Interview: On the Life of Fred Eckman with David Adams, No. 24

Photo of David Adams in the Mar Office

The Working Lives of Writers

In October 2024, David Adams visited his Alma Mater, Bowling Green State University, to read at Prout Chapel, present on the archives of Fred Eckman, deliver the archives of Fred Eckman to the archival department at BGSU’s library, and sit down with us at the MAR blog; you’ll find his interview below. This interview was conducted by Elly Salah.

Fred Eckman was David Adams’ mentor, guide along his path as a poet, and friend for nearly thirty years. In all their time together, Eckman never revealed his history working on CRONOS or The Golden Goose, two projects that forged a significant path across post-war literature. The works of Fred Eckman are housed in the Eckman Archive at BGSU.

You can learn more about the Eckman Archive at the following link: https://avalon.bgsu.edu/media_objects/12579s858 

Interviewer:

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your time at BGSU’s MFA program? While you were here as a student you worked as the MFA secretary and had a very close relationship with the program’s founder Fred Eckman, what was that like?

David Adams: 

Well, Philip O’Connor was actually the first director of the MFA program. O’Connor and Eckman were both involved in the planning of the MFA Creative Writing Program which was very condensed because you had to get it approved through the university bureaucracy, and then through the state regents, and, by the time that was all completed, it was fairly late in 1968. The program was set to begin in the Fall of 1969. Eckman didn’t want to be the initial director of the program and deal with all the administrative stuff. O’Connor was hired specifically to help bring the program into existence. It was only natural that O’Connor would see himself in that role, and that’s why he was the first director. I had a couple of classes with O’Connor as an undergraduate at BGSU; I had some familiarity with him. In the summer of 1969, I was recently married and scrambling for employment. O’Connor reached out with a job offer, and I accepted. So, in the daytime, I was working for the university grounds, and, in the evening, I would work for O’Connor, handling correspondence from prospective students; recruiting in that short of a period was a real challenge.

Interviewer:

I bet.

David Adams:

I handled correspondence for my future classmates. It was kind of a weird thing, and I did some typing of O’Connor’s fiction manuscripts. I did whatever he asked me to do, and it was just an oddity of the circumstances. I was still an undergraduate when the semester started, and I was student teaching at Bowling Green High School to wrap up my bachelor’s degree. But, I was also attending the MFA workshops. Fred rang someone up to get me graduate credit for those workshops that I did. So I wasn’t on an assistantship or anything. There weren’t too many of those because there were no undergraduate writing classes for MFA students to teach.

Interviewer:

The BFA program in creative writing hadn’t started yet?

David Adams:

Oh no! That was years later. The MFA grad students who got assistantships had to teach freshman composition. I was not doing any of that while I was doing student teaching; so that whole first year, I was there without an assistantship, which was hard. It was a strain on my family relations, my marriage, everything else. But I had, at that point, discovered that this was who I was, and I was pressing ahead. As I got through the program, I became less and less enchanted with higher education. I managed to piss off a lot of my creative writing faculty except for Fred Eckman. I especially pissed off Philip O’Connor, temporarily… That’s another story.

I dropped out of the MFA program with only my thesis and oral exams to finish. After that, I was working two jobs: one, a couple days a week at the University warehouse. I also had a very good friend who had been in the doctoral program here and dropped out to take a job managing a gas station in Toledo. So he hired me to work the night shift. I was doing this split shift stuff, living in a farmhouse in Bowling Green with a doctoral student that Martha Eckman had connected me to and his girlfriend. They were from Texas. I was paying my share of the rent in cash every month. I came home one night from work and the place was cleared out; they were gone. About two days later, the landlord showed up, saying he hadn’t received any rent for three months. He said I could stay three more days, but, after that, I’d better be gone. 

Interviewer:

The couple was taking your money?

David Adams:

Yes. Naturally, I wasn’t thrilled. But I went to Fred Eckman. At that point, he was still a friend and a mentor. I told Fred, “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t have a place to live. I’m barely making a living.” Fred said, “Here’s the deal. I know you’re a stubborn guy, but listen to me, there will be a time when you will be grateful that you have this MFA degree. Come back. I will pay your tuition. You can live in my office while you’re completing your thesis. Type it on my IBM Selectric, and you can shower in the gym. You can get your meals in the union.” And I said, “Ok, I’ll do it.” That got me back to the program. I put my committee together. It was Dr.  Edgar (Fred) Daniels who was chair of the English department and somehow liked me. I don’t know why. And Dr. Stanley Coffman, the provost, who was the chair of my committee. I got the degree. Fred was right because I thought I was just going to be a rebel and work these odd jobs and write my poems whenever. Also, you have to understand, there were not many teaching jobs for MFA graduates at the time. The jobs were not plentiful because there were only four other MFA creative writing programs in the country at that time. We were the fifth. It never occurred to me that I was going to be teaching in that field. And as it turned out, I never did. I taught at the university level off and on for thirty-some years. Only once did I ever teach a creative writing class, and that was only with reluctance. That’s the story of my degree.

Interviewer:

That’s an incredibly touching story.

David Adams:

Fred Eckman was an angel to a lot more people than me. But, he and I, for some reason, had an especially close relationship. There were times even further out when I lived in Fred and Martha Eckman’s basement for stretches of time. My recent effort in my work has been to honor Fred Eckman and bring his legacy to wider attention.

Interviewer:

Could you talk a little bit more about CRONOS and The Golden Goose. Turning these archives into the BGSU library, is that the end of the project for you?

David Adams:

I hope so. It’s been a long road. Eckman never mentioned this work to any of his students. I checked with students who had been his students before I got there. None of them can remember him ever mentioning it. One of the preceding students said, “Well I saw a copy of The Golden Goose on his desk once. But Fred didn’t talk about it.” I think there was an abiding anger about the way that the whole thing ended. He just kind of cut it out of his presence. 

Interviewer:

It’s spectacular you’ve been working so long on preserving his memory.

David Adams:

Well, Martha Eckman asked me to. Fred Eckman had a memorial service in the BGSU library after his death. It was 1997. I would’ve been up in New England, probably, on a part-time job at the University of Maine, one of several that I had. I came back for the funeral, and James Thomas (one of MAR’s founders) came back too. Martha asked James and I to come to Coffman’s place and talk about this idea she had that somebody needed to produce a volume of Fred’s work but also his critical writings and appreciations by all of the people whom he had supported over the years. So that became Over West: Selected Writings of Frederick Eckman.

I told Martha when she asked that I might be able to interest the director of the National Poetry Foundation in Orono, Maine because I knew it was a period, late 40’s and early 50’s, that the guy was interested in. So I went up to Orono and pitched it to him on everyone’s behalf. He said, “Well, we might be interested if Linda Wagner-Martin is attached to the project.” The implication is that she’s somebody and you’re not. [David laughs.] I called Linda, and I said, “Would you be willing to co-edit this?” And Linda said, “Absolutely.” Then, it was on.

Interviewer:

Linda Wagner-Martin was Fred Eckman’s first doctoral student?

David Adams:

Yeah. Linda is incredibly famous in the world of literary scholarship; she wrote her dissertation about William Carlos Williams as a master’s student at BGSU, which she was only allowed to do after Fred Eckman advocated administration. After her dissertation was out there, Wesleyan University Press immediately published it as a book. That was the launch of her scholarly career which continues to this day. She’s still writing. She wrote a very famous book about Sylvia Plath, taking a more measured look at Plath’s life and relationship with Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, which was very controversial. But Linda concentrated more on the poetry and the fact that as harsh as that relationship was it probably contributed to the quality and value of Plath’s poetry. Ron Johnson, one of my classmates in the MFA program, was married to a woman, a poet, for a long time. After they were divorced, she was dying, and she wrote him a poem. The title of which was: “Being Married to a Poet is like Having an Operation.”

Interviewer: 

I could see that.

David Adams:

I think it’s especially true when two poets marry. I have never had a romantic relationship with another poet. I just think it brings into play too many conflicting issues. I have known some relationships that worked out very well. Not many. But, that line was just so precious. I can imagine what she had to put herself through as Ron Johnson’s wife. And Ron’s a character. You have to think about the other half and what they live through.

Interviewer:

Definitely.

David Adams:

The publication of Over West was a major achievement. I’m really proud of it. We were supposed to do something about Golden Goose in there. Originally, I wasn’t going to edit the poetry. I wasn’t sure I was the right one to do that, so I approached Carroll Arnett, Eckman’s late-in-life friend and another accomplished poet, who was teaching at Central Michigan University. He agreed to it. When it got to the point where he was supposed to start that, I called him up, his wife answered the phone, and she said, “I’m sorry, but he dropped dead last night at dinner. Massive heart attack.” I was grieving with her. He was a good friend to me as well.

After that, I talked to Linda Wagner-Martin and she said, “David, you’re the person to do this.”  Then, I talked to NPF up in Orono, and they agreed. So I did it. I wrote the introduction to the poems. I selected the poems. I solicited contributions from former students. Linda handled the critical side of things. I found out later it’s the only book NPF ever published that actually made money for them. If you try to buy a copy now, it’s very hard to find. They’re going for ridiculous prices, up to $800, and alums have told Lawrence Coates, the director of BGSU’s creative writing program, their indebtedness to Eckman as a teacher. So I told Coates, “Y’know I have an extra copy of this at home. I want to get it in a place where your students can read it.” I’m very proud of the introduction I wrote. Linda Wagner-Martin wrote a fabulous introduction, touching on his teaching and scholarship. 

Interviewer:

Fred Eckman stopped writing at age 54. You’ve written 11 collections of poetry, releasing one just last year 2023. Ocean Voung came to Toledo recently and said that he wants to come to a place in life where he can stop writing peacefully. Do you envision yourself continuing to publish? Have you ever had the desire to stop writing?

David Adams:

There have been times over my career when I was having difficulty placing poems. One thing that has happened in the last couple of generations is poetry has become more time-bound in terms of what’s trendy and new. Not so much in terms of form but subject matter, and I’ve never been trendy. But, on the other hand, when Eckman stopped, he had been here at BGSU for a very long time: teaching, and doing the same thing. My life has been so erratic and disruptive in terms of place, what I’ve been doing, and where I’ve gone. I keep making discoveries. When I first moved to Maine that was a big door opening for me poetically. When I first started traveling to Micronesia, oh my God, it was a whole new universe on every level: culturally, sensually, the smells, the sounds, the colors. It all just kind of exploded.

I think part of the reason, oddly enough, that I’ve been able to keep at it is not so much that I’m well-known enough or anything because that’s not true. It’s just that I keep finding doors opening, doors of experience. I graduated in 1972. It was another two years before I felt like I had found my voice, which is what Fred Eckman kept saying, “You gotta find your own voice. You have to chart your own path.” I had lots of influences that were drawn into my writing. Because of Randall Jarrell’s writing Poetry and the Age, I started writing in voice, doing poems in another persona. Because of the things that Fred Eckman opened to us as MFA students; he introduced us to so many things: French poetry, surrealist poetry, imagist poetry, and poetry from different regions. Eckman never expected us to write the way that he did. 

Even Robert Creeley who most people associate with these straight-line, jazz-influenced poems and rhythms. When I met up with Creeley in Cleveland in 1983, he was doing a week’s residency at Cleveland State University. Eckman must’ve talked to him and told Creeley to call me because I was in Cleveland. Creeley called me at my parent’s house and invited me out to dinner. He’d just come back from a State Department tour of Korea. You’d think being in an Asian country, his writing would get even more condensed but no. He said, “It opened up the need to start writing in longer lines, longer rhythms, more prosaic stuff.” And his later work was like that. Have you ever seen the movie Raider of the Lost Ark? Harrison Ford stars in it. There’s a line where he’s all beat up. His love interest, Marion, is trying to clean up his wounds. She wanted to find a place to kiss him where it didn’t hurt. She said, “You’re not the man I knew 10 years ago,” and he said, “It’s not the years, Marion, it’s the mileage.”

When you think of everything Fred Eckman went through, a soul change in him in 1960 when he quit his tenured job at the University of Texas, divorced his wife, and ran off with Martha Eckman to NOLA. They had no job, no anything; until the time his son was murdered down there. Somebody asked me at the presentation if I connected Eckman’s drinking with his son’s murder. I said, “It certainly didn’t help but he was already an alcoholic.” Even in graduate school, Eckman was an alcoholic. When Fred was in graduate school at Ohio State, I could gather from the back-and-forth letters that Richard Wirz Emerson was joking about Eckman being a drunk. Eckman was making excuses for not doing tasks because he was hungover. It was a thing that a lot of poets fall into, and some of them never get out of. So Eckman already had that issue, and the grief of his only son’s murder hung with him for the rest of his life.

I never specifically asked him about his son’s murder. I just figured it was too deep a wound. I knew it was there, and I needed to tread around it; I tried to. When Eckman finally went on his last bender, he ended up in Saint Charles Hospital in Toledo. I was one of only two people who were allowed to visit him there. When he got out, I was about to leave for Maine. I drove him around town, and I was worried about him. I didn’t know what was coming next. I said to him, “Fred, are you going to be okay?” And Fred said, “Yes, I’ve decided that I want to live.” He had no relapses after that. He was sober for the rest of his life. But the physical damage had already been done. He lived with arthritis, pain, and the cancer of the esophagus, which eventually took him. So yeah… It’s not the years but the mileage.

Interviewer:

Have you heard this quote from Helen Vendler, “Immediate challenges arise for a lyric poet who is writing a poem about history.” I was wondering if you agree, and, if so, how would you classify yourself as a poet?

David Adams:

Fred Eckman once labeled me a lyr-rative poet, and it’s true, I think. I talked about my affinity for Randall Jarrell and his critical writing. Jarrell’s famous book Poetry and the Age is essential reading for any poet. He quotes in there, “Within every poem, no matter how short, are the bones of a story,” and to illustrate that he quotes the two-line poem of  Bion of Borysthenes, A Greek Philosopher, “Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the frogs do not die in sport but in earnest.” I find that to be true because poetry is so compressed compared to regular prose; even my prose poems are story poems. Fred’s description that he stuck on me was apt. Other people along the way, Ha, they always try to classify you somehow, and I don’t care. I’m just making the poems that I make, but I think that’s as good a description as I’ve ever had: lyr-rative poet. 

That quote is true. I do a lot of that, especially when I’m writing for music. There’s a chapter in my memoir Casual Labor called “Roots & Branches.” I have many of these people, characters. Fred was in there, Linda’s in there. Suzanne Ferguson. My best friend of my life, Terry Plunkett. Terry was dead by the time I wrote the memoir, but Linda and Suzanne are alive; they still help me as readers. This was a third-person memoir, I let them pick their own names. The poet Dana Gioia, whom I met a couple of times, encourages poets as they go along in life to try new things. One of the things he urged them to do was try to write librettos for opera, and I have done that. I have an opera that I wrote with a composer. Last year, we completed the opera, which is based on a historical incident I first encountered while teaching at Cornell. I was working in the engineering college, team-teaching with an engineering physicist who turned me onto a book called The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Roads. It’s a really compelling book. That book is absolutely essential for understanding the history of the 20th century. 

There was a little vignette in that book about Clara Haber, who was the wife of Fritz Haber, the Nobel Prize winning chemist and the father of the German poison gas program in WWI. The opera I wrote is a tragic story that ends in Clara’s suicide. I read that little vignette and decided some day to write something about it. I didn’t know it wasn’t going to be a libretto until I considered Dana’s advice; he has a whole book about writing librettos, and he wrote libretto from an opera that was performed. I read the entire correspondence history between Richard Strauss and Van Huffman Staff, his longtime librettist; they produced many operas together. The correspondence gives you some insight on how writing a libretto is; it can still be poetry, but it is very different from a freestanding poem; in that, you need to have room for the music, room for the dramatic interpretation of the words by the singers. 

I had written some songs with a composer from Cleveland that were recorded; we had initially started working on an opera together that never got off the ground because of her megalomania. She wanted control of everything, so everybody she had engaged in the project quit. I learned some things about working with composers that helped me when I started working with Dawn Sonntag on this opera about Clara Haber. Dawn’s husband is someone she met while living in Germany, and she knew a little bit about the story of Clara. I met Dawn at an opera workshop at Baldwin Wallace University while I was considering working with this megalomaniac again on another opera, which, again, proved disastrous. I learned my lesson; I thought Dawn would be someone who could work this story. That kind of collaboration is never easy, but we worked through it; what we have is a valuable product that is probably running into the headwinds of the fact that it’s a story that happened more than a century ago, but the themes of it: the struggles of assimilated Jews in Germany and how they validated themselves, the idea of science being co-opted for national military policy, the subjected role of women in that time, even in the field of someone who’s got a PhD in Chemistry. Clara thought she was marrying into an ideal situation where two scientists would cooperate for the better of humankind, and she ended up being relegated to the role of Hausfrau (German word for housewife.) When Fritz had run off for the last gas attack that Clara had begged him not to go to, she looked out the window of their room, and she saw him in the embrace of his secretary, so Clara grabbed Fritz’s revolver with the intention of going down to the garden and killing them both, but they had gone. They had disappeared. In the story, she’s racing around in the garden and finally points the gun on herself, and that’s how the opera ends.

Interviewer:

That’s so tragic.

David Adams:

Yes, it’s a tragic opera. Tragedy is historically part of opera. We thought it was a story that should have timeliness. It was just a question of finding someone willing to commission a performance.

Interviewer:

Did that end up becoming a performance?

David Adams:

We hope so, but it hasn’t yet. Unfortunately, Dawn got long-COVID last year, and it completely zapped her energy. She’s not been able to promote it, and she’s trying to scrape out a living as a choral teacher, commissioning other work. I’m not that plugged into the world of opera. Even in our contract, Dawn is the one who handles the business side of things, which is appropriate. A composer usually does that; the librettist always has a secondary role.

Interviewer:

Does writing libretto influence your poetry?

David Adams:

Yes. When I was at Cornell, I fell in with this Bluegrass group, and I became one of their roadies. We composed a number of Bluegrass songs together, which got recorded, and I still have them. I learned something about writing for a singer, and what one has to change to allow them to express themselves with the music. Reading Dana’s book was very helpful in that regard. I read several books on the history of opera. When you get off on one of these tangents… I think I mentioned my motto at last night’s reading. People tell me my poems are complicated, and I use this slogan that I saw at a dive shack in Chuuk Lagoon, Micronesia which is a scuba diving Mecca, and the slogan there is: Go Deep or Go Home. Poetry is not supposed to be easy; it’s a compressed language. Even in that two-line poem, once you start thinking about it, there really is a story that could grow out of those two lines when one wrestles with them, considers them for a while, and that’s certainly true of the music that you put into a lyr-rative poem. One of my classmates, whom I became very close to, once told me his definition of a good poem: It’s gotta have music, and it’s gotta have soul. I’ve taken that to heart. Lately, I’ve started casting my poems in centered lines on the page for musical reasons because I want a reader to be able to hear the rhythm of a poem more precisely, and me too; that’s not a new thing. John Donne did it. John Keats did it. I decided to experiment with it, not every poem, but certain poems I do.

Interviewer:

What did you study as an undergraduate at BGSU?

David Adams:

I had a dual major in history and political science. I didn’t become an English major until after I met Fred Eckman. After I met Fred, I switched to English, but, in order for me to actually graduate, I had to go the English education track because that was a faster way to get to graduation which my family, my wife-to-be, everybody was on my case about it. But I’ve never lost my interest in history. I read extensively in history, even now. Right now, I’m reading the biography of Rudolf Diesel, who created the diesel engine. He did so for environmental reasons because the first diesel engines ran on peanut oil, not petroleum; and he was murdered by somebody who viewed him, to an extent, like John D. Rockefeller or Kaiser Wilhelm II because he was sharing technology with the British and the Americans.

Interviewer:

Do you find poetic inspiration in history?

David Adams:

Yes, I have. Sometimes, there’s a story in there that’s so compelling, which is what happened with the Richard Roads book. For my work, reading history has inspired a series of poems in which I imagined photography by the Hungarian photographer André Kertész. I imagined photos that he did not actually create, that would represent the path of history during his working life. One of those imaginings was a photograph of Edward Teller as a young student in Munich. Edward Teller, who would later become the father of the hydrogen bomb, and other imaginings of Kertész’s experiences during the communist revolution in Hungary, following the end of WWI. It was called the Vanilla Revolution because all the formed communes ever produced was vanilla ice cream. Essentially, Kertész was kicked out of his house, his family’s possessions were taken; he immigrated, and a lot of the Hungarian Jews did. Right after the collapse of the communist revolution, a very right-wing Anti-Semitic regime took over Hungary, and they still have one now. A lot of the Hungarian Jews fled to Germany, which they thought was a haven.

When something I’m reading really hits me like that. If it hits me in a way that I can imagine as turning into a good poem, I’ll write the poem. When I started going to Micronesia, I read everything that I could about Micronesian history. I made friends with a really wonderful photographer who did the cover photo on my most recent book and is my photography mentor. He fed me books, and I got to know the former national President of the Federated States of Micronesia. I got to know a really ornery old guy in the Marshall Islands who had wonderful stories to tell; he was the first Micronesian to receive a degree in an American college, which happened to be Heidelberg University in Tiffin, Ohio. I had to learn the history and the culture to be able to function in Micronesia as a consultant because if you want them to change something they’re doing with their education in the colleges, it has to be their idea; you can’t tell them what to do. People are always doing that, coming in to tell them, “This is what you have to do.” I approached it differently; it was a question of leading them to discovery. I read the poem “Bikini” last night about nuclear testing. There’s a long history there; and a legacy that’s happened ever since of radiation poisoning. You see the grandchildren of people, who were impacted by testing, who are deformed, walking around in the capitol. It’s just a horrible legacy.

Interviewer: 

Those events were not that long ago.

David Adams:

Three years after I moved back to the States, I was teaching a course at John Carroll University. But even when I was teaching at the University of Maine, the lack of knowledge of history was one of the most striking things that I saw while teaching undergraduates and to their detriment, I think. For those students, Vietnam might as well have been as far back as WWII. They don’t know anything about it anymore. It’s sad. They don’t want to know because it’s work to find out. I read another poem last night that came from my experience in Micronesia. I wrote it for a friend of mine, who was a BG graduate, and her father was stationed at Pearl Harbor during the attack. It was part of the dynamic of the poem that my generation of parents who lived through the Depression and WWII left a legacy of silence as we were growing up. They would not talk about their experiences. We knew nothing about their experience; we just didn’t talk about it. Now, we think of war as serious stuff, and it is; but there has been nothing in the world that compares to the scope, and the reach, and the consequences of WWII. I wanted to write a poem that brought all those things together, and I did that. History remains an abiding concern. I have two old friends; we exchange history books. It’s sort of a history book club. We keep each other excited about things we’ve just discovered. 

Interviewer:

You’re always on a path of discovery?

David Adams:

Yes. One of the reasons that I’ve been able to keep writing. If the doors close, and they’ll close at some point, on my publishing opportunities because most of the people who publish me are roughly in my generation, then I’ll keep writing as long as I feel like I can make a poem. One of the things Fred Eckman instilled in us, and I learned from reading Randall Jarrell and other writers that I admire; it’s the making of the poem itself that’s the greatest joy. Once it’s written, the poem is out of your control anyway. You can’t control what people think when they read your poem unless you’re there to explain it to them. When publishing goes away, and if I live long enough… I’m burning the short end of the candle at this point. A lot of my contemporaries and classmates are already gone. One of the things I learned from being a hospice volunteer was this slogan of living with gratitude: Wake up each day and be grateful for the day. Try to make good use of it. It’s something that people of your young age probably don’t think about that much. I’ve always concentrated on the work of making the poetry; I have not done as good a job as Fred did in passing that legacy along because I didn’t teach creative writing very much.

Interviewer:

How do you feel about grading poetry?

David Adams:

Oh, I hate it. You’re dealing with people who used to be you. That was Fred’s great gift. He could get you to see the flaws in your writing but not in a judgemental way. He also had enormous patience with us. I’m a patient guy, but I don’t want to be in that position. When I was in Maine, I had to supervise a couple of honors theses, and I had my patience tested enormously in that process. What I found is that my colleagues, in order to avoid stress, were just kind of passing whatever, and the standards went down. Fred never let us get away with shit, but he had a way of not letting us get away with it that wasn’t threatening. That’s a very hard thing to pull off. It was not me; part of finding yourself as a poet is finding out what to do. Making a living teaching poetry was never something that I wanted to do. I very much enjoyed working with engineering students to teach them how to become better writers.

Interviewer:

Could you talk about your work as a technical writer? You mentioned yesterday the stochastic effect…

David Adams:

I’ve learned a lot from working with very smart, talented engineers because I’ve always managed to work in good engineering colleges, especially Cornell. First of all, I was amazed that they hired me because I’ve been told that they don’t hire graduates of public institutions. Cornell considers themselves an elite engineering college, and they are. Although, they were not the best students that I ever encountered. The faculty at Cornell made you feel like you had to be the best at what you were doing, and that challenge was never stated; but you felt it while working with the engineers. That pressure made me a much better partner because we were team-teaching these courses. I carried that knowledge to Michigan State University. I even did it while teaching an MBA program at Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island. The head of the NPF at the University of Maine told me something very interesting once, “Ya’know if I write a paper about Ezra Pound, and it turns out I’m completely off base… Well, nothing happens. But if an engineer is designing a bridge or a highway or a building and the writing, design, or planning they do is flawed… Well, people can die and have died because of that.” At Michigan State, we had a whole course about engineering disasters; we read a study stating something like 80% of the cases resulting in disasters were due to faulty communication. Engineering students don’t think they’re going to have to write, but we show them the surveys that I initiated from employers. ¾ of an engineer’s working life is spent speaking, listening, writing, or reading. When you start to show young engineers that their future employers have those concerns, you get their attention. 

The teaching model that I evolved at the University of New Haven, specifically integrates writing into every engineering course. Typically, what happens when engineering students go to take a required writing course, is they’ll go to the English department, faculty who know nothing about engineering. The students hate it and put it off until the last minute, so they’ll graduate without learning writing skills. To this day, at New Haven, it’s the first instance where a college of engineering has done that integration at all four years, across all seven engineering programs, culminating in a senior design project that incorporates writing. At this point, they’re the only engineering college in the world that has accomplished that. I’m very proud of that. The engineering guidebook that I wrote, which evolved, is in its fourth edition, and I’m very proud of that. It’s made a difference. 

Interviewer:

You’ve definitely made a difference.

David Adams:

When I first went to the University of Maine after I left Michigan State, I saw a student on campus who looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. A couple of days later, he approached me, “Professor Adams, you probably don’t remember me, but I was in the Fluid Mechanics course that you were team-teaching at Michigan State University. I just wanted to tell you that I hated your guts… at the time. Since I got here, my professors have been telling me that my writing is far ahead of other students, and I’m really grateful for what you put me through.” That’s the type of feedback that you typically don’t get, especially when you’ve moved around like me. My engineering career was a way to make a living, and it’s all due to Martha Eckman, who encouraged us to audit her tech-writing course. It became my way of making a living, to support my writing; it was partially due to my background in construction that I was able to fit in with the engineers. I did a rough count the other day between everything I’ve done: my work in engineering colleges, my consulting, my work in private industry as a tech writer; I have probably published between 5500-6000 pages of writing. My poetry is a fraction of that. 

Interviewer:

That’s incredible. 

David Adams:

I look back on my legacy… People have told me, out in Micronesia, “You have a legacy of achievement out here that has made a difference.” That came from the president of the country, in the FSM, and from the cranky old guy I got to know in the Marshall Islands, from the president of the college where I was teaching in Saipan. So yeah. That’s a lot of writing. I didn’t do it all alone, but that was the production.

Interviewer:

My final question is related to your reading at Prout Chapel last night. Yesterday, you made this beautiful comparison between horse riding and poetry. You said, “If it doesn’t humble you, you’re going to go off the rails.”

David Adams:

That wasn’t me. That was Buck Brannaman who said it to me when I told him I could see the relationship between learning how to make a poem and learning how to work a horse. That was Buck’s answer to me as he slapped me on my shoulder, and nearly broke it, but I think it’s true. It’s easy to get caught up in what I call the “diva aspect” of any of the arts. I remember an experience that I had at Cornell where my landlord, an artist, invited me to a gathering of some fellow artists; some of the artists were from NYC, and they were talking about another’s work and said, “Oh, that work I’ve seen – so last year!” I laughed so hard I almost fell out of my chair. You even see this in classical music, soloists, and conductors. I have very good friends who play in the Cleveland Orchestra, and they’re not like that. They’re arguably the finest, classical ensemble in the world, which isn’t just my opinion. The conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra, Franz Welser-Möst, put out a memoir called After Silence in which he explains the importance for artists, particularly composers and musicians, to appreciate the role of silence and humility in their work, and that aligns with the horsemanship. Horsemanship was another one of those doors that opened for me. I never knew about any of it. I never knew how philosophical horses are, and how sensitive and intelligent they can be. If you approach horses in the right way, what you can get them to do is just sort of amazing. Last night, I mentioned, that if you can find that documentary, Buck, then watch it. It will change your life as a poet; it will. 

I can’t ride anymore. I don’t have my horse anymore, but I did find him a really good home. I continue to work with horses at the barn where I used to ride. The guy asked me to work with a troublesome mare that he wanted to use as a lesson horse, but the horse kept bucking off these kids who did the wrong thing. I said, “Sure, I can do that,” because I worked with another horse that tried to kill me when I first started riding. But it was because of something that had happened in his past which we didn’t know about. It took me six months to work that out of him, following Buck’s advice. When I met up with Buck in Fort Worth, I told him all about it; he said, “David, you’ve got to do something. That horse is going to kill someone,” and horses do kill people, so Buck said, “I want you to come here, go down to the front row, and watch the horses all morning. These horses have never been ridden, never been handled; they come here right off the prairie. Everything you see in them is going to be fear. You can’t do anything with a horse unless you overcome that fear. Watch the way they hold their feet, the positioning of their bodies, what their tail is doing; you have to be cognizant of all of those things at once. If you can get the horse to trust you, you’ll be a safety partner for them. You can take their fear away. The horses know they’ll be safe with you.” I did that with this other horse; it took about six months, but now he has little eight-year-olds riding around on him. He’s just as gentle as could be.

Interviewer:

Is removing fear an important part of writing poetry as well?

David Adams:

Horse riding did affect my teaching. I became more patient with my students because I’d gotten to a point of frustration. I could feel myself becoming impatient. In those last years of teaching, I became more patient in my teaching; I became more aware of when I could see a student’s insecurities, and what I could do to respond to those insecurities positively. So yeah, I guess it did. If I were teaching poetry, I probably would’ve done the same thing with young poets. I know Fred never rode a horse, but I think he was doing the same thing with us.

Interviewer:

Thank you for your time.

Interview: On Fantasy with Jennifer Pullen No. 23

Jennifer Pullen with images of her published books
Professional photograph of Dr. Jennifer Pullen

Photo Caption: Dr. Jennifer Pullen

Jennifer Pullen holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Ohio University, as well as degrees from Eastern Washington University and Whitworth University. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies including F(r)iction, Phantom Drift Limited, Corvid Queen, Pinch, and Strange Machines (Apex Publishing). Her books include A Bead of Amber on Her Tongue (Omnidawn, 2019) and Fantasy Fiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2023), the first comprehensive history of fantasy and craft guide. She grew up running wild in the forests of Washington State. She has since been sufficiently domesticated to become an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Ohio Northern University.

At Winter Wheat 2024, Dr. Jennifer Pullen was the keynote speaker. Between the festival chaos, Dr. Jennifer Pullen sat down with us for an interview which appears below. This interview was conducted by MAR Assistant Editor Jaden Gootjes.

Interviewer: How did you start writing?  

Jennifer Pullen: Honestly, I’ve been writing my whole life in a really nerdy way. When I was a child, I loved stories so much, and my parents read books to me constantly. Our house was full of books. So when I was five, I went up to my parents and said: “Mom and Dad, I have an idea for a novel.” They said: “Well, you can’t write yet. And I responded: “That’s why I’m going to dictate it to you. I’m going to tell it to you, and you will write it down.” My parents were very tolerant of me narrating some wild story that had a wizard, a princess, and a magical cat that was cursed. That’s all I really remember about it. So, I guess the storytelling impulse is something I’ve always had. As soon as I was able to scribble for myself, and I didn’t have to impose upon my parents, I did.  

As far as deciding I wanted to become a writer, that was probably when I was around 13 or so. I went to a festival in Spokane, Washington called Get Lit, and they had a section that was aimed at teenagers called The Writing Rally. I went, and I had this moment where I realized: “Whoa, there are people who make teaching and writing their life.”  I thought: “I want to do that.” So, I was determined to make writing my life from a really, really young age. Little did I know everything involved in that, but I knew that that was what I wanted.  

Interviewer: In 2023, you published Fantasy Fiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology, which has been called the first comprehensive history of fantasy craft guide. What were some of the challenges and successes you encountered while writing this book?  

Jennifer Pullen: I would say some of the biggest challenges came from the fact that I signed the contract to write the book with Bloomsbury, and then shortly thereafter COVID-19 happened. So, when trying to get permissions for the anthology, it became very complicated to get ahold of editors, publishers, and agents when everybody would have gone home. So, choosing the stories and doing the permissions while on lockdown was really surreal and strange. It added communicative challenges I hadn’t anticipated.  

The other challenges I encountered had to do with the fact that I had more to say than words I was allowed to write. I am a chronic overwriter, and after I wrote it, I looked, and I thought: “Oh no, this is like 30,000 words over my contracted word limit.” So I had to go through and really, really pare it down and think: “Okay, I know I have endless amounts of things I would like to say, but what is essential for what I’m trying to accomplish rather than me just being a giant nerd?” So that process was really interesting. Also, it was just interesting to be trying to write the textbook and work on a novel at the same time. I would be essentially working on the novel–sending portions of it and drafts of it out to my agent at that time–then while he was looking at it, which would take around six months, I would write chapters of the textbook. So, I was sort of alternating. I was still teaching a 4-4 load–four classes each semester–and alternating between critic-scholar brain and artist brain. That was a fascinating sort of challenge. It kept me grounded when writing the craft portions, because I was writing about the craft of fantasy as I was trying to write a fantasy novel myself.  

Interviewer: What were some successes you faced while writing Fantasy Fiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology? 

Jennifer Pullen: I felt confident in writing the book, and I knew that this was something I knew a lot about. It had been the focus of my research and, frankly, just my lifelong, nerdy passion. But what startled me was I didn’t fully understand how much I knew until I sat down to write, and I was able to pull it out of my head. Then I thought: “Oh, I can actually just remember all of this.” And that was a really validating thing.  

I think as women, we are often not taught to think about our own expertise or to feel like you could be say: “yes, I know a lot.” So to have the validation of realizing that I was able to write so much of it basically from memory made me feel really good and confident in myself as a scholar and teacher. I also really enjoyed getting to write the book that I wished existed my whole life, because I spent my entire time as an undergrad and graduate student in a world in which fantasy and science fiction–really any so-called genre fiction–was hardly taught in the classroom. I took a Tolkien class in undergrad, but the professor chose to teach in the course in the theology department and they were interested in the books’ theology, not in their craft. So, getting to do what I’d been doing informally, being an evangelist for the genre, and getting to actually put it out there and make the book that I wished existed was a really fabulous experience that made me really happy.  

Interviewer: I watched an interview of yours where you talked about the influence of The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle on your work, which is my favorite movie. Could you talk about the book or another book or author that has had a significant influence on your writing and appreciation of fantasy? 

Jennifer Pullen: Well, The Last Unicorn–the movie and the novel—was definitely the big one, formative in my youth. If you want an explanation of my entire aesthetic, that’s it right there. Sort of sad, melancholy, and lightly gothy, but also beautiful at the same time and hopeful. I’m really interested in the tension between sadness and beauty. Beyond that, a novelist that I’ve really, really admired for many, many years is Guy Gavriel Kay. He’s a Canadian fantasist, and he’s considered our best living historical fantasy novelist. He essentially writes mostly single one-off novels. He’s mapped the globe and created fantasy versions of different medieval cultures. He researches really heavily for each period and place. Then, by changing aspects of period and place, he’s used his fantasy to turn up the volume of particular aspects of place and time. And his work is really beautiful and very prose-forward. He does a lot of really interesting experimental stuff in some of his more recent works. He’s retold a portion of what happened with the Crusades, but entirely from the perspective of civilians or people who get caught in the edges of war, characters who would never normally be the center of a fantasy novel because they’re not involved in the big scheme of the conflict. They’re just people. His novel, The Last Light of the Sun, is one of my favorite books. The end makes me cry every time because all the pieces of the characters and the world and the conflict that’s been building comes together perfectly and snaps into place. He does some really interesting, masterful things with point of view as well where I think: “are you allowed to do that?” He pulls it off, but you’ll encounter a side character for a moment, and they’ll live through something they probably shouldn’t have. Then, he’ll move 30 years down the road, and you’ll get a brief explosion into the future over around a page of the character’s life and how this moment where they should have died impacts them. It’s incredible. If I could ever pull off some of the stuff he pulls off, I would be a happy woman.  

Interviewer: That really shows you the kind of work that fantasy and fiction can do outside of themselves. You talked about how when you were a young writer, there wasn’t a lot of emphasis on fantasy and science fiction in academia. But how would you describe the state of discourse in fantasy writing communities and academia today?  

Jennifer Pullen: I would say it’s better. I think now if people outright prohibit writing fantasy, you’re not in vogue. When I was 16 and taking classes at a community college, I turned in a retelling of “Thomas the Rhymer.” It was handed back to me, and I was told to “write a real story without fairies.” That was very common and normal at the time. I think most of academia is aware now that’s fuddy duddy, and you probably shouldn’t do that. I think that’s been a pretty radical change, particularly as the boundaries between “realism” and “genre” have gotten a lot of fuzzier. I think we’re in a transition period where people realize that anti genre bias is a social construct. But, I don’t think most programs in academia have completed the shift to actually offering classes in genre. It’s entirely possible to have a PhD in American literature but have ignored fantasy entirely, versus I would never have been allowed to just pretend realism didn’t exist. I think we’re in that period where the hostility has decreased but coursework–especially at the graduate level for people qualifying–has not shifted to include teaching people about fantasy or thinking of it as essential. You always see on the Creative Writing Pedagogy Facebook page people saying: “all right I have an undergrad who is applying to MFA programs, who’s genre friendly?” and you still have to pour over the faculty and classes. There are a few programs that specify popular fiction as their emphasis, but that alone is actually evidence of the fact that it’s not fully included. Nobody would ever say “this is an MFA for people who want to write realism.” You would never feel the need to create a realism-emphasis MFA program. So, hostility is way down. But I don’t think we’re at the point where people recognize you should and must include an inclusive genre program.  

Interviewer: You grew up in Washington. How does the natural world, or the world outside of fiction generally, influence your creative work? 

Jennifer Pullen: Oh goodness, so much. I grew up in Washington state, like you said, but also in a little valley surrounded by mountains on all sides. I was homeschooled, and my parents are bookish scientists. My father is a forester, and we grew up on 70 acres backed by thousands of acres of state land. So, I was kind of a feral woods and library child. I was always going outside with my mother and identifying plants, and if my dad has a religion, it’s nature. So, treating the natural world as vitally important and sacred in and of itself was very much a part of my childhood and my growing up. For me, I think stories and nature are the two cores of my life, and that’s why living in the flat cornfield part of Ohio causes me a lot of problems. I see all the corn, and I think: “industrial monoculture!” and get really angry every day when I drive through it.  

I feel like so many of the storytelling traditions I’m interested in–a lot of fantasy as well as folk tales and myth–come out of the understanding that there are forces that are larger than humans. Humans are not the center of the universe, and I think that is something that is different in a lot of fantasy, fairytale retellings, and myth as opposed to realism where individual human experience is centered. Human experience is important, but that’s not all it is. There are always larger things and forces that influence individual decisions. Be it larger, like social forces, but also the natural world. I think magic in a lot of fantasy is, in many respects, an acknowledgement of the fact that humans can’t control everything and there are things beyond us. So, for me fantasy and nature writing go like this [Pullen laces her fingers together]. I have a hard time separating them.  

Interviewer: Your [short story collection], A Bead of Amber on her Tongue, was published in 2019. What was the process of world building and character creation like while writing? 

Jennifer Pullen: That is a little chapbook of two short stories from my dissertation. They are feminist retellings of myth. I had a big project that I was working on all through my PhD program where I was retelling myths and fairy tales from the perspective of characters who I thought had been silenced in the original versions of the stories. I was trying to embody them and focus on their experience. The characters were mostly women and retellings of Greek myths and fairytales. In [A Bead of Amber on her Tongue] I have the retelling of Aphrodite in Hephaestus and the golden net. In Greek mythology, Hephaestus, who’s the god of smiths, makes a golden throne and gives it as a gift to Hera and Zeus, but it’s a trap. Hera can’t get off it, and Zeus says: “Free my wife.” Hephaestus responds: “Only if you give me your daughter Aphrodite as my wife.” So, Aphrodite just gets traded away to the God of Smiths even though she’s a goddess. She’s still property, which is just trash. She’s the goddess of love, and she’s now married to Hephaestus. But she has children with several other deities. There’s a story where she has a long running affair with Ares, and Hephaestus catches Aphrodite and Ares in bed together and throws a golden net over them and traps them. Then he calls all the other gods to see Aphrodite in her shame. That story always bothered me. So, I rewrote the story from Aphrodite’s perspective.  

The other story is a retelling of the story of Helen as she runs off with Paris. She’s so often vilified and treated as the cause of the war, and I really wanted to think about that from her point of view, what that would have been like. I wanted to be accurate to the myths; I didn’t want to change the plot. That gets done plenty. But what I wanted was to tell these stories and really, really take seriously what it would be like to be Aphrodite and Helen, who are both very powerful and very powerless, and infuse the stories with a deeply human sense while also maintaining the feeling of myth. So, I already had the plot; I just had to think about the individualized experiences and try to get the sense of the ancient world to come off the page without it being a history lesson. 

Interviewer: We’ve vilified female characters in stories for centuries, and today in TV shows and movies people still fall for it. 

Jennifer Pullen: They sure do. 

Interviewer: So, what do you hope readers will take away from your work? 

Jennifer Pullen: Kind of depends upon what it is that I’ve written. But in terms of all the short stories that were part of that project, I really just wanted people to think about what the stories are and what culture tells itself. Because that’s one of the things that’s fascinating about myths and fairytales, that they’re retold repeatedly again and again, and we don’t even have the capacity to discover what the original is because they’re oral. We can’t even verify where it began so every version that exists is technically a retelling, and it reflects what the reteller’s cultural values are and what they believe. Every retelling is a kind of a commentary on the ones that the writer had seen or heard before. So, I really want people to think about what stories we are telling to ourselves and what do they say about our culture? What is the relationship of the past to the present? I think the fact that these stories are so consistently retold shows that humans don’t change that much; we just put different dressings on our behaviors. If we can accept that we are part of the past–even as we’re living in our present–we can have more ability to actually change things. We don’t act as though we exist in a vacuum.  

Interviewer: I think one of the big draws of myth is its ability to stand test of time and still be relevant year after year after year because it’s just plainly about human nature. 

So, I want to end with what advice you would give young writers today. 

Jennifer Pullen: Oh goodness. Read a lot. Read, read, read so much and read widely and deeply and then just keep writing what you love and trying to make the best version of whatever it is that you love. Take good advice; take advice from other writers; learn from your classes but use advice and what you learn to become the best version of whatever kind of writer you want to be. I had mostly teachers who wrote realism, but I still learned a lot from them. I didn’t let them make me a realist writer. I just learned things from them anyway and read piles of books. I know sometimes people want to be writers, but they don’t read a lot and that’s just not going to work. You’ll never to be any good, frankly. So remember what you love and keep working at it.  

Interview with Jacqueline Vogtman: On Fiction, Fellowship & Girl Country No. 22.2

White square with black lettering over an autumn background. The black lettering reads "Fiction, Fellow and Girl Country" followed by "An interview with Jacqueline Vogtman"

Interviewed by Elly Salah & Jamie Manias 

Picture of Jacqueline Vogtman in nature

Jacqueline (she/her) was interviewed for an hour in the early afternoon on September 26th, 2024. This interview occurred in East Hall at Bowling Green State University, just a few hours before Jacqueline read at Prout Chapel for our reading series. We were thrilled to sit down with Vogtman and talk behind the scenes of life as a writer. The interview is split in two parts; part 1 was posted last week. This is part 2.

Jacqueline Vogtman received the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship, awarded earlier this year, 2024. Jacqueline graduated from BGSU’s MFA program in 2010. She currently teaches composition at Mercer County Community College in New Jersey. Vogtman’s short story collection, Girl Country, won the 2021 Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize and was published by Dzanc Books in May 2023. Vogtman’s book Girl Country is available for purchase with the following link:  https://www.dzancbooks.org/all-titles/p/girl-country

Interviewer: 

You’re a professor at Mercer County Community College, can you tell us a bit more about that?

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

I mostly teach second level English comp, which is a little more fun than the first level. We get to incorporate literary sources in there, and I guide the students during a research project. It’s fun. I really enjoy working with my students.

As there is a steep growth curve for writing, there is also a steep growth curve for teaching. I was pretty young when I started teaching, and there’s this navigation of authority, like “How strict should I be? Are they going to respect me?” Maybe now that I’m older I feel like I don’t struggle with that as much.

I just give my students grace, kindness, compassion, and respect, and somehow it comes back to me. The last few years in the classroom, I’ve just felt so surrounded by love. It feels like I’m giving out love, and they’re giving it back to me. It’s a very nice feeling.  

Interviewer: 

It’s a big accomplishment to have your students trust and love you.

Jacqueline Vogtman 

It can be hard to get to that point. I’ve felt this way for five years. Before I reached that point, I was still navigating asking, “How do I do this?” Then, eventually, I sort of found myself in the classroom, and I felt this confidence had been building inside me from being in the classroom for so long.

Maybe it’s also just being a parent. I don’t know what it is that changed in me, but I see my students as not my kids, but almost like secondary children. I imagine my daughter in the classroom and how I would want her to be treated. 

Interviewer: 

Has teaching taught you anything about your voice as a writer? 

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

My first instinct is to say no, probably not. I find inspiration everywhere. I’ve found it in the classroom with my students, their stories, lives, and even their names. I’m always struggling to find names for my characters, so sometimes I’ll look at my old rosters to see if there’s any good names there. Overall, it hasn’t played into my process a huge amount. 

Interviewer:  

I was wondering if growing confidence as a teacher has seeped into other areas of life? 

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

Yeah, basic principles like don’t beat yourself up for a shitty first draft or let yourself just write your ideas, and try to let go of that inner critic. These are some of the things that I would tell my students that I also tell myself. 

Interviewer:  

In your Mud Season Review interview, you were speaking about how the idea of “Girl Country” came to you after you had your daughter. Could you speak a little bit more about how parenthood has impacted your journey as a writer? Do you see your relationship with parenthood and writing as evolving or interconnected?  

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

On one hand, being a parent robs you of a lot of time that you might have previously had for writing. That’s the negative of it all. On the other hand, I don’t know if I would have been able to write this book if I hadn’t had my daughter. I’ve been so inspired by the journey of being a mother and watching her grow up, and, overall, just the struggle of parenthood, the struggle of breastfeeding.

The story of “Girl Country,” which is the title short story in the collection, came to me in a dream. My mind was always there because of struggles I had trying to breastfeed. A lot of the stories in the book have to do with women’s bodies and maternity.

I think sometimes when you become a parent, or when you have a full time job, those things take a lot of your time. It forces you to make time for your writing. Which might sound counterintuitive, but, sometimes, it’s helpful! Sometimes, it forces you to actually use the time that you have. 

Interviewer:  

That’s definitely a challenge. For the fellowship, is there anyone that you’re checking in with, or do you have to be on top of your own schedule?

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

The fellowship is a lot of working with your own deadlines. You have to give yourself deadlines. I believe a lot of fellowships are like this, but this is the first fellowship I’ve received. It’s really flexible. When you’re chosen as a fellowship recipient, there’s money, there’s resources to help with writing, but, the money doesn’t have to be used for anything specific.

Some people might use fellowship funds to pay off debt if you can make a justification for why it’s going to help you. For example, someone might say, “I’m going to pay off a bit of credit card debt because the debt is really weighing on my mind that’s going to help me write better,” and that’s OK. For me, I paid for a couple of summer camps for my daughter, so I could do a little writing. It’s pretty open and flexible. I don’t really have to check in with anyone, but there’s an end of year report.  

Interviewer:  

In one of your previous interviews, you talked about coming from a working-class background and how that’s influenced your writing. Have you always been drawn to writing working-class stories? 

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

When I started writing fiction, I wanted to write characters that were similar to my family growing up. A family that maybe you don’t see as much in fiction. I remember one of my first weeks here in Bowling Green, I was talking with one of my fiction cohorts, who was a year above me, Dustin M. Hoffman.

He said something to me that resonated. He said something like, “I want to write real, working-class stories. People working, really working. I want to write stories that my dad will read. I want to reflect on the real-life experiences of blue-collar people which you don’t see as much.” And when he said that I was like “Yes, that’s what I want to do.” Do it in a different way, but that really matters to me.  

Interviewer:  

Definitely. The New England Canon of literature is so bound up in wealth. It’s interesting to see prose about characters who are different from that. We also wanted to ask what topics or themes have you been gravitating towards recently? 

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

The novel I’m working on has something to do with the American Dream. The family is a working-class family. Part of the novel has to do with finding out about a secret relative that someone’s father had a child from a previous marriage. Part of the novel also involves new genetics testing, and I’ve been looking into that. The novel’s set along the Delaware River, so I’ve been researching its history.

Interviewer: 

I’m going to read a quote from an interview to get your thoughts, ‘I’m a poet from a working-class background, and I write poems about myself, and the people I grew up with who are working-class. I can’t really do anything else, which is why I don’t see my poems as a form of resistance against social expectations or economic pressures. I see them as approximate depictions of my reality,” is a quote from poet Sydney Mayes, interview is published in Only Poems. Does this quote resonated with you?

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

Yeah. That rings true because I’m not… I’m not trying to make a statement. Anyone could say, “I’m going to write about this social experience because I think we should make a political statement about it.” But that’s not necessarily how I go about it. I approach writing by thinking about how I grew up, what I want, the people I want to write about, and the emotions, love, and complicated feelings that I have toward my childhood and background.

Interviewer:  

That’s awesome. Do you see the literary world becoming more inclusive of working-class stories? Do you feel like working-class stories are adding to or expanding the canon of what’s considered literary instead of rebelling against the canon? 

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

In the past five years, maybe ten years, it feels like the literary community is becoming a bit more inclusive of different identities and backgrounds. Hopefully, that’s an expansion of the canon, right? 

Interviewer: 

We saw in one of your recent interviews that you’re bad with titles. We love the title, “Girl Country.” Do you think that’s still the case? 

Jacqueline Vogtman:  

That interview happened very early on in the writing of this book. Pretty soon after I had written the short story, “Girl Country”, that was probably the first story I wrote where I feel like the title came to me. And I liked it right off the bat. Thank you for saying you love the title.

When I came up with the title “Girl Country,” I could even see it as the title of the collection rather than just of a short story. I’ve gotten a little better at titles since back in the day. Sometimes, it’s still a struggle.

I figure out titles by brainstorming whole pages of different words and phrases to figure out what works best. But with some of the stories I wrote recently, I thought, “oh, that title wasn’t that hard to come by.” And I’m OK with that. Coming up with titles gets easier. 

Interviewer: 

What does a good title do in your opinion?   

Jacqueline Vogtman:  

A good title advances the theme of the story. Sometimes a good title adds something to the story that’s not necessarily even in the story. A good title catches the reader’s attention. But much of writing is still a mystery to me and forever will be. 

Interviewer: 

Do you think the mystery of writing is part of what draws you to writing? 

Jacqueline Vogtman:   

Maybe because of the lack of clarity. There’s no correct way to do writing. For instance, there’s no right or wrong. You don’t have to make definitive decisions all the time. I don’t know if mystery is what draws me to writing. Sometimes, writing feels like an impulse that’s existed in me forever, almost like dreaming.

I’m not necessarily drawn to writing because I like mystery. It’s just that mystery is part of writing. I know this is not a popular opinion because we don’t want mystery in the academy. When you’re teaching creative writing, you want to be able to say, “yes, you can teach creative writing.” And you can teach certain aspects of it.

Everyone’s born an artist. For some people it somehow thrives or takes off, maybe a little more in others. For some it ends up fading away for some reason or lingering inside them. Maybe it comes out in weird ways throughout their life. 

Interviewer: 

Thank you for your thoughtful answer. Your short stories are really stunning and incredibly powerful. In your short story, “Girl Country,” the girl is not named until the end of the story. We thought this was a very powerful technique. One of the many powerful craft techniques employed. Could you talk a little bit about the power of naming in creative writing?  

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

In that particular story, it is very intentional that she doesn’t get a name until the end because we don’t know her, we don’t get to. She’s a mystery who appears on the side of the road. We don’t know who she is. Then, at the very end, she transforms into a person with an actual name. 

Interviewer: 

Can you talk a little bit more about the power of naming? 

Jacqueline Vogtman:  

Naming can do so many things without even telling the reader much about the character, just the name can tell you certain basic things about them. With a name, sometimes, you can tell how old the character is or their culture or background. Certain things emerge from a name that are just basic stuff.

Names give you a level of specificity for a character. I have a story in the collection that there’s a character, a woman is just called, she’s “a woman” and not named throughout. Sometimes, I leave the characters deliberately unnamed to create a surrealist feeling.

The book isn’t realism. It’s a story that is almost dreamlike, not a real-life scenario where so-and-so has a name. Sometimes, I like to leave characters unnamed. 

Interviewer: 

When I was reading “Girl Country,” it felt very emotional to me when we got to the naming because in the story, I figured it was intentional. It felt incredibly powerful, to use a quote, “this girl who had braved escape and had come back just to save him.”  

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

Thank you. 

Interviewer: 

Do you have any tips for someone who has to figure out how to be a writer alone? 

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

You have to give yourself deadlines. It’s nice to have at least one other person holding you accountable like sharing work together on a deadline. It’s important to set up a writing routine. It’s great to have a writing routine where you do something every single day.

One of my old MFA cohort members, Dustin Hoffman, said he was going to force himself to write everyday even if it’s just a single sentence. I think that’s a manageable goal.

I’d also say give yourself some grace and don’t beat yourself up. Sometimes people when they don’t meet their goal will get down on themselves and end up throwing away their work which isn’t good. 

Interviewer: 

Thank you so much for your time. 

Interview with Jacqueline Vogtman: On Fiction, Fellowship & Girl Country No. 22.1

White square with black lettering over an autumn background. The black lettering reads "Fiction, Fellow and Girl Country" followed by "An interview with Jacqueline Vogtman"

Interviewed by Elly Salah & Jamie Manias 

Picture of Jacqueline Vogtman in nature

Jacqueline (she/her) was interviewed for an hour in the early afternoon on September 26th, 2024. This interview occurred in East Hall at Bowling Green State University, just a few hours before Jacqueline read at Prout Chapel for our reading series. We were thrilled to sit down with Vogtman and talk behind the scenes of life as a writer. This interview is split into two parts; the second part will be posted next week.

Jacqueline Vogtman received the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship, awarded earlier this year, 2024. Jacqueline graduated from BGSU’s MFA program in 2010. She currently teaches composition at Mercer County Community College in New Jersey. Vogtman’s short story collection, Girl Country, won the 2021 Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize and was published by Dzanc Books in May 2023. Vogtman’s book Girl Country is available for purchase with the following link:  https://www.dzancbooks.org/all-titles/p/girl-country

Interviewer: 

You were recently in the woods as part of your fellowship. Could you tell us a little bit more about that experience? 

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

I used some of my fellowship funds to book a cabin in the woods for a week as a DIY writing retreat. I went alone, with my dog, to this nice, little cabin. What was really amazing was returning to a solitude that I hadn’t experienced in so long. I normally dedicate so much time to being a mother, caring for family, and my students. The silence and the solitude were really refreshing, and they helped me have headspace to think through my novel and begin working on it.  

The first part of my writing process is on paper: brainstorms, scribbles, mapping things out. I did some of that, and then I was able to begin actually writing. I did a decent amount while there. Being out in nature is inspiring to me. I took a lot of walks while there. I find walking to be meditative and a good way to let ideas flow. The combination of solitude, silence, and just being surrounded by nature helped me get started on this novel.

Interviewer: 

Has it always been your natural inclination to go to secluded spaces or natural spaces when you’re in the writing process? 

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

Absolutely! For me, it’s helpful to have a private space to write; I’ve never been one to do my best work in a crowded coffee shop. I find so much inspiration in nature, being surrounded by woods, or being in the countryside, even in a suburban backyard visited by birds and deer. These are things that help my creative process.

Interviewer: 

Can you tell us more about the moment you realized that you had a collection of short stories that would eventually be Girl Country? 

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

I can’t recall an exact moment—but after writing several of the stories, I realized that they were all fitting together thematically and that my short story “Girl Country” was kind of the thematic thread holding them together. From there, I was writing new stories with these themes in mind—that they’d all somehow have something to do with girlhood, womanhood, motherhood, the body, nature, magic, and finding light in the darkness.  

Interviewer: 

Is nature integral to your writing? How do you not go crazy being alone in the woods for so long?  

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

I’m definitely inspired by nature. I feel like I am at home in the woods. I have more of a fertile imagination when I’m out there. I know some people thrive in a city but that doesn’t do it for me. It was nice being alone in the woods because I constantly have stuff to do: teaching, mothering. I like stepping away from all that to be alone in silence. Silence makes me the opposite of crazy. Silence gave me clarity for the first time in a long time. 

Interviewer: 

I can see how that would be a relief. How do you feel about being back at BGSU? We read in one recent interview that your cohort had great rapport. 

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

Yes! It feels surreal being here. On the one hand, everything looks the same. On the other, things feel different. It’s all such a long time ago but feels like yesterday. I would say some of the best years of my life were at BGSU.

I don’t know if everyone feels this way, but when I came here and met everyone, I felt like I was finally meeting my people. When I was growing up, I felt like a bit of a weirdo. Probably a lot of writers do, so getting to the MFA and meeting people who are on the same wavelength and interested in the same things was eye opening. I finally found myself. 

Interviewer: 

That’s awesome. Do you keep in touch with your cohort? 

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

Yeah, I made some great relationships. Now, we’re all sort of scattered around the country. It’s nice because we still have those connections. This past summer, a few of us had a mini workshop via Zoom because we’re all in different parts of the country. It was so nice to reconnect. I felt like I lost my writing community after leaving the MFA. 

Interviewer: 

We are scared to graduate! Thank you for the wise words. So you live in New Jersey now. How did you go about making a literary community where you are?  

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

The sad and short answer is I haven’t really. I find a lot of inspiration in non-writing communities and through my kid. She’s a kid, you know? Kids are imaginative. For my own adult writing community, I don’t really have one aside from sporadic mini workshops with my old BG friends. I don’t want to sell myself short though. I advise a creative writing club on campus where I teach. Obviously, the club is more focused on students, but it still gives me a sense of being a part of that world. 

I was also the editor of this literary journal called the Kelsey Review that has been running for a really long time. We focus specifically on the county. It’s not a national literary journal; it’s for people in Mercer County, NJ to submit their work. I felt lucky when I got the job as Editor-in-Chief. That’s another writing community I was a part of. It was really nice to see work from the community.

Interviewer: 

So you were the Editor-in-Chief of the Kelsey Review, you aren’t anymore? Do you still have a role on the masthead? 

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

Yeah, I recently handed it over. I’m no longer the editor. Some of my colleagues took over. I was the Editor-in-Chief for nine years. That was nice. But at this point, my main involvement is helping the new editors transition into their roles. 

Interviewer:  

How did you make that decision to give it up?  

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

It was difficult. On one hand, it was such a nice part of my job that was a refreshing break from grading research papers. It was also very time-consuming, and there was a lot of red tape, working with the administration on money things. I don’t have a head for money. I don’t want to. I don’t want anything to do with money.

Running the Kelsey Review took a lot of time and headspace. At times, it became stressful. That all played a part in my decision to move on. I also wanted to step away from helping others publish, so I could focus on my own work. After publishing Girl Country, I am working on a novel now. I want to focus on that now. 

Interviewer:   

When you were in the MFA, was your thesis a short story collection? 

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

Yes. I worked on short stories. Actually, three of the short stories from thesis ended up in the book. I wrote a whole thesis here. At the time, I was happy with it. When I left Bowling Green, I tried submitting the manuscript to a few places.

I wasn’t very aggressive about it. It wasn’t picked up. As time went on, I was not super happy with it. I basically put the whole project aside for a long time. Years later, I sat down and wrote a few, new stories that are in the book. One day, I realized that I have a collection here. I looked back at my thesis; some of my short stories fit into the new collection. It was a matter of taking those three old stories and somehow fitting them into the collection.

Interviewer: 

Did you ever consider taking your thesis in a novel direction? 

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

Not really. I didn’t feel ready to write a novel. It’s such a different beast than a short story collection. I didn’t feel ready, and I wasn’t that interested at the time.

Interviewer: 

What changed to make you feel that you’re ready to write a novel? 

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

I finished this project of short stories, Girl Country. I figured I’d written all the short stories that I wanted to write. Sure, I still have ideas jotted down for a few new ones. But I’m not as interested in writing them right now. I want to try something new, the novel. I’ve had these thoughts of a novel for so long. Maybe there’s some maturity that’s happened like I can handle it now. Back then, the novel felt like a beast. 

Interviewer: 

Is the novel not a beast now? 

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

It still is just not as big of a beast. I think it will always be a beast. With a novel, it’s so big. There is more structure, more to plot out. In general, there’s lots of pieces to put together with the novel. And that was the most challenging part.  

Interviewer: 

Have you heard the hypothetical: would you rather fight like ten horses, or thirty duck-sized horses, or one horse-sized duck? Would you say that is accurate to short stories versus a novel?  

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

Oh, I haven’t heard of that. It’s an interesting hypothetical to be sure. Short stories are more of a fight with a bunch of duck-sized horses, while novels are more of a fight with a horse-sized duck. A huge duck is one solid thing. So that feels right.

Short stories feel more manageable. Arranging the collection was putting pieces where I wanted them. Right now, I’m still in the thick of the novel, and there are lots of pieces. I’m trying to figure out how to create and mold the huge duck.

Interviewer 

That’s awesome. It’s interesting how a writer’s voice changes over time. I’m at the stage now where I’ll look back at my previous writing and not like what I was writing a few months ago. Does that stage end?

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

You mean that feeling where you’ll look back on something you wrote like six months ago and go “Oh that’s such utter shit?” 

Interviewer 

Haha. Yes.

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

It has changed a little for me. There’s always going to be shitty first drafts. It’s always going to be messy in the beginning. I think what I write now, like even the stories that I wrote for this collection, a lot of them came not fully formed. Obviously, there had to be a lot of revision, but I didn’t look back on them six months later and think “Oh god that’s so awful I’m so ashamed I don’t want to show this to anyone.” That does change. As you navigate this steep growth curve, it sort of levels out. Again, the first things you write are going to be messy for the most part, and once in a while, you’ll get a gem that just comes out and it’s like “oh my god I wrote this almost perfect thing and I don’t even have to do much to it”. That’s very very rare, but it might happen.

Interviewer 

Thank you for your time.

The final part of this interview will be posted on Wednesday, 11/21/2024.

Interview with Abigail Cloud: Preparing for Winter Wheat No. 21 

Image of snow on wheat in the forest. This is promotional material for Winter Wheat writing festival.

by Carolyn Hogg

Winter Wheat promotion image. This images feature a zoom in on a piece of grain, dusted lightly in snow.

Abigail Cloud and Haley Souders were interviewed on October 30th, 2024. This interview took place almost 1.5 months after the first interview with Souders and Cloud. Abigail Cloud is the Editor-in-Chief of MAR, and Haley Souders is serving as the Winter Wheat Coordinator this year. During this interview, we discussed preparing for the festival and advice for attendees. Winter Wheat 2024 starts tomorrow Thursday, November 7th. We hope to see you there! 

Registration for Winter Wheat 2024 is still open. You can register here: https://casit.bgsu.edu/winterwheat/2024-registration/

About Winter Wheat:

Winter Wheat, created in 2001, is a festival celebrating writers and readers, produced by Mid-American Review and hosted on the campus of Bowling Green State University. In workshops, students, faculty, and guests from the Bowling Green community and beyond come to learn, discuss, read, and most importantly write. Through “keynote” readings, special guest authors read their work, sign books, and talk with Winter Wheat participants. Winter Wheat creates the ideal environment for graduate and undergraduate students, faculty and staff, community writers, and those from other states to mingle and create new work, effectively planting the seeds of new writings for future harvest. There is no fee to attend Winter Wheat. The festival is sponsored by MAR, the BGSU Ethnic and Cultural Arts Program, the Creative Writing Program at BGSU, Prairie Margins, the Graduate Writers Club, the Creative Writing Alumni Fund, and donations from attendees. The festival would not be possible without donors! Donations for Winter Wheat and MAR can be made online, or through checks made out to BGSU Foundation, with Mid-American Review in the Memo line. Donations may also be made onsite, with cash, check, or credit card. Thank you for your support. Now, please see the interview below.

Interviewer:

What advice would you give a first-time attendee for the Winter Wheat writing festival? 

Haley Souders: 

Last year was the first writing conference of any kind that I’d been to. I remember when I went to AWP later, I was really overwhelmed, but I think since Winter Wheat is only two days, I didn’t feel as overwhelmed. It’s good to plan one workshop period where you don’t go to any sessions and just take a break for your mind. I remember after some of the workshops I just wanted to sit down and write afterwards because it’s a very fun environment to be in where everyone is talking about writing. You get to write in the workshop, and it just makes you want to write more.  

Abigail Cloud:  

That’s true. You’ve got to have a good notebook, a couple pens & some pencils. When you’re thinking about coming for the first time and wondering what it’s going to be like, we don’t know either. We know to some extent, but it’s a little different every year. We don’t know who all is going to show up. It’s never really chaotic (I need some wood to knock on), but it’s flurried at some points and then super quiet at other times. So it’s good to be ready for that ebb and flow of traffic and flip traffic. And, understanding your role in it is as a creator. We’re in charge of the festival as staff members of Mid-American Review, but we’re also creators, and we need to take advantage of that. And that’s the same thing with AWP. You never do get a chance to settle down at AWP, not really. At Winter Wheat, you have the opportunity to talk to presenters. We do our own book fair table where our presenters can bring their own books and we sell their books for them. So you can actually meet those people onsite. And it’s a nice opportunity to support authors directly because we’re not ordering the books from the presses or through a bookstore; they’re bringing the books, so that money goes directly back to them. That’s a great way to support them and also to have an immediate reminder of the types of things that you were working on in their workshop. 

Interviewer:  

You mentioned every year being a little different. What’s new this year? 

Abigail Cloud:  

DnD! So we had Dungeons and Dragons a few years ago–an organization called Tales of Initiative did some one-shots and it was really fun. There were a whole bunch of people who were interested in learning about DnD. So this year we’re doing a little workshop ahead of time using Dungeons and Dragons character sheets to talk about characters, the brainstorming that goes into storytelling, and how that practice can help you write your own fiction. We’re doing the one-shots again, and we’ll have an experienced table and a beginner’s table so people can learn how to play. People can also spectate if they so choose. A couple people two years ago just wanted to spectate, which I thought was amazing because I like doing that too, just doing some work while people are joyfully coming up with all manner of magical excitement. So it’s a fun little thing that embraces the ability to tell a story on the spot well as collaboratively. Also, Jennifer Pullen is coming for the Saturday keynote reading/craft talk, and she’s also giving a workshop on fantasy fiction. And since we don’t have fantasy fiction here as a class, this will be a good opportunity for students to embrace that side of writing. We certainly have many students who are writing fantasy fiction and we want to give them the opportunity to learn and grow. Also, this year our Saturday night open mic is at Juniper downtown. We’ve had a couple different locations over the years and Juniper happened to be available this year. So I’m greatly looking forward to fair fries.  

Interviewer:  

Are there any other workshops or readings that you’re especially excited about? 

Abigail Cloud:   

I typically do not get to go to stuff. I’ll make Haley go to stuff. It’s so easy to get distracted by the business side of things and everything else that’s going on constantly, people with questions, and so on. But as much as possible, it’s important for us to also show up and to be there as participants. Haley, which ones are you excited about? 

Haley Souders: 

I’m excited for the “Walking with(out) Purpose” workshop with Brad Aaron Modlin. It seems like it’ll be really interesting and different. I think getting that movement in during the workshop will be fun. And Sydney Koeplin’s Workshop, “Dreamweaver,” which is about writing from your dreams. I’m excited for that one because in the past I used to write from an idea I’d get from a dream but I don’t think I’ve really done that much recently. So I’m curious to see if going there will start that back up again for me.  

Abigail Cloud:  

We also have a couple specific workshops that are about finding your own voice and your own craft. Sophfronia Scott is doing one called, “Almost Straight to the Heart,” on the self-discovery process, using self-discovery as a way to unpack ideas and thoughts. And Naomi North, who is an alum, is doing one called “You Can Tell Me Anything” about finding your own authentic writing voice. They’re both framed almost in terms of an adventure (just as the walking one is), that challenge of digging into your internal self. We also have a couple that are based on family history or using history in your own writing. We see this sometimes in trends, a trend toward wanting to find authenticity and wanting to uncover memories and use them regardless of genre, not just in creative non-fiction or memoir, going deeper into that and seeing what it can spark. So that’s great and it’s feeling very organic in that way.  

Interviewer:   

I think I’m going to Jessica Manack’s “Writing Your Family Tree” and Naomi North’s workshop, so I’m really excited for those.  

Abigail Cloud:  

It might feel a little bit like we’re on a retreat. It just sort of has that vibe right now, and I’m not mad about it. I love that.  

Interviewer:   

Shifting over a little bit, do you have any advice for starting up a regional conference like Winter Wheat?  

Abigail Cloud: 

When you’re dealing with a festival or conference that’s part of a university, your rules are so much different than when you’re doing it yourself, when you’re doing it independently or as part of an organization that is non-university. You have rules at a university but you also have resources. Technology for instance–it’s in the classrooms already. We have the educational buildings available. If we need it, there’s catering. If we need tech services, there’s tech services. So all of that is built in but there’s also the need to follow policies. So just little bits and pieces like that. And being aware of those types of things. I think the main thing that most people face is just getting people to go, getting people interested, using social media and other forms effectively to build up your base. We have a base that’s been built up over twenty years of people, of past participants and contacts. We’re constantly updating the contact list, adding more ideas, things like that. But as an independent organization, getting all of that work done, in addition to all the infrastructure, there’s just extra to do. So, I think it’s good to know whether you want to do it as part of a joint project with a university or an organization, or if it’s something you’re going alone. And then figuring out who your base is going to be. Especially because we’re not out here giving each other our participants list, which I know is a common business thing, but it’s not something that we do. I’m also very stingy with subscriber lists. I’m not into just making those available to people. So I think having some idea of costs and some idea of your base is kind of your go-to, but also just deciding on your vibe. They’re all different. AWP has a very AWP vibe. I don’t even know how to explain it. It’s more scholarly, less craft. There is some focus craft but it’s more about writing than doing the writing, at least on the spot. We’re about doing the writing on the spot. I also think it’s important to think about what you need in your area. What is your area missing? That’s not easy to do sometimes. You really have to be plugged in with the community in order to know what’s missing and what people want. It’s good to do that ahead of time and that also helps if you then go for grants. Arts council grants want to know what your goals are and who your constituents are and what those people have said and what they’re interested in. Having feedback and community involvement increases your panel score generally, so that’s good to utilize. 

Interviewer:

Sounds like there’s a lot of networking going on. And a lot of moving parts.  

Abigail Cloud:  

So much networking and a lot of moving parts. And there’s planning that you can do ahead, but you also just have to let things happen in their own time. I have trouble with that sometimes but Winter Wheat has helped teach me not to over-manage. It’s going to happen regardless. It’s happening. We have the things done. Haley’s been working so hard and getting the word out. People are registered. So I just need to not flip out about it all the time. And that’s probably my best advice for someone starting a writing conference. Get some help you trust and then don’t flip out.  

Interviewer: 

Haley, any big lessons from doing the Winter Wheat assistantship this semester? 

Haley Souders: 

I think the biggest thing I’ve learned is the importance of having a spreadsheet. I feel like there are so many things to keep track of for something like this and with me doing it for the first time, it would be really easy for me to get overwhelmed. But because of the way that everything has been organized where we have the list of things that need to get done and we have specific spreadsheets for the book fair and for workshops, there was never a moment where I wasn’t sure what I needed to do or where something was, or where to find information about anything. It was very well organized by Abby. 

Abigail Cloud:

Well, by legions of past Winter Wheat people. This stuff grows up over time and we change the duties and the plans list every year. It has to change as new things come up or as policies change, as venues change, and whatnot. But it does at least give you a completion timeline and helps you understand what the direct lineup is. Here we are in one to two weeks before and we’re seeing the list gradually getting italicized as things get done. Even looking at it, I’m just like, ‘yep, okay, got some things that we need to do.’ This list gets longer and longer the closer we get, but again, it’s coming and it’s time. It’s happening as it needs to happen. 

Interviewer:  

How do you expect or hope Winter Wheat to evolve over the next few years?  

Abigail Cloud:  

I always like to hear from our participants about what they want even though getting feedback is really difficult. It’s hard to get people to fill out the feedback forms. I think hearing those ideas and seeing how our student population looks and what they’re interested in has always been a guiding force. And understanding that part of our job with a festival is to bring something to the community that it doesn’t already have. So whatever we don’t have, that’s what we do. For instance, we have Jessica Zinz who does collage poetry. She and Amanda McGuire Rzicznek do graphic novels and comics and they’ve worked on the word and image combination, which is why we now have the minor here at the University that students can do. They’ve really brought that to the forefront. That’s just not a thing that we had 10 years ago. So looking ahead, testing out new things like the D&D event, and knowing what our participants are interested in. It’s hard to predict where the writing world’s going to go but we do know that there are things that people are interested in more than they used to be, and we can bring those things to Winter Wheat. Bringing in different types of writers for the keynote is a great one that helps us keep pace with that. I’m also curious to know if we’re going to continue doing the hybrid sessions and how that might evolve. We do have some sessions on Zoom so people can participate and present from all over. So if that’s going to remain popular, we’ll try to do more with it. When we were all online the one year, I didn’t love it because part of Winter Wheat is the on-site community. But having some things hybridized still brings in the wider community. And being able to bring back people who have been here like alums and past participants is still important. I just didn’t like how it worked out with the open mics and receptions. Nobody really loves those online. So, finding new ways to make the online component work I think is going to be a challenge continuing forward.  

Interviewer: 

What about you, Haley? Any thoughts about the future of Winter Wheat?  

Haley Souders:  

I hope that I’m able to keep going in person and can see future Winter Wheats. I’ll definitely keep trying to attend online wherever I am, but I hope I can still make the trip back sometimes. 

Abigail Cloud:  

That’s one of our favorite things, having alums back. And seeing how their writing has changed and grown, and giving them the opportunities for further professional development and continuing that education. It’s nice to keep building those relationships and keep those people close. 

Interviewer:  

What are you most proud of about Winter Wheat and/or your involvement in it? 

Haley Souders:

This is a weird thing to be proud of, but the social media part of it. I’m not a big social media person, and I feel like that is one skill I’ve directly learned from this job. I don’t know if I want to do marketing or social media things in the future, but it’s now a skill that I possess and can say that I have done and know how to do. 

Abigail Cloud:  

We have concrete examples to add to your portfolio. I’ve been pushing that really hard on my students lately, having a portfolio of the work we’ve done. Because when you’re applying for jobs or further schooling, you have that already there. You can already point to it and say, ‘this is a thing that I have achieved.’ 

Haley Souders:

Also, anytime I’ve directly answered an email from someone and I’ve gotten to see the excitement from people who are getting to attend, especially if it’s someone who is not currently affiliated with Bowling Green in any way. It’s just exciting to see how far Winter Wheat can reach.  

Abigail Cloud:  

Yeah, and it’s always nice when you see new people, new faces. As I’m looking at the registrations coming in, there are a lot of familiar names on there, which I love, but I also love seeing the new folks, ones who have identified that they haven’t attended before. And then sometimes we have alums and friends teaching elsewhere and they bring their students, which I love. I think having something that people feel comfortable coming back to is one of the things that I feel most proud of. It’s a comfortable environment. There’s a lot of camaraderie, there’s a lot of face-to-face conversation. One of the things we’re going to do this year is bring a large collection of our out-of-date literary journals and let people go through them and talk about submission strategies. And that’s how we’re going to start. We’re inviting people into the mess of submitting work right away, giving each other advice and so on. And I hope that that’ll spark conversation. Let’s face it–writers, we don’t always want to be perceived or out there talking to people. It’s not really what we do. It’s kind of literally the opposite of what we do. But Winter Wheat is our opportunity to be in a safe environment to do those things, to talk to people, to be perceived, and to make something new. That’s the spirit in which Winter Wheat was created, and continuing in that vein and representing, in a larger aspect, the spirit of Mid-American Review, is really important to me. I feel really good about that. And also my registration spreadsheet.  

Interviewer:  

If you had to describe Winter Wheat using only food metaphors, how would you describe it?  

Abigail Cloud: 

Mashed potatoes. I’m a potato person. I like potatoes, potatoes are part of my regular diet. They are my safe food. I find them comforting. I always want them. I’m always excited about them and you can do so many cool things with them.  

Haley Souders:  

My first thought was a bowl of Lucky Charms. 

Interviewer:    

Are you the kind of person who eats the charms mixed in, or who saves the charms for last? 

Haley Souders:  

I save the charms for last and have a bowl of marshmallows. 

Abigail Cloud:  

Lucky Charms is such a great answer because if you eat them straight from the box like I do, you can’t really see ahead of time what you’re about to consume–you just know it’s going to be delicious. 

Haley Souders:  

Thank you for validating my metaphor. 

Interviewer:   

If you could invite one of your favorite authors, dead or alive, to Winter Wheat, who would you choose and what do you think they’d be most excited about? 

Haley Souders: 

That’s so tough. My first thought is Charles Yu just because I was talking to Jane Wageman (MAR’s Managing Editor for 2024-2025) when we went to package everything to ship about how whenever I recognized a writer’s name, I was so excited and I was like, ‘oh my gosh, I’m touching this person’s mail right now.’ One of those people was Charles Yu. I don’t know what he would get most from it though.  

Abigail Cloud: 

We’ve published his story “Class Three Superhero” in Mid-American Review. He would come. If we could afford him we’d bring him. As for what he’d get from it, he would mostly receive our adoring eyeballs because we love him so much. I was going to say Brenda Hillman because she’s always my answer, but Dana Levin would be super great here. She is one of my poetry fairy godmothers. I love her enthusiasm and her dig-in mentality. I feel like she would be a really good reader but I also think she would in turn enjoy the generative workshops. I think she would like to create.  

Interviewer:  

Awesome. So we’ve covered a lot of ground. Anything else you’d like to add before we wrap up?  

Abigail Cloud: 

Everyone should come to Winter Wheat. It happens every year–put it in your calendar. It’s such a good opportunity because during the year we tend to get distracted from our writing. We’re doing all these other things, we’re wearing  many different hats, and it’s so nice to be able to say, ‘this weekend, I’m going to write and that’s it. I’m going be with my own kind. I’m going to be with my people.’  

Haley Souders:

Yeah, I’ll just just a second that. I feel like anytime I’m in a place where everyone is really interested in writing and we’re also talking about writing, it always makes me so much more excited to write than I am when it’s just me and my mind thinking about how I haven’t been writing.  

Abigail Cloud:

Yes. Winter Wheat opens up so many doors.