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.

.

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. 

.

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. 

.

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

Interview with Jeff Fearnside, On Poetry No. 5

Jeff Fearnside, author of Making Love While Levitating Three Feet in the Air, A Husband and Wife are One Satan, and, most recently, Ships in the Desert, is a writer of fabulous range and grace. After his poem “What We Call Home” was featured in Mid-American Review Vol. XLI, Jeff agreed to speak to a few of our curiosities around his poem, his award-winning short story chapbook A Husband and Wife are One Satan, and the subjects of his work. Many thanks to Jeff Fearnside for sharing his thoughts and for making this interview a genuine treat.

—Mays Kuhail and Samuel Burt, MAR

Your poem “What We Call Home,” which was just published in Mid-American Review Vol. XLI, is a terrific celebration of belonging. Notably, this poem does not follow any specific speaker. However, the poem’s questions and attentive quality suggest that the poem comes from a place of deeply contemplative observation. What role does the natural world play in your writing life, and what has spending time in nature meant for you as a person?

Nature has played an extremely important role in my life ever since my earliest memories. I grew up exploring the fields and woods behind my childhood home, climbing trees, bushwhacking through sumac, searching for arrowheads in the sand. Those were much different times. It wasn’t unusual at all then for us kids to head out after lunch and be gone until dark. Usually it was me and my brother though often just me alone. I had an extremely difficult relationship with my father, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that nature saved me in many ways. Being in the outdoors was one of the few places where I felt like myself and free—there and in the world of books. So it’s not surprising that the two combined and nature has played such a prominent role in my writing. It’s not something I consciously think about. It’s just part of who I am.

Adrienne Rich wrote in her essay “Someone Is Writing a Poem” that to write a poem you must believe that “an ‘I’ can become a ‘we’ without extinguishing others,” and that “a partly common language exists to which strangers can bring their own heartbeat, memories, images.” This quote came to mind at the “We” in your poem’s title. As you entered this space of universality, what were you hoping the strangers who come across your work would find?

Those are beautiful ideas from Rich, and I completely agree with them. The “We” in my poem’s title certainly is meant not only to reflect all of humanity but also to invite everyone into the worldview of the poem and experience its sense of belonging, its sense of home. Its setting is a natural place. So the “We” is intended to include even more than just humans. It also includes the blackbird who is the focus of the poem and by extension all animals. It includes the cattail-lined water spot where the blackbird lives and by extension all of the natural environment.

This may seem like a lot to divine from such a short poem—it’s an unmetered sonnet with a Shakespearean rhyme scheme, so everything occurs in fourteen lines—so I’m glad you earlier mentioned the lack of any specific speaker in it, for that highly detached point of view emphasizes the scene playing out. This is about putting the reader right there with the blackbird. That’s where the connection is. That’s not just the world of the poem. That’s our world. Humans and nature are one.

As a writer, you work in many genres. Your poems have been published widely, your short stories collected in A Husband and Wife are One Satan won the 2020 Orison Chapbook Prize, and you’ve recently had a book of essays published by the Santa Fe Writers Project, titled Ships in the Desert. What is different for you, in terms of your process, feeling, and state of mind, when you sit down to write a poem like “What We Call Home” versus a short story like “The River?”

The feeling and state of mind remain the same no matter the genre I’m working in. There’s always a spark, an enthusiasm for an idea, that drives me to write anything, and I always write best when I allow myself to fall into that feeling and write uninhibitedly, without overthinking it.

However, the process for each genre is a little different, because there are different reasons to write in each. For me, poetry is best for those crystalline moments we encounter in life, where it’s more about image and feeling. The basis of a poem can come to me quickly, though it often takes many days to get everything just right. I usually write first drafts of poetry longhand. There’s something about producing work by hand that way, physically putting pen to paper, that seems to connect me to deeper parts of my subconscious. Scientific studies have shown that students remember more when they take notes by hand as opposed to typing them, and I sense something similar occurs in my writing, with writing and memory being so inextricably linked.

Stories lend themselves better to prose. Which stories move me toward fiction and which to nonfiction depends entirely on whether they would be better served by use of imagined details, in which case I generally opt for fiction, or a grounding in realistic information, in which case I generally opt for nonfiction. That’s not to say my fiction can’t be realistic and my nonfiction imaginative. It’s more about the mode of storytelling. If a story is better served in third-person omniscient point of view, for example, then I would be tempted to render it in fiction. But many others writers use third-person omniscient to great effect in their nonfiction. John Hersey and John McPhee immediately come to mind for this with their reportage or literary journalism style. Being a former newspaper journalist myself, I also sometimes employ that style in my nonfiction. So it’s not cut and dried. I don’t follow a formula for anything. I trust my gut feeling about each idea and allow it to lead me. Once I settle on a prose genre and begin writing, I typically use a computer, even for first drafts. It’s a simple practical matter in this case: While it’s easy enough for me to type a poem based on a longhand draft, it’s too time-consuming for me to do so for longer prose pieces.

Editing is the same for everything I write. After completing a draft—and in the case of poetry, typing it on a computer—I print it and go over it on paper. I can do some editing on a computer, but it’s a lot easier for me on paper. This is an important part of my writing process. This is where I try to understand what a piece really wants to say. I’ll go through many drafts, adding, cutting, rearranging, refining. When I get to the point where I begin putting back punctuation I removed earlier, or vice versa, then I know I’m done.

Your chapbook A Husband and Wife Are One Satan is a rich collection of stories on culture, history, and quotidian life. How do you capture the setting, in this case Kazakhstan, and all of its particularities in a way that’s almost familiar to readers who have never been there?

I strongly believe that underneath the cultural apparel we wear, humans are fundamentally alike. So the best way to make a foreign culture familiar is to expose the similarities that are right there already. We all love, hate, feel crushing disappointment and rising joy, take pride in our work, mourn the deaths of loved ones, and so on. No one culture has a monopoly on any of these universal feelings. So making a particular culture seem real involves tapping into the commonalities we share while at the same time rendering the culture as accurately as possible in its details, which comes from observing those details in real life, really paying attention to and absorbing them. It’s probably obvious, or at least should be, but it can’t be stressed enough: Being a close observer is essential to a writer.

Despite the stories in A Husband and Wife are One Satan tending to be short, your characters come across as complex and three-dimensional. How do you develop vivid characters in little page space?

I’m happy you feel this way! I don’t know if there’s any trick to it other than simply remembering and having curiosity about people and their behaviors. For example, many of the epithets the couple of the title story exchange with each other are real phrases my wife’s grandparents sometimes used with each other. I loved the vividness of these epithets and the richness of Russian idioms in general. It was that interest in language that prompted me to write that story.

But those two characters are otherwise nothing like my wife’s grandparents were! The story isn’t anything I had heard or witnessed. It all came out of those phrases, which led me to the further idea of a bickering couple who also cared for each other more deeply than they realized. That’s where the universality of human feelings comes in. There’s often a thin veneer between love and hate. So I just followed that. And I peopled the world of that story with composites of those I knew or had observed while freely imagining the details of their lives. For all of the stories in that collection, even the characters with some basis in reality are 90 percent invented.

Earlier, I said it’s important to have curiosity about people instead of an understanding of them because I don’t think understanding is necessary. Can anyone really know the heart of another? But in being curious about others, we want to reach out to and connect with them. So that’s also essential, not just to a writer but to anyone who wants to get along in the world.

In this short story collection, we got a variety of full-bodied stories revolving around such subjects as normalized wedding rituals in “Accomplices to a Tradition,” or metanarrative storytelling in “The River.” How do you decide which stories are worth telling, and what challenges do you face in making these narrative decisions?

I’m very much an intuitive writer when it comes to those kinds of decisions. I always try to get a sense of what the story wants to be, not what I think it should be. Certain stories seem to demand certain perspectives. It just seemed clear to me that “Accomplices to a Tradition” had to be told from the first-person point of view—the story essentially demanded that the narrator take part in what was happening, however reluctantly, for as the title alludes, our societal traditions are collectively built, not just by those who actively do so but also by those who remain quiet about their dissent.

In “The River,” the first-person is working much differently. There, the point of view highlights the element of unreliability in a distinct way, which is important to the metanarrative you mention, the nested cups of stories within the overarching story. I don’t plan something like that as much as feel my way through it. That I can to do so undoubtedly stems from my having read a lot high-quality literature and absorbed the techniques used. That and a lot of practice.

As to challenges, the main one is remaining open to possibilities. A story can go in any direction until you put words on the page, and then it becomes committed to something, and once that commitment is made, we as writers can be reluctant to go back and play with other possibilities. I’m not immune to that any more than anyone else. I can feel stubbornly wedded to my own ideas, my “darlings,” as Faulkner called them. But we have to be willing to give up on any idea, no matter how much time has been spent on it, if it isn’t working. We have to be willing to get it right.

At one point in “A Husband and Wife are One Satan,” the character Raim greets a Muslim customer, Murat with “Assalamu alaikum,” then welcomes a Christian customer, Kolya, in Russian, shaking each of their hands in accordance with their respective cultural customs. How else does your work reflect the cultural diversity and pluralism of Kazakhstan?

My most recent book Ships in the Desert has a section devoted to just this idea. The book is a collection of essays about different subjects, from the environmental catastrophe of the Aral Sea to my host family during my first months in Kazakhstan, but the most relevant essay in relation to your question is “The Missionary Position.” The United States has often been called a melting pot or, more recently, a salad bowl, to better represent how cultures here both integrate and remain distinct, but we’re far from the only country that has embraced multiculturalism. Kazakhstan is home to more than one hundred different ethnic groups. My students there came from many different backgrounds: Kazakh, Russian, German, Uzbek, Korean, among others. This reflects how the country and Central Asia in general is a literal crossroads between Asia and Europe. It’s been an important region economically and strategically for centuries. In fact, it and not Europe was the center of world power in medieval times. The Great Silk Road facilitated not only the trading of goods but also the trading of ideas, fashions, and religions. It wasn’t and still isn’t a homogeneous region. I talk about all this in more detail in “The Missionary Position,” but really, anything I or anyone else writes about Kazakhstan or Central Asia has to reflect cultural diversity and pluralism if it wants to be accurate.

The title of this collection, and of one of its stories, A Husband and Wife are One Satan, is a translation of the Russian saying “Муж и жена – одна сатана.” How else does your knowledge of Russian, Kazakh, as well as other languages influence your writing in English?

I have to give a big thanks here to my wife Valentina, for I rely on her a lot to help me work through understanding many things about the Russian language. I’m not fluent in it. I can follow it pretty well in normal, everyday circumstances. Just don’t ask me to translate War and Peace from the original! But I studied it and used it a lot while living overseas. I studied Kazakh as well, though less intensively, and I used it far less often. Both languages helped me understand my own language better. I taught English overseas, and my students constantly asked me questions about things I as a native speaker had simply absorbed at an early age. My students’ questions forced me not only to analyze what I had absorbed but also to compare it to their native languages. I had studied other languages in high school and college, mainly Spanish but also some German, but that kind of classroom experience is very different from the immersion experience I had in Kazakhstan. It was there for the first time that I fully understood how we actually have to think differently when speaking another language—and how it works the other way around, too, that another language can change the way we think.

How that plays out in my writing is subtle, but it’s there. Even though my dialogue is overwhelmingly rendered in English, I’m always considering whether it sounds right to the way certain characters would think and speak in their native languages. In my mind, I try to hear them in their native tongues, and if I don’t know exactly what that might be like, I ask my wife, at least for Russian. Then I try to get the feeling of that into English. It’s a lot like translating.

Still, even though our different languages suggest differences between us, just as our cultures and traditions do, these differences are essentially cosmetic. I believe strongly in the underlying unity of humanity. So I try to write characters that behave true to their own humanity. To achieve this more believably and consistently is an ongoing, lifelong task. There’s always more for a writer to do. The work is never finished.