Alyse Bensel serves as the Book Review Editor at The Los Angeles Review and Co-Editor at Beecher’s. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Not of Their Own Making (Dancing Girl Press, 2014) and Shift (Plan B Press, 2012). Her poems have most recently appeared in Heavy Feather Review, Sugar Mule, and Ruminate, among others. She is currently a PhD candidate in creative writing specializing in poetry at the University of Kansas. Her poem, “Glossary for Metamorphosis I,” appears in MAR 35.1. She’s here today on the blog to discuss poetry, cat-themed clothing, exposing family secrets, and more.

Quick! Summarize your poem in 10 words or fewer.

An exploration of 17^th-century German vernacular for metamorphosis.

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

“Glossary for Metamorphosis I” only took several revisions for me to be happy with it, but it was rejected 16 times before it found a home in MAR. I think the rejection count is on the low end for me.

I started working on the poem in January 2013. It was formed from a scattering of notes I had taken about Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717), the subject of my manuscript-in-progress. All of the words explored in the poem are terms Merian initially used to describe metamorphosis. She didn’t know Latin, so she worked in the German vernacular for her observations. At that time my friend and I had a weekly Panera Bread workshop, where she suggested opening up the language more. I also got rid of a few sections, eulenfalter (nocturnal moths) and capellen (diurnal moths and butterflies), although they may reappear in other glossaries. This poem is only the first installment.

Coffee was most likely consumed during the writing and revision process.

What was your reaction upon receiving your MAR acceptance?

I danced around my house. My cats probably watched me. They do not approve of my dance habits.

What was the worst/best feedback you received on this piece (either in the writing/critiquing process, post-publication, or otherwise)?

I wrote this poem post-MFA, so the worst and best feedback was that I mostly had myself to converse with about the poem. This was a terrifying prospect.

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

“I wrote a poem revealing the family secrets.”

What do you consider your biggest writing-related success?

My first chapbook Shift, which Plan B Press accepted and published in 2012. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing with my writing, and that first chapbook acceptance opened doors for me. After that initial push for publication, everything became a lot easier. In the months that followed publication, I gave more readings, met more writers, poets, and publishers, and delved into becoming an editor myself.

Your biggest writing-related regret?

Going to graduate school nearly nonstop. The year I took off between my MFA and PhD was the time where I figured my writing out. I finally had time to breathe.

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

If there is a piece of clothing that features cats on it, I have to have it. There is no stopping me. I own a cat dress, a cat button-up shirt, a cat pullover sweatshirt, and multiple pairs of cat socks. I just need cat pants.

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

How can I name only one? I think I’ve reread Luis García Montero’s work in the issue three or more times now. It’s so beautiful and haunting. He approaches the city and space from such a deeply engaged and fraught position I couldn’t help but take notice.

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

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

How can you possibly not read a contributor interview in which the writer describes his story as “Little Red Riding Hood kicks all manner of ass?” So please, read on and learn more about George Choundas, whose fiction and nonfiction appear in over twenty-five publications, including The Southern Review, The American Reader, and Subtropics. He is winner of the New Millennium Award for Fiction (Winter 2014-2015), a former FBI agent, and half Cuban and half Greek. His darkly imaginative short story, “The Girl Who Not Once Cried Wolf,” appears in MAR 35.1.

Quick! Summarize your story in 10 words or fewer.

Little Red Riding Hood kicks all manner of ass.

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

My daughter is four years old. She likes her bedtime stories. I read them to her sometimes, and sometimes I make them up. In the fall of 2013 I launched into a telling of Little Red Riding Hood. I realized by Sentence Three that Riding Hood had no need of hunters. And that Claire—born in the Year of the Tiger, on Bastille Day, with enormous eyes of mischief green—had no need of stories suggesting she was less than. I told her a different version. The story grew each time I told it. Longer, more detailed. Finally I wrote it down. I spent nine months revising and editing. And engineering progressively more disgusting ways to describe wolf innards.

What was your reaction upon receiving your MAR acceptance?

You read and write short fiction for years—decades. For decades you admire this icon called Mid-American Review and the stories in it because they’re good and, well, it’s iconic. And one day you receive an email that this same institution would love—“love”—to publish your writing. You do not fully comprehend this. You cannot reconcile it with what you know. So you do three things: First, you keep your reply email short for fear of writing something that inadvertently confirms some background suspicion on the editors’ part that this acceptance is not simply implausible but in fact a mistake. Second, you continue thereafter to play along and pretend everything’s cool, everything’s as it should be. Third, you show fate some gratitude the best way writers can: you keep writing.

My reaction? One day I’m daydreaming about space and rocketships, the next I’m in an astronaut suit bearing a NASA insignia going, This is fucked up.

What do you consider your biggest writing-related success?

I recently learned I’d won the New Millennium Award for Fiction for a story that originally appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review. That was kind of incredible. Then I learned that the award’s founding editor, Don Williams, called it among the best stories to ever win the prize. That was kind and incredible.

Your biggest writing-related regret?

That I did not realize at a much earlier age that writing has little to do with knowing what to write about, or with having something to write about, but rather with writing and having written and determining to write some more and thereby finding out, to your surprise and (ideally) delight, what there always was to write about.

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

I can’t shoot pool or play a musical instrument without sticking out my tongue. It’s an unconscious tendency over which I have no control. It’s as if my tongue needs to get out and aloft to receive some kind of homing signal. This is a problem because my son five years ago agreed to play the cello if I learned along with him, and now I’m the one whom the instructor gently chides for resembling at our summer recitals an overheated dog, and at our winter recitals a deranged one.

Thanks for an entertaining interview, George!
Laura Maylene Walter, Fiction Editor

Today, we’re pleased to introduce Doug Ramspeck, whose poem, “Unblessing,” appears in MAR 35.1. Ramspeck is the author of four poetry books. His most recent collection, Original Bodies, was selected for the Michael Waters Poetry Prize and is published by Southern Indiana Review Press. Two earlier books also received awards: Mechanical Fireflies (Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize), and Black Tupelo Country (John Ciardi Prize). Individual poems have appeared in journals that include The Kenyon Review, Slate, The Southern Review, and The Georgia Review. He is an associate professor at The Ohio State University at Lima, where he teaches creative writing.

He also apparently plays tic-tac-toe with chickens. Read on to learn more!

Quick! Summarize your poem in 10 words or fewer.

Cut-up-for-pieces poem (this needs explaining).

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

One of my favorite methods of producing a poem is to take, at random, four or five poems from my “Failed-Poem Folder,” cut them up for pieces, then combine them into what I hope will be a coherent whole. That is how “Unblessing” was produced. Each time I try this approach, I am amazed by how, when I am done, I am able to convince (delude?) myself into imagining that the pieces longed to be together all along, and my role was as simple matchmaker.

What was your reaction upon receiving your MAR acceptance?

My wife likes to claim that my response to acceptance by any journal is akin to the Groucho Marx quotation: “I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.” In other words, she claims that my evaluation of the journal’s prestige is reduced in my mind because I received the acceptance notice. In truth, though, I was delighted to be included.

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

I like to tell the story about when my first book of poems was published, and I told my daughter about the royalty payment I would receive for each copy that was sold. She did some quick calculations in her head, and said, “That means that if you sell a million copies, you will make _____!” I didn’t have the heart to explain just how many zeroes she was off in that estimate.

What do you consider your biggest writing-related success?

After I had a poem published in Poetry Salzburg Review, I was contacted by a student who was writing a long essay about the poem. She sent me the paper when it was completed, and it was a very nicely-written piece. Of course, it had almost nothing to do with anything I had thought about when writing the poem, which I took to mean that my child was now making its way independently into the world, and didn’t need my guidance any longer. There was something both very gratifying and a little lonely in that. My actual daughter is teaching 9^th grade in Micronesia this year, and I feel exactly the same way about her.

Your biggest writing-related regret?

I suffered from horrible and self-inflicted writer’s block as a fiction writer from about age thirty to age fifty, when I began writing poetry.

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

When I tell the story about how my wife once lost at tic-tac-toe to a chicken in San Marcos, Texas, I seem to think that I come off better in the story because I explain that I was able to tie the chicken.

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

I don’t like to imagine that I actually write anything I produce. I simply listen to the voices in my head and write down what they say. I am, in short, an amanuensis. This way, it seems to me, I take neither credit nor blame for the work that my fingers transcribe.

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

I am a sucker for a beautiful death poem, and “Stillborn Lamb,” by Sarah Burke, is about as beautiful as they come.

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