Author: Post Road

What inspired you to write The Dive Reflex?

This essay was formed in response to a prompt Mark Doty gave while I was attending the Writing by Writers Tomales Bay workshop. Part one of the prompt was to recall a significant location and write a description of it for five minutes, relying on all five senses; part two was to write about an entirely different topic that associatively connects to the first. I wrote about the Waukesha public pool because it was the first place I learned how to swim, and water has always been this charged space of mystery and belonging, safety and power for me. The second topic I wrote about was wearing an eyepatch as a kid to strengthen my vision, which on the surface seems totally random, but relates to underlying questions of perception and vulnerability I was trying to grapple with throughout the essay.

Was there anything unique or striking about the writing or research process?

It’s always a thrill to look back and notice where intuition takes over during the writing process–I’ve found the most significant memories and moments of understanding shine through when I give myself permission to wander. This can sometimes be nerve wracking during the initial drafting because it’s not always clear what material will be useful and what might be interesting, but doesn’t serve the project. There’s a bit of a push and pull going on between the subconscious and the intentions a writer lays out.

I was shocked, for example, when my mother found a way into this essay. When I wrote the first draft a few years ago, I’d been exploring themes of childhood/family at length in my writing, and actively wanted to shift focus. I wanted to write a love story about my then-boyfriend (now-husband), and this essay is certainly that, but it’s also about risk, fear, and the wisdom I inherited from my mother, who inherited wisdom from her mother in turn. When considering how women pass along knowledge in a family–especially innate, non-rational knowledge–this essay becomes another kind of love story, one about heritage. I couldn’t tell one without mentioning the other, even briefly.

Have you read anything recently that you’d like to recommend to readers?

Recently I’ve been reading a lot of coming-of-age novels for inspiration while I work on my first book. Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino, Now Is Not the Time to Panic by Kevin Wilson, The Knockout Queen by Rufi Thorpe are a few recent favorites.

Where can we learn more about you and your work?

Website: kayleighnorgord.com
Instagram: @kayleighnorgord

What inspired you to write “Soundings” and “Fable”? Was there anything unique or striking about the writing or research process?

“Soundings” began in a pandemic exercise suggested by the poet Rae Gouirand: each day before writing, spend five minutes or so “visiting with silence.” It’s meant to help you push past the everyday noise and connect to something deeper. I was having trouble with the connecting part, so I often ended up writing about the literal noise. It gave me a way to ease into writing even when I didn’t feel like it.

My Amsterdam apartment faces a green with a canal running along one side and a busy street along the other, and the zoo is only a short block away, so it was a rich soundscape. I began to notice how much my mood infused the descriptions of sounds. Intrigued, I took the most evocative ones, whittled them down, and played with the order to reflect the course of the pandemic and the changing seasons.

“Fable” was also to some extent a product of the pandemic—at least that was when I became invested in the reproductive success of a pair of magpies that returned each year to the mulberry tree outside my window. The mulberry leafs late in the spring so I had a clear view of their nest as did the crows. Crows will eat other birds’ eggs, even their nestlings, and the magpie parents were at constant war.

One day, when the magpies were trying to fight off an especially burly crow, I leaned out the window and clapped to shoo him away. Instead, I scared the magpies who took flight across the canal, leaving their eggs to the crow. Originally, the poem ended with the image of the magpies flying away. “How pretty,” early readers said. “But it’s supposed to be horrifying!” I said. So I added the final couplets.

It went through a lot of titles—“Plunder” and “Unintended Consequences” stuck around the longest, but both felt overdetermined. In the end, I settled on “Fable” because the poem reminded me of Aesop’s fables—the crow, hubris, consequences.

Have you read anything recently that you’d like to recommend to readers?

I’m currently reading Mia You’s Festival  at the recommendation of friend and colleague Laura Wetherington. I love a poem that makes you laugh in the moment and has you still thinking days later. Mia’s a master at approaching weighty themes with a twisty sense of humor. 

Where we can learn more about you and your work? My author website is sarahcarriger.com – hopefully I’ll get around to populating it. Currently, it redirects to my bio at InternationalWritersCollective.com, the creative writing school where I serve as the director and teach.

What inspired you to write “Dusk in March, 755, China, Civil War” and “Afternoon in theMeadow?”

Both of these poems were written at about the same time. My wife and I were in North Carolina visiting our first granddaughter.  We were eager to be with her and anxious about the world she would inherit. I nearly always travel with the poets of the Tang dynasty. Why?  Nothing  about their life and times was easy. War, famine, vindictive emperors, sickness and personal loss were commonplace and still these Chinese poets find daily consolation through friends, nature, memory, the next destination. They subscribe to a simple yet profound aesthetic that you also find in Whitman, Dickinson, Mary Oliver, Merwin, and dozens of other poets:  pay attention, be astonished, tell about it.  The poems that interest me the most are the ones where the world intrudes on some private moment and you find in these poems a blending of external force and internal power.  In that way, both of these poems, Dusk in March and Afternoon in the Meadow, attempt to engage the world as it is without turning away.

Was there anything unique or striking about the writing or research process?

I am always in the hunt for what I think of as observational oddities, like a tongue seeking the jagged tooth, what Camus called writing that’s “heavy with things and flesh.”

This hunt always includes looking at the derivation of words.  I never tire of learning that words often begin in one place and like stones gathering moss, end up in another world of meaning.This process alone provides for discovery and astonishment.

Have you read anything recently that you’d like to recommend to readers?

I read as much fiction as poetry.  Lately, I have discovered Irish women that I should have known about:  Jeannette Haien, Claire Keegan, Edna O’Brien.  I am always reading Linda Gregg who remains the most submerging of all contemporary poets.

Where we can learn more about you and your work?

I have been around a while.  I’m not that hard to find.  I have published two novels and seven books of poems.  More of me and what I’ve been up to can be found at jpwhitebooks.com

What inspired you to write “Trigger Warning, “Nostalgia and other risks” and “between us?” And was there anything unique or striking about the writing or research process? 

Of these three, “between us” has the clearest origin story: a trip to the zoo with my siblings. Time with my siblings often prompts me to write because they are simultaneously the humans I communicate best with and the humans I communicate worst with. And I love writing in response to zoos and museums; we go to these places to encounter animals or artifacts, but what we actually encounter is often our distance from those animals and artifacts–arranged and choreographed into an experience that we move through. Any time I can combine fact-learning and people-watching, a poem is likely to result. 

Have you read anything recently that you’d like to recommend to readers? 

I’ve just reread (for maybe the 10th time) Stolen Air (Christian Wiman’s versions of Osip Mandelstam’s poems)

Where we can learn more about you and your work?

www.ceridwenhall.com

ART
Paintings – Bascha Mon

CRITICISM
Chan Marshall, Author of “Visions of Johanna” – Rick Moody

FICTION
A Groundhog’s Day – Patrick Duane
I’m Tom Hanks – Mark Leidner
Crushed – Matt Leibel
The Program – PJ Henry
Tornadoes – Andrew Graham Martin
The Loaves – Phoebe Baker Hyde
The Pirate  – Peter Gordon
Hope  – Rebecca Pyle
We Don’t Joke About Such Things  – Neil Serven
Calendar – Maeve Barry
Other Living Things  – Alexander Fredman
Particulation Glitch – J. Paul Stein
The Blue – Mary Helen Specht

NONFICTION
The Ways to the Cabin  – Chris Fink
Why She Cried  – Larry Allen Pankey
The Dive Reflex  – Kayleigh Norgord
Young Girls, Like Me  – Nina Semczuk
This Land Is Your Land  – Abbey Cahill
Finding Our Way: On Maps and Mapping  – Priscilla Long
Sunfish – Lynn Eustis
Necessary Things + Cheap Sleep  – Gordon W. Mennenga
Alternative Education – Abigail Carl-Klassen
Feathers in Tar – Joel Long
The Woman in the Factory Who Will Cut the Fish  – Katherine Cart
The High Pass – Frank Light
Pleasant View Drive  – J.A. McGrady
Dr. Pangloss’s Intelligence Quiz  – Debra Coleman
Head on a Swivel – Juliana Gray
The Year We Were Almost Famous – Katiy Heath
Puzzle Box  – Jeff Ewing

THEATRE
Eat and Be Eaten: A Play – Carter St Hogan

POETRY
Tell Me About the Glaciers – Kaylee Schofield
For John at St. Vincent’s + Adonis + Final Visit  – Cindy Milwe
Learning to Pronounce /L/ + Body Tree – Daniel Ooi
Dusk in March, 755, China, Civil War + Afternoon in the Meadow – J.P. White
Life Poem 2 + Caravaggesque – Elisa Gabbert
Paper Flowers + Paper Cranes + Paper Flowers + Paper Flowers – Brandon Shimoda
Patina + Some Fairly Useless Reflections on Cakes & Pies +
This is Not a Rehearsal – John Dorroh
Soundings + Fable – Sarah Carriger
Getting Lost – Ryan Fitzgerald
Love Canal – Claire Christoff
Too Happy – Luke Bloomfield
Syntax Practice – Hannah Rego
The Fugitive Lands – Christopher Brean Murray
Have I Been Too Much? + The Great Song of the World – Chris Martin
Poem + Room – Sean Singer
Shroud (Ghost Apples) – Sébastien Luc Butler
Little Volcano + Nothing But Time + Metro, North – Jared Harél
Don Juan, + soiled + Midnight Mass – Javier Sandoval
Itch [some sunburned writing] + Bacon Cheese Combo +
Dappled + God Salsa – Benjamin Niespodziany
Elegy + Character Witness + Reluctant Inheritance + Gingko Tree as ASL Interpreter – Beth Ann Fennelly
The Bat – Jeremy Voigt
currents / recurrence – Amelia Bell
Svalbard, Two Days Before Polar Night – Georgia M. Brodsky
April 23, With a Glancing Thought + Begin – Eamon Grennan
The Reverent Spaces of Childhood + The Neighbors Took Down Their Twelve-Foot Skeletons Today – Andrew Hemmert
Trigger Warning + Nostalgia and other risks + between us – Ceridwen Hall