Nancy Hewitt’s chapbook Heard was published in 2013 by Finishing Line Press. She earned her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has maintained a private practice in clinical social work in Salem, MA, for over 30 years. She divides her time between Swampscott, MA, where she is the town’s first Poet Laureate, and Randolph, VT, where she is most apt to meet up with her muse. Her poem, “Measure,” appears in MAR 35.1.

Quick! Summarize your poem in 10 words or fewer.

associations to meanings of the word “measure”

What can you share about this piece prior to its MAR publication?

The word “measure” was resonant to me. I like to meditate on words that have a range of meanings, especially if there are current news events that contribute. In this case, I had personal associations to exactness in measuring, & I kept collecting other examples, like iron filings to a magnet. And the piece which really solidified the poem was an article I read in the New Yorker about Osama bin Laden’s capture. Truth is absolutely stranger than fiction.

(The title poem in my chapbook – “Heard” – began when there were a number of strange news items, in a short time, about hearing and ears. I linked these with other associations, & the poem grew from there.)

I worked on “Measured” for a year or two, 12 revisions. I go through long stretches when I don’t send anything out, but I remember sending this poem & 2 other prose poems to a good journal I’ve tried to publish in previously. Emailed them at 10pm & they rejected them by 7 the next morning! I think MAR was the second market I sent to. Thank you, MAR, for your appreciation of prose poems!

Fashion attire for my computer desk is most often flannel pjs, & the more papers & books stacked on the desk, the better! But I always write by hand first, in lined notebooks, so my attire then depends on how public is the writing spot!

What was your reaction upon receiving your MAR acceptance?

Ecstasy! It’s a fine journal! Went to AWP one year & talked to a young man in a lunch line about looking for places to send my prose poems. He happened to be an editor? a reader? an intern? at MAR, & told me about the Fineline Competition…the rest is history.

You’re at a family reunion and some long-lost relative asks about your writing. What do you say?

“I have some copies of my chapbook here. Would you like to buy one?”

What do you consider your biggest writing-related success?

Having my chapbook, Heard, published in 2013 (Finishing Line Press).

Your biggest writing-related regret?

Wishing I’d started to write poetry way before I did, at age 40.

Tell us one strange thing about yourself that involves writing.

While I wouldn’t consider it strange, a unique thing about me is that I’ve been with my writing group – Kitchen Table Writers – for over 25 years. We have a First Friday writing practice every month & 2 weekend retreats a year. Amazing women, so supportive.

Do you have another favorite piece of writing in this MAR issue? If so, name it and tell us why.

So many fine pieces! My most favorite is Anne Barngrover’s poem “Site Fidelity.” Spare language, beautiful images, & an amazing last few lines. It reaches very deeply.

I also love Claire Wahmanholm’s poem “Theory of Primogeniture: Barn” for its wonderful tale of grass eating the barn, & then…another terrific last few lines.

Thanks for the interview, Nancy!
Laura Maylene Walter, Fiction Editor

Katie Booth’s work has appeared in Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, The Fourth River and Vela, where she also edits the “Bookmarked” column. She has earned recognition and support for her work from the Edward Albee Foundation, the Blue Mountain Center and the Massachusetts Historical Society. She teaches writing and journalism at the University of Pittsburgh. Her creative nonfiction piece, “Still,” appears in MAR 35.1.

Quick! Summarize your piece in 10 words or fewer.

Excavator birds. Burned out house, brink of demolish. Flashback: fire.

What can you share about this piece prior to its MAR publication?

This was one of those pieces that I struggled with for years. I won’t bore you with the details of its many transformations and deletions. I will say that it only really broke into its current shape after I read “Stillness” by Charles Baxter, and let the piece unwrap around a single moment.

What was the best/worst feedback you received on this piece?

Once, after I read it aloud, a friend said, “It sounded like it was very beautiful, but I couldn’t actually hear you.”

What do you consider your biggest writing-related success?

I recently published a fiction story which was a thinly veiled story about my great-aunt’s experience as a native speaker of American Sign Language in an oralist deaf school in the 1930’s (where Sign was forbidden and punished). She had spent so much time, over years, letting me interview her, answering all these stupid questions I had—both for this story and a larger study of that moment in Deaf culture—but I’d never shared my writing with her. When I found out she had cancer, I was living in China. I couldn’t deliver it myself, but I finished the story and emailed it to my mother, who interpreted it into Sign Language for my aunt. It was published in Indiana Review this year, which was wonderful, but I was far happier to know that the story made it to my aunt, in her own language, before she died.

Do you have another favorite piece of writing in this MAR issue? If so, name it and tell us why.

Yes! At the risk of sounding like I didn’t read past the first piece, I’ll say that Jennifer K. Sweeny’s “Parenthetical at 35” is my favorite. She does this wonderful poetry-meets-essay thing that I’ve tried for years to pull off, but never really have—not like she does. The images she creates are so taut and layered; returning to it now, I’m shocked at how short the piece is. There’s such a full world within it, and such a quiet unfolding of the story that holds it together. I love this: “I had wished to live in a country of bad weather and nested inside a winter inside a winter inside a long night.” But for all the slow lingering of Sweeny’s piece, I also love the rushing thoughts of Wendy Cannella’s “Immortality,” and Nancy Hewitt’s “Measured,” both of which move breathlessly forward, ending in such unexpected ways, among the extension of the details we began with, but with expansive breadth.

Can you show us a photo of you holding your MAR contributor’s copy?

Thanks for the interview, Katie!
Laura Maylene Walter, Fiction Editor

Wendy Cannella’s poetry has appeared in Phoebe, Free Lunch, and Southern Indiana Review; her article “Angels and Terrorists” is featured in The Room and the World: Essays on the Poet Stephen Dunn (Syracuse University Press). She earned her MFA from Vermont College, PhD from Boston College, and has taught at Boston College and Southern New Hampshire University. She lives in Coastal Maine with her husband and two daughters. Her prose poem, “Immortality,” appears in MAR 35.1.

Quick! Summarize your poem in 10 words or fewer. Extra points if your answer rhymes.

Will I receive partial credit for a haiku?

To live forever
is to endure much housework;
consider a maid!

What can you share about this piece prior to its MAR publication?

“Immortality” represents my first attempt at a prose poem. The subject begged this particular shape, demanded it, really, the way a clean shirt demands to be folded squarely. The concept arose through dialogue and scraps of drifting commentary, and involves more quotations than I would ever dare press upon a lyric poem.

What was your reaction upon receiving your MAR acceptance?

I thought, oh no, does this mean I have to write more prose poems? There is something in me that, like the speaker of “Immortality,” just might equate a long prison sentence with a long prosaic sentence, especially one I myself have written.

I also thought, wow, this is the journal I have loved since encountering Stephen Dunn’s poem about seagulls in its pages in the mid-1990s (what I have long considered to be the greatest decade of all time, a belief recently made official in the New York Times). That poem by Dunn is titled “Radical” and ends like this:

Then the gulls began quarreling
as if what was happening
could be a matter of opinion,
but they were merely experts,
there every morning, not to be trusted.

Merely experts. I love that paradox, and I was hooked on MAR.

What was the best feedback you received on this piece?

A good friend told me that after reading “Immortality” she now dumps her clean silverware, unsorted, into a kitchen drawer. So, poems can bring change.

You’re at a family reunion and some long-lost relative asks about your writing. What do you say?

Oh, I see you haven’t met my young children yet…

Do you have another favorite piece of writing in this MAR issue? If so, name it and tell us why.

I find myself returning repeatedly to Jennifer Sweeney’s piece, “Parenthetical at 35.” The poem performs a number of remarkable balancing acts, not the least of which is its form—which teeters between stanza and paragraph, lyric and narrative. The question of form is related to the poem’s problem of the parenthetical, as Sweeney writes: “What to place in this raw absence, this […].” I love a poem unafraid to tell its own story and this one is spoken by a central “I” who is wise enough to step aside and allow the poem’s own logic to determine how events unfold. In this way, the “I” occasionally gives way to information which seems to rise up from the groundswell of the speaker’s world: “For headaches, feverfew. For cold womb, false Unicorn root. To ward off hibernating insects, Osage oranges in the windowsills. For twin ghosts, divide fire in two equal parts.” By the end of the poem, the reader must go back to the beginning to understand just what is missing, what is finished.

Thanks for the interview, Wendy!
Laura Maylene Walter, Fiction Editor

Jennifer K. Sweeney is the author of three poetry collections: Little Spells (New Issues Press, 2015), How to Live on Bread and Music, which received the James Laughlin Award, the Perugia Press Prize and a nomination for the Poets’ Prize, and Salt Memory. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, her poems have appeared in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, American Poetry Review, Linebreak, New American Writing, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily. Her poem, “Parenthetical at 35,” appears in MAR 35.1.

Quick! Summarize your poem in 10 words or fewer. Extra points if your answer rhymes.

winter, abundant with losses, no baby, wringing my hands

What can you share about this piece prior to its MAR publication?

This poem was one that steeped for a very long time. Though the time of the poem was at age 35, I wrote it three years later when I was out of the fire, no longer living a daily prayer that I would finally succeed in getting pregnant, no longer living in a perpetual Michigan winter but in the California desert. I was napping with my baby boy, and I just heard the poem. It entered the room, my body, entirely. I said lines over and over so as to not lose them and eventually was able to get to a pen and paper. I had most of it down after that afternoon, but worked in the next months fine-tuning its many different movements; there was such a lot to contain. I didn’t show it to many people and sent it out only a few times. It just felt like such a dense poem for an editor to take on, I wasn’t sure if it would get picked up.

What was your reaction upon receiving your MAR acceptance?

I was so happy to find out this poem would be published, but by MAR? That was wonderful. I had admired the journal for a long time, and I felt particularly read and witnessed by the editors regarding a poem that felt so different from anything I had ever written. I received a kind note about the correlation of the “35-ness” of my title and the anniversary of the journal and was touched that my poem opened this issue.

What do you consider your biggest writing-related success?

My most surprising and successful moment as a writer was finding out that my second book had won the James Laughlin Award. I was in Prague for the month and unreachable by phone or email for about five weeks. At the end of the trip, I asked a secretary in our apartment building if I could use her computer to check my emails. When I opened the weeks-old message from the Academy of American Poets, I let out such a joyful shriek that the secretary knew something wonderful had happened and brought out a bottle of wine even though it was only 9 am. I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone yet, but I told that woman who gave me one of the warmest toasts, and we drank to it together. So unexpected. Perfect moment.

Tell us one strange thing about yourself that does not involve writing.

After college, I spent six months in Siberia, Indiana, town of 25, as a volunteer. I lived in a mobile home across from a tiny church with an old rectory and convent on either side which now housed adults with severe disabilities who lived under the guidance of a Benedictine nun and a lay houseparent. Beyond the homes, there was an organic farm with goats and chickens. I was there to assist both homes and help with the farm. There was no computer or tv; I only spoke to those ten people on that plot of land and little else. It was an incredible time full of tenderness and longing, deep silence and doubt.

Tell us one strange thing about yourself that does involve writing.

I was on an artist residency at Hedgebrook in mid-February, and on Whidbey Island, the barred owls were mating. They nested in tree holes lined with feathers or grass along the path I followed each evening to eat dinner, my head spinning the day’s new fragments around. It was on such a walk when I was struck upside the head and brought down to the forest floor. Disoriented and dazed, I assumed fallen branch only to look up from my knees and see a female barred owl flying off, her three-and-a-half-foot wingspan sweeping slowly and silently through the alders. I found out later that barred owls have fenestrated wings which make no sound, and I can affirm this is true. The owl incident caused a stir among the other writers who were not as interested as I was in being hit in the head with an owl, but I appreciated the desire to have an intimate experience with nature and being met with an ambush. It seemed the perfect instruction for the writer, some totem of wisdom smacking any comfortable notions of progress upside the head, and saying Wake up, get with it.

Do you have another favorite piece of writing in this MAR issue? If so, name it and tell us why.

This is a tremendous issue. The poem selections are wonderful, and the feature of prose poems/short shorts/flash nonfiction is truly a treat. I love the urgency, dislocation, and surprise of Clare Wahmanholm’s “Theory of Primogeniture: Barn”; the poem itself seemed to incinerate as I read it. Sarah Burke’s “The Rock Has No Children” is a deeply affecting poem in which the grief and refusal to surrender are portrayed exquisitely. It is also very much speaking to my poem; it’s a lonely conversation to live, and I was moved by how her poems and mine bookend the issue and perhaps provide a larger parenthetical relationship. From the feature, I especially savored “Immortality” by Wendy Cannella, “Diving Deep (My Father as Octopus)” by Bryce Emley, and “Violet on a Plane” by Lisa C. Krueger. I’ll say it again—I love this feature!

Thanks for the interview, Jennifer!
Laura Maylene Walter, Fiction Editor