MAR is back from a busy and fruitful AWP in Minneapolis. We celebrated the journal’s 35th anniversary, hosted a party in an art gallery complete with a cake and a keg, gave away lots of hotdish recipe cards and MAR issues at the booth, and best of all, connected with some of our wonderful readers, contributors, and former editors. Here are a few snapshots of our time in Minneapolis:
photos from Laura Maylene Walter and Chelsea Kerwin
MAR is headed to AWP in Minneapolis, and you know what that means: bookfair swag. This year, in honor of Minnesota’s fondness for the hotdish (casserole), we’ve compiled hotdish recipe cards from various authors. You can pick up a card or two, or you could really commit to the hotdish goodness by picking up one of our hotdish books. It all happens at booth #1728.
But wait, there’s more! We’ll also have reclaimed-sweater potholders, art prints from GJ Gillespie, subscription deals, and free back issues.
So stop by table #1728 at the AWP bookfair this week. Say hello. Find some hotdish inspiration. And maybe, if you’re feeling saucy, you could wish MAR a happy 35th birthday while you’re at it.
As a finalist in the 2014 Fineline Competition for prose poems, short shorts, and everything in between, Bryce Emley’s piece, “Diving Deep (My Father as Octopus)” appears in MAR 35.1. He’s here today to discuss science as artistic inspiration, bizarre birthmarks, and his rather unorthodox reaction to his MAR acceptance.
Bryce Emley is a freelance writer and MFA student at NC State. His work can be found in Best American Experimental Writing 2015, The Normal School, Prairie Schooner, Your Impossible Voice, etc., and he serves on staff for Raleigh Review and BULL: Men’s Fiction.
Quick! Summarize your piece in 10 words or fewer.
dad = octopus
What can you share about this piece prior to its MAR publication?
This piece started when I read a science article I was finding pretty challenging but also vaguely intriguing, though I didn’t really know why. I stuffed the magazine into a drawer with the foggy impression that one day I would turn the article into a poem—a process which took an absurd amount of re-reading, thinking/talking to myself about, and revising (which is still going on, actually).
What was your reaction upon receiving your MAR acceptance?
I think I pumped my fist and humped the air a few times. It was less weird than it sounds.
You’re at a family reunion and some long-lost relative asks about your writing. What do you say?
I’m working on it.
Tell us one strange thing about yourself that does not involvewriting.
There’s a birthmark on my left foot that looks from one angle like an angel carrying a basket, from another like a bad-ass bearded guy on a Harley.
Do you have another favorite piece of writing in this MAR issue? If so, name it and tell us why.
Jennifer K. Sweeny’s “Parenthetical at 35.” It’s so weird and so lovely and so logical in equal parts.
Can you show us a photo of you holding your MAR contributor’s copy?
Thanks for the interview, Bryce!
Laura Maylene Walter, Fiction Editor
Today on the blog we have a contributor interview with Kristin George Bagdanov, whose poem “Purge Body” appears in MAR 35.1. Kristin is an MFA candidate in poetry at Colorado State University, where she is a Lilly Graduate Fellow. Her poems have recently appeared in or are forthcoming from Cincinnati Review, Juked, The Laurel Review, The Los Angeles Review, 32 Poems, and others. She is the poetry editor of Ruminate Magazine. You can find more of her work at kristingeorgebagdanov.com.
What can you share about your poem, “Purge Body,” prior to its MAR publication?
I’ve always been really good at sleeping. I took it for granted, drinking coffee right before bed and falling asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. Then I got older. Or maybe it was grad school. And I started to notice how even at night I couldn’t escape distraction, lights and flashes and worry that kept calling me away from that deepest solitude of sleep—that time when we are lost inside ourselves with no guarantee of waking. And this poem grew out of the craving for darkness, for emptying out the exhausting brightness of daily life. While writing this poem, I also started doing a lot of research on light pollution, and there’s this really great, and I think important, book out now by Paul Bograd called The End of Night that I suggest you all read. He says that “in our artificially lit world, three-quarters of Americans’ eyes never switch to night vision and most of us no longer experience true darkness.” And I have to wonder, how is that lack of darkness harming us, inside and out?
What was your reaction upon receiving your MAR acceptance?
Happy dance. There may have been a squeal as well.
What was the best feedback you received on this piece?
Well, this wasn’t in reference to this piece, but I think it’s a useful story about feedback in general. Several years ago, after an editor had accepted a poem, I sent him a revised version to print instead. He told me he liked the previous version better and asked why I cut so much out of the original. I told him I had workshopped it and got some additional feedback, the consensus of which was to cut it down quite a bit. He replied:
“Yet another reason why workshops are dangerous to a poet’s health! In my experience, the product is rarely an improvement on the original—you can cut out the gripes from the peanut gallery, but then you lose the magical spark of the original creation.”
I was much younger then, and hadn’t learned to fully trust myself or my poems (and I suppose I’m still working on that). I’ve carried this advice with me ever since, through countless workshops and critique sessions. In the end, you have to trust your own sense of the poem, and take everything else with a grain of salt.
You’re at a family reunion and some long-lost relative asks about your writing. What do you say?
I usually start by saying “I hate this question” (in response to “what kind of poetry do you write”).
Once a relative told me he liked my chapbook, but suggested I should try rhyming more. So, there’s that.
What do you consider your biggest writing-related success?
Well I’ll define “success” as that which has helped me most with my writing, rather than some sort of prize or publication. And so to that end, I’d say it’s my time in the MFA program at Colorado State University, which I am finishing up now. I can’t believe how much I’ve grown not only as a writer, but as a reader. My experience there is what informs and will continue to inform all other writing-related successes I might be fortunate enough to have.
Your biggest writing-related regret?
Any poems printed in my undergraduate literary journal.
Tell us one strange thing about yourself that does not involvewriting.
My cat is my muse.
Tell us one strange thing about yourself that does involve writing.
My cat is my muse.
Thanks, Kristin! Laura Maylene Walter, Fiction Editor