An Interview with Jonie McIntire: Finding Poetry and Community in the Midwest

Winter Wheat is just a little over a week away! As a part of the writing festival, on Saturday, November 7th, poet Jonie McIntire will be reading alongside Dave Essinger and sharing her work with us.

McIntire is a long-time Winter Wheat supporter, but additionally, she is deeply immersed in the communities she works within to support her writing and foster writing among others in Northwest Ohio. McIntire is a writer based in Toledo, Ohio and is the Poet Laureate of Lucas County, Ohio. She is the poetry editor for Of Rust and Glass and serves as Membership Chair for the Ohio Poetry Association. Additionally, she hosts a monthly poetry reading series, Uncloistered Poetry, which has been going for over six years and currently runs in-person and on-line events each month. You can read Jonie McIntire’s full bio here.

In the interview that follows, McIntire shared with us how she found her communities or formed them when they weren’t there. She discusses the value she finds in community, how they support and encourage her, both in helping her to generate and develop her writing. She also shared with us a little bit about what she will be reading for us at Winter Wheat and why you should attend. Read on to learn more!


You are a part of many literary communities including the Ohio Poetry Association where you serve as a Membership chair, and with the monthly reading series you host, Uncloistered Poetry. What are some of your favorite things about the writing communities you belong to?

What I love about artistic communities is how they overlap and interplay. I have been a part of the Ohio Poetry Association for many years, but during the pandemic, I took on the role of Membership Chair because I loved the work they do and wanted to help them grow. OPA is so well-connected to Columbus, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and other major areas in Ohio, and they work to move events around the state whenever possible. More and more poets from the Toledo area have been getting involved in OPA events, from the Underground Railroad readings to the recent River Roots anthology. I love seeing our local poets reach out and establish themselves in the wider writing community! In 2024, I moved into the role of Treasurer and, though we are searching for a new candidate to fill the position, I have loved seeing the group expand its reach and offerings. They have a lot planned in the next year or so. I can’t wait to see more activity in our corner of Ohio!

During the pandemic, I also found some new communities who have become dear to my heart. In particular, the Women of Appalachia Project, founded and led by the incredible Kari Gunter-Seymour. Working with Haley Haugen-Mitchell, Kari edits a yearly anthology of writings by women in and from Appalachia. I was born in Pittsburgh and found so much resonance in what these talented women had to say. Finding WOAP really helped me build my voice and give me a chance to focus on some stories from my past. And I truly find kindred spirits every year I get to read with the group. In fact, through this group, I came to learn about a writing retreat Pauletta Hansel hosts in Kentucky which I have now attended a few times and am excited to return to in the future. 

Beyond that, I have a couple writing workshop groups that I regularly interact with. One includes a few teachers from Toledo School for the Arts as well as a good friend I’ve known since college (Justin Longacre, Adrian Lime, Heather Smietanski, Lydia Horvath, and Kerry Trautman.) Kerry, Adrian and I have been writing together and reading together since the late 90’s. They are truly pivotal to who I am today as a writer, and they continue to be the best editors a gal could find. The other group I write with is online – a small collection of poets who are mostly new to me, but we email poems to each other, using a final line from the poet before us to start our next poem. I’ve been in this group for a few years now and it’s delightfully challenging but easy-paced (which is the right pace for me!)


Your reading series, Uncloistered Poetry— how did you come to create it? What prompted you to start it?

Uncloistered Poetry started in 2016, when my first chapbook “Not All Who Are Lost Wander” was released. There was a new brewery downtown called Black Cloister with the most delicious beer and a lovely little stage. So I asked if we could have readings, made our first reading a book release, and thought we might as well make this a monthly reading. At first, it was called “Cloistered Poetry.” Unfortunately, the location did not work out and we were only there for a few months before we had to move to Calvino’s. I changed the name to “Uncloistered Poetry,” and we stayed at Calvino’s for about three and a half years before the pandemic made us move to an online format. During that time, we were able to pay performers through an Arts Commission of Greater Toledo Accelerator Grant, and even raise funds for NAOMI House, Library Legacy Foundation, and Toledo Streets Newspaper. At the time, there weren’t many open mics going on. I was involved in Broadway Bards, which read at The Original Subshop and had been going for many years, but Hod Doering, who ran the series, was slowing down a little and I wanted to help build more stages for poets. Calvino’s opened on Sunday nights just for us, made us feel at home, fed us, and really gave us a space to grow in. 

When the pandemic moved us online, we found a new community there. People from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, England, Italy, the Phillipines and all over the United States joined us and shared their work. It was really an incredible experience to find new poets each month. 

As we were able to meet in person again, I wanted to maintain both series, the in-person and on-line. So we moved to The Attic on Adams for our readings in Toledo. The Attic has given us space to host all kinds of events over the years, from “Back to Jack” to book releases, even a few wakes for poets who had passed. And we were able to visit a few other locations, like the Switchboard, The Trunk (a long-time favorite haunt for local poets), and even The Peacock, all of which were incredible hosts.


As a writer based in the Midwest, can you speak to our community specifically? How does being a Midwest writer influence how you think about your work or impact the way you engage with the community?

Where you live and where you come from seep up through the pores in your writing. It’s in what objects you focus on and what attitudes you have about rain. Midwest writers talk about work even when they aren’t talking about work – because so much of what we do and where we live is centered on it. I guess I would say in my work, there is always a cloud – the dead body in the love poem, or the sadness of a sunny day. That’s pretty freakin’ Midwestern. I talk about the economy, about working class situations quite a bit, about women trapped by work and family, decaying houses and old dogs. 

I suppose you can tell I’m a Midwest writer because I shy away from the stage sometimes, but when I get up there, I say what I mean whether you like it or not. That feels pretty Midwestern to me. A begrudging frankness. But a need to see other people get up, a true deep joy when they push themselves to say something difficult and find that they are not alone. Maybe that’s not just Midwest. But it’s what I love about the poetry scene in Northwest Ohio. We show up for each other. 


Much of Winter Wheat is similarly about creating an environment for community and connection. As a past participant of Winter Wheat, I wonder if you can speak to some of your experiences for those who haven’t attended Winter Wheat before.

Oh you are in for a treat! I learned how to make little books at Winter Wheat. I learned how to use fairy tales in poetry to take allusions and assumptions and turn them. I learned how to do yoga and turn that into poems about the body. I learned about what journal editors look for and what they immediately reject. I learned about incorporating memoir into prose poetry. I learned about writing theater pieces that interweave multiple storylines. I learned about drinking tea and making that an experience that generated many poems. I learned about building poetic communities.

Winter Wheat is a reunion of writers. Not just local and not just academic, but from all over and from all genres and styles. Because the presenters can be from any walk of life, the classes can cover any aspect of literary art – from the physical production of paper/books/broadsides/collage, to the ideation of poems and plays, from craft to presentation. I love the creativity that workshop leaders bring. And of course, there’s the bookfair – another favorite of mine. You get the chance to talk to journal editors about what they are looking for, get free copies sometimes or purchase some to get a better idea where to submit. There’s always the opportunity to get to know the other writers at lunch time or between workshops. And then there’s the open mic – THAT IS THE BEST! No, seriously. Open mic at the end of Winter Wheat is how I want to let go this mortal coil. Walk out with the exhausted, inspired, frantic joy of feeling everything renewed again. Open mic is where you get reborn.


Finally, can you share with us a little bit about what you will be reading and how you selected it? 

What I’m going to read is a collection of various writing over the years. Because I want to tell the tale of how I got here. How I went from writing in college, to having kids and working, returning to poetry, retiring from corporate work at 43 years old, finding the courage to write about difficult things, returning to work at 50, and maintaining a sense of community through all of it.

Featured Writer: Sara Moore Wagner

Thursday, March 23rd, at 7:30 PM, Sara Moore Wagner will be reading a series of her poems for the 2023 Prout Chapel Reading Series at Bowling Green State University.  

Sara Moore Wagner is the author of multiple collections including Swan Wife, awarded with the 2021 Cider Press Review Editor’s prize, and Hillbilly Madonna, published by Driftwood Press in 2022. Wagner has also authored two chapbooks: Tumbling After released in March of 2022 and Hooked Through published by Five Oaks Press in 2017. Her work has appeared in several publications such as Sixth Finch, Waxwing, Nimrod, Western Humanities Review, Tar River Poetry, and The Cincinnati Review. Wagner has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize multiple times as well as Best of the Net and Best New Poets awards.     

Wagner’s poems explore relationships between mother and child, father and son, and other family ties in Appalachia. Several poems address the opiate crisis that heavily ravaged Appalachia and the entire country. Poems such as “Girlhood Landscape” explore the impermanence of beauty through a young girl waning optimism, stating: “because I want to remember blooming. // Because I think I could just bloom.” These poems also depict moments of trauma associated with miscarriages. Her work incorporates fairy tales and folklore, with several poems devoted to sharpshooter Annie Oakley, myths of Tantalus and Thetis, and Biblical figures in works like “Self Portrait as Judas.” 

In her work entitled “Invasive Species,” published by the Normal School in December 2020, Wagner talks about a nest created in a dated wreath. The relationship of mother/daughter and mother bird/hatchlings seems to blur. Both mothers are “separated […] by a door” from their young. The poem closes with: 

We’re all just waiting to crack open  
or be emptied out, to be forced  
from our homes or windows,  
to destroy what we love  
because we need it,  
because we think  
we’re safe.   

There is a sense here of the complicated necessity of letting our loved ones live their own lives, continuing to love them from a distance. This necessary and natural trajectory of love and how it operates exists in these final lines. Perhaps the complexities of love lead to hurt when love is needed most. The shared habitat of the nest on the house’s door creates all these avenues of focus. 

Poem excerpts appear courtesy of Normal School and Saramoorewagner.com. Biographical info also from saramoorewagner.com. 

–Michael J Morris, MAR

Interview Bites: James O’Bannon

James O’Bannon’s poems “Naming” and “Dad Keeps Saying Pray About It” were published in Mid-American Review Vol. XLI. In the spring of 2023, James agreed to answer a few questions by associate editor Christopher McCormick on his poetic work.

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Your poem “Naming,” (after a poem by Diana Khoi Nguyen) which appeared in Volume XLI of Mid-American Review, utilizes non-sequiturs and surrealistic elements, as in the unforgettable line “If there is a child who is dead there is a bird alive somewhere,” yet a firm wisdom seems to underpin the entire poem. Can you tell our readers a little bit about what you sought to achieve with this piece?

“Naming” is written after the poem “Grief Logic” by Diana Khoi Nguyen. In her brilliant poem, she utilizes hypothetical syllogisms to explore grief as well as other ideas. For “Naming”, I wanted to maintain the sense of logical leaping employed in Nguyen’s poem, while using the image of a bird to symbolize a child in sort of a spiritual sense.

I found myself thinking about the language used in the death or incarceration of Black children and how that differs from the language used with white children. Considering that dehumanization, I wanted a poem where Black children could exist/stay alive in perpetuity, hence the “If the child stays alive” line’s repetition. Lastly, in all of my work where a god figure is mentioned, I think of it as a means to wrestle with an aspect of faith and hopefulness in a world that consistently contradicts those beliefs and antagonizes them. 

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In your poem “Dad Keeps Saying Pray About It,” you write “I’d like to live / in a world where there is a god / who calls my name.” What role does religion and spirituality play in your writing? 

In being raised in a Black, religious household, participation in church and other aspects of Christianity were expected. I went to Sunday School, Bible study, participated in sermons, etc. As a child, you are never really allowed to interrogate your inherited belief system. As I got older, I found myself questioning many of ideas I was taught. Christianity felt too idealistic to me, and it excluded too many people I loved. 

In my writing, I see god as a figure used to interrogate those difficult questions.Much of my poetry deals in the questioning of how one could believe in not only a god-figure, but a god that is unquestioningly good, when so much of our world fails us in so many ways. 

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Your poem “and now the doctor asks if depression is a family,” published in Waxwing issue XVIII, speaks on subjects such as race and self-love. Can you talk about how those subjects have been an influence on your journey as a writer?

​I wouldn’t really call my relationship to these ideas an influence. Race is definitely embodied in my writing because as a Black person in America, it is tied to every part of your being. You wake up Black, you breathe Black, you sleep Black. In this particular poem, I chose for the relationship between mental health and Blackness to be overt because of the ways it is stigmatized. There are so many negatives poured onto the waywe view the mental struggles of Black folks; even medically. So, I would say my goal in marrying these concepts would be to allow people to see the struggle I’ve dealt with (and still deal with) in its most open and bare form, hopefully, as a means for people to embrace the humanity in that struggle. 

What We’re Reading: You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

I’ve been revisiting Alexandra Kleeman’s novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (HarperCollins, 2015). I find the novel fascinating in that it was written in a pre-Trump, pre-2020 America and yet it feels like the novel is, if anything, a postscript to the last few years. The novel deals with a woman, known only as “A,” dealing with her roommate “B” and boyfriend “C” as she tries to break free from a sense of malaise. This malaise forms the core of the novel and it seems to be a symptom of, not of any mental illness on “A”’s part, but rather a result of her realisation at just how empty her life is under late-stage neoliberalism. 

What drew me back to the novel is its presentation of Wally’s: a fictionalized Walmart with its brand ethos pushed to the extreme. Throughout the novel “A” visits the supermarket chain as she tries to find a particular snack cake to satiate her cravings as she tries to navigate just how empty her relationships, and her life, feel. This does not work, and we are treated to passages like the following: 

Every Wally’s had a similar feel inside, the interminable rows of smooth color that began to break apart as you got closer to them, dissolving into little squares of identical logos. But the stores had a little trick to them… they were designed to baffle. The most sought-after items—candy bars, sandwich meat, milk—were places in the most inaccessible parts of the store…. Sometimes you ended up at a different desirable object, peanut butter, for example, and bought it instead, but more often you bought both, and the things in between. (113-114)

Ultimately, the novel does not point to a way out from this malaise. “A” tries one route, a cult, but it is a dead end. I mentioned that Kleeman wrote and published the novel before Trump, the coronavirus, and the BLM protests of 2020 but that it felt like it came after. I found revisiting the novel after all these things powerful because it creates a sense of a lost future. I worked as a reporter during 2020, and for a few brief months that summer it felt like things might change. But they didn’t, and now two-and-a-half years later we’ve returned to the same malaise that characterized the Obama years. Ultimately, I find the novel striking because it didn’t have to be as relevant today as it was when it was written. If the energy of Summer 2020 had persisted maybe, just maybe, the rejection of Trump could have been the birth of something new and not a return to the old ways of doing something. Kleeman makes me imagine and mourn that future as her 2015 feels just like 2023.

To try and counter the malaise of Kleeman’s work I’ve also been returning to a classic—at least in some journalist circles—Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Vintage 1998, originally published in Rolling Stone 1971). Revisiting Thompson’s gonzo trip into the weird world of LSD and journalism at the end of the sixties has paired with Kleeman’s novel better than I had originally anticipated. I think the more popular film adaptation of Fear and Loathing does the novel a disservice by placing attention on Thompson’s wild behavior over his political astuteness. The novel follows a barely fictionalized Thompson as he travels to Las Vegas to try and make sense of the failures of the hippy counterculture and figure out how to keep hope alive as the counterculture gave way to Nixon-era conservatism. I think I was drawn to read Thompson’s novel with Kleeman’s because Thompson does point to a way out. Thompson finds his way out by pushing the limits, simultaneously rejecting the dominant culture and immersing himself in it. For Thompson, the key is to look inward, not outward, and to be “just sick enough to be totally confident” (204).

—William Walton-Case, MAR

What We’re Reading: by associate editor Tyler Michael Jacobs

I’m currently sitting with Kwame Dawes’ collection Nebraska (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). I just love Dawes’ poem “Chadron” from this collection and looking at the poem as an interrogation of the myth of the frontier and the speaker’s place as “a strange statue in the wind” (25) of Chadron, NE. I find this collection to be a search of place discussed through the seasons of Nebraska and through history. As a native Nebraskan, I find the poems in this collection honestly cohesive while also being a formally restless exploration of a place I have known for the thirty years of my life. While I keep returning to this collection, it returns me to a home I’ve known most of my life. The speakers of Dawes’ poems try to walk carefully over icy driveways due to the winter freeze in the opening poem “How I became an Apostle” (3); they realize how you learn to ignore the sounds of yourself in the quiet vastness Nebraska surrounds one with in “Loneliness” (14). In “Prairie” Dawes reminds us of the enormous space between the towns of Nebraska, assuring us it all “stretches over / the open fields, mutates, pulses, breathes, / finds its own music” (61).

I’ve also been revisiting Mary Oliver’s work. In particular, House of Light (Beacon Press, 1990). In my undergraduate career, I stumbled upon a reading of “The Summer Day” by Oliver herself and the grasshopper she describes “…eating sugar out of [her] hand” (60), which always takes me back to my childhood sitting in the grass outside of my grandparent’s house under the birch tree in their front lawn while grasshoppers would fling themselves into my palms. This poem found its way to me again as I drove back to Ohio from Nebraska nearing the end of winter break. I was listening to On Being with Krista Tippett, revisiting the interview with Mary Oliver, when Tippett played an audio file of her daughter reciting Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day.” I found myself back in that innocence in the lawn as a young boy, much like I did in my undergrad, and when I returned home, I picked up Oliver’s book and found myself lost again in her poems, wanting “…to stroll through the fields” (60) rather than hiding from the cold of winter under a blanket in my Ohio apartment. I have this poem taped to my office door so I’m reminded of summer in these frigid months.

After moving to Ohio, I’ve kept a copy of Ted Kooser’s Splitting an Order (Copper Canyon Press, 2017) sitting on my office desk which I’ve returned to over and over throughout the fall semester and continue to do so. I find Kooser’s observations in Splitting an Order to be both incredibly familiar and quite deep in what lies behind the actions of the personae, as in the titular poem, which describes an elder couple, as the title suggests, splitting an order, “…and then to see him lift half / onto the extra plate that he asked the server to bring, / and then to wait, offering the plate to his wife” (9). It’s a very vulnerable act of compassion and love and I find myself returning to this poem when, at times, life may feel bleak and void of these acts, as a reminder that such small moments of kindness and love do exist. Poems such as “Two Men on an Errand” (5) take me back to my childhood spent in the waiting room of mechanic shops while my father talked the mechanic’s ear off as I spun on those stools wrapped in duct tape only found in mechanic and autobody shops, and the scent of grease and metal where men in denim bibs and suspenders would chat over coffee in Styrofoam cups. Maybe there’s an air of nostalgia with Kooser, but I’m wary of reducing Kooser to pure nostalgia as the sole reason I’ve read and keep reading this collection of poems. I think, too, of poems like “Garrison, Nebraska” and how Kooser speaks of his town in winter with “its gardens of broken washing machines, / its empty rabbit hutches nailed to sheds, / cold and alone on the sea of the prairie” (47) speaking on the beauty, the normality of cluttered lawns, and Nebraska’s harsh seasons. Or how he explores the domestic intimacy of a lost life in “Mouse in a Trap,” in which Kooser eulogizes what we deem as a pest and how it comes to rest on “…the ship / of the rest of its life” (48). I keep returning to this book for the way Kooser captures a life, or a moment of a life, and the impact these seemingly fleeting happenings that surround us can have, which only poetry can put words to.

—Tyler Michael Jacobs, MAR