Interview with Aamer Hussein, On Characterization No. 17

Aamer Hussein was born in Karachi. In 1970, at the age of 15, he moved to London to complete his education. He graduated from SOAS with an Honors degree in South Asian Studies. He simultaneously studied European languages. He began to publish short fiction in the 1980s. Mirror to the Sun, his first collection including new stories with others previously published in journals and anthologies, appeared in 1993. This was followed by several other collections including Cactus Town and Insomnia, and two novels, Another Gulmohar Tree (2009) and The Cloud Messenger (2011). He returned to shorter forms with The Swan’s Wife (2014) and Hermitage (2018). He has since published his first collection in Urdu and a volume of memoirs and autofiction, Restless (2021). His stories have been translated into Italian, French, Arabic, Japanese, and Urdu. Aamer was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2004 soon after the publication of Turquoise, his highly acclaimed 3rd collection. He was also a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, The New Statesman, The Literary Review and The Independent for many years. He is currently a Senior Editor at Critical Muslim and a regular columnist for the literary pages of Dawn (Karachi). Aamer Hussein’s latest work is a selection of his stories, memoirs, and essays, entitled What is Saved (2023). 

Sheeraz: Many of your characters are seen walking, biking, sitting in a moving train, or planning to go somewhere (e.g., the protagonist of “37 Bridges”). This often corresponds with their mental miles across continents and years. What makes them go places? What makes them develop a sense of belongingness everywhere and nowhere?  

Aamer: Let us go back to beginnings. My mother was born in Indore in what was then called Princely India, but both her parents came from elsewhere. Though she retained many of the ways of Malwa, where she grew up, and was always nostalgic for its green spaces and its monsoon when she moved to Karachi after her marriage, she told me many years later that she always felt she did not belong in Indore. In Karachi, where she had a busy social life and dedicated herself to classical music and to women’s rights, she found the topography alien and spent much of her spare time planting flowers and fruit creating gardens with my little sister and me assisting her. I believe her children inherited her “sense of belongingness to everywhere and nowhere” though to tell the truth I do not think I belong everywhere. I began to feel like a stranger in the city of my birth when I was a child and often longed for rainy Malwa and its cold winters. Not one of us returned to live in Karachi once we left. I spent four formative years between the ages of 11 and 13 shuttling between Karachi, Indore and various Indian cities, until I spent 18 months studying in the Blue Mountains in South India before moving to London at 15. So I experienced a sense of inquietude at a very early age; although I spent many years trying to settle down in London, and didn’t begin to travel abroad till I was 20, I chose to belong nowhere. By chance or unconscious design, many of the friends of my youth were transients, wanderers, and exiles. At 21 I began to travel in Europe; at 26 I visited Bangladesh, where my sister lived, and since then I have frequently travelled back and forth between London and South Asia. Like my parents, who moved back and forth between their homelands all their lives, I put down some tentative roots in Karachi in the second decade of this century to assuage my sense of longing for a permanent home, but continue to move between languages in my writings and contrasting landscapes in my memories and anticipations. I suppose my characters’ constant flights reflect my own adult life and journeys. The title of my antimemoir, Restless, captures my writing self and to some extent my private world too. 

Sheeraz: Critics have read some of your characters as fictionalized real people (e.g., the protagonists of your novel, Another Gulmohar Tree as writer Ghulam Abbas and his Greek-Scottish-Romanian wife, Zainab or poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz and his British wife, Alys). To what extent is this reading correct? How do real people contribute to the development of fictional characters? How do you decide on what to allow of a real character to enter the narrative? How do you keep a fictional character different from the person that inspires it? 

Aamer: Fallacy. Faiz and Alys have nothing at all to do with my story. I did read “The Girl with Golden hair”, a story about a transcultural marriage by Ghulam Abbas, the unsatisfactory conclusion of which provoked me to start AGT as a rejoinder, but it was quite a while later, when I was well into the Karachi section of my story, that I discovered Zainab/Chris Abbas’s charming illustrations in a book of her husband’s poems and tales for children. Since I am not an illustrator, I found them enormously helpful in depicting a British woman’s attempt to give her pictures an unexotic Pakistani flavor. Usman is one of the most difficult characters I’ve ever created, and entirely unlike me; since I have read very little about Ghulam Abbas’s life, any resemblance between him and Usman owes all to happenstance. I later found out that Ghulam Abbas happily lived with two wives – now if I’d been writing about him, where would that have taken my story? In most cases, when a real person enters my story, they appear as themselves; for example, “The Lady of the Lotus” is drawn, with her approval and collaboration, from my mother’s diary. There are exceptions I can think of; my Urdu story “Zohra” (an English translation was included in The Swan’s Wife) was inspired by the tragic death of the very talented Lahore poet Hima Raza, and drew tears from the eyes of her sister when the latter heard it read out in their native Lahore. My friend, the late great Indonesian poet Toeti Heraty, asked to be portrayed in a story, and not only chose the name of her fictional self but loved the story “Insomnia” when she read it. Inspiration, however, usually comes from characteristics writers observe in the many people we meet, and indeed contradictory aspects of ourselves, not from fictionalizing any one person. When I went on to write about real people, I chose the form of the personal essay, a form I approached in my 60s with some trepidation and then increasing confidence: I’ve written about the role the writers Qurratulain Hyder and Han Suyin played in my life, on a note of elegy; and about encounters with Abdullah Hussein, Intizar Hussain, Fahmida Riaz, sadly in the form of obituaries. But my Karachi friends Mehreen, Taha and Shahbano appear as themselves in some pieces, as does my Chennai friend Mukund in “A Convalescence”, which is often read as fiction, but is actually fact, an experimental and time bending memoir; its dreamy quality derives from the large quantities of painkillers I was taking during the eponymous convalescence. There are one or two “lockdown” stories in Restless which trickily navigate the middle ground between genres, because I wanted to fictionalize myself in that time that slipped away from time, rather than follow a diaristic approach or a strict adherence to clock or calendar.   

Sheeraz: Most of your characters live in big cities (e.g., London, Paris, and Karachi) as globalized, educated, middle-class people. They find friends in swans and doves and trees and waters but are often seen struggling with developing human friendships. How do relationships define a character? 

Aamer: I would say that my characters struggle with betrayals and unrequited love, not human friendships. Poet Mimi Khalvati, at the launch of my collection Insomnia, described my abiding concern as friendship and love beyond the narrow confines of the erotic. The title story of that collection, for example, and “The Angelic Disposition”, are both about friendships between men and women that defy sexual desire. And Restless, too, embodies this in its factual or semifictional depictions of my abiding friendships. My characters, at least since my third collection (and to an extent in my novel The Cloud Messenger, in which romantic love becomes friendship), are defined by such relationships, which sometimes as in “Knotted Tongues” only end with the death of one person. The stories in Hermitage, which are fables drawn from my imagination in which characters like the Buddhist monks appeared before me from nowhere, or from traditional sources like the legend of ‘mad’ Qais and Laila, do often deal with love and separation, in an attempt to reach out to the grand Sufi tradition. And yes, as Ali Akbar noticed in his interview with me, my characters do find solace in quiet green places, by rivers and lakes and the sea, among birds and sometimes other creatures: but their walks are often companionable, chatty rambles with friends, not solitary expeditions.    

Sheeraz: Your poetic short short, “Dove,” is a character story. For an expert reader, the phrase, “country’s queen of melancholy verse,” when read along with the cities named, is indexical to poet Ada Jafarey and adds her life history to the meaning of the story. How do you decide what to mention and what to keep out for the reader to fetch from their knowledge, experience, or emotions?  

Aamer: I can’t say much about the story except that it came as a kind of epiphany; and yes, the central image was inspired by a passage in Ada Jafarey’s magnificent autobiographical work, Jo Rahi So Bekhabri Rahi; but I never met or even saw the lady in person, and wanted to present the era in one life, not a biographical essay about the poet. So no, not a character story in my book, though for a reader who knows of the poet situated in history, it may appear to be so, and the reader who doesn’t may not need to know the inspiration behind it, though I mention it in an afterword.  

Sheeraz: I heard you speak in a craft talk about a composite character inspired by multiple people from real life. Would you like to elaborate on the creative process behind writing such a character?  

Aamer: I think you’re talking about Sara in “Zindagi se pehle” (translated as “What is Saved”)? Her cats, and the walk in Regents Park, are inspired by my friend the novelist Mary Flanagan, as is the visit to exhibition in the story: but Mary does not see herself in Sara at all! The life of the painter LM, who never appears but plays a catalytic part, is entirely fictional: I felt her work was inspired by the paintings of Lee Krasner, until my friend Alev Adil, herself a writer and visual artist, reminded me of our visit to an exhibition of the paintings of Etel Adnan, whom I knew, at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park like the exhibition in my story. Memoir forces the mind the observe ‘truth’ in chronology and location; fiction gives me licensee and plays wonderful tricks, as it did in this case, where memory took me to a spot I had forgotten. That is why I wrote the story as fiction and not as an essay or memoir: an unconscious process, as is the creation of character.    

—Muhammad Sheeraz Dasti, Mid-American Review  

Craft Corner: The Art of Diversion in Fiction 

We’ve all heard the phrase, “Life is not a straight line.” This holds true not just for our own experiences, but also for the types of stories and lives of characters we encounter in stories. Yet, in fiction, the temptation often exists to create linear journeys, with heroes marching steadfastly towards their goals. But what about the detours, the unexpected turns, the moments where characters veer off course? These diversions, often dismissed as mere plot twists, can be the very essence of a character’s arc. 

To many writers, diversion is the creation of a surprise in a narrative, and the thrill of that surprise is what keeps the reader involved in the story. The word “diversion” has its first recorded use in England in the early 1600s.  It is believed that the concept of diversion bore some similarities with some elements of writing discussed in the treatise “On the Sublime” by the Greek philosopher, Longinus, but it became popularized by eighteenth-century writers who employed digression as a form of diversion. For Longinus, diversion, as a crucial literary device, suspends the reader’s sense of disbelief. Generally, in literature, it refers to the practice of including stories within the main story. The stories within the story are usually very brief and are often used to expound on a particular element of the main story. As Peter Selgin notes, by its very essence, a story is “an exercise in controlling information.” Writers must skillfully dole out knowledge to create patches of unknowledge – i.e., suspense – and keep the reader interested. Such diversion, in the form of well-timed revelations and withheld information, does not happen solely according to the creative strategy of the individual writer but adheres to a tradition as old as the stories themselves. The main purpose of a diversion is to create a sense of anticipation or to build enough suspense to keep the readers interested in the main story. A writer could also use this technique to provide the reader with some necessary background information that cannot be included in the main story or to help set up a climax. By using the different stories within the main story, the writer has a chance to provide a much wider view of the world. The reader gets various perspectives on different elements of the overall story. This can serve to make even the most fantastical of stories seem more real because it is demonstrated that different characters have different, opposing views and so on. Also, by giving the reader ‘breaks’ in the main plot where they get to read other smaller, self-contained stories, the writing becomes a lot more accessible and targeted to all kinds of readers.  

In simple terms, diversion in fiction, like other forms of display, seeks to do more than to decorate or to entertain the audience. When one witness in a court trial declares that, for example, defendant A did not break into a house, it is so easy for the audience to keep making wild, imaginary scenarios of how the burglary took place. However, the narrative, fabricated in their minds, is abruptly cut when the same witness suggests that in fact, the burglary did not even take place on the previous night as he claims to know, but on the night in question. By offering new, surprising twists to an on-going temporal narrative and deconstructing the audience’s version of the known events, the narrative gets a boost. Through diversion, we see the writer cleverly creating situations in which the reader’s anticipation is crafted to naturally expect a certain chain of events. This then allows the writer to break this chain and surprise the audience.  

It is of course important that writers should discern when to use diversion as a literary device in such that subplots, creation of cliffhangers at the end of chapters, adding in unexpected twists, deceptions, strategic revelation of information, and creating an open ending, all contribute to keeping the reader diverted. The reader feels smart when they catch the hints and forms expectations on how the story will unfold. At the same time, they become curious to find out whether the predictions are accurate as the plot progresses. In turn, by being engaged in the reading, emotions are evoked as the story takes the reader through different methods of diversion, making the reader experience the special and stunningly galvanized into plot and characters. For example, a well-timed twist can suggest hidden correlatives and themes. Or it can inject an unexpected viewpoint that might add a fresh sight or serve to emphasize thematic elements. Well-disciplined use of diversion often profound the reading. Readers may continue to explore to find out what each new turning and twist may uncover and can be delighted by success at prediction or stunned by a wily and subtle deception. This act of provocation is a delight to many readers who find the discovery and unraveling of solutions highly satisfying. In this manner, diversion enables the reader to be active on a metaphysical and emotional level. 

Again, when we think of how diversion can become a shrapnel for crafting the character arc, it becomes clear that characters are not robots programmed towards a predetermined conclusion. They are complex beings shaped by choices, experiences, and the unforeseen twists and turns of life. Through diversions, the writer can add depth, nuance, and a touch of the unpredictable to their journeys.  

Why does there need to be a twist in the plot in every story, you may ask? It is an interesting point to focus on, the real thing is that if one diverts someone’s attention, and then that other person will most probably be focused on other things, instead of finding out the truth. So, the reader will not try to discover the writer’s true opinion or where the story is set if it is made clear. If a writer is telling a story directly, then diversion would be in the form of flashbacks and maybe the introduction of more than one small puzzle, maybe a few more than two! It is remarkably interesting because if you take the definition out onto the internet or open books, you will find that diversion covers many different parts of stories, from characterizations to distinct types of diversion. 

It is important to consider some real-life examples of how diversion works. Fans of this literature will find various examples of distraction at work in short stories across the ages that have been written by a range of authors as well. A great example to start with is “The Purloined Letter,” written by Edgar Allan Poe and first published over 150 years ago. This classic short story is about the amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin as he attempts to retrieve an incriminating letter that is being used for blackmail. Throughout the story, there is a sense of deliberate, misleading information that is being given to the reader, which distracts from reality and makes it more difficult to discover the truth. This kind of diversion could further be used to create suspense within the reader as one avenue is explored after the other, each with its own sense of partial logic and progress. Another prominent example of diversion in short stories can be found in the work of Shirley Jackson and her famous short story called “The Lottery.” This tale of a small town that commits human sacrifice as part of the harvest ritual was first published in 1948, with some readers dismissing it as being nothing more than mere sensationalist horror. However, when looking deeply at the themes within the story, it becomes clear that Jackson has intentionally used diversion to guide the reader towards shock and distaste for the characters and society within the story. The use of detail to distract from the grotesque occurrences of the “lottery” and to prepare the reader for something entirely different is a key strategy; the fact that the ending comes as it does shows that diversion has been used effectively in this piece. Through exploring these examples of diversion in short stories, the message of how this works to create interesting and absorbing literature becomes clearer.  

While the town is small and it seems everyone knows each other, the truth is that it is completely isolated. The village serves as a dehumanizing environment that is resulting in a change in society. First, we can observe the irony of the town’s and the lottery’s name, as the lottery is commonly known to be a good thing to win and be a part of, but in this situation, the ‘prize’ is death. The first mention of tradition comes when the boys see each other and make a pile of stones. Soon after, the parents, especially the dad, are with the boys. He’s reminding the boy of how to arrange the stones and Jackson writes, “Bobby Martin has already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones…” (Jackson, 2009). The author wanted to clearly show how even the youngest of the village knew what they were doing, what is the underlying meaning of this ritual, and how to bring the evil of the event to its success. This creates an atmosphere of horror as even the audience becomes aware that a successful prize of winning is death, as they see that everyone, children and adults, had taken part in organizing the lottery and preparing for it for the past few weeks. Finally, when the victims gain a voice after the winner has been selected and is going to die, they use ‘it isn’t fair, it isn’t right.’ It is a reminder that people and society do have the power to change things and that they’re not losing their voice to fear. 

-Aishat Babatunde, Mid-American Review 

In Honor of the Eclipse

As BGSU is abuzz with excitement for the total eclipse, we at MAR can’t help but consider how the moon has been reflected in literature, more specifically, poetry.  

The moon has been an object of curiosity since the beginning of time, with many cultures regarding the moon as a symbol of power that holds the essence of life and time, and the ways of the earth in its clutches. Cultures including the Greeks, Egyptians, Mayans, and Chinese worshiped the moon and associated many deities with it. The moon has consistently appeared a female deity due to similarity with the menstrual cycles and its fragile appearance when compared to the flaming power of the sun. 

Thus, with these associations, the moon in literature has been a divine source of female fertility, love, purity, romance, beauty, mystery, madness, and power. The history of the moon’s symbolism, its glowing appearance shrouded in darkness, and its continuous cycle of changing appearances have given writers a lot of freedom to display a variety of emotions and themes. Poets and writers such as Emily Dickenson, Shakespeare, Percy Shelly, Ted Hughes, and more have used ideas behind the moon to express raw emotion, change, and death. 

Eclipses are not as commonly written as the complete focus of a poem of piece of work, yet many poets mention eclipses to once again signify change or the tense relationship between two people or ideas. A beautiful example of these themes expressed in poetry is by the American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919): 

In that great journey of the stars through space 

About the mighty, all-directing Sun, 

The pallid, faithful Moon, has been the one 

Companion of the earth. Her tender face, 

Pale with the swift, keep purpose of that race, 

Which at Time’s natal hour first begun, 

Shines ever on her lover as they run 

And lights his orbit with her silvery smile. 

Sometimes such passionate love doth in her rise, 

Down from her beaten path she softly slips, 

And with her mantle veils the Sun’s bold eyes, 

Then in the gloaming finds her lover’s lips. 

While far and near the men our world call wise 

See only that the Sun is in eclipse.  

Wilcox here uses her expression of the moon and the eclipse to express intimate love and change. As an activist, Wilcox also makes social commentary within this poem, noting that men at times only can acknowledge the masculine energy that they relate to (the sun), missing the beauty and the effort of the opposite sex (the moon). 

So, as we prepare to celebrate the eclipse, I encourage you as readers and writers to find your own favorite examples of the moon in poetry and ponder how the author uses the moon to carefully craft their narrative. Eclipses are more than just a special phenomenon, but a chance to express so much emotion and power within our own works. 

-Ellie Timmins, Mid-American Review 

Why We Chose It: “The Retch” by Colten Dom

Mid-American Review fiction staff selected “The Retch” by Colten Dom for publication in Volume XLII, Number 2.

“The Retch” is one of those stories that contains seemingly incompatible subjects: on the literal level, it is about dog vomit; on a thematic level, it delves into marriage, family, nostalgia. One of the pleasures of the story lies in this unexpected pairing, the way in which the surface conflict of the story subtly explores the underlying conflicts of the protagonist, Queenie, through a balance of pathos and humor. What starts as a fairly ordinary occurrence (the family dog, Bee, eating something she shouldn’t and throwing up on the carpet) quickly escalates into the absurd, as Bee begins regurgitating objects she couldn’t possibly have eaten. First, it’s items from the owners’ childhoods, then unnaturally large objects (“a golf club or an intact model ship”), and eventually orbs that resemble fish eggs “warm to the touch, with the texture of a flayed grape and the smell of a leather armchair gone rancid in the rain.” 

As evident in the above description, Dom’s language is striking, with attention to sensory details that make even the impossible feel physically real. The opening paragraph is rich in sensory details packed into rhythmic sentences: “There are hooks made of sound: the slap of sex, the generic jingle of the nightly news or the cacophony of your husband sneezing. There are pop song sippets of adolescence, guitar licks that drag you back to high school. And jaunty radio realty commercials, dropping through time to mom and dad and the typical divorce, leaving your childhood toys behind to guard the leaky attic where they became toothpicks for a family of raccoons.” The poetic syntax, alongside the story’s absurdity, renders the familiar conflicts of domestic life unfamiliar and therefore new.

The story as a whole is built around pattern—Bee vomiting increasingly unbelievable things—but continually moves in directions the reader could not anticipate. George Saunders, writing about David Barthelme’s “The School,” describes this kind of structure as a series of “gas-stations” that propel the reader forward. While advancing the pattern, the writer “fling[s] us forward via a series of surprises; each new pattern-element is. . . introduced in a way we don’t expect, or with an embellishment that delights us” (177). The patterns and surprises of “The Retch” accelerate the story forward in unexpected, but nonetheless fitting, directions. The ending, in which Bee vomits a web that slowly forms into a house, provokes questions about Queenie’s relationship to the domestic sphere and her family, particularly things she has kept inside herself that ultimately must come out, however messy and unpleasant that might be.

––Jane Wageman, Mid-American Review

Note from the editors: This essay contains a quote from “The Perfect Gerbil: Reading Barthelme’s ‘The School'” from The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders. New York, NY: Riverhead Books, 2007, pp. 175-185.

Interview with Jose Hernandez Diaz, On Poetry & Publishing No. 16

Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020) Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024), The Parachutist (Sundress Publications, 2025) and Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man (Red Hen Press, 2025). He has been published in The Yale Review, The London Magazine, and in The Southern Review. He teaches generative workshops for Hugo House, Lighthouse Writers Workshops, The Writer’s Center, and elsewhere. Additionally, he serves as a Poetry Mentor in The Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program.

I really fell in love with the poems in Bad Mexican, Bad American. The poems in the first section are largely in verse and the rest of the collection’s three sections have poems exclusively in prose: How do you view this book’s relationship between the poems in lineation and the poems in prose?

The first section, in linear verse, tends to be autobiographical poetry about my real life growing up first-gen Mexican American, back and forth between Northern Orange County and Southeast Los Angeles. There are a few prose poems in the first section, however, that are not entirely autobiographical.

The rest of the book is written in prose poetry, often surreal, often absurdist, often with Mexican and Mexican American imagery and/or settings. As far as why dual or varied aesthetics/forms? I like to play the blues, Ranchera, psychedelic and Mariachi. I try not to put limits, borders, or boundaries on myself.

Bad Mexican, Bad American feels very close to the poet but also, at other times, feels distant. How do you view the relationship between the poet and the speaker in this collection?

Yes, some of the poems are more confessional, personal, autobiographical. Others are more surreal, absurd, and existential. I contain multitudes as Whitman said. 

I thought about separating the books into separate collections: autobiographical linear verse and prose poetry, but then thought: no, I’ll mix it up as it is a closer representation of my complex self and my hybrid aesthetics… more representative than if I split the books into only showcasing one style or aesthetic. Plus, I hadn’t really seen such a varied voice or aesthetic in other contemporary poetry books, so I thought: why not break boundaries and be different/innovative.

You had The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press) publish in 2020 and Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books) publish this year and two collections, The Parachutist (Sundress Publications) and Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man (Red Hen Press), forthcoming in 2025: How has this success and exposure impacted your writing?

I have been more calm lately in terms of not feeling as much pressure to write. Trying to balance my life out more, not just as focused on the writing. Teaching more. Going to more readings. Early on I felt more pressure to have a book published and out in the world. Now, I want to enjoy being an author with various books out and on the way and no pressure to produce. Can take a deep breath and enjoy the fruits of my labor. 

The first poem of yours I ever read was “The Jaguar and the Mango” from the January 2020 issue of Poetry Magazine which is a prose poem. Why is the prose poem the perfect form for this sort of personified exploration in the poem?

I think it is the perfect form for condensed writing and you can still get a scene or an angle of storytelling in. Sometimes we just need a window into a scene not the whole backstory and inner monologues. We sometimes want to fill in the blanks on our own. Minimalism, haiku, short stories, have always been fascinating to me for their brevity and intensified mode/power of expression.

Your chapbook The Fire Eater is all prose poems and Bad Mexican, Bad American is primarily prose poems. What is it about the prose poem form that keeps you returning to it?

It hasn’t gotten old to me. I still love writing a vibrant prose poem. The discovery, spontaneity, freedom, The associative leaps. The imagination, The pace of it, musicality. The voice. The persona. The art of condensed writing.

There’s a lot of discourse surrounding the composing of poems in lineation and poems in prose. Do you feel that the form dictates how you approach writing the poem?

For me: my autobiographical work tends to be primarily in linear verse while my fictional or surreal work tends to be in prose poetry. Not always, but generally this is how it works for me.

After drafting a poem, how do you approach revision?

After getting the first draft on the page I will go back and read it to myself until I get it just right paying attention to line break and form if it’s a poem, specificity of imagery, do I need more description, or less description, musicality, titles, awkward moments which need to be blended in a seamless way, and overall wow factor, does the poem leave me wanting to read it over and over in awe..

Your publications range from first issues of magazines to well-established journals, what advice do you have for emerging writers who are submitting their poems to literary magazines/journals?

I like to have a range of submissions and publications. Would be a long and boring wait if I only submitted to the heavy hitters. It also feels good to be part of a journal’s early issues and help get them off to a good start. This is a poetry community and oftentimes you can connect more with smaller journals. With that said I like to be in fancy journals like anyone else, can’t deny it, so I always send out to dream journals as well even though they require more patience and perseverance. 

My advice: prolific writers are always prolific readers first, rejections don’t always mean bad, talent is important and worth ethic but also we must have the ability to bounce back in the face of constant rejection and knock on doors to places we might feel like are too big for us or we’re imposters for trying to get into.

Bad Mexican, Bad American is a collection that challenges its readers, but it’s also a collection that allows the reader to have some fun as well. When you’re reading a collection, what is it about the experience that makes a book spectacular for you?

I love getting pulled into the language, storyline, imagery, voice, persona, politics, struggle, humor, craft of it, passion of it, duende, Kafkaesque quality, deadpan, codeswitching, Spanglish, barrio poems, hood poems, surrealism, gritty realism, honesty, vulnerability, empowerment, love.

For writers soon to be leaving MFA programs, what is a piece of advice you wish you had coming out of your MFA program?

The book publication process is a marathon not a sprint. Time will help the process. Patience is difficult but a virtue. Time also allows for fresh eyes with revision. Enjoy the small victories along the way. Don’t compare yourself to other writers though this is hard to avoid. Treat others how you want to be treated. Call your parents, if they’re supportive, on the weekend.

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––Tyler Michael Jacobs, Blog Co-Editor