, waterparks to disaster simulations). ”

Above all, it was important to me that the book wouldn’t be read as a miscellany, but that each essay would complicate and refract some of the themes that emerged in the piece that preceded it, that the conceptual undertow of the book would pull the reader along, even as the topics and genres of the pieces shifted pretty dramatically (antiwar veterans to psychics and mediums, waterparks to disaster simulations). My hope is that the later essays will function to click the themes into clarity and show how some Americans have been reckoning with life in this country from the late Obama era to our democracy’s present unraveling.

Because some magazines have house-styles and because I am pathologically obsessed with cadence and inflection, there were some slight alterations between the book versions and the magazine versions of these pieces. In most cases, though, the differences are so granular that I wonder whether anyone else would even notice them. One of the ways in which my OCD manifests itself is in the sculpting of sentences, and I get so irksomely particular about phrasing that it can be emotionally debilitating.

EDC: In “Political Fictions” for The Paris Review you mention you abandoned “aspirations to be a presidential speechwriter and enrolled in an M.F.A. program for creative writing.” Narrative is a through line with both of those career paths and the importance of story is threaded throughout your essays. What prompted you to focus on creative writing, and how did you get your start?

BS: I started writing seriously in undergrad and was fortunate to have had two tremendous fiction instructors—Laura Krughoff and David Michael Kaplan—both of whom pulled me aside after their respective creative writing classes and told me that I could pursue this as a possible profession. That kind of validation was ventricle-swelling for a young writer and gave me permission to take the idea seriously. At the time, I was interning on a presidential campaign and thought that eventually I would become some sort of hip, leather-jacketed political operative, loitering in the back of the campaign bus with the candidate and concocting little burbles of oratory that would help sway national elections (please know that I cringe to admit this). To the astonishment of my family and friends, I pretty swiftly jettisoned my political ambitions once I got into an MFA program.

During the program, I was writing and publishing short stories mostly, with the occasional foray into poetry, but it wasn’t until I graduated from the MFA that I started writing essays. For whatever reason, I almost never used material from my life for short stories—the vocal conceit of my fiction was almost always character-driven, a kind of dramatic ventriloquism—so once I started digging into my life, a whole little terrain of potential topics bloomed out in front of me. My early essays were memoiristic, and it wasn’t until I went to that utopian community in Florida—called The Venus Project, which I discuss in “Prophet from the Swamp”—that I tried my hand at longform journalism. As a reader, I tended to love that kind of excursion piece, where a writer jaunts off to some odd quadrant of the culture and tries to make heads or tails of a particular community and their place within it. The Venus Project piece was my first attempt at that, and I wrote it entirely on spec. From there, I just started submitting it like crazy until the recently shuttered and deeply mourned Pacific Standard made it a cover story. After that, some other magazines started reaching out and other editors started taking my pitches more seriously.

“People who know me well will tell you that it’s strange that I became so addicted to this kind of work because I essentially have the nervous system of a toddler—(even something as routine as flying on an airplane requires extreme levels of personal courage for me)—so a job where you’re constantly traveling to and spending time in offbeat communities doesn’t seem like the most congenial of arrangements for someone with my temperament.”

People who know me well will tell you that it’s strange that I became so addicted to this kind of work because I essentially have the nervous system of a toddler—(even something as routine as flying on an airplane requires extreme levels of personal courage for me)—so a job where you’re constantly traveling to and spending time in offbeat communities doesn’t seem like the most congenial of arrangements for someone with my temperament. But I think there’s something about that tension that makes me keep doing it, that the occasions for the articles kind of nudge me into the world and force me to scrutinize it more rigorously. 

EDC: What’s your writing process like and how has it changed over the years — on a craft level but also as you navigate changes in the publishing industry and your work as a professor?

BS: In the years after the MFA, saddled with student-loan debt, I did the adjunct hustle for seven years, teaching at as many as three different campuses at a single time in order to make ends meet. As a result, I learned to write at odd hours and interstitial moments. During that time, I would get up at 3:30 or 4AM and write until 8 and then head over to the college for a full-day of teaching. Possibly that sounds monastic or extreme, but it was a way of convincing myself that I was going to pursue writing even when no one was waiting for a piece. A few years ago, after several years on the job market, I was lucky enough to procure a tenure-track teaching position, so I’m a little more stable financially, although my writing routines and rhythms haven’t much shifted or varied. For whatever reason, I find that early morning hours tend to be the most generative, maybe because I’m too tired to entertain the Greek chorus of self-lacerating voices that would otherwise colonize my head. So a good day will be four hours or so of scribbling in the morning and then a couple hours in the afternoon for rereading and revision. Within the last year or so, I started writing all my first drafts longhand, which I couldn’t recommend more highly to anyone. There’s something about the kinesthetic labor of writing the words that allows me to better hear their music, whereas the choppy velocity of typing often results in me paying more attention to how the words look on the page (to the detriment of the narrative sensibility). Plus, I don’t like the visual trick of how Word processing platforms make even the filmiest draft seem “finished.” I’m trying to think of other quirks in my process.

“On reporting trips, I record EVERYTHING, so usually I’ll return home with 36 to 72 hours of recordings, and will spend a week or two listening, which allows me to relive the experience, and I will fill two or three notebooks with memories and rough scenes, frequently consulting whatever additional notes I took on the trip (usually on my phone). In those notebooks, I’ll start drafting scenes, and when I’ve written two or three of them, I’ll brandish a fresh legal pad and begin writing the actual piece.”

On reporting trips, I record EVERYTHING, so usually I’ll return home with 36 to 72 hours of recordings, and will spend a week or two listening, which allows me to relive the experience, and I will fill two or three notebooks with memories and rough scenes, frequently consulting whatever additional notes I took on the trip (usually on my phone). In those notebooks, I’ll start drafting scenes, and when I’ve written two or three of them, I’ll brandish a fresh legal pad and begin writing the actual piece. The first draft can take anywhere from a week to a month, depending on the nature of the reporting and the scope of the research, and at some point during that phase, I will switch over to my computer, which is a built-in assurance that I pour over the sentences again and do another version. I always like when writers disclose the peccadilloes of their work habits, so I will tell you that I type my stuff in Microsoft Word, with Times New Roman 12-point font, single-spaced, with the “View” at 115%, which makes the text small enough that I can see almost the whole page and keep track of the meter of the graf in question. I listen to “Brown Noise” or “Pink Noise” when I write, although sometimes I will throw on William Basinski’s “The Disintegration Loops” or Happy Apple’s “Homage Ritchie Valens,” particularly if I’m feeling autumnal or whatever.

EDC: Your craft talk on October 15th will discuss the role of personal material in longform narrative journalism, and your writing strikes a balance between journalism and essay. Without giving too much of the craft talk away, can you tell us a little more about crafting a persona for these pieces, or the importance of it?

BS: For fear of sounding redundant on the 15th, I will keep my answer brief. I don’t know about you, but when I was growing up, middle-school and high-school teachers tended to talk about personal writing as a matter of “finding your voice,” as if there were some Platonically ideal self that loitered at the rim of your consciousness, as if the act of writing was nothing more than the unearthing of this “real” identity. My own experience is that one’s persona is far more flexible and contingent, one’s voice far more protean, and the emergency of a given essay’s scenario requires that my narrative sensibility chameleon itself to its tone and register. All of us calibrate our social personas this way, but at least when I was an undergrad or an MFA candidate, I didn’t hear professors talk at much length about the “I” in creative nonfiction. A lot of times I think it’s hard for fiction writers to transition into essays because they forget that one of the fundamental tasks in nonfiction is self-characterization, which is something that, if they’re not writing autofiction, they probably don’t have much practice at. One thing I try to remind my students is that any topic they choose to write about is in some way a reflection of their affections, hopes or fears, and so the essay needs them to create an “I” where those resonances between the topic and the writer are immediately apparent. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this is an authorial masquerade, but I do think that essays present the writer’s revolving door of self.  

EDC: In addition to crafting and presenting a persona on the page, your pieces are incredibly well researched, and your work spans a wide range of topics: historical notions of masculinity in America, the Spiritualism movement in the mid-nineteenth century, school shootings, and the antiwar movement and organic farming, among other subjects. What’s your research process like? How extensive is it, and at what point do you know you have enough for the piece? Or do you ever find yourself with too much research?

BS: Oh, god. It’s different for every piece, but I tend to do gobs of research up front, if only because each of my essays almost always concerns a completely different topic than whatever I wrote about in the last piece. For this reason, I am apt to suffer debilitating cases of imposter syndrome. Grad school was helpful in this regard, because in having to build reading lists for one’s thesis or dissertation, you can’t help but become proficient at curating a list of research materials that will help you passably draw the contours of some historical moment or topic. With every piece, then, it can seem like I’m giving myself an intensive undergraduate degree in the subject. For instance, with an essay like the one in Harper’s about the contemporary men’s movement, I was fairly omnivorous in my research, reading as many as 20 books on masculinity and men’s groups, listening to (oftentimes hair-raising) podcasts on the subject, watching documentaries about body builders and the Proud Boys, and interviewing people in the community—all of which I completed before I went on the trip. Doing this kind of work up front allows me to have an intellectual framework for whatever community I’m entering and allows me to select more deliberately the details and anecdotes that I experience while I’m on the assignment.

The great odium that I’ve noticed about contemporary publishing is that the imperative of timeliness and the velocity of online publishing makes it harder to do the kind of research that will help a writer historicize their subject and allow them to understand that these aren’t new trends but part of a larger pattern, which is crucial if you’re a writer who’s interested in tracking the true etiology of our social problems. For instance, so much of the coverage about contemporary men’s groups—much of which was weirdly laudatory— failed to acknowledge that these sorts of communities were popular in the past and tended to enjoy periods of massive growth only when there were corresponding advancements in feminism (the Iron Johns during Third Wave, the Male Liberationists during the Second), which is an important thing to consider, especially if you’re going to insist that they can be efficacious in addressing things like toxic masculinity. Along these same lines, in advance of going on the trip to Lily Dale, the world’s largest community of psychics and mediums, I read a veritable deluge of trend pieces about how “millennials are going wild for astrology” or “why are CEOs embracing spiritual traditions,” but virtually none of these articles talked about how the birth of Spiritualism in the 1890s and the rise of New Ageism in the 1960s coincided with periods of epistemological confusion and narrative breakdown, which demonstrates the extent to which people will reach for an ideological ballast whenever the center is not holding.

That said, early on in my career, I think I tended to rely too heavily on research, or rather I didn’t know how to integrate it seamlessly into the narrative account of the excursion. As I’ve gotten more experience in the longform genre, I think I’ve become more adept at letting the research merely inform my observations rather than inserting all those factoids into the piece in question.

I don’t think you can do too much research. If anything an essayist like John McPhee, who does titanic, if not Talmudic, amounts of research, provides compelling evidence of the extent to which the real danger is not doing too much research but rather failing to develop a methodology for organizing the info one gathers. In order words, what’s debilitating for writers, I think, isn’t the amount of research, but the inability to successfully wrangle it.

EDC: Though your essays often deal with serious subjects, there’s a fair amount of humor and levity in your essays. In Lost in Summerland, you visit Wisconsin’s famed Noah’s Ark Waterpark to “summer” as a verb, discuss the connection between Kim Kardashian and Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist,” and attend a West Wing fan convention. In a darkly funny moment in “This is Not a Test,” your press liaison misidentifies you as a writer from Harper’s Bazaar, prompting you to “waste a bunch of time wondering how a fashion organ might cover the events at Disaster City: ‘Containment Couture: How Hazmats Will Overrun Athleisure as Your Work-from-Home Daily Water’ or ‘You Down with PPE? Yeah, You Know Me: How Gloves, Masks, and Protective Eyewear Will Soon Become the New Urban Chic.’” What role does humor play in your writing, and specifically when writing about serious or grave matters? 

BS: I can’t remember who said this—it was either a comedian (Gilda Radner?) or a philosopher (Wittgenstein?)—but they once described comedy as the truth told at a higher velocity. Part of me likes to think that whatever humor emerges in my essays is borne of that fact, as is hopefully legible in the example you mentioned, about the press liaison at Disaster City. The fictional headlines that I conjured ended up not being very far afield from the actual scareheads that certain fashion organs were publishing in April and May of this year, when the first wave of COVID-19 was peaking and when Work-From-Home couture became a booming industry. For me, it was grimly disconcerting to see such headlines rubbing shoulders with pieces about the pandemic’s death toll. And so whenever I’m on a reporting assignment, I’ll always bloodhound around for details like that, for those ironic little doodads that vivify not only the weirdness of the situation in which I find myself but also the absurdity of life in America at this tragicomic moment.

 On a practical level, though, the humor in my work emerges out of a larger agenda, which is to craft a narrative persona that faithfully reflects my personality. My favorite writing is where the person shows up in their work, and so, for me, every sentence tries to establish a companionship with the reader, something that an artist whom I’m close with describes as becoming “a friend of the reader’s mind,” which is a phrase I rather like.  

EDC: Last but certainly not least: favorite books or reading recommendations? And what’s your favorite piece of writing to teach and why?

BS: I’m going to answer a kindred but less stultifying question. The best essay collections I’ve read recently are Elisa Gabbert’s The Unreality of Memory and Jordan Kisner’s Thin Places. Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah’s essays are invariably exquisite and brilliant, and I’m waiting for her collection, The Explainers and The Explorers, with a kind of bated anticipation. And my god, have you read Elif Batuman’s recent essay in The New Yorker? About Zoom performances of Greek tragedies during the COVID-19 pandemic? I swear, it will ruin and restore you. I also love both Lauren Olyer’s and Patricia Lockwood’s criticism. Also, Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism.

Among my favorite things to teach is Zadie Smith’s NW, which a contemporary modernist novel that was, by my lights, insufficiently celebrated when it was first published and that my first year college students start out hating (because the prose isn’t linear) and end up loving (because Smith is an absolute genius, and she renders the sadness of our neoliberal moment in a way that is both energizing and elegiac). I also love teaching “The Hunger Artist” by Kafka (which I wrote an essay about) and “Notes from a Native Son” by James Baldwin. I can read these works again and again, and unfailingly they perform on me an emotional and intellectual resuscitation.

Tune into Barrett’s craft talk on Zoom on October 15 at 7PM. Here is the link. Meeting ID: 886 3826 7523
Passcode: 602055

Co-sponsored with the L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library.

Elizabeth de Cleyre is a writer and editor based in Eau Claire, WI. Find her at cedecreative.com

Quarantine Comforts: The Art That's Comforted Four Local Creatives

Elise Eystad

 When the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire went fully online last spring semester, I moved back to my parent’s house. Day after day was spent in front of my laptop screen, either in a Zoom meeting for work, an online class, or finishing a paper. It felt like every day blurred together with all of my screen time, yet I also felt as if the majority of the days were wasted, since I almost never changed out of my pajamas. At the end of the night, however, I would curl up in the living room with my parents and watch BBC shows; they had just gotten a BritBox subscription on Roku to fill our quarantined nights. I watched every British period piece that I could, then also re-read Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen became my best pal and quarantine companion. While this evening practice didn’t help me feel any more productive, I was comforted. It was fun to laugh at British slang with my dad and swoon over Darcy and Knightley with my mom. The period pieces also made me thankful that I was stuck inside with my phone, TV, and plenty of books, instead of having to resort to a “turn about the room” in my boredom, like a 19th century heroine.

Cesar A. Cruz said that “art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.” While I don’t know if “disturbed” is the first word I would have picked to describe our collective state during the Covid-19 pandemic, I do believe that we are all fairly disturbed, disheartened, and in need of comfort. And whether it be a movie, book, album, or visual piece, art has a way of comforting us, even while the reality of our own world seems uncertain and harsh.

With that in mind, I asked four local people in the arts about their own “Quarantine Comforts”: What art has helped lift their spirits in the time of COVID-19?

Thank you to Angela Hugunin, Michael Perry, Stephanie Turner, and Rebecca Mennecke for contributing!

Angela Hugunin: student, Editor-in-Chief at NOTA

“I found that it informed my now more frequent strolls and helped deepen my appreciation of the natural world around me—I’ve been grossly underestimating trees! ”

Like many others around the world, I’ve seen an exponential jump in my screen time over these past months due to a shift in working conditions. This shift has brought me a newfound longing to spend time outdoors. I’ve found myself drawn to nature in new ways, and this has shown up in the art I’ve taken in. I read Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees over the summer, and for me it brought a perfect mix of wit and discovery. I found that it informed my now more frequent strolls and helped deepen my appreciation of the natural world around me—I’ve been grossly underestimating trees! I also really enjoyed Wayétu Moore’s She Would Be King, which I got through the Dotter’s Books subscription (hooray for local bookstores!). Moore’s novel took me to faraway places, challenged my understanding of the history of colonization (in a good way), and had me rooting for the characters’ superhuman abilities and resilience. Both books expanded my thinking and buoyed my spirits.

Michael Perry: writer

“‘art’ doesn’t always have to spell itself with a capital ‘A’ to improve the world. ”

1) This is irredeemably self-centered, but honest: my own work has been a source of retreat, if not comfort. I don't mean reading my own work and going ooh, aah, I mean cranking it out. As a freelancer and a performer I've had to redouble my writing production to counter income lost from the road. This has included some self-published projects. The side-benefit of writing and writing and writing, is that I am able to disappear into the work. Even if I'm just editing a revision, taking pen in hand and bending to the task literally allows me to duck and cover. I am also very grateful that in writing my books, turning in my columns, recording audio, I am allowed to work through hope and unease in real time. And it's a chance for me--overtly and between the lines--to acknowledge and thank those people out there striving for good amidst the grim.

2) Given all the home time, I finally finished reading Voltaire, the biography by Jean Orieux, and Voltaire in Love, by Nancy Mitford. It was dreadfully fascinating to observe as Voltaire navigated social unrest and upheaval mirroring much of what we're observing or at the precipice of today. Again, I wouldn't say this lifted my spirits, but there's always something grounding about reminding ourselves that human behavior has been twisting itself into confounding knots forever, and in reading histories like these we are given clues as to how best adjust our own course. And even more importantly, how history will judge us.

 3) During the earliest months of the pandemic, my daughters hooked my wife and me into streaming the detective comedy-drama Psych. It is a silly show and I would never have chosen it for myself, but it quickly became a shared and goofy joy that we looked forward to on those dark early nights. Its implausible plots and running gags remind me that "art" doesn't always have to spell itself with a capital "A" to improve the world. The creators of that show gifted us with a nexus for cheer, and we needed it.

Stephanie Turner, UWEC English Professor

“Nothing ever goes away. Trouble circulates, manifesting first as a strange new virus, reforming into civil unrest over police murders and mask mandates, escalating as anxiety over returning to work and school.”

You Can Go “Away,” But You’ll Always Be Somewhere 

In grade school, when it seemed everyone was sporting sew-on patches with all the latest slogans, one of my classmates sewed a skull-and-crossbones “POLLUTION” patch to the seat of her pants. She had the right idea. The slogan her patch and its placement evoked was “there’s no such thing as ‘away’.” When you throw something away, like waste, it just ends up someplace else, in some other form, like the unthinkable things piling up in a landfill or bubbling through the sewage treatment plant. It’s a simple law of physics.  

Our shared crises during the pandemic remind me of this fact. Nothing ever goes away. Trouble circulates, manifesting first as a strange new virus, reforming into civil unrest over police murders and mask mandates, escalating as anxiety over returning to work and school. To get away from it all, I watched the Netflix series “Away.” In that series, a small group of humans with big differences work together to solve a common problem: how to reach Mars safely. If only it could be that easy here on Earth. Here, there’s no “away.” We are the common problem. Still, we’re finding out way through it with our forms of expression. In my visual rhetoric class, students are looking for iconic images that creatives are remediating to comment on the present time. Thus, Edvard Munch’s classic painting “The Scream” appears on a face mask; the man and woman in Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” stand the requisite six feet apart in a cartoon.  

I find comfort in exploring these extremes. “Away” streams into my living room; iconic artwork is used to comment on our times everywhere else. Challenging inertia, another law of physics, we change direction, pick up speed, create away.

Rebecca Menneke: Associate Editor at Volume One

“Art inspires art. It’s others, truly, that inspire me.”

“Arts, culture, and creativity are one of those three key sectors that drive regional economies,” said Jo Ellen Burke, the president of the Eau Claire Public Arts Council. “Any lasting damage to the creative sector will drastically undercut our culture, wellbeing, and quality of life.” 

I’m not sure many people would consider my line of duty “art.” Though I’m a writer (thereby, creative) reporting on often the artistic elements of the community (thereby, creative), it rarely feels like an artistic endeavor to write about the hard-hitting nooks and crannies of the community. Lately, I’ve covered how racism has impacted the Chippewa Valley, the ways in which people of color have had to tirelessly work to recreate unjust systems that unfairly benefit white people, how COVID-19 has impacted the arts, local farmers, how mental health has taken a solemn hit during these – dare I say it – unprecedented times. To say that writing about these challenging topics is “art” seems to undercut the depth and complexity of these issues. But that’s precisely what I consider my line of duty: art. And discussing these nuanced issues is, in of itself, a form of art. When interviewing Jo Ellen Burke about the recent profusion of public art in downtown Eau Claire, or Wayne Marek at the Eau Claire Children’s Theatre about how theatre is impacted by a pandemic or Bre Ferraro at the Eau Claire Film Festival about filmmaking during these times, I’m constantly reminded of how the arts thrive during challenging situations – they were made to thrive – and it encourages me to create my own art during these chaotic. And my art is this: I’m taking the complex issues of the day and making them less complex, more accessible. By writing about the new murals going up downtown, I’m creating my own art. And, to be completely honest with you, it gives me a sense of purpose and meaning. Before I got my job as associate editor at Volume One, you could most likely find me in my parents’ basement, watching yet another episode of Forensic Files, still in my pajamas, bundled under a blanket and feeling purposeless – defeated, uninspired. Now I feel I have an important mission: to tell the important stories of our community and to do those stories justice. Art inspires art. It’s others, truly, that inspire me.

Getting The Buzz About Honey Literary: An Interview With Co-Founders Dorothy Chan And Rita Mookerjee

Krisany Blount

Those of us who have lived for any length of time know what it’s like to be frustrated. Sometimes things just aren’t going your way. Sometimes life is overwhelming and there’s nobody around to help. And sometimes you’ve been dealing with racism, sexism, homophobia, or other forms of oppression for so long that you reach a tipping point. In instances such as these, you have two choices: calm down and continue with your life as it is or announce that you’re done and do something to change your life.

Dorothy Chan and Rita Mookerjee chose the second option.

Over the summer, Chan, an assistant professor in the English department of the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, and Mookerjee, an assistant professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Iowa State University, founded a literary journal. Fed up with the racism and sexism of the literary world at large, they set out to create a space that is run by womxn of color and focused on BIPOC voices. That space is Honey Literary.

I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Chan and Mookerjee about the founding of Honey Literary, the formation of their masthead, and innovation in the literary world. Be sure to check out their website for additional information and to see their submission guidelines.

Krisany Blount: Congratulations on launching Honey Literary! What was the impetus for founding a literary journal?

Rita Mookerjee

Rita Mookerjee: We needed something new and bold to break up the white literary scene. We kept hoping we would see diversity and innovation from journals. Many places offer that, but we still wanted more. It was clear that we had to sculpt our own space.

Dorothy Chan: Exactly. Over the summer I got fed up, so I tweeted that I’d start a BIPOC-focused, intersectional feminist literary journal run by all BIWOC. That tweet really picked up, and I realized: this is going to happen. I texted Rita. She said she was in right away, and since then, we haven’t looked back. But that’s really our attitude with everything in life. I’m thankful to have such an amazing co-founder and best friend. Rita motivates and inspires me every day.

KB: I love the name Honey Literary! Where did it come from?

RM: In brainstorming, we wanted something really femme and fun. Dorothy and I both study and write on food extensively, so that probably influenced the name as well. We were Googling a lot and making sure our brand wasn’t like anything else out there. The saint with whom I share a first name is associated with bees. I love them; I have them tattooed on my left arm. The texture of a honeycomb parallels our masthead and category breakdown—distinct segments linked by their borders. The honeycomb pattern is unmistakable. That’s what we want to be.

KB: I don’t think I’ve ever seen categories like Valentines or Animals in a literary journal before. How did you decide which categories to include? What attracted you to Valentines and Animals in particular?

DC: Fun. When I teach creative writing, some of my students are very form and/or genre oriented, while some are very prompt oriented. “Valentines” and “Animals” are instant prompts.

Honey Literary is really about breaking down barriers—enough with the gatekeeping! Part of that is challenging the idea of what a section/category in a literary journal means. We wanted fun categories. A lot of our editors write about animals and Valentines anyway. I mean, the sonnet is fourteen lines. Just like Valentine’s Day. It’s truly the perfect romantic amuse-bouche.

Rita edits and curates the poetry section, as well as the Sex, Kink, and the Erotic section. There’s really something for everyone. We’re opening up conversations and all kinds of writing. Bring it all on.

KB: Honey Literary’s masthead is quite the collection of talent! How did you select them to be editors?

DC: Rita and I have been lucky to meet so many brilliant people in our creative and academic careers. All these editors were such natural and instinctive choices, and what’s really amazing is that they all said yes immediately! We love you: Avni Vyas, Claire Meuschke, Jessica Q. Stark, Christina Giarrusso, Zakiya Cowan, Trinity Jones, Maria Clara Melo, and Gaia Rajan.

Please check out our masthead page. We each honor some of our favorite writers here. If you’re looking for reading and/or teaching recommendations, our masthead page is a great place to start!

In addition, many members of our masthead have published books and chapbooks. Check out Claire Meuschke’s debut poetry collection, UPEND (Noemi Press, 2020) and Jessica Q. Stark’s debut poetry collection, Savage Pageant (Birds, LLC 2020).  Check out Avni Vyas’ collaborative chapbook with Anne Barngrover, Candy in Our Brains (CutBank Books 2014) and Rita Mookerjee’s chapbooks Becoming the Bronze Idol (Bone & Ink Press, 2019) and Protection Rituals (Drum Machine Editions, 2020).

Gaia Rajan has a chapbook coming out with Glass Poetry Series in 2020-2021. It’s titled Moth Rituals. Can you believe Gaia is only 16? She’s brilliant. She designed our entire website, and we’re so grateful. I’m always blown away by how her mind works.

I’ll be using our Twitter page to continually highlight staff and contributor achievements as well.

KB: What kind of space is Honey Literary hoping to create within the literary landscape?

RM: We are so proud of the BIWOC writers and editors who helped pave the way for us. To honor them, we want to set a new standard, but really, an anti-standard. We are big on hybrid forms, experimental work, and multigenre writing. Dorothy and I see so many places still publishing pretty poems about trees. I’m like, “Who cares?” Where is the urgency? I think urgency needs to come to the forefront of contemporary writing. There must be exigency as well.

KB: What can people do to support Honey Literary?

RM: Share with friends and send us your work! You can follow us @HoneyLiterary on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. We are so excited by the warm reception we have had from writers and journals we love.

KB: Anything else you’d like to share?

DC: In early October we’re debuting a special artist spotlight section called “Sticky Fingers” (a play on honey, of course). Our first spotlight is the inimitable K-Ming Chang, and we’re publishing her short story, “Invasive Species,” along with an interview with Editor Zakiya Cowan.

Our first issue debuts Winter 2021. Stay tuned!

Be sure to follow Honey Literary on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, and check out their website. Submissions for their first issue are open through Dec. 1.

Local Stories of Work, Play, Love, and Prayer: Celebrating the Release of "Hope of the Crow: Tales of Occupying Aging"

caption: Hope of the Crow cover art featuring crow atop book.

Elise Eystad

After seven years of blogging and a year of revising, author Dr. Katherine Schneider’s latest effort, Hope of the Crow: Tales of Occupying Aging has, as she puts it, at last “flown the nest.” This newest work comes after three other books: Occupying Aging: Delights, Disabilities and Daily Life, To the Left of Inspiration: Adventures in Living with Disabilities, and the children’s book Your Treasure Hunt: Disabilities and Finding Your Gold.

Organized into four sections—work, play, love, and pray—Hope of the Crow is a compilation of Schneider’s blog posts and other writings that center around her life as an elderly, disabled woman. With humorous chapter titles such as “Mercury and I are in Retrograde,” “Sighted People are Strange,” and “What If Wonder Woman had a Disability?”, the book is filled with fun anecdotes and musings on aging, faith, friendship, living with a disability, and much more. In addition, there are thought-provoking entries on privilege and ableism, like “Only You Can Stop Ableism,” “The Many Faces of Privilege,” and “Is Accessibility Nice or Necessary to You?” that discuss practical tips for interactions between sighted people—medical professionals in particular—and blind or visually impaired person.

As displayed in the title, Hope of the Crow: Tales of Occupying Aging, spends a lot of time focusing on the relationship between growing older and living with a disability. “Half the people over sixty-five will develop a disability,” Schneider says, “so I want to share a few tricks of the trade and give some realistic hope about the good life still being achievable.”

Included in the book are also tales about Schneider’s Seeing Eye dogs, as well as two poems: “An Anthem for the Americans with Disabilities Act” and “Hope of the Crow.”

And why the title Hope of the Crow?

“Crows fascinate me,” Schneider says. “They’re smart—the females make and use tools. They survive and thrive in many environments, which gives me hope in these turbulent times. They can’t sing (neither can I), but we still try to caw out our hope somehow.”

Not only is the current release of Hope of the Crow: Tales of Occupying something to celebrate after eight years of writing and editing, but it also comes at a culturally fitting time. 2020 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. According to adata.org, “The ADA is a civil rights law that prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities in all areas of public life, including jobs, schools, transportation, and all public and private places that are open to the general public. The purpose of the law is to make sure that people with disabilities have the same rights and opportunities as everyone else.” As a self-proclaimed “disabled elder activist,” Schneider says that Hope of the Crow was published on this thirtieth anniversary for a specific reason.

“This book,” Schneider says, “is the living out of the ADA.”

Hope of the Crow is available from www.wheatmark.com and online outlets. It is available in accessible format from www.bookshare.org. You can keep up to date with Dr. Kathie Schneider and find other writings on her blog at http://kathiecomments.wordpress.com.

To The Class of 2024: Reflections on Learning to Lean

Katy Hackworthy

As I think about all the amazing students & teachers getting ready to head back to school during a time of deep uncertainty, particularly the class of 2024, I can’t help but reflect on my freshman year at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Caire. That first fall was one for the books, both literally and figuratively. I spent most of my high school career as an overly ambitious & overly socialized music kid, bopping between one rehearsal or production to the next with a gaggle of pals trailing close behind me.  I wanted college to be different.  And so, I decided my first semester would be all about quality time with me, my new city, and my ever-expanding book collection. Although I was a music education major, my first love was literature, and diving into the more appealing alternate realities found in the literary world was the comfort & escape I craved in order to avoid the more intimidating task of making new friends.

“Anyone who has spent time in the Chippewa Valley during the fall understands how breathtaking it is to witness the leaves turn, to feel the breeze off the river chill our noses & fingertips a little earlier each day, to cozy up at a local coffee shop and let yourself lean in to the momentary briskness before the bitter winter returns. I spent most of those first few months walking along the river...”

Anyone who has spent time in the Chippewa Valley during the fall understands how breathtaking it is to witness the leaves turn, to feel the breeze off the river chill our noses & fingertips a little earlier each day, to cozy up at a local coffee shop and let yourself lean in to the momentary briskness before the bitter winter returns. I spent most of those first few months walking along the river, acquainting myself with this city I was unsure about. Those freedom-filled days took on various forms, but I always ended up lounging on a park bench or laying under a tall pine with a book in hand. I almost never brought along the assigned readings slumped on the desk in my cramped dorm room, neglected in favor of something I picked up at the public library or at my hometown bookshop. Those unfamiliar benches & parks ushered in a welcome sense of anonymity & freedom, something I craved coming from a small river town where it was difficult to walk down the street without running into someone eager to talk your ear off. 

I reserved my afternoons away from campus for those intimate indulgences that added up to a whole lot of self discovery & a fair amount of earned solitude. I made sure to separate the city & all I did in it from the campus that often felt claustrophobic.  These efforts at keeping my worlds distinct allowed me to more fully fall in love with this incredible place that’s imprinted itself upon me forever. In my attempt to lean into that solitude, I was also making friends with this new city & the places that marked it with character, like the public library which felt like a secret I was keeping from my peers (pro tip, students: snag a few required readings from the public library before padding the pockets of the campus bookstore!), and the record store where I would spend chilly afternoons chatting with fellow music nerds that made me feel at home. In one particularly memorable moment, I walked across the bridge just after sunrise to make it to my appointment at a clinic near Water Street only to find out I had the wrong day. To make the most of my mix up, I stumbled into a tiny coffee shop called The Goat where I found a group of old men playing cards over mugs of coffee & cracking up with the kind hearted owner. I was the only other person in the joint that early, and sitting by myself, smiling at the group of pals over my copy of the local paper, made me feel like I was a part of something good.

“Students, never forget we all deserve and need comfort & company, and those two things are hard to come by during these days of physical distancing combined with a social & cultural revolution”

Students, never forget we all deserve and need comfort & company, and those two things are hard to come by during these days of physical distancing combined with a social & cultural revolution. That’s asking more from us than many have ever given in their whole lives.  And so, I’m here to remind you to lean in and lean on. Lean in to the discomfort, lean in to the learning, lean in the small joys like books & walks by the river & your favorite barista handing you a warm mug without having to ask for your order. And of course, never forget to lean on the places & people you love for the necessary comfort along the way. 

"Selling Books Out Of A Backpack": On Persistence, Getting Scrappy, And The Power of The Notebook

Dalton Hessel

There’s a pile of multi-colored notebooks that sit on my windowsill. They aren’t leather bound journals with paper delicate enough to make the Founding Fathers blush. They are notebooks scavenged from the shelves of a local Dollar Tree. “Don’t quit your day job,” is what they tell us as writers, so this was my means of pinching pennies from the very beginning. The words that found the pages of these notebooks eventually worked their way into paperback books sold out of my backpack in between classes at UW-Eau Claire. Those same books (and some new additions) are now in cardboard boxes in the back of my Subaru named “Alfred.” While I’m far from any bestseller lists, I’m thankful for the journey these erase marks and scribbles continue to take me on. 

“Looking back on it now, I treat that first book of mine like an awkward first kiss; it wasn’t pretty, but it happened”

I published my first book when I was a senior at Hayward High School in northern Wisconsin. Looking back on it now, I treat that first book of mine like an awkward first kiss; it wasn’t pretty, but it happened. Since then, I’ve realized the importance of continually working at the craft of writing. If I am lucky, I will be able to plan for morning writing sessions while tucked in the corner of a coffee shop. The majority of the time I am opening the notes on my phone at 1 a.m. because a thought came to my head while lying awake. (Something that happens quite frequently in the Wisconsin summers while living in an apartment with no air conditioning.) I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter where you write or what you write as long as you continue to write. We can envision holding awards and the book tour autograph sessions all we want, but nothing happens until our pencil hits the page.

Creating these days can be a rather daunting and scary process. Not that it hasn’t always been, but putting yourself out there for the Internet to see is intimidating. I’ve gotten into the habit of sharing short pieces of my poems on Instagram and Facebook in hopes to stir up some interest with my writings. There’s something about sharing what’s on your heart at the time with the world that often holds me back from hitting that “post” button. I think we as writers owe it to ourselves to be true to the words we put on the page, but there’s always that lingering fear of it being rejected by the world. The thought of “but what if I don’t?” has started to overpower the fears that riddle me.

I believe that I will always hold onto those cheap notebooks and I will continue to buy them as I move forward as a writer. Their covers are starting to crack and the pages that still smell of coffee shops throughout the Midwest are frayed and worn. But despite their decay, they’ll continue to serve as a reminder to me of the writing process and the beauty that one can find in writing yourself out of the bargain bin. 

Dalton Hessel’s most recent book the ramblings of a twentysomething can be found here.

Also, be sure to check out The Northern Nerd and follow their page on Facebook to see what’s happening in the northwoods of Wisconsin. 

Finding Fellowship, Solitude, and Inspiration in Door County

Dan Lyksett

I’m sitting on a Leopold bench at the edge of a clearing at the Write on, Door County writers  retreat.  It’s mid-afternoon, early August, and it’s the fourth day of my weeklong writer’s residency. I’m wrestling with the main character of a short story I’m writing. I know what he’s doing, but I don’t understand why. There is a truth he is missing. I am missing. Perhaps I don’t know him well enough. I’m hoping a walk along one of the trails on the 39-acre retreat or the butterflies flitting among the prairie flowers or the scolding of the blue jays will lead me to knowledge.

I have my notebook with me, but my computer is in the house I’m sharing for the week with two other writers, Katie Vagnino, who lives in the Twin Cities, and Sarah Stuteville, of Seattle. They are back in the house, writing. Both are educated and accomplished writers. Katie’s prose and poetry have been widely published and her first book, Imitation Crab, will be released by Finishing Line Press. Sarah is a former journalist who reported stories from the Middle East, East Africa, South Asia and the former Soviet Union, and her memoir pieces have been widely published. Both have taught writing on the university level.

And me? I took one college English class, fall semester 1970, freshman English Composition, taught in old Schofield Hall by a guy named Will Jennings. I only remember that nearly every Friday we wrote while he fiddled with a guitar. You might recognize the name. Will Jennings left teaching shortly thereafter and went on to become an award-winning songwriter, a Hall of Famer whose writing credits include the lyrics to “Tears in Heaven” and “My Heart Will Go On.”

I took the class pass-fail. I passed.

Full disclosure: I still don’t consider myself a “writer.” I’m a retired veteran newspaperman who is trying to become a writer and is appreciative of some small successes I’ve had along the way. A few years ago I attended my first writing workshop, one organized by the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild. After the first day I went home, sat on our patio sipping a beer and told my wife I wasn’t sure I was going back. I was intimidated by the smarts of those writers, their understanding of the bones, muscle and  tendons it takes to craft a piece of fiction. I only knew about deadlines and the inverted pyramid; elementary truths like “Show, don’t tell” were new to me. The next morning I braved the country roads back to Cirenica, and I have benefited from the knowledge and generosity of the writers I met there ever since.

It happens again at Write On, Door County. The night of our arrival, Katie, Sarah and I sit at the picnic table on the deck behind the house getting to know each other and talking a bit about our plans for the week. I mention I’d brought some books to read including a friend’s manuscript I’d agreed to look over. I believe it was Katie who gave me a rather odd look and said, “It’s nice of you to use some of your time here for that.” It was the first inkling of something I was to learn. I’m here to write.

The next morning I open up a short story I started about a year ago. I once thought it was finished. But earlier this year my friend, novelist Nick Butler, was generous enough to give it a read. He basically told me, “It ends too soon.”

During my week at Write On, Door County, I never open another story, and I never read another word of the books I’d brought along. Katie, Sarah and I might see each other briefly during the work day, grabbing another cup of coffee or tea or a snack, but we are mostly in our own spaces. Working. Writing. I usually write with a classical music station playing in the background, but I swear off news and social media for the week, and I don’t want to disturb the quiet focus permeating the house. My radio stays silent.

We socialize in the evening, sometimes venturing out into the charms of Door County for a careful supper in the Age of Covid. One night Katie arranges for us to introduce Sarah to a traditional Wisconsin fish boil. But mostly we sit around that table on the back patio, sharing life stories and wine and beer, talking about goals, what we had done or hoped to do. And in the morning we go back to work.

As I sit on that Leopold bench, I am only yards away from The Coop. Norbert Blei is a Door County writing legend who worked as a reporter in Chicago for a time but became a renowned writer of non-fiction, fiction and poetry. He advocated for Door County and is revered there. He did much of his writing in the converted shack that is Blei’s Coop. It’s been moved here to provide an inspirational workspace for the visiting writers. I could write in the shack. During my introductory tour, Jarod Santek,  the Write On, Door County artistic director, showed me where the key was hidden. But Blei accomplished much of what I aspire toward. I must earn my in.

“Maybe it’s the butterflies or the shorebirds I don’t recognize calling overhead but sitting at that bench I suddenly discover the truth my main character has been ignoring. I’ve been ignoring”

Maybe it’s the butterflies or the shorebirds I don’t recognize calling overhead but sitting at that bench I suddenly discover the truth my main character has been ignoring. I’ve been ignoring. I jot down some quick notes before the thought disappears and hurry back to my desk. From my window I can see across the street where workers are putting the finishing touches on Write On, Door County’s new Writing Center, a beautiful structure housing offices and space for writers to gather. I open my story and search for when my character might first suspect his truth, or perhaps where I hint at his lack of awareness.

It’s late afternoon on the last day of my Write On, Door County residency. I finish the first draft of the story. I save it, close it, and I have not opened it since. I’m letting the story breath, putting some space between it and myself so when I approach it again we can introduce ourselves as strangers. Discover if the truth still holds true.

I owe Katie and Sarah. Without knowing it, they taught me what a writing residency should be. I owe Write On, Door County. They generously share an inspiring space that moved me. And I owe the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild. They made it possible. I will try to repay these debts.

How The Guild Inspired the Midwest Artist Academy

B.J Hollars 

If there’s one thing I’ve learned throughout my years with the Guild, it’s that change always begins with you. No, not me, but you, reader. Our Guild members have always pushed us into new and exciting directions, directions that have expanded our membership, dreamed new programs, and inspired unique retreats.

“For the past five summers, I’d often find myself sitting on a porch at Cirenaica or The Priory when, inevitably, some writing retreat participant would amble over and say, “You know, it sure would be nice if young people had this sort of opportunity.””

For the past five summers, I’d often find myself sitting on a porch at Cirenaica or The Priory when, inevitably, some writing retreat participant would amble over and say, “You know, it sure would be nice if young people had this sort of opportunity.”

They were right.

Add to this the dozens of emails I’d receive annually in which parents would plead for the same thing.  “My child loves art,” they’d write.  “But we don’t know how best to support them.”

James Joyce Centre

Fast forward to last summer, when a few friends and I had the opportunity to teach high school-aged writers in Ireland.  After a week spent roaming beaches, cemeteries, and soaking in culture wherever we could, the students put down their pens just long enough to prepare for their final reading at The James Joyce Centre.  Nerves emerged as the students revised right up until showtime, at which point they stood bravely before the mic to share the fruits of their labor.  By evening’s end, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.  As my fellow instructors and I observed the tight-knit community that had formed, we joked, “Gosh, we should really start at arts-centered high school…”

Ireland Instructors Maggie Pahos, Ban Hao, B.J. Hollars, Chris Clartigue in Inishbofin, Ireland.

And then we sort of did!

Introducing The Midwest Artist Academy--a transformative precollege experience for gifted, talented, and diverse high school-aged artists from the Midwest and beyond! (Or as I like to call it: "Hogwarts with a different sort of magic.")

With offerings in five disciplines--creative writing, theatre, dance, visual arts, and music and composition--our weeklong experience on the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire campus will conclude with a culminating collaborative showcase at Pablo Center at the Confluence. Our goal: to grow as artists, and to grow as people. Click here to learn more about our amazing instructors coming to us from throughout the world!

“The Guild proved that when passionate people come together in common cause, anything is possible. ”

Of course, none of this would have ever come to be were it not for the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild.  The Guild proved that when passionate people come together in common cause, anything is possible.  The key is bringing those people together.  And now, Guild members can help!

How Can You Support The Next Generation Of Artists?

First and foremost, by staying in touch with the Midwest Artist Academy!  Please subscribe to our newsletter by typing your email address into the “Subscribe” bar right here on the homepage.  You can also like us on Facebook and Instagram.  By connecting with us—and extending your own connections to interested parties (high school-aged artists, as well as their parents)—we’re able to direct all money toward scholarships rather than marketing.  Word of mouth is the most powerful tool we’ve got, which means you are the greatest gift we’ve got!  Tag your friends, send personal emails, messages, texts, etc.—collectively, we can spread the word far and wide!

Second, if you’re in a position to give, please do!  Donations of any size are greatly appreciated.  Consider making in a one-time donation here or make a pledge to help us long term!  If you or your business are interested in funding a scholarship or partial scholarship, please reach out at info@midwestartistacademy.org.  For 375.00, you can sponsor a half-scholarship for a student.  For 650.00, you can sponsor a full scholarship.  You can even name the scholarship in honor of, or in memory of, someone you admire.  There are plenty of perks to those who give (in addition to changing the life of a young artist!), and you need only drop us a note to learn more!

In closing, much like the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild, please know that the Midwest Artist Academy isn't mine--it's ours. Let’s work together to support the creative economy, support local arts and artists, and support young artists dedicated to crafting a better world. By helping the MAA, you are helping young artists find their future in the arts.

Thanks to the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Foundation, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, the UWEC English Department, and Pablo Center at the Confluence. And most of all, thanks to you. 

Announcing: BIPOC Workshop Group Hosted By Yia Lor

The Guild is grateful for the opportunity to support a new BIPOC-centered workshop group hosted by CVWG board member Yia Lor. Our hope is that this writing group will, as Yia puts it, “allow BIPOC writers to gather, share, and grow in a space that centers itself around lifting diverse voices.” Please see below for Yia’s complete message! And thank you to all future members for taking part!

A New Group For BIPOC Writers

Yia Lor

Writing can be a lonely endeavor, but we are truly in tremendous company here in the Valley. The support I have received from other fellow writers is immeasurable, and the many workshops and events offered through the Guild have greatly enriched my writing. 

As I continue on this journey though, I often wonder where all the other writers are who share stories about girls who speak English at school but swear in Hmong at home, girls whose classmates make fun of their hair because of the texture, and girls whose friends pull at their eyes and ask why their faces are so flat. I certainly don't want to believe I am the only Hmong writer with these experiences.

“My hope is this workshop group will allow BIPOC writers to gather, share, and grow in a space that centers itself around lifting diverse voices.”

My hope is this workshop group will allow BIPOC writers to gather, share, and grow in a space that centers itself around lifting diverse voices. I look forward to conversations about character development and mind-blowing plot twists, and I’m especially excited to trade stories about grandfathers who grew peaches to remember a home left behind and mothers who packed rice with pork and mustard greens for school lunches.

Mark your calendars for our first meeting, which will be held Thursday, August 20th from 7-8:30pm. We will meet virtually on Google Meet (https://meet.google.com/ifz-ghyx-nfy). You will need a Google account to join. This first meeting will focus on getting to know each other and how we want to structure our time together.

For more information, drop the CVWG a note by way of Facebook message or email: chippewavalleywritersguild@gmail.com.

Happy Pride Month! Celebrate with this great list of LGBTQIA+ writers to read & support!

Katy Hackworthy

Art, particularly writing, is one of the most impactful mediums we possess for truth telling. June is Pride month, a time to celebrate and honor  the LGBTQIA+ community’s history, resilience, and joy. The first Pride, known now as the Stonewall Uprising, was a riot & a protest led by Black trans women such as Marsha P. Johnson and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy. We must center those radical roots while also acknowledging victories up to this point and fighting for queer liberation, this month and every month.  As readers and writers, an excellent form of celebration is supporting and uplifting LGBTQIA+ writers and supporting their collected works. 

Katy Hackworthy (left) with poet Mary Margaret

credit: Justin Patchin

As a Queer artist in my twenties, writing, and particularly poetry, gave me a vehicle to explore my identity in a more expansive and intimate way. During my senior year at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, I learned about a writing conference interested in bodies of work that interrogated the theme of Revelations. I saw the opportunity to submit my work as a simultaneous opportunity to explore how my Queerness revealed itself to me over the years as well as how coming out (and coming out again, and again, and again) effected my life. I visited a friend in Montreal over winter break, and dedicated a good chunk of the trip to creating a micro chapbook of sorts, which led to greater discoveries about my sexuality, my experience as a closeted teenager, and how my queerness impacted my relationships.

“From growing up in a conservative household to being part of a largely Queer friend group, I was a professional at expressing myself differently depending on the company I was in, but as corny as it sounds, the solace of a blank page was the safety blanket I needed to truly make sense of how I connected to my community, my family, and my own sexuality. ”

From growing up in a conservative household to being part of a largely Queer friend group, I was a professional at expressing myself differently depending on the company I was in, but as corny as it sounds, the solace of a blank page was the safety blanket I needed to truly make sense of how I connected to my community, my family, and my own sexuality. I am grateful for the ways writing has helped me learn about myself, and I am even more grateful for all the LGBTQIA+ writers whose words and experiences made me feel seen along the way.

Even though I believe we need to go deeper than the sentiment “representation matters”, I must acknowledge it truly does wonders for folx in my community, especially young people. I still remember reading the scene in Fried Green Tomatoes by Fannie Flagg where Idgie retrieves honeycomb for the object of her affections, Ruth, and how deep and true their love felt on the page. As a precocious 11 year old who was far from understanding who she was, seeing two women who loved each other, even in a yellowed old book that could only explore queerness on a more surface, made me feel like that kind of love was possible for me. I feel so much delight knowing how many more books are readily available for young members of the LGBTQIA+ community who may not have to search or hide the way I did for much of my youth. 

This June, I hope ya’ll celebrate your LGBTQIA+ friends, families, and community members by learning more about our shared history, by lifting up their unique experiences, and by reading some of the incredible writers in this list compiled by me and my fellow Queer poet, Dorothy Chan (see above!). Don’t forget to support these folx every other month of the year, too--happy reading and Happy Pride! 

“Like A Snow Globe Capturing Time”: Jessi Peterson on Poetry, Place, and her new collection, Century Farm

Jessi Peterson—poet, children’s librarian, and lover of landscapes—recently published Century Farm (Finishing Line Press)—a collection of poems which explores, among other things, the evolving rural world in the face of ever encroaching suburbia.  The collection’s title is taken from a poem of the same name (available here), which placed third in Wisconsin People & Ideas 2011 poetry contest.

 According to poet Max Garland, Jessi is a poet “who knows the names of things and where they belong…”.  Poet Jeannie Roberts adds that Jessi’s work “embraces us with her tender renderings of animals, plant life, and of lost lives…”. We recently (virtually) sat down with Jessi to chat about her new work, the publication process, and the trickiest part about writing poems.

B.J. Hollars: What was the impetus for Century Farm?  How did it take shape?

Jessi Peterson: So much of my writing is tied into the natural world, holding it high and hoping others notice and practice looking for themselves. When you know what a roadside flower is and when to expect it to bloom, you will notice when it is absent. Or suddenly there – when I attended one of the Guild workshops at Cirenaica and walked out along the drive I saw Deptford pinks blooming, which I hadn’t seen since I was 8, but still recognized.  It only made sense to string the things I have noticed on the earth that I have loved, whether it be here or in southern Illinois.  For me, the book both celebrates and mourns the world we are losing as spaces get built up, changing the norms and soundscape and eroding the ties between the natural world, the agricultural world and the growing demands of suburbia. The trickier part may have been the ordering of poems, deciding what chimes with what, putting poems written recently next to older poems and vice versa, back and forth until it flows.  In my mind, at least!

BH: You're a master of rendering landscape on the page.  Are some landscapes harder than others?  Any tips for fellow writers?

JP: The old chestnut about writing what you know holds true for me – I think immersion in a space is key.  I’m privileged to have lived consistently in one space for 40 years, to have learned the landscape as a child and to keep learning it anew every day.  As a kid what interests you is smaller and less guarded – you can go anywhere that is interesting, whether that be through the swamp, down a cliff, up a tree or through a culvert.  All of that gives you a very immersive perspective if you can hang on to it as a adult, although it’s been some time since I’ve tried wiggling through a culvert! Focusing on place encourages me to take the long view, to think about the land as it was, as it is and as it will be, and I am just a tiny part of that, so there is no room to be overly self-involved in what I write.  I mostly want to make a little enclave of words to evoke a particular place or a moment, like a snow globe capturing time.  What to feel about it slips in there sideways, maybe.

BH: How does place inform your poems?

JP: If this is a focus you are interested in, keep in mind it doesn’t have to be a giant space or a landscape with a big bang, just one you are in enough to know the rhythms of the space, to notice what is surprising and of interest.  And read – get your hands on field guides to everything.  Birds, bugs, wildflowers, rocks, mushrooms – all of it.  Knowing the names of our neighbors, be they animal, vegetable or mineral gives you a really rich vocabulary to write from, but is also a kind of shareable magic and respect, calling our fellows by their names. 

BH:  Can you share a bit about how the book found its home with Finishing Line Press?

JP: I submitted the book to Finishing Line’s chapbook contest for women, which  I think is open now!  I didn’t win the prize, but was selected for publication.  Finishing Line only does chapbooks, so they are a great place for shorter, more focused collections.  Several other local authors have had their works published through Finishing Line and had positive feedback about the press.  I was particularly pleased to have cover input – the cover is a historic plat map showing where many of the poems are drawn from.

BH: Can you tell us a bit about a particularly tricky poem?  How did it find its final draft?

JP: All of the poems have been gone over a number of times and I’m sure each felt tricksy when I  was messing with them,  but the one I struggled with most is one that actually isn’t in the book but perhaps should be.  I have gone round and round the mulberry bush with this poem and am not yet certain it is finished, but it’s time for it to be somewhere besides in my brain. The title is a thing my Dad used to say.

Want a sample of Jessi’s work?  Scroll below for “Blue Bobbie’s”!

Blue Bobbie’s

Always the same answer

when I asked where they were going:

“To Blue Bobbie’s.”

Of course they went to the feed mill,

the bank, the laundromat. Still,

I pictured it, an ice-cream parlor

carnival, impossibly bright, loud

with forceful carnie patter from the

implement and seed dealers,

their voices like old roof slates,

charming, but with hard, chipped edges.

Our quiet, worn neighbors

held weathered faces silent

over fizzy, violent colored

ice-cream drinks.

A flashing neon, peanut-shell strewn palace,

presided over by a giant of a bald man

whose soda-jerk smile hung

in the calm cobalt sky of his face

like a lazy crescent moon.

A juke-joint only just across the creek

in the blue-green haze of possibility,

slightly west of my perfect, placid life.

Tonight the dog across the creek keeps me awake,

the convulsive laughter of his bark floating

on the cold, still night water.

I wonder if he’s at Blue Bobbie’s.

We Stand With You

We at the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild stand with the Black Lives Matter movement’s campaign against violence and systemic racism towards Black people, and support them in advocating for freedom, liberation, and justice.

The murder of George Floyd, and the protests that have followed, has reaffirmed what has always been true: that systemic racism is woven into our daily lives. White people are the beneficiaries of this system, and at the expense of people of color.

The Chippewa Valley Writers Guild believes words are vitally important. Words launch movements, educate, build empathy, and shape the world. But beyond words, our actions matter, too. 

As outlined on our website, the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild is open to all. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, ancestry, color, age, familial status, disability, religion, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, lawful sources of income, national origin, or any other discriminatory practice. Our door is open. 

And yet our door is not open nearly enough.  We acknowledge that our organization’s own privileges, combined with institutional policies and practices, has created the conditions that make it easy to overlook systemic racism within our group.  To rectify this, we must take a much closer look at ourselves, and our organization.  We must acknowledge our shortcomings, too.

Since our founding in 2016, our organization has failed to adequately recruit Black, Brown, Indigenous, and all people of color both in our membership and as our guest speakers and presenters.  We will redouble our outreach efforts, as well as continue to make fundamental changes to our offerings, in order to more fully become an inclusive organization.  We are committed to elevating and centering underrepresented voices in all facets of our organization and will seek out every opportunity to do so. 

Since our founding in 2016, our organization has failed to adequately recruit Black, Brown, Indigenous, and all people of color both in our membership and as our guest speakers and presenters.  We will redouble our outreach efforts, as well as continue to make fundamental changes to our offerings, in order to more fully become an inclusive organization.  We are committed to elevating and centering underrepresented voices in all facets of our organization and will seek out every opportunity to do so. 

Additionally, we will draw greater attention to inequities in the publishing industry, both locally and nationally.  In the United States, the voices and perspectives of white writers are still overwhelmingly elevated over writers of color. Not because these stories are somehow more valuable or valid, but because of deep-seated structural inequities that exist in publishing, educational institutions, and the media. As a service to our Guild members and anyone else who needs it, we’ve assembled a partial list of resources on how to collectively rectify this. Click here to view the list.  

Finally, we pledge to work with our partner organizations—the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission, Pablo Center at the Confluence, and the UWEC Foundation, among others—to ensure that equity, diversity, and inclusivity remains at the core of our shared mission to help create a more equitable world.

 Together we can—and must—do better.  And we will, by way of our words and actions. 

What Can We Do To Diversify Publishing?

What books are published, and which writers are supported, has traditionally been defined by the privilege of the white majority. In the United States, the voices and perspectives of white writers are still overwhelmingly elevated over writers of color. Not because these stories are somehow more valuable or valid, but because of deep-seated structural inequities that exist in publishing, educational institutions, and the media.  

We can change this. People who value the beauty, the diversity, and the power of words can help in many ways.  Please see below for a list of resources for what you can do today to work toward more equitable publishing practices.

• Increase demand for books by writers of color. Publishing is predominantly a white system, one that runs on profit. Publishers will publish books that sell. Increasing demand for books by writers of color will increase publishing opportunities for writers of color. Read widely and read thoughtfully. Read outside your comfort zone. Not sure where to start? Dotters Books in Eau Claire has curated a list of books for their Anti-Racist Book Club. 

• Support Black-owned bookstores. Black-owned bookstores are amazing supporters of Black writers. They give platforms and voices to those who write outside of the white viewpoint. But independent bookstores, which were already struggling in the era of online retailers, have been hard hit by the pandemic. Support Black-owned bookstores by ordering online and having books shipped to you. 

• Support nonprofits that support Black writers. Writers need time to write, and organizations such as Kimbilio Fiction, Hurston/Wright Foundation and Rhode Island Writers Colony offer workshops and readings that exclusively support Black writers. 

• Build empathy early. Building empathy starts when children are young. Children must have access to books that feature people of color, ideally those written and illustrated by people of color. In 2018, only 10% of children’s books included a Black character (for context, 50% were about white children, and 27% were about animals). Again, your purchasing power can help. EmbraceRace has many recommendations, as does PBS Kids. A Mighty Girl has curated a list specifically of picture books featuring Black girls. We Need Diverse Books produces and promotes diverse books, writers, illustrators and publishing professionals. They have also compiled a list of resources on race, equity, anti-racism, and inclusion. Empathy matters; representation matters. 

• Offer Book Suggestions. Not all of us have the means to purchase books or make donations. If you are an active card holder for the L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library in Eau Claire, consider sending them a suggestion for purchase. Please read their Anti-Racist Pledge.

• Request a Conversation Kit. Our local libraries also offer a wealth of resources on being anti-racist, including family conversation kits that can be requested through the catalog. 

 This partial list is only the beginning.  Collectively, we must continue to build resources to work toward a more equitable publishing industry for all.

Hope Is One Foot In Front of the Other

Julian Emerson

Daily walks through my neighborhood have been especially lonely for the past six weeks. 

I often begin my days with early morning strolls navigating the crosshatch grid of streets that surround my home in Eau Claire’s East Side Hill neighborhood. As I traverse sidewalks in the pre-dawn shadows before the sun peeks above the eastern horizon, I appreciate the still-sleeping world, the quiet around me, interrupted only by the sound of my footsteps on pavement. 

However, in recent weeks that solitude I used to appreciate before my day explodes in a haze of phone calls, text messages, deadlines and other tasks too many to pack into the time allotted has become disquieting, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. 

These days, I am surrounded by the sound of silence. 

Our new, uncertain lives in this time of COVID-19 are teaching us many lessons the hard way. Chief among them is the value of human interaction. Gatherings of all sorts -- from family birthday celebrations, to graduations, to meeting another couple for dinner at a restaurant, to grabbing a cup of coffee with a friend -- have disappeared. Even chance meetings are rare as we seclude ourselves in our homes, fearful of catching or spreading the dreaded virus. 

My walks used to include periodic greetings, mostly with neighborhood friends I know, sometimes with strangers. I took them too much for granted before, accepted that they were just a part of my day. Now I miss those simple “hellos,” affirmations of friendliness, that I matter in some sense, or at least am acknowledged.

In fact, I miss all of my previous socialization, meaningful conversations, laughs and hugs and smiles. I even miss the tougher talks, those times when people challenged me, or pointed out some facet of my life that needed improvement. 

For an extrovert like me, someone fueled by human interaction, this quiet time feels like a prison sentence.

The sky was blue-gray when I began a recent walk, passing familiar bungalows, yards, and trees as I inhaled the air fresh with the scent of spring. I had struggled emotionally the past few days, my heart heavy, but I felt my spirits begin to lift as the sky brightened. The chorus of birds in trees overhead signaled the promise of a new day, a sign that our silent winter was at an end, that a new, brighter time is ahead. 

A moment later an eagle soared above, floating effortlessly, majestically, before alighting atop a nearby pine tree. I stopped, appreciating the moment, a time to cast aside troubles and simply enjoy being alive.

I continued along my way, and a short time later unexpectedly encountered a friend hanging a Happy Birthday sign in the yard of a friend of hers. The sign was for her friend’s son. COVID-19 meant the youngster couldn’t host a traditional birthday party. But he would have at least one birthday wish. He appreciated it, based on his big smile as he looked out the window.

A short time later my walk took me to one of my favorite neighborhood spots, a hillside perch that offers an expansive view of downtown Eau Claire and beyond, a place I sometimes visit just to think. 

The building I entered countless times during my many years working for the Leader-Telegram newspaper lay below, along with churches, restaurants, coffee houses and other sites that have become so much a part of my past. A short ways off the Chippewa River flowed, mist rising above it, and then UW-Eau Claire. Other buildings dotted the landscape as my eyes looked further south, west, and north, many built decades ago and some more recently. 

My gaze revealed the streets are still quieter than normal, the number of vehicles on them less than what it used to be. Sidewalks are still nearly void of pedestrians too. Restaurants and other shops are still mostly shuttered as a government-issued stay-at-home order remains in effect to prevent the spread of COVID-19. 

But there is hope here. The snow has melted, replaced by a bright-green world. Nearby trees and bushes left naked during winter are sprouting buds and leaves. A pair of robins hops across the grass, chittering cheerily as if carrying on a breakfast conversation. A passing bicyclist waves. 

Much as the birds sing, we too will regain our voices and greet each other again one day. Like the flowing river, we will move forward, overcoming obstacles in our way. We will meet together again, more grateful for our friendships and for our community. 

Julian Emerson is a journalist based in Eau Claire.

Hope Is The Thing That Burns--When No Oxygen Remains

Justine Vandenberg

Hope is the thing that burns —

When no oxygen remains.

And Hope is the thing that speaks,

When all else has gone silent.

It is seen and heard,

In the darkest night—

Sometimes soft, the fiercest whisper,

But sometimes thunderous,

A trembling, all-encompassing shout.

and

Sometimes it comes like a song,

Melodic and easing to the heart,

While other times, like a

Train

Bearing down on you,

Hitting you like a bucket of cold water and reminding you to move,

Act, Do, Reach —Now.

And maybe it is one word,

Or maybe it’s something seen in the eyes,

Maybe it’s the call of the wind, stirring your soul,

Or maybe it’s the sight of your name, imprinted on the heart of someone you love.

Maybe Hope is all of these things, and

More.

But what you name it matters not.

Because, still,

Hope is the thing that speaks to us,

When all else remains

Silent.

And Hope is the thing that

Burns —

Ever the brighter —

Even when the oxygen’s all

Gone.

Justine Vandenberg is a high-schooler from Indiana who has a fierce passion for writing and poetry. In fact, she would equate writing poetry to the necessity of breathing. She aspires one day to publish her various novel ideas, but regardless of publication, simply enjoys being with words and ideas.

Choosing His Own Adventure: Ken Szymanski Named 2020-2022 Eau Claire Writer-in-Residence

All photos credited to: Justin Patchin Photography

B.J. Hollars

Ken Szymanski’s writing journey began with a spiral notebook.  The then-eighth grader flipped to its opening page, held his pencil at the ready, and waited for inspiration to strike.  It did, eventually, in the form of a Choose Your Own Adventure book.  Rather than tell readers what would happen next, Szymanski asked them to choose. 

“I wrote this story about a guy named Jeff Remington who was wrongly accused of a crime and put in prison,” Szymanski says with a chuckle.  “The whole book is him trying to escape.”

Today, Szymanski’s no longer the 8th grade writer, but the 8th grade writing teacher at DeLong Middle School.  Which gives him the opportunity to regularly return to that notebook.  At the start of each school year, Szymanski reads Escape from Cell 7346 to his class, urging students to work together to make the right decisions to set Remington free.  Yet even after well over 100 readings, Remington’s freedom remains elusive.

“The book’s still undefeated,” Szymanski laughs. 

For decades, Szymanski has continued to live his own writing adventure—a journey that’s taken him from the spiral notebooks of his youth to the pages of the Leader Telegram and Volume One.  Along the way, he’s also earned a pair of Grand Slam titles in the Eau Claire Running Water Poetry Slam, as well as having his work featured on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Wisconsin Life and Converge Radio’s Bend in the River and Oddly Enough radio dramas.  Most recently, his journey has led him to the pinnacle of local writing, earning him the title of Eau Claire’s 2020-2022 Writer-in-Residence.

Szymanski’s thrilled to serve in the position most recently held by outgoing Eau Claire Writer-in-Residence Karen Loeb.  His mission: to bring writing to the masses.

“I really want to get writers into the community in different ways,” Szymanski said.  While this work begins by hosting the L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library’s popular Writers Read series, Szymanski also hopes to extend his reach beyond the library’s doors by providing writing-related opportunities in places like classrooms and nursing homes, too.

Additionally, Szymanski hopes to widen the region’s literary audience by including artists from different genres.  “I want to collaborate more with musicians,” Szymanski says.  “I think writing and music go together really well.  Good writing should have the rhythm of music,” he explains, “and the best music tells a story.” 

He’s also welcomed local photographers into this collaborative mix by way of a forthcoming project titled “Snapshots,” which will encourage writers to take inspiration from the photographs and put it into words.  Writers will then record their work with the photograph serving as an accompanying image. 

Finally, Szymanski also looks forward to partnering with existing programs such as the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild, the Chippewa Valley Book Fest,  and Writers Anonymous.  He hopes to support current writers, while also bringing new and diverse voices into the fold.   

Though the title of writer-in-residence comes with much acclaim, Szymanski confirms that his role doesn’t make the writing itself any easier.  Szymanski still approaches the blank page with the same humility he always has.  

“My first drafts are so rough and unpolished,” Szymanski says, “and sometimes I’m not even writing about the things I’m supposed to be writing about.  I have to sand it down, smooth out the rough edges, and try to figure out what I’m trying to say.  It’s a long process,” he continues.  “But it’s probably like that for a lot of writers.”

One key to staying motivated, Szymanski says, is remembering that every polished piece of writing started out as something quite different.  When all readers receive is the final draft, it’s easy to forget the hard work that went on behind-the-scenes.  Yet it’s the unobservable hard work that makes all the difference, he explains.  A good piece of writing has the potential to become a great piece, but the writer must put in the time.

And for Szymanski, time comes at a premium.  As a dedicated husband, father, and teacher, it’s would be easy for writing to fall to the wayside.  Yet Szymanski continues to make it a priority. 

“Whenever I have the time to write, I’ve got to use it,” Szymanski says.  “It doesn’t matter if it’s early in the morning, or late at night, or the afternoon.  I don’t have an ideal time.  And the same is true of place,” he adds.  “I don’t have a set up with lots of souvenirs and knickknacks to inspire me.  It doesn’t really matter if I’m sitting at the library, or a coffee shop, or a desk in my basement.  The writing transports me to a different place anyway.”

Though on occasion, Szymanski has been known indulge in his very own makeshift writers’ retreat in a camper parked in his driveway.  He’ll invite a few friends, they’ll cook some hotdogs, and then, they’ll get down to work.  “It’s may not be as polished as a writers’ retreat,” Ken says, “but the spirit’s the same and the outcome’s the same.”

Writing, Szymanski says, is for everyone.

“You don’t need to wait for permission.  You just need to sit down and write.” 

Hope Is The Thing In Quiz Question #7

Ken Szymanski

For the latest in a long line of quarantine “distance learning” assignments, my 8th grade students listened to an episode of This American Life. In the story, a nine-year-old girl bombards her father with the biggest questions in the universe. Where do we go when we die? Is heaven another planet? How do you know what is true? And so on.

After listening to the story, students logged into an online quiz. It started with fact-recall and then became more abstract. The final question—Quiz Question 7—echoed the one that the dad in the story had the hardest time answering: What is love?

This question was my student teacher’s suggestion. I was skeptical. If I had been asked “What is love?” in 8th grade, I would have responded, “How am I supposed to know?” Plus, the novelty of distance learning had worn thin. Jaded students were no longer giving their all with these ungraded “supplemental” assignments; I didn’t imagine they were eager to dig into such a complex question. Sometimes it felt like these assignments were simply an item to cross off a list, something in the way of them getting on with their days.

Trying to create something more personal, I’ve been recording and sending the students a series of fake radio call-in shows based on the assignments. I actually added a laugh track after my jokes, to make it sound less lonely.

When I opened the quiz responses and got to Quiz Question 7, the first student had written a quick “i don’t know.” Others, though, dove in deep. Some answers were so profound that I put them in a Google search to see if they had gotten that answer online. (A couple did.) But some of these 8th graders, perhaps because of the story or the extended isolation, had turned into sages and philosophers.

Unlike the dad in the story who struggled to answer the “What is love?” question, 8th graders wrote of putting someone before yourself, seeing beyond the façade, and a sense of belonging that “keeps you sane.”

One student wrote, “Love is not giving up. It’s more than just a word; it’s a feeling, it’s something you show. Love is something that lingers on your brain even when you don’t know it’s there.”

Another student offered one idea from each side of his brain: “Love could be something purely chemical, its purpose is keeping our species alive. Or it’s something of magic. Magic powerful enough to bind people together. You choose which one you believe in.”

I can’t imagine formulating those thoughts when I was in 8th grade. I’d have been more like this student who took a comical approach, simply writing, “Kevin Love is a player for the Cleveland Cavaliers.”

While some took it lightly, others explored potential perils. One extended answer ended with, “Love can make you feel whole but it also can break you down until you are nothing. Loving is a dangerous game and you don’t know if you can come out on top.”

Another only saw the dangers, simply stating that love is pain.

That’s undeniable. Still, some chose to see beyond pain and even, in the case of one student, beyond our physical existence. She listened to the story with her mom and admitted that they both cried. Yet this teenager took solace in the idea that “energy is neither created nor destroyed. And so that’s why when someone dies, we can still feel their energy even though they’re not there.”

That’s love, “something that lingers on your brain even when you don’t know it’s there.” And the unwavering belief in it, voiced from quarantined middle schoolers—the next generation—is something more.

It is hope.  

Ken Szymanski is the 2020-2022 Eau Claire Writer in Residence. For more on Ken’s writing, click here.

Hope Is The Mantis, Named After Prayer, Killing and Eating Her Lover Mid-Sex-Act

Nick Demske

I just read Max [Garland’s] entry and the Whitman he referenced reminded me of a quote attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Mary (Magdelene).  The quote, in the translation I’ve read, is “…..be encouraged in the presence of the diversity of forms of nature.” The first time I read it I said “…….huh?”.  Cause it’s wordy. But it’s also confusing in context. It comes as the end of a few-sentence answer to the disciple Peter when he asks about sin (“…..what is the sin of the world?”).  So this is ostensibly Jesus’ recommendation for safeguarding against discouragement and sin.

That’s weird.  That’s freaking weird.  If someone was like “How do I stop from sinning?” (granted that’s not the question here, necessarily), and I was like “Be encouraged in the presence of the diversity of forms of nature,” you’d be like “Cool, cool……Nick is doing drugs.” 

But isn’t that the answer the scientific research keeps confirming for us?  I love how ancient wisdom cultures keep getting co-signed by scientific research, millennia after the fact.  Science is like “Turns out meditation is crazy good for you,” and gnostic traditions are like “No shit, y’all.  We done been said that.”

I recently heard second hand from a woman who does literacy work (like myself) about a study she read that claimed writing about trauma had significantly stronger recovery metrics for vets with PTSD than talking with other vets in group settings.  She mentioned this because she was part of a group that helped facilitate such a program. She then off-handedly mentioned that the study also said simply being in nature had significantly better metrics than writing about trauma. So……there’s that.

This Jesus quote has become a protection mantra for me.  “…..be encouraged in the presence of the diversity of forms of nature.”  It’s nonsense, at first, but it’s basically like saying “drink water if you’re thirsty.”  It’s such a simple, direct, basic prescription for what some would argue is THE challenge of being human, that my impulse is to dismiss it as……a mistranslation or something. 

But when I turn to the diversity of nature—not by thinking about it or watching it on TV, but being in its presence—it’s so utterly insane that it actually arrests everything I think I know about everything and forces me into a child-like mind-state.  If I’m feeling hopeless, that sort of just vanishes cause……what the hell do I know? Scientists estimate that 2/3rds of marine life isn’t yet discovered. There’s over a million micro-organisms in a single fistful of compost. Everything alive shares some amount of DNA, which means we’re literally all related.  Damn.

These are my siblings.  These are my parents. My elders and my ancestors.  I am them and they are me. And we are the interconnected web of life.  Ain’t no climate change, or nuclear war, or shelter in place gonna change that.  And I can’t help but be swollen with hope at the thought of my big-ass family.

Nick Demske lives in Racine Wisconsin and works as a children's librarian there. In his community, he's very involved in local politics, racial justice work and criminal justice reform. He is also an elected official (County Supervisor, Racine County Dist 1). Nick is author of a self-titled collection of poems which was chosen for the Fence Modern Poets Series prize by Joyelle McSweeney and published by Fence Books in 2010.  His work has appeared in over 100 journals and magazines, he runs the BONK! Poetry and Music Series and he is the current chair of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission.